2023 - On The Doorstep of Change
It’s said that compounded interest is the 8th wonder of the world and when you stick with good decisions and let them compound, it’s a beautiful thing. Well, 2023 was a year of compounding the interest of positive momentum. Another year in the books and I felt that 2023 reinforced all of the trends (both positive & negative) in my life and further crystalized what’s important. I feel extremely grateful that I get to write another chapter into the book of life on a high note at a time in the world when it feels like there’s always a reason to punch a wall and shout in fury. Turn off the social media feeds, say a prayer, and find your high ground - that’s how I feel, that’s how I cope, and how I choose to live with resiliency.
My prior ‘Years in Review’ tend to have a consistent element - how we change through the years and how we react to that change. You often hear that you can’t change what happens, only how you respond. More so than any prior years (2022, 2021, 2020, 2019, 2018, 2017, 2016), this one was probably the most consistent year I’ve had in the last decade but it sits in anticipation of by far the biggest change and evolution I’ll experience.
In years past I’ve waffled a bit as to what to share, for fear of oversharing, but in the wake of the horrendous acts we witnessed on October 7th in Israel and the deep cutting sense of helplessness, my opinion on public displays of life has been to shine even more light into the world to combat the hatred that I can’t control. Remain anti-fragile, strengthen as the conditions get tougher! The stress of situations will always be there, finding perspective in the depths is the only coping available.
Work stresses, financial stresses, macro stresses, time management stresses, health stresses can take over your mental capacity and I had no lack of those in 2023. While I got caught up in it at times, I think I give myself an A- in finding perspective through it all. Coming home to Laurelle after work and having dinner together always re-centered me. She’s the bedrock of my life and keeps everything properly secured. That and the often 6am flights to the coasts brought moments of solitude and clarity of mind. I don’t know what it is about that air 30,000 feet up but it has its way over me.
Next Thing You Know…We’re expecting!
End of March rolled around I waltzed into my 33rd birthday with a prayer to call on. I wrote in my journal that my sole birthday wish was to become a dad - looks like someone upstairs was listening to me. The next week we went to Broken Bow, Oklahoma for a little getaway in the mountains to refresh our souls in some nature after a stressful Q1.
We’re unpacking the car and Laurelle asks me to come inside and check out my birthday present. With closed eyes and outstretched hands she gives me a bag with a children’s book, baby slippers and a positive pregnancy test. At first it was utter disbelief, surprise, then excitement, then fear and then pride. The spectrum of emotions overtook me but I couldn’t help but think about what the rest of our life would look like. Laurelle swore she saw her late grandpa, Cecil, smiling down on her when she was driving home from the doctor after she found out she was pregnant. Don’t try to tell me there isn’t something higher up orchestrating our universe! This was the best 33rd birthday gift ever! I would spend the next 9 months reading and preparing for our first child. We vowed to each other that we would not find out the gender and instead make it a surprise at birth…but that surprise lasted about six weeks before we caved with a gender reveal. Baby Boy coming December 30th!
The gestational period is long but flies by like a blink of an eye. Laurelle and I (but mostly her) tracked every week’s changes. I tried not to over-extend myself in the prep work but did pick up ‘Dad’s Expecting’ by Harlan Cohen and tried to understand what she’s going through while also looking for some daddy do’s vs. daddy don’ts.
We had our first doctors appointment and got a chance to see the peanut sized baby and hear the heartbeat at 8 weeks. From that period on we would go to the doctor every couple weeks and see the progression. I think I spent those entire anatomy scan sessions with my mouth agape at how you could see blood flow, cranial activity and organ development week over week.
After the first trimester mark, we made the calls to our parents and the reactions were legendary. The joy that our parents felt when they heard the news was unfiltered nirvana. What a feeling that I still can’t shake!
I remember mid summer sitting in a Thomas Rhett concert at the American Airlines arena and just internalizing Rhett’s song, Slow down summer. While we both can’t wait for what’s to come, we just want to slowwwwww it all down.
As we got closer to the third trimester, we started building the nursery and Laurelle harnessed her nesting and interior design skills to build a safari and adventure world for this kid.
