E370 | James Ashford, 8-Figure Founder: The Person You’re Protecting Is Destroying Your Business

Sack the dickheads, even if they're high performers. Like, it fucking— it's the most irritating thing for me in a business. For me, selling is in the service of others. Like, that's why I don't believe in bonus schemes, because the moment you put a bonus scheme in place, you are now selling. You are acting in your own interest. Everything in business is connected, and very often you're trying to solve the wrong problem. So you may think you've got a sales problem, but you don't realize that that's connected to every single thing else in your business. And it might not be that you've got a sales problem, you've got a marketing problem, and you're not gonna find anyone who cares as much as you, the founder. That's just a fact. Like, no one's gonna care as much as you or work as hard as you or, you know, be as driven as you. You can't expect them to be. Um, but it, but you can put playbooks in place that set the standards.

Minimization, being the bottleneck, being the rescuer really. And when people aren't very good, diving in to save them. What's the— you admitted that last week that you'd been a, you're a reformed rescuer. What were you doing? What did you change?

Yes, this came from— Hi, my name's James Ashford, and my story is that I've always wanted to be an entrepreneur. Love entrepreneurship, love the freedom that it can give you. Failed entrepreneur many, many times, and then eventually kind of figured out what it took to become a successful entrepreneur. Built a business that was successful, ran without me, a software business, and sold it Uh, within 5 years of starting it, uh, to Sage for an 8-figure exit.

Fab. And what is it that you believe that other people think are mental that you're prepared to say in public? Or vice versa?

Yeah, I think I've got quite a few challenging beliefs. I think we've talked a lot about before about sales and that for me, selling is in the service of others. Like, that's why I don't believe in bonus schemes. Because the moment you put a bonus scheme in place, you are now selling. You are acting in your own interest. You or the, the salesperson can only be acting in their own interest. So you can't genuinely be in the service of others. And to be in the service of others when it comes to selling might be to say, you shouldn't buy this from us, or you shouldn't buy now, or you should buy— I've seen another product down the road that you should go and buy. Don't buy our car, go and buy that car. They've got a great deal on it. Like, yeah, genuinely in the service of others.

Yeah.

And it gives, it, it forges long, long-term relationships, not short-term relationships.

What else you got?

Sack the dickheads, even if they're high performers. Like, it fucking, it's the most irritating thing for me in a business. I had a guy ring me, he, he messaged me. He's not, I've not spoke to him for years. He just messaged me outta the blue and he said, I've got a real problem in my business. I'm really struggling. Can you help? So I have no idea of his situation. And I just sent a voice note back saying, who's the dickhead you need to fire and why don't you? Shocked face emoji saying, oh my God, how do you know? I said, it's always the same. If ever I go into a business that's got an issue, it's always the same thing. A high-performing dickhead that you don't sack.

Okay.

What else?

What else? Gonna keep going till we've got a few more.

Um, that everything in business is connected. And very often you're trying to solve the wrong problem. So you may think you've got a sales problem, so, but you don't realize that that's connected to every single thing else in your business. And it might not be that you've got a sales problem, you've got a marketing problem. And I love this, this is a good challenging phrase, business development. So people talk about their salespeople as business development managers, or, you know, it's just like a bullshit phrase, right? If you're, if you're doing B2C, True business development is not developing your business. It's developing their business to the point where they're ready to buy from you. That's what proper business development is. And that can only be done through educational marketing to take them to the point where they're ready to buy from you, where they fully understand the problem, where they understand how you can help them.

Okay. And, and one last one.

Um, you've got to be aligned with your significant other. Even if they're not involved in the business in any way, that's your primary relationship. That's where you're going to find peace in your life. And so if you are pulling in one direction with the business and you're trying to achieve this thing to give you the life that you want, but you've not actually spoke to your spouse and said, are we aligned with what we want? Are we aligned financially? Do we have joint bank accounts? Like, are we connected at home first? It's very difficult to build the life that you want. And I speak to business owners And they're trying to achieve X. And I'm like, is that what your wife wants as well? And they're like, I think so. I'm like, have you asked? This was one breakthrough conversation I had with someone. It's just a random on LinkedIn. He messaged me really struggling. I said, message me, I'll have a quick chat with you. I'm on a drive. And the bit he thought he had all these issues with his business, it wasn't. It's because he'd never had a conversation with his wife to say, what is it that we want? And the answer was far simpler than he thought. It was, More time. It's the obvious stuff. It's more time at home. It's taking the kids to and from school a few times a week. You know, it's often much simpler than what you're actually aspiring to get.

Yeah, yeah. I'm gonna dig into this one, but sometimes it can be harder to align than you think. Because I remember a client said to me, Dom, he said, you've got girls. How do you feel about crafting? I said, mate, I fucking hate crafting. He said, oh, thank fuck for that. He said, I hate crafting. I can't, I just can't be bothered. I just like, I, you know, but then I read Friends by, oh, the guy from Dunbar, Robin Dunbar. And in it, he describes men and women making, building relationships in different ways. Women like to talk and men like to do stuff together.

