Do NOT Lead From The Ivory Tower! #entrepreneur #leadership #business #entrepreneurship

The quietest guys or women are always the most dangerous in the room, especially if you're in a big meeting. The quieter person is the person you need to be aware of. So listen more than you speak. Good leaders do this really effectively. Most people do not listen with the intent. To understand, you need to pay attention, listen with intention, be there 100% present, and listen more than you speak as a leader. Welcome back to the Everyday Entrepreneur. Today we're talking about some of the entrepreneurship fundamentals that I think are the most important ways to increase your leadership skills. So as an entrepreneur, one of the things that you constantly have to be working on is your leadership. And there are tons of ways over the last decade that I've learned and harnessed my skills as a leader within my company and, and personally. So let's dive right in. One of my favorite quotes by Aristotle, we are what we repeatedly do. Excellence then is not an act, but it's a habit. I also included a quote from John C. Maxwell and James Clear, who wrote the Atomic Habits, one of the best books you can possibly read to Creating good habits. And one of the things that is talked about very, very often to be a top performer is just your consistency, having the same routines. You don't like, fuck your morning routine. You don't need a two hour bio hacking routine, but if you do the exact same things every single day. I was just listening to a podcast with Alex Hermosi and he literally has the exact same day seven days a week. And that is definitely one of the reasons that he is so successful. He's been so consistent for so many years. So I would highly recommend reading the Atomic Habits and just building a schedule for yourself that works with your family, with your friends and with your work to be consistent. Another really good place that you can go into that you can listen to about consistency is the Modern Wisdom podcast. I've been a really big fan of Chris Williamson, his podcast with Alex Hormozi, his podcast with Tim Ferriss and Peter Attia. Some of my favorite podcasts that I've ever listened to in my life. And this guy embodies leadership, manliness, being a strong minded person, and he is extremely consistent and he attributes a lot of his success to his consistency. Next, building trust. A really good analogy that I got from my therapist years ago was it takes years to build trust with people. And you build trust drop by drop by drop and eventually that cup will get full. And then you have built and developed trust with people. But unfortunately one single action can tip that glass over. And sometimes it'll break the glass and you'll never be able to develop trust again. Or. But if you do want to, it's about the consistency and filling up a little drop. Day by day, action by action, to build trust with your employees, with your customers, with your family, with your friends. Building trust is so important, and really good leaders are examples of trustworthy people. And you need to do that as an entrepreneur. One of my favorite quotes by Warren buffet, it takes 20 years to build a reputation, in five minutes to ruin it. If you think about this, you. You'll do things differently. Of course you would. You would not take shortcuts or hacks to get to places that you need to be because you're thinking about the long term and being a trustworthy person. And you want to be able to trust people. Your friends, your family, your coworkers. Trust is so important. This is a really good tactic that I learned from Cole Hatter. I'm pretty sure it's something from maybe tech stars as well. But we would have a lot of conversations with our team, and sometimes you have shy people, especially if you're working with engineers or just they're quieter. And one way to get people talking is by doing roses, buds, and thorns. So roses is something that's going on that's really good. That recently happened in your life. It's flourished, you're happy about it. Buds are things that you're investing in, you're thinking about, or that you're excited about that are going to happen in the future. They're budding, and then thorns are what are my challenges right now? What might be on my mind that's distracting me away from what I really should be working on. But this was a really good tactic that I used to open up conversations. And as the leader, since we're talking about leadership, you should always start. Be the first person to share. This was how we worked with our team at Data Nerds. This was a photo from, I think, 2016 or 2017. You know, we had 10 or 11 employees at the time. And this was before we started to state it, actually. So the next piece of advice for good leadership is celebrating your wins and learnings. I think there's nothing more important than celebrating your successes, but at the same time, what brings you the success is the processes and the journey that you took to get there. And success is kind of fleeting. It's really just a moment that you already accomplished the goal. And most the time in entrepreneurship, you're already thinking about what the next goal is. So just be present when you do have a win or a big lesson and have the takeaways and then keep moving forward, keep taking action. That is the most important thing you can be doing as an entrepreneur. Nelson Mandela I never lose. Either win or, or I learn. It's