Building a Culture of Motivation, Consistency, and Success with Brandon Bornancin

Every company has breakdowns in their revenue process. Sure thing. Deals slip into next quarter, competitors creep in and swipe deals away at the last minute, and deals getting single threaded that don't get to power. These are just a few examples of revenue leak, but there are a ton more and they're preventing your team from reaching their sales targets. That's why I'm such a big fan of Clary's Revenue platform is the only tool that actually helps leaders take control of their revenue and thrive through any market conditions. Especially when things get tough. You can't afford to miss a single detail, but you also can't be leading by gut. Clary combines the science and the art of sales and sales leadership. So go to clary.com if you want to answer the most important question in your business. Are you going to meet, beat or Miss on revenue? Welcome to the live Better Sell Better podcast with your host Kevin Dorsey of Inside Sales Excellence, the number one Patreon group and YouTube channel for tech sellers and tech sales leaders, where we dive in deep for tactical advice on how.

To book more meetings, close more deals.

Faster, and lead sales teams to success. But we don't stop there. We also focus on the person in salesperson. We talk about mindset goals, time management and so much more. So thank you for listening and if you're interested, head on over to patreon.com InsideSalesExcellence now with that, grab a notepad, get ready and let's dive into the good stuff. What up everybody? Welcome to another episode of the live Better Sell Better podcast. This is your host Kevin Dorsey, AKA kd, and I hope you're buckled in. I hope you've got the fire retardant hat and suit on right now because this one might set the computer speakers on fire. Because I am beyond excited to be diving into a topic today that is near and dear to my heart with an individual that I've been connected with for over eight years now and have gotten to watch him rise to complete supremacy in his space. Because we're talking about culture today. Everyone's heard the cliche phrase culture eats strategy for breakfast, but no one ever talks about the strategy to develop culture, right? Because you have to combine the two. You have to have culture, you have to have strategy. But to design it and build it takes intention, skill and focus. And that is why I'm so, so excited to have Brandon Bornansen on the call with me today. CEO and founder at SEN Seamless AI. If you haven't seen him on LinkedIn, you haven't been Paying attention. But what I believe he has done so well is not just scale a company, but scale a culture. And we are going to dive in today on how exactly to do that. Brandon, my man, welcome to the show.

Wow. Kevin, thank you so much. I'm so grateful and humbled to be here. And I've had an amazing time learning from you following your amazing journey in the SaaS space as a sales executor, sales leader, and a lot of tips that I learned, I learned from you as well on leadership and execution. So it's an honor to be here today.

This. This is going to be great, man. I already know, like, and just so anyone listening, there was already like, eight minutes of us riffing before this started on content around here. So let's dive into culture, man, because it's something that, you know, it's a buzzword like, oh, culture, culture. We have a culture, but very few people are intentional about it. So start with just defining it. What does culture mean to you? Like, when you think about building a culture, what does culture mean?

Culture to us and me and the leadership team, from the top down, everything in between is like, what are your principles? What are you doing? What do you do? Why do you do it? And I. You know, what was interesting is there's so many fake people out there. There's fake leaders, there's fake. There's certainly enough fake gurus. We know that for a fact. If you go on LinkedIn or on Facebook, you'll see all these fake gurus in their jets and their. And their cars and their Rolls Royces and their airplanes and all this jazz, right? You've got the fake gurus, you've got the fake leaders. One, one great example. And no hate, no shade. Like, you've got the better.com CEO. I love you guys, your family to me. And then the next month or whatever, jumps on Zoom video and debauches, laying off a thousand people, then gets fired from his growth equity firm, you know, like, so. So I think that's. That's, like fake culture, right? Real culture to us is, what is your mission? What is your values? What are your principles? And it's not just something you write on a poster that you hang up and you tell everyone that's our core values. Like, I basically decided at a very early time to say, hey, I'm going to actually write a book on our core values, on our culture, and. And wrote whatever it takes to embody our core values, our culture. Because this was during COVID Thank you, by the way. I Love it. Katie's got the books up there. Yes. And by the way, anyone tuning in sales secrets? Kevin Dorsey is the first chapter. One of the best interviews I've ever had. Kevin Dorsey, first chapter in the book man, man earned it. And culture is like, like that's culture, right? To even have the energy and the, the mental capacity to say, I'm trying to run a company, I'm trying to build a billion dollar software. I'm going to take the time to write a book about culture so that all of our employees embody culture. That's what culture is. It's like doing whatever it takes to serve your people at the highest level to maximize their success, no matter what you want. And that's just kind of how we operate. Like, I wake up every day, I don't see quotas. Like, it's funny. People will be like, oh, well, what's your reps? Quotas? I'm like, I, I used to know that like three years ago, five years ago. I don't know. It's X amount in mrr. I know our annual goal. We're going for a hundred million IPO. 100 million ARR. IPO. But like, I look at people and the only thing I think about every single day, and this is, this is how our culture is built. There are four pillars to your life. Professional, personal health and wealth. Every day I wake up and I inspire our leaders and I inspire our individual contributors to help each other maximize their professional success, their personal success, their health, and their wealth. Like, to build an empire, you need these four pillars. To go from broke to financially free, you need these four pillars. And if one of these pillars starts to crumble, you've got a house that's built with four pillars. If one of those pillars falls down, guess what? The house collapses and the empire is destroyed from within. So for us, it's like figuring out what can we do to maximize everyone's potential, professionally, personally, health, wealth. And if we're constantly improving you to improve those levels in your life and those areas of your life and the principles and the habits and the mindset and the skills and the processes and the strategies and the secrets, then we've built an amazing culture.

And so there's so much we can unpack there. Have you read the book what you do is who you are by Horowitz, yet?

I have not.

