Coping With Grief And Loss Through Faith With Robert Fukui
Faith is a core value that we must focus on so everything will fall into place. Chad Burmeister and Robert Fukui, CEO of i61 Business Development Network, delves into coping with grief and loss and how to overcome life’s challenges with peace. Robert Fukui shares personal and professional experiences that contributed to the success he has attained. He shares his marriage story and how he encountered grief and peace he has dealt with.
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Coping With Grief And Loss Through Faith With Robert Fukui
I'm here with Robert Fukui with Power Couples by Design. He started the company a few years ago. The reason he started it is because he went to counseling with his now-wife. At that time, they weren't married and even dating. He would come home from a counseling session pre-marriage and the not-quite girlfriend would say, “What happened in your meeting.” Finally, Robert said, “Why don't you just come along with me?” That's how Power Couples by Design was created.
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Robert, welcome to the show.
Thanks. There's definitely more of that story but that's the foundation of why we do what we do.
I'm sure we're going to get into Power Couples by Design and everyone reading whether they're dating, married, remarried, etc., everybody can use some honing up in this area because it's relationships. We're all people so this will be a good conversation. Before we get there, I want to ask you the question that I ask of every guest which is, let's go back to early childhood. You're in Pasadena now. Where did you grow up? What did you love to do? What was your passion when you were 5, 6, 7 earliest memories as a child?
I was born on the big island of Hawaii so I'm an island boy. My dad was a pastor. He traveled around a few islands before we made our way to San Jose, California when I was nine. That's where I grew up, went to school and college and all that. I loved anything outdoors, basically. I don't know if there's any favorite thing, being outdoors and playing, going to beach or riding bikes, playing basketball, anything sport. I loved sports growing up. That was my outlet. I'm pretty introverted and I still am, even though my wife would say otherwise. We always had a discussion about whether I'm introverted or not. I'm a highly functioning introvert. Anything outdoors, I just loved being outside. That was where I got to release and show my other side of me when I'm not introverted in school and such.
I've always called myself that as well because I recharge in private and not in front of people and yet I do love to be with people but I also need to recharge my batteries back at the hotel at 9:00 when everyone else is out until 11:00. In that sense, I view myself in the same way you do. I've been to Kauai and Maui and some of those and I can just picture the swimming, the notion, did my first and only stand-up on a longboard there back in Hawaii when I was probably that age. If you think of the thread between then and now of what your passion was, is there any tie between what you loved to do then and what you're doing now in life?
The first thing is I love to solve problems. I love puzzles. A lot of that came from the fact that my dad was a disciplinarian. He wasn't one of those people that you felt comfortable going to ask questions. In fact, he felt like you shouldn't be asking questions. I grew up just trying to figure it out for myself. Even in class, I was too shy to ask questions to the teacher. I would listen to what other kids were asking and the answers they are giving. I fill in the gaps. The rest of it, I'll be figuring out for myself so problem-solving. That's why my forte or my experience career-wise has been in marketing and sales. I love the strategic planning of it.
Also, as I grew older and came out of my shell especially as I got into my profession because I worked for three Fortune 100 companies in my career before I started consulting in my own business. I had a thing about just helping people. I want to see people excel. I was always willing to lend a tip or share some. In sales too, I was never competitive with the other salespeople because especially, to win awards, a lot of times you're competing against other salespeople in your company. I never felt that competition. I was always willing to share what was working for me and wanted other people to do it whether it's just sitting for coffee with a buddy, if it was someone in sales and I also did some sales training in my company. It’s interesting you asked this question. I shared with you early on that I have the same approach to figuring out. You ask me questions about my childhood, my past and my experiences. That's how I found what was going to be my brand, niche as I started consulting.
I sat down with my wife. We were in Pismo Beach on the cliff, overlooking the beach. I said, “Let's write a one-page story about ourselves. Write whatever you want about your experience from childhood on. We'll trade and then make notes to each other about what you see that you didn't write in each other's story.” Basically, from that story, you started to see some of the common denominators. There's a phrase she put in there was developing people. It wasn't exactly that. It was something to the effect of to mentor and it struck out because I didn't put that down for myself and she put that down.
