Friends with Benefits

Finding Clarity by Blending Discipline and Heart with Rob Moyer

• Sam and Jason Yarborough • Season 3 • Episode 6

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There’s something powerful that happens when you meet a leader who thinks in systems but leads with soul.

This week, we’re talking with our friend Rob Moyer, someone we’ve looked up to for years for how he builds partner programs, but even more for how he builds the people behind them. Rob has scaled partnerships at every stage, from early-stage chaos to billion-dollar organizations, and he brings a perspective that blends discipline, clarity, and heart in a way you rarely see in tech. He’s also the founder of BlueThread.io, where he’s helping operators bring smarter systems and AI-driven clarity into their partner strategies.

We get into how he narrowed Gong’s partner ecosystem from hundreds of “maybes” to a focused engine that actually produced results, the frameworks he teaches operators to bring order to ambiguity, and the mindset shifts that helped him create a life he’s proud of. Rob talks openly about redefining ambition, taking bold career pauses to be present with his kids, and why “total life victory” has become the filter he uses for every decision. This one hits leadership, identity, craft, and the courage it takes to do what actually matters.


What you’ll learn:

  • How to use focus, math, and operating systems to scale partnerships with intention
  • Why discipline and self-honesty matter more than headcount or big visions
  • How Rob designs for “total life victory” and builds a career around the relationships that matter most


Jump into the conversation:

(00:00) Introduction

(03:04) How music connects us to the people we love

(04:24) Breaking down the systems behind great leadership

(07:12) Why the math always tells the truth in partnerships

(12:57) Building structure when everything feels chaotic

(14:43) Speaking the language your leaders actually hear

(19:56) The habits that shape strong teams

(24:21) Leading with honesty, heart, and humanity

(26:52) Staying grounded as the world shifts toward ai

(31:59) Total life victory and choosing what matters most

(42:01) Finding calm through gratitude and getting outside


Connect with Rob Moyer: https://www.linkedin.com/in/robermo/ 

Check out BlueThread.io: https://www.bluethread.io/ 


Check out Arcadia: https://www.BeArcadia.com  

Connect with Sam Yarborough: https://www.linkedin.com/in/sam-yarborough/ 

Connect with Jason Yarborough: https://www.linkedin.com/in/yarby/ 


Produced in partnership with Share Your Genius

https://www.shareyourgenius.com 

[00:00:00] Rob Moyer: You have the ability to change your mind, and that’s okay too. People just, it gets stuck on these steps that, well, I made this commitment, I got to do this. Well, you know what? Things change. You find the right thing. You can do what you want. It’s okay. Your network’s going to be with you when you’re doing great and when you’re not. So that’s the ones that matter. That’s total life victory right there.

[00:00:32] Jason Yarborough: Welcome to the Friends With Benefits podcast. A business podcast about revenue generating partnerships, not a podcast about business time with friends. We are your co-hosting couple. I’m Jason.

[00:00:43] Sam Yarborough: And I’m Sam. Welcome to the show, friends. So if you’re in the partnership space, you definitely have heard of today’s guest. He is one of the most well-respected, successful, he has run partnership programs. We all aspire to lead. But furthermore,

[00:01:00] Jason Yarborough: Yeah, I think what inspired this conversation was a lunch that he and I had last time I was in San Francisco. We talked a lot about the programs he’s ran, built, was building, but more importantly we got into some of his leadership and lifestyle philosophies and I was like, wow, I really want to share this conversation with our guests and bring on the podcast and really talk about what it means to build a life that you aspire to and get into some stuff that I think everyone should think about outside of work.

[00:01:32] Sam Yarborough: It was an awesome conversation. So without further ado, Mr. Rob Moyer.

[00:01:37] Jason Yarborough: Hello, our fellow friends of the podcast.

[00:01:41] Sam Yarborough: Hello. Hello.

[00:01:42] Jason Yarborough: It is cruising into holiday season. So we got that kind of thing going on over here. I’m already in the holiday spirit, Christmas spirit. It’s kind of early. I don’t think Sam’s quite tracking, but I’m feeling it, man.

[00:01:55] Sam Yarborough: He’s ready to put up the tree, but that’s a hard stop for me. We got to get through Thanksgiving and all that first.

[00:02:02] Jason Yarborough: I’m ready. I don’t know why, but it just feels like it’s time. But anyway, speaking of gifts, we’ve got a real gift for you today. See what I did there? That’s pretty good transition.

[00:02:10] Sam Yarborough: That was pretty good.

[00:02:11] Jason Yarborough: I got my friend Rob, you’ve probably already seen the thumbnail and you’re listening to it because he’s here. But if you don’t know Rob, he’s a very, very special person in this partnership world that we exist in now, startup world. But Rob’s built some of the most admired partner programs in tech. Thank you. His Rolodex of success is we all want it, but after getting to know Rob, I think what’s really interesting to me isn’t how he’s scaled programs, but more so how he scales people. His take on that and his life and how he lives and what he’s after is something we can all strive to do. So today we’re going to unpack a little bit about how systems thinking meets soul, which if you know Sam and I, it’s the kind of leadership that we believe wins in both business and in life. So please, ladies and gentlemen, welcome Rob Moyer to your ears.

