Hey everybody. Welcome to today's podcast episode. Does cultivating a way of being really work when scaling your business? This is a question I get a lot, by the way, thanks for coming back to the Kaleidoscope podcast and just know we're doing several of these. One-on-one kind of with me on the mic. I look forward to bringing in guests and diversifying it, but I just felt pretty strongly that in the foundations course of the pathway, when we're just kind of getting onboarded and getting acclimated with each other, it's actually really important for us to have this time where you can really get a sense of what we've done and how we've done it. And if you are aligned and how we can serve you. We want all that feedback and we feel like we can only do it through a really sturdy and steady foundations piece.

So look forward to introducing guests eventually. But anyways, this conversation around a way of being is a much larger conversation and I think the reason why it impacts so many people. We also have a mastermind called Wisdom Trust here at Imiloa, which is limited to 10 people per year, and it goes really deep. And in particular what it goes deep into is what are you creating in the world? Why are you creating it? What is your purpose-driven, audacious goal, and what's the stake in the ground that you're putting in pursuit of creating what you want to be creating? And what that does is a stake in the ground forces you to get clear, doesn't force you to adhere to something that you don't want to adhere to, but it forces you to get clear. And this is what is absent in a lot of people, people's lives who are trying to create anything is they don't have clarity. So when you have a stake in the ground, all of a sudden you know what you're focused on. And when you have something that is more than just about you or even more than just about your business, when you have something that can potentially touch or transform people's lives, your way of being in the world starts to evolve as you pursue it.

That to me is the easiest way to really articulate this conversation or the beginning of this conversation, one of hopefully many that we'll have together around the idea of a way of being the stake in the ground. By the way, the thing that's going to really move people around you move the communities that you serve. Nine times out of 10, and in fact I'll go 10 times out of 10, if it's bold enough, if it's courageous enough, you won't know how to get there. And what that does, and this is why we have a mastermind around this, this is extremely hard to do individually what it does when you put a stake in the ground that's bold and courageous, where you don't actually know the steps to be able to create what you want to create, what that does is it cancels out the ego because your ego can't build that bridge and you move to a place of surrender and you start listening differently. You start listening differently to what's happening around you. And that quality of listening combined with the courage and the boldness that's in whatever it is you're trying to create, I'm telling y'all, it starts to change how you live into a future. You start living into the future differently as a result of the stake in the ground and your way of being transforming as you start to pursue it. I'm going to give you a really good example of this. The year was 2022.

It was a hard year. We had just come out of Covid at Imiloa. As you know, Imiloa was the only place to not shut down or fire a soul during Covid, like anywhere in the region that we're in Costa Rica. Everyone else had either shut down or fired people and furloughed, and we didn't want to do that. And for many, many of our team members, we were the only employer that stayed open in entire immediate and extended family. And just a little side note on that, that's the power of what having a vision, a big grand vision in the world. A person with a vision can trump people with strategies. They eat 'em for breakfast. A people, a person with a big enough vision in the world or a company with a big enough vision will trump any strategic advisors and any strategy that someone can develop for you, it's big enough. It supersedes it.

So we stayed open. We didn't fire a soul, we pivoted massively investors. There were 35 or so of them at the time in the first version of Imiloa, and they were extremely patient. In fact, many of them were benefactors to individuals on our team. As 2022 came around and we started hosting many different retreats, investors who were past due on their payments started to get impatient. I should note here that 90, 95% of the shareholders were extremely patient. However, there were a few that were quite loud and vocal and rightfully so about being paid, being paid back per the agreements of the investments that they had made. And we couldn't do it. We just couldn't do it. It was tough. And some of the more, shall we say seasoned investors understood why we couldn't do it. And I remember it was December, 2022 and I had a lot of people that were upset and frustrated.

Both my co-founders had exited the company. I'm not exactly at the time, at least I wasn't like a very billable bankable CEO. I still sometimes question that, but my team gave me feedback that I'm doing just fine and I should stop questioning it. And I remember having a conversation with one of my lead investors who's still one of my dear friends and his company had just gone public. I had read somewhere in the Wall Street Journal that the company, that he was the first investor and had gone public to the tune of like 800 billion, like an insane amount of money. So I was very happy for him. I remember talking to him on the day it went, it iPod, and we were just thrilled. And I had a conversation with him a couple months later and I said, can you please give me the money to fix this? It was like $4 million or whatever it was, four or 5 million. He said, no, I won't do it. I won't do that to you. I said, what do you mean do it to me?

Imiloa might not survive. I mean, I have people very angry. He says, I can't do it to you. It would rob you of becoming the CEO and founder that I know you can become. He said, you know how much I'm in for? He said, but I'm not giving you a dime anymore. He said, I'll get on the ground. I'll crawl with you. I'll hold your hand as you're crawling through the mud, but I'm not giving you a dime more. So I prayed about it. I'll never forget it. I was on the floor of bungalow two right around Christmas time in 2022 alone at Imiloa. Everyone else was on vacation. We always give around four days around the holidays so that people can be with their families. Very uncommon in hospitality businesses. And I remember calling some of the other lead investors and I said, listen, I need a year.

