Ultimate Business Strategy for 2026 (DROP YOUR EGO) THIS ONE WILL HURT

My wife, she is dangerous.

I did not want to be the queen at home and get whatever I wanted when Andy was working. I wanted to be the battle mate. I wanted to grow with him, I wanted to feel the grind. I wanted to support him, I wanted to hold him accountable. I wanted all of that. The world is telling you out there that you have to be good at one thing and not the other. Who sold you on that lie? Really want to make success happen for you and you really want it to last. You're gonna have to change. Let's get right. People say all the time, why don't they care like I care? Why don't they see the business this way? I'm the only one that cares so much. I mean, I can't let this go. They don't care like you care because they don't see what you see. You're holding stuff back. You don't know their kids names, you don't know their wife's names. You don't know what they're going through. You don't know what their goals and dreams are. You don't know what debt they have. You don't know anything about them, but you want them to work hard for you. It's a two way street. The only way they're going to care and fight for that culture for your business is if you care about them first. You do. You have to care about them. You see our stuff all the time now. We got cake flips for the wives and the kids and everybody running around. We seem like we're a daycare most times here and it's awesome because people feel like they care. They can bring. I never wanted to be in a business where I had to walk around and I've been on eggshells my entire life. When I worked for people, everybody was afraid of the big boss. I worked for big companies and I had leadership positions my whole life. But still when the boss showed up, everybody was afraid of them and it sucked. I said, I'm never going to walk on eggshells again. And when I have, when we build our business, which we didn't plan on building a business, we just couldn't find it. We could have worked for anybody. If the Elliott Group would have existed in another company, we'd be happy. We'd be number twos and we'd be the best number twos in the world, I promise you that. But I told Andy, I said, when we have a business, I'm going to be around people that I trust, people I don't have to walk on eggshells around, and people that don't need to walk around eggshells with me, that's super important. But we truly do care about people. And like I said in the beginning, I said, I truly believe that our team is just a few years behind us. Everybody is going to have a house better than the one we have, and I give them the opportunity to do that. They have it. They're all growing. They've already all changed their lives since they started with us. They're all growing, and we give them a pathway to success in everything in life. Not just financially, but in everything.

Let me say something super important. I didn't want you to miss what she said, because this is a big part that, like, probably if you were to think, like, what would be the one thing that would create loyalty, would create someone to give more to you than they've ever given to anyone? Most of the time when people are with you, they've given a lot to someone before, and it didn't work out, and so they're. They're just never going to give that much again. Does that make sense? How can you be the one that they give more to than they've given anyone to? How?

By giving me.

That's the key. How can you get. Guys, I don't care what you do for a living. We're all in the business of people. Would everybody agree? Okay. And Jacqueline's sitting here talking about something that, like, is so important. She said, we've changed every person on our team's life. I want you to listen to me for a minute. If we have a hundred people and your army, your team, all 100 of those people, you've transformed and changed their life. We think that culture is going to be like, remember this. Every single one of these people move across the country because they believe what we believe, and they want to help change people's lives. And by the way, what me and Jacqueline do is irrelevant. If we were selling couches, they'd be right there with us. If we were selling homes, they'd be right there with us. If we did anything, they'd be right there with us. You know why? Because I believe that people want to find people they want to do life with. And I want you to hear me, because some of you guys, you grew up in different eras, and we weren't treated like this, okay? I grew up in the dog mentality era, like, kill, kill, kill. But I'm telling you, man, like, it's a different era right now. And you know what? I like that. You know, things have to shift. Things have to change. And so when Jackie's talking about changing people's lives, I want you to do me a favor. This is your homework for me. Go write on a piece of paper every single person you have in your company and ask yourself, have I not? Have I been good to them? Have I changed their life? And if the answer is no, you know what you have to do when you go home. And you may say, well, no, no one can change this person's life. I can change every person's life in my company. These are my kids. Okay, listen to me. And I just want to say this because I want to have Jaclyn. Keep going. In the book that we read, Shedog, it was the founder of Nike, right? And I mean, he built Nike, biggest brand in the world. And at the end of the book, he said, the hardest thing in my life was with his son. His son wore Adidas. Some of you have someone in your company that wears Adidas and you're the founder of Nike. And you're like. You're like, man, you're out. Like, that's your kid. And at the. His son died at 19 years old. 18 years old. He died. He, like, died in a car accident. And he said, the one thing I regret in my life is I never solved that problem. I never found the formula to solve that problem. I'm going to tell you today, I told you to write down the name of every person in your company, and I want you to figure out the formula to solve that problem. I don't care if they're wearing Adidas. And you're the Nike. They're your freaking kids. You're the one that hired them. You're responsible for them. I'm going to tell you guys, I got three kids, okay? And I want them to work here with me forever. But if they work for someone else, that person is responsible for my children. And some of you, you have people in your company, and I want you to know that those people in your company, they have a mom and a dad, and you're not taking care of them. And that shit should eat you alive to your core. And if you can think like this, you will build something that will go down in the history books. This is the new way of thinking. This is the new model of owning a business. If you can do this, you've created something no one in the world can compete with. So you have to change their life, right? That's your job. You're not a boss. You're not a manager, you're a coach. Because they're all coaches.

