– Welcome everybody to today’s Building My Legacy Podcast. I have with me today Peter Montoya. He is fascinating because he has created a software network company which he sold, but this is what’s interesting, he’s done it without capital and without investors or partners. And I think, and just an interesting side note, with some of you who’ve listened to our podcasts before, you may remember Chad Peterson, who talked to venture a MNA person who talked about the next way in which businesses would be funded, would not be necessarily through investors or debt, but really looking at how do you bootstrap and how do you build collaborative relationships. So, you’re having done that Peter, I think is fascinating. And so you built a successful advertising agency and software company, that was dedicated financial services, and then sold that. So, tell us a little bit about that journey. You also do a lot of work with leadership strategy development, working with companies who are in various stages of business, and you’re now looking at a next stage of your life. So, tell us about that journey of yours and what brought you to where you’re at?

– Well, I graduated with a degree in political science and with a degree in political science, you only have a couple of choices. Your first choice is going to law school, but I just didn’t have the scholastic capability. Second choice is to go into food services, You can become a waiter or a bartender or your third choice is sales, And I chose the sales path. I went to work for the biggest motivational speaker in the world, and I spent five years living on the road, more or less they call being a front man, doing sales and sales training for five years. And the ripe age of 28, when I retired from being on the road, I realized that I knew it all. So, I thought I was smart enough to go in business for myself as an entrepreneur. So, I started in an advertising agency, just specializing in Financial service professionals. Back in 1998, I wrote a book called The Brand Called You, which was specifically on personal branding for financial advisors and all the mistakes I’d made. The one smart thing I did, was I specialized my business early . Specialization really helps a lot. So, the more competition you have, the more specialized you should be. And how do I try to go after a generalized personal branding market? I probably wouldn’t have had the capacity of the bandwidth to get that done, but because I severed a piece of the marketplace off and just specialized in punch advisors. I found a tall hold so I can get some success under my belt. And then in 2006, after eight years of working in the advertising agency business, which I found very fatiguing, it was a witch-hunt market. So it was always hunting in order to eat. I really wanted a recurring revenue business. So I started a software company called Marketing Pro back in 2006. And my saving grace, there was a couple things. Number one, I was going to a market I already knew and who already knew me, I was highly specialized. I found a very specific problem in the marketplace and I developed a solution specifically for that marketplace. And the third thing was, I realized I didn’t know, it couldn’t be done ,so I didn’t quit.

– So I wanna go back to that second point ’cause I think that is a huge mistake that so many people make and that is getting that niche very narrow. How did you go about doing that? Always there’s that fear, look at all of what I missing, right? All those fish that I’m not catching, but so how did you go about that and finance, why finance?

– So that’s where I was as I was working already with independent financial advisors, and that was the niche that I had and the niche that I know. So, a lot of times I’ll ask people what is the key to marketing success? And a lot of times people will say, it’s good promotion, getting good messaging and building the right brand. But I really think the key in a really good marketing is finding the unmet need and filling it better than anybody else does. So, for individual financial service professionals, they had a really specific need. They needed to do ongoing client communication. It’s the most effective form of marketing for them. You will call it content marketing or relational marketing, where they’re constantly dripping on everyone they know on a regular basis. That’s a very important marketing strategy. And the second problem is every single one of them has to send every piece of communication through their compliance offices before that, which is really labor intensive. So, I developed a software that create the content, it route it through compliance for their review and sent it out for them, and it was really well priced. So, I knew the problem, I knew the market and I developed a solution better than anybody else had in the marketplace. And that’s why we had so much success incredibly quickly.

– Wow, Okay, so for someone who’s in the process of thinking about doing something like that, advice that you have.

– Until I didn’t have any capital, I mean, 2006 and ’07 and 2008.

– You were in a bit of doubt.

– Yeah, So, I was more or less working in a two jobs. One job was keeping the advertising agency going. And then I was pulling off $10,000 a month to pay my software developer to build the software. And then I was also working a second job doing enterprise sales, calling all my clients and trying to get them to purchase this product. And the thing with a software as a service model, is you have a long ramp-up period. You have two or three years where you’re moving very incrementally slow. Kinda like a train leaving the station, it is a ton of energy to get that train moving just a little bit out of the station, and then all of a sudden you get to acceleration. So, I really stuck with it, but the key was, you’ve gotta be able to pass off a piece of the marketplace. Had I tried to go after the general business marketplace and say I’m gonna do content creation for any kind of business, it never would have gotten out of the gate. It had to be specific.

