Why I Tell My Staff I'm Just Trying to Get Rich

If you're a founder that has to ask your team to work harder or to think about profitability, and part of you is worried that they think you're just a greedy asshole trying to get rich, then this video is for you. I want to talk about a weird thing that I do with my team to try to fix this perception, what I learned after I actually asked my employees about how it landed with them, and how their feedback is going to help me, hopefully help you too, build trust faster with your team. If you don't know who I am, my name's Luke Murray. I'm a former physician. I've been an entrepreneur for about 20 years. In that time, I've done around $100 million in revenue. My current portfolio does about $3 million a year in revenue, and I make these videos because I would like ambition without the bullshit, and I'm guessing you would too. So I do this thing sometimes when I'm talking to my company about our goals, and we might be talking about customer retention, customer satisfaction, or efficiency, and In the middle of that, after saying the normal stuff like, we want to do good work because we're here to serve our customers, I'll sometimes throw in something like, and obviously I'm just trying to get rich and buy a fleet of Lamborghinis because that's all I care about, which is funny to me. It's funny because I know that I actually do care about my staff and the quality of services we provide. So when I say I'm just trying to get rich and buy Lamborghinis, it's such a one-sided cartoonish perspective that I personally just get a giggle out of it. But then I started wondering whether anyone else got the joke. And I also wanted to know, like, am I telling it for some reason other than, like, Luke thinks this is hilarious? When you're an owner, there's this incentive dynamic that everyone can feel, even if nobody says it out loud. And I'm a big proponent of saying the quiet part out loud. So— Anyway, employees want to get paid more, and they don't want to be worked to death. Management wants more productivity and lower costs. The owner wants the company to just work, because if it works, then he gets rich. And that doesn't make anyone evil. It just means the incentives aren't perfectly aligned. Actually, they're completely at odds if you take each person's pure incentives to their extremes. The polished way to manage this tension is to say something diplomatic like, we need to be a profitable company, While also doing good work. And that sentence is literally true, but it can also just sound like bullshit, like a way to hide behind your real intentions. Like when a company says, we're a family. It's like, no, dude, we're not. Your family is a family. This is a company. Hopefully it's a good company, a team trying to accomplish a meaningful mission, and people care about each other, but it's still a company, which means it's trying to provide products or services and make a product so I can continue to provide products and services. So I actually asked a few employees what they thought when I said stuff like, you know, my Lamborghini joke. And the answers were not as clean as my little theory. One employee has, she's worked for me for like a couple years, said that when she first heard me say stuff like that, she believed me. Like she was like, oh yeah, I thought it was funny. But then I also just thought, oh, okay, I guess this guy just cares about making money. Another person who's only been with me for like 6 months said at first she thought I was an asshole and now she's just like, no, I just don't think you're an asshole. That's all she gave me. My assistant who's been with me for like 5 years was like, yeah, you didn't used to say that. And now when you do say stuff like that, I just see it as you being silly because I have helped her professionally, personally, financially in a lot of ways that weren't maximizing to my income. And then I asked my CEO and he had basically no reaction. Like it didn't hit his radar at all. So here I was saying the same words to different people and they responded differently. Surprise. What I told myself I was doing was creating, creating trust. And for some people I was, they believed me more because, you know, they got the joke. But what I was also doing was trying to control people's perception of me. I was basically saying, let me accuse myself. In the most exaggerated way possible so you can't accuse me of that later. And they did accuse me of it just because they believed me. But there's also something insecure in that way of being, because the deeper truth was when I talk about profit, I worry you'll think that I'm greedy and you'll stop trusting me and you'll leave. And that's super vulnerable and not a good look. Hard for me to admit even to myself. But it's true. I mean, actually, this has already happened. I had a friend once, after we had made money in a company that he'd helped me build, call me a greedy cunt and say, yeah. Needless to say, that was the end of our friendship. And that stuck with me. It confirmed a fear, honestly, that I had all along, which was that when you become wealthy or just wealthier than the people around you, that people are going to get jealous. And so I was trying, I guess, am still trying to control that perception with how I give money away and how I tell these self-deprecating jokes. I think part of me started trying to get ahead of that accusation before, again, anyone else could say it. But then I had this experience where I was at this billionaire's house playing pickleball in his backyard, and it was the most opulent residence I have ever heard of. And I realized I'm not jealous of this guy. And if I was jealous, it would be my problem. It's not his responsibility to manage my feelings about his money. And if he'd walked around saying like, hey guys, don't worry, I know this looks crazy, but I'm just trying to buy friendship, like, I would have probably thought like, that might be what's going on here, and that is kind of funny, I guess, but this guy is insecure about being rich. Which is exactly what I'm doing when I try to manage how people feel about me. Being the owner of their company by making the types of comments I was making. So originally I thought my strategy of say the worst thing first so they can't accuse me was gonna work. And depending on the person, it did, but that ended up being a way too simple way to look at this because again, surprise, surprise, people are not all the same. So now what I've learned from this process is notice the accusation you're afraid of. Like, in this case, I was worried that people wouldn't like me if I— if they thought I cared about making money. And then check whether you're naming that accusation because it makes the conversation cleaner or because you're trying to just control how people see you. Sometimes the joke's just funny, and sometimes the joke is me hiding behind the sentence that I'm afraid to say, like, I'm worried that you guys won't work for me anymore if this company actually starts working. So yes, I may still make the Lamborghini joke, but I'm also going to slow down when I make it. Am I naming this incentive conflict so we can talk more honestly, or am I trying to make sure nobody thinks I'm the villain here? Because those are not the same thing. So what about you? What accusation do you think you're trying to outrun as a founder? And What self-deprecating joke do you make from a place of trying to get people to like you more or to trust you more or to not be upset with you? I'd love to know what it is because apparently mine involves a fleet of Lamborghinis that I don't even want. Thanks for watching.