How to Develop a Strong Team

No matter what you call your team, there are going to be good actors, bad actors, people who are high performing, people who are normal, people who just don't show up. That's inevitable. Please stop fighting the inevitable. Please remember, if you're struggling, calendar equals control. For those who struggle in your personal life, in your relationships, building the broader team with people. If you don't feel like you're getting the momentum in your family, in your health and anything in your life, I'm telling you it's coming because a lack of focus on calendar, you're not knowing where and when you want to go and building backwards from that and knowing the milestones it would take to get that. And I wanted to start this very big coaching session today where we're going to be talking about team and how do you develop a team around you, whether you have a business or you don't have a business, how you can get more support in your life, how to think about team. If you are a business owner and I have so much to talk to you about, how do you achieve that higher level of experience in life where you feel more joyous, more vibrant, more confident, more able to lead, make your difference, earn more and change the world? How do we do it all together as a team? That's what this is about. And my coaching with you today is going to address, I know many of the reasons you'll see most people don't think about team. They don't think they need it. We have a lot of solopreneurs who think, I don't need a team. I'm an individual contributor. We have a lot of people who go, I don't want to hire a team ever, because you know that's a pain in the butt. And obviously we've got people who do work in organizations and teams around the world in more formal matters. But I do believe that this is one of the most important topics of your entire lifetime to get right strategically and tactically. Because here's how you know if you've done team well in your entire life. And I mean, that means if you work for somebody else or you run your own team or you're considering it, here's the simple answer. If you are either A overwhelmed on a recurrent basis, B far behind what you believe your potential is, or C, not making the impact or the revenue that you know you can, you got a team problem, my friends. Because what we're going to do is we're going to take on the topic of developing team today. So bust out your journals get ready to really reflect. And do me a favor. Whatever notions you have about team, let them go. And let me help you construct a more diligent, more purposeful, more intentional mindset about team. And we'll talk about tactically how to do that too, because here's where it begins. It's. It begins with the mindset. So many people bemoan team. Ugh. Brendan, I don't want to hire a team. What a pain in the butt. Hiring sucks. And then someday I'm going to have to fire people. And besides, how am I going to pay them? And then you know what? They're going to cheat and steal from me and oh my gosh. And people's attitudes towards teams are so negative. And I don't judge it because I know many people have had that experience and come from fact. They had experience where, you know, somebody did come into their organization and do something wrong or they did go through, you know, waves of hiring and they're frustrated about it or they did feel like they got cheated, stole from, lied to. But listen, that's life too. Don't blame the concept of teams for what inevitably happens in all of human behavior. I think the number one reason people get teams wrong is they hope that team behavior and the individuals in their team are different than humans. You know, and what I mean by that is, listen the full game. Think about your family and your friends. Isn't it true you have some that are more successful than others? Isn't it true some do lie to you, some do steal from you? Isn't it true that there's good behavior, inappropriate behavior, bad behavior? Listen, on a team, no matter what you call your team, there are going to be good actors, bad actors, people who are high performing, people who are normal, people who just don't show up. That's inevitable. Please stop fighting the inevitable. Stop setting your mindset to the fact that, oh, well, this one person took some money from me or this one team member was terrible and I had to fire them. It was the worst experience. Listen, part of real leadership, part of becoming a high performer is the ability to just simply anticipate that human behavior will always run the gamut of positive and negative. You should no longer ever be surprised by poor behavior on your team. Not once, not ever. You should never be surprised when a high performer lets you down. You should never be surprised when somebody asks for the raise and they don't deserve it. You should never be surprised when somebody quits and you were surprised. You should never be surprised that, you know, people would do inappropriate things while you're paying them. All of these things that I know are blocks for people that do again happen. It happens. So what, it's just like, hey, listen, if you're going to go chase a dream, is it true there's going to be struggle? Is it true you're going to fail? Is it true there's going to be so many Mondays you think this sucks? I want to quit. I want to never deal with this dream, this task, this project ever again. Well, whatever you're striving towards for your dream and all the struggles and the conflicts that you of course know that's going to happen, know that is exactly going to happen in team development. Don't be surprised by human behavior. Write it in your journal. Stop being surprised by human behavior. I mean, read more books on psychology or watch more shows or read more books in personal development and realize, wow, there's a big range of people out there. Your job is to find good ones, to cultivate the good ones, to unleash the good ones, to support you in your mission and your cause and not get so trapped or upset by the ones that aren't great. You know, I share this from the perspective of, as many of you know, over the last years, I went from a very individual contributor in my own business and my own brand. For the first decade of my life, I basically had one or two outsourced contractors, when I say the first decade in my own career now as an influencer. So I had event support, customer service support, and that was one person. And then it became like two people and then it became like three people. But for the first decade, I really kept a really small ship on purpose. But during that time I was also invested in other companies and becoming part owners in other companies. And I had other partners who were hiring and managing our teams. And I saw how diligently they did it, how well they did it, and how we achieved such extraordinary growth in some of my other brands and businesses investments. And why did that always happen? It wasn't because of me. Even if I was tied in those companies, it was always because team. And so I really want to encourage you when wherever you're coming from, whatever excuse you have, however negative you feel about team, to please with me today, revisit it. You deserve to have a very positive, buoyant, abundant mindset about teams. And if you don't, you're the one getting in your way. Do not blame prior poor human behavior. Please do that as yourself, as a gift. That's the most Important thing. So I'm going to jump right in with the first and most obvious thing today that we're going to return to over and over and over. Commit to building team right now. Commit to building team right now. No matter who you are, if you're like, brennan, I don't have any employees or you got 100 or you got a thousand, right now, today, you got to switch your mind and go. If I want to achieve an extraordinary quality of life, I. I need to build team. And let me talk about that in a very generic sense right off the bat before we jump into the specifics for you today, just to make sure that you're connecting here. Listen to this. It's very important. There's different areas of your life that you're always going to be building team, right? Think about your personal life, like yourself, right? You want to build a team, a support system of people who help you thrive individually as a human. That means you want to have relationships that you might call part of your team. I think of my team as an example. I think of the team. I think my wife, she and I are on a team together, right? We call each other team Tooties because if you know our nicknames, I call her Cutie Patootie, and she ended up calling me Cutie Patootie back. We just called it Short Tooties. And so she's like, I'm my team. And team Tooties, we take on everything together. And when there's a difficulty or challenge, it's us, it's a team together trying to knock down the problems, trying to build a quality of life together. That's a team right there. Your spouse, your partner is a team. So some of what I'll talk about today, even for something be like, I don't want to hire anybody. Brennan, listen closely, because it applies to your family, too. You got kids, they're on your team. You know that, that part of your life, in your personal life. Most people don't think about that. I got a team for my health, right? When I think about, like, oh, I've got a chiropractor. Oh, I have a doctor. Oh, oh, I. I've got a masseuse. Oh, I, I, you know, have somebody who helps us prepare meals sometimes, especially if I'm either on the road or we have a really busy season come up, or several launches that we'll have, you know, I think about all of that. To keep me running at my highest levels, I gotta have a personal team, and I gotta think about that. My family is my personal Team. So please, like, broaden your conceptualization of team. Think about even in the service you want to give to the world, even if you don't have a business, the service you want to give in the world. Boy, I would love Brendan to help more kids, you know, be able to go to school. I love to build some schools. I would love to be able to help cancer patients. I would love to help women do this. I would love to help this audience do that. If you're in service in mission to helping other people, you're going to need more people to support you with that. You know, even great pastors of great churches realize they're never going to reach more people with the word unless they end up getting more people to support it, not just in their immediate congregation, but also in more churches, also in more organizations, also in more countries. And so if you want to scale something of real meaning or value, whether that's your business or a cause that you support, obviously team. But many of you right now, you think you've committed to building team, but you haven't. You really do. You're like, oh, no. Oh, yeah, I get this, Brennan. Okay, tell me about your team. How often do you speak with them? How often do you develop them? How often are you strategically moving the chess pieces around to get the right people in the right places? It's a constant and never ending thing. You should focus on working your team as much as you work your tasks. Write it down. Your week should be comprised as much in supporting or cheering on or placing or playing the chess pieces of team as your individual tasks. That's how we know you're going to achieve an extraordinary quality of life. Now, I know some people are like, Brendan, Brennan, Bren, I'm a millionaire. I've never hired anybody. I'm like, I get it. The questions again come back to that very first piece of this. Are you overwhelmed a lot? Do you feel like you're not reaching your full potential? Do you feel like you're not earning as much or making the difference you can? And in those three areas, the answer is team. So I'd love for you all to have a different commitment. Are you where you wanted to be this year? And if you're not, don't fool yourself. Team is at the center of all that. So let's all right here commit to building a team. I also think about team before I get into the business side of things. I also think about team in terms of skill development. Right. For me, I'm always piecing together people who are Going to help my skills develop individually. I think of the people who I've hired as coaches to help me be a better public speaker, people who've hired as consultants to make me a better marketer and business person, people