Chad Silverstein spent $3,000 then $6,000 then $9,000 monthly on coaching as he scaled from himself to his team to his whole company, but only 20 to 30 people actually adopted it. The damn few who do the work are enough to change everything.
Day 120 the damn few. This is definitely a common theme with Built to Lead. You'll hear about it all the time if you're in our practices, and that is that, you know, most people are normal. Nothing wrong with that. And you can't judge them for that. But I don't know about you, I don't want to be normal. I'm not trying to be like everyone else, and I have no desire to be like everyone else. And I don't care if people think I'm normal or not. In fact, I know I'm kind of weird, and I know I'm a little out there, and I think differently than other people. And a lot of times it's on purpose. And what we say at Built to Lead is that it's about the damn few. And so I have a couple examples I can share with you that really kind of helped me understand this concept. When I first started with Built to Lead, I was paying $3,000 a month with my coach. It was a lot of money, and I wasn't even paying for it. I was, because my company was paying for it. But I was. I wasn't, like, out of my own checking account personally. It was my company checking account. And I remember when I wanted to give this gift to my leadership team, my coach said it was going to be 3,000 more. So now I'm paying 6,000. And then I wanted to give it to my entire company, and it was 9,000. So I was paying $9,000 a month from my company, which was still a small percentage of what we were investing in leadership development. So to you, it may sound, depending on who you are, it may sound like, wow, that's a lot. But, you know, from a big company's perspective, that's not a lot of money when they're investing, you know, less than 1% of their budget on leadership development. And what I knew that would do for people on my team, it was worth every penny. And in fact, this actually was one of the things that was the catalyst when I bought out my partner in 2013. We were partners for 15 years. And he called me up one day and he said, what's the shelf life? I'm Bill to lead. And I said, why would there be a shelf life? He's like, well, when do you think we'll be done with it? He sees me spending $9,000 a month. He's in Cleveland, I'm in Columbus. I said, look, we're breaking records. People love it. Why would I have a shelf life? I Go. If we're not breaking records and we're not, you know, making more money, then I'll fire him. And it was in that conversation that he asked me if I wanted to buy him out. It's incredible, right? So you know, what I Learned in offering built's lead to my entire company and only having maybe 20, 30 people show up for it was that it's not for everybody. If you're watching this, it's because you're weird, you're a little crazy, you've got a growth mindset. You're not normal. You're not like everybody else, and it's okay to embrace that. You know, we say I'm built to lead. You're distinct, and you're deeply connected. You're distinct because you know who you are, and you're okay being different. In fact, you know, you're designed different. You should be different and not like everyone else. And you're deeply connected to everyone else around you, and especially the people that are important to you. But I learned that built leads only for a few. And so I stopped going after the masses. I still cared that people didn't come. I was spending $9,000 a month to give them this gift, and they weren't taking me up on it, and I was paying them to come to leadership practice. But a lot of people don't want to look at themselves in the mirror, and they don't want to do the hard work. And so that's one example. You can look around at anything in your life, anything that's hard, anything where people do things well, and you'll realize that theme. Usually there's only a few. Usually is pretty much right on with everything. And what I learned about this is that you don't need more than a few. You only need a few in any of the scenarios. And when you have just a few and it's not just you, that's a good thing. And that can spread like wildfire. And you can get more than a few. And when we joke, my good friend Brett, who's a Built Elite client, he's like me. He was crazy and put built a lead in for his whole company. And Chet was coaching both of us and the companies, and we'd always joke we said we have more than a few. So even though it's about a few, the few can light up others and there'll be more. But just know that if you are always frustrated because you're one of many doing something that's normal, and that's the only time I think it's good to be in the normal state is that when you're only one of the few and it's that's consistent in your life and embrace that. Don't get frustrated with it. It's the gig. And if you're a leader, that's really something you have to get comfortable with.
