2387 - Why the Toughest Challenges Can Lead to Purpose-Driven Success with Patrick Mork

0:00Daily 15-minute show featuring leaders who believe real impact comes from generosity, not hype. Which means, as a listener, you're going to get the good stuff. In fact, we created PodVerified.com to give thoughtful leaders like you free tools to show up better on podcast stages like this one. That includes your free PodVerified score, free PodVerified guest training, a free media kit builder, and so much more. It's the first ecosystem of its kind built by podcasters who genuinely want to help guests thrive and grow in podcasting. Visit podverify.com if you'd like to be featured as a future guest.

0:38I'm Josh Elledge. Let's get into it. With us right now, it is Patrick Mork. Patrick, you are leadership speaker, your executive advisor. You've got a very popular podcast called Mork Unfiltered, which we've linked to as well. and you are found on the web at patrickmork.com, where our friends who are listening can also see your book, which is called Step Back and Leap, which we'll be talking about just a little bit, Nine Keys to Unlock Your Life and Make Change Happen. Patrick, it's great to have you. Thanks for having me on the show, Josh. Great to be here. For sure. Before we get going into your superpowers and your impact that you have, I'm sorry I didn't warn you about this.

1:21One thing I love doing is just hopefully this should be real easy for you. I always love finding what leaders do outside of work. So when they're not working and, you know, more beyond just being an awesome dad or whatever that might be, you know, individual hobbies, movies, TV shows, games, music, like just something that you might be geeking out on. What are you currently into? I'm currently very much into food and nutrition, to be honest. So, like, I love cooking. uh i'm really into kind of like all the all the macros all you know everything related to good nutrition and staying healthy so you know i read quite voraciously i think i'm reading you know a couple of books a month on average and um i'm also into health and fitness so you know i live in on miami beach i do a lot of walking cycling fitness in the gym and uh now getting into tai chi and uh and djing playing music so nice do you have do you have a tell me about djing or do you have a deck or what's what's the console or what's what's the hardware and software that you're using well you know i i used a tractor for a while i'm in the process of getting a new one and uh you know i'm really i've always been into kind of like uh house music and edm for a long time so i'm belgian originally you know we belgian kind of invented uh you know edm way back in the day so uh that's something that i just i've always had a strong interest in were you were you listening to house and like are you talking like back in the 90s yeah i mean back in the 90s it wasn't called house right um back in the in the 90s it was called techno which is like very very primitive and then before that there was industrial music right so yeah but i grew up on all that stuff you know i uh going going to high school and college in the states you know i was big into you know nitsereb and front two for two and you know a lot of those old school bands that really started the industrial movement in music.

3:13So, yeah. Wow. So I grew up in the Midwest. You're speaking my language. And of course, Wax Tracks out of Chicago. So all the Chicago scene. That was kind of my, you know, scene of ministry. And of course, the Germans, you know, the KMFDM and all that sort of thing. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I remember KMFDM. Oh, my God. Yeah, it brings back my words. Awesome. Well, we'll geek out more on industrial music later. That's good. But hey, Patrick, tell me about the work that you do. And of course, we're for sure going to talk about your book, but your website is patrickmork.com. I'll let you kind of maybe share a little bit about your superpowers and the impact you have in the world today outside of DJing and industrial music.

3:55Outside. Yeah. So outside of DJing and industrial music. You know, so basically, you know, what we do, what my company does is, you know, we basically help founders and leaders build companies that are rooted in purpose, contribution and service as opposed to money. Right. So, you know, obviously, I'm a former tech founder. I founded two different companies. I'm a three time chief marketing officer. You know, I've spent many, many years in Silicon Valley. 10 years, was a couple of years at Google, spent, you know, five years in London, spent a couple of years in Spain, all running, building, scaling, marketing teams at tech startups that were venture capital funded.

4:33You know, we know how much, how hard the struggle is, right? Elon Musk once said, you know, running a startup is like chewing glass. And, you know, it is very much like that. And so what we try and do is we try and take a lot of the mystery and a lot of the struggles out of it. We try and, you know, I personally mentor and advise startups as an executive advisor who are going through this process. I teach them leadership skills. I help them manage conflict. I help them manage co-founder issues, board issues, and I help them build company culture. And the objective really is to give them the soft skills that oftentimes they haven't learned, right?

