We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Dan Carusi a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.

Alright, Dan thanks for taking the time to share your stories and insights with us today. To kick things off, we’d love to hear about things you or your brand do that diverge from the industry standard

Red Paint Consulting provides performance improvement solutions for leadership and team development. Making people uncomfortable and leveraging Adventure & Equine Experiential Learning is the foundation to our methodology. Our consultants are outdoor enthusiasts to include rock climbers, hikers, surfers, paragliders, mountaineers, horseback riders, and paddlers, all who are also successful business professionals. Combining our passions towards performance improvement and the outdoors, we have helped people & teams grow both personally and professionally around the world.

Why Experiential Learning? The traditional approach to performance improvement and talent development simply does not work anymore, if it ever did. Companies invest millions of dollars every year expecting change, but only to see performance and growth stall, wasting time and money. Doing what has always been done but expecting a different outcome, how is that working out for everyone? Also, with employee engagement on a downward spiral and with the difficulties of attracting and retaining top talent, it is time to change the status quo. Our stoke is to watch people and teams perform at a level they did not think was possible after completing one of our programs. When you tap into someone’s passion, push them out of their comfort zone, and rally around one common goal, the trajectory is only upward – we like to call it “One Team, One Goal, Many Summits”.

Red Paint Consulting LLC has partnered with sales organizations, business executives, high school & college students, tech. startups, law firms, and cross-functional teams delivering highly successful Experiential Learning programs. Activities range from climbing a rock face, paddling a river, hiking & camping, working with horses to activities that take place in the parking lot of the office building or ballroom pre-function space. We meet our clients where they are and design programs in alignment with their business strategy & desired outcomes. Our signature program is Equine Facilitated Learning for team and leadership development. Watching people interact with horses, forming a human/horse connection is life-changing for many and amazing to experience. Participants exit the program not only with the tools they need to be successful in their professional lives but to be better people in life.

Awesome – so before we get into the rest of our questions, can you briefly introduce yourself to our readers.

I was a Cross Country & Track runner when I was in school, so performance improvement was important to me at a young age. When I started my professional career, I chose sales & sales leadership as my profession. It kept my competitive juices flowing and allowed me to continue to focus on elevating performance. Later in my career, I shifted to Leadership and Talent Development taking on Chief Learning Officer & Sales Enablement roles in numerous technology companies. I loved my work being 100% dedicated to individual and team development. However, I became frustrated as I witnessed leaders & employees return to their old behaviors and mediocre performance after completing programs I developed.

It was a Boy Scout canoeing expedition to Canada that changed everything. Our business philosophy of today was founded on Red Paint Lake in Ontario, Canada, during the expedition with a crew of nine Boy Scouts and Leaders. The crew was faced with both extreme mental and physical challenges but overcame them by coming together as a team to successfully paddle 65 miles and 24 portages. The adults and scouts bonded together as one team, pursuing one common goal. Through this experience and others, we quickly learned how to improve team and corporate performance, by applying what we learned from the outdoor experiences to the business world. Since the Red Paint experience, numerous outdoor adventures reinforced the concept and provided the data, that we now apply successfully to the corporate world – Red Paint Consulting was born.

How we are unique and different to traditional programs is we focus on changing behaviors versus teaching new skills. We push people outside of their comfort zones to where they will accelerate their learning & growth. It results in self-discovery and awareness which leads to behavioral change. We also place a heavy emphasis on building trust, improving communications, being in the present moment, team problem solving, developing relationships, accountability & ownership, and working as one team. All are attributes you need to be successful professionally and as a member of a climbing team ascending a mountain. See the connection? Our ultimate goal is helping people perform at a higher level personally & professionally and build high impact teams. How does this translate in the business world? Higher productivity, successful business outcomes, employee engagement, lower turnover, stronger leaders, and thriving corporate cultures.

What’s a lesson you had to unlearn and what’s the backstory?

Actually, there were many lessons I had to unlearn throughout my career but there were two that were critical contributors to my life journey and to what Red Paint teaches today. Growing up in the corporate world, everyone is basically taught the same incorrect approach to leadership, developing talent, and motivating teams. Getting results through people was the mantra that most leaders followed which had the opposite effect on employee morale and productivity. The harder you push your teams the greater the results and as an athlete, I believed in that philosophy. To pivot my thinking, it required studying human performance, measuring what positively and negatively impacted employee productivity, lots of self-awareness, and the willingness to take the risk of leading differently than mainstream leaders. When I received feedback such as “no one else is doing what you are doing” or “you are leading incorrectly”, I knew I was on the right path and doubled down on my approach. Now the philosophy is with people we deliver results versus through people we get results.

The second lesson to unlearn is the importance of a team versus the lone wolf. As a runner, if you hit your own PR (Personal Record) in a race, you felt successful, and in sales, if you hit your individual quota, life was good. Individual performance was rewarded over team performance. However, there is a ceiling for success when you go alone but as a team, performance and success for all is elevated to much higher levels. This became very clear to me during the canoeing expedition in Canada and the numerous times tied to a rope with a climbing team. You can only climb as fast as the slowest climber and we either reach the summit together as one team or we turnaround short of the summit to descend as one team. One of the biggest challenges in the corporate world is getting everyone to perform as one team, rallying around one common goal. Sounds so simple but yet most fail.

We’d love to hear a story of resilience from your journey.

There was a stretch in my life when I was growing my career, trying to be a good father & husband, and accomplishing larger adventure projects, a lot to balance when you are performing at your best. Unfortunately, I was not at my best and suffering from lower back pain due to a ruptured disc for more than 10 years. At that time, the success rate for surgery was less than 20% and I tried every non-surgical treatment available to find relief. However, it became my new norm, and I had good days and some really bad days for an extended period of time. It wore me down both physically and mentally to the point of borderline depression, disconnecting myself from the family & impacting my professional work. In 2016, I hit rock bottom. The pain intensified and began damaging the nerves in my left leg. Each day it became more difficult to do basic functions including walking across the parking lot to my office. The good news is 10 plus years later, the surgical techniques advanced significantly, and the probability of success increased to 88%. I was a strong candidate for surgery. In 2017, I had a successful Microdiscectomy surgery to repair the ruptured disc and nerves. I immediately launched my #surgerytosummit project and within 11 weeks I reached my first summit at Seneca Rocks, WV and four months following surgery I reached the summit of the Grand at 13,775 feet in the Grand Tetons Range. After the surgery, I felt like I had a do over in life and have done my best work both personally and professionally. Today, I am advocate for the National Spine Health Foundation and help others suffering from back pain and giving them hope for the future by sharing my story.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://redpaintconsulting.com/
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/profile/
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/company/redpaintconsulting/
• Other: Email: redpaintconsulting@gmail.com

Image Credits

Nick Carusi Photography