How I Scaled Businesses to $100 Million and Beyond!

You have to get rid of. Right. You have to get rid of the cultural cancers that are inside that are putting the wrong energy into the cult. And then it was all around, like, making sure that we stirred the Kool Aid, you know, that we didn't focus on results all the time. We didn't focus on metrics all the time. We focused on keeping people happy, keeping people engaged, keeping people having fun. Wow. Who am I? I'm a Canadian. They'll catch that probably in the first 12 sentences because they'll hit me with some, like out or about or. Or something. I'll say, so I'm Canadian. I was groomed as an entrepreneur. My dad was an entrepreneur. Both sets of grandparents were entrepreneurs, and they raised my brother, my sister and myself to all be entrepreneurs. We've all been running our own companies for between 20 and 25 years. When I was 20 years old, I had my first 12 employees in a company that I started. I was running a house painting business. I was painting six simultaneous homes at the same time throughout the summer. So I learned basically how to run a business at quite a young age, like a real serious business. Since then, I had opened the west coast of the United States for the largest house painting company in the world. It was called College Pro painters. Back in 1993, I recruited, hired and trained Kimbal Musk, that's Elon's younger brother. I was a reference for Elon and Kimbal in their first round of fundraising in January of 1995 for Zip2. So that was way before Tesla, way before PayPal. That's the first time I met Elon, was in 95. Their cousin Peter Rive, who built SolarCity, was also an employee of mine that I trained, coached him. By 1993, I'd coached 120 entrepreneurs. And that was when business coaching was just starting. The International Federation of Coaches and Coachu started in 1993, and over the four years prior, I'd already coached 120 real companies. So I've been in the business coaching space since before it was littered with business coaches. From there, I opened up a chain of collision repair shops. A family friend called me up. He had seven auto body shops and asked me if I'd come on as a partner and open up the franchise business for them. We took it to 65 locations in four years. It's now called Gerber Auto Collision. In the United States, it's called Boyd Auto Body. In Canada, it's about a $2 billion revenue. Legit, largest collision repair chain in the world. I left there in 1998 and I was hired as president of a private currency company. We built that company up and sold it two years later for 64 million to a US public company. We were doing what Bitcoin is doing today, but we did it 25 years ago. We had 30,000 companies in the US and Canada buying and selling using a digital currency that we created that was backed by nothing other than the promise to accept it. In our economy, we had Starwood Hotels, Avis, Rent A Car, Budget, Rent A Car, Bose Stereo, Hard Rock Cafe, the Olympics, all using our digital currency instead of the US dollar. So that was 24 years ago now, which is insane. And then I joined my best friend Brian, who had started up a company called the Rubbish Boys. And he asked me if I'd come on and start coaching him. He just converted the name over and I joined Brian as the 14th employee at a company called 1-800-GOT junk. He'd taken 11 years to get to 2 million in revenue. And then I came on as the chief operating officer and six and a half years later we were at 106 million in revenue. So 11 years to go from zero to 2 million. Six and a half to go from 2 million to 106 million. And I was the chief operating officer during that growth. Left there 17 years ago. And since then I've published six books. I've been paid to speak in 29 countries and on every single continent, including getting paid to speak in Antarctica three years ago. Had no desire to be a business author or writer. And then I started up an online course called Invest in youn Leaders. It's being used all over the world. And I also started a mastermind community called the COO alliance, which is a large community globally of second in commands. So that's kind of some of the background, I guess. I'm also a dad. I'm A father of two boys, 21 and 23. Husband, happily married, and my wife and I are global nomads. We sold everything three years ago. We've been traveling around the world for three years. It's really interesting. So I want to go back to when I was 16 to kind of explain the flux. I mean, we've all seen it on Facebook and on, you know, Instagram. I think the first was probably Tai Lopez. Like, here I am with my Ferrari or my Lambo in my garage, right? And then Ty's, by the way, genius. Like, he's literally world class at analytics of data and marketing. But then it's now become like everybody in Their Lambo. And then here I am in my private jet. It's like, who cares? Like, at the end of the day, when you die, none of this matters. So when I was 16, my dad took me to our golf course in Canada, and we were members of this private club. It was actually the first mastermind community that I really remember being in, other than scouting. He put us into this private club to meet all of the other successful people in our city. But we were at the golf course one day at 12 o' clock to go golfing on a