Episode Transcript
[00:00:05] Speaker A: Hey, everybody, and welcome to the Worst Advice I Ever Got. I'm your host, Sean Taylor, along with my producer, jb and today's guest is Ryan Heckman. Ryan, on top of being a two time Olympian in the sport of skiing, has been an investor, CEO and entrepreneur for nearly 25 years with a calling to build great organizations that elevate the industries and lives that touch with this deep sense of purpose. Today, Ryan is a co founder, managing partner, and CEO of Rally Day Partners with a vision to establish the firm as a destination for the best entrepreneurs who seek a more powerful and fulfilling source of capital and partnership as they scale their organizations.
[00:00:48] Speaker B: Hey, Ryan, thank you so much for joining us today.
[00:00:51] Speaker C: Oh, it's an honor to be here, Sean.
[00:00:53] Speaker B: Well, Ryan, we don't beat around the bush on this podcast. We just jump right in and ask the golden question. What's the worst advice you ever got?
[00:01:00] Speaker C: The worst advice I ever got was actually from my father, who told me to go do great things and then give back. Sounds fine.
[00:01:09] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:01:09] Speaker B: Interesting. So he wants you to be successful and he wants you to give. So. So he came from your father. Tell us more about when he gave you this advice.
[00:01:16] Speaker C: I was an athlete. I was a skier. The Skerio was about 20 minutes from my home, and it was an ideal opportunity for my parents to torture us. And in the case of my father, he was not an active father, always working, and he. He never gave me advice. In fact, this may be the only advice my father ever gave me. Ironically, when he did give me this advice, I. I was 9 or 10 years old at the time, paid attention because of the limited amount of times he did give me advice.
And so that drove me for like 30 years.
[00:01:56] Speaker B: You heard it, it's your dad. You're like, hey, all right, dad, yeah, I'm going to make you proud. And you pursued this, right?
[00:02:03] Speaker C: Yeah. So I need to do a little biography here. I was 10 years old when my father gave me that advice. It wasn't but six years later that I was actually in the Olympics as a skier. I represented our country in the 1992 Olympics in Albertville, France, and then again in 94 in Lillehammer, Norway. So I lived up to the success part early in my life. And then it came time to get an education, which I did, and to get a real job, which I also did. My first job and only job I've really had since has been in private equity, which is a field that's pretty brutal, much like athletics, I would say, very cutthroat environment. And it's very objectively a win or lose field. And I did that for roughly 15 years and did well. The give back thing gave me a lot of permission to what I think are fatal sacrifices that prevented me from a full life and even from reaching my full potential that I. I regret, I guess, in some way.
[00:03:12] Speaker B: Know, part of the. Part of the point of the podcast is to say, let's dig into a little bit about how the worst advice actually negatively impacted you. So we've been talking a little bit about success on the slopes and representing your country in the Olympics, which is all great, and you jump into private equity and you're successful for 15 years, but you kind of alluded there to. There was something maybe going on, you know, in the background. Can you unwrap that a little bit?
[00:03:39] Speaker C: Yeah, I mean, I. I guess I would call it kind of a warrior mentality. Visually, it would look something like just drawing a circle around my body and not focusing on other people. You might call it a form of narcissism, you know, in an Olympic athlete. And I would say this about most athletes, especially in individual sports. Individual athletes can't blame anything on anybody for anything. One way I would describe being an Olympic athlete is that there's only four people that get chosen to go to the Olympics, and there's about 50 people behind you that want your slot. And if you have one bad day, you get a hall pass or a mulligan. Two bad days, it kind of becomes a trend. And the third bad day you have, you're out. And the odds of you getting back in are slim. It's kind of brutal. And so, you know, my dad's advice around doing something great with my life was very motivating, and that I could always give back later gave me permission to do whatever I needed to do to win that day, which didn't make me a great teammate.
[00:04:51] Speaker B: You isolated yourself to a bit from the standpoint of other team members, and it was, I'm successful or I'm unsuccessful. And when I'm successful, it's me and really nothing to do with you. And so you live many years in this environment, yet maybe it got a little lonely.
[00:05:08] Speaker C: I literally, when I was preparing for this podcast, I really loved the question. I have listened to your podcast, and I've rarely considered bad advice. I mean, I've always thought of any advice was good advice, you know, just given how important my dad was in my life. This one was not advice that I. I took. It was more that this advice was given to me. By my father, it's different. I look at my athletic career very selfishly, and then when I moved into private equity, the fact of the matter is that you got promoted, you got more money, the more people thought you were adding value.
