The #1 Leadership Skill No One Teaches | Chris Dyer on Company Culture & Scaling Businesses #203

Hey, everybody, welcome back. This is Jeff Duden and we are on the Unemployable podcast and today I have the incredible Chris Dyer with us today. So if you have been an Olympic level swim coach, an elite water polo athlete and coach, if you have climbed Mount Whitney, Mount Fuji and Mount Kilimanjaro, and at the same time have led his companies to be named Best place to work 15 times over, and named by Inc. Magazine as the world's number one leadership speaker on culture, if you are the author of the Power of Company Culture, which has been celebrated as one of the top 10 HR books of all time, your name can only be the incredible business athlete Chris Dyer. Welcome, Chris.

Hey, thanks for having me, Jeff.

Yeah, you're welcome. Excited to have you on here today. So I've got two openers. I've been flipping back and forth as to which one to go, but I think I'm going to go with my original one, which is. Is it ever too early in a startup to define the culture of a company?

No. I mean, that's definitely something you should be doing. However, Asterix, like you can change it, right? You can pivot and change as you grow. Because you got two people in the office and then you got 10 people in the office and you got 50 people in the office, you're going to have to keep kind of changing and morphing and thinking about and making that culture a bit more sophisticated. So, you know, it might all be about the idea when there's three of you in the office and it might be about how we work when it's 10 or 15. So, yes, start early, but also think about iterating it as you go.

In my experience in building lots of businesses and helping lots of franchise owners build their businesses, there are certain things that keep small companies small. Leadership lid culture gets toxic, kind of sneaks up on them and they didn't realize that there were things that they should have been doing or could have been doing to kind of keep things running clean. Interestingly enough, when employees get out of privity with the owner and you start putting layers of management in, the behavior changes drastically. It's really interesting how that loyalty to the owner and I was here when it all started and now all of a sudden people start getting layered and they start getting sorted based on their skill sets and bringing in people to do in the right seats and getting the right people. You know, you have all of this to manage and deal with. I find it to be exhausting. But I have found some fundamentals that have worked for me over time. I'm interested, if you were in our audience, is startup business owners. A lot, a lot of startup business owners, people that have stepped out from corporate America, They've stepped into the jungle of entrepreneurship and they're getting it done. So if you today were going to start a business and then just like you said, at the end of year one, there's going to be 10 people at the end and then it's going to double every year, at the end of year two, there'll be 20, the end of year three, there'll be 40 at the end of year or there'll be 80. That's a traditional growth for a fast growing service business. What types of things would you make sure that you did on day one? And what are some of the tools that you would have in the toolkit to be able to make sure that, like the company was set up to go from the scrum to the organization?

Yeah. So be very clear about what I want from that culture. What kind of culture do we want to have? And really being clear on what that is. Like, people like us do things like this, if you can answer that question, because that's different. Right. Think about Amazon, like how they operate. It's very different than Google. It's very different than, you know, Meta or any of those other companies, but yet they're successful. But they have very different ways in which they operate. Currently, my two Great Danes behind me have decided that they want to wake up and play. So I'm going to try to get them to be quiet.

I can't tell you the last podcast we had that did not have a dog on it. I was, it's like, right.

Janet was like two laziest dogs that never make a word, never make a sound have decided that this moment is going to be their moment.

We're a family first pet, first company, and that's the way we want our podcast to be. But no, we had a great, we had a great lady on and her dog. Somebody came to the front door and her dogs were going bananas. I'm not saying I'm kidding. Like 90 seconds. And she just kept going. Like, she didn't stop, didn't stop.

Like, it's not happening.

I love it. I was just, yeah, I was just like, this is, this is the. I couldn't hear a word she was saying. But, like, I think we'll leave it in.

We'll just, you know, be very clear about who you are because that makes it easier to deal with the things that you were mentioning, right. As you get those layers, as you start adding in management, if we're very clear on who we are and what we do, it's easier for the managers to take that Persona on for them to be able to, because otherwise they just start doing it their way. And that's where it gets murky. Because now I'm like, well, I worked with the boss, I worked with the leader all this time and I know how he or she wants me to do it. Now you're telling me something else and like that, right? You feel totally just discombobulated. Go ahead.

Okay, so like when you say you need to know who you are, is that the leader, founder, or is that the business? Is that the collective you collectively?

Well, both, because especially if you're starting a company, the company is me at that level.

Right.

As a founder, whatever the things I believe and my little intricacies and my things I'm fascinated about and how I treat people, that is the culture from like 0 to 25. Because you're just so ingrained interacting with all those people now, that's going to become more sophisticated as you grow. But the culture is the founder in so many and are exceptions. But like there you can just feel it. If I'm a grumpy, results oriented person only and I don't care about like, you know, what you did on this week, you can feel that because we're small enough for that to be important, as it grows and those layers come into play, that changes. Right. Maybe it might be a little bit more about how my new boss is acting. Right. That might feel a little bit that way. So this interesting correlation that as the company grows, how you feel about your team is how you feel about the company, and how you feel about your boss is how you feel about the CEO. When we're doing surveys and rankings and things like that, as that, you know, you start to pull away from the culture and pull away from the, from the CEO or founder who, who you deal with every single day is kind of how you think about. That's like your, that's your, you know, your reality. Even though that's not necessarily true. That's your reality as an employee.

Yeah, it's the, it's the reality of proximity.

Right.

It's, you know, my, my experiences define my experiences. And my experiences, lived experiences every day are the people that I'm engaged with. And actually whatever happens over in that department or that department, I don't, I never see it, can't see it from my front porch. So it doesn't really impact you. So you know this concept of building teams within a company is, is been powerful. I want to get your opinion on something I so when I coach our franchise owners, we have a set of values and it's cares, community, community, accountability, respect, excellence and servant's heart. So it says cares and what I found in building businesses that those overarching values govern the relationships with how we want to show up, how we want to execute, what's important to us. But I also find that they're somewhat incomplete. As I looked at your seven pillars, you know, which get very specific, I'm like okay, you know, is, you know, your seven pillars are action oriented. You can actually listening. Right? Okay, you can actively listen. I encourage our owners to that the cares values need to be up top. But I, but you should build a business that's authentic to you for your attracting and you're retaining not only for your employees but all stakeholders, subcontractors, referral partners, you know, your culture and how what they can expect from your company needs to be defined and you need to be able to articulate it in a 30 second, 3 minute or 15 minute interaction. So if you want to build a faith based business and you want to have seven principles, God bless you. If you want to build a veterans based business, if you want to build a business that cares about pets and animals or things like that, what's authentic to you inside of you know that you're who, who you know, how you, what you believe is important and what's going to define the organization now within region. Right. If you're in a home service business. Well, we have a fencing business. So pets have a lot to do with fencing actually. But I mean you know your, your values and your principles need to be aligned with the business that you're in, with the communities within which you're going to operate. But they also need to be authentic to that owner because you can only be somebody you're not for so long. So do you at the startup phase, do you, do you, I mean you've obviously you work for big companies, like you work with the biggest companies and you have a, you know, thousands of people and you know you can operate in that environment. But like for these startup owners, like what tools do you have for them as they're just for the first time thinking about their values, their principles and the environment, the foundation that they want to lay out to welcome the first people into.

