The Success Nuggets

Success Nuggets #35 - Celebrating Creativity and Compassion! with Terry Kyle

• David Abel • Season 2 • Episode 15

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This week on The Success Nuggets, I had the incredible opportunity to host an inspiring guest whose work as a book author and entrepreneur is nothing short of transformative. With a focus on promoting imagination and creation, he helps others overcome mental laziness by explaining the pitfalls to avoid and guiding them on the paths to achieving real management success.

As one of the best accountability partners I've ever encountered, his dedication to effective processes, habits, and regular check-ins is unmatched. Despite his remarkable 40-year journey as an entrepreneur (which he might not thank me for mentioning 😉), he remains youthful at heart. His realistic, often humorous insights into creating a great work culture are both refreshing and enlightening.

Beyond his professional achievements, he is the compassionate founder of a dog shelter that has helped thousands of dogs find loving homes. His pioneering work in this field is a masterclass in customer experience! If, like him, you dream of seeing an end to dog loneliness and homelessness, I strongly encourage you to follow his journey and learn how we can address these fixable problems together.

Thank you, Terry, for sharing your wisdom and compassion. Your work in both the literary and animal welfare worlds continues to inspire us all! 🐾❤️

Speaker 1:

Amazing, amazing wisdom.

Speaker 2:

Entrepreneurs Success, success.

Speaker 1:

Around the world? This is the Success Nuggets Podcast. Have you ever wondered what you could learn and how inspired you'd be if you asked incredible people from around the world about the patterns that drive progress? Get ready to dive into a world of insights and inspiration. This is the Success Nuggets podcast, with the founder of the Digital Lightbulb and your host, david Abel.

Speaker 3:

Today we're thrilled to welcome a true visionary, seasoned entrepreneur, terry Carl, to the show. With over 40 years of entrepreneurial experience, terry has not only mastered the art of building successful ventures, but has also developed a knack for creating and teaching simple, effective habits that drive personal and professional success. Hello Terry, greetings David. How are you doing man Pleasure to be here. It's amazing to have you on Four decades in business and you kind of see life as a series of projects now, rather than a single job or a career path. How's that mindset come?

Speaker 2:

about I do. My wife used it as a character flaw, but therapy hasn't worked. It's just kind of who I am. So I think one of the things I talk about in my book, as you might well know, david, is the importance of your imagination. As an entrepreneur, your imagination is extremely important because you can't create anything or a different future for yourself or an organization without imagination. And you've also got to have a kind of again what other people around me might say a somewhat idiotic self-belief that it will actually work, which of course often it won't. And then you've got to have that see-through ability to execute, of course, on that. So you've got to find that space and your particular way of keeping that imagination working and engaging with new projects. And it requires rejecting mental laziness and saying screw that. I enjoy my imagination when it's working and I'm not going to rely on other people just to provide it all for me. I'm going to be that creator, that imaginer.

Speaker 2:

And when you said 40 years of entrepreneurial experience, you said, whoa, david, slow down, that's too much so for my age. I have excellent heart health because with my dogs we walk about 350 kilometers every month. This is great for me. It's my imagination, my physical health and all of that. But I didn't get there easily and I know because I invite people to join me on the walk all the time and almost nobody ever does, because they can't get over that hurdle, that obstacle of getting up early. Even though we go and see magnificent views, it's in the mountains and all of that. They just can't get over that kind of mental laziness hurdle to do it.

Speaker 3:

Yeah, that's it. How do you teach others to build key habits and maintain them? I think this is where I struggle with maintaining habits.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, I'm toying with the idea of doing another book and program after the one I'm currently on which is about dogs, about management, because as a certain kind of entrepreneur, I've spent most of my adult life absolutely hating management. I hate nothing more than managingaging people. Biggest pain in the ass in the world, Absolutely hate it. People will tell you give you excuses, this password didn't work so I didn't give you the thing a week ago, Just kill me. However, I've had to move beyond that because you actually to be effective with an organization, you must have your management nailed down. You just got to have it. You just can't do without it. It's like the habits. So management, a lot of management is self-management. So if you're the manager, you've got to manage your own stuff first, and I talk about that in the book. I have the habit of self-leadership rather than leadership, Because if you've got it working for you internally, like your mindset and habits and all of that, your team will fall into place without any problems at all. You've got to view it as starting from an internal point, not the external one of shouting at people or whatever. That doesn't work in the long run. So how I teach it and the way that I teach it. I work one-on-one, so I often mentor young people here in Sofia. I'll probably take on two next year. I work with them for about three months. We meet once a week and we discuss all these things their habits, their dreams and natural skills and all that usual stuff. But in terms of making sure that habits happen, you either have to do the management. So very simple tools and I obviously did not invent any of these. They've been around forever. The Monday setup meeting and the Friday review meeting of progress work and there might be a midweek brief check-in for oversight is critically important.

