You Will Never Be Ready, So Stop Making That the Requirement
I want to tell you about a man who used to wake up at 4:30 in the morning, sweating, certain that the sound outside was a tow truck coming for his car.
His bed was on the floor. There was no frame, because there was no money. He had co-signed nothing and owned nothing, and the little he did have was slipping through his fingers one late payment at a time. Around that same stretch, he flew to Connecticut to referee a college playoff game, sat down with his crew for the pregame breakfast they always shared, and could not afford to order food. When a friend quietly offered to cover him, he said he wasn’t hungry. He was too proud to say the truth.
That man is Bryan Neale.
Today Bryan is the founder of Blind Zebra, an NFL referee who stood at the center of a Super Bowl, and a keynote speaker whose ideas have trained thousands of people. I have had the privilege of working alongside him and his team for years, camera in hand, watching him build. And the reason I wanted to write this down is that almost nobody who admires the finished thing has any idea about the breakfast he couldn’t buy.
(You can watch my full conversation with Bryan here.)
Nobody Ever Sees the Climb
Bryan told me that he once walked through his whole résumé of failures out loud with one of his sons, and halfway through he thought, I am a loser. I have not been good at anything. Because when you stack the failed attempts next to each other, there are always more of them than there are wins.
We do not see that stack. We see Blind Zebra. We see the Super Bowl patch. We see the guy everybody in the room seems to know. What we miss is the environmentally friendly cleaning equipment business that took him from a good job at Procter and Gamble to complete bankruptcy in about fifteen months. What we miss is the power getting shut off in a house he shared with a roommate, and the roommate gently putting the bill in his own name.
Here is the part worth sitting with. Bryan will tell you exactly why that business failed, and it has nothing to do with cleaning products. His reason for starting it was so that he could walk around town and tell people he owned a business. One hundred percent ego. When the whole engine of a thing is you wanting to look a certain way, it does not have the fuel to survive the hard part.
You Are Not a Bad Person, You Just Cannot Add
The thing that pulled Bryan out was not a windfall or a lucky break. It was a reframe.
He found a book by an offbeat author named Stuart Wilde, and one line rearranged something in him.
“Just because you go bankrupt doesn’t mean you’re a bad person. It means you can’t add very well.” (Bryan Neale, on the book that changed his self-talk)
Read that again, because it is doing something sneaky and important. The voice in Bryan’s head had been screaming a character verdict. You are a failure. You are bad. You are the kind of person things like this happen to. And that line quietly demoted the whole crisis from a verdict about his soul to a problem with his arithmetic. He had spent more than he brought in. That is a math problem. And a math problem has the decency to be solvable.
I think most of us are walking around with a math problem that we have mislabeled as a character flaw. We treat a bad season as evidence about who we are, when it is usually just evidence about what we did.
Why the Trampoline Never Gets You Out
Once the shame loosened its grip, Bryan still had to actually get out of the hole. And he has a way of describing this that I have not been able to shake.
Most people, he says, try to jump out of a hole instead of climbing out. Picture a thirty foot hole and a trampoline. You bounce as hard as you can, you get some air, and then gravity brings you right back to the bottom. You are exhausted and you have gone nowhere. The alternative is a step stool. You get up one level. You stand there until you feel solid. Then you find the next level. It is slower and far less dramatic, and it is the only version that actually works.
If you grew up anywhere near the Midwest, Bryan has a second image for you. When a car is stuck in the snow, you do not floor it. You rock it, gently, back and forth, until it starts to move. Small movement is not the consolation prize. Small movement is the whole strategy.
The First Domino Is Never the One You Expect
This is where Bryan says the thing that made me want to write all of this down.
When people set out to do something meaningful, he told me, the failure is almost never in the process. The failure is the failure to start. People will happily plan a thing forever. They will research it, watch the videos, sketch the org chart, and price the equipment. And then they never do the one action that makes it real.
He calls that action the first domino, and he insists it is never the one you think.
Ask a room full of people what the first domino is for running a marathon and they will say get a training plan, or buy the right shoes. Wrong. The first domino is going to the registration page and paying the fee. Now you are registered, and everything else has a reason to follow. The reason people do not register is that they open the twenty week training plan first, decide it is impossible, and quietly walk away. Want to start a podcast? The first domino is not finding the perfect topic or the perfect co-host. It is spending seventy-five dollars on a starter kit so a box shows up at your door and stares at you until you open it. Want to start a company? Bryan started Blind Zebra by going to the Indiana Secretary of State website, typing in the name, and paying seventy-five dollars. He did not have a business plan. He had a name and an LLC, and that was enough to make it a thing.
My favorite version of this is what he does on stage. He asks who has always wanted to take flying lessons, gets a volunteer up, and then calls the airport and buys them a lesson right there in front of everyone. First domino, pushed for you, live. And the whole room realizes at once that the thing standing between them and their dream was never the dream. It was one uncomfortable phone call they kept refusing to make.
You Will Never Be Ready, So That Cannot Be the Requirement
Here is the trap underneath all of it. We are waiting to feel ready.
Bryan’s answer is blunt and freeing. You will never be ready. You are never ready to get your pilot’s license. You are never ready to start the podcast. Readiness is not a feeling that arrives before you begin. It is something you assemble on the way, one rep at a time, long after you have already started.
He lived this in the most literal way possible. Before he made the NFL, he used to jog to an empty college stadium at six in the morning and referee an imaginary game. No ball, no players, no crowd. Just a man on a chalk line, throwing an invisible flag, building the reps nobody asked him to build. He kept it up until a groundskeeper chased him off the grass. That is what wanting it looks like when no one is watching and no one is making you.
The Freedom Hiding Inside the Discipline
There is one more turn in Bryan’s story that I did not expect, because it runs against his own personality.
Bryan is a visionary. He is the what if we did this and what if we did that guy. People like that usually run screaming from structure. But the operating system he built for salespeople, the one that has grown into hundreds of certified coaches, is almost aggressively systematic. Checklists. Process. Rules like integrator wins, so that when he and his CEO disagree, the argument has a clean ending.
