Our Top 27 Business Growth Lessons around Leadership and Management

In this clip, we are going to talk about the 27 most important leadership and management tips from the last 365 days. But before we do, if you like clips like this, whether you are on podcast or on video, don't forget to subscribe if you like business and marketing stuff and maybe some bonus stuff too. So without further ado, let's go ahead and jump into it.

Without people, you're not going to grow your business. Elon Musk did not make Tesla. He did not make SpaceX. He did not make PayPal, any of these companies successful. Yes, he's awesome. He's smart. He's brilliant. And he's helped these companies succeed. But it's the team. Without good leadership, without good people on your team, you're not going to build a big business. Everyone forgets that. It's not just about tactics. It's not just about marketing. It's not just about sales. It's not about product. It's not about design. It's about everything combined. But you can't do it all. The only way you're going to have a successful business is if you hire A players.

We have a personality test that we have people on our team take. It's called the Gallup StrengthsFinder, and it basically helps you measure the top 5 traits. We did this with the lead team. We did this with other people on the team. For me, my top trait after going through a test is about 45 minutes or so. It said my top trait is being a futurist, right? Which just means I always like looking ahead. Like I'm always thinking about next. As an owner of the company, A, I have to be the most optimistic. B, I have to be the most pessimistic at the same time. So I have to kind of balance the both of them. And then the second one was I'm an activator, right? It also said like I tend to be impatient.

Like I just want to get things done. And that's very true.

So when you share these personality tests with your team, then they start to understand how you are. After working with you, they understand who you are. That's just one part of it, but actually being able to measure you, that's really powerful. Once you're able to see these kind of top 5 traits, you can learn what drives people, and you can also ask those people too, kind of what drives them. And if you want to take it one step further as well, you can also use the DISC assessment, the Tony Robbins one, and I also did another one called the Myers-Briggs. It gives you an idea of kind of who you are. You should oftentimes not try to spoon-feed the answer to your team members. The reason for that is this: you talk about teaching someone how to fish or feeding them fish all the time, like, what's better at the end of the day? Long-term, it's better to teach them how to fish. And if you're trying to feed them answers all the time, if you're the manager, you're feeding them all the answers all the time, how are you going to have the time to do what you need to do to succeed? That's why long-term, like, you know, it's better. But short-term, when you're coaching people, you're not giving them the answers, it's actually harder. Like sometimes when you just want to give them the answers, it actually just solves the problem right there, like temporarily, but they're going to come back to you. It's going to be this vicious cycle where they keep asking you for more questions over and over and you have to keep solving their problem. At that point, why even have them on the team? They're there to help you take the load off your shoulders so you can do other things. That's why when you coach them, you ask them the right questions. They can figure things out for themselves eventually, and they become very self-sufficient.

Ultimate culture is just simply who you hire, right? And so for us, when we're going through the hiring process, we are looking for people that are like us. We want people that are super humble, that work hard, that are super smart, that simply have a results-oriented attitude, that are very team-oriented. They don't, they don't have that's not my job in their vocabulary, that don't believe in a 9-to-5 work set. Like, they, they They don't mind coming in at 10, 11, but they also don't mind working 10, 11 at night, right? And so the very first thing from a culture perspective is hiring the right people. If you try to, you know, shoehorn a square peg into a circle hole, they're just not going to be a good fit for the team. And so before we hire anybody, we make sure we go to lunch with them, we make sure to bring them in for a day. Some of them are working 2, 3 weeks with us before we finally pull the trigger.

If you, if you can get people in the early days that can just do the work but maybe aren't necessarily a fit down the road, I think you roll the dice on these people or roll the die on these people. Because Sam Altman from Y Combinator, one of my friends actually asked him the question because he's in a YC batch. So, their incubator. And they were having trouble. They're like, man, this person is really, really good, but they're totally not a cultural fit. And Sam gave him really deep advice or direct advice. He just said, hey, look, if you can fire this person quickly, go for it. Like, make the hire, let them do the work, fire them quickly.

