The 2023 Recession will EXPOSE Bad Leadership

Welcome back to the Mike Andes Podcast where we discuss the ins and outs of owning a small business. If you're new here, the Mike Andes Podcast is all about taking your business to the next level. Mike talks about what it takes to be a leader and how to inspire others and how your vision can be the most powerful tool in your business arsenal. Let's get into it and HEAR how the 2023 recession will expose bad leadership. So buckle up and enjoy this keynote from Landscape Summ.

Let's talk about this. Man, my voice is getting better. This is fantastic.

The off site meeting that changed everything.

It's coincidence somewhat that I'm talking about leadership right after Dan just somewhat talked about it. But I wanna talk about emotional stability of a servant leader and go through a few things that is meaningful to me. I'm gonna tie it in with what we've talked about so far when it comes to the economy. Because for anyone that says money doesn't mean anything or it doesn't matter, just wait until you can't hit payroll, just wait for one day when your bank balance goes negative, just wait for one day when you realize that you're getting a piece of equipment repossessed cause you can't make the payments. All of a sudden money means something. And so when we have money issues and we have business issues, it's going to affect our emotions, it's going to affect our life in a lot of different ways. And so instead of trying to hide from that and saying, oh, money isn't.

Everything, obviously it's not everything, but it's required in order to be able to.

Do the things that we want in life. The goals that you have, the ambitions you have, many of them are actually tied to money. Say oh no, I just want to be able to spend time with my kids.

But probably a good idea to build.

A business that can run without you and build it on systems might take.

You a few years, but it's absolutely important to nail this part of life. Cause it is the number one thing I see in families, relationships and even.

In people's physical health when it comes.

To what is the root cause of it.

It's a lot of times physical and all the mental and psychological and all that pain, a lot of times will some way shape or form tie back to financial pressure. And that's why Thursday night I so emphasize just the impact that relationships, your physical health, as well as the capacity limits that you personally have, just how important those are to you in your business. Emotions will cloud the business decision making process.

I talked about this a little bit.

Last year, and some would say that this is robotic or this is something that you should avoid and that is losing emotion.

Let me be very clear.

This isn't decision making processes for your business, all right?

There are people that are extremely emotional.

And a lot of times those make very good salespeople.

Ultimately, in order to grow a business.

From 0 to 500,000, typically the skill.

That I'm looking for the most is.

Someone that can sell, someone who's extremely ambitious, someone that's very extroverted, someone that is extremely emotional.

They get riled up very fast, they talk really quickly, they're very excitable. But when it comes to the person that scales a business past 500,000, I consistently see that individual, potentially the alternative to this person, alternatively struggle from zero to 500,000. But after 500,000, especially after a million, the individual that might not be as charismatic or emotional, but is able to be a good leader and lead their team is the one that actually takes.

The business to the next level.

If you're plateauing between 500,000 and a.

Million dollars and you're feeling like you're.

Hitting a brick wall, there's a very.

Good chance that leadership and your ability.

To form a team around you that believes in what you're doing is likely.

The reason as to why you are hitting that plateau. It is not sales.

And everything we talked about prior in this conference about the economy you can literally throw out because you've already accomplished.

Market penetration by crossing 500,000.

You've already got enough customer base. You should have enough context in your.

Database to be able to fill the.

Funnel regardless of whether or not we go into recession. If you're struggling at 2,300,000 sales is the most important thing, you should be focused on your ability to communicate, your.

Ability to close fast. Time to close these other close ratio.

These other KPIs we've talked about are.

The most important thing. But after that point, as you scale.

Your business to a larger size, the only thing that matters is building a.

Team around you, because you cannot do.

It of your own, regardless of how powerful and great and awesome you think you might be. And that's something you all, including myself, have to face.

And that is the morality of realizing.

That you can't do this by yourself. And you'll have to do things that are outside of your control and give things to other people that you see as valuable to the organization and let them run with it. When you without your supervision, higher lows.

And lower Highs, we talked about this last year. This is something consistently we talk about all the time. Higher lows.

That means that when you're really, really down, when everything is against you, when the spring rush is hot, when employees walk off the job, when customers are hating your guts and leaving online reviews that you feel are not right or you do not feel are warranted, that's a low.

That's a point you want to give up. You just made a damage case.

Potentially, now that low in the business correlates now with a low physically. You go to a doctor, you realize.

That at a checkup, there's something that's amass or something that is inconsistent with what is supposed to be healthy.

Potentially, this also correlates with a low. Cause many times these things all stack on top of each other with your personal relationships.

And now you have a talk with.

Your husband or with your wife, and they are saying, if these things don't change, I'm leaving.

This has to be different. I'm going to divorce you. I'm taking the kids, I want the house.

When these are conversations that start to come up, these are typically the things.

That happen during a low, low point in somebody's life. And this is the moment when some would give in.

This is when they would close their business. This is when they would start to turn to alcohol. This is when they would throw in the towel on their physical ability to be able to be healthy and live a healthy life. This is a time when some people would not only quit and be become bankrupt in their business, but also in their personal life. They would start these stupid things that scar them for the rest of their life because they're trying to get back to the people that they once loved. And during a low low, they make poor decisions. During the low lows, it's easy to find a lot of books and things about being motivated, finding love for the.

People that hate you, finding how to improve your business and make it more profitable, how to become more healthy. In six weeks, you'll get flat abs.

All the rest of it. There's plenty of material out there to.

Try to fix the low lows, and.

Some of them may work. However, the thing that we don't talk enough about is having lower highs. Because in my opinion, that in your business, your personal life, and in your personal psyche, you cannot have the ability to say that I'm not gonna have low lows, and I'm going to try and make higher lows in my life by preparing for them, having a plan in place, guarding against Going very, very low to where I do give up.

To where I do commit suicide, where.

I do go into depression, where I do break my relationships. And in order to protect against that, that might be easy. But the thing that we so often fail to realize is it's very difficult to do those things. But also expect yourself to be able to have massive high highs. Lower highs is just as important as higher lows. And if you think that you're gonna be able to just party it up and get super excited and super motivated and jump up and down when something good happens, don't believe that you're also not going to experience the low lows and the depths of depression that comes when not everything is going your way. This is the root of most religions is to keep you more balanced.

And you're like, balance, Mike. That's a new word for you.

True.

I don't have a lot of balance.

I believe more in when you walk, when you run, you're consistently out of balance. You're walking from one foot to the other. There's a counteracting back and forth, a weight, a seesaw if you were, that keeps things in check. However, if you allow yourself to get imbalanced, emotionally imbalanced, psychologically imbalance, mentally imbalanced, physically imbalanced spiritually, it will ultimately lead to the demise of your business. And that's the tie in that all.

Those things have in what we're talking about this weekend. Like that's a bunch of foo foo.

It's the reason why small businesses fail or succeed. It's the reason why we have the support track to support your spouses and your managers. Cause the only thing that really will keep you through the low lows is having that support group around you to ensure that you don't pull the trigger, to ensure that you don't bankrupt, and to ensure that you don't put a knife in the backs of the people that love you.

But ultimately emotions when it comes to business will cloud your decision making process and lead to poor outcomes in the future.

When we look at emotions in general over the past couple years, the one in 2021 in my opinion was very much about of a greed. Obviously we know the quote from Warren.

Buffett that says be fearful when others are greedy and be greedy when others.

Are fearful, which ultimately is essentially buying the low low of the market, investing when it's low low and then selling when it's high and everyone's in euphoria mode. So I'm tying right now the emotion.

Aspect of you as a leader and.

How your business and the economy is going to operate over the next couple years, the unemotional person in both of these environments will win. Getting caught up in the emotion will cripple your ability to make clear, decisive decisions. Because in 2021, it was the cool thing to get more assets, buy stocks, buy real estate, start more businesses, go, go, go. Everything was going up in price. You could basically flip a coin and you win on something. You could start a business doing lawn care and immediately be making $100,000 a month because there was so much work to be had if you start in the spring rush. And now what I hope I'm trying to prepare you for is the low low that's about to come over the next couple years. If what we all believe is expected to happen as we go into a recession. 90% of us raised our hand on Thursday night when I asked, do you think we're in a recession or going into one? If that is true, we are heading into a period of great fear, uncertainty, and when the news cycle would become that of we are all dying. The exact same fear that everyone bought into in March 2020 and suddenly shut down factories, put on masks, stayed in our house and literally shut down the economy. That same fear is what is about to happen when we enter a recession, because we have not seen it for the past 14 years. The majority of executives, CEOs and people in places of leadership have never seen a recession.