Yeah, I mean go sit on a rock and think about, you know, what is that Best company, the best boss, the best environment that you want to create, right? So take the time to think strategically. What I find fascinating is that most people don't think deeply about much, right? They might think really deeply about like that product or that thing, I'm going to go sell a dog leash. And they think really deeply about that and the client, all that. And then they go, okay, I'm going to hire some people. And like they're not thinking really deeply about how are we going to operate and how are we going to make this business work for people and how are these people going to come into this business and be happy and serve the business in a way that makes sense. And like they don't think about that deeply and it's probably because they don't know. But we haven't been taught that. This isn't something you get taught in business school, it isn't something you learn inherently. And so my framework works for startups, it works for Fortune 100s. And it's, you know, you look at those seven things and you got to figure out how to implement them in a way that makes sense for you. And you're right, they're very action oriented. Because what I find is if you did think deeply and you did say, I have this really clear plan of who I want this, what I want this company to be, that's day one. And by day 50 you've, you're so focused on selling dog leashes that you're not even thinking about that anymore. And, and you start to lose that momentum and you lose that feeling and you, then you start hiring people that are not in alignment with what you said was important. And that's how you end up with a really crappy employee or, you know, someone who's not serving your business is online. So your question was is what tools? So I have found that there are some really specific things that you need to do to really make sure this is helping your business and that you're thinking about it. Number one is your meetings. Your meetings are a direct reflection of your culture. So if you are making people come to the same boring 30 minute meeting over and over and over again without a proper agenda, without a different focus, you're generically asking them to show up and just on, you know, on the spur of the moment, be magical for you, you are doing them a disservice. CEOs, founders, it's hard for them to understand, but I had to remind them, not everyone thinks like you, not everyone thinks as fast as you, not everyone thinks as deeply as you. Not everyone is as smart as you. Not everyone has had the same experiences as you. Or they would go start their own company and then that's a little harsh to say, but that is the reality. There are people that are going to go out on a limb, start their own company. Maybe they have the money, the access, they have the idea, whatever. Most people show up to work for somebody else. And so how do we help those people be incredible? And it's through our meetings. And so we found that we would name our meetings very different things so that it told the employee exactly what was going to happen, how long the meeting was going to be, what their role is, what they were supposed to do in that meeting so they could show up and be incredible. Give you a good example, a cockroach meeting. Cockroach meeting is a 15 minute meeting or less. Always start on time. We never go over 15 minutes. I would use the example, there's a cockroach in your bathroom. It's a small problem. You may not want to be the one who cleans it up, but like, you go get the cockroach, you throw it away, you flush down until the problem's over. It's quick problem.

Who brings the pointy shoe?

Right? Right. Who brings the pointy shoe? Who brings the tissue? Like, who's going to deal with the thing? But it's one issue. Now you might go in there and clean up the cockroach and find out you got 50 in the cupboards. Now we have a new problem. That's something else. But that meeting, anybody could call a cockroach meeting. And you could invite anybody you want, no matter how big. I had 4,500 people in our ecosystem when I sold my last big company. Anybody could invite anybody. Now is optional for me to. If you're inviting me, it's optional for me to attend. And it's optional for me to, you know, I can say yes, I can say no. But if you think inviting the CEO and the CTO and the CMO is the right call, go for it. They might say no if they don't think they're the right person to be on there, or they're busy or they can't do it or whatever. But like, what we found is that people spend so much time picking up the phone and hanging up, pick up the phone, hang up. Or walking around the office and asking people questions one at a time. Time. And so information moved very slowly and they took them a really long time to get their answer. This is magnified in Remote and hybrid work, or your workforce is sort of spread across the country or the world. And then they were stuck having to wait to talk to their boss on their weekly meeting or wait to talk to their team on their weekly meeting. And so their answer, they might go an entire week and not get their answer. And if their boss cancels or the team meeting gets pushed, they might go two weeks. Do you know how incredibly frustrating that is? You know how that just kills your business? That someone can't get an answer to their question, can't get their problem solved without someone else or a boss or somebody like that? So that is a culture killer, in my opinion. We've seen that again and again and again. Frustration, can't get my problem solved. That turns me into a lazy employee who doesn't care, who's totally apathetic, because you've trained me to do it that way. You've trained me that the organization doesn't care about solving my problem and we don't care about getting things done quickly. And so I'm just going to sit back here and wait. I'm going to collect my paycheck and wait because you've told me I'm not important. So we shift that meeting into I can get my answer. I can invite five to seven people. I can get my answer. You know, I call the meeting for an hour from now. I can get my. Call my meeting and I can figure that out. At least I can get something. Hey, you know what? We don't know the answer, but Jason does. I know Jason had that problem last year. Go talk to him. He's the right person. Right? And I can get unstuck and get things moving and feel good that I'm being productive in the, in the organization.

Negative progress or no progress are the greatest dissatisfactors in life. You just, you're spinning your wheels. Okay, I'm getting paid, but I'm not being fulfilled. And every. Everything's a hassle and everything's friction. And if I want some recognition or I want some positivity, I'm not going to get it because I'm not getting things done. And at the end of the day, you know, I, I'm not accomplishing my goals. I do have a specific question about one of your seven core pillars.

Yeah.

And it's acknowledgement. How does acknowledgement help foster a positive culture?

