The CEO's Journey: Mastering Leadership with Shrad Rao

The thing is, your relationship with your employer, your employee, is dependent on you actually fulfilling the obligations of payroll.

The greatest thing you will need to do as a leader is to find out and embrace the leadership of $100 million leader before you're going to be able to get everyone to follow you and bring them there with you.

One of the biggest learnings that I've had recently is that we think people are trained on the skills for the job.

Good day and welcome to the Wealthy Entrepreneur podcast. I am your host, Bob Govreau. It is great to have you here with us. Just before I introduce the special guest that we have in today, I just want to remind you that the Wealthy Entrepreneur podcast is the place where we dissect the elements that contribute to entrepreneurial success from mindset and leadership to profits and revenue. Now this specific episode, we're going to talk about mastering leadership and culture. A conversation with Shrad Rao. Did I say that right?

Yes, you said that perfectly. Thank you.

Excellent. So before, before I bring shroud in and we start having these conversations about leadership because I gotta tell you, before we kick this off, mind blowing conversations about leadership and the challenges of being a CEO, but I want to do a formal introduction. So Shrad is wage points long suffering CEO as he describes himself. It's only a partial joke given the intensity of payroll where you have to get everything right all the time. Is that not the truth or what? Knowing how difficult this subject matter is for most small business employers, his approach was building a simple product and backing it by the friendliest, most approachable support in the business. He's come to learn that leadership throws you curveballs even when you think you've mastered all the calls. In his free time, Shradd contemplates how he found himself in this position. I absolutely love and I'm excited to welcome Shrad to the show. Shrad, how's everything going?

I'm great, Bob, how are you?

I'm doing great, man. I got, I got to tell you, before we hopped on here, it is not easy building a business. And you know, I love it when, when you get the. It must be nice, right? It must be nice that you've built this business that has a successful track record and this wonderful brand. Must be nice that you've maybe got the flexibility to work outside during the day or to maybe take a Friday off. But what people don't really understand is what happens behind the scenes. Shrad, tell us the story of how you built up your organization, where you've come from and where you're at today.

Yeah. Well, thank you for that intro, Bob. I appreciate it. I mean, look, you know, leadership is a art and a science, and so what's really interesting is that I don't feel like I never. I never seem to learn all the lessons. No matter how many times, how many times I go to bat, I seem to find more. More and more waiting for me at every. Every corner. But, yeah, so I started the company just about 12 years ago now. So I've been at this for some time. For me, like, you know, building payroll has always been. It's a very. The topic itself is, like I said, it's very intense. Like, people generally don't like it. I mean, there's not a lot of people who are like, I love payroll. I wish I could, you know, name my child after it. I like, it's. It doesn't. It doesn't really inspire anyone. And at the end of the day, like, if you get it wrong, those consequences are pretty dire, right?

Like, I mean, it's pretty sensitive, right?

It's sensitive.

It's a sensitive area because every business owner has employees who are negatively sensitive towards payroll. Not positive, just negative.

Yes, just negative. And the thing is, your relationship with your employer, your employee, is dependent on you actually fulfilling the obligations of payroll. So the relationship itself gets fractured. When you have a problem with this, in this situation, and given how tenuous all of these relationships can be, you want to avoid it, you know, in anything that you can avoid those relationships getting fractured, you. You. You really want to spend time and attention there. So anyway, so I wanted to build something that, you know, I've always loved small businesses. I think they're the best people to work for. And so just being in support of them and building something that was, you know, taking something that's difficult, making it simpler, and then making the. The conversation around it. Like two friends were talking, right? Like, imagine if you were calling someone about something you don't know a lot about. You don't know how to describe your problems, for example, But a good friend can help you work through that. And that's essentially what the feeling we wanted from customers. We wanted customers to get when they contacted us, and that included our partners as well. For example, you guys are one of our awesome partners. One of our awesome partners that, you know, you have a bunch of your clients using WagePoint, obviously, we're super grateful for that. But even when your partner, when your customers contact us or you contact us, we want you guys to feel like you just have buddies on the other side, looking after you. Looking like talking about the problem with you. And so the idea was to build the kind of business where every customer would feel like they're our only customer, even if we have 25,000 of them, which is essentially the way we've built the company so far. Wow.

So 25,000 customers. Now, how big is your team?