Wednesday, and he started showing me all the people walking in to play golf. And it was like, that's Bruce McCullough, he owns a car dealership, and that's Tom Ford, and he owns this accounting company, and that's Carol, she owns a law firm. And he was explaining all the people walking in, who all these people were, and every single one of them was an entrepreneur. And he didn't say anything else other than that. And we went out and played our 18 holes of golf. And we came back and we were sitting on the balcony and I eating my typical fries and gravy and my Cherry Coke, and my dad's having a burger. And he starts showing me all the people coming into the golf course at 5 o' clock on a Wednesday. And this is like sunsets around 10 o' clock in June. And he's showing me all the people coming in at 5pm and it's like, he works for a car dealership, he works for an accounting firm, he's a teacher, he's a minor. And he said, do you know the difference between everybody showing up to play golf now and everybody that came at 12 o'? Clock? And I said, everybody that came to play golf at 12 o' clock owns their own business. And my dad said, the number one reason you want to be an entrepreneur is so you can do what you want when you want without anybody having to give you permission. And he said, and if you focus on all the free time and all the fun and all the stuff that makes life worth living, all the money will follow. So that began my entrepreneurial journey of realizing that. One quick example, even that summer, all of my friends were caddying and they were spending four and a half hours hauling golf bags around the golf course and getting paid virtually a fixed wage. What I would do is go and park myself at the bottom of the 13th hill on the 13th hole, there was this hill, and I'd put a lawn chair there under an umbrella, and I would run bags up and down the hill and collect tips. And I was making four times what my friends were making because I was kind of running my own business and I did it when I wanted to. So it just began that entrepreneurial journey. So I joke about it now saying that my Lambo flex is that my wife and I have been to 54 countries in the last three years with no real reason to stop. So I think back to, you know, Jim Collins in the book Good to Great. One of his concepts was about the flywheel, right? It was becoming that monomaniac with a mission. And if you just found one thing that if you kept putting all of your focus on that one thing, it would create the momentum and the momentum would create momentum and that momentum would create growth. I think so often entrepreneurs, entrepreneurial companies, leadership team members, they're very distracted. And now we're more distracted than ever. Since 2007 with the advent of social media, there's. We're just bombarded with things and opportunities and stuff we could be doing but it's not necessarily going to propel the organization. So I'll tell the story back to 1-800-got junk. Even though it's a 20 year old story now, in the first two or three weeks I was there, I said to Brian there's three things we have to do. The number one is we have to raise our prices by about 40% and everybody in the company, the other 13 people thought I was crazy. We're going to go bankrupt. I'm like, we're going bankrupt anyway. Brian's not making money. Franchisees aren't making money. Guys in the trucks, nobody's making money. So we're going to charge more so that we can afford to actually scale like we want to. So being that premium price product, focusing on do I understand the P and L and budgeting and cash flow like fo. If you don't focus on the numbers, none of this stuff matters. No great marketing, nothing matters. So focus around numbers and profitability. Second was we had to build slightly more than a business and slightly less than a religion. I wanted to get into that zone of a cult and if we could get that culture where our super happy employees were super engaged and were really having fun, that were really focused and really felt valued and really felt loved, they would take care of our customers. Most companies focus on revenue and profitability and customer success. I focused on employee engagement like the employee net promoter score first, knowing that everything else would come from that. So we built a cult. So much so that we actually had Tours of our office in Vancouver, Canada, virtually every Friday for four years. We'd have 20 to 35 business people on a Friday coming at 10:30 for a 90 minute tour of our company. And that was because we were getting so much press about our culture. And that helped us with growth, it helped us with recruiting, it helped us with retention, it helped us with engagement. We got pressed from it. And that led to number three was we had no money for marketing. So we decided to go after free public relations, free pr, which is one of the six books I wrote. And we decided to start reaching out to. There were no podcasts back then, but we reached out to magazine writers and TV show hosts. We were on copra, major newspapers. We landed 5,200 stories about the company within six years prior to Facebook even launching. So we had nowhere to even amplify the press. But we were able to generate all this momentum and all this focus and all this free coverage that led to the