In this conversational coaching session, Jacqueline Elliott and a co‑speaker explore why building a high‑performing team is the essential secret to scaling a business, contrasting the myth of solo success with the reality that "if you want to go far, go together." They outline their expertise in culture creation, hiring, and retaining talent, emphasizing that a strong team outperforms any individual skill set. The dialogue delves into common leadership pitfalls: promoting top salespeople into leadership roles without the necessary teaching ability, making decisions driven by ego rather than impact, and the danger of becoming a "professional babysitter" who cannot step away from day‑to‑day operations. A major focus is the "golden handcuff syndrome," first described as employees staying in high‑pay roles despite stagnation, then re‑emerged when owners become dependent on a few high‑revenue producers. The speakers illustrate this with a case study of "Alex," a top‑producing but disengaged employee whose behavior threatens culture and morale. They challenge listeners to weigh profit against culture, identify tolerable toxic behaviors, and develop processes that foster true leadership rather than reliance on isolated star performers. Throughout, the tone is energetic, persuasive, and occasionally confrontational, urging immediate action to reshape hiring, leadership development, and cultural norms.
Chapters
So if you want to go fast, and we've talked about this with the last case study, right? If you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together. Okay, so we're always talking about, you know, we're nothing without the team, right? Nobody can beat us because of our team. Like, we build our team, and so we're good at culture building, we're really good at hiring, we're really good at recruiting, we're really good at keeping our people. We're really good at empowering them. That's what. That's our bread and butter. That's how. That's what people are missing today.
Well, if anybody's going to. If anybody's going to build anything big, I don't care how good you are, an individual can be beat, but a team can't be beat. If you're better than me at a skill, but I have a better team than you, I'm gonna kick your ass. And so the goal is, whoever has the best team wins. Remember, it doesn't matter how good you are. It matters how great your team is. That's the only thing that matters. And so many people, they just want to be great, but their teams aren't that great. And that's why they'll never get where they want to go. So, like, this isn't a solo sport in business. It's a team sport. And so whoever can build the best team wins. And I just want to say, like, as she's saying this, in order to never let your team outgrow you, you must keep changing and never change your back. The fastest way to lose everything you have in your life is to stop changing and get comfortable. You'll look up and all those people you once inspired will all be gone. I am a sales boss. I am a sales leader. I live, eat, sleep, and breathe sales. Sales is the free enterprise system. Sales equals freedom. Sales equals commissions. Sales equals growth. Sales feeds 3% of the world, which are sales people feed the other 97%. Nothing happens until something gets sold. If you ever want to get rich, sales and leadership, period, you learn those two things. You could be an absolute idiot in this room. Learn sales and leadership, and you get rich.
And so we talk about building, building a team.
Yeah, but so you have to build the teams. If you want to do something really big, right? Like if you want to be cool, that's awesome. Go build a social media channel. But if you want to build a business and you want to get rich, build a team.
We're going to Freaking shake your ass until you change. That's, that's us. Okay, so next question. Does your leadership team make decisions based on ego or impact? So we realize this too. We had the example of Sarah. When we would promote people, most of the times would be put people that are high driven salespeople in, into leadership positions and they're not meant to be leaders.
They'll sink your company.
They will sink the company. They want to teach people how they learned, but not everybody learns the same. So what happens? It creates a big, big disconnect and they actually will sink the company because they're meant to be high drivers in sales, not necessarily to be leaders. They can't teach it. You know?
Yeah, when I was younger, I was a really good showman, you know, like a showman, like I could show off, right? And so, like I could go sell. Like if you couldn't close something, like, I'll go close it. I'll close it in front of everybody. I'll shut every deal down. I don't know how I did it. I couldn't replicate it. If you wanted me to go teach you, like, I will go show you that I can do it, but I don't really know what I'm doing. And just when I get there, I'm really good at pressure, so I'll make it happen. And so like that I was not a good leader. Because if Jackie said, I need you to train these 10 people how you close those deals, I honestly have no idea how I close them. I would just tell you. I walk in, I build rapport, I make them laugh. My words have weight. It happens. What does that mean tactically? How does that happen? I have no idea. So I could not be the leader. I could be the number one performer in that company, but I didn't need to be in charge of teaching other people. And then Jackie started breaking down how I was closing.
