Amplify Your Capabilities By Surrounding Yourself With Great Team Members | Capability Amplifier

Welcome to Capability Amplifier, the show for business owners and entrepreneurs who want high performance upgrades for their brains, bodies and bank accounts. Hello and welcome to the next episode of Capability Amplifier. My name is Mike Koenigs. I am here today with Mr. Dan Sullivan. How are you doing, sir?

Mike, it's really great to be with you. And you introduced a thought to me just before we went on about capability. And one of the main capability is what entrepreneurs surround themselves with in terms of really great team members. So we're going to have a talk about this and Mike, you've had different kinds of companies that require different kinds of team members, but if you look back, you know you're kind of at version 6.0 of Michael. If you had to say, just doesn't matter what kind of business you have, doesn't matter what field you're in, you just got to have these kind of people around, around you. Regardless of what the product is, regardless of what the service is, regardless of what the marketplace is, what would you say? Just saying that. Don't leave home without this.

All right, so here's my four number one, you gotta have a great EA who is super resourceful, understands the value of your time and protects your time at all costs, knows how to schedule and knows how to just solve problems and, and ideally has a value system where they're always available, meaning they understand that emergencies happen. So that's to me a huge thing. Next is the all important integrator and that is the person, especially for people like us, who are quick starts on the Colby scale, who take over your operations and competently are watching the back and the details and know how to deal with a visionary, generally crazy person like us. The third would be a project manager. Now a good integrator can do that, but we're always coming up with all kinds of ideas. Someone's got to manage hiring and finding talent and resources to get stuff done, whether it's in house or contract or vendors. And then the fourth is a communications director, someone who understands the branding, the messaging, like what the company or you stand for and being able to take some ideas and flesh them out so they're ready for primetime, whether it's on social, emails, messaging, proposals and that kind of thing. So it really mixes into a brand manager, communication director. That to me are my primary four that I always look for. If you just had four employees, that's what I would have, no matter what the business is.

Yeah, I think the EA one is really the crucial one because we live in a world where the world wants to get at you. And you need a gatekeeper of people who can sort out requests for your time and make judgment calls. You know what a Newton machine is? That's that ball of racks. And you take a ball at one end and you pick it up, and then the vibration goes through. And they're not someone who passes on other people's messages to you. They're people who interpret. What's the meaning of this message? And is it really important for Mike's. If I use you as the example, I don't think there's a good use of Mike's time. They know this from experience. They know this from knowing you. And they said, you know, can I talk to you a little bit about what you're trying to get? Because I think that I can get you some solution to what you're talking about right now. But I can tell you that what you're want to interest Mike in. He specifically told me he's not interested in that right now, and he's really busy right now and everything else. So my feeling is that they are more and more intelligent gatekeepers. But on the other hand, someone who's right for you, they're almost someone who can get that person into you right away. So they kind of know what your vision of the future is, not so much what your situation in the present is, but it's sort of what your vision of the future is. And they're sizing up and they're making judgments. And judgment is a marvelous capability to have in a person around you, because they don't bring everything robotically to you and say, could you evaluate this? And then I'll go back and answer. They're actually making judgment calls. My feeling is if they're confidently judgmental, even if they make mistakes, I will reward them for their confidence in making the judgment. And I say, now, here's a way of thinking about this next time, okay? This is how we do it next time. So you really feel that you have a partner with the future? And I'll leave it over to you, Mike, because I think that person is really, really a crucial person.

I agree. The challenge I've had in the past is creating what I'd call an SOP list. Because there's some stuff that you really rely on, the character and the values of the system to be able to operate without a big instruction list. Because if they're the type of people who require a bunch of instructions, they're going to fail all the time. And I don't know exactly what that's called I should know that from a psychological point of view. What is it that determines if someone is an order taker versus the thinker judger? I know that shows up in Colby and disc profiles, which I know that's something that we want to talk about is like, how do you find and hire this person? I've got a few ideas. I know you do too. But the other thing is my way of managing my ea, for example, is I use text messaging. I have some general rule sets and I just create a big old list of stuff and I'm like, basically get this stuff done as soon as you can and come to me if you have any question about what order they should be in. I basically give it to her. In my case, I've got a 13 year old EA Lori who's worked with me and she just knows my insanity and how to deal with it. But still, there's always going to be trip ups because I'm moving at a fast pace and I forget stuff. I'm just kind of a random access generator. So having someone be able to predict and anticipate and think ahead and look at your calendar is always a struggle with folks like us. So I'm going to bounce this back to you on your thoughts and then let's talk a little bit about our finding, hiring training process because again, you've seen 40,000 business owners. You've got a lot of experience in hearing what people bitch about as business owners.