5:07So you might be a brilliant engineer who went to MIT or Stanford, but unfortunately, they're not going to teach you how to give feedback to a difficult employee. They're not going to teach you how to manage conflict with your board or with your co-founder, right? So a lot of the harder things of running a company, which I've seen and I've been a part of, those are the kind of things that we help founders and leaders with. And on top of that, because of the work that I do and the experience that I have in the book, I'm a keynote speaker on the topic of resilience and leadership. So I talk a lot about what is resilience?

5:36How do you build resilience as a muscle? What are the five pillars behind resilience? How can you become more resilient in everything you do? And I also run workshops for founding teams. Right. So oftentimes I'll go in, I'll be working with with a founder for a year, two years. They'll be like, wow, this leadership work is amazing. Building purpose in our company is amazing. How do we cascade this down to my team? So I will run leadership programs for an entire year to get their team up to that level where they can lead as well as the founder. Yeah. Anybody who says that, you know, starting a company or startup, I mean, is, you know, can be wildly easy if you just follow their system is absolutely selling you a system.

6:18You know, I think about our own experience. So we launched a product based company or, you know, kind of product service company. And, you know, we started this process maybe about 10 months ago and we have a perfect incubation like we're cash positive already. I mean, and just launching this product. I mean, it has been so I mean, it's just challenging. There's just so many emotions that go with it outside of just the very tactical things that you have to take care of. And I just cannot imagine most people going through this. So I know that this is a lot of work that you, you know, this is a lot of, you know, the work that you do.

7:07Do you mind maybe just kind of giving a little bit more of a glimpse for someone on the outside who thinks it's easy, like what this founder actually does go through? you know, starting a company is one of the hardest things you're going to do, right? In your professional career. And I always give kudos to entrepreneurs who do this. It doesn't matter the size of the company or in the industry. If you raise money, if you didn't raise money, none of that matters. But I mean, you know, you're going to deal with a million different issues, right? You're going to deal with all the financial issues of should I raise money?

7:38How much money should I raise? Who do I raise it from? Right? Do I get a bank loan? Do I get a grant? Do I get an investor? Do I go to a VC? Right. There's there's the cash component. There's there's managing cash, right. Managing cash flow. You know, companies don't die because of, you know, profit and loss. They die because of cash flow management. Right. It's it's, you know, am I having enough money coming into the bank? But, you know, the bigger issue that I've seen, you know, in my 20 plus years doing this kind of stuff and running teams is that the biggest mistake founders make are on the people side of things.

8:10They mismanage people. They mismanage human relationships. If you have a star engineer or a star salesperson who does something bad, you have to give those people feedback. You have to understand how important feedback is to correcting the behavior at hand. You have to give people feedback when they're doing things well, because obviously you want to reinforce that behavior. A lot of people don't understand that feedback, for example, has a four-step process. And that to the extent that you adhere to that process, your ability to get feedback that sticks, that makes an impact, can be successful or unsuccessful.

8:46So, you know, running a company has many, many, many different components, right? Building your product, finding a product, finding product market fit, getting it to market, selling it. But often what we see is the failure of most companies is a failure in leadership. It's a failure because the people, it's not that they can't sell. It's not that they don't know how to manage money. It's not that they don't know how to build a product or sell the product. It's that they don't know how to manage the softer issues, which end up being the harder issues. If I have a problem with a co-founder and for weeks and weeks and weeks, I ignore that problem because I'm so afraid to give them feedback because I don't give, I don't feel comfortable giving them feedback.

9:28That problem festers. It becomes worse until one day you explode on your co-founder. Right. So these are the tough things that nobody tells you when you start a company. It's that's what kills companies. Yeah. You know, and boy, it's, you know, especially, you know, you think about all of the attention that a founder needs to expend in so many different areas. and at times it's going to feel wildly appropriate to say you know what i need to strap on the headphones and just lock in on this project for a couple of weeks um i'm listen uh coo you know manager of people or whatever i need you to handle because i really have to be you know you know working my pitch deck or whatever the thing is right and so um it can be very tempting to do that.