– It’s fascinating, from that one of the things that your experiences working with businesses, you talk about that one of the things you’re passionate about is transformational leadership and the need for that. So, speak a little bit about that and how you came to that conclusion.

– I absolutely love transformational leaders and what a transformational leader is, is they change the common understanding of “what is?” That’s what a transformational leader does. So, we can go back 225, 45 years or so, and look at the founding fathers of the United States of America. And up until that time, the dominant governance structure was that of a monarchy, almost all the treaties in the world were monarchies. And they basically said, we’re gonna create this thing called Democracy. And it was a completely revolutionary idea about how to govern a country. And once they did that, it completely changed the world of more toward a democracy. And I think it’s 70 or 80% of the world’s governments now are democracies, something like that. And not only did they change the governance, but they also change us the individuals. We actually came to a new understanding of what we, as people, could do. Another great revolutionary or a transformative leader is Steve Jobs. And Steve jobs may have actually had three major transformations in basically a new understanding of what we could do. The first one was the personal computer. Instead of computers only being the bastions of governments, or think tanks or universities, now you can put a computer on your desk and it completely unleash not only new hardware and new software, but also individual content creators and business people. Once we’d had these personal computers, he did it a second time with visual music. So rather than music being sold through a record stores and CD stores, he actually put it online. That was the second time he traded at a completely new understanding of what was possible. And the third time is with pocket computing. We took the computer once again from being on the desk, into our pockets. And it once again, unleashed new hardware and new software, but also transformed the way we connect to one another and the way we do business. So, a transformation leader is someone who creates a revolution in a common understanding of “what is.” So, what we can do with leaders is help people have a new transformation in their own lives, a revolution, an understanding of what they are capable of, and also more importantly with the people in their organization are capable of. Now, transformation is a magical word because when you have that moment and I’m sure you’ve had it before Lois, where you actually worked through a problem, you’re in the middle of an obstacle, you get through the obstacle and you basically have a new vista of what you and your team are capable of.

– Right, It’s that aha moment. I think at that often with what people talked about with Einstein, when he had a major breakthrough . And he generally did it on his breakthroughs, he said always came on the right side of his brain. And there was that moment where he couldn’t verbalize it. It was so exciting, so fresh. And then if it, as seconds passed, he could verbalize it. But I think sometimes in our busy society, we push through that. And part of what you’re talking about is taking pausing moments, maybe longer to reflect. So, you see the possibility for transformation. So, tell me in a busy CEO’s life and you’ve been there, how do you discipline yourself to do that?

– So, first of all, when I first started off as a CEO, I had more or less pushed through 12 hours a day. I worked 12 hours a day, every single day for more or less 10 years, and I now regret it. Now, what I do is I spend a lot more time journaling, meditating, and also making sure I have scheduled days off. And what I always find, especially when I’m vacationing, on that second or third day of vacation, I almost have always had these major aha moments, where I’m actually starting getting more creative again. My brain actually has time to process all the information that’s been shoved into it over the past three or four months. So, those breaks are really important for our brains to settle and assimilate all of the things that been going into it on a regular basis.

– So, I wanna go back a little bit with your transformational leadership. You talked about a need for this right now. What is it that drives that need and what vision do you see? What can or could be accomplished, do you think if people really opened their eyes to transformation?

– That’s a great question Lois. Lois, I’m gonna ask you a really hard question. So, here’s the question. Based on our current trajectory, will human civilization be better or worse off in 50 years?

– Wow, Okay, So, let me answer it in parts. If you are gonna ask me that ,if I were gonna respond to that based on technology, I’d say, we’re gonna have much more sophisticated technology, we’re going to be communicating in ways we haven’t even imagined. In terms of relationships, I would say we’re gonna be worse off, because we have let the machinery and our social media manage our relationships.

– Okay, so based on current trajectory, do you think human civilization will better or worse off in 50 years?

– Okay, So the reality is, that will allow us civilization to survive is the relationships, not the technology.

– So, you think worse off?

– Reserve.