credibility that once we had marketing dollars, we could take over the market. So it was focusing on those critical few things. So there's a few things. One is you have to get rid of, right? You have to get rid of the cultural cancers that are inside that are putting the wrong energy into the cult. So we actually trained all of our franchisees in the movie the Secret. We made them watch it twice. We made our franchisees watch it twice. We cannot came out and said, hey, it's a little cheesy, it's a little bit materialistic, but understand quantum mechanics and energy. And if we can bring in more of this positive energy, the like attracting like that momentum will, will be created. So that was one, or I guess two. Get rid of the cultural cancers. Understand quantum mechanics. We started to brand everything, right? We had like the names on our rooms were branded. In fact, I was in a. A client that I coached here 12 years ago in his office in Kelowna, British Columbia the other day. And he was showing me all his boardrooms and they all had names, but there were no names on the glass windows. I'm like, say, put the names up, like brand these things so that people remember it and they're reminded of it and then create acronyms, right? Create these. So any of the little sayings and the acronyms and the phrases, they become part of the vernacular, part of the way that we do it. We used to call it the 1-800-got-JUNK WAY. And every time you brand something, it's kind of like the insiders have secrets and other people don't. Know what you're talking about. So those branding of things like if I say the Ten Commandments, people want to go, oh, what are the Ten Commandments? Right. Even if you're in another religion, you kind of wonder what's inside that religion. Well, that's cult. And then it was all around, like making sure that we stirred the Kool Aid, you know, that we didn't focus on results all the time, we didn't focus on metrics all the time. We focused on keeping people happy, keeping people engaged, keeping people having fun. I think those would probably be some of the keys. Culture is not about the perks. It's not the free massages and the free lunches. Those are perks. The other thing that really drives culture, there's three. One is an alignment with a vivid vision. I call it that four or five page description of what your company looks like, acts like and feels like in the future. One of my best selling books ever is called Vivid Vision and it's how a CEO describes what their company looks like, acts like and feels like three years in the future so that everyone in the company, employees, suppliers, shareholders, accountants, lawyers, they can all see what you can see and they're all going in that same direction. So it's alignment with the vivid vision. Second is alignment with core values. Again, that's firing the people that don't live the core values. Recruiting and hiring people that already live the core values. They asked Herb Kelleher from Southwest Airlines, how do you get all your employees to be so happy? He said, we hire happy people. So hire people that already live your core values and then you don't have to train anybody on them. They're already showing up that way. So it's that obsession about core values, the alignment, core values. The third is the bhag, that big hairy, audacious goal, the crush Adidas or democratize the world's information or democratize air travel or put a computer on every desktop. My BHAG is for vivid visions to replace vision statements worldwide. So that culture is permeated when you have an obsession with that long 20 year stretch. And then the fourth is the core purpose. Right. What's the Simon Sinek kind of why we exist as an organization? Everybody knows Simon Sinek in his book start with why. What they don't know is Simon used to sleep on my couch. Simon actually worked at 1-800-got junk in our marketing group for about a year, helping us as a consultant. He was on our board of advisors for a year, five years before he wrote the book start with why. So we understood this idea with core purpose and how to have it permeate through the organization. My core purpose today is to help entrepreneurs make their dreams happen. It's why I say yes to your show and why I said no to two other podcasts yesterday and today was they're not aligned with entrepreneurs. One was very kind of corporate. One was like government agency stuff. I'm like, yeah, not worth my time. But for me, it's a full body F. Yes. When it's anything to do with helping the entrepreneurs. So that's where culture permeates, is an obsession and alignment with that kind of a stuff. One of my biggest curses or things that hurt me in the world and in business was I was kind of emotionally abused by the school system. For 18 years, from kindergarten until the end of university, I was told to sit still and pay attention and try harder. And if I only focused harder, if I only worked harder, I could be as good as everybody else. And intuitively I knew I'm not wired this way. I don't get it. It's boring. None of this matters. I had a business, and I'm only in grade six. Like, this didn't make any sense to me. So I kind of started to ignore the work hard mantra, the Protestant work ethic. And what I decided to do is find the cheat sheets. I decided to work smart. I decided