When I asked how a visionary built something so disciplined, he gave me the line I keep repeating to myself. Discipline creates freedom. He spent most of his life running from constraint, and then discovered that constraint was the thing that finally let him breathe. Once his calendar is handled and his deals are honest and his tools are in place, the anxious static goes quiet, and he is free to do the actual art. The structure is not the cage. The structure is what unlocks the door.
Your First Domino Is Smaller Than You Think
If you have read this far, there is a decent chance you are carrying something. A business you keep almost starting. A book that has lived on your bucket list for thirty years, the way Bryan’s did until he finally called a publisher last week. A voice you suspect the world needs and have decided, quietly, is not worth the trouble.
I want to be your guide here for a second, the way Bryan was mine. The people who need what you carry are already out there looking. Right now they are finding someone with less insight and less care than you, not because that person is better, but because that person started and you have not.
So do not plan it. Do not get ready. Find the smallest true action, the domino that makes the rest inevitable, and push it today. Register the thing. Buy the kit. Open the blank document and write the first line. Sometimes, Bryan says, it is as small as creating the folder.
Create the space, and you will be on your way.
You are an artist. Your voice is needed. Go create your art.
Watch the full conversation with Bryan Neale and subscribe to Create Your Art at 1898creative.com. #createyourart
#createyourart
Full Transcript
Darren: Welcome back to another episode of the Create Your Art podcast, where we believe that you are an artist and that you need to do the hard work of bringing that out into the world. We’re on a mission to help you find your voice and create your art. Today I get to sit down with an awesome dude, Mr. Bryan Neale. Bryan, thank you.
Bryan: Flattered to be here.
Darren: I’m so proud of you, as weird as that might sound. We worked together for a long time. You got to start things, and you did it. And once you do it, it’s a thing. I’m so happy for you.
Bryan: Man, I love that. It’s been an honor to work with you guys and the Blind Zebra team over the last handful of years, bringing all the visuals to life and fun stuff. It’s been cool.
Darren: It’s my claim to fame. I say, hey, I get to work with Bryan Neale, and everybody’s like, oh yeah, I know that guy, because you know everybody.
Bryan: I’m trying to be, trying to.
Darren: There’s a thousand places we could go, because you do all kinds of things. You’ve been podcasting for most of your life. A keynote speaker. You have a fantastic sales coaching business, Blind Zebra, which is the best name of a company ever, which we’ll explain in a minute. But you’re also an NFL referee, which as an NFL fan is super cool, because I get to see you on TV every once in a while and go, hey, it’s Bryan.
Bryan: Unless I screw your team over. Then it’s not so cool, right?
Darren: If you’re reffing against the Colts, then no.
Bryan: [VERIFY, garbled in raw audio] There’s only been one time. We flip. It’s a thing.
Bryan: Windows are words into the soul. [VERIFY: Bryan references this line again later, so attribution is confident, wording is not.]
Darren: But again, a thousand different things we could talk about. Obviously the NFL ref thing is really cool. You are one of a handful of people who can say I stood on the center of an NFL Super Bowl Sunday, refereeing. What year was that again?
Bryan: Super Bowl 56 [Super Bowl LVI, February 2022] in Los Angeles. Bengals and Rams.
Darren: Okay, so you’re one of a handful of people who can say that. Talk to me about that kind of pressure. There’s no do-overs, no oopsies, none of that. You’ve got millions of people watching. What was that like?
The Pressure Is in the Buildup, Not the Event
Bryan: The funny part about games like that, and it doesn’t matter if I’m reffing the national championship game or a Big Ten game or some other big games, one thing I always tell people, if you’re in the National Football League, every game is a big game. I don’t care if it’s week one, week six, week eight, Super Bowl, AFC Championship. They’re all huge to these players, fans, coaches, everything. And you’re also aware it’s the biggest. They’re all big, and it’s the biggest.
Bryan: Pressure-wise, it’s funny. The pressure in situations like that is more about the buildup than the event itself. What relaxes you the most in those huge moments is when we kick the ball off. Now you’re just in your groove. So the buildup, family tickets, dinners, all this stuff, that’s kind of stressful, because everyone’s at it. It’s weeks, especially with the Super Bowl. Flying to New Jersey to get a patch and all this stuff. But when the game kicks off, there’s almost this feeling of, ah, now we’re where we’re supposed to be. Because at that point, honestly, it’s another game.
Bryan: And it’s funny, in the NFL, the Super Bowl could be a week six, one o’clock game. That’s just a game to the fans, you know what I mean? It’s not in prime time or anything. We know what it means to everybody and everyone involved, and what it means to us. It’s super important. And it’s great. Once we kick off, you can just sort of relax and do your thing. That, to me, is the only way I think people are able to perform like that in those environments. It’s with their number of years and years of repetition. That’s what gets you ready for that. Because once it goes, you’re like, I’ve done this a thousand times, a million times, ten thousand times. I’m just doing it again right here, right now.
Darren: Talk a little bit more about that. What does that look like in preparation, not only for you, but for all of us who are trying to build something? What does putting in the reps look like?
Bryan: Malcolm Gladwell wrote a book called Outliers. There’s a chapter in there that talks about the ten thousand hour rule. I don’t know if Malcolm Gladwell invented that or borrowed it, but it’s a pretty common sense thing.
Darren: We’ll give him credit for it.
Bryan: He talks about the Beatles, when they were in their teens, getting hired by a German bar owner to basically play music twelve hours a day, days at a time. How could you not figure stuff out? How could you not get inspiration, because you’re putting yourself in the place to get that inspiration. So to me there is no substitute for action along the way.
Bryan: This is kind of dorky, but I did it when I was working small college and then getting into Division One. We live in Indianapolis, Indiana, and I lived about two miles from Butler University, which is known more for basketball. As part of my workout routine on Friday mornings at 6 a.m., I would jog over to their football stadium, about two miles. And then I would work a pretend game in my head. No ball, no people, no players. I know it’s dorky. I know Russell Wilson caught a lot of hell for pretending to work a game. But I would just stand on the sideline, 35 yard line. I would look down the kickoff line, and I would pretend the ball went, and I would go into the hash. I would jog up, stop, and pretend I got the ball, and I would pretend to throw it in or set it down. I wouldn’t do a whole three hour game, but just over and over, to visualize and put myself in those modes.
