My guest on this episode is Mike Sackmary. And as you’ll hear, he has a great sense of humor. He calls himself a recovering rocket engineer. So it makes sense we’re talking about building rockets. Turns out you can incorporate what he learned when doing that, into your everyday life. Want to motivate people better? He’s got some ideas for you. And hear how he smartly and intentionally created the corporate culture at his company.
At an early age, Mike learned his brain loves to inhabit regions which are unseen by normal people. As a youngster, some of his rockets went up, some went sideways. His friends became nimble at getting out of the way.
Fast forward to post-college, he worked on the space shuttle, and many types of rockets and satellites. In the rest of life, he kinda sorta learned how to talk to female humans and claims he’s still working on this skill. He married a fellow nerd and she’s awesome.
He started an investment fund with $10K, got to $2M and then decided to start looking for clients. The rest is history, except for the parts that haven’t happened yet, which are actually future history.
Mike says the question he is most frequently asked is “What is WRONG with you?” and this is sometimes followed by “Barb married YOU?”
It seems that being good at investing and being good at rockets doesn’t necessarily translate to being able to think like everyone else.
Today’s episode is sponsored by Zen Rabbit. If you’d like to move away from living in a state of constant anxiousness and instead find peace of mind no matter what’s going on around you, get on a complimentary call with me. In less than 30 minutes, you’ll get insight on any issue you’d like to bring to the table. And you’ll leave the conversation with clarity and renewed energy. Click HERE for the booking link.
Transcript
0:00:01.9 LORI SAITZ: Hello and welcome to fine is a four-letter word. My guest today is Mike Sackmary. Welcome to the show, Mike.
0:00:28.9 MIKE SACKMARY: Thanks, Lori, it's really fun to be here.
0:00:32.0 LORI SAITZ: But we're gonna jump right into the fun and start with the question of what were the values and beliefs that you were raised with that contributed to you becoming who you did as a young adult?
0:00:47.1 MIKE SACKMARY: I had the tremendous blessing and good fortune to be raised by two parents who taught me that you want to always look at people for who they are and not what they look like, 'cause my dad used to describe it, it's like, you can trust people, and it'd be nice to everybody. To give you a reason not to be... My mom was even more... And they're both very scientific-minded people, moms in medicine and dad's in engineering, but mom was always like, Listen Mr, everybody puts her pants on what we get the time and don't pay, but tell any different. Okay, so that was the value, and then I also learned... My parents had me in Scouts for a long time, so it was a lot of service projects. Right. Up helping other people for free, no expectation return. So that was ingrained. Real early in my life.
0:01:44.9 LORI SAITZ: Did you enjoy that? Yes. Okay, I mean, some kids are forced to go and they don't know, Selassie
0:01:52.3 MIKE SACKMARY: Cally, male children often... We raised two sons. Oftentimes, Melchior N, You have to force them to do something I don't wanna do, because it's new, so they're a little bit scared, but once you get into it, they really like it.
0:02:07.8 LORI SAITZ: Yeah, that's a great lesson straight off the top for anybody, regardless of your age, it always... It often feels like, Well, I'm scared to do this 'cause I don't know... It's unfamiliar, I don't know how to do it, I don't know if I'm gonna be accepted. And then you go and do it. And you're like, Oh, what was I afraid of?
0:02:25.7 MIKE SACKMARY: I think it's a super important trait for any leader, and I see this throughout my career, I had positions where I was having to lead my management from the bottom, and I've had other positions where I'm in the top of the team. It's super important that all the people in the organization know that if they try something and the outcome isn't what we wanted to get, that's okay. The important thing is, what did we learn from it, and how are we going to change what we did?
0:02:54.9 LORI SAITZ: Or is that something that you learned from your parents or from scouts? Or is that something that you learned along the way as you were going through your career?
