Marty Brickey, a consultant and serial entrepreneur based in Orlando, Florida, has formalized a personal rule he says he has followed for years: he does not take strategy calls before his morning bike ride. The announcement is not a fitness plan but a sequencing rule, one he argues has shaped his decision-making since his early years running companies.
Brickey cycles four to five days a week, rain or shine, and treats the ride as a fixed block that does not move when the week gets busy. Under the rule, no calls involving a decision, a negotiation, or a hire happen before the ride is complete. Purely informational calls are permitted; anything requiring him to choose is pushed until after.
"I used to think the calendar belonged to whoever asked for it first," Brickey said. "Now the ride goes on the calendar before anything else does."
The rule matters, he says, because the order of a day changes the quality of the answers a person gives. Brickey has built and sold companies across media and gaming and has sat on boards where the pressure to respond quickly is constant. He points to his own experience as evidence. "Early in my career I didn't have balance," he said. "That wasn't a minor issue. It was a direct cause of a lot of loss. I don't say that lightly."
His claim is specific rather than abstract. "A decision made at six in the morning, before I've cleared my head, is not the same decision I'd make at nine," he said. "I've tested this enough times to trust it."
The practice extends beyond cycling. Brickey credits long walks, separate from the bike, as a tool for working through self-doubt or a stuck decision. "When I hit a wall on a problem, I don't sit at the desk and grind on it," he said. "I walk it out. Most of the time the answer shows up somewhere in the middle of that walk, not at the start."
He frames the habit as a corrective to a common executive mistake: treating exercise as a reward for a clear schedule. "I treat it like the reason the schedule works at all," he said. The announcement matters, he suggests, because other founders and executives skip the same step and pay for it later. "I'm not telling anyone to take up cycling," he said. "I'm telling them to put something before the phone. It doesn't matter what it is, as long as it happens first and nothing moves it."
Brickey is committing to keep the rule in place and to discuss it when asked rather than treating it as a private eccentricity. "If I say I have balance now, I should be able to point to what that actually looks like on a Tuesday," he said. "This is what it looks like."
He measures the pledge by whether it survives a busy week rather than a slow one. "Anyone can protect their morning when nothing is happening," he said. "The test is whether you protect it when three people are waiting on you. That's the only week that counts." He expects to fail occasionally and says that failure is part of keeping the rule honest. "If I never break it, I'm probably not being tested enough," he said. "The point isn't perfection. The point is that the default goes back to the ride, not to the phone."
Brickey founded Layne Morgan Media in 2002 and later founded Flyover Entertainment, which included Secret Lair Studios, Grumpy Ninja Studios, and Studio Chi'n. He has invested in, advised, and served on boards for companies including Gas Powered Games (Gasworks Games), and he holds a B.S. in Management from Missouri State University.
