The Mindset Shift Every Second-in-Command Needs!

If you're good at it, everything's easy. If you don't have any training at it, I can tell you for sure that business gets difficult. I had a CEO one time and I said, how much training have you ever had on doing interviews? He goes, none, but I probably hired 100 people. I probably done 100 interviews. And I said, maybe you've done them all wrong. And he went, oh. Like it had never even occurred to him that maybe he was doing it all in a way that was either inefficient or wasn't going to give him the results that he was looking for around predictability. So I want to talk about what I call the two ladders in our business, and it's an analogy that I take from College Pro Painters. What a lot of people don't know about College Pro Painters is it ended up growing to be the largest residential house painting company on the planet. And every year at the head office of College pro, we had 60 people at the head office of which I was one of the 60 people. I was actually in the top 30 people on the leadership team globally for College Pro. Every year, college pro, 60 people, the head office would have to go out and recruit, hire and train 800 franchisees. So imagine hiring 800 business leaders in one year. Well, we had to do it in four months. And then we would have to train them. And then in one and a half months, those 800 franchisees would have to hire 8,000 university students to paint houses for the summer. So we had to give them a development program to recruit, interview and hire and train 8,000 students at the same time as we were actually recruiting, training and growing 800 franchisees. And then between May 1 and August 31, we'd paint 60, 60 million in houses in 40 states and every province in Canada. And then we would literally shut down the business. August 31, 8800 kids would go back to university, we'd all get rip, rip roaring drunk. And September 2nd, we would do it again. So I was on the senior team for four years where we had to recruit 8,800 people over a five and a half month period. The only way we were able to scale that was by really growing the skill sets of our people. And I'm going to talk about how we need to grow our people so that they can scale our company. I believe that we all massively overcomplicate business. Every single one of you, everyone I've ever met in EO, we massively overcomplicate things. I have spoken at the EMP program at MIT for EO. 17 times I've been to Endicott House, now that I've spoken, and every single time that I'm there, I bump into entrepreneurs saying the same things. My business is different. My city is different. My industry is different. No, the reality is those are all truisms. But most of us have not done one thing properly and we haven't grown our people the way that we need to. And I'll give you an example of this. We would never send our kid off to play Little league baseball without teaching them how to hold the bat properly or how to catch the ball or how to toss the ball. We would give them the basics of baseball. Otherwise, Johnny would come home from baseball and say, daddy, baseball sucks. So, like, no, Johnny, you suck at baseball. So we give our kids the basics in sports, but do we give our employees and our managements the basic skills that they need to scale up their business? I'm going to show you where I believe most companies are failing around this and how we can actually quickly compensate for that to change it. So my story is I actually grew up in Sudbury. When we moved from Winnipeg to Sudbury, Ontario, I lived really on the other side of that lake by the university in Sudbury. My dad was my first mentor. My dad passed away about 18 months ago, but my dad was an entrepreneur his whole life. His parents were entrepreneurs. My mom's dad was an entrepreneur. My dad groomed my brother and my sister and myself to all be entrepreneurs. And it's really all that we've ever done. I've been running my own company, this time for 16, 17 years. But when I was 20 years old, I had 12 employees in my first business. I really got my first real world MBA running College Pro Painters. This was where I learned how to run a business. And then it's when I went full time working for the head office. You know, one of my claims to fame is I hired Kimbal Musk. Elon's younger brother worked for me in Toronto back in 1993 as a franchisee and as did his cousin, Peter Reeve, who went on to build SolarCity. They were both employees that I hired at Queens University. I trained them to run a business one summer and then each were running a franchise for me. But that was where I learned how to run businesses, was under this college pro format. I joined Mastermind communities like EO. So I've been in. I was an EO member for five years, and I've now been paid to speak to EO chapters in 28 countries. I was a member of Strategic Coach for seven years. I've been in Genius Network for eight years. I've gone to four Baby Water events, five Mastermind Talks events, a number of War Room events. I went to the main 5 day TED conference for 10 years in a row. I've really invested in myself and being in Mastermind communities and growing because I believe that the more that I grow my skills and my confidence and my connections, the more that I can scale up the company. So even when I was in eo, I was always in at least one other Mastermind community at the same time. And I think that that's something we have to look for for our people. I visualized my role at 1-800-GOT Jun someone whose job was to grow people, right? My job was to grow the leadership team and management team skills and confidence and connections so that we could delegate more to them faster and faster and faster. And when we were doubling the size of the company every year, if we didn't grow people quickly, they were going to be out of a job so quickly that we would have actually compressed our growth. So when, when I focus so much on how do we grow the skills of people, that was really what I considered to be my core role for the first six years or the six years that was