a great way. I never liked saying like we lost or we failed at this. It's like we learned something really valuable. Let's take some actions to do it better next time. Another really good quote about entrepreneurship. I couldn't figure who this was attributed to, but entrepreneurship is living a few years of your life like most people won't. So you can spend the rest of your life like most people can't. I really feel like I'm in a position right now where I'm living a life that most people can't even fathom. I was talking to some entrepreneurs, they made a million dollars last month and and they were having tough times discussing about they've grinded for six or seven years and then they finally hit success and they don't like people judge you differently. At the end of the day that's your own journey and you can just live that. And as a leader, just be respectful about it. That's the only thing that matters. The next big thing is momentum. I freaking love when momentum gets going and it's working. There's no better feeling. But do not take your foot off the gas. These moments will not last forever. A really good quote that I read about this was from Darren Hardy. He's kind of a legendary, personal developed, self help guru type of guy. But momentum, the big mo is without a doubt one of the most powerful and enigmatic forces of success. If you are riding a wave of momentum, ride it as long as you possibly can. Keep working hard. Don't take your eyes off the prize. Tony Robbins talks a lot about this as well. And anything you can read or listen to from Tony Robbins will add value to your life in my opinion. The next thing with leadership viciously protect your time. Especially once you get a bunch of employees and a lot of clients you need to start protecting. It's our most valuable asset. I talked about it in the mini lessons in this course and you have to prioritize your life or someone else will. That was from Greg Tim Ferriss. Being busy is not the same as being productive. In today's world we just live in such a distraction attention culture. Everything is pulling for your attention. So I cannot cannot iterate enough how important it is to viciously protect your time. Next delegation quadrants another really good book about this is Buy Back youk Time. I've talked about it many times from Dan Martell. Being able to delegate out responsibilities as an entrepreneur and as a leader is a key skill set. One of the things that I used very often was this important versus urgent Eisenhower matrix. It's we would get post its, we would just draw it on a whiteboard or on a wall and I would figure out what's important and urgent. Those were the things that I was working on. And if it was not important and not urgent I was probably delet maybe delegating it. But if it was important and not urgent I was for sure delegating that out to someone. And so you can use this to figure out what lights you up, what fires you up and what you should be working on. So this Eisenhower matrix just grab some post it notes with your team, especially when you're feeling overwhelmed. Write out all the to dos and tasks that you have going on and then delegate out what you don't want to be doing and isn't as important to you. And then like that urgent, not important. That's the stuff that you delegate out. And then schedule in everything that's important and urgent and even important and not urgent. Schedule it out in the future so that you can just viciously protect your time. Bunch of quotes about this not going to go into all of them or read them too. You can check them out later. This presentation is shared beneath this video. Understand when people need space and to take time for their own lives. This was. This took me a long time to start to learn when people would come to the office and I already had all their to dos and okrs set out for them but they had something going on at home, something was distracting them with their family. I would often push them past their own limits. And I had two things that I think really helped at a stated one was I almost forced mental health days monthly on people. If I could tell someone had a lot of shit going on I was like just take a mental health day like I love you. I want you to come back to the office a happy healthy human. Go take care of whatever needs to be taken care of. Another thing for me personally that I Learned from Philip McKernan and then I've done some spiritual journey stuff this year is this digital detox days. You need to put your computer away, put your phone away and just think one of the things I do every single day is I either go for a walk or a run in the morning. I try and have vast views look at something beautiful. No cell phone on me. And just think. Get clear thinking. And this will also create respect with your employees because you're looking out for them beyond just what's happening at work. You want them to be happy, healthy humans. Another really fun thing I miss this the most about having an office and having 20 employees in there every day is we had these Kleenex boxes that we designed and made cute. And throughout the week, people would drop post it notes in these gratitude boxes is what we called them. And then on Friday at happy hour, we would all get together and we would just pass them around and we would share out these gratitudes. And sometimes people would want to say it was me, sometimes it was anonymous. It didn't matter. But gratitude is