Fit Happens: The Executive Search Podcast

Jason Baumgarten 00:00
Jason. I'm Jason Baumgarten and you're listening to Fit Happens, the podcast where top leaders, investors and board directors share the stories, surprises and hard earned lessons behind finding the right fit. Let's get into it.
Jason Baumgarten 00:18
Hi, this is Jason Baumgarten and you're listening to another episode of Fit Happens. Today. I'm delighted to be here with my friend and CEO of Wilkatika Resorts, Terry Cumes. Terry is also the author of a just released book called Special Guests, which is a fabulous read. We'll talk more about both of these things and his incredible career as we get into it.
Jason Baumgarten 00:39
Terry, welcome to the podcast.
Terry Cumes 00:39
Thanks, Jason. Great to be here.
Jason Baumgarten 00:44
You're in Peru now?
Terry Cumes 00:45
I am.
Terry Cumes 00:46
I'm sitting here at Wilkatika in the Sacred Valley in the middle of the Andes in Peru.
Jason Baumgarten 00:46
And for all the listeners out there, you went to two of the most prestigious institutions on earth. You were living in the cradle of Silicon Valley. You're working in the intersection of technology and education. And you did something a lot of people think about doing, but not a lot of people do, which is you relocated very far away to a very remote place to do this incredible role.
Jason Baumgarten 01:14
Tell us a little bit of that story and how you got to make that decision that it was the right thing for you.
Terry Cumes 01:14
Yeah, well, this is a family business, so it was always in the back of my mind. My mother moved to Peru 32 years ago and built a small retreat center that she named Wilkatika, which means sacred flower in Quechua, which is the language spoken here in the Andes. And so she started building, not really planning on running a hospitality business, but because she'd like to build and to garden and she liked Peru. And then my wife and I always had this idea that we might move back and take it over.
Terry Cumes 01:46
And then a few things happened around 2018 that inspired us that this was the right time to make the switch, both because of where we were in our careers, because where my mother was, and because of our kind of interest in exploring this opportunity and pursuing it. And so in 2018, we moved down to Peru. So we've been here eight years.
Jason Baumgarten 02:11
And as you thought about that from a career perspective, what did you start to put together around your superpowers to realize that this was the right thing for you to do?
Terry Cumes 02:15
Well, I'd worked in hospitality, so before business school, I was in France running logistics for a company called Backroads Active Travel, which many of our classmates from Stanford are probably customers of now, loved hospitality.
Terry Cumes 02:32
My first job when I was in Berkeley undergrad, was a tour guide. So I always liked that idea. I studied Spanish. I knew Peru. So I had some idea of my superpower being hospitality and people and travel.
Terry Cumes 02:45
But I didn't know that I would be able to put all these different skills together and run a wellness retreat center. That wasn't really clear until probably a few years ago.
Jason Baumgarten 02:45
I will say, for anyone listening, the number one thing I learned from you about leading tours is when somebody says, well, how much longer do we have? You would always magically say, oh, just a little further. Just a little.
Jason Baumgarten 03:05
You had a line, and it would give you just enough hope that the pain and suffering would end shortly, that you'd sort of put one foot beyond the other, and then you'd say, oh, Terry, how much longer? You say, just a little bit longer. Just the next tree, the next ridge. And whenever I'm on a hike with someone, I'm like, just a little bit longer.
Terry Cumes 03:23
Well, that's funny you say that.
Terry Cumes 03:24
That's a joke in Peru, because in Peru, people ask, how far or how long? The answer is always aquisita no mas, like, just a little bit more. So I must have translated that directly from Spanish.
Jason Baumgarten 03:39
I try to channel you regularly when I've got a group going anywhere.
Terry Cumes 03:39
I think it's actually appropriate. Even when it's not a physical thing, when it's like a mental task, like, just a little bit longer.
Jason Baumgarten 03:54
When you transitioned, you had a very different workforce. I mean, you'd been used to working with folks in Berkeley and Palo Alto.
Jason Baumgarten 03:54
And what were the big leadership lessons of moving to the Sacred Valley and having a very different kind of employee base? I know they've been very loyal and with the organization for decades, but what translated and what didn't, as a leader?
Terry Cumes 04:22
Yeah, I had to unlearn a lot of lessons that I learned in business school. I think that was the first thing. I knew that not everything that we learn in the business world applies directly to running a wellness center in the Andes.
Terry Cumes 04:22
But took some time to unlearn a few things, like trying to control. I actually worked in multicultural environments and always taught cultural competency and global skills training. So I thought I went there knowing how to work in different cultures. But this is a culture of Quechua people, indigenous people of the Andes, which is why my mother was drawn to Peru, because of their traditions and their spirituality. And so they speak Quechua.
Terry Cumes 04:44
Spanish is their second language. If they speak English at all, it's their third language. So there's a big cultural shift there and things, you know, talking about key deliverables and metrics and systems and evaluation. All these things have to be reframed completely and in many ways unlearned before you can effectively lead people down here. And those are some of the fun stories I think that I write about in my book, is how I had to come to grips with the inadequacies of my education and training and relearn them in a different context.
Jason Baumgarten 05:13
And what did you find was universal? What translated?
Terry Cumes 05:13
Well, you know, loyalty. We have a staff of people who've been with us for 25 years. And I remember in HR class they would talk about intrinsic versus extrinsic motivation.
Terry Cumes 05:27
We try to pay well, but we really know that to motivate people, it's loyalty and pride and their family. I mean, these are the values that our staff care about. And I think I pretty quickly figured out that if I was going to keep a family business going for another generation of 25 people who have been working with us for decades, I needed to understand that family business most important to them and values that they care about and not compensation or bonus plans or performance reviews.
Jason Baumgarten 06:04
So that was more obvious, I think, in the beginning. We had Jennifer Wallace, who wrote Mattering, on a few episodes ago, and she talked a lot about this reality of people want to matter.
Jason Baumgarten 06:04
I mean, yes, you need to pay people fairly and you need to give people what they need economically, but you can give people all those things and then if they don't feel like they matter, you've actually lost them. So I was very touched reading the book about how you talk about keeping the team on during COVID and all the little things that you've done over the years to make them really feel like they matter. And I remember one story where you're talking about a very specific employee and difficulty and sort of, you know, do you get his advice? Do you not get his advice? What will motivate him?
