Co-Founder of O2X Human Performance: Phil McCullough

Paul ,  it’s good to see you again. Why don’t we start with your pre-history and what you did before O2X?

Yeah, great to see you. Prior to O2X, I served a little over eleven years in the US military. I enlisted in the Navy in August of 2001, so less than two weeks before September 11th. I had an awesome experience during my time in the SEALs. I think I had luck and timing from a standpoint of being able to do something where I really had the opportunity to serve our country and to do something in a meaningful way and got to do that with such a great group of people. 

I did that until I exited at the end of 2012. Coincidentally enough, I started O2X with Adam La Reau, and there’s another co-founder here and managing partner, Gabriel Gomez, who was before our time in the military. Adam and I had served pretty much side-by-side the entire time in the military and through the SEAL teams together. I met Adam going through training right around 2002 and ended up on the same SEAL teams with Adam.

I was deployed a bunch of times with Adam as well and I worked under Adam in the military. He was an officer and I was on the enlisted side. We pretty much entered the military at around the same exact time and then got out right around the same time as well. When I had exited the military, I had met Gabriel Gomez just a little bit before Adam had. Gabriel was also a former and had a ton of experience in the business world and the private sector, and he had done a lot of work.

Gabriel actually invested in O2X and really brought in the original capital to formalize the business. Early 2014 is really when the company took off and we’ve been off to the roads ever since.

What led you to become a Navy SEAL? 

I’d be lying if I said I joined because of one specific reason. One, it was pre-9/11. Like I said, I enlisted right before, so I didn’t have this call to service if the nation was under attack and I felt like I needed to do my part in complete honesty. That really wasn’t the case. I definitely wanted to serve my country, for sure. My dad was in the military, but I didn’t come from a family that was pushing that on me by any means.

I was an active kid, and I did not like the classroom setting. I played competitive sports growing up and came from a great family. I think it was more of a realization probably around my junior or senior year of high school where it was like, everyone I knew, I went to a Catholic high school in Massachusetts, and pretty much the entire class was moving on going to college. I didn’t really want to follow that path.

I played high school hockey, but I wasn’t good enough to really go anywhere in hockey. I would have played at a low level in college anyway. I really wanted to take the challenge and I saw the SEAL teams as a group of, in my opinion, not professional athletes by any means, but just something that I read a bunch of stuff.

If you don’t quit and you try hard, you’re in shape and get a chance of making it. I looked at them as well, This is the best of the best. I went and talked to a bunch of different recruiters and other branches and I thought that one looked the most challenging. It was really more of something I wanted to put myself through. I believed I could do it. I never would vocalize that to anyone, but I believed I could.

So to answer a question more streamlined, I think I did it for the challenge. I wanted to do something different. I wanted to do something different. I wanted to do something that mattered, and I really felt like that was the right path for me. In a lot of ways, I feel like I was raised in the SEAL teams. I came from a great family with great parents who raised me to the best of their ability. But as an adult and going out and seeing the world, I can’t think of a better place where I could have really grown up than the SEAL teams. I still think it’s probably one of the best-run organizations, if not the best-run organization in America.

What can you say about the culture in the US military and what leadership lessons did you take from your time as a SEAL?

I think, look, I’ve had great leaders and I’ve had bad leaders just like everybody else. But I will say that some of the best leaders I’ve had in my life and I believe will ever ,  have come on the SEAL team. I’d say the biggest piece from the military that I gained from a leadership perspective is it’s not just a line of one team, one fight. That is the truth. There’s no bull-shitting that you don’t check into a team and have that team mold to your personality.

That’s just not how it works. If I could take anything away from the leadership side of the teams, it’s what we try to have here ,  culture is everything. For me, in the teams, the amount of effort that the community puts behind the brand and the culture, it’s significant. You know exactly your role. There is no second-guessing your role. You know what’s expected of you. You know what good performances are, you know what bad performances are ,  people take a lot of pride in that.