Faith: Business consulting is about developing the person because for them to really execute the strategic plan well, they have to own the plan.
Sometimes, other people see you more clearly than you see yourself. I asked her why she put that down. She told me, “You're always wanting to help. You’re always there to coach and mentor or whatever whether it's formally informally.” As she was sharing that, it dawned on me that I got this national award at my last company, Bristol-Myers Squibb and it wasn't a sales award. They call it the Core Behaviors Award. Before the sales ward presentations, they gave out these core behavior words. It's based on the core values of the company.
One of them was developed people and I won that award. This is a national award. It’s 500 salespeople. I get this award and I'm looking at us as crystal. In fact, I keep it on my desk. I always wondered. You’re trying to be gracious and thank you but I'm thinking, I don't get this award for me. In our company, we're pretty independent. We were field-based where our office was at home. We rarely had physical interactions with other colleagues unless we had a sales meeting, which was about once a quarter. I get this award and I'm thinking, “I'm not a manager.”
I'm not in a position to really mentor people. I thought it was interesting. They share with me how they always see how I'm always willing to help. When Kay Lee said that about me and I was like, “That's not an award. I was thinking it's interesting of all the sales awards and marketing awards that I won and that one was like interesting. Time to your question, as a business consultant, I love problem-solving or doing strategic plans and trying to fix why are you not profitable. What's the issue and problem solve?
For me, it's not about consulting and creating a plan, it's about developing the person because I feel that in order for them to execute well. They have to own it. If they only would do it because I drew it up then you'll see success but not to the level if they own it. It's always important for me to make sure I mentor them and coach them so they understand the process and why we came up with this decision or plan. I'm much more of a coach. I get to wear both hats. It’s strategic planning but really developing the person.
One of the events we do at Living A Better Story is everybody goes around and they stand on these squares. What were you doing at 10, 20, 30, each of the years in your life and the ones that jump out at you? It's like, “I'm eighteen. I get a car at sixteen. I get married. I have kids,” all those things that happen in life. You talk about your history. Everybody goes around the room and you say, “What did you hear about the good, the bad and the ugly and all of it?” The reflection that you see in the mirror from all these 25 people in the room or however many are there. It's like you're saying the mentoring, the coaching, you start to go, like, “Mine was you're a giver.” I'm like, ”What do you mean? What? A giver?” They're like, “You funded this event for most people that attended.” They're like, “I couldn't have afforded this.” I'm like, “Doesn't everybody do that?”
I'm competitive. My dad gave me a hockey stick when I was eight years old. I held it and I'm like, “I remember competing,” and not just competing to win. Once you learn the tricks, showing other people how to win and using the same tricks. It all comes rushing back. When you're a kid, you know what your life should be about and then life happens to you. That's what I like to peel back in these things. With that, the next big question is what challenges have you faced in life? You can pick a small, medium or large, whatever you're comfortable sharing. A lot of times, we think it's a mountain. We look at it. We're like, “That is a huge mountain I can ever imagine.” You get around it, under it, over it and made it to the other side. Is there something that you're comfortable sharing that was tough for you at the time?
Every time I get questions like this, a while back I would think, “I don't know if I'm just blind,” but I was like, “I lived a blessed life.” We didn't have a lot of money growing up but at the same time, I wasn't for want. Nothing bad really happened to me. I had challenges in school, sports that are up but you persevered and overcame them. A lot of it is probably not thinking about the challenges I had because of the way I was raised by a Japanese dad. We suck it up and go. You don't even think about the challenges that you're going through. You have to sit back, think about it and own up to it. When you go through it, you go through it and you go, “That's all right.”
