I had stage four cancer.

Getting that with the phone call.

If you have a couple months to live, get your fares in order.

You have to have a positive mindset to battle your way through that and continue to drive an organization as you're doing that.

It's a very humbling process.

As you click through, what are the potential outcomes?

How are you going to move forward?

And in a lot of ways this will sound crazy, but getting the cancer made me a better person and made me stop, kind of reevaluate what was important, really bring a focus to what I wanted to do for whatever time, time I was going to have left.

I'm grateful that I've got through it, grateful that I had the opportunity to learn from it.

What a grounding moment.

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On this podcast, the world's most innovative senior leaders share their top success strategies to motivate your direct reports, cultivate your top leaders, and accelerate your career.

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Here's Ben.

Hey there, lady.

The team nation.

Welcome back to another great episode.

Today I have for you Bruce Lowthers, who is the CEO over at Paysafe Group.

If you're not familiar with Paysafe, well, they're a leading payments platform with an extensive track record of serving merchants and consumers in the global entertainment sectors.

They have over 20 years of online payment experience, an annualized transactional volume of $140 billion dollars in 2023, and approximately 3200 employees in twelve different countries.

And paysafe connects businesses and consumers across 260 payment types, over 40 currencies around the world.

Holy smokes, Bruce.

Welcome to lead the team.

Well, thank you.

It's great to be here.

So what was one of your earliest leadership lessons?

Oh, so one of the things that probably stuck with me from, you know, going way back, I was in high school, and so you'd say, well, there's not a lot of leadership lessons, I guess, in high school that would stick with people.

But like many kids, I played a lot of sports, and I was supposed to, in my mind, be named captain of my team and my football team.

I was not.

And they took the vote and I didn't get it.

And like many brooding 18 year olds, I was very disappointed.

And I remember going over to my grandfather's house.

He was very ill.

He was in a bed.

And so we went over there, visited with him, and, you know, of course, here's a guy that's facing the end of his life, and he's like, what's got you down?

And Mike, you know, gramps, I didn't.

I didn't get this captain.

I thought I was going to make captain.

And he just kind of looked at me, and I still remember it all these years like it was yesterday.

And he said, oh, well, do you have to be captain to run out on the field first when you go out to play the game?

And like most 18 year olds, I was like, this guy's crazy.

What?

What is he talking about?

Of course you don't have to be captain and run out first.

He said, oh.

He said, well, when you're leading, you're starting all the drills.

Do you have to be captain to go first to do that?

I'm like, no, gramps, you don't have to be captain.

Whoever lines up first goes.

He said, oh, so you can't make all the great plays unless you're captain.

And I was like, that point, I was like, no.

He's like, well, then what difference does it mean?

You can lead whether you're captain or not.

Don't get hung up on the title.

Just go do it.

And I never forgot that.

And I always thought that was pretty cool.

I probably didn't appreciate it at 18.

I thought he was probably just crazy.

But as I later in life, as I started thinking back on that, which I've had a number of opportunities to kind of reflect on that over the years, as you would imagine, that always stuck with me of the title.

Doesn't matter.

It's just your attitude and what you want to go do.

I love that the vote for captain was probably for authority, but not leadership.

Yeah, leadership is really something that your grandfather got, which is, hey, I just be first, lead out front, get out front, do the kind of work that you want others to do, and lead by.

Lead by example.

Be the example.

Yeah.

It's so easy to forget.

And I suspect in your business, you've seen people who maybe had a lot of authority, but maybe you weren't always the best leaders and people with no authority being a great leader.

Yeah, look, I think it's something that probably everybody talks about.

They talk about empowerment.

Empowerment comes up quite a bit in any leadership discussion.

And what separates the people that feel empowered to just go do things from the people who are always looking for people to tell them it's okay to go do things.

And so you definitely see that throughout your career of the people that truly embrace leadership and willing to lead, regardless of where they are in an organization.

Great for people to think about.

So from a leadership perspective, are you empowering your people?

Are you encouraging them to basically take control over what they can control and be proactive and do it, or you ask them to come to you to get permission and with people experiencing this episode through their boss.

Yeah, take, yeah, take the power that you have to control your own destiny and make an impact.

Way more fun.

Now, on the flip side, sometimes empowerment is a dirty word in terms of a, I want my employees to be empowered, but not too much because it might make a ruckus around here in a way that's not helpful.

I don't know.

How do you, how are you talking about it inside pay safe and even with your own kiddos?

Yeah.

Look, I think for me it's always been about team, and maybe it's just growing up in Boston and being a sports kid, that everything was really about the team.

