Think Big, Get Big: The Goal-Setting Strategy That Changes Everything | Eric Partaker

Some of the bullshit that people have to stop peddling is work-life balance is a complete myth, you know, for founders and CEOs. Yeah, it's more like work-life satisfaction.

How much of that do you think is cultural, right? So I feel as though if you're in the US and you say, I'm gonna build the world's biggest whatever it is, people go, yes, fantastic, how can I help you? And you say that in the UK and people go, that's not gonna happen, is it?

I used to be the world's worst procrastinator.

Uh-huh.

So bad that I bought a set of books on overcoming procrastination in the year 2000 and I didn't read them until 2010. You know, anybody listening or watching, you know right now that there's something you should probably be doing that is critical for your growth and development, whether the, the company or, or yourself, and you're not doing it. And rather than get caught up in what those things are, just have the courage and be bold enough to just do whatever that thing is. Hey there, Dominic. Yeah, Eric Partaker here and excited to be on the show. My background, very quickly, is started off as a consultant at McKinsey and Company. I was part of the early team at Skype. So back when we were using Skype, we're on Riverside now. So yeah, Skype doesn't exist anymore, but there was a time when it did. So I helped with the blitzscaling of that. We had a big exit to eBay for a few billion dollars about 21 years ago. Built a restaurant chain after that. So a complete pivot. That was an amazing experience until it all went up in smoke in COVID. We could talk about that. And then, and now, yeah, new phase in life. Ended up focusing on CEO coaching and mentoring. Built a following of over a million on LinkedIn over the last couple of years. And have a few books coming out. And yeah, excited to be here.

Fantastic. Eric, before I pick your brains on some of your history, what are some things that you think are true that other people don't or vice versa?

Well, I think for the type of people that you and I seek to help, So for the typical, say, founder and CEO, I think, um, some of the bullshit that people have to stop peddling is like, um, for example, work-life balance is a complete myth. Um, you know, for founders and CEOs. Um, yeah, it's more like work-life satisfaction, right? I mean, you, you, you are— Right.

What we'll dive, we'll dive, we'll dive into these. What, what, what are a few others?

And then we'll loop back. What else? I think there's an experience myth as well, like that you need to be quite experienced within a certain area to do anything. I mean, I've gone from consulting to tech to food to social media to becoming an investor and John Lennon, life is what happens while you're busy making other plans. So I think that keeps people back because they pigeonhole themselves basically, and they don't realize that life is a constant reinvention.

And then—

Yeah, what's— I mean, those are 2 big ones, I would say. Right there.

Okay. And are there other things that you think about?

Ah, wait, I got one more.

I got one more.

I got one more because this is coming up quite a lot lately. So, I used to come from the approach of achievement from this concept of choose your identity, who you want to be, and then that version of you can achieve something great. And I actually wrote about this in a past book called The 3 Alarms. But something funny happened the other day. I looked back through all of the examples that I gave in my own book about this supposed model, and the real lived examples didn't match the theory that I proposed. So it wasn't that I decided I was going to be like this better person and then I could achieve these greater goals. No, no, no. It actually worked the other way around. It's that I went for these massive goals, and then that forced me to level up to a different level as a person. What I mean is that the goals that we choose, the goal itself impacts what you achieve, and that forces the identity change, if you get what I mean, rather than choose the identity and then achieve whatever you want.

Oh, look, I think that's right. Jim Collins, you know, says, you know, pick a BHAG. You know, this, you know, the companies that did good to great had a BHAG, that sort of 10 to 25 year goal.

Yeah.

And, you know, they have to be scary and unachievable.

Exactly.

And then you go, well, what would have to be true for this to be true? And it forces you to challenge all of your assumptions. Or, you know, 10x is easier than 2x, Dan Sullivan's Uh, book, you know, and that, you know, if you—

There was actually an article that predates, uh, I don't know when that, that, that book was written, but I, I think it was relatively recent.

Yeah.

