Why EXTREME OWNERSHIP Is The Secret To SUCCESS! | Peter Kozodoy

I also realized, Stephen, is that they had knocked me back into a second best version of myself. I'd begun thinking, well, I'm not going to be first best Peter. So I guess I'm going to be this other guy. And 30 really snapped me out of that, Made me realize that there were really big goals that defined who I am. And I talk about that in the book. If you're going to be honest, start with who, not with why, not with what, not with how, but with whom you are. And that's, that's the alignment part.

Welcome to Stuck to Unstoppable, where we interview the world's foremost thought leaders to break things down in order to help you get past your hurts, habits and hang ups and finally level up and move forward. I'm your host, Stephen Scoggins. Now let's go ahead and get into today's guest and our featured conversation. You're not going to want to miss it.

From the depths of 2008, our special guest today co founded and built an Inc. 5000 marketing agency and then went on to work with startups, Fortune 500 companies and the automotive industry, along with Warren Buffett as a national and international speaker. Peter Kozadoi's newest book, Honest to Greatness, is flying off bookshelves and is a must read for 2020, where he actually shares how using brutal honesty in life and business is one of the key factors in success and overall scalability. If you're honestly ready to take your business or your life to the next level, you, you're going to have to enjoy the show and help me welcome Peter Kozadoy. Peter, what's going on, man? How you doing, dude?

Doing well, man. Thanks for having me. Appreciate it.

Oh, man, I'm loving it. You know, honest to greatness, man. I mentioned the book a little bit in the intro, but, you know, I've had my chance to kind of get, get my arms around it a little bit. And I have to, I have to say I love the fact of the term brutal honesty.

Thank you.

Because I find out that, you know, so many people tiptoe around things and as a result it probably, I know for me as an entrepreneur of over 20 years myself of multiple companies, anytime I've tiptoed around a problem, it's caused me more problems rather than facing it. How did you.

It does more harm than good.

It does. How did you actually come up with the term? What made you decide to write this particular book on this particular subject?

You know, Stephen, that's the great thing about Writing, you know, and speaking about honesty is I get to be honest. So to be honest, I never set out to write about, speak about her frankly, even care about honesty. I really didn't. You know, out of the many failures and successes and mostly failures that I had, you know, to date, I was always frustrated by what I was seeing out there in the business world. And I sat down to write what I thought was a marketing book, okay. And I queried 400 literary agents, 400. Many of whom never got back to me. Some of whom did get back to me and said, please never email me again. This sucks. You'll never be an author. Three of them took a meeting and one of them signed me. And as soon as he signed me, he was like, you know, this is great, Peter, but this is not a book about marketing. It's a book about honesty. And I said, well, clearly I've signed with the only literary agent who can't read, because it has nothing to do with honesty. Like, what are you talking about? And of course, as I went home and was thinking about it, I was like, okay, he's absolutely right. This is much bigger than how do we communicate as a company? It's really, how do we communicate as people? What do we believe about. About ourselves, about society? Is honesty the best policy? What are we seeing in this new transparency that is the 21st century? And so it ended up being a much bigger topic. Now, the irony of this, Stephen, is if you had known me in, like, high school or my early 20s, I was voted, like, most likely to continue being a jerk. For me to talk about honesty and transparency and vulnerability and all that happy horse crap like, this should be shocking to anyone who has known me.

But.

But I like to say, like, if I can figure out the power of this stuff, then truly anyone can.

Yeah. You know, one thing good thing is about that I find really clever about your book is it actually gives a lot of real world examples. You know, one of the first of which is obviously Elizabeth from Theranos, who created the. The only major medical breakthrough that actually never happened, that never was.

Yeah, yeah.

So walk us through a little bit about what that experience taught you about honesty and why you decided to include that. That story or one of the stories.

