The Failure Gap

Speaker 2 (00:00.162)
Hello and welcome to The Failure Gap where we talk with leaders about closing the space between agreement and alignment. We love talking with interesting people and today we're joined by Harvey Johnson. Harvey is the CEO of PD Mayors, an accounting firm based on the East Coast. And I'm so excited personally, Harvey, to have you here today because I feel like you really embody this idea of aligned leadership. And I'm really excited to have the opportunity to share some of your journey with our listeners, some of your thoughts about the power of alignment.

in your own life and in your own career. So Harvey, welcome to the Failure Gap.

Thank you, Julie. It's pleasure to be here.

Glad to have you. And I would love it if you would just start this conversation by sharing with our listeners a little bit about your journey to leadership. What has brought you into being the CEO of PDNairs?

Sure. Great. Perfect place to start. So just a little bit of background about PV Mayors. We are an East Coast based accounting firm. We operate in Virginia, North Carolina, and Maryland. Our team is about 400 to 450 people and the firm is around a hundred million in revenue. If we're really lucky, we will top that this year. I have been with PV Mayors my whole professional career. I started with the firm in 2003.

Speaker 1 (01:18.734)
I've worked my way up from all through the levels from staff to senior supervisor manager partner. When I became partner in 2013, took over and started leading one of our specialized niches. Also then became the regional partner in charge. you know, I'd say CEO was never part of my career goals starting out. I very, very good about vision and goal setting.

I had three goals when I came out of college. I want to make partner. want to get my master's degree and I want to pass the CPA exam. It wasn't until later in my career that the opportunity to be considered for CEO came up. I took over in January of 2020, right before the world burned down for a little while. And it was certainly a thrust into the fire of leadership and running an organization. But my

The to get there was somewhat interesting. We have a mandatory retirement age. We're a partnership. So our previous CEO had to retire at 65. It was in 2018 when we started the selection process for looking for his successor. Me being one of the younger partners as well as one of the more accomplished for our group, they tapped me on the shoulder.

There were eight folks as part of that selection process. We had a whole committee and we were going through different panel interviews and one-on-one interviews. We had to write essays to the partner group and present to the partner group on like, what makes you a good leader? And it was the most uncomfortable thing I've ever done in my life, to be honest, because no one, guess, when I thought about leadership, no one ever really just shows up and say, I'm Harvey, I'm here to lead, right?

Leaders are almost kind of organically identified. I grew up on teams. No one ever said, you're the leader of the team. Like the leader of the team just kind of emerged within the pack, if you will. So one being someone who has never thought about what makes me a good leader, what makes Harvey great? Why am I the person to lead everyone? Also just a little bit of the humility factor for me, right?

Speaker 1 (03:38.634)
actually very rarely will introduce myself to someone as an executive. I tell them I'm an accountant because it's not something I want to go and boast and brag. I don't need to pound my chest about how great I am. But also just thinking about your human feelings of self-worth. Like, am I good enough? Can I lead this? I remember going through an executive leadership program leading up to this once I became a candidate. And as part of the

the course, we had to talk about different aspects, but I remember sharing with my coach, her name was Lila. She was wonderful, very, very small stature, wore glasses, just the most unassuming woman with the most powerful presence I've ever been around. But I remember telling her and telling the group and just expressing those fears of, I've never done this before. Am I good enough? I've never led an organization. I've never been a CEO.

How am I going to take over for this iconic leader who's been the CEO for 30 years? There's no way I'm going to be good enough. And I remember Lila looking back at me and she said, yep, Harvey, you're right.

and your partners know all of this and they voted for you anyway. And that was really one of the first times professionally where I realized, yes, I am good enough. And they chose me because of all the potential and opportunity that they saw in me that you obviously have to keep growing. You have to learn, you have to mature into this role. But as far as all of the characteristics of what makes me a good leader, someone who's a self-starter, self-motivating.

goal-oriented, a risk taker, someone who can, I've been kind of my business profile personality index describes me as an innovative problem solvers, someone with higher, self-accountable, someone who can drive change and challenge the status quo. It was those types of characteristics helped me lean into my leadership and being a good leader, even though I wasn't.

Speaker 1 (05:50.776)
quote, experience of being an executive at the time.

