Episode 108:

Hello everyone and welcome to The Upstream Leader. My name’s Jeremy Clopton. We’re going to have a fun conversation here today on the heels of our last episode, which was all focused on physical health as a leader. Today, we’re going to talk a little bit about loneliness as a leader and how do we overcome that? How do we use community, as leaders, to make us better at what we do? And for that, I have the founder and CEO of Quade with me here today, Mark McFatridge. Mark, good to have you on the show.

Jeremy, man, thanks for having me. I’m looking forward to it.

Absolutely. I’m looking forward to the conversation. I think that community is one of those elements that we sometimes take for granted. I think those organizations that are in-person just expect that they have it, but what we know is we’ve got to be much more intentional to create community than most of us would probably admit. But before we get there, I’m going to start this show off the same way I start every episode: How did you become the leader that you are today?

Yeah, I love this question. I’ve been listening to several of your episodes and so I’ve practiced, I’ve got my answer down.

Very good!

Yeah, no, in all honesty, I’ve been super blessed throughout my life, really, not even my professional career, to be around great leaders. One of the things that I’ve always been fortunate enough to do is what I call pocket experiences. So as I see other leaders in action, I kind of take note of how they handle certain situations, and how they communicate, and honestly, sometimes I see what not to do in certain situations and I kind of put that in the other pocket. And so as I start to find myself in these situations, I’m able to pull things out of these pockets and go and make them mine, but have some experiences that come from others that I’ve built. You know, I’m not very bright, I’m from small town Indiana, and so I don’t have any original ideas, so I’ve had to just kind of copy and mock everybody that I’ve been around. But again, just being super blessed, literally in my entire life, being around great leaders and just watching how they handle certain situations, and then when I find myself there, just making it mine and doing it that way.

So it sounds like—and this isn’t really a surprise—community has played a significant role in your background as a leader and how you’ve gotten to where you are today. Talk to me a little bit about this idea of loneliness in leadership. I know we’ve chatted about this a little bit as we’ve talked about what Quade does, but give me a little bit of insight as to what exactly does that mean? I think we’ve all probably heard the phrase, oh, it’s lonely at the top, but what exactly does that mean for a leader, and what are some of the impacts of that?

Yeah, it’s a great question. I think you can see studies out there today that loneliness in general is at an epidemic level, right? That even as connected as we are technology-wise and all this kind of stuff, people are really suffering from loneliness themselves. Take that to the CEO level or the entrepreneur level, or the business owner level, and it magnifies it even more, and here’s why: If you own a business, there is nothing like that in the world, right? Everybody thinks that it is the easiest thing to do, right? You set your own hours, you make whatever you want, you take off vacation whenever you want. We know it’s simply not true, right? Like, you know, I think if I looked over and I calculated my hourly rate at the times that I’ve been CEO of organizations, that hourly rate is pretty low, when you start adding in, waking up at three o’clock in the morning and starting to write down notes and what you need to do tomorrow, and who you need to contact, worries and whatever.

So that loneliness piece, there are so few people that have those experiences—those opportunities and challenges—that are faced by CEOs and business owners and entrepreneurs that you just don’t have anybody to talk to. And you know, you grow up thinking that you have to know everything and you always have to be on. And that is a tough way to go through life. If you can’t talk about what you’re facing on a day-to-day basis and knowing that literally every decision that you make affects not only you, not only your family, not only your company, but your employees and their family, your vendors and their families, your customers and their families, and every decision you make is amplified and affects so many people, that people just don’t understand the pressures. If they’ve never been in that role, they don’t understand the pressures that come along with being in that. And so it is lonely at the top because you don’t know anybody that you can talk to.

And in our profession with partners or business owners, and it may feel like, oh, well there’s lots of other partners here. I would speculate most aren’t having those types of conversations. They’re talking about getting the work done. They’re not talking about, okay, well how do we actually solve some of the business challenges that we have? So how does community help with that? And maybe I should step back first: How do you define community?