You will love that book. Won plenty of Jay Z references in that book. He's who wrote hard things about hard things, but it talks about culture. It's the best book I've read on culture and one of the things he talks about that goes against common recommendations is what she just talked about is the culture is decided by the leadership. The leader decides the culture of the org and the team, and what he calls out is how important that is. Because when you do culture by committee, right, you hire a culture consultant and then you poll everybody on what the value should be and you do all these things, you get a watered down version that no one can identify with, whereas when it is set at the top, it also ensures that the top lives it. And I can guarantee anybody listening right now, you can hear it in his voice, he lives this. And that's the key to the culture. Right? But let's keep going.

Yeah, that's interesting. I totally agree. And like the court. So the core values. This was really hard for me, right, because I came from selling for IBM and Google, and I've been on the 90 different culture committee meetings and the meetings about the meetings about the culture and what it's going to be. And we would literally like have hundreds of people write on sticky notes what we thought the culture should be and what do we want the culture to be and what do we want the values to be? And like, I just remember it was really weird. You've just got a bunch of people writing a bunch of shit down and there's. There's no concise strategy. So the way that I came up with the mission and vision and the core values was I just literally wrote it out. I, I was like, why am I, why am I gonna give up making millions, having eight to 15 hours a day off of my job? Why am I going to work 18 hours a day, seven days a week, 365 for 10 years straight or more? I was like, you got to have a big mission and vision. So I'm like, okay, we built seamless to help the world connect opportunity. Okay? Why do we do that? Because we want to positively impact billions of people and transform, revolutionize an entire industry to change people's lives forever for the better. Boom. That's the mission. On a mission to help the world connect opportunity and positively impact billions. And then the vision is to maximize, like, okay, so then you break down the layer. After I wrote that down, it's like, what's, what's your vision? Then? It's, okay, well, I want to, I want to maximize the potential of every professional globally. Like, I don't care what you do or how you do it. My goal is to help you improve 1% a day to maximize your potential. You improve 1% a day by the end of the year. That's 37x. That means if you make a hundred thousand dollars a year, you multiply that by 37, now you're making 3.7 million. Let's say if you're not in sales or an entrepreneur and you can't increase your income, well, what if I provide you with the secrets to realize, like, oh, I'm not investing in my 401k. Well, if you do that, then you avoid 40% taxes. Then if you do that every day with a certain amount, you could then get to a million dollars in your savings. Or you know, how to improve your health so that you don't die. You know, if I could help you save 10 years or 20 years or 30 years or 50 years of your life, like, that's how I envision our, our vision to maximize the potential of every professional globally. And then the core values I just wrote down, like, what are my success secrets that I've learned from everyone I know? And I just jotted them down. Like, I jotted them down. We have, we have eight different success secrets. Try to pull it up. B rock my video guy. Pull up all the success secrets. And I've got so many different operating principles and core values that I live by. Like, there's 100 of them, but we took the top eight that I live by that are applicable to everyone at our company. You know, like action over inaction. Go big or go bigger. Do whatever it takes. Like, we've got it. On our website, every company meeting, every month, I go over our mission, our vision, our core values. My video guys going to bring it up just so I can read it to you.

And I'll jump in as you pull that up because where this transition well into is, first of all, your culture has to be defined. Find, it has to be documented. But one of the ways it describes culture in the book as well is cultures are behaviors and how a lot of companies do their values, their, their beliefs. They're not behaviors, they're beliefs. And there's a gap there, right? One of Enron's core values was integrity and communication and excellence. And anyone listening right now, I bet you have some core values that sound very similar. There's something around integrity, there's something around the customer, there's something around, you know, innovation. But they're not behaviors. You have to define it. But then what you were just starting to get into is how do you reinforce it, right? And so I want to go down this path so you have them pulled up to.

Yeah, and I agree with that. Right? Like, Katie, well, you just went over those three, right? To the people listening or watching this. Did you even know what that meant? Like, what the does that even mean? You know, like, if core values people can't listen to them and understand, like, at the core, what does that mean and why I should exude it to change the world with my products and services that I represent at the company I work for, then we've got a problem. So, like, our. Our core values, we've got 8 to 12. I'll read them real quick if that works for you, Katie.

Yeah, let's do it.

