February 20, 2026 – Insider Trading Tom Hardin and FUD Factor Brendan Keegan

0:04 Intro 1 : Broadcasting from am and FM stations around the country. Welcome to the Small Business Administration award winning school for startups radio where we talk all things small business and entrepreneurship. Now here is your host, the guy that believes anyone can be a successful entrepreneur, because entrepreneurship is not about creativity, risk or passion. Jim Beach,

0:25 Jim Beach : hello everyone. Welcome to another exciting edition of School for startups radio. We have a fantastic show for you today. I am very excited. First up, we have a really sad story, a young man on Wall Street got trapped in and sucked into the vortex of evilness that is Wall Street and ended up having some unfortunate prison time. I don’t know if he had prison time or not. I might take that back. No prison time, I don’t think, but he did get caught and wrapped up in some insider trading as 26 year old just out in the world. And it’s an incredible story, so I’m excited for you to hear it. After that, we have a greatest hits. Brandon Keegan is with us in the greatest hits, for those of you who don’t know, we lost our server after 10 years, and so we’re here slowly putting back the great shows that we had up there in the fantastic interviews that I don’t want you to miss. So this is one of those. And I am sure you will enjoy hearing for Mr. Keegan. I how do I pick the greatest hits, the ones that resonate with me, that I still remember you say, Brandon Keegan, I remember immediately the interview, the story, the background, everything, and therefore I know it needs to be shared with you. So we will be back to get started in just a second. Bonus points, if you know who Ivan Boesky is, we will talk about that in the interviewing

2:01 Intro 1 : the real environmental environmentalists, the bold new book by Jim beach. It’s not about activists, politicians or professors, it’s about the entrepreneurs, real risk takers, building cleaner, smarter solutions, not for applause, but for profit. The entrepreneurs in the book aren’t giving speeches. They’re in labs, factories and offices, cleaning the past and building clean products for the future, the real environmentalists is available now because the people saving the planet aren’t the ones you think. Go to Amazon and search for real environmentalist. Thank you.

2:30 Jim Beach : Welcome back to the show again. Thank you so much for being with us. Very excited to introduce my first guest, Tom Hardin. He has a new book out called Wired on Wall Street, talking about him being an FBI informant and working on Wall Street and doing insider trading and getting caught and going to jail. Unbelievable story. He turns out to be the good guy in the story, though, 100% and you kind of have to feel sorry for him, I would be very excited for you to hear this and see what you think. I think Tom is a great guy, and I’d like to welcome him to the show, Tom, thanks for being here.

3:11 Speaker 2 : Great Jim. Thanks pleasure to be here. Thanks for having me.

3:13 Jim Beach : All right. How did you get just tell us your history, a little bit background. Give us the foundation that led to the book. How about that? Yeah, thanks to

3:24 Tom Hardin : do that. So I grew up suburbs of Atlanta in Gwinnett County, 1990s went to big public high school. Back then, we only applied to three colleges, and I applied to University of Pennsylvania as my reach school, got deferred the regular admission, and they think they let somebody in from Georgia at that time, so they, they let me in. Got to the Wharton School. They’re the best business school in the country, and then got started working in the hedge fund industry, going back to the early 2000s if people are familiar with that tech stock bubble, back when there was etoys.com and everything was a was a.com and I love picking stocks in the hedge fund business. And hedge funds, you bet on stocks you think are going to go up, and you bet against stocks you think are going to go down. So one of my would have been a career making idea that I never saw come to fruition. Was about a year after Google went public, I figured out that probably all those yellow pages in our driveways, we’re going to go away. So that’s the only career making trade that you need in this business, is to be long Google or short the Yellow Pages. But I also became aware, Jim, that insider trading was rapidly going on, and we could, we could talk about

4:33 Speaker 4 : that. So,

4:36 Jim Beach : you know, as a lay person, I would just sort of assume that it always does, that they’re all crooks. You know how far off? Yeah, is that? That’s just sort of, I think

4:47 Tom Hardin : you’re, I think you’re, there’s some truth to that. Your mom, back when I was involved with this, I’ll talk about sort of the mid 2000s into the financial crisis. So 2000 to 2009 it was primarily a hedge fund problem in my industry. Be where the hedge funds, investing in tech stocks, would hire people to work for them that worked in Silicon Valley companies who would call back and get the non public information. And today, there’s still about 50 cases a year like there was back then. It’s just other individuals. It’s often the corporate Insider. So if anybody works at a public company listening, you know, you know you have to have that training not to share non public information, because they were still charging today. And the biggest problem today, Jim, is our our Congress, right? So there’s they can trade single stocks, both both parties. You know, if they don’t make their filings on the single stock trades, Jim, they only pay a $250 fine. So you can see all these politicians making millions. Of course they would, right? So that’s, that’s where the problem is today, to be honest.

5:47 Jim Beach : Alright, that is kind of scary. And you certainly hear all of the politicians making a ton of money during their career. You know, of course, Nancy was a great example of that. I don’t know that that’s very fair, that our politicians are doing that. So it kind of bothers them. How much money are we talking about here? Is it a small amount or, I mean, we’re talking 10s, hundreds of billions of dollars a year, I would guess. What are your thoughts this is actually going to cost

6:23 Tom Hardin : so that with just with my story, I was working at a small hedge fund. I was young, there was pressure to perform every month. You have to put up numbers every month or the fund’s not going to survive. And I hate to say Jim, I just looked around with other guys are making millions and and I received four insider tips from another investor who, you know, she said, Everybody’s doing it, they’re making millions. And I, I bought four stocks in my my company’s portfolio at the time, around 2007 I figured my boss had a problem. He’d ask me about it, and all the deals happen. And he comes into my office and says, Hey, this is great, but don’t tell me how you’re doing it. So today, when I talk to leadership, so you have to ask questions about short term performance in any industry, right? You can’t be willfully blind to what the employee is doing. And me personally, on those four trades, Jim I made, I made $46,000 so I threw away my career at 29 years old. I mean, I can look back now and say, just not to be too dark, but that’s the price of my professional suicide. The average case today is $58,000 when you see somebody throwing away their career as a regular person. Now, just pick it up and some corporate insider or some employee tips the stock and trade. So it’s not much. Sometimes, in the context of people’s career, for the course in Congress, it can be millions of dollars. But that was just a crazy stat. But when I share the story today, people thought, Oh, I thought you made millions like no, it was, it was $46,000

7:47 Jim Beach : I’m not. I didn’t understand that. Did you get caught and get in trouble?

