Good Goals vs. Bad Goals: Rethinking Success

Starting the conversation:

Is the way you define success actually sabotaging your business? How you develop and execute goals, choose connections to become relationships, and push past your limiting beliefs may be at odds with your definition. David Steele, Founder / CEO of One Wealth Advisors and Co-Founder / Executive Chairman of Flour + Water Hospitality Group, shares why it is BOLD to rigorously examine your own goals to ensure they are authentic and not based on ego or outside pressure.

There are pitfalls along with power from goal setting. But you can start right where you are! Critically question the goals you write to make sure they are your own (and free from family and societal beliefs) and discard the ego-driven and instead find your own authentic goals. Cultivating deep meaningful relationships will uncover a support system for you as you courageously face limiting beliefs and stay tuned into your authentic self.
Showing genuine care and valuing others creates a cycle of positive, impactful relationships at all levels and is fuel for your goals.

In this episode, you will hear relationships are central to everything in life, the dreams you have matter so articulate them clearly for yourself, and every business has a plan as you’ve already answered THE question. It is time to tap into a deeper well by listening to this conversation between Jess Dewell and David Steele, Founder / CEO of One Wealth Advisors and Co-Founder / Executive Chairman of Flour + Water Hospitality Group, as they talk about the human magic of goal setting.

Host: Jess Dewell

Guest: David Steele

What You Will Hear:

03:15 The centrality of people in all aspects of life and business.

• Business, personal relationships, or travel — the focus is always on people.
• Always considers who he can impact and be impacted by, who to love and be loved by, no matter the context.
• David Steele’s mother demonstrated that relationships should be the top priority, a lesson he learned by example.

06:25 Finding deeper meaning and true satisfaction in relationships, even beyond basic needs.

• Check in where you are at and how fulfilled you are, at a deep level.
• True satisfaction comes when you build meaningful, personal relationships.
• Seek deeper meaning, even just one level, in your work and life.

07:50 Recognizing and addressing loneliness to build genuine, intentional connections.

• Changing surroundings does not address internal loneliness.
• Intentionally remove unfulfilling relationships and focus on building authentic, meaningful friendships.
• Use a systematic approach to cultivating strong connections, especially the groups that will benefit you the most.

10:45 Blending business and personal relationships enhances fulfillment and success.

• Doing business with friends and befriending business partners leads to richer, mutually beneficial relationships.
• There is value in bringing personal intimacy into his professional world, which has positively influenced David Steele’s business.
• Your social network, built on deep relationships, can become a major asset both personally and professionally.

13:30 Questioning traditional goals and redefining what success truly means.

• Question the conventional list of life and career goals and ask if they are truly your own.
• Societal expectations often pressure us to aim for “perfect” outcomes, which might not genuinely fulfill you.
• Assess whether your goals are authentic or driven by cultural, family, or ego influences.

17:40 Appreciating the power and risks of goal setting as a form of “human magic.”

• Goal-setting works almost like magic, often leading to realization of goals even in the absence of a rigid plan.
• Be intentional and careful with the goals you set, as you are likely to achieve what you focus on — whether or not it’s right for you.
• David Steele’s reflection on past goal achievement shows the surprising effectiveness and power of simply writing down what you want to do.

20:40 Challenging the conventional concept of retirement in favor of lifelong mastery and financial independence.

• Most people are less happy after retirement, and David advocates for continuing to use mastery and skills beyond typical retirement age.
• Reframe retirement as achieving financial independence, empowering people to choose to work, not be forced to.
• Maintaining productivity and teaching others is a more fulfilling and sustainable way to live than traditional retirement.

36:25 Every business benefits from articulating and revisiting its business plan.

• All businesses, regardless of size, need a clear business plan for direction and to answer key questions.
• Writing plans is not just for investors; it’s also vital for securing partnerships, leases, or effectively managing teams.
• The process of annual strategic planning ensures organizations remain aligned and adaptable as they grow and change.

46:35 It is BOLD to really embrace the human magic of goal setting.

Resources

• David Steele on LinkedIn

Transcript

Jess Dewell 0:00
I actually am really excited that you said we need to question those goals and dreams. I’ve never heard it put quite like that, and I like it. I like it because it makes me clench up a little.

David Steele 0:11
I think we will achieve all the goals we set. I’m just saying be careful with the power you wield in setting these goals.

Jess Dewell 0:19
I’m so glad you’re here. Thanks for stopping by. At the Bold Business Podcast, we are normalizing important conversations.

Yes, there are tips. Yes, there are ways to solve problems. More importantly are going to be what do you need for yourself to be able to solve those problems and make the most of the education, the training, and the programs that you are already using?

This is a supplement to that. It can sit on top of it, fuel your soul, fuel your mind, and most importantly, regardless of where you’re at on your journey, maybe you’re starting out. Maybe you’re ready to scale.

Maybe you’re going through a reinvention. The conversations we are having will help you at each of those stages. So hang around, see what’s going on, and I look forward to seeing you engaging with our videos.