Yeah. Um, but Astro Teller, the person who heads up, uh, uh, Google X's Moonshot Factory. So all of their most ambitious projects.

That's it. I very rarely get name envy.

Yeah.

Like AstroTeller.

Like what? Like, huh?

Just like, almost like, how could you not be in charge of Google's moonshots if that's your name?

It's almost— Yeah. The only way you could ruin that name is if his middle name was John or something. But he wrote a piece for Wired. What did you say the book name was again?

10 10x is easier than 2x.

Ah, okay. Okay. So most certainly that book was influenced by Astro's actual article. In 2013, he wrote an article for wired.com. Look it up online. And the title of the article was 10x is Easier Than 10%.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

So I'm almost certain then that book inspiration came from Astro. And what he What he talks about in the article is how when you go for 10% growth, you get— I mean, these aren't the words he used, but, you know, in my own words, you get trapped in like incrementalism.

Yeah.

'Cause there's so many different ways you can grow 10%. But if you go for 10x, it fundamentally changes the way you think. Like, quick example, let's say you or I are coaching a, A founder, and to keep the example simple, let's say that she has sales of $1 million a year. And how do you get your sales? And she says, oh, well, I just make phone calls. Okay, founder-led sales, great. Your goal is to get to $1.1 million next year. How are you going to do it? And she goes, okay, well, I'll just add an extra hour to the day. I'll make more calls. And she can probably come up with like 20 other ways to do it as well, right? It's only an extra $100K. But if instead we said, no, no, no, you have to get to $10 million next year, then her brain breaks because now there's not enough hours in the day, the existing model doesn't work, and she has to think much, much bigger. It thinks in terms of leverage and all that. And that's quite exciting. And when I look— and I'm sure you can relate to this too, Dominic— when I look at all of the goals that I've achieved in my life from the McKinsey days back in the late '90s up till today, Yeah, the goal, going for that big goal, or like, as you said, Jim Collins' language, that BHAG, that personal BHAG, it just changes everything. And that literally, I think, is the secret sauce. That's like what I tell to my boys. I'm like, you have to pick huge, massive goals if you want any chance in hell at achieving a massive result. It's that think big, get big. Think small, you'll stay small.

Yeah.

Sort of thing.

Well, I was chatting to a founder this morning that's just exited, and I'd done the intro that helped him get the exit, and he'd been doing it for 25 years.

Wow.

And they sold to somebody, like they'd done 25 years incremental growth, and they sold it to a business that had done that. And that was his reflection. that he was happy. He said, you know, I've worked quite hard. I'm quite happy with where I've got to. But my goal had always been to, you know, it wasn't, he just didn't have when he started 25 years ago, that massive goal. And what, how much of that do you think is cultural? Right. So I feel as though if you're in the US and you say, I'm going to build The world's biggest whatever it is, people go, yes, fantastic, how can I help you? And you say that in the UK and people go, that's not going to happen, is it? Yeah. And you're from Barnsley. How is that going to—

Or even worse. Yeah, exactly. Or even worse, you say it in Norway. I'm half Norwegian, half American. Yeah. You couldn't have in the Western world 2 more extreme viewpoints on what you just said than those 2 right there. So on the American side, as we all know, it's like the sky's the limit. You just absolutely go for it. Go for gold. You don't want to win a gold medal even once. It's like win 10 gold medals in a row. Whereas in Norway, there's a thing called janteloven, which is— I mean, it basically says, you shall not think you are anything. You shall not think you are better than anyone. Um, it's, it's very like communist in a way.

Yeah.

And, um, and it's tough. It's tough culturally because I think, you know, Norway is, is still coming out of that and trying to battle that because, um, you have a society there and a culture there that, you know, be careful about, you know, don't, don't blow your horn too loud and don't go for anything too big. You know, look at how that makes you look and, you know, don't be silly now. And yeah, I lived in the UK for 17 years. And so you have that too in the UK, but UK's way closer on that spectrum to the US than to Norway, right? Much closer.