Yeah. I really appreciate that self-reflection, Harvey, because I know you to be a leader who brings a really beautiful intersection and a powerful intersection of humility and confidence. And that idea that I certainly have room to grow and learn, and I have something valuable to contribute. And I really appreciated that over the years as I've gotten to know you as a leader. And I think it's really...

It's really interesting to know that you had to find that space for yourself. didn't just, it wasn't just, we're born with it, right? You don't just come into it. Yeah.

Well, it was part of what we called my growing edge. as part of that course, you were asked like, what's the one thing in your life that if you change would have the biggest impact on you professionally and personally. So just spending some time self reflecting on that. But where we landed as far as what my leadership challenge was courageous authenticity.

They didn't want me to be the next version of Alan, our previous CEO. They didn't want me to be anything other than me. And part of what allows me to really connect with people is the fact that I'm authentic. You will very rarely hear me read from, if I'm reading from notes and our teleprompter, it's going to sound terrible. It is so disingenuine and just, I don't typically speak in corporate speak. don't speak like an executive. I speak like I'm speaking to Julie.

Speaker 1 (07:20.046)
And I speak like that to every one of our people, which really allows me to connect to them pretty authentically. Just the courage to be myself.

Yeah. And I think that shines through. So I've always, always appreciated that about you. And I think that there's something in that space of also not needing to be a replica of the person who came before you, no matter how successful they might've been or how great of a person and how awesome of a leader, you can't be a carbon copy of somebody else. You have to find your own way forward in leadership. And that's when you start to get to that intersection of humility and competence.

Absolutely. Thank you.

Yeah. Well, thank you for that introduction and giving people a sense of who you are in your path to leadership. I'm curious now, Harvey, as we talk about this space between agreement and alignment, is there anything in your own life, like we all talk about it professionally, we all know strategy, transformation, we all struggled to align to that, but in your own personal life, is there anything that you've tried to, or you feel like I agree that would be great if I did that, and there's sort of a journey of alignment to getting that done?

Well, I just think about my own keys to success of how I've gotten here. And it really is going back to someone who's being very, very goal oriented and action setting that process of visioning. Where is it that I want to, what does Harvey want to be in 10 years? Where do I want to be in five years? Where does this firm want to be in 10 years and five years? And then starting with that goal and vision, coming back to setting the individual goals that get you there, then the hard work and the preparation.

Speaker 1 (08:54.862)
having the right diligence to map out that process, having the attitude and the patience to get there because failure comes along the way. And that is really, to be honest, I've experienced a lot of failure from very, very on in my career, which has built kind of that grit and that resiliency that you need to lead because you're going to fail. I'm a big fan of Brene Brown.

kind of love everything that she does. And she talks about daring to lead and courageous vulnerability, right? If in order to inspire trust, and she talks about how the courage to be vulnerable is not about winning or losing, it's about the courage to show up when you can't predict or control the outcome. And that if you choose courage, that you're gonna know failure, you'll know disappointment, you'll know setback, you'll know heartache.

And that's why it's called courage. That's also why it's so rare because most people wouldn't or don't have the ability to know that you're going to fail like that and still show up to play the game if you will.

You know, I think that's such an interesting thread to pull just a little bit on in this idea of alignment, because we often hear leadership teams say, we need to empower people around here. We need to empower our leaders. And with empowerment comes accountability and comes the risk that you're going to fail and you might be held accountable to that failure. And then we see leaders get really squeamish about, know, do they, are they really willing to do that? And I think that.

this courage to fail, this idea that you can do hard things and you can work your way through it, it plays into the ability of a leadership team to create this construct of empowerment for their next level of leaders. Have you grappled with that at all?

Speaker 1 (10:55.578)
Just a little bit. You know, I think about where our firm and our culture and what we're trying to create one, two fundamentals of transparency and accountability, right? You have to have clarity in order to delegate and you have to have hold people accountable. Everyone loves to talk about accountability until it's time for them to be held accountable. So it's something that certainly.

something is human nature, right? You're always thinking about that. But when I talk about really, or some of the challenges in our organization, in particular, it's all around teaming and collaborating. It's kind of one of those things where everybody, and it makes such an inherent sense, right? let's work together, let's collaborate on all these things. But you'd be incredibly surprised at how much of a challenge that is.

in an organization, particularly when you get to higher levels, right? Everyone is a players, everyone is been successful individually contributing. And so not necessarily intentionally, but sometimes egos get in the way when you're trying to collaborate across functions or departments. And then this notion of decision rights always comes up. What, who has the decision rights for things? And that is just always a really difficult thing.

