WHO You Surround Yourself with is KEY To Success!

Let's imagine that NASA launches a program to put a team on Mars, and that capsule lands on Mars, videos are on, and they open it and the crew is all dead. I don't think you're gonna have the people standing up and clapping and celebrating and saying, we got the vehicle to Mars. Right? I mean, part of it is like getting the team to Mars and getting the team home. That's kind of what growth has felt like to me, like in the last 10 years where it's just like we have this go goal and we're going to get there even if it means we burn through our company three times and all the people and we lose them all. And it just felt like that playbook on how to run a business was going to expire. And so I wanted to share a different playbook that we had sort of executed and experienced and some other folks around. How can you grow the organization by growing the team? Honestly, I think we have a whole generation of leaders that don't know how to do that because they've grown up. You know, people just think, oh, you can switch from the hyper growth top line to profitable culture. All these things. It's not, it's not so simple.

You know, I've built now seven businesses, various levels of scalability, one of obviously it's scaled really, really well. Several hundred team members, all this kind of stuff. And I find that a lot of entrepreneurs, including myself, struggle with helping their teams become successful. So when I discovered your work elevate your team, I was like, you know what? This is going to be a brilliant conversation for the entrepreneurs out there who don't know how to scale their businesses via their team. So curious on how you kind of really segmented yourself there with so many other amazing pieces of work that you've already done.

Yeah, well, look, timing is everything, right? It's better to be lucky than good sometime. And so I started on this book, It Takes a While a few years ago.

As sort of a reflection on a different growth strategy. And this book then came to market as soon as we had the collapse of what I will call the steroid growth era. And so I think it's helpful to use an analogy to describe kind of what's going on in a lot of businesses in the last five or 10 years, which has been precipitated by extraordinary and artificially cheap capital that just valued growing at all costs and not even having to figure out what business you were in or whether it was sustainable or otherwise. So let's imagine that NASA launches a Program to put a team on Mars. And that capsule lands on Mars. I don't know, we'll call it the Steven vehicle lands on Mars. The videos are on, and they open it and the crew gets out, and they open it and the crew is all dead. I don't think you're gonna have the people standing up and clapping and celebrating and say, we got the vehicle to Mars. Right. I mean, part of it is getting the team to Mars and getting the team home. That's kind of what growth has felt like to me, like, in the last 10 years, where it's just like we have this goal and we're going to get there, even if it means we burn through our company three times and all the people and we lose them all. And it just felt like that playbook on how to run a business was going to expire. And so I wanted to share a different playbook that we had sort of executed and experienced and some other folks around. Why don't you. How can you grow the team by. How can you grow the organization by growing the team. So instead of a wave that you're drowning under, it's a wave that you have a surfboard on. And that's, that's sort of why the business is growing. And honestly, I think we have a whole generation of leaders that don't know how to do that because they've grown up. You know, people just think, oh, you can switch from the hypergrowth top line to profitable culture. All these things. It's not, it's not so simple.

Yeah, yeah. No, I think that's important because I, you know, one of the things I heard you mentioned before is when you were searching for your cfo, like, you didn't, you know, so there's this element of capacity and aptitude.

Yeah, right.

So having the aptitude to do the role, but also having the capacity to continue rolling. And I know you break down capacity in a few different areas, but I want to start off with the importance of when. When a founder, leader, executive team, if you will, needs to have a better understanding about whether or not they can grow the team member from the inside out versus whether or not they need to hire from outside in. How. How does someone actually figure that out?

I mean, I think it's. I think it's tricky for each role. So I think for the role, you're looking at the individual person and, and there's a chart in the book around kind of how to understand the. The demands of the role or the team and the organization. So let's Just say you have a team, a marketing team that's growing 50% a year for three years kind of means for everyone to keep doing what they're doing. They need to grow 50% and actually, like, it's very unlikely that someone's going to be able to go of that. Maybe an associate in year one and you may need a director in year three. There's often not enough miracle grow that you can put on people to turn them from associate or like, from bookkeeper to controller to CFO in four years. Like, it's just not. It's not pragmatic. So I think there's two different equations. You look at the demand, the supply side, or, sorry, the demand side, which is what is our growth trajectory and what do we need? And then who do we have? And are they getting better? Are they improving? I think people tend to look at experience more than aptitude, dude. Ideally you would get both. So look, as much as we want to build.

