Burned Out? This Founder’s Advice Will Change How You Lead - Keith Alper - S2 - E1

Are you a founder or entrepreneur feeling overwhelmed, stretched thin, or stuck in survival mode?

In this episode of A Founder’s Life, we sit down with Keith Alper, a seasoned entrepreneur and leadership expert, who shares what 40+ years of building businesses—and navigating personal loss—have taught him about sustainable leadership, emotional resilience, and building companies that don’t burn you out.

🔥 Keith opens up about how grief, therapy, and vulnerability made him a better leader—and why success today is about leading with love, building aligned teams, and putting purpose first.

This episode is a must-watch if you’re an entrepreneur looking to grow without losing yourself in the process.

⏱️ Timestamps:

00:00 – Intro

01:45 – Keith’s early business journey and managing 400+ people

05:30 – Starting The Nitrous Effect and reinventing creative leadership

11:20 – The cost of burnout and the myth of hustle culture

17:15 – Losing his wife & redefining success through personal healing

24:00 – How therapy and coaching helped him lead with more heart

30:00 – Loving your clients: a different approach to business growth

38:10 – Advice for entrepreneurs who feel exhausted or misaligned

45:00 – What legacy really means (and how to live it daily)

✅ Subscribe for more weekly episodes on:

• Entrepreneurship without burnout

• Purpose-driven leadership

• Mental wellness and emotional resilience for founders

• Work-life alignment (not just balance)

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Transcript

Leo Gestetner (00:00)
Hi there, you're listening to A Founder's Life and I'm your host Leo Gestetna. My guests and myself share our entrepreneurial journey and our methods for a balanced life. I'm joined here today by Keith Alper. Keith, thank you for joining us today. I'd love for you to introduce yourself, please.

Keith Alper (00:16)
Well, thank you, Leo. Great to see you and great to be with you. I'm Keith Alper. I'm born, raised and worked out of St. Louis, Missouri, right in the middle of the United States, like right in the center. And I'm an entrepreneur since I'm 15. So that's why I have no hair. But I've started several companies and it's my 40th year in business this year. So really excited.

I get just as excited to go to work today as I did when I was 15 years old. as somebody said, I get paid to practice in my work.

Leo Gestetner (00:47)
that and tell us more about that journey so what where you started you said back at 15 all the way sort of what brought you to where you are today

Keith Alper (00:58)
Yeah, thank you. You know, I was, very rare because I, I'm, you know, I talked to lot of friends and I knew what I wanted to do when I was like a little, little kid. I wanted to be in show business. put shows on for my parents when I was a little kid. I asked for a little light, brights and sound systems for Hanukkah.

And they're the local theme park in St. Louis is called Six Flags over Mid-America. And you're not supposed to start till you're 16, but I just kind of moved the year over and I started when I was 15. And that was my opportunity to kind of work in the big theater. did 12 shows a day with a big orchestra at the Palace Theater. And I just got the bite of working my first job, working to put on shows and, you know, started as a stagehand. But I met my then

business partners, it would be two business partners and we started doing some work actually for Six Flags on the side. So that's how we started our business. Unfortunately, one of those partners passed away and one had the opportunity to retire two years ago. But the funny thing is what you learned back then and what you learn now and when you look at life, the basics never change. We were there to do good hard work and they ingrained in us and Six Flags very

different than it is today. But the founder of Six Flags, originally out of Dallas, wanted him to put up like little Disneyland's around the country and have a quality, clean park, entertainment, good rides, family entertainment. And so that was drilled in our head as a kid at 15. If you walk by a piece of trash, you had to pick it up. You know, there were no beards and no mustaches at the time. And they put a lot of money towards the family experience. And so, you know, they used to tell us somebody might have saved up for a year or two.

to come to Six Flags with their family. It might be your 100th day in putting on the same show, but the other thing that I like and I use it today is...

you know, there's ageism. And so there's, know, I was very young, but I loved what I did. And so I rose even part time through the ranks of producing concerts. And, know, the day I graduated college, they offered me the job to take over the entertainment department at that time, have like 400 employees as, you know, seasonal workers and stuff like that. By the way, I think, I think they were underpaying me by law. I don't know what happened, but you know, when you do a job that you love what you do, you don't care. I was young. So that was the very beginning of, um,

me and my partner starting something on the side and very excited. And we still use a lot of those basics of, you know, really working hard, loving your clients, having great experiences. And when you do that every day, as I like to say, you know, I don't know if we've got 20 or 30,000 events and shows under our thing from big clients from L'Oreal or Ulta Beauty. It always starts with that same DNA.

Leo Gestetner (03:51)
Sounds like a good journey that gave you some lessons you're still using today.

