Jonathan Whistman: The Architect Behind $500M Exits and Teams Competitors Fear

Young people today are growing up with a constant stream through Meta, through all their social media channels, exposure to AI. They should be able to make multiple six figures. They should be able to do that easily. They have instant access to knowledge, and then you bring them into your company and it's like, yeah, slow them down. Lots of rules, lots of regulations. This and that just squeezes out the ingenuity, the creativity of the thing that could be the best part of your business. Because the truth is, and you know this, Mike, People will work for you as long as they believe they can do the best work of their life working for you.

I think that is so non-obvious. I remember when you said it, I was like, that is a massive nugget.

We want creative humans in our business. We want uniquely talented. We don't want to squeeze that out, but we also need them to land in beat to, to the music, to what we're trying to accomplish in our organization. But a lot of companies are like a high school band, right? Like sometimes some are even like grade school bands. It's all over the place. My clients say, I don't have a people problem.

Problem.

I can find as many as I want. I can bring them in. They'll scale. And it's the happiest day because when they hire that human, they know they're adding $1 million, $2 million, $3 million revenue into their business.

Hey, hey, welcome to Capability Amplifier. This is Mike Koenigs. This is my friend Jonathan Wistman., and he is the bestselling author of "The Sales Boss." He is the mind who replaced gut instinct hiring with 5 million data points. He's also the architect behind the performance machine. Now he's helped Andy Elliott build the structure to grow to $100 million in sales and now expects to double to $200 million in the next 6 months. He's also the genius who helped Tommy Mello scale his company A1 Garage to achieve a half a billion dollar exit. Now, as I mentioned, his name is Jonathan Wistman, and he has a unique expertise in predictive hiring, leadership psychology, and culture design. He's the guy who realized that you are in the business of humans and the culture you create is the only thing that matters in your business. Now, he's also a friend whose genius I deeply admire and trust. Now to frame the gravity of his work, this is what Andy Elliot says. I had so much success running my team on his system, I cut him a check for $2 million so we can move faster. And if you're a smart person, you'll invest where I invested. Now Jonathan is here to show you how to take the first step toward building your own unrecruitable team with a hiring process that actually works and build An organization your competitors will fear meeting on Monday morning. So my friend, it has been a crazy couple of days.

It has been, and great to be here with you, Mike.

Total blast, total blast. I've been looking forward to this. So I think the best place to begin is before we talk about the tools and the system, what breaks your heart about hiring and leadership and how it's usually done?

You know, I think the saddest thing is when leaders don't recognize the power of human potential. They underestimate what they can accomplish when they get the human part of their business right. You talk to business owners, my grandfather used to say, "Business would be easy if it wasn't for the people." And you see that in businesses. They love their business, but when you start talking about their people, they're frustrated. And it should be the best part of their business. And when you get it right, everything else is easier.

Yeah, one thing that was awesome yesterday when we were talking to Andy Elliott, like, this guy is so on fire with you right now. The other thing that I love is your best customers became your investors in your platform. So that to me is a sure sign. Plus, I've had the good pleasure of spending time with your team over the past few days. They're total rock stars. Thank you. And I really think you live into this. It's part of the reason I'm so excited about this, this conversation. So we're going to get to your really, really wild backstory and your history, but I want you to think about the moments in your life that have profoundly shaped who you've become and also how technology is shaping the world of hiring and business in general. Because I've got a Gen Zer, you have a Gen Zer laying on your team. They're almost a totally different species. But let's think about this through the lens of AI and what you're seeing right now.

Yeah, I think, of course, you're on the forefront of AI, so you know the world is changing faster than ever. And I think the thing that business business owners are not aware of is that they're still stuck in an old model of organizational psychology, the hierarchy in a business. Young people today are growing up with a constant stream through Meta, through all their social media channels, through, uh, exposure to AI, that they should be able to make six figures, they should be able to make multiple six figures, that they should be able to do that easily. They have instant access to knowledge. And then you bring them into your company and it's like, yeah, slow them down, Lots of rules, lots of regulations, this and that just squeezes out the ingenuity, the creativity of the thing that could be the best part of your business. And that's why you hear people say young people don't want to work anymore. Yeah, it's not true. They just don't want to work for you. And I think you absolutely have to master this ability to understand who's the human that you're bringing into your business. And I challenge business owners to think about the human that's sitting in their car coming to work for you or preparing to go to work. What's their mindset? What's the state they're in? And at the end of the day, when they leave your business, are they better prepared to be a father or a mother, a brother, a sister, or are they stressed out, frustrated? Because the truth is, and you know this, Mike, people will work for you as long as they believe they can do the best work of their life working for you.

I think that is so non-obvious. I remember when you said it, I was like, that is a massive nugget. I don't think we remember that as business owners, leaders, because we're in the trap of holy crap, I've got to hit my— I always call it the 30-day monster. Yeah. Or the quarterly monster. It depends on what level you're at. It could be a weekly monster and it's about performance and keeping things together and you forget what's important and what's most important. Yeah.

Your dream as a business owner has to be so large that everyone else's dream can fit inside of it. And the minute their dream outgrows what they can see inside your business, they're going to leave. The problem is most business owners, they don't really think about the individual human. They think about the team. And we're no longer in a world of team. We're in a world of individuals and purpose and mission. And people have always talked about culture and mission, but I think we need to throw the old playbook back. Out the door and really think about that at a very deep level.

Okay, so that brings us to millions of data points. We're going to get to the platform in a moment. And it just turns out we have your partner Reggie inside the room with us, who's the science behind the platform. The magician. Yes. So I'm looking at it right now. How you doing? So you've seen thousands of hires. Your platform has looked at them, measured them, been able to create a human experience that sifts and sorts through, it could be thousands of applicants to find the true needle in the haystack. So with all this science, what is the non-obvious, the nuance that separates those who rise versus those who stay stuck? And has that changed over time? Is it the same?

Yeah, that was a great question. I think that, you know, it's just like a plant for a plant. A seed, rather, a seed always thrives in a certain amount of soil or a certain type of soil, right? It's direct sunlight, plenty of water, whatever that is. The science has progressed far enough now that we can look at humans and say, this is the ideal soil for this human. And I think we mismatch that when we're bringing people into our organizations. People are still trusting gut and intuition. They're not looking at all the data that's available to them. And the reality is when you trust gut and intuition, like the divorce rate—

Yeah, you wind up hiring a friend.

