Grant Cardone's Operational Genius | Sheri Hamilton, COO Grant Cardone Enterprises (Podcast 33)

We have our E commerce group, we've got the online university group, and you know, Grant as an author and writing books. That's a whole, a whole nother division, let alone Grant as the host of Cardone Zone, the GME show, the Young Hustler show, the real estate show, and our whole division, that is Grant Cardone.

TV Sheri Hamilton brings 28 years of corporate operational experience to her executive role in Grant Cardone's enterprise of companies. She joined the company back in 2011 as COO for Cardone training Technologies. I'm also Cardone Capital, Cardone Real Estate Acquisitions, and Cardone Enterprises Inc. In her tenure with the helm of the organization, They've grown from four properties and a staff of eight to a thriving venture with over 107 employees, $800 million in assets, and five successfully performing real estate investment funds. They also have a digital TV network and ad agency and a world class online sales training university and a bar setting. Entrepreneur Business Conference 10x Growth Con. Expecting 35,000 attendees for three days and only its third year. Kind of classic underperformers, aren't you guys? Sherry has a background with JP Morgan Chase, Option 1 Mortgage Corporation, and studio head of United Artists in Hollywood, California. In her free time, she enjoys beach walks, contributing to local charities, and piloting single engine planes. But I'm guessing you don't have a lot of free time. Sherry, thank you very much for being on the podcast.

Thank you so much for having me. I really appreciate it.

Yeah, you're welcome. So the inspiration for starting this podcast really was we often hear from the entrepreneur. You know, everyone wants to know the story of how the entrepreneur, the CEO, has built the company. And Grant Cardone is certainly one of those figures that people follow him around and want to know what's going on and how he did it all. But there's always kind of the rest of the story. And I liken it to when two parents, maybe a husband and wife, are raising a family and you ask the wife, how did you raise your children? And she'll give you a very, very true story of how they raised their kids. And then you ask the husband, how did you raise your children? And he'll have a very true story of how they raised their kids and they'll be completely different. So true, but both really valid. So I'd love to know kind of how you got involved with Cardone and, you know, just kind of give us some of the background and then we'll dive in.

Well, it's a very cool story. I actually Met Grant, twin brother Gary. We were doing a charity event and I met Gary and Sorbet friended him and we were kind of hanging in the same circles and, and when we were attending the grand opening of this big building that we had helped fundraise for and I then met Grant and his wife Elena. They came into town and here comes Grant with his cowboy hat on. It was a very cool themed event. It was like the pioneer being crowned on this building. So here comes Grant and Elena with the cowboy hat and the bull garb and all decked out. And that was really my first time meeting Grant at, as an introduction from his brother. And from there I attended some parties and kind of started running in the same circles when I moved to LA and then ended up meeting him later. As far as, you know, the possibility of helping him run his Bismol.

Very cool. So. So what do you think he saw in you in terms of, of kind of taking over in that second in command role?

Well, I feel like I was corporate where he was more cowboy. It's the definition of our first meeting. So he was definitely on his own. He had a few people, they had. The business was run out of the pool house at his beautiful home in the Hollywood Hills at the time. And I came from very corporate background, JP Morgan Chase artists and you know, boards of directors and nationwide audits, you know, governmental agencies. So I feel like I was the person that he could rely on to know all the things that he didn't know and to sort of take, take on all of those things that he didn't want to handle. He wanted to be involved in the creative, the business and the creation of his technology and the creation of his university and teaching people and talking to people and being himself and all of those administrative functions having to do with hiring and firing and policies and procedures and details, that's just not what he loves to do. So I think he saw in me somebody who had that background and that capability.

Totally makes sense. It's kind of the classic visionary implementer role. So makes sense what he saw in you. But why would you leave such a big corporate world in a corporate track and, you know, join such a small, at the time, entrepreneurial company? What did you see what, what kind of grabbed you?

Very. It's very funny because he says he had to court me for two years.

Sure.

Before we actually did say, okay, we're going to do this thing. It was a very unique time because just as 2008 had rolled around and the world really changed at JPMorgan Chase and a lot of things were not as they were and agencies were closing down and banks were closing down and that whole world knew had quite reset. So it wasn't like I felt, gosh, I'm leaving something at the very top of it. I felt like I'm coming into something brand new that's super exciting, that has an amazing amount of potential rather than something that possibly had reached its peak and was on the way down.