And if the team was successful, then success would follow through the members of the team.

And so it was always great to have alignment in any team of what the goal was and whether it's here at Paysafe or any other company for that matter.

If you have people aligned on what the ultimate goal is and what you're trying to achieve, and people can very quickly distill, am I doing things to drive us towards that outcome?

And so you try to encourage that and fail fast.

You hear that all the time.

But hey, I came out of, for startups in my background, so we screwed up things all the time.

It was just make mistakes, end it fast, and move forward and take the lessons forward.

So I think if you can really encourage a behavior to act on the best interest of your customer, on the best interest of the company, to achieve the goals that you're set out for, good things happen.

Yeah, I like that.

What I hear is empowerment plus alignment.

If you're just empowering everybody, everybody feels empowered, but there's no alignment.

You can get a lot of chaos, you can get a lot of people's own agendas and making things harder for the company not easier.

But if you create that alignment, which is a leadership and a major and a managerial responsibility, really, you can kind of channel that in a productive way.

Now, you mentioned a startup.

Which other businesses you're.

You're known as a serial builder.

What is one of your most memorable things that you've built and what'd you learn?

Yeah, look, I've been very fortunate in my journey, having four startups that I participated in, a couple of associations that we've built.

Grauna, a very large Fortune 250 company.

And now here at Paysafe, in the midst of a turnaround that I'm very grateful to have the opportunity to be part of.

Learned a lot along the way.

I don't know.

You know, it's a funny thing.

I don't know that I have a favorite of all the things.

What I've always loved out of all of them is the ability to learn new things.

And each of those companies and opportunities that I had, there was always this underlying thought of getting to do something new, learning something new, getting.

It didn't matter whether I was answering the door or I was doing the accounting on the weekends, or I was coding or doing sales, raising money.

All those things to me were fun because it was learning different things.

And I think that's probably more the trait that I would say that and the teammates that I made along the way and seeing their success as kind of.

I've gotten older in my.

A career journey here, but seeing the success that my teammates have had along the way has been a lot of fun.

Yes, funny.

Asked about what's been the most memorable thing you built, you're like, hey, I built my own learning.

And every place I went, and I built the team and built the team, and it wasn't necessarily the business, it was the people side of it.

Yeah, well, the journey is a blast.

Like, it's.

It really has been fun to have the opportunity to do all these different things, but I think when you distill it down to what you really like, it wasn't necessarily a particular product.

We've launched lots of products.

It wasn't a particular company.

We've done that now repeatedly.

It's really about the team that you build, the people that you surround yourself with, and the ability to explore and create and learn.

That's really what's been fun.

A lot of leaders, I don't say a lot.

It seems like it's coming up more periodically now, where senior executives like yourself, when you go from business to business, they bring you in.

It's a different company.

Leaders are now bringing their team with them, and that's an expectation sometimes being hired.

I don't know, this is exactly your specific situation, but are you seeing that more where the leader and where I'm going with that is the value of creating your teams and network and having people willing to follow you to different organizations?

Yeah, I would say it probably wasn't a conscious thought.

I think what happens over time is if you're doing things right as a leader, people's career, they're growing and thriving and they're moving into different roles.

So the people that were with me 25 years ago are in very different roles than they were 25 years ago.

Like, they've gone on, they've had success and they're progressing in their career path.

And so if you connect with them later on, it's not so much about what they were doing for you early in their career, or it's more about that you've built a trust with them, and that trust is something that feels good.

They know that we're going to do things in a certain way, they're going to be treated in a certain way.

And that's really what's key about bringing people along.

And so I think that attracts people is, hey, they know what they're getting from me and I know what they're going to give towards the team and what we're trying to accomplish.

It's a really good note for people to make because it's, your team is like your team now, but also it's those relationships that you're cultivating the trust with for future possibilities.

And it's, it can be, I think it's a real skill to be able to build trust with people quickly.

But, but it's also great to be able to maintain trust and deepen trust for years because those can be your go to people for your entire career.

Really good stuff.

Now, you're also known for this idea of positive mindset.

And I'm curious, from your perspective, what's your perspective on maintaining a positive mindset as a leader, and when's the time that it specifically came in handy for you?

Yeah, look, I think anybody that's tried to do startups or really anything difficult, you have to have a positive mindset to be successful.

Right.

Because it's a, these things are difficult by design, right.

They're things that people haven't done before.

And you really have to embrace the grind of that, have that positive outlook of it can be accomplished.

And not only do you have to have it for yourself.

And you have to have that internal belief that anything is achievable.

