Thirty Minute Mentors Podcast Transcript: ESPN Founder Bill Rasmussen

I recently interviewed Bill Rasmussen on my podcast, Thirty Minute Mentors. Here is a transcript of our interview:

Adam: Our guest today disrupted the sports and media industries. Bill Rasmussen is the founder of ESPN, the first television network fully dedicated to sports, and the largest sports media entity today. Bill is also the author of the new book, ESPN: One Giant Leap for Fankind. Bill, thank you for joining us.

Bill: Oh, good to see you, Adam.

Adam: It's been a while. I’m excited to have you here.

Bill: Thank you. I always look forward to chatting about the good old days of ESPN and the good new days of ESPN. It's been quite a change as it began back in the ‘70s.

Adam: It should be fun. Though you grew up in Chicago and spend time in the Air Force in between college and grad school. You played baseball. You're a big baseball fan. And your goal was to play Major League Baseball. But your first experience working professionally in sports wasn't playing in the majors. It was working as a sports director for a Springfield, Massachusetts local TV station. Can you take listeners back to your early days? What lessons and experiences were most instrumental in shaping your worldview and shaping the trajectory of your success?

Bill: Well, I think, first of all, been a sports fan forever. As you mentioned, I had decided someplace along the line, I wanted to play third base for the White Sox. Great idea, I thought, because I had a rotten third baseman back then. Oh, he was not a relative. Anyway, that was my idea of the white sack. Never heard of it. So that didn't go. So after I get back from the Air Force, I worked at Westinghouse for a couple of years. And they had some problems, shipping some sales materials, and coordinating with some campaigns across the country. Just got to get it done. And I had an idea that if I could find enough people, we could do a thing. And no matter what they asked to be shipped, we're doing 24 hours. And it turned out to be a very successful business. There are a lot of those 24-hour delivery services now today. But that was working every day from 7-11 for many weeks. And I decided I was gonna get back into sports somehow. And the way to do it was to be a sportscaster even though I played in the Air Force and everything else. Clearly, I wasn't going to play third base for the White Sox. So I went to a radio interview, which I think you might find interesting. Back in the day, there was a magazine called broadcasting and they would put in little two lines of personnel things they needed, sportscaster they needed to attack, whatever. So I saw this and it was in Westerly, Rhode Island. I'm living in New Jersey and Westerly, Rhode Island isn't that far away, but it's a pretty good drive. So I called a guy and said, “I saw your ad” and I'm talking and he says, “Sure. Come on up”. So I walked in and the first thing he said was, “Did you bring a tape? Can I have your tape?”. “I don't have a tape”. “So what do you mean? You don't have a tape measure?”. “Well, I don't have a tape”. “Well, what station do you work for?”. “So I've never ordered radio, either. That's why I'm coming here to talk to you”. You can imagine how that conversation went from there. But in the end, he hired me and he said if I would help him. He was putting a new station on the air up in Amherst, Massachusetts. And he said, “If you help me get the station on the air for the first three or four months, FCC stuff”, he said, in the sportscaster, that was it. That's how I got started. And the first time I ever said anything on the radio was the day when we went on the air, I had never gone on before. It was April 1, 1963. I will never forget that day. I'm standing there. 7:45 was to me, my start. And I had 7:44 something. I thought, what am I doing here? I have no idea why I'm here. But I started talking and I guess I haven't stopped.

Adam: I love it. So many great lessons there. You weren't afraid. You didn't care what your background was. You didn't care what your traditional credentials were. You went for it. You went forward and you took your shot. And it went in and you didn't care that you might make mistakes. I'm sure you made your fair share of mistakes along the way.

Bill: Oh, I made a lot of mistakes along the way, Adam, as you would imagine.