Jason Baumgarten 06:34
And I was reflecting on some of the work she shared as well about how do you make people feel like they matter at work? And that is definitely a very universal, cross cultural truth.
Terry Cumes 06:48
Yeah, yeah.
Jason Baumgarten 06:48
How have you thought about community?
Jason Baumgarten 06:49
You obviously have a very unique community. And one of the things I loved about the book and anyone out there, please grab a copy. But it is. The guest stories are fabulous. I mean, that is one of the trademarks, is just all the amazing stories, some a little bit horrifying.
Jason Baumgarten 07:03
I definitely had a few moments of like, I can't believe that. And then you'd have one where you're like, oh, that was really sweet. It definitely brought back some PTSD of bad vacationing. But community, when you're that far away, can be very hard.
Jason Baumgarten 07:16
And one of the things we think about in finding people's fit and how do you make sure you fit is how do you fit in with a community, whether it's friends, et cetera? What advice would you give somebody who's contemplating a very significant relocation, whether that's geographic or cultural, in terms of finding your own community around you or building community around you?
Terry Cumes 07:44
Yeah, it's hard. And I've had experience doing it in several countries in my career. I lived in France for three years, in Mexico and Spain, and each time, it gets harder to build community.
Terry Cumes 07:52
As you get older, it gets harder. Peru is a wonderful, warm and inviting place, but people who live here often are transient, and they come through for months or a year, and they leave. We are lucky in that our family is our staff. They've been with us, and they are all related, by the way, so they are literally family.
Terry Cumes 08:03
They live with us. They are community. We are very close to them. My mother still is with us. She's retired, but she lives here with us.
Terry Cumes 08:10
My wife, who's also a Stanford graduate, is here with me and is my best friend and partner. And then we have friends, you know, people like yourself who come down and visit. And it seems like every month there's someone coming from the States to visit us. So we feel like we're in close contact. Zoom calls helped a lot during the pandemic, and we go back a few times a year, so we don't have the same network of friends and community that we have back home, but we have something else that's in very many ways, very rich.
Terry Cumes 08:37
And there's actually a word in Quechua for community. It's called ayllu. And one of the things that we teach here is, you know, how to work with a community and a family unit. And so we're immersed in community all the time. But I would be lying if I said I don't miss my friends back home, and I don't miss things about the Bay Area and the scene, the food, the excitement.
Terry Cumes 08:55
That is stuff that you can't necessarily replicate. We can go to Cusco, which is an hour and a half away, and have a little bit of a city life, and we try to do that once or twice a month. But other than that, yeah, it's a very different experience being here in the mountains.
Jason Baumgarten 09:17
You tell a story in the book about not having a car when you moved and then the journey of acquiring a car, which I will let readers experience on their own.
Jason Baumgarten 09:18
It does make you think a lot about just isolation and how do you find community. And some of the things that help you do it are very practical, like having a car, having the same comfort zone. And then there are other things that are very difficult. A lot of people who want to find themselves or want to figure out what the right fit is need to do some introspection. And I found that a lot of people who want to find themselves or learn more about themselves need an external stimulus, whether that's on one end, read a book or listen to music, on the other end could be traveling to a place that's very special, that takes them out of their daily grind or their daily element.
Jason Baumgarten 09:55
Wilkatika is one of those really special places in the world where you can really forget your normal day to day and be immersed in amazing vegetarian food, amazing gardens, amazing places, the occasional spider, they're harmless, but it's just such a magical place surrounded by a magical place. And I'd be curious, you've now watched so many people come to Wilkatika to learn something about themselves or to experience something different. What have your observations been about that journey of using an external stimulus like travel, like a wellness retreat to do that? And what advice would you give to people who are considering it? What questions should they ask and what would you advise?
Terry Cumes 10:39
Well, the sense of place is key, I think, for doing deep work. And if you're going to retreat, almost inevitably it'll be in a beautiful place for a reason. You know, you were just talking about the lake outside your house and being by the water. Here we have the mountains. So we're actually going to go to a lake tomorrow, but we have to drive a little way to get there.
Terry Cumes 10:56
The mountains are magical here. And you feel at the first moment you land in Cusco at the airport and you're at 11,400ft and you look at the mountains and it's palpable. And so you feel it physically, feel emotionally. Some people feel it very spiritually. The local people, the Quechua people, worship the mountains.
Terry Cumes 11:12
The mountains are their gods and they call them Apus and that is their spirituality, is about reverence for Mother Earth, for Pachamama, for the mountains, for the lakes, for the rivers. And that's something that I think we can all appreciate. Whether you have different ideals of spirituality or you're an atheist, you will still feel connected to Mother Earth, into nature, and when you see it and you feel it and you walk in it, it'll affect you. I've never met a single person who's disagreed with that. So that makes our job a lot easier because the mountains can speak for us.
Terry Cumes 11:40
Now, on top of that, we have our staff, we have our food, we have our beautiful facility, we have our gardens, we have our spa treatments, our programming. But that's all done with the backdrop of the mountains and the magical elements that Peru has. Now we're in the Sacred Valley, which is the heart of what used to be the Incan empire. And so it was chosen for a reason. I mean, this is an empire that went from halfway down Chile all the way up to Colombia.
Terry Cumes 12:03
And they chose this area to grow crops, to build temples, to really have the center of their empire. And there's a reason why they chose it. So it's a special place. Peru itself is a special country with many different amazing topographical, cultural, culinary things to see. And then we have built, I should really say my mother built, garden paradise within that.
Terry Cumes 12:23
So when you come to Wilkatika, even though the Sacred Valley is growing and there's more construction, you still feel sheltered and you feel like you're in a safe container, so that you can do deep work and exploration.
Jason Baumgarten 12:44
So a sense of place is really important and I think it makes our job a lot easier. What would you, beyond choosing the place, what have you seen work for people? They arrive, they experience the place.
Jason Baumgarten 12:44
But whether it's mindset or attitude, I'm sure you've seen people where the minute they walk in, you must go, they're not getting a lot out of this. And then there's others where you just know they're going to get a lot. What differentiates those two?
Terry Cumes 13:02
We're really lucky. I like to joke.
Terry Cumes 13:03
One special, really special in the negative sense. And I'm giving away the book a little bit. One negatively special guest a month. If we're, you know, and that's a lot. Our guests are, we like to say like minded, but that means lots of different things.
