099: Kevin Lawrence - Leaders Put On Their Oxygen Mask First

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Hello and welcome again to the Scaling Up Business podcast. I'm your host and business growth coach Bill Gallagher. On the show with me today is a senior super international rockstar coach, Kevin Lawrence. And Kevin's got a book out now all about putting your own oxygen mask on first and he's going to talk to us about we've had Kevin on before, very popular show about taking care of yourself as the CEO and I thought with the book out it'd be great to have him back on and go a little deeper on the topic. We'll recap some of it for those of you who didn't listen to the prior episode, but just welcome back to the show, Kevin.

Thanks, Bill. Looking forward to it today.

Yeah. So Kevin is up in Vancouver where I was recently up in Whistler and just a beautiful, beautiful city and I'm so glad to have you on the road today. We run into each other at coach summits and places like that over the years and so not often in the same town or passing each other. So Kevin, talk to us about to give folks remind people about your background. How did you come into the world of coaching? Where did you come from here? How did you get to this place?

Yeah, and it's interesting, I look back and that was a Long time ago, Bill. I've been doing this over 20 years now, probably 22 years. And the reality, I was in the media business in the advertising industry and I was working with companies to build their businesses through advertising, which was a lot of fun, I enjoyed it. But at some point it struck me silly that they'd spent all this money and time and energy advertising to bring in new customers and then they didn't take very good care of them. Now that worked for our business model because they kept buying more advertising. So although it worked for us, it seemed silly. So I started doing marketing consulting going back years ago. The thing I found is we'd come up with great strategies to improve the business internally. And I'd check in with the CEO in three months or six months and nothing happened. And I heard of this thing called coaching where you actually work with people on an ongoing basis to follow through and get the results. And so I started studying coaching. This is in the mid-90s and it's expanded along the way to where I've, I'm a constant student, nonstop learning. And I obviously started with smaller businesses and worked with larger and larger companies and got to the point where most industries you can imagine I've worked in, and India, Middle East, Australia, us, Canada, and it's been a riot. I absolutely love it. The book comes out of being involved with all these high performing CEOs and executives over the years and seeing how it either slowly destroys them being part of a growth company or it forces them to get stronger, hence the book.

Well, that's an interesting thing, right? So it either destroys you or we go to the gym. We work out hard enough to get some training value, but not so hard that we rip a muscle or break an arm or that kind of thing. And then we recover and rest and come back again. Right. And then we've gotten stronger in the process. And if you do that right, you get stronger. I, I think you're pointing to same with our leadership and our companies.

It is Bill, that's a great way to put it, is that you have to push yourself enough to stay sharp. But unfortunately in the world of business, because you can get so consumed by it. And as a CEO or a leader in a growth company, it will suck everything out of you if you're not careful. And a lot of the work actually feels good. You get a sense of winning and accomplishment and for many people it can be very addictive, the success and achievement. So you need some tools and mechanisms to essentially protect yourself from yourself when you're involved in these companies because they're so exciting.

So the book title is actually your oxygen Mask first, is that right?

That's correct, Yep. And it's 17 habits that subtitle 17 habits to help high achievers survive and thrive in leadership and life.

So why don't you tell us some of the things that you've seen people do, the mistakes you've seen people make, and then the good corrective actions. Give us a few of the things that informed that went into this book.

Yeah. Well, let me give an example of what things are like recently. Every week or two weeks, I end up having a conversation with a CEO or a senior leader. And it goes something like this. Hey, Kevin, you got a few minutes to talk? And I say, sure. And I go. And after about 15 minutes, we'll get closer to the root because it's a little bit of an awkward conversation, but it'll basically be, they feel they're losing their mind. Like the brain is not functioning right, or they have lost their belief that they can actually do this, or there is such a big meltdown, they're overwhelmed and they don't know what to do. Now, these are wildly successful leaders and CEOs. These aren't your garden variety small business people. These are people that you would read about in magazines. These are people that would be winning the Entrepreneur of the Year awards and getting all the accolades in their markets, but on a regular basis. Because I'm very transparent about what it's really like to be a leader in a growth firm, and therefore they're comfortable talking to me. So the root of it is for all of them, there's some early signals that they're pushing it too hard, or there's a couple of big events, almost like a couple of headshots, right? They've been punched in the head twice in a row and they start to get dizzy, metaphorically, if they're boxing. But they don't know what to do, so they just keep on pushing. And then it gets worse to the point where they just start to freak out. And, you know, and a CEO, 10 days ago, a CEO gave me the very specific example of being on an airplane. They're about to take off and they start having panic attacks. Like literally panic attack, like where you start to panic. And they're like, get me off this tube. And they were using every mental technique they'd learned to try to calm themselves down so they didn't freak out and didn't make them have to turn the plane around. Because of them, it Was. It was pretty serious in that case.

