Delegating as a Leader with Dave Kerpen

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Thanks so much for Having me.

Bill, are you in New York today?

I am. I'm just outside the city, Port Washington, N.Y. born and raised in Brooklyn and have lived here most of my life.

That's awesome. And I'm on completely on the other coast in the Oakland hills in the San Francisco Bay area. So we are coast to coast today. Bi coastal and we want to get into this. So why don't you say a little bit more about your business background like when did you become an entrepreneur? Like take us through the arc that kind of leads to this book. But, but paint a picture for our listeners. Viewers.

Sure. It's kind of a crazy story. What brought me into entrepreneurship. I'm a serial entrepreneur. I'm on my seventh business now. My very first business came about when I got married to my wife in 2003. We oh my God, I just messed that up. I'm getting older. 2006 we we we we wanted a huge wedding and couldn't afford a huge New York wedding. So we partnered with minor league baseball team to create a sponsored wedding promotion and got married at the end of a game. 1-800flowers.com sponsored our flowers, Smirnoff sponsored our alcohol, David's bridal, sponsored our wedding dress and bridesmaids gowns. We raised a hundred thousand dollars for an awesome wedding and got I got to get married in front of literally everyone I knew, 500 friends and family, 5,000 strangers. And we generated quite a bit of media and marketing PR for our wedding sponsors. So much so that after the wedding our vendors, 100Flowers.com and Entamins who had sponsored our desserts came to us and said what are you guys going to do next? And we couldn't get married again. So we started a business together that was our marketing firm Likable that we ended up selling a few years ago and I've sort of gotten the bug ever since then starting and building businesses. I like to call myself a serial entrepreneur and an author. So I've done this will be my fifth book. I've had a few business successes and a bunch of business failures. But either way I learn a lot along the way and I and I like to spread the word to others about what I've learned that allows me to scale ideas and learn and make my mistake, turn my mistakes into opportunities and learning for other entrepreneurs.

I think it's so brilliant genius to point out that you've had both success and failures. We learn so much from our failures. They're character defining. We apply them to the next business that kind of thing. But if you want to go through life pretending you've only had successes, you are fooling not just everyone but yourself, probably. First.

Yeah, the word failure means a lot of different things to a lot of different people. But you know, I'm not, I'm not against the word failure. To me, there are absolute failures. But it doesn't mean those failures need to be defining. It doesn't mean those failures need to be game. Game, ending game. You know, they can be game changing in a positive way as so long as we learn from our mistakes and learn from our failures and help others, we just keep moving, right? I mean, to me it's all about keeping moving forward one way or the other.

You know, it's funny, I read the news this morning as we record this, that SpaceX is about to launch their big rocket again tomorrow and it's going to be their third launch of this big new thing. And you know, it's probably going to blow up somewhere in the process. But they're not afraid to go out and blow up a few rockets to learn some things because the other way is painfully slow and expensive. The old school NASA way. Look, in the beginning they blew up a lot of rockets and in the Mercury program in particular. And what led to that? And then they, they got better at, at a little more, well, maybe not better, but worse at getting things out and all the way through and had some very near misses with the Apollo program, but still there was a push at doing stuff. Like there was a race on the space race, right? There was pressure to get it done. And then you saw the just unbelievable malaise after that of decades of not getting stuff out. And then along comes SpaceX and they aren't afraid to make some mistakes and do something. Trul. Innovative is super interesting to watch that company.

Yeah, I mean, I write a lot about fear and courage. And the thing is we all have lots and lots of fear. I have fear every day I wake up. Right? I mean again, if we're kidding ourselves if we pretend not to have fear, but it's courage in the face of that fear that makes the difference. And I wrote this book because for me the stakes have never been higher than around, around delegation. I just seen so many entrepreneurs and business owners and even managers at bigger companies. But overall, lots and lots of leaders spend a lot, a lot of time, precious, precious time doing stuff that they could have delegated and the impacts of that are tremendous. Of course, they're tremendous on our businesses. But to me, the bigger stakes here are our lives and our happiness and the sacrifices that so many folks make in the name of. I have to be the person to do this. You just. We only get this time once. We only get it once. You never get it back. And so that's, that's kind of the main reason that I know I'm jumping ahead, perhaps, Bill, but that's the main reason that I wrote this book, that I felt so compelled, you know, to put the, Put this in writing.

