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Gabe Krajicek – What comes after winning, leaders going off script, and the inescapable power of intent | Episode 2
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Welcome to episode two of Builder, Banker, Hacker, Chief! The guest on today’s show is Gabe Krajicek, CEO of Kasasa, a marketing and technology provider for community financial institutions.
On this show, I’m unpacking the stories, decisions, and influences that make people successful leaders. And full disclosure, my history with Gabe goes way back. I worked with him at Kasasa for 11 years before jumping into the career adventures that have landed me here at ZSuite.
My name is Nathan Baumeister; I am the CEO of ZSuite Tech and the host of this podcast.
What you’re about to hear may sound like a conversation between old friends because it is. And that friendship allowed us to dive into some topics that are very raw and vulnerable. You’re going to hear Gabe talk about his insecurity as a young CEO in an industry he had no functional experience in. You’re going to hear about the way the loss of a parent fed into his drive to win and what happened when he discovered that his drive to win wasn’t enough. You’ll hear about his victory against the Federal Reserve and the internal shift that has transformed his approach to leadership – after more than 20 years as a CEO.
It's my privilege to share a glimpse of Gabe’s wisdom, and radical transparency with you in this episode.
Resources:
Gabe’s media recommendations:
The Outward Mindset: How to Change Lives and Transform Organizations
Connect:
Recommended
Transcript
Young CEO's Journey
00:00:00
Speaker
And the business was not in a great state the ceo that was there was not a good fit for the long run and the investors ask if i wanted to just be the ceo and i was like well heck yes i do this would be a fantastic opportunity i don't know what i was doing and i mean i literally went home drives home. From work i would call my mom.
00:00:21
Speaker
Crying saying I don't know what I'm doing like I they're laughing at me the founders of this company Who now have like a 22 year old boss and they're you know, 10 12 years older than me and they're from the business They know what they're doing They can see that I'm an idiot in terms of running a business and so I don't really know what I'm doing and she would just like give me the stick with it just keep doing your love thing keep listening and to to to kind of like
00:00:48
Speaker
lessons came out of that for me that were important for my life. One was solidifying the idea. I had this microbiology teacher in college that every time before the test, he would put up this quote, and the quote said, Chance favors the prepared mind, Louis Pasteur. It was right before the test, and it was his way of saying, if you want to be lucky on the test, study, because if you know the stuff, the test will probably seem easy.
00:01:12
Speaker
And that idea of chance favoring the prepared mind, it's like, well, was it pure luck that I got hired for dealerskins? Yeah, and obviously it was pure luck. I mean, you have to have the coin land where it lands to have an opportunity to say, I got heads. But also you've got to be able to pick up the coin that says heads and say, I will be the CEO now. How do you make that leap?
00:01:32
Speaker
And how do you even get asked? It's like, well, I think that the reason that I got asked was because I was obsessive about not letting people down, not failing. When they saw my work ethic, it was like, this guy is going to bleed fire to try to get it done, or he'll probably explode and fail. But somewhere in between him exploding and failing and this thing being a success, there will be no give up in that guy.
Podcast Introduction: Gabe Cragik
00:02:03
Speaker
Hi, my name is Nathan Baumeister, and you're listening to Builder, Banker, Hacker, Chief. A podcast where executives from the world of finance and technology share the story of how they got where they are and the decisions that made them who they are. I'm looking for hidden moments of truth and sacrifice, wisdom and folly, and what it's like to navigate treacherous waters at the helm of a growing company. I want to do all that so that together we can learn from their journey and use that insight personally and professionally.
00:02:33
Speaker
In episode two, my guest is Gabe Cragik, CEO of Kasasa, and in full disclosure, he's a close friend and mentor because I actually worked for Gabe at Kasasa for more than a decade. Gabe's leadership style is exceptional for his focus on love as a guiding value and his commitment to doing what is necessary instead of what's expected from CEO. Sit back and listen close. You're about to boldly go where few leaders have gone before, to hear what collective consciousness and loving intent have to do with running the successful company.
00:03:16
Speaker
Gabe, thank you so much for joining us today on Builder Banker Hacker Chief. Glad to be here. Full disclosure, I've known Gabe for over 15 years now. I actually spent 11 years of my career working with him as my CEO. He's always been an inspiration for me. There's a lot of things that I work hard to emulate on what you do. I'm excited to dig into some of the stories.
00:03:43
Speaker
that have helped shape you become the leader that you are because I found you so inspirational.
Origins of Leadership
00:03:48
Speaker
I'd love to share that with the rest of the folks that are listening to this. Thank you. I'm excited.
00:03:54
Speaker
I always like to start off with the origin story. I know you're a superhero fan. I'm a superhero fan, too. And both the superheroes as well as the supervillains, there's always things that happen in their childhood or their high school years or whatever that kind of created the arc of their character. So as you look back to any formative experiences as you were growing up, are there any that you look at who you are now as a leader?
00:04:26
Speaker
that really defined kind of the trajectory that you were gonna go down? That's a huge question. Certainly, yeah, my childhood impacted who I became, like I think it impacts everybody. And I like the metaphor of a superhero in an origin story, because when you think about like origin stories, the greatest superhero of all times, clearly Superman. No debate, no debate. It's not even relevant to debate it, we all know.
00:04:53
Speaker
And Superman's origin story is fundamentally a tragic story. I mean, it starts off with his whole planet is exploding. His parents love him so much that they're going to find a way to ship him away to some other place. In the process of that, he develops superpowers. Spider-Man, you know, like gets bit by a radioactive spider. That's not a fun experience. Shazam gets captured by wizards and gets all these new powers. He's a kid. He can't deal with what's going on. The idea of an origin story almost always has tragedy at the heart of it.
00:05:20
Speaker
And from that comes strength. And, you know, I choose to try to look at my life that way everywhere I can, not because I want to see tragedy, but because I want to see that the hard things that happened to me served a purpose to make me a better person. And, you know, I think if you were to start the origin story, it starts when I was three, my parents were divorced. And, you know, a lot of people have divorced parents and there's
00:05:39
Speaker
Nothing special about that except that my experience of it was one where I developed this desire to be perfect, like really deep down. I did not feel okay if I was not winning at whatever I was doing. Fundamentally, it was about bringing back straight A's to my parents because
00:06:02
Speaker
You got a split house. As a kid like that, sometimes you just want to be noticed. You want to make sure that they notice that you're there and you're doing good things. You got two different families. You're going back and forth between. But it's like, hey, look at me, look at me. And my look at me was, look at me. I'm making straight A's. Look at me. I always mine. Look at me. I read my verse. My 10 verses of the Bible every single day.
