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I recently had the chance to sit down with Jonah Peake to talk about the go-to source he created for all of San Diego’s tech and entrepreneurship events, (and perhaps what could be called his alter ego), The Social Coyote. 

More than just a mere event newsletter, The Social Coyote is one man’s mission to get 1000 San Diegans out of their dens and into the tech and entrepreneurship community. Sprinkled throughout the weekly calendar are a healthy doses of coyotes wearing sunglasses and a fur-rocious amount of puns. It’s great fun, sure, but The Social Coyote is also a case study on building community and connection in an increasingly digital age. And honestly, it’s working – it really does get people excited for these events! Who would have thought that such a simple concept, a curated event email newsletter, would be so much fun? Jonah would, that’s who. 

We talked about a number of topics, including using change to propel yourself forward, his thoughts on San Diego’s tech culture, how to build and see a community’s web, how to be comfortable at unfamiliar events, and how to finally find your pack. 

If you’d like to learn more, you can reach Jonah on his LinkedIn – or sign up for his newsletter here to stay abreast on all that’s happening in the San Diego tech scene. (Just make sure to use this link so I can get the coveted CoyoTee). 

Howl yeah! 

I’m primarily interested in the concept of resilience – whether personal, communal, or societal. What does the concept of resilience mean to you? 

I like this question – I’ve actually been thinking about it all week! Resilience, to me, means going through something challenging, coming out different, and then finding a way to use that difference to move forward. 

I have a bit of a personal story with this. When I was 27, I went through a health crisis. I went into a coma, was taken into the hospital by my girlfriend (who is now my wife!), and it turned out that I had ketoacidosis, which is what happens when you have Type 1 Diabetes. Basically, your body turns acidic because you can’t get sugar into your cells. 

It was crazy because, after a few days in the hospital and many IVs, I was released from the hospital – but I had an entirely new lens to view the world. If I eat a certain way, I have to think about it differently. If I exercise a certain way, I have to think about it differently. Even something like leaving the house is different. And it was a total shift in how I lived my life. 

So in a weird way, going through that experience shifted who I was completely, and refocused how I thought about everything – and I do see that as finding a bit of resilience in an extremely challenging situation. I could have easily said “This sucks” and felt sorry for myself, (although you sometimes do), but that’s not the way you want to go through something like that. 

I think if we think about it, most of us have had an experience that totally shifted us, but that health crisis was a really strong one that taught me a lot. 

So going through something, and coming out on the other side differently as a result – but resilience is found when you use that difference to propel yourself forward.

I mean, you never go back to being the person that you were a year ago – or even the person you were yesterday. Propelling yourself through change with a new context is how I like to think about it. 

You are heavily involved in the San Diego startup and entrepreneurship community. Can you briefly give some background on your career/areas of focus so far? 

The start of my career in San Diego was teaching surf lessons and handing out Monster Energy drinks. These ended up being dead end jobs and I needed to find something I could grow into. So I went searching for a startup, and what I found was basically on-demand tech. I found my way to a company I found on Craigslist called Handy, which was a home cleaning startup, in the era where people were trying to build the next “Uber for ….” They eventually were purchased by Angie’s List.

Handy shared coworking space with Postmates – so we battled for conference room space with them to onboard our people!Then, I worked on a project that would eventually automate my job entirely at Handy, and, seeing the writing on the wall and having connections at Postmates, I jumped over. Plus, food delivery felt cooler than home cleaning!

What I started to notice, though, is that when a company (like a Postmates) gets massive quickly, they start to dial in certain processes. There’s less “We don’t know how to solve this, go figure it out,” and more “Here’s the playbook, run it and do the same thing every day,” which isn’t necessarily how I tend to think. 

I really enjoy trying things and being creative, and that doesn’t always lend itself as well to the big machine that companies eventually grow into. I realized that I wanted to go earlier and see what companies that were far younger were doing. And so I started to seek out the San Diego tech scene, see who was active here, and see who was building things here. That’s how I started to plug into what was happening in the scene. 

I started offering to volunteer at organizations that I thought were cool, like Startup San Diego, which was looking for an entrepreneur in residence in 2020. I ended up spending a year with them and putting on the Startup Month conference. It was actually a month, not a week, at that point!

Cool.

