Why Billion-Dollar Decisions Are Made on Emotion with Keith Cronin

Here is the transcript of the episode:
In this episode of *The High Performance Leader*, host Jimmy Burroughes is joined by Keith Cronin, founder of Capital Catalyst. They explore why high-level business decisions—even billion-dollar ones—are ultimately driven by emotion rather than pure logic, and how leaders can reconnect with the fundamental human needs and desires of their customers. Keith shares practical advice on reinvention, avoiding burnout by doing less, and breaking through corporate desensitization to drive scalable growth.

"Doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result is literally the act of insanity." — Keith Cronin

"Billion-dollar decisions are made on emotion. Everyone thinks, 'Oh, they're always completely logical.' Not true." — Keith Cronin

"A confused mind does not buy. So if all of a sudden I'm bringing energy X and energy Y is not matching it, nothing happens." — Keith Cronin

"You have to look outside of your world to go find the inspirations to bring it back in. You just can't keep going down the same track that everybody else did." — Keith Cronin

***

Introduction

[00:00]

KEITH: You have to look outside of your world to go find the inspirations to bring it back in. You just can't keep going down the same track that everybody else did. Because if you do, when you get to the end, you're like, "Oh, doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result is literally the act of insanity."

JIMMY: Welcome back to this week's episode of The High Performance Leader, the podcast for leaders working in complex, challenging environments, to gain insights and ideas which help you increase your impact without burning out, and to help you build a high-performance culture in your team. I'm your host, Jimmy Burroughes. And if you're new to The High Performance Leader, make sure you subscribe or follow so you don't miss any of our upcoming episodes before you put down your device.

[00:46]

JIMMY: Hello and welcome back to this week's episode. And this week, I'm joined by somebody who is quite fascinating and I'm sure you're going to love this episode. I'm joined by Keith Cronin, who is the founder and owner of Capital Catalyst, and we're going to get into what does that mean in a little bit. But Keith, welcome to the show. How are you?

KEITH: I'm doing fantastic. I really appreciate it. This is a—we've known each other a long time. This is a chance to come on here and actually chat and uh to larger audiences, but this is just great.

JIMMY: Absolutely. And you know, you and I met when we were going through a scaling activity for Jabil, and we're going to talk a little bit about that today in terms of how do big businesses do some stuff that's going to help them scale. What I want to get into initially, though, is what brought you to this point? How did you get here to running Capital Catalyst? What's the journey?

Keith's Background and Reinvention

[01:39]

KEITH: Uh so the journey is even in Capital Catalyst, this is just, just started because of where the journey goes. But you know, as it always goes, there's you go to a spot, and then you go to another spot. So here's the spot I am now, but the spots before, there have been a bunch. So I'm actually a Doctor of Physical Therapy by trade. Uh and then I was a just like a manager, you know, you go in there, you do your normal stuff, but I always wanted to be an entrepreneur. And I eventually worked my way out to running a company called Dynamic Tape in the United States, and they're actually were originally based out of Australia, and I ran international operations. And so here I am, a physical therapist, but now I'm doing shipping, logistics, warehousing, you know, doing sales shows, and you just start learning a lot of things along the way. And then that led into working with other companies that are also in that rehab space, and then COVID hit. And I did all this stuff for years, and then in three weeks, all my business went away. And I had to re- just completely start over, and I had a—just started recently doing marketing and cold email system, and doing these basic things that are out there. And I started, I partnered up with someone and and we just took it from nothing to about $2 million a year in eight months. And it was just from understanding your audience, knowing what their needs are, and being able to connect the dots in that lead gen and sales space. And then that also was with the same time, with one client I was working with, just helping them raise capital via cold email, just sending out messages and saying, "Hey, are you interested in this particular opportunity?" And over the course of time, they raised like $16 million. And it was like, "Woah! You know what I need to do? I think I just need to take it to the next level." So I went and got myself fully certified Series 7 broker-dealer, uh joined a group, actually just got on this week. Uh I've been studying for four and a half months. I'm 41 years old and I'm still trying to figure out ways to reinvent and uh push forward and I learn a lot along the way. And I hope it's interesting to any audience that wants to listen.