what will power you. It helps create purpose. It makes you feel good. It makes you feel important. And I see Dan Martell talks about gratitude a lot. His success and his purpose comes from how fucking grateful that man is for the life that he lives and the people that he helps. And so it's been a challenge for me to really dive into the gratitude side of things. But I notice it helps me a lot and it always lifts my spirits. It puts a smile on my face, and it definitely allows me to be a happier, healthier human. Zig Ziglar, Absolute legend. Gratitude is the healthiest of all human emotions. Think about that. And when you express gratitude for what you have, the more likely you'll have even more to express gratitude for. So, like, the more that you give it, the more that it comes back to you. Best feeling in the entire world. This one I've always battled with. I am an open box. I love to share. I was too transparent early on in my career with all my employees, I told them everything that was going on, not only personally and professionally with me, but also just I would. I wanted everyone to be in the loop with exactly what was going on within the company. And so transparency and openness will create respect, it creates trust, and it also helps with communication. So you should be transparent, at least weekly or monthly with your company in all hands about what's going on. Like, you don't want to have, like, hiding shit behind the curtains. Like, a company that I did work for not that long ago told us stories and quarterly updates, but they weren't the true story of what was going on. Not only was it delayed information that they were giving us, on top of that, it was just like, we see what's actually going on with revenue and sales, but you guys don't talk about that in this meeting, you just make it look like it's all sunshine and rainbows and it's absolutely not. So share about the hard stuff too. Another thing is don't lead from the ivory tower. And what I mean by that is a lot of CEOs are in their vacation house or, you know, their mansion and they send the team out to deal with all the problems instead of being the leader and facing it. Leaders go to battle like you think about old Roman warriors and stuff. Like the leaders led from the front. And nowadays with a lot of businesses, especially larger corporations, you see that they just lead from the ivory tower. And so as a leader, I've always believed that you should be in the front line. Brutal honesty delivered kindly. We've talked about that a lot. Consciously communicate. There's really good books out there for that. And then at some point you'll get to a scale where you only share what needs to be shared. But you can be transparent and open in that. One of my favorite things that we did on Fridays as well is every week on Friday we would buy lunch for the whole team. We'd sit together like at a community table in our office and we would just chat whatever came up. And it really helped us build camaraderie and happy, healthy humans. I apologize for the birds that are out here and all the noise, but you know, I'm in a beautiful location here in Playa del Carmen. So I wanted to film outside today. Having healthy, well connected teams are more productive. I always believed that if we communicate well, if we share food and comida, it's such a blessing that we have this. And it just made me really grateful and I know that we would celebrate our team's achievements in these moments. We'd call people out for the good work that they've been doing. And team lunches were just a great thing. As a leader, I would highly recommend at least once a month having like a pizza day or something where you just all get together and just shoot the shit. Water cooler talk is so important. One on ones and 360s. So when we started doing OKRs, CFRs were another really big part of OKRs. I talk about that in the business fundamentals. But my one on ones were the most valuable and most productive. When I would go for walks, coffee walks with my employees. I love coffee and I like to walk. It gives me a clear head. No phones, no nothing. And I could just go and do real check ins with your employees. As a leader, your team will scale. Eventually you'll only be Able to do this with your direct reports. But it's so important to keep a pulse on weekly. So just a weekly coffee, 30 minutes, 60 minutes, whatever you need. Check in with your leaders, the important people in your company. You should do it with your whole team, at least quarterly. One meet with each person just to check in where they're at. You're the leader, you run this show. They need to respect you and they need to see you and you can level with them in these meetings one on one. You really don't want to like, you know, like I say, praise in public and correct in private. This can be the moments where you can correct someone in private. Respect. I've talked about this. Building trust. Respect comes with that. It's a non negotiable within a business. A good leader is a respectful person. They not only have respect from their team and their, the people, their customers, but they also respect themselves and they show respect to others. Albert Einstein I speak to everyone in the same way, whether it is the garbage man or the president of the university. Legend. Legend, right? This was a really good lesson I learned from my friend Danny. He runs some mega, mega companies, invested in huge, huge projects as