0:03:04.5 MIKE SACKMARY: I learned it really starting my first job in high school, working in the traditional fast food and shoveling rock landscaping and all the great things we get to do his teammates. Right. I learned it by the negative example, I saw lots of very poor manager screaming at people and embarrassing people in polices like, I don't wanna be that way, I'm gonna be the other way. Something didn't come out to, what you want? Well, what do we need to do different? Always, I just sort of naturally fell into that thinking, which later developed at the professional level of, Okay, whoever you are, male, female, whatever your experience level, whatever your age, if you wanna try doing project X, let's do it. Let's set you up for success. And as your sponsor meant or whatever, if there's any heat coming from above, I need to do the one to take that, I need to be the shield, because that's how I'm gonna get you to try things next time.
0:04:07.5 LORI SAITZ: And that's how you get innovation happening in your company or in your organization?
0:04:14.4 MIKE SACKMARY: Yes. Yeah, it's amazing to me sometimes when I hear people making... Talking about big senior people you've seen in the news making comments, I'm like, That's a great way to kill innovation in your company, what you just said to Barret.
0:04:33.4 LORI SAITZ: Right.
0:04:34.3 MIKE SACKMARY: So you went through scouts, you... How did you start your career? I, from a very early age, fell in love with space, I think it was because I was raised on the original... The real Star check is, I call it just pulling a few shades out there, but I just... I love that. What did you see in the Star Trek series? You saw Captain Kirk, who was kind of the John Wayne, Daniel Boone, Davy Crockett for... I had go to the Frontier Canale. Yes, Mr. Spock, who was the analytical part, and saw McCoy who was 100% emotion, and between the three of them really realizing this is a young child, but between the three of them, what you're watching in that show... It's one complete brain. When the three of them are working together. So I was like.
0:05:24.9 LORI SAITZ: Yeah, I never thought about that before.
0:05:27.4 MIKE SACKMARY: They had the Versa navigator and they had the lady Communications Officer. So you saw this principle that I was raised with, it's like, who cares, it's like, what's important is diversity of thought and diversity of opinion, but still with a command structure, it... Everybody has their input, but then you just... You trust what your lead top leader tells you to do, and Soper smart enough to listen to people, what all that ends up being was, How do I create something... 'cause I was working in the rocket business and thought everything was fine, and it wasn't... It wasn't.
0:06:08.3 LORI SAITZ: Yes. Well, since the show is called fine, is a four-letter Reiter gonna get to that. So we might as well start right now, tell me about that.
0:06:17.0 MIKE SACKMARY: I love the work, I love creating things that didn't exist, I love thinking about three-dimensional mathematics, I love Pastrana vacation.
0:06:27.2 LORI SAITZ: These things are so my head's gonna explode here because I'm just trying to wrap my head around it, it's so different from where my natural tendencies are but I'm fascinated.
0:06:38.6 MIKE SACKMARY: Well, I tell people it's easy to think about it like a pool table, right, 'cause everybody can vision all the round balls being different directions now, make that three-dimensional where they can float above each other and be each other, so those would represent your planets and medias and things you don't wanna run into, and so the navigation trick then is how do you get around to head stuff. Got it. Okay, so that's a good easy way to visualize what's going on, and what I didn't like, what wasn't fine is I'm working in this industry, and the salary I started out with out of college... It's pretty good. So I started Marshall Space Center in Alabama, which is not an expensive place to live, but eventually I moved out to San Diego, which was crazy expensive. And I just said, I've been in the business maybe 10, 12 years at that point. And I'm like, I can't afford a place to live by myself and have any money left to go on dates or do anything by the time I pay my rent and my California taxes and my gas to get back and forth to work as you do in California, nobody walks in
0:07:52.0 LORI SAITZ: With... No, eternally thing.
0:07:56.7 MIKE SACKMARY: Yeah, no, I was like... I would go down to the beach on weekends, and I would talk to people. I talk to everybody everywhere I go, it's just me, but I would talk to these beach bums who are all muscle out and they're not then have jobs, the state is paying them. I forget what it was, it was some special class of... Boom, I call them
0:08:19.6 LORI SAITZ: Both a special class of bum. Okay.
0:08:23.2 MIKE SACKMARY: Yeah, but they were real straight forward, these guys and girls are very straight forward about, it's like now the state pays us to stay down here and essentially do nothing, and we have these three sets of weights they gave us so we could stay healthy, so we work out and enjoy the beach all day. Get paid for it. Wowed. Even afford a place to live by myself, right?