You know, I'm told a lot by folks, well, before you start delegating things, learn how to do it yourself. Develop, even if you do it badly, but get familiar with the whole thing. And that's always a little frustrating to me, and it feels limiting. I wonder, do you have any thoughts about when that's a good idea or not a good idea to begin to learn something before you start to delegate?

It's a great question. You know, I love when I do a podcast and I get a question that I've never gotten before. So kudos. Congrats to you for giving me a. A new one already as I start the delegation podcast circuit. I think you're right. It's not a good idea in most cases. I think it's probably an excuse that people tell themselves because they're afraid to delegate. Yeah, it's, it's, it's pretty much impossible that you're the best person for the job, whatever that job is. And it's so arrogant of us to think, if you really think about it, it's arrogant of us to think that we're the best person for the job. So I take some of my learnings from Vern Harnish, one of the founders of eo and Jim Collins, one of the best business authors around, about what it is that we should do. Yeah, and those are three things that entrepreneurs should do. I have a little acronym, share S H A R E. So the three things in the SHARE model that we should do are one, set the strategy and vision for the company, or if we're not the CEO, our teams, The H is for hire. Get the right people in the right seats on our teams, and the A is for assure access to the resources and cash to get the job done. Strategy, hiring, accessing capital. That's it. Everything else, in my humble opinion, everything else can and probably should be delegated. I know that many, many people watching, listening, will make the case. Oh, but I need to be the one to start to validate the sales process, the marketing, the website, the product. Again, there's probably somebody out there that can do a much better job than. Than. Than I can for all of those things. And so do I need to learn everything? I don't know. I guess it helps to learn a little bit about everything. Like, the example is coding, right? So somebody that's building an app. If you know a little bit about coding, if you know a little bit about product management, it's much, much easier to lead that team that's doing the work. But I think there's a slippery slope between knowing a little bit, knowing enough to be a good leader, and actually ending up doing the work and then getting stuck in the work and in the weeds. And that's the problem that I want so desperately, entrepreneurs and small businesses out there to avoid.

You know, when I was young, I learned a variety of computer languages. Cobol, Fortran, Pascal Basic, some assembly machine language. Like, and I fiddled with things, made little apps and that kind of thing. But the main thing I learned is I had no appetite or interest to get good at this. Like, I understand it. I understand the fundamental structures of how it works and that kind of thing and even newer kinds of things. But I, like, I don't want to work on it, but it gave me enough to start to work with developers, to hire and manage other people. So, like, even in high school, I remember working on selling some programs to some businesses that my friends worked on who love to do that. And I'm like, oh, I like better the architecture and the sales part of the whole thing. But there was value in. In a little bit of that learning. You know, you shared the story of your wedding and that kind of thing. And I've always felt really good about my wedding, but now I feel a little inadequate.

Well, the surprise made that toast. She, my wife's friend, she. She. She did joke that, that we set the bar very. In a very difficult way, that men think that they get away with getting married at a baseball field and having it paid for. So I'm very, very fortunate. It was my wife's idea, by the way, so she's the better half in every sense of the word.

She seems pretty creative. So talk about how that marketing agency grew, what you did there, how you developed your internship and like that. Share that story.

Yeah, so, you know, like many, many entrepreneurs, I was a bit of an accidental entrepreneur. Having sort of gone from this wedding to all of a sudden having a marketing firm. We really didn't know any. I mean, when I say we didn't know anything about anything, I mean, we really did. I. I did not Know what a P and L was? I did, I mean, I did not take a course in marketing or entrepreneurship or any business finance, none of it.

Right.