[00:03:03] Rob Moyer: What’s happening? I’m here, happening. Rob, I just want to know which albums are showing up because that’s kind of like, I didn’t switch ’em out before this one, but…

[00:03:10] Sam Yarborough: I can see Lincoln Park and then I’m embarrassed to say, but I don’t know what the pink one is. Can you enlighten me?

[00:03:17] Rob Moyer: Of Monsters and Men, although they…

[00:03:19] Jason Yarborough: Have new…

[00:03:21] Sam Yarborough: We’re…

[00:03:21] Jason Yarborough: Fans. Do you switch ’em out for every other day for all the different video…

[00:03:26] Rob Moyer: Calls? No, about once a month. I will tailor, I’ll put my Cranberries if I’m talking to somebody in Dublin. I like to switch it up a little bit. It’s my talking piece.

[00:03:38] Jason Yarborough: I love that. I love… is one of the albums you just go to all the time?

[00:03:43] Rob Moyer: It’s really mood driven. I got a little bit of Smiths, my kids got into The Smiths.

[00:03:47] Jason Yarborough: Nice. Nice.

[00:03:48] Rob Moyer: That’s like my vibe. My adult kids, my daughter for her college graduation took me to Outside Lands because that was our thing, concerts. So it’s a very important part of my life because it’s my connection to my adult kids.

[00:04:06] Jason Yarborough: I love that. That’s so great. Music is such a great connection. We have a six and four-year-old. We talk a lot about that. Getting them introduced to music from Planted to… Sam is really good about keeping music playing in the house. So that’s a big one for us as well. Love it. Right on. Let’s jump right into the fun stuff, right? Let’s talk a little bit about some of the frameworks from your partner operating models and your partner GTM engineered playbooks and that can help us better dig into how your leadership differs from those that are out there. And before we jump in, if you’re not following Rob on LinkedIn, you got to give him a follow. He is starting a thing called BlueThread.io. He’s got some GPTs that he’s built and I’ve got to say I’ve become a mega fan of the BlueThread.io GPT, use it quite a bit. It’s loaded with everything you could want and it’s like tapping into Rob’s head. I tried to ask the GPT to give me some dirt on Rob and it wouldn’t give it to me, so I need to upload some more of that stuff. So Rob, you’ve said before that most partner programs don’t fail on vision, they fail on operating systems.

[00:05:11] Jason Yarborough: So I want to tap into when you came into Gong, what was missing or broken, confusing or whatever and how did you design for scale instead of chaos?

[00:05:21] Rob Moyer: Yeah, and I’ll go back in time a little bit because it gave me the confidence to continue this path whether I was in a startup or scale. I was fortunate, one of my mentors was the CEO of Synnex and we had a scale business. I ran a hundred million dollars business that I scaled up to a billion. And it was ironic that when I came to Gong, I had the same kind of observation as everybody’s quick to try a little of everything. And my mentor told me, Rob, you can only accomplish three things in a year because anything out over that is foolish, you’ll never get there. You just never get to project five or six all in. So he always forced me to refine my focus, which I did. And so when I came over to Gong, I had to be honest, I failed the first six months. I kind of was buying into, well it’s startup so the world’s different, so…

[00:06:20] Jason Yarborough: So much to do.

[00:06:21] Rob Moyer: Exactly. And then I quickly realized we’re not focused, so we had to get hyper-focused and we had to really narrow our focus. We had a couple hundred partners, we really had no business and we just narrowed it down to 50 and I said, let’s focus. And so my theme all along is this hyper focus and then that gets into this, there are two types of people, operators and executors. Well, in order to be an operator, you need to be so focused that you can execute. That’s my philosophy and that’s kind of what I talk about and how I teach with my clients.

[00:06:59] Jason Yarborough: I’m sure the answer is pretty plain, but when you looked at a hundred partners and they said, or you said, you got to get focused, how do you set that line to focus on or focus on later or not now?

[00:07:11] Rob Moyer: Yeah, so it’s like getting in the weeds. The most important skill in partnerships is math. And so what I do…

[00:07:19] Sam Yarborough: That’s a hot take.

[00:07:20] Rob Moyer: Yeah, well it is, because when you think about it, I force all my teams to break down their portfolio all the way down to how many customers does each partner have, how many do you think you can penetrate if you got them to deal reg, how many can you get deal reg, what’s your win rate to MQL, MQL to SQL, and then you put in your average deal size and then you have your basic math. And I’m maniacal about this because it forces you to think about where am I spending my time? Because on one hand you can go, oh, I have these massive customers, but if you’re going to get like 0.5 penetration of them, the math might not work better than a partner that has 50 customers that you can penetrate half of them. So math matters, it’s just doing your homework.