there. Most entrepreneurial companies don't understand the basics of how to grow people, right? We don't understand the basics and what skills. I got lucky because we were taught those back at college Pro painters. And those are really the skills that we brought forward from today. And in most of our companies our training programs are random. We kind of just throwing money at, right? We bring in a random speaker, we tell people to read some random book. We come back from the an EO speaker or a retreat or whatever, we've heard about some good thing and we tell six people to go read whatever and that becomes our training program. And it's fine. But there's, there is a better way that we can all kind of plug training into our business to allow us some predictability around scale. So I visualized employees as all climbing up two ladders and the ladders being right beside each other. Now I imagine all of us have climbed a ladder and at some point that ladder gets a little bit kind of swaying. Especially if you're on a 24 or a 32 or a 40 foot ladder. When you get up to the middle of the ladder it kind of, it sways a little bit and you kind of have to hold on. Well, if you're climbing up two ladders that are right beside each other and your left hand and left foot are climbing up one ladder and your right hand and right foot are climbing up another ladder. You've got to be pretty sure that each ladder is stable. I want you to think about all of your management team and anyone in your company that manages people. Think of them as climbing up two ladders right now. One ladder is skills. The second ladder is confidence. And our job is to make sure that they have the skills and the confidence which gives them the skills, which gives them confidence. If we increase their skills, we increase. It's constantly how do we keep doing that? And as the company scales, we need to keep ahead of them and keep growing them or putting systems or programs or people in place that help that to happen. And again, if we point back at everything we did right at 1-800-got junk. One of the core things, and probably one of the least talked about is how much we grew the people in the skills that I'm going to talk to you about today. And no matter how strong someone is, they can always get better. So this is me on the, on the left hand side. I'm a 6 foot 3 and a half standing beside Mark Eaton and Mark is 7 foot 4. People can always get bigger. Your management team skills can always get stronger. The last thing you want to do is rely on the fact that oh yeah, we've got the skills. Those are last year's skills, those are yesterday's skills. If the rate of change outside your business is greater than the rate of change inside your business, you're out of business. And we're in a time right now where businesses are changing rapidly. And if you're not constantly looking for ways to grow your people's skills and to grow their confidence and to grow their connections, you are absolutely going to get trounced or you're going to start to suffocate your, your growth. Really good growth is not 10, 12, 14% a year. Christ, inflation is 10 was 10% a year. You need to be growing at 25 to 40% a year. 25% a year for three years is doubling your company every three years. That's kind of norma for me, but that's really what we need to be focusing on is minimum 25 to 26% growth a year just to actually be scaling. And the best way to do that is to grow people. So there's a few different types of training programs you can put in to grow your people. You don't need to have A gold medal training program. Right. We need to have a base, kind of like a bronze or a silver level level. So I'm going to give you what I would consider kind of a bronze or a silver level of training that all of you can plug into your businesses to scale people up. The first area that you need to train people on is what Simon Sinek talked about in his book Start with why we need to train people on our company's core purpose, our core values, our vivid vision. Simon was on our board of advisors five years before he wrote the book Start with why. Simon flew from New York to meet Brian and I in 2004 after reading about us in Fortune magazine. And he wanted to see if our culture was as strong as it was. He was running a six person marketing agency in New York City with a partner and we got really, really early indoctrination to understanding the core purpose. But most of us forget to really train people on our why, our core purpose, our bhag, our vivid vision, our core values, the history of how we got here. We really need to indoctrinate people in that cult. Most companies are really good at training on the outer circle and that's the what we do. We train them on the skill, we train them on the using the technology that we're using. We train them on the actual job at hand. But the area that I obsess on is the middle rim, the how, that's the area that I've always focused on growing people is the skills of being a leader. And we'll talk about those. The 12 core skills that anyone who manages people need to be good at. These are the 12 core skills that anyone in your company that manages people need to be really good at. Situational leadership, which is the ability to adapt your style on a project by project basis. Coaching, because we all do coaching of people. Classroom training, which is when you're training groups of people at once, either online or in person. The ability to run meetings, whether it's annual meetings, planning meetings, meetings, strategy meetings, finance meetings, one on one meetings, daily huddles, L10 meetings. We need to train people on how to run meetings. Everybody that manages people does one on one trainings. But most people have never been trained on how to do a one on one. So there's training around that, proper systems around time management. How many of you have had at least an hour's training on how to do a job interview before? Every single one of you has hired people, but only a few of you have ever had a basic level of Training. Now think about all of your managers