Yeah. You know what's funny is that the first chapter of the book is called Fraud is Our Fault, and it talks about the power of herd mentality and the personal responsibility that we have towards honesty, towards not just our truth, but the actual truth. Right. Like the objective reality or as close as we can agree to it. And originally that chapter was at the end and it was my editor who was like, no, we need to illustrate for people right up front what can happen if we ignore honesty, if we just sort of float along with our own assumptions, Right? And so what happened with Theranos for people who don't know? I mean, Elizabeth Holmes swindled very smart, supposedly smart people out of hundreds of millions and billions of dollars. I mean, should have never happened, right? But if you look at, say, well, most of the constructs in our society, but venture capital being one of them, the whole idea is that they all wait and do nothing until one person takes the lead investment role and takes the brunt of the risk. And then everyone else says, oh, well, that person jumped in, so let's jump in too. Like, never mind the independent due diligence, nevermind. This is like the classic case of how do we be a leader in our space by following everyone else. That makes no sense. And yet I've seen it, Stephen, over and over and over again. And those kinds of dishonesty, right, that kind of, those kinds of lives, they are what can lead all of us astray, both in business and in our personal lives. So, you know, those are fun cautionary tales for everyone to take stock of right up front.

Well, you know, it's funny thing, you know, a lot of the listeners that we have are all, you know, are in, in business in some way, shape or form. Either they're working for an entrepreneur or they are the entrepreneur. And I can tell you after, you know, 20, gosh, 22 years of being an entrepreneur myself, one of the things that I've discovered is that sense of responsibility and accountability. And I find that some of the greatest lies that we tell ourselves as entrepreneurs or trying to lead people, matter of fact, is actually that we somehow have all the answers. But what I've heard you say or illustrate in many respects is actually the best thing you can possibly do is just be straight up honest. Because the truth always finds you out.

It does. I mean, it's going to find you eventually, you know, and those you know, I call it being out of honest alignment. You know, when you get out of honest alignment, who you, you know, really are, what you really want, what it really takes to get there, that's that feeling in our gut that's like something's not quite right. I've had that so many times. Steven didn't know what it was. And then to recognize it is to do something about it, right? Like, oh, I am lying to Others myself, about what success looks like, about what makes me happy, you know, on and on and on. And this is the wonderful gift that entrepreneurs have, but then they don't exercise it. Or like we have the gift of choice and freedom. We get to choose what we actually want. And then so many of us get boxed into what our spouses want, what our employees want, what our suppliers want, what our mother wanted for us. Like, you know, all sorts of stuff.

Yeah. So tell me this, what do you think prevents people from just taking ownership and go ahead and sticking their, Sticking their truth out there? Let's put it that way, sticking their truth out there. What do you think prevents them?

Straight up fear. That's one of the number one questions I get asked off of keynote presentations. It's like, how do you actually get over the fear of people won't like me, I'm not good enough, all that stuff. And I came to that around, you know, my crisis of turning 30, which was like horrendous for me. I don't know why. I mean, I'd built a million dollar company, just gotten married, my wife and I are flipping a house, should have been happy, but I just wasn't. And, you know, I realized that I had had two massive failures as a teenager. You know, one being denied a chance at the Olympics as a figure skater and the other not getting into Harvard. And they were devastating. Like, that was my life track. And I was like, pushed off course and it was devastating. And I'd carried that with me through my 20s. Now, they were great fuel for building a company. Right. Started my first company at 22, out of college, went tens of thousands in debt not knowing anything, and then eventually grew that because I had those chips on my shoulder. But what I also realized, Stephen, is that they had knocked me back into a second best version of myself.

Okay.

I had begun thinking, well, I'm not going to be first best, Peter, so I guess I'm going to be this other guy. And 30 really snapped me out of that and made me realize that there were really big goals that defined who I am. And I talk about that in the book, if you're going to be honest. Start with who, not with why, not with what, not with how, but with who you are. And that's, that's the alignment part. So when I, you know, looked around at my life, there were things missing. Right. I am someone with an Ivy League mba. But that wasn't true. I had to go rectify that. Right. I am an author. Well, I didn't have A book. I needed to rectify that. And I always thought about it in terms of what's going to be honestly important to me at 83. Like when I look back, am I going to say to myself, it's a good thing I let fear overcome me and didn't go for any of those big goals? Like, no, that never. That's never a thought. Right. Not 83, but I'd be surprised if an 83 year old said that. And instead I took the opposite tact that. I mean, I was 30. Right. And no matter what age you are, there are things that are going to put you back into honest alignment with who you really are. You fight them at your own peril, because that's a fight you're going to have forever. Or we can give in and go start that business, restructure that marriage, you know, put that kid into rehab that you know is a drug problem. Like all these talk about. Brutal, right?

