Transforming M&A: Lessons in Culture, Growth, and Purpose with Ron 'Omani' Carson

25:38So we did a lot of minority deals. And then over the years, the M &A has only ramped up for us really just in the last few years. Now they're getting up there in age and they need a full buyout. And we own a minority interest. Now we've, for those that want to completely sell, we've bought 100 % of the business. We've got the bandwidth, the people, the technology to actually continue to drive strong organic growth. While at the same time developing through our coaching program and our business consulting group, G2. And there's going to be a massive shortage of capacity in the advice space. We've been very aggressive on generating, growing the next generation of advisor, giving them career tracks and able to be able to place them in our offices.

26:26I want to come back to how you're evolved M &A because I think your personal story sort of changes a bit of it. Going back to some of your revelations that you had, you mentioned around 50 years old. I want to hear a little bit more about that because one of the things your team members highlighted was how the company culture has evolved. They said, hey, money's evolved. The name change is part of the story. A lot of personal revelations. And that turnaround impacted the company culture where they said, hey, we used to be super buttoned up suit and tie every day in this company. Now I look around and it feels like a tech startup in Silicon Valley over here.

27:05I want to talk a little bit more about your personal journey and the leadership because you set up a lot of stage, a lot of the biggest success stories. You know, you kind of hear the Michael Dells and things like that, what they sort of did. And you got a lot of common elements there. But I'd love to hear about sort of what the inflection look like when you mentioned around 50 years old. By the way, there's a common... So I'm an investor with a group out of Boston. And it's with a guy the name of Mark Cassidy, who used to be the CEO of LPL Financial, which I was for a long time. And I knew Mark when he was back with Scudder and then he went to LPL.

27:38So Mark and I've been friends for a long time. And I've invested in his fund, which has done really well. He was sharing with me the other day, because I was talking to him about Omia, this new business I started, and that I deal with a lot of people like myself. So I was operating under this fear and scarcity model. Today, it's love and abundance. How did I get there? And I said, you know, Mark, I really embrace the ingredients of my past because it's what allowed me to be successful and to even have this option of being able to do some of the things that I want to do. I had a lot of childhood trauma.

28:16He says, we have been looking at what are the most common traits. And this will be really interesting for the M &A crowd. He said, there are four common traits that leaders have that make their businesses really successful because of the drive they bring to it. And the number one trait is they had childhood trauma. If you think about that, it drives people to prove something, to just push. They're willing to push, especially if you went through a really uncomfortable period in your life. Any kind of challenges you come up in a business seem like nothing compared to what you lived through. Yeah.

28:55I can relate personally. Yes. Because people have asked me, when I grew up, I went through some dramatic experience. And that's why I'm a bit risk forward. Because I've already had to deal with a lot. It's like, that's nothing compared to... Yeah, like a little fearless. Like, what are you going to do? Die? What's the big deal? Come on. It allowed me to really examine my life. I met a gentleman. I call him my cosmic father. Today, he works with me in this new business. Go to him. His name's Karosh. and he was a talk, and I had lots of therapy and therapists. My mom was manic depressive. She was either manic or she was in mental hospitals and couldn't even function because she was being bad.

29:35I mean, it was, she was worried that my sister and I were going to have the same kind of thing. And she always had us tested or had us talking to people. Talk therapy never really helped me much. Jenny and I were working with a therapist that was trying to help both of us through our stuff that we were going through. And I finally told her, her name was Dr. War. She has a head of nationally syndicated radio show and Jeannie still works with her to this day. And I said, you're just not helping me. And she goes, yeah, I don't think I am. She goes, I think I know somebody that could. And I was so done.

30:05I'm like, okay, give me the name. Maybe I'll work with him. Maybe I won't. And she gives me the name. And I don't know, there's just something in me. She was so sure that he could help me. I reached out to him. And after a conversation, I'm like, there's something with this guy. I'm going to give him a try. And so he agreed to work with me, but I had to fly out to Venice, California and spend a week. And he asked me to completely unplug, just work with him, read books, take walks, get massages, but just totally unplug. And then I met with him every single day. We did talk therapy and he shifted my life.