You have to have it to the point where the others around you believe it as well.

And so it's really important to have that positive mindset.

I think there's lots of examples throughout my journey.

The startups early on, even I always tell the joke of talking to my mother late one night early on in my career at one of the startups, and she's like, you really should consider getting a job.

This is really not something you should be doing.

You've got a family now.

You should really think about getting a real job, not playing around with this startup.

It turned out pretty well, but she never really kind of saw that.

So you have to have that positive mindset to get through.

Even the closest people in your life may question, are you doing the right thing?

And you have to have that positive energy to get through that.

I think probably a decade ago, 910 years ago, I had stage four cancer.

And so if you don't have a positive mindset getting that with the phone call, if you have a couple months to live, get your affairs in order, you have to have a positive mindset to battle your way through that and continue to drive an organization as you're doing that.

So I've had lots of examples where I can go into a lot of detail of why having a positive mindset is really important, down to my dad at the time had stage four cancer as well, and we would have our life is good.

I later become friends with Bert from life is good, but having that life is good gear on through that illness was just a constant reminder daily of having the right mindset to tackle the problem that you were facing.

So what is life is good?

It's an apparel company here in the US and you'll see them everywhere.

And they've got these great t shirts that hats, t shirts, clothing, and two brothers built this company from nothing years ago up in Boston.

It's a great little success story, american success story.

I think my wife has got a hat that has a little smiley face figure in a canoe or a kayak, and it's his life is good and she's had it for years.

I never knew the story behind it.

Great company, Burton John, great people.

They've got a wonderful foundation, the Playmakers foundation for kids.

And so just a wonderful organization.

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So you were diagnosed with stage four cancer while you're an executive leading a startup?

Yeah, while I was an executive at a large company.

At a large company.

Wow.

And so what was that like?

I think it's a very humbling process.

As you click through, kind of what are the potential outcomes?

How are you going to move forward?

My son at the time was about ten years old.

So you're worried about Braden, my son, and how he's digesting that his father's ill, trying to process that.

In some ways, it's really easy as well because you're just focused on getting to the next day.

So the tasks become really brought into focus.

And so you're, you know, in a lot of ways becomes easy as the person being sick, it's harder around the people around you.

For my wife, my son, and my family members, the people that care about you probably have a harder journey than I did because it was very focused on what I was trying to accomplish.

Wow.

Yeah.

What a grounding moment.

Yeah.

In so many ways.

And so you find out.

Shocking, probably, and you bring anything to focus.

What was the journey like ultimately from there on?

Yeah, so, you know, it took me a little over a year to get through treatment, to get to remission.

You know, one of the great things that I've learned through that process was really that everybody had a story, and that cancer impacted a lot of people, a lot of families.

It brought probably more empathy to the table.

You know, it's very easy when you're in your career to kind of lose sight of the things that are truly important.

You get focused on how your company's doing or the awards the company made or selling your company or the next company.

And in a lot of ways, this will sound crazy, but getting the cancer made me a better person and made me stop, kind of reevaluate what was important and really bring a focus to what I wanted to do for whatever time I was going to have left.

So as bizarre as it may sound, I'm grateful that I've got through it, grateful that I had the opportunity to learn from it.

And hopefully it helps me as I'm kind of moving forward.

That, my friend, is a hell of a lens, and it's inspiring because what an obstacle thrown in your way.

And you didn't say gratitude, but I sense a sense of gratitude for that time in your life and the focus that it brought and the way you talk about it.

Yeah, definitely.

I mean, one, it's, you know, you learn a lot about yourself.

Some of it's not always good, but as you moving forward, like everything, you have an opportunity to learn.

You want to take things forward.

And how do I get better at what I'm trying to accomplish?

And again, it brought a, crystallized a lot of things for me as far as where I wanted to go, who the leader I wanted to be the person I wanted to be with the dad I wanted to be, the husband I want to be.

All those things kind of crystallize very quickly for you.

You are the life is good leader.

I don't know about that, but those.

Guys would be happy.

I'm very happy to be here.

All right.

So, man, I got chills just hearing it, talking about it.

And it is powerful when we allow ourselves to allow our personal growth to infuse our professional growth and not keep them separate.

I don't know if you had a tendency to do this, but I can see where a lot of leaders would try to keep that diagnosis quiet and, like, separate and, I don't know, did you share it with the team and all that, or were you like, I don't want to mix my personal business with the professional side.

I shared it with the team.

I was very close, still very close to.

To those folks.

We may not all work together anymore, but I still talk to them regularly, so I decided to just share it.

