Emotional Mastery, Reinvention & the Inner Game of Entrepreneurship with Phil Neil

with Phil Neil

Jul 25, 2025 · 00:34:17

Today's podcast guest is someone who truly understands the inner and outer game of building extraordinary companies. Phil Neal is a serial entrepreneur, 8-figure exit founder, deep tech strategist, and high-stakes growth advisor. He helps founders and investors navigate pivotal decisions at the intersection of strategy, psychology, and entrepreneurial reinvention. Through his frameworks like the Clarity Sprint and Courage Compass, Phil empowers visionary leaders to scale consciously without sacrificing their wellbeing In this conversation, we explore how to lead with clarity under pressure, avoid costly mistakes, and build a business that honors both your ambitions and your values. Welcome to The Total Entrepreneur, Mind, Body, Spirit, where we turn cutting-edge science into practical strategies for entrepreneurs. I'm your host, Dr. John Torrance, entrepreneur, Inc. 5000 honoree, and professor of entrepreneurial practice at the University of California, San Diego. at Syracuse University's Whitman School of Management. Each episode, we dive into mental, physical, and spiritual health with expert guests offering actionable insights to help you thrive and perform at your highest level. Let's get started. So, Phil, welcome to the podcast. Really great to have you.

Thank you for having me.

So, the first thing I want to know is about your company, Neobex Medical. So, you had scaled that to, I think it was $70 million, and had an exit. So, yeah, just kind of talk about that journey, and I'm especially interested interested in your own personal reinvention after your exit.

Perfect. Yes. So, Neobex was originally a buying group for local health centers that were too small to have a purchasing person within their team. So, they were paying way too much for furniture, and some of them had good volume. And so, we came in, we acted as their purchasing department, we helped them save, and we took a cut of the savings for ourselves. So that was in a nutshell the model. We had adapted a little bit so that we can expand in as something closer to a distributor for pharmacies. And we were carving a little niche and trying to find synergies amongst different smaller health centers. And then when COVID hit, we lost our suppliers. And so this was a part-time business. We were about to onboard reps to help it grow even more, but because we were restricted in our purchasing power because of COVID then we were facing failure because it was either we bite the bullet and lose money every month until COVID ends, or we close it, or we pivot. And in a nutshell, I pivoted the model, went into nitrile glove with extended cuff for chemotherapy and other more specialized health services. And then, I was able to get a government contract and I expanded did that for many other contracts and then went in the US, Mexico, a bunch of different countries and built it to $70 million in about 8 months.

Wow. So it was a result of a pivot, right? So it's kind of interesting how COVID was super stressful, but it opened a door for you that maybe wasn't open prior.

Yeah, I think just being in the game, you can see opportunities that other people cannot. And that really surprised me when I moved from someone doing business dev in big pharmaceutical companies to really being wearing my entrepreneur hat. You don't see the same— people don't see you in the same way because you shoulder a different kind of responsibility. You're all in, you know, it's a different risk. And because I was in that game, although it was a very small business, it was bootstrapped and just, you know, I could still figure out that this was an option and pivot in that sense. And everybody had the same pandemic, right?

But yeah, yeah. Yeah, so it's interesting. They're very different models or different circumstances. So during COVID people were probably, uh, they were after you for your nitrile gloves, probably, right? It was an in-demand product, maybe?

Yes.

But beforehand, it seemed like there was probably more of a sales cycle that you had to go through. So, so selling, you know, like the Neobex medical services to small practices, that must have been harder than selling the nitrile gloves, or am I off on that?