[00:08:15] Jason Yarborough: That’s actually a really good point. I think about some of the experiences that I’ve come into and you kind of look at what’s on the board. There’s 70 agency partners, then there’s 70 potential integration partners. How do you begin to focus and think about how to really execute on that when you’ve got a number? And I think if you… I’m sure what you saw is that the partner team may be trying to chase all 100 of those partners and only effectively penetrating 0.01% of ’em.

[00:08:44] Rob Moyer: Yeah, it’s true because there’s this natural feeling that if you have a good meeting, something’s going to happen. So people tend to have meetings and then when you start adding up those meetings, you felt great about 10 of ‘em and then you look 30 days later and when you’re not seeing conversion rates, you’re like, maybe I need to have different meetings. So… I mean it sounds a little bit harsh, but it really is trying to get into the details. I remember one of my people that worked for me at Gong, I backed all the way up and did a spreadsheet on time, where are you spending your time, what’s your quota and how are we going to get there? And after about an hour he came back to me and said, this is amazing. It’s just this clarity that he got out of looking at where I spend my time because the old adage, people don’t get fired for being incompetent in sales. They get fired for spending their time in the wrong place. So having these exercises that are foundational are critical for team success.

[00:09:53] Sam Yarborough: I think it’s so important to look at this from a numbers perspective, like you were saying, because sales does it and marketing does it and partnership people tend to shy away from that for whatever reason. We can’t quantify or look at our pipeline until it’s a sourced deal. There’s no leading indicators to get there. So it feels a little shot in the dark for partner professionals. So I’d be curious, for example, in this employee at Gong, how are you, other than this partner has the most customers, how are you encouraging people to spend their time to be most effective in that?

[00:10:28] Rob Moyer: It really comes down to the job is to train your people so they can do it themselves. So my job was to give them the tools to make the decision. All bright people. And so for example, in that case it was pretty obvious once you start writing it down, the math does play out, and I don’t want to overuse that word in this conversation, but you start looking at here’s the potential of my partners, here’s where I’m spending my time and here’s my target. It’s not aligning and I don’t have to tell them at that point, the spreadsheet will tell them because they’re like, ooh, maybe I need to spend a little bit more time recruiting partners, or maybe these partners are really not going to deliver. It’s not that you’re going to cut ‘em off, you’re just going to spend less time. I mean, we’re all in business to make things happen and my job as a leader is to teach the people how to get there, how to create their own decisions. Because what I find is most people have it in ‘em. They’ve just never been given the tools or the training to really use it in this way. It’s like, to your point, direct has all these systems from MQL to SQL, SDRs to AEs, all that. Partnerships tend to be vague across the board. So everything I do is around structure, attribution, time, where you’re at in the funnel, because some partners are top of funnel, some partners are middle funnel and some partners are bottom of funnel and post. And I want the teams to always know where their partners fit in that value chain and a lot of these exercises focuses on that.

[00:12:22] Jason Yarborough: The exercise is going to make me think of calorie tracking, not that I do a whole lot of that working…

[00:12:28] Rob Moyer: For me, but I wear a Whoop to overcompensate.

[00:12:32] Sam Yarborough: We all are, for what it’s worth.

[00:12:33] Jason Yarborough: I can’t say I’ve ever… yeah, we all have on the Friends With Benefits podcast uniform today, so appreciate that. None of us are calorie tracking, but reminds me of what you’re talking about, how you track everything that you’re doing so that you can optimize the body for its performance, to lose weight or to gain muscle or to do whatever. So doing the same thing and tracking time, effort and energy that you put into the program and how it’s going to grow as a result. How was the leadership’s take on your approach coming in and wanting to scale back on the amount of partners you were actually focusing on and trying to get more strategic in that initiative?

[00:13:08] Rob Moyer: Well, yeah, I’ll give you a couple different answers because I know most people know me for Gong in this crowd, but I’ve done it both. At Gong it was pretty simple. We didn’t really have business, so just moving us forward off from zero to one is very hard and I did it in five different flywheels, so it was very well received. In other roles, it was actually harder in scale because in the bigger businesses that are established, they’re a little bit more risk averse. And what I found is it came down to the same thing. It’s like you got to build a system. At the end of the day, I think we were talking about this, about the people, and so you have to put in a system. People want to learn, people want to be a part of a system and when it works, I used to tell every employee that ever worked for me, give me 18 months, learn the system and you’re going to be great the rest of your career and I’ll help you the rest of your career. But trust me, there is a process and a system for you to be successful. And I think that’s part of my philosophy. I don’t… unlike Gong, it was at Synnex, it was at Microsoft, same thing.

[00:14:16] Sam Yarborough: So a lot of times partner teams, we’ve seen it for the past several years, they’re cut or they’re given way less resources because they can’t quantify or justify the work they’re doing. You’re talking about it’s simple math. If you run up against a CRO, which I’m sure you have in your career that doesn’t quite get partnerships, how do you explain to him what partnerships does in a way that gets them on board and they’re on the game at this point?

