Managing the Balancing Act Between Home and Work

Managing the Balancing Act Between Home and Work—with Jeff Mask

My guest is Jeff Mask. After beating cancer and successfully growing multiple businesses, Jeff understands the struggle of growing and leading a thriving business while also being successful at home. He has created a powerful coaching program that enables founders and executives to find confidence, clarity, and conviction at work and peace, passion and prosperity at home. Jeff and I discussed the reason why you must find harmony between work and personal life. Pay attention to how Jeff explains why leaders must let go in order to be able to build a thriving culture. Also, Jeff breaks down the steps to building a proper culture after you define your personal why. Finally, pay close attention to the practical tips Jeff provides in order to be able to start spending more time with your family and letting your team know about it. I love this episode because finally, we could speak about building and growing your culture while also at the same time, building your personal life.

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Jeff, thank you for joining me.

Thank you, Meny. I’m happy to be here.

You and I have known each other for a long time and we’ll get into a lot of where we met and a little bit of your past history. You have an inspiring personal journey. I would love for our readers to learn a little bit about you and then let’s dissect it and dive into the lessons learned and how you are teaching and coaching small business owners and leaders on the philosophy. Tell us a little bit about your journey.

It’s been quite the ride as everyone’s life is. I’m grateful for the day in 2007 when you and I met. I can’t believe it’s been that long and we have more kids and more gray hairs since then. My journey is fun to look in the mirror and think who am I and why am I and what happened here. It’s taken a while to come into my own and recognize that. My journey is as the youngest of six kids with a school teacher of a father who was an amazing teacher. He inspired and taught us all if we want to go create something and make something work, go make it happen because I’m supporting six kids on a teacher’s salary. He didn’t necessarily have any animosity around it. He said this is what it is and if you want to create, go create. Early on, my brothers and I had paper routes from the age of eight on. If we wanted to get that pair of shoes or clothes that we couldn’t afford, we had to go find a way to make it work and we did. I went into long businesses with my best friend, Eric.

We always dreamed of being in business together and was a support to my brother, Clate, in an early business that he was in when he was in high school and I was in grade school. We’ve always been entrepreneurs and creating and loved to make it work. Fast forward, I was in a web services company in college, so it was my friend, Eric Martineau and my brother, Clate. We built that up and was acquired by About.com before the bubble burst. Perfect timing for us, not great timing for About, though none of us knew it would be that bad. It was the best lesson in learning how to grow a business and the pains that come from growing a business, both growth pains and shrinking pains. What happens when you have to let go of 100 people in one week? That was super tough.

After that, that taught Clate, Eric and me how to build a business that has a purpose but also you can make money and help people along the way versus one or the other. That is what inspired Clate and Eric to start Infusionsoftway back in those days. I stayed at About.com for a while, but that was the beginning of the big part of creating something. Clate caught a vision of how to create a culture that enables people to be their best both at work and at home. To create value perpetually and to help people in their lives succeed at their purpose. It was a phenomenal ride. I joined Infusionsoft a few years later because I had found a major stumbling block in my life when I was diagnosed with cancer and had a focus on what do I do, why do I do it, and why I am on this planet. That gave me the awakening to be my best self. I stayed at Infusionsoft for a few years. I loved that. I grew that up from under $1 million to over $100 million and learned almost every lesson you could possibly learn along the way. Meanwhile, I knew that in time, I would be an executive coach as I saw my brother, Clate, who is leading Infusionsoft is the Cofounder and CEO. I thought that’s what I’ll be doing. Now, that’s what I do. I coach founders and executives on how to grow their business profitably, smartly and also not lose their mind, their life and their family along the way, which I found can be tough.

