Is Loyalty Overrated?
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About this Episode
Work hard enough and stay loyal to what you built, and it will work out. Rich Tarity believed that right up until he sat down with his two business partners at a Philadelphia cheesesteak joint and slid a separation agreement across the table.
Rich Tarity has spent 27 years building technology companies. He has founded, scaled, and exited multiple businesses, including one he grew past $10 million in revenue. Today he is the co-founder and CEO of truCX and the bestselling author of The Intelligence Within, a book about getting organizations out of thinking that stopped being true a long time ago. But the lie he came on this show to take apart is the one that cost him the most, and it is the one nobody warns you about, because it does not look like a lie. It looks like character.
He started his first company at 26, two months after buying his first car and his first townhome. He brought in the VP of sales who had hired him, then another top rep, and split the cap table into thirds. Three and a half years later he was doing most of the selling and most of the building, and the resentment was stacking up faster than the revenue. He took a fair buyout at one of the least profitable points in the company's history, sat out a full year on a non-compete, and started over. Six months into the new business, with two employees, he was at $1.5 million in revenue with a seven-figure Viacom deal and accounts including Clarks, CEI Group, MTV and CMT.
In this conversation, Rich walks through the lunch where he ended the partnership and what he had to stop believing about himself to say it out loud. He explains why splitting equity into equal thirds at 27 was a mistake he would never repeat, and how he now decides who earns equity based on value creation instead of revenue generation alone. Jason connects it to a concept called escalation of commitment, where a decision stops working and you respond by committing harder. Rich names what finally replaced loyalty for him, and it is not ruthlessness. In the closing minute he makes a case that curiosity beats experience, and takes a swing at another business lie most people never question: that the customer is always right.
CONNECT WITH RICH TARITY Website: richardtarity.com LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/rtarity Email: [email protected] truCX: trucx.net Book: The Intelligence Within, available on Amazon in hardcover, paperback and Audible
Subscribe to What's Real?: therealjasonduncan.com/articles Book Jason to speak: therealjasonduncan.com/speaking Get the book: therealjasonduncan.com/book The Real Jason Duncan Podcast: therealjasonduncanpodcast.com
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Key Takeaways
- The lie: if you work hard enough and stay loyal to what you built, it will work out. The truth: I had to walk away from my first business and leave equity on the table to prove myself wrong. Within six months of starting over, I closed a seven-figure deal with Viacom and reached $1.5 million in revenue with just two employees. The lie was costing me everything; getting clear was the unlock.
About the Guest
Rich Tarity
Guest
Richard Tarity is a founder, builder, best-selling author, advisor, and sought-after speaker who helps leaders make confident decisions, align organizations, and create meaningful business value when the stakes are high. With more than 27 years of hands-on experience building technology companies and advising enterprise organizations, Richard has developed a reputation for simplifying complexity, challenging conventional thinking, and helping organizations focus on what truly drives results. Throughout his career, he has founded, scaled, and successfully exited multiple companies while generating millions in revenue across industries. Richard is the Co-Founder and CEO of truCX, the groundbreaking discovery and collaboration platform redefining how organizations uncover insights, align stakeholders, and accelerate customer experience transformation. Under his leadership, truCX has emerged as a first-of-its-kind platform that empowers executives, consultants, and enterprise teams to move from fragmented opinions to data-driven clarity and action. Prior to truCX, Richard founded and led multiple successful technology companies, including LiquidSpoke, which he grew to more than $10 million in revenue before a successful exit. His work has spanned customer experience, enterprise communications, AI, digital transformation, and technology strategy, advising organizations ranging from high-growth businesses to global enterprises. Over the course of his career, Richard has worked with and advised companies including Viacom, Brooks Brothers, Korn Ferry/Hay Group, Indeed.com, Firmenich, and AMETEK. His companies and leadership have received numerous recognitions, including Philadelphia Business Journal’s 40 Under 40, SmartCEO’s Future 50 Award, CRN Fast 100, Deloitte Fast 50, INC 500/5000, and multiple appearances on the Philadelphia 100 Top Companies list. As a speaker and podcast guest, Richard brings a unique combination of entrepreneurial grit, strategic insight, and real-world experience. He speaks candidly about innovation, customer experience, AI, leadership, business reinvention, and the dangers of organizational complacency. His perspective is shaped not just by theory, but by decades of building businesses, navigating uncertainty, and helping leaders rethink how they discover opportunities and drive transformation. Richard is also the best-selling author of The Intelligence Within, a book focused on helping organizations break free from outdated thinking and adapt to constant change in technology, leadership, and customer expectations.
