Heed Your Call

John Livesay interviews David Howitt

Today’s guest is author David Howitt of Heed Your Call. He’s also the founder and CEO of Meriwether. I’ve had the honor of reading his book and it has so much great information about how to be a successful founder and also a successful person. David, welcome to the show.

Thanks so much. I really appreciate you having me, John.

I want to start at the very beginning like most things do that give people a little context of texture. You obviously have quite an impressive background. You worked at Adidas, both in their legal division and then went to licensing, and then you and your wife launched Oregon Chai and sold that successfully in 2004. But there’s a lot of journey that you talk about in your book, Heed Your Call, where so many of us are told ‘do this and you’ll be happy and then you’ll find that career path’ but this isn’t making you happy, and you’ve managed have multiple careers.

You now have Meriwether Group which helps founders through a variety of things that we’ll get into, but if you would give us a little context of what it was like when you were miserable as a lawyer, and where did you find the courage to leave that and start your business with your wife?

I appreciate that introduction. In terms of the law firm and my journey, I think like most of us, I stepped into what Joseph Campbell refers to as the ‘known world’, and Joseph Campbell was the foremost authority on mythology. He looked through a variety of cultures, spiritual belief systems, time, and geography and came away from it saying there’s one central mythology, one central myth that’s been prevalent through all of those things which in and of itself is powerful. In that myth, which he refers to as the ‘Hero’s Journey’, he built a road map and this road map was the articulation of one person’s journey in life and what I found in reading that is it’s truly applicable to all of us and applicable to business.

Answering your question directly, my known world was growing up in a middle class conservative town in Michigan and having parents, grandparents, neighbors, friends, and teachers, all of whom I listened to and respected and admired, all had a central thesis which is ‘you should go do this’. For me,‘this’ was you graduate from highschool, you go to a four-year college and then you go on to some form of grad school, you graduate, you go get a great job somewhere that you may or may not like, likely you won’t like, but that has high level of earning potential, you meet someone, you get married, you have 1.2 kids, buy a house and check all the boxes. I subscribed to that all the way to the point that I found myself in a very large law firm.

One day I woke up and said, ‘boy, I’m miserable. This is really not a happy place for me. I don’t feel like I’m in alignment with what is my truest self and it’s starting to show itself physically, emotionally, and spiritually and I need to think about what to do’. Now, of course, at that moment ego jumps in and starts screaming at you, ‘well, there’s nothing you can do, people will think you’re insane if you quit this job. You’ll go broke, you’ll be homeless; your wife will leave you, your neighbors will think you’re mad’. So, I struggled with it for a while, probably close to a year, before I got to a place where I finally decided to surrender and let go, because it was just so painful.

You talk about that in Heed Your Call about how we’re so concerned with worrying about what other people think and wanting others’ acceptance. We live our life from a place of fear and trying to control things all the time and I think everyone listening can relate to that no matter where you are on the start-up journey; whether this is your first start-up or your fifth start-up, there’s a journey and overcoming fear is a part of it.

A huge part of it and it’s interesting, John, in our society, in business, and in our personal lives, we’re told that fear or that letting go or that surrender is the equivalent of failure and that if you allow yourself to be humbled and say ‘I actually need to let go of this’ ,or ‘I’m afraid of this’, or ‘this is no longer serving me, I give up’, that that is waving the white flag, admitting defeat, and being a failure, but in Buddhism, it’s exactly the opposite.

One of my mentors and guides, Deepak Chopra, who is very successful in business and in life, said when we surrender and finally let go, actually that’s when possibility is at its highest. That’s when creativity is at its highest and that’s where our ability to co-create a result in our business and in our lives is at its highest. It’s by surrendering, it’s by letting go that in fact we invite in the potential to actually align ourselves with our highest and best.

That’s great. We’re going to tweet out that. That will be one of the first tweets from the show. When we let go, possibility and creativity are invited in. That’s a great line. I love it. Thank you.

Awesome. What I want to say also, is that everything I try to put forward in Heed Your Call and what we’re talking about now is stuff that I’ve seen illustrated in the world in business. So, I felt like there were a ton of great spiritual books out there and a ton of great books out there on business, but maybe not one that had built a bridge between the two. Having grown up in a home where there wasn’t a lot of spiritually around and having gone to law school, I really wanted this book to be grounded in actual business case so that maybe the ego for your readers could let down a little. That concept of surrendering and letting go, and that allowing for creativity and possibility is something I have seen demonstrated in many successful businesses including Oregon Chai.

One of the things that I really resonate with what you just said that’s in your book is: “When we dial up too much of our left brain tendency and ignore our more empathic and intuitive nature, our relationship with the collective consciousness diminishes.” I’m personally really fascinated with that, because what I do is I help the founders, tech founders in particular, which are very left brained about how something works, when they’re pitching, what they don’t realize is they have to move to the right side of the brain, which is the spirituality, the storytelling, the emotional engagement. That’s where all the selling occurs.