The logo means something and people live and die for that culture. I think for me, for leadership lessons, it’s getting the full team on board with that one team, one fight. We win together, we lose together. Maintaining a standard that’s widely accepted, and it’s not based on an individual, right? You could have a cancerous personality get into any group, and that one person can dilute the entire group.

And that can’t happen, right? That’s not acceptable. I think it’s culture. I think everything stems back to the top, and not just coming from the top down, right? Bottom-up culture matters just as much. And we try to do a ton of that in O2X. I think all of our people here are just… They’re just great people. They live the brand we want to be here. We have seen, especially with the type of services we provide, our people are everything.

They’re the ones that make things tick. We’re talking about human performance. If you don’t have a reputable person in front of an audience, that doesn’t work. So people need to live that brand.

The things that stand out to me were that from the very beginning, you were not allowed to do anything by yourself, as in it’s always a team of two. So you should be walking with two people without a person all the time. You should be doing the exercise with a person at all times. Your timing is not about your timing, it’s about the timing of the two people. Then you have teams of 10 and so on. From the very beginning, you immediately learn that it’s all about the team ,  it’s not about yourself.

Then the second thing I always remember, which is an extreme example, but you would never get an order to go and do X. You would actually see the leader of the group go and do X first, and then you just follow them. So you learn that leadership is by doing, and you cannot tell anyone, to go and do something you can’t do yourself.

Yeah. So the ‘buddy system’ ,  never leave a man behind, all that stuff. You’re right. It’s ingrained from day one. You’re not even allowed to go to the bathroom unless you take someone with you. You can’t go to the shower, or you can’t do anything. It’s in force. You’re only as strong as your buddy. It’s a team environment. And then, yeah, leaning from the front, right? There are a lot of people who do what I say, not what I do in today’s culture. I really hope as we continue to grow here at O2X, that’s never mind. You should never be above doing anything. I try to get on the road as much as I can. I’m not afraid to try to talk about our product help some of our sales folks out or take the trash out or whatever it is. People take that for granted, I think. And especially as you start to get more senior within the organization, you start to lose track of reality. And people who can’t lead themselves, in my opinion, shouldn’t be leading other people. So living by example, in general, I think, is a huge aspect.

You can’t be someone that’s running around telling people how to live their life and how dedicated you are to the company and then you’re a disaster of a person in your personal life. That’s not impressive to anyone. And if your employees are of high quality, they’re going to look right at you and see that you’re smoking mirrors anyway.

How did O2X come about and how did you meet your co-founder?

I think the O2X story is very much every entrepreneur’s story where it’s so many different avenues that we’ve taken to really grow and succeed as a business. When we put the company together, it was definitely probably the opposite of the Harvard Business School review of what Wright looks like. We didn’t have a great business plan. We didn’t have any long-term strategic goals. What we really built on was from our time in the military, we wanted to build something that mattered.

That was one piece. We wanted to build something that we were passionate about, hence human performance in general, so that fits the mark for us. The biggest one is we wanted to do it with people that we respected and wanted to work with. I luckily have business partners that come from a similar background that I have a lot of respect for both professionally but also personally. People that you know are going to be there for you outside of, in this case, O2X.

That mattered to me. I would put that over the product truthfully without diluting the brand O2X. If O2X was selling ball bearings, I think I could get equally fired up to sell those ball bearings if I were to sell those ball bearings with my business partners and all the folks who have dedicated their lives to work with us at O2X because they’re just great people.

They want to succeed and they want to deliver good products and they want to have good careers. That gets me up in the morning. It’s the culture of people that we’re working with. When we put the business plan together is for those reasons. We wanted to be a human performance company. We actually started doing mountain races in 2014. We did mountain races in New Hampshire, Maine, Vermont, New York, Colorado, and Vancouver.

We started doing executive development programs for senior executives, taking them in backcountry-type stuff. We did work with college teams and individuals on building culture and accountability and anything on human performance at large. We were doing all these things in the first year to create a human performance brand with the idea that we would have a product that would come out of that. We didn’t know if that product was going to be something on the nutrition side, whether it was going to be something on mental performance, it was going to be apparel, it was going to be sneakers.