Yeah. Well, and here's, here's the truth. The divorce rate is over 50% in this country. Yeah. Like if gut and intuition served us well when it comes to the people we marry. Yeah. It would serve us better than 50%. Right. Right. And we think that when we're bringing employees into our organization that we can just trust our gut. So if you're hiring like you hired in 2023, you are already getting really far behind. And you should— that my true belief is the single most important system in the business is the one for identifying the humans that will do well in your business. Your intellectual property is what causes people to come in, succeed, and thrive. And what are the kinds of things that cause people to get stuck at mid-performance? And if you can master that, then you can bring people into your organization who ramp quickly and stick and stay in your organization. And that's always the balance. In fact, that's why I fell in love with Reggie and this whole world of using blueprints to predict human performance. I was speaking at a conference and I'm a big believer in things like DiSC, Myers-Briggs, all of those sort of things. And afterwards she came up to me and she said, you know, I think all those companies have it wrong. I don't think a business owner cares if somebody's introverted or extroverted. I think they care, will this human come onto my team and will they perform at the top 5%? And will they hang around long enough that after I've gone through all the brain damage of training and development, that I can make a return on the investment in them? Mm-hmm. And that truth, and then the data evidence to back that up. I started talking to some of her clients. She had Mercedes-Benz as a client. For them, she's predicting pre-hire, this salesperson's gonna sell 50 cars, 40 cars, 30 cars. They're gonna stick around for X period of time. And she was getting within 15 to 20%. Never seen anything like that. And that's fundamentally changing the way businesses should think about people. And yet you still have people going looking at resumes, right? And the person they have looking at the resume is somebody usually late 20s, early 30s, never done the job. They wouldn't know excellence if it hit them in the face. And yet that's the front tip of the spear. How are we going to drive our organization? How are we going to get results?

Okay. So before we get into the— I mean, this in a lot of ways is the ultimate who, not how finder and filter, which is a very resonant tone in the entire Strategic Coach Genius Network and Abundance 360 community. And you just had Ben Hardy speak at your event like a week or so ago.

Here's an interesting data point. How many people do you think a company has to talk to in order to find one person that ends up at the top 5% of their organization. And I'm going to save you guessing.

Oh, okay. Because I was going to say something. Reggie was talking earlier about the firm that she worked with that was in not private equity, but what's the wealth?

Not—

Yeah. Yep. And they were— she said 3,000 and they got 8 out of that. So anyway, go ahead and give me the stat.

Across our client base, the data suggests that you have to interact with 100 160 humans in order to hire one that's going to be at the top 5% of your organization. Well, now your listeners, if they look in their organization—

hire or look at—

you have to look at, interact with. But most, just to hire one that ends up in the top 5%, if you looked inside most of like your audience, if they're listening and you say, how many on your team are A+ players? It's probably just a tiny fraction, less than 20%, right?

10% is the norm.

Yeah, that's the norm. And the reason is It's so much work to talk to 160 humans. Yeah. You can't find that many people to talk to. And if you can find that many qualified people, you probably have to sort through thousands of resumes. Mm-hmm. And so you end up making a decision not on who's the best fit from a performance culture standpoint, who's gonna do well. It's like, I'm tired, I'm gonna stick to these 5 people. I'm gonna choose from these 5 people and this is the best of 5.

Got it. Yeah. Which is, virtually impossible unless you've got a huge HR department and da, da, da, and we're going to show the tool that does it. Okay, next question then. Before we get into the science-y part of this and the performance machine, you have a super fascinating background. When I first met you, I'm like, all right, here's a dude who's kind of been through literally the shite show of all shite shows. But Why are you such a student of psychology and systems and patterns and ritual and culture? It's because—

Yeah, well, I grew up in a religious cult, and when you grow up inside of a religious cult, you're in a small fishbowl of humans. And in order to survive, you have to be highly observant of human behavior. And so from a very young age, I started observing humans. We were expected to be on the outside of—

or what would happen.

Well, you can, you can, you'll be outcast from the group, right? So you have to find a way to how do I conform and still have my own free thinking? But secondly, the belief of the organization was the world was going to end. So I never thought I was going to hit 20. They had historical prophecy. So from a very young age, it was a near certainty that the world was going to end by the time I was 20. And that our job was to save everybody else on the planet. So every human I looked at, I was like, how can I get inside this human's head to help them see the seriousness of the end of the world coming and convert them? So you would go knock on people's doors, get invited in, complete strangers, sit in their home, sit in their easy chair, and proceed to convert them into a form of belief that would cause them to leave their family and everything else behind and change their life. I was really good at it. In fact, I was so good that when I left, I tried to unconvert people and I had exactly a 0% success rate doing that. But the reason I say that is like also inside of the church, I, you know, because I had this internal battle about, you know, was this the right thing to be doing? But I always thought it was something wrong with me because all of my adults, my grandparents, my parents, every adult I admired said this was the truth. Yeah, right. So I thought there was something wrong with me. And what that caused me to do is to really study harder. And I got promoted. And when you get promoted in the church— it's sort of the wrong term to use inside of a religious organization— but with responsibility, now I'm leading people, and you're bringing them onto the church team, so to speak, and asking them to give most of their wealth, most of their discretionary time to the church, and you have nothing to reward them with. You're not writing them a check. You can't fire them. You can just expel them from the church. So how do you get top performance out of people? When you can't write them a check? Think about if you were running a company and you had to get people to show up and put in their best effort, put their whole heart into it, and you couldn't write them a check. And so I looked at the world that way, and I think that's why I'm so effective now. When I go into an organization, I'm able to see what's the missing piece between what you're trying to get this group of humans to do and what they're actually doing. And most founders think it's money, and it's almost never the money.

All right, well, that leads us to what's the answer? What are they really there for? And what were you rewarding them with that you know is probably the singular driving force that you've been able to scientifically prove with your scientist partner?

Yeah, so one, inside of our platform, we have the ability to look deeply at why do certain humans take up jobs. So when we we create what we call a Reggie Blueprint. And this is a blueprint that is matched to every role.

Reggie is your partner, by the way, and it's also the acronym. Yeah, yeah.