And, and we were sitting there. We, we, we were good at one thing. Well, good at a couple things, but one thing we were good at was barter. We had just done this barter for our wedding. So we bartered for our first office space. And we were, my wife and I were sitting in this office space. We had. Yeah, yeah, true story. And it was a pretty big office for New York City. It was just the two of us. And I was like, I was like, we, we should get a team together, but we can't afford a team fill this office. And we had this idea to bring in some college students to bring in some interns. And it was 2007 and we, after the, after the wedding, we had started off as a word of mouth marketing firm doing kind of guerrilla marketing, experiential marketing. We actually did a couple other baseball stadium events, but we had our two of our first. We have four interns for the summer and one of them's girl, Kathy from Georgetown, she said to me, you know, Dave, Facebook is this social network that just opened up beyond us college students. And I think it's going to be pretty big. I think you should sign up for a profile. And I didn't really know what the heck she was talking about, but she was an intern that we were paying and I said, okay, so you know what, sign me up for a profile. Well, that was very fortunate because a few weeks later, I realized as one of the first non college students old fogies on the platform, that this was going to be a very, very effective way of doing marketing. Frankly, much, much more effective than baseball stadium events and mall events and the guerrilla marketing that we've been doing. And thanks to our first set of interns, we pivoted pretty early in our, in our journey to go from word of mouth to digital word of mouth or social media market marketing. We were able to lean into that work on social media campaigns for a bunch of big brands. Like, we launched the Verizon Facebook page, we launched the 1-800-Flowers Com Facebook page. A whole bunch of early work. And throughout that process, we were able to hire more and more college students to help do the work. We realized that not only were they capable, they were frankly more capable than their adult marketing counterparts because they had grown up with this as like they were native social media users, while us old fogies were just trying to figure it all out as we as we went at one point we had 60 interns and 12 full time staff. And it was thanks to them, and thanks to our ability to scale our operation through hiring all these college students and delegating all this work to them that we were able to grow year after year, Inc. 500 year after year. And unfortunately, thanks mostly to my wife's excellent leadership as CEO and then CEO when I stepped aside, you know, we sold the company three years ago.

You know, I love that story and I think I love the idea of entrusting young people and you know, many folks, I'm a boomer. I'm both proud and sorry to admit, but a lot of times we look at young people and we're like, oh my God, they know nothing. And it's true, they don't know what they can't do. They don't know. So they lack wisdom, they lack some experience that you have and the perspective that comes with it that is really, really useful. But they also don't know that they shouldn't do something. And if you think back to all of our early businesses and accomplishments, we did something that we probably shouldn't have done. We rethought it like, oh, I wouldn't do that that way again. But that's one of the beauties of young people who just go out and try something new and they end up doing what's unthinkable, unaccomplishable, working in new ways and they challenge us to out of school. Generation after generation, it's always the same pattern. And then you get to my age and you complain, get off my lawn kids and the dumb kids today and they don't know anything. And I look at my parents and they talk same way about us. And the ones like, the pattern is the same how these kids, they're so coddled or whatever, but they come out and they do stuff rapidly. My own son has had a number of businesses and raised money and that kind of thing that didn't do that well. He felt really terrible about all of it. And then now he's involved in something that's around the world and he's already accomplishing more than probably I have or will accomplished in my lifetime. So he levels up that. But he just went after like world scale problems again and again. He's like, okay, let's tackle. Not like what could I do and how could I make a little bit of money, but what problem would I like to work on that's like global in nature. Love that we should all do more of that.

You know, I love that. And you know, we were talking about failures before. You know, I did the fundraising thing and raised $4.5 million for a software company that went south. And at the time I thought it was the end of the world and, you know, my investors would hate me forever. And you know, on the other hand, on the contrary, I was transparent the whole way through and maintain those relationships. And now I've learned so much. So now I can, when I do my own investments and advising companies, I can take everything I learned from that and apply it. But to your point about young people, it's funny because that was back then, you know, 10, 12 years later. So at the time I became this expert, my first book was a New York Times best selling book on social media. All of a sudden I was an expert on social media, thanks to these kids. Well, 10, 12 years later, I've got a new company and now I've got again college students teaching me how to use TikTok, because I can't for the life of me figure out TikTok, because now I'm the old fogey again. And the world of social media has completely changed in 12 years.