00:06:20
Speaker
and try to be the best I could be. And that became my superpower, which is something that I would never want to lose. I would never go back and say, man, I want that radioactive spider not to bite me because I got powers from it. I got a drive that was probably an unhealthy, but an uncommon drive that a lot of people didn't get blessed with.
00:06:41
Speaker
And I think my life has been in large part learning how to wrestle with what to do with that energy that's inside of me that wants to be so good and wants to do the best and wants to win and all that. And like, how do you do that? And also not turn into a neurotic, you know, nervous breakdown. And I think that's like, that's been the path is figuring out how to harness that and turn it into something positive. Yeah. Isn't it crazy that some of the things that are superpowers when taken to an extreme also are the root of our downfalls.
00:07:09
Speaker
100%. It's like, everything's about that. As I get older, I get kids, your life becomes clearer to you with some age.
00:07:17
Speaker
Like, everything is about the balance. It's walking the path. It's like, too much sugar is bad and you need a little. Like, how do you find what that right thing is? And it's like, you can find this tool that you know how to use, which might be like, I drive for perfection, I drive to win, I drive all the way. And then you look up and you've got to wake the dead bodies around you because you pushed too hard and people got burnt out. And it's like, you got to balance that and find the right spot. And I don't have magic for that, but I can say that's the path to walk. It's a hard one.
00:07:47
Speaker
Understanding the dual nature of strengths and weaknesses is crucial to building a successful company. If you're willing to radically accept that fact, you can deploy your strengths where they're needed most, ensure your weaknesses before they become points of failure. Having weaknesses doesn't make you bad just as having strengths doesn't make you good. Both are attributes of humanity and even superheroes.
00:08:11
Speaker
there's no doubt that it's a path, right? And it's always going to be changing and reandering and something that you'll have to work through. I always like to understand kind of the
00:08:25
Speaker
exposure that great business leaders have to business as they're growing up. Were my parents CEOs? Did they run companies? Were they entrepreneurs? Did they do startups or not, and how that influences? So as you look at
00:08:48
Speaker
Um, your parents and the formative adults kind of in your experience as you were growing up, was business something that you were exposed to? And it was that, was that something that drove the passion of you end up being an entrepreneur?
Family Influence on Leadership
00:09:01
Speaker
Oh, a hundred percent. My, uh, my grandpa is a,
00:09:04
Speaker
accomplished entrepreneur. My dad worked with my grandpa. They started some companies and took them public. And business is what we talked about. That was a big part of what was my childhood. And this is what my dad was up to. He was traveling all the time, doing stuff. And I wanted to know what my dad was doing.
00:09:19
Speaker
And I think you can't get away from the blessing it is to have the dinner table conversation be like how the stock market works or how to motivate your employees. When that's like what you're doing when you're eating mashed potatoes from the time you're six to the time you're 20, it adds up with some good coaching along the way for sure.
00:09:39
Speaker
It would be challenging to imagine me knowing how to do what I did or have the confidence at 22 to go say, yeah, I'm going to be a CEO if I hadn't since I was like 10 here. And here's kind of how you do it. Here's kind of how it looks like. Okay, this isn't a foreign world to me. I can step into that. Yeah. When I know a lot of kids like to rebel against their parents.
00:09:59
Speaker
And so a lot of kids that are exposed to that type of startup life, and obviously there's stress associated with that as well. You mentioned that your dad was traveling all the time and all those different types of things. At first, were you determined not to go in that path or was it something that you always wanted to do? No, I lined up and saluted, man. That's that perfectionism. Once I heard there was a goal that sounded like work real hard and you can make money and be
00:10:25
Speaker
more powerful in the lives of people that you wanna support and have the capability to do that. I was like, that's the only path that makes sense for me. So it was, you know, I did think about going to medicine for a while, but I had bad hand-eye coordination and wanted to be a surgeon. So that idea didn't pan out, but it really wasn't rebellious. I was always trying to just excel at the level, the maximum level that I could.
00:10:49
Speaker
That's great. As you look back at some of those dinner table conversations or these opportunities to talk about, is there any particular story or lesson that you can look back to that has stuck with you throughout the years? Absolutely.
00:11:07
Speaker
My dad was in the Petrochem business. So I don't know what the listener might know about the Petrochem business in the 90s, but it was not like this wasn't a place where you did Kumbaya kind of trust falls and we hug it out and we say we love each other and talk about our feelings. This is not that kind of industry. This is like hardened dudes in Nomex suits working in 100 degree heat and 100% Louisiana humidity and like
00:11:33
Speaker
to be in that environment and to say loudly, I love my employees and it's important that they know that I love them. And that was part of my dad's just way of being and wearing his cashmere sweater and walking around with his Pomeranian dog, like he just didn't fit in in that universe. And that was his unique way of bringing, like his way of being a leader and making it about love into that industry. And it was inspiring to me. And so
00:11:57
Speaker
When I was 22 and found myself first time as a CEO, that was the first thing is I will make this a loving company and try to emulate my dad. That's beautiful. I totally agree. I don't think it's just the petrochem industry. I think many industries in the 90s and going back previous to that, the idea of even talking about love,
00:12:20
Speaker
would be considered an afternoon. You can say, today, I get in front of a bunch of bankers. And I'm like, we always talk about our patch values of love. We've got 50, 60 bankers in the room. And we say, we have love. And I can tell that it's OK that you said that word. But it's like, are you really professional? Don't you mean care? Don't you mean compassion? And I'm like, no, I actually mean love. I think it's the root thing behind all those. And I think it's a bigger value. And I don't know why we would be ashamed to say we want to hang our hat on the biggest, most powerful, wonderful value we can hang it on.
00:12:49
Speaker
Yeah, absolutely. I mean, obviously, as I mentioned before, spending so much time at Casasa, this idea of love in a company was something that always spoke to me. I found that it softens it a little bit. If you say things to your employees like, I love y'all, instead of I love you. Some reason, just those I love you makes people a little bit more comfortable. But if I throw in a y'all, everyone's like, okay, I guess this is okay. It is. That's a good way to get there. I kind of like making them uncomfortable though, because it's like,
00:13:18
Speaker
Why is this uncomfortable? Like why is it uncomfortable? Isn't the natural state of humans to be in love with each other? Like it's all the stuff that gets in between us and the other person that makes that not be the natural state. So we were trying to build the best like the way we could come to work and live in the highest type of working environment.