And it's going to take many people off guard and they have not prepared.

Themselves physically, emotionally, psychologically, mentally and spiritually for the fact that their low lows are going to be the point in the next couple years that they give.

Up and throw in the towel.

This is what in any market cycle.

How it would look in terms of.

The stock market, real estate. And I want to parallel this with other things and that is more importantly your emotions, because as it ultimately dictates the direction your business will take. But if you look at this, this is if you look at almost every single trend on the S&P 500 real estate, the business cycles of even the US dollar and certain assets like gold, you can see this happen. You have a takeoff period, a first sell off point, and then you have a bear trap. A bear trap means everyone thinks everything's going to be horrible and then immediately it takes back off and then we enter a period of mania. All right, Media starts to get attention, enthusiasm. Now do we enter greed?

In my opinion, this is what happened.

Covid 2020 in March. We had A first sell off in the market, extreme amounts of fear. All of a sudden though, the Fed came in, cut interest rates to zero, printed a lot of money, and the market entered into a massive rally like.

We'Ve never seen before. You could literally flip a coin, buy.

Anything you wanted and it would go up in value. Because we were entering the mania phase. We got media attention, we started enthusiasm. We have greed, now we have delusion. This is where we were in October and November of 2021.

Delusion. This is when the crypto things are starting going crazy.

We had NFTs starting taking off, spending millions of dollars for NFTs that are.

Now today worth literally pennies.

There's a new paradigm. Cryptocurrency is gonna take over the world. We literally do not need any US Dollars. We're gonna run off the gold standard. All this other stuff, this is a new paradigm. The world order is going to change. And then all of a sudden things start to shift. Last December and January, the Fed says, hey, we're gonna start raising interest rates. All of a sudden in March, we have a war breakout in Ukraine Senate cascading in the event of having a energy crisis across the world.

Denial. Oh no, this is fine.

We're going to the moon. This is awesome.

This is fantastic.

We're gonna go on another 10 year bull run. Everyone wants to start a business. Every single TikTok is about, forget being an employee, jump off, do your own thing. You can work from home, do this and make $1,000 a day. And that somehow gained traction. This is a bull trap. And that is everyone's like, hey, we're gonna buy the dip. We're gonna make sure that we invest into this dip here in the bull trap. And this, in my opinion, was February, March and April. Ah, everything is fantastic. You know, after we get to the war, things take a little bit better. Okay, we got it. This is the bottom of the market. And then we return to normal. Inflation starts to come back down. No longer are you paying a gazillion dollars for a sheet of plywood. No longer is fuel $6 a gallon, $7 a gallon for diesel no longer the case. We're okay. But what I'm starting to see is the fact that there's actually a difference in where all the asset classes are on this chart.

And I want to go over that.

In just a second because I personally feel that we are right here. And as we are starting to feel the elements of fear of what's currently happening inside the economy, you're starting to Hear it in the media. You're starting to hear just little bits and traces. But just wait until capitulation. Just wait until everyone is saying you should sell every stock you own. You should sell your house, because everything is crashing. In my opinion, that is March to June of this coming year because it'll hit the news cycle when year over year, sales of homes, the average equity is negative.

And then we enter a period despair.

And again, this is the low, low.

That 90% of people cannot withstand, and that is despair.

And eventually you come back to that.

And you return to the mean or the average.

Let's look at this a little bit in closer detail, though, after we look at the one simple fact. If you take asset classes and simply looked at when should I buy things, when should I invest into my business, when should I invest in the stock market, when should I invest into real estate? It's pretty simple. You buy low lows. You buy when everyone else is afraid. You sell when everyone else is in denial, delusion. And it's a new paradigm and everyone should be getting in. I would be worried silly if everyone was saying that this is the time to get into the lawn care business. I would be worried silly if people were saying that lawn care is an easy business to make a lot of money. It's super easy to hire people, super easy to charge high prices, super easy to have an office staff, super easy to be able to maintain your equipment, super easy to be able to deal with taxes, regulations, and the things coming down on us as employers. I'd be freaked out in my mind because that would mean that we are in the top of this market in the same way that any stock market or real estate investment might have low lows and high highs. In 2008, if you just bought anything.

In real estate, you're doing really well.

Why?

That was the low low, emotionally, that.

Was the point of despair, where everyone said, everything's going to collapse, Lehman had collapsed, everything was going to hell in a handbasket. And ultimately, if you would have just purchased and made an investment financially into real estate, you would do well. The same is true for stocks. But what I want to include today is the fact that when you enter into capitulation and despair, that stage, it's going to happen in business as well. And we haven't seen this for a market cycle of more than 14 years where US as small business owners are impacted to the stage that we potentially could be if the Fed continues to raise interest rates. And remember, with the graph we saw on Thursday, it's likely that they will have to stay very hawkish and be raising interest rates in order to keep.

Inflation down, the only period of time.

Where CPI is so much higher than the average rate of interest. And so if you can actually make emotional investments in your business and actually commit to what you're doing during this period of despair and capitulation, that will lead to the greatest results. And so when we talked about on Thursday and said that someone who invests in their business, and there's been a lot of questions like Mike, you talked about being defensive, and then you also talked about investing into this market, investing into despair. It simply comes down to if you are in profit mode or in growth.

Mode, and we'll talk about that this afternoon.

But ultimately, the person that emotionally invests, maybe you don't have the finances to grow and scale and get more trucks and hire a bunch of people this.

Coming spring when fear is at its peak.

But if you don't have the financial investment, perhaps this conference is simply here to make sure you have the emotional investment. Because when your friends and your family and your spouse start to doubt whether or not you should have a business and whether or not you should go back to the cushy job or go back to college, because that's what you were trained to do, that's when you'll have to make an emotional investment.

And those are sometimes the hardest investments to make. And the greatest risk comes with the greatest returns.

And making an investment in your business, in yourself, and the confidence that you have in your future during your low.

Lows is where you'll see the greatest results.

Every great hero story starts with a gun to someone's head on the verge of having a divorce. It's a low low moment. Just realize it's the start of coming out of despair. It's a low, low moment that you don't want to deal with, and we're trying to prepare you for it and say we gotta have higher lows and have plans in place, a. A support network, people in place, people that are gonna support you so you don't go to that low place and you don't give up. But if you're there and you have no one to support you there, that's the moment to go all in. That's the moment to realize you've gotta leave it all in the field. And every single ounce of emotional investment you have left in your pocket needs to go into the business, needs to go into whatever dream of success and what that means to you. That is the moment to Invest everything. It is not the moment to give up. If we look at asset classes over the course of how these markets move, stocks in my opinion, move very quickly. The reason for that is it's liquid. I can tap a few buttons and seconds, transact, move money in and out of the market. Because something is liquid, it means it's easily transactable. So if you go to a bank and they ask what are your liquid assets? They actually typically will include stocks with your cash. The reason for that is cause stocks are so liquid, you can buy and sell them very quickly. And that's why you have massive gyrations of 10, 15% in the market every single day, is because it's so liquid. It's easy to make emotional investments in the stock market because it is so liquid and it is so easy to.

Buy and is so easy to sell.

That's why the stock market is people say it's rigged. The reason it's rigged is because most people can't deal with the emotional investment that is required when things go down and they get caught up in the euphoria, delusion, greed and new paradigm that is caused when everyone is doing it. And because it's liquid, because it's liquid and easy to transact, it makes it extremely simple to be able to buy into the fear and the low lows. Let me stop here and just say this. This morning I was thinking about this.

There's an owner that I'm considering talking.

To this and saying this specifically.

But back to what I said Thursday. I've already mentioned it several times and I mentioned it yesterday in relation to why we started the support track.

But what I wanted to say is this owner, because I know the specific situation he's going through is Your success in 2023 in your business will have absolutely nothing to do with the economy, marketing, hiring, leadership or anything we talk.

About this entire weekend. It'll hinge on one thing and it's whether or not you keep your marriage together. And for the people in this room.

