C-Suite Concerns: Shayne Fitz-Coy Of Rustic Pathways On The Top 5 Issues That Keep Executives Up at Night
An Interview With Cynthia Corsetti
Hot wars. We have two large scale wars that the US is involved in to some extent. They impact real costs of materials our businesses need, such as gas. They also make our travel clients nervous, as formerly safe and travelable parts of the world are torn apart by war.
When it comes to business leadership, challenges are omnipresent. From rapidly changing market dynamics to technological disruptions, executives today grapple with multifaceted issues that directly impact their decision-making and strategic orientations. What really keeps the leaders of today’s corporate world awake at night? How do they navigate through these turbulent times to ensure the growth and stability of their organizations? As part of this series, we had the pleasure of interviewing Shayne Fitz-Coy.
Shayne Fitz-Coy believes that great leaders focus on providing good value to customers and treating their teams fairly. He emphasizes the importance of patient capital and an engaged workforce in building successful teams. His approach to leadership is centered around serving customer needs and prioritizing long-term results over short-term fluctuations.
Shayne Fitz-Coy is an entrepreneur, business builder, author, and growth strategist. Since founding Sabot Family Companies, Shayne has been driving business growth and turnarounds across various industries. He is the Co-CEO of Alert1, responselink.ai and Rustic Pathways, and specializes in strategic investments and corporate strategy. He holds an undergraduate degree from Harvard University and an MBA from Stanford University. He now splits time between the San Francisco Bay Area and Seoul, South Korea, with his wife and their three children.
Thank you so much for joining us in this interview series. Before we dive into our discussion about communication, our readers would love to “get to know you” a bit better. Can you share with us the backstory about what brought you to your specific career path?
I had a mentor when I was in college at Harvard who told me that while I was a good college football player, I was unlikely to make it in the NFL. He mentioned that an analogue to success in pro sports was success in business. In college, you practice six days a week for one game, but in business, every day is game day. I loved that.
That vision of “every day is game day” led me to an internship at JP Morgan Chase after my junior year. The job was intense, I loved it. I worked for a woman nicknamed “The Hammer,” but I wanted to be closer to the action and more in the operations of a business. That led me to Cintas Corporation (NASDAQ: CTAS), a Fortune 500 business-to-business services company based in Cincinnati, Ohio.
I didn’t know it at the time but I was lucky to be placed in a Cintas turnaround location in Washington, DC. I had two excellent managers in my first two years there who still serve as my models for being people first and data driven second in solving tough business problems.
As I went through the rotations there, I realized that the most successful leaders in the company almost always had a strong sales background. So I asked to be moved to the Sales functions and then became excellent at sales. I became one of the top sellers in the country.
Those four years — learning how to lead a team, learning how to drive improvement through data, and learning how to sell value — were foundational to my business career.
After four years at Cintas, I took off for China. I wanted to see the world, and I did. I went from village to village, teaching English, learning the language, meeting the people and trying to start companies. That time was formative for me in learning how to travel with and travel like a local, work that would come full circle at Rustic Pathways later.
Then as my quarter life crisis wound down, I applied to business school and left for Stanford Graduate School of Business. Stanford ultimately gave me the bona fides to launch my own venture. I met my future investors and business partner there. I was dropped in as a turnaround CEO into a private equity owned business. That turned out to be a home run for the investors and for me, and I went on to become the co-founder of Sabot Family Companies.
We purchased Rustic Pathways student travel in 2019, and since then I have led the company’s digital transformation efforts, navigated the pandemic, and modernized our programming offerings. The role of CEO is always the same, in a sense. You have to lead change among people who must own the change themselves. Turnarounds work best when everyone believes in the need for change.
You are a successful leader. Which three character traits do you think were most instrumental to your success? Can you please share a story or example for each?
I have tried to be selective in whom I work with. My closest colleagues are trusted professional confidants. They are not my best friends, although I have also worked with personal friends. My best work relationships have been those where people exercise their best judgment in the work that we share, tell the hard truths, and work hard to improve ourselves and our teams. They make work feel not like work at all. With teammates like these, I am willing to fly around the world for their mother’s funeral at a moment’s notice — and I have.