And so it just sets in motion a whole bunch about incentives that actually fed off the way I was raised. I mean, I. I understand, you know, receiving bad advice at 20 or 30 years old, but there's a difference when you're 10.
[00:06:07] Speaker B: Yeah, you literally grew up around it. You took that advice and. And it molded you to be the competitive, driven individual doing things for you, you know, in a way, knowing that.
[00:06:19] Speaker D: Later you can give back.
[00:06:20] Speaker B: Yeah, later I'll become more of a team guy or I'll give back. And you took that advice, I guess, really to drive yourself to success in your. In your business life as well, Is that fair to say?
[00:06:31] Speaker C: Yeah, I mean, you know, the one half of the equation that my dad gave me, which was go do great things with your life, was playing out perfectly. I think that taking that mindset of winning at all costs into the business world was also a contributor to my success there too. So the problem with this advice was I got reinforcement all along the way that this was great advice. Right?
[00:07:01] Speaker B: Yeah, but it's. There's an imbalance in there somewhere.
[00:07:03] Speaker A: Right.
[00:07:04] Speaker B: The equation didn't balance. When did it start to not balance for you? When did this become bad advice?
[00:07:09] Speaker C: I mean, we're talking about 30 years of my life here. Okay? So it wasn't like I was a bad guy. It was just I wasn't the guy that I knew I could be or that made the world a better place, if that makes sense.
[00:07:26] Speaker B: Totally get it. I can relate very much to what you're saying here, Ryan, because it's probably more an inward evaluation than an external evaluation. People weren't walking around going, God, that Ryan, what a jerk. It was more your self reflection of yourself.
[00:07:40] Speaker A: Fair.
[00:07:40] Speaker C: Yeah. I'd say my awakening, my buddies call it, my midlife crises. I had become a managing partner and otherwise in charge of a private equity firm when I was only 32 years old. And I mean, I have 32 year olds at the firm where I'm the CEO now. And I cannot believe that I got to the top at that age.
It's staggering. And I don't mean that with any arrogance.
It's more sort of like, you know, like, just. It's crazy, but by the time I was 40, there were a few things that happened. I. I had a daughter, I had a company Go bankrupt because the founder had committed fraud. And the third thing was, my grandfather died. I really looked up to my grandfather. He was a product of the Depression. He met his wife in the elevator at the telephone company. His job was to basically take memorandums from one executive to the other. So he was basically like the email of the 1920s, just a really cool guy. I was the sole grandson and family member in Denver, and he was only about 5 miles away from my house. And so all these years that I was building up my career, he was five minutes away and he would call and it was obvious that a visit would be really helpful. And I went all those years telling myself that I'll give back to this guy when I have time and after I've achieved the mission. And he died that same year at the age of 97, by the way.
[00:09:24] Speaker D: So you had plenty of time.
[00:09:25] Speaker C: I mean, there's no excuses for that. You know, I mean, I could say all the while, you know, I would not come home from work to tuck my kids in or have dinner because I wanted to be successful. I could tell you that on vacation I would load up my calendar and come down to the pool at like 5:00. I could tell you that my mom had like a computer problem and wanted me to help her and didn't. I mean, I could tell you all these examples of foregoing giving to these people that loved me and gave their life for me. But I was on a mission to do great things and was going to just give back later. But with my grandfather's passing, I realized there was a point at which giving back later had an expiration date.
And, you know, I kind of had a. I had a moment.
[00:10:21] Speaker B: When you went through that moment, how did you process it?
[00:10:24] Speaker C: Well, there was a fourth moment. I was at a conference in Orlando, Florida for a bunch of private equity guys, and it was about 2,000 men. And I was looking at this sea of white men in blue blazers, and I was thinking about my grandfather and I was like, I do not want to be one of these guys. And so I decided that day to quit private equity. As I say that, I want to point out that I was making over a million dollars a year. I had reached the pinnacle of my career at the age of 40 and my flight home from Orlando to Colorado, it's like a three and a half hour flight. I mean, I cried the entire flight. And it was me mourning kind of the end of my career in some ways. And also just like, shame for not being the guy that all these People would want me to be because I wanted to be successful. And so I landed and I made a decision to change my life. And I know my, my grandfather would be very proud of that.