That think that anything that's talked about at most of our conferences, mine included, has any impact greater than things that are most important. As we talked about Thursday, relationships, physical health and your personal capacities. If those things are not in check, please don't listen to any of the garbage about economies, markets, what's happening in stocks, real estate. It's a bunch of nonsense. You need to keep priorities priority. Once those things are checked, you can move on to something as insignificant as making money. Real estate moves very slowly because it moves very Slow. It's usually a very good investment for people because it forces you to not.

Be able to buy and sell based upon emotion.

If you're really freaked out because all of a sudden there's an oil shock or an energy crisis or a war, you can't just sell real estate tomorrow. It's less emotional, it's less affected by the emotional tides of a human being. Whereas the stock market is so liquid and many times they say it's simply a chart of human emotions.

The reason is because it's so liquid.

It'S easy to transact. Real estate moves slowly, usually 12 to 18 months behind the stock market. So if you see a crash in the stock market, you usually won't see a crash in the real estate market for another 12 to 18 months. So what we've seen in 2022 will likely be a result of what happens in 2023 to the real estate market because stocks have massively collapsed over 2022. And it is very likely, as we head into this high interest rate environment that typically only sees itself put up its head 12 to 18 months after interest rates have been affected. And we are literally 12 months almost to the day from when interest rates.

Started to be hiked. That is why in my opinion, as.

We head in towards June of this year and we start to see it affect the real estate market, that is the thing that everyone has most of their equity and their asset values in their personal portfolio are wrapped up in their house.

That's when you're going to see personal.

The max amount of fear and peak fear.

Now businesses move even slower like we.

Talked about yesterday or Thursday, the domino effect of high speculative all the way down to the point where the last thing that typically is affected before peak fear is what unemployment percent. And that's still not being affected. But as that catches up to us over the next year, that's what's going to affect us as business owners.

It moves very slowly.

Usually it's two plus years behind stocks, inflation easing.

That's our return to normal, right? Everyone's like, oh man, finally you don't have to pay so much for gas and oh, it's a little easier to.

Hire people and we don't have to pay so much for materials and there's $100 surcharge for delivery because of the fuel prices. Everyone like, we're back to normal.

That's where we're at right now. Return to normal. And in my opinion, potentially just falling off of this right now.

All right, I expect 2023 bankruptcies to be massive in my opinion, more if not.

At that same level of 2007.

2008, because we've dealt with inflation for.

So long, our margins have been compressed to the point and I believe that there's false hope that the labor market's going to so much easier for us.

And it's somehow going to save us in 2023.

And then at the same time those same owners that took out debt in 2020, 2021 and 2022, that is this greed, delusion and new paradigm that if.

You just took debt out for whatever.

Reason because it was cheap, you could somehow grow and scale a business. And they listened to some influencer that said you should get all the can because somehow a tax incentive from the government. Those are the people that are going.

To be caught with their pants down in 2023 and more importantly 2024. In my opinion, when it comes to businesses, because it moves so slowly, following.

The trend will at best lead to average returns and will most likely lead to capitulation. What that means is you say, well, let's just take stocks and real estate. It's easy for us to understand. I'm just going to stay the average all the time. I'm just gonna buy and hold it forever.

Great. You're gonna average returns.

And if that's what you want, that's fantastic for a lot of people that's actually what they should do when it.

Comes to investing is buy and hold. Never touch it, never look at it.

Don'T get caught up in the emotional.

Swing of what goes on.

But if you wanna actually get above average, and I don't believe anyone comes to a conference, cause I'm stoked to be average. If you want to be above average in your business, in your success of your marriage, in the success of your physical health, if you want to be above average, you will have to put ungodly amounts of effort, time and investment during low lows. And you'll have to sell off energy that is lower highs during the moments of euphoria, when everyone's patting you on the back, when everyone thinks you hit the home run, when you get the award in your city that says you're the best small business of the year. When your employees think you're the best because you give them a profit sharing or some sort of bonus and everyone loves you and you just did your team meeting, you spent a bunch of money and everyone loves you and it's raw, raw, raw, go, go, go. That's the moment you dull it down. You don't get into the hype. Don't buy your own hype. Because if you do that and you get very emotional and you buy into the high high, you will inevitably sell out. During the low lows, when all of those things flip, you'll give up. And the average, the average person will quit in 2023 because they will not be able to escape capitulation and despair. Remember, we are currently just returning back to the mean. So this drop right here is going.

To seem extremely scary for us as business owners, the stock market, real estate, et cetera, just realize we're coming back to the mean. Like we talked about on Thursday, the stock market's still up 15% compared to before COVID All right. The real estate market's still massively up since before COVID We're still way up here.

So as we see, we're going to have all this fear and capitulation, everyone giving up. We're literally just getting back to what is actually the normal. But over the past 14 years, we've gone out of control. But what's so important is pain tolerance.

And I might have these definitions wrong. I don't look up stuff online. I want it to be as original as possible.

This is not a quote.

I make this stuff up, maybe it's wrong.

Probably is the difference between your pain threshold, that's when you start to experience pain, and your pain tolerance. That difference directly correlates, in my opinion, with one's ability to outpace the average, the market, other competition and outcome outlast capitulation. And the low, low moments. The difference between your pain threshold, that's when you start feeling pain. And some of us might not start feeling that till the middle of this year. After you go through a spring rush that's muted, after you still can't find employees, after your marketing that you got so jazzed about on this weekend doesn't work out.

Hey, thank you so much for listening. Looking back, Landscape Summit 2023 was a game changing experience for all of us. And we even had such a good time. We can't wait a whole another year for another one, so you don't have to either. Coming this October 16th, we're holding a whole new Landscape Summit. We've outgrown our hometown and we need a much bigger and better location to host the largest business conference the green industry has ever seen. So for the first time, we'll be holding Landscape Summit in Louisville, Kentucky at the Omni Hotel. Start out your week with great talks from industry leaders and keynotes from Mike Andes. That will completely change how you do business. And then head over to Equip Expo. It's just down the street at the Kentucky Expo Center. This isn't like any event we've held before, but we need your help to make it happen. So get your Tickets now@mikeandys.com Summit doesn't work out.

That's when you start to have the pain threshold being hit. But the pain tolerance, the max level of pain you are able and willing to bear is ultimately, in my opinion, the thing that separates entrepreneurs that outlast the market multiples much better and are able to have returns far greater than the average.

Here's how I want to correlate this. Chart your pain tolerance.

How many of these are needed to cover your fixed expenses? This is how you chart your pain tolerance in your business. How many employees do you need to actually cover fixed expenses? Cause this is. Pain tolerance is great. Your pain threshold, great. But you know what your pain tolerance is, right?

That's when you literally are negative in the bank account. That's when you have to give up.

And so at that moment, that is the question of how far can you go? What is the actual max amount of pain you can take?

This is something that you should talk about.

Oh no, we're going to. It's a recession. But we're gonna just like massively grow.

Maybe you will. Fantastic.

But this is something, this is defense.

No one likes to talk about this. Everyone likes the offense. No one wants to talk defense. Employees, how many employees do you need to cover your fixed expenses?

Marketing, what's the customer acquisition cost? Maximal. That you can spend and still be profitable on that customer within the next several months. And how long does it take you to recoup that money of that customer acquisition cost? Did it take you a year? Likely you will not make it because the cash flow will not work for you to be able to recoup the cash that is required to buy that customer. And if you have no idea what your customer acquisition cost is, I recommend you start testing something, please.

You need that number because when customers.

Are no longer lining up to buy your services, you will have to buy them in the form of eyeballs and attention on Google, Facebook, your nextdoor, whatever it is. How much revenue do you need to cover fixed expenses? The chart on Thursday should be very helpful in figuring that out. What is that? That minimum amount of revenue that you have to make in order to cover your fixed expenses. How many recurring customers do you need? Assuming that every single project doesn't show up tomorrow. No one wants to talk about this in the project space. And every single one that is not willing to talk about this started their business after 2008. Because the companies that started their business before 2008 have realized they have to diversify or, or they have to make sure they have some sort of recurring maintenance program, or even if they install a project, there's some sort of recurring revenue in the form of maintenance back on that site.

You have to cover your fixed expenses. That is not your pain threshold.

That is your pain tolerance. It's extremely hard to operate a business.

When there's negative cash flow.

How many new leads do you need? If you're project based, how many new leads do you need to get projects?

Is it going to be a funnel effect? How many leads do you need?