You know, as much as that, we want to build, you know, people from within. If I'm going to hire, you know, if I realize I need a CFO who has global experience in tax and M and A and otherwise, like, I can't invent that right internally. So I'm going to have to look to the market. But I always like the person in the market who hasn't done it yet, who's the number two, who's a fast riser, who wants to prove themselves, who. It's the first time they've been in the. That number one seat. We have had really the most luck with sort of those folks because they're hungry, they're growing, you know, tremendously, and we need them to keep growing once they come in.

No, I think that's really good. I would tell you that I'm one of those ones that made that mistake. In my large. One of my larger businesses, we had a controller that was on the verge of being a cfo. He was on that track record. He. We ended up going somewhere else. But he wanted to set a senior accountant up to be the next controller.

Yes.

So he exits, but with the promise of training the senior accountant. The senior accountant then gets in the seat, has not been properly trained, continues to struggle, and then cost us seven figures.

I tell a story in the book. I don't think it's your story, it's similar to that. But I have a friend who promoted his controller into CFO because she was very good, she was very loyal, she wanted it. He knew she didn't have experience but he promoted her and she made a million dollar mistake because she didn't have the tax knowledge and stuff that you needed from. So you hear this a lot in finance, again, particularly when someone's loyal and they're good and otherwise. And the thing to say to them is like, look, I really hope that you'll be a CFO here one day or other, but you don't actually have anyone to learn from, mentor you otherwise. So we're going to hire the cfo, you're going to be the controller, the senior control. You'll learn from them and maybe they'll move on a couple of years and then you're ready or you can go take that role. But I can't. This is leadership. Right. I need to balance wanting the best for people and wanting them to achieve things they've never done before with realistic assessment of what the business needs. And controller skills and CFO skills are not one and the same.

No, they're not. And this part is, I wanted to kind of set the conversation up around kind of how you're breaking things down, because I find that most entrepreneurs are either very giving or they're completely oblivious.

Yeah.

Or a combination of both. I can speak for a combination of both for myself. But as a rule of thumb, we need frameworks and ways to facilitate dissemination of information. Like ways to take in information, dissect it, pull it apart, make sure we can bucket things in place. Which is one of the things that I found in Elevate youe Team. Because there's a. The approach of kind of breaking down capacity in several areas I think is super important. So let's talk about the importance of capacity, if you don't mind, and kind of why you focus there as a primary driver of building and elevating teams.

Yeah. So the capacity building framework I actually started in my book Elevate, that was about individual improvement. And then I started to realize that actually what we were doing on the organization was just a different version of the same thing. So maybe explain it in general and then we can dive to each one in the work context. So spiritual capacity is about understanding kind of who you are, what you want most, the standards you want to live by. It's mostly it's your core values. It's not religious, even though it sounds like it. Intellectual capacity is how you improve your ability to think, plan and execute with discipline. This is kind of your personal operating system. Physical capacity is your health and wellbeing, and physical performance and emotional capacity is how you react to challenging situations. Your Mindset, kind of quality of relationships. And so for an individual, imagine, like, I think this is the process of how you get better. So there's four quadrants. These four quadrants are like a ball. If they're growing, you've got mass, they're equal. It rolls faster and faster if one of these things. And they're never all in alignment, but it's totally out of whack. This ball is going to kind of bounce all over the place. And so that was really a formula around individual leadership and development. But then I started to think about, that's for the individual, but what is it? What does it sort of look like, you know, in the context of an organization? And that's. That's in this book. I sort of expanded that. And I said, all right, well, spiritual capacity, in that case is making sure you help your people understand who. Who they are, what they want, what their values are, because they are going to lead aligned to their strengths. You know, intellectual is creating a culture that's about learning and feedback and growth and development and people who constantly want to get better and rewarding that, you know, physical capacity, similarly, is just making sure that you are not working people to death and you're not exhausting them and that you've helped build a culture that sets boundaries and that lets people go on vacation and lets them recharge and do the thing that you need to do to have them come back to work. And emotional is a culture that has strong psychological safety and that really focuses on the things that it controls and not the things that it doesn't control you. You can see this in organizations. There are organizations that blame everything and teams on the outside, a lot of sales teams are really kind of coached around this. They've never lost a deal that was their fault. And then there's teams and leaders that say, no, no, we don't look to the outside. We kind of look to the. The inside on the stuff.

