Transcript

Joe Mills: What shared experiences motivate today’s business leaders to keep growing, and how have their unique stories impacted the way they enable others to do the same? I’m Joe Mills.

Reid Morris: And I’m Reed Morris, and we’re investigating what and who it takes to build companies that foster growth in people and business.

Joe Mills: Then we’re sharing those stories with you. This is 1,000 Stories, an original show from Element Three.

Reid Morris: Okay, Joe, who are we looking to talk to next?

Joe Mills: Yeah, so coming out of Kevin’s conversation towards the end, we talked a lot about balancing the desire for dopamine and the need of serotonin. Actually, I think even in the way I just stated that that says something about the general mindset that I keep, and I think that a lot of people who are trying to be growth oriented and trying to do things and make an impact tend to think like, I need to chase the next thing, and that’s very much a dopamine driven response.

Serotonin actually feels much better. it is. The contentness is, um, being happy . Yeah. Basically it’s like a precursor to the happiness feeling. Yeah. Uhhuh. . Um, and so we talked about with Kevin this idea of like balancing those two. Yep. And I asked him, Hey, who does a good job of that? And he actually pointed us in the direction of Jon Speer, who is one of the founders of Greenlight Guru.

Mm-hmm. Green Light Guru is a unicorn. They have raised over a hundred million dollars at evaluation of over a billion dollars. They’re a technology company who works inside of the medical device. That’s a pretty good resume. So, hearing Kevin say, Oh, he does a really nice job of balancing his desire for more, or like the chase for more with being content with what he has.

Mm-hmm. . Cause those feel like opposites, right? Those feel like being content where you are doesn’t make you as hungry, but being driven makes you less happy. So like, how do we balance this? Yeah. Um, especially for Yeah. Somebody who’s sort of

Reid Morris: like serial entrepreneurial type of individual. Yeah.

Joe Mills: Mm-hmm. , it’s.

You hear those sorts of stories about really high achievers all the time where they’re really not very happy and so it’s gonna be really interesting, I think, to unpack with Jon. How do you stay growth oriented when you’ve had so much success, and how do you also find fulfillment and contentment and happiness, if we wanna call it that?

In all those experiences? Mm-hmm. , we’ll see what he has to say. Sounds great. Jon. Welcome to 1,000 Stories, man.

Jon Speer: Yeah, thanks for having me. Looking forward to it.

Joe Mills: But just to start, can you take us back? How did you and Kevin even meet in the first place? Yeah,

Jon Speer: so our team was really struggling with a consistent process.

The company goal for that quarter, whatever it was. A lot of that was coming again the last couple of weeks at the quarter, and. We usually had one or two of the handful of AEs that were contributing to 80 plus percent of that quota for the entire team. And so we had some folks that were really, really struggling, but there was no process essentially that was being followed.

It was each AE was sort of left up to what they thought was best. Right. And that was tough because some of. Better performing AEs. They probably had the worst process. It was hard to be critical of that because those guys were keeping the new revenue boat afloat, so to speak. But we knew we had to do something different.

And our ceo, David Duran, the guy I started Green Light Guru with, he approached me one day and he’s like, Hey, what do you think about? Kevin Bailey and to help teach our sales team a little bit. I’m like, Man, we need to do something. I don’t know if Kevin’s the guy, but we gotta do something different cuz this ain’t working, this isn’t scalable, this isn’t sustainable.

We can’t repeat this over and over. This is creating too much stress and strain on the business. So we brought Kevin in and he was just really at the beginning of starting to like understand the benefits of mindset and these sorts of things. And so we worked very closely with our sales team and we started to, I.

Process. Right. And so we worked with him for a while and at the same time, because of all these things that were happening in our business, like there was a lot of internal tension. The ceo, the co-founder, and I, like, we were not getting along. And I think fortunately it was largely. Invisible to most of the business.

But if you were involved on the sales side of the business, you were aware of it. I suspect I get on

Joe Mills: a personal level, was that like affecting your own output? Was that affecting your own performance? Like, how’d you feel about it? Yeah,

Jon Speer: I think it was, I mean, I think what it affected more for me was life outside of green light.