You’re able to be a left brain lawyer till the cows come home and shift that into a right brain story. And speaking of stories, let’s jump right into one of my favorite stories in your book about your grandfather. This great line about instead of why is this happening to me, why is this happening for me, and everyone has had that question that they ask themselves in their life, in their start-up, so please tell us about that story in your grandfather. What an amazing influence.

Thank you for that. My grandfather was not a traditionally-educated man in the sense of western culture. He didn’t have a big college degree or grad school degree, but he was a very successful entrepreneur and a very successful person, and he credited that with what he referred to as using common sense. When I dug a little deeper on what he meant by that, effectively what he started to articulate - and I later really came to understand - is that comment that you mentioned about what you do, which is help people to toggle so seamlessly between the left brain and the right brain, what we refer to at the Meriwether Group as the power of ‘and’ that you need to have analytics, but you also have to have artistry. You need to have intuition in addition to intelligence; prophet and profit. And it’s when we combine our whole brain, when we bring our truest and fullest self that the magic happens and with regard to my grandfather, I think he embodied that.

He had enough of that left brain chops. He understood how to build a profit and loss statement, how to look at an income statement, margins, supply chain, the consumer. He probably wasn’t the best at it, but he was certainly capable, and he also had empathy and the ability to understand his consumer and his audience deeply. As you put forward so well, when you’re working with your clients to help them understand deeply, in the book Heed Your Call, I speak of deep empathy; our ability to be connected to the other is so present at any given moment. If we just allow ourselves for ego to quiet down, we truly can walk in another person’s shoes, sit in their seat, truly appreciate and understand what it is that they’re living with and/or looking for. Then we can shape our message, we can shape our pitch, we can shape our business, our product, our service, in a way that’s going to be mostly likely to be embraced by our audience, our consumers.

My grandfather talked about these subtle shifts that were really pretty powerful and the one which you commented on, when you look at life and certainly in business, you’re going to have multiple times, I certainly still do, where you’re going to hit a wall, where you’re going to have someone in the organization you’re butting heads with, where we’re going to have some type of challenge or hardship that is really in your face. I think for most of us when that happens, is that we go into this victim mentality of ‘why is this happening, woe is me, this is so hard, why do I have to deal with this everyday’, but if you can shift that as my grandfather taught me and ask yourself, ‘why is this happening for me? What is the lesson here? What is the mirror that is being held up to me that’s going to allow myself to grow as a professional, as an individual, as a boss, as an employee?’ and I think when we look at life through that lens, suddenly the shift allows us to actually approach these challenges through a lens of possibility instead of a lens of being restricted.

Carlos Castaneda in his books refers to guides and mentors and I think for most of us we always think of a guide or a mentor as someone who is there to really help you, who is your friend, who is there to give you positive reinforcement and tools. But but Carlos Castaneda talks about guides and mentors that are actually there to create impediments for us. They’re still your guides, they’re still your mentors, they don’t do it in a way that feels as good, maybe, but they’re there to help us overcome elements of our personality or of our journey, that are going to allow us to move further down the path. So, when you find that in your work, in your job, think of these people as a guide or a mentor and what it is that they’re there to teach you about yourself or the world.

There’s so many things you said that I want to recap. First of all, I’ve never heard this phrase you said and I love it, we’re going to tweet that out. Prophets versus profits. That is absolutely brilliant, because it’s the whole ‘and’ philosophy, you know. Your book talks about how you need to be the thinker and the dream, the artist and the scientist. You need to have prophets and profits with the two different spellings and your analogy in the book is even music has light and dark keys, so you need both sides to make that sing for the investors when you’re pitching. I mean, it all ties together in such a great metaphor that you said, so thank you for that.

Your book is broken into three different categories: initiation, mentors, and mastery. I want to touch briefly on each one of those sections just to tease our audience to make sure they go out and buy and read it. The initiation, the thing that really stands out for me is, you not only have to hear the call, but you have to heed the call, hence the title of the book. The mentors that you just touched on is most people just assume that mentors are only going to be your cheerleader to help you and not give you any obsoletes and what you just said is so interesting, that somebody might not have the label of guide or mentor, but if they’re giving you a challenge, if you shift your perception they can absolutely become a mentor and then of course the whole mastery. So, let’s dive into mastery a little bit, which is what you do at Meriwether, and if you wouldn’t mind, walk the the readers through all the different options that you provide founders from the accelerator to giving capital.

Thank you John, I appreciate it. Our firm the Meriwether Group was really based on the power of ‘and’, and based on being with an entrepreneur and a business owner through all facets of their journey. We ground it on the left brain side with what historically was called a merchant bank, and merchant banks back in the day were very high touch consigliere partners to business owners and folks who were birthing businesses. They basically locked arms with you and said ‘we can help you understand how to grow your business and actually be there to assist you with the work. We can add capital if that’s necessary as part of your growth and then when you’ve reached your defining moment, we can assist you through an exit that is high water mark economics’.

