Why Saying ‘Thank You’ Matters More Than You Think in Business

Life is a gift. We are a gift to each other. And we need to, as he used to say, we need to love on our friends and our family and our customers and our suppliers more than we do. We need to go back to our customers and our suppliers, our partners, our members, and say thank you, show gratitude, praise them for living and exhibiting the core values. We need to send them gifts to tell them we're thinking about them. Because I think the butterfly effect of loving on each other and remembering that none of this stuff actually matters. We'll build better organizations, better associations, better humans. And I think that's really what matters. My wife and I sold everything three years ago. We've been global nomads for the last three years. We've been to 54 countries in the last three years. And this October, we're going to be crossing off one of my bucket lists that's been there for 30 some years. When I was back in 1991, I was backpacking around the world. I heard a friend went to Vietnam and I was like, whoa, that would be so cool. And he went to Laos. I'm like, that would be so cool. And I never got back to that region of Southeast Asia to actually go and explore it. And this October, my wife and I go to Laos in Vietnam. So that's going to be one that we're crossing off. My wife and I publish our bucket lists and we share them with the world to inspire people just to live what we're calling our bucket list. Life. Sea urchin. I've had it a couple times and it really kind of gags me and doesn't taste super good. So I'd have to put sea urchin down there is pretty high up. But I think, again, because we're such global nomads and I've been traveling the world for years, I'm pretty open to most. Oh, and then in India, they have this thing called creatures, which are like these bugs that they serve with, like, a goat milk. That's pretty disgusting. It's like. It's like these bugs in milk. Like you would eat, like, cereal. It's pretty gross. I've had great grasshoppers and crickets and ant eggs and like, all that stuff's been pretty good. But yeah, the. This, the creature, just the bugs in milk. I'm. I'm pretty much a hard pass. It would be closing down because I'm really bad at anything creative. It'd be like, it'd be our last show. The band would be called the Last Show. I'm Just so not inclined to. I love music. I just went to two dead shows in Vegas. Yeah, just not. I'm so left brain. Not creative. I love and appreciate it. But yeah, mine would be the last show. There's. There's the typical business podcast that I really like. So I like My first Million with Sam Parr and Sean Pury. I really love the all in podcast with the guys from. From the Bay Area because I think they're just talking about, like, really cool issues around business and government and. And AI. And that's kind of intriguing. I'm going to their conference later on this fall, but my wife and I are listening to a bunch of stuff around biohacking, so around health, we're listening to stuff around sexuality polarity, so listening to a bunch of stuff on that. So we're kind of going outside of the business world. At the end of the day, none of this stuff matters, right? Like, the stuff that we are sitting and thinking about and worrying about constantly, at the end of the day, we die. You know, we talked about a really close friend of ours, John Rulin, who passed away recently, and I'd rather be thinking about other issues. So we listened to the health optimization podcast with Tim Gray. We actually went to his conference. We'll listen to one called Ignite Intimacy. Listening to one called Sex with Emily. Another one called the Upgrade Human Dave Asprey. I used to coach Dave. The one I was listening to this morning is the Tantric Life with Leila Martin. We actually went to a conference with her over in Turkey. So we're doing a lot of work around the rest of our life to stay very balanced. And that's probably because we're plugged into a very European and global audience now. Whereas in North America, like, if you and I met on the street, you know, I would say to you, what do you do? And you would probably answer with, oh, I build a wealth management firm and I run a podcast. When you're in Europe and someone asks you, what do you do? That's not how they answer. In fact, if you answer with what you do to make money, they kind of go, no, I didn't. Like, they almost stop you. Like, that's not even what they meant. They're like, what do you do? Like, what are you exploring? What are you learning? What are you having fun with? Like, I don't give a what you do to make money. So I think that's probably why we're kind of unplugging a little bit from the business world more and thinking about a more holistic world in life. I'll kind of go through a little bit of a timeline. So I would say that the most meaningful. From the time that I was 7 years old until the time that I was about 16 or 17, I ran about 15 different little small business ventures. Some of them lasted a day, some of them lasted three or four weeks, Some of them lasted, you know, a summer. But it's a lot. And I could repeat a dozen of them off the top of my head really quickly, the lessons that I learned from those little businesses, because I was doing it and I was experiencing it and I was struggling with it, and I was feeling the successes. I really internalized the lessons. And it was like my mom and dad weren't out there running my lemonade stand, I was out there running my lemonade