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Work hard enough and stay loyal to what you built and it will work out.
Well, that's what people believe anyway.
And my guest believed that right up until he walked away from his own company and left his equity sitting in it.
And six months later with two employees, he closed a seven figure deal with Viacom.
Just take an action on it, right?
Hold yourself accountable.
Look yourself in the mirror and ask yourself, how do I get out of the lie and why am I letting this lie continue to control my.
Well, welcome to the Real Jason Duncan podcast.
I am your host, the real Jason Duncan.
And every guest on this show is here for one reason.
They used to believe something that turned out to be wrong.
And some figured it out on their own and some had to get knocked flat first.
But either way, by the time they sit in this chair, they know the difference between what's real and what isn't.
And what I've come to believe and learn is that the lies that that we believe
are the ones that hold us captive to the things that are inhibiting our growth, that we need to break free from that.
So that's what we have designed this show for.
And some of these lies do a lot of harm to us.
And the ones that do the most harm are the ones that, you know, they look like wisdom.
They're the ones that everybody repeats, the ones that you're so sure about that you never think to question them.
And a lie like that builds what I call a cage.
It builds a cage around us.
And here's why we stay in the cage, because the cage looks like gold.
I mean, it looks like the smart play.
It looks like the good life.
It looks like a strong marriage.
It looks like the right way to do business or do things in general.
And nobody walks away from something that looks like treasure.
So that's what the show is about.
is the lie.
And every conversation here is about finding the cage, seeing that the gold was never real and then walking out.
So today's cage is built out of something nobody would ever call a lie.
Work hard and stay loyal to what you built.
That doesn't sound like bad advice.
That sounds like character.
And it's what you'd probably tell your own kids.
And that's exactly why it holds people for years.
When the business stops working,
The belief has an answer ready, work hard or stay committed.
Anybody can walk away.
You're not just anybody.
So you put in more hours and every one of those hours is proof that you're the kind of person who doesn't quit.
And the worse it gets, the more loyal you get, the more loyalty feels like the one thing that you're still doing right.
Well, my guest today lived inside that.
And what finally got him out wasn't more effort.
It was walking away from the company he built and leaving his equity in it to do it.
And that's where we're going today.
So my guest today is Rich Territy.
He spent 27 years building technology companies and he's founded, scaled and exited more than one of them, including a company that grew past $10 million in revenue.
And today he's the co-founder and CEO of TrueCX.
And he's also the bestselling author of a book called The Intelligence Within, which is about getting organizations out of thinking that stopped being true a long time ago.
So welcome to the show, Rich.
Thank you, Jason.
I'm happy to be here.
Well, Rich, before we get rolling today, I told the people listening, as you heard in the intro, that you came on this show today to take apart a lie that you used to believe.
Work hard enough, stay loyal long enough to stay loyal to what you built, and it's going to work out.
It'll just be fine.
And you believe that right up until you walked away from your first company and left your equity in it.
So I want you to put it on tape in your own words.
What was the lie and where did you pick it up?
I picked it up just growing up, right?
So I grew up in a very blue collar town just outside of Philadelphia, and my parents instilled in all of us kids.
you work hard.
And we had been working since we were 10 and 11 and 12.
I mean, anything we could do to try to make money, cutting lawns, going around handing out flyers for the local pizza shops, things like that.
So me personally, I was always kind of attracted to the art of making money.