Yeah, for sure.

But. But nothing great can change unless the foundation is being honest with who you are and what you really want in life. Yeah.

So I mean, essentially, correct me if I'm wrong, but essentially this is the concept of the hall of Two Truths that you, that you speak about a lot in the book.

You did your homework.

Well, again, the book you've written, everyone needs to read. I believe every entrepreneur on the planet needs to read it. I believe it's timely. I believe that there have been far too many Bernie Madoffs and there have been far too many overnight billionaires that have swindled their way to billion hood. I believe there's far too many entrepreneurs who are scared to fire team members simply because they don't want the team member to know they don't. I mean, there's not acing this dude is it's costing entrepreneurs their entire business structure. Not being honest with their spouse, not being honest with their family, not being honest with themselves. You know, and essentially all of these different parts and pieces make up who we are as entrepreneurs and business owners and as one yourself. I mean, you face some of these things. It's, you know, one thing about entrepreneurship is you're going to face struggles and you're going to face many opportunities to tell the truth and be brutally honest or kind of be kind of honest and. Or just be dishonest altogether. So break down the hall of Two Truths just in general for the audience to understand.

Yeah, sure. No, in the book I thought it was important to really take people back to understand like how has society gotten to where gotten to in Ancient Egypt. Imagine that you just came out of the market, right? And you're carrying some sacks of flour over your shoulders, and you come outside and you get hit by the blinding sun of the desert, and you trip over the stone steps in front of you and go ass over tea kettle into this bucket of just really hard melons, right? That's the new tweakable moment, by the way. What's that?

That's a new tweetable moment, by the way.

That's it. Ass over tea kettle is one of my favorites. You know, you split your skull open, brains everywhere, and boom, you're dead. Right? Well, in ancient Egypt, what would happen is you'd be instantly transported to the hall of Two Truths. And in the hall would be a scale. On one side of the scale would be the feather of Ma', at, who's the goddess of truth. Basically, a pious life. Right. Were you an honest, good human being. And on the other end would be your heart, like your actual cardiac organ.

Yeah.

And the idea was, if your heart balanced out with the feather of truth, then you were allowed into the afterlife. Now, in ancient Egypt, the entire society was built towards the idea of an afterl getting in versus being denied. And of course, if your heart was heavier than the feather, then it would be devoured by this crocodile God named Amit and you would be dead. Right? No Vegas style after party for you. So what happened with the Amun priests in the later parts of the Egyptian dynasties was that they got wise to this and they decided that they had an opportunity to sell what basically amounts to a Disney fast pass into the afterlife. And the way they did it was they had these ancient scrolls and they said, look, your odds of getting into the afterlife are much better if you have these specific incantations that are customized to you. That'll only be 30 shekels, please. And so what happened was we started to pervert this idea of truth and profits, right? Of honesty and money. And we started to allow society, started to enable folks to lie, cheat, and steal and. And then at the end of their lives, you know, pay a couple shekels here and there, and voila, everything's fine. By the way, the Roman Catholic Church did this like it's happened throughout history. I tell some of those stories, and what. What we all need to realize now is that we are in a fundamentally different time. And the. The phrase for this is information asymmetry. Right. It used to be before those Amun priests knew something that we didn't. Now everyone's walking around with One of these, right. Someone somewhere is recording what's really happening. The truth comes out. We have that phrase in the English language for a reason. And in that world going forward, my biggest thesis is that it will no longer pay to do anything but be honest and transparent. And we're seeing that shift now.

Yeah, for sure. Especially in the, in the field of thought leadership. You know, there's a lot of, gosh, you think about five or six years ago it was a big push on who's the next guru. And obviously gurus have a, at least, and I'm speaking metaphorically, gurus have a sense of they have a shiny new thing that they're trying to teach a new thing and they're trying to get people excited and people buy the new thing, they excited about the new thing, and then they find out the new thing is not actually the new thing after all, or it's not going to help them in any way, shape or form. And I think, you know, one of the things I think your book is so timely is because I think people need less gurus and more guides. And guys typically have the history and the experience to actually say, hey, look, not only have I been where you are, but here are the steps to go from where you are to where I am. Walk with me. You know, And I find that that's such a timely message for so many people because I think in the world that we're in today, there is more dishonesty looming around us than honesty. And it seems like the honesty style of thing is an outlier where it seems like you're trying to create a movement of bringing in, hey, look, here's the strength that honesty brings and here's the risk that dishonesty brings.

