How Entrepreneurs Rise Stronger After Setbacks, with Gary Mottershead

Shannon Waller: Hi, Shannon Waller here and welcome to Inside Strategic Coach with special guest, Gary Mottershead. Gary, thank you so much for joining me today because I am excited for our audience to get to know you better. And I just rediscovered that you and I have both been a part of Coach for the same amount of time. We both joined in 1991, which is kind of amazing, that's quite a long time now. And I'm excited to talk about your own entrepreneurial career, how you got here, the difference that Coach has made for you. And you're one of our very valued associate coaches. So people have a chance to actually work with you, should they be inclined, which I hope they will. I mean, to my mind, you're one of our very special coaches because you bring such a wealth of knowledge and experience and focus on team, which of course is always one of my things. So I can't wait to dive in. So that is a very brief introduction from a coach perspective, but how do you like to introduce yourself? What is important for us to know about you from your perspective?
 
Gary Mottershead: Well, Shannon, first of all, thank you very much for having me on today. You know, as we say, we have known each other a long time and worked alongside. I've worked alongside with your family as well. So it's been really a great pleasure for me to do that over all these years. You know what, when you ask how I describe myself, I can't go without saying that certainly my business, and I've been an entrepreneur for 35 years, been involved in the tire recycling world, but if you were to boil it down to the things right now, is that I'm the founder and president of GCP Industrial Products. We're the largest importer of industrial sheet rubber into the United States, and we sell in U.S., Mexico, and Canada. And I'm an associate coach with Strategic Coach. GCP is now 25 years into its 26th year, so we've passed a milestone. And Strategic Coach, I've been coaching now for almost 29 years. So those two things really define the past three decades of my life.
 
Shannon Waller: And before we go too much further, tell us about your fabulous family as well.
 
Gary Mottershead: Yeah, you know what? I've been very blessed. Karen, my wife, I say my first wife, also 44, almost 45 years, we're talking about it last night.
 
Shannon Waller: First and only.
 
Gary Mottershead: Yeah, first and only. My practice marriage is still in practice, I guess. I like to joke that when I leave the house and come to Strategic Coach, I'm not allowed to take any keys. If the locks have changed when I get back, then I know my time is up. But so far, that hasn't changed. Actually, I installed the smart locks now, so I can do it from my phone. I tried to get around that. I've got two great children, Craig, who's married. We have three grandchildren on his side. He also works with me. He's our vice president of marketing, so I get a chance to connect with him on almost a daily basis. And Christy. Christy is also married with John and Christy got her own business. She's the entrepreneur as well and is also part of Strategic Coach in her own right. So I've got two great kids.
 
I always considered that one of my most, the most important responsibility was being a father. And if you're going to bring people into the world, then look after those children. And so I'm very blessed, both Karen and I are blessed. And equally so, Karen looked after the family while I was gone. I traveled 100 days a year sometimes. I was gone. I'm still gone 50 to 60 days a year. So, and I think I've cut back a lot, but, and Karen's really handled it all—so none of this would have happened without her support and without the great support that I had with my family. And I know you want to talk about teams, but that's a very big part of my life too.
 
Shannon Waller: Well, I think a lot of people, well, we don't talk about it this way, but there's family teamwork, right? It's like my husband, Bruce, is the same. We actually had, my husband called them the A-team. They were our nanny, Annie the nanny, Anita, the cleaning lady, whom we still have, by the way, and then Angie, the cook for a couple of years. And so we had home support on purpose, because both Bruce and I are not capable of doing certain things well, consistently. So having that support at home is so vital to, I think, the success of any entrepreneurial family, unless you're gonna just compromise way too many things. So I love that.
 
Gary Mottershead: So you know one of the things that I found too is, because when people talk about who we are, I noticed your Kolbe’s a 3295 and I'm a 3395, well 9 being the Quick Start. So you think you'd handle lots of change. And I determined that I didn't really want to have my house changed very much. I didn't really want my personal life to change very much because I knew there was so much other change and possibly turmoil that would go on in my life. And so Karen and I have only lived in three places in the 44 years. Our first apartment for a couple of years and then a house for 14 years and the last 30 years we've lived in our home. So the stability for me is really, really important.
 