How many customers do you get? How much revenue does that create? How many employees does that allow you.

To have if you're project based? And that will answer a lot of these questions in terms of revenue, et.

Cetera, you need to know these numbers. Because when you start coming down on them, you'll need to be able to realize, okay, I'm still 10% above my pain tolerance. I can still take this. I'm still just barely screaming by, but I can get through the low lows.

You are not a failure. You are not an idiot.

It's not that you're dumb. It's not that maybe another service is something that you should replace in your business. It's that you're experiencing a low low that every entrepreneur, business owner, leader of any organization that has any meaning in this world has at one point been through and somehow figured out how to get through it emotionally, physically, psychologically, mentally and spiritually.

How to stay aggressive during this period of time, it's extremely important to make decisions fast.

In my opinion, speed of execution is much more important than the plan of execution. Everyone here wants a plan. I always ask for people ask for systems. I want plans, I want procedures. I want a method, I want a template. Absolutely does not matter. Compared to the speed of the execution, the plan of execution is absolute garbage. The speed at which you make the execution will determine how far and how fast your business goes. Business is very different than most things in life.

And as it counts home runs, it does not count strikeouts, all right?

You can have people fail and fail and fail and fail, and all of a sudden hit a home run in their business, and we just know them for the home run. What that means is if you actually take a step back and say, I want to hit home runs. I want to do great things. I want to build a business that's incredible. It simply means you should make as many swings as possible in your business.

You should keep swinging.

If you have two strikes and you're about to go out, you have to ask yourself, am I at pain tolerance where I can't strike out and I need to take a bunt or a single just to make cash flow this weekend and be able to bake payroll and be able to take my wife out on the dinner date this weekend, if that's what you need, hit a single. But in general, if you're not backed up right up against a wall financially and you have only zero or one strike, you should be swinging as much as possible and as hard as possible. Decisions in your business are like swings. Realize that most decisions, even if you.

Strike out, will not hurt you.

They will not sink the ship, and in your mind, they become a massive ordeal. When striking out in business, rarely that one time is going to be the.

What's it called, the needle that broke the camel's back or whatever, the straw that broke the camel's back.

It's very rare in business. You should keep taking swings and ultimately you should actually make sure you're making some mistakes. Because if you're not, you're not making enough swings. If you constantly are in the batter's box and constantly waiting for the perfect pitch and never take any swings, you'll never get any hits, runs or home runs, you'll never win a game. You'll have to make decisions quickly in your business and realize that some of them will be wrong. One of the executives and the head at Twitter that is accompanying Elon Musk in a podcast said that Elon expects that they have at least a 10% rollback of features. Anything less than that means they're not innovating fast enough. Which means if we are not swinging and trying enough things and we actually make mistakes, if we don't do that at least 10% of the time, we're not pushing the envelope enough. And yet so many of us sit back, admire people like that, and then wonder why we in our businesses can't make great strides, gain market share, get more employees, make more money for our family, send our kids to college, gain some respect in the community. The reason you can't do that is you stop swinging and you're playing things so conservatively. When it comes to decision making processes, the decisions that you're making, two and three week decisions, could literally be made in seconds. One of the things, that's probably the hardest thing to work with me is I do not deliberate on anything. If it can be made, a decision can be made instantly.

It should be made instantly.

There's no reason to say, I'll circle back to you tomorrow. What's gonna happen tonight? Are you gonna have a dream about it? Are you gonna be walking on the treadmill and all of a sudden something drops in your head? No, you know what you need to do? Make the swing. Speed is so much more important than the plan.

You say, oh, no, that's reckless.

All right, you're gonna make some mistakes.

Sometimes 10% of the time, you're gonna make a mistake.

And guess what? You're gonna have to apologize.

And guess what? People will forgive you and you'll move forward. And ultimately, the reason you'll be admired is not because you sat in the batter's box and waited for the perfect pitch to hit the one home run in your entire career, but rather the person that swing 1,000 times and hit 100 home runs in one year would be the absolute talk of the town.

And yet they struck out hundreds and hundreds of times.

Mistake after failure after mistake after bankruptcy after failure. I tried my treatment division and it failed. I tried my saw division and it failed. I tried. No, it didn't work out. I tried to do landscape and didn't work out. In time and time and time and time again. And then finally something comes along in a low, low moment. You put all investment in and you just start taking swings. Just start taking swings. You start getting reps. And that practice eventually builds the muscle required that when the perfect pitch comes not in the next pitch, it might be in five years.

There's one time I remember driving. We used to play baseball all the time, and my brother's here, and we'd just throw pitch all the time. And I played t bowl. He was always a couple years ahead of me.

One day I was going to practice.

My dad was driving me. I still remember exactly where I would drive. We were driving the west on 8th street, turning left onto Valley View. I would have been about five or six, probably.

And I still remember I had this stupid coach that would put me in right field.

I had never played right field my whole life.

I was always pitcher or shortstop. I was like, in my mind, the best thing on the team. And I still remember as my dad used to drive me to T ball. I only use T ball at this point. Maybe it was machine pitch. And he said, mike, if you're still in right field, Be prepared, even if it's in a month from now, for the one time you need to pitch the ball.

But be ready. And I always remember thinking I'd go out to right field.

He's like, this is so stupid. I will never. Hey, in Little League, you never see balls in right field. If it's in the infield, it's considered like a home run walk in the park.

So.

I still remember that. And ultimately, that's what you'll have to.

Decide on when it comes to you and your business.

It might be five years from now, but waiting for the perfect pitch is not the right decision. Get your practice reps in. Build the muscle of making decisions quickly in your business. There's no reason to deliberate. A lot of you come up with. You thank me for what we're doing. You say, admire what you're doing and how much you can accomplish. We were here five years ago. It was our first one.

There was literally like these three tables and that would have been it.

It was really, really small. There was none of this or this or anyone at the back. It was really, really janky.

Let's just call it that.

And you say, man, you've done so much.

Here's the secret to it.

Write on the board. Just make decisions. Realize it's not gonna kill you. Make decisions fast. Just do something. So often the times I get questions, people like, should I do X or Y? And a lot of times you'll see in Facebook or YouTube content, don't really respond. Because what I wanna say, and I don't wanna feel like a jerk, is flip a coin and just decide it.

Literally.

It won't affect your business, it won't.

Affect the direction of your business, and in five years, you won't remember the decision. So just make a swing. Just go for it. That's ultimately what you need to do, especially if you trust your decision making process. Because if you ultimately look at all the decisions you've made and they're either yes or no, they're either good or they're bad. Was this a good decision? Yeah, that was a good decision.

To add mowing. Yes, this is a good decision to add this. Yes, it was a good decision to hire so and so. Nope, bad hire.

All right, so if you take all the decisions you make, these are all the swings that you have, whether it be strikes, balls or hits, and you put them into, yes, this is a good decision. I got a home run or no, this is a bad decision. If you put all these into a bucket and if 50% or more of your decisions are good and growth is the goal, then speed should be the focus. Cause ultimately, if you have more than 50% of your decisions being good, you should just consistently keep doing it over and over and over and over and over again. And so I'm not gonna say everyone in this room should do that, because some in here, your decision making process is not great.

The decision you make with your health, not great.

The decisions you make with your personal life, not great. Decision you make in your spiritual life, not great. And because of that, you do need.

To take more time about your decisions.

And think things through a little bit more and get the opinions of someone else you might trust that has a good decision making framework and can think clearly because they're not in a low.

Low or in a high high. It's called a batting coach. And the best of the best have.

Them and there's no stain on their name.

When the best of the best have.

A coach and no one knows the coach's name, no one needs to know the coach's name, all the fame goes to the player. But the best of the best realize they still need a coach because they need someone else to help them with this framework. Is this a good decision? Is this not a good decision? I need someone else to balance something off of because I might not see business like I see sports. I might not see my personal life like I do see sports. So because I'm a sports guy, I'm gonna get someone else's opinion on these other things so I can remain balanced and my decision making focus, my decision making process can stay focused on remaining positive.

But if 50% or more of your.

Decisions are positive and good, and vast.

Majority of you are, because you literally just made a good decision to come to a conference network, meet with other people, improve your business, probably a good decision, probably good things you're doing. And I would venture to believe that most of you, more than 50% of your decisions in your business are good ones. If that is true, you should just keep making as many decisions as possible. When I look at the opportunity for us to start, Copilot, is this a good decision? I don't know.

