The CEO Only Does Three Things With Trey Taylor
The CEO only does three things: culture, people, and numbers. Chad Burmeister’s guest today is Trey Taylor, the CEO of Taylor Insurance Services and author of A CEO Only Does Three Things. Trey discusses with Chad how, if you’re a CEO and you don’t like these three things, perhaps it’s time to reconsider and go back to what it is you love doing. If you want to increase the value of your business, you need to bring in people who love to do the things you hate doing. Life is more fulfilling when you find a career path that makes you happy rather than blindly doing what you’re told to do. Live a better story by following the God-given desires of your heart. Tune in!
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The CEO Only Does Three Things With Trey Taylor
I’ve got a good friend of mine. We meet in Florida at the Board of Advisors quite frequently every quarter. It seems like every time we are turning the page of the calendar. We are back in Sarasota. I have known Trey for more than a year now. He is the Managing Director of Trinity Blue Consulting. They have been around since 2015. They work with a lot of great people. He’s also the author of an amazing book. If you are looking for something to read, I highly encourage it if you are an entrepreneur, executive or CEO. It’s called A CEO Only Does Three Things. I encourage you to venture to guess what those three things are. Trey, welcome to the show.
Chad, thanks for having me. It’s good to chat with you.
Great to be here. I love doing these. I talked to Kris Dehnert and he shared his story on how he was eye to eye with not making it. I talked to Mitch Russo who said he was ten seconds from not making it. A lot of us have interesting stories throughout our lives. That’s what we like to double click on in this conversation is digging into that. Before we go deep, tell us a little bit more about Trinity Blue. What do you help companies do? What’s your core business?
Trinity Blue is a consulting business and we do a lot of executive coaching and organizational design. One of the things that we have noticed throughout the years is most people want to talk a lot about their 3 to 5-year plan but don’t have a one-year plan. I bet 80% of my business, as far as that goes, is sitting down with people and coming up with a strategic action plan that is executed within the next twelve months. What I continually say to people is, “If we do three of those, it’s way better than doing one 3-year plan that nobody ever executes on.”
A lot of what we do is on strategy and organizational design. Meaning, do we have the right people clustered around the right time horizons and areas of competency? I do a lot of executive CEO level, specifically coaching where the phone rings at 7:00. Somebody has a problem and they need help with that problem. We come together on whatever those issues tend to be. It’s in those veins. We also help people with a capital raise strategy and those kinds of things as well, which you and I have talked about before.
A CEO Only Does Three Things: Finding Your Focus in the C-Suite
For our audience to get to know you, if we were to look back and you go back, let’s say to age 6, 7, 8, you are young, some of your first memories, what was your passion then? What got you up in the morning, you walked out of your house and you were like, “I’ve got to go do this?” What was that for you?
Back then, I didn’t know that I had any anchors into the future, except that around 7 or 8 I loved Legos, reading, putting things together, be those ideas from reading or building fantasy worlds and playing with my Star Wars guys. Looking and doing a reflection back on it, all the toys, the play that I did was always about consolidating everyone’s efforts behind one guy so we were going out and conquering territory or whatever the play happened to be at that point. A lot of my life choices have been about that. I went to law school, my education and those kinds of things have been about, “How do we find the right answers that benefit everybody as we move down the line?”
If you think about it from then to now, you went to law school. If you were to say there’s a thin blue line between then and now or a thread, maybe the lines are already taken for another cause but let’s talk about the thin thread between then and now. How does that relate to what it is you are helping companies do nowadays? You answered it already a little bit.
It’s the same activity that I’m doing. That lens applied to different types of things. For example, I have a portfolio company that we have invested in. We had a virtual board meeting and we were going through things. The idea became, at the end of the meeting, that I was leading the conversation and getting everybody to commit to the actions that they could take that we could increase sales in preparation for the potential additional round of funding or even an exit. We can’t have those conversations before we have the additional sales conversation.
When the call kicked off, it was much more of, “Everything is great. I wanted to give you guys an update.” I was like, “No. We’ve got to get focused here and let’s consolidate behind the CEO, who’s a good CEO so we are moving the needle for him. We don’t need to show up for an update. That’s an email but we need to show up for a conversation and a commitment. That’s what this meeting needs to be.” It’s always that same lens for me.