7:52 Tom Hardin : Yeah, so I made the trades. It was about seven months after the fourth trade. It was July, 2008 I’m leaving my apartment to drop off some dry cleaning in New York City, where I lived in Manhattan. I stepped on the sidewalk in New York City at 630 in the morning, and I heard my full name behind me. Are you? Thomas Kobe harden and the last time I heard my full name, that was my mom back home, about to whip my butt. It wasn’t mom. I turned around. It was two FBI agents, dark suits, wallets out. Anybody seen, you know, crime show FBI. Come sit down with us. We sat down at the Wendy’s in Manhattan, and he’s like, Look, man, we know about your four trades. We know that you were just down in Georgia visiting your baby nephew for his baptism, and they knew my baby nephew’s name, and he was six weeks old, and Jim, my first thought was, oh, my God, my my parents are going to kill me, right? All they could talk about was my success, leaving Georgia, going to this great business school, they’re going to be so disappointed. I thought, my wife’s going to leave me. We just got married, we had no kids, and I thought, you know, this might impact my career. Of course, it would. The FBI asked if I knew what insider shooting was going on. It was rapidly happening in the hedge fund industry at that time, and they said I could probably help them out, help them build cases. I was so naive. I said, Wait, should I talk to a lawyer? And the FBI said, don’t talk to a lawyer. They gave me their card. And for two years, it’s just some crazy stories. In the book, it’s kind of a thriller, where they’re sending me around Wall Street, getting me in conversations. I’m wearing a body wire, and at the time, it was a small device that fit in my front dress your pocket, and it was against people I didn’t know that well, like a 48 year old Silicon Valley Big Time hedge fund manager. I’m a 29 year old analyst in New York running around doing this, and didn’t talk to a lawyer for two years. Just some crazy people, like sort of riveting page turners in the middle of the book. That’s really a

9:38 Speaker 4 : lot of what this was. My goodness,

9:43 Jim Beach : do you recommend the strategy of not having a lawyer, even when the FBI tells you not to?

9:48 Tom Hardin : I do not. I do not. So that’s a good question today. And anybody actually, the FBI will just do fishing expeditions. And you know, hopefully you didn’t do anything wrong, because sometimes the FBI is building cases, they’ll see. You know. Can we go scare a bunch of people and see what they say? You always take their card. You call your general counsel at your company. Never, never, never talk, because then things escalate. You know, that’s that’s looking back.

10:11 Jim Beach : And why did they think your four trades were illegal or wrong?

10:17 Tom Hardin : Well, they had actually the woman. So there was a woman who had tipped me, and she had already been investigated by the FBI a few years before. I had no idea. And so when they approached her, they said, Who did you tell? And she said, Oh, this guy in New York, you know, this young guy, Tom Hardin. And so she met me for lunch a week before the FBI approached me, got me in a face to face conversation, and said Tom, you know, those four trades last year were illegal. And I said, Oh yes, I know, I know they were, but we rationalized it. She had been recording that, that conversation with me, so that’s they got to me.

10:52 Jim Beach : Wow, so did they view it 20 years they didn’t say that.

10:57 Tom Hardin : So they didn’t. There was no Miranda rights, like I technically wasn’t under arrest at the Wendy’s. So I was free to leave. But it was there, was there was it was sort of like intimated that, hey, if you don’t help us, you know the classic scene where they show up and bust your door down at your apartment and arrest you with the FBI windbreakers like that could happen. But, you know, I should have talked to a lawyer, as we talked about before, but they, I think they knew they did sort of follow me. This guy’s a regular guy. They even mentioned one day or tracking me. They’re like, wow, you leave the office and go home to your wife. You’re not like the typical Wall Street guy. Well, you know, this Catholic and just otherwise outside those four trays of normal life. And so they really, you know, there was some manipulation with me, and I, you know, I was naive and 29 but I figured, well, they got me, I should try to help them clean up the industry. And so they had me running around. There was one guy, Jim, that was, like, high up the FBI list. I got 15 face to face conversations. He was always onto me. He changed the subject a Sunday afternoon. He invites me to dinner in Connecticut, where he lived. The FBI got excited. This guy was one of the top guys they wanted. I take the train out to Connecticut with the body wire in my pocket. He picks me up at the train station, and he says, Good to see you. I brought swim trunks for you. We’re going swimming at my mother’s house. And the sopranos was popular that summer. All these ideas are going through my head. I played it cool. I said, Let’s go swimming. We went to this old mansion in Greenwich, Connecticut. Walk into this house. He starts disrobing in this room, so he wants to see if something’s taped in my chest. It was in my front pocket. Now I’m about to have a heart attack. I excuse myself. Went to the restroom, took the wire out, put in my jeans, put these swim trunks on. So the two of us are walking out to this pool. It was so quiet. I saw a shovel against the house, a hole in the ground. I thought, Oh my God, he’s going to try to kill me or something. And he was having landscaping done. We got the swimming pool. He grabbed a tennis ball. We’re playing this awkward game to catch. He’s pouring it on I’m so scared. I want to go home. He said, Tom I have to ask you one question. He spoke to a liar, and I have to answer it truthfully. I was going to give an option. I wanted to go home. I said, what’s said, What’s your question? And he said, Okay, Tom, have you been approached by the SEC? And the SEC is actually the regulator, not law enforcement, so I can actually say no. And he starts making all these implicating statements about all the stocks I’d asked him about. He starts confessing in the pool. Of course, that was not recorded. This guy was actually never charged for insider trading, and he was one of the worst actors. So that was the scariest moment for me. You know, as I look back writing the book, that I’m just happy in the lives, because that conversation wasn’t recorded, and so the FBI would just say, it’s a he said, he said, but he was one of the worst actors. And so, you know, for years I went through maybe a version of, like, Why me for the four trades? Why not this guy in Greenwich? And my wife is so great, like, she stayed with me 85% of marriages in and whenever I got the poor Tom spiral, she would slap me around, not physically, but just say, Hey, is it helping you find a job Tom? You know, after this was happening, so she really stayed strong through this. And she’s, she’s by far the real hero of the book. When I asked her last year as I was writing it, how did you get through it? Sue, she said, thanks for asking, because you