What we've tried to do at PB Mayors is really put a little bit of a framework around it. I'd say all the time, if I can't put the right stakeholders in the ring to talk about a problem, and if we've identified the right problem, we spend a lot of time getting to what's the root problem, what are we trying to solve for? What's the objective for this group to solve for? If that group can't come up with three to five solutions,

and kind of put them in a decision matrix to go, how costly is this? How much of the resource is going to be? How long is this going to take to implement? How difficult is that? If they can get together and come up with three solutions and walk out of there going, hey, we think this is the right recommendation. I have 100 % the wrong group of leaders.

Speaker 2 (13:13.085)
It's not the way people in the room, huh?

That's not sometimes, and this was something that I think Bruce had shared with me as just kind of talking through some of the leadership dynamics and challenges at our firm. It's, it's that Harvey, you, you continue to do this work. We've done a lot of work with Kerikens of really over the last couple of years around alignment and making sure we're creating the right culture for our team to be successful. And it's like, you're constantly saying the right things and you're constantly putting in the right systems.

And if you're still having all of that friction, sometimes it's not about the process, it's about the people in the room.

Yeah, and that's a tough conclusion to come to, I think, for leaders. And you want to give that as much time as you can, and you don't want to give it too much time because then those become around tough decisions. I want to click down just a minute on your decision framework because I think this is so interesting. I like your thought process around get the right people in the room and then understand what are, let's call it three possible solutions that could solve this problem, and then put that through.

decision matrix around how much is it going to cost, how long is it going to take, to what degree is it going to fix the problem, and then come up with a recommendation. Did I get that right out of these? Yeah, I think that's a really nice way to think about it because we often get kind of hung up on how do we make this decision, and I think that's a really nice, simple, and accessible framework for people to use.

Speaker 1 (14:29.186)
Absolutely.

Speaker 1 (14:40.966)
for 100%. Again, there's more, there's never just one answer to any problem, right? There's always creative interest and solutions. We even try to get the leaders out of the room. Sometimes we say, let's make sure we agree on what the root cause is. And then let's go engage our teams. Let's go engage lower level people in the organization to really come up with innovative and different ideas to solve it. but when it comes back to again, the decision makers, who should make this decision? Well, if I've.

put this group together and I've asked y'all to come up with solutions and y'all consider them and y'all come back with that recommendation. I think I have a real good darn reason to not go, yes, that's the one I'm gonna support. Because you're thinking about all those different things. What are the other priorities? What can we do right now? What's the thing that's gonna be long-term? Often it's multiple things that we're gonna do this now because it's short and we can get a quick win and cost effective. But we're building towards the long-term solution that is

a bit more complicated and it takes more time and resources. And it's very, very rare that that group comes back and says, we couldn't agree on something.

Yeah. We couldn't figure something out. Yeah. When you think, Harvey, about your experience as the CEO of PD Mayors, is there an example that stands out to you where the leadership team has worked really hard to get aligned to something specific? Can you walk our listeners through an example?

Mm-hmm.

Speaker 1 (16:10.606)
Oh, every time we have M &A, every time we do an acquisition. because we're always, you're right. We're always have our strategic plans and our budgets and our priorities. And I always have this sheepish grin when I come in the room and I say, guys, I know you were really busy. And I know we not even through integrating the last one, but there's this really great opportunity to go require another firm.

And after you see the heads roll back for a minute eyes roll back for a minute because it's just a lot of pressure It's a lot of stress. You're already have a full plate now. We're we're picking this up as well so but every time the groove always rallies around it because They understand in goal in mind right is gonna make us better. We're gonna go acquire another firm It's either a new or existing market. It's gonna expand our team. It's gonna

create new talent, we're going to be new opportunities, we're going to be stronger as a result of it. So it's one of those things where the group is hesitant to do it. There's often of, we're not even done implementing the previous one sometimes. And you look at our firm, when I took over in January of 2020, at the end of 2020, we were a $50 million firm. We're going to be a hundred million dollar organization five years later. So

Doubling in size comes from a lot of organic growth, but I think we've done essentially four acquisitions over that time. So basically one every other year. And so it increased the tense environment. There's a lot of stress. There's a lot to get done, obviously. But the way the group rallies around the notion of, I may not agree that this is the right time, but when is the right time, right? We have to take advantage of the opportunities.