[00:11:21] Speaker D: So when you change what happened, my.
[00:11:24] Speaker C: Business partner, Nancy Phillips, calls it a. When you pull a fish out of the water and the hook still in their mouth and they flop around the deck, that was kind of my soul for probably a year. You know, I was really struggling with, you know, like, what do I do now? I had become addicted to many of the accoutrements of success and money and so forth. And so it wasn't like I, I landed and started a charity, okay, so wasn't quite that clean. I did a number of things, bought a small business with about 11 employees. And my thinking was I'm going to take what I learned from private equity and I'm going to just pour it into my employees and help these employees grow as humans and therefore my business will flourish. And I took that business from 11 employees to 450 employees over a five year period of time. With this entirely different mindset around almost treating that company as a platform for the personal development of the employees that work there, I doubled down on my relationships. I reconciled a lot of those of deferred opportunities to invest in my family. In essence, if you think about that circle that I had formed around myself, I just, over a period of about 10 years, I just kept increasing the circumference of that circle.
And then I decided, with two other very dear friends, to start a new private equity firm that was entirely devoted to the same mentality of being helpful, humanizing business and building futures for our employees. And all the while like enjoying my relationships.
As it turns out, giving now, regardless of your success, is sort of the secret to life. There's, there's three problems with giving back. One is a time issue. To defer giving to others until you've been successful is just a really bad recipe for your happiness. Part of the second problem with giving back, which is it implies a transaction. I'll do this and then I'll give back.
And the third problem is that it misses entirely, like how you're actually both successful and significant in this world. And by that I mean, you'll have to forgive me for the length of this, but if you think about the first time you opened your iPhone and you took it out of the case and you opened the box that had this crisp air that sort of vacuumed out and you just saw this beautiful machine and at the store you said wow, that was expensive. And then when you actually like open this package, like, I cannot believe that I only spent 400 bucks for this thing. I mean, what that is is a value imbalance. So the difference between that which you paid for something and that which you got and what that is, is a gift. It's a gift from Steve Jobs to you. And on a personal level, the way you actually succeed in this world is by being worth way more than what people have to pay for you. This is the nature of creating value in the world on a day to day basis. And so when I did turn 40 and I did encounter this situation with my grandfather who passed, I decided to change the way I went to bed at night. I don't know about you guys, but in my early years I used to go to bed thinking about my wins and my losses. And I did make a decision after landing from Orlando that I was going to change the way I went to bed every night. And I was going to think about how many people and to what extent I helped and then how many people I hurt.
[00:15:27] Speaker B: A different form of wins and losses.
[00:15:29] Speaker C: And that really changed everything for me. One, I slept better and I became very interested in helping other people as a way of winning. I would just say, like, that shift in the way I thought about myself in the world and how I showed up has really changed everything. I'm far more successful than I was if we want to use that metric. I'm significant in the lives of the people that work with me and importantly at home. I talked to my mom and dad for an hour yesterday. My dad has Alzheimer's. I went to bed last night just thinking about, like, what if I had done that for my grandfather? What if I had done that for my kids when they were little?
What if I had paid attention, Pardon me, What if I had paid attention to their needs and measured my life on how much I helped them?
I guess the good news is, like, I found out soon enough to be able to enjoy, like, the fruits of labor as opposed to confronting winning and losing every day. The great thing about giving is that you, you can control it. There's absolutely nothing that is preventing any one of us from helping others. And when you go to bed at night, you're a winner.
And nobody, nobody, no circumstance, no competitor, nobody can get in the way of a great day.
[00:17:10] Speaker B: When, when you think about being successful in life now, how do you hope to mold that for your coworkers, for your kids, for your friends?
[00:17:22] Speaker C: Like, first of all, you've got to make the Shift in terms of the way you measure your life, I mean, that's like job one. Do you measure it by your wins or do you measure it by the number of people you help? In my private equity fund, we have a very deliberate culture and we have today 12 behaviors that we reward our people on in their performance reviews. And they're sort of like, I would highlight the first two of the 12th, and it's by design that they're number one and number two. Number one is invest in your heart and your mind and your soul. Because when you nurture your mind and your heart and your soul, it, it, it, it sort of says you are going to tend be a steward of the relationships in your life. You're going to listen to that podcast from Sean that might help your life. You're going to do those things that fill your cup so you can share that juice with other people. Behavior number two is take care of each other.
