Mastering Personal Development: Chip Wilson's Journey to Success

0:00The law of attraction from Brian Tracy kicks in and I started attracting people in my life that were out for something bigger than just themselves. How much more successful would you be if you had lunch once a week with insanely successful entrepreneurs who share their biggest secrets on how they think and achieve success? Grab your seat at the table because this is Business Lunch with Roland Frazier and Ryan Dice.

0:30Welcome to another episode of Business Lunch. And today's a snackable episode with Roland where he's going to get into some more tactical strategies that you can start using to live a rich and happy life. If this is the first snackable episode you're hearing, I'd encourage you to go back and listen to some of the other episodes that Roland has put out. And if you want to get notified every time we release a new episode, go to the new businesslunchpodcast.com website, and we'll send you detailed notes along with every episode. That's businesslunchpodcast.com, www.businesslunchpodcast.com. And you can sign up for the free email newsletter where you'll be able to get all the highlights and resources from the episodes.

1:05This is awesome. It's so wonderful. to have you here. And you got through the, you came from Canada, down from Vancouver. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So he made it down. Yes. Yes. That is awesome. Well, this is super fun because I have, I have been a fan of all the stuff that you've done over all the years. And then you wrote the book, which you just recently updated and had a chance to go through that a few times and look at everything you're doing. One of the things that I know about you is that there's an interesting thing you have about the number 43. Would you share a little bit about that? Well, something I noticed is that everyone gets glasses at 43.

1:49I don't know if you've ever, like, I mean, okay, a year before or after, but, and I think when people get glasses, they go, oh my God, I'm getting old. You know, it's kind of the first revelation. And of course, 20, 30 years ago, a man would have gone out and bought a red Porsche, you know, and, and, but you know, that's, but I think what happens is that, that couples look at each other and then, and their children are like 14, 13, 12, the children don't need the parents anymore. And I think the parents start to see, oh my God, You know, like we're going to be home. You know, the kids are going to be off at university soon.

2:28Who are we together? And I think people, they think about, well, who am I married to? Is that the right person? Am I living in the right city? Do I have the right job? And I think there's this whole revelation that happens. I think people should change their name at the age of 43. What would you change your name to? Well, I think Chip's a pretty good one. I got that nailed. It kind of works all the way, right? But, you know, I think it was one of those books, Freakonomics or something, I forget, where they said that how a name can really target how old you are and what socioeconomic spectrum you're from.

3:04So I think at 43, it's the right time, especially as we start living to 120 now. I love it. One of the things that you're very big on is personal development and goals. and I love that you put together kind of the best of some Brian Tracy things from the psychology of achievement and some of the things that you got from landmark and you were like I like goals but I don't like goals and would you share a little bit about what kind of your philosophy is on that yeah sure I mean most people start goals like I think go to the what is it start or something anyway a goal is achievable by smart smart smart goals I was going to say start I knew that was Pretty much the same.

3:45Yeah, I like it. But, you know, this part about achievable, I kind of came to the thought that maybe goals, you should fail at 50 % of your goals as part of a training program to learn how to fail in life. But I think more for goals, I found that myself, when I first started them, I think I went small. Okay. And I went small because, well, let me give you an example. I was 242 pounds. I wanted to be 220 pounds. So I set a goal to be 220 pounds, but December 31st, let's call it 2020. And then, but let's just say that I'd woken up in the hospital with amnesia and I had, and I just decided like, I want to get into better shape.

4:34I want to look at whatever I'm doing. And because I have no concept of what my weight was before or what people think I should weigh or what society thinks I should weigh, I might look up in a bunch of medical journals and then go, my often weight is 208 pounds. So what I really got from that is that I, and I would say most people set goals that are based in the past from past experiences that include a lot of failures and not thinking big enough. So now I come at work every day. I come at life every day as though I'm going to compete against myself or I'm going to reinvent myself every day as though I woke up in the hospital with amnesia.