I didn't know what to attribute it to at that time, but I just wanted more in life in general.
And so
at the age of 26, after two years of being a top salesperson at a company where the owner really didn't love salespeople, most of us were kind of feeling like, man, why are we here helping this person make all this money and be successful when we're the ones really busting our humps?
So at the age of 26, I decided I'm going to take a leap of faith.
Now, I had just bought a brand new car and a brand new townhome for the first time.
And I said, I'm going to start my own company.
And my mother and father were just so scared.
They were like, I cannot believe he's doing that.
How old were you?
How old were you?
I was 26 at the time.
And it was my first opportunity to try to build something for myself.
And I really had all the burning desire to do it.
I mean, I wanted to do this.
I wanted to succeed at this.
And I had proven over two years that I knew how to sell and I knew how to work with customers.
And they were very loyal to me as an individual.
And I busted my hump for all of my customers.
And so I said, well, I'm gonna try this out.
And so after I took the leap, about two months in, I hired the VP of sales who had hired me at that company to come on as one of my partners.
And then another top sales rep a year later to come on and join us as another partner.
And so this company that I had started at 26, I started creating equity in the cap table for these two individuals because I knew them and we had pretty decent relationships.
And I knew this would be good for the business for growth and so forth.
And so they started building the business with me.
But what happened is as you start to build a business and you're not just working inside a business for each other, you start to have different opinions and conflicting conflicts around certain ways you look at the world, certain ways you treat customers, certain gold standards you wanna set.
And so after about two and a half years into the business, we really started to see that the ideologies around what we wanted to do were very, very different.
And so within another year from there at the three and a half year mark,
I'm a Philadelphia native, so anyone that knows Philadelphia knows it's a diehard sports town.
And there's a couple of iconic restaurants here in Philadelphia.
One of them is called Chickie and Pete's.
It's a big place.
A lot of other teams that come into play, the Eagles or the Sixers or Flyers tend to go to get a cheesesteak there, or they'll go get other things at these places throughout the city.
And so I had invited both of my partners at the time and said, hey, I want to have a meeting, let's have lunch at Chickie and Pete's.
So one of the things we did prior, Jason, was I built out a separation agreement with my attorney and I presented it to them at that lunch.
So how long had you been in the business at this point?
Three and a half years.
So three and a half years, you divided in a couple of people, shared equity with them.
What was the equity split at that point?
We were just a third, a third, a third.
Okay.
And side point, do you think that was a good idea?
Third, third, third.
At the age of 26, 27, I thought it was a reasonable idea based on what I perceived as value coming into the business.
But now looking back, would you do that again?
100% undervalued my role and what I did, which was take the leap first.
Um, and, um, no, I would never do it again.
Been there, did the same, not, not exactly the same, but like same, same story.
Okay.
So three and a half years in, you got two partners that own 66%.
You're at 33% and you invited them to launch for a cheesesteak and you had a separation agreement said, I'm out.
Is that what happened?
I said, I'm out.
I'm going to do a year under non-compete.
It was written up very fairly.
It was a very fair buyout at the time.
Um,
We were probably one of the least profitable times in history right then for multiple reasons.
And I said, this is gonna be really fair.
But I knew in my gut I had to get out and chase my own dream.
And that was one of the lessons learned through this process is that you can undervalue yourself by giving the house away when you're the one that's really doing a ton of the building and you wanna build things the way you wanna build them.
And so that was the first real life lesson that I learned in business.
And ever since then, with the last few companies I've built, it's been radically different on how we value people and their contributions.
So take me to that moment when you're sitting there at that table.
Now you've already made the decision.
The decision's been made.
You've typed out the paper.
But the moment that you said out loud to these two guys,
When you said, okay, I'm out.
What did you what did you have to stop believing about yourself to be able to say that out loud?
Oh, man, I had to first come up with the whole idea.
It's it's it's something that I've read in Thinking Grow Rich, which is my favorite book.
It was really my head around whatever the mind can conceive and believe it can achieve.