Yeah, well, I think you can talk about it in a bunch of different ways. I think one of the ways that it makes sense for us to focus on during this conversation is that independent community, which sounds almost like an oxymoron, but if you’re able to have a community of people that are like-situated—and I stopped using like-minded several years ago—but like-situated, so meaning they have similar roles, similar responsibilities, that type of stuff. So they have similar challenges and opportunities and know what you’re talking about. They get to know you on an intimate level, kind of how you operate, who your family is and all that kind of stuff, but they’re independent of you, meaning that gives them the freedom to say, Jeremy, I hear what you’re saying, I think that’s a stupid idea, right? And they’re coming at it out of love, out of hope that you’re going to do better and help achieve whatever your goals are.

So what I love about having a community around you, it’s that independence, but that intimacy—they know you and cheer for you and want you to be successful, but they’re going to come at it and share with you their experiences—and then also hold you accountable to achieving your dreams and doing the right things. And they’re going to be radically candid of your ideas and your thoughts and just not hold back because they’re doing it out of their love for you and their hope that you’re able to achieve what you want to achieve. That’s the type of community that I like to focus on right now and how it really applies to some of our conversation today.

So given that definition, I’m fully on board. That sounds like an absolutely wonderful group of people to surround yourself with. If you’re feeling lonely at the top—and maybe treat me as though I have no idea what I’m talking about, because sometimes in this topic I think I don’t sometimes—how do I go find or build a community? It almost feels like how do I go make friends as an adult in a leadership role, because that’s kind of what it feels like and in my mind, it doesn’t seem like it should be that hard, but it feels like it’s really challenging. Help me understand: How does one then go build that exciting group of individuals, that community that you just described, if you’re feeling in a place of loneliness.

Well, I mean, start with your organization, right? Upstream Academy does this, right? I mean, you’re bringing together like-situated people, and so I think that’s a great place to start. I believe you don’t have necessarily competing organizations so people can come together and talk fairly freely.

Mm-hmm.

I think if you start to take that at a different level, right? You need to start going to where people that are like-situated hang out, you know, certainly chambers of commerce at local places, sometimes that gets a little bit squirrely just because you’ve got people in the same market and all that kind of stuff, and you don’t always want to feel comfortable sharing your dirty laundry and that kind of stuff. But you’ve got to start fishing where those people are and so, you know, places like Upstream, other associations, state CPA societies and that type of stuff for your industry, chambers of commerce.

Yeah.

But, you know, there are a ton of organizations like Young Presidents’ Organization is a worldwide organization that I’ve been a member of for, gosh, I just started my 19th year, which tells you how old I am. But that’s an awesome organization. You’ve got requirements that you have to meet to do that. But you know, frankly, that’s why Quade was started—to provide a community for CEOs and entrepreneurs to have those discussions, to have those relationships where they can push each other and hold each other accountable and cheer for each other, and pat each other on the back and kick them in the butt when they need that too, so, you know, there are organizations out there. Every city has them, industries have them. But yeah, that’s where I would start. But gosh, you guys are doing it, right?

I mean, absolutely. I think that there are plenty of opportunities. We’ve got peer networks, we’ve got conferences, managing partner groups, and maybe I’m thinking more for those folks that aren’t in those already or their organization says, I don’t know that we need to invest in community, and they’re trying to figure out, okay. Well, if I don’t want to—this is going to sound perhaps bad, but—if I don’t want to pay for community, which don’t get me wrong, if you’re in any of our programs where you are doing that, I would encourage you, it’s a great thing. You should keep paying for community. But I don’t think you’re paying for community in that case either, you’re really paying for other things. But that aside, if I’m sitting here listening to this and I’m thinking, all right, all those things are great, all these organizations… What you’ve said at the start is perhaps most meaningful, which is go find where like-situated people are located, and go find people there. And for any leader that’s listening in, if you’re thinking, well I can’t do YPO, I’m not a president, I can’t do Vistage, I don’t want to do this, I don’t want to do that. First and foremost, figure out what do like-situated people look like? Where are you at? Then go find them.

You run communities at Quade, they’re called circles. We’ll get into that in just a little bit. But in your experience there, so you bring like-situated people together. It’s one thing to bring them together, put them in a group and say, hey, you’re now a group. That doesn’t mean they’ve got the foundation of trust to really get the benefit of the community yet because hey, we just met each other and you know, some guy named Mark said, we should all fit well together because we’re like-situated. That doesn’t mean that I trust the person next to me well enough to actually air my dirty laundry and get meaningful feedback. When you get a community, or you get a group of people, you get a group of people that are like-situated, what’s required to build community, what are the steps?

