Dallas Burnett: Hey everybody, we're talking to Brian Fielkow today.
What an amazing guy.
He's a business leader, author, and safety culture expert who transformed a
trucking company into a tenfold growth story, was nationally recognized for his
just culture and employee-first approach.
He's got some incredible stories about turning safety into a true competitive
advantage that drives profit and loyalty.
He's got a great new book coming out called Making Safety Happen, a
wealth of knowledge and leadership lessons all over the place.
You don't want to miss this incredible conversation
And it's gonna go and play, bum-ba-da-da, and so then we're gonna come back in here
Brian Fielkow: Okay
Well, thank you, Dallas.
It's great to be with you.
I appreciate the invitation to join
it started within the family really.
I grew up in a city called Appleton, Wisconsin, uh, right near Green Bay,
and my parents were in the
retail business.
So they
had
several different businesses.
the one that I worked in, uh, was, appliances, furniture.
Th-think about the days before, before Best Buy, way before an Amazon, right?
you go to your local store and, uh,
I started there I was probably eight or nine years old, wanting to go in,
hang out with my dad on the weekends.
I mean, being in retail, your parents were working, long hours and that
was a good way to be with them.
So I
learned
a lot about business.
I learned a
lot about customers
and
service and
just by watching, and then by probably 10 years old, I was out on the floor selling
Oh, it was great.
great.
I loved it on the weekends.
A lot of fun
it was definitely, learning curve, just know, kind of
to listen to the customer, to understand a buying signal compared to somebody
that really was not there to buy.
learn a lot of that stuff being in the front lines and
watching some of pros do it.
also learned the difference between sales and marketing.
and, I realized over the, pretty early on that my strengths
probably were closer to marketing.
me, trip with marketing, the skill with marketing is
drawing people into your orbit.
and, that, that's something that, my dad did, like, extremely well.
would have TV commercials with just crazy ones, with wrestlers,
and it, was just great.
But it, it created a buzz.
I mean, there, there was a buzz around that business just because of
some of the crazy stuff he would do.
He was really, um… And people still see on Facebook, remember when?"
It's like, this is
40 50 years ago.
still remember it.
And,
you know, I definitely
learned early on that, creating that buzz around your business and,
you know, as long as the marketing
ties to what you really do, as long as it, there's a relationship to your value
proposition, you know, it, it's important to, to draw the people into your orbit.
And I, I
learned that
early
on too
it
was a
blast
Oh, no, it wasn't that.
It was just hitting an age where it's time to graduate high school,
go to college, and move on.
and so some of the skills I, took, that I learned over the years, I I
didn't know I was applying them, right?
wasn't conscious.
But after… I went to University of Wisconsin-Madison, then went to law
school, uh, practiced law for a while, and then ultimately got into business.
And every step of the way, um, I, applied those skills.
I mean, I guess one of the things that people still don't forget is when I
was in Madison, I was, the president of the student government, and our
claim to fame was we convinced Rodney Dangerfield's production company
to, film Back to School at Madison.
and
that's… And, and people still talk about that today.
it's stuff like that.
it's crazy.
And that was, by the way, one of the most fun
three weeks.
Um, you know, the stories I could tell
as an extra, like a walk-on, right?
Not a speaking part, but an extra part.
But, I mean, the producer called me when they were back in Hollywood, you
know, putting it together, and said, "By the way, we're gonna put you in
the credits." And I sat there at the theater till the end, and there I was.
I was like
Yeah.
Yeah, and Rodney Dangerfield was on campus, and he was, you
know he he was a nice guy, but I didn't know if he really knew me.
Eight or nine months later, I went to Los Angeles for the premiere,
and he came up and it's like he remembered me, and I was just
I was
shocked.
I
was
absolutely shocked.
He was talking to me like, we were
old friends.
"Hey, how you doing?
long time no see." and
he… that, that
shocked me.
And it was also
kind of a that, you know, um, no matter where somebody is, just
remembering you means a lot.