Yeah.

And he uses the example of, you know, women could work together all day and then come home and then ring each other up and still have something to talk to. talk about. And he's got this example in the book where he's got 2 blokes sitting outside a bar in Greece with a little glass of ouzo, and they've been sitting there without speaking for 3 hours and they're having a fucking great day out together. It's just, so there is, so alignment can be harder because, and what about business partners alignment there? Same thing. People tend not to be aligned.

You don't have to be aligned with everything. Like I had explained to me, like a healthy relationship is not When I say alignment, it's not like that. Alignment is like that. Like we're directionally working together and there are moments of crossover. That's what we're looking for. Not kind of in parallel.

Yeah.

And so I think it's the same with a business partner as well. You need to be directionally aligned. I think it really helps if you're at similar stages of life. If you're at different stages, it's a real issue I see with partners in business. Like if you've got young kids, And then you've not got young kids or you've not got kids at all. You're just at different stages of life. And therefore, does this business give you what you want at those different stages? And you need to be aware of that and have those conversations.

Do you know, um, I think that that's the biggest disconnect with life partners that I see. So, and you might think it would just be those coming towards the end of their career where their wife is saying, do you still need to work quite so hard? But actually, I was chatting to a client recently who's in his 30s and his girlfriend was saying to him, do you still need to work so hard? And that's really hard because these guys are thinking, I want to keep working. If I stop working, I'll have nothing to talk about. I want, like, this is my hobby.

This is a big thing. And this is when you talk about what people don't talk about. So you do need alignment at home. But there is something else, which is that, and this is, this came out when I, after I sold my business, because my wife used to use this phrase, which is, oh, I'm going to get you back now, am I? Like, when will I get you back? So she thought that I would sell the business and then she would get me back in fucking, I don't know, whatever capacity that looked like, right?

24 hours a day.

Yeah. But what, here's the thing that people don't talk about is that they say, oh, the reason I'm doing this is for my family. I'm doing it to improve our lives. I'm doing it to make us more financially secure, financially free, all this stuff. Beautiful. But there is another reason why you're doing it, and it's because you just fucking love doing it. You love the fight. You love the scrap. You know, um, what's it called? Tyson Fury. He talks about this. When he's in moments of depression, it's when he's not fighting. When he's in the ring fighting is when he's at his calmest. When other people look at that and they think that's the most chaotic, situation, that scrap, that is when he is at his calmest. For, I think entrepreneurs, you want to be in the fight. What I've realized is that I'm a mountain climber. I never want to stop climbing mountains. I'm just going to find different mountains to climb and other people to take on those journeys with me. So it is a real issue, um, because she's— the answer is she's not going to get me back because I'm just going to keep going.

Yeah. How did that go for you?

Uh, it's working. We still, yeah, no.

Well, and do you know what I think? I think in, I think we as men are lucky because that is a societal norm. And I think many of the female founders I've worked with have found that even more challenging because it's not a social stereotype. And so therefore they feel massive pressure to do, to be at home and work and love it and say that they love it. Yeah.

Yeah. I think if you, the more you can ditch these, these norms, because most of the norms are bullshit. Like, and if you kind of trace the norms back, Like they, uh, they've often got like dark agendas behind them. Like, like for example, it's the norm for your kids to leave home at 18 years old, right? And to go off into the world and go and do their own thing. It's the norm for families to split up. Yeah.

That's not the norm.

The norm is for families to stay together. The reason why that's been taught, this is my conspiratorial belief, and there is evidence about this. The reason why we're taught to split our families up and to spread them apart is because we're more valuable to the government if we're all paying separate mortgages, if we've all paid our own tax, if we all live apart. You look at the wealthiest families, they stay together. They live, they live together, they work together. They, you know, have less income streams. Much smarter.

I've got, I've got, I can, well, I think it is a conspiracy, but not for the reason you think, right? So here's, here's where I think, because I went, I did a bit of research a little while ago. And here's what I came up with, which was that up until the Middle Ages, there was a clan village. They were the same thing. And the reason the Catholic Church bans you from marrying your cousin is because it destroys the gene pool. And here's my wife, my sister. And so in the Middle Ages, it went from being, if you look at the genetic in the Neanderthals, they've got populations that were only 50 miles apart that weren't interbreeding. And so in the Middle Ages, when the Catholic Church banned marrying your cousin, people actually had to leave the village, leave the clan homestead to get married, which is a good thing for the gene pool. But then it became the norm for people to leave as opposed to stay. And so, yeah, I've got a, one of the things that I think I'm going to dig into some of the stuff around your new book. Can I do that? Can we talk about your new book before it's published? When's it due out?

Well, I keep rolling on. It's meant to be next month. July is available next month. I've got the audio version back. I'm going to send you a copy of the audio version for you to share if you want.

Magic. That'd be great. So, look, I have this notion that companies don't fail, that CEOs fail or founders fail.

Love that.