Terry Cumes 13:16
They are open. They are here to grow and to learn and to experience Peru. They're generous to our staff. We're lucky. I mean, there are some exceptions, and that's the funner parts of writing the book, are those exceptions.
Terry Cumes 13:26
But I would say someone who comes here needs to be open minded and willing to learn and grow and that's most people who come here. And so if you're open and you're learning, you will grow here and you will find something that you're looking for. It may not be exactly what you're looking for, but you will get something out of it, and it will happen pretty quickly. In a few days, people really feel transformed. And those changes take place over many weeks. So we're lucky.
Terry Cumes 13:50
We're lucky to have this place and to protect it. And people that come here keep coming back. And I think that's the biggest proof, because a lot of us like to check countries off our list, and there are many beautiful countries in Latin America. But Peru does bring people back multiple times, and there aren't a lot of places that do that. You know, we had a leader yesterday here from Costa Rica, and Costa Rica is a spectacularly beautiful country.
Terry Cumes 14:10
And she runs a retreat center, but she keeps coming back to Peru because it has something very unique.
Jason Baumgarten 14:16
And for you, because you're there all the time, do you have moments where you have to pinch yourself and say, wait a minute, I'm back in the grind, running a business, with your teeth. How do you reset given your, you know, you don't have that benefit of arriving with the mountains?
Terry Cumes 14:39
It's a very good question, and I'm glad you asked it, because yesterday I was getting to that point of, oh, God, I'm working so hard. What do I do?
Terry Cumes 14:39
And I get out in the mountains, I get on my mountain bike, and in 20 minutes, you can just be in a pristine location. Right around here, it's busy and crowded. But if you get out 20 minutes and if you're hiking, you know, 40, 50 minutes, but if you're on a bike in 20 minutes, you're out in this beautiful mountain and I watch the sunset and I took a picture of it and I sent it to my friends because it's magical. And I have to remind myself sometimes that the magic is just out the door. But if I'm working hard, which oftentimes I am, I'm looking at the mountain, but I'm not really experiencing it. So I have to force myself to go out and experience it.
Terry Cumes 15:09
And I take my dogs for walks and take guests for walks and try to get out there at least every day or so.
Jason Baumgarten 15:34
And by the way, when Terry says that it's really busy around there, I think most of us probably would not consider it super busy. Tell us a little bit about the hospitality side. So you've been in a lot of different businesses over the years, obviously have spent a lot of time in hospitality. But hospitality is a unique experience.
Jason Baumgarten 15:34
And you have a moment in the book where you're kind of doing something that it's very obvious that as the CEO and the general manager of the business, you really don't need to be doing, but you're doing it anyhow because a guest needs it. And you're down that rabbit hole. And I think we all have this notion that at some point we'll be senior and you can delegate, but then you realize, no, no matter how senior you get, you have to do the work, you have to do the details. But in hospitality, that can be at an extreme. How do you keep that balance?
Jason Baumgarten 16:04
And what lessons would you have for people outside of hospitality that you think you've learned a lot from being in that industry that you wish other industries would learn from and vice versa? What do you wish you could shift?
Terry Cumes 16:23
That's a complex question. The question of boundaries, I think, comes up a lot in the wellness space, because wellness is about taking care of yourself. It's hard to take care of yourself if you don't have clear boundaries.
Terry Cumes 16:27
And so as a leader in that space, I have to have clear boundaries. And back in the corporate world, that meant, okay, making sure that people had time to exercise and be with their families and take vacation. But here it means, you know, hospitality is an energetic exchange. You are sharing your energy with people constantly, and that can be exhausting. And when you knew me 20 years ago, Jason, I was a super extrovert.
Terry Cumes 16:47
Now I would call myself an introvert. So I'm often losing energy during the day while I interact with people. And so I have to figure out what is that point where I need to withdraw, or when is the best impact of my time? When should I chat with guests? At what moment does it make sense for me to sit down with them and ask them how their day is?
Terry Cumes 17:05
Because it will not be good for me if they start to tell me about their trip to Machu Picchu and their flight through Houston, which my wife, by the way, loves those conversations. She will sit and ask everybody how their flight was, and I will just, my eyes will glaze back. I cannot hear it about another person's flight connection. So let me focus on a ceremony they did or let me focus on their intention for why they're here and why they came to Peru. And those are the kinds of topics that are generative for me and for them, and I can add some value. But if I'm just chit chatting and doing small talk, it's exhausting. By the end of the day, I want to run and hide.
Terry Cumes 17:35
And I think anybody who's worked in hospitality would learn that lesson sooner versus later. And I know when I worked at Backroads, that was something I heard a lot of leaders, they would need a week off after they led a group just to recover. And I think here, when we do retreats, we need a few days to recover from that. And that's sometimes at odds with the Silicon Valley culture of on, on, on, never stop working.
Terry Cumes 17:57
If you send an auto reply email, you've somehow failed in your life. And I think there's power in that notion of boundaries.
Jason Baumgarten 18:04
The other practice that you've been doing long before I even met you, you were really like a pioneer amongst my friend group in yoga, and particularly for men doing yoga, because I think we were in the Luddites, share a little bit about your own journey with yoga and what it's meant to you as a leader. How does that impact you to have that practice?
Terry Cumes 18:28
You know, it's about embracing everyone's journey.
Terry Cumes 18:28
So yoga means a lot of different things. And when I started doing yoga, I was 15 and it was a very different practice from what it is for me today. Today it's about having some time to myself to focus on what I'm feeling energetically that day, what I feel I need emotionally. It could be sitting, it could be doing poses, it could be walking. When I was much younger, it was a much more dynamic physical practice.
Terry Cumes 18:51
So it changes. And then there are more people doing more kinds of yoga today than ever before. It continues to grow, which is great for our business because we work mostly with yoga groups and wellness groups. But it is something that I'm encouraged to see growing, even though I may not be the version that I would practice or I may have to. I did a post on social media the other day trying to teach yoga teachers that if they're doing handstands in their class and they have an old lady in the class who can't touch her toes, they're not being a good yoga teacher.
Terry Cumes 19:18
And I have to tell people things that I thought were basic. But, you know, everyone has a different definition. We do aerial yoga now. There's Kundalini yoga, there's breath work. There's so many different versions and I think they're all wonderful.
Jason Baumgarten 19:30
Hold on, you gotta go back. Aerial yoga.