Yeah. And when you think about, you all have put a lot of time and energy into your leadership ways of working. When you think about those ways of working and that moment comes when the M &A, let's call it the M &A crazy train, right? Is leaving the station, right? How do your ways of working come into play there as people are thinking, oh my gosh, this is a lot of work and we've got a lot of other work to do and now we're going to tackle this. When you think about specifically for P.B. Mayer's, your ways of working,

Speaker 2 (18:31.448)
How does that come into play?

Yeah. So we refer to those as our team commitments. And we have five, but three of them tend to stick out very, very clearly in that. And even four, if you will. One is around communicating constructively, right? We have a belief of willingness to say what needs to be said, no matter how difficult it is, no matter what you think, making sure that we are creating a safe environment for people to express themselves, teaming and collaborating.

Right. If you're going to, you're going to bring on a new acquisition or you're going to achieve anything from a large scale perspective, you're going to have to do it together. There's nothing, zero things at this level in our organization that are just happened in one department. Everything is cross-functional. Everything needs an IT resource. Everything needs an HR touch or a finance perspective. So it just, it's, it's the collaboration from that group.

think there's that whole proverb, right? If you want to go fast, you go alone, but if you want to go far, you go together. Our team absolutely always, bodies. Yeah, they go, they've, they embody that, that mantra because they know that we're going to be stronger together. And then you really start to see, what we call our teaching to delegate team commitment come to life. You can't do everything by yourself. We're picking up something new.

They go.

Speaker 1 (20:02.114)
You have to really, really start delegating downstream. And you can do that when you have clarity on what the vision is and what needs to be done. And you've built some of that trust. If not, you're not, it's hard to delegate people if they don't understand what they're trying to accomplish and what they're accountable for. And then last, just that enterprise mindset. This is what's best for the firm. Everyone's going to do what and trust that.

we're working towards and what we're doing is in the best interest of PV mayors. And that's where you kind of really see the magic happen.

Yeah. You know, I work with so many leadership teams who say that they want or they need to have an enterprise mindset across the senior leaders, but they struggle with that. Any insight or perspective on what it takes to get aligned as a leadership team around an enterprise mindset that might be useful for people who are struggling with it?

And I think this is relevant to just all of our team members in our organization, but in particular, when it comes to alignment versus the agreement, I think people need to feel safe, seen, valued. Right? You need to have safety, safety to speak your mind and make sure that when you don't agree that you can do so in an open space and you're not going to be, there's no repercussions for it, safe to challenge ideas, safe to challenge assumptions.

So they have to have that, call it safety within the group to be able to express themselves or you'll never get to alignment. Being seed or heard, right? That your voice was considered. I said my piece and we all can't, if there's, we have six people on our executive leadership team, we can't all agree on everything all the time. There's going to be someone that has to align. But as long as you feel like your voice has been heard and in particular, it's about closing the loop on that communication.

Speaker 1 (21:57.262)
Julie, we heard your input, we heard your feedback, we had to make a different decision and here's why we made that decision. Helps people get to that state of alignment. And then just valued, right? As an individual, I recognize my contributions are important to the team, they're recognized and valued by the organization. And that not only addresses that kind of agreement versus alignment within.

our leadership team, but that trickles down to all of your employees when they're in an organization. When they feel safe, when they feel seen, when they feel valued, you really, really start to create a powerful culture.

Yeah, I love that mantra, safe, seen, and valued. And I think that you're right, it really fuels that enterprise mindset because it allows you to get out of your own what's best for us and our part of the organization and to look more broadly across and say, what's best for the enterprise?

Yeah, I think everyone's intentions is always right to do what's best with the firm where your blockers get into is again, some of the individual silos or what you think you're accountable for being able to step back up onto that balcony of let me get out of my service line. Let me get out of my department and think about the firm's broader picture. So it's been obviously a lot of work that we've done for you all to just constantly reinforce that and

It's like everything else, have to consistently do it. You have to come back to that agreement alignment. It's gonna ebb and flow. You don't get there and go, we're done. You're gonna have those waves and just periods. And again, having it pretty consistent.