Yeah, no, I think that's important. You know, I was thinking, too, you know, when you're trying to elevate a team, it really starts with the hiring of the team.

Yeah.

How is. How is your. Your. Your process change in hiring to start the. You know, to start the ball rolling down the hill in the best way possible.

Yeah. So the. The. Our hiring has always been focused in two parts equally on are they a culture fit, and do they have the aptitude and the capacity to do the job that we need them to do? And I. Ideally, the growth capacity. Right. So the questions would be behavioral Based questions tied to core values. If they don't have the core values, they're not going to be a fit. If you get the core values right but you get the job wrong, like, that means like, they're probably a good fit for the company, but not the job. Unless you're a huge company, that still can be problematic. Like, do I have another role for them? Am I hiring for it? Do I have budget for it? So that is how we break down the basic interviews. And then I would say, like, there's a couple things that I would look for in terms of people who are like high capacity kind of folks. And that if you were kind of looking at their resume in terms of like, what is it that makes them kind of higher capacity? And you can tell in your organization. So the first is that I think they've been promoted in place and done well in place. We all know that you can just jump, you know, the way that people get people to leave companies is offering them a promotion often that they're not really qualified for. So I give more credence to someone who kind of executed in one place for a while and showed that they can grow, that the only growth was leaving the job. Because we know in a crazy economy you can do that every five months. And that just means you keep working with new people that don't know you and otherwise. So, you know, that's, that's one that I look for. If people did leave their job, you know, a lot, the question is whether is it, is it push or pull? Like, are they, you know, it would be great. Why did you leave here? Well, Steven, my old boss, like pulled me in and told me I had to come work from. So if that person is being pulled by people that they worked with, like, that's that. That's a good sign, right? You can also just tell people that like to learn when you ask them about things, that they've got better at seeing rapid improvement. But back to that last one too. I am very dubious of people, let's say, like in their 40s, right, who are out working with a new recruiter and seem to be like, they're not finding a job from within the world of people that they've worked with before. Right. They're working with a new recruit. Like, it seems like everyone they worked with before doesn't want to work with them or doesn't want to hire them. Even the recruiter that placed them before is not placing them. So that's one I think people miss. But you really have to look like, is this person seem like they're on an island 20 years into their career? That is not a good sign.

Yeah, no, that's. I was just thinking through some of my former hires that kind of resembled that it didn't work out.

Yeah, it occurred to me one day, like, I hadn't really thought about it until someone said it to me, particularly the recruiter. Like, the recruiter. Have you worked with this person before? I've placed Steve like three times. He's the best candidate I've ever placed versus, like, again, why? Is the why how you found your, like, you're, you're, you're trying to get away from? I, you know, I just love hearing about the people that got pulled three times into jobs, but people that worked from there with them before.

Well, let's take it a step further. So we got the hiring phase kind of figured out. We kind of know what we're looking for, kind of know how to position it. What about the onboarding phase? How do you set a team member up for success so they can perform at a high level of achievement within the organization?

Yeah, so. So you find the right person, you put them in the right job. This goes back to the spiritual capacity. I would actually go out of your way to make sure this person understands their core values, their whys, their strengths, these things, the things that they are naturally going to show up and do in the organization and so that they can lead that way. And then this is where, you know, good training, good onboarding. You know, one of the things I talk about in the book is I think a lot of people struggle with communications, difficult conversations. Like, we practice this with like a difficult conversation training that we do. So. Yeah. And having clear objectives. So one of the problems about why people are working so hard in physical capacity and kind of burning them out is like people and companies and leaders haven't figured out kind of what is the 80, 20, what are the couple metrics that are success? And I don't care whether you work eight hours or two hours. Think about sales. These are the things that matter and move the needle. And this is what we're going to validate you on. In fact, when you're hiring someone, you should almost be giving them what their 6 and 12 months performance review is going to look like and say, look, if we're sitting down in six and 12 months and I'm either really happy or you're in a, you know, this isn't going to work out conversation, it's going to be about these five things it's going to be that there's a book of business of $2 million. We brought in 10 whatever things because then that person can choose to sign up for that or not sign up for that. I think a lot of companies set people up for failure with totally ambiguous outcomes when they come in. I have had friends that call me and they're like, you're in marketing, you know, you're a lot of company. Like, let me ask you a question. I'm looking to hire a sales and marketing person. And I'm like, time out. Like already you got a problem? Are you hiring a salesperson or a marketing person? Send me the JD on this. Because the person, I think they're going to half upset sales and half upset marketing if their metrics are some cobbled together thing between the whole thing because they think they're doing their job and both sides are unhappy because the marketing team thought this person was going to market and the sales team thought they were going to sell. I think so much of this stuff comes down to basic organizational clarity of who does what, what success looks like, what are the key performance indicators, what are the few or five things that matter. And then let's get people focused on the outcomes, not the inputs.