Bryan: I had to stop that because the groundskeeper one day, he was seeing my footprints and got really irritated. This is made of grass. He came running out there. Who are you? What are you doing? I said, hey, sorry, I’m a college football ref. He said, you can’t be out here. So I stopped. Found another blank field over at Broad Ripple High School. But it’s what people do when no one’s around. That’s extra. No one’s making you do that thing. So, like podcasting, people say, well, I don’t know what to say. I’m like, if you want to start a podcast, just go turn your mic on and record yourself and just talk. Practice asking questions. You don’t have to show it to anybody. It’s a repetition, and every rep you get, it gets a little easier.
Darren: I’ve heard a lot of people say that. When you’re talking about how do I get better on camera, or how do we get better at podcasting, it’s like, well, you’ve got a phone, you’ve got a camera, just turn it on. You don’t have to show it to anybody. And it’s so interesting that you would go out and practice those games there. Because in my mind, when you said ten thousand hours, I’m thinking, well, what happens if I’m later in life and I didn’t do it when I was younger? For me, I was a musician for years. That’s what I did into my late thirties, and then all of a sudden I found a camera and started doing that thing. So it’s like, how does the ten thousand hour rule apply to me if I’m trying to build something now? But I like how you’re saying, just put yourself into practice.
Bryan: All the time. As a videographer, you can shoot video all day long. You can go down to the grocery store, go out to the woods, film dogs at a dog park. You can work on shots and frame things. I like that, I don’t like that. That’s just the discovery process.
Darren: Too often we think about those things, but we don’t do them.
Bryan: I’m very, very big on just go do things and you’ll get better at them.
Before Blind Zebra, There Was Bankruptcy
Darren: I want to go back a little bit. You have a company you founded called Blind Zebra, which, now that everybody knows you’re an NFL ref, and then you named your company Blind Zebra, you win naming awards for your companies. But before Blind Zebra, let’s go back in the time machine. There were some failed attempts at business. Sometimes I like to have those conversations, because we see the success of Blind Zebra, the NFL ref, the keynote speaker, all this cool stuff, and we forget the beginning. We forget the hard days, the days that the voice in the back of your head says this isn’t going to work. So take us back. What were you doing that just failed miserably or wasn’t working?
Bryan: There’s a list. I ran through this with one of my sons on a walk one day. I started going through this, and as I’m saying it, I’m like, I’m a frigging loser. I haven’t been good at anything. Because you pile them up together, and there’s been way more of those than there have been the goods. The goods are the goods, and you see that, oh wow, you got this, you got that. But you didn’t see the climb, man. There’s a lot of stuff.
Bryan: The biggest one I’ll tell you is I got my first job out of college at Procter and Gamble. Great company, great culture. This is in the early nineties. They had awesome training, and we sold groceries to grocery stores. Tide, Downy, Charmin, paper towels, Bounty, Jif peanut butter. And I loved P&G. I loved the people, loved the training. I hated that industry. Not the industry itself, I’ve got a lot of friends there, but it just didn’t do anything for me. From the day I got there, I started thinking, I want to do my own thing.
Bryan: I looked into everything. I looked into buying a Buffalo Wild Wings, a BW3, went through the whole franchise deal with them. Started a little company called On Your Mark, Get Hired, teaching people how to get jobs out of college. Starts and stops. None of them worked. Finally, I had a buddy from college who had caught on to some environmentally friendly cleaning equipment that you sell to restaurants and hotels and hospitals to get out of bleach and chemicals and use more environmentally friendly things. He asked me if I wanted to join him as a business partner, so I did, after five years at P&G. That was in January of 1996. And then by April of 1997, I was bankrupt. I lost everything I had. It wasn’t a lot, but it was everything I had. I was late on car payments.
Bryan: His stepdad had co-signed my car loan, because he ran it through the business, and I was ruining his credit. I used to wake up, we got the newspaper back then, and the newspaper person would come at like 4:30 in the morning, and I would think my car’s getting repossessed. I’d jump out of bed sweating. My bed was on the floor, there was no bed. It was just miserable.
Darren: Probably the stress and pressure of that, like always there, right? Always sitting on you.
Bryan: Awful. I had to have my referee money just to pay my bills. I got my power shut off. My roommate was a doctor, and our power got shut off. It was in my name and I was late on the bills. He’s like, hey, we got a little problem here. We got the power turned off, and it sounds like we’re late on our electric bills. So I’m going to switch it to my name. And it was just shame and embarrassment.
Bryan: When I reflect back on that, and I’ve talked about this before, but not a ton, my motivation for wanting to start a business and own a business was so I could tell everybody I started a business and owned a business. One hundred percent ego driven. No part of it was, oh, I love helping the environment, I love cleaning stuff. Nothing. All I wanted to do was run around town and talk to the ladies and say, hey, look, I’m an owner. What do you do? I work for myself. I’m a business owner. And no wonder it failed. What a bad reason to do something. It was terrible.
Bryan: I refereed a division two playoff game in New Haven, Connecticut, and I had no money and no credit left. Luckily they bought our plane ticket, but usually I’d get that check and we’d go to breakfast, and I didn’t have money to eat breakfast with my crew. One of my good friends I reffed with for a long time, he said, you’re not eating. He called me Curly, after Curly Neal, the old basketball player. He’s like, you’re not eating, Curly? I said, no, I’m not hungry. He knew, but didn’t want to say it. He’s like, hey man, I can spot you if you need something. I’m like, I’m good. Too prideful to say the truth.