So there's, there's a lot of talk around bringing key executives from big companies into small entrepreneurial companies and how they often fail at that. Why do you think you were successful at leaving the big corporate world and you know, getting into the entrepreneurial world where it's, it's often the jack of all trades, master of none when you're a small business. How did you get into that culture and what do you think made you successful at that in the earlier days?

I really feel like it's because my dad started his own business when I was just very small. I was 6 years old in fact. And he left working for his father. They were the authorized Maytag repair company and he actually had the audacity to break out into his own service division. So he operated out of our home and I was 6 and I learned how to file and I learned how to, you know, put things in alphabetical order for him. As I grew up in his business, I did everything, everything from taking phone calls to dispatching technicians to troubleshooting over the phone. One summer I ran the parts department with the huge microfiche full of arrows and numbers. And so literally I feel like being raised in an environment like that where I had to do everything. It really helped you understand entrepreneurial mindset and what it really takes to make something successful.

Totally part of your DNA. Give us kind of the helicopter tour of the Cardone enterprises that you're running today. Then the 107ish employees, you know, what, what functional areas of the business report to you and are there any areas that still report into Grant?

So every single area of the company reports into me. And we're really starting to see that these division branch out into what's coming into BE as their own companies almost. And so that is the challenge. But we have Grant as the public speaker, the keynote speaker that travels the world. We have Grant as the unbelievable multifamily investor. And that venture is going so incredibly well right now and it's growing so much that it's something that we are definitely going to have it's own. It be its complete own entity with. With another operations manager, I'm sure, very soon. But right now we have 10 employees over there. We've got another 13 employees in the ad agency that we started. We have our E commerce group, We've got the online university group. And you know, Grant as an author and writing books. That's a whole. A whole nother division, let alone Grant as the host of Cardone Zone, the GME show, the Young Hustler show, the real estate show, and our whole division, that is Grant, Cardone tv. And then on top of that with the whole live event. It's really just honestly, the live event thing has taken on a life of its own.

He's a classic underachiever.

He really is. I will tell you, it does take a very special person and group to support him.

The question I was going to ask you was, and I want to know about some of the support stuff that you have to do to play to with him. But the first part of the question is what. What's it like to be kind of in the shadows of the brand? And this is very common of every second in command. One of our jobs is to make the CEO iconic and it is tough. And walk in the shadows. What's it like for you to walk in the shadows when you're. When you know you're doing so much of it and often you kind of walk as an unknown?

Well, I feel like if you are in a position where you desire the spotlight and you must have that acknowledgement, it's probably the wrong role for you. You should probably be out there doing something else that would get that. I really never needed that. And the satisfaction that I get comes from every single day when I have an employee that's doing better because of something that we've talked about or the statistics rise or something else is happening. We pull off a huge event that it's our first time doing an event and we've pulled off 9,000 people at the Mandalay Bay Event Center. And those kind of things bring me the gratification that I need. If I were. If I were the type of person that needed that attention or acknowledgement, I'm afraid it wouldn't last very long because it's just not that kind of role.

Well, so you actually mentioned Mandalay Bay and I wanted to ask you a question about that. I was at the Thrive conference with Grant. He and I have shared the stage a few times together. I was at the event in Vegas a year and a half ago or 14 months ago when he And Elena were holding the party up at the top of Mandalay Bay when that awful shooting happened. I want to know from you as to what it was like when, you know, we had a lot of our friends that were there. They were in a lockdown until around 7 o' clock in the morning, 7:30 in the morning up there. What was it like for you running a company when the figurehead was in such a danger, dangerous place and a scary place then we didn't have a lot of communication with them during that time as well. What was that like and how did you work through that? That's one that doesn't come out of the normal playbook.

It definitely is not in a normal playbook. Luckily, with my background in some of the other roles that I've had, I've had to handle, unfortunately. 9 11, when I was with Chase, then when I was with United Artists, we had some other things that happened with the studio head there that, you know, nothing that was very dangerous like that. But going into places that were worldwide, you know, global, known to be dangerous and cautions needed to be taken. And so I am used to reacting quickly and level headedly, just being effective. What I did is when I saw that in the morning, it was about 2 in the morning when I got the phone call and so I was asleep, but that phone rang and I got it and I said, wow, okay. I talked to our aviation people because our plane was there and I said, okay, I need to know, number one, is the airport passable? Are we going to be able to take off? Number two, how do I get him to the plane? Like, how do I get through all of these barriers and get him and the team out and over to the plane? So we worked through that plan and we coordinated with some friends of ours that we had there in Vegas and that's exactly what we did.