00:13:35
Speaker
And it's like at North Star, I'd be like, everybody walks in and they don't have baggage. They're not here to worry about their ego. They're here to connect us human beings with other human beings they love and commit to a big purpose that they're going to go accomplish something that matters in the world. That would be the awesomest place to come to work every day. And I'm not saying Kasas is there. It's not. I mean, we've got a ways to go to get to that vision where it's
00:13:56
Speaker
as pure as it is in my head, but that's the thing that just keeps going. I want to walk in and feel like I live in an oasis of love where everybody cares about everybody, where we are working together, working for a common purpose that matters, not trying to throw salt in one another's game so we can look good in the political evaluations of who gets promotions and raises, but it's like, let's just go win together.
00:14:17
Speaker
You can't get away from human personalities. There's always going to be people that get in that and muck it up and don't share that type of vision. But the closer you can get to only working with people that do share it and feel that way together. And I know, I mean, Nathan, that's what you're building at Z-suite. That type of...
00:14:32
Speaker
energy is unstoppable. The times that Casasa has been knocked down by regulatory changes over and over again or economic conditions that buckled the company to its knees and you watch it bloody stand back up with a bunch of people smiling and saying, we're going to do this. It's like, God, if that didn't inspire you, you want to be the best leader you can be. You got to level up when people are showing that kind of passion. Absolutely.
00:14:58
Speaker
Absolutely. Thank you for sharing some of those lessons as you were growing up and all those types of things. I know you
Career Path Shift
00:15:09
Speaker
went off to college and as you mentioned, you thought maybe you're going to be a surgeon, but that was pulled back pretty quickly. Did you actually study business in college or what did you do from there?
00:15:21
Speaker
Well, I studied zoology as my primary major. I got into Emory Medical School and then I went and took an aptitude test that told me my hand-to-eye coordination wasn't very good in my junior year. I flipped all of my electives to business. It was like a Hail Mary. Can I eke out a business minor from LSU in a year and a half to go and get enough that I could go into business as opposed to?
00:15:42
Speaker
I guess, working at a zoo with a zoology degree since I'm not going to be a surgeon. I picked up those business classes, but it was like econ 101, 102. It was very, very basic. I didn't have a lot of business training when I graduated. I was really relying on a lot my dad had taught me and a fundamental understanding of debits and credits. Just a preview into what I want to go to next, but I want to set it up because I think it'll be an interesting question.
00:16:11
Speaker
One of your first jobs, I mean, you're a very, very young CEO. And so I want to get into that in just a moment. But just for context for the folks that are listening, I mean, what job did you do or had you done before you became a CEO at 22?
00:16:30
Speaker
I'd probably done a lot of jobs like a lot of people did. My stepdad had a produce warehouse. One of my jobs at about six years old was to go and crush the boxes so that they could go to the trash. It was pretty hilarious because there were these big wax, big heavy boxes, like cardboard that's thicker than you've ever seen before that carries these big, big things of bananas and stuff.
00:16:53
Speaker
And my job was to jump on them and to make them flat. I don't think it was an actual job. I think I was just getting paid to pretend like I was working. And I think I had a lot of those jobs from my parents along the way. I remember when I went and worked with my dad when I was like 14, I got my first summer job that was kind of a real job where I punched a clock and stuff.
00:17:09
Speaker
I might've been about to turn 15. I think it was the summer I turned 15. And my job there was basically doing whatever the people in the shop wanted me to do. My favorite job that I look back on that I am convinced was not a real task was to cut the ends off of five gallon buckets. They would have like a hundred buckets. There were five gallon buckets that had used to contain oil and stuff. And like, you got to cut the bottoms off the buckets. So how would you cut the bottoms off the buckets? And they said, it has to do with OSHA.
00:17:36
Speaker
And I was like, well, if you got to do it for OSHA, you got to go cut the bottoms off the buckets, but this would be like an entire day's worth of work with a saw. And then I would come in, I'd say, I cut the bottoms off the buckets and they'd be like, yeah, that's great. Like, I don't think it mattered that anybody cut the bottoms off the buckets is my point. I think my dad wanted to see if workers told me to cut a hundred bucks bottoms off in a day, if I would just sit there and do it. And I did. I cut them straight, stacked them nice. Task achieved.
00:18:02
Speaker
Lots of stuff like that, mowing grass, trying to start businesses selling flowers that I'd picked in the field. Typical kid trying to figure out how to be a person. Absolutely. How is it that a kid that cut the bottoms out of buckets, got a zoology degree, all of a sudden, 22 years old, someone said, you should be a CEO.
00:18:28
Speaker
How does that happen? I think it's really good luck. I mean, I have to acknowledge there is some tremendous luck in my life that I don't take any credit for. I just was in the right place at the right time and seize the opportunity. The path that led to it was when I graduated from college, my dad was dying. He had a brain cancer and this ended up being the last year of his life.
00:18:51
Speaker
I moved back home from Baton Rouge where I went to LSU, went back to Lake Charles, Louisiana, lived with my family there for a year, helped my dad kind of, you know, deal with what that was. And after that finished up and he died, I knew I wanted to leave Lake Charles. It's a, it's a great little town. It's a great place to be from, but it was, I wanted to move on.
00:19:13
Speaker
And I moved to Nashville, Tennessee, because I got an opportunity to work with a guy named John Gerber, who had a little bitty investment bank that was doing technology deals. And I was kind of his boy Friday, and I would help him write the business plans, interview the entrepreneurs, do things like that for us to try to raise money. And this was right like 2000, 2001, before the dot-com implosion.
00:19:33
Speaker
getting out there and do investment banking work for technology companies in the early 2000s, late 90s, blast. Then all of a sudden, the market just disappeared and we couldn't get a deal funded. The business that we had put together was a company called Dealerskin. One of the businesses we helped put together was a company called Dealerskins that did websites for car dealerships way early on before anybody had really built content management systems to build websites.
00:19:58
Speaker
And the business was not in a great state. The CEO that was there was not a good fit for the long run. And the investors asked if I wanted to just be the CEO. And I was like, well, heck yes, I do. This would be a fantastic opportunity. And I didn't know what I was doing. And I mean, I literally went home, drives home from work. I would call my mom.
00:20:20
Speaker
crying saying I don't know what I'm doing like I they're laughing at me the founders of this company who now have like a 22 year old boss and they're you know 10 12 years older than me and they're from the business they know what they're doing they can see that I'm an idiot in terms of running a business and so I don't really know what I'm doing and she would just like give me the you know stick with it just keep doing your love thing keep listening and to to to kind of like
00:20:47
Speaker
lessons came out of that for me that were important for my life. One was solidifying the idea. I had this microbiology teacher in college that every time before the test, he would put up this quote, and the quote said, chance favors the prepared mind, Louis Pasteur. It was right before tests, and it was his way of saying, if you want to be lucky on the test, study, because if you know the stuff, the test will probably seem easy.
