262: Scaling Up Insights — Coach Panel with Max Kozlovsky and Daniel Marcos

Well, hello, hello. Welcome to Gann. We're talking today about talent development, about being comfortable with yourself and being vulnerable. The power of that, how to do that. We're talking about delusion, self delusion. We'll be talking about some of the things we're hearing, the latest in work from home and the hybrid of work from home plus regular old work in the office. We'll talk about meeting in the middle and we'll hit on the source of all our suffering. All that and more. Coming up with Max Kozlovsky and Daniel Marcos.

Again, everyone.

I'm Bill Gallagher, scaling coach, host of the show. This show is all about how to scale and grow your business no matter what's happening in the world, the economy, your industry, etc. We're interested in the things that transcend all of that. You can find hundreds and hundreds of episodes now on leadership and scaling up@scalingcoach.com We've also got the downloads of all the tools that we talked about our show. Notes from the comments of the speakers, their tools, their special offers, all that and more. We'll even send you a free copy of the book Scaling up right there@scalingcoach.com you just pay the shipping and handling. So scalingcoach.com is where to get it all. Listen in now to a great conversation with Daniel Marcos, Max Kozlovsky as we get into the latest in the world of scaling up, the things we're seeing in the world. Welcome, guys.

Hey, Bill. Thank you for the invitation.

So two guys in Texas.

Oh, yeah. And it's raining big time in Texas. I don't know if Max is. It's new, but here it's like the sky.

We have an amazingly beautiful. I'm just going to gloat about what, what an amazing day it is here. The sun is shining like beautiful, perfect temperature. Yesterday I was out with one of our business groups, actually three business groups. We did a sailing race between three EO chapters on the San Francisco Bay. And we took out all these boats and we had a bunch of skippers helping out and we had a picnic lunch on one of the islands and then we did a race on the San Francisco waterfront, which if you've never done before, is extremely intense, exhilarating wind for most people who are not used to sailing in that kind of way. Super, super fun. People are like, do you have three.

EO chapters in San Francisco or in the Bay area?

We do now. We've had for years the San Francisco chapter, of which I joined 21 years ago. Roughly. And then we have a Silicon Valley chapter, a close relative. Now we've added a new chapter for the East Bay area because we're large geographic area with a lot of business. And I'm actually the incoming president for that chapter. So right now beginning my term next month. So very excited about the year ahead. We've got tons of members and of course we're starting to do lots of things in person again. And we did a few modified things last year. But this year is like boom. So May on the Bay was our sailing event yesterday. Super fun, super great. I should get out there doing some surfing myself this weekend. So it's not bad.

You do the machine, the one with a motor. Right.

So I do like three kinds. I like the foil, which is a hydrofoil, rides up out of the water on a foil into the water. And I have one with a wing. I can take it and surf, just, you know, standing in surf. And I also have another one with a motor on it for the no surf, no wind days, you know, when we just want to go. And in fact, I might take that one out either this morning or tomorrow morning when there's no wind and there's high tide and like that. So.

So any. Anything that moves. Right. You're also an airplane pilot, if I remember.

Yes. But enough about me. What do you think about me? So you guys are in the rain. We actually could use some rain here. It's. We're headed for a dry thing, which is kind of terr because I think we could have some bad fires and smoke again before the summer's out.

So not in Texas today since it's been raining consistently.

So I think it has to do with some of these changing climate patterns. Right. Because it's. It's been unusually wet where we're happy, but unusually wet.

But that's what happens. It just is changing all the patterns that we have. I was in Toronto, I live in Toronto still. And the winter was really crazy winter. Like it was. It was hot until like end of January and then it got desperately cold, like big, big time bad cold and then up again. That was it. Yes, but it was really three weeks. That was very uncomfortable.

It seems up and down. We had, we had our sailing event yesterday. Christina Harbridge, who is one of our friends and speakers and that kind of thing came down to the event. She now lives in Lake Tahoe area. She said it was snowing as she left her house.

She's one of my favorite persons in the world.

So we're kicking off today's conversation with news Marc Benioff says they may buy a ranch to try to create like a next Crotonville Salesforce CEO Mark Benioff talking about creating a physical place to gather people together, to develop people. I mean this race raises a couple of issues around just the investment in talent development and coming together and also the value of like having a physical place, getting out of the office, not just in your training room, but getting to another location to change the focus, the attention. One of the firms that is big on scaling up, a private equity firm, K1, uses a place that they don't own, Terranea Resort. I like to find regular resorts or places. We've done a number of sessions at the resort. At Squaw Creek, one of the Tahoe resorts, we've got favorite kind of recurring places in Hawaii, along the coast here in the Bay Area. Do you guys do stuff like that? How do your teams work with getting off site and doing regular training beyond just their planning days, that kind of thing?

So I still do a lot of planning sessions in Mexico, Mexico City. I have a lot of clients there and there's a town called Valle de Bravo close to Mexico and I do a lot of planning sessions there. There's a lot of hotels, golf course, a really big lake and a lot of the wealthy people from Mexico have houses in Bahi. So we usually go to two or three houses and then we rent a place in a hotel and do a lot of that. But I love the idea of getting out every quarter. We and by the way, I tell them the farther we can go from the office the better. So even like a two hour driving, it just changes the mentality. People are completely disconnected and not allowed to think. So I love when Benioff said this thing of the ranch. Just as an example, at the Growth Institute we don't have a physical office anymore. We used to have offices in Austin and Mexico City. Now we don't have an office, but we want to have a place where we could go and meet once a week or something just to have meetings and spaces. If we could have a ranch or a property that we could drive for half hour, an hour outside of the city and be able to meet there once a week or once every couple of weeks, that'll be perfect just for cultural things, but then the rest be home and work from home.

So I think you want to do a few things, right? You want to control the environment, eliminate distractions and give a treat, right? For the people attending, make it special, make it something enjoyable because Getting to be part of our retreat, getting to be part of a planning session is a positive sign for your career, for the work that you do. So I think that rewarding, eliminating distractions, and then just the time of being together is what's most powerful. If you can do it in a beautiful place, even better.

So we just did one. We've done a number like in backyards over the last year. Some CEOs backyard that we would use as a gathering place. We did one in a Airbnb location, a large, good location with a big living room. And we just did one though at a Napa resort and we're starting to do these. I like indoor, outdoor. I like getting to a place that's a little bit away and either a larger like rental property or a resort kind of thing where everybody can have their own room. But I think it makes a huge difference in if you just get out.

And kind of disconnect from the day to day. The thing is really important.

We also did another event recently with a group at Beloved Farm near the Bay Area. It's a farm that was created as a, as a retreat center for a restaurant group here. And it was kind of their built in thing and it's this really interesting sustainable, organic farm and really cool. We did a group there and they have a lot of great meeting space I'd like to create. I might have to build it if I can't find somebody else who's got one. A kind of an indoor outdoor space. A lot of windows, a lot of ability to open, get fresh air when the weather's right, but have like a dedicated place where people, people could come in the Bay Area. We don't have that yet. If you've got a place like that, tell me. I'm looking for a place.

Well, I agree. Having a dedicated place like that will make a lot of sense.

Yeah, so we, what we did is we, we bought a house and used that for a lot of our trainings. So it has a large training area, conference room, and then as you said, kind of the backyard. So you know when you're feeling a little droggy, you can just get people up and go outside and have conversation standing up. There's a shaded area, so that's helpful. But mostly for people that are. Well, it's very convenient for people that are local. They can just drive up. It's only a few minutes away. Yeah, so.

And you have that in San Antonio, Max. What part of the city?

It's five minutes away from the airport, so you know that in San Antonio everything is close by. So yeah, it's, it's, it's convenient.

I have a couple that is moving San Antonio and they're now house hunting and they said there's no houses.