Yeah. Just one final thing on your four positions. Actually, in my position, there was one that we hired first. Before we ever hired an ea, we hired an artist. And the reason is that communication through graphics is 100 times faster than communication through words. So I went after having an artist because like you, Mike, I'm in a conceptual world. It's a world of ideas and ideas spoken lend themselves to a hundred different interpretations in the minds of the hearer. But if you can take an idea and put it into a graphic, it's almost binary. They either get it or they don't get it. So I right from the beginning, we took a graphic approach to everything we were doing. And in the first instance, these were overhead projections. Then it went to slides.

That's right, Grandpa. I appreciate that.

Yeah, we had magic lanterns, you know, which depended upon candles and everything like that. So that's the only thing I have to say. But one thing is that we have a rule on hiring. You're only hiring to free me up, free up Babs, or free up the people who are freeing up Babs and Dan. If a hire does not free you up, it's a cost. It's not an investment, it's a cost. So that would be just a general rule I have about that. But in terms of looking and finding the people out there, people say, well, I can't find any great people. And I says, well, they're out there. Are you someone that great people are looking for?

That's really interesting. So I'm going to go down that little rabbit hole with you just for a moment. There will be two concepts I'm going to throw at you. First of all, I totally understand the artist thing and I agree fundamentally. But I'll tell you what, and I've got a project we're doing right now. I'm creating a new identity for my next iteration right now. And this new identity is going to be the book what is going to be what I'll call my new offering. It's a thematic brand and it all revolves around the super being concept that you and I have talked about before. What I do now is I need what my communications director slash brand manager does is instead of having the artist in house, which I understand through your lens, you need consistency of imagery and that's why it makes so much sense and the flow. Very often what I need is a lot of creative ideas, so I can pick the best one. For me, I like volume and I like to throw out. So we use 99designs and we create a spec and this way I can get like 50 or 65 different looks and drill down. And that's also how I find really high quality talent. But we live in such a gig economy right now that I found in the past that I didn't have enough work to keep a designer busy. And eventually this is my fault. I didn't have the ability to keep them busy all the time or manage them properly or have someone to manage them properly. So they sit, twiddle their thumbs and as a result they get frustrated. We have substandard work and part of it's because of my development cycle where you've got consistency. But again, I see the value in that totally. And I would actually lump artists under communications. Right.

Yeah.

So I think that's really a great distinction. I also like the way you think about it because I see now I never thought of it through that lens that, you know, out of your 30 books, they're illustrated and you really do think in pictures when I see Dan present and perform, because you are a presenter entertainer as well. And it just makes sense to be able to communicate that way. So I love it. So let's go down the journey of when you are hiring. And again, I'll give you an example of what I do.

