CEO's Ultimate Guide To Stop Team Politics & Silos Forever

What happens with politics and silos and turf wars is when people think that their business area is their most important team, they're missing the point. The most important team is the company. Second most important team is marketing. We have to get culturally aligned at the leadership team level that our most important team is not the business area we run, but the company as a whole. When that happens, the debates that we're having, the celebrations that we're having, the discussions that we're having, the confronting the brutal facts, all of that is happening for the good of the team, the good of the company, not for their business area. What you're going into is kind of less of the founder mode to manager mode and more founder to chairman mode. So it is about having a really strong, vivid vision in place so that they have a strong vision for where the organization is going over three years, kind of on top of the one year, three year, ten year goals and plan. Like a really well crafted four to five page vision that articulates all aspects of the organization. Really making sure that the team all understands kind of core values. And then even for you, starting to give them some coaching and development around the fact that your part of your role has been that chief energizing officer and now they need to show up with that energy. What is it you need to do so that they will start showing up with that energy? What does that energy kind of transference mean? What are the little things that you've done that either were kind of the, you know, at times we undermine our own strengths. Like we're like, oh, that's no big deal. Well, it is for everybody else. Like it's no big deal to you because it's a unique ability. So you need to start to quantify and codify what it is that you do that is no big deal. That actually drives energy that is an anchor. And then start to train them in that so that more of them can pick that up so that it isn't just a pure reliance on you. There's also something, you know, when you move into this that you really want to be careful with. Delegation versus abdication. Right. That we can often drop stuff on people's plates where we are kind of walking away from it and running away from it without really knowing what their skills and their confidence are on each of those areas of the business. So really spending time in the next two months making sure that you're pretty aware as to their skill level and confidence level, really having the deep kind of dives and discussions with them and then even Making sure that they have things like the CO alliance for them or mentoring for them so that they have places they can turn where you're not going to be there as often even when you come back. You know, when we were building one, 800, got junk, we made sure that every member of the leadership team was a part of a couple of different communities they were learning from. So they had a peer group and we made sure that they each had a formal mentor that they were being mentored by. So I had the incoming COO at Starbucks mentoring me. We were doing one hour calls every month, we were doing full day in person meetings every quarter. Brian had a mentor. Roman, the head of IT was being mentored by the head of at Abe Books, our head of finance was being mentored by the head of finance at Business Objects. So we all had really strong kind of mentoring systems in place and that might be maybe something you can plug into. And then the other part is just ensuring that as long as they build the organization, I think of it like an inverted pyramid that you've got the vivid vision that they're all driving towards. And then they build the business inside the core purpose and the core values. And as long as they're making decisions towards that, the path that they take should start to matter less to you. And then lastly, there's a system that's really important which is around the skip level meetings, right? The ability for you to inspect what you expect. And I think that's something that the one day a month, you know, when you are back in the business, really good solid understanding of how to run a skip level meeting. And there's two ways that you can run a skip level skip level is you're going to skip over your direct report. Let's say you skip over the head of finance, you meet with everybody in finance or you skip over the head of marketing, you meet with everybody in marketing and you're going to be presenting them with your ideas, your vision, where you want the organization to go and asking them how they think it's going, how's it going with the team, how's it going with the direction, what support do you need? If this is where we're headed, how are we doing towards that and just getting their thoughts and then you're merely saying thank you, that's important or thank you, I appreciate that or you're talking to them and just asking them what they think can happen. That's better, right? What's broken, what's not working, what are their needs that they're not getting supported on. And then for you, it's you saying thank you for that. The key is to not engage. You know, if they give you a problem, you can't engage and say, oh, we'll fix that. And I'm glad you're mentioning it, let's start digging in. Because you don't know the rest of the story, but you only know that. So it's just saying thank you, I appreciate it, and then I'll take that back to their VP or back to their CMO or whatever