and leaders. Do you know for sure that your managers and leaders are certified or SK set based enough to do job interviews? Have they been trained on how to do proper job interviews? Most of them know so. Most of them don't even know how to interview and hire people and they do it. Most of them have no idea how to run meetings and yet they do it. Most of them delegate projects to people without any training on how to do proper delegation. Like all of these are the base level skills that everybody needs to be really good at. If you're good at it, everything's easy. If you don't have any training at it, I can tell you for sure that business gets difficult. I had a CEO one time and I said, how much training have you ever had on doing interviews? He goes, none, but I probably hired a hundred people, I probably done a hundred interviews. And I said, maybe you've done them all wrong. And he went, oh. Like it had never even occurred to him that maybe he was doing it all in a way that was either inefficient or wasn't going to give him the results that he was looking for. Around predictability. So the reason college Pro painters could recruit, hire onboard and train 8,800 people in a 4 1/2 to 5 month period every year with predictability. The reason we could do $60 million in house painting in four months was because we were good at these 12 core skills. Those skills that I outlined in. I've had dozens and dozens of hours on each of those individual skills. I've been certified in each of those individual skills and I've built training programs since then around each of those individual skill areas. So things like situational leadership, that's the number one skill that every manager and leadership team member at Starbucks gets trained in every single quarter. My mentor was being groomed as the CEO at Starbucks and he was training me on a quarterly basis. One day in person at their head office or one day in every quarter at our head office in Vancouver, we were doing hourly calls every month and most of our calls were around situational leadership and coaching. Again, I mentioned the act of delegation. But most of us don't know how to delegate. So we get the project back the way that we want want it to. We get it done with least amount of time being spent and the least amount of money being spent, the least amount of PETA factor being spent. Most of us don't delegate understanding the skill set or the competence or the confidence of the person. We're delegating to and we end up with people that are delaying projects or frustrated working with them because we don't understand the basic skills. So there's, there's some training stuff that you need to have in place for this. And again, anyone in your company that manages people is managing projects and priorities and tasks, but if they've never had a base level training, then yes, business is difficult. But again, it's kind of like Johnny coming back and saying baseball sucks. It's like, no, Johnny, you suck at baseball. Running a company is actually easy. Most of us suck at running a company because we've never been given the base level skills at leadership and at all these 12 core areas. When you get the base level skills on those, business gets quite simple. When you know how to do proper interviews, it becomes very easy. I had a CEO one time and he said it usually takes about 30 days after someone has started, started working for us, for us to know if we hired the right person. I said that's because you suck at interviewing. Right? If you had proper interview skills across your leadership and management team, you'd have so much predictability that you would know in the very early stages of the interview. You wouldn't have to wait until you hire them to know if you have the right person or not. So we can choose to be messy, right? We can choose to be entrepreneurial, we can choose to be winging it, or you can find a better way. So the process that I use to train people on any given skill area is the first thing that we do is create a pre test. So give people a basic test, multiple choice, true, false, whatever, fill in the blanks on any skill area. And if I gave you a test right now on situational leadership, it's rigged in such a way that you would fail the test, you would write it and you'd go, oh, I don't know this information, which would open your mind up to just thinking and learning about whatever that skill area is. So then you can teach them that skill. And then I'm going to watch people actually practice that skill, watch them trying it out, I'm going to watch them practicing it. Then I'm going to actually observe them doing the skill in their day to day in their actual jobs. And then we'll have a post test afterwards to see if they've retained the information that they were trained in. Now, retaining the information doesn't mean that you've actually got competence. It just means that you're good at remembering what it was you got taught in, but then I want them to be able to reflect on it and try it out in their jobs later. At which point we'll repeat the training a second time and then certify after we've retrained them in this stuff two or three times. The key is to go through these cycles of learning a few times so that people can actually have really good predictability around implementing those skills. So one of the really easy fixes for all of you, I launched a course called invest in your leaders. The course is those 12 core leadership skills that I outlined. And it's me with a pre test, it's me teaching it over video, it's written information that they read and it's a post test around each of those 12 core skills in the order that they need to be learning them. We've got one of our members of the COOL alliance has got 27 of her employees signed up for that course already. She is anyone in her company that manages people going through that content. So adults learn. If you look at the bottom left hand corner, your leadership team and your managers and you even in the room, we all learn predominantly in one out of three core ways. We're either