Somewhere in the third trimester, I started to really obsess over others’ early experience of fatherhood. I fell enamored by the stories of others’ welcoming their first child into the world (love this earnest piece by my friend, Tom). I have a deep fascination of old photos of my dad with his boys and find myself oogling over shots of him holding me in his hospital scrubs. While I’m sure parenthood will only draw Laurelle and I closer to our own parents, it gave me a twinge of nostalgia for the stories of my father and father-in-law. My dad was a desirous doctor who was branching out to build his own practice when he had my older brother. My father-in-law was a flying-high business man in South Africa building his apparel business when he had my sister-in-law. I try to transport myself to their younger-years to empathize with their experience and compare it to what mine will be like.
“You can always understand the son by the story of his father. The story of the father is embedded in the son” -Francis Ford Coppola
Laurelle would frequently ask me “Are you even excited?” to try to elicit my effusive response but as my mom likes to remind me “Still Waters Run Deep” which is how I feel about emotionally showing my excitement about the biggest life change imaginable. I prefer to write it out rather than verbally expressing it. Like biblical horology, they say there is before kids (BK) and after kids (AK) and so this was my last year of BK and that comes with mixed emotions.
The Xeal Way, Year Two
Professionally, if 2022 was a rollercoaster, then 2023 was a bungee jump! We took a couple of licks this year and learned many-a-lesson the hard way. All the while, I wouldn’t change it for anything! The story of electrification of transport persisted despite some harrowing reports of higher stagnant EV inventories and some of the typical early adoption push back. The biggest headwind that the industry faced was interest rates which put pressure on capital improvements and energy projects at large. While the EV industry continued to see strong growth rates, our core customer of real estate owners were in the midst of a recession. Navigating new market challenges, adopting new business models, fending off competition, expanding into new channels, improving our efficiency and optimizing for profitability sent us down numerous paths in 2023 and we are all the better for it.
The year kicked off in NYC with our inaugural Sales Kickoff. This was the first I’d ever run and organized one myself so it was a mini project unto itself. I convened the entire team at the Roxy Hotel and the World Trade Center in Tribeca and for three days straight we worked on sales training, strategies for the year ahead and built up a much-needed bond given the remote nature of the team. It’s wild looking back on that event now and seeing the faces in the room and those who were yet to join the company. Startups move at light speed and personnel changes in the early years can be a bit shocking.
On the hiring front, we really made an effort this year to bring in people who had built and done the task at hand before. We brought in one specific individual to run our revenue operations who I truly couldn’t live without to this day. She has single handedly built the sales infrastructure I believe is required to propel us into the future and she has become a true partner in every sense of the word. As we grew our sales team however, I learned a hard lesson. The idea that as you hire more people the company’s productivity will grow became evidently more of a fallacy. The more people, the more complex the problems would become if you don’t have all the appropriate systems in place. We also put a hard emphasis on growing through our channel partnerships in 2023 to build an even more efficient business that requires hardware logistics and installation. I suspect this will be a huge part of our long term growth.
Come mid-2023 we had to make some hard decisions and slim down the team to create a culture of higher efficiency. We really labored over this decision but often times the hardest decisions are the right ones to make. I tried to remember Manson’s law of relativity which is ‘The extent to which the change is large is proportional to how hard it is to act on that change.’ Leadership is often best exuded in difficult environments and this year called for a lot of those moments. These are the moments where self-doubt and fear shows its ugliest face but you have to throw on the bravest.
We had two main offices, NYC and LA but we built out a small office in Dallas as we hired a sales director and a local master electrician to create a firm base for the central region. Texas was quickly proving to be our fastest growing market so it made sense to put more resources behind it. The relationship we’ve been able to garner in our small pod has been one of the more rewarding things from the year as there’s nothing quite like holding each other accountable when you see each other every day. Sean and I specifically have been lucky enough to go through similar phases of life together and he recently welcomed a baby girl this month which has been cool to watch. One other fun notch on the year was that it was the first time in my career I got a chance to work with my brother, Adam, who started advising Xeal on some key legal matters.