00:21:10
Speaker
And that idea of chance favoring the prepared mind, it's like, well, was it pure luck that I got hired for dealerskins? Yeah, and obviously it was pure luck. I mean, you have to have the coin land where it lands to have an opportunity to say, I got heads.
00:21:24
Speaker
But also you've got to be able to pick up the coin that says heads and say, I will be the CEO now. How do you make that leap? And how do you even get asked? You know, it's like, well, I think that the reason that I got asked was because I was obsessive about not letting people down, not failing. Like when they saw my work ethic, it was like, this guy is going to bleed fire to try to get it done, or he'll probably explode and fail. But somewhere in between, like him exploding and failing and this thing being a success, there will be no give up in that guy.
00:21:54
Speaker
And so if you can be that kind of person that brings that kind of energy, people are more likely to look at you and say, hey, let's give that guy a shot. So I think that chance favoring prepared mind, like trying to be the person that was ready for whatever all the time helped me out a lot. The other thing that came out of that was,
00:22:09
Speaker
probably more importantly was a way of leading that could work for a person that didn't know what they were doing. So this is like a really, you got to figure out I'm the boss. I have to be the boss. Like it's literally my title. You can't not approve things and say left and right. When people are asking you, you got to go left and right. So how do you do it?
00:22:25
Speaker
And not being an expert in anything what i tried to become an expert in was finding ways of communicating and being with people that would allow for the best ideas to flow to the top is that idea like i don't have the answers i got a room for people should know the stuff.
00:22:41
Speaker
if I can facilitate the conversation where the best ideas are the most buoyant and they can float to the top and then I can just help everybody see that that's the best idea not own it but just like let the ideas stand out then that would be a way that I can align everybody to go in a direction but it won't be the direction that I laid out because I don't know which direction to go it'll be the direction we found and that became really like when you get all the way I don't
00:23:06
Speaker
unpack all of it. Like you look at the Casasa values. There's one in there that we used to call five star leadership, which has been changed to empowered ownership. But it's the same basic idea of if you want to get people engaged in the business, encourage them to speak up all the time and say whatever idea you have, we want to hear it. We want this to be a marketplace of ideas. And we're all going to surrender to the best idea because we all have the same goal.
00:23:30
Speaker
And if you can create that kind of culture, which I'm not, again, I don't say I'm perfect at all, but that's been my driving goal to be great at that. I think that's a good North Star because it takes a lot of pressure off of a leader to always be right and always know what they're going to do next, which is impossible. And instead says, we as a team, like a quick aside, did you know that a thousand people can guess the weight of a cow?
00:23:53
Speaker
I didn't know that. OK, this is real. You can look it up on NPR. And I pick NPR because they did a story on it and it's like this is some weird, wacky stuff. So if NPR says it's true, it's probably true. But it is a real thing. It's a statistical thing. And it's been done at state fairs for decades. And you ask a large number of people, what's the weight of a cow?
00:24:13
Speaker
And any individual person is going to be wrong probably by a lot, but the average, the mean of the means is like it's within a few percentage points of the weight of the cow. And it's been proven statistically to be more accurate than a small cohort of experts. So imagine this, you have five people that know everything about cows and you ask the five people what's the weight of the cow and they're less accurate than a thousand random Joe Schmoes that are on the sidewalk.
00:24:38
Speaker
What does that tell you? I interpret that to mean that there must be some sort of collective wisdom somehow that's accessible in the minds of lots of people. Like the IQ of one person might be 100, the next one's 100, the next one's 100, and you add them all up, and the average is always 100. Some are a little smarter than the others. When you add up all of them, and they somehow have some means to collaborate in a constructive way, the wisdom in that crowd knows the freaking weight of a cow.
00:25:02
Speaker
That's a magical, and literally from magic grabs the answer out of space and knows the answer in a tangible sense, in a real sense. As a leader, when you're looking at your employees, I think a cool way to visualize your employees and see them is like a collective consciousness. Yeah, they are individuals, but they collectively have wisdom that far exceeds the wisdom of any individual in that group.
00:25:25
Speaker
The challenge is how do you help them guess the way to the cow? How do you get onto a system where they are working as one and their IQ is not the IQ of an individual, but it's the IQ of a collection of individuals, which now is like the IQ is like a thousand. They know things that couldn't possibly be known, but somehow by working together, they can tap into that intuition and find the answer. And so like, I know it's a little hokey, but I think as a mindset of saying like, it comes from a place of humility. If you're looking at your employees and you're saying their IQ is a thousand,
00:25:55
Speaker
I'm pretty smart. Maybe mine's north of a hundred, but I'm not even where near what that collective wisdom is. If you surrender to that idea, then it becomes pretty easy to say my job is to raise the IQ of the collection. Yeah. Well, and what's interesting when you go into that, I would say that one of the biggest downfalls of leaders, at least the ones that I've studied since the 1950s through business school and stuff like that, it always comes down to pride or hubris.
00:26:25
Speaker
When you look at a typical path of people who move into leadership positions, it's because they've built expertise over times, they've proven the expertise and now they get in the leadership position. And I think they're the ones that need to provide all the answers. I'm in this role because I'm the expert, right? So it's interesting, you flipped it on its head.
00:26:44
Speaker
you were thrown into a position that you knew you didn't have the experience for. So it actually drove you to this higher level of leadership that most other leaders have to work years and years to pull back to understand this idea of humility and trusting others and those types of things. That's just, it's a, it's a fabulous warning and circumstances that you found yourself in. Yeah. And it is, like you said, it's just circumstance. I mean, if I'd have found myself, if I'd have been a surgeon and I'd have gone into surgery and I'd have been
00:27:12
Speaker
great surgeon. Then I said, okay, I want to be in business now and I'm going to create a surgery center. The way that I would approach that would have been totally different. I've been like, I've been working for decades thinking of all the problems in surgery centers and I'm going to go fix the things that I know are problems. I'm going to go do it.
00:27:25
Speaker
And I just didn't have that option. Like I think a lot of metaphorically, a lot of leaders get to be outboard motors for their boat. Like they know where they're going. They're going to stick that outboard motor on the back of the boat and dammit, they're going to go fast and in the direction. It's like, I didn't have that. I didn't know which direction to go. I didn't know the industry. I didn't know what would happen. So my job was a sale. I had to throw a big sale up and make sure it captured all the wind that was out there and make that wind kind of blow in a singular direction. So we're all kind of feeling that.
