What Pete Carroll Taught Me About Building a Business
I spent Friday morning in the LA Coliseum watching my nephew Josh Nacion get his MBA from USC. Pete Carroll gave the commencement speech.
I expected football stories. Pete gave us those (he reminded everyone, more than once, that he went 39 and 3 in that stadium). But the speech wasn’t really about football. It was about something I’ve been turning over in my head ever since.
He told a story I haven’t been able to shake.
In 2000, Pete got fired by the New England Patriots. He flew home to Medfield, Massachusetts and sat at his desk wondering what came next. He picked up a small blue book about John Wooden’s coaching life and read that Wooden won his first national title in his 14th year of coaching. And then ten more in the twelve years after.
Pete grabbed a yellow pad and started writing. Everything he believed about coaching. About people. About what it meant to win. Twenty-seven years into his career and he had never written his philosophy down.
When he was done, he had two words.
Always Compete.
That was the moment Pete Carroll became Pete Carroll. The USC dynasty, the Super Bowl ring, the cultural footprint. All of it started on a yellow pad in a Massachusetts kitchen.
I’ve been running businesses since 1999. Same twenty-seven years. And the question I keep coming back to with the founders I coach is the question Pete answered on that pad.
What do you actually believe?
Not what’s on your About page. Not what you said in your last pitch. The thing underneath all of that. The thing that decides who you hire, what you say no to, how you talk to your team when nobody is watching.
A lot of people are running companies without ever stopping to do this work. They’re good operators. They’re working hard. But they don’t have a center. So every decision feels heavy and every choice feels like a coin flip.
If that’s where you are, here’s where I’d start.
A Step-by-step Guide: Writing Your Founder Philosophy
1. Find ninety minutes.
Not at your desk. Pete did it at his kitchen table. I do mine at the Proper Hotel with a pot of tea. Get out of your normal workspace.
2. Write by hand.
I know. But trust me. Something happens when you slow down enough that your pen can keep up with your thinking. The laptop tempts you to edit. The pen lets you tell the truth.
3. Start with what you don’t believe.
This is easier than starting with what you do believe. What’s the conventional wisdom in your industry that you secretly think is wrong? What do you wish other founders would stop doing? Five minutes of that and your real beliefs will start showing up.
4. Look for the word that keeps repeating.
When Pete went back through his pages, “compete” was everywhere. When I did this exercise years ago, the word that came up for me was aloha. I’m Filipino/Hawaiian. Of course it was aloha. But seeing it on the page made me realize how much of my work was about that one idea.
5. Look that word up.
Pete looked up “compete” expecting to see something about winning. The root is Latin, competere, which means to strive together. It changed how he ran his teams. Whatever your word is, the dictionary will tell you something you don’t already know.
6. Write the rules that come out of it.
Three is enough. Five is plenty. If you have ten, you don’t have a philosophy yet. You have a wishlist.
7. Sleep on it. Then say it out loud to one person.
The person you tell will tell you whether it’s real. You’ll hear it in your own voice and know what’s true and what you wrote because it sounded good.
Pete said one more thing I keep coming back to.
“You have earned the right to be totally confident. You have earned the right to trust yourself.”
That hit me harder than I expected. So many of the women I coach are still acting like they need permission to be in the room. They’ve built companies. They have clients who keep coming back. They have teams who would follow them anywhere. And they still hedge.
You don’t have to. You’ve put in the years.
Book A Discovery Call
If any of this is sitting heavy with you and you want to talk it through, my calendar is open. Thirty minutes, no pitch, just a conversation about where you are and where you want to go.
DOWNLOADABLE WORKSHEET
The Founder Philosophy Worksheet
This worksheet is a guided reflection exercise designed to help founders clarify what they truly believe about leadership, business, and decision-making.
