Succession planning for Founder-CEO’s - Evgeny Shadchnev

29:05But get some sense of what's happening inside you. But once you get some sense of clarity of what's happening inside me, it's the time to start talking to the board. And here, the earlier, the better. So if you leave it until the point of, I can't do it anymore, I'm quitting next week, and my co-founder is going to be the new CEO, it's probably very late. You really want to open it much earlier when you say, okay, I'm happy to run this company for another year or two, but I think there are reasons to consider hiring a new CEO. Or even, I have decided to step down, but I'm completely open regarding timing.

29:42Let's discuss how to orchestrate the transition in the best interest of the business. Okay, so you've decided? Yes. Then what? Take charge of the process. And by this, I mean, don't wait until the board makes the first step. if you are thinking about stepping down as a CEO, there is a certain chance that the board might also be thinking about replacing you as a CEO. And if you raised venture funding, they probably have the power to fire you. So in this situation, you will probably have more options and better options if you proactively start a conversation with the board about what's happening, why it's happening and how you want to orchestrate it.

30:27At some point when you've got some clarity on that you certainly want to step down, speak to the board one by one, individually it's probably best practice, then together at a board dinner or a board meeting, again to make sure that everyone had the chance to process the news and think what it means for them. And then together as a board, work on it as just another business challenge. Yeah, it's interesting. I suppose it's sort of similar to any negotiation, like leverages everything. And so whoever makes the first step and how you navigate that conversation, which is a difficult conversation, you know, being in control of the communication because you've thought about the next steps gives a huge opportunity to having the outcome that you're looking for versus basically accepting what someone else does.

31:25Exactly. So leverage matters. And this is why I suggest in most cases, wait until you've got clarity and then start the conversation. And the more clarity you've got around your performance, your feelings, your plans, the company needs, whether the company needs a founder skill set or the CEO skill set, how the board sees your performance, which is a whole different topic. The more clarity you've got about around all of this and how you see it working, the easier it will be to orchestrate the transition that's going to work well for you and the business. So how do you go and find someone that's right for this role?

32:05And what does that person really look like? So there is no answer that's going to fit every company because every startup is so different. Where your company is on the product market fit scale matters. If you've got a strong product market fit, it's generally easier to bring an external scale-up CEO into the business. If the company has a weak product market fit or is even at an earlier stage, it's probably going to be difficult to find an external candidate. So you're probably looking at your co-founders or early team members. so that's one consideration an executive search can be genuinely helpful but the real important bit is to find someone you can deeply trust and people who we really trust are people who we have known for years and so they're probably coming from either your network or inside the company or the investors network.

33:07So by the time it gets to an executive search, you probably have exhausted the supply of trusted people inside your business. But finding someone you can really trust your company to, someone you can't wait to give the keys to and look what they do with your business is genuinely important. So how have you seen this go wrong? It goes wrong in plenty of ways. First, sometimes founders leave it until too late and they just want to get out as quickly as possible at all costs and they hire the first candidate that looks okay. This would be a mistake. It's such an important transition. It will have a huge impact on the future of your company and on when and where you retire even if this moment is decades away.

33:59So it is absolutely worth planning it carefully and giving time. So one mistake is just hiring the first candidate that looks good. Another mistake is sitting on the fence too long. This was my mistake. I spent two years thinking, should I do it? Should I not do it? But I like the company, but I'm very stressed, but it's okay to be stressed. And it was just going on in my mind for too long. I really should have acted sooner for the benefit of the business. Another very common mistake is not clarifying your role after you step down. So you hire a new CEO and then you hang around as a founder without a clear role.

34:39So a good example here, in my book I quote James, founder of Sanctus, who hired a new CEO and then stepped down as a founder with an unclear job spec. And as he later told me, he felt like other people didn't know what he was doing. His work was not as important as people with real jobs. And it was just an uncomfortable place to be. And it's really important to get out of the way, which brings me to another possible, another common mistake, not getting out of the way. It's really important to get out of the way and not undermine the new chief executive. A really good example, a case study I describe in the book is a transition at Opus Recruitment Solution, a mid-sized recruitment business in the UK where the founder, Darren, hired his successor, Amy.