So we had to name it after Reggie.

Yeah.

And, but when we look at the blueprint, it's job-specific. So when we start, we're not guessing what are the things that, you know, cause people to be successful in this role. Regina looked at about 450 different psychographics, traits that that research schools say we can reliably measure with an online testing. And so, we go into an industry, as an example, when we went into HVAC, we got thousands of employees to take a long psychographic test, think sitting down for hours, and we get this really rich view of who takes an HVAC job. And then on the other end, we got actual performance data. So, how long did they say, what did they sell, what was their performance metric, customer service? And we're feeding that into a machine learning, and that's a big word that some people may understand, Others might not, but it's basically sorting and saying which of all these things we can measure actually show up and matter on this particular job. And that allows us, much like when you think actuarial science for insurance, like health insurance, if somebody is going to insure you, they want to say, hey, I'm not going to pay out. Mike's likely not to die from this, so I'm going to cover this. The thing he's likely to die from, I'm never going to cover. Right. It's risk. We're applying that same thing to humans. So we're saying when you hire this human, Here's the risk profile. This person's really highly likely they're going to succeed in this role, and this person's likely high risk in this role. And that's really at the core what we're doing. Now, you're not going to solve everything through data. On the other side of that, you have to have leaders who understand that the job or their business isn't the business they're in. In other words, if it's home services, they're not in the home service business. If they're in technology, they're not in the technology business. They're not in the insurance business. If you're on a leadership team, your number one thing is to have your leadership team understand above all else, they are in the human business. Finding humans, developing humans, inspiring humans. And the new model for leadership is you have to be mission-based. You have to draw people to you with loyalty, and that only comes from understanding that people are going to do things for their reasons and you have to be able to show them the path. You get young people coming in, they're not looking to spend 20 years with you. They're looking for to stay with you as long as they can grow and as long as they can actually grow. When I say painlessly, I don't mean they're not willing to put in effort. It means they don't want to jump through all the bullshit, the, the needless requirements, right? They're willing to work hard, but they're not willing to work for hierarchy.

It's really good. So if you were going to summarize what the performance machine is, which is really the vehicle here, what is the problem you've been trying to solve and you are solving?

Yeah, I would say we actually have solved that problem is how from the time you decide as a business owner that you have a vision, how do you use technology to identify all the humans you're attracting? Which of them should you spend your time, money, and attention with? Which of those humans are going to scale quickly? Once you can identify the right humans, now you have another problem. What is the messaging? How do you bring them in? How do you ramp them quickly? How do you put systems in place? In my book, The Sales Boss, I talk about sacred rhythms. What are the sacred rhythms in your business that causes people to say, I belong here? You've heard the saying, if people don't know how they fit, they'll always be a misfit. Right. And so, the genius is that we actually get to craft how do we get people to think, how do we get them to feel, and how do we get them to act? So, in my book, I talk about this think, feel, act. So, just give you an example. If your listeners are listening to this, if they got their leadership team together and they said, when somebody joins our organization or they're thinking about joining, What do I want them to think? So, they might be— you might put a list like, oftentimes I'll hear companies say, wait, we want them to think we're champions. We can build champions. They can trust us with their future, right? And you get a whole list of that's what we want to be known for. People think about it like mission statements on the wall. What do we want them to think? So, then I encourage business owners to actually do an audit. Go stand out in your parking lot and look at your building. If you had to just judge from the outside of the building, What does your building make people think? Does it make them think, I'm a champion, they can trust me with their future? Let's sit in your lobby, let's sit in your bathrooms, let's walk through your lunchroom. Every touchpoint has to be congruent with what you want people to think, because once people— you control how people think, you're actually controlling how they feel. And when you control how people feel, you control how they act. So you think about business owners, they overcomplicate it. You really only need what's known as the first followers. If you can convince 2 or 3 people to think, feel, and act, you bring somebody else in, they observe that, they're like, "Oh, this is the way to think, feel, and act." People don't like to be an outsider. And pretty soon you've got this virtuous flywheel that starts making everything more simple. As an example, Andy Elliot, you mentioned him. He has such a powerful culture that when he's not there, the organization runs better than if he was there. He took a full 6 months off to Dubai and grew his company by $50 million. Most business owners can't do that. They have to, they have to be involved in the business every day for it to continue to go, to grow, right? So that's the fascinating part, is, is it's, it's simple design. I tend to tell people, you're— you should think about your company as a stage play put on by a psychologist. You, you go into a stage play. Why do you enjoy theater? Well, the, the The set design, the music, the lighting, all of it's been designed to take you on a journey. And if you think about your business that way, what is the set design? Somebody comes in to work for you. Are you taking them on a journey? Have you designed it to take them on a journey, or is it just is what it is? I'll give you a real example of a company out in California. They have a massive warehouse building. They're actually in home services. They do plumbing and heating and cooling. But right up right on a major highway on the side of the building says now hiring, has their pay rates. It's an old vinyl sign that is sun-weathered, clearly been up there 10 years, tattered, falling apart. The parking lot's dirty. There's dust on the window. Does that— Yeah.

Seeing that, who wants to work in a dirty environment, right?

It just blends in. It's not because they're evil. They just haven't given it any thought. In fact, they're lazy. Yeah. So when we get them to go, hey, we want people to think we're a champion, that they can trust us with the future. And we stood them in their parking lot and they looked at their building. Now you can start brainstorming. How do we fix that? So here's the fix they came up with. They're right on a highway now. They have a big picture of 3 of their top performers, big like billboard size. Mike, right on the building says, this is Mike. He was a waiter earning $25,000 a year before he came to work for us. Now he's $160,000 an earner. Right, Tina, here's what she does. We build champions. Now, somebody drives by, they see that. What do they think? What do they feel? And what's the action they take? Would there be a difference? It's obvious when you think about it that way, that concrete walkway now is painted red like a red carpet, and it says, only champions tread here. These are simple investments you can make in your business to cause people to think, feel, and act. And you should just design your entire building that way. In fact, after we got done, after we got done with this particular customer, they decided they were going to move buildings entirely, right? Because they realized this. And I'm not saying you have to have a fancy building. That's not the message. The message is you have to decide what am I causing people to think at every single touchpoint?

