Synergy Shorts #4: Tobi Pearce, CEO Of EzLicence on Navigating Emotions and Leadership in building a million-dollar empire

We're thrilled to bring you another episode in our Synergy Shorts series, featuring one of our most celebrated guests yet—Tobi Pearce, the dynamic CEO of EZLicence as one of our highest viewed and most downloaded episodes on the Creating Synergy Podcast.

Join us as Tobi unveils the secrets behind Navigating Emotions and Leadership in Building a Million-Dollar Empire.

💡 Why You Can't Miss This Episode:

• Uncover the Power of Emotional Intelligence: Learn how Tobi Pearce harnessed his emotions to fuel his leadership journey and build EZLicence into the powerhouse it is today.
• Real Talk on Real Challenges: Get up close and personal with the challenges and triumphs of navigating the complex landscape of modern entrepreneurship.
• Blueprint for Success: Tobi shares practical advice and personal anecdotes that serve as a roadmap for aspiring leaders looking to make their mark.

🎧 Tune in now to discover how you, too, can navigate the intricate dance of emotions and leadership to build your own million-dollar empire.


TIMESTAMP:

[00:00:15] - The Flawed Assumption About Emotions

[00:01:50] - Skill Acquisition and Emotional Control

[00:02:10] - Leadership and Emotions

[00:02:47] - The Goldilocks Zone of Emotions

[00:03:00] - Stimulus, Response, and the Space in Between

[00:05:33] - Learning Through Experience and Reflection

[00:06:37] - Advisory and Coaching Insights

[00:07:14] - Seeking Truth Over Knowledge

[00:09:51] - The Importance of Writing Decisions Down

Where to find TOBI PEARCE

• LinkedIn
• Instagram
• Facebook

Join the conversation on Synergy IQ on LinkedIn, Facebook, and Instagram (@synergyiq).

Access SynergyIQ Website to get to know more about us. 

Say hello to our host Daniel Franco on LinkedIn.

Transcript

00:00:09:15 - 00:00:11:05
Daniel Franco
How do you regulate your emotion?

00:00:11:06 - 00:00:39:14
Tobi Pearce
One of the macro things here is that I think a lot of people make a very unfortunate and flawed assumption about this, and they start from the position that, you know, I'm super emotional and then I get a whole bunch of feedback that that's not good. For whatever reason, society feeds that back to them. And then they generate this belief that, well, if I'm hyper emotional or just emotional to any degree, which we all are, myself included, and I get negative feedback about that, well, therefore, the goal must be to be not emotional at all.

00:00:39:17 - 00:00:40:03
Daniel Franco


00:00:40:05 - 00:01:03:09
Tobi Pearce
And that's very inaccurate. Right. The reality is that yeah as human beings, we're always going to be emotional. The variable is not so much do we or do we not feel emotions? It's to what degree do we let the emotion dictate our behavior? Okay. Right. So there's a subtle distinction between having and not having emotions versus having them, but then not letting them dictate your behavior.

00:01:03:13 - 00:01:26:07
Tobi Pearce
There's an intellectual component of this, like actually understanding what's happening and why, you know, what are your emotions, You know, why do we have them? You know, how do you define them? In what context do they present themselves? There's this intellectual and educational part. Yeah. And then there's a there's a more kind of, you know, tactile experiential component of it, which is more like you're how do you recognize that and feel that and captured in real time.

00:01:26:07 - 00:01:47:06
Tobi Pearce
So an equivalent might be, you know, if you look at a sport athlete, Michael Jordan's always a great example. He's not even really like he's his unconsciously competent. He's so good that he's never really thinking about much. It's kind of just happening. The opposite of the spectrum is unconsciously incompetent, so most people are completely unaware that their emotions are taking control.

00:01:47:06 - 00:02:05:15
Tobi Pearce
So this is a skill acquisition process. No different to playing a sport. And you're a lot of people will conventionally say, Well, yeah, we study the intellectual component, maybe for the more tactile experiential part. We maybe we meditate, maybe we reflect them, we journal, maybe we have a coach that we talk to, to, you know, sort of write down these reflections.