and chatting to get the rest of the stories. But those skip level meetings are important. And then in conjunction with that, it's really the whole inspect what you expect. So it's looking at the key metrics in each of the business areas, just being aware of the projects that people are working on to make sure that they're working on the right stuff. Until you know so much as the team, you know, your leadership team really has them going in that right direction on wins. I think it's really important that all of us as entrepreneurs, CEOs or even as CEOs really do stay very present and focused on the wins that our team are having. Projects that we're completing, core values that are being lived or demonstrated. Because we're often so focused on setting the next goal, hitting the next project, driving towards the next growth. Great, we just did 100% growth. Let's do it again. And we often forget to say thank you and praise people for all of those projects that just happened. Like if Nels was to sit back and look at all the reasons why we had 100% revenue growth in the last 12 months, he'd have 50 different things to be praising people on and thanking them for. And the energy that transfers from that. When we actually focus on praise and gratitude and saying thanks more than we do of giving them the next project, they'll find the next projects on their own. And so I think it's important that it's not hard for us to come up with those. There's some data that says that the bonuses can become more of a demotivator than a motivator. And I'll explain why. For an owner, we already take enough money out of the business on a day to day basis to be satisfied, right? If we need more money, we take more money out. If we want to pay for something personally through the business, we tend to, we're kind of already taken care of and everything at the upside is kind of our bonus and we're chasing it for the good of the game and the good of what we're building, et cetera. But for the average employer, the general employee, they're really often kind of struggling to make ends meet all the time. And to create some kind of a year end bonus means that they're really happy for one or two weeks of the year, but then for 50 weeks of the year they feel like they're stretched. So it's often in my mind better to pay people very fairly, pay them very fairly for 52 weeks out of the year, make sure that they're satisfied and happy for 52 weeks out of the year. Any bonus that comes along should almost be a discretionary one that the owner decides to share the wealth or share because we hit something big and we want to say thanks. A way to really inject some energy and positivity into the group. But in terms of it driving performance, the data shows that the really strong A players are going to perform the way they're always going to perform, right? They're going to show up and give it their best. They're going to always be driving towards, you know, results are going to always be living the core values. So a bonus for them is like, well, I'm not working any harder than I was already working. Like why are you trying to make this an incentive? So that's something to consider. And then for a lot of people as well, they don't really have full control over anything that you might be trying to tie a bonus to, right? It's hard. Especially like think creatives, right? People that are in marketing, people that are in copywriting, like what are you going to tie the bonus to? Me writing good copy, like always writing good copy or me putting out good creative, like unless you're going to pay me a percentage of revenue. So I think the only people that should have performance based pay are either a, the salespeople that are really in kind of more of that eat what you kill environment. And this is more outbound sales versus inbound sales. And then the second one is people that are like more project based where you're giving them a project for a defined base of time and if they achieve it faster or they get better results, there can be a bonus incentive tied to that, but it's more like a result thing. And then the lastly is more people that are on like piecework, you know, people that are doing a job that, let's say that you're painting a house if you were out there and you're going to paint a house that I think is going to take you 40 hours to paint it, and you paint it in 30, I'll pay you for 40. But if I think it's going to take you 40 and it takes you 50, I'm still going to pay you for 40 with a minimum base of minimum wage. So the incentive is there to really work hard and then they can get more done. And basically what I'm doing is I'm getting more gross margin per hour, per labor hour worked. So that's where a performance based pay can work. But for most roles, it doesn't tend to make sense. Like imagine if you said to your spouse, I'll buy you flowers. If you're nice to me, I'll buy you flowers. If you do a good job around the house. That doesn't make any sense. Why are we thinking that it's going to work with our employees? I think it's a bad structure. If we're going to tie this into any kind of performance based pay, it shouldn't be all or nothing. I've almost never seen it work where it's all or nothing and someone misses and people feel good about it. What happens is, let's say that you say, okay, you're going to get 10 grand if you hit X and you come in 1% less than X, you missed. But then the employee's pissed off, the manager's nervous, everybody's kind of frustrated it really didn't