Recognition and acknowledgement is everything, right? So acknowledging that person, we're acknowledging our clients, whoever we're, whoever we're doing that for, we're finding ways and in the book, I give you two very different courses of action. I think in most businesses, especially in startups, it's just about saying thank you. Now, whether you put their name up on a board or whether you say thank you in Slack or on teams, maybe you call a quick meeting. Again, I think if you do it on email or Slack, that works the best for your extroverts and your introverts. Right? Someone who's really introverted and you call a team meeting and you pull them up in front of everybody, you're actually not making their day, you're making it worse. So doing it in a place that's, you know, where everyone is going to be happy is great, but just that thank you, right? And if you can, it's really hard to do if you've got five people, but if you've got 25 or 20 people, you can start. It really should be owned by your employees. Your employees should be the one driving recognition. They should be noticing somebody. Hey, I just, I was on a call with Bob and we were doing this, talking to this client and he came up with the most amazing solution. And you put that into Slack and like Bob did the most amazing thing. We had this little emoji called. It was a green flag. We were like, green flag, way to go. And that was our little thing, a green flag. But it was just a thank you. So we want to have that in there. Are we calling people out? If you want to think about if you're a very sales driven organization, do you have a president's club? Are you calling people out for being your top salespeople? If you're a customer service driven company, are you calling your top customer service people out? Are you giving them bonuses or vacations or whatever it is that motivates them? You gotta figure that out. But if you say you are a thing, are you doing something to really show everyone you really care about that through your actions and measure. Measurement's one of my pillars too. Are you measuring that? Right. I can't tell you how many times that people say, oh, we're a customer service based organization. Cool. What do you do to measure customer service scores? And like, you know, we're just the best. Our customers are really happy. And I'm like, so you're not doing a survey? So you're not checking in? You're not. You just. You. That's just a. You believe it, but that doesn't make it true. Right. You know, so you have to be really focused on how do you say thank you and how do you acknowledge not just your employees but your clients, your vendors, everyone in your atmosphere?

I've coached 30 seasons of my kids sports and I wrote a book called hey Coach. And within that book I called out the importance of unique language and stories. And I still talk about that unique language. You know, naming certain things. Any kind of club that you've ever been a part of has a secret handshake or, or something that they call it here that they don't call it anywhere else. And I've heard just in this first 20 minutes I have heard green flag. I've heard cockroach meeting. I've heard all of these things that I've never heard anywhere else before and that these so but like that makes a culture special. Like this is us, this is ours. And I, and I actually had overlooked but I see that uniqueness is one of your seven core pillars of cultural and I talk about that all the time. I said you've got it. You create a unique language and then your culture is an organization's memory. It's going to live in the stories and you need to make sure that the right stories stay alive inside of it. What are some other things that you do intentionally to create uniqueness in your workplace?

So what you're referring to is tribal speak and we can look at some of the best organizations in the world. I was just at Disneyland yesterday, they have an entire language, cast members backstage. I mean they have this language, right? Walmart has 900 letter acronyms for everything. And I think it's the most ridiculous thing I've ever seen. But it is a very specific language and it is their thing and they've obviously are wildly successful. So having that is so important. I'm glad that you called that out and can be anything. Take my cockroach meeting and rename it something else. I don't care. Just make it something special and your people really will love doing that stuff. When we think about uniqueness though, it's about celebrating each individual person or each team or each department about what makes them successful. So there's lots of lenses here. There's the lens of what makes you unique as like my top salesperson. Like what, what is it about you that you're doing? What are your practices? Who are you? You know, where are you? Like how are you doing that? And getting really curious about that. It's also about you. You have a whole team of people and it's really easy to like say well what do we all have in common? What do we all like to do. And what you end up doing is some of the people end up that. You're right about that there is a lot of commonality, but you end up excluding certain people who don't have those same values, don't have those same experiences, don't come from the same upbringing or whatever. And so I, I know this is a hot button topic, but that's sort of like my way of doing inclusion right about getting. How do we bring in the right people and be able to ensure that we are really curious about what makes them special and them uniquely good for our business. And so if I'm overly focused on, oh, we all like tacos and we all like pizza, and I don't ever ask anybody else what they like to eat. I don't, I don't learn anything new, and I don't get exposed to any new ideas because, well, we all like pizza, we all like tacos. That's what we'll have at all of our meetings and all of our lunchtime. We all like the same thing, right? And it's. That's just sort of a cognitive bias for us to get trapped into, where are we the same? And as opposed to, well, how are we different? And why is that cool? Like, quick, really quick example, we did the strengths finders. Gallup strengths finders. That was always a constant thing we did. Any new employee that came in, we had them do their top five. I highly recommend any business, no matter what your size is, to do that. Now, when we got big enough, what we did is we took all that data and we measured it and we put it a little tally mark in each one of the strengths. I think there's like 34 strengths. And out of thousands of people, what we realized was that we had strengths where we had nobody or almost nobody. So we were hiring the same kind of people over and over and over again. And then I'm saying, as a CEO, we need fresh ideas. We need people to think out of the box. We need innovation. But I'm hiring the same person with the same values that thinks the same way because someone has said, well, that's predictable. I know I can get out of that person. If I hire that kind of person, I know what I can get. And so what I told everyone was, I don't want anyone to do a final interview unless that person has in their top one or two, one of those strengths that we don't have, or we have very little. Wow, did I start getting different people in the interview? Right. I didn't ask Them to hire more men, more women, more of this, more of that. I didn't do any of that. I just said, I want people who think differently. And this is how we're measuring it concretely. Go find me different people who think differently. And that was really important for our business at that point, when we were kind of doing our next doubling of employees. That was a lot of people to really get people who matched into the places where we were really weak.

Was it long enough ago to know whether it was a positive?

Oh, yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. We saw that we kept our cultural identity as we grew. We saw that that was a multiplier. And, you know, we started getting people who could help us in ways with things that we hadn't ever tackled. Right. You start growing that way. You need different types of people who think differently or have different skill sets. Also, we would suddenly be like, well, we need a lot more sales help right now. And we could easily shift people because they had different types of experiences. We could say, hey, we were thinking about adding, you know, 10 more of this type of people. Does anyone in the company interested in that? And people would raise their hands and we look at their resume and be like, you're in customer service. I had no. I didn't know you had done sales for 15 years. Right. And I was like, you're perfect for this role. You know, And. And so it allowed us that kind of the variety of people in the organization with very different skill sets, as opposed to hiring that same generic person over and over and over again.

What was the impact on innovation and what was the impact on conflict?

We certainly felt like innovation. There is this strong belief that you have to have innovation separated from the organization, especially as a large organization, in order for it to actually occur. We see big companies do this all the time. They pull them out, they put them in separate building. They have different rules, so they're not sort of stuck in the dogma. Kodak knew about digital film. They knew all about it. They understood it. They were working on it, but they couldn't get away from the cash cow. Right. Wasn't that they didn't know. A lot of people think they didn't know. No, they knew. They just couldn't get away from the cash cow. Same thing with Blockbuster. They knew all about streaming. They understood it. They just couldn't stop selling and get out of their business model. And so when you remove innovation out, you can. You can start another company to start to test. You can do something different and then integrate it back in later. We Never felt like we had to do that because we felt like innovation was strong. I will say we had a software partner, though, that was separate, and they did do separate innovation that was really helpful to us. So we kind of had, like, the best of both worlds. I felt like we had really good innovation internally with things. We also had a great partner who was doing their own software innovation that we didn't have to even think about. And so as they got better, we got better. You said on conflict.