My original ad that I wrote to attract my current EA Lori was called the Mr. Or Mrs. Moneypenny AD. And anyone who knows who Mrs. Moneypenny is from James Bond knows that Mrs. Moneypenny was the everything for James. Right Tap had his butt all the time. What I did is I got inspired because I found a little graphic that was a spy. And I took this little spy graphic, I stuck it in at the time Microsoft Word, now it's in a Google Doc and I wrote a headline and it was Agent M seeks Mr. Or Mrs. Moneypenny for secret missions. And then from there my ad was and it opens up something like, and in fact I'll read you the opening line, okay? Because I've given this thing away to so many people and they've used it and they said time after time they find amazing people. And what happened when I posted this ad is I got people responding in character saying agent April's showing up for duty sir. And then I had people writing and saying I don't want the job, but this is the best ad I've ever read and it makes me want to work for you or can I copy this? This will drive you nuts, but I'm going to do it anyway. Okay, so Agent M seeking Mrs. Moneypenny, aka an executive assistant that is a workaholic, obsessive, compulsive, co dependent, extremely detail oriented, with impeccable organization and communication skills to help manage serial entrepreneurs business. But then here's what you can expect. Results driven, chaotic, intense, high energy, easygoing, generous, happy, enthusiastic Internet entrepreneur seeks a super smart executive assistant to help him with his business. And then it goes on and it's like an open, here's what's wrong with me. Here are my fatal flaws, but here are my gifts. Then a list of qualities and values. And then I had something in here like bottom line, if you can't write or type well, if your spelling or grammar isn't outstanding, this isn't the job for you. I also had qualifiers in there which was click and fill out this survey in order to be considered. And by the way, if you complain about this, I absolutely know you're not the right person. And then I also put in there, if you're gonna send hate mail, I'm gonna ignore it anyway because I have someone screening all these. So you know, basically because I Had some people just bitched and said, how dare you ask people to do work to get a job? You know, it's like you get these weird responses. So anyway, I know I went down a rabbit hole there, but I also had my values. One other thing, which is my number one rule, your family and your body come first. As long as you let me know what's going on so I can manage expectations. You can take care of your family and I strongly and highly support you taking of your body too. You'll be happier and perform better in every part of your life. So my rule is family first, doesn't matter what it is, call me up, you're off the hook, doesn't matter how long, things like that. So I'm going to shush. I'd like your perspective because you have a much more scientific approach to finding and hiring. And again, you've coached and advised tens of thousands of entrepreneurs through the process.

Yeah, well, first of all, can I say something? Your ad really demonstrates a considerable level of self knowledge. And my feeling is that if I'm in the employment market, if I have a choice between someone who doesn't know who he is and someone who does know who he is, I feel unsafe with the first one and I feel a sense of trust and reassurance of the other one. So the thing is that right off the bat, you've established a trust level that most ads, people are really taking a risk to actually spend their time to even investigate it. If it sounds like leftover government cheese, which most, you know, employment ads really sound like, you know, you know, I mean, this is not good for you. Nothing about answering this ad will be good for you. We treat people like machines and several of ours have worn out and we're looking for a new machine. You know, basically that's what most ads do. So the big thing that I want to compliment you on, you just provided entertainment in a market that usually doesn't have any entertainment at all. So that right off the bat, you've differentiated yourself from every single ad that they're going to encounter. But you've given them a lot of leeway to say, because this is a creative ad, I'm expected to be kind of creative when I come aboard. So you've actually conveyed a lot of the cultural values in the ad in a very entertaining and kind of a general way. But you've also established some hard truths. So because you were entertaining, you could really lay down some fairly strict rules, you know, So I think it's a brilliant piece of Advertising. Just back in my own belief about this, I favor single focus jobs in my company. So give you an example. I have one person, I have two big workshops that I start every year. It's really in the millions of dollars how much we make on these workshops. And we get enough referrals and we get enough interest that both of them could be filled, but only if you have a person in charge of filling. So I have one person, day in, day out, every workday that she's here, she's just filling seats in my workshops and testing out. You know, we asked for a deposit and then they go past the deadline when they have to put their balance in, and she's immediately on to our sales personnel and say, is this real? We got the deposit, but they're not doing it. So she's making sure that those seats are secure and everything like that. So as much as possible, I try to get people into single focus. And I just read Peter Thiel's book Zero to One, and his whole philosophy is, have one people who are uniquely good at one thing and just give them one really extraordinary thing to do. So my feeling is that you're looking for a gatekeeper, but you're not asking her to do other things besides be a great gatekeeper. So the big thing that I look for is if someone is just phenomenally good at one thing, just have them doing one thing. I don't know if that's helpful.

