Self-Promotion Hacks for Creators

You're very, very lucky because you're doing it at a time when hiring people is cheaper than it's ever been before. It's cheaper because you can hire people that are overseas. So you can hire people who are very, very skilled that in North America might cost you 150 grand a year. But based in Latvia or based in Lithuania or based in Colombia, you're paying $24,000 a year for the same person, the same level of candidate. Second thing is, because of the Internet, because of WI fi, because of video, you don't need to have full time employees coming to a company. You can hire fractional people to work for you a day, a week or six hours a week. So you can start to build out your team with fractional experts who are remote, who are global, who can actually work on a project by project or a task by task basis. You don't need to hire full time people. I got fortunate with the rise of social media. So I got very well known for building. The fourth company that I built was called the 1, 800 got junk. I did three companies prior and then I was the chief operating officer for 1, 800 got junk from 2000 until 2007. Right as I was leaving the organization, I had the first the Facebook account in the company. Everyone was laughing at me, people thought I was crazy. And then I got onto Twitter very early. I was one of the first 200,000 people in the world on LinkedIn. And right at the intersection of me leaving 1, 800 got junk and starting off as a coach, basically coaching CEOs and I've written six books and I've been paid to speak now in 28 countries. But it was the rise of Facebook, the rise of Twitter, the rise of LinkedIn where I started to share my information and I was a bit of a self promotion machine. But really I learned that in 1986. I was 20 years old and I landed the first newspaper article with a photo of me. And I realized how easy it was to get press coverage and also how powerful the press coverage was versus marketing and advertising. And I realized that I could use that newspaper article and show all of these homeowners that I had credibility as a house painter and they hired me to paint their homes and. And that started the rise of my first real company. I had 12 employees when I was 20 years old and I started landing a lot of press. And then for every company that I built, I landed press. Now I'll go Back to the 1, 800 got junk again around this. When we were building that company. There were five members of the leadership team. Of the five members of the leadership team, I cared about one thing more than the other four. I wanted to be known for building the brand. I knew from the day I joined Brian. Brian was my best man at my wedding three months before I started with him. He watched me grow two other companies prior to me starting working with him. But I knew that it was never going to be about the money. I knew that the money that I could actually make was my name being attached to the brand. So that as we scale, if I could do speaking events for the company, if I could be a thought leader for the company, if I could be an external voice for the company, much like Harley Finkelstein is for Shopify as their CEO, if I could be an author and talk about what I'd done for the company, if I could speak to the press, I about wanting to undergot junk. My brand equity would be worth way more than any money that I would be making in the actual organization. So I was paid, you know, 300 grand a year to be COO 17, 18 years ago. But my real leverage came off of the fact that I could attach my name to that and then leaving the company, starting to talk about it on social media, that really was really powerful for me. And that's what built my brand. No one to this day, I mean, no one could name, sadly, the other four people of the leadership team, they were all very critical in getting us there, but they never really cared about having their name attached to the brand. So to this day, nobody knows they even existed. I've been notoriously horrible at selling from the stage. I've left millions of dollars on all those stages that I've been paid to speak on because I was really bad at selling my course or selling the other services that I had. But I was very good at delivering content and helping the people in the audience. So I always wanted to share. And I think for me, I started coaching CEOs back in 1989, way before business coaching was even a thing. I'd coached 120 entrepreneurs by 1993. And I've always seen entrepreneurs and entrepreneurial companies kind of like fly is trying to get out a window, probably like you're doing with creators. You watch these creators trying so hard and banging their head on the window. But there's an easier path. If they would just do this, they could, they could grow. So I always wanted to share the cheat sheets or the systems or the playbooks or what we were doing to make each of our companies successful. And because I did that and talked to the media about it, or I talked on stages about it, or then I started talking on social media about it, people kept turning to me as a thought leader and an expert. I'm like, I'm not an expert. I'm just telling you what I'm doing. Nobody else is really talking about what they're doing, right? I think if I'd known about the creator community now, if I'd known about it back in 2007, my brand would