Gareth Hermann: The New Paradigm of Self-Managing Teams and Communal Living in Costa Rica
Please welcome my adventurous and curious friend, Gareth Hermann. Gareth is an entrepreneur, an “ops nut” like I am, an expat, a fellow lover of travel and “steel ponies,” and an aspiring overseas real estate mogul.
Most recently, he built and sold a seven-figure digital marketing agency pioneering impact marketing. Nowadays, he splits his time between Nosara, Costa Rica, and Boulder, Colorado.
Today we’ll be learning what it takes to build a geodome village in Costa Rica and jamming on his new simplified version of EOS that is easy to implement and actually creates results.
Gareth Hermann Quotes From the Episode
“I believe that we have over-indexed on the paradigm of individualism, and we’re actually craving and needing more connection and more community.”
– Gareth Hermann on the growing need for connection and community.
“Transcend and include, which means don’t reject the previous stage of consciousness, take the benefits of it, include it, and then continue to evolve on top of that.”
– Gareth Hermann on why you shouldn’t completely reject past stages of development.
“Everyone wants to do good work. Everyone wants to be on a team that’s winning. Everyone wants to be making progress towards goals.”
– Gareth Hermann on motivation, teamwork, and the human desire for progress in both business and personal development.
Additional Resources
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Full Transcript of Our Conversation
Meet Gareth Hermann and His Journey in Business
00:00.88 – Brian David Crane
Please welcome my adventurous and curious friend, Gareth Herman. Gareth is an entrepreneur and ops nut like I am. He’s an expat, also like me, a fellow lover of travel and steel ponies and an aspiring overseas real estate mogul. Most recently built and sold a seven-figure digital marketing agency, pioneering impact marketing, which we’re going to get into as far as what impact marketing is. Nowadays, though, he splits his time between Nosara in Costa Rica and Boulder, Colorado.
Why Gareth is Building a Geodome Village in Costa Rica
00:28.28 – Brian David Crane
Two nice places to be. So today we’re going to be learning what it takes to build a Geodome Village in Costa Rica and jamming on his new simplified version of EOS that is easy to implement and actually creates results. Please welcome Gareth. How you doing, buddy?
00:42.26 – Gareth Hermann
Super excited to connect.
00:44.27 – Brian David Crane
Yeah. All right. Cool. So let’s chat on the Geodome Village first on what you call a new paradigm. Yeah. What’s the background on it?
00:51.14 – Gareth Hermann
Yeah. So I believe that we have over indexed on the paradigm of individualism and it’s, we’re actually craving and needing more connection and more community.
01:06.13 – Gareth Hermann
I mean, you and I met through an entrepreneur community, right? And that’s like one of the best weekends of the year is to do the global gathering. We all get together. We’re masterminding. We’re connecting. We’re doing fun things together. And I feel like that’s really what the world needs right now. And that is what’s going to get us to these challenging times.
01:24.23 – Gareth Hermann
And my framing around this is going from the paradigm of individualism to the paradigm of communalism. And that’s different than like communism or collectivism, because those are experiences we tried socially that didn’t work, frankly.
The Need for Community: Shifting from Individualism to Communalism
01:42.36 – Gareth Hermann
And so that’s not the answer, but I would say that most people can agree that what we’ve got going on right now, especially in the US, isn’t the answer either. It’s clearly not working and it’s not creating the outcomes we all want and clearly have the resources capable of creating.
01:59.23 – Gareth Hermann
And so when I think about communalism, it’s really going back to a more ancient way of living, and I think we’ve gone away some of our core human biology. I would like to bring in some bio-neurology.
02:15.74 – Gareth Hermann
Around this, okay, well, how does dopamine work? How does oxytocin work? How does serotonin work? Well, a lot of those chemicals get released by feeling like you’re a part of a group, that you belong, that you have strong family ties, you have strong friendships, and that’s just baked in. I think you’re traveling around the world right now. You’re in the DR, the Dominican Republic. I bet you there is a strong sense of feeling of community to a lot of these different smaller villages that are probably surrounding you there. And I think that’s something that we’ve gone away from that is actually hurting us biologically. It reduces the amount of serotonin and oxytocin we receive on a daily basis. And I think that’s why we have a lot of depression and anxiety and all these other things. I think a lot of that stems from the feeling of isolation and aloneness. And it’s me versus the world until you get a partner. And then it’s me and my partner versus the world. And then you have a family to take care of.