Keith Alper (03:57)
great lessons and you I know you and I talk a bunch, know, still learning every day, right? Business is not the same. You know, we get COVID thrown at us or the recession thrown at us or, you know, job wages spike or whatever. So, you know, what I like to do is say from those lessons learned, how do you react to things? And how also do you react to things like, hey, I'm not going to do things the same way. My old Keith,

pre-COVID wanted everybody in the office seven, you five days a week. I could not think about.

having people work remote and now 25 % of our employees are remote because we can get great employees that we need them to do and where their location is not important anymore. And you know, our employees work from the office three days a week. And so you do have to learn also how to change from your ways that you learn. you know, as you and I have discussed also then what's the balance of life? You know, as I've gotten older and have the opportunity to step back a little bit more and have our leadership team, you know, manage.

I learned a lot and I apply those still daily.

Leo Gestetner (05:02)
And what, you've got a number of businesses now, so what are those businesses? What would you say you do now? And maybe give a little overview on each of the businesses. You've got certainly a number of things you do.

Keith Alper (05:14)
Sure. Well, you know, it took me a long, and when you, if you asked me this question a few years ago, I would give like bullet points and bullet points, and I will talk about those businesses. But the unique thing that all of our businesses do is we work on connecting head and heart. So that's all we do. We don't make widgets. We don't sell insurance. All we do is connect head and heart. that's engagement, marketing.

experiences. So what we're trying to do is help clients either get more donors, change employees attitudes, have an exciting evening as a celebration, do more digital marketing to get, you know, to get new business. So connecting a head and heart is the way we look at everything now is that's our business. by the way, wherever you are, wherever you are politically and wherever you are in the world, what's changing is head and heart.

you know how people think about things so it's not easy right it's not an easy business but you know our oldest business is still our largest business and that's in the large events

a business like your family background would understand, we produce a lot of big business meetings for big Fortune 500 companies. And that means, you know, helping their C-suite understand the head and heart and what are they trying to do when there are 5,000 people in the audience for three or four days. And it's not just about the wow and the lights and the tablecloths, but it's about the business of engaging every person in that audience. And when they walk away, they're like, I learned something. I'm excited about the mission. I got to meet other people that

work in the big company.

All most of our clients are all big, big companies and it's hard to move a company that might have 200,000 employees or 50,000 hospital workers. And that's actually the real exciting part of, those businesses is how do you engage? How do you excite and, how do you have Leo walk away when he leaves one of the meetings and said, wow, I didn't know this or I'm excited about this or you know what I was thinking about maybe changing my career and now I'm going to stay with this company because they better

explained how I can help the mission and join them. Then we have a great special event company that does, think of them as more one-offs. So that opening of the big museum or fundraisers for a zoo or we're about to do a grand opening, really cool $150 million Symphony Hall in St. Louis, one of only built around the world right now of one of the oldest symphonies in America. again, we're helping with that event and donor engagement.

So what I always like to say is how can I leave you with kind of brand love in your head and heart like you might have for Apple or you might have for your favorite restaurant or your favorite employer or your favorite client? And then what I would say is untraditional marketing businesses. So we go a little upside down. We start with strategy. We enhance with creative, but everything's related to data, data, data. So if I'm marketing to somebody, we're getting feedback about the data.

By the way, Leo, it's the hardest and ever of humankind to market now. But, you know, 25 years ago, there were a handful of radio stations, a handful of newspapers, handful of maybe digital sites, and that was it. And now there's millions and millions and millions. And for me to find Leo, I got to spend a lot of money. I don't even know.

you know, what you listen to, what you like. So marketing segmentation has gotten much harder. so we really, and a lot of people just throw money at things, right? I was just talking to a political candidate the other day and they were saying, we're just doing marketing to people that vote.

So there might be a big city election, but they're not going to go in the areas, the zip codes of people that don't traditionally vote. So that's good data that they have. And then we have actually a digital broadcast platform called Geniecast. We have the world's greatest speakers, experts, and authors. You can bring this way to a meeting or a podcast, everybody from...

You know, Steve Wozniak, all different kinds of speakers. And what we do is we started this a few years before COVID and it was a way to get somebody into the big business meeting who didn't have to be in the room. They can be on the screens. You save 70%. What's good for the speaker is they don't have to travel. You don't have to do that. They can be with their family. And what's good for the audience that we figured out is it's a less expensive way to get somebody you couldn't get. so across all these areas from our video marketing company or digital company,

always we worked separate and we work together. So our holding company is called the nitrous effect. Now people said, Hey, are you are you inhaling nitrous gas? No, we're using the nitrous, the fuels race cars. And the idea is when you bring these separate specialist agencies together, it's like an explosion. And because there's no one great agency that can do it all, it's actually a bunch of BS when somebody said, we can do this and we can do this and we can do this. So after the recession, we were looking there going, my God, our events business

are about to collapse, people are canceling meetings. Even though we did video marketing in one company, we said, we're not seen as the specialist. So Leo, we would go to call a fortune 500 client said, Hey, no, can't do your event. But would you use us for video marketing? Like, no, you're the, you're the event guys, you're the event guys. And so we said, let's go start our agencies. didn't buy anybody. Let's go start agencies and find number twos. It's important. Number twos.

