Episode 322: The Structure of Success with Patrick Esposito

Okay, team, here's the intro and the outro to the Patrick Esposito podcast. Welcome to another episode of the Above the Business podcast. My name is Bradley Hamner, your host. On today's episode, we have Patrick Esposito. Let me tell you, you know, if you listen to this podcast, hopefully we've been able to serve all of you in like learning and developing skills of running the business end of your business. And I think Patrick, in this conversation, and in his book, The Secrets of Success, a framework to help build your business better, can help you to do just that. Without further ado, here's my conversation with Patrick Esposito. What if you could step out of the day-to-day and see your business from a whole new perspective? Welcome to Above the Business, where we empower you to rise above the daily grind and embrace a higher way of business ownership. It's time to build your business by design. Patrick Esposito, welcome to the Above the Business podcast.

Thanks so much for having me. Really appreciate it.

I'm super pumped to have you. Enjoyed chatting with you before we hit record. So we always start with background and origin story. I love hearing kind of where people came from and their journey to where they are. And yours is just a wealth of experience. So why don't you take our listeners kind of back and bring this to present day.

Yeah. So, you know, to the point that you're making, I have, you know, taken not a straightforward path, right, to ending up in business. I initially thought that I would probably engage in public service, went through, you know, undergrad, grad school, law school, engaged in public service as a Deputy General Counsel for a governor and realized I fundamentally lacked the temperament for work inside of government. So I realized that my impatience that, you know, was a detrimental thing to public service work was actually an asset, right, in business. And so ended up with some opportunities to do some work for some government agencies, primarily in, you know, sort of management consulting activities. And out of that work ended up turning that company into a software company over time. It was actually a very early Internet of Things middleware company. And had I been smarter, I would have probably said it was an Internet of Things middleware company, but I wasn't quite that savvy. So we had intelligent sensor networking software. But the path to getting there showed me how easy it is to have a business potentially fail. And what you need to do to build success, right, in a business. And along that 10-year first startup, right, we had another startup that spun out of it, you know, both of the first two startups I did actually, we ended up leading them to acquisition by multinational leaders in the spaces we were playing. So, you know, two success stories out of the gate, ended up trying to figure out, am I a startup person or should I be in a, you know, in a public company. So after 2 startups and transitioning those technologies and teams into, you know, multinational leaders, ended up working for an organization that was a publicly traded financial services firm, gave me a chance to try to learn and explore some of what I had experienced in the small business, you know, 0 to 10 million revenue space in a much larger organization, right? That was, you know, several hundred million in market cap. Great lessons learned there, great opportunities. And what I found was I still wasn't sure if I was a small business person or, you know, a public, you know, middle market publicly traded company person. So I decided to spend time rather than starting businesses or working actively in businesses, to focus on helping small to medium-sized organizations. So businesses, government entities that were starting up nonprofits with working through their growth journey, right? So whether it was, you know, problems after startup, the need to make adjustments to get to the next level, building out management teams, started slowly doing work with businesses and found that I started to really get, you know, at least a good set of anecdotal data around what was causing success and what would cause failure. And, you know, what gave rise to the book The Structure of Success was wanting to explore whether the anecdotal data I had actually would bear out in, you know, empirical research. So conducted a survey of 100 business leaders and found great alignment between their success and failure causes and what I saw. And from working with, you know, about 100 or so businesses, you know, I realized there was a way, right, to take these 8 foundational aspects that really ultimately lead to success or failure in most for most businesses and come up with a logical way to make sure you keep those in check and, you know, try to make sure that you only focus on what you need to focus on to drive the business forward. And, you know, obviously the smaller you are, the less things you can focus on. Bigger you are, more things you can focus on. Regardless, I try to tell most folks, don't do more than 3 things at one time, right? You will flood yourself with too much too much on the to-do list and ultimately end up probably accomplishing nothing. So to your point around the pathway, the path of my journey is really the path that led to the book.

