
Sign up to save your podcasts
Or


In this heartfelt episode of Built With Purpose, Chris Fay sits down with Quin Hatfield, head football coach at Christ Church Episcopal School in Greenville, South Carolina and a former pharmaceutical sales leader, for a conversation about faith, vision, leading through adversity, and the kind of influence that has nothing to do with a title. It’s a personal one for Chris, too. Quin coaches his sons, and it was Quin’s message at the program’s annual prayer walk that sparked this conversation.
Quin shares his journey from small town Manning, South Carolina, where football became his outlet growing up and where an uncle and grandfather who both played at Clemson showed him what the game could teach. He spent 20 years at Takeda Pharmaceuticals, growing from sales rep into sales leadership, all while keeping a hand in coaching on the side. Then, in late 2019, a door opened he never saw coming: Christ Church asked him to lead its football program. After two months of counsel, prayer, and a note from his wife that read “Where you go, I will. We’re in this together,” Quin took the leap in February 2020.
Chris and Quin explore what it took to build a program with just one team meeting before COVID shut everything down. Quin talks about honoring a storied past, including a state record 55 game winning streak, while casting a new vision built around one word: Elevate. Elevate your mind, elevate your work ethic, and performance follows. They dig into why getting your seniors on board matters more than any speech from the head coach, and why peer leadership carries ten times the weight with the people watching.
Chris and Quin discuss:
Most Powerful Moment
While working with his Leadership Academy to define leadership, Quin landed on three words: saying, doing, and being. What you say and what you do matter. But being, the vibe you give off and what it’s actually like to be around you, may carry more influence than both. Then he turned the question on Chris: what is it like to be around Chris Fay? It’s a question every leader should be ready to answer.
Key Takeaways
Connect with Chris & Quin
Chris Fay | LinkedIn: /cjfay
Quin Hatfield | Head Football Coach, Christ Church Episcopal School
In this reflective episode of Between the Builds, Chris Fay flies solo from his brand new studio to revisit last week's conversation with Admiral Sandy Winnefeld and unpack something nearly every competitive leader wrestles with at some point: imposter syndrome.
Chris opens with honesty. Sitting across from a four star admiral, former Vice Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and Top Gun instructor, then spending time in the fast pace of New York surrounded by towering accomplishments, he caught himself asking the same questions so many leaders ask quietly. Do I belong here? Am I worthy of this conversation? Am I doing enough? He shares how that feeling has followed him through the years, including time spent alongside highly accomplished CEOs in YPO who are buying, selling, and scaling businesses at a remarkable pace.
That reflection lands right as Chris's own organization heads into strategic planning season, with the executive leadership team gathering to define where the company is going next. It's his favorite time of year, and it sparked the core idea of this episode: imposter syndrome usually isn't about the other person. It shows up when we lack our own plan, our own vision, and our own identity. Chris walks through the inputs that shape his personal vision, from keeping the business privately funded, to being home with his family while his kids finish high school, to protecting his health. Those choices define what success looks like for him, and they're different from what success looked like for Sandy.
Once you own the inputs and the outcome, Chris explains, the comparison loses its grip. Highly successful people stop being a measuring stick and start being peers who pursued their own path well. The better question becomes how they set their vision and built toward it.
Chris closes with two actions for the planning season ahead, a candid look at why he'll never monetize this podcast, and a preview of how the show will continue to evolve with new conversations and guests.
Chris discusses:
The Most Powerful Moment
Chris describes a choice he gets to make every time he sits down with someone like Sandy. He can ask whether he's worthy to be in the room, or he can recognize that Sandy fought his own fight and pursued what he wanted from his life, and that it's okay if Chris wants something different. That shift turns intimidation into curiosity. Instead of measuring yourself against someone's success, you get to learn how they built a vision and achieved it.
Key Takeaways
Connect with Chris
Chris Fay: LinkedIn /cjfay Built With Purpose: builtwithpurposepodcast.com
In this remarkable episode of Built With Purpose, Chris Fay sits down with Admiral Sandy Winnefeld, retired U.S. Navy four star admiral, former Vice Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Top Gun instructor, and author of Sailing Upwind, for a conversation about leading under pressure, staying calm in a crisis, building elite team culture, and the relentless curiosity that fuels great leaders.
Sandy shares a 37 year Navy career he breaks into three chapters: learning the machine, leading inside the machine, and leading the entire machine. It started in the cockpit of an F-14, flying combat missions and eventually earning a spot as an instructor at the real Top Gun. From there, he went on to command a fighter squadron and later the USS Enterprise, a nuclear powered aircraft carrier with 5,000 sailors aboard. Early in his career he served as Colin Powell's aide, an experience that shaped how he thinks about people, communication, and composure. He closed out his service as the second highest ranking military officer in the country, advising two administrations from inside the White House Situation Room.