Bryan: And those things stick with me. No one sees those things. You don’t talk about those things. But now you look back on them, and those are the things that shape you. When you’ve been in those places, it keeps you humble when you’re not in those places anymore, and it gives you empathy for people who are. There’s no one who could say anything to me where I wouldn’t be like, dude, I got you. It’s cool. I don’t care what you did, how you did it, what happened, why. Send the elevator back down to help someone else who’s in that. I have so much admiration for people who can come clean and say, hey, here’s my deal.
Darren: The empathy side of things. Once you walk through something like that, it’s that lesson for you, right? The struggle. You talked about sitting there at the table that day, the shame, the embarrassment. That often keeps a lot of people down. They can’t overcome the shame of whatever it is. They try this and it fails, they try that and it fails, and they start to pile up some losses and they can’t get out of their own way. How did you step beyond that, into something, to use that as a stair step to climb? How did you not get stuck in that shame cycle?
You Are Not a Bad Person, You Just Can’t Add
Bryan: That’s a great question. I’ll say this. Sometimes when you’re down to a certain level, you kind of can’t go any lower. And if you frame that perspective, once I was bankrupt, it sort of doesn’t matter whether you’re minus ten thousand on your net worth or minus a million. You still have nothing. It’s kind of the same zero. Negative is negative, and when you go bankrupt, you’re not paying anybody back. That’s the deal. I didn’t want to accept that as good, but I’m like, okay, I’ve survived all this. I can just keep going. So all I knew was, it didn’t kill me. I made it through everything.
Bryan: I like to say to the audience, think of all the hard stuff you’ve been through in your life. You made it through everything. Because you’re sitting here. And you might be in it now, and you’re going to make it through that too. So that’s an important thing. And then the next thing is to raise the white flag and ask for help. That was the biggest thing I learned there. There’s some pride in men sometimes. There’s pride in a generation. We’re Gen X, we can figure this stuff out. And asking for help came in the form of networking and asking people for mentorship and guidance, and then feeding your brain with things you need to correct.
Bryan: I found a really goofy author named Stuart Wilde. He’s passed away now. He’s a little bit metaphysical, which I like a lot of, though some of it got a little crazy for me. He wrote a book called The Trick to Money Is Having Some. He basically said, just because you go bankrupt doesn’t mean you’re a bad person. It means you can’t add very well. And I’m like, huh. That’s interesting. So I’m not a bad person. I just didn’t add up my money and my expenses very well.
Darren: But the voice in your head was telling you that you’re a bad person.
Bryan: One hundred percent. Failure, bad, awful. But once you find a different way there, once he intellectualized it for me, I’m like, that’s true. That’s really what happened. I just overspent what I was taking in. That’s a math problem. And I can do math, simple math like that at least. I can fix this. So it’s really just feeding your brain things to reframe all that stuff, which then gives you the ability.
Bryan: The other thing is, I think people try to jump out of a hole versus climb out of a hole. That’s the thing I think people miss. They try to make it binary. I’m going to get a trampoline and bounce out of this thirty foot hole. And you keep bouncing up and you can’t get out, and when you come back down, you’re back at the bottom. Versus, okay, I’m going to take a little step stool and get up to the next level, level zero plus one. And then hover and sit there. Okay, I’m solid now. And then another little level up, and another. Versus trying to get out of it all at once.
Darren: It’s like, what is the next step I can take to get to where I need to be?
Bryan: Everybody wants to eat a salad for lunch and lose eight pounds that day. That’s not how it works. That’s another math issue.
Darren: Oh man, I was having a salad for lunch today too, Bryan. I lost a pound. The seven beers I had afterwards really put a damper on it.
Bryan: It’s a math problem.
Darren: That’s really good on the reframing side. In failed business or failed things that you try, bankruptcy, whatever, the voices start to tell you that you’re a bad person, you can’t do this. And I love the idea of reframing. So you read some books. What are some other things that actually helped you reframe?
Bryan: I’m a huge fan of action. Not necessarily the Tony Robbins massive action. I like little bits of action to get traction and movement forward. We live in the Midwest. If you live in Florida, you won’t get this. But in the Midwest, if you’ve ever helped someone get a stuck car out of the snow, we’re super helpful here. You see someone stuck, three or four people get out. And what you do is you rock back and forth, nice and slow. You just try to get the car moving. You don’t slam the gas pedal down and everyone push as hard as they can. You get it moving, but you’re moving. It’s that little movement that helps.
Bryan: So an example. Bankrupt, didn’t have a job. I could have just stayed in my basement and listened to tunes and done nothing. Instead I had to force myself out of bed to networking meetings, go to lunch by myself to run into people, read the book, go on the walk or jog. It’s that little action part that was the trick to climbing out slowly versus jumping out.
The First Domino Is Never What You Think
Darren: That speaks very heavily to something I’ve heard you talk a lot about, which is this first domino thing. I’ve heard you share it at a handful of keynotes and in your trainings, and it’s so good. It’s something I’ve said a lot over the last handful of episodes. It’s simple, but it’s not easy. So, first domino. Talk to me a little bit about that.
Bryan: Just over observation and my own ups and downs, goods and bads, I’ve learned that when people set out on anything in their life, whether it’s weight loss or building a business or starting a podcast or reffing the Super Bowl, the failure isn’t in the process mostly. Mostly the failure is the failure to start. So many people think of things they want to do, and that’s all they do. They never take a movement forward. Most people want to plan it out. How do I do this, how do I do that, get this and that. And then they never do it. They plan everything, but they never take an action.
Bryan: That’s the first domino. The first domino is the first action. And it is typically not what people think. I’ll use examples. People say, I want to run a marathon. I say, what’s the first domino? And people say this all the time in an audience. Get a training plan. I say, no, that’s not the first domino. Get my shoes and equipment. That’s not the first domino. And then finally someone will say, register. I say, that’s the first domino. If you want to run a marathon, the first thing you do is go to the Carmel Marathon registration page and pay them fifty bucks and register. Now you’re registered. Then you get going. Because if you put a training plan together and look at it, you’re going to go, I can’t do this, it’s too much work, I’ve got kids, I don’t have time. They never register, because they get scared away by the process.