Well, I was listening to the Knowledge Project podcast at the weekend and the guy who runs the Norwegian Sovereign Wealth Fund was on. And he was talking about exactly that. He said that's Norway's biggest problem.

Yeah.

And he said, well, how would you fix it? He goes, you can't fix that. It's like, just, it's, it's, it's part of being Norwegian. Like, it's like we couldn't, we like, there's no, we couldn't change it even if we wanted to. It's just, it's just as a nation who we are.

And God knows how the hell this happened because, you know, from an ancestry point of view, if you look at the Vikings, I mean, Jesus, these, these guys were In terms of risk takers, they were like, everyone get in that goddamn boat, start sailing into the ocean. Yeah, but we don't know what's out there. You shut up, get in the boat, we're going.

Yeah.

And they show up and take what they want, do what they want, taking enormous risks. So I don't get it. Again, if we look at the Western world, In that example there, who was more risk-taking and entrepreneurial than the Vikings? But yet, how did that happen? Yeah.

Yeah. And one of the other things you were talking about there is work-life balance. Is that a difference between Europe and the US, do you think? I mean, you said work-life balance, a myth. You know, I don't, like you, I mean, I say to my kids all the time, look, you don't, you're not going to have an extraordinary result by not working hard. You know, you don't learn to play a musical instrument by not practicing. You know, people who are amazing spend a lot of time doing deliberate practice.

Yeah. I mean, it's, to me, it's just like a really simple equation. And the more hours you put into something, within reason, of course, you can't run yourself into the ground. you know, generally speaking, the bigger results that you'll get, right? So if you can look after yourself, stay healthy, make sure you're showing up at your best, not just in the health front, but, you know, in the time that you have with your kids and your spouse. And if you can do that and still put in 60-hour-a-week average, well, that version of you is gonna run circles around the 40-hour-a-week average. Right? I mean, it's just how it is. So the pivot for me is less balance and more satisfaction. And I just simply define that as, are you, with the time that you choose to spend outside of work, are you showing up as best as you could? So like my 12-year-old, for example, he's super into football. And, um, um, and, uh, yeah, he's been scouted recently by one of the, the top academies here in Portugal. And, and, and this is something that's super important to him. And so that's just like completely carved out of my schedule. You know, I— we, we do trainings together in the mornings. You know, I attend all of his practices. I go to all of his games. And I fit in the work around that. So I'm showing up at my best for him, for something that's super important for him, and still doing all the other stuff. Um, you know, 21-year-old, same thing. You know, for him it's a little bit different with, you know, job, uh, you know, thinking about university ending and job search and all of that. And I just carve that time out. But, um, you know, if I, if I, if you measure the actual hours, I, I massively over-track on work. But I'm still, you know, doing my best in, in those other areas. It's also though, like, it's like, it's so hardwired in my DNA though that, um, my wife said the other day, she said to someone, she's like, I don't think you, you, you understand Eric because you think to be— you seem to think that if he adds this person here and adds that person there, that this is going to create this extra capacity for him, which he will then just relax in. And she's like, that is not how he works. All you will have done is that you will have created an empty container in his day that he will immediately fill with something else and keep the intensity at the same level still. So I think we also too, my point is that I think we also just need to be honest with ourselves about How are we wired? What do we want to do? And how do we want to live? And again, if you're not sacrificing your health and your family and still showing up at your best, then just be honest with yourself and just be satisfied, but don't pursue this myth of balance.

Do you ever look back and have you ever had a moment where you sat there and thought, oh God, I just wish I wasn't quite so driven because life wouldn't happen at such a pace?

I have. Yeah, I've literally thought that exact thought. Literally, literally, I, I thought like, oh my God, it's— it is such a blessing and a curse, right? Because you, you can achieve incredible things, um, but you know, who's happier? Whose baseline happiness is higher in life? Mine? Or, I don't know, the postman or the milkman, right? Mm-hmm. I don't have a chance against them. They're going to have a higher baseline happiness than me. Like, I am—

Got a— you've got a higher level of what, inbuilt dissatisfaction about status quo and drive?

