Well, I'll, I'll we'll kinda start at the beginning. I was a, a a child of two entrepreneurs, World War two veteran, and, I ended up in banking. And they were in small business, and they thought I could be anything but a banker because in your small business, other than here, the IRS, and the and a bank are the only two governors you have in most small businesses. And, so I started, right at the time that banking changed, and banking turned into sales culture. You know, it used to be they were order takers, and my generation was the first one of you went out and sold your services. And I think that was the beginning, by the way, of a big change in ethics. We'll get to that later, but, I think that was a forerunner. But I started out and, with a very large bank in the Midwest, and and and about the first week, I took a test. They had all the management trainees in, and, I was in the front row, and, the proctor looked down at the answer to my first question and said, excuse me. Question one, you have to answer yes. And I said, excuse me, sir. I said, this says, have you stole anything? And he looked at me and he says, I believe you haven't yet, but you will. And he said, you'll take a pen or a pad of paper. And it was interesting that that was one of the first things I encountered. But, I spent seven years with them, rose very quickly in the ranks, and ended up, running corporate banking in in Saint Louis, the largest market that we were in, at twenty five. And then, at twenty nine, I was a little slow, Hannah, and I figured out that in the last seventy seven years, the bank had a common name and their CEO. And I didn't have that last name nor had I married any of the dogs. So I figured out I wasn't going to be CEO. And, and thirty four years later, guess what? They're now a hundred and eleven years in business with the same last name of the CEO. But, so at twenty nine, I bought a bank. And, it was an incredible journey. We, we went public, when I was thirty five. We were the first company in America to sell a public security after nine eleven. That was a very interesting period because I had my largest acquisition under contract, and, when the financial markets literally the morning of nine eleven, I was flying out east to start a roadshow to sell the securities for the acquisition. They had to close at the end of the month, and, it's a fun story in the book. But if you'll if you'll indulge me for one minute here, I have to tell you my favorite story. We buy this bank, and it's a hundred and sixty eight miles from civilization, and it's it's on the Iowa border, and it had a million one hundred thousand dollars in cash in it. Ten years later, I had thirty eight offices, and we didn't have fifty thousand in and we had more of the ATMs than we did in the, in the bank. And my partner and I said, you know, we could take this to the Fed, and in those in those days, overnight money was about nine percent, and we could earn about another five, six thousand dollars a month. So, Hannah, I loaded we loaded three quarters of a million dollars of cash in the trunk of my car because it was gonna cost two hundred and fifty dollars for brakes to come and get it, and we had to wait a week. And, I drove a hundred and sixty eight miles, in the dark with no, no security, no insurance. And then we got to my house and we unloaded it, and I slept with three quarters of a million dollars. And then the next morning, we loaded it back up, and at about five in the morning at the Federal Reserve Bank of Saint Louis, there's all these armored cars in one bred Buick full of cash. So I guarantee you I'm your only guest who's either been crazy enough or stupid enough to carry around, three quarters of a million dollars. But, we had a lot of fun. We grew eighty fold in nine years, and that's in banking. This is not in technology. And, you know, most banks, if they grow five, eight, maybe ten percent a year, that's something. We were a darling of Wall Street because we had doubled digit earnings growth quarter over quarter the whole time. And, we're very focused because we're all our shareholders on the bottom line and on asset quality, and, we did a lot of crazy things. The the thing that I talk about sometimes is what I call my biggest failure, and, that was before my biggest failure. But, we, I made a mistake in technology. We were being a small company was an advantage. We started out probably in nineteen eighty nine as the fifteen thousandth largest bank in America, and we ended in two thousand three as, as one of the top one hundred. So that gives you how much, how much we grew. But along the way, I made an error in technology, and I, I made three acquisitions in a window. And a woman that looks much like you, who's brilliant technology person, kept saying, Sean, we can't do this. And I kept saying, Kim, we can. And, and and that's an interesting period. And it cost us a lot of money, but Wall Street never knew it because our earnings were up twenty five percent. And that's when I learned this lesson that I would pass on to your viewers. It's not an ethic one, but the buck, as Harry Truman would say, always stopped at my desk. And I went for about a week wanting to fire someone. And after about a week, I figured out I should have fired myself because I made those decisions. But that that's the run. We sold out to the seventh largest bank in America, and then, they spent four years with them, and all of a sudden, they came became two thousand eight, and they went from a double a rated credit bank to failing. Now people don't fail at that bank in size anymore. You know, you merge. You never really fail. Someone buys you, and they disappeared, a a hundred plus billion dollar bank. And, I lost a tremendous amount of money. I bought another small bank as an investment. I was in real estate, and, and that was the beginning of, the climax of my ethical issues. So that's that's the short story.