I'll tell you what, that will single handedly define where my greatest failures in all of business come from, which is the way I used to hire. And most entrepreneurs can probably think of this as sort of like, you get someone who does something, you're like, hey, can you do this too? Or do you know someone who could help me with a blah, blah, blah. It'll be like a single task that needs to get done and then they end up being an employee.

Do you mind going getting coffee?

You know, you are one of the most valuable people that I've ever met. My whole future depends upon you doing it. Oh, do you mind going get some coffee for me? There's a discordant double message there, you know.

Right, right. I'd never do that. But it would be more like, you know, I have a guy who I'd hire for setting something up, some mechanical work. Hey, do you think you can be like, can you sit behind this camera here and be like, yeah, I've done some wedding photography. And pretty soon he's like, instead of hiring the best person for the job, convenience which got rid of a short term pain, ended up being a long term pain. Right?

Yeah.

And eventually, if you're not managing things properly, they also have the weirdest expectations, you know, because again, might not be a cultural fit. So I really agree with that. And it takes discipline to think ahead. Which really gets back to think of it like this. Most entrepreneurs I know, and I've even sat in at a strategic coach meetings, for example, or at Genius Network or Abundance360. I'm talking to an entrepreneur and they're like, God, I really need help with fill in the blanks here. But I'm not even sure what that's called. And where would I find someone like that? Like how would I even put together an ad? How would I screen them? How can I determine whether or not they're good or they don't have any way of measuring or having metrics even. Especially when it comes to marketing related or I was talking to a young entrepreneur yesterday who I'm mentoring and they're like, we know we need to build a sales team. We have a salesperson now, but she sold stuff in a completely unrelated market. How many salespeople do I need to have before I get a sales manager? So it's like getting past that entrepreneurial hump of initial team building to actually having a real business again. I'd like to go back to you and say, Dan, knowing what to call people, creating the ads, screening them, keeping them motivated and knowing when they're useful. End of cycle. And then we can get into the integrator Communications project manager.

Yeah. But here's one thing and it's coming at something from a completely different angle. So I had a phone call last night with an 18 year old. He's the son of a really great entrepreneur and he's just applying for college and he just wondered if he could talk to Dan about this. Okay. And it turns out that the conversation wasn't really about that at all. That he actually is having reservations about going to college because he looks at his dad, who's an entrepreneur and he knows me through his dad, and he says, do you think it's really important to have a college degree? And I said, well, I think it is in this respect that I have a lot of entrepreneurs earlier in the days, not so much anymore, who never went to college and they have a bit of a chip on their shoulders for the rest of their life because they feel the need to actually prove that they're the smartest person in the room. Where I felt that if they had gone through college and got a college degree, they wouldn't do that. So I said, here's why a college degree is really important. And I said, I don't want you to think that I'm saying something trivial here. I'm saying something really important, that when you have a college degree and you're sitting across the table from someone else who also has a college degree, you know, it doesn't mean anything. But someone who doesn't have a college degree thinks it's a really big deal that you don't have a college degree. And I said that confidence, it's like going to a party and knowing that you're well dressed, but there's someone else there who's conscious that they're not. They're spending the whole party thinking about how they're dressed, and you're just having a really good time. And I said, you know, there are certain settings in the world where having a college degree is actually like being properly dressed. And it's a confidence thing. And all entrepreneurism is about confidence, of leveraging confidence from one level to the other. So I said that. And he said, well, how do you start an entrepreneurial company? Because I'm kind of interested. And I said, know who you want to be a hero to? So when you're hiring people, I would put in my message to hiring. I am an entrepreneur whose company is a hero to these kinds of people out in the marketplace, and we uniquely help them do this. What I want to do to be a hero is I want to devote all my energies to being a hero in this way. And therefore, if you come to work for me, you've got to be a hero to me to free me up so I can be a hero out in the marketplace. And my feeling, that thing about being a hero in today's world where there's a bit of cynicism about that and that every bureaucratic organization in the world is designed so that there's no need for heroes anytime in the future. I think this whole thing of telling them who you want to be a hero to actually is a way of attracting people. And if they don't resonate with the word hero, you know, they're not for you.

I love that. That's really, really powerful. And we talked about the hero concept before.