Together, Chris and Sandy dig into what leadership looks like when the stakes are as high as they get. Sandy walks through ejecting from an F-14 at night, 700 miles off the coast of San Diego, and the training that carried him through it. He takes listeners onto the bridge of the Enterprise on 9/11, when a ship headed home turned toward Pakistan, and shares how he cut through competing priorities and found the right words to rally his crew before their first strikes. They also unpack the surprisingly humble culture inside Top Gun, the "murder board" that kept everyone sharp, and how Sandy learned to brief presidents in plain language that helped them make better decisions.
Chris and Sandy discuss:
In the days after 9/11, Sandy was searching for the right way to speak to his 5,000 person crew before their first strikes. The answer showed up in a local newspaper that mistakenly printed a silhouette of the World War II-era Enterprise. Sandy realized the original Enterprise had also been heading home when Pearl Harbor was attacked, and also flew some of the first strikes in response. That connection became the heart of his message over the ship's PA system.
Key Takeaways
Connect with Chris Fay — LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/cjfay/
In this energizing episode of "Between the Builds," Chris Fay kicks off the fall season after a summer hiatus with a conversation about vision, planning, and why the most effective leaders don't wait for the calendar to give them permission to change.
Chris opens with a highlight from a recent YPO chapter event he and his wife hosted, where he led a fireside chat with Jason Garrett — former head coach of the Dallas Cowboys, backup quarterback to Troy Aikman across three Super Bowl championships, and now an NFL analyst for NBC. What stood out most wasn't just Garrett's message but how he delivered it: sharp, prepared, and deeply convicted, always with a smile, even at his most intense. Garrett's core idea on leadership stuck with Chris: the first word in leadership is "lead," and leading starts with painting a vision. Every organization, family, and team needs something bigger than itself to strive for, and without that vision, there's nothing to rally around or hold anyone accountable to.
That idea landed right as Chris's company heads into Q4 and its annual planning season, a time he genuinely looks forward to for stepping back, reflecting on where the business has been, and setting a clear vision for the year ahead. But it also raised a bigger question: why do we always wait until January 1st? Chris unpacks how New Year's resolutions, product sales, and event invitations all work the same way — they're calls to action, and most of us sit back and wait for one before we move. The reality is that nothing requires us to wait.
Chris shares how he's put that into practice. With a season of intense restructuring, divestitures, and acquisitions now behind him, he found himself facing a calendar in disarray and a new chapter for the business. Rather than wait for the new year, he created his own call to action: he set October 1st as the date for major change, backed it up to the very next Monday, and walked into his leadership team meeting to announce that the company would begin operating differently starting that day. The goal is to get those changes working well now, so the business is off and running when the new year arrives.
Chris closes with a challenge to every listener: whether it's a strained relationship, your health, your calendar, or a hard conversation at work you keep putting off, stop waiting for January. Pick one change, put a date on it, and make next Monday your call to action.
Chris discusses:
Key Takeaways
Connect with Chris
Chris Fay — LinkedIn: /cjfay
In this reflective episode of "Between the Builds," Chris Fay flies solo the morning after Labor Day to unpack a week that brought a year and a half of transformation to a head — and the mental discipline that got him through it.
Chris traces the transformation back to February 2025: a diversified organization running six different business units, narrowing its focus as the competitive landscape and technology shifted. Five M&A deals in roughly fifteen months later — selling business units, acquiring a new one, fundamentally reshaping how the company goes to market — last week marked the finish line, with the signing and closing of the final acquisition and a celebration with the ownership group.
That same week held a harder moment. Chris shares the loss of a 19-year employee who had a fast, aggressive battle with stage four pancreatic cancer, with a funeral held the Friday before the long weekend. From there, the company moved straight into Labor Day — a holiday established nearly 150 years ago to honor the American worker — and Chris found the collision of a major business milestone, a funeral, and a holiday built around honoring work impossible to sit with quietly.
That's the backdrop for the episode's central story: a former Navy SEAL sniper and training instructor who once spoke to Chris's company, and a moment where he asked an overwhelmed team member how many projects she had going at once. She said 30 or 40. He asked again, and again, until someone in the crowd finally said "one" — because in the SEALs, complicated missions get broken down to a single step, a single milestone, nothing more. Chris talks about applying that same discipline to the 18-month transformation: rather than getting overwhelmed by where the company needed to be in a year or two, he focused only on what needed to happen today, and this week.
Chris closes with two things he's still working on: learning to actually pause and celebrate wins instead of immediately chasing the next fight, and the belief that growth only comes from doing hard, uncomfortable things — they get easier over time, which is what makes room for the next hard thing. His challenge to listeners going through their own hard season: don't think about next week or next month. What's the one step you can take today?
