Vijay Pendakur: Building Trust, Resilience, and Clarity in Uncertain Times

Intro: Broadcasting live from the Business RadioX Studios in Houston, Texas. It’s time for Houston Business Radio. Now, here’s your host.

Trisha Stetzel: Hello, Houston. Trisha Stetzel here bringing you another episode of Houston Business Radio. It is my pleasure to introduce you to my guest today, Doctor Vijay Pendharkar, leadership advisor, coach and founder of Vijay Consulting. Vijay helps senior leaders turn disruption into a competitive advantage by focusing on the human side of performance things like trust, clarity, resilience, and alignment. He brings a rare combination of academic rigor and real world experience. Having served as dean of students at Cornell University and in executive roles at companies like Zegna, VMware, and Dropbox, where he led global work and culture and leadership. What makes Vijay’s work especially powerful is his focus on behavioral science and habits, helping leaders understand not just what to do, but how people actually respond to change, stress, and uncertainty. His work helps leaders stabilize teams, rebuild trust and sustain performance even in the midst of constant disruption. Vijay, welcome to the show.

Dr. Vijay Pendakur: Oh, it’s such a pleasure to be here, Trisha.

Trisha Stetzel: I’m so excited to have you on. This is a long time waiting for me to have this conversation with you. So why don’t we start with this? Tell us a little bit more about you.

Dr. Vijay Pendakur: Sure. Um, so I would call Chicago home out of out of all the places I’ve lived. Um, I grew up in Chicago. Uh, my parents are immigrants from India. Um, and I spent many years working with students. Um, my first, my first career, uh, in life was, uh, working with students and, um, with a focus on students who oftentimes are nontraditional if we want to think of it that way. So students who are the first in their families to go to college, students who are working full time while trying to pay their way through school, adults who have come back to learn while supporting a family of their own or taking care of elders, veterans, um, and many groups who really want to pursue higher education. But oftentimes it can be very challenging. And I spent almost 20 years trying to improve and design systems to unlock the best work of their lives. And that meant working directly with those populations, but also thinking about environments and how we can change environments so that people can do the best brain and body work that they can. And then I moved and took that same kind of bucket of skills and approaches into working with employees. So different stakeholders. Similar approach. And I worked on employee experience. And so. Executive and leadership development team function and team capability. Um work for three different global software companies. And that was really exciting because I was able to take that same approach and look at the complexity of global teams and really fast moving teams. Agile is very common in software companies. And so how does this stuff work when you’re moving incredibly fast and when you’re in a highly disrupted environment? And then I launched Vijay Consulting and I run a business now helping leaders and teams improve performance and times when uncertainty and disruption are often leading the team to feel overwhelmed under, uh, where they may be under delivering against goal. Um, and I help restore that team capacity to be excellent.

Speaker 4: Mhm. Mhm.

Trisha Stetzel: Okay. So I love this because we’re bringing this human component in here, which I think is so important. Organizations, I believe, are pretty good at planning change. Whether they’re good at it or not is a suspect, but they’re good at planning change, but often struggle with the people side of making that change happen in a way that’s not so disruptive. So what are leaders missing?

Dr. Vijay Pendakur: I think that, uh, one of the first places I always start with a leader who says, hey, Vijay, we’re going through several enterprise changes or business transformation changes right now in my organization. Um, and for some reason, my team is struggling and I always say, okay, first and foremost, let’s start with the clarity that humans experience change first and foremost through their nervous systems, not through their brains. And our nervous systems evolved over hundreds of thousands of years to keep us safe in physically dangerous environments. And we may not love that fact, but it is a fact nonetheless, and our biology experiences uncertainty and rapid change as a threat. So our bodies, during periods of intense volatility and ambiguity, are flooded with chemicals, hormones, and neurotransmitters that help us fight or flee. You know, think about the savannah 200,000 years ago trying to outrun that cave bear. Trisha. Super helpful on the savannah. Maybe not as helpful on a cross-functional team in an energy company or a, you know, manufacturing or hospitality organization that’s trying to go through complex business transformation, AI, adoption, M&A, and everybody is flooded with fight or flight chemicals. So when you are noticing your team saying things like, wait, hang on. So wait, what are we doing? And, you know, clarity has collapsed, right? We’ve pivoted enough times that people aren’t able to keep straight what the priorities are, who’s deciding what the roles are. This is a very common thing that happens to teams, but we need to understand it human first. Right. And that means that first step is to help restore people’s ability to calm down their nervous systems so that their brains can come back online. Um, and that’s where I always start the conversation. Is that human centered change first deals with the fact that we weren’t built to change at the rate that we’re changing these days. And so we have to support people to get grounded. And then the, the brain comes back online and we can go through the disciplines of high performance work that a lot of leaders know they need to do.