Very good. So now I want to I want to rapid fire through some questions. That was super interesting, by the way. You hadn't walked me through all of that yet. So talk a little bit about creating predictability in this, because I know I'm thinking about this through my own selfish lens going, huh, I have a virtual company for the most part. You're experiencing a live version of it. That's a component. But my whole team is virtual now. Yeah. So I don't have an office. I have to create an environment they love to work in and also feel like they're participating in a cause that matters, that they also feel like they're learning and evolving and developing. So there's a transformation that takes place. So I'm setting that up because what I want as a business owner founder is predictability. I want the Reggie blueprint. So can you explain what a Regi Blueprint is and how that takes out the fact that you've got decades, you grew up inside a cult. You learn this intuitively and you happen to connect with a scientist who's got millions of data points, who's able to convert that into a software platform.

Make it easy for them. Yeah, so remember there's two things here. One is the Regi Blueprint is gonna allow you to say this human that's coming through my hiring funnel is uniquely seated suited to thrive in my environment? We're 100% answering that question for you, and we're taking about 70% of what I call the mind-numbingly dull work of HR off your plate. So every— as soon as the candidate comes in, our system's text messaging with them, interacting with them in a very human way. We're sending them an AI video that looks real, talking about their resume, you know, pumping up your company, moving them through the hiring funnel. Through that, we're comparing them to humans whose job performance we already know. So you're not guessing. I liken it to, you know, if you had a bunch of kids, like young kids in music class just beating on pots and pans. And if you were able to look at that group of kids and say, hey, if I give all these kids the same opportunity, same training, this kid's probably going to like sing in the shower. This kid may be karaoke. This kid's going to go to Carnegie Hall. That's what we're answering. We're not saying that they already have the skill. We're saying when you put them in your training, in your environment, this one is going to be world class. Going to get there faster. In fact, many customers that we have, they take their training periods from 90 days down to a month. They start seeing Tommy Mello as an example. He had million-dollar-a-year producers, but he only had a handful of them. Now, most of the people that come into his organization are million-dollar-a-year producers, and he has a $2 million club, which he didn't have before. Andy Elliott's the same way. That's why these, these people, when we interact with them, they make huge investments in our software because it's fundamentally changing the way they grow the organization. But now you have to add to that. You can— I actually had a customer call me, said, I think your model's broken. We're churning people out. And I said, well, if our model, if our software is not working, it's a you problem. And I'm 100% convinced that. So I flew out to their organization right away. I could spot the difference. Their, their, their building was filthy. Their leadership sucked. Everything about it was a meat grinder. You can take great humans and put them in a meat grinder. They're going to grind out fast. So you have an obligation as an owner to do your own work on yourself. So in my book, I talk about sacred rhythms and I use the example of a jazz club. And I know you like listening to jazz club as well. But when you think about a jazz club, I used to live downtown Kansas City and I would walk from my office to my downtown condo. And right in between that was the oldest jazz club in Kansas City. And I would walk by, even evenings where I wasn't in the mood, I'd start walking by and I'd hear the thump, thump, thump, thump. I'd be like, ah, well, maybe I'll just, I'll go in and hear one song. And what do you think happened? I'd go in, I'd lean against the bar, the bartender would say, hey, Jonathan, you want something? I'd say, oh, not tonight. Pretty soon I'm shaking, you know, my foot goes. I'm like, I'll just have one. Next thing you know, it's 2:30. Everything in that jazz club is designed to get everybody moving as one, even you have house musicians and there's rules around jazz. So, they can bring in a visiting musician with their talent and their flair, they can rift over the top and they can land right in harmony. Well, our businesses are the same way. We want creative humans in our business. We want uniquely talented. We don't want to squeeze that out, but we also need them to land in beat to the music, to what we're trying to accomplish in our organization. But a lot of companies are like a high school band, right? Like, sometimes some are even like grade school bands. It's all over the place. So decide what your sacred rhythms are. This is how you save yourself, save yourself time. I'll just give you an example out of my book. Super simple. Let's say you have a sales team and you're trying to get them to look at the number of calls they make, 'cause there's a direct correlation between the number of calls they make to the quality of those calls and your conversion rate. How do you monitor that? Well, most companies, one, they either don't monitor or it's clunky. But you can just design your meeting cadence. Let's say on your weekly meeting, you come in and when people sit down, you just have a script and they just read it. They say, hey, this week I made 300 calls, I made X dollars sales, my commitment to the company was X, and this was Y. And you go around and the leadership team doesn't have to say anything because guess what happens in a group like that when you hear everybody's numbers and you hear their metrics? You self-correct. Yeah, because we all have the need to belong. And we might go, well, I might suck, but I don't suck as bad as Mike, right? And so next week we try harder, or we tend to excuse ourselves. And every human's like that. So I remember I forgot my wife's birthday one time, right? And I thought, well, she knows, she knows I'm busy. She knows I love her. I just, you know, there's been so much going on in the business. If I heard— I excused myself. If I heard that about another guy, I'd be like, man, that guy's a real clod.

Right?

The humans in your business are doing the same thing. So you have to give them this point of comparison. All you have to do, if you design that sacred rhythm once and you start your meetings that way, you never have to touch it again.

All right, so that leads me to yesterday before we started our session, I watched a couple videos and one of them was the morning sales meeting that takes place at the Andy Elliott organization. So there's a couple things that I want to drive at and one of them, I'm going to just tell every viewer, listener about something that we prepared for them because a couple of tools. So I'm going to tell you about this right now so you know about it. It's at thesalesboss.com/free. There's two things there. One of them is the masterclass that I watched yesterday morning that Jonathan did, and he walks through the science and the steps and the process for this. Okay? The second is a presentation made by Dr. Ben Hardy. And if you don't know Dr. Ben, he's the guy who wrote Who Not How, 10X Is Easier Than 2X, The Gap and the Gain with Dan Sullivan, and also Be Your Future Self Now. The guy's remarkable. So go to thesalesboss.com/free, get those two videos. They're really, really good. But now I want you to tell me about the sales meeting with Andy Elliott.

Well, in that video that they can get, they can watch the last 8 minutes of an hour sales meeting.

Yes.

