In Bed With Keala Kanae: Building 8-Figure Cultures Without Becoming a Cult | Top Trends

If you're not clear about the mission that your company is on, their mission will become to serve themselves. I didn't know how to build a company and build teams and, like, build culture, any of this stuff. So I paid the price of that ignorance. And that's where my team went from, you know, infighting and drama to up at one in the morning, sending slack messages, working on Thanksgiving, working on Christmas, even though I don't necessarily want them to.

I look at the organization as a living, breathing ecosystem that's not only just adding new people and subtracting people.

I really believe that every human being has something remarkable to offer the world. That's my core driver. How does that differentiate you from anybody else? Like, what do you think? Like, somebody else is hanging lie to folks on their wall as a value? Like, no. Right. Like, you have to have integrity just to be in business.

I imagine this would damage his personal brand more than mine.

Our core belief is that every human being has something remarkable to offer the world. And if you don't believe that, do not work here. It'll be hel.

Hi, I'm Bobby. Now, this is Nick Fisher, and I'm honored to be at Squad Up Summit 2025 with Mr. Keala Kanar. And he drove all the way here from his ranch now because he's too famous and living off the land these days and running some really cool. What I would consider Douglas is naked and afraid just came to mind. He's running naked and afraid for Fortune 500 companies. No. Calla. Welcome to the podcast. This is Top Trends.

Thank you, Nick.

You're welcome. I think in this, if you guys know what we're referencing here, I think I would now insinuate that you asked me to be on this and to come here, but that is not the case. So let's dive into it. And the reason why I love doing this podcast so far, and this is episode one, if you guys are seeing this, is because I really care about surrounding myself with people that I can learn from. And I fortunately got to a point in my career where I once looked up to this guy and learned a ton from him. And to get to a place where you would drive out here and share stuff with me is pretty cool. So thank you, truly, bro.

So we just ran into each other about, I don't know, two or three weeks ago, and while we were there talking, you had said to me, like, oh, yeah, man, I learned a lot. I learned a bunch from watching your stuff. You said that to me while we were there. And when we, as we were leaving, I was telling my girl, I was like, I don't know if you realize like how big a compliment that was to me. Fisher said to me that he learned a lot of from me.

Really?

Oh, yeah, bro. We talked about it that night, her and I.

That's. Well, dude, that's. You know what I mean?

You're a thug, dude.

Well, thank you, man. I. I try, I try to. To basically rest on the shoulders of giants or whatever that quote is, that.

Stand on the shoulder. Resting on the shoulders.

That's what we're doing. That's maybe. Yeah, man, you got the messaging all wrong. That's why you're doing this. No, but that's. It's super cool. And we were gonna talk about marketing funnels, but since this is our event and Cody's down there on the floor, I wanna make sure I catch some of that too. So I really wanna sink into something we were talking about earlier, which is a shared passion for core values and how we're using them. And I just heard a little bit about it, so I have my own way. But what was the point where you realized core values were important? Because I always thought it was like some woo woo stuff that just big companies did that wasn't really important. So I didn't have any core values for GEX and New Reach when we started. For the first year, we didn't think about it. What was that like for you? Or what was that point where you were like, oh, man, they matter.

Yeah, man. No, I think so. First, I just want to clarify for your audience. So when we're talking about core values, you're talking about the core values of a business, like as it scales, why does that become important? I think.

Yeah.

And I think both of us probably. It sounds like you too, we learned it the hard way because we paid the prices of not being intentional about our culture. And then when you pay those prices, you realize like how critical it is to be intentional about the culture that you're building. Because if you don't build a culture in your organization, what happens is your team members will build the culture for you. And they're not going to do it with the vision in mind. They're gonna do it with their own purposes in mind. Right. Like they don't do it from a mission driven perspective. Because if you're not clear about the mission and your team, this is my experience. If you're not clear about the mission that your company is on and you don't have a mission, you haven't articulated the mission in a way that everybody on the team can get behind it. Their mission will become to serve themselves.

When was the first time that bit you? Oh, well, like what was the impetus for you even getting to that point? Because that is, that's wise.

We, so we, when we launched my first courses coaching business, we scaled it from zero to a million a month in four months. We went to 20 million our first year. I went from zero employees to 60 plus in 12 months.

Whoa.

And it was chaos, man. And so what happened is. And I wouldn't recommend that, by the.

Way, why'd you do it in the first place?

I didn't know any better, dude.

You just were scaling for.

