“Our humanity rests upon a series of learned behaviors, woven together into patterns that are infinitely fragile and never directly inherited.”
—Margaret Mead
WITH THE DEMISE OF THE RADIO STATIONS hanging over me, I started my next business, Sign Language, in 2008. I didn’t launch the company from a point of passion or peace, but from anger and fear. I felt I had to show my family, my father-in-law, my business colleagues, my friends—everyone—that I could overcome the losses in radio and make this new venture work. I was going to use my will at any cost to my health to make this venture work. My worth as a human being and my works as a man were knotted together in ways that were not in alignment or balance.
I was still unclear on how I could ever look again in the mirror after the loss of the Denver radio stations and the invested money. I was even more puzzled how Phil could look at me, let alone speak to me. I feared I had failed him beyond repair.
He invited me to his house for a dinner between just the two of us during June 2009. It became very clear that as CEO of the radio company (which was still operating on a small scale in Denver and with our twelve stations in the mountains), I needed to completely own what had happened. Attempting to spread the blame to the board, other colleagues, or our competitors was not going to be acceptable. Phil would stand for none of that. He was honest about some of his own failings and the enormous amount of capital that went along with each failure. What mattered now, he emphasized, was how you moved forward.
“Great leaders have failures,” he said. “What’s most important is what you’ve learned from the experience and not giving up. You need to get back in, fight, and jettison what happened in the past.” He clearly knew that we have a choice of what type of label we ultimately supply to an event in our lives and whether we will give failure our permission to tightly wrap itself around our talents, gifts, and strengths. Phil remained committed to standing behind me, and I believe he felt I would come around to understanding the importance of getting back into the fight.
Later in 2009 the two of us discussed how to dramatically grow Sign Language, acknowledging that it would take patience along with the right execution, and that the company would be poised for a solid market position when the economy recovered. It was at this point that I doubled or even tripled down on the bet that Sign Language could be a national player. My team put together a business plan and received the funding to build out our infrastructure and team beyond anything we had ever imagined possible one year earlier.
Our manufacturing footprint went from a five-thousand-square-foot building to a fifty-thousand-square-foot building. At the same time we made the leap of faith to embrace a “build it and they will come” model by tooling up with more printing firepower than we had customers. I made the decision to push all the chips forward on the table, and with that major capital investment there was no turning back. The entrepreneur in me couldn’t resist the opportunity to build something with this much potential, and the broken ex–radio businessman in me was looking for a ticket to atonement for my recent failure.
As I ramped up Sign Language, I began to change. Instead of looking at the present and future as a new opportunity to grow internally, I settled back into my old habits of low self-esteem and a lack of self-confidence. Instead of paying heed to the advice I was given to jettison the past, I chose to compare and measure everything I was now doing in the present through the filters of my past failure. I had done absolutely nothing to learn from my experience and move on.
At KCUV, I wore jeans, T-shirts, and boots or flip-flops on non–client-facing days. At Sign Language, I began donning suits, ties, and cufflinks. I joined a number of professional organizations and various boards of directors. It was as if a light switch had gone on, and I now was pretending to be a powerful CEO by trying to play a role in a drama I didn’t write. I continued to come up with new reasons why I had failed in the radio business. My rationale at the time was that I had been too casual and relaxed, and that successful business leaders conducted themselves differently. Any win we had at Sign Language was always overshadowed by my perceived failures with the Denver radio stations. We built Sign Language from the ground up, and we gradually earned success, but I kept pushing for some greater statement of atonement. With Sign Language, I was determined to prove to the world that I was smart enough, good enough, and capable enough to be taken seriously as a senior executive. To this end, I began joining boards so I could be very visible and be around people who had “made it,” emulating their values, even if they weren’t fully my own.
One and a half years after launching Sign Language, Libby looked at me and said, “Who are you? What have you become?”
SOMETIMES AS I WAS DRIVING around Denver in between sales calls for Sign Language, I’d glance toward the Rockies and have these mini–“Glory Days” type of moments. I would think about how I’d managed to get the last FM broadcast signal installed on Lookout Mountain on Colorado’s Front Range. That’s where my heart was—still up in that tower. But when KCUV disintegrated, I no longer felt compelled to follow my dreams and continued to convince myself that the problem was with me personally.
One evening, my son, who was seven at the time, came to me and asked, “What’s wrong, Daddy?” I told him about some of the economic and company problems and said, “I’m working as hard as I can right now because I want to make you and Mom proud of me, and Sign Language is still struggling to get new customers.” The next morning he left me a note that he’d written the night before: “To Dad—to help with your cumpny [sic].” Accompanying the note was a $10 bill from his piggy bank.
I was moved beyond expression (the sawbuck and the note now share a frame that sits on the mantel over my fireplace), and I kept working even harder, ignoring all the gathering signs of personal trouble.
The costs were accumulating within me—but so were the profits. While I was dying inside, we were growing the business. We printed a grand total of fifty 14′ × 48′ bill-board vinyls in 2010, but in September 2011, our momentum continued to build and we produced a thousand by the third week of September, setting a new monthly record. We grew because we made a conscious decision to stop acting like a printing company and start acting like an outdoor advertising company.
Our commitment to being different from other printers included learning the business cycles of our customers. Outdoor billboard companies receive a lot of orders at the end of the month, and most want to get everything posted for their customers by the beginning of the next month. Printing companies, however, always pushed to get everything done by the end of the month. We adjusted our printing schedules to line up with the sales cycles of the outdoor advertising companies. By shifting our direction and adopting our customers’ schedules, we turned around our cash flow within six months.
We started to listen intently to our customers so that we understood their challenges. Listening, really listening, forced us to focus on our customers’ challenges instead of worrying about ourselves. In doing so, we became a more integrated partner, and they began trusting us and sending more business our way, including new areas of outdoor advertising like wallscapes and transit applications.
The tool behind our growth was simple: Be flexible. The definition of our success? When Plan B works. You don’t have to invent something, just innovate it. We did just that, and our entire team moved collectively in that direction. “Service driven, by design” became our brand and the key to our success. Unfortunately, I hadn’t adopted that motto across all the areas of my life. It was business, not personal.
NOTHING ABOUT THE TRANSFORMATION in my life has been easy, but all of it has been enormously worthwhile. Everyone has heard Woody Allen’s famous quote, “Eighty percent of success is just showing up.” Well, jumping into the parade is not about just showing up. It’s about breaking out of that pattern so we can live differently on a daily basis. It’s about being willing to do the work and complete the process.
In some ways, I had one foot in the parade already, but that wasn’t nearly enough to prevent what was coming. I didn’t handle the pressure of all that was crumbling around me in my personal life, and it nearly cost me everything. Instead, I found hope. The troubles of life didn’t fade away, but I discovered a path that includes joy, regardless of the highs or lows. I began to build spiritual muscle and to live with a purpose. It was then that I truly jumped into the parade.