to kind of hack the system. From a very young age, I realized that the teacher would tell me what was going to be on the test if I would merely ask them, what should I study on? What should I focus on? I could find prior tests. I could find the actual copy of the test in his office when he was out at lunch. Like, I did lots of stuff to figure out the system, but what I didn't do was be the fly trying to bang my head on the window all day. We've all seen the fly trying to get out the window. And they're going to work hard, they're going to keep banging their head on the window, they're going to work hard. They end up dead on the windowsill. I didn't want to work that hard because I was too busy doing other things. And I also realized there was a door, but if I just turned and went out the door, I was free. So I always looked for the shortcut. I always looked for the cheat sheet. And I think that was what made me so successful in franchising was I developed systems that were easily usable by kind of the worst franchisee in the Worst market in the worst weather and they could actually operate that system. So I would dumb down the system so that everybody. And that's how I see my business too. So I think while so many businesses are, as you put it like that, working hard and doing everything and grinding it out and getting up early, I'm like, pause, think, be strategic. What's going to drive that flywheel? So I think strategically about working on the critical few things and then how can I get leverage off those few things? And I think most people are so busy working hard that they miss all of those extra opportunities. Well, and I know some people are watching and some are listening. The people that are listening can't see me sitting here laughing to myself. The reason I'm laughing is when you said you have to hop from rock to rock. I flashed back to a year ago. My wife and I were in Iceland on this crazy eight hour hike and we were way off in the middle of nowhere. We were hiking across a glacial stream. I mean, it was glacial that you could see the glacier. And then we were hiking and it was like 12ft across and we couldn't get our shoes wet. So we had to take our shoes off and hike across 12ft barefoot. And we were going stone to stone. And I was like, this is so effing cold. I was dying. I'm like, sometimes you really got to focus on that system, man, because you miss that system and you're dead. So again, for me, it was about the cheat sheets. I would look to simplify the system. I learned it when I was 20. I bought a franchise at 20 years old at a house painting company called College Pro Painters Or. I was awarded a franchise and they handed me a 330 page operations manual. And I realized that the systems that they put in there were for my benefit. They weren't forcing me to do anything. And yes, if I followed those systems, I'd do more revenue and they'd make more money. But if I did more revenue, I'd make more profit. And I was so scared of failing that I just memorized the system and I did what they did. And then I recognized something that I now called interdependence. That I'm dependent enough that if a system exists, I'll follow up. But I'm independent enough, I'm entrepreneurial enough, that if there's no system, I'll figure one out quickly and I'll run with it. I tried to document. I was coaching a CEO about this the other day on this company. It's about a $50 million company. I was working with their team on developing some systems and I said, if you can't document a system on a post it note, like a simple 2 inch by 2 inch post it note, you're not thinking clearly enough. You don't need to process map this thing on a whiteboard for six days. Just knock it out so that the newest employee, who's the least trained employee and the hardest day that they're having, that the worst period of their life can follow a system. And then how can we actually create systems that can remove people from the process? I'll give an example of this. Speeding in virtually everywhere in the world is a terrible system. They have speed limit signs, they have police with cameras. They've got like notifications on our cars beeping that we're going too quickly. And then you go to a golf course, you get in a golf cart and you know what you try to do when you go into the, into the parking lot, the car all of a sudden stops and goes like really, really slow through the parking lot because it's got little RFID chip inside and says, hey, if you're in this zone, you can only go this fast. The perfect system for saving lives on highways and saving car accidents and saving speeding and getting all the police off the road is put an RFID chip in every car. So the car, when it hits a certain speed zone, can only go X speed, period. But nobody wants to have the. But everyone wants to rely on people, right? So Michael Gerber, when he wrote the email, said, people don't fail. Systems fail. I always look for the broken system and the missing system. And I'll give you one last story on this. We as leaders often try to blame a person like, why did they do that wrong? Why did they miss this? Why did they screw that up? Or why is this broken? One of my mentors, and I mean a serious mentor, who was doing a one hour call with me every month for about two years and then every quarter a full