And there were a few others as well – the San Diego Angel Conference was going online, and when I talked to some of the people involved, it seemed super interesting. So I volunteered there, and tried to meet people and see who was operating in that space. 

What ends up happening with many communities is that the same faces start showing up at different events. You start recognizing people from all over the place, and you start to put these webs together. 

I had enough time working in and hopping between these different ecosystems and realized that we have a pretty intimate web in San Diego. Even though it’s large, there’s lots of overlap and crossover. And that got me really excited. 

Before we move on to The Social Coyote, let’s keep talking about the idea of a San Diego ecosystem. What do you believe are some unique strengths in the San Diego scene? A common topic of discussion is that the San Diego tech scene is great at starting and growing mid-sized companies, but with a few exceptions, tech companies here seem to have a hard time crossing the chasm to become giant household names. 

There’s a lot of debate on what makes San Diego what it is and why it’s the way that it is. Some people say that we’re the little underdog brother to some of the bigger scenes, and others disagree. Other groups don’t count biotech as part of the tech scene, even though I think it’s really a massive part! It could be partly due to the fact that there are so many transplants here. I’m one. 

One thing I’ve thought about, and I don’t know if this is the real reason, is that some of the biggest industries and most influential groups in San Diego aren’t necessarily in the news. For example, they provide infrastructure or something to the military and it’s literally top secret so you can’t talk about it. 

Biotech is also interesting. They don’t like to share what they do unless it’s already successful. Then, a company like Qualcomm is huge, but their technology powers other technology – and most people are just more familiar with Apple than the technology inside an iPhone.

So I think there’s a feeling that we don’t have as much going on here as we truly do, just due to the nature of some of the biggest tech businesses we have here – but again, this is something that people like to debate. 

The other thing though is that we have this culture here that is a touch more relaxed. You might have noticed this if you’ve asked for an intro to someone. It’s somehow easier to acquire than other tech scenes or tech communities. 

I also think there’s just something about the way the city is structured. It’s very laid back. It doesn’t have the intensity of New York or San Francisco, and I think that changes how other people view it. But I think that’s a good thing! I really like how we have this energy and how we, for example, like to just take advantage of when it’s nice out! 

So, I don’t know. I do think the friendliness and interconnectedness are a bit more vibrant here. We also shouldn’t forget that we’re 1.5 million people with 2 million more just south of the border who are very engaged with what’s going on up here – in effect, we’re nearly 4 million people in a very small area. That counts for something. 

Totally. And so that’s where you come in! Your current project, or perhaps your alias, is The Social Coyote, and helping push these connections and the culture. Can you talk about that? Why a coyote?

I guess I was looking for some creative fulfillment. I was feeling disconnected from, let’s say, community in general, for a number of reasons. There was the pandemic, and I had a young child which also limits your schedule. But a few cool tools started to come online right around then – AI started to come out and people are generating amazing images with it, and there’s this new platform, Beehiiv, which allows you to make newsletters in a really effective and efficient way. All of these things kind of came together for me – I know I want to do a project, I want it to be creative, I want it to be helpful, and I want it to have some sort of cool impact on San Diego. And I also know that I have a limited schedule, and there’s lots of cool stuff going on. 

 Meanwhile, people would shoot me a text and ask me if I was going to something that night that I didn’t even know was happening. I had to decline all the time because I couldn’t get out of the house that quickly, so it started to get a little frustrating. So I first thought that, if I could learn how to code a web scraper, I could pull every event into one big database, and then I could know who is doing what and then I choose what fits in my schedule. I used as many tools as I could and banged my head against a wall, because that turned out to be a really bad plan! I realized that curation is what makes The Coyote special, not aggregation.

I told a friend about this and he told me just to do it manually – just make a list and put it out there. See if anyone cares. That was a good point, because I was really overthinking what I wanted to do, and he pushed me to just go for it. 

So at that point, I had to figure out what I really wanted to highlight. I knew some people in the tech community and really respected the events they were putting on, and I could share their events without having to attend each one. So then it all started coming together, but I couldn’t put out a brand that was something like OnlyTechEvents, or something,  but that’s a little too basic – or a little too much like OnlyFans. But maybe my SEO would have been great! 

