Paul Swaney sits down with Ryan Heckman, who shares how he found his way and built success in the world of private equity. He talks about the valuable lessons about leadership and culture that he has gathered along the way, which contributed a lot to him becoming Co-Founder, Managing Partner, and CEO of Rallyday Partners. Paul explains why their firm embraced innovative yet quite controversial practices, from eliminating management fees to focusing on business architecture rather than governance. He also explores why he prioritizes purpose-driven leadership and cultural development more than anything else in his career.
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Finding Success In Private Equity With Ryan Heckman
Paul’s Grandfather And Military Service
Welcome to Lever Up, the private equity entrepreneurship podcast. I’m sitting down with Ryan Heckman, founder of Rallyday Partners. I’m looking forward to telling his story. It’s super good to have you on the show. First, why don’t you walk us through a little bit about your background and then tell us your story about what came to found Rallyday?
First of all, thank you for having me. Can I ask you a question first? I was doing my homework. I can’t believe you’re the third Paul Swaney. I can’t believe all three of you guys served in the Navy. I think your grandfather was in World War Two. Your father was in Vietnam, and then you were in ‘97 to 2002 or something like that on a nuclear sub. One, thank you for your service, which you probably hear all too often. The second one though is when you’re the third of a name, is there more sense of responsibility like keeping the the baton going in the race and taking from one and going the other? How has that informed the way you look at your destiny, for lack of a better word?
My grandfather was born in ‘15. He’d be about 20 and 35. I don’t know the backstory of him in World War Two. If you’ve elucidated something, that would be interesting. My father was born in ‘50, which would have made him 20 and 70. I don’t think he was in Vietnam. I know he was in the Army but in Korea. We’ve honestly never had that discussion. I know for sure my father was in the Army. I do not know for sure my grandfather, but now I’m going to dig into the genealogy. I did the 23 and Me thing after I moved to New York.
On the other side, my mother’s father was in Vietnam in the Special Forces, but he was very senior. I want to say he was born in the late ‘20s. My mom’s mom was born in ‘28 or ‘29. She was actually from Germany during World War Two, and then they met after the war ended and he happened to be in Germany Frankfurt. I could be wrong. The military part of the past has come up to catch us. When I was in high school, it was a logical option. I remember I got accepted to go to NC State and I did moderately well in high school, not exceptionally well. I remember going, “$4,000 a year seems like a lot for college. Why don’t I go get the GI Bill,” which now is mind-blowing that much money.
Did you have a five-year obligatory service?
I did six that I signed up for. You do a couple of extra years for nuclear training, but plenty of time. I joined in ‘98 and got out in ‘05.
How in the world did you go from the virtue of serving our country and military service to being a private equity guy? How does that work?
I tell everybody my career is much more like a jungle gym than a ladder. I got out and did a bunch of different ops jobs. I worked for ConocoPhillips at a refinery outside of Newark Airport and left there. I worked at Amazon for a bit. I ran a chemicals business factory, and I wrote this book on how to put Op-ex in a chemical plant where it normally goes into assembly job shop-type manufacturing.
After that, McKinsey & Company started this group up of ex-operators and a set of MBAs. Somehow they got access to my book and my resume. I somehow snuck through the back door there and did three and a half years there. I did originally kind of bigger companies. I figured I liked private equity better. I head on a way to work as an operating part of that. That’s where I met your friend, Patrick, and we bumped into each other at the private equity firm, then I left in 2022 after my deal partner left and hung up my own shingle versus going on another private equity firm.
Career Journey
Good for you. I’ve never heard of jungle gym versus ladder. With your permission, I’ll give you attribution, but that’s a great way to describe one’s past, especially when they don’t necessarily make a lot of sense, I suppose. In my case, I grew up in a small town, 1,200 people is my recollection. It is still probably 1,200 people. It’s in the western part of Colorado. It was kind of a bedroom community for our ski area, and then the other half were the students, sons, and daughters of ranchers or miners. We had a big mine in town, and it was always shut down, by the way.