Okay, so number one, whatever it takes. Pretty simple. Do whatever it takes to serve our customers and our employees at the highest levels. Everything else great will follow. If you do whatever it takes to maximize the success of your customers, of your employees, you will win. Give to get. It's like no brainer. The next one, the whole is greater than the self, dude. Cultures are destroyed from toxic, unkind people, people that are not kind to others, that think they're better than other people, that treat people poorly, that scare people at work and create fear. So whole greater than self is all about. There is no eye in the team. We win together and we lose together as a team. The third one is think bigger. Take all of your dreams, all of your ideas, and all of your goals and aspirations and think bigger. Then develop the action plan to make them a reality. And I learned this because I used to set average goals. And then a few of my mentors were like, these billionaires were setting goal. They would have the reality of like, okay, let's just use this for quota setting, right? Because we're talking to salespeople. They're like, okay, my. My VP of sales gave me a quote of a million dollars. Okay? That's my goal. I will do that. Well, when I was selling and I had a quota of 10 million, I'm like, I'm gonna do 30 million. Like, just crazy. I'm gonna 3 exit. I'm gonna 5 exit. It was actually, for me, throughout my whole career, I would always 3x and 5x the quota and then reverse engineer the activity to hit the 5x quota. And I would never make the 5x, but guess what? I would always make the 3 to 4x. And I'd always get pissed because I'm like, why is it every year I can never hit my 5x but I could always hit the 3 or 4x, like, one day I will beat myself and it's you versus you. And I gotta figure out how to get to the 5x. But that's what that one's all about. The fourth one is challenge everything. And this doesn't mean, like, be a pain in the ass to leadership, Be a pain in the ass to like your people because challenge everything. Like, I've actually had co workers, you know, who just like to just fight just to fight. And I'm like, guys, that's not productive here. When I say challenge everything, it means like the, the 1% improvement, right? If you're waking up every day and you're, you're, you're generating the same results every day, what are you not doing that you could be doing to improve? What are you not thinking about changing or improving or optimizing that could set new records, that could create new paths. How can you, like, how can you achieve what you've never achieved before? Innovate and challenge everything. Every single day. You have to be improving. The fifth one is take action. This is the most important, like, one of the most important ones because a lot of people, you know, we, we work with, like, I don't know, it's like 400,000 to 500,000 sales teams on seamless right now. And when I'm working with SDRs, AES, VPs, you know, they, they have these grand ideas and they have these amazing products and services they want that they need to get in the hands of the people that desperately need them. And they will change those people's lives forever for the better if they could just get in front of them. But the thing is, is they spend 90 days developing a strategy and then they want to execute that strategy over a year. It's like, guys, how do we develop the strategy in a day and then how do we execute that strategy tomorrow? And this is MVP1. And then after this week, we'll do MVP2. In week two, stop thinking and start doing Take action. Paralysis by analysis doesn't accomplish anything for anyone. Got to take action. And I'm a big believer. I tell this to my leadership. They get scared a little bit, but, like, it never hurts them. I say take action and ask for forgiveness from me. And guess what? If you ever up, I will not be mad, right? I will actually be more upset that you didn't get the data and take the action to make a decision to make our goals and dreams a reality for the customers and the users that we serve. And this happened to us recently. Let me give you an example. Like, we've got, oh my Gosh, hundreds of thousands of transactions. I think it's like, I don't. Tens of thousands of transactions a day. Like payments going through seamless AI. One of the big things is like Stripe is not built for SaaS subscription management. 10,000 plus transactions a day. We're like, we have to get a SaaS subscription management software. So the OPS team, and this was before I brought in a VP and before I brought in a Director of Ops. But one of our OPS managers selected a high end subscription management software. Okay, well, fast forward six months to where we're at now. I've got a VP of ops, a Director of Ops. They're like, this is totally. This is the wrong platform. It's missing 50% of the requirements that we need. We thought that it fulfilled our requirements six months ago, but this is the wrong platform. Brandon, we're so sorry. We can't believe we wasted all of your money and all the company's money and blah, blah, blah. I'm like, guys, it's okay. Yeah, like you're, you're trying to change a massive problem. Like if I, if we cry over every single mistake that we make, we will never get to where we want to go. Like, I'm not even thinking about what we lost.

Right?

What would make me more upset is if we stayed with this wrong solution for five years and we create a ton of inefficient workflows and fixes that were patches to the hall and the holes with water coming through the walls. Like, fix. Where's the water coming from? Like, fix the problem at the core. So I'm like, guys, like, kill the deal with that. Those guys. And then they're like, we've got this way better platform. It solves 98% of our needs and we're ready to sign. It's going to cost X. I'm like, go, go. Run. I think that's a take action. And that falls into our six core value, which is find solutions. Like, there's opportunity. Oh, this is a little different. So take action. You guys. You. You get that? Dorsey, have you ever experienced that?

Oh, I mean, absolutely. And it funny you mentioned because this is my leaders. Most of the frustrations I ever had with my leadership team was not what they did wrong, it's what they did not do. I was like, like. And we would talk. I was like, yo, when is the last time you did something wrong? Like, literally, can you tell me the last time you did something wrong? Like you actually made a mistake. You can't. Right? And actually I Say them often is like, I don't say no enough, meaning you're not bringing me enough things to say no to. Like, that's strong. What. What are these batshit crazy ideas? What are the things that you want to try? Right, But I. What our phrase was what's best and why not. I would never be upset with you if you did what you believed was best. And at least ask yourself the why not question. What's best? This software, why not? At least address the why not. Right? Because then if you thought it through and you believe this was best and you had your why nots, cool, we're onto the next one. But it's the inaction I love that kills people. Whereas, like, taking the action, you learn, you get things done. And truthfully, all listening, more often than not, you're probably going to be right. I literally. Oh, yeah, I want you to.

That's just.

When's the last time you actually made a mistake? Like, actually truly made a mistake of commission, not omission, meaning not like you didn't do something that you knew you should have. That is a mistake that you did the wrong thing? It's rare. It's way rarer than people think. And that's part of the problem.

And this is a mindset thing that, that Kevin's talking about. The, the action over inaction. Take action. Like, I, I always same thing. Like, tell the. The team and tell everyone. I coach and mentor. Take action over inaction. The whole world has trained you. No, like, as. As kids growing up, which is totally messed up. Like, I'm. Kevin Dorsey has kids and I don't. We were actually just recently talking about this this past week. So I'm saying this without any experience, but I do this with my dog. So Danielle always tells our dog, you can't do that. You can't do this, you can't do that. And I'm always telling Ella, our puppy, I was like, run faster. Run out the door. Kill the rabbit, dude. Like, do whatever you want to do. Right? I was like, go harder when she's going crazy. Attacking people in our. In our house. Because, like the whole world, I'm just built to nep. To not let fear and not put constraints and limiting beliefs on other people. My mom, my dad have always put limiting beliefs on me. You can't do this, you can't do that. Teachers have always told you, you can't do this, you can't do that. You've got bosses, co workers, friends, people in your network. When you are about to do something that they don't have the courage to do, don't have the intelligence to do, don't have the unlimited potential to do. They will start putting limiting beliefs on you to not take action. That's a bad idea. I wouldn't do that. That. Why are you working so hard? Why are you writing that book? Why are you launching your sales software company when you're making all this money? Dude, my whole life everyone's told me, don't take action, don't do it, don't go for it. And it's a limiting belief that if you can just, I'm a go all in on action. And it will always work out. If it doesn't, like, it's a failed test. Just like a convert conversion on a website, you know, if you have. You got an AB test, life should be an experiment that you run and the decisions that you make just realize, like, okay, I could do A or B. If A doesn't work out, okay, now I've got the data to try B and then see what improves better A or B. And this is how digital marketers do it. Well, they'll take a landing page. We'll try version A, we'll try version B. If you start thinking like conversion rate optimization and every decision that you make, everything that you shoot for is like a data point to, to get to the goal and improve. You're gonna win big.