work. And they're like, I was 1% or I was 6% or I was 7% or I was 8. Like, at what point is close enough? Close enough. So I almost think that it's got to be like 100% payout for hitting the goal. Maybe it's 75% payout for coming at 95%, maybe it's 50% payout for coming at 90% and maybe it's lost. Like, so at least there's a bit of a sliding scale around it. And then what if they overachieve, right? If they, if you want to take away some money because they missed, what happens if they come in at 100% of gold? Do they get a kicker? So I think you just have to really think clearly about that. If the CEO is stepping in to do work, you need to make sure that there's systems in place to ensure that that work gets done to the satisfaction level of the CEO so they don't need to jump back in again. So if this, if the CEO is just kind of doing a skip level meeting, that's fine. They're supposed to. If they're just inspecting what they expect to be happening. They're supposed to. But if they're jumping in and doing the work that they feel you should be doing, I think that it's important for you and them to sit down and talk about what's the result they're looking for, what's the output they're looking for, and how can you actually ensure that there's a system or a process or somebody in place who can actually then do that work? Right, and make sure that work gets done? Because our role as leaders is to grow people, is to make sure that they're working on the right stuff and to make sure that they have the skills and the confidence and the connections to get it done. The connections like the who, not how. So as long as they're getting the work done, they're feeling good, they're empowered, they're getting results. The metrics that they're responsible for are fine. I had a mentor one time, he was working with Starbucks, and the CEO called him and he said, why is the letter B on this specific sign in Seattle not working? And Greg said, I don't care. The question we need to ask is, what system do we have in place to ensure that every letter on all of the signs at all of our locations is always working? I'm not even going to go and find out why that letter is working. I'm going to make sure the system. So for your CEO to go in and just write some emails isn't the fix right? The fix is, how many emails do we want going out? Why? How many connections do we want with our clients? Why? What results are we looking for from emails? Why? Okay, if I understand that, let's take that to marketing. Let's get marketing to do it so that you can stay at the CEO level, but you need to prevent them from dropping down and doing functional work. If there's something on the CEO's plate that they're not good at, that they don't love doing, that they're not energized by, then let's get it off their plate. Even though it might be traditionally a CEO task. You know, my former business partner, when we were building the autobody chain, was supposed to do, because he was CEO, we were just taking the company public, was supposed to do calls with the public market, was supposed to do calls with the investment bankers, was supposed to do calls with the lawyers, and he hated them. So I was like, well, don't do them. He said, I have to. I'm CEO. I said, no, it has to get done. Let's get Brock the CFO to do all those calls so that you can stay on Biz Dev and stay on Vision and Stancy. He's like, that'd be amazing. So Brock our CFO started doing them. Nobody cared. I tried doing a split EA years ago at Wenn Tender got junk. I had an EA and then Brian wanted an EA but didn't think he needed a full time one. So I said, fine, we can split one, but I need you to track all the stuff you're giving to her and all the hours that you think that stuff is going to take. And as soon as you get over 20 hours a week, you're getting your own EA because I'm now not going to have the time to get my stuff done. What we realized after about three weeks was we could really load up people with stuff as we got better and better at loading them up. You might find that your team needs a fractional EA or your team needs to get better at hiring people off upwork or fiverr, or you get a fractional person that your team can use as you start using one more and more. But yes, you can use one within the team for sure. The key is to make sure that you understand and they understand all the stuff that's being delegated and then really, who trumps who? Let's say that you and I both delegated something to her for him and it's due, you know, tomorrow at five o'. Clock. Whose project is more important than mine or yours? You know, if they only have eight hours in the day and they've already got six hours worth of work and you give them a four hour project and I give them a four hour project, it's not, well, somebody's work's not getting done if she's only reporting to you and all of the work that she's doing is your work, you and she can prioritize and it's easy. But now all of a sudden you're going to bump somebody else's project. That's what tends to happen, you know, when you're using a shared resource like that. I don't like profit sharing for a couple reasons. Number one, there's not very many early stage growth companies that are driving profit. They're driving growth. What you're building right now has a longer term economic value than earning profit. And if you had more money sitting there, you'd probably hire somebody, which hurts profit. You'd invest in marketing, which hurts profit. You put some systems in place Hurts