visual, auditory or kinesthetic. So we learn from seeing or reading. We learn from listening or speaking, we learn from touching and doing. But we all have secondary and tertiary styles of learning. So even if we're a visual learner, we still learn in some ways from listening, in some ways from trying. If we're a kinesthetic learner, we still learn from watching or from listening. So we try to build that into the training cycles to make sure that you're actually using all three parts of learning. The second part is the cycle of learning that everyone goes through. At the top of the cycle you have the abstract conceptualization. This is when people are learning about a new concept. It's abstract, it's something new to them. Then they go practice it, they try it out, they play with it a little bit. That's the act of experimenting. Then you go down to doing and trying it out in your day to day job. And that's the concrete experience. Experience. And then afterwards you can think back at what's going well, what's not going well, what can you have done better? That's reflective observation. You need to go through that cycle a few times on any one skill area to really have that concrete experience and letting that lesson and that learning sink in. The key is to make sure that you create a gap so that your employees want to learn. So what I like doing is tying skill development to promotions, tying skill development to pay raises. I would tell people none of you get a pay raise until you go through all these 12 modules in the invest in your leaders course and you get the certification at the end showing that you've completed it all. That's the only way I'm going to give you more projects or give you more responsibility or give you more pay or let you take on more inside of the business. It's because we have predictability that you've actually jumped the gap and you've learned that information. You can also build your own internal training programs, right? You can. If you don't want to sign people up to the course course It'll be about 700 per person to sign them up, which is a rounding error. It's like no money when you think about you pay somebody a hundred grand a year investing 700 to grow them on those 12 score. 12 core areas is so low. But you can also build your own training program. You can pull together a book club and have every employee reading one book a month or one book a quarter. You can find videos that you get them to watch and get them to watch a video once a month or once a quarter. You can sit down and talk about those things. Sometimes it's just more work than than it's worth to actually try to create it all in house. But those are ways you can do it. You can bring in consultants to teach people. You can hire consultants like me to come in and teach your team or teach leaders different core skill areas. You can send them to conferences, right? Send your second in command to CO alliance events or have them join the CO alliance is a good way to do it. You can find mentors for them. Everyone on the leadership team at 1-800-God Junk had a formal outside mentor. Our head of IT was being groomed by the head of IT at Abe Books which ended up selling for about 900 million. Our head of finance was being groomed by the head of finance at Business Objects and Crystal Decisions. I was being groomed by the head of this of operations for Starbucks. Head of our call center was being groomed by the VP of the call center at WestJet. You know, like I can tell you each of our mentors and the training programs we had. But this invest in your leaders course were the 12 core skills that I trained and certified everyone in at 1-800-God jet junk. It's IP that I wrote, that I created that I train people in. It's the stuff that's not even included in my books. I believe that all every company should have a minimum budget to spend 1% of the employee's salary per year on training them and growing them or $750, whatever is more. So if you pay them 100 grand a year, you should at least earmark a thousand dollars a year to train people. Now you can leverage that up by putting them into a course, by getting one speaker to speak to 10 people, whatever it is. But your training budget is what's going to give you predictability around scale. So I've heard this before. What if I invest in them? What if I grow their skills and they quit? Well, what if you don't grow their skills and they stay like it's going to cost you more to have these people showing up every day doing it the way that they've always done it. It's just upside by growing their skill set. I've always believed that you can R and D, right? You take the best systems that other people are doing and you put those in place. So I just took the best of what we did at college, Pro painters. The best of what I did at 1, 800 got junk over the years growing and coaching companies and leaders. That's how I created the course content. And you can plug your people into it to grow them. So that would be my suggestion is is the best dollars you can spend would be to grow your people. I also launched a mastermind community about six or seven months ago called the OP Spot. And it's for anyone in your company that manages people or works in an operations role. And it's only $250 a year to let them be a part of the online community called the Op Spot. So I would be doing that. I'd have anybody who manages people or is in operations join the OP Spot and go through the course. If your company least 5 million or greater, you can put your second command into the CO alliance. And then I would be putting training programs in place to grow people. Because the more that you grow your people, the more they're going to grow the company. You need to understand the difference between a coo, a VP of Operations and a Director of Operations. And if you don't understand that, you're making huge, massive mistakes. So check out all the resources below on what the differences are between a coo, VP Operations and a Director of Operations and how you can leverage the titles of people that are in those different roles.