Hosting Events & Building Real Community with Hollis Carter

0:01Light that spark fire nation JLD here and welcome to entrepreneurs on fire brought to you by the HubSpot podcast network, the audio destination for business professionals with great shows like I Digress. Today, we'll be talking all about hosting events and building real community. To drop these value bombs, I brought to Hollis Carter and to EO Fire Studios. Hollis is the co-founder of Baby Bathwater Institute, lifelong entrepreneur, curious human, lover of adventure, and purveyor of good times. And today, we'll be talking about the evolution of events and lessons learned, building real community, the battle of happiness versus success, and so much more.

0:38And a big thank you for sponsoring today's episode goes to Hollis and our sponsors. Nudge, hosted by Phil Agnew, is brought to you by the HubSpot Podcast Network, the audio destination for business professionals. Ever notice how the smallest changes can have the biggest impact? On Nudge, you learn simple evidence-backed tips to help you kick bad habits, get a raise, and grow a business. Oh, and it's the UK's Fast-Growing Business Podcast. A recent episode on how to win any argument shares decade-long research into persuasion from a world-leading neuroscientist. Listen to Nudge wherever you get your podcasts.

1:10Ever thought about giving a TEDx talk? It's one of the most powerful ways to share your message with the world. And four-time TEDx speaker Taylor Conroy from Thought Leader can help you get there. Visit thought-leader.com slash fire to join Taylor's free training where he teaches you how to land a TEDx talk and spread your message to millions. Hollis, say what's up to Fire Nation and share something that you believe about becoming successful that most people disagree with. Awesome. Yeah. Thanks for having me back. I think it was like 10 years ago when we last chatted. So really nice to be back here.

1:47July 1st, 2015, buddy. Oh, wow. Yeah. That was quite a time ago. I think I was living in a van. Very different life now. Down by the river, if I remember correctly too, right? Yeah, up on a mountain and down by the river. Yeah, so I mean, I was thinking about that question. And one thing I think I hear on social media, podcasts, all the success kind of stuff is the like five people you're around, quote, that gets thrown around quite loosely and people believe on it. I think a lot of people view that as like a ladder where they're like, let me make my success by the people who are successful. if I get around those five people, I will just automatically become that.

2:31And they view it like climbing a ladder where I think it's actually a little bit deeper than that. And success is very different for every individual. Like you have your life that you've built, that you enjoy, you've figured out your niche that you serve and how you want to live and you do it. It's different for everybody. So like climbing other people's success ladders, especially in business, I don't think is the path. I think it's actually about being in a community of people. It can be five, it can be more where you're actually valuable to them. I think that feedback loop to us, like intrinsically as humans is the most powerful, like actually being a valuable person.

3:08So not just being around five people who you can climb their success ladder and be what they are one day, but actually having the people you spend regular time with in business and in life that you are truly valuable to them. You know, the most valuable person in the tribe usually lives the longest because there is a psychological and physiological feedback loop there. So I think people just kind of get that wrong and take it at face value and don't think about are they being valuable to the people they spend the most time with. Fire Nation, you know, I do end every episode by telling you that you're the average of the five people you spend the most time with, but you also have to take into account what Hollis is saying here because there's more to it than just being in the vicinity of those individuals.

3:48Now, you've been hosting events for over 10 years, Hollis. I mean, over 10 years. And it's pretty incredible. I mean, there's obviously been an evolution in what you've done from the beginning to where you are now. And you've learned some lessons along the way. So I wanna riff on that for a little while. Talk to us about your evolution when it comes to hosting events and the lessons you've learned. 10 years has been what I'd say I've been in the niche of doing it professionally, but pretty much my whole life. I was throwing parties in high school and booking college bands. Honestly, it's just the in-person interaction has always been the biggest thing for me in all of life.

4:33It's what kind of let me up. I have that kind of yin and yang where I like being off on my own in the middle of nowhere, or I like really being in person with people and try to avoid the digital world as much as possible. But that's what we live in. And I think the lessons I've learned from it are, one, nothing will ever go to plan. So if you're like someone who loves to have the most dialed SOPs and everything follow that exact plan, it's probably not something you want to go into. And if you're just attending these and being a part of them, it's really key to know that. And your experience is usually going to be dictated by how good you are at going with the flow.