But I would come home after, you know, spending 10, 12 hours was pretty routine. Sometimes even more than that, grinding and sometimes literally fighting. I would just be in a shitty mood to the people who loved and cared about me. I was not being a good human to them and I wasn’t aware of this initially.

And you know, the people I love that care about, they were all trying to like, Jon, you’re kind of being, you’re not being very nice right now. And it took me, unfortunately, a long time to get through that. And I give Kevin a lot of credit this because he started to make some progress with some of our account executives.

But I think the biggest thing that he did, at least at this point in time, in our in interaction, he pulled me aside one day. He’s like, Hey Jon, can I speak to you for a moment? He goes, What’s up with you and David? And I was in denial. I was like, What do you mean? He’s like, What’s going on? You guys don’t seem like you like each other.

Like, Ah, no, it’s just, we’re just competitors. We’re just the thick of things. But he didn’t accept that and he kept probing. To the point where finally like, Yeah, you’re right. This dynamic is not good. He’s like, Well, do you mind if I put the two of you guys in a room and work it out? He goes, I’ll be there if you think it’ll be helpful, and I, Okay, fine.

And so it happened. I’ll sign up for this therapy. Yeah, essentially. So he got us in the room and he was there. And for me personally, that was a catalyst because with a lot of startups is that you have to be willing to sacrifice everything that’s important in your life in order for your company to become successful.

I think that is a common, I put it in the category of myth, but for some people it is truth. I was not okay with that, and I think this is what I was struggling with at that time because the reason I was doing this startup is for the people that I love and care about is to grow this company. But to be able to help provide for my family and help improve my quality of life and the quality of life of my kids, and to have to sacrifice all of those people and say, Hey, I’ll come back hopefully at some point, but right now I gotta grind.

I gotta go all on the startup and alienate everything that’s important in my life. That just didn’t make sense to me. And so I said that in this meeting. I’m like, Hey, I’m not okay with this. I need to have the right work life balance. I don’t live to work. I wanna live, you know, I wanna enjoy life. That was like so important because I bet this has been bottled up inside and so Kevin helped unlock that and I think gave me permission to speak my truth and to own

Joe Mills: it.

Yeah. It sounds like you had an internal, what we opened the conversation with this balance of serotonin, end dopamine, and you already had an internal understanding of that, that you weren’t able to like put into words and understand Yeah. Processes to allow those vote to come. It was like you hadn’t identified a process to allow those sides of you to equally live.

Jon Speer: Yeah, and the opposite of serotonin and DOPA being one of the big no-nos is cortisol. Cortisol is sort of another chemical that gets released in our body, but it’s a toxic one. And I’m sure my cortisol levels were through the. But yeah, I think that’s a nice way of saying it, Joe. But I don’t think I was cognizant at that time.

I just know that the moment that those words came outta my mouth, it was so relieving. Like I felt a flood of dopamine and serotonin was like, Oh wow, that, that felt pretty good. The thought started to occur to me is like, Oh, okay, well how can I feel this on a recurring basis? I’m an engineer, so you know, I think about process and and things.

I’m like, Oh, does that mean I have to put myself in a situation again to where that cortisol keeps building up and up and up. To where I have to have this release or is there a way to sort of sustain that? Like I was really curious about that you had that

Joe Mills: moment and then what changed for you? Like what was the next step?

Because like you said, Hey, I’m an engineer. I’m like, do I have to go through this rotation or this cycle of like build the cortisol and fall like. What happened next? You have that like poof, aha.

Jon Speer: Well, I went into research or investigation mode. I’m like, Oh, what is all this? What is this? And it wasn’t like advertised or described or prescribed as anything.

Mindset per se. Again, my second interaction with Kevin Bailey. He was just beginning his own mindset journey, right? Mm-hmm. . So there was some things that he was doing with our team, but I don’t know that he had put it under the bucket or the label of mindset and just quite yet, you know, just breathing right?

Like we would do some breathing exercises and one of the breathing exercises that we would do is whim h breathing, which, you know, I don’t know if you’ve ever done that. It’s, it’s, it’s kind of interesting and I was like, Oh, wow. The feeling that I felt after doing a round or two of whim hop. Hmm. That’s interesting to me.