We just knew we wanted to build this human performance brand. What ended up happening is that the content and the curriculum were really starting to develop more than anything.

Rather than trying to start selling T-shirts or a supplement, we really just kept doing more of the curriculum piece. Even these mountain races, weren’t just a mountain race. They were experiential learning weekend events where people stayed the night and they started at the base of the mountain, they got to the top. We brought in human performance experts from around the country and they spoke at these fireside chats.

Then we started getting some teams involved. Harvard Hockey brought their team up and raced in a bunch of other kinds of sports organizations through that. We were running these curriculums for different groups after the events. These groups ranged from athletic teams to private companies to what now is the biggest piece, which is the first responder public safety ,  tactical athlete. That’s really our bread and butter.

What happened right around 2015 was that we linked up with the Boston Fire Department. Joe Finn was the Commissioner of the Boston Fire Department ,  I still have a ton of respect for him. He put a huge amount of focus on the health, safety, and wellness aspects of his organization. We were brought in by a guy who happened to be a Green Beret.

He brought us in and he knew what we were doing. He said, Hey, I think I could get you a meeting with the commissioner. He might be interested in what you’re doing for some of these support teams and some of these other organizations. I think this could be relevant to what we’re trying to do in Boston. We went to Boston and met with the labor and management teams from the Union President and the commissioner and a bunch of other people from Health and Safety.

The idea was to run a four-to-five-day human performance workshop. Boston happens to have about 35-ish firehouses. Their idea was to take one member from each firehouse, and it didn’t matter if that person was a physical fitness stud or they were super out of shape and hadn’t worked out in the last 20 years or whatever. They just wanted influencers. That was the idea we came up with. Let’s bring an influencer from each firehouse and we’ll train the trainer event from human performance.

We were at the infant stages of O2X, actually, from our curriculum standpoint. We’ve now been doing stuff like this for about a year.

We didn’t have that deep of a bench of subject matter experts, but we did have like a couple, one or two in each field. We had our performance nutritionist. We had someone who could speak through sleep hygiene. We had someone in stress mitigation and behavioral health, post-traumatic stress, strength, and conditioning. There was some level of injury prevention, PT. It was a complete package where we’re going to run a little bit of our culture side, but also get really into the holistic approach to human performance.

We took one member per firehouse. They came through our program, went through, I think it was a five-day workshop, and they left and they were fired up. Right there, we were like, Oh, my gosh, this is awesome. We haven’t had training like this before. Let’s do it again. They called Joe Fin. Joe Fin gets a lot of feedback. We took a lot of feedback and surveys and things like that. Joe Fin calls us up.

He said, These members, complain about everything. This is the first training that I’ve had them go to where they’re fired up. Let’s do it again. As long as I have interest, let’s run with this.

We went from one person per house for that first showcase event or pilot program to eventually running one person per shift per house. There are four shifts per house. We started doing that. Next thing, we started running the first week of their training academy. Then we started to do a refresher training. At this point now, years are and we have done thousands. Almost the whole department has come through our program at some level.

What ended up happening maybe a couple of years in is we really needed to see the results of the program. While we had some awesome subjective feedback, we didn’t really have the objective results that we needed. We also saw a mist with the train-the-trainer concept in the fire service because it was great in theory, but it’s unlike the military, as I know you’re familiar with, where you might be the subject matter expert in a certain skill, but everybody does that skill.

You’re not going to bring it back to the group, but you’re doing it on an annual basis and maybe you use it overseas and you come back and repeat. When you’re talking about human performance to these organizations, whether it’s a law enforcement agency or a fire department, or it’s a three letter agency in the government, whatever it is, they’re not bought into it…

This train-the-trainer concept with human performance just doesn’t work. They’re not going through this every year. They don’t get sleep hygiene classes every year. They don’t do performance nutrition every year. And even if you did train up a couple of people to go train the masses, what are they a pack for? It’s a collateral duty. It’s this system that just doesn’t work. They have no resources to back them.