[03:32]

JIMMY: It's it's such an exciting story to hear that you are on a journey of reinvention, and one of the things that you specialize in is helping businesses that maybe are larger to reinvent themselves so they can get larger, or helping those entrepreneurs to find that real value of reinvention for themselves. And, you know, I want to share with our audience a little bit about you. You have worked at, and I'm going to say extreme scale, when it comes to lead generation: sending millions of messages a month, supporting business growth, and now helping to scale organizations rapidly through a variety of tactics. But, you know, there's got to be a reason behind wanting to do this scaling and growth in business. And I remember when we were talking initially, you said that, you know, "We're in the midst of unprecedented financial and global challenges, and businesses need to think a bit differently, and so I'm here to help them." Talk us through that. What What does that help look like? Because presumably for each client, it's a little bit different. But what Where is the area of specialty for a large organization that's thinking, "Hm, we need to think a bit differently"? What are some of the opportunities or low-hanging fruit that are there for them?

Connecting Emotionally with Customers

[04:36]

KEITH: I I think when we also talk about it, and even since we spoke about that, it's even moving more rapidly. We have AI coming into place, which AI is just essentially mimicking the things that we do, it's doing it at a faster pace. The way that we have to keep up is we have to get back to actually the customer and what they want, the consumer, what how they feel, what their their the emotions that are involved in what they do and how they do things. And I think the things that we get caught up on are just the demographics, and if I fit to this audience, I send. You know, there's so many different ways that you can send, whether it's LinkedIn or a cold email or you actually do Facebook ads or Google ads. You have to get out there and you have to market your brand and who you are and what you do. And whether you It's really great what I've worked with small companies because they're they're really connected to the people that they're talking with. And I think this as a larger company, it gets to be a challenge because so many layers of separation occur that it starts to look more just like numbers and space as opposed to, what emotionally energized you to and connect with this brand, to connect with this service, to do anything? And what started you there? Because that is what built the company. And then I've found with the larger companies, that can tend to kind of fade away because we lose that connection.

[05:54]

KEITH: And so, in these times when you're talking about higher interest rates, you are talking about capital that before was seemingly almost free to all of a sudden we're at 5.5-plus percent, you go get a home, it's 8% here in the US. You do all those things and it makes you look at, "Okay, how am I going to spend my time, my efforts, and my money?" So those sales groups, those marketing groups that are in there that you have in your organization, they have to look at it not just from the standpoint of, "I'm checking the box, I'm doing the things I need to do every day." They need to connect with that audience because right now, they're getting hit with so many things that are real, so many things that are fake, so much stuff all day long. How do you stand out when you have now systems that are designed to follow you around, to connect with you all day long? And here you go, I'm one of the individuals who does that. I'm the one who's been going out and I can find the targeted message and to to hit home and to get you to have an emotional, energized reaction to then go, "Yeah, I'd like to learn more," right?

[06:54]

KEITH: Well, if your sales teams and your marketing teams aren't feeling and going in and getting that same emotion, and you can do this from the top, from the CEO down, if you aren't connecting and finding what really turns a the two categories of needs and wants. What can you do to create a If you have a product or a service that's a need, versus you have a product or service that's a want, okay? The way I always tell people to do this is, if you have a need, you need to make them you have to make them want to need it, okay? So you have to give them want to recognize their need. I'm a health care provider, so what do I do? I go and tell people, "I'm going to go and crank on your knee, and you don't want to be here," okay? "And it's going to hurt terribly! But you, I'm going to show you you're going to want to come in here because you need to move." Okay, that's one example.

[07:44]

KEITH: But then the other example is you have to also create that that energy to make you need a want. And what is that? That's simply going, how can you connect an emotion to somebody that they go, "You know what? That's cool. I'm game for it. Let's I'd like to give this a try." You you probably see this with messaging and things that go out there, and don't worry about the mechanism that goes. It's not that, it's the emotion. You have to emotionally connect with people because they feel so detached these days because they get hit all day long. And by going down to the baseline, instead of looking at them like a demographic—35- to 44-year-old males who make $150- to $200,000—stop that. What makes them feel like they want your product or service? What What Why did you get into this in the first place? Where did you start? Because guess what? That's probably still going to work. It's just harder at a larger scale because we get desensitized.