profit, Right? Why would you share profit when all you're concerned about is growing growth and economic value? So if anything, you might try some bonuses that are more discretionary, that are tied to growing the economic value of the business. Tried to overall to growing gross margin for the organization, then maybe there's a percentage. So we used to share a percentage of our gross margin, but 20% was reserved for the company and it was anything above that that we would share. So as long as we earned X, we'd share a bit of Y. If you were the CEO of a house painting company and you had no arms and you walked around all the homes that were being painted and you noticed stuff that needed to get done, what would you do? So if you do all these skip level meetings and you see all this stuff that gets done, pretend you have no arms and tell all the people to do it and then coach them to make sure they can do it and make sure they have the support to do it and cheer them on when they're doing it, but don't do the work. When I got divorced, my 9 and 7 year olds started making their own lunch. For a while I stood there sometimes I had to like hold this stuff and show them how to cut their own carrots or whatever and like how to package it. And I showed them what they needed to have. They always need to fruit, they always need to have some vegetables, they could always have a snack, they always need to have a sandwich. And then I showed them how to like make sure it was all safely done. And once they could do it, I just made sure they had the right items. Like they couldn't pour a bowl of Froot Loops into a box and say that was lunch. Once I trained them, then they were making their own lunch. Just do the same with your team. Make sure they have the skills, but don't let yourself get sucked into doing the work. The second part is don't do skip level meetings every week. You know, these are a once a quarter per business area thing. At most a skip level meeting could be just management by walking around. It can be you walking around and sitting down with people and saying, hey, show me what you're working on. How's it going? What do you need? It could be going for coffee and just saying how's it going? The key is to not engage and say, oh yeah, we have to fix that because you don't have the rest of the story. When I ran a house painting company, if I was walking around the property and I noticed stuff up on the third story that hadn't been painted. And I went up and put the paint on it. And I come back and Guy's like, why did you just paint that? I still had to sand it and prime it tomorrow. Like, oh, I saw that it hadn't been painted. He goes, yeah, you didn't have the rest of the story. Like, I've scraped all the bare areas. Now I have to get the sander out. He's like, you just wasted my time. Now I got to scrape all off your paint. So it's not our job to do work, it's our job to observe. And then when we go back and say, hey, I saw this stuff, they go, yeah, it's being sanded tomorrow. You go, okay, I won't even look for that stuff anymore. I'm good. One of my most intense meetings that I had with my mentor was he did a one hour skip level with each of my eight direct reports. And then he and I went for dinner. And he did one hour, one hour, one hour, one hour. And then he sat down and he goes, what do you think you're doing? Well, I don't know, man. And he's like, where do you think you can get better? I told him those. And he goes, okay, here's what I think your team thinks you're doing well. And here's what I think your team thinks you can do better. And over like a 90 minute dinner, I got eight hours of feedback that was very anonymous, that was very unbiased. It was only there to help me grow, and it was delivered in a really good coaching way. Even when I do that coaching module of invest in your leaders course, I even talk about coaching in that way, right? What are you doing well? What are you not doing well? And then me giving you feedback. So the skip level is similar to that. Really highly recommend you read the book the Dream Manager by Matthew Kelly. John Ratliff was the CEO at Apple Tree Answers. I taught him the whole idea of the dream manager as well. John had approximately 120 employees at the time, spread over a few different call centers. And John took the idea of the dream manager, which is basically, get all of your employees to write their bucket list. Get all of your employees to write down 101 things they want to do or see or try or experience. Places to go, whatever it is. And when they write down all of the things on their bucket list, your job is to try to help them make those things happen. Not pay for them, but to give them the confidence, the connections. Let's Say there's seven people that want to learn how to play guitar. Great. Why don't we start a guitar club, have a guitar teacher come in once a week and teach everybody in the group. Or I want to go hang gliding. Great. Why don't we get six people that want to go hang gliding and all of you go together? Or I want to get out of debt. Great. Why don't we all come in and I'll run a budgeting session for you and teach you how to run a personal cost flow. There's a lot of things that we can do for people that can be giving them resources or giving them inspiration or giving them, you know, groups that they can do stuff with. But when you understand all the dreams and the desires and the goals of people, your job as the dream manager is to help coach them and encourage them