have been 100x bigger than it is today, because I would have actually paid some people to be behind the scenes helping me. Lewis Howes, who I've known since 2007, the year that I left 1-800-got junk. He did not build his brand. There was a guy behind the scenes, almost like the wizard of Oz behind the curtain, whose name was Sean Malarkey. And Sean ran the entire business of the Lewis Howes LinkedIn program for about six or seven years, from 2007 till about 2013. During that time, that's what really got Louis to be really well known. And then he was able to continue to grow off of his brand being there, but it was someone else. He didn't have the skills to build his brand. Someone did it for him. I really missed that opportunity. I think I understood the value of being on social media, the value of sharing, but I didn't pay someone to help me build my brand properly, help me gather all the email addresses and monetize them, help me grow my list properly. I didn't know how to leverage that. I should have leveraged it. There is someone out there who every single person listening or watching knows their name. And I'm going to give you the full backstory. So his name is Guy Kawasaki. Guy Kawasaki worked for Apple back in, I think it was 1986 to 1989. And in that period of time, at a meeting one day, Steve Jobs told all of the employees, who, all of you are technical evangelists for Apple, okay? And then he kept talking. Guy Kawasaki went out and got business cards made up that day that said guy Kawasaki, product developer or whatever and technical evangelist for Apple. And he started handing them out to people. He literally built his brand pre Internet because the Internet really didn't start off until like 98, 99, right? Guy Kawasaki's entire brand got elevated because people started talking to him as a technical evangelist. And he started speaking on behalf of the company as a technical evangelist because his CEO, Steve, said, you're all technical evangelists, everybody at 1, 800, got junk or at all the brands I've built, whether it be Gerber Auto Collision or Boyd Auto Body in Canada or our college Pro painters, we all had a chance to speak to the media, to speak on stages, to share our stories. Most people didn't. And I wasn't doing it again to be the smart person. I was doing it because it was a way for me to meet people and it was a way for me to help people. And it was cheaper than spending money on marketing and advertising. For me, I try to have in a very entrepreneurial way, right. Without spending. You know, I don't have like having his guy off in the corner with videos and cameras. Like, I don't have that team sitting here doing stuff. But I figure if I'm going to do something, I may as well get additional leverage. So when your episodes go live, my team will share it on Facebook, they'll share it on LinkedIn, they'll share it on Twitter, they'll share it on Instagram. We'll take it and like slice it up. We'll email it to our list. And I'll do that multiple times a year. With the one episode, I learned this with the media even when we were On Oprah for 1, 800, got junk. It's not about that one press hit that you get. It's not about that one episode that you're on. It's what you do with it. And I think that we're missing a lot of opportunities there as well that I think we kind of feel like we have to keep shooting videos where most of our audience never saw that one video that we shot last year. We can share that video three more times this year and they're not going to remember they saw it or other parts of the audience will see it that I think we can actually reuse a lot more of our content more frequently than we do. There's a lot of entrepreneurs who have done it. The reason I started my podcast called the Second in Command Podcast is I want the rest of the story. I was speaking with Guy Raz at the main TED conference about seven years ago and he was interviewing all these CEOs who were really, you know, really good at sharing their story. Kendra Scott from her jewelry business. I've known Kendra since she was 2 million in revenue. She's now a billion dollar company. I've heard Kendra's story so often, I wanted the rest of the story. But yeah, I think there's a lot of entrepreneurs who have done it I haven't seen a lot of executives inside of companies doing it. I think they're the ones that are missing massive opportunities. They have a voice, they have ideas to share. It's almost like if I was to ask your mom and dad what, your mom would have a very true story. Your dad would have a very true story. They'd be very different stories, but they're both very worth hearing. And I think we have a lot more of potential creators that are not the entrepreneur inside of their company. I think there's a lot of people out there that are doing amazing things in business that should be sharing that or that are just doing amazing things in life and should be sharing it. Right? You don't have to be like. My wife right now has a YouTube channel and she shares videos of all of our travels. We sold everything three years ago. And. And we travel. We've been traveling around the world for three years. Every single country we go to, she produces another video. And sharing it, not to monetize it, not to pay bills, merely to actually inspire people to live better lives and have more fun and to cross off