0:08:40.7 LORI SAITZ: You're like, Where do I sign up?
0:08:41.7 MIKE SACKMARY: I find out you really can't. You need... It was some... You need to... All the special criteria had to meet, I tried though. Because like any good engineer, I'm like, I don't get this. Milk, this is upside down. This is not fine. And then there's about a 10-year overlap between aerospace and what I do now, so I kept working while I was proving out the concept of my new company I wanted to do... So I knew some things, I knew I wanted to have a company where people are treated right, 'cause it's not natural to us as humans to treat other people with love and respect and humility, or something where
0:09:24.9 LORI SAITZ: It's not... I think it is. And I think that that ercole think as humans, we are born with those abilities... Innately, yes, yes. And that the ability, somehow in the growing up process, they're trained out of us, or I don't wanna say trained out of us, they are perhaps
0:09:48.4 MIKE SACKMARY: Beaten out of us by bad management.
0:09:52.2 LORI SAITZ: We... Attention through school, I will say they may be socialized out of us...
0:09:59.1 MIKE SACKMARY: Yes, that's a great way to say it. I'm gonna still let phrase... 'cause there's a much better way to say it. So by the time we're working in a professional career, it's not our go-to to go back to being that way, 'cause you just said It's been socialized, animus, and I thought, I don't want that kind of company, I don't like working for those kinds of managers and just for any listeners, it may be in a professional career, one of the great tools that you always have to find a manager you do like even if they're not in your chain of command and spend time with them.
0:10:32.0 LORI SAITZ: That's great advice. Yeah, 'cause the other thing is that I think a lot of people, especially in corporate, don't necessarily think of as that is networking, inter-company, networking. So
0:10:53.6 MIKE SACKMARY: I wanted to have an environment. And I started... The traditional thing is like I was looking for a place that was already like this instead of building it, I want an environment where people of whatever appearance, whatever they are, people felt, they all felt safe about saying, I wanna do this, I wanna try this. Let's do this, and I wanted to be in an environment where people socialize with each other outside work as a group, yeah. Not the traditional team building exercise that nobody wants to go to...
0:11:28.5 LORI SAITZ: Right, right. So you test created this company. Right. And how did you... How did you choose or how did you invite people... Or how did you attract the right people? 'cause not everybody is gonna do well in that situation to a... For a strong hierarchy.
0:11:50.1 MIKE SACKMARY: I started spending time in places where I normally didn't spend time, so I took some sales training courses, I took some how to talk to humans that aren't engineers courses, I put myself in these different environments, starting the Toastmasters.
0:12:06.1 LORI SAITZ: I love the teasers. Yeah, you've already said a couple of things that reminded me of a past guest, Steven English, and so people who are not... You know Steven. Okay, cool, because you have called similar experiences in corporate for one thing, and he's big on to his masters as well, so...
0:12:26.9 MIKE SACKMARY: Yeah, so shut out to Stephen were have to telepaths show that we mentioned him. Yes. So yeah, I just... So I'm looking around and then I started asking people, What is your primary motivator in life, and there's different ways to ask that question depending on a person's communication style...
0:12:48.1 LORI SAITZ: Right, because just walking up to somebody and saying, Hey, what's your personal motivator to you on a one... I don't know what you're talking about, what is that?
0:12:58.4 MIKE SACKMARY: So I started listening and I went to a lot of... Because the business is building is focused on investing and having an investing fund, I started going a lot of presentations that startups were doing it, why you should buy our stock... Right. And just watching the room, we start reading the room, and sometimes I'd be up and usually sitting in the front rows, I could Turgut and watch the audience. It seems a little weird at first, but what that gave me was seeing the faces when in management is making certain comments, then I could start figuring out who were the people I wanted to go meet later... Yes, I... Atalanta, thank you. I stole that idea from John Bates. He's the executive speaking coach.
0:13:49.6 LORI SAITZ: It's not a nearly stealing... It's called swipe and deploy.