Those groups were largely bought up by large multinational financial organizations because they were so successful and then has it often happens, the very things that made them special were lost in those acquisitions. We felt from the left brain side that this model of a more connected and more holistic partnership in helping these business owners made more sense than forcing them to talk to one group about growth, a different group about capital and a totally separate group about preparing for and going through an exit that is very disjointed, it’s very disconnected.

It has apparent risk and for people like your readers who were working 70 hours a week trying to start up those different relationships or juggle three different relationships is often very tiring, so that was the left brain concept. Back to Joseph Campbell and the Hero’s Journey and I’ll use an illustration that hopefully your readers will identify with. The Hero’s Journey has been a central thesis for many of the biggest movies and books. Lucas cites Hero’s Journey as the basis for Star Wars and all of the storytelling; the Avatar movie, Lord Of The Rings, The Hobbit…the list goes on, but I’m going to use the Wizard of Oz as a way to explain what we do at the Meriwether Group and how it ties back to this notion of the Hero’s Journey.

At the Meriwether group, we define the entrepreneur as the modern day hero. It’s our belief that entrepreneurs - your readers, people who are birthing new businesses, disrupting the status quo, looking at the world and asking themselves where the consumer has been deprived of innovation, of relevance, and of a really good choice, and then bringing that to the market - are modern heroes, more so than politicians, more so than maybe even folks and NGOs. So, we want to be in service to that hero. We want to be a guide or a mentor to them.

You have this founder and they live in the known world. From me, it was growing up in Michigan. We talked about that, but for some of us that desire to listen, that quiet spot inside of us that tells us, ‘hey, this isn’t what you should be doing’, or ‘this path isn’t your highest and best’. For some of us, we actually get to a place where we open ourselves up to listening to that voice and that voice is always there. It’s always present, but we do things to try to quiet that voice, because that voice is a voice of change and a voice of risk. Ego doesn’t like that so we employ tactics to try to keep that voice at bay and we say things to ourselves like, ‘I could never follow my heart, I could never start this business, I could never do this because…I have a mortgage, I have kids going to college, I have car payments’, and as a result, we live our lives in the known world and we don’t ever take that shot.

In writing Heed Your Call, I spoke with a number of end-of-life caregivers and mostly through the hospice care and the single biggest regret people have as they’re reaching the end of their life is I mailed it in. I didn’t take my shot. I live my life in accordance with other people’s view of who I should be and I played it safe and I really wished I hadn’t.

So, back to Wizard of Oz. You’ve got Dorothy and she’s living in Kansas, that’s her known world and Dorothy feels like there’s got to be something more than a dirt farm in Kansas and she finds herself leaving her known world and we all know she ends up in Oz, so this is the founder leaving their job, leaving their career, leaving the vestige to the known world and taking the leap and starting the company.

Initially it’s pretty euphoric: there’s beautiful colors, there’s all this people singing and great for her, she’s excited, she’s left the bonds of the known world and we all know this as business owners, we know this moment and we celebrate it. But it’s pretty short lived is what mythology tell us and eventually you have, as Dorothy did, your “witch” shows up in a puff of green smoke and says, ‘I’m going to get you my pretty’.

Now, for the business owner that might be, ‘well, this business idea is cool, but I didn’t think through the supply chain’, or ‘how was I going to market?’ or ‘is there enough margin?’ or ‘can this product actually be made?’ and so you fall into what Campbell refers to as the abyss and the abyss is that moment of despair where we have to actually surrender and let go.

We have to give up, kind of drop our arms and say, ‘you know what, I give up. I don’t know that I can do this’ and interestingly, it’s that moment in time when the mentors and guides show up. The reason is, I think, that before that moment of humbling, you’re not going to be open to the advice or counsel of people around you, because you know it all, because you just started your business, you’re all that. The Buddhists say that when the student is ready the teacher appears.

I love that.

And so it’s this moment of surrender where we are now truly open to possibility and that’s when people show up.

But wait…there’s more!

This post has been adapted from The Successful Pitch podcast. Listen to this past episode for more on the inspiring story of David Howitt!

Subscribe to The Successful Pitch via iTunes.

To learn more, watch my Get Funded Fast video.

About
As a funding strategist, John Livesay helps CEOs craft a compelling pitch which engages investors in a way that inspires them to join a startup’s team.

After a successful 20-year career in media sales with Conde Nast where he worked across all 22 brands in their corporate division [GQ, Vanity Fair, Wired, W and Vogue] and created integrated programs for clients such as Lexus, Hyundai and Guess, John won salesperson of the year in 2012 across the entire company.

Follow John on Twitter at @john_livesay. We welcome your comments.