[bctt tweet=”If you want to go create something and make something work, go make it happen. ” username=””]

One of the things our readers know about this show is that we always say that we bring you no-nonsense advice. The reason I reached out to you is that I followed that journey. I didn’t know the exact year when we met, but you remember 2007, which is giving us a nice amount of years. I’ve seen you almost at the start at Infusionsoft and then that could have worked there and then what you’re doing now. I feel that you have seen it all from a personal perspective. You also have seen it from a corporate perspective where you’ve seen companies go to that $100 million mark. You’re also coaching small business owners and probably starting somewhere in between where we all face growing pain. We all face growth as a part of the journey of a business and we need to address it and deal with it as the way that we need to deal with it. At the same time, most of us run families as well where that balance could sometimes be hard to be able to have that proper balance.

I want to touch on both sides of the aisle. Let’s start speaking about in the early days, what led you to join Infusionsoft. You’ve seen what Clate is doing there with a purpose. You mentioned a couple of things before when you said being meaningful about helping people along the way. What would you say that has done for that company and that culture? How much of that is part of why you have seen that company grow the way it’s growing?

It’s everything. It is having a clear vision of where you’re going and why to me is everything. In fact, when Infusionsoft started in the early days, I had the opportunity to join as an employee. There were already two Martins there. They would have been two Masks and I thought too much nepotism. I don’t want to mess up any family relationships. The timing wasn’t right for either side. The interesting thing is fast forward a couple of years, as Clate and I talked again about Infusionsoft, he used different language. I could tell. I could feel something different and I asked him what was different and he said, “I now know that we’ve created this company to bless the lives of millions of people, whereas before I thought it would be a nice lifestyle business to provide for my family. I feel a deeper calling to help more people. I know it’s going to work because I know this is what God wants me to do.” It was the first time that I had felt a spiritual side of work that so often, I think now in business, people shy away from talking about spirituality in work to the point where there’s no spirituality.

I thought, “Tell me more.” He said, “I believe that as you start a business, it’s someone’s passion to do so but they don’t realize how hard it is. They don’t understand how difficult, how dark, how sometimes demoralizing it can be. They need help. They need systems, they need people, they need process. They need all the inspiration they can take to make sure that they do succeed and they can make payroll.” I could feel his passion. When he got clear that Infusionsoft existed to help small businesses to succeed, I was turned on. I felt a different emotion. I felt a different call. It inspired me to join because I wanted to make an impact differently because I had survived cancer and thought, “I don’t want to have a job to have a job. I want to build and create something to bless the lives of as many people as I can.” The timing was perfect.

To go a little bit deeper on culture and also on purpose, a lot of people, when I speak to them and I personally know the answer, what I would love to know how you would answer it. A lot of people, when you speak about purpose, passion and bridging that to what you’re doing every single day. They’ll say, “I don’t have a passion other than I want to make money.” Sometimes people try to say what that passion is. What is that purpose that will help me see ROI and deposit that in the bank?” In your words, how would you answer that question?

In other words, I feel sometimes that purpose and core values are fluff and don’t add to my bottom line. Therefore, why would I do it? The answer to that is if you want to endure successfully, there has to be a deeper why than bringing money into the bank. Money is fleeting. Money is not the source of happiness. It’s not the source of evil. It depends on how we look at that. What endures, inspires, unites and what aligns is a core philosophy in a company that has a deep enduring why or purpose connected with shared core values that create alignment on how to operate in business. The skeptic of culture, purpose, vision and values, to that skeptic I say, “If you don’t have shared values and aligned purpose, the inefficiencies that go on day-to-day in your organization are catastrophic.” There’s so much wasted time. There’s unnecessary energy or misguided, misdirected energy versus the leader getting clear with the team and having co-collaboration and contribution to help people say, “Here’s where we’re going. Here’s how we do it.”

That efficiency is super powerful. Not to mention you help create people to become their best version of themselves, both at work and at home, which increases productivity significantly because they have more desire, purpose, and fire. Without that, it’s a job for your employees. You get about 50%, maybe 60% if you’re lucky. When you have a powerful aligned culture, literally you get more than 100% and the mathematician would say impossible. I would say it’s possible because what a human being thinks is there 100%. When a great leader aligned with the great purpose and values connects that, they expand the person’s capacity to produce, which goes beyond what originally was 100%. It’s phenomenal and it works. I’ve seen it work over and over in hundreds of thousands of businesses across the globe.