There was one that knocked me off my keester, for sure. I was married to my childhood sweetheart. We met when I was twelve years old. She was ten at a church camp. We'd see each other once a year. She lived in Los Angeles. I lived in San Jose. At 10, 12 years old, we couldn't commute to see each other. Once a year, we'd see each other at church camp. As we got older, we started having these little summer romances at church camp basically. Once I got into high school, she stopped coming to the church camp and then I lost touch but we kept in touch by letters like snail mail, not email and the occasional phone calls. She came up for my college graduation. When she came up, we hit it off, rekindled everything. We decided to date, “Let's go for it. Let's start dating.” Three years later, we got married. We were married for five years. It's an amazing story.
I never thought I would end up marrying her. There's a whole story there but we’re just childhood sweethearts. Many years ago, five days before Christmas, she was on her way to work in downtown LA. We're already down here in Pasadena at the time. She gets caught up in some slick roads out, spun out, wrapped around a light pole and she had passed at the scene. I never had a chance to really say goodbye other than the fact that I did say goodbye that morning. I always remember this. It was an interesting morning, not too unusual other than the fact that it was her last day at work before she was going to be off for the break for Christmas.
I was on my first day on the break. I headed out to golf and she was going on at work. We had a tenant parking in our condo so I had to pull out to let her out. We hugged, kissed and said goodbye. I remember getting my car, I was pulling back and she was just still standing there looking at me and paused. I almost stopped to say, “Do you need something?” I kept backing up and then she got in her car and left. I always remember that pause. I was like, “That was odd.” That never happened before. Literally, ten minutes down the road and they say, statistically, that's when fatal accidents happen within 5 miles from home.
She gets into a car accident. I didn't find out until I got back from golf that evening. The coroner was waiting at the house to tell me the story or tell me what happened. That threw me for a loop. You don't see that one coming. She wasn't sick and all that. I leave that morning. I come back and all of a sudden, she's gone. I went through all the phases of grief within a few hours and denial, anger, sadness, all that kind of stuff.
The next morning, some key friends that I grew up with in San Jose were at my front door. I remember like, “Now you know who your friends are.” It’s a 5-hour drive, literally a drop of a hat they found out that the evening before. All of a sudden, the doorbell rings and there they are. That was really cool. I remember getting ready for the funeral. I was writing out the eulogy. I wasn't following the Lord at that time, even though I was raised a pastor's kid but I did the standard prodigal son thing as a PK. I remember just typing out my eulogy. I’m like, “Lord, they say things happen for a reason and You have a better plan. It’d better be really good.”
Part of the backstory too was her mom had passed away two years earlier unexpectedly. Her dad had prostate cancer so we were expecting him to go but he ended up going after her mom did. He passed away six months before my wife got in a car accident. My wife was the caretaker of the family and took care of some of the legal matters. Literally, all of those things were tidied up, all the legal and financial matters and then she gets in this car accident. We were like looking for the future. We’re concentrated on taking care of her dad when he was sick. He died in our place. It was like, “Now we can start to move forward again.” It was like that and then all of a sudden this happens.
We always tried to make sure we didn't take our marriage for granted. We always were the type to have fun even though we save for the future but we wanted to have fun and enjoy life while we were young. I've heard so many stories about people waiting until they retire and then they get sick. They work all this time to retirement than to enjoy life and retirement but then they get sick and they can't enjoy life. We didn't want that to happen.
It sends a level of peace when you're sharing and joy would be the two first words that come to mind of your experience pre-living now. For anyone reading who might be faced with a similar situation, at that time, it was on a pain scale. I'm sure it was 11 out of 10 and yet now you're able to be okay with it. I guess the two things that I'm thinking about here is one, in time, how do you put one foot in front of the other and go through those phases? Everybody goes through denial, anger and all of that. How did you get through it? How are you so at peace with everything now?
I didn't experience the anger so much. Part of my benefit when I was grieving was the fact that I walk with my wife through her grieving process with her mom and her dad. I started to see in real-time all the phases of grief. You hear about the phases of grief and that's absolutely true. The thing is, you just don't know when and what time that's going to happen. I was ready for those emotions so that was helpful. The other thing is that I started sharing was we didn't want to take our life for granted when we got married and we had our ups and downs like most marriages do. At the end of the day, we knew we’re for each other and we were going to live life as best we can and enjoy life while we had it, even though we're being prudent financially and praying for the future.