Speaker 2 (23:37.922)
You got to stick with it. That's, think, one of the things that we see people struggle with the most is that alignment is not a final state. It is something that you continually have to work with, and it does ebb and flow. And part of your job as the CEO and the other enterprise leaders is to stay in it and to build those habits so it's not such a lift all the

Yeah. And you have new team members. I have three new team members on my executive leadership team this year. We've had to transition some other team members because of where they work, the right leaders for the organization. now you're in some ways it's I'll say easier because you're having to reset and regroup and it's nice to bring the group back together. In other ways, you're bringing new people, introducing them to a team dynamic. So that has its own impact to the culture, but

I think about the difficult things that, you have to do as a leader and with thinking about the core values and our team commitments, it's really, really easy to identify. Everyone thinks about, our culture and we don't want, we want to risk what's best for the culture. It's easy to identify toxicity, right? You can always identify the person who just stands out. They clearly don't align and all of those things. I think the more difficult aspect of that is.

when it comes to the team commitments and people not either being able to or just not showing up in the right way. I've had two individuals where these people have been with the organization a long time. They love the firm. They have given their life in many respects to PB Mayors. But at our level, if you can't communicate clearly what the expectations are and you can't be transparent around what the expectations are.

and you can't team and collaborate and work effectively, and you can't either hold yourself or others accountable, you're not gonna be successful as a leader. And so that conversation with someone, woof, that's a harder.

Speaker 2 (25:47.918)
Yeah, that's a heavy one. That's a heavy one. But I do appreciate also you called out at this level. And I think for all of our listeners, I just want to have them lean in for a minute and think about where they are in their own career journey. Because one of the things that hinges somebody from being a great team leader to becoming an enterprise leader, a senior level leader, is the ability to do those things that you've just mentioned. Team and collaborate, hold people accountable, create clarity. Those are the things that give you that leg up.

to continue to grow and advance in your career. So I think those are really important to call out. Harvey, we're regrouping after a little bit of a technical outage and thank you for hanging in there with us. I appreciate it. We left off with me asking you about an example, a favorite example that you might have of where your team has really aligned and delivered together through your team commitments. Can you just share a story with us that really stands out to you?

Sure, I can kind of share a real live example that we're going through right now. And it's really around our client targeting objectives that we have for the organization. If I step back to our firm and our mission and what we started with, our firm is over 60 years old and we have the same mission that we had 60 years ago. And that is to provide excellent client service. We want to take care of our employees, want to make sure that we provide opportunities

for them to not only have a job, but to have a career and have this be a profession for them. And we also want to support the communities in which we live and serve. Without strong communities, you don't have clients and without strong communities, our people don't have places to live and grow and support their families. So those objectives have not changed. They're the same ones that we had 60 years ago.

They're the same objectives and mission that we're going to have 60 years from now. What has changed over that time is how. What's also changed over the last few years is for who. And over the last 10 years, in 2015, a firm was basically a $30 million organization. In 2020, we were a $50 million organization. Here by the end of 2025, we expect to be $100 million organization.

Speaker 1 (28:04.59)
So that's some pretty substantial growth in particular just over the last five years doubling in size. But as your organization evolves, right, the nature and the size and the complexity of the clients have to evolve with it. The clients that we're targeting and serving today are very, very different from the clients from 60 years ago. But even from five, 10 years ago, we have to think about who it is that we want to serve. Those are the same goals, right? Provide great client service, take care of our people.

support our communities, the question is for whom? Which clients? Because that dictates and drives all of our marketing, all of our recruiting, all of the efforts that we have internally around supporting that strategy. And one of the things that has been, we've taken our approach for that. I've just sort been so impressed with our team and how those aligned to our team commitments. What we've been doing is really taking a blank sheet of paper approach.

not looking at who we have and who are our clients today and how do we grow that wallet share or how do we expand presence, but really taking a step back and saying, if you had a blank canvas, what would the picture of the client look like today? As we think about disruption, as we think about the size of the client, the nature of the services that we're providing, not only today, but that we anticipate providing over the next five, 10 years, that client profile and that

It looks very, very different and will look very, different over the next few years, which is a very, very hard exercise to do. It certainly, in my opinion, takes a little bit of a open mind and a risk-taking approach. Our entrepreneurial, be entrepreneurial is one of our team commitments. And it's just allowing them to get in the space of thinking differently about not what we are, but what we could become. And so it's been a wonderful exercise around

teaming and collaborating together, bringing together all of our different resources and thought leadership from the market standpoint, and really exercising on that, entrepreneurial mindset, because it's gonna be a massive shift for the organization.