Adam: We're gonna get into some of those. But before we do, I want to talk about one of your big successes, your biggest success, the founding of ESPN. But before that, there was a failure. You were working as a sportscaster and a publicist for the New England Wellers, now the Hartford Whalers, and you got fired. And a few months later, you're sitting in traffic with your son. And that's when this magic moment, the aha moment comes to you. And that's the moment that changed the course of history and changed the way that millions of us consume sports. Can you take us back to that point in time? How did you come up with ESPN?

Bill: Well, it was really interesting. As I mentioned, you're starting in radio visiting, doing these little things we want you to get to television. I started, just for the record, to set the record straight, I started quote, by going down there was one ABC station at 11 o'clock that would do as much news as they could do for 10-12 minutes and whatever. And that was it. They were done. They didn't have Johnny Carson at 11:30, like the NBC station in Springfield. So I went down, I call the station managers as I said, “You know, I'm a fan of theirs. And watch your channels, ABC affiliate. But why don't you do sports? You don't have any sports today. I can do that for you”. Of course, I've never been on television either. Just like radio. They said, “What are you talking about?”. So I was shot down. Driving down a half-hour drive and we'll talk about it. I'll tell you what my ideas are. I think he said resign Utley. Okay, come on down. So when I went in to explain to him and I said, “You know, we had a lot of sports fans. They had an American Hockey League team, all usual high school sports, and a couple of colleges and tranquil”. So he said, “Well, this is a Friday”. I remember very distinctly this Friday afternoon. He said, “Well, alright, let's try it”. And so I did that for just a few months. And the NBC station isn't going on the air in the early 1950s, the first UHF station in the country, and had a sportscaster who was a real veteran and had been there for a long time. He was promoted to vice president something at a station in Charlotte, North Carolina. And he was asked for a recommendation and he and I got to know each other. And then he told the president, Dr. Bell, he's going to, it's going to be fine, that we're going to work out. I did and it did. And I went on to channel 22, which was the NBC station in Springfield. I was there for eight years, six as the sports director and two as the news director. And that's when the WHA decided to move to Hartford because the Boston Bruins didn't like them as tenants. In the Old Boston Garden, they introduced me to Howard Baldwin, one of the owners, who told them what I could do. I like to put the games on the radio for the playoff games that were going to be played that spring. He said, “Okay. I saw the advertising travel with the team doing all the games”. After that he hired me, and I was there for two years. I was informed a world a weekend that I was no longer required to report to the Whalers because I had been fired and the person delivering the message was none other than Colleen, a housewife. I had done some work with them as well when they came from Houston to do so there. It was on Memorial Day weekend of ‘97. I had no job. But one thing that I had done when I was with the Whalers was I convinced them to have our sports show. They said we'll try it was a television show that they do. I'd worked in Springville, and I said, “Sure”. So I went from three and a half minutes twice a day at 6:11. In sports in Springfield, Illinois, I had a half hour to produce my own show. 30 minutes, whatever I could do. Well, it was easy. I had access to the hockey team. Here a lot of sports around central Connecticut and so on. The University of Connecticut was big. So I said let's do this. And we still didn't have enough time. We did that half-hour show. And I kept thinking while there are still people who want more sports. At that time, there were only five cable systems in the state of Connecticut. But I figured if we could get at least a half-hour sports show put together on five stations that could lead to something because along the way I'd been hearing about RCA doing some things with HBO and HBO is on five hours a night and I thought I'm gonna do five hours and I went all chopped up. The feeling about how programming was presented in the 1970s is totally, totally different than it is today, called RCA. And they said, “Yeah, we'll come up with C”. And so they came up and we started talking.

Adam: You saw this hole in the market. Was there an aha moment where things just clicked? Or was it more of a gradual process where you had this 30-minute show, and you saw that the 30-minute show gained traction and there was a demand for more and you had additional programming? Oftentimes, there's a perception that entrepreneurs have a light bulb go off, and there's a click, but in my conversations with so many of the most successful entrepreneurs, you hear the exact opposite, where it's a much more iterative process. How did it work for you?