who were spurned by their number one, either of not giving them stock.

or not promoting them fast enough. So we went to find people that wanted their own agency. We would finance the agency and we would help support that. So that's how we, that's how we grew all of our agencies. We found the entrepreneur, but really the expert. We built experts around them. So if you want marketing, digital advertising strategy, they go to this company. And if they want to do an event, we bolt on our other company. And that has been a very big winning solution for us and not to knock the big, um,

giant ad holding companies, the global ones, they don't really do that because all those other companies are competitors where we're owned by a similar group. So that's our businesses. And the fun thing for me and our businesses is we love helping clients grow.

sell problems and hit home runs. I mean, it is just so much fun to get in under the work and actually maybe push the client a little bit. Hey, you know, Leo, you said you want to do this, but we're hearing this, like which side are you on? And so that's been a really fun thing to help a lot of businesses significantly grow. That is our, you know, and we're, we've pretty much have a guarantee, which I've never heard of an agency having a guarantee. The guarantee is basically you're going to be really happy with our service.

you're going to be really happy with their results. And basically, if we agree on a formula, we're going to guarantee success. And if we don't have success, if we all agree what we're going to do, then we're going to give us some money back because we didn't do our job. That's how sure of what we're doing we are. Now, that means you got to put in the right budget. can't have, you know, somebody saying no, no, no, no, no. And it is a great partnership. And that has been a great little what I would call competitive advantage in our back pocket.

Leo Gestetner (12:45)
That sounds like a recipe for success or a recipe for disaster, depending which way it goes.

Keith Alper (12:51)
Exactly.

Again, this is why I have no hair.

Leo Gestetner (12:54)
So,

yeah, people think being an entrepreneur is an easy path. I've often said it's when I talk to young students, don't become an entrepreneur if you think it's the easy path. Don't become an entrepreneur just to make money because to be honest, you'll probably make more money certainly in the first few years getting a job. It's not easy, there's nothing more satisfying, nothing more exhilarating, but there's nothing easier about it.

Keith Alper (13:20)
Not only is that correct times 10, you have to know you're going to have failures. I don't know any entrepreneur that hasn't failed in something. And what I tell people all the time is, you know,

A buddy of mine was kind of criticizing something on mine. said, have you ever started a company? He goes, no. I said, have you ever taken idea to the next level? goes, well, maybe in my job, but not really. I said, well, you have no idea to knock me. because entrepreneurs, are going to try things and we're going to fail, right? We are going to try an electric car and fail a few times and then make one. We are going to try to have music in the cloud and not records and fail and then get there. We are going to try to say, we're going to have the fastest, largest.

retailer in the world by doing something and so it takes entrepreneurs every single business that anybody knows was started by an entrepreneur and You don't get rich quick. A lot of people lose money several times and it It's actually like you ever see those ads for medicines like this does this this does this it's the opposite It keeps you from sleeping. It makes you cry. It makes you wonder what you're doing

But once you kind of figure out your algorithm, what you're really good at and what you're not good at, I'm sure you've heard this a million times. The best thing, took me a long time, is to say no to things. No, I don't want to do that. No, we shouldn't be doing that. No, let's not hire that person. And it takes more discipline to say no than yes, because yes gets you in a lot of different things. So I'm happy you brought up that it's not easy to be an entrepreneur.

I coach a lot of young people also with good ideas and I never want to tell anybody you have a bad idea or no, because that's what everybody tells everybody. But I basically say, hey, why don't you do this? Why don't you work hard at night, keep your day job and start your little company with you and a friend. Don't ask anybody for money. Maybe your parents a little bit of money. Don't go to a VC. Don't go until you keep on proving it out, you know, and then and then, you know, see where it goes.