And so when you were scaling GoProposal, what, just building on the belief thing, what belief was in your way that you had to confront and go round, go over, go under, stop believing? Or maybe there wasn't one, but did you get stuck and then did you have to go again?

Yeah. So many beliefs is the first thing. and many moments of getting stuck. And one thing I talk about is like, what we ask is, what do I need to do differently in this instance? And you keep trying different things. The better question I came to learn is, who do I now need to be? And because I realized that it was actually me that was causing the issues, or at least I took responsibility for it. Because if you at least take responsibility and think, well, there's all these things going wrong. If, what if I'm fault here? What if it's my belief system that's causing this? Because this is something I can control. And one of the things is that, um, only, only I can operate at this standard. No one else will be able to operate at my, at my standard. Um, no one else can do marketing like I can do marketing. Uh, only I can solve these problems at this pace. So I need to be there to solve all the problems. And doing all of those things, I was minimizing the team.

And I can see in a small team or even actually in, I could see how that could be true, right? Because quite often people are hiring subordinates, not peers, right? So it's entirely possible that again, there's this sort of self-limiting belief that people go to market and they go, I'm going to delegate marketing. And they go and hire somebody who actually isn't as good as them. This whole, you know, people say often, I'm going to hire people who are better than me. And then I look at the CVs of the people they're thinking about hiring and I'm like, well, they're not better than you. You've, you know, somehow you've got this, you didn't write the job ad or you screened them all out. So there's a subconscious thing that people say, I want to hire somebody better than me. And then they tell me they can't. And it's, it's, they haven't confronted the fact that they're just not, or they won't, and they haven't. admitted it to themselves yet.

No, it's a really good point. And you're not going to find anyone who cares as much as you, the founder. That's just a fact. Like, no one's going to care as much as you or work as hard as you or, you know, be as driven as you. You can't expect them to be. Um, but, but you can put playbooks in place that set the standards. You can't be unreasonable with those standards as well. Like I was just saying to Nathan here, like, this setup that I've got here, I said, right, we're gonna— I want every cable labeling, and I want this setup photographing. I want this bottle of water We've got plastic bottles and glass bottles. When I'm doing a talk, it has to be a glass bottle. I want the glass bottle to be on show. So let's measure the distance from the edge of the table for this and for that, and let's get it like— it's that level of granularity that you need. If that's my standard, and people think, well, I'm being unreasonable if I say I want my bottle of water and I want the logo facing forward or whatever. No, you're not. If that's your standard, set the fucking standard. And then it's about Somebody said, it was my brother actually said to me, but the thing is, James, as your business grows, your standards will slip. And I said, they will if you let them. I'm not gonna let them. So I'm gonna have the playbook in place. And then the next step, and this is a phrase from Dr. Edwards Deming, you have to inspect what you expect. And so it's not good enough saying this is the standard. Then what's the inspection process? I bought, um, A bracelet, a Cartier bracelet for my wife. And the process was beautiful. You went in, they took your bags off you, they offered you a drink, they greeted you. Like, there were all these steps that just created this amazing experience. When I left, I got sent this survey saying, would you look? If you're sending surveys out, this is a great tip I've got recently, Dom. You never want to send a survey out from Cartier. It always wants to come from the person because I'm never going to do it for Cartier, but I'll do it for Dom. Right.

Yep.

So, so if Dom sends me out, hey Dom, um, hey James, I'd just love to get your feedback on what the experience was today. You know, it really counts towards my whatever it is. Right. And then the survey went through. Were you greeted at the door? Were you, was, did somebody ask your name? Was your, were your bags taken? Were you offered a drink? Were you offered a, were you given a menu of drinks? Like, that's the inspection step to make sure that what they expected got delivered. Um, and then here's the final thing to you, to your point. What I realized is I couldn't be replaced by a person in marketing, but I could replace— be replaced by 5. It took a number of people to replace. I could— I can do all the things. I can set up a camera, I can film it, I can edit it, I can turn it into a blog post, I can write a compelling— I'm good at copy. I can write a social media post. It's difficult to find someone, respectfully, with all that skill set. But I can find a videographer, I can find an editor, I can get a copywriter, I can get a social media manager, and I can assemble a team of people that can be close to what I can deliver.

And one of the things, the, there's a whole sort of E-Myth, the book, in fact, E-Myth. I have a, um, I think what that suggests is that you write down processes for everything. And I think That's one of my, what a load of bollocks things. Because at any one time, there's one constraint in your business. And so that constraint should be where you go, what is it that you are spending time on that if it's a constraint on the founder, what is it you are spending time on? You should hire 5 people to fix, or is it sales or is it delivery? And that's where you should then look at the standards. Have we got them high enough? Have we trained them? Are people clear? Because you're doing them a disservice if you are not clear. So often I find myself saying to people, do you know what's expected of you at work? It's question 1 of the Gallup Q12. And people have not really any idea. It feels to me like it's like working down the mine and digging coal, but not knowing if you're actually digging coal or not. You might just be digging rock. It's hot and sweaty and miserable, And you'd have no idea whether you're making any progress and tomorrow's going to be the same as it is today. It's like, or working on a chain labor gang. Do you know what I mean? It's like, it's like you're just doing something, getting hot and sweaty and it's all pointless. And so it just seems, it seems a shame to not tell people what they're supposed to be doing.