Look at some of the comments I made this morning. It's like, give me a year and I'll prove it. But I don't know, maybe we strike out. But ultimately when I look back and say, okay, the things that we've done, I've made some strikeouts, I've made some terrible errors. But over the course of time, more.

Than 50% of my decisions, I feel.

Have been positive, good ones. So guess what we're gonna do? We're gonna swing.

Go for it.

Let's go.

Let's pump a bunch of money, move development teams over, get everyone together, spend sleepless nights trying to figure this out. Cause that is the decision making process I make. And it's immediate. It literally was made in less than two hours. The entire framework of how our agreement was gonna roll with Patrick, how everything was gonna happen. I stayed up all that night to write a three page document exactly what was going to happen over the next year and the next 24 months. That's how you must make decisions in your business. This is not a six month decision.

And I made some mistakes in 2022. And that's what's gonna happen when you move fast.

I said something so stupid on one of our franchisee calls.

To this day, one line keeps me up at night. I said something. So I never said this.

No one's ever even brought it up to me. I said one thing so dumb on.

A call with all of our franchisees. It makes me sick to my stomach just thinking about it.

Everyone.

Dude. The level of anticipation in the room, just like.

Man, you guys want me to say that?

Oh, dude.

Okay.

Okay.

No.

Okay.

Confession is good for the soul. Okay. So I said a stupid line. It might take me a couple extra minutes, guys. Sorry. Okay.

So in spring, we made some mistakes.

And I promised last conference to our franchise we'd do whatever it took to make sure we got through spring rush without any heavy missing any calls. And we were missing somewhere between 3 to 7, sometimes 8% of the calls in this peak of spring rush, like May, especially April and maybe.

But it was because we hired like 40 virtual people. And what happened is it required all of our top people to start training all of them.

We made some mistakes.

And ultimately what started to happen is we had. We were doing scheduling and invoicing for all our franchisees. It's very difficult to do invoicing and scheduling remotely because you don't know your crews, especially scheduling. Because if I said, hey, just give me how many budget hours you have and how many crew members you have. That's how we would operate.

But we don't have a software that.

Does that for us. We have to do it manually. Look at how many budget hours there are. Look how many team members there are. We don't have what we're going to build with Copilot, where it kind of predicts where you can put the job on the Schedule. So it's manual. The problem with that is if someone doesn't put budget hours incorrectly, if they forget to put budget hours in the estimator, if we mess up something in this whole process, we can really mess up scheduling and invoicing. And we started making some pretty big mistakes. And people at Command center are awesome, Man, I'm sweating my God goodness.

And so we started making some mistakes and they're bad ones. And you can't mess up scheduling because then you gotta apologize and everything. So we decided at 11 o' clock at night on a Wednesday evening that we were gonna stop doing scheduling invoicing. As a service at Command center, you're like, oh, it's not a big deal.

But I made this decision in a blink of an eye because the reason for it was because we were losing people at Command center left and right. Our best people were leaving. And it was because the stress levels were going through the roof. Because when they make mistakes, they take it very personal. There's a lot of emotion with it. We have yellow slip system. They are paid on pay for performance as well. So it gets. They take it very seriously, sometimes more seriously than a franchisee, honestly, when there's like a complaint and stuff. But it was just super high levels of stress. We were having everyone working more hours, weekends. Like, we were just. It just kept compounding because when someone drops out, well, then everyone else has to pick up the slack. And when that happens, it creates more stress. And the phone keeps ringing and estimates still keep coming in. And we're 500 estimates behind and the day's ending and I'm doing estimates, trying to help out. So anyways, I realized if we didn't.

Pull the plug that day, by the.

End of the week, we would lose more of our top people. I'm talking our trainers. And so when that happens, your trainers drop out, then all the people that are training their quality drops. And so then you have quality issues.

So I got on a call with all of our franchisees and those who have been around, they remember this. They got a video at 2 or 3 in the morning. I was on the phone with Liz at like 11:30, and we were going through. Okay, what's the ramification of this? I know everyone's gonna hate my guts, but we will literally lose our best people here in the next three, four days. Emotions were extremely high at Command Center. Lots of when you start making mistakes, like the past two or three weeks, I don't think there's been any yellow slips. I don't Know where Brian's at. But we were making eight or nine a week, and these are. If you mess up an invoice and it's $1,000 instead of $10,000, that's a big deal. But that's one keystroke.

Anyways.

Okay, So I got on this call with them.

I say, hey, we're cutting invoicing and scheduling, effective immediately.

Right.

Maybe a mad decision. Probably should have changed how I rolled that out. That's why we have a franchise advisory council now. Thank you all very much.

But on that call, I said the stupidest thing ever. And the reason was because I was.

Trying to justify why we made such a fast decision, which is stupid, because the reason why we did it made sense once we explained it. It made sense. But I said the stupidest thing. I don't even know if I can say it. Okay, here we go. Does anyone in the franchise even remember what I said that you think I'm going to say here? No. No one knows.

Oh.

Who you do what you said, not me.

What? That's such a cop out.

Don't give me that. Trying to make me feel bad.

So I said, you know, being a part of Augusta is kind of like being in an open relationship. You can come and go as you want because there's no penalty to leave.

Stupidest thing I have ever said in my entire life in front of everybody when everyone was mad at me, like, just shut up.

But back to my slide.

Thank you.

Maybe I'll sleep better. All right, so back to what we were talking about. When you make decisions fast, you will make some mistakes. All right? That's what one of my. One of the many I made in 2022 only mercy goodness. All right, that slide was supposed to take about 30 seconds. Okay?

So leadership, historically looks like this.

In my opinion, I made this up.

I'm probably wrong when I make stuff up.

Probably wrong on 90% of it.

Organization on the left hand side over.

The course of time, you have tribes.

Back in the day, you have nations.

Dude. Now I just feel weird saying that. Okay, can everyone just, like, laugh or something?

Clap it up. All right, dude, man.

Dude, that was rough.

You just passed the microphone.

Okay, what was the most embarrassing you said last year? Forest.

Goodness.

All right?

Organizations, tribes, nations. We get into these groups of people.

And the reason that we organize as.

Humans, even if everyone's like, oh, we want decentralization. We want no control over us. Impossible.

Regardless if you dropped humans that had.

No idea about society, organizations, nations, or.

How we run inside of our Culture.

They would eventually organize.

The reason for that is very simple. When we gather into an organization of people, we put people in places of power and position.

We make chiefs and tribes.

We have presidents.

What's the other prime ministers? There you go. Canadians.

Prime ministers for nations. We have CEOs inside of companies. We have parents inside of families. There's always an organizational structure to every.

Single part of our life, and it would happen automatically. And I'll talk about it in a second. Why?

Because these people are put in this position.

We give them certain privileges.

In a tribe, you make the chief, you give them great respect. In a nation, you have a president.

You give them power.

Power over the nuclear codes, power over to be able to veto massive amounts.

Of money and change and organize and make laws.

Companies, we give them CEO and they make a lot of money. And everyone cries about how the average CEO wealth is like 100 or 200 times.

This is why companies make CEOs and.

The privilege that they get, typically, if.

They'Re doing well, is gonna be a lot of money.

In families, you have parents and the privilege that you get of being a parent.

And sometimes I think parents, people become parents just for this one piece. I want someone to listen to me. So you get obedience. So families, parents, obedience.

Because of the privilege that is given to the leader.

Remember, we're talking about servant leadership here.

Because of the privilege that is given to a leader in exchange for that, the people that follow them expect certain things in return. This is an exchange in exchange for having respect towards the chief. The tribe expects that there's strength in.

A time of weakness, that when there's.

A virus, when there's a threat, that someone stands up strong. For a nation, a president, they are given power, but they are required. And we expect that. They give us security and they protect our borders, they protect us from terror. We expect us from war. These are the things that we expect. And that's why we give them the power. That's why we vote for them. When we go out and wave banners and do all this other garbage and argue with each other about them is because we are expecting that someone keep us secure in a company, a CEO. We give them much wealth in exchange for the expectation that they come up with a strategy and they make the decisions in the business.

Because your business would be absolute chaos if everyone was making decisions in the company. Ultimately, it has to come down to one person.

This is why joint CEOs rarely work out.