And I say that from experience because, you know, when I worked for Six Flags, we kind of started our business for Six Flags on the side. came to us and we did that. And then eventually I did leave, you know, I got promoted at Six Flags and then to a project that the Bally who owned Six Flags at the time put me on. I was very young. I was in my second or third year out of college, but our business started taking off. So I was my first employee. Then my business partner was our second employee. And then we realized, okay, we can make enough to eat. That's it.

eat, we had no employee, we were scared about making payroll and it takes you know one success, one success, then we get knocked down. One success, one success. So do you remember the song?

something about if you knock down, get up again, whatever that song is. It was an Australian song. It's a great thing when you get knocked down, get up again. And I found that in life also. I've never met anybody who actually really hasn't gone through some big thing in their life. Somebody dies, somebody gets divorced, a business goes bankrupt. And I've been through a lot of that actually over the last eight years of just a bunch of things, you know, my wife passing away eight years ago, you know, some personal changes

in my life, somebody, sick member of my family, COVID, which almost wiped out all of our businesses. I worked hard and then nothing I did, you know, I didn't cause that. And what I learned from a great speaker, Tim Story, who's an amazing speaker. should do him on a podcast one day. Tim is the kind of coach and whisper to the stars.

And he's out in Hollywood and he's coached everybody, not in their good days and their bad days. When something happens, they call him and he does, he does have many books about coming back or getting back up. And he basically says, you know,

When, Mike Tyson, you know, he had never lost about, but when he got knocked down, the only way for him to get back up was somebody lifting him up, giving a hand. And I believe that in all of our lives, if it's personal journey, business journey, that you really can't do anything alone. You really can't. so over time, by the way, I was one of those, micromanagers. I got to do it else. It's not going to get done. Right. Get out of the way a long time ago, learning. I realized, this didn't get me anywhere. And so again,

When you talk about it being easy being an entrepreneur, it is a team sport and it's not, you know, whatever. But as you have some successes and you realize, wow, we're really good at this and we can help people win. were there, you know, I like to say, I'm not going to go to a brand new brain surgeon. want a brain surgeon with at least 15 years of experience and thousands of surgeries. And that's like what we bring to our clients. Like, Hey,

You know, we know a lot about AI right now. We know a lot about this. We know about a lot about this and we're not going to be as you, know,

Leo Gestetner (18:19)
Yeah, I think a few months ago, a couple of months ago, I posted a blog actually talking about you learn more from failure than from success. I definitely think that's the case. And it's interesting the thing you talked about where you said, you know, about hiring other people. again, literally the first piece of advice I ever received in business was you've got to let people make mistakes. Otherwise you can't hire other people and you can't grow your business. You can't be a one man band.

Keith Alper (18:46)
Right, completely correct. And by the way...

Our rankings got better because the algorithm for the people that work in our businesses, we've honed more and more and more, but you never totally get it right. know, last year we hired some senior people that we determined were not the right fit of the company. And so you've heard this business term, I'm sure, know, hire slow, fire fast.

And it's hard to do because when you're a leader, it's not very popular to do these things, right? And so we've got a much better algorithm of who is the right success factor for us. And that might mean.

Well, you have to be ridiculous on customer service. If you're not a good communicator, then you're not going to work well in our companies. If you got to, you got to do what you say you do and do it early, faster, better, cheaper. If you can't do that, you know, whatever. But we still get messes all the time. You know, one slips through the door and we figure out this guy's not the right guy for us. And so we, we just say, Hey, we don't have the right mix and you know, here's the door and you know, good luck and all those things. So, but making those mistakes.

like you said in your blog, you learn a lot. And like in our special event company, we have mainly women in there that work in the business. They're expert, you know, detail, event specialist, those things. But we realized most of our events we produce are on nights and weekends. Well, a lot of moms work in that business. And when do they want to be with their kids? Nights and weekends. So we had to figure out the algorithm that works for us, or either people...

that don't have kids yet that want kids or people that kids are a little bit older now and they can work. But you know, if you have a one or two year old or a few kids, it's not going to work. They will raise their hand and say, well, I can't work nights and weekends. Well, that's when every one of our events are nights and weekends. So that just made it a lot smarter to say upfront now, hey, by the way, 40 % of your work is going to be done in nights and weekends. And then we learned that. as you know, when you make a mistake,

you try to fix it. So for example, you know, we threw a vendor, got like cyber fraud last year and we would have never caught it until they caught us and said, Hey, we've never been paid. And we said, well, we've paid you. And there's a lot of little tricks and tips people are doing, but you know, they, they changed a banking relationship. it snuck into an email, long, long story short,

we were all kind of novices at this and now we've built that bulletproof of how that works. So, always lots to learn and lots to react to.

Leo Gestetner (21:32)
And tell me about family for you. What does family mean?