And what I want people also to remember about virtues and values here is they're all intertwined, right? Cause Bren is not talking about taking blind action. It's taking action with the premise of the other values of are you taking action that's aligned with thinking bigger? Are you taking action with whatever it takes? Are you thinking action of doing, like, what's right by our customers? The virtues guide each other. It's not about blind action, but if they're all working together, that's where it comes through. So we got six of them. You got two left for me. What are the last two?

Yes. And what was up there? Real quick? B rocks. So this is a big one. Find solutions. So this is something that I try to coach our team on a lot. Like, you got to be positive with everything, you know, quick story for everyone. So I pitched 300. I. I prospected thousands of venture capitalists and angel investors to fundraise cold outbound prospecting using seamless with the list, cold emailing with outreach IO, cold calling literally every angel investor in venture capital that you could find on LinkedIn that, that you can find on Angellist. I Built the list with Seamless, LinkedIn, Crunchbase, and I start cold call prospecting because I'm like, okay, to really build this search engine that finds everyone in the world and their contact info. Like, I need some money and I need a shitload of engineers. So I'm going and I'm pitching all these investors. And that. What. What happened was I literally, a week before demo day, we. The venture capital firm, I went through an accelerator in. In Newark, New Jersey. Part of the accelerator. Accelerator was I had to live in downtown Newark, New Jersey. And I was pretty much in the ghetto with gunshots and people in my backyard, gangsters in my backyard. Newark, New Jersey. And no offense to Newark, New Jersey, because I'm Italian and there's tons of Italian people out there, and I love New Jersey. The whole state of New Jersey actually invested in Seamless. But long story short, so doing whatever it takes to get funding in New Jersey, and we're prepping for demo day, and I'm like, dude, this was my last year. Three years trying to build Seamless. We're out of money. Demo day goes bad, we're bankrupt. It's over. Game done. So I'm the. The. The managing partner says for the last two weeks of demo day, no one's allowed to travel. No one's allowed to do anything. Last week, it was the fourth day leading up to demo day, we're on stage at the hockey rink. I don't even know what it's called. The Prudential Hockey Rink. I get a call. My Danielle calls me. She's like, yo, you gotta fly to LA asap. She's like, your. Your mom's on. On the deathbed. And, like, if you don't get out there, like, today or tomorrow, she's gone, and you're gonna regret it. I'm like. I was like, I got demo day. I gotta go, though. So I called the managing director. I saw him. I'm like, dude, mom's about to die. I got a bowl. So I literally go fly there, see my mom for the last time, you know, get to say my piece. She couldn't talk or anything, but she was grabbing my hand and stuff, and it was amazing. And then literally flew back in 24 hours, and I'm on stage presenting to a thousand people like. Like, nothing ever happened. And I. This is an example of finding solutions, not problems. I could have sat there and weeped for a day, a week, a year, a decade, and said, wo is me. I'm a victim. Life is over. Like, or I could look at the situation and appreciate and be grateful and, and realize all these different gifts. Like dude, life is short. Leverage every second. Like my mom passing and you know, and she had Alzheimer's since I was 21 years old. Finding solutions, not problems is like finding the answers and being grateful and happy that you're alive because there's a solution for everything as long as you're positive and you're looking for that opportunity. And I just leveraged so many learnings from the demo day and my mom passing with like appreciating life, being grateful for everything and, and by the way, that made me go vegan. Whole food plant powered. I changed my diet because started researching Alzheimer's, cancer and diabetes. And like a lot of why people are sick is because of their what they eat, right? Like if you're smoking cigarettes and you get lung cancer, you can't be like, oh, how do I cure lung cancer? Well, guess what? You know how you can cure heart disease, cancer, Alzheimer's and diabetes? There's one thing and it's, and it's what you eat, you know, so I'm a big proponent of like what you eat to maximize your health. So I just learned all these things and finding solutions during problems, during tough times, good and bad, you name it. And that's, that's the other core value. And then the others real quick just because I, you know, I know we've got a lot of them do the right thing. And I think this is a better way to say integrity. You know how you said Enron says integrity? 99 of people don't even know what the, that means straight up. I, I actually don't even know what the definition is of integrity.

Google it right now. I'm sure it's not Google the, the.

Definition, but our, our way of saying the same thing, I believe is do the right thing. Like no matter what you're doing, do the right thing. Like what you know is right and wrong. Don't do the thing that you believe is the wrong thing and do the right thing.

Yeah, well, it's funny because. So integrity, right? The quality of being honest and having strong moral principles. Because what's funny again, integrity is a belief. It's a characteristic, it's not a behavior. You do something with integrity. Whereas if you just believe in integrity, it doesn't mean anything you have to do with integrity. You have to go through it. And so we had our core virtues for our sales org and same idea. Ours were all behaviors. Take care of the person and salesperson, seek perpetual Growth, own your shit, Help ytp, Help yourself, team and prospect, ecm. Every conversation matters. Plan and play to win. Celebrate the process. Those were ours, right? And we defined them. They were documented. We knew what good every single one of those had. Nine or ten examples of here's what it means to plan and play to win. Because that's also where a lot of companies go off with their values, their virtues, their cultures is they define it, but they don't document. Like, what does it mean? Like, what are examples of doing the right thing?

