How To Grow Your People so They Can Grow Your Business

My obsession in business has been to grow people. My core job was to grow people, not to do stuff. My job was to delegate that stuff to people and if they couldn't do it, to grow their skills. I've always visualized myself as this leader in charge of growing people. And I get frustrated watching these companies where the entrepreneur is growing themselves, and then they're saying, it's really, really hard to get things done. I'm like, well, you're not growing any of your team, and the business keeps getting bigger. So every day it's harder and harder for them to do the job.

Vivid vision is amazing. For those of you guys who don't know, Cameron, right now, you run this incredible coaching program called the CEO alliance, which the only. I think, as far as I know, it's the only coaching program. If it's not the only, it's certainly the best coaching program for second in charges.

I have a book coming out about it called the Second in Command, coming out in January. And I was the second in command for a company called 1-800-GETJUNK. But I had also twice before that, been the second in command for two other businesses that we grew to over 100 million as well. So I'd done it a couple of times. And I'm very entrepreneurial. I always have been. I've run my own companies. But I've recognized this other need for these people that were really running the business for the entrepreneurs. And they're very different. They're very different DNA. They have a very different personality profile. If you think of, you know, Colby profiles or disc profiles, they're just completely different profiles from their entrepreneurial counterpart. So we were sending these CEOs off to all these events like YPO and EO and Vistage and Genius Network and Boardroom and Maverick, and all these amazing places for entrepreneurs to go learn. But their CEOs don't fit in that group. And then there were groups for marketers and engineers and lawyers, but there was no group for the second in command of real companies. So we put in place a $5 million floor. Yeah, we've got members now from 17 countries. You know, you know, Dan Martell, Dan COO is a member now from the SAS Academy. Just. It's a really cool, eclectic group. Our largest member is about a billion and a half in revenue. And to qualify, you need to do at least 5 million just to get in the door.

And you said that there's this thing that you've been doing lately with your clients, which is like an internal leadership Development system.

Yeah. And I'm going to talk about kind of the genesis of this and where I learned about this. But my obsession in business since 1989 has been to grow people. I was groomed this way by a mentor. He was the founder of a company called College Pro Painters, which I helped scale. And CollegePro is the world's largest residential house painting company. And I'm going to talk a little bit about that. But when Greg was grooming me there, he kept telling me that my core job was to grow people, not to do stuff. My job was to delegate that stuff to people and if they couldn't do it, to grow their skills and then give them more and grow their. Like, it wasn't to do things. It was. So I've always visualized myself as this leader in charge of growing people. And I get frustrated watching these companies where the entrepreneur is growing themselves, and then they're saying, it's really, really hard to get things done. I'm like, well, you're not growing any of your team. And the business keeps getting bigger. So every day it's harder and harder for them to do the job. And I'll talk a little bit about where we're screwing that up. So that's been my recent obsession for the last probably 18 months with clients. But for the last 33 years, it's just always been the way I've operated, and I just realized people weren't. What I've been focusing on is this concept that I've been thinking about is two ladders and to grow our people, they'll grow our company. And the reality is, I think as business owners, we often over complicate business. You know, we would never send our kid off to learn how to play tennis through his first tennis lesson without at least teaching them how to hold the racket and maybe hit a ball. We give them the basics, right? We'd never send them off to little league baseball without teaching them how to hold the bat, throw the ball, or catch the ball, or even cricket, how to, like, bowl. You know, you teach the kid the basics, otherwise they come home at the end of the day and they go, daddy, baseball sucks. It's like, no, Johnny, you suck at baseball. And I think that's the way I've been thinking about a lot of us in business as well. As Taki mentioned, I've done a lot in my past. I've written five books. My sixth one is coming out in January, called the Second in Command. One of my books appeared in Richard Branson's Necker Island. It was actually in his library on Necker. I've had dozens of my friends have been to Necker before the hurricane kind of blew it off the bookshelf into the ocean. I don't think Richard actually ever read the book, but it is actually true that it was spotted in his library. I want you to keep your mind open that maybe I'm right. Maybe some of those ideas will work in your business. So really show up with our dumb hats on today and say we don't know any of this. And I'm willing to just listen to Cameron kind of go on and see how I can apply these systems into my business. So to start us off, I'm going to read a list of 12 things that happen in our business day to day. I'd like you to keep count and just write down how many of these 12 things or count on your fingers or whatever. How many of these 12 things right now are frustrating to you in your business today? So do your employees, do your managers, do they know how to adapt their leadership style on a situational basis? Or even, to be more frank, have you ever trained your leadership team and managers on the actual concept called situational leadership? So if that's a no, count one on your fingers for no, you're not doing that. Have you got managers or leaders in your company who coach other people? So do you have managers or leaders that coach people on any aspect of their business? If you do, you can count that as a two. Do you have managers who teach people things, maybe three or four people at a time, either in a classroom or over zoom? Are they teaching them skills or things in the business, or ways to be better as leaders, or maybe ways to use your product or your service? So are any of your team ever in a classroom training situation? Again, count three. Do any of your managers or leaders delegate tasks or projects to their direct reports, or do you delegate projects to your direct reports? Do any of you hold meetings, whether it's over the phone or in person or in zoom? Or do any of your managers hold meetings where they invite other people to attend? Or do any of your employees show up at meetings so clearly you're all counting that as a yes? Do any of your managers or leadership team conduct job interviews where they interview potential people to join your company? Do any of your employees feel like they're overwhelmed with email? Or do you feel like they don't reply to emails or things get lost with slack or email, email or sms? Are they overwhelmed with a lot of that? Do they Struggle with getting shit done fast enough for you? Do you feel like the work is expanding almost like Parkinson's law where work expands to build a space that we give it? Or do you feel like your team is very productive and really efficient with their time management? Do you feel like your employees are completely aligned with your vision or not? So this is your counting. If they're not aligned with your vision, if they can't read your mind, if they're not truly following that vivid vision idea. Do any of your managers or leaders struggle with conflict? Do you find that they're arguing or not getting along? Or there's politics in the workplace, that kind of thing? Do any of them run one on one meetings where they're actually coaching any direct reports, you know, where they're coaching people on a one on one basis, on a weekly basis? And then lastly, do any of them have to manage projects ongoing, so rolling out projects with multiple steps? So just write down in the actual chat how many of those you actually have them doing. Can you just read out some of the numbers that are appearing in the chat for me?