10:20But I can speak from experience. There are consequences when that delegation is maybe presented either in a naive way that is just going to get handled in the way that the founder would be doing it. How do we as founders manage that? When we can't entirely take our eye half the ball in certain areas, but we kind of need to. I mean, you know, part of what I... Oh, feel free to push back on my assumption too, because I don't know that I'm right. I'm just speaking from pain. Yeah, no, I mean, look, we've all been through, right? That's where we get the gray hair and that's where you get the growth.

11:08But I think, you know, one of the most misunderstood things, I think, about being a founder is the art of hiring a team, right? And so what I learned at Google, we had an incredibly rigorous process to select and hire people. First off, you have to start off with an incredibly clean job description of the role that you're hiring. People often gloss over this, but understanding what exactly is this person going to do on my team? What are the skills they're going to need? What kind of support are they going to need? What kind of software are they going to need? That stuff is fundamental. But also, you know, when we're hiring people, we need to make sure that we understand then that we tell them, you know, what do we expect from them?

11:48But what are they going to get out of doing the job? Right. What's the benefit of me going to work in your organization in sales, in marketing, in whatever? What am I getting? How am I going to grow professionally? Right. So start off starting off with a good job description. And then, of course, I think, you know, to the extent that you're successful or not as a founder, it's your ability to build a good team that you can delegate things either that you're not good at doing and that they hopefully are and things that will free up your time to work on the more high value stuff. So let me give you an example.

12:20I mean, you know, I worked with a founder, you know, who's built two, you know,$400 million plus exit companies. I remember going into his office one day and he was like booking flights to a conference. And I'm like, why are you booking flights for a company? She's like, oh, you know, I just need to book my flights in my hotel, whatever. I'm like, dude, we have like 300 employees. You know, you need to get the receptionist or your EA to do this kind of stuff, right? So learning how to delegate is essential if you're going to be successful because, you know, you need to work on the higher value things that really have an impact on the business.

12:50So on the one hand, you need to feel comfortable delegating. On the other hand, you need to have a good team that you can delegate to, right? So that the people component, again, is where so many people make mistakes. They don't hire fast enough. They don't hire the right person. They don't delegate to the right person. They end up micromanaging and controlling too many things. They end up doing too many things just because they want to get stuff done instead of focusing on the things that really move the needle. Well, listen, I have a lot of empathy, as I do for our friends that are listening right now, especially if you've been through this school of hard knocks, you know just how tough it is.

13:28You know, but I want to shift just a little bit, Patrick, on your book, because I love this line here. We've all had those sleepless moments grappling with profound queries like, what's my true purpose? And how on earth can I steer my life in a new, exciting direction seems to be a major part of Stand Back and Leap. Can you share with me a little bit about the book, who this is for, and the transformation that would come from someone that reads your book? Sure. I mean, you know, the book was written in, you know, I started writing the book during COVID because, you know, our business was struggling so much that I found that all of a sudden I had a lot of time on my hands because, you know, we were all in lockdown in Santiago, Chile.

14:12And it came out of the frustration that I had when I left tech about trying to figure out what I do next, right? So I was a serial chief marketing officer. And then one day I had run in with the founder of the company that I was working in. I got laid off and I woke up the next day and I realized two things. I was like, you know what? I don't want to do marketing anymore. I'm like sick of the marketing thing. I've been doing this for like 15, 20 years. But the second realization was, what do I do next? And so this book has never been more relevant, Josh, because now with artificial intelligence, we have jobs in industries all over the United States that are disappearing in front of our very eyes, right?

14:47We are starting to see now people even graduating from top schools like Harvard and others and INSEAD in France, which is one of the top MBA programs in Europe. These people are not finding jobs. And so increasingly, we are seeing a generation of young people that are very talented, very experienced, very hungry, but there's no jobs for them. And so the book basically is a kind of like how to find a career of meeting and purpose, coupled with my life story and all the crap that I went through over the last 20 or 30 years, right? It's like my journey since startup land, my divorce, you know, getting beaten up as an expat in Mexico City, you know, when I was eight years old, you know, running and being in different startups, all that stuff.