I'll never
forget that, right?
And that's a lesson I think we
can all take.
Yeah, it's just all about throwing the ball down the field, I guess,
it… All those experiences
were fun and they kind of form you for the future
the thing about, practicing law is that I did corporate law.
I've never set foot
in, in a courtroom and, uh, hope never to.
Um, So it was tr- it was contracts, transactions, business advisory.
So that was a formative part of my career because, I learned
from some brilliant people.
I was able to watch a lot of great clients and learn from them, and quite
frankly, I, was also able to watch some who may not have made the right moves.
And, you know, I, took notes on both sides of the ledger.
Um,
and and so It was like, career education, you just… Y- you-- It was irreplaceable.
and one of the clients I did a lot of work for, I was very close to, wound up
going to work, for them as their chief operating officer.
And again, you can't write this stuff down.
In other words, if… I look at my career and I-- it's nothing
I could've ever scripted.
you know?
And, and, and, and that to me is fun.
um, I, I don't mind, um, a little randomness.
I, actually embrace it
When you're on the outside looking in at entrepreneurs, you think
of them as high rollers, right?
As, as, just,
we'll roll the dice and see what happens.
And to a person, the best entrepreneurs
knew how to manage risk.
and,
and I learned that in
law, right?
In other words, the the best entrepreneurs were not the high
rollers who might have gotten lucky.
They were calculated, they were deliberate, they're strategic.
they understand you can't necessarily mitigate risk.
Risk is risk.
you
can manage
it.
you can put your defenses in place, and the better you do that, and
let's not expect perfection here, but the better you do that, the more
confident you are in playing offense.
You've thought about what can go wrong, you've protected the organization to the
extent possible, then you can focus on offense, where I think the people that
are more of the, the cowboy approach.
N- I'm not saying it's a bad approach, I'm just saying it, I could never
figure out how to do it, it's, not me.
Um, it, it's, it's the old,
I guess growing
up a Packer fan for all those
y- years right near, right, growing up right near Lambeau
Field, the Lombardi defense, the
Reggie White defense.
it's like you
do that and your offense can shine
in between law and Jetco was a real important step.
I went to go work for my favorite client.
they were a family-held recycling company, second and third generation.
And, they brought me in as their chief operating officer right out of practicing
law, and I'm like, "Well, if you guys are willing to do that, I'm saying yes."
so it… I always wanted to be on the business side, and so this was
a great opportunity.
Um, and, we grew the business.
Ultimately, it was sold to Waste Management, and so I moved down
from Wisconsin to Houston to help Waste run their recycling
business from their headquarters.
I did that for a couple years, and I learned a lot at Waste.
It was a great organization, but I still had this entrepreneurial bug, right?
And I still wanted to do my own thing.
And I needed to prove if I could do it.
The recycling business, I think I helped make it more successful, but
let's be real clear, it was gonna be successful without me, you know?
I, I needed to prove I could do it and to myself.
And so I looked for companies, and what I was really interested in,
I was interested in trucking and
logistics as one option because I really enjoy the process of taking
what is perceived as a commoditized business or a commoditized
industry and de-commoditizing it,
right?
and trucking, if you
view yourself as commodity, you, you compete on price, and there's
probably not a lot of future in that.
But if you can kinda create a value proposition, and ours was real simple.
It was the right people, it was the newest and best equipment we could
afford, and it was leaning into technology, which even early
on was transforming trucking and logistics, and now it's
been a revolution.
But, so it was a people, you know, strong on the
inside,
unbeatable on the
outside strategy regarding our people.
Um, making sure our people had the best equipment we could possibly provide,
and then, weaving technology in to create a value proposition that, that
we thought would resonate with not all clients, but with the right clients.
Oh, 100%, making the leap.
By the time I left law, I was pretty comfortable with it.
I enjoyed practicing it, so was a level of comfort and security, right?