I have hired as consultants to help me, like, reformat or rerun my organization. I think about my, you know, my lawyers. I think about the skills in every area that I want to develop, whether it's learning to play piano or learning to speak Spanish. Guess what? I'm building a team around that constantly to support me, and those aren't even people I consider part of my companies. Does that make sense? So I want you to always be thinking about, oh, wow, I got to think about team in a much broader way. I got to be thinking about team for my health. I got to be thinking about team for my skill development. I got to think about team. And if you can really lock in on that. Now, some of you right here, you have a business or you're in a business with a team. And I'm just here to tell you, if you want to climb the ladder, if you want to make more revenue, you've got to commit to building team at another level today. Listen, the high performance experience is always this phrase. We're always talking about reaching another level. We got to go to another level of commitment and discipline in building your team. And if you will do that with me today, I promise things will change. I know that many of you do want to build a team in terms of your entrepreneurial business, or you're looking to develop the team who you already work with. So I'm going to jump into some very tactical things. Let's jump into how you should think about bringing on team, how you should think about developing team where it might fit in your life. And what I'd like to do first off is start with the number one objection that people have, which is, Brendan, I don't know how to hire people, and I don't have money to hire people. So let's begin with that. I always tell people, when you're hiring people, first and foremost, you do not have to go out and hire people automatically with these huge salaries, you know, of the average, you know, income of the United States, whether it's, you know, 50 or $60,000 here or worldwide at some other number, stop thinking that hiring always means writing big checks. Many of you could get a tremendous number of supporters, people around you as interns. Many of you could get tremendous amount of supporters and team around you informally by building community. Many of you can get a tremendous number of volunteers around to support you, and you think, well, I don't have a team, so I can't do it. I'm like, really revisit that. The first question, as you know, that we talk about high performance habits is having clarity about what you want, what is it you want to build, what is it you want to grow into? And working backwards from that, I'll give you an example. One of my first big things I ever wanted to do was run events. I want to do seminars, I want to do conferences, because those things have changed my life. And I wanted to do it, but I didn't have any money to pay people. And I, of course, let that limit me at the very beginning of my career and thinking, oh, well, I don't have any money to hire anybody. I guess I'll never get this dream. And then I started telling people what I wanted to do, and I'd meet people and like, oh, you know what? If you ever do that, let me help you out with that. I started shouting from rooftops what my dreams were. And I talk with people who are passionate about similar things and say, hey, if I ever do an event like this, would you come help me? I might pull off the event. I might not have any money, but maybe you could volunteer and just help out a little bit. Would you be interested in that? And I enrolled teams of volunteers. Even to this day, you'll see dozens of volunteers at some of our events. And those volunteers help us execute great events. And you'll have seen them come back. Many of our volunteers come back over and over and over again, mostly because my team really does a great job in leading them. But at the very beginning, it was literally me and one other person, and it was scary. And I had to recruit my. My mom, my dad, my then girlfriend, my. I mean, I just, I. I recruited everybody to come and help me, and they were my team. I wasn't paying. I didn't know how to do that. The first time I wanted to have a team in my personal life, I was like, I need a chef because I can't cook. I. I suck at cooking. I don't enjoy cooking. Sorry for all those cooks out there. I love you and please invite me over to your house. I will eat all of your food and I will tell you it's the best thing ever because every. I just love food. But I'm a terrible cook. And if for me to do anything that is not my craft, I am easily distracted and I will just spend hours and Hours and hours doing dumb things. So I went to a culinary school and I put up a job board for an opportunity to get a personal letter of recommendation to come and get some experience as a private chef. And I had a private chef when I was broke, living in San Francisco. And people are like, oh, my God, you're living large. Or they're, Brandon, you're private chefs. I'm not. They're doing this for experience. This is like an intern. And people were amazed. So, first off the bat, please don't let this money conversation stop you from recruiting volunteers or interns or people who could support your cause. Because if you did that, if you let that mindset win, please realize we would have never had Gandhi, Martin Luther King, Nelson Mandela. Please realize we would have never had the origins of the beginning of our country if we didn't have leaders, people who would persuade and speak and enroll people into a big vision. Your job should be always enrolling people into your vision. Always. Some people will come on who are professionals. Some people come on as volunteers. Maybe you find some interns. But do not discount your ability to get people to support you. That's very important. I know I'm going on and on sending some mindset here stuff with you guys because it's so incredibly important. And I've seen that so many times. People say, well, I don't have any money. But then they also say, ah, you know, I. I don't know if I want team Brendan. I know maybe I could figure it out, but I don't know if I want team or where I would do that because I suck at hiring. So let's talk through some of this thing. My. My big idea for mindset development is to know your style and your role. I'm going to talk through each of these to know your style, my friend, and your role. So let's talk about this in the difference that you're making in the world. Let's talk about your style now. In your style, your style of work. Let's. Let's imagine you have a mission or you got a dream. Your style of work. There's. There's really kind of like four styles of work, aren't there? There's that style of work where you're just the individual contributor and you just love doing your thing. You're the artist, the craftsperson, the creator. Like, you just. You just. Your style is. You want to work on your thing by yourself, not dealing with other humans very often. If you know that is true for you, I'll talk to you in a bit. Okay. That artist, that creator, that individual contributor. That's the first style. Okay. The second style is more of the tactician on a team. Meaning you love to be on a team and you love. You're a tactician, you do a specific thing. You're like, you're the coder, you're the graphic person, you're the video person. You're someone who's a tactician and operator on a team, and you love to do a specific thing and you love to do that thing as a contributor to that team, sort of solo. That's. That's style as well. Third style, managerial style. That's like you're a people developer. You love to bring on people. You love to manage people. You love to work with people. You love to give people projects, tasks, activities, make them accountable, make them grow, make them able to achieve with you. That's more of the manager style. Okay, that's more of the manager style. And then the last style is more of the, I would say leader, investor style. That's more of the. The. You absolutely need teams to be able to achieve something, but you're not going to be the person working in the team. You're not the person doing individual contributions. You're not the person managing people. You're just up here coordinating the troops to go there. Okay, so those four different styles. Now here's what happens. Usually the first style, the individual contributor, the artist, the creator, that person doesn't like to hire people, that. This person doesn't like to think about hiring people. That person doesn't want to hire people. That person thinks it's, oh, my God, what a pain in the butt. If that is you, you need to first and foremost immediately work with a hiring agency and in your town. Because listen, you're never going to go post on a job board. You're not going to take the interviews, you're not going to do all the coordination because to you, that's your style. I'm here to save the day. Go hire a hiring agency, call them and say, how does it work? I need to get three people in here right away. I need a personal assistant, I need a graphic designer, and I need a marketing person. Tell me how that works and let them guide you through the process. Let them line up the people, let them even sit down with you and help hire the people and help them. Let them help onboard the people. Maybe one of the people they hire is a manager for you. So it's like getting in the game. Learning that process is important. There are parts of my career. That was me. I was like, oh my God, I never want to deal with that stuff. I don't want to hire anybody. But you know what? I wish I'd talked to hiring agencies earlier in my career. For some of you, if you already have a team, but you know you're the individual contributor and your team is not being managed well, then maybe your next hire is to finally hire a manager. Somebody in your space who has skills. We'll talk about that later. Or who has managed others before and put them in play and make them the your like if you're the general or you're the individual contributor, then guess what? Make this person your, your lieutenant. They're the ones who now hires people, brings on people, manages people. You never need to see a status report if you're that number one style person. It is okay if you never see a status report, never talk to people. If that's for you, that's okay. You got one person, that's your right hand person, that, that's the person who becomes your, in effect, either your HR department, your coo, if you will. So that's the person who's operating at all and you can do your thing. If that's you, that's fine. Just know that that's okay. That's totally okay. Because your role in that style is not to suddenly become something that you hate, not suddenly to do something that you are going, that's going to take away from your craft. And I made this mistake way too much in my life, frankly. Way, way too much hiring that. I spent way too much time, you know, without delegating that to others on my team. I spent way too much time worrying and freaking out about stuff like that. Across all of our companies and our brands, especially our startups. I'm always like, oh my gosh, it's so difficult. That's okay. So you got to have other people who help manage that or other organizations that help manage that. That's part of knowing your role and your style. What if your somebody who's like, well, Brennan, I'm on a team, I'm a tactician, I'm really good at what I do. Here's what I'm gonna tell you. If you're a tactician, you're happy with where you're at. Just do your thing, man. If you're a tactician, you wanna get a raise, you wanna grow, you wanna get better, Your whole mindset must be, oh my gosh, I need to lift my head out of these tactics and I need to develop two things. One, I need to develop as fast as possible another person that I can manage or lead or count on to do the very tactics that I'm doing. I need to demonstrate some leadership or management ability here asap. Who can I get on with that or how can I propose something to take on bigger projects that will move the business forward. Where managers go, oh, let's assign another person to you because you're already good at this. You got to see where your skills fit within the strategy of the organization you work on. And then build a co worker, build a peer who is as equally as good as you as fast as possible. Because showing that leadership will help you move to the next level. So it's important for the