Go to kids’ homes, spend the nights, and stuff. You’d see a father who was out of work or furloughed for 40 days sitting on the couch, watching Andy Griffith Show at 2:00 in the afternoon. It was in some ways an oppressive environment to grow up in, but at the same time, it’s super inspiring too because it was in the mountains. I knew that I wanted to get out of there. I was terrible at sports. I wanted to be a good athlete so badly. I was small for my age and tried every sport. I even tried wrestling with the singlet and the headgear thing.
I did it too.
I got my ass kicked because I was like 20 pounds less than the smallest weight class or whatever. I was desperate to be good at sports. I ended up being pretty good at skiing. We had a ski program. It was free on Mondays. By the time I was like 13 or 14, I became the best in our country at ski jumping, which is a weird niche sport. Before that sounded cool, we were the worst country in the world. It wasn’t like that was necessarily a great outcome.
I bring it up because I ended up going to two Olympic games when I was 16 and 18. That did a few things for me. One it got me out of this little town and introduced me to the world. It taught me a lot about grit and all these words that we use to describe very determined people. I also set my sights higher about myself and about what I thought was possible with my life. I wanted to be in private equity, believe it or not, while I was a competitive skier.
I didn’t go to high school because our sport was in the winter. We would go to Sweden in early November and we would come home in April. That perfectly matched the school year. Though I had a lot of travel time, so I would read a lot. This was pre-internet. I’d bring stacks of books. For whatever reason, I enjoyed self-help books, business books, and biographies. The first biography I read was on Sam Walton, a great book.
I became interested in building businesses. I know that sounds weird given I was only eighteen. I rode on the airplane with a guy named George Gillett who owned Vail Ski Resort at the time, Packerland Beef Company, and a bunch of television stations. I talked to him from Dulles to Zurich. He said, “If you get a college degree, give me a call.” Notice he didn’t say when because it wouldn’t have been exactly obvious given how rough around the edges I was.
I went to the University of Colorado. I tried to go to Stanford and they sent me a cease and desist letter because I didn’t have a GPA, SAT, or ACT. I thought I could get into CU. I got denied there as well. My librarian got me in. I had to start over. That went from being a world-class athlete to being a no-one person, no name at a very large university. I was woefully behind the other students in the class. Real whiplash, I would say, from my self-esteem standpoint, but I worked my ass off and graduated.
When I graduated, I gave a call to George Gillette. I said, “Do you remember, we rode on the airplane together.” He said, “What was your name again?” He asked me to meet him at Mile High Stadium to watch the Broncos versus the Raiders. It was Monday night football. My interview was from his car. He had driven to the game. We got done with the interview. It’s probably 10 or 15 minutes. He said, “How much do you want to make?”
My mom and my dad both work for the government. My mom was a school teacher. I remember them talking about my dad having a raise. It was $40,000 or something like that. George looked me in the eye and he went, “How much do you want to make?” I said $40,000. He said, “How is $37,500?” I said, “Done.” I thought to myself, “How in the world am I going to spend that much money?” The more important thing was I got into private equity at the age of 22. I’ve been doing this now for 28 years and I freaking loved it.
I learned from a guy who did not call himself a private equity guy. It was more of a family office I guess you could say. He detested what he called professional investors. He would say, “Ryan, we’re business builders. We’re not investors and a lot of other F-bomb-laced things that he would bark at me day in and day out. As it turns out, I learned from a great human being. It gave me a foundation to explore our industry almost as a rebel, I guess you could say.
I went from that firm, which was called Booth Creek to another private equity firm in Denver. I was living in Atlanta at the time. I wanted to get back to Denver. I worked for a group called KRG, then another firm called Excellere Partners, which I co-founded with two of my dear friends from KRG who are both now deceased.
I was turning 40 and had a midlife crisis. I was at an ACG Conference in Orlando, Florida with 3,000 White dudes and blue blazers, loafers, and a lanyard. I was wondering, “Is this what I want my kids to remember about their father? Is this my meaning and calling in life? Maybe some other things that a lot of us face or confront when we’re at these seminal birthdays.
I quit private equity after getting to exactly where I wanted to go. It was a troubling time. I talked to the CEOs who I worked with who had become my friends. They said, “You should go buy a business and run that. You’re good with people. You love leadership development. You seem like you’re too good of a guy to be a deal guy anyway.”