00:27:52
Speaker
that movement where we're trying to head and then just keep recrystallizing and recrystallizing. It's a different organic process than having a plan. I envy people that have that plan. That must be awesome. You got your outboard on, you strap it, you're going north. Gosh, what a level of clarity that must be to lead that way. There are times where I've had that, where I know of north and we're going this way.
00:28:13
Speaker
And I think, I don't want to diminish, there are parts that you know are North. There are parts that you have to make a stand for that are like, as the leader, this and only this. And that's where I think it comes down to culture. I heard a mentor of mine described leadership as creating a rainforest. And the way he described it was that in every rainforest, there are orchids. There's are orchids in rainforests.
00:28:38
Speaker
So you don't have to make orchids happen in rainforest. You have to make a rainforest and wait for the orchids. And so if you can kind of unpack that philosophically, it's like a lot of leaders go in and it's like, I'm going to make you bloom. You're going to be an orchid. I'm going to make an orchid out of this department. It's like, well, there's things you could do. You could like mist it. You could give it the right fertilizer. You could really focus on that one orchid and make it bloom. Or you can kind of zoom back and say, is this an environment where orchids bloom?
00:29:06
Speaker
And that's my job. And if anybody threatens my rainforest, they will find a very big outboard all of a sudden strapped onto the back of my boat saying, no, no, no, north to the rainforest, north to the rainforest. But if it's direction within the rainforest, I think that's where you step back a little bit and say, okay, I don't have perfect clarity on this. I mean, we're in a challenging industry, you and me, Nathan. I mean, this is like,
00:29:27
Speaker
community FIs are going away. I'm not going to be doomsday about our industry, but just go look at the data. There are fewer every single year. This is a market where things are constantly in flux. Change has never happened quicker than it is happening right now. The organizations that can survive in that type of flux and that type of uncertainty are going to have to be nimble, in my opinion. I think that's where
00:29:48
Speaker
the wisdom of the crowd comes into play because they're going to have so much more input. Absolutely. I think it's a good segue to one of my favorite stories of yours. I like that I can cheat because I know so many of your stories so I can pick them where appropriate. You just share the industry that we're in with financial institutions and overall decreasing year over year. You have a unique passion for this industry.
00:30:16
Speaker
baked into the mission of what Casasa does in general. And if I remember correctly, there was an inkling within your first business that really drove some of that passion. So as we go back to dealer skins and this first job company that you took over as CEO, ended in a successful exit. So, you know, skip to the end, went great. Obviously, it was a meandering path.
00:30:44
Speaker
And so I know there's some hardship and I think you have a great story of how a banker actually stepped in and helped out with that. Yeah, I would not be. I didn't realize that I would own my entire career to a community banker, but I do. I don't even know his name.
00:30:58
Speaker
Um, but I remember what went down. I'd been a CEO for about a year of dealer skins. We were a startup. We had very little money. Like when we started with $50,000 as our little seed capital, get it going. When I took over, um, I think we got another 70 somewhere along the way in that first year. And we were doing everything we could to grow a business. I was factoring the receivables. So.
00:31:22
Speaker
for your readers or listeners that don't know what factoring is, you're basically selling your receivables, which means that some other third-party company is calling your car dealers and asking them when they're gonna pay, and they've already paid you like 95% of the value of the invoice. So it's essentially crack. Like once you start factoring, you can't stop factoring. So we were in this situation where we factored everything, we financed everything, we were max maxed out, we were skipping paychecks. And our chairman, John Gerber, knew a community banker
00:31:52
Speaker
that was Bank of Nashville. We went down to Bank of Nashville and had put on my grandpa's suit because that's what I had to look nice and came in there with the business plan. It was all beautiful. It's like, here's how we're going to make all this money. And this banker's looking at me like, clearly, this is a joke. Like, not like a joke joke, but look, imagine someone walks in, they factored all the receivables, their cash flow negative, they're not profitable. Their growth is not moving in the direction that it needs to move. And you're a
00:32:20
Speaker
commercial banker thinking about making a loan to this dude. You're not getting approved and the guy said I'll need a personal guarantee and I stood up and I said I personally guarantee you I will pay back this money and like I didn't know like I thought it was like a promise but then I understood there of course be some guarantee so I did like I signed all my
00:32:40
Speaker
me guaranteeing that I'll pay this back. But the guy shook my hand and it was definitely on a, it was definitely related to relationship. John Gerber knew that guy. That guy trusted Gerber. Gerber trusted me. And there was a connection there that had that moment of trust not occurred. If he hadn't laughed at the little kid that says, I'm going to, I personally guarantee you I'm going to pay you back.
00:33:01
Speaker
and said, okay, I'm going to give you a shot. That $50,000 we got right there bridged us until Crum Carmichael and Lucius Birch could come in and guarantee a $500,000 line of credit, which ended up being what we needed to be able to grow the business and take it where it needed to go.
00:33:19
Speaker
A banker is nothing if he or she isn't trustworthy. And it might sound a little overly simplistic or trite, but the entire global economy is based on mutual trust. That trust is built on individuals trusting each other to keep monetary promises and even rolls up into governments trusting each other. Trust is a reputation that you build over the years and can erode in moments. Gabe's story illustrates just how much success or failure can hinge on the decision to trust another human.
00:33:52
Speaker
Had that person not stood in the gap and said, I will accept your guarantee and let you do this, we would not have had a business. Chance would have not favored the prepared mind. Everything would have failed.
Navigating Legal Challenges
00:34:02
Speaker
And it really was a person making a handshake. And I think like while that moment did not hit me at that moment because I was in the car business and I was just honestly just trying to make payroll. I wanted a paycheck. I wanted to pay my employees and anything that would get us there would work.
00:34:16
Speaker
As I look back and I correlate my story with all the stories that I've heard from our clients and the impact that they have with similar entrepreneurs in their communities, it's dumbfounding to think about what if community banks went away? How many people just like me, like you, Nathan, the others throughout their starting their entrepreneurial dream,
00:34:35
Speaker
and that financing that is the bridge to the next thing, you know, that community FI financing goes away. There are tons of people that are going to say like, oh, I'm not going to start my little business. I'm not going to chase my dream. I'm not going to take a risk. I'm going to go get a job, but a big corporate company and we can all be drones.
00:34:51
Speaker
I don't like that version of America. I like the version of America where people's money that they hold in their page, their checking accounts, that money goes back into the community to do good in the community that they live in and love. And that's the ecosystem of reinvestment that community FIs facilitate.