Yeah.

So, yeah, it's. I mean, I tell you, Bill, I see crazy, crazy things that nobody talks about because it's. It doesn't make you look, you know, tough and strong and resilient, but it's truthful. And. And the root of it is there's early indicators, and then they don't. They don't respond. They just push through because, hey, it worked last time. There's also things where they just. If we go back and retrace their steps, in almost every case, they have stopped doing the things they do or they did in the past to stay strong, or the things they're doing weren't strong enough for the size of game that they're playing today. That's fascinating.

Well, I noticed that I've had two or three calls like that in the last week alone where somebody lost their mojo. And I think the ones that I worry about are the ones where they're not even calling, which hopefully your book and the thing, and instead they're acting out in some fashion. They're drinking heavily or they're doing whatever. Right.

It's true, though. And I will tell you, Bill, since I have published the book, the number of calls that come to me has tripled, and many of them with people that I already know. So it's new people who've heard about through the book, but even my existing network and people that I communicate with because they know I understand this stuff. And you're right, people do end up acting out. I mean, there's symptoms. Addictions start to kick in more severely when you start to get messed up, all those things that are byproducts of stress. And what I found, the most important thing is if you talk about it and if you get help, all that stuff is fixable. It's just mathematics. It's levels of stress exceeding your capability. And if you have 100% stress capability and you're at 110 for too long, you have two choices. Increase the amount of stress you can handle to 110 or 120, or do things to bring the stress down. But pushing through just that 10% overage starts to create a meltdown over time. So in the book, we talk about things that will both bring your experience of the stress down and increase the amount of it you can handle at the same time. Because you know, when you grow from a $20 million business to a $250 million business, there is more stress, no matter how you look at it. And you need more of the right tools and systems to be able to handle it. And that's what many of the 17 habits are about.

I definitely noticed that it takes something like every time you level up, right, you truly level up and you manage to figure out how to stay there. You develop new skills, tools, resources, and you develop new capacities that you didn't have before you leveled up. But the initial thing is completely stressful and overwhelming at each stage until you truly level up. And before then, you're operating at the lower level now in a higher level environment, just trying to tread water to stay alive. And sometimes you have to go back down because you just can't deal.

Yeah. And. And the sad part is some people don't stay. They hold out, trying to be persistent, and then it just slams them into the ground like an airplane shot out of the sky. Yeah, right. Big burnout, big crash, or a big failure. You know, whether it's an owner or an executive, the other one is where they back it back down and then don't go on to achieve what they could. And the reality is need better tools. So I'll give you a simple example. Today I was at the racetrack today, and I'm out of the track and I'm in the first session I'm doing it was like a practice day. And in the first session I'm doing something was not right with the front tires of the car. It didn't feel right. And I started thinking about it, and then I started getting into my head and then I couldn't stop thinking about it. So I know the tool. So I got off the track, checked everything out, Everything was fine. Then I know for the next session. What I realized is the first time I didn't do the mental preparation I know I need to do to be on my game. So the next time around, I go back to my basic tools, take a few minutes, clear my mind, do a little visualization, then I'm good to go. But I tried to play a big game without my preparation, and thankfully I was smart enough to pull myself off because otherwise I would have messed something up. And it's the same in business. If you want to play the bigger game, you just need better tools. And most people can learn them. It's just they don't usually get told about them or there's a lot of bad advice out there.

So you drive regularly, right?

Yeah, lots.

And what do you drive or what are you racing?

This one is a street car. It's called a Porsche GT3 RS, which is Porsche street legal race car. Basically.