It was different, I think. Yeah. So I was very young in my entrepreneurial journey at that point, and I didn't even know what product market fit meant. And so I just knew how to close deals as a salesperson. And so I went with hypothesis, you know, you work on the how and you mix it with the what, and you kind of confuse your buyer by not being clear yourself how to structure a go-to-market. So that was one of my challenges before COVID Then when we pivoted the business model, it was adaptation that was a big challenge because the market was shifting all the time. I didn't know what an ISO certification, what it meant. I didn't know how to import. I didn't even know who was involved in the logistical chain to bring products out of China to Quebec. So learning how to File to be a manufacturer for Health Canada. That was a challenge. I mean, I was so naive because I remember in the beginning you could sell gloves in a plastic bag and they had a charter plane. You just had to ship it over there. So my first purchase was a guy on Alibaba selling router that claimed he knew someone with nitrile glove in a warehouse. So I wired him all my savings as a deposit. And then by the time I had paid in full, the first shipment, the government changed the rules and now I had to have a box with proper packaging and no longer charter planes. And so, learning to adapt, understand the ecosystem, and then I still remember exchanging emails with some people at the government here and say, hey, it's not a big deal if it's not written on the box or if it's not certified. Come on, what does it actually mean? And a couple of months later, I could see how naive that was because it is super important, but I had never been in that space before. I was just learning as I flew my plane, I guess.

Yeah. So, do you think that naivete helped you get started? Because it seems like if you knew all the obstacles and roadblocks in advance, you may have made a different decision.

Well, yeah, in a way, we could say naivete, or I would call that entrepreneurial courage because I think people look for certainty to get started, whereas you need aimless courage really because you kind of have a sense of your why and your what and then you just go out there, rapid iteration cycles, and through your leadership lens, you figure out the path towards success.

I think that rapid iteration cycle is the key for sure. So when you were getting ready to package the company for sale, or how did that even happen in the first place? Did somebody approach you interested in buying or investing, or did you make a conscious decision that you were going to package the company up and go to market, get a valuation? How did that beginning of that exit process start?

So, my exit was I've sold my share to my other partners. So, it was a simplified exit, I would say. It started as a founder conflict. When we rose to $70 million, you know, we made about 60% gross profit. So, it was a big, it was a crazy time, right? So, it was abnormally huge. So, we were 4 that had bootstrapped it. We had already kind of agreed that because me and my other partner, Danny, who was the integrator, were doing 95% of the work, we were supposed to kind of have a commission structure at some point. But then when you make so much money, that becomes an issue, right? And on their side, they had another partner that wasn't part of the original group but was part of their kind of holding company together. And so he had the rights to share on their side of the pie. So that resulted in what they perceived as an unfair distribution of wealth, whereas I had 25%, they had 18%. They were splitting the 75 amongst 4, right? Which was not originally how it's supposed to go. And then I was also supposed to receive some commission, and that was the spark of a campaign where I couldn't find a compromise that would satisfy one of the passive founders, I would say, because Hugo got in the way. And so I, as a compromise, I sold— I made a partial exit sending some of my shares so that we're all at 20. And then down the road, seeing that that was not resolving the founder conflict as I thought it would, I just decided to make a full exit and sell everything and just get into another adventure.

So yeah, which brings us to your reinvention, right? So I know you've got a reinvention playbook. So talk to us about what that looks like and why it's such an important thing for entrepreneurs to be ready for.

So I think that there's crossroads in the light and in the shadows. So in the light, I mean, when you exit a business, you arrive at a crossroad where you either anchor yourself in your old metrics and try to keep growing in the same way or you actually transform. And I think that's a path I missed originally because I was in my early 30s. I was a multimillionaire. I felt like I had done so much already, but it was still not enough for me to feel like I was truly mastering entrepreneurship. And so I wanted to do more and I kept raising the bar of what it should mean for me to be successful as an entrepreneur. And it took me a couple of failures and a few years to realize that my rule of doing something surprisingly impressive to measure my worth was not working. I had to change my mindset, not seek growth but seek transformation, become an investor, become a mentor. So, you don't measure your growth with the same KPIs when you transform. So, that was a crossroad I missed in the light, but I also missed it. It happens also in the failure zone. So, I call that the shadow because I believe there's 3 emotions that derail any business, which are uncertainty, fear, and unworthiness. And when you reach the fear level and unworthiness level, you're in the failure zone. And if you stay too long trapped because you don't recognize these emotional patterns, It derails your decision-making capacities, which brings you to the crossroad in the shadow, which is you either become a fallen hero, someone resentful against reality, angry at life, and a victim mindset, or you actually transform. And the playbook is that you don't transform from your headspace, you transform from your gut space, your intuition. So, I had to let go of every growth metrics I was attached to so I can find the business pivot and my personal leadership pivot that would allow me for success. And I've done it with the gloves. Like I said, I was in the shadow and then I had an intuition that nitrile glove was the way to go, but I didn't know how. And I followed my entrepreneurial courage towards the market fit. And I've done it again with my nanotechnology company, Prometheum, where The market wasn't ready for a new air purification machine. So, I narrowed it down to the unique value proposition. It was aimless for a while and then found the path. And it's the same thing for myself, whereas I gave myself a year after hitting my rock bottom after a big warehouse fire and allowed myself to be aimless until I could see a path to transforming. And that solved my sense of unworthiness that had been piling up since my founder conflict, and it allowed me to become a way better entrepreneur and be involved in VCs and building funds and many other roles.