I was an affiliate. I started out as an affiliate marketer. Right. So like you're taught the scale. Exactly. I just knew how to get customers. I didn't know how to build a company and build teams and like build culture, any of this stuff. So I paid the price of that ignorance. Which is, which is how we learn. I, I had a developer that stole $240,000 from us. That was the first sign. Still didn't catch onto it. We had team members that were stealing hours, stealing money. We had people that had put their family members on payroll and were putting hours in their name and they were getting paid for it. And then eventually I was going through a, in our, in our second year, I was going through a partnership breakup. There was a ton of stuff that unfolded there. Like I had a, I had a million dollar loan that was taken out in my name by our CFO at the time, without me even knowing. I had, like, there's a, there's a whole story that I can tell behind this. But going after I bought out the partner and we're rolling into 2019, rebuilding, rebranding the company. I had some time to sit back after all this crisis had unfolded. And my question to myself was, what's the root cause of all this? Like, if I break it all down, what was the thing that created? Because it's not so much like life has kind of taught me that it's not so much about like each individual action. Right. It's like getting to the root of that chaos. And so what I discovered, what I, what I realized is that I didn't have a team that was dedicated to a mission or a vision. Like they were each individually dedicated to their own well being. And that was my own fault because as a leader, I wasn't, again, I wasn't intentional about the culture. And that's When I realized, oh, if you want to build a team, like, a team is rallied behind something.

Yeah, Right.

They're on a mission. They have a vision, they have a collective goal. And they're all, you know, engineering their. Their energy into that one thing and it. And hopefully it's something that's bigger than each of them in their individual selves. And so that's what we were intentional about. And then I went through the process of coming up with our thing. Our core thing is something I call the core belief. And then we have our mission, vision, and our values and that single thing. If there's one thing that I did in my company that changed the company more than anything, like, running ads was cool. Having funnels was cool. Customer acquisition is cool. Sales school. But if there's one thing that changed my business more than anything and made it a pleasure to run, it was getting clear about those things and then creating a culture where everybody, like, loved being together. And that's where my team went from, you know, infighting and drama to up at one in the morning, sending slack messages, working on Thanksgiving, working on Christmas, even though I don't necessarily want them to. They were so driven by what the work that they were doing and the impact that it was having that they would. They would. I didn't have to manage.

Yeah.

Management is a. Is the absence of leadership.

Let me think about that for a second. I believe that too. In a perfect, like a hundred percent perfect elastic leadership, you don't need to manage because everyone is pulled in the exact same way.

Self managing.

Self managing.

Yeah.

I have a question, though, on core belief. What? How'd you even get to the core belief that you currently have? And what other ones did you consider? I imagine it wasn't just like a God moment. Perhaps it was.

No. So it wasn't a God moment. So in designing our vision, mission and values, in the process of that, which I'll share because I think it's important about how you come up with that, because what a lot of people do is they. They just pick random shit off the shelf and they. And they, like, put it on a wall and they decorate it real nice, but nobody lives by it.

Yeah.

And then it's like the laughing stock. Yeah. Yeah. It disillusions the team. Right. Because they think like, oh, I joined this company because of this. And then, you know, three months in, they realize, oh, we're not actually that at all. And then they're in it for themselves again. But in the process, I had asked myself, okay, like, why Do I do what I do? Because I had just, you know, gone from broke to rich to like the cusp of broke again on a, on, on the partnership buyout. And I'm working my way back to rich again. And I realized money doesn't make me happy. Right. Like, I think people have to get money to understand that it will never make you happy. But money's not gonna make me happier. So what. Why do I do this every day? Like, why would I put myself through the hell of entrepreneurship? Cause it can't be money. Money's not adding value to my life. Of course it solves problems and stuff, but it doesn't like spawn happiness. And so I was like, why do I do all this? And I realized that I had this belief in me that was kind of unconsciously running me, which is I really believe that every human being has something remarkable to offer the world. That's my core driver now. That's. I'm running an affiliate marketing training. I'm teaching people how to fucking run ads to third party offers. Like, what's that got to do with. You believe every human being is remarkable. But that's, that was my vehicle to help them discover their own remarkability, if that makes sense.

Sir, this is clickbank.

Yeah. Like, sir, I just want to make an extra $10,000 a month. That would be remarkable.

Right. But you get to, even if they don't buy in during the interview process, you get to teach them that over the next, I imagine, few weeks or months at the company. Right?

Yeah. So we still. Yeah, so our, yeah, that became our core belief is. And there's parts. I think this is important too. Like, at least in my experience, and I'd be interested in your experience is in developing a vision, mission and values. And in our case, a core belief. I think it's more autocratic than democratic.

What do you mean by that specifically?