Well, these days, to be honest with you, with ebbs and flows, I don't know the exact number right now, but I'm hazarding around 200.

And, you know, that becomes more difficult to know that exact number as the team gets bigger. I've learned this over the last couple years. The only reason I tend to know is we use a software called Bamboo that manages a lot of our internal. Just employee documents and whatnot. And it gives me an employee count, so I have to check it from time to time. So typically, my answer is, well, it was 105 as of last week, but I'll have to recheck it again this week because I'm not sure.

Right.

It's. It's. Once you get over 30, it doesn't. It's not overly relevant anymore.

No, I think there's another inflection point somewhere around maybe. I think I've heard 300 or so. And. And there is a compounding nature to this thing. Like, it gets harder the more people you have, because the. The reality is you have to galvanize people, right? You have to kind of teach them how to cooperate, collaborate, and coordinate, and they have to do all three of them at an expert level for your company to grow. So when you take any group of people, right, Even like a small basketball team of five people, or you still have this three Cs, and those are hard to do with five people. So now when you keep compounding that, like, sometimes I was listening to indra Newey, the CEO of Pepsi, and she had 300,000 people working under her, and I was like, you know, like, barf. Like, how could you even live in that? It's like a small country. Right? So anyway, so, yeah, I, like, I. Yeah, just thinking about that makes me feel a little sick inside.

But I was just thinking about hitting leave on this podcast.

Yes, exactly. Yeah. Because there's real challenges to this thing. And, like, so, yeah, there's a very big difference between doing leadership and then doing it really well. And when you have to do it really, really well, it's very, very hard. It's way harder than most people. Most people realize.

And so you've. You've Been in this for a few years. You've built up an incredible team. You know, from our experience, working with, with your team has been nothing but enjoyable and seamless, which is, which is fantastic. What is your intention with wagepoint as you're moving forward? Like, I understand you guys have had some pretty high growth and so where do you want to take this, this baby?

Well, so here's the thing. Like, we, we were having very high growth, but recently it's been, it's been starting to get a little bit harder to do the things that I expect from a high growth company. And this is what you and I were talking about just before you hit play on the podcast. So my, my style of leadership has typically been, let's be honest, okay, none of us really want to work for a living all day long. It just doesn't make any sense. Like, I don't like to like, pretend that this is like the, this is the purpose of our life. Right. But what we can do is we can view work as a place of growth, right, where we experience challenges in a very self, like in a very contained way. You're experiencing things like you said, like confrontation, something that you might not love, but now you're forced to do it and you're forced to grow in that direction. Right. But it's still safe, right? Like, you're not going to get killed because you've confronted someone.

Hopefully, yeah. Hopefully not. Geez, those are some rough confrontations.

Yes, exactly. So, but the thing is that you get the practice, you work the muscle and all that other stuff. So work is very much a, like, I'm not one of those let's change the world kind of guys. I'm like, let's change our internal experience of the world. Let's actually grow from, from a subjective point of view and sort of accept that challenge in life as hard. And this is just a, it's kind of a safe way to give feedback. For example, like if you go on the street and you try to give someone feedback, you're probably going to get the backhand of, you know, they are the right. But in a, in a company, both parties are sort of forced to give and take it in a way that's measured and reasonable and that's a good thing. It actually teaches us how to do it in life too. So it's always been my, I'm not like, like I said, I'm not like the, you know, the guys who go on the TechCrunch stage and says, that's it, I'm gonna We're gonna change the world. I'm more like. Like I said, let's change our inner experience. But then recently, what I've been thinking is, like, when I say that, what I'm really doing is I'm talking to. I believe I'm talking to people who are seeing the problem the same way as I am. But most people don't do that. They don't actually see it like that, but they see it as a place where they are coming to get something from the situation. And growth is not always the top of thing, the thing that is top of mind. So we have made, I would say, a series of mistakes, particularly starting with hiring. Just hiring people without that growth mind, without that growth mindset. And that alone has cost us quite significantly, I think, in terms of our momentum. We were one of those companies that were doubling every year until just recently when I just wasn't seeing that same momentum. And I'd say that just not focusing on that, hiring people who are. Who care about growth mindset has been probably one of the big, sort of the big lessons learned for me. And so my leadership has gone from. Or my thinking around leadership has gone from sort of being realistic about it, which is like, you know, what are we really all here to do? To switching it to the idea of saying, well, how do I bring people through the continuum from within themselves, like, where they bring out the best in them? How do I. How do I actually bring the best? How do I take the potential that someone has and actually pull it out of them? With their. With their help, of course, with their assistance, with their consensus. But how do I actually bring out the best in a person? And that has become my new sort of mantra, my new mandate. And doing that is literally a thousand times harder than I think I would have imagined in the past, because it requires you to kind of bring awareness to the problem. You got to get their buy in. You got to, like, actually work there. Like, you have to teach them how to empower themselves. That is a very, very complicated thing to do. When I've started to realize that that is the only way to keep sustained growth in the company. You need to create people who think exponentially so that the entire business continues to grow exponentially. And so to do that, you need to find people who want to think exponentially or want to at least want to be led in that direction. So you got to change the players, and you got to change the game. And that's what I've been thinking about very, very recently.

