The Difference Between Starting & Managing A Company | My First Million Podcast

skill set or thing that I've learned in business that pretty much shocked me. I, I really only learned this in the last year, but looking back at it, people have told me this forever, which is there's a massive difference, a massive gap in skills, and a lot of people cross it, but there's— the gap exists of starting and managing. So when you start businesses, a lot of people think of Mark Zuckerberg and they're like, this college kid started this thing. He was 20 when he started it. Now he's only 30, or he's could be 25 still, and he manages 10,000 employees. He hired the, the best people in the world from Princeton and Stanford and Harvard, and he stole people from Amazon, the brightest minds on earth. And you think, yeah, that's just how it goes. Well, managing those people and the business, it's incredibly challenging. And oftentimes the people who are creative and crazy enough to start companies, a lot of times the skill sets they needed to start it are not only different, but oftentimes opposite of what it takes to run. When you start something, you could look at a lot of spreadsheets and you could kind of like guess your way there. But a lot of times, not all the time, but a lot of times starting something, it's completely irrational on paper. Things may or may not work and you just got to be creative and you got to do shit and you got to move fast and you're not going to have meetings. You're not going to talk to people about stuff. You're just going to move quickly and you're going to execute and you're going to do it. And it's a very creative process. It's almost like creating a piece of art. Like maybe there's some equation that says like the perfect rectangle looks this way. But every— but a lot of times there's just Picasso who just says, fuck it, this is interesting to me, I'm doing this. And sometimes it works. That's kind of what starting a business is. But managing a business is a lot different. And so at our company, I did a pretty good job of getting us to about $1 million a month in sales. But towards the ends of that, I was breaking. I was doing horrible. I was not good at managing it and I was very unhappy. And so we hired— one of my first hires was this guy named Adam who I went to high school with. And he's now president of our company and he runs a lot of the day-to-day stuff. So I kind of, I kind of, I'm like, he's like Sam, sandwiched in the middle, whereas I'm really good at thinking of these really high-level ideas. And I'm also really good at going in at the very bottom and just being an individual contributor and, and creating interesting things. I'm not always great at managing the day-to-day of, of what's going on. It's, I bet I could get good at it, but it just really doesn't interest me. And that was really hard to learn. And I struggled with this for years. Like I said, I hired a CEO coach. I had— we have a handful of really great angel investors and I kind of talked to them and I'm like, I don't know what to do here. And it wasn't until I realized that Adam is one of the best at this. He loves this. He's the type of guy who was the captain of the football team, the president of student council. He loves leading people. And it kind of hit me. I'm like, man, the way that I sometimes don't understand why people are unwilling to start something or how on earth they're afraid of starting, I am kind of like that on the other end with managing. There's people who it— whether it comes naturally to them or they've just worked on this skill set, they're really good at it. And so in a way, I was wearing this backpack that was full of weight and I hated carrying it on my shoulders, I just took out some of the weight and I put it in Adam's bag and he loves carrying it. And so through this process, I mentioned earlier we have HustleCon speakers. Through this process, I actually talked to a lot of people at our conferences and that was one of the major things that I used to ask people, which is, do you have a right-hand man or a right-hand woman? Do you have someone leading the day-to-day? Because I'm struggling with that, how do you do that? And there was typically two answers, which was, yeah, I don't like it, it's really hard. And I could sense that these people, I'm talking, I mean, I don't wanna call anyone out, but go and just Google like HustleCon speakers or something, look at all the people who we've had at our events, and this is the type of person, or those are the people who told me this, which was, they would say like, I am horrible at managing this. Or oftentimes they would have like one of their assistants or like a keeper or like a handler like with them. And I would be like, hey, what's this person like as a manager? And the answers were pretty consistently pretty bad. This person's not good. And so the first answer was, I'm not good at it. I'm really struggling with it. And a lot of times those people would say, I wish I had someone who I could replace myself as CEO. I would hear that