tacticians is to develop a peer. I said there's two ways that you have to develop. First, develop that peer and then second, develop an extraordinary relationship with your lead or your manager. So for those who are already on teams, I'm talking to you too. Okay? Third, that person who's a manager, hey, if you love managing people, oh my gosh, I love you. God bless you. Hey, I'm going to be hiring managers, you know, in all of our businesses and teams forever. But listen, here's what I know about managers. Managers often completely screw up their career opportunity or their impact by thinking they're style one or style two. They go, no, I just want to be an individual contributor. So they got one leg in being a manager and one leg out. No, I just want to be the tactician. Brendan, they got one leg in being a manager and one leg out. This is why it's so important to know your style and your role, your style. Listen, if your style is you're a people developer and that is what you do, you need to absolutely leverage that and fully commit to that and step in. And many of you are great with people, but you've never hired anybody. What the heck? You're an amazing people manager and you have not focused and turned your attention and your skills to hiring. And I'm here to tell you, make that a craft, make that a skill set. If you love people and you love developing them, you should be absolutely fired up in studying how to manage people well, how to hire people well, how to build a culture well, like go all in on it. The worst thing in the world is a half interested manager. It's the worst, right? I know some of you, is that true? How many of you guys have worked for a crappy manager, like a terrible manager? I guarantee isn't it true if they were a terrible manager, like a terrible manager, is it true they were usually stuck in style one or style two? Right. They just weren't, they weren't there. They were a half interested or half hearted manager. They never stepped in that, whoa. It's my job to build this culture. It's my job to develop this person. It's my job to assign projects that are hard and difficult and help people become accountable and better and activate their potential. Can't tell you how many people do that. They don't honor that style and that truth. And if you're a, if you're a manager, if you love doing that even in your own company, for those of you who own your own company, I'm here to tell you, think more strategically, hire more team, develop them better. You're already good at that. You don't understand. If you're a great people manager, you are an unbelievable asset. But you as an asset will never be activated without either greater goals for the organization, which you can activate the people you already have, or the decision to activate more people to achieve a higher goal. So in other words, get more people, develop them better. You've got that artist, individual contributor, you got that technician, you got that manager. That fourth one I was talking about was the leader and investor. And I think this is important because this is going to show you that you can kind of be all four. I'm all for, in some of my brands and businesses I play each of the styles but I got to know where my role is in, within them. Let me give you an example. You know, I've got multiple other companies that we invest in. Where I know my job there is really strategic leadership and investment guidance. Meaning hey company, I work with their leaders or our managers there and I go, listen, this is where we're going. This is the strategy. What are you challenged with? Are you hiring? How's it going with the people? What do you need help with? And I never manage a single person. There is no management and I do no individual contributing into the company at all. So I don't contribute into the company. I'm not a tactician in the company. I'm not a manager in the company. What I am there is I'm a leader and an investor and I got to step into that role and really own that well. So it's not my job to manage team there. It's my job to inquire whether or not the teams are being managed. Well, that makes sense. You know, my hope for you guys here is just to kind of broaden your perspective to team. I know some of you, like Brendan, get down to like, oh, my God, I don't know what to do. How do I fire this person? I promise I'm getting there. Next, let's talk hiring. I got two big points, three big points on hiring. Because it's often the most critical question that we get number one in. No matter what role that we've discussed today, whether you're an individual contributor, you're the tactician, you're the manager, you're the leader investor, I want you to know this. If you are again, A, overwhelmed B, feeling like you are not, you know, moving ahead fast enough, or C, not activating your full potential or achieving your full revenue that you could, again, team is an issue. And if you've already identified team is an issue, but you are not already a world class weapon at hiring, I want you to immediately get hiring support and get hiring support. Now let's talk about how to do that. Get hiring support. Many of you have never hired anybody before and I don't want you to go like, I guess I'd better go read a book on it. I'm like, no, hire somebody to help you hire. Right? Hire somebody to help you hire. Whether that is an outsourced hiring agency in your town or it is hiring a hiring manager. Bring on an HR person right off the bat. Listen, the second hire at Netflix was an HR person. Reed's second hire at Netflix was an HR person. Why? Because he knew he was, he was going to need people and he didn't know how to do the people part. So the second hire was an HR person to be like, let's build people together. I think that's really important for you to realize. You don't have to figure this one out. I think a lot of people spend way too long thinking they have to figure this out. And I want you to know I'm talking about myself included. I waited way too long to get some hiring support and it was crazy. So I ended up working with a company to help me get more people in faster. I also ended up in other of our entities finding a key employee who manages hires, the, the people. I'm not even involved in that process, which has been critical and key to our growth and many of our other teams, and having a person who might be the operator, who's in charge of other people's careers. So it depends where you're at, but especially if you're beginning get some hiring support, you know, even if you just hire a Hiring consultant for like one month, right? Write that check. We're talking about, like, I mean, depending on where you're in the world. And you can hire a hiring consultant who can help you place your first one or two or three employees. You can get that hiring consultant for not kidding you, like $1,000 to $5,000 for the month. And they can help you bring on, set up the systems and onboard the whole team. Now, there's SaaS, companies that can help you do this, meaning software companies that can help you walk through all of that. I don't have general recommendations there because I, I think especially if you're new, working with a person who's done it before and hiring that consultant or working with that agency is going to be the best use of your time. And in hiring, time really matters. I just don't want all of you. Here's the problem. I'm talking to a community of high performers. I know you guys, you're going to be like, you know what? I'm a high performer. I'm going to figure out how to hire everybody. I mean, I'm do it myself. No one's ever going to help me. I got. Because, listen, you are so good guys at mastering skills that you think you have to master every skill of the company. You don't have to master every skill of the company, but you do have to give your attention and time and focus to developing team. So you might not have a whole lot of attention, time and development for team because you're the individual contributor or you're the tactician or you're the leader. So guess what, you're going to need some hiring support. You just are. And I'm here to tell you, hiring team is always going to be difficult. And having some support in that process will ensure you maintain momentum. Listen, you know, in one parts of our business, I would say in the last year and a half, we've probably lost 40% of the people who we onboarded, meaning they didn't last. We either let them go or the job wasn't right for them. And like, people always ask Bren, how do you. This team thing, you have people coming in, out all the time, like, yes, just like in business, you have money coming in and out. You should anticipate again, I'm going to keep coming back this word over and over. Anticipate, anticipate, anticipate, it's okay. But you need some hiring support if you're totally new. I'm going to give my philosophy on this one here, both from a Research perspective, but also very practical perspective across all of our brands and the companies I invest in now, we have over a thousand employees. Now, remember, it's not my job to manage all those, so don't go out there. Brennan has a thousand employees. I don't have a thousand employees. Not on my personal brand, but in our companies that I invest in or that I lead. We got over. We just passed over a thousand employees this year, which is amazing. And here's what I've learned through that process. It's going to sound very straightforward. You. So write these things down. The types of people you need to hire. Number one, skilled. Number two, passionate. Number three, social. And number four, problem solvers. This is your key. Every single time you have screwed up in hiring, you messed up somewhere here. Isn't it true you got a very skilled person, but they were terrible with human beings. They had no social skills. They had no. They could not communicate. They poisoned the culture of the company. You hired skilled people who are really good at doing something in their. In their last company, but they couldn't solve a problem. They couldn't dig themselves out of anything. You got other people who, they're really skilled, but they have no passion, they have no heart. And these are the four things that you're looking for. Skilled, passionate, social, problem solvers. I know everyone's going, brandon, those people don't exist. You don't understand. I'm like, if you think these people do not exist, that is your mindset. You need to get hiring support. If you don't believe these exist, you've never gotten help. What happened is you didn't know how to do this because you never got help. And now you're blaming team. No, I'm blaming the fact that you didn't know what you were doing. I'm your coach. I got to say the hard stuff like that. And I also have to take the lumps into my own self. Like, there's been plenty of times. I'm like, oh, wow, you know what? I hired someone who was passionate and social and could solve problems, but they didn't have the skill. So I spent all this time skilling them up on the basics. Here's what I mean by each of these pieces. Number one, let's talk about skilled. Okay, let's talk about skilled people. What do I mean by that? I want you to only hire people who have knowledge, skill, ability, or experience in your defined industry or field. I'll give you an example. The number one problem I've made over and over and over in my experience in my companies or my brands or I've heard from my friends, is that we often try to hire people outside of the field of understanding from our industry. And every time we do, it's like this. What we're doing is adding to their learning curve. And every time you add to someone's learning curve at the beginning of their career, you tend to take away from their duration in the career. It's the worst thing that most people never see. So you keep onboarding these people who have no experience, no knowledge, they don't understand your industry, your topic, your business field of interest. And guess what happens? You spend all this time getting up to speed on the basics of how your business or industry works. Listen, I take this all the way down to the simplest of frontline employees. Listen, if you run a bakery and you're looking for a person to work the front counter, I'm like, don't hire anybody who's never not worked in that type of food service industry. Don't hire somebody who's like, well, you know, I'm out of college where I, you know, where I was a mentor to kids who couldn't do