Announcer 1:09
You are listening to the Bold Business Podcast, where you will hear firsthand experiences about what it really takes to ensure market relevance and your company’s future.

Jess Dewell 1:22
Today I’m talking to David Steele. He is an entrepreneur and a cultural leader with ventures that cross finance, food, and the arts. He started in financial planning, which made not only him realize, but also working with his clients, each of his clients, the power of what is behind the way that we’re thinking for our financial goals, for the life we want to live, for the things that are showing up for us and whoever is with us on that journey.

I think it’s really cool how he has taken that learning and he talks about goal-setting being human magic. And so we delve into a lot of different areas that come back over the conversation and through the conversation that goal-setting is our magic. It’s human magic, and it’s rooted in you and me and David and each of us and the connections we have with those in our lives.

The three things that punctuate and accentuate the themes in our conversation are this. Number one, people are always central. Our relationships matter.

Number two, there is good goal-setting and there is bad goal-setting, and it’s important to know the difference. And the third, that every business requires a business plan. That’s important because you’ve already answered the question that you will be asked in every other part.

By the way, that also applies to your life goals too, when you think about them and write those down. Okay, I’m super excited to have you here for the Bold Business Podcast and enjoy my conversation with David Steele. I know you have a lot of experience, David, in a lot of different things.

What are some of the commonalities that you have taken across all of your experience in life, in business, that you bring to every new experience you have?

David Steele 3:17
I didn’t know this when I was younger, but it’s always about people. It’s always people. It doesn’t matter what you’re doing.

It’s just about people. So in every experience or every endeavor, I don’t care what it is, whether it be business, personal relationships, travel, whatever. I’m always trying to think about who are the people that I can impact, be impacted by, love, be loved by, regardless of the context or situation.

Jess Dewell 3:54
I think you’re the first person that’s ever said that to me. And I’m going to say, you say that’s you. But I’m like, I think that’s clearly different than most people think.

David Steele 4:02
I would contend that it is the truth for literally 100% of everybody. They should just become conscious of it.

Jess Dewell 4:11
How do you do that? Or how did you do that? Or is it natural to you?

David Steele 4:15
I do think that we’re born with one desire beyond our physical needs, which is to be loved. And I hypothesize that a decent nature-nurture argument to the extent that we have control over our kids, that is to say, nurture them. If the kids aren’t loved, I think that’s possibly a source of psychoanalytic rich territory when they become older.

But I just think it’s human nature to want to be loved. And part of being loved is to love, right? Or to be valued and to therefore value, because I see it as inherently a circular type of phenomenon.

I was raised in a pretty troubled household, single mom, poor, raised two kids. So that was tough, I’m sure was impactful on the person I became. But my mother, to her credit, she taught me early on that relationships are first and foremost a thing to prioritize in life.

And I observed her. She did it not just through words. In fact, I don’t even know how often she said those words explicitly, but I watched her place so much value on relationships, on others.

I just observed it from the moment I can remember to this day. So I think I got it from there. And I went through trials and tribulations to go from being a child to a young adult idiot to being less of an idiot to hopefully at this point being somewhat mature.

And it was through some of those trials, trying times that I was able to reflect upon what mattered, what didn’t matter. And it always came back to what matters is people.

Jess Dewell 6:07
Then taking the evolution of what was demonstrated to you and shown to you and taught to you by your mom, now I’m curious, through your trials and tribulations, how did that get deeper for you? What was the added depth that you’re now bringing to the world that your mom gave you the foundation of?

David Steele 6:24
It’s easy for me to first go to the relevance to this in business. And I think about human motivation begins with, and if you look at Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, begins with physical needs. And when I got out of college, I immediately got a job on Wall Street building a financial planning practice that I still have almost 35 years later.

Really, if I’m honest, at the time, getting a client for my financial planning practice then was not an emotional or relational situation. It was to eliminate the fear I had of not eating and not being warm, dry, and fed, as I like to say. Dare I say clients at the time, not sure how much empathy I was able to find for them as people, because they gave me business.

I got paid. I got to eat and pay my rent. But it was pretty shortly thereafter that I started looking for deeper meaning.

And I was fortunately able to start realizing that the depths of relationships I had with my clients was where I was really starting to get satisfaction from. That was the beginning of this transition for me.

Jess Dewell 7:46
Were any of your trials and tribulations ever around loneliness?

David Steele 7:50
I lived in New York. I was relatively unhappy in the early 90s when I started building my first business. And we’ll talk about the restaurant company eventually, which is the second business I launched.

But when I first started building that business, I was making pretty good money, but it was near a city for crying out loud, which meant that I was still lower middle class, even though I was making pretty good money. And it was a bit of a rat race. And I don’t think I was aware of my loneliness because I was so focused on building, again, not starving.

And I conflated my unhappiness in New York with geography. And so I decided to move to San Francisco. Whenever you move, wherever you go, you’re still there, right?

