The week before we were slated to play number three Louisville, we played UConn.

I was blocking punt and got what's called a Liz Frank fracture, which to many is a career ending injury.

It was really just a decision like, hey, this is the end of my career right now.

If I get surgery or they can do some things for pain management and we can go through and press through and I can play, you know, throughout the rest of the season.

That next week we came back and beat Louisville, who was number three in the country.

At that time, we were number 15.

It was one of the greatest moments in athletics at the school.

It's not about trying to avoid adversity because there is no avoiding it.

When adversity hits, you know, what are you going to do?

Are you going to focus on the process to overcome it or are you going to wither?

And it's no different in life and business and anything you might come across.

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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 your top leaders and accelerate your career.

Let's get started.

Here's Ben.

Hey there everybody.

Welcome back to lead the team.

Today I have for you Anthony Callie.

Who is CEO of Cypher North America.

The global end to end cybersecurity company.

He's also a tech entrepreneur and a youth sports coach.

Cypher is actually owned by the third largest physical security company in the world, Prosa.

Anthony, welcome to lead the team.

Yeah, thanks Ben.

Appreciate you having me.

So let's start off with this.

You talk a lot about overcoming adversity.

When's the time that you faced it.

And what helped you?

Yeah, I think adversity is inevitable no matter what line of work you're in.

It's something that's gonna gonna hit all of us in the face at some point.

And for me, whether you're starting a career in sales or you're in athletics, nothing is ever going to be perfect.

Right.

And the ability to persevere and focus on the process to change that momentum or the process in which you have the ability to control ultimately to get to your goal is really something that I preach to our team and especially our sales team.

You know, whether it's, you know, myself and my college football career playing five or six games on a.

On a broken, slash, dislocated foot through a bowl game, it certainly wasn't the way I wanted to end my football career.

But it was either have surgery or play through the pain.

Right.

And I chose the latter so that I could be part of our team and contribute at some point in business, you think about, hey, I might not be hitting my sales numbers, I might not be hitting my quota or even close to it.

There's no one deal that's going to drop out of the sky, and there's no one deal that's going to close in 24 hours.

Every salesperson would love that.

But at the end of the day, it's about, all right, what's the process and what do I need to do each and every day, each and every hour to help move that ball forward?

And that's what we talk about on our team here at Cipher.

All right, well, you can't dangle out that story and not have me ask about it.

Broken foot.

So you're a Division 1 college athlete at Rutgers, right?

Correct.

Playing for Greg, who's.

I mean, really put Rutgers football, I mean, it was already on the map, but really elevated it ranking wise.

I mean, people watching football back in the day, what.

What were the years that you were there on the team?

Just in 2002, when you talk about adversity, Right.

I was, I was Coachiano 1, part of Cochiano's second recruiting class.

And in 2002, you know, I didn't.

In the coming out of high school, if you asked me if I was going to go to Rutgers, I probably wasn't.

I thought I was going to end up at Boston College.

And long story short, Cochiano had such a steadfast vision of what he wanted to build in terms of that program, and he never wavered from that.

And at the end of the day, you know, we, you know, some of my teammates we had got there and were like, this guy's out of his mind.

But that vision and that persistence and what it took, that process to build the program really came to fruition four years later.

So 2002 to 2006, we were 1 in 11 my freshman year.

11 and 2 my, my senior year at that point, which we finished 12th in the country and ultimately won the school's first bowl game against Kansas State.

Yeah.

All right.

And so we're along this.

Did you break your foot and why not just sit out?

Because, like, hey, I'm not going to make.

This is not going.

Playing more football is not going to help my injury here.

Well, if you have any college football fans listening, you have to remember back in 2006, college football and the landscape look a lot, looked a lot different.

Right.

The medical red shirts, the nil, the ability to transfer without sitting out didn't exist.

So this was my fifth year.

It was the week before we.

We were slated to play number three, Louisville.

We played UConn.

I was blocking on a punt and basically got what's called a Liz Frank fracture, which to many is a career ending injury and or at least a long recovery through that.

At that point, it was the eighth game of the season.

Going into that Louisville game, right, we're having the best season in school's history.

We're undefeated, we're playing in front of a national TV audience.