30:39I remember leaving. I was getting ready to fly back to Omano-Rascow on a Friday and getting ready to leave his office. I gave him the biggest hug. I'm like, man, I love you. because no one's been able to give me the kind of tools and think about my life the way that you've gotten through to me. And that was really the start of just being able to have a life that I just love. And Burt White, our CEO here at Carson, and I've known Burt for a long time, probably about 15 years because we worked together at LPL. He tells people all the time, I've never met anybody that protects their happiness more than Omani.

31:15And that's true because I felt like the balance of unhappiness was so present in my life for so long. Now it's just about joy. I was jolted to joy through this process that Khrush put me through. I've probably referred Kassan over the years, a couple hundred people to him, like me. Right, right. And I've not had a single one, if not said, I never knew there was someone like that that could really dig deep, get to the issue. And even today with Kuroche, he'll check in with me and my whole family actually works with them. I'm thinking, man, I am so good Kuroche. Let's just talk about fun stuff. And then he'll pick up on something I said.

31:59And it's like, okay, that was really amazing. He's able to uncover stuff, elevate stuff, and help you process and think about stuff in a way that I never thought about in my life in the past. And here's the beautiful thing. As successful as I was in that fear and scarcity and sprinting, once I started to look at life differently, my relationship with my, we call them internal stakeholders. I have employees or staff here at Carson. My internal stakeholders, there was a shift there too. It wasn't this just driving, driving, driving for results. It was a relationship. They started to become part of my family.

32:38And it became a part of our extended family. And my relationships outside of the office and partners, I didn't know it at the time that there was a term for this. But I started to run what I would call a conscious capitalist business. And we even called it conscious capitalism. and someone said, oh, you must be part of the conscious capitalism group. I didn't even know there was a group. John McKay out of Austin, he started Whole Foods Markets and then him and Raj Sosoda started this conscious capitalism, which today I'm a part of. Capitalism has done more to raise the standard of humanity worldwide than anything.

33:17If you just look at the history of capitalism, it's really powerful. Milton Friedman wrote a paper about capitalism in the 70s. It was published in the Wall Street Journal. And he said, the sole focus of capitalism is to maximize profits. And a lot of people jumped on that bandwagon and me being one of them. And it's not true. Conscious capitalism looks at profit is important, but investing in your stakeholders, investing in your partnerships, investing in your community, investing in the planet, the way that you just show up in this balanced way allowed me to invite in abundance back to a Kudorosh.

33:55I looked at the world completely different. And not only was I having a ball, I felt like a nine-year-old on Christmas Eve every day because that was my favorite day of the year. My business accelerated at a pace I never thought possible. I started it, but instead of attracting stakeholders and partners that were operating, because when you're operating at fear and scarcity, you attract them and no one trusts anybody and everybody's pushing everybody for the best deal they can get. Now I'm attracting a totally different kind of energy. I'm attracting stakeholders and partners that are operating under this abundance model.

34:29And it has been an accelerator for all of us. Our philosophy at Carson and the Carson Family Office, which is a whole other topic. We have a lot of resources and we're investing our money in conscious leaders that have world-changing ideas. These are people that are operating under this love and abundance model. And then people are seeing me going, I knew you then, and now I know you now. And I want some of this now. Can you help me? And hence, this Omya was born to where we help people have this activated life plan where we can architect it with coaching and advice and integrate it with a really powerful network and these amazing experiences.

35:12And it allows us to do things that that I never thought possible in my life. But it really came from this shift that happened when I was 50 years old. You had a whole life philosophy shifted. It did. 180 degrees. When you went back to running the business, how did it impact the business? The business accelerated. A lot of the deals that we're doing today, people that are coming to us today would not have been part of Carson before. What did that change look like? It's the way that your team mentioned it. It's like, whoa, I feel like a 180 flip. But how did that transition? Was it sort of, you know, did you address it openly?

