It Takes a Tribe

by Will Dean

  Like many of us, looking back, Gaby can’t separate her weight issues from her mental health at that time. “That lowest point was I was in a bad depression because I was so heavy and I was eating because I was so depressed. I couldn’t break that circle. My husband and I had just split up and I had my little boy, and I was all alone. And just constantly eating.”

  Food had always been a problem in Gaby’s life. She grew up big, a casualty of that shift in working habits between generations. Her mom and dad are not exercise mad but they were blue-collar physical workers, so they naturally kept weight off. Her dad worked in a factory and was sweating from head to toe forty hours a week. Her mom worked in a factory and as a cleaner. “So they were both on their feet and active, and they never had a problem with food. They needed a lot of energy. My mom makes food that’s not greasy or anything but they eat; their portions are big.”

  Gaby herself trained as a laser eye specialist, which did not involve much heavy lifting. She didn’t play any sports, but her big plates of food became a habit, then an addiction: “I didn’t even know what it was like to be hungry because there was always food in my belly.”

  She can’t exactly place the moment she decided to turn things around, but there was a voice in her head that abruptly said enough, and that was the start. Her friends encouraged her to go to the gym, but given the stigma about body shapes, she says that was too embarrassing originally: “You can’t even go to the gym when you weigh 330 pounds. Even the gym, especially the gym, the place you would think you would have support in trying to get fitter, people look at you funny, like you don’t belong there. You want to say: ‘Look I’m here trying to do something about it!’ It’s like you can’t win anywhere. So I actually started working out at home. That was my starting point.”

  At the same time, she gave up buying any junk food, no rubbish. And the more she exercised the less she craved the salt and sugar. People began to tell her she had great willpower. Developing willpower became unavoidable because maintaining the change became such a big part of her life once she started to shed weight. Still, it took her a couple of years to get to the point where she did her first Tough Mudder.

  That first one she did with a friend. The most recent was with her new husband and brother- and sister-in-law—she got married for the second time last summer.

  Gaby’s T-shirt provoked some laughter going around. Best was she ran past a group of guys, pretty tough guys, who had slowed to a walk; when they read what was written on her T-shirt, they all laughed and told her: good job. “It’s funny,” she says, “I don’t have the upper body strength but I do have endurance, I find I can just keep going and going which is something I would never have imagined.”

  In many ways, the best part of that determination is that Gaby sees it rubbing off on those around her. She has gained a few pounds since her wedding, so she is back to training and is determined to shift them. Her son, now in his teens, appreciates that effort. She fears he has her genetics so she worries about him. She is proud of the fact that he will say, after her example, “Mom, I won’t eat dessert today because I’ve eaten dessert a couple of days a week already.” She thinks he makes healthier decisions knowing what the effects can be.

  She laughs about having become the go-to person for any of her friends looking to get in better shape. But she tells them what she has learned: that there is no magic pill, that it’s about eating and exercising, drinking water not soda. “I just tell them you have to make the decision in your head and be tired of it, be tired of feeling that way, just make it and stick to it. After that,” she says, “anything is possible.”

  CHAPTER 8

  Tough Lessons: Learning from Failure

  The arrogance of success is to think that what you did yesterday will be sufficient for tomorrow.

  —William Pollard

  At the end of 2012 I flew back from our second event in Australia, where I had been introduced at the start line to five thousand Aussie Mudders who, surreally, went down on one knee in my presence. The flight to New York is sixteen hours, generally with a stopover in LA. On the first part of that flight a heavy cold I had been nursing developed into full-blown pneumonia. I had to leave the plane and, unsure where to go, holed up in an airport hotel to try to sleep it off. It was the first time for several months that I stopped working a back-to-back schedule, and as soon as I did, I collapsed.

  Creating Tough Mudder and trying to help it grow—at the same time making constant operational decisions, not to mention deploying teams to build events on three continents and trying to set up robust internal systems—had meant an intense workload. That overnight stay in the LA airport extended to a few days and then a week. I felt too ill to get to an emergency room, just occasionally summoning the energy to Skype Katie to let her know I was still there but was, honestly, about to head home. In the previous weeks I’d been traveling so much from one event to the next that I never seemed to be on the same time zone as friends and family. I felt suddenly alone. Everyone was worried about me and to be honest, though it’s not really in my character, I was a bit worried about me as well. I remember thinking, on a loop: I have to get home. And then, I can’t leave the hotel because I don’t have the strength to pick up my suitcase.

  This went on for a few more days, but eventually I did work up that strength and got back to New York. However, now well behind with all our best-laid plans and delivery goals, and with a new season’s events to get control of, I plunged straight back into work. I had a sense that I couldn’t slow down, or step away, because too much depended on me. We had gone from nothing to a fifty-million-dollar business in a very short time, and the last thing I wanted was for it all to come crashing down. The court case with Mr. Mouse had taken more out of me than I thought, and there were a hundred other pressing anxieties and responsibilities. And then the thing that I had dreaded since we had started the business happened. In April, a young man, twenty-eight years old, died at the Walk the Plank obstacle in our event at Gerrardstown, West Virginia.

