Remembering Brad Sousa: Man of God, Husband, Father, and Brother to Many

(Joel Beasley at 00:00:00) Today, we are honoring a great friend of mine, Brad Sousa. Brad was a loving man of God, a husband, a father, and a brother to many. I met Brad early on in my podcasting journey, and he quickly became a close friend and mentor. I've learned an incredible amount by watching how Brad lived his life, from how he operated in business to how he treated his family. And today, we are going to honor him by picking out a few of Brad's best moments from the show to share with you.

(Joel Beasley at 00:00:32) So I'm curious to know, if you go back and talk with the version of yourself ten years into your career, maybe at, let's say, twenty-five, thirty, what is the one piece of advice that you'd give that individual?

(Brad Sousa at 00:00:50) Wow. So I think I would say to that person, give yourself time. I think we run ahead of the changes of seasons in our life and the changes of seasons in our organizations. And I probably would encourage my younger self to give myself more time and not be so concerned or stressed about deadlines. Deadlines are critical. I'm not suggesting that deadlines aren't important.

(Brad Sousa at 00:01:21) But in measuring who we are against a perceived set of goals or values or accomplishments, give myself a little bit more time.

(Joel Beasley at 00:01:34) One of the things that Fabiana was talking with us about this morning is mindset and how do you stay positive when the media that you're consuming is mostly negative. And so I was just hoping for some words of wisdom on that.

(Brad Sousa at 00:01:49) Yeah. So I guess I would share a couple of things. So first, I'll share a little bit about me personally, and then I'll share how that applies to the workplace or my role as CTO. So as somebody who is a man of faith, I realized that there's certain things that I can do to influence the outcome, and then there's certain things that I can't do to influence the outcome. And so I try and apply my energy to the things that I can influence and trust for the things that I can't influence.

(Brad Sousa at 00:02:30) And by doing that, it gives me the capacity to actually apply my energy towards those things that I can really make a change or influence on. Otherwise, I'll waste all sorts of time applying energy against things that I can't actually affect an outcome with. So that's the first thing, and I think that comes from my faith. The second thing I'd share with you is that I'm really reinforcing to our team that so many people are waiting for something to happen. Tell me what's gonna happen next. What if this happens next? And I'm really encouraging us as a company to not wait till something happens, but to go make something happen. And because we're so connected to essential services and we're so connected to how organizations communicate, there's always, always, always a need for that. So let's go help customers make something happen on their own. And so we sat down and defined four very specific customer personas, actually, up to six customer personas that we think are in a place of need at this moment in time, and we mobilized the sales force not to go get deals done, but to go help people.

(Brad Sousa at 00:03:45) And as a result of that, some of the ways we're gonna help people, we're not gonna make any money on. It's gonna be free licenses, free cloud services. You know, we'll turn it up for you for free. We're absolutely okay with that. And other offers that we have, there's an opportunity for us to help somebody and make some money in the meantime, but it's really focused on what can we do to make something happen. I don't know. Is that kind of where you're headed a little?

(Joel Beasley at 00:04:10) No, I love it. It's like I can work out my body and get a better body. I can work out my mind, get a sharper mind. I can work on my appearance. I can do all of these things. But working on your spiritual self is something that affects all of us. And I mean, it affects your quality of life and your days. And it's like, how do you go about sharing that in a work setting? Do you just wait for opportunities? What does that look like?

(Brad Sousa at 00:04:38) Yeah. So I think there's a couple of things I would share with you. And the first is maybe kind of a view that I have on this idea of the purpose of being a Christian. So I don't believe that the purpose of me being a follower of Jesus is to get to heaven. That's not my goal. That's the reward or a reward, but it's not the purpose. And the purpose for me is bringing heaven to earth. That's the purpose of being a believer for me. And I think that's what Jesus meant. You know, he said, so when you pray, pray like this, and we know the Lord's Prayer.

(Brad Sousa at 00:05:27) Right? And if I was to paraphrase it, it starts off with, you know, Father in heaven, you are holy. Your kingdom come, your will be done on earth as it is in heaven. And I think what he was really saying is wherever you are on earth, bring the kingdom of God there with you. Whatever that means, whatever God has revealed to you that that means, bring that with you.

