Pivoting your business, narrowing your focus, and solving problems with Brian Zuercher (CEO at Align)

Brian Zuercher 00:00
I think I would have done myself better just to say, like, if you're getting into this, you're getting into this to pursue this for a long period of time. That's not how we talk about entrepreneurship, especially tech entrepreneurship. It's start it, scale it, raise money, liquidate it, sell it, go on your whatever trip. I think it'd be better for us—and for me it's been like, "Okay, let me just think about building something with no end in mind. I'm just trying to build the best thing possible."

Callan Harrington 00:26
You're listening to That Worked, a show that breaks down the careers of top founders and executives and pulls out those key items that led to their success. I'm your host, Callan Harrington, founder of Flashgrowth, and I couldn't be more excited that you're here. Today's guest, we have Brian Zuercher. I've known Brian for a while now. Brian is the CEO of Align. Brian, welcome to the show.

Brian Zuercher 00:58
Thanks for having me, Callan.

Callan Harrington 01:01
In this startup world, we've probably known each other for, I don't know, two decades.

Brian Zuercher 01:07:
It is dog years. It is 100% in dog years in the startup world.

Callan Harrington 01:10
So tell us a little bit about Align and what you're doing with Align.

Brian Zuercher 01:13
Yeah, Align was born out of the problem of watching companies not being able to figure out how to help employees reach what we would call peak performance. So if you imagine not feeling like you can get your best work done in the work experience—real estate, tools, tech, just the way you do business—we watched companies just missing on that. They're testing against mission values, employee engagement, but they're not really thinking about functional work. As we started to study that, we realized there was an opportunity to build an assessment, understand analytics, and insights for companies that can invest in that experience. Real estate is expensive. Should we have it? What should it be? So Align helps companies navigate that, build a baseline, understand the personas of the workforce, and then how to invest to improve the performance of work.

Callan Harrington 02:02
I know this was not the first company that you founded. You founded many. Where did this all start?

Brian Zuercher 02:08
Oh, let's see here. Let's get the bourbon out in the morning. Yeah. So Hopewell, as some Columbus natives would know, was a coworking lab. We were really trying to understand our own interest in experience. As many people have been around, you kind of just sort of end up in an office sometimes when you do a startup. The last two companies we had, we just opened up an office, randomly put furniture in there, and told ourselves it kind of worked out in a way, but it definitely wasn't thoughtful and intentional. And if you scale that all the way up to big companies, you notice they're having almost the same kind of problems. There's intent, there's facilities management—it's a pretty clinical way of talking about the space where you're trying to do work. My business partner, Emily, and I had just been knocking our heads on that, saying there's something missing. With tools and tech and mobility, there's something off here about the way we put ourselves into these boxes and the way we do work. We'd all been at conferences. You go to San Francisco back in the mid-2000s, and it was becoming like a Whole Foods in every office, and there's free transportation. But none of that really was in Columbus at the time, but it also just didn't seem to solve the problem. Okay, free food and ping-pong tables and all that kind of stuff—that's not what people need to do great work. It's not connecting people better. It's not helping you perform. So we started to think about that, and that's really how Hopewell was born. We wanted to create a space that emphasized removing isolation from your life and helping you have better quality time with people, whether that's one-on-one, by yourself, or in group work. That was the inception. We thought of it as a student union for adults, with a coffee shop, private rooms, meeting rooms, and space to connect. It got us into the industry at that point. We got into the interiors industry, the real estate industry, the furniture industry—all these people who surround that experience have a stake in it. To credit Continental and Ira Sharfin, they adopted the concept with us. They used it as a showroom for their work, and then we were off to the races. But I had no background in real estate, interiors, or human performance at work. Emily had been running HR at Chipotle for about a decade, so she had insight into the challenges facing companies in getting feedback from the field on how things were going.

Callan Harrington 04:26
One of the things that I didn't realize was that Hopewell was more of a showcase, and the main company was behind the scenes of that, is that right?