03:08.45 – Gareth Hermann
And that is an intense amount of pressure. You’re battling in the game of capitalism against everyone else in the playing field. And that’s stressful. And most people buckle under that pressure, and it takes only a few to succeed. So I thought to myself, when did I feel the best in my life?
03:27.21 – Gareth Hermann
And a lot of the time, and maybe you can relate to this in your own story, is, OK, it was that high school sports team. Maybe it was the dorms in college. As an adult, it was like maybe a festival experience like Burning Man or another festival over the world, or starting a company and having a team. So, what do all those things have in common? Well, it’s a group of humans. They have a shared mission and purpose that they’re trying to achieve, that they’re working together to achieve.
03:55.45 – Gareth Hermann
And those humans are in close proximity and you have to rely on each other to achieve the goal. So if you’re on a sports team, you have to win. You have to get the ball across the finish line. Or if you’re building a Burning Man camp, you’ve got like four days to build camp in the dust storm. And so you really need each other. And that really creates these deep social bonds and connections that I found really fulfilling and meaningful to me.
04:19.64 – Gareth Hermann
And so I thought to myself, well, why do I have to go back to my life from these amazing experiences? How do I get that sports team feeling back? How do I get back to that sense of belonging or that these are my people? And in my story, I didn’t really have a great experience growing up in the US. I lived in this neighborhood. There was like two other kids. They were pretty far apart. And one of them was kind of a dick and yeah. It was just not fun, living in the neighborhood, especially older people, and it was not a great experience. I compare that to how I grew up, which was when I was born in Germany, and then my dad got hired to build a Waldorf school in Southern Portugal for a bunch of German farmers living down there.
Gareth’s Childhood in a Rural Portuguese Community and Its Impact
05:08.75 – Gareth Hermann
And there, you know, I grew up as a kid. We had our little house, the neighboring farmhouse. I had, Hubert was there. He was like my second dad. So when my dad would go to work, I would then go over to my second dad’s house and we would drive around on the tractor all day. And we had a farm. We had cows. We had sheep. We had chickens. We had a vegetable garden. We had a big lake.
05:30.83 – Gareth Hermann
And we had a couple of Dutch families, a couple English families, mostly German families, and a couple Portuguese families all living in this like farming valley. And we were just running around every day having a blast. So that’s what I came from. And then when I came to the US, it really sucked compared to that.
05:48.79 – Gareth Hermann
So as an adult, I’m trying to get back to some of that feeling of belonging and connection to community, to nature, and that’s the core inspiration for this project.
06:04.50 – Brian David Crane
A couple interesting interesting threads in there. One of them is,
06:11.33 – Brian David Crane
Yeah so I have this idealized version of your childhood, early childhood. You’re on this farm, communal living in Southern Portugal. and I think I’m curious as to what like why did you all leave that and what’s happened to that communal living set up since, you know, over the past 20 or 30 years.
06:36.35 – Gareth Hermann
Yeah, that’s a great question. And I love that you’re asking this question because for me, as you said, I’m an ops nerd, and I really care about implementation and effectiveness. And so it’s weird, I straddle two different worlds, you know, coming from the business world where all that matters is results and outcomes.
06:47.18 – Brian David Crane
Yeah, totally different worlds.
06:55.07 – Gareth Hermann
And then living in community is all about the feeling of connection and belonging and relationships. So those roles have to meet and a lot of communities out there do it terribly. They lack practical real-world experience and operations, and they lack a better term to actually be effective in being a community.
07:16.64 – Gareth Hermann
And so that’s why a lot of these intentional communities around the world get a bad rap because they’re usually founded by some sort of like a spiritually guided, visionary, semi-crazy individual that has attracted a lot of followers, and then they just go live together and it turns into a disaster. So that’s usually what happens.