5:14Now, on that note, Hollis, have you gotten better or started at least on some level trying to prepare the attendees of your events to this fact? A hundred percent. You know, it's funny if I ever took the time to write like a book of lessons learned more of like how to attend and get the most out of things. That is a big piece of like, you know, people have these expectations in their mind of what they're going to get out when they invest time and money to come to these things. and I always say the real value is like in the easter egg that you didn't even know is there like uh it in my 10 years of going to events before I was hosting where that's where I really got my value because I wasn't good at you know being a dyslexic ADD guy sitting in course content I would just sit in the lobby and every time like I can't believe I just met that guy who taught me this lesson that it just feels like the universe you know delivered that person to sit next to me and that was like the easter egg i found i was with probably 10 baby bathwater members uh just sitting in a at an airport the other day and they were talking about some of their best experiences have been when things went horribly awry like we had a huge snowstorm come and everyone couldn't get down the mountain and like 40 people had to go into my house that was up there for a few hours until the roads cleared and we could come and it was like a highlight for them but those are the people who went with the flow and realized oh i'm gonna get to have these conversations with these folks and you know to your kind of very acute point there like prepping yourself to get the most out of live events and doing that one thing i've seen is people try to sometimes recreate magic which has taken me a while to as a producer and and someone who's helping the attendees don't try to recreate it like the new magic usually comes on its own and people have this one magical thing that happened one time or how it was last time.

7:03And it's like a very key thing in like upgrading your experience to not be chasing, recreating some moment you had, you know, in the past. I love that mentality and that idea of not trying to recreate magic, but, you know, being available and aware that magic can happen when you put yourself in the right situations and around the right people. And, you know, to me, like when you were first talking about that, I just went back to a lesson I learned as a little kid. Like I remember I was like eight years old and we went up to my aunt's ski cabin and it was up in this ski mountain in New Hampshire.

7:41And it was actually during the summertime. So it wasn't skiing. It wasn't snow at all. And we were just there for the weekend. I had very low expectations. Even as a kid, I was like, oh, it's just going to be hanging out, whatever. Ended up being like the best weekend ever. I mean, there was like pickup basketball games where like I was just on point and I was having so much fun with everybody there. And there was like this, you know, this great arcade that we were just playing with all these kids and having so much fun. And then we went on this hike that was magical and amazing. And then we roasted marshmallows at night.

8:09And for like two years, I just had this image in my mind about this perfect magical weekend that I had. And I kept bugging my mom like, we need to go back, we need to go back because I just assumed it was going to be the same. And we went back a couple years later. And of course, yeah, I was a little bit of a different age, but I was still in the same mindset and like looking for the same thing. and it was just like such a disappointment, such a buzzkill. It was like nothing lined up and I was just like, wow, for two years, I was just holding this up on this pedestal. This was gonna be the best place ever to return to but I should have instead realized that, hey, that was a magical weekend.

8:43Things happened that were great. Let me just leave that as an amazing memory and look for the, or be aware and be open to the next magical weekend that may not be expected somewhere, anywhere, or wherever that might be. And I think that's just a great way to go about life. And I love how you shared that thing about the Easter eggs. Like, look for those Easter eggs, Fire Nation, because that's cool. That's magical. That's what people remember. Now, you believe that we can actually build community as a business, Hollis. Tell us more about that. When I go back to my first few businesses before it, I did learn stuff from courses and when people had more of like a teaching type mentality for me.

9:25But that's never what actually catapulted me. And there was like an organic community. I think when we met, it was like the pretty early internet marketing, like when people could first sell stuff online, like it was this cool new world. And the information that was online was so out of date so quickly. I didn't quite realize it, but it was really community that helped me have my first few successes. It was because I spent a ton of time hanging out in hotel lobbies with other people who are all trying to figure this out. We're all in similar stages of life, similar stages of business, and it could be sort of intimidating and scary.

10:01And like the psychological back piece, they talk about being lonely on top. Like when you have other people who are dealing with fear of making payroll or let's try this new crazy thing. It may not work, but I'm going to put hundreds of hours into it. That was like the fuel that really allowed me to move forward and kind of pursue you know these kind of crazy desires i have um when i had the ability to get out of those businesses and start a community business um i'll give the disclaimer it is not for the faint of heart because it's so much less linear just like a live event would be with things that get thrown at you people are have different needs they're in different stages and they change along the way and there's a lot of stuff out of your control.

10:46But at the end of the day, you're really just selling trust. And I think that's why a community business is different than, say, an industry conference or a mastermind where it's very specific. Community businesses, we're basically putting the trust that if you're part of this, you are supporting one another. When I'm meeting with this other person, it's not because I want to sell them something or get something from them directly, but getting space in their mind and in their emotions is invaluable because they're supporting me. I'm supporting them and not only supporting, but challenging each other and kind of holding you to it.

11:21You know, I was just at an event with some people last week and we all discussed kind of the stuff we're working on. I have such a deep relationship with them. I don't want to show up to the next time I see them and not have done the things I said I'm going to do. So I feel supported, but almost even more, I feel challenged to like have respect in their eyes. And I think when you join a community or you become a part of a community, that is really what you're doing. You're putting trust, faith, challenge, and support kind of together around each other. Fire Nation, I think there's a lot of lessons to learn here when it comes to building community for what it is that you are doing.