And it was really just a decision like, hey, this is the end of my career right now.

If I get surgery or, you know, they can do some things for pain management and we can, we can go through and press through and I can play, you know, throughout the rest of the season and try to be as healthy as possible each and every week and be accountable to my teammates and provide something to the team.

So for the Jersey people out there, that next week we, we came back and beat Louisville, who was number three in the country at that time.

We were number 15 and the field storming the whole nine.

It was one of the greatest moments in athletics at the school.

And you were there, I was there.

You were fighting for, through it.

So it was worth it to play through the pain to do this.

Yeah.

You know, you kind of look back at things in life, in your career and, you know, you kind of look at and go, hey, you know, things were, things were eventually meant to happen that way because choosing Rutgers and being part of that community and hitting it at the time, I did, you know, afforded me opportunities after I had had that, that surgery, which now I have four permanent screws in my right foot holding it together.

But after that surgery and then understanding, gosh, what am I going to do with my career, what am I going to do with my life?

Someone grabbed me that I knew and was like, hey, you should try this sales thing.

And if you had told me that I'd be, you know, start my career jumping into.

Into sales and tech sales, I.

I would have never believed you because I thought I was gonna maybe go to law school until I found out how much.

How many of the books you had to read.

Like, how many books we're talking.

Yeah.

All right, so what helped you get through that time period?

Because that sounds like it's.

But like it's one thing to struggle, but it's another to have a physical ailment, you know, compounding the whole thing.

Yeah.

I think as you go through it, you know, whether.

Whether it's your career in sports or your career professionally, there's.

It's not always going to be.

Going to be going the way you planned.

Right.

And it's not about, you know, trying to avoid adversity, because there is no avoiding it at that particular time in this particular situation.

It was.

It wasn't.

Not only the physical pain like that I could really manage.

That was.

That wasn't.

That's something that, you know, is going to be there.

I think it's more of the mental preparedness that you need to kind of come to a realization that, hey, you know, football potentially is coming to an end after this.

You want to play more.

I was very limited into how much I could play with my injury.

And you want to prepare and practice with your teammates.

And literally my week was filled with training table and getting as healthy as possible and not being on the practice field and not being in the.

The total preparation in the field with your teammates.

So it was.

It was more like, how healthy can you get?

And, and that's, you know, it's.

It's a struggle.

You know, you've got a walking boot on or you've got crutches during the week, and then all of a sudden you're trying to.

Trying to run on a Saturday.

So I think it's the.

The mental ability.

And Coach Young always talked about the, you know, being mentally tough.

Right.

And the fact that, you know, when adversity hits, you know, what are you going to do?

Are you gonna kind of focus on the process to.

To overcome it or, you know, are you going to wither?

Right.

And it's no different in life and business and anything you might come across.

Well, I think about what you ended up becoming the top executive in cybersecurity.

But your business is all about adversity.

Right.

There's no adversity you guys wouldn't like.

We wouldn't need cybersecurity.

But you're, you know, you're probably working with companies and executives.

Hopefully they've been proactive, but probably a not, not as much as they could be.

And they're in reactive mode.

Maybe they're calling you in tears, I don't know.

But how do you, what, what do you, what do you bring forward from those days when you're working with your clients, when you're working with your team, knowing your business is all about adversity.

Yeah.

So I hate to be the cliche football guy, but it's not much different.

Right.

It's not much different in terms of being a leader in business and dealing with, you know, all sorts of personalities that come from different walks of life and roles and functions, just like different positions on the team.

Right.

To have an organization, you need three things, and this is stolen through my time playing football.

It's trust, belief, and accountability.

So trusting in your teammates, trusting in your organization that they're going to do the right thing, Belief in the overall mission, belief in the goal and being accountable.

That's both internally and externally.

You know, the way we talk about being accountable is do what you say you're going to do to your teammates internally, but also be accountable to your clients, your partners, et cetera.

When you talk about the landscape of cybersecurity, certainly we're very fortunate to be in the space because it's ever changing.

No day is exactly the same, which makes it fun and interesting because there's always more bad guys or threat actors to stop.

Again, going back to football, though, it's offense and defense.

Right.

And then there's a little bit of special teams when you talk about some of the things that prosecute your does and really specialized units, but when we talk through the way we can help our clients, it's proactive.