07:37.46 – Gareth Hermann
And, you know, this, how I grew up was a little bit different because there was no guru. And furthermore, there wasn’t even an established community. It was just an organic evolution of people moving to this Valley and trying to get away from the nuclear fallout of Chernobyl in the 80s. And yeah, just wanting to live a more natural and wholesome life. So there wasn’t like this, we’re doing a community experience growing up. It just sort of happened. And the reason we left, to answer your question, was because you know as we got into the 90s, a lot of the kids started to get older. And this is before the European Union. Back then, Portugal was like a second world country.
08:21.34 – Gareth Hermann
It really had terrible infrastructure. There’s one highway in the entire country. you know Think like cobblestone streets. like sometimes you’d like to take the moped or someone would be driving a donkey through town. It was a different world back then. And so the education system was all road.
08:40.33 – Gareth Hermann
It was all old school, and the education system was pretty bad. So there was a sort of brain drain that happened. As kids got older, families then moved back to Germany, back to Holland. In our case, we moved to the US so that the kids could get access to good education. Not everyone did that, but that slowly would happen over time. And so the lack of education for young adults was really the primary motivation for people to leave that experience.
09:10.21 – Gareth Hermann
And at the same time, you know, the water still school is still running.
09:10.42 – Brian David Crane
Yup.
09:14.26 – Gareth Hermann
And it’s now for Portuguese students as well. And that sort of took off from thriving. The farm is still there. There’s still people living there. There’s a whole new generation of kids now, like my three sisters, who were not really my sisters but Hubert’s daughters.
09:30.40 – Gareth Hermann
You know, they all still love there. They all have kids now. And so when we go back to visit, it’s like a 2.0 version is happening. And it’s really, really special to see.
09:39.86 – Brian David Crane
That’s cool. Yeah, I have, I have a friend of mine who lives not in the valley of Portugal that you grew up in, but lives north of Lisbon, a town called Aracera. similar organic growth to it. People came from different reasons. They’ve come with young kids and they’re going through the same brain drain even in 2024, 2025 because they get to a point where the kids are old enough and there’s not a good school system for them and they wind up leaving and going elsewhere. And so it’s a real pain and they’re all looking around going like we should build our own school. They don’t really want to run a wall door, like another school, let’s say.
10:14.65 – Brian David Crane
Yes I understand it’s still happening even in 2025 so what do you envision with the new new paradigm villa or village as far as what education would look like and it’s like how are you having grown up in a Walter school and then gotten you know a traditional education in the states gone to James Madison in Virginia and you know like how do you marry the two of those.
The Challenges of Building a New Village and Integrating Education
10:39.01 – Gareth Hermann
That’s a really great question. So one thing, I think the first response to that is pick your battles. I’m not choosing to pick that battle right now. And the reason being is because I chose Nisara and Park because it has a Waldorf school already here. It has a you know wild school. It has like several alternative schools for you know kids that are young. And then it has an IB high school here.
11:07.04 – Gareth Hermann
Those are all really great community assets that I want to leverage. And you’ll hear this more in the project: what do we really need to own inside the project? And what are the community assets that we can leverage and be a part of? but We’re a part of an ecosystem here. We don’t have to do everything from scratch. And so that specifically is something that Nisari already offers, and we don’t have to reinvent the wheel.
11:33.48 – Gareth Hermann
That being said, I am very passionate about education, and at some point, I would like to create a new school system that marries both worlds. For example, in Waldorf School, they develop you as almost like a human soul first and foremost.
11:51.66 – Gareth Hermann
And just through the way they teach, there’s no textbooks, you create everything yourself. It’s all about intrinsic motivation. If you’re creating your own textbooks, you’re doing art, you’re learning theater, you’re learning, I mean, you have to do like the Roman sports and participate.
12:10.00 – Brian David Crane
Follow your own curiosity.
12:11.62 – Gareth Hermann
Yeah, exactly. It’s really amazing in many ways and you have to do everything collaboratively and you work on your own and it’s not like sit down and learn this thing. Everything’s like storytelling and I had a really amazing experience at the water school growing up until a certain point. Your brain starts to develop and I didn’t feel like I was challenged enough.