Charlie Munger, Warren Buffett's partner, said incentives are like the main driver It's everything, right? So how are you gonna keep people for the long term? You know, can you add in bonuses? Are you gonna give them raises? You know, there's obviously different types of compensation that you can do. And so this is why I'm constantly thinking about incentives, right? It's like, because people are the main thing at any type of company. And, you know, how do you incentivize your people to stay for the long term? Are there benefits you can add too? So I'm constantly looking at, you know, what type of incentive agreements people are doing. Like Basecamp has a really good unit incentive agreement. There's equity you can do too. There's just a lot of different things you can do. But the one thing that's gonna harm you is if you don't think about incentives. Because, you know, if you have to keep switching people in and out every single year, then that's a problem, right? 'Cause then you have to stop, retrain, stop, retrain. People move on and then, you know, what if the next person's not as good as the one that left? So it's in your best interest, your incentive is to make sure you give people really good training. And think about, you know, their growth for the long term.

You got to have an idea of where things are at. The people that are too hands-off, they don't have these systems in place to kind of keep things moving. That's when the wheels kind of start to fall off and people start to just automatically say, okay, I'm done with this. I'm too burnt out. Especially if people are working for you, you can't expect them to work at your level. Like me, for me, I love working all the time. I think about work all the time. That doesn't mean other people are the same way, right? Like I know people, CEOs, leaders of companies, just because they work, you know, 100-hour weeks or so, They feel it's okay to call people on the weekend, Skype them, whatever, text them on the weekend, get them to do stuff. For me, I think it's important to establish those boundaries because not everybody's like you.

In the beginning, you should clearly, as best as you can, lay out the roles and responsibilities, right? And that way everybody has a clear idea of their value add because I feel like that's important, right? Sometimes it feels bad if you don't— if personally you don't feel like you're adding value to the company. And I think Getting all that out in the beginning and recognizing each other for each other's value-add is important. So communication is a huge piece of it. When it gets tough, you'll see people's true character come out, right?

Yeah, but I think it's establishing those rules and those criteria and then being able to move forward from that, right?

It's almost like you have to overcommunicate in the beginning. It's no different than a relationship with, you know, outside of work, like, you know, with your significant other.

Communication is key, and that's no different than, you know, in So a lot of growth happens through acquisition, but here's one of the things that he said that's really stuck with me. Whenever someone joins, one, number one, they don't do golden handcuffs. So they just give them all the money for the company right away. Because a lot of times you get acquired, they're like, now you have to stay.

Mm-hmm.

Number 2 is that everyone becomes a co-founder. And I was like, that's really interesting. I was like, you make them a co-founder, don't you want the— you're the founder, you started this, it's yours, it's mine. And he's like, number one, I don't care at the end of the day. I want the company to do well. And 2, I want them to be a co-founder in the business. And it's actually stuck with me where the more that you can have founders working at your company and people running businesses, those are the people that are looking for change and improvement and growth and not to be an employee. And so the more that you can actually have that at your business, the more likely you're gonna have a bunch of people looking to grow your business to be very large.

It's okay to take risk. So many companies are risk-averse today. They're so trying to be safe and politically correct that in fact what happens with their marketing is it ends up being the edges aren't sharp anymore. They're so rounded that you really don't communicate anything, and it's not really breakthrough.

Mm-hmm.

So one of the things we were really good at was taking calculated risk and being okay with failure. So we always had the saying, if you're gonna fail, fail fast, fail smart, and fail cheap. So don't have this thing go on forever. Make sure you learn from it, and don't put all your eggs in one basket from a, you know, spend standpoint. Diversify that out, but test new things. We were always taking 10% of our budget and trying new stuff with it. And a lot of times that 10% paid off like jackpots because you had a small investment in something that was high risk, high reward, and you would— it would pay out and you would have all the benefits of that without, you know, enveloping your entire program in this risk.

Trello is a simple free product where everyone within the company, they just go and put their ideas. Then as a team, we just start selecting which ones we want to implement. You get them up within a day. If you can't get them up within a day or 2, that means your experiments are too big. You should try to pick smaller ones, and then you can start seeing the results. The reason you also want to do smaller experiments is you don't know if things are going to work or not. The last thing you want to do is spend 6 months doing something that you don't know will work, run it as an experiment. You just spent thousands, if not hundreds and thousands of dollars, and wasted months worth of time doing something that's just taking you down the wrong way.