Speaker 2 (30:13.686)
I think that's so exciting to be able to do that blank sheet exercise with your people. also what a rewarding thing for you as the CEO after all of the time and investment you've put into aligning around these team commitments and how you want to lead together to be able to go into this exercise with people bringing that mindset and bringing that energy in, it must be really rewarding.

it's extremely rewarding. if you, again, as you think about the way the firm has grown and how you lead as an organization at a smaller, as a smaller firm, I'll say the C-suite were able to make a lot more of the decisions. Really the CEO kind of dictated the strategy or CRO or all of those things. We made a lot of the decisions that good Lord, at a hundred million dollars, you just can't make. You have to delegate. We have to teach and delegate one of our lurching commitments.

And just seeing how empowered our team members have become, seeing them able to utilize their subject matter expertise, really feel like they have a voice in shaping the future is incredibly rewarding to see.

Yeah, I'll bet. And it's been a joy to be a partner with you on that journey. So thank you for that opportunity. I'd like to bring us out to a couple of final questions here. And one of them is, if you were asked by another CEO who has aspirations of growing from 50 million to 100 million or whatever their exponential growth goal might be, and they're saying this alignment thing, sounds pretty awesome. Where should I start? What should I do? What are a couple of...

three hot tips you would have for that person about how to get started on aligning their teams so they're delivering together.

Speaker 1 (31:54.796)
Yeah. My first two would be transparency and accountability, right? You can't delegate responsibility if people aren't clear on what the task and what the goal is. The more crisp, the more clear you can have for your vision for the organization, that you can articulate that across the firm, the more that you'll be able to empower your team to lead. My message has to be, and it has to resonate and be something that

all the way from on board members to our partner group, all the way down to the admin, even the interns in the organization can understand. So it has to be simple. It has to be clear, but also has to be powerful and have meaning as the CEO. You have to be able to articulate that vision to your group. And then, right, what's the transparency? You can then start to really, really delegate, but you've got to hold your team members accountable, right? There's the whole speed of trust. There's a whole book on that. You can't have trust without

accountability and that starts certainly at the top of the organization. First and foremost, owning your own mistakes and holding yourself accountable. And then everyone else starting with self and having that self accountability and the ability to commitment to hold each other accountable are certainly the two things that I would look at. last but not least is you have to look at, take a hard look at your team. There are, you know, there's a point.

Juliet, which you can have the right commitments, you can have the right culture, you can have the right attitude, but if you don't have the right leaders in the room, you're only going to go so far. And that's certainly something that we've seen and it's just natural. Again, as your organization grows, the skillsets that you need at a $30 million firm, a little bit different as a 50 million and extremely different at a hundred million, we're thinking about what are the skillsets we need at two, $300 million.

And sometimes you outgrow people and leaders in certain positions and you have to be willing to look at that, take a hard look at it and be able to make the hard decisions. Strongly encourage working with someone like Kerikens. You all have been very, very instrumental and powerful in helping us get clarity around that vision. Who do we want to be? How do we want to lead? And how do we want to show up together? It's work that

Speaker 1 (34:21.93)
One, honestly can say Witten have gotten to where we are without you all in that journey.

Thank you for that. appreciate that. And we are grateful for the partnership and the opportunity to be on this ride with you and your team, your wonderful partners to work with and your embrace of the power of aligned leadership, I think is really showing up in the results. So thank you for that. We have one last question, and this is just a fun one for you. If you could think about.

aligning your family, your community, some group of people, your colleagues, the world, whatever, to achieve something. What would that something be? What would you love to see people get aligned to deliver together?