Man, that’s, I love that question. This is a really great question. So for it to be really beneficial, right? As opposed to just being ten people that hang out and grab lunch once a month. For it to be really beneficial, you first and foremost have to establish trust. And once you establish trust—and I’ll come back and walk you through how we try to do this—but once you establish trust, that allows you to be vulnerable. Once you know that you’ve all signed your NDAs and everything that we talk about is confidential for life, that’s a great first start. But you still have to be comfortable and it’s an evolution, right? This is, I think the important thing to know is, you know, something like a Quade Circle or a Vistage Group or a YPO forum, these are not necessarily curriculum-based things, and it’s a finite deal at, you know, in twelve months you’re going to be cured and everything is going to be great. This is an evolution of time, and the real ROI doesn’t start to happen at the first month or first two months, or first three months because it takes a long time to build that trust and to fill the trust that allows you to be vulnerable and open up your issues and opportunities for other people to help you get inside of it.

Again, we’re hardwired as leaders to keep things close to our vest because we don’t want people to think that we’re weak or that we’re not succeeding or whatever it is. And so how do you do that? Well, I can share from the Quade experience when we bring together a new circle of ten allies plus your circle director—the very first meeting, the first thing that we do is we typically have a personality assessment, whether it’s MPO or it’s a Predictive Index, or it’s DISC or something like that. We’ll have an expert come in, they’ll have done the assessment. They’ll share those results. They’ll talk about what the dynamics of this circle are, number one. So now everybody’s on an even playing field. Like you said, they don’t know each other until today, right? And so now you get at least some insights into their personality and how they communicate and that type of stuff.

That expert leaves, the next thing we do—and we don’t tell them this upfront, so I’m kind of spilling the beans here if anybody’s listening and they join a circle tomorrow—but I say, tell me your life story without sharing anything professional. As you know, typically when we introduce ourselves, it’s like, “Hey, I’m Mark McFatridge. I’m the founder of Quade.” Or, you know, whatever. “I’m Jeremy Clopton, I’m the president of Upstream.” That’s how we start out, so now you can’t do that and you get it unexpectedly. So you immediately start to go with, “Oh, I was born in small town Indiana, my parents. And my parents got divorced when I was five.” And, you know, all this kind of stuff. And all of a sudden somebody goes, you know what? I grew up about thirty miles from you, and my parents got divorced and—now all of a sudden you’ve got this chatter going on and it’s all personal, which in and of itself is vulnerable, right? You don’t always share all the good and bad and ugly of family life and growing up and all this kind of stuff, but that becomes an instant bonding moment. And quite honestly, that establishes that trust, vulnerability from the very first meeting, and then it just builds upon that meeting after meeting.

Now, I will tell you that because it’s generally all CEOs and entrepreneurs, the second meeting we have to get into business right away or else, you know, they’re like, hey, this is a little bit too—this is a little bit too woo. We need to back off on this a little bit. But honestly, that’s how we start it, and it really establishes that trust and vulnerability from that first meeting.

Yeah. So what I’m hearing is first things first, you take the legalistic stuff, get it done. NDAs, all the confidentiality, all the agreements and all the legal protections are in place—that eases the mind from a legalistic standpoint, if you will. I’m not worried that somebody’s going to go steal my trade secrets or whatever, so we’ve got that out of the way. You get some characteristics out of the way. But then what I hear is you essentially strip away the protection that is title and all of the, kind of the façade that we put up that is our standard business bio, which keeps us from really having to say anything at all. We say something but we don’t say a whole lot. Like if you go look at a bunch of CEO bios from the professional standpoint, there’s going to be some similarities there. You’re not going to find much out, so you all essentially say, nope, we’re taking that veneer off and we want to know about you as the person, because that, it sounds to me, helps to expedite the trust building—it doesn’t shortcut it, but it jumps right into the personal, vulnerable side of it, is that the idea behind that is, hey, let’s strip out the protection and make you get serious right away?