There’s no consistency with the program. What we started doing is we started looking at that a couple of years and we’re like, Man, all these people that fired up, they went through the training. But this is like a sunburn session. They go through, they’re fired up. That lasts for maybe a couple of months, and then they go back to their old habits. We started doing other things. We started, one, we developed the O2X, tactical performance platform, which has a mobile app and a desktop and all that stuff.

The thing we started doing was we got pretty big into the screenings and assessments, getting, and collecting real data. Let’s see the shoulders, knees, back, hip, core. Let’s see how well people are sleeping.

Let’s see how well they’re eating. Let’s see what their body comp is. Let’s see how stressed they are. We started a ton of assessments and reporting. As our team started to grow, we started giving real-time support through our platforms to all our subject matter experts to include all our training plans and reach back and all the stuff. Then we were able to take these reports and start delivering these reports to the leadership on a minimum of a quarterly basis.

But the individuals would be fired up to do this because we’d be able to get individualized reports. From those individualized reports, they could say, Okay, you want to lose weight? Let’s help you out here. Do you want to sleep better? Let’s help you out here. You want whatever it is, like we can give tailored plans to people, so they want to do it. Then we would take that aggregate data. We wouldn’t say, Here’s what John Smith’s body comp is, or Here’s how stressed they are.

But we just say, On average, we’ve got a thousand screens here. Here’s how well your people are sleeping. Here’s how well they’re eating. Here’s the likelihood of an injury rate.

We have been doing that for a long time, collecting all this data, and we’ve been able to save municipalities and organizations millions of dollars with very small incremental changes from an individual level. And the biggest thing we’re doing now, and just to fast forward to the conclusion, it’s probably our biggest part, which I know we’ll talk about on the back side, is you have this training and education component from workshops that can be customized in any way.

The other side is you get all the virtual stuff, which obviously you’re very well familiar with. Then you have these consulting data reporting screenings. But the biggest thing we’ve done over the last few years is we’re actually putting O2X people on site within these organizations to not look at this like a collateral duty. They’re looking at this from a full-time perspective that is keeping these programs alive.

But the difference is we’re not a staffing agency. We don’t just drop off, pick the field. We don’t just drop off a Strength and Condition Coach and disappear. That Strength and Condition Coach is very much a part of OQX, which comes with the whole power of the company behind that individual.

Can you speak a bit about data in general, how you’re using it, and how you’re taking advantage of it 

Yeah, the data for us has been huge. One, let’s be honest, we partner with organizations that we have to show an ROI on. It goes back to the subjective versus objective results. The great part about data is that it’s real. It’s not something like he said or she said ,  it’s none of that. It’s when we do readiness assessments, that we can find out what the average body comp of the entire group is.

When we do movement screenings and we can look at their shoulders or their back or their knees and highlight the likelihood of an injury, we can see that. When we can look at an academy class and we can see here are your results from an aerobic capacity to push, to pull to any standard we can get that data. The other thing it does too is from an individual side, sometimes people just lie to themselves, right?

When you look at the course of the job, when you’re gaining a couple of pounds every year over the course of the job and you’re on the job for 30 years and you’re like, Damn, a lot heavier. Some of these groups that we’ve done studies on were averaging a pound a month on the first year of the job.

But it’s just this non-sustainable piece that when we partnered with you all a while ago, I think meeting people where they’re at was pretty big. Rather than just collecting data from one device just for an example, or a broad base here, we’re going to do a PT test and hear the results, having this wearable technology integrated into our platform is massively beneficial in a ton of ways. One, we don’t care what device you use, right?

If we’re working with the army and you have 300 soldiers and some are wearing Routes, some are wearing Fitbit, some are wearing Garmin, some are wearing Polar, it’s unrealistic for these large groups to buy everybody a loop. They’re probably not going to do it. Also, people might not want to wear that thing. Our thought is we want to grab as much data as we can from different people. And then we’re not going to go so far into the weeds of pages and pages down at that data.