So you talk about the stability at home, you talk about the stability around what we do, so that we have the energy to handle the changes that are happening. And so I've adopted the same thing with my team. I'm very fortunate on my leadership team, there are seven of us, three people have been there 19 years, two have been 17 years and another one 16 years. So you just look at that and I got most of them relatively young to come in, Russ, I've known at DuPont for more than 40 years. Christine worked somewhere else before she came to me, that's 16 years. But that stability on the team and looking after them has just made a huge difference in terms of what we can accomplish as entrepreneurs. And so from that standpoint, I think that was one of the things, if you haven't asked me, I think that's one of the things I did well, to be able to build that stable team around, to be able to focus on the business side, the things that I wanted to create, the things that I knew were going to change, that we had to have energy for.
 
Shannon Waller: Let's talk about some of those changes, because you have weathered some brutal ones as far as I'm concerned, some major, major challenges, downturns, you name it. I mean, industrial products kind of go up and down. So can you share some of those? Because one of the things that I think is admirable in entrepreneurs that I look up to, which you're one, is that ability to be resilient, to have grit, I've been rereading Anti-Fragile, you know, to actually make good use of those challenges, which you do a brilliant job of doing. And I think that it's so intriguing to learn, not just the good times and the success, but actually how you got there and how you weathered those storms. So can you share some of the, both the ups and the downs of your entrepreneurial journey so far?
 
Gary Mottershead: Sure, we won't take a long, long time to do it. But there's a couple of things that are really important in that, you know, I'd like to go back to almost the beginnings of being an entrepreneur. We were talking about before we got on, when is it more risk not to make a decision?
 
Shannon Waller: Right.
 
Gary Mottershead: And for me, and I gave the example of the workshop, the 10x workshop that we did not so long ago, was the fact that my decision to leave DuPont was the right decision for me, even though I was on a good track, I would have been in management, doing all the things that were there. So not to go was a greater risk because I wasn't comfortable with what I saw in the future. And to me, that's how an entrepreneur is driven. There's things that they're just driven to do and they don't know why they have to do it that way.
 
And so a couple of years later, when I started the first business, the tire recycling business, which was something I really knew nothing about. I got involved in business partners I knew nothing about. And maybe part of that story you probably don't even know was when I first got started, the tire fire, a big tire fire happened here in Ontario in 1989. Well, at that point in time, the government said any place with more than 100,000 tires on it was shut down. Well, the place that we had just acquired in November and the fire was in February had more than 100,000 tires on it.
 
So not only had I invested in a business, Christie was born, my wife was on maternity leave and not earning any money. I wasn't earning any money. I'd thrown $50,000 into the pot. Doesn't seem like a lot, but it was a lot then when you're not earning anything. And I now had to pay a guard 24 hours a day, seven days a week, and not operate. That's my start as an entrepreneur.
 
Shannon Waller: Yeah, you started on the down.
 
Gary Mottershead: Yeah, so you know how everybody wants to be, you always say, let's go from success to significance, right? Well, I am built upside down. I wanted to be significant before I was successful. So I said, can I do something? Can I do something with these tires, you know, and then can I make them into something? And some crazy notion that I figured I could do this, which I did, by the way, in the end, it worked out. And to the extent that we made and sold what we called cryogenic tire recycling facilities, we made them all up, we sold them, we've installed them in Europe, Mexico, US, Canada, as well as Japan. Sold a number of them around. And it was very gratifying to do all of that. Wasn't very successful from a financial perspective, but certainly set the tone.
 
And there isn't anything, I mean I could go into lots of detail, I couldn't think of anything that I would do that would be any harder than that. But I have a little funny incident with respect to that. I remember getting applying for a grant from the government about recycling tires, a research grant. And I went and built a whole new facility. It cost about a million bucks. We borrowed about 600,000 of it, which we didn't have. And then I threw an event on Earth Day. And I invited the minister of the environment to come down, and I invited so many people, turned the whole plant over into a show place. And I said I'd start the plant, except the plant wouldn't run. So we had to fake it. But I made sure that the minister, when he was coming, was bringing a check with him for $400,000.
 
Shannon Waller: Nice.
 
Gary Mottershead: So I went up on the podium and picked up the check. As I walked off the check, the banker was right there to take it from my hands.
 
Shannon Waller: Excellent timing. Good showmanship.
 
Gary Mottershead: So I think of all the crazy things that I did back then just to make something happen. However, in the end and sort of your story that you wanted to hear is that when I sold that business was in 1998 and I got out with my shirt. They kept $100,000 that they owed me. My partners turned their back on me and I left with nothing and I'm 45 years old. So my father just passed away, I had time to go be with him, and so now I'm the oldest male member of the family, and I have four sisters, and I kind of go, you know, something has to work at this point. So I had started to do a little bit of coaching, but not very much at that point with Strategic Coach.
 