It does that, number one. And then number two, it also reinforces why we’re together. So one of the things that we focus on in Quade specifically is the whole person, right? We recognize that work-life balance doesn’t really exist, right? It’s really work-life integration. And so if all you’re going to do is come in here and talk about your forecast for next year and all this kind of stuff—important, sure. Could you not get that other places? Yeah, you certainly can. But again, reiterating and going back to how we started this conversation about the loneliness at the top, that loneliness is, you know, you could have conversations that center around, look, I’m looking at making an acquisition. I just got an unsolicited offer to buy my company. The person who I thought was the CFO is really only controller. How do I deal with that? But you also could say, we just discovered my daughter’s an alcoholic and I don’t know how to deal with that. I think I’m on the verge of divorce. How do I handle that? My parents are aging. We’re looking at succession planning, but my sister and I don’t get along and we’re going to fight it out. Those are real world things that fall in addition to all the business things. Those are real world things that fall on a CEO that, again, when you add them all together, not the average employee does not have to deal with all those things at the same time. And so getting back to your thing, yes, it starts to bring in the trust and vulnerability, but it also says, guys, it’s okay to talk about your personal life here, because that’s going to weigh on you as much as anything else.

And that’s where I would say, in our profession, it’s incredibly important for a community because you may have a group of partners, but the comfort level with going into some of those things doesn’t always exist, or it may feel like, I’m a new partner, I can’t really get into that here, because I don’t feel that level of comfort yet, and the amount of time and just understanding the nuance there, so having that external community. Don’t get me wrong, I’m a huge proponent of building community within an organization, within a firm. You need to have strong communities. I view this conversation as how do you find community outside the walls of your office, outside the walls of your home. Because I would say that for many that are in leadership, at least my experience is if you don’t have somebody to talk to about these things at the office, it’s probably going home with you. And you’re having the conversations, but you and your spouse or partner or significant other, whoever it may be, if there is somebody there with you, there’s probably a general understanding that they can listen, but they’re not going to be able to help if they haven’t been in that same situation. So it’s not that that’s not helpful, it’s not that having partners in the office isn’t helpful, it’s that we all need to find a community to be our sounding board and really to be our friends to help us through the things that we can’t discuss with others because we don’t have that like-situated group that can help us through it in a holistic way. Is that fair?

Yeah, no, that’s exactly fair. And I’ll take it to maybe even another sideboard on that of, you know, let’s say that you’re one of a handful of partners in a CPA firm and you have your eyes on becoming the managing partner at some point, but so do four other people that are about your age. You start to have some personal challenges, whatever those are—do you want to share those with those other four people, even if you have a great relationship, when you theoretically could be competing with them for that next level? Do you want to give them an opportunity to do that? Because they’re not going to be independent, right? They can’t because they’re thinking about themselves. So that’s obviously an extreme example, but it’s true. Same thing if you’re the CEO and you have a board of directors, you know, if you have some things that are coming down the pike, whether it’s personal or professional or whatever, if you haven’t had the opportunity to sound them all out, do you want to go to that board of directors first, as opposed to going to this group of peers, of like-situated peers that you can go, hey, I’m thinking about this, I feel pretty good about it, but man, could you help me kind of refine it and how can I take this to the board and getting those insights? Your group may say, it’s perfect as is. It could be, dude, I would not share that at all. Let’s figure out how to do that, or let’s touch it up here. So that’s why it’s so important to have those outside, independent, like-situated folks that you can bounce stuff off of.

Yeah. It’s not really replacing the internal relationships, the internal communities, but in a way, it’s almost like having your own personal board of directors that’s independent, but like you said, like-situated, that can help you navigate that and navigate the loneliness, so to speak, at the top.

Yeah. By the way, once I get this recording, I’m going to cut that out. I’m going to use that as an ad. That was perfectly done. Thank you.

You’re welcome. I do what I can, I do what I can. Let me shift gears just a little bit. So we’ve got a lot of leaders in our profession that are advisors—they work with a lot of their clients, and they’re probably a bit of an outside sounding board for the CEOs of their organizations. And this is something that you all at Quade are really uniquely situated for, it seems to me. Help me understand: How does a leader go about creating a community for a group of their clients? So let’s say there’s a partner that’s running a construction practice, she’s got twelve phenomenal construction companies: like-situated, non-competitive, great leadership CEOs. How does she go about creating community within her client base? Or is that even advisable?