Oh, yeah, I love that. And that's what you showed me. You showed me in. Because Kevin Dorsey has been, we love talking about leadership strategies to maximize people's successes. One of the things that you did where I'm like, oh, great idea, is you had examples of all of the values. And like, because people can hear one thing and it doesn't resonate. Here's another, like, way to train culture, teach culture. I tell the same like, like, thing that I'm trying to teach, but I, I share it with like five to ten different ways. Five to ten different stories, five to ten different examples. But it's the same thing, like, fail forward, don't quit, don't give up. Like, these are different operating principles. But I'll talk about different stories and themes and ways to do it, because one way may resonate with someone and another way will resonate with someone else. And I love that. How you had that laid out in the Google Doc, that's genius.

You have to. Because if you think about even something as simple as do the right thing, giving examples of what that means is important, right? So here's the situation. A customer calls in, they are still under contract. They want to cancel because budget's tightening up. What's the right thing? Right. As a company, you need to understand and define, like, what is in a situation like that, what is the right thing? Well, the right thing for the customer might be to cancel. The right thing for me is the rep. A lot of reps might go, well, I don't want to make them upset, so I'll let them cancel. The right thing for the company might to be able to keep them, but the right thing for the customer too is like, wait, wait, wait, you're tight, so you want to take away something that makes you money. So budgets are tight and you want to take away some of that, like, what is the right thing? And defining that is very, very important throughout all this process. But where I want to go next, because this is really, really important, is most Companies don't even take it this far. But something you said earlier that is important is you have to reinforce it. She said something like, you know, like.

Yeah, this is the most important.

Okay, cool. Right. Because we've also, you've been there especially, you were big companies where the C suite comes out and they go, tada.

Here are our frogs.

And you get a little sweatshirt and it's all up on it, right? And then nobody ever does anything with it. How do you reinforce these? Like, are you bringing it up in meetings? Are like, how do you make sure that this stays top of mind for everybody?

Yeah, it's a great, great question. It's probably the hardest thing for leaders, companies to do. I think it took me years to really figure out step one, you can't be fake. Like at the core, if these core values don't align with you and, and who you are, I highly recommend just going to a different company or going to like doing something different. Because who I am now is the same as who I was back then when I started the company. I just have a lot more money and a lot more availability of money to make an impact. I've got more money and people and product and opportunity to create a bigger impact. So like if you're an asshole and these core values don't align with you at the beginning, well, money will just multiply. You being a complete asshole and an unkind, right? So like at, at the core it just comes down to like, who are you? And, and do these core values represent you? Because eventually if you fake it on social media, on Instagram, like if you, if you're taking pictures. Another way to explain this is like if your family is falling apart and you're, you're about to get a divorce, but, but you're taking pictures of you wife and the kids and the dog and everything's great and dandy. Like people will see through that and it will crumble and they will know that you're not authentic. So I think at the core, be authentic. And the way that we do this is just every time people see me and work with me, they're like, man, dude, I mean, Keegan's right here. Guy moved from Michigan to. Or, sorry, Orlando, Florida. Left his dog, his girlfriend and moved to Ohio because they were toxic. Not his fault. He had to get out of a bad situation and, and he's like, I gotta follow the money, I gotta be around. Brandon came here and he's like, man, you're, you're, you're way more hard working than I've ever seen. You're way more humble than I'd ever imagined. You care so much about all of your people. More than I've ever seen out of any company I've ever worked for. You name it. It's like I am me, all in all the time trying to maximize our team's potential every day of the week. So, like, you got to like work it and do it every day. Not for the cameras, not for LinkedIn posts on the company page, but you got to actually like, do it every day and then ways that I instill it. So I've created a SL like to get tactical here because that's what you guys care about. So I created a slack bot that literally posts to the company in sales every hour, which is crazy, in marketing every four hours, and to the company every day. And in this Slack bot, it highlights our mission, it highlights our vision, and it highlights the results that we deliver for our customers. Because, like, at the end of the day. And can you zoom out of this camera real quick without screwing up the deal? So we, we built this company to get every single user at Seamless into Presidents Club. Because I remember when I was selling for IBM and they gave me a $50 million quota and I worked like a slave for freaking a year straight. No one cared about me trying to help them make all this money. And then I made them 60 million and they, they just said, Brandon, now you need to do 100, now you need to do 200, like we don't care about you, whatever. And I felt like to where we're like, dude, president's club, we want anyone that hits our quota, we want Anyone that makes 6 figures in sales, 7 figures in sales, 8 figures in sales to, to get these awards, to win these awards. So one of the things that we do every single day is we show the hundreds of millions of leads researched by our users. We've got over 13 million appointments that have been made by our, our users and customers. We've got almost 3 million deals closed by our customers and $26.7 billion in revenue generated by our customers. Over 13,000 Six Figure Club winners. Can't see it in the shot. Six Figure Club winners. And then we've got over 4,000 Seven Figure Club winners. So like every day, my company, our company, they see the business impact. They see we're transforming people's lives, the results, the revenue, how we're, we're changing companies, we're helping salespeople survive, thrive, go from broke to financially free, you name it. So Every day we post this and we highlight it. That's one tactic. Also. Another tactic is we capture every success story from everything we do. Like, so every. Every success story about a customer, we. We track and we share. Because I want. I want our people. When we're tired, we all get tired. Like, we're grinding. I get stuck almost every day. I get tired every day. I get unmotivated and uninspired because I'm exhausted every day of the week. But the way that you remember, you have to go all out no matter what, whatever it takes. Don't quit when you're tired. Quit when you're done. The way that I do that is I'm like, look at all these people that have won the. This seven figure club, this six figure club, all of my employees that have bought their house, that have went on their dream vacation, that were finally able to take their kids to Disney World for the first time, that bought their dream Aston Martin. Blake Nolan, you know, AJ got her penthouse. She just got her penthouse in Brickell, Miami. And she's living the high life, like, for our employees and for our users, like, those success stories from our. Our customers and then the success stories from our users and our employees and from our books and from our thought leadership. So we have like 10 different channels that we have. We save all of these success stories, and we share it every single day of the week with every single employee. Because it just helps you realize, like, we are on a mission to change the world, help the world connect opportunity to positive impact billions. We are serving at a greater level, higher than ourselves. Like, like, this is very. Like, you look at mass movements like church and politics, and it's like they're serving at a level that is far greater than them. And when you do that and you revolutionize and transform people's lives for the better, Giving, giving, giving with zero expectation of anything in return. You really do get everything you've ever wanted in life. And you put everything aside and say, I don't. I don't care about what I have. And by the way, today, can you believe this? By the way, this, this. This was interesting. Tough. I. I've gone through a transformation where, like, I worked seven years straight, and like, on my wall in my office, I had pictures of Lamborghinis, Ferraris, Rolls Royce, all this stuff, right? And today I just had ev. I. I sold the two Lamborghinis. I had people drive up and they literally, like, right before this, they were picking up the cars today, and I got rid of everything because I Don't give a about that. The only thing I care about is the 13,942, six figure Presidents Club winners. The only thing I care about is the freaking. I mean it's in the ROI thing. I don't know what the number is. I Forget what. It's 4500 and something. Whatever it's in the email gets emailed out to everyone. It gets posted to Slack Key and pull it up right now. And. And the 27 billion in revenue that we generated. So and the employee success stories and all the money that we're generating for our employees and the freedom that they're generating. I think that's what it's about. So we, we post those all the time. What else do we do?