In my book, I say things are only good or bad by comparison. Yes. Here's what I believe. Most owners think they're great. Most leaders think they're great. And they think the problem they have in their organization is about everyone else. If you watch just this last 8 minutes, it will be the most remarkable 8 minutes you've ever seen in any meeting. I agree. Right. And I would guarantee you, if you take that 8 minutes and put it up against anyone else that's listening to this, You're gonna say, I've never seen great like this, and this team would beat my ass every day if I put my team up against them. So watch it. Here's, here's the problem. We think we're great because we've never considered what real greatness is. It's the same thing when people interview. They think, oh, I do a great job interviewing. The reason is they interview better than the 2 or 3 people they interviewed with when, you know, they got jobs way back when. And for most business owners, that could have been decades ago. They've never really compared themselves to excellence. So on Andy's team, every single sales meeting, every single day is completely designed to pull the absolute best out of people. Just like a jazz club. A jazz club, you can walk in when you're not in the mood and that rhythm and that beat is so strong, you're going to stay, you're going to buy a martini, you're going to have fun. Yeah. And you have to design your organization that has such strength, strong beats, because you're going to have even great people show up not in the mood to do their best work. You have to take them from wherever they are when they show up in your building and remind them that they are there to build their future. And Andy's excellent at that.

Yes.

You will never hear him talk about money and he makes a lot of it. He has a team of 40 people, all young people, most of them under 30. At least 5 of them make over $1 million a year on straight commission. There isn't anybody on his team that makes less than 6 figures a year. Why? It's because they come in and he talks about their faith, their fitness, their family, what are their goals. And he reminds them every single day that they are on the playing field fighting for those things. They're not fighting for him. They're fighting for those things. And it's a constant reminder. And he has— now, when you watch that video, you might say, well, I can't do that. That's not my flavor. And you'd be missing the point.

Yeah. And I want to interject here because hearing you say it's one thing. Yeah. My reflection back was while I watched it and like I have a sales guy, right? But I walked away going, holy cow, every part of this is repeatable and I haven't seen anything quite like this. And if I would hear me or you talking about it right now, I'd be like, there's no way that's going to happen. I can't be that kind of person. Just listening to it's one thing. When you watch this video, you get it and you not only say my sales organization needs that, my entire organization needs a culture of reminding people who they are, what this is for, and that this isn't about me, it's about we. But it doesn't feel weird.

Yeah. And here's, here's the thing. If you watch it and you go, oh, I'm not that, you don't have to be that brand of psycho. No. The problem is, as a leader, you haven't decided what brand or flavor you are. You don't stand for anything. We instituted what we call a talent reveal interview. And people that come on to our performance package, they— we explain to them how to do that. They bring in 50 people at a time and interview them, bring them into their organization, and they're selling their first $100K in 30 days. That's not happening by accident. All of it's designed. But Andy, as an example, he'll have people come in for the interview and he'll sit down. He tells them, you know, why work for them, the good, the bad, the ugly, also what is in it for them. And he'll look at someone, he'll say, look, you look like somebody that drinks a lot. If you're not willing to completely give up alcohol, you're going to be uncomfortable here. You should probably leave. He'll look at somebody else that's out of shape and he'll say, look, I can't imagine that you're happy with your health right now. If you're not committed to coming here and being healthy, you should probably say no because you're going to be uncomfortable here. Now, when your listeners hear that, they'll go, oh my gosh, that is the future of leadership.

Yeah. And it's the intent behind it. It's not coming from a place of judgment. Yeah, that, that I think is That is the nuance that's hard to communicate until you experience it.

And the reason is, is people are oversensitive, right? We've been taught you got to be HR correct. Now, I'm not saying that you have to build your business where, you know, it's fitness, no drinking. Those are your standards.

The point is South Park has said woke is dead. Yeah, just remember.

Okay. But you— here's the thing. You have to have standards that are so high that people will go, if I come here, I'm going to be a better version of me.

Yeah.

People will do their best work of their life as long as they realize they can do the best work of their life working for you. You're winning. Yeah, right. The minute that's not true, it's over. So I would encourage your listeners, download that. Like, if you want to be a fly on the wall of greatness, and I've worked with some of the best leaders on the planet, and you will never see something like that. And here's sort of the annoying part of Andy Elliott. He wasn't even there that day. This is his third-string leader. That's how deep greatness goes. And any company would be great to have this 8 minutes. This was literally 8 minutes. I pulled out my cell phone and caught at the end of an hour meeting and they have it every single day. Yeah, it's, it's relentless excellence.

Yeah. Yeah. So I'll, I'll— and I just want to accent this again because without mentioning the fact that you can get it right now, go to thesalesboss.com/free. These two videos will definitely shift your thinking about what you're doing and give you new things to model. Now I want to shift a little bit. You know, you've got your training that you've used to take lots of companies, A, double their sales very, very rapidly. The first time I met you, I'm like, yeah, sure. I was like, I don't really believe it. And I looked at your stuff. I didn't get it until I experienced it. And this is very much an experiential learning type of thing. Thing. And then I learned about your software platform and I'm like, oh, now I get it. But that's not what you focus on. But I do want to— want you to talk about the software platform and what that does in terms of sifting and sorting and getting to not only the best hires, but the least likely to run away or leave or fail. Yeah, it's the science behind that. Can you explain how the platform works?

Yeah, so most people are probably familiar with what's called an applicant tracking system. It's just a way of keeping track of all the people that are applying at your company. Inside of our platform, we help write the job ad. We're using AI to do that, but we're comparing it to job performance ads that we actually know how they perform. So we're going to reduce your cost, but we're pushing that out to your job board. We're pushing that out to Indeed, your social channel. Our ads tend to outpull applicants about 6 to 1. So we get 6 applicants for every 1 before you go through our system, which reduces your ad spend. We have a client that was spending $20,000 a month on Indeed. They're now $3,500. They're getting just as many applicants and they're hiring better quality humans as a result. So we're, we're fixing that on the front end. And then instead of looking at a resume— and I can't think of anything I'd rather do less than look at a work of fiction resume—

colonoscopy comes.