Yeah, that's how they won't see it as a job either. Okay, so going on to trust, I was reading that and then consistency. Consistency is the biggest problem that we have. Right. So I talk about consistency a lot during the business. Mastery and how to get good at that. Because that was our biggest problem that we had. How to hold people accountable and how to like, basically they hit a goal, they don't hit it. How to take care of it, how to follow KPIs, how to make sure you have, you have the right one on ones, how to make sure they understand what they're doing wrong, how to listen. All this stuff is like really hard. But consistency is one thing that will break your trust. So those three things, the empathy, transparency, and consistency, you need in order to maintain trust. So if you don't have one of those, you have to be working on that because that's the only way to get it. So think about it. Have you lost credibility as a leader? This will lead to people quitting on you. It will. Okay, so if you think about it, consistency, Monday you come up with a great idea. Like, oh, guys, we're gonna start this new thing and we're gonna do this. And by Wednesday you've already forgotten and you start something completely different. You're an inconsistent leader. So if that's you, that's something that you need to. You need to change. Okay, so how reactive are you? Think about it. Reactant. When somebody tells you that there's a problem, do you go by the first thing that somebody tells you? Maybe the high performer, you don't listen to the whole story. And then you go, you change everything. Andy and I had an ongoing joke that before, like, I would tell him, hey, I would tell him, hey, you need to pay attention to this or this is going on. This could be a possible issue, but I've already got it solved in my head. I just have to share it with him, obviously. So I'm like, I would be like, okay, where's your phone? I'd be like, where's your phone? Give me your phone. And I would take it and I would put it somewhere where he couldn't even see it. Because as I'm talking, before I finish talking through the whole thing, he would get reactive and start like texting all this bullshit. And I'm just like, dude, like, let me finish here. So sometimes we get reactive and you know what? Time is everything, timing is everything, speed of execution. We preach that all the time. But being reactive is completely different, okay? Completely different. So can someone come up to you with a problem? Can they trust you enough to come with a problem, and do you explode? You have a client that complains about something, and you have the person in customer support that says, hey, you know, we have this client that we didn't deliver this. This person wants a refund. How do you react to that? Oh, my gosh, I can't believe we screwed up. You guys are so dumb. And then you call the client. You're like, man, I am so sorry we did this. This is not like us. Artie. He's just. Man, I just. I can't believe he messed up. I'm going to really get onto him. I'm going to fire him. You know what? If I don't fire him, he's going to learn his lesson. He's. You're shitting on your employee. You're getting mad. What's going to happen the next time somebody complains or gives you an issue? You're going to hide it. You're not going to know. And there's going to be so many of those that happen in your business. Just because you can't control your emotions.

And you're reactive, that's when your business gets in trouble.

That is when your business gets in trouble. That's when you lose visibility and trust because you can't control.