math, but I know I can do this job here at the front desk of this bakery. I'm like, don't hire somebody outside of food service experience. Get somebody who's skilled in an understanding, even if they only had one year or two years. Get like, wait. I'm here to tell you, wait. To hire people who have skill or competency. Let's just call it knowledge, skill or ability in your field of interest or your business category is going to save you so much time onboarding. I know there's going to be tons of people down below. No, Brandon, I hired a complete idiot. This person knew nothing. And I developed them and it was amazing. And I'm like, yeah, and they're one of my best employees now. I'm like, absolutely. And you went slower because you did that. It doesn't mean they're not a good person. This is what, listen, business owners, my friends, I'm passionate about this. So many people said. But, Brendan, I took a complete nobody newbie person who had never done anything, and they're one of my best employees. Now. I go, I know. And you went slower. You cost time, energy, effort and opportunity from your organization, from your company because you hired somebody who had no understanding. It doesn't mean that we can't take high school kids and college kids and people who never went to school or never had any experience and develop them. Eventually. But strategically, if you care about high performance, and you guys have asked me, you have paid me, you have challenged me to challenge you. That is my job is to challenge you to be better, to move faster. And I'm here to tell you, if you want to be more extraordinary in team, you're going to begin by hiring more experienced people in your category or field. Please hear me. I am very clearly explaining to you, of course you can take somebody who has no experience and make them awesome. It just means you're going to do it slower. And time is what money. And if you're running a company and your company matters to you, time is money. Time is money. And I know this. I've screwed this up a million times in our companies. And I don't feel bad about it because I'm that person who's like, I'm the people developer. I love to put people in roles and be like, let's go do this and let them figure it out and let them struggle and let them develop. I love that. It's part of development and it slowed me down. I'm just being honest with you guys. Hire somebody skilled. It will speed it up. And here's the reason, the only reason most people don't do this either. A, they're in too big of a hurry. You can wait another two weeks to get somebody skilled in there, or B, they're cheap and they say, Brendan, somebody skilled is too expensive for me. People don't take jobs for money. People take jobs for alignment with mission. And if you will spend the time to explain the mission and the vision and you explain your brand, explain where you're going well enough, you can get incredibly experienced people to come on board at much less salaries. We have parts of our teams in Arizona and California who had higher salaries when they came to work. But they knew that what we were doing here was important. They knew what we were trying to do. They knew we were an education company, not a billion dollar public company. And listen, if the people who want to go work for billion dollar public companies who are like, oh gosh, I want a $300,000 salary, they can go get that and they'll go do that. And you know what? A lot of them end up quitting that stuff. They leave that stuff and go work for organizations that are doing real, meaningful, important work that they connect with that maybe they didn't connect with a big company. I tell you that because that was me. I left a big, huge Fortune 500 company to start my own thing. I took the biggest Salary pay cut in the history of ever. I went from, you know, six figure salary to zero and then I went broke and then I went in bankruptcy because I had no idea what I was doing. If I'm willing to do that, people say, well, yeah, that's you, Brendan. I'm like, no, most people job hoping. Most people aren't job hopping for salary. That's what they do in their 20s and they're young and they're dumb and they just like want a fancier couch in their house. But then when they get more experience and more maturity, they're like, you know what? I want to work for an organization that's doing something important that allows me freedom, that allows me autonomy, that has a good culture, that's a good workplace, that allows me to enjoy the people I'm working with and see the impact of my work. And if you don't believe that that's your experience, not market experience, and don't confuse the two. So please be willing to search for the skilled people because many great skilled people who are higher compensated will take a lower salary just to be if with you, if you develop a great mission, which we're going to talk about. Second, big idea, passionate people. If somebody bores you in an interview, don't hire them. It's not saying that we're looking for extroverts and storytellers and, you know, charismatic people. I'm looking for passion people to sometimes, you know what passion looks like? Someone like me, someone who's a dork about their research or about their field of interest. They're a geek, they're dorky and geeky. There's an enthusiasm for the topic area they're talking about. And that enthusiasm might come out quietly, but it's there. And your job is to look for the passion. When they're in that interview, if they're not enthusiastic, excited to be in that room, if their enthusiasm, their passion. Listen to this. If their enthusiasm and their passion does not swell above the fear that they feel being interviewed, don't hire them. A lot of people come in and, and certainly I've experienced this hundreds of times who literally come in and when I was Accenture, I got to onboard a lot of teams. I mean, by the time I was 27 years old, I'd seen thousands of people laid off and I had personally been in the onboarding process of over 400 people on the teams. I had a ton of team experience by the time I was 30. And I will share with you the mistakes that I would see over and over and over again is someone to come in and after the person left, you would think, you know what, they were just nervous. You know, it's a big company, they're just nervous. But you know, they got the skill. They were just nervous, they were fearful the whole time, but they got the skill. Let's give them a try. No, don't do that my friends, ever. That's where you make the mistake. I hope these distinctions are helping you because these are literally at this stage of our career, millions of dollars of distinctions and this one's so critical. If somebody's scared in an interview and their fear never gets overwhelmed by enthusiasm or passion for a topic, a project they worked on, the opportunity to work with you, don't hire ever because that person is going to bring down your culture. That lack of enthusiasm or ability for their passion to overcome their fear means they will never attain high performance in your career. This is my personal perspective in this one. I know some people say, well no, but Brendan, I've got this outlier who did I know, but in general mass public I am here to tell you, if in a job interview their passion does not overcome their fear or their nervousness that is immediate, immediately don't hire them. Because listen, the problem in hiring people always think, well, let's give them a try. And I would say there's no take backs in hiring. You don't give people a try because by giving that person a try versus somebody else now you're taking all your team's time to onboard that person. You're taking your managerial time and your focus and your mental effort and you're spending your money on that person when you could have been doing it for somebody who was going to succeed there, who's going to be better, who's going to perform better. I hope this makes sense to you because this one's so, so critical. Passion. I love to ask people, people like, well, what questions do you ask for this? Like one of the questions I'll often ask if I'm in the room is like tell me about a project that you worked on that was really complicated or difficult but you were really passionate about and tell me how it went. And if they can't describe that project with passion, they will never describe a project in my company with passion because I just set them up for win. Tell me about a project that you were passionate about. If they can't remember a project they were passionate about, oh my God, do not hire that person. In fact, in one of my other companies I will End the interview right there. They can't ever remember a project they've been passionate about. Don't fool yourself and think you're the one that's going to make them there. I hope that helps. Okay, other big idea, social. I think this is really important and under leveraged in that a person should come across well in interview. But you should also ask them about their team interactions. Tell me about your last team. And here's my trick. If they tell me about their last team and as they're telling me about last their team, it doesn't sound like they ever forged any friendships there. I don't hire them. Listen, if they're telling you about their last team and it doesn't sound like they forged any friendships, I don't hire even to the point where I'll ask that simple question. Yeah, this is great. Thanks. You described a lot of roles and responsibilities and where you played on that team. Did you like the people you worked with? And I'll wait for that question. Then I'll ask a question. Well, you know, on that team that you're on, where would you rank yourself in terms of your communication skill? On that team, you know, the best communicator on the team, worst communicator on the team, where would you rank yourself and why? And that tells me everything. And if I'm not clear that they're a good communicator either in the interview, if that's not obvious or from a question like that, then they just go in the no pile. Now some of you are like, but I'm not sure, maybe they're close. That is where your diligence comes in. That's calling the former manager, the former leader, the former employer and asking specifically, would you describe this person as a social person who's a great communicator and, and adds to the positive culture of the company may tell it to you again. Would you describe this person as a social person, as a good communicator who adds to the positive culture of the company? If there is hesitation on the phone, you don't need to ask another single question. There's your million dollar idea, my friends. So many of you think of hiring people and you've never called a former employer and I know some of you like, gosh, Brendan, calling former employers takes so much time. I told you already. Then get hiring support. Hire that HR consultant or that agency to help do that. They got a call. I think it's really important. People ask me all the time do I think it's mandatory to call former employers. I believe if you've not done a lot of hiring and until you've hired 30 persons or been on part of onboarding 30 persons into a company, I think absolutely, you must. I think it's crazy, personally, if you don't. This last thing is so important. People miss this. Problem solvers. How do you get to that? In the interview you say specifically, can you tell me about a project you've worked on before that was really hard? What was the major problem and how'd you handle it? Can you tell me about a project, an activity, a task, something you worked on before that was really hard? Describe the problem and how you dealt with it. If they can't see their role or their experience through the lens of problem solving, if they're inarticulate or unable to deal with that, I think they're a no. Now controversial. Many of you right here at this stage will say, but, Brendan, I'm hiring kids out of high school. How can I do that? Don't hire kids out of high school who didn't have work experience. Brendan, I'm hiring kids out of college. How do I do that? Don't hire kids out of college who didn't have work experience ever. Everybody in high school or college has the opportunity to volunteer or get a job. And if they don't do those two things, I would never hire them. Everybody walking into your office, your home, your kitchen, to sit down with you at the table, who's a prospect or a potential employee? I want to