stand. So I really learned so much from the act of doing. I think that was a very meaningful part of my business career was all. And I did a talk that's been on the main ted website for 13 years now, or 14 years, called let's Raise kids to be entrepreneurs. And it was about the lessons that I learned from my entrepreneurial journey. So that was very meaningful. The second one was when I was in second year university. I found a flyer on the floor and I went to throw it out, and it said, Earn $10,000 and run your own business. And I was like, whoa, let me read that before I throw that out. You know, that was 1986. $10,000 was a lot of money in 1986. That's probably the equivalent of, you know, make $40,000 today. So, you know, imagine being in university second year and you can make 40 grand. That was just. And in Canada when tuition was only, you know, it's only 5,000 a year today. So I was making eight times what my tuition was in a summer that was pretty intriguing. And I got involved in a group called College Pro Painters, which went on to become the largest residential house painting company on the planet. I was a very successful franchisee for them for three years. But then I got to work at the head office level for four years, where I was recruiting, hiring, training, and coaching 120 of their franchisees. And that was very powerful for me because at a very young age, at 24, 25, I was getting close to 100 hours training on situational leadership. Close to 100 hours on coaching, close to 100 hours on interviewing. Like, I got deep, deep leadership skill training on about 10 or 12 core skills that most entrepreneurs and managers haven't Even bumped into, you know, maybe they've learned from experience. But I had, you know, coaches and workbooks and trainers and role practicing and video sessions and really in depth leadership training. That, that was very powerful. So that was very meaningful. You know, I got to hire, at the time, it wasn't meaningful. I hired Kimbal Musk, who, you know, Elon's younger brother, worked for me in 1993. His cousin Peter Rive, who went on to build SolarCity, worked for me at the time. They were just great franchisees. But that turned out to be meaningful because of some of those relationships later in life. And then so College Pro was successful. I would call it my real world mba. And then I think the next meaningful one was, you know, I. I built a private currency company. It was cool. Building 1, 800 got junk for sure was meaningful. Right. Like, we built the number two company in Canada to work for. I was the COO and took them from 2 million to 106 million in six years. That was certainly meaningful. Getting on Oprah, like all the awards and that was meaningful. And then I guess, lastly, I've now been paid to speak to audiences of entrepreneurial groups in 29 countries on every single continent. So three years ago, I got paid to speak in Antarctica to a group of entrepreneurs. So I've now literally been paid to speak on all seven continents in 27 countries. That's kind of meaningful in a way that I've been able to share my ideas with the world and help all these entrepreneurs, because my core purpose is to help entrepreneurs make their dreams happen. There was a lot of penguins in that one day. We saw somewhere between 300 and 400,000 penguins, and we got to walk through them. Yeah, penguins. And piss a lot, though. It's disgusting, the smell of 300,000 penguins. Sure. And I know the association space. I mean, I was involved in a number of different trade associations over the years. As a member, I've been a speaker at the asae, which is the American Society for Association Executives. I spoke at their Canadian conference in Halifax. I was around 10 years ago, know a bunch of people that are in and around the industry. I coached a group called MCI Global that kind of advises lots of the trade association does work for. So I know this space. A trade association effectively is a business. They have a mission, they have a core purpose, they have core values. They're trying to do something for their members. Their customers are really their members. So you can kind of see an association like a business. It has a budget, it has people, it has timelines, it's got goals. The idea with the vivid vision, how if I can unpack it, it becomes a four or five page written description of what your business or association looks like, acts like, and feels like three years in the future. So if I was in a. So let's say I was the association of, you know, chiropractors and I was going to craft a four page description of what the association of Chiropractors looked like in the future, I would have a couple of paragraphs about our members. I'd have a couple paragraphs around how we raise money, I'd have a couple paragraphs around our conferences, how we communicate with members, how we deal with the media, the benefits people get, how our internal employees work, maybe how we learn from other associations. You know, I would describe the culture, the meeting rhythms, our dashboards. I'd really talk about every aspect of the business as if I was walking around the association and describing everything I could see. And I would then bring that rough draft. I would have a copywriter polish it, or I'd push it through a couple of rounds of chat GPT with some good prompts and I'd punch out this really good, clear description that I could add some graphic design elements. So it feels like the association. And I would share it with everyone. I'd share it with