11:56And before we take a quick break, Hollis, what is just one key thing that you've learned over the years about building a community? You know, maybe one of the lesser known things or kind of one of the more far out things that you think is relevant for our listeners today. Yeah, I actually heard this quote from Adam Grant, which was, it's less about being right and more about getting it right. So if you are organizing a community or you're running a community, you're going to have theories you're going to test. What if we try this? What if we try that? They're not there to be taught by you. You're not the guru that's signing up for your step-by-step course.

12:32They want you to build with them. And so the ability to be agile and learn along the way. Great example is some of the things that you might have tried at the beginning. The people are going to evolve. Their lives are going to change. I've seen it when people have kids or they go through divorces or, you know, have new lifestyles. Some of the stuff you have tried that may have worked really well a few years ago as you're growing it, it may get a little off track and you need to adjust. And And it's not about you. They're not signing up for you and, you know, to learn your steps. They want you to try to get it right of how do we build, like what I talked about before, the support and the challenge and the trust.

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16:17I want to talk right now about the battle of happiness versus success. Because I'm assuming, because I know I went through a few of these, that you had a couple forks in the road that you had to make decisions on when it came to do I go down this path, which seems like I'll be happier, or do I go down this path where it seems like I'll be more successful, maybe financially or whatever that might mean at the time. But I don't know if I can have both right now. Talk just about that in general. What's the battle of happiness versus success? Great topic, and one that I feel like I've had the privilege of not only my journey through it, but by stewarding this community for the last decade, it's what's actually at the meat of every conversation.

17:03People's logical brains joins these communities because, oh, I'm going to learn this thing that's going to help me or I'm going to meet this person that's going to help me. The emotional reason is why they stay, where they start to explore these more deep conversations and what I've realized at the end of the day, everyone's trying to figure out what that actually means to them and no one actually knows. Like we have these success metrics of, you know, you can measure through a financial exit of a business or whatever. But the happiness thing, it's complex. And I've really, really enjoyed watching some of the people I feel like who've navigated it kind of like a Bruce Lee version.

17:39They're like water. And they realize it changes over time. When we talked back quite some time ago, happiness to me was very different than what it is now where I have two kids and a house and this business with employees and tons of customers. It means something to have those responsibilities when you have less of them. Happiness has a different gauge. The through line I have found across our group, myself, and many people, it really comes down to freedom. and sometimes you're in a pendulum swing of is it freedom to or freedom from and i think using that filter with other people and chat with them of how they are they having freedom from having to do something or freedom to do something and it depends on like the level of responsibility and how much time you have available and this is where seeing people who have navigated the steps that you're coming into when it comes to life.

18:39I know we're both newer into the whole parenthood world. I spent probably three years with everyone who was in our group who I knew had just gone through the stage I was going through just trying to gather lessons of how this new stressor also created happiness, how they dealt with those changes. And so the biggest thing is the happiness thing has to be agile as you go through it. And the one thing that's been super clear, money is not the main driver. When people get so focused on it, they usually screw up their time piece and they don't acknowledge that. Like money can buy some time with delegation and how you fly, travel, things like that.

19:26But if you get so focused in on that, you lose track of it. And I think I watch myself, I watch people in the group fall victim of that. and you really got to acknowledge the stages of life you're in. We can sprint and take breaks. I think that's one of the greatest privileges of being an entrepreneur versus, you know, a corporate employee who's just going to run a slow and steady race. You know, really enjoying timing up your sprints where you're working really hard at the business and having some breaks when you can be with friends, when you can be with family and looking at that, knowing your version of happiness is probably very different than the ones you're looking at from other people.

20:01So So taking the time to really analyze that is super key. And it's such a buzzy word that you really do need to be specific and figure it out for yourself. That was one of the biggest things that shocked me when I launched Entrepreneurs on Fire 12 years ago because I was kind of naive in the entrepreneurial and business world. And I just assumed that the goal of everybody was to start a business and then was to sell the business and be filthy rich. And then life was perfect. And I remember one of the questions I asked for the first eight years of the podcast, aka 2 ,000 episodes, was, what is your worst entrepreneurial moment?

20:39And so many of my guests said the day they sold their business. And that was just so counterintuitive to everything that I thought was entrepreneurship success and business success that it really blew me away and really sent me down a rabbit hole of doing some deep thinking. And luckily, and this is one of the benefits of doing a show like this and listening to a show like this, Fire Nation, is I learned from them. I learned from their mistakes. And I learned from their miscalculations and realizing that, man, maybe that shouldn't be the end goal. I mean, for some people, it is. Like you said, there's a percentage of people that was the best day of their life.