And then I was being asked for a couple of years if I would work with this factory in China. And I said, I don't sell finished product. I've been in DuPont to sell raw materials and the tire recycling sold raw materials as well. And anyway, so they convinced me to do it. And then I go to them, I said, all right, I'll start this and I'll sell for you. But I said, I can't pay you. So I'm going to buy from somebody that I don't know. And I'll tell you, I'll pay you when I get paid.
 
And so started GCP. GCP Last America at the time, GCP Industrial Products. And we then built that business from 0 to 25 million. Over that time, we became profitable and successful. We became the largest importer of industrial sheet rubber. And to me, the whole thing that was important was all based on recycled material because I wanted to do it. But until now, Shannon, I haven't been able to tell anybody because nobody really cares. We've just become Green Circle certified and we can tell people about that. So it's been that hidden secret for 35 years for me.
 
Shannon Waller: Wow. Congratulations.
 
Gary Mottershead: Thank you. So the thing is, because now I have somebody else that certifies it for us as opposed to us being certifying it for ourselves. So what I want to say is that it doesn't matter when, when you need to start over, what you need to do. The time is never up unless you say it's up. And the mark of an entrepreneur is not how many times you get knocked down, but how many times you get back up. And so, as the things you talked about, 2018, I thought we were over again because President Trump was in the first time, immediately announced duties on the products, with we have ships on the water, orders were cancelled, and I'm in my sixties and I'm sitting there, I remember being, I was up at the cottage and found out this happening, we got stuff coming in, and I said, I've been doing this for 20 plus years, I'm in my sixties, I said, is this how it ends?
 
We had about a week, two weeks at most to figure out how we're going to deal with 30% price increases when our world usually only deals with single digit increases over years. Anyway, we did and we got on and prospered. And then of course the pandemic and then all the freight things that go on and supply chain challenges. So yes, we've dealt with a lot and we feel that we have what we call a great crisis muscle. You know my team, you've coached my team before. And that's Nathan's expression, crisis muscle.
 
But what happened? In the course of all of that, and I know you're going to come to it, is in 2020, I said, you know, what if I could tell people about the things I've learned in the last 20 years, both coaching and in this business, and I started writing a book. And partway through, I started early part of 2020, and then halfway through the pandemic hit, so we finished the second half, and then I let it sit for two and a half years because I couldn't bear to read it.
 
Shannon Waller: That's interesting.
 
Gary Mottershead: And so I had the manuscript done, but the thing is why I was nervous was I'm trying to talk about the future and we've just gone through the biggest change that we've had in this world in a hundred years. So if I'm writing about the future, if what I've just written doesn't stand the test of the last year, two years or two and a half years as it turned out to be, it doesn't need to be published. It doesn't go anywhere. So Karen and I, who you know, my wife Karen, we were down, our 40th anniversary was in April of 2020. And we paid everything up by end of February. Of course, March 17th, pandemic, it can't go.
 
So we finally take the trip in November of 2022 down to the Barbados and I took all these things to read. The last thing I read was the manuscript, because I couldn't bear to think about what was gonna happen. And as I started reading through, I said, oh, this is okay. Needs to be cleaned up, needs to be this, needs to be done that. And so that then came out for me, which is really, you know, as you know what it's like to write a book, you've done a number of them. It's a big step. And when you tell your own story that you want other people to gain from. So yeah, so it was a little bit cathartic in a way for me, but also very gratifying that just as you said, we've had to live a nimble future all the way through.
 
All the changes, all the things that have gone on, continue to go on, we're facing again now, but our team is remarkably calm because they've gone through it in different ways before and everybody knows the situation in 2018. We didn't know what it was going to be. And so as you said to me about how I am how I'm different, you know there's a different confidence level you have over time when you get to a certain point.
 
Shannon Waller: So I just want to say the whole title of the book. So the book is called Nimble Future: Reinterpret Your Past, Protect Your Present, Engage In Your Future. I've had several conversations with you about what it takes to have a nimble future. And I find it so energizing when we've chatted about it. So thank you. Thank you for sharing your experience because I think for newer entrepreneurs who've not gone through those things, I mean, Dan talks about recessions. He goes, yeah, I think this is about my sixth or seventh. What do you do when we thought there's going to be a recession a year and a half ago?
 