Then I thought of some other names, like Songbird Soirees. But songbirds didn’t make sense, and soirees are too fancy. So then I started to think about what we have in San Diego. What’s a San Diego animal? Could be a pelican, but then everyone who reads my list is a pelican too. So then I thought, what do I really want this to be? And I wanted it to be groups, packs of people. I wanted it to be a clever animal. I wanted it to have the feeling of something that is always present, but you might not always see. That’s when I thought about coyotes, which you sometimes see in our canyons or trotting around our neighborhoods, and I’m certain that they know a hell of a lot about us, even if we don’t see them at all! 

And all of these things together felt really right. Packs and families, groups coming together. It felt like something I wanted to embody – bringing groups of people together and having them meet each other. My thesis became, the more people got out into the community, then the more opportunity they’d have to meet someone new who can open a door for them. We just needed the initial catalyst to get people out of their dens. And then the puns started showing up, and that’s what I built the brand around. It just felt right.

That sort of hearkens back to your original comment about resilience – using the change from a transformative event to propel you forward. You felt disconnected from a community, then acted on that feeling to build something new. And you acting on that feeling has allowed other people to access that community too. 

I think that’s really true. When I started talking to people, I realized that most of the comments I got back were things like, “My events pop up in my feed,” or “Someone told me about it,” or some other way of getting lucky. I didn’t want luck to be the barrier that prevented people from getting out there.

The more interactions we have, the better we get at them, so I wanted to make it easy for someone to grab my list, make it unbelievably simple to find what they’re looking for, and encourage them to go to it. And I wanted to make Mondays something to look forward to!

But really, I see this as a way to bring more eyes and more people into the tech community. If we can get more people in more easily, I’d consider that to be a success. 

You mentioned that the genesis for The Social Coyote was that you felt disconnected. It was during COVID, you had a young child at home. Now that you’re connecting with the business community at large, does that fill that personal need for connection? Are you experiencing more community? 

I think it does! 

I think what ends up happening, and maybe this happens by accident, is you just start to go out more. You start to notice more connections. You start to see more people doing things you appreciate, and you absorb that. 

Speaking of resilience, I remember going to a couple of events in the very beginning to test my thesis, and I knew no one. It was so hard to be at one of those events with something so small. The Social Coyote was tiny, and I wasn’t even sure I was allowed to talk about it yet. No one had heard of it. I didn’t even know if I had anything yet. But what I realized was, the more you went, the more you started to see similar people. The same people were now at a different event. And so you started to feel a bit more comfortable, and by being more comfortable, you felt more confident in going out and trying something new. 

The other thing I noticed throughout this process is that every event starts out and hasn’t warmed up yet. So a lot of times you show up and get into a room and think, “This is uncomfortable. I am uncomfortable. I shouldn’t be here.” But what I realized is, after a certain amount of time, everyone warms up and loosens up, and so does the event itself. A lot of people associate that with having a drink or whatever, which can be a good strategy, but the event itself takes time to warm up too. 

Sometimes just giving it time, being observant, and finding someone that you recognize is all it takes to get to that point. Then, when you get out more, you run into more people. You follow their journeys, and you see them grow as well. That’s kind of how I think about it, anyways.

To continue down the coyote theme, you’ll start to find your pack and this will help you get more comfortable! 

What are some tips that you have for people who want to get involved in a new community, perhaps the San Diego business scene, who don’t have much experience in these types of events and don’t know where to start?  

One thing I learned from the early stages, before I was comfortable, was that I didn’t actually have to say anything. I didn’t have to come to the table and start to pitch what I was doing, or tell everyone everything that is really cool about me, or whatever.

This strategy lets me ease into events a little more. After a few times, you start to recognize people, and now it becomes easier to chat with someone or even just show up at an event. Like I said earlier, it takes time to warm up. It will always feel weird at the beginning. And if you do have something you want to chat about, have that prepared a little bit so you don’t hit someone with a really long winded story! Wait for some questions to come in after you give a little elevator pitch. 

The other thing is to just ask questions. Care about what other people are doing. That makes the thing a whole hell of a lot more fun if you’re curious and truly want to learn what other people are up to. 

I used to do this when I was uncomfortable. I would be in my own mind a little bit and pretend I was hosting a podcast. Just ask some questions and don’t feel like you have to talk about yourself, because sometimes that can be a bit uncomfortable. Sometimes just being curious as to what other people are doing can be super helpful, and can take the spotlight off yourself too. 

