$100M CEO: The Key to Effective Leadership

Layoffs come from bad leadership. And they are coming because I think a lot of companies these days have pretty bad leaders and companies without good leaders will fail. Trust is so low. Some people think our elite are literally lizard people. 12 million Americans believe this. We do not trust our leaders. So we as leaders have to do better. They're trying to do one thing which is short term gain because they don't want to have short term pain. If you want to be a great leader, don't be nice. Be honest. You aren't sweet. You need to be effective. So how do you do that? I love this podcast because I love talking to friends about how they made their millions and helping business owners solve their problems. It's fulfilling. I love sharing all the secrets. But when I can't meet in person, there's only one tool I use. It's called Riverside. Riverside ensures I can talk to someone anywhere in the world. Recorded in 4k so the quality of the video matches the quality of the humans. You're listening to Riverside records separate audio and video tracks so we can easily cut out those awkward interruptions that are my least favorite part of interviews. They have in platform editing software based off a 99 accurate AI transcription and if that's that simple, simple enough to take AI one step further for their show notes. It summarizes your entire content into an SEO optimized description and chapters, all automatic. Saves me a ton of money. So you can use Riverside for podcast interviews, panel discussions, presentations, webinars, more and best of all, it's simple. Try Riverside for yourself with link in the description. Use code Cody for an exclusive discount. I get a deal? You get a deal. Hey and welcome back to those who put in the work. It's Cody Sanchez and this is the Big Deal podcast for those who don't just want to be rich, but free and do what it actually takes to get there. Today I am on one. You guys want to get amped up and go down a rabbit hole with me today? Because I think don't you feel like all of us need a little rant lately? So this is what I'm calling rant time. Okay, here's the thing. If you want to create wealth, change the world, build a business, be a big deal, you need to lead people. And yet most people couldn't lead a starving horse to a hay pile. I don't know. I want to talk about lessons I've learned so. So you can steal my homework. Let me just preface this with one thing though. I have built many eight and nine figure Businesses. And we have a big portfolio. But I am far from perfect, so I like to steal from experts who are much smarter than I am. So when we get into leadership, we're gonna talk about some crazy shit that's going on in the world today. We're gonna talk about how to apply this especially to you. But we're also gonna talk about why most leaders suck. And we're gonna steal the homework of the best so that you can be the boss that you wish you had, or you can even coach your boss to be the boss that you wish you had. Speaking of that, this podcast is exactly why the Conturren community exists. We bring what I see as no nonsense truth about business ownership when others won't. Instead of getting rich quietly, we believe in getting rich together. So our business mentorship program provides step by step support to buying, building and selling businesses. The idea is we create owners and challenge the system as opposed to just theorize like we all did at university. If you're serious about getting freedom and ownership, you should reach out to us at contrarianthinking Co. We'll figure out the right spot for you. CEO story time. Elon Musk is a G. Can we all just go back to this video of Elon Musk telling New York Times exactly how he really feels? Can we just watch this for a moment and revel in it?

There was all of the criticism. There was advertisers leaving. We talked to Bob Iger. I hope they stop. You hope. Don't advertise. You don't want them to advertise?

No.

What do you mean? If somebody's gonna try to blackmail me with advertising, blackmail me with money. Go fuck yourself. But go fuck yourself. Is that clear?

