Passing The Torch #04: Finding the human side with Peter Murphy

Marcos Bravo: Hello everyone, and welcome to episode four of Passing the Torch the podcast by Growth Mentor, us being in Episode Four means that we are already part of the 60% of podcasts that really make more than three episodes. That means we’re making or we’re doing something good. Today I’m going to be talking with Mr. Peter Murphy. Peter is someone I consider to be almost a fellow Chilean. He has an incredible story of how he navigated through many different kinds of businesses, before finding a position in something that I consider to be a niche in the long-term care business, if you want to call it that way. But I’m gonna let him tell the story, I want to remind you to subscribe to our podcast, subscribe to all of our social media channels. And without further ado, let’s take it away. 

Marcos Bravo: All right, Peter. Well, great to have you here. I already mentioned a few things about you during the intro. I mean, we’re basically both from the same country sort of. And we’re gonna be talking about like, what well what you’re doing and a little bit of the relationship with that you have with growth mentors, how you ended up there, what did you learn? What are you teaching? And of course, we wanted to gain from the stuff that you’re doing with LTC here. So let’s take it away, man. 

Peter Murphy: Now, where do you want me to start?

Marcos Bravo: I want you to introduce yourself, just say a little bit of I know a lot of you. But I want you to explain where you come from, where you going, where you are, and basically that. Let’s start with it.

Peter Murphy: I’ll start with what I think is the important part. I am the Father of an amazing six-year-old son named Quinton, I’m married to an amazing Chilean woman that I’ve been with for about 13 years. And everything else is secondary. My life, probably the way that people would define me professionally or even personally would be a person with a diverse amount of interests. So you know, I started off in Kansas, went to high school in Missouri, went to college in Boston, moved to Chile for my master’s, and Ph.D. started my first company in Chile when I was 27. That really took off and grew to four different cities, and moved back to the US in 2019. With my family, and now I’m working in long-term care work as a consultant, and board member on a couple of different institutions and in love with communities like growth mentor, that’s probably my closest, my best introduction.

Marcos Bravo: That’s quite it’s quite an introduction, especially from my side. I mean, I met Peter through growth mentor, but I knew about the stuff he was doing in Chile because I’m from Chile, obviously. And the story is that the oldest stuff that he did there, you will find it I’m gonna add all the links into the description of this video. So you see what he’s talking about. So I’m just gonna move on to the mentoring part, right? Because we all end up and at growth mentor somehow for different reasons. But how was your experience what did you come for help? Did you offer your help? How do you end up in growth mentor?

Peter Murphy: I don’t remember how I found growth mentor but I found growth mentor as a mentee first. And I remember when I first reached out to Foti, the founder, I thought that it was a scam because I thought that the amount of value that he was promising from the school like a well-configured, well-vetted, community of kind coaches seemed too good to be true and to inexpensive. And then once when I met him, I’m like, No, this, this guy’s just building and there’s a lot of altruism in this. I signed up the very next day as a mentee. The reason I came in was, I have spent the first 39 years of my life in the b2c world, so business to customer business to clients. So basically selling products directly to someone without there being a bunch of decision makers in there. And when I got into healthcare, became the VP of Marketing at a healthcare software company. One I’d never sold software to had never sold enterprise software three had never sold to, you know, five decision-makers, and selling software that somewhere between 50 to $150,000 a year was different than selling bicycle tours, walking tours, or even doing a TV show. So I needed to be skilled up or very fast and I booked I bet you I booked probably five to 10 calls a month from about December 2020 till about February 15, 2021. For about two months I used it. Yeah, I used it like I was preparing for a marathon. I think I met everyone, including the founding mentors. I think I met all of them. And soon thereafter, once I knew where I was in the healthcare space, I reached out to Foti. And I said, I want to be a mentor, and I want to pay back everything I got. So my incubator phase as a student was about two and a half months, three months, and then moved over. And now I play both roles. I do probably book about two or three calls a month as a mentee. And I probably do about six to 10 calls a month as a mentor.

Marcos Bravo: Oh, wow, that’s quite a lot. But because I’m right now, I’m not doing many. But the fact that you went from a mentee, and you felt ready to become a mentor like he likes to bring your experience into other people’s. But how did you feel? Or when was the moment that you say, You know what, I can do this because I have a lot to give, or I love to say, was it that or you felt that you had a lot of experience that you wanted to share? Was it more like something that you wanted to do? Or it’s just like, right, well, I can do it.

