How To Produce Independent Super Star Leaders #2

Part two on building superstars. And let's go over to. We ended the first part kind of abruptly. And let's get Joe Tansey's reaction and get his. He had a question for me on that. Go ahead, Joe. Yeah. Larry, quick question. The targets that you just spoke about, are they for new recruits? Are they for graduating RVP's? Which ones are they for? How did you focus on that? See, these targets are things that you're getting. These are like you're preparing for your final exam. You know, this is what you want them to be able to do when they graduate. But as they're going through, like if you went through law school, you go through anything you're studying, you know, at the end of this thing, you're going to be getting an exam, you're going to be tested, you're going to see if you're, if you were paying attention, if you mastered these things. And when you get a rookie, the rookie comes in, you don't know if. Let's just say this, let's use the American Idol thing. The rookie shows up and he's, he's, he's going to try and, and showcase what he could do out in Albuquerque or someplace where they're having auditions. If he makes it through the trial and he lasts through the, you know, the first phase in hours, we put them through a thing where we race them to district and the first management position. Essentially what you're doing is if you're primarily interested in training and developing people, you're making your sales are made as a byproduct of this training process. So really it's an auditioning process. Sure. They're going to come in and they're going to make sales to help you make sales and run your business. But primarily you're putting them in there to see if they're going to laugh. You're giving them simple things to do. So if they make it through the rookie thing, the trial stage and they become a candidate, I mean a full blown management candidate in our business, it's someone who has the potential of becoming a regional vice president. They've got the big contract, they can run their own training center. It could be they graduate to running their own McDonald's. If it's in that business, they could run their own store, they get their own restaurant or their own retail store. If it's in clothing or if they're professionals, they can go out and open their own doctor's office, law office, things like that. Does that make sense? See if when they come in you have a big group of people we're going to try, going to go through trials, and they're going to be. It's going to get squeezed down to a smaller number and make it through. As they get in here and they get it now they're into the real deal. They're like seriously pursuing this point right here where they can graduate. They're like law students who made it through the first year. When I went to Georgia Tech and Architecture, 140 students and freshmen orientation, they said, look at the person in front of you, behind the two people in front, the two people behind, and the people on either side of you. If you're still here in five years, they'll all be gone, because only one out of seven is going to make it. And that was just school that wasn't getting out. If you made it through that gauntlet, then you earned the right to start plunking your architectural board exams. After three years of slavery, minimum wage, being a draftsman, and then not everybody, we're certainly not guaranteed you're going to pass architecture board. So by the time you were 35 years old, you could start your career. You know, it was a elimination process. And then anything you go through, like if you start working behind the counter at McDonald's and you don't have any other career options, well, if you knew well at McDonald's and worked way up through the ranks, you could have have your own store one day in ours, you could become a regional vice president if you could climb the ladder. So you give them a chance. Like, if I want to climb the ladder, Joe, how do I climb the ladder? And what do I do? What am I going to be facing when it comes to final exams to get out of this thing, what do I need to be able to do? Of course it's not going to be perfect, but if I was perfect, what are the areas that I'm supposed to be excellent in? So does that make sense? I wouldn't really wear them out with that stuff coming in the door. They got too many things to think about. You're trying to get them, you're introducing them to the businesses, the core competencies, the language, things like, they don't even think about graduating. I take a kindergarten student. I'm not talking to them about what they're going to have to do to graduate high school saying, here's a crayon, here's a piece of paper. I put the crayon on the piece of paper rather than the desk. Let's start there. And over time you get them up here, but certainly once they get into high school, it's the countdown to graduation. And you're trying to get them ready to be able to at least graduate and then hopefully be ready to even go into the next level, which is college. So does that help? Yeah, that was, that was very clear on the RVP1. Like you said, they, they just need to be able to train and develop people in the field so that way they don't just get stuck as the personal producer. Well, we'll get to that, we'll get to that. But this whole thing is, is that are you good enough? They're trying to prove themselves. We're giving them an opportunity to prove themselves. And if they're good enough, when you start playing basketball as a kid, if you prove yourself along the steps, eventually you get to the NBA. We're trying to help people as highly trained, high earning, independent, long term career professionals like you would in sports. But you got to be able to do it because when you get out there on the court and as the game is running, you got to be able to deliver. And he can't help you there. Coach can't come out and answer your questions. You got to be the one. So that's what we're trying to do is put them through this process where if they're good enough, motivated enough, and they like our business or whatever business you're training them, they can make it to the top. And who knows, you might have the next Michael Jordan, Tiger woods, you might have the next superstar and just goes through all the rewrites, all the records books, you know, football, Adrian Peterson doing all the running records right now. So who knows? But they've got to prove themselves. So we have two things. Comment on our. Essentially we had two things. We had the core competencies, we had the one. You've got to be confident, you've got to be able to do it with high quality. Or another word is persistency. Those are two of them. But there's other things you got to do. You've got to be, if you want to graduate, we've got to trust you. We've got to trust you to have great business. We got to trust your business judgment. We got to see how you work, how you treat people. You got to have confidence about your ability to handle problems. You got to be able to see these things have to do Joe, with creating activity, okay, like you did. You gotta be able to create. You could sell something. And that's the same thing as if you're in a retail store, people come to you. You're in a restaurant when people come in there. Or if you've got to go out in the marketplace like we do at financial services and approach people, even the doctors, you got to sell your service. You gotta. And you gotta be able to do that. You gotta be able to do it again at a high confident and a high enough level, high persistency. But then you've got that judgment. How do you treat people? See, over a period of time, we're going