Good luck with that. The only place worse right now, I think is Austin.

Yeah.

By the way, I was having breakfast earlier and they told me something about that. I put the map in silo and said house for sale.

Yes.

So where we were, the typical silo, there was no match of any house for sale. Like any price before you have 100 houses every time you open silo for sale, there was zero houses for sale.

A friend of mine put a bid for a house that was 10% above asking price and he didn't get it in San Antonio. In Austin.

In Austin, yeah. Yeah.

So, so where we are, homes are going for substantially more. Like the house on the corner just sold for half a million. Over asking. Over asking, yeah. As it's heated up in this area, right. And we thought years, 25 years ago when we bought our house, paying a little over asking, people said we were crazy. But today paying a couple percent over is nothing. It's these ones that go, you know, a million over half a million. You're like, okay, that's a wake up call. How do you even do that?

So one of my team members just recently moved to Philly, the suburbs of Philly. He did 12 offers in 12 houses until he got one.

Until he got one.

He got, he went above asking and 15% he got it. And while he was drafting the contract, they came back and said, oh, you pay us 25,000 or we don't sign the contract. But you agreed, don't care. And he was really mad. And I said, I get it, you're going to be mad for 15 minutes. But if you're going to use the house for 10 years, it went up.

So how long will this last?

Not much, I'm sure.

Well, this has been a trend for 25 years. Where we live the going for over asking.

California.

It'S a, it's a lovely neighborhood.

And right in the U.S. like in California, in Texas, you've never seen people bidding over asking price. In Texas, it's just been.

Well, we have had a lot of Californians wanting to move to Austin who they've moved. They see it as being a decent place to live, kind of interesting place and not maybe as hostile to their politics as some of the other parts of Texas. We've had a lot of that kind of go on and the taxes are a little nicer there. But for us, California and one or.

Two other values and mindset differences.

Yeah. You know, I think about there are two things that we did to get our house years ago that were more subtle than the brute force of just raising our bid. One of them is we bid $1,000 more. So it was something one rather than an even number. Just because if somebody else guessed and came in at the same exact number, we wanted to just be one off that. So we took it one up over the rounded the even number. And then the other thing we did is we found a reasonable, credible excuse to have a direct contact with the seller. We actually bought it from a trust, a family trust, but there was a primary resident who was the controlling party. And we came up with a legitimate, valid reason to want to talk to him about the history of the house and some of the details face to face. And that had him like us. Right. And our whole focus going through this. Yeah, we want to learn these things, but we really want him to want us to have the house to favor us.

It's interesting because even in the retail environment, which I would have not expected, we're starting to see some resistance in pricing. So one of my clients is trying to buy a building and we matched the offer and they were second guessing it. Come to realize it, the owner had a dream of what they wanted built there. So we had to go full marketing and turn on our vision, our messaging and convey what our vision for that space was going to be and how it was going to have a positive impact in the community and how it was services that were well needed. And the jury's still out. We don't know we're going to get it or not, but we definitely thought that we needed to go. As you, as you were alluding to Bill selling the vision even when.

When their hearts, which is actually a good segue. Our next topic. Elon Musk hosted SNL recently and it's funny. I often watch the SNL program. Saturday Night Live. If you're listening. Out of the United States is a weekly comedy sketch comedy program. It's been on for many decades and Elon Musk was the host. You may have seen clips or heard about it. I thought he was awkward as all hell, not a great performer, like that kind of thing. But he was so great about owning up to that saying, like, you know, hey, guess what? I have Asperger's. Hey, guess what, I'm a weirdo. Like, what did you expect? I'm like trying to create a Multi planetary species. Send people to Mars on a rocket. I'm transforming automotive, you know, internal combustion. Be normal.

Yeah.

You could not expect him to be normal after what he thinks and the way he does things.

Right.

It was weirdly awkward, the presentation.

Yes.

So is anybody that achieves that level of success normal? Is Jeff Bezos normal? Bill Gates normal, by the way?

Bill Gates. We're learning way more about that.

Yeah. We're learning more and more Bill Gates every day that maybe he didn't ever want to get learned, you know, I wonder if there isn't some power. I think there's a special power in sort of being able to own your weirdness. Right? To lean into, to name it, to call it out. If somebody's being weird and then pretending like they're not weird, it's obvious to everyone and you feel it. I think it gets in the way. And yet we all try to polish off the rough spots and do all that to be more mainstream or more normal or that kind of thing. It doesn't always work.

It's interesting. Remodeled my house recently. Was working with an architect, and there was going to be a beam standing out, right? Like a beam. That wasn't part of the deal, wasn't part of the plan. So he gave us a couple of options of what we could do. But one of the things was, if you can't really put it away nicely, then make it stand out. Right? Like, paint it red, make it a feature, make it be part of the deal instead of doing a crappy job of trying to conceal it, which kind of goes along with that. Right. So art and business, we see it combining all the time, Right. It's human psychology at the end of the day.

Well, Pat Lancini reminds us that vulnerability builds trust, right? Being willing to be vulnerable, to have the courage to say something, acknowledge something. Dave Rendell also talks to us about leaning into your weirdness and turning that into a superpower.

I love that you said, get your biggest weakness and convert it to a train. And I really believe that's the best way. Like Elon Musk, right. He's super good in some things, but he's super awkward and he laughs about it.

He says dumb things that irritate people and that.

By the way. But I do believe we're getting to an excess that he tweets and he moves Bitcoin 40%.

Oh, my God.

Yeah, it's. It's crazy that you get to get that power. I have a friend that is in the board of X Price with Pierre. The Manis. Every time we have an express, a board meeting, the first 20 minutes is just commenting what Elon Musk just did, and then we get into the meeting. But every time we meet, there's all these tweets and things that he did, and we all have to comment about them, and then we start the board meeting.

Yeah, well, he is clearly disruptive. Right. I think there's something useful to name here. So, like, I know, and you guys probably know certain things about you. And when I'm coaching, when I'm speaking, when I'm working with people, I know that I am verbally dominant, that I just fill the silence too much. I know that I tend to cut people off. I start speaking, I hear something, and I lean in. They're not even done talking, and I'm not even very conscious about it when I do it. I know that. I'm sure I've done it here already. I know that my verbalization, my persuasion occurs as manipulation, and I don't like those things. I wish I didn't do them, but I know where they come from, that kind of thing. So mostly I just say, oh, I'm sorry I cut you off. I do that all the time. I'm sure that I'm going to do it again. I cannot promise that I'll never do it again. I'll try not to, but for sure it's going to happen again. And simply like saying that, like, I have this problem. I do. This thing is so used. People are like, wow, like you just owned that, you know? And I think when coaching people, I try to get them to own their random weird shit.

So I like that, that approach because it. It desire, it disarms the meaning that your actions could have to them. Right?

Yeah.

So, for example, if you cut someone off, they might feel it's disrespectful, so they might get angry and disengage, versus you're letting them know that it's not them, it's you. So you're taking all the meaning and all the energy out of that possibly negative situation. So I think it's a wonderful strategy to recognize it and also the empathy that it creates. Right. Look, I'm not perfect, you're not perfect. Let's be honest with each other because that's how we can help you best and that's how we can make this work.

So before I start coaching company, I tried to interview the CEO and a couple other team members, and I said, the more I know of all the weird things happening, the more I'M going to be able to help. And at the beginning, they were like, no, I'm afraid or hope that that doesn't come out. And I was like, it's going to come out. One of the things that I like about scaling up, as an example, we make everything float, the good and the bad, and a lot of things stink. The earlier that I'm able to identify them, the better. So, Max, what you're saying is true. If we could have that conversation at the beginning, make things way easier after.