That’s such a scathing indictment. People say that all the time in front of deal guys. I mean it is about everybody but they very flipping like, “Deal guys suck, but not you.”
I say it about ourselves. I’ll say that in addition to my gratitude for your military service. It’s nice to meet a kindred spirit who’s not a typical deal guy, but I get it. The problem was no one was going to hire me to run their company. I didn’t have a ton of money to go buy a big business. I think I took $2.5 million. I bought a business with around $700,000. It was a multi-site healthcare business. I went to work and learned on the job. I took that business to under $14 million of EBITDA in about five years. I ran out of money.
You spent $2 million on a business and you took it to $14 million of EBITDA?
I did.
That was bananas.
I put an extra million in. I remember a couple of times we had a hard time meeting payroll. I had to put money in. I didn’t even want to look at that money because I was so embarrassed. Let’s say all in, I probably had at most $3.2 million. We had 11 employees when I started, and we had 450 when I was done. We did like twelve of those on acquisitions. I built a team. I did all the cool stuff. It sounds so cool now, but it didn’t feel cool at the time. I didn’t sleep at night. I had a keg in my office and it started getting replaced more frequently. It was hard to be an owner and an operator. I didn’t raise outside money because honestly, I was scared of losing it.
To be clear, you threw a million of your own money back in again.
Yeah. I say it was a million. There was one moment. It was December 23rd, a couple of days before Christmas. My CFO Cathy called me and she kept blowing up my phone, then she sent me a text and said, “We needed to talk.” I was like, “That’s never good to get that from her.”
I have this rule with my fiance. I’m like, “Don’t text me, call me. Call me when you get a second. If it’s like fire, flutter, or blood, keep calling me and I will answer the phone. I’ll go drop out of any meeting.” That ambiguous “Call me,” there’s nothing on Earth more anxiety-inducing than that.
It was way worse than my anxiety had even conjured up. We were short by $415,000. It’s December 23rd. We had to get the money to the payroll company in enough time to get it to the employees. They had not gotten paid on Christmas Eve. It’s the opposite of It’s a Wonderful Life moment for me. There were some of those hair-raising moments.
The thing that was probably the best about that experience aside from learning a lot about how to lead people and build stuff as opposed to being a backseat driver investor was how important culture was. I had not ever led people to any great degree, so I hired a fellow named Brian Kight to come help me with that. I paid him my salary for the entire five years.
Side story, when I sold the business ultimately to a private equity firm called the Cortec Group in New York, that same CFO who called me about the payroll issue wrote a letter to my kids, telling him that I had not gotten paid at that time for four and a half years except for the money for health insurance. It was $16,000 or $17,000 a year for payroll. I gave my salary to this fellow named Brian Kight to help me learn to lead people better.
She gave that letter to me, then she also attached the pay stub from the most recent year with my $20,000 salary. It’s something that was way more important to me than the money. Even though the money was great, I also had this cool business with an incredibly good culture. I could leave and know that it was still going to perform at a very high level.
It was a great experience. I got done with my entrepreneurial journey and I was going to do that again and again because it was lucrative and I found it more fulfilling than my old life. I ran into two partners named Mark Hopkins and Nancy Phillips. Over too many beers, we decided that we were going to build a new kind of private equity firm and fix all the problems that we thought were systemic. We made a list of about a dozen things that we hated about private equity and then lumped them into themes. Our simple business model was to fix those things.
For example, we got rid of our management fees. We don’t get paid at 2 and 20. We submit a budget to our investors. That includes my salary and bonus. They either approved it or not, and were aligned in terms of making sure that we’re making the best decisions for long-term value creation as opposed to assets under management.
Creating A Limited Partner Base
I have to unpack this. Just to be clear, when this goes on the waves, there are going to be some people and firms that will get annoyed at this. What was your logic for getting there and what was the reaction to the limited partner base when you said, “I’m going to give you a budget. You’re going to help support exactly the budget.” That sounds logical but it is not industry practice.
It’s probably not as lucrative for us in some ways, but to your point on getting grief, I have a lot of friends in the industry. My old business partner, David who’s now deceased, came to my office and he was like, “What the f are you doing? Don’t start this,” this could be a slippery slope kind of comment. He jabbed me and invested his own money in the fund. Take that for what it’s worth. I get it. The investors love it. What it requires us to do is make the case for how we’re spending their money.