Yes.

Listen, I mean, I felt like we did a good job of dealing with conflict, but I don't know. I'm not sure anyone is ever completely satisfied with how you deal with conflict. You have human beings and you have people that disagree with as many people as I had. I had the full spectrum of political views and how we should do things. And so there was always some conflict that we had to deal with. But we tried to center it back to our culture, our values, who we are, what we believe as the most important thing for the business, and everything else had to fall in line under that. So if you believe this thing over here, politically or socially or whatever, that's, that's, that's fine. But, like, does it feel fit? This is what we're trying to do. This is who we say we are. If you don't feel aligned, that. That's okay. Go find another job. You know, we'll. We'll root for you from the sidelines. Yeah, but we had to be very clear about who we were in order for that to work. But I, It. It felt like it, it fostered better conversations. One of the things, one of those meetings that I did was called a tsunami planning meeting. And so what we did is once a month, we got our teams together and they had to have a fake meeting. Now people are always surprised that I would call a meeting that isn't. That we don't even need. Right.

It's like.

But it was once a month. We gave them a topic and it was a. What would happen if really big. What happened if a tsunami, right. Hit the coast? Like, that would be a big event. What would happen if the CEO went into a coma? What would happen if we lost half our business? What would happen if we doubled our business, you know, in a month? What would happen if. And we got these great ideas. That's where innovation started. Because we were asking them to think in an innovative way, but there was no pressure because it's not a real thing. When I ask them to come up with a real answer right now, no One's going to get told they're going to be put in charge of it. Now, just because you came up with an idea, we're not going to be like, oh, Jeff, that's a great idea. Guess what? That's now your new thing, right? You're gonna have to go do 40 more hours a week on that idea. Like, we're not. Because people would be cautious about saying things in meeting. Cause they might have to do it. They might have to take that on or, you know, add that responsibility to their plate. But most importantly, we got innovation. We got cool things out of that meeting. But the best thing we got out of that meeting was that it was a chance for the manager to sit back and watch their employees have a conversation and have a meeting for 30 minutes about this thing. Realize who was screwing up your meetings all month long. Because maybe Dave won't shut up. And Dave keeps talking over everybody. And you're like, because if he's doing it in that meeting, and guess what? He's doing it in all the other meetings too, all month long. Or maybe Sally is not. Not talking. She's not getting her voice heard. She's not raising her hand. She's letting all the other people talk over her, and she's just sitting there quietly. Those are two very different things you need to be worried about as a manager. But you better go deal with that. We need to go tell Dave to tone it down. And we got to tell Sally to, you know, we want to hear from her. We hired her for a reason. She's a smart person. I want to hear from you, right? And all these other, like, bizarre personality, bad conflict, people cutting people off, being passive aggressive. Like, that was the meeting that the manager could then go back and meet with those people that she did. He or she needed to meet with and coach them on how do people like us do meetings, how do we do all of that? And that helped us eliminate so much conflict over time because we were pre coaching them to the behaviors that we wanted from them.

What's the difference between a mistake and an error?

So an error is, I'm not trained properly. I don't care. I haven't slept in three days. So let's just say I'm a nurse and I've given the wrong medication to the entire floor. Was it because I don't care? Was it because I have worked 3,72 hours straight with no sleep and I can't even, like, think straight? Like, those things are errors, okay? And errors should not be tolerated. That we don't allow errors. Errors are not cool. Right. That's when. That's when safety things happen. People get hurt. We do things are going to get us sued. All of that mistakes are, I was trying to do the right thing. I thought I was doing the right thing. And I tried something new or I tried the thing I thought I was supposed to do and it didn't work. But my intentions were pure. My intentions were correct. Like, great example. I mean, Southwest Airlines has gone through a lot, and I don't know if they're the same organization anymore. But, you know, 10, 15 years ago, if an employee did something that they thought was the right thing, Southwest Airlines would never criticize them publicly. They would always back up that employee publicly in the news. And it didn't matter what it was if that employee was like, I made this change or I did this thing, because I really thought this was the right thing to do in that moment, based on everything going on in my training, I thought this was the right thing. And Southwest Airlines might say privately to that employee, well, next time, this is how we want you to deal with it. We have a little different way. We want you to think about this. But publicly, they would say we backed the employee. They made that choice. That was the right choice at the right time. And so that's a mistake. And mistakes we can learn from. And we can figure out how to get better. We can go try something and say it didn't work and come back and tell the entire team, guess what? We made this change in the software, and guess what? Everyone hated it. It was the wrong thing. We're going to change it back. We're going to come up with a new solution. We want mistakes to be prevalent and to come up to the surface and to have sunlight on them. Because if people are hiding from mistakes, we can't get better. We can't. Our organization will never thrive. We will never have people brave enough to try new things and to create innovation or to even just admit that, hey, I did something and this isn't right. We got to fix it before it turns into something else bigger. So really understanding the difference, when do you put your foot down and say, this is not acceptable? And when do you say, thank you for trying that? Thank you for totally screwing up. That's amazing. Let's go tell everyone what happened and let's figure out how to do it better next time.

There's a great lesson in SpaceX, and my son's an engineering student and he loves aerospace. I mean, anything he can do to get in the aerospace industry. He's interning right now over at Helmet Aerospace. And he would wake me up in the middle of the night and said, SpaceX is going to do a launch. And we'd get up and we'd watch it and it would blow up completely or fizzle off the launching pad. I just look at him and say, are there people in there? And go, no. I'd say, okay. And then, you know, and that went on for years and years and years. It seemed like they never successfully launched anything. But what they were doing is they were iterating with mistakes and they were measuring. So, you know, that's an example of innovation at light speed, going fast at great expense, but understanding that they're only going to learn the thresholds of their systems to the extent that they push them to the failure point. And over time, they eliminated all of the failures and it went up into space. So, I mean, you know, it's, you know, we get this. Gosh, what did somebody say the other day? It was like comfort seeking. Comfort is, is the. I forget it. But like, it was, it was, man, was it. It might have been. Judge Shaw said something about comfort and. Oh, yeah, and it was something about comfort. And, you know, it was that. It just, it's, it's how destructive it is to constantly aggressively seek comfort. And organizations do that. I find myself doing that. Oh, you know, I'm a startup guy, I've built multiple businesses and you get them to a certain point and you think that, okay, we've got recurring revenue, we're covering our expenses, we're making profitability, we've got a good strategic plan, our people are in place, people are generally aligned with what's going on. We've got to upgrade here. We gotta, we gotta top grade here. We gotta, you know, we've, we've gotta make ourselves more efficient. But at the end, you, you, at some point, you know, the, the executives want to let it run and let it just kind of motor along and nothing is neutral in life. Every decision is either positive or negative. Every action you take is either positive or negative. Failing to make a decision or failing to take an action is always going to be negative because anything left to itself will always go from bad to worse. So, you know, we were constantly fighting entropy. And, you know, I think there's a concept that companies need to, they need to have rest and then they need to sprint just like any athlete. Like you. Like, you know, how would you train for a climb or a hike or a, or a match? Or a swim or those types of things. So I find it incredibly thoughtful about, you know, the things that you've shared about mistakes and errors. And I listened to you talk about it on another podcast, and I thought it was, you know, I had to be. Did I have to be this old when I learned that from you? Right. But I think it's a subtle but very significant difference in the way that you look at things that don't go as planned.