You know, you mentioned several things that I wrote down there that I kind of want to pull the threads on. I think no more important than whenever you said, I wanted to kind of figure out what it is you need to do to create success. Which helps me to be able to feel confident that there's a predictable path to the things that both create success. But I think the part that also resonated with me that I wasn't really prepared for going into this, which is good, is that you're also saying that there are some things that can predict failure too. And knowing both of those is really critical because if I can avoid the things not to do, don't do these things, don't run the thing into the ditch, but then also do more of these things that we know work. That helps to rid myself of a lot of clutter. Do the things that work, follow what the path is that other people have found to be successful instead of attempting to reinvent the wheel. I'd love to just get your, your thoughts on those two things specifically. And I've got some other follow-up questions.

Yeah. And so, you know, look, with the, you know, right now I'm involved in leading two businesses, right? One is Initiative Labs, which helps to apply, helps businesses to apply the fundamentals from the book to their own business. But in a way that it's not sort of, you know, consistent consulting. It's more of here, just make sure we understand where we're going. Check in as needed, help here, here to serve as a guide, right? Rather than, rather than an outsourced agent. The other is Acme General Corp, where we use the same, a lot of the same principles to help public sector organizations with their growth trajectories. But, you know, as I've worked in my career and in these two organizations, you know, I have found that what drives success and what causes failure, they're basically the same, right? And I wanted to start the book with a chapter on failure because, you know, one, I'm a worrier by nature. Two, no one talks about failure, right? Everybody wants to talk about success because positive thinking, right, is what we want to see. We want to be inspired. We want to think about a better future. We don't want— we tend to shy away from things that make us have dread or worry, right? So, you know, one of the great things about, you know, the editing team that I worked with from Ink Originals and Greenleaf Book Group was they said, you can't, you can't start with failure, right? They said, you absolutely cannot. We need to put a positive spin on this, which is actually how You know, working together with the editorial team, the title was produced, right? And I have to credit them with that. You know, I wanted to balance the two, right? I wanted a title that reflected the fact that what drives success is, you know, the flip side of that is what is going to cause failure. They said, look, let's keep it positive. And they said, finally, we'll let you hit failure. But like in Chapter 3, right? The remarkable part about this is more business leaders that I talk to say, you know what, I gotta tell you, my favorite chapter is the one about failure because nobody talks about it. And it's funny how, you know, you end up, I think, to your, to the point of your podcast, right, where it's elevating yourself above and beyond the day-to-day operations of your business. Only way you're going to succeed. Right. Is if you can truly bring yourself above it, look basically from the outside in to make the changes you need on the inside. You know, thinking about negative ramifications of events, of human activities, you know, that's the right way to make sure the inside is functioning well. And so one of the things that, that you gravitated towards is what I tend to gravitate toward. Which is, hey, everybody, everybody wants to be successful. Nobody wants to fail. But you want to know how to make sure you don't fail and you do succeed? Same thing, right? It's exactly the same thing. And, you know, there's a lot of folks who tend to sort of, when they're guiding a business, think, if I can just create enough revenue, this is all going to work, right? Well, you know, those who've operated a business know it's more complicated than that, right? You know, oftentimes there are variables that no matter what you do on the top line, the bottom line may get out of control or you may be focusing on growing and fail to build the infrastructure, right, to allow you to scale. And so The Structure of Success, the book and the whole premise around success and failure is really driven around keeping 8 elements of your business aligned and in tune to where your business is, right? It's having a good governance team, having a good management team, having models to look at how to make adjustments and pivots, build the infrastructure for growth, having the right foundational legal documents, right, for how to handle business disputes. Because let's face it, if you have co-founders, you may not always agree. Having the right structures to assess acquisitions, mergers, you know, exits, those types of things. And then the two things no one really likes to talk about: being prepared for disasters and succession planning. And why does nobody talk about those things? Well, those aren't the things that you think will impact your business day to day. But a lot of what will harm your business is not being ready for what you don't want to see, right? So to your point, what I love about success and failure when it comes to businesses is most of the points you need to discuss to make sure you have success are the same ones that if you don't discuss, lead to failure.

I think that on that last part, whenever you were talking about, it's, I think Chris Voss, for me personally, brought up the idea of the black swans, unknown unknowns. And in business, with the exception of something like COVID, there's not that many black swans out there. There's things that you can kind of prepare for, not prepare for everything, but you can prepare how you will respond to some of those things that happen. What you're suggesting is that there are predictable things that could happen in a business, succession planning, you pass away, your, your partner passes away, what are we going to do with that? How are we going to handle disputes in the organization? I mean, I could keep going with those. Some of those things can actually be looked at and avoided. So therefore they're not black swans, they're not unknown unknowns, correct?