Yeah, but you now have AI writing the resumes and AI looking at the resumes. We actually don't really care about the resume. Our AI does look at the resume, but we're just pulling out relevant details, our system starts interacting with the candidate. We handle all that. The real magic is we're comparing them to humans whose performance we already know. That's a magical thing. We're saying this human is most like this person who we know will do well in that. And it's a little counterintuitive. As an example, most people, when I say that, they go, oh, you're just interviewing my, you know, my best performers and you're comparing them to them. Nope, that's not it. We're actually looking at thousands of humans, and we're actually not looking for what makes them great, 'cause there's a lot more poor-performing humans than great. What we're actually looking for is what's the fatal flaw that's gonna cause this human to come in, stall out at mid-level performance, and then churn out, right? Because longevity is what creates greatness in a company. Longevity creates greatness. If you have somebody that's interacting with your customer, are they developed? Are they delivering a better customer experience on day 1, month 1, year 1, year 2? The longer they're there and the more they're in your training, the more they are part of your culture. Isn't it true that they can start to anticipate the problems your customers are going to have? They're going to have better customer service. You have a competitive advantage the longer somebody stays with you, as long as that somebody is a high performer. And is continuously learning. That's the problem that we fix with our software.

Yeah. And from there, so the net-net is you get more applicants for less money. Yeah. You sift and sort automatically. It also does the follow-up process. It compares, reduces the probability that you're going to hire a dud. Yes. And what really is happening is you get the compounding effect better people stick around longer and have a higher probability of sticking around and succeeding.

And then in The Performance Machine, we give a whole bunch of extras to help you build your culture. So we have blueprints for everything from how to design the perfect onboarding, how to run the perfect interview, how to design a compensation plan that does that. Andy Elliott loves my work so much, he gives every one of my clients full access to a sales training library. These are secret weapons that cause people to be able to go from zero to $100 million in 5 years. Most business owners, they struggle to realize how fast they can scale when they get this simple thing wrong. I actually think some business owners don't want to scale. I was talking to a business owner the other day. He's been in business 21 years. He has a $2.5 million company. He's wore out. He's ready to hang it up. I put him in a room with Ben Jordan. Ben Jordan's name is probably not familiar, but he's one of, one of my clients. He opened up— he uses our performance, uh, machine. He's mastered that. He's invested over $1 million with us to, to, to, to, to really perfect this. But he opened up a shop in Phoenix in the same business. He has no experience in this. In 10 months, he's now at $10 million. $10 million in 10 months with no experience versus somebody that's been at it 21 years and they're at $2.5 million. If I tell that guy that's $2.5 million that he could have been in $10 million in 10 months, he just won't believe it. He'll think I'm full of shit. Yeah. Sorry for cussing on your podcast. No, you can bleep it out. No, I don't. Right. But like, which, which business do you want? Yeah. And it's a simple choice to get good at the human part of your business. You know, my grandfather used to say business would be easy if it wasn't for the people. In my book, I say people are unique, but they're predictably unique. All that means is it isn't that hard. You just haven't given it the attention it deserves. And frankly, I think if you're a business that's going to churn through humans, you should get out of business. Because think about what happens. I had a business owner, he's hiring people, kids straight out of trade school. This kid pays to go to trade school, and the business owner is proud of himself. He's like, I decide really quick, if they don't work out in 90 days, I fire them, I hire another one. I think that's being a terrible human, right? Like, think about the impact on this kid. He's invested his money to go to trade school, he comes out, he goes to work with your company. Who do you think he tells that he got a job with your company? His mom, his grandma, if he's, if he's in a relationship. And then 90 days later, because you have a crap company and you haven't decided how to train and develop people, He's fired. What does that do to his confidence, his ego? Does he go have a drinking problem? Does he break up with people? Does he— like, he spends his life on— like, I— that's the impact of business owners who aren't serious about their business. And our system is not for that kind of person. Our system is for those that want to leave legacy.

Well, let's talk about the size of the business for a moment on where your platform makes sense and doesn't make sense? Are there business types it's not appropriate and doesn't work for? And I know you've got like trades are one of the areas you focused on. Now, Andy Elliott's company is a sales training organization, but it's really loosely disguised personal development and human mastery. And my first impression of him is I didn't like him. I had a, I had a very negative impression.

Him and I couldn't be more different from the outside.

Totally.

Totally. Yeah.

He's a great human. Yep. Yeah. I really, really like him now that I understand what he stands for, 'cause I just didn't believe it at first. And again, that was my impression after looking at some social. But when you look at that kind of growth, getting from 0 to 50 to $100 million in 5 years doesn't happen to someone who's not doing something right. The next one is Tommy Mello. And I know Tommy well enough and I've spent enough time with him to know that's the real deal. And he was talking about you the first time I met him a couple of years ago. And then you've repeatedly got customers who invest, they get results, and then they want to invest in your technology and your platform, which knows that they're tied. They see the big picture exit potential, which is what you're building towards. So back to at what point, when is this too much and you're too small and what businesses doesn't it work for? And then who is like your perfect fit? This will work for you.

No brainer. Yeah. So that's a complicated question. I'm going to simplify it. Some companies say I'm too small to make this sort of investment. And the truth is, if you're a 10-person company and you have 2 people underperforming, what's the impact of those 2 people? Yeah, I would argue that's 20% of your company and you should invest more to get that right. The foundations of your company, it's much easier to build solid foundations, then go back and do a whole remodel. Like, if you know you want a company that is massive, that is scaling, that is having impact, then you should start right. So it's really the mindset of the owner. If you're committed to building a business with greatness in it, that's easy to work in. Our system is not complicated. It's not hard. It's got lots of science, but we've dumbed it down. It's easy. It's a blueprint. If you can bake a cake, You can do what I'm talking about. It doesn't require genius. It requires the mindset that it's important and that you're willing to invest and do it.

Okay. That didn't exactly answer my question. Like, if I were just, again, I'm being hard on you.

Yeah, you hit me between the nose.

All right. So if I'm, and I can do the math, I can go, all right, 2 people, let's say I got 10 people. So if I'm willing to invest, let's say $25,000 for $250,000 to $1 million impact. Yeah, this is a no-brainer.

Yeah. Anybody that comes on our platform, they're going to invest $20 million or $20 million. No, they're going to invest $20,000. That's the, that's the cost entry level baseline. You're going to be— it's unlimited to be in our platform at that and it scales from there so you can get in. So you really have to— you're just measuring that. I would say our best clients end up being starting somewhere around 40 people. And they— there's an importance in the fact that they're hiring humans and they're investing some sort of training and development in them. Right. So they're not looking to just throw things at the wall, see if they stick. If that's your, you know, if that's your mindset, we have insurance companies. They don't pay their people anything. Right. So if that's their mindset, they're just going to burn and churn through people. You're not a good fit for us. If you're an insurance company, you're like, I don't want to do that. That's— that sounds horrible. I want to bring people in that I have a high degree of confidence in, that I know I can train and I can develop, and I'm not going to do that chaos, then an insurance company is great for us.