So go figure and it'll change again. And, you know, for a little bit we had the clubhouse thing going around and you know, like, oh, you got to jump on that thing. You know, it's interesting talking about one of my other kids, right? We're talking about young people who can do stuff. I remember came home, she was either still in high school or just out of high school or that kind of thing. And she's working on something and I'm like, what are you doing there? And she's like, oh, I'm doing some cover art for this artist. And it was a New York music artist that I like and that kind of thing. And I'm like, oh, that's cool. Is she in town? Like, how did you meet her? And she's like, no, no, no. I just met her online and asked if I would do this thing, doing it. How the heck does that happen? And that business, like again and again, fresh minds approach, like getting out to peop new people who have passion, ability, who are willing to try things and make mistakes. That's fantastic.

Yeah. I mean, one aspect of delegation that's really important is we might know an outcome. But it's very, again, it's very, very rare, if ever that we know in our absolute certain minds the precise, best way to get to that outcome. So what happens is the older we get, the more experience we get there's good elements of that experience, but there's also a downside. Like, we know how to do it, right? And by delegating, not just to young people, by the way, but to anyone, to bringing in other people and having them tackle the problem with us or for us, we get to learn there might be 10 other ways to get this problem done. There might be 10 other ways to get to the finish line. And by the way, it's probably pretty likely that One of those 10 ways is better than your way, better than the way that you think is best. I certainly know that. I mean, it's like Socrates said, the older I get, the more I realize how little I know. And. Right. It's so arrogant of us to think we know it. Well, let's turn to 10 other really smart people that are really good in their field and have them take a stab at it and figure it out.

It's great you think about this. Like, I. I've had business friends who made a lot of money in real estate, right? And I. But I went to rent a condo years ago and I got burned pretty badly on it and on the whole deal. And it cost me quite a bit, this experience. It was put a bad taste in my mouth about ever renting residential properties, right? And I'm like, well, maybe I'd get involved in business real estate, but I ended up not doing that either. And. And yet I have lots of friends who made a ton money in different kinds of real estate deals, but I've always been a little, like, afraid of it. And you think about, this is a common pattern. We're like, oh, don't get into that. You'll get burned in that. But this starts in childhood, right? You get excited in class, you raise your hand, and then you say something stupid and everybody laughs at you. And you're like, oh, I'm never, ever, ever going to do that again. And then it goes by a couple years, and then you put yourself out and you walk up, you ask somebody out, or you tell them you like them, or you ask them to dance or something like that. And they and their friends laugh at you for whatever reason. Maybe it has nothing to do with you. Maybe they actually liked you, but you're crushed by that experience and you're like, I'm never, ever, ever going to do that. And then we take all those decisions and we don't just like, oh, well, that happened. I'll do something else different. No, we carry those into the future. We're like, I'm never Ever, ever, ever going to do that again for the rest of my life. And then that wisdom becomes this limiting view of what's possible. And okay, this works, but only this little narrow path works for me in life. And we become constrained. At some point, we retire and die.

It's, it's, it's, it's a big, it's a big problem. And, you know, I sat down to write this book on delegation and I realized that most of, most of the issue, the reason it's called Get Over Yourself and is that, is that, you know, most of the half of the book is on, is on our mindset issues that get in the way of delegation because tactically a lot of us know what we need to do. It's not rocket science how to actually tactically delegate. Sure, there's processes and there's ways to do it well and, and I get to all that. But the biggest things that keep us from delegating are fear and distrust and need to control and need to be perfectionist. It's all stuff in here.

Yes.

And to your point, Bill, it's years and years of experiences and failures and challenges that lead us down this path of fear and distrust where all of a sudden it's like, oh, I can't do that because it's not going to work out. Because, you know, it's funny.