Like, it's a, it's a top down thing, not a bottom up thing. Like the person sweeping the floors probably shouldn't be telling you what the company values are. Not to take, not to disrespect the person sleeping the floor. They have an important role too. But if they're not sitting in the, if they're not the visionary, if they don't see where you're headed, you know, how can they come up with a roadmap? Right. Like how? Because values are a way in which you're going, the team is going to operate. It's like how we're going to accomplish the mission and how we're going to treat each other along the way.

Yeah.

And like, how can somebody, you know, who's not in the visionary role see that? Now, I sourced it democratically, but I decided it autocratically.

Cool. That's more akin to Josiah. And I feel like maybe the stage of business that we're at is once you have enough people, like, we just. We just refined. Do we actually decide. I'm going to break fourth wall on what the redefinitions of our core values were on the last leadership retreat. Yes. I'm gonna ask you those after because I'm actually. I want to know. Because it's very important that when we use a term, we know what it means.

Well, there's something that you're skipping over here that I think is kind of important, Nick, which is you already had.

A successful company at this point. Yeah. We can go back at the beginning. Autocratic.

No. But in this point, when you did the leadership retreat. Right. Like, you've already had a successful company.

Yes.

So why not just copy and paste the same values over?

Because the. I look at the organization as a living, breathing ecosystem that's not only just adding new people and subtracting people. I also believe that people are constantly changing. And ideally, a good company is going to get as many of those people headed in a positive trajectory towards whatever they want than a negative. And by having a clear vision and you get people pulling in the same direction, you get clear on what they want. And then I get super confused. That's what we were talking about earlier of like, if someone really understands the vision and the values in the core belief, if they get to a point where they just aren't. Don't have conviction or this, that and the other, I get confused. I'm like, okay, maybe. Maybe I'm not being very clear. Like, are you lost? And then that usually doesn't lead to a redefining of the values. But if enough, that happens enough times, which is kind of what I would see in New Reach recently. I'm like, oh. Like, that's not that value. Kind of got it. Like, it's. It's getting lost and it needs redefined. So. But in the very beginning, I agree. The janitor comparison is like, I care about the janitor now when it's just me and a few other people. It's got to be you, I think, because you are such. You are the. I would call it. I actually have never used that word before, the one autocratic. What's the difference between meritocratus and autocratic?

Well, meritocracy is based on merit. Right. Based on, like, a reward system. Like somebody's earned something. That's. That's merit.

Right. So some people's opinions are weighted more than others.

Right.

Cool.

So I'll share with you. I think you said something really important, though, on this topic. And by the way, you know, so we're clear, I've installed this in every company that I've built since I learned this lesson. And even in companies with, like, two or three people, this has accelerated our growth. So I'd highly recommend it to anybody that's watching. Like, they. No matter where you're at in your business, that you. You take this seriously. And what you mentioned is important, too, is that a company is a living, breathing organism. Values actually stems from a field of study known as axiology. And through axiology, we know that values are dynamic. Like, they change over time. Right. Because they're going to be based on voids, our perceived voids in life. When we try to fill a void in our life, that becomes our values. That's where values are derived. So I'll share with you this, like, how we developed our. Now we have an audience here, people watching this.

Is this sensual or uncomfortable or.

They even dressed up to come see us today.

Yeah, you missed. A little earlier. We. We pulled up the OG Script and attempted to essentially mirror it for the first part so it'll be funny.

But he's Bobby.

I'm Bobby.

And I'm Drake. Just so we're clear.

And I broke in character, and we.

We might cuddle at the end. He might even get divorced. We're not sure how far we're gonna take this parody.

I'm willing to take it pretty far. For the sake of marketing. You know, let's.

Last thing out. Last thing I want to hear in bed with you is, I'm willing to take this pretty far.

And I'm like, man, yeah, I'm willing to take it far. But then it becomes hard to undo. The personal brand starts to be built around it.

I'm not so worried about it. We could play gay chicken on camera.

Yeah.

Anyway, so my point of values. What I was gonna say is, so here's how we developed ours is I took. I took. I got on an executive call with my executive team, and I said, in every one of your department. So in all of your departments, you probably have one or two people that are a players. Like the person that, if we lost them, it would be, you know, tragic.

Yeah.