I like to bring that up because a lot of people go through life and find themselves out of their comfort zone. Even if it’s one degree out of their zone, they could be in alignment with their God-given talents like you are. I’m sure there are hard days, good days and bad days but being in alignment with what you are meant to be doing, it’s important to have that alignment.
When we were kids, if you are privileged like I was growing up, you are told over and over that you can do anything in the world. You were never told, “Find the thing that makes you the happiest,” and give you that completed ego feeling because when you do that work, you never do any work. It’s always playing for you. You have to fight to find that zone in your business and life. I see a lot of friends of mine who never did that. They always did what they were told or what they were supposed to do and they end up with a career that they absolutely hate and that always spills over into other areas of life. Call me triply blessed but at least I have been able to fight and build a moat around the things that I want to do daily.
CEO Only Does: We start a company because we have a set of values. We have a set of things that we think should be true in the world.
Even reading your book, A CEO Only Does Three Things, culture, people and numbers. If you read the book and you are a CEO, you go, “I don’t like people, numbers and culture,” you might need to look in the mirror and say, “I was a good salesperson. I was a good chief financial officer.” There are times you might need to make a pivot and go back to what it is you love to do.
I have had to fire CEOs in our portfolio companies before, not often but two times, specifically that I can think of right off the bat. Both of those times, the conversation easily was, “I was a great sales guy and I thought if I go start this company, I will have something that I love to sell. The first couple of years of the business, I did all the selling. I’m having to deal with HR issues, financing issues, regulation and government. I don’t want to do any of that stuff.”
Oftentimes, the firing of a CEO looks like, “We are going to help you get back to doing what you love and that you were the best at. We are going to bring somebody in to help you increase the value of the business by doing the things that you hate doing.” That’s an easy conversation. It’s always trepidatious but when you get into it, it’s an easy conversation. I have seen the guys that we have done that with go, “It’s an ego bruised a bit but I feel better about what I’m going to be doing going forward in the future.” We all had to hold a mirror up and have that conversation with ourselves.
A lot of what we talked about has been, it works for you. You have written a book, got this business and you help companies do investments. I’m sure there had to be a couple of speed bumps along the way and probably at the time, it felt a little bigger than a speed bump. Is there something that you can share with everybody that you say, “I felt like a mountain at the time and now looking back, it was something that I had to go through and it made me a better person?”
The three hardest things in my life were that I always wanted to be an attorney. I always wanted to go to law school and solve big problems for important people, companies, rich people, or whatever it was in my child’s brain that I had figured that out. I went in and had a certain skillset in law school but it wasn’t the one that makes you successful in law school. After the first semester, I came home and told my dad, “I’m done. I’m not going back.” I felt like such an abject failure that the thing that I had wanted for so long, I hated every second of it.
I was good at most of the things but terrible at some of the things. You get rewarded for some of the things that I was terrible about. My dad said, “You have already done half a year, go finish the year and you can do something else.” I did. I packed up and moved home. Dad said, “You have already finished a year. You might as well finish the next two years because you’ve got the hardest part out of the way.” Me having to deal with real depression about being in that cognitive dissonance about, “This is what I thought I wanted to do and now I hate every piece of it. I’m not as smart as I thought I was. I’m not as good as I thought it was.” Those kinds of poisonous thoughts are going around in your head and you can’t tell anybody because law school is a competitive pressure cooker for no good reason but it is. It was a lonely place. That was tough.
I can look back on it now and know that I developed some internal fortitude but if I’m honest, what I developed was the strength to say no to things that I hate and I won’t do them anymore. Sometimes it makes you unpopular. I have something in politics with some people that you and I know together and they are doing something together. I said, “It’s not me. I hate it. I will help in any other way but what you are asking me to do, I’m not going to subject myself to.” They think that’s negative, primadonna behavior or something like that. They may be right but I’m not going to spend my life doing things I hate. That was the first one.
The second one was that I’ve got married and divorced early. That was painful and one of the defining moments in my life, working through the pain of going through a divorce and the internal dialogue of, “I thought I did everything right. I did everything wrong. I must be a terrible person. She told me I was a terrible person.” You have to process through those things and eventually come out with a better understanding of who you are. Did you make mistakes? Will you repeat those mistakes? That was an ugly time in my life and not one that I like to revisit often.