You know, I think we're afraid of hearing those things and we're embarrassed by them. As a coach, you probably want to help people to access them. Like, you know, if I got caught being persuasive and got called out as being manipulative or whatever, I would be embarrassed and I would apologize and it'd be awkward. And then it create this whole thing. And when I learned to. But by virtue of having a coach to say, oh, yeah, it's just kind of how I am sometimes. It's not personal. That changed, you know, everything.

So I think that a lot of, you know, being comfortable with your weirdness comes with a level of maturity that comes from feeling that, you know, you're not going to die broken alone if, even if you're not perfect, right? So I believe that humans are under evolved species and we still act on some of our basic instincts, right? Survival. So we don't want to lose love because that means we're going to lose support, and that means we're going to die broken, alone. And I think that we try to conceal these weaknesses as to not lose that love, that bond, that community. And I, you know, we've. I think we've, we've all heard this idea that some people would rather be right than happy. And, and the thought in, you know, is it doesn't matter who's right.

It.

It's about getting it right, right. And it doesn't matter who got it wrong or failed. It's about what we learn from that. But being able to, to. To overcome that anxiety of, you know, losing. Losing the love, which means all of these other things happen, is, Is a critical point. And that's why making it a safe environment. And you know, what was. But what Daniel says with what Bill says, I think it's so powerful because you're really saying, you know, we're not perfect, but together we can figure this out.

Well, Elon's business namesake, Nikola Tesla, definitely died broken alone. It can happen, right? If you don't have a coach if you'd like a coach to help you kind of get in touch with your whatever it is or help your whole team to level up this thing and work better together and to recognize themselves and all that, our coaches, all three of us are coaches, but we have nearly 200 coaches now around the world. So there's a coach in your neighborhood or with your style or with the background or whatever you want. But in the world of scaling coaches focused on business growth who use the scaling up framework, we've got nearly 200. If you'd like to find a coach in your area, course you can get in touch with all of us. We'll put our links up before the end of the show and in the show notes here, but you can just drop us an email infocalingcoach.com and we'll say, oh, here's one in Miami that you could work with or here's somebody who specializes in this area or that kind of thing. So we're happy to help you find it. Most of us stay pretty busy all the time, but finding an opening for one company with one of the coaches is definitely possible. So if you don't have somebody, if you haven't worked with some, you owe it to yourself to at least experience a little bit of having a coach. Nobody gets great without a coach at some point. Next up is Adam Grant's TED Talk. Think again. So there's a link, we'll put the link in the show notes as well to a TED Talk that I watched recently with Adam Grant, which I think is just brilliant about the booby trap of being too smart, of thinking that you're not biased of thinking your way through things and get, getting so bogged down in just being too like, too, too cerebral, too in your head about things. Right. With your own perspective.

And, and that's, it's similar to Liz Wiseman, rookie smarts. If you come thinking that you're a rookie, you're going to be open to ask questions and learn and get better. If you think you're the most intelligent person in the room, you're done. There's nothing else you can do.

So there's, there's, there's this idea that just blows my mind. And we are, we are terrible at self evaluation, right? We're just terrible at self evaluation of our, of our skills. Whether, you know, whether you're a speaker, you might think you're worse than you really are or better than you really are or, or a writer or a tennis player or whatever that might be. So to Me, it is critical that you get professional eyes on you to give you a real and unbiased feedback of where you really stand so then you can really improve. Right. So if you surround yourselves with a bunch of people that are just the equivalent of yes and yeah, you're doing great. You're awesome. Well done. How. How are you going to figure out what you really need to work on?

Yeah.

If you're hanging out with a bunch of your, your high school friends and they are all like, you're sock, you're terrible. It's not going to work. That doesn't do it either.

Right. What high school did you go to?

So. Exactly. You need someone you can trust that knows whatever you want to get better at and can really provide you some real feedback because again, it's just amazing how bad we are at self assessment.

So Adam, in the video there talks about how going around in our own head with our own thinking, we're not biased and trying to think our way out of the box. One of the things that we do again and again is staying the course on bad decisions. So we've invested something. It's not working. We keep investing, we keep noodling on it. And there's a difference between knowing when to adjust and when to quit and when not to quit. And sometimes we think, just don't quit and something good will happen. But if you don't quit, you keep doing the same things that aren't working. That's just crazy. Right. But something that every last one of us does again and again.

So the idea of sunk cost bias. Right. And some of the values and beliefs that we've inherited from our parents and grandparents.

Right.

Winners never give up. Right. You see things all the way through. So we buy into this mindset versus at any given time, looking at the situation and making an assessment of what's the best move right now, regardless of what has happened before.

Yeah. So I mean, you're getting or at least adjusting your approach.

I believe whenever you believe there's just one option, you're wrong. That's for me what it allow you to see more than one option. And it's happening politically. This is the only party that has the truth. No, all political parties are destroyed. And they do some things good. Do something bad. You have to align to the one that gives more of the right answers, according to you. But they have, and they all have good people and they have bad people. It's the same. So for me, that's what that gave me.

More options. Yeah, more options.

If you Think that there's just one option or you are the only option. You're done.

So that's a great actually opening to talk about two things. You've got a course with on the Growth Institute, don't you Daniel? With Kaihan Krippendorf on strategy Out Thinker competition.

Brilliant.

Yeah. So Out Thinker really talks about getting additional courses of action. The other one is our workshops. If you do one of our public workshops versus a private coaching session, you will hear from other companies and the things that they're doing and very often the approach is taken by other people in other industries can give insight and fresh ideas to things that you might try in your industries. If you come into one of our workshops with an open mind, you will get a great, great deal of benefit from that. We have a two day deep dive masterclass workshop coming up July 1920. If you'd like to do it. We will offer a variety of like pricing levels. So individual team and then absolutely free if you want to be in the workshop for you can observe only in a private Facebook group and we'll have that 7-19-20 and then of course there's a fee if you do it live and interactive. In our Zoom session we also include some private coaching with that workshop. You could do all of that just send us an email to get into that thing if you're interested. Infocalingcoach.com Again the same email. July 1920. Do you guys have workshops or events coming up to.

We have at Growth Institute we do the online masterpiece courses. The three months.

Yes, all the time.

That's when people say they really like said hey, the videos with Vernon are amazing. The coaching calls give us all this guidance with a coach. But the mastermind, the discussions with other members, it just blew things away. Indeed. I like to tell a story. There was a lady that took our MBD program and she joined and the.

Next MBD is the Master Business Dynamics. It's a multi month course. It's like an MBA but for operating scaling companies.

That's correct.

Thank you for that. So when she joined we gave her access to these WhatsApp group with all the other MBD's and she was waiting for her class to start like in month and a half or two months and she got into the group and she was seeing all these people having discussions about things in their business and she said hey guys, I've been having this issue that I have been able to fix for the last two years. Does someone have idea how to do it? And two of the other CEOs said, Private message me, I know exactly how to fix it. And two calls with two different CEOs taking the MBD and she sold it. So she emailed me two weeks after she paid and said the whole NVD was paid. I already fixed this big problem that was costing me hundreds of thousands of dollars. And it was Fixed by other 2.

CEOs in your group by just having a community of committed people in the same. Yeah, really great.

And that's one of the things that I really like about what we do and the way that we do it, because we build both, right? We are following a proven system with tools, with methodologies, with a thinking criteria, and we build communities. So you get the point. The best of both worlds. So you know, sometimes that, as Daniel was alluding to, is more powerful than the tool itself, but without the tool, the framework in the direction, then you're not moving clearly towards specific goals. So I really appreciate the combination of the two pieces that you guys are all working on.

By the way, we've begun to offer one of your courses, Daniel, the masterclass in scaling Up. If you want to take that self paced thing, it's largely led by Vern Harnish there and you can go through all the modules. We're combining that with coaching now. Our low end for that is $5,000. So for just that, you can get some private coaching plus that self paced course for yourself as the CEO of the company and start to get your company down the path of scaling up.