00:02:05:15 - 00:02:27:29
Tobi Pearce
So there's a lot of practice involved with doing that. And a lot of people unfortunately want to simplify to don't have emotions, which in my opinion is probably if we would come back to the leadership perspective, leading with no emotions is fundamentally flawed, in my opinion, in the sense that you need to make decisions from a commercial perspective without your emotions interfering.

00:02:28:01 - 00:02:43:22
Tobi Pearce
But everyone that you're leading has emotions, and by virtue of that, you must be able to understand them. And to understand them, you must be able to understand yourself. Therefore, you must be emotionally driven. So it's a little counterintuitive, but a lot of people get lost in the oversimplification, right? They have a low fidelity.

00:02:43:24 - 00:02:47:03
Daniel Franco
Yeah. So staying within the spectrum of what an emotion.

00:02:47:06 - 00:02:47:14
Tobi Pearce
Yeah.

00:02:47:15 - 00:02:54:15
Daniel Franco
Should be, right? You know, you don't go over that line, You don't go below that line. You stay in what is a Goldilocks zone I guess. And.

00:02:54:18 - 00:03:15:20
Tobi Pearce
you mean you even think about it this way, right, Until the example is, is that there's a stimulus. Yeah. And then there's the response. And then in between the two, there's this space which we call choice. Right? But there's also another way of looking at that. And that is that. Well, does does the way you feel in business really need to have any link to the decision that you make right.

00:03:15:21 - 00:03:39:04
Tobi Pearce
So, for example, you're trying to do a big business deal. I'll use my own experience. You know, it's where we went through one and 36 hours before it was meant to come to a close and ended up falling over. It cost me more than $10 million of my own money. It was a massive public failure because I'm guaranteed a whole bunch to the team, which was a bit of a a learning from my part in management and leadership.

00:03:39:06 - 00:03:58:25
Tobi Pearce
In that particular scenario, I can sit down, be really angry, I can be really angry because something's got in my way, sad because I've lost out something embarrassed because I've just had failure in front of a huge bunch of people. And then the natural response to those combination of emotions would be to recluse. It would be to run away and hide from a lot of people, right?

00:03:58:29 - 00:04:20:16
Tobi Pearce
Correct. That's a terrible decision. From a leadership and management perspective. I agree. Yeah. If you want to set a culture that welcomes learning and failure, you have to acknowledge your own right. And so in that case, yeah, you might have stimulus, you know, choice and response. Right? But the stimulus, the emotion in this particular case and the choice don't necessarily actually have to have any relation to each other.

00:04:20:18 - 00:04:40:05
Tobi Pearce
That's not necessarily a rule. Yeah, it's a useful principle to live by, but if you're constantly making decisions with the emotions being the key variable that you consider, well then don't ever expect to make a lot of money in the long term because the commercial transactions, you know, if you're doing a very big deal with a bunch of investment bankers or people or acquirers, they're not worried about if you're happy or sad or otherwise, Yeah, don't worry about it.

00:04:40:05 - 00:04:48:16
Tobi Pearce
The transaction makes sense. They need to feel good about it, right? But your decisions have to be quite rational and practical. They can’t be emotionally driven.

00:04:48:19 - 00:05:22:20
Daniel Franco
Do you think the skill comes from the continuation of making mistakes in that space where you learn or is it can you go from I mean, I know we know this. You can't just go from being at one end of the spectrum to the other end of the spectrum in you have you have to get better. And that's why they say recently we did a podcast with Mark Randolph, the co-founder of Netflix, and one of his quotes that he said was that you, you know, you learn as much well, saying that you can learn entrepreneurship from a book is the same as you can learn playing golf from a book, right?

00:05:22:26 - 00:05:33:26
Daniel Franco
You have to be able to play golf. You have to learn. Do you think do you think the same goes with controlling emotions? You just have to be in it. You have to be in amongst it. You have to be overwhelmed, build resilience, all of the above.

