Unlock True Success: How Servant Leadership Transforms Teams & Lives

There’s a moment early in this episode of The Hustle Zone where host Ryan Perez admits he almost didn’t know what to expect from his guest. He’d booked Dr. Joshua Nelson — founder of the leadership and coaching company WellFed LLC — off a cold outreach message, hadn’t had time to prep, and spent the day trying to guess what “WellFed” even meant. By the end of the hour, it’s clear the confusion was worth it: Nelson delivers one of the more grounded, lived-in conversations about leadership the show has hosted.

Nelson’s path to leadership wasn’t a straight line. Born in Newport Richey, Florida, he split his childhood between Florida and Arkansas after his parents divorced. By his own account, he wasn’t a serious student — he estimates he graduated high school with something close to a 0.6 GPA and drifted for about a year before enlisting in the Marine Corps on an open contract, which meant the Corps picked his job for him. He became a data network technician and information systems chief, training at Parris Island and Twentynine Palms and serving most of his four years at Camp Lejeune. He left the Marines when his wife was eight months into their second pregnancy, took a 13-month stint at the TV ratings company Nielsen, then moved into the local school system — working his way up the ranks while going back to school for a bachelor’s in business administration, a master’s in management and leadership, and eventually a doctorate in business administration with an emphasis in technology.

The real turning point, he says, came about a year and a half to two years before this taping, when he read Michael Hyatt’s book Living Forward — which opens, notably, by having the reader write their own eulogy. That exercise pushed Nelson to notice that his fulfillment wasn’t really coming from the technology work itself, but from developing and empowering other people. Nine months before this episode aired, that realization became WellFed: a company offering one-on-one coaching, team-building sessions for groups of twenty or fewer, and motivational speaking, all built around helping people reach their own definition of success rather than a one-size-fits-all model.

Pressed on what makes a good leader, Nelson doesn’t hedge: he believes there’s only one real leadership style — servant leadership — even if there are many management techniques (authoritative, diplomatic, persuasive) layered on top of it. “Rather than me thinking that I’m in charge… I look at it in the opposite direction, whereas I’m serving them,” he tells Perez. He traces the instinct back further than his Marine Corps years or his degrees — to a playground moment around age five or six, when being bossy with his friends got him abandoned mid-game. That was his first lesson in the difference between leading and dictating.

Perez walks Nelson through a hypothetical: manage an unfamiliar 30-person team for a single day. Nelson’s answer is structured — start by asking the team what’s working and what isn’t, spend the morning cutting tasks nobody can justify, check in over a group lunch, and close with an after-action debrief that hands ownership back to the team rather than taking credit for the day’s results. On handling employees who aren’t highly skilled, his rule is simple: whatever you’d do for one employee, do for all — because neglect breeds disengagement faster than low skill does. And on people who genuinely aren’t a fit, he argues real service sometimes means an honest conversation, not propping them up out of attachment.

The conversation also covers the collision between entrepreneurship and family life. Nelson, who has five children (three biological, two his girlfriend Ashley’s), talks candidly about a computer repair business he ran in his early twenties that grew fast enough to conflict with his full-time job and schooling — and how he ultimately chose stability over the business. He’s blunt that constant hustle isn’t sustainable, comparing overwork to lifting weights: muscles need to tear and then rest to get stronger, and pushing past personal capacity without recovery just leads to burnout.

Lighter moments round out the hour — dirt pie as a favorite dessert, The Walking Dead over Game of Thrones, Michael Jackson over Prince — before Nelson answers a viewer question from Anthony Davis about sincerity, landing on a Gandhi line: be the change you want to see in the world. He closes by plugging WellFed’s Tap the Well Leadership Conference, held both in person and via livestream, and invites listeners to connect at iamwellfed.com.