And that's, that's a a hell of a story, and I can genuinely say I think you are the only person on this podcast that has driven around with over a million dollars in cash in your boot. So, you can you can absolutely take that one. So talk to us about, your journey from there because we you know, you mentioned, obviously, your climb down from the moral ethics high ground. What happened then? How, you know, how are you now in a position to talk, you know, honestly and openly about this? What what actually happened to you?

In in the in the in the, intro to the book, I say that, I was fly I don't I didn't fly. I flew, but I never flown a plane, and I used to have an investment in health care company. And, one day, I had to fly a plane. I said, we fly so much. You need to know how to operate this plane. And, Hannah, I will tell you that I'm not afraid of flying, but I was afraid of, being the pilot. And I thought I was in perfect line with where we're going. He let me fly for a period of time. And then all of a sudden he said, Sean, I'm gonna take over, and I was tremendously relieved. And he said, in a couple more minutes, we would have been in restricted airspace, and they would have scrambled f fifteens. And the lesson is if you leave LA headed for Washington DC and you're off by one degree, given the time you're in the air and the speed you're flying, you're gonna end up in New York City. And that's what happened to me. I think that there's certainly a small percentage of population that are that have the criminal mind that wanna do the wrong thing right now. But most of us, it's one little decision at a time. And, I mentioned my first week in, in in banking, and the question was, you're going to steal something. Well, eventually, you do take a pen home or a pad of paper, and you do things like that. And over time, you slowly move, and that's why the book's called The Great Choice. The world is a lot of gray and a little white and a little black. And it's easy to get into the gray, and then it's not that hard over time. And when I tell you what I did and how I got there, it'll even it'll even make more sense. It doesn't justify it. I committed a crime, and I knew it when I did it. But you don't just wake up and do it, or I didn't. And one of the lessons I learned that that I always like to stop and say is we used to spend a lot of times in meetings talking about what was an appropriate gift level for an employee to accept from a client. And having been what I've been through, I would tell every executive zero is the appropriate amount because your judgment is slowly clouded. And if that happens over many years, what starts out to be a a harmless, de minimis amount of of a gift gets a little grayer and a little grayer and a little grayer, and it clouds that individual's decision making ability. And what happened to me was I believe that in business, most as in life, most decisions are based upon fear or greed. And when two thousand eight hit and I was losing millions of dollars a week, fear was definitely there. And then an opportunity came along that was completely legal that I had done in smaller versions hundreds of times, and I'd watched a man that had been a mentor doing very large versions of buying debt at a big discount and reaping awards of of, of, the liquidation of the debt. And the transaction that, that I compromised my ethics and it cost me my my family, my freedom, my friends, and my fortune was in a debt transaction where we were buying debt of a real estate developer from three different banks, and I had lined up friends of his who were very credit worthy because we wouldn't lend him money. But his job was to liquidate the real estate, which would have had my bank make a gain. Those individuals would have had a gain, and he would have made money, and he would have gotten rid of tens of millions of dollars of debt. At the eleventh hour, one of the banks, I was a partner with him in a development that was gonna have a Target store on it. It was a performing loan. There was nothing wrong with it, but they didn't want his name in their bank. And so what they did was they said you have to include this in the package. Well, it was August thirty first two thousand nine, and it had to close that day. We've been working on it for months. And I believed since I wasn't taking any money, that was my justification, Hannah. And I knew the moment that I said, okay. We'll put it in a package. I'd committed a crime. There was no doubt. I could look myself in the mirror because I we say over on on this side of the pond, when you rob a seven eleven, they call the police immediately. When you're involved in a financial crime, I wasn't indicted for six and a half years. So it isn't like, you know, you you do something, it happens. And I and I was able to to get myself to do that because I didn't take any money. What happened was is that once this transaction closed, this man literally we eventually committed suicide, but he he he just literally didn't do anything. And he stuck his friends in a bad situation. He put the bank in a bad situation. And because the one asset that I was involved with was in that group of hundreds of loans, I committed a felony. And, and I didn't just wake up one day and think I was gonna do it. As you can tell, it took a long time to get there, and, and I did it.