well. But, and I actually use this in my personal relationships quite a bit too. But you have to assume good intentions and if you don't have good intention or you think the other person doesn't have good intention for you, wait to have that conversation. Take a time out, take the space, Communicate. When you want to talk about this and you want to go into every single conversation with good intentions, happy, healthy humans, again, good intentions. If someone comes into a conversation with bad intentions immediately, you should take a time out, go take some breaths, do whatever needs to get done, lower the level of anxiety or stress or whatever is going on and have good intentions with everyone. I really believe that if we assume the best, you know the golden route. Treat everyone as you would treat yourself. So brutal honesty, deliver kindly. We talk about this quite a bit sometimes. This is a tactic that I used for this and it was called the shit sandwich. You start out with the good news, you share the bad news and then you give them good news again. And most of the time the people that you're working with are only gonna hear the bad news. So iterate and hit hard on the good news and then give the bad news. Make sure that they're still in a good mindset to accept this information and communicate openly about it. It's so important. Another really big thing that I see, leaders of CEOs of big companies right now, you know, they write their values on the wall. You can talk about Enron type of values like respect and honesty, and it's like they don't actually live and breathe the culture of the company. As the CEO, as the leader of this entrepreneur, you need to live and breathe your culture. 100% of company culture comes from the CEO and the leader. So as a leader, you need to live and breathe your culture. This is an interesting one for me as well. My gut never really drove me in the wrong direction. When I listened to my gut. Deep down, I knew when I had to make decisions, whether they were hard decisions or even just ones I didn't want to make, I needed to listen to my gut. In 2022, my gut told me to sell everything and I executed on that. And I didn't tell everyone, but I deeply trust it within myself. When your stomach feels it. Another funny thing was an old friend, Corey, told me he ran a pretty decent company, had a great exit in Kelowna as well. And he told me that if he thinks about firing an employee twice, he knows he should have done it already. And I couldn't agree with that more. But your gut, if it keeps you up at night, is obviously telling you that this is a decision and an action that you need to take. With me, I had to fire a CEO at one point because he really helped us for a couple years and incredibly valuable to our company. But it got to a point where he was just babysitting me. He was kind of poking his finger in departments where he didn't belong anymore, and he was incredibly valuable for the time that we needed him. But I had to fire him. And it was the hardest fire I think I had to do in my entire company. And so I really think about this like when your gut tells you something, you know that feeling. Execute on it, take action. Hiring and firing, this is the hardest part as a leadership. When you're firing someone, you say as little as possible. You can't really give reasons in Canada or in the us. It just needs to be a direct conversation and it's the hardest part of the job. But good leaders are able to do this. They don't outsource this, especially if you're firing your direct reports. HR should not do that. You should do it yourself as the leader. Communication, adaptability, problem solving are just some of the important technical skills. We have a whole thing in the business fundamentals about hiring, but this is very important. To be a good leader, you have to be able to hire and fire people couple just resources. I wanted to give you to add to this the five habits of effectiveness from the Effective executive Know thy time. We talked about that earlier. Viciously protect your time. Focus on contribution meaningful output. Make strengths productive. Leveraging individual and team strengths. First things first. Prioritize delegation quadrant and then effective decisions. You know you should have an OKR system. We talk about that a lot. Another good thing that I've learned as I've gotten older is just listen more than you speak. The quietest guys are always or women are always the most dangerous in the room. Especially if you're in a big meeting. The quieter person is the person you need to be aware of. So listen more than you speak. Good leaders do this really effectively and so I can't. Most people do not listen with the intent to understand you need to pay attention. Listen with intention, be there 100% present and listen more than you speak as a leader. Couple more quotes on that 7 Habits of Highly Effective People. Incredible book. Be proactive. Begin with N in mind. Put first things first. Think when when. Seek to be. I don't need to read all these to you. This is a book you have to read. It's in the library as well. Thank you so much. That's what I've learned about leadership over the last 10 years. I hope a few of these will add value to you. And let's keep going. These entrepreneurship fundamentals are just getting started. I'm really, really excited to have you here and if you have any questions, leave a comment down below or shoot me a dm. Thank you so much.