In this motivational panel, host Evan Carmichael and guests—including Will Smith, John Paul DeJoria, Richard Branson, and Amy Jo Kim—discuss why people, not products or technology, are the true engine of business growth. Will Smith shares his personal shift from a product‑focused, win‑at‑all‑costs mindset to a people‑first approach after becoming a father, describing how this opened new creative possibilities. Evan emphasizes that entrepreneurs often limit themselves by trying to do everything themselves; he illustrates how hiring a small team allowed his YouTube channel to scale from one video a week to three videos a day, freeing him to focus on his “Michael‑Jordan‑level” talent. John Paul DeJoria explains his people‑first culture at John Paul Mitchell Systems—free lunches, profit‑sharing, low turnover, and treating employees the way they’d like to be treated—showing how this drives loyalty across 96 countries. Richard Branson stresses that genuine care for every employee, from executives to cleaning staff, is the key leadership skill. Amy Jo Kim argues that in the game industry, the quality of teams outweighs any IP or technology, and she highlights a gap between belief in this principle and its adoption by shareholders and boards. Throughout, the panel stresses hiring, delegation, and cultural practices as essential levers for unlocking limitless growth, ending with a call for viewers to identify the next task they can hand off to accelerate their own impact.
Chapters
It took a couple of years, but as soon as I got knocked off of product and started shifting to people, the whole world opened up.
And if you can do everything in your business and you can do it yourself, then your mission isn't big enough.
If my people go, my God, the company goes. People are your company.
Rise and shine, it's Enspresso time. Good morning, Believe Nation, it's Evan. My one word is believe, and I believe in you. I believe you have an amazing gift inside inside you that I want to see explode out onto the world. So grab your coffee and sip on today's message: Focus on the People. Over to you, Will Smith. I wake up every morning, espresso keep me going. I wake up every morning.
I've always been really product-oriented, you know, it's like I want to win. When I do something, I want to win. I want it to be number one, and I want to smash it. And I had a period— you know, I have a daughter now. I have a 15-year-old daughter, and she really— she got me and shifted my focus from product to people. It took a couple of years, but as soon as I got knocked off of product and started shifting to people, the whole world opened up for me again, and acting opened up in a whole— new way, to not go into day one of a movie trying to figure out what everybody has to do so we win versus opening up and every person's a new— it's a whole new world.
Do you mean the characters you play or the people you work with?
Both. You know, generally when I went into a product, when I went into a meeting with a director, my focus was, can this guy win? Can this girl win? And that it was a, you know, it was a pathology that got broken for me a couple of years ago. And then releasing that and just wanting to connect with people and wanting to grow and wanting to get new ideas and have new experiences that don't have to have an outcome. It just opened up a whole new world for me and I fell in love. And then I couldn't imagine what else I could do in acting that could add so much to my life. Other than acting.
If you want to go fast, you go alone. If you want to go far, you go with the team. I think this is something that really holds a lot of entrepreneurs back, is they think they can do everything themselves. And if you can do everything in your business and you can do it yourself, then your mission isn't big enough. You're letting yourself down. You are capable of so much more than what you're currently doing because you are unwilling to bring on a team. You have Michael Jordan-level talent at something, But chances are you're only spending 5 to 10% of your day every day actually doing the thing that you are world-class at. And the other 90 to 95% of the time you're spent doing all the other stuff around your business that maybe you're good at, but it's not what you have Michael Jordan level talent, what you were born to do. And so you need to expand your team. You need to bring people on to help you. I look at this YouTube channel as an example. In my early days, I was doing everything myself. And I think that's a good thing. I think at the beginning you need to do everything yourself. I hate spending money on things before I'm making money. I was doing everything myself. I was in front of the camera, I was behind the camera, I was editing, I was researching, I was doing everything. Thumbnails, titles, tags, everything. And I made one video a week. That was my max output with everything else that I was doing. I was making one video a week. And then as I brought on people to help me, as my business started to grow, I was starting to make a little bit of money. I put that right back into my company and I hired a team. And I started with one person and then expanded to two and three and four, and there's eight of us now who work on this YouTube channel. And by bringing on a team, I'm able to just go so much further. I get to spend my time doing the work that I love. I get to spend my time in front of the camera. I get to spend my time still reviewing all the videos that go up. I get to spend my time hiring and coaching my team, and they take care of everything else. And that's allowed me to go from 1 video a week to 3 videos a day. I'm able to have a much greater impact on you guys, on my mission. I'm able to create a lot more content that I am proud of because I'm not spending only 5 to 10% of my time doing the thing that I love to do. So like I said at the beginning, I think you should do everything yourself. Find a way to make any kind of money possible and then invest that back. And when you bring the people on your team, Understand it doesn't have to cost a lot of money or anything at the beginning. In the early days of my business, I had interns work for me. I had free interns come from high schools to get credit for their course. I had international students come for credit so that they can go back home and say that they worked in Canada. I had people working part-time for me, 1, 2, 3 hours a day so that they could take some of the things off my plate. You don't have to go and drop $50K on somebody to be able to build your business. You can use a lot of the labor and the friends and the community that you have around you to help you get started. I like starting at the beginning, everything by myself, just to understand how things work, to understand what I have talents and abilities and a real deep passion interest in, and the things I don't, quickly offload them to people who love doing those things, attracting the right teammates for free at the beginning, paying a little bit as you go, and then as you start making more money, as they're contributing more back to you, Right? As I brought on my team, I can go to 1 video a day, and then 2 a day, and then 3 a day. That allows me to have a bigger impact, that allows me to make more money, to then bring that and invest it back into the channel to make even better videos. You should see what's coming. I got some such surprises. I'm so pumped and excited by it. And it all starts with that mindset that you can go fast by yourself, but you can go far as a team. And I know a lot of people get burned. I know a lot of people make mistakes in their first hire. A lot of people bring on somebody whether it's paid or whether it's an internship, and it doesn't work out. And you spend a lot of time training them and it doesn't work out. And a lot of people then retreat back and they say, well, that didn't work out. I'm never hiring anybody again. I could just do it myself. I know it's going to work out. And as long as you adopt that mindset, you're going to stay small. Chances are the reason why that first thing didn't work out, that first hire, is because you suck at hiring and you suck at managing. And that's okay, because at the beginning you suck at everything. Whatever you're doing in your business, the first time you tried it, you sucked at it. So don't expect to be great at hiring the first person that comes in. Don't expect to be great at managing somebody the first time you try. You're going to make mistakes. Look at any successful company. Look at their foundation. Very, very, very rarely is the first employee for that company still around a year later, 2 years later, 10 years later, 20 years later. They don't stick around because the entrepreneurs, they messed up. And so that's part of the journey. You will mess up. You will make bad hires. You will suck at managing. And as you get more experience and as you learn and as you get better yourself, you will develop the skills to be able to do it. And it's important because your mission is big and you cannot do this alone. Now I've got some special bonus clips for you, but before that, my question of the day is, I'm curious, what is the next thing in your business that you are going to hand off to somebody else to really accelerate your growth so you could focus on what you have Michael Jordan level talent at? What is that thing you're gonna delegate away? Leave it down in the comments below. I really wanna hear from you. Thank you guys so much for watching. I believe in you. I hope you continue to believe in yourself and whatever your one word is. Much love, enjoy the bonus clip, and I'll see you again tomorrow morning for another shot of espresso.
