EE507 - Mentor Moment: Steve Crosbie - When One Dream Ends, Another Begins

Welcome to this week's Mentor Moment. What happens when the thing you've dedicated your entire life to doesn't work out the way you planned? This week, former professional rugby player and founder of Phadail Saunas, Steve Crosby, shares the mindset that helped him navigate setbacks, reinvent himself, and channel the same obsession that drove his sporting career into building a business. Enjoy this week's Mentor Moment with Steve. We were sauna hipsters. We were doing them before it was cool.

Nice. Yeah, exactly.

So how did you start that? So for context, you started this 20- early 2019?

2019, yeah. So six years literally last week, which is a pretty cool milestone to hit.

Congrats. That's huge.

Thank you. Um, but yeah. It was, I suppose, with my passion for the sea, alongside with the ability to tear and repair your body, uh, recovery from my previous background of playing rugby. Uh, I was lucky enough to live out a boyhood dream, and also loved the benefits that came from the sea, uh, being brought up by it when I was younger. My, my family's from a place in Cork, in Kinsale, that was, uh, just right by the seaside there, so I never had the fear of the cold, never had to overcome that, and never understood why people had a passionate no or a yes answer whenever it was, "Do you wanna do this activity?" And then you kinda just get obsessed with it, and you just want to see why somebody is that, um, passionate about their, their response to something as simple as, "You wanna come for a swim in the winter?" And you can imagine some of the responses that come from that.

Yeah. For context then, you started with a barrel sauna at the Forty Foot?

Yep, 2019.

So bring me right back to, like, literally the first couple of days, 'cause I think that's fascinating for most people is those early days. Everyone resonates with that.

Yeah. Um, well, it was, I suppose, the, the concept kinda came from when I was transitioning out of rugby and retiring from that, uh, which was a tough decision for me to make at the time. I was quite young at the time, I was only 26, um, and was offered to go elsewhere, but, do you know, I'd kinda been a journeyman, not by choice, uh, at that stage in my career anyway. I'd gone from Leinster down to New Zealand, uh, to then come back to Munster, to then Connacht, uh, within a very short space of time. And I suppose it kinda took, uh, its toll on me a bit in terms of I never foresaw that in my career. I just was very linear with my progress, um, uh, when I, when I managed to get into the system in Leinster. Irish Twenties as well, like, privileged to be able to represent there as well, and, uh, would've been, do you know, uh, I could, I could just see, see where it could go, but that sports swinging doors didn't work out, and I was all in, all e- all eggs in that basket kinda mantra. Like-

Was it in you could only see success in terms of, "I'm gonna do Leinster and Ireland all the way to the top"?

Quite literally, like, as in, like, I, like, I wasn't the wonder kid, like, in sport. Like, I wasn't the, the freak athlete that was running around the place and, you know, just clearly physically capable to do a lot more. I was never that guy. I