Chris discusses:
Key Takeaways
Connect with Chris
Chris Fay — LinkedIn: /cjfay
In this reflective episode of "Between the Builds," Chris Fay flies solo to unpack what stuck with him after last week's conversation with Moe Abbas — and what a hard, transitional season in his own business has been teaching him about sacrifice, self-care, and the climb that never really ends.
Chris opens with something small that turned out to be not so small: he finally cut his hair short again, the way he feels most like himself, after months of letting it grow during an exhausting, 14-plus-month M&A process. That decision landed against a heavier backdrop — a longtime employee of 19 years was diagnosed with stage four pancreatic cancer and passed away just five weeks later. Between the stress of the transition and the sudden loss, Chris found himself re-evaluating what it means to show up for others, starting with how he shows up for himself.
That's where the thread back to Moe Abbas comes in. Chris revisits Moe's defining moment — getting dumped and beaten up within the same 24 hours as a teenager — and the lesson underneath it: you can't take care of anyone else until you've taken care of yourself. From there, Chris digs into their conversation about sacrifice: how much of your marriage, relationships, and money you're willing to give up to chase the top of the mountain, and why the people willing to give up the most often go the furthest. Chris is candid about where he draws his own line — unwilling to sacrifice his marriage or his relationship with his kids — and why he still believes he can build something exceptional without going all-in, as long as he surrounds himself with the right people.
The episode's other throughline is Moe's line that stuck hardest: no matter how close you get to the summit, there's always another hill on the other side. With his company's transition nearing its close, Chris admits his first reaction was dread — before realizing the climb itself, not just the summit, is what he actually loves. He's candid about being bad at pausing to acknowledge wins, and about carving out time to actually sit with what's been accomplished before the next hill shows up.
Chris closes with a direct challenge, tying back to an earlier episode with Dr. Grant Zazour on longevity: look in the mirror and ask honestly whether you're proud of what you've built. Rather than fixing everything at once, pick the one change that would move the needle most over the next 30 days.
Chris discusses:
Key Takeaways
Connect with Chris
Chris Fay — LinkedIn: /cjfay
In this candid episode of Built With Purpose, Chris Fay sits down with Moe Abbas — founder and CEO of SalesAsk — for a conversation about immigrant grit, the true cost of entrepreneurial sacrifice, building and rebuilding companies through failure, and how AI is transforming the way home service and construction businesses sell.
Moe shares his journey from Lebanon, where his family fled a war-torn country when he was three, to a working-class upbringing in Canada raised largely by his mother while his father worked seven days a week as a tiler. Left with unusual freedom as a kid, Moe started selling door to door — lawn care, chocolates — and discovered an early talent for sales. A pivotal moment in high school, getting beaten up and then dumped by the girl he'd chased for years, sent him into two and a half years of self-transformation: daily workouts modeled after Arnold Schwarzenegger and six to eight hours a day reading nonfiction in a bookstore. That foundation carried him into a job fixing phone lines he didn't know how to fix, first in British Columbia and then in Palm Beach, Florida, where meeting wealthy homeowners taught him a lesson that reshaped his ambitions: they weren't fundamentally different from him.
Chris and Moe trace the arc from there — building and scaling a residential design-build construction company across Canada with a crew of childhood friends, a cash-flow innovation that changed the business's trajectory, and running multiple companies at once, some hits and many duds. They dig into the decision that changed everything: walking away from a thriving construction business to chase a bigger game in technology, a bet that cost Moe his marriage and led to a failed social media startup that burned through his savings. He talks candidly about the discipline it took to climb back — running a construction company for three months to stabilize it before handing it to a partner, building a second startup to modest success while getting rejected by Y Combinator eight times, and learning the difference between tenacity that pays off and stubbornness that just delays the inevitable pivot.
The conversation turns to SalesAsk, the AI sales platform Moe built for home builders, roofers, and home improvement contractors after spotting a competitor's rapid growth and betting he could build a better product. SalesAsk listens in on the sales conversations that happen at the kitchen table, scoring reps and generating coaching and follow-ups synced to CRMs.
Chris and Moe discuss:
Key Takeaways
Connect with Chris & Moe
Chris Fay — LinkedIn: /cjfay
Moe Abbas — Founder & CEO, SalesAsk — Website: salesask.com
In this reflective episode of Between the Builds, Chris Fay looks back on last week's conversation with Michael Shank to unpack a sobering statistic: companies spend $3.4 trillion a year trying to transform themselves, and 70% of those efforts fail. Chris digs into why that number is so high — and what it means for any business owner or leader trying to drive real change.