Peter Murphy: I mean, I think I knew right away from the beginning that I was going to be a good if not great mentor, I belong to other communities, where the premise isn’t based around coaching or mentoring like growth mentor, but the role or the value that I give inside of that is similar to what I give inside of growth mentor. So I’ve had probably 100 to 150 International interns come through my travel company in South America. And I had taken entry-level liberal arts students who are studying Spanish, and they’re from France, and I taught them how to become a very good marketer within three to five months by engaging them empowering them setting SOPs, creating systems. So I knew that I would be able to do the mentor side. I just needed that same thing when I first got into healthcare.

Marcos Bravo: I remember one of the goals that we had and I had with you, it was about this new product does not encourage anymore, but this project that you had with LTC, here’s when at the time when you mentioned it, I couldn’t understand the market because it was it’s such a unique market. And it’s not a niche because there’s plenty of money around the market. But you totally created something that changed the way people communicate in the market. Can you tell me a little bit more about the LTC hears what you build for me is impressive, and I love it.

Peter Murphy: Yeah, so LTC heroes means long-term care for anyone who’s not in health care. That means long-term care is almost anything that is not a primary care doctor in a hospital. So when generally speaking, people call it a nursing home, but it’s a little bit bigger than that. And when I got into that space was right in the middle of COVID. So I couldn’t go into a nursing home for obvious reasons, because of the pandemic. So the best way for me to be able to help our customers and our prospects was to interview smart people about what they were doing and turn that into evergreen material so that the rest of the industry can continue to improve upon the way that they were delivering care. And that LTC heroes was a pretty good fit for me, because you know, this Marcos, I have a TV show in South America. And the premise of the show is not about me, it’s about the people that I interview as their heroes. So I just took the format that I had from South America, which is to interview people in a unique way that makes them realize that they are they’re contributing human elements to the show, and doing the exact same thing with the podcast just without the video. And so what that means from LTC Heroes is I interview nursing home owners, certified nurses aides, dieticians, maintenance people, people who are trying to make a difference in American senior living in turn them into heroes, and it really took off within three months. I got crest credentials to the most important healthcare technology convention for five days, and I got to take the podcast there and interview all of the leaders I mean, interviewed the most important executive from Zoom which you and I are currently using, to on the podcast within the first five months. And then since then, I’ve interviewed the CEO of the American Healthcare Association, the CEO of leading age, which is the nonprofit, and almost every top, you know, top 50 faces of long-term care. They’ve been on the podcast, so it’s really really grown. 

Marcos Bravo: What surprises me is that you created a podcast in the middle of what I mean when there were millions of podcasts and everybody was making a podcast at that time. And you thought of applying the podcast format into a business that didn’t have one eye at least I don’t know if there’s anyone else doing media for long-term care like yours Going wasn’t unique or as you said, like, right, well, let’s try what work in other companies or in other fields. And let’s see if you’re working here.

Peter Murphy: So I think that there were probably one or two other podcasts. To be honest, I don’t consume a lot of podcasts in my niche, I consume, you know, business development, like innovation or even self-help. So I don’t really know what my competitors cover in their podcasts. What I do know that makes us unique, because I hear this from people when I go to conventions is that LTC Heroes is told and more kind of an authentic human story type of feel, which is similar to similar to the TV show in South America. So that, you know, you might think that you know, if I were interviewing you, Marcos, you might think that I’m going in to talk about how you just acquired 50 new nursing homes in the state of Florida. But actually, you and I ended up talking about how long-term care impacts you as a musician, and that the guitar that you have behind you bought you received as a gift from a senior that you were taking care of in Pennsylvania, and we don’t actually talk about mergers and acquisitions. 

Marcos Bravo: You ended up making it up about the human behind the business, basically. I think that’s what makes it different right now in business is people are tired of the business story they want to hear like, right, who built this, why they built this. And that goes with my next question because we started talking, you mentioned that this was your first time as the VP of Marketing for a company like this, and you went for a software company, right? So you went for it? And how was the beginning? How was your setup? Okay, here I am with a computer. What do I do? First? I know you have marketing experience, but how did you take the first steps into it?