5:18That's awesome. How has your goal setting changed over the years? Because you've been doing this since 18, 19, right? Well, actually, I think as competitive summer it's automatically set in because you turn an age group at from 12 to 13 so there's a record you have to beat and you know there's an age so a goal is you know quantifiable with a buy-when date so how they changed over the over life I think when when I first started setting goals it was all about me and as I've grown older and of course life is nearly perfect for me in every way. So in order to stimulate myself, it has to be about other people, other people winning.

6:03Okay. But it seems like, well, certainly during the time that you were with Lululemon, it was all about the winning, which was pretty cool. So it's been fairly constant, then it sounds like. Well, no, I'd say at that time of 43, it was like I moved from being about me to giving without expectation of return. That is a good place to be. It's a really tough bridge to go over when you haven't really got that much money. Yeah. And to think it's about everybody else before me. But I noticed by operating from that point, I started the law of attraction from Brian Tracy kicks in. And I started attracting people in my life that were out for something bigger other than just themselves.

6:49Nice. And it was all by mistake. I didn't do any of this on purpose. You mentioned being a competitive swimmer, and you talk about the 100-meter backstroke. Right. Will you share that story and what your takeaway was from that? Yeah, it's a neat story, and I wish more people had this opportunity. I was 10 years old, and I was swimming the 100-meter backstroke. I was a very mediocre swimmer, very mediocre. And so I'm about to go off the blocks. And my dad came up to me and said, just try to do something like just go full out, like right from the very start. Because kind of the thing of the day was probably to look good, to try to go a little bit slower at the beginning, save yourself, come roaring into the end and hit the wall and look fantastic.

7:42Right. So this is kind of a change of thinking. So I did the race, went full out, and I dropped my time by nine seconds, as a 10-year-old's almost unheard of, and I broke the Canadian record. So you can kind of see where my way of looking at life then started to become from almost a fear of not giving 100 % right from the start. And then I kind of think I came to the point of I never want to be laying on my deathbed thinking I only gave it 98 % and I failed. And God, if I just would have given it all, would I have made it? I think that's such a great observation because if you're giving, like at the end, you're giving the 100, but you still have energy, you're still going, then you've definitely shortchanged yourself.

8:35And what's the difference if you gave it all at the beginning and got way, way ahead, right? And then didn't have an energy. To me, that just makes a whole lot of sense. It was really cool that your dad saw that. Now, you developed a lot of personal development stuff for the Lululemon team, and I think you still have it for some of the other ventures you're doing now. Could you tell us a little bit about that? It was like a combination of kind of all the best stuff that you're learning? Yeah.

9:05There was a period of my life when I was 19 when I had the opportunity to read the top 100 books of all time. as just working this kind of construction job, I had that opportunity. And then when I sold my snowboard company when I was 42 or something, I had kind of the same thing, a year in order to read. And it was the era when audio tapes just came out. So I listened to the top 100 business books of all time or self-development books or whatever. And I came to probably the same conclusion as 90 % of the people come to, and that is there's like four or five books that basically say it all about everything else.

9:45And it's Good to Great by Collins, Seven Habits of Highly Effective People by Covey, Psychology of Achievement by Brian Tracy. And then I'd say that the course, the landmark form course was radical. And so what I recognized is that I could actually have my employees at Lululemon do all that in two weeks. And I noticed that after that two weeks of training, I could send them out to Baltimore to go open up a store, you know, like a 23-year-old, you know, right out of university, and they could, like, run it flawlessly. Do you still have that? Do you still have people go through that system? Yeah, I'm definitely at my new companies that I have, you know, my real estate and my family home office, that type of thing.

10:39I love Hold It All. What a great name for your family office. Well, my nine-year-old came up with that. This is great. It's just awesome. So one of the things you talk about is linguistic adaptation, which I think is really, really cool as like a short, kind of a shorthand language. Would you share a little bit about that and how it works? Yeah, as far as culture goes, I think that the term values is out now. Just like I think vision is out and the word purpose is in. And instead of values, I would say linguistic abstraction is in as the word. So it's kind of like you think about two surgeons working on a knee.

