How to Scale Your Team

As I said, all of our mentors have built successful companies, but I want them to talk about what they did in building their own companies and, of course, working with our Pinnacle clients, and just to share some insight on how they did it. You know, like Tammy having 1400 employees, and Stuart building several successful companies. And also Melissa Franchising to 40 locations in five different countries. And some of you are going, I'm just trying to get to, you know, employee 5 or 10 or 15 or something like that. Right. All right, so this question is for Melissa and Tammy, for the ladies. How did you know you wanted to scale your business?

Thank you, Ellison. Well, it started with a dream, and we were in a dying industry in the dental supply business. And we said, hey, if we can sell cotton rolls and X rays, we can sell Greek salad and breadsticks. Seriously. That's how it was like the decision to go into the restaurant business. But once we did, then we knew we were entering into a segment that was untapped and that was quick, casual, family. And first thing we had to do was proof of concept. Okay. So you really have to start proving yourself. You have to have the numbers. You have to have the training. You have to be able to have consistency. So when we got to four restaurants, we said, okay, we think we have it now. We've tried four different areas. But then the family had to make a decision. What do we do now? Do we grow and keep it? Does anybody want to be, like, traveling all the time? What do we really want to do here? Or do we want to take on an investment partner, like a vc? Or do we just want to sell it all? And we all looked at each other, and we're like, sell it all. This is a tough business. Right. We're getting out. So then we had a vision. Build so many restaurants really fast and then sell it all. So that's how we came up with the scale strategy.

Yeah. And you knew exactly, like you said, how many you wanted to scale to and what you wanted to sell for and all of that.

All of that. Yes.

Yeah.

And so every decision we made was, does it get us to the 25 restaurants as fast as we want to get there? So it was really easy to make a decision. Go this way, go that way. It doesn't get us to 25 fast enough.

Right.

So really intentional. How about you, Melissa?

My scale strategy was definitely not intentional. I was an entrepreneur, and we had started this business not knowing really how it was going to work out. We were really excited about it, and we had tremendous Success out of the starting gate. And we loved, loved what we were doing.

Tell people, because some people weren't here yesterday. What did they do?

Okay, so we ran children's gyms. And these were gyms for kids, believe it or not, ages 3 months to about 10 years old. And we just, we loved what we did. My partner was a teacher. I was sort of the business head behind it. And we just started having this tremendous success. And we would wake up every day. We couldn't wait to go to work. All we talked about was business. We worked six days a week, sometimes seven days a week. And we loved it. We were on five. And fast forward to like three, four years later. We were tired. We were burned out. And I was thinking, there's just no way I can continue to do this. I'm missing, like, my life. And we didn't even have children at that point, but it was still just exhaustion and burnout. So that's when we said, okay. I said, we've got to figure this out. We've got to duplicate ourselves. And our clients would say, there's no way you could ever, ever duplicate yourself. And I was like, you know what? I don't think that's true. I think we can do it. And we were very successful at duplicating ourselves. We literally took out every tiny nuance of what we did in our customers experience. And we taught it to our employees and eventually taught it to our franchisees to the point where even in China with a different language, they were doing exactly what we were doing, exactly. With their body language, with their tone of voice, everything. So it's definitely doable and it worked.

Yeah, I love that. Isn't that such a cool story? And didn't you have like, a princess from Saudi Arabia?

Yeah, that was our very first franchise. We had no idea what we were doing. We were like, sure, we'll sell it to you. We had no idea that boys and girls could not even be in the gym at the same time. Yeah. So we had to adopt a whole new, like, brochure and everything to the culture. We really didn't know what we were doing. But it was a great petri dish for sure. Yes. Yeah.

That's so cool. So, Stuart, what were the biggest challenges in. In building teams and how did you work through that?