And so in two behaviors, we've changed the private equity industry because when the people at rally day are investing in themselves and then taking care of each other, they're immediately clicked into giving now as opposed to giving back later after they've become successful.
[00:18:46] Speaker D: You said something about success. So you've seen it. Even though you've changed your mindset and you act going to bed differently, are you seeing all the same financial success that you had before?
[00:18:57] Speaker C: I mean, if you look at this Quantifiably, I've created three times as much wealth in these last 10 years than the first 15 combined.
[00:19:11] Speaker D: Wow.
[00:19:12] Speaker C: The real answer is wealth. Real wealth isn't really just money, Right? It's, it's the account of. It's an account of the value that you have provided all of your stakeholders and the people that rely on you.
And if you look at it on that basis, it's a 10x return in terms of outcome, including most especially that I'm 10x as joyful and happy. And I don't want to be selfish about it, but we do have a limited amount of time to live and to contribute. And my only regret, I suppose, is that somebody told me at an earlier age that the time to give is now and that success won't certainly, but very likely follow. And if it doesn't, you've still lived a great life.
[00:20:03] Speaker B: Absolutely. It was a blessing. Speaking about being blessed to have you come and share the worst advice you ever got, Ryan, I think that when you hear the advice at first, you think, what's wrong with being successful and what's wrong with giving back? But when you make it transactional, like you talked about, it's incomplete. And I hope people that listen to this episode take that cue and don't wait to give. There's no reason to wait. Start giving now. So thanks for sharing your story. I think it's going to be very impactful to our listeners.
[00:20:37] Speaker C: Sean, thanks for creating the platform that you did. You're really contributing to a lot of folks, and in that spirit, we're kindred. And I really appreciate your work. And thank you for giving me an opportunity to share my life lessons, however modest they may be, in service to your listeners. I mean, it's a real privilege, and I take it very seriously, and I'm very grateful for the opportunity.
[00:21:09] Speaker B: Thank you so much, Ron.
[00:21:10] Speaker A: Jb, I really enjoyed meeting Ryan and talking to him. He's another example of someone who got the worst advice they ever got at a really, really young age and from someone who was in a formative, impressionable relationship. You know, his father. How do you not listen to that?
[00:21:31] Speaker D: For sure. And his life was pretty good. He was like, hey, you got to work hard and make the Olympic team. He's like, okay. And then he did, and it was like, okay, but maybe this isn't bad advice.
[00:21:40] Speaker A: Yeah, his life was great. I mean, he makes the Olympics twice, and he's wildly successful in business. And really, as a result of this advice, it drove him. And I love his line. I didn't take this advice. It was given to me. It was like he was saying he didn't have a choice but to listen to this advice.
[00:22:04] Speaker D: Yeah. Like you were saying, you know, from the dad. From the father. You're like, you know. And he even said this might have been the only piece of advice he ever gave me in my life. So, you know, that really. That's gonna mean something to you as well. But I always love the episodes where there's an impetus in which, like, the advice becomes bad.
[00:22:21] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah. We were. I mean, we're. We're 15 minutes into our conversation with him, and I'm going, okay. It was this feeling of not being complete. And it really took this. These moments in his life to realize that it wasn't complete.
[00:22:37] Speaker D: Sure. I think everybody probably got a little emotional when he's talking about his grandfather passing, you know, and that it really hammered home that. And then part of the advice, you know, be successful and then give back. Like you said, there's an expiration date.
[00:22:51] Speaker A: Yeah. He's. He's obviously very in tune with his emotional understanding of himself because it takes a certain person to realize I was wrong before, and I can see exactly why, and to recognize that for himself and to find a way to turn it around. It's really an excellent example of what we do here on the Worst Advice I Ever Got.
[00:23:13] Speaker D: Yeah, it's the perfect kind of episode and probably being aired right now from your drive back from Thanksgiving. And if you're wondering if all of them are this good, they are.
[00:23:23] Speaker A: Exactly. Well, I'm being around Thanksgiving. I'm thankful for Ryan, I'm thankful for our guests on the podcast, I'm thankful for all the people that it takes for these episodes to come together, and I'm grateful for everything that gets done to bring this podcast to you. And ultimately, without you, our listeners, this wouldn't be possible. So thank you for continuing to tune in. Be sure to follow us on our social channels. Make sure you don't miss any of the other great content we're putting together each and every week for you. We'll see you next time for another episode of the Worst Advice I Ever Got.