– Yeah, I think worse too. And 90% of the business leaders who I ask also say worse off too. So, the elephant in the room at every single conversation that I have with a business leader or any leader, is we are always kinda looking at our short term goals, six months or a year. How do we accomplish these things? But the much bigger question is, how are we, as a species, going to survive? So, the vision that I have and that I want to impart to every single leader out there is that we do have the capacity to solve every single existential threat that is facing us right now as a species. And we can do it in a way that uses our resources in a responsible manner, and also helps us thrive along the way. However, this fractious nature that we are using right now here in the United States, which is really about how can we demonize the other side for our own gain is not effective. It will not work, and it will not get us where we want to be. The leadership at its very basis is, how do we collectively solve problems? And I’m actually very optimistic with the new breed of leadership that’s coming along here, who realizes there’s not just one stakeholder anymore. It’s not about me making money at the expense of everybody else, it’s me providing a valuable service, yes. Being rewarded for it, but making sure that employees and vendors, the environment and the communities are well-served. And that’s the vision that I hold and that leaders are buying into.

– So, you’ve been through a process, maybe you were working 12 hours a day, you were bootstrapping it, you didn’t have a lot of capital. And you came to that realization in the sense what you’re advocating requires capital, it requires putting resources into something at a time when you might not have had that, those resources. So, talk about that.

– So, what’s humanly interesting is this is, what’s baked into every single human being’s DNA, is the desire to positively contribute to other human beings. It’s already baked into us, we already wanna help. So, when an organization builds what we called the golden trout, the golden star. The golden star are making sure you know why you are doing things, it’s your mission, it’s your vision, it’s your purpose, it’s what we call your meadow value. With all those things are aligned to actually help other human beings, you will attract a higher caliber of talent. So, a lot of times businesses think, I’m gonna spend all this work doing my mission and vision and no one really cares. It does matter because when you do that, you actually can transform your organization from being a managed business in which you’re hiring people and merely trading them time for money. You basically say you work eight hours a day, and I’m gonna go ahead and give you this money. You don’t have your purpose of how you’re helping society, that’s all you’re gonna get. It’s people trading time for money. If you want people to bring their maximum innovation, their maximum creativity, their inspiration, and their problem solving, and you want them inspired working more hours than they’re actually being paid for, you got to know what your golden star is, how you’re benefiting society, and you actually get better people. So, you’re not only going to be having better impact in the world, but you’re also generate more revenue. So, it isn’t so much a cost or yet as it is just being really strategic with the resources you already have.

– So, there’s a point in a startup, where you don’t have many people, but yourself, right? But I think that one of the mistakes that entrepreneurs often make, is to not be thoughtfully enough as you start building and growing about who you bring on. And I think, bringing on people who are better than you, for example, who know more than you, who can really make a significant contribution, but there’s always that fear of where does that leave me as the boss, right?

– Yeah, I would agree. So, my paradigm has completely and totally transformed about what leadership is. When I first started in business, what I thought the key to go leadership was doing a vision, strategy, all of the thinking and also dictating. So, I thought my job was a leader was more or less to tell everyone what to do. And that is really, really limiting. Now what I believe the job of a leader, the number one job of a leader is leadership development. My job, if it’s done right, is actually am making leaders who are better than me. That is my purpose, is to build leaders who are better than me. And that’s how organizations now get exponential growth , is through a process of leadership development.

– Got it, So, in your talk a lot about the difference between power and empowerment. So, talk about that in relation to leadership.

– Oh, good. I get to ask you another question here Lois.

– Generally when I do podcasts, no one asks me questions.

– All right, here we go. So, do you want more power? Why or why not? Do you want more power?, yes or no, and then why or why not.

– Generally, you know what? Okay. I want more authority. And so, my power is not as important to me, but authority is, and I’ll tell you I’m colored in my opinion, because I grew up in Japan where individual standing out as individual is problematic. You have to make a group, move together. So, I’m not a typical American in terms of my response. And I know that.

– Interesting! very good, all right. I’m gonna give you a definition for power and let’s see if I can change your mind. So, power is the ability to achieve intended results.

– Okay. I think that’s important.

