We tackle the weighty decisions that can make or break not just a company, but the very livelihoods of those it employs. This episode is a candid portal into the lives of small business owners during crisis, filled with the wisdom needed to build trust, navigate transition, and emerge with a team that believes in you, their leader, through thick and thin. Prepare to be inspired, to find strength in vulnerability, and to understand that the true test of leadership isn't just about weathering the storm—it's about reshaping the aftermath.
We tackle the weighty decisions that can make or break not just a company, but the very livelihoods of those it employs. This episode is a candid portal into the lives of small business owners during crisis, filled with the wisdom needed to build trust, navigate transition, and emerge with a team that believes in you, their leader, through thick and thin. Prepare to be inspired, to find strength in vulnerability, and to understand that the true test of leadership isn't just about weathering the storm—it's about reshaping the aftermath.
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Speaker 1:
this is unleashing leadership, and I'm your host, travis moss, with our season five special guest. I don't know, dave, by this point I don't know if you're special anymore, you're just I don't know if I ever was.
Speaker 2:
You're like a co-host. Now you're just here. You're part of the furniture.
Speaker 1:
So we got dave nurchey with us. We're unpacking the hard thing about hard things by ben horowitz. We should just shorten that to the hard thing too, because uh, yep, we're too far in the I don't know why I was just running my mouth.
Speaker 1:
Um, all right, that's brought to you, or today, today's point is going to be wartime ceo, and so our discussion is going to revolve around that, and that's going to be brought to us by the one big thing podcast, because you are not alone. Learn how to reframe your challenges and overcome the things that are holding you back. That is hosted by steve Campbell, who really gets into it. I mean, he's got professional athletes, he's got college presidents, he's got rabbis, he's got war heroes, he's got Navy SEALs he's got a cool lineup of people.
Speaker 2:
Yeah.
Speaker 1:
And they're talking about stuff that they've kind of seen in their lives and overcome and advice that they would give Really cool. If you want to get more info on them, go to nqrmediacom, and I think you can do it from there. You get there. You're going to find his content. You can also go to our YouTube channel at NQR Media and you can check that out. Or go to Spotify, go to Apple Podcasts, go anyplace else where they got podcasts. You'll be able to find the one big thing. You know it's the one big thing because you'll see C's big head on it. He's the good-looking one. He's my co-host from Ditch the Suit, so he's the good-looking one out of the two of us. You got his face on the one big thing. I didn't really mean it by big head. I meant just it's a big part of the picture when you look at it. So you got Steve on there and he just absolutely rocks out. He does an amazing job with his interviews. All right, so now that I put my foot in my mouth and I'll probably get a couple of weird looks, at least for that one.
Speaker 1:
Wartime CEO. I love this. The Wartime CEO. I love this. The Wartime CEO is my favorite.
Speaker 1:
I did a whole episode, like a whole narrative, on the Savage and the Stoic a couple seasons ago. Wartime CEO is about survival and I guess the way that I would lay this out is and this is situational again like we were talking before there's a peacetime CEO and there's a wartime CEO, and Ben does an amazing job in his book articulating what it feels like to be the wartime CEO. What actually happens. I mean, I listened to that. I can listen to it like every day because it's like I can resonate with that.
Speaker 1:
That's what it's like to be an entrepreneur and be through the fire and realizing that just because you go through the fire once doesn't mean you're not going to walk back through the fire again. Right, and so you got wartime CEO and peacetime CEO. The biggest challenge people have with these two concepts is you are you should never be just one or the other. So people were like I'm the wartime CEO. Okay, if that's all you are, you've got a shelf life. You can be hired into a position where it's time to fight and when it's not time to fight, you've got to get your rear end out of the way. Or you can be the peacetime CEO, but if you're not willing to fight if you just want to make everybody happy all the time your business is going to go under, you know, and you'll get replaced by the wartime CEO, hopefully before the business goes under.
Speaker 2:
Yeah, so that balance is the key of being able to do both.
Speaker 2:
That doesn't seem like an easy thing that everybody can do. Right, that takes some special skill and it's interesting, you know you talk about like, about what does it mean to be CEO or entrepreneur or business owner? And I didn't have that experience at all before in prior jobs. Right, You're part of organizations and you kind personnel related, just you know, company related overall, whatever it is, you have a very different view when it's it's on your shoulders, right, or you're part of that decision-making that is ultimately deciding the direction of an entire company. What doesn't matter, the size doesn't matter if it's 20 people, 50 people, 100, thousands You're still deciding the fate of a company and everybody who's part of that, with the decisions you're making. Whether you're in wartime or peacetime, Decisions in both of those areas are super important, right?
Speaker 1:
I always liken it kind of like being a parent and I know that there's parents out there who don't do this and maybe you should once in a while. But you, you want to. You want to be soft and caring and loving and give everything that you can to your kids, right, and you want to be supportive and all that kind of stuff, and when times are good, you can give them more, and so most parents will give them more. But then there's there's times where there's crisis and things are just you know what. Shut up and sit down and listen to what I say. Not time to talk back, not time to say no, not time to tell me about your feelings and what you want to do. It's time to sit down, shut up and just listen or just do what I say. Don't have time to explain it all to you. If I have to explain it all to you, you're going to die in the house fire, right, like? In the house fire, right, like, if the house is on fire and I say get out of the house, we're not going to debate whether or not we should use the front door or the back door, you're just going to get out of the house, right If I say go out the front door, you just go out the front door Like we're not going to stop and be like, well, you know, let's have a vote on it. You know, when the business hits a crisis, let's say it's COVID. Right, covid happens.