I feel like at this point we should cue sunglasses coming down over his face and whatever that rap theme music is. But another way that Elon is a G is this memo he wrote to his employees that we try to embody at Contrarian thinking, Main Street Holding Company and all the other companies that we have. I gotta read this to you. So he starts out, and I'm gonna abbreviate it with talking about three things. Progress, precision, and profit. Elon Musk says progress, precision, and profit are what matters for progress. He starts by explaining their goals, then goes on to say, any Tesla department or supplier that is unable to do this, we'll need to have a very good explanation why along with a plan for fixing the problem and present that to me directly. That's every vendor at Tesla. If anyone needs help achieving this Please let me know as soon as possible. We're going to find a way or make a way to get there. First of all, love that line. Make a way to get there. Next, he goes on to talk about precision. He says some parts suppliers will be unwilling or unable to achieve this level of precision. I understand that this will be considered an unreasonable request by some. That's okay. There are lots of other car companies with much lower standards. So smart. He's, like, positioned himself better than the competitors. They just can't work with Tesla. Also amazing. It's like, oh, you're good enough to work with us. Then he goes on to talk about profit. The last segment with one of my favorite quotes. He says, there is a very wide range of contractor performance from excellent to worse than a drunken sloth. All contracting companies should consider the coming week to be a final opportunity to demonstrate excellence. Any that fail to meet the Tesla standard of excellence will have their contracts ended on Monday. So good drunken sloths. Then he gets into the meat of it and I get just like, hot and heavy actually thinking about this part. And meetings. So he says, by the way, here are a few productivity recommendations. One, excessive meetings are the blight of big companies and almost always get worse over time. Please get all large meetings unless you're certain they are providing value to the whole audience, in which case keep them very short. Also, get rid of frequent meetings unless you're dealing with an extremely urgent matter. Meeting frequency should drop rapidly once the urgent matter is resolved. Walk out of a meeting or drop off a call as soon as it's obvious you aren't adding value. It is not rude to leave. It is rude to make someone stay and waste their time. I've never done this in my life, but I think I need to start. Second, don't use acronyms or nonsense words for objects, software or processes. Anything that requires an explanation inhibits communication. We don't want people to have to memorize a glossary just to function at Tesla. Next, he says communication should travel through the shortest path necessary to get the job done, not through the chain of the command. AKA any manager who attempts to force this, enforce this chain of command will soon find themselves working elsewhere. I think this part's brilliant because this is what you find. I'm finding this in one of my companies right now. I've got an incredible performer, won't say their name one way or the other, who just, you know, wants to grab it all so tight and doesn't want anybody else touching their stuff. And that's a problem because they get hot and bothered if somebody reaches out to one of their employees. Not okay will not allow us to win. Then he says a major source of issues is poor communication between departments. The way to solve this is allow free flow of information between all levels. If in order to get something done between departments and an individual contributor has to talk to their manager, who talks to a director, who talks to a vp, who talks to another vp, who talks to a director, who talks to a manager, who talks to somebody actually doing the work, then super dumb things will happen. Which seems true. It must be okay for people to talk directly and just make the right thing happen. In general, always pick common sense as your guide. If following a company rule is obviously ridiculous in a particular situation such that it would make for a great Dilbert cartoon, then the rules should change. And I love here how he uses in leadership like really graphic imagery, drunken sloths, Dilbert imagery. They're not going to work at Tesla because there's lots of other shitty car companies, all of which we know. And then finally he says, if there is something you think should be done to make Tesla execute better or allow you to look forward to coming to work more, which is the same thing in the long term, he says, please send a note to me. Then he ends with thanks for being such a kick ass team and accomplishing miracles every day. It matters. We are burning the midnight oil. To burn the midnight oil. Elon. Ah, so good. I think most of young adult loneliness in this country would be solved by a group of people getting in person, solving big problems together. And I think we forgot that that's why we used to want to work together. It wasn't just to make a paycheck, it was because it was something worthy of building now at our companies. I say if you're not relevant, leave. If you don't, send a brief start. How can we waste less time? And I think the team overall needs permission. Your team needs permission. Or maybe you do, to say the quiet part out loud, especially some people that aren't that comfortable. So hopefully this helps you. You can say it's from a multi. Multibillionaire. No, not Cody. Elon Musk. All right, I want to talk about one other thing. Let's talk about my friend and investor, Bill Perkins, and why he's very rich. He said a line to me that I've repeated a lot but bears repeating here. I asked him once why he was so much more successful than other people in many different ventures and he thought about it for about 10 seconds. And then he said, I just move faster than everybody else. By the time they've thought about it, taken it to investment committee, thought about a name, I've already made a decision, made three mistakes and found a better way. In fact, Sam Walton, CEO and founder of Walmart, said this line that then Jeff Bezos stole. Exactly. He said, we get into some of the dog onest knockdown drag outs you've ever seen, talking about his management meetings. But we have a rule, we never leave an item hanging. We will make a decision in that meeting, even if it's wrong. And sometimes it is. But when the people come out of that room, they would be all aligned and it would be hard pressed for you to see which ones are for it and which oppose it. Even better. He said, once we've made that decision on Friday, we expect it to be acted on in all, all the stores at Walmart on Saturday. Decision on Friday, acted on Saturday. What we guard against around here Walmart, is people saying, let's think about it, we make a decision and then we act on it. So good. My too long didn't read here is if you want to be a great leader, don't be nice, be honest. You aren't sweet. You need to be effective. You don't want people to like you. You want people to become better because you are around them and you are helping them win. And this will mean that people actually really don't like you, means people will leave your company, means people can't keep up with you. It means people get upset. It means people don't think that you are their best bud. And that's okay. In fact, I think it's what's needed. One of my favorite lines is that we do not do what we want. We do what is required. So in my last weekly Compass, I shared an update on how we do updates and readouts. And it was very succinct. Your readouts should be good, be actionable, be brief, and then you should be gone. And that's what we are all here to do. We are here not for easy, because easy leads to misery. But we're here to build something bigger and better, but as effectively and efficiently as possible. That's why in this instance, I actually stole from John Wooden, who is one of arguably the best basketball coaches of all time. So John Wooden's kind of famous for this one story, which is that when he was younger, he was given by his dad a two doll bill and a white card with a poem written on it by Henry David Thoreau and this card encompassed this seven point creed that Wooden had handed down. And he then progressed his entire life saying that the most important advice he ever got was written on this tiny card. Because of that, I create at every single one of my companies something called a creed, which is basically what are the words that we live by? Because I think in a business and in life it's if you keep the spirit, the stats follow. And often we obsess on the scoreboard and what we're doing in our job with a bunch of TPS reports. But in reality, if we have the spirit behind us, we'll be able to hit those statistics. This is my contrarian creed. I'm going to walk you through 13 of them. And the idea is there's 13, because who needs luck? Every single week I do something called a weekly WhatsApp. And this starts at the beginning of the week. On Monday with all of my teams. I get together and I give them a little 5 to 10 minute presentation. And I highlight one item from this creed. Here's what the creed is, and it took me a few years of compiling this together. Number one, people who say it cannot be done should not interrupt those who are doing it. Number two, be a great fucking human. Do what's right even when it hurts. Number three, how you do anything is how you do everything. Number four, we do the dirty work. Number five, your word is your contract. Number six, we are Archimedes. Find your lover. Number seven, winners want pressure. Number eight, we want your weird. Better weird than boring. Number nine, your job isn't done until the job is done. We work the problem. Number 10, assumptions are for assholes. Find the truth. Number 11, less words, more meaning. Number 12, even our notes are worth stealing. Make every creation a mini masterpiece and show me your results, not your intentions. So why do I go through this? Well, in this day and age there are a ton of fake leaders like these guys.