Yeah, no, I think that's great. In fact, I would tell you that early stages of my business career that probably bit us in the, in the butt. Many times we would let people go who honestly should have been, it was our fault they weren't trained the way they should have been trained. That was a learning lesson.

Or people never actually got the JD right before they came.

Yeah, exactly.

Yeah. They have no clue.

They're like, well, I, I thought I was doing X, Y and Z and you're talking about doing A, B and C. Like I'm like, what's going on here? You know. So I think one of the things that I've done with my team is we have this, we use a term called KRA that we learned from the Ramses. So key results here, which is like a summary job description, but it also has those five or six things that are going to be measured on throughout the course of the year. Yeah, into it. Hard, hard line. Into it. And when we're actually going through that, that tool, one of the things that we're doing is we're not only trying the KPIs to it specifically, but we're also trying to make sure that they have a complete understanding of what that performance is going to look like. Allowing them to have asked, you know, allowing Them to ask questions. And yeah, one of the things that.

You'Re super, make sure everyone's on that same page. Right. Are you? Best thing you could do is say this is what success looks like after six months. Right. You're going to have 10 new clients, $1 million pipeline. People can go, oh, hell no. Or I want that right now.

And I think that goes to another key aspect of the book specifically is you and I both believe in a high impact feedback scenario.

Yeah.

Right. So let's talk about the importance of feedback. You know, maybe why businesses struggle to get a feedback loop in place.

And then how it benefits the business long term.

So feedback is super critical. Like, like feedback and growth are, are hand in hand. And to me that's part of intellectual capacity. Same time people and companies suck at feedback because they don't teach anyone how to do it. And what they know of feedback is like this overly personal, like hurtful thing. And I, I, I have talked to people, I'm sure you have, like five or 10 years later and they, they are still PTSD about something someone said to them or they told them, stephen, you're, or you'll just never do this or like there's no point in that type of feedback. So let's talk about like giving feedback. Feedback should never be character or organized. It should never be, you are something that ostensibly makes the sort of argument that you cannot change. It should be that presentation really lacked strategy. And here's what strategy looks like and here you can improve it. Or your thoughts seemed all over the place on that. Not you are stupid. Right. And so there's a framework I always like. Situation, behavior, outcome. What was the situation? What was the behavior? What was the outcome? And I always say, why was the outcome bad for you? Right. I think that's what really hits people. Like, why is the outcome? Hey, on the call, when you constantly have 10 seconds of silence after the client asks a question, I'm really worried they don't know what you're talking about. What I know is that you're someone that's cerebral and needs to think through things. So like, let's talk about a crutch word that you can answer with to buy you the time to do that. So again, I think cardinal rules of feedback do not talk about the behavior, the action, do it quickly. I like the rule of 72 hours or you're not allowed to say it because is there anything worse than six months later walking into a performance review and hearing a whole bunch of grievances from five or six months ago. If, if it's about getting better, then you should be telling the people in real time. You should not be saving up a list of things that annoyed you kind of three to six months ago. So that's, that's the, the, the giving side. Equally as bad, I think is the receiving side, which is, you know, leaders making the psychological safety in the organization. People can see that they can speak truth to power, they can say things. And if someone comes to you with feedback as a leader, I say you have one chance to demonstrate that you're kind of willing to hear it. And the next time they'll just go to everyone else and tell them that rather than you directly. And in that case it's just make it clear that the door is open, that it's welcome. Have people ask you difficult questions in group scenarios and make it clear that that was totally appropriate to do right. People can tell, like with kids, like when you've done something wrong, like you need to be like, that's an awesome question, a tough question. Thank you, Steven. Let me answer that. Two is just listen, don't start. You don't have to agree. Don't start formulating the response in your head. People can see it. They can see you preparing your defense. You know, as they're talking, you take a deep breath in like, yeah, you're like, yeah, just listen. And the last is thank the person and what's clear on this because you're trying to get them to come back with this. You don't have to like it, you don't have to agree with it. But again, and we're all better when emotions are evolved with a 24 hour rule. So it's better to process it, be thoughtful. You can go back to the person, but just thank them. But I just think like making it clear the door is open, listening, thank them. That will just ensure that the feedback loop stays open. And if you don't have people in an organization that are willing to speak truth to power, you're going to make really bad mistakes. You're going to, you know, have all kinds of things that you're going to miss because someone wouldn't raise their hand and be like, this is dumb and we're about to lose our shirt on doing this. And Kim Scott shared a tip on this that I really loved. And if you're not sure whether you're a psychologically safe leader in your next team meeting, ask your team something that they need to do that's completely impossible, like totally impossible, can't be done. Budget, otherwise, whatever, and see if anyone speaks up there has no clothes. Right. Yeah, right, right, right. The emperor has no close tasks. Right. And I was like that. That's a really. I thought that was really smart.