their bucket list items. But I think there's a lot more people that can do that inside of their, you know, their normal day to day. And sometimes something catches something. People will either catch a spark of inspiration or it'll help them grow in their career or they might actually stumble into the fact that maybe they're more of an entrepreneur than they thought they were too. But to answer your question, no, I can't think of any specific names. Sam Parr from my first million, I think Sam and Sean Puri have done an incredible job building a brand around, you know, around the hustle and then around their podcast and around each of the businesses and they're leveraging. It's incredible to watch. I talked to Sam the other day about this that they're actually leveraging their podcast. My first million to really leverage all of these other businesses because they're non compete is coming up with HubSpot and I can pretty clearly see that they're going to detach themselves from the brand. They're going to run something else off because they're really using their podcast as a way to market their other businesses. I think there's something pretty solid there too. I'm even doing it with my second in command podcast. I've been approached lots of times to run advertisements on my podcast and I'm like, no, I'm going to advertise my invest in your leaders course. I'll advertise my CEO alliance. I'm going to use my own audience of 100,000 listeners to market my things. So I actually really love cults and culture and something that's culty. In fact, I was a guest on a podcast called A Little Bit Culty with Sarah Edmondson and Nippy. I'm actually really close friends with Sarah and Nippy. They used to live here in Vancouver. And I approached her when. When the show the Vow came out and talking about Nexium, the sex cult, and found out there were 17,000 people in this. And I was like, I want you to come and recruit for the CEO Alliance. Like, you're an amazing recruiter. But I was talking about, when does company culture go too far, right? And at College Pro Painters, my mentor Greg Clark said that an amazing company has to be a little bit more than a business and a little bit less than a religion. It has to get into that zone of a cult. And I think companies that have done very, very well in getting their employees to be thought leaders and promoters and spokespeople are cults. And our MLMs, Scientology, right. As an example, like, they've got Tom Cruise and they've got John Travolta, right? Like, you've got these. These amazing. And. And I don't necessarily like those businesses. I don't run an mlm, but I think there's something there that they actually recognized if they can get their employees passionate and sharing and have a stake in the outcome. You know, affiliates are another big one, where affiliates actually are out there promoting and marketing. Foreign is another former client of mine. I coached Dave for a year, helped him hire his former coo. It's about seven years ago. Dave Asprey was really the Godfather or the grandfather kind of. He's. I think he might have even coined the term biohacking. So Dave Asprey kind of created this whole biohacking movement, and then from that created a brand called Bulletproof Coffee. It was just like this geeky thing that he did and created a brand around that. A lot of people think Dave's brand is because of Bulletproof. Not so his brand, or he kind of was the creator or the thought leader that created a brand around that. But then someone who's in that space who's done extraordinarily well, and I'm pretty impressed, actually, is a woman named Aggie, but she is this, I think, Polish girl who has built. She just came out with a book called Biohack like a woman. And every time I see her on Social media and her fiance, Jacob I think is his name. She's kind of blowing me away at with her courses and her thought leadership and her leveraging of a book. And now she's doing products. And all she was was this pretty girl on Instagram, kind of attached to this guy who was doing Instagram. But she's done a good job with turning that into a legit business and a brand and a voice. And she's kind of blown me away. Christian LeBlanc, lost LeBlanc. I think he's done a great job with being a thought leader and a voice around social media and around travel and now creating some pretty cool real estate ventures, I guess you'd call it, in Bali. I'm impressed with what he's doing. You're very, very lucky because you're doing it at a time when hiring people is cheaper than it's ever been before. It's cheaper because you can hire people that are overseas. So you can hire people who are very, very skilled that in North America might cost you 150 grand a year. But based in Latvia or based in Lithuania or based in Colombia, you're paying $24,000 a year for the same person, the same level of candidate. Second thing is, because of the Internet, because of WI fi, because of video, you don't need to have full time employees coming to a company. When I was building companies, originally you had to hire them. They had to come Monday to Friday, 9 to 5. There was no other way to do work. Right. I remember walking into my company in 1989 with a computer and my VP going, why do you have a computer? Scott's got one. You can borrow it. You guys can share a computer. And he was serious. Like, we