Brian Zuercher 04:37
Yeah, and that was not how it was incepted. Like every business plan, the business plan was dead the day it started. So we started out the space wanting to have that, but by way of our relationship with Continental, we'd have their clients coming in, often senior executives from bigger companies, and we'd be talking with them, asking questions, probing back, "Who are you trying to make your space for? What do you know about them? What kind of work do they do?" And they’d kind of glaze over and say, "I don't know." You're like, "Okay, so your number two most expensive asset besides labor is going to be real estate, and you have no real clue what the expectations and KPIs are outside of cost efficiencies, those types of things." That was when we realized, "That's weird that you would operate so blindly on this in order to get to an outcome." So that was really where we started to say, "Is there metrics out there, either existing or things that we could create, that would give us insight into someone's performance at work?" We became somewhat obsessed with the concept of flow and a flow state, primarily because it was one of the few things that people could understand and self-describe to say, "Can I do uninterrupted work for 45 minutes?" That became one of our centerpieces for trying to understand someone's work experience. It turns out, most companies unintentionally get in the way of people doing uninterrupted work. I could speak to all the reasons that happens, but our idea was, from an individual standpoint, can we understand what is important, necessary, and preferred for them to get their work done?

Callan Harrington 06:12
So Hopewell was growing, and it was really becoming the spot in Columbus. If you were in the downtown area, I mean, that's where everybody was. I was a member, and I went quite a bit. Then COVID hit. What's going through your mind when the shutdowns are happening? You've got this space that is, for all intents and purposes, taking off—it was the spot to go. How are you experiencing that?

Brian Zuercher 06:37
Yeah, well, it was good and bad, right? The bad part was, obviously, I think we—I've been listening to people recall the first few weeks of March 2020, and you start to go, "Oh yeah, we did all think that was going to be over in a couple of weeks." And obviously, it wasn't. So we had a hard stop on the space. It was shut down. Revenues from the space were sort of cut off. We had a lot of loyal corporate partners who were like, "Just keep billing us monthly. We're cool." That was very kind of them to do, which helped support it a little bit. But the opportunity did open up that we had some time on our hands to really focus on this other part of the business we were thinking about—the assessment and understanding people's work habits. We didn't even know at the time that this was going to be a 10-year acceleration of flexibility in the work experience for companies—remote, distributed, all that was happening in the background because of talent crunches—but it wasn't nearly what it is today. I don't think for the first six months anyone thought that was going to become a permanent feature of knowledge work going forward. So for us, it was a challenge. It helps you set your priorities straight really quickly. We emerged over the coming year realizing we were in two different businesses, and I'm not sure these businesses are as connected as we thought they could be. Trying to thread a needle between essentially a hospitality company and what's becoming an analytics company is very hard to do without lots of money.

Callan Harrington 08:08
So it forced you to focus. Did you find that your previous experience, just as an entrepreneur and a founder, made a pivot like that easier to make, or did you find that it was almost more challenging because you had all of this momentum going into it, and now it's, "I don't want to drop this thing that's working." What was that like for you?

Brian Zuercher 08:28
Our previous company was called Fly, which became Seen, and that was in its pivot from a consumer application to a business-to-business model. You tell yourself, "I'm going to remember this in the future, and I'm going to act faster on these things." You don't. But you're right—there are a bunch of entanglements between momentum, relationships, and just wanting things to succeed. People want to see things they've done succeed, right? So it's not as easy to say, "Oh, you know what? We need to just kill this or sell it," or whatever you have to do to get really focused. So there's no doubt it took time. We also had the idea that we could still thread the needle between the two, and they added credibility to each other in a certain way. So, did the experience help us? I mean, I think it helped us continue to realize that we had to focus. But I'm not sure it helped us act faster. It's also just a thing where, had that been a product—a software product—it would've been easy to say, "Okay, I don't think we're going to do that anymore." We could have killed that off in 30 seconds. But when it's a physical space with leases and partnerships, real estate doesn't unwind itself during a pandemic as easily as you would like it to. So there were some natural forces that just didn't allow us to move as quickly as we might have hoped to.