You need one person with that level.

Of strategy that is singularly focused on.

What'S happening in the company strategy.

That's what we expect as an employee to the owner of the business is.

We expect them to have a plan in place. And the worst thing you can say.

Is there's a horrible thing happening and I have no idea what to do.

Not a good thing for an employee to hear sometimes.

There's sometimes being vulnerable where that can be effective. But ultimately they are then looking back at you in the face and say.

You come up with a plan. Families, parents, we get obedient for that.

But we expect as a child that we are provided for. I'm not wondering where my neck says piece of bread and my next meal and where I'm gonna be sleeping tonight. I expect that my parents provide for me as a child. If I'm four and five years old, I can't do that. I can't provide for myself. I need to be able to have provision. And therefore I am willing to exchange that for obedience that they desire.

And listen to them when they say.

Something and shut up and eat my vegetables. I'll do that because they provide for me. And if I don't give them the.

Obedience, there's a chance I don't get fed tomorrow morning.

And when this happens, when these things.

Happen in our life, just stick with me for a second. Spring rush in our businesses.

Economic downturns, unruly customers getting super mad at you, firing a team member, the horrible news cycle that we're gonna hear in fear and panic and all the rest of it. That is the low, low. That is the time also that a leader relinquishes the right to wait, retreat, or cower in the face of adversity. And there's plenty of adversity, both personally and in your business and in the economy over the next 12 to 24 months. And when those things happen, if you're gonna stand up and call yourself a leader, you relinquish the right to say, I'm gonna sit back, I'm gonna wait. I'm gonna sit this one out. I'm gonna retreat. I'm gonna step back and take a breather. That's the time when you as a leader are expected to have strength, security, and a strategy in place and provide for the people you're leading. If you can't do those things, you are not a leader. And you are expected to. And that's why you as an owner have respect and power and wealth, and people obey you when you say something. It's cause when the things get tough, they're looking at you as a leader to give them these things. And in the face of adversity, recessions, when a customer fails, freaks out at one of your employees, they're looking at you to come fix it. They're looking at you to fix something. When everything's blowing up and employees are leaving at the same time, all these leads are coming and the phone's ringing off the hook and employees are unhappy and there's a mutiny coming against you. That's when you, as a leader, because you say you're a leader, have now relinquished the ability to take a step backwards. And if you do, in that moment, you will eventually lose the place of.

Being the leader of that organization.

And you wonder why governments are overthrown. You wonder why tribes and families are broken apart.

The reason for that many times is when there's a time of war and something bad happens, the leader fails to take action, and they fail to step forward and make decisive, clearance, unemotional decisions about what was the best thing for that organization. You say, well, that's business, that's political. All right, let's talk about different organization. Parenting your kids require you to be able to exemplify these things. That's why they respect you. That's why they look up to you and say they don't. Maybe because you aren't a good leader. Look at yourself in the mirror and say, maybe that's why they don't listen to me. And I hear a lot of people complaining about their employees, and they don't listen. They don't work hard, they don't show up on time. But maybe you should look at yourself in the mirror and ask yourself, am I really a good enough leader? Where they're actually going to give me those things. They're gonna give me some respect, they're gonna listen to what I say, they're gonna care about the mission and the dream of my business. Don't call yourself a leader if you can't give these things to them. And in a time when everything is hell against you and you're in your low low, that's the moment when a leader really is required to step up and earn their stripes. And a failure to do that will lead to a revolt from your entire.

Team in any organization.

Just gonna read this one real quick. Anyone can lead when times are good. Lots of work, there's good reviews, there's good employees that are applying, Morale is high, the weather is good, income is going up and to the right, things are going great. Family life is great, the wife loves me, our kids Are doing great in.

School, there's no one sick. All that is easy life is good sailing. That anybody in the world could call themselves a leader. And that's why I'm really afraid, because for 14 years we've all convinced ourselves that we are quote, unquote leaders because we own a business and because the business is successful and everything is going fantastic. We are a leader. Just wait till that hits the. A roadblock, a massive brick wall over the next two years. And you're gonna be the one as the leader that's going to have to make sure that you live up to.

The expectations your employees have, say, well, that's business. All right, let's bring this down.

So in your personal relationships, when everything is on the rocks, when you've had a massive argument, massive discussion, you're not happy with somebody, you know, that they don't like how much you work and they resent you because they feel like they take care of the kids. Only when all of those things are happening, intentions are strong and. And you're at a low low in the relationship, that's the moment when you, as the leader, have to step up. That is not the time to step back and say, oh, let's take us six months away from each other. Let's see how things work out. Let's go try something else. Maybe we should just separate for a while. Let me just share the kids for a bit. That's not the decision to be made of a leader. That's a coward. Don't be a coward. In a low low moment, the decision.

That you make will determine whether or not you are a coward or you are a leader.

And in business. The vast majority of entrepreneurs that are in business today have not seen what.

A low low means when an economy hits rock bottom. And what I hope this conference does is prepare you for that moment so.

In that time, you don't give up.

Don'T throw in the towel.

Because after that, in that moment of a low low, in that time when everyone else is afraid and there's fear in the relationship, fear in the business, fear in the bank account, that's the moment where the best gains, the most gains are made.

From that moment onward.

Nine, eleven would become a day to remember. The job of a president is protect the American people from harm. Put your politics on the side of.

A second, all right?

Don't need to worry about that. And some do. And it turns out I was one that did.

My assistant came in and said, a plane is at the World Trade Center. And I said, well, that's a strange accident.

And I called the President initially, we.

Thought maybe a small plane of some kind of. And he said, well, keep me posted.

He'd been told a small twin engine prop plane crashed into one of the towers of the World Trade Center. You know, oh, that's a horrible accident. I was concerned, but I did not think of it as a national security threat.

I remember when he came in, even as a seven year old, you know who the President is, right? And I remember like even feeling like that young feeling like kind of like starstruck and giddy, like I'm going to Disney World or something. And I put my hand over my heart, like I, you know, when you think about patriotic things, when you're that little, you know, you do the Pledge of Allegiance every day. And I literally put my hand over my heart.

I asked my communicators if they could find a television.

And at about one minute after nine, they came back in with a television set. So we brought CNN up. I was calling the White House Situation Room to talk to my senior duty officer. So I was chatting with him on the handset and watched the television as the rest of the country was watching the television at 9:03 when the second aircraft impact impacted into the second World Trade center tower.

When the second plane hit, there was.

An audible gasp of air in the room. Some people put their hand on their chest.

It was two realizations, right? One, the immediate death toll and then the fact that this was an attack on America.

It hits me as I'm standing there.

Next to the President to the left, that the President's the only one that doesn't know the second plane has hit the building.

I had to deliver a message that the President didn't expect to hear and was almost unbelievable.

But it also literally was the message he had to hear, whether he wanted to or not.

Andy Carr comes up to my behind me and says, second plane has hit the second tower. America's under attack.

And I'm watching a child read. And then I see the press in the back of the room beginning to get the same message I just got.

And I could see the horror etched on the face of the news. People who had just gotten the same news.

During a crisis, it's really important to set a tone and not to panic. And so I waited for the appropriate moment to leave the classroom. I didn't want to do anything dramatic. I didn't want to, you know, lurch out of the chair and scare the classroom full of children. And so I waited.

Try it again, get ready for the beginning of that sentence. Get ready, she prayed with her love in her pavilion.

I was studying him intently and his mouth was kind of drawn and tight and there was almost.

For just a brief moment, sort of a startled look in his eyes and also a weightiness to him, if you will. I could tell he was really focused on trying to get through that event.

You're literally seeing the mindset of the President of the United States play out on tv. Everything about what he thought he was about as a president.

Is changing right in front of you.

We hear about the great wartime leaders, Churchill, Roosevelt, others.

Days, if not weeks to process and gird themselves for what was ahead. This is all happening in real time.

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In my opinion, that's what a leader does.

And just a few days after that, he stepped out into a field in.

Front of tens of thousands of people at New York Yankee Stadium with a bulletproof vest underneath his suit to be able to throw out the first pitch. Just moments after, days after a terror attack, he steps in front of a.

Whole bunch of people.

It'd be extremely easy to kill him, even with the bulletproof vest. Be extremely simple. But the reason you do that is because you're a leader and you've relinquished the right to take a step back and cower in the face adversity in your family, in your business, and in any organization, whether it be church, political or in the private sector of our companies. But as we head into recession, remaining.