Just a personal plug. We just relaunched our scaling up workshop. We do this thing every month now. And you can go to our website, scalingcoach.com and you can register for this. But what's interesting, why I bring it up now is that we put mindset work at the right at the beginning of this workshop. And I notice already in the first couple instances of this, what I'm seeing is that people who bring a real challenge, something that's really frustrating them about their business, and they do that mindset work at the beginning of the thing, get a lot out of it, and people are just like, I'm just working on this and I don't really have any problems and I'm not willing to look in the mirror, that kind of thing, you're not going to get as much from it. But if you want to bring a real challenge, something that's frustrating you and you're willing to have a breakthrough in your mindset around it, then we'll talk about which of the scaling up tools apply and can make a difference. But we're going to start all of these workshops, a little bit of mindset work around an area of challenge frustration for you and your Business.

I love that it sounds like a great, a great program and certainly any EOers or YPOers or EOAers out there that have experienced the forum model will know just how powerful working on that mindset is and, and how all consuming it can be and ultimately. And at the end of the day, it is so rarely a tactical issue. It is almost always a mindset issue that's getting in the way and distracting us and, and keeping us from doing what we kind of already know we need to do.

Be interesting to see we're going to do some live versions of it in some evening things for some of the EO chapters and YPO groups and things like that around. And I've started putting in a little bit of that in the accelerator sessions that I lead to just explore first a mindset around a topic. I just did a bunch of ones around people and people workshops and people are by far and away the most frustrating part of and challenging part of our business because people aren't logical, people are psychological, as Vern likes to say.

I'm bummed we didn't meet. My last book, Bill, was the Art of People. So we're on the same page about the importance of people skills.

So talk to us about delegation and Scott and this New York real estate agent and tell that story.

Yeah. Well, first a, a important caveat that all the names have been changed. But you know, the, the I talked about someone like Scott and I. Exactly. And I talked about, about the stakes here. Yeah. And Scott was a very, very successful entrepreneur.

Yeah.

Who built a wonderful seven figure, you know, eo a qualified business. But he came to me when we were talking, we were talking about our kids and he said, you know, I, I've got a 16 year old kid who's, whose childhood I missed and got a lot of money now and I've got a lot of success, but at what cost? And it broke my heart. And Scott's not alone there. There are. Yeah.

By the time they get to 16, they're already writing you out of their life.

That's right. And they're countless. There are countless, countless examples of this in the book I write about a deathbed research Bill and you know, people on their deathbeds. Basically less than 1% of people, as you can imagine. Sort of. It's almost like joking. But shockingly, fewer than 1% of people say they wish they had worked more. But the most common deathbed regret is not having as much time with family and friends as people would have wanted. And you know, for Me, when I had that conversation, it was, it was a game changer because I was already pretty good at delegation, but I wasn't necessarily as good at setting these people personal boundaries with my time. And I'm really proud of the fact that after that conversation I, I did and you know, you and I are recording this at 2pm Eastern Time, at 3pm Eastern Time, I will pick my son off a son up from the school bus as I do every single day. And you can't, you can't reach me between three and seven and I'm certainly not checking emails and I'm not taking meetings because that's, that's the time that I have with my 8 year old son every day. That might mean that I can't get some, some things done as quickly as I would have liked to anyway. And you know what, it might mean that my current business apprentice takes longer to get to eight figures. So what? So what? I'm not going to regret that on my deathbed, but I know I would have regretted not having more time with, with my son in his formative years, just as Scott regretted not having more time with his son when he, when he came to see me. And so, you know, if you are watching, if you are listening, I just. That hustle, that hustle mentality, that Gary Vee, who, who is terrific, very, he's very, very successful, ambitious, driven guy, great guy, but he's also been kind of the leader of the hustle, the hustle movement. And I think that there's a real downside to that. There's a real downside to entrepreneurs hustling at all costs, thinking they have to be the one to do all the work and potentially losing that precious time with their family that you absolutely never get back. You just don't. Like you said by 16, I mean, you always have a chance to move forward in your relationships. But relationships, a lot, a lot of relationships suffer, Bill, at the hands of entrepreneurs, you know, leaning in to their businesses. And the sad thing is, as we said before, it's not even the best outcome for your business necessarily. The best outcome to your business might be finding a partner or a vendor or an employee who can do this better than you can.