Bill: It seemed logical to me. I'm thinking now everywhere I go, people are talking about sports and it wasn't because of me. I was playing the sport. I was talking about it. I was impatient because people always wanted more. When I did the three and a half minutes at the Springfield stations, almost every night, somebody called to see how could you miss this. Whatever game it might be the local high school or whatever. Why didn’t you mention the Red Sox tonight? Or you’re in Red Sox Nation, why didn't you mention the Red Sox as well? And some other game was more interesting or who knows. It just seemed there was this kind of nagging. Three and a half didn't mark, didn't survive a half-hour and people are still following? Why didn't we ask this question? We need more. Can you do this show? Can you bring those people in? Don't forget the university community. It's just Wesleyan there. And so when the late Wailers had won the championship and by Memorial Day weekend I started thinking about that seriously. Because I had heard a little bit about satellite transmission, no clue how it worked. But to run some space to kind of promote the idea of doing something in Connecticut, Roy, maybe finding out some more and how can we take cable systems all across the country and put them together? Oh, much to my very pleasant surprise, RC had solved that by launching a satellite in December 1975. There were 22,300 miles above the equator just south of Hawaii and in geosynchronous orbit with the earth right above the equator, and you heard my entire technology background right there. 

Adam: And no one says, listen to the market. In your case, you heard the market say we want more than three and a half minutes of sports. We want more than 30 minutes of sports.

Bill: Exactly right, Adam, you're exactly right. It's exactly the process. It goes with what you've just encapsulated very well. And that is you don't quit if somebody asked a question. You say I want to do this. And they say no, that's never gonna work. You can take endless nos. But only one yes. And we got the one yes.

Adam: What were some of the key obstacles that you faced along the way? And how did you overcome them?

Bill: Well, the first thing was convincing anybody we talked to about anything, even in the state of Connecticut. 24-hour sports never going to happen. And I was forever explaining how we're not talking about just sports in your hometown or your home state. What I'm envisioning is all 50 states all across the country. And we're going to do a half-hour Sports Show. We call it Sports Central. It turned out what was going on here was Sports Center, of course, but we're gonna give you a game from California from Florida from Mississippi, Minnesota doesn't make any difference. And we will cover all of the sports action several times a day with these 30 minutes, fortunately. And of course, people kept saying no, and when you walk in and somebody laughs at you beforehand, I thought that was kind of extreme that happened on the visit to a cable, or five cable companies. That will hook into the one meeting. There were Daniel's Associates, around five or six franchises around the country. And as I walked in, there is a young lady and a young man sitting there, they laugh. They said, “You know this isn't going to work. But we saw it would be kind of fun to talk to you and just see what you're thinking about”. Well, I'm really serious. I'm going in there and I'm fine. I'm going to do this. I’m going to be advertising sports. Oh my goodness, cable television couldn't do that. And it's going to be 24 hours today. They laugh and said, “One, nobody wants to watch that many sports. And two, there are not enough sporting events to build 24 hours a day, 17-60 hours a year”. The lady was kind enough to squeeze I apologize. I'm sorry. We're laughing at you. But this isn't gonna work. I said, “Okay”. So many years later, we relive that visit. So what I felt was to take the idea and it sounds wacky to some people but didn't sound wacky to me. And you pursue it to the end and never give up. I have six-letter things I always talk about ABC, and NBC, and always be curious. And never be complacent. Keep asking questions.

Adam: Always be curious, never be complacent. The importance of having conviction in your ideas, having conviction in your beliefs, it only takes one yes, you don't need a million people to say yes to you. And they're going to be so many nos along the way as there were in your case, but it comes down to having tremendous persistence. The best salespeople are incredibly persistent, the best entrepreneurs are incredibly persistent, you need to have a thick skin. You can't be afraid of rejection, you can't be afraid of failure, you're gonna fail many, many times along the way, you're gonna get rejected many, many times along the way. But you just need that one yes. Not everyone is going to have the same vision that you have. But you just need to find that one partner. And just because people don't see things, the way that you see things doesn't mean that you're wrong. And they're right, you could be right. And if you believe so strongly in your vision, and have good reason to believe in it, push forward, don't give up, and keep going.