[08:34]

KEITH: Instead, if you want to be truly challenged, and you want to get in there and keep your business not only growing, but being able to energize the people in your own organization as well as the customers coming in, the first thing is emotion. Billion-dollar decisions are made on emotion. Everyone thinks, "Oh, they're always completely logical." Not true, okay? The decision you make to do a $5 purchase can just be instantaneous and reactive. It's actually the middle-ground ones that are a little bit tougher. And so, I encourage as these times they keep changing, as money is more expensive and you have to go and focus it in certain areas, you need to sit back and go, "Do I actually know my audience? And if I do, what am I doing to emotionally engage them on a regular basis? What value am I providing, and what education am I providing, and how am I standing out against all the other brands and all the other businesses out there, so that when they wake up, even when they're getting hit left, right, and center from everybody else, all they can think is about my brand and what we make them feel like?"

The 7 Core Benefits in Sales and Marketing

[09:30]

JIMMY: It's so interesting, you know, the overlaps between building a high-performance culture and building a high-performance business. And one of the things we talk about with leaders is connect with the person, not the position. Because they are not just their job title, they're not the job they do. They are a whole person, and they have emotions and feelings and families and hobbies and kids and whatever it might be. And what you're saying here is, if you want to get to the crux of a business decision, actually, what you want to be targeting is the emotional center of their of their brain, and the things that maybe uh they're worried about, they're fearful about, they're thinking about, that they want or they need in their lives. And then going, "Well, how do we How can what we have solve that problem for you by giving that to you and just connecting you with our service or our product?"

[10:15]

KEITH: It's benefits. I mean, we have the same things in our own lives, whether you're an employee, whether you own your own business, you're the CEO to the janitor. It still comes down to benefits: How do I make money, save money, save time, decrease a headache, increase marketability, stroke an ego, or do right by people? It's the same seven in some way, shape, or form all the time. The only difference is how we approach it. So let's take those same things to our employees, right? And so you're looking down and say you're talking to a marketing and sales department, or you have another group that's in operations. There can be tension between the two, but the reality is is they're here to make money, they're here to have a life so they can take outside of it and do the things that they love. Bring now in your customers: They're coming in here because you have one of those seven things that attracts them, and the people who work for you need to inspire that same element that they're looking for, because if they're not, they create a disconnect.

[11:03]

KEITH: So what happens there is, a confused mind does not buy. So if all of a sudden I'm bringing energy X and energy Y is not matching it, nothing happens. And this is where the bigger it gets, where the disconnect with customers can come, because you can just say, "Oh, well, we feed more Google ads and it will be just fine." Yeah, that works for a while, but guess what? You can only feed so much. "Oh, well, we're going to do so many sales conventions and talk to people." You should, and you should be able to connect with people, but if you're not emotionally energizing your own staff along with the customers and there isn't a there's a disconnect, guess what? It breaks. And that break is what I see happening with large companies, and AI is trying to speed it up, and let's do more and more and more. And I'm going to say, slow down for just one second and ask yourself, what are you putting out into the world and then what's coming back? Because if you're not getting stuff back, what you're putting out needs to change.

Actionable Steps for Senior Leadership

[11:53]

JIMMY: I'm I'm so fascinated by the fact that we're talking about raising capital and growing businesses quickly, and the crux of the conversation is emotionally energizing our staff. And I want to go a little bit deeper on this because a lot of our listeners, most of our listeners, are senior leaders who, you know, they're not writing the copy, they're not sending the emails or the marketing messages, they're not the ones doing the sales meetings. They might be, but chances are they've got teams and teams of people who are doing those for them. So, you know, I'm I'm a CEO, I'm a senior leadership team member who's sitting around the table going, "Well, we need to do something a little bit different here." But I'm hearing this emotional energizing thing from from Keith, and I'm thinking, "How can I How can I get my teams doing that with their customers?" Can you walk us through maybe some some tips or some steps or some ideas that, if I'm thinking, "I need to energize my team to emotionally connect with our clients and customers in the way that I used to when we started this business, or, you know, the founder did when they started this business," what would they What Where would they start with this?