14:07 Speaker 2 : never did before. She was right.

14:11 Jim Beach : Do you know who Ivan Boesky is?

14:14 Tom Hardin : Tom I do. I do. That was the first round of cases in the late 1980s with Milken and Boesky.

14:19 Jim Beach : Yeah, yes. I went to school with his daughter, and oh, wow, she showed up the first day of school in a helicopter.

14:28 Tom Hardin : Yeah, that doesn’t surprise me. The first the first cases were milking and Bosque the late 80s, predators ball about Drexel Burnham. And then the next biggest cases were the ones I was involved with going back 15 years now, called Operation perfect edge. There was two billionaires that were at the top of the list, like I was way down. That was a meno around these great whites. And they were going after two great whites. They got one of them and didn’t get the other. The one they got was a Sri Lankan billionaire named Raj Rajaratnam, and he ended up going to prison for, I think, nine or 10 years. Wow.

15:03 Jim Beach : And did they How did you get out of it when you finally spoke to an attorney after two years, what happened then, after two years,

15:12 Tom Hardin : they said, talk to an attorney. I called him up. I didn’t know how this was going. Like, if you can just picture a stone faced, poker faced FBI agents. There was no feedback on how I was doing with this wire wearing craziness. And then one day they called me, and I was at home. My wife just gave birth to our first daughter, and so she’s home from maternity leave. We’re up at 6am with the baby. The FBI calls me on a Friday morning and says, Turn on CNBC. 20 guys are in perp walks handcuffs like the TV cameras just happened to be there when they’re being arrested, and all these names are coming out. Oh, my God, I know these people. One name in the middle was not revealed, and it was called tipper X, and I figured out, you know, pretty quickly, oh, I don’t see my name. I think I’m tipper X. I feared for my life. Are they going to figure it out? The FBI said, No, you’re fine. And then eventually they wanted me to wire on two friends, and I had tipped on these stocks, and I drew the line there. I said, then these are good these are good men. And the FBI said, Fine, we’re done with you. Your name’s coming out tomorrow. So if you can picture your name being on the front of the Wall Street Journal for a federal crime, that’s what happened with me. My wife had just gone back to work in January that year in maternity leave, and then her husband’s names on the front page of the Wall Street Journal. And I was, I was actually not sentenced for this. For practically seven years, all of my 30s were lost, you know, to just waiting to be to be sentenced. When I was finally sentenced, the judge actually said there was 81 people that were arrested on Wall Street. She said I helped build 20 of these cases for the FBI. And for that, she just said, you know, I’m not going to send you to prison, but I still had to take

16:47 Jim Beach : a felony condition for that, for the four trades, yeah?

16:52 Speaker 2 : For the four trades, uh, felony securities fraud.

16:56 Jim Beach : Wow, you are so lucky you didn’t end up in jail. Yeah,

17:00 Tom Hardin : I mean, that’s, that’s most people, most people do. And at the time, there was this Occupy Wall Street movement, if you remember, like, sort of back then, where it was sort of down with the banksters. And, you know, at these insider trading trials, the prosecutors would say, you know, Mr. And Mrs. Jury, like, you can’t pay your mortgage because this guy traded this stock, which is not necessarily true. You know, they never, they never, they never went after the bankers. They went out for the traders. But it was, it was a crazy time, just in history, sort of the worst stock market in 75 years, in 2008 so I’m dealing with that at work, and then I’m like on the side, meeting with the FBI and the Crown Vic on the next target. So that’s sort of this dual life. I mean, I can’t believe, as I was writing this last year, I can’t believe I even got through some of this just, it was just a crazy,

17:43 Speaker 2 : stressful time.

17:45 Jim Beach : Yes, I can relate. I woke up well, I came out of my radio room in March 4, 2017 and walked into the kitchen and my wife was there were two guys in there with my wife and I was, had no idea, you know what that was, who they were. They said, Jim, you know, I was like, yeah, they Excuse me. They had search warrant for our house. And I then, kind of when I heard that, I was sort of aware, and looked around for the first time, and there were four or five guys with machine guns in our backyard, and then they made us go outside while they searched the house for guns. And there were 20 SUVs on the street and an ambulance and the fire department was there, assuming that, you know, we were going to fight back or something, when they served their warrant, and I spent three years before I heard from them again, so they hang with the search warrant took all my computers and stuff, and then I didn’t hear from them for three years, and then I got called in downtown to the Richard B Russell building in downtown Atlanta, and they accused me of secure social security fraud, because I had been on disability, and it was absolutely hell for three years, my wife and I really just kind of laid there every night wondering if tomorrow morning, at 6am and we were going to get that knock, you know, yeah, finally, I was brought downtown. They interviewed me for six hours, and I didn’t bring my attorney. I just went in by myself. And at the end, they said, Okay, we’ll do some research. And then, like, a week later, they called and said, Where do you want your computers sent? And I was like, you know, why do you bring them back to where you took them from you? And yeah, there were no charges ever filed. Never spoke with a prosecutor or anything, but it took them three years of investigating, of me living through absolute hell and unlike you, but that marriage did end up breaking up. I don’t know if that was the. Total cause, but we never recovered from that. You know, what happened Tom, the night that they, you know, served the search warrant, the day was hell, and the kids came home, and my wife and I tried to fake it through dinner and, you know, all that. And, yeah, got the kids to bed, and we went to bed, and my wife was like, you want to talk about it. And I was like, not really to you. She’s like, not really. And we never did, we never talked about it. And so our communication stopped at that point. You know, I was living life and not telling her, and she was living life and not telling me, and we just were afraid to talk, because we had no idea what was going to happen. So, absolutely brutal, absolutely yes,