and help them make those things happen. John took the idea of the dream manager and he merged it with the Children's Wish foundation and he merged it together and he called it the Dream on program. So John granted 120 dreams over three years at a cost of about $3,000 per dream. So his idea was if I grant 120 wishes over three years, which is basically three and a half wishes a month, he spent a total of $420,000 over three years granting 120 wishes. So about $3,000. But he ended up selling the company for $107 million. As he was growing it from 3 million to 36 million. Granting all of these dreams and wishes created a cult like environment. Internally. They had a full time person whose job was to coach people on making their dreams happen. You know, again, you don't have to be the dream manager. You just have to be able to kind of rally the program and challenge people to do it. So that would be the starting points I'd have. What happens with politics and silos and turf wars is when people think that their business area is their most important team, they're missing the point. The most important team is the company. So at the leadership team level, which is where it starts, the head of finance has to remember their most important team is the company's leadership team. Their second most important team is finance. The head of marketing has to remember their most important team is the company. Second most important team is marketing. We have to get culturally aligned at the leadership team level that our most important team is not the business area we run, but the company as a whole. When that happens, the debates that we're having, the celebrations that we're Having the discussions that we're having, the confronting the brutal facts, all of that is happening for the good of the team, the good of the company, not for their business area. And then our job at the leadership team level is to stop the politics, to stop the turf wars. Politics tend to start happening between 100 people and 300 people. That's when they start to creep into the organization. When companies are less than 100, when you're going from 30 to 100, there's just not enough people for real politics to be there. It gets uncovered too soon, it gets seen too soon, but it really starts to come up around the 100 person mark. So your job is to start breaking it down. The ways that you break it down are making sure that everybody remembers that the company is their most important team. A second way that you can do it is to celebrate the successes and wins at all the business area meetings. So when the leadership team is meeting, finance has to say thanks or congrats to some other business area for something they did well. Like we have to be watching the other people and celebrate. Very similar to when the offense is coming off the field, the defense is high fiving them and saying great job, and they're letting them know what they saw when they were out there. When the defense is coming off the field, the offense is high fiving them and letting them know what they saw. Everybody's trying to help each other for the good of the company. When you shared your win, you kind of odg shucked it because starting a slack channel and a group kind of recognition around core values is actually huge because it does start to celebrate the wins. It does start to sit to show praise, it does start to show that they're important to us. And it also allows us to then kind of build core values as a benchmark that we build off of versus something that we penalize if it goes wrong. I would sit and talk about that as a group and say, hey, if these are the things that we're noticing, what do you guys think that we should do so that those disappear? You know, if, if this is something that we're noticing, what do you guys think we should do so that we can eradicate that or so we become more of a team? When I start with an acquisitions and this is, I go back to even thinking about John ratliff. He did 17 acquisitions over the course of, I think, three or four years. When you do the integrations for an acquisition, and my sister's done, I think, 12 acquisitions now for her company, it's always first about integrating them with the core values and the culture, making sure they're aligned with the vision, making sure that they're really kind of onboarded and understand the people and the idiosyncrasies and why we do stuff the way we do it, but not getting them to change the way that they operate too quickly. You don't need them in the early 30, 60, 90 days to all be using your software. You don't need them in the 30, 60, 90 days to all follow your SOPs. You don't need them in that first quarter to be doing everything the way you do it. You need them all to be aligned. You need them all to start liking people. You need to all get them to have some best friends. You need to get them to understand the culture and the core values and that they're safe. There's a little bit around Maslow's hierarchy of needs that they need to feel safe and secure. So it's really underpinning that around culture and the safety and security that they know they're okay and they're going to be good and they're excited about where they're going. And then after the first quarter, you start moving them into using the systems and the brands. We did a lot of acquisitions when we were building Gerber Auto Collision and Boyd Auto Body, and we really never even worried about changing the company name over, you know, even when Gerber in the US Was buying all