So you got him out early then?

Yes. As soon as they were able to leave the hotel, we got them to the plane and they took off. And then I was able to breathe much easier.

Yeah, I was supposed to be at that dinner that night and I declined. I actually said, I originally said yes, I was going to be there and then changed my mind and decided to fly home to Vancouver that night instead. And I remember when I woke up in the morning and seeing the news and seeing all the friends text messages and stuff coming through, it was pretty scary time to, to go through.

You have to just look at yourself and go, wow, how did I know to do that in that moment? Just trusting yourself is so key.

Yeah, for sure. Now, how do you handle all of the. He's a quick start. I mean, Grant is definitely a, you know, idea plan later, right? Or execute. How do you play cleanup to that? How do you say no when you feel you need to say no? And how do you, I guess, give him the permission to start all the things he wants to and then you to kind of figure out the how later?

It's a great question. And I feel like it's probably just because I know what he's trying to do, and I'm 1000% on board with what he's trying to accomplish. I love the mission of what he wants to do, and that's why it's really my privilege to support him and making sure that that gets executed. He calls himself the Hurricane. It's no mystery to him. And he comes in and he just causes all sorts of problems and messes. And so what we do is we just try to put processes in place, actually beforehand every time we have something happen that we go, wow, this is really a mess. And so we. I meet with the team and say, okay, guys, what can we put in place that allows for this in the future, that it's not such a logistical nightmare in the background? And we really learn as we go how to prepare, to allow him to be as free as he wants to be. And that's really, you know, I think, where the skill comes in, because you have to think outside the box for sure. The usual ways don't work. And it's true. Every single day we're trying to figure out, how do we do something different, better, faster, without all of the red tape that we would normally see in something. Now when it comes down to, hey, we really cannot do that, or we really. That would harm our brand, or that's something that is going to be detrimental to the customer. It's not a good customer experience. And I just talk to him and say, you know what, G? What we're finding is we're finding this and we're hearing that. And he'll say, well, who's telling you that? And so when I go to him with those, I always have some examples. And I said, well, watch this. When you go here and you do this, or when you hear this and you go there, you reach a dead end or whatever the example might be. And he'll say, oh, no, no, I don't want that. So it's really very simple because he's such a great person and his, again, the purposes are so aligned. I'm not trying to do something other than what he's doing. So it's really as long as I communicate to him challenges that we're, we're having and executing his plan, his dream, you know, his mission, he'll be like, no, no, we don't want, we can't have any stops or any blocks on that. And it works out fine.

Give us an example of what you're doing to, to build out the team. Because when you're on such a rapid growth rate, it's often hard to actually grow your people. And I've often said the best leaders are the ones who grow people. Can you talk to us about how you're growing your team and how you're growing the people inside the organization?

Sure. We have such a great team. And many of my managers are new because they were promoted because they were excellent performers in their department. So it's not like my customer service manager has always been a customer service manager. She was a stellar customer service person. So now she's managing 10 people in the customer service team. You know, we've got a guy back in client relations who's managing our corporate client division, and he's not managed a big team like that before, but, you know, he is the number one corporate client relations person. So the way that I've been developing them is I meet with each one of my managers once a week privately, and we go over what are you running into, what challenges are you having, who's performing well, and how are you acknowledging those people, who needs improvement, how are we handling those people? And by coaching them in those real life situations once a week privately, they grow as managers and they understand now the next time they see that situation, they know what to do. We'll all coach them through reviews. I coach them through any kind of training they need to give for their team. In addition to that, we have a manager meeting once a week and they all come, and usually I'll go over with them some particular premise or concept about managing the team and that sort of a group education piece. And then we do a coordination point so that if we're coming out with a new product, for example, it's not only that the web team that has to know about that accounting needs to know, customer service needs to know, sales team needs to know, everybody down the line needs to know so that we're prepared to deliver.

So you're, you're growing them ongoing then as well.

Ongoing.