At the end of the day, the 2% management fee isn’t a fee, as you probably know. It is a loan. It’s not our money. It’s our investors’ money. We have to pay that back before we get the 20. Do I have to go ask our investors to borrow money every year to pay for expenses? It seems very obvious to me and the way it should have been done from the beginning. I guess Mark, Nancy, and I would rather do it this way and lose than do it any other way and win if that makes sense. We think this is the right way to do it.
It makes total logical sense. It’s what any operating company would do. By convention, Wall Street has told us that if you want to be smart money, you’re going to pay over 100 reps.
Other Controversial Innovations
At any rate, we had several other innovations that would also seem just as obvious and in some ways just as controversial. For example, everyone at the top of our firm, all of us managing partners, there are four of us, all started a real business, built that business to scale, sold it to private equity, and reported to private equity firms as business founders and CEOs.
That changes the way that we approach the work that we do with our founders that we’re partnering with as a private equity sponsor. It’s more of a peer-to-peer relationship and the experience that our CEOs get out of this chapter of their lives is important to us because we were them. We try to be the kind of private equity sponsor that we wish we had.
We were building our companies, but the market wasn’t there. We take that seriously. It also instructed the way we approach post-closing. We don’t use the word governance, for example. It’s kind of a BS word. It sort of means this entrepreneur or this executive team needs a hall monitor or a parent in the room. We like the word architecture much better. It’s us being an architect riding shotgun with our founders to help them design and build the business of their dreams as we say.
The experience that we hope they get out of it is that they don’t just look back fondly on the relationship that we built together, but maybe they grew as a human, as a person in their work and at home. Maybe even spiritually. They grew as much as the business grew. We hope that the executive team and the employees similarly grow personally as much as the business. It’s a lot of soulful nuances to our business at Rallyday that feel good at this time of my life.
Leadership Over Management
I did some digging. I have heard that you don’t like the word management. Is that true?
I think that thing is a chicken sh*t word.
What that implies is there are management processes that are “corporate.” We can use that as a pejorative. You don’t like the word management. I’d love for you to walk me through your logic there.
A couple of dimensions. First of all, management seeks to reduce volatility, nothing better to a manager than the same. It lacks any implied responsibility to stretch that rubber band and do some bold audacious things with the business that may create volatility. I just don’t like the word. I also don’t think that human beings necessarily show up to work hoping to be managed.
Management seeks to reduce volatility. There is nothing better to a manager than the same. Share on XIf your standard of behavior when you’re on top is to manage your people like you would manage assets, it’s pejorative to employees. Employees would rather be led than managed. I prefer the word leadership because it gets to the heart of the fact that we’re trying to build and create stuff that needs to be led, and management is never going to cut it. I don’t like it from that standpoint.
Another pet peeve is a lot of people in the private equity industry have this expression, “I manage these assets.” We don’t manage assets at Rallyday. We lead people. If you’re going to lead people, it’s more about leading their hearts than their minds. Before we even talk about strategy, we work with this woman named Haley Rushing who rode a shotgun with Herb Kelleher at Southwest Airlines. She does a full 45-day interview with key stakeholders of all of our companies as step one to find out what is the real meaning of the business, what is its inside-out sense of purpose, why employees come to work, and why are they proud of the work they’re doing.
Only after we do the purpose, do we then go into strategy. Once we do the strategy, then we talk about what are the cultural gaps that we need to fill. If we plan to go 3 to 5 times our size in 3 to 5 years, how do we make sure that the culture gets better by 3 to 5 times its dimension during that same time period? That’s hard to do, but if you don’t do that work or strategy, it’s like out-kicking your coverage in football. Your strategy gets ahead of your culture and all of a sudden, you own that business that has been followed out by its lack of of meaning and goodness.
We spent a lot of time on culture. Once we do that, then it’s a matter of putting in leadership development programs for all the employees, from the CEO all the way down, to make sure that the people in the company are growing their own capacity and ability while we’re making the business putting the business on steroids. That’s a very long answer. I apologize for this, but that’s our basic formula for post-closing architecture as compared to post-closing governance.
