Partner Corner with Jake Summers: Not Taking Investors, Risk, and Clarity

In this installment of the Partner Corner, Tripp and Jake discuss the pitfalls of leadership and how being wrong can provide an opportunity to see values in action. As they get ready to launch Advaita Health Ventures, the partners talk about how they are meeting their goals and how the simple act of dressing for the workday can impact their productivity.  Tripp and Jake explore how organizational choices and time management on a personal level translate to the overall success of their team and how those intentional actions impact the communities they serve.

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www.greenhillrecovery.com

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Flourish by Advaita Health explores how people, providers, and communities move from suffering to flourishing. Each episode weaves together perspectives from healthcare, wellness, and human experience — from the science of mental and physical health to the art of living well.

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Transcript

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Tripp  0:00  
Jake Jake Jake, welcome back here we are again partner corner. Sitting in a new Florida floor. Yeah, you

Jake  0:08  
covered in glue. Yeah, I don't know you're gonna hear Tripp walking around everywhere gave me advanced warning of when he's coming into my new office.

Tripp  0:16  
It's been a fun few weeks. We missed a couple of partner corners but I think we've been pretty busy.

Jake  0:22  
We have been very busy. But I want to steal the floor here and share with our audience a funny moment. We finally got Tripp which is a rare thing around here. We got him gaslighting another one of our employees, which is which is tough and they're not employees or team members and it was Nick Slovak, our executive director. So yeah, the other day we we were walking around our new building, prepping for DHHS inspection as we launch our psychiatry practice. And one of their clients for DHHS is that you have to hang a framed exit plan near your front door. And trip had said to Nick Nick asked for wasn't trips like, well, if you had taken a look anywhere when you walked into a building, you would have noticed that it was framed and hanging downstairs. And it's like okay, my bad. And then yesterday, I was in the office and I was walking Nick out, and he turns around and he looks at the wall and he's like, what the hell. He's like, he gaslighted me and he like runs over to the corner. We're all like the framed like call this hotline number and, and sure enough, there was no trip. There was no framed exit plan there now. And then we went on to the Google Drive and it wasn't even in a PDF format. We couldn't even print it anyway, Tripp uses this fancy graphic design software InDesign, it makes everything in there. So Nick and I were helpless.

Tripp  1:54  
Yeah, and then I wait for yourself. I mean, I was in a panic yesterday, like and I we were having a fun text exchange the three of us. But I was like, Oh, shit, I guess why didn't Nick he's gonna be so mad at me. He's, he's, he's gonna think I'm an idiot, whatever. But it ended up being you know, just a funny moment. But,

Jake  2:15  
um, one of my comments was, like, you know, this is why we're, we have built a culture and why we're building a successful company is because we just laugh about things like this, like, you know, other organizations I've worked in this would have been something that people stood over and gossiped about and like, you know, the CEO is an asshole and look what he did to one of our team members and and then we just laugh about it, we move on, and we do more work together. So I think like that self awareness, culture and like these are, these are these moments where our values are in action. And like we can you know, unity and transparency and, and we feel comfortable putting you on the spot and making fun of you in moments like this.

Tripp  2:53  
Yeah, really busting my balls when I was in an all day off site yesterday, and I felt really bad. And then I was like, these, these assholes, they're just messing with me. So it was a lot of fun. But well, let's jump in I we spent a lot of time the past couple episodes, talking about investors and kind of our fundraising, and then we decided, basically, you know, not to take any sort of money. And now I wouldn't say like, we know, we're gonna need to, like we're gonna have to take money to go to scale with certain things. But we're not doing it right now.

Jake  3:28  
Yeah, and I think, you know, one of the things we've covered before was this idea of going to market and getting feedback. And then the tough thing that, you know, railroads, a lot of entrepreneurs and inventors is that they aren't willing to take that feedback. So in an interesting exchange, like you, you listen to my idea that we need to go out there and we need to pitch a little bit and we need to hear what people say about our product. So like, step one was, you know, get out of this office and hear about it. And then a lot of the feedback we were getting is, why are you taking investors? Why don't you just keep starting smaller? So So I think we took that feedback very seriously. And we, you know, spent a lot of time crunching numbers and talking about the risks and you know, similar to the way when we started working together in Green Hill,  we made this decision to bet on ourselves and trust our projections and visions and numbers and, and we feel confident moving forward for the next couple quarters and launching our psychiatry practice and, you know, moving everything up to kind of that Advaita Health Ventures level without investor support.