No, I think it’s absolutely advisable. I think if you look at it, who better than a CPA, and especially partners in a CPA firm, who have a really solid book of business that are interacting with these folks, they’re calling them on a regular basis, asking probably more tactical strategy type questions, that type of stuff. What a perfect position to be in, to say, you know what? That’s a great question. I have nine other clients that are pretty similar to you, like you said, non-competitive, maybe even different industries, but they’re like-situated. They’re facing the same opportunities and challenges. What if we all came together, I’ll facilitate it, but I’m not going to be the expert in here. You guys are going to help each other grow. I mean, think about that. Think about how powerful that could be to set up a group like that.

And again, a lot of firms are having get-togethers where they’re talking about different tax code changes and all that kind of stuff, and that’s good, but I would contend that to me that’s almost table stakes, right? That you’ve got to do that type of stuff. If you really wanted to take advantage of your expertise, your client base, your relationships with those, you’d start to bring those people together and now you look like the true trusted advisor because you’re not just regurgitating facts and codes and changes and all that kind of stuff. You’re actually bringing together these groups that can lean on each other and push each other and hold each other accountable, and all you’re doing is facilitating those conversations, and they’re learning from each other, and they’re talking about different banking relationships, they’re talking about different HR relationships, they’re talking about how they’re marketing, how they’re doing website design, all these things they’re sharing amongst themselves. And, you know, that partner in the CPA firm may or may not be experts in all those, and yet they’re experts in bringing these relationships that they already have together and allowing those conversations to happen. I think it could be a real differentiator for firms.

So education is good, facilitating community is great. Accountants are probably thinking, yeah, lovely idea. I don’t know if you’ve met us before, but we tend to be a little quieter. We claim to be more introverted than most. I don’t know that it’s true. We claim it. So is this a skillset that A, accountants have, or B, they could at least develop? Is this something that you can teach or is facilitating community something that is reserved for those that are more—I don’t know, the “I” on the DISC assessment comes to mind—that are out there, you know, let’s shake hands and kiss babies and be really, really outgoing. Is it reserved for folks like that or can anybody do this?

Well, I do it, so that’s proof that anybody can do it, If I’m being honest. You know, we didn’t talk about my background, so I was an accounting major, I went into public accounting right out of school, I hated it and got out of it. But the beauty, in my opinion, the beauty of setting up these Circles and being the—we call them Circle directors, but the facilitator, the moderator of these is you don’t have to be outgoing. You have to just have a knowledge base of who’s in the room, some background on their experiences, so you can go, Jeremy’s talking about whatever, making an acquisition, and you could go, oh, well, hey Susie, you just made an acquisition. How did that go? How did you approach it? What were you looking at? All that kind of stuff. That’s it. You don’t have to be an expert on anything. You just have to be able to go, hey, why don’t you talk about that? Or, you know, maybe you go, Jeremy, share a little bit more of that, because I don’t think you’re going deep enough.

That’s it. There’s no expertise about it. There’s no, you know, like you’re not singing and dancing. You’re literally just kind of facilitating conversations amongst like-situated people who are already interested, and they’ve already earned the respect, because you’ve hand selected these ten people to come together who you know are going to get along, or at least challenge each other and push each other in that type of stuff. I mean, I don’t care how big of an introvert you are, that’s about as easy of a community as you can be in.

Yeah. And what a great opportunity to learn more about your best clients, build relationships with your best clients, perhaps an opportunity to land new work by allowing your best clients to invite close peers that you don’t yet work with, that they think would benefit. I mean, I’m sitting here thinking, what a business development opportunity.

Boom. And provide, you know, bring in an educational resource from your own firm of maybe a service that is not widely known that you do or is not widely used by that group, and expose them to that. I think it’s an amazing—first of all, I think it’s a retention of your client base. I mean, so now you become a true, trusted advisor. You’ve solidified this relationship. They’re going to go tell people. So now it’s a business development piece. You can offer this as—you can charge for it, you can include it in your fees, whatever, however you want to do it, but I think it’s a true differentiator, especially as, you know, I don’t want to say that service-based firms are becoming commodities, but…

I will. I’ll say it. Service-based firms are—we run the risk of becoming a commodity.