Yeah, for sure.

What, um, why, just going back to sales. So you didn't, when you're talking to people that you, you know, consult with or people ask for your advice, Do you say don't pay sales commission then?

I don't, I don't believe in it. I just think like, I don't actually think it works because I think it creates stress on the salesperson. People say they're motivated by money, but then they've got, they've now got stresses in their life because they know that if they hit, they have to hit a certain target to be able to bring in the income, whatever. And what I think you're far better off doing is just paying a really good salary to people. And I think if you spoke to people and said, look, would you— like, what I would, what I would do is say, like, what was your bonuses last year? Okay, what if I just roll them into your salary? What if I just assume that you're, you're going to hit those targets every month and I'm going to hold you to those targets? Like, you can still set targets for people, and if they don't hit them, that you can fucking get rid of them. Like, it's not an issue. But what I'm going to do is I'm going to back you up front and I'm going to give you I'm going to roll that into your, that's what I'm going to roll that into your salary now, because I believe that's what you're, that's what you're capable of. Would that be much calmer for you? Would you like, they're not going to drop if you've got the right person, they're not going to drop the standards because you've just rewarded them upfront.

Do you know what it's, uh, so normally when I'm in violent agreement with you, if I ever do a blog post or something on LinkedIn about it, I get hate mail from salespeople and sales directors. But I get it certainly in the tech sector, technical founders go, what is this thing you speak of? No sales commission. Where have you been? Because they really are not happy about paying sales commission. And I think the data is 85% of salespeople don't hit quota. And so if paying sales commission worked, the number would be more like 100, not 15.

Yeah.

And if paying for performance worked, when you went to a restaurant, all of the waiters would be pleasant and care because you tip them. And in fact, it doesn't seem to work. So anyway, all the data suggests that it makes no bloody difference. Yeah. If you tip them, that's what I do.

We're going to a restaurant and I say, look, I know that I'm going to get a great service from you. So I'm going to tip you. I'm going to tip you now. I'm going to back you. You don't have to prove yourself to me. I'm going to tip you now. So pay a tip when you sit down.

Do you know what? That's the same philosophy as just paying good salespeople salary.

Yeah, for sure. But do you know why it doesn't work? It's that I knew this great sales guy and he ended up leaving the company because he was on like enterprise sales and working with huge companies to try and bring in big contracts. Well, if you're working with a big company, with a big co— that's like a change management piece that, that is going to take time. So it doesn't matter how good a salesperson you are. There are things on their side that need to move and need to align. The best sales guy I know, the best sales guy I know, I'm gonna name him, right? He's a guy called Mark Garwood and best, hands down, best sales guy I know. And the best deal I saw him bring in for a company was a £5 million contract and it took him 10 years to land it. 10 years to land it. If he was on a sales bonus, Mm-hmm. Right? At what point in that 10-year journey would he have said, I'm not inviting them to the races, I'm not going to go and meet them, I'm not going to go and send them a gift, I'm not going to— I'm going to stop replying to emails? Like, it just wouldn't have happened. 10 years to land the £5 million contract. Within 2 years, they doubled it to £10 million a year. Like, and that represented for the business double their business. It doubled the size of their entire business. So for me, You can't act, you can't act, you know, in the interest of the client. And I had it, this was the clincher for me, Dom. When we were growing this GoProposal, we, we, the whole app ground to a halt one day and it got slower and slower and slower. And then it just went bing and it all stopped. I'm like, what the fuck? What's happened? And we contacted and it was the server. The server had just ground to a halt and we were paying like whatever it was.

Yeah.

200 quid a month for our server. And he came back to me and said, we need to move you urgently and it's gonna be £3,000 a month, which for a small business, that was like such a huge leap. And, uh, but we had to do it and we had to do it fast. So we agreed to do it. And this guy, this sales guy was brilliant. He was so helpful. And he said, look, I'll be on the call. We'll do it tonight. We'll do it at midnight. We'll switch you over. I'll make sure everything's cool. So we got to, um, it was midnight and we moved servers. And it all went swimmingly. And I'm like, oh wow, brilliant. And the sales guy, oh my God, amazing, right? And then I remember looking at the corner of my screen and it was the 31st of the month. And I messaged the sales guy and I said, can I just ask, have I just helped you to hit your quarterly, your monthly bonus with, with getting that over the line? And he went, yeah, you have actually. And I said, Can I now ask, was that the server that we actually needed or was that the bonus that you needed?

Oh.

And it was just that realization that you don't know whether you're getting the right— and we, I ended up moving away from, I lost faith in that business at that point and we moved to another server. We switched to another company after that, but you, people just can't act in your interest if bonuses exist.