11, 6, 8, 7, 11, 10, 12.

You're all there.

We're relatively high.

Great. So most of you struggle with or at least have some opportunity to learn how to get better in these areas. And that's what we're going to talk about today is how to get better at these core, what I call the executive functioning skills. So my background, I grew up in a small town up in northern Canada where this was actually the main hospital and they decided they were going to tear it down and then they decided not to tear it down. So it's been this weird living piece of art for the last six years. I lived on the other side of that lake. It's a very small town of about 80,000 people. And I was groomed to be an entrepreneur. This is the last photo I have of my dad and I. My dad passed away in September, but he was my mentor, he was my, my kind of cheerleader. He was the guy who got me into entrepreneurship and trained my sister and my brother and I to all be entrepreneurs, which is really all we've ever done, entrepreneurs other than the time where I was kind of in those second in command roles, but again, very entrepreneurial. But I was groomed to be an entrepreneur and I'm kind of going somewhere with this concept. I ended up doing a talk that's on the main TED website. It's about let's raise kids to be entrepreneurs. It's had over 2 million views now. And it's really kind of my story of how I was groomed to be an entrepreneur. But, you know, 20 years ago or 30 years ago, being entrepreneurship was not like it was today. It was very different. We were kind of vilified and I was groomed to be that. So I was trained on the skills to be an entrepreneur, even though I had the DNA to be an entrepreneur as well. My real world MBA came at this company here, College Pro Painters, which I'll talk about in a little bit as well. But again, at College Pro Painters, I went through tons of training programs on how to run the franchise, how to actually then coach franchisees, train franchisees, hire them. Kimball Musk was one of my hires. I hired Elon's brother Kimball, back in 1993, and his brother, Peter Reeve, sorry, his Cousin who built SolarCity, were both employees of mine. Again, it was because College Pro Painters gave us the training to actually run businesses. So that became very formative in me and started my mindset around growing people. I joined mastermind communities like the Entrepreneurs Organization or Boardroom. I was a member of EO for five years. I was a member of Genius Network for seven years. I was a member of Mastermind Talks for five years, and David Gothwater and all of these organizations where I knew that if I grew my skills, I could scale up the organization because of the Entrepreneurs Organization. That's where I met Brian from 1-800-Got Junk. As you know, I came in as the second in command at 1-800-Got Junk, and we built that company up together. Had I not been in that Mastermind community or surrounding myself with these people, I wouldn't have had the confidence or the skills to necessarily go up to that next level. My kind of passion and my focus at 1, 800 got junk was really around growing people. I helped take the company from 14 employees to 3,100 employees in just under six and a half years. And it was because of my focus and obsession of growing people that we went from 2 million to 106 million in revenue as well. So I've always really been kind of focused and obsessed around growing people. At College Pro Painters, every year we had to go out and get 800 new franchisees. We had three months to find 800 franchisees onboard them, sign franchise agreements with them, and train them to run their own business. And then in one month, we had to train those 800 franchisees to go out and hire 8,000 university students to be painters. And then in the next four months, we painted $64 million in houses. 8,800 people would quit on August 31st. 60 of us at the head office would get drunk and the 30 of us, the top of the company, me included, would wake up September 2nd and we would do it again. So every year for four years, I built an 8800 person company off of a team of 50 or 60. So I was really good at kind of growing people to get there at 1, 800 got junk. We grew the company up into 330 franchisees that we had to train. And they had over 3,000 painters and navigators out in the field that we trained. We built learning management systems, we had LMS systems, internal videos, we had training manuals, we had certification programs. All stuff that I'll talk about today. And then even now in what I do, I've got CEOs pay me $4,300 an hour to give them coaching advice. They sign up for a one year contract for 78 grand. They get one call with me a month for 90 minutes and they're paying me that kind of value. So I again, my world has been growing people and it stays kind of where I am today. I think that most businesses don't get it right. We don't focus on the basics. We don't focus on the nuts and bolts of what training really is because most of us don't really understand what it is. So I'm going to walk you through some different aspects of the core things that we need to train our people in and then how to actually build that internally as well. So right now training is too random. It's kind of all over the place, right? It's stuff that you might be learning on your computer. It's, it's, you know, your personal development plan. It's, you know, a manager tossing a book on some employee's desk and saying, here, read this. Maybe it's a video link that we send them saying, watch that. You know, maybe it's a seminar that we send them off to or a consultant that we bring in, or it might even be a training department that we built internally that isn't necessarily focusing on growing the people in the right areas or in the right way. So a lot of our, it's kind of random acts of training. It's almost like a lot of our random acts of marketing. We need to get much more focused in the way that we train and grow our people. And I'm going to walk you through some of my methodologies on that. So I visualize every leader, every one of Your managers, everyone on your leadership team, and even you as climbing up two ladders. And I kind of see them as their left hand and their left side foot is climbing up the skills ladder, and their right hand and their right foot is climbing up the confidence ladder. And our job is to grow their skills and grow their confidence and grow their skills and grow their confidence. And if one of the ladders is shaky, they start holding on and they can't go up the other ladder. So we have to remember that our job is to always grow their confidence and grow their skills. And growing their skills gives them confidence, and giving them confidence allows them to take on more, which grows their skills. That's really what our core job is. So the first area we have to focus on, as I mentioned, is skills, right? What are the skills that we're going to get into and how do we focus? And the second area is that confidence. And I really need you to remember