Yeah. And just we Were chatting again right before we jumped on saying, we've kind of gone through a similar transform. A part of ours was a little bit more forced than yours. Well, in a, in a different way, maybe in a different way. So we acquired a company which you might have had experience with in Volta a few years ago, and, you know, bringing two cultures that were very similar, but one was a remote sort of environment and one was a virtual environment. And that was a pretty drastic change. So we had to go back through and reinvent who we are and what is important to us. And one of the core values that really ties into what, what you were talking about was choose opportunity so that we're always thinking about what the next level of growth and innovation could look like as a business. And really for us, you know, we defined that. I almost actually went at this backwards shrut because, you know, as much as I read all these books on leadership, I don't know, I feel like everybody's got to adapt it in their own way. So. So when I was going through these core values, I was more so identifying the behaviors and the outcomes that I didn't want to have happen. And one of them was I did not want to have a stale environment that wasn't embracing growth and change and innovation. So I was like, well, what do we do? How do we define that? Well, we reverse engineered it and said, well, choosing opportunity is just something that is part of who we are. So anyway, I completely understand and you know, one of the, one of the interesting things, conversations that I had with, with a good friend and colleague who's built a few companies and exited, he said to me one time over dinner, he said, well, what is it that, you know, you want to accomplish? And I was sharing some pretty lofty goals and I share pretty openly that we want to get to be a hundred million dollar professional services firm. And, and he said, okay, well, do you know what it takes to be a leader of a hundred million dollar enterprise? And I said, no, like, I'm barely hanging on now. And he said, you know, the, the greatest thing you will need to do as a leader is to find out and embrace the leadership of $100 million leader before you're going to be able to get everyone to follow you and bring them there with you. I was like, oh man, that sounds like a lot of work. And you're embracing that in reality right now too.

Yeah, I mean, like, that's what I mean. Like you, you have to keep redefining what you think of as leadership. Like it, you There is no, there's no, there's no book for this really. Like every, it's everyone's experience of that, of that situation. But until you step in the seat, it's sort of like, you know, that Game of Thrones moment where like, you know, the, the king is moving towards the throne and sitting on there. Until you actually sit in that seat, you have no idea what it's like. And nobody on the outside world can tell you this because the thing is that, like, for me, I've always been, I've always been like, you know, the guy who wants to, I want to be your friend. Right? And you can't do that the same way when you're in this, in the seat. You, you can be friendly, but you can't be someone's friend. So recently I've been, I've been telling people, look, I want you to understand that I want us to become a high performance sports team. Like, I want us to be like that. And just like that, we're going to have sometimes competitive tension between us or, you know, like whatever, like our ideas. I mean, like, you're going to have to compete for the best ideas and I'm fine with putting my own. You know, I don't have to be like the guy who has the best ideas in the room. I just want us to compete on the best ideas so that the best idea emerges. Emerges, Right.

And that the team's winning.