Yeah. So it's, it's a matter too of really going— I think if you're coachable and you have a sense of time value. Yeah. And you know that 1 or 2 bad hires just cost you probably a couple hundred thousand dollars plus the deals that you've missed out on in the meantime. To me, that's a simple math problem, but challenge me on that.

You know, it's exactly right. In fact, in my book, far before I ever had software to sell people, like, this has been my belief since forever. You should think about every hire as though you're writing a $500,000 check. Yeah, right. Because that's the impact on your business. And most businesses, when I get in front of them, I say, how many people in the company are authorized to write a $500,000 check? Usually it's just the owner.

Yeah, probably.

Right. Just the owner. And when the owner writes a $500,000 check, they think about it. And yet, if your listeners are listening to this, just one of the things— think about the last interview they had. There was probably some executive in your organization that went, oh crap, Joe's showing up for an interview in 5 minutes. Who has his resume? And they rush around, they sit down, and their hair's on fire, and they— oh, I like Joe.

Yeah, so you made a feeling decision that you're gonna pay for.

Not only a feeling decision, a rushed feeling decision. There is no bigger decision you're gonna make on that day than the human you allow in your business. This is a decision that the owner of the company has to decide, that the single most important role all of us have is the one for hiring people, identifying hiring people. The valuation of your business is directly tied to the quality of humans. In fact, Tommy Muhle had a, sold 41% of his company for half a billion dollars, getting ready to have a billion-dollar exit a second time in the same company. Part of his valuation, he was told by the private equity group, was his ability to take 50 technicians a month, hire them with no sales experience, no technical ability, and, and print them into $2 million a year producers within 2 months. That's a blueprint. It's a system and it's repeatable. It's learnable. That's how you get big valuations, is to master this part of it. And it is so much easier. Than the thing business owners are doing.

First rule, churn and burn, right on.

Yeah. So I really think it just comes down to, they haven't seen it done, so they don't believe it's possible.

Yeah. No, after seeing it and the tools you have, meeting your team, and also watching the results and the conviction of your current customers, to me, that got me to buy in.

I had a customer say, I have him on video saying, this is when I heard about the way that you do the talent reveal interview, I thought it was the stupidest thing ever.

So what is that?

Well, it's—

what's the talent review?

Well, you do a talent review interview. Think of it like a group interview, but on steroids. So you bring in a group of people, call it 10, 12, 15, however many from your company. No, from—

no, you're talking about these are the people who are coming in. All right.

And you're going to interview them all at once. But we teach you a way to do this. So we have roles assigned to your company. So one of your staff is going to play an undercover applicant. They're actually going to be in the room. As an applicant, because when all the staff are out, how are the applicants going to act when that undercover—

you have to have a plant who starts it off. But is that in the beginning or midpoint?

Oh, you know what? For your audience, Mike, I'm going to put our whole group interview blueprint, the talent reveal, in, in, in the download so they can see it. And I'll give them a video for how it works. But it's brilliant. But the whole thing is a stage play put on by a psychologist. Everything is crafted. The music, the way they're sitting in the room, the games they're having played. Everybody is getting intelligence on what's happening in the room. This same manager who said this is the stupidest thing ever—

I remember, I just looked at the video yesterday.

It's a waste of time. He got up afterwards after our first, uh, uh, talent reveal interview. He's like, I will never interview another way. They've now done 10 of those interviews. For the first time in the history of the company, they are confident they can scale as many people as they want. That's the— this is my favorite thing. I have clients who are bellyaching about, I can't find great staff, I can't find people to work. They get together with other business owners. They're like, oh, I got a business. My clients say, I don't have a people problem. I can find as many as I want. I can bring them in. They'll scale. And it's the happiest day because when they hire that human, they know they're adding $1 million, $2 million, $3 million revenue into their business. And your business owners know that's true. If they could hire like their A-player, they'd have no problems. The problem is they haven't figured out a system to hire that A-player. In fact, there's a research report called Star Performers in the 21st Century. It's a really heavy research paper that says that most companies treat their star player like a unicorn because they've only ever been able to find one of them. But the truth is, those unicorn players exist all around us. You just haven't had the ability to see them because our gut tells us, oh, a star player looks like somebody that went to this college and plays with this sport. And we have all of these biases that get in the way of us seeing the multitude of humans that are right in our community that could join our cause. And then, by the way, we're not very good at creating a mission that people want to join, right? People who hear about Andy Elliott, he puts out one post on social media that he's trying to hire. He gets 2,000 applicants overnight. Tommy Mello, people are beating down his door to come work for him. Andy, crazy story. He has people move across country to come work for him where he's never talked about a pay plan. They show up and say, I'm here, I want to work with you. That's possible if you follow the blueprint. The performance machine is designed to just suck humans into your business and have them perform at the highest level. Your people problems can be over.

Very good. So is there a question I should have asked you that I didn't? And oh, by the way, there's 3 things you get now when you go to thesalesboss.com/free. These are awesome. I'm telling you, you're going to be blown away just with that one video. And now you've got the blueprint, the group, group hiring. It's brilliant. And I've watched the testimonials. It's really smart. You've got the presentation by Dr. Benjamin Hardy, who is a freaking genius, and he's all about scaling. And then you get the conversation in the masterclass with Jonathan Wistman. Total no-brainer. All right. Now that I've given you a moment to think about it, What should I have asked you that I didn't?

