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My Personal Team

Life is too complicated without guidance and support. So I picked my mentors with care. 
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If left to myself, I would never leave the office. I’m an entrepreneur. I’ve got a great group of creative and talented managers. We publish 26 magazines and nine newspapers. We’ve got a load of new projects. It’s just too much fun.

The problem is, I need to get out of the office. Being hermetically sealed inside any environment, no matter how diverse and exciting it is, deadens the mind and suffocates the soul. It’s a little like being an aging Chinese emperor insulated inside the Forbidden City. Sometimes I have to force myself to go outside, breathe some fresh air, and hear things I wouldn’t normally hear.

I’m not very good at forcing myself to do anything. So over the last two years I’ve assembled a team of people to draw me out. Their job is to make me do things or look at things I wouldn’t otherwise do or consider.

If you’re like me—if you enjoy building your company a little too much—you may need to create your own outside team. Here’s who I put together for mine. Maybe it’ll give you some ideas of how to assemble your own.

Mike McCurley is one of the city’s best-known divorce attorneys, but that’s not how I got to know him. Mike and I belong to the same private club. This club has nothing to do with business; in fact, it discourages talk about business. One of the rules of this club is that every member must choose another member as his mentor. I chose Mike. He serves as a sounding board and a counselor, not about how I run my business but how I run my life.

Talking to someone about life issues, as opposed to business issues, was a little embarrassing for me at first. Mainly due to Mike’s gentle prodding, I’ve grown accustomed to it. It’s not like chatting with a buddy. It is learning the art of applying the same discipline and decision-making skills that I use in business to how I live in the world, achieve my goals, and make myself the best I can be.

At Mike’s insistence, I decided to get in better physical shape, and that’s how I got to know David Whitefield, another member of my club. David is a personal trainer, and I see him for an hour three times a week. That’s more time than I spend with most of the people who run our company. Between my grunts and groans, David tries to advise me on how to live in a mechanical world. I know nothing about cars, cell phones, sprinkler systems, or dishwashers. David is the kind of guy who just built a fence for his backyard. I could never build a fence. I need a guy like David in my life. (Not to mention that I’ve lost 20 pounds.)

I told Mike I wanted to learn to meditate. All the great spiritual movements agree on the need for centering prayer and deep silence. I am not a deep-silence kind of guy. (Some would say I’m more of a whirling dervish.) Yoga teacher Jeff Farrell has such an aura of deep stillness that it quieted me down, and he has somehow managed to teach me how to settle into the stillness myself. I see Jeff twice a week, and every time I leave smiling.

Both in my personal and in my business life, I need a reality check. Mike Boone filed the original incorporation papers for D Magazine in 1973. Today Mike and I rarely talk about legal issues; his partners Don Templin and Tom Harris handle those with such aplomb that he’s not needed. Instead Mike helps on a more personal level. One of the busiest people in the city, he still will take the time to answer my questions or to backstop my ideas. The response may be nothing more than yes or no or “that’s the stupidest thing I ever heard,” but because we’ve known each other so long, terseness is a form of telepathy. A conversation with Mike, no matter how short, is always an antenna adjuster.

I once thought I could do everything myself. I can’t. I once thought I could think through things on my own. I’m not that smart. I once thought I didn’t need help. I do. If you’re running your own business, I can tell you from experience: You do, too.

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