[00:14:43] Rob Moyer: Yeah, so I think there’s two things. You have to learn their language. So I start with the customer and then I break down what are we trying to accomplish, and I’ll put it everything from top of funnel, middle of funnel and bottom funnel, once again, because there is a value chain of where partners play. I never promise that partners do everything. The second thing I do, and we’re in sales and I use this quite a bit in my consulting agency, is like, hey, show them the work. Show them where others are ahead of them because no companies have scaled to a billion dollars without partnerships and it’s just a matter of where are you going to start? Are you going to be the one that creates this accelerator? Then the final thing I focus on is don’t expect partnerships to win if you consider ‘em an expense center. They’re part of your go-to-market org and you have to treat ‘em that way. I’ve actually used this example, and I can’t tell the company who I did this with, but I’d go, you’ll spend 25,000 in an event, marketing event, with no leads in Vegas, yet you won’t spend 25,000 to develop a partner who actually has customers in our ICP. So I think you have to talk to them in their language. I think you have to be very factual and I think you have to cast a vision. The key here, and I think this is where your question comes from, is I see a lot of partnerships… you got about 18 months to prove yourself. And I think it’s like, gets back to my notion, less is more. They try to over promise and then when things don’t work, they’re constantly trying to back their promise, where I’m like, I’m going to only promise one or two things and try to deliver and if it doesn’t work, I’m going to iterate very fast, like this agile methodology for partnerships, like, hmm, I’m close but not there and I’ll just keep changing and keep iterating until I get there. And I think that’s what people have to do. It’s kind of peel the onion back and focus, focus, focus. I feel like I’m over repeating a lot, but…

[00:17:00] Jason Yarborough: No, I particularly like your point about speaking in their language. At our Arcadia experience last year, we had our friend Sangram there to speak and we’ve been on this track or this topic around partnerships in particular. We sit in the middle of all these different teams, as you know, and I think our primary job is to translate the problem of each department we sit in the middle of back into their language. We have to hear what CS is struggling with. It’s going to be different than what product is struggling with, and sales and marketing, we hear their problems and we know how we hold the answer, but we have to translate that back to them in a language that they understand. I thought that was a really good point for Sangram to bring up and make because I’ve been guilty of like, hey, this is my partner spiel, I’m just going to spew it out and you’re going to drop to a knee and kiss the ring. And they look back at me, they’re like, what the heck are you talking about? And to your point, I failed to translate it back into a way that it made sense to them. And I think a lot of folks in partnership tend to miss out on the need to really accurately communicate that back to the teams they work with.

[00:18:15] Rob Moyer: You triggered one thing that I always do and you have to have some guts to do it, but if you’re in the org for about six months, you now know it. You got to have your die-on-the-hill moment. I did a couple where they didn’t want to do something I want to do and I go, I’ll die on this hill. And when you have that kind of statement, they do stop and listen and they give you a second look. And I think sometimes people lack the confidence to go make those statements. But I remember I’ve done this a couple times and it sounds a little arrogant, but in hindsight it was the best thing I ever did, is I used the die-on-the-hill moment. And the other thing I said, well, if I’m going to get shot, I’m going to go get shot swinging. Get shot for something. Yeah, I’m not here to just create average results and just float around and get let go. You hired me, this is what I’m going to do. I’m not going to be perfect. I’m not going to always be right, but have that die-on-the-hill moment and have that feeling that I have nothing to lose, because they don’t have it, they need it. That’s why they hired me. I’m going for it.

[00:19:30] Sam Yarborough: Well, and to your point, if you have the numbers and whatnot and the systems to back that up, then you have something to stand on. I think if you don’t have that, then your die-on-the-hill moment may not be as successful. So for listeners, make sure you’ve got your foundation built and you’ve got your story down.

[00:19:49] Jason Yarborough: Confidence comes from proof, as they say.

[00:19:51] Sam Yarborough: Okay, so say that we were shadowing your team for a week. We could only be so lucky. What is one operational habit that would become very obvious to us that is embedded in the culture?

[00:20:03] Rob Moyer: That I tell bad jokes. Yes, perfect. But it would be my 5–15. Every team… I’ve been doing this, I get eye rolls, my old team would all eye roll this and then they go lead and then they install a 5–15 every Friday. I like having a document that’s supposed to take five minutes to read, 15 minutes to write: what’s working, what’s not, what’s on deck. And the reason I do that is I try to create this self-correcting discipline within the org because everybody knows what’s working. It’s like by nature in sales, you’re great at telling people what’s working, but if you really dig deep, you avoid what’s not working. And so this thing is this little disciplined way of doing that. And as a leader it’s important because as you build trust with your teams, they will be candid. You might not catch it in a one-on-one, but it’s like an asynchronous update. You can go, oh, this isn’t working, and I can come back and I can go, hey, is this important enough or should we go it three ways? It’ll go, I’m here to help you, this is low level, you should help yourself, good callout. Or let’s have a discussion, let’s make sure this is the priority. But the reason I do that is it’s part of this whole disciplined approach to this weekly cadence, to a monthly cadence, to a quarterly cadence, and very operational that way. And it starts with the self-discipline of a weekly cadence. So that would be kind of the one callout.