0:13:54.2 MIKE SACKMARY: There you go. Swipe and deploy. So I would just walk up to people, especially 'cause engineering nerd... Who do I know? Engineering nerds, who am I around all the time? Engineering Arts, and it turns out there's this whole section of the human species... It's female. Yes, most of the people I knew were... Most of the women I knew in work were very much like Vulcans, it's a very technical analytical mindset. And that's not that common. So when I was trying to meet other people, like How do I talk to this other half of the species is a DUI would just walk up to people and say, I have no... I'm an engineering nerd, I'm a racketeer, I have no idea how to talk to people from your realm of business, I never made it about the gender or anything else, it was like, I don't know how to talk to people from your realm or
0:14:56.0 LORI SAITZ: Are... That was probably smart, that probably got you into more conversations than saying, We know how to talk to women... No, 'cause I think that was obviously, anyway, but at least it, Totten benefit of the doubt that you just couldn't do to other people as a whole... Right.
0:15:15.5 MIKE SACKMARY: And that did a lot for me. Now it's like, Okay, I'm starting to learn how other people... I'm getting live fire practice, and some people were very, very nasty males and females, we get really nasty and others would be very nice. Yeah, finally I met... This one was like, You have no idea how to talk to girls do you... That's what she said to me is.
0:15:39.2 LORI SAITZ: Is this the one who became your wife? Yes.
0:15:46.8 MIKE SACKMARY: He's like, Well, guilty as charged, but hey, how else am I gonna learn if I don't do it?
0:15:51.5 LORI SAITZ: So I apparently found it endearing, apparently.
0:15:56.1 MIKE SACKMARY: Or just hopeless or something, and that opened up the whole role, it's like, Alright, I know the kind of business I wanna build, the kind of people I wanna get in now starting to meet people from different areas of industry and who has the kind of attributes... I'm looking for it. As I describe it, who is it that's gonna be on my team that if there's a gun fire happening, is gonna come with me towards the sound of the gun fire and not color somewhere, 'cause this is... Business is tough. I knew the kind of people that aren't gonna... I'm gonna say, And badly, I'm just saying, you need the kind of people that aren't gonna back down and freak out when things start going wrong, you knew the kind of people that are gonna have each other's back, and I thought back to this one time I had a tape for Rishi from my boss written for a mission to take my vacation. So I'm gone for a week and I come back and the first thing I go to the factory. He just like, Where the hell were you? And I find out he told...
0:17:04.9 MIKE SACKMARY: He told the plant manager three levels up, he didn't know where it was.
0:17:09.7 LORI SAITZ: But there was probably paperwork that you had to fill out to say that you were gonna be gone... Right.
0:17:14.4 MIKE SACKMARY: Yeah, which I did, of course. And he signed it. Yeah, wow. But I was like, Yeah, I don't need to work for this cloud rainforest.
0:17:25.7 LORI SAITZ: That kind of environment. So many lessons that people can learn, we often talk about learning lessons from mentors and role models that we want to model, and we don't talk enough about... Or not as frequently about learning lessons, like you mentioned earlier, and just again now of how I don't want to be, there's just as valuable a less in seeing what you don't want, and at the same time, even not just necessarily in business, but in figuring out what you want and don't want in your life, like a lot of times people are like, Well, they want to figure out what are their dreams, what are their values, they... Where are they going? And they get caught up in, I don't know what I want. And a good place that to start potentially is, Well, okay, what... Don't you want... Start from there, if that's where you can start from...
0:18:28.5 MIKE SACKMARY: Yeah, that's an excellent way to say it, and that's how we approach building rockets, see what are the outcomes, we've gotta make sure don't happen. Then from there, you proceed, it's like, Okay, have I made sure that I've cut off the opportunity for these bad things to happen?
0:18:50.6 LORI SAITZ: Right, yeah, often we ignore the the... I don't wanna call it negative, but for lack of a better word, the negative things, 'cause we're trained to only think positively, and yet those... What I don't want, what are the negative outcomes is a great place to start and then build on...