Are there any core areas that you're really focused on? If you were to look across all of Your managers, are there any one or two skills that you're really focusing on growing for them?

It's the people management that is the toughest part of any manager's role. And the reason that it's tough is because, you know, people, they have a variety of different things. And when you're trying to handle a person, you know, if you get into the trouble that that particular person is having, then you might think that you have to have a million sets of handlings in your, you know, bag of trick in order to handle people at work. But I feel that that is not the case. I feel that if you are competent in your managerial skills and if you've done a really good job in hiring that person and setting the expectations for that employee and then you coach them along, you can keep it about the job and the company and the job they're doing and their performance rather than try to handle that individual person's situation, whatever it may be. How are you getting the job done or it isn't getting the job done?

How are you as a company? I know you're very hard driving as a company, very achievement goal oriented and kind of drive, drive. How are you as a company when, you know, people are just having individual issues in their lives? You know, like, I think all of us in some way are struggling deeply with something today. You know, you've got something, I'm sure you're struggling with Grant, as I do, somewhere in our family or ourselves or with our children. We're all kind of going through something. How do you take that into consideration without it impacting, you know, the results?

It's very easy because everybody here has the same goal, which is the customer must be served. And so, you know, we had recently one of our sales team, he's really new on the sales team. His father passed away. You know, we just rallied around him, we took hold of his clients, we made sure that they were all serviced and made sure that he had the time that he needed with his family to, you know, make sure that his, his mom and family were helped. I guess, you know, we don't have that same. We're not unfeeling when it comes to, you know, somebody's having an issue. Now at the same time, if you have somebody who's underperforming and then they also have issues that are personal issues, you really have to separate those two. And so if they're underperforming as a, as a usual, we just try to manage that person and give them the corrective action and training. Path they need and if they're able to be managed up, then we're happy. But if they have to be managed out, then we realize that we have to do what's good for the team.

Yeah, yeah. You've got to take care of the A players, not always the C players as well.

That's right. And we really have to take care of the, of the customers first and foremost and we, we need the full team complement in order to be able to do that the way that we want to do.

Tell me a little bit about the, the 10x growth conference. I mean you, you said that in three years you're, you're going kind of from 0 to 35, 000 people. What's made it so successful and what's made it so, I guess, you know, wildly fast on its growth. What do you think you're doing that is, is connecting with the customer or is different from everybody else?

People want to see Grant Cardone live. And it's so interesting because when I came on with the company, he was just transitioning from doing live conferences to 500 people audiences around the country, traveling all the time. He was. And he had just now created the online universities so that he didn't have to do that anymore. He was coming home and he was running the company from the house and we were selling the training to corporations and individuals so that they could see him and listen to his technology and benefit from it 24 7. Whenever it worked for them, they didn't have to go to a hotel somewhere, they didn't have to travel, they didn't have to take time off work, they could study in these short five minute segments. You know, it is so funny because as we made this kind of trek over the last eight years, about two years ago, he became such a phenomenon and so popular and I really feel it's the social media piece. He's so generous with his time and doing Q&As with people and they call him Uncle G. They really his audience demanded a live event. They just. When are we going to see you live? When can you come here? When can I see you? Where's he speaking? And the speaking engagements we were doing were private corporate events that he was hired to speak at. So we, we couldn't really have, you know, his fans there. So it became truly by popular demand that we had to say, okay, I guess we give up, we have to have Grant live somewhere so that people can come see him. And we thought, well, it's a running joke because I was at the Diplomat Hotel here in Hollywood Beach. And I said, you know, let's just plan for 500 people, you know, and we'll see what. What happens. We've got to block this many rooms and have this many, you know, security, and everybody wants to plan. And I'm thinking, hey, well, let's just plan for 500. Well, five times that showed up. So we ended up with 2,500. And we kept saying, hi, we need more space. Hi, can we have a little more space? Hi, can you move this other group? That was our first one. And so when we decided to do the second one, we knew that we better allow a little bit more space. So that's why we went to 10,000 in Vegas, where there were plenty of hotel rooms and plenty of auxiliary space to move into and, you know, convention center and easy to fly in and out. We had people from out of the country. It was amazing. After that experience, we actually pulled the audience at. In. In the Vegas conference and said, okay, where would you want to go? Would you want to come back to Vegas, or would you want to go to Miami? And they all said, miami. Well, it's a challenge, because we are not Las Vegas. You don't have these big convention centers connected to the hotel. Somebody flies in, you know, you don't have thousands of hotel rooms that are right there and all. No car rental needed. It was quite a challenge, but we're going for it.