Now you're
going into something that, you know, you might, uh, succeed spectacularly, and you
might flame out, and that, that unease, it accompanies every transition you
make, whether that's inside the business, right, moving into a new business
line, making a significant investment, transforming the business somehow, or
whether you're just kind of going from one business or opportunity to another.
that it's unsettling, but it gets your adrenaline going.
and that's why, again, I would never tell somebody… Um, I think in one
of our earlier conversations I was saying, one piece of advice would
be ignore the influencers, right?
There's a million people out there that wanna tell you what
to do, how you should live.
if staying in one place your whole career fits for you,
then that's what you should do.
So I would never… I should never would never say that anybody should follow my
career path, but for me, I guess call it a certain restlessness, a desire to sort of
go broad, led me to these career choices.
And I, look back at it and I'm never… Like I said before, I never could
have scripted it out, but I'm really excited it's turned out this way.
when I moved down to Houston to join Waste at their headquarters, there
was I didn't know that how long it was gonna last, but was no intention
at that time to say, I'm gonna do this and go buy a trucking company."
But I got
to the point at Waste where I'm like, "Okay, great organization, great
people, but I gotta do my own thing." And then I started to
make a list of what kinds of industries would be the best for me.
and again, that decommoditization thing was important to me.
Kinda, kinda finding a business that was big enough to have some scale, but not
so big that, I couldn't own most of it.
Um, one that was an industry that I, thought I could learn, again, one where I,
thought maybe, um, tired but not broken.
That's the kind of company I was looking for.
one that, you
know… I mean
Yeah.
I mean, and the,
owners of this company when I was doing due diligence are-- they were fantastic to
deal with.
You
could tell the integrity was there.
the main owner took me out for lunch with three or four customers
on separate occasions saying, "No script, you ask." You know, in other
words, they threw things wide open for me, which that that just gave me
such comfort that, you know, I knew what I was… I knew what was there.
and they were, you know, the primary owner was in his early sixties.
and, he was just real clear, "I, I need to double down on my fleet, double down
on my capital, or I need to sell." and the funny thing is After closing, we
signed a six-month consulting agreement, and then, you know, he would move on.
Well, he's still there.
Um, yeah, I mean, he's still there.
I
just saw him a
couple weeks ago, just
a wonderful person.
So
our
transition went very well.
We
built a great working relationship.
he taught me and the people that I brought in so much, and it was…
You know, I've have this belief that if an acquisition is screwed up.
nine times out of ten, it's the buyer that screws it up.
And
I promised
I wasn't gonna be that buyer.
Um I mean, a seller can screw
it up
by
misrepresenting, by sabotage.
there's ways to do it, but let's just, let's not assume that.
Let's assume that the seller represented correctly, there
was no malfeasance post-closing.
The problem with buyers sometimes is they're, they're, you're
the smartest guy in the room.
It's my toy.
I'm gonna play with it and break it.
That's insane.
if you buy a good culture, it doesn't mean that you're gonna keep it
stagnant.
It doesn't mean that, that you're going to um, just do things the way it always was.
You're gonna change, but it's
gonna be evolution.
You're gonna capture the best of what was there and then layer in
what you're bringing to the table.
Uh and so I made a promise to myself that if I had the
chance
to buy an
organization, I would not be that buyer that, to be
the star of the show, had to be the smartest guy, in the
process screw up a good thing.
in the very early years, if I was intentional, it might have
been, um… You know, you're, you're nervous as a buyer, right?
So it it was some common sense stuff, treating
people right and that kind of thing.
But it took a couple years for me to get really strategic
about what is, culture, right?
In other words, you've got a culture.
The question is, is it… the culture you want?
is your culture working for you or against you?
So a- as I matured in the business, it became
real clear to me that to
have a
healthy culture it's values.
It's the value.
It's having value-aligned people, but that's not enough.
Then you need systems and process.
It's people, systems, process working in harmony.