I often hear that I’m cool and calm in conflict. I’m not easily drawn into warring emotional situations. Once in a while someone at one of my companies will leave in a huff. Sometimes they call me first to announce their departure. And I’ll hear all kinds of venting and my way is always to ask: “What else could we do to better?” Sometimes we keep folks and sometimes we don’t. But once people get everything out of their minds, they usually leave feeling heard. I don’t respond to the line items; I just let them let it all out. It’s important to take it and then if there is anything there to improve for the folks who are staying on the bus.
The third trait is related to the second. I believe that the truth is somewhere between what he said and she said. People are complicated and imperfect. I don’t expect anyone to tell a perfect and fair story, especially when there are problems. I expect that everyone will try to tell the part that they believe, and that the whole story is understood over time.
Leadership often entails making difficult decisions or hard choices between two apparently good paths. Can you share a story with us about a hard decision or choice you had to make as a leader? I’m curious to understand how these challenges have shaped your leadership.
I have outside investors in my companies, so I am responsible for results. Rule number one is don’t lose money and rule number two is to remember rule number one. The companies I lead have to grow and produce a return on invested capital.
There’s always a question of how evenly that growth and those returns should be. Should they be monthly and quarterly, or annual? Biannual? How evenly spread should the returns be? The temptation is always to have smooth growth that is always up and to the right, as steeply as possible. But the reality is that decisions for the good of the company in the long run often run counter to smooth marching growth. A simple example that happens is whether to book next quarter’s sales as this quarter’s sales in order to make this quarter look better. It sets a terrible precedent, and it set up the team to then have to run harder next quarter, just to make up for the sales that this quarter borrowed. We don’t do this stuff.
I’m committed to doing what’s right for long term growth, even if the results look bad next quarter. Fortunately, my investors agree with me and give me plenty of room. I’m lucky to have them.
What do you believe are the top five concerns currently preoccupying the minds of C-suite executives, and why?
- The election. The polarized climate keeps finding their way into business by way of social media, where teammates, customers, even vendors post their various allegiances. There’s no need to charge our professional relationships with culture wars. Two people can work together who don’t believe the same stuff.
- Hot wars. We have two large scale wars that the US is involved in to some extent. They impact real costs of materials our businesses need, such as gas. They also make our travel clients nervous, as formerly safe and travelable parts of the world are torn apart by war.
- The climate. Wow it’s hot this summer. There will be consequences for business; for example, some places will have to start having siestas. How will working hours shift. How will flight patterns change. Not to mention demographic shifts toward cooler places.
- The next generation. New graduates are coming in with different ideas about what work is and what it means to their identities; what kind of privacy they want or don’t want; and what sort of workplace and work colleagues they want. Each generation is defined by their preferences; some folks in the new generation bring their whole selves to work, politics and all. This can make office dynamics charged, but is also an opportunity to talk to one another.
- Healthcare — and other major costs that dig into everyday people’s paychecks. Some of these are just out of control. We have backed ourselves into an impossibly tangled system of escalating costs. A baby born in Korea today costs almost nothing to someone on national insurance. Even those who pay out of pocket pay $3,000. The same baby in the US could cost $40,000. This must be fixed, but it’s unclear if that’s feasible.
In the face of rapid technological advancements and market shifts, do you find that you need to constantly recalibrate your strategies to ensure sustained growth?
Of course. If you’d asked me 15 years ago about our involvement with social media and digital platforms — we would have little to speak to. Now, you kind of have to live in social media, right? With the ever-changing environment — especially with our target audience at Rustic Pathways — a lot of what we do is strategized around technology and the digital age. Whether that’s a stronger presence on platforms like Instagram or Facebook, or building out our website’s blog, the Rustic Pathways team is constantly adapting to meet our audience and the industry’s needs.
With the emergence of AI, blockchain, and other transformative technologies, how do you determine which tech trends are worth investing in?
So start with the guiding question: how does this create value for our customer? If you nail that one, it helps set a north star. Keeping up with new technologies like AI can be overwhelming — but we try to invest in what’s beneficial for our companies. What makes sense for each company? The answer varies. Trends can sound very appealing when buzzy and popular, but we strive to find a balance between ones that will have long-lasting benefits and make sense for our audiences, versus ones that feel more flash-in-the-pan.
With increasing digital threats, how are you prioritizing cybersecurity, and what measures are you taking to protect your organization’s assets?
You have to take cybersecurity threats seriously. Of the major unpredictable threats (cyber attack, nuclear war, biological and chemical weapons), it’s the only one where a company can really try mount a defense.