35:47Was it more incremental? Yeah, I talk about it a lot. And something that might be a little controversial, I actually brought Karosh here. We have a big emphasis on within Carson Family Office and me then around mental wellness. I mean, it hit a home. It was a big part of my life with my childhood, with my mother and my father and my grandmother. It was everywhere. and the other piece of the story to Kassan was I did psychedelic therapy at the end of that week with Karosh he didn't even mention it I had done a ton of reading and I said what about psychedelics and the psychedelic therapy and he says it would really help you and I'm like where was that all week why am I bringing this up as literally as I'm walking out of your office he says it'll call you when it's ready for you and the fact that you're asking about it tells me that you're ready And I won't go too deep into this, but I was terrified because the only thing I'd ever done in my life was maybe smoked a little bit of weed in college and drank a lot, which to me, that wasn't a drug.

36:48That was okay because it was legal. I went to Topanga Canyon with a doctor, an MD that was doing this work underground at the time. Keep in mind, this is 10 years ago. And my parents were atheists. I had no spirituality. And I did my first experience. My spirituality was born. There's something out there. And it just was so exciting for me. And that really fed my abundance. I become very, believe in God. I believe that this isn't the end. That gave me an energy that I never expected. Openly, I shared this with my team, with Karosh, was actually there. And our Carson Family Office, we invest heavily in these companies that we have MDMA therapy that we think, especially with RFK coming in and they will be over the FDA.

37:43It didn't get approved. We went through three trials. We had amazing results. But there's such a conflict of interest in big pharma not wanting these things because they're not patentable. There's not a lot of money to be made. But it's super exciting what's going on. Matter of fact, a year ago in January, Stanford did a piece. My mom died of Alzheimer's. so this is also really important to me, that there's another psychedelic called iboga, which is an African root you can consume. There's 30-some alkaloids in it, and then the key alkaloids are also called ibogaine. They extract them from the iboga plant.

38:19And Stanford did a study with this, and it showed literally it was the only thing they've ever seen that grew brain matter. And they believe it is the key to curing Alzheimer's, which would be huge for our society. And so there's a lot coming. We work with vets. We're doing a trial right now with the VA that we're funding. Carson Family Office is funding here in Omaha. And even in the study that we did with the FDA, we got extraordinary results. And so you're going to hear a lot more about this because it's going to help a lot of people. But back to my team, I openly shared that because I think there's a lot of misinformation out there about what's okay and what's not.

39:01We know alcohol is really toxic for the brain, toxic for the body. There's nothing good that comes from it. Yet that's socially acceptable when a lot of these other, we call them sacred ancient medicines that have been used by the indigenous people for hundreds and thousands of years. We have a relationship with the Sacropie tribe in Ecuador. Sacropie tribe, we built a healing center down there so we can legally take people down there and have these incredible experiences. is when I was down there about a year ago, the last two people to die in their tribe were 114 and 117. Wow. Never had access.

39:39Never had any treatment of Western medicine. Everything is from the jungle. So I was down there and we needed something and they're hunter-gatherers, truly. They don't have zero material possessions, but they've been doing yae, which is a plant for a thousand years. And their kids do it. And mothers actually take it when they're pregnant. Can you only imagine if we were doing something like that in the U.S.? It's just part of it. It's how they live. They get up at 4 o 'clock in the morning and drink this plant that gives them... It's like having all kinds of energy from coffee, but it's also very medicinal for the body.

40:16There's just so much that we can learn from these beautiful compounds that are all over the world. This is different from ayahuasca. Ayahuasca is one of them. I think it's South America. Yeah. There's ayahuasca. There's aboga. There's huachuma. I could go on and on. The sacred peyote is another one. So this kind of opened up on top of the journey you went with the therapist. This is another layer that kind of opened things up for you. Yes. Kind of gives you a whole different view. You're already open about it with the team. So when they see some changes in you, they sort of understood because you're pretty transparent about it.

40:50how did that impact to the team come in place where all of a sudden they're like, kind of know like this is a different, the company culture is changing. Like all of a sudden the way the company's operating is changing. Like how did that sort of spread out? Well, I tell you what it did is people love working here more than they ever had. And it allowed us to attract people we could never attract before. We had a reputation in the industry as like, you can go to Carson, but expect to work like a slave because that's how hard I push people. And then the word got out that this is like the best place on the planet to work.

