george grombacher 0:02
David, to get us started, give me two truths and a lie, please, sir.

David Steele 0:07
Okay, all right, let’s see. I wrote a master’s thesis on postmodern literary theory. I am on a bicycle over 200 days a year, and I once turned down an offer to be on a show on the Food Network.

george grombacher 0:30
Oh, my goodness, these are excellent. You’re into post modern literary theory. 200 days a week spent on a bike, and you’ve turned down 200

David Steele 0:39
days a year. 202

george grombacher 0:42
What did I say? 200 days a month, days a week, a week. Yeah, you are, you are a high achiever. So, all right, well, I am going to guess that the post modern literary theory is the lie, got which one was a lie?

David Steele 1:04
Well, my master’s thesis was on Paul demons, views and allegory and ironies, as found in nabakov Pale fire, post modern literary theory anyway, and I am on my bike 200 days a year, but I have not turned down an offer to be on a show on the Food Network.

george grombacher 1:23
Okay, I believe that you are a restaurant tour. So I thought that, that thought that that would have come your way maybe one of

David Steele 1:29
these days. Yeah, I prepared well for this, this meeting with you, obviously,

george grombacher 1:36
Well done, sir. All right, so the first you said a lot of words there with names of authors and books and works. Are you still? Are you still a literary fanatic, passionate reader?

David Steele 1:49
No, I’m a person who start, who finishes what He starts, and when he says he’s going to do something, I generally do it. I said I was going to write a great American novel, and so I went back to school after having already been successful in my professional life, and got a master’s in literature in my first semester of writing a seminar paper, I realized I hated writing, but I finished the degree anyway, and never wrote the great American novel. I did write a play that was on stage once, but I never wrote The Great American Novel anyhow.

george grombacher 2:31
So how do you think about sunk costs?

David Steele 2:34
Yeah, it’s a heck of a great question. Actually, I use the idea of sunk cost to, in fact, make decisions or avoid making bad decisions. Is the point. I guess, in business, it depends upon what you’re trying to achieve. Though sunk cost the context of your question, I think, is around allocation of resources as a business person, I think, and for me, I knew I was going to get something in return for the time invested in getting a master’s in literature. It just wasn’t what I thought I was going to get when I went into it. So I reject, I love the question, but don’t think it applies here.

george grombacher 3:22
Yeah, fair enough. Fair enough. Sue a great American novel, it’s never going to be coming out of David Steele,

David Steele 3:30
no, not for me. Okay, good enough. I don’t think I’m, I don’t think I’m a very good writer, frankly. So yeah, the world’s not bores off as a result of that decision.

george grombacher 3:40
Good enough. Well, what is, what is top of mind for you right now?

David Steele 3:45
I mean, the same thing that’s always top of mind for me. I mean, my, you know, I had, I have dabbled in creative stuff. I referred to playwriting earlier, and I did some mixed media collage visual art. I’ve had a few shows with that, and I realized pretty within a few years of attempting those various different forms of creativity that my art is team building. And I do see business has a potential to get into the same sublime area that visual art can if looked at from a from a certain perspective. And for me, business is really about people, whether it be the most obvious one, your customers, but maybe not too far behind that, your team members, partners, the people that work with you and for you. And I believe human beings really have two things. They achieve. Everything could be boiled down to two forms of motivation, the pursuit of love and desire. Excuse me, the pursuit of love, not desire. Pursuit of. Love and being valued, feeling valued. And so when I think about that, and I look at my customers, I look at my team members, I’m always thinking about, how can I make these people that mean the world to me feel loved and valued.

george grombacher 5:23
When did you figure that out that that is one of the big drivers to human beings feeling loved and valued?

David Steele 5:30
Spent my 20s reading every book on metaphysics I could get my hands on, visited places like Esalen Institute, time and again, I was, you know, on a on a quest, spent years in therapy, realized that all of that pursuit was a little bit superficial. That is, I was trying to be perfect. I woke up one day and made the decision, and has stayed with me ever since, which is, I am already perfect, or, more specifically, I’m as perfect as I’m ever going to be. And it took a heck of a lot of pressure off, but along the way, I developed sort of, I guess, an intellectual and maybe emotional and psychological framing for what really I felt I knew I was pursuing. Hopefully it wasn’t a Freudian slip with when I said desire earlier, because I very much meant being loved and valued, and I suppose I started to project that onto the world,

george grombacher 6:45
so that that’s, that’s obviously an important moment, recognizing that perfect is in the game. It’s I’m as perfect as I’m ever going to be. And so I’m going to start operating in that way. What is, what is the framework that you developed.