Yeah. So, but if we settle in our, you know what we're. What if we settle, right? Then you just don't have that in the end of the day, like you don't push each other. So you have to like, you know, when you're, like, when you're friendly, then you tend to go like, ah, don't worry about it. Right? But when you're like friendly and competitive, then you're actually pushing each other far beyond what's comfortable for both parties. And that's, that's really, when I think about my executive team, that's what I'm pushing them to do right now. And I would say, by and large, I'd say they're grateful for it. This is the other thing that was a bit surprising. Like you would think that they actually are, they want the buddy, but they actually want the leader. And because they, they want to be better at what they do. Right? And so really what you're doing is you are, you have to be the example. Like people say this all the time, right? You hear this. Be the, be the example. Set the example as leader. And you don't really, again, know what that means until you see people following your example. And then you say, oh, shit, if I don't do something different and I don't. If I don't set the bar, they're never going to meet that bar. So that means you have to now start becoming everything that you want them to be. And that part is the part that's work. Because what most people think that happens is you think that you're going to be the leader and other people are going to do the work. Right? But actually you have to do most of the work and they will come close to you, essentially. So that's the part that's the hardest.

Oh, yeah, yeah, I know. And you know what, it's funny because my wife and I have these conversations all the time. Well, maybe not all the time. They used to happen more frequently where she would be like, you know, what part of building this team, you know, of a hundred plus people, wouldn't that mean that you would have to do less of the work? Yes, and. Right. And I would be like, well, yes, I am doing a less percentage of the work, but my role is not getting less work, it's actually becoming more intense. And yes, it may be less, you know, accounting work and it may be less software development or working on code related to how things are working, but it doesn't mean that the intensity and the importance of the role is changing. In fact, it's probably getting more difficult, more challenging. And, you know, I don't see that going anywhere but up.

Yes, well, and that's the thing, like your capacity to change has to be almost endless, Right? Because it's like you are the eagle soaring above the forest. And so you have no limit to how high you can fly. Like, you have to be able to continue to go. And in this case, the forest is growing vertically for some reason, in my analogy. But essentially that, that's kind of the idea is like you have to stay on top of the problems or on top of the set of problems that you see. And the thing is an intellectual game, it's an intellectual puzzle because you have, you know, you have all. Like, I was, I was at the Amazon, Amazon's office in Paris last year and I was talking to them about something and they told me, you know, we really want to do this initiative, but the thing is we don't have the resources. And I was, I just burst out laughing because I was like, see, now here's Amazon, right? Saying that they don't have the resources for Something. And so the thing is like anytime my team comes and says, you know, we want to do something, but we don't have the resources. I always think about Amazon because I'm like, see, the thing is this will never end. Like, you could be the size of Amazon and you will still not have the resources that you need. So now the question is, what can you do with what you have? Right? Usually. And here's the other thing. I don't know if you, you've experienced this, but one of the biggest learnings that I've had recently is that we think people are trained on the skills for the job, but what they're not. So they may be trained on like how to move an Excel cell from 1, the copy and paste from one thing to another, but what they're not taught is how to delegate, how to do alignment building, how to get buy in, how to do change management. Like if you're introducing a new process, how do you actually introduce it in a way that you actually get the buy in from everyone, you get the desire to change actually stoked. How do you actually work those problems? So I don't know if you've, you've, we've started to do actual like behavior training or like skills training based on behaviors and mindset training. And both of those things are making far bigger, different than difference, than any sort of individual skill that you can cultivate. Have you guys had, have you guys been doing training of that nature? Like, how do you delegate, how do you, how do you do alignment setting and stuff like that? Have you done things like that in your, in your practice?

Yeah, we've, we've started and I think it's finding the sweet spot on how to do it the most effective way. Because what we did and just like we were talking about before, you know, you guys have a bunch of progressive, innovative roles for the new modern organization, right? So we had a culture coach that we brought in that was working with people one on one and it was great. You know, half the team maybe was taking advantage, not taking advantage in a bad way, but utilizing this resource and it was working tremendously for them. However, once we started changing the rules of accountability and we were making, you know, the individual leaders in each department more responsible for outcomes, all of a sudden you have a culture coach that's telling employees or team members to do one thing and then you've got the team leader who's trying to get them to do something else. So there was like conflicting guidance on this and it was all of a sudden I went, okay, this doesn't work anymore. So, so, you know, we scrap that and we look at the next iteration and say, well, how can we do this? Still get the benefits of what we were intending to do, but also support the accountability and outcomes of each of the team leaders.