I like that podcast host tip – that’s unique! A fun little mental trick.

It actually works! Although it sometimes backfires, because I’ve had conversations end and the other person says, “I feel horrible! I didn’t ask you anything about yourself!” 

In my mind though, I’m like, “I loved our conversation, I learned so much!”

Can you share some success stories from The Social Coyote? Have there been any connections or communities built that you have been especially proud of? 

There are a few examples! I can’t take credit for either of these events, but I love that I can help elevate newer events.

One of my favorites is the North County Tech Meetup. This isn’t my group, but I love helping to promote it. Hussein is the best! 

Rick Moy’s product group is another group that I love to promote. 

Both groups are under a year old but are gaining steam. Everyone knows about the big San Diego events, but it’s these up start groups by talented people that really get me going.  

So it really doesn’t take much to get me excited. Someone gave me a “Howl Yeah!” in Costco the other day and it made my week! I can’t take credit for much of this really, everyone else is working so hard – I just collected a few things that I thought looked awesome and wrapped them in some coyote puns.

The branding of The Social Coyote is so unique – and fun! I especially love the “Howl Yeah” shout out. Despite being a relatively small niche (San Diego tech events), you have such a strong brand voice. Can you talk about the importance of branding? What, in your opinion, goes into making a strong and memorable brand? 

I don’t have a background in branding or anything, but I just like things that flow together and sort of fit. The Social Coyote has a lot of elements that are kind of weird, or funny, but together feel like they make sense for some reason. It’s important to listen to what other people are saying too. They like coyotes wearing sunglasses. They say things like “Howl yeah.” And you’re like, “Oh man, that works. You’re right.”

I think maybe the advice is, for something like this, you don’t have to create the entire brand, but set the foundation and put it out there, and you’ll get good feedback. The hard part can be, and part of this is from the tech background that says to always innovate and move forward, is knowing when to keep things simple. I put out a couple questions asking what I can do better and what to do next, and someone replied, “Don’t.” And that made me realize that something cool can be simple.

Totally. What’s next for the Social Coyote?

I’m trying to figure that out right now. There are lots of really interesting ideas! For the brand, it could be events. It could be promoting events. I’d love to help founders make connections if I can, and of course I’d like to be a little more connected myself. 

I’ve even been pitched a Coyote Accelerator, a program that helps founders. I like all these ideas, so I think it’s now just finding out how to look through the lens and see what’s next. 

I wish I had a grand master plan, but I’m having so much fun meeting people that, just the fact that this is out there and people are noticing it, is considered a win. I think there could be more down the road, but we’ll have to see. 

What is the best way for someone to follow you (or get in touch!) if they’d like to learn more or get involved? How can someone reading this blog help out? 

I’m mostly on LinkedIn. I have a pretty simple rule for connecting there – if you’re in San Diego, I’ll accept. I just love to meet people in San Diego.

I think the best way to help is to just come out and support event organizers! People put a lot of work into these events, and getting out of our dens makes an even more connected San Diego. Oh, and loop in folks who’ve just moved here with The Social Coyote so we can bring them out too. 

That’s kind of the origin of all of this anyways. How can we build a bigger network, a bigger group, a bigger pack of people who care about San Diego Tech and Entrepreneurship?

The other thing too is, there’s always room for more awesome events. If you’re eager to get a pack of people together and start something, go for it. Nothing should slow you down. Even just getting people together for coffee is valuable, and I like promoting that stuff too.

Get out there and check things out!

Want to go more in depth? Learn more here: 

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Jonah Peake’s LinkedIn

Startup San Diego Events Calendar – Powered by The Social Coyote

This latest interview is a special one with a special guest – my father, Steve Hammock!

An accomplished business professional, he was president of Watkins Wellness, the leader in the worldwide hot tub and swim spa industry, for over 25 years. While growing that company into the hundreds of millions in revenue, he was also highly accomplished on the personal side as well – raising 5 kids and maintaining his marriage of nearly 35 years.

As a newly minted parent of a six-month old, I find myself constantly thinking about the lessons I learned in my own childhood from my own father. And as someone who is always working to grow and expand his career, the business lessons that my dad imparted to me are also invaluable.

In a way, then, this is a post on the ground zero of where I developed a sense of resilience – watching my dad work to provide for his family, develop a loving relationship with his wife and kids, and grow a successful company.