Well, and that framing. If anyone wants to go on a deep dive on that, there's a book called Antifragile, and the author really dives in. And I think the biggest lesson out of the book for me was if you look at environments in nature that are calm and pristine, right, where there isn't a lot going on, they're very weak and fragile. If you think about, you know, the. In nature, the environments that last and continue to exist, they are hardened against all of the elements. I mean, look at the. The coral reefs, right? The tide coming in and out and in and out, right? They have to be prepared for that constant chaos. Maybe it's a forest and it has winds and fires. I mean, there are no environments where everything is perfectly pristine and calm and nothing ever bothers it. I mean, that just. That's not reality. So if you want to go have a lifestyle business and you set it up and it's going to run that, that's totally cool, that's fine. You need to understand what the risks are of that. But if you're trying to reach a goal, it's not going to be, well, I'm going to set up this thing and put a manager in place, and I'm going to go sit out on Go Fish. And it's all going to magically happen. There's going to be problems, there's going to be issues, going to be things you have to deal with. And the. One of the best things I ever learned from one of my CEO groups, I remember I'm sitting there and I'm complaining about all the stuff that I got to do and this and that, these problems. And this is long before I kind of really got involved in the culture stuff. But one of these kind of more senior CEOs turned to me and said, you know, one day I changed my perspective on all of this. I realized it was my job as the CEO to deal with the hard stuff. It was my job to deal with the big issues. And instead of being grumpy and upset about it, I decided I was going to be happy that they brought it to me. I was going to be thankful that I had the opportunity to solve this big problem. And he totally changed his perspective. And I, as I'm sitting there, I'm going, oh, that's so good. He's so right. Like, oh, I'm such an idiot. Here I am complaining, oh, you're bringing me this big problem. Do I really want a brand new employee to be dealing with a really large problem that could totally change my business? No, I want that person to bring it to me. Don't want that person to do a little stuff. Absolutely. So, you know, it's like I want to let go of the little stuff and I should be one dealing with the big stuff. And that perspective is like huge for CEOs.

Oh, it changed my life when I learned that I needed to subtract I have to and replace it with, I get to change my life. Because, you know, you've gotta, you've gotta protect as a CEO, as a business builder, I guess as everybody. But you know, maybe I'm a little self involved but you know, you have to protect your heart and you've got to use your mind because you, when you step into a leadership position, oftentimes you are unfairly attacked. You are, you have an outsized level of stress and responsibility. Even if it's something that you could say, well, I didn't pay attention to it, it didn't go well, it wasn't me. But at the end of the day, everything's kind of your responsibility and it's just, and it seems like you're just constantly finding latency. What you called, you know, the things, the, the, without having a cockroach meeting, things just take forever and they don't move anywhere. I just, I just call that latency. I know that one of my roles in leading companies is to remove latency from the business. From the moment that there's an action or a decision made or an action that needs to be taken to the time that it actually gets implemented. This latency in the business and too much latency in your business, it just, it's, it just kills it. I mean, you're not running a clean race. It's like you're trying to water ski and you haven't got up on top of the water and you're just dragging yourself face first through the water and, and you know the business. And what happens is if you don't get the latency out of your business and remove the friction, your people ultimately get tired and they get fatigued because they're just swimming so hard and they're hanging onto that rope, but all they're getting is a face full of water. And it's so much easier said than done though, I mean, because it just seems like it's constant, so. And then you also don't want to end up doing everybody else's job, which, you know, if you run around like a little firefighter. Now, I've never done that. I mean, I've always erred on the side of over delegating probably and then making adjustments from there. But man, you know, I could not scale a company probably until I was 40 years old just because I was a firefighter and I had to have my hands on everything. So yeah, those CEO groups are incredible. I joined Vistage. When I joined ypo and I joined Vistage, it changed me almost immediately. And you know, one of my, whether you join eo ypo, Vistage, there's a great organization called CEO. There's masterminds everywhere. But like, get out of your business and get around other people that are doing the same things that you're doing or have done them before. Huge.

And a lot of that is new information that you just didn't have, you didn't know.

Right.

And all these other people are telling you, hey, here's all these other ways we can do that. And so that's why transparency is my first pillar. Because you've got to get people information. You've got to be able to tell them all the things you can possibly tell them about your business, about why you're making decisions, how you're making the money, how you spend the money. Like, the more you can tell them, the more they can actually show up and help you. Because if they're in the dark, like we were in the dark before we went to the CEO groups and we learned new things and we read books and suddenly our right, we're transformed because we have all this new knowledge and that we can go attack our business in a different way. It's the same thing for our employees. So they're sitting there drinking from the fire hose and they don't know what's going on. They have no idea how decisions are made or how the businesses run. They're in a no win situation. So if you're a CEO and you're thinking, well, how do I start to shift that? How do I start to change that? Right? So step one is to start on a very regular basis, whether it's monthly or weekly or whatever it is, can you show up to a team meeting or company meeting, and tell everyone what's going on. Here's what's happening in sales. Here's what's happening in marketing. Here's what's happening. You know, hey, we lost this person. They left our company. And here's why. Like, if you can give that, you know, sometimes you can't. But, like, here's what happened, and we're hiring this new person. This is why we hired them. This is who they are. Just giving people that information is so valuable. And then the second step is stop making the decisions for everybody. If you don't want to walk around and you don't want to be the firefighter and you don't want to do all that, start asking people when they come to you and they want that last seal of approval, and they keep coming to you, and they're not making that decision because they just want to make sure they're not going to screw up or whatever. You just say, what do you think we should do now? Yes. If they're going to pick something illegal or something that's going to cost you a million dollars, yes, you can jump in. But for most decisions, even if you know they're going to screw it up a little bit, you got to let them go do that and just say, what do you think we should do? Okay, why don't you go try that and let me know how it works? I had to get myself out of the habit. It took me a year to get out of the habit of just giving everyone the answer and telling them what to do or putting that rubber stamp. And then I was, of course, going home and complaining to my wife that, like, no one makes decisions and no one's trying anything. And. No, but I. Because. Because they were coming to me and I did it for them.