For the team. So next week, when we get on this call. I want you to have the names of each of those people and the characteristics and traits that make them an A player. And so when we got on the call, the next executive call, we sat and went through every department, we went through every person's name, and I wrote down all the characteristics and traits that made our A players, A players. And what my executive team didn't know is I had already done that same exercise on them. So when we left that meeting, I took that list of characteristics and traits and I distilled IT down to 7 expressed values and 1.1aspirational value. So I think values are. When we're developing values for a company, we really have three sets of values. We have express values, which are the ones that actually matter. And this is what people get wrong. Then you have pay to play values. A pay to play value is silly. And it's what most people do. They're like, our value is integrity. Well, great. Like, how does that differentiate you from anybody else? Like, what do you think? Like, somebody else is hanging lie to folks on their wall as a value? Like, no. Right. Like, you have to have integrity just to be in business. So that's not a true value. There's no differentiator.

You think of that as more of a law of human nature would be, is integrity.

Yeah, like, you just want to. You want to be in business a long time, have integrity, you know, but the. And then the third is aspirational.

This is a good one, though.

I mean, I might have met people in our industry that might have. That did have that value. I'm not sure, but. And then there's aspirational values. Aspirational values, I think are kind of dangerous because they're the ones that you put on the wall and you say, like, we need to be more like this. But if you're not like that, what happens is people get disillusioned because who we say we are is not who we really are. Bro.

That's really interesting, because I look at the values I originally curated is sort of a blend of aspirational express. Yeah, Aspirational express. I don't know if there's a word for that, but there's definitely ones. I naturally exhibited more. And I was really trying to balance that, but I didn't know how necessarily.

Yeah, I mean, that's a good. That was. I was really. I studied axiology quite a bit, like in my. In our personal development company that we have now, our leadership training. Axiology is the core of everything that we teach.

I really want to go through that. That would be sick. That's. It's. You've gone really deep on this. Is there like axiology in college and.

Stuff or is this a. Yeah, it's a field of study. It's a. It's a field of philosophy.

Interesting.

So axiology and teleology are like the core of what we do. Teleology is a study of purpose.

We should have brought Jordan Peterson in here next. I bet he would vibe with this too. He's probably like, oh, yeah, I know about that.

Well, I mean, if you want to invite him back, it's only going to cost you. How much?

Yeah, right? Yeah, this would. This would.

Look, he probably upcharges too, for the bedtime.

Yeah, he would. I imagine this would damage his personal brand more than mine, so I will let him probably skip that one for now. But you know what? We can work our way up to it.

I wonder what value we're expressing right now. Dude.

The value of candor, self expression, authenticity.

I like that. Vulnerability.

Yeah, maybe something like that.

I like the authenticity.

Yeah, I would say maybe even just intuition or just. I don't know, I think maybe it's.

Just our value on marketing, bro.

Value on marketing. Yeah, maybe, right. Our desire. Our desire maybe to. To push the boundaries.

It could just be my. My love for Drake.

That.

And that is my fantasy of being.

That is like the Drake of marketing. Do you. I. I would consider you the Drake of marketing. And that's a good second too. Hey, I told you. I told you our values downstairs and I didn't tell you why though, or what they.

Yeah, yeah, sure, sure.

So we have four values of the gexa, which became. There were mirrors when we started New Reach. So we have four values at New Reach. But the four de Gexa I thought about. It's going to sound really dumb. If you go to our website, you'll see them. And I thought about them for about two days straight for eight to ten hours on walks. So I put a lot of time into it. And then thinking of what song name actually correlated to, because I've listened to a lot of Drake, much like you probably. And this has been a great year for Drake. Obviously, if you're watching this, his personal brand is shot, so Kendrick. But he'll recover because he's resilient. And that's the first one is nonstop. And it's about nonstop improvement and love of the game. And if you have that, you're going to get maybe thrown off or you get thrown curveballs, but I would never expect Drake not to get back to where he's at and beyond. It just might take them a little bit. But people thankfully forget things and have recency bias and the trauma heals. So Drake, if you ever see this and you might just know. We love you.

Ish.

How do you feel about Drake these days?

No, I'm a fan, bro.