No, I think that is smart. You know, I was thinking too, part of this feedback thing, and this is again, I'm going back to some of the lessons that I've learned after being in business for over 25 years, is being a quality enough leader.

To execute the feedback in the timely fashion. And you mentioned that briefly as you. When you were kind of helping us understand the core of it. What I want to do is maybe pivot a little bit to leadership in the core, in the, in the way that helps a leader understand how to communicate feedback, you know, because I'll give you an example.

Yeah.

Primary example is I have actually done the, the thing where it's six months before I offer one of my, my personal direct reports feedback. So they think they're killing it. I think they suck. We sit down, six months later, they're broken.

This is every, every check in. But. Yeah, yeah.

So I, what I discovered was that that's a leadership issue, not a team member issue.

100% right. You're not. No one should be surprised in a check in. A check in should be the coronation and polishing of things that have already been discussed. If you're walking into check in and your team is blindside, not giving them in the field. Right. Feedback. Yeah.

So for me, it was fear of having the conversation that kept me from having the conversation, so to speak.

Yeah. Most. I would say most common.

Yeah, yeah. So talk to me a little bit about, you know, helping leaders who are, you know, design supposed to be leading teams. What can they do to get themselves out of that predicament?

Everyone doesn't have the conversation because they're fearful. And it's difficult. I'm sure it's happened in history, but in my experience, difficult conversations put off, never become easier. They become more difficult to the point where then you're forced to have them and it's even worse. And it's like, so. So it's bad karma. And look for what happens too is when, when the dam breaks, all the dirty water comes down. For any of us who have been in a relationship or a partner and you sat on something and ate it, you sat on something and ate it. Then it breaks four months down and you go, all the dirty laundry. Please, please write into the show for. To me, if it's ever worked out for you or ended really well, but there's a version of that, I think, that happens in the business side. And so it all comes out and they're like, what, you've been pissed about this for six months and nine months. You didn't tell me, like, we've all seen this movie. So all I can tell you is that the trying to avoid pain only leads to more pain. And I joke that I feel like everyone on my team has a name badge of someone on their team who they just didn't tell the truth to. They didn't give the feedback. It ended up blowing up in their face, spectacularly. Being a disaster kept them up at night. And that is the name that makes them have these difficult conversations earlier and faster.

Yeah, No, I think that's great. And I think one of the things that I had to do as a leader is we use personality tools disc like that. One of the things that I did that I now have my leaders do is before we have the difficult conversation, they have to do two exercises. Exercise number one is definitively define the problem that needs correcting.

Yeah.

As well as the things that are tied to it that the person's already doing well. So they can actually build a sandwich conversation.

Yeah.

The second thing that they've got to do is they have to go back through this, their personality tool assessment of that team member. And in this one, there's a specific page that says how to communicate with.

Yeah, awesome.

And it's their goal to communicate not in whatever the leadership style is, but in the way the team member style is so they can receive the information.