Because you're, well, that's exactly right. Because you're, and then you spend all as a, as a founder or CEO, you spend all your time, or sales leader, you spend all your time trying to make sure that the salespeople aren't gaming the system or just get rid of the system. One bad hire could cost you £50,000 and 6 months of momentum. And if you're turning over more than £5 million, you've definitely lived this. Not because the person was bad, because look, you've hired off a vague spec and you've trusted your gut feel in the interview. We all have. You bring them in, you carry them for months, and then you're back to square CEO fixes that before you post the role. You tell it where the bottleneck is. It gives you a role profile, what to test in the interview, and what good looks like in the first 90 days. One bad hire is going to cost you 50 grand. CEO Friend is going to cost you £145 a month. Get your first month free and have a play. stwtrialceofriend.ai. Links in the description. Anyway, I've got another, I've got another question for you. All right, so I know you were talking at our client event last week. And one of the things you were talking about was something from your book that I wanted to dig into. So this concept of minimization, right? And being the bottleneck, being the rescuer really. And when people aren't very good diving in to save them, what's the— you admitted that last week that you'd been a You're a reformed rescuer. What, what were you doing and what was your— what did you change?

Yes, this came from a book by Kim Scott, which is Multipliers, and it was how do you have a multiplying effect on your team. And there was just one chapter in there called Accidental Diminishers.

Yeah, yeah.

Where are you accidentally diminishing your team? And you could score yourself across these 6 areas to see which one that you were diminishing them the most. I was diminishing them on all 6 areas. Like, I was bottling it. I was mega. I scored very highly. On all of those, but it's for the right reasons. So if you're CC'd into an email, like you're the first to respond. If you're in a quarterly planning session, I'm the first to come up with the ideas to solve the problem. And you think you're doing good. Um, and you even acknowledge that you're diminishing the team a little bit because you're stepping in. But, but you've been— you justify it in your head because you're actually bringing some great ideas and they're fast so we can get on to the next idea, right?

Yeah.

So although I'm diminishing, I'm still adding. But what you're not doing is you're not multiplying them. And the moment you stop solving their problems and just keep quiet, they now have to solve their problems. And so you create a team that can solve problems, that can plan, that can work through issues, and it move— it genuinely moves you out the process. And the reason why this became so important on reflection was when we went through the sales process, it was such an intense period of my life. That 100% of my time was focused on the exit process of the business. It became 50% of the ops director's role was on the sale of the business. And there were the lead, some of the leadership team, 10% of their time was on the exit of the business. So if I was also solving problems and needing to step in and develop new standards and processes and stuff like this, Um, or hire people or fire people or whatever it may be, I can't now focus on the core activity that I need to be focused on. And so you have to remove yourself. But here, here's the thing, Dommy, you have to be aware. I, I've just had it with, with someone recently. What need is that satisfying? So I can explain to you intellectually that you are diminishing the team and you need to stop doing this. in order to allow them to grow and to free your time up. And we can write that out and logically that makes perfect sense. And then you still go and do the fucking thing that causes the problem and the bottlenecks, right? So I asked a guy last week that I was working with, I said, right, the 6 human needs. Tony Robbins talks about 6 human needs. The need for certainty, the need for variety, significance, love and connection, growth, and contribution. What needs are the primary needs that you need to satisfy? And he said, the need for certainty and the need for growth. I said, lovely. What a great bullshit answer, because that's what you— they're the needs that you want me to think, and they're the needs that you would love to be satisfying. But from all my conversations with you, they're not the needs you're satisfying. The needs you want to satisfy is the need for certainty and the need for significance. So whilst ever they're your dominant needs that you're trying to satisfy, You actually want to be the rescuer because in being the rescuer, you are maintaining significance. And shall I tell you where I first learned about this, Dom? It was me gran. So God bless her. No, it is.

Right.

My gran, she used to cook 2 things, bake 2 things really well. She used to bake bread, beautiful bread, and she used to bake fruitcake. She had this fruitcake, and I'm not joking, you have never had a moister, lovelier fruitcake than this, right? And I used to pester her for the recipe, right? I said, Gran, you don't have to make this all the time. Like, give me the recipe. I can bake it myself. She'd never give me the recipe, right? And I thought, why would she not give me the recipe? And it's because of significance. Like, while she doesn't give me the recipe, she's now useful to me. So I will still fight over her for dinner. I will still go and visit her. The moment she gives me the recipe and actually frees up the process and frees up the system and allows me to operate more efficiently with accessing fruitcake more readily, it now removes her from the process. She's no longer as valuable. And I'm convinced that's why she never gave me it. I did eventually get the recipe, by the way, before she died. But I think business owners do this. They don't want to— you talk about the bottleneck. They don't want to stop being— they want to be the bottleneck because underlying, they want to be significant.

