I almost didn't send the email.
I ran into a friend Will Hunt, CEO & President of Hunt Marketing in Oxford, Mississippi — at a conference in Orlando — had mentioned him almost offhandedly. "There's a guy you should meet," he said. "Jeff McManus. He ran landscaping for 25 years at Ole Miss. Transformed the place. They became one of the most recognized and celebrated campuses in the country under his watch."
Will paused for a second and then added that he'd heard UT Austin had just recruited Jeff away — which surprised even him. "I honestly thought he was going to retire," Will said. "UT must have made him an offer he couldn't refuse." Whatever the details were, I filed that away. If a man like that — someone who had already built something remarkable and had every reason to call it a career — was willing to start over somewhere new, there was something worth paying attention to there.
I'd told Will about the greenbelt — 72 acres of land our HOA owns just outside of downtown Austin. About the trails I'd been building out there for years. About the land disputes we'd fought and won, the attorneys, the adverse possession claim that cost six figures and eventually paid us back. About my vision of turning that raw stretch of Texas hill country into something the whole neighborhood would treasure for generations.
Will thought Jeff and I should talk. Will is a busy guy so instead of bothering him, I found Jeff's email myself, wrote him a note, hit send, and crossed my fingers.
He wrote back. Said he wasn't sure how much help he'd be — he'd never worked with neighborhoods or greenbelts — but he was happy to have a conversation. I could tell from three sentences that this was an in-person meeting. We scheduled it for a Tuesday morning.
I wasn't sure what I was going to encounter, but I knew Will well enough to know this wasn't going to be an average conversation. Will doesn't speak that highly about average people. I drove over to the University of Texas campus — 1301 Dean Keaton Street, Building FC8.
I found FC1 through FC6 without any trouble. FC9 was a ghost. I wandered the campus for ten minutes before finally texting Jeff. He called immediately, talked me right to the door, and met me outside with a parking permit in his hand.
We shook hands. He had the easy, warm energy of someone who has never needed to prove anything to anyone. He led me inside — through a non-descriptive maintenance building that was charged with keeping a university beautiful — and into a small office with a round table and two chairs.
I sat down. He sat across from me. And I still wasn't entirely sure what I was about to get. "Tell me what you're thinking," he said.
So I did. I talked about the trails. About running through the greenbelt in the early morning and what it feels like to move through land you helped shape. About the satisfaction of building something with your hands and then watching other people use it. About my bigger vision — not just trails, but land stewardship. Native plants. Wildfire mitigation. The kind of restoration work David Bamberger did at Selah Ranch, where returning the land to something like its original state turned out to be the most practical and beautiful thing you could do with it.
Jeff listened. He asked questions. He kept digging. What's your ten-year vision? What does it look like if you're not there anymore? Who carries it forward?
He wasn't interrogating me. He was mapping something. I could feel him building a picture of who I was and what I actually needed — not what I'd asked for.
Then, about 35 minutes in, he stood up. "I like to draw diagrams," he said, walking to the whiteboard. "Come up here if you want."
He drew a pyramid. Four levels. At the top he wrote Results. Below that, Actions. Below that, Beliefs. And at the base, the foundation everything else rested on, he wrote one word: Experience.
He tapped the bottom of the pyramid. "This is where it starts. Always. You can't tell people what to believe. You can't argue them into action. You have to give them an experience first — and the experience changes the belief, the belief changes the action, and the action changes the results."
He told me about his early days at UT. He wanted the grounds crew to edge the grass square — clean vertical cuts, the way it looks at the best properties in the city. They resisted. That's not how we do it here. He didn't argue. He didn't write a memo. He loaded everyone into a van, drove them to the Texas State Capitol, drove them past the Domain, and let them look.
Nobody argued on the drive back. That experience rewired something. And the results you see on this campus today started with a van ride and the willingness to show instead of tell.
I kept thinking about my company.
I run SATISFYD. We help businesses in equipment-intensive industries — agriculture, construction, trucking, outdoor power — measure and improve what their customers and employees actually experience. We've grown steadily, and right now, with what AI is making possible, I see an acceleration coming that genuinely keeps me up at night in the best way.
But sitting across from Jeff, I kept hearing his framework applied to everything we do. We show up with data, with benchmarks, with decks full of evidence that customer experience drives revenue and retention. And all of it is true. But Jeff was describing something more fundamental: people don't change because you prove something to them. They change because they feel something.
The most valuable thing we offer our clients isn't a report. It's a moment where they truly understand — in their gut, not just their head — what it means when a customer feels genuinely taken care of. Everything else follows from that.
Jeff looked at his phone at one point. It was 10:04. He'd told me when I arrived that he had a hard stop at 10. We'd scheduled thirty minutes.
"I can move some things," he said, and kept going. We ended up talking for a full hour.
He listed out my personality traits with an ease that was slightly unnerving for someone I'd known for an hour. He asked what else in my life I'd attacked with this same energy. He told me that leading people who don't work for you and don't have to listen to you is one of the hardest things a person can do, and that if I had 90% alignment in my community I was doing something most people never manage.
I told him about two little girls — five and seven years old — who had wandered out into the greenbelt by themselves one day while I was raking mulch off a trail after a wildfire mitigation crew had come through. They asked what I was doing. They asked if they could help. I only had two rakes, so I handed them both over and stood there with nothing to do but watch. Not fifteen minutes later, they had completely changed the game on me — one of them disappeared and came back with a garbage bag, and suddenly we weren't just raking mulch anymore. We were picking up trash in the greenbelt together. I hadn't asked. It hadn't crossed my mind. They just saw what needed to be done and went and got what they needed to do it.
Jeff pointed at me. "That's it. Right there. That is the experience. You didn't recruit them, you didn't convince them, you didn't hold a meeting. You just showed up and did the work — and they wanted to be part of it."
I drove home thinking about trees. About trails. About grass edges and van rides and pyramid diagrams drawn on whiteboards in maintenance buildings.
And I thought about something Steve Jobs once said — that you can't connect the dots looking forward. You can only connect them looking backward.
A conference in Orlando. A conversation with Will Hunt. A cold email to a stranger. A parking permit handed through a car window. A Tuesday morning in a building I almost couldn't find.
I went in thinking I was going to learn about plants and how to put a landscape plan together.
I came out understanding something about people — about how you bring them along, how you build belief, how you lead without authority, and how experience, more than any argument or any data point or any perfectly crafted vision statement, is the thing that actually changes minds.
Have you ever left a meeting with someone you barely knew and felt genuinely changed by it? Walked out knowing you would never forget that conversation? That's what this was. There was something powerful about it, but also easy and comfortable — like the kind of connection that doesn't happen often but feels immediately familiar when it does. I'm convinced the layers go much deeper than what I was exposed to in that one hour. Jeff McManus is truly an impressive human being, and I intend to find more reasons to be in the same room with him.
There's a conversation you've been putting off. A door you haven't knocked on because you're not sure it's worth it. A cold email sitting in your drafts because the introduction never came through.
Send it.