Yeah. So I'm going to bring awareness to an issue and the topic that folks probably know about, but haven't maybe not fully understand the full impact of it. I was watching a documentary with my daughter not long ago and it was very, very unsettling. so I promised that I would do something about it. This is my attempt to do something. The topic is called Ocean Trolling.

Go!

Speaker 1 (35:21.826)
And I'm sure you might be familiar with this where there's the big boats in the ocean and they throw out big nets and they just catch fish at large scale quantities. Okay. That's what ocean trolling is. But like all services, right, you evolve over time and with technology. So the way this has evolved today is they have much, much bigger nets and they have these metal rods on them at the bottom. So they sink all the way to the ocean floor.

So you're not just scooping up fish out in the middle part of the ocean. They literally drop nets all the way down to the bottom and they scrape it all the way across the ocean floor. Think about these hundreds plus yards wide. Well, that sounds great, but it's actually the very, very inefficient way of fishing. so why does this matter? Well, it's destroying everything in its path.

these metal things that go down to the ocean floor and it literally rips the ocean floor to shreds. And it kills everything in its path. And that's important because the ocean is its own ecosystem, right? Everything relies on each other, all of the marine life, all of the plants, everything. And that's equally or very, very important for us on land because the ocean does two things that people don't realize.

One, it produces over half of the oxygen we breathe. There's ocean grass all along the bottom floor of the ocean. It produces more air than all the trees on land can buy. Yeah, so we're ripping it all to shreds and it's going to have a massive impact. It also sucks up all of the CO2 emissions. So for anyone who cares about...

you know, climate change and CO2 emissions and taking better care of our planet. The ocean absorbs all of this CO2 that we produce and helps bring down the rock. So as we're destroying it, the level of climate change, the temperature is not only going to rise faster, but the toxicity in the air is going to get much more deadly. This is way more impactful and significant than anything that we are talking about as far as reducing

Speaker 1 (37:41.048)
the use of oil or gas or all of those things from the standpoint. So it's also killing half of the marine life. They trawled these fish and they scoop up everything, but they're only looking for one species. So you might be looking for clams or scallops and they shove all of the dead fish back into the ocean. It is incredibly wasteful. This is food that could be feeding people from around the world.

We are damaging our planet in what could be unrepairable ways. If we don't stop the lines on the floor from this can be seen from space. That's how wide those nets are. and they're just doing it all day, every day. This is a 24 seven operation. And because it's out in the ocean, most people don't even recognize this happening, but it's having a real big impact on us, our land.

And I like my planet. I'd like to stay here a time. I'm a big believer of taking care of our home and the place that we live, supporting the community in which we live and service. And so I would bring awareness to that. And there has to be a much, much more efficient way to fish.

Yeah, so aligning on a solution to that problem, I think is a really great call to action there. And we'll definitely get that message out for you, Ari. So let your daughter know.

I would tell her that I made her proud today.

Speaker 2 (39:12.482)
Yeah, there you go. There you go. Well, thank you so much. I really appreciate your willingness to have this conversation, to share your own leadership journey. You talked a lot at the beginning of this conversation about your journey through finding that intersection of humility and courage and how you stand in that space with gravitas to accept the leadership and also move into it and push yourself in ways that you wouldn't have expected maybe early on in your career when you had your three goals of

becoming a CPA and some of the other things that you shared at that point. I really appreciate your diving deeper into accountability. A lot of people do struggle with that as leaders. And the enterprise mindset piece is so important as you look to align and deliver together as a leadership team. So we've had a couple of really big topics. You've given us some great examples from the work you're doing at PBMares. And we'll end that on a call to say, efficiency or going fast is not always the right answer when you...

come to things like how do we take care of the planet and how do we care for our ecosystems. Sometimes you have to look for more creative and effective ways that might not feel as fast and efficient as scraping the ocean floor. So those are all things that we can come together and work to align on finding better solutions for. So I appreciate that call to action. And with that, Harvey, I'm going to say thank you very much. We really appreciate your time and your energy and your leadership.

And for all of our listeners who are joining us here today, please remember to like and subscribe and to share this episode with your colleagues and your friends. We really appreciate your support. And Harvey, thanks again for being a guest on the Failure Gap.

Thank you so much. was my pleasure.

Speaker 2 (40:53.004)
Yeah, we'll see you next time.