Calm, stable and in control of one's.

Emotions will yield the greatest success and returns.

Imagine if you would have heard that news. And like many of us, when we hear horrible things that happen or really awesome things that happen, we have an immediate emotional reaction. If he would have had that in.

The moment, just take your tin hat off for a second and your political stuff.

But if he would have done that in the moment, just think what that would have done to the rest of our country, to our response and to the world of what terror could do to a society. And the forces that he fought that.

Day in terms of terror, people flying planes into buildings, we will probably never have that responsibility.

But there are forces that are programmed against your family, your personal life and your business as we head into a recession that will require the same level of leadership and the ability, when things are really, really, really bad, to be able to step up in that moment and make a clear, decisive action that is unemotional. There is no pride in commotion, crazy time schedules and feverish action. Only in the results of a leader. Calmness is contagious. Take action that is calculated, precise and void of emotional tides.

Say, where'd you get that from? When I was running stairs?

There is no pride and commotion. You will never hear me brag about.

The work schedule that I have. Never. You'll never hear me about how little.

I sleep or how hard I work, because there is absolutely no priority. Pride and commotion and feverish action. The results you have as a leader is the only thing that your followers care about.

The only thing your followers care about is that you live up to the unsigned document that we all resign ourselves to. That when you, as the leader, signed up for that position, you would stand up in the face of adversity, protect defenders, and be able to make sure that the followers that have entrusted you with that place of a leader are protected.

Five levels of leadership.

I did a video a couple years back on this on a whiteboard. Lee was talking to me on a podcast recently.

Shout out C Suite unfiltered for Lee.

Thank you.

Yeah, there you got it, Lee. All right.

Five levels of leadership.

All right, so again, this one came to me at middle night. I was thinking about my dad. He just started a church locally, Inferno. If you guys wanna join Sunday, you're more than welcome to come.

But five levels of leadership. The first is force. You can force people to lead or to follow you.

All right?

You can force people to do what you want.

Let's take some examples from a parenting perspective. You can force your kids to do something.

They're probably gonna grow up rebellious, wanna run away from you and never see your face again. But you can use force in order to be able to get achievement done. Now, what you can't really see well on this screen, but a little bit over here is as we move closer to the center of leadership, the vision in the center there, that's the longest form of leadership, the longest long term thinking that is required when it Comes to leadership, in my opinion, short term, force, I can literally make you do something, put your right hand up.

Great.

I can tell him what to do, I can force him to do that. And I immediately have a response.

Fair hand, thank you.

Now, it'd be a whole lot harder for me to be able to convince him to raise his hand by using simply my vision.

I'm over here like, man, I want Vlad to raise his hand so bad. So that's my vision. I just wanna see that.

It's my goal. He will not be able to see that for a very long time. It's not the immediate response, and that's why so many people default to force so quickly, is because you can immediately.

Make someone, you can force them to do it.

And you see that in parenting, never works out great force when it comes to dictators, people that have led countries again, leaders of some sort, they force their people to do something again. You will get the action done. You have the result you wanted as a leader very quickly. In business, you can force your employees to do certain things, or you could potentially ask them what they think they.

Want to be done, have some involvement in the company, have a poll, see.

What their thoughts are on things, have an open Q and A. But for the sake of the example, you can force them to do something because you, as a leader in the short term can make things happen. Second is positional authority. Because you're the boss, I'll listen to you because you're my parent, I'll listen to you because you're the president, I'll pay my taxes. That's positional authority. It's another layer of leadership that is better than force. It's better than me going over here, grabbing his hand and be like, hey, it's better that I, because I am an owner, I can tell my employee, because I pay their paycheck and my positional authority is above them, that they listen to me better than me forcing them with a whip to do the work. Most of the business world has gone out of force. We don't have slaves, we don't beat people up.

And if you do, you need to talk to someone. My goodness, grow up.

Positional authority, though, is another layer. It's better. And that was most of us, where we operate in most time. The reason your employees listen to you.

Is because you pay a paycheck and that's why they listen to you and they think you're an absolute jerk and behind your back, that's what they're saying.

But they will listen to you and.

You'Re like, I have the great employees.

They listen to me all the time. They love me so much. No, they don't. You're just the boss. And that level of leadership is better than force, but not really ultimately where you wanna be at. The third is incentive. This is the parent that says, if you eat the vegetables, I'm not gonna force you to. I'm not gonna say it's because I'm your parent, but if you eat the.

Vegetables, I'm gonna give you ice cream. You can give them incentive.

All right, so you know what the government does, right? They give incentives for us to listen to them. Cause guess what? I'm not gonna go out and buy or sell cheap houses, what's it called, Low income housing. I'm not gonna do that. But if you give me an incentive, I will do that. That's politically in your business. Guess what? We do P for P. Bonuses, Profit sharing. These are incentives in order to get some sort of action from our employees.

Still not the highest level of leadership.

Next one is passion. All right, this one is scary because it's extremely useful and it usually drops off like a cliff. Usually the most motivating people, super passionate. Let's go. Jumping up here. Like, the best speakers are typically passionate.

All right?

Extreme passion. And when you do that, you'll get followers because their level of passion and conviction is less than yours. Therefore, they will follow you in a parenting environment. Because you're so passionate about them becoming an NFL star, because you're so passionate about them becoming a ballerina or whatever. They'll listen to you because you have so much passion and energy and you're just so motivated that they do something.

And they'll listen to you for that reason.

Not because they're your parent, not cause you incentivize them, not cause you force them, but because you're passionate about it and you get really passionate. You come back to after a conference like this, like, guys, we're gonna do P4P. This is gonna be fantastic. We're gonna change the business. I'm gonna start listening to you more. I'm gonna be a great leader. I apologize for things in the past. We're open book management. It's gonna be great. And you're gonna be super passionate. And people are like, yo, this is great. This is fantastic.

Let's go.

Okay, we'll go see what.

This is awesome.

You'll get some buy in. It's a form of leadership. Greater.

But the greatest form of leadership. In my mind, that's the most long term is someone that has a vision. And if you don't know what you want for your business and why it exists, this is why it is so important to know why your business exists and where it is going. Because if someone buys into that, they'll overlook a lot of the stupid mistakes you make as a leader and you won't have to beat them over the head with force. You won't have to say, I'm the boss. You won't have to say, hey, if you just do this, please, I'll give you $100 if you just come out on the snow route. Please, I'll give you $100, just please come out on the snow. I know, it's really. Everyone's exhausted. Please, $100. Oh, no. We're just gonna get everyone motivated. Motivation meetings, like, let's go. We're gonna do off sites, we're gonna do. We're gonna go to the driving range, we're gonna drive fast cars, we're gonna go. That's passion.

It's very hard to lead from a place of vision to close out. I wanna tell a story and I haven't had any notes this whole time, but I kinda need to read this one. I was gonna try to do it off the top of my head, but I wanna make sure I hit all the details. So I wrote this out, got some information on it, and I wanted to read it to you. Okay, so stick with me. Cause I'm reading. I don't like reading notes. I think it's really bad for a speaker to do that. But hang with me for a second. All right, so years ago, this is like hundreds of years ago, there was a man, he was leading an organization and he had a scheduled off site meeting. This is the title of this whole thing. Off site meeting that changed everything.

He had a meeting, an off site.

Meeting with his key 12 executives. And he had the financial department, operations. Everyone was coming together for this off site meeting. And they determined that they would have the off site meeting in a restaurant. So they called ahead and said, hey, we need room for about 13 people. Could we book this, the upstairs loft area of the restaurant? They said, well, we're kind of overstaffed tonight or overbooked. We don't have enough of our staff or understaffed, but you can come. We're just not gonna be able to get to you right away. We're just really booked out. So they say, that's fine. We'll have the loft upstairs and that'll be fine. And so.

Typically, back in the day, this is a long time ago, they didn't have cars. They walked a lot. They would walk in sandals, and they'd get dirt on their feet and everything. And so it was actually really hard to have really executive meetings or things when it was really, really hard, when it was more of an upscale kind of meeting, like a red carpet kind of event, because they'd get dirty. We walk in and they had robes. This is like medieval age, right? So get all dirty.

But at this event, it was a.

