Becoming the Founder Your Business Actually Needs - Part 2

There’s a moment in every founder’s life when someone holds up a mirror they didn’t ask for.

Sometimes it’s a coach.

Sometimes it’s a spouse.

Sometimes it’s an employee — quietly, on a regular Tuesday — telling you something about yourself you didn’t know was true.

In Part 2 of our conversation on Inner Work, MaryAnn Means-Dufrene sits down again with Dave Munson, founder and CEO of Saddleback Leather Co., for the second half of a conversation that goes from a 2010 lunch with Zig Ziglar to fifty “signs of pride” lists, twenty-four mason jars, and an Aveda lotion bottle that quietly changed his marriage.

The Disruption: When an Employee Calls You Prideful

In 2010, Dave got a seat at a lunch table with Zig Ziglar — the man who once charged $50,000 to speak for an hour and wrote thirty-some books. Six people at the table. Dave asked the question.

“If all your books disappeared, all your audio tapes and DVDs and courses, and you could only leave us with one book — what would you write about?”

Ziglar named three things.

Court your spouse. Encourage everyone. Help everyone around you be as successful as they can be.

“All of those are other people focused,” Dave said. “And so what I realized — I was like, ‘Hey, I’m kind of me focused.’”

The realization was slow. It didn’t move the needle for years.

Then in 2015, an employee named Gene — a Christian, a good worker, a quiet guy — told Dave to his face: “You’re one of the most prideful people that I know.”

“Thank you for telling me that,” Dave said. “That was real big of you to confront me on that.”

He went home expecting his wife to back him up. She did.

“Give me a break — you’re one of the most humble men I know, Dave.”

Then he sat with the comment instead of with the comfort.

The Inner Work: Fifty Lists and Twenty-Four Jars

Dave Googled it. “Signs of pride list.”

He found fifty.

He read all fifty, sorted them, and ended up with about twenty-four categories of pride.

“Imagine a table of twenty-four little mason jars,” Dave said. “Some are filled to the brim. You’re like, ‘Dude, how is that not spilling over?’ And some have a little bit, and they go up and down — we all have it. But some were chock-full.”

He went home that night and said something to his wife most leaders never let themselves say out loud.

“I think I’m the problem in our business.”

She read the list. She laughed. She agreed.

He learned the definition that reorganized everything:

“Humility is saying what’s true.”

Pride was the rest of it. Performing spirituality. Praying differently in public than in private. Never asking questions because you weren’t actually interested in other people. Leading with achievements. Being defensive. Calling someone else sensitive when you’re the sensitive one. False humility — saying you’re a loser when you know you’re not.

Most of it didn’t look like pride from the outside.

That was the point.

The Rebuild: Serving His Wife and Reshaping the Business

The first thing that changed wasn’t strategy.

It was that Dave got out the Aveda lotion and rubbed his wife’s feet with no expectation of anything in return.

“Who are you?” she said. “What did you do with my husband?”

The unintended consequence: she wanted to serve him back. Naturally. Without asking.

The second thing that changed was inside the company. Dave started watching for the pride he’d been blind to. He realized he had been all about himself, “and I wasn’t about my employees as much.”

Then he did something most founders wouldn’t.

He published the “signs of pride” research on the Saddleback Leather website.

About 1,200 people a day now find it organically.

The biggest reframe came later, when Dave put words to what he believed was actually happening underneath all of it.

“God is using Saddleback Leather to highlight — so that he can shape me, bit by bit, more like Jesus.”

The business wasn’t the goal.

It was the curriculum.

What I Know Now: Get Married, Have Kids, Start a Business

If there’s a single line in this episode that sounds like a joke and is actually a thesis, it’s this one:

Get married, have kids, start a business.

“With those three,” MaryAnn said, “you’re covering everything you could need to become about as humble as you can be.”

Dave agreed.

The same logic that runs through every Inner Work conversation surfaced again — that the business isn’t separate from the leader’s formation. It’s the formation.

He talked about writing his book, They’ll Fight Over It When You’re Dead, which won Audiobook of the Year for 2025. The advice he gave — start with a Google Doc, drop in years, fill in stories — is the same logic he applies to leadership. Start. Capture. Iterate. Don’t wait for clean.

He talked about going three and a half years without a smartphone — a Light Phone in his pocket instead — and how reading came back, memory came back, attention came back, prayer came back.

He talked about refusing to use AI for creative work, hand-writing his newsletter, taking a photo of it, sending it as an image.

None of it sounds like a leadership framework.

That’s the point.

The leader your business actually needs isn’t the one with the cleanest playbook. It’s the one being shaped by the thing they built — and willing to notice where the shaping still has work to do.

🎧 Listen to the full episode now!