35:34And Darren and Amy made an agreement that the only time Darren would override Amy would be when he would justify her. And he never did. Seven years later, she took the business to an incredible exit. So it's a really, really positive story. But it was very important for Darren to get out of the way and give his successor complete freedom over the business, even though it was a bootstrapped business. And so Darren was pretty much the only or major shareholder. So there was no board of investors. And I suppose that's, you know, there's two sides to this always, right? There's the founder, the founder's ego, how the founder resolves a lot of this pressure and tension and what they want to do next and all that stuff.

36:23And obviously the psyche of the incoming person, there needs to be psychological safety that they can do the job properly. Otherwise, presumably it's just really not that attractive and they will do a bad job. Yeah. And there is a good example of a founder CEO who hired a new CEO, linda it's it's it's a buy the company beautiful business i thought you're gonna talk about twitter no no no no no definitely elon's out linda's in no you don't think it's going well nope different linda uh and linda left after a year and a half uh not because she was a bad ceo the business genuinely needed her skills and she made good progress and she's proud of what she's done but what happened is that the founder stepped down to join the senior management team but he effectively tried to continue running the company.

37:10And for a year and a half, Linda was technically in the CEO position and she was the CEO. And then there was the founder who was ex-CEO and the entire team who knew the founder as the ex-CEO. And he was still trying to have his way. And a year and a half later, Linda effectively said, you know, we need to find a different arrangement. And so she stepped down and the previous CEO stepped back into the role. My point is, it's okay to quit. But if you do quit, get out of the way. If you hang around undermining the new CEO, it will be a lose-lose situation. If you want to keep running your business, don't step down.

37:50If you step down, get out of the way. It's really that simple. But you've studied this space and interviewed loads of people. So what's What's the most common process that happens?

38:01I think most commonly people actually get out of the way, but they leave the company. They go and do something else, which is a bit of a loss because founders are genuinely helpful. They know the company, they build the company. The best solution in many cases is to find a way to stay involved, but genuinely crafting your role for yourself, not undermining the new chief executive. This way, the company can leverage your skills, experience, everything you learned about running this business, but with a new CEO having full freedom to run the business. But what happens in most cases is that founders leave and go and do something else.

38:51And when they do that, and having a conversation and they're trying to hire the new person and all of this stuff. So give us some examples of how to hire the right person. We've talked about how it can go wrong. How can we set people up to succeed? How can we ask the right questions? And that's beyond trust. So outside of your ideal network. Yep. So first, be clear on who you are hiring. do not hire like for like. The goal is not to hire a replacement for the founder CEO. The goal is to hire the right CEO for the next five, 10 years. And maybe it's a scale app CEO, maybe it's a CEO who is going to get the company to an exit.

39:31Maybe the job is to optimize for free cash flow if this is the goal. So it's important to stop and think, what does the business need going forward? Not what the CEO used to be doing up until now. And presumably you need a feedback process in that right so because you are going to be the one stepping away yeah so it's no good you being like well i've had a look and i've decided that this is what the company needs so that's who i'm going to hire and then i'm going to bugger off because the board and everyone else might be like absolutely what the no way is that what this company needs that's exactly what's going to happen if you don't get the board involved this is why it makes sense to get the board involved earlier and then instead of jumping into interviewing people straight away spend a lot of time thinking about what do we want to see happening, align the board around the vision for the company, make sure that all key decision makers are on the same page, discuss the mandate for the new CEO, what do we want from the new CEO, write it down on paper, job spec, and all of this, and figure out what the process for hiring the new CEO is going to be and who is going to run it.

40:39somewhat counterintuitively, it's actually surprising when companies hire non-CEOs, basically everyone else, there is an HR team and they have process and best practices and whatnot, and when it comes to hiring the CEO somehow all of this sometimes goes out of the window and one of the board members says oh I know someone I met last week, let me introduce you and you interview them, so basically the entire process all best practices go out of the window this is a mistake Think about what's important, write the job spec, design the process, figure out who is going to run it. It's probably a chair if you've got a chair or a lead investor, maybe even the outgoing CEO, but they are understandably biased.

41:21And then run the process. So in one example of one of my clients, he designed a beautiful process. and it's really important for him to get very diverse talent at the top of the pipeline, just to make sure that he doesn't hire yet another white man like him. And then he's got an investor who kept sending him WhatsApp messages along the lines of, hey, I met this guy yesterday at a networking event. Could you please interview him tomorrow? It's already in your calendar, which was highly frustrating for them both. It would have been much easier. Basically, what happened is that they sat down and had a conversation about, how are we going to run the process?