Up to that point, I always found myself to be somewhat of introvert and quiet and not someone that would share a lot of things.

Certainly nothing emotional.

But for whatever reason, at that point in time, I decided to share.

I actually wrote a little letter to them because I couldn't figure out how to articulate it verbally, so I wrote down a little letter to try to put it in something that seemed digestible to me.

So that was kind of the path.

Then periodically, as I was going through, I would send out an updated note saying, here's where I am, and just grateful for everything they were doing for me, appreciated them.

Did you, when you.

When you share the news, yet you are still working?

Yes.

Did the team feel like, okay, he gave me an update.

He doesn't want to talk about it.

When I talk to, you know, like, like when I talk to Bruce or just talk about work or, like, did you set up.

Hey, don't really talk about it at work.

Let's just focus on work, or feel free to ask me or how'd you go with it?

You know, that's a great question.

I don't know that I really set parameters, but I think anybody that knows me is I'm pretty focused, right?

And so I work is work, and I'm pretty dialed in on work, and we collectively have a goal, and I'm not going to let things get in the way of our goal and what we're trying to accomplish.

And so I wanted them to be successful, the team to be successful, and I was going to do whatever I could to do that, whether it meant talking about it or not.

Some people wanted to talk about it more.

Some people didn't feel comfortable talking about it.

I don't know that I felt comfortable talking about it, but it was what it was, and I tried to accommodate for whatever each person on the team was needing.

It's a real case study in communication because I think so many leaders like, hey, I'm not comfortable with this, but I need.

But you found an avenue to share in a way that was comfortable, that was authentic for you, to suit your style, but to find a way to be transparent when the big things move.

And I think it probably brought your team closer to you in a lot of ways.

You know, now looking back at that, I'm just guessing and versus maintain the.

Separation we've interesting in hindsight, it really started and catapulted a unprecedented run of success for the company and it really just launched us.

And I think it had a lot to do with, as you said, kind of gelling as a team, having a high degree of trust within the team.

And that really set us off on a really great run.

What a beautiful story.

Now, we could stop the interview there, but I have a couple more questions.

Okay.

Because I feel like we just basically did a whole interview.

Like that was a big right story to stop.

But I'm looking at your background, like, why payments?

Why, like, why paysafe?

Of all the things you could have sort of niched in here, why is this the thing for you?

Why did I go to pay safe?

I think for me, I had a great opportunity.

Like, I had accomplished a lot of things in my career that I never thought I would ever have the possibility to do, right.

I've got the opportunity to run a large company.

I've got the opportunity to do startups, I've got to meet all kinds of celebrities.

All of those things were great.

But when I had the thought of what do I want to do.

In the last ten years of my career, I now have a luxury, really making a choice of what do I want to do.

And I really love building.

I enjoy the learning process.

I enjoy building the team.

I enjoy trying to solve the problem that the companies are facing.

And I was intrigued by what we have here, which was a business that was partially consumer centric and partially merchant centric.

And bringing those two ecosystems together was a thesis that I found intriguing and thought that we could get it going.

And so it was really exciting opportunity to say, okay, let's take this one more time.

Let's see if we can build something one more time in a place where I've not been able to really play throughout my career, most of my career, all my career generally was b two b.

So this incorporating a b, two c structure and trying to create this network effect from a b two b and b two C marketplace coming together was really exciting.

And so that's really what kind of pushed me forward.

Most fun celebrity encounter.

Most fun celebrity encounter.

Darius Rucker was pretty cool, dude.

I really enjoyed meeting him.

Really a lot of fun.

But, yeah, you know, Dale Earnhardt Junior was great as well.

Talk about a wonderful guy.

Humble guy.

Dale not only came and did an event with us, but he stayed and took pictures with everybody on my staff, came back and shook hands with everybody before he left.

Like, just a wonderful person.

Cool.

I don't know much about him other than that one encounter, but I.

But really, that one encounter made a big impression, didn't it?

The way he went about doing it.

It's something for leaders to think about, right.

Of all the celebrities, you know, what was about Junior's visit?

Well, he took the time to meet everybody and, you know, shake their hands and take the pictures.

That makes a big difference.

Well, wow, Bruce, what an interview today, sir, what's your, what's your parting thought for our listeners?

Parting thought is your own chief learning officer.

Be positive, adaptable.

All those things help you build relationships.

And that's really what the game's about, is having fun, building relationships, and being curious, learning.

Be your own chief learning officer.

And that's an order from the CEO.

Bruce, thank you for coming on lead the team today.

It's my pleasure.

Thanks for having me.

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