I’m married again to a wonderful woman who knew all of that stuff coming into it and still decided to stick around once the ring made an appearance. That was good. There are a lot of times where I start to do or say something, “You did that before. You might not want the same result again,” so you learn a lesson from that. The third thing is I lost my dad at a young age. My dad was 52 when he passed away unexpectedly. I was completely pursuing a different path in the life of law, venture capital and corporate development work with large corporations. I was one of the first 100 employees at WebMD. I had moved from WebMD into the venture business.
That came to a screeching halt on 9/11, as you can imagine, I then went in-house with companies like EarthLink and AOL to do corporate development, divestitures and investments. All of that was going well and my dad passed away from what we now know is COVID. We didn’t know it then. It was SARS-2, is what we knew it as. He passed away from that and I had to come into his chair in the family business, start over completely and get it right from the first day. Those are the three defining moments of my life that have said to me, “The way that you solve those three problems equals the person you are now, whether you’ve got it right at the moment or not.” I can look back and look internally and say that’s who made me who I am.
CEO Only Does: Quit overthinking and simply do the one thing you’re called to do at the moment.
Sometimes, I know that’s raw. Those are important things to deal with. When you are going through them, it looks like a mountain. Looking back, you are like, “I have made it.” Is there something that you took away from those experiences that’s a common thread that you can say, “I did X, Y and Z, and that got me through it?” What was that for you that made you get to the other side of it?
All three of those shared the same thing, that the only solution that I could figure out was putting one foot ahead of the next one. In law school, it was, “If I get to Friday, I can go have a beer down in the French Quarter,” because I went to law school in New Orleans. With the divorce, “If I can get through the next whatever legal situation was, now that that’s all over if I can get to a place where I could go on a date or something of that nature, whatever it happened to be.”
With my dad passing away, it’s me taking on all of those responsibilities, it was breaking everything down into increments and getting through that next increment. The character trait that I developed through all of that, which we never can see these things in ourselves, somebody else has to point it out, I never quit with something. I don’t lose because I don’t quit. I don’t mean to sound pompous. What I mean is, you keep doing it until you get the result. A lot of times when people on the other side look at you and say, “This guy is never going to quit. I better give him what he wants.” It happens all the time. That’s a character trait that I had developed through those hardships.
I went to my folks’ house. My daughter graduated from high school. Now we are going to be empty nesters around here quickly. My dad gives me two old hockey sticks that I used to use. I played roller hockey. I’ve got to be good at it and competitive. I remember the thing that I love to do is, once I’ve got so good and I’m scoring 10 to 1 against the other team, that wasn’t fun anymore. What fun was setting other people, I remember that there was a girl on our team of all guys. I was like, “She’s the person that I’m going to work with.”
I say, “You go crash the goal and I’m going to hand it off to you right when I get to the end.” By the end of it, after 1 or 2 seasons, she’s the one coming down. I go, “I’m going to post up on the goal.” It was so fun when you compete and that’s my thing. I compete no matter what the situation is. When you can connect with that and go, “Whether I’m starting a company or a nonprofit, it doesn’t matter what it is, I take that skillset and realize that it’s your unique fingerprint in the world, double down on it and don’t worry about it.”
You are hitting on a theme that I’m intellectually exploring and some writing that I’m doing, which is, “Why don’t we start companies?” If you boil it down to the most essential point, you and I started a company because we have a set of values. We have a set of things that we think should be true in the world. Those beliefs only come from our experiences. We think that either we have had negative or positive experiences and we have had both, we blend those together into a vision of how the world should work.
We started a company to prove to the rest of the world, “This is how things should work.” People say, “I don’t have a values-based organization. All of that is fluff.” None of that is true. Every organization that we consult with and every organization that I talked to, that’s the real reason that the company got founded. Money and control of my day is a part of it and how I want to live but what we are doing is trying to live our values out loud.
This is a curveball question. Most people go, “I’m not sure,” but I will ask it anyway. What would you like to accomplish in life that would change everything for you?