Really pivotal time for the organization because the entire organization was coming to a point because everyone in the organization was wanting to become the second in command for the company and the CEO. He knew that there was all this infighting, like, who was the best person for the job, who was going to become the next person in life, who was going to be the one that had the next. They had the big bonus structure, things ready to go for whoever would get this position. And at the same time, the cfo, chief financial officer at the time, was planning a mutiny against him, planning to completely undermine him because he handled the money side of things, and he kind of knew where all the money was spent, and he felt like there were some things that were wrong and money.

Was not being spent where it should.

And he kind of felt like there was too much money being kept in the company. And so he actually started looking into the details of the organization and realizing that the leader was actually in trouble with the government. And the government actually wanted him to put him in prison because he had made riots and told people that the government, they wanted to overthrow them. And we're just super politically charged. And he was always with a lot of really, like, just hard people, like.

Go out with people that were drinking.

All the time and rough life in the red light district. The leader was just kind of off the wall. And so everyone was very much against him, especially the cfo. He wanted to basically try to get him handed over to the government. So he knew a lot of the companies and the people inside the government that could help put him under arrest. And so that night, little did the CEO know that the CFO was actually planning this mutiny. And they would set things up, the government would come in and they would take the CEO to jail.

And so because they had.

They made.

This meeting, they had offset meeting. And the CEO knew that, like, this is a pivotal moment for the business, a pivotal moment for the organization. We have to get these things ironed out. There's a lot of people jostling for position. He knew that the CFO was literally just against him and had problems with the money and the taxes and the government that was there. And he knew all this was happening. So they come to the restaurant and they go upstairs. And again, because they were understaffed in the restaurant, there was no one there to wash their feet. So typically you'd come into a restaurant back in the day when you would walk on the roads and things, you're so dusty. So at these nice restaurants, like you should have for your off site meetings. Nice restaurant, let's go.

So when you go there, they would.

Typically have someone that would wash their feet. Now, typically, back in the day, this.

Would be a slave. This would be something like the very.

Bottom of the totem pole. Like, the worst job was the foot wash flunky. The guy had to wash everyone's feet when they walked in the door because there wasn't just dirt, there was also like horse manure and everything else. Because they were walking on these roads. These were not asphalt, these were dirt roads they were going through years and years ago, just very old times.

And so literally, they all sit down for dinner. The CEOs there, they're all starting to break bread and starting to eat.

And the CEO gets up out of his chair, goes and gets the towel and he grabs a little jug of.

Water and he literally starts taking their.

Feet and washing their feet.

And his chief operating officer at the time, he's like, what are you doing? That is the worst thing that an owner and a CEO can do.

Like, you're literally, you know what's going on here.

Everyone's in upheaval, and here you are.

Like, washing people's feet, like, what in.

The world are you doing? It's like the most menial. That's what a slave does. And he literally is like, no, you're not washing my feet, dude. You're not doing this. That is so beyond you and so below what you should be doing as the leader.

And some of you might have picked up on it, but that event, that night was considered the Last supper. And that CEO's name was Jesus of Nazareth. And regardless of what your religion is or what you think about religion, that.

Night exemplified truly what servant leadership is.

Because that night, in the midst of.

Jesus, knowing that everyone in his organization.

At the top, his executive team, was against him.

There was people jostling for position. He exemplified what a true leader does. The first and foremost, he was willing to serve and humble himself. He was willing to do what no one else was willing to Do. And I'm flabbergasted by the owner that would think that they expect their employees to work as hard and crush hours and do 50, 60 hours and they've never done it themselves. And they show up at 9 and 10 o' clock and leave at 3 and 4 and the guys are getting back to the shop with photos on.

Instagram of you on a boat while.

They were just working till 7, 8.

O' clock at night.

You are not a leader. A leader humbles themselves, is willing to get dirty, is willing to get on their knees in front of their team and ask for forgiveness and humble themselves. And furthermore, not only was he humble, he was passionate. Because that night, not only did he have something that he was preaching or something he was saying, something that he was telling the followers that he had to do. Not only that, he was willing to die for what he believed in. And most of us have a vision no further than our shadow that we would not be willing to give an ounce of energy, time and effort towards. And in low lows, we'd simply throw in the towel when at the lowest point in time, he had so much passion he was willing to give his life for it. That's what a leader does. And a business is so miniscule, so tiny to the responsibility of you as a leader, as a parent, you inside of a church. And here we are looking at the leader of a church which, by the way, has outlasted the Roman Empire. And to this day, millions of people follow him. And every single day, thousands of people start to follow this leader. And he died thousands of years ago. And for most of us in this room, myself included, within one year of us dying, no one would remember the things that we did, what we said, or the impact that we had. Why? Because you're not a leader. And the vision that you have is so tiny and the size of business that you believe you should build is so below your personal capacity and how many jobs you could create and what you could create for your church and your family and for your community that there's nothing to be remembered for. There's no one that wants to follow a leader that has no vision.

Outlasted the Roman Empire.

To this day, thousands still follow him. And the 11 executives in that room, every single one besides John, Every single one, 11 of them died because of the cause that that man stood for. That's what a leader is willing to do. Not only give up their own life, but the people that follow them follow the vision. So much so that they're Willing to die for it.

You want people to die for this? No. That's all I'm saying.

I'm exemplifying the furthest extent of what a leader does and someone who leads with vision. People will follow you into battle in order to get things done. People will work the extra hours without you forcing them, without you telling them you're the boss, without you giving them an incentive, without you trying to get passionate and motivating them. They'll follow you because of vision and what you want the business to become and what you want the business to be able to do in your community. And what you see the business being able to give opportunity to people that would otherwise not have it, that's what they'll buy into, that's what they'll follow you for. And that's why they're leaving you now for an extra 50 cents down the road, is because there's no vision inside of your company.

I encourage you today, stay calm, stay in control, and stay focused on the mission. That night, his CFO came and betrayed him and turned him into the government.

And he literally said to him, do what's in your heart quickly.

Get this over with.

Let's go do it.

Let's do this.

At his lowest point, he said, I'm committed.

Let's do this.

I'm all in. And he knew what was going to happen. Cause moments before, moments before, he stepped aside and he talked to the one.

Person that he could actually have some solace in.

And he prayed to his father, please, I don't want to go through this. I don't want to go through the depths of this despair. I don't want to go through this low, low moment. This is not fun. And guess what? A leader doesn't do that in front of their team. Cause the next moment, he walked over to his disciples, the leaders of his organization, and he was calm, collected, and.

Said, this is happening.

Let's go. Let's do this. Calm, collective, unemotional decision making in the heat of battle when everything's against you, adversity all around you. And he knew he was about to die and go through the most torturous death imaginable. And he'd be able to stand there and have a vision so clear that the people that he would impact that night would die for that vision.

Thank you all so much. I hope that this conference is a.

Moment like Jesus had that night. And I don't mean to make this super spiritual or you think this is.

So great or amazing about leadership. That's not my goal.

I'm taking the most extreme so that.

Hopefully it inspires you to take one step more closer towards vision instead of positional authority, incentive and force.

And what I hope this conference is.

For and why we do this, because we don't make money, it's a lot of work and it's a lot of pressure on us. The reason we do this is because, like Jesus, that night before a very low, low moment, he stepped aside from.

His team and he went and talked.

To someone that he could have solace in. And tonight at lunch and throughout this.

Weekend, I hope you're able to talk.

To the people in this room and.

You say what you're going through and it's not all sunshine and rainbows.

And that's fine.

Because in the lowest low, as he.

Was sitting there and kneeling down and.

Blood was pouring out of his pores because of the pressure and intense heat that he was under in that moment, he stayed committed to vision and did.

Not throw in the towel.

And as miniscule as this seems compared to that massive sacrifice, you in your business are likely to experience that moment.

In 2023 and 2024 for the first time.

And I encourage you during that moment to exemplify those attributes of a leader that stays focused on the vision, why you started your business and what it can do in the future. And the team that will surround you will buy into the vision. And that alone will be the long term focus and the thing that keeps them around.

Thank you all so very much.

This has been the Mike Andes podcast. Thank you so much for listening. And like we mentioned earlier in the episode Landscape Summit 2023 will be continuing in the Louisville, Kentucky coming this October and we hope to see you there. That's all we got for you today and we'll see you next time.