Callan Harrington 09:49
Do you feel that ultimately put you in a better position?

Brian Zuercher 09:52
I mean, I think it's rosy-colored glasses. I mean, it was painful. Yes, I do ultra marathons, and at some point, it always sucks. The question is, where is the pain? Are you going to focus on it, or are you going to continue to move forward? You've got to put one foot in front of the other. We definitely were able to keep putting one foot in front of the other, and that was fine. But yeah, it sucked. We were also fans of the product, so it was harder to let go of that, too. Seeing people like you there, we knew there was something good going on, so there were emotional ties to letting that go. But yeah, ultimately, it was better because we were able to continue to move along the process and get focused. We were very fortunate to have a lot of friends, partners, and investors who were helping us get to the promised land faster. Without that, it only takes one of those things not working for you to then just have it all shut down. So the village thing—you just hope you don't have any bad villagers.

Callan Harrington 10:55
How did you prioritize during that? You mentioned this a couple of times, and it makes total sense. For something like that to survive, when it was a thriving physical space with this analytics play, how did you prioritize? How did you decide? Because you could have done anything—you could have done 500 different things. When you looked at that, how did you make those decisions on what was the most important to focus on?

Brian Zuercher 11:14
I think the one thing that wears in the leather more when doing more startups and early-stage companies is you start to sense what's surfacing to the top for customers, right? There are things that people always nod to—"Yeah, that sounds great"—but there's a fire in the corner of their room. They want a fire hydrant, not the future fire safety system. That isn't what they're looking for at the moment—they want the fire hydrant. So we were able to notice, okay, this trend is going. They're very confused about why it's working for some people to work at home. "What the hell? Why is this going on? Is our real estate worth anything? Oh, crap." And you can start to see this problem surfacing to the top. We've seen a big flushing out of "nice-to-haves" in the last six months as the economy tightens. What surfaces to the top? Stuff that makes your life easier or more essential. Making sure your real estate is working for you, if you're paying $20 million a year for it, becomes pretty essential. If the place is empty, you want to know why. You want to know how to help people if they're struggling, if labor is tight and expensive—these are now becoming the fires in the corner that need to be put out. So we started to notice, "Okay, this other stuff is really nice to have." When things are going well, you'll spend discretionary money on going to the nice off-site at Hopewell and having nice coffee, but if you're losing people because they're telling you they need this, this, and this and you're not doing it, that bleeding has to stop immediately. So that was easy for us to sense—somebody was willing to write us a check for that. High margin, good business, solving a big problem for them. Let's go over there and keep working on that.

Callan Harrington 13:03
Do you have a process for that? To give you an example, I agree with everything you just said. I think a lot of what you just said is why some of the best companies are actually formed, whether they were started or they may have started just before a tough economy. Because you are forced to get to the actual root problem—there can't be any fluff. The fluff gets pushed out really quickly because no one will buy it. I talk about the importance of those customer interviews, consistently doing customer interviews to figure out what's actually the most important. How do you figure that out? How do you figure out from there what is important? And I would say outside of just, "Well, here's what they're buying," which is a pretty big indicator that that's something to follow. How do you think about that?

Brian Zuercher 13:49
I would say one of my weaknesses, not my strengths, is that I'm an intuition guy. But intuition will get you that first customer, maybe the second customer, because you're sensing that. But the process—I've been a big fan of Steve Blank's customer development process, the academic sense of the process of customer interviews, feedback, hypothesis, and testing. I think if you're going to scale up from that intuition, going from gut data, gut to data, is probably the transition you have to make. So for us, it was, "Okay, let's go talk to as many 'friendlies' as we can." And again, I think you probably know this, and many in the audience would too—knowing the qualifying sales traits of someone gives you a better idea of how to ask the right questions. Budget, authority, need, and timing—using that as a model for your questions in the customer discovery process is the same thing as selling, right? Ask for advice, get money. Ask for money, get advice. That's how we really thought about it—trying to understand that customer persona, specifically the buyer. To get in the weeds on this, in the corporate real estate world, most corporate real estate managers were kind of off to the side in the organizations, and then all of a sudden, a spotlight got shown on them during the tail end of the really pandemic period, saying, "Hey, tell us the strategy on real estate."