those two things. I don't think any of us as leaders do a good enough job at coaching and growing the confidence of our people. And we often try to give them the skills in areas that don't give us enough leverage as well. A leader's core job is to grow people. I'm 6 foot 4 and I'm standing beside this giant. So just remember that analogy that no matter how big you are, again, I'm six foot four. People can always be grown into something much bigger. No matter how good you are as a leader today or how good one of your managers are, if they're not driven and wanting to continue to grow as a person, I would get them out of the organization. Because even the best athletes on the world have coaches, right? Sheryl Sandberg, who was one of the best COOs probably in history, was constantly working on her leadership skills. The core 40 people running Starbucks globally, the 40 people at their C level and senior VP level all go through training every quarter on situational leadership and coaching. So when some of the best of the best are still getting coached, if you have any employees that don't want to grow, I think you want to get those people out of the organization. Because our job is to always grow people, and if we grow them, they'll grow the business. So what you need to ask yourself is, is what level of training program do you really need internally at your company? And what level of training are you really willing to pay for in terms of time and money or people hours to make it happen? I kind of think of it as everything, as bronze, silver, or gold for most of us bronze is just okay and it's good enough. Don't worry about getting to silver, don't worry about getting to gold yet. You certainly don't need to have a gold level training program like General Electric has with their Six Sigma or the Starbucks program, or even the program I built at 1-800-got junk. It's overkill for where most of you are. It's overkill for most businesses. But if we can get to bronze or silver, that's pretty damn good. Because most of us today don't even hit the podium with the training that we're applying right now. So Simon Sinek, who wrote the book Start with why Simon was actually on our board of advisors four years before his book Start with why even came out. He flew out to Vancouver to meet Brian and I to see if what we were building was real. Introduced us to this concept of the golden circle. Right. We've all seen this, the why, how and the what. I think that most of us as companies train our employees on what we train them on what we do. We train them on our how to run our business and what our product is and how to work with our customers and how to use our internal software. That's the what we do. Where we're really missing is training them on the why we do what we do. And where I obsess about is the how we do what we do. So the why we do what we do is really stuff around training all the employees and making sure that they are trained on your core history of the company, kind of how you got here, all of the crazy stories from inception, the hero's journey, all the ups and downs to where you are today. They're trained about your core purpose, they're trained about your core values, they're trained about your vivid vision, they're trained about kind of anything that is the cultural side, that's kind of the why you do what you do your bhag. And it's making sure that you as the CEO should do those training videos so that you get them done, you get them scripted, you get them recorded and the employees can then watch all of those videos and then you don't have to keep actually showing up to train the new person who shows up tomorrow when you just ran the session yesterday. So get those training sessions on video so that everybody can be relearning it. I'll also get talk a little bit later about why you want to do a pre test before they go through this and a post test afterwards and even a retention Test three months later. But the basic bronze level is you getting your core values, core purpose, bhag, the history, your vivid vision, everything into video to inspire so that you can do it once and then for the rest of your life. These employees can all be ingrained in this. The how we do what we do is what I'm going to focus on today. The middle section, that middle. And I think that's where the real leverage comes from because it supports the what we do as well. So the 12 core skills that I'm talking about are these ones. Situational leadership, coaching, classroom training, meetings, one on one coaching, time management, interviewing, delegation, conflict management, email management, project management, and executing against your vivid vision. If your managers and leaders are really, really strong in these areas, your business will scale if your managers and leaders are not strong in these these areas. It's why you're feeling the frustration you're feeling today. It's why you're feeling like you're constantly hurting cats. It's why you're feeling like you're having to hold people accountable instead of hiring accountable people. You know, I had a CEO recently say to me, oh, it takes about 90 days after I hired someone to know if they're the right person. I'm like, that's because you suck at interviewing. You know, you would never get married and say, well, I need to get married and see how it goes for three months and then I'll know if it's my right spouse. No, you do all that in the dating period before you decide to actually, you know, go to the marriage. So I want you to think about these core skills and ask yourself, what's the best way to get these deeply ingrained in your organization. And I'll give you a couple tips around this as to how you can either build this out internally or some of the kind of ways you can sidestep that and maybe even do it at an accelerated, easier pace as well. So each skill has a negative and positive to it. The positive is how it will really help your organization if your people are truly trained in this skill. And the negative is what's happening to your business today if they're not trained in this skill. So I'm going to go through each of the 12 very briefly just to kind of illustrate the point and show you how important these are in your organization today. So situational leadership. This is how a manager has to adapt their style of leadership based on two things. The person that they're managing on that specific project, how strong is their skill at that project. And what's their commitment level on that project. And each of the projects on their plate require a different style of leadership. Whether it's very direct or more of problem solving or more coaching or more kind of a delegation where you're just there in a supportive role. And if your managers don't know how to adapt using this very simple model of situational leadership, they're really missing out. Now you can follow the model developed by Dr. Paul Herzy and Ken Blanchard. It's covered in the one minute manager. I give a bit of a crash course, a more entrepreneurial