Twice Up the Mountain: Tony Hartl's Second Climb

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I'm in the middle of my doctoral research and I need some CEOs. Here's the question: Is there a point where working more hours actually indicates a worse leader? Nobody's measured it before. I'm measuring it now. So if you're a CEO or president with at least 10 people in the business and 3 direct reports, it takes just a few minutes and your team answers a few anonymous questions. But what you get back is a report comparing how you rate yourself to how your team rates you. That gap is usually the interesting part. The link is scalingcoach.com/study. Again, scalingcoach.com/study. The link's also in the show notes. Help me out now, please.

Are you sacrificing your personal life, your family, your health, your situation to grow something, to get a promise of something else? Someday. I think a lot of us do that that way. We struggle with our business, up years, down years, plateaued years, but we tell ourselves that we're building something along the way. We say we're managing it. We really work very hard not to let the impact of it affect our family and our relationship, but we sacrifice ourself again and again. And in fact, Sometimes even with that, we still feel pretty stuck. If you're feeling stuck with your business and stuck in your personal life in any way, and not just experiencing climbing levels of new challenge and new success, then this story might really be interesting for you. Hey everybody, I'm Bill Gallagher, scaling coach and host of the Scaling Up Business Podcast. This short conversation is from the podcast. Our show comes to you every week, about 700 episodes now, wherever you get them, like, subscribe, all that kind of thing. So I want to talk to you today about sort of two ways of running a business, the first and latter. In, in the book, there are three client stories where they led a business one way, then they had a transformation, they led it another. We also compare and contrast two well-known leaders that ran Disney, and we talk about Michael Eisner and Bob Iger, and we contrast that. So this is one of those stories. This is about a guy whose company I've worked with the last few years, Tony Hartle. Tony Hartle is a Crunch Fitness franchise partner. He has a company called Undefeated Trot, and Tony, back in his 20s, started a company, Planet Tan. He borrowed $10 $10,000. He started a business, ran to about 17 locations if memory serves me right. He was in every job. He started early in the morning, he worked till late at night, he got involved in everything. 17 franchises. So Tony was busy and he grew the business successfully. He grew it, he sold it for more than $10 million. Tens, I think he says, or discloses. So it was pretty good. A lot of us would love to have that kind of thing. You might be very happy with that. But he was exhausted and his marriage didn't survive. His marriage was very short-lived. So it had an impact on his marriage and his family. His whole marriage and family situation collapsed. He sold the business, made some money. It wasn't a full resounding win because of those kinds of things. And he was exhausted by it. He did well, he did okay, but so much more was possible for a guy like Tony. So he takes 10 years off. He goes between Jackson Hole and Argentina. He dabbles in winemaking and other kinds of things, but he spends a lot of time talking to really interesting people, people like Vern Harnish, my friend and mentor, and he thinks about, is there another way to do this? A way with leverage. After taking some time off and feeling that he's really too young to be fully retired. Tony gets back into it. This time he starts a new business, but this time Tony's gonna protect his personal life. He's gonna raise his team up. He's not just gonna make himself millionaire, he's gonna make a bunch of people millionaires. He's gonna elevate them and build a much bigger business. So, uh, Tony buys into the Crunch Fitness franchise. Um, so he buys some territories, he starts with a couple of them. That's when I meet Tony. And I start to help him grow that business. Now, I'm not going to quote the exact numbers here, but Tony's business now is, is thousands of employees and dozens of locations. The valuation already with, with a little bit of outside investment in is disclosed as in the hundreds of millions of dollars, strongest valuation in their sort of category and as long as anybody knows, and is tracking now a goal of 100 gyms, which should put them at a valuation over $1 billion, right? So, you know, member, friend, client, right? I've helped him with getting the people right and the execution right and the meeting rhythms right and all those kinds of things in the world of scaling up. Tony though helps his kids get ready most mornings. He makes most of the family meals, he cooks them. So he's home and cooking family meals most nights. Tony almost never spends the night away, like travels on business. He's home, he gets home and back. Sometimes he turns a trip into a thing for he and his wife, but he's that. So we're now well over 3,000 employees, hiring about 1,000 a year, opening at this point probably 2 gyms a month. So we've developed that engine of opening gyms and hiring people and running the base right so we're not eroding the base as we grow that. Meanwhile, he's getting home in time for dinner, having great time on the weekends and that kind of thing with his family. He focuses on the messaging, hiring great people, making a lot of people. He's counting now, how many people can I make millionaires, right? Each of the many executives and market partners, things like that in his business will become, fairly wealthy by their comparison in their worlds as a result of it. His helping other people grow is what will do that. And I notice this again and again with Tony, with Michelle, with Larry, contrasting Iger versus Eisner. There are two different ways of running a business, right? One of them is you rely on your team, your tools, that kind of thing, and you have a personal life. Your time is the taking thinking time and assembling the team. You're growing through the team. And the other way is you're in every business. You're involved in