Keith Alper (21:35)
Well, you know, at the end of the day, I've seen it a million times. All you have is your family. You might have your close, close friends around you, but your family in a good way, you're stuck with. Um, I'm very fortunate to have, you know, two wonderful kids. I've got a son, Max, who's 28, who, who has a cool job working for a big public company. And I have a daughter, Zoe, 25, living in Hollywood and working in the entertainment behind the scenes. And, and they are my everything. As I said, um, I lost my wife about

eight years ago to cancer and they lost their mom when they were both younger, one in college one in high school. And so we were always tight before and then we got tighter because I'm the only parent but it's great to have adult kids because you can treat them like a friend right over here but you're still gonna always be the mama bear and the papa bear because you know my kids are everything to me. So you know it means a lot and also I learn a lot from them you know I'm a 62 year

white male and you know the world has changed a lot and I'll ask them like just you know from a Gen Z perspective how do you see this and by the way

You know, have you ever heard like, you speak German and I speak French and it just, miss each other. And it's another big part of marketing. Like if you're a CEO and you have a bunch of 25 year olds work for them, by the way, don't say, Jodz is terrible. expect. No, it's just one speaks German and one speaks French and you don't understand their culture. You're not going to change a 25 year old. By the way, they were born with the internet. They were the first thing they played with was an iPhone. Right. And so, the.

way they adapt and so we learn a lot from 25 year olds you know and their way to work is different but not better or worse you know so I learn a lot from my kids and sometimes they tease me because I have bad dad jokes and stuff like that but you know I would think from you and your kids you know there's a great relationship there but I learn you know so much and I also try to teach them some things like one of my pet peeves and like again this this shows up to my first day of working at Six Flags.

You better show up on time, especially when you have an hourly job and there's a lot of people in line for that job at the stage crew. So, you know, if you're supposed to be there at eight in the morning, it's not eight oh five, it's eight ten. So I get to work a half an hour early. I didn't know if there was going to be an accident. I know if it was my uniform was going to be at the the wardrobe shop. I didn't know all these things. And so I always get to places early because if you get there early, you can check your email, read the newspaper, whatever. But if you get there late, so I tell young people this all the time. Think about this.

If you're with a client, even your family, whatever, if you're late, people will remember it. And if you're early, people will remember it. And they're both completely different. So like I show up early. had a really early meeting this morning. I showed up early. I was there. I stayed late, you know, and those are all those mental bank deposits that people remember. Like, you know, do they care? Do they care about me? Do they care about my business or my family? You know, my kids know I'm there 24 seven for them.

had to push them out of the nest a little bit on some things. like, Hey, you've got this now. I told my kids last year, like, I'm getting older. I've worked my ass off. I'm to take a little more time off. I'm going to take more vacations. yes, you will have some inheritance hopefully. and that's a first, you know, a first world problem to have, but I'm going to live my life. And you and I have talked about balance of life.

And like when you're 62, first of all, I still feel like I'm 18. But if you ever feel like you're running out of time, like somebody goes, Oh, have you been so and so? like, no, I got to get there. No, I got to get there. No, I got to do this. I'm like.

I want to get to all these things but family's number one and there's not a lot of people you know it makes me sad when someone's not talking to their family or has a conflict and again I've learned over time you got to patch those things up you got to fix those things and it's taken me a hard time to just forgive I'm kind of a hard nose at time but even forgiving

is a big weight off and just like let that off and forgive and stuff like that. But you know, there are people that die in fights and anger and I never want that in my life. My wife Nancy died suddenly from a procedure so we didn't get to say goodbye to her. My kids were overseas and never and the good thing is, know, Nancy and Edward, she was great and we were so upfront with each other. I mean, people still don't believe this. In 25 years, I think we had three fights, literally. She was so good. We were so good and we would just talk it

I would say like hey it bugs me with this and she's just saying bugs me this and I'm like I'm not gonna change that but you could do this or I'm not gonna change and actually we always used to make fun of our little pet peeves and then we'd bend them a little bit so remember I just told you I'm a stickler in time so we're supposed to go out with friends at 8 o'clock you know she'd clean up the house a little bit not want to leave it a mess and all that stuff it's 8 o'clock I'm like hey hey hey we gotta go so I just change the time a little bit like we gotta leave you know so we figured it out but

Think about this with all the stuff going on in the world. I've told you about this book that I've called From Like to Love with all the things. If you make love, if you make love your number one thing, love your clients, love the world, love people you don't agree with, that is a great recipe for living life. It really is. So that's something when you ask about family is I just absolutely love my kids, but

I love my friends. hang up now with friends saying, hey, I love you. That was not me a long, long time ago, but you don't know when you're going to, you know, I just had a really good friend, Rick, pass away who I knew from my EO group and he lived in Dallas and got pancreatic cancer and maybe had it a year and was gone, you know? And, so we never know. So, you know, my friends know I'm extra mushy and it's all about love. So.

Leo Gestetner (27:35)
All about love, that's a one. What do you like to do for fun?

Keith Alper (27:40)
I boring. I love travel, so I'm just back from a YPO trip with about 50 people, which was great. In Thailand, we went to Bangkok and an island called Kusumui. So love traveling. And even when I travel for work, I make it fun. And when I travel for fun, I put in a little work there. just, that's my mix. You remember...

