2214 - How CEOs Can Energize Their Work and Their Teams with Disruptive Leap's Loic Potjes

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1:05With us right now, it is Loic Paties. Loic, you are the founder and managing partner of Disruptive Leap. You are found on the web at disruptiveleap.com. Loic, it's great to have you. Thanks very much for having me, Josh. Happy to be here. Yeah, and you're in Johannesburg, South Africa. And so, Loic, before we kind of get started talking about the work that you do and your background as well, which is fascinating, Tell me, what have you been kind of currently into lately in terms of, I don't know if you're watching anything interesting, if you have any hobbies that you're really passionate about?

1:42I'd love to learn a little bit more. It's always just fun to kind of hear what passionate entrepreneurs are kind of doing in their off time. Well, Josh, when I was young and beautiful, I studied wine knowledge, enology. And so, yeah, we have a wine club with a few friends. We taste some, I'm based in Johannesburg, South Africa, pretty interesting climate. We have great wine varietals and a number of pretty great wine domains here. So we have a bit of a wine club where we share a bit of a gastronomic meal. And then I do blind tasting for them, trying to recognize various grapes, terroirs. And so it's just for fun.

2:24And then people are pretty shy as they start their journey. But from the third glass onwards, they're pretty, they're really open to chat about it and share the learnings, the thoughts and the emotions as they go through a wine discovery journey. So, yeah, that's pretty fun. Who would have thought, right? I mean, I know that there's, I'm not, I'm not much of a wine fan myself. I like a Florida white because it's out of the orange groves generally, and it's usually a very sweet wine, which unfortunately my palate just can't seem to get into the dry stuff as much as I've tried. I'm kind of a late bloomer when it comes to wine anyway.

3:08Can I ask you a question? So in terms of the region, how would you describe what South African wine might be known for? So you'd have a Bordeaux blend style, which is a Cabernet Sauvignon with a Merlot and a Petit Verdot and Cabernet Franc. So that's more on your international palate. But something very typical from South Africa is the Pinotage grape. And the Pinotage grape is uniquely found in South Africa and is a mix between the Pinot Noir from the Alsace region originally in France, and the Hermitage from the Côte d 'Uron region in France. And that's actually, during the Philox era, a great sickness that decimated the wine stocks in Europe.

4:02They then put these two together. And so that gives a bit of a rich, under the sunny climate of South Africa, a bit of a rich open palate for the wine that's reasonably interesting, I would say. Fascinating, fascinating. Now, it's a whole world, and I know it's quite a rabbit hole that one can go down. We start thinking about the complexities of everything, the mouthfeel and everything, the taste when consuming wine. Obviously, I'm not a wine consumer myself because of my lack of vocabulary on the topic. But, Loic, let's definitely talk about the work that you do with Disruptive Leap. What is Disruptive Leap?

4:42so um i call that josh my second midlife crisis um so my my background is a corporate ceo turned scale-up uh entrepreneur turned tech investor and i had a coffee chat with a friend a year ago in paris and i said what are you up to he said hey i'm doing ceo coaching and i flew him up for a bunch of friends who are ceo entrepreneurs to learn a few insights and do a bit of an event and a keynote speech. And I found that fascinating. Fast forward, Harvard and a couple of business schools, I studied a bit more about coaching and I'm leveraging essentially my business knowledge, tech knowledge, corporate knowledge, entrepreneur knowledge to and a bit of a toolbox and coaching methodology to accompany entrepreneurs and founders and CEOs to scale themselves as a leader and to scale their company so i'm currently coaching about 15 ceos across from india hong kong miami um san francisco mexico lithuania london geneva ghana and so a little bit across the world i'm being spanish speaking from my wife french speaking from home um dutch speaking from boarding school and a bit of a global citizen as i've lived in emerging markets in mature markets, and in a number of countries and cultures across the globe.

6:13So, yeah, CEO coaching for leadership development and scaling up your business. And so I have to ask you, you know, here we are kind of in the middle of 2025. What are CEOs talking about? What are they concerned about this year? so the there's of course the acceleration of ai the acceleration of new technologies and so on and and how to scope um your scaling how not to be left behind how to how to adopt new tech how to get about new tech into your um a client spaces what new services should we should you be delivering not to be left wanting and not to be left disrupted is a key talk. But overall, there's an acceleration of life, of life in companies, of topics to have to handle from opportunities to crisis, and everything goes at an ever-increasing faster pace.

7:18And so to deal with that, coaching is amazing because twice a month for 90 minutes, it's your safe space, your space of authenticity, where you get to pause and reflect and work on the business. And we work on the business, on the stuff that really moves the needle, the 80-20, the stuff that's going to make or break you or your business. And then in broad brushes, we get to the bottom of it. And we provide CEOs essentially with clarity and simplicity. And if you imagine a CEO having to handle 100 things in the day and being in the cold phase, it's very hard to have clarity on core issues and to just create that time to get to the bottom of it.

8:07And through a sparring partner, a buddy, an experienced mentor or coach, you get to do that. And we get to decision-making, we get to next step, actionable stuff. And yeah, we ensure that CEOs flow. So back to your question, it's that. It's the stuff that's going to move the needle. It's the next opportunity, the next crisis, how to keep moving the company and themselves ahead. Yeah. And so what does, Loic, when you are working with CEOs, for a CEO that's never had a CEO coach, do you mind maybe sharing the unique kind of lifestyle or kind of, you know, it's like as a CEO of a company, right? Right.