20:47 Speaker 2 : that tension just builds. Yeah,

20:49 Tom Hardin : my I was only allowed to tell my wife. I couldn’t tell anybody. After the FBI approached me at Wendy’s, and I thought, how the heck am I going to do that? You know, I thought she was going to leave, because she, you know, you lose complete trust in somebody when you’re like, you know, she married me, and all of a sudden I made these trades, like, how she would think, how do I even know this person? So it was a Friday after work. The FBI was a Tuesday morning at Wednesdays, Friday after work, you know, how was your week? And Jim, she was working on Lehman Brothers. So if people remember that, this was a stock that went to zero eventually, and so she was going through hell there. And I sat her down, I said, Hey, I have to tell you about what happened Tuesday. And I told her everything, like the FBI approached me, and I said, Hey, I did make these trades. I shouldn’t have done it. You know, there was pressure. There’s no There’s all kinds of excuses and rationalizations I made. They said, Hey, this is what the situation is. And she paused Jim, like it took forever for her to answer understandably. And she said, can you see that again? And I said it again, and the way she took it, I’m very lucky, this is the way she took it. She said, Well, you didn’t, you didn’t do anything to hurt me. And of course, that’s not true, because she’s collateral damage to my decisions. She’s no longer married to the future head manager. She’s married to the FBI informant. It was not easy, but the one thing that we kept doing was communicating through it like she and I actually guarded, guarded her quite a bit because it was scary situation, like body wires. She’s like, What the heck is happening? And she just, you know, once I was had to leave my job and it was sentenced, and I was a depressed kind of stay at home dad, she would just keep me focused and grounded. And she always said, Hey, you got us into this. You’re gonna get us out of it. So I made some very bad decisions in my career, but I made one very important decision. You know,

22:31 Jim Beach : did you ever watch the TV show billions?

22:33 Tom Hardin : Yes, it’s very good. They have very good consultants. The first season or two was very, I think, pretty, pretty good, really realistic with the storylines, the prosecutor, the hedge fund guy,

22:43 Jim Beach : see the scene where Bobby, the main character, Bobby Axelrod, has this female counterpart who does motivation for the business, and he thinks that she might give him up, and So he brings her to a sauna and gets naked. So that’s right, trying to test if she’s wired or not.

23:07 Tom Hardin : So that’s right, one of the consultants on the show, I know, he said they actually took that from the public record of my my case at the swimming pool. And I was like, Hey, where’s my royalty? Yeah, there’s some of the scenes, you know, is Hollywood ish, but it was also pretty, you know, very well

23:23 Jim Beach : written. I thought it was a great show.

23:26 Tom Hardin : Yeah, yeah. Industry now too. So now, yeah. So the FBI, I was sentenced in 2015 so going back almost 11 years, 2016 the FBI calls me up, and I thought, Oh, my God, what are these guys want? Now, it’s always, so people know it’s always a restricted number. I called you, and they said, How’s your life going? I said, Well, it’s not great. I had just found that I couldn’t coach my daughter, who was five, because I had to check the box, and it’s all my own decisions. I mean, I’m not crying about it. But they said, Oh, I thought things were better. Wait, why don’t you just come talk to the FBI about your case? Because of the 81 people they arrested, Jim, I was the youngest person, and I made the least amount of money like that. $46,000 I missed him, was the lowest. And they said, you know, why’d you do it? And I said, you know, great question I was I rationalized it. I spoke at the FBI to the rookie agents. I said, hey, when you use cooperators, don’t tell them not to talk to a lawyer, right? Like they’re your assets. And three guys like me, the FBI rolled up on like me, killed themselves that day. So you don’t want that outcome. I spoke at the FBI, and the FBI gave me this idea that, like, why don’t you go just, you know, you’re still relatively young, just go make lemonade or lemons. Just try to go tell this story to all these young guys on Wall Street or in business schools about how you can be just start making the wrong decision to go down that slippery slope, the classic slippery slope. So I just started a pilgrimage of just sharing this story for free. Didn’t charge at colleges, like, does it land? Do you guys understand it? And that went great. And then one day, a company was like, What do you charge? And I said, for what they said for this talk, this is training. You’re not. You’re not. It’s not a how to guide, right? Sort of training and preventative and I quoted them, and it’s turned in in the last nine years for like 650 talks in 13 countries. And then a year and a half ago, my publisher reached out, and they said, You gotta, you gotta get this on the page, to get this out, to give it bigger audiences. Because it’s not just the Wall Street, it’s any anything in life. You know, you know, I just spoke to a high school two weeks ago, and they’re having a problem the teacher’s having a problem with the kids using AI, right? So it’s like, how do you start going down that path, and how do you recognize it? So that’s what I do today. It’s about 50 talks a year, professional speaking, and then now, obviously the book will be out there, and hopefully many people’s hands,

25:36 Jim Beach : yes, and how much time did those 80 end up getting

25:43 Tom Hardin : so the average so 8132 of the 81 people were cooperators, so then I guess 49 went to prison. The average sentence is to about two years. The highest was nine or nine to 10 years for two, for two

25:56 Speaker 2 : people, right?