00:05:33:26 - 00:05:55:02
Tobi Pearce
Yeah, Yeah, I think to a degree again. So I think that's a great quote. I'd probably yeah, I'd probably suggest you know rather than it being kind of like one or the other, it's just, it's always this combination. Yeah, that's right. Like if we look at skill acquisition in general and your leadership is a skill management is a skill making decisions is a skill.

00:05:55:02 - 00:06:20:26
Tobi Pearce
These are all skills that we either we don't have them or not have them, we all have them. That is somewhere between being not very effective and highly effective, right? So we all sit somewhere hand. The goal is always to move more towards the highly effective. And I think when we look at business, you know, no matter how many shitty situations you put yourself in and how many times you kind of win or otherwise, that's not actually going to reinforce efficient decision making, right?

00:06:20:28 - 00:06:35:12
Tobi Pearce
It's the reflection. Yeah, it's the consideration is the digestion of the feedback that you get. Right. Yeah. If you're in a boxing match and you constantly go one way and you hit the same way every time you can get hit ten times 100 or 1000, unless you take that as feedback. Yes, I want to reflect and do it.

00:06:35:13 - 00:07:00:28
Tobi Pearce
So you're going to keep going on the head, right? And so business is very similar. I mean, now, since having exited one of the organizations I founded, Sweat, and I've gone on to quite a large amount of like advisory work with founders and in a mentoring on coaching capacity, it is fascinating to me how many people learn the same lesson many times, and that's kind of a that's an ironic statement in itself because if you learn it once, you really shouldn't.

00:07:01:00 - 00:07:02:23
Daniel Franco
yeah

00:07:02:26 - 00:07:29:17
Tobi Pearce
be keeping on learning. It's a really interesting thing to observe, you know, from an arm's length perspective, right? That in that case, people's emotions and the ego are blocking them from learning, right? So yes, you have to have the intellectual component, right? How to play golf or watch how to play golf, then go try to play some golf, then reflect on the feedback that you're getting from the sport itself, your body, the results, people watching you, whatever, you know, environment.

00:07:29:20 - 00:07:49:18
Tobi Pearce
It's just data. And again, that sounds a little mechanical. When people sometimes find those sorts of like words confronting them, it's like every day that you're at work, you win, lose or otherwise losing is a strong word, maybe it's win, learn or otherwise. Yeah, that's all it is. Feedback. If you don't want to accept and digest feedback, well, it doesn't matter how much you play the sport right?

00:07:49:20 - 00:08:10:14
Tobi Pearce
Right. So it's a combination of how do we intellectually learn to be experientially learn. If you want to think of it this way. But then I very importantly, like the learning, is still predicated upon receiving and ingesting and integrating feedback and new information, which unfortunately a lot of people don't do because they get emotionally blocked. They're afraid or they're egotistical or whatever, which we all have to to a degree.

00:08:10:17 - 00:08:29:17
Tobi Pearce
One of my favorite kind of perspectives or quotes, if you will, and I very often ask this to people that I work with, I say to them, I, do you want to be right or do you want to win right? Or and you can change that to a variety of different contexts. Yeah, if someone's doing a deal, exit deal, it's like, what would you want to be the smart person in the room?

00:08:29:17 - 00:08:47:25
Tobi Pearce
We won't be rich, you know, like, well, what are the kind of polar extremes here that we want to go out? And the one that presents itself to founders very often is will like, Do you want to be comfortable or do you want to progress? Because the two are very, very rarely exist together. Yeah. And leadership and management is a great example.

00:08:47:25 - 00:09:13:10
Tobi Pearce
It's like it's really uncomfortable to digest the feedback. If someone says you're not good at management or that didn't really work for me or it's not really effective or whatever it might be, that's quite hard to digest. And people as human beings, we always want to kind of autonomously move towards the path of least resistance and the path of least resistance in many of these environments is avoid the feedback, avoid the data, hide you know, it's kind of head in the sand type mentality.