Yeah. And I think that's that's kind of what we're talking about today, isn't it? That slippery slope of of going down the wrong hill. And you don't actually kind of realize how far down that slope you are until you suddenly stop and look back. And, you know, for those that are, I guess, in in positions of authority and, you know, us and I guess finance directors, like, they're seen as the ultimate integrity holders for a business. You know, on the flip side, you know, how hard do you think it is to to maintain that that ethical standard? Because there there isn't that much holding you to it, is it? A lot of it's about your personal ethics.

It is. And and I I, I was on a, a TV show several months ago, and I and the man who was grilling me, I know him and I know his wife very well, but he was he was just on me. And I kept saying, one, I can't argue with you, but you're telling me that that there are perfect human. And as I went through this journey, there's a book written by an attorney that says every businessperson commits at least one felony a day. Because no you know, it it's that thing of, white lie. You know, what's the difference between a little lie and a big lie? And, and, and and and fraud is a very bad term and a very big term. And there's a lot of things done in business that are not necessarily fraudulent, but they're illegal. You know? They didn't go into them with that thing. So I'm not saying that everyone does it, but I would say it's a much higher percentage. And over I had dinner with some people the other night. When I was in the banking business, we had a lot of people who committed fraud, but we didn't turn them over to the authorities for this reason. It was very selfish. If I turned that person over to the authorities, I was gonna lose a lot of money. If I use them to work through my problem, I might not lose any money. And since those of us who sat around the table, I don't own over a third of the company, and I owned five percent, I wanted my money back. And so what we did was we made a we made a business decision of we're gonna look around their their bank fraud, and we're gonna get our money back, but we never chose to do business with them again. And that was a different kind of situation. So I think you'd find it's more prevalent than, than people wanna admit. And I think it goes back several thousand years, when the question was asked, he who's without sin cast the first stone, and no one did. So it's, that doesn't make my my my fraud any better, my crime any better, but, it's far more prevalent than you realize.

So that that statement's quite, I guess, not scary is probably the word is that I think we're all more vulnerable to to to the gray than we realize, and potentially people that we're working with are maybe working more in the gray than we realize. So how do you you know, like, looking back, what would you have done differently? You know, apart from not making that decision, but is there anything that you would have done differently in the lead up to that to that what at that point?