Xeal continued to make a name for itself in the multi-family industry and put a strong emphasis on brand building. We came out emphatically on the conference circuit and I saw the transition from a young unproven startup to more of an entrenched industry player. That evolution only puts a larger target on our back to outrun. A few key achievements I’m most proud of the team for this year include winning the exclusive business of more top real estate owners, opening up regional electrical distribution partners that now carry our product in stock and signing a partnership deal with one of the largest smart device companies in the entire industry (more to share in the future).
Despite a multitude of mistakes this year, I’m proud of the accountability we took along the way and I love to see the team working with fervor and intensity. It was really evident throughout the year who was deep in the trenches and who was showing up to cash a paycheck. As leaders at the company we had to push through reductions in force, a real estate pullback and a tougher market with more competitive pressures than we’d seen before. The road ahead is going to be hard but I remain invigorated to march on with intensity and focus because I know the problem we’re solving is warranted and we have something unique. I truly believe we have the best and hardest working team in the industry but I’m not too proud to say we have it all figured out. I think 2024 will require more agility and flexibility than we’ve ever implored before as we light up new channels, strike new allegiances and seek to partner our software with best in class hardware providers.
We now head into 2024, my third year at Xeal, with a restructured sales team and a plan to win alongside our channel partners, navigate into new verticals, find eager new customers and expand with our key accounts that have seen the power in our offering. I’ll snag a little bit of time for paternity leave and then will be ready to get after it in ‘24.
Be a Student of the game:
I don’t have all the answers and while I’m not sure anyone does, all we can do is build a collage of inputs from others to inform the output we want. As Howard Marks likes to say, there are two types of people in this world. “Those that don’t know and those that don’t know they don’t know.” I like to be the former. I spent a lot of the year trying to be the student of two games, 1. Effective sales management and 2. The economics of electrification.
The first game I tried to improve was how to be an effective and efficient sales leader - learning, reading, testing, failing, and revisiting varying methods of sales leadership (a lot gleamed from John McMahon’s Qualified Sales Leader). The other area of focus was trying to understand the subject expertise of electric vehicle charging and how we can avoid the pitfalls of those who came before and navigate into new territories of success. Whether that was trips out to Amazon’s charging facility to understand the mechanics of overnight fleet charging, studying the false-negative quality data on Plugshare, reading public investor decks of all of our competitors or interviewing experts in the field, I recognize we don’t often know but we’re trying to feel our way through the minefield without getting baited into the typical traps of pioneers.
I spent a lot of time questioning whether I was focused on the right thing and took accounting of the components of my job. I love real estate as a practical, no non-sense asset class and enjoy solving real problems in the built environment with smart decision makers. I find pioneering technologies like electric vehicles alluring and the opportunity to solve hard problems in a nascent space exhilarating despite the difficulties of early adoption curves. As for the function of sales leadership, I think I’ve enjoyed it because I’m a deal junkie and like to get in the collaborative trenches with the team but find others’ wins more rewarding than my own.
This year I felt that my style of leadership was motivating and inspiring to some but fell on deaf ears with others but I’ve come to appreciate the different personality styles on the team (the artful and the scientific sellers). Some people want to call me ten times a day (collaborative and affirmative sellers) and others don’t want to be bothered at all (lone wolf style). It’s all good as long as the numbers are there and the team is rowing in the right direction!
As a young leader I’m always in search of signs that I’m on the right path. I’ve done a lot of media over the years but this candid conversation really stuck out to me as Bart Berkey went deep with me into the areas that inspire me to do what others’ do not.
Drink from the well of inspiration
“A man who doesn’t spend time with his family isn’t a man at all” - Don Corleone
This year I was inspired by more of my peer set than in the past. While in the past, I’d look up to others who had achieved top tier business success as my key motivator, this year more than any other, I felt myself inspired by other mid 30 year olds who were finding balance in their lives achieving career success and building a family simultaneously. I also tried gluing myself onto other sales leaders who I could learn from that had gone through business cycles like Carl B, Mike D and others. I was lucky enough to have many of those inspiring voices around me at Xeal and it’s been amazing to learn from them and grateful that I don’t have to make the mistakes alone but rather let them guide us to smarter decisions. I also found great inspiration this year in my peers who took action in October to effusively show their strong Jewish connections.