Trisha Stetzel: Yeah, absolutely. So the, the word that I picked out in what you said was clarity. So is that something that we need to tackle to calm the nervous system of our teams that are really at this high stress level? Tell me more about that.

Dr. Vijay Pendakur: Yeah, yeah. You know, clarity clarity collapses for teams very quickly under under the kind of level of change we’re going through right now. Mhm. Um, and the loss of clarity is one of the things that triggers the nervous system response, right? So clarity loss looks like a number of different things. One, it could be I’m not sure what my role is right now. Right. You know, you see a lot of teams where there’s been reorgs new executive leadership, um, people’s jobs start to get really blurry. And when we have a loss of role clarity, what’s my role on this team? The secondary question that’s coming up for people is do I matter? Am I still valuable? Is my work still important? So when leaders, when we talk about clarity, oftentimes dig in multiple levels as a coach and an advisor with a leader to say, like, let’s, let’s go through the clarity stack first, starting with how do we actually give people a sense that they matter? And we’ll talk about some very basic rituals and practices of recognition that help build back people’s sense of value and contribution, which is one of the fastest ways to get people grounded. Again, that you do matter. You’re seen and supported on this team. And so then the nervous system calms down and then the other layers of the onion of clarity, if you will, to quote Shrek, it’s like, you know, the layer two here is, is role clarity, right? Who’s doing what? Who decides what does good look like? These are these are also forms of clarity that are more tactical. But when they’re not resolved or when they got disrupted, people’s work product suffers. And so there’s a, there’s a sort of a, a behavioral science component to this. And then there’s like a smart teaming component to this. And clarity functions in both of those places.

Speaker 4: Yeah.

Trisha Stetzel: It’s so at a high level, you and I can talk about clarity all day because we know what it is, you know what it is. I know what it is. And I’m sure that leaders who are listening today know what clarity is. How do I know that I’m not being clear? I’m a leader. I came in, I gave direction, and things are not going the way I thought they would. How do I how do I know that it’s me and not them?

Dr. Vijay Pendakur: You know, I think one of the toughest things about being a leader is even if it’s them, it’s you. Because your team, your team lacking clarity, ultimately comes back to the leader not being able to achieve their goals. Right? So whenever we get into when I’m coaching a leader and they’re like, I’m so frustrated with my team, I have explained this multiple times and they’re like, not getting it again, this is on you as the leader and that the mantle of leadership is heavy. Trisha. Right. And so one of the things we always work on is a couple of things. Um, let’s break your, your clarity communication down into smaller pieces. So first on each of your major projects and work streams, um, do people have a clear sense of the North Star? What is the purpose of this work stream? And that might sound so basic. Of course they know what the purpose is. Really. Let’s check in and ask folks, why are we doing this work right? And you will get six different answers. Another. Another very basic communication element is, is the team aware of the priority order for work? So I call this running a priority stack with your team. I’ll ask the leader to go in with their team and say, hey team, let’s take our top 5 or 6 priorities and take ten minutes in this meeting.

Dr. Vijay Pendakur: I’d love for you to stack rank those priorities, help me see what you think is first, second, third, fourth, and fifth priority. And the leader goes, sure, I’ll run that with my team. You know jiffy. No problem. Right? And what ends up happening is a quagmire, because it turns out the team has very different perspectives on what’s most important. Second important, you know, last importance. And it’s revelatory for the leader to see that we’re in such different places around what why are we doing this work and what matters most? And I think for the smart leaders who are listening to us right now, right? Like if the team is not aware of why we’re doing the work and what matters most. Then we have a huge issue. And so I try to help leaders through these kind of micro skills of, um, of, of basically being able to cut through the noise around team confusion in the face of rapid change and transformation with rituals that help them see and diagnose better where the communication or where the clarity is collapsing.

Speaker 4: Okay.

Trisha Stetzel: Can we throw trust in here at this point? Because I think that trust plays a really big role in the entire conversation that we’re having. We started with clarity. Let’s talk about trust, and then we can move on to some deeper things. So how does trust play in here?