12:33.93 – Gareth Hermann
And for example, you mentioned James Madison University. I got a degree in integrated science and technology, which is a pioneer program that combines all the STEM. It’s pretty much engineering, manufacturing, computer programming, environmental science, energy, telecommunications. It’s interdisciplinary, problem solving, real world problems.
13:00.19 – Gareth Hermann
A lot of Physics, a lot of Math, and super intense. And that was the challenge that I needed. And I think what we’re capable of as humans is to yeah really be challenged intellectually. and But if you take a traditional school route, that’s all they focus on, and you get like a 30-minute recess class, that’s also out of balance. So again, you And I were talking before the podcast, and I am a really big fan of integral theory. And one of the principles in your integral theory is as consciousness evolves, transcend and include, which means don’t reject the previous stage of consciousness, take the benefits of it, include it, and then continue to evolve on top of that. And that’s my philosophy on education is how do we get the best of both worlds and integrate.
13:48.27 – Gareth Hermann
Versus you know a lot of alternate people just want to go back to the past or do this alt thing. And I think that really taking the best of everything and putting it together is what I would personally like for migrants.
What is Integral Theory, and How Does It Apply to Business and Life?
14:03.41 – Brian David Crane
So for those who are not familiar with the integral theory, describe it verbally, what it looks like visually. It’s a spiral or it’s a triangle. like how does it visually represent itself?
14:16.62 – Gareth Hermann
Great, so integral theory was developed by Ken Welber, who is an amazing philosopher and visionary. And he took spiral dynamics. So I would say it probably comes from a spiral, but he sort of maps it more in a progression you know from the bottom you know upwards. And the basic idea is that you know we started off in like red, which is a hunter-gatherer tribal environment.
14:45.42 – Gareth Hermann
Where might makes right and the dominant leader controls the village or the territory through fear, and they’re the strongest man. And then that’s valuable at that stage of consciousness because it allows you to protect the tribe, conquer territory, and you know ah secure resources in competition with other groups.
15:06.56 – Gareth Hermann
The evolution past that is is is more of a, is I think it’s blue is the color, but that evolution allows the caste system, it allows hierarchy, it allows structure in society based on role and rank and title as opposed to just pure brute force and what that unlocks is the society’s ability to to execute longer term projects and to yeah have social stratification and think strategically and execute things over a long period of time like build a pyramid or build a city or build an aqueduct which is not always possible when you’re in sort of in like warring tribe mode.
15:47.82 – Gareth Hermann
So that’s going to lock there and then the downside in that system is that there’s not much innovation or achievement because if you’re born into a cast, you’re going to stay there for the rest of your life. If you’re born into royalty, you will be royalty. And so that’s the downside of that.
16:04.88 – Gareth Hermann
System which then we evolved into meritocracy or orange which is the world of capitalism and that’s where a lot of the world lives today which is about innovation achievement individualism And that unlock really says that it doesn’t matter who you are or where you were born, if you have the best idea, if you add the most value, you will win. And so it really unlocks innovation and creativity for a population that anyone could take their shot. The downside is that it if we over focus on individualism and success and achievement, we can actually
16:47.56 – Gareth Hermann
Do things that are harmful for society that we’re rewarded for inside of the inside of the game, yeah for example.
16:51.65 – Brian David Crane
The environment. Yeah.
16:54.99 – Gareth Hermann
And that’s really the next evolution. Out of that is green, which is collectivism, which is all about the group. It’s about feelings. It’s about caring for all.