26:00 Jim Beach : Wow, one of my friends got caught up in a situation, actually, my CPA, my accountant, and he got sentenced to two, two and a half years, I think, and the ringleader got 25 years. He was like, 75 or something, and got 25 years they were doing the conservation easements, where you buy a piece of property and say, we’re going to put a hotel on here, and it’s going to be worth $100 million once the hotel is here. And then you take $100 million deduction, even though you haven’t put the hotel on there yet, correct, right? And so it was legal for a while, supposedly, and they changed the law supposedly.

26:43 Unknown Speaker : And, yeah, so

26:48 Jim Beach : I had to watch my friend go through that as well.

26:52 Tom Hardin : Yeah, as I share that story, I mean, people come up to me and they always have a real, you know, everybody’s touched by maybe a relative who’s gone through something like this, and they’re a lot. Most people are just suffering in silence. So I figure, hey, let me another person that might read the book might be going through something like this, you know, marriage fail, just like kids, don’t, you know, whatever, and like they’re going through something and sort of going through hell, and then maybe they’ll just hear something like the hardest part is just to accept responsibility and own it. And actually, the hardest part also is to forgive yourself. I mean, that’s still what I go through today. Sometimes it’s just sort of that stuff. Sort of that self forgiveness, because we can be, you know, our internal voices of our thought can be, can be pretty, pretty negative at times.

27:30 Jim Beach : Yeah, well, Tom it’s amazing that you made it through this. Congratulations and congratulations to having a great wife that put up with it. And congratulations on the two teenage girls and published by Wiley. You don’t get more prestigious than that. So congratulations on that as well. How do we find out more? Get in touch. Get a copy of the book. Hire you to speak for our company. Thanks, Jim.

27:57 Tom Hardin : So it’s wired on Wall Street. Is the name of the book, tipper x.com. Is all my information? T, i, P, P, E, R, x.com. The US Patent Office just told me I got the trademark for tip or x, so there can no the FBI can’t use tipper X anymore, so I’m the only tipper X out there. They figured out that’s feel free to reach out to me on LinkedIn too. I write a lot just about slippery slope and ethics and decision making.

28:19 Jim Beach : Did you run cross country in high school I did, yeah,

28:22 Speaker 2 : ninth grade at Brookwood, yeah,

28:26 Jim Beach : okay, you look a little bit familiar to me. I don’t know how or why we were 10 years apart, so we didn’t cross over, but you look very familiar. Yeah, i Congratulations on not being in jail. Yeah, thanks, Jim. Appreciate that. All right, did we get all your URLs? How to tipper x is the best way?

28:50 Speaker 2 : Yeah, tipper x.com is the best place. Well,

28:53 Jim Beach : Tom, thank you for being with us, and we’d love to have you back. Thanks, Jim. Big pleasure to do that again. Thanks, and we will be right back.

29:14 Intro 2 : Olis, oh my gosh, I love the opportunity to do this. Thank you, Jim, wow, that’s, that’s, that’s a great one. You know, that is a phenomenal question. That’s a great question. And, and I don’t have a great answer, that’s a great question. Oh, that is such a loaded question. And that’s actually a really good question. School for startups radio,

29:37 Jim Beach : we are back in again. Thank you so much for being with us. Very excited to introduce my first guest and to introduce this story. It’s a very impressive one. Please welcome Brendan Keegan to the show. He is the chairman, CEO and President of merchants fleet. It is the fastest growing fleet. Technology company in the United States. He is also author of three books, including his new one called the FUD factor, overcoming fear uncertainty and doubt to achieve the impossible. He has also written a couple 100 articles for Fast Company entrepreneur News Week, places like that. The company that he’s been running, merchants fleet has twice been named on the Inc 5000 fastest growing list. It’s been named a Deloitte, best managed company and a Fast Company, top 10 most innovative company. Pretty impressive.

30:42 Speaker 4 : Brandon, even computers have an off day. They do.

30:49 Jim Beach : Brendan, welcome to the show. How are you doing today? Great.

30:53 Brendan Keegan : Really looking forward to it. Jim, excited to have our conversation today.

30:56 Jim Beach : I am too, and I too want to let the audience know we’re having our conversation twice today because of technical issues, and I want to apologize formally and let everyone know how classy the guest is being during my stupidity here, sir, how did you get started? Go back to the very beginning. What set you apart from everyone else, obviously, your trajectory has been different from that of your peers. When did that start being different?

31:29 Speaker 4 : Yeah, it’s

31:30 Brendan Keegan : a great question, because you really kind of digging into, you know, when did I like my passion is leadership, and you know, when did I really come across my, my, my passion and, and I, you know, I guess it really started when you’re just in youth sports, just getting a chance to, you know, be captain of different teams and, and, you know, I was a kid at CYO basketball that liked picking up the basketballs after for the coach and bringing them to his car. You know, I was a kid that, you know, when, when someone was running a lap in football practice, and you had a few kids struggling that just enjoyed going back and cheering the the other kids on right to the finish line. So I always just kind of didn’t even realize it, but like, started to practice these little leadership habits, and then get into high school, and I got a chance to run for student government. And I really enjoyed that, you know, whether it was, you know, being the elitist in the cafeteria that wanted pizza on every day instead of just Fridays at school and and then, you know, I started my career as a programmer. On the technical side, I was an engineer, and I quickly got moved over to working more with people. And I’m thankful to my mentors that did that, because they saw that. You know, my skill set was better as a leader. And so when you ask the question, you know, trajectory, maybe versus a peer, or have I maybe been able to achieve anymore? I think it’s as simple as something we hear all the time. You know, my passion is leadership. So when I, when I get to lead companies, and I get to fill my passion, I just think, naturally, you know, I achieve a little bit more. But if somebody’s passion is, is selling things on eBay, they probably have a successful eBay business. If their passion is is opening up an entrepreneurial retail store, they’re probably successful at that. So I’d say, you know, most people that follow their passion and not just go to work, but follow their passion, usually outperform those that aren’t following their passion. So I guess that’s what I’d credit, credit to is just following my passion of leadership.