At the same time, we have to make sure that we're enjoying life now and enjoying each other. That's what was part of what was comforting to me at that time. Even in that first week, I was definitely grieving. I was crying. My family's here but I'm crying in the shower and that stuff. At the same time, there was a level of peace because I knew I didn't have regrets. Our marriage wasn't perfect but we did the things that we sought out to do. We'd lived life, enjoyed life and enjoyed each other. With that, I said, “I don't have any regrets.” I don't have any, “I wish we would have while she was alive.” There are things that we were going to do later. We only have so much time in a day, year. At the same time, we did what we wanted to do.
One of the things I learned with my wife grieving is you got to be able to talk about it. Some of the worst advice people give is to keep yourself busy and take your mind off of it. It’s the worst advice ever because you can bury your emotions but those emotions are going to find their way up to the surface but it's going to be in a way you can't control and the way you don't even understand what it is, why do you have this outburst with a customer or the employee or manager or whatever? These emotions will come out but they're going to come out in ways you don't understand and you can't control versus let the emotions come out when they're coming out.
Faith: It takes a lot of strict boundaries between business and marriage. If you master that, it's going to have an exponential return because you're going to be more fulfilled in life.
When you're filled with grief, let it go. I had some good people to talk to about that. I didn't have a counselor or anything but I had some people who cared and listened. I never shied away from talking about the story and what happened. It was painful but the more I shared it, the easier it got. I was at peace with the pain because I said, “If I didn't love her, I wouldn't be hurting so bad.” I came at peace with the pain. I didn't try to avoid it. I let it happen. There'll be times I'm driving on a freeway. Literally, it’s eight months after the death and I'm driving down a freeway and started crying uncontrollably. I wasn't thinking about it consciously and all that but it just happened.
I knew what was going on. I like to say, one, was don't take life for granted with your spouse and do as much as you can. Enjoy each other's company as much as you can while you can because you hear the cliche tomorrow's not guaranteed and it's absolutely true. The next ten minutes aren't guaranteed. Two, allow the grief to happen. Otherwise, it's going to come out in ways that are destructive to you and other relationships around you.
We had some neighbors when we were in Southern California in Foothill Ranch who lost their son a couple of years ago. You may have heard it on the Orange County News, a nineteen-year-old boy, which is now my son's age. He was murdered in the park in Foothill Ranch. It's interesting because that glance that you were able to get that you talked about, I can tell that's a neat experience that you have ingrained in your memory forever. This kid came home from college and got to spend a week with his parents cooking food. That's what he loved to do is cook. He had multiple glances and interactions with his family and they are able to hang on to that, the memory and the good times. That was a tough situation but their family did the grieving. They did the work and now they're all about helping other people and changing the world. They created a movement called Blaze It Forward as a result of that, like pay it forward. Let's go into the marriage side because you're now remarried. How many years have you been married?
We’ve been married for several years.
Let's get into that a little bit because your business is Power Couples by Design. You sit across the table, the couch or the Zoom video I assume the last couple of years with another couple but both of you are on the call. Most entrepreneurs that I talk to have a hard time balancing burning the candle at both ends, working and then being at home and it's two different games they feel like they're playing. How do you counsel people to make sure their marriage is where it should be?
I was talking about maintaining priorities, faith, family, finance, finance being the business, your career, whatever, in our case business because we're coaching married couples in business. The power of struggle is maintaining those priorities. When you hear about work-life balance, what does that look like? It's not 50/50. You're not putting 50% of the time in the marriage, 50% of the time in the business. How do you maintain your priorities of God and family over the business?
Whether you're doing good financially or not, a lot of times the time spent in the business overtakes quality time with the family and the marriage. For a lot of entrepreneurs, it's hard for them to turn that off, being on the go, achiever. A lot of it is because you've dealt with so many hard times. You want to make sure this thing is coming. Part of our challenge is helping them know how to work smarter, not harder in the business.