In this interview, you’ll learn about building a strong and resilient, company culture, how culture pays dividends in challenging economic times, the critical importance of keeping your customer at the center of your target, the parallels of business and family, and what my dad learned from his own father.

If you enjoyed this interview and would like to contact Steve Hammock, you can contact him here.

I’m primarily interested in the concept of resilience – personal, communal, and societal. What does resilience mean to you?

Well, we certainly all know what the definition of resilience is. We know too, that life is hard, business is hard, parenting is hard, and relationships are hard. Resilience is about navigating your way through all that. But for me, resilience has primarily been about growth.

I’ve always believed that you’re either growing or you’re shrinking. You’re moving forward, or you’re moving backwards. In a business sense, we really don’t have the ability to stand still!

If you think about it in a business context, the primary reason companies go out of business is that they can’t figure out a way to grow. To me, that fails the resilience test. In business, there’s going to be a lot coming at you, and the way to win is to grow your way out of it.

Can you take us through a cliff notes of your career journey?

I’ve sort of had a different type of career by modern standards. I only worked for two companies after leaving college – one for a relatively short time, and then the other for over 40 years.

I joined what was a rather small, very young, consumer products manufacturing business in the early 1980s. I started in a low level, sort of an entry level marketing job. I grew my career with that company as it grew along a sales and marketing track. After a couple years I became the Marketing Manager, then National Sales Manager, Director of Sales and Marketing, the Executive Vice President, and lastly, I had the privilege to serve as company president for the past 25 years.

You were the President of Watkins Wellness for a number of years. The company grew and transformed an incredible amount during your tenure. What were you most proud of?

Gosh, a lot of things!

First of all, our growth was phenomenal over a very long period of time. We grew to the point where we became the number one company in our industry, and maintained that leadership position for at least the last 30 years in a row. You’d be hard-pressed to think of another company in any industry that has ever done that.

We navigated our way through the public company space, which is difficult in its own right. We also had tremendous success after emerging from the Great Recession, which was very difficult.

I am certainly, too, proud of the way we handled COVID. We were a company that got shut down for 16 weeks, so restarting all our factories was a huge task.

But I think if I had to pick one thing, it was the culture that we built at our company. We did a great job, I think, of inculcating a growth mindset, giving our people purpose, and creating a culture where everybody pulled on the same oar.

In fact, we won top workplace here in San Diego County multiple times, and that’s an award that is voted on by your employees. So, while I think hitting all of our business milestones was rewarding, it was really the culture of the company that we built that was “that one thing” I’m most proud of.

Was a strong company culture something that you had always set out to create? Or did you notice it happening organically, and you worked to incubate it? Was it a byproduct of the growth and success Watkins was having?

Well, I think cultures are developed off the personalities of your leaders. Certainly, I had a personality, and I think over the years we did a great job of hiring the right people to get us where we needed to go. We always walked our own talk, if you will, and challenged everyone to call us out when we didn’t! But many years ago, maybe over 20 years ago, we took a good look at our company, why we had been successful, why our employees were happy, what made us unique and special, and why our employees rated us so highly, and we formalized our value system. That gave us a roadmap to stay on as we grew.

As you know, the more you grow and the bigger you get, the harder it is to hang on to those unique things that make you, you. By formalizing our culture, making it a centerpiece of what we talked about on an ongoing basis, and then hiring people that were motivated by who we were and wanted to be a part of it, it helped us maintain our guiding principles as we got bigger.

You also were president during a number of challenging times and recessions. Can you discuss a major obstacle that you overcame, and how you overcame it? Does culture help build resilience to navigate challenging times?

Culture absolutely helps you – if you take care of your people when times are good, they will be there for you when the times get tough. We saw that play out in our business time and time again over the four decades. For example, everyone talks about the Great Recession starting in 2008. But in our particular category, since we were so tied to the housing market, it really started in July of 2005 and extended all the way through 2009! It was a very long, very tough time.

We made expensive products that oftentimes needed to be financed, and during that period all the funding sources were wiped out. There was no home equity for people to borrow against and your traditional lenders weren’t lending. It was a pretty desperate time. Since we were a discretionary product, we produced the kind of things people defer when times get tough. As a result, we lost half of our top line over that period. But we still made a profit, even at the very bottom, which obviously is the goal of business. That was a reflection on how our people battled.