Talk today about how you stay connected with the vision. I mean, Grant has not only the overarching vision for the group of companies, but probably for each of the individual businesses. How do you ensure that you and he are in complete sync on the vision of what the company looks and feels like and acts like three years out? And then how do you get him in sync with what your plans are? Kind of envision this always like a homeowner building a house is, you know, you can't just hire the contractor and say, build me my dream home and leave for a year, because they'd build you something. But it might not look anything like your visioning. How do you get in sync and so that the plans link up and that his vision syncs up with you?

I think being with him for eight years is really. I've grown to really understand him more and more. But the way that we stay in sync is just we meet. We try to meet, you know, once a month at least, off premises, off outside the business. And a lot of times, he and Jared and I will get together on a Sunday morning, super early 8 o' clock, and we'll go someplace very quiet and we'll just go over. Okay, in the real estate business, what do we want to see? And it's really just goal setting. It's nothing to do with mechanic. He gets all, you know, the mechanics is the thing that he needs me to be in charge of. And when you start to have this beautiful idea, for example, hey, let's have 35,000 people in Miami. If you start to think of where are they staying, how are they getting here, how are we going to feed them, what's going to happen, how are we going to sell them tickets? If you get into any ghost mechanics and logistics, you're going to stop holding your tracks.

Well, I think what also works really well with, with the. The CEO, CEO relationship to become that true yin and yang relationship is really trust. How do you. What do you think you're doing to both of you to keep the trust so high between the two of you? And has there been anything that's ever happened along the way that maybe, you know, broke trust intermittently or, you know, for a moment?

You know, I can't say that there's anything that's ever broken trust. I think with. Were very candid with each other. I think that we've known each other long enough and we know each other well enough to know what, what our true goals are and that we're both here doing the very best we can for the company. So I don't think that there's any point at which we said, wow, okay, our trust is broken with each other. There's definitely been times when he's like, when he would say, you know, well, why are we doing it that way? Or, why is this person still here? Why haven't you fired that person? Or, you know, why haven't we hired this other position? Or, you know, question why? And so without getting into too much justification, I just tell him, gee, I'm on it. I'm doing these actions, and I'm totally in sync with you. You know, if you go to somebody and you try to explain and justify, it just becomes something else to bridge up against, if you know what I mean. And so I think that what. What we try to do is, is keep track of. And I keep him informed on the report, the reports is what he wants to see. And I get him that P and L and he sees those numbers going up, and he's like, all right. And he looks at the P and L and he says, well, wait a minute, look at these expenses here. And these expenses There and are we spending enough in salary or in or in advertising and this and that. And he looks it over and he goes, yep, yep, that's right. And that is what gives him the trust in me that he has. Because in the end of the day, the numbers are going to tell them the full picture.

I love that you said that. You speak with them very candidly. I have always felt that that's something that the CEO's job is really to kind of be the one saying the emperor has no clothes when so many other people are nervous to tell the truth or to say what they really feel. I think we are. We have to. To almost put ourselves at risk at times to really truly say what needs to be said. And I think they actually really respect that. I think the CEO is starving for the truth. Truth, right. When they gut saying one thing and all the people around them are saying something else, and they need to have that truth often so that they can confront the brutal fox as well.

It's very key. And I wouldn't be doing my job, nor is anybody else in that type of role if they're just a yes person. Now, he wouldn't need me if he just wanted a yes person. He could just find somebody else.

That's easy. Sure.

Yeah. But I'll tell you also is I never come upon a make wrong standpoint, like right, we're doing it wrong or hey, that I always come at it from a point of listen, I think this is getting in the road of us really accomplishing what you want to accomplish. And when I want to talk to him, and it's really not all that often that we need a sort of a. That kind of thing that makes you nervous to talk about because much and think most of the time. And if anything, he's so intuitive. I'll just say, you know, I think we're going to have to remove so and so. And he. And he's like, like, yep, I agree with that.

Agreed.