I would be remiss if I did not acknowledge something just before we go into the Q and A. And that is very soberly acknowledge that a few weeks ago I was asked to go to a friend's 50th birthday. And as soon as I sat down at the larger table, I realized it was a little larger group than I had anticipated and I made a bad mistake. Instead of sitting down, I should have stood up and walked back, got in my car and drove back. The spirit of what I'm preaching all the time was contradicted. And I got to own that. And so I want to apologize to you because I need to preach and practice, not just preach and not practice. And I've done my best to do that.

This is, by the way, Gavin Newsom, a real peach, apologizing for eating a thousand dollar plus dinner without masks when he was locking the state of California down tighter than places in Germany and he decided that he could have his own special party. Hashtag neverforget. Gavin Newsome. These guys are all over the place. Which is why probably we don't trust leaders and also make this world make sense. How did this guy think it was going to be okay? But you and I, we are builders. And builders are built different. We know people trust leaders less because of guys like that. I mean, think about this for a second. Trust is so low in leaders, some people think our elite are literally lizard people. Samuel, watch this. Everything they teach you in school is a lie.

You want the truth? The world is controlled by shadowy elites.

And shape shifting lizard people. Now this sounds crazy, but apparently something like 12 million Americans believe this. And Vice even did a segment on it. Now, I don't know about lizard people. Maybe some of these people wouldn't surprise me so much. Look at that face. That still seems like a pretty big jump. But it does tell me we do not trust our leaders. So we as leaders have to do better. So today, building isn't enough. As St. Anthony said, if you want to build a ship, don't drum up people to collect wood and assign them tasks, but rather teach them to long for the endless immensity of the sea. So how do you do that? I think that gets to my idea for the deal of the week. But first in the comments, tell me if you like this rant. I think I want to add a few of these to a repertoire in tandem with a bunch of interviews. All right. And now the deal of the week.