33:37 Speaker 4 : Is that something you learned from Ross Perot?

33:40 Brendan Keegan : No, I gotta tell you, there’s a lot of things that if you were at EDS, where I started my career, which Ross founded, I’ll tell you the things you learn from them are values. If I could just say what’s the one thing you learned from Ross is he instilled values in you as an employee. And I can tell you that even when the company was 120,000 people, it resonated top to bottom. So Ross was very, very big on on values and honoring those as as team members.

34:12 Jim Beach : How do you get values to that 120,000th person? How do you take from Ross and get it all the way down through 83 different layers of bureaucracy at the business, so that even the new people who have been there a month still get those values. How are they so good at that? At EDS?

34:34 Brendan Keegan : I’ll tell you. It was July, July 7, 1991 it was my first day at the company, and I flew to Dallas from New Hampshire, and my first day of business training, we had our president come in and talk to us. His name was Jeff Heller, and he drew a big circle on a white on a whiteboard. So you can tell that this was a long time ago, and it resonated with me. True circle. He goes, You know, this is companies. A’s values. And then he drew a circle inside that, and said, This is company B’s values. And then he put a little dot, just a little dot, right in the middle. And he said, those are our values. If we want to serve all our clients, if we want to serve all different industries, if we want to be a global company in 80 countries, we have to have values that are stronger, built to last and are better than any of our our clients, and we have to be able to work in all different client environments. And if for one hour it was like probably the second hour of business training, and everybody at the company went through it, the President came in and gave you that talk, and you can tell it’s, it’s what, 30 years later and 32 years later, and I still remember that, that conversation from the first couple hours of my business career. So So I think it starts with you, start with the first day, and then you just reinforce it every day thereafter.

36:00 Jim Beach : And did you try to copy that at your businesses? Was that something that you are actively working on as you became the CEO?

36:09 Brendan Keegan : Yeah, it’s something every company I’ve been at, values. We talk about them all the time. We talk about vision and values. You know, in the vision part, you know being you know, something that you know I’m really passionate about is, if you want to go in a direction, whatever direction, if you’re if your team and your employees don’t understand that direction in very simple terms, and if you aren’t able to really turn it into a story, they’re not going to be able to go and and so if you can tie your vision with your values, yeah, at some companies, I’ve had our values on our on our business cards. Now granted, in 2023 business cards are actually going archaic, and we’re just doing QR codes now. But, yeah, it’s something we talk about with we just don’t have them up in the hallways. We actually put them in performance reviews. So, you know, every person, when they get do a performance review, gets rated on values. You know, ours at the company, the main three, we talk about a service flexibility and innovation, and every year we kind of do an assessment, are we honoring these values? And I can tell you, last year we actually made a decision that said we did a good job on our values, but one in particular innovation. We said we didn’t have as good a year last year and innovation as the year before. And I think just the fact that we had that conversation really is a good example of how values are brought to life, and I’ll take that right back. That is a gift that Ross Perot did give me at EDS, and then I’m able to carry, carry on to others and impact others many years later.

37:34 Jim Beach : Can you teach leadership? So obviously it was ingrained in you. You’re collecting basketballs after practice. For those of us who were not like that, does the military do a good job of teaching it? Can it be taught? Are the books any good? Yeah.

37:52 Brendan Keegan : So, you know, I very, very, very much, have a premise that, you know, you know, leaders are not born. They’re made and and the first thing that really has to happen is someone just needs to make a conscious decision that they want to be a leader. Now, for some people, they come to that decision on their own. They say, you know, I really want to be a leader. I want to be a manager of my company. I want to, you know, be a coach of my kids sport. And that’s a leader role. So some people come to it on their own. Others, they maybe didn’t grow up in that environment where somebody was was telling them that they could be a leader, but somebody recognizes it now. Somebody at the Boys and Girls Club, a big sister, a big brother, somebody at the Y a coach, a coach says to him, Hey, why you stay after practice? And the coach takes them under their wing. So there’s different ways people decide to be leaders. Some consciously do it. They see that role and they want to do it. I think that’s where I was. And then there’s other people that somebody sees it in them and taps into their leadership. And I look at leadership really in the form of years, has nothing to do with really leading up, leading teams or leading people. It just has to do with doing little extra, you know, as I mentioned, you know, picking up the basketballs. You know, you walking down the hall at your office and there’s something on the ground, and you pick it up. You know, somebody in the company says, Hey, we got a special project coming up, and we need some volunteers. And you raise your hand before you know you even really know what the project is. You know that you’re not in a leadership role formally, but informally, you’re putting yourself into a leadership role. And I think that’s really, really powerful.

39:36 Jim Beach : Tell us about the new book I love, the title, the fun factor. Tell us about the book.