00:35:07
Speaker
I didn't realize how important it was until I had been in this industry about five years. I planned on only being at Bankview, Kasasa's old name, for five years. It was going to be just like dealer skins. Take the job, flip it in five, flip it in five, and my vision of my job was flip it in five, I'm going to do lots of companies. I fell in love with this industry, and I've had chances to sell it and cash out several times, and I just stay because I want to see community effort. I want to see what would happen.
00:35:31
Speaker
if there was a voice for community FIs that was loud enough to stand toe to toe with the megabanks. Because I sincerely believe that if you gave people a choice, if they felt it in the marketing, if they were aware of their options, then it was easy for them to go and open an account at these little institutions. The average American, when given a choice between Bank of America or their local bank,
00:35:50
Speaker
with product quality being equal, they would certainly choose the local bank because the local bank's the good guy. We've all seen it's a wonderful life. We know George Bailey wants to help his town and we know if he goes away, everything goes bad. They made a whole movie about it. That idea of community FIs going away harming communities is deeply embedded in the human psyche of being an American all the way back to the movies we watch every Christmas. It's there for a reason. It happens to be true.
00:36:15
Speaker
And so I want to see these community FIs have a chance to see what would happen if they could shout as loud as the big guys and match them with product. And I think that we could see a different type of America like literally over like this is what keeps me going. I think we could change the course of this country over a 50 year to 100 year kind of trajectory.
00:36:35
Speaker
if finance did not continue to get more and more consolidated into the hands of fewer and fewer people whose only objective is to raise their stock price as opposed to serve the communities that they live in and love. And I want to live in the world that looks like a bunch of people taking care of their communities because they love them. And I believe Casas is going to be successful. But honestly,
00:36:56
Speaker
I don't have to have it be successful to know that I'm spending my life on something that matters. And it's like, pick a purpose, stand for it, and I'm standing with all my might along with the rest of the CASASA team. We'll see where we go. Yeah. And I think a lot of great lessons in what you just shared there. But first, just for context for the people that are listening. So we're recording this at the end of 2022. You said you thought you were going to be there for five years. How long has it been?
00:37:24
Speaker
17 years 17 years. Yeah, so just the the trajectory and the commitment I think is really really cool But it ties to one of the things that you know from my perspective If you want to be a great leader You have to have passion and you have to have the passion that you could then translate to others and I think you Articulated that very well with your own story there So as we
00:37:50
Speaker
Move from dealer skins and thanks for sharing that story. I just love that story and having also worked with companies where you're not quite exactly sure where the next payroll's gonna come from. I know that feeling very well. It's a hard one to be in. And those people that come in to help out to keep it going always has a special place in the entrepreneur's heart.
00:38:17
Speaker
Yeah. You shared that you had a successful exit. It was awesome. And you jumped right into what was then Bankview, but now is Casasa, right? There was just like no transition. It was like from one to the next. Yeah. And when you first started and I think it was end of 2004, beginning of 2005 is about the time when you started started working on that.
00:38:45
Speaker
I joined in 2007, so I wasn't right in the beginning, but came in a little bit after that. But in that first two-year period, starting off this company, you really built out on this awesome trajectory of growth.
00:38:59
Speaker
And it ended up being a rocket ship that went for a long time. I mean, I can't remember how many times you made it onto the Ink 500 list. It had a full cover story about Bankview, Kasasa, all that fun stuff. It wasn't always roses, though. I think there was a couple of thorns along the way. But in that rapid growth time period within Kasasa, I'm curious if there's just one or two experiences that when you look back, really,
00:39:29
Speaker
taught you some important lessons that have been impactful for you. The biggest lesson that I learned during that period, by far, all the credit goes to Don Schaeffer, our founder. I think he's an amazing man. He's a character too, and he knows it.
00:39:47
Speaker
Whenever I had been there probably eight months as CEO, it was exactly eight months as CEO. The Federal Reserve said that our core product was illegal. Award checking, now we call it kasasa cash. That was not compliant. And we did not have, we had a million dollars left in the bank. I'd raised about, not me, me and Don and everybody was a team effort. But we had raised around, I think it was close to $3 million from the, essentially the dealer skins crew and their friends and families and their extended kind of group, a bunch of angels.
00:40:16
Speaker
And at that time, we had raised about 3 million. We had about a million left. We were burning $300,000 a month. So, simple math, you have a three-month runway and the FDA and the Federal Reserve said our core product wasn't legal. So, I mean, we couldn't launch another one. We had to decide what we were going to tell all our existing clients. We told them it was illegal, but we think they should keep offering it until we find a resolution in this interim period because we don't want to shut all their accounts down and come back up.
00:40:41
Speaker
We had to change the way we sold. We had to go and tell FIs that, hey, this product is a hot product. It's so hot. The FDIC doesn't want you to watch it. But you should sign up now because we're signing up tons of institutions. And if you don't want to be last to market, get in the production queue. It's a weird sale to make. But I remember when I first got the word from the Federal Reserve that our product was illegal. I called up Don Schafer.
00:41:05
Speaker
And I basically quit. I mean, I didn't quit like I'm quitting, but I told him we have failed. Like we had a million dollars left in the bank. There's $300,000 a month in burn. We have an illegal product. The Federal Reserve says that it's not legal. We can't launch another one. I don't know how to change the law. And this was me saying like, I don't, I'm stuck. I'm stuck as a CEO. I feel completely boxed in. I don't know what move to make.
00:41:28
Speaker
And I was ready to give up. I was at that point of failure where I would have thought, like, if he'd have said, well, we all win some, we lose some. If he'd have done that, I'd have said, well, shucks, you're right. We all win some, we lose some. I'll tell the team, we'll try to unwind this thing as easy as we can. And instead, I know he was yelling at the top of his lungs. And I think he had the phone far away from him. But I remember exactly what he said. He said, hallelujah. Thank you, God, for giving us another chance to show you how awesome we are.
00:41:57
Speaker
And I just started laughing when he said that because I was like, that is the most inappropriate response for our situation that I can imagine from where I was at that moment. Now, as I look back, it was the most brilliant response he could have possibly given. And what happened inside of me was I laughed and I thought it was crazy.
00:42:15
Speaker
And he said something like, you're pretty smart, right? And I said, I guess so. He's like, well, you better be. Go figure it out. And he hung up on me. And he actually didn't hang up. He told me who to call. He said, call Karen Neely. And then he hung up. And he was doing it kind of like a little ribber, like it was like, you got to go figure this out.