That's right. That's what I want people to see. The risk, reward. And that's why in the first chapter of part two, I tell the story of Charlotte McCourt, the 11 year old girl Scout who like any other girl Scout, wants to sell some girl scout cookies, right? She's a little capitalist like the rest of us, right? And so she asked her dad, hey, like, you know, who can buy some cookies? Who do you know has got money? He says, well, I mean, a friend of mine's a venture capitalist. Why don't you check him out? She goes, yeah, great money, awesome. But she didn't just knock on his door. What's that?

A qualified lead?

Yeah, exactly. Sales qualified lead. Right. And she, you know, she doesn't just knock on his door and say, hey, do you want to Buy some, you know, Samoas. Instead, she writes him a letter because at 11 she is frustrated with the amount of what she calls false advertising out there in the world. Pretty perceptive, little girl. So she writes a letter to him and says, look, sometimes the Girl Scouts of America can use false advertising. By the way, I did reach out to the Girl Scouts of America for comment. They did not have one.

And she says, you know, I want to be honest with you, right. You're my customer. So here's a rating scale of all the cookies and the ones that are good and bad, right? She rates some a 10 or an 11 even. And she rates some a 1 or even a 0. She called 1 kind of cookie a gluten free wasteland. Right. She avoided at all costs. Good little writer. The thing is, with that kind of brutal honesty, it made people laugh, right? It made people buy cookies. But most importantly, it made them share the letter because it was so refreshing. We have that phrase in the English language too. Refreshingly honest. And as the letter got shared, big name people started to pick it up. Mike Rowe found it, sent it out to his 10 million followers. The national news found it. She ends up on CBS Sunday Morning. Charlotte sold 30,000 boxes of girl Scout cookies. Now, you can't do that, Stephen, unless you are willing to be brutally honest. Right. That's the power of that and the opportunity cost we lose when we don't do what's. What's right and what's true.

I totally agree with you. You know, you have this other interesting concept in the book that I took a lot from. It's called the Hourglass of honesty.

Yeah.

So break that down for everybody because I think, I think there's a lot of insight in there for everyone to understand how to shift from maybe a dishonest kind of mindset to more of a brutally honest, brutally honest kind of mindset.

Sure. Yeah. And this came out of, you know, both my personal struggles with honesty and also seeing it play out in the. You know, we worked with startups to Fortune 500s and I was fascinated that there wasn't a way to sort of codify this. Right. It's like if honesty is the best policy that must work universally and if so, how. You know, I became fascinated with this as I was doing all this research and interviews and writing. And eventually I came up with a triangle shape. Right. And stratified honesty into three levels. The first is getting honest with what I call the community. Right. In other words, what's going on in society, you know, what's going on in our industry. There are consumer tastes and preferences that are changing. Right. That's what Blockbuster missed when Netflix, with Netflix, right, there are, you know, there's gender discrimination, there's racial bias. We used to have two genders. Now we have 18. Like, all these things are going away. We're in the middle of a pandemic. We don't have to like them or dislike them, but we do have to acknowledge that these things are happening. Right?

Yeah.

We cannot put our heads in the sand and expect it all to go away. You know, by the way, we can all name folks and businesses and leaders, I use that term loosely, who have ignored what's going on at the level of the community or how the industry is changing. Right. At their own peril. We can't do it. We need to be honest. This is what's happening. The second level is being honest with and about the others around us. Now, this is a very important distinction. Sometimes we need to be honest with people. Right. Back in 2009, the CEO of Domino's Pizza came on TV and said, well, America, I'm sorry, but our pizza is terrible. Our customers said so, and you deserve better, and we're going to fix it. And they did. You know, if you had seen that they were being brutally honest with their customers and had bought their stock, Stephen, you would have had a 3,000% return over the next 10 years.

Well, the interesting Domino's is when they did. I remember when they first launched that new campaign about, call it brutal honesty. They actually showed pictures of their. Their pizzas delivered in a messy box, toppings missing a line everywhere.