Right. So then I started to like, you look into infinite different breath work techniques that want to just the power of the breath and like being in control of how you breathe and realizing that how I breathe is a direct correlation to how I feel. It’s like, wow, that’s trippy. I mean, it’s, we’re never taught this, right?

Joe Mills: I do whim ho almost every morning, and your point about it directly impacts how you feel. I’ve missed a couple mornings in a row, and it, it does, it really does impact my day. It impacts how I feel, how I perform. And even less like about performance. I like to consider myself a high performing individual, but like, it’s more about like, did I get to the end of the day and like, was I happy today?

Did I live a life? Proud of today and like, yeah, I have found a weird amount of correlation between did I do my breathing exercises and. How that answer is answered. Yeah.

Jon Speer: And it’s so simple, really. I mean, all these breathwork techniques, um, some of them are more difficult than other. I mean, you get something like the proma breathing and that, that Sure.

That could be challenging. You know, cuz they have four phases to the breath. There’s the inhalation, there’s the hold, there’s the exhalation and the hold. Yep. Some of that proma, some of those holds can get like, oh my god, they can be hard. But like box breathing, I mean, and whim ho. I mean these are all very simple things that one can do.

Yeah. So, We had had some success even after Kevin left that engagement with us. At that time, the sales team would still, you know, do a lot of breathing exercises and mindset work together. So there was some of that that was sticking, but we were now starting to have some really good success and rapidly growing.

And I think at one point we had doubled the size of our sales team. It was a very short, short period of time. And so now we have a lot of new folks coming into the mix, and we had had a couple of different sales leaders in that tenure or that period of time as well. They just weren’t a good fit, so we found ourselves with a growing sales team, but some of the sales leaders that we brought in were not aligned with where we were going.

And so now the CEO was kind of back in the head of sales seat, which you were at a point in time in our company where. We need our CEO to be the ceo. He needs to lead us in a more strategic direction from a business. But we’re still of a size where revenue’s still pretty important. I mean, revenue’s always important to a business.

It’s the fuel for a business. We needed someone to step in that, and the CEO’s job is to keep the business going and cash keeps businesses going. He’d step back into that and you know, it wasn’t ideal. It was a necessity. David Duran, the CEO of Green Light. He’s an energy guy, like he’s a motivator. He has this innate ability to paint a crazy vision and picture.

Of where we can go and he has this ability for people to like want to do that. Right. It’s a great skill set that I admire in him, like he has this ability to do that, so he gets all these people excited and we’ve got all these new people and. We’re kind of back in that same scenario from time one when we had Kevin, where some folks were doing a really good job of following process.

Others, our training was maybe not appropriate or applicable or what, what have you. So we were kind of stuck at this weird crossroads again, like the process that we had for the handful of AEs, maybe that wasn’t right size for. 10 or 15, or even 20 or more AEs. So we sort of had to revisit or process. But as you hire AEs from other SaaS companies, they’re bringing their own mindsets with them, you know, and the likelihood that they have been taught mindset and meditation and journaling and all these sorts of things before coming to your company is probably close to zero.

So we’re like, All right, we need. An intervention. Again, let’s bring Kevin back and at this point in Kevin’s journey, he was full on into the mindset side of things and like when David approached me and said, Hey, what do you think about bringing Kevin back in? I was like, That’s a no brainer. My last interaction with Kevin personally changed my life forever.

Joe Mills: I’d love to hear you mentioned I was leaving the people that I loved and care about and the reason I was building this business. I was sort of putting all of that on hold and I didn’t want to. What changed in your personal life when you had that aha moment and you started implementing these practices and even just things like breathing and meditating and journaling.

How Jon Spear change, not Jon Speer co-founder, but just

Jon Speer: Jon. I tell my kids this all the time and I believe it to be true. If you can’t love yourself, then how can you love anyone else? And how can anyone else love you if you don’t know how to love yourself? I had this aha, like if I was being honest with myself, I’d be like, Mm, that guy’s kind of a dick.

He’s kind of an asshole. I would not wanna hang out with that guy when I started being honest with myself and like owning it once she owns something and take responsibility and accountability for it. It is so cathartic. And then I started to forgive myself, right? This is one of the things that, that I learned is like I have to give myself permission to make mistakes and cuz that’s a way of life.