[00:21:46] Jason Yarborough: The self-discipline on the cadence side, meaning for them the self-discipline or more for you?

[00:21:53] Rob Moyer: Yeah, because tell you what, I used to get teased about it. I remember a CEO of… it was a Fortune 200 company, would ask me why I send this 5–15 to him every week. And I was like, because that’s the way I think. But more importantly, it showed the discipline that I structured. And I would literally, if two people were on the fence for promotion, I just go into my records, who was more disciplined in sending that, that person would get the promotion. And what it did over time, it proved to me is the people that were disciplined were the people that went up. Numbers are one version of the metrics that you look at for promotion to bring people into management or manager level. They got to have certain attributes other than hitting their numbers. One of the big fallacies around a lot of people do is they promote their highest achieving person when they have no skillset to manage. So by having this mechanism to see who is really accountable to themselves gives me an idea of, hey, who do I want to invest in and who should I bring along for the journey? So it’s multifaceted, but that’s the reason I do it.

[00:23:11] Jason Yarborough: Got it. I want to pluck a quick word out of something you said a minute ago, trust. When Rob Moyer comes onto a team, how do you begin to immediately start building trust and earning trust with your team?

[00:23:25] Rob Moyer: I think being authentic. I love the stuff that you both write about and it starts there. I used to have this joke that it sounds corny, but I’d be in my leadership things and I’d always end with, hey, we’re a great team, but our number one role is be a decent human. It’s like we all come from different areas, different backgrounds, beliefs, but you know what? It doesn’t matter what your belief or background is, you can be a decent human. So when you talk like that as a leader, they inherently will open up a little bit and you are able to build trust because you’re authentic. It’s funny, I know that I’m quirky. My favorite story is in South Carolina I had a team, and South Carolina’s a little different than California. And a little bit… for a holiday gift I gave everybody… they didn’t recycle, this was probably 15 years ago and I was offended.

[00:24:24] Sam Yarborough: I couldn’t… the audacity.

[00:24:25] Rob Moyer: So for holidays I bought every person on the team a reusable Starbucks cup. And the funny thing is, the most conservative people on my team loved it and it kind of brought this connection of they accepted me for who I am, I accepted them for who they are. And I think that trust is built through being authentic. So long-winded answer, but it’s kind of the way I think. It’s the way I think people will view you. They might not love you, but they’ll respect you.

[00:24:58] Sam Yarborough: I think that paired with… I love your 5–15… creating a cadence of communication is also super important. And I think that might be an underlying foundation of that 5–15 that’s really special. A lot of leaders just wait for the one-on-one and then there’s so much pressure built up in that, you can’t get beneath surface level in one week or one hour at once a week.

[00:25:25] Rob Moyer: You are spot on, because sometimes the one-on-ones become kind of like we’ve got fire drills on both sides and we don’t get time to connect, where if you have a 5–15 I can definitely see something’s going on and I can either do the praise or I can do the, hey, let’s talk about it. But it’s the asynchronous communication vehicle. And what I loved about it is, like I said, people would take that and they just implement it on their teams. They would start doing it as they went through in their careers. And it’s just a great way to communicate with your teams because when I do a lot of my consulting or talk to a lot of companies, one of the biggest red flags I get is that people… they’re not actually taking their feedback. That’s a common theme right now, especially in this world. You’ll go in and on the employee surveys, it’s like, management doesn’t hear us, blah, blah, blah. So it’s like if you can do it at the ground level, that’s a good way of creating this two-way dialogue.

[00:26:33] Sam Yarborough: For sure. And you just mentioned it too, but especially in a virtual world, having an open door policy or whatever, that doesn’t exist anymore. And so this is a beautiful way to create that constant, and then they feel like they have stake in the game they’re leading in. So I think it’s really spot on. With the advent of AI, how do you see your leadership changing in this new world of AI, if at all?

[00:27:00] Rob Moyer: No, I don’t see it changing leadership. I see it changing things like measurement or output. When I think about leadership, I still think it’s very personal because all AI is going to do is probably put a little bit of a hole in the middle class. Like, smart people with AI are going to just produce way more than normal, and people that are not using it are probably going to sink a little bit. But it doesn’t change the dynamic that you want to bring your team along for the ride. And so I view it as it’s a point in time. The one thing I love about AI is it does get rid of the mundane tasks. I’m in the camp that I think of it this way: as simple as AI… there’s never been anything in the history of the world that consolidates information as fast as AI, but it still needs human discernment on understanding how to use it. So maybe I’ll coach a little different on discernment, but it doesn’t change the attributes you look for in people that are going to be great with you. And so AI is just another productivity tool and people that embrace it are going to probably do better than the people that don’t. And you know what? And I have the right to change my mind in a year as this evolves.