Brian Zuercher 15:16
They were like, "What?" They heard a CEO say, "I'm going to cut 50% of real estate."

Brian Zuercher 15:21
So we noticed that they had some budget, they kind of had some authority, but they really didn't have a need before. And the timing on real estate is generally slow. All of a sudden, two of those factors were changing overnight—the need went way up, the timing was now. So we sensed it, but then we started to get enough feedback from the field and through our customers. We leveraged our existing partners to say, "Hey, can you help us get in and talk to XYZ person?" I think that's one of the things that took me a long time to figure out—just how to ask for help from people you know, not just friends, but customers, partners. They probably know more customers and partners, as long as they're not competitive. So we were able to leverage that to learn faster.

Callan Harrington 16:08
Most listeners are going to know what budget, authority, need, and timing (BANT) is. But for those that don't, it's a sales qualification methodology. You have budget, authority, need, and timing. SPICED is another one. There are tons of them, but having one and starting to put a little bit of structure around whatever's in that earliest stage—zero to one, zero to one million—is important. It's going to change. It's almost guaranteed to change. Maybe some elements will stick, but it's almost guaranteed to change. But put something in place so you know what to iterate on. I think that's great advice. You weren't always in startups. You started out at GE, correct?

Brian Zuercher 16:48
Yeah, I did the big company thing. I was in a sales development program they had there, which admittedly was more gathering than hunting because the name GE and the breadth of the network that existed—you didn't have to do the startup hunting. The thing I learned mostly being there was just the rigor of process. That was in the heyday of Black Belt, Green Belt training, process, and teamwork was a big deal. The team I landed on was just a bunch of insane, hard workers, but they were helping each other a lot, even in a sales way. What didn't fit for me was, one, I'm not really a salesperson directly in that way, and I also wanted to build a product. So I ended up leaving to go to a company called Woods Industries that historically owned the entire consumer electrical aisle at Lowe's and Home Depot. So you probably own an extension cord from them and didn't know it. I got the ability to launch a new product line for them, which took me to China and overseas. I was 23 or whatever and totally over my skis. This was pre-cell phone for young Brian, so going to China fully analog, knowing no Mandarin or Cantonese—that was a new experience. Those two languages would help now that you could get to the websites. I remember trying to go to an Ohio State score on ESPN one time on my laptop when I was there, and it was denied. The Chinese government was not super happy.

Callan Harrington 18:17
They must be Michigan fans. So you were at GE, and I've heard that from a lot of people. A lot of people say that big company experience—they learned what scale looks like and realized that there's a reason all that process is there. Because if you don't have it, things will fall apart. It's really hard to truly scale without laying that process in place and thinking scale. I think just thinking about all the decisions we make and how they will scale. At the next place, was that more of an intrapreneur role within a larger company?

Brian Zuercher 18:53
Yeah, in both cases, it's all about people, right? Especially when you're a junior person in a company. The experience I had at GE was one experience, and then regime change at the top for the division became a completely different and worse experience. It was a loss of a leader, and then every mid-manager capitulated to a new chameleon color for the new person. I get it—self-preservation—but yeah, at the other company, I had a boss who was like, "Look, this is the mission. The objective is to go here. Figure it out." For me, that was truly like my own entrepreneurship in a very risk-free sense. I wasn't putting my own capital or other people's capital directly up for my job, but it gave me the sense of building and being self-sufficient in building. I never lacked motivation, but there is something about keeping yourself on task and process and going. So I felt better in that sandbox than I did at GE because I'm not great at relying on other people for my success. I like having coaches and mentors, but I definitely don't like being told what to do all the time and how to do it. So that was a better sandbox for me to play in.