Peter Murphy: So we were re-scaling or re-skilling up our marketing team and our revenue team inside of our company, we were rebranding, and starting over with a brand new team. So I was pretty clear from the beginning that I didn’t want to use my brain on the production side, or even the prospecting or pitching side, I wanted to focus my energy on solving either industry problems or business problems inside of our organization. So I immediately hired a podcast agency, and some people were like, Well, why would you pay $3,000 to $4,000, to do the pitching the prospecting, the editing, the post-production, and the social media for you if you could have saved a lot of money, well, I knew I needed if I started with that for three or six months, I could fire that team afterward and do it all on my own. But I needed to focus the first six months on showing up and understanding problems instead of paying attention to my sound adjusted. Was my audio Correct? Was my green screen set up correctly? What if this person shows up and I don’t actually want to interview them? That I outsourced all of that. 

Marcos Bravo: So right now you’re doing DC heroes? On your own you do everything?

Peter Murphy: No, I still work with the agency, simply because the return on investment with the way that they do things is amazing. So I just show up to calls. Most of the time every once in a while I’ll handpick some people that I want to be on the program.

Marcos Bravo: Because I have to say, I mean, the production level, it changed from the beginning to now I mean, you like he’s way more advanced, it looks like almost like a TV show right now.

Peter Murphy: I would say probably there are three main things to that one is a certain percentage of the podcast, I don’t actually put on, you know, like Spotify, or Google podcasts or whatever. Those are just live streams and for that software, I use stream yard and that works really well. And it looks well done. It kind of looks like ESPN Sports Center. That’s one. The second one is I just feel more comfortable, right? Like when is like Marcos, if I threw you into an industry tomorrow, let’s say you know like you’re gonna work in construction. And you have to do a podcast on construction. You might feel so insecure talking about foundations and contractors. Well, that’s how I felt for the first year I was around these people who have been working in post-acute care in the United States and in technology for 10 to 30 years. And I was this guy who ran a bicycle tour company in South America. I had so much impostor syndrome, that it showed up in all of my interviews. 

Marcos Bravo: But I and believe me, yours is one of the few podcasts I also follow especially because I like the way you handle the human side. But I think that sort of I don’t know much about what I’m talking about here made it even more authentic. That’s you asking the real questions. That’s you asking what you really care you’re a sociologist right? What are your studies on?

Peter Murphy: My studies background in Spanish and sociology and then my postgraduate in political science So nothing related to health care. 

Marcos Bravo: But you do know people. 

Peter Murphy: I do know people.

Marcos Bravo: And I think that that one makes a difference in the way you feel your bookcase specifically. So let me go back in time to the time that you were in Chelas, because I don’t get it.

Peter Murphy: Let me add one thing too, because I think it’ll it’ll make sense to you. Why my podcast is different, or why is my purchase different I attribute this to my parents. My parents taught me from a very young age, and I actually have this conversation with my six-year-old probably once, once a month, or once every other month. The person that you are with needs to feel that they are the most important person in the room. There’s no real reason that you need to ever tell them. I know if someone says something smart to you about a date or about how to do something. You never need to say, Yeah, I know that or Yes, I did that. You need to say, Wow, cool, interesting, that person needs to feel that they are learning that you’re learning from them. My parents always taught me that. So as long as I’m not the expert in the room, just because I have a microphone in front of me that format would work. And I think it’s replicable to anybody. Like if you and I were forced to do a construction podcast in China, I’m pretty sure you and I could do it. If we follow that format. Marcos. Sorry, you’re gonna go to Chile?

Marcos Bravo: Nope. I believe that. And I think I think I learned that too. When my kids. I remember saying that I know. I know. And seeing their face almost destroyed is like, Oh, my God, like, I came with my like, and I completely changed my mindset. I’m like, no, no, no, sorry. Like, I want you to tell me what you discover. Because I really want to learn from you from your perspective. And you’re right, I think it makes a massive difference. So yeah, going because I wanted to go back to Chile for a bit because, um, I want you to explain sort of how this journey of entrepreneurship shapes your vision right now or what you do right now. And let’s start with the La Bicicleta Verde. Right. That was your first business. So how did you end up I and I could bet yours was one of the first ones to be properly advertised. I think I don’t remember thinking in Chile is not the best place to rent a bicycle, for sure. So for you to start something like that, like how that happened. Let’s go through that journey a little bit.