Completely.

Yeah.

Yeah, 100%. You know, where does it come from? I don't know, we're gonna have to add a psychologist to this, but, you know, yeah, of course. You know, you know, I'm 50 years old, right? So, you know, where does it come from? You know, is there a chance that it comes from me trying to prove myself, me trying to put my hand in the air and say, hey, notice me, aren't I good enough? You know, look at me. You know, yeah, yeah, of course, probably. Um, am I going to spend, you know, a ton of money in psychology sessions to get down to the bottom of that? Fuck no, I'm not interested.

Are you, are you deeply curious?

I'm fascinated with building things.

Yeah.

And creating things that, um, I'm, I'm, I'm fast— I'm fascinated with achievement. And so I'm fascinated with, like, if, if, if, if you meet an Olympic medalist, this is very interesting actually. I thought about this too the other day. Uh, 'cause there's these double standards that exist all the time in life and in society. So if we meet an accomplished athlete or, you know, Olympic gold medalist, At any point do we say to them, oh, for Christ's sake, what's wrong with you? Isn't enough enough? Like, why do you have to— what are you trying to prove? You know, what is all this stuff? Like, you know, is this an ego issue? If, you know, are you not content? No, we don't, because we idolize these people. We're like, yeah, you know, how many gold medals has Michael Phelps won? Is it like 20 or something? I mean, when's enough enough?

Yeah.

But that doesn't apply. And I don't think it should apply to people in business either who are chasing their equivalent of a gold medal, so to speak. And so my fascination comes in building things and in achievement because the act of doing that For me, I was never a great athlete. That's my Olympics. Those are my Olympic gold medals. And so back to your question of, are you a curious person? No, I wouldn't say curious like in an Isaac Newton sort of way, like how does the world work and Galileo and all of that.

Yeah.

No. But am I curious about anything that relates to the goals that I'm trying to achieve and achievement and winning those gold medals?

Absolutely. Is that why you went down the flow state route? Because you thought this is really about mindset and if I'm going to, you know, this is going to be a key part of my future success?

Yes. I'm obsessed with peak performance. Again, not because I love the field of peak performance, but more because It's an enabler to achieve, you know, amazing, you know, big things.

And is that, is that, is it, is it about getting to a particular level or is it about getting to the level you want to get to with the least amount of wasted effort?

Oh, both. Right. So it's certainly about, you know, climbing the peak as efficiently as possible, but what happens when you get to the peak? You are staring across the horizon, you're like, oh shit, there's another mountaintop over there. You know, which you don't see until you get to the top, because as you're climbing your current peak, all you can literally see is left foot, right foot, left foot, right foot, you know, and you're trying to make that ascent. But the moment you kind of get there, you realize, ah, oh, look at that. That's— it changes your perspective. And that— this has happened, you know, to me You know, again, throughout, like, I've always gone for what I would, you know, say are these like 10x goals or these 10x outcomes. And, and they're, for me, they're exhilarating, but in an Olympic athlete sort of way applied to business. So when you, once you win that gold medal, you're not like You don't hang it up and say, ah, I'm done now. But equally, you don't berate yourself or get pissed off or think something's wrong with yourself because you wanna go for the next one, right?

Yeah.

So, you know, from the McKinsey days to the Skype days to building the restaurant chain, you know, LinkedIn as an example. Again, you know, 50 years old, not a social media person. I didn't know what the hell was going on in social media 3 years ago. Um, I don't know, it's like I'm the wrong person to ask, but I thought, hey, this is another peak, let's win a gold medal here. And so figured it out, dialed it in, and, you know, 3 years later and it's 1.2 million following, you know. So it's like, but, but now I've moved on to the next thing because, yeah, that's kind of like boring now, right?

Yeah.