the companies, Boyd Auto Body bought Gerber first. It was just a. At first it was a Boyd Auto Body company, and then it was like equal billing, and then the company just switched. You don't even need to change the company name right away. They can operate as their current company, you know, a division of yours for the first 90 days, and then it could be, you know, equal billing and then you can drop it. So don't worry about changing the least important stuff first. So something else that's attractive to A players too, that we haven't spoken about, and that's vacation time. You know, I had a CEO that I was coaching one time, and on the first coaching call, he said, my COO just quit. I'm like, what? She's been with you for four years. She's amazing. Like, she was one of your A players. Why did she quit? He said, I paid her. I think it was like a 20% pay raise four years in a row, and she quit to go work somewhere else where she could have more vacation time because she didn't even have time to spend the money that she was making. So he was, he was giving her something she didn't want. You're never going to attract and retain great employees with two weeks paid vacation period. If you're in Europe, it's five or six weeks. Gen Y needs more time. They're going to moonlight, they're going to work other jobs, they're going to work part time. Like the culture that you're creating with a two week vacation time is much worse than paying people fairly and giving them five weeks vacation and no bonuses. You'll retain people, you'll attract people, they're not going to quit. Your training cost goes down, your retention goes up, word of mouth goes up, productivity goes up. You do five weeks paid vacation, including your sick time. And on December 31st, any days you haven't used, you lose. And every week or every month you're coaching people to take their vacation time. So at the end of the year they're refreshed. So they found people to cross train so the business isn't completely reliant on them all of a sudden. It's pretty incredible what's happening with your company. Culture Unlimited is actually proven not to work. And I'll explain why. Nobody actually means it. If any senior leader ever came to Kate and said, hey Kate, I'm going to take off six weeks vacation right now and I'm going to take off four weeks next month, you'd be like, like. But yeah, but it's unlimited, right? So we don't really mean unlimited. We mean, what we mean is more like five or six weeks. But then let's make sure we take it. So I think you're going to be better off going five weeks paid, including your sick time. So hire healthy people and if you're coaching them every single month to take their vacation time. So by the end of the year, and I like one week over Christmas and New Year's, two weeks in the summer and take your other days and make all the three day weekends into four day weekends. Everybody wins. The key is though, make sure that there's no leftover because you don't want people to accrue vacation time and get paid out in a year or two or three. I want you to take vacation. I don't want to see you every day. I want you actually being recharged. I want you to actually delegate more. I want you to systemize your work more. Years ago I was teaching a company and we actually were at an off site. We took all 70 of his or 80 of his employees off site for the day, and I ran some training sessions for them. And then at the end of the day, he rolled out his vivid vision to the employees. He passed out a copy to every employee. He said, I want you to all read it and read it out loud together as a group. So one person at a time read a paragraph, and then the next person read a paragraph. And at the end of that, Dean said, this is what our company looks like in three years. And around 15% of you don't like what the future looks like, and that's okay. But this is absolutely what our company is going to look like in three years. So if any of you do not like the future, do not like what it looks like, I'll pay you $3,000 if you quit by Friday, because this is absolutely what we're building. Around six weeks later, 15% of his company had quit. A year later, he ranked as the number two company in western Canada to work for. They crushed it. And what they did was kind of identifying what you wanted is the ones who aren't quite sure they're not quite the right fit, get them to go work somewhere else. Because we are absolutely going to be monomaniacs with a mission. We're absolutely going to be aligned. Now, part two of that is your company can have A players, which are the racehorses. You can have B players, which are the workhorses. The C players need to go to the glue factory. So it's okay to have individual contributors that come to work. They work hard, they get their day done, they leave. Maybe they're not cultural icons, maybe they're not, like, stirring the Kool Aid, but they just put in a good day's work for a good day's pay. There's nothing wrong with that as long as they're aligned with where we're going. But if they don't like the future, you just don't need them around because there's other people that would rather work for you that are inspired and team players and excited about where we're going. They don't necessarily, again, need to be cultural icons. They just need to be aligned. You can just sit down and ask them, too. What I like doing in rolling out the vivid vision is I ask people, what part of this vivid vision excites you the most? What sentence of this vivid vision