Speaker 1:
And most small businesses went into crisis mode for at least a little while during COVID because we're not sure what's going to happen. Should we even stay open? Should we close? How do we pay the rent? Should we take a loan out? Should we get the PPP, all these other things. Right, you have this crisis that's happening. You have to become the parent that tells everybody to sit down and be quiet and listen. Now, that doesn't mean that you don't ask for input and stuff like that, but it's in a controlled way, right, like we maybe don't have time to analyze 40 different scenarios before tomorrow, because if we get to tomorrow and we haven't made a decision, we could be closing the doors. Right, and for small?
Speaker 1:
And people don't understand this a lot of times when they talk about well, you know, entrepreneurs or people wind up making a lot of money, business owners, and why did? Why does Jeff Bezos make so much money, you know? Or or Elon Musk made so much money. The amount of risk and the amount of I would bet this? I don't know for sure, but I would bet Well, I know for sure for Elon Musk, because they wrote a book about it. I haven't read one on Jeff Bezos. But the amount of days that you're on the edge between being in business and not being in business, most people don't understand that. And even if it's like, look, we just have a month left, when you have a month of cash left and you got to do something to make sure that the business is still going to be open when you're living, that's a razor's edge, right Like for businesses that are used to being in war mode.
Speaker 1:
That sounds great For businesses that are getting hit with war mode for the first time. They're sitting there going. How the heck do we even get to next? How are we going to survive this? And you're required to move and act fast, and that means you're going to do things that people aren't going to understand and people aren't going to like. But if you don't do them, there won't be anything left to argue about when you're all done.
Speaker 2:
Right. I love the example, as the parent that I'm using, that I'm going to be wartime dad and peacetime dad because you have to do both there. So how do you get, how do you help people understand that, whether it's in your organization, kids, whatever it is, how do you help them understand the difference there?
Speaker 1:
Well, I think that if you haven't been through it, I don't know if you will understand it right. So I don't know if somebody who's never been in crisis understands what it's like to be in crisis until they go through crisis, right. And same thing with the leader. You know, a leader doesn't understand the emotions that we talked about at the peaks and the valleys that they're going to get and the fears and the anxieties that they're going to get, until they get hit with it. And then it's about how you react. So there's a fight or flight mechanism for most people, and leaders are no different. There's a I'm going to run away from this that's typically more of a peacetime, as somebody who can't get out of peacetime mode, right, if I'm just nice to everybody, everything will work out. No, that's not the case.
Speaker 1:
Sometimes you got to be mean, right. Sometimes you got to be tough. Sometimes you got to do things that look mean or tough but got to be mean, right. Sometimes you got to be tough. Sometimes you got to do things that look mean or tough, but you don't mean them mean or tough at all. You just mean them to because, look, I got to worry about all these mouths to feed, you know, and sometimes, if that means that one person gets upset, one person gets upset, you know, and um, and then you got fight and that's the wartime CEO. That's the fighter, that's the person who says, come hell or high water, I will put you on my back and I will drag you through this. Now the problem with the fighter is, if I'm always the fighter, if I'm always looking for that threat that I can battle, I'm going to burn everybody around me out, right, so that fighter's got to stop fighting sometimes, right, and go back to peacetime. But the the typical, I think, team member or employee until they go through it and can appreciate what it is, they can't possibly you can't explain it to them. And this is where all these other skills come in, so important.
Speaker 1:
If I'm in wartime mode and I don't tell anybody and I'm not being transparent, everybody's going to think I'm an asshole, right, and they're not going to want to work with me. But if they understand that I'm fighting for them and their jobs, you know. Or fighting for them and their raises, or fighting, you know, a potential takeover from a competitor or whatever it might be, you know. If they understand what I'm fighting for and why I'm acting the way I'm acting and once the threat is contained, I no longer act like that. They actually can come and help.
Speaker 1:
Because think about it like this you don't know there's an emergency and maybe your natural disposition is kind of goofy and aloof and just trying to be, you know, light of the party, and I'm busting in the room putting the hammer down and you're like what the heck's going on. So if I don't cue you in hey look, there's a legit issue here and I go wartime on you, I could very easily break your spirit and lose your trust and your will. But if I say, look, this is really serious, this is why it's really serious, you might be my absolute best ally. You might be able to jump in and say I got your back, man, what do you need me to do? I'll even do things out of character to make sure that I help you, because I understand where we're trying to go with this thing. It's important and I think that's a lot of times what leaders get wrong is you need to let your biggest advocates be big advocates, right?
Speaker 2:
Yep. So I think the important point there and kind of the answer is if you get into wartime, you can't just shut down all these other skills and things that we're talking about. Right, it's more important when you're at that kind of elevated state of I'm coming in like we need to make things happen. That's when all this other the trust, the honesty, you know, showing the fear, bringing the team in there that's when all of this stuff comes together. It's even more important to make sure everybody's on the same page.
Speaker 1:
Well, and think about the respect that you get to. You build that foundation in peacetime, yeah Right, you build the ability to adapt. You build the ability to have trust and those types of things when everything's calm. Number one, and then number two if you do have to go through a wartime scenario, you do it right. Right, you control your emotions and you communicate clearly. You may not do it perfect, you're probably going to make mistakes, but you get through to the other side and then you go back to peacetime mode.
Speaker 1:
The crew that went through that with you, they are forever going to believe in what you do because they've seen you turn it on when it needed to be turned on and then turn it off. So it's like I think Jordan Peterson talks about the monster within. Having that monster, you can have that monster right. You can. You can totally. I mean you can. You can be the the biggest dog in the fight, but you don't always have to be fighting. And so, just because you're capable, it's better to be capable and have people know that you're capable sometimes than to always be kind of like projecting outward. And that's the thing. Once you go through something and you show people that you're capable, you will get respect from that, as long as you turn it back off.