And I think the most successful companies in terms of their cybersecurity precauture, they're proactive.

Right.

They're not sitting along waiting for something to happen before they.

They create a reaction.

So, you know, doing things like, you know, red team services and penetration testing and understanding where their vulnerabilities are and then going out and protecting it.

Way back in my tech journey, you would ask somebody, what's your cyber security strategy?

And they just rattle off a bunch of products.

Oh, I.

Cisco Palo Alto, you know, this thing, that thing.

And that's no longer the case.

Now a full strategy, not only from, you know, the staff or potentially limited staff that organization might have, the strategy trickles down to partners like Cypher that can help protect these business businesses 365 days a year, 24 by 7.

Yeah.

It's interesting for leaders to think about, okay, what's your offense?

What's your defense?

And it just feels like right now, people like, as much as proactive as you try to be, there's, there's always going to be new threats emerging.

And so having someone to call in those moments is really important.

And I'm curious from your, like, are you seeing people more of, hey, I'm going to handle this as our company and if we get attacked, like then I'm going to call Cypher or are they.

Or the majority now, like they've got a very proactive partner like you that they're working with to help create that offensive strategy.

I think it spans one end to the spectrum to the other.

Right.

You know, a really good fit for a company like Cypher for us to work with is a company that's an enterprise company that has an enterprise budget and might not have the enterprise staff and expertise behind it in their cyber security division or team.

Right.

Then we become an extension of their team.

You know, Goldman Sachs and Deutsche bank and JP Morgan Chase, they have cyber teams in their own, in their own company that are bigger than ours in totality.

Right.

So when we think about, hey, where's the good fit?

The good fit for us is becoming an extension of their team, understanding their environment left and right.

And you go through and you talk about the evolution of threat actors and threats and, you know, all the things that evolve, right.

That's what makes the industry fun and scary all at the same time.

You know, we have to leverage things like AI and machine learning and logging those new types of threats and different threat actors.

Right.

This, which is what we do from, you know, our XMDR solution, which is our proprietary platform.

So understanding and leveraging technology is a big piece of staying ahead of it.

And the AI and the machine, the learnings that we can grab from our platform, but also the services and the managed services wrapper behind it.

And that people, people touch is super important as well.

So it's for leaders to think about from a cybersecurity standpoint.

Did they see themselves building a big team out internally like a Goldman Sachs or.

I guess all the banking industry people.

Want to have a lot of that.

Stuff internal or do they see, they want to outsource it totally or they would have a few leaders but then do the extension model.

Is there like a certain threshold where you're like okay.

You know, you need to, you need to build your team versus you need to have an extension model versus outsource the whole thing.

Like, yeah, I think, I think it comes down to the ciso and the CIO's vision, or maybe the CIO, CTO's vision, depending upon the organization.

I think we see a majority of that being hybrid.

Right.

Which means we're in a crowded markets marketplace here in the US There's a lot of ciphers out there.

Right.

So how can we provide differentiation when we get into the market?

So the hybrid model being, hey, I may have four or five people, 10 people, 15 people managing my, my tech stack or my cybersecurity environments and.

But I, I know that's not enough.

Right.

And I need an outsourced partner to do more so that my team can focus on, you know, our day jobs are keeping our business healthier, advancing a project moving forward.

That's really where we can provide a lot of value.

I don't see, and I haven't seen a ton of, hey, we're going to outsource the whole thing and they're just going to become, you know, our full cybersecurity staff.

Right.

I think.

Does it exist?

Sure.

Has it gone probably, you know, wrong a few times.

Right.

And has, you know, some MSSP type companies come back and said, oh yeah, we can do that.

And then all of a sudden, you know, there's a lot of finger pointing and, you know, it's really easy just to blame the partner.

I see companies extremely cognizant of cybersecurity and their, their ability to protect their business.

The problem is they're not getting any more people budget.

Right.

Unless you're one of these massive organizations.

Right.

So they're cognizant of it.

They know they can't get breached.

They know they have to protect their IP or they know they have to be in compliance from a government.

From a government.

If they're in a regulated industry, whether that's PCI or HIPAA, etc.