That that that's a great question. And here's what it was. For fifteen years, I had and I stress this to people, you know, and we read it and you hear it, but a whole lot of us don't do it. For fifteen years, I had three men and a woman in my life that helped me unbelievably accountable. And, I, I was actually telling stories about Virginia last night. She was just the most she was the best director you could ever had, and what a mentor. But those four people, we met once a week, at least once a week for fifteen years, and I had an accountability circle. And when I sold out and I became one of the top thirty five people of a company that had thirty six thousand employees, I did not have that kind of group around me. And then when I went back out on my own, given the time that it happened and the age of those people, when you're twenty nine and you buy your FirstBank, most of the people you're dealing with are thirty plus years older. And so they were now retired or as I say dead, and I didn't recircle myself with people. So I always challenge people, find three or four or five people that are gonna hold you accountable. And I had lunch with a gentleman on Monday who's one of those people now that I have hold me accountable because, my nephew I have two nephews. One, has won the FedEx Cup, then on several Ryder Cups, is quite a golfer. I only had one sibling. And the other one's a better golfer. In the book, he cost me ten million dollars, but he now has an unbelievably successful Inc. Five hundred companies that, he started on, on my experience. But he wrote me this beautiful letter. I got it the week before I was sentenced. He said uncle Sean is what it was. He said, everybody loves the rise of a person, but they really like the fall. But there's nothing like the comeback. And, Hannah, I've been so fortunate. And since this since this has been over, the comeback has been a lot of fun, and it isn't just a book. It's business and other things, and it's helping people change their lives. But I now have four men around me who hold me accountable. And, and that's that difference. And that's hard to do in a big company because in a large company, my opinion of large government companies and the government is you don't have to do a lot right, but God forbid you don't do one thing wrong. But the further you go up that organizational chart, it's really hard to have one or two people to hold you accountable. And maybe the the man or woman at the top has a board like I have. But between them and the and the and the customer facing people, there's a lot of people who can make really bad, poor, unethical decisions. And not that they're bad people, but they're just not one of those places where people hold them accountable. So that's what I tell people is find some people who are gonna be tough on you because, that's a challenge for all of us. We don't like criticism in general.

And I guess it's finding, like you say, the right people. So what are you talked about people that would be tough on you. What are the key sort of characteristics that you look for in that circle?

Well, they have to have the say when I say goals, I don't mean that the same goal, but they have to be driven. If you're driven and you wanna be successful, they they have to have those things. If you're an engineer, you need to have someone with engineering, you know, because there's if, you know, there's a terrible story here many years ago of a structural engineering company where someone made the wrong choice and many people died. So you have to have somebody that understands what you do but also understands where you wanna go. And then as hard as it is, and I think this is something again in relationships that makes for good relationships, but it's hard for us to accept is people who are different. You don't want people who think, like, I'm extroverted as you can tell. So a good introvert around me is a good balance. It's those, you know, anything in, in moderation is good. And so having people that are opposites, and I, I say, in fact, I'm writing another book now. And when I was in college, it's based on one of the few things I felt like benefited me college. Really, all I learned was how to learn. But, it talked about partnerships, and I've seen some unbelievably successful partnerships, and I've seen some horrible ones. And the most successful ones were where the people were almost opposites. You know, you had the salesperson and the engineer, the salesperson and the accountant, where you had someone that was totally different that was watching and and it went both ways. And so the the people around you can't be clones of you, and we tend to like the birds of a feather flock together, and that tends to make for weak accountability partners. And so it's hard for people, to want that because at the same time, they're trying to raise a family or they're in a relationship, and they're balancing those things. But in your career, it isn't just who you work for or who works for you or who you work with, it's who's gonna hold you accountable. And I I think that, I read a study about thirty years ago. It was on octogenarians, and one of the things that, they said that they didn't realize they'd live so long. And I think we all hear this, but it's hard to take, seriously until you get older as I am. Life isn't a sprint. It's a marathon. And sometimes we forget that, and we think we're making long term decisions, and we make a short term decision as I did, which I made a lot of good ones and a lot of bad ones. But the critical one that unfortunately defines me today, I don't believe it'll define me by the time I leave this world, is, is one that, I made thinking of a sprint, not a marathon. Because in reality, I I knew that when that decision I done it wrong, I thought, one, I wouldn't get caught, and two, I justified it, and three, that it might buy me a year. Well, it bought me about a year, but it cost me ten, certainly three thirty seven months in federal credit entry. So, I wasn't thinking long then, and that's that's another thing. You have to always look at the long term goal. What's the and you're going to fail, and that was a hard word for me, to accept, but failure is an event. And, I just ended up having to fail really big so that I would, would understand it better. And, but I don't want your listeners, to experience that. And that's what I get out and tell people is, push yourself, yes, but challenge yourself even more. And, and and and and the game's fun. I love the game.