8:53What we've enrolled into a certain type of life. Right. And some of that I know, you know, there's that, you know, we hear this frequently. Right. It's lonely at the top. You know, CEOs kind of have built a world for themselves that is fairly unique. And so as a coach that specializes in working with those CEOs, do you mind maybe talking a little bit about some of those sensitivities for folks that might not yet be in that lifestyle, but this might be what they've signed up for if they're on their way to kind of continuing to grow their company? yeah it's basically life throws when you head a company a million things to you every day it could be a crisis with the staff a crisis with a client an opportunity somewhere else a next product or services to launch or and it gets extraordinarily busy and mostly mostly nine CEOs out of ten end up being managed by life rather than managing life.

9:55And being managed by life, meaning you're not mastering your own time, your own agenda, your own schedule, but everyone demands your time, your energy, your presence, be it clients, be it staff, be it your shareholders, your investors, whoever that may be, and you're pulled and you have a sense of positive energy because you're busy, you pack your days, you work 12 hours in a go, and it feels productive time. But essentially 90 % of that doesn't move the needle and it's busyness, but not scaling on the business. It's not the stuff that truly moves the needle. In order to get and to switch to the stuff that's going to move the needle, you need to pause and reflect.

10:43You need to have clarity on your 10x plan. What is the number you need to achieve of impact or wealth generation or whatever triggers you, social impact, whatever? What is the number that you need to plan five years from now? How do you have a backwards plan for key milestones that you need to get there? How do you have the core steps of a plan towards that? How do you build a winning team? What is your unique talent? we tend to as key execs or CEOs we love working with people who are like us so if I'm high on energy and strategy I'll choose someone who thinks like me but maybe I need someone that does get things done as a COO or CFO and it's the need for a complementary engine and a winning team and then you need to cascade that plan and then you need to have regular checks daily, like is it two hours that you're going to work on the business every day?

11:49You're absolute non-negotiable. From there, you move to the important. From there, you move to the nice to have and the stuff that really can wait and nobody's going to die. And maybe you should have a six hour day or eight hours a day, but you should make sure you deal with the stuff that really matters in a way. So back to your question, it's really, it's really being leading and not have a sense of busyness and productive energy, actually not moving anyway. I think it's easy to get sucked into that, right? Because I know, you know, I was just talking with someone about this, you know, kind of growing up, you know, working class, you know, particularly in the Midwest, you know, I was just always taught, you know, the harder you work, you know, the more successful you are kind of idea.

12:37And, you know, I think a lot of us, you know, wear that sacrifice as a badge of honor. And it, you know, can sometimes make us feel like we're the superhero, right? And so, but at the end of the day, you know, we get to a point, I think most of us realize where, you know, that's not sustainable. And, you know, if I'm serving the world, you know, sure, I'm showing up 12 hours a day, but I'm at 60, 70 % capacity. That's not what I need to be. I need to be, to your point, maybe it's six, seven, eight hours a day, but you're on at 100%, which is, I think that's where we need CEOs at 100%. CEOs at 60, 70%, I think are really not helpful to the organization, in my opinion.

13:26Any thoughts on that? Yeah, definitely. And there's something about flowing to your core DNA and your core DNA is your core talents, what you were brought up to do for the world, essentially. So if you're a great visionary and you've got lots of ideation, a lot of starting up things, if you are great at execution and building teams together, whatever your great talent is, you should be absolutely aware of that. and then your comfort zone, the stuff that you can do with your eyes closed and then your irritants, not necessarily your weaknesses because as CEOs, we end up having, or entrepreneurs, we end up having many competences, but irritants is the stuff that you don't do with pleasure that you procrastinate on.

14:11But you know what the best part of that is? It happens to be someone else's talent and place of joy. And so if you're absolutely clear on your core talents and you flow towards that, if you've built a team around you that complements you, that's an 80-20. Yeah. There was a survey released two days ago in France. Just give me a number, Josh, on the percentage of employees really engaged in the workplace. If you take out the present tastes and the absent tastes, what's left of engaged employees in France? but they can be contrary, but it happens to be. So I would imagine, so first thing I'm going to do is like, well, how did you measure that?

14:57Because I feel like reported and actual are probably going to be, there's probably going to be a gap there. But if you're talking about actual, my suspicion is it's going to be pretty low. I would guess 30s. It's absolutely low and it's substantially lower than that. It stands at 8%. That means that nine out of 10 of your staff, they actually don't want to be there. They're not interested. They're not engaged. And so how do you and so flowing people to their talents is something it's the core insights that helps to change that essentially. So what makes people tick? How do they find the space within your startup, within your scale up?

15:39And how do you show these behaviors first as a leader? yeah uh loik i i want to share for a friend that's listening and they're like uh you know they they very intentionally are listening to this episode because they're wanting to get to know you um they they're listening here and they're like listen i i would really love to have a conversation with loik i'd love to learn more about ceo coaching where do they go from here um the easiest is to go on the website disruptiveleap.com and you can book a slot from there or simply pop an email or WhatsApp and get a conversation going. Yeah. You have your schedule link directly on your website as well, if you kind of scroll to the very bottom there.

16:24But disruptiveleap.com. Loic Paties, it's been great having you as a guest on the podcast. Thank you so much for joining us. Thank you, Josh. Thanks for having me.

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