version that I've included in my course. Invest in your leaders. But either way, you need to actually make sure this is the most important skill for every manager and leader. And if you guys have not been exposed to this, you're massively missing out. Again, this is the core skill that at Starbucks head office, the top 40 people in Starbucks worldwide get retrained on situational leadership every single quarter because they believe this is the core skill that's allowing them to scale every aspect of an organization. Coaching, right? Think about this for a second in terms of do people know how to use a Socratic method? Do your managers know how to inspire? Do they know how to break down a project with one of their direct reports and grow them? Do they know how to inspire confidence in that direct report? Do they know how to step back and observe instead of actually getting over involved? Or are they micromanaging? And if you have any of your people who are struggling in their role, it's probably because their manager doesn't really know how to coach them. And if you haven't been trained on how to coach, you can either approach it in one of two ways. You can either be a player, coach someone who's really good in that role, who can train somebody in what they're really good at, or if you're a really good coach, and I've actually been certified in coaching, you can actually coach people on stuff that you might only be competent in if you're really good at coaching. You can coach people on what you're competent in. If you're really amazing at something you can possibly coach people on. The one thing you're amazing at. The big opportunity is for us to train all of our managers and leaders in coaching so that they can actually coach all of our employees on the 10 to 15 different areas of the business they're involved in, not just on one specific thing. So it's really something to think about. Delegation, right? If you've ever had Managers or yourself frustrated with the work that you get back isn't what you were looking for or a project that you delegated takes too long or goes over budget or employees are kind of bewildered and have to come back three times to ask for more information. That's because you suck at delegation. And there's some very, very easy systems that you can put in place. But every manager probably delegates at least one thing a day to every one of their direct reports. And if they've never been trained or given a simple system for delegation, then that's where some of the frustration in your business has been. You can see where we're kind of going with this, right? Each of these skills is very powerful if you have it and it's causing you a lot of problems if you don't. And I see most of us as entrepreneurs like flies trying to get out a window. We're going to keep banging our head on the window, but if we would just turn and turn right and go out the door right here, it was an easier path. Most of us are making it hard on ourselves. One on one coaching. Here's one that's really interesting. I was talking to a COO in the CEO alliance the other day and he said he was really excited to get all of his one on one meetings off his plate. His direct reports were now going to start doing all their one on ones. And I said, well, two questions here. Number one, have you ever been trained on how to do one on one meetings? He said no. And I said, you're now delegating them to your direct reports and they're now going to do one on one meetings. Who's training them? He goes, well, I guess I will. I'm like, no, but you've never even been trained on how to do them, so how can you train them on how to do them? And he scratched his head and he's like holy shit, how am I supposed to do one on one meetings? And as soon as I talk to him about what a solid one on one meeting, a solid wise. I used to call goal setting and review a really good 30 minute meeting where you're working on delegation, support, coaching, applying situational leadership, I'm breaking down problems for them, making sure that the manager doesn't feel like they're being managed but they're being supported. That's when you serve a turbocharge your organization. He realized he had no idea how to delegate them, let alone how to actually do them. So we worked on putting that deep into his organization as well. Time Management. I mean, oh my God, if you haven't been trained or if your managers, and by the way, if you go and ask your managers, have you been trained on time management? They haven't. They don't know how to take down a project or all of their complex projects, break them down into all the tasks that need to get done, letter their tasks into A's and B's, numerically order all the A's so it's a 1, a 2, a 3, etc. Do the same with the B's. How do you put a time block on all of the A's so you know how many hours or minutes each is going to take, how many minutes each of the B's are going to take? Delegating 80% of your B's and then putting your A's actually into the calendar for the time blocks. I just raveled that system off to you in one minute and most, most of you have never heard of it, nor do you use a system like that. And for sure your managers are struggling with getting done because they don't know how to manage time. So what you're hearing is I need more people. No, you don't need more people. You need to teach the people you have how to get more shit done with less people faster. It's by teaching them time management, by teaching them delegation, by teaching them coaching and situational leadership, etc. That you supercharge the organization. So think about interviewing for a second as a classic skill that managers need. If you have not trained your managers on how to do interviews, right? And just think about that. Like have you actually gone through training? And I don't mean have you interviewed people, I mean have you had someone teach you how to do open ended questions, close ended questions, utilize the pregnant pause, have even trained in how to review a resume and analyze a resume against the scorecard. Do you know how to, you know, interview for cultural traits and behavioral traits and skill set? Do you know how to use torque and reference checks? Do you know how to sell or reverse the sell in the interview process so that you're selling without even having to talk? Do you know how to set up the room in the environment? Those are all things that if you don't do properly, you're going to be able to attract more A players into the organization and you're going to be able to know for sure if somebody's an A or a B or merely pulling the wool over your eyes. If you don't know how to interview, then at best your interview becomes the 90 days after you hire people, which is why your turnover is so high in the first three to six months is because most of our managers have never been trained. So it's a core, core skill that it astounds me how management teams and companies don't train every single person who manages anyone on how to do interviews. It's critical