39:45 Brendan Keegan : Yeah, so it’s, it was interesting, you know, during during covid, I kind of put a little inspirational book together, kind of a coffee table book, because I saw a lot of people, you know, their fears growing. And I’ve always had this concept of of fear, uncertainty and doubt and. How do you overcome it if we were doing this live with cameras in my office? I’ve got saying, Have the courage to fail and the faith to succeed, and I’ve got that on the wall and but I always tell people, you know, to have the courage to fail. You’ve got to face your fear. You got to lean into your fear. It’s going to be uncertain. You’re going to have doubts. People are going to say, I don’t think that’s going to work. Well, it might, it might not. So during covid, I kind of put this coffee table book together, you know, pictures, words, well, inspirational. I had a pretty good reaction to it, so that’s when I sat down and put the fun fact together. It really just goes through telling stories of lots of different leaders from from Brian Cameron, who’s a 22 year old lacrosse player who just graduated from Rutgers to Zach Brown, who’s CEO of McLaren racing, and lots of in between. You know, I have stories from a lot of people that are friends of mine are in my network. I share their stories, but then I also share like, how do you how do you, very simply, overcome your own fears. How do you overcome your own uncertainties? And you think about it, you know, this has been bred into us. Like, one example I use is, you know, I remember, behind my house was this tiny, little hill, and I used to like going skateboarding, but, you know, as parents, now I’m a parent, what’s the first thing we say when our kid picks up a skateboard? Be careful. Put a helmet on. Be careful. You’re going to fall well, you know that that five year old had no concept that they were going to fall off that skateboard, but as adults, we were taking, if you will, a little bit of our fear that they were going to fall and hit their head and have a concussion and all that, and implementing it and imprinting it on them. So this is something that’s been happening to all of us since we’ve been little kids and I just kind of put a book together, which says, Hey, recognize it. It’s there, but, you know, face it and lean into fear, you know, overcome uncertainty and beat out so that you can have more success in whatever you’re trying to be successful at all.

41:58 Jim Beach : Right, so how do we overcome the fear? I don’t want to start a business. I’m afraid I’ll look silly, and people will make fun of me, and my wife will leave me, and the kids will be disappointed. So I can’t do that because I might fail. So how do we get over that?

42:14 Brendan Keegan : Yeah, well, you know, if it started a business, one thing I tell people on starting a business, the number one key, I actually talked to someone about this yesterday is start, there’s lots of people who think about starting a business, and years and years go by. You know, right now, when we look at the young generation, there’s a there’s a thing going on, and you hear about it, it is the side hustle. You know, when you’re getting that side hustle that’s, we’re bringing up a generation that’s kind of saying, Hey, I’m doing something on the side, you know, I look at that as they’re being entrepreneurial. They’re leaning into their their fear, they’re leaning into their ability to start a business. So Jim, the first thing I’d say is, Hey, start a business. Just go, go start something, you know, pick something you’re passionate about. Get it started. Now, the next thing I’d say is, Jim, how long have you been married? Oh, 10 years, 10 years been married, 10 years. Well, I have tremendous faith that your wife is not going to up and leave you because you’re going to go start a business and your kids aren’t going to not like you. So those are just things that you know, finding somebody that’s maybe started a business that can walk you through the successes and failures, but it’s also going to say, Hey, your fear of your wife leaving you if it’s not successful, you know you’re amplifying something that’s really not there. You know your kid’s not like you or you’re going to be a failure. I think these are all things that what happens is, you know, they’re, they’re, they’re one inch problems, and we turn them into one foot, and then 10 feet, and then 100 yards. So what I’d say is, you know, just start something and you’ll be surprised how successful you’ll be, and you’ll also be surprised when you do fail that it’s not as bad as you think. I look at a lot of my failures that I’ve had throughout my career and in my personal life. And you know, before you failed, you thought it was going to be epic. You thought it was going to be mega. You thought it was going to be on ESPN news and and Fox was going to cover it. And you realize you failed, and it wasn’t that big a deal. It wasn’t that big on that didn’t mean it didn’t matter. I’m not minimalizing it, but what you realized is, wow, there’s failures every single day in every walk of life, in every office, in every home, and I just had mine, and I’m going to be okay. And then you just the next day, you get up and you say, Okay, how am I going to recover from that?

44:38 Jim Beach : Well, I’ve had some bigger failures that you have Brendan because they’ve actually been in the paper sometimes. So there you go. Oh no. And you know what, I did survive. It was ugly as hell. But we do survive that. That is true, and that’s one of the great things about America, is that you can fail and fail again and keep going and try until you find some. Things better. What if you don’t know what you want to even do? I find a lot of the 25 to 35 year olds don’t even have an idea what they want to be when they grow up, which is, I don’t know. I find a lot of 55 year olds that don’t know what they want to be when they grow up, too. What do you say to those people? Yeah, what

45:25 Brendan Keegan : I’d say is, you know, going back to kind of the first part of this segment is, I just asked them, you know, what are things that you’re passionate about? What are things you like, if you if you say, you know, your biggest passion is sports. Well, then, you know, look in the sports profession, you know, what are your skills? And you’re good at data. Well, you know, there’s lots of data jobs in sports. If you say, Boy, you know what, I really like numbers, you know, and and, you know, I really enjoy math. Okay, well, then you know, what type of math do you do? You like? You know, there’s so many jobs in finance and actuary. So you know what I’d say is first, kind of define, what are things that you really like, what are our industries that you like? So for me, I’ve always said it’s less about what the company actually does that’s important to me, and what’s the impact I can have on the company, and who are the people I get a chance to work with. So I’ve been in very different industries, from technology to financial services to marketing services, and now I’m in commercial fleet, but when I look at what’s been similar across all those they’ve all had great opportunities to transform an industry, and I’ve loved working with the people in all of the companies so but that’s where my passion is. There are other people their passion is. They just are technologists. They love technology. Then I say, you know, get in bed. You go look for opportunities in deep technology companies. And some people say, I’m not sure what I like. And I don’t believe that. I don’t believe that at all. If I gave you a piece of paper said, write down five things that you like, someone could say, well, you know, I like food. Okay, well, guess what? There’s an entire restaurant industry, culinary industry, hospitality industry, somebody writes down, you know, I really like kids. Okay, there’s all sorts of industries where you could be in supporting kids. So what I’d say is, you know, yes, everyone’s passionate about certain things, and the more you can fall in line with your work and a passion, then it’s not going to be work. It’s just going to become your passion. It’s going to become your vocation. It’s going to become your calling, and you’re going to find yourself enjoying work more, and you’re then going to increase your trajectory in your career, because you enjoy it more than maybe the person sitting next to you.