tell you something very clearly. They better have worked before. They better have been on a project before. Because if you're trying to hire somebody who's never been on any projects, who's never tried to do anything, you are slowing yourself down and you are cheating your family for more money, period. Sometimes I gotta say that so directly to people who just think. I just like to hire people, Brennan, right out of high school, who have no experience. I'm like, you are cheating your mission. Let somebody else hire them. Let a Fortune 50 billion dollar company, they got the money and the time and the infrastructure to support that nonsense. You don't. I know many of you say, but, Brennan, I had this experience. I know your experience. But listen, your personal experience is not the same as market experience. That's one big thing about being. Becoming a high performer is knowing the difference. Stop making decisions from just, oh, I have had this experience. And start making the experience and the decisions from a perspective of the marketplace and a better way of doing things. Always choose the Better way of doing things, not the way you're used to. I think you know that. What type of team do you build first? And why so good? Hey guys, it's Brandon. I'm jumping in here real quick. First, I want to make sure you've gone to progressmode.com and to join the newsletter because I have a resource for you related to this episode and I have an upcoming meetup with my private group, Ultra. If you've ever liked to be in a private group with me where I help you get more progress towards your passion projects or to build your business or your brand in a bigger way, just go to progressmo.com, click on Private group to apply to. See you can get into Ultra and we can take it to the next level by getting in person and meeting up virtually once a month online as well. Just go to progress mode.com the type of team that you should always build, first and foremost is always, always, always going to be your revenue team. Always hire revenue team first. Everybody gets this wrong. Here's who you want to hire. You want to hire somebody who takes off tasks from your shoulders that you don't like. In other words, many of you, your first hire is called a convenience hire. We're not after that. You don't have the time and the energy and effort for that yet. Your first hire should be somebody who can help you and your company. If that if you're in a company, make money now. If you're just an individual contributor, we're working by yourself. You don't care about the money. You're already good. Hire tons of inconvenience people. But if money matters, hire a person who can help you make money. They do one of two things here. Either A, they take off so many organizational things off of your shoulders, not just inconveniences. Everything off of your shoulders. So you can be the primary earner, do the things that you already know how to do to make money. That's where you hire like operations person who can do it all. You focus on making the money. That's option A, right operations person, they do it, you make the money. Or B, more of a peer, somebody who comes in and helps you earn more money. Now listen, major mistake when people hire option B. Often what they do is they go, well, I'm going to make my partner in my company. You know, I'm already making some money, but I need to make some more money. I need a first hire. I'm gonna make my first hire partner. I'm like, oh, don't never, never go out of the gate with a partner. Always. You make the money, you hire some team, and if someone in that team becomes amazing or you find that you need a partner later, then get the partner. Don't start with the partner. I know that will be controversial because some people say, but I needed an investor, Brendan. I'm like, okay, make them an investor, not a partner. In other words, people. You can set up LLCs and organizations. We're not really going to talk about necessarily the structure of companies here. I'll leave that to LegalZoom. That can explain it very simply. You can have somebody invest in your company and you can give them shares of the company without making them a member or an owner. Usually what people do is they go, well, I'm just starting, Brendan. I need a partner. We're going to make money together. I'm like, no, hire that person. Be like, okay, you're saying, because listen, you don't know if they can do it or not. How many people have hired a partner who turned out couldn't even do the job and they gave them partnership in the company. They don't even know if the person can work. No, no. Hire that person a consultant or a contractor and make them prove it for six months. After six months, if they knocked it out of the park, then you consider those types of things. But hire first. The first team you should always hire is a revenue team. If I'm that person who owns a bakery, I'm going to hire the person who be like, hey, can I know how to make the bread? Can you go sell it? That's the issue. Somebody who can drive the revenue. If I'm in my industry, I'm the writer. The first person I'm going to hire is a digital marketing person who can go and sell the books. Someone who makes the money. Often we think we have the answer with team. But if you have this team, sit them down and say, hey, listen, let me walk you through everything on my plate. Can we talk about the best things that you're able to take on here? Can you help me figure out the best way to leverage you here? Show them what's on your plate and discuss what needs to be taken off. If you don't want to start there with that conversation, here's the answer. Think about what builds your brand, your revenue the most and what critical activities you need to be focused on and give the rest away. What are the critical activities? Please don't make the mistake that I talked about earlier. Well, I just don't like doing these things. So I'll put them over here. It's not about do you like the activities? My question to you is what are the critical activities that moves the business forward the most? Does that mean you just managing the revenue producing people better? Does that mean you going out on the road more and you being the revenue producing person more? I want you to know what activities build the business the most and you focus there. If you're the owner, that's the thing in ownership. If you own a business, you have to fully own that business and you need to go, what are the critical activities that move this business forward? Let me really focus my time and attention there. Sometimes that might be you're the individual contributor, you're the technician, you're the, the manager or you're the leader. I don't know. You need to know your style, your role there. But find those critical activities because sometimes, like right now, let me tell you guys, my experience, you know, this last in, in my personal brand, in the Brendan brand for hbx, I spent, I don't know, last four weeks focus on very tactical things. Now those tactical things aren't things I wanted to focus on at this time, but for the business, those required me to stop 50 other activities and those became the activities that I focus on. Because the question as an owner should always be what are the critical activities I must focus on to move the business forward now? And that's where you should play. I think the systems to do that are literally the monthly, the quarterly and the annual systems. Meaning every month you should sit down and ask yourself these very questions we're talking about. You sit down, go, what are the critical activities? Am I doing them? Am I focused? Am I able to move those things forward? If not, let me hand them off. You know, on that more quarterly thing, it's like print out all those quarterly reports, know your numbers, know where you're struggling, know where you're not getting ahead and get some support in shoring up the, the areas that aren't being attended to in the organization. And then three annually. Obviously it's more than annual, but it's that conversation with your team or your employees about exactly where their role is in the company, where they want to play and what they can take off your plate. I hope that helps. When you are starting and you're doing everything yourself, the number one most important thing that you need to focus your time on is how do you generate recurring revenue? That's it. Not does everything look pretty? Not do we have all the Ideal things. Not do I know all the systems backwards and forwards. It's like, what activities do I do that actually brings in money and let me operationalize that, systemize that and then I can do other things that I want. Let me give you an example. Like, listen, many of you guys know I'm more of the artist. I love to write, I love to teach, I love to perform, I love to coach. And at the beginning of my career, I did 100% of everything for almost a decade, except for having customer support, except for having operational support. And when I say that, I mean 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 people. That's it. And I mean, I, I think I had one or two people for like three or four or five years. So I really mean I was doing a lot of it. I made sure that my activities were focused on the revenue, even sometimes at the cost of my art. Meaning, could I have written five more books during those first six, seven years? Absolutely. Would we have created a empire and the ability to reach millions of more people with the book? No. Could I have sold as many books in the future? No. Setting up the infrastructure to earn recurring revenue by either your activities or your first hire's activities. That is what I would advise your focus turn towards next up. And this is a big issue. Okay, so you've hired, you hired based on what I shared. Skilled, passionate, social problem solvers. Bam. Now what? This is important. You need to onboard slowly emphasizing mission and measurement. I'm going to break this down for you guys. Onboard slowly emphasize mission and measurement. Let me walk you through what this means, okay? First and foremost, too many people who onboard too quickly. And oh my gee, have I made this mistake many times in my career. You're in a hurry, you're going, you're scaling. And so what you do is you onboard, you hire a bunch of people fast, which is okay, but you put them into work in critical activities of the company before they have context, before they have training, before they have a mentor sit down and show them things. And so they're thrown into systems and processes and activities that they don't yet understand and they screw it up. And sometimes their screw up isn't caught for three, four, five weeks or months. It's not their fault you threw them in the things that were critical too fast. In other words, think about this. When you onboard somebody, you want to bring them on and what you really want to do is, is emphasize, you know, in the first week, be just talking about the mission and how the team works and what things do make sure. That you know, you're talking about the measurement systems of the company. Meaning like these are the metrics that we are trying to build towards or you know, these are our five or six primary goals here. And here's how we try to achieve those. It's saying, you know, here's how you will be measured in your career here. And then it's when you start them into the actual activities of work, giving them baby step projects, supervised well by somebody else, giving them baby step projects, not in the critical activities of the company, but almost like think about this. When you bring somebody new on, give them a little bit of like playground that's, that's separate from the major sandbox of the company. Like give them a little projects that they can work on that are important to the company but they're not the revenue producing critical activities. I'll tell you where I've screwed up this before. Where in multiple our companies. In fact, sometimes we'll hire people and too quickly we'll let them into our systems. Like for us, our major systems, as you guys know, are marketing funnels. And we'll throw somebody who's completely new into a marketing funnel and think that they can manage the tasks, but without the context, the little baby step projects and the supervision to say this way that way or not that way, without the lead, the manager or the supervisor, they end up kind of fishing around and screwing stuff