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And what— I'm intrigued because at McKinsey, I'm guessing you got to see a certain number of business models. And then you had a great Run at Skype, man. And then you went and did a restaurant. Yeah. That's like, it's just like, did you not, did you not know there were crappy businesses? Like, yeah, all those people and the low margins and the stress. Like, what possessed you to do a restaurant?

I, well, uh, simply because I wanted a burrito one night in London and I looked and I couldn't find any. And I thought, huh, you know, is there a business idea there? And yeah, it's a very tough industry. Very, very tough. We got a lot of things right with it, and we got a lot of things wrong with it. Some of the things I had the most fun with when building that So Mexican, Mexican restaurant chain, uh, Chilango. And I love intangibles in business. I love, I love, um, I always say you have to, if you can master the intangibles, you can just break ahead of the competition. Um, you know, for example, Nike has mastered the intangibles. If I walk into a Nike shop, What do I feel like? I feel like I think I might run a marathon. I think I might achieve something amazing. Um, even if you're like the crap athlete that I am, you still think this. Um, I don't have those feelings when I walk into JD Sports, you know. Then it's like, it's like, where are the shoes?

You know, how quickly can I get— how quickly can I get out of here?

In and out, right? And that's the power of one example of intangibles, the power of brand. And you look at all the world's best brands and they can kind of distill themselves down into single words, you know, Disney, happiness, Nike, competition. And that was the first intangible nut that we cracked with the restaurant business because I realized that, hang on a second, we're not selling burritos and tacos, we're selling vibrancy. That was the one-word distillation.

Mm-hmm.

And the goal was to make the world a more vibrant place. When we were building Skype, the 7 words were, the whole world can talk for free. It wasn't like, let's propagate this free piece of software everywhere and hit the tops of the charts and everything. So we had a much deeper thing. So that was fun. And that helped create a brand and a culture that really made it stand out. And literally translated into customer experience as well. We would get feedback all the time, like, thanks for those 15 minutes. You know, it was much cheaper than a trip to Mexico. You really brightened up my day, all that sort of stuff. So it's—

Yeah.

The vibrancy was real and we could see it in the numbers too. You know, again, restaurant industry, very, very tough industry. Our unit-level economics were 20% average EBITDAs. which is like monster in the industry.

Fantastic. Things we didn't do as well. That's software level margins. Yeah.

I mean, yeah, I'd say bad software level, but yeah, no, I hear you. Things that, um, things we didn't do as well.

Well, tech services at least, if not SaaS, but tech services.

Yeah. Things that we didn't do as well, it's more on the HQ side. So like unit level, Within a restaurant, crushed that. Absolutely crushed it. HQ level, we overexpanded.

Yeah.

We took on too much debt.

What else? We when when because you you raised money at the point where we first met. You were the key person of influence in front of the business, and you were raising. I was just thinking about your ads actually, and vibrancy would sum up the ads where you were raising burrito bonds. What proportion of the money that you raised came through customers buying those?

Oh, small percentage at the end of the day. Yeah. I mean, roughly speaking, probably It was probably like 20% or so.

Um, okay.

So yeah, it was, it was a minority.

Um, most of the money was high net worth and, uh, but drove massive customer loyalty, institutional, you know, people feeling like they should eat, they should eat a Chilango because they'd put some of their money in. Yeah.

Yeah, there was a bit of that. I think because we had created such a strong brand and looked after the customer so well. Um, I think it was just more of a, I really like this place and I really want to be part of it. And, um, and if I can make some money along the way, you know, doing it, amazing.

Yeah. Um, and would you, would you have, uh, you said, look, we raised too much money or raised too much debt. Would you— were you overextended anyway ahead of COVID do you think, in retrospect?