(Brad Sousa at 00:05:56) And so for me, my goal is to bring the kingdom of God, bring what heaven has here on earth. I'm not interested in telling you the gospel so that I can convince you to go to my church. That's not my goal. I'm not interested in presenting the gospel of Jesus in a way that you have to say a certain prayer at a certain time. That's not my goal. I'm not trying to manipulate a situation to have you say a prayer.

(Brad Sousa at 00:06:28) My goal is to understand where you are at, human to human, person to person. Where you at in life, and are you stuck someplace, and can I bring heaven into that place for you? So let me give you an example of what that looks like in just a real work situation. So this is several years ago. I would come into the office sometimes by myself early before anybody else, and I would just pray over the building. Now, at this particular time, I was one of the owners of the company.

(Brad Sousa at 00:07:06) And so I would go around the building, and I'd just pray. And I'd pray over people that worked there. And you know, they all knew that I was a believer, and there wasn't any conflict with that. But one evening, I get a phone call from one of my engineers. It's about 8:30 or 9:00, and he says, hey, can I get you to meet me at the office? Sure. So I show up, and he's sitting in the conference room with a cup of coffee. And I'm like, dude, what are you doing here? And he said, um, he was struggling with alcoholism.

(Brad Sousa at 00:07:44) And he had been struggling with that prior to when he started work for us. And I knew that about him, and he had shared that with me. And he said, I'm in the middle of a conflict right now with my wife, and my old patterns would be to go drink, and I don't wanna do that. I'm like, okay. He said, so what I do is I come sit here by myself in the middle of the night. Okay. Why? Well, because there's peace here that I don't get someplace else. All right. Well, what can I do for you?

(Brad Sousa at 00:08:25) And he said, you're older than me. Can you help me understand what to do in these situations in my life? And so now I'm able to bring the kingdom of God at his request into this situation. Yeah, dude. Everybody has conflict with their wife. You're not the only one. You know Janelle and I really well, and you can see the conflict with us. But here's what's different. We both give God an opportunity to speak to each other separately about the thing that we're having conflict with. So here's what I would do if I were you.

(Brad Sousa at 00:09:02) Can I just pray with you about it? Can I just give you this counsel and advice? And for however long this conflict is with you and your wife, I'm willing to just hang out with the two of you. And you wanna bring Janelle in? The four of us could hang out together, and we could work together on how to resolve this with the two of you.

(Brad Sousa at 00:09:24) So that's an example of a situation where he happened to be stuck. Really smart guy, very courageous guy, former Marine, you know, always able to take care of myself. He was stuck. But because I lived out my faith openly around him, he had confidence to come to me and say, here's where I'm at. Can you help?

(Joel Beasley at 00:09:53) That is a good story, man. I like that.

(Joel Beasley at 00:09:59) That is amazing.

(Brad Sousa at 00:10:02) I don't wanna take up more time. But can I tell one more story along that line?

(Joel Beasley at 00:10:06) For sure. Yeah.

(Brad Sousa at 00:10:07) So I'm out in, this is a couple of years ago. I'm out in Cincinnati. I'm working with some customers out there, and I'm getting ready to fly back home. And all I have in mind is I've got a long flight. I wanna get something to eat, and I know I've gotta get some emails out.

(Brad Sousa at 00:10:25) So when I get in that mode, man, I'm just focused on my little screen and that's it. Right? And so I dodge into this little pizza place in the airport, and I'm typing away, and the server comes up to me and takes my order. And as she's getting ready to leave, I hear God speak to me in my heart, and you were talking about this with your pastor, how God speaks to you. I hear God say to me in my heart, I like her. Pay attention. So I'm like, I don't have time for this. I've got ten minutes to get something to eat. I gotta go catch a plane. She comes back and we have a little short conversation, and she leaves.