There people used to say a work-life balance and I say it's more of a work-life integration because entrepreneurs are always your minds always thinking you can't turn it off. But it took me about two to three days recently in Thailand to kind of shut it down, not read as much, not react to work, telling everybody kind of mom off and stuff like that.

was never a golfer, was never a tennis player, but now starting to get into that with, you know, some friends and want to pick up golf and I'm too ADD for it, but I'm going to force myself to again, try it again. I really, I spent about 25 % of my time and give back either in civic work or nonprofit boards. Think about this, Leo. 250 years from now.

Nobody will know anybody maybe in the history books maybe a president or two, nobody will know nobody will know who you and I are nobody will know who whatever and So we're here for a speck of time. So I try to figure out with my little speed you and Also, what don't I love to do?

So on those questions, I love being with friends. I love traveling. I love being with family. I love the arts. know, it sounds, you know, people throw that out there. I'm too ADD for art museums. So like when I go.

I don't have to stare at a picture for 40 minutes. Like my wife and I were at the Louvre and she's like, what are you doing? I'm like, I'm looking at the moisture sensor. Like I'm just a geek. I thought that was cool. They had a whole thing and she's like looking at something. So, uh, but love Broadway, love music, love concerts because I'm in that business. Cause we do a lot of live entertainment, a lot of concerts and there's nothing like live energy and people being together at your favorite concert, your favorite children, your favorite sporting event because I had

ADD and I'm not the biggest sports fan, like I get really bored at sports. So I'm like, I'll go with my friends. like almost a national holiday in St. Louis is the opening of our baseball team, which is this Thursday, the St. Louis Cardinals. Everybody goes to that. Like businesses shut down. You know, I think still our teams in the top five of winning world series and it's a hundred plus year old tradition. So I love, I love, I love those things, but

It's really cool because I know you do some really cool things. It's cool to look back and say, hey, I need to be known for this, but it was really cool to help this organization. It was cool to help make that happen because that was your own special talent that you took time out of your day to do and stuff like that.

All those things kind of make up my time. then you know how you think you're so busy and then you fit one more thing in, you know, so it's kind of malleable of who you want to help. And, you know, again, after a lot of setbacks in the last eight years, I'm the happiest I've been in a long time and we don't know the next punch. There's all kinds of political stuff happening in our country. There's all kinds of just all different things, but we got to kind of keep a...

a positive moment and see where we can help on things and stuff like that. if we talk a year from now, or no, when we talk six months from now, we'll talk before that, is you'll say, hey, Keith, how's your golf game? And I'm gonna either say, I took three lessons and it's not me, or hey, I really like it. A lot of my friends are into pickleball. I don't know if it's happened overseas yet, but pickleball's a big thing. I've played a little bit of that too.

Leo Gestetner (31:23)
Yeah, I've never played golf, but I asked a friend of mine who was a big golfer about learning golf and his advice to me was, if you really want to learn golf, have lessons twice a week for six months, and then you'll be good enough to play with your friends. Doesn't mean you'll actually be any good, but you'll be good enough to play with your friends. I never started it. He gave me that advice like five years ago. What do you do for health? Whether that be nutrition, fitness?

Keith Alper (31:43)
That's funny.

Leo Gestetner (31:53)
meditation, mental health, physical health, what do do for health?

Keith Alper (31:56)
I think I'm like most people you're kind of on again off again. I'm not like a health nut where, you know,

But over time I've lost weight, I've gained weight, I've lost weight. I like to say I'm on my COVID-20, I'm trying to take off the 20 pounds that I gained over COVID. I work out, I try to walk when I can. I don't drink, I've never drank, so I don't drink, I don't do drugs, I don't do any of that stuff. And it's just by choice, it was not for religious reasons or recovery or anything like that. Really, I don't like the taste of alcohol, I just don't like it. So my bad addiction is diet.

coke which is you know I'm sure there's chemicals in there not good for you so I drink a few diet cokes a day I try to eat healthy

When my wife passed away, had never been to a therapist. So I went to a therapist after my wife passed away and that was helpful. And it's just good to talk to somebody other than a friend, because either your friend will give you bad advice or good advice or say that's stupid and they'll make you feel stupid. Where, you know, I've never been in a business where you just pay someone to talk at them, which is kind of funny. But, you know, so my therapist hit me up the other day. like, Hey, it's been four months since I've seen you. And I think you go back to therapists when things aren't great. So I'm trying to get on a regular schedule.