I, nah, maybe I, I look, I know why I know. That means no, by the way. Just letting you down gently. Look, I know why it starts the way, why it starts like this, because up to say 10 or 12, single span of control, founder CEO, you are head and shoulders above your team and all the tasks come through you and you are playing basketball. Business at that stage is a strong link sport. As Malcolm Gladwell would say. And some people definitely do get significant. And I think those are the ones that can't hire people better than them. And even when you point it out to them, don't want to acknowledge that this is why and don't want to unwind their psychology. But there are some other people. And so did somebody point it out to you that you were diminishing other people in the team, or did you have that sort of self-awareness? But at some point you were doing it and then you were able to change.

Yeah.

And then you hired people who were better than you, even if it was 5 of them.

Yeah.

And, and so I think there are people, I mean, I, we've got a client, I've got a client at the moment who, you know, 18 months ago rang me up. We were talking about it last night and, you know, said, I'm working 7 days a week, 14 hours a day. Could you help me have a day, day a week back? And, um, not accidentally, diminishing and had a team of about 70 people, was just, didn't have good enough people and just sort of hadn't, so in the weeds, couldn't prioritize hiring people who could do the next phase, probably from competitors, and has now put 2 or 3 people in place from competitors who know what the next phase looks like, who themselves want Yes, they're getting paid, but actually they want to have influence and significance, and that's why they've gone from a bigger company back to a smaller company. And so that's freed him up 50% of his week now to focus on the things that he should actually be doing.

Yeah.

I've got another thing I'd like to dig into, which is another thing we could violently agree about, but you put it in a particularly You turned up last week to speak with a prop, which of course I didn't bring into the studio with me today, which is my fault because I'm a moron.

You didn't steal it from me.

I did not let you go home with it.

Yes.

So before we get onto what is this prop you speak of, what is it that we're talking about? Because I think this, when you said it, You're right. I think this is the number one reason why leadership teams struggle and why businesses struggle to grow. So, yeah.

So it's about being truthful and radically candid with people. And in a high performance team, if you look at high performance sports teams, then that is, that is just the language of the team. Like, and it's given during a game. Like when my, when I see my daughter play hockey, the hockey coach from the sideline is shouting the feedback and criticism, whatever it needs to be. In the game. There's no point in waiting until halftime. That person needs to know what they're doing wrong now in front of everyone. Deal with it. And they just turn around and say, yes, coach, and they get on with it and they make the improvements. That's a high-performance team. Rather than wait until halftime and say, could I just have a little word with you? Maybe you weren't marking your man well enough. That's just not going to work, right? We've got a few minutes before we get back on the pitch. Like, we're going for it here. There's no time for that. And so the environment that I had was very, was very much giving feedback in the moment to each other. And when I think back to my board meetings and the non-executives that I had on the board with me, even pre-acquisition and post-acquisition, mate, they held me to the fire.

It was—

they— board meetings hurt. I'd turn up like, right, let me tell you about all the, all the things I've done this month. And they're like, yeah, we don't give a shit about that. What haven't you done and why?

Fuck.

Like, you're just facing the fire every day, right? And it— but it got us to grow. And the moment you can just drop all that bullshit, all that padding around everything, you can get to the truth. And like, the truth will set you free. And when I go and work in other— the companies that I've invested in and working in, it just astonishes me how untruthful people are with each other. They just bullshit. They step around things. They don't want to upset somebody. They don't want to offend anybody. And then, but behind the back, they might be saying something very different. And so my conclusion was that the truth is heavy and it has hard edges. And if I'm delivering the truth to you, I don't have to soften that. It's not that the burden isn't on me to soften the truth and it isn't to lighten it. It's for you as an adult to deal with. And if you can't deal with it, that's your problem, not mine. If you start crying while I'm delivering the truth, I'm not gonna stop delivering. Oh, gimme the, gimme it back. I didn't really, no, no. Dom, if you need to cry, go and have a minute. Go and do the crying that you need to have, but this conversation is not stopping. So I'll wait here. You come back when you've composed yourself and we'll continue. Like, I'm not gonna lighten it. I took, that's not my responsibility. That's for you to deal with. Yeah.

What if you are wrong?

I have been wrong before. There was, there was this one time.

I asked your wife. She said it was more often than that.

All the time. With your wife, it's all the time. Listen, I'm, I might be wrong and there are different ways to approach things. And I think being a northerner from Yorkshire, Like, we— there is a, there is a language of speaking. You're from the Northeast. I remember going and working with a physio company in Hartlepool, and I remember being sat in this, in a training session, and these girls were talking, and I thought it was going to kick off. I thought they were going to— genuinely thought they were going to start fighting because they just were giving it to each other so straight, so direct, no padding, telling you where you'd been shit this week, etc., right? And the moment it was over, he's like, right, we're all done then. All right, let's get back to work. I'm like, was that it? It was done. But do you know what? Because the truth is heavy, when everyone left that meeting, no one was burdened with it. No one was still carrying it and having it weighed down. And what happens is we get burdened with it, and the more we carry it, the heavier it gets. And then very often it's delivered in a massive ba-boom. Like a big boom.

Oh yeah.