We made money because we always had our customers in the center of our target. If you have your customer in the center of your target, you’re going to do fine. Most companies, I think, and most people, have someone or something in the center of their target, other than their customer. In my opinion, that’s when companies run into trouble.

We also were very tough to compete against. We were an extremely agile group, and we weren’t wedded to any specific products.  If it sold, we kept it, if it didn’t, we moved on. We knew that when we got into those tough times, our traditional retail customer was going to be out of the market for a very long time. We had to do something different. So, we pivoted to different products, different customer segments, different channels, and things like that. So agility, I’d say, would be another component to answering your resilience question.

Being last one standing in a space that is being wiped out doesn’t help you! The inclination often, is to hang on to what you have, and ride it down. We didn’t do that. We were conscious enough of what was going on to say, “Hey, you know what? That’s not going to work anymore, we have to do something else.” And we did. Again, since our people were all-in on our mission, we did a lot of something-else’s, and it ended up paying dividends.

You’ve told me that one of the most important qualities a leader can have is the ability to decide. Can you expand on that? What other qualities are important for a leader (or in general, a businessman) to have?

Well, obviously a business is made up of a lot of leaders, so really the decision-making comment I think applies mostly to the person at the top. Not everybody is built to be a number one. There are a lot of great number twos out there that really aren’t the right people to be number ones. I think in my experience, the primary thing that separates someone at the top of a business, who does well there, from otherwise really smart people who don’t, is the ability to make a decision on time. On time always means before it’s obvious to everyone else.

As an example – I always looked at growth as the main thing. No matter the environment, you’ve got to grow. Growing requires rolling the dice. You’ve got to take some chances. But once the right direction becomes obvious to everybody else, the move has already happened! So you have to move before having all the information, and that requires a certain amount of fortitude that a lot people don’t possess. In the business that I was involved in, we made a lot of really impactful decisions before it was obvious to everyone else, and that made us very tough to compete against.

So there’s a certain appetite for risk that must be there as well.

It’s absolutely required, absolutely required!

I mean, honestly, if you want to be a “me-too” business, that’ll last for a while, but again, companies go out of business because they can’t figure out how to grow or how to innovate. So, in your parlance, that means they fail the resilience test. But in order to grow, you must be “first” a lot of times! Yes, you almost always have to be better, but you also have to be first.

First means that you have to come out of the box before your competitor is ready to move. That’s risk. So, it’s classic risk and reward. And you won’t always be right. I sure wasn’t. We made plenty of mistakes, but over the long haul, we were right way more than we were wrong.

Not only did you find success in business, but you were (and are) a great dad to five kids! Can you talk about how you worked to build resilience in your family life? What, in your opinion, makes a resilient family?

I think there are a lot of business parallels!

You have to stand for something, you have to have values. I think the greatest virtue to have in business is transparency. I’m going to skip around on you here a little bit, but communication is always key, and transparency is the most important part of good communication.

When you think about a company, literally everyone working there is doing it for a living. That means that everybody is equally vested. Therefore, the more people understand what you’re trying to do, where you’re trying to go, and how you’re doing along the way, the better off they are, right? All employees really need to know four things – Where are we now? Where are we going? What role do I play? And what do I get if we get there?

 It’s my belief that, in order to do the best job possible, a person needs to know everything he/she thinks they need to know. It’s a simple concept.  If you think you need to know something, then you probably do.

In our business, we would say, “If there’s something you think you need to know in order to do your best job, please tell us what it is, and we’ll get the answer for you.” That’s how you empower your people. We spent an awful lot of time teaching our teams about the company, why we do what we do, why we don’t do what we don’t do, how our profits are made, how we go to market, what our channels are all about. The more that teammates understand about the entirety of the business, even if it doesn’t relate to their specific function, the more valuable their opinion becomes. Since we are all equally vested, all opinions mattered.

When you’re running a big business, you got to be listening to everybody, because nobody has all the answers. It’s the basic philosophy of “everybody is in it together”.

All of that is to say – many of the tools required to build a winning culture in business, and are the same ones needed to build resilient families!

You have to stand for something, you have to have a certain set of principles, you have to walk the talk, you have to impress upon your own children that you’re actually the kind of person you say you are. If you want to be a good dad, start by being a good husband.  Respect your partner, treat them well.

