Why Founders Run Yellow Lights: Sean Finter on Rewriting Old Code

3 days ago

6 min read

Sean Finter's napkin opens with a line every driven founder should hear. You're not broken, you're running old code. Sean grew one bar in Sydney into eight bars and restaurants, then took a consulting firm from his kitchen table to 28 offices in eight countries. The code that built all of it was simple. Work harder, take the risk, get the proof, go again. It worked right up until it didn't. A doctor warned him at 295 pounds. Later came eight days in a hospital he calls the best and worst of his life. His point is that the old code was never wrong. It was useful for its time. The problem is running it in a new environment. For an established owner, the word on the business plan has to change from more to what for. Awareness creates the choice, and choice rewrites the code.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3ODGQ_kEy_M

Inspired by Paper Napkin Wisdom Episode 383 with Sean Finter.

Why the code that built your business stops working

Sean came up on slogans. Just do it, no one cares, try harder. At twelve he was working in a truck stop, and his teachers had told him he was destined to wash dishes. His boss there had arrived from Greece with five hundred dollars and no English. He told Sean the teachers were wrong and showed him a formula. Dream out loud, set goals, find mentors, do the work, get the proof, and go around again.

Sean compares it to giving a young person a weapon and not teaching them how to clean it or upgrade it. Nobody mentioned that the code had to change every time his beliefs, circumstances or goals changed.

So he became, in his words, a yellow light guy. Take him on and he would get you safely to the other side. He would take a lot of risk, outwork everybody and get extraordinary results on a minuscule budget. The proof came in. Money he never thought he'd make, travel all around the world.

Meanwhile his life kept changing every three to five years. He went from no kids to four, from two employees to four hundred, from one office to twenty-eight. Each shift asked the same thing. Am I running the right code for this now? He kept the old one. "My problem was I kept running the old code in a new environment." It still moved certain KPIs. It did not make his life better, or the lives of the people around him.

What a yellow light costs a founder before the red one hits

Sean draws a line between yellow lights and red lights. A red light is one you are lucky to survive. His yellow lights were losing meaningful friendships, being an absentee father while living in the same house, and heart palpitations after too many Red Bulls.

The first red light came on a treadmill in Sydney, during a test for key man insurance. He was 32 or 33 and weighed 295 pounds. He had put on 100 pounds mostly by drinking it. Coffee with lots of cream in the morning, Coca-Cola and Red Bull in the afternoon, beer and wine at night. The doctor asked how old his eldest was. She was three. The way he was going, the doctor said, he would not be at her wedding.

He sold the restaurant group and moved back to North America. The only thing that changed was the geography. Same software, new place, and the next red light was the hospital. Being asked to hand over his belt and shoelaces. "I had run a red light and I was out of control."

I notice how easily a high-risk identity forms around a run of wins. The part nobody says out loud is that the family, the team and the business ride along on every gamble. Sean's own self-talk was that this was all he had, and that everyone knew what they were getting into. His standard now is different. He believes "an adult, leader of a company, leader of a family, should be able to respond to yellow lights and not have to hit the reds."

How to find the trigger underneath the pattern

Sean breaks the old code into a loop. A trigger sets off a story. The story drives a reaction. The reaction produces proof, and the proof keeps the belief alive.

His trigger was simple. You're not enough. He is adopted. Being dyslexic, he was put in a special education classroom. He was bullied, and eighth grade was the last grade he finished. So when a public company passed on him, he went after the number one company in the space and landed the largest contract of its type in his industry. It was meant to answer the story that he was enough. It didn't.

That is why the loop is so hard to see. The proof looks exactly like entrepreneurial success. Sean likes the acronym for fear, false evidence appearing real. His false evidence was that running yellow lights is what made him successful. Years later a therapist told him, "You're going back to rescue your twelve year old self."

Recognition comes first. During his eight days in hospital, Sean filled spiral ring binders with everything that poured out of his head. Writing gets the loop out where you can look at it. He also took it to his forum group as an exercise, looking at each member's current code and what triggers it. Five friends at a coffee shop can do the same. Therapy is another route. Because "you can't change something that you can't fully recognize."

What is the business actually for?

Sean's old business plan, if he had written one, would have said one word. More. Nobody ever asked him what for. How would it affect his kids? How would his health hold up on 85 flights a year?

His new trigger points somewhere else. A rich life of experiences, friendships, travel, and more time with his parents and children than most people get. Being dyslexic and very visual, he keeps a vision board and looks at four quadrants of his life every day. Professional, family, community, and himself. The family quadrant alone has a thirty-six month plan. For years the business box was the only one, and it dragged everybody along with it.

With clients he starts by preparing the business for sale, even when they say they never want to sell. An offer can come in. Someone can get sick. Then he asks about their kids. One client had a fifteen-year-old, which means three summers left. Sean asked what six weeks off each of those summers would look like. Over the last four or five years of setting goals this way, nobody has gone backwards. Some grew and some didn't, and no one is unhappy. "Let's run a kick ass business in parallel with a kick ass life, but you have to design both."

I think most owners want three kinds of freedom. Freedom in the business to do the work you like. Freedom from it, for those six weeks away. And freedom because of it. Sean grants that a one-person business is a different case. If you have employees and still can't step away, he wonders if what you have is a really nice job with a ton of overhead and risk attached.

Travel shows the shift too. Sean has been to sixty-three countries, but by his own count he has really been to about twenty-five. The rest were airports, hotels and meetings.

How to apply this in your business this week

Pick one of these and do it before Friday.

Write down your yellow lights. Friendships fading, missing at home while being home, the body sending signals.
Trace one loop on paper. What was the trigger, what story followed, how did you react, and what proof did you collect?
Ask what for about the biggest goal on your plan. Who does it benefit?
Draw the four quadrants and give each one a plan, not only the business.
Test your absence. Could the business run for six weeks if you held an hour-long call twice a week?
Take your plan home. Show your family what it means if times get tough. Does someone disappear for seventy hours a week, or go on the road for fourteen weeks a year?

Sean made a lot of decisions on behalf of a lot of people and never talked to them about the plan. The other piece he names is self-forgiveness. That is where he says the real weight got shed. The old code got you here. It deserves respect. It does not need to keep driving.