17:07.52 – Gareth Hermann
It’s really this worldview that You know takes others into consideration and wants to be inclusive and wants to play team and wants to bring everyone together and for there to be respect and harmony and peace and all these beautiful things the downside and the shadow side is that it it lacks self-awareness and so it’s Dogmatic and judgmental in its approach. So it can really rub people the wrong way because…
17:39.45 – Gareth Hermann
Someone’s being dogmatic about not being dogmatic and can’t listen and can’t actually hear it can’t receive feedback, and is just operating in a massive blind spot and so that lack of self-awareness really holds back green and then they’ll, you know that’s when you get into teal which is the breakthrough at which point you can realize that there’s value in all the different stages of consciousness, and you start to implement them and you go into that transcendent and declued model where you take the best from each and start to put them together and you’re sort of operating in this sort of superhuman state at that point to the last stage, where you are sort of in a state of enlightenment where you are everything and you’re one with everything, and you can access those states of consciousness. So that’s my summary of integral theory.
18:27.20 – Gareth Hermann
And that’s just one part of it, I should say, that’s the spiral. There’s four quadrants and all these other things, but I think as what we’re talking to, both as a starting a new village and what I mentioned, we’ll talk about later on in the podcast around teams and business, though this framework applies to everything.
18:30.02 – Brian David Crane
Yeah.
18:46.96 – Gareth Hermann
And that’s why I’m so passionate about it.
18:50.95 – Brian David Crane
Yeah, how do we can get into it now because I’m imagining that as you have.
18:58.37 – Brian David Crane
Different people on the team, in the community, in the group, who are at different levels you know on spiral dynamic as it as it on the spiral as it goes upward. Somebody who’s in red, somebody who’s in green, somebody who’s in blue, somebody who’s in orange. They’re not locked in those levels, but I think if you’re at blue, let’s say at the top, again, and let’s use a hierarchy. this’s the better way to put it like You’re looking down and going like, okay, cool. You can see where this person is. You can see also as you move up and down between them. Don’t you then, again, perpetuate the..
19:45.26 – Brian David Crane
Like you have to be the leader, basically. You’re going to wind up in the same kind of like yeah dynamic of where you have to, again, lead the group because not everybody is all not is a blue, let’s say.
19:47.82 – Gareth Hermann
Yes.
Leadership and Meeting Teams Where They Are on the Spiral Dynamics Model
19:57.21 – Gareth Hermann
Correct. So this is what I’m really passionate about is leadership because that leadership is being able to meet your team or other stakeholders where they’re at and being able to speak their language to have that, that social awareness, that empathy.
19:58.77 – Brian David Crane
Yeah.
20:13.71 – Gareth Hermann
To understand where they’re at, where they’re operating from, what they’re trying to achieve in their own life or in the conversation or in the meeting or in the business partnership or what have you and meet them there. And again, that’s why I love this model is because you have to be fluid and dynamic. For example, there were times at magic, my last business where I had to step into red, you know, that just to get nerdy on you guys, we had the iOS 14 updates.
20:37.29 – Gareth Hermann
You know, a while back where, until that point, before that point, everyone was crushing it on ads, because we were at a data rich environment and then all of a sudden Apple and Facebook get into a war and suddenly the data quality drops and all of our campaigns start, you know, massively underperforming.
20:53.64 – Brian David Crane
Dumping, yeah.
20:54.08 – Gareth Hermann
And so, yeah. Did you have an experience of that? Did you go through that?
20:58.60 – Brian David Crane
No, yeah, I just know. I knew that was a data apocalypse, right? Like all of a sudden, yeah, everybody had built ad campaigns on the data they were getting from iOS, so that river of data dried up, please.
21:01.90 – Gareth Hermann
Yes.
21:07.14 – Gareth Hermann
Yeah, exactly. And so in that moment, I, you know, I had to step into red mode because the team was freaking out. If I had tried to do more of a green process and have everyone share their feelings and all of that, it would have made the situation worse. But I dropped my red. I was like, all right, guys.
21:26.07 – Gareth Hermann
Here’s what we’re doing. We’re going to create the iOS 14 playbook. We’re going to get it out there. We’re going to figure out what works now in this new thing. And we’re going to be thought leaders. We’re going to be strategic partners to our clients. And here’s the game plan. Let’s go. No time for anything else, really. We’re all going to focus on this playbook.