To deliver it often, it, it's not as heavy, it doesn't hurt as much. Um, and, and I have it with my kids. I speak truthfully with my kids. But you know what I found, Dom? And, um, this is what I found. It creates the most trusting environment. It creates the most psychologically safe environment. We've taken on a new lad here yesterday. He's come straight out of A-levels. This is his first job. He's come to me. And I've said, you are gonna have to make a gear change cuz you're stepping into a high-performing environment here. And that means I'm gonna need to be truthful with you. But this is gonna make you feel so safe because it means that you are never gonna be worried about what I'm thinking of you. You're never gonna be worried that I'm talking about you behind your back or that I'm pissed off with you and you don't know it. That will never, ever be a thing because you will know the moment I'm pissed off with something. You will know and be given a chance to address it. And I said, how does that make you feel? And he's like, yeah, that actually feels better. That feels safer. Of course it's safer. If we're all truthful with each other, it's a far safer environment.

I, do you know what? I think people say, but school, at school, people say, if you've got nothing nice to say, say nothing. Maybe your mum even said that to you. Um, and so there's a, there's an anti- Anti-truth, you know, that's the world is against truth, right? Because it, you know, let's not upset people. Um, uh, praise in public, um, criticize in private, right? But I think that's the op— as you say, that's the opposite of high-performing teams. And certainly we had James Kirk with us for dinner last week, didn't we? And, um, he was talking about the work he'd done with the All Blacks. That's— and so, you know, they put it, one of their values is stab me in the belly, not the back.

Well put.

If you've got anything, you know, if you've got anything to say to me, say it to my face.

Love it.

And we do an exercise. The first exercise I do with clients when they're here on an offsite strategy session is brutal truths because we've got 2 days together and people are bringing their truth with them. Like it's in their backpack. They can't not be carrying it around. And I need to get it out at the beginning. And so I say to the CEOs, look, we're going to do this first thing on the first day. And we have done it with some clients and this exercise has still been going at 5 o'clock at night and it's gone on into dinner. And nothing else that was on the agenda on Monday, on the first day, got done because there was just so much shit that you guys had not talked about. And in other cases, it's over in 20 minutes because it's actually a team that have got the muscle. But you can't, if you come to a strategy day and you believe there's something fundamentally fucked in this company and that in the 2 days you believe we're not going to get to it, You don't participate because you just think this is a waste of my time because there's one thing that I know to be true that you all seem to be just fucking ignoring. And like, we need to get that out. And you're right. And then once you've got it out, then you need to start doing it in small chunks. But I've had some of those explosions. We've had tears. We've had times where people have been here for 3 hours and the whole room's just been in tears for 3 hours. Oh man.

The exact same exercise I do with the teams, Dom. If I'm working with someone, Get 'em all to write down what is the truth? What do people need to hear? What have you been holding back? And normally anonymize it and get everyone to chuck it into a pot and then pull it out and write it up on the board. And we just get the truths out. Like, and I have to normally clear it with like the CEO first. I'm like, are you ready for this? Do you wanna be in the room or not in the room? Like, can you actually, can you accept what's about to be said? Because until we've got this out, like you said, no ideas are, no one's interested in anything else because That all their energy is on carrying this thing. There's like, there's no point in doing anything else until that's been uncovered. It's such a great exercise.

Do you know what? Only once has an organization come to the farm in 11 years and not carried on to work with me for the next 12 months. And that was the same organization that I get people to do that anonymously in advance. And then I put it on the screen.

Nice.

And one of them went, I didn't know this was going to be shared. I'm like, what did you think we were going to— what part of this exercise did you think like just giving me anonymous feedback was then? And so I realized that they had no concept of psychological safety, truth. Like it was completely alien to them as a team. And at the end of it, it was just the CEO's like, no, this is just going to be too hard. We're not I don't, I'm just gonna sort of plod along, I think. Um, I'm not, I'm not up for the fight.

Do you know what that can come down to as well? And this is again from Tony Robbins, but he talks about what is the underlying metaphor that you use for your team. So if it's family, if it's fa— so, and oh, it's lovely, this is my family. Okay, how truthful are you with your family? Like, I don't know anyone with a normal family. Everyone's family I know is just nuts, right? So it's just like the worst metaphor that you can have because it's normally, they're not, families are normally crackers, right? Or you've got members of your family that you would never want to invite to events.

Or speak to again.

Yeah. And you're just not truthful. It's just like, you know, so it's such a bad metaphor. A far healthier metaphor is a high-performance sports team where you have to establish that and what the rules are of that and what a conversation Uh, sounds like in that.

Oh, and, and also I think onboard them right, right? Because you might, you might, you might not be like that and then want to change it and you have to tell people that you're going to change it.

Yes.