[12:54]

KEITH: Yeah, and that's and that's a great question, and this And the approach that I have uh is sometimes a bit, I always would say, distant, but it's let's we're going to we're going to mix it up here. One of the first things that if you're in senior lead leadership, you rely on your staff and everybody who's coming through to be the voice to you and then you make the decisions that come down from it. So just as you mentioned before, "Oh, hey, we got the copy together. Here's some of the metrics you're seeing." Here's what I'm going to ask you: Did you ever look at it? And here's what I'm probably going to say: You probably didn't. You looked at the metrics, you looked at the stats, you looked at everything that came through. Did you actually see what went out and read it end to end and get a feeling off of it? Then did you take that, and you probably have people that you would along the way, you probably have some trusted advisors or people that were not part of your business, but they provide us really good advice of course the of course that. What I always do is this: I take it and I give it to them. "Hey, what what are your thoughts on this? What what do you feel off of it?"

[13:46]

KEITH: Then you go down to those You probably have testimonials or customers and everything else. Do you reach down to those individuals and say, "Hey, we are just going to do put together a quick uh We have this this new product we're actually putting out, and me as one of the senior-level people, we just wanted to gather together 30 or so people and just wanted to get your feedback on it." What you usually end up doing is you pass it off to other people. In this case, what's going to happen is your emotion and energy is going to get down to the bottom where you had originally started. You're here, you're growing, right? It kept going. And then this entire thing, this battery, I call it, because you're you basically a battery and a lattice structure. So you've been powering this thing for a long time, and then you spread your energy to everybody else along the way.

[14:32]

KEITH: Well, what happens is is as it goes down the line, it dissipates. It does, it's just the way it is. But then if you realize if you went back down to the bottom where you really connected, just for moments, you don't have to do this forever, I want to be clear. Get a feel off of it because now you're going to be emotionally connected again. You go back to the top and you go, "Guys, we need to make some changes." Because you're relying on everyone who is essentially a copy and/or a connection or extension of you to tell you what you should be doing, when at times, if you want to re- reinvent, once, twice a year, you need to go back down to the bottom, feel it, get a feel. Then when you come back, you're going to look down from 30,000 feet, and you're going to have a different view because you thought the bottom looked like this, because when you left it, it did look like this. And then you actually get down there now, guess what? It doesn't look like what you had made. And if you can do that, that changes everything tremendously because now you're relying on you and your expertise and your experiences to make decisions. But you don't have to do them all, you just have to come back down and connect.

Beat Burnout, Ignite Performance Book Announcement

[15:37]

JIMMY: Hey there, Jimmy here. Hope you're well. I just wanted to drop into this podcast and let you know that my new book, *Beat Burnout, Ignite Performance: The Leader's Playbook for Building a High Performance Culture*, is going to be released very soon. And if you haven't already, head over to my website and grab yourself the first chapter of the book absolutely free. The address you want to go to is beatburnout.jimmyburroughes.com/book and you can download that first free chapter to get you interested and excited about the topic of purpose. And the reason we're giving it away for free is because we think that purpose is the single most important factor for beating burnout and we want to get it into as many hands as possible. So head over to beatburnout.jimmyburroughes.com/book, grab *Beat Burnout, Ignite Performance: The Leader's Playbook for Building a High Performance Culture*, and enjoy reading.

The Power of Senior Leaders Reconnecting

[16:40]

JIMMY: You know, it's it's so interesting. When you were telling that, it just reminded me of a story when I was early starting out in my corporate career, and the country MD came in from London and uh said, "Oh, I'll come on a sales meeting with you." And I was like, "Oh my god," you know, "I'm a junior junior consultant and the the country MD is coming to to take me on a sales meeting." And there were two things that happened in that meeting. And this was a client I'd been working on for quite a while and wasn't really connecting really effectively. And the country MD walked in, and, you know, he was a master of his art, and he just made this great connection, and he shared these amazing insights, and he really built trust. And it turned into one of my biggest accounts. And I and I was thinking about it afterwards, like, "What What happened there?"