We lost some amazing souls this year. Most notably we lost my dear friend Dina Lemberger. Dina was sick throughout most of the last three years and finally we got word that she wasn’t going to make it in early September after a long battle with cancer. I rushed up to NYC for the day to spend time with her as she meant the world to me and I wanted to send her off with love and laughter. I was lucky enough to say goodbye to her and rekindle special memories with her, Pete and Evan. I worked with Dina for the majority of my professional career and she transcended a work friendship and became my work mom, sometimes I referred to her as my “mama goose.” She was such a radiating personality with an endlessly positive attitude despite a cruel and unfair dealt hand. She passed away on Sept 27th and we will miss her dearly. Her honor lives on with her family but her work friends at Xeal will always remember her as she represents one of our core values - “Be Like Dina.”
We lost a number of pragmatic and brilliant legends that I looked up to in 2023. Most poignantly, we lost Sam Zell and Charlie Munger. After years of watching Munger recaps of him and Warren Buffett deliver quippy, but rational, remarks at their annual meetings, I feel like I lost a grandpa who taught me many key life and business lessons. He reaffirmed perspectives that I’ve come to believe deeply - investing should be boring and patient. Eliminate toxic people from your life, continue to always learn (even at 99), be kind and be moral, and try to avoid making too many dumb decisions (just make less than the people next to you). Zell was just unapologetically himself and that was refreshing.
Books I read this year that informed my views:
Qualified Sales Leader by Jim McMahon in my pursuit to hone my craft and really become a top notch sales leader
Footloose American by Brian Kevin as he explores South America and follows the Gringo Trial of Hunter S Thompson (gave me a bit of a wanderlust hit that I needed in Q1)
How to Invest by David Rubenstein - there are so many styles and ways but a few consistent themes like compounding, patience and read as much as you can (similar to Charlie Munger’s approach - buy wonderful businesses at fair prices)
Dad’s Expecting Too - Harlan Cohen shares that while a lot is changing in your wife’s body, here’s how you should prepare as well
Premonition - Michael Lewis doing what he does best but this time with the pandemic story
Rules of Civility - Another year, more Amor Towles!
Kitchen Confidential - I’m beyond impressed by Bourdains command of the English language
The Godfather - An epic ode of tradition and ideals
Elon Musk’s biography by Walter Isaacson - The double edged sword of success
A message to Garcia (man’s loyalty to the commander)
The Big Rich - The Texas Big 4 Oil Families to better understand the rich oil history of Texas
Greatness is a Choice - Ethan Penner’s words of wisdom to a balanced and meaningful life.
The music that really spoke to me this year more than anything was country. I found Corey Kent, Jordan Davis, Thomas Rhett, Noah Kahan and others giving me a wholesome, yet raw and vulnerable sense for what life is really about. I often channeled some of those lessons into my writing this year and frankly my biggest shit-eating grins would come while sitting out back listening to lyrics like this:
Wall Street can keep the money
Hollywood can have the famous
I've got a house that's home, I've got a can that's cold
I've got a hand to hold, that's how you know you made it
On the outside, you can only look inside
Spy balloons, military exercises and Semiconductor squabbles from China - a new cold war felt like it was brewing in 2023. The Russian Ukranian war continued to rage on as our government unilaterally poured billions of dollars into protecting democracy abroad despite facing a rising and unimaginable deficit with massively inflationary effects at home. The impacts of the decisions made in 2023 are likely to come to a head in the years to come.
2023 we saw a regional banking crisis that threatened to take down the whole system and a deepening of the crypto-winter that finally exposed the fraudsters (SBF sent to Jail & CZ of Binance arrested on fraud - called this one in my yearly predictions). The Federal Reserve had all the eye balls on it this year as the Fed tracked inflation the way that welter-weights track every pound.