Every company mission real quick because the key to culture are stories. If you want to. If you want a culture to live, you have to tell stories. And if y' all go back and listen to this episode, that's actually one of the things you're going to hear a lot of is their stories. He was dropping names, places you can.

Just give me your phones.

Right. Like you have to tell the stories to keep the culture alive and then the recognition of the value. So this is something that my teams did is we recognized the virtues on a weekly basis. So Brandon got a shout out. Brandon for you know, plan and play to win. The way he went into that demo call for with legal was phenomenal. Da da da da da da. Shouting out Gabby for seek perpetual growth. She did three additional like we shot shouted out the behaviors. We have to recognize the behaviors because back to your dog story. Right? Telling the dog to get off the couch and saying no is not nearly as powerful as saying good job when they get off. Right. And so we'll to all no, don't do this, don't do this versus you did what I was looking for. Great job. And it reinforces the behavior. And the last one I want to bring up here because you and I have both gotten flack for this. So it'll be fun for us to talk about this real quick before we wrap. Is culture right? The best analogy I've gotten for culture is a culture should be like a magnet where it attracts the right people but repels the wrong people. There are people out there that cannot stand me and there are people out there that cannot stand you. And I think that 100 important for culture because again, when most people create a culture they're trying to create a culture that attracts everybody. But then again that's why you do not have a culture. Whereas being real, being authentic of like, this is what you're getting. This is who your leader is. This is how we think, how we operate, what we do here are our values. It's also going to repel some people, which I actually think is okay because it's saying like, hey, then you wouldn't fit in this culture. As long as the culture is not exclusionary. Right? Where you're excluding, it's like, no, like, yeah, we do whatever it takes here. If you don't want to be a part of a whatever it takes culture, this isn't the place for you. We take action. If you want to be in a fully analytical culture, this isn't the place to you. So talk to me about that as we wrap up. Of like, not only does the culture attract the right people, it also will repel people that maybe it wouldn't have been a good fit for.

Oh, gosh, yeah, yeah. And you loved this post that I did. I said, and we actually saw the woman at the speakeasy bar. So you know, Kevin and I were getting together recently, the past two months, and I did a big post about how I was trying to recruit this high end person to join the company. And she's like, brandon, a lot of your success is because you work 24 7. And I was like, she's like, so I'm not interested. And I'm like, okay, sales objection. Let's just overcome the sales objection and get this deal closed. So I'm like, okay, K, I appreciate that. I was like, that's not how I coach and teach our company. I was like, I never expect any employee to work as hard or harder than me. Any leader, any CEO, founder, that says, I want my employees to work harder than me or more than me, I'd run from them faster, as fast as you can. Like, I will never expect or tell my employees to work harder than me. And I actually tell our employees, if I ever work less than you, you go to the board and you fire me as fast as humanly possible. Like, because, because any leader that's putting that on there, people like, they don't have the equity that you have, they don't have the buyout, the, the salary, the investments that you have. Like, of course they're not going to work as hard as you. And this, this is what I told Kristen. Sorry, K, dropped your name. I told her, I was like, Kristen. I was like, yes. What you see is reality. I work seven days a week, 365, and guess what? It's the thing that I love to do the most because I've got this mission to, like, literally change the world of sales forever. To serve billions of people and get them to the highest level of success. Like, that's just who I am. But my people don't work. Like, I don't put that on our team. That's not our culture. I was like, we've got, like, 30 to 45 days of PTO. We've got summer Fridays. We've got all this stuff where everyone is off. The amount of time off that people have is insane. And I yell at people. I don't yell at people.

Hey, get out of here. Go to Disneyland. And just.