Mm.

But I'm gonna get a full blown race car for the track. It's a brand new track that's just been only going for two, maybe a year and a half. So, yeah, it's a ride. And it's, it's, you know, for me, it's also a community of entrepreneurs. It's a members only track. So it's almost all. Almost all entrepreneurs or, you know, a few professionals like myself. Mm. So it's not only a great community and, you know, we're always helping each other out with things, but obviously, if you like motorsports, playing with cars is a riot.

Well, earlier this week, I was with a group of CEOs and entrepreneurs and we got a chance to drive a whole range of cars. And one of the car, not by far the. The most potent car of the day that I drove, but definitely a lot of fun, was the Cayman gts.

Yep.

Which is super fun. We were not on track, although there might have been a speed limit or two broken. But I also got to Dr. A McLaren, a Ferrari California. We drove Lamborghini. We drove just a whole bunch of. We drove even a Viper. What else do we drive?

They're all fun.

Super.

The Cayman gt. You know what? And if you like that stuff, it's a ride. If you don't, you'll think we're crazy.

Right.

But the Cayman GTS is a spectacular car.

Oh, it's a pretty fun car.

It is. It's very well balanced. Easy to drive. Yeah. You know, the reality is, no matter which car you're driving, if you enjoy it, everyone's got a big goofy smile on their face. No matter what the car is or how much power it has, if you enjoy it, you enjoy it. And I'm one of those people that does. It's a riot.

Well, we also got the chance to drive the new Acura nsx, which was a lot of fun and not an everyday supercar with interesting talents, but able to sort of bridge that. Like you could drive that every day, think through with the Cayman GTS without being like the, The. That particular Lamborghini was not, not as tame, not as easy to shift and all that as some of the others, but. But super fun. Well, so back to. So some of the ideas. Right. The principles are the same as we apply in that. And we're, we're taking on more and more competitive world. Give us a few more examples of some of the cars that you. The car. You can talk about the CEO.

We can talk about cars all day.

Yeah. We could like I've still got those drives on my brain, I'm sure.

So examples of the CEOs that.

Yeah, well, the situations that you're dealing with. And give us some more of the 17 right from the book.

Yeah.

So I'll give you another example of a CEO. Another CEO that went through a sale process, and they had a few things happen. They're in the process of selling their business for a incredible amount of money. They had a shoulder injury, so they couldn't sleep properly, and then they had a new baby within a short period of time altogether. Exactly. So basically, they had exceeded the rule of, you know, two punches to the head and you're out. You know, in mental health, they talk about two major life events and you're at risk for a mental health issue, which, again, a part of the book is about mental health. But the root of it is to avoid those issues because it's constant and never ending and happens all the time because of the strain we put ourselves under. I mean, we're similar to people going to the moon or climbing Everest or whatever. It happens to be what we put ourselves through. So this is a guy who was a very, very capable CEO. Highly admire him. One of the smartest people I've ever worked with. And we got to the end of the deal, and he's finalizing the contract and working with the private equity guys to get the deal done. But his brain went to mush, and people's brain going to mush. And basically getting stupid is incredibly common because when the going gets tough, the tough get going and they just push harder and harder until they almost blow up. So as it goes, he's in the final stages of the negotiation with the private equity firm on the east coast, and we end up having a conversation. He couldn't think straight, so we got on the phone to brainstorm some of the things to close the deal and some fine points. And look, he's a way better negotiator than I am. He is smarter than I am. No two ways about it. But I had 100% of my brain, and he probably had 60 of his, literally. So as a result, we got on the phone, we were brainstorming how to handle some objections to close the deal, and I'm like, hey, man, want me to type you up some notes? Oh, yeah, that'd be great. So, you know, I'm typing up the notes and kind of, you know what to say and how to say it. And again, I am less capable than him, but I had 100% of a less capable brain and helping him to be able to clarify so he can go and do what he had to do just because the gray matter was not functioning like it would. Yeah. And, you know, and I've seen others where people just bonk and can't handle it. So one that wasn't about mental health. And this is one of the chapters is called stop being chief problem solver. You know, this amazing A plus executive that I work with in another country, he is the type of guy that if you could hire him for, you know, a million or $2 million a year, you should hire him now. I won't tell you where he is because my client isn't going to let him go. He is spectacular, but going back five years, he was such a rock star that he was almost like Superman. He performed like Superman. He was always saving the day and making things happen. It was absolutely spectacular. But he couldn't build a team to save his life. So it was all about him. He was solving everyone's problems. He became so burdened by his team that he got bogged down. So he had to learn how to basically build his own team of superheroes, which is about getting the right people and forcing them to think for themselves and not swooping in to save the day. So that's a bit of both. Both chapter 12, which is stopping chief problem solver and then make yourself useless, which is chapter 10.