only needed a computer once every three or four days. So now, because of technology, because like it's. It seems kind of silly to say this, but you can hire fractional people to work for you a day, a week, or six hours a week. So you can start to build out your team with fractional experts who, who are remote, who are global, who can actually work on a project by project or a task by task basis. You don't need to hire full time people. So if you're a creator, you don't need a full time copywriter. You might need a copywriter for six hours a month. So find that great expert. The key is to plug yourself into communities where your network is getting stronger. So now you're one degree away from people. Second thing is leverage everything except genius. So get all the stuff off your plate that you suck at or that you are drained of energy from. Dan Martell wrote the book Buy Back youk Time. And it's a concept that I learned probably 20 years ago where you figure out your effective hourly rate. So let's say that you're a creator and you're making $500,000 a year. And off of that $500,000 a year, maybe you're making $300,000 a year in profit. Okay? So if you're making $300,000 A year in profit, that's $150 an hour, times 40 hours a week, times 50 weeks a year. So if you make $150 an hour and you're working on anything, that's a minimum wage job. I would fire you if you worked for me, right? If I was paying you $150 an hour, why are you doing a $20 an hour task? So start delegating all those tasks off your plate, but go hire a full time person for it. If you only need somebody to do check your email once a day. Hire somebody for 30 minutes a day to check your email or an hour a day to check your email and then be good with it. And I think that's a big opportunity for creators is you don't need to have these full time people. My wife has a part time person doing video production. I think he's in Eastern Europe somewhere. And she's a part time woman doing content production and content management on all the social platforms. She's based in South Africa. She's a full time person in South Africa for $20,000 a year. That's incredible. So I think creators have got a big opportunity to kind of leverage that. The other thing is don't give out big titles to people. The Chief of Staff title is a title that came out of government. The Chief of Staff used to be the person who reported to the President of the United States and they managed that person's calendar and communications. If you're a 20 person company, you don't need a Chief of staff. You need an executive assistant and an Operations manager. That's what you need. So don't give out big titles to people too early. Don't give out a COO title to a person who's merely a vice President of operations or Director of operations or an ops manager because they're going to have an inflated sense of value. They're going to have inflated sense of worth. They're going to be on indeed and Glassdoor checking to see what other COOs get paid. They're going to be working on being this big executive instead of rolling their sleeves up and getting dirty. So give out titles that match the person's pay and their roles and responsibilities and the amount of strategic insight and P and L responsibility they have. Entrepreneurs got sloppy in the last 15 years giving away titles thinking they didn't matter. And we were giving away titles as a marketing tool, we were thinking, oh well, because they have an email address, because they're on social media. If I call them a chief marketing officer, it's going to help them get noticed more. Yeah, but it also cost you more. So there's a bit of an ROI kind of calculation we need to take into consideration there too. If I was an early stage creator, the first people I want to be hiring as like the first freelancers are the jack of all trades, master of none. So somebody to help me manage projects, somebody to help me manage freelancers, somebody who can help me get stuff done, that would be number one. Secondly is a virtual assistant, somebody who I can delegate all of the admin, all the minimum wage work. My, my executive assistant who's been with me for eight years is now heading up operations and sales as well as the whole admin area. But in the eight years she's been with me, a year ago I made her hire a virtual assistant to offload a bunch of the real admin off her plate so she could work on higher impact things for me. We have a full time virtual assistant, 40 hours a week based in the Philippines for 1800 dollars a month. So that's $20,000 a year and she's a full time employee. We're overpaying by about 20% to handcuff this person. We, we don't want her ever to quit. We were giving her swag. We're giving our company logo stuff. We're making her feel part of the team. But yeah, we're going to overpay in the Philippines to keep them. But if I was a creator, I would be getting all the admin off my plate. That frees me up to think. That frees me up to create. That frees me up to network. That frees me up to be strategic. That frees me up to market my brand and I would be spending all of my time and energy around growing revenue. There's not a single problem that exists inside of your creator company that writing a check can't solve. So if you focus on the back end and the systems and the processes, that just creates overhead for you. It