all the time. I was shocked by it. And the second answer that I got was, yeah, I hired a really good COO or a really good president, and this is my right-hand woman or right-hand man, and they run a lot of the day-to-day, and it allows me to focus on what I do best. And the people who said number 2 were way happier, and oftentimes I think a lot more successful. Now, there are these rare occasions where the person who started it is just, they're also a great CEO, CEO or a great people manager. That, that definitely happens, but often it is not the case. I'm looking at a photo of Ted Turner. Ted Turner is one of my heroes. He was pretty notoriously a bad manager. He was a great leader. People wanted to follow him in battle. But what he would do is he would come up with these great ideas. So Ted Turner came up with the idea of CNN and he launched it. But before that, he had other businesses. And when he came up to CNN, a lot of people think, Ted Turner, you're the guy who started CNN. Well, yeah, he is, but he also— there's another guy named Reece, and Reece was the guy leading the day-to-day. Ted came up with the idea and then he went away for 3 months and did a sailing competition. So having these right-hand people is very important. And a lot of times I feel like I'm the right-hand person at this point. But I think that it's really important to understand the difference between starting and managing. I mean, for a long time, For a long time, it was normal that they would call 'em gray hairs. It was normal to get a gray-haired leader to come in for a startup. So these young people would come up with this idea for this great tech company, and then the, the investor would say, all right, let's go hire a CEO. And that is not popular right now, but I think it should be. I think it's actually quite effective. Maybe not CEO, but you definitely need this team of experienced people. And so the reason why I brought this up is it's a, it's something that most people I've found struggle with, but there's not a lot of resources out there, not a lot of people talking about it. And so I think it's really important to learn this. Ultimately, this skill set comes down to delegating. And there's 4 resources that I'll have that I've liked. The first one, I don't like the name of the book, but it's very helpful. It's by a guy named Felix Dennis. Felix Dennis, he was this— he's dead now. He died a few years ago, maybe 10 years ago. He was— he's kind of like Richard Branson but more vulgar. He was a British entrepreneur. He started Dennis Publishing, which launched Maxim magazine, which launched a ton of great titles. It's still like a $200 million a year business. He also launched Micro Warehouse, which basically before Amazon was around, it was like Amazon for software. And it was a huge multi-billion dollar publicly traded company. So very successful. Entrepreneur, close to a billionaire. And so this is why I don't mind his book being titled so horribly. It's called How to Get Rich. And the reason why I don't mind it is because he was really successful. He wasn't this like get-rich-quick guy. And in that book, he does a great job of talking about delegating. And that book, I use it as a reference book. I read all the time about how to work with people. That's my go-to. The second one is I like The One Minute Manager. Just Google it, you'll find it. It's a great book on managing. The third thing is The Five Dysfunctions of a Team. And so it's a great book that looks at what successful teams and people look like and what they don't look like, more importantly. And so you, in order to, oftentimes the best way to be good at something is you find out the bad ways of doing it and you just don't do that. And the fourth thing is one of my investors is this guy named Tucker Max. Tucker Max, if you're a man and you're, between the ages of probably 28 and 40, you probably know who Tucker Max is. He was famous because he had this blog called I Hope They Serve Beer in Hell, and it was very controversial. It was basically about his frat days, and he was just this wild partier and drinker. So he has a really controversial opinion, but after— he's in his 40s now, so he's no longer a kid, but he's really thoughtful at this point. He's kind of turned his image around, and he has a great blog where he, A, talked about firing himself and replacing himself as CEO. And he— it's maybe like a 12-part blog. It's really good. I would highly recommend everyone reading it. And he's one of my investors and he's kind of a mentor to me. You know, he— him and I are kind of similar in that we try to be macho and— or at least we started that way of wanting to be macho and show no weakness. But he's actually done a really good job of being introspective and talking about his feelings a lot. And he's done really good about talking about managing people. Tucker also has this great book on how to create— or this great document on how to manage a company or like create a culture. And you could Google Tucker Max culture document and you'll see it. It's free.