Peter Murphy: So the short version is I had just started my Ph.D. at the Catholic University there. And I was a full-time professor at the University of Chile, you know, so I was spending 40 to 60 hours a week as an academic, and I wasn’t making much money. And I realized that academia, I can’t speak for academia, the rest of the world, but academia and Chile, your first 20 years is filling up coffee for a lot of people, and then writing papers and somebody else putting their name on it and saying that they wrote it with you. And, so I knew that it wasn’t going to have the creativity nor the autonomy that I needed. So I applied to a bunch of jobs to work out after my job at the University of Chile as a professor, I applied to work different jobs from five o’clock till nine o’clock, and nobody would even consider me because I just looked like this stuck-up academic who didn’t know how to do anything in the private world. So I was forced to create my own company and the only company that I could think of that I knew that I could do better than any Chilean right away was something in English and something in travel because hospitality in Chile, when I moved there in 2005, or 2004 was really subpar. Hospitality in Chile has gotten a lot better because immigrants, like Venezuelans and Colombians, have made improvements that have made hospitality a lot better. But we are really bad at making people feel welcome in our country for the first couple of years. So when I walked in with Spanish, or when I walked in with English and I walked in with hospitality, I knew that I could grow to hack any travel company faster than any Chilean and although I chose a really small niche, like Bicicleta Verde it grew into other niches that were much more profitable right away and you were right, like we hit marketing on the spot. When we started basically they were, as far as I know, there weren’t any other travel companies that had their name and Spanish. They were all in English and Chileans, especially upper-class clans want everyone to think that they speak another language that their family was from a different background that their ancestors are from France, or that their ancestors are from Germany. Well, we specifically said, Who cares about my ancestors? I’m going to speak in Spanish and the people who come to our country want to learn Spanish and they want to meet Chilean so we’re going to speak the language with the name of our company in Spanish. And you know, that got us on the front page of the New York Times. We got a New York Times twice. We had customers like Beyonce and Paul McCartney and Aerosmith. All of those people have come into our office and so our branding took us off really quickly.

Marcos Bravo: That I think it was actually at that time and I remember reading about it and even for me it was like okay, well, that’s very unique because otherwise Yeah, and any other gringo would call it Murphy’s bikes or whatever. And you did a great job and then how the TV show came like the TV show I missed it. But I find out because one of my friends used to work a thing and one Manuela Warto. He used to work there, and he started posting about like, I keep less regular Peter and blah, blah, blah. And I started checking out and it was, it was what it was missing at that time. I mean, now there are plenty of shows similar, but maybe, maybe we just got to use Saturday. But how did you end up from like your venture into, like in front of the TV?

Peter Murphy: So every springtime in Chile, which is about September, October, November, all of the popular TV channels come around, and they find what is up and coming in the summer. And they would always knock on our door at basically Bicicleta Verde and say, Hey, what do you get going on? New? Are you going to the new vineyard? Are you new to doing a new cultural tour? And we would say, Yeah, we’re doing this and they say, can we come out and film? So in those three months, you know, five to 15 channels would come through and do small little pieces of press on us two minutes, five minutes, 60 seconds, whatever. One of those programs was a little bit different and was called Vuelta Avanancana for anybody in English. That means like, let’s do a loop around the neighborhood. And they specifically asked me to show off my favorite neighborhood where I lived in Santiago called Recoleta. And they had me do it on a bicycle. So that program wasn’t five minutes. Rather, that program was like 15 minutes, which is a full day of filming. So like 12 hours of filming gives you about 15 minutes of TV. And on that specific day when I was filming, at lunchtime, one of the bosses showed up and started having lunch and asked a lot of questions. I’m like, That’s odd. I’ve never had a boss show up when I’m doing the recording. And I think what happened was, the person either wanted to get a feel for how we were doing or the person heard from one of the kinds of co-directors, hey, this might be somebody who can do their own program. And he reached out to me about five days later, asked me to go out to dinner and drinks with them, and said, hey, what if we do a program just with you? And I said, let’s call it a Keto struggle, Peter, which in English means like, like, I’m bringing my A game or on the best you ever gonna see. But it’s ironic, right? It’s making fun of me because I can’t do the jobs well.

Marcos Bravo: But I love that I love the approach because I mean, well, like most Latin American countries, we always like, to look good to the foreigners, right? We have this thing that we want to impress them so that the format of the show was incredible. And again, I’m going to add that link. So you guys at home can watch it just to start closing a little bit of conversation because I know you have a tighter schedule. What I want to ask you is what will be the journey that you. I mean, all journeys are different, but what do you recommend people to take or what’s the road that you think is more optimum for entrepreneurs to just study a lot? Isn’t that just failing a lot trying to like what worked for you, and what’s something that you would recommend and the mentoring call, for example?