up in critical systems. Every person, including the skilled people that you bring on, should be given baby step projects to begin. And I think this is a critical mistake that tons of companies make. I've certainly made it tons of times. Still do. Because when you're hiring, you know, like I said, we're at a thousand people between all companies now that I manage or invest in. And inevitably somebody is royally screwing up a system that they should not be in this very second across the companies. So you're never going to get exactly right. But it's something to be very vitally aware of. I hope that makes sense. You want to be very vitally aware of, of this, like very thoughtful, very clear on it and that'll be that. That'll change everything for you. Now let me emphasize two things. One, make sure they understand the mission and make sure they understand their personal place in that mission. Make sure they understand the value orientation of the mission, meaning why you're doing what you're doing and then measurement. Now I'm going to go off on this one a little bit because you all ask me all the time and there were These questions, you know, how do you manage the team? And I'm going to go through a lot of different protocols and ideas on that. But measurement's an important thing. And when you're onboarding, when you're hiring somebody, you want to tell them how are they going to be measured in this role? Now in some companies that's easy because maybe there's a sales metric. You're like, you're either hitting the sales metric you're in or you're out. In my companies, where they're more branded companies, it works a little differently. So I'm going to tell you guys how we do it in our company. We show all of our team members this diagram that is how they're going to be measured in their career. And I hope you guys will write this down because this is so money. Let me walk you through this. I tell everyone as we're hiring them, so everyone's always clear about how they're going to be measured. In our company, especially when we're at startup levels like my personal brand with hpx, we're, we're starting up HPX again. We don't have super defined metrics yet because we're still building the new funnel and the offerings. And that can take six months to a year sometimes before you have super clear metrics. For those who love the metrics game, make sure you read a book called Measure what Matters. Make sure you read that book, Measure what Matters. And for those who like this hiring conversation and want more, make sure you read a book called powerful by Patty McCourt. But what I've learned is to tell the team they're going to be measured in these five ways. At the center of all their measurement is C, which is communication. Your job on my teams is to be an excellent team communicator above anything else. Before your individual role, before your tasks, for your activities, your job. The way you are measured in our culture is are you a good communicator? Are you clear when you're overwhelmed? Are you communicating when you're behind deadline? Are you informing people before you roll something out? These types of things, excuse me, come down to communication and I'm crazy about it. If somebody's a bad communicator on the team, that's all you need to know, right? There's almost nothing you need to know. If someone's a bad communicator on the team, there's nothing you need to know. They're gonna, they gotta be gone. At some point, they're gonna be gone. And I'VE learned that so much that I literally, in our company, we put that right at the center communicator. Okay. Then the top one says B. And that to me is a business operator. Everybody, all roles, by the way, front desk people, all the way down to customer service, all the way up to sales. Anywhere you go around the spin of the wheel call a role in our company, they're going to be measured by this. Okay. Communication. B is business operator. That means operator. Are we're going to measure them on, do they do their job? You know, whatever we've assigned to you, do you tactically do that job? Well, if you're giving these tasks and activities, are you consistently doing them with excellence? Okay. V. Value creator. Value creator. And I got this from Accenture. That's their language. And it was really. I love that. Value creator means are they creating innovative ideas? Are they coming to the table like, hey, I've got this idea. I think this will really work. We should do this. Or are they just doing their job? Right? If they're just doing their job, but they don't come up with new ideas and they don't communicate to the team or contribute to the culture. Bye bye. Right? You don't want people who can just do a job ever like to just do the job. I know some of you like Brendan, but that's just my. Because haven't you ever wanted to fire somebody? You're like, they just won't do their job. Yes, fire them, no problem. Get rid of them faster, sooner than later. However, as we were bringing people on, we're explaining, listen, you're expected to communicate well. Do these. Do this job, your assigned tasks and projects and come up with new ideas. New. And share them with your leads. And if you're not coming up with new ideas and sharing with leads, then you're not building the business with us and there's no reason for you to be here. Bottom 1 PD people. Developer Again, Something from my Accenture days. Like, we want you to be developing the people around you or being focused on developing the culture or team. Meaning every person should add to the culture, should add to the team, should be developing somebody, whether it's helping a team get better at their job, even if it's outside their role. But to be a mentor, a contributor, a coach, a facilitator, a helper. Meaning if you're just on the job and you're sharing lots of ideas and doing the job, but you're not actually developing the people around you by helping them, supporting them, cheering them on contributing the culture, you're going to be measured on that. And then the last piece that we measure on is cc And I call this, it's not for every company but for us, we call this customer champion. It's like customer champion. Do you know our customers? Do you cheer them on? Are you finding those successful stories? Are we getting better at, you know, fulfilling our promises to our customers? Meaning your direct tie to customers is really important. So this is kind of what I would share now. I think it's important that you have your own sort of measurement system about how you're going to evaluate people. Now, obviously there are some roles you can be like, you know, very metric driven. Did you achieve X percent or whatever? But you also need to have that large level framework. You know, it's not just did you serve the mission and you stand for the values of the company and do your job, it's are you communicating well? Are you a good team member? Are you coming up with ideas? Do you know our customers? Are you helping us become better with our customers? All of that is vitally important to what we do here. Read a book called the Culture Code. The book is called the Culture Code. Phenomenal. Like one of my favorite team books of all time. But to help bring all those together, your vision is the vision of the company and where you want the company to be and the difference you want the company to make in the world. Like I. Our vision for our company is to be the number one personal development provider that's ever been right. That the vision is that that number one level. Not because we think we need to get there for ego. It's just I want to bring more personal development to people than anyone ever has before. So we've set up all these brands to do it outside of mind included. Mission. Mission is more of the operational, like, what do you do at work every day? Right? The vision is where am I going? What's the ultimate destination? Mission. What's the mission of what we do every day? As an example? What we do every day in our company is we change lives operationally. Everything we're doing is set. Is this going to make an impact in somebody's lives? Because that's going to help us get to that vision of, of being the best personal development provider as an example. Values, you know, from values, you might say things like, we value integrity, we value, you know, responsibility, we value hard work, we value honesty, we value, you know, respect, whatever it is for you. We value excellence, high performance. Those types of things are very common. Culture is what is the vibe and the knowledge, skills and abilities of the team that allow the company to move forward? Not just the vibe. Like, are we all fun playing ping pong? No. Does the culture, like most people miss? This culture should be outcome attached. Meaning is the culture, the vibe of the team able to achieve the vision and the mission, the values? And if not, then we need to have a revisit. I hope that helps. Okay, I'm going to jump back into some management things. I would like to have my management team create battle boards for the functions of my business that they are responsible for. I may get some pushback or low interest. What would you recommend for the best way to get them on board? I love that they got to see you geek out about it. You saying, hey, you know what, y', all, we are all doing so many things. We need a visual representation of what we are doing here and where we are going because it's gotten complex and we are sometimes stepping on each other's toes. And many of you don't know what your, your team, fellow team members are even working on. So we're going to develop some battleboards up here, some visual representations of where we are focused on our tasks, our activities, our projects, and what we're trying to achieve. And this is what one looks like. And I want you to create your own and have at it. And it's not a request. I think one of the most important things that people fail to do in managing teams is they want to be friends and they want everybody to love them and like them. And your job is not to be their friend. Your job is to protect the interests of the company so that everyone can get their paycheck, so that everyone can make their difference, so that everyone can serve the community. And I know some people don't like when I say things like that so bluntly, but leaders, you. You got to make sure that people are doing the things that are going to help the company succeed. And in these types of things, you know, don't make it feel like it's an arts and crafts activity. Make it feel critical to the company. Always make it feel critical. Like, hey, y', all, we're stepping on each other's toes and there's too many cooks and kitchens, and sometimes we don't know exactly what we're doing. We're going to build a battle board and here's what's going to happen. And I need you to go do that. And here's your deadline. I'm going to share with you a very simple thing that I've learned from other investors and some of our other companies that I really love this statement and some of you are going to really hate it. Some of you, I'm really going to like share this with one of you. Calendar equals control. Calendar equals control. Okay, Many of you, because you are a manager or you think of team in terms of people, you're failing to ever develop the people or the team or the organization because you're giving them more time than you're giving the calendar. Here's what I mean by that. The most important strategic thing you can do in the company is know what you're doing and when people exist to support knowing what you are doing and when or helping you determine knowing what to do and when. Meaning the most important control you'll ever have with team or the ability to project, manage or get anything done is managing the calendar. Well now this is always controversial because it's like what most managers will do is they'll overly share, they'll be like, okay guys, here's everything going on. If you work with any of my teams, they'll often tell you like, we don't know everything going on. And that's on purpose for me because if my teams knew everything going on, they would, their heads would explode and they would be. And this is not speaking ill of them, it's a reality because my organizations exist more than one company. It was just. If I just had one company, it'd be much easier. But because there's always needle moving things that always support everything else, there's so much going