Yeah. And your new business, if I take a look at your first business and then go through 2, 3, 4, 5, this business you're in right now is totally about you being a hero to someone else so they can be a hero at A much higher level than they ever been. So every time you've making a jump, Mike, you've gotten closer and closer to being a hero to some specific person out in the marketplace. And my feeling is that you're having a very easy time attracting capabilities and opportunities today compared to previous versions of yourself in the marketplace. And the reason is because you're stating exactly who you want to be a hero to.

No, it's absolutely true. Absolutely true. It's been uncomfortably easy, to tell you the truth. I've been amazed at how little I've had to do to create movement. And you're right, it's in the past. And again, this is a typical cycle of most entrepreneurs. It's like the ones that I've worked with. Even people who are running 10 and $50 million businesses, they still don't know who the hell their customer is. They don't know the language pattern to use. It's still shotgun, accidental, whatever it is. Fascinating. Absolutely fascinating. And it's another one of those things you don't learn until you've observed and gone through the cycle. So let's go back to talk a little bit about the next one in line, which is we've talked about the ea. You mentioned the. Which I think is important. Let's talk a little bit about integrators, because they're a fascinating bunch in itself. Geno wichman wrote the EOs. There's a whole culture that revolves around this.

Well, rocket fuel. You know, the whole notion that Gino companies have visionaries and then they have integrators who communicate and get the entire rest of the organization to support the vision of the owner. So I think it's really big. I mean, from your experience, Mike, how big does your organization get where you kind of need an integrator to be the translator between you as the visionary? Because if you have three people, probably having one of them as an integrator probably isn't the thing that's needed right at that moment.

Yeah, I needed a bookkeeper first, which is a nice hourly thing, and they could manage money flow. I think in the cases of. In the past, I made the mistake of having a partner that served as an integrator but didn't really want to be one. So they were like a creative. And they were like, I'll do that too. Which, as you can imagine, ended up. But eventually we'd get a good integrator. So I think around a million in revenue is sort of like the magic number. And I don't know if that's the case across the board. But when I'm kind of tracing thinking through all of the past clients and customers I've had, when you go past where the bookkeeper doesn't know how to make stuff happen and there's integration between campaigns and marketing money coming in, more vendors, you just need that traffic cop, someone who understands all these little bits and pieces. Yeah, I don't know if that's been your experience.

Yeah. In Gino Wickman's and Mark Winters, who wrote the book Rocket Fuel, they talk about this visionary integrator. But in our company, we have two visionaries and we have three integrators. So I'm the visionary of the program. Babs is the visionary of the company. Like, I don't have anything to do really with the thinking about expanding the company. I have everything to do with expanding the vision of what kind of product that we're putting on stage. You know, essentially, it's like theater. And I'm responsible for what's on stage. Babs is responsible for all the wraparound activities of the actual theater as a company. And we need people who translate backwards to the company so that everything gets lined up between putting on the best possible program and also growing the best possible company. So those are the two visionary activities. And it's kind of unusual, Gino says, kind of unusual to have two visionaries. Otherwise, people say that Babs is kind of my integrator. Babs is not my integrator. She has almost an identical Colby to mine. She's a long, quick start. She's got modest amounts of fact finder and follow through as I do. So she can't be the integrator with that Colby. That's not a Colby profile. You need people who are really, really good fact finders and follow throughs to be integrators. So that's the thing. I put enormous amount of emphasis on the project manager one that you talk about, Mike, because I work in projects. Do you work in projects?

Generally, I'm driven by relationships and observation of opportunities, and I break an opportunity into a project.

Yeah. I'm just going to query you about where you're taking on individuals and you're kind of multiplying exponentially their notion of who they are and what they can do in the marketplace. Do you look at them as just one event that's going through a uniform process, or is each of them a project?