You can 10X, 100X the business without putting 2X, 10X or 100X more time into the business. We heard the term work smarter, not harder but when things get tough, the first thing to do is put more time into it as opposed to reevaluating what's not working, let's fix that. Trying to give them more time back into life with the marriage or the spouse and the family by helping them structure the business so it's working more efficiently. They get a little more time back. In the marriage, know that the quality time spent with your spouse and your kids is going to provide an exponential return.
It is definitely going to have a positive impact on the business but it's going to have an exponential return because you're going to be more fulfilled in life. What good is it if your business is humming along but your wife is checked out and your kids hate you because you missed all the baseball games and all that stuff? How do you prioritize that? That takes a lot of strict boundaries between business and marriage.
Going back to why I love what I do and how we got to this point is because it's blending. I talked about the counseling piece that we did for two years before we got married so that's been the foundation of how we help them develop better communication and resolve conflict in a healthy way. Also, on the business side because I grew up and my career was in Fortune 100 companies, I knew what working smarter, not harder looks like. A lot of typical businesses learn as they go. They're good at a skill and a craft and then they start charging for it.
They just learn as they go. That's why they ended up working harder, not smarter because they don't know any better. I was formally trained in Marketing and Sales as my degree. I grew up in some of the best environments to learn on the job. I saw what working smarter looks like. As you look at the typical small business owner in a typical marriage, most people have never been trained to do either of those. They might take like a little course at church or something for premarital counseling but it's not.
Our guidance in Southern California was something that I still hang on to but it's interesting and it's, “You can do anything for any amount of time as long as you know why.” It's like, “You're going to face challenges in your marriage and you might need to do things for 6 months to 2 years. They may suck but just know the why behind the what.” It's fair advice but that was the nugget that we were taught. It turns out a handful of times that's not enough.
The crux of it is not too many people would grow up in a family environment that knew how to resolve conflict well. That's what holds a lot of marriages. That's what creates a lot of issues in the marriage because there are disagreements about something that was financed, raising kids, buying a house, whatever, they get in these arguments and some things can resolve, some things don't. We'd never been giving tools of how to resolve conflict well in a healthy way where it's to each other's satisfaction versus saying, “We're just not going to talk about this issue anymore because it's just too hot of a topic.” That's not good. On the business side, it's the same thing. Most business owners have not been raised and formally trained how to run a business. The gaps I see on the business side are just fundamentals.
In these marketing operations, finance or whatever, there are always fundamental gaps in that. I'm still surprised how I can run across a business that still doesn't have some kind of booking system. That's literally still going based on just receipts and not even an Excel spreadsheet. You'd be surprised. I can't take anything for granted. Marketing is a challenge for a lot of businesses and then even operationally, how to hire, fire, train, and build a succession plan. There are so many fundamentals that most business owners haven't been trained into. Both on the married side and the business side, it comes down to the fundamentals of how to do those things well.
I'm blending what we learn in counseling for two years as well as in our own trial and error. I learned in the big corporate environment and then bring that kind of knowledge and wisdom into the small business environment. I get a kick sometimes because they say, “That works in big corporations. It won't work here.” I said, “The reason why they're big, they didn't start big.” Every single business I worked for started just like them.
I haven't found too many counseling organizations that can handle both sides of the equation. If you go to a founder and CEO and you're like, “If I can give you back 15% of your week.” You're not hanging out with your wife as much as you should be on date nights or whatever else. That's a good founder could be like, “Yeah, I do that,” and then you go find the 15% and there's your time back. That's a compelling thing. Final question, this has been an awesome talk so thank you for being vulnerable and sharing. I think people who hear this going through tough times hear what we said now. It's important to understand that there is another side, you have to push forward and grieve if you're going through a situation. We talked a little bit about faith. You said faith, family and finance is third. Faith is first. What does that mean to you? As a pastor’s child, a similar prodigal son, I'm the firstborn and I strayed for a while, had a Mohawk when I was in high school for a year, a nose ring and three earrings. You came back. What do you think it was about being the sheep that strayed off on the hillside to bring you back? What role does faith play in your journey? How did you get there?