You know, let me. Yes, and Gary Vee and having a great life with a great relationship. So when my kids were, were 10 and 12. 11 and 13. Right. We were right in the middle of a profound business crisis. Like our business was cratering, the economy was messed up. It was the end of 2008, 2009 and we didn't know if we'd have a business, a house, any of that kind of thing, right? And so we're looking at this, but we also look regularly at our lives as well. And in doing that, we're like, wait a minute, this is that time. Because we said when we first got married, when we talked about having kids and what our family would be like, we said that when our kids hit this age, we're going to do some serious travel with the kids. Because we both traveled a lot. Like, we're going to take them to Europe and we're going to go to Asia and we're going to spend long time. Now, we had actually already done some travel with them. We brought them to trade shows in New York and to factory visits in Asia and things like that. So we'd done a little bit already, but we're like, no, we're supposed to take long time. So we said, okay, next year we're gonna go for the summer to Italy, maybe some other places, but. But for sure to Italy. And we'll either go with backpacks and kids and like, I did a trip with my dad at 13, 14, or we are gonna go in, in style, right? Because we don't know if we'll have a business in our house still. And then over the next year, we produced a profound breakthrough and we started going through a period of rapid growth. And so we ended up with a really great trip. But over that year, I started telling my team, yeah, next summer I'm going, and so how are you going to handle this when I'm gone? So we had all the things that you'd learn from scaling up Rockefeller habits. We had the meeting routines and we had the scoreboards and dashboards and we had quarterly plans and we had all that kind of stuff and daily huddle and that kind of thing. But I still was very hands on. I wasn't really delegated. I was involved in everything. So the shift was not about any tools, but about my relationship to the tools and my empowerment of people. And so I just stopped. Instead of solving every problem that walked in my office every day, I just said, what are you going to do when I'm gone? How are you going to handle this? What do you think you should do? And I just stopped solving people. And it took a lot of work and practice to do that. But.

But.

I got a month in Italy with my kids at 11 and 13. I got a month. And that time never comes back. You know, they're 24 and 26 today, and all of these moments are precious and they don't come back. But not only did I get that, but my company got stronger. So it's a yes and kind of thing. And then if I look today, both my kids are entrepreneurs in different realms and like world class, in their twenties already in their specific fields. And along the way we took them to the factory and we shared with them business struggles and we helped them shut up. They helped set up trade shows at the Javits center and they did things like that that were, you know, not. We took them out of school to do stuff sometimes like. And they learned, even without us lecturing them about entrepreneurship, what it took to start. Run businesses.

Yeah, no, it's, it's, it's, it's really meaningful and it's, that's amazing that you were able to, to, to do that vacation. And it's funny because I have, I, I have another story in the book. I, I forgot who. I, I don't, I don't remember all the names that I changed it to. So I'm going to call this person Scott also. But I was, I was coaching. Scott was a, an accelerator. I was coaching who. I've never taken a vacation in, in four years in his business. And he came to me just absolutely petrified. And I, I said, but if he didn't take a vacation, he was going to lose his marriage. Like, it was a big deal. He had to take his vacation. Yeah. And I said, yeah, yeah, you're going to take this vacation. You're going to put people in charge, you're going to trust them and you're going to set some boundaries around time that you will work no more than 30 minutes. What I, what I do when I go on vacations, I set those boundaries. Fortunately, I don't sleep a lot, so when everyone goes to sleep, I'll do like, you know, 11pm to midnight will be my, like catch up on work time every night. Right. So we set that up for Scott, Big Scott. And, and, and he came back and he said, dave, not only did I have a great vacation, but everything got done. Everything got done. So I wrote a chapter in the book about going on vacation and how valuable it is. And I even challenge people to take a fake vacation. If for whatever reason you can't afford to or you're not, you know, you don't actually want to take a vacation. Take a big, Take a fake vacation. Tell them all you're going on vacation and hang out and read in your house for a week. And guess what? You'll find out things, the place won't burn down, things will go fine. Who knows, people might even feel empowered to come up with a couple of ideas that you, that, that you wouldn't have had otherwise.