Regardless of the company, we have to approach it on a technical and a human level. On the technical level, systems and software have to be kept up to date, network security and firewalls have to be up to date.
But the bigger and harder side of defense is human. How do you actively prevent human error? We conduct training and even that might not be enough to protect against phishing attacks. Who has the right authorizations to the right data? We make sure our incident plan is up to date. We conduct audits regularly. Dual authentication. Mandatory password resets. Segment data. Is that enough? God willing. We have to be relentless and vigilant.
As a top executive, how do you manage stress and maintain mental well-being? Do you have any personal practices or routines that help you stay centered?
I have young children, and they’re great reminders that being an adult isn’t all that great sometimes (laughs). Honestly, I try to be a little more like them every day. One thing they do well that adults have long forgotten is they wear their hearts on their sleeves. Happy things are happy, sad things are sad. It helps them grapple with reality, and I try to do the same. When you feel things in real time, you can get into a nice flow. It frees both heart and mind.
What habits or practices have been most instrumental in your personal and professional growth?
I try to do things right away. The number of things that can accumulate and fester is astounding. Anything I don’t plan to do, I delete and move on cleanly.
I ask why. Sometimes in organizations there’s a time honored tradition of maintaining the status quo. This can mean that processes continue with no good reason. Rooting these out frees up all our time to try new things. It starts with asking why.
I read and listen as much as possible. I consume an enormous amount of content, whether written or audio. The goal is to learn what’s happening in the world and also to hear from people I disagree with. The aim is to understand, to broaden my field of understanding.
The business world is evolving faster than ever. How do you ensure you’re constantly updating your knowledge and staying ahead of the curve?
I read. Sometimes that’s reading high publications like The Economist and the New Yorker and sometimes that’s low publications like DailyMail or US Weekly. I try to track internet culture mostly through Reddit. I consume from the American left and I also make sure to spend time on FoxNews. I actually really enjoy The Greg Gutfeld show. I don’t read enough international media candidly which is a gap, alas.
The importance of diversity and inclusion in the workplace has been emphasized more than ever. Do you have any initiatives promoting diversity and inclusion in your organization?
In one of my companies, we’re in student travel and travel is exciting and fun, so Rustic Pathways attracts a decent amount of linguistic, cultural, ethnic, and racial diversity in both our clients and our workforce. Our leadership is more diverse in terms of gender, ethnic, geographic, and experiential diversity than any company of our scale.
We’ve started to put more weight in our diversity and inclusion efforts into actively recruiting older folks. Age diversity is harder and so we’ve had to expand our efforts. Actively reaching out to experiential educators with experience and showing them that student travel may be a viable career option and not sleeping on futons ten to a room as they may think. Dear experienced educators, please contact us at Rustic Pathways, we’re looking for you!
Can you share a piece of feedback or advice you received that significantly altered your leadership approach or philosophy?
That stuff is more or less baked in your youth. My parents and church leaders and community forged a lot of this when I was 12 I’m sure. I don’t think there’s a piece of advice that significantly altered my philosophy since I graduated from college and certainly not since my early professional years. My approach to leadership has been much more evolutionary and cyclical. I try to learn from everyone and stack those lessons one on top of the other. Honestly, I learned from Chili, the mom in Bluey, that you can always be more patient and that mistakes are part of growing, even the repeated mistakes.
You are a person of great influence. If you could start a movement that would bring the most amount of good to the most amount of people, what would that be?
I would love to inspire people how to start their own entities. I use the term entity intentionally rather than business, nonprofit, NGO, art studio, summer camp or tennis center. Entities are important. I’m really not thinking about some AI driven tech startup that IPOs, but rather I’m thinking about a thing that adds value by delivering a product or service of merit in their local community. If we had more lower case “e” entrepreneurs, addressing local needs better and teaching others in their community, building communities, we’d live in a radically different world.
How can our readers further follow your work online?
https://shaynefitzcoy.com/
@rusticpathways on Instagram
Thank you for the time you spent sharing these fantastic insights. We wish you only continued success in your great work!
About the Interviewer: Cynthia Corsetti is an esteemed executive coach with over two decades in corporate leadership and 11 years in executive coaching. Author of the upcoming book, “Dark Drivers,” she guides high-performing professionals and Fortune 500 firms to recognize and manage underlying influences affecting their leadership. Beyond individual coaching, Cynthia offers a 6-month executive transition program and partners with organizations to nurture the next wave of leadership excellence.