The.

The Domino's guy showing up with, you know, his Domino's, I guess, apparel kind of untucked and all that kind of stuff. I mean, they really. They really did a really good job of owning it. They really did.

Of course.

And.

And what happens, you know, why does that work? Well, if. If you do something bad and then I'm upset with you, you're going to come to me and say, peter, I'm really sorry. Clearly I messed up. These are the steps I'm taking to fix am I going to do. I'm not going to kick you while you're down. Right. Mostly people say, you know what? I respect that. And that's exactly what Domino's customers did and rewarded them for it. Now, that's something that we always need to keep in mind. Sometimes we need to level with people. Other times we need to be honest about the others around us, about their biases, their fears. Their self limiting beliefs, their ego. Interestingly, you know, the interesting part of the domino story is that the chief marketing officer had all this data and he knew he needed to push it through the executive team to get the CEO on TV in the first place. Right. What he did, very clever. He got honest about these executives. He went around and polled them. What do you think of the pizza? What do you think of these marketing ideas? And so what he was able to do was compare the data sets and said, well, you said their pizza is great. 90% of our customers say it sucks. What do you want to do about this? Yeah, very clever. He was honest about them. Right. If he didn't have that empirical data, it would have been your opinion, my opinion, her opinion. Right. So, you know, this is where we need to get honest about others. And this is why brutal honesty does not mean just going out and offending people. Doesn't mean sharing whatever on your mind. That is not what brutal strategic honesty is. Right?

Yeah.

It's getting honest with and about the others empathetically. Right. And the third level, Steven's getting honest with and about the self. Right. Their own biases and self limiting beliefs and assumptions. As leaders, I've worked with hundreds of entrepreneurs helping them grow million dollar companies.

Yeah.

99% of business problems are personal problems in disguise. It is a bias or an assumption that's locked up and it forms the foundation of their entire operating system. And it's not even true. And those are the most harmful and subsequently most impactful kind of changes that entrepreneurs can make. Not how do I systemize my business or how do I sell more. None of that is as impactful as is that kind of core work. Now, interestingly. Sorry, go ahead.

No, I was going to say I apologize, mean to cut you off. I was just thinking as I was looking at the hourglass of honesty, I'm curious and just that this is a kind of offshoot question. Why not start with self and then bleed in the community rather than community and bleeding the self?

That's a great question. So. And I've gotten that plenty of times. So that's what I asked myself too. I kept asking myself like what comes first? Right. And here's where I got to. And then I'll show you why. It's an hourglass. Right. If you're getting honest with yourself, right. About who you are, what you want, what it's going to take to get there. Very different if you're an ancient Egyptian living in 2000 BCE or someone living in 2020.

Okay.

Context matters. So we operate in an environment. We operate as a function of the people around us. Our parents or siblings, our business partners, our kids, whatever. And then we operate in ourselves. And so to your point, it's a sort of feedback loop, right. As you descend those levels, you realize more about the people around you, you realize more about your environment, and so on and so forth. What's. What surprised me, Steven, you know, I had stopped there, right? I was like, oh, three levels, awesome. It's a journey inward. What I didn't realize was that there's a whole second half to this. And that's why it's an hourglass. Because here's. Here's the thing. Once you get honest about the community, right, and you get honest with and about the others around you, and you get brutally honest with yourself, essentially you're a different person. Yeah, like, honest Steven is a very different person than dishonest even. Honest Steven has different hopes, dreams, likes, fears, aspirations, desires. Right. And what happens is once you're a fundamentally different person, the honest you, you naturally change the others around you. You start to come back out the other side. You begin to mold your friend group, your family group, your employees, the kind of clients you want to work with. And by changing the others around you, that's how you're able to influence the community to achieve the kind of game changing, wildly profitable results that I talk about in the book. I mean, I want to be clear, this is. I was very, you know, pleased and honored. The book premiered as number one new release on Amazon in a couple categories. Business ethics was one of them. Look, I think people should be ethical. I think they should be nice and kind and all that crap. That's not what this book is about. This book is about how to achieve results in your life and business. How to make shit tons of money in a society that is brutally transparent. And the way I have been surprised, as anyone, to learn is by weaponizing honesty. And that hourglass is the codification of that.