my customers, my suppliers, my employees, my partners, the members, so that everybody could see what the board of the trade association could see or what the CEO or chairman of the association could see. And that way everybody is now completely aligned and pulling in that same direction. So the ideas from the members become aligned with the vision, the ideas from the board become aligned with the vision. Because right now people can have lots of ideas. But if we don't know where we're going, any road will take us there, right? That was the Cheshire cat in Alice in Wonderland. And the problem with ideas is unless they're aligned with the vision, the ideas can pull us in every different direction. It's like a clock. If you think that the center of the clock, we can have ideas pulling us in 12 different directions, or we can have everybody pulling towards the number 12. So the board of directors really would have to kind of craft it together and it's partially dependent. And this is one of the frustrations I have with boards or with nonprofit groups is they often transition leadership every year. So I would really culturally first get the leadership team of the association to say, regardless of who's on the board, we will always have a three year vivid vision. We will not change that three year vivid vision until the end of the three years. So if you're the board in the first year, you're going to be in charge of crafting the vivid vision and starting to execute it. If you're the board in the second year, you are just executing against the one that was written the year before. If you're the board in the third year, you're the one that's executing the one. And then at the end of your three years, you're writing the next three year one. So you prevent two of those three years from redoing the vision. Because if every year you change the vision just like this, you get whiplash. It goes nowhere. It's the groups that are very aligned with core purpose, with core values, with mission, with the vision. If they continue to drive towards that, that's where scale happens. And I think that's what often happens with the nonprofits or associations is the new leadership team comes in and they have a different vision. But what happens is you just zigzag. You know, you're like tacking on a boat. It just takes you forever to, to go in the direction you want to go in. It's challenging. That doesn't go without challenge. So, you know, you really have to sell them on the benefit of that, right? So I always say sell them, don't tell them. So if you sell them on the bit on the reason this is powerful, that's why they can then go in that direction. What board members have to ask themselves is, is my vision more important than the health of the organization or the association? And if it is, you're probably doing it for the wrong reasons, right? If you're so married to the fact that you just want to do something that you want to do, that isn't necessarily the best thing for the organization. I think that's where the really kind of introspective, emotionally intelligent leaders will come in and say, you know what? I'm good with just executing for the next couple of years because I can actually make a big dent in this organization continuing to drive for that period of time towards that which is, by the way, very COO, right? Most I run an organization called the COO alliance, which is like a trade association for CEOs. There's no entrepreneurs allowed. It's only second in commands. And we have second commands for 17 countries. There's not a single CEO that's in our CEO of Alliance who sets the vision for their company. They come in and they say, CEO, show me the vision of where we're going and then move to the side and let me figure out how to get you there. There's not a general contractor in the world that comes into a home and says, let me design a dream home and build it for you. The home was like, no, no. This is what I want my dream home to look like. Design that. Right? The homeowner has the vision and I think that's where boards have to be careful. Is our job to be so kind of focused on vision or is it to be focused on the good and the health of the organization we're building and the members that are in it? I launched a course three years ago called Invest in youn Leaders. It's an online leadership course that has the 12 core leadership skills that I believe not only every CEO, but anyone who manages and leads people need to be good at. So this is like anybody on a board of an association, anyone running a business, any vice president or C level or manager or director, and the skills, the core skills. I'll even go from the 12 down to 6. Everyone who manages people needs to be really good at these skills. And most have had no training. The situational leadership coaching, delegation, project management, time management, and one on one meetings. Everyone who leads people, if they're not good at those things, they're, they're managing and overseeing people. They're holding them accountable, which you don't need to do. They're constantly hurting cats, they're frustrated with projects, they're always following up on deliverables because they don't have the proper skill sets to make those happen. Right. So if they're good at those six skills, you can almost flip the org chart upside down where now. And it's like a board of an association shouldn't be telling members what to do. The board of the association is there to support members, it's there to help members, it's there to align members, it's