I think that make yourself useless is a critical one. You still form some function for the company, if nothing else, just sort of the heart and soul, the heritage a lot of times. But making yourself useless is not only useful for selling the business, but also for its maturing if you don't pull back. I've seen this in, actually, some of my larger clients. We're talking about companies with hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue, and they're like, I'm the superstar. And they work all kinds of crazy hours and they go nuts. And they may or may not drink or do things like that to deal with the stress, but they don't realize that that behavior is keeping the team small. If you don't step back, your leaders never develop anything.

Yeah. Not only does it keep the team small, it makes you hate your business.

Yeah.

Like, I've had so many. Yeah, I've had so many CEOs who end up telling me that they call me because they think they want to sell their business. And I start digging into it, and they say, well, I'm working, you know, 60 hours a week, and I have to do everything and Blah, blah, blah, we start digging into it. Well, it's because they're involved in every darn process. And so making yourself useless is critical to grow. Because if the business needs you for everything, you have no extra bandwidth to focus on strategic projects and your team is so dependent on you, you're going to get exhausted. And that ain't fun. And in most companies I go into, it's the, I mean, actually the truth is, Bill, if the company is in a reasonable market, but it doesn't grow, it's the CEO's fault. No two ways about it, it's their fault. So it's their own growth. And usually they're doing too much. So you rip your people off from the opportunity to grow. Or it's because you kept throwing people who actually can't do the job and you're loyal to people who can't perform.

But this is a thing that I think many of our CEO clients struggle with. Hearing from us is like, okay, you're the problem. And that's good news and bad news. Right? It's bad news that the problem's with you because you'd like it to be with everybody else. It's good news because you, you can work on you more easily than you can work on someone else.

Yeah. If you're committed. And again, you know, entrepreneurs and CEOs, you know, they're usually very smart or street smart. So they know how to make these things happen if they know what to do.

Right?

And I've said to people like, you know, probably same for you and me, Bill, like, scaling a business is so easy if you have a smart CEO who's hard working and willing to make tough decisions. And by smart and hardworking, there's a willingness to learn there. But it's not hard as long as they're not addicted to something major or heavily medicated. In those two cases, I mean, it may have addictive personalities, but if they're really hooked on prescription meds or other things, it's tough because their brain locks up. But it's not hard to do. You just have to continually make better decisions and strengthen your team. And this making yourself useless, I'm sure you do it. But it's one of the prime strategies I work with on every company I go into. And most of the time they're either the CEOs stunting the growth of their team or they've got executives that just can't handle the job. The job has outgrown the executives and those are tough decisions. But of course, as you make them the business gets better.

Well, I think it's true at every stage. Right. My last CEO role in 2010, one of the best things that I ever did in any business was remove myself from all the regular operations. And the way that I did it was by scheduling a month long vacation. In some countries, taking a month long vacation is nothing, it's normal.

But in the US it's a big deal.

It's a big deal. Right. So in our world, taking a month long really involved disengaging and that meant standing my team up. So teaching them to think from and find the parameters and putting in all the routines of the rock habits that we use in the scaling up framework. So doing all of that kind of work and then learning to let go, like being willing to let people make a mistake without letting them crash and burn, having them be being sort of there, spotting them, if you will, until they could make a mistake, learn from mistake and evolve to the point where when I was on my, we went to Italy and we went sailing and did all kinds of stuff with the family and I could get my daily and my weekly reports and I could see the team was on track and that I didn't need to worry about anything.

Yeah. And that's the ideal. And what you use there is an event created or became a catalyst for you to improve some things so it could run without you.