Yeah, I mean, all right, so let's take a step further. Let's take the hourglass of honesty and let's move it back to more of a positioning of a business structure that bleeds right over to another concept that you share in the book, which is referred to as the waterfall of culture. From the executives and working your way down, explain how this can radically alter, radically shift any business endeavor.

To its betterment.

That's huge. So let's talk about a company that just came public called Rocket Companies. Right? Stock symbols, rkt. That's essentially the parent company of Quicken Loans. Everyone's sort of Quicken Loans and Rocket Mortgage, right? Push button, get mortgage. Seems simple. The question is, Quicken Loans was, before it just came public, it was a private company headquartered in Detroit. It was a fraction of the size of Wells Fargo, bank of America, all these other bigger mortgage providers. How in the world did it come out of Nowhere to capture 90 something percent of the mortgage market ahead of all those big publicly traded companies? That should never happen on a resource basis alone. Right?

Yeah, sure.

So what was it? Well, if you look into Quicken Loans, they have what are called isms. It's their culture code. They believe things like, it's not about what's right. I'm sorry, it's not about who's right, it's about what's right. Yeah, and say yes before no. There's a video on YouTube where this employee says, you know, she had this great idea. She came to a manager and she was like, hey, you know, this is a great idea. I think we should do it. And he cut her off. He wouldn't even let her finish. Rude, right? He says, listen, yeah, could be a good idea, could be a bad idea. I have no idea. Why don't you go, you know, grab a couple team members, go try it, let me know how it goes. Yeah, that's their entire culture, right? Their managers are coaches. They're there to say, hey, what do you need? What great ideas do you have that you want to execute today? How can I provide you all the resources to make sure that happens? So that when someone said, hey, how come we have to kill a tree every time we want to get a mortgage? Why can't we just like go on our phone that knows who we are and click a couple buttons? And they were like, I guess it sounds cool, I don't know. Hey, listen, grab a team, go build it, let's see if it works and see if people like it. Of course, a company that is intent on that kind of mindset would engineer Rocket Mortgage, right? Of course they would be the ones to do that. And I'm looking forward to what they do now because while all of those other bigger banks, their managers are gatekeepers, right? They're trying to push their ideas down to prove their self worth, do all that Rocket, you know, Rocket companies doing the opposite. The Ritz Carlton is doing the opposite. They're honest about who are the real leaders here. And it's not the executives in an office who knows where, it's the people on the Front lines. They are the ones who are empowered to lead the company and achieve its mission. I don't know if you know this, Stephen, but at the Ritz Carlton, every employee is given up to $2,000 to spend on a customer experience. They do not need to get approvals, permission, nothing. It's like, hey, this is your customer. You're the boss. You're on the front line here. If you need to do something for your customer, go for it. Totally different. So much trust, right? Yeah.

So I've had the pleasure and honor, obviously, of staying at the Ritz Carlton a few times at a couple of different places, been very blessed and fortunate in life. And one of the things that their culture, to your point, when I was reading about that in the book, one of the things that I picked up on very quick is I was actually imagining myself going up to the concierge desk, the check in desk, and the person coming out from behind the counter grabbing my luggage with me. And rather than calling a bellhop to come over, they grab my luggage and they say, follow me. Mr. Scoggins, is everything okay? Mr. Scoggins, hey, by the way, this is Kathy over here. And Kathy's works are at concierge desk. And we understand that you like to do a scuba dive. Like, how'd you find that out? Oh, well, we messaged your wife. Like, they take it to a whole nother level. And then I stumbled across this thing. I think it was Martin Gerber. I think it was. And I think it was the ebook or e Myth where he said that their terminology is, we are ladies and gentlemen, serving ladies and gentlemen.

That's right.

And they take it to a whole nother level. Once you experience that, it made so much more sense. Because I'm glad you. Actually, I didn't know that they did the whole $2,000 thing.

Yep.

And the reason I. The reason it makes sense is because my wife and I, the last time we were at a Ritz Carlton, we were in Maui, Hawaii, at the one end of the island. And we were going to do something in regards to a catamaran. They had to cancel the trip at the last minute. And they basically paid for our dinner at two different restaurants in their hotel gratuities and everything.

Amazing. The thing is, it's not that hard. Right. It just took them saying.

