Ryan Deiss argues that while pay matters, purpose keeps teams and customers loyal. Payroll is your biggest expense, but pay-driven employees leave constantly. Build missionaries instead: people who work for your mission, not just the check.
Do I need to be a cult leader in order to scale my company? So you don't need to go full blown cult leader, but you need people who are willing to come to work for more than just a paycheck. Because one of the biggest expenses you're going to have as a business owner is payroll. And if people are only there because you're paying them the most, then as soon as somebody comes along and is willing to pay them a little bit more, they're gone and you're having to replace your people. And that's just not a good way to scale. Same thing on the customer side. If your customers only see your products as a commodity, then they're not going to stick around and they're certainly not going to tell your friends, which means your customer acquisition costs are always going to be high because you're never going to have word of mouth. So do you need to go full blown cult? No. But you would like to build a team of missionaries and you would like to build a community of customers that are also missionaries as well.