You have hit it right on the head. So, so this is the thing, right? Culture is all the soft stuff. It has become all the soft stuff. It's the well being, it's the, you know, taking care of your employees and all that other stuff. And those things are important experience that the employee has with you. That's what the focus is on all the time. That's what culture gets equivocated to. But what it is is a combination of the well being and the performance. Okay? And so somehow over time, this is the performance has just fallen off the list and now it's all about the well being. And the issue with that is that you don't work in like we are here to do a collective enterprise, right? It's like we've been given a parcel of land and we have to cultivate it. Now if one person is busy cultivating or you know, sowing the seed and another person is sleeping somewhere underneath the tree, over time somebody's not eating, right? And the problem, the reason I'm so bullish on this recently is because our culture has become that. At which point like we have overcorrected in the direction of like employee well being and human well being. And that sounds crazy when you say overcorrected. But the thing is, we're not here. We're still sort of within a capitalist framework. So without that other side of it, you only end up having one of those pillars met. And it really has to be a balance of both because otherwise you don't actually have anything like accountability and ownership. Everyone, like, if I tell you some horror stories, my man, like we, we are so soft as a company that people there are people who have missed their targets for two years and we haven't done anything about it until recently when we finally did something about it. And even those people are like, you know what, it's fair that you did.

Something about it for sure. Yeah, well, and truthfully, that's sort of the play that we've had to go through over the last couple years. Because as a smaller organization, not maybe is necessary, right? Where there's people can step in and, and ensure that different people are hitting their goals or the departments are hitting their goals, but as the team grows, you know, it's a Shared responsibility. And it's not one that I can, you know, really move the needle on anymore. And I used to say, you know, I would be happy to put everybody on my back and get them across the finish line, but that's not the case anymore.

And no, you're like, you depend on other people to help you accomplish those goals. Yeah.

And to your point, you know, I think there's a discussion that always needs to be had. And I would say we potentially overcorrected as well. But I think that was maybe a Covid sort of sense that everybody needed that sense of security and well, being needed to be taken care of. So as leaders, compassionate leaders, we just did that and we focused on that versus, oh, wait a minute, we actually have to create a sustainable environment so that the organization will survive instead of. Right. Instead of just focusing on making sure that everybody was okay. Because that was the time we went through and. And we kind of did that too. We had to pull it back and say, okay, now everybody's good. Right? Everybody's feeling good. Okay, now we've got to get back to business here. And here is the responsibilities and the targets that we are going to put in place and that we're going to enforce because it has to happen for everyone to continue to feel good and have that well being taken care of. We need to hit these targets otherwise the whole thing falls off the wayside.

Yeah. Well, I don't know about you, but my, my, mine wasn't Covid related. Mine was. Or any sort of. Any trigger. I guess it was. I've always thought that if you do the right thing, the other person will do that too.

So sorry to hear that you were wrong.

Me too. Me too. I won't lie. There's a part of me that's disappointed in this, but I also think that it's not fully on them because if we don't set expectations clearly and if we don't communicate them on a regular basis, they may think they're doing the world's most bang up job. Right. So what I was telling you earlier is that when you look at our org chart, we have everything that you would need to succeed. Like we have all the like positions that we, you know, positions that are progressive positions, positions that are very transactional but with good people and all.

We have all of it share some of those roles and what they look like. Because I think this is an evolution of an organization that really has created a caring, successful culture that is now just going back to the accountability part of it and Saying this too is also important, but maybe share some of the titles of what those roles look like because I think it's important for people to hear that.

Well, so at one point we had like an employee experience specialist and their entire job was to work on the emotional intelligence part of, from a company standpoint, right? Like basically like teach self awareness and self regulation and things like that. And then we'd have you have learning and development person for example. And I know it's used to people inside of that space but like we have, like I said on paper, we have everything that you would need for a successful organization. And the thing is that when you actually start seeing what people do, how they do their work, that looks very different. So just using recruitment as an example, okay, where you source candidates is going to matter quite a bit. Okay. Now if you source candidates, like you know, if you're like, okay, I'm going to go to LinkedIn and do some outreach and I'm going to like put up a job post and then I'm going to wait for people to come to me. Let's say those are your two sources. Is that really the same as going to a place that high growth people already live and exist?

Right.