Yeah. And I love I loved your comment about, you know, people that are different to you because I think there is some we I've talked about this on the podcast before, the importance of diversity. And for me, diversity isn't just the color of somebody's skin or whether they're male or female. I think it comes into, like you say, personality, personality traits, their background, their experiences, where they're from, you know, in the world. I think there is something powerful about diversity, and I I love the fact you've incorporated that into your concept of that accountability circle.

Well and and I one well, thank you. And two, I will go back to one other thing, about diversity of color and, and sex. When we bought our first bank, we had it was in North Missouri. We put a a a woman on the board. When I bought my second bank, I put women's and African Americans on the board. And people in Saint Louis today actually, I had a meeting yesterday with the the head of the African American Chamber of Commerce, and he said, how do you know everyone in Saint Louis? I said, because I bought a bank in a ninety nine percent African American area. In day one, we put people in the African American community on the board, and you have to know your your world. And, being a white male, I can't relate to being a white female or a black male or female or, you know, whether you're Asian or whatever. And I think that diversity of people and race and ideas makes really good things. And I I believe that committees don't make good decisions, but input from committee members to one person making that decisions makes great decisions because none of us are an island.

No. I love that. And I think that's something for us all to think on in terms of how we increase the diversity of thinking, and, like you say, experiences from from different aspects as well. So you talked about being on a slippery slope, and, that sounds like there, you know, there was a almost a realization moment where you came to think, oh, I've gone I've kinda gone too far here. Like, as you went down that slope, was there a self awareness that you were slipping, or was it all of a sudden a realization?

I think in my case, and I can't speak for others, I always push the envelope. I would go, I use the largest law firm in Missouri, and, I would go to them and I would say, Hannah, don't ever tell me I can't do something. Tell me how I can do it legally, and then I'll decide if it's worth the effort. And the example I would use is I wanna go to Chicago. And for my office, that's literally, one street down, and I can go I forty four to fifty five and drive there, or I can go north to the airport and fly. But the example I would use in their case is, well, Sean, you have to take the train to Kansas City. You have to rent a car and drive to Des Moines. You have to hitchhike to Minneapolis, and then you can get a plane. Well, that probably doesn't fit what I wanna do. So when you constantly have that issue of pushing that envelope, it's very hard to tell when you cross the slope because we were constantly there's a chapter book called pushing, pushing, pushing. We were literally overdrawn at the fed, which, you know, individuals do that frequently, but we were a bank. I think we're only on seven days in a row. They don't like that. But we you know, and it wasn't intentional. It was that we were fighting a liquidity battle. And, you know, and and you've watched in the in the last few months, quite a few banks in the US and, and Credit Suisse really fail over liquidity. And so we pushed when you push the envelope everywhere, it's hard to tell when you really hit that that really slippery part of the slope. Because in business, again, there's a whole lot of gray that's not illegal and certainly not morally wrong where there's really margin. And we're near an industry as banking was, which is in a long long term cyclical decline. It's consolidating. When I got in it forty years ago, there were thirty thousand in this country. Now there's five thousand. You all have not had that problem for centuries. But, you have to do things that are out of the box. I didn't say illegal, but you have to you have to have a niche. And so since we were always searching for a niche, we tended to operate in the gray. And, so you get out there and it's it's like walking around the dark. You think you know where you're going and you're very confident and then you fall right over the cliff.

So is that something you tell people to look out for is almost if you feel like you're being constantly pushed into maybe the darker gray area versus the lighter gray area, perhaps you need to take a pause and think, oh, kind of what are the if we go back to self awareness, what are the signs people can look for to go, actually, I just need to just check myself. I need to make sure that I am comfortable with where I am sitting right now.

And that's why I talked about those those three men and that one woman where literally once a week we talked about these things.

Right.