0:19:09.7 MIKE SACKMARY: Yeah, and I just really wanted to show this example with you, 'cause you do... Before I went on the long ramble, you ask how we put the team together, I had a zoom call and I invited the people that I thought might want to be on the team at everybody there together, see each other's faces, so anybody that wouldn't turn to camera was automatically out, okay. It's like I want them to see each other's faces is who's there, because I don't know who knows each other and... What year was this? Oh gosh. This was four years ago. Okay.
0:19:44.4 LORI SAITZ: So it was before everybody had zoom. Right, I just wanted to figure out the time frame here... Yeah, okay, go ahead.
0:19:53.7 MIKE SACKMARY: And then it was a pretty short presentation, I promised them 15 minutes, I was done in 15 minutes, so I need to know three things from each of you, message me privately. Are there people on this call that you know you don't wanna work with, or former significant others or what... I have no idea, right? Me, don't blindside me. Second, do you already have some money to live on because starting a new business, I don't want you to be under the pressure, like, We gotta make money, we gotta make money. What we have to do is build the right service for people, and we have to do is make the connections with potential clients, if you're focused solely on you gotta get the money in, it's the wrong mindset. And the third thing was, Are you willing to have other people's backs even when they're annoying you or making you mad, can you separate an action from a person... Wow, that's so pale. The ones that joined the team are the ones that said yes to those three questions.
0:21:03.4 LORI SAITZ: How many people said yes? We started with seven. And how many people did you have on that first call? 30. Wow, okay. I love the intentionality around all of this of how you're thinking and how you're building this team.
0:21:22.5 MIKE SACKMARY: And I also tell them, If anyone potential client, current client, anybody, I don't care how big a fish they are, I don't care how much of our income they represent... If they're not treating you right, tell me. Don't internalize it. And some of the people are internalizers. It's like, Okay, you're gonna have a hard time not internalizing, but try to stretch yourself. Yeah, yeah. And yeah, we had an incident where one of our ladies was being addressed in in appropriate manner, by a client. So I had her on the call with me, and we called the client. And I'm like, No. You can apologize profusely. 'cause you were warned. It wasn't something you said one time and it was just, you know, miscommunication, 'cause that does happen, creates was not A... And you can apologize or we're done. But I didn't say it like that, it's like, we're going to... Has a client. Yeah.
0:22:33.2 LORI SAITZ: That's another great thing about having your own company is you get to choose not only who you work with on your team, like you did, you also get to choose who you work with as clients, and if it's not working out, you get the freedom to... A release them.
0:22:51.6 MIKE SACKMARY: And I tried doing that in the rocket business too, you can't do with clients, there's only like five clients in the entire planet, which you can do it with suppliers, and I would sometimes go to my... Whoever was the boss at the time and say, Listen, we need to exit the supplier because here's what they're doing. Other parts are great, I don't know, their parts are great, but they're treating my people a crap and... I don't wanna put up with that. Yeah. And sometimes you win, sometimes you lose. It depends how I breathe up and you... Sure, sure.
0:23:30.1 LORI SAITZ: You're not gonna win all of them. Right. So tell me more about the experience that you've... The company you've created, the culture, and so of those seven people, it's been four years, are they all still with you?
0:23:46.6 MIKE SACKMARY: No, we're still at 7, but some of them got... Went off to do other things, which I think this is a super important principle, and it's gonna sound like I'm bragging, but it's not how I mean it, I want every business owner to think this way. If someone's ready to fly, help them. Yeah, I really think they got a good possibility of success, invest cash in their business. It's horrible to take somebody who's skilled, talented, motivated, even if they don't have any idea what they're doing, and maybe this is inventing a whole new industry, right. But it's terrible to take that kind of motivation and squash it.
0:24:30.6 LORI SAITZ: Yeah, yeah, because then they're not being their full self, but you're not getting the best of them, and the world is not getting the best of them, so it's to everybody's advantage, repeat the approach in the viewpoint that you did or that
0:24:48.6 MIKE SACKMARY: You do, I just... I'd love to infect the entire business planet with ideas. Help them fly. Yes.
0:24:57.5 LORI SAITZ: Help them fly. Love it. Okay, so what happened... How has it been building your company in this way... Do you see a higher level of success? Or is it just... I don't wanna say just, is it... Are you seeing an increase in revenues from a business perspective, is the ROI hire... Or is the ROI the theme? But the joy of working this way is so much higher.