on there that not every person in every role in every of those brands needs to know the full efforts that we're working towards because it would be way too overwhelming. It'd be. They'd be seeing 70 different activities happening every day that they don't know about. Like literally anyone on my team, there's always a hundred different things going on that they have no clue about because they don't need to in that specific role. But as they, as they move up in the organizations, they tend to know about more. But what's important for you to understand if, for those of you like, I don't understand how to manage or I got these projects, calendar, calendar, calendar, calendar. You have to have a command of your calendar at like level 10 of 10 levels. If you really want to build a team that drives real revenue and growth to the business, you need to know what you're working on quarterly, monthly, weekly. In some companies, it's convenient to know that us, our calendar Control is super easy because our calendar in our company completely revolves around our live events. Because for us, our live events, those are the only risks that we have primarily in the company, right? If we don't fill a hotel, we get charged a bunch of fees, that type of thing. So for us, managing to calendar is fairly straightforward. We gotta do enough marketing to fill enough hotel event seats, and that's pretty straightforward. And it's an ongoing calendar because those our priorities are always the same, right? Get more customers, keep more customers, communicate to them better, get them to live events, make sure they go through our products and services and they love them and they achieve great outcomes and lifetime values. Straightforward. We have a company that, that's my personal brand, that's always the same. So managing calendars super straightforward because we all get to do very similar things on a very similar rhythm. That's fairly straightforward in other companies. Listen, what they're doing each quarter is so different than any quarter they have ever done before. They're launching new products and programs on a consistent and constant basis that all of those new things that aren't familiar or new to people before. The more new initiatives that you're rolling out that are not familiar to team, the more you need to manage that calendar, the more that you need teams coming together to prepare, the more efforts you need to do to enroll people, to help them understand it, to get them excited about it, it just changes the game. So for those who don't feel like you're in control of your team, don't start with the individuals on the team. Start with the calendar. Sit down and get real clarity about this year's calendar, what you want to achieve in the next two or three years, and then either work backwards and strategize it if you're the leader manager and you already know it, or if you have a more experienced team, that's the time to get everybody around the table and be like, guys, gals, this is where we want to go in three years. Let's talk about how to make that happen. And then let's work it backwards and set up the calendar to achieve that. And then you roll it out to the teams. What most people do is they kind of wander around, they're like, what are we doing? When, where, what? And when you have a lot of people going, what are we doing when, where what? That's called operational drag. It's a bunch of people sitting around unfocused. And it's really hard because some teams, like my teams in my personal branding, we do the Same thing all the time, right? We have a funnel. The funnel's always running. We have the same events, we're always filling events. We have the same products and the same programs that we've been selling pretty much the same for 10 years even. We call it something different. So we have, like the benefit of that. But if all of a sudden you yanked away that from the team or you yanked away from events and you said, okay, we're going to roll out seven new product categories, we'd have to get so disciplined. Everyone would have like, the whole company would have to know it. So you have to know what type of company you have and what type of rhythm you have. But please remember, if you're struggling, calendar equals control. For those who struggle in your personal life, in your relationships, building the broader team with people. If you don't feel like you're getting the momentum in your family and your health and anything in your life, I'm telling you it's coming because a lack of focus on calendar, you're not knowing where and when you want to go and building backwards from that and knowing the milestones that would take to get that. I get up in the morning, I go over there. I get my. After I've done my 20 minutes of stretching, so I do my 20 minutes of stretching or yoga or walking, but 20 minutes of movement in the morning. Go over there. Hot green tea, Go over there. Right there. Work on the high performance planner. If not there, then the office over there. That's it. If meaning the first thing I do is I'm jumping into a planner because I can't achieve speed, especially with as many brands without a great deal. Focus on the planner. Everybody's the same. They all love big picture and they all love detail. Your job as the manager is to know that person's ratio is imbalanced there. If they're more big picture and that's vital to their role, you're communicating more of that. If they're more detail, you're communicating more than that. Meaning I'm. Everyone's the same. Everyone wants big picture and detail. You need to know for that specific person's role, where they need to play and which, where they love to focus on there. I think universally everybody should always know the big picture. Always, always, always, always be speaking the bigger picture. And if people get big, they get bored from that. It does not matter. Your job is not to entertain people. Your job is to keep people on track. Big picture, always say it over and over and over and over. I've had the blessing of working with two US Presidents now in terms of interviewing them post presidency. And I asked them both, you know, dozens of questions about leadership. And both of them, one of the things that really surprised me is both of them shared that in terms of communication, the thing that surprised them the most was how often they had to say the exact same thing over and over and over and over. And they're like, they were. They were tired of saying it. And they, you know, when people say, brennan, I'm tired of telling these people, what should I do? I'm like, say it again. How do you consistently create connection, engagement among virtual team members? I think it's so important. It just depends your role, obviously, what your role is. But if you're the manager of those folks, I think two things just have to happen. Number one, you got to do a weekly zoom call or phone call. There's got to be a weekly voice connection and touch. It has to be weekly. Number two, you need to make sure you get a status report from everybody on that virtual team every single week. And number three, you've got to set up relationships within that virtual team where they're managing and working with each other, meaning there's a workflow. They know how they work together, and they're not all separate, so it feels like they're on a team. Those three things in place are powerful. Number one, you got to have that voice with them weekly or have the person who does like in my teams and my companies, other people do that, because that's not. Because so much of what I do is driven by my personal actions as a brand builder. Like I've. It's not useful for me to do a lot of status calls or team calls in that way, though. All of my teams, across all of our seven companies, I will tell you, will say, brendan, we need you on more team calls. They. They've said that for 10 years. It's just never going to happen because my particular unique ability is not that. So that's just a warning, Lucas, that maybe you don't need to do that, but somebody on the team and the team itself needs to have that conversation. Number two, status reports. You got to have a status report that is sharing what everybody's working on so that you from a high level can understand what the virtual teams are doing and where they're struggling and delegate or change. And number three, assigning roles, leadership roles or lead roles, management roles or collaborator roles where the people don't feel lonely. And I think that's important. One beautiful thing I think is important. If you have virtual teams and they're long standing virtual teams bring them together once a year. You know, we have an unfair advantage in my company. We do so many events, we do, I think eight events per year and we kind of rotate the people through who are coming or who want to come and we get to see each other. We have like camp, you know, multiple times a year. So we have an unfair advantage there. But you can build that into strategic off sites with the team. I think it's important. If you can't do an off site with the entire team, do an off site with the team leaders and that will help bring them together and they'll take that energy back and then supporting, you know, dorky things that people can do for holidays. It seems like you lead the company and if you do let somebody else within the company focus on that. Where's the best place to find great team members? The best place to find great team members is from places that are similar to your company who were former team members on those companies, meaning people who have experience working for your competitors. Those are always going to be the best place. Your competitors are the best place to draw team members from because it's in your industry. They do similar things. So always look there, people like, well, how do I find them? I'm like, go on LinkedIn and message them, say, hey, I see you're in this role. I've got a business that's this is our mission. Seems like we're aligned. If you're ever looking for other opportunities, we're hiring right now. Straightforward like that. Now I know that's going to create a lot of controversy with everybody watching. And there's other ways to do it. If you feel like, oh my gosh, Brendan, that's going to create a bad name for me in the industry or something like that, then you do this crazy thing is get support and have a recruiter do it for you. So I think that's important. I think the second best place is from the people who love your company, fans of your company, not fans of you if you're an individual influencer. But if someone loves your company, they love what you do. They love how you're in service to the world. People who love that, acknowledge that, appreciate it. Those are awesome, awesome, awesome hires. Next big point is this. You have to, if you've committed to building a team, the next piece of building that team is to understand a very big piece that your focus is always in developing team. And I'm going to share something with you in terms of building high performance teams, it's so critical that most people won't like and they most people won't do because it's really uncomfortable. And that is to understand that development always means difficult tasks. Development always means difficult, difficult tasks. Like your job is to constantly think of how to do harder things in the company. How do you challenge your employees, how do you take on something new even if they don't know how to do it? Like we do it all the time. Like, oh, we're going to try this new event. Oh, we're going to launch this supplement. Oh, we're going to do this thing for our customers. We don't know how to do that. But just because you don't know how to do it doesn't mean you don't put it on people's plates. Development for people does not mean you going, you know, to some off site and climbing a bunch of ropes together though. That's cute and fun. But what they have found in all of the high performance team research, that's never the factor, right? For those who have not read the Google work study, make sure you do the Google work study. Or if you've never read Flow, a book by Mihaly csusentmihalyi There is no question whatsoever that a lot of the growth and a lot of the flow and a lot of the creativity that really benefits a company happens because you're giving people and teams hard jobs that they don't know how to do. Because if you're not doing that, they get bored. But if they're