And so a lot of people, I think, as I observe, me included, when we’re feeling internal disjunction, we’ll look to change variables externally in our life, which keeps us busy for a while. But when we digest the pig in the python, so to speak, whatever that changes, when we digest that thing, we go right back probably to the stasis we were at before. I moved to San Francisco and continued to build my business, trying to get settled there.

A couple of years into it, I woke up one day and realized my father, when I was younger, told me, he said, I asked him, I said, Daddy, why don’t you have any friends? And he said, son, when men get older, they don’t have friends.

Jess Dewell 9:20
Oh, that, oh, not untrue. It’s not untrue for his time.

David Steele 9:27
Anyhow, I woke up and one, one, I was, I was partying. I was in my late 20s at this point. I woke up.

I was, had been out late and I had this realization that I was, I didn’t have any friends, real friends. I had a couple. I had my brother and one of my best friends at the time.

And I went through a radical cleansing process to eliminate associates from my life that weren’t serving me with the type of reciprocating, loathing relationship that I knew that I wanted to pursue. And so I started really focusing on people that mattered to me. And I, frankly, utilize a bit of a systematic behavior around building my, my friendships with men specifically, one at a time.

Same way I built my financial planning practice, one client at a time. I made sure that I was being conscious about who I was adding back into my life. And I will tell you, as now I’m 58 years old, I have an incredibly enviable social network of true loving friendships.

Mark of men, lots of women, wonderful, loving relationships, which by the way, has greatly positively impact my business world, because in fact, I don’t separate business from non-business. I love doing business with friends and I love being friends with people I do business with if there’s that type of intimacy in terms of You actually said, if you stereotype, and I was actually thinking about my dad, I was thinking about my grandpa.

Jess Dewell 11:19
I was thinking about my uncles. I was thinking about people that lived in a different time than me or you. And then I was thinking, is there, I think there are studies that have shown that unless we’re consciously making the choice to not be that, it’s what we were unconsciously taught.

So I’m going to say, I agree with that. And I want to challenge me in that, if you stereotype, but also us in this conversation of, is this a paradigm shift that everybody, regardless of gender, can be aware of because we are consciously or unconsciously being shown the way, quote unquote, that we have to choose different?

David Steele 12:05
Yeah. I think ideally we all realize, again, go back to what we talked about at the very beginning, which the number one thing I think about it is it’s people, it’s always people. I accept that whether it be somebody who has a mild case of paranoia or trusting, that could be inherent in them or they were taught the wrong thing.

And I’m an old person now who doesn’t totally feel comfortable, confident to talk about gender and gender fluidity and all that right now. But I can say, to the extent that a man, cisgender, white man like myself can have empathy for a woman, I may be that person because I was raised by my mom, who was a very emotive, communicative, loving woman. And that was what I was exposed to.

Was I more open to this teaching because I was raised by a woman rather than a man born in the thirties? I don’t know, but we all got to get there regardless of why or where we are at.

Jess Dewell 13:21
Starting where we are, we can actually still go after that biggest dream we ever had, even if we thought we had to let it go before.

David Steele 13:30
Do you believe that? I’d rather be more specific about what you say what the dream is, because to me, the dream matters. And where I’m going with that is that I’m very, as a financial planner, I bring a lot of my framework for living that I gain from the academics around financial planning.

So what am I talking about? I’m talking about goal setting. In finance planning, we do a lot of work, unsurprisingly to anybody listening, including you, in helping people articulate their goals.

But then the next place we go is, why are those your goals? Are those good goals? For example, we are taught in our culture that you, depending upon your background, probably go to college, start saving money, find a partner, get married, have kids, buy a house, retire.

Okay. So there’s a lot in there. I have a goal of getting through college.

I have a goal of getting a job. I didn’t mention it before, but of course, getting a job, making money, finding a partner, having kids, buying a house, retire. I’m going to tell you, every single one of those are goals that one should question.

Now, if upon questioning it authentically and honestly, that any of those goals or all of those goals are your goals for the right reasons based on your authentic self and not what you should be doing or worse, ego. How early should I retire? How big should my net worth be?

To me, those things really should be deconstructed because we put a lot of pressure on ourselves to have all those things go right or worse, go perfect.

Jess Dewell 15:23
You’re listening to The Bold Business Podcast. I’m your host, Jess Dewell. This is your program for strategizing long-term success while diving deep into what the right work is for your business right now.

Announcer 15:38
You’re listening to The Bold Business Podcast hosted by Jess Dewell, a nationally recognized strategic growth consultant. She works with business owners and executives to integrate just two elements that guide business through the ups and downs of growth. Number one, know what work is necessary.

Number two, do all the work possible. Schedule a complimentary consultation to find out more at reddirection.com.

Jess Dewell 16:07
So you’re in a unique position in a lot of ways. One, this important work you’ve been doing. Two, having more than one successful business that you’ve been able to bring this work to and develop through.

And three, you’re constantly helping others learn how. I actually am really excited that you said we need to question those goals and dreams. That is, I’ve never heard it put quite like that.

And I really, I like it. I like it because it makes me clench up a little, David. Like right now I’m like, oh, what does that actually mean to me?