Speaker 2:

In the book I talked about what I consider are the three critical pillars of good management, which is, firstly, you have to have accountability, structure and over-communication, and the reason I say over-communication and not communication is because we all think we're great communicators. Turns out, we all pretty much suck at that and we think we're clear, but we weren't clear enough and we need to over-communicate more. Structure is meetings, high quality meetings. If you've got garbage meetings, then your culture is not doing well. You need to work on that and I find a very useful technique within a poor meeting is to adopt a kind of a meta commentary on how bad the meeting is during the meeting, kind of like Chandler does in Friends. So he will have this meta kind of sarcastic narrative on how badly something's going while it's actually happening. And this is a good way to wake up the zombies who might have just drifted off because the meeting is horrible and actually start to reflect on thinking about what they're doing and not just kind of aimlessly going through with it.

Speaker 3:

Yeah, no, definitely Tell us a bit more about your culture. I know you put on things like skydiving and helping people with their journeys or boundaries, or more. Can you share any more briefly about that?

Speaker 2:

yeah.

Speaker 2:

So we have a specific mission externally but with internally, our goal is to make the time that our staff spend with us one in which they gain a lot of skills. They gain a lot of hands-on project management experience. And this is another thing where projects are very useful, because you can accelerate people's skill acquisition and confidence. And all of that by getting them to manage small projects that don't really matter too much If it blows up, nobody will be killed or die, it's okay and you kind of gradually escalate them to more and bigger projects. So we want our people, if they ever leave, to look back on the time with us and say, wow, I learned so many skills beyond what I thought I could do, so many good experiences work-wise as well, and met many great people in the company. But outside of that, we have a dedicated person. Her role is good vibes director, so her full-time job is to organize all these things for the team.

Speaker 2:

So we have about 100 people here at Dover, so we do things like skydiving, or we've done bungee jumping from hot air balloons, for example. We've done scuba diving as well. All of this, I mean we have a pretty young crew, so they like dangerous, extreme stuff. It's not for me. I'm afraid of heights. There's no way I'm getting up in a plane and jumping out Absolutely not. But they love it and that's cool because they get a lot out of it. And then I think, you know, when I hear back their experience of it and some of these guys here because Bulgaria is a bit of a poorer country I've never even been in a plane before and the first time they go on a plane they're jumping out of it not to fly somewhere for a holiday. So that's pretty extreme. But I can tell that was kind of an unforgettable life experience. You know they'll never forget it and they'll always associate it with the time they spent with us here. So we're big on that.

Speaker 2:

We like to promote from within. Promote from within the guy who's our senior sysadmin. He started as a junior support agent. Brilliant guy, alex T Hove, hopefully you'll be with us forever. We've had much more success promoting from within than external recruitment. This works for us better. So, yeah, those are just some of the principles. We have no shouting people. We've got rid of all of those. We have a pretty quiet, very cooperative, friendly. We don't tolerate bullies, any of that. I don't want to work with assholes and nobody on my team should either and what you find is, as you accumulate and we made every recruitment mistake possible in the world many times over early on stupid stuff what you find over time is that good people in your organization attract other good people. It's a bit magnetic. You reach a certain tipping point where it's just naturally someone knows someone in the company, they're great. We come and interview them, they're perfect. Next thing they're working for us, maybe forever. It's like that.

Speaker 3:

Yeah, oh, wonderful. That's such a good way to do it. I think I've always, as a manager, said I want you to be self-sufficient after this Any day, any of us could leave and to create a whole culture. That must be very rewarding.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, one more thing I'll add on that, David. So if anybody ever wants to leave, I absolutely respect their wishes on that and I'm not bitchy about it and I don't get sulky and annoyed. I think all of us are looking for the place where we fit in the world, and if it's not here, that's completely fine, and those people should absolutely keep going and find that place where they do fit in the world and I thank them for their time here and I wish them well in the future. And quite often we have people who leave here go to other companies. It sucks over there and they come back and work for us again, kind of forever as well, and get on no problem.

