MrBeast's employee handbook just leaked... here's my thoughts

Jimmy Donaldson, aka MrBeast, has built possibly one of the most successful production companies in the world, bar none. Recently, his 36 page HR playbook was leaked to the public and I went ahead and read it. You don't have to. I've got five takeaways that every B2B CEO needs to understand. And so in this video, I'm going to walk you through the playbook. My reaction to it as someone who looks at the most successful people and tries to emulate what they're doing that's working in their businesses and how I'm implementing these particular takeaways into my B2B service business. Some of these are just common sense, others are kind of counterintuitive actually. But all of them, I believe are crucially important if you want to have a high level operating team like Jimmy does. And of course, if you want to give this document a read for yourself, it'll be linked down in the description below. All right, lesson number one, don't build a rule book. He says I need to kick this thing off by saying the purpose of this is not to give you a bunch of rules to follow. On top of that, I want nothing in here to be taken literally. What we do is complex and changes based on the situation. Okay? This is important. If your playbooks are perceived by your team as a list of rules to follow, then you're going to get very different outcomes than if it's a set of principles to just kind of keep as your North Star while you operate within this team. Layla, the CEO of acquisition.com, she says she actually doesn't like SOPs because people perceive them as just that, a set of rules to follow. She would much rather have organizational values and then continually be training her team in, okay, how do we live these values out in the way we operate on a day to day basis? At another point in this playbook, Jimmy's describing how to handle a specific type of project and he follows it up with this. He says you need to use your own intelligence based on the project to determine that. So if you give people room to use their intelligence, you will attract and retain intelligent people. Crazy, right? On the flip side, if you dumb everything down to the lowest common denominator, you will attract and retain the lowest common denominator. Chick Fil a is a great example of this, right? They tend to attract people who have a really good attitude because they've essentially codified having a good attitude into the way they operate every single day. Even little things like saying my pleasure, you Have a fantastic day instead of you're welcome. Technically, from a dictionary standpoint, these two things mean basically the same thing. But one of them has a very different connotation than the other. On the opposite side of the spectrum, there's Taco Bell, right? Like they attract lowlifes who smoke weed in the kitchen because they've created an environment where lowlifes can smoke weed in the kitchen and still hold onto their job long enough to pay their car bill or their drug dealer. But if you create an environment where low performers can make it, you will attract and retain low performers. And as a byproduct, your A players aren't going to stick around long because they don't like hanging out with low performers. They know that that's dragging down their individual performance. And an A player is very concerned with their individual performance and how they're able to contribute their best and greatest to the team. On the flip side, if you create an environment where the low performers self select out because they can't make it, then your A players are going to love you. They're going to stick for so long. This is exactly what Jimmy has done in his organization. He's made it impossible to be a low performer and to make it there. You either won't make it in the door in the first place or. Or you'll self select out very quickly because you'll realize, man, this is way more than I thought I had signed up for. Alright, lesson number two, how to cultivate problem solvers. He says, I'm young and I'll be the first to admit I'm not perfect. I promise, not a single person on this planet wants us to succeed more than I do. And no matter how much you work, you'll never invest more time into this company than I will. But I can't promise I'll always be right. Having said that, there are ways you can help me be right more often. So he then goes into describing everything that's on his plate to explain why he's not necessarily the best guy to ask every question because he's not intimately involved with every single function of the business. And he shares how to properly communicate with him given that understanding. So he says, instead of saying, hey, in a coming up video, we're giving away a car. What do you think of this lexus? It's only 10 grand, which is how 99% of questions are asked towards me. Do this instead. We have a coming up. Would you rather video one of the bits at the six to nine minute mark? We will be giving away a car. We are still on budget and the budget of this car is $10,000. I checked with PM, it could go up another 5,000 if you really wanted. I searched all of North Carolina for cool ass cars around that price point and here are five I got pre approved by Creative, all on budget. I also got five other backup options that are less cool looking and more average. If you're going for that, here's a Picture of all 10 cars, the miles on the cars and the information you want. Which of these cars do you think is best or should I get other options? Okay. This is awesome. They're giving him all the context and all the information, getting him up to speed to make the decision on this. This is possibly one of the most important things you can train your team on, how to communicate with you. It's really important for us as CEOs to be able to keep our minds clear at least during certain times of the day or certain days of the week so that we can focus on driving the business forward and doing really what our best and greatest is for the company. Right. But if you're constantly getting asked questions by your team every five minutes on these low level decisions that they should be able to do themselves, where are you getting that time to actually drive the business forward? You might not be. Dan Martell's got a great story from his book Buy back your time where his HR director comes to him and he's like, hey Dan, we gotta hire like 15 people in the next 90 days. I've never done this before, like what should I do? And Dan's response to him wasn't to like tell him how to do it. It wasn't to, well, you know, when we did it before, this is what we did. His response was, hey man, I've never done it before either. And this is kind of what I hired you for. But if you put together a couple options and come back tomorrow, I'll, I'll talk through it. And the next morning, Dan wakes up, he's got a text from his HR director saying, I figured it out. Problem solvers are greater than doers and this comes with the risk of them doing things wrong. Right? This is probably our greatest fear that's holding us back when it comes to equipping people to actually solve problems. But this is just one of those calculated risks that us founders, US CEOs have to take every single day. Because if you never take the risk, you've just got a guaranteed outcome that nobody in the company except for you are going to be able to solve problems. And that's certainly not what we want. Lesson number three, money doesn't solve problems. People always assume money is the answer. And if we just spend more money, we