Bryan: So podcasting. I don’t know how to edit, I don’t know how to do this. I’m like, first domino, podcasting. And people say, get a topic, find a partner. Nope. Buy the equipment. That’s the first domino. Seventy-five bucks on Amazon, it’ll be at your house in a day. You’ll have a podcast starter kit. Now it’s sitting there staring at you. Hey, I’m a podcast kit, open me up. And then you go. That’s how it gets going.
Darren: So often, again, simple but not easy in the sense that it’s overlooked. There’s something inside of somebody, this art that we’re supposed to create, a business we’re supposed to start. You’re almost saying, don’t be overwhelmed by all of the things. The first domino is probably to go register the LLC.
Bryan: Literally that’s it. Just start the thing. Think about, in my NFL journey, I got some advice from my coaches. First thing I had to do was register with the high school athletic association to take a test to get my license. That was the first domino. If you would have said, here’s everything you have to do to get to the NFL, you have to get a license, work JV, then varsity, then small college for this many years, then work this many, and it’s going to take you twenty-seven years, and then eight more to get in the NFL, and you’re going to lose your marriage along the way, it would have been, no thanks, I’m out. Instead, I’m like, okay, I’ll send my money into the athletic association and take a test, and now I have my license. First domino.
Darren: Man, I’m just sitting here thinking of things in my own life that I’m scared to start, or thinking about, or been dreaming about, or have watched nine thousand seven hundred YouTube videos on how to do the thing, and then I haven’t done the thing. And it’s the first domino.
Bryan: Can I tell you a nerdy thing I’m doing?
Darren: Please do.
Bryan: Do you know I’m beekeeping now? I do a lot at the house. So same deal. I start watching these videos about beekeeping. I’m like, this is fascinating. I’m not a big earth guy, not an animal guy, but these bees just fascinate me. So I find this thing called a Flow Hive, a little bit of a lazy person’s bee setup. I’m like, I can do this. So what do I do? Amazon. Twelve hundred, fifteen hundred bucks. My wife got it for me for Christmas. It shows up at the house, I open my beehive up, and there it sat for a whole year. But the first domino was done. Finally got it set up, bought a brood, and I’ve got a full beautiful beehive going right now. I’ll have my first harvest of honey here in about three weeks. People say, I’ve always wanted to beekeep. I’m like, buy a hive.
Darren: I’ve been to a couple of your keynotes, and you do this with somebody. You say, has anybody ever wanted to take flying lessons? And I want you to tell the story of what you do to those people in that moment.
Bryan: First domino. Someone says, you ever thought about flying a plane? You’re like, oh, I have. Have you ever taken a lesson? No. I’m like, come up here on the stage. Call the airport, buy them flying lessons right there in front of everybody. First domino. People are like, oh my gosh. But that’s it. That’s what people just can’t do, for whatever reason. I really do feel like people are intimidated by the long-term process, or by not knowing how the process works. And you will never be ready. You’re never ready to get your pilot’s license. You’re never ready to start a podcast, ever. You will never be ready. So therefore, just start.
Darren: I do the same thing. We obviously do a lot of podcast production for what we do here at 1898. But I always get overwhelmed by all of the things that have to be done for ourselves. I’m out here telling everybody, do it, it’s fine. And then I get overwhelmed by it. So I love coming back to that principle of the first domino. What can I do today? That one little step.
The Birth of Blind Zebra
Darren: So we’re standing on the pile of some failed things as you were trying to figure this out. The journey leading up to the start of what is now known as Blind Zebra. Talk a little bit about that experience. Did you feel ready when you started that? Or did you just go, hey, first domino, let’s go?
Bryan: So even though I stand on a stage and talk about first domino, and I’ve pushed a lot of them, there’s a whole lot I haven’t touched. People have been telling me to write a book for thirty years. Haven’t done it. You know what I did yesterday? Yesterday I had my first call with a hybrid publishing house, with the CEO, a group called Affinity Publishing out of DC. [VERIFY: publisher name uncertain in raw audio.] I had a call with this guy. It’s time. First domino. So I had a thirty minute meeting with them yesterday. We’re started. I don’t know exactly what it’s going to be about, I don’t know how much it’s going to cost, but the first domino is done. And it took me literally, people have been telling me since I was twenty-two, I’m fifty-six, you should write a book, you should write a book. It’s on my bucket list. And then I pushed the first domino. So I’m going.
Bryan: When I started Blind Zebra, that was about a seven year push from friends and peers. I was partners with my podcast partner now, Bill [Caskey]. I was getting the itch to do some things different than Bill and I were doing together. He was the primary owner, I was a partner. And people kept saying, you should go out on your own. Seven years people told me this in my peer group. I don’t know why you don’t go out on your own. Well, comfortable, whatever. I don’t know if I can handle it, all the doubts. I just let it be.
Bryan: And then in 2014, I did exactly what you said earlier. I went to the Indiana Secretary of State’s website, and after figuring out my name, which was a coffee shop exercise, I typed in Blind Zebra Consulting LLC to search if it was available. It was, and I paid seventy-five bucks. And then I was incorporated. So it’s a seven year path to a first domino. But the first domino was, I didn’t have the business plan written, I didn’t know how I was going to do it, I didn’t know what it was going to look like. But I had an LLC called Blind Zebra Consulting LLC. And it was a thing.
Darren: Then you got the business cards and could hand them out saying you were the owner to everybody.
Bryan: Exactly. That’s all I do anymore.
Darren: So when was it on that journey that you were kind of like, we’re onto something here?
Bryan: So I was doing just traditional sales training. I had ten to twelve clients at any one time. That’s not a business, that’s a job. It was great, I loved it. But it’s not scalable, it’s not sellable, it has no value, because it’s me. But I was happy. I’d moved up into the NFL at that time, making great money on both sides. My life was pretty clean and good and easy. I didn’t want to change that.