21:42.79 – Gareth Hermann
And so that was a red move, even though I had a pretty green organization, like one of our core values was being real. And one of the ways that we built such an amazing team culture, even though we were, you know, this has also happened to our code. We were an entirely digital business at one point, but we still had a really strong sense of culture with our core values and really deep personal relationships. And yeah that was you know I was able to bring a lot of green in as the culture, but then you know shift that. like Sometimes we had to be, hey, listen, we’re operating the game of capitalism. We’re in a hierarchy here. You’re the copywriter. you know This is your job. This is what success looks like.
22:23.53 – Gareth Hermann
You know, like, yes, you’re, you know, yeah we all value each other as human beings.
22:24.78 – Brian David Crane
Yeah.
22:28.01 – Gareth Hermann
And we all have a say when it comes to our weekly Friday check-in call, where we do acknowledgments and celebrations and reflections from the week. And also, you know, did you get your four ads done for this client?
22:40.61 – Gareth Hermann
And so that was my approach is again, trying to integrate.
22:40.76 – Brian David Crane
Yeah. You have to marry the dichotomy though, basically. If I use a human, you’re paid for a certain outcome or set of skills that enable this entity to keep functioning.
22:47.48 – Gareth Hermann
Yes.
22:52.11 – Gareth Hermann
Exactly. And that’s part of my struggle is, or was, for example, this is, you know by the end of the scaling magic and selling it, I was actually pretty jaded because I felt that leadership conflict.
22:54.76 – Brian David Crane
Yeah.
The Emotional Toll of Running a Business and Why Leadership is Hard
23:08.60 – Gareth Hermann
Like there’s some of our team members that had been around since day one or the first year, but because the way the game of business is played and the agency model that when we were only profitable when everyone was maxed out, maxed to the brim and had a very stressful life. And that, for me, was in conflict with my personal values because I value health and wellbeing as one of my personal values. But here I am playing this game of business where I’m only making money when my team is super stressed and they’re working you know a ton of hours each day.
23:41.08 – Gareth Hermann
That’s when the model works. and when they have a chill workload and they feel excited about their jobs, I’m literally not getting paid what I need.
23:48.01 – Brian David Crane
You’re bleeding cash. Yeah.
23:49.45 – Gareth Hermann
Yeah. So that’s kind of messed up, and that was hard. Or, you know, for example, we lost a couple of big clients. I got to lay off some team members and it felt like I was, you know, one of my team members, um, you know, he, he, he, he didn’t deserve to be laid off. He was doing his job really well.
24:09.42 – Gareth Hermann
But that role just wasn’t necessary for the company to survive. And so I felt like I was on a ship that was sinking and on a life raft and literally there’s like having to kick people off of the boat. And they were my friends that I built really deep intimate relationships, but then we’d done so much great work together and that was brutal. And the it’s when you win when you operate business and leadership from a more hard open integral way,
24:39.45 – Gareth Hermann
It’s hard. It was really challenging for me.
24:43.78 – Brian David Crane
What was the, you had a co-founder in Magic, right?
24:47.59 – Gareth Hermann
Yes.
24:48.71 – Brian David Crane
Yeah. What was the dynamic between you and the co-founder and why I ask that is because in my mind you have, let’s call it one person who’s the visionary or creates the, the one person visionary and the other person that we implement, right?
25:03.75 – Brian David Crane
Like if you want to use a model from communism. You have the Marx who writes the communist manifesto and you have the Lenin, the one who actually implements. I’m not saying magic was this, but just like as a means of like trying to understand the personalities. like Who is who was who was who in the organization?
25:22.99 – Gareth Hermann
Okay, so this was a very interesting situation because my business partner was the digital marketing expert and was really amazing at sales. And those were his two main strengths. So he was the CEO as a result because you know he needed to be out there, that title to get the whale clients and to work with clients that we had.
25:47.44 – Gareth Hermann
But at the same time, he wasn’t you know I had more of the business operations experience from previous startups. and you know We were jamming a little bit about like starting work in high school. You know I had my first business in high school, so I had a lot more business experience in startups. and he had some as well, but it wasn’t his own genius versus mine. so in a strange way, I was often setting the vision for like what our culture you know should be like.