00:09:13:10 - 00:09:17:28
Tobi Pearce
And normally the people that are hyper successful do that less.

00:09:18:01 - 00:09:28:07
Daniel Franco
How did you learn and develop yourself to to get to where you are now that you're you're talking so many truths and have so many different thoughts? How do you continually progress yourself? Yeah.

00:09:28:09 - 00:09:53:27
Tobi Pearce
Like one really solid cut through thought with all of this stuff and to do this is free of charge, right? It'll cost you $0. You don't need to learn it or study it. It's free. Yeah, right. And 99.99999% of the world will never do it. It is seek the truth and to to add, you know, some explanation to that most people will seek knowledge and the issue with that is that not all knowledge or information is true.

00:09:53:27 - 00:10:09:24
Tobi Pearce
And so when we seek truth, we build the skill set that is to form our own opinion, which requires digesting multiple sources of information or data going through our own problem solving and rationalization process, and then arriving at a conclusion.

00:10:09:26 - 00:10:18:00
Daniel Franco
What did you do as a CEO to really drum in? This is the culture that we're working for. How did you lead by example?

00:10:18:03 - 00:10:41:04
Tobi Pearce
Look, I think to to state it and this would be kind of very anticlimactic, but to just state it in the most honest and kind of factually true manner, the only thing that I did was have an openness to it, you know, So like, it would be false for me to say, hey, I was, you know, that I was an epic leader or epic manager because I was terrible for the majority of the journey.

00:10:41:07 - 00:11:00:05
Tobi Pearce
I want to say terrible. It's not that I didn't try, it's just that the learning curve is just so big. Yeah, I would say that I got pretty good, you know, towards the end. But I, you know, I was just incredibly lucky to be able to get access to and eventually become surrounded by people that were just absolutely incredibly good at their jobs.

00:11:00:06 - 00:11:04:06
Daniel Franco
As a leader of this business. And you know, what was a non-negotiable for you?

00:11:04:07 - 00:11:21:02
Tobi Pearce
You know, we use using collecting information, metrics or whatever to kind of make decisions. But ultimately, all of those decisions you make or any decision and any business is, is it has a context. And the context in any business is ultimately the business model, right? So to answer your questions like, what do I look at and what are the users like?

00:11:21:02 - 00:11:36:27
Tobi Pearce
Well, I spent a lot of time trying to figure out what actually are the right metrics for this particular business model that actually make sense in business. What's the name of the game? Well, make good quality decisions more often than you make bad ones for a really long time.

00:11:36:29 - 00:11:55:24
Daniel Franco
But you like me. We were a young CEO, right? And and and look, anyone that's in, you know, lot 14 over there doing these you know beautiful startup fantastic text out of all of the above right Yeah they're not sure if they're making the right decision then you know you come to a fork in the road, you go shit left or right, which way do I go?

00:11:55:24 - 00:11:59:21
Daniel Franco
I'm going to choose Left. Yeah. Is that the right decision? And you go in there comes back

00:11:59:23 - 00:12:02:14
Tobi Pearce
To point one, they're afraid of accountability.

00:12:02:17 - 00:12:03:08
Daniel Franco
Yeah, well.

00:12:03:09 - 00:12:04:20
Tobi Pearce
At the end of day, like, you've to choose left or.

00:12:04:20 - 00:12:06:18
Daniel Franco
Right, you circle back and go round the other. Yeah.

00:12:06:21 - 00:12:10:08
Tobi Pearce
Because the worst choice is to passively make no choice.

00:12:10:15 - 00:12:11:08
Daniel Franco
Yeah.

00:12:11:10 - 00:12:29:02
Tobi Pearce
But the biggest risk to most businesses, especially early on. Right. When their still figuring all of the basic junk out. Right. The biggest risk is no decision. And the reason for that is because they don't have unlimited cash or time. A lot of people think that's like all I'm saying is I don't want to show you anything. My idea is special, bespoke, rah rah.