So you know, you imagine you sponsor a meetup, you just buy coffee for everyone at a meetup, but everyone at that meetup has showed up, shown up for growing themselves. Now that pool of candidates that you're hunting in has changed quite significantly, right? Because now you're not just getting people off the Internet or people you don't really, you don't know anything about. If you go to a place where those people have self, the growth focused people have self selected into that area now suddenly you've changed the, the, you have at least one very important dimension. So recruiting one version versus the other version gives you very different results. So what I find and, and you know, obviously I'm, I'm, I'm Canadian, I'm also American. So at this point I could, you know, I'd be equally discriminatory about both countries. The, the truth is that I don't think that Canadian talent and maybe even the US talent for, to some extent. But you know, I think the, this, the population size just makes us harder to like, harder to say definitively. But in Canada I feel like the productivity problem that we have is very much tied to how well we understand our jobs from the difference between doing it and doing it extremely well. So if you're going to be a recruiter, for example, okay, a talent acquisition specialist, and if you want to look for, if the mandate of the companies to go for high growth potential, people with high growth potential or people who are very internally motivated to grow, you're going to have to go hunt, quote unquote in the grounds when places where those people live, not the general Internet, but that specific you, you want to go to LinkedIn forums where that might be the case, or you got, you have to figure out how to get into those communities. You can't be like, oh, I, please let me in. They'll just be like, no, now what are you going to do? Right? You got to hustle to figure out how to do it in a way that's still kind of good for them and good for you. Right? And then let's say that now you have to test them when they've come into your, before they're going to come into your organization. The way we've been hiring Bob is my favorite way. And I'm totally being sarcastic when I say that, hey, Bob, you look like a good person. Come hang out with us. Yeah. Yeah. So instead of doing what we, we should be doing, which is what are the things that we need to understand about what Bob will have to do when he comes here? He'll have to, maybe his role will require some delegation or some alignment setting or whatever. How do we test for critical thinking? How do we test for, you know, decision making? And how do we test in a way that's still interesting? So we started to do, we started to do this stuff more and it's, it's the difference between like literally like getting the right candidate and the worst candidate in the seat. So when you start thinking about this, what I'm saying is that in Canada, at least in my, my experience, and it's been like 12 years, so you know, it's somewhat significant.

It's not fresh.

Yeah, it's not fresh. There are very few people who actually know how to do the job extremely well. They know how to do some aspects of the job, but doing the job and doing it well are so markedly different that we have to now understand the person that we've just inherited or just got into the company. Where are they at? How far are they away from what we expected? And those three month probation periods, like right now, again, the way we have, we've handled it is we're like, okay, I guess they've passed. Versus what are, what does it 30 days look like? What does 60 days look like? What does 90 days look like? So almost all of our mistakes have happened have have come down to understanding how to put what does actual structure look like and what does the follow through on that actually look like. So the reason I say all of this is so that any person listening to this podcast and hears about leadership and they think, I think I could do that. What you're going to find is that no matter how many times you have tried to solve a problem, you have to go back to that problem continuously. As, as long as you keep adding people to your team, you're to keep working the problem differently every single time. So that iterative style of building a company where you're iterating your own leadership, that is essentially, I think, the core of a high growth company. You had to iterate everything that you're doing continuously and that is where the exhaustion comes from. And that's why you feel so tired, right? It's motivating too. Don't get me wrong. There's lots of things that are very inspiring about it. You grow yourself, you watch other people succeed. It's quite rewarding. But that's the balance of it is that your, your energy is going to that iteration.

And I like that too. And I would say if I'm paraphrasing, you know, the problems don't change, but the solutions and how we solve those problems will. And you know, it's super interesting to think of it that way because it's true, right in the organization it's the same problems that come up over and over because those solutions no longer work. And now it's our job to find out the next solution to solve the problem.

But also I would say that the, the problem, the center of gravity of the problem changes a bit too. Like, so what I mean by that is, you know, there's this idea of solving the right problem. And the right problem tends to be something where you put, you have low effort and high impact. That's what you're looking for. You're looking to do the least amount of work to get the highest reward. That's, that's the game. But if you don't teach people how to do that, and now at 200 people, everyone has to do that because otherwise you have incremental gain. You don't have exponential gain. And high growth companies are all about exponential gain. So the idea is to teach everyone to solve the right problem. So when you start to like break this down, there's so many facets to getting it right that and any one of them you fuck up on, so to speak. Sorry about that. I don't know if that's allowed on your podcast. But. But any one of them, yeah, I'm on a terror these days for some reason, but any one of them, you get wrong, and it's sort of like an algorithm, you know, you're going to have. The outcome is going to be impacted by the. The fact that you've missed somewhere. So, yeah, it's. I mean, this is an esoteric conversation. Obviously. We're not giving, like, strategies. We're just talking about. It's. It's very difficult to call yourself a master at leadership. I'd say maybe, maybe there's like a, you know, a handful of people who think they are masters or they may actually be masters, but in reality, it's just an endless cycle of punishing growth for you and everyone.