And you come across these hur-
hurdles where you may have a productive employee, somebody that, you like,
somebody that you may even wanna go have a beer with, but you're not
value-aligned, right?
in our company, if safety wasn't your core value, safety wasn't in your heart, I
don't care how technically good you were, you didn't have a home at the company.
and so those are,
like, things that you
sorta
have
to learn that, it's gotta be leader-driven and employee-owned,
but leader-driven means you've gotta
pull harder than everybody else.
And if you look the other way, everybody else sees you look the other way, and
they come to the conclusion real fast that you're not serious about this
there were a few of those along the way.
I think, early on, if I look at my first three years or so, you give me a metric,
growth, profitability, safety, We were doing really well, uh, and too well.
In other words, we sort of got complacent and put our feet up on the desk.
And then we kinda had a string of incidents and issues, and that brought us
down to earth, which was an, an important part, I think, of the growth journey.
and
and We
realized that, you know, the
company had grown a lot, and we didn't have the processes and the systems in
place to handle today and tomorrow.
our processes and systems were still based on yesterday.
Th-that was a good wake-up call.
but I think, our business And, the trucking side of the
business, we had two companies.
we had a trucking business and a freight brokerage business.
In the trucking business, the truck driver is the heartbeat
of the organization, right?
in other words, y- you have to have this unconditional respect
for your frontline employees.
and we tried, and we did okay.
But what really changed the game, the aha moment, is we asked our
drivers to elect a driver committee.
And what they basically did is they
elected their-- people who their leaders are, right?
Remember, your
leaders
don't necessarily have big titles, and
sometimes the--
when you get a
room of
people with the-- only with the big titles, you don't
get to the right decision.
So once we elected the driver committee, we did not make a decision about
the life of a driver, whether we're talking about pay, work, equipment, et
cetera, without at least the input of the chairman of the driver committee.
Um, and That, broke down the physical or metaphorical
window that separates the office from the front lines.
that is toxic.
that separation is toxic.
when
that came down, driver retention
employee retention skyrocketed.
service skyrocketed.
We created a sense of ownership, a sense of camaraderie that wasn't there,
and you couldn't necessarily create a situation that allowed 150 people,
drivers, to express their voice.
But through the
committee, we gave them a channel to do it, and especially
working with the chairman.
So something that
sounds so simple because people sometimes think of committees
as a suggestion box, right?
just
give it to the
committee and hopefully it goes away.
That wasn't what we did.
we
really brought the committee into the DNA of who we were.
that was a huge sea shift in, how our
culture and how we functioned internally.
And remember, that's what your customers
are buying.
Your
customers, at the end of the day, are
buying not what you do, but how you do it
Yeah
I think it's about rhythm, and focus.
I don't remember the exact details, right?
But Pat Lencioni, who is one of my favorite authors, writes about it where,
You know, one of his books, I guess you don't have to go past the title of
the book, Death by Meeting, you have
to be intentional about how
you
engage your team.
So, we would have kind of quick standup meetings every day, what, went right,
what went wrong, where are we what course corrections do we have to make?
But it wasn't like every day we would sit down for a marathon meeting, but then
we would make sure that we would have off-sites, and uh, it was relationship
building as much as it was business.
So in other words, it, was really trying to focus on making .Sure that we had
a, a cohesive team in place that was aligned, that had the bandwidth, and the
latitude to do their jobs and execute.
'Cause my, my whole goal in building the business and I think I proved
it after selling it, was legacy.
I didn't
want a
business that ran around me.
What does Brian want?
What does… No.
I wanted a business where the people, we taught them how to approach issues, how
to run the business, and then they did.
I remember toward the end of my tenure there, I was having dinner with
some people, and the old Brian came out, and I started to get detailed.
And, the woman that ran our intermodal business said,
"Wait a minute, Brian, stop.
You taught us.
Now let us go do it,
and if we have any problems, we'll come back to you." I'm like, "Thank you
Well
said.