It for some people.

Right, it does, it does. Which forces the growth.

Right.

And that's what we need. And you know, and when people hire us as coaches, you know, all we are is a catalyst to force growth. Because really what they're saying is they're putting their hand up saying, okay, I'm ready to learn some new things so I can be more successful. Or I'm ready to learn some new things so I can have less stress, or I'm ready to learn new things so I can grow beyond this point and, and enjoy it more. Which because it's all learnable. That's the unfortunate part. Bills. A lot of people don't get the help they could. And it's not just us, there's other sources, but they don't get the help and then they get stuck or they just hate their business. And to me that's kind of unfortunate. Business should be fun and rewarding and obviously hard work. But the root of it is, the best part for me as an advisor and for the CEOs and leaders is is it forces you to grow and stretch yourself to do things you just didn't even know was Possible. That's why it's a ride. That's why I love this. To me, it's a riot.

Yeah, well, there's definitely something in that, in growing and expanding, and then, you know, there'll be some new challenge to take on at the next stage of that. But that there is magic in that. And I mean, if you're the founder of the company, but even if you bought into it or were hired into it as the CEO, there's a certain level of working in the business that you're already doing, and we want to shift that to where you're working on the business and working on yourself at the same time, learning to stand your team up, to develop the culture, to bake in all the key pieces of the strategy and to create those practices while you manage yourself and learn to look out for the marks in. In your team. A coach. You pointed out, I think brilliantly, that you have a client who's smarter than you, and you probably have a lot of clients, as I think a lot of us do, who are smarter than us, if not in every way, in certain very specific domains. But we can still see things that they can't because we're the coach and we're not swimming in their water. It's not that we're smarter, it's just we're not living in their skin. And so we'll see things. And I think the same thing's true then to a lesser extent, for the CEO, to their direct reports. As you look out on your team, you may recognize that somebody's gone off, that somebody's had it out. And if you can start to spot that, not only do you want to develop that for yourself, but also for your core team, you'll have team members that will start to lose it, who aren't taking care of themselves.

Yeah, 100%. And once you have awareness of it and understand it, then you can one fix it within yourself. Then as a leader, you become capable of helping others with lots of things. And that's why, even with the book, I broke it down into 17 habits, 17 specific things that you can look at, do the exercises or worksheets around, get clarity, and then improve. And one of the executives I'm working with, the whole leadership team, is going through the book chapter by chapter. And some of the chapters, the habits are completely irrelevant for people today, but for each of them, they're finding the two or three that will dramatically improve their performance, and those are the ones they focus on. And as a group, week by week, they go through it, which gives them a common language which as leaders we need language or tools to help our people grow. So it could be something as simple as personality assessments like Disc or Myers Briggs as a tool to help you understand better or you know, I've got a tool in the book for tackling tough conversations. It's a simple four step model to go and deal with the worst conversations you have to have. And contrary to popular belief and Contrary to Hollywood, CEOs are not these aggressive Wall street type personalities that we've seen who will say anything to anyone at any time. Most of these CEOs are super respectful people that people admire and will follow. And dealing with conflict is not their number one thing. And they need like the rest of us humans need tools to do better at those kinds of things. So it's all basics, Bill, as we know. And one of the things that Jim Collins said in a session we were in, he said it's success is about relentless, relentless execution of the boring basics within your hedgehog, which is the simple model for your business. It's not rocket science. Innovation is easy, creativity easy. Most innovation not all, but generally the ideas and ideation is easy. But the relentless execution and being a more successful leader CEO, it takes relentless execution of basic, basic things. One of the other things, things in the book is this thing called resilience rituals. What are your personal resilience rituals that keep you sharp for your body, your mind and your spirit. And if you neglect any of those, man, you're in trouble. You got a debt that's going to be building and building. It's like a psychological debt and it's going to call one day when you're not ready to pay it. Now you're in pain. I get excited about this stuff because it's all basic stuff. It's not rocket science. And when things go wrong, it's almost always the basics.

So we won't have time to go through everything. But why don't you rattle off some of the 17 for us now so that people can get a sense of it and then we can go deeper as they digest the book or go to your site.