Bill: And never lose focus. Even to this day, if you were to walk onto the ESPN campus right now. They have a very simple mission statement. Some corporations have pages and pages and how we're doing this and how we're doing that. There's really simple. It was six words, and I didn't think they could get any shorter. It used to be, to serve sports fans anytime, anywhere. And they've now cut that to five words, saying, serving sports fans, anytime, anywhere. They're singularly focused, just as you said, they made this decision, they make his daily decisions about what they're putting on the air and everything. They can't be letting the second guesser say, oh, we better stop because Adam doesn't like to see whatever it is at seven o'clock. It's not the way to put it all out there for everybody. Some people like it, some people don't like what some commentator says, it's not the end of the world.

Adam: The importance of focus cannot be understated. And I think that Bill, every entrepreneur on the planet, myself included, probably yourself included, has had periods, many periods, in which we lose focus, where we're focusing on way too many things. And if you're trying to push on 10 different things, you're not gonna push on any of them successfully, you find yourself running really hard, but ultimately running in place. And it's those who are able to maintain laser focus, focus on that one thing. In the case of ESPN, they have five simple words. We are serving sports fans, period, this is what we're doing. Having that laser focus is essential.

Bill: When they say anytime, anywhere, they mean on all seven continents. And they don't mean in the Greater Hartford Connecticut area. They mean everywhere. And that's why you'll see different games in different parts of the country. I know the thinking now, to these days they want for example, major league baseball, they're not only going to show the Yankees or the Red Sox or somebody else. They have their scheduling, they integrate everything into MLB TV. So that basically MLB gets what they want. ESPN gets what they want. And the fans no matter where they are can find their game, the one they want to look at. And that is amazing when you think about in 1977-78, the big three networks ABC, NBC, and CBS has a grand total of 25 football games in the entire season. Because in their mind, the evening programming that they could sell in half-hour and one-hour blocks. That was what America wanted to see, they come home from work, have dinner, sit down and watch television. That's not the way sports fans were sports fans. They're active. They want to do different things.

Adam: It comes down to knowing your audience. In your case, you understood the audience better than anyone else did, which was what allowed you to, number one come up with his idea for ESPN. And number two, have such deep conviction. In your idea, you understood that. This is what sports fans want. This is who sports fans are. ESPN understands sports fans. And regardless of what business you're running, you have to know your audience better than anyone else knows it.

Bill: Oh, true. Absolutely true. I can remember, even when at the beginning when looking for investors. And somebody always says, how did you finance that? Do you know the story? Of course, but if I'm talking to a college group or whatever I say, that was the easy part. $9,000 credit card, a cash advance of 140 $5 million dollars from the get-go. Voila. The network. I remember going to my parents who lived in Chicago and I lived in New Jersey. And I remember going out and talking to my father about it. I said, “This is a good idea if you really invest in this”. Well, he lived through the crash of 1929 and the Depression of the ‘30s, and so on. It was a tough time. And here I am saying he should bet on this wild idea and invest in this company, which he eventually did but he said, “Wait a minute”. He had all the same questions. Everybody else said, are you gonna find enough sports? Nobody's gonna watch all of that. You've been that way since you were a little kid. You're always interested in sports, you know? Well, still am. Fortunately, they invested in my sister. My brother invested. So it worked out all right, but you're right. You just have to keep going. Even with your own family sometimes, when they raise a question, you have to take it a little more seriously but it worked out fine.

Adam: Not only has ESPN stood the test of time, but ESPN's signature show Sports Center, which you made reference to, you were the innovator behind Sports Center. More than 40 years later, Sports Center is still going strong. Why do you believe Sports Center has been such an enduring success and what can anyone learn from it?