Right.

Right. So I don't need a bunch of robots. I need people who can show up and be creative. And I. But I had to change my behavior to make that happen.

Yeah, we teach people how to treat us.

Yeah. Yep.

As I mentioned in the opening, you've been an athlete and you've been an adventurer. What would you share with people about the importance of getting outside the business and doing hard things? I have this concept of a business athlete, and it kind of goes like this. It's. You know, I was a college football player, so we would train 300 days a year, training room, watching film. Then you'd go to lift weights, and then you'd go out on the field in the afternoon and you would. You would catch a thousand footballs, or you'd run patterns or you'd work on agility or footwork. And you were just like every little aspect of you as an athlete was being worked on individually with different coaches who were responsible for that aspect of your performance. Then we have business owners that don't even watch the videos and they don't, you know, and then they show up out of an appointment or at an, at an interview with employees or at a business networking group, and they haven't put in the work like, they haven't trained. So what I've. The connection that I made was people that train at a high level athletically, know how to prepare and they understand the importance of preparation. And While it's not 100%, there is a correlation between people that have done hard things, that have broken performance down into its various parts, put them together, and had some success translating to their success in business. Was that the case for you?

Yeah. I've never met a business owner who was successful who did not work on the business. Right. At some level, whether that was a little bit every day or they took a week off or a month off or. All the successful ones I've ever met have that in their business where. Or in their life where they're working on and out, out of the business sort of separately, whether that's with consultants or advisors or a business group or by themselves. It doesn't. I mean, there's lots of different ways to do it, but you can't just be in the business all of the time running the rat race. You have to take that time to step back and to think about how are we going to do things differently, what's happening with the market. I mean, if you're not stopping and thinking about AI right now, I mean, right. This is your last summer, maybe very clear. This is it. This is your last summer knowing your life, how it is. Because ChatGPT5 is about to come out, and by this time next year, you're not even going to recognize your life or your business. Us. Things are going to change that much that quickly.

Right.

And, and, and so this is like I've been telling you, it's like the summer of 69 or whatever. This is like your. Or maybe it's February right before COVID Like, you don't know. You don't realize what's about to come about to hit you across the face. So if you're not spending this time right now understanding AI, stepping out of your business and thinking about how we could do things differently, what would we do. If this changed or that changed, you're screwed. You're gonna be playing catch up. Your business might not even survive, right? If that's how you're gonna approach it, if you're like, well, I guess I'll figure it out later. No, no. You know, this is one of the most fundamentally important changes gonna happen to business. And if you don't believe me, it took ChatGPT 17 months to get 800 million users. It took smartphones for five years to do that.

Right?

Just smartphones. It took Netflix like 10 or 11 years to do that. And those are really big shifts in our entire. How we work and how we operate. Just chatgpt alone. Not Claude, not Perplexity, not any of those other ones, just that one did it on its own. In 17 months, you got to be thinking about that stuff or you're going to be, you're going to be gone. So I think that is an absolute for me, it was. I definitely, the first six or seven years was stuck in that work in my business. In, in, in, in, in. And I had to learn how to step, you know, mature and how to step out of it, for sure.

You've written another book called Remote Work in the past and you, your company was one of the largest, most successful, 100% remote work businesses. What would you share about your view of the future of work, work and workplace? As you've already talked about, AI, but what about remote work? What about contracting? What about, you know, some of the shifts that you see that are, that you're thinking about and that keep you up at night right now?

Well, I mean, any business that's going to continue to be viable, you're going to have to think about having an adaptable, flexible workforce. Now. There are people that companies that can be very, you know, we're going to have everyone in the office and you're all going to be here and like, they have a certain leverage because of who they are, the size they are, how much they can pay, the opportunities they can give. But for. We were really talking about startups here. We're talking about these companies that, you know, how do you compete against the gorilla? I'll tell you how I competed. I was super flexible. We allowed remote works. I could get talent for half the price somewhere else in the country. Hiring a CMO in Kansas who was just as good as a cmo, I could get in Los Angeles for half the price that allows me to be farm. I can go spend that money somewhere else on marketing, on sales, on whatever. And I can compete better against the big gorillas. In my industry, we allowed people to work, they didn't want to work full time. Okay, I had a lot of single parents that were very happy to work 30 hours or 35 hours. And we figured out all the complexities with insurance and all that stuff with them. Like, so that we could offer them that opportunity. We figured out that spouses of military were the. Was the best. That was like that. That is the best group of people I could ever hire for my business because they're really smart and they can't find a job because people locally know, well, your spouse is in the military. You're going to leave here in six months, you're going to leave in a year, you're going to, in the middle of the night, disappear because you get relocated. They don't want to hire them. And I'm like, I'd love to hire you. If you get relocated, you can take that time off. It doesn't count against your pto. It doesn't count. Take that time off, Go, move, get yourself settled and you can start working again. Like, we gave them that flexibility. You want to work 20 hours, you want to work 40 hours, you want to work 35 hours, whatever, we'll figure it out with you. And so I got supercomputers working for me who couldn't get a job, right? Because we found a group that worked really, really well. So if you're trying to compete against the big boys, I think being super flexible and trying to find a way to get a great person in who doesn't fit the traditional. I have to come into an office, I have to sit in traffic for two hours, I have to work 40 hours, I have to be here all the whole time. Like, I found these most amazing people who were, wanted to be stay at home parents, but also wanted to work a little bit, or spouses military, or people that were physically handicapped that couldn't leave their, couldn't leave their, their home. But, like, they could do amazing work for us. Like, we just thought about, how do we get these people that are kind of left on the fringes to create an army that could kick the butt of those big gorillas in our space? That was how we approached it, and that's how I would approach any new business.

Is the characteristics of creativity and curiosity going to be more important than they were with all of these AI tools or with agency and AI agency, is that going to replace that too?

Unless there's some radical, you know, evolution of AI, the LLMs, the large language models are essentially predicting, predicting what they want. We want them to say. My good friend Dan to part off. He uses this great example in his keynotes. It's like once upon a, and most people would say time. And if you told an LLM once upon a, it would say time. It would, it would predict what you wanted to say. But we get into really big complex things. It has a hard time. And so it is our human ness, our creativity. It is the spark that makes us human, that allows us to direct and navigate what AI is going to do. AI is going to take care of, take care of tasks. There's already agents built into ChatGPT and Claude and all these things. They're going to do a lot of the mindless work that we don't need employees to do anymore. We can take those people and allow them to be in more creative positions, allow them more agency to think about how do we solve problems? Do we spend more time talking to clients? We, you know, I remember during that first couple like three, four months of COVID it sucked. But I remember like we were working on things in the, in my company that we never had time to work on. Things had slowed down a little bit. Everyone had to stay home. We cut certain meetings, right? Like things shifted. And all of a sudden we're like deeply thinking about these really big projects and these really big shifts that we wanted to make. We knew we were thinking we were going to come out of this in three or four months or six months. Like we didn't realize how long it was going to take, but like we suddenly had the time to think deeply. And I'm, that's exactly what AI can do for your organization. It's going to get a little farther to where we're getting those tasks and things operating. That's going to allow your people that time to go do that stuff that we never had time for before, which I think is going to be really cool and allow us to do new things in the business.