That's really interesting. So I think of each person as a project, but what I'm always doing is each one is Inspiration and motivation for creating new processes. So I'm much like you. I am a performer and I'm always creating as long as I have an audience. So whether it's an audience of one or an audience of 10,000, I look at every single experience and I think through what's common. In other words, what is replicable that I can bring over and over again, what's new and how can I package every experience they have and every breakthrough into a system or a strategy that I can kind of put in a pallet. It's sort of like a toolbox that's always building and growing. It seems like every time I elevate my own value, I attract a higher quality person. As I like to say, you attract exactly who you deserve, depending on your.

Own self worth and also who you're aspiring to be.

Precisely. It's a fascinating thing and more open and in white space and ambiguous. You allow yourself to be without fear the faster you elevate and escalate. So I know I over answered the question, but to me, I don't think of a person as a project or a product so much as an experience. You know, every experience. So then I'm networking and connecting people and elevating everyone I'm working with all at the same time. You know, people benefit from motion as an organism, not as an individual. If that makes sense.

Yeah. The reason is that, you know, we started off with me as a one on one coach with as many people as time permitted. And then we realized to multiply we had to go into a workshop setting where in the same time I was coaching one person before I could coach 15 people, 20 people, 30 people. And then we got to a point where you ran out of time. And then I brought in other coaches and we have other coaches now. So this year we'll coach 125 groups, but I have 12 of them. So that means 113 of the groups are coached by other people. So in our world, each of those workshop groups represents a separate project. And then new workshops, from the standpoint of content are other projects. So we have our workshop projects and then we have our new concept, new tool projects that are intersecting with that. And we have project managers on both sides of that because there's a lot of complexity. I mean there's a lot of electricity and plumbing behind the walls of a process like that.

And just for the listener who doesn't know what's your total headcount right now? The number of people who work for strategic coach, 130ish.

140Ish. You know, we're spread out over three countries and five cities and about 3,000 entrepreneurial business owners, our clients. But then we have a team program that actually supports them, but that has grown, you know, I mean, you start with one and you kind of master the intricacies of one, and then you do a second one. So you're always starting with a very, very small sample and testing it out. How could it be a bigger. You go along with 1, 2, 3, and then you say, hey, I know how we can do 10, and now we know how to do over 100. And my sense is that in the future, you know, not naming a year, but we'll be at 1,000 groups around the planet. Because it's a simple model. We have a very simple model, but it has a lot of working parts to it.

Yes. And I think going back as I listened to you, I think the direct answer to your first question or your last question was, I do think of each individual as a project. That would be the smartest way, because there is a variation in the business types. And again, this is my instinct right now is we are in such a fascinating shift and change from a cultural, a business, a media, a marketing employment perspective. So much is moving around. I see a lot of flux. Business models are changing the way we attract and retain and employ and hire. So I've chosen this time to kind of experiment with a lot of different models to see which works best and sticks the most and accelerates the quickest, too.

Yeah.

So why don't we bring this episode home? And one of the big walkaway takeaways is can you guide us through the process that Coach is using right now to find higher attractions, calibrate employees? Because you've been at it, you teach this, and you've systemized it really, really well. And that would be, I think, a valuable takeaway in addition to some of these big ideas that we shared.

Yeah. Well, first of all, as a first step, we identify who in the existing company needs to be freed up or it's time to add an entirely new capability that will multiply. And largely, that usually happens in technology and marketing. So you can add new technological multipliers. So you're not actually freeing someone up. What you're freeing is your present level of capability to go much higher level with the technology. But let's just talk about where we're freeing someone up on the inside. What you have to do then is identify what the job is that gets created. That has to be Filled right away so that people can be freed up for more valuable activity. We use the impact filter. That's a coach tool that we identify. You know, this is the project. This is the purpose. This is the difference it's going to make. This is the ideal outcome. The best can happen if we get this new person, the worst that can happen, and then eight measurements that tell us that this person is really, really a good person. Okay. So then we send that actually to the employment, because we work through agencies, sometimes we have affiliations. You know, it's somebody that we know, somebody who is related in some way to people who are already in coach, which is usually a good thing, because they want to protect their reputation in the company by not bringing in somebody who's inappropriate. That's actually a useful way of doing it.

Quick question. Do you incentivize employees to bring people? Is there?

No.

Fascinating.