Bill: Well, I think there are two reasons. One is the information, obviously, they really have figured out how to satisfy the broadest swath of sports fans wherever they are. Because they're on so many times a day now but they've done over 100,000 shows and 100,000 sports centers now, think about that. 100,000 times a half hour air for two hours or sometimes they go overnight. But the beginning of it was guys like Chris Berman came in and Bob Lee Tommy, young rookies, and then we had Lou Palmer from Hartford, just go to JC in Hartford. He was older and had a little different perspective. And he mixed all these rookies and everybody together. And Chris Berman started with his nicknames overnight, in the middle of the night, he'd be talking about Bert being home by 11. And that was sort of Bert Blyleven, who played from Minnesota. And who's gonna catch you? That's kind of catchy. But these don't have three in the morning. And people say, oh, it's okay. He can do that. Nobody's watching and all of a sudden people, they asked him to stop and he stopped in New Orleans. People say, Chris, why aren't you doing that anymore? What's going on? The audience drives what you're gonna do, ultimately, because you can't sell it to the audience and to the advertisers to get to that audience. We won't make it. And you know what boomers are the same today? He was probably 24, maybe, when he started. I talked to him just yesterday. He's right back. He said, “I'm getting old”. I said, “Come on, Chris. Don't give me a why”. So I'm slowing down this football stuff. I have to come in here and I have to get the show ready. It wasn't like the old days he grabs the papers and goes in and wings it as best he could. But people love that kind of stuff. I don't know what the population is somewhere between 130 and 35 million. We have different opinions about what we like. Some people can't stand even other football games. Other people don't do anything with our radio. Kids today don't do anything with even email. I mean, we didn't have internet, we didn't have email and all that until the ‘90s. But ESPN was a success long before that. One of my very favorite comparisons is ABC bought ESPN for $237.5 million, not much in today's market. That was in 1989. ESPN had gone from losing money to posting a $100 million profit. Same period, ABC lost $80 million. Now here's ABC with all the big fancy shows. And here's good old ESPN serving sports fans anytime, anywhere, nothing about sports, no news. Early on, there was an experiment to put some legitimate news stories on the air for like a half-hour in the morning. And I don't know, it didn't last very long. It was a matter of weeks or months. Sports fans, this was our station. We don't want that new stuff around and go elsewhere to find that. And then news networks began proliferating, FOX came along. And NBC, they call it something anyway, there was a lot of doing a lot of different things, but we say it was sports.

Adam: Yeah, a couple of key lessons there. Showing your personality, being yourself. Chris Berman, a great example. Chris Berman could have gone in and tried to be like every other broadcaster who had ever come before him. Instead, he was his authentic self. And the audience loved it. And bless him. Number two, listen to the audience. We spoke about that before, but it can't be overstated. Know your audience and listen to your audience adapt as your audience adapts. Innovate with your audience, as your audience wants new things, to move and shift with your audience.

Bill: Yeah. Well, the interesting thing is, talking about persistence. Well, you have to have a lot of sports guys, if we're doing a half-hour sports, and we're doing a football game, we need bodies. And somehow the word got out and before you know, we weren't there, three or four or five weeks 2500 little tape from everything, because you're probably too young to remember that, cassette tapes that people would submit for an audition. And we had 2500. And the question to Scotty Connell, who was up from NBC was, how are you going to get these people hired? How are we going to handle this? He said, “Just tell them all to come up. Tell all 2500”. And it just like that had to get them up here. Guess what? Those that don't have what we've just been talking about the persistence, the will to go, trying to fear rejection, whatever it might be. We cover half of that. 2500 never showed up. Never ever showed up. He'd say, okay, Adam, you're doing the six o'clock, Charlie, you're doing this, Chris Berman you're doing the 11 o'clock, okay. And you're looking at him and say, man, he will come back and you see what I mean? And you're a sportscaster, go put it together. I told you, you're on summer fog. So that's the point at which some of us I think maybe I'll go this way and out the front door. As opposed to, I'm going to show him I can do this. And as a result, we got really, really good people. And then a lot of them develop their own personalities. Bob Lee is very talented, very bright, and different, and a totally different approach than Chris Berman. But equally successful,

Adm: The importance of resourcefulness.