Yeah. Cool. And by the way, Bill, if people want to, like, for each of the principles on my site there is a video for each one to describe it. Yeah, because you know, there's an overview of the book and a video for each principle because it's easier way to consume it. But you know, so I'll run through them quick. So number one, and we're going to.

Give people the link to all of this right afterwards.

Yeah, perfect. So number one is live an amazing life, which means it's a combination of head success and heart success. A lot of achievement in business is pure ego, which is okay, but it's all head success. And truth be told, whether your net worth is 5 million, 50 million or 500 million, there is no difference in your quality of life. But somehow your ego feels that if it chases more, life will be better. But that's a con. What makes you feel better is feeling better. So that's the heart success. So it's balancing ego achievement and the intrinsic feeling wonderful with what you're doing. Number two is forget work life balance. That is a silly concept. And if you try, you will always feel like a failure. Instead, we focus on work, self, life, passion. Basically, if you had a hundred passion units in a week to spend 100 units of your best energy, you know, how do you make sure you have enough in each of the areas? And you might be a 70, 15, 15 person, 70% might go to your business, 15 to yourself, which is your own resilience and happiness, and 15 to your life. Or you might be 50, 25, 25. But where people go wrong is they don't have enough passion units for themselves and their life. And then it just implodes.

Right, so it's energy into different areas.

Yes, times are relevant. It's not about time. It's a certain amount of your best energy. Your best three, double your resilience, which is figure out your resilience rituals so you're twice as strong as you are today, mentally, physically, and spirit, or spiritually, whichever that is for you. Invest in your sweet spots, which is basically do what you love and you enjoy getting better at and very quickly get yourself out of the junk that drives you nuts.

So consistent with like strengths, things like that.

Yep, very. And you know what? I will tell you, it's one of the big things that gets CEOs in trouble. You know, I had a CEO I talked to the other day and he. They have a lot of loose lawsuits in their industry and they just drive him crazy and they, they drain him. I'm like, okay, well, why are you dealing with your lawsuits? He's like, well, I have to. I said, says who? And he's like, well, you know, that's important. Yeah. And anyways, long story short, we found someone else who loves dealing with lawsuits and they will do it better and won't drain him.

All right, now I love the next one. Number five.

Lick your toads.

Lick your toads, not your toes.

Correct. Toadas, lick the big frogs. Yeah. You know, it's a keynote that I did back in early 2000s. It was 2000s.

Yeah.

Maybe late 90s. Which is about dealing with the yucky, ugly things you don't want to deal with and how it burdens you and weighs you down. It's incredible. So it's basically eliminating all the little things that you procrastinate and finding ways that you don't end up carrying a burden of 150 incomplete items in your head, which is about the number most people have. 6. Deal with your emotional junk. As companies scale, it's not brains that usually hold people back, it's emotional issues.

You know, I don't think there's any surprise. 5 and 6, because they're highly regulated in my mind. I'll do like an inventory of incomplete things with people and. And in there often buried some. Some significant emotional baggage.

Correct? They are. And a lot of these overlap, Bill. But that's. That's very true. And by the way, I have had CEOs or leaders, both, that just cleaning up their toads has improved their performance and decreased their stress incredibly. It's. They have an outsized impact on us. It's surprising. Deal with emotional junk as you're talking about. I mean, everyone, if you want to continue to scale, everyone's got 30, 40, 50 hours of deep, deep coaching or therapy that's needed. It's part of the game, Ladies and gentlemen, you can't play the big game unless you do, because basically will happen is you keep getting in your own way or too much of you shows up in the room and your emotional triggers make you stupid and you do stupid things and limit yourself. So some people don't, but 90% of people have some serious work to do.

All right, that flows right in the next one.

Exactly. Manage your mental health. I got introduced to a model called the mental health continuum, which has you understand where you stand in terms of your mental health at any given time, and it breaks it down into green, yellow, orange, and red zones. And you can self assess. And if you're yellow, you should be getting some help. If you're red, you need serious professional help because you're in deep doo doo. But once you're aware of it, you can help yourself. The other thing is it helps you understand when sometimes your key people, you think they've gone crazy or they've just gone toxic. Sometimes they're actually good people who are just mentally ill and need some help to get Healthy again. It's actually, it's quite, it's eye opening. Let me tell you. I was very ignorant to this in the past because I would misinterpret people's signals as, you know, being bad people versus people in bad places.