00:42:36
Speaker
You don't go, don't you dare give up. I want to see some fighting you. And I called Karen Neely and we started getting a plan and that night I went and shaved all my hair off. I had long hair at the time and I shaved it off like a buzz cut and I moved my office to the center of the cube farm in our little 40 person office.
00:42:53
Speaker
and was telling everybody we're going to war with Washington. That's why my hair was shaved. And I was on the phone every single day in front of everybody with our attorneys calling the Federal Reserve and they could hear me working. And my big fear at that moment was that people were going to quit because if, you know, like when you quit, you're working at a startup, you don't know if you can get paid. I was always transparent. I've told them the financial situation. So they knew exactly where we were as a business. And I was like, but please stay because I think we can turn this around. But if everybody had left then, if they hadn't
00:43:22
Speaker
decided to fight with me in that fight and decided to see, wouldn't it be fun if we can fight the Federal Reserve and win? We would have lost the company. And if Don hadn't shifted my mindset in that moment, I would have lost the company. The thing that I learned in that was,
00:43:38
Speaker
Hopeless situations are never as hopeless. You never know how hopeless it is. It may seem totally hopeless, but you're not going to know unless you go try. Would you want to look back and say, I gave up before I knew? I'm that guy who, when it looked really, really hard, what I did was quit. I don't want to be that guy. I don't think anybody listening wants to be that guy. You could think of a product being declared illegal by the Federal Reserve as the worst kind of software bug.
00:44:06
Speaker
The situation required Kasasa to find a solution that preserved the product's secret sauce and appeased the regulators. A good hack is any solution that cuts through a difficult problem using unconventional simplicity, which is exactly what Gabe and his team did to get the product back in the Fed's good graces. We didn't dive into details here, but their solution was called Pali, or Pay a Little Interest.
00:44:30
Speaker
So, you know, Don was a miracle worker for shifting my mindset in just the perfect way that made me snap out of it and go, hoorah, let's effing go. Yeah, that's awesome. What an inspiration. The other thing that I love about that story is I think lots of times
00:44:55
Speaker
Leaders think that there's a specific way you're supposed to act, and there's a specific way that you're supposed to do things. And if you follow the textbook, it's going to be good. Always buttoned up, very clear communication. And I think both you and Don within that story show that that's not what it needs to be.
00:45:14
Speaker
Obviously, Don's response is, as you mentioned, you're like, what did he just say? What is going on here? But then the overt act that you took to symbolize to the team and very specific actions that you took, shaving your head, moving your office, and those types of things.
00:45:32
Speaker
You didn't work from a place of fear of what are people going to think about this and whether or not it's the right thing. It was what can I do to put myself out in front to really show the commitment? And I think that's a good lesson for all of us to really lean into that. And, you know, again, it kind of sounds cliche, but bring your whole self to work and bring your whole self and your personality and who you are to what you're doing on a day to day basis.
00:45:59
Speaker
So crazy growth. Can I chime on that real quick? Because I think that's the thing. It's the thing that if I had one lesson, I could try to say, this is what I learned all the way, the 25 years or so of being a CEO. You can do anything.
00:46:19
Speaker
in two different ways. There's a great book called The Outward Mindset that I strongly recommend that unpacks this idea better than anything that I've read. And it's basically you can do anything. You can do the same task. I can go and talk to somebody and encourage them before a sales meeting. And I can do that task and say the exact same words.
00:46:37
Speaker
And I can do it from a place of caring about the person that I'm talking to, or I can do it from a place of needing something from that person and manipulating them to behave the way I need them to behave. The words could be identical. Every single thing about it could look the same from the outside. If you were an alien recording the person doing the thing, it would look the same, but the origin, the source, the heart of the person doing it.
00:46:59
Speaker
Whether it's authentic and caring about another person, or it's manipulative and caring about selfishly the outcome that I need to create, that difference is literally everything in your success. Because I don't know how people know. I don't know what the magic in humans are. It's probably that same magic that knows the damn weight of the cow. They can tell that you're not meaning it. They can tell that you're manipulating them.
00:47:22
Speaker
And, you know, Nathan, you've watched me change over the years. And I think I did this a lot and fully own it. You know, I wanted to be a great leader and I wanted to win so bad that I knew I had to be nice. And I knew that's what helped me win. And then there was like part of it that was manipulative. And I own that. I'm not proud of it, but I'm saying it. So other people that are doing that can know that, yes, we know you're doing it. You know, you're doing it. Don't say you're not. You are.
00:47:48
Speaker
And if you can shift that and say, no, no, no, what's really important? I just had kids. I want to be such a good dad. I want my kids to be proud of me so much. So what would make them proud? It would be a dad who loved everybody the best he could and spread it for real. And then I'm going to motivate somebody to make a sale. And it's like, I care about you, Chad Jolly, one of our sales guys that I happen to think is amazing.
00:48:11
Speaker
And if I'm trying to connect to Chad to go help him make the sale, what I'm really trying to do is help him feel like he loves himself. He feels great. I love you, Chad. You feel that? Take that energy into the sale. That's going to win. That's a different way of motivating somebody than like, you can do it the opposite way. Chad, you're not good enough. You're never prepared for this. You need to go buck up and get tighter. And that could get the thing. The way you would motivate if you love the person is going to naturally flow from that love.
00:48:38
Speaker
The way you would motivate if you needed the person because you're operating out of fear and you're afraid that if they don't perform, you're going to be harmed. The energy is just night and day. It's the opposite. It's 180 degrees different person coming in to motivate somebody and they could say the exact same words, but the outcome will be night and day different. Yeah, absolutely. Thank you for sharing that. And Chad Jolly, what an awesome name.
00:49:03
Speaker
That's awesome. You just closed two deals yesterday. Ask my boy. Yeah, that is awesome. So tremendous growth, overcoming adversity, having your product literally declared illegal and pushing forward through that and seeing growth nonetheless.
00:49:25
Speaker
Until 2008, right? An economic recession hit. The main thing that Casas at that time did for banks was to drive deposits and banks all of a sudden did not need deposits anymore as well as a bunch of them were just in financial array. What changed in you as a leader and do you remember any specific times when this happened when you went from
00:49:52
Speaker
leading this company that seemed like infinite opportunity to the thing that you were selling no one needed anymore. What was that like? It was horrible. What changed in me as a leader? I'm not really proud of this phase.
00:50:23
Speaker
When I look back, I don't think the changes were positive. I think that I was an immature young man who had won at everything I had ever done. And I got to a point where it wasn't winning.