Bill: Amazing phenomenon. It really is. Today I look at it.

Adam: Bill, you created one of the most successful TV networks of all time. You spent years as a professional communicator and as a sportscaster. What are the keys to effective communication? And what can anyone do to become a better communicator?

Bill: Well, one, you have to have the belief of your own conviction. Can't be afraid of failing. Oh, I know I have done that. A lot of times we all fail at something you try to steal an ovation, you get thrown out, and you fail on race days and the base bet. I've always been positive. I always think I can sit down and think something through and then I don't have 100% of the thought through ever. Because it's going to change. Whatever your idea is, you're gonna get a little tweak here and a major change there, whatever it might be. But if you're positive and you go forward, I don't know if this fits in and this whole story does for me. I was diagnosed with Parkinson's many years ago. It's a terrible disease. You eventually lose balance in your yard, just a mess and as the doctors tell you, you won't die from it but you will die whether it is a tough road along the way. I have tried to apply the same principles to Parkinson's as I have done everything else. And so I have a positive attitude and the book we talked about right at the beginning here. That's the result of a neurologist who diagnosed me with Parkinson's saying, not only do you have to exercise your body, and you have to keep moving because Parkinson's is a restrictive kind of disease, but you have to exercise your brain. So he said, one of the charges, I'm going to give you his goal. Every day when you wake up, plan to take a full sheet of paper, a blank sheet of paper, I should say. Write about anything you want to write all the way down. Then fill the page every day. Keep that brain working. Exercise as long as you can. So then I started writing and I thought, well, this is silly, why don't I just write a book? And that was probably three years ago now. And so I talked to George Bodenheimer, who has had someone help him get started writing a book that he did when he was president at ESPN. John Phillips is this gentleman's name, and then Georgia and pick up the phone call, and they'll talk to you. Again, I could have just left the phone on the hook, and I pick it up. But I said, sure, let's do this. Why do you want to do this, I told him what I just told you, to write something every day, write something every day is kind of like warming up on the first baseline. Let's get into the game. And why not make it a book? And here we are in today, just this very day that we did this. They told me I just won something at the New England Book Festival. So you never know. But you just stay persistent, stay positive and go forward. And I really believe that's helped me greatly with my slowing the progress of Parkinson's. And to me, that's a pretty big deal. I got 90 years and I might as well go for 100. At least 100. 

Adam: At least, I like it. 

Bill: See, that's a positive attitude. 

Adam: Good. I'm with you, at least 100, Bill. And the lesson for listeners. Regardless of what hand you're dealt, regardless of what challenge you're facing, regardless of what pitches are thrown at you. If you have a lemon, turn it into a lemonade. And it's easier said than done. But it really starts with having a positive attitude. With a mindset that recognizes that life is not all roses. But there are things that you can control. There are things that you can't control. What can you control, you can control your attitude. You can control how you react to adversity. And Bill, you're a shining example of how to react to the most challenging circumstances, whether it's your health, whether it is challenges you faced in your career, that it's not the challenges you face. It's how you react to the challenges.