And truthfully. Right. Like, it's. You might be having exceptional leadership success in the moment, but tomorrow's a new day with the same problems needing a different solution.

Oh, my God, you're so right, Bob. I've had those, like, woohoo, I'm doing an awesome job moment.

Today's my day. And the next day you're going, oh, my God, I need my inspirational videos or podcasts or something to listen to to pick me up.

Yeah, exactly. But I mean, look, I still recommend it for people. Like, I still think that, like, you know, going into leadership either as an entrepreneur or a, you know, even a manager, those are all very, very good things for you because it's like you get forced to grow up. You know, like, you. Some of your notions get challenged. You experience hard. Like, you know, the first time that you have an employee that sends a, I don't know, a complaint against you, whatever, like, or whatever it is, like, they complain to your boss about you, that's the first time that you kind of realize, whoa, this is actually a lot harder than I thought it was going to be. So all of that stuff, it kind of, you know, it makes you better just by the. Just by the sure effort of having to work through it.

Absolutely. Shrad, I could talk to you all day. I know we've got a tight time constraint here. I'm going to have you back if you're open to it. Let's. Let's do this again. Let's have some leadership banter another time as well. But in the meantime, how can people get a hold of WagePoint? How can they learn more about WagePoint and what you guys are doing to help people with their payroll needs?

Well, so wagepoint.com is obviously, as our domain, so that's where one place you'd find us. But the other thing that we've been thinking about, a lot about is how do we actually serve our customers differently than we do today. So one of the things that we are looking to do is all of the coaching that we're doing internally that we're finding very effective. We're thinking of turning that coaching outward and actually teaching our customers and just like, you know, teaching them how to do some of the, some of the, really the stuff that you actually need in your job that no one actually teaches you. And that could be delegation, it could be alignment building. There's a lot of things that we have got planned. So I would say that that would be. We would love to see more people or people start taking us up and actually showing up to some of the webinars and sessions that we have planned. It hasn't officially kicked off, but once we do start kicking this off, what we've found is that this, this coaching that we are doing inside of the company is so effective that it is almost shocking to me that we, that we don't see this kind of coaching across the board for small businesses as well. So I would, I would say that, you know, if you could just look, look out for us on our website. We're going to have a landing page up soon and it's going to be all about how we're going to help teach people on the, you know, in our customer base and their employees like, and we don't really care who attends this. Whoever needs this information or whoever thinks could be benefit to them. We want people to show up and learn about behaviors, skills that are actually tied to behaviors and not just functional skills.

Excellent. Love that. Check out the Wage Point website. Continue to follow up for new, bigger, better solutions that will help everyone and help people understand what leadership is and how to be a good leader, but also how to grow a successful business. Shrad, this has been an absolute pleasure. Thank you so much for joining me today. I hope to have you back and to chat a little bit more because I think you and I could chat leadership all day and, and people might be sick of us at that point. So it's good to split this up a little bit. But guys, this has been the Wealthy Entrepreneur podcast. We've been talking with Shrad about mastering leadership and culture. A conversation with the CEO of WagePoint and hopefully this has been super insightful. If you found anything that's insightful, leave a comment. Give us a follow. Make sure you're available for the next week's podcast we release every single week, talking about finances, leadership, how to build a successful company, more on culture, whatever that looks like. We will continue to evolve that out to help you as a business owner. If you know someone who would benefit from hearing some of the insights that Shrad shared today, make sure you share this with them. We want to help as many people as possible understand and be successful leaders. Thank you all so much for joining us this week. Shrad, once again, I appreciate your time, and I look forward to doing this again soon.

Yeah. Thank you, Bob. Thank you very much.

All right, thanks, everybody.