I believe in coaches, I got a few coaches in my life and so my friends really keep me happy. I'm in a good place that I do have anxiety, I do have ADD.

but it's only affected me in a pretty much of a good way. I mean, look, there are a few people that say, Keith, you're a little too much and they just have to take me like I am. But like I went to my doctor once and I said, Hey, I think I want to be on ADD medicine. He goes, I'm not going to give it to you. I said, why? goes, well, everything that kind of made you successful might be taken away by Adderall or some of these drugs. So like it's worked for you and you're not, you know,

not doing things because of this. And so he goes, I don't want to give it to you because I think it's going to have an adverse side effect with you. So I trust him and you know, whatever. I try to relax a lot more going on vacations. It takes me about two days to unwind and get out of things. But when you're on a boat in the middle of the ocean in Thailand with a bunch of friends is like, this is really cool. You know, this is what life is about. know, so

You know, all those things and.

You know, I've seen a lot of people go hardcore. There's no way to diet forever. There's no way. So I think it's just in little increments and no, um, a friend of mine calls it harm reduction. So if I want that ice cream cone tonight, harm reduction would be have a low fat pudding and I'll be just as happy. But I sell my, I save myself 250 calories. So I try to be aware of, you know, if I'm going to eat something fried or if I'm going to do that. And also in the back of my head, you know, I'm 62, I hope to live to 92.

to or something to, but I'm also an only parent now. So I look at that, that I gotta stay healthy and active for my kids and my mom's 85, know, stay active for her. She's very active for 85. So yeah, but like everything we've talked about, it's all in your stream of who we are and who's in our DNA. But I think if like you peeled your skin back, you're gonna see marks of...

not good mental health at some time, a scar. You'll see a scar of not eating right. You'll see a scar of somebody making you feel bad. And those are all in our DNA. And I think we got to continue to work through those and those out there. But think about it. mean, I know it's a dream because the world's never not had war. The world's never.

not had, you know, there's been no peace ever not peace because somebody has more power and more money or whatever. But if you get your own little world and you start with you and you're just your family of what does peace look like? What does happiness look like? And by the way, I think money is the last thing of happiness. You know, everybody you talk to people that want to be the mark next Mark Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos. First of all, I think a lot of those people are miserable. Now they have enough money for their yachts and to do, you know, rockets and stuff like that. But

I would say that money is comfort. gives you the opportunity for choices. But I have several friends who took money over family and they're not happy. They've gone through things or whatever. Their kids might not talk to them or they might have screwed up at their company. So I really try to keep it balanced. I'm a geek so I still love to wake up and go to work. I still love to go to a project we're producing. So for me, it's never about money. It's like about, excuse my French,

getting shit done and making the bell ring and making things happen if it's in a small way or big way. So I think all that goes to mental health, overall health, you know, and stuff like that.

I'm 62 as I said, I feel like I'm 18. Thank God I go to a great doctor. I get, I get a checkup three times a year. I get every single vaccine. I'm an overvaxxer. So I believe in science. I believe in vaccines. They've never done me wrong. Knock on wood. I've never really had COVID. I never got the bad flu season and I might not have been around people or whatever, but I do believe in science and

You know have seen by the way a lot of great science going in our world and research that has cured certain kind of cancers has cured certain kind of diseases and And stuff like that. So I'm a big believer in medicine, but also spiritual medicine, you know of Thinking the right way and it was great to be in Thailand to see you know, we had some monks come and talk to our group which was really beautiful and very interesting of just how they see life is

getting rid of all the clutter we have, right? And all the clutter of our lives. So how do you see?

Leo Gestetner (37:50)
Sounds like you've found a good mix of balancing things. And what has been a pivotal moment in your life?

Keith Alper (37:58)
So it's interesting.

Uh, there's an exercise I'm in the group called YPO, the young presence organization. We're broken into forums of 10 people. And there's a lot of things you do with your forum. Think of it as your own personal board of directors with other CEOs and leaders. And, know, I've been in forums since the nineties when I helped start EO and this group, the entrepreneurs organization. And so forums a big part of my life, but there's an exercise that everybody does. And if you make it out, okay, you cried, you broke down, whatever, and it's called life.

And you basically write out your life. It's a two hour presentation, but nobody can interrupt you. And you go from the day you were born to current things. And you really have to kind of go back and say, my God, you know, this is when so-and-so died. This is when my parents got, you know, making this up. But these are all these different life moments and these different pivots. And, you know,

You know, we all have the good, the bad and the ugly, but the thing that I have learned from my parents is like, nobody's going to do anything for you, so you better do it yourself. And so I always raised my hand. I was always the volunteer. And so when I looked at a lot of pivots, it was just like, I just asked. A great mentor once told me, you're not going to get anything without asking. And still today, I'll ask for some of my kids going, I can't believe you did it. I'm like, well, you're not going to get anything if you don't ask. And 90 % of the people don't ask. So you're opportunistic.