What would you say to the critics that say that a lot of the companies that are so big on purpose and culture, a lot of those leaders are being taken advantage of because it becomes fuzzy, warm and emotional versus strict business?

You have a skewed view of what purpose is. Purpose and values are not only a great work environment that’s warm and fuzzy. A great work environment also is clear accountability, clear integrity, being your word, creating a culture that when somebody says, “Yes, I’ll have that done by 5:00 PM and the business on is Tuesday,” you know without a doubt it will happen. It’s not about, “You’re my friend and so I’ll be kind to you and it’s okay if you didn’t get it done.” No, because we love someone, we get even more in their face and say, “Unacceptable. You said by 5:00 PM Tuesday and it didn’t happen. What’s going on?” I think it’s a missing interpretation of what the warm and fuzzy is. It’s not either/or. You can do both.

We teach a lot in our forum where we speak about core values and sometimes, I will bring upon the screen the core values of Ptex. Somebody will pipe up from the group and say, “I love your core values. Could I use it?” I always say this is to reiterate the point that you said, which is it’s not a marketing company doing the core values for you. It’s something that’s probably within inside you or a benchmark where you want to be and then you enforcing the how. This is how we operate and then we hold each other accountable accordingly. The point I’m saying is that it’s not something that you put on your website or on your walls. It’s something that you live by and you hold people accountable on day-to-day. I remember we mentioned before Clate, I think at one point I spoke to him, I’m not sure where it was. He said, “Leaders want to know if they’re doing a good job with core values.” That says many times that somebody will come over and say, “Enough with it, we get it.”

You know you’re doing your job when your people start to roll their eyes when you continue to talk about core values and culture versus once a year and you’re done. You’re right. I think a lot of times, some people catch onto the trend and the fad, so they think of creating core values and putting them on the wall and they checked the box. Core values are how you operate. It’s how you think. It’s how you make decisions. It’s how you perform in good and bad times. I like to share the airport analogy that I share with people. For example, you’re on an international flight. You have come from London to New York and you have to travel to LA. You’re on a layover in New York. You haven’t slept for 24 hours. You haven’t eaten well for 24 hours. Come to find out your flight is canceled and you did nothing wrong. You weren’t late. It happened to be. You’re heading up to the customer service desk of the airline who canceled you to try and rectify.

Right there, at that moment, I like to ask the question, “Who are you? How do you show up and how do you live your personal core values and your business core values if you’re there for business as well versus when things are going great?” When you’re flying first class, when you have everything taken care of, when you have a driver ready for you, it’s easy to be kind. It’s easy to live a core value when things are going well, but at the airport, that’s the time to test your mettle and determine how you live in. That to me is how core values if lived well can truly shape how we think, how we speak and how we act. It then creates the culture in the good and the bad times.

Sometimes it takes much discipline from a leader and even a team member to be able to stick to the true values. That’s why we call the core values. You need to be signed upon it. Every person brings their way of doing stuff to an organization, and rightfully so. We’re not born equally. If you can have the common denominator that those 5, 6, 7 things we do the same way or the same things that we’re focused on, it creates an environment that we work together as a team, regardless of what position we hold. Let’s speak about what are the trends that you’re seeing when you’re not coaching business owners. What we’re seeing is a significant amount of companies growing and then failing. We see a small percent of companies that are making it successful. I’m even not talking about technology companies that are being valued at numbers that don’t make sense or venture capitalists putting in money. I’m talking about regular service and product-based businesses that are killing it as far as growth, success and customer satisfaction. What have you seen, what are the trends and what could you say for the small business owner reading this to say where the focus on those companies that are successful or what is the lack of focus for the companies that are not is?