And then they don't, it's then it's not optional, but if they want to leave, they should leave. I remember, I can't remember the name of the company, but there was, uh, there was, um, well, certainly, certainly Atomic who are the, who own WordPress. did it, Matt Mullenweg did it, and then somebody else had done it as well, where they had this big thing around Black Lives Matter. And I remember the CEO said, we're no longer going to allow chat on Slack about matters of politics. And if you don't like it, you can take severance and you can bugger off. And a big chunk of the company went, this isn't the business we were at. We don't like it anymore. And so I think if you tell people that we're going to change and then you change, then you have to then hold people to account. But you can make that, as long as you've got 30%, the research looks, it says if you've got 30% that can behave in the new way. And I did once close down an organization of 120 people and made them all redundant because I didn't have anybody that I would enthusiastically rehire. But look, let's, business books. What are your business MOOC recommendations? Obviously you've got a bestseller about to come out, but have you been reading anything? What's your view on learning? I mean, you've talked about Kim Scott's Radical Candor and the book about diminishers, which I can't remember the name of, what the title is. I'm looking around. Liz Wiseman.

Yeah, Radical Candor. And then it's Multipliers.

Who's that? Oh, that's it. By Liz Wiseman.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. I'm sorry, I got the names wrong.

Yeah.

Sorry, Liz Wiseman. Yeah. Yeah.

What, anything else that you think people should be reading?

I, I do. I've got some recommendations, but my recommendations for books as well is not to read books, like to go through phases. 'Cause sometimes if you're constantly reading books, it can, it can come from a place of, I'm inadequate, I'm not good enough. I need, I always need to know more. But maybe you know enough, maybe you just need permission to kind of get on with the things that you, actually know already and actually implement. So for me, I will deliberately pause if I'm not implementing a good percentage of what I've learned from a book. I won't read, and I won't read the next one because like there's no point. And, and doing that forces me to take action. So I think it can be healthy to have a pause on books. Um, a really good book, we talked before about, uh, The Alchemist, uh, which is very good for being in search of treasure. It's a book I have to revisit every few years. And it always feels a very different book when I read it. Another really good book is The Four Agreements. Have you come across this?

It's ringing a bell, but I can't remember. Okay.

Toltec wisdom. Miguel Ruiz, I think it is.

We'll find it and put it in the show notes.

There's 4 agreements that if you can have your— that all human suffering comes back to not having these 4 agreements with yourself. And if you can just have these 4 agreements with yourself, it removes all human suffering. a large amount of human suffering. And if you bring that into business, it's the same thing. So one of them, for example, is always speak— is to speak your word, like for your word to count. Again, back to being truthful again.

Mm-hmm.

And another one is never make assumptions. Like assumptions causes businesses so many problems. Like we've had a sales meeting, I've rang you 4 times or 8 times, you've not replied to any of my messages, therefore I assume that you don't want to move ahead with the sale. Right. What? There's no assumption to be made there. Like you've just not replied to any of them.

Do you know what? That drives me demented. I have that conversation with salespeople all the time and I go, except I said, look, I reposition it and I say, look, let me assume that I am this person you are chasing, right? You could easily have rung me 10 times and I could easily have bounced your call 10 times because I was in a meeting. You might've sent me 10 emails. I might've scanned them on my phone and thought, I haven't got time to reply. because I'm busy and there's something else that's more important. I might still want to buy your thing and you're just going to have to keep going. And they go, oh really? I'm like, yes, I'm just busy and you are not the most important thing in my fucking life. And they go, oh, I hadn't thought about it like that. I'm like, yeah, that's because you are you.

Yeah. And that's why that very reason was why I came up with my software product in the first place. proposal software and that designed it in such a way that you could close and produce the proposal and have it accepted and take the payment if you wanted to during the meeting. For the very fact that at the moment people have left. I've like, if I explained my day when I finish this call with you now, I've got a PT session. I've then got to get back and return the mobility scooters that my son had for his prom. He wanted to go on to his prom on mobility scooters. I've got to—

Of course you do.

return to those, take my daughter to athletics, then I've got paddle this evening. It's like, when do you think, if this was a sales meeting now, when do you think I'm going to reply to a call? Like, it's just not going to happen. And that's not even everything that I'm up to. So, yeah. So be impeccable with your word. Never make assumptions. They're just a couple, but yeah, just a great book. And I just think, Dom, that the more we can be aware of ourselves as business leaders, the greater awareness that we can have, the more that we can challenge our belief system. is that's actually the thing that's impacting our business the most, you know, because that's at the very most foundational layer of our business, our belief system. And we don't realize that we're bringing that into the business, albeit very subtly, albeit with very subtle words and phrases that we might say, but we're actually shaping it. So as business leaders, we have to have the greatest awareness of ourselves. And I think reading books around mindset, philosophy, having that deeper understanding is actually very very impactful on our business, not necessarily about strategy or sales or marketing.

Okay. I think that's magic. I think you're right. Mindset gets in the way. You've got to get off to PT. I've got to go and jump on calls with other people. James, as ever, an absolute delight to chat to you, man, my friend. Thank you for coming on.

Thank you, Dom. And thank you for the event as well last week. I've been telling everyone about it, but just your generosity, In like what you do with podcasts like this, with what you share, with what you post on, on socials. Like, you're just an incredible light and, and force in, in this entrepreneurial space, someone I really look up to. But it's just the fact that you bring great people together and share it. So I want to thank you as well, brother.

Cheers.