The way that I see things right now is, my family has always been a hard-working family, middle-class, professional, white-collar as much as we can be. For me, I would like to affect the next 3 to 4 generations of my family by being able to turn a lot of our assets into capital assets and teach the next generation how to manage capital assets. My sincere hope that in doing that, I would give them a life where they could work on things without having to punch a clock but some political issues, some social issues, they would have the freedom, ability and time to be able to do that. I have a family per purpose statement and it is around that. My job is to take hard assets, turn them into capital so the next generation can achieve things that you can’t if you are beholden to customers and the time clock
I love that you did 3 or 4. If you have met Eric Dunavant from Paradiem at BA, he talks about our responsibility as three generations downline. You say 3 or 4 because, by the time you are four steps removed, you are hopeful that gen 1 would pass it on to gen 2 to gen 3. Four might start to get out of reach in a lot of us.
That’s the case. We are three generations now. We onboarded the first member of the fourth generation. She turned eighteen and she got the initial one-hour presentation about, “This is the family that you are a part of. You don’t know this now but this is what we have. This is what we do and these are the things we believe.” We have done that and that’s a two-year process before she gets a vote. We have this scripted thing that we are intentional about and my job is to do the next three generations. Her job is to do that for the next three generations. That’s how you get it going.
My grandfather gave me something that he wrote in handwritten with a pencil. I still have it and I copied it because it was fading over the years but it’s in eighth grade. It’s the top ten things. “Love your God, love your neighbors and love yourself being the top two.” I was never given the speech, “Make sure that this passes.” What I’m looking at as my job is, “I’m going to build that into scrolls, internet or something that has some physical characteristics to it to make sure that it gets passed down.” At my daughter’s graduation, I read it out loud to everybody in the family and I was like, “Who’s signing up to this?” At first, there were crickets. One kid dropped and they all started to raise their hands. I’m like, “We’ve got the first step done with some verbal sign up and now it’s time to continue that and move it down the line.”
I love that process. We do something similar with sharing the values. We do make an opt-in decision. The opt-in is at the end of the two-year onboarding and an indoctrination process then the person has a decision to make. “Do they want to be a part of this and these are the values that we will live or they don’t? That’s completely fine. You don’t take yourself out of the family. We still love you. We still support your decisions,” but those that work for and with the family received different levels, different kinds and different types of support.
It’s like looking at a lawyer. You didn’t like it so if someone comes in and says, “This is not how I operate.” “That’s fine. Other people in the family can carry the torch, too.” That’s the big picture. It changes everything. Look 3 to 4 generations down. Let’s go three years, we are three years from 2021 so it’s 2024. We are at BA in Sarasota. You look back and say, “That was the most amazing three years.” What happened over the last three years?
The thing that will have happened is us fully implementing a family office strategy. We began down that path, the work that I’m telling you about. We began getting the legal entities, investments placed, the liquidity soaked up. We had three liquidity events back-to-back, two of them are good and one of them from a bad place. We have to get all of that infrastructure placed in working and in three years, we will know, “Are we doing the right thing or do we need to take a different tack on that strategy altogether?”
Is there anything at your business that you tolerate where you see, “I could do better than that,” or do you figured it out, it’s not part of your business?
In one of the businesses that we own, which is an employee benefits advisory firm, it’s the old family business that’s more than 55 years old now. I tolerate it a lot because I have onboarded a management team over the past years to run that business. I tolerate a lot of things that I would probably do differently. They are not the wrong things but they are things that I would do differently. I’m tolerating them because those guys have to eventually walk on their own. In the first year, I didn’t even tell them that they were in control. I didn’t correct any of their actions.
The second year, I said, “Here’s what I did last year that you guys did notice but I wanted to do it to give you the confidence that you could do it. Here’s the second year.” In the third year, which is 2021, I have been extraordinarily clear with them that, “These are the results that they must attain. If they do, the rewards are strong but I want to see them get to the results.” That’s what I have been focused on the last years in that business. Not bad things, not bad habits or anything of that nature. They are not the way that I would do things. I’m somebody that likes a bow on every package. These guys are shooting from the hip a little bit. It’s totally natural. It’s fine. The results are there but for me, I like things tied up in a bow a little better than they are. I’m tolerating that now.