[17:25]

JIMMY: And there were there were a few things that were going on. Um first of all, he knew how to energetically connect with with that client. So, and and this was well below his pay grade. Going on a sales meeting for the country MD was, you know, it was a small a small thing, but he knew how to connect, he knew how to do that. He also inspired and showed me how to connect. So I was one consultant that came back and I shared this story of, "Oh my god, and Gary came out with me and it was amazing and he did these things." And so all of the team around me were like, "Oh my god, how do I get Gary to go on a meeting with me?" But they were all emulating some of the things that I'd said that he did in the meeting. But also, he got a really good handle on where his consultants were at, and what they were saying and doing, and, you know, the training that we'd all gone through was suddenly, "Mm, well, maybe that training could be tweaked because these consultants are not getting the intent or the the stuff that sits behind why we do this. They're just getting the the parrot version of the training." And I think this is what you're saying, right? Is if you want to generate more business, you've got to get back to the energetic spirit of what you were trying to achieve in the first place, or what the company was trying to achieve in the first place. And you're probably a master of your art, but you haven't done it for a little while, and you can go back and see what's happening and just reset the rudder slightly.

[18:34]

KEITH: You'll always remember. You'll sit there, it's riding a bike, and you'll get down there, you're just like, "Oh, well, I have The world has changed." I got it, so have you. You've You've gone with it. You haven't gotten to this point by accident. Success begets more success. So you can say, "Oh, well, this is a young generation and I'm they know this stuff better." No! Because it got here because of what you did and how you did it and the people you brought with you and the way that you inspired. And your customers and your your clients, they feel that. And if they can re-engage that feeling, it didn't go away. Like, all of a sudden, human emotion and everything didn't just change overnight. It didn't all say, "Oh, well, AI is here, see you later," and, you know, that didn't happen. We're now actually craving more connection, more, because everything is so distant, like I've said. And what you said right there, that is perfect. You this person, he's like, "This person shouldn't be here. They're really important." And just by that one act alone, you felt more empowered, you felt seen, you felt like, "Okay, I can do more. Okay. Okay, I'm going to watch, I'm going to learn. Okay, this this is cool." He's going to get you got a little bit of feedback, and even though that feedback could have been absolute malarkey, it didn't matter because you felt heard. And guess what you did from there? You're like, "I can do better." And now that's spread to you, and that's now yours to do, and he, you know, he or she, they're benefiting from it.

[19:53]

JIMMY: And that client felt made amazing as well because, "Oh, the the big, big boss had turned up to have a meeting with them," and they were like, "Oh, clearly this relationship is important." And it was that personal connection which grew, I mean, so that account became one of my biggest accounts, and it was incredible to to watch that growth just from that one meeting after I'd been struggling for so long. So there's a lesson in there.

Restimulating Old Business

[20:15]

JIMMY: You know, does this work does this work with old business? So we've talked about sort of generating new business, or getting new deals over the line with energetic connection. Does this work with restimulating old business, as well?

KEITH: Absolutely. In fact, it's the most important thing. I mean, we all know that from marketing perspective, the most expensive thing you can do is offer a new product to a new customer, okay? That's the most expensive. The most profitable, generally speaking, is offering a new product to an old customer. Because you it doesn't take as much. But because it doesn't, we spend so much time pushing forward, pushing forward, get more, get more, get more. What are you doing to add value and harness the ones that already have believed and are behind you? And here's the kicker: It doesn't take a lot. I mean, it doesn't take a lot. For longtime customers, just that little, "Hey, here's a 10 or 15% coupon off the next thing or a discount," or, "Would you like to get early access to some of the new things that we have going?" Do you know that that creates a sense of of special? And like and they say, "Hey, also, if you invite five of your your friends, they also get that special red-carpet treatment, they get early access to it." Watch pretty much if I were to say this, watch literally anything that Taylor Taylor Swift does for concerts and everything else and how they roll stuff out and merchandise and everything else, and follow that lead, okay? To connect with the audience.

[21:29]

KEITH: Now, take that for any business. You have to go back to your base. How are you connecting with them? Are you actually doing anything that hits them up or is it just always when I have something new? I live in Colorado, and I live near near Vail. So they're out there regularly. You go to Beaver Creek as an example, and they have warm cookies they walk around with to give to kids to keep them excited. So this is an old customer, they're there, and they're just making sure you remember next time to come here because of the feeling you got from it. You go anywhere and they have this sort of ethos that they do. That's what those more of a service and, you know, your your Disneys and everything else do that super well. When you go to something like a product, are you only talking to them when you're trying to sell them? Because if that's the only time you're talking to them, that's not good. Why aren't you talking to them otherwise?