[00:28:27] Sam Yarborough: We all do with AI. Nobody knows the answer yet.

[00:28:31] Rob Moyer: Yeah, exactly.

[00:28:32] Jason Yarborough: So as someone who’s now leaning heavily in AI and building repeatable systems and has engineered them, what is that one area where you’ll still rely on your gut?

[00:28:43] Rob Moyer: I think it’s discernment. It’s kind of funny. If you look at the way I write on LinkedIn, I’ve shared publicly I’m dyslexic and I did catch a little heat for the em dashes. I try to get rid of ’em now.

[00:28:59] Sam Yarborough: We all do.

[00:29:00] Rob Moyer: I’m still insecure. But it just also tells me when people call you out, they don’t understand the thought process of how you use AI. You have the thought, you just want to get it refined. And my view on this is if you notice the way I write, I write a little bit counterintuitive to people because I’ve seen what works as an operator and I tend to think sometimes we’ll all rally to the echo chamber. And what I have learned in life, the echo chamber only gets you to average. Exceptional performance, you have to do something different. You have to kind of zig when others zag, but you have to do it thoughtfully. So I look at it as all it does is speeds up my process of evaluating next steps. That’s where I use AI. It’s like this motion of brainstorming, but ultimately I kind of go against the grain because my special skill is I’m curious and when you’re curious with some facts, you can be dangerous. So it’s like, how do I use it to benefit the next step? I don’t care about next year, I care about this year. What am I doing this year to execute?

[00:30:20] Jason Yarborough: That’s a very good description of viewing AI and I kind of resonate with a lot of that. But I got to highlight, the echo chamber only gets you to average. That’s a strong, powerful statement. I love that.

[00:30:34] Rob Moyer: You get a little hate on the…

[00:30:36] Jason Yarborough: Back end of that.

[00:30:37] Sam Yarborough: So true though.

[00:30:38] Jason Yarborough: It’s fantastic. It’s so good. I was looking for my pen to write that down.

[00:30:42] Sam Yarborough: Don’t worry, this is recorded.

[00:30:43] Jason Yarborough: Yeah.

[00:30:46] Rob Moyer: No, you know what though? I hate to say it, but it’s kind of almost like how we developed a relationship. It started online, we understand each other’s point of view and over time we go, yeah, I understand that. And then it’s like the nuances of how we execute differently. There’s no right or wrong answer, but it feeds more thought process into how you execute. I love some of the stuff you all talk about and it’s probably what I’ve been saying resonates for you as well, otherwise you wouldn’t have called me. So that’s how it works. Not every person you follow online has a particular take that’s important. But there’s some that if I want a certain topic, there’s certain people I follow. I just sent a note to one of the influencers. I go, man, you don’t know how you influenced me. It wasn’t about your take on sales, it was on your approach to your social media.

[00:31:56] Jason Yarborough: Love that.

[00:31:57] Rob Moyer: I literally was studying her approach rather than what she was saying as her practical advice, if that makes sense.

[00:32:07] Jason Yarborough: Absolutely. And you’re right, that’s kind of what led us here. So the last time I was out in the Bay Area, we sat down and had lunch and you kind of took me down this track of what you called total life victory, right? The idea of winning in every arena. I thought that was so good that I actually wrote it down. I think I may have texted or called Sam and I was like, we got to get Rob on the podcast, talk about this. I loved how you were breaking that down. So tell us how you define that total life victory for yourself and break that down for us.

[00:32:27] Rob Moyer: So I took two breaks in my career and it was another one of those… everybody just shook their head like, what the heck are you doing? You have an amazing job. And I know one of ‘em was my kids are everything to me. We were joking about it on the front end of this about connection, music, but a mentor of mine told me, you only have one shot at raising your kids. And when my daughter was going into ninth grade… by the way, she’s successful in this industry, happy about her, total girl dad, and she made me a better manager of women. I love that about this.

[00:33:09] Jason Yarborough: That’s awesome.

[00:33:10] Rob Moyer: I was working for Microsoft, I was killing it, but I was traveling every week. The light was shining bright on me and my mentor goes, you only have four more years to establish an amazing relationship with your daughter before she goes to college.

[00:33:26] Sam Yarborough: Wow.

[00:33:27] Rob Moyer: And it just like, wow.

[00:33:29] Jason Yarborough: Goodness.

[00:33:31] Sam Yarborough: How’s that for a mic drop?

[00:33:34] Rob Moyer: And so I ended up leaving Microsoft. I was like, I got to do something else. I need to focus this time. I already had a good relationship with her. But it is true, you have 18 years to determine what your relationship is the rest of your life. I mean, you can still have a great adult relationship with your kids, but you know what winning is? It’s enjoying your job, having a relationship with your kids where they want you, not just like you want them. And that’s kind of how I had an outlook. And I know I walked away from a lot of stuff in career, but I wouldn’t trade it for anything because I know a lot of my friends that it’s like, wow, what happened? Because the only thing your kids know is time.

[00:34:32] Jason Yarborough: That’s it.