Dr. Vijay Pendakur: Trust. Trust shows up. Um, everything in everything we do. Right. Uh, the, it is the bedrock for healthy human interaction, right? If you’ve ever been in a human relationship, a friendship or a collegial relationship where you’re not sure whether you can trust the other person, think back to that time in your life and immediately your body starts to produce all of these, uh, like chemicals. We actually rely on trust to be able to function normally and healthily with the people around us. And so it sits as the scaffolding for team performance. When a leader says, Vijay, I think I have a problem with with performance on my team. It’s really uneven. I’ll actually we’ll, we’ll go in and do a trust audit. And what I do is I try and take a word like trust, which we all value. And I don’t, I’ve never talked to a leader who’s like, trust isn’t important on my team, right? I think people get it, but we don’t often have the micronutrients. So what is trust, right? How do we break it into something that’s actionable? And for me, I’ve found simpler is better. I just talk about trust in three C’s. The three C’s of trust in my practice are care, courage, and consistency. And what that means is the, the care component is do people feel like they matter? Going back to that human need, right. Am I seen and supported? Do I feel heard when I speak? Uh, is is the first leg of the stool.

Dr. Vijay Pendakur: And the second one is courage. Can people speak up and ask hard questions? Can they offer feedback and receive feedback? And can they admit the small failures so we avoid the big failures without fear of shame or punishment? And the third one is consistency. Does the team see each other as reliable and steady? And often I coach leaders, right? So we’re working at the leader level. And when I when we go through and we do a quick audit of trust on the team, we will notice that one of these is weak. Um, and, and that means that maybe the leader is under so much pressure that for three days in a row, they are generous and caring. And for two days they are hot tempered and transactional. And then they go back to, um, the nice leader, and then they go to the, the shadow side of their leadership. And when they when they they tell me that they’re like, well, Vijay, you need to understand I’m under pressure here, right? Like I got to deliver and the teams dropping the ball, I go, great, I get it. It is super frustrating. I can hold space for you to be frustrated, but with your team, you showing up consistently is one of the most important things you can give them.

Dr. Vijay Pendakur: Because when you’re inconsistent, you’re breaking that third rule of trust and they will pull back on courage. If they see you as inconsistent and you need the team to do the courageous things, ask hard questions, give and receive feedback, admit to small failures so you don’t have big failures, you know, um, on, on the care side, right? I’ll, I’ll talk about what is the culture of recognition look like on your team? And oftentimes leaders will default to, oh my gosh, once a year, I take the team out for dinner. We splash it up with some steaks and I’m always like, hey, as a carnivore, I love me some steak dinner. I’m not knocking it. Um, if we can, if we can get a good old fashioned in there, let’s let’s go. And that is not a formula for human recognition. And they’re often surprised. They’re like, what do you mean? You know, that’s costly. And I go, great, let’s talk about zero cost, durable, sustainable recognition. And that means every week, can we build in some kind of a micro ritual that helps the team affirm that people’s work matters here? And they’re like, I don’t want to get into the little League trophy thing where everybody gets a pat on the back for doing their jobs. I’m like, great, let’s not do that. Then let’s just break it. Let’s set some guardrails.

Dr. Vijay Pendakur: We’re only going to recognize three things small wins, heroic effort and generative failures. Small wins are the things that leaders know to recognize. You got to recognize the wins, right? Heroic effort are when people are going above and beyond. And if we don’t recognize that, people feel taken for granted. And the third thing is when we make a mistake, but everybody learns. And so you set the guardrails for when recognition happens and you create a team ritual I use with my teams and I write about it in my book, The Alchemy of Talent. Um, five minutes of fame. It’s in the weekly stand up, right? If you do a weekly team meeting or a bi weekly team meeting, it’s on the agenda. Five minutes of fame. And it’s just a popcorn style. Anybody can unmute and go, hey, uh, I just want to say, on Tuesday night, Trisha stayed with me and fixed the client facing deck. I was stuck on the whole table that we were going to show them about, you know, the cost plan. And I couldn’t figure it out. And Trisha stayed back and helped me. And so I just want to recognize her contribution. And it was a big unlock for me. And when the team starts recognizing each other like that, it lifts, you know, it lifts the whole team’s sense of care. That first leg of the stool.

Trisha Stetzel: Yeah. It’s such a big deal. You know, it’s interesting. I’ve had this conversation around celebrating the good things that we’re doing and how important that is in teams and lifting the entire team. Right. I think that’s so very important. All right. We I know that there are folks who are already listening or who are listening who already want to connect with you. So what is the best way for Jay for them to get in touch with you?