Absolutely. And, you know, one of the things to your point around unknown unknowns that, you know, when I worked, you know, sort of post the first two startups and exits, I ended up in this, you know, financial services firm. Financial services firms, especially those that have bank— banking elements, tend to be heavily regulated. One of the regulatory regimes that overlays financial services firms are requirements for disaster preparedness, business continuity planning, you know, to the point that it, you know, it's very in-depth, right? Requires strong documentation. And actually, in many of these organizations, quarterly exercises where you play out the disasters and the business recovery plans so that you see if they actually might work. Well, what's unique about that is most businesses don't have a requirement for that type of activity, right? You know, we obviously want that for the banking system. But most businesses don't have a requirement for that. It changed the way that I thought, though, about how you should plan for disasters. And I'm not advocating, you know, to your point, documenting every possible disaster and doing exercises around some of the scenarios. But what I will say is critically important is thinking through what could go wrong and how you might react to it. So, you know, COVID is an example. One of the businesses that, you know, I help lead today, Acme General, one of the issues that we saw very early on when we started that business in 2018, we ended up with a very distributed workforce. Part of that was because of where our clients were and part of that was because we needed a specific set of talent and capabilities that did not lead to an aggregation in one geography. Right. So we became very good at doing remote work, remote management. You know, we would frequently though need to travel to client sites. So when the COVID pandemic happened, we were very good at working internally via, you know, via Slack, via online meetings. We were not as good at managing customers remotely. Right. So, you know, what was great though is the way we manage ourselves internally. We quickly decided we're gonna manage our customers the same way. And, and while some businesses had a difficult time moving toward a remote work and remote client management environment, we, because of some of the peculiarities of customer locations and talent management that we needed to do, we were ready. And, you know, to a point that someone said, you know, sometimes it's better to be lucky than good. We were probably more lucky than good. But, you know, while that pandemic has obviously had tragic outcomes and has been supremely disruptive to, you know, people's lives and businesses, for us, from a business operations standpoint, strangely, we were ready for it, but not because we saw it coming.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. No, that makes sense. I think that's the— you can't necessarily see around the corner, but you can be prepared for how you're going to be able to handle some of those things.

That's right.

I got a question. You mentioned, you've said this a couple of times, and I haven't heard it very much. I don't know if I've actually ever heard this terminology together, but I like it. Growth trajectory.

Right.

And so I want to ask a question. There's a maxim that I have, but I'm not going to tell you what the maxim is at first because I'm going to see what your answer is. And that is that there is a trajectory to get on, and then there is speed in which to go when you're on the right trajectory to then go.

Yep.

I'm assuming the sequence matters, that you have to get on the right trajectory first, then acceleration happens, right?