I need a year and I will figure this out in a year. I need 12 months. I need to learn how to raise money. I need to face that greatest fear in my life. I need a year. What are you going to do with a fear with a year? They asked, I just need a year. I said, and slowly each one of them led by the lead shareholders, some of whom who were very, I not convinced of my ability to do this signed documentation that gave me a year. And if I could get a sale done or whatever restructuring in a year, I would be granted that grace. And if I couldn't, then it would very likely, although it was never written down, very likely Imiloa would've gone into bankruptcy if I would not have been able to do that. And so what I gave my word, I put a stake in the ground on something that I could not have possibly known how I would do. Now, I grew up in a small mill town in Maine. I was successful in television, but then not, I lost everything multiple times over. I never was good at raising money. In fact, that was one of the main reasons why I partnered with my ex-business partners because they had experience, one of them had experience raising money. This was my greatest fear being alone in a jungle with nowhere to go, no one to call, and needing to raise millions of dollars. This is not exactly my cup of tea.

The stake in the ground of saving Imiloa of what that would do for the community, what that would do for our clients and the future clients that I didn't even know the names of yet, that made the stake bold and courageous and big and important. And so what I did was I started to raise the money and in fact, I had raised all the money over the next seven months, and I went to Europe in July to sign the deal in one of the investors at the very last minute, literally at the 11th hour, pulled out, set him out of the deal, and that was the moment when I thought it was all over. And so then I continued working at it, continued working at it, and ended up pulling the deal together. By December of the following year, I had to fly to Miami to do the transfers to the investors twice because I couldn't do that.

Large of transfers from Costa Rica in a US account had to fly to Miami twice on the week of New Year's Eve, between Christmas and New Year's Eve. And just within the nick of time, a mere matter of hours before Imiloa would've had to go bankrupt, declare bankruptcy, or do some other radical restructuring, we were able to successfully pay back every single note holder with interest. People that thought that it was over for them, that they would never see their money back. They were able to be paid back with interest, and our equity holders were able to be paid as well. So that is an example of when you put something at stake where there's a literal stake in the ground when you don't know how you would possibly live into that future, who you have to become to do it is what we're talking about when we're talking about how your way of being, how it works when you're scaling your business. This creates a cultural shift in an organization and can really set it toward a growth trajectory.

Companies like Zappos, teal organizations like Morningstar, Google, when you have people in the organization, leaders, CEOs, managers, whatever it is, when they put stakes in the ground and they invite others on that journey with them and their way of being starts to transform, and it is palpable. By the way. This is not just some mumbo jumbo. You also can't learn this in an MBA program, sorry, to the folks at Harvard or Yale or wherever else you're in, your Thunderbird, your MBA programs. You can't learn this. You've got to learn it by doing. This is about playing on the field, and I'm not talking about playing in case studies. I'm talking about actually sweating it out. Clocks ticking. Have to make the right call, have to make the right judgments, lose it all. If you don't, when you put stakes in the ground, your way of being starts to transform and your culture in the organization changes. It's as if by miracle that as I put those stakes in the ground in 2022 and 2023, the team itself at Imiloa became more open. Agile. I saw otherwise humble team members, gardeners, housekeepers suddenly become entrepreneurs in the organization, creating experiences for guests that they weren't asked to create. It affects your way of being what you live into impacts the entire cultural identity of the organization,

And it ensures that the leadership team begins to embody and champion core values from a felt experience and a lived experience rather than just something that's on the board, navigating challenges and difficulties and pursuit of a purpose-driven goal is

Not easy, but it is simple. You just stay focused and agile. I would meet dozens of people that were not right for investing in Imiloa's future. I thanked them, I honored them, and I used it as grist for the mill. You've got to stay focused. It's very important. It requires a level of deft discernment. At least it did for me. And it started really shifting how I showed up. I showed up present and powerful, but not always needing to placate or do what someone else wanted to do, including the investors. Investors don't necessarily run the show. They don't have to either. The new ones, the old ones, the prospective ones. You have to be clear. And in fact, I had put up, I would say in hindsight, the reason why the deal fell through in July of that year with one of the investors is because he was emerging as a wrong fit shareholder.

And I wasn't kicking him out, obviously, I wanted to get the deal done. I was under a tremendous amount of duress and stress. But what I did do is I started to be clear on boundaries that would exist if he were to partake in the investment opportunity. And obviously that resulted in him walking away, which is a much better process than me needing to remove someone or getting into bed with someone that ultimately would not have been a good long-term fit. And I do not believe that that person would've been, even though I really liked him on a personal level, and so did the other shareholders by the way, that were part of journey cultivating a way of being within your business is not just about creating a nice environment, nor is it about you stretching or having big goals. It's about your transformation as a human being.

Business can be a vehicle for your transformation at the highest levels, meaning in the C-suite, all the way down to the housekeeping team. Business can be that vehicle. When you set a foundation of focusing on being instead of doing, it elevates the organization automatically, the consciousness, the very fabric of the organization starts to elevate in ways like you can't possibly imagine. You just have to put one foot out front of the other and try it out for yourself. And not only drives growth, but it deepens our impact. It nourishes our wholeness. When we live into a future that's worth that we've created, that's worth living into, it nourishes all of our wholeness. You become somebody that can do something that maybe you yourself did not think you could, but because you put a stake in the ground and you moved everybody toward it, suddenly you get to look around and you realize that I'm the person that can do that.

I can do these types of things. Now. I'm the person that can raise money for his businesses if he needs to. Don't particularly want to, not my favorite place to be. Little stressful, complicated, lots of numbers, but I know I can, and my team knows I can. And that's why we are so united now all these years later, and it's all these very subtle things. It is subtle things, but it makes a world of difference when you're trying to navigate tricky challenges, trying to create things that no one has ever seen before. It's a really powerful testimony to yourself, to those around you and to those that you serve.