Expectations On A CEO
Given that, what does the day in the life of a CEO of Rallyday look like that’s different than a general manager? What’s your expectation for how they operate the business that’s different? It does feel a little bit different.
I don’t know if we expect things differently from our CEOs than any private equity firm does. A multistakeholder’s lens on the balance may be more important to us than shareholder value. In board meetings, we like to talk about how our business is supporting the lives of our employees, for example. I don’t know if they would necessarily say we have different expectations. We have different expectations of ourselves as it relates to the way we show up for our CEOs. It’s funny, I was texting with the CEO of our dental business. I’ll read it to you. It’s pretty authentic. We had a board meeting on Monday. We use a tool called Zeck. Have you heard of this?
We have different expectations of ourselves as it relates to the way we show up for our CEOs. Share on XI haven’t heard of it. Send me the link.
Zeck is a new platform built by the tandem of a guy named Robert Wolfe and Edward Norton, the actor.
Really?
I swear to God. I’m interviewing him on our podcast next week.
Are you kidding me?
No.
I am a super Ed Norton fan.
What they’re trying to solve is this problem of how shitty board meetings are.
They are so bad. They are so brutal.
If you go to Zeck‘s website, Robert and Edward have a zany way to describe how terrible private equity board meetings are, or maybe board meetings in general,l and how their technology tool reduces the time required to produce the materials and how much more interactive it makes the experience and how you can get the quantitative stuff out of the way through this platform that they’ve built so that during the board meeting, you’re talking about the important stuff. They lace it all with these funny anecdotes about how, for management teams, board meeting feels like a midterm exam. You picture them in their PJs at 4:00 in the morning, putting together that last little info.
“I want you to prepare for this.” I’ve watched this happen. They’re like, “Can you fly out to help me?” Also, as an aside, it’s surprisingly on-brand for Edward Norton to dive into something like this.
He has a cute way of sharing how when he talks to his buddies and family about his new project, they’re like, “That sounds so boring, Edward.” I was texting with the CEO of our dental business this morning. It’s 11:45 Central Time. I suggested that he use Zaeck for follow-up from him. You get done with the board meeting and share what you heard at the board meeting and then what he was going to do about it.
He said, “That sounds cool, good idea,” then I gave him my notes that I had taken during the board meeting. He’s saying, “I’m getting ready to send this thing out,” then I wrote, “Are you good? I’ve been thinking about you a ton in the last few days. I’m excited for you and I’m hoping that you feel energized despite all the voices in your head right now.”
I then said, “It’s TOUGH,” in all caps, kind of a Donald Trump tough, “to be a private equity CEO, isn’t it?” He writes back and says, “I’m good and I’ve already been digging in data around this and I’m excited. Work never stops but that’s why I love the work.” He said to have a good weekend and I said, “Awesome, Tim. Thanks for your partnership.”
It’s different. I have had Tim’s job. I ran a multi-site healthcare business, roughly the same size as his. I know what a pain in the ass I am to him as a private equity guy. I want to be better for him and he knows that. I have mastered my intent to be better. I don’t think I’ve mastered being better but I’ve mastered the intent.
I want Tim to win. I want the employees to win. I want the industry to win because of the work that we do. When he tells the story, I want him to be able to say, “That was the best chapter of my life.” I want someone to say, “Do you mean in your professional life?” I want them to say, “No, it was the best five years of my life that I got to spend with Rallyday.” It’s a muse. It’s a wonderful muse that I think a lot about.
Onboarding Process
You have this quiet calm to you that I don’t quite possess. I think about that as you’re background. You run a business brand multi-site. As you’re going to talk to new founders or new opportunities, how is that conveyed to them? As an aside, I met a lot of vanilla private equity bros trying to ingratiate themselves with people and businesses. Is that part of your approach? When you’re meeting someone new, what does the onboarding look like? I’m probably asking an amorphous question, but I’d love for you to talk about that.
A couple of things. Entrepreneurs have great bulsh*t meters. Through hard knocks, they know who’s real and they know who’s not real. I do like to participate in auctions. We don’t win very often. I do like to participate in them.
That’s surprising.