day in person, I would either go to their office or he would come to my office. He was being groomed as the COO at Starbucks. This was back in 2004. So I'm effectively being groomed by the CO at Starbucks or incoming COO. And he told me a story how when Howard Behar, who was, I think, the second CEO, it's after Howard Schultz, Howard Behar came in as CEO, and Howard Behar called Greg one day and said, greg, why is the letter B on the sign at 50th or 45th in Wallingford, in Seattle. Why is the letter B on that sign not working? And Greg said, I don't care. Howard goes, what do you mean you don't care? Greg said, that's not the leadership question we should be asking. He said the system question we need to ask is what system is missing that would ensure that every letter on every sign at all of our locations is always working. He said, that's a question I'll dig into, but I don't care why one sign has one letter out. And I think that's how we need to approach problems in a company is what system is missing. Now we call it like the first principles, right? Like what system is missing or broken. If we fix that system, it'll never happen again, right? Why is a customer unhappy? Let's fix the customer. No, let's fix the system so that no customer becomes unhappy, right? And I think it's that systems thinking and that's kind of like the fly, you know, what's, what's that? That's just the way I think of things. I have to think that way. I have to think that way because my ADD is so bad. I have 17 of the 18 signs of attention deficit disorder clinically diagnosed. My ex wife said if I was paying attention during testing it would have been 18 for 18. So I counter my, I guess good. I counter my ADD with a lot of OCD systems. I put these little systems in place to ensure that I don't screw up because I not never paying attention or I'm always on go. Simple example of this. I'm in Kelowna, British Columbia, where Dan Martell, a really close friend of mine lives. We've been friends for like 13 years. He runs a Tuesday morning hike up this mountain that's kind of right behind me. And I always know that if I'm meeting them at 6:30 in the morning, I have to be out the house at 6. I'm probably going to forget my water bottle. So what I do the night before is I put my clothes out for the hike and then I put my water bottle and key beside the door so I can't get out the door without grabbing my water bottle and the key. Without that little system, I have to rely on me. And a human isn't as reliable as the system. It's. I usually put my keys in my shoe. So if I'm leaving someone's house I know my keys are in the shoe. But those are examples that as companies we need to teach the leadership team to Think that way. See, a leader's core job is to grow people. Most entrepreneurs are so frozen in doing and in doing and busy and they have a to do list and they forget that their to do list doesn't have their name on it. Right. If Bob is the entrepreneur, Bob can delegate everything on his to do list. And Bob can spend more time being strategic, thinking, inspecting what he expects, looking for the missing systems, looking for the broken systems, growing people's confidence, growing their skills. That's what we need to do more of as leaders. So we need to remember that most managers, especially first time, second time managers, have never been exposed to this kind of thinking. And all we're doing is teaching them how to use ClickUp or how to use like Asana. Forget that, that stuff comes later. Teach them how to think and how to be leaders and then your company scales. So I'll give you there's a part A and a part B. So if I go back to College Pro painters and I need to kind of illustrate this so that people understand the size. CollegePro went on to become the largest residential house painting company on the planet. So amazingly, I was on the leadership team of the largest house painting company in the world, the largest collision repair chain in the world, and the largest junk removal company in the world, all from very early stages and actually the largest private currency in the world at the time. So College Pro, though, back in the 80s, every year had to go out and recruit, hire and train 800 franchisees and they were all university students. So imagine recruiting, hiring and training in four months, 800 students and training them how to run a business. And then in four weeks, in one month, those 800 franchisees had to go out, recruit, hire and train 8,000 university students to paint houses. So in a five month period, we had to recruit, hire and train 8,800 people. For the first three years I was a franchisee, okay, so I'm like in my MO but I'm being trained and groomed on a lot of these systems. For the next four years I was on the senior leadership team, recruiting, hiring and training. And I was in the top 30 people of the 8800 person company for four years. So there's not a lot of companies on the planet that recruit, hire and train 8,000, 9,000 people a year. There's not just not like Google does, like the PayPal do, but like that's, it's very rare. So when you're in the top 30 people, you're getting trained on leadership systems and leadership skills. That most people don't have access to. So I was, if I go back, I was 24 and I was being trained. And I mean like consultants coming