And I would agree with that position, you know, 100%. And, you know, if you're not on the right trajectory and you're trying to grow, you know, I will tell you, I've lived that, right? Where you have either the wrong product or the wrong services offering and you are making a lot of investments and trying to sell and market those but not getting traction. Right. And, you know, to your point, when I look at growth trajectory, right, part of that is about, you know, the pivots and adjustments you make to get yourself on that path. And then part of it is how do you invest in the infrastructure to support that scale? Right. So it is, it is really to your point, you know, there's some of it that's in sequence, there's some of it that is in parallel and if you are finding, right, in your business that you are making investments and you don't feel like they're generating return, you've probably got the trajectory a bit off, right? And some of that infrastructure you're laying in place to support the growth could be premature. But odds are pretty good you need to make some pivots and adjustments, or at least some version of those to get the business on the right path. And certainly in the first startup I did, we had to make multiple pivots, right? We started as a consultancy. We found a software product we wanted to make for environmental commodity management, right? 2002, you know, Kyoto Protocol could have happened globally. We thought there was going to be this environmental market that opened up that now 20 years plus later we're seeing, right? We were 20 years too early. What we had built in though was the capabilities for sort of real-time monitoring of information, right? Initially emissions information. And we, we said, okay, we guessed wrong, right? The market's not there. We've spent some money on software. It's not going to lead to a growth place. What do we do next? We go back to bootstrapping and we find that that real-time data requirement exists in you know, national defense and national security in a lot of other markets, right? And so we take some of the lessons learned, some, some, some pieces of software code that we expand and we come up with a toolset to allow developers to, at that point, create sensor-enabled applications. Well, except for the fact that in 2005, 2006, most developers didn't want a toolset. They wanted to code it themselves. But you know who did want tools were system engineers, but they didn't want to code. They wanted something that looked like a router to configure sensor data and set up intelligent event alignment based on, you know, this, now we call it Internet of Things data, right? Based upon Internet of Things data and the ability to control things. So business plan number 3, we actually end up on the right trajectory the right direction for growth. And that's really when we could start laying in a good infrastructure to scale. But, you know, that took 6 years, right, to get there. And, you know, a lot of folks will tell you that it is that 5th or 6th year for businesses if you're still around, right? If you're still around because, you know what, 50% of businesses are gone. By that point. But if you're still around, you usually start to get to the right place. And, you know, look, there's outliers, there's high flyers, there's people who make the decisions right out of the gate correctly. But for every one of those, there's those of us who have to fumble around a bit, right? And take a disciplined approach to listening to our clients that we have, clients we want to figure out where to go.

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Well, I think you, you may have just answered the, the question that I was gonna attempt to ask. I've asked this question in some type of version, maybe 2 or 3 other times over several hundred episodes. So I'm going to attempt to ask it to you because I don't know if the question is, is able to be articulated perfectly, but I'm going to do my best to attempt it. And that is this, this balance, this art of the business of— some people will say you just got to have stick-to-itiveness. You're on the right path. You're on the right path. And you think you're doing the right things. You're 3 months down the road, you don't see results, but you're doing the right activity. 6 months down the road. Now it's a year. Now it's 2 years. But if you just continue on that path, you haven't given a specific number— 6 years— you will eventually get there. Where's the balance between that? And at the same time, you are beating your head on against the wall. You're not focused on the right things. You're not doing the right things. You are working really hard, but you need to make a pivot. It's not going to work. You can stick at this for the next 6, 7, 8, 9, 10 years. It will not work. And so I'm giving kind of an extreme example, but I think in the day-to-day things that we have, and if I'm going to try to get work to get above the business, these are the decisions that I have to be able to make. And I have to be able to honestly look at it and say, you know what, this is not working. They don't want this product or they don't want the way that we're positioning it, or my culture, absolutely, it just sucks and I need to change it or whatever that may ultimately be that's actually causing the constraint of the business is kind of the back to the, the goal, the Theory of Constraints book, right? I'm sure you're familiar with. And so, like, I think that, you know, it's like, where did— where have you been able to land in your own journey, but then also in, uh, the research that you did with 100 business owners, which is certainly a lot, to begin to kind of figure out how we make these decisions in those moments?

So, you know, to your point, right? Most individuals who start a business have some theory, right, of what that business will be, right? And it may be the case that they start a business and it's consultancy and they'll do whatever work in a certain space they can bring in the door and they figure they'll find out what the business is later, or they have real clarity of mind and they have a, you know, a plan that they're going to launch and move forward with either way, right? What I will sort of offer is that trusting your team to help you, even if you're the sole owner, sole founder, but trusting your team to help you get the right signals, right? And process those signals into figuring out how to make adjustments and pivots. Is critically important. And so, you know, certainly I've lived that from a business perspective. I think when I meet founders, owners, executives, managers who tell me how hard they're working and how little progress they feel like they're making either on scaling their business or divesting the 5 hats they wear down to 3, or on revenue growth or profitability, that really to me is a signal that they really need to look right at both what's the management team composition, right? What's the product or services offering that you're making and what's the market tell you you ought to be doing? And sometimes you know, you have a nice little market, but if you want to grow your business, you're going to have to add other things on top. Right. And normally the customers who you're serving today, they have wants and needs. Right. So you just need to have those conversations to get that data. You know, to the point you're making, though, folks who 5 to 6 years on are working 80-hour weeks and haven't found the right way to really scale yet. That's the time when I say, okay, you do need that intervention, right, from outside in and say, look, let's look at the path. Let's look at what our customers and our team are telling us. And let's look at where the market opportunities may be to create a new type of offering, right? And that doesn't mean you leave the business that you have today behind. That may mean that you supplement it. And who knows, maybe that supplement actually becomes the core of your business. So to your point, that's one of the reasons why from a process perspective, right, part of the structure of success is looking at these 8 areas. The other part is having an organized, regularized process to gathering data, analyzing that data, making decisions around, you know, concepts that we might look to explore. Prioritizing those, planning for them to occur, and then implementing. And obviously, you know, it's like a funnel, right? You have a ton of market signal, you have certain ideas that you may theorize may be good to try, you have some that you prioritize and think we should give this a go. And some of those are product offerings and some are adding team members, right? Some are making investments in infrastructure. But you know, you should only plan for so many and you should only implement very few, right? Because otherwise you're not going to be successful because you're going to spend too much time focusing on change and not enough time focusing on operating.