We get a lot of coaches purchasing that for their clients because that's, that's the only way to get burned directly, let's say teaching. And we have, he has over 9 hours of earn teaching every piece of scaling up. So it's a great add on to coaching indeed. Every time I do a private implementation, I usually send what we call a champion that it's the master practitioner who's in charge of helping me implement internally. We usually send that person to go to the full master business course because of all the community, the videos, and they help me implement scaling up in the company.

Oh, nice, nice, nice.

I always do that.

Yeah, well, we haven't done as much of that, but we're just starting to do it now because we've seen so many people want a self paced approach and they want to do it in their own time frame and they want a mix of the private coaching plus the online learning, which I think is really great. This whole notion of work from anywhere at your time. The last year we saw the wfh work from home. Right. And that accelerated something that's been brewing for a long time. Atlassian's just updated their policy and planning to do that. We've seen a lot of our teams have a mix of that. I think people are going to be navigating this for a little while. What are you hearing from the companies that you're working with on work from home, work in the office or the hybrid of the two? How's that conversation going?

You want to start Max?

Sure.

So it's very interesting because the pandemic forced people to, to even give the work from home a shot. Right. Like it was not an option. And what I've seen is like a mindset shift from a typical no, everybody comes to the office because we need to see humans in the office to a, this is not too bad, is it? To a. Well, it's more convenient. So it's a very cultural thing, I believe. Right. And I think that we still haven't figured out fully. So I think that the most, you know, some of the more progressive people that I work with are trying to figure it out as we speak and they understand the value of giving people some freedom, some accountability and some face time and trying to combine all of them to get kind of the best of both worlds. Right. So Silicon Valley and companies in Silicon Valley have been doing it for years with what I hear, less than stellar results in some ways because some people just can handle the responsibility of working from home, getting their work done, showing up when they have to and being engaged and some people struggle with it. So I think that companies are going to have to figure out what model they want to do and who are the, who are they going to need or what skills are going to need to develop to be able to accommodate that vision.

So for me, I'll tell you, first growth is what we're doing and then what I'm hearing. A lot of my clients at the Growth Institute, we decided we're not going to have an office. But we're looking for a place that we could go there one day a week in Mexico and Austin. So we said hey, Tuesdays everyone goes to the office and we'll have all.

Our internal meetings, everything like co working space or something.

A co working space. But we're looking for a co working that will allow us to pay just for one day instead of the five days and everyone will take home their stuff. We have a warehouse so we have all the physical stuff very located in Austin and pre central location, Austin and Mexico City and then the idea is to go to a colocation for once week, by the way. But our business is very, very virtual. So we could work virtually very easy. I have a lot of my clients that have a lot of their work is physical and what they're doing is the team members that are able to be self managed, they could work from home three days and go to the office two days. The ones that do not, or they have poor results being home, they have to go to the office four days a week or three days a week. So if you want to be home more, great, you have to raise your productivity. So now they're playing with a KPIs and said, hey, if your KPIs are above this and they're green, you could work from home. If your KPIs are below yellow or red, you have to come to the office. So it's been a great way to get people to be more productive and focus on results, not on hours. So I think by the way, this pandemic just accelerated something that was already happening, but he just made us figure out than before. And I always tell the story. We've been doing online education for nine years, almost 10. And I've told my clients, hey, this course work great, I don't care, I'll pay you three times more. But you fly to my office and you do it here. And I was like, but online is better. You're going to do bite sight pieces in three months instead of two days. I don't care, I'll pay you. You come here. And now they have to go online. And they called me and said, this thing is great online. I've been telling you for nine years.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

I think because of what happened, we had to get used to doing it online and figuring out how to do things remote. So I don't think we're going to go back to the typical big buildings in downtown cities. And I think it's going to be very, very hard that we go full to that. I think we're going to still keep offices, but it's going to be a mix of home and home office. And by the way, that's why going back to the housing issue that we're seeing, people are buying bigger houses. People used to live with two or three roommates, now they want less roommates so they could use a room as an office and all those kind of things where we had to invest in building that. So now that you have that, you don't want to go back to the office and Go two hours in traffic a day. So I really believe we're going to have to figure out a balance. And the balance is going to be determined based on your productivity and your age. The millennials in their 20s, they want to go to an office and have fun and all those kind of things. For me, that I have kids and it's two hours work with my kids. I could have lunch with them every day. No way. I'm not going to go to the office.

So I noticed that companies have discovered that they could recruit more widely by having the work from home, remote work. So they could, instead of being limited to people in the Bay Area to come to the Bay Area or whatever or wherever it is, they could recruit all across the US and all over the world. Now they're like, oh, I could hire a developer in New Zealand or I could hire wherever so they could find people in different places. And that also then changes the competitive nature of the salary and the cost. So it untethers a little bit from the realities of living in certain places, which works for some jobs. And that's been useful in a number of our companies. Now they have a core office and core team that's now managing blended. But there are some people who have been recruited now in other parts of the country and world that are never going to move or unlikely to ever move. And those people will operate remotely. So you have some people working from home locally, some people working from home remotely, and then from time to time wanting to actually get together. So we just did this meeting up in Napa with one of our teams that is more remote. The first meeting where people flew in from places for a meeting. We've done some other meetings like in a CEO's backyard this last year, but this one, people flew in for a meeting in Napa and there was some time for the strategic thinking group to meet and then some time to work on an acquisition. And that was really great. But those are people who all work in different cities and states and different parts of the world. Right? So that is, I think, beginning. Of course, there's still restrictions on some of our international travel, but with vaccines and that kind of thing, that's beginning going to change rapidly soon.

But as an example, in at the Growth Institute, we went remote and we had a huge saving for being remote, but the team is being saying, hey, want to be together, blah, blah. So we put a really big goal at the end of the year. We had an amazing last year because everything went remote. We've been online, so we told people if we get to our number, we're going to go to the beach in Akumal, south of Cancun.

Oh yeah, yeah.

And we're going to go for a week all the office. So in the summer we're going to get all the team for seven days in the beach and everything we save in office, whatever, we're going to spend probably 20 or 30% of that and for a week fly everyone to the beach. We're going to do a lot of work there, a lot of planning and the rest. We're also going to have a lot of fun as a team. And that's going back to Salesforce Margaret saying we need a ranch. You need that space to go and have these retreats and just have fun for the cultural part. So whenever we're working home that will last you for several months and then you have to see each other again.

But if you're not as big as a Salesforce, you maybe aren't going to have your own dedicated space that you have to own and manage. And we have spaces now like this in the coaching community. So you could do a multi party retreat in Akumal. I've got a friend with a group of houses on the beach in Costa Rica that are perfect for a retreat. We have a place where we do regular retreats in Marathon, Florida down there that's fantastic and really well set up. Vern's got a place that he likes to use in Boulder, we've got the, the resort in Lake Tahoe. So we have a lot of locations to suggest to people that are perfect for doing your off site, for your learning, for giving the team a little experience and connection time as well.

Let me go back for just a second on this idea of remote work and what's going to happen. And it kind of reminds me of the early days of television in, in television commercials. So the first television commercials were.

I'm sorry, you said it reminds you. I said you don't look that old.

Well, I, I used to work for, for consumer packaged goods. So I, you know, spent some time on that. But the early television commercials were a bunch of people reading scripts like they would for radio, but with a camera.

In front of them.

They, they, there was like a new technology and they just didn't know what to do with it.

Right.