– The ability to achieve intended results. So, no matter what you want in life that you currently don’t have, it’s an exercise in power. So, for some people hiring the next employee, which they don’t have the budget for, and they’re trying to get them brought into the organization is an exercise in power. For some people, improving their relationship with their spouse. Maybe their relationship right now is on a scale 0-10 is 5, and getting them from a 5 to a 9, that’s an exercise and power. Maybe you want to contribute more dollars to charities around the world, or you wanna spend a week, a week, a month building houses in other countries around the world, those are all exercising power. So another, which you don’t have that you want is always an exercise in power. So yes, power is the ability to achieve intended results. And if anybody offers you more power, you say, yes.

– Well, there you go. So, here’s what’s interesting is the emotion that is surrounding words. And because I do a fair amount of work with global companies, I’m always fascinated by words and how language limits us. So, immediately the word power took me to the Asian culture, right? And so, your definition is great. And that’s the other thing I’ve learned, sometimes you just have to define your words for people, because we all have such different emotions attached to words.

– There’s a lot of negative stigma to the word power. Most people answer No to that question as well, but once they understand what it is, the answer is, well, of course I want more power. And then what I discovered, which is kind of interesting, I’ve come to realize that my definition for power is also my definition for leadership. So, leadership is the ability to achieve intended results. And I’ve had some people criticize that and say, “well, Peter, you know, it doesn’t talk about the cooperation of others and bring people in.” And the truth is you can’t do anything today without the cooperation of others. I mean, as soon as you walk out of your front door and you were walking on a public street, that requires the cooperation of others, even your clothing, it required hundreds, if not thousands of people in the supply chain to get you the clothes that are on your back. There’s virtually nothing you can do without the cooperation of others. Leadership and power is achieving intended results.

– Okay, for you, what’s like a say, would you like to leave?

– So, for me I’m both equally optimistic and pessimistic. So, I really believe in that we have the ability to solve our greatest problems. And I really wanna be part of the solution creating the next generation of leaders so we see our species survive. That’s really important to me. I think it’s baked into our DNA . Life for all we know is incredibly rare in the universe. Despite whatever YouTube videos you think you may have seen, or what TV shows on ancient aliens, there is no evidence, good evidence that aliens have visited our planet yet. Life is intelligent, life is most likely not very abundant. And then as big as the universe is. So we have a very unique responsibility to be here. In the cosmos to both witnesses it and to drive it forward, though, I’m very focused on generating leaders who are committed to the speed and survival of our species.

– I’m fascinated by that because it is a lot of energies gonna have to go there and you look at what is going on in our world in a very simplistic way. In this moment and space, we have so many issues and things that we need to address and can they be addressed?, of course, but it takes a huge concerted effort and it takes somebody being willing to arrive at. Don’t you think?

– It does, we as human beings, we have a couple of things working against us in our psychology. And the first one is we are massively insecure and we’re constantly looking for assuredness that we both have the physical resources to protect us and make sure we are fed, that’s the first thing. The second thing is, human beings, we are incredibly greedy. So, we like to have all the nice comforts around us, which means were really good at taking care of ourselves in the very short term. We have a difficult time caring for people who are far away from us, both in distance and the time. So, imagining and planning for being strategic enough to take care of ourselves in five and 20 and 30 and 40 years is very difficult for us. So, this new brand of leadership, which I’m currently developing is really taking in consideration our future selves and thinking about how we behave today in a way that protects our resources for the future.

– One of the questions that I think, is so useful when I want to reflect is, 10 years from now, when somebody is picking up my pieces, what will they wish I would have done?

– That’s a great question.

– We don’t think forward enough about that imprint, that we’re right now creating.

– You’re absolutely right about that. We don’t think about our legacy. And so this is a time, you know, I’m 51 and then the last five years or so, I’ve really had a chance now to reflect, to think about that kind of a legacy question, what is the impact that I want to make onto humanity? That’s a really important question.

– Peter, our time is unfortunately up and we could go on and on, I could ask you so many questions. And I think for those of you who are listening this thought of how do you lead a transformational organization or a group of people so that they can really maximize their greatest potential for themselves, but also for the community and the space around which they operate. Just asking that question alone would make such a huge difference. And I appreciate so much Peter, your being here and sharing with us your journey and what brought you here, because it should be, hopefully, the beginning of a discussion for many people. So, thank you so much for being with us today Peter, and those of you who are listening to Building My Legacy Podcast, thank you.

– Thank you, Lois.