00:12:29:05 - 00:12:38:18
Tobi Pearce
That's all crap and all that's crap and all that waste time. Yeah, right. Like, the important thing is, like, how am I determining progress and what am I even trying to progress towards?

00:12:38:20 - 00:12:39:10
Daniel Franco
Yeah.

00:12:39:13 - 00:12:54:19
Tobi Pearce
But most people are not even clear on those two things. Why? Because that's bloody scary. Yeah, So I'm building some super cool piece of tech. Okay, well, how are you objectively measuring if it does what you think it needs to do and is what you think it needs to do, even what the customer wants to do, and if they want to do that, will they even pay for it?

00:12:54:19 - 00:13:12:01
Tobi Pearce
And it's like, well, how much will they pay? We're like, This is really simple conversation. Most people will never, ever get to it because like, I'm building cool tech every human behavior is a reflection of emotional need. Yeah, right. So emotions are very important. Often, very often they're fuel. They certainly were and still are for me in a variety of different ways.

00:13:12:04 - 00:13:16:28
Tobi Pearce
But again, this comes back to the like let the emotions do the thing. Do not let them make all your decisions is.

00:13:16:28 - 00:13:22:06
Daniel Franco
How do you do that? It is you think it's based on the type of person and their upbringing.

00:13:22:06 - 00:13:23:25
Tobi Pearce
And there's a lot of variables. here, right?

00:13:23:25 - 00:13:24:25
Daniel Franco
But absolutely if.

00:13:24:25 - 00:13:50:17
Tobi Pearce
You you know, one of the biggest things that I learned about trying to improve decision making is if you're really having a tough time making a decision, write it all down. Because when you write it down and you know, and shock, horror, what is writing it down to? Well, it makes us accountable to our thoughts because they are real a lot of time when people are trying to make decisions in their mind, you know, on the fly, on ones that they, for whatever reason, fun, challenging, but doing it exclusively internally.

00:13:50:20 - 00:14:06:28
Tobi Pearce
Right. Is a wonderful way to avoid accountability. When you write it down, you are now accountable. I was shit. Yeah. I do think that and who you are and you start to get a bit of reflection and reality and all of the time where these things, an exercise I would do was I'd write it down, leave it for a day and I'll think about it.

00:14:06:29 - 00:14:19:01
Tobi Pearce
Yeah, come back, review it again, see if I would change anything leave it another day and I'd come back and then I would make my decision because you get a bit of fresh perspective. And also when it's written down, you no longer need to think about it. Why? Because you go, yeah, I've already written all that out because it's a.

00:14:19:01 - 00:14:20:04
Daniel Franco
Physical object now.

00:14:20:07 - 00:14:38:00
Tobi Pearce
Yeah. And so like, as by virtue of that, I mean it's great for clearing your mind. You can review your thoughts the same way that you would review a piece of copywriting or review a contract or review a financials. You can review it and analyze it, and you effectively then become almost a third person in your first person.

00:14:38:02 - 00:14:57:26
Daniel Franco
Thank you so much for your time Tobi, it's it's been amazing having you on someone like, look, I did not really affect here, but someone you as youthful as you and experienced so much with so much knowledge is is definitely a testament to you and and all the hard work that you've put in over your career.

00:14:57:26 - 00:15:04:15
Daniel Franco
So kudos to everything that you've done and everything that you're going to do. And thank you for sharing your knowledge on the show today.

00:15:04:17 - 00:15:06:01
Tobi Pearce
Thanks for having me on. I really appreciate it.

00:15:06:01 - 00:15:24:03
Daniel Franco
Some questions. Beautiful. Thanks, guys. We'll catch you next time. Thanks for listening to the podcast. So you can check out the show notes if there was anything of interest to you and find out more about us at Synergy IQ dot com. Darius I I'm going to ask though, if you did like the podcast, you would absolutely mean the world to me.

00:15:24:03 - 00:15:32:27
Daniel Franco
You could subscribe, right? And review and if you didn't like it, that's alright too. There's no need to do anything. Thank you guys. All the best.