Dr. Vijay Pendakur: I’d say the best way to get in touch with me is my website, which is vijay.com. Now I know I’ve got one of those names. Uh, so, um, but the cool thing about having my name is I’m the only Vijay. So if you just go to Google and put in an even a near proximate spelling of my name, it’ll be one of the first few links. I’ve tested it. I’ve told my name a few times just to see. And it’s, I’m the only person with my name. And the website comes up. That’s, that’s, you know, you can see what I do, how I can help you and how to, how to contact me. And the other thing is I have a very active LinkedIn presence. And so you can also find me on LinkedIn.

Trisha Stetzel: Oh, fantastic, I love that. All right. Um, I love your care, courage and consistency. I think those are so important and the way that you’ve lined them out and using them to kind of peel under trust, and they’re all parts of trust. Do you work with leaders who may have come from that role as a team member that is now a leader, and what what does that bring new to the team where someone from the team, where they were all peers has now been promoted to? We’ll just call it a manager for today’s scenario. How does that change the way one they see themselves and two, the way that you work with them?

Dr. Vijay Pendakur: Yeah. I think, um, oftentimes, so I lived through this. I’ll start with the personal. I was, uh, one of my first times, um, getting an internal promotion. I went from being a team member to being a manager of the same team that I was a member of. And so one, I just want a name. It’s really hard. It’s that is a hard lane change and um, a few things that come up often when that I experience when that happened to me, uh, but also in the leaders I’ve coached that have lived through this is, um, imposter syndrome. Even when, if that’s not a big deal in your life, it will happen when you’ve gone from team member to team manager and imposter syndrome, if you’ve never heard those words, just means think about those times where if you’ve ever had to give a speech in public, right? And you’re sitting there, you’ve practiced your speech, you know your speech, you’re waiting to get on stage, they’re reading your bio and the voices inside starts whispering, who are you to give this speech? Why would they even want to listen to you? You’re not even a great public speaker, right? What imposter syndrome is the whisperings inside that that ask you why you right? You know, why would these people follow you? And so we, we oftentimes start working there around. Look, you were chosen to lead this team. Now let’s make a plan for how you’re going to deal with the voices inside you that will rob you of your resiliency and also lead you to over rotate in one direction or another.

Dr. Vijay Pendakur: And I will often map this out for them so they can be aware of the potential threat. Imposter syndrome will lead a leader to overexpress either friendly, leader friendly vibes that undercut their leadership or command and control approaches that undercut their leadership. And what I mean by that is, of course, you want to be warm and human with your team, but you’re not ride or die homies with your team, even if you were as a team member. If that’s your tendency, the actual steps are to put in place some some very healthy natural boundaries around. I am friendly with, but I am not friends with. And that’s a that distinction of I’m not your friend, but I am friendly. It can be very helpful if, if if imposter syndrome and your nervous system is leading you in the direction of being like, I’m just going to be everybody’s bestie. And it’s like, nope, that’s going to undercut your leadership in the long run. Ultimately, some folks go, okay, my nervous system is acting up. I’m going to drop the hammer, right? I am going to set the pace and I’m going to hold people accountable. And it’s like, sure, you have to set pace. You have to hold people accountable. But ultimately, humans follow leaders into the fog of war. They don’t follow command and control dictators, you know. And so inspiring followership takes warmth. It takes recognition. It takes those other tools that leaders use to inspire people to want to be on the team.

Trisha Stetzel: Yes. I love that. So something bubbled up for me as you were talking through that. And that’s burnout from the leader’s perspective and even from the team. So somebody steps into this leadership role, or they’ve been in this leadership role. And there’s a lot of change happening, and we’ve got to get a lot of things done. And the team is burned out, but the leader is burning out, too. So how do we as leaders keep from. It’s a two part question burning our teams out and burning ourselves out.

Dr. Vijay Pendakur: Yeah. Well, let’s start with the self and then move to the team. Um, whenever I’m talking with a leader and supporting a leader that is mentioning that they’re feeling kind of crispy, that the burnout is, is real. I will often go into a couple of different helpful coaching tools that I use. The first is the idea of rapid recovery. Um, this is a one of my most proven practices, um, in coaching high performing executives. What rapid recovery means is that when I ask a leader how they take care of themselves, most often we will say something like, I, you know, I go hard and I and I just, you know, overclock, but like three months from now, I know I have a vacation booked. I’m going to Mazatlan where the mai tais flow like water, right? And I’m like, okay, I love Mazatlan and I love the Mai tais, but actually that’s not a form of scientific and evidence based recovery. You actually need to take care of your nervous system every day. Rapid recovery is the is the daily investment of dealing with neurological gunk that builds up in the pipes of our neurobiology. The stress of working in rapid change and high ambiguity environments accrues inside in chemicals like cortisol that build up in our system. And so I teach people a simple rapid recovery habit of, um, identifying a few 3 to 5 minute neurological resets, nervous system resets.