  We had known deep down that statistically it had been bound to happen. We knew, for example, that one in sixty thousand competitors dies during a triathlon, and by 2013 we’d had well over a million participants complete our twelve miles—but it did not change the news for any of us that a young man had lost his life. As founder of the company, with all the emotional investment that involved, it took me a long time to process the fact, and it inevitably cast a cloud over the whole company that summer.

  One result of that and many other insistent concerns was that I wasn’t sleeping well and routinely forced myself to work beyond my normal endurance levels. Though I talked a lot about the importance of balance, pushing myself—and others—harder and harder had started to become a kind of addiction as well as a point of honor: it was what Tough Mudder was all about, right? We kept going. And then we went some more. It was a habit I had practiced to a degree throughout my twenties, particularly at the Foreign Office, where workaholism was pretty much assumed: the terrorists never stopped so how could we? It began to creep into everything I did. I remember Alex Patterson persuading me to take an afternoon to go surfing one Saturday out in the Rockaways. There were some big waves and everyone was pretty tired in the swell after about twenty minutes. I stayed out in the waves on my own for two or three more hours. When I got to shore, people were asking, “Aren’t you exhausted?” I was like, “You know, I am always exhausted.” Some months later, I did the Help for Heroes hundred-mile bike ride overnight. I hadn’t done any training at all for it, just got on the bike and went through it without a break. People say that you are running on adrenaline at those times but I think it’s more just a stubborn refusal to stop because of all the problems stopping implies you have—not least of which is the acknowledgment that your current level of effort is not sustainable. TMHQ had long been a family, but increasingly that was at the expense of any life outside the company. That summer I st
arted wearing a beard because I would always need to hide at least one boil on my face.

  The longer you push yourself in that way, the more you come to realize that brute resilience on its own will carry you for only so long. Work must be balanced by proper rest and perspective—and given purpose by a sense of fun. The casualty, in the absence of these factors, is your good judgment. I think up until then I had been pretty effective at thinking strategically about the growth of the business. I had a clear sense of Tough Mudder priorities at different stages of development. In the first two years, it was all about trying to deliver the events themselves seamlessly and safely. We hired some people with deep experience of event operations—people who had done logistics for Grand Slam tennis tournaments and rock festivals, and several who had been involved in the London Olympics—and that capacity improved substantially.

  We had, too, worked hard on our marketing and our innovation, driving growth, adding ever more Tough Mudder events, making the business international. We worked tirelessly to create a culture of excellence, forever drilling down into problems, asking all the whys. Despite all this we were inevitably making up some strategies on the fly, and the questions kept coming: Which parts of these processes shall we do ourselves and which should we farm out? How do we interact with our providers, our contractors, our venues? Should we buy land and have permanent sites? Our small team was putting on an event for many thousands of people in sixty places around the world, sometimes four times in one weekend. We were setting up military-style camps outside a city, taking on the enormous expense of developing obstacles and of safety and insurance, and trying to build an organization that could cope with that and at the same time remain true to our values. Cracks inevitably formed.

  In October 2013, when we opened our bookings for the year ahead, it quickly became clear that they were markedly down on budgeted projections. It was the first time this had happened since we launched. The bookings were not down across the board, and not in all territories—Britain and Australia were performing well—but they had dipped significantly for certain events in the United States. To begin with we weren’t sure how to react. Was this a blip or was it a trend? Most concerning was that our repeat business, consistently about a third of all bookings and the lifeblood of the company and the tribe, seemed to be falling significantly behind our projections. But with an increasing number of events and new initiatives and a growing workforce, costs were going in the other direction.

  I had been waiting for this moment and these numbers: one of the first ideas I had taken to heart when I started Tough Mudder was Andrew Grove’s famous mantra at Intel that in business “only the paranoid survive.” I knew that growth curves never went only one way. It was a lesson also hard learned in my time at the Foreign Office, where a healthy degree of short-term paranoia, along with a clear faith in long-term strategy, was sometimes literally a matter of life and death. However much you tell yourself to expect the worst, though, success can breed a sense of invincibility. And if you are not careful, that belief can also start to define you.

  That belief had certainly taken root in some corners of TMHQ. So the sudden sense not of imminent crisis but of things not growing merrily year after year as they had done changed the atmosphere around the company. A few people, both inside and outside, took it as a cue to question our future. Having for three years been the serial disruptor of the endurance fitness world we were now faced with a few more competitors, some trying to be as nimble as we had been in the beginning. And as with any new business that matures, a little of our novelty had worn off.

  That summer, we had hired our 150th employee, and revenue reached ninety million dollars. I sent a company letter around that described this expansion as being like that of a boa constrictor that has recently swallowed a large mammal. “If we process this all correctly,” I wrote, “we are going to be well set for a long time—but the scope for indigestion is also very high.”