Well, I told you, professional babysitter, sitter. Basically, if you don't, if you don't build leaders, if you're in a leadership position and you're stuck doing all this stuff and then you try to go on vacation or you leave and then you see everybody sinking because they need you there all the time to make the money, then you've become a professional babysitter. You don't have a sustainable business, you don't have anything like that. So I was telling them, hey, if you really want to build a good life, you're going to have to create new leaders. But those leaders that you think deserve that leadership position sometimes don't because, because they can't talk to people, they can't relate to people, they don't understand, they're hot headed, they're reactive. You know, we need somebody that really understands and can teach, not just be that showman that he's talking about. So, so it's so important. Ask yourself, you know, and, and your leadership team that you have now, do they want to prove a point? Are they doing it? Having every person in mind when you make decisions, like you have to see what tool that you bring in is going to benefit every single person in the organization, how it's going to save you time, how it's going to save you money, how it's going to make money, you know, systems and processes. As you get new ideas in there, you're going to have to see how it's going to make that impact and not just make a quick sale here or there. You know, what behaviors do you tolerate that you shouldn't? We're going to go into another scenario and then we're going to go into a definition of the golden handcuff syndrome, which we have had before. Golden handcuff. And I'm going to explain a little bit more about what that means in a minute. But we had golden handcuffs when we were employees. We're very high producers. We had really good pay plans, we had the benefits, we had the health insurance, we had the demos, the cars, all the stuff, all the nice stuff. As employees, when you see your boss or you see certain things happening, you kind of put up with certain things because like, man, I can't lose my job because I have all this stuff and now I've accumulated all this debt and I've had these benefits. We have the key kids. How are we going to do this? So you keep your mouth kind of shut, right? You have the golden handcuff system. You're tied into a salary, right? And you're not growing because of that salary. When we start our business, we said, hey, you know what, we're not going to have the golden handcuff syndrome anymore. We're going to break free and we try to find a place that we can find that loyalty, that we can find people that didn't lie to us and we can have all this stuff. And we looked for the right place. Like we couldn't find it personally, we couldn't. So we had to build it, right? And he said, if you don't find it, build it. But, well, like we're not never going to have the golden handcuff syndrome anymore. So what happened is later on we had hired the first people that we hired in our team. They showed up and they basically were making all the money, right? They were making. They were the highest, highest revenue producers. And then we realized that they were the ones that weren't attending the meetings. We realized that we're the ones that didn't feel like they could be coached anymore. They were the ones that were entitled. They were the ones that were making most of the money. And then we were caught really not saying much because, like, what if we lose them? Then we're going to lose all this income, right? So that's a golden handcuff syndrome too. And we're going to get into examples on what to do if you feel like you're in that position now where you have the golden handcuffs as business owners, like we did when we were employees and to business owners. Okay, so we're going to go into other case studies talking about that. But you know, that's what think about right now. What behaviors do you tolerate that you shouldn't do? Does everybody in your company follow the same core values in rules or are they only meant for certain people and certain people that aren't? You're going to have to identify what that looks like and see if you're basically falling prey of the Golden Hand Cresce syndrome. Okay? But we're going to go into another scenario and this would be more in line with about what we were talking about a little bit earlier.
Okay, dude, this is a good one.
Okay?
The silent culture killer.
The silent culture killer. Okay, so Alex has been with your company for six years. He produces high revenue, follows the process, and he never needs to be micromanaged. Easy, right? You don't have to micromanage him. You don't have to take. Tell him what to do. He follows the KPIs, he makes high revenue. He probably makes about 30% of the. All the company's income is a high producer. Okay? The problem is that he refuses to be a team player. He doesn't show up to the meetings, he eye rolls, you know, he doesn't, he doesn't feel like anything pertains to him. You know, he feels like he's better than everybody else. The team kind of resents him. He skips some meetings, isolates him today. Isolates himself and dismisses new ideas. Every time you say, hey, you know, you gotta log your customers into the CRM. He's the one guy that doesn't do it. But he's also making most of the money. You don't want to blow him out. Okay. So the newer employees feel disrespected and his attitude is creating resentment. If you remove Alex, you'll take a financial hit. You risk losing team morale and future leaders. So what happens? As a business owner, you have Alex. Most of the time, what we do is we kind of leave them alone. Like, oh, there's two things here. Who do you trust? You want to have good company culture. That's so important. Company culture doesn't always pay the bills though, right? You have Alex. That's high producing. You also have team meetings and you're telling, hey, Rafa, what's your goal? Oh, my goal this month is going to be to hit 100,000. Okay, great. And then what happens is you hit 20 and you're not following with your word, but you have the best culture in the world. You're so positive, you're pouring into everybody. You're very easy to get along with, right? But then you have Alex over here. He's not showing up to the meetings. You're sitting there, you're paying attention to everything. You're taking notes, but you're still putting 20 grand when you said you were going to put 100. Right? But you have Alex over here. He's not showing up to the meetings because it's taking time away from making his calls, right? But he's also eye rolling and doesn't feel like he's. He just doesn't want to be there. Right? And then everybody else is looking at Alex and saying, that asshole gets away with everything. Right? But really, who cares more who's keeping their word? Alex is putting up the numbers and he says he's going to hit a hundred thousand. He is. Rafa, you're doing 20, but you have good morale. Company culture is great. You'll do anything for the team. Who's hurting the company more? Think about that. So I want you guys to think about this scenario with those eyes and really see what's really happening right here. So what would you do? Would you fire? Were you fix them, who would you fire and why? At what point does culture overweight profit? And like I said, who does really care more? You know, do you want to be micromanaging all the time until Rafa gets gets it really? You know, making false promises? How would you fix that? What kind of processes would you put in place to make sure that you know? And if you did not have your feelings involved, if you did not have feelings involved and you took away the feelings, what would make more sense, you know? Now, our heart is the biggest thing and the reason why we have strong culture, but it's also costed us a shit ton of money. I'm just being honest. Okay? So I want you to think about what you would do. How do you handle an entitled top performer?