Bill: Yeah, I mean, I have down days. We all have a down day. But I'll wake up the next morning, I kind of go through this every now and then. I've been asked to speak at some Parkinson's groups. I say, first of all, don't wake up with a negative thought when you're starting to wake up. Think good things are gonna happen today. Think positive for the day. And if you're so inclined, how am I happy? Tune in your head or stand up and sing out loud or go on about some whatever something is seen in the movies or some record or whatever might be. And then get up and exercise, do some stretching because stretching is very important for a Parkinson's person because there's a tendency to close in. So I tell them that this one always gets a laugh, and you probably will do the same thing. I'm not setting you up for this. But then I say I want you to finish with all that. You're awake, you've had a good thought if I'm too happy to understand a happy tone. You've done some exercise. And then I lean into the camera, like this, and then say and make the bed. Make the bed. You started off. You've done one good positive thing before you even go downstairs.

Adam: It's Admiral McRaven's advice. Always make your bed. Before we go. I want to ask you a few rapid-fire questions. 

Bill: Sure. 

Adam: You came up with one of the great ideas of our day. What advice do you have for anyone listening on how to generate great ideas?

Bill: I guess, look around. If it's holding the driveway in the back and you think that's the most important thing in your life, or kind of getting an infection if it's not, what is I think for you personally, you're going to change many times, especially in your younger years. When you're in seventh grade, you might think you're gonna be something and that's not true by the time eighth grade comes. That happens all through life, we change. And sometimes we change for the better and sometimes for the worse. But my main six letters I told you before they mentioned it before. ABC, NBC. I really do live.

Adam: As someone who lives and breathes innovation, how can leaders foster a culture that fuels innovation?

Bill: Well, that's a really good question. A lot of people don't want to invest in themselves or buy invest, I don't mean dollars and cents, I mean, belief. A kind that just walks down the street, so to speak, they move forward with the flow. You have to be willing to turn and look in the face of adversity and say, I can still do this. Instead of taking a right turn and walking away from it. If you really believe in yourself, you just do everything that you possibly can, as positive ways you can accomplish it. And you can't ever be afraid of the nos. I couldn't tell you how many nos. They told me I would be off the air if I didn't get a hairpiece because I was losing my hair. You see, I don't use airbrush anymore. I said that wasn't for me. And it turned out I'm right. I left the TV station and when I actually issue and the next issue is finding a job, which I did quickly. And the Whalers were there and I got fired from there, along came to ESPN. So always positive. Everything comes back to that, Adam, no matter which way I look at it, what can we do? And obviously, you have a very positive attitude in what you're doing. I appreciate that.

Adam: Bill, before we go, I want to ask you one last question, which is, what can anyone listening to this conversation due to become more successful personally and professionally?

Bill: I would say listen to it again and pay attention to the positive conversation you have had. And that person should endeavor to be just as positive no matter the obstacle, and go forward. If they really believe that in their heart they know that this is a good idea. Don't ever give up the pursuit of them. Always be curious and never, never be complacent.

Adam: Bill, thank you for all the great advice and thank you for being a part of Thirty Minute Mentors.

Bill: I'm always pleased to share with you. Thank you very much.


Adam Mendler is an entrepreneur, writer, speaker, educator, and nationally-recognized authority on leadership. Adam is the creator and host of the business and leadership podcast Thirty Minute Mentors, where he goes one on one with America's most successful people - Fortune 500 CEOs, founders of household name companies, Hall of Fame and Olympic gold medal-winning athletes, political and military leaders - for intimate half-hour conversations each week. A top leadership speaker, Adam draws upon his insights building and leading businesses and interviewing hundreds of America's top leaders as a top keynote speaker to businesses, universities, and non-profit organizations. Adam has written extensively on leadership and related topics, having authored over 70 articles published in major media outlets including Forbes, Inc. and HuffPost, and has conducted more than 500 one on one interviews with America’s top leaders through his collective media projects. Adam teaches graduate-level courses on leadership at UCLA and is an advisor to numerous companies and leaders. A Los Angeles native, Adam is a lifelong Angels fan and an avid backgammon player.

Follow Adam on Instagram and Twitter at @adammendler and on LinkedIn and listen and subscribe to Thirty Minute Mentors on your favorite podcasting app.