creates expenses it creates stress. But if you focus on revenue, if you focus on money coming in, if you focus on more gross margin, you can use all that money to pay for people to do all that other stuff for you. So, yeah, I would get all the admin off first, and then I would drive everything towards creating more revenue, and then I would create the better back end. Third. The other part is to make sure that everybody that you hire can actually manage projects and manage time and manage conflict and manage communication on their own. I was asked by Fortune magazine in 2003, how do you hold your employees accountable? I said, I don't. I hire accountable people. And I think we have to remember that if you're hiring someone to manage other people's projects, you should be hiring freelancers who can manage their own projects, can deliver on time, can deliver the result you want. So it's all about kind of stepping back and getting better at interviewing, better at recruiting, better at selecting, better at onboarding people so that you don't need babysitters to manage people. Yeah, the project manager I'm thinking of is less about managing other people and more hiring them, finding them, managing traffic, coordinating it all so that I don't have to do that. But we're getting the right people who can deliver on those things. We don't have to babysit them. Don't come to me and say, hey, I did a great job this year. Can I get a bonus? No, you did a great job this year. You get to keep your job. I hired you to do a great job. I paid you well to do a great job. The only way you get a bonus is if I'm giving you more responsibility, probably a title increase. If you're able to work more autonomously, you're bringing in more kind of strategy into the business. You've got more P and L responsibility. I might pay you more, but I'm not going to pay you more to do a good job. I hired you to do a good job. And we need to get more companies kind of thinking along that route. Because it's kind of like when my kids come to me and they go, I cleaned the house. Can I get an allowance? No. You're part of the family. You cleaned the house because you live in the house. Like you took out garbage because you helped create the garbage. I don't give you an allowance to do the stuff that is part of being in this family. And I think we need to think of our companies a little bit more that way, too. Culture is not about the free massages and the free lunch. And those are perks, right? So forget about all the perks. Culture is in alignment with four things. If you think of a jigsaw puzzle, the four corners of the jigsaw puzzle, the first is your vivid vision. It's an alignment with a four or five page vision of what your company looks like, acts like and feels like in the future so that all of your employees, all of your customers, all of your suppliers, all of your stakeholders are completely aligned with where the CEO wants to take the company. So that's number one, that culture is that massive alignment there. Secondly is in its alignment with core values. And the core values are things that you're going to hire people based on, they already live them and you're going to fire people who are breaking the core values. You can't have a good company culture if you have these toxic negative energy people that are showing up breaking core values every day. So you have to live and obsess about and thank people and praise and celebrate core values. Number three is in its alignment with your bhag. That big, hairy, audacious goal culture is like that massive, like push. It's where the SpaceX employees want to colonize Mars. That's a BHAG. Or back in 1972, Nike wanted to crush Adidas. That's a BHAG. My BHAG is to replace vision statements with vivid visions worldwide. So it's an obsession with, with that long 20 or 30 year push. Apple's BHAG is to create insanely great products that challenge the status quo and change the human race. That's a bhag. And then fourth is it's an obsession with a core purpose where every employee knows why we're showing up and what we're building towards and they can say no to those things. It's kind of like the three guys who are making bricks 100 years ago in Barcelona, they're all sitting out in the dirt making bricks. Said to the first guy, what are you doing? He goes, I'm making bricks. No alignment with anything. They asked the second guy, what are you doing? He goes, I'm building a wall. I get to make bricks to build this wall. Okay, he's got some alignment with something. He's not super inspired. They asked the third guy, what are you doing? He said, we're building the Sagrada Familia. It's going to be one of the most incredible cathedrals in the world to worship God and I get to make bricks to build the left wall of the Sagrada Familia. Like, who do you think is completely, massively aligned with core Purpose? It's the guy who actually sees the vision and is aligned with that. I got lucky being exposed to core Purpose because Simon Sinek, who wrote the book Start with why Simon was on our board of advisors five years before he wrote that book. Simon used to sleep on my couch in Vancouver. He was on our board. We hired him, he did some branding and marketing for us. He flew out to meet Ryan and I because he read about a Fortune small business where Justin Martin said that we were building this cult