42:02How are we going to add candidates? How are we going to interview them? And aligning on the process itself and figuring out who is running it can take a lot of frustration out of the experience. What are the horror stories that you had? There were definitely few. One horror story is a founder who raised venture money, basically. So she raised Series A, then the company didn't make enough progress. And the investors panicked at the first sign of trouble and said that we will invest more money to effectively bail out the company, but only if you get out and we hire a new CEO. And the founder felt like she had no other choice, so she stepped down.

42:53than what she described as a slow motion car crash. Investors brought in a new CEO. He quit after half a year. Investors brought in another person, and he wound down the company another year later. There were no winners in this scenario. Investors, clients, the team, founders, everyone lost. And when I look at this horror story, I think again about the importance of trust. I'm not trying to say that the company would have been fine if the founder stayed as a CEO. Ultimately, we don't know. But there was a complete lack of trust at the top level, which absolutely didn't help. And another horror story, which I probably wouldn't mention if it weren't just too common is discrimination at the level of the CEO.

43:50In one specific case, investors did not include the founder CEO in the options round. She was the only person not included in the round of new options when they learned that she was pregnant. It's discrimination. It's immoral, illegal, and wrong on every level. And I wouldn't be mentioning it if it just wasn't still happening today in 2024.

44:15In that situation, the founder didn't want to step down. She wanted to keep running the business, but effectively she felt like she was being pushed out of the business by her investors who decided that apparently it's not okay to have children if you're running a business. And I know it's not right on every possible level. and unfortunately such horror stories also happen. So listening to a lot of what you've said, it sounds like, you know, fortunately the job of a CEO is often strategy. However, founder job is different to CEO job. So maybe founder is not the best at strategy. It feels like there's a lot of strategic pieces on the chessboard to move along here.

44:57You've got maybe an incoming funding round. You've got your intentions to step out externally and leave the company. and you either need to bring someone up from the company to take over your role or go for an external process and find a way to communicate all of this at the right time without creating a toxic environment. How the hell do you do all of that? So this is a really interesting question. So the timing of fundraise really, really matters because if you're running a venture startup, you're probably raising every 18 to 24 months. Stepping down as a CEO right before the round is difficult because you might not close the round.

45:30investors want to know who is going to lead the business. If you try to live right after the round, it's also difficult because the investors will ask, why didn't you tell me last month, which will be a bridge of integrity and a difficult conversation. So ideally, you want to live right in the middle of the round. When you raise the round, maybe made some progress, and there is still another 6, 9, 12 months of runway for the new CEO to step in. Now, the timing this transition is difficult because you don't know when you will find your successor. They've got their notice periods, search, who knows how long it's going to take.

46:07So one possible way to navigate all this is to do what Adam Fudakovsky, the founder of Switchy, did at his business. So when he started thinking about stepping down one day, he hired his future successor, Tom, as a head of strategy. The intention was twofold. First, to get to know each other and to get some experience of working together before actually promoting Tom as the CEO, and also control the timing. The board got to know them. Then he raised the round together with Tom, so the new investors got to know Tom. And then I think six or so months later, he said that he would step down and promote Tom to the top position.

46:54And by that time, he was in control of the timing. Tom was a known quantity and he knew the company. The investors, previous investors from the latest round also knew Tom, so there were no surprises. And the transition went very, very smoothly for all of them. So, you know, what I've just written down the note here is just tons of awareness around timing. Yeah. Timing is critical and very important. It's interesting because if you think about in life, so outside of work and stuff, you know, things happen and you get very emotional. And when emotional things happen and you have an emotional response to stuff, you're not necessarily thinking clearly in that moment.

47:41And this almost feels like the perfect example of the exact opposite, like leaving your company can not in any way really be an overly emotional experience because you need to keep it together long enough to turn up to work every single day for another nine, 12, 18 months from the moment you've made that decision with genuinely great intention. Yes. And that is like a very mature, very strategic, very calculated and very unemotional way to behave in general, which is difficult because leaving the company that you founded is a hugely emotional thing. This is difficult. And this is what you described is precisely why it would be a mistake to leave it until the last moment when you feel like you just can't do it anymore and you need to get out of it by the end of the week at all costs.