And I actually realized I let go of goal setting in that sense of those big things because ultimately they were challenged and wrong. It was, can I be fed and pay my bills? Will I be secure no matter whatever happens?

Everything in my life was supporting those, but I was still accidentally sabotaging myself. So I said, let’s just not have those goals and let’s just have this, right? So this was my path.

I’m giving you my thing and I can’t wait to hear your responsiveness. So I’m somewhere in the middle of this gray area of, I can do whatever I want. I feel comfortable with that.

I can pay my rent. I can do these things, whatever I want to do, no problem. And now I’m like, maybe I need to actually go back and say, do I actually have goals beyond the next few years for Red Direction?

What do I want to still be doing? How do I want to still be showing up? And are there things I don’t want to do that might shape what that actually become?

Because of who I am and all experiences from today forward, not who I used to be to get here.

David Steele 17:40
Goal setting is human magic. To the extent that we, again, I’m not a religious person. So to the extent that I do think there’s something potentially metaphysical, we have control of as humans.

It very well may be goal setting. What I mean by that is if we set a goal, we don’t even necessarily have to have a succinct plan we abide by on an hourly, daily, weekly, monthly, annual basis to achieve that goal. We’re probably going to achieve all the goals we set. Probably, not for sure, but probably.

Jess Dewell 18:18
Can we put the addendum when you’re aligned with your highest self?

David Steele 18:21
I think you’re going to achieve the goals even if it’s not aligned with your highest self. That’s my problem. I have a friend, I have a client, very close friend, and he won in a very, we had a finance class.

Maybe he’ll listen to this, he’ll get a kick out of it. I won’t use his name because I’m going to give details, but we had a finance class and we were asking each other, what do you want to be someday? And I was like, I had no idea.

I was like a sophomore and in business just because I don’t even know why. And I said, I don’t know, man, what do you want to do? He goes, oh, I want to do mergers, acquisitions, leverage buyouts, that type of stuff.

I’m like, who the hell is this person? Anyway, fast forward, the guy starts a little merchant bank, raising money for companies, took some equity in each of them. None of them won, but he identified this one company.

He was able to acquire it for next to nothing and grew it. And next thing he was worth an extraordinary amount of money. He won, he was done.

He and his kids and grandkids never had to work again if he chose. I would have bet anything that he would have continued to push to be a billionaire. And one of the shocks of my life and my friendships and relationships is he said one day, nope, that was a goal.

It’s the wrong goal. Now, here’s my point. If he didn’t have that self-awareness and realization about the cost to have continued on that previous goal he had set, which he then realized was not his highest call and truest self, or however you phrased it, he would have probably achieved that goal and been less happy than I think he is now.

No, I think we will achieve all the goals we set. I’m just saying, be careful with the power you wield in setting these goals.

Jess Dewell 20:13
Here’s what I’m taking away, David, just so you know. I got to be real about having some different goals that actually have clarity versus the general overall impact. I don’t know if you’ve ever felt this way.

I’d be curious. Is that I let go of what the outcomes needed to be so that I reduced my friction along the way. And that turned into a lot of awesomeness without a lot of direction.

And I think, to your point of the cost, what is the cost of the goal? There’s a cost of not a goal also.

David Steele 20:41
First of all, I just want to say to anybody listening, I don’t think anybody should ever retire. As a financial planner, we have 383 clients. I’ve observed so many clients retire.

I would say something south of 25% of them are happier after they retire than before they retired. What I would say is that whatever it is about the mastery you develop that has led you to the point where you can afford to retire because you have developed mastery, you should think about the things about your quote-unquote job you don’t like, figure out a way to still apply your mastery post your typical retirement age and delegate out all the crap you don’t want to do to somebody who, by the way, wait for it, you will be empowering with training and knowledge. So by delegating, you’re actually training. So I just want to deconstruct the idea of retirement, or at least at a minimum put into question the idea of retirement.

But let’s say somebody calls bullshit on what I just said and says, nope, sorry, Steele, I still want to retire. Okay, great. What does retirement mean?

What does it mean you’re completely replacing your income? Does it mean you’re improving your income? We meet with so many clients that have absolutely no idea what financial, and we always change it to financial independence because I do think financial independence is a great goal.

Because if you’re working, quote-unquote working, but you don’t have to work, you’re choosing to work because it’s a sense of self-worth, productivity, relevance, whatever it may be. That’s awesome. But if it’s because you have to still take care of financial requirements, you’re not, so to speak, that can put pressure to force you to do things that are not were to the thing you want to be doing.

And think that everybody should set goals. They should unpack those goals. Are they authentic actual goals for themselves?

What does it mean? And quantify them. And I think they’re going to wake up and achieve all of them.

Jess Dewell 22:38
One of the things that I think you said earlier was understand the reasons behind your goals and are they the right goals and challenge those. So is part of the process that regardless whether you’re in the restaurant world or in the financial planning world, are you talking with people about how do you know when the goal is no longer the right goal? And it’s okay to let it go.