So it's that ability to be nimble and to have, I love that term, crisis muscle, and actually to be so savvy and so smart, to have the confidence, and I want to talk about mindset, to have the mindset to know that okay, time to be nimble rather than be a turtle on your back and your limbs flopping around going, you know, just to be helpless. No, let's be nimble. So nimble is very much a mindset. And you've been talking about that and born through some very challenging experiences at different points of your life. So kudos. So what does it mean for someone to really be nimble? How do they think, how do they respond, all the things?
 
Gary Mottershead: And thanks for bringing that up in the sense that what I said is reinterpret your past, because let me come to the point you're saying is that our past is so important. Our past is there. And I love Dan's expression about forgiveness is giving up the hope of ever having a better past. But because history is really, to me, two words, his story, we get to rewrite our story. We get to rewrite our story. And so what is it about our story that's important? Not to carry the burdens forward, but just to carry the lessons, the things that we've learned, the things that are important to go forward, which gives us the confidence. And that's why I talk about reinterpreting your past.
 
The other thing, and what's important about the second one, protect your present, is because there's so much information that's coming at us all the time. And physiologically, mentally, we're not really built for all of that. So if we allow ourselves to be inundated by everything that's going on, and we don't have a filter by which we now choose to take in information, then we get paralyzed. And so engage in your future. And what I like about that the most is that the future is not written yet.
 
Shannon Waller: Right. Yeah.
 
Gary Mottershead: So you get a chance to decide it. You get a chance to play a hand in what's going on. And the best example to me, there are two young people involved in the sales team and Strategic Coach, Nick and Jamie. They came and joined my workshop one time and we got talking about thinking about the next 10 years, visualize the next 10 years. All the clients are sitting there working on it and they're sitting at the back going, just pen in hand, sort of paralyzed. And I went up to them and said, what's the matter? What's going on?
 
He says, well, no one's ever told us we could do this. No one's ever said that we can do this. I said, well, for you two, this is the opportunity. Your future isn't ready. You get to decide what you want to put in there. And so what's important about this is that we now get to decide the information we bring forward, the information we take in, and how we filter what's going on for the future. But you have to have a direction.
 
Shannon Waller: Yes, you do. And I just want to dive into that, protect your present for a second, because I think that's vital. And I think that's where a lot of people get wiggly, put a technical term around it, is if they don't have that direction, if they don't have that intention, they don't have the means to filter in the right things. We were talking about a favorite client of both of ours, who this morning on the Weekly Planning Call talked about having the right people, the right tools, and the right resources. You don't know what's right unless you are super clear about exactly what's important to you, what your values are, where you want to go, how you want to win. You probably know where you want to get to. You may not know how. That usually gets figured out in the moment. But without that intentionality, you don't know what to protect.
 
Gary Mottershead: And you know, we're both simplifiers, so I like to simplify things. And there's a Katy Perry song, I believe it's called Roar. And she said, I stood for nothing, so I fell for everything.
 
Shannon Waller: Right. Such a good line.
 
Gary Mottershead: And I pick out little lines like that of things and say, oh, if I don't know what I'm doing and what I'm standing for, then everything's going to impact me. For example, I intentionally gather information. I don't allow it to come to me. So I don't watch TV news. I don't listen to the radio news because they get to tell me the news that they want to play for me. I'll read about it and I get to choose the articles that I want to look at, whether my Google, Yahoo, whatever feed I'm looking at that I can pull out, you know, real politics, whatever it might be. I get to pull the articles out that I want to look at because I know what I'm looking for.
 
So therefore that gives me the filter and it's not about being narrow, it's about saying … like I'm really interested what's going on with the economy, what the future looks like in that economy. We won't go into that subject today, but what's happening there. And we're certainly very interested in what's happening in the U.S. geopolitical landscape. Not the politics, but the geopolitical landscape. So I don't care about all the other pieces, but what are the things that they're saying? You know, one of the things they're saying, well, we know tariffs are going to come in. They're going to come in for everybody. So before it was just China. Well, now, is this going to level the playing field differently? Why are they really going to do this? What's the rationale?
 