48:32so you really need to start acting while you've got while you can see yourself doing it for another year or two and yes it's not easy it is an emotional question which by the way I why I do recommend taking time away and basically clearing the space and mind space to really think through this decision. For me, I spend a lot of time going to Chamonix in France and Scotland, just be alone hiking or on my motorbike to slow down, not be distracted by email or slack, and just think about what's going on. Feel my feelings, reflect on the situation. Be fucking cold. Be a bit cold. It's a good distraction.

49:19Scotland and mountains, got it. Yeah, but it's really important given the magnitude of the decision. Taking a week offline when you are going to do nothing but reflect on what's going on can be a great investment. What are some helpful questions then that you can ask yourself in this period of reflection? What's going on really and how do I feel? And what am I afraid of? Exploring fears. And ideally exploring them with someone else. because fears are, well, scary, at least in my case. And exploring the fears with a trusted person who doesn't have the skin in the game in terms of whether you step down or stay can be tremendously helpful.

50:09Okay. So you've stepped aside and things have all gone well. Yeah. What next? First, take a break. Don't rush into it. If you can at all afford it, slow down, think, reflect. You're probably more tired than you realize. If you ran your company for years, it must have been very stressful. You need some rest. It's probably measured in months, if not years, the amount of time you really need. But then start thinking about what's next for you. There are a few traps to fall into here. The first one is founders often think that they can't do anything else. They think, and I've been doing this for the last decade, so they think that the only option is to go and start another business.

50:58Yeah, you feel unemployable. You feel unemployable. You've got all kinds of wrong ideas about what's possible out there. So it's very easy to conclude that I'm a founder, so of course I'm going to start another company. In fact, there are seven different career paths available to founders or seven common career paths that founders tend to take after they leave their businesses. And starting another business is only one of them. And then another potential trap is to fall into doing what's easier. Let's say you're not worried about your bills and you've got some money in the bank. and then it's very easy to just wake up in the morning, watch Netflix and have a pint at four o 'clock and feel like it feels a bit empty inside and my life is drifting in the wrong direction.

51:48This would be a mistake. If you're resting, plan it like work. Figure out what you want to do, how much screen time you want to have. Do you want to spend more time with your parents or nephews or doing that big trip or meditation retreat you always wanted to do? So plan your rest responsibly. But another trap that founders sometimes fall into is getting busy with what is familiar to them. Like joining panels and getting various volunteering positions and helping other startups and doing the same things that they've been doing for the last 10 years. Or maybe they never had time to do what they could do.

52:30Basically busy work. Basically busy work. And this would equally be a mistake. Plan your rest, plan your recovery, do different things, do new things, get immersed in new relationships, get to know yourself, and then slow down, reflect and think, okay, there are many different options available to me, which of them is going to be my next professional step? You mentioned the seven career paths that we can take. I didn't know that. What are they? Actor, dancer, ballet? Well, only for some of us. So the seven are joining your own senior management team. You step down as a CEO, you join as an SMT member.

53:14Starting a new startup, joining someone else's startup as a member of a senior team, or joining a corporate, which is quite a different story. Some people go freelance. That's my case. I went into founder coaching, effectively building a freelance career. Some people go into investment. And finally, it's fairly common for founders to go into an executive chairperson position. The transitions to the corporate world and to a senior role at someone else's startup are particularly not obvious. So I'm thinking of an example of Nick Eels, who sold his startup back. And then he wanted to get the job of a VP of product at some other company.

54:07But he never did anything other than running his own business. So he was competing with people with 10 years of product experience on the resume. And as he told me, he updated his LinkedIn to make it look like all his career was leading up to this moment. The way he described it was that he had to fake it until he made it. He was learning about the product and eventually after several crazy interviews, he got the job as a VP of product at one company and then the other one. And right now he's in his third VP of product role. And looking back, he said that this process helped Nick realize how valuable his CEO experience is.

54:50Because for a founder CEO that he's working for right now, he's the only person on the SMT who really sees the situation from a CEO lens. All other members of the senior team, they might be experts in sales or technology or someone else, but he's got a holistic founder view as a CEO. And this can be tremendously helpful if he becomes effectively a right-hand man to another chief executive. Right, because he has empathy and he can also connect things up to the higher purpose, the vision, etc. Yeah, exactly. That makes sense. One of the things that founders get wrong, hiring, and certainly hiring processes, especially onboarding processes.