Yeah. Well, so I want to talk a little bit about your journey as a serial entrepreneur, but first I was interested in what you said about the change in the KPIs, right? So how did it change from being in business, or how did it change in general from one situation to the next? What became your new KPIs and what were the things you were looking at?

Well, it can mean— so I don't want to— I want people to think that there's one possible answer for that. I think it really depends on where your intuition pulls you. So for example, right now, I'm aiming towards teaching kind of again, because I am now at peace with my sense of imposter syndrome or unworthiness of not being in a place where I can actually help another entrepreneur because I haven't done another exit, right? That was my issue. And now I'm I feel like I have something worth sharing, so I'm stepping in it. And I calculate it not in pure metrics of doing something that is along the sides of another bigger exit, but more around the sides of, can I verbalize this in a way that resonates with more people? And can I become— it's a matter of who. It's really a matter of who. What are the metrics of the Feel, feel, talk, leadership excellence. It's not necessarily another exit. It might be to be on a TED stage. It might be to write a book. It might be to have positive resonance with the audience I'm trying to help. So I don't know if that answers the question, but that's what comes to me. And while I was building the fund, it was also a different— it was the same. So my KPIs were not around how much do I know about scaling a business. It was How can I evaluate the due diligence process? How can I look at return on investment? What's— how do I manage my risk? How do I raise money? So, it wasn't the same, right? So—

Yeah. No, I can relate to that. And, you know, no matter what, the imposter syndrome just kind of lingers, right? No matter how much good stuff you've done. But it seems like you're going from, you know, building success to translating that into some significance with giving back and teaching and helping the next generation. So, I think that's really positive. Yeah, yeah. So as a serial entrepreneur, how do you maintain balance mentally, physically, spiritually? I mean, it's tough. So what are some of your go-to strategies?

Well, I can tell you what I've done wrong and then hopefully we can learn from that too.

Yeah.

So when I exited my business, Neobex, so the final exit was to be paid later because a lot of money was stuck in inventory. I took the pile I had already gotten out and I started mostly investing in the nanotechnology company. But then my other partner, my new business partner, had a bunch of opportunities coming his way all the time and they felt like they had a lot of barriers to entry. So they felt really good. I invested in an Irish pub franchise in Thailand. We started— I bought into his construction company also in Thailand. So we built villas on an island on Koh Lanta, which we are still kind of doing. A bunch of different things all the way to to a supplement company, to a skateboard company. So, I was kind of following the flow of we're going to reach an equilibrium of involvement between my partner Matt and myself and the business all have a huge potential upside. And we thought by just staying in our X factor, we could manage it. But what I didn't account for is that none of them add cash flow. So, they were all under fire. And so, I think that's a big mistake with serial entrepreneurship is people see it as diversifying their risk. But because the root cause of startup failure is the internal mismanagement that derails decision-making, what will happen is that you're going to be fighting fires everywhere. And a little bit even if you don't just have a couple thousand dollars in a skateboard company, the little fire that it adds to the big fire of your main company sometimes become overwhelming. And so that's what I learned. And then after that, I decided to step away, close a bunch of different projects, and really focus more and more on one thing. And to this day, it's hard. It's super hard. And I'm getting more and more quality offers, but I'm really motivated to build the Courage Compass company because it feels very true to me. It feels— it's really the pathway to become the next version of myself that I want to be. And I really believe in the success and impact it can have. So now it's getting easier to say no. I have a whole team also to support. Yeah. So, I would say that that's the core lesson I learned.