Terry Cumes 19:47
Well, you're the first person to know this. We just built an aerial outdoor yoga space where you can hang from a swing and do restorative yoga poses. And you need a proper teacher who knows how to teach aerial. But it's incredibly restorative, and for those of us with back pain, it's a wonderful thing to hang suspended.
Terry Cumes 19:48
And I got to keep things interesting for myself, too. So I built this this year because I'm like, I want to practice aerial yoga. We're running an aerial yoga retreat in November that I'm super excited about, and my staff's going to do it. Our yoga teachers are going to join us, and my wife's doing it, and we're all excited to hang some swings because as you get older, you need more restorative yoga.
Jason Baumgarten 20:08
I was gonna say it sounds like a traction device.
Terry Cumes 20:08
Yes, it is. It is a traction device. You would love it. A little cervical spacing.
Jason Baumgarten 20:13
That's good, that's good.
Jason Baumgarten 20:13
Exactly. Every time I'm in a yoga class or Pilates class or something, I do think of you as the person who introduced me to yoga when I was, probably when we were in business school, which was over 20 years ago, I was one of the only people doing yoga regularly. And there was also very little talk about meditation, mindfulness.
Jason Baumgarten 20:33
I remember there was a brown bag lunch we had at Stanford where we invited Jack Kornfield, a very famous Buddhist scholar and vipassana teacher, to come to Stanford and speak about meditation. It was part of Jeff Pfeffer's Path to Power, which was totally out of character for him, but he did it and no one showed up. There were, like three of us at the lunch, and I remember feeling so embarrassed. This is one of the big names, especially in the Bay Area, of Buddhism and meditation and mindfulness, and there was no one there. Now, you know, we take Stanford interns every summer, and they're all taking mindfulness classes and learning about wellness, and it's part of the curriculum, which I think is fantastic.
Jason Baumgarten 21:08
And I think yoga has taken a similar trajectory where it was an outlier before, and now it's just ingrained in everything. And, you know, there's parts of that that I might not fully agree with, but most of it I'm pretty happy about.
Terry Cumes 21:32
Yeah, it is powerful also just to find something that gives you, whether it's a meditative space or, you know, some people just exercise to find that if I was more passionate about exercise, I might get that endorphin.
Terry Cumes 21:33
But I said to somebody recently, I don't think I've ever gotten endorphins from exercising. And they looked at me like I was crazy. And I was like, you know, that just isn't me.
Terry Cumes 21:43
I grit through it because I know it's good for me. But I'm never like, oh, I've got a high from working out.
Jason Baumgarten 22:18
You've spent so many years now, I mean, eight years, obviously full time, and then before that for many, many years, around healers and elders and ceremonies that are in many ways about leadership, but not using all the formalized language for leadership. And what's an idea from that world that you wish more Western leaders would adopt or recognize or pick up on?
Terry Cumes 22:18
Yeah, I think that's what I'm really excited about, is I'm seeing it start to happen.
Terry Cumes 22:18
We talk a lot about intuition, and I think you're hearing more and more leaders talk about their intuition without being embarrassed to say it. And there's ways to use your intuition and ways not to use your intuition. And my personal belief is you do both. You do your analysis that you learned in consulting, and then you check in with your inner voice to feel what is the higher wisdom. And if you can use both of those, which is what I was growing up trying to do my whole life, then I think you're adding a huge advantage, whether it's in the boardroom or in the mountains, because you're accessing different wisdom.
Terry Cumes 22:49
And here, what we're teaching people in the Andes is how to access traditional Andean wisdom as it's taught for many hundreds of years, and using modern practices as well as ancient practices like yoga, to tap into that intuition. And so when we do a ceremony here, which in our wellness program, we'll do a ceremony every day, it could be a cacao ceremony, it could be a sound healing ceremony. It could be a lot of different things. And people are asked to think about their intention, what are they working through? And the ceremony gives them a vehicle to experience sensations, insights, wisdom that comes organically or comes sometimes in a very powerful way.
Terry Cumes 23:30
And it helps them make decisions about their purpose in life, their career, their marriage, whatever their legacy is. And the ritual and the ceremony are tools that they can use. And so they can go home, and we always try to help them with their integration when they go home, and they can do similar ceremonies back home.
Terry Cumes 23:47
I mean, you were actually at my wedding, Jason, so you may remember that we had a ceremony at our wedding where we couldn't bring coca leaves because it was Australia, but we brought eucalyptus leaves, and we had people do a little intention setting for us at our wedding. And everyone loved it because you're just taking a moment to pause and think, what do I want for myself, what I want for this couple, what I want for my family, what I want for my career. And by creating space and using ritual and using ancient traditions, those are very powerful experiences and they have lasting implications. And it's hard to do that in the day to day work in a busy life. I remember I worked at an educational company and we would have people take a five minute break to drink water because that's all they would agree to do.
Terry Cumes 24:25
We couldn't get them to do yoga, we couldn't get them to do a walking meeting, but they would agree to, okay, we'll take five minutes and we'll all go drink a glass of water. And that was as much as we could get people to do. So those are the types of things we teach here. And the idea is that you will take those back and use them at home.
Jason Baumgarten 24:43
I'm sure there's people listening right now thinking, oh my God, these guys are nuts.
Jason Baumgarten 24:43
What are they talking about? Good for people who are skeptics who struggle to tap into some of that. Because you've been surrounded by skeptics of some of these things your whole life. Certainly you can't drag somebody into it, but what advice would you tell them to help them shift their mindset or to look at it a little bit differently, to be a little more open minded?
Terry Cumes 25:04
Yeah, it's like meditation. If you tell someone, don't think, just empty your mind, people are going to leave and walk out within 15 minutes. But if you tell them it's okay that you have thoughts, embrace those thoughts and try to acknowledge those thoughts and maybe release those thoughts, they're going to have a lot more fun and a lot more success with meditation. If you tell someone, be open to everything and don't have any suspicion or doubt, they're also going to walk away very quickly.
Terry Cumes 25:30
But if you say, you know what, it's actually great to be critical, to be even a little judgmental. But try to see if you can do it with an open mind and maybe not be as cynical as you would normally be in the office. So if you're going to have the coca leaves read, sure, you don't need to believe everything that the person tells you. In fact, you shouldn't. But listen to what she has to say.
Terry Cumes 25:49
Maybe you'll learn something new. Ask a question, ask a follow up question. If it doesn't make sense to you, have that self inquiry, which is often the first thing people teach you in a meditative or Buddhist practice. Have self inquiry.