Yeah. Yeah. Well, I have to tell you, you know, when I came first came across you in your book, I was immediately hooked on just the title. I told you that before we hit record. Like, I was like, Structure of Success. It's about business. I'm in. Like, we're having Patrick on for sure. But I think that, and by the way, the book cover is beautiful. So you did it. Your team did a really nice job.

That's all the team, very little me.

So, and then even the subtitle, A Framework to Help Build Your Business Better. I think that frameworks, I love frameworks. I love models. I love principles. I love those type of things because those make it feel business becomes more approachable, more I can get my hands around something. There's a structure, a process, a routine that I can be able to adopt so that the business is not always dependent upon me basically to do that. So, Patrick, I think this has been a great conversation. I think we barely touched on obviously all of the different 8 decision categories for success. Why don't you, before in closing, why don't you go over, maybe give us 10, 15 seconds on each one of the 8 models, so to speak, the structure that you have in the book so that we have a kind of a teaser for that. Point people where to be able to find, connect with you and the book. And then I'll ask our closing question before we wrap up.

Sounds great. So, you know, the 8 areas, right, that we found over time tend to help actually drive success and unfortunately can drive you to failure if you don't have them aligned well, are, you know, the governance team, right? And what does that mean? You think, do I need a corporate boardroom? No. I mean, the answer is you may be a governance team of one, right? If you're the sole owner and sole founder. But what we, you know, what we've seen is that having a governance model, even if it's not a proper board of directors, a team of advisors, or even your professional services firms that you work with who can give you inputs and act as a sounding board as you make decisions, incredibly important. And if you're a, you know, set of co-founders, having a third voice in the room to help you make sure that you don't end up with just groupthink or, you know, at loggerheads, also critically important. So the formality of the governance team not that critical, but having something that functions in a similar way, very important. Management team, you know, obviously you've got to have, I think, diverse viewpoints, right? Folks who don't look at the world the way you look at the world. If you're a revenue creator, a great salesperson, you need people who are thinking about compliance. If you're a compliance person, you obviously need people to help drive the revenue model and aligning the compensation so it speaks holistically. So Salespeople aren't just compensated on growth, they're compensated on growth and compliance. Compliance people aren't just compensated on, on compliance, they're compensated on revenue growth because otherwise you have two parts of the business who aren't ever going to try to work together because they're not incentivized to do so. Um, processes and strategies for things we talked about like adjustments and pivots. Again, these are things I tend to look at quarterly. Do we have the right mix of offerings? What are we hearing people need? What are we hearing they don't need and how should we change? Laying the infrastructure for growth, right? Sometimes it's people, to, to wear some of the hats, right? Take them off the executive team or to, to grow the talent pool because you've got too many people who are working too hard and you just need more of it. Sometimes it's tools, right? Or equipment. Maybe you need more software, maybe you need more office space, maybe you need less, right? Making the decisions about infrastructure investments or getting out of some of this investment is critically important. Again, looking at the ways that you lay the foundations for, you know, sort of the legal components, right? How is the business structured? You may not have made investments from day one to have robust operating agreements if it's an LLC or bylaws and shareholders agreements of corporation. If you're still going one year after existence and you have pretty flimsy things you downloaded from the internet, get a lawyer to help you make decisions around how to structure those things. M&A opportunities, exit opportunities, other types of partnership opportunities. You know, normally businesses do not go on their own without either, you know, inorganic growth happening or becoming part of another business. It's just reality. So having a way to look at those opportunities is important, but not overly obsessing on, right? Because you need to drive your organic growth while these inorganic opportunities appear. And the last piece is, right, as you said, being ready for unforeseen events, um, then also being ready for either you or key members of your team on an, you know, an emergency basis needing to have their roles filled, or longer term building the team who can help sustain the business so that if you want to partly retire or, you know, fully retire, there's still something there at the How can people find out about you, connect with you online, and find out and pick up the book? Yep. So, uh, patrickesposito.com, um, it's my author website. Also, I'm pretty easily found on LinkedIn. Uh, the book's available, you know, most of your online outlets, some of your local bookstores, and many of your airport, uh, bookstore kiosks.