Yeah. So, while you're dealing with fires, right? I mean, because you're still going to deal with fires even though you've done a great job of narrowing down the scope, right? And maybe limiting the number of fires, you still have fires, right? Entrepreneurship is all about solving problems every day, right? So, how do you manage that and maintain balance in your life?

Yeah. So, first of all, So, I categorize that in 3 ways: seeing it, navigating it, and learning from it. So, I think I'm building what I call an entrepreneur readiness score, which looks at the internal readiness of entrepreneurship more than anything else because I think we miss that part too much. And if you approach it from that lens, the first layer of emotional mastery is about navigating the shadow. So, can you see yourself becoming uncertain right now? Do you have the tools to navigate that uncertainty? And once you have that mastered, can you actually use your emotional reaction as a signal that your body is trying to verbalize something it cannot put into words right now? And as a leader, that becomes a superpower when you can do that. Same thing for fear and unworthiness. It's another data point that only you can generate. And so, That's one way I'm trying to manage that. The other way is I've always been very good at understanding we need different buckets in our life, like from a father, from an energy, from a business standpoint. But I didn't understand that you don't manage buckets like you manage a calendar. You manage them like you manage a plant. You won't water a plant if it's raining for a week. So, just as you don't have to water your energy if you've been at a Spartan Race boot camp for a week. And so, it's not necessarily the time you put in, it's the energy harmony that you arrive at.

Or the right inputs, right? You don't need water after a heavy rain, you need something different. So, knowing what those inputs that you need are.

Yeah.

Yeah, that's insightful.

And not letting your plant dry. You need a minimum amount of water. And so, I try to approach business in spring. So, if I feel like my business is in a season that needs more water, then I try to time-bound it because otherwise I would just sprint for too long, get out of— and then I fall in the shadow and my decision-making sucks and everything I've built in the sprint doesn't work anymore.

Yeah.

So, putting a time boundary, an energy boundary on things is really helpful for me. And the last thing I'd say that comes to me is a big lesson that I learned at my rock bottom, which is it's okay to let the world burn for a while. So, you think you need to fight every fire, but if you let it burn, you know, usually it's not as bad as you think. And then in stillness, you find clarity. So, yeah.

Yeah. And it speaks to a little bit of our sense of control too, right? Because as entrepreneurs, we control everything or we think we control everything. Yeah. So, maybe just by, well, sticking with that metaphor, if you just let it burn, once you're ready, there's not going to be as much fire to fight, right? So yeah, I guess to an extent that could be wise, but it could shoot you in the foot too.

Yeah, you have to have a good level of intuitive decision power because it's funny, I was speaking with my chief transformation officer before she actually joined me and she said, look, she— my current boss gave me this assignment, but I can feel it's not really necessary with time because she's older, she has more experience than me, her intuition is more attuned. And the next time we met, come to realize she just had received an email, say, hey, no, we're not going to go in that direction, so forget about that task. But before, she would have reacted to that task and worked day and night and then mismanaged her energy.

Yeah, that is a really good example. Yeah. So you mentioned 3 things. So fear, unworthiness, and what was the third one?

Uncertainty.

Uncertainty. Thank you. Yeah, I just kind of wanted to keep those in mind so we can go back to them. But I wanted to talk a little bit about this this idea of the entrepreneurial shadow. So you mentioned that a few times. So can you explain again a little bit more about what it is and how it shows up in a founder's journey?

So I believe entrepreneurship is a hero journey, which means that you step into the unknown. But the way we're approaching entrepreneurship right now is we're doing it in reverse. We're aiming for tactics, tools, skills that we can plug and play into a trail that's known in our forest. But that's not really entrepreneurship, and it often doesn't work anyway because the next step is people are going to go to the second layer, which is strategy. Okay, maybe I just needed another angle, and they're going to self-sabotage with internal pressure. That's why failure is the norm and burnout is the norm of entrepreneurship, as we see right now. So I believe we need to flip the script and start with internal clarity. on our core motivation, our anchors in our different buckets outside business so that we have less identity fusion. And so there's a bunch of tools like that that I'm thinking about that I've used unconsciously or consciously that have helped me. And so that helps navigate the journey. But even if you do it in the right order, you're still going to start from a place of hope, which is you're setting a target, you're setting, you know, you have a business plan basically, and you rub it against reality. And the first thing you're going to realize is that it doesn't fit, you know. So uncertainty is inevitably going to happen at some point. It's very rare that you can think yourself to clarity. And I've never done a business that has been a home run on the first try. You always question yourself, you always question some elements of your plan. And so, that's when uncertainty first steps in. If you don't manage your uncertainty because you have a depth of understanding of where you're going and that you might be uncertain in the tactics that you're using, but it doesn't derail the inner clarity and the strategy that you've built, then it's easier to navigate. But if you have started in reverse, then it's easy to derail yourself into fear of failure. And then fear of failure could trigger a sense of, well, why did I even think I could do it in the first place? Who am I to create a SaaS that's going to compete against Google? You know, things like that. You know, so, yeah. So that's kind of what I mean.