21:16But for such a big percentage of people, it wasn't. And I had to find out why. And it's really helped guide me in my kind of path and pursuit of happiness versus success. The exit thing, we've seen that a bunch. And it actually goes back to the very first question you had asked about where I kind of talked about being valuable. That is the core emotion that we've seen when people who had an exit and they kind of lost sense of self, right? you were so valuable to you had employees who needed you to answer questions you had customers you delivered value to you had all that and then like one day you just exchange that for a check and you have to like recreate your whole identity um i've watched a handful of people in the group go through that like crisis of identity it's a little bit of a loss of your feeling of value yeah luckily that happened to me at a young age at 26 it wasn't you know selling a business but it was getting out of the military and i was 26 years old and for the first time in my life i I remember waking up and saying, okay, my whole life, it was like zero to 18, you know, doing the rat race of school, high school, and then college, of course.

22:20And then after college, I was in the Army for four years, like deployed to Iraq, and like everything was intense. And I knew that I wanted to leave the Army, that I was going to be very excited, and I thought it was going to be the best day of my life. And I remember like after a couple weeks, after I was finally out of the military, I would wake up and I would just have this weird feeling. when I did a deeper dive on it. I was like, man, I've lost my relevancy in this world. You use the word value, which is so true, but I feel like I just wasn't relevant anymore. Of course, my parents still loved me, et cetera, et cetera, but nobody really cared.

22:55I remember walking around Walmart. It was the weirdest feeling. I was just like, I woke up this morning and nobody cares if I'm here or not. I'm not reporting. Nobody's wondering where I am. Nobody cares where I am. It was just really this weird feeling that's kind of buried deep in our innate human core that a lot of us don't know exists because we just go from one rat race to the next with this vision of once I retire 65, like that's when I can start living. And that's the saddest thing that most people realize is they turn 65, 70, and now they're frankly pretty old, probably not super healthy.

23:31And And now they're also not relevant in this world. They've lost their meaning and then they die. They say the reason why retirement's the number one killer for that reason. So I want to end strong, Hollis. I want to give you the mic and just let you kind of maybe give us a final point, a final takeaway of this whole concept that we've been talking about today. Happiness versus success, hosting events, building real community. Pick your poison and bring us home. You know, it's funny. just organically having this conversation with you. Now I see the through line is like how you spend your time.

24:09Like the business model that I'm using to run this, I would not go teach seminars on how to get rich doing it. Like I said, there's lots of variables. It's got a lot of things. COVID came and we lost everything for a few years. There's so many variables there. I would encourage it that way. But your relevance and your value, being someone who can provide value to a group and feeling that is amazing so like i think when you're looking at the time you have to live and what you want to do some people want to follow that model where it's like buy a boring business like a car wash or a laundromat cash in and then spend their time with their family and that's one approach to it where you're i'm doing this way to create my freedom i'm doing it or you know waking up and putting the energy into something you really care about.

24:59I love that. Actually, I think the biggest benefit I get is not having a business that produces enough income for us to have a house and a nice family and all that stuff. It's like the relationships, the learnings, like I'm almost building my own version of my own continued education community. It's like, I already know who I'm going to be around when I'm older because we're growing together. There's been, including myself, I think four people who found their husband or wife, which is definitely not the angle we're going for with this. We even try to make it important that people aren't here to sell or hook up or do the things that happened in a lot of live environments.

25:39It's truly about helping each other. But those long-term real relationships, I couldn't even put a dollar amount on it. So the risks and the stress that come with it are far outvalued because I really do enjoy what we do. I love live music music i waste a bunch of our money on booking amazing musicians to come i get into certain i got into like regenerative farming and so i was able to get ranchers to come to this event and join this community and be a part of it there's like ways that to your point earlier of it's not always about exiting it might be about building something that produces value from you income can be one of them but there's so many more things that can come from it like some of my most peak experiences have been at our own events, which is technically my job.

26:30And, you know, actually enjoying those people and having it is really fun. And the pattern I've noticed is if I was to go back to when we first chatted, it was a bunch of people just trying to figure out how to make more sales and be on their laptop in cool places. That's like a very, very small percentage of the people now in the community because we've grown, you know, along the way. And there's still nomadic people doing that and enjoying that freedom of digital world. But they've gotten really into being the best versions of themselves and how they take care of their health and their families and their life.

27:03But it's still the quirkiest, most fun group of people that have had the pleasure of getting to call that work. And, yeah, you know, I think if anyone's listening and trying to figure out what to do with their time, money is just one indicator of how to do it. I think you got to take care of those Maslow's hierarchy of needs in order to have the privilege to have those conversations. But once you get there, it does take continuous effort every day, and it's good to enjoy the thing that you're doing. Hollis, if Fire Nation wants to connect with you, wants to learn more about what you have going on, what is your call to action for our listeners today?