0:25:40.9 MIKE SACKMARY: The ROI is staying fairly level, the joy for me personally, in the join the team, it keeps increasing. And this magical thing happened. Is one of the things I've wondered if it would happen, I'd read about it in various business books, but it's like, Hey, you never know that they say that in their business book and not really do it, I have no idea, but this magical thing actually happened where the team would start coming to me, Hey, I identified so and so as a potential client, they started going out, finding potential clients on their own... Oh, nice. Because they were so excited about what we're doing. Yes, and then we started the podcast about a year ago, just to talk to business people, we don't sell anything in the podcast is just to have conversations. Right. They started going out finding guests... It was like Good. Yeah, that's really encouraging.
0:26:38.8 LORI SAITZ: They've taken ownership in the company because it is their company, whether he's at the top of running it or not, it doesn't matter, they still have an ownership in it, that's the best kind of company to build.
0:26:56.0 MIKE SACKMARY: And they do for the first year. Every check I got from a client was split equally... It's called the pirate ship model. I learned it from watching Captain Jack Sparrow.
0:27:11.2 LORI SAITZ: A... Tell me more about it. I too...
0:27:17.1 MIKE SACKMARY: Did people on pirate ships get paid, they get paid the number share, so whatever the total amount is that we tick in on our voyage, the captain would get two shares, so you take the number of crew and you divide the amount of money by the number of crew, and that's how much each share is worth it, Kehoe people, if you had 10 people and you made 100 a share or 10. Okay, so umpire ships, I used to say the captain would get two shares, everybody in the crew would get one share, it was divided according to your job, but there were only like two or three levels, right. And I said seven people were just gonna do what he called shares from the first year. Okay, so now everybody's like, Hey, I might put his money where his mouth is, and it was myself and our main investor were the ones putting the cash in to make the business go, we didn't ask him be on the team to pitch in money. Okay. And so they're like, Okay, I'm donating my time, I'm not getting paid to... We actually start having an income, and as soon as they start...
0:28:30.2 MIKE SACKMARY: As soon as I did that with the first jet, which was not big, Elio, he really did it. Who does this one? Got a team that's so motivated.
0:28:43.7 LORI SAITZ: Absolutely. Backing up a second, because I'm not sure we mentioned this in our conversation yet, what exactly is that your company does
0:28:55.4 MIKE SACKMARY: That or asking... See, this is why my co-founder is so good at explaining what we do... I ramble... Yeah, 80% of our income comes from the investing Fund, so business owners will contact us and say, Hey, I'm busy running my business, manage my personal assets and keep me Rich, or don't let me run out of money. So that's 80% of what we do. The other 20% is we train business owners on how to get funding, and we don't wanna conflict to interest there, so typically we don't invest in people that were training... Okay, 'cause it would be an inherit conflict of say, we're telling you to do this, this and this, and here's some cash, it's like, No, we want you to do what's natural for you. Yeah, yeah, so we train on... When you're standing in front of a room full of investors, how do you get them to say yes, how do you read the room, what your presentation need to look like, what kind of investors do you want to think about, what you don't want in your business?
0:30:01.3 LORI SAITZ: Again, it comes back to the intentionality that you use in building your company, what were the tools or techniques that you used... I know you said you made yourself go talk to people you didn't know that were different than a... You didn't identify with... Were there other things that you did because running a business requires so much faith and trust in whatever you wanna call the Higher Power, were there other tools that you use besides just forcing yourself to go talk to people, do you... Journal did you meditate? What prayer? What have you implemented there?
0:30:45.6 MIKE SACKMARY: So, making this super brief, I'm a biblical Christian, I have investigated the Bible, I speak and read the biblical language was not an emotional spurt moment decision, right? So I adopt the things, particularly from the Book of Proverbs, has a lot of wisdom and how to talk to people, so I adopted a lot of that is prayer, specific tools, I will show up... I'm the kind of guy that'll come up to you in a business meeting with the notebook in my... An actual notebook. To paper, pencil.