Yeah. So you've got a shadow check ritual. So tell us about what that is and how founders can use it to improve clarity and resilience.

The shadow check ritual is a work in progress for me. I'm using it myself, you know, currently, because I'm aware of my shadows now, but I'm trying to put it in a framework. So unfortunately today they cannot use it because it's not fully actionable. I'm testing it.

But in terms of how you use it?

I'm using it by recognizing the word. So vocabulary is the first step. So if you can name something, you can see it. And so seeing that, okay, I'm feeling uncertain right now. Oh, I'm really panicking, you know, or I'm— oh, the imposter syndrome is creeping in again, right? So if you can see it, then the goal of the shadow check, you know, if you just start with that, is to understand your emotional state and how deep you are in the shadows, because that's going to inform how the correlation between your decision and your decision patterns. So if you're deep in the shadows, you're going to default to your decision, your current comfort zone of decision-making. that I call, which then you can use the courage compass to create a distance between that pattern and where your intuition is leading you.

Yeah. So I recently taught a course to a bunch of undergraduates and graduates, and we focused on mindset in entrepreneurship. And I know you've got a few thoughts on that. So what are, in your opinion, what are some common mindset traps that you see high achievers or entrepreneurs fall into when they're trying to launch and grow a company?

Well, I think we downplay the role of luck and bad luck. That's important.

We do. Yeah.

So I think I've been exceptionally lucky and exceptionally unlucky in many ways in my career, my entrepreneur career. So I think that is a trigger for imposter syndrome and unworthiness. And it's also a trigger for inflated egos and narcissism. So I think we need to be mindful of that. The other thing is we confuse hustling with business and entrepreneurship. To me, they're all different.

Yeah.

So you can have a side hustle and be happy with that. You can be a business person that takes a problem and build a system of efficiency to solve it. And then you can be an entrepreneur that goes in the forest and trailblaze your own trail, you know, and live on the lining of a coin in between 2 realities, trying to bridge between your comfort zone, the current state, and what you think should happen, right? And that's a different experience.

Yeah. Yeah. So there is a difference between, you know, hustling, self-employment, entrepreneurship, innovation, small business ownership, right? Even though they all are kind of part of the same, I guess, family, they do have different looks and flavors for sure. Yeah. But yeah, I think, you know, it's the role of luck, both good and bad luck, is underplayed, right? It's, you know, if if you're super successful, you like to underplay your good luck, right? And if you had a failure, you like to overplay your bad luck, maybe it seems, right?

That's why I think we have to approach it as a transformational tool. And if you think about it with AI, the rules for human productivity are being shaken. We don't know if jobs are really going to be— so what will happen? And I think entrepreneurship is a possible default answer that might rise. We already see that it's becoming a big trend. I think there's 50 more businesses created in the States in 2024 than it was in 2019, but the failure rates are the same. So we, I think we need to not only learn to navigate it better so that we lower the failure rate, but we also need to see it as a transformational tool. So if it's the case that every business will fail at least once and that most of the businesses out there have been built by founders that have failed before and tried again, then how— what's the difference between an entrepreneur that tries again and wins and one that has a destructive failure that destroys their identity and, you know, makes entrepreneurship into a bad experience? Well, I think part of the answer is acknowledging that the real treasure is not the exit. It's the broken icons that you had when you started the journey. about how it should play out, who you are, what are your skills that are being destroyed by the reality of the experience that you can now integrate into wisdom that helps you transform and give back.