Speaker 3:

Now, terry, your impact extends beyond the business world. You're a passionate advocate for animal welfare, so in 2016,.

Speaker 2:

I was on this local entrepreneur, a British guy, his podcast and he wanted to talk about entrepreneurship and apparently all I talked about was dogs. And someone listening approached me and said this lady Luzenga, who'd been working in this area for a long time. In Bulgaria and in Eastern Europe, dogs are treated much worse than in the West. Casual cruelty, abuse of dogs particularly, is very common here. It's far worse than any Western country by a long way. So she approached me and there was this very big socialist abandoned industrial area very close to Sofia and there were no residential buildings or anything for dogs to get food and there were about 500 homeless dogs living there not getting fed, which is they turn on each other. It's a horrible situation. So back then in 2016, wpx agreed to start paying a guy a couple actually to feed the dogs three times a week. So they go out there with giant bags of food, do a big run, because it's a huge area, and just drop off in, like these 12, 15 checkpoints where the dogs are gathered. So that was 2016. In 2024, we're still doing that every single week. We're still doing that, but along the way, in 2019, we created our own foundation, which is Every Dog Matters EU. Our website is everydogmattersorg and in 2020, we opened our own dog shelter, because I kind of had the view that this is a bit of an old fashioned view.

Speaker 2:

But if you have a successful company, I feel that you should try to make a permanent positive change in the world, in the community that you operate in. I think it's kind of an obligation if you've been lucky enough to be really successful, and we have. So when we got involved in that, I naturally have a kind of world domination mindset in anything I do usually in peaceful ways, by the way. So my goal with the foundation and the shelter, it kind of has two components to it. I want to build a shelter of the future that's unlike any other shelter for dogs. So I'm kind of trying to build the world's best dog shelter, but for dogs, not for people, not for the people managing it, but from. If we want to talk about customer experience in business, the customer experience at our dog shelter. The customer is the dog.

Speaker 2:

So our dogs live in very big yards, for example, and most shelters in the world stick dogs in tiny cells because it's convenient and easy to manage them, but it's devastating and destructive for dogs, just like people. If you want to punish them, you stick them in a tiny prison cell and they kind of go mad. Same for dogs. So with us they live in very big yards like 600 square meters this kind of thing, 400 square meters. We have an onsite vet clinic and vet technician. We do orthopedic operations which can cost a thousand euros per leg on a shelter dog and we have quite a few dogs who needed three or four legs operated on after being hit by cars. So the costs are crazy high. It's insanely high to do all of this. Most shelters don't do any of this. Our dogs all get routine vaccinations, deworming, they're washed, groomed all of that because then they've got a better chance of adoption.

Speaker 2:

So the model with that is we want people and organizations around the world to look at what we're doing and go. That's the future. It's like the first time you pick up the smartphone and you play with a few apps. And I was using my smartphone this morning with a gps tracker and an app to see where my dogs were when they'd run off on the during the war, and that costs five euros a month per tracker, per dog. It's the best, best money, best tech ever. It's amazing. So the first time you pick up the smartphone and you kind of get what it means, you go. That's the future, you know. Forget about the clunky old giant nokia thing that looks like a walkie-talkie from the world war ii. I'm old enough to remember that.

Speaker 2:

So you know, our goal with the dog shelter is we're building a living prototype. We've made lots of mistakes but we've learned a lot. The shelters organizations can copy our blueprint, which will be up on our website very soon, and we'll be in a dog book that I'm semi-clinicating now. That'll be out in a few months, called why Dogs Matter. So our blueprint is there. It's obviously available for free. Any organization or person in the world who wants to build a new shelter can kind of get the cheat code on how to build a really good shelter for dogs. And one of the benefits of that is the dogs are much more adoptable, much easier to get them into homes because they don't have crazy behavioral problems from being stuck in a tiny cell. So I can't see the point of a dog shelter that isn't actively working to make its dogs more adoptable. Most do not care, those that do under--resourced or they just stick with the old model of the dog in a tiny prison cell, and that's the past. We want to throw that in the trash bin of history.