11:19Well, they can't afford to be giving you the definition of every little ligament and muscle and bone or the way they operate, but they can say one word and it means a whole lot. So from the three books I just said in the landmark form and maybe even the e-myth, that I took 30 terms out of those books and that's what I run the company by. So a classic one would be conditions of satisfaction. So when I'm discussing a project with somebody, there's no finish to the communication unless there's conditions of satisfaction and a by-when date it's going to get done by. We would have a definition for integrity.

12:11Integrity being, I do what I say I will do when I say I will do it in the expected way. and if I can't get it done, then I've got to go clean up my mess and reset new buy-wins and condition satisfaction. So when you bring in 30 of these terms and definitions, then I can phone up somebody in Xiamen, China, and we're on the same page. Is this something that you're using in Amr, the new things that you're doing as well? Well, for Amr, I'm bringing it in, definitely. It's a slow process. I think we, well, we came in knowing that they were old companies run wholesale by men in engineering. And we were moving it to direct-to-consumer, female-driven.

12:59And that required a whole different type of thinking. And so you spend a year and a half getting the right leaders in place. And then, of course, COVID hit. And that kind of set us back a bit. But I'd say in the main company of AMR, which is Arcterics, that's definitely a big part of the culture. Is this something that we could go find someplace and go through the two-week program ourselves if we wanted to? Well, of course, you could read my book, which is on chipwilson.com. I think everybody here should have a copy. It should be on their chairs. Thank you very much. Fantastic book. And then I have inside of that website, of course, is the linguistic abstraction, a three-page document by Michael Jensen, who was a professor at Harvard working on integrity and how it works within corporations.

13:55And that three-pager, I think, is probably the best three pages ever written in business. We mentioned, Amr, what one story, well, actually, I'd love for you to tell the story about, because this was something that you had looked at years and years and years ago. And then ultimately it worked out. Would you mind kind of sharing that? It's kind of cool. Yeah. When I started Lululemon, across the water in Lululemon was this company called Arcteryx. And definitely the very best outerwear clothing in the world. If nobody's ever worn it, you know it's far superior. when you get it. And then, but I, Lululemon was such a rocket ship and so much to do.

14:36And I couldn't really take my eye off the ball and that, well, I just don't have time to, to, to go buy it type of thing. And, and I didn't know how to buy it. I didn't know bankers. I didn't understand finance. I didn't understand any of that world. So it wasn't really there. And, and then when I sold, you know, I sold Lululemon private equity and then went public and all that. And I left and And I started looking for other companies to get involved in. Well, then Wilson Sports in Chicago was available. And I thought, oh, that's pretty cool. Go buy a sporting good. The name's already there. I don't have to do much to it.

15:12And so when I started looking at both these companies three years ago, I found they were both owned by Amr, which is the American tobacco company set up by the Finnish Student Union to bring in American tobacco and the time they shifted over to athletic clothing and equipment. What appeals to you about that that caused you to go back into that after kind of moving out of the big Lululemon? Well, I think it's the authenticity of, if you look at Nike, they're best in the world at running shoes. At Lululemon, we were best in the world at yoga clothing. I think to break into the athletic market, you have to be best in the world at something.

15:58Now, interesting among these brands in Amher, which is Atomic and Salomon, which I think are the two best ski brands in the world. Salomon, I think, is the best at trail running. Wilson, of course, has, you know, best at balls and equipment. Best basketball to be stuck with on an island. Yeah, yeah, of course. Wilson, that's right, too. And we have peak performance, you know, out of Stockholm. home and then I think Archerich's best in the world at what I'd call top of the mountain survival gear. So it's really easy to take something that has amazing authenticity, especially most of the brands in equipment like Wilson Atomic or Solomon, and then put apparel towards them.

16:42Because what I learned is that money is all in the apparel. It's actually not in the hard goods. So when I had a skateboard surf brand type of thing. I'd put all the skateboards and surfboards and snowboards up front, you know, kind of pretending to be a hard goods company. And then I'd have the apparel in the back, but that's where all the money was made. You, you did something in the business that we, that a lot of people here at Traffic and Conversion do, which is you actually had a, a lead magnet. You, you had a thing that you did with yoga mats to attract people into the store, to get them to buy more things by selling those at cost.