Terry Cumes 26:00
If you don't have that, it's really hard to grow and learn. And so I encourage people to be a little cynical and to have an open mind at the same time and to take what works for them and to leave what doesn't. There's no rules in this. And we're a very non dogmatic place here and yoga should be a very non dogmatic practice, as should meditation, as should ritual. It's really what is needed at the time and not what someone tells you you should do.
Jason Baumgarten 26:22
When you think about going back to this decision eight years ago to move full time to Peru, in some ways perhaps it was easier because it was a family business, because you had known it for a long time. But stepping back, it also integrated so many things about your life. Your prior work experience, your passion for different cultures, your passion for yoga and wellness, some of that. Obviously it's impossible to extract and pull apart the braid of what was there because of your mom's creating this center versus what was there. But as you think about other people who might be taking a leap where not everything is going to be obvious, in the book you talk about, well, I'm going to take a two year period and obviously it took a little longer and that's natural.
Jason Baumgarten 27:09
I mean, I think we all sort of make goals and make timelines and naturally things sometimes go much faster than planned, which can be as disruptive as going slower. But as you think about somebody who's contemplating maybe a non obvious decision in some respect with their life, what wisdom would you share, having done something that again, a lot of people may daydream of but not do it?
Terry Cumes 27:46
I think a lot of people don't do it because they overthink it and they overanalyze it. And boldness has magic and power and it is, Goethe said. So at some point you just have to take a leap of faith.
Terry Cumes 27:46
And that's where that intuition, that higher learning, if you have a strong feeling or a pull, we hear people say, oh, I was called to come to Peru. That language can become a little trite after a while. But I do feel like people have a calling and a lot of people have thought about moving, taking their family and living in Portugal for a year and they don't do it. And so kinds of voices that talk to you, at some point you need to listen to them. And that's what the hero's journey is about.
Terry Cumes 28:09
And that's what leadership quests are about, is about listening to that voice and paying attention to it. And it doesn't mean you have to drop everything now and leave. In fact, we encourage people, please don't make any rash decisions when you get back from Peru, don't leave your partner, don't quit your job. Wait a while. But at some point, you can't keep waiting for the perfect time, because the perfect time is not going to come.
Terry Cumes 28:27
And so you have to move and you can't overthink it. And you have to find some way to tap into that wisdom and intuition that you all have, that we all have, to decide what the right thing is. And it will work out, but it will not work out the way you think it should or in the timeline that you want it to. And that was the same that happened with me. You mentioned, we came for two years because that seemed like the right amount of time to turn a business around.
Terry Cumes 28:48
And we hit the pandemic, and we had two years to sit and think about what we wanted to do during the pandemic, which ended up being a very fruitful and magical time. We still talk about those two years where we had no money and we tried to keep our staff employed and we created all these new programs and ceremonies and built things, and it was a wonderful time. And then it took us two years to then recover from that. And now here we are feeling very good about where we are, but eight years later looking in the mirror going, wow, we got a little older.
Terry Cumes 29:15
We're not exactly where we were eight years ago. And also, I don't think I've lived in one home for eight years in my lifetime. So this has probably been the one place I've lived longer than anywhere else in my entire life, which is also saying a lot.
Jason Baumgarten 29:32
I don't remember, but did you go for like a very short period to test it out and commit, or did you just commit?
Terry Cumes 29:32
We committed. We quit our jobs, we rented out our place in Berkeley and we moved down knowing that we still had a place to come back to if we needed to and that we could probably find a job if we needed to. But I'm not, you know, as time goes by, that's become less and less of a concern and probably a reality that we would easily just slip back into life in Silicon Valley. I mean, my wife is still a technology investor, but she's been living in Peru, so she's not doing as many deals down here as she would be doing in Silicon Valley.
Terry Cumes 29:59
And I would probably not go back into ed tech. If I went back to San Francisco, I'd probably do something else. So it's hard to know where life would take you if you went through the other door. But we're happy with this door and it's been very exciting, and I'm glad we took the plunge. And I'm very lucky that my wife was willing to do it with me, because I think that's where it gets tricky. If one person wants to do it, the other person doesn't. So we were lucky in that sense.
Jason Baumgarten 30:31
I loved the notion of power and boldness and following something that feels like it's calling you to do it, and also not doing it impulsively, but not waiting.
Jason Baumgarten 30:31
I've talked a lot about on this podcast, just a limited number of hours and weeks and years we all have. And when we think about it conceptually, it all seems like a lot of time. But when you start thinking about how you spend your days and how you spend your weeks, you can do a lot of things that just sort of push what you actually want in life off to the deferred life. And I remember talking to somebody who said, oh, when my father died, he still had his good clothes wrapped in the closet for when it was good enough to wear. We've all had that with, whether it's good china or the bottle of wine we don't open because it's for a special celebration.
Jason Baumgarten 31:07
And I remember my son went to a ski lesson once. He nicked his ski on a rock, and he was very upset. And the instructor said, it's a tool, not a jewel. I always loved the phrase because I'm sure it came from someone.
Jason Baumgarten 31:20
But this idea that life's about living it, not about observing it so that you can wait to live it in some future state. And I think that's a very powerful concept, but also something that you guys jumped into and did, obviously also made an incredible career. I think for those listening, it's worth noting that Terry and Tristan didn't move to Peru and become ski bums or surf bums. You guys are running an incredible business and you've been on best places to visit and CNN top retreats, and I mean, Wilkatika was always very special, but I think you've turned it into an amazing business, an amazing destination.
Jason Baumgarten 31:59
And I think bringing some of that, while some of the lessons had to be relearned or unlearned, you know, bring some of the experiences you've had to something that could be done a little bit differently. So I give you a lot of credit for, you didn't opt out or check out. You really embraced it as a business challenge and a life challenge, which is special.
Terry Cumes 32:26
Thank you. I think that's what's made it so rewarding is especially for our families, because this is a family business, and I have three siblings.
Terry Cumes 32:28
And so they need to understand that this isn't just me hanging out in Peru, having a good life. This is me building a business that's going to be a legacy for the 25 people who work for me and their families. And that's several hundred people right there, and my siblings and their families. So that's important that the business succeeds and grows, that there's a succession plan. And one of the classes I wish they'd had when we were in business school is family business, which now is a class, by the way, at Stanford.