Faith has always been huge. My dad was a great dad and pastor. Both him and my mom definitely ingrained God and faith into my life. Even when I strayed, I didn't stray that far. I wanted to see the other side, have a good time and party and stuff like that. I never lost my faith in God or Israel. A big part of it is because when people have a real personal experience with the Lord, it never leaves you. When I was 9, 10 years old, when we first moved to San Jose, I had one of those Samuel moments where the Lord woke me up in the middle of the night, calling my name, audible voice, the whole 9 yards. Samuel thought it was Eli. I thought it was my mom calling me. I woke up, went to my parent's bedroom, looked in the bedroom and they're both fast asleep. I went back to bed then the Lord woke me up and called my name. I'm like, “I know the story.”
I said, “Speak Lord. I’m listening.” He gave me a download. Unfortunately, I don't recall what he said exactly because I had to note to self and also note to everybody else, when the Lord wakes you up in the middle of the night, get out of bed because I didn't get out of bed. I laid there still how you're still laying in bed and fall back to sleep. All you heard was the Peanuts character. I woke up the next morning and told my mom, “God spoke to me.” She didn't doubt me for a moment just because of how I was beaming at night. I knew it without a shadow of a doubt.
Having that experience, I never doubted that God was real. Meeting my wife, Kay Lee, that's basically who brought me back to the Lord as far as starting to live it out. It was interesting. She knew I wasn't going to church at the time but she knew my story. She slowly started to leave things. As we started dating longer, she says, “I’d really like it if you would pray at mealtimes.” I said, “I can do that.” She said, “If you're going to come out and visit me on a Sunday, it would be nice if we went to my church.” I said, “I can do that.” Slowly but surely, she started to lean back in.
After we got back married, we went to our church and went to Israel. They announced the trip to Israel. My wife was like, “I've always wanted to go to Israel.” I'm like, “Let's go.” That was my rededication. My first real acceptance of the Lord at the Jordan River because we had a baptism at the Jordan River. When I was young and my dad did it, it was more an obligation. This was my choice but this was the first and this is me. This is my acknowledgment of the Lord and getting baptized. From that point on, it changed. Even when I had my moments before I came back to the Lord, I always still lived my life very biblically.
I knew the lines that you don't cross. Even in the corporate environment, I was still led by biblical values and principles even though I wasn't quite walking the Lord. I knew those things are important and those things matter. I saw that it was very beneficial, not in just my own faith but it was beneficial in my career and now my business. I taught for a few years in business at our church. When I got this curriculum, I was like, “This is exactly how I saw in the corporate environment.” I saw how even with these companies and they're not all Christians and the CEO probably wasn't Christian but I can see whenever things are going well with the company, they were living out biblical principles. When things went south, they violated them.
It reminds me of a phrase that I came up with. There's no ROI for drinking. I want to compare that to what you just said. There is an ROI for faith. There's this app that I did at the end of 2020 called 75 Hard. You do 75 days, 2 workouts a day, 45 minutes each, a gallon of water, read ten pages in a book and no alcohol for 75 days. By day 75, you're invincible. You're like back in high school, the six-pack abs are starting to come back. Maybe not quite but you know they're under there. Your mind is on fire. During that time, I'm like, “Think about it. What's the ROI?” I’ll enjoy a good glass of wine from time to time but when you get into three glasses of wine, now you got a headache the next day. You're a little lethargic the next day but your point about the opposite and it's not heads or tails so it's different. I don't think most people think that there is an ROI to practicing faith. That's deep.
I was interviewed by a group in Bulgaria about this. People feel challenged about living out their faith and biblical principles in their career, in their job or their business. They think they're at a disadvantage to the rest of the competitive market. I said, “The difference between sector thinking versus biblical thinking is number one, sector thinking is very short-term. It's what do I get now? Biblical thinking or God's thinking, you just know who God is. He's looking down the future. He's connecting dots. What you do now has ramifications tomorrow, next week, month, year. You may not see it but the typical person is going for the now, the typical business owner. When you adopt biblical principles, it's about long-term thinking. You may “lose out” now but going to gain in the long run, it's like a tortoise and a hare.