41:26Not only do we have freedom, we operate under the belief that, you know, if we have to tell you how to do your job, we have the wrong person. We want to give you flexibility to really be creative and be responsible for yourself. And I think people just crave that. The other thing that they noticed is Jeannie and I started investing heavily in impact. They love being a part of that. We started Dreamweaver 14 years ago, and we do end-of-life worships for the terminally elderly. We have 20-some schools that we have funded, and we'll serve our four millionth meal in Kenya, Africa, to the schools that the company supports, and Jeannie and I individually support, Charity Water.

42:08But they got behind all of these causes because it's how we felt. It's where our heart was that we wanted to give back to the community, thinking of the conscious capitalist model and to attract the best people you can find. They have so many choices today. There's so many places they can go. They're not just going to be somewhere because they get a paycheck. They want to be part of something much bigger than themselves. And that's truly what we're creating here. Just within OMEA, which OMEA exists because of Carson, because of the relationship with the people that we have. A lot of people joining OMIA are becoming Carson clients.

42:44So it's also feeding that. But my goal within OMIA in the next 20 years is to create a trillion dollars of impact. And when you think about the fact that there's 80-some trillion that's going to transfer from one generation to the next, it's 100 % doable. It'll exceed the goal. And we already have... I could send you a press release on something. We're hosting the World Cup of Healing at the Omiya Ranch in the summer of 26. Well, the top soccer players from all over the world there. And we're going to add a trillion years to humanity through having midwives or mothers. It's a program called FC Mother.

43:21We got the Vatican. We got Mayo Clinic. We got FIFA all behind this. Another program is through a guy by the name of Zach Bush. That you talk about impact. We want farming. We're journeyed to farming. is a big deal for us. And he just shared with me last week that he met with the royal family and they're going to fund a billion acres in Africa to regenerate the soil and the farming. And you think about this is also a big piece why impact is so important and stakeholders want to come to a company that supports it. We have ruined 97 % of our top soil. It took four and a half billion years to create the topsoil.

44:0097 % of it, we have raped the soil. We've taken the nutrients out. We have eroded the topsoil. Nebraska, Iowa, Indiana, Illinois, and the Ukraine have this 3 % that's left. And we're in big trouble if we don't take care of it. So again, we're some of the largest farmers in Nebraska today, and we're leading the charge on regenerating the soil, creating better food. These are reasons why people want to be a part of something. And Jeannie and I vowed a long time ago, all of our profits from Carson Group, and I think this also resonates with clients. It's what's your why beyond just making money is all of our money is going, our kids are getting a little bit.

44:43We took a Warren Buffett quote years ago. We're going to give our kids enough they can do anything, but not so much they can do nothing. All the rest of it's going towards these causes, which our kids will obviously be involved in, but we're attracting an energy and people because of the impact that we want to direct. So you're supporting these impacts. You mentioned Charity Water, mentioned Omya, and then Dreamweaver is another initiative that you have as well. Yes. You sort of touched on, you got a lot of initiatives going on. Yeah, we do. Omya is different. The impact will be driven out of the entrepreneurs and the people with resources that we're attracting that are wanting to go through this healing process.

45:22They want to explore themselves through their spirit. And then through the mind, they want to get clear with what and how they want to show up in the world. And then there's the vitality of it. When we work on their physical and medical longevity, because we have doctors, therapists, coaches, and we do have M &A people in this. And then play is big. You know how many people don't have a plan for joy, a plan for really cool experiences? we've developed literally an activated network and an activated plan, which then leads into legacy. It's like, let's help people live their legacy now. Estate planning doesn't go far enough.

46:04So I have created Aaron Shaben, who's the CEO of the family office. We developed, co-developed, and implemented what we call the family constitution to where we are going to direct and have impact over many generations in the future. and even from my grandkids, they'll have very specific rites of passage starting when they're 10 and 12, 14, 16, 18. And a way of passing forward this really cool impact that we want to have and the energy that we want to have. And we're going to create this in many families. And that's where we're going to drive towards a trillion dollar impact goal. Awesome. I got a couple more areas I want to touch on.

46:43Both M &A and then personal here. Are you privately held? Privately held. Jeannie and I, we own about 53 % of Carson and the rest is held by. Bain has a minority hold and then our stakeholders have the rest of it. All this cultural thing, really exciting, like big transformation culturally. Yeah. When you look at coming back to M &A, how does that impact M &A in general? Do you think it kind of weeds people out? Like only people like sort of like are, you know, hey, I'm interested in this culture. They like it. Or does it deter some things? Like how did it impact M &A? The perceived culture used to hurt us.

