45 minute listen
Portsmouth, NH
Visualize with me the hard challenge of entering your family owned company basically starting on the plant floor, after being a skier and ski instructor for your extended college years.
You come back to the business to help out your family and then, over the 45 years, massively transform the business from a marginal performing RV manufacturer to a world class mission critical defense contractor. Cary Corkin is one of those second generation business owners that defies the maxims: he took The Entwistle Company to a whole new stage of sustained success.
In this hour-long podcast, Cary and I talk about family businesses and the different roles that you play in them, the challenge of following big footsteps, the crisis that turned into a positive transformation, and keeping his feet on the ground all the way. Lots of insightful learnings and unlearnings from this unpretentious entrepreneur.
Listen to the interview here:
What I am Reading / Listening to
Contributed by Marisa B. Lister
Offspring (2010)
Created by Debra Oswald, John Edwards, and Imogen Banks
When I stumbled upon Offspring, while scrolling through the many options on Netflix, I must admit I did not expect to get as immediately hooked as I did! Admittedly, I have a soft spot for both British and Australian-based shows—the dry humor, the unusual narrative methods, peculiar characters—but this series hit it out of the park for me. With 7 seasons (no official notice was made as to cancellation or hiatus of the show, leaving fans very frustrated), Offspring centers around Nina Proudman, a 30-something obstetrician with an impossible love life, and her wacky and unconventional family. Nina’s very vivid imagination and narration add a unique element to the family-based comedy. Her family’s ever-demanding needs along with the outlandish antics of her coworkers makes Offspring an easily lovable show. This set of quirky, endearing, and variable characters makes you find yourself laughing crying, relating, and rooting for them throughout the series.
Entrepreneur Owner-Manager Quote
“A good boutique M&A firm is the equivalent of a very nice hotel in a strange city. The secret is great service and honest direction. Ask yourself this question: Does the hotel have a high powered guest-focused ‘Concierges Desk’? This will dictate the impression of your stay. At Bigelow the ‘Concierges Desk’ is superb!”
-James Seely, President & Chief Executive Officer of Residential Mortgage Services
Energy Creation
Energy Ignites Drive
What’s the difference between the highest performing Entrepreneur Owner-Managers and all others? Drive has a lot to do with it. Purpose, resilience, passion and persistence for long terms goals. Grit. And positive energy ignites drive.
Many of my friends have heard me speak of personal Energy Management (as opposed to time management). Don’t get me wrong, I am completely intentional about my time, (I cannot allow anyone, but me, to schedule me), but time is only one component of energy management (or more accurately, “positive energy” management, I mean, who wants to focus on managing negative energy?!?). And when we are depleted and don’t have positive energy, we are no good to ourselves or anyone around us. When we have a surplus of positive energy, we throw it off all around us, right?
Positive Energy unlocks talent and drive. Components of positive energy management for me include sleep, exercise, nutrition, breathwork, meditation, and hot / cold therapy. These are not all equal. I would say all the other components of energy management rest on a foundation of sleep. A helpful tool for understanding sleep and fatigue is the use of the Oura Ring (pronounced aura).
Like other wearable fitness trackers (Apple Watch, Fitbit, WHOOP, HR monitor) in many ways it seems to me the Oura ring doesn’t give me new information as much as it confirms what my unconscious is telling me (if we are listening?). I only wear the Oura ring for sleep as I don’t like its intrusiveness on my hand, and I don’t get any value from it. (I mostly just use a HR monitor for exercise, and even then I don’t do it all the time, and really only want a chest band giving info to an app on my iPhone that I can check in on). However, readers, like many of my longevity geek friends may want to wear it all the time as it does track all kinds of inputs through the day.
Here are two screen shots of the output from the Oura ring. In the first one, whoa you can see that’s not a great restorative sleep, only 6 hr 44 min but with quite a bit of REM and deep sleep. Can’t carry on that short a sleep for too long.
The second shot shows a remarkable 9 hr 5 min of sleep and you can see that there’s a good bit of REM but not as much deep sleep. If you look at the graph you can see that I evidently popped in and out of light sleep and REM sleep, I suspect because my recently replaced right knee was giving me a high level of background pain which I am vaguely aware of (and sometimes get up to pop some ibuprofen to deal with it.).
I haven’t shown additional screen shots for brevity, but the Oura ring also tracks average HR, average temperature, respirations, heart rate variation, and a host of other interesting data.
What I have found is that my “normal” sleep is about 7.5 hours in my perfect world that’s 9:30 or 10:00 pm to 5:00 or 5:30 am. When I am on the road or other things interrupt my routine, then typically I get less sleep because I don’t wake up later in the morning. The Oura ring helps me be more aware and intentional about sleep, managing fatigue, and positive energy.
In the interest of full transparency as always, I am a modest owner in Oura Health, the Finnish company that makes the Oura ring.