October 7th, 2023 was a day that will live in infamy as Hamas terrorists stormed into Israel and killed hundreds of civilian jews and captured hostages as prisoners of war in Gaza. The last two months have brought about devastating sadness and revitalized a dormant anti-semitism that our world hasn’t seen since the 1940s. We’re living through such a dark moment as Jewish people in this world. The feelings of helplessness and despair were stronger than I’d ever felt before as an American Jew - a congregant of a diaspora previously felt shielded from much of the hatred. For weeks at a time, I couldn’t peel my eyes from social media and yet I felt that my mouth was locked up - not for fear of expression - but from my inability to properly describe my emotions. It all threw me into a confounded state and I didn’t know how to say exactly what my heart was telling me.
All I can say now is that the flames of our Shabbat table and Hanukkah menorah burn brighter today than they ever have as we pray for the hostages stuck in Gaza and our soldiers in Israel and hope to disburse the light of our faith through the world.
Take that Trip
“Man travels the world over in search of what he needs and returns home to find it.” - George A Moore
We started the year off in Hawaii where I foolishly chose to WFH, Work from Hawaii, arising at 4am to make early calls and work an east coast day. It was a nice reminder that if a beach beckons, only take it if you’re on vacation. Working from afar is still working and not as fun as advertised!
This year though like many years prior we hit the road a lot. Except this year felt like it was our last year of pure unbound freedom with the impending life changes. Laurelle continued to soar in her professional role and it brought her around the world in search of cloud partnerships at Vultr (Tel Aviv, Amsterdam, Copenhagen, Miami, Sao Paolo). I continued my routine trips to NYC to visit Xeal HQ and continued on the conference / client-meeting circuit. This year’s box score looked like this NYC (8x), Chicago (3x), LA (3x), Vegas (3x), Philly (3x), Miami (2x), Atlanta, Baltimore, Catskills, Hawaii, Charleston, Santa Fe, Nice, Cannes, St. Tropez, Provence, Paris.
The highlight trip of the year was when Laurelle and I took our baby moon to the South of France 🇫🇷. We spent two weeks bopping around the French Riviera towns and feeling bourgeoisie in Paris. Europe has a centering effect on your soul as it brings you back to a less complicated way of living.
Amidst the Constant, The Change Remains
My weekly routine didn’t change all that much this year as the compound effect continued. Back in the office 5 days a week, morning workouts, Shabbat at my in-laws, golf on Saturdays, morning walks with Brody, and rinse repeat.
My typical Saturday morning you would find me perched up at Pecan Hollow Golf course with Michael, Steve, Paul, Brad, and the rest of the guys that have at least 30 years on me. My obsession for the game of whacking a white ball around an open field only grew as I notched an 83 in early June only to find the 70’s unreachable. Despite the gastrointestinal nightmare, I would always succumb to a hot dog w jalapeños and onions at the turn.
This was year number two in Dallas and Laurelle and I settled in a bit more. We continued to get closer to her cousins and felt the comfort of living close to her family. We would frequently host and attend Shabbat with our family and friends in the neighborhood and felt that our social calendar filled up more than before. We continued to keep our yearly traditions as Aaron and Mintsche came to visit us from Austin with their kids and then Eddie & Courtney ran their Memorial Day special coming up to Dallas with Harper to float around the pool and let the dogs go buck wild. We hosted a big memorial day pool party at our house as we had all our newer Dallas friends out to the house.
As we’ve gotten older and life’s distractions further engulf our time, Adam and I found some brother time as he came to visit Dallas in June. In our typical brothers weekend fashion we had a blast playing golf, playing hoops at our cousins and reliving our younger years playing MLB on Xbox and dueling virtually as Phillies vs. Ranger. When we’re together, it gives us a chance to transport to our teenage years with fewer cares in the world.
I learned that around 30 years old I started to take real interest in my family’s lineage. My mother sent me a home video from 1983 of my Zeyda (her Grandpa) sharing his life story and it kicked something into high gear for me. It was amazing and moving. So on my grandma’s would-be 70th anniversary with her late husband, on the doorstep of her 94th birthday we filmed and interviewed her about her past. I’m excited to store this momento away for future generations to watch as we did with my Zeyda.
