The View from the Office. 

I met up with Ned Phillips at Tartinery, the cafe on the 3rd floor of the Mall at Columbus Circle for coffee.

Ned is a Brit who has spent 35 years working in Asia, mostly for American financial firms. He was a managing director at E*Trade and worked for ITG. 

He left corporate to launch his own fintech. It failed. He calls it “the best education I ever paid for.”

Now, he has a company, The Sales Movement, that trains sales teams, teaching them how to connect with customers in part through story telling.

Ned began his career selling horse manure 33 years ago. Since then, he’s sold LED display signs, financial advice, magazine ads, stocks and B2B WealthTech

He also has a podcast called The Sell. He said it started as an experiment and then became a habit. He says podcasts are “the best networking tool no one uses.”

That’s because you spend an hour in deep conversation developing a relationship. He met many of his business contacts that way, including me. 

Ned was on his way to Tennessee where he will be among 75 people competing in the world championships for the Backyard Ultra, a race founded in 2011 by Lazarus Lake. 

Competitors have to run 4.1 miles every hour to avoid elimination. The last person still running wins. The world record holder ran for more than 119 hours. 

Ned qualified for the race by winning the Backyard race in Singapore. He doesn’t expect to win the world championships – his best time was 30 hours. 

New York was fabulous. He visited his daughter who lives here and works at Rippling. She brought him to a rooftop concert she arranged for a band called The Lonely Parrots.

“We were born too early,” Ned told me. “Now you can tell stories, build a business, and run an audience – all from your phone.”

You can find Ned on LinkedIn or DM me for a warm intro.