And and and I had and they were all successful in their own right and, in diverse industries. None other none of them were in banking, and we didn't look at I talk about this a lot in the book. If someone asked me why do we do this, if I ever said that's because the way we always did it, they usually meant we ended up changing it. And so when you have people that push you in that way every way, when you're talking about these things, you you you find a comfort zone in which which you you classified as the light gray where there's margin, but you also have a natural barrier of people of we're not gonna cross that line. Because you think about the decision I made, if I would have run that by any one of those four, I wouldn't have done it. But they weren't around, and, again, I could say, Sean, you're not taking money, and bingo. I took the step. But there's no way that woulda happened, with those men with those three men and that woman around me, And that's why it's so important. That I just can't stress enough. And by the way, your significant other, your partner, your spouse is probably not one of those four people because, you know, in relationships, there's always a little, if not a lot of manipulation. And as well as that person knows you, that's probably not always gonna be the person who tells you no. I didn't say never, but I said not always. And so they need to be for people that are truly, have, diverse backgrounds, diverse experiences, and, and like minded goals, though.

Absolutely. I think, does it worry you that in business, there are so many opportunities for Gray? So if we think about a lot of the conversations, some of the stuff that I read about coming out in terms of, you know, the, you know, the the newest and greatest unicorn that's coming out of Silicon Valley and how they've got there and what they've done. It's almost like this expectations of massive success is actually driving issues and more pressure to go into that gray versus living in the white the white space?

See, here's what I believe. I believe that gray is only I I have five children, and and their my second son is very similar to me. And I always tell him, Brooks, there hasn't been a new idea in ten thousand years. He's just

Love that.

So I would say I would say, Hannah, all those things are out there, but because information and and really power and money is made and controlled with information, is that before there wasn't that information, and so we didn't know it or see it. And I think that probably, why know what I did if I would have done it fifty years before would have never been figured out because it was that complex. But I think so many things in generations before were totally dark gray, if not wrong, but the information didn't get out. And I think if you look back at history, a lot I was I was talking to many Winston Churchill is one of my favorite characters in history. I think that he and Franklin Roosevelt are the greatest people of the twentieth century, and I have to do this because of where your show originates. My favorite quote in the history of mankind is this. Never in the history of mankind have so many owed so much to so few. But I was talking to I'm involved in a in a in a ghost kitchen business here we're launching, and the and the CEOs had two successful tech businesses. And he's a bright young man, but my opinion is younger people today, he's thirty six, they are not students of history. And so I challenged, said, you need to read about Churchill. You need to read about business. You need to understand these things. And I said, did you realize that Winston Churchill was almost broke for a long time? Forget that he was out of favor as a politician. But, you know, if he hadn't written certain articles, he literally did that to buy alcohol and tobacco and and eat. And he was like and his opinion was, well, he was lord Winston, and he was wealthy. And, you you know, the one I said, no. I said, you don't understand. People had all kinds of challenges that you don't know because you don't study history. Well, all that information wasn't there, where today it's on the forefront. So I think that, there were just as many challenges before. They were just different. And and today, it's more prevalent because you see it more. But I have to say, in the last few months, we saw First Republic Bank fail. And I look at what I did, and and and one person interviewed me and they said, you know, you're the only person from my financial crisis that was a CEO who went to prison, and I said that's probably true. But the men on that board that paid them, they were all men, that paid themselves obscene bonuses belong in jail because I know the business they were in, and I've been out ten years. And twenty years ago, we could have predicted they were going to have a huge problem in the next year. Yet a few months before they failed, they paid themselves tens of millions of dollars in bonuses. And fifty years ago, you would have never known that. Today, I'll be shocked if something if the if the justice department doesn't do something. And that's, Jen, again, information and timing of, the way time way speed of information is.

And there is a difference, isn't there, between what is legally wrong and what is morally wrong? And how do you what's your perspective on that, particularly in the business world at the moment?