(Brad Sousa at 00:11:04) And I hear the Holy Spirit say again, I like her. Pay attention to her. So as she comes back to bring me my check, I said, so how you doing? And she goes, um, quite honestly, not very well. I said, okay. What's that about? And she says, um, she begins to just tell me how crappy it is to work in this place and blah blah blah, and this whole story kind of comes out. And she turns around and walks away. That was the end of the conversation.

(Brad Sousa at 00:11:37) And, oh, that was interesting. Couple minutes later, she comes back and she goes, you know, I apologize. I should have never said that. I shouldn't be talking like that with a customer. You just asked me and it just kind of came out. And, you know, I said, it's perfectly okay. Yeah. Fine. We all have those kinds of days. Would you mind if I prayed for you?

(Brad Sousa at 00:11:56) And she's like, no. Okay. Well, how about we do it right now? And so as I begin to pray for her that God would, what is it that God would do if God was standing here? How do I bring heaven into this gal's life right at this moment?

(Brad Sousa at 00:12:14) And as I'm praying over her, I hear the Holy Spirit speak to me, and he says, she's really, really alone. And so I just start praying over friendships and connections. And I don't know if you have a church that you go to and, you know, this whole kind of thing. Man, she's just bawling her eyes out. She's snotting right now. She just can't kind of keep it together. And so I'm crying now because she's crying. I get done praying. Lasts thirty seconds. She leaves, doesn't say anything.

(Brad Sousa at 00:12:47) Like, man, you're a jerk or you suck or man, that was awesome. Nothing. Just leaves. Comes back and said, why did you do that? I said, well, because God said to me, I like her. Pay attention to her. And then this whole story comes out about how she moved from her family in Texas to Ohio to take care of her mom who was dying. Her mom just died, and now she's alone in this town that has nobody to talk to. And this whole thing, just a person struggling with life. And she just starts weeping and says, do you really think that God knows me?

(Brad Sousa at 00:13:24) I'm convinced of it. And here's what I would do if I were you. And I just shared with her some ideas to how to start a prayer time with God, and then how to have a conversation with him, and then where to find good people, and what good people look like. That was the last time I saw her. Never had a conversation with her since.

(Brad Sousa at 00:13:46) But the idea is that in that moment in time, I was so focused on getting my task done that I almost missed an opportunity for God to say, hey. Look. I care about this person. Would you just ask how they're doing today? No preaching involved. No big theological story. Nothing. I just needed just a person there that just needed to get loved on for a moment. And she gave me permission to do it, so I did. And I think it radically changed who she was.

(Joel Beasley at 00:14:16) And I told my wife, you know, we were talking about it yesterday, and I was like, I need to somehow find a way to deal with this because I don't have the skill to deal with this because I've never experienced this before. And she's like, well, you're talking to Brad tomorrow. I'm like, yeah. Okay. Yeah. So I was like, I'll ask him. And so, yeah, what do you, why do you think that's, is it my age and my career that I've just been doing business longer and so it's just more is coming up now, or what?

(Brad Sousa at 00:14:46) Well, so I think there's multiple factors to it. So one factor is that where you're at in the maturity of you as a business leader, in the maturity of your business, there's a confidence and there's an equity in the brand that people naturally want to leverage for themselves. So that's certainly part of it. Because when you look at your trajectory and the trajectory of Modern CTO and the podcast and the other things that you've been doing in business, it's matured to a level that there's real equity involved in that. And so they want to leverage that equity for themselves.

(Brad Sousa at 00:15:35) And that's not necessarily bad. That's okay. As long as the way that they're wanting to leverage the equity matches with where you're going with your company. Otherwise, what they're doing is, if it's not an ecosystem, then what it is is a withdrawal from you. And you do enough of those, and it's gonna start impacting the equity you built.

(Brad Sousa at 00:16:06) So that's one thing. That just has to do with the maturity of you as a business leader, the maturity of your organization, the brand value that it has, the excellence that you've developed, all of that kind of thing. I'm going to paraphrase a proverb because I think that this has got real value to your situation as well. And basically, it says that good people have blessings in their wake. So I'll give you an example of this.