Yep. I don't have to go into a thing, but if there is something sensitive, you know, I make sure that it's a private moment and I say, gee, can I talk to you about something? I think it's really important. And he'll always, of course, say yes. There was one time when I had something really I thought, oh man, this is going to be rough on him, you know, as an experience to experience this communication. And I got my purse and I walked over to him, which I will never done. And I said, hey, G, you want to take a ride of Course he knew he had to say yes because I've never asked him that ever, in eight years. So he knew I needed to talk to him. So he's like, I guess I do. I'm like, okay, let's go. We did that. It's just hard to get a private word. And it's really important to not have any additional peanut gallery input and to keep it very clean and very just about what we need to talk about and not a lot of emotion or pet projects or, you know, those kind of things other people might interject in.

It's also like a marriage. You kind of need date night once in a while. You need actually time for just the two of you to get together in sync again, you know, and you don't need to have the rest of the leadership team or the people or even the business around. Sometimes getting off site is powerful.

It's extremely powerful. We're lucky enough that we do get that when we do our off site events. We do get some of that. And also after each growth con that we've had, we've taken the executive team and we've gotten on a plane and gone to the mountain. Mountain. And we had this beautiful house in Utah and we just got to be at the top of this pristine mountain in the middle of winter and just us say, wow, guys. Okay, we did that. Now what's next? What will we do differently?

You know, he doesn't happen to have a place at Powder Mountain, does he, in Eden?

No.

They're great. It's an amazing area filled with entrepreneurs that they, they actually bought this mountain called Powder Mountain and everybody's buying homes there. It's spectacular.

Wow. I'll have to look into that.

It's a total entrepreneurial eco verse. It's the, it's the group that started the Summit series that bought the mountain. Richard Branson has a place there. Tim Ferriss has a place. It's a spectacular spot, really. It's called the town is Eden, Utah. It's about one hour straight north and it's around. Oh, I'm gonna forget. Anyway, it's about an hour straight north of, of Salt Lake Ogden maybe. Is it like 15 minutes outside of Ogden, Utah? Would that be north? Spectacular spot, though. And great, really legit skiing too. You mentioned Grant. Looking at the numbers, I always think about the dashboard of a vehicle that we have, you know, these, these gears or, or dials up there. And every once in a while one of them lights up red and one of them is bigger than the other. Does he have you know, three. Or do you even have. Let's talk about you instead of him. What, what are the. The numbers that you look at or the, the dials that you look at that would be like, you know, your speedometer and your, your gas gauge. Are there any that you look at for the real health of an organization more than others?

Yes, I have in my office. I have a very large screen on my wall, and there are. That just kind of flow through and they're all on graphs so that I can see how the lines are rolling up, down. Some look like roller coasters and. And I watch, for sure. I watch revenue and I watch production of all the sales team. I want to see the numbers that they're doing. I want to see the number of accounts they're selling, and I want to see the dollars. I want to see the store and how much that's doing. I want to see the university and how much that's doing. I want to see event tickets at sales. So those are, you know, the, the revenue expenses that I look at as far as. Or the revenue lines I look at as far as expenses go. I look at total expenses on a monthly basis, and I take that P. L and I drill down each and every expense and I compare it not only to the prior month, but to the year prior, same month. And I try to make sure that we are in sync with our growth, that, that those expenses are increasing as they should be in the correct percentages with our team or our revenue.

How about on the people side? Are there any numbers that you'd look at to measure the, you know, your employee satisfaction or employee engagement?

Well, it's very easy to measure because we have a meeting every single morning, and I lead the meeting in the morning, and I'm, you know, we're talking about successes and we're talking about how we're doing. And as I'm in that meeting, I'm looking around the room, and if there's somebody that isn't engaged or if there's somebody that's unhappy, it's so easy to spot. They send out like a sore thumb. It's like a big neon sign saying, hey, I'm not happy. And so I'll always either talk to them directly, if they're under me directly, or if they're under one of my managers. I'll have the manager check in with them. Hey, what's happening? It's always, what are you running into first, you know, as a conversation.

Now, you guys 100% on location then? Or do you have some remote employees as well.

We are 100% on location. We do have our property management team that of course they operate in the properties so they are remote and they're third party. But other than that we are all here.

And will that be the continued like is that the plan to continue the growth? There's such a huge trend towards people that are working remote now and I'm really struggling with that as a, as a concept. I'm, I'm really more from the era where we all kind of came to an office and built a culture and could share and collaborate. How are you working against that trend for remote employees and how are you finding great employees that I guess that are either all in Miami or want to want to move there?