conflict. This happens in our workplace all the time and it's even accelerated now because of the amount of written communication that happens in the workplace. The amount of written communication causing conflict from Slack and email messages and SMS is huge. But to teach people how to actually handle conflict in a very safe environment using a model or a couple of different models can be huge. So just ask yourself, if there's conflict between people in the workplace, do they pull out a physical model and work through the model together or just, you know, does politics get in the place? Are they going to HR and having HR solved it? The problems for you are you having to get involved? If it's going well, they actually utilize a model. And then as Pat Lencioni talks about five dysfunctions of a team, you have good, healthy conflict that is driving the organization forward. For meetings, I used a picture of one of my books, meetings suck here. But if meetings are run well, you know, Elon Musk sent out a tweet about three years ago and he said to his employees, if you're in a terrible meeting, stand up and leave the meeting. So I sent him a text and I said, no, tell your employees to learn how to run meetings, fix the meetings, and they won't be in the meetings that they have to walk out of anymore. Because if you fix the root cause of the problem, meetings don't suck at all. We often just suck at running meetings. But most of our managers are taking too long to cover things or they have too many people showing up at a meeting and they don't know how to turn people away. Or they bring seven people to a meeting, but only three. Three people talk and four people that are showing up are wondering why they're there because they're never kind of brought out into the discussion at all. So there's systems in place on what meetings to run and how to run them. The question is, have you trained your employees in that or not? Email management or. Now we're into like the Slack and SMS management as well. Do you have a system in place to manage the business to inbox zero. So at the end of every day, your physical inbox, your in your email is just as empty as your mailbox is at your house. So think about that for a second. If you go to your mailbox at your house, you don't sort through it and leave all the letters in the mailbox. You take them and as you're walking towards the kitchen, you grab the stuff that's going into the garbage, you put your magazines in a pile for later, you pull the two bills aside, you deal with those once every two weeks, and you open the one piece of mail that is right away, it's like, deal with it, drag it, delegate it, or delete. So there's systems around Inbox zero that are really powerful. And again, I don't care whose systems you use. Either mine that I learned from Starbucks or you know, getting things done or whatever systems you're using. The key is have you trained people to use these tools or the tools managing their lives? And if you go and look at any of your employees inboxes right now, or even better, ask your top 10 employees to send you a screenshot of their inbox in the email, it will scare the out of you. And if yours has more than 10 or 15 emails in it today, you're not managing the business as well as you could be as well. So there's huge opportunities there. Classroom teaching is anytime any of your leaders or managers teach two or three or more people on any area of your business and are they using things like the abstract conceptualization, the active experimentation, the concrete experience, reflective observation, are they covering the kinesthetic and auditory and visual sides of learning? And do you have a simple system in place to get them better at this? Or are they merely standing up in front of a room, kind of wasting time with students sitting there, you know, wondering why they're back in grade four again? So there's systems again that can be very helpful. Project management really, really does seems to do well in IT companies, a lot of SaaS businesses, because they really it's core competency of theirs. But most other businesses that aren't really heavily reliant on building out any of the tech stack usually suck at project management. And that's really about how do we get more done with less people faster, how do we not allow a project creep? How do we make sure that projects don't expand in terms of the amount of time that they take or amount of budget that they cost? And how do we not kind of let projects become these big hairy things that maybe we waste all this time on, but we don't, you don't really get results from. So there's opportunities to train your teams around that as well. And then lastly, it's around executing against your vision. You know, if you're ever wondering why you feel like you're, you know, herding cats, it's because your vivid vision isn't really, really strong. See, so many of us as entrepreneurs, and I just wonder why we're working so hard. You know, your business doesn't have to be this messy. I know this is a bit of an exaggeration, but there is a better way. So my core process that I use to train people is I first recognize that I have to set a gap. They have to want to learn, or they're just going to kind of close their ears and close their eyes and say they're not ready. So for every module or anything, I'm going to teach someone, I give them a pretest and I rig it in my favor where for sure they're going to fail the test. No matter how smart they are, they're going to write this test test and they're just not going to do very well in it. So that opens them up to, well, maybe there's something I can learn. So then you teach them. After you teach them, you watch them doing it. After you watch them doing it, you practice it, you let them practice it, and then they actually are doing it and doing it. I'm going to talk about each of these in a little bit more detail. After doing it, you do a post test to make sure that they remember what they've been trained. That's kind of like a bronze level of training right there. What I've covered. Right. Pre test, teach them, watch them, practice them, do it. And post test, which is more than most of you are doing today, but it's kind of bronze level of a training program. After you let them reflect on it, then you want to go back and repeat the process again. You go back through and retrain. So it's like duragi, demonstrate, observe Redemonstrate, assign a goal, give them a task and inspect. You go through the drag, you go through the drag, you go through the draggy, and then you can actually certify them in the task. Now you're at more of like a silver level of training where you actually have certification models for each of the skills you're teaching them in. And then you can kind of take it to the next level, which I'm not really going to cover today. So I, I have an easy path for all of you. You can take a look at something called invest in your leaders It's a course that I launched about two years ago and I've got clients from