I'm done." You know, and, and I was at
the
company's month, the company's fiftieth anniversary.
It's been around fifty years now.
now And, it's the morale and, it's…
I feel like the, it's the day I walked out.
and a lot of
the stuff
that I know I put in place is still there, and that that's the fun part,
is I've seen too many companies that revolve around the, quote, "owner."
I never wanted to be the owner.
I
never wanted the world to revolve around me.
First of all,
the burden is just
too darn
big.
Um, but you're not really building anything that
lasts.
And I
wanted something that
was gonna last.
and again, That's where
it's
process, systems, and the right people
There has to be a recognition that safety is at the foundation of
operational excellence and profitability.
can you imagine a company that's running poorly when it comes to
safety, being productive or profitable?
That, that company doesn't exist.
They could
have a lucky quarter, a lucky year, but over time, it's not gonna work.
in not relatively recent times, but let's say in the past fifty, forty, fifty
years, the best example is Paul O'Neill.
Paul O'Neill, uh, became chairman, CEO of Alcoa, and he told his investment
community in his first meeting with his
investors, "If you wanna know how Alcoa is doing,
look at our safety statistics." And some of these people ran for the door.
It's "This guy's crazy," you know?
And Paul O'Neill, by the way, went on to become George Bush's
treasur-treasury secretary.
I mean, he
was very,
a very accomplished leader.
but but what Paul O'Neill understood was that if you're hurting people,
your own employees, members of the public, um, if you're continually
have a continually revolving door because you can't operate safely, if
you're spending your money cleaning up the mess rather than playing offense,
you're not building a solid organization.
So
it's that
foundational principle that, that safety is truly at the core of, operational,
excellence and profitability.
On top of it, of course, it's the morally right thing to do.
It's one of those where all the boxes are checked, right It's the right thing
to do, and it's really good business.
And safety outcomes, to put it bluntly, it's a mirror of leadership effectiveness.
So you know, We weren't
perfect.
We had safety issues.
When we had safety issues, the first place I would look in the, was in the mirror.
It's like maybe my hands weren't on the levers, but is there something we missed
in process design, in how we're managing our people, in how we're communicating?
and and generally, I would find, you would certainly have the occasional unforeseen
issue, but I would find that most of the issues revolved around production
pressure, around training, a-around things like that, that that just symptoms of
things that we could do better as leaders.
So while I'm certainly not gonna absolve the person whose hands were
on the levers of accountability, they may be accountable.
If you just hold them accountable and don't look in the mirror, you're probably
missing eighty percent of the story.
Yeah.
It's hand in hand.
it-- when safety, improves well, your, your insurance carriers notice.
that gives
you, more opportunities on your insurance
costs.
Your employees notice.
But
your ladder story is perfect.
it's like, you know, we look at
people wearing their PPE, and if you're area that requires a hard hat.
you should absolutely wear a hard hat.
I'm not minimizing it.
But how about if we focus on the steps to prevent something from
falling on your head in the first
place?
So, so you gotta you gotta design the
systems, and then PPE
becomes
your last resort.
And again, it's
important, but a lot of times we look at it and say, "Well, they're
wearing their vest and their hard hat.
They're okay." But they haven't thought about design, and that
ladder story is exactly the right story because you focused on design,
Let me first tell you what it's not.
not academic.
It's not theoretical.
So the whole point of the book is to bring actionable ideas
to businesses of any size.
You a big budget.
isn't about who's got the biggest safety department.
Whether you're a, a startup, an entrepreneurial business, a
large established business, the ideas in here will work for you.
And the book is organized in these areas.
First of all, we've gotta sort of change our way of thinking about safety, right?
It's not a compliance function.
Safety and compliance, in my view, are barely related.
what's the real cost of being unsafe?
It's way beyond your insurance cost.
We gotta change how we think because once we change what we believe,
then we're gonna change how we act.