Terry Cumes 32:52
And it's a class I'm very involved with because I speak to the faculty, and I'm dealing with a lot of these things. And so I think the business does have to grow and succeed, and that makes it a lot more rewarding and fun and exciting, and it makes it worth all the investment that those years before required so that we could do the things that we did. And when I first came down here, I joked to a friend in business school who said, you know, it's kind of weird that I'm doing the same thing I did before business school. And he rightly pointed out, no, you're coming to us with a whole bunch of different skills that you did not have back then. And you're going to approach this in a very different way than you would have approached it before then.
Terry Cumes 33:26
So it's not time wasted. It's actually time that's very valuable.
Jason Baumgarten 33:26
Well, as two people who did that and went back to professions and colleagues we had before business school, it's funny, I was talking to somebody about AI today, and they were remarking that a lot of their younger teams are actually struggling to get a lot of value out of AI. And I said, well, why do you think that is? And he said, because they don't know a lot.
Jason Baumgarten 33:50
And he didn't mean it disparagingly, but he meant, like, he had these layers and layers of wisdom and knowledge to apply to being a Sherpa to the AI. And he's like, AI is like having an employee. If you have nothing to guide the employee, you can't be a very good manager. And he was saying, so I've got all this experience about how to get something done, how to structure workflow, how to think about it. He said, so I get all this amazing work done with AI, and then I have these people coming out of college who come work for me, and they know a lot about the tools, but they actually don't know as much about how to get value out of them.
Jason Baumgarten 34:26
Which I think is something we're going to struggle with over the next decade as we all embrace what AI and robotics and everything else means to our working worlds. Tell us a little bit about the special things that have meant the most to you in terms of what you've changed or shifted in Wilkatika. If you had one or two things where you're like, hey, I'm really proud of this thing we've done, what really stands out to you?
Terry Cumes 35:01
I mentioned earlier we had a lot of time in the pandemic with almost no guests for the first year, no one was traveling internationally.
Terry Cumes 35:01
We had some Peruvian guests, which is a funny story in itself, but the Americans and the foreigners that would usually be our typical guests weren't able to get into Peru. And so we had time and we had space and we had the need to start innovating. And so we created a seven day wellness program, which I am very proud of. It was nominated for a couple awards by Vogue and CNN and no one else was doing this in the pandemic. And we had a lot of time to think through it.
Terry Cumes 35:24
So we basically just said, okay, we do yoga. In the yoga system, there are seven chakras. Let's do a seven day retreat. Very simple. We'll do focus on one chakra every day, which is an energy center.
Terry Cumes 35:34
We'll do a yoga class, we'll do a nature connection activity because we love nature. And again, I'm saying we, but these are really things that I loved. So I picked my favorite things. That's the benefit of being the CEO.
Jason Baumgarten 35:47
Is you can, right?
Terry Cumes 35:47
That is the benefit. Put your thumb on it a little bit.
Terry Cumes 35:55
Yeah, to your point earlier, I have the benefit of 30 years of experience doing these things to know that I'm not going to be that far off.
Terry Cumes 35:55
I could need to adjust. But we are really now, six years later, running that exact same program every couple months. We were running it every month, but I lead it and so it got too tiring for me, so I do it every couple months. I also bring in leaders and coaches to lead it with me because it's more fun. I would love to have someone like you come down and offer a coaching session every day.
Terry Cumes 36:15
We do bring down people, so that keeps it fun and interesting. But the format is the same as we came up with in the pandemic in 2020, which was seven days, seven chakras, seven yoga and mindfulness classes, seven Andean ceremonies. I mentioned some of those before. Water ceremony, fire ceremony, an offering to Pachamama, a sound ceremony, a cacao ceremony, and there's an option for a plant medicine ceremony. And so those are the ceremonies.
Terry Cumes 36:39
And then there's therapeutic treatments like our flower baths and our massages that people love. The meals are coordinated by color by day. So a lot of fun things that we bake into it, which allow us to be creative. And that is something I'm very proud of and that is something that will continue. And we're now kind of offering that to business leaders.
Terry Cumes 36:57
So the same wellness program, but for a business leader who needs it probably more than anyone and who could be benefited and have an impact from it more than maybe anybody. Because a lot of the times we're preaching to the choir. The people that come here are wellness aficionados. They sign up for tons of wellness retreats, they go, they do all the yoga things. But what we're trying to do now is expand that to people like yourself who may be a little less likely to go do a wellness retreat for seven days and all that that entails and try to get those people to spread the word and have leaders take care of themselves so they can have a better impact on their communities.
Jason Baumgarten 37:32
Yeah, well, we always use the metaphor of the airplane mask. You know, if you don't put it on yourself as a leader, you can't help anyone around you. And I think there is this culture of burnout with leaders where it's like you work as hard as you can, push as hard as you can. And the reality is for a lot of leaders, they actually do need to find their own way to recharge, to reset, to rebalance and recenter. I'm all in on the wellness retreat.
Jason Baumgarten 37:54
The only one I am self aware enough to know I could not do are the silent retreats. I had a friend just come back from a two week or ten day silent retreat and my skin crawled just thinking about it. I was like, I don't think I could stop talking for 10 days.
Terry Cumes 38:16
Really? I'm surprised to hear that because I feel like that would be easy for me, and I feel like I'm more garrulous than you are.
Terry Cumes 38:16
But everyone has something else that they're afraid of. I did a retreat once before Peru, and everyone went around talking about their fears. And one person was afraid of being alone. One person was afraid of the dark. One person was afraid of animals.
Terry Cumes 38:28
One person was afraid of silence. And I was like, I'm afraid to have to sit and listen to all of you talk about your fears for seven days. And I felt terrible having said it out loud. And then one of the women said, thank you for being honest. We really appreciate you sharing your real traumas. Like, I don't know if I could listen to all these complainers.
Jason Baumgarten 38:46
I know you well enough to know you weren't just being snarky. That was your, and those people became some of my closest friends, by the way, because I think I was brutally honest with them.
Terry Cumes 38:59
And that's why when you come to these things, it's like any group dynamics.
Terry Cumes 38:59
There's forming and storming and norming. But the idea is, if you show up to your other question and you're open and honest with people, you'll get a lot more out of it, and the group will get more out of it, too. And some people come to do individual retreats. And most of people come because they're part of a group. And so there's some group dynamics that you have to explore.