It’s partially because I love for entrepreneurs to see the difference. If it’s just a meet and greet and there’s no A/B test, I don’t think there’s as easy an opportunity to differentiate. What I would say is we care deeply about the work they’re doing. We can talk to them as peers. It’s not talking at them. We talked together. I’m in Chicago tonight to have dinner with the founder of a business. She and I are going to dinner on a Friday night in Chicago. She’s flying in from Rochester.
I flew in from Denver. We’re going to talk about how she got to her place in the world and what she wants to do with the business. We’re going to have a great time. I suggested we go for a walk in the morning. Why not? It is different, and it’s different because it’s real. The story of us is that we’ve done this work as a CEO and a founder before. We feel a calling, summon maybe even a better word, to change private equity and make it better for founders like us.
Investing On Personal Purpose
Given all this super good context, what’s your advice to someone who’s 19, 20, 21, 22, and graduating college, probably going to get into an investment banking analyst internship or a full-time role, to make it good and not make it transactional? How to get there and make it good, not make it just transactional.
In our culture at Rallyday, we have four beliefs and one of them is personal purpose. We think that to work at our best, we need to invest in our personal purpose. We have three behaviors that we require from the people who work at Rallyday. The first one is to invest in yourself first, your heart, your mind, and your soul.
I bring this up because we say that the most important investment that a professional at Rallyday is going to make is in themselves. That protects a young person from getting ruined by our industry. Make sure that you spend Thanksgiving with your mom and dad. Listen to those podcasts even though you’re supposed to be working. Do things that feed your soul like getting outdoors, being in the mountains, or being in nature. Whatever that means, do a lot of that.
The reality is that our industry is like a meat grinder, and it sucks. Especially when you’re a young person, you’re very likely going to have a crummy boss. There’s likely going to be a lot of politics that are confusing and disorienting in the organization, whether it be an investment bank or a private equity firm. You’re going to be in a shark tank with peers that sometimes act like your friends and other times will stab you in the back. You’re going to be evaluated based on what you did the week before, reviews, and your bonus.
The recency bias is nauseating. I’ve seen so much of that when I was with McKinsey. It is nauseating.
It’s horrible and yet it is the best career opportunity that you could get anywhere in the world. It’s like how we complain about our country and yet it’s the greatest country the world has ever known and will probably ever know. The finance industry is tough. I say all that to say that there’s a severe responsibility for young people to continue to invest in their heart, mind, and soul during those tough years when if you don’t do those things and if you don’t fight for yourself, you’re going to get sucked into the machine and end up someone’s new terrible boss in the future as yours was to yourself. The responsibility is on young people to not be a victim.
If you do not fight for yourself, you will get sucked into the machine and end up someone’s new terrible boss in the future as you were to yourself. Share on XI very easy to be a victim these days because of our reward structure. A question I get a lot is when do you tap out from a current firm or current role versus when do you stay and stick it out? The problem I’ve seen people say is they want to go across the street for $10,000 when they have a good boss, and then that’s a very easy answer for me to say, “When do you make the decision that it’s time to jump and it’s time to stay the course?”
Some of this is my opinion. Please take it with a little bit of a grain of salt. I like to see chunky resumes. I don’t like to see people hopping around. Once you start at an organization, come hell or high water, it’s very smart to stick around there for at least 4 or 5 years. During that time, even if it sucks, you can continue to invest in yourself so that you stay pure of your own sense of self.
I also think there’s something to reverse role models. We all want that mentor coachy boss and never get them. My first job at KRG was my first Institutional job after my job with George Gillett. It was like a sitcom of crazy. It was like family drama going on among the founders. Some founders are not showing up to work for weeks on end because they are mad at the other founders. Investment committee meetings that were full of f-bombs.
The firm did well. They ended up with 5 or 6 months over their life. It was like a crazy ass place and I was the lowest-paid guy there at the time. I got advice from someone who said, “Study weakness. Study all this dysfunction, understand it, and sit in it because it will help you understand if nothing else what not to be when you’re older.” That can be a very powerful influence even though it’s maybe less comfortable than that positive role model that we all want but rarely get.