there to inspire members. So really the CEO is at the bottom supporting the managers who are supporting the members who are supporting the vision of the organization. And almost like an inverted pyramid, it's teaching leaders and managers those skills that I'm so kind of focused on. Let me, let me speak to situational leadership, but let me also speak to something else, which is there's not very many entrepreneurial managers or even really any leaders in most companies that have ever had the training, the formal training on these skills. Most have learned by doing so. I was interviewing or I was coaching a CEO about six months ago and I said to the CEO, how much training have you ever had on doing an interview? Right. On interviewing potential fires. And he said, well, nothing formal. I've read a couple books and I've interviewed 100 people, so I know how to do it. I said, maybe you've done it wrong every single time. And he went, whoa, I didn't know that. Like, if you asked me five years ago, do I know how to swing a bat in baseball, I would have said yes. Until all of a sudden I was at my kid's baseball practice. I'm Canadian, so we didn't know this, but your back elbow is supposed to be up high. I didn't know that. I was 50 years old. Nobody ever saw. I really didn't know how to swing a bat properly. I had done it wrong for 50 years. So when you get the proper training, business gets difficult. And I think for most leaders, they're like a fly. You know, you've seen a fly trying to get out the window and it keeps banging its head on the window and the fly ends up dead on the windowsill. That's because most leaders are trying to work hard doing what they've only ever done. If you step back and you get some training, you realize there's a door over here and you just turn and go at the door and you're humming free. And I think that's the case for why it's important to grow our people. It's even why I called my course invest in your leaders is it's about investing in them because that's where you're going to get the multiplication of results. What's interesting around the skills that I gave you is every single one of those skills does not change. Even though we're now remote teams or hybrid teams or global teams. Like I'm speaking to you over WI fi on a laptop. I'm in a different country than you're in and it doesn't matter. But in terms of situational leadership, if I'm going to lead you on something, I would apply it exactly the same over video or in person. If I was coaching you, it would be the same over a video or in person. If I'm delegating a project to you or an initiative, I would be delegating following the systems. Those six skills that I gave you are identical and they don't change. What has really changed because of the digital world is leveraging the tech stack. We're no longer using paper based daytimers. You know, I'm not using a telephone, I'm using video. We have asynchronous communication, we can, we can use digital whiteboards. But the act of leading people and influencing people and growing people, none of that's really changed. You know, maybe I'm not going to have you learn by, by reading a book. I might have you learn by reading a PDF on a website and by watching some videos. But training is training, coaching is coaching. Delegation is delegation, situational leaderships. That's probably why I've been able to do what I do for 35 years, is because the niche that I'm world class at is around the area of building and developing people and leaders. And I didn't become an expert back in the 90s on marketing because everything I learned about marketing in the mid-90s would have been dead by now. A second part to that is I think there's some generational differences right now around people that we have to remember that the incentives and the satisfiers for Gen Z and the second half of Gen Y is very different than the first half of Gen Y and Gen X and the baby boomers, right? Baby boomers came to work for a company for 15 years. Gen X came to work for a company for five to 10 years. Gen Y came to work for a company for two to five years. Gen Z is like six months to two years max. And it's because the baby boomer parents are saying don't go work there for 15 years. Hop around and work up the ladder, right? Why would you stay like, so we're training people to do that and then now we have the ability to work from anywhere, collaborate. So the needs of the people is different, what satisfies them is different. But intrinsically leading them is the same way. The example I always go back to, and it's funny, I keep referencing this in so many different situations and it's the book. Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus. Brian, you and I are men. Or I guess we have male parts, whatever we're supposed to call it these days. Like we are, we're men. We are not hairy versions of women. We see the world differently, we perceive the world differently. We solve problems. Like women and men just see and perceive things very differently from each other. Generations see and perceive things very differently from each other. So the key is to make sure that you understand them, you understand what satisfies them, you understand their needs, you understand the way that they're perceiving things and you understand the relative strengths and weaknesses they both have. So as an example, one of our members of our COO Alliance. He's only 22 years old. He's running a 100 person company that he's built from three people to 100. And he's their COO. He is