Then we're gonna talk about the leader's role in safety, and we're gonna talk about
not just the… We're gonna start with the C-suite, and we're gonna make sure that
as executives, we understand that, safety is part of, uh, enterprise risk that
that safety
is part of your role of managing, risk.
Then we're
gonna move into
employee engagement, how to get our employees to, uh, align with where we're
going and how to harness that unlimited power of our frontline employees.
Then we're gonna talk about respect for process.
And let's not mistake process, actionable process with a 600-page handbook
that I guarantee you nobody reads.
We're gonna talk about how you make process actionable, how
you make it understandable by by your intended audience, by the
people that need to follow it.
I'll kind of say if your audience reads at a seventh or eighth-grade level,
and your process manual's written at a collegiate level, you don't have process.
You
have words on
paper.
So it's
how to get
process… It's how to
ingrain it, how to make it actionable.
And then we move into accountability, and what I'll talk about there is that
an organization can cause an injury or a crash as much as an individual.
So a lot of times we'll just blame the person whose hands were on the levers.
But like I said earlier, we gotta look in the mirror, individual accountability,
organizational accountability.
And then we're gonna end by talking about resilience.
Even in the best organization, you know as well as I do, bad things are gonna happen.
You can't sweep it under the rug.
How do you learn from it?
how do you listen to the whispers?
how do you build smarter, stronger organizations?
One, one example I use when I speak, and it's really a, a tragic situation,
but we had that crash in January of 2025 over the Potomac the American
Eagle
and the
military
helicopter
And something
that we
should all learn
from
is that between two
thousand eleven and the date of the crash, that exact same set of
circumstances appeared over eighty times.
It's just that it didn't result in a crash.
Yeah.
So… And, and but the key is it it happens in all organizations, right?
You know, very few people will say that was a shock loss.
Well, if I look deep enough, in most cases, that was not a shock loss.
It was a predictable surprise.
If you listen to the whispers, if you listen to the near
misses, if you look at the unsafe
conditions, if you look at the, flaws in the system, you'll find it, and
that's where you really can prevent it.
But it's a function of leadership, and not just executive leadership.
Some of your best leaders are in your front lines.
It's, it, it's
a function of
not just process, but, unconditional respect for process.
So, e-e-examples like
that, these na- big national news examples like the crash over the
Potomac, I don't like talking about those too much because I don't want
to sensationalize such a tragedy.
But a bigger tragedy is if we don't learn from it.
And I'm
telling you
that at its root, you'll find
those citations, you'll find those penalties, you'll find those paper
cuts or s- or minor cuts, not paper cuts, but like minor cuts because
you didn't have machine guarding, and all of a sudden somebody loses their
hand that means ten people cut their
hand and they got lucky.
you didn't fix the machine guarding.
Now somebody lost their hand.
and you're surprised.
No.
if you have
dealt with the
hand cuts in that unsafe environment, you might not have
had somebody lose their hand.
it's… That's
the kind of stuff w-we hit in the book, but in a
way that
people can take
it and adopt it and make it their own
whether you like Alabama or not, Ni-Nick Saban's the model of that, right?
If you listen to what he would say, he's "All I knew how to do was, was build the
process and trust the process," right?
It-- the scoreboard takes care of itself
if
you've got the process,
But If you're
looking at the scoreboard without the process, probably doesn't work.
in the sports world, I don't think anybody has done a better job
articulating in a way that business people can learn from, than Nick
Saban on just respect for process.
build the
process, keep refining the process, but trust the process and
don't deviate from the process.
And it's why you see these organizations, I mean, A-Alabama under his
leadership, Green Bay Packers, right?
Since Brett Favre took over in 1993, they've had three quarterbacks.
O-other than, injuries And, you know, minor, and again, it's the process.
and you have all these wide receivers coming in that, maybe they didn't--
they weren't big names or anything, but they became great because
they were in a system that works.
Um, compare that to signing the free agent in, a bad system.
the free agent might get a big paycheck, but we've seen
that play out a lot of times.
and, those are-- those analogies work.