It's like a love language. Yeah.

It's exactly what we use it for. Exactly what we use it for. You know, so in that same thing, I mean, for me, it's like part of quality leadership is taking the time to lead, which means before you go have the difficult conversation, you don't wait till the sales call happens and someone explodes. Like, look, we're talking right now, right? That's. That's not necessarily the best time to do that. Rather than, okay, let me pull this apart. What do I need? What is the behavior that needs correcting? You know, have the metrics been communicated well? What are the standards? That kind of thing. And then setting that. That time aside, the other thing that I know you're super passionate about is measuring people by the outcome rather than the input or the hours that they're kind of using for the outcome. So talk to me a little about that.

Yeah. Can I just. I just want to comment on one thing. You Said because I, I, I agreed with 98% of it. There's one thing that I think people constantly is problematic and you said sandwich. And so I think, you know, common known as the S sandwich. I, I think giving balanced feedback and doing everything you're talking about, like say it's a review. Hey, here, here's the things are working, here's things that are not working and they're like, all of that is correct. I think when you really have to give like a real serious conversation, like your job is on the line or this isn't going to work out or otherwise, you don't want to wrap that with like, I've watched in all these trainings and stuff, and the person never realizes that it's serious because the person's trying to wrap it with a happy opening. Like, we've practiced this hundreds of times in training and the way you start a conversation where someone's job is on the line is we're about to have a really difficult conversation and we can discuss, but I need you to, I need you to listen. I think way too many leaders when they have, they miss the message they're trying to deliver because they try to wrap it in a bow on either end.

Yeah, no, I actually 100% agree with that.

Yeah.

I think the one thing that we try to do is we try to, we try to, if we're, if we're going to have that same difficult conversation, we're going to, we're going to press the point that this, this needs to improve now.

Yes.

We're also, in the event that they don't improve, we're going to send them out with grace.

Yeah.

We're not going to hurt them or totally.

Yeah. I mean, that's a whole different discussion on, on how you exit people. But yeah. When I can't tell you the number of times when I've heard that people, I had the conversation with Stephen, then you talk to Stephen. The two people are not on the same page. So it's also after this, really good to follow up with an email or make sure that that person understood what's. If you have a conversation where someone's job is on the line and they're not clear about that, that that is your fault. Yeah, yeah.

No, you're right. But the other thing that we did specifically that I think helped us drive the seriousness home is we'll have one verbal conversation with no directive writing down of what happened, no performance improvement plan or whatever. Everything else after that is a documented competition and. Right. And they can they can sign I agree to this. I mean I agree with the, you know, kind of the challenge or they can say I disagree, but you're still signing the document that we had.

So there's no ambiguity. Yeah.

And that alone has called or has saved me hours and hours and hours of additional post frustration for exiting a team member. Let's go and talk about exiting a team member because that's, that's a reality of business.

Yeah.

Right. So what is the right way to assess and do it versus not?

Yeah. So we had a very unique process around this. We used to call it mindful transition and then we called it our career engagement program. But we actually just believed in very early on having conversations with people and giving them options and saying that we had a policy that said, look, if you ever come to us and tell us it's not working or you have questions or otherwise, you will never be walked to the door. Like, we're a client service business. We would rather have you transition out. We'd rather have you find a new job, like if it's not the right fit. So we try to make it safe for people to talk about problems on their side. And then conversely, we tried to give our leaders the ability to have the same conversations and say, Steven, like, like love you. Like, great. But like you've missed quota for 2 3rd, 3/4 in a row. Like this isn't. Continue. Are you sure you want to do this? Do you want to be in sales? Like, is there something else we could look for you? Is it, should we start a transition? Which means, you know, we'll give you 90 days to go find a new job and do this because we'd rather do that openly than get surprised with two weeks notice. And look, people aren't going to work for we, we, we have this operating system around. Like people are going to work forever and they work for like 14 months at most at like the same place these days. So the, the, the, even at the top companies it's like 18 months. So I actually think just changing this whole. Stop getting so offended when people leave. I get offended when people leave and they leave with two days notice and the whole thing after we've given them every opportunity to have a real discussion because that violates our core value of own it. You haven't owned it. But people aren't going to stay forever and we need to change the taboo around that and that you're pissed at them for leaving. And it's a small world. And in our world they go out and they Hire us and all that stuff. So we really try to have this kind of open. We call it an open transition policy where managers can start discussions that have long and employees can start discussions and know that they won't have forever, but they'll have some time and our support to figure out what they want to do next.