Yeah, you know, I would have probably asked me what's the single thing I would have somebody do that's listened to this podcast. And the thing I would have business owners do is to sit down with their leadership and ask them 2 questions. The first one would be, what is our turnover rate across all the positions in our company? And have them write it down. And what you'll soon discover is that nobody has an idea. They have no clue. They know what your sales were last month. They know where your returns last month. They have no idea about the most single most important metric in their business. How long do people stay with us? Hmm. Zero clue. That should tell you you have a problem. Second thing is, what do we want humans to think about us on day one when they learn and interact about our company? Have them write it down. One, I would guarantee you everybody on your team is going to think differently. And then I would take all of those people out to your front parking lot and have them look at your building. And just tour your building. Look at it. Does this tell our audience that they're at the right stage, right? That what we want them to believe is something that's really true? That congruency or miscongruency— I don't know what's the right word here— between what incongruent incongruency about what you're saying you want people to do and what's actually happening. Is destroying your business. The truth is the value of your business isn't just going to grow because of the humans that you hire. It's also going to be destroyed by the humans that you tolerate. You have to get both sides of that correct. You have to have humans that do things a certain way because you've inspired them to do them that way.

That's really, really smart. So I'm going to add something onto that because I'm a virtual company, but I'm a platform and I know a lot of virtual companies now. I don't have a storefront to look at. All we have are the proof and evidence of what we've done. I'm going to just let you talk.

Yeah, because I'm familiar with this. Most of my company is remote virtual as well. I have an awesome company.

You have no office. What are they going to think? What's the North Star here? What's that? Nuance something.

Hey, you have people with beautiful audience, beautiful offices that can't keep people, right? So if, if, if I've, if I've overemphasized the physical environment, we've gone too wrong. It just is important, as is everything else. The language you use, how you interact with people. It still comes down to even if you have a virtual office, design thinking. What do I want people to think? What do I want them to feel? What do I want them to act? I look at every single touchpoint with our company and I ask that question and I design it. So as an example, in our company, we know people are remote. We know one of the problems with remote is you're going to schedule a Zoom call. People are going to be on an island by themselves. You're not going to have as much of that natural interaction. So we have a virtual office, we have a Zoom room that's open 24/7. And when my leadership team— and it's all designed like we changed that, we changed the backdrop for the weather. Everybody's office is designed a little differently. It has some fun to it. But when we meet as leadership teams, we don't just jump on this Zoom, you know, off our own private Zoom. We all get on the company, we call it the company lobby. We all jump in there 'cause then we get this little interaction. Then we go into a breakout room, we hold our meeting, and we just design these little spots where you can have interactions and say, hey, how was the weekend? Hey, you know, you're having a baby. How was the trip that you took? You just have to do it with intention. That's it. Your leadership team should just go, what are all the friction, what are all the interaction points with the humans and how do we make those magical? So as an example, one of the truths about human beings is humans love autopilot. But you think about it, like, you can go from driving from the airport to your home, not even think about it, right? But you can also be off autopilot when, you know, a police car pulls behind you. All of a sudden, I'm off autopilot. I got to think about everything. This is design thinking. If you're the leader in your business, when do I want my people on autopilot? When do I not want them them on autopilot. I get to, I get to design every single one of those things. So as an example, the way you start your meeting can put people on autopilot or can take them off autopilot. Imagine the first time they show up in this meeting, you're blaring rock music. They're gonna go, oh, something's different. Off autopilot. Right? If you're always 5 minutes late for the meeting, they're on autopilot, right? Every single thing you get to design. So how do you start a meeting?

Sounds like a pattern interrupt. Yeah, it's a great way to do it. It is.

Yeah, it is. Especially when you want them to pay attention, but other times you want them on autopilot. So when I start a sales meeting, I remember I talked about the sacred rhythm. They all have a check-in script. I don't even start it. It's autopilot. I want it to be on autopilot. Why? Well, I've baked a lot of things into that. I've told the whole group what's important. Making a certain number of phone calls is important, and they got to say it out loud, and I don't ever have to check it. I just audit them, sort of like Reagan, you know, trust but verify. I pull one and if people are, you know, if they're being untrustworthy, but I also now baking in this habit of them looking in the CRM, looking and having awareness of the number of calls they're making. And I don't have to do it. I don't have to be the enforcer. It literally is as simple as design thinking. Nothing in your company can be left to chance. I want your listeners to think of themselves as a director on a Broadway play. There is nothing in that theater that's left to chance. The lights, the smoke, the music, the sound, the chairs, the smell— every facet of it is designed to take the audience on a journey.

All right, so I got to tell you, this has been truly one of the best interviews I've ever done, where I've had— I've had the benefit of spending 3 days with you and multiple days working with your team prepping for this. Getting in my mind ready, and I just didn't really get it until our first day. I'm like, okay, and the second day and the third, and how profoundly important this platform is and the mindset, but also spending time with Andy Elliott and seeing it in motion, and also knowing behind the scenes what Tommy Mello went through with you and the amount of profound thinking that goes on inside this. So I think the best way to sum it up is I'm totally sold and I can't wait to just send more people your way because I think what you're doing is important. I think young people like kids my son's age, Gen Zers, will deeply resonate with the message that you have and also what businesses can do for a whole younger generation that just thinks differently. They've got a different operating system. And also people who've felt like they haven't been seen or heard in the organizations they work for or with. Yeah. So I just want to give you an enormous amount of credit for being a visionary, finding someone with Reggie who thinks differently, came from a completely different world and incorporated all of this remarkable science into a combination of technology and AI and psychology and also being able to test this over and over again. Like, I think your timing for this business is profound, and I've been forever changed because of it.

Thank you. I appreciate that. And, you know, at, at the core, my belief is that world change comes from entrepreneurs. Entrepreneurs are uniquely suited to solve problems. It's what we do all day. So when we run a great company, we impact humans. And when we impact humans, that changes families. And when we change families, it changes our communities. When our communities are better, our cities are better, our country is better. That's how— that's, that's the magnitude. It's not just about can I make more money? There's plenty of money to be made. We live in the USA. Yep. The question is, do we want to live in a world where greatness exists? And that's a decision a business owner gets to make when they decide that their business is going to be a factory that grows beautiful human beings. It helps them reach their human potential.

Completely agree. Well, my friend, what a great experience. I'm so glad I've gotten— I've had just the opportunity to grow and learn with you. Awesome. And your team. So, uh, well done. Thank you. And to you, you know what the next step is? Where do you need to go? salesboss.com/free. Get the videos, get the tools. And if this resonates with you, just schedule a demo with Jonathan's team because this stuff is profound. All right, thanks for watching. Thanks for listening. See you in the next episode.

Bye-bye.

Thank you, Mike.

Got it.