I like to think of success as enduring sustainable success. It’s easier to find a glint of success that’s short-lived, short-term success. I like to look at success as enduring. The common denominator I’ve seen across the years and it’s even more prevalent now. The most successful businesses that are consistent year-over-year successful with a thriving culture, a great growth rate, high profitability are the companies that know who they are. They have a soul. They know why they exist. They know who they serve. They are relentless in living that purpose to the tee and hiring like-minded people that share a similar purpose, similar core values, and will stay the course regardless of what comes. We all know business is way more difficult than any of us anticipated.

It’s never consistent. Markets are constantly changing. There’s constantly dynamics that are evolving and you’ve got to stay with that constantly. Those that truly know what their purpose is, what their why is, are key. What’s interesting as I dug deeper and I found what’s the common denominator there of companies that are doing well. They have a great purpose. Why is that? Here’s the scary truth. The reason why those companies are doing well is that the founder or founders have their own personal why dialed in. They’re confident, they’re clear, they know where they’re going. That doesn’t mean that they have it all figured out and they don’t have doubts. Their own personal identity, why they exist on this planet. They’re clear and they can be boldly confident because they know where they’re going. They know why they exist and they’ve learned their identity is not their business.

Too commonly, founders and executives attach their personal identity with the business and that’s not an enduring way to live either. It’s all about purpose and leadership. It’s all about why we exist and what our native genius or superpowers or whatever it is you’d like to say. When we know what that is, then when problems come, because they will, when criticism comes, because it will, you can confidently and boldly lead without being arrogant, without being brash, without being over the top. You can be who you are day in and day out. That’s where long-term sustainable success comes from. It’s a simple process yet difficult for many to finally achieve that. When they do, they’re unstoppable.

Let’s speak about leadership in general and leadership styles from your experience as a leader you want to empower your team. A lot of leaders are afraid to let go. What would be a proper transition on somebody being a self-entrepreneur to solo entrepreneur to now I’m leading a team being able to scale the business?

There are a few steps in this process. The process I’m talking about is letting go as a leader to enable more leaders to grow with you versus you holding the rein tightly as the founder. First of all, recognizing that you are holding on tightly and that it’s okay. It’s totally normal. Why are you holding on tightly? Because you know more than anybody else how difficult it was to get where you are in the level of success that you’re at and the pain and the difficulty of getting to that level and the fear of going back. You don’t want to go back to where you were. You are finally making an income. You are impacting lives. That feels good. Going back to those nights of, “I don’t know if I could make payroll anymore. I don’t know if I can make this work.” Nobody wants to relive that. Subconsciously, our ego protects ourselves from that failure and fear by holding on tightly. Recognizing it is truly the first step. When you recognize that, then you have to ask yourself a question. Do I want to grow as a business more or do I want to keep the status quo?

If you want to keep the status quo, then don’t let go or hold on and lead it the way you’re leading it. That’s fine for some. If you’re not comfortable with that, you’re not happy with that, you do want to grow and improve, then is the time to learn how to let go with whom and when. As we say many times in growing businesses and helping businesses, the whole journey from founder to CEO is learning how to relinquish control along the way because it’s difficult to do. When you can relinquish control, let go of perfectionism and understand that other people may do it differently, but different doesn’t mean wrong. It means different. All of a sudden, you have more peace of mind. You have a greater ability to relax, to be able to strategize, to be able to think more clearly. The people around you will rise to the occasion. A book that I recommend in this process is Liz Wiseman’s Multipliers. Have you read that one?

I got the original recommendation from you.