(Brad Sousa at 00:16:43) Janelle and I will be out to dinner someplace. And when we walk into the restaurant, it's not very busy. But within fifteen minutes of us being there, it's jammed. And I didn't notice this, but it seems to be a behavior wherever we go. And we were out to dinner with, and if you don't mind, I'm gonna get a little personal on this.

(Brad Sousa at 00:17:09) We were out to dinner with John Britt. And Janelle made the comment to me, you know, it's happening again. And John said, you understand that you carry a blessing on you, which means that there's a blessing that follows you wherever you go. This is what this proverb says. And I went, that's really interesting. I've turned, I realized, Joel, that it's absolutely repeatable and true and measurable. And I think that you're at a place, and you and Michelle are at a place, where in your life, you guys have made choices to live a higher way. And the result of that is there's an attractiveness to you and to your business as a result of that. And people just want to be around that because there's an attractiveness to it. And in today's economy, in today's, I'll just put it within the world, the business world, today, that's unusual.

(Brad Sousa at 00:18:18) And I don't know that people, like it's obvious to them that they rationalize it. And they say, oh, man, Joel's an awesome guy. He's a good man. I want to be next to him. I don't know that they're rationalizing it. I just think that there's an attraction to you because of it. And dude, you've paid the price to get to that place in your life. And the result of that is people want to be around it. Does that help at all?

(Joel Beasley at 00:18:48) Yeah. Yeah. I've got a lot to think about. You know? You always do that. Every time I talk to you, I'm like, oh, man. I've got so much to think about. What is the best piece of leadership advice that you've ever received?

(Brad Sousa at 00:19:03) Oh, dude. The best piece of leadership advice I've ever received. I'll share with you at least one of them. Right? So I remember early in my business career, a friend of mine, a mentor of mine was CEO of a company in the Pacific Northwest called Fred Meyer.

(Brad Sousa at 00:19:33) And Fred Meyer was a retailer. And two-thirds of all, two-thirds of the population in Portland, Oregon was in a Fred Meyer twice a month. That's how impactful they were in the industry. And he decided he would have lunch with me one day at my request.

(Joel Beasley at 00:19:54) And I

(Brad Sousa at 00:19:54) was trying to rationalize how business worked as a young man because it seemed so cutthroat to me, and that in order for me to win, somebody else had to lose. It was more of a competitive thing. And he was probably the first to input into me that the idea of good business is an expanding economy for everybody involved. And it's all around, how can I help expand this thing that we're all doing together? And that obviously has stayed with me since then.

(Brad Sousa at 00:20:36) His name was Dale Warman, and he was a great, great mentor and friend to me. Can I tell you one other one real quick while I'm thinking about mentors and gave me some good advice? Another mentor of mine, Janelle and I were living in Burbank at the time, so I must have been, I don't know, 28, something like that. And this Glenn Taylor was his name. Glenn was a mentor, and he was one of those guys that somebody who was 28, a busy young businessman. He had more money than God, and I just couldn't figure out how he got there and how it just kind of all seemed to work. And we were living in Burbank at the time, and you couldn't go anywhere in LA and not where he was not known. It was, he was just one of those kind of guys. Right? And he said to me one day, he said, Brad, how do you handle your money?

(Brad Sousa at 00:21:39) And so I tried to explain it to him. And then he said, well, do you tithe? And so I tried to explain it to him. And he goes, you know, I don't think you're getting the point that I'm making. Like, alright. Well, make it clear to me. He says, my wife and I, Vera was his wife, my wife and I live on 10% and give away 90. You're struggling to get yourself into a place where you live on 90 and give away 10. He said, that's not your goal. Live on 90, give away 10. Your goal is to live on 10 and give away 90. And man, that changed everything for me. That was a huge, huge moment in my life. Live on 10, give away 90. And that's true in every business transaction or relationship I live with.

(Joel Beasley at 00:22:42) Boom. Nailed it. That's mic drop moment. I can't add anything better than that.

(Brad Sousa at 00:22:47) Super good.

(Joel Beasley at 00:22:49) We made a podcast. There you go. Feel?

(Brad Sousa at 00:22:51) It's always good doing it with you, man. I love it.