David Steele 23:02
It really is person by person. That requires for me to advise somebody what if I sense somebody has a wrong goal or they’re aspiring or desiring that particular goal for the wrong reasons, which is often.

Jess Dewell 23:17
These days with all the experience that you have, how do you know when a goal is no longer right for you?

David Steele 23:24
For me, I’m in truly the most luxurious place a human being could be in, which is to say I’ve achieved all of my tangible goals in my life that I wanted to achieve, every single one of them. But there’s one awesome goal left, which is I help other people achieve their goals. So if you look at my businesses, I have two companies, essentially a restaurant company and a financial planning company, both wildly successful by any measure.

I am not trying to grow those companies for my own benefit any longer. I am trying to help my partners in those businesses achieve their goals, which does in fact, require we continue to grow those companies. So I do consulting, business consulting.

I do some coaching with individuals. It’s all around helping people. And of course, the financial planning company has 383 clients by which the number one thing we’re thinking about is trying to unpack their goals.

But there are some obvious ones. If somebody tells me they want to be a billionaire, the conversation is probably over because I’m not going to jive with that person. That does not compute to me.

That to me is a ridiculous, that is all ego-based. There is nothing a human being can do with the billion dollars that they can’t do to make their life wonderful with $20 million. Nothing.

Like, okay, they can have their own jet, but that is not going to bring them more joy than flying business class. It’s not even going to reduce much friction than flying business class. So there’s some obvious things that when I’m talking with somebody that are bad goals, so to speak, somebody’s saying they want to retire at 40.

To me, okay, boom, I’ve got my answer. I don’t have to intuit anything. Bad goal.

Jess Dewell 25:15
Are you familiar with the concept of fire and fat fire?

David Steele 25:18
Oh, you’re talking about that retire early nonsense? Yeah.

Jess Dewell 25:21
I love that you added nonsense. I was like, I don’t know if it’s nonsense or not.

David Steele 25:24
Complete ridiculous nonsense. I feel it’s nonsense. And it’s nonsense because it eliminates one of the main reasons that being alive is so wonderful, which is having a sense of self-worth and value by way of developing mastery.

So if we try to retire at 30 or 35 or 40, the implication baked into that is that all we’re doing mercenary style is using our career that we don’t really care about or believe in the name of getting to a point that we think when that happens, then I will be happy.

Jess Dewell 26:03
It sounds ego-based the way you described it to me. There’s a lot of ego in that.

David Steele 26:08
I’m not positive it’s ego. I am positive it’s misguided. So what I mean by that is if somebody wants to retire at 30 years old, they’re going to live to be actuarially speaking, 85 or 90.

What comes next? It’s a lot of time. A lot of time.

I do accept the fact that when you’re in your 20s, generationally, this idea of work-life balance, it’s ridiculous if you’re in your 20s. Show me somebody who’s focusing on work-life balance in their 20s and I’m going to show you somebody who is not going to achieve their potential in life. And notice I didn’t just say career, just in life, right?

Because what we do, if we focus our energy in a very focused, specific way on developing mastery professionally, we have a long-term goal of financial independence, which is a very legitimate goal. There’s transition periods along the way. At some point in time, we will have developed a network, respect from our sphere.

We will have confidence. We will have all these things. We will have an understanding of how to be more efficient with our time.

And we’ll figure out ways to leverage that, to monetize all of those things, which allows us to then have that last forever. So if you, like, for example, my financial planning practice, I was 100% dedicated to that practice in my 20s. It allowed me to get to the point where, and I was building a good business, so admittedly, you do have to be doing something that is sustainable, but it allowed me to then start enjoying my life in my 30s and my 40s and still growing financially and focusing on other things.

I do think a lot of what we’re talking about probably is age-based as well.

Jess Dewell 27:58
I’m your host, Jess Dewell, and we’re getting down to business on the Bold Business Podcast. This is where we’re tackling the challenges that matter most to you with actionable and achievable advice to get real results that lead to your success.

Announcer 28:14
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Jess Dewell 28:31
I want to go back to the human magic of goal setting. And we’ve been talking a lot about goals in a lot of different ways so far. When you called it human magic, when did you realize for yourself?

David Steele 28:43
I’ve written a couple of life plans. I used to do it like every 10 years. And after two of them, I went back and would look at them like, holy mackerel, I did everything on this list.

And the combination of that, along with having a lot of success in my financial planning practice for clients and seeing them achieve all the things we more explicitly articulated and quantified, that’s when I realized. So it was something that I realized in my 40s. I opened my first restaurant.

So I have a restaurant company with seven restaurants, three more opening over the next 18 months and a consumer packaged goods business, 250 plus employees.

Jess Dewell 29:24
All in California?

David Steele 29:25
Yes. Success by any measure.

Jess Dewell 29:28
I was just curious if I could go to one up here. We’ll come to California.

David Steele 29:33
But I had on my life plan was to open a restaurant.

Jess Dewell 29:38
Really?

David Steele 29:39
Yeah. But it wasn’t to build a restaurant company. I think when that restaurant opened and it was successful, fortunately, I think that was the period at the end of the goal-setting is human magic sentence.