They know that, but they're not getting any more people behind their budget, which is a great place for Cypher to come and assist.

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Yeah, unless you're just getting a ton more people, it's hard to really organize around the threads and to keep growing, especially if your company's growing and that's a great place to bring.

Yeah.

If you look at the, if you look at the economics behind it, you're going to get, you're going to spend more trying to hire your own people.

You're going to end up training those people and hopefully they do a great job for you.

But at the end of the day they can also.

Because the cybersecurity market and those employees are so valuable, they can also leave after a year and go, go get another zero behind their paycheck because the job market is really hot and tempting for a lot of people.

So for us, being that agnostic strategic advisor and partner is really where we want to sit.

And again, flexibility and client relationship is massive for us.

Coming back to your career, when's the time you had unexpected twist or failure and how did it lead to your success or growth on down the road?

One unexpected twist and I won't say the company's name right.

I had done what I thought was a great job building a relationship with the CIO at the time and we were getting nowhere.

It was back when I was at Presidio.

I remember I was on vacation with my family in France.

This is when my team was responsible for selling to large scale organizations.

We could provide this company a ton of value.

It turned out to be.

No, just not the right time.

And I was on PTO and I got a call from back from the US and it was this particular CIO who was going through a massive crisis outage in which their POS terminals or point of sale terminals were going out to the tune of 10,000 stores at a time.

It was a massive conglomerate.

And he's like, listen, I need you.

I don't know who to turn to.

I know you guys can help.

You know, we didn't have an msa, we didn't have a po and what we decided to do was just step in and try to help.

Right?

And understand that, hey, look, this is a time where we have the ability to prove ourselves.

This is a time where we have the ability to earn this client's trust in their time in need.

And you know, thankful to my team because it was all hands on deck and we deployed people all over the country and into Canada and you know, helped them solve a pretty massive problem.

But it goes to show, you know, you know, my biggest kind of point of pride in that whole situation is that this particular gentleman thought of me and that, you know, hey, I'm facing, you know, one of the toughest points of my career and I need a true partner.

So that relationship and the ability to just act on that turned into, you know, multimillion dollars worth of business moving forward.

You took a big risk because you guys spent a lot of time and resources that you didn't have prepared per se to deploy and you pulled it all together and made it happen.

And they could have not done the deal with you at the end of the day.

Right, they could have.

But you had to, you had to do the calculation.

You're like, okay, this is the right thing for the company and you get.

To get on the phone with a few people and explain, you know, the risk versus the reward scenario.

And hopefully, you know, thankfully I was a good enough salesman to get them to take that risk because I would have been in looking for a new job if it had hit the fan at that point.

Okay, that's what I was going to ask.

Was your job at stake?

And it sounds like it was.

But you felt like it was worth the risk.

Yeah, you come to, you come to all these different points in your career, right?

And you have to, you really have to evaluate calculated risk, whether that's, you know, getting, whether that's myself putting Cypher in a good place to win, but also understanding potentially some risk behind, you know, a deal negotiation.

It's our goal to be as flexible as humanly possible and do things that our competitors aren't willing to do around, you know, payment terms and finance options and, you know, integrations that we need to build in our platform and we always will.

Right?

We're always going to do what's right by the customer and what's right by the partnership within.

Taking the long view with everybody you work with.

I think that long view approach, whether it's a $5,000 deal today, and I've had a few of them throughout my career where they've been $5,000, you know, partnerships that have turned into 20 million with some large scale institutions and that ability to take that long view with all you, all, all you work with, create customized solutions and most importantly, provide personalized service, whether you're an executive like myself, a frontline manager or a salesperson, or even someone that's a client facing customer success, rep that face, to name that accountability goes a long way.

What's the one trait you wish you could Instill in every employee.

And why do you think it's important?

Well, I think when I look to hire someone, and I hope my management team does as well, I really look for the intangibles like I look for grit.

I look for toughness.

Right.

You know, when we talk about, you know, another acronym is eat so Eat so Effort, attitude and tough.

Toughness.

Right?

Jobs aren't always fun.

Jobs aren't always easy.

We need people that are going to provide maximum effort because they're accountable to the greatness of our entire team.

And we can't be great as a team if people aren't going to be great themselves.