I had to get Napoleon Hill fully baked into my subconscious.
You have doubts.
Am I good enough to do something else?
Am I leaving this too soon?
Why can't we just continue to work hard and things will start ironing themselves out?
The reality is that everybody's built a certain way.
We have our own NDA, right?
It makes us who we are.
And you can't change people's fundamental NDA.
And we just gotten to a point where the relationship between me and my partners had kind of run its course.
There was no animosity.
Nobody was bad mouthing each other.
There was no internal fighting or anything like that.
We just had different career paths and ideas for what we wanted to do, where we wanted to build professionally and personally, and what we wanted to aspire to do.
And I just had outgrown
what we had started together and what that company had really looked like at that point.
And I knew in my gut that if I didn't leave and I didn't take the next chance to really springboard, I'd have a real hard time staying there.
And then it probably would have turned into more of a toxic relationship.
I didn't want that to go down the way it was because I did have a lot of respect for both of those individuals.
Okay, well, I want to get into a little bit more about the
you know, I guess the inner conversation you must have had at that time to make that decision as a, you know, what, you're 30 years old at this time.
I mean, at that time I was 20, yeah, 29 and a half, 30.
Yeah, right in that area.
Yeah, so I wanna talk about, in just a second, I wanna ask you about that decision making process because you had to go from the belief of, hey, I need to work hard and be loyal and stay in and this will all pan out.
And you had to kind of you had to say, well, that's not true.
I don't have to do that.
I'm going to ask you that in a minute.
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Now, back to the show.
Okay, so Rich, back to you and your story.
So at 30-ish years old, you had the belief from through your 20s as a young go-getter out there, you know, being a sales guy, then starting your own company, taking that leap.
You had this belief, if you work hard and you stay loyal, it's gonna work out.
Before you had that meeting with your partners to say,
Sayonara, I'm out of here.
You can have the company.
I'm not doing this anymore.
You had to have a shift in that belief.
So what happened?
How did that belief shift for you?
Yeah, I think the work hard has stayed with me for life.
That's still one of the core components.
But it was really the loyalty piece that started to shift in my direction and thinking around it.
So I was putting a ton of time into the art of just building the business, reading books, spending time on self-improvement,
And the challenge you have is when you're in a partnership like that and there's not an equal amount of effort going into all fronts, you kind of start to build some resentment, right?
And that was really the core of when I said, I'm starting to feel like I'm putting a lot more time and energy into this thing right now.
And so it's not a matter of whether I stay loyal to these two folks.
It's not a matter whether I continue to work as hard as I'm working.
I could not get rid of that feeling of resentment starting to build because I knew the level of effort going into the business was starting to shift and I was all in on building.
And others were starting to get a little bit complacent around watching some of that go.
And I've seen it play out.
I've talked to a lot of other owners that have gone through this when I was younger.
But that's really what shifted there was just that overwhelming feeling of like, I feel this resentment building and I know I need to get out of here before it just gets...
I know you're watching me laugh and smile at your story because it sounds eerily familiar to my own.
I had a very similar situation.
However, I didn't give the equity equity away.
I was I did the opposite of that thing.
So but it's not about me.
It's about what you believe.
So you said that the hard work part you still believe in, but it's the loyalty part that you understand loyalty alone doesn't make doesn't assure success.
So first of all, what define that?
What does loyalty mean?
What do you mean?
Are you talking about
being loyal to these two partners, loyal to the concept that you developed?
What do you mean?
Yeah, it was early on more loyal to the people, right?
Loyal to the partners, loyal to what we were trying to build together.
What shifted for me over time is more about contribution.
What is the value creation we're doing within the business?
So my businesses today are all about, and I say this to everyone, on my whiteboard, if you walk into my office, it says, I pay people to think.
I want you there thinking.
I want you there challenging.
I want you to think about how we create more value for our business in the business.
I want you to create more value for our customers.
We're all about value creation now.
That's really where a lot of that stuff shifted early on.