Your team is the most important asset that you have. Sure, you know, people say, you know, customers are the most important, but without your team you cannot serve your customers well. So it's important to think that your team is happy, they're getting what they need. When we see people are spending too much time, it's really easy for us to monitor, see how much time people are spending. It's important to talk to them and say, hey, how are you feeling right now? Sometimes we tell people to take a day off. Sometimes we, you know, we'll book them to, you know, a nice dinner with their significant other. Other times we might say, hey, just go take a vacation or something like that. Super important to have an idea, a pulse on kind of what's going on. If you're not a services-based company, And you don't focus on tracking time. Well, okay, great. You can use a tool like 15Five just to see kind of where people are at. And you can use one-on-ones too. One-on-ones are super important just to see, okay, the agenda is what's on their mind, and then you're kind of getting a sense of where they're at psychologically. And then also talking about kind of what's on your plate too, right? But it's more about them than it is about you.

If you just force learning down people's throat, most people won't do it. You gotta Figure out ways that jive with people's personality so that they want to do it. Because if they don't want to do it, they're not going to spend the time. They're not going to digest information. They're not going to put into practice what they've learned. So we've had some people who say, hey, I prefer learning through videos like the Lindas, the Skillshares, or whatever those sites are out there where you can just subscribe and you get all these videos. For those people, you want to give them the subscription. For the people who are like, hey, I prefer the in-person stuff. You may want to consider lunch and learns or you want to consider local events or conferences. You got to figure out what jives with your team members and figure out how to adapt it in there. Now, not everything is going to be feasible. For example, if everyone says, yeah, we want to go to conferences, well, it adds up. If you had to send your whole team to conferences, you may have to pay for flights, hotel, the conference ticket expense. It really adds up. So that could be something that you do over time where you rotate who gets to go each quarter, each year. But more so, the biggest point I'm coming across is you got to figure out what jives with your team members and adapt the learning to them.

In terms of creating a step-by-step marketing plan that actually works, the methodology I recommend is this book that's called Traction. So this is called the Entrepreneur's Operating System and you might be thinking, well, you know, that's great for entrepreneurs, but I'm a marketer. It's totally fine. Like it's a system that works. If it works for entrepreneurs, it probably works for marketers too. You're looking to work off of a system to make it predictable, and then you're following that system every single week, every single quarter, and it makes your life a lot easier. So the Traction System, okay, the book is by Gino Wickman. It's really good because every single week with my teams we have these meetings and it all follows a certain format, right? It's like going to the gym. You go to the gym, maybe one day you're doing arms, one day you're doing chest, one day you're doing legs, right? And one day you're just doing cardio, but you have a system that you're following and you're being consistent with it. What happens is when you start to fall off of it, your results start to get worse, right? And it's the same thing that happens with business too. So you gotta have some system you can follow, whether it's Traction, there's another one called Scaling Up. Scaling Up is one that you can also follow as well. And what is really cool too is that every 90 days there's a cadence where you say, okay, we're gonna do an offsite. The offsite is let's talk through these issues, let's talk through some new initiatives that we have going on, let's talk through vision. And the offsite, sometimes it is gonna take the entire day. Sometimes it might take 2 days, but then you're planning for the next quarter. And at the end of each year you do the offsite and you're planning, you're doing annual planning for the next year. You do this for your business, you do this for your marketing team too. That's the first step. That's how you can decide where you want to go. You set these goals for yourself every 90 days because 90 days is a good cadence to follow. 90 days just goes by really quickly.

Having your pulse on, on the customer and, and like trends and things happening in industry that can get lost and that's actually really hard, you know, easier said than done. And so, I think for us, we've kind of developed internal processes, workflows, and devoted human resources to that area alone. So we have, you know, George, who used to be our VP of Ops, but now he's our VP of Market Intelligence Strategy. And like, you know, doing that, it'll reduce the chances of you ever getting surprised by like another competitor coming in with some innovation, or like you want to make sure you stay ahead of all that.