Advice To Younger Self
I honestly think we could go like Joe Rogan style here, like three hours. We’re going to have to do this again. The last two questions. Number one, what’s the biggest piece of advice that you wish someone in the future would have given your younger self to help shape your career?
It’s so funny you bring this up. I’m going to be on a podcast in a month. The name of the podcast is What’s the worst advice you’ve ever been given?
That’s the podcast name?
Yeah.
There’s a podcast for everything.
I thought it was so interesting. Here’s the advice I wish I would have gotten. I was in this elite athletic world where winning was everything. I then went into private equity where it was about winning. I promise you this is not because I’m this older wiser version of myself. I wish I would have learned this when I was in my early twenties. That is measuring your day by how many people you helped is what it’s all about. If you think about the first time you got an iPhone, you unwrapped it and you’re like, “I cannot believe this thing was only $400.” That is value.
As an employee and as a teammate of an organization, the more you’re able to serve other people around you both up and maybe down and certainly sideways, help them do better work, help the company help others. That’s when you’re going to get paid more money because that’s who you want on your team. I also think it’s a good way to go to bed at night.
Serve other people around you and help them do better work. Share on XTake a stock of, “Who did I help? Was I helpful to people today?” It’s a way to get promoted quickly. It’s a way to live a more fulfilling life. It’s not as tethered to the paycheck. It leads to more growth personally because you’re being brought in to help maybe with some complex problems. That’s why someone needs help.
It leads to more authentic relationships at work because people start to trust you. They start to confide in you. They consider you part of their ecosystem. It’s real. I probably spent 25 to 30 years of my life trying to win. Everyone told me, “Give back later.” I now have reversed that and it’s like serve now, don’t give back later. I wish I would have figured that out earlier in my life.
Book Recommendation
Last question. What is the book that has been the most impactful in your life? I ask everybody this. You can say anything you want. There’s nothing off-limits.
I read a lot. My seventh-grade Civics teacher’s name was Jan Kurtz. At the end of my seventh-grade school year, I had been serving on the student council. She gave me a book called The Greatest Salesman in the World by Og Mandino. It has a very uniquely red cover. I still have the book that she gave me from the seventh grade. I have a treasure box of things that I’ve kept over the years. I probably read it every couple of years.
I would say that was the most powerful book because it also hit me at a time when I didn’t have great self-esteem and I was living in this small town. I knew I wanted to do something bigger in my life, but I didn’t have the language for it. This book taught me that life can be full of moral purpose and a higher calling and that it can be ambitious. That book set me on a course that I’m proud of.
Episode Wrap-up
Ryan, it was great to have you on today. We have to do this again. I’m going to come out to Colorado. I saw Patrick back in May or June. I’m inspired by what you guys are building. I’m looking forward to keeping in touch. It’s super good to have you here today.
It’s so cool to meet a deal guy that viewed his life as a jungle gym. I love this, Paul. I was looking forward to it. I want to encourage you to keep doing this work. Demystifying this whole private equity thing is of great service to people. I want to make sure I’m somebody up in the stands cheering you on. Thank you for all that you do.
I’m glad you came. I’m looking forward to doing it again.
Important Links
About Ryan Heckman
Ryan has been an investor, CEO and entrepreneur for nearly 25 years with a calling to build great organizations that elevate industries and the lives they touch.
Ryan was previously the founder and CEO of EVP Eyecare, a regional provider of surgical eye care with operations in Arizona, Colorado and Texas. Prior to forming and successfully selling EVP Eyecare, Ryan co-founded Excellere Partners, a private equity fund focused primarily in the healthcare industry with approximately $2.3 billion of capital under management.
As an entrepreneur who eventually recapitalized his business and reported to a private equity board of directors, serving as CEO, coupled with a long career as a private equity executive, Ryan feels a calling to elevate the private equity industry in service to other founders and their employees.
With this deep sense of purpose, today Ryan is a Co-Founder, Managing Partner and CEO of Rallyday Partners, with a vision to establish the firm as a destination for the best entrepreneurs who seek a more powerful and fulfilling source of capital and partnership as they scale their organizations.
Ryan is a two-time Olympian (skiing), the Chairman of CiviCO, a Denver-based leadership development organization serving the private, government and non-profit sectors and proud father of two children; Chase and Reese.