Early on, it was all about, hey, we're loyal, we're buddies, we're going to do this, we're going to grind it out.
And it shifted to a more mature process down the road, which was more about value creation.
I think that's where we hang our hats today and we just get so many more results when we actually instill that inside the people that work with us.
Yeah.
I'm working on a project right now and one of the things, just a microcosm of the project is determining
how to set up compensation and equity structures for partners and for a team, you know, people that are in your A team.
They're not equity partners, but they're A team members.
And one of the things that I've been working through on that is this, it's not necessarily a formula, but it's a rule of thumb formula about how you give equity, grant equity and or compensation has to be based on, as you said, value creation first and foremost.
and then second uh is time put in and time is less important but it's also important because you know if some person makes one decision that changes everything that's good that is value creation but that's also not the same as a guy working 60 hours a week for an entire year who's making everything work he's obviously putting more time which needs to be compensated commensurately right so so your story my story
comes from a very similar painful place where I had, I too had a partner who wasn't putting in time or value creation.
At first it was, like we were all buddies and like, we're gonna get this thing done and we're gonna build this thing and it's gonna be amazing.
And then later, only one person was standing around when the dust cleared.
And so I get it.
Now let's do the math on what this belief cost you, because as I understand it, and you can correct me, like when you walked away,
You know, you then had two employees six months later and you had a million and a half dollars in revenue with Viacom.
Now, so what that tells me, that's what you were capable of the whole time.
which means every year you spent being loyal to those partners was a year that you weren't able to spend somewhere else.
So do you see it that way?
I do see it that way.
I sat out a year under non-competes and I gave them a very fair valuation just to get me out so that they could become 50/50 partners.
It was a very equitable way to look at it because I still had all the confidence in the world to know that I could do the things I wanted to do.
So after that year of sitting out, I was advising for a couple of customers that I had worked with in the past.
As soon as I launched the new business a year later, I was able to compete and I was able to go all types of new customers.
The new customers I got, the best part about that was I went after the larger market and started landing these larger accounts.
So what would have happened if I stayed true to being loyal and stayed true to just continuing to put my head down and work hard is I would be building this business with all these new
really profitable, really high profile accounts stuck underneath my partnership.
And it wouldn't have been a good situation, right?
Because again, the resentment would have been building.
We would have came to a head in some way, shape or form, but now it would have been a lot harder of a business divorce, if you will,
if I had just continued to do that.
And so that was no regrets decision to just do that.
But I didn't compete too hard with them, you know, with the existing customers.
A lot of the business we grew in the new company was all, a lot of it was in that new business.
And we were just going after a completely different market with different offerings.
So Rich, when you made that, you called it a partnership divorce, right?
So when you called it
I understand what that means.
So what you're saying in the lie is that loyalty alone is not gonna make you successful.
So sometimes you just have to make the decision what's in the best interest for me and or the business or both.
Like that's what you had to make a decision.
Is that kind of what now looking back with hindsight, you said, you know, if I hadn't have made that decision, if I'd have just stayed loyal to these two guys, we'd all had mediocre success or failed, but because I made the hard decision,
I was able to go succeed.
Is that what you believe now?
Yes.
Yep, I do.
And the funny thing is, within another year and a half or so, they ended up having a business divorce and went their separate ways as well.
So the science in it is, what I would say to any entrepreneur, young entrepreneur out there is if you really good at making decisions in life using your gut and your gut is telling you you need to get out of something to grow, you gotta go.
The procrastination of making no decision has all types of impacts.
An indecision around something that's life altering.
I mean, it's your life, right?
You're putting all this work and all this energy out there to build something of value and to bring people in that can build something of value.
You've got to trust your gut and you cannot be loyal, as they say, to a fault in any type of business situation.
I remember in college I learned something, and this was in my, this was an, I got a master's in education, so it wasn't a business degree at all.
But in that master's, there was one business class that we took and the gentleman teaching the class, teaching the course, said something that I've never forgotten.
And he referred to it as a phenomenon called escalation of commitment.