I continue to recommend it and here’s why. What happens is she does a great job in her research and the data to delineate two different types of leaders: One that’s a multiplier and one that’s a diminisher. Both of them can be successful, yet interestingly, the multiplier sees genius is abundant. Everybody has a natural ability to be amazing and to create and to do amazing things. The diminisher use genius as scarce. Something that only a few select people have and that individual has it all and it’s typically the smartest person in the room. More often than not, they found in the data, the diminishers are intentionally trying to be diminishing. It’s unintentional diminishing. When they have to be the one with the answer, when they have to be the one that solves the problem, it unintentionally decreases the genius and the creativity and the problem-solving ability of those around them. It creates the self-fulfilling prophecy of yes, you are the smartest person in the room because you won’t let other people come to the table and fully take on the problem and solve that. It’s a phenomenal read that enables you to think.

You ask the question, “Am I an accidental diminisher? How am I doing this?” The answer is yes, you are. Everybody is in some way. Typically, we do so in the areas of our business where we’re most skilled and where we’re most afraid of the outcome if we were to let go. Constantly, you’re going to continue to get what you put in, that is people not fully showing up. If you find yourself frustrated that your people don’t care as much as you or they don’t commit the way you do or they don’t have the same desire to finish and to resolve and to solve the problem and they look to you for answers. I have a sobering piece of advice. Look in the mirror, you are the problem. It’s not the people. It’s you. If you’re frustrated with your people, that’s a you issue, not a them issue. That’s tough to hear that as a leader, but that’s the truth.

It reminds me, a guest spoke about leadership and he says that you will not find a successful leader that’s leading a successful team if they didn’t work on self-awareness. This means at one point, they have to be self-aware of their capabilities and where they stand and where they need to work on themselves. Because they’re not aware of exactly where they are. It’s hard to build a team around you. Let’s speak about your personal journey. You mentioned before the personal illness. What type of effect did it have on your life? What could our readers learn from that?

It had a profound effect on my life. Interestingly, previously, I almost lost my wife to medical problems and that helped me realize, “What kind of husband and father do I want to be? Am I living that every day? If she weren’t by my side, would I be proud of my activities, my thoughts and my behavior?” More often than not, the answer to that question is, “No, I’m not proud of that.” That helped shaped me personally as a husband and father. Cancer helped me to face death. There’s something interesting that happens when you truly look at death in the face and ask yourself, “Why am I here. Am I making an impact? What am I scared of in my life?” Once I faced that, I went all the way to the other side in the darkness and then came back in the light, I thought, “Fear inhibits me more than I realize. The fear of death did enable me to live more fully.” I vowed to change that and I have. I thought more figuratively where in other parts of my life do I “fear death” that doesn’t inhibit me from doing what I know I probably should do, but I’m too scared? For example, in your career, what is death in your career if you’re an employee? Getting fired. How often do employees not step up and do the right bold thing to preserve their life versus preserving their life and doing the safe thing because it’s what will preserve them?

Our ego protects us from death, from any catastrophe or anything. We realize, “What am I not accomplishing in my career and in my life only because I’m scared?” If you were to ask yourself, “When was the last time I made a decision out of self-preservation or out of lack of humility not wanting to be humiliated in any regard versus putting myself out there and making it happen?” When I made that shift in my career, I made much bolder decisions. I took bigger risks and I thought, “This may mean that I may not work here anymore, but I don’t care because this is the right thing to do. It’s in line with our values. It may not be popular, but I’m going to make the harder decision.” It totally catapulted my career to much more success over time. It wasn’t the motive of how can I climb a ladder faster and how can I make more money? It was how do I make sure that I don’t let fear rule my thoughts, my acts, my words, and my behaviors? That was the key differentiator.

In your MASK Principles, one of the ways that you describe your coaching program for founders and executives is confidence, clarity and conviction at work, and peace, passionate prosperity at home. We interviewed a lot of business coaches, advisors and experts. Most of them are focused on different parts of your business. Some of them more on purpose, some of them more in the culture, others in more clarity. What I’ve seen differently from you and in the conversations I had with you throughout the years, it’s focused a lot on prosperity at home. Even in our conversation, you mentioned that a lot, which brings us to work-life balance. I want to get your take on it, but I also want you to address what we see in the marketplace. We’re living in a world that’s with social media and people getting all kinds of notifications. They don’t have any peace of mind left. We live in a world that gurus and experts out there are constantly speaking about the hustle. How do you speak about hustling and then still speaking about prosperity at home?