do you want to help make us come true? Right. Which parts of this don't you like? And then just watch the reactions and you'll see who they are. The guideline is not to divide a budget Based on functional area, it's to allocate budget based on what needs to get done. And then the team, the leadership team, is to look, to try to find ways to say no, the ways to say not now, or the ways to optimize first and then automate parts of what we do. I'll give an example. I was coaching a CEO and their COO about four or five years ago, and the COO said they had 900 outstanding customer service requests and over the next 12 months they were probably going to double the size of the company. And she was worried that she'll never be able to handle 1800 customer service requests. And I said, what are the outstanding requests? And she said, well, they're always the same. I said, well, if they're always the same, why don't you fix the problem so they don't complain anymore? Well, there's only four reasons we even have a customer service department. The product sucks, our service sucks, we overset expectations with the client that we can't deliver on, or the FAQs on our website aren't clear enough and strong enough for people to solve their own problem. So they end up coming to us. We looked at their customer service page and right in the middle of it was call us 24 hours a day. No, you're not going to pick up the phone if you're in the shower, you're not going to pick up the phone if you're having sex, you're not going to pick up the phone if you're on vacation. So it's not 24 hours a day. And why do you want them phoning you in the first place when they could go to the FAQ so they could solve their own problem or they could email you, worst case scenario. So when we fixed the systems, we fixed the problems, we started to optimize and then we could automate some of it. They were able to double the size of the company and they had one customer service person instead of what they projected at needing 8. If they budgeted what percentage of the company they should always be having, they wouldn't have fixed the problem. So the same with finance, right? I'll give you an example. With it, there's almost not an IT department that exists that doesn't like to build stuff, right? They want to build soft stuff, they want to make it better, they want to optimize stuff, they want to integrate everything, they want to tie all the stuff together. But if you ever said to an IT department, go find 12 expenses in the company and find 12 free solutions that we can use today to replace those 12 expenses. That would be an IT project, but they don't like doing it because they don't get to build anything. They don't get to integrate. Right. I want 12 standalone solutions to replace expenses. That's a way that you can get more done in a business area. So I approach the business slightly differently. I don't try to budget what percentage everybody looks at. I look at what's everybody doing. Do we need to do it? Can we say no? Can we say not now and then can we optimize and can we automate? And then based on that, it's more of a zero based budgeting where you budget up to what's needed and then you figure out what we need in terms of gross margin to pay for that and then revenue. Right. What do we need to do in terms of sales to have that gross margin to pay for it? As a company scales, a couple things happen that get wasteful. Number one is every mid level manager or every first time manager's solution to every problem is hire more people. It's one of the reasons why I launched that invest in your leaders course is if they actually had the skills to be strong leaders, they wouldn't have to hire as many people to do the stuff that doesn't need to get done. They'd handle conflict more, they delegate better, they'd control Parkinson's law. Leadership is really about scaling those things up versus allocating. Budget suggestion number one is one or two Airbnbs that are really close to each other. Because the real team building comes by waking up in the morning, putting on shorts and T shirt and just kind of making breakfast. Here's what I do on the cooking together. Split up the team into group A, group B and group C. Because the reality is four people can make it all happen. So I would take 12 people, break it up into three groups of four. Monday morning, group A makes breakfast. Monday afternoon, group B makes lunch. Monday night, group C makes dinner. So for three days, everybody makes breakfast, lunch, everybody makes lunch. Once everybody makes dinner, lunch. I would also, as part of the team building, give every group whatever you decide the budget's gonna be. 500 bucks to make breakfast, lunch and dinner for 12. Give everybody 500 bucks and say, go to the grocery store and go grocery shopping. Go buy your stuff. It's really fun. It's crazy what they come up with, right? One group will be super healthy. Other groups making like whatever, you know, we'll all survive. But like, it's incredible. To watch what happens. But then while the four people are making breakfast, the others are hanging out in the living room and dining room and chatting. Well, four are making lunch. The eight are sitting, connecting. When you're all making dinner together, what tends to happen is a couple people don't really do the work. Some of the people are doing all the work. And then it takes up a lot of time. But when you break it up as 4 people are cooking for 12, it gives the 8 people lots of time to connect.