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One truth, your ultimate leverage is your customers. So my contrarian creed I gave in the weekly WhatsApp last week was this. It was the give me a lever long enough and a fulcrum on which to place it, and I shall move the world. Which is Archimedes. One of my favorite quotes of all time. It's basically like, how do I do more work while working less? So most companies actually ignore their greatest asset, their customers. I mean, think about it. Have you flown on an airline lately? Flown miserable. It's like they don't even want you there. Companies outsourcing customer service wild. I go back to those who have made billions and see what they all have to say was the key to their success. And an underrated hack in that is only take advice from those who have actually achieved the thing you are trying to accomplish. So I go to Sam Walton, CEO of Walmart, one of the best business leaders of all time, who said, and I quote, there's only one boss, the customer. And he could fire everybody in the company, from me on down, simply by spending his money elsewhere. Which is probably why his company has a market capitalization of $500 billion. And then look, the same exact idea from the founder of Home Depot who said, the key is not to make the sale. The key is to cultivate the customer. At Home Depot, cultivating the customer is much more important than creating a bottom line. So we teach our associates that if you can save a customer money, do it. We're not looking to fleece the customer. If I can save them 100 bucks, why not do it? That reflects one of our core values, their core values at Home Depot. Caring for the customer. Care for them today, they'll be back tomorrow. I know this sounds commonplace, except it's not. Which is probably why they have a market capitalization of 359 billion. So this week I celebrated our customers. And I can show you these screenshots right here, which are kind of cool. I put on the weekly WhatsApp and I said, look at all of these people. Look at Zach buying this company. Look at Nadia from Sydney, Australia, and highlighting those who actually gave us positive reviews and who did the damn thing. I guess a question for you would be, when was the last time you celebrated your real boss, the customer? Because you win when your customers win. You never wanna forget that. Okay, let's get to our contrarian Idea of the week. It's not a pretty one, guys. It is that layoffs come from bad leadership and they are fucking coming. Because I think a lot of companies these days have bad, pretty bad leaders. And companies without good leaders will fail. This is premium meme content right here. Look at this meme. It says, hello, I'm new to the stock market, but is it good when the Intel CEO starts praying? Intel is down. Oh yeah, 29% today. 15,000 about to be laid off. Dividends suspended. Foundry business hemorrhaging billions unfixable lake chip problem. ARM taking over laptop market. Totally missed the AI hype train. Intel is struggling, which is sad actually, because intel, you know, for those of you who are maybe not as old as I am, this is the company that started a revolution in chips. And not Pringles. I'm talking about chips in your computer. It's like one of the American marquee companies. And yet this company used to be at its peak and survived harrowing experiences under one of the best leaders of his time, Andy Grove, and now is suffering under a different type of leader. Andy Grove's kind of interesting because one of my favorite stories about intel and is from like the mid-1980s. At that time, Intel's main market was in memory chips. So remember back in the day, well, you still have it when you go to Apple and you get your computer and you say how much memory you want the computer to have. So that was their big market. But the Japanese stormed the market with way better quality levels and nearly got rid of Intel. Intel was competing with the Japanese producers who had better quality, lower priced, mass produced parts because they had created the Toyota Way, which was the assembly line. It is at this point in time that Andy Grove with another one of the executives famously said he looked out of the window from his office at the headquarters of intel and remarked, if we were kicked out and the board hired a new CEO, what would he do? The answer was he would get out of the memory business. And then they did. And because of that, intel became one of the most profitable businesses again and has lasted for decades. The problem is most leaders suck and lack leadership. They're trying to do one thing, which is short term gain, because they don't want to have short term pain. And all short term gain ever leads to is long term misery. And I think Intel's a perfect example of that. Unfortunately, I think we'll see that all over the world as we continue to see the stock market get hammered and companies like intel that aren't Keeping up, they're going to die a lot faster. I also love Andy Grove's advice on managing your career. He said you got no lifetime guarantee of employment. You're in charge of your career. So think of yourself as a CEO of your career. And you're at a company of one, right? You're your own boss, and you're responsible for the outcome of the company. You have to see what's coming around the corners. And just like he did with his company, you have to think, am I keeping up with whatever the next hype is that could kill my company one way or the other? Andy Grove was also a G. Andy wrote one of my favorite business books of all time. It's called Only the Paranoid Survive. So keep those eyes peeled, because I do think he was right. Only the paranoid survive. And speaking of paranoia, don't be greedy. Share this pod with the needy. Hit that share button and let's make this thing go more viral than Justin Bieber, who apparently turned into a lizard during a live concert. Guys, just make this world make sense. Also, in the venerable words of the world's most hated, but also maybe most followed man on the Internet, Andrew Tate.

I find myself super funny. I find myself super, super funny.