And this happens in business, but it happens in relationships, it happens everywhere.
And the way he described this, I don't know if you've ever heard this before, but he said, escalation of commitment is when you have committed to something and it was a good decision at the time, but it isn't working.
And instead of calling it what it is,
and pulling out of it, you escalate your level of commitment to it in spite of the fact that it's not working.
And then you continue to escalate that commitment.
And what it sounds to me like, Rich, is you're echoing that sentiment.
It's like, look, I could have been loyal to these two guys and realize that I made a commitment to them.
and I need to stay committed to them.
So I'm going to be even more committed to them and continue that escalation of commitment, which we're referring to as loyalty here.
But it sounds to me like you're echoing that saying, yes, escalation of commitment is no bueno.
Don't do that.
You need to realize what it is and figure out how to pull out gracefully if necessary or blow it up if you have to.
Totally.
Yeah, I fully agree with that.
It's kind of funny, I have all these other business owners that I know and we all grew up together,
And I've seen the folks stay in bad partnerships.
And you know what it is 18 years later for them?
It's still a bad partnership.
So how can you reach any real optimal exit or any real optimal way of growth professionally and personally if you just stay inside a very average type of a partnership?
People stay because of fear.
People stay because they fear change, right?
Others fear, what's the unknown of trying to do this on my own?
A lot of people like to do things where there's comfort in doing it with a few others.
So if you fail, you fail together.
You know, if you succeed, you succeed together.
But my sentiment on it changed drastically over the years and has even through multiple other businesses that I've built and now exits.
Fortunate enough to have had five plus exits now and still building businesses.
I guess I'm a bit of a startup junkie in a certain way and I love it.
But, you know, it's to pay it forward now, right?
It's to teach people that are younger.
I'm on a few boards.
I've invested in a few smaller startups that are now finally getting closer to a series A.
And it's just, you know, these 20 something year olds are so much different than we were in our 20 somethings because the world's changed so much.
You know, the access, they have the data and the access to speed and the acceleration through automation is rapidly different than than when we kind of grew up, you know, earning our chops here in the industry.
So my advice to them is still real, though, in
Even though we have transformation, automation, all this stuff at speed, you really have to pick your partners well if you're going to create equity in the cap table.
You have to define how to prove what that value creation looks like to the business.
It has to be creating value to the business.
And your point earlier is spot on.
There's operational people that are creating astronomical value to the business.
But as entrepreneurs, we sometimes get stuck with attributing only revenue generation to people that can earn in.
And that's a mistake.
That's something else I learned through the second business and third business.
It's not just revenue generators that should be getting an opportunity for earning.
It's anyone and everyone in any role
that's really executing making customers happy and executing and creating value that you can tap into and ultimately take advantage of within the business.
And that was another huge eye-opener for me and not just having it as revenue value.
So your bestselling book, The Intelligence Within is, as I understand it, built around helping organizations break free, break out of this outdated thinking.
And I guess this is not ironic.
It's based in your life experience.
I mean, you spent years unable to break out of your own outdated thinking inside a company that you own where not one person on earth had the authority to stop you from leaving, which you eventually took the opportunity and you did leave.
So you wrote this book for organizations and you're the case study.
You're the case study for how this happened.
So what are you trying to prove or what are you trying to tell the world with that book?
You know, a lot of it is to get away, like you got to break free from the status quo, right?
The ability, like not making a decision is making a decision, but it's generally can put you in jeopardy.
Your role, your position at the company, things like that.
Stagnation is something that will get you fired, right?
It talks a lot about these things.
The book really angles around that as the problem context, right?
It's decision makers that aren't making decisions in companies.
They're staying the safest option is staying status quo.
We'll look at it again next year.
We'll look at it again next year.
We don't have the luxury of doing that any longer as business owners and people that operate businesses.
We have to keep moving or we're going to get run over by a lot of things, not just AI, just a lot of other stuff because there's a speed element.
Speed is like the new currency right now.