Later they discovered that you could tell these Marvelous stories in 30 seconds, right. And create movies, et cetera, et cetera. So I believe that we're kind of like that right now. We're still trying to do the same type of work but with, with, with new technology and the technology will continue to evolve. So I think that we're going to evolve how we even look at meetings, how we look at communication, how we look at interaction. So instead of again, just trying to do the same thing, but now virtual, I think we're going to come up with different dynamics and activities that only through technology could be done right. So Daniel, I saw a post that you gave a workshop on VR.

Yes, I give away from VR Alt VR. It's a platform in Oculus and I was with my Oculus here in my desk and I upload the presentation and I had my hands controls and I was flipping the slides in alt and it was a lot of fun. It was weird and clunky and it's weird because you have to change these settings that if I'm talking, I want everyone in the room to hear me. But if I'm talking to one person, I have to lower the volume so they will just hear me. So they're even figured out in ar. And it was really weird because people were talking to each other and I could see them moving and talking and I could hear them. And it's weird because they don't believe you could hear them and they're moving and talking and bumping around in the stage. And I was like, guys, this is distracting. But we're not used to. We're just getting it, used it. By the way, you have to do a VR presentation. It's going to be the future. We know it's going to get there. Today is clunky and weird, but works. Now you have a space and you could flip slides and everything on the virtual space.

I have not done that yet.

It's very cool. It's very worth it. So now we have EO chapters doing it all over the world. I've had five or six year chapters that I've heard they've done it. Bill, I'll help you. I'll introduce you to the company. We hired a company in Poland thing or somewhere in Europe. Yeah. And it was not that expensive. They set up everything, send invitations to everyone and they manage it.

And it was great.

So great example of new technology and how we have to first figure out what's out there, how to use it, how to get value from it and really create the future.

Well, you know, it's funny, we used to do this as an audio show once a week and we did that for a number of years. It was great and it was building an audience. And then when the pandemic hit. One of the first things that we did was begin to increase the tempo. So we started doing more of them and then we started doing them live and we started adding video to them. So now where before video was the exception, now video is the norm and we have, we still have more listeners than we do viewers, a lot more. But we have a tremendous potential now to reach more people and get our content out in more ways with the video and out of this whole other dimension which was part of that multi year thought that we would develop video at some point, right. So cameras got better, mics got better, the lighting in the office got better. My office became a little mini TV studio. Daniel's begun to upgrade his. I see Max, you're working on yours. But we all got better at these things. And I think this is going to.

Be my homework this tonight how to set this figure out.

I've got the studio where we deliver workshops with several cameras and angles and toys because doing a presentation with a talking head is not quite right. As fun as the movement and the interaction. And I know you use like stream deck and stuff like that to pop in and out and change sizes and make it more dynamic. And without this situation I would have probably never gotten into figuring that out.

I co led a big workshop last week with vern. We had 550 people register. Daniel was in it for a bit and that kind of thing. And for those, we're using multiple studio locations, guests coming in from different places. We're putting slides as our background with video and animations in the background. We're bringing in music as well to the whole thing. So it's highly interactive. And I think while you may expect your coach and speaker presenters to have done that, I think it's a mistake that more CEOs haven't gotten better at this. If you're a CEO speaking to interacting, leading meetings, addressing a growing company and you you haven't figured out to keep the light source in front of your face, to turn off the distractions, to close the door, to get a better microphone, to master some of these basics that you will see people who are doing, speaking and coaching, that kind of thing remotely do it. You're making a mistake. You should be doing that same kind of thing that you see us doing here. You might not like. I now I'm talking into a teleprompter right now. It's not scrolling words like a news person would do. It's got the zoom window on it. But it allows me to have eye contact pretty Close to on most of the time. Right. You maybe don't need to go quite that far, but learning to talk into the camera, getting your basic lighting right, improving your audio and not try like this isn't going away even as we go back to the office. This needing to be facile and capable and expert. A good speaker in this environment is. Is with us. If you're a leader of a business, even not the CEO, any C suite, you ought to get good at this. It'll make a big difference.

As you were saying, you can make it more fun, right? Because at the end of the day, we all want to be entertained. We want to have a good time. We want to learn, but we want to have a good time. So what are you talking about? There we go. Exactly what I'm talking about.

Right? Being silly, being playful, having some room for it. Right.

By the way, Bill, I already got this. Give me one second. You're gonna love it.

What do you got?

Probably one of the new tech toys. There we go.

Also, actually. And Elmo comes from our mutual friend, right? I learned Elmo from Rich Manders, another one of our coaches. Elmo stands for enough. Let's move on.

Whether you have a discussion, instead of just being rude and interrupt, just share.

Your Elmo, and I'll have somebody going on a little bit and I'll just start to go like this. If you're listening, I'm bringing Elmo just in the corners of the visual of the video frame.

It really breaks the discussion in a very playful way. And you're not rude. So we have to learn all these things to be able to have better meetings.

Speaking of playful and humor intact, Tyler Perry gave a talk. Billionaire entrepreneur, entertainer Tyler Perry has always been a little bit different. And he spoke in the Oscars, giving a great speech and highlighting about refusing to judge and hate people and inviting everyone to meet in the middle. And certainly a lot of the media for the last bit has inflamed things by taking extreme positions, by bait and switch, by spreading innuendo and misleading things, and has pulled us apart. And as we work from home, I think it's probably useful for us to think about how and where to connect, where to find a place of common agreement, common perspective.

Yeah, it's. It's challenging, right, because everybody's fighting for. For. For our attention. And. And somebody can quote me on this one. But. But I think that, you know, like, 40 years ago, 30 years ago, we saw, you know, like 3,000 messages a week, and now we see, like 30,000 or 300,000 messages a day. Right. So the amount of brands and messaging vowing for our attention is, is completely overwhelming. So the only way to get our, our, our, our brains to stop and recognize something is if there's a threat response.

Right.

Because we're built for that. So, you know, I think it's going to get worse and worse the more, the more, the more brands are vowing for our attention, the more products and services are out there, the more we get bombarded, the more extreme they have to get to get our attention. And they pull us to one side or the other because they need to have this again, this survival response, this fear response. So that's when it comes to the media, one of my biggest concerns, because I don't see it getting better because otherwise nobody cares.

Right.

You don't get the attention. So I find that idea of meeting in the middle to be really, really challenging because it kind of goes against human nature. And I'd love to hear your thoughts on how that could be fixed. I haven't figured out a solution for that.

I feel like it's a personal inventory. The media isn't going to go change or transform or suddenly do anything different. It works for them to operate that way. So there's something that we have to do differently as human beings.

Works for them, not for us, right?

Absolutely. It doesn't work for us. It doesn't work for society.

Some years ago, like two or three years ago, I had some of my team. She's just in her 30s, millennial, from, from Vietnam. And she said, hey, why this? The first company that I built was a pretty successful big company, 1200 employees. And she's like, what do you guys did? Why you got to grow so big? And that was because we were the first one to put news online for the Mexican market.

Yeah.

And she was like, what do you mean? And I was like, you used to get your news on the newspaper or the morning news, and then until the night news at 6. If something happened in Japan at 2pm, there was no way for you to know. And she was like, what do you mean? She grew up just with Internet having everything on her phone. And she couldn't understand that we had no option of seeing News. But just two times a year. Indeed. CNN was the first news channel to be 24 hours and they were bankrupt for. They didn't make money like for 10 years because even it was even there, no one want to see it. And now everywhere is with the news.

CNN crisis.

Yes.

Watching it live in. I Don't know, some lounge or some area. And, and that idea that I didn't have to wait for the evening news to see what was going on. Now, of course, they followed every detail of this thing in ridiculous detail.

I heard what made CNN successful was the first Gulf War. That was the first time people saw TV 24 hours a day. Because CNN was on site showing you the attacks 24 hours a day.

Yeah.

And then that changed television forever.

Yes.