I'm a fan of. I'm a. I just, I. I told people last year when the Kendrick Drake thing was happening. I'm like finally. I've been waiting for this to happen. I was like, this has been like since 2012. They've been going at each other now they're actually, you know, directing. But the values are non stop then charged up, which means being prepared, coming to meetings with a clear agenda, a systemic and practical mind and just really thinking about what someone's saying before trying to interject and hog the conversation. And the anti value of that I would say would be kind of an aimless meeting where you're not really sure if it should end or go on. And where are we headed? What are we trying to achieve with this? Worst behavior would be maybe the value we're exhibiting. I would call this worst behavior. Okay. And by worst behavior we say go after big 10x upsides with zero or little risk. So like consider okay, like that's a big idea. Do I not believe that I can do it? Because that's different than this is risky. And sometimes it feels like that because the fear can feel the same. Right? So to me, like what did we feel when we sat down comfortable? Why would we feel like this is risky? Because of the intention that maybe we have after of how to use it or how it might be perceived. Maybe that's it for me and it's something different for you, right? So worst behavior helps people push past that which allows us to, to take big jumps instead of incremental improvements where nonstop helps us with the incrementality of just like 1% better every day. And then crew love is the easiest one to define that people get right away, which is create family, which to me means talent density and family versus team. We talked about that a little bit. I guess it's team, create team. But create a team. Create a team that plays like a family together collaboratively. And I always tell people that our team every single year. And I think it's the case with squadup. Zach, tell me if this is the case. I feel like we're better than we were last year as far as the team and how we show up. Right. Just like, we have some of the same people from last year, and we have new people, and the A players want to be surrounded by A players. So usually if you do it right and you get rid of people who. Who don't want to be there and people who want to win know that it's easier to win together, and hopefully it just snowballs over time. So those are the four.

I like it, bro.

Thank you.

And I mean, I like it mostly because you took two days to consider it versus, like a 21 hour exercise of sitting down and going, like, what should my company values be? And just writing some stuff down that, like, sound cool.

Yeah. And I've. I remember being like, the team is definitely gonna think that this is weird, but if I can convey that, the intention and the essentially charged upness of it, then I can probably sell it. And it's at the point I wanted to show you this because one thing that you said made me think. We have a Slack channel just called Core Values and I can get a running feed of anyone in Slack. I don't think maybe we have Internet. The value and how it was expressed.

Oh, nice.

And if I come in here, anyone's post that I see, I can give it the emoji. That's worse behavior.

Oh, you guys have. You have turned your values into a set of emojis.

I do that with everything. Notice our first brand is Astrophoto, the emoji rocket ship sub 2, the one on my hat. So, like, it's. I'm not very good at visual brand, but the one thing I am good at is like, okay, when we start to create a community and there's viral and network effects, is there an easy way to spread it? Can I reduce the friction of how people share and identify? So this one actually is slightly different than the actual peace sign. Shout out to whoever designed this. Andy, this was for a Halloween. It's like skull version of it. So, like, it has variations, but it started as the default and it's easy.

That's smooth.

Thank you, man.

Yeah, so I think we said we're segueing now into, like, not like, once you've developed your values, it's like, you got to get the team.

We should probably take our shirts off now at this point. Enough foreplay.

Don't tempt me with a good time.

Yeah. Are we doing good on time?

It's almost three, bro.

Okay, cool. So we're gonna have to do a part two. Yeah, this, this. This won't just be a tinder Fling.

We can do a part two after we go downstairs and meet with Cody.

Yeah, we can. Yeah, let's do that. If you're down.

Yeah, let's do it. Yeah.

No pants. People would never know. It would just be me.

Yeah, cool.

Do you have a final thought? Do you want to wrap it up maybe with a cap on the cor. Core belief, too, of how your team, how that core belief has maybe attracted or helped your team?

Yeah. I think what I found working with people, especially in our company that we're running now, our leadership company, everybody has some core belief. They're probably not aware of it. So consciously or unconsciously, everybody has some sort of belief system because belief systems drive all of our actions.

Yeah, right.

They drive our thinking, which. Our thinking drives our actions. So everybody has some core belief that's running them. And I think a great leader like, is they're building something around a belief. Like entrepreneurs. Entrepreneurs tend to have, like, visionaries have a belief about what the world should be, and they're on a mission to make the world different.

That's a really simple way to put it and. Good. I've never distilled it that easily.

Yeah, right. Because, like, that's what visionaries do.

They see the world different, they want it to be different, and then they're crazy enough to believe they can change it.

Exactly. So that core belief for us has just like, you know, when I tell my team, we actually tell our team in our interviews, in our interview, in our hiring process, on one of the first interviews, we tell people, here's our, you know, values and all this, you know, read through it, and if they don't sing to you, this is not the place for you. And we let them know right up front. We say our core belief is that every human being has something remarkable to offer the world. And if you don't believe that, do not work here. It'll be hell. Yeah, like, it'll just be hell for you because, like, we have a way that we want to treat people, you know, and if you don't believe that about people to begin with, it's going to be a hard place for you to work. You're not going to fit.

We've never developed a core belief statement. That's. That's like the biggest takeaway that I feel like you've given me here. And there's been several. So thank you. We'll come back and do a part two, and I'll have to think about what New Reach's core belief might be, either implicitly.