But that effort is something that's non negotiable.

Having a good attitude, being pleasant to work with, being positive is something that we look for.

And then toughness, right?

And toughness is like physically tough.

When I think about playing on a broken foot, it's mental.

Right?

Can I overcome adversity?

Can I creatively problem solve?

Can I think about something that can help unlock, unblock this obstacle that may exist within, you know, my path?

With a customer or partner, there's no substitute for grit.

You can't really teach it.

Sometimes it comes through life experiences outside of business and you kind of just inherently have it.

And then there's a lot of people that, that's not their personality trait.

You know, when the fire gets hot, they, they kind of wither a little bit.

And you know, if I have someone that can persevere through a problem and be really accountable to their teammates and figure it out, you know, I want people to have an entrepreneurial mindset in their business and what they do for us and really just make hard decisions on their own until they get to a point where they need to potentially take the risk.

Then we like to be involved in that one.

Do you hire for eat or do you nurture for eat?

That's a great question.

I think if you can tell in the hiring process that someone's not a maximum effort person, probably eliminating them.

I don't think you can teach effort.

I think it's inherently in you or not.

Especially in a hybrid work environment.

Right.

Listen, I'm not, I don't care if you go need to pick up your dry cleanings or dry cleaning or your kid from school or you have something, all that is fine.

Just do your job right?

Make sure that there's only one person that you can look in the mirror and say, hey, I gave my all today.

I hit every piece of my business between my customers, my prospecting my partners, you know, my internal needs.

There's only one person at the end of the day that can answer that question for you.

Especially in accountability driven hybrid work environment.

I don't know if you can nurture that.

You can coach a little bit in terms of, hey, this is.

These are all the familiar symptoms of someone that's high performing within our organization that falls back to that acronym.

But I don't know if you can nurture it.

Yes, something good for listeners to really think about having, you know, what do you want to instill in your employees?

And it sure is nice if they can show up with it already instilled and you can keep developing it and.

Yeah, efforts, efforts.

One of those that if they're willing to invest it up front.

It's hard to convince someone to give effort.

Yeah, I think, I think there's, there's, you know, the coaching part of it is there's a little bit of an imposter syndrome.

Right.

There's.

Well, I did this today and I talked to this one person and they got me a meeting.

I'm done for the day.

Well, that's great.

But we talk about, you know, when are you a success?

Well, you're only a success when you perform a successful act.

Successful act, then you have to go and do it again.

So great.

We just closed a million dollar deal.

That's awesome.

What are you going to do?

Go close another one?

Right, that's, that's great.

We're going to celebrate these wins, these big milestones within our business.

But you're only a success when you perform a successful act.

Then you got to go and do it again.

Right.

Just the way this year is about to end.

We're going to have all these great milestones within cypher us which I couldn't be more proud of.

The people and the team that we're building and the relationships and some of the stuff that's going on for the future.

But again, you can have a great year.

Those weeks turn into months, months turn into quarters, quarters turn.

In a year you gotta do it all over.

Yeah, it's like the process to be a success continues.

You're never really officially there and then enjoy that journey and really embrace it.

Being together on that and that helps you keep going, but thinking about helping keep going.

Over the years, what's been your biggest source of inspiration and when's the challenging time to help get you through?

Yeah, I think it's my family.

You know, I've, I have two kids and you know, my wife and Just understanding that, you know, you want to, you want to professionally be great for them, not only, you know, monetarily, but just also as an example, I want my kids to understand that you can have fun working, you can also, you know, also have bad days working.

But really through the end of it, as long as you enjoy what you're doing with good people and you're passionate about it, that's super, super important.

Right?

You know, not everybody rolls out of bed passionate about cybersecurity.

Not everybody rolls out of bed passionate about what they do for a living.

So if you have the ability to say, hey, look, I'm with a good, good people and a good organization that supports me in my career, I think that's, you're probably ahead of the eight ball.

And no, I tell our team all the time, you know, whether they work directly for me or they work for another piece of our management organization, you know, I feel responsible to you and your family, right.

As, as a, as a leader of our company here in the US I'm personally responsible to making sure that you are in a good place in your career.

Because if you're in a good place in your career, that means your family is in a good place for the most part.

Right.