Jess Dewell 29:52
It is amazing how even parts of our goals might show up and that’s actually how they developed or manifested for whatever reason. I think that’s really cool. Is there a step?

Knowing that you can write it down and you can get it and you believe that being able to write it down, good, bad for you or the world or whatever else, it can still happen at the actual cost with the actual cost associated with it. Is there something that you have found over time that allowed you to consciously say, I’m going to set this goal and go get it and identify some things that are either nuanced away from or actually better than the goal-setting step process that we have?

David Steele 30:36
Before you’re talking about this fire thing, retire early, whatever, and anybody listening, if they’re a proponent of that, is going to call bullshit on what I said because they’re like, wait, then you came back and said when you’re in your 20s, you should just work. But I did also say you should just work and focus on your career, but I didn’t say to retire. I then said to parlay that into continuing to use your mastery.

So I really want to cross like that. And let’s talk about good versus bad goal setting. My motivation to opening my first restaurant, if I’m honest, was because I wanted to be cool.

I wanted to show the world that I could do it. There was definitely an artistic component to it, which is financial planning. I do see it as creative, but it’s not so obviously publicly facing creative as opening a restaurant.

And that probably has some authentic stuff baked into there. But a lot of it was I just wanted to be cool. I now help build this restaurant company because it’s about people.

And in a perfect world, and when I was in my 20s and I’d set the goal to open a restaurant, I would have been evolved enough to say, I want to open a restaurant because it’s going to connect me with so many people that I can have wonderful relationships with, that I serve, that they serve me. And all that stuff that I now realize is the real benefit I got from a questionable intended goal. Yes.

And I do think if you have a map and you say you’re going to drive from San Francisco to New York, and you have a direct route to get there. And if you detour to Chicago, this place is awesome. And maybe Chicago is where you want to end up because it was a detour, but it’s probably still better to have had that New York goal on the map to get you straight there.

Because if you didn’t detour somewhere that you prefer, you had the most efficient way to get to that destination. So metaphorically speaking, I still think it’s good to set goals, even though the detour may end up being better than what you intended the goal to be.

Jess Dewell 32:44
I love the detours. It’s another reason now I’m actually thinking about this. And I’ve been looking forward to our conversation because like I said, I don’t know if I actually have real goals anymore.

They’re just these things out there that I want to work toward because I’m more interested in the experience along the way. And what I’m hearing you say is the goal is probably going to get a better experience when my motivation is coming from the highest and best good or my true self.

David Steele 33:11
Two is too few goals. Can’t see a single reason why one wouldn’t.

Jess Dewell 33:17
I know a lot of people who think that writing things down doesn’t make any sense because then you have to go back and look at it. And this might actually be an interesting way to talk about the growth of your restaurant business too, right? The success there.

I work with a lot of companies that are small. They have several locations, but they’re not gigantic. Or they have a hundred employees, still not gigantic.

And they’ve gone this way. It’s an argument, like almost crazy argument of a belief system. Write it down and say where you’re going to go.

How do you communicate it with everybody else? How do you understand what the right thing to do is if you haven’t written it down when you have a hundred people having their own interpretation of this?

David Steele 34:00
They’re wrong. Full stop. There’s a reputation restaurants have for being high fail rates as businesses.

By the way, that’s been deconstructed. It’s not actually accurate. The restaurant fail rate is not radically higher than other industries, but let’s just pretend for a moment it is.

So I’ve opened, personally, I’ve opened nine restaurants and I’ve consulted on five others. I’ve helped entrepreneurs write business plans, figure out ways to structure the company to raise capital from investors. And then my restaurant company comes in and consults on organizational development.

I’ve opened nine myself and I’ve consulted on five. So that’s 14 restaurants. 12 of them are still around, have paid back investors a hundred cents on the dollar, are cashflow positive.

I believe involved in the conversation of culture, have great cultures. That’s 12 for 14. And every single one of them has business planning as a core foundation to how we run the businesses, run the companies.

In the case of my restaurant company, the parent company, an annual strategic planning process that’s a quasi rewritten business plan every year.

Jess Dewell 35:16
And so it never gets put in a drawer. It’s always refreshed. And I find that fascinating.

If we’re a startup, our business plan is going to have different things and have a different purpose than if we are mid cycle somewhere, or if we’re in a reinvention place, or if we’re getting ready to exit. And I think that is a big misconception that people forget. I did one, but if I’m not raising capital, why would my initial business plan need to look like somebody who is raising capital?

The functions are different. So I think it goes back to what’s the goal and what’s behind the goal to actually bring that same concept maybe to a little bit of business planning. Would you agree with that or no?

David Steele 35:55
I would completely agree with that. But the problem is the person you’re talking to that’s questioning it is conflating an investor debt or a business plan. An investor debt and a business plan are different things.

Okay. Good news is all investor debts should start as business plans. Okay.

And not everything in a business plan finds its way into an investor deck. Okay. But pretty much everything in an investor deck you’ll find in the business plan.