Tripp  4:36  
Yeah, I think what was interesting for me was a lot of the conversations and, you know, a futures kind of season of this podcast will focus on mentorship and having advisors, but really, we sourced feedback from probably 10 or 15 advisors overall, and no one gives you the exact same feedback, but we kind of got to this place where it's like if we were to take money right now, we're taking money on an idea, you know, we're not taking money, unless we wanted to do it use it for Greenhill, which we don't, we already knew that that was off the table. So the idea being that if we get this started, and we can do this ourselves kind of bootstrapping and paying for our growth, then we're going to be in a lot better position in the future, and that everything we're doing with our psychiatry and primary care practice is exactly what we're hoping to take the market for Educare educators actually just another permutation of this specifically for college students. So if we can get a proof of concept, then all of a sudden, we are asking for, you know, investor dollars, not based on an idea, but based on an operating company with existing revenue, which dramatically changes both the valuation and what we're going to get in return, you know, for the equity. That's really cool. I mean, it's fun. I'm also like, it was a cool, like you said back to the, you know, kind of the good old days is like, it's, it's scary. And it was us thinking we wanted to hedge our bets, you know, we wanted to hedge our bets. We're not really taking meaningful salaries. And we thought this was a way to do it quicker. But we decided we're just going to big ticket, we're just going to put it all on the table. And we were going to try and figure it out. And and we're confident because of the work we've put in. That was a risk we were willing to take it's not a blind risk. It's not. It's a very calculated risk. Yeah. So I'm just excited. It's also scary. I mean, there's a lot of there's a lot of adrenaline in the startup phase, like Jake was in here, flooring on the weekend where, you know, frantically ordering, you know, couches and getting art for the walls and plants around the office because I love plants. So yeah, it's

Jake  6:59  
I don't think we intended to talk about this, but you always hear when when people talk about startups, like business plan business, but like everything, everybody talks about the planning that goes into it, but nobody talks about that 28,000 unsexy things that you have to do like order business cards and signage and like I came in this morning and trip was potting plants, because we need plants in our waiting room. And it's like, you know, trip is probably spent 50 hours in the last month just shopping for Walmart. And so my challenge to all of our listeners is, is next time you go into a doctor's office or small business, really take a minute and look around, like you know, somebody had to mount that TV that's in the lobby, and somebody had to choose which magazines are on that coffee table. And somebody had to pick the couch and there's just so many little decisions that go into starting a company. But one of the things that you know, you and I have been talking about a lot is you can use those little things to generate momentum and like a lot of the theme for this week has been stacking up wins. And it's like if we order signage and we and we assemble a couch and we install your flooring. A lot of those you know minor aesthetic things that you can look at every day when you walk into the office like a hanging evacuation poster. Like if that really is what drives you forward to when you're boxed in and you have to do the really frustrating stuff at the very end. It really gives you confidence to do that.

Tripp  8:27  
Absolutely it's it's fun. I mean, I think we I am often paralyzed by trying to make things perfect. And all of these little wins help get us out of that mindset where it's like no, we just actually need to clean this one office out we just need to furnish this one office. Yes, we wanted to all tie in together and be perfect but we're not dropping $100,000 and getting an interior designer right now. So we're going to have to put in the work and I think that that's you know to kind of pivot into part of the conversation around clarifying your role and what you're going to be doing more of moving forward is we're making very deliberate calculations with our time and how we're spending it and and what we have to do because we we don't necessarily have the money to pay for problems to go away. Yeah, so what's changed your awareness you're wearing a collared shirt and yeah berries and it's I don't really know what's going on I mean I'm used to like British infused Everyone's so confused I mean what is going on? Did you have some sort of quarter life crisis? I don't

Jake  9:37  
know I Yes, I did.