But from a cultural standpoint, back to the beginning of the conversation, we don’t need that level. We’re not talking about the little tiny, What is the difference of the, or whatever.

We really need to see overall, what calories are these people burning? How much are they moving a day? How overweight are they? What’s the HRV? What is the basic stuff? And so we can take all that data from a wide variety of devices, but also a wide variety of individuals and we can bucket it. So we could say, Here’s what a cavity class looks like. Here’s what a certain unit looks like. So that’s been pretty big.

And then the other thing is that helps our trainers. So if you’re working with an individual on a fitness goal, for example, or you can see this data in real-time what works with that, which is great because that can help change plans and things along that nature.

What would you say are the main characteristics and perhaps values of the people at O2X? 

I got to tell you, I’m so blessed. I’ve had it really my entire life. I’m in my early 40s. Like I said, I went into the military directly out of high school. Now I’m in my mid-40s, I’ve really had two really major careers. One is the Civil Leagues, which I think is the best culture ever. And then we have O2X, which is the best culture ever. I’ve just been blessed. I don’t even know how to paint or create that again.

I don’t know if I could or if I… But if I were to advice to my kids, I’d be like, Surround yourself with great people and you’ll end up doing great things. And that’s here. So O2X, our people are everything. Our culture is absolutely everything. Can you think about it? We’re not doing breaking science stuff. Everyone knows you’re supposed to eat well. Everyone knows you’re supposed to sleep. Everyone knows you’re supposed to eat.

You have good people. We put on basic education courses that are life-changing to people, but it’s tangible, relatable, and digestible information, you need the right people to deliver that or fall short.

We have really good people that can do that. Internally here, the people out of an HQ, we’re based up in the Boston area, just south of Boston, about 230 miles or so. That’s where we’re headquartered. We also have an office in the mid-Atlantic, right in Old Town, Alexandria, near DC. Then we have one out in Southern California, outside of San Diego. We have this little triangle going from an HQ perspective.

I have to tell you, they all come from different backgrounds. I will say there are a lot of high performers and high achievers in those backgrounds. We do spend a lot of time making sure that the right people come in the door. I do think that’s a big advantage that we have is the people that just get a job here in general, they’re already high performers, but they’re going to be in our culture. But these people, I got to tell you, man, they are… I don’t care if it’s marketing, if it’s operations, it’s the education, if it’s anything: customer service, client service, business development, relationship management. These folks, they really care about what they do, and they’re good at it. They’re passionate about it.

Some of that is running off. They’re fired up about it. How to do this the most official way? How do we get the right people in front of the right crowd? Because audiences are different, right? Those people are just unbelievable. I couldn’t be more proud to be associated with our HQ-type group. Then the other side of the business that we have from O2X is really three areas. But the second area is these full-time people that are, these are W2 employees, but they are placed within these organizations.

These people are full-time at the FBI, the DEA, the US Marshals, the Secret Service, the army, the fire department, and the law enforcement agency, they’re full-time within these organizations and they are living the brand. They are O2X. When you’re at the DEA and you guys get an O2X, you’re like, They are O2X. Everything they give them from a training, education standpoint, everything they give them from a screening or assessment, the app that they give them, their names on it.

When someone’s not meeting their standard and they’re getting mad, I’m getting fired up, which is good. We’re making sure that we’re going to. That’s the second bucket.

Then the last bucket, it’s a very much larger bucket are these subject matter experts that are more contracted to us. We have hundreds and hundreds of these folks that we’re tapping from very relevant fields across a wide variety of human performance sectors. We’re bringing in and we’re making sure those people are the right people for the job and they go through a very arduous training regimen that our HQ staff controls.

That’s been good. We got all three buckets firing on all cylinders. But I can tell you that people are very happy here. They love their job, they love working with each other, and then they get the double bottom line. They get to do great things for a great cause. It’s all around.