Yeah, I coach people up and I get pissed when they're working. Like, my VP of marketing is going to Disneyland with his kids. This guy, Jonathan Pogat, marketing genius, one of the hardest guys I know. He's always working in the morning, in the evening. He's always on calls with me, brainstorming day in and day out. Like, because. Because he loves what our mission is and who we serve and his team. Just like I do. So for us, it's like, we'd rather do that than watch Netflix or whatever. So we'll screw around, you know, and try to strategize on how to take the business to the next level. And I'm. And he's like, hit me up. And I'm like, dude, aren't you on pto? He's like, yeah. I'm like, guy, spend time with your three kids and your wife and drink a lot, eat a lot, and don't text or slack me unless it's pictures of you eating, drinking on. On freaking rides or whatever. And me, Mason, Phil B. Rock, Keegan, Chelsea, Stephanie are pissed that we didn't get the invite to do the Epcot drinking and eating tour next time we want the invite, you know, because, like, you should never just put that work stress on people like that. That's an example of just how we operate. I get a lot of heat. So going to the. Hate anything you do, if anything's worth doing, that you do. And when you're trying to get to the next level of success, anyone below your level of success with a high degree of confidence will hate on you. And you have to go into it. And I learned this lesson the most. Oh, my gosh. Like, I. I'm a speed reader. I love reading. I try to read a book a day. And I was like, man, what's one of the. The number one most sold books in the world say there's two of them, right? Number one, the Bible. Okay, Most sold book like in the world, the Bible. Okay. And then the next one is Harry Potter. And I'm like, okay, if I go down the religion route, it may cause some like HR issues. So I'm like, okay, let me research the, the, the Harry Potter deal. And I'm like, this is one of the most sold books in the world. And I went to the Amazon, go to Amazon and look up Harry Potter. You will see tens of thousands of five star reviews. And guess what else you will see thousands and thousands upon thousands of one star reviews. This, this book has sold tens of millions of copies. Like, like, I don't even know what the exact number is, but it's, it's literally one of the top five or ten books sold of all time. And the amount of haters and the amount of people talking and everything going on is absolutely insane. So anything that you do that's worth doing and that's at another level of success where your network or your people aren't at 500 million copies. By the way, my guys just pulled it up. More than 500 million copies of the Harry Potter books have sold worldwide. Go to Amazon and pull up Harry Potter. Let's see the stars. So, so when you're doing this, people will talk about you. But, but like Kevin and I talked about at the early of the podcast, don't let your fear hold you back from taking action. Just know people below. No one talks about people that are more successful than them. I never look at Kevin Dorsey and I'm like, oh, he's got a bigger following. Oh, he's doing his teaching. Oh, he's got, he's speaking like Kevin Dorsey. This guy's speaking at what, the cool.

Thing Dublin in October.

Yeah, so, so Dorsey speaking on stage in SAS doc in Dublin. I never got an email or call to speak at SAS Doc in Dublin. I could be like, ah, Kevin Dorsey doesn't know. Why is he speaking? That's one way to look at it. But, but winners and people that have the right mindset and the rate, the right principles and habits and culture are like, man, that's amazing. What can I do to help you get the word out about that to drive people to attend your session to go and, and do that. And by the way, what can I learn from you, man? Like, how'd you do that? I asked Horsey like, oh, you're speaking in, in sasdec. That's amazing. How did you do that? What can I Learn from you. You name it. Like you try to learn from people who are doing these things that are greater than what you're doing. You don't try to degrade them. Like never degrade anything bad. I just have a rule. I try to have a rule that says never talk bad about anything or anyone because you don't know what they're.

Going to matter and it doesn't help. Right. Like it's funny because I think this like the way you were phrasing at the beginning, the way I took it initially is like I've never been hated on by someone more successful than me, right? And like, and if you think about it's the truth, they don't have. They're not focused on hating, they're not focused on tearing people down. They're focused on succeeding and moving up. It's always people that look up, they say, oh, we want to pull that person down as they go through it. And what's hilarious, man, your example, part of our objection handling sequence. If someone's like, oh, we saw some bad reviews, we would pull up the reviews for Disneyland. A Vidyard like true story with Nathan Leong. If you're out there, he and I were the ones that created this. We literally pulled up the reviews For Disneyland, clicked 1 stars and recorded them and said even the happiest place on earth has bad reviews. Of course we have some bad reviews. Even Disneyland has bad reviews. That was actually part of our objection handling sequence. If someone's like, no, I saw you had some bad reviews. Well yeah, everyone has bad reviews. In fact, the presence of no bad reviews actually makes people trust them less. By the way, anybody listening? All the reviews are perfect. You trust it even less because you know that there's, there's flaws.

And so yeah, and like that the Harry Potter book. So there's 17,089 global ratings. 4.8 out of 5.1% of the reviews are bad. If I was good at math, I'd be able to calculate that, right? So you literally. 170.

You can do that.