around 17 countries are putting their managers through 12 modules. They actually are the 12 modules that we were just covering. So you can take a look at that. What I want you to understand though, is how your leaders in your company actually learn. So if you're going to build out something internally for yourself, you have to make sure that it covers the visual, auditory and kinesthetic. Visual means that there has to be some ability for them to watch some content, watch some others, watch a demonstration. Because many people learn from visual. A lot of people learn on auditory, which is actually reading or listening. And then the third part is the doing. People are learning from doing, from role playing, from practicing, doing worksheets, etc. So whatever program you put into your organization for any of these skills or any other skills, make sure that you cover those three styles of learning. And then to the right, you want to make sure that they go from the bottom in a clockwise direction. So you're going to teach people the concept or the abstract conceptualization of a new idea of a new thing. You're going to teach them. And then they move to trying it out and practicing it, which is the act of experimentation. And when they're in that trying it out, they're kind of a little bit of learning by doing, right? Learning with, playing with it. They're learning by, by saying something into a mirror or role playing with another person. So you build that into whatever training program you build for people. And then the concrete experience, experiences where you have them actually practicing and using the skill in their day to day, they're going to be learning from doing that, taking notes down as they're doing it. And then when you sit and talk to them afterwards, that's the reflective observation component. And then you can reintroduce the skill. So what I like doing is introduce the skill with a book, have them go through the whole cycle. Then I can introduce the skill with a video again that go through the whole cycle. Then I can introduce the skill again with a, maybe a consultant coming in. They can go through the whole cycle. So they could be doing a book and a video and a consultant just around interviewing. And that can become part of whatever you start building at your organization, you know, for any, any different skill area you want to teach people in. The key is to make sure that if you're building your own, that you incorporate all of these styles in, otherwise your learning is going to fall flat. Now this is something I took From Starbucks. I actually have their entire leadership training program from Starbucks. I'm not going to share it with you, but I have every single page because my mentor was being groomed as the CEO at Starbucks. So you can build a, you know, a real detailed program like they have, where they have, you know, books and readings and activities and workshops for every single skill area of the business. And often this is done when your company's at about 250 or more people where you have a training department or a learning department or a really strong HR department that has some competencies. Here at 1-800-GOT junk, we had six full time people in our training department because we had 3,100 employees system wide. So what this was one of the eight business areas I ran was our training department. And we built out our own videos and our own manuals and our own field training and our own certification models and our own train the trainer models and our own workbooks and worksheets. You can do that as well in your company as well. It's a lot of work. I recommend that you also look for, you know, putting books in your organization or even chapters of books. You know, you don't have to have them read the entire darn book. You can give them a chapter of some book that you like or you can give them a TED Talk to watch or you can bring in some, some coaching and get people to work with them. You can send some of your employees off to conferences, very specific conferences that are going to help them grow and dedicate some money towards that. You can find mentors for some of your key employees. We had all six members of our leadership team at 1-800-God-JUNK. Each had a formal mentor in place so that they could get grown. I was being groomed by the COO at Starbucks. Our head of IT was being groomed by the head of IT for ABE Books. Our head of finance was being groomed by the head of finance for Business Objects. So we all had mentors that were really there to grow us and grow our skills and grow our confidence. So if you're building out an internal training program for your, your company, make sure that you include some aspect of that. You can use software that exists like something like Talent Guard. If you're putting in place certification models like I built at College pro painters and 1-800-God- junk where you certify employees in certain skills and if they demonstrate a competency, they might get a bronze in the skill or maybe they get to silver with their seven or eight out of ten. If they're really proficient at something. They get a nine or a ten. And then you can use the certifications as a way for them to get job promotions or pay raises. And you hold people to wanting to get certified in skills, otherwise they can't get more money. And by the way, if you, if you build this proper model, which is more like a gold level training program, so you're training them, you're teaching them all this stuff, they're getting certified in these skills and they want to get certified because that's the only way they can get paid more. It's like a viral loop inside of your organization which propels your company forward. I suggest suggest that you have a training budget in place. I suggest that you have 1% of their annual wage or a minimum of $750 per person, but I suggest 1% of their annual wage. So if somebody's $150,000 employee spend $1500 a year on growing them. And by the way, if you're not willing to spend $750 to grow a person's skills for the year, you should probably fire them because the output that they get off of you growing them is probably 100x off of that 750. If you're worried about your employees, you know, I had people say, well, what if I paid for their training and they leave? What if you don't pay for their training and they stay? Let that one sink in for a second, right? What if you have all these employees and you don't trade them? What's the negative impact that it's having on your business every day versus investing $750 or 1% of their income, whatever's greater, and really growing them. If they leave and go somewhere else, that's okay because it's worse off if you don't grow them and they stay. I believe that suffering is optional and that your R and D should stand for rip off and duplicate. There's companies out there that have created great training programs. Just plug your employees into those or grab the good training material that's out there that you need to get better at and train them in that.