So every business should have a business plan where you articulate your goals for the business and you develop systematic strategies to achieve those goals. And then that absolutely applies to starting the company, but it also applies to running the company as well. If you’re thinking about an investor deck and the business plan only needing to exist because you have to present to investors, I think you’re missing the human magic part, which is we as business people, as entrepreneurs, if we write a plan with goals in it and have a strategic plan to achieve those goals, I think that’s the human magic I was referring to earlier.

Oh, and by the way, it’s going to be more convincing when you pitch investors using an investor deck. Or if you don’t need investors, you know what? We use investor decks that came from business plans and we show it to landlords when we’re negotiating leases.

Let me tell you something. You show that to a landlord negotiating a lease for a restaurant and you’re competing for that space. Am I going to beat that next person who doesn’t have a really beautiful business plan slash investor deck?

So if I show it to a potential general manager of a restaurant or director of operations, do you think they’re going to take me more seriously as a business operator because we have our shit together, so to speak? It’s well-planned. So these decks we’re talking about are not even just for investor eyeballs.

So the business planning process, absolutely critical. I believe deeply in it. And then from that, you can build myriad different types of decks, not only investor decks.

Jess Dewell 38:11
Because it supports whatever the audience is and the goal that you have. And the depth is there of the information you need to be credible, to have that connection, and to answer any hard question the person that you’re talking to may want to present you with.

David Steele 38:28
That’s the sales process. What about the most important process, which is you’ve already answered the question to yourself as a business person. So therefore, the sales process is pretty easy because you’ve already answered the question to yourself.

Jess Dewell 38:45
What’s the biggest learning that you’ve experienced over all of your years of life? Could be when you’re eight, could have been when you’re 48.

David Steele 38:53
Sorry, I’m going to come back to people.

Jess Dewell 38:54
Yeah.

David Steele 38:55
A moment?

Jess Dewell 38:57
Or is this just the theme?

David Steele 38:59
I told you about the moment when I first moved to San Francisco and I still found myself relatively… You asked about loneliness, and I was relatively unhappy even though I was warm, dry, and fed, and I knew I would be. And that’s when I reflected upon the thing my father told me, which of course was sad and wrong, and was able to fortunately reflect upon the lessons my mother taught me, which then radically informed what I did with my life from that moment forward.

And everything is always about people and relationships and being in the service of others. There’s a really awesome book, and everybody’s heard about it, How to Win Friends and Influence People. And everybody should just read that damn book.

Jess Dewell 39:38
Every year, I’d put that as part of the business planning process, actually, because what are the things that connect us? Why are we answering the question for ourselves? Can we hold it up to ourselves?

Do we love and like ourselves? And then who are we working with? How do we work with them?

And then who are we serving? To your point, I’m going to just say, yes.

David Steele 39:56
The people that people find most interesting are the people that do the least talking and the most asking of questions. So you’re going to be the most interesting person at the dinner table if you’re actually doing less talking and more asking, which is because people like to talk.

Jess Dewell 40:14
And they like to talk about what’s important to them and what they’re interested in.

David Steele 40:18
What you’re doing in that by asking is you’re celebrating somebody’s value.

Jess Dewell 40:22
Where are we on evaluating each other as people today in our world, in our communities, in our neighborhood? And what could we do to either leverage the good or increase the good to leverage?

David Steele 40:34
That’s a very macro kind of question. And of course, it touches on the political environment right now and the proliferation of mass media and AI algorithmic driven business that really exists for the purpose of being provocative and frankly tearing us apart and riling us up emotionally. And I have absolutely nothing to say about any of that other than it breaks my heart.

But what I do have to say is more about micro, which is me, you, anybody listening. We have complete control over ourselves in our sphere. And there’s nothing we can do about the macro environment.

As individuals, listen, I vote based on my beliefs. I give money based on my beliefs. I refuse to get upset and angry at things I read and hear.

I refuse to get upset and angry about some of the implications of the way you asked the question, which is completely legitimate and what everybody wants to talk about right now. I don’t get upset and angry if I read an article and I’m two paragraphs in, now I’ve gotten the information needed to be culturally literate and I start feeling myself agitated and I go to a place of nihilism, which is easy to do. Guess what I do?

I stop reading the Veeam article. I literally just stop. And if somebody listening goes, he’s not well-informed or he’s missing a lot of information.

Okay, so be it. I’m not well-informed, I’m missing information, but I’ve got one life to live and I refuse to go there and I can control my little mini micro world that I’m living in. Or at least I can say, I have some control over the micro world that I live in and I’m going to focus my energy on that.

Jess Dewell 42:29
Got it. Pause. It may mean I can’t have a conversation about it intellectually or statistically or factually, but guess what?

I probably don’t want to have that conversation anyway, because like you said, I’m going to be putting my time, my money, my choices into the things that are important to me that I think make the world a better place. And that’s sometimes good enough, always good enough, I would say.