It's build the system, build the team, ingrain the
process, keep refining it, but That's the only way I know how,
whether talking operations.
And then the scorecard.
Your scorecard, card, namely your P&L statement, is an outcome of that
if they're really busy, the first thing I do is tell them
that, "Hey, we, uh, produced an audiobook, so you can listen to
it on the, way home." Um, but the thing I'd want them to take away
is that, that if you're a smaller business, small stature is a virtue.
Small thinking in any size business is the kiss of death.
So we
gotta
think differently and think big.
And
from there, we're
gonna… the
book's gonna show you as a leader things you can do, how to engage your employees,
how to build process that works.
it takes what I think a lot of people overcomplicate.
I'm not saying that this is easy, that, anybody can do it.
But I'm saying that if you just focus on the fundamentals in the book, you
will get demonstrable, improvement.
And it's really no different than the ladder story,
Dallas, that you told, right?
It's those incremental improvements that all of a sudden pay these huge
dividends, like what you saw on the-- with the ladder, big gains in productivity.
Um, we had customers find us because of our safety reputation.
not every customer cares.
some customers just want that last nickel.
Fine.
That's not my customer.
I'm not
competing
for
that business.
You can
have it.
but the
ones that
care are the ones that that vet their vendors, and then I know that I'm
competing with other vendors, other logistics companies that share the
same values and that do things right.
I'll compete against those guys all day long.
Not gonna compete against the bottom feeders that don't do it right.
and so you start to attract value-aligned customers that feel
the same way, and that's where I think where the magic happens.
You have the right customers, the right employees, and, that's how
to build a business that lasts.
And we ultimately sold the business, and we were able to tie all that to
the buyer, showing the buyer our, stability and our low customer
churn rate And that low customer churn rate wasn't because we brought
better donuts than the next guy.
It's because of everything we've talked about in this call.
the book is available on all major outlets, so wherever you like,
Amazon, Barnes & Noble, et cetera.
the e-book, it's in Kindle format, Apple Books.
it's widely available.
if people want more than 10, if you wanna use them for group, for your employees
and for group conversations, you can just reach out to me, Brian, at Brian
Fielkow, B-R-I-A-N F-I-E-L-K-O-W.com.
We've got bulk pricing, a-a-available.
Um, and, we've tried to make the book as accessible as possible
with, the hardcover, the audiobook, and then the electronic versions.
And You don't need to read it chapter by chapter.
It's not meant to be read sequentially.
It's meant to kind of meet you and find you where you are, meaning that
you find the chapters in the areas that are the most important to you
today, that's where you should focus.
Yeah
well, if we looked at anybody in time, right?
you're gonna no longer have the chance to get a guy like Paul O'Neill on, so
that's, that unfortunately is gone.
But I'm… if I could think of, I guess when I was thinking about this question,
a- again, somebody that you no longer have the chance to do, but, I'm a
huge Jimmy Buffett fan, been forever.
And the thing I the thing I liked about Buffett so much, besides the
fact that I think he was a great songwriter and a great performer, is
you couldn't put him into a bucket.
He was also a great businessman, a brilliant entrepreneur, New
York Times bestselling author.
And I love people like that that, you know, we all wanna put people in buckets.
you're country, you're rock, whatever.
I like people that that avoid the buckets, that you simply can't put in the bucket.
And I think maybe that's one of the reasons that I liked him so
much, wa- was just because there, there was no no rhyme or reason.
Uh, People tried, but they couldn't.
and again, that's the key is people, anybody, any guest that marches
to their own drummer, that kind of figures things out on their own.
We were joking before about not listening to the influencers, right?
People that, that don't… If you meet somebody that's got all the answers, run.
Run as fast
as you can.
So I wanna, I would love to see you have more guests like that.
more guests
who have just done it their way.
Um, not the right way, not the wrong way, but their way.
Thank you