47:49 Speaker 4 : Tell us about Be fearless, yeah.

47:52 Brendan Keegan : So, you know, be fearless is a little like movement I started on just, kind of just, and, you know, it kind of tailed off of my my first book, when I put together and it’s just, you know, hey, go, go, try some things. So I’ll give an example. When I joined merchants fleet, we had three business heads, and I said to them all, okay, in your in my first 90 days, I want you to start two new businesses, to start them, and it’s okay if one fails. And I got to tell you all three of them really wrestled with the second half. They’re like, well, you know, you’re saying that, but you don’t really mean, you know, you’re our new CEO. If I go start two businesses and one of them fails, like, you know, I just don’t think there’s that you’re going to, you know, come performance review season, you’re going to be a big fan of mine. I said, Well, guys, you can’t start two businesses, you know, in a relatively short order of time and have them both be successful. You just can’t, you know, just you’re not. And also, if I say you can’t fail, then you’re not going to start one in 90 days at 108 days. You’re going to take a full year, year and a half, two years before you really get a business going. So one of them, we said, let’s go in the truck rental business. Okay? And it was the 90th day, and the person said, we’re gonna go in the truck rental business. A great. How many trucks have you got on order that we can rent? Well, I haven’t got to that yet. Well, that afternoon, we actually ordered 500 trucks. And I told them, great, we’re in the truck rental business. You now have 90 days to get these 5500 trucks on on rent. But that’s where that person although they said they were going to start a truck rental business, their fear of, Am I really going to start it? I haven’t put in any orders, and you can’t, if you don’t have trucks, you don’t have a truck rental business. So in that instance, what I was able to do for him is push him through his fear by simply placing an order for the trucks. So they came in, and now we were in the truck business. I’ll tell you, that was four years ago, and we now have 6000 trucks on rent across North America. But the person that I talked about that had that FUD early on, he really faced his fearlessness, and now I love watching him go around the company and tell others, Hey, be fearless. Make a decision. Situation, it’s okay if it’s wrong. That was not his mentality four or five years ago, four or five years ago. It was, I’ve got to do all the analysis. I’ve got to figure out exactly what cities. I got to figure out exactly what truck and I told him, if you try to figure all that out, you know, one, you’re only going to be 50% right. And two, it’s going to take a year. Let’s just get it started and get moving. And I really, you know, look at what that as an example of once you unshackle people from maybe their own fears, maybe some of the uncertainty they have in their abilities, or the doubt they have that they’re the person to lead it, once you’re able to take that off, literally, there is no limit on what people can do.

50:40 Jim Beach : So now it seems you have enough money to invest in play things. Tell us about United Auto sports, one of the largest UK based f1 racing companies, right? Yeah, yeah.

50:57 Brendan Keegan : So they’re now they’re in World Endurance Championship. So, like one of my what’s very interesting is, since I’ve said, I grew up watching Magnum PI and I remember sitting there watching him, like the new version. I don’t, I don’t get into the new one either. I can’t. So, you know, I grew up, you know, Malcolm’s red 308, GTs, Ferrari. And I said, Someday I’m going to have one of those. And I set a goal I was going to have one. So I’ve always liked sports cars, and I happen to be in a commercial fleet business now, which is around cars. Up until five years ago, I had never, ever been in any type of industry around vehicles. So I always liked cars, and I like going to races. I really got pulled into f1 the Netflix series. If you haven’t watched that drive to survive, I can tell you, my wife’s not a race fan. She watched that now she’s as big a race fan as I am. So I’ve always enjoyed that. And then, you know, we have a partnership with McLaren, their CEO, Zach Brown owns. He had owned a big portion of United Auto with his high school friend, Richard Dean and and I got a chance to work with them and come in as an owner. So now, you know, my, my role with the company as an owner and advisor is, you know, how do we grow it from Europe, you know, globally, and how do we make it bigger? And how do we make United Auto more successful? So it’s really just fueling, you know, my passion for cars and into the business world and a little bit more of what I what I talked about, if you do things that you enjoy, generally speaking, you’re going to be better at them than most very true.

52:35 Jim Beach : How do we find out more about you? Follow you online, listen to your podcast. Get a copy of the FUD book.

52:43 Speaker 4 : Yeah. Oh, so

52:44 Brendan Keegan : you know, fun factor. It’s on Amazon, Barnes and Noble. It’s currently, I’ve got a lot of people sending me pictures from different airports. I guess it’s in airports right now, but it’s on Amazon. It’s on Kindle, Barnes and Noble. Every you can follow me at Brendan P keegan.com I’ve got a website where you can subscribe. I send out a newsletter once or twice a month. I’m on LinkedIn. I’ve got a newsletter I send out through through LinkedIn. And there, it’s Brendan P Keegan. And then I put a decent amount of content up on Instagram, and I’m VPK fearless there, but you know, and as I tell everyone, feel free to reach out. You know, just yesterday, I met with the young entrepreneur who was looking at his question was, how do you raise capital? I do reply to all requests that come in and do my best to help people overcome their fear, uncertainty and doubt. So thank you for asking.

53:39 Jim Beach : Well, we appreciate you being with us very much. Thank you so much, and hope you’ll come back.

53:45 Brendan Keegan : All right, Jim, thanks again. And really enjoyed time with your great guy.

53:49 Jim Beach : Oh, thank you very much. Likewise, enjoyed the conversation, and we have a great day. Bye. Now you.