There you go.

Especially if we overly rely on technology.

That’s it.

There are many, many great firms in this profession that will not become a commodity because they understand the role that their people play in being a differentiator. I really believe that what you’ve laid out here from a sense of community further builds on that and reduces that commoditization risk.

1,000%. I mean, that’s—again, you already, you did a great job of leading this thing off of just talking about the epidemic of loneliness throughout our society right now. But again, it is amplified tenfold, a hundredfold, in the CEO seat, in the business owner seat, in the entrepreneur seat. And you as a CPA partner firm have access to this list of people that you can go, these ten would get along really well. These ten would get along really well. These ten would get along. You’ve got senior partners who maybe they’re starting to slow down their practice, and they’re not billing sixty hours a week anymore. They don’t want to retire, but they want to remain relevant. They’ve got these great relationships with the clients that they already have. They would be great Circle directors or moderators or facilitators. They would enjoy it. They’d get to use a little bit of their knowledge base, but really, it’s solidifying and expanding relationships. It would be a true differentiator for firms, no question.

Absolutely. Well, a lot of what we’ve talked about falls into the category in my mind of not overly complex; it’s probably fairly straightforward, but it’s simple: Creating community, facilitating conversation—the skills themselves are pretty simple. The execution for a lot of folks will feel anything other than easy. Yeah. So give me just a quick overview. How does Quade help either provide community for CEOs that are looking for it, or how do they help leaders create community where they believe a community needs to be created?

Great question, thanks. You know, I’ll say a couple things, and just to tie back before I answer that question, it is—how do they say—easy, not simple, or something like that?

Simple, not easy.

Yes.

I say it a lot. Simple, not easy. It’s simple, it’s straightforward!

Thank you. Yeah, simple, not easy. It really is an art to lead these groups, right? Because it takes a certain amount of emotional intelligence to know when to push, when to pull back, when to bring somebody in, when to scrap the entire agenda because dealing with some stuff that’s really emergent, that’s super important to them. So it’s coachable, it’s teachable, it’s trainable, but it is an art form. So we do it in a couple of ways. Certainly we have Circles that are building all around the United States and so we have Circle directors in many cities and we’re building virtual Circles and that type of stuff. So we can certainly accommodate anybody that wants to do that.

But we’re also starting to train CPA firms, for example, to put Quade Circles and a Quade practice within their own firm. And so we’ve got a program that we’ve developed and it’s plug and play. We’ll coach you on how to do it and how to set it up and turn you loose to go and then provide you support along the way. So yeah, handful of ways to get involved, but love where your head goes and we’re aligned. I think that there are some really good ways to differentiate your firms out there, for sure.

Absolutely. Well, if somebody wanted to learn more about how Quade could help them with this, how do they get in touch with you, and learn more?

Yeah. You can get directly with me on LinkedIn, it’s Mark McFatridge, or you can go to our website, which is QuadeCircle.com. Either way, we’ll get you right to me and our team and we can walk through and see what makes sense and figure out how we can help.

Very good. Well, Mark, I’ve got one more question for you: As you think to the future, and I know you’ve kind of reinvented your career a few times. A you said, you started in public accounting and you led some financial institutions, now you’re creating community. As you look to the future, who’s the person that you’re looking to become? Who’s the future Mark that you’re trying to evolve into?

You know, wow. Jimmy Buffett’s got a song, something to the effect of growing older, not up? And I strive to do that. I want to have fun in everything that I do. I like to enjoy life. We work hard, we play hard, we do all those things, but I just want to make sure that I stay young for the rest of my life. And that means just having fun and doing things that I want to do. We’ve got a person in one of my circles that says, if it’s not a hell yes, it’s a hell no. And I want to do a lot more hell yeses, right?

I love it.

So that’s who I want to become and feel pretty good at the start that I’m on.

That’s outstanding, Mark. Thank you so much and thank you for joining me today on the show. I’ve really enjoyed it.

Jeremy, it’s been a blast. Thank you for the opportunity and really love what you’re doing with Upstream. It’s really impressive.

I appreciate it. Thank you.