Yeah, no, I really like that. In fact, we've, I've had a couple situations where we were able to place someone that just wasn't working out for our business and it was better for them and us. They ended up, they ended up sending us future business because we transitioned them out.

Well, yeah.

Which I think is pretty interesting. The other thing that comes to mind as I'm kind of thinking through that is, you know, as you're kind of working with these, the various, the various teams is how are you training your leaders? Are you just sending them back to the core values themselves and saying, look, if this is, this is our, this is our out of bounds marker. Like as long as you stay within these lanes, you know, with core values being kind of being like the boundary lanes of the highway, if you will, we're good. But even if the leader steps out of bounds, but yet is maybe throwing the, the team member under the bus or kind of covering their high knee, how do you uncover, disclose and kind of work through something like that? Because I see that a lot in smaller organizations you have a lot of leaders that aren't, that aren't super successful at leading and as a result they, they use and abuse people, unfortunately.

Yeah, I mean, it's a multifaceted question. So I think a couple things. One, some people shouldn't lead, they don't want to lead. They're great individual contributors. The organization has signaled that you can't get more responsibility or seniority or pay without becoming a leader. So they become a leader. So it's not what they want to do. So first of all, give those people a rip cord to come back and become rockstar engineers, salespeople, marketing task people without having to manage a team. Because when you become a leader, your reward center has to totally change from. It's about you getting patted on the back for what you did and delivered to. It's about your team and how well your team does and that's kind of reflective on you. So. And then again, I think leadership training is, yes, it's around the values, it's tactical. We just did a whole thing with our top 15 up and coming leaders. It was on these assessments, understanding their why, understanding their values, understanding communication, styles, communication is 95% of all problems. Right. So understanding a lot. How do you communicate, knowing where you are or otherwise and pulling all these situations and saying, let's examine this. Like, and again, let's look at these assessments in these things, and maybe you'll understand why you and this person are like, you know, this on everything. You know, how do you approach all of this from your. Your strengths? So I think it's a combination of kind of the hard and soft skills, and obviously, like, if you have a clear culture and core values, yes, people understand that, that those are the. That those are the bright lines. But. And then there's very tactical stuff. How do you have a difficult conversation? You know, we try to figure out what are the things that most leaders struggle with. And, you know, it's usually difficult. New leaders, it's. It's delegation and difficult conversations. Right? So people will spe those groups around what they learn, what their best practices are. Like, I tell everyone the stages of delegation. It's. You go from overwhelmed to giving everything to everyone with no instruction, to them not doing it how you like it to. You taking it all back and saying, no one can do it how you like it.

Like, like, like, it's like you're reading my mind.

Delegation is more work up front. It's twice the amount of work up front. It's not here. Take all this and figure it out. Like so. But everyone's seen this movie, and I think, you know, particularly new managers really need training and case studies and leaders sitting down and explaining that stuff to them.

No, I think that's awesome. The other thing, too, is there was a statistic done that's probably four or five years ago. It's been a little bit now prior to Covid that talked about the dollar amounts and how dollar amounts of teams change over time. So from zero to your first million, you can keep about 90% of your team in place. Yeah, from zero, from a million to 10 million, you lose about. I think another. I think you lose 30%. Replacing 30% by the time you get up to the $50 million mark or you know or above, you've gone through 98% of your entire team has completely changed.

That's probably right. And I heard, I heard every time you double your business, you break half your people and half your processes.

Ooh, I like the way.

And look, it's not. The problem is it's not that those people couldn't.

Grow with the business. It's that they have to understand that what got them there, what Got them there, won't get them there, right. Or what got you here, we'll get you there. It's they, you can't be the same type of person, leader, whatever at a million dollar business to a $50 million business. So if you want, and look the folks like Mark Zuckerberg and whatever you might think of them, I mean to go from startup to public company, CEO means reinventing yourself a hundred times over, right. You cannot do the same thing, execute the same playbook. So that's what it requires. But people really struggle with change, you know, and so I, I, some people want to do that and they want to qualify to be the leader of the company and do all of that and, and others frankly are better being honest and saying, I love being the, the, the, the man or woman that takes you from 5 to 25. And I just, I do that and then I go back down, I do it again because I love doing that. I, to me there's no right or wrong answer. You just have to actually understand what you want. If you want to try to change yourself totally and go from a, you know, 1 million revenue controller to 100 million, anyone can do that. The question is, do you want to do that? It's a totally different, yeah, totally different job.