like environment and Simon wanted to see if it was true. He was running a six person marketing agency. So he flew out to meet with us. Yeah, that's where I believe culture comes from. It is an obsession around those things and then it kind of emerges from there. Vivid vision, core purpose, core values and bhagavad transcend, whether it's virtual, online, global. All of my clients in Saudi Arabia, Qatar, I coach the royal family in Qatar around culture. In fact, I fired them after starting to work with them because they wouldn't care about core values enough about the people side of the business. So I stopped working with them. I was working behind the scenes, coaching the monarchy. The idea of culture transcends every single size of business. If you think it's about showing up into a physical office, you're starting to make excuses of why culture doesn't matter, Right? So I coached Bob Glazier, Rob Glazer's company, Acceleration Partners. I coached Bob from 40 employees up to 200. I got them to number two in the United States to work for on Glassdoor. And when Bob's company, Matt Wool, was one of the original founding members of the CEO alliance seven years ago, their obsession around core values, core purpose, bhag and vivid vision transcended the fact that not a single office was created for Acceleration Partners ever. They all worked remote. Bob used to work in his attic. Matt was in the basement. None of the employees came into a physical space, but they recognized that culture was attached to those four things. That's where it emerges from. And then, yes, if you've got a physical office, sure, you can layer into that. You can spend more time together. You can have lunches like my sister Christy. Her company in Toronto is great because they have like potluck lunches and family stuff and they play games together. But you can also do that online, right? You can do social events online with your teams. You can connect with people better and have meaningful discussions with them on Zoom for five minutes instead of just dropping straight into the meeting so you can think about those. And you can also celebrate things more than we tend to celebrate. I don't think any CEO, whether they're creator or a CEO of a major organization like Sprint, who I used to coach, I don't think that any CEO spends enough time saying thank you, showing praise, showing gratitude, and celebrating the core values. The one who I think has done it best of any CEO I've ever seen was a guy named Howard Behar, who was the CEO at Starbucks for about seven years. When Howard Behar would spend two hours every single Friday handwriting thank you notes, he was spending five hours of his time every single week saying thank you and showing praise and showing gratitude and celebrating core values. That's kind of the only CEO who I've ever encountered who I think truly gets the power of that in terms of culture. I was working with Marcelo at being more of a heart centered entrepreneur, more of a heart centered CEO of Sprint to actually say thank you to his team, to humanize things. Marcelo was such a hardcore driver, driver, driver who's on the board of Google, the board of Softbank, but he wouldn't slow down enough to go, thank you, you're amazing. He's got this incredible smile. So we got, we got Marcelo starting to send video messages to his employees and his leaders all over Sprint globally, just to humanize this really hardcore driver. That's something that everybody, Whether you got 75 employees or if you're a 10 person creator company, if you say thank you, if you celebrate the core values, if you praise people twice as often as you give them new projects, twice as often as you show them stuff to fix, twice as often as you, as you, you know, create three new goals. Like if you set three new goals, celebrate six projects you just completed, that doesn't take a lot of work. And if we can show up as the chief energizing officer, our creator. Businesses go to the moon. If you ever go to a big theater production where there's three or four people on a stage, or you go to the Taylor Swift conference, Taylor Swift is one person, but there are thousands of people behind the scenes making that thing happen. There's lighting, there's costumes, there's set design, there's makeup, there's people setting up stages, there's sound people, there's lighting people, there's people selling popcorn and beer. She's front stage. Everyone else is backstage. Now, if Taylor Swift doesn't go on stage, everybody else loses their job. But if everybody else doesn't perform, Taylor Swift doesn't perform. And I think we need to remember that in our company, if we're the creator, we are merely the front stage for the rest of our team. But our back team are the ones we have to obsess about. So the number one metric I've had, I got this in Bob Glazier's company. I got this in Sprint. Every company I've coached behind the scenes. The number one metric that every company, creator included has is not the one that you're measuring today. The number one metric you have is your employee net promoter score. It's not views, it's not likes, it's not impressions, it's not shares, it's not watch time. It's none of the you think it is. It's not revenue, it's not gross margin. Your number one metric is how happy are your employees. So every three to six months you should