Yeah, in retrospect, yes. We had a couple of factors that really lined up that made things difficult for us. And it's a good reason why, you know, now when I look at, for example, raising capital, it's like you have to just be so careful, especially on the debt side of things, looking at your coverage ratios, really modeling out, you know, the unexpected things that, that, that, that could happen just to see how you might survive or, or not before you enter into those, those decisions. During that time, like Jamie's Italian had gone under. Mm-hmm. Pretzo closed. I think it was 100 of 300 locations. Um, Carluccio, same thing. And so pre-COVID, one of the big drivers for this— there was some speculation around Brexit impacting labor supply and all that, but the, the single biggest disintermediation was with the delivery platforms that came in. And so the delivery platforms came in like Uber Eats, Deliveroo, and changed the whole economics of the industry. And then a lot of people started to order from home rather than going to the restaurants. And so restaurant businesses, uh, ended up taking double whammies in that not only were you not getting as much of your clientele in the restaurant anymore, but it got swapped out with them ordering at home. But you're also now giving 25% of that to the delivery partner. So the economics just massively changed, which caused all these shutdowns.

Yeah.

And then also changed football pattern, literally changed football patterns to locations throughout the country because, again, more people just stay at home rather than walking into the restaurant. So we had 4 leases that we had expanded to regionally that we had not yet opened. And in the time from acquiring them to opening them, a lot of this change started to happen in the industry. And then when we did recounts in front of the sites to look at, you know, to what degree does it make sense to continue ahead with these sites, uh, footfall patterns had changed dramatically. And so then we got into a situation where, well, how do we get out? We gotta get rid of these leases now because we can't live in them because they don't— the economics look horrible. But good luck getting rid of leases when you got Pretzel getting rid of, you know, 100 restaurants. Jamie's, you know, everyone's getting rid of leases. And the rent-free periods, and suddenly you start having to pay rent, but now the site's not earning money.

Yeah.

You're overextended on debt. And so you get a perfect storm situation. And then COVID happened and we had actually completed a restructure to survive all of that, which had gone through. And then COVID happened. And in the COVID agreements, CIBILs and all of that, there was a clause that said if your company's been through a restructuring the 12 months prior, you're immediately disqualified from any government funding.

Yeah.

And yeah, that was it. We didn't have a chance thereafter. So in hindsight, what to have done differently? Not raise as much debt for sure. Not expanded so quickly across multiple locations, right, without first getting some like tests and measuring. And then the third thing I would say is take larger— we should have taken larger institutional investing earlier because I think that is a good— it would have, you know, forced us to— we just would have had more support around this.

You'd have had some more gray hairs around the boardroom table.

100%, right? Yeah. Um, and, um, but, you know, having experienced everything from kind of unicorn success at Skype to kind of seeing things go up in smoke, um, and understanding, you know, where I could have done better, um, that in a way I couldn't have anticipated. has been from an experience point of view, again, countering. Yeah, I ended up losing everything with that alongside many investors, but it was literally, for me, it was literally like life savings. Other investors might have invested, if you bought a bond, it's like average investment, I think was like £1,000 or something. So it certainly wasn't life savings. But But it certainly has helped me connect a lot better and help founders and CEOs today having been through those highs and lows.

Let's pick your brains on some of the things that worked. Building a leadership team.

Yeah.

So how long was the journey from start to finish?

13 years.

So during that time, you know, you obviously go from 1 to, I think you said earlier, 17. Did you have 17?

13. 13.

Yeah, 13. You know, the people you had at the beginning, were they the same leadership team at the end? And if not, why not? And what lessons did you learn building leadership teams?

Yeah, well, I forget who said it, but there's a quote, something along the lines of, If you think a professional is expensive, wait until you do business with an amateur. And you get what you pay for when it comes to leadership. And there's a time, of course, in the beginning when you kind of have to make do with whatever you have, but you have to very, very quickly pivot. And you've scaled, I know, a few businesses yourself. You have to very, very quickly pivot. You need to know when is the right time to invest in the professional, right, who is really skilled within their function, rather than trying to get everyone to kind of chip in and just make it all work.

Mm-hmm.