[22:15]

KEITH: When we've done this before for building Facebook groups or building new audiences for smaller businesses, we say offer four information or educational contents and then one offer. So are you doing a four-to-one ratio? Because I bet you're just doing a one ratio: just offer, offer, offer, offer, offer. What if they don't want the offer, okay? So then you're going to alienate them? You're just going to say, "Stop trying to sell to me. Can you speak to me?" What could you do to just say, "Hey, there's some great things you can do with our product. We wanted to show you kind of a list. Now we're collaborating with some others. Hey, we put on this event and we want to show you all the cool things, you're absolutely invited out to it." All those things just make your old customers come back. And when they do, they are so valuable. They are, because they are your best referral source.

[23:01]

KEITH: You can Google all day long, that's great, all right? Send out all your Facebook ads, awesome. You can go make partnerships, wonderful. You get your customers to organically talk to other people and bring people in, and that is so incredibly valuable that if you aren't doing things to engage them on a regular basis, you are wasting money and effort. You are sitting here spinning on a wheel and you're putting one one customer in, one customer out, and you're like, "We just got to go faster." Stop, slow down. Why are these people leaving? Why aren't they still engaging? It's something you're doing wrong that they originally you had, and then guess what? You stopped doing it. Go backwards, go back to the bottom, go back to what were you doing that kept them engaged, and then go, "Ah, there it is." Back to the top. "Hey, team, here's what we're going to do." But only you, the senior leadership, can do that because you were there when it started, you were there and you felt it, and now you're going to be there to not just fix it, but push it forward.

Looking Outside Your Industry for Inspiration

[23:51]

JIMMY: And and even if you presumably weren't there when it started, you started there for a reason, you joined for a reason, and so and it was what was attracted you to the brand or the business. And what and what we tend to see at the senior leadership level is it's a pretty considered choice to go into that organization for, you know, three to eight years in a senior leadership role. So why did you join and what and is that perception of the brand or the way that the business works cascading into the customers? Cascading into the way that you interact? And, you know, I was fascinated you brought up Taylor Swift and I was thinking initially was like, I'm not sure Taylor Swift is an appropriate reference point for a senior leadership team. And then I was actually recalling an article I read in HBR about the sophistication of the Taylor Swift enterprises marketing and branding machine for customer loyalty. And her her fans are lifetime fans, right? Her business is generating billions of dollars a year through customer loyalty. And so it's the way she makes people feel at every single moment is the sophistication behind it, not just that she stands on stage and sings songs. There's a whole lot of smarts that go behind that. Uh she just makes people feel excited at the concert, but there's a whole lot more that sits below it.

[25:00]

JIMMY: We've This conversation has has gone in so many uh fascinating directions that I wasn't expecting, and and I think that's a good thing, because often when we're in senior leadership teams, we think in a track. You know, we're like a we're on a set of rails, and we just keep going where the train is going. And Keith, what you've suggested is that maybe we think a little bit differently. Maybe, if you want to get that performance edge, we take a slightly different energetic shift and stop thinking about business, and start thinking about people and feelings and emotions and energy and customers, and I love that.

[25:32]

KEITH: Well, I brought up Taylor Swift, that's I'm trying to create a

JIMMY: And and you brought Taylor Swift to the conversation as well. So [laughs].

KEITH: I don't go to her concerts, I don't do anything, but just think of the model. Just just if you sit back and you go, you're always a you're always looking at a big business and you're looking at other big businesses like you for the answer to what you should be doing. You need to stop and go look around, because there are so many other things you can learn and take. And as I come here to you today talking about, I'm a physical therapist who has experience in marketing, warehousing, distribution, sales, and I'm sitting here talking about broker-dealer, capital raising, talking with private equity and venture capital. You go, "You've you've been a lot of different places," and they go, "But I've taken something from each of them, and when you put them all together, you can bring a lot to the table." So as a as a senior leadership, you have to look outside of your world to go find the inspirations to bring it back in. You just can't keep going down the same track that everybody else did, because if you do, when you get to the end, you're like, "Oh, doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result is literally the act of insanity." That is

Achieving More by Doing Less

[26:36]

JIMMY: Completely agree. And yet we all seem to keep doing it: We'll just do more KPIs and more goals and focus harder on profits. Yeah, no, I completely agree. It sounds like you've done a lot, Keith. Um what's something you wish you had done, but never got around to doing?