Peter Murphy: I have a strong opinion on this, I don’t have a strong opinion about what you shouldn’t do. Because there might be something that works for you that wouldn’t work for me. But I can tell you that if I were to start all over again, or, you know, my son came to me and he was 22 years old and said, Hey, what should I do? I’m pretty strong about having a very frank conversation with a founder bits a size of a team of somewhere between, you know, two and 15 employees that are already making money, so that you don’t have to worry about getting paid at the end of the month, reaching out to that person and saying, Hey, I’m willing to work on the cheap. And I’ll do 50 to 75% of my tasks following SOPs and doing trivial mundane work, but I want to be mentored and I want to be coached up. And I want to know that when you have your next hire for someone big, I want to apply for that. So I want to basically move from an intern of $500 a month to be either the sales manager or the CMO or the project manager at your next hire. And I find that young entrepreneurs who are at that size the company, like go-getters, don’t really care about your resume. So if I were giving advice to myself again, I would say, Peter, you don’t need to go to college, go to any college, the cheapest, and just finish it and learn how to write, learn how to think read philosophy, sociology, talk to your teachers get mentored by your teachers. Don’t worry about what school you’re going to if you want to be an entrepreneur, find a young Marcos who’s 28 and already has a product that works or already has a service that sells, and say hey, Marcos, I want to be your intern. I want to learn how to do WordPress, I want to learn how to do email copy. I want to work five hours a week under your ads person. I want to go to your strategic planning meeting. And the next time you fire someone I want you to record it will you share it with me and tell me how to hire fire and skill up I think if you have that conversation nine out of 10 smart entrepreneurs will take that person under your wing.

Marcos Bravo: I really liked that this whole learning. I mean, that’s the only way to grow really just to learn. Having this sort of journey that goes beyond just gonna show up and say, like I want the position of VP now is a journey in the road, and applying, like you said from scratch in order for you to learn to fall to get up and keep learning and hopefully get promoted from within, I think is one of the best advice I’ve heard. So, Peter, one more time. And thank you so much for joining us today, I’m going to add all of the details so you can watch what Peter’s doing and some of his old ventures. Do you still have the Bicicleta Verde?

Peter Murphy: Selling it right now to my business partner? 

Marcos Bravo: All right. So if you ever go to Chile, make sure you go to the security of everything, you’ll you will not be disappointed. Peter, man, thank you so much for joining us. And we’ll see you around for sure, man.

Peter Murphy: My pleasure, nice background.

Marcos Bravo: It was it was great to have a chat with Peter. I think we were it was good to hear about his adventures in my homeland, my motherland. But also to see how much he grew from studying this little bike rental into becoming a VP of Marketing for a huge it’s weird to say a huge niche. But that’s basically what it is. It is it’s an industry, and he’s leading the way they communicate. So I’m super proud and super happy. Okay, now we’re gonna do our swoop. And I want to bring the three things that I really, really took with me from this conversation. So Okay, the first thing that really caught my attention was the fact that Peter never stopped doing things. He does everything he puts his family first, absolutely. But he’s always creating new ideas have new businesses, and when he started with this bike rental on to become now a BP of a huge industry, really, I mean, is something that is growing and growing. And he’s leading the way that communication. This takes me to point number two. He’s leading it because he’s focusing on the human side. And that makes a huge difference. People really want to hear about the human behind the industry, who are the people building these things, and who are the people putting their heart into what you can see as a very unique industry, which is long-term care. And the last piece of advice that he gave is something I want to reiterate again, just take the chances if you want to become very good at something, start from the bottom, but go and take that chance. As someone, please let me learn from you. And I bet you I will be your right hand in a very short time, I will learn everything that I need to know because it’s part of my passion. And because I want to learn, and I want to become part of the industry. So if I have to sort of repeat his advice is just to take the chance, take that internship start from the bottom do whatever it takes for you to enter an industry that might be hard to get in there. But if you strategize your way in the can make a huge difference. So those three things really made my day with our conversations. Let’s finish this swoop. And that’s it. I mean, it’s great to finish this episode four on such a positive note. I also would like to remind you to subscribe to our podcast, we really appreciate all of the views, and listen and follow our social media channels. Try to start a conversation with us because we were always there to reply to you. Very much looking forward to our new episodes. This episode five coming in a couple of weeks. So we hope to see you there. And we’re not much more to say. Thank you again for coming. Thank you for watching. My name is Marcos and this was passing the torch. See you next time. Cheers.