And I think that's a critical point. I think the interview process as well, AI makes this so much easier. Everyone should be asking themselves, especially if you experience a situation where you really struggle with a particular function, let's say, in your leadership team, just pick whatever it might be. We've tried finding a director of operations or a COO, and we're on the 4th one now, or the 5th CFO, or whatever it is, because every company will typically have one of these roles that they really, really struggle with.

Yeah.

And if you just have a conversation with ChatGPT, open book, about here's all the things that we're struggling with, here's all the things that I want to see in this role, can you please help me design an end-to-end interview process from job description to assessment to their first 90 days that will allow me to course correct on the historical here and finally get the right person? And even down to what are the behavioral-based interview questions based on the pain points that you've heard me share that will help uncover the degree to which this person is a good fit or not? What are the right assessments? All of that, super, super critical to find those right people. But I think the main— the biggest problem with leadership and getting that right, I think very often is at the very front end where people underfund the role. And/or have a very poor process for identifying the right talent.

Yes, I'm just— we were helping a client hire a head of revenue. And I got asked to do the final interview.

And I went, no.

And I think because the recruitment process had been done by the team, if you're not an expert in the function, The only thing you can hire for is likability. And so the guy was quite likable, but didn't— was never going to be able to take this company from $1 million to $3 million in the next 12 months, let alone $10 million the year after. So it's just, have we got the right people? Are we asking the right questions? And nobody's ever been hired. Nobody's ever been trained to do interviewing properly.

Yeah. And so there's another—

They wing it.

And there's another fascinating stat too that comes from McKinsey's Global Talent Survey. So, this is especially relevant the higher the complexity of the role.

Mm-hmm.

But when you compare star performers versus average performers in very complex roles, a star performer will have 800% more output than an average performer. Now, this is especially relevant when you think about Well, a star performer might be 2 or even 3x market rates, which might make the person squirm. But what the research shows is that, yeah, but you're going to get a 9x return potentially if it's a highly complex role that you're hiring them for. So, that's, I think, another— And then one more thing, because it's all related to this, getting the right talent. What that doesn't mean is that you need to suddenly expand the budget, because if you look at the top-performing CEOs as well, what they're very, very good at is making sure that they constantly reallocate. And the best CEOs will actually reallocate 6 times more on a percentage basis their annual budget to get it flowing to the highest return people or projects than an average CEO. So meaning the best-performing CEOs don't create extra capital to hire star performers, they reallocate the capital.

Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, and so often you have these, you have siloed budgets and no reallocation, you know, in average performing companies. Somebody's going, no, this is my budget. Leave my budget alone.

Yeah. And they keep doing it and they, you know, they stay on with the same people because they've always been there and they forget the whole, you know, adages and sayings, they exist for a reason. And the whole, you know, what got you here won't get you there applies to people as well. Right.

And so what was the, what was the point in that Chalango journey where you hired your first, um, kind of like senior outsider?

Big move, like hire. Uh, uh, from memory, that was in year, within the first year, I think it was maybe. Yeah.

And what, and what role did you hire them into?

It was an ops director.

Yeah.

Yeah. Um, yeah, ops director.

And are you a, are you a maker or a manager?

Um, I'm, my natural skill set is more on the maker side.

Yeah. Yeah. So that's the, this is your, you are hiring somebody who is a yang to your yin.

Yeah.

Like in the, in the detail, do it every, get it better every day rather than Mean shots.

Yeah, exactly. Um, I'm more excited about making the big kind of, uh, making the big things happen that don't seem possible. Mm-hmm. Um, rather than all the details that need to stay in place to keep whatever that is, you know, performing as, as strongly as possible.

Well, here's the thing you might have seen then. Often I see founders say to me, I think I need to hire a CEO. Because they think that getting on top of the detail and making the trains run on time is a CEO job. And I try really hard to persuade them that what they need is an operations director or a COO and not To give up the— and it comes back to a mindset thing. They feel as though the company's got to whatever size and now it needs professionalizing.

Yeah.