Unfortunately, you can't you can't morals, you just can't can't do. You know? You try. You have, you know, you have norms. You try to set the best example. My, my now former wife was an employment lawyer, and, she was the one that, when a woman, filed a a a harassment suit since she was with a large law firm, she defended, you know, the male. And because a woman can go after a woman in court, not a man. And she was a she's a very bright and tough woman, but she was amazed that we never had a discrimination suit. We never had age, sex, racism. We never had sexual harassment, and that was a cultural thing. So on morals, that to me is and I would say, those years I was CEO, my title was chief culture carrier. And I set the norm for the culture. And the culture was we treated we treated each other with respect, and we treated each other like we wanna be treated. And that's how I think you regulate morals because you cannot enforce morals other than by actions. And even then, you're going to fail and that's human nature. On the other hand, when it gets to the legal side, you really back to where I started, you have to have policies that just say this isn't tolerable and it's one strike and you're out. And that's a hard thing to do. And very few companies have the fortitude to do that because they're looking over their shoulder at the earnings or results or the whatever. I have a friend who, has made a fortune consulting large companies by he's a psychologist. He deals with pornography issues in men, and his but his specialty are large company IT people. And why is that? Because if you're an IT person, you can get through the system where a person like myself, if I put in a a bad word and hit enter, you know, I got the email back and it went twenty places. And his business model is based on consulting those people. There's always gonna be people who are gonna figure that out. And large companies would fire you or I for what happened, but IT people are so hard to get, especially cybersecurity, that they figure out a way not to fire them. Well, you're you're just if you're letting them slide here, it's gonna happen over here. And I believe a lot of IT breaches are caused by issues. Well, we, you know, we didn't fire them for pornography, but we had this breach of, you know, a million of our clients' Social Security numbers getting out, and there's probably a correlation. And probably in the next ten or fifteen years, that'll come out. So you you you you have a zero tolerance policy when it comes to to those things.

So it's not just about, you know, dealing with the big stuff. It's actually like you say, it's about dealing with it when it's small and seemingly insignificant, but sticking to your guns at that early stage.

It's the pencil. You're going to take the pencil one day. And then where you go?

And I think that's good. And and, you know, I think most, like like you say, a lot of FDs will see the the dangerous side. So they'll they'll feel pressure from either the CEO or the sales head of sales and revenue to to, or being given things that perhaps they're not comfortable with. How do you you know, have you got any tips for them in terms of how do they challenge that effectively? How do they stand firm in the pray you know, in in place of the pressure that they might be feeling from other areas of the business? Or would you say it's a walk away situation?

Well, I think well, I I I prefer not to wait walk away immediately, but you have to quickly. You have to hold your ground. One of the most moral men I've ever been around, one of the most ethical men I've ever been around, said to me, he said, Sean, in business school, the first thing they teach you is lying with statistics one zero one. How to manipulate the numbers in your favor. And and that's where it starts. And you have to say, the numbers are the numbers, and this is how I believe we would present them. Now I was gonna say, you have to walk away after you presented your case and you lose. Now I also tell people don't quit that job until you've got the next one, but that's the day you start looking. The day you feel compromised is the day you start looking because if it's one compromise, in another few years, it'll be ten, and then you never know where it goes. I got to, through this journey, I've gotten to know the guy from Archer Daniels Midland who, who, you know, eventually became the witness. Matt Damon played him in the movie. And, when you really read his book and you meet the man, it's the same story. It started with the little things, and then one day, it was, you know, wasn't it was as they taught us in banking, you know, we'll teach you to lend a thousand and then ten thousand pounds and then a hundred thousand pounds and a million pounds. And before long, I could lend you fifty million pounds. But you start out with one and before you know it could be a billion. And, and that's where you end up in in a place you don't want anyone to go. And I certainly don't want anybody to if if anything out of our of our chat today is if one person changes course, it was all worth it.