  That latter prophecy proved true. As all entrepreneurs learn sooner or later, growth may be the goal of your business, but it is also its potentially fatal flaw. The transition from start-up to something with a sustainable life of its own—the infamous journey from good to great—is invariably a painful one. The skills and character that you need to make the first leap into the unknown are not the same resources you need to create something stable enough to withstand inevitable reverses of market and fortune. These strains showed for me as I tried to make that transition from founder to leader. The entrepreneurial mind-set encourages you to fix things on your own—that self-reliance is the answer. I was always well aware of that voice, and its limitations. I knew the importance of sharing responsibility. But in extreme situations, the voice could be insistent.

  I took some comfort from the knowledge that no one is exempt from this reality. It was true for Steve Jobs, as he discovered after getting forced out of Apple in 1985, and then watching the company’s decline to near bankruptcy through the Apple Newton disasters of the early 1990s. It was true for Phil Knight at Nike, which enjoyed explosive growth in its first years, only to be eclipsed by Reebok in the mid-1980s. Knight’s response was to “Just do it”—to both intensify and diversify the brand, proving wrong the headline writers who were already creating obituaries for his company. Elon Musk’s stellar career, meanwhile, has been a series of near-death experiences that resulted from trying to go as far as possible as fast as possible. Musk came close to losing all of the fortune that he had made from PayPal when his first three rocket launches at SpaceX exploded, simultaneously destroying his investors’ confidence. He stuck with his beliefs, though, and found the solutions that led to NASA investing $1.6 billion in his company.

  That’s the price of experience. I have talked a lot in this book about resilience, about grit. It is a relatively easy thing to be resilient and gritty, to work punishing hours and to put in that extra effort in life when all you can see is sunlit improvement. The real test of character, though, comes when you try to maintain that determination and drive in the face of serious storms. I was not naive enough to imagine that Tough Mudder, like any start-up that makes money, had not benefited from a great deal of luck at the outset, for offering the right experience at just the right time. If, for example, advertising through Facebook had been priced in 2010 as it was priced in 2014, we would never have gotten off the ground. But luck will only ever take you so far. People talk about companies having growing pains, and there is truth in that idea, but the pains are not the benign discomforts that the phrase suggests. They put at risk everything that you have worked for.

  I had prided myself, and our start-up team, on four virtues, each of which I’ve explored in this book: the people we hired, the culture we created, the innovation we practiced, and the leadership we demonstrated. At the beginning of 2014 it was becoming evident that we were coming up short in all four areas. We had hired some of the wrong people, the culture was losing its focus as a result, we had stopped doing new things as effectively or memorably, and our leadership, including my own, was less coherent than it had been. As anyone who runs a business will tell you, it is rarely one thing that causes a dip in fortunes, but an accumulation of different, related things. And though these things appear to come at you suddenly and all at once, they are generally rooted in missteps and wrong decisions—and lack of balance and overwork—made in the past.

  One of my initial responses to those cracks was to hire a layer of experienced senior managers across the business from the corporate world who I believed could think strategically, to take some of the burden off myself and give me space to breathe. All of these people were highly qualified, maybe eight or nine of them, attracted by the prospect of doing something different and strapping themselves in to a high-octane start-up. To persuade some of them to join us we gave out some fancy titles: a Chief People Officer, a Chief Concept Officer. What I discovered, however, was that when the going got tough—and in the absence of some of the insulati
ng certainties they had been used to in a larger corporation—some of these chiefs tended to retreat into their comfort zone, which was for analysis rather than hands-on intervention. They became defensive and risk averse. They would “offer inputs” rather than getting urgent stuff done, spend a lot of time and energy justifying inaction. Some of those with a management consultant background would argue to me that they were bringing process and structure to the business, but too often the reality was that they were making us prematurely bureaucratic and overly consensual. I had, in retrospect, deviated from what I had learned to be true, that understanding of our values was the key criterion in the team; all the corporate experience in the world was no substitute for that. (I’m all for “buy in” as far as it goes, but there is, too, an important lesson to be learned for young businesses from Richard Branson’s mantra: “Screw it, let’s do it.”)

  To take one example, we desperately needed the Web site updated so that we could create a more fluent experience for new Mudders. I gave one of our chiefs responsibility for the change. He responded by producing a two-hundred-page PowerPoint document about all the ways it could be done. It took me eight hours just to go through the endless slides about the fors and againsts of the tweaks he was suggesting, which concluded with an outline of the potential risk to the business of making any change at all. At the end of it I said to him: “Why didn’t you just trial your best idea and then revise it until it worked?”

  Elsewhere, despite our Ninja recruiting strategies, in an effort to expand our capacity quickly we found that we had hired people in key positions who didn’t intuitively understand the culture. Because in the beginning we were all so hands-on with every aspect of the business, the nuances of our culture didn’t have to be explained; we had all grown up with them. As we hired more experienced people, who had done their time in very different cultures, some of the more intangible spirit of those tribal values was harder to communicate. There were tensions, too, between our original hires, who didn’t need telling about our values, and those who didn’t quite get it. The culture of any company is hard to define exactly, until you come up against people who don’t understand it. By 2014, I found that I was starting to have to explain myself and my instincts for Tough Mudder more and more often in meetings.