I remember our pastor told us the simple sentence before we’ve got married in premarital counseling he said, “You can do anything for any amount of time as long as you know why.” Like law school or any of it. Knowing that you are going into it with that even though you know, put the bow on it but it’s a worthwhile experiment or handing over the reins in that case that you were talking about.
CEO Only Does: If you have somewhere else to spend your time at a later point, you make much better choices in the here and now.
I spent a lot of my life saying, “Let me find somebody who’s a high achiever. Let me study that person so I can be a high achiever.” My focus has shifted to say, “Let me find high achieving families and study their characteristics. Let me find high achieving businesses and study their characteristics because I want them to be true in my life as well.” One of the things that I noticed from high achieving families and I don’t have the words around this yet but it’s that ability to sit down with someone and say, “You are going to go to law school. It’s going to suck. You are going to spend three years doing that, and then you are going to go to the Public Defender’s Office for two years, that’s going to suck, too. You are going to do this but the entire vision of how you are going to spend your life adds up like this.” I don’t think that we do a great job, most of us, in doing that for our kids and showing them that, “The linear steps you take are going to get you here. “
I have a particular soapbox that I get on when it comes to marriage. The first year of marriage is tough. You and I, behind closed doors, admit that we hope our spouses don’t read it but they are saying the same things too. The third-year marriage is a little bit difficult because typically that’s when the kid comes in for the first time. I don’t know anyone who has a good seventh year of marriage but you will know when you figure that out. In your eighth year, when everybody says, “Our seventh year was terrible too.” That’s wrong. That’s not the way we should be doing things. We should be sharing with people up front, “You are going to have these struggles. This is what it looks like. When this happens, call me, call this person, do this action whatever it happens to be.” As a society and a culture, I don’t think we show the roadmap that people are going to live through nearly as effectively as we should be doing if we are doing it at all.
It’s almost like the company is a person. It’s different because a lot of people combined into one person. Expanding the vision to not following a superstar person but a superstar family. That’s extremely on point. I like it.
A huge part of my consulting business for companies and organizational design is exactly saying, “When you have three employees, these are the challenges you face. These are the tools you have. This is the mission that you have to accomplish to go to the next level where you will achieve higher monetary results, hire more people and have these challenges. You are trading these for those.” I’ve got that map built out. What I want is when I’m born at age zero is for somebody to hand me the map and say, “These are the challenges that you are going to face throughout these years of your life and these are the answers that you may find useful in solving those challenges.”
It makes me think of Larry Yachcik’s talk because it has to do with communication. Probably the number one piece is communication but there are a lot of other inner working parts. Last couple of questions. We talked about A CEO Only Does Three Things, culture, people and numbers. What makes the difference between a good CEO and a great CEO when it comes to those three aspects?
A great CEO can do two things at the same time. I have seen this in every company that I have worked in with a good or a great CEO. I have seen it in companies where it is lacking as well but the person who taught this to me was my sixth-grade Algebra teacher, Madelaine Brownlee. When I first knew her, she had these polyester suits that you could shoot bullets at and they wouldn’t damage them at all. She had this way about her where she would do these two things.
Number one is preception. A great leader, CEO, pastor or any role of leadership in life can look into someone else and see gifts in that person before the person can see them in themselves. It’s a key thing. Not everybody necessarily is attuned to that but everybody can go out and find someone doing something well and say to that person, “You are doing something well and I see this gift in you.” The second thing is evoking that. It’s preception and evocation. It’s from the Latin phrase ex voca, “To call from within.”
That is one of the specific geniuses of leadership. To be able to look into somebody is fine. We all know people with gifts but to be able to look into that person and call it out and say, “I noticed this gift in you and you are going to be extraordinary in life if you pay attention to this gift, I want to encourage you in that. I’m so blessed to see you do that.” Whatever that process looks like in individual interaction, we must explore those two things. When I was writing the book and that’s the concluding chapter of the book is to encourage CEOs to explore those two things to be great.
I shared that with a mentor of mine who worked for Jack Welch. They were peers at GE. They were hired the same year at GE and went through a lot of their career together. He snapped his fingers and he said, “Jack Welch had that more than anybody I have ever seen. Jack would do it to his peers. They would be five Bourbons deep at the bar and he would turn to the plastics salesman for the Southeast region or something and say, ‘You are the best connector of people I have ever seen. I hope no matter what else happens in your life, you continue to do that and continue to put a real study focus on doing that.’”