And, I think one of the the challenges is that there is a huge amount of pressure to succeed, to post these results, and to drive growth within the business. What's your perspective on the difference between, like, risk taking and being smart risk taking and impactful and dangerous decision making? Like, how how would you advise somebody to to manage that? Well,

one, I believe if you're gonna be successful, you have to take risks. So I'm the first person to say you have to get up every day, and you need to take a lot of risks. You need to be willing to fail. I don't hope hopefully not catastrophically, but you need to, again, go back to those three or four or five people and say, what do you think of what I'm doing? And as long as they're keeping good people will say, you know, this these are the boundaries. You're within the boundaries. I might not take this risk, but there's nothing wrong with it because you have to look at the downside. And in particular, when you're younger, you don't look at the downside. Maybe when you're older, you look at too much of the downside. That's back to that balance in that group. You need people a little younger than you are at times and people older than you are in that group, but you have to take risk. Because one, that's how if you didn't take a chance, I mean, look at Thomas Edison. We might not have a light today. It took him, you know, ten thousand tries to get a light bulb, and you have to be willing to accept failure. And, and that was something I couldn't do. I I failure to me wasn't an option and then once you fail at the catastrophic level I did, then you truly learn it's only an event. And, and that's something in in risk taking, you have to be willing to fail or you shouldn't take that risk. And maybe that's where you need to need to change what you're doing or say, this is a level I'm comfortable at. Because there's nothing wrong with being comfortable at some level in your career, whatever you do.

I like that. There is, there is this kind of constant pressures in there to always be better, always be going up the scale. But, actually, there is a point where, you know, there's nothing wrong with staying where you are if it's a level that you're happy and comfortable and you can do what you need to do at that level.

Yeah. I completely agree.

Amazing. And so this is, it's been genuinely fascinating, Sean, to hear your perspective almost having sat on both sides of the fence, Led and built a successful company, but also made mistakes that you're able you know, you're now looking back on. What would you you know, what are your top tips for for balancing ethics within an organization? You know, if two CFOs listen to this, what are the key things that you want them to take away from today's

Well, actually, the CFO, it all gets down to numbers. So the the quality and the ethics around the numbers have to be near perfect. No one's perfect, but near you can't tolerate anything. So at at the level of of the CFO, it's a zero tolerance. It's also one of trust but verify. You know, you have to do that. I was, given that we were in banking and we had a lot of lenders, I was notorious for asking the audit people to look in their bank accounts and see if they had any even dollar deposits. And my theory was if somebody was gonna bribe you, they might give you five hundred dollars or a thousand in cash. They weren't gonna give you check. And if you put it and so why would you have an round deposit in your account? But it's those little things that somebody in in the CFO's chair that you wanna audit the people around you. You cannot make the assumption, and that was one of my errors in my crime is I made the assumption that, this man wanted to solve his problem as bad as I want to solve mine, and that's not always the case. But I'm keep gonna go back to, at that level of CFO, have have have some friends. One should be a CFO of equal stature in another institution, another organization. One should be someone that has a very technical background because CFOs do, but somebody should be one somebody should have a very sales oriented background because sometimes when you're the count in the numbers, you take for granted what the salespeople tell you. And, it's that diversity of people you surround yourself with, and and you need that. And it can't be some fluffy trade group where you get together once a quarter and share, you know, best practices. It needs to be people who will have a cup of coffee or a cup of tea or a beer and look you in the eye and say, Sean, you're going down the wrong path if you do this.

So that's amazing advice that you've just given us. And I think there is something, like you say, about understanding the perspective of the people you're dealing with. And I love that tip about, having a salesperson potentially in your circle as an adviser. That's that's a great shout. What I wanna say is thank you so much, Sean, for for being on the podcast with me today and answering all of my questions. If people wanna know more about yourself, your background, and about your book, where's the best place to to to find you, and where can they learn more?

It's sean hayes dot com. And by the way, it's I spell my name right. It's it's a s h a u n, Hayes. So I have to tease people about that.

Well, my husband would agree with you because that's the exact same way that he spells it. So, the right way.

Hey. Good choices, Hannah. I can tell already.

Well, it's been an absolute pleasure having you on the show, Sean. And thank you so much for sharing sharing your experiences and, helping others, avoid the the mistakes that you've made. So it's been a genuine pleasure, and and thank you so much for joining me on the show.

Thank you, and have a wonderful day.

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