And when I make those mistakes, I give myself permission to forgive myself. Don’t keep beating myself up over and over. It’s gone. I can’t do anything about it. I used to coach high school baseball and I was reminded as I was having this discovery, there was one parent in particular that he would see the kids make a.

And he’s like, You gotta flush it. And he would like physically like flush a toilet. He’s like, Gotta flush it, let it go. And I was like, reminded of that. I’m like, Yeah, I gotta flush it. I just gotta let it go. And so once I started to let my shit go and forgive myself and love myself, then now I was open to receive the love from friends, from my kids, from family, but I couldn’t see it.

I designed myself to be a very complex individual. It’s like there’s layers and layers and layers, and I would be very, very hesitant to let anybody into my core, you know, let them in. Did you let yourself in? No, not to the most inner part of me.

Joe Mills: How’d you find that? Genuinely, I think I do a lot of the same things you’re describing.

Yeah. And so I’m really curious, like, how’d you start unpacking that to let yourself know you and learn to love?

Jon Speer: There’s three people specifically at my world, my son, my daughter, and my best friend that they, It was pretty clear they didn’t wanna have a lot to do with. Or the interactions that we did have felt a little forced with a lot of tension.

And these are the people that are the most important people in my life. And for interactions to be so strained, it’s like, what the hell am I doing? And I took ownership of it cuz, well, I honestly, that’s not true. I think there for a while I started to say like, Well, why don’t you do this? Why don’t you, And they’re like looking at me.

Dummy. The problem is you, you know, And they didn’t say it like that, but that was, I got that message pretty quickly. And I think it’s like, okay, so I have to go work within, but a few things had to happen. I had to be willing to give myself that permission to go there. And I think one of the things I had to do is I had to be aware of my ego, which the ego is the biggest liar that I have inside of.

It tells me all the things, or it has the potential to tell me all the things that I want to hear. Even sometimes the ego tells me, it’s like, Oh, you don’t wanna do that. That’s a terrible idea. The ego’s trying to protect you, but it doesn’t always come out as protection. So I think that’s one of the things like aha, this ego person, this little Jon inside the Jon that you see, there’s another person in there.

And I know for some people that may sound crazy, but it is true. I promise you. There is someone inside of you. And I think the other thing was trust. I had a mantra for a while. Trust leads to abundance. And so I adopted this, like this would be whenever I’d be in a challenging situation, maybe not seeing eye to eye with a colleague or some interaction, I would say to myself, Trust leads to abundance.

Like let that shit go. Trust you brought this person here intentionally to be a part of your team so that they can contribute. Let them do their job. They don’t have to do it your way as long as you’ve given them enough knowledge about the task at hand. Just be there to mentor and guide them if need be, but be hands off.

Just let them go. Have trust, and I think when I started to like adopt that, be cognizant of my ego and give myself permission to forgive and actually give myself permission to know myself and then lean into trust. That as a game changer. Did you have the same

Joe Mills: thing going on with your kids?

Jon Speer: I think there’s some similarities.

I would take it slightly or give a slightly different perspective. Please. So my kids today are 23 and 20. So we started the Green Light Journey in December of 2013 when I started the Journey. My kids are in the middle of their teenage years. Mm-hmm. Teenagers are interesting creatures. , I’ll leave that there.

But, but at the same time, you know, I was like starting to have some ahas in my life and certainly have made plenty, plenty of mistakes in my journey up until this point in my life. And I. Could very vividly call a lot of the stupid things that I did and as a teenager and certainly in my young adult years.

And so I think me, as a parent, what I try to do is in part upon my kids all the mistakes that I made so that they wouldn’t have to make them. And so like my best friend who eventually she and I got married and blended families, she’s got three children of her own between our kids today. They range an age from 23 to 15.

And we want our kids to get it. And it is the elusive thing. And Maya is probably different than your, it is probably different than any of their, Its, but we want them to get it as soon as possible in their lives. Because once you get. Life is so much more rewarding. And so over the years it’s like is there something that we can share with or teach, like breathwork, meditation, journaling, all these sorts of things to our kids so that they can have some of their own aha sooner.