That guy became the best connector you have ever seen. The question was, “Was he like that before Jack Welch told him he was or was he like that because Jack Welch told him he was?” It doesn’t matter. What matters is that’s what came out of his life. That’s a little flag that I love to wave for people to say, “You can start this and you should.” We have a moral obligation, in my opinion, to see gifts and others before they see them themselves and they call those gifts into reality.
I think of sales departments where there are a couple of marketers 100% of the time. They are living in the sales department. They hate it and there have been a few times where I will go, “Lauren, let’s have a quick chat. You love to send email blasts. That’s perfect. You are great and you always keep three meetings in your drawer, pull them out at the end of the month and meet your quota. You should use that and let’s get you doing the emails for the rest of the team. You are awesome at that.” Another person, “What if I gave you a tool that could get you to 1,000 dials a day and I pay you a little bit more than everybody else because you are great at doing cold calls.” You are defragmenting the hard drive and shuffling the deck. By calling it out, they love it. It’s good for your business, for you and for everybody to get the person lined up with their talents.
What if we did that in our families? What if I went to my nine-year-old and said, “This is something that you have inside of you in a magnificent way you were created with this inside of you? Dad and mom recognize it. When you are not around, we talk about this. I want you to feel free to be as good at that thing as you can be for the rest of your life.” What a blessing we lay on that child’s life doing it. How many of us does it? It’s an uncomfortable conversation for no good reason. We should do that. We have a moral obligation to do that every time we have the opportunity to do it.
This has been a phenomenal conversation because that is what this show is all about. The core person, who’s a friend of our families named Robert White, wrote a book called Living an Extraordinary Life. Ordinary and there’s extraordinary. The whole punchline when you get to the end of the book is, “Live within what your God-given talents are.” The story is they went out and they did an experiential exercise and they said, “Go out and find somebody and talk to that person.”
This one person went out and found a homeless man under a bridge. They found out his story, did the exercise, and brought them back to the class. The guy ended up sitting in the class the rest of the event, ended up becoming their top sales trainer, and took over the company or at least was the number one trainer and had a significant portion of ownership of the business. His name was Art. That was the same story, only this was to a complete stranger not even someone in the family, and use that what you shared.
I used to do a course with my mentor Ron Willingham and one of the things in that course is we would take people and put them through exercises and the things that we take for granted. I would do this course and go to the homeless shelter and say, “Let me have ten people come through this course with us, this life-affirming course.” Often 8 of those 10 people would say, “No one has ever believed in me or said that I had any gift or anything to offer in the world. You, doing that has changed my life.” They weren’t talking to me. They were talking about the process of having people do that. It’s something that I firmly believe we should be doing.
What role does faith play in your journey?
I came to faith late in life. Thank God that I eventually made it. I considered myself a faithful person. She knew I wasn’t a convicted person. She said to me, “I will marry you but you have to do one thing for me. You have to take me to church. You don’t have to believe everything you hear. I know how argumentative you can be but you have to take me.” Over a short time, a couple of years, probably of me sitting like this and disagreeing with a lot that I heard.
You are reading your phone.
No, I paid attention. I was there for it. It became simplified in a way that I could understand. I love complex things and my faith decision was the simplest thing I ever had to do. I had to quit overthinking lots of other stuff and simply do the one thing that I was called to do at that moment. We run a faith-based organization. That doesn’t mean that I require everyone to have the same faith that I had because if my wife had required me to have that faith, she wouldn’t be my wife.
I would miss out on most of the sweet things in my life. We don’t require that but we share our values, all of which are for my faith, biblically driven. We have thirteen for a reason. They form the basis by which we relate to each other here and they are all biblical values that we try to live into the world. We don’t have scriptures associated with each one of them but we could because I have that research, notes and that’s where my faith is. Faith is a part of what we do.