do a survey. On a scale of 1 to 10, how enthusiastically would you recommend ConvertKit as a place to work? Take the percentage of people that give you nine or ten, those are your promoters. Subtract the percentage of people give you a 1 through 6 as your detractors, you end up with the result of somewhere between negative 100% and positive 100%. Your goal is to get over positive 50 or 60. And that's considered world class. Where I got Acceleration Partners to Annuity Elite SCM was over a positive 90% Net Promoter Score. On the employee side, when your employees are that happy, they're going to go through brick walls for you. You don't need as many employees. Your revenue per employee increases, your salary as a percentage of revenue decreases. You literally are not losing employees. You have no turnover. Recruiting is easy. And you can actually get super happy customers because your employees love you so much that they take care of the customers. Which means your customer net promoter score is high. Which means you can charge more and you earn more. So it's about flipping it upside down. And I think when, when CEOs come in and they care about their customers so much, they, Herb Kelleher from Southwest Airlines got it right. They said, why do you say your customer is number two? He said, because if I care about my employees so much, they'll care about my customers. But if I care about my customers so much, my employees are going to feel burned out, not loved, stressed, overworked. It's a really, really interesting way to perceive and see your businesses. And yeah, the thought leader, the creator, the front stage person has to care about the back of stage more than they care about their audience that we're speaking to. Steve Jobs is very misunderstood. He was almost like autistic in a way or so. Kind of hypomanic in a way. And when he would walk into a meeting and say, why the are you here? He wasn't being a dick. His computer was going, why are you here? When you have seven other projects you should be doing? We only need to have four people in the meeting. He was so obsessed with simplicity. He was so obsessed with kind of like the core basics that I think he was misunderstood in some ways. He also, because he was aligned with core values, aligned with core purpose, aligned with BHAG and aligned with this vision of what he was creating. Everyone lined up with that. If he was a complete dick to people, they would have quit and left. They didn't quit and leave because they still bought into that cultural alignment. So yes, he could have been softer and nicer, but the fact that he was aligned with the four things that matter most is why people stayed foreign that you set a goal for ConvertKit, find one or two goals the company just accomplished to say thank you or to celebrate or to send out a quick video to the team going, hey, just wanted to say thanks. We got these two things accomplished. That's amazing. Then set the new goal. Every time that you find something wrong, whether it's, hey, there's a problem with our website or there's there's a problem with this thing, then the same day, find two things to say, hey, I noticed two good things going on. So in the one Minute Manager, still probably the best book on leadership that exists by ken Blanchard and Dr. Paul Hersey. It's all grounded in the science of what's called situational leadership. It's the first module in my Invest in youn Leaders course. It's all around praising people twice as often as you criticize. It's about praising people to success. So they used to call it the sandwich. You take the bad thing and you kind of sandwich it with two good things. What bad leaders do prop or improperly is they try to go, hey, doing a good job today, but I wanted to talk to you about what you're really screwing up on. And thanks again for doing a good job. You don't do the sandwich in the same 30 seconds. You do the two praises at some point during the day and you do the one criticism that day. You do the two thank yous during the week and you do the one kind of private criticism during the week. You try to praise twice as often as you criticize. You try to celebrate twice as often as you set new goals. It's all around trying to kind of keep count that way. So I would take a post it note and every time you tell somebody three things to work on, try to tell people six times what they did well, try to try to keep count twice as often. It's kind of like God gave us two ears and one mouth. We need to use them in that same ratio. We need to praise, celebrate, and say thank you twice as often as we ask people to do stuff, show them what's broken, give them more stuff to do, load them up with stuff. It's kind of like your spouse, right? If you're married or you're in a relationship. Like, I don't tell my wife once a quarter that I love her because she knows I don't have to tell her that often. Of course she knows, right? Because there's all the stress that we go through in our normal relationship. I'm telling my wife multiple times a day and showing her multiple times a day that I love her and I care about her so that she feels it, so that she sees it, so that when we have the tough moments, we've built a base of that gratitude that she can kind of live off of. And I think that's something that leaders forget and that the best leaders absolutely work on.