David Steele 7:03
I mean, I just, I call it mental gymnastics, which is when I have these feelings of negativity towards myself or others. For that matter, I really try to find empathy for others. If I have negative thoughts about somebody else, I I focus on their suffering. I suppose it’s a bit of a Buddhist perspective. And for me, it’s, it’s, uh, it’s self empathy, if you will, which is a self love. And I do, I do what I call mental gymnastics, whereas when I have those, those feelings of of anxiety or negative feelings about myself or a situation, I take a deep breath, I acknowledge the thought and as a thought bubble, I allow it to float away.

george grombacher 7:54
This is not a value to me. I recognize it is a feeling that I’m having, but I’m going to choose what I’m going to do with it and this chance, or in this example, I’m just going to let it float away. Yeah,

David Steele 8:06
I don’t succeed 100% of the time, but because I have that practice, I suppose I succeed more than before I did. Yeah,

george grombacher 8:13
I appreciate that.

David Steele 8:15
So

george grombacher 8:16
I think that you referred to team building as a form of art, if not visual art, and that is something that that you’re passionate about, that you find interest in, and that you are good at. How do you why? How do you think of that as, as, as a visual art? If, if that’s what you said, No,

David Steele 8:34
I see it as art. I don’t see it as a visual art. I you know, there’s all different types of visual art. Anybody who has spent time in a major city like New York has walked by some artists, visual living, breathing art that you can see in the street that they’re trying. I mean, you can look up a woman named Laurie Aarons, Laurie Anderson, who’s sort of a famous musician from the 80s, but really she was, she’s a performance artist. And I read about how when she first started, she was doing this really interesting performance art on the street, which was dependent upon her executing the performance. And it was, in fact, art, and there were sometimes other people involved in that. And when I think about creating a business, I think about coalescing a group of people around this, this idea, this form of creation, this form of human magic that’s living and breathing and ideally financially sustainable. And ideally, I guess, even more so never ending. And that’s sort of how I frame the analogy between art, or applying the term art to business.

george grombacher 9:49
I think that that, I think that that’s a pretty cool thing, and that’s been working. It

David Steele 9:54
has been working. Yeah,

george grombacher 9:59
you strike me. Is a really, really thoughtful person, obviously working to be an empathetic person, and I’m sure succeeding at that. What is, what are some of the biggest challenges that you’ve experienced over the past couple of years? I’m sure that you figure things out and they come easy, but you strike me as you’re probably a guy who’s looking for things that are hard.

David Steele 10:26
Well, my financial planning company, which is my my day job, if you will. That’s the first, first business I started. We’re a bit of a socialistic capitalistic exercise, and what I mean is we’re the opposite of eat, which kill. Everybody is on salary. Everybody gets a 5% raise every year, no questions asked. Nobody gets bonuses. Everybody gets a percentage of the profits of the company we distribute every quarter. The salary ranges are not identical, and the percentage of profits that people get rights to, if you will, varies based on their role in the company. But you can see where, if a particular customer is one, and they’re substantial and they’re going to radically increase our revenue, well, guess what? The person who sourced that client isn’t going to get paid anymore. On the flip side, the person who may be the primary relationship manager for a particular client, if we, God forbid, were to lose that client, which occasionally happens rarely, but occasionally, that person’s not going to get paid any less. And the it’s beautiful. It’s wonderful, everybody. It’s all for one, one for all. And if anybody’s not pulling their weight, it doesn’t usually require any of the leaders of the company to have a sit down with them. It doesn’t usually happen because I think there’s this sense of obligation to the to the team, to each other, and that’s awesome. As the company’s grown from we started it with just a couple of us, and we’re 12 people now with over a billion dollars in assets under management, maintaining that type of what I call socialistic capitalistic experiment. Occasionally, there’s a some complications that are that arise from that people feeling undervalued, or certainly people feeling that their contribution may be worthy of more different and it that’s, it hasn’t been a serious problem, but it’s, it’s something that my antenna is up for, and I’m aware that it’s going to continually sort of be something we have to pay attention to.

george grombacher 12:50
Is that a good problem? Very bad.