Yeah. Well, I think it comes down to two things, right? It comes down to does the person have the capacity to want to get better? So that's on them. And then you also have the, the flip side of that is does the company have the ability and provide education and things of that nature to get them there? I know for us going from the 40 million dollar mark with one of my businesses, the 80 million, those two things were, were key focuses. So we had to come up with an assessment, if you will, of okay, well, does the person have or the capacity and, or desire to want to become. You know they, because you, on paper everybody's like yeah, I want to make more money, I want more opportunity. But then it's, are they reading the books, are they going to the seminars, are they doing the leadership trainings? Are they doing the work? Like how are they executing and showing us.

Yeah, traction had this framework gwc get it, wanted have the capacity to do it. I always, I always liked that nomenclature. Yeah.

Well the other thing too is one thing I love about elevate your team is I find, and I was excited about this conversation is most entrepreneurs struggle with their businesses because they don't know any better in a variety of different ways. And one of those things is the team piece Right. So there's one of the things I love about this book is it is a, a fairly sophisticated, well, it's easy to understand, but sophisticated roadmap and how to execute and build a great team.

Yeah.

You know, so talk to me a little bit about maybe as we're kind of wrapping up here, what are the top three things that everybody should do outside of go grab the book right now so they can actually put it in place. What are the top three things if a leader, a leader struggling to kind of get a stabilized team, they should do right now?

Yeah. So the first is I would take an inventory of your organization and figure out, you know, who are your rising stars, who are the five or ten people that you can't afford to lose and that you need to invest in and, and, and, and sort of you want to focus on them. So that's, that, that's one, two. I, look, I would go, I, I would start making your culture a learning culture. You know, in some way it's so you could have a podcast club, a book club. We're going to discuss this. Someone's going to present a case study. Like they, they, you can just tell when companies are about learning. Like just kind of inject education, like easy thing to do. I mean again I say podcast clubs are free. Like you know, people listen to a 40%, 40 minute podcast and then we're going to discuss it and we're going to come together. So show people that you're about learning and you can go from complicated leadership, off site training to just a podcast club. So I think those are the first two. I, I think the thing that any organization could, could benefit from is, is getting clarity around for everyone. What are our values? What are our top priorities? What are our three strategic priorities? Getting alignment around a few things and a few outcomes and a few KPIs. When I walk into an organization and I say like what is it that you guys are? What's, what are you trying to do this year? And everyone's got different answers and they're all over the place versus someone says our three objectives for the year, which we review every quarter with a red light, green light system and which drive. Our quarterly objectives are double our market share to X, launch new program of Y and receive a feedback score. There's no way that the first organization is outperforming the latter. Like in those organizations people know what's most important, what's expected to them and what good and bad looks like. So I think for a lot it's beyond just KPIs. It's. It's. If you don't have the. And three is a good number. If you don't have clear strategic priorities and objectives around what you've communicated to your business, around what a good year looks like. It's kind of like going to a basketball game and not. There's no scoreboard.

Yeah.

There's no clock. There's no score. Everyone's like, this is great. But, like, when are we leaving? When do we win? Do we lose? Like, I. I don't. I don't understand.

Yeah, no, that's very true. Well, dude, man, I love the conversation. I do want to help everybody. Make sure they go get a copy of Elevate your team.

Thank you very much.

Enjoyed a lot of the content and myself. It's, It's. It's reminded me of a few things and helped me reposition a few other things. So I even. I'm, you know, as a constant learner myself. I'm loving it myself. Where can everybody find out more about you? The book and all the good stuff?

Yeah. So all my stuff, including my Friday Forward newsletter, which goes to about 100,000 leaders each week, is at a www.robertglaser.com. so you get the books there, Glazer, so you can get the books there. Podcast and newsletter, kind of everything all in one place.

Love it, dude. Thank you so much for coming on.

Thanks, Stephen. I take care.

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