I get passionate about this topic. The reason why I chose my executive coaching business is to coach the whole person at work and at home because to me, there is no separation. We’d like to tell ourselves there is, especially with technology as ubiquitous as it is, social media is present as it is, turning off work now is much more difficult than it used to be. And so, learning how to create and find that harmony is key. I purposely use the word harmony versus balance because I don’t believe there’s ever a true balance. We’re always out of balance in one way or another. Harmony happens when you enroll in every person in your life. Think of music. Everyone’s singing a part in four-part harmony. If you want your home, your family, your kids, your team, your investors, whoever it is to be on the same page, clear communication in a 360-degree way is imperative to know who’s doing what.

Sometimes you have to stay late because there’s a deadline, but if you don’t communicate that to your family, you communicate to them, “You’re not important. Work’s more important.” Instead you say, “I’m going to be late, but instead, we’re going to do this the next day.” That’s the harmony and not the balance because you’re out of balance for sure. I’ve chosen that purposely because I don’t think there’s a separation. I’ve also realized that when we get clear on who we are and why we do what we do on our own personal, why it enables us to know how to prioritize, how to time block and how to be prosperous both in the office and at home.

Because too commonly, I believe we subscribed to the either/or mindset. I’m either going to be successful in the office and I’m going to putting my time for 10, 15 years so I can provide well for my family only to find out after 10 or 15 years you come back to your family and they don’t know you anymore. They’re either out of the house or they’re either literally or emotionally gone and it’s all for naught. I believe there’s a genius of the end to use a Jim Collins-ism that you can bring them both together, but it’s knowing how to do so and how to block out time so that everybody knows where your priorities are. People say, “How do you do that? I don’t think you understand how stressful my work is, Jeff. I don’t think you see my calendar and how back to back I am. It’s impossible. It’s hard.” I say, “Keep saying that and you’ll continue to create that.” If you say, “I have all the time in the world, I can make this work,” you can. For example, if you have an office outside of your home, what I recommend is the three-hour magic hour. When you come home, you have this magical block from 6:00 to 9:00 PM or whatever that time is for you where you either leave your phone in your car or in a part of your home where you aren’t there consistently. If there’s an entryway from your garage, whatever it may be.

Discipline yourself, commit to yourself, to your family and to your team. This is family time. I don’t care who you are and what business you’re in. No emergency at work is going to explode if you don’t respond within 3 hours completely. I know you’re probably saying you don’t know my business. You can resolve it in 3 hours. It can wait. Whereas a four-year-old who wants you to read a book, can they wait? Sure. They always get the shaft. Why make them wait? Why not wrestle with them? Why not be with them? It’s all about letting everybody know this is how I want to live. You tell your team, “If you need me between 6:00 to 9:00, know that’s going to be when I’m dark and I won’t be responding.” They know you’re not deprioritizing them to where they’re no longer ever important. They know, “That’s right. It’s family time.” They are understanding. When you don’t communicate that it can keep it on intentionally that you don’t care about them, that they aren’t important and they’re a low priority, which may be the case. If you don’t communicate, they connect the dots. It’s all about setting up boundaries and expectations across all members of your team. I say team loosely, meaning your executive team, your direct work team, your family team, everybody. Everyone knows what page you’re on and then you have more time. It’s a fascinating phenomenon, but it’s true.