can give Jimmy what he wants. Now, he goes on to give an example here. Which sounds cooler to you as a prize for a gaming video? $20,000 or a year's supply of Doritos. To me, Doritos is so much funnier, and I think our audience would find it effing hilarious. So let's say we define a year's supply of Doritos by five packs of Doritos a day for 365 days. That's 1825 packs of Doritos. And a quick Google search shows you can buy a pack of Doritos for less than a dollar. But we can round up and say. And just say a dollar per pack. So our prize for the video just went from $20,000 down to $1,825, because we just didn't throw money at the problem, and we used creativity. This kind of reminds me actually of a meme that's been going around Twitter lately of like, the founder mode versus manager mode. And the idea behind it is kind of that companies can be in one of two modes, right? They can be in founder mode is when the founder is intimately involved in every part of the company. They're developing product, they're doing marketing, they're talking to the sales team. All this stuff. Think like Elon in basically every single one of his companies, right? He's intimately involved in everything. And when you're in this kind of environment, you're fast, you're nimble, you're innovative. Stuff gets done because the founder is this person with, like, this passion. They. They created this company. This is their baby. This thing matters to them. And that then infects the entire team with a sense of enthusiasm and working 16 hours a day, essentially. Then there's manager mode, though, and manager mode is when the founder hires a CEO and the CEO hires VPs, and the VPs hire directors, and the directors hire managers. And now you got 17 levels of managers in between the founder and the people actually doing the work on the ground floor, right? It's super slow, it's super inefficient, and it never, ever, ever comes up with anything revolutionary. The perfect example of this, right, is Apple way back in the day with Steve Jobs at the helm versus Apple today. Like, how much innovation has Apple done on the iPhone, for example, in the last five Years, they've done nothing. The past five iterations of the iPhone have barely changed. Where back in the day, it was like revolutionary changes to their product lineup every year or every couple of years with Steve Jobs at the helm. Another great example of manager mode. The US government. They've been in manager mode for years. They think throwing money at problems is going to make them go away. And that's exactly what's gotten us in the mess we are today. This is basically never the case. Lesson 4 Blind trust is a signal of low IQ. One of the common themes you're probably seeing is accountability, and this doubles down on that. Don't take anything at face value. Always dig. This is particularly important when dealing with people outside the MrBeast production team. If someone says something too good to be true, find out why. If it's fishy, investigate if you need 10,000 pillows by next week and you've called 10 pillow companies and none have more than a few hundred in stock. But then the 11th company magically has 10,000 pillows. Investigate. Are they drop shipping? Are the pillows shitty? Why the F does no one want your pillows? Push and get answers. To put a point on this, the number of companies I've talked to in the last six months who have a marketing agency, this marketing agency is underperforming or just not performing at all. They're continually saying they need more time to get results. And then the CEO just trusts the agency. They says, okay, I'll give them a little bit more time. I'll give them a little bit more time. I'll give them a little bit more time until six months has gone by and you're still in the exact same situation, except you've paid out $50,000 to this agency in the last six months and you, during this time haven't even done any research or asked around at all. Well, if I had a dollar for everyone, I wouldn't be rich, but I could probably get queso and guac with my Chipotle. If you retain a vendor who's not doing what they said they would, then that's on you for not asking around, not pushing on them, and ultimately not firing them to go find another one just because that would be difficult and it's gonna take time and effort on your part. That's on you for trusting someone who's potentially lied to you at this point. And I say this as a guy who owns a marketing agency, there's gotta be zero tolerance for this stuff. This is why the agency world in particular has such a bad reputation. Right now because there's so many agencies who don't perform. Don't perform, don't perform. And their game is to just BS clients long enough so that they have a lifetime value that maths out and the agency can continue to exist. Lesson five, consultants are a cheat code to success. Consultants are literally cheat codes. Need to make the world's largest slice of cake. Start off by calling the person who made the previous world's largest slice of cake. He's already done countless tests and he can save you weeks worth of work. Okay, this was kind of unexpected because the talk around, like, hiring consultants, it's been really negative for a while, right? Like, there's this meme that if you're facing a problem in the corporate world, nobody ever got fired for hiring McKinsey. They come in, they tell you what you already knew, but because it's got the McKinsey label, everybody believes it now and the advice becomes wisdom from the heavens or something. But it's a cool switch from like the old school big name consulting model to the find people who have done the thing you're trying to do model. I think that's way more valuable. I think that gets your business way further ahead. And yeah, it's a shortcut to success because you've got a thing you're trying to do. You could either, like, try to do it yourself and learn the hard way, or you can find somebody else who's already done it the hard way, pay them a few thousand bucks for their time, and suddenly you've got all of the mistakes that they made out of the way, and you can just kind of innovate to the next level. Like, this is how the science industry has always worked, right? Like, scientists spend their entire life working on their one specific passion project doing this research, and they publish their findings in a paper, and then the next generation of scientists takes this knowledge that the last generation found out and that's their foundation now for kind of going the next level. And like, this is how we iterate in the scientific field. But a lot of people are super against this in the business field for no real reason other than the fact that a lot of the big box consulting companies have gotten a little stale. So the rest of this document, it's basically just YouTube advice, which I'm not going to get into here. It's incredibly valuable stuff though, and I highly recommend you check it out. Particularly if you create YouTube content for your business or if you're thinking, thinking about creating YouTube content for your business. I'm implementing a lot of these takeaways into the long form content I'm producing for my marketing agency and also for the long form content we're producing for a bunch of our clients. It's just cool being able to get inside Jimmy's head as probably the most obsessed and definitely the most successful creator on YouTube. He's got a lot of really innovative ideas and he's been doing this long enough that he's got it really well frameworked out. So check it out at the link below.