David Steele 12:52
I think it’s well, I mean, the the alternative to that is short term company, like a more traditional finance company, which is which you kill, and it creates five thumbs and tribalism and and the which, to me, from my worldview, is is a bigger set of problems. So I think there is no way of doing anything in life that is problem less this is just a way less bad problem.

george grombacher 13:22
You said more different, and I have in the past, heard more different and better. Those are things that cause us to slip out of contentment and have that cause us to be malcontent or or ill content or non contented at all. You’re addressing that with the socialistic capitalistic model. And talked about how it’s a skill of yours to bring a team together. So how do you sniff out When, when, when people are starting to feel that way? They’re they’re feeling like they’re not getting what they ought to

David Steele 14:08
we have a requirement that everybody in the company has lunch one on one with everybody in the company twice a year at a minimum. And there is no requirement. In fact, people are suggested that there’s not that much business discussed. The purpose of that is to have us be constantly humanized to each other. I think what ends up happening is you, you know, you dehumanize somebody the less one or more connection you have with them. We also have required mentorship program. That is, everybody in the company is either a mentor or a mentee, sometimes both. And those team, those people meet once a month. And so there’s this constant force humanizing, if you will, which is, yes, these are people dealing with so what I think it does. Is it gives depending upon who the person is. Inevitably, if there’s 12 people, each person is going to have a forum with everybody in the team, some of which will be leaders, some of which they’re going to feel comfortable with, even if they’re not comfortable with other leaders. Therefore, there’s opportunities for people to talk about things that are concerning them in a safe environment, and usually there’s enough trust where that person who is confided in is able to go to the people that we run the company and make changes, or maybe there’s coaching and guidance from that particular leader to say, Here, here’s how maybe you should deal with this, so I don’t have to deal with it for you, and you can feel more empowered to do so yourself.

george grombacher 15:49
It’s so true that if we’re not interacting in interpersonal communication with people, we do have a tendency and a wonderful skill to dehumanize people and so to break down those barriers. And it’s so simple, just twice a year at a minimum to sit across and break bread, it’s going to hopefully get in front of that

David Steele 16:11
for sure. Yeah,

george grombacher 16:12
I love it. I was just thinking this morning about the the Eisenhower matrix, and making decisions on what’s urgent, what’s important, and then there’s not urgent, not important. And ideally you want to spend time on things that are important but not urgent, kind of a thing. Stephen Covey, I guess, made that famous in his book. How do you make decisions? You’ve got so much going on. You have varied interests. You’re You’re a highly productive human being. Um,

David Steele 16:40
well, I mean, strategically, we have, in all the companies that I’ve started, which is more than one, more than two, and that I’m still involved with, we use the and OKR objective and key results. I think it was started by the former CEO of intelli, wrote a book on it, and frankly, I haven’t read that book, but I have a board member one of my companies who taught it to me years ago, and it was a light bulb went off, and we did some strategic planning for the companies prior to that, but we’ve implemented OKRs across all the companies now. And I it’s one of many organizing methodologies to run a company, real estate, really stay focused on the things that matter. And so there’s five objectives each year for each company with a six that’s aspirational for the following year. And we assign a leader to each of those objectives. The objectives are agreed upon by the leadership teams, and there’s a Strat planning meeting that happens towards the end of the year that we agree upon what the five objectives for the company are for the following year, who the leader is going to be and what the key results are for each of those objectives that the leader will be measured by. And the leader is required, not just encouraged, but inquired to required to get other team members involved in the accomplishing of those key results. That is to say they’re not to be hero and do it themselves. And then I, as CEO, I’m CEO of one of these three companies, I sit down with each of the leaders four times a year to see what kind of progress they’re making, and then we use that to report to our advisory board as well. So it’s, it’s an interesting system,

george grombacher 18:30
not everybody. Well, there’s visionary leaders, then there’s the actual doers and the operators. How do you fall? Where do you what? What do you consider yourself? If

David Steele 18:42
you I feel comfortable saying I’m a visionary, not like Steve Jobs, Elon Musk, by any means, but I do think I’m a bit of a visionary. I do have confidence. I do accept the fact that in order to achieve things, you have to be willing to fail. That’s not a trait that everybody shares people. You know, some people are, are risk averse. I also completely respect, appreciate the need to implement reliable systematic behaviors across the company, but I tend not to be the one doing the tasks of those systematic behaviors, I tend to be a person that delegates those and bluntly pays people to do those things, hopefully fairly.

george grombacher 19:36
What was the there’s a lot of different ways to build a financial company. So the socialistic capitalistic Was that something that you always sort of had in the back of your mind, I want to sort of figure out how to implement this, or was there an event that catalyzed that? How did it come to be?