Yeah.

Eight is no secret to any of us. Learn like your life depends on it. I mean, you know, it's.

Keep learning. Yeah.

Just keep learning. Lots. Yep, yep. 9. Get tough feedback. You know, the problem with being the CEO is everyone treats you like you're brilliant.

You're not.

You're human still. And people are afraid of their jobs. That's why they don't tell you the truth. So whether it's a coach like us who will tell you the truth, things like 360s and finding people who are very good at laying it out for you and making sure they know you appreciate it, it's super important. Otherwise you grow weaker, make yourself useless. Number 10 we talked about.

Yeah.

Build a team so strong that there's very little you need to do.

Right.

Don't be the smartest one in the room.

No. I mean, you're not anyways. Well, in some cases you are. But if you're the smartest person in the room, you probably haven't hired properly. Right. You're in the wrong room.

Yeah.

Quadruple your iq. One of my favorites. And I learned this from some of my most successful clients. And it's to have a fleet of advisors in all areas of work and life. And they're. But they all have to be what I call 14x advisors. They've done what you're up to 14 times before, so you're not. You should be nobody's guinea pig. And if your normal lawyer costs you 300 bucks an hour, but the employment lawyer is 900, you got an employment issue, you use the employment lawyer. You know. Yeah.

This is the thing. This year I've been going out and studying, and you and I'll eventually get together, but studying under coaches who have done it longer, deeper, bigger, different than.

I've done in any realm. Right.

And so what are you doing as.

CEO, entrepreneur, CRO, whatever your job is. Right.

Where are you learning?

From somebody who's playing a whole other game.

Yeah. So one of the things that's interesting is in a lot of the executives that I work with, the challenge is, is to get a 14x mentor. And literally. Sorry, it's a 14x. Like they've done it 14 times or they're where you want to be in three to five years. They're already there, right? So if you're an executive or a CEO and you don't have a mentor who's already living the reality you're trying to build, you're ripping yourself off. There's lots of people who will gladly help you. You just gotta go ask. Totally 12. Stop being chief problem solver. And the outcome is to have your people answer their own questions 90% of the time. And again, it's emotional issues that keeps us always answering people's questions. Sometimes it's naivety, but it makes you feel good to answer questions.

Sometimes just habit. Look, breaking people the habit of just solving problems because that's what you are in the early stages of a company. But if you find yourself now and you're 100, 200 million in and hundreds of employees and you're still being the problem solver, you really got to take a long hard look in the mirror.

Well, yeah, because one, you'll get exhausted and in two, your people aren't growing. As we talked about before, people are smarter than we think. And when you force them to pre think and to come with recommendations, people can impress you. And then you give them feedback and help them get better. It's yeah, why have smart people if you're going to use your brain instead of theirs, right? Teach people to meet your standards. You know, look, a lot of us are very, very picky and hard to please. I know I am. And the good news is people do want to please us. But all too often CEOs don't teach people to give them exactly what they want and they either tolerate it or it slows down the machine. So it's about making requests and framing up front. Here is how to work with me. I've got something in my world for everyone who works with me. It's called the 247 rule. If we talk about something on our Monday call and it's a task, my expectation is it's by default completed in 24 hours. If it's a little project that it's done in seven days. Now if it's a big rock or something else, that's different. But anything that we talk about and discuss, it's 24, 7. And if you can't work 24 7, you can't work with me because that's the way I roll. Tackle tough conversations is chapter 14. We talked about that already. Which is quickly. I've got a 48 hour rule where you should always cool off first and then a four step model to write out your approach to the conversation. Have a guaranteed way to not explode the issue and approach it in a way where it is shockingly easy to get a tough communication through to someone else. 15. Love the lessons. This is psychology here, Bill. But it's basically, you are going to get punished again and again and throw in big problems and big headaches, and you can either love them or have them kill you.

Embrace.