Well, one of the rationales is they're going to use it to help balance the budget without raising taxes on people. That makes sense to me. Okay, now I'm watching for something in a different way than I thought about before. You know, so I look at it and go, what's going to impact you and what's going to be important for you? But you have to know what it is, where you're going. And that's what I really like about Coach, because Coach helps you really think about that. And you talked about Chad Jenkins, another one of our good clients, a coach, and he said, everything starts with vision. And it does. And so, you know, if you don't have that because it's not the easiest thing to do, we'll help you do that. We'll help you think about your vision, what's important for you. Not all the details and the how, but where you're going and why you're going there. Those are the things that are really important.
 
Shannon Waller: So let's talk about vision for a moment because my experience is, and certainly for some people listening, is that they have so many choices, it goes back to your Katy Perry quote. So how do you help entrepreneurs get clear on their vision? How do you help them just cut through the clutter to figure out what is actually important to them versus what someone else thinks is important or what they could possibly do or what some random, probably not random, but someone that they admire, tells them will be a good idea? What do you think is important in that process of people getting clear on their own vision?
 
Gary Mottershead: Well, again, like for you, things aren't very scientific. Even though I'm an engineer by training, things aren't very scientific because we're people, we're human beings, and the human part comes first, the intellectual part comes second. So first thing I want people to do is, we have a gut sense. What's your gut telling you about things? Are you doing the right things? I happen to be reading this afternoon actually somebody on LinkedIn. I said this name is familiar to me. Why don't I got it? And I remember she was in with her partner talking about marketing. But since the time that she's been, she's done five or six other things. And she was talking about she was hustler for 26 years, but she didn't ever like the hustle. She called herself a hustler anyway, like a workaholic, hustle anyway. And I go, yeah, I remember that about her. But so you've got to be able to do things that feel good for you, that you're consistent with. So getting that set. And the hardest thing I think for an entrepreneur is to be honest with themselves.
 
Shannon Waller: Oh, that's interesting.
 
Gary Mottershead: As Dan would say, all progress begins by telling the truth. So we know instinctively what we're good at. We know instinctively what mark we want to make because we all want to make a difference in some ways, how we describe it. But we may not be honest with ourselves because we haven't either given ourselves permission or feel somebody else needs to give us permission to do that. So we do what we're trained to do. We're trained to be an engineer or an accountant or a lawyer or whatever it might be. I don't mean just to be professions but in certain things. But like for example, me, I was never trained to be a coach. I turned out to be a coach for 29 years.
 
Shannon Waller: A great coach, yes.
 
Gary Mottershead: Thank you. But that was never in the plan, never happened, but all those things feel good. So you need to do that, you need to be honest with what you feel is good and we call that Unique Ability. And the other thing is to also see how other people have reacted to you. I'm going to take things just totally away from some of the things we do, but I hope they reacted to you. And when I was asked to be a coach, for example, I had to go back through my life and say, when had I done this before?
 
And I went back till I was 17 when I said, I remember sitting on the phone in the little hallway there talking to this guy about things. And I also realized in that conversation, I can only help people who want to be helped. If they don't want to be helped, there's nothing I can do with them. We work with your motivation. So, you know, you go back and again, that was me reinterpreting my past, applying it to the present and saying, how am I going to go forward? What am I going to do with this? And so there are many things that we've all done in our lives that we maybe just haven't accepted that made a difference.
 
Shannon Waller: That is such a, first of all, brilliant example of reinterpreting your past. And I think when you're hit with a new circumstance, like being asked to be a coach or what have you, to go back and say, and Dan has told a very similar story, what are examples of where I've handled this well in the past? And I have similar stories, coaching people much older than I was at a very young age. I'm like, yeah, okay. Then you get to pull out some things and the past is this massive resource of stories and things that were relevant early on, less so now. Things that were not relevant before are incredibly important now under a new context. So thank you for sharing that example. That's a lot of wisdom right there.
 
Gary Mottershead: Well, we've got another one right now. We call it AI.
 
Shannon Waller: Yes.
 
Gary Mottershead: But AI is a large language model. Just when you talked about it, it gave me thinking about it. It's got that vast history. But what's the most important thing to get the best out of AI?
 
Shannon Waller: Your prompts.
 
Gary Mottershead: Your prompts, your questions. So if you don't know what you're looking for, I mean, back to just the same thing. If you don't know what you're looking for, the old expression with computers, garbage in, garbage out. And so you can get a lot of great things if you choose what it is you're looking for and not start to get distracted and going around in different directions. Well, we have to do that in our lives as well.
 
Shannon Waller: Yeah.
 