No, it's not a precedent that we want to set because it might work once, but then it doesn't work five times. They grab the money and then they quit.

Yeah, I got it.

So that's not a useful thing for us. But then the other thing is this new structure I have, which is the 4x4, where we tell the person who is hiring how they have to show up to work, the kind of results we're looking for, and how they can really be a hero to us and how they'll drive us crazy. So we tell them right up front that if you show up and you do this type of activities, you'll be a hero on the one side and you'll be crazy. We're just experimenting with this, but you know Gord Vickman, who's the podcast manager?

Yep. Love him. We've been having tons of fun.

Yep. Gord is the first person just to go totally through the whole process, and he hit the ground running, and he's listening in on this. I'm just going to say it's one of the great employment successes that we've had, adding a new team member in the history of the coach, you know, because he's just did what we exactly wanted. So I think we're at a new threshold. Mike, it's an incomplete answer I'm giving you because we're switching over to an entirely new mode of approaching things. In a couple weeks, we're going to have a meeting with everybody worldwide in the company, and everybody's going to get their 4x4. So we're going to do it in about two hours, start to finish. Everybody gets their 4x4. So maybe six months from now we'll have a revisit of this topic and I can report on progress.

Okay, I'm going to give you a reference, something that I found that's really interesting. It's a woman named Patty McCord, I believe. I'm going to double check. Yeah, from Netflix. And she has a book. And I'll tell you what it is. I've been listening to the audiobook version, but she's the culture doc, so she wrote this book. I'm trying to find the dang thing right now so I can tell you exactly what it's called. There it is. It's called Building a culture of Freedom and responsibility. And it is filled with some of the most fascinating, non obvious, but very obvious when you think about it, ways of managing. And the bottom line is Netflix basically has no rules, no limits, no vacation policy, no budget policies because they hire the right kind of people with the right kind of values. It's really a refreshing listen.

Yeah.

And she talks about what's gone on behind the scenes with Reid, the CEO. But right now, Netflix, they're beating Hollywood. They're creating the best dang content and a lot of it. You know, it's kind of like the early days of dot com, where there's so much money being thrown around, but they're playing a really amazing long game. So that's a resource that I want to mention to our listeners. It really has had some big impact. And then going back to what you're talking about, which is even you after coach being in business, as long as it has coaching, 40,000 clients, 3,000 right now. Your hiring process is also in flux too, all the time.

Yeah. I mean, the world's changing so you got to be very, very alert and curious about how people are looking at working from decade to decade. It changes. So this is my fifth decade of being an employer and it's continually changed. I've continually changed. So your approaches to anything in your company, you should say, so far, so good. But how are we going to have to make this more flexible to change everywhere?

I agree. So I'm going to do one more reference for our listener, which is another great book. It's called Measure what Matters by John Doar. Let's see, the subtitle is How Google Bono and the Gates Foundation Rocked the World with qkrs. So it's basically how they measure what matters and determining what that is. It's really fascinating. And the audiobook has Bono Speaks Bill Gates on there. The guest list is Amazing. And it's an entertaining piece. Historically, I haven't listened to audiobooks, but I've been doing it lately. There's some gold in there as well. Dan, this has been fascinating, as usual. Do you have any final words as we wrap this one up?

Yeah. I would say that there's a certain point where no matter how successful you've been as an individual entrepreneur, you have now hit a ceiling. You're going to be repeating yourself and you have to switch from you as the individual to you as a member of a expanding high capability team. With everybody on the team having greater abilities in their area than you would have in their area.

It's great. So here's what we have for you as the listener as we wrap this thing up. First of all, you, if you head over to capabilityamplifier.com, you can get links to the books mentioned in this episode. I'll have links to the Colby test. And also I'm going to provide a link to my original Mrs. Moneypenny ad that I used to attract my assistant that is still with me today after 13 years of putting up with my pure unadulterated insanity as an entrepreneur. A lot of generational cycles of reinvention. So, Dan, as usual, this has been an absolute pleasure and I can't wait for another episode with you, my friend.

Thank you, Michael. All right, bye.

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