Callan Harrington 20:08
And then after that company, is that when you started your first company?

Brian Zuercher 20:12
Yeah, I went to grad school at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in New York. I had been in these low-tech worlds, even at GE, even though it's a tech company at the time. We were in building construction technologies, not pushing the envelope, at least in my role. So I saw the opportunity—this was 2006—in the Midwest, where I was in Indiana at the time, software startups were still pretty few and far between. I wanted to get out of dodge, and RPI offered a program around tech commercialization and venture finance. You got paired up with tech graduate students to do stuff. For me, it was good—bounce from the Midwest, get out to the East Coast, different flavor of education. For those of us who've grown in the land-grant schools, there are schools out there you've never heard of—they don't have big football stadiums. In fact, I remember getting on campus in the fall and saying, "Alright, when's homecoming?" or whatever. They were like, "Yeah, we don't do homecoming at a football game. We do it at a hockey game." I was like, "Okay, got it." It was good—it was sink or swim. I got thrown into the deep end of a place where academically, I was well out of my league. I'm not blowing away the SAT scores or anything.

Callan Harrington 21:31
So seeing that process and going into an entrepreneur role and making those changes, and then going to school and getting more involved in the entrepreneurial side—how did those things help you in what you're doing today?

Brian Zuercher 21:44
I have nephews and nieces, and sometimes they look for advice. I'm probably the worst person—I’m sure my sister is like, "Do not follow his path," which is very weird and windy. I think I pursued stuff I was curious about and interested in, and that helped build a pretty wide range of experiences. I've just been in a lot of rooms, seen a lot of different things. So on the one hand, I'm not that surprised very often. Especially once you've done a few companies on your own—"Oh, we're out of money, no surprise"—you hear it from friends, and you're talking to people. I would say that stuff doesn't keep me up at night as much as it used to. Over time, you sort of wear the scars. All those experiences were great for me. The challenge for me is that I'm not deep in an industry. That is one challenge for some people—to sort of decide. I don't think you have to make a conscious decision about this, but you may end up in your 40s and go, "Oh, well, I've been in fashion retail for 15 years. Am I a fashion retail person now?" You might be. I mean, then that's okay, or you can always make the change. For me, I'm not in any vertical, but I'm now kind of unemployable because I'm an early-stage expert. Is that a thing? I mean, those experiences have kept me, and they've just generally helped me figure out what I don't want to do. I'm pretty clear about what I don't want to do, and I'm getting better at figuring out what I do want to do. I'm very passionate about zero to one. I love that. I love people that are way smarter than me. So early, really deep technical stuff is exciting to me, even if I can't understand exactly what molecule they're talking about—"Molecules? What the hell is going on?" Marrying those things is where I've always found myself—finding great, smart people to work with and solving interesting problems. My challenge is I can get bored with a problem pretty quick.

Callan Harrington 23:48
That has been probably one of the biggest game-changers for me personally—exactly what you said, knowing what you don't want to do. I think I was on the "take the next good opportunity, take the next best opportunity" path. I've said this before a few times because this comes up quite a bit. At some point, you just have to start following your gut, as you mentioned earlier. Did you find that to be the experience?

Brian Zuercher 24:32
Yeah, I think it's weird when you get a little older—goal-setting is not maybe as obvious as it was. "Okay, I'm a high school lacrosse player. I want to be on first-team all-state Ohio lacrosse," whatever. That's a pretty easy objective to put out there for yourself. When you get to be an adult, you have a wide range of things you could pursue as goals—personal goals, family goals, professional achievements, financial goals—and you definitely can't do them all. That is, for me, the harder part—narrowing down which lane I want to be the best at. There are four or five lanes—personal, professional, athletics, health, whatever. I'm not going to be able to pursue all of those things. It's a hard concession to make if you're an alpha idiot trying to still do certain things. I've had to step back. I did a lot of stuff in the entrepreneur community for a long time—Wake Up Startup, all that—and at some point, you're like, "Wow, this is opportunity cost," even though I really loved it and pursued it. For me, it was, "What's the shelf life of this thing for me? Is it still interesting? Is it still adding value to me personally?" But then having to figure out what these other goals are that are longer-term, that aren't going to satisfy me this month with something fun. No, I want to pursue something that takes 1,000 days to get done. Resetting that longer arc of achievement in my life has been something I've really had to think about.