Going back to how you started this conversation when you use the word harmony instead of balance. This is something that I appreciate because the definition of balance means 50/50. I have to balance the stuff. This doesn’t exist anymore because there are times that we’re focusing on family and my wife gave birth to a new baby boy, which means I need to be out. I’ve been out for a few days beginning of the week and I need to be able to adapt my schedule to accommodate something like that because this is the priority. Sometimes you’re launching a new business project and your family has to be able to stand on your side and say, “Go for it. We rally for you. We’ll take care of the kids.” Gone are the days where you could say, “I’m a family man because come 5:00, I’m at home.”

Maybe you’ve got to sacrifice two days out of the week where you’re not home at dinner time, but then the one or two days you are home, you’re fully focused in your daily role. Something that is sharing with our readers or something that I personally do, there’s the famous book, The 5 Love Languages, which is understanding even who your kids are and maybe one of your kids love taking a long walk every night. Once every few weeks, you take a walk and then the other kids are playing with them. Find what will bound you as a parent with your kids and your family. Create those guidelines and create those boundaries around your time and making sure that you focus on that.

Here’s another example for people that are maybe thinking, “How do I apply this?” Think of this. It’s a Wednesday afternoon and your team sees you leave at about 3:00 and you’re gone, but you don’t communicate anything. What is a natural thought for your team to have? He’s disconnected. He checked out. It’s not fair that he gets out early. That’s what happens when you don’t communicate in the harmony that I’m mentioning versus how about that morning, you let your team know and say, “My son has a soccer game at 3:30. I committed to him that I would be there. I’ll be leaving at about 3:00. I wanted you guys to know.” When 3:00 comes, not only does your team know where you’re going, they’re encouraging you to leave and they step up. They want to honor that commitment. When someone is true to their word, naturally as human beings, we’re attracted to that. That is something that we want to achieve and we want to mirror.

When it occurs, people want to enable that to occur. You then encourage them to do that in their life. What’s the virtuous cycle that continues? More productivity, more connection to work because they feel more loyal. They’re a different human being versus having to be there out of duty, out of taking a paycheck. No. They’re part of something bigger because you’re supporting what’s important to them, all from a simple act of one, communication and two, commitment to your integrity. When we don’t do that, we miss on such an opportunity to lead people in a more powerful way. I see it happen all too often because people feel ashamed or guilty for ducking out early. It doesn’t have to be, especially as we communicate and get on the same page of music.

As leaders, we have to make sure that the culture allows this across the board. Let me ask you a final question, how does Jeff Mask define success?

I define success based on what my wife, my kids and anyone that I’m working with professionally feel about themselves when they’re with me. Meaning, when someone would ask my wife, “Do you feel loved? Do you feel appreciated? Do you feel beautiful?” If her answer is yes, success. When anyone asks my kids, “Do you feel loved? Do you feel appreciated? Do you feel like you can conquer any challenge that comes your way?” When they say yes confidently, success. When anyone asks any of my coaching clients if they feel confident, if they feel clear on who they are and they feel equipped to take on the next challenge, if the answer is yes, then yes. There’s a little bit of trickiness to that answer because if I’m not careful, I advocated success to others. I’m not naive enough to think that, therefore, if their answers are no, that I’m a failure. I’m not saying that. I’m saying I live my life from a place of how do I make sure that those around me are set up for success and are feeling confident, convicted and happy. As long as I can live for other people and their happiness, I know in time the reciprocity is so natural and so flowing that I’m a happy man.

Let’s close with the four rapid-fire questions. Number one, a book that changed your life?

Multipliers.

Number two, a piece of advice you got that you’ll never forget?

Don’t let fear inhibit the outcome you want to create.

Number three, anything you wish you could go back and do differently?

When I had each of my kids, I wish I would have taken more time off from work.

Number four, what’s still on your bucket list to achieve?

Beach house in Barcelona, Spain.

Jeff, thank you for joining us. I know your time is valuable and that is why in the name of our readers, we will forever be grateful for sharing some of your time with us.

Thank you, Meny. I appreciate you. You’re a dear friend and a great business leader and a great family man as well. Thank you for what you’re doing in the world.

It’s my pleasure.