55:38and the best companies have the best teams, right? The best hiring processes, et cetera. So extrapolating that all out, how much extra time do you need to put into place for the hiring process of a CEO and onboarding and like getting them up to speed, all of these things? I mean, it sounds exceptionally hard. So how do you design something amazing? So it's slightly different compared to all other employees. So the difference is that first, proper hiring and onboarding process matters. Often boards don't really pay attention to it because every board member is part-time on that board and their old CEO is gone.

56:18So there is no manager, so to speak, to really take care of the onboarding process. And this is generally a mistake. But what's also relevant is that much of the onboarding for the new CEO can and should happen before they take on the role. Usually onboarding happens after you show up at the office, get the new laptop and all the stickers and the onboarding begins. The new CEO should be able to hit the ground running on day one. On day one, they should have a good idea of what's going on, why it's happening. The old CEO should be out of the way. And so the transition of knowledge and all relevant systems and so on can and should be done while the old CEO is technically still the CEO.

57:02but they know that the new person is going to take over in a few months. So this is what we've done with Claudia, for example. At my business, we effectively co-ran the company for a few months before she took over. So by this, I mean that I was running the business, making day-to-day decisions, but I was also very aware that Claudia would be living with the consequences of my decisions. And so I would do my best to align with her on how both of us think about the future of the business and make sure that I don't do something that Claudia would need to revert in the first week that she's a CEO.

57:46And so in the process where we're aligning on decisions, handing over all the important systems changing, access passwords. And there are also some in this process, there are sometimes non-obvious points like, for example, I almost forgot that I've given personal guarantees to one of the lenders in the early days of the business. It happens. Lenders sometimes want personal guarantees at early stage companies. But the trouble is that when you step down as a CEO, if you retain this personal guarantee, then you're on the hook for someone else's actions. So you really want to negotiate a personal guarantee way before you step down because the new CEO will not be keen to take on your personal guarantees.

58:31And fortunately, in our case, it was possible, I effectively made an argument that the business is so much bigger and more stable and is in a good position. So it wasn't necessary. So we just canceled it. But I almost forgot about it. Yeah. Okay, it's probably quite a long checklist, I imagine, of things. Yeah, it's a long checklist. And given that CEO transitions in the company don't happen often, it's not like it's a reusable checklist. So you can't go to HR and say, hey, give me a checklist for a new marketing hire that we used two months ago. It needs to be prepared carefully. There are lots of things like bank mandates.

59:14And in our case, updating bank made it with our old boring high street bank with a blue logo took a long time. Have you created a checklist? Yeah. Can you share some of the things from the checklist we should watch out for? All the systems, like domain names, for example. Domain names happen to, I bought our domain name, I think, under my own name in the early days of the business. It's kind of obvious when I say it, but there are lots of small things like this. Who credit card is registered for, banking access, biometric systems, notifying financial services authority about the change of a key person, notifying some of our industry bodies because we're a regulated business, so we needed to notify others.

1:00:06If you are stepping down as director, you need to notify companies house. So again, all of this is obvious when you look at it, but there are dozens of things like this that you need to write down and then have a proper handover document that will probably take several pages. Right. And it might be like the one time you do it in your whole life and the whole company does it once. So actually what you're developing is a really useful cheat sheet for those single instances across the industry. Yeah. Nice. Just a question on communication. Yeah. How do you navigate the question of communication with your team?

1:00:42And how did your experience of how you did it compare to the people that you've interviewed in your book? So in general, it's a good idea not to let the team know until there is a clarity on what's going on and what it means for them. If you go to the team and say, I'm stepping down as a CEO, but I don't know when, I don't know who is taking over, and I don't know what it means for anyone, it will just create a bit of chaos for no good reason. So I told the team only when there was clarity that I'm stepping down, Claudia is taking over, it's happening on the 1st of September, and this is what's going to happen between today and the 1st of September, which is how I think most companies do it, and for good reason.

1:01:26At the same time, I also learned that senior members of the team will probably figure out what's going on much sooner because there will be some signs that something is changing. So one senior team member at my business later told me that he figured out that Claudia would take over as a CEO because she started to attend more meetings and ask more questions and generally got more involved. So it also happens. But what's also important here is to align communication at both companies. One company is obviously your company, but the other company is where the CEO is coming from. Because the chances are that they had a CEO job or another high-profile job elsewhere.