Dr. Vijay Pendakur: Uh, and these are ways of changing your physical or environmental context that are evidence based, that help you buy back some neurological energy? So super simple things. One. Taking a ten minute walk without your phone and without your phone pieces is is key here. Because if you take a ten minute walk and you’re going to and you’re clearing your inbox while you take a ten minute walk, nothing good happens, right? I think a ten minute walk is a cognitive motor reset that actually is evidence based. It helps you restore your nervous system function. Um, some people say I don’t have ten minutes. Great. Give me five. So if you close your eyes, put in headphones and listen to one song that blesses you out. So this is not welcome to the jungle. This is not your pump track for the gym. This is something else. Everybody has different bliss vibes, right? But like find the song that blesses you out. Eyes closed, headphones in five minutes or 3.5 minutes, depending on what kind of pop music you like. Right? And, um, even that can take your brainwave pattern from spiky and jagged the stress pattern into those rolling hills that buyback, a little bit of that nervous system energy.

Dr. Vijay Pendakur: I have a whole list of these hacks. I work with a leader to actually tune that menu to their body, right? We talk about what works for them. Every body is different. And then the key here around behavioral change is that we don’t say, oh, that was neat information and let it go. You create a menu, you write down the three rapid recovery resets that are going to work for you, and you stick it on the corner of your monitor. You put a Post-it note on your monitor. And the reason is you need a nudge that reminds you every day. There we go. Trisha’s lifting up her Post-it notes. You need a nudge every day that visually reminds you, take care of my nervous system. And the second thing I say to them is the intention to change your behavior is nice and rarely works. We’ve all had that New Year’s resolution that went nowhere. The reality with behavioral changes, it’s super hard. And so if we don’t anchor the behavioral commitment into some part of our day, it’s unlikely to happen. And what anchoring means is you pick a time in your day and an action that you can link the new behavior onto. So for me, I know I have a 10 a.m. second cup of coffee. I know it’s probably not the most healthy habit, but I do.

Dr. Vijay Pendakur: And so while I’m making that cup of coffee, it takes three minutes for my coffee machine to make that cup of coffee. And in that three minutes, I do a reset. Every time I don’t have my phone, I don’t try and work while the coffee is brewing. I do a reset every time I anchored the nervous system reset into something I know is going to happen. People have things that happen in their day on a regular basis. My lunch break at noon. Um, the change between my 2 p.m. meeting and my 3 p.m. meeting, whatever it might be. Right. Stick your five minute reset into that and commit to that. And 90 days later, it moves from behavior to habit. Habit is when something happens without you thinking about it. And that’s where you get the the real counter against burnout because you’ve designed a life system that actually buys back. Neurological energy every day as opposed to waiting for Mazatlan. And, and, and, you know. That’s one example of, of how I coach for resilience. Um, you know, we don’t have the time here to unpack all of it. But you did ask about the team. Trisha, do you want me to speak a little bit about what I, what I would love?

Trisha Stetzel: Yes, please. Let’s go there. Yeah.

Dr. Vijay Pendakur: Okay. You know, oftentimes when the leader says, you know, my team is just complaining about burnout, but I I’ll say, are you worried that what they want from you is to have less work? And almost always the leader goes, yes, I haven’t touched this lightning rod because I don’t know how to do resilience without just taking work away. And the reality is, most of the operational environments in which I coach and advise and do work, you can’t just take work away. That’s not realistic. Um, so it’s, uh, the reality is that we have to design for resilience in ways that aren’t as as utopic as well. Everybody just do 10% less, right? That’s not realistic. And so what we do is oftentimes look at burnout as a symptom of our ways of working. Are there areas of how the team is functioning that we can actually buy back calories that are currently being expended inefficiently? And so we’ll do things like, um, looking at decision quality and decision hygiene for the team. So, um, how is this team making key decisions? Is it clear, uh, when, when we’re consulting to get information from each other and when we are making decisions as decision owners and informing the team? Oftentimes what we’ll see is that decision making is an area where the team is struggling and inefficient decisions result in bad outcomes that the team then has to rework because the decision was made without clarity. Going back to that C word, right? And then the team is redoing effort because the decision making, hygiene and quality wasn’t very strong on the team.