I think it helps to get people ready for it. Ready yourself ready others to plan for it a little bit. I also find that it's very hard for me to take a fake vacation. So I generally have to put in something like I'm going skiing, I'm going surfing, we're going to fly here. Until I buy a ticket or do something like that, I often don't end up, I end up shorting it. I'm going to work a little bit longer on this new course or whatever. I'm going to talk to that client, I'm going to take some calls and then I don't end up doing it. But if I commit myself in some way with like dollars and bookings and it helps a lot. Like, okay, I'm going to go away, I'm going to get another place to stay and I'm going to go right there. You know, I'm going to work on a book or something. You know, that's a different. There's is usefulness in boxing yourself in.

Yeah. I was ideal as a vacation with your family and spending that time if you don't have a family. I actually, that was going to be my, my next idea was going to be write a book. You know, I run into entrepreneurs all the time. They're like, oh, I have a book in me, but I've just never had the time. Okay, well, make the time. Go write that book and watch your. Let your team shine. Let your team rise to the occasion. And, and, and by the way, if you, if you can't do that, well, then maybe you have some delegation issues, but also maybe you have some team issues and maybe you need that. Maybe, maybe you've gotta find somebody that's amazing that can be your lieutenant. Right. I mean, yeah. None of us do this on our. You can't scale a business on your own. You just can't. We all, all need great, great talent to bring in to, to help us.

Talk to us about your exec assistant you shared in preparation. Tell us, tell, tell us about that.

Well, I think we're talking about Rob. Although I've had EAs throughout my whole career, which have been great. So I met. So this, it's kind of a crazy and amazing kind of current entrepreneurship story. I mentioned all those college students that have worked for us.

Yeah.

And through the years and so, so I was on, I don't even remember company three or four and continuing the model of college students working for me. Yeah, and Rob was my EA while he was in college. For a couple years he had worked, he had co authored a third edition of a book with me. He had worked on a million dollar real estate client with me and he was helping me with the software company, doing some, some recruiting work, some operations work, et cetera. And he came to me his senior year, he said, Dave, I think there's a business model here in connecting people like me with people like you. I feel like you've been hiring all these college students for all these years and it's been really valuable for you. And he said, and you know, for me, he said, honestly, I've learned more from you than I've learned from, from three and a half years of school. And I said, you know Rob, you're totally right. Let's, let's start it. And within a few weeks we were business partners. We started a company called Apprentice, which is a network that connects entrepreneurs with the top college level talent. And I'm very proud to say that Rob went from being my EA and somebody that I was, you know, his boss to my mentee and my partner on this. And two and a half years later he had an EO qualified business at the age of 23. So it's a pretty, it's a pretty cool, it's a pretty cool story. And to me it's proof that anyone can, you know, with a great idea and the great and the right mentor can, can, can do amazing things. And so I'm always thinking about how I can lift people up and, and find great people to, to mentor and potentially go into business with. And I think the, the next level, the next level up from being a great delegator is really being a, a great mentor. And you know, you talked about people skills, but thinking less about task, you know, sort of task is the, is the, is the, is the baseline then, then project, then company, then life, right? Like, how can, how can I really impact this person's life for the better and really get to know and understand them in a way that you all can solve problems together and maybe start a business together.

That's a really important thing that you pointed to there, that I see again and again, really thinking about connecting with people. Who is this person? What do they care about? What are they great at? What are they passionate about? That is key to getting more out of focus. I can remember an entrepreneur I worked with Some years ago at a business, he's like, I don't know what to do to motivate my people. I've tried incentives and spiffs and games and nothing seems to work. I'm like, well, what do they care about? What matters to them? He's like, I don't really know. I'm like, okay, well, I got a little extra time today. Let me go talk to a few. So I bounced around his office for a little bit and I came back and I'm like, okay, who's ready to start a family? I don't know. Who would like to buy a home?

I don't know.