And of course, the Internet made it easy, accessible, available. And by the way, we have it on the phone. It sends you a message now. It goes to your watch, and it's just a mess. Bill, I just got this watch a month ago. I was seeing that you were using it. I've been using it for sleep. And the biggest thing for me with the watch is you have these options like you're in the theater, you're in bed, it's night, whatever, and you tell them not to bother you and be able to let you sleep.

That not everybody learns. So I see a lot of young people doing that. And we, we certainly had it with our kids where we didn't create the boundaries and the habits. And so all the kids in that group will go down to the one that's sort of the, the least healthy, the least functional. So the one that's got some weird crap going on at three in the morning is going to wake up and engage everyone else who will answer. And if that kid's phone is in their hands, in their room, they're part of it now. And they end up with weird sleep cycles and no ability to block it off. So I have my phone and watch and that kind of thing set to not bother me, me in the evening. Like, I turn it off now. You know, there are probably ways you could get through to me if you're having an emergency, but I really do not want to get pinged and dinged all night long.

But, but that's the issue. So my phone, I tell them I go to bed at 10, at 9:15, it prepares, it tells me, hey, 9:15, go to bed. So you could start doing your, you get that like your system or my, my ritual. And by 10, I'm, I'm done. I need to start not sending me calls. But that's the issue. I don't have a phone in my house, so my only phone is my phone. And it's yes, turned off automatically at 10. So there's an emergency at 2am no one can.

The short answer to that is that you can assign a few Phones, a phone, numbers, then it can actually get through at whatever time.

So I haven't, I haven't programmed that. But my parents, they're getting old. I would love for them to call me anytime if there's any emergency at.

2Am so you can have their own number.

My daughter is 16, she's starting boarding school this year and if she calls me at 2, I want to be able to hear it, I want to be able to react. So yes, I need to do that. I haven't done it.

Some mix of that. Well, you can create exceptions like I want to hear from no one except this list or that kind of thing, which I have like my alarm company and my kids and that kind of thing on.

I don't know how to do that. I need to ask you to tell.

Me on the next podcast, the next.

Podcast settings for your phone.

It could be reached at 2am for an emergency.

Also, sometimes multiple calls will get through. There's a few things like that that you can configure. But I think figuring out how to manage and protect your boundaries and not answer everything and manage your life is critical for you and the people on your teams. Learning how to put the phone down when you're in the middle of a conversation and not look at the distractions and that kind of thing. Warren Rustand reminded me of the importance of doing that, of like, listen, if you're coming here to talk with me, don't look at your damn phone. I didn't make that mistake with Warren, but he told me about somebody else who did. So I was sure. I was primed not to.

I'll give you an example. So I'm a little bit of a night owl. So I tell my team members, if you get a message from me at 10, 11, 12am, don't worry. I don't expect an answer, I don't expect a response. Heck, make sure your phone is off. But my expectation is not that you're going to respond to it, it's just that that's when I thought of something.

It happens the same thing. And I had discussion with my team, Zoom, and they said, but if you send me a WhatsApp or a message, I just cannot see it. So send me an email if you don't want me to see it. So.

That'S not actually accurate. That's about how they're set up. But they could turn it off?

They can, but they usually don't see their email of ours. But you do see your text in your phone.

I do not.

You do not no I do.

No text, no WhatsApp, no nothing. Generally between 10pm and 7am, I see nothing except like a call from my kids or my alarm company will get through. Yeah, that's it. No WhatsApp, no nothing. No slack. And it's funny. So I've now coached three companies through billion dollar valuations and I'm super proud of that. But bigger is not necessarily better. And one of those companies, the CEO, was trying to be Superman all the time. And they would send a message at three in the morning to people on their team saying, hey, I've got this idea. I'd like you to have something ready for the staff meeting. The staff meeting was gonna be at 9am, so the person would wake up at 6 or 7 or whenever they woke up in the morning and they'd see this 3am message from the who just effed their whole day and whole world up with some unreasonable request to do something that, you know, there's a time and place to be unreasonable. A time and place where it's magic, but if you overuse it like anything, you just are. I don't know, I don't know the right word. A shit show. You're messing with your team's vibe, their whole mojo by giving them constant emergencies.

So it reminds me of a lesson I learned in my corporate days. And the idea is simple. You've got to manage your team members and you've got to manage your boss. Yeah. And I like to tell that to my. To the teams. Yeah, absolutely. Set expectations, have conversations, communicate. Right. Because that superhero CEO might not realize what, what chaos he's causing. But if that person can say, hey, right, if there's a high level of trust in the organization in between them, they could and should come back and say, let's talk about this. Right? Because this is how it's having an impact now, if it's that important for you, et cetera, et cetera, great, I'll wake up at five and get it done. But if it isn't so manage up and manage down.

So that CEO in particular was not terribly coachable. That was a challenge. You know, I think I'm a decent coach. But I was not able to interrupt that they weren't interested in trying some new approaches.

One day I was hired by a private equity fund to work. Sorry, with a client. They just invested like $30 million in the company and they were having a lot of challenges with the CEO. So they said, hey, we're going to hire you, you coach the CEO, and we've been probably two or three weeks with engagement. And I would have dinner to a Japanese, very nice restaurant in Mexico City. And I had the entrepreneur, their number two, and myself. And we're having a conversation, and he said something like deeply offensive to his CEO. And his CEO responded. They begin elevating the conversation. They start shouting on table, table. And his number two just left the table and left. And the CEO stayed eating. And I was like, he's your number two. He's your partner. Like, you're not even gonna apologize? And the guy said, no, he does his drama. He'll be quiet, he'll come back tomorrow. And I was like, he's not coming back tomorrow. And the guy said, like, he's not. Like you are deeply offended. And so we had a big conversation. We came out, they continue fighting on the. On the parking lot. And he said, I'm done. I'm never going to come back. And I remember the CEO, I went with him and I left my car. So he went and dropped me somewhere. And before he dropped me, he said, hey, but we're going to do great, right? And I was like, no, this content. I told him, this company is going to be successful because of you, in spite of you, because it's really ugly to work for you. And he was like, ah, come on, it's not that bad. And I was like, no, it is really bad. Every employee that I've talked to in the last couple of weeks eat you. But you paid so much money and you're being so successful that they work for you, but they eat you. Yeah. And he was kind of quiet. He changed very little. Yes. By the way, the engagement didn't last six months.

Yeah, I think we all have things like that. And sometimes your past success, your money is a limiting thing. I had a similar conversation with a CEO who the company was big, the product was good in the world. It was successful and powerful in its category. It made lots of money. A gajillion. Gajillion dollars. Right. Like profitable, cash positive, all that kind of thing most of the time. And the CEO's behaviors were the source of everything that he complained about. And when it became clear and when I pointed it out, he looked irritated. And that was the last time we worked together. I'm like, well, it all comes back to this. If you're not willing to shift and try some new things, I can't help you anymore. And it's good news that it's all you, because you can change you easier than you can change anybody else. But if you're not willing to share and shift your approach. And I think what wasn't really said, but what felt like it was theirs. Listen, who the hell are you? Coach Punk? I've grown this company this size and I've got all this money and I'm like, whatever and like, okay, but you're stuck here and you've got these complaints. So how's that going?

So I have a rule when I work with companies. I don't believe the CEO or the founder or, or founders of the company could build a great company.

Yeah.

Focus on building a great team.

Yes.

If they build a great team, the great team is going to build a great company.

Yes.

If they try to skip the middle, not gonna end the world.

Yes.

You could fake it and you could like through effort and push, you could do it for some time. Nothing in the long term if you really don't. And by the way, Steve Jobs is one of the most minimizer CEOs we've had. And he knew before he died, he built the university. He knew that he needed to leave a space to continue growing the team for Apple to continue being successful. And a lot of people predicted Apple was going to be gone after Steve Jobs. And that's why there are 2 trillion dollar company today.