What's the number one thing that you think business owners should stop doing when it comes to developing their team like this? Well, like we talk a lot about what we need to start doing. What's the one thing you, you just go stop that.

I don't think I found a single leader today that works hard enough at praising people and thanking people for what they're doing, what they're Doing well for the effort they're putting in for living the core values, for, for trying. We don't work hard enough at raising their confidence level. When was the last time, Taki, you're married, right? When was the last time you told your wife? Do you tell your wife like these you love her? Once a quarter, once a.

Once every six months, sometimes even more. I once famously got in trouble for saying, well, I told you I love you when we get married. And I just figured if anything changed, I'd let you know. That didn't go down that.

No, you probably tell your spouse you love her multiple times a day because we're always deposited. And I don't think owners, I don't think entrepreneurs thank our employees or tell them what we're happy with. We give them another task, we give them another project, we show them what's on, going broken. Oh, they know I love them. They've been here for four years. They're happy. Like, no, they don't. Because all you've done for the last 21 days is show them a new project. A new. You haven't said, thanks for getting that project done. Thanks for getting that project done. Thanks for nailing that project. All you're doing is piling more on. I really think that most, most leaders really suck at that. And I think it's sad.

Do you have a time budget for training? So you've talked about a percentage of cash. What's the time budget? Like, how much time should a leader or a team members spend in this training process?