opportunities is you have a 10 % loss rate and a 90 % win rate possibly. That's even asking for money, asking for a favor, asking for a donation, asking whatever. so pivotal points were, you know, me applying to a thing called birthing of giants, which EO did in the first version called white EO. And I was able to get that organization, become the board chair, on the board, meet.

literally thousands of friends and that was my kind of entrepreneurial spirit and I changed my life to have, excuse my daughter, to have my friends and pivotal life of you when my daughter was sick you know and had a brain tumor when she was seven you know these moments are when

You know, when we thought we were losing our business in the last recession of 08, 09, 07, who knows when it was, but like we had one business, that was our events business. And then that was about to crash. said, wait, we have to start other businesses. Cause as I said before, people didn't take us serious. I'm sorry for the dog barking. and so the pivotal moments I could write on a piece of paper, just like most people can the day I did or didn't get into that program, the day I did or did reach out to somebody. So.

My secret little success thing is I'm...

introducing myself and doing reach outs every single day to some of the biggest people in business. And they're going to answer you or not going to answer you. And just like I did a reach out to a potential client that I kind of knew we had lunch. found out what his nonprofit needed and I introduced them to our agency. And in reaching out to our agency, not only did we get to the table, we were the right people for them. We could help them. It would help us too. And so those are little, what I call micro pivots of when you see

like that could happen. But again, my favorite thing is to talk to a 25 year old because they think, oh, the world's this and the world's this. And if you look back and read back 200 years, 500 years, a lot of these things still don't change. The leaders are leaders because they step forward. The industrialists are the entrepreneurs because they step forward or they did something. And if you do it and be humble and helpful, it comes back. It just really comes back.

Those pivots over time, could tell you, pivots almost every year. We're making pivots right now based on the US economy, some pivots we're gonna have to make. We made pivots post COVID.

Like our businesses were collapsing. said, Hey, we have to do this, this, and this. And it is, you know, big business and small businesses are making pivots on a daily basis of this products in this products out. So I tell people, and again, I didn't make up any of these things. I just listen to people is if you go to a doctor for a checkup, the first thing they do is take your pulse. They listen to your heart. And I do that in my life with my. Listen, listen.

in business listen, listen, and like in our companies right now, the way people did business five years ago, it's not even there anymore. Any business, the way people are doing business now in an AI world, if nobody's AI pivoting, they're dead.

I don't care if you have an ice cream shop, if you want new flavors to chat GPT it, or how you're going to get new customers or how you're going to change your flavors or use fat free or whatever. And so if you call it up people, my leaders in the company, like Keith's gone a little crazy on AI, but you know, I always feel like we're late to things even though we're not. So I would say lots of pivots.

Leo Gestetner (43:09)
Thank you. That's been, love some of those insights. And how can people find you?

Keith Alper (43:09)
Thank you.

The best is a few websites. Well, first of all, I'm going to pitch my book from like to love. You can see it kind of in there. Maybe not.

Leo Gestetner (43:22)
We can't

really see it. What is it? there we are from like to love. When's that out?

Keith Alper (43:25)
from White to Blue.

So that has been out for about four or five years. It's been out, it came out right before COVID. And the idea, it's a business book, but it's anybody can use. So I like to say.

Here's your business plan right in front of you. How do you take people from liking you to loving you? If they hate you and hate your product, you're not going to get them back or you might get them to like. But we wrote that because we work with so many companies and all these big employers. And we said, Hey, you know, if you walk into that store, Leo, you're going to ask two people, how do you like your job? One is going to say, hate the job managers and ask whatever you're going to say. Some people go, I really like it. When somebody says, I love my job. That means they're going to stay extra. They're going to help the customer.

So one is you can look at what we do on that site and that's a book speeches blah blah blah and that's from like to dot L O V E. So the the it's not dot com it's dot to dot L O V E. I have my own site Keith Alper K E I T H K L P E R dot com and then our companies are at the nitrous effect dot com so you can find us all over. My favorite thing is to get away and speak to groups. I don't do too many so I'll do some for some nonprofits.

and some for our clients and stuff like that. But I do think I'm like you are and lot of entrepreneurs, we're gospels of the truth of what we learned over time and how to coach people and how to coach businesses. And I thank you for inviting me. It's been fun getting to know you over the last six or seven months and love what you're doing in your businesses and also hearing what's going on in you and your family's lives and stuff like that. So my number one thing is to meet other entrepreneurs or future entrepreneurs. That is my...

that we're in the same ballpark. And it's like, if you love a baseball team and I love a baseball team, that's what we talk about. Mine is business, but it's not business for the business of money. It's for how to get things done in a good way.

Leo Gestetner (45:17)
Thank you Keith. And thank you for listening to today's episode. you enjoyed the conversation don't forget to subscribe to the channel, tell your friends and leave a review. Thank you.