in, watching videotapes on vhs, reading books, round table role practicing, being coached, people watching me do the stuff in my, in the field. And I was being trained on about 12 core skills. They're actually the skills that I put into my invest in your leaders course. It's called investinyourleaders.com but I was trained on. The one I'll talk about was situational leadership. I'll talk about that in a SEC situation. I was trained in situational leadership coaching, delegation, project management, time management, interviewing, one on one coaching at running effective meetings, classroom tanning, written communication, which would now be similar to like email management, Slack. So when you get a lot of the skill development on hardcore leadership skills at a very young age, that leaves a real imprint around me that my job isn't to do work, my job is to grow people. So at a very young age, at 24 years old, I had 25 franchisees and at one point, 32 franchisees reporting to me I was responsible for 320 people just in my part of that little microcosm. But I was getting groomed in all these leadership skills. So situational leadership is the one skill that I think most people have never even been exposed to. It's the skill that the book the One Minute Manager is based on by Ken Blanchard and Dr. Paul Hersey. It was written 40 years ago. The One minute Manager is still used by all the best companies on the planet. By Google's, by PayPal's, by all of them. It teaches a leader to adapt their style of leadership on a project by project basis, even for the same human. So let's say as an example, I was training you on running a podcast. I probably wouldn't talk to you much about the podcast. I might talk to you about the amplification of the podcast, or I might talk to you more about finding guests and getting PR firms to find you guests. I might talk to you about the stuff that you're not really thinking about, or I might talk to you more on like stuff that's not even related to your podcast, leading your team or coaching your team or having a bigger vision for your podcast. Because I understand that on some parts of your podcast you have a lot of skill and a lot of confidence, but on other areas you might either have no skill or some skill or lower confidence. So learning how to assess on a project by project basis based on the two things, skill and confidence, where a person sits and then which of the four leadership styles to use makes me a very highly effective leader, which allows me to grow people and grow hypergrowth companies. 1,800 got junk. We were 100% revenue growth six consecutive years in a row without giving up any equity and having no debt. And we ranked as the number two company in Canada, worked hard. That only happens because of the ability to attract people, retain people, and grow people, not by doing work. So I think that for me is a skill that I probably took for granted and really only recognized post 1-800-got-Junk how powerful that was. When I started coaching really seasoned leaders of companies, they'd never even heard of this before. You know, they were just in the default mode of coaching someone. And then the second part is. The second part is, it's amazing to me how often people go to work every day without having the basic skills to do their job. I'll give you a couple examples. Almost everyone listening has interviewed and hired people. And to a person, they've probably had no training on interviewing and hiring somebody. Yeah, they might have done it a hundred times, but maybe they've done it wrong all 100 times. Maybe they've read a book. That's not training. It's reading a book. Training is watching information, reading information, working with the coach on it, practicing it, getting critiqued on it, role playing, kind of stepping back and observing, looking at what you can do better and then going through that training again. That's training, right? And you think about the best athletes in the world that get training in their sport. Why are leaders not getting trained on how to run meetings? Why are they not getting trained on how to delegate projects? Why are they not getting trained on how to effectively manage projects in time they do every day, and no one's ever given them the skills. That's the stuff that I now go, wow, that's where the hypergrowth comes from. It's usually in the very first module that I can put them through that they go, holy, I get it. All this other stuff. I have no skill development. So I was coaching a CEO of a very, very effective company, 200 employees, and I asked him, like, how much training have you had on interviewing people? And he goes, none, but I've hired a hundred. And I'm like, maybe you've done it wrong every time. He goes, okay, teach me. He's like, okay, teach me. Give me something right. So I started giving him some ideas, and he's like, I don't even know what you're talking about. So all of a sudden I created the gap where it was almost like he fell off the bicycle. And he goes, okay, teach me how to. Or he fell off the skateboard and he's like, teach me how to ride the skateboard. He realized that everything he knew wasn't necessarily the best way. You know, it's like, I didn't know until I was 50 years old that when you hold. When you're going to bat, you pull up your elbow, the back