Oh, that's great. Well, for me, to all of our listeners, if you really want to learn business like you want. I know there's a lot of people that listen to this podcast because we talk about business, end of business quite a bit. I think it's a great book for you to be able to pick up. So Patrick, last question for you. What do you believe getting above the business specifically? How does that relate? And, uh, uh, what is that? How does that resonate with you?

Yeah. So, so getting above the business and I love what you're doing. Uh, I really do because I think that is in many ways what the Structure of Success should hopefully give you tools to allow you to do. If you're so busy operating the business and you never come above it and look down in it and see how it's functioning or how it's not functioning, you're never going to have the right opportunity to do the analysis, to get the decisions, to then plan and implement the changes you need to align the trajectory for success.

Fantastic. Patrick, it's been a pleasure having you on. Hope to have you back on in the future.

Awesome, Bradley. Thank you so much.

As I always do, I always try to take 1, 2, or 3 kind of big ideas to share with you. My summary, or my— what do they call it online? TL;DR, too long, didn't read. Maybe it was didn't listen. If you just fast-forwarded this part of it, hopefully that you do go and pick up Patrick's book because I think it can help you in learning the business end of business. I mean, some of this stuff, you know, look, I went to school, business school, not to get my MBA, but even in MBA, I did start initially to get my MBA for a short period of time, but they don't really teach you the practical application of running a small to medium-sized business. They don't, they can talk about it in an academic way, but very, very few times does it transfer over to the real world, right? There's kind of like the academic world and then the real world. And things like how do you make adjustments and pivots? I mean, I hear about when YouTube make a pivot, I hear about when all of these companies make pivots, but what does that actually look like? What about business disputes and breakups? And a lot of times we have to kind of learn through whenever it happens to us, we have to go through it. We don't have a plan, we don't have structure, we don't have process, we don't have a routine for that. And so we have to go through the tough part of learning it ourselves, as opposed to someone like Patrick. This is the beauty of learning and reading and studying books from someone like him who's already gone through that heartache. We can, uh, through all the hours he put in preparing the book in, I don't know, 4, 5, 6 hours, read the stories of that. We can understand growth and infrastructure development, succession planning. Pivots, disaster preparation and management inside of it, maybe even acquisitions. Maybe you're considering wanting to buy another small business or mergers or other business transactions. All of these things are like, where do you kind of go from that? And I think a book like this, I'm so happy that someone like Patrick puts those things together. And so I know that's kind of a lot of things over into this one overarching theme, which is to learn the business end of business. And some of these are the things that we just don't really necessarily talk about. That's why I love being able to try to curate the guests that we have on the Above the Business podcast very specifically for all of you is to try to look at this thing called small business, which is small business, by the way, is typically $25 million or less in top line revenue, which pretty much all of our listeners are in that space. And so when we look at it from above the business, what are the things that we need to be aware of? And these are some of the things. That I know we had not talked about. So I try to curate guests like Patrick who have just a different angle, or maybe we go deeper on something. If you listen to Alex's podcast, I mean, we hit some things multiple times, and that's kind of by design because we need to hear it multiple times. It's not about just learning new things all the time. Maybe we needed to relearn it, or maybe we needed to hear it again because we're at a different place in our business. So go pick up the book, go to patrickesposito.com. Uh, you can pick up the book, The Structure of Success, I'm sure on Amazon and where other books are. So appreciate Patrick coming on the podcast. As always, big shout out to our podcast partners. And I do use partner very specifically. TodayApp Pro, Autopilot Recruiting, Coach P Consulting, and of course, Club Capital, we really want to work with some of the best in the industry, best in business. We could go out and build a team of who's going to be our podcast partners, but we don't even look at