The episode opens with a story from Michael's own home office — a guitar sitting untouched in the background — and the analogy that grew out of it: a fool with a tool is still a fool. An instrument, a CRM system, a new AI platform — none of it matters if you haven't learned to use it. Chris connects that idea to his own experience picking up (and putting down) guitar every few years, and to a broader truth he's observed across YPO peer conversations: every business is dealing with the same hidden struggles, no matter how polished things look on the surface.
From there, Chris walks through the real reason most transformation efforts fail — and it's rarely the technology itself. Few companies take the time to truly understand how their own organization runs before they go shopping for a solution. He breaks down the common trap: buying a new CRM, accounting platform, or AI tool without first mapping the people, data, and processes it's meant to support — and then wondering why adoption never sticks. He also makes the case for when bringing in an outside consultant is worth the investment, and why self-managed change initiatives so often lose steam.
The conversation lands on a practical challenge for listeners: identify the one broken process inside your business, map out how it actually works today, then find and implement a solution — and overinvest in the adoption and sustainment work that most teams skip. Chris ties it back to a favorite framework from The One Thing, pushing leaders to resist tackling everything at once and instead focus on the single change that will move the needle most.
Chris discusses:
Key Takeaways
Connect with Chris Chris Fay — LinkedIn: /cjfay
In this episode of Built With Purpose, Chris Fay sits down with Michael Schank — founder of Insight Twin and author of Digital Transformation Success — for a conversation about why most digital transformations fail, what it actually takes to make AI useful inside a real organization, and how the consulting industry itself is being reshaped by the same technology it's selling.
Michael shares his path from deep technologist — 13 years as a Java/C++ programmer and solution architect at Accenture, then two years running production systems at Bank of America — to a decade at EY, where he stumbled into business capability modeling on a client project and built an entire process excellence practice around it. He walks through his time at Citibank leading a massive risk-data transformation following a $400 million regulatory consent order, and how that work became the seed for both his book and his company, Insight Twin — a platform that builds a structured "digital twin" of how an organization actually runs so AI has real context to work with, not just public training data.
Together, Chris and Michael dig into why companies spend $3.4 trillion globally on transformation every year while roughly 70% of those efforts fail — and why the culprit is rarely lack of effort, but complexity and chaos: business, technology, risk, and testing teams that all speak different languages and hold different pieces of the picture.
The conversation also turns to what's next: the build-versus-buy decision in the age of vibe coding, the "SaaSpocalypse" threatening per-seat software pricing, and why AI is only as good as the context data behind it.
Chris and Michael discuss:
Key Takeaways
Connect with Chris & Michael Chris Fay — LinkedIn: /cjfay
Michael Schank — Founder, Insight Twin; Author, Digital Transformation Success LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/michael-schank Website: insighttwin.com
In this Between the Builds episode of Built With Purpose, host Chris Fay returns from a month off to kick off a new season, reflecting on his recent conversation with Dr. Grant Zarzour of Sperity Health and unpacking one of the most overlooked challenges every leader faces: treating your own health with the same discipline you bring to your business.
Chris gets personal, sharing that a longtime member of his team was recently diagnosed with pancreatic cancer, and that his own father fought and beat esophageal cancer years ago. Drawing on Grant's insight that people rarely change until they're confronted with their own mortality, Chris breaks down why so many of us wait for a crisis to make changes we already know we need to make.
From getting your annual physical and knowing your numbers, to building one or two sustainable habits over 66 days instead of overhauling everything overnight, Chris walks through a practical, step-by-step framework for making health a priority before life forces the issue.
Chris covers:
Why it often takes facing mortality to spark real change
The parallel between building a business vision and building a health plan
Why an annual physical is the most underused tool available to you
Nick Saban's philosophy on mastering the fundamentals until you can't get them wrong
Practical health markers to track, from full body MRIs to heart scans
Why small, incremental habits beat dramatic overnight overhauls
Key Takeaways
Facing mortality is often what finally pushes people to change
Your health deserves the same vision and planning you give your business
An annual physical is the most underused tool for catching problems early
Elite performers win by mastering fundamentals, not chasing complexity
It takes 66 days to build a new habit, so start now
No amount of success matters if you're not healthy enough to enjoy it
Connect with Chris Fay
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/cjfay/
From the publisher's feed
Built With Purpose shares thoughtful conversations with the people who design, build, and improve the world around us.
Hosted by Chris Fay, the show blends experience from commercial construction and tech leadership to explore how values, systems, and steady execution create enduring companies.
Each week, you’ll hear:
Builder Conversations: Warm, in-depth interviews with founders, operators, and craft leaders across construction, architecture, engineering, manufacturing, and built-world tech.
Field Notes: Short, practical takeaways on leadership, culture, brand, sales, and operational excellence—ideas you can put to work on Monday.
If you care about building teams and businesses that last—without losing sight of purpose—this podcast is for you.
Subscribe and build with intention.