Who'S the important thing here? Like, who are the leaders here? And it's those frontline employees. So different than the way that most companies treat their frontline employees, which is the bottom I show in the Book how that whole model has inverted the whole pyramid structure. It's reversed. The people at the top now are the frontline employees. I tell you, Stephen, I've done a lot of focus groups and surveys for companies over the years. Every time I go into a frontline employee brainstorming session, they always know 90 minutes, they'll solve any problem you give them. Right. Then the real challenge is how do we get it past all the gatekeepers. And that's so sad and it's so dishonest, it's unbelievable.

It also cost a company their scalability, in my opinion.

Not only that, it costs them those key employees. Because who wants to work in a culture like that, right? Where they come up with the solution and nobody wants to hear them. Yeah, people don't need that anymore. They can go work on the beach in Cancun from their laptop. Right. We have more choice than ever before, let's be honest. So it's not about the ping pong table. It's not about how many days off. It's giving people, you know, at the Ritz Carlton who stand by the door the ability to make a real difference in customers lives. That's purpose. That's everything we talk about. Right.

And they do, they do. I mean, my experience there far outweighed any of the hotels that we stayed during our month there in Hawaii. Far outweighed. So I can totally see that for sure. And I'll share this much with you. I mean, part of the reason I'm able to sit here in this conversation with you today is because I have amazing team members that are running my businesses. I didn't get there overnight, but I have to at some point in time. I had to. I was the roadblock for a long time. I had to stop saying every decision that you big decision you make has to come through me. Now it's more like, okay, test it, see how it works out. Here's what, here's how. Maybe how I would do it differently. Maybe let's look at some different options. But for the most part, they're running the day to day operations on a regular basis.

That's great.

Allowing me to have the one thing that most entrepreneurs don't get until some time of maturity, which is freedom. Most entrepreneurs are owned by their businesses, not the other way around, 100%. So tell me this one final question before I let you go, if it's all right with you. And that is what is one thing that you think every single entrepreneur should be doing or using as it relates to bureau Honesty.

I will give you two questions that'll, you know, it literally has the power to change your life. I think everyone should adopt it all day long. And it's this. Is that true? And how do I know? Whether you're watching the nightly news and you see a headline or you see Great Aunt Betty's Facebook post or a thought that comes into your head, just stop and ask, is that actually true? And how do I know? Because so often we react, which is a dishonest habit, by the way, to things that aren't even true in the first place. No wonder we end up in a society with the vitriol that we have today. And it just doesn't have to be that way.

Yeah, for sure. Well, look, I had a. Had a great conversation. I appreciate you taking the time to come on. I know you're a very busy guy. Got this book launch. You're running around like crazy. I'm sure. How can everybody stay in touch with you and find out more about you?

Absolutely. So come have an honest conversation at honest to greatness dot com. That's honest t o greatness dot com. There you can take the free 21 question. Honesty quiz tells you how honest you are. If you're brave enough to know. You also get a free workbook companion. Workbook that goes along with the book. Of course. Buy, you know, honest to Greatness for yourself and your team. I bet a lot of folks say, like, I read this, bought 12 copies because we all need to read this. Which of course warms my heart. That's why I wrote it. Cautionary tale. Just don't hand it to someone with a wink and be like, oh, you really need this one. Like, that's not a way to develop a good relationship. There. Wouldn't do that.

That's brutal honesty, though.

Yeah. You guys have to check this book out for sure. Honest to Greatness. I'm telling you what, Peter, dude, I have enjoyed it. Love the thought leadership here. I love everything you're doing. Can't wait to see where this goes. Something shall be the future New York Times bestseller. I know.

You just.

I know the launch just got started, but I see it well on its way. I really appreciate you taking the time to do this. Not just the book, but also share your insights here on the podcast.

Thank you. Appreciate it. And thanks for being honest.

Awesome. Take care, my friend. Take care.

See you.

I hope you enjoyed that interview with Peter Kozadoy. And if you did, don't forget to check out his book, Honest to Greatness. And in the meantime, make sure you check out this interview right here.

Broken number one. When I was just broken man. When I was 10. My older brother was 12. He got electrocuted. We were home alone, and he died in my arms. I was so broken as a little kid and.