Tripp  9:40  
  The 13 this year um, 

Unknown Speaker  9:43  
no so yeah, over the over the last two weeks I've been on a little bit of a personal journey and I've been really looking at you know what Green Hill needs and really Tripp has challenged me to think about this stuff. But you know, what is Green Hill and Advaita Health Ventures, what do they nee d from me and And really what that is, is the thing that I can do that nobody else does is the financial modeling and really just investment mindset like we have this this pool of assets that are real estate and capital and really being the quarterback that manages all that. And I think you and I have been in this year long battle about, you know, how I spend my time and I, I'm a very solutions oriented FIX IT guy and I like to run around and just put out fires. And a lot of that has been in the facilities department. So you have a really forced me to, to evaluate that time and think about it. And while I can do plumbing work, my best, you know, look for the company is not to show up dressed like a plumber and act like a plumber. So I've sort of, you know, tech companies do this stuff all the time where they you know, they get the beer in the office and the fancy coffee makers and the beanbags and couches and it's like, if you make your environment somewhere you want to be then you're going to spend more time in it where there's like this running joke, the Jake's never spent a minute in the office. So I've moved into a new space in our you know, psychiatry practice upstairs next door to you and I was very deliberate about setting up my space in a way and just keep this mindset like how do I trick myself to be here. So I kind of did this redecorating project. And then the other thing that was important to me was I had to, you know, dress like an executive like I can't I have this hypothesis that if I show up dressed for construction, I'm probably gonna do construction. So that's sort of what we're testing right now. So the last couple of days I've shown up in slacks and button downs and shoes that are not ideal for construction. And, and we're seeing where it goes. But yeah, it definitely blindsided everybody, I had to say to Anna, my fiance on Sunday night or Saturday, and I said, I'm not having an affair, but I are gonna dress, I'm gonna dress a little better. So if you see me wearing clothes that aren't covered in paint, and shoes with holes in them, like I'm not trying to impress anybody, but myself, and she's been dying, laughing late last night, she came home and she's like, it's it's 8pm. And you're still in that outfit. And I was like, I'm really trying to do this.

Tripp  12:17  
Oh, yeah. I mean, what's different for you? I mean, I don't think it You said I was kind of a battle early on. But we have this has been such a fun evolution just in general, right? Like, this was just, if you didn't do the facility, stuff you did over the past few months, we would have had to take money to like everything was well thought out. It just wasn't always, you know, we're just saying, for the next step. You have to be managing risk from a desk in some ways. Yeah.

Jake  12:53  
How does it feel? I mean, it feels good. I feel like yeah, I think it in a very basic sense, it feels good to come up with an idea. And then again, it's like the little wins, right? Like, I committed to myself, like, Hey, I'm gonna, you know, dress better. I'm gonna spend more time in this office. I'm really that's how I felt like, you know, yesterday, I texted you guys. I'm like, it's, it's 4pm. And I literally haven't left my desk today. Like, I don't think I've even gone outside. Which is another problem that, you know, I face in this whole workaholic mode. But it feels great. And it feels good. It's just like, again, like you said, like, for me, it just comes down to being deliberate. And it's like, you know, choosing the right ingredients for for your dinner, you know, makes all the difference. It's not how you prepare it necessarily. So so I think that's kind of just being delivered about doing like, I've been packing my lunch every day, and I've been bringing a yogurt for breakfast. And it's just like these little things where I don't feel like I have to leave where before that was always my, like, I got to go home and get lunch, and then I never come back. And I was always in some facilities problem, because all of our residences are closer to my house. So it was way easier for me to run out after lunch and go do some trim work than it was to come back to the office.

Tripp  14:08  
What about the ideal week stuff? I think that was a cool exercise. No, I did it initially for my executive assistant, but we kind of went through that together and shared it.

Unknown Speaker  14:19  
Yeah, so so that's another thing we try to do is just be mindful of our time. And it's like, you know, creating these buckets and figuring out on a macro level because because one of the problems about being an entrepreneur and just working in startup life in general is that everybody's utility player, and everybody does everything and everybody runs around. And it's this like, crisis energy that that permeates the organization. And really what that does is us make suboptimal decisions. So to summarize my last six months is I've just been making a ton of sub optimal decisions with my time in some ways. So I again, I in this deliberate mindset, like I sat down and I looked about like, you know, looked at what do I want to do what is kind of my new role that the organization needs and then how should that translate to my time and then also putting in things that matter to me now. So something we've talked about before and I you know, I love hanging out with our clients like I have great relationships with them. I text them all the time I like those little organic moments where it's like hey, hop in the car come help me with this or like it let's go grab lunch I'm hungry. So I built into my site so I took an Excel sheet I kind of made a calendar and I blocked out you know, times in different colors for I'm going to be wearing these this hat for these hours of the day. And again, like I started with the, the CIO stuff, where, you know, it's a CIO, we don't really have one and it's more the investment profession but I am calling the roll more of a Chief Investment Officer because really, what I was trying to do is is like, like I mentioned earlier is our biggest asset class as a company is real estate, we own all of our real estate. So I wanted to create this idea that sort of combines my facilities role and then also my you know, CFO you know, finance role. So, so I wrote a job description for what, you know, what a CIO should do in this world and then I chunked up my time and then I and then yeah, I made sure to put in things that mattered to me like BM building in time for clients. And then another thing that I'll highlight is just you know, you've been on this big content push and that's why we're you know, doing these podcasts and when I lived in Cambodia every week I wrote this weekly newsletter that like like people really liked and followed and it was so much fun The highlight of my week every week in Cambodia was sitting down on my porch and spending two or three hours and writing this like extremely long narrative about you know, what was going on over there. So that's that's another thing that I've done is I've set myself a block for writing every day and I think this is one of the things that you do phenomenally well and you know, big companies like Google builds into people's schedules 20% like this this time for you know, anything but work and curiosity and doing things you care about so so one of the things that like I've set up you know, I set up my office in a way where I had this writing in mind it's like what you know, how did I do that before I you know, I sat on the couch with my feet up and my coffee and I just crank something out, I didn't have a couch in my office before. So like you know, I've set up this this you know, side of my office that has a couch and a coffee table and chairs, and it's more of a Hangout area. So today is my writing day and I'm excited to sit down and write and the unfortunate truth is I'll probably be writing DHHS policies and procedures but it's still writing