You talk about one foot in front of the other. It becomes easier when you know that you’ve got the wind at your sails. There was a guy who came to the fire pit, Dr. Jim Wilder. He’s a Neurophysiologist. I was about to write a book on making good choices and it turns out he already wrote it. I was like, “How do you make a good choice, Dr. Wilder?” He said, “In the Old Testament, there are 614 simultaneous laws that one must consider when making a choice. That means it’s 2 to the power of 614. There are a lot of possible choices you can make.” I’m like, “All the grains of sand on the beach in California?” He goes, “Every known neuron in the entire known universe times 2 times 3.14.” Basically, he was saying that infinity is the combination of choices. Having a North versus a South that’s based on something that has been proven over thousands of years is better than us trying to define what good and bad are.
I’m the guy that can say that because I lived on one side of the fence and the other side. When I watch people go through hard things that don’t have the comfort of faith to be with them, I grieve twice for them. I grieve through what they are going through and also the fact that they are having to do it all by themselves. In one of my lines of work, which is life insurance, we see that frequently. It’s not the time for me to preach to anybody but I think about that. Life is better if this is not the only thing we are doing if we have somewhere else to spend our time at a later point, life is much different. You make much better choices in the here and now.
No back pains there. You don’t stub your toe. There are quite a lot of goodness that happens when you are on the other side.
Sign me up for that.
Trey, this has been fabulous. If people want to get ahold of you, what would be the best way to reach out to you?
The website for consulting is www.Trinity-Blue.com. Contact information is there and some services. I would love to hear from anybody who’s looking for a way to juice the performance of the organization. The book is available on Amazon. It’s A CEO Only Does Three Things: Finding Your Focus in the C-Suite by Trey Taylor. It’s doing well there. I do an occasional newsletter. Sometimes it’s five days a week, sometimes two days a week. It’s a free newsletter. You can sign up for that. We have about 10,000 or 11,000 people that are following that newsletter. PlantYourFlag.live. I believe that if we plant our flag, others who need to see what we are doing will find us more easily. We talked about venture capital, wine and whatever is of interest to me that day is on that newsletter and we have good feedback on that. I would love for people to take a look at that.
We have been talking to Trey Taylor, Managing Director at Trinity Blue Consulting. Thanks for exposing and being transparent with the audience. I appreciate you and you are becoming a good friend. Thanks for being here.
Chad, appreciate the time and appreciate the work you do with this show.
Important Links:
Jim Wilder – LinkedIn
Amazon – A CEO Only Does Three Things
About Trey Taylor
Trey is the Chief Executive Officer of Taylor Insurance Services. In this role, his primary responsibility is to set the guiding vision of the organization, recruit the best possible talent to fulfill that vision and then assist those people in doing the best possible work they can perform. Trey holds a Bachelor’s degree in History from Emory University in Atlanta, a Juris Doctor degree in tax and Corporate Transactions from Tulane University and has done post-graduate work at the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University and the Georgia Institute of Technology. Trey is licensed in Life and Health Insurance Sales in Georgia and several other states.
Trey began his management career at Healtheon|WebMD where he participated in the largest private placement of equity in US Financial history. Trey then worked as a Senior Analyst for a venture capital firm in Atlanta before leaving to work in a corporate development role at EarthLink and AOL/Time Warner. Heavily involved in public service in Valdosta and Lowndes County, Trey is currently a Board Member and Past-President of the Board of Trustees of Leadership Lowndes, a Member of the Board of Directors of the Alapaha Council of the Boy Scouts of America, and a Member of the Board of Trustees of Lowndes Associated Ministries to People (LAMP), and an Advisor to Azalea Health Innovations, Inc. and AgencySpotter, Inc. Previously, Trey served as a Board Member for the Greater Valdosta United Way and the Chairman of its Allocation Committee, and a Board Member for the Valdosta North Rotary Club. In 2013, Trey was named one of Georgia Trend Magazine’s 40 Under 40. Additionally, Trey received the Cheers for Peers MVP, Cheers for Peers MVP Giver, Employee Recognition Award and Happiest Company Award in 2014 from TinyHR.
In his private time, Trey enjoys teaching introductory wine courses and is a WSET certified sommelier. Trey and his wife, Sheya have recently founded Tyche Wines to produce and distribute interesting wines. They have produced a 2007 Willamette Pinot Noir, a 2009 Sonoma sparkling wine, and a Bordeaux. Trey and Sheya are the proud parents of Roy Edward Taylor IV (Ret), and Emmaline.