17:23We do that a lot. We teach at Digital Marketer, have a thing that you either give away or whatever that gets people in, and then you have other things you can sell. Would you share a little bit about that strategy? And are you using that also now in the new one? No, not yet, because I don't think they're sophisticated enough to understand. And to do something like a loss leader, which is, I don't know, I learned it in marketing in 1970, 1912. If we call it a lead magnet, we can charge a lot of money to sell information about it. Yeah. Well, for yoga mats, it was a commodity product, really easy to make.

17:58There were other people having it and doing it. They needed to make a profit. I didn't need to make a profit. I just need to get people in the stores or online in order to then sell the clothing. And because I, not only was I vertical because I'd eliminated the wholesale, but I was more than vertical because I owned my manufacturing. Right. Which I don't understand. It had to have been maddening when you went through the process of, I think you said when you were getting ready to go public, they said you've got to do three things. And one of them was you had to divest out of manufacturing. Yeah.

18:31But the manufacturing was the whole, it was a very key part of the vertical retail model, right? Right. You had to have been just like, why? Yeah. I got myself into trouble already because I didn't realize I needed to figure out how to control a public board when I actually went private equity a couple of years before. So I lost control of the company. But, you know, I mean, boards of directors operate by fear, you know, the U.S. litigation system. I think quarterly analysts, they don't want any bad news about anything, you know, and consequently they become mediocre and they fail to become great.

19:12So you were talking about authenticity. And to me, that coupled with what you were just saying dovetails into that Lululemon and all of the things that you've done have always been very, very authentic. And yet all of the advice that you get from the outside investment world is it's not be inauthentic, but they push you to be something that you're not so that you can appeal to the investment world. How do you stay authentic and find that funding and connect with that other world? Is that just like you can't? No, I believe that you can. I just didn't know how at the time. And I really didn't understand the power that I had.

19:58I was a company. I didn't need the money when I went private equity. Lou Lemon was making money hand over fist. and so but what I did want is I had three kids under the age of two I had two older boys I'd missed a lot of my older boys life and I didn't want to do that again so I was treating in you know this amazing company to have to be a family man the I mean I think Phil Knight from Nike did it very well and now I think because I've come out with the book, most people are figuring this out. And that is you control the board through A and B class shares. If you can control the board, then you can control the culture and you can ultimately decide who the CEO is.

20:48Yeah. You said, going back to the authenticity, that you like to be authentic about your inauthenticity. Sure. Would you elaborate on that a little bit? Yeah. Authentic about it being inauthentic i if i take myself back to being a teenager or a 20 year old and i was trying to date a girl i really liked you know it'd be kind of like oh i'm going to try to be what kind of guy that girl wants you know so that would have been you know being inauthentic about about my authenticity um you know i i think it's um let me see if i can find an example being authentic about well just i think pretending that i that i'm a man of integrity you know i really understand integrity i understand how it works but still i'm a person that continually falls out of integrity you know i'll be five minutes late or i'll tell a white lie you know like it's better off i just tell people you know like um oh i'm gonna i'll see you there at one and then i have to like, I walk away and then I have to call them and go, the reality of it is I'm going to be there at 112.

21:58I'm not going to be there at one. I don't know who I was lying to, but you know, and I kind of, and I think the interesting thing about that is that the more I kind of set out there, how inauthentic I am about who I actually think I am, the more people trust in who I am and what I say. So does the code that you have help kind of provide a guidance system for that integrity? Right. So the code would have been originally called the manifesto, which would have been on the side of the Lululemon bags. And it would have had maybe 40 or 50 sayings on it. But again, I think that time goes by and so many of those things would have been so radically unacceptable to Wall Street that the bags, they'd all got taken off.