One mistake I really made Was taking on the wrong type of clients, and I'm sure we've all made this mistake. The money's good, but you kind of you know when talking to you're at the closing state of a deal, and the client just kind of sounds like it's not the best fit. Say no. I always now look for red flags in the client. We actually have three or four different questions or things that we look for. One is their personality, and can they work with our team? Two is are they are they okay to when they— when you give pushback. Because frankly, when a client works with you, they're not looking— they're looking for you to give them feedback.

Right.

You're supposed to be better at them than— at marketing than they are. But if they start really being hard to work with or not taking that pushback well, it's kind of a sign of a bad client. And then lastly, it's their attitude. I think that some clients just like to berate. There's certain personalities that just don't work. But I look for like, are they gonna be an asshole? And I don't want to take on any asshole clients, no matter how much they pay. And every time I've broken this rule, and every few years I break this rule, 'cause it's like, it's the brand that's great, or like something, something good that's like, okay, maybe I'll break this rule. I kick myself in the butt because it always, it always comes back to like, don't take on bad clients.

Back in my days where I was leading marketing at an online education startup called Treehouse, this is when I was what, I don't know, 26 years old. I had no idea what was going on. And I was only one, one minute, one month into the job. And what happened was our revenues were flat for the last 2 years and we were not hitting numbers.

We're flat, flat, flat. Okay.

We only had a couple of months of cash left in the bank. And one month into my job where we were kind of in trouble and I was promoted into my role, the CEO pulled me aside and said, hey, we're going to have to let you go if you don't hit numbers this month. Totally.

Like, I was like, oh, what do I do? You know, I don't even know what to do.

Hmm.

But what I did was this, at the time I knew that we had to pause all of our ad spend. I paused all of our ad spend and then I audited what we were doing at the time. So don't feel like you need to jump into things quickly. Take a look at what you're doing, pause what you're doing, take a step back and then start to analyze.

Okay.

And then from there, if you start to see some trends, you start to see some opportunities, go ahead and start betting. At the time I paused everything and I literally saw some trends within our analytics around YouTube advertising. And I bet everything on YouTube advertising and it ended up working out. And now they are a very healthy company. So that's just one example. And I'm just giving you a couple of tactics just for that case, but that's a framework you can use.

Focus on one metric. Each person on your team, have them focus on one metric that will drive the business forward. So let's say you have someone that focuses on SEO, have them focus purely on how they increase organic traffic week over week. You have a social media manager, Have them focus on engagement on one channel that's most important to your business, one social media channel. By having each person on your team focus on one metric, what you'll see is you're gonna cut out the noise and focus on what's most important for your business, and you're gonna accelerate growth.

You have to look at the numbers. If you don't look at the numbers, you're gonna be screwed, because if you run it, you can, you can kinda get away from this, get away with this as a freelancer or consultant where you're just kind of haphazardly doing things. But if you don't look at the numbers, you have people that you're responsible for. Also, you're paying for costs such as rent for this place, and we signed a 5-year lease for this place. Like, we're stuck here. So, um, you have to look at the numbers. So what do I mean by that? Like, each week, like, let's say with our sales team, we'll look at the pipeline, new pipeline added. We'll look at the conversion rates, how many new sales we added, how many potential deals we're going to close, how many qualified leads. And we're constantly looking at the funnel too. Where are people dropping off the most and what can we fix?

Right?

So, you know, we look at it from like a sales and marketing perspective. How can we continue to optimize the sales funnel, the marketing funnel as well, and also look at the numbers around expenses? How can we keep expenses down? Um, and then also how can we also spend some of that money if we have extra money to bonus people, right? If we're doing really well, we've got to bonus people too. So it's, you know, kind of manipulating the numbers to make sure that your company is performing really well. If you're looking to build out a marketing plan and you're working with people remotely, You gotta have some type of collaboration with people, 'cause you're not in an office, you're not saying, hey, what do you think about this? You're not having that ability to collaborate quickly, but when you're doing video, video takes it one step further, right? Which is why I always recommend using some form of video chat too. So whether it's Zoom or Skype, you can even use Slack video chat too if you're paying for it. It seems like a really basic thing to recommend, but video chat is when we work from home, everybody, we do a Brady Bunch style, right? And it's really important that we all are showing our faces, 'cause we're all bought in. Because if one person or two people decide not to show their faces, then everyone decides they can do that. You know, we're starting to, you know, send a negative message that we can make exceptions, right? If you start to make exceptions for one person, you start to make exceptions for everyone. So this is more like a cultural thing, but it does flow over into how great work is being done. So keep that in mind.