26:12.84 – Gareth Hermann
And where are we going in the marketplace? and like what’s And my business partner was more like, let’s get the revenue. Let’s make the money. Let’s get the clients in the door.
26:24.32 – Gareth Hermann
And that was more his approach.
26:24.64 – Brian David Crane
Yeah.
26:26.00 – Gareth Hermann
So yeah, there I was, straddling both some of the visionary as well as the operations and execution.
26:29.86 – Brian David Crane
I get it.
26:36.41 – Brian David Crane
And now it’s got to be tough for you with a New Paradigm because you have to do both, right? Like you’re trying to both bring in money, investors, let’s say, and also ensure that the people who are brought in are on board with the vision.
26:42.29 – Gareth Hermann
Yes.
26:53.49 – Brian David Crane
Yeah, that they’re part of the team.
26:55.79 – Gareth Hermann
Yeah, so exactly. And that’s been a ah real challenge because if I’m if I’m working with another team or another founder, it’s so easy for me to extract the vision from them, play it back to them, help them clarify it, translate that into clear goals, organize the team in terms of roles and responsibility, execute those goals, train them on time management and project management and hold them accountable to making that actually happen. So that’s really easy for me to do for someone else. But when you know it’s my vision, it’s like sometimes I struggle to articulate and clearly communicate the true energy behind the vision that is inspiring.
27:37.75 – Gareth Hermann
And then likewise, then being able to translate that into my own project plans, you know financial model, yeah the real estate you know market research work and execution of that.
27:50.78 – Gareth Hermann
It’s definitely a challenge doing both right because I’m like raising the money.
27:52.18 – Brian David Crane
Tiring.
27:56.07 – Gareth Hermann
At the same time, I got to update the financial model and like scouting land actively. I’m working on you know, de-risking the project by enrolling people to yeah purchase the first lots in the community and to build that community. And so there is seven different trains I’m trying to push for at the same time, which is incredibly ineffective from a you know from an efficiency standpoint.
28:19.36 – Gareth Hermann
But that’s where I’m at. I need to get enough momentum to attract more partners to the business, which is starting to happen. I just got a lead investor locked in a couple of weeks ago. That gave me some momentum. And that gives the people that are interested in the project more confidence, and they’re getting more excited.
28:37.51 – Gareth Hermann
So it’s often a chicken and the egg thing. And then I’m also exploring conversation with someone that has already developed a successful project here in town, which him getting involved in the project would then add to our project execution credibility, which adds even more credibility to the project. and so Yeah, and at the same time last year, I had my first lead investor back out as we got closer to putting in, yeah submitting an offer, going into due diligence. So it’s a startup, it’s a roller coaster. It’s awesome. I love it. Sometimes, I get overwhelmed and stressed out. Here we are.
29:17.11 – Brian David Crane
And how do you square this yeah this experience that you’re going through? Let’s put it this way. but how do you square the experience you’re going through in real estate with the ability that you have when you’re talking to existing CEOs or people who have a business and they say, okay, cool, like I need help with EOS. They’re not even familiar with EOS and you’re Yeah, you because you know EOS.
29:48.69 – Brian David Crane
What I want to say in the question is, you know EOS is an operating system. I want you to explain what that means to people who don’t know what it is in a second. But you know EOS, you’re you’re looking at an existing organization going, okay, cool, Mr.
29:55.45 – Gareth Hermann
Yes.
30:01.16 – Brian David Crane
And Ms. CEO. This is like you’re serving as a mirror, listening to them, getting the key stakeholders involved. That’s on one side. And then on the other side, you have a real estate venture where you assume trying to operate by EOS principles, let’s say, and then also you need to wear all seven of those hats that you described or push all seven of those trains forward, right?
30:22.92 – Brian David Crane
So like you have the real estate project, which is zero to one, and then you also have one to many over here to use Peter Thiel’s example of like existing businesses where they’ve already found product market fit where they can afford.
30:24.18 – Gareth Hermann
Yes.