22:45and one of them would have been in 1998 that Coke and Pepsi were the tobacco of the future. And great marketing, terrible product. And even then I could see the obesity that was occurring in America and I could see that that was probably the crux of it. But I would have had things like, even back then, like, you know, suntan lotion may not be good for you, you know, And just from the understanding that the skin is the biggest organ and we absorb so much through the skin and the chemicals and that. And it's now I just read a month and a half ago where they've actually banned a whole bunch of suntan lotion now because of the chemicals in it.

23:26You know, so it's all all things that I think probably came out of being West Coast, a little bit of a granola cruncher, super athletic, really kind of looking at, you know, diet and and, you know, way of living in life. one of the women that you had come in as CEO for Lulu, I think, I don't remember if it was when she was or when she was coming, but came to you and said that, and hopefully I remember this correctly, if I don't correct me, but said that we have to change the bag. We have to take the thing about children or the orgasm of - Yeah, children or the orgasm of life. Yeah. Because we've got complaint, and you're like, well, how many?

24:10And I think she said one. Yeah, exactly. Would you, knowing everything you know now, say, keep the daggone thing the way it is, let's stand our ground on the sayings that we have on there? Well, first thing I would have done was fired her right off the spot. They would have told me she was the wrong CEO. Right, yeah. And it was my first time I transferred out of being a CEO and got a new one. I wasn't really that great at understanding what was good and what was bad at the time. But when you get something that's so – like the manifesto on the side of the Lou Lemonbag was the number one reason people were coming to work for us.

24:46Now I had a CEO that was coming in, and the first thing that she wants to do is change the very thing that 90 % of the employees came to work for the company for. So in retrospect, I messed up. So what are your thoughts on, because you've, are you the CEO of any of the companies now?

25:08I don't, no, I don't think so. Okay. Somebody will tell you if you are. But what are your thoughts? Investment, the investment world, the public offering world and all, they'll tell you, you got to bring in a seasoned CEO that's done this before and all that. And so they bring in professional CEOs. Do you think it's good to bring that in or, or keep the founder who has the heart and soul of the company and maybe get a COO or somebody like that that can do that? Cause obviously you can't know, you can't know all the things that you need to know if you haven't done the things that people have done.

25:51But, but how, how do you feel about that? Yeah, I think you've hit it on the net. I think Wall Street and the analysts would come in, they'd want you to get a CEO that is acceptable to Wall Street as opposed to someone that can actually run the company. And I think that the, I think it's true that myself as the CEO or my employees probably didn't know what, how to set the company up perfectly to get to the next level. but what i do if i had to do it over again i would hire a coo under me i would hire a person underneath each one of my core cultural managers that knew the company who and the people underneath would be more experienced but i would pay them 40 percent more than the and how than the person above them.

26:44Because the problem is if I brought in a COO who could probably do the CEO job, one, you've got to take care of their ego of not being a CEO. So then you have to pay them to compensate for the difference. But that's all it takes, I think. Nobody's ever really tried it. I can't say that. Have people tried it? I don't know. Okay. There you go. Checking your integrity. I like that. you've seen the impact of social media and and traditional media and it has you experienced lots of good from it helped a lot of the different companies that you had and you had some people who did things they probably shouldn't have for their 15 minutes of fame to cast you in different lights how how do you balance that do you think to get the good that media has to offer without suffering the bad?

27:39Well, I think it was, I got caught just because it was 2.13. It was just a change of time from old school media into the new school media. And nobody had ever really been subjected to the council culture before. So I think I was kind of the poster child for what happened. And that's fine. You know, like I, it's my own fault. I, I always thought I was a futurist, but obviously I didn't know what was happening in that social media world. I don't really have a... My opinion is that sticking with authenticity and documenting inside the company website about what the stand is for diversity, pay equity, is really important.

28:31and what the company stands for. So, for instance, I'll give you an example right now. Lou Lemon and my companies in general are all about 32-year-old single professional. And they're about providing components for people to live a longer, healthier, and more fun life. Now, what happens out of the left wing and social media is that they can make you wrong on any subject. One, we have a bell curve in life, and on any subject you have one extreme side here and one extreme side here and in the middle. So you can never get away from anything bad in social media. But I think by documenting about who you are and what you stand for is really important.