everything. It's responsible. You're just being thoughtful. Different way of running things, right? They both grow. Like Michael Eisner grew Disney very, very large. Bob Iger also grew the business, but Bob Iger's relied on partners and team members and built something up so he had time for the personal thing. He also, I would say, had a lasting, larger ultimate success because of building not just through superhuman effort, but through a whole team in a coordinated way. Same thing's true with AI today. Are you using AI just to spin up more projects for yourself, or using it to make you work better in your own thing in the smart way? We can use our teams and our tools better than ever before but only if we resist the urge to get involved in everything. And there's so many reasons. We'll be talking more about what some of those moves are and why we do them. And we've talked in some past episodes about that. But I think that's the key is, are you doing this the first or second mountain way, right? Like, so we climb the mountain a particular way. We use our team, we use superhuman effort. We do it together, we do it alone. If you do it together, you go longer, you go further, you go faster, it's sustainable, you enjoy the ride, it results in a better life, it results in something that's more saleable, has greater legacy. When Tony's company gets to be, you know, enough thousands of people and 100 locations, it'll likely be worth a billion dollars. And Tony will of course make some great money off of that. He's already made some, but Lots of people on his team will have made some money and they will be so running all of it. It's big enough already now that Tony can't possibly run it. The difference between dozens of locations and 17 locations is profound. The difference between hundreds of people and thousands of people is a big deal, right? But you won't get to thousands of people by waiting for that to happen. You have to start to disengage and shift the way you operate. So that's the ask this week, is which way are you running it? And what would you need to do to begin to shift now? What if instead of waiting for the thousands of people to show up or that kind of thing, you just started being and acting and doing things like the leader of a big company, where you empower and encourage people to rise up and to carry their own thing, to be fully accountable? Instead of telling them what to do, you invited them to do it. And then you said, okay, I'm gone, I'm going home for dinner now, I'm going to go see my family, I'm going to step away, I'm going to get a workout in, I'm going to go see my friends, I'm going to take some time off. That kind of living is the invitation here, really, of this book and of this thing. And, and that's the thing that I keep asking myself, um, myself in my own life, right? And then my clients— which way are we doing this? And is this lasting? Is this saleable? See, I think most of us would love to have a saleable business, but unless you start to think about that, you won't have it. Because if you just run it the way with your hands involved in everything, like giving yourself a super job, you don't get to the other side of that. So that's really my invitation this week, is to start to look for what— how are you running the business today? What kind of leader are you today? Are you like young Tony, or you like later Tony? Are you involved in everything, helping everyone and being responsible for everything? Or are you really hiring people, paying them well, and demanding, requiring them to do their job, not stepping in for them, encouraging them, supporting them, but really expecting great things from them? So, two different ways of looking at it. How would you know? Well, you want to talk to the people people you work with, you want to talk to your foreign mates, you want to take a long hard look in the mirror, talk to your spouse, look around you and start to see, am I doing this in a way that's going to cost me my family, my health, my vitality, my passion, my joy? Um, is it really like that? Are you like I was, where you're going through the motions, you're making the major events, but you're missing the minor moments? Um, are you torching your family and your marriage? Is your weight gain increasing? Or are you doing it kind of the second way where you're really encouraging a great team to stand up, where you can go away to Italy or Bali or Hawaii or like whatever, Costa Rica, where you can go have some thinking time, when you can go on a motorcycle track with your friends or go fishing in Alaska and, and living that kind of a life? So That is really what I want. I want you to have a great business that's growing great with a team that's great, that's saleable, that you could exit from, and at the same time have a great life. At the same time, not after you do it, not after you retire, and then I'm going to go do all those bucket list things. But like right now, have both of those things together. So great life, great business. No like holding things small because, uh, you think it'll tap you out. So that's the invitation. What kind of thing are you leading this week? What would it take to make a difference? That's your challenge. That's what we're talking about. We'll talk to you about the next step in all of it next week. In the meantime, Busy Is Broken, wherever you buy your books, Amazon, Barnes Noble, I don't know, probably everywhere by the time you're seeing this message. And meanwhile, I am in Greece as we talk about this, doing my 5 weeks off. Not here in my, at my home, but off way in Greece, working on the research that continues this thinking for my PhD and promoting the launch of the book right now. So find it now. Go order yourself a copy. Get some of the preorder extras. BusyIsBroken.com is the website. You'll find Busy Is Broken on Amazon or wherever else. Until next time, keep scaling. We'll talk to you soon. Bye-bye. Thanks for listening today. One last thing. If anything in this episode hit home, my book digs into it further. Busy Is Broken: Do Less, Scale More. It's all about how to stop drowning in work and build a business and a team that scales without you. Available right now with content samples at busyisbroken.com. Go grab it. Be less busy.