Tripp  17:56  
man that's great I'm I'm a big fan of the idea week stuff I just on boarded an executive assistant about a month ago and the first thing I did was write what my week should look like. And really I think I've shared something about this in the past I have to dig it up but looking at like, what are our values? And how are we allocating our time towards what we value and then like what the organizations need from us so taking care of what we need to but also making sure like you said, making sure to schedule time with our residents you know, making making sure that we build that into our schedule because it's important to us and I think what really that helps us do is be present for what we're actually doing. You know, one thing that I mean if I'm, you know, going off script here is like, there's nothing worse than when Jake isn't present because he's like, immersed in his phone trying to manage 13 other things that are occurring in other places or the future or dealing with crap from the past. And when Jake's present he's like the most engaging person in the world and I think so much tension comes you know, from ourselves when we're not dedicating our time based on what we value or we're worried that we're supposed to be somewhere else. So like Jake put together that document I put together one and we shared it with each other to say, Hey, this is how I think I should be spending my time this how I want to spend my time, what feedback do you have? And then it's just like, oh, you're not doing you know, you're not doing facilities today you're not doing facilities or you're gonna be in the office. We're gonna work on this podcast today because it's Wednesday and that's when we make some content. So it's been fun it was

Jake  19:33  
like yeah, I sort of turned the gun on you and Nick yesterday cuz you guys asked me like a facilities question. I said, Hey, I'm sorry, Friday's my facilities that we can cover it then.

Tripp  19:42  
And we'll have that ticket management system, it'll be great. And the

Jake  19:45  
other quick note I just want to say is that you and I are very deliberate about we live in the week we don't live in the day and I think that's important for us like that, you know, back in in my investor days, like a good investment. Managers you know, the longer that you go your your your time horizon is and the more space you take in between making adjustments to your investment strategy and portfolios, the the better it often is. So the guys who look at things quarterly probably do better than the guys that look at things monthly and yeah, you might miss little opportunities but it just trains you to be less reactionary. So so we don't like sit down like we didn't put together the ideal day and we probably do that in our personal lives and we're big on morning routines and evening routines. But you know, we weigh each other on the week and what that does for me is it it just gives you a little more you know, self forgiveness and breathing room, I guess if I if I don't do something on a Tuesday, then it gives me that space to catch up on a Wednesday and a Thursday like I don't have to judge myself. You know, it's much harder in a day than it is in a week. So I think that's important for us too is like it gives us a little bit of space and we don't have to ask permission to move things around as much Yeah.

Tripp  20:59  
What uh, we've only got a couple minutes left anything else you want to cover say?

Unknown Speaker  21:04  
Um,

Tripp  21:06  
we are rocking and roll I mean we are having a ton of fun this week to the past couple weeks has been a blast. I don't know yeah, it's it's

Jake  21:13  
just gotten fun again. And it's it's it's really I think I use the analogy of like the championship game where like when we have a launch date you know we're actually seeing our first patients Yep, patients this week in sort of a soft launch format and then we're you know, launching the psychiatry practice in November and it's just it's awesome when you really tightened down to like look we have one big thing we bet you know all of our capital and future on it and let's just grind it out and do it. So So I love like we were talking about this scattered fragmented not being present where I think that is really what has forced me to be present is like we have one thing to worry about. Let's get it done. And let's have fun doing it. Yeah, and we'll keep gasoline each other along

Tripp  21:59  
the way. Yeah, sliding. Well, hey, this is fun.

Jake  22:04  
It's always a blast.

Tripp  22:06  
Always a blast. Well, hey, if you're out there listening Thank you so much. It means a lot and follow along. We've got a new website coming out AIMwellbeing.com and you can check out what we're up to also ad AdvaitaeVentures.com and  GreenHillRecovery.com . Thanks a lot.

Jake  22:24  
Ciao for now.

Tripp  22:25  
Ciao. For now. I like that. All right. All right.

Transcribed by https://otter.ai