incredible on the automation and optimization of processes and integrating things using Zapier. So he's literally automating every process. Now, he doesn't necessarily have the leadership wisdom that a baby boomer who's 65 might have. Somebody who's been leading people for 40 years has been running teams, but the baby boomer can teach the 22 year old about the leadership wisdom. The 22 year old can teach the 65 year old about integration in the tech stack. If they can learn about their relative strengths and weaknesses and join hands like a man and a woman can actually learn to. Men are from Mars, women are from Venus. We can learn to speak with each other, collaborate together and build a very strong team. And I think that's one of the skills of COOs is how do we build teams, how do we get people to collaborate, how do we get people to think? So one of the key skills I'm working with people with ON right now. Do you watch any American football? Favorite football team? All right, so we got the commanders. So on the commanders, you've got their football team, the commanders, you have the offensive team, you've got the defensive team, you have the special teams. For the wide receiver, which is his most important team, what team does he play for? That's his most important team. What happens in companies is when you're running a functional area, if you're the head of marketing, the VP of marketing or the chief marketing officer tends to think that marketing is their most important business. Not at all. That's your second team. Your first team is the company. So even at 1-800-got junk. When we were building our leadership team, I got them to think about the leadership team as the first team and your functional area was your second team. So when leaders can actually show up remembering that we're debating things, we're working together, we're collaborating, we're communicating for the good of the organization. Because when that wide receiver is going out onto the field, he's high fiving the defense, he's cheered on the defense, he's telling the defense where they just got beat and how to. And then when the defense is coming up like they're in it together, right? They're not just myopically focused on their part of the greater team. And I think that's what I'm trying to get leaders to recognize too is that our job is to build healthy debate for the good of the organization, to argue, to build the core values, to drive hard towards the overall vivid vision and to fight for your business area needs. Maybe never, right? Because what you're really fighting for is the good of the goals, the vivid vision, the core values and the core purpose. That should be the same for every trade association, right? What we're trying to do is to build the vivid vision for the or not whatever you personally believe because you're on the board for this particular part of time, like this is a 50 year organization or 100 year organization. We're supposed to be building some legacy that is helping the good of our members. That kind of a thought process, I guess. Remember when you were five years old and you wrote a letter to Santa Claus? Dear Santa, you know, I would like this train and this model toy or whatever. And you walk down to the mailbox with your mom and you're holding hands and you put them letter into the mailbox for Santa and you keep your fingers crossed and six weeks later, oh my gosh, Santa read my letter. It's like, no, Brian, mom read your letter. Like Santa doesn't exist. But what mom wanted to do was she kind of asked Brian in this tricky way what's important to you. And then she just bought you what was important to you. And it's easy. When you're building a business or an organization or an association, the leadership team doesn't have to have the answers for what to build. What they have to do is ask all the members to write the letter to Santa Claus and say, hey, members, all the chiropractors or the neurologists or the auto body shop owners or whatever. What's important to you? What would give you the most value in this organization? What are the things that we do that we could get rid of that provide no value whatsoever that could make things simpler and easier. And if you just take the advice of your members and you do what most of them want to do, business is super easy. And they're really happy. What happens though is members try to or boards or leadership teams try to figure out for themselves which is the equivalent of mom and dad trying to guess what Johnny White might want. And if they just asked Johnny what he want and bought Johnny what he wants, Johnny would have been happy. Here's the system that makes it easy is six every six months, twice a year we send out a survey to all of our employees or to all of our customers. If it's to our customers we say, on a scale of 1 to 10, how enthusiastically would you recommend our brand to a friend? And then on the thank you page, we say, thanks very much for your rating. What's one thing we can do to have you refer us even more with our employees? We say thanks for, you know, on a scale of 1 to 10, how enthusiastically would you recommend this as a place to work? And then we say, what's one thing we can do that would make this an even better place to work? So we use that Net promoter score survey with what's the one thing we can do? Letter to Santa Claus. The other thing I do is every other. So every other survey, what, in six months, let's say January, I do the what's one thing we can do in July? I'll say, what's one