It's so interesting because we've tried the remote, the remote arrangement many times. We thought okay, that was our answer. Especially when we moved here from LA to Miami. We came here with three people and we were thinking, gosh, how can we even ramp up fast enough? Got to wait for them to move. They've got families, they're great people. So we actually tried remote arrangements with some very talented people and it didn't work. And there is something magical about being together here, feeling the energy of the team, being in that meeting every morning, coordinating with each other, being on the same page with Brandt in the space. This is what drives it. It's this power of the whole group that drives the success of the individual. And so it is very challenging when we're, when we're hiring people. We've had people come from Dallas, Atlanta, all kinds of states just recently to start working here. And so funny because well, grants reach is very global. But we do have that experience. The same as you were just saying that it just doesn't really work without the, that power of the culture behind everyone.

Well, it's interesting. I, I when we were building one, 800 got junk years ago, we were saying that we had to build slightly more than a business and slightly less than a religion. We had to be in that zone of a cult. And the only way I could ever really figure that one out was to have everybody in the same place because it just kind of stir the Kool Aid with them a little bit more. Tell me. I wrote a book called Meetings Suck recently and I was really tired of people complaining about meetings. And it was actually a, a CEO that I coach who's based in Tampa that was had gone from 60 employees up to 700 and he was, was complaining about meetings. And I said, you know it's not that meetings suck. It's that we don't know how to run them. How do you teach your team how to run meetings and also how to attend them and how to participate in them? How do you. Because you actually talked about some strong meetings, the private one on ones and kind of the daily huddles and the off sites, you know, do you have, like, any methodologies that work well for you in meetings? Any kind of core, maybe top three tips that work well to have highly functioning meetings?

Yes. Never meet without a purpose, never meet without an agenda, and bring everything that you need in order to have decisions made to the meeting. So also, you don't want to invite people to the meeting that really don't pertain to the thing being discussed.

Yes.

That's really why people hate meetings. You know, they don't want to be there. They get dragged into these meetings and they're like, man, I really have other things to do, or I can't really influence this anyway. And why don't my suffering through this, this. It's because people want to be productive.

Yes.

If you go from one to the next to the next meeting and you're not actually doing anything and there's no accomplishments, of course people are going to hate meetings. But I teach my managers to come to meetings with their agenda, what they want to cover, know exactly what it is we need to talk about, and any supporting documentation that they need so that go through it and actually reach a result out in the meeting.

Yeah. I love the top three, but I really, really love the fact that you get, you know, it's not about inviting everybody so they feel good. They're actually not feeling good that they were invited more often than not, they'd rather sit at their desk doing the important work that they're really focused on. Let's. Let's leave us with one final parting tip. If there was one real great kind of leadership skill or, or lesson that you've learned over the years that maybe you wish you'd known 10 years ago, anything. For a COO who's listening or for a leader who's listening, what's. What leadership lesson could you impart for them?

I would say that it's so key to get all the information before you decide you are irate. It's so easy to have someone come into your office or send you an email and tell you this horrible thing that's happening or this terrible shortcoming of one of your employees or this upset customer. And if you were to act on all of those little things before getting the full information, you might chop a whole lot of heads off that you don't need to chop. And I would just say get all the information before you're. You decide you. You're completely incensed.

That's a huge, huge lesson, by the way. I've actually, I don't think I've even heard it before. And, and when you said it, it was a real slap of reality for me because I tend to react versus respond. And that's a huge tip for people to listen to. And I'm actually going to. As soon as we get off this, I'm actually going to hop on Facebook and say that I was just excited about having you on the show. That was awesome.

I'm so glad.

Yeah, it was great. I really appreciate you sharing that. So thank you, Sherry Hamilton, the COO for Grant Cardone Enterprises, really appreciate having you on the Second In Command podcast and giving us the rest of the story. We need a place on the truck to attach water bottles. I'm like, what are you talking about? Like, the water bottle goes in the coffee cup holder. He goes, no, like, water bottles. I'm like, what are you talking about, water bottles? He goes, like, the big, big 40 gallon water bottles or water. I'm like, like on the side of football fields. He's like, yeah. I'm like, there's two guys in the truck. He goes, I know. That's how much water they drink. Like, what are you talking about?