This year was another year of family milestones as we celebrated my parent’s 40th anniversary, Laurelle and I celebrated our 3rd, we celebrated my Grandma’s 94th birthday and Nana at 86 got a new knee and hip that has brought a fresh pep in her step. Asher and Hunter both continued to grow into themselves as cute little kids in Philly, Rijon grew her fertility law practice significantly and life continues on.
I started a new tradition on Sunday’s with my father in law, Michael. He gave me a chance to interview him about his life and career in South Africa. I got a chance to explore his golden years running Mathomo and building the first black empowerment business in South Africa. I have aspirations for how I want to portray his successes to the world. The right medium matters.
On the friends front, the list of new parents only grew this year as Stevie, Jordan, Liv and Bryan each welcomed baby boys and Jonny and Benji both heeded the call and expect kids in 2024. While we’re at the tail-end of wedding season, we had a chance to send off Jonny and Blair - a much needed celebration for Philadelphia’s finest.
Explore Your Backyard (and theirs):
As I’ve gotten older, I’ve found my curiosity to explore has waned a bit and that scares the heck out of me. Despite feeling content in my routine, I tried to break it. I still have a bucket list of Dallas that I try to check off - and add to as I find out about cool new happenings. This year I had a chance to see Dave Matthews at the Fair Grounds, bike the Trinity River path by downtown, see Luka Doncic dominate and Thomas Rhett jam at the American Airlines center, explore the Fort Worth Stockyards, Play golf at PGA’s new Frisco golf mecca and Maridoe, attend Ranger’s opening day in Arlington, watch golf at the Byron Nelson, experience Southlake’s Oktoberfest, see Corey Kent at Grandscape, and find whiskey jazz lounges in the design district (Triumphs)
Settling into Home:
They say that the work is never done and I can attest to that. This year we continued to improve and maintain our home. We redid our garden in April and Laurelle orchestrated a complete makeover as we invested further into our forever home. In the early summer I thought I’d fully lean into middle aged male-hood and buy a Weber grill, as one does. My neighbor David even made me a strong denim apron in preparation of cooking up TX style Ribs - as he likes to say ‘Merica!
As we no longer maintained the moniker of new kids on the block, we settled into the neighborhood with our first ever Halloween. Our street takes halloween very seriously as it welcomes visitors from all over North Dallas. It’s a THING and I had to play my part to scare the living daylight out of the six year olds.
How Do We Compound Our Interest in 2024?
I stroll into 2024 with the expectation that my world is going to get flipped on its head. They say you can’t prepare for your first kid and so I’ll embrace the unknown with open arms. My only real concern walking into the new year is how will I balance work’s demands with the demands of becoming a present and involved dad. I’m sure that is every parents’ struggle and anxiety so the waters aren’t unchartered. My mantra to myself in 2024 will be “all in due time” and “you only experience it once, so embrace it.” I’ll find new ways to delegate at work and only prioritize what I know has the highest value so that I can be the most active and present dad and partner to Laurelle.
In years past I’ve given myself some pointers and a few reminders so let me once again offer a few words of advice to myself:
When in doubt, just laugh at the absurdity of it all
Remember they too are just like you
Life happens in front of you, stop planning for tomorrow
Here’s to another year of compounding the amazing things in my life; my family’s health, our faith’s continued strength and traditions, strong and evolving friendships, hard but fun professional challenges, a strong iron game, and a holistic life that I’m proud to be living out each day of the year. And may this year bring a bundle of new challenges.
(If we did holiday cards, this is what you’d get) ⬇️
*Updates as of 12/29/2023 - I published this year in review on December 16th. Five days later, 12/21/2023, we welcomed our son, Owen Charlie Roseman. This was one of the craziest and amazing days of my entire life. The following week was a massive adjustment, learning how to care for a newborn, supporting Laurelle as she nursed Owen. We held Owen’s Bris Milah on Thursday, 12/28/23, surrounded by family and friends and it was an incredible outing and filled with meaning and ritual. As we head into the new year, we’re hunkered down carrying for this little guy and adjusting to our new life with baby Owen and as our family has truly begun!