Bryan: I’ve always been part of a coaching program, because I always want to grow and develop. So I joined a program after eleven years, a Vistage group, a peer group for business owners. Then I joined a different one called Strategic Coach, and I go up to Chicago once a quarter with a coach named Chad Johnson. Dan Sullivan is the founder of Strategic Coach. And I start to learn these tools. But better than that, I’m sitting around these other business people who are ahead of me in the game. They’ve already built and flipped a business and they’re doing it again, or they own a company worth forty million bucks and they’re sitting next to me learning. I’m like, huh. And they’re all telling me, dude, you could scale this. You should scale it.
Bryan: It took me about five years. My wife and I went to a couples retreat through Strategic Coach down in Florida and basically planned our life out. And I’m like, okay, we can scale it. So there’s the first domino, sign up for the couples retreat. And then you start making the moves. Steph came into the business. I was the CEO, she was doing sales. It wasn’t working. Second marriage, we didn’t want to screw it up a second time. We’re arguing about stuff we don’t really argue about. And I said, why don’t you be the CEO? I hate being the CEO. I just want to do my coaching work and develop things. She goes, okay.
Bryan: So we put her in charge. Eighteen months later, we went from fourteen clients, the most I ever had, to ninety clients under her leadership. I was the problem. I was the bottleneck.
Darren: Get out of the way.
Bryan: Which is true. When I had to do that, I had to take that first domino, which is, I don’t want to be in charge.
Darren: Was that scary?
Bryan: It was relieving. I can’t tell you how much weight came off of me when I didn’t have to be in charge anymore. It’s my personality type. If you say I’m in charge, I will be in charge, and no one will doubt that guy’s in charge. But as soon as you say, all right, Bryan, I’ve got this, I’m in charge now, I’ll take a second seat, absolutely. I look at that as a gift, that I can do that. She basically more than doubled the business in less than two years.
Discipline Is the Thing That Sets You Free
Bryan: So then it got too big. We started running on a program called EOS, which stands for Entrepreneurial Operating System. Highly recommend it. It’s based on a book called Traction by Gino Wickman. I fell in love with this, but it didn’t have any sales stuff in it. A little bit, but not much. And I got this idea. I can write an operating system for sellers, similar to Traction, similar to EOS. So Steph supported me, and again, first domino. I called some friends, some that you know. An instructional designer named Sarah. I called this awesome videographer named Coop, Darren Cooper. That was literally where we collided. And all of a sudden, that was the first domino. We had our first meeting. I still have the slide deck to my pitch to our team. Here’s my vision for this thing. Still have it on my phone. And now it’s a thing. Flash forward three and a half years later, we have two hundred and seven certified coaches, twenty-five companies that run the system, ninety-eight percent retention over four years now. It’s just crazy. But it all started with that first, I’m going to put a slide deck together and cast my vision. That was the first domino.
Darren: What I love about the Blind Zebra Sales Operating System is that it’s so much more than just sales coaching. I’ve told a handful of people this. I’m sitting in the back with the camera going, man, that’s good, I’ve got to break that down. You talk about the first domino stuff, but you also talk about letting go of deals, not getting so strung up on things, and how that plays into your life as bigger than just the sales process. I’m going, this applies to everything in what I do. How did that become the foundation, or at least what was baked into what you were doing? Because I see it everywhere. I hate to use the term self-help, but it’s more than just the sales process. My life is different by going through this. How did you get that in there?
Bryan: I just put it in there. No, seriously though, I learned a lot from Bill Caskey, my mentor and great friend still. Just thinking first about what’s inside of our head, heart and soul. It shows itself in our actions and our words. It just does. I made a little funny comment earlier where I said windows are words into the soul, and they are. So I’ve got to tend to my head, heart and soul as a business person, a seller, a dad, a brother, all the things. I’ve got to tend to that first, because that will drive my actions. So we needed a foundation of philosophies installed before we could start putting mechanical, action-oriented tools on top of it. So we came up with the guiding principles. We didn’t create these things, they’re philosophies that are in the world. We just organized them and put them into a sales structure. And once we have that installed, then we layer on tools. This is where our operating system gets away from traditional training and coaching, and gets into very mechanical, rote, action-oriented tools with checklists and process.
Bryan: The best compliment I ever got was from a guy named Dan, one of our certified coaches and CRO of a software company. He’s from Philly. He was one of the first class of certified coaches we had. He goes, hey Bryan, I don’t want to offend you here. And anytime someone from Philly goes, I don’t want to offend you here, you know what’s coming. He goes, this is really just organized common sense. And I was like, I actually see that as a compliment. That’s the best thing I could have heard. And he goes, you know what though? No one does it. Nobody does it. It’s a lost art. Common sense is a lost art. So all we’ve done is written down and documented organized common sense for people, and put it into a process they can easily follow to drive their outward action, mostly in their sales world.
Bryan: A new sales leader on their own will have their own version of the stuff, but they’ll be sitting in a team with eight other leaders, and each leader’s got their own little playbook. As a company owner or CEO, why do we have eight different playbooks for our sales leaders? Why not give them one? And then if one leaves and one comes in, same playbook. If I switch territories, I can switch managers, same playbook. It creates this great consistency throughout a sales org that then creates predictability and visibility. CRM data gets clean and neat and tidy. There’s no old deals like, well, this one’s supposed to close in December of twenty-four, and it’s a little late.
Bryan: I love doing this. When we’re selling to someone, I’ll go, pull up your opportunities, let’s look at your top ten deals, top twenty deals, and let’s look at the anticipated close date. Guaranteed, without question, ninety-nine percent of those are expected to close on the thirtieth or the thirty-first of the month they’re in. And that makes no sense, because they’re not all going to close on the thirtieth. Even if the thirty-first is a Saturday. So we deal in this vagueness, and this operating system just makes that go away, where everything is closing on specific days throughout a month. You’re never chasing the end of the month. It creates this systematic, engine-oriented drive in a sales team. And then everyone can do the art part of selling. They can do the magic part, because they fixed the process.
Darren: Something I only know because I’ve worked with you here is that you’re a visionary leader. You’re the guy that’s like, what if we did this, what if we did that. What you built with the Blind Zebra Sales Operating System is very systematic, very checklist-oriented. You can follow the process. Somebody can come in, somebody can come out, and it’s still consistent. How did you as a visionary leader get that? Because that’s not the way your brain works, the system and the checklist. I only ask because I’m the same way. So I’m asking selfishly. How the heck did you do that?