getting overwhelmed in a way in which they don't feel supported, then you hurt the company. So the job is to build the relationships, the trust, the role, clarity, the calendar out that everybody understands. But at the end of the day, all development on the job is not giving them access to some new training that they can log into. It's giving them hard things to do, is making sure their tasks are things. They're like, whoa, I don't know, I don't know. Let me get in there and try it. That's not only how do you move a company forward, it's how do you keep people engaged? Meaning all development is really on the job training. It's on the job tasks and difficulties. I'm not saying that you can't do lots of other creative things to create fun cultures because, you know, we all love to read, you know, books about Zappos and their, their funny costumes at work. But there's been hundreds of other companies that wildly Succeeded that were way more buttoned up, that didn't do that stuff, that still built unbelievable revenue, lifetime value and impact in the culture. And they did that because they never shied away from taking on hard things. I think it's really important we have a culture right now where everyone's so scared to give other people hard and difficult things to do, and yet that's the only way people grow. And so you gotta be thinking as a manager, as a leader, as an investor, whatever role you play, working with other people on a team, how can you strategically insert difficult tasks onto people's plates? Like, how do you keep up leveling their roles and responsibilities or the outputs desired while at the same time still providing the support for it? It's like, you know, I'm always doing that with my team. I'm like, please tell me when you need us to hire, because I'm just going to keep piling it on and then one day you're going to go, we should hire. And that's how that should always go. You as the business owner, operator, you managing the team, keep piling it on the team. Even if they don't like it, even if they complain. Because your job is the growth of the organization. Because if the company doesn't grow, then you don't get to employ people. They don't get to pay their mortgage, their rent, their kids, college tuitions. So your responsibility is fiduciary, like to make sure the company succeeds. The way the company succeeds is you keep growing it, you keep excelling, you keep delivering, you keep earning. So I don't want anyone here to ever go like, you know, I really shouldn't put this on the team's plate. No, first job to consider is how do I put it on their plate? But make sure they're supported and in able to be able to do that. I hope that makes sense. If your peers on a team are not performing well, your job is to have the candid conversation. There's a book that you should even read called Difficult Conversations or Candid Conversations. I think those are great. But a better book I think that's really relevant these days. It has a good edge to it is a book called Principles. Make sure you read that book called Principles and that will give you some perspective towards that as well. I think it's so critical that you give that candid feedback immediately. What people do is they let somebody slide in the 11th hours, as you said, with a project deadline over and over and over. And this bitterness grows and this feeling grows and they're mad. And then one day a person resigns or another person explodes and you're like, why didn't you just communicate that earlier? The time to hold someone accountable is immediately and fast. Do not let it build. Do not let poor behavior go unaddressed right now. And I think that's what's important, Tammy, is to sit them down and say, listen, I'm. We're all trying to do our work here, but this thing that you keep doing is preventing us from doing that. How can I support you? What do you need to do it better? Or were you unclear? Did we not set you up? What must we do to make sure that you perform higher? If somebody you're collaborating with in an organization keeps underperforming in that way, then the job is to say, listen, this keeps affecting us. I got two choices. We figure out, how do you do it better? Or we just talk to our manager together and figure out how you do it better. Which one would you like to do? And that's how I always present it. It's like we got two options. We figure it out together and this doesn't happen anymore, or we go to the manager and we all figure it out together. Notice I didn't say I'm going to tell daddy on you. It's not. I'm going to go tell the manager. I'm going to go tell mom on you. No, no, no. It's okay. We either figured out together or would you like to enlist the manager in figuring this out? Because we got to figure this out. That is the only way. And that is the very conversation that 90% of people avoid, and that's why organizations suck, is because you got a bunch of people thinking things and not giving feedback. Organizations that succeed, they're the best. They've generated trust. And what Google work project called psychological safety to allow each person to give honest and candid feedback. And people learn to take that feedback without being little children like, oh, you hurt my feelings. Like, you know what? That's good performance feedback. I'll get better. That's what matters the most when that team is an employee or someone you are managing specifically, I want to encourage everybody here to fire people as fast as you humanly can if you know they are not a fit, if they are poisoning culture, if their performance has been strike 1, 2 and 3, you discussed it with them, you documented with it, you gave them a chance, or if they've done something just, you know, critically bad to the organization, bam, fire them. Now, here's the thing. So many People are so sensitive about firing people. And I'm like, I say this to all my teams all the time. I say, I'm going to be doing this till I'm 100 years old. We're going to have literally hundreds of people who come in and out of the teams that we do. I want to let you know I'm never going to be sensitive about hiring more people if you ask that. And I'm never going to be sensitive about letting somebody go because my job is to maintain the organization and its mission. That's my job. And I don't mind letting people go. But for those of you who are so scared for that, can I give you a new way of thinking about firing? And that is to fire somebody means to coach somebody out. That's what I mean. It's. It's like, it's a better way of thinking about it that will help you do it when it needs to happen. It's like, first, obviously, you don't fire unless you give them a chance. You explain what's going on, you've given that great feedback, everything's good. But then it's about sitting them down and saying, you know what? I'm sensing from your performance here that you really don't want to be here. And we've given the feedback. You haven't rised the occasion. If you really wanted to be here and you really loved what we were doing, your potential would be activated. You would love coming to work, you would make it happen. You would care so deeply about doing this because you cared about the culture. You didn't want to let other people down. You're not excelling here and you know you're not passionate about it or excelling because you would have gone to a whole other level. We wouldn't have had these conversations, so this isn't a fit for you. And just calling a spade a spade and letting them know that this will be their last day and coaching them out, letting them know that this isn't for them, and not having guilt, not having anxiety, not having frustration. Listen, most people, over 70% of people in major organizational surveys report not enjoying their job or their company or not being engaged at work. It's okay. You're going to have a ton of those people. Don't be scared about letting people go if they're not contributing to the vision and the mission, the team, the culture. If they're not performing well and they've been given that direct feedback and it just is not a fit, stop wasting time. Let them go. So Fast. You'll be happy you did. I've never met someone who's like, oh, well, we let people go too fast. No, they're always like, why don't we let that person go earlier? And it's not because you see what you do as a person who has a heart, which I do all the time, I want to take care of that person. I want to support them. I want to be their friend. I want to see them succeed. That's not your job, though. Your job is to ensure that the company succeeds so that this person's co workers not only get to make their difference, but that these coworkers are protected in a way that, you know what, they're protected from underperformers so their job doesn't become harder because of an underperformer. So that the company isn't compromised so you can't pay the mortgage so that, you know, you can't pay the lease so that you can't pay them and their teams. I think it's really important to take it seriously that letting people go protects the company. And once you realize, like, oh, I'm actually protecting the company, I'm protecting these other people who are high performers, I'm protecting the culture. Once you take in that mama bear, papa bear stance, like, oh, letting someone go is protecting the company. Now you feel obligated to do it and you'll do it faster if your thing is like, oh, well, I'm just loyal to this nice person. Be like, no, you can be friends outside of that job, fine. But they don't need to be polluting the culture or bringing down the performance of the organization. So the impact isn't being made or their co workers jobs become, you know, at peril because you can't afford payroll anymore. So it also prevents somebody who would love that job from being in there and having a passionate purpose. I've let people go only to have someone come in who's more passionate, who loves it, and you're bringing somebody else's potential and fire and purpose to life by letting somebody go who that wasn't true for them. I hope that serves last big idea and I hope this will serve is that remember, a team is a community of potential and you got to approach it that way. I said at the top of the hour. One of the things that hurts people so bad is that they C team is a pain in the butt. People will lie, cheat, still underperform. It's hard to hire them. People come in and out. I hate the onboarding process. Yeah, that's all true. And this is a community of potential. This is a community that you get to be in. The way I look at team is like, wow, I get to be in this team. We get to do this together. You know, it's that old Margaret Mead quote, a small group of people. Never underestimate what a small group of people can do to change the world. It's like, yeah, you get to build, like, if you're working with people, you get to, through your communication with them, get to shape your ideal work environment over a period of time, your ideal impact in the world over a period of time. And you get to have fun with people doing it. Now, I know some people. Well, not everyone's fun, Brendan. I'm like, oh, trust me, I know. But that you have that opportunity. Enjoy that. I hope you will. I hope you enjoy that. And I hope that will serve you as you continue to dive deep on this. Because, listen, last point. No one ever finishes their team journey. I'm still learning to build teams. I still work with companies that are still wanting to build teams. It never, ever stops. But what must also never stop is your commitment to build the teams that are necessary for you to serve your mission, for you to make your impact, for you to build your career, for you to develop your skills, for you to really change your life, your family's life and this culture. You will need other people. So now make it part of your job to think more consistently, more strategically about team. You got to have people to help you become better. You got to have people to make a bigger difference. So realize that part of your journey to becoming extraordinary is helping develop extraordinary teams. I celebrate every single one of you for your passion to live a more vibrant, connected and excellence driven life. Until next time, everybody please go out there. Realize that you can change the world. Realize that you can be a high performance person if you choose to. And as always, make sure live every day, love as much as you can, and go make a difference. This week.