There's some things I can't control, but I want to make sure that you achieve your goals by being successful here at Cypher, you know, putting your kids through college and whatever those goals might be.

So that sounds like a lot of pressure.

Or you're like, hey, I'm thinking about you as an employee.

I'm thinking about your family.

What do you do personally to help, help yourself handle the pressure of being, having that kind of responsibility but also being in such a dynamic, high pressure, cyber environment.

Yeah, I think it's the best thing I can do.

Right.

And I'm a competitive person and I like to win.

Right.

But the best thing I can do to, to help my kids see that is be ultra competitive.

Right.

No matter what, we can, we can all hold hands and it can be total, you know, fun and you know, even in business we can go have drinks together, but there's a scoreboard at the end of the day, right.

And if I'm, if I'm on the sales team, I want my name to be at the top, but I'm going to support my teammates that if they did a great job, you know, we're going to celebrate and it's going to be friendly.

It's not going to be toxic.

It's going to be healthy, competitive it's going to be a healthy competitive situation.

But you know, what I do is I just try to stay involved especially within my kids sports life.

My son plays football and if you think being an executive in businesses pressure, you should try coaching an 11 year old football team.

Yeah, let's talk about that.

So, so you are passionate about youth sports.

How do you find time to do that?

How are you prioritizing that and what lessons have you learned not from playing football but being the coach?

Yeah, I think for, from, from my life.

Right.

I look back and you know, there are a lot of people that helped me throughout my journey and many of them weren't blood related to me.

They weren't, they didn't have a skin in the game from being my family member.

I think the, the, some of the most influential people in my life were coaches.

You know, whether that was my high school football coach or you know, one of my position coaches or even coach Giano back in, in terms of the things that you, you learn and kind of absorb throughout your time there and when you're younger you kind of look back, this guy doesn't know what the hell he's talking about or I know this or I know that and then you know, you become a dad or you become, you know, further on down your journey and you're like, yeah, you know, he was right, you know, and this is, this is a lesson I learned when I was 21 that you know, I think I can apply here.

So I think coaching is, is one of the most critical things you can do for young people.

I look at, you know, and my son's on the team, but I look at all the kids that I coach as an opportunity to help them.

We have kids from all different backgrounds, all different family, family situations, all different economic situations.

And I was very fortunate to have people that cared about me even though I wasn't related to them.

You try to communicate and I, I'm sure there's, if there's people listening.

You know, I'm not the easiest youth coach to play for because I take a lot of the same lessons that I learned throughout my college career.

And not only that, but again, teaching these kids accountability and teaching these kids work ethic, it doesn't get done a lot in the general population of youth athletics.

And I think, you know, making them mentally tough will only set them up for the next phase of whatever they want to do in life.

So it sounds like you feel called to pass it on.

Yeah, you do.

And it's, it's personal with me for, for my son who has a passion for the game and, you know, works at it more that more so than the average, the average player or the average kid.

And I told him, like, listen, you know, we'll go to your quarterback coach and we'll go do this and we'll go do that.

And, you know, it's special because now I can bring him back to Rutgers and watch practice of a team and a coach that I played for.

So that's pretty cool.

But he's got to create his own path in his own life, just like every other kid on my team or our team.

And, you know, they've got to want to pursue football and they've got to have a passion in their energy for it because the.

Just like in business, no one's going to hand you a scholarship, no one's going to hand you playing time.

Everything is typically earned.

Same thing in, you know, sales and business.

You.

You're going to eat what you kill and the effort you put in.

Not to mention you got a super cool coaching name, Coach Cali.

I mean, yeah, I don't know.

I don't know how cool they think.

I am, but yeah, you come in and say, hey, I played Division 1 football for Rutgers.

It's got to be worth something to these, these kids.

I hope so.

There's a.

I've learned a lot, like the, the vernacular that these kids use now.

I've.

It's taken a lot to, to translate in terms of, you know, the new slang that, that's out there, Ben.

So I'm just hopeful to communicate very directly with them and hopefully some of the things I'm telling them sleep in.

But listen, they've.

This team has been awesome.

It's been a new team that we formed here in Central New Jersey and we just won the, the Shore Conference championship last week and.

Awesome.

Yeah.