Gary Mottershead: We have to decide the things that are important for us. And it may seem like I'm cutting an avenue off, But I tell our clients that there's FOMO, right? We all know what FOMO is. Fear of missing out. Well, what's JOMO? Joy of missing out. Joy of missing out. So, oh, well, am I really going to miss out on something? Well, you don't miss out on anything if you've chosen the path that you're going to take. So you just have to say, well, that wasn't for me to be involved in.
 
Shannon Waller: It's taken me a long, long, long time to come to grips with that. Like probably 40 years. But that's, you know what?
 
Gary Mottershead: I had to do it a little earlier because I was on the move all the time.
 
Shannon Waller: True.
 
Gary Mottershead: And there's certain things that I just could not do. But even consciously today, there are things that I do and I stick to my Free Days. We're going to talk about Free Days, Focus Days and Buffer Days. And that's still a big cornerstone. And so Fridays have now become a Free Day for me. They did earlier in the year. So I've had a bit of time with the Coach helping convince them that I don't do things on Friday, but we're getting there. We're getting there.
 
Shannon Waller: You sure you can't coach on Fridays, Gary?
 
Gary Mottershead: No, I don't coach on Mondays or Fridays. So anyways, come to my workshop is Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday. You know, you're going to be midweek. I got it. But the point of it was that that's a boundary.
 
Shannon Waller: Yeah.
 
Gary Mottershead: And that boundaries made a huge difference for me because one of the relationship with my wife and the time that I have personally and the things to know, because I believe all of us have performances to give. And we give performances all the time. But not everybody thinks about it as a performance. But if you're talking to somebody on the phone, if you're writing an email, if you're obviously giving your presentations, but there's a lot of things that we do that are all performances. And I tell my whole team, everything you do is a performance. So you need to be ready for your performance. You can't perform all the time. So Friday's the day I don't have to perform. It's a nice feeling. I don't have to do that.
 
Shannon Waller: Well, and going back to the time system, I think it's key for people to recognize that you need that downtime, you need that time away so you can come back fully energized, fully present on your best self. If we expect the same thing from ourselves every single day, day in and day out with no break, Part of you is gonna gear back. Your body will set a pace, even if you don't, just to sustain itself. And so it makes sense. Take those breaks. A lot of us work better in terms of like in spurts, right? And then we're on as long as we can be off. And I think that's, again, great wisdom.
 
Gary Mottershead: Well, the great model for us is Dan, Dan Sullivan, because you work closely with him and I've known him a long time. He just told me in front of three members of my team last week that we're starting to get to know each other after 33 years, so it's okay. I know you've got a big smile, so it goes on. But the thing is, Dan has been far more creative recently when he gave up coaching Signature Program and then gave up coaching 10x Program because he's got the time to be able to focus on that. And the same thing with me, Christine, who was working with me for 16 years, just told me the last two and three years have been the most creative years for me because their are just things I'm not doing anymore. But I still have my business, I still have all the people, I still have more Coach days in there than I had before. But it's not Fridays, so a lot of my summer is off, and things that would be important to me and be around for.
 
Shannon Waller: Well, I like it, Gary. And I think this is one of the other things that's a characteristic of a successful entrepreneur, let me put it that way, is that they keep expanding their freedoms. So we talk about the freedom of time, the freedom of money, freedom of relationship, and freedom of purpose. And all through this conversation, what I've been hearing is how you keep expanding those. And purpose, to me, comes down to your book, being nimble, which I think is fantastic, Nimble Future. But even now, you're still expanding your freedom of time.
 
Gary Mottershead: Well, so we talked about time. The last two years have been my best earning years ever.
 
Shannon Waller: Yay!
 
Gary Mottershead: For those who want to know, in 2025, I'll be 72 years old.
 
Shannon Waller: Bam!
 
Gary Mottershead: But that's not the point. So I've got time. We've got the money, relationships. My purpose in life is helping people and organizations grow. And so I just want to work with those people who want to grow. Now, if I'm going to work with people that want to grow, I have to grow. I have to be better next year than I was this year. I have to be doing things like that. And again, my purpose, the book, the podcast, these things, coaching, things that I do. So, my other thought is that when I was on, you probably know Pete Worrell, another one of our clients. By the way, have you done the Kolbe with them yet, their team?
 
Shannon Waller: Yes. Well, actually I'm coaching them next week.
 