Yeah. And I think that helps the transition in general, right? Because I know, myself included, and a lot of other founders after the exit, you think, okay, this is it. I'm going to be happy now, right? But without meaning, that kind of success is quite empty.

Yes, absolutely.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. So you've also, you've got a framework called Courage Compass. Is that in the kind of the same developmental state as the Entrepreneurial Shadow? Or is there something more that you could talk to about?

So, so like, I, I'm trying to build my frameworks around the 3 levels of emotional mastery, decision mastery, and intuition mastery.

So this would be fear.

Okay, the Courage Compass is at the decision mastery level. So once you have the shadow checked, you know what What's your emotional state? Then you should recognize your decision-making patterns. And so what I do is I, for now, I'm using Imbrogenetics as a psychological assessment tool to get the default cognitive patterns of people. So for me, I have, I'm 95th percentile creative, relational, and logic, and super weak on structural. So when I'm in the shadow, my pattern that I could see through time was that I was going to my creative conceptual brain first and imagining a billion pathways. Then I would try to relinquish my ownership of outcome as a leader of my business through partnership and other people's opinion in my relational strength. And if I'm not lucky and my logic doesn't step in, then I spiral down and become even more fearful, and you go back to conceptualization. So I've learned to use that as a baseline to understand that you can have the same IQ, same experience, same whatever, be both great leaders, but have a cognitive preference that makes it so that your decision typically goes in one of the 4 quadrants. And so for someone, if you do a YouTube video and say, hey, why don't you call these CEOs? Hey, look what I just did. I just called the CEO. Oh, this guy is so courageous. He's taking decisions that I wouldn't feel comfortable doing. But that's, that's his comfort zone, most likely. It doesn't mean he's a good leader or a good decision maker. It might be his pattern. And then at some point, it's not going to work, especially if he doesn't manage his emotional state. So what I do with the Courage Compass is I start there, and then I give entrepreneurs the permission to let the world burn for a while. I teach them to anchor outside outside business so that they don't feel like they fail as a person if their business is failing, and to reconnect with their intuition so that they can actually go in the quadrant that they need to do. So one way to do that is to use strategic empathy, to pretend like you're a decision maker with the strength of each quadrant, come up with 4 possible decisions for that strategic decision you're trying to make, and then, and then the letting the world and the anchoring is a way for you to stop convincing yourself to go back in your own pattern because you kind of feel where you have to go. And the more you do that, the better you feel it. And sometimes you— and at some point you don't need to write it down every time. You kind of know I need to be structural right now, which is often what I need to do. But yeah, so like that.

Yeah, no, that's a great insight and I like that framework a lot. So you work with entrepreneurs now and if people are interested in finding out more about you, what type of work you do or reaching out, how can they find you?

They can go to my website, philneil.com, P-H-I-L-N-E-I-L.com, and I'm building. So, it's kind of a new venture I started a couple months ago. So, we're building as we go. I don't know when this podcast is going to be released, but I'm testing the first version of my Entrepreneur Readiness Score next week. And so, it should be live in July. And so, I think it's going to be free. I think it's the first step into that whole ecosystem of approaching entrepreneurship through a different order. And then if that brings out a gap in your leadership style and entrepreneur style and you want to dive more into how to increase that score for yourself, then it's going to be on my website. I'm working on workshops and speech and things like that.

It sounds like a great tool because, yeah, a lot of people maybe dive into it without being completely ready, which I think is true of a lot of things. But yeah, just being able to see where your blind spots are and work on them seems like a really wise move. So that's great. Good luck with that.

Thank you. And I've been into big companies before, and every employee has a performance plan that is being tracked. But for entrepreneurs, we don't have that because it's hard to have a common place where we can say, okay, well, this applies to every business. But I think the inner mastery, the inner management, and the quality of decision applies to every business. So, so that's— I think that could be very impactful.

Well, thank you for being here, Phil. This is a great conversation. I'm sure people will benefit. Thanks so much. Thank you so much for listening to the Total Entrepreneur Mind Body Spirit podcast. If you liked what you heard or heard something interesting today, Please give us a like, share a comment, or better yet, subscribe to the podcast. Thank you.