I know, I just didn't want to sound smart. But you know, there we go. Stupid, you know, 170 bad reviews. Like, like dude, okay, so 500 million copies and you're going to talk about Harry Potter. And by the way, I never read the book. I, I'm just not into fiction books. I love like only self improvement stuff so. However, I'm not going to hate on it because it sold 500 million copies. You know what I will do? I sell and and write all these books, right? Like we've got all these books. Well, guess what I haven't done. Maybe I should read Harry Potter because I haven't sold 500 million copies of these books. So now a winner. Like, and Dorsey said, like, people that are successful don't hate, they create. That's what the core theme was, don't hate if you're creating, right? They study these people, they study success. Success leaves secrets. And you got to find the secret that you can learn and apply to become the best you can be. And that's one of our core themes at, at seamless positivity only, no negativity. How can you learn to improve? You got to be obsessed with improvement, obsessed with the impact all of these things and the leadership. Like, the greatest way to constantly improve culture at the core is I talk about these principles every day with every single person I interact with. We were, we, we had an off site with our team yesterday and we went to the speakeasy that we've got. It's a private speakeasy place. And for four hours I'm coaching them not about how to do sales better. I don't give a about that. Like, I've got books, we've got training, like to learn objections and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Like I'm trying to figure, I'm giving them secrets all day on professional personal health, wealth, relationships, and I'm sharing everything I've learned from paying billionaires to coach me, millionaires to coach me, and the 800 books that I've read because I'm trying to read a book a day to become the best that I could be. And when I learned the seat, the reason why I care about that is I learned these secrets because I know if I could learn these secrets, then I'm going to share them with my audience, my employees, the people that follow me. Because then if I could help my audience, the people that are around me that follow me, if I could help them improve, they get smarter and better. I'm going to get smarter and better because they got smarter and better. And if I keep giving, giving, giving, guess what happens? You get. You give enough, you're going to get. It's just a, a fact to culture. So to, to conclude culture, I would say give them everything you've got. And that's how you build an unstoppable culture. And guess what? I don't believe we, we've cracked the surface. I am so hungry to win. Number one, best places to work 50 times a year. You know, 50 times 50 years in a row. Every single employee that leaves. I personally feel like I lost the deal and someone stabbed me in the heart. And I'm like, what the did I do and what the did I not do to keep every single person that works here happy and, and feeling like they've got an unstoppable career here? And, and, and you just have to have that extreme ownership. It's not about, oh, my leader did a bad job or, or, or they don't know what they're doing. I don't blame the person leaving, oh, they're idiots. They won't be successful. Like culture is anyone that leaves, you want them to win no matter what. So anyone that leaves, I want them. I want them to be better off being here with us. And then when they go to their next thing, they crush it because they were part of our culture. And that's why we have so many boomerangs. People will leave and then they'll come back, which I love. Like One of my KPIs is if you feel like you gotta leave, how many people boomerang? Because I want to see everyone boomerang. I want everyone to leave.

Yeah, well, I don't want everyone to leave.

I don't want anyone to leave. But if they leave, I want to win back 100% of the people that leave. And I try to learn from everyone. Like, what are we not doing? Or what could we have done differently? Or how could we have improved to maximize the retention. I want to, I want. I call it net employee retention. Ner. Just like you track customer success, you track churn and then you, you, you basically track retention and net revenue retention. Retention is how many customers stay with you from when they started. Net revenue retention is how many customers stay with you and grew from when they started. Like, world class retention is anywhere from depending on the industry, 85 to 100. And then world class net revenue retention is anywhere depending on the industry from 100 to 140, 150%. My goal is to have 99.999 retention and my NRR goal is to have 300%. I want my employee base. If we've got 400 employees, I want them to refer 800 people or 1200 people. And then we grow to 10 to 2000 and then 5000. Because I'm not just coming for zoom info and trying to kill zoom info. I'm coming for Benioff. I want to be bigger than Salesforce and change the world. And it's like, how do I do that?

People just like SaaS, if you have poor retention of people, just like you have poor retention of customers, you do not get there. If you have poor expansion of your product, if you have poor expansion of your people, you do not get there. Right. Your people need to be expanding, they need to be staying. And then also a referral engine, right? The virality component, 1.3. You can get every single person to bring you in. 1.3 people. Virality component, like, you're done, right? And so, y', all, I hope, like, this is longer than we normally go, but there was no place to stop this, because I want y' all to go back and listen, because this was a master class in not only storytelling, but also tactics, but also authenticity of living. This, because that's what he opened with. It was one of the first things that he mentioned was, you can't fake this. You can't fake it. And the moment you try to fake a culture from day one, people know, they sniff it out. They sniff it out. They're like, wait, what they told me is not real? And then they don't believe anything. Whereas if you can live it, breathe it, support people in it, teach it, hold them accountable to it, you should fire based off these behaviors. You should hire off these behaviors. And that's how it all comes together. Brandon, my man, where can people go get more of you? Where are you putting out content? Where can they get the books? Like, wrap us up here, man. Where can they get more of this?

Yeah. Thank you so much, Kevin. So, so grateful and. And thank you, audience for tuning in. I really appreciate you and. And Kevin and I, we've got a similar mission, to just change your life and help you elevate your game and achieve everything you've ever dreamed of. I'd love to connect with you. I share daily secrets with my newsletter at Seamless AI. You could go there. Also, you can sign up for a free Seamless AI account. And when you put Dorsey, Kevin Dorsey or the show name, he's got a special 500 gift for you for tuning in and bringing this on. Just put in the referral code. We got that. Also, when you put in the referral code, I'm going to hook you up with the copy of this book, whatever it takes. Now I'm gonna. It's. I don't know how to do the automated shipping thing, so I do know how to do the ebook, so I'm gonna get you a copy. When I see the referral code come in, not only are you gonna get 500 in credits for Seamless. I'm going to get you a copy of Whatever it Takes because this book is all about culture. It's all about the habits and principles to maximize your success. But would love to hear from you. And then also, in addition to Seamless, my daily newsletter, you can follow me on LinkedIn. I would love to hear from you in the comments. Unfortunately, LinkedIn caps you out at 30,000 connections, which is stupid. But I'd love to follow you and hear from you, connect with you. I write Daily Secrets there to maximize your success. My goal is to help you go from broke to financially free. To help the world connect opportunity and positively impact billions. I can't wait to help you do that. This year is going to be your biggest and best year ever. And thank you for giving me a moment of your time today.

I told y' all this was going to be fire, y'. All. Look for that referral code in the comments, look for the link to Brandon and Seamless in the comments and we'll see y' all in the next one. Appreciate y'.

All. Sam.