elbow kind of comes up. I didn't know. Nobody never taught me that before. I'm 50 years old and I didn't know this. Like, this is irresponsible of me to teach my kids how to swing a bat when I don't know how to swing the bat. I don't even know how to hold the bat, let alone swing the bat. But then why are entrepreneurs keep saying that business is difficult? Business isn't difficult. What happens is we would never send our kid off to little league baseball without teaching them the basics. You wouldn't send your kid off because Johnny would come home from baseball, he go, daddy, baseball sucks. You're like, no, Johnny, you suck at baseball. And then all entrepreneurs come back and you go, business is difficult. No, you're difficult because you're not. Because you suck at it. You're not learning this core skills. And you keep repeating it. And then the last part of this is the baby boomers and Gen X that go, oh, I have 30 years experience. No, you have five years experience six times in a row. That's why the best baseball players on the planet today still have coaches. They have mindset coaches, they have swing coaches, they've got fitness coaches, they have nutrition coaches. If entrepreneurs and their. And by the way, every entrepreneur that gets skill training for themselves, they have a coach for themselves. They're in a mastermind for themselves. That's great. What will really scale your company is get coaching and get your key employees into courses and growing them and getting into masterminds. If you grow your team, that's what scales your company. Growing yourself is like a one times one return. You grow the seven people on your leadership team. Now you're getting a 700%. Like it's just incremental growth, two parts. Unfortunately, I can't use the baseball analogy here because it doesn't stand up as well as a football analogy. So in US Football or American football, we have, let's say we have like the Dallas Cowboys, right? We have the, the offensive team, we have the Defensive team and we have the special teams and we have the Dallas Cowboys. So let's say that you have the, you know, the wide receiver. Right, wide receiver. What's the most important team for the wide receiver? Offensive team. Right. How about the most important team is the Dallas Cowboys. Bingo. So if you're now the head of marketing and I say, what's your most important team? What does the head of marketing say? Normally they say marketing. Head of finance. Finance. No, the company you're running. So when I was the COO at 1-800-got junk, my most important team wasn't operations or the call center or PR or sales. And I really like my most important team was the leadership team at 1-800-grout junk. That was my first team and we called it our first team. To the outside world, we called it our leadership team. But the seven members on the leadership team, we called it our first team. Our second team was the functional area that we ran. So the head of finance knew that his first team was the leadership team. And the head of finance knew, even though he had eight people on it, the second most important team was finance. When everyone's showing up with a company in mind, the vision for the company in mind, the core values in mind, the. The debate is for the good of the company in mind. That's where real kind of scale happens and that's where everybody pulls together. And the second part is by practicing gratitude and praise across functional areas. So at every leadership team meeting, I like to show up and say hey to one other business area. This every week. Hey, finance. Quick shout out. Bobby on your finance team crushed it the other day in that meeting that we had. I want to say thank you. And then finance like, hey, I wanted to say something to it. You guys were knocking the COVID off the ball. We were working on that project. Thank you for that. When every. And it's kind of like when the offense is going back out onto the field, what are they doing? They're high fiving the defense. They're slapping the defense on the. They're telling each other what they did. Hey, this guy beat you. Keep an eye open for that next time. That's because they recognize that my job is to praise and show gratitude and celebrate the other teams that are all on the same team. When you build that system into your company, massive growth happens. And then the cult that flywheel right really starts to steamroll. The first big one is, is you're not running a freaking country. You're running a business that's small in a Microcosm in a city. Stop worrying about the global economy, the global financial crisis. Get away from your desk, get away from the news, get away from social media, start doing some sales, start doing some marketing, start taking care of your employees, start taking care of your customers. Business will grow. You're not running a trillion dollar company. You're not like you don't have to worry about the global financial crisis. So stop creating your own doom loop right in every single economy, good and bad. Like it's why in these last couple of tough years when so many companies were struggling, the top seven were crushing it. Guess which companies I've been buying stock in for almost 15 to 20 years? The top seven. I've been buying stock in Amazon every two to three months since 2003. Why wouldn't