Yep. And I talk about the shift from woe to wow. You can say, woe is me and why is this happening? And it's not fair. And lala, you know, and in that mindset, you're stuck and you feel bad. Or you can get on your knees and look up in the sky and go, okay, wow. Thank you for the gift of this amazing test. I have no idea why this is any good for me, but I know something good will come and you can appreciate it, and then that gets you into action too. So you can appreciate the pain and go do something about it. But when you're in that woe state, you just whine and spin in circles. It's very, very important. That's why it's funny you ask some of my clients, but sometimes it drives them crazy. But when they get into big, big problems, big by nature, I just start laughing and say, that's awesome. We're gonna learn something amazing here. And obviously you needed to have this kick in the rear end for some reason. So let's figure it out and then let's make sure you get smarter as a result. 16 is keep going for it. And it's modeled after my grandmother, Betty Howitt, who at 81 went back to university because she wanted to learn more. Most leaders are trying to be successful on a skill set that worked a decade ago, the mediocre ones. So keep going for it is to continually stretch yourself. And it's about really continuing to stay fresh and not getting stale and using tools or techniques or habits that worked a decade ago. So if you want to be. Continue to be successful in your 50s and 60s and 70s, you have to keep pushing yourself. But most people start to atrophy in their 30s and they don't. Or they're not willing to put themselves in situations where they feel like an amateur. You know, like now I'm thinking about maybe getting my pilots or my helicopter license. I don't think I have time just yet, but it's a big mental challenge to stretch myself.

Yeah.

And I don't. I just don't. I don't want. I don't want my mind or my soul to atrophy and unfortunately it happens to way too many people.

Number 17.

And the root of all this, you know, the whole model of the book is work, self and life. And the idea of plan, plan, plan again is like in something like a methodology, like scaling up. You know, you have quarterly plans for the company. You see how you did and you reset them. And with this you have a plan for yourself. I call the master plan. And it's got a plan for your work, yourself and your life. And every quarter you evaluate how you did. And there's a two page worksheet. One is the self evaluation and then the second page is the reset for the next quarter. So just keep recalibrating in those three categories so you just get better and better.

So there's so much more.

We could talk about each one of.

Them, but you got tips, tools, rules, processes for each of these areas.

The book is put your own oxygen mask, your oxygen mask first. We'll put the link in it, but it's lawrenceandco.com we'll put the link right in the show notes for you.

I want to thank you so much.

For being on the show with us today, Kevin.

Yeah, Bill, it's a lot of fun. I just love, I mean, obviously we love talking about these principles because we're passionate about them and we see them work. But yeah, it's wonderful to share and, you know, for people to know as well. There's also an audio version of the book if you'd rather listen. And it's a workbook to actually do the exercises in and write because a lot of people don't like to write in real books and they're both available on Amazon or the workbook is actually free for download on the website too.

And the link that we'll put right.

In there has little clips on each of these. So if you want a little bit.

Of deeper one on each one, there's a video on each of the 17. You may find yourself resonating or needing one more than the other at any point.

So thanks again to Kevin. I want to thank you and remind our listeners that if you'd like shows.

And tips like this, posts and tools.

And things for your business, you'll find us@scalingupbusiness.com thanks again for listening. We'll talk to you next time.

All right.

I want to give special thanks as always to our original growth guru, Verne Harnish. Our show producer is nigh obeyed. Audio production is by by Podfly Productions and audio editing by Albert Burge. Our show notes are compiled by Ein Codena with proofreading by Tim McGowan. If you got some value out of this show, please share it with somebody else and let us know the parts that you loved. Thanks again for listening and Keep Scaling Up. Are you ready to turn your goals into daily wins? You should check out our Scoreboard software powered by Align, it's the official software for scaling up. With Scoreboard, you'll get an AI driven coach for priorities and KPIs and it'll help keep your team focused on what matters most. With Align, you can track your goals in real time and you'll even see results on the go. With their mobile app. You can rest easy knowing that Align has world class onboarding and support to set your team up for success. This is really more than just software, it's what I actually use to manage growth in our scaling up client teams. Unlock clarity and results with Scoreboard by Aligned. To try it now, go to aligntoday.com Bill G One more time aligntoday.com Bill G that's aligntoday.com Bill G Check it out and try it now.