And it talks a lot about those things.
The real solution to this is this platform that we've built and brought into the marketplace called TrueCX.
And what it's doing is it's accelerating for all types of deciders, CFOs, CEOs, CIOs, right?
CMOs.
We've built all these advanced discovery mechanisms and templates that allow companies to quickly get through a process.
so that they could accelerate decisions around business transformations, whether they're trying to change out a new tool, a new platform, a new system, rather than spending months and months and months of what we call mental ************ not making any real decision at the end.
This platform is enabling people to go deep and wide in the business with teams and departments to build consensus and alignment so that they can get the clarity and confidence they need to accelerate through decisions in the future.
It's been incredible.
We've really grown the business a lot over the last two years, but this is constant evolution.
And the approach I wanted to take with the book was to really just kind of get out of my head all of the things we're building this platform around.
It's really for decision makers, it's for buyers, it's for organizations to get themselves right.
I've never seen anything like it thought up in the past.
You know, we built it because as consultants and trusted advisors in the industry for so long, even as good as you could possibly be, an Accenture, Deloitte, doesn't matter, a boutique type consultant, it still takes you a long time with human effort to get through schedules and calls and conferences and meetings and then re-scoping.
This platform enables you to get through things in days and weeks.
Does it matter the size of the organization?
Does it matter how many people have to go through the process?
It's time boxed, it's consistent, and then it gives you all the business intelligence you need to really kind of promote the right type of decisioning.
That's really what the book is about.
So if we look at the idea of loyalty, going back to the lie that loyalty and hard work will always pay off and make you successful.
If we look at loyalty, if you've uncovered and discovered that loyalty isn't in fact the thing necessary to allow you to get that next level of success, what do you replace that with?
I mean, is it brutalism?
I mean, are you being brutal to everybody or do you not care anymore?
Like what?
Which is probably not true, but what is it?
What do you replace loyalty with?
Or is there anything that needs to take its place?
I think you replace it with alignment, right?
You have to have alignment, whether you're the leader of the organization or you're the folks working for the leader.
To me, everything goes back to if there's alignment, then there can be a rhythm.
And as long as the team's operating with a rhythm, generally your clients are feeling good about that because your people are happy.
They're taking care of your customers, you're taking care of them.
That's kind of how we look at stuff now is really the alignment of people, right?
How you hire people, how you fire people is built around the alignment of your core values.
If you're not hiring and firing based on your core values, you shouldn't have core values 'cause what do they stand for?
It's just a bunch of stuff written on a wall.
Back in the day, I remember walking into a business and there was 20 different things written down.
They said, Oh, that's our core values.
And I said, If we brought any single employee into this room right now, other than maybe your two C-level executives, how many of your employees would be able to recite even one thing that's written out of those 20 on the wall?
And they're just sitting there like, yeah, you're right.
Like, that'd be an interesting bet, be an interesting exercise because it's too much, right?
You can't have alignment around that.
And so the whole idea for me is like, we do talk a lot about this alignment factor in the book.
I think it also goes hand in hand with consensus.
But that's really what we look at, Jason, is how aligned are we to be able to do the work we're doing.
Yeah, loyalty is fine.
Yeah.
So loyalty is fine, but it's alignment is what we're looking for.
It's total alignment.
Yeah.
I mean, people have loyalty to businesses.
They have loyalty to their partners, right?
They have loyalty to family and stuff like that.
Loyalty is a fantastic word, but in business, you have to really understand what loyalty can do.
It could be a detriment, right?
It can really hold you back.
It can also keep you somewhere for too long, but it can also keep you somewhere that's a good fit for a long time because you are loyal.
So the context of that early on, to me, loyalty early on was like, hey, you're my buddies.
I brought you in.
We're going to do this through thick and thin and we're just going to be loyal to each other.
But again, we've talked about a lot of things, the downstream dependencies of what were the negatives
of that.
And if I had stayed, there would have been a lot of negatives to that.
And so you just had to peel it back.
We weren't aligned.