Bryan: I’d love to. I’m going to go a little old school on you. There’s an author named Richard Bach, really famous in the seventies. He wrote a book called Jonathan Livingston Seagull, kind of a spiritual book, and another book called Illusions. The subtitle of Illusions is The Adventures of a Reluctant Messiah. It’s kind of a play on a religious theme without being outward about it. But there’s a quote in there that says, we teach best what we most need to learn. We teach best what we most need to learn. I built this thing for me, because I need it. Without it, I’m all over the board. When I have structure and process in my life, it’s way better and way easier. So it’s built for me. And I noticed there’s a lot of salespeople like me who need a little system and structure.
Bryan: And then what I realized, this was the big light bulb moment. I say this now as part of the program. Discipline creates freedom. Where I never wanted to be constrained by discipline, what I’ve realized is that’s what creates my freedom now. Once I know everything is covered in my calendar, once I know all my deals are up to date with accepted dates, once I know I’ve got tools if I get ghosted, I can relax and breathe. But the visionary part of me never had that, so I’m all over the board, trying this, trying that, forgetting that one, remembering that one, oh shoot, too late. And I still did okay. I thought, man, how much better could I be if I just tightened this stuff up? So it’s literally written for me.
Darren: I’ve never heard it said that way. Okay, so you wrote it for you. You have this process, this plan. Something I always struggle with, and again this is a self-serving question, is shiny object syndrome. What if we did this, what if we put this in there. And then six months down the road, what if we blow it all up and try something different? How did you avoid shiny object syndrome, or did you?
Bryan: It’s a double thing here. One, I need that to feel fulfilled. I need an outlet, an idea place. So one thing we’ve done in our systems is have, for lack of a better term, a repository for those ideas. I can bring them up, present them, scratch them up on a whiteboard, and they can go sit somewhere. They may never get touched, but we have this big long list of all these things, and they sit there. Some of them sit there forever. Some of them I lose my love for, and I’m like, yeah, that was a great idea when I thought of it.
Bryan: I had, for four years, a canned wine concept called Blind Zebra Vino that was sports-oriented, where the wines would be referee calls for the sport that you’re in. So if you’re at a football game, the white would be Fair Catch, the rose would be Illegal Formation, and then the heavy cab would be Unnecessary Roughness. And then you can switch the sports out. So if you’re at a hockey game, you want a wine. No one wants to bring a bottle of wine to a tailgate, and canned wine’s better. But let’s make it fun and sporty. Four years that sat at Blind Zebra. I flew out to San Francisco. I met with a wine producer. First domino, bought a ticket to San Fran. Set up meetings with label artists, a packaging group, a distribution company, got all the stats, all the math. Didn’t do a thing. The first domino I did, but I didn’t finish it. And we just took it off the list. Thank God, because wine consumption is through the floor right now. And I’m cool with that. It was fun. I love the idea though. Somebody is writing that down right now.
Bryan: The point is, that sat in my repository for four years and I just killed it. I lost my thing for that. At one point it was one of my top priorities of the year. And I took first dominoes, but it never completed, and that’s okay. The failure would have been not starting. I didn’t fail because I didn’t finish. I would have failed if I didn’t start.
Bryan: So I have a repository. That’s one way I handle that stuff. And then we run on this EOS system, and that allows my wife, our integrator Stephanie, to pick and choose the ideas. One of the rules in the EOS system, you have visionary and integrator. Visionary has the ideas. Integrator has the execution side of things. In disagreements or when you’re not sure what to do, integrator wins. That’s the rule. So now I can surrender. I can say my piece, and integrator wins. So if Steph’s like, I think Blind Zebra Vino, we shouldn’t do that, I’m like, integrator wins. That protects us that way.
Darren: So you’ve almost systematized your ability to be a visionary leader.
Bryan: One hundred percent.
Darren: It all comes down to, see, as a visionary guy for a long time, I always felt like nobody got it. It was like, you’re a bunch of idiots, you don’t see the cool new thing. And then, shout out to my good buddy Dustin, who’s helped me integrate for us. There are times I’m like, no dude, you don’t get it. And we’ll get in arguments. I’m seeing now that we just need to systematize that. I never got the system thing. I was like, I don’t get it. But now I’m like, we need the systems, and we need to play within the systems even in our visionary.
Bryan: That’s it. Game changer.
Darren: This is changing my life. Man, that’s so good. I love what Blind Zebra’s doing, because it’s so much deeper than just sales coaching. It’s a way of life. I never saw the connection between EOS and the Blind Zebra Sales Operating System and what you’re doing. It’s super cool the way you’re putting that together.
Detach and Play the Next Play
Darren: A couple other questions here. One of your core guiding principles is this idea of detachment. Detaching from the outcome of what happens. I’ve heard you say, detach and play the next play. You’re an NFL ref, so, detach, play the next play. What does that look like on a Tuesday when a deal is falling through, or your visionary idea isn’t working? How do you detach from these things and play the next play?
Bryan: You said it earlier. It’s simple and difficult. Simple to detach, and difficult because of our emotional state sometimes. So again, I’m going to go back to process and system. I stole this idea from a book called The Little Book of Coaching, written by Ken Blanchard and Don Shula, who was the head coach of the Dolphins, the only NFL team to go undefeated. This is a very common thing, you’ll hear this in the NFL. I think Don Shula started it, but it’s still alive. It’s called the twenty-four hour rule.
Bryan: When I have a failure or something that’s bothering me, or a win or a big success, I have a twenty-four hour period to either celebrate the big success and feel proud of myself and beat my chest, we’re great, or if I lose a deal, I have twenty-four hours to be upset. And then it’s over. Move on. It’s literally timestamped. So if we’re in this icky, gross vibe because we lost this big deal, it is 10:50 a.m. So we have until 10:50 a.m. tomorrow to feel this way, and let’s feel it. Let’s talk about it, let’s piss and moan, let’s do all that. And then 10:47, 10:48, all right, we’re done, let’s roll on. Having a mechanism like that is so great. And it’s for both. It’s for winning too. Because we see this with salespeople, they get this big deal, and man, they are the guy or the gal for months. Don’t you remember back in high 2007 when I closed that?