We do 2 trips a year to Seattle, and this is a great time for us to just sort of kick back.

Why Seattle?

So it's the middle of Austin and it's 100 degrees. It's a great time to get to Seattle. For those that don't know, Seattle is like the best-kept secret in America. summer, right? It's like 70 degrees and sunny for 100 days straight. There's like sailboats everywhere. We went out there and we ended up renting 2 Airbnbs, one in the woods. We spent a couple days there just hiking and doing some, some bonfires, enjoying ourselves. And then we did another 3 days in the actual city where we went out and, and just partied together. And, you know, when you're, when you're spending, you know, that much time together, that's really like when you get to know someone. Like, you can be working and it's like all about work, but once you get out of the office and like You're having like more personal conversations. You're able to bring that, you know, that unity back into the office.

We do a lunch and learn every Thursday. Someone will give a speech. The teams, everyone on the team, whether they're in marketing or not, is learning something new. In addition to that, you know, they're all getting free lunch. So they're having a blast because free food, plus they're all learning something that we feel is important to them.

For me, culture is what your employees say about you and the company. when you're not there. Picture, you know, a couple employees hanging out on a Friday night having a beer or whatever, and their friend— they bump into a friend and the friend's like, oh, you're working at SnackNation now. What's SnackNation all about? Culture is how do they— what's the feeling that they have inside of them when they're describing what SnackNation is all about? And are they incredibly enthusiastic about it and they love it? Or do they have kind of this like downtrodden, you know, depressed kind of like—

Right.

job, or no, you know, Snack Nation or wherever they're working, it's my lifestyle, I have friends there, like how they light up and how they feel about it. That's, to me, that's what culture is.

We create a group. You can do it on Slack or any communication platform you want. We use Skype, and by adding everyone in there, every time— and our group's called Did You Know?— and anytime there's an interesting stat or study or something changed in marketing, People share it in there and we do that constantly on a day-to-day basis. So everyone's continually learning. And what we found is by making that group active, I participated in it. Mike, my other co-founder, participates in it. It gets the other team members also participating and everyone is continually learning more and more.

What I do with reference checks, without going too far into this, is I ask them on a scale of 1 to 10, how would you compare this person to their peers? And in some cases, sometimes I've gotten like, you know, glowing review and all that but it's like a 7. That's when you know there's a problem. Well, why is it not a 10? And then they start to get deeper and deeper and deeper and then what I ask after that is, hey, who else do you know that I should be talking to? And then they give another second-order reference and then you can get the real feedback again just like the indirect feedback.

I think with the ego, what it made me realize is like, what do you really want to accomplish, right? And does the title really make that much of a difference for you? And I think the ones where you're doing that, it's like, okay, that's obviously, I think, misguided. Because you have a title, but if your business sucks— that's why I think most people shouldn't be calling themselves CEO right away. I don't think anyone should be called— unless your business is making a million bucks a year in profit, don't call yourself CEO.

When I first started Single Grain, our blog was only getting 4,000 visits a month. So we weren't doing a good job. And but like all the work that we put in, it's like, we got to do this. Okay, we got to try this. We got to do this content. I got to hire this person. I got to let go of this person. And we gotta move fast, fast, fast, right? It's on you if you are, let's say you're a leader, let's say you are the owner of the company, sorry my lights just turned off. But it's on you to kinda keep things pushing, right? Because if you don't push, other people aren't gonna push. 'Cause it's your thing at the end of the day, or it's kind of your KPIs, or key persistent, key performance indicators that you need to hit, so you gotta be the one that's pushing. Alright, so I hope you enjoyed those tips. Let me know in the comments which one you enjoyed the most and which one you actually plan on implementing. And again, don't forget to rate, review, and subscribe whatever platform you are on. And we will see you tomorrow.