Callan Harrington 26:04:
What impact has that had on you? Let's say, cutting those things out and taking greater focus on fewer things—how has that impacted you?

Brian Zuercher 26:13
On the positive side, you just get narrower with friends and time and family. I think the pandemic might have done this for some people. When a bunch of stuff got cut out because of the circumstance, you didn't miss it as much as you thought you would. All of a sudden, you're like, "Wait, I've been going to three networking things every week. What was the pursuit of that again? What did it add? Was it doing what I wanted to do? If I had to start net new, would I add that back in first thing?" A lot of people have chosen to do other things, which is good—it was a good reset for whatever cost we paid for it. So for me, it's done that for me, too—it's let me put out some things that are important to me that I know I'm not going to get done. I want to run a 100-mile race. I've been doing long-distance endurance stuff for 10-plus years. This is not something most middle-aged men can do across the table—yeah, 0% chance. Even someone who's got this experience—it's not happening that quickly. It's allowed me to think about in startup world—I'm trying to bring this back into something new focus here—I think one challenge for entrepreneurs, especially in the early stage, is that there's a fictitious timeline set out for these things that does not match reality. So you put a business plan together—this is the market size, $6 billion, we're going to do $20 million in revenue by year three, and yada yada. And then in year three, you're doing $600,000 in revenue, and it's harder than you thought. Now the timeline's tripled, and it's not going to be three years until you exit and are on your yacht—it's going to be 10 years, and you're going to have a paddle boat. It's changing. That is really hard in early stage—it's more of a treadmill than anything else. It's not really a marathon because there isn't really an end. I think it's a misunderstanding that starting a company doesn't have an ending. Liquidity is a pretty hard thing to achieve for most companies. Even companies that have been running for decades—selling a company is hard, going public is hard. I think I would have done myself better just to say, like, if you're getting into this, you're getting into this to pursue it for a long period of time. That's not how we talk about entrepreneurship, especially tech entrepreneurship. It's start it, scale it, raise money, liquidate it, sell it, go on your whatever trip. I think it'd be better for us—and for me it's been like, "Okay, let me just think about building something with no end in mind. I'm just trying to build the best thing possible, and I've got to be committed to five to 10 years of doing this at least to start, or it's not worth pursuing."

Callan Harrington 28:58
I heard a quote from a guy named Greg Alexander, who is a successful founder and exited his company. He said, "I want a company that can last forever but could be sold tomorrow." I was like, "Yeah, that." I didn't understand that—I had to get out of the whole venture world to understand that. But it's just that we want to build this—we want to build this to be a strong company. We've got the margins to withstand ups and downs in the market. We are very intentional in how we hire and invest. But if the opportunity comes where it makes sense to have that liquidation event, then we're ready for it. But if not, we've got a great business, and we're building something we really enjoy, we really like doing. I think that long-term focus also makes it a lot easier to make those short-term decisions, and it can pull some of that short-term pressure. That's what I've found to be the case in my experience. Have you found that to be similar?