Well, you know, we opened the show with conversations about Elon Musk. We're talking about Steve Jobs now. A lot of people, a lot of very powerful leaders who accomplish a lot of things are kind of obnoxious. And the stories about Jobs and about Elon in different ways, about being obnoxious, are legendary. And yet they did accomplish something. And clearly the culture and the people that Jobs left in place actually did continue and grow and evolve. Because there were a lot of people who thought, well, he's dead, it's done. Right? They're never going to do anything else. And they've continued to be a different kind of company than they were under him. But evolve. He clearly created something.

Is he the norm or is he the exception?

I think he's the exception. Let me tell you two stories quickly. One is the other day I was talking with this guy in his 20s and he said, I not going to finish college. And I was like, why not? Because if Bill Gates and Steve Jobs didn't finish college, I don't need college. And I was like, yeah, that's for the exception. The other 99.99% of the world, college really works for us, right? Yeah, that's the exception. I remember seeing this documentary after Steve Jobs passed and they were interviewing some of his employees, people that worked right for him, and saying, okay, how was to work with him? Him, like, expecting all this. He was a luminary and blah, blah. And everyone spoke really badly about working for him. So the reporter after second or third said, like, and then why you stayed? If it was so bad, why do you stay? And one said something that I thought it was very profound. He said, steve Jobs wanted you to be greater than what you think you could be. So if you resign to working for him, him, you were resigning to a better you.

Yes.

Very difficult to resign to a better you. So I think he took it to such an extreme that people, when they went to bed, said, yeah, it was a tough day to work for him, but I'm a better human being. I'm having a bigger impact in the world because I'm working for him. And I think that's why he was so effective.

Yeah. So when. When you guys look at. At the leaders that you work with, can they be like Steve Jobs in the good ways, and can they be like what we expect from great leaders as well? Right.

I say yes, and I can think of a few things, but it takes work. Right. I coached a woman some years ago who was working on something, and in the middle of or in the beginning of this leadership development work, she had a recurrence of cancer and was set up for a substantial and difficult series of chemo. And she came to me and she said, listen, we got to stop our work in this project. We got to stop up our coaching work. And I looked at her. I appreciated her world. I got her situation. And then I said, no. I said, you can't quit. I don't care if you do this from the hospital. I don't care if you're throwing up, if you feel terrible. You can do everything we need to do here with your voice in conversation. So you can do it all by phone if you need to. You could have somebody else do the computer stuff or whatever, but you cannot quit on what we're doing right now, and you cannot quit on our coaching. I say, no, you don't get to quit just because you have cancer and because you might die. If you finish this with your last breath, let it be your legacy.

Wow. And did she stay and did she survive?

She did complete the whole project. She did complete the coaching series. It was successful. She lived to the end of it. She was surprised. It was difficult. She was exhilarated and fulfilled by what she'd accomplished. And she died about a year later from the same cancer. But that whole project, that initiative, outlived her and continued. I don't know about still to this day, but for some years later, I used to hear about it and I realized that it did matter to her. She was deeply proud of that work and that I had pushed her to do it. Even when it was reasonable not to do it, it was uncomfortable to do it. And I was really proud of that coaching. And the only thing that I think that made that work, and I think it applies not just for the coaches, but for our CEOs, is if you're having somebody do something that they care about for reasons they care about, you can push people to do something with their dying breath, right? Like, that's okay if I'm trying to manipulate them to get something done for me, like, I'll burn in hell for that. But if it's for them, for what they want and I really know them, I have that room, right? It's maybe a little more dramatic than.

You know, like, you really pushed. You really pushed the purpose, right? And even gave her something, something to focus on because in a nutshell, you helped her focus on what really mattered to her. And I'm sure that you infused a lot of energy and probably helped her get through those difficult times better because it was something to fight for.

So in the course I've been developing on leadership and the book I've been writing on, the same aspect of stuff is about this thing, the leadership flywheel, and a set of four core disciplines of leadership that scales. So we'll be doing that. I'm pretty sure that. That the chapter on that coaching stuff will be named after her. I will want to acknowledge that because that was a very memorable thing. Hey, I've got one more deep thing before we wrap our show this week, but before we do that, let me remind folks that if you are managing a team remotely, if you're trying to keep the team on track now more than ever, especially with these hybrid and remote working things, you've got to to get some kind of online scoreboard so that everybody can look at it. You can't just have a whiteboard anymore where you write things down. And so our Align scoreboard, you can go to scalingup.com software and get the Scaling up scoreboard from Align is great and we continue to develop that. The interface, the UI of that's getting better and better. And the integration, so now you can integrate that using Zapier or with Salesforce and other things to update priorities. You can integrate some of the Metrics and the updating of that scoreboard into some of your other tools so that there's less maintenance involved. But anyway, all that and more there. Also reminder to folks to like, subscribe to share it. Dan, you want to say something else?

Yes. Something about scoreboards and the new updates. By the way, I'm a huge fan and I have to disclose I'm on the board of alignment. It's a great company. They've done great improvements to the platform. But here's just one thing. And we had the discussion on the board. We've been requested for many times from teams having this automation or connection with Zapier, the API or Sapia, another tool so we could get data automatic. And I think it's huge. It's going to help a lot.

Lot.

Yes. But I want to give one big disclosure.

Yes.

For me, the priorities. Yeah. I want the teams to go manually to look for the data.

Yes.

And put it in. Because the 15 minutes that they take a week, really good updating, that helps them to do how to analyze their week and how to grade how well they're doing and how well they're executing.

Yeah.

So I think it's extremely important that you don't skip that.

Searching the data, like picking up the pen to use the whiteboard is important and useful kind of an experience for people rather than having everything automated.

So don't have 100% of your dashboards automated. Have a space that every week your teams have to go and look for the data, interact.

Yeah.

Put it in manually and be able to do the analysis of what the data means.

Yes.

Lots of ownership. Right. In having to get that number yourself because you own it, it's your number. And playing around with the numbers gives you more insight than this is the outcome. So I'm with you, Daniel, that understanding how you got to that number.

We have some KPIs, like traffic on the website and stuff that gets automatically into. Into a line or dashboard or scoreboards. And the priorities, they're all manual. Whenever you have to update your priorities, I want that to be manual because of that importance of having to analysis.

Yeah, well said. I think it's really important. I remember going to my flight instructor years ago when I was learning to fly and being very excited to show him one of these early flight planning software apps. And I could do it right on my phone at the time. And he's like, that thing's going to get you killed and let me show you why. And he had me put in some flight path and he's like, okay, now would you go fly that? And I'm like, yeah, the thing says I did this or that. And there's the thing. It's all automated. It's on the computer. The computer knows. He said, okay, now let's go draw it out on the chart. And so this was a visual, not an instrument flight plan. And he had me driving through like an active military training area and into the side of a mountain.

Mountain.

And he's like, you have to think about where you're going and what you're doing. If you over rely on some of these tools, you over automate that. I had another team that did very, very poorly for a while because they spent a lot of money investing in one of these fancy BI systems and they put monitors all over their office with the intel on it. And the CEO had come from a background where he loved having his Bloomberg terminal and that kind of thing. He just loved having these things. But I'm like the rest of your team, that's just digital wallpaper. There's like pretty graphics showing up there, but it's not telling them anything. They're not using it right. Unless there's an occasion, a prompt, some interaction, it's just wallpaper.

So at the Growth Institute we have our dashboards in a line for pirates and stuff and we also have some dashboards in clipfolio for a lot of day to day and no one was going into to them. And then we start sending it by email and integrating them into our slack. So they at least get them every day.

Yes.