I? It's not going anywhere, right? So, so focus on the critical few things and stop worrying about all the noise and all the distraction because none of that stuff matters. Tom Peters when he wrote In Search of Excellence back in the 80s, said that to be truly successful you have to be a monomaniac with a mission. So that's that true sole focus, right? That's where, where the real growth is going to come from. And I think really good entrepreneurs can slow it down, take a breath, pull their team together and say, you know what, we're not marketing to the whole world. Like if I ran a restaurant, I got enough people like within view of this camera on my phone that I can market, I'll just market to them and I would be successful. I don't need to worry about what's happening in San Francisco or Chicago or you know, Israel right now. Who cares? I can care as a human and out of curiosity, but it doesn't impact my business. I'll give two books that are not, not mine. One is called Insanely simple. It's the 10 core simplicity systems that Apple and Steve Jobs use to scale Apple that are absolutely applicable to a 10 person, 50 person, 500 person company. Super applicable. They're very, very easy to understand and you can take those concepts and bring them into your company. So Insanely simple will be number one the second and I think it's because it's very, very tied to a time period that we're in right now is called the Hard thing about Hard things about Ben Horowitz and it's about operating as a wartime CEO versus a peacetime CEO. They don't mean it in the physical actual military war. They mean like how do you run a business when there's an economic crisis. When you're in a period of stagflation, you're in this crazy change of political. How do you run in that when you need to be super focused and leaders need to lead and you can't get all fluffy with consensus? I would read that book right now, too. Foreign I've been calling stagflation for three years. So I've been calling the hyperinflation a recession for three years, and it's finally proving out to be right. I was off by because I called it in 2019, 20, because when we started to print money for Covid, we delayed it. But we're in a period of stagflation, which is what happened in 1974. I've run businesses through three economic downturns. Like I was running a company in 0809. I was running a company in 2000, 2001, when the NASDAQ fell by 78%. And I was running another one back in 1990-91 when we had the big belt bell. So I'm used to this. I think where we're going is a period of stagflation for another 16 months, which is kind of till the end of 2025. Inflation still, even though the government's going to stop telling us it's inflation, they used to say that 2% or greater was too much. Now they're thinking that 3% is a good threshold. They're basically allowing. So I think we're going to be a period of inflation where people are going to need more, everything's going to cost more. I'm not Trump fan or not a Trump fan, doesn't matter to me either way. But if Trump comes in power, watch what happens. Stuff is going to get more expensive because he's going to become more U.S. protection. U.S. protection makes everything more expensive. Buying out of China, buying out of all these other countries is going to help us get cheaper goods and cheaper services. So stuff is going to get more expensive either way. And then I think we're going to have this period of inflation. And I think we have a period of inflation where consumers are basically tapped out. They're starting to live off credit cards. They're not going to topgolf anymore. They're not going to movies anymore. We're seeing a switch from line to beer. We're seeing Amazon sales off. Like we're seeing stuff where consumers aren't buying and that's going to start hitting business. And then we're going to have the commercial real estate impact. You know, where all these commercial real estates and banks. So I think we're going to have a period of recession and inflation for a period of another 16 months. Where do I go outside of that? I don't even care past that really. Like for me it's like debt is good until it's bad, right? Don't over leverage anybody who's under 35. The big lesson for you is these interest rates today are normal. Sorry, but like six and a half percent. When I got a mortgage in 2000 for six and a half percent for five years, I was doing my happy dance. I was thrilled, man, because I remember getting Canada savings bonds in 1982 at 18 and 3/4%. So I remember when 7, 8% was like an okay business loan. So I got news for you, like 2009 till 2022, that 13 year period we had artificially low interest rates. So anybody who's 35, they don't know anything different. They think that's normal, that's not normal. So we're going to get used to this as being normal again. It's not the new normal, it's the real normal. So I think we're sitting in a period now where inflation is normal. We're going to have this kind of like period where we start to digest that inflation. It's like the snake swallowing the frog. At some point you've digested it, we'll digest that printing of money. It'll become the new normal. Interest rates will feel normal again and we'll get back to business. I think that's what's coming in 2026 is, is. We're just used to this as the norm.