to see how you treat people. How do you make good judgment? And here's what it comes into. Can you solve problem? Anybody can go out there and make presentations, but can you solve problem? That's what we're looking for. Can you overcome ups and downs? You're always going to have ups and downs. So we gotta be able to trust your business judgment and know that you're not. Somebody's gonna go like over buy, spend too much on an office that you can't afford, make commitments to people you can't live up to. That's gonna embarrass the company when you don't do it. And then everyone points their finger back at the company. You got a good business judgment, so you don't want to go out and be ruined. We can't have you going out and looking meeting rooms and things at hotels and then you don't pay the hotel. And then no one will let anybody from our company come back in there ruining our name in the marketplace because of your bad judgment on business practices. You gotta be able to overcome problems. You gotta be able to have a good business judgment. All of these things fall into the same area. What it is. Can we trust you in business? Are you somebody who's not going to just panic and do something outrageous to get out of a problem that creates more problems for the rest of it. The other thing, Joe, that I tell people is personally, on your personal judgment, are you going to. We have people, we've had people before they got their promotion, they got out on their own and graduated and they went out. That'd be like. And they went out and bought themselves a new Cadillac. That'd be like a kid gets his diploma, he graduates from Rutgers or wherever, and all of a sudden now he goes right down to the car mutages, he gets himself a Ferrari, he buys himself a million dollar house, he goes and gets himself expensive watch, buys a diamond ring for his girlfriend and it's like, what are you doing? You've got to be able to control Your finances. And you've got to be able to control yourself the way you, you know, again, where you treat people in your personal life. And so these are areas that we've got to be able to trust you to do. And this thing is. The other thing is you've got to be able to do. It all comes down to duplicating yourself. Can you teach people what you know? At a large extent, can we trust you to manage other people? Because when you go out and you're going to be a superstar leader, you got to be able to deal with people, you know, like Tiger Woods. Even as a golfer, he had to deal with his agent. You know, nobody went out there and hit the golf ball for him. But first of all, he had his caddy. His dad used to make all these decisions for him. He got out there and eventually he wound up and his dad helped him make all these decisions. But eventually he replaced his caddy, he got a caddy, he replaced his agent. He got people around him at different levels, a different coach. You know, he changed his coaches. These are all his team seems duplicating himself and his people. Now, if you get a business where you're opening stores, you need to be able to teach people what you know where. You're never going to get big. The idea of being a superstar leader is that you could go out and you can get big. Well, you can't get big if you can't duplicate yourself. So we want to know that not only do you know the core competence, you can do it at speed. You can get this thing done quick enough at a high enough level to be successful. You got good business judgment. We like the decisions, the business judgments you make. We like the way you solve problems. You run into problems and you solve them. You know, you're creative, you're a thinker. Not only can you create activity in business, you can overcome problems, you can solve problems, you can keep. When the bumps of the road come, you can do that. And your personal judgment on your personally, you're not going to create problems for yourself and as a result, create problems for ourselves. You know, like these football players, they go out there, they get drunk. Well, all of a sudden it's a bad thing. You give a bad name to your football team and you get drunk, you have an accident like this Dallas Cowboy guy did. Longtime friend. They were out drinking as a wreck. Now his friends did it. Now it's in the newspaper. Now you got a tragedy. Now you got this very disruptive as a result. Cowboys going into One or two critical games so they can make the playoffs. They don't make the playoffs. He can't blame it on him. But it's disruptive and so personalized. You can be disruptive. Are you going to be somebody calm who can build confidence again about people with your personal thing? And then can you duplicate yourself? See, this is coaching. Can you pass on what you know to others? Can you encourage. See, this implies a certain level of maturity. Not only can you do this, but you can do it in a mature way. You can bring others along. Those are the people who develop into superstars. So well, none of us, Joe, are perfect in these areas. These are the areas that we used to talk about people excelling in. They have the product, you know, production proves they can do the business. Persistency, quality of business proves they can do it the right kind of way. The way the fact that, you know, it shows up. If along the way we've had a lot of problems with them, we've had a chance to get to know them. This is why you spend those hundreds of hours with people to get to know them personally and their business, judge and give them situations to see how they perform. And if issues don't come up, that tells you that they're doing a pretty good job in those areas. They're saving money. They're not just making money here. They're saving money. They're on their business. They can make business decisions inside a budget. These are things they're going to have to do. You don't want to have to be going out once someone's graduated and ask them about stuff like that or have to check them on that. You've got to be, you know, you want them to be ready. And then they've got to duplicate themselves because that's how we all continue to grow through life. If we duplicate ourselves, we're able to pass on what we know to the next generation and have them achieve bigger and better things than us. And so if we're evaluating. So you have standards, you have numbers, you have things you look for. But I used to talk. I found if I talked in these terms to people, they kind of got it. The ones with the brain weren't trying to rush out the door. Let's just say the American Idol example. They weren't racing out the door to get on stage in front of Sing the Star Spangled Banner of the super bowl until they were ready. They didn't want to make a fool out of themselves. Maybe this year they're not ready. Maybe next year they are ready and they go on and have a 30 year career. But if they went out there before they're ready, they become a joke and they go back to being any kind of common labor job they can get to survive because no one will take them serious. No one's going to give them another chance. Our job is to get them ready for the spotlight. And these are areas that I always focused on. Do you have any other others? I think that that's perfect. I think the five areas you're talking about here as I'm taking notes, the business judgment, the personal judgment, I mean, that's just about the character of the person. You know, if we want to have someone on the team, we got to make sure that they know how to make the right decisions when we're not around or at least know to call us to get the right decision. All right, there's a few more things we want to say to wrap this up and let's go on to part three.