But then I begin asking questions about things and people said I don't know. And I was like it's on the dashboard. I said which dashboard? And I'm like the one you get by email every day at 9:03am and the guys were saying like just usually get it and delete. So we had to do a class teaching them how to read the dashboards and really get information because if not they don't see it and now they understand it. As an example, one big thing they were really worried about revenue.

Yes.

And not gross profit.

Yes.

So we had goals of revenue and they said I go to the revenue. And I'm like yeah, but you sold a program that had 10% gross profit and on the priorities you had one that had 80% gross profit. Profit, that's a big difference. And they were like no, I got my revenue. I was like that doesn't mean anything. What means is the gross profit. So it will pay for all the expenses. Those kind of very small things make a huge difference when you're running a company and that's very important to use on their dashboard and that they are able to understand them building decisions based on that.

We've got one more great topic about suffering, why we suffer, how to suffer for a little less coming right up. Before we do that, you guys have anything to promote, talk about, want to shout out. We've got growthinstitute.com any special events or anything. Daniel.

So we have a webinar with Kevin Oakes next Thursday. Culture, innovation. What are the 18 things you have to do to renovate your culture? He has amazing data on culture and he's going to share a lot of great data data. So we have that next Thursday you could register@growtheastle.com and then we have cultural innovation and after that we're going to have scaling up master business course. But here's the most important thing we're doing this year. We're doing private universities for companies. So companies, hey, just give me access to everything. And because the way we work with our leaders were the way we pay them, we couldn't give people access to everything. Now we have access to that. So we get companies that starting at 1500amonth they could have their own private university with people like Vern Harnish, Salim Ishmael, Pierre Diamandis, Brad Smart and the rest to be able to train and grow their team. It's an amazing program. We already have some companies going through it. And if you want to build your own private university to scale your business with the best faculty in the world, give us a call. We'll be happy to put some something that is tailored for you and your company.

Nice. And Max, excellent.

Well, right now I've got a project that's on the works but maybe you have me back in a few months and I'll tell you a little bit.

About that secret still in stealth mode.

I'll tell you just a little bit about it. So we've been working with the veterinarian field and we've really kind of adapted scaling up to help animal hospitals, veterinarian practices. So soon we're going to be opening up our doors to the premier practice where we're going to use all these technologies to help these grow and scale.

Interesting, interesting. We've had a couple veterinary companies related businesses go through our accelerator program and I did a little bit of coaching with a grooming business. We had a mobile surgery go through. So yeah, we've had a few that.

Have been like that It's a very exciting industry.

I'll send you a text. I have a client in Canada that needs some help with that.

Excellent.

Reminder that We've got about 300 shows now in our back catalog. So many of the people that we've talked about before, we've had Kai and Kreppendorf on, we've had others on, we've talked about exponential organizations, about scoreboards, about various aspects of leadership and so on. All that and more. That whole back catalog of podcast episodes@scalingcoach.com, so you'll find all that there. Of course you can like subscribe, thumb up and get them wherever you get your podcast content. Or you can do it on our own website@scalingcoach.com if you want to get in touch with us or give us some feedback or get help finding a coach. Informative. Scalingcoach.com is the email. So our last topic I think is one of the more important ones and that is about the source of suffering, why we suffer. There's a new video Michael Singer's put out one author of Untethered Soul and the Surrender Experiment, one of our thought leaders in the world of well being and leadership. And he's got a video out about the dangers of our mind, both the gift on the one hand and the danger on the other hand of what goes on within our own heads and how it can both help us and get us in trouble. And I think it's really beautiful. I try to remind myself that pain is inevitable, but suffering is optional. And sometimes that doesn't seem to help me enough when I'm going through something.

So when, and by the way, I haven't seen that video, but I've studied some with Michael Singer and, and I come back to Ryan Holiday that he said the obstacle is the way as human beings, entrepreneurs, the best entrepreneurs I've learned from said the time when they grew the most was with their biggest failures and leaning into it. Leaning into it. Correct. And then leaning the book with Charles Zamberg. And also like in selling, the first time I heard this about selling, people said, hey, you start selling when you get the first objection of your client. And I'm like, no objections. When they're saying no, that means they already started thinking about it.

Yes.

Before an objection is done, they kind of of disregard until they get the first objection. That's when they really start internalizing the process. So that's where the, the, the selling start. I do a podcast for EO organization in Spanish and my first question is give Me, your favorite failure. Because we all have a failure that made us who we are today.

So.

So that's part of human connection and condition. We have to soften, and that's the way we.

I really appreciate this subject. It's actually something I've studied a little bit, and I really like Michael Singer. So to me, there's a couple of people that really go deep into that subject, anywhere from Krishni Murthy or Eckhart Tolle. But Michael Singer communicates in a language we can all understand. Right. Because you're talking about going a little into the deep. But I believe that most of our pain comes from expectations, right. We have a view of how things should be, and then reality doesn't match that vision of how things should be. And then we get frustrated, angry or upset. Right? So, you know, I have a little bit of ocd and I've been able to manage it throughout the years. One of the things that happens with this OCD is that you get an idea of how you want the world to be or to look like or people to act or the food to taste or to look. And then when it doesn't match that paradigm, you get frustrated, you get upset, you want to do something about it. So learning to be clear about the outcomes that you want, not how things need to look. And in a typical example I see with, with entrepreneurs, usually the ones that are stuck is where they've been, the ones carrying all the weight. And, you know, they're the, they're the Steve Jobs of the world, that they have a perfect idea of how things need to look. And then when a different team member does it and it doesn't look like that, they discard it. It's wrong. It's not going to work. I don't like it. Versus saying will it get the outcome? Might get the outcome in a different way than I had envisioned it, but will it get the outcome and being open to that. So focusing a little bit less on the exactly how things need to look and a little bit more on. On letting things flow and getting the outcomes that you really are looking for and in realizing what matters and what doesn't, Right. If you, if you're expecting a project, a meal or something a certain way, and it's not exactly that, does it really matter? Right. What's the impact that it's going to have? And if it's not going to be significant, then you got to let go of those expectations and be. And be comfortable with those outcomes. So very specifically for me, it has been it has been helpful to set less specific expectations on little things and have better expectations of bigger outcomes. And then I think it facilitates what Daniel and Bill, you were saying about learning from those failures because you know that they are just working you towards those outcomes. So that's a little bit about kind of what has made me suffer throughout the years and how I work out of that.

Yeah. I hear in what you're saying, I'm reminded by both what you said and what Daniel said that for me, the source of the suffering is resisting the way things actually are, resisting the present reality that I'm not digging or the expectation of where the interpretation of the reality that I have that whole thing is the suffering. And then as Daniel said, leaning into. And Max, you said, noticing your fixation on some expectation, all of that gets in the way. You actually lean into what's going on and even your interpretation of what's going on. And then the suffering becomes an interesting challenge. We choose the present reality or we accept it and things begin to shift for us. Right.

By the way, if you remember the drama triangle.

Yes.

The main thing that goes from a problem to a challenge challenge is we all could be creators or victims. The difference of victim said I don't have the power or the tools to fix something. So it's a problem.

Yes.

Yes. If you have the power, then it's a challenge.

Yeah.

So the best thing is how can you are going to get your mindset to be a challenge.

Yeah.

And yes, there could be some suffering in the process, but that will help you do the change. That will help you. You change from a victim to a creator and be able to do something about it.

Well, I'm grateful to you guys for coming on the show and having a great conversation on a weekend morning with us as we record this. I want to give big thanks to Lucy Summers working behind the scenes, making our show happen, scheduling, preparing all the production, and to Verne Harnish, author and creator of our Scaling up framework that we're all grateful to. Our audio for the show is edited by Albert Burge at Podfly Productions. Our show notes are written up by Ein Kodina and then proofread by Tim McGowan. I want to thank everyone for listening and watching. Thanks for joining us. We'll talk to you again next time. Keep Scaling Up.