15:30and what I learned from the experience. And the reason it's important is because nobody's going to really teach you how to find what your purpose and meaning is in life and how you should find a career, right? This class doesn't really exist. And this is actually something I'm in the process of building and I'm in the process of putting together a workshop that I'm going to host here in Miami in February on this topic. And what the book does is it chronicles nine different chapters, nine different stories that are real stories of things that happened in my life. Everything from being fired at the last start that I was at, to my divorce, to being on the streets of Santiago in the middle of a social revolution with like supermarkets being burned down and all sorts of really crazy shit.

16:08And basically how I dealt with each one of those chapters, right? So there's a chapter on how to find your purpose, right? You know, I talk about getting fired and I give exercises on how do you go about finding your purpose? Here's a Japanese framework that will help you find your purpose. There's a chapter on values, right? So many people today in this country are burnt out at work because they're doing work that fundamentally goes against their values. Let's say you or I have a value that is we want to be good parents. If I work for a big investment bank and I'm working late nights and weekends and I'm not seeing my family, how can I be a good parent?

16:46If you do that long enough, you will burn out. and you burn out because you're doing work that goes diametrically against the values that are important to you. So the book basically humanizes the entire process of finding a job that gives you meaning and purpose and aligns with your values by giving you real life stories that are, from what I've been told from the reviews, pretty entertaining about all the messes that I had in my life and how I dealt with them, coupled with exercises that help you actually work through and write down, how do I find my values? How do I find a career path? How do I find my purpose?

17:20How do I hire a great team? How do I delegate to that great team? All of these things are very normal human questions that every entrepreneur has, but not only every entrepreneur, but anybody that is struggling to find a job that gives them meaning today. That's what I tried to do with the book. Patrick, we have about a minute left. Your website, patrickmork.com. Could you share for our friend that's been listening where they might go next? I know you have some resources here. And then if you could kind of throw into that just a little bit more about the work that you do, you and your team in executive coaching.

17:55Obviously, you do a lot of workshops and speaking as well. Sure. So, you know, if you want to get more information about me, the easiest is PatrickBourke.com. That's my website. We have tons of information about all the different works that I do as an executive assistant for founders, as a speaker, as a workshop facilitator in leadership. you can follow me on Instagram and on LinkedIn, Patrick Burke official. You know, I have a lot of great content, you know, as Josh mentioned, my podcast is called more unfiltered. You can find that on YouTube, Apple, Spotify, all major podcasts platforms. I'm available.

18:27And, you know, the major folks that I do is a kind of helping founders build great companies, build great purpose, be better leaders. And then I do a lot of work as a workshop facilitator on the topics of leadership and as a keynote speaker on the topic of resilience. So, you know, if you just Google my name, Patrick Mork, M-R-K, like Mork and Mindy, you will get all the information that you need. And if you need any help, just reach out. Also, your Mork Unfiltered podcast, which is all linked, and we have that linked as well. If you're a friend that's listening to a podcast, guess what? You can just click and you can start listening to Patrick's podcast as well.

19:01Patrick, thank you so much. Patrick Mork, again, founder of your podcast, Mork Unfiltered, your website and company, patrickmork.com. And of course, the book that we talked about, Step Back and Leap. Patrick, thank you so much for joining us. Thank you so much, Josh. It's been awesome. Thanks again.

19:20Thanks for listening to The Thoughtful Entrepreneur. If your goal is to grow your business, increase revenue, and build authority without gimmicks, this show is designed for you. Each episode gives you practical insight from leaders who have turned trust and credibility into real business results. If you value short, thoughtful conversations that respect your time, make sure you're subscribed. We publish daily 15-minute episodes focused on growth that actually compounds. And if you're interested in being a guest or you want to turn podcast appearances into measurable business growth, visit podverified.com.

19:56You can start for free with your pod verified score, along with free podcast guest training and a free media kit builder. These tools are built to help you get booked on better shows, deliver stronger interviews and convert audience trust into revenue. No more desperate sales. You truly can enjoy all the business you like by generously sharing your wisdom. Everything we offer is built by podcasters for guests with a focus on trust, organic growth, and long-term business success. Thanks again for spending your time with us. I'll see you next time.