[26:50]

KEITH: I'd probably say earlier in my career, I was probably the opposite of what I'm talking about here. So if I say didn't get around to doing, it would be taking that advice before to try to be more expansive and try to take more joy in the things that, when it wasn't working, to do the more traveling, or the more fun. I'm doing more of those things now, but earlier, I had the time and the effort, but I was so focused on trying to move forward that I actually ended up spinning in circles. So for me, you know, I I was when I was 18 or as I was college, I taught myself to play the guitar, and I took so much joy from that. It wasn't to make money or anything, it was just because I enjoyed it. And every moment now that I do have, I was like, "Okay, I'm a" when I turned 35, I learned how to ski. So I started skiing. I skied 37 times this past season and I worked less, yet I seem to continue to have more success and connect with more people and work with even better businesses by doing less.

JIMMY: Mhm.

KEITH: Which was crazy.

[27:52]

JIMMY: Yeah, it's the age-old adage, isn't it, of getting off the hamster wheel, and the less you do, the more you can achieve because you're focusing on doing the right things, not just doing all the things. Yeah, I could probably learn a lesson from that as well [laughs] in my business.

KEITH: We have to constantly like eat eat our own our own advice on a regular basis. I've had the fortune of so many great people that have helped me along the way, and now I'm trying to do it and pay it forward, where before, I've been the one receiving it. And now, as I sit here, I go, "Okay, what I wish I did more? Everything. I want more of everything." And it's not more business or just more Well, I want more money, or I want more people to be like success and be important. No, actually, I just want more of life.

JIMMY: I think that's probably the thing we the only thing we can't get more of. Um we just have to enjoy the the the time we got.

KEITH: You don't know how much you have. [laughs]

Conclusion and How to Connect

[28:38]

JIMMY: If people want to reach out to you, Keith, if they want to get in touch, find a little bit more about what you do, the value you add, and and where to connect and have a conversation about what's some innovative stuff that you can bring to my business to help me, what's the best way to get in touch?

KEITH: It it probably just go to the Capital Catalyst site. It's uh Capital with a K and Catalyst with a K because uh my name's Keith, and I just added some more Ks in there, so it's kind of fun. Uh but kapital-katalyst.com. And there, there's just It's just basic information, but I find I have enough in there that you go, "Okay, here's the stuff you've done." But more in reality, uh it's go hop on a call. Uh because that's the best way that I find if there's a match to work with anyone. Uh even of the clients I work with, the first contracts I always have are all 90 days. And because I don't go and go sign up for two-year-long or year-long because like, we don't really know each other yet. Let's give it some time and see if it's going to work out longer, and you don't hold two ends to each other for forever. And that's uh it's the way I've always done it, whether it's in capital raising, or whether it's in uh business development, or lead gen, or marketing, or working with sales programs, or helping organizations just what I talked about: Go back to the bottom, get the feeling, bring it back to the top. And then, what's crazy is such little things can make a huge difference.

[29:54]

JIMMY: Completely agree. Keith Cronin, founder, owner of Capital Catalyst, Taylor Swift advocate, and uh man of many, many tricks, millions of emails later uh understanding the key emotions, messaging, and facts that need to go uh into creating innovative business change. Thank you so much for joining us on this episode of The Ways of Working podcast. It was an absolute pleasure. Thank you.

KEITH: I appreciate it, Jimmy. I appreciate it so much.

[30:20]

JIMMY: That's it for this week's episode of The High Performance Leader. If you enjoyed this episode, please drop a review on whichever platform you listened on. We really appreciate it, and it helps us to connect with new listeners. Also, if you haven't already, head to jimmyburroughes.com and download a copy of my latest bestseller, *Beat Burnout, Ignite Performance*. It's the leader's playbook for building a high-performance culture, and is packed with practical action tips to get you started. Stay tuned for next week's episode of game-changing insights and ideas on The High Performance Leader.