Coaching CEOs: EOS and How to Build Self-Managing Teams
30:37.53 – Brian David Crane
To hire you as an outside confidant or consigliere to come in and advise them. So how do you like sitting in both of these worlds or is there one world that you’re more comfortable in?
30:51.26 – Gareth Hermann
I love sitting in both the worlds because for me, this real estate project, the Judom Village and the New Paradigm Village, like that’s how I want my life to be. So my vision for that is really that I wake up in the morning, it’s like 5 a.m., I can hear the monkey the howler monkeys, that’s my natural alarm clock, I get up, you know I do a little morning practice before my future kids get up and then you know help them get ready to school, but i you know I get my sort of like either morning surf or nature walk-in in the jungle to recharge and center for the day, then it’s like I want to be doing something there during the day. Once this project is complete, I just want to be sitting around in my villa, you know, with my ocean view, just chilling. like I want to be engaged in the world and active and..
31:42.51 – Gareth Hermann
Being part of what’s happening. So in that vision, I do see myself, like I’m talking right here from Outpost in Nisara, which is like this high-end co-working place where there’s a bunch of cool entrepreneurs down here and there is a lot of creativity in things happening and that really excites me.
31:44.70 – Brian David Crane
Yeah.
31:58.25 – Gareth Hermann
I feel like I’ve really tapped into a unique zone of genius here in the work that I do do with companies and I want to be doing that every day. And then I want to turn off, you know, it’s, I want to go watch the cultures here is everyone stops working at like five goes watch the sunset on the beach.
32:15.33 – Gareth Hermann
And then you’re, you know, it’s an actual connection point. I don’t even have to plan anything. Just go to the beach. I know I’m going to bump into friends. And then with those friends, well, either, you know, go for a sunset surf, throw the Frisbee, have some fun.
32:26.83 – Gareth Hermann
And then it translates to a dinner, usually at someone’s house. And then you go home and your bed by like 8:39 and then and that’s life.
32:34.63 – Brian David Crane
I talk.
32:35.41 – Gareth Hermann
And so that’s the millionaire lifestyle, right?
32:36.19 – Brian David Crane
Yeah.
32:38.31 – Gareth Hermann
That’s how I want to be living every day. It’s also the, what I call like the biorethmic lifestyle, like really being away, you know, from like 5G, Wi-Fi, big cities, noise pollution, light pollution.
32:51.43 – Gareth Hermann
It, you just get tired early. I wake up no alarm clock. You just sort of a life force of Costa Rica has a big impact on your central nervous system. It just sort of takes over in a way that I find very healing and recharging.
33:04.82 – Gareth Hermann
So, to to answer your question, you know this project is really about developing this community and making it making that reality possible for my future kids at the same time. Like you said, I really enjoy, if I hop on with the CEO and they’re stressed out about their date, they’re getting sucked into the weeds, day to day, their team, and they really have this cool new project that they want to do to grow the business or to expand the brand and but they just feel like they’re like chained to their you know business because now they’re at a certain scale.
33:39.47 – Gareth Hermann
It’s just a nightmare for them. And I couldn’t i can ah relate to that because that’s what I had to do with magic. The entire way up, you know we raised zero capital. So I was our project manager for every single client.
33:49.88 – Gareth Hermann
I was our bookkeeper. I was our recruiter. I was all the low-level positions until we made enough money that I could be.
33:55.18 – Brian David Crane
A jar.
33:56.44 – Gareth Hermann
Yeah, I could be the HR manager until we, and then I was the Chief People Officer and then we hired a Chief People Officer. I will tell, you know, as the Bookkeeper, we hire a Controller. Okay. Then I was the CFO, um, you know, and so on and so forth. And so I know what it’s like to be in the weeds and everything and to have, you know, whatever it is, six, eight zoom calls a day and then your normal workload. And, and so we had to get super good as an agency to just get so dialed on everything from the quality of the product we delivered to the time management, to the project management. And that’s how I’m able to do this today. That’s how I’m going to do a real estate project and have my other business is that I had just become a master of resource management inside of a company. And so it’s very easy for me to go to a CEO and I’ve created a very simple framework that’s based off of leadership systems and team.
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