If you walked into any organization and spent a day, what would be some of the most obvious and most common cultural leadership mistakes? Maybe the top three or some other things that people should immediately stop doing.

Well, I, I, I'm a big proponent of eliminating one on one meetings. Oh, so let me explain. I'm talking about the one on one that you have with your direct report every single week. I hate that meeting. I think it's stupid. I don't think it serves anybody anymore. And it is an absolute waste of everyone's time, especially the leader what you should be doing instead is shifting that meeting into the team meeting or a team meeting that you have. So if you have a group of 10, let's say 10 people you're managing, why not get those 10 people together once a week or twice a month or whatever the right cadence is for you and talk about what everyone's goals are. Does everyone know what everyone's goals are? Transparency. Most organizations will say no. That only their boss and their direct report knew what their goals were. And then people above them. Why not everyone on your team know what your goal is and everyone on the team know what the team goal is. And everyone on the team know what your boss's goal is. And why aren't we showing up just like we do in those CEO meetings, just like at Vistage and just like at eo. Why aren't we all showing up and helping each other and coaching each other and celebrating with each other and commiserating with each other just like CEOs do.

Right.

In that team environment. Right. I was like, I remember I was going to my CEO group and I'm like why? Why am I getting this benefit? How can I put this into my company? And so we shifted it to where the team shows up. And so now the leader is not responsible for being the only person who's coaching you through whatever your goals are. Whatever you're trying to do now the team is helping you. I attribute it to group therapy versus individual therapy. There are times in our lives we need a therapist to work on something. Maybe we have a problem in our life. Maybe we are seeing something. Maybe we're going through a divorce. Maybe we had someone die. Like there are times when you need your boss to meet with you and go through something. So can you have one on one meetings? Absolutely. Coaching. There's a problem. You need to work on a project with someone. Have a one on one. But that stupid reoccurring meeting every Tuesday at 9am we're supposed to come and talk about our goals. We cancel them all the time. It creates that. What we talked about earlier. That slowing down, we're waiting. That's when we're supposed to get the decision from our boss is in that meeting. There's no accountability to the team. That's where people come and they're. They're bitching and moaning to you about their other employees. There's politics, there's. There's backstabbing. How many times I sat in a one on one and people would complain about everybody else.

Right.

I don't want to hear that. That is not what I want to focus on as your leader. I want to put that into the team meeting, put light on that. No one's going to tell me that so and so isn't getting stuff done if that's not true because they're going to say it to their face in that meeting or it's going to come up there and they're just saying it to me now I gotta go. It eliminates so many problems. So I always told my people, you, if you need to meet with me, I meet anytime. You got my calendar link. You can get on my calendar. Anytime we need to meet, let's meet. But I'm not doing career development and I'm not doing this one on one. We meet constantly. Oh, I think it's an outdated, really old practice from like, I don't know, the 80s or the 70s or something. It's really outdated. And we're. Because we're moving too fast. Things are happening too quickly. There's. And there's too much information for us to think about to do it on our own in such a siloed way. So if you're a leader who's got so many meetings on their calendar that you can't get your work done, think about how if you have 10 people, you could get rid of 10. We get rid of nine meetings and replace that with one meeting with your team every week. Wouldn't that. That's like if you're meeting with them for an hour, that's 10 hours you get back. Right. If it's a half an hour, I get five hours back. What could you do with that amount of time as a leader? So that's my big one to get rid of right now.

Yeah. Four. Four hours of Tik Tok and then go to the gym.

That's right. There you go.

There you go. We had a halftime meeting. We, we, we were about halfway to our goals in 30 months. Our stated goals that we had set in his organization. We brought 70 employees in from around the country and we did a what's possible, what's missing, what's next exercise. And we also did some individual development. We took the first half of the day and had them do some visioning and what they wanted to see out of their career and share that. And they all shared that with myself. And then we went back and. Because the number one thing that came out of the meeting was everybody wanted more professional development. They wanted more opportunities to learn. They wanted to learn more about the franchise space. They wanted to know where the opportunities were and it was across the board. But it was, it was, I was so inspired that our people wanted to learn and wanted to grow and wanted, you know, we're asking for help in that regard. So we've, we, so we then we did a more specific survey and now we've got it all in. You just said though that you're not doing one on one individual development meetings. I get asked for that kind of thing all the time. I've done it in the past. Sometimes it's with employees, other times it's with other executives or more junior executives in the space. And it's a burden. It's, it's, and it's what is it good for them? Probably if they come prepared and if, and if I did my work. But what are the types of things that you could or you would recommend that we look at installing in our culture and in our practices so that we are continually providing opportunities for professional personal development for our people here.

So if you move those meetings into the group meetings, you're going to get far more development a lot faster because there's going to be a lot more people to help that person learn quickly. Okay. As opposed to the burden is on the leader. Right. And their time. If you're going to do that, if you're like, well, I really do need to teach this person this thing, record it and have it available so that the next time someone asks, you can say here, why don't you watch this video first and then let me know if you have any more questions if you missed anything. We would record everything, every training, every little interaction and we would have them as an internal thing and we could send them to people, provide them. What we learned by mistake was that people actually preferred the video over the live session and here's why. They can go back and watch it. If they don't understand, they don't have to feel stupid and say I don't understand. They just rewind it and they re watch it again or they take it and then they go ask their questions to somebody else or to Google or now ChatGPT. Like they can do a lot of their own self development. But I was shocked. We, I sent the video out to someone for the first time and I went back to look to see if they had watched it by looking at the play count and the play count was 12 and I'm like, did she send it to somebody? Why is it 12? So I called her, I'm like, hey, just I'm curious. And she goes, no, I watched it 12 times. I'm like, you watched that training?

Yeah.