Similar to my previous comment, in our family, our kids were in the center of our target. If the kids are in the center of your target, then that’s where you’ll spend your time. If you walk that talk, you end up with some pretty good kids.

Heck, even though you and the rest of our kids are all grown up, I think the five of you are still in the center of our target.

Is ensuring that the kids are at the “center of the target” how you are able to find the balance between work and family life? How did you find that balance?

Yeah, it’s funny you bring up balance. I don’t know if I did find the balance!

I mean, I tried to do what I could, but there’s a lot of ways to do it. In our family, we were very traditional. I went to work, I made money so we could pay for things, and your mother spent her career raising you kids. My job when I was home, was to be present, to show up for things, and to inculcate the gifts of hard work, integrity, humility, and those other personal qualities that you want your children to have.

The goals we set were mostly ensuring that each of you was reaching high. We told each of you that if you reached super high and attained something great, we would be there to support you. And I think that’s how it worked out. We had a plan, and we executed that plan. Of course, in our family, staying close to God and being a faith-filled family also played a major role.

What would you consider your greatest success on the family side to be? Were there any significant obstacles?

Well, we live here in Southern California, and we had five kids. It’s an expensive proposition! Everybody worked really hard in school and earned their way into really top colleges. That cost a lot of money, so these were obstacles that required us to make decisions. Again, we prioritized our children over ourselves.

That said, I think in any family that’s going to work, the parents have to take care of their relationship first. In our case, a strong marriage has been, and is, key. When you do have kids, you’re undoubtedly going to say no to things a lot – but you have to explain the whys behind the reasoning. This is the transparency part! You communicate from within values and the principles we established for our own family, and the understanding is there.

Our goal was to raise five great citizens, and I believe that we’ve done that.

Your own father was a colonel in the Air Force. What lessons did he impart to you about business or family?

Well, he was a man of integrity and a man of humility. He was a pretty simple guy, a man of few words. But first and foremost, his main lesson was always, “Be honest”. Adjacent to that was, “Do the right thing”. That’s it really. Pretty simple. If you’re honest with the people that you love, be honest with the people who love you, honest with those who work for you, and mostly, be honest with yourself, you’ll go far. He would also always say, after do the right thing, “And you know what that is.”

That second rejoinder is not unimportant! The right thing can change in the moment! But he would always say, “And you know what that is.” Again, one of my goals in life is to live guilt-free, because guilt is so debilitating. If you do the right thing because you know what it is and you’re honest with yourself, you can live a guilt-free life.

What’s better than that?

How has the transition to retirement been? Was there anything unexpected? Anything easier or more difficult than expected?

What’s been the most interesting is that I don’t miss work – and I thought I would. I do miss talking about business and talking about work, and I do know that I’ve got more to give. Right now, I’m trying to think through how I’m going to do that going forward.

I certainly have more aches and pains than I was expecting to have, ha! All this golf and tennis comes with a downside, I guess. But retirement’s been pretty smooth so far.

I’ve always been a person that worked off lists, and I write out a list every day of some things that I want to accomplish. I move through that list, and get a lot done, so it definitely hasn’t been boring.

How’s the transition been to grandfather?

Well, it’s been pretty easy for me, because I’m not doing that much! I think my opportunity will come after the baby stage. Our little grandson is still a baby, so it’s grandma’s time to shine right now.

But I think the most rewarding part, not that we don’t have a beautiful boy there, has just been watching you as a parent and watching your relationship with your wife grow. Just seeing the two of you and how you’re taking care of your child and maturing, and again, doing the right thing has been so impressive to watch. So, I think that’s been the most rewarding part of being a grandfather thus far.

Wow, thank you! So, what’s next for Steve Hammock?

I don’t know. Like I said, I’ve always been somebody that had a plan and I don’t really have a plan right now, and I think I’m good with that. But I do have some talent and I do have some gifts, and I still have a lot of energy. I wanted to take some time and just sort of live life, which we’ve been doing right now, but I’m starting to contemplate how I want to channel my professional energies going forward.

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Want to learn more? Go more in depth here:

Watkins Wellness website

San Diego Union-Tribune Interview with Steve Hammock on Leadership

San Diego 500 Profile on Steve Hammock

Contact Steve Hammock