1:02:12And the change of a leader should be communicated by that leader and not by a post on Twitter. So the way to do it is to have two all-hand meetings back-to-back, probably online because it's easier and everyone is hybrid anyway right now. So in the first meeting in one company, the outgoing CEO announces they're stepping down, introduces the new CEO. Next meeting, the same thing happens. and afterwards both companies share it on social media, send emails to key partners, trusted suppliers, and basically notify everyone. So having a written communication plan for the day of the announcement is really important because it's easy to forget someone, like people who are on holiday or out of the office or who are about to join but haven't signed the contract yet.

1:03:07So it's important to think about every audience and manage it quite tightly, which is not difficult, but it still needs to be done carefully. I find there's a really strange dichotomy in general as CEO, where really one of your jobs is to control the flow of information and make sure that everything that is being communicated, that people have awareness of, is contributing to the best outcome for the company one way or another, aligning people, not causing chaos and confusion, like you said. And sometimes that can be really misaligned with someone's own personal desire to be transparent, authentic, friends, family, all the words that come up, you know, with how you feel with your colleagues and stuff.

1:03:54And ultimately, that can eat away at you. And I know it's a perfect example is when you know you have to let someone go. Yeah. And you know, you have to let that person go. And even worse, when it's for financial reasons, actually nothing to do with their job. You think they're great. You really like them. They've been loyal, all of the things. And you know this information for sometimes weeks before you have to have that conversation. You still have to turn up with them. You still have to interact with them every day. It's a horrendous feeling. It's a horrendous feeling. And you're talking about doing this for 18 months.

1:04:28Well, hopefully less, because part of those 18 months is the period where you already know when the new person is taking over, which is when you can announce it. But in my case, it was definitely a few months between I firmly committed to getting out of there and we started interviewing candidates and when we announced it to the team. Right, but that's still the longest. I mean, that's longer than any that you'd hold other information, right? So how does that feel? That doesn't feel particularly nice. It feels, yes, there is a natural instinct to be open with the team and to share everything. And at the same time, being a CEO is a lonely job for a reason.

1:05:17It's stressful for a reason. It can be more or less stressful, but this is one of the aspects that makes it particularly difficult. We just can't be, as CEOs, we can't be transparent about everything with everyone all the time. So it's part of the job. Okay. Fair. Sounds terrible though. All right. I want to do a nice closing question. So

1:05:49you've been around Europe asking people this question. What is the most surprising thing that you've learned about how to step down as a founder CEO? What is the thing that you might have learned that would have changed how you did it? The most surprising thing I learned is that it's far more common than it may seem. When I was going through it myself, it felt like everyone else is committed for life or until the exit and I'm the only one who is thinking about it. It's common. Nearly every founder or CEO either thinks about it or considers it at some point. and so when I started talking to other people I realized how much how much is there to discuss to share to uh to learn from and this conversation hardly ever uh happening uh in public and here uh there is an interesting parallel with you know 10 years ago it felt like the founder community did not talk about mental health everyone was pretending that I'm killing it everything is fine I just closed the funding round and hired a great candidate as my new chief revenue officer.

1:06:55And they are slaying. And they are killing it every single day. And I would feel like I'm the only one who's got no idea what I'm doing. And over time, this changed. Today, founders are so much more open in the meeting that sometimes it is really difficult to run a startup. And it doesn't make us bad founders. It's just how things are. and I really, really hope that the conversation about founder-CEO succession will also become more open because it's happening. It's there. Lots of founders are thinking about it. Lots of founders are going through it. And in many cases, as I've said in the beginning, it's a sign of success, not failure.

1:07:36You took the company from an idea to the point when it's possible to bring in a professional CEO. This progress is success, not failure. Well done. getting the company successful and getting out of the way. Beautifully said. Evgeny, thank you so much for your time on Secret Leaders. Thank you, Dan. Okay, that's it for this episode. And thanks for tuning in to this one on Secret Leaders. If Evgeny's story resonated with you particularly, then share this episode with someone who you think you could have an open dialogue with, an honest conversation about these kinds of challenges and the opportunities that present themselves from stepping down from your company and moving forward.

1:08:22I know I've personally taken a lot from it and it opened up a lot of difficult but important conversations that needed to be had in one of my companies as well. So if you found value in the insights we shared today, the simplest ways to support our work is just to subscribe to the podcast and check us out on YouTube at Secret Leaders Podcast. Don't forget to like and subscribe. Thanks for listening.

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