them as sponsors. We look at them as partners. And so, um, really, they are some of the best in the space in which they work in. If you really want to have an incredible UI experience for your team and have a platform that is something your team is going to use every single day where you can embed custom word tracks into it. It's going to be completely corporately approved with your corporate partner that you work with. TodayApp Pro is the absolute best compensation bonus and even word track platform that is out there for your team. Go to todayapppro.com, todayapppro.com. They can give you a free demo, you can work with someone in your team, talk to them. If you're still sitting on an Excel spreadsheet or you're using one of the other very complicated bonus structure tools out there, go to TodayAppPro, get on a call with them, get a demo with somebody on their team, and they can show, show you exactly how it can work for you, how easy it is to switch. Because I know switching cost is a big deal. There's time, there's money, there's investment, but there's really a lot of time. And headache, but switching Today app is not going to be that experience. Go to todayapppro.com. We may want to find where are you going to get some of those custom word tracks, and one of the best places to go is to work with Coach P. Go to coachpconsulting.com. Look, he's going to give you an entire free month off if you let him know you heard about him on the Above the Business podcast. I know many of you had, have sent messages to me saying that you work— some of my, a lot of my clients work with David and what he does, and he's just exceptional. And the thing about what David has and Coach P has is that your team gets to work and gets to be a part of that as well. In different programs, mine being one of them, we typically work with the founder, the owner, the entrepreneur themselves, but the team needs support. And you don't always have to be the one to wear that hat. Sure, need to be able to structure and architect the training and development program, the onboarding program for your team, but the delivery of some of those things, maybe training and coaching, or even just training, is not one of your strong suits. David can really help you with that. He can give you the, the word tracks, the things that they use on a day-to-day basis. Go to coachpconsulting.com. You can use those to be able to plug into today's episode. Well, we talk about A-players quite a bit. Obviously, we just had Alex on the previous time— previous week. We've had him on a number of times, and he and his team at Autopilot Recruiting are absolutely the best in the business to help you to be able to build a bench for your small business. Or if you have an opportunity, you're looking to expand, looking to grow, or maybe you just recently had someone to leave. One of my long-term clients, just had his number one producer surprise him about a week ago. They had just come off the best year that they had had. So excited. Boom, right back into the office. Day one, he loses his top salesperson. So it can happen at any time. Change is inevitable. We're going to lose sometimes our A-players, even if we do everything we possibly can to be able to retain those A-players. And so That's exactly where today— excuse me— and that's exactly where Autopilot Recruiting really shines. So go to autopilotrecruiting.com, autopilotrecruiting.com. And in the end, as your business is growing, you got to be able to manage the cash in the business. Go to our partners, go to Club Capital, book a no-obligation demo. Maybe this is your— you didn't know exactly what your profit is. It's the 1st of January when we're dropping this episode. You don't know what your profitability is going to be. You don't know, maybe you have some concerns about the taxes that you're going to go, oh, going into next year. It doesn't have to be that way, especially when you work with a partner like Club Capital. Go to club.capital so they can help you bring your back office to be something that actually fuels the growth in your business in 2024. For. Hey, for all of you, in a week from now, January the 23rd, we are hosting the January kickoff event. If you go to the abovethebusiness.co website and would love to be able to join us for a one-day special event, you go and pick up a ticket there. Would love to have you. We're going to help you to connect the work you did in December in creating your annual plan to January. We're going to help you to create, build, create and bottle up some momentum so you can actually— this is the year that you finally start to hit those big objectives, those big targets or goals that you have for 2024. I'd love to work with you personally on doing that on January the 23rd, Tuesday, January the 23rd. Love to see you there. All right, everyone, till next episode, lead well. [MUSIC] [MUSIC]