0:31:17.7 LORI SAITZ: Not, not like a hate.
0:31:20.1 MIKE SACKMARY: Yeah, exactly. And I would take notes, I'd ask people, it's like, Okay, well, we're talking because I've never spoken to anyone like you before, can I take some notes 'cause this is gonna help me get better at communication. I'd say about 95% of the time. The other person is like, Yeah, I take notes. It's so unexpected.
0:31:39.2 LORI SAITZ: Yes, yes. And before I was doing this before pandemic, I was actually teaching networking strategies for people who are going to in-person events, and I would tell people to do this because how else do you follow up? How do you remember everything, you've had 10 conversations, how do you remember them all, and how do you then follow up with people, so I love that you did this, and
0:32:02.0 MIKE SACKMARY: The best... Well, thank you for that. The best speaker I ever heard in my life was so able to hold the audience's attention, and I went up to him later and said, Okay, yeah, of course, there's a long line of people wanting to talk to you, so I wait until the lions done. I'm the last person, 'cause I'm like the last person. He's tired. Everybody's gone, perfect timing. It's like, Listen, man, I got one question, I wanna write down the answer 'cause otherwise... I don't wanna miss anything. He talked to me for an hour. Tied, it was like, How do you do that? How do you hold an audience's attention? He told me how he did it, I was like, Oh, who was the speaker? If I'm curious, a guy named Robert Welch in San Antonio, and I was like the two big takeaways that stuck with me forever, whatever you're speaking on has to be a topic that you really believe in, you don't go up there. Say anything that you're not willing to take a bullet for, it come on out of your mouth, it better be something that you believe you could be wrong, but you believe it's true.
0:33:13.8 MIKE SACKMARY: So no fluff. I said, The other thing is, when I deliver a speech, I don't look, I make eye contact with individuals, but I never think about how big the room is, so... Because now I'm connecting with people. Right.
0:33:30.9 LORI SAITZ: And everyone feels as if you're talking straight to them...
0:33:34.5 MIKE SACKMARY: Yeah, so that's how we did it. I'm like, Wow. Okay.
0:33:40.0 LORI SAITZ: Wow, we have covered so much ground today, I really enjoyed our conversation too, thank you so much before we go, I gotta ask, 'cause you seem like a pretty laid back guy, nothing ruffles your fathers, I'm getting lots of things to... Okay, alright, that's cool, but what do you do? And what's the song that you listen to your hype song when you need that extra boost of energy, maybe you were listening to it before you walked into that room full of people that you were afraid to talk to. What's your song?
0:34:20.4 MIKE SACKMARY: Amazing grace, it's the most incredible song, and there's a ton of versions, my current favorite version of Sarah Brightman singing in opera style.
0:34:31.0 LORI SAITZ: Okay, alright, I'm familiar with that one, and if our listeners are not, we are going to put a link to that in the show notes so you can go listen and get inspired, I
0:34:42.8 MIKE SACKMARY: Just... It's a beautiful song and it's a very... It's a calming down song for most people, but for me it's a motivating get up and garner on the block on energizing song.
0:34:56.0 LORI SAITZ: I could see how that would be. Now, if people wanted to continue the conversation with you, where is the best place for them to find you.
0:35:03.9 MIKE SACKMARY: Fastest, is linked in a...
0:35:06.7 LORI SAITZ: That's a connecting...
0:35:09.0 MIKE SACKMARY: Yeah, I watch my own LinkedIn feed, there's no gatekeeper on LinkedIn. Okay, so that's the quickest way. Alright, and I encourage people. Contact Me. I love meeting new people. If you're an early stage company, meaning you're not quite out of the mortality range yet, and you wanna come on our podcast, we love having guests. Okay.
0:35:34.9 LORI SAITZ: So I will make sure we have links to all of that in the show notes as well.
0:35:41.3 MIKE SACKMARY: Thank you, that's very nice.
0:35:43.0 LORI SAITZ: Thanks so much for joining me today, Mike, on fine is a four-letter word.
0:35:48.0 MIKE SACKMARY: Who won the name of the podcast is great.