Jason Baumgarten 39:15
Yeah, I think that, and you touch on this story in the book, but I think this idea of the norming and the storming and bringing your candid self. There's so many people that look at a team or look at a group, and they're always trying to play the angle with it. And I see this in leadership all the time, where you'll get somebody like, boy, if you could just let your guard down and be you, you would be so much more effective. Sometimes we forget that when you're not trying to impress anyone or you're not trying, you're just trying to do the thing that matters.
Jason Baumgarten 39:47
You often can get the most done because people respond very authentically to you showing up, just saying, hey, I really want to get this done. I'm struggling with it. Can you help me? Can sometimes be a lot more appealing than somebody who's trying to push your buttons or figure out how to weave it into your performance review. So I very much appreciate that notion of every team goes through that forming and storming stage, whether it's a retreat or your own team at work, or even aspects of family.
Jason Baumgarten 40:17
I would love to ask you this question because you work in the leadership space and you've been around all the big thought leaders. So I would think there's a lot of work being done, as there was 20 years ago, about communicating effectively and being vulnerable and showing authenticity. And I know that's still a very much a big thing. But what I don't know and what I believe to be true is that I'm not sure people are doing the work to figure out what their authenticity is, to figure out who are they and what do they want to communicate before they take all the high performance leadership classes about communicating. So that's what I would hope to do, is can we help people tap into that inner voice that then they can go out and communicate?
Terry Cumes 40:52
I'm not going to teach them how to communicate. There are people a lot better like yourself at doing that, but I would love to give them tools to tap in with that inner voice and then other leadership communicators can tell them how to be effective in the workplace. Are you seeing both of those or are you seeing more of just the communication piece?
Jason Baumgarten 41:16
I think there's three separate pieces. I think there's, I would almost call it clarity as opposed to communication because I think it's about what are you really trying to convey?
Jason Baumgarten 41:16
You know, obviously there's a tool in how you say it or how you write it, but it is the clarity of thought. It starts with the clarity of thought and purpose that then you have to emote and transmit. I think the second is authenticity, which you touched on, and then the third is actually vulnerability. And I think people commingle the three and they often, they don't step back. One, I totally agree with you that a lot of people, especially when it comes to their own pathways in life, they don't do the work to figure out what they want.
Jason Baumgarten 41:44
They're doing what somebody else wants or what somebody else said is impressive, or they want a job. People will often come to me and say, well, I'm at a stage in life where I don't need a lot of money, I'm not working for the money, so to speak, whether they mean that exactly true or just sort of directionally true, and I know what's coming next, which is they'll then say they want to do something that invigorates them or is learning oriented or gives back whatever sort of they've come up with. And I always tell them, you may believe that, but you may not choose that because you're not really internalizing what that means, because you're still vulnerable to the signal of what someone else thinks about you. And until you really come to grips with the fact that you're doing it truly for you, selfishly, honestly for you, you'll choose the car that's flashy, not the one you actually need, because that's about what you want to signal to others. Not necessarily.
Jason Baumgarten 42:36
If you drive under the speed limit very carefully everywhere, you don't need a Porsche. But if you love driving and that's your thing, you should buy a Porsche or you should buy whatever the car that drives well to you is. So I think there are a lot of people trying to talk about how to have clarity because a lot of people think they're being clear when actually they are. And that's why some organizations will have picture based standards. Because when they say a tidy bed or this or that or the other, they mean like this picture as opposed to your image of a tidy bed.
Jason Baumgarten 43:08
So I think clarity is really important. I think on those other notions of authenticity and vulnerability, I don't think people often know what authentic means. And there's two reactions. One, in tech right now, there's a real trend of I'm going to be performatively rude, or I'm going to be performatively harsh, or I'm going to be really aggressive because I'm trying to show everybody this thing that could be authentically you, but often that is as inauthentic as the person who's code wording authentic for caring. If you don't really care about other people, don't try.
Jason Baumgarten 43:42
Humans have developed amazing radar for insincerity. We can even tell insincere smiles for somebody to say I want to be authentic. You want to be authentic to what? To win, to make a lot of money, to beat your competitors, to have the most amazing customer reviews. What are you being authentic for?
Jason Baumgarten 44:05
And I think a lot of people don't just do the inner work which is absolutely needed in what you're talking about. But they don't even do the outer work very well. The code word of authenticity is I'm going to do something that's kind or nice, and it's sort of code word for that. And then there's vulnerability, which is just showing people you don't know all the answers and then you can learn. The idea that leaders weren't supposed to make mistakes or they weren't supposed to change their mind became very perversely intertwined in leadership for a while.
Jason Baumgarten 44:34
And I think now we're starting to recognize that it's totally okay to say, hey, I've got different information now. I was wrong. There's nothing wrong with that as a leader. The worst leaders are the ones who say, I'm dogmatically going to keep committing even though all the evidence is flashing red, but I'm just going to headline, go for it. And you lose your team because the team knows that you're wrong and everyone around you knows you're wrong.
Jason Baumgarten 44:58
And then you lose your followers. So I think that there's different threads people pull on and they often, when they say be an authentic leader, what they really mean is read some self help book and talk about how you care about everybody. It's like, no, if you're an authentic asshole, be an asshole. It's fine. You'll find your tribe.
Jason Baumgarten 45:16
You'll find the people who want to work in that environment. Years and years ago I ran a jewelry business. We always would laugh that there's something for everybody. Taste is individual and it's really true. You'll see something or you'll taste something that you love, but it's really not for everybody.
Jason Baumgarten 45:33
Be authentically you and you'll find your tribe. You'll find the people that resonate with that and want to be part of that journey with you and they don't have to be like you. That's totally okay. All right, well, we should do a speed round because no podcast would be complete without it. So we'll start with one that I think will be easy for you because you're a voracious reader.
Jason Baumgarten 45:53
One book that has had a big impact on you recently.
Terry Cumes 46:22
A couple weeks ago we had this wellness retreat that I just described with a coach, actually a McKinsey coach, who came down and did a coaching program and she recommended a book called Shakti Leadership, written by an Indian couple who helped co-author Conscious Capitalism, which was started by the CEO of Whole Foods, John Mackey. And I read the book and it was great. It had a lot of the same frameworks we use. Hero's journey, four directions, the yoga, Sanskrit, lots of things.