She's like, I didn't understand. So my mind was blown. I'm thinking, here I am giving the best training ever. I'm clearly the best, most amazing trainer. And she had to watch it 12 times to get it. You don't. She doesn't get that opportunity in a live setting. Right, right. So video is huge. Can we continue to put content? So think about AI now you can create, you can give everyone ChatGPT access that is company based and share with them custom GPTs that have been pre programmed with certain information. You can create projects. So maybe the project is customer service. You could load up your customer service values and you know, previous talk tracks and interactions with clients and how we handled situations and they could go in there and say, here's my situation, how do I deal with this?

Right.

And it would be like, well, the last time this happened, this is exactly what Jeff said to do. Right. And, and give them the tools to be able to help them answer their own questions and get their own information, you know, solved. So video used to be the way we did it. I think really chat GPT is going to be along with some video. Be nice if it was like, hey, here's how Jeff said to do it. And by the way, here's a training on this. Here's. You might want to watch this YouTube video that Jeff put together about this topic that the employee would already get because you might do it now and then like three years it comes up and you've already forgotten you made the video and you just like here, I'll meet with you and we'll do in an hour.

Right.

And it drags you down. So taking those tools and, and I will say it's a giant pain in the butt to do this.

Sure.

You're going to feel like you're in quicksand for the first couple months, but as soon as you build that up, you're going to feel like you're just lightning fast.

Right.

Because you have all that stuff built in and people just start going and they've got all those. Got great content.

Yeah, absolutely. We're doing something similar. We're in a Microsoft environment, so we're doing something very similar with Copilot. That's a big initiative that we have right here. And the nice thing is is everything is recorded for the most part, so we have access to it. We have all the conversations, we get all the threads and the sharepoints and the team chat groups and all of that. Kind of stuff. So we do. We have a. Even though we've only been at it about three years, we have a pretty substantial body of information that we'll be able to glean from. So.

And I wonder, you said your most important need then, right? Is to make sure people know how to access that and how to find their answers. That now becomes the new thing, right. Is to spend all your time training people how to get their answers. So you've done the amazing work. That's where I see leaders fail, is that, like, we. We put all these documents together, we did all this stuff, and they don't teach employees how to go and do it.

Chris, this has been amazing. I have pages and pages of notes. I never get tired of learning about culture and tools and. And tactics. And then also every time I leave a conversation like this, I realize, you know, how much I've missed. But culture is the hard stuff. You know, I. I share with our franchise owners that business is two things. It's people and math. And you're building a system that is math based about conversion and leads and engagement, time and time to implement and all of these different things that you can measure. But then there's the people piece to it. And if you just do the math and you don't do the people piece, then your company is going to be incomplete. If you don't. If you just do the people piece and you don't do the math, then the people won't know where to focus. So these two things work in concert with one another. I guess you could say that people is art and math is science, but I've actually heard you say that there's a science behind the people. Is that something that you talk about in your book?

Yeah, it's. It. Culture is not an art, it's a science.

Yep. All right, well, so now I have to change my narrative, so. Which is just another thing I've learned today. So we're going to let people go out and get the. The book, the Power of Company Culture. And I guarantee that if this will either improve what you have or to help you lay a foundation in the absence thereof. If you're starting a new business, you might as well start out on the right foot with the right seven core pillars, because I believe that they're right on point. So we're going to tug a little bit on the reins and head the horse towards the barn here. But I've got two questions for you, if you would play along. Number one, I'm going to have a curveball for you. And then I've got a fastball coming straight down the middle. But before we do that, how can people best get in touch with you, Chris?

A few ways. So if you want to text 33777 and put my name, Chris as the message I will send you, you know, certainly happy to stay in touch with you. Have my email, but I'll send you a PDF that's got all those different meeting types that I talked about.

Okay.

And also 25 great starter questions if you want to learn how to better listen to your people and ask great questions. So that free document, free resource, happy to send out to you. You can go to chrisdyer.com or if you hang out on TikTok or Instagram or wherever you hang out in social, I'm there. Happy to be your friend and connect. So.

And I also want to check out Chris Dyer's creative friends. Is that you?

Nope, that's another guy. He is. That's what I thought. He's a Peruvian artist. I think he's a Peruvian artist. He's like this crazy psychedelic stuff. And what's so funny is I was supposed to meet him in Tampa and it just didn't happen. We were going to have the two Chris Dyers come together. So.

So our chat research said that was you. And I went to it and I'm like, this is not him.

No, no, no dreads. No, no.

Say you, you, you cleaned up nice. Okay. All right. So here's the curveball. Gun to your head or falling off of Kilimanjaro. Something that you care about if you had to start a new business in the next 30 days.

Yeah.

And it can't be anything that you're currently doing. Where do you see the opportunity? In the marketplace.

Oh, that's really hard because I just started a business. Where do I see the opportunity? I would say I have been thinking, is there opportunity? And it's not a long term business. It could be a short term business which can be very profitable. Is there a place for some bit of the slow adopters and the kind of in between adopters of AI to do training and education and things like that. Like is there and that's not going to last forever. But like there is a whole bunch of people that are. I mean, I remember like people were still learning like Microsoft Word and taking courses on that and like, you know, it lasted a really long time. So it's not a forever business. But I do think there's some opportunity there if you want to set up a good Business, do training for people, corporate, and all of that. That has been on my mind. Like, should I do that? Because I think it's going to be a big need.

Well, somebody certainly taught all the baby boomers how to use Facebook, so anything is possible. All right, right here is. Okay, Nana, put the camera down. Right. It's going straight up to the Internet. All right, fastball right down the middle. If you had one sentence to make an impact in somebody's life, what would that be?

What you focus on grows.

Perfect.

Yeah.

Anything to add to that?

I mean, if you want more happiness, focus on what makes you happy. If you. If you're going to focus on what's not working, guess what? You're going to be dealing more with what's not working all the time.

Yeah.

If you focus on the five employee, five salespeople who aren't making their quota, that's all you're going to be thinking about and dealing with is the failure. Maybe you should go focus on the three salespeople who are killing it, who are half of your business, and figure out why they're successful and how to help them more and how to help them be more. Right. Like, go focus on what's working, and inevitably the other stuff kind of works itself out. Yeah, Right. Those salespeople go away, you get rid of them. Right. They don't get any oxygen in the room because they suck. And, like, the people are doing great stuff. They get all the oxygen. Like. But if you. I've seen sales leaders do this. They spend all of their time on the five people who aren't doing well, and ultimately, sales start going down because we're not helping the people who are doing the best stuff. So whatever you focus on will grow.

The founder, one of the founders of Ritz Carlton, said exactly that. Focus on the things that make you money and it'll make you great.

Yep.

Awesome. Chris, thanks so much for being on today. This was so much fun.

Yeah. Thanks for having me. I'm glad we got connected and it was a good time.

Yep. I'm Jeff Duden. We have been here with Chris Dyer, and we have been on the unemployable podcast. Thanks for listening.