thing we can do that doesn't cost money? January, what's one thing we can do? July, one thing we can do that doesn't cost money? It's incredible the ideas that come from a board or from members of things that we can do that will make them really happy that actually are free. But we end up trying to reinvent the wheel all the time. So it's actually quite simple. If you put that system in place and if you listen, I'm not the fly trying to get out the window. Like, if I'm going to try to figure it out for myself all the time, I'm banging my head on the window. But if I just stop and I ask everybody what, they're like, oh, go this way. I'm like, oh, go that way. Like, it's easy. So I'm actually, I'm taking the cheat sheets. Like, I'm actually, as a leader of companies, making it easier for myself versus trying to be the smart. And it's probably because I was not the smart person in school. I really struggled. I got a GPA of 2.3. I just found out the other day my wife got a 5 GPA. I didn't even know you could get over a 4. I had no idea you get over a 4. But I never got an A on anything in my life. So for me it was always about minimum viable, everything, get it done and get it out the door. I used to say in university, 5, 0 and go. Like, give me 50% and I'm done. I actually wrote on an exam one time, if you give me a D minus and I pass this course, I promise to never take another economics course as long as I live. And he gave me a D minus and I switched Majors. I think that's what. What most leaders try to do is they try to be smart, they try to work hard. What I try to do is the cheat sheets of just try to take the path of least resistance. Like water going down the hill. I'll just follow the easiest path versus try to cut a new path. I'll give you two things. If you went to a doctor right now and the doctor said, hey, Brian, you have a. A tumor in your chest, how long would you leave that tumor in? You'd be like, get that sucker out. Can we go in this afternoon? Like yesterday, right? Get it out. So the cultural cancers in your organization are the negative, grumpy employees, the employees that aren't delivering results, the people that are arguing with everything, the people that nobody like. Gosh, even the smokers that are showing up and they're just unhealthy. I get rid of all the cultural cancers in my organization. That's number one. Because what kills culture is a cancer. I listened to grandmother on this one. Grandmother told us that one bad apple spoils the whole bunch. When you have one cultural cancer in your organization, it kills everyone. So fire them all. Get rid of them. Super simple. By the way, you often don't even have to rehire any of those people because they weren't doing much anyway. Now you've got more net profits sitting around that you can actually pay the better people more. Second thing is, I think of all my employees in kind of the simple rating system. My A players are racehorses. My B players are the workhorses. The C players should go to the glue factory. We often spend too much time as a leader on our bad people, underperforming people, coaching them, trying to move them up. But what's happening is all the time we're spending with our Cs we could have been spending with our A's and our B's. Imagine if we were coaching and developing and listening to and leading our A players. Imagine if we were spending hours a week caring about and working with our A players. The organization goes to the moon. But because most leaders are spending time with our underperformers, like a teacher always having to tutor and mentor the underperforming kid. Meanwhile, the A player could have been world class if we gave them any attention whatsoever. We've got it all backwards. So Those are the two big cultural cancers that I think of. Three weeks ago, one of my closest friends of 17 years passed away. His name is John Rulin. He's the author of this book, Giftology and When you just asked, is there anything that's happened that's really impacted me for about six or seven years? Every media interview that I've done, I've usually finished by saying none of this actually matters, that running a business is merely what we do to make money. It's not what matters. At the end of the day, we're all going to end up as a kebab. We're all going to end up as meat on a stick. And what really matters is our friends and our family enjoying our bucket list lifestyle, doing stuff that matters, being a good human. And John Rulin passing away at 44 years old, leaving four girls between the age of four and 13. The lesson that I learned from him is that life is a gift. We are a gift to each other. And we need to, as he used to say, we need to love on our friends and our family and our customers and our suppliers more than we do. We need to go back to our customers and our suppliers and our partners and our members and say thank you, show gratitude, praise them for living and exhibiting the core values. We need to send them gifts, to tell them we're thinking about them. And I think if we can remember that and kind of honor John Rulin. And I would ask everyone who's listening to go and grab the book Giftology. In fact, instead of buying a copy for you, go buy 10 copies, read one, give nine away, and when you're finished reading your one, give that one away. Because I think the butterfly effect of loving on each other and remembering that none of this stuff actually matters will build better organizations, better associations, better humans, and I think that's really what matters.