00:50:41
Speaker
And it wasn't winning, and it wasn't winning, and it wasn't winning. And I kept trying to shift, and I didn't know what to do, and I couldn't find the wisdom of the crowd that would fix this problem. And I think that what I did at that moment was the beginning of a series of choices that were not ideal. And some of them I don't want to unpack completely, but I'll say, like, you know, Kasasa's not perfect. We're always trying to realign. And when I look back, that was a period where I began to lose my self-confidence.
00:51:11
Speaker
I started trusting other people that I thought were more capable than me. And they were more capable than me in many areas. And it's not unwise to trust people. So I don't want that to be the takeaway. It wasn't that I brought in experts, but it was my energy behind needing to bring them in. I wasn't bringing them in because I was strong and needed stronger players. I was bringing them in because I was scared and didn't know if I knew what to do. And I had lost my confidence.
00:51:39
Speaker
And that changed the way that I operated as a CEO. And it was to the detriment of the company. Not because the people that were there, anybody that was there that you might think I'm trash talking to you, that's not what I'm saying at all. You're awesome. If you happen to be listening, it's positive that you were there at the company. It was me not owning my role as CEO and not having the emotional maturity to understand that you don't always win every time. And that was one of my first times of like,
00:52:04
Speaker
dealing with a loss that was bigger than I knew what to do. I mean, the loss of my dad, I mean, I was the kind of guy that literally was depressed for years because I couldn't cure cancer. Like, it bothered me that I didn't figure out how to save my dad. Like, I was, I had ideas from pre-med that I thought could have been researched and I was like, I should have just pursued the research. Like, I couldn't save my dad from dying of cancer in my head was a failure. So imagine like, I can't make community banks buy this
00:52:32
Speaker
deposit growth product in a recession, it also felt like just a human failure, like I'm worthless. And that was the beginning of fixing my head, that I made that mistake then, realized it later, and got to mature myself beyond it is, I'm not saying I don't want you to be like, I'm not arrived, I'm not arrived at all of a leader. The only thing I've arrived at is knowing how not there I was, and what the path would be to hopefully get there as a leader over time to continue to level myself up.
00:53:02
Speaker
I want to emphasize what a rare moment this is. To hear a leader of Gabe's caliber talk about the deep emotional identity level work that he needed to do on himself is really special.
00:53:17
Speaker
He could have buried the problem, blamed it on picking the wrong talent, or found a dozen other reasons not to look in the mirror. When you're in the captain's chair, leading isn't about knowing all the answers. It's about a willingness to point the team in a direction and work together to cross the briar patch between you and the goal. The growth demonstrated in
00:53:44
Speaker
your ability to do that type of self-reflection of looking back is honestly, it's very humbling and amazing. And I don't want to diminish the work that you did to get there because I know that's something that all of us really work hard on. And I think there's a lot of leaders out there that probably feel like that at this moment or feel like they've been in the past or they haven't had that realization.
00:54:12
Speaker
that, oh, I need to look inside me here. If you were thinking about those people, do you have any insight or words of wisdom or something that kind of helped you to kind of go along that path of self-reflection and realization?
00:54:33
Speaker
The advice that I would give, I don't feel qualified to give advice really, but let me just say what I did. What worked for me was that I opened myself up to the amazing richness and depth of the people that I worked with.
00:54:53
Speaker
And I don't know how to say this clearly cause it's really, it's almost a spiritual thing. I don't know how to describe what happened and where it started to shift, but I say it to our employees. Like you see these little zoom windows, you know, right now I see you, Nathan, you're like two and a half inches by four and a half inches. And you look at that and it's like, that's the person they're two and a half inches by four and a half inches. No, no, no.
00:55:12
Speaker
That's a whole life. That's a whole multi-generational life. There are lives of lives of lives of lives. 13.8 billion years of chance brings me to be sitting here with Nathan Baumeister talking about this right now. That's a full person. It's not a Zoom rectangle.
00:55:29
Speaker
Somehow that clicked in a really big way inside of me and I began to be humbled by the amazing people that I work with, how big their lives are, how much chance brought them to be here with me in this moment and how grateful I am to whatever created that circumstance for me to get to enjoy this moment with this person.
00:55:46
Speaker
I know it's cheesy and I don't know how to tell someone how to do that because it just opened up inside of me through some stuff that I was doing and I started to see people as these huge rich people with big, big lives and that just shifted how I work with them to want to serve them because everybody needs so much.
00:56:04
Speaker
I have a lot of pain. That's one of my stories. There's parts of it that were rough. I've been divorced. I've had dreams of business that didn't come exactly through. I've lost my dad. You go through that pain and you think it's like, oh, I'm the painful person. I'm the person who's got all the pain, not everybody else. No, everybody else has pain as big as yours or bigger. And if you're sitting here just worrying about how bad you hurt, you're missing the big picture. There are humans everywhere who need connection. They're desperate for it. And I believe that today more than ever, our society is desperate.
00:56:31
Speaker
for human connection, real human connection, not something you get on social media, not alike, not just hey in the break room, but like where you can connect to somebody and say, I'm a real person too. That's a real person. There's an electricity that flows between them when that happens.
00:56:46
Speaker
I think people need it. I think leaders have an opportunity to be that for people, like to create that, to create that rainforest. And I can think of no higher calling for my life than to try to spread that rainforest as big and as far as I can. I do it with checking accounts. It's not about the checking accounts. It's not about the checking accounts. I love it.
00:57:09
Speaker
I always tell people that I truly believe that when given the responsibility to be a people leader, it's not a job, it's a sacred calling because the impact that you can have on those individuals is something that can have generational impact and affect every aspect of it. I just really appreciate your willingness to jump on and share your stories with us, Gabe. I feel like we could probably do like five more episodes.
00:57:39
Speaker
But thank you so much for your time and grateful that we were able to spend this time together. Likewise. Me too. Thank you. Well, if you didn't know who Gabe Cragic was before this episode, you have a pretty good idea now. I hope that you can hear how much blood, sweat, and tears Gabe has shed along the way. You heard him talk about the role that Muck has played in his success, but the work he's done internally to get there is no accident.
00:58:06
Speaker
I hope that you've enjoyed this conversation and will share it with your friends and colleagues. You'll find the book recommendation Gabe made in the show notes. Thank you for listening to Builder Banker Hacker Chief, a podcast produced and distributed by Z Sweet Technologies Incorporated. All rights reserved. I'm your host, Nathan Baumeister, the CEO and co-founder of Z Sweet Tech. This show was recorded using Zencaster and was written and edited by Zach Garver.
00:58:32
Speaker
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