But you can’t because I gotta be willing to allow my kids to make their own mistakes. As a parent, it’s hard to be tolerant of that sometimes, but I think the best way I’ve learned personally in my life is when I made a mistake, like, and sometimes I unfortunately made the same mistake twice, but you know, it’s just trying not to repeat those mistakes.

That’s when I’ve learned the best. So it’s like, okay, give them some space. Allow them to make mistakes, but make sure that your core values, what you think is important, is clear and understood enough so that the mistakes that they make, Hopefully are not catastrophic. There’s

Joe Mills: an interesting like mirror that I’m seeing.

I asked you about the organizational shift you may or may not have seen when you started working on yourself and you’re like, I don’t know, I just, I’m a founder, invisible. I was gonna be the example. And then with your kids, it sounds like the way you take, it’s, I’m gonna impart wisdom and I’m gonna say things when it’s appropriate, but I’m gonna work on me and it’s gonna emanate.

Like if I’m the right version of myself, they’ll learn by watching when it’s appropriate, while still putting their own spin on what their truth is, whatever their it is. Right. It’s a cool mirror to see between the Jon Speer a founder and Jon Speer a person. Was there an impact on your motivation to grow Green Light when you started giving yourself that?

Jon Speer: If you’re gonna grow a company, you have to trust other people. I mean, does the quarterback win the football game? No. He’s probably the most visible person on just about any football team there is. But if you don’t have the right characters and players on your team with a skillset, then that quarterback is gonna have very little chance to be successful.

That was more in a role where I was the head of customer success at that point. So that was more my motivation, I think, than the explosive growth because we had other people on the team. That’s what they were charged with. I let go and I trust and said, Okay, David’s got this and Jason’s got that and Nick’s got that, and so on and so forth.

People came to the company early on that really helped shape the vision and the trajectory of the company bigger in a more awesome way than I could have ever imagined, and I’m grateful for those people. . So as far as what motivates me, I care about improving the quality of life, my journey into the medical device industry.

I mean, I have a chemical engineering degree, which is mm-hmm. , The medical device industry is not a typical career path for somebody with that background or that degree. But I had a moment fairly early on in a medical device capacity as a product development engineer, where I had designed and developed a product that was going to be used on humans.

And I was present for the first human use of a device that I had designed and developed, like from a career point of view. That was very critical because I suddenly had this moment as the device is being used that that’s a live human. That person came in, they were alive. Now granted, they’re here, they’re in the operating room, they’re on anesthesia, but I’m guessing that person expects to be alive after this procedure’s over, and I’m guessing their loved ones are looking forward to that person coming home after this procedure.

I had this epiphany, this moment where it’s like what I do. As a medical device professional has an impact on quality life. I want that impact to be positive, and so that became my mantra, my North star, my personal moral compass, if you will, for the rest of my life and all things that I tried to do in life.

Full confession. I’m not always great at that, you know, sometimes I do stupid things, but when we started Green Light, That was like my focus, like improve the quality of life. And to this day, that’s still the mission at Green. Light grew and it’s awesome that we get to impact the quality of life in a positive way, improve the quality of life for medical device professionals, which in turn means that they get to improve the quality of life for the patients that are receiving their products.

And Oh yeah. By the way, we’re growing as a company and so we’ve got this focus on culture and we’re trying to make this a, an amazing place to work that operates and thinks maybe a little bit differently than conventional wisdom and conventional companies. And so all of our employees, you know, I feel like we get to have this opportunity to improve their quality of life and Oh, yeah.

Now that Jon gets it and he’s awake and tuned into who he is a little bit, his quality of life’s better and oh yeah, my kids, my wife, my family, we get to share in this journey together.

Joe Mills: I think it’s very cool that, at least from the outside, and as I hear the story, there was this point in time where you were like, I’m acting incongruency with my core motivation.

The my best friend, my son, my daughter, Are not living their highest quality of life and neither am I, and I’m directly impacting their quality of life. I think the self awareness that you bring to the table is exceptional, and I love the message of like lean into trust that I’ve just heard throughout this, like lean into trust also, like lean into forgiveness for yourself and Oh, for sure.