<LYRICS>I wake up every morning, espresso keep me going.</LYRICS> When I worked for other companies, some of them, not to mention any names, were so bad. They would treat people the old way. I'm the boss. Here's what you're going to do because I'm the boss, right? Or there were times, for example, when maybe you had a dollar for lunch. You can't get a lot for a dollar. So I just knew that that's how I was. And if I had a company that I had control of, by gosh, everyone was going to be treated the way I wanted to be treated. So the minute we could afford it, everyone had free lunch. Whether you had money or not, you have free lunch. We pay for it for you. Carpool will pay for that. So we started doing things for people that I wish happened to me. Maybe that's part of fate. Maybe because a lot of things along the way weren't so good, right? That as things started getting good, it was so easy for me to share with our people. So easy to do that. People sometimes don't save money. As soon as we possibly could afford it, we started profit sharing where at the end of every year, and we'll take that profit sharing and put in a retirement fund for you. It's yours. It's yours. You're here so many years, it goes with you no matter where you go, but it's yours. That's your money.
That's really incredible. How much do you think that that sort of golden rule approach has fed into your ridiculously low turnover rate, which is literally almost unprecedented? I mean, that's crazy.
I try and treat people exactly the way they'd want to be treated, exactly the way I would have wanted to be treated. I'm happy with my people. I realize my people are the company. If my people go, my God, the company goes. People are your company and they take care of the customer. The customer is always right no matter what. So what do we do so the customer's happier? If somebody's unhappy, we try and discover why. And because you treat people this way and we love them, you walk in our company, it's love. If you go to the front desk here in Century City, this girl just has the biggest smile saying, "Hi, welcome to John Paul Mitchell Systems." She loves what she does. Our big problem is we don't have turnover. We have so many people want to work for us, and the thing is you got to wait for somebody to die. Now, as we grow, we'll add one or two on, obviously, at a time.
Sure.
And we're pretty big now because we're in 96 countries. It's how you take care of people anywhere in the world. You don't boss them around. You include them in what you're doing.
The key to, I think, being a good business leader is, is your— is how good you are with people. I think if you can care, genuinely care about people, um, uh, not just your fellow directors, but, you know, the cleaning lady, the switchboard operator, you know, everybody throughout the company. You know, if you praise and don't criticize, um, uh, you know, people, people will flourish. Um, and, uh, so I think, you know, it, it, it's really your people skills that will set you apart, and, and I don't think that can be overemphasized. I think you just got to You know, if I'm on a Virgin plane, I will make sure that I always have a notebook in my back pocket. You know, make sure I get out and talk to all the staff. You know, if they've got issues, make sure I don't just hear the issue and not write it down. Make sure those issues get written down. You know, talk to the passengers. If they've got issues, make sure those issues get written down.
Who in this audience believes without a shred of doubt that nothing, not technology, not IP, not patents, not trademarks, not brands, not relationships, not any asset of a game company is worth more to our company's success than the quality of our teams. If you believe that without a shred of doubt, raise your hand. Okay, a lot of hands. That's awesome. Now raise your hand if that sounds idealistic. You believe it in your heart. You want to believe it, but your mind is just kind of full of questions. Those other things are pretty important.
Okay, good.
We're pretty sure of this, which is great. Um, now lastly, raise your hand if your company, your shareholders, your boardrooms all believe this and internalize it the same way you do without a shred of doubt. Okay. A lot less hands. Um, Now, you know, this is where I think we have a problem as an industry. Because until we all agree, until all stakeholders fully believe in the value of our people, then we struggle to prioritize what really matters. And it's going to hold us back as an industry from, you know, our full potential.
So let me give you the one word secret to happiness. One word. This is all you need to be happy.
The most important word.
Ever. If you had to think of one word that's most important to you or that sums you up or that would be kind of like a little beacon. Hey, Believe Nation, if you want to know what the most important one word is for Tony Robbins, Gary Vaynerchuk, Oprah Winfrey, will.i.am, and Howard Schultz, I have a very special secret video for you. Check the description for details.