All right, now let's hear from my other top leaders. That would be you guys, my top GS, as our buddy Andrew Tate would say. By the way, I've been dming with him on Twitter. Is it weird to say I think he's actually kind of a nice guy? All right, you guys can murder me in the comments. Let's answer some of your questions. I'm going to start doing this in every single one of the podcasts. So first we got Diana Karina. 1. What advice would you give a person stuck in a 9 to 5 wanting to become an entrepreneur? One word. Deal making. Do you want to know why, whether you like him or not, he might become the president of the US Donald Trump, because he wrote a book called Art of the Deal. He is a deal maker at his core. He understands how to turn the things that he wants into things that other people will do the work for him to execute on. I think most people in life think negotiation, think deal making think is too, too esoteric. They can't touch it and so they don't spend any time learning it. And that's why we created an entire community and university, all with this idea of how do we turn people into dealmakers because dealmakers make money. There's also this clip I love. Do you guys see this? It's about yappers, how yappers make money. I actually think dealmakers make money. Yappers, they blow out their vocal cords for the dealmakers who are in charge of the entire company. All right, good question. Thanks. Diana Manvic. Hi, Cody. Thank you for all you do for making your content free. You're welcome. I'm glad I met you online when you started your podcast. I'm experiencing a revolution in my life, and I must confess that it started with your videos podcast. Amazing. I'll make this quick. You post so much quotes on Twitter, which I follow closely, and I must say they're inspirational. Question is, do you always think that people can read their minds into them? You could hear someone quote you and then interpret it in a way you never thought of. So basically you're saying, how do I feel when people misinterpret me on the Internet? Mike, I think naval has an amazing line that I loved that said, the biggest mistake any performer could make is to look at the audience. And I think a lot of the reasons why influencers, podcasters, celebrities flame out is they try to do an actual performance. They're not who they are. They don't mean the things that they say. They don't stand behind them, and they have the backbone of a spiny jellyfish, which is no backbone. And so I don't really worry about it that much. I know that at the end of the day, I'm going to ignore what people think about me, keep being what I define as a good person, and know that the truth will shake out one way or the other. And I think you guys can do the same. Fuck trolls. Live under the bridge. We don't need to go down there. All right, we got Jonah, 9202. What do you look for in a business partner, and what are the pros and cons of having one or more? One piece of advice. No. 50, 50 partnerships never accept marriage. It's no. Most partnerships end. And so in my mind, you need to have one person who's in charge. You need to have a great exit plan. Start with the end in mind, because you will likely get divorced. All right, DV C3700. What's your skincare routine? Because that skin is. This is. You can't see it, but I'm making a fit, like an okay. It's basically saying, I have good skin. Thank you, ladies and gents. I actually don't right now. I have this crazy thing called perioral dermatitis, something like that. That's what Gabrielle Lyon tells me I have which is basically really cute. A mixture of like a bacterial and fungal infection. Sexy. And I don't know, they apparently you can get it from different products that you use sleeping in different places. My husband also does jujitsu and I do some stuff on the mat, so I guess you can get it from there too. Anyway, gross. So it's not the best right now. She gave me some stuff to clear that up, but when I'm not a walking petri dish, I use something called Osea. I don't know, I'm not sponsored by them, but it's really clean organic product line. And then I like coconut oil on just about everything I do get to be honest. Really crazy lasers on my feet. Expensive ones. I can tell you which one if you guys ask in the comments. Okay, Jeff Tice 8534 what advice would you give to an empty nester looking to change careers after 50? Bet on you. Get fucking going. Who cares? 50's young man. I mean, if you go and look at the top billionaires, most of them did not become billionaires until far later in age. Most millionaires didn't hit it until their 40s, so you got nothing but time. All right, I got one more weaponry Fitness 22 how to get an LLC Going this one's easy. We have an investment in a company called Doula D O O L A I believe if you go to Doula and you input Coti or Contrarian, you should get a code for something free for your first llc. So go ahead and go to Doula. We invested in that company. Okay, y' all tell me how you feel about this segment in the comments. I'm picking questions from this podcast for next week to answer, so go ahead and drop them below. Also, this is by far our smallest platform right now, so if you want to engage with us, this is probably the best way to do it. I think we're going to be able to answer basically all of the questions we get at YouTube. The big deal Podcast. Thank you for being here. The truth of the matter is, you are a big deal to me and the only way we grow, by the way, is if you share this podcast. So don't be greedy. Share the pod with the needy. Do me a solid too. Share this pod on Instagram and tag me in it to show me you're not also a succubus of a leader gobbling up all the goodness for yourself. All right, love you guys. Oh, and don't forget to like and subscribe. And I'LL catch you again next week. Oh, for those of you still here, this podcast is exactly why the Contrarian community exists. We bring you what I consider to be the top education program in ownership and buying businesses in in the world. Instead of getting rich by ourselves, we get rich together. So our business mentorship program provides step by step support to buying, building and selling businesses. We're committed to creating owners and challenging the system. So join us for the fight for financial freedom and community through ownership. Go to www.ContrarianThinking.co and you can see all the ways you can get involved. Until next week.