Gary Mottershead: Perfect. Awesome. So Pete was on my podcast and I was on his. And so he said, well, you know, people go through stages in their life and chapters. And he says, you know, Gary, and he just did this past summer. He said, what's the stage of your life called? And I said, new beginnings.
 
Shannon Waller: Oh, nice.
 
Gary Mottershead: He didn't comment, but I thought, oh, maybe he wasn't expecting someone like this to be able to do that. But I really feel this is a complete remake time because I've been given that opportunity. Well, I got to tell you, 33 years ago when I joined Coach, that was nowhere on my mind. Just the ability to be able to think, have the mindsets that we have and to continue to be able to expand it and gain more, not give up anything, not give up your time, not give up your income, not give up your relationships and expand to your purpose. That's huge, absolutely huge for me. That's what I wish, that and more for all of the clients, all the people that come in, they get to see that, they get to experience that for themselves. And so, as you said, you felt I was either calmer, more relaxed, whatever it was, because I am. You just get to the point. And that's what I do it for. That's what I do it for them and the appreciation. And I get to watch them in their lives. It's great. It's a fabulous experience. Isn't it great?
 
Shannon Waller: Isn't it the best? I mean, being a coach is such a blessing because you get to see other people grow in the ways that are important to them. Because coaching is really just asking really good questions. That's what good coaching is in a way.
 
Gary Mottershead: Don't give away our secrets.
 
Shannon Waller: You'd be hard pressed to come up with those questions on your own.
 
Gary Mottershead: Right.
 
Shannon Waller: Right. I mean, and you and I are both clients as well.
 
Gary Mottershead: Yeah, we are.
 
Shannon Waller: We're both in the workshops and we've got our own butts in the seats so that we can keep going through those exercises and doing that kind of thinking. But I think what I'm left with is this incredible sense of expansion where you can have increased expansive freedom of time, money, relationship, and purpose, which is what we call having a Self-Managing and even a Self-Multiplying Company. The only stuff you give up is stuff you don't like doing. Like you don't have to compromise, you don't have to like chop off an arm or something, you actually can have it all.
 
Gary Mottershead: You know, here's the thing, and I've kind of figured this out too, is that I play golf. I'm decent, but I'm not fanatical about it. So there are two things I say about golf. I'll say the first one is that a lot of the guys that I play with in the summertime, because it's men's day on Monday, and I make sure now I go to Mondays, so I get there to be with the guys. And one of the things that they asked me, they said, when are you going to retire? And I said, I'm always retiring. I'm always retiring from things I don't want to do. And I said, on the other hand, golf is the reason I don't retire. I'm just not going to do it all the time.
 
So I'm there. I'm there for the Mondays. I'm there to be with the guys and do that, which I didn't do for most of my life. But there isn't any guilt about that. Nothing that's really critical. But when the summer's over, I come back to the office and I get back to the things that I want to do and put that together. And so those are the things that I just never could have seen before. It's not like a switch. You come to work or you turn it off. Entrepreneur's a lifestyle, not a job. So you've got to learn how to deal with this in your own head and put all the pieces together. Because what happens at work, you really don't want to take home. And what happens at home, you really don't want to bring to work, but it's there in the one mind. So how do you do that? We help you think about those things.
 
Shannon Waller: Very cool. And thank you for doing the work yourself and for leading the way. Because I find when we can see you, when we can see Dan making those kind of decisions and living their life that particular way, you're like, oh, I could do that too. And that's really inspiring. Oh, Gary, this is so fun. I feel like we could talk forever, but I'm excited about Nimble Future for you. Love the book. It's just such a cool book. And everything that you bring to your coaching, people are lucky to be in your workshops. So if anyone's interested on how they can get a little more time with Gary at Strategic Coach, just check out strategiccoach.com. Beautiful new revamped website. Yay. Lots of great information there. Lots of great resources to get you started even before you start Coach, which is really fun. But as we've been talking about, if we can help you expand your freedoms, live the life that you want and have that quality of lifestyle and ambition that you're looking for, Coach is a great place to be.
 
Gary Mottershead: Absolutely. And it's been totally game changer, life changing for me. But you know what? I don't feel it because it's just all so natural. It was always something we had beside us and behind us.
 
Shannon Waller: Wonderful. Thank you so much, Gary, for your time.
 
Gary Mottershead: Shannon, thank you so much. Always a pleasure. And I know our paths will continue to cross.
 
Shannon Waller: Very soon.