[00:34:33] Rob Moyer: Did you put the time in?

[00:34:35] Jason Yarborough: And how you spent it with them or without them. And I think we are very much in the same camp. I mean, that’s kind of why we took Arcadia down the path that it’s gone down. It means harmony and how we find that in life and the work that we do and the life that’s important to us. And for us, I would say one of our non-negotiables is our kids. We’re not willing to give up on that time that we get with them. We may leave a lot on the table, we may leave a lot out there, but we’re just not willing to sacrifice that life that we have with them or who we are in their eyes.

[00:35:08] Rob Moyer: I have a funny story, and it gets back to an earlier question you had of me of some of the things that I did. I used to bring my kids on business trips and I remember I went to a baseball game and I was with a CEO of a Fortune 500 company and I brought my son and we’re in a suite, so it’s a nice thing. And I look around and he’s just sitting with my son the whole game and he came up to me afterwards and goes, thank you. He goes, I love that you did that. I didn’t want to talk to half the people here, so it was good. I have a son his age and I just wanted to talk to him. And I didn’t do it on purpose, other than, like, I go, man, I’m so busy, Matthew, why don’t you come to this game? It just showed you the kind of people that you want to surround yourself with. And I had a great relationship with the CEO moving forward. And I think if I would’ve gone down this business track, pitching him, da da da da, at night to build a relationship, I would’ve had an average relationship. You got to know that I kind of personally bring my kid to a work event and he’d take my call after that every time. So just a lesson in that. It gets to that counterintuitive: be you, do you, and that’s enough, and just… it’s okay.

[00:36:33] Sam Yarborough: I am on a… well, this is something I’m struggling with. I keep saying I’m on a career break and I’m not. I’m building a business, but it’s just different. It’s just different than working a corporate job. And it’s become really apparent to me that while we’re in these jobs, we give everything to them and of course we’ve seen it, they can decide in a moment’s notice that you’re no longer needed. And so I think it’s a really important thing for people to take a step back and define what success looks like and then build their life accordingly, because we can all chase exits and titles and everything that comes along with it. But to your point, if you have kids or your spouse or whatever it is, those things deserve attention and it is fleeting, the time you have to build those. And so…

[00:37:29] Rob Moyer: Well, you’ll have to bleep out this part, but I’ve been married to one… my wife… for 33 years. You can maybe say 23, so I’m not as dated, but it’s true. My only advice for you is there’s going to be a group of people that will want to do business with you more because of that statement. They’re going to be wishing for your success and helping you because it gets back to life in general. I used to say, I think I posted on this recently, I used to tell my team, you don’t need crappy customers. As much as everybody wants to chase a number, your best customers are going to refer you. The world is so big, you can find great customers and hit your numbers and have a good system. People that just will like, well, I got to give ‘em a break then… well, you know what? There’s some karma that goes along with that. But I love the statement you said about, hey, you’re kind of on a break, but you’re not. You’re building a lifestyle business that others are envious of and they want you to succeed, so they’ll probably help you because deep down they want that. A lot of people want that, and there’s no shame in that.

[00:38:50] Jason Yarborough: We’re firm believers in surrounding ourself with the people that we want to do business with. We’ve both walked away from jobs or offers or contracts, clients purely because of what we knew about the company, the people, what was communicated, and we’re just not willing to move in that direction and sacrifice ourself in the meanwhile. There’s too many good people, there’s too many good opportunities and there’s too much good to be had in the world.

[00:39:17] Rob Moyer: And I always say this, your network is not there just when you’re winning. Your network is there when you’re on your worst days. That’s your network. That’s how you find out who your network is, is when things are kind of not doing great.

[00:39:34] Sam Yarborough: And to go to Jason’s point and to yours, Rob, I think first and foremost the step is everybody taking literally a step back and saying, what’s important to me and how am I building towards that? Because yeah, we walked away from jobs, but that was a hard decision because there was a lot of “should” in that, and then we had to look at our own lives and be like, that’s not the life we want. And that’s okay, but if people aren’t taking the opportunity to take inventory on their life, then they’re going to just keep going down a road that doesn’t fulfill them.

[00:40:08] Rob Moyer: Yeah. One thing I’ll say as the elder statesman in this three-people talk, you have the ability to change your mind and that’s okay too. People just… they get stuck on these steps that, well, I made this commitment, I got to do this. Well, you know what? Things change. You find the right thing. You can do what you want. It’s okay. Like I said, your network’s going to be with you when you’re doing great and when you’re not. So that’s the ones that matter. That’s total life victory right there.

[00:40:42] Jason Yarborough: That’s it. And that’s what I like about total life victory, TLV if I may, is that it denotes that you can win it all. You don’t have to focus on just winning your career or just winning family or whatever it might be. If you position yourself in the right way and focus on the right things, you can win it all. You can win this life in a total life victory. And I think there’s a lot to be said for that and a lot to chase within that.