Hi, everybody. Well, the first largest challenge I had with building teams was with my first company. And we were sighted in the urban enterprise zone of North Philadelphia, and we put ads in the paper and we had salaries and everything ready to go. And nobody Showed up. Nobody even called. It was a fatal flaw in our business plan, this Wharton MBA business plan. And so we had a company already to go, and we couldn't hire anybody. It was really weird. And so what we had to do is we had to use trust circles. We then recruited all of our friends and all the community leaders to put out the word that we needed employees, and we needed people who we could trust. This was a place where I carried a gun for a year. So it was not a friendly place. And we ended up creating a team of employees that ended up being like family, and it was really something special. The second thing is a shared vision, and you got to get people going in all the same direction. And that's really hard because everybody communicates differently. Everybody has different values. And so what I learned was that you have to become very good at storytelling. You have to have a story for each employee and for all your employees. And you have to do it regularly, all the time. A leader's job is telling stories and leading people through stories. And one of the things about stories is that a story speaks a thousand words. It's like a picture. So you can teach a lot and lead people through stories. And the third thing is understanding the difference between management and leadership. And the way I see it is that management is the management of complexity, and leadership is the management of change, and they're completely different. Management is about reproducing results and lowering risk. It actually dehumanizes people. You'd like to have everybody. Automatic leadership, however, is taking people through their own personal transformation as the organization grows. And most entrepreneurs don't know this, and they kind of mingle leadership and management, and they mess it up, particularly when they get big enough. So the complexity forces them to separate management and leadership, and they don't know when that point comes. So I think it's a really important point that everybody think about that, because when you try and institutionalize people's behavior, they get upset with you, and they feel like, oh, now I'm a number. I was part of the family, and now I'm a number. Non accountability. So you can run into really big problems, and you can lose your leadership passion of telling stories because you're down in the weeds of the numbers, and that can really wreak havoc on your team. And you got to keep your team's momentum and focus in the direction of your vision.

That's awesome. Wow. That was a great answer.

Yeah.

I mean, those questions, that's where you really look at yourself and say, am I managing or am I leading? We're going to talk about leadership this afternoon. Tammy, what did you love most about building teams?

What I love the most? Well, my philosophy was always, grow the people, grow the business. If your people aren't growing, your business isn't growing.

So.

So one of the things I loved is we created this career map to success. And when you came into the company, you could choose your path. If you came in as a dishwasher, you could figure out how to be a gm. And I have people who are living proof. You know, within 18 years, this guy Gerardo ended up being a general manager because he just followed that career map. I go from here to busboy to there to there. So what I loved is when you find people and you can tap into their creativity and their passion, you have to understand that, and then you have to give them the freedom to develop it. A lot of people say, oh, yeah, I give them the freedom. No, you're holding the reins. And when they develop a process for you or a system and they can put their stamp, like, I did this, and then we train other people, and it absolutely lights them up. Another example is Tim Corcoran. He came and he was this detailed guy, right? And he was only 19, and we developed him into designing all our kitchens and all our processes in the kitchen. And today he works for Jack in the box. He's like, fifth from the top. It's just amazing.

Yeah. Isn't that inspiring when you do have people? I know it's hard when people move on, but I always feel like, gosh, if now I know they're taking. They're going to this whole other level, I really feel good about that. I mean, I know it's tough when we're losing people, but would you have wanted someone to hold you back when you were going after your dreams? So that's. You should feel really good about all the people, Tammy, you've inspired over the years.

Absolutely.

Yeah.

So, Stuart, what have been some of your favorite client breakthroughs in team building? What's one that stands out for you even in Pinnacle?

Well, I think the biggest breakthrough that I enjoy with the clients is when they get to that moment of transformation when they pass through a paradigm. You'll hear us all talking about working in your business versus on your business. And most people who are working in their business look at working on your business and say, what's that like? You know, what's it like to, like, not have to be in here every day and controlling everything every day. And so I'll Refer to one of our clients because it's really satisfying for us as mentors to go through that. I'll refer to one of our clients, and that's Marshall Doyle. And Marshall is one of the most detail oriented people. Hi, Marshall. One of the most detail oriented people you'll ever meet. He's got an equipment certification company right down to very fine details. And when he started with Pinnacle, he was in the weeds. And now Marshall doesn't have an office in his company and he doesn't come in to work. And so he has experienced that full transformation of going from working in your business to working on your business. And that's a whole paradigm shift. And we're about paradigm shifts. I have a belief system that perspective precedes perception. And your perspective, your point of view filters your perception of everything. And if you can get out of a disabling perspective, and we've talked about it in this event and into an enabling perspective, one that allows you to get out of that past limiting belief and it really clouds all your judgment, then you have a new view of the world entirely and everything looks different. So if you hear us talking about, well, you might want to look at it a different way. You should listen because we're trying to get you to look at it a different way. And your world will change.

That means no. Yeah, buts that doesn't work for me. Well, you know, is this working for you now?

No.

That's awesome, Stuart. Thank you, Melissa. How did you. So you had a younger transient group as your employees. How many of you have. You know, you've got like young adults, teenagers even, as employees that are in school. Right. Do any of you have challenges with that? Getting them to be motivated or take it seriously or, oh, showing up. Anyone have that?

Yeah.

So I know you did. How did you keep them motivated and passionate?

