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Outside the Grind is our occasional feature that spotlights the unique passion projects, side hustles, and hobbies of finance professionals outside of the office. Let us know if you know, or you are, a CFO or finance pro with an interesting, weird, or unusual side gig.
Adam Ante is the Cincinnati-based CFO of Paycor, a human capital management platform for SMBs. He’s been a finance professional for decades and also spent eight years in the Army Reserve.
Ante took up indoor rock climbing during a moment of self-reflection, to challenge himself and help cope with the stresses of a growing career. While mostly a weekend hobbyist and a self-described novice, rock climbing has helped him decompress and disconnect from the pressures of work.
CFO Brew recently spoke to Ante about how rock climbing helped him cope with the stresses of a busy finance career, combining the physical and mental in business, and being in the moment.
This interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity.
It takes a lot of work and a long time to get where you are. How do you deal with the pressures of getting to CFO?
I’ve really gone through a lot of things in my personal life around how I personally identify, who I am as a person, and where does my individual personal success live? Most of the time for most of my career, it’s been in my business success. Doing things outside of my business and work life has helped me to find that better balance in my life about who I am as a person.
Rock climbing has really helped that because the pressures of the business are there all the time. All the pressures in growing your career, they can be there as much as you are willing to put into it. And it can, of course, get to an unhealthy level where you’re constantly stressing and thinking about it. You need…some outlet where you can decompress.
The ability to disconnect and plug into something that makes me think about something else, I think is really, really helpful. Rock climbing specifically, is a physical exertion but it takes this other mental focus where you can’t think about the business.
You can’t think about anything for that matter, you have to be completely present for whatever moment that you’re climbing or it’s not going to work.
What’s your experience like when you are on the wall?
There’s a way when you approach a route or a problem on a boulder, where you’re trying to visualize how you’re going to move or how it’s going to feel, what sort of move you’re going to have to do. So first you approach it and you start to just try to visualize it in your mind: “How am I going to have to move? Where are my hands going to go?” Then, some of those sections where you’re really going to have more physical exertion here, [I think,] “I’m gonna have to really pull here, I’m going to have to have to hold this pinch.” So you’re looking for those things so that you can move through it quickly.
The longer you stay on the wall, the harder it becomes. You end up falling off because you can’t hold on as long.
There is this feeling I just absolutely love: When you grab these holds, and you start to feel your body position on the rock, and get yourself into a position that’s more complicated and you can feel yourself progressing through it. It feels very satisfying, like in terms of just an accomplishment. When you make it through those problems, and you accomplish it, it’s a huge burst of adrenaline.
How do you see the relationship between your finance work and rock climbing?
It is interesting, this balance of physical exertion and sheer will and determination to get me through a little bit more. And you have to have that in business. And, of course, finance is just a lens into managing the business, right? And the problem solving, you can’t just brute force everything, either. You can’t just smash everything and say, “I’m gonna get this done through sheer will.” You have to think about it creatively and you have to be intentional.
You have to know what your capability is and where you’re going to have problems and what you need to train on or work on so that you can accomplish some of the harder things.