Darren: It’s like the Dolphins saying they were undefeated still.
Bryan: Literally. And I’ll tell you, one thing I never hear in my years in the NFL, when you are interacting with the team that won the Super Bowl or went to the Super Bowl, they don’t mention it once. It’s over. They’re so done with it, and they’ve got to try to do it again. I love that culture. Once it’s over, it’s over.
Darren: As an NFL fan, I’ve heard that you do these interviews, and I’m like, there’s no way that you don’t think about that afterward.
Bryan: You don’t. And my role is little, but it’s still, I’m out there in front of a lot of people on TV at a Super Bowl. I kind of understand how famous rock and roll people get addicted to drugs. Because you’re on that stage, you’re jamming, there’s forty thousand, eighty thousand people. You get in a van to go to your hotel, and you’re in your hotel by yourself. It’s like, what just happened? Where am I? No one cares anymore. It’s over. You go see this awesome concert, it’s awesome, you have the memories, but it’s over. You’re not still there. I don’t have the performer in my living room. It’s over. It’s dead done. So it’s an interesting thing to think about.
Darren: I love that twenty-four hour rule. I just had an experience yesterday, I’ll call it a financial faux pas, where I was like, I shouldn’t have done that. That was a bad idea. Woke up, went to bed stressed, woke up stressed, trying to figure it out. It’s a tax situation. So now all the implications, in your brain you’re going, I’m literally going to sleep under a bridge tomorrow. That’s how I feel. The twenty-four hour thing, it’s like, I’m still in that twenty-four hour piece, but let’s now get to work and figure it out.
Bryan: Everything’s figure-out-able. It just is.
Darren: I forget a conversation I was having recently where they said, when you quit something, there’s a definite outcome in quitting, right? But when you continue to try to build something beyond the failures, there’s a chance, there’s a percentage chance of something going. But when you quit, there’s zero percent. It’s that idea of balancing that. It’s so easy to just sit down and go, screw it. All those years ago, you could have sat down, stayed in your basement, I’m not worth it, and listened to those voices for the next twenty years of your life. Or you go, no, there’s a percentage chance I can get out of this. Let’s go do that, one domino at a time.
What He Would Tell You
Darren: Final question. Somebody’s out there, maybe you twenty years ago, listening to the voices. They have this thing inside of them, they want to build this art, with business or with art itself or something, and they’re just struggling. I think they can take a lot of wisdom from what you’ve already said, but what would you say to them today? How would you encourage them, prod them along in where they’re at?
Bryan: I’m going to mention a book. There’s a book called The War of Art by Steven Pressfield. The War of Art talks about resistance in artists and people who want to create. My summary of that book is, it’s the fear that it’s not going to be perfect the way they want it to be. So they struggle with, it’s never good enough. You see artists all the time who are self-critical of their songs. You listen to a song on YouTube and they hear the flaws, and we hear it and go, that’s beautiful. And this doesn’t have to be an artist artist. Video, music, art, business, anything at all. Everyone has that. So accepting that you’re not different, because people think, oh, there’s something wrong with me, I can’t. And they beat themselves up. I’m like, everyone has that, in some way, shape or form.
Bryan: And then I’m going to go back to what I’ve already said. If you’re listening to this, you probably know what I’m going to say. You hit the first domino. Once you take a small, easy action toward a thing, and then take another one, and another little one over time, those become massive results. So if you’re thinking, I want to start a podcast, I want to start a business, go to the Secretary of State’s website and pay seventy-five bucks and name it. I want to start a podcast, go to Amazon, buy your stuff. I want to write a book, call a publisher like I did yesterday and talk to them, or take a blank piece of paper or a blank Word document up on your laptop and write chapter one and just sit there and see what happens. Sometimes it’s creating the folder that goes in. Create the space for things to happen, and then you’ll be on your way.
Darren: Man, that’s so good. It’s been so fun to be a fly on the wall over the last few years. It’s funny, I told this to somebody the other day. I didn’t realize where I was at in the Blind Zebra journey when I came in on that. The whole Blind Zebra Sales Operating System thing was in its infancy at that point. I come in thinking, this is a cool thing, they’ve built this for years. And it’s like, no. To be a small fly on the wall and play a small part in that, to see what it’s become, to see the impact you’re making on these sales leaders and these businesses, it is absolutely fantastic. You are a fantastic example of what it looks like when you become the artist in your field.
Bryan: You’re awesome. And I’m going to say this, because you didn’t pay me to say it. It happened yesterday. We had a prospect say, hey, by the way, the video quality on that little marketing thing you sent, that was awesome. Whoever’s doing your video is doing a great job. I said, I’m going to see the guy tomorrow, I’ll take it. But here’s what I want to do. Compliment you past that. The videographer part, you’re beautiful at that. But you truly understand what people are trying to do. You’re so good that I trust you so much now. We go shoot a thing and I’m like, that’s it. At first I was like, are you sure? And then you give us the product, and I’m like, dang, dude, you captured it.
Bryan: So, people who are listening, you have to use video. This isn’t even a plug for you, this is a plug for video. You have to use video in everything you do. If you’re a CEO, a VP of sales, a salesperson, you have to use video, because that’s how people connect with you these days. Email’s flat. Phone calls, no one answers their phone. Video, you get to know someone. And then you’ve got to find someone like Coop who can take your story, connect to it, and put it into a video format that people can digest.
Darren: I appreciate that. Thank you for being here.
Bryan: Always.
Darren: And thank you for watching this and listening along. Before we go, I want you to remember one thing. That you are an artist, and that your voice is needed in this world more than you know, and that you are loved more than you could ever imagine. So go out and create your art, and we’ll see you here on the next conversation.
Create your art. #createyourart