Yep, that's a great question. And I'll be totally honest with you. I mean, I knew as a business owner that they were a transient group. So sometimes we'd have like a good two year run and we'd have the same group with us. And I knew that, oh, my goodness, I know it's going to come to an end. So for one thing, I was always in hiring mode. I really was always hiring. But the second thing is what I did. What was so important? Well, there were three things that were really important. One was culture. The second one was development. And the other one was empowerment. And so for culture, like we would. Even in the ads that we would play place, we made it really Clear what kind of culture we had so that we would attract that same kind of employee. And so what did they want? They wanted to come to a place for work that was flexible with their schedules because a lot of them were in school and or that was fun to work at. So we made it fun. But we were also in the business of entertainment. And like I said in my introduction, what was the key to our success? And the secret sauce was the customer's experience. So we needed young people that were not shy and timid. You know, when we first started out, we were hiring for teachers or people that were studying, teaching, and we realized that was not the right fit employee for us. We needed employees that were camp counselors or ones that wanted to be actors. So we really had to look for that skill set that we needed. And then we would train them on what the program was, but we needed that enthusiasm. So we would come in every morning, whatever the shift was, and each employee every day got to pick the song that they wanted. We'd blast it on the stereo, and they would just be able to get ready for the morning shift with really loud music. And I knew that that made everybody super excited. So we did cultural things like that. But what was so important is that we knew that they could entertain and they wouldn't be intimidated by, you know, these other, these older people looking at them, that they were there just for the kids, to entertain them. We also did a lot of fun things. We took one day off every year to go skiing. We were in Southern California and you just have to drive up to the mountains and we would take a whole day off and everybody looked forward to that. We also had parties all the time. We celebrated birthdays in a gigantic way. So we didn't have to spend that much money either. So that was really, that was how we kept them involved and engaged in their jobs. The other thing was the development, which was we taught them. We really taught them because our customer experience was so important. We taught them how to talk to people they learned that look at. In order to build rapport, what you're going to need to do is you're going to need to understand and know each child's name of their dogs, their cats, their guinea pigs, where their grandparents live, like everything that's important in their lives. We would say, you need to know all these things about these children so that when they spoke to the parents, they could say, oh, how's your dog doing? I heard that it was in the vet from your 4 year old told me that you know, or whatever so that the parents could really understand that we saw their children. So we taught them how to basically network and not be so shy and intimidated by older people. We also would. Every now and then we'd get a book. Like three or four times a year we'd get a book and we'd say, okay, everybody needs to read this book. And then we're going to actually have a meeting and we're going to talk about the book. And what ended up happening was, even though it was a transient group of people, people I knew that when they left our organization, they were better human beings, more prepared for the next chapter in their life. And that, to me, was so satisfying. I mean, we had literally hundreds of people come through our organization over 20 years, and we were hiring for all of our other corporate stores that were in the area. So, like, hundreds. And I think maybe we fired maybe five people out of all that. You know, it was just. We ended up getting it pretty, pretty down pat. The other thing was the empowerment part, which, again, was a way to develop them. We would empower them to actually. We'd say, you've got this. You know, you've got the keys. You know, your job is to open up the gym in the morning and to greet the kids. And they'd be really freaked out and really scared. And I'd go, you know, you totally have this. I'm available if you need me, but I know you have this. And they would always, always rise to the occasion. So it was empowering them.

Yeah, I love that. And I know you've told me that when you would interview them, you would watch them. And you said if they were focused on filling out the application and they weren't enthralled in watching the kids.

Yep.

Then you weren't. You wouldn't hide.

I knew that they were all ready. They didn't pass the first test. So they would come in as a group. I was always hiring. Like, seriously, I probably interviewed at least five times a month. And then I would keep applications in case I needed somebody. Or sometimes I would just hire a couple of people with the feeling like somebody might be leaving, even though I didn't know that they were leaving. Do you know what I mean? Just to have a backup all the time. Because if I didn't have a backup, then it was me working, and I didn't want to do that. So we would have a group interview, and they'd all come in and they'd watch a class, and I would tell them this in the screening call so you're going to come in, you're going to watch a class. They'd come in, some of them would be in, like, real business y clothes. It cracked me up all the time. You know, they were like 18 in these business clothes. And I'd hand them an application. I'd say, okay, after the class, we'll meet and we'll talk about, you know, we'll start the interview. And they would sit there and for those people that would just sit with their head down writing out the application, I knew that they were not even interested. The ones that never filled out the application and were just like laughing and smiling and enjoying watching this class. I knew they had a chance. It was great. You know, the other thing that we would do is we'd ask them to imitate their favorite animal noise. And so they had to be comfortable being like an improv. We'd do all kinds of things like that, like improv things. And sometimes they'd be like, this isn't for me. No, they. They'd leave right away. I was like, good.

Yeah, that was good.

They out themselves.

It's not going to be a cow today. Well, this is. Did it get you all thinking? All these things apply to you and your business because we're all leading teams in one way or another. It doesn't matter what business model. So let's give them a hand.