For those around you and like. Those two pieces are awesome, Jon. I, I appreciate it, man. Absolutely.

Jon Speer: Thanks for the conversation. It’s been fun.

Reid Morris: Okay, Joe, let’s roll into it. So you had a conversation with Jon Spear today. Do you sort of wanna walk me through the main threads that you found throughout that conversation?

Joe Mills: Yeah, it’s interesting. We walked in looking to explore this like balance of serotonin and dopamine. Mm-hmm. like we talked about with Kevin. Yeah. And we went down that track. We went there in like a bit of a circumvented way where as I reflect on it, we really talked about two things. We talked about the need to know yourself and love yourself in order to like show up in a way that you’re happy with and to give that to like the rest of the world so deep.

Yeah. It really was interesting and we talked about. And then we talked about the like necessity of leaning into trust. Mm-hmm. in order to grow and lead others and to leave impact that you want to. It’s interesting because when Jon first interacted with Kevin, we learned this in the conversation that Kevin was still at, at that point, it was relevance, but it was slingshot days.

Mm-hmm. basically. Okay. And then, Kevin came in and did some work with their sales team, but he was only just early in his own like mindset journey and so he was teaching some things like breathing and journaling, but he was not a master’s in neuroscience like he is now, and he was not the coach that he is now.

So it was really some self discovery alongside. Of their team and mm-hmm , he got hired to train the sales team and then he ended up doing some work with Jon and David, the CEO and co-founder with their own relationship. And I won’t spoil the fun that listen to it, it’s interesting. But yeah, it was just, it was interesting to see Jon sort of talk about learning it almost on the fly.

And I think what’s interesting is I know the fear that I have around. Dopamine and serotonin and like manipulation of those two is dopamine’s like your motivator, right? It’s like go get it. Go achieve, go do something. Goal focused. Goal oriented. Yeah. And serotonin is sort of, everything’s just great.

Happy with where things are. Mm-hmm. grateful. Like gratitude releases serotonin. And it’s interesting to see how, like in my head, those two are so opposed to each other. I think I genuinely have a little bit of fear of letting myself go too far down the serotonin path for will it make me not driven enough to achieve the things I want to achieve?

Mm-hmm. , And it was really cool actually to see in Jon’s story, As I’ve reflected on it how he started Green Light with a key vision in mind. He talks about improving the quality of life and he ties that into like everything. It’s amazing to watch him like weave that thread through the employee experience and his family experience and his life.

And he’s like, If I’m not doing something that impacts the quality of life in a positive way, then I really don’t wanna do it. But I think in looking at it, and I didn’t say this in the conversation cause it came to me, In the middle when he talks about needing to have this reset, I think he’d probably fallen away from that a little bit.

Like if he were to really reflect on that and be like, Was I acting in a quality of life manner? Like he wasn’t. And I think he had that realization where it was like, I need to change something cuz I’m not showing up well for the people that I love and care about, which is the whole purpose of doing this in the first place.

Mm-hmm. . And that was sort of the moment where he was like, He’s probably out of balance. It was just like all drive. Yep. And none of the balance. And so, which we’ve talked about on some

Reid Morris: level too, of that like just constant dopamine focus, drive, drive, drive mentality that it

Joe Mills: isn’t sustainable, it’s it’s not.

And you probably don’t even enjoy the success when it comes because you’re already onto the next thing. Yeah. And onto the next thing. Yeah. Mentality. Get

Reid Morris: mental. Talk to me more about in hearing his sort of tipping point in that journey, what were the signs, the tools that became a part of getting past that, that you think might be applicable for yourself or other people that are

Joe Mills: listening in?

Really, it was like this self discovery mode. Like he had to go in to go out. He had to work on himself in order to show up better for others. And then I explicitly asked him like, What else changed in the organization? He’s like, I don’t really know. He’s like, I’ve never thought about it before. I was just focused on doing what was right for me and knowing that as a central figure that will be right for others.

And so it was this interesting. Very internal growth focus. Not so worried about what the outside expectations were and not so worried about how others would perceive it, and much more worried about, I know that if I do right by me, I will do right by others.

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