David Steele 42:54
You can imagine those of our clients that are not supportive of Trump as our president were a bit more emotionally reactive and wanting to take decisive action in their portfolios maybe than those of our clients that were supportive of Trump as president. I’m not being provocative when I say that. No, you’re not.

When this was all happening, this type of attitude that I had around refusing to let the headlines trigger me emotionally allowed me to go back to traditional academic rules of thumb around financial planning and investing, which is focused on long-term goals and stick with the plan. And so I think it’s really important that we all do the mental gymnastics necessary to control our emotions. And if we find ourselves getting triggered emotionally, we have a fight or flight instinct as human beings.

And so if we get triggered emotionally, there’s an understandable desire to take action. Guess what? Oftentimes when you’re triggered emotionally, that’s probably not the time to take action.

Jess Dewell 44:00
I don’t know about your experiences, but all my experiences, I’m like, the pause would have been really good right there. A pause of, is it an emotional reaction? Being able to recognize it is an emotional reaction and then say, is there validity in questioning the plan or the goal or the thing, or is it important to the equivalent of sleep on it?

David Steele 44:24
I believe the time to take action is before the shocking events, not after. That is to say, whatever goal you have or plan you have to achieve those goals should imagine these things happening. And yeah, we’re talking about financial markets and macro economies.

Jess Dewell 44:42
It’s also applicable to business plans too. You got to think about what that progression could be.

David Steele 44:46
If you think about COVID and okay, what did that mean for restaurants? That was completely unexpected. We, in fact, restaurants don’t sit on $2 million of working capital to pay every employee to have no revenue coming in.

But having zero working capital would have meant you literally have to close the doors and you’re not going to be able to reopen. As it turns out, there was government support by my measure a bit too much, but that’s another conversation. And it really did save businesses that didn’t have any revenue coming in during that period of time.

But we didn’t know that and that took a few weeks. We had working capital in the bank to allow us to then get to the government support, to allow us to then get to be in a position of strength when the world reopened. So yeah, I mean, I think it does apply to, for sure it applies to business, not just investing.

Jess Dewell 45:41
Technology startups have the valley of death.

David Steele 45:44
My goodness, anybody getting married, you should absolutely have a prenup. And all prenup is a contract that says, hey, if things don’t work out, here’s how things are going to be handled. It just is an agreement.

It’s a contract that says, could be both people have equal assets, they still should do a prenup.

Jess Dewell 46:03
We do it in business.

David Steele 46:05
It’s the most important contract you’re ever going to sign in your life. And it usually is given the least amount of thought. What I’m saying, have a contingency plan because the prenup then is you’re preparing, okay, if things, God forbid, don’t work out here, I’m ready for it.

So you’re not blindsided. So it doesn’t matter what it is that you’re doing in life, what the goal is, there is in fact a way to prepare for the unexpected.

Jess Dewell 46:35
I want to know what makes it bold, David. What makes it bold to really embrace the human magic of goal setting?

David Steele 46:41
If somebody is deconstructing the goals to make sure it’s a worthy goal that’s not ego-based or only really because you’re supposed to, to me, that’s pretty bold. That’s really bold. I also think that we have self-limiting beliefs.

And so I think in a more traditional sense, being bold is to challenge your goals to make sure, because I think everything, the implication of all we’ve talked about with goal setting, that me deconstructing the idea of goals being just inherently you’re born with them, they’re culturally influenced by your family or whatever. I also think we are nature or nurtured into not achieving all we can achieve. So the other side of that same coin is, I said, don’t try to do this fire thing where you retire at 30.

On the other hand, really ask yourself the question, what does financial independence mean? And maybe in fact, it’s bigger and bolder than you imagined, or the person you’re looking for and the traits you’re looking for in a spouse or what you want for your children or where you want to live, or maybe you want to live in multiple places, which I do, by the way. These are all ways of being bold that I don’t think are natural.

So I would point to goal setting and deconstructing the goals and making sure they’re truly worthy goals for you. That’s bold. And being aware of your self-limiting beliefs and pushing yourself in the other direction where worthy.

Jess Dewell 48:12
Every single time I have a conversation, I take away something that I want to share with 25 people. I know when you’re listening to this podcast, you’re also listening for that and will have something that you want to share. In the comments, I would like for you to engage with us.

What is that thing that you want to tell 25 people from this program? Here’s why it’s important. It’s important because, yeah, there are going to be how-to’s.

Yes, there are going to be steps. Yes, you’re going to be like, oh, I wish I wrote that down. I wish I wasn’t doing this and I could actually take action on that right now.

But guess what? You’re not. So engage right now because that one thing you want to share with others will be the thing that you can figure out how to incorporate in your business, in your workflow, in your style tomorrow.

Announcer 49:02
Jess hosts the bold business podcast to provide insights for building a resilient, profitable business by deeply understanding your growth strategy, ensuring market relevance and your company’s future. It is bold to deeply understand your growth strategy with your host, Jess Dewell. Get more information about how to drive solutions and reset your growth mindset at reddirection.com.

Thank you for joining us and special thanks to our post-production team at The Scott Treatment.