Who's never taken a trip outside the United States? I don't know. Who wants to go back to college? I don't know. All those people work for you and you need to go figure that out. Because when you can connect what they're doing here to what they really care about, then you'll have access to something. And you know, in light of that, some of those people left working with him. They worked with him for a while. They raised some performance. They got up and some people moved on to do some of those other things. But that's great because they then had a great relationship with like, well, that's the place I learned that. And to the extent that, and where they didn't know that, then people moved on because they're like, you don't know me, you don't care about me. You know?

Yeah, yeah. No. It's really, really important and often overlooked because people are so task focused and outcome focused that maybe they lose sight of the importance of that. But it can't be, it can't be overstated. I my, you know, folks have a lot of different tools and assessments here. My favorite tool by far that I include in Get Over Yourself. I teach all my authors to always hold their book up. So if you're watching the video, there you go is the Enneagram. So the Enneagram is centuries old assessment system that looks at core motivation and 9, 9 core motivations that people have. Every single person that works for me takes the Enneagram assessment. So I understand what that core motivation is. So I know that if you're motivated by connection, I'm going to spend some real time getting connected with you and understanding you in a really deep personal level. If you're motivated by achievement, I'm going to help you be the highest achiever and, and publicly recognized.

Yeah.

And if you're motivated by detachment, I'm learning. I'm going to let you go and stay away from you and let you learn as much as possible. But that those motive motivating factors are huge and people really respond to them.

Yeah, I know a lot of folks who are very big fan. I haven't used the Enneagram much, but they like it for that reason. Thinking of motivation. We use the CliftonStrengths tools a whole lot for understanding talent themes and where you love to spend your time and understanding each other, but a particular focus on what, what drives people, what do they care about and then getting really tangible about it. Like is there a specific thing, an object, an experience, whatever that people are fixated, that's an expression of that for them. Like understanding people is really good. Hey, before we turn into a pumpkin here and run out of time, let me just say the book is get over Yourself. You held it up there, go find it, Amazon or wherever you get books, that kind of thing. We'll put the title on the screen as well so that people can find it and read it and that kind of thing. It's been an absolute pleasure to talk about getting better at delegating, understanding what drives people and learning to give things away. I think most of us as business leaders would not want to end our careers like Queen Elizabeth dying on the job. We should probably give it away to our successor sooner and develop that person. And with that we can let our organizations grow. But there is something about letting go, about empowering, about entrusting, about teaching people to take some risk, about letting them stub their toe a little bit that I think is really powerful. I love that you wrote this book.

Thank you so much for having me and I am delighted to to chat with anyone that, that that wants a free coaching. I do. Scheduledave.com every Thursday afternoon I meet with folks that want, want some help. I love, love, love talking to entrepreneurs. And Bill, if, if people take one thing away from this, I hope they'll really think through their priorities in life and make sure that if they want to take their that vacation with family that they prioritize it and they figure it out. Figure out a way to delegate and empower so that you can get those priorities in your life done.

Seize the moment, seize the day, seize the month. These things matter huge. They're precious and inescapable. You know, in 2020 I invited my family to join me in the middle of a business trip across eight countries and we all met in Greece and late February of 2020 and you know, the world was about to change a few weeks later and everybody was a little bit nervous because they could sense it coming. But my son, my daughter, my adult son, adult daughter, my wife and I joined and we had a little over a week together in Greece, right? Everything changed after that. Like we all kind of shut down and that trip wasn't possible. And then since that time, now my son's married and has a baby and all that kind of thing and life's moved on and you know, you couldn't do that trip again today the way that it was. And that was a magical time. And my business got better. In the process, we learned everything. So take that moment. You can not only get that precious thing for yourself, but you could actually make your business thrive in the process of doing that work that gets you to that place. All right, thanks again everyone for watching. For listening. You'll find our workshops and free tools and things like that@scalingcoach.com ScalingCoach.com is where you can go find that the book get over yourself. And thanks again. Thanks to store on who gets our show produced each week and to my friend and mentor Vern Harnish, the creator of the Scaling up framework and the Rockefeller habits that came before it. Thanks again everyone for watching. We'll talk to you next time. Keep scaling. Bye bye. Foreign 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 line 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.