47:20Today, it's the biggest selling point that we have. When we try to sell culture, Bert will tell you this. He said when he was at LPL, he heard about the incredible culture that we had. And he's like, yeah, everybody says that. And we have a really good culture at LPL. And then he comes here and he goes, oh my God, I've never experienced anything like this. It's really something. If you were to come to, we call it Partner Summit and all of our partners come in, our CEO Summit, you would see people that are going out of their way. I love a Bill Belichick quote. He said, the reason I was successful because I put people on the team that were willing to give it their all even when it wasn't convenient for them to do so.

47:59And that's the kind of partners and internal stakeholders we have. And it's a culture that is unique because people are friends. Most of our community views each other as their extended family. And because of that, that they're willing and able to do things that most other companies won't for each other. How does it impact on the culture of the companies you acquire? Does that change? Yeah, that's the number one thing we look at when we're doing a deal. If there's not a cultural fit... You have a pretty dramatically different culture than the whole industry. Yes. So you might say, hey, I can see them blending in and evolving to our culture.

48:39Or you might look at it and say, this is not going to change. They're way too stuffy or something. look at where a lot of our deals have come from, they've come from our coaching group. These people have known us for a long time and they've also evolved with the culture. Yeah. Here's a great quote from one of our partners. He's gone full circle. He was our first partner. His name was Scott Ford out of Maryland, Hagerstown, Maryland. And someone asked him, why did you go with Carson? He goes, I didn't know who else I could do 12 years worth of due diligence on because he had been with us for 12 years.

49:12And if you think about it today, we're the largest coaching group in financial services, but we've had thousands in our program that have come in and out over the years. A lot of people have gotten to know us. We just did a deal with Brian Sweet. It's a billion dollar deal. We closed on it. And I was listening to his podcast this morning and he was being interviewed on why did the deal with Carson and culture is a big piece of that. Brian knew who we were. Brian was part of our coaching group for, I don't know how many years, maybe 12, 15 years. Okay. So personal question. I'm in my 40s and I'm always thinking even part of the business, like it's the opportunity to sell part of the company, all the company.

49:53There's this view of the financial view of like, okay, how do you sort of preserve? And you know, the outcome is going to be good. You know, you're going to have more money than you know what to do. And then you're like, okay, then what? And there's part of me that's very, I guess my philanthropy interest is like with the kids. Like you lead a leadership development with children. It's always been mine, just raising three kids. I'm sure you had perspective on that. I'm just curious on your view of already going through it because I haven't gotten to my 50s yet, into the 60s. And we'll keep your age off record.

50:20I'm proud of my age, yeah. But how do you see it? How do you see your personal view, just looking at me and just giving me advice of how to sort of think about that as I sort of get through the years? I'm obviously going to continue the entrepreneurial jury. But I feel like this is the commercial life. Yeah. But after the commercial life, what you've sort of reached, and I think that's why you stepped out of the CEO role, is to focus a little more on more of the other non-commercial aspects of life. And I want to get a sense from your view of just trying to talk to me a little directly of what's ahead.

50:49There's a few things I would share with you. One, I'll never forget. I had an opportunity to go to Necker Island and spend some time with Richard Branson. And Richard made this comment. He said, I don't think as work as work and play as play. All of it is living. And if I had to give advice to people, like immediately structure your life to where you don't know the difference and no one out on the outside looking in knows the difference. If it's not a heck yes, it's a heck no. I actually use a different phrase, but we'll keep it PG for this. Because I think people, they sacrifice. We have to make some sacrifices in life, but do it very intentionally and very purposely.

51:27It's like, okay, I'm only going to get out and do something I don't really want to do, but I've been very, very thoughtful about it. Number one, just love what you do. There's no difference. It's just all life. There's no difference between work and play because they feel the same. The other piece is hire the best people you can find and get out of their way. It's easy to say. It's easy to hear. And it's easy to agree with. It's really hard to do. It's true. And Bert, I felt like I was doing a good job when Bert came in. He brought a whole other level of capability here. And it's like, wow, there's no substitute for that.