Well, it depends, right? Because we only have three inputs in our business. We have people, we have time and we have money. And the key is how do you get the highest return off of those three investments? So a leader can spend a lot of time in it, or you could spend two minutes and sign up seven employees to this course and tell the seven employees to each do two modules a week and do a five minute book record on Monday and you spent no time. Or you could develop all this yourself. You could spend all the time online looking for like. So that's a huge question, right? When I was 16, my dad said, look, you're never going to be the smartest guy to figure this out. Just do what the best people are doing. Your R and D has to stand for rip off and duplicate. So for me, I just take a good system and I put it in place versus trying to figure it all out for myself. And is it perfect? I don't know, but it's way better than what we've got. And if I just plug them into X, then I can go and work on. Yeah. Your employees should be spending 2 to 5% of their time at minimum on a monthly basis, weekly basis on growing their skills. Like one hour a week is not, is not a ton of time to grow their skill set. Right. It's Stephen Covey. Sharpen the saw.

How do we make our meetings more effective to keep people focused on actions rather than just talking and going through the motions?

Talk about this both in the course, in the meeting section of the course and in the book meeting stock for every agenda. So with your agenda. So every meeting has to start with the purpose, outcome and agenda. Right. The one sentence, why are we having the meeting? What are the three outcomes we're hoping for from the meeting and what's the agenda for the meeting? So what are we covering? In what order are we covering all of these things? And how many minutes are we going to spend on each agenda item? That's the starting point. So agenda, you know, if we're going to be talking about X, it's three minutes. Talking about Y, it's 17 minutes. Okay? They @ least know. Now, for each agenda item, you have to tell them what the style is that we're using. It's either info share, that's one person sharing information, either top down, bottom up, or lateral. It could be your 5 minute updates or the CEO sharing or employees talking about something. That's info share, no discussion, no debate. Or there's a creative discussion where you're going to throw a bunch of shit against the wall. You're going to share ideas, share opinions, you know, share resources, collaborate, maybe have some good debate or there's consensus decision where we're actually going to talk, we're going to share, share, we're going to look at data and we're going to make a decision on something and we're all going to agree on that decision that has to be assigned to every agenda item. So people know we're not even talking about this. It's not for discussion. This is like a unilateral thing or this is a discussion. That's what happens in meetings. That's why people go, they don't have the purpose, they don't have the agenda. The next thing is book all of your meetings for half the time. You first think about booking them for. So it's like having a quickie. You can get it done in less time if you need to. The key is to think about your meeting the same way. If you're Gonna have an hour meeting, book it for 30 minutes, right? If you're gonna get together for a full day, book it for four hours. And then try to follow this agenda with, you know, the basics of a moderator, a timekeeper in a parking lot so you can get done. The last part is you only invite people to the meeting if you want them to speak, and if you don't want them to speak, don't invite them to the meeting. But your job as the person calling the meeting has to be to get the quiet people to speak. Otherwise they get steamrolled by the high dominance, the high expressives.

How can we get staff to take more ownership and responsibility of their tasks?

To hire people that are accountable, Right? Hire people that already deliver on their promises. Hire people that, you know, it's kind of like they asked Herb Kelleher from Southwest Airlines, how do you get all your employees to be so happy? Well, we hire happy people. Like, so how do we, how do we. How do we get our employee, you know, how do we get employees to deliver on their promises or to. To get their stuff done on time? You hire people that do that, right? You, you make sure that you interview against that. You make sure that you set clear expectations in your job postings. Like, I like job postings that scare 50% of the candidates away so they'll never apply. Because then the A players are like, oh, my God, that's where I want to work. Like, I want to work for a culture that this hardcore. I want in because then I know that I'm not going to be working with any C players. Is there any ways of finding accountable people? Is there any, like, good questions or things we can look at in the interviewing process? Yeah, you make it. You make it really, really blatantly obvious in the job posting that if they're not accountable and they don't deliver on their promises, they're going to get fired and it's going to hurt their career moves. You make sure that you incorporate it into torque and in your reference checks, you make sure that you really drill them in the interview process to find out where they've missed on expectations, if they're missing how. You also find out how they time block and how they break down their projects so they understand. Like, often people don't get their stuff done on time for a few reasons. They're either overwhelmed, they don't know how to manage time, they don't know how to manage their projects. You know, they're bad at saying no, or they let work expand, right? So you just kind of ask a lot of questions around those things as to how and get them to show it to you. Like, show me your calendar. You say you manage your time this way. Show me your calendar. Oh, you don't really. You know how to manage your time, but you don't really manage your time that way. Torque is the thread of reference. Check from. From top rating and hoot again, like, none of these systems are my systems. I. I've just taken the best systems from companies that have done. I just. That's why every company I've built grows so fast.