Brian Zuercher 30:01
Yeah, and it's easy to say these things later on, like, "Oh, it's a long-term game." But look, when you have an idea and you want to start a company, and let's say you're marginally aware of venture ecosystems and things like that, there's a pathway that seems to be paved to go down. But it's weird because if you were going to open up a barbershop on the corner, the venture pathway door never opens up. Understandably, that's not what they're there for. But too many people, when they have the idea, get sucked into the pursuit of one path. "Okay, this is a small business, this is a lifestyle business, this is a venture business," before ever just saying, "Well, do we have a customer? Does anyone care about this?" I feel like there is not enough time spent just figuring out how to solve problem one. I think there's a bootstrapping mentality that some people—and it's maybe emerging back up now—but a lot of it is a hype thing. There's a lot of good feelings, too. "Oh, I raised money." There's a lot of validation—venture capitalists can be very smart people. It can be a very sexy thing—they're going to write a headline in a newspaper saying, "You did this." There's a real feeling of great achievement by having that, and often it is. But that isn't the goal—the goal is to build the company, as you're saying. It's hard to take the emotion out of it—this is like a tug-of-war with yourself, with your friends, partners, and people you talk to—to try to center it back to, "What do we want to do? What do we want to build? What are we really in this for?" And hey, if you're in it just to try to make as much money as possible in a short amount of time, that can be a pursuit, but it's a really specific kind of pursuit. It's a complicated story, but yeah, for me it's been, "Wow, it's really fun to watch." I'm more impressed with companies that I find out are like 75 years old—that is impressive, right? Wow, somebody suffered painfully at the beginning of that thing. Maybe again in 20 years they suffered again, and then again. They probably did—they had to keep reinventing it. But the fact that that company and the people that came with it, if they did good things, is really fascinating to me. I don't know if there's any formula there—I think there's just good people trying to solve problems, doing it the right way, and a lot of luck.

Callan Harrington 32:18
And to me, and we've talked about this before, there isn't one right way to do it, whether that's bootstrapped, venture capital, or whatever that may be. Or just, we don't have to say venture—it could be investment in general. A way I try to think about it is, "What could I build, and then do I need to take on venture to hit my goal?" If I've got this giant, world-changing goal, I'm probably going to need some sort of capital to get there. I think what you said is dead on—it's a path, and I encourage people to look at all paths and try to figure out what you want.

Brian Zuercher 32:54
It's hard because a lot of times the advice or convenience is the loudest in our heads. If you happen to have a friend who's been in venture, when you start talking to them, they're like, "Well, yeah, I know these venture people. I can introduce you." If you happen to be in more small business or lifestyle, you might find people who open up doors on that pathway. Advice by convenience can be heavily influential for people, and it's hard when you don't have enough time. "I’ve got to go network to find somebody else to tell me something different?" You want to keep moving as fast as possible. So I just always caution myself and anyone else—am I only getting advice of convenience right now, or is there another place to pursue information that might change my mind on what route to take? Honestly, doing endurance sports has helped me with that a lot. There are a million different ways to achieve running a 50-mile run and getting the fitness level to do that. Everybody thinks they've got the right idea to do that, and then there's you and what you're capable of, what you have time for, what your actual goal is. I'm not going to win a race—I just want to cross the finish line before the cutoff time, right? So it's really knowing what you want to do, what you're going to pursue, that will slowly help you figure out where the advice path is.

Callan Harrington 34:10
If you could have a conversation with your younger self—up to you on the age—what would that conversation be? What advice would you give?

Brian Zuercher 34:21
It's hard to say. I think I would have maybe tried to start a company sooner than I did. I don't know that I was ever waiting for the right time, necessarily, but I just don't think I was aware of—not necessarily how easy it is, but I just wasn't surrounded with those types of people that were pursuing. I was in jobs, right? I think I would have tried to maybe consider pursuing that even earlier. But I've been fortunate and lucky to work with great people and be in crazy, weird things. I've done bio-ag, GE, consumer whatever, real estate—really, to me, it's all fun. I think I would tell a young person to just optimize for experience. Whatever you can do to pursue things, don't hesitate for one second to take that next trip, to call that friend, to go do that thing—you never know what's going to happen. That pure curiosity—that's the regret you don't want to have, the thing you almost did. Luckily, I probably have more regrets on the things I did too much of. I might have told my younger self to maybe hold off on the last shot of the night at the bar when I was 22.

Callan Harrington 35:39
I can't think of a better place to wrap up than right there. Brian, this was awesome. Thanks for coming on the show.

Brian Zuercher 35:46
Yeah, thanks, Callan.