[00:41:09] Rob Moyer: I do have to give a shout-out to one of my mentors, Rick, a.k.a. “Rico.” He brought this concept up to me many years ago. He did the same thing. He left a career at Ingram Micro. We were crushing it. He was a very young VP, moved to Redding, went out… he probably got… this is all public… our one-on-ones are paddle boating to an island on some lake near Lake Shasta. He figured it out and he was the one that used to preach it to me and influenced me so much in this thinking because it was like, I was just going, wow, you did the unconventional thing, leaving a huge job at a young age to just go live life and still run a business. It’s amazing to see that.

[00:41:58] Sam Yarborough: And it’s possible, and that’s amazing.

[00:42:01] Rob Moyer: Totally.

[00:42:02] Sam Yarborough: I’m just curious, is there a single practice or ritual that you’ve adopted outside of work that has influenced the way you lead?

[00:42:10] Rob Moyer: Yeah, I can do on the spot. Gratitude journal. Gratitude journal. The thing about life is you have to knock down the highs and the lows, and sometimes it’s as simple as writing a few notes to yourself every day, things that you’re grateful for, because it puts perspective when things are low and it knocks you down when things are high, because the good stuff happens in the middle. We’re all on a roller coaster. There’s no getting off this roller coaster, but it’s like having a bit of a daily reminder is a big deal and it sets you back on track. The second thing, which is going to sound hokey, but I think you can relate, being in Montana, is just getting outside. We get so caught up in life. There’s nothing like… maybe put your phone on Do Not Disturb, listen to music and go on a walk in nature. That sets you up for success. And guess what? You treat people much better after you do these practices, and that kind of leads to this better… you want to manage when you’re the best version of yourself, not necessarily the worst, although that happens at times. But that’s really the goal.

[00:43:36] Sam Yarborough: And if you have awareness of when you’re your best and your worst, at least you can come to the table with that. And I think that’s a huge step in the right direction.

[00:43:45] Rob Moyer: That’s why I like to write it down, by the way. I don’t just put gratitudes, I put when you get wins, just being thankful, grateful for that win. You may have grinded it out, but it’s like there’s just something about doing that.

[00:44:01] Jason Yarborough: Yeah, no, I love that. I’ve recently started doing some gratitude, maybe call it meditation. I haven’t started writing ‘em down yet, but trying to just keep myself centered around what’s good right now and how do we stay in that moment and stay present around it. So glad to hear that’s the one thing that you stay centered on.

[00:44:17] Rob Moyer: Yeah. I have a fun, a good short story and we’re almost out of time, but one of my goals in life… I climbed Mount Whitney, which was the highest peak in the lower 48.

[00:44:31] Sam Yarborough: 48, okay.

[00:44:32] Rob Moyer: Yeah, I was…

[00:44:32] Sam Yarborough: Congratulations.

[00:44:34] Rob Moyer: Thank you. But this guy, about 75, he was… he kept passing me and I was struggling, and the guy just kept going, small steps, small breaths, you’ll get there. He’d said this to me like five times.

[00:44:52] Sam Yarborough: You were like, shut up. This is hard.

[00:44:55] Rob Moyer: I know, exactly. But you know what? I started using that when I’d get stressed in life. I just had to say that. You were talking about meditating and sometimes it’s about slowing your mind down, taking smaller breaths and being grounded, and it sounds hokey, but it works so well.

[00:45:16] Jason Yarborough: No, that’s so good.

[00:45:17] Rob Moyer: Love it.

[00:45:18] Jason Yarborough: So good. So we’re going to bring it home here. You’ve built systems at scale, you’ve scaled people, you’ve done all the good things. You’re taking some breaks now, seeing you talk about scaling life and building this company and sharing all of your knowledge on LinkedIn. So if the next chapter of Rob were titled like one of your frameworks, what would you call it?

[00:45:39] Rob Moyer: Be the CEO of yourself. Just keep it simple. You don’t have to live anyone else’s life other than your own. Scale what matters most.

[00:45:50] Sam Yarborough: Yeah, exactly. Okay. Okay.

[00:45:53] Jason Yarborough: I’m available for hire, those of you who are looking. I’m just kidding. Rob, this has been fantastic, man. I greatly appreciate you joining us today and sharing some of your knowledge and thoughts and total life victory, all those things. You’re a G of a human and I’m grateful to call you a friend now. So thank you for joining us.

[00:46:11] Rob Moyer: No, thank you for having me, and I am just going to be cheering your journey the whole way. I think you are two fantastic people that have figured it out early enough in life to make an impact and just encourage you to keep taking that journey.

[00:46:29] Sam Yarborough: Well, the same for you, Rob.

[00:46:31] Rob Moyer: We’re cheering you…

[00:46:33] Jason Yarborough: On however we can.

[00:46:34] Rob Moyer: All right, thank you.

[00:46:35] Sam Yarborough: Thanks friends. We’ll see you next time. Go follow Rob on LinkedIn and we appreciate you. Be great.

[00:46:41] Jason Yarborough: See y’all.