God is like a tortoise. I'm going for the long-term. I'm going for legacy. I'm going to impact not just people here now but generations in the future. What your position and your business for now is setting up a foundation for generational impact 2, 3 generations from now. You've got to establish a business that way. It's not about how do I make the dollar now to get the profitability this month and this year. What do I need to do to set myself successful for the long-term?
At The Fire Pit, Dr. Jim Wilder was invited one day. He's a neurotheologist. He’s a super-power, amazing person. His father was a pastor and they did foreign overseas trips and pastored people all around the world. He had questions as a young kid, “Does God exists?” He and a friend got together, prayed and said, “Let's test God here. We'll pray and we'll compare notes to the next day.” They did it for a month. This download just like when you were talked to by Charlie Brown, they compared notes and it was the same dang thing every night. He was like, “He exists. Now, let me go spend the rest of my life and learn about the neuro side of psychology around it.
He came to The Fire Pit and said, “In the Old Testament, there are 614 simultaneous laws that one must consider when making a choice.” That's 2 to the power of 614. When we make choices, are we optimizing for now, tomorrow, forever? Are we optimizing for me, my parents, my kids, my wife? There are too many variables. He said the only proper way to optimize there was like a two-part answer. The first was there's just no way you can do it. It's the what would Jesus do? What would God do? You have to try to go, “If I'm looking down on the situation, here's maybe what God would probably do. The second part was curious because it maps with optimize my decision for the end of time.
I think about if I'm doing that and I have X number of years left on the planet whether it's a day, a week, a month, an hour or 50 years if my next motions don't optimize for the here and now. You think about what could happen in 100 years, 500 years or 5,000 years, how would you make different decisions now? It's hard to put that mental mindset on but it's been living in my subconscious. It's a pretty neat place to live.
One thing I always draw people back to especially when they're Christians and talk about legacy is I said, ”You look at the leaders in the Bible like Moses and David, the promises that God gave him them and unleashed the vision they didn't fulfill in their lifetime but the next generation did.” The business they plan he's planted in the palm of your hand is not just for you. The ultimate fulfillment isn't going to happen in your lifetime anyway. All the companies I've worked for were 8 to 10 generations removed from the founders. We're a lot different now than were when they started. You lay the floor. Your ceiling is going to be the next generation's floor. That's what you're preparing for you. You want to prepare for the next generation to handle how to torch over so they can see the fulfillment of God's promise on this business because your business does have an impact. It does have meaning.
Faith: Don’t keep yourself busy to take your mind off your grief. Experience the phases of it, let those emotions out, and be at peace with pain.
Robert Fukui, Cofounder of Power Couples by Design. Check it out. There's a Download Your Steps Now. It will show you how to have a thriving marriage and a successful business. It looks like you can get the cheat sheet right there. I'm assuming that once you start getting into the cheat sheet, you may need a mentor. I'm going to download the cheat sheet and we will be in touch. Great to get to know you, Robert. Thanks for reading. What an awesome conversation. I'm so happy and excited to go to the Living A Better Story Retreat and continue the dialogue as we go. Robert, we'll catch you on the flip side. I appreciate you.
God bless.
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About Robert Fukui
Robert decided to stay local to get his Bachelor’s degree in Business with a concentration in Marketing from San Jose State University. He got his first sales job with the local Coca-Cola distributor straight out of college.
After almost three years with Coca-Cola, he transitioned to the pharmaceutical industry, where he spent another 19 years with two major pharmaceutical companies in various types of sales, marketing and training positions. He first worked for Novartis Pharmaceuticals and now most recently has spent 17 years with Bristol-Myers Squibb, one of the largest biopharmaceutical companies worldwide and among the industry leaders in HIV, Immuno-science and Oncology.
Over the course of his professional career, he has been privileged to be instrumental in the launch of six major brands, responsible for over $150 million in revenue and a recipient of national sales and leadership development awards. His successful experience in product marketing through ever-changing economic conditions has positioned him to be able to assist local organizations achieve sales success in any economic environment.