Speaker 2:

The second part of it is that we want to encourage a lot more responsible pet ownership, where all of the homeless dogs come from uncastrated, un-neutered pet dogs and owners who refuse to neuter their dogs and they dump the puppies on the streets or at shelters like ours, very common all over the world. So part of our mission is kind of to end street homelessness for dogs just by a few simple things and, by the way, the Netherlands, the country, already figured all this out. They have a completely working blueprint. There are no street dogs. The shelters are pretty empty in the Netherlands. Most other countries actively choose to ignore that model because it requires some work, some effort and they don't really care. They don't think there are votes in it, whatever, so they don't do it and to me this is a completely outrageous response when this is an entirely fixable problem.

Speaker 2:

The other part of it is that I know a lot of companies do donate to causes.

Speaker 2:

Of course, all bigger companies do that and that's okay.

Speaker 2:

But we felt that that sector was in so much trouble and under-resourced in terms of skills, marketing management, digital stuff all of that that we decided to take on management and doing it ourselves, and I can tell you the difference between donating and managing it yourself is like 100 times more difficult. Every day there are big challenges. Every day we deal with difficult animal cruelty cases that are just heartbreaking to see People do all kinds of horrible things to dogs and many other things. It's incredibly challenging. We now just got to the end of our fourth year in the shelter and basically I'll be doing it forever. Also, the main funding here, both directly and indirectly, for this whole project comes from WPX. So if we were relying on private donations completely impossible because that's too low and it's too unstable. We're one of the very few shelters where we have a company backing us financially, plus through my salary as well as my wife's salary, so we have financial stability and we can hopefully make a massive positive impact in this area through that kind of role model that we're doing.

Speaker 3:

Yeah, and you are, and that was an incredible story to be sharing the blueprint and all your insights here For anyone listening. Take a look but get inspired. And now you've gone on to found your own shelter yep, with partnerships like alzheimer's as well, which extends even more good vibes. And, uh, can you share some more about your experiences with the dog, shelter and life for the work base?

Speaker 2:

perhaps do you have a one golden nugget I do, but you might want to put your seat belt on. It's a big one. Okay, we go click, I I'm in. Yeah, I think my observation of people in my working adult life is and this applies to organizations as well is that they can be far more ambitious and achieve much bigger impact in the world than they possibly thought they ever could. And we're continually self-sabotage with stupid beliefs about what will work or what won't, all people think about this or that or whatever, and actually not caring about any of that stuff. But again, focusing on the outcome is massively liberating and you want to get that monkey off your back of things like status or what will people think or what will people say or any of that stuff. This is all an illusion. It's all nonsense. Most people are too wrapped up in their own distracted world to even think of you. So be more, be way more ambitious. You can achieve so much more, and we live in a golden age where that's much more possible. And another one I'm just going to throw in a small mini bonus PS extra nugget as well. Thank you.

Speaker 2:

When you find that thing that you care about and you actually have a mission and serious purpose in your life. Do as much as you can for as long as you can, but start as soon as you can, with no perfect time to start. Everything that's ever been hugely successful was scrappy, scruffy, nonsense at the beginning, but somehow it got traction. You'll just figure it out on the way. And again, that's the project, it's imagination, it's creativity, problem solving. Start now. You'll figure out the year one will suck. After that it gets a lot easier and better. You build up skills and experience. But don't put off starting. Time goes quick. Be ambitious and really go for it.

Speaker 3:

Age advice. Listeners, as we wrap up today's episode, I hope you're as inspired as I am by Terry's incredible journey and insights and remember, whether you're cultivating new habits, motivating a team or embarking on a new adventure, it's about embracing the journey, learning as you go and, as Terry says, making an impact. Terry, thanks for coming in. It's been a real honour to have you on Total pleasure. Thank you, david. It's been a real honor to have you on Total pleasure. Thank you, david. I wish you well, same, and we hopefully will see you again on the Success Nuggets Indeed.

Speaker 2:

You bet, take care Cheers.

Speaker 1:

Bye. Join David and his incredible guests next time on the Success Nuggets podcast and to find out more, visit OneGoldenNuggetcom. Thank you for listening.