Yeah, well, let's talk about that because I want to I want to talk about what's the cost of staying inside that life for another five years and then what's waiting on the other side for somebody who decides to walk out of that.
There's a ton of soft cost to it, right?
Like mental to mental state.
You know, there's a monetary
Certainly cost to that because if you're building something of value and others aren't building it of immense value with you, you feel cheated in a lot of ways because you're sitting there saying, hey, I'm busting my hump, doing a majority of the sales, majority of the revenue generation here.
And I feel like people are sitting back and just watching versus actually participating in it.
You know, so there's a lot of soft and hard costs associated with that from my view.
Well, before we close, I want to give you one minute, and I'm not going to interrupt you.
I want you to tell the world as directly and as passionately as you can what the lie is and why they've been believing it and what the truth actually is.
Go.
Oh, man.
It's like.
I used to think that leaders had like all the answers and I put a lot of emphasis on experience, right?
I really valued like experience, experience, experience.
And what I've come to know over time is that curiosity, like being a curious individual is probably one of the biggest things you could possibly do.
Like my big thing is be insatiably curious at all times.
That's what makes you the best leader.
That's what gets the best answers, right?
Ask better questions, get better answers.
Curiosity never killed the cat.
Curiosity kills the competition, right?
Stay curious.
Having insatiable curiosity, it's one of our core values we talk about all the time.
We only have four of them, so we can recite them.
But that's one of the big things.
The other little hidden lie is, do you ever hear the customer's always right?
They're not.
The customer is not always right.
You have as much a say at that table when you're sitting across from someone as they do.
You should be qualifying them out or into your network and they should be doing the same thing.
So I always tell people, the customer's not always right.
That is such an old tale, it should be thrown away.
The customer a lot of times can be wrong and you've gotta politically and ethically have an obligation as a consultant or as a value creator for them
to consistently help them through some of the problems they have.
That's why you're there, is to help them do that, to add value.
That's why they pay you.
So there's a way to not blast the customer, but the whole notion of that little lie of the customer is always right, that's always driven me crazy the older I get because I've fired customers that are really bad customers and my employees
are greeting me the next day with like that a boy high fives.
Thank God he did something about it.
Those people were beating the heck out of us.
We don't deserve it.
We're really good at what we do.
You know, so those are the that's what kind of what I would leave people with is those little tidbits.
So tell people how to find you.
So look me up on LinkedIn.
Richard Tarity.
I would get a copy of The Intelligence Within.
It's out there as an audible hard copy, soft copy on Amazon.
It was the number one best seller in three categories on the business side.
And you can find us at truecx.net.
That's our website.
If you want to check out the platform we're building.
We're migrating everything very soon to a new front end.
We're putting a massive development behind it.
It's called True Intelligence now.
So it's really going to take on the heartbeat of organizations around continuous improvement, not one time snapshots in time.
So check it out.
If it's something of interest, reach out, hit one of the action buttons, get in touch with us.
Be happy to talk to people.
All right.
His name is Rich Tarity.
That's spelled T-A-R-I-T-Y.
And his LinkedIn is linkedin.com/n/rtarity.
So you can go check him out on LinkedIn and look him up.
And you got the show notes, of course, here on the show that you can find him.
Final question for you, Rich.
If somebody listening right now is still inside that lie, they're still believing it, what's the one thing you want them to hear before this episode ends?
Take action on it.
Just take an action on it, right?
Hold yourself accountable.
Look yourself in the mirror and ask yourself, why am I, how do I get out of the lie?
And why am I letting this lie continue to control my destiny?
Rich, thank you for sharing your portion of this story today and your perspective on this lie.
I appreciate you being on the show.
Thanks, Jason.
I appreciate being here.
Great conversation.
Well, that's a wrap on today's episode.
If you saw a bar on your cage that you hadn't noticed before, send this episode to someone who needs to see theirs.
The gold is the lie.
As always, I am your host, the real Jason Duncan, and Jesus is King.
I'll see you next time.
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