Terry Cumes 46:22
But what it had was the heroine's journey because it basically said the Joseph Campbell framework on Hero's Journey doesn't really work for women. And 85% of our guests here are women, and they're the ones that sign up for retreats, and they're the ones that are actually moving the needle in this space. And so I thought, wouldn't it be great to have a woman come down and modify the frameworks so that it fit better for those women? So that was the book we read a few weeks ago, which I really liked.
Jason Baumgarten 46:46
That's great. I'll have to put that on my reading list. We touched on this earlier, but maybe you'll have another one. One thing that guests going to a special place like Wilkatika should do to try to get the most out of their journey.
Terry Cumes 47:03
Yeah, I mentioned this earlier, that being open and that, you know, it sounds obvious, but this is a new place.
Terry Cumes 47:03
Everything's different here. The air, the food, the water. People are going to feel weird. You're at altitude, you're going to have symptoms, you're going to have sleep issues, you're going to have dreams. I mean, there's just all kinds of stuff that's going to come up.
Terry Cumes 47:16
And so one of the wonderful things about working with yoga practitioners is they understand kind of tuning in and taking a breath and listening, going, oh, I'm feeling this way rather than reacting to it and having a negative reaction. Which in hospitality is very easy to say, well, I'm not feeling well and I didn't sleep well, and blaming. And luckily, people come here and they realize that this is a new spot. If they can be open and attentive, but also being receptive to what's happening, they'll learn a lot and they'll feel better pretty quickly.
Terry Cumes 47:44
If they resist it and they struggle, it'll make the whole experience hard for everybody.
Jason Baumgarten 47:44
What is the hardest truth you had to come to terms with about embracing Peru full time?
Terry Cumes 48:06
Well, I'm still a foreigner here. I've been speaking Spanish since I was 12, and I like to think of myself as fluent. But just last night I went to watch the World Cup soccer game, and the friendly waiter comes up to me and says, where are you from?
Terry Cumes 48:06
And I said, I live in Urubamba. I've been here for eight years. But where are you from? Said, oh, you want to have that conversation? Okay.
Terry Cumes 48:13
And so that never stops. I've been here eight years. I know a lot of people here. They still look at me a little foreigner, and that's okay.
Terry Cumes 48:20
I'm at the age now where I can let it go. But you're always an outsider when you live overseas. And I think we, you know, being in California, where people are so cosmopolitan, it does get lost that you can be foreign and still blend in. But in many countries of the world, you can, people will always look at you as a foreigner, and they'll always think of you in a different way.
Terry Cumes 48:38
And that can be an advantage, and it can be a disadvantage.
Jason Baumgarten 48:38
All right, Terry. The leadership advice you hear all the time but you think is actually really harmful.
Terry Cumes 48:56
You know, we are taught to solve problems in our corporate world, and I'm a good problem solver. I remember my first management role, loving people coming up to me and saying, what do I do?
Terry Cumes 48:56
I love that. I would tell them what to do, and I would feel really confident about it, and they would do it. And learning to stop doing that has been one of the hardest things to do. And this is, you know, when you work in the metaphysical realm, sometimes it's about less efforting, and that's hard for us to do, to stop efforting and just give it time and space, and things will start to happen. And when we put someone in a ceremony, that's what we're asking to do. We're saying, set an intention and see what happens.
Terry Cumes 49:21
Go for the ride. Don't be in a hurry. Create space. And that applies to business. I've had a tough time not solving a problem because I know how to solve it, or I think I know how to solve it.
Terry Cumes 49:31
My staff want me to. Peru is a hierarchical place. The boss is supposed to make all the decisions. And when you're trying to empower your staff to make decisions, just to say, I don't know, or maybe you figured out, or give it a try, or let's just sit and do nothing for a day or two. That's been really hard.
Terry Cumes 49:45
And I think that advice is partly why shifting the paradigm from a masculine, traditional centered business leader to maybe a more feminine, intuitive leader is really important for leadership and growth, is that it's not all about fixing everything. Sometimes it's about listening and being receptive. And that's why the rituals and the metaphors can help people understand and appreciate that in a deeper way than just telling them, oh, just sit quietly and meditate and don't make any decisions, that's hard to do. But go into a sweat lodge and sit there for two hours in 105 degrees and try to solve that problem in your head. See what happens if you try to force something when you can't breathe and you're hiking in the mountains and you're out of, see if you can tell everyone what to do at that moment.
Terry Cumes 50:23
So these, you know, we have these tools that help people let go of that dogma that we've been inculcated with since we were very young.
Jason Baumgarten 50:23
Terry, what's a skill that early in your career you thought really mattered and you've sort of totally about-faced, changed your mind about it?
Terry Cumes 50:45
Well, systems and logistics. I was telling you, I ran logistics for Backroads. I loved having everything documented and having protocols.
Terry Cumes 50:45
And now I'm trying to embrace the catch-all way, which is it's a team effort. Everyone works together. There's a word here called ayni, which means reciprocity. So often it's not a system, it's a group effort. And that can be frustrating because there's no one accountable and when something goes wrong, everyone points a finger.
Terry Cumes 51:00
But really it's a group teamwork. And having watched people work like that now for eight years and the job gets done, it always gets done and it gets done beautifully, probably better. But things do slip between the cracks and so you have to build a backup slack in the system so that there's not perfect accountability. But things work. And both systems have their pros and cons.
Terry Cumes 51:21
I try to teach both, but I've had to unlearn the idea of documenting and protocols and having feedback and one minute manager kind of stuff. Sometimes it's just about let it, let people figure it out and it's not going to happen the way maybe you want it to and hopefully you'll learn from it. But it's going to be a team effort and people are going to figure it out on their own way.
Jason Baumgarten 51:50
Well, Terry, I really appreciate you sharing the wisdom of the Sacred Valley, your journey to finding fit as a CEO of Wilkatika, and sharing some of the stories out of the book, which is a fun read for anyone who's been a traveler, really anywhere at any time. You'll find some fun stories to laugh about and maybe some of our listeners will come for a visit.
Terry Cumes 52:02
I can say I've been, it's amazing. I wish I had more time to come back, but I will.
Jason Baumgarten 52:02
And thanks for coming on and for being a guest on Fit Happens.
Terry Cumes 52:16
Thanks, Jason. It's great to see you and great to hear your wisdom as well.
Terry Cumes 52:16
And I look forward to more conversations down the road.
Jason Baumgarten 52:24
Thanks so much. And for everyone listening, tune in every week for a new episode of Fit Happens.