52:07You know, one of my dear friends, by the time this runs, I don't even know if he'll be alive. He was a former business partner and he's about my age. And he just found out 10 days ago that he's got 30 days to live. Another piece of advice is live every day like it's your last. And one day you most certainly will be right. Our time on this planet is a flicker. Let's have a lot of fun. Let's not waste time being negative and not being the best version of ourselves that we can be. I love that. I appreciate that. Hey, so you posted the other day about doing a seven-day water fast. Yeah. I can ask you because I love trying these different diets.

52:45Yeah. It's kind of like a mental challenge and it's just good. So I've tried everything, like all the keto, paleo, vegan, everything. Raw vegan even, which is pretty... I've done a couple of day fasts. Yes. How is a seven-day fast? It's fantastic. I was just literally last night, I was in LA, and I had this conversation with these people about, like, oh, I can never do that long a water fast. I said, you can. It's a middle thing. Here's the data. One seven-day water fast will reduce your chance of cancer by two-thirds, like 67%. I saw that fact, but yeah. And I believe it's true. Let me give you some anecdotal evidence here.

53:22Another good friend of mine had a buddy who was given six months to live and he had brain cancer. And he went with him to Seattle to support him. And he went through a medically supervised 30-day fast because he had nothing to lose. He went into remission and is still alive years later. The medical community calls these spontaneous remissions and there's really no reason and they're just really random. But that's not true. that we know when you get into this deep stage of autophagy, where you start to eat the flawed cells in your body, which is where some of these cellular diseases actually come from.

54:03The medical piece of it is there's a lot of great data out there. The practical piece, and if anybody's interested, they can reach out to me on WhatsApp or send me an email and I'll add you to our group. But we did it as a group. So I invited our community, about 35 people signed up. We had a check-in every day on Zoom for 20 minutes, just say, how are you doing? I had my medical director from Omia actually on it. He supplied all kinds of information for people. We had about half the people make it all the way through the seven days. And the first day is the hardest. It really is. The second day also sucks.

54:41But the third day, you're starting to feel like you've got some momentum here. Yeah, you're hungry. But after you get beyond three days, your appetite disappears, your energy skyrockets, you need two or three hours of sleep a night and you don't ever feel like, oh, I'm lagging. and then when you get into day five, six, and seven, your body, your whole body feels amazing. I would have gone for 10 days, but I had lens replacement surgery in my eyes on Christmas Eve and I thought I shouldn't probably be doing this fast. I called my doctor. He goes, no, I don't want you fasting into the surgery. I don't think it'd do anything, but I don't know.

55:22I never had anybody be on. I would have been on like day nine for the surgery. That's so interesting. And it really reset my system, my body. You'll lose some weight, but you'll add that weight back on because you don't want to lose lean body mass. By the way, the leading indicator of future health is your lean body mass. So you got to take care of your lean body mass, but you're going to have very little. There's some things that you can drink and take that keep you in a ketosis that will retain your lean body mass without you deteriorating that through this process. Cool. Well, look forward to learning more.

55:55Hey, before we wrap, Omani, I got to ask, what's the craziest thing you've seen in an M &A? The craziest thing in M &A? Well, for me personally, it was just the first deal we did. Being set up, I didn't put anything in the agreement because I just trusted that this person had been in my coaching group for a long time. And I'm like, oh yeah, yeah, that's fine. We'll do that. And soon as literally the check cleared, everything we discussed and I thought was going to happen in good faith was out the window. So that to me was, it hurt because I'm such a relational kind of person and I felt like I had really been duped.

56:31That was a good story. Yeah, I like it. The first deal. That's the woozy. I'll look forward to, I mentioned, working on ours. So I'll be sure to reach out for some more do's and don'ts. All right. Amani, I appreciate the time. Thank you so much. You've helped me become a better M &A scientist. It's been fun. Hey, if you listen this far, fellow M &A scientist, I'd love to hear what you think about this interview. I thought it was a trip, to say the least. Please hit me up for feedback on LinkedIn. I'm reachable. I like to hear from folks, get feedback. Until next time, here's to the deal.

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