Dr. Vijay Pendakur: That’s it’s a more complicated subject to unpack. But when I’m coaching, the team will often look at something like decisions, prioritization, like we’ll run a priority stack and we’ll see that people have been working counter purpose. One person is putting their premium effort into something that actually the rest of the team realizes is low priority, but that person doesn’t know it, right? So we can actually redesign effort allocation when we can see that we’re misaligned on priorities. We’ll look at things like how the team evaluates trade offs, and I’ll actually run them through an exercise called effort versus impact mapping. And we’ll take the key initiatives of the team, and we’ll plot them out on an x y plot where one of the axes is effort and the other axis is impact. And we’ll look at the key workstreams initiatives and projects, and we’ll look at the items that fall into the high effort, low impact part of that chart and say either if something is here, it either has to be modified or stopped. What are we going to do? That’s a coaching process, right? So it’s not a moment. It’s a process. But in doing that, we’re not simply saying everybody does less work. We’re saying we need to work better, smarter and more efficiently. So I have a whole toolbox around ways of working that help the team take the finite energy in that system and use it, use it more effectively.

Trisha Stetzel: Wow. Oh my goodness. Okay. So our time passed so fast. This is such a great conversation. I want you to leave us with two things. And I know we’ve already talked about it, but what’s one thing that we can do as leaders this week? A new habit we can start this week to really turn down that crispiness that most of us feel. Okay. And then what’s one new thing we can do at work with our teams this week that will create some forward momentum in bringing more positivity to the workplace.

Dr. Vijay Pendakur: Yeah, this is a great callback to some things we’ve mentioned, but I but I get the chance to put a bow on it. So thank you. So one thing that I would love to offer to our listeners today as a personal commitment is to recognize that change is not stopping and the level of disruption and ambiguity we felt probably since 2020 and most of our lives is now the new normal. And as tough as it is to hear me say that, respond to that challenge by investing in your day to day biological and neurological health by committing to a rapid recovery reset, I want you to build your menu of three small hacks that are available to you at your desk or within your working environment, that you can stick to your monitor, and you’re going to choose to anchor a five minute reset into your day And a couple of months from now, I want you to shoot me a note, either a DM on LinkedIn or through my website and tell me about how doing that reset has actually made you feel differently in the aggregate, right? The cumulative effect of daily care as opposed to heroic care and at the team level.

Dr. Vijay Pendakur: Um, I think that everybody who’s leading a team in and that’s listening to this call, I want you to think about the natural touchpoints when you pull your team together and how you can use some kind of a team ritual to remind folks that they matter on your team. And what it means to matter is, am I seen and supported on this team? Does do people know that I’m here and I’m working and I’m trying. And one of the best ways to do that is to come up with something that feels eminently like your team, right? You can take my five minutes of fame little ritual, but change it, right? Change it to make it your flavor. Brand it in ways that fit your industry or your company, and have some kind of a recognition ritual that allows people to share mattering moments on a regular basis. It’s a zero budget investment that will lift the energy reservoir of the team over time.

Trisha Stetzel: Oh my goodness. Can we just keep talking? I’m kidding, I’m kidding, I’m kidding. I know we talked about we’re just going to go two hours and we just can’t help ourselves. This has been absolutely amazing. Thank you doctor for coming on and sharing your wisdom with us today.

Dr. Vijay Pendakur: It’s been a pleasure. If any of you are swinging through Austin, look me up. That’s my hometown. Just a couple hours from Trisha. And I look forward to connecting with all of you online in the near future.

Trisha Stetzel: I love that, and if you guys, if it’s driving you crazy, how to spell his name, I’m going to do it for you right now. It’s VIJAYPENDAKUR. You’re all welcome. For those of you who are detail oriented now, you can Google him. Uh, looking forward to having you on the show again, because I think we, we need to uncover a few more things. How about that?

Dr. Vijay Pendakur: It’s a deal.

Trisha Stetzel: Okay. I would love that. All right, you guys, that’s all the time we have for today. If you found value in this conversation that Vijay and I had, please share it with a fellow leader, veteran, or Houston entrepreneur ready to grow. And be sure to follow, rate and review the show. It helps us reach more bold business minds just like yours and your business. Your leadership and your legacy are built one intentional step at a time. So stay inspired, stay focused, and keep building the business and the life you deserve.