Yeah. It's, I mean, it's, that is a, that's a potential solution to— I would, so I, I would imagine a conversation like that, what underpins it is Something's not happening to their satisfaction when it comes to scale, let's say. And, um, whether they're trying to scale their free time or scale the company's growth or both. And, um, and it's much more powerful, you know, people need to be there for a reason. And it's much more powerful to identify what is the primary constraint that's holding this business back.

Mm-hmm.

And, um, because most, the problem is usually not I don't have the right person in the right role. That could be related to solving the problem, but that's not the primary problem per se because those people need to be doing things. The primary problem is, are you focused on weakening the number one constraint that will unlock growth or not? And are you pursuing that unlock in an organized fashion or are you like the typical founder and CEO? We need to grow sales. What are you doing? Well, we're doing an A/B test on this page here. I've launched a podcast. I'm, uh, I, I'm trying like cold, you know, email outreach over here. And yeah, I hired this content manager to create content and it's just like all over the place. And, and that's, yeah, that, that's the issue.

So, um, yeah.

Yeah.

Um, what, um, What books have been helpful to you on your journey?

A few. So first off, I used to be the world's worst procrastinator. So bad that I bought a set of books on overcoming procrastination in the year 2000, and I didn't read them until 2010. One of those books was The Now Habit by Neil Fiore, and, uh, that literally changed my life. I went from being a procrastinator to a super producer. Literally life-changing. Number 2, um, Five Dysfunctions of a Team by Patrick Lencioni. Game changer in terms of how I managed, uh, leadership teams. And then the 3rd most influential book for me, uh, was Built to Last. Um, and, uh, an old classic. Uh, I'm sure you've read it as well. And, um, yeah, and that was a real eye-opener for me about— they talk about 5, I think it was 5 commonalities shared by the world's most enduring companies at that time in the data set.

Yeah.

And, um, and it was just Yeah. I mean, those 3, because it helped me. The first one helped me optimize myself. The second one, 5 Dysfunctions of a Team, helped me optimize the output of other people. And then the third thing helped me optimize the output and the performance of the company. So those, yeah, very powerful.

The 5 Dysfunctions of a Team.

Yeah.

Did that, what bit of the model was most showing up in your business at the time that Lencioni's model helped you get into?

It was the Conflict and the commitments piece.

The avoidance of conflict.

Yeah, avoidance of conflict. And then, the commitments and the accountability piece there. Yeah, those are— so, there was a lot of artificial harmony in the leadership team basically.

I think Everywhere. And is that— I don't know about Norway, so the— so, but if I think about England and I go, okay, Holland, it starts to get a bit more direct. And then, you know, I've had teams in Bulgaria where it's actually just black and white. Where's Norway on that, on that sort of spectrum of directness?

It's not as direct as The Dutch, I mean, they are like in your face direct. Um, but there's, yeah, there's less sugarcoating though, I would still say than you get maybe in England and, uh, and in, um, is there sugarcoating in the US? In the US, the US can be pretty direct too. You know, it's like—

Well, but it's, yes.

You know, you're fired. Why? Because you are.

But there's, but it, there's a, it's this human trait. I, I like the way the All Blacks, it stabbed me in the belly, not the back. Right. Which is that you want that level of directness if you can, you know, that it's imperative in high-performing teams to have that level of Yeah. Directness.

Dominic, I need to shoot for another call here. Is there anything that you want to say to wrap things up here?

Is there one other thing, one nugget from your coaching experience that you'd like to share before we leave you?

Yeah. The last thing I would say is that You know, anybody listening or watching, you know right now that there's something you should probably be doing that is critical for your growth and development, whether the, the company or, or yourself, and you're not doing it. And you're, you're not doing it for a myriad of reasons. And rather than get caught up in what those things are, just have the courage and be bold enough to just do whatever that thing is. So, um, Good to see you again.

Eric, that's brilliant. Thank you very much indeed. Good to see you.

All right, speak soon. Thanks, Dom. See you.

Bye-bye.