So moving on to the regional playoffs, slug shout out to the St.

James Royals.

That's great.

Well, it's so cool when the effort pays off in terms of a win and a lot, a whole lot of wins and a championship.

So.

Yeah, yeah.

Listen, I've been, I've been on one in 11 teams and I've been on very successful teams.

What makes it fun again, just like business, when you can come to practice or you can go to work with people that you enjoy working with that, you know, have your back and, you know, are working hard just the same and have the same mentality and the same, same mindset you do, whether you're 11, 12, 42, 52, 22.

You know, people like to be around like minded people.

What is your take on the adage that success is a terrible teacher?

Yeah, you know, it's, it's interesting.

We, we talked about this yesterday or a couple days ago on a, on a monthly town hall and I said, you know, I'd heard this quote somewhere and it really stuck with me.

It's the same thing as doubt and criticism, right.

If you, if you drink success the same way you drink down criticism, you're probably going to believe one or the other.

And you know, I'd heard that, you know, you can smell success, you can sniff success, but, but don't drink it.

Right.

Don't start, don't start feeling yourself when, when you have to go and do another successful act.

So, you know, I really like that one because listen, I'm myself included.

There's times where you look at and you go, how the hell am I going to get this done?

How I'm going to climb this hill?

How am I going to hit the sales number?

You know, I'm a million dollars off a quota.

My pipeline sucks.

You know that self doubt as well.

Or you can, you can believe all that and you can, you know, there you go.

I'll give you a Coach Saban.

That rat poison right there.

Yeah, the rat poison.

You can start believing how good you are, how bad you are, and typically you're going to turn into that.

But you can say, okay, stop, let me focus on the process, let me go back, let me keep making plays.

And there's a coach prime for you.

Right?

Keep making plays, keep grinding.

Just keep the process moving forward.

And remember that the next cold call could be the next one that, that makes your year your quarter.

Right.

Or the next relationship, the next email as it moves forward.

Just keep making plays, keep that, keep that process moving forward.

Yeah.

So good.

And it's so hard, it's hard to handle success and to get good at handling that.

And even as Saban is how, how many great seasons as he had, he occasionally had one where people were drinking their success.

Yeah.

See it go off the rails.

So I love to, I love to listen to successful coaches and see, you know, kind of their mindset, you know, outside for, you know, look, we, we have every year we set what, what the standard is going to be and we all kind of agree to it.

Right.

And the, the interesting thing is that, hey, if you have a teammate that's not living up to the standard that we all agreed to in our room at our sales Kickoff.

You know, we think of feedback as feedback, not criticism, right?

There's a way to provide correct.

Correct and positive feedback.

And we talk about feedback being a gift, right?

No different than if you had a teammate on the field and they were screwing up and you wanted to say, hey, look, you weren't running fast enough or you didn't give your effort, you didn't give your.

All that feedback is a gift mentality runs through our management team, from me to them, from them to each other, from them to their employees.

And we're really blessed to have the team, you know, and people that have written books and people that have led huge teams.

And, you know, when I looked at, you know, coming over here to.

To build this here in the US I couldn't be more pleased with the job they've done in 10 short months.

And, you know, that's everybody throughout the organization.

But just because we're.

We've been successful, we've done a few things, doesn't mean we're done.

And it doesn't mean we can drink that rat poison.

Yeah.

All right, y'all watch out for rat poison, but trust the process.

Anthony has been so fun today.

So many layers, I think, for leaders, rising leaders inside the organization and football coaches or soccer, any.

Any kind of coach.

What's your parting thought for our listeners today?

Parting thought is just, you know, if you're a leader, just continue to evolve.

You know, what I thought of as being a good leader or being a good employee or being a good teammate wasn't the same at 28 as it is now 40.

Be a good listener, be a pointed and direct feedback giver, and be an open feedback receiver, because I think it's full circle.

The best thing that I've done in my career is get people that are better at my job than I do, than I am.

I could probably do my job better than I.

Don't be intimidated by people that, you know, are super smart.

You want those people on your team.

You want to be able to collaborate with them.

You never want to stop learning.

Thanks for coming on the show today, Anthony.

It's a pleasure.

Thanks, Ben.

Appreciate it.

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