David Steele 19:55
No, I mean, my if you do, you know some of those personality tests you. You’ll find I’m one of the that I always score as the person who doesn’t want credit for anything and really wants everybody to get credit. I just think it’s my nature to want to be collaborative and share the wealth, if you will. I mentioned a socialistic capitalistic experiment because our company, we’re we grew 27% year over year. We haven’t, I don’t think we’ve had a year. We’ve grown less than 15% top line growth since we launched the company ever. And we’ve, we haven’t made a effort in sales and marketing and advertising over 15 years. We’re really proud of that growth, and that means that’s greater profits for everybody in the company, not just me or not just a couple of couple of people. So by all means, we are capitalistic, and we do want to make money. So I want to be clear about that. I

george grombacher 20:53
totally get it, and i i Everything you talking about has really resonated with me. I spent time thinking about what are the things that unite all human beings, so that you shared love and feeling like you’re valued, I think is an incredible thing. I love, I love the idea of writing a great American novel. Also, though I don’t know that that is inside of me trying to come out and the reality of of of consistent growth at least 15% or whatever it is every year, that certainly makes makes things easier from implementing the kind of model that that you put in, but that’s all because you’re doing it the right way, and I’m sure you’re working really hard at it?

David Steele 21:40
Yeah, I think so.

george grombacher 21:44
So I also appreciate that that you know that you told us about how you you put your money, where your mouth is, and your time, and you enrolled in this program, a master’s program, because you were going to write this novel. And then you discovered, well, I don’t even like writing, so I’m not going to do this. Was that? Were Were you happy to discover that? Were you irritated?

David Steele 22:11
No, I was irritated. I was definitely irritated. But I was very proud I was doing it. I always felt like an intellectual, and I always believed in intellectual has to have at least a master’s degree. I was always I always thought it was cool and I was proud of and that my brain was working differently by doing so in an area that is unexpected by the world, which is most people would expect me to get a MBA or JD, MBA or something, and Nope, you got a master’s in literature, and my my I do think I challenge my brain to look at the world maybe a little bit differently than if I had been a little bit more myopic, with just focusing a business,

george grombacher 22:53
something that that financial folks struggle with. Well, at least from my experience, is talking about the work that you do. And let’s take a big step back. When somebody asks you, what you do, David, what do you tell them?

David Steele 23:06
Well, I remember I started a couple of other companies in addition to my financial planning company. But my, again, my main thing, the thing I spend most of my time with, is my financial planning company. What we do is financial life planning. I added that word life in there. We added it. I don’t know too many other firms that do that, because we do see money decisions as life decisions. They affect you psychologically, emotionally, relationally to people. It really is decisions you make in money are very much decisions you make in life. And so we help people plan their lives financially. And I that beat was intentional.

george grombacher 23:53
I love it. I love it. Well, David, you’ve given us a lot. I’m going to ask you for a difference making tip, sir, what do you have for us?

David Steele 24:06
Well, I think setting goals is a version of human magic, and every 10 years or so, I write down my life plan with my three most important goals for my life, and I tend not to look at that piece of paper. Sometimes I never look at it again, or I’ll look at it way more than 10 years later, I’ve done this three times now, and I’ve achieved everything, and I didn’t necessarily try to tangibly, specifically achieve everything. So my tip is, no matter how old you are, consider if you don’t have everything you already want, which many don’t write down on a piece of paper, your three most important goals, unpack. Why I. I’d like to challenge people that oftentimes their goals are are not authentically theirs. They’re what people in their life influence them to think they should want, or society influences them to think they should want make sure they’re authentically yours, and I like everybody’s chances at achieving those goals.

george grombacher 25:23
Well, I think that that is great stuff that definitely gets Come on. It is human magic. I like to say it’s a human superpower. So we are reading out the same script there. Brother, I love everything about that. It’s amazing. You write them down and you check back, 1025, years later. It’s amazing you you actually did what you wanted to

David Steele 25:42
absolutely

george grombacher 25:44
Well, David, thank you so much for coming on. Where can people learn more about you? How can they engage with you?

David Steele 25:49
Well, we my financial planning company is one wealth.net, but I have a website that shows some of the other, all of my other areas that I’m involved with, in addition to one wealth, which is David Steele dot XYZ and my one wealth financial planning company’s email address, D [email protected] is the place to email me. Excellent.

george grombacher 26:11
Well, if you enjoyed as much as I did so David, your appreciation. Share today’s show with a friend who also appreciates good ideas. You could find David’s financial work at one wealth.net, and then all things David Steele at David Steele, and that’s S, T, E, L, E, dot, x, y, z. Thanks again, David,

David Steele 26:32
my pleasure. Thanks for having me finally. Friendly

george grombacher 26:35
Reminder, it’s never going to be anybody more interested in your financial success than you are, so act accordingly. You.

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