#5 How to Make a Few Billion Dollars | Part 2

When I hire key people, I'm trying to achieve a two part goal, accomplish big things and have fun doing it. There's nothing contradictory about this. When you have the right people in place and if you can do it at scale, you'll have an organization that can pursue big goals. I just read an excerpt from how to Make a Few Billion Dollars by Brad Jacobs. And this is part two and episode five of Uncommon Excellence. And today we are going to be getting into the last half of how to Make a Few Billion Dollars by Brad Jacobs. The link is in the description if you want to buy the book, and this is a great book so far, as you saw in part one. It was a great, fantastic masterclass of how to build your business and how to make a few billion dollars. And real quick, before we get into this, something that I want to point out is I just released my premium feed and if you want to implement these ideas into your own life, join this premium feed. If you want to make a few billion dollars, join this Premium. It's only $5 a month. $5 a month. What you get is you get that my top 10 highlights of every book. You get many podcast episodes and you get all of my detailed podcast notes that I hand make specifically for each podcast episode. And what this does is you can basically supercharge your life and take this to the next step and where you will be one year from now versus today. If you buy this, you'll be so far ahead of your competition that it will go, it will be crazy. And so that's why I really recommend that you buy this premium feed that I've created. This is a journey that I want to go on with you guys. And if you, if you want to take the next step and make that few billion dollars, I will be exploring in depth little ideas that you can implement in your life every single day. And so that's what I ultimately want and that's what I'm going to be doing with this platform. And so that's why I really recommend that. And that link will be in the description down below. Let's get into this. How to Make a Few Billion Dollars by Brad Jacobs. So we left off at the beginning of chapter four and chapter four is how to build an outrageously talented team. So Brad talks about his hiring philosophy and importance. He says striving for perfection in most areas can be counterproductive, but hiring is a non negotiable. You have to aim for perfection there. And I love this quote, he says an empty seat is less damaging than a poor fit. That's insane because when you think about it, you want to strive like striving poor for perfection is really hard to do. And it can be counterproductive if you are hounding on it so much. But hiring is a non negotiable because that is your team, that is who you're working with. And I love what he says here. To create billions of dollars in value, you need to build a team that is smart, hardworking, honest and kind hearted. And he elaborates on these four essential qualities that you need to look for in a, in anyone. And so what he goes through is there's four different things. There's intelligence, hunger, integrity and collegiality. Now intelligence is about problem solving, Problem solving. You want to hire individuals who genuinely enjoy solving problems. You don't want someone that comes in and doesn't know how to solve a problem or gets frustrated when they try to solve a problem that is not going to be the right fit. And you don't want to do that. And you want to also hire people that are smarter than you. And what this means is you want to seek out talent that challenges your thinking and they should be capable of innovative ideas. And you want them to have a higher IQ they than you. The higher IQ part is that you want them to be smarter. You want them to be smart. You want them to know their own iq. Because intelligence, intelligence isn't just about raw iq, it's about the willingness to learn and adapt. He also brings up humility. True, truly smart people are humble and not arrogant. You can tell this out by if a humble person, a humble person doesn't need to tell you that they are humble, they show it through their actions. And that I love that, I love that. And so how you might be asking, all right, that's great. How do I look for intelligence? How can I ask these people? What can I ask? What are the type of questions I can ask in an interview or in any type of setting that I can tell that they are highly intelligent? And a big thing is a big question is, can this, can this person think dialectically? So can they see multiple sides of an issue? Another question is are they capable of changing their opinion with new evidence? These questions will help you gauge if they're prideful or if they actually are telling the truth. This is what you want to look at. So this is the intelligence side of it. Another thing you need to be looking for is the mindset in terms of intelligence. Do they have a burning desire to win and also win fairly Are they not being a jerk about it or do they play by the rules to a certain extent and they do it with a good attitude and they do it right. That's another big thing. The second thing he talks about is hunger. This is what he looks at in every single person he hires, right? So hunger. You want to look for ambition and drive. You want to hire ambitious individuals who are driven to achieve big things and earn significant rewards. Another part of this hunger aspect is a lean team advantage. This idea is insane because this will really help your business. Smaller, leaner teams often display greater focus and energy. He this is a direct quote from the book. It's better to be slightly understaffed than badly understaffed. I think another thing that he adds to this quote is that you want to have a smaller team because you can get kind of like bloated or become fat to where you can't really run well. And I love what he does that, what he, what he does there. With a lean team, a smaller team, they actually can focus and display that. They display that better and they have a lot more energy. The third thing he talks about is integrity. Integrity is built on a foundation, a foundation of trust. I love what he says here. A company's success depends on the integrity of its people. Without it, there's distrust and poor communication. He goes later on in his book to say, you can't over communicate. There's no such thing. It's impossible to over communicate. You want to be communicating so much that it feels like over communication. But ultimately you're doing that to the point where you're communicating so much that it's embedded into your culture. Another thing that integrity. A big lesson from integrity is if you. There's three things he looks for. If you are. If you're a liar, number one, small lies equal big consequences. If someone is willing to lie about a minor issue, expect them to lie about a bigger issue later. Inevitably they get exposed. So quote, he quoted this or I quoted this from his book Liars Get Caught. He goes on to talk about honest people tend to succeed in the long term. And also actions speak louder than words. Honest individuals don't need to proclaim that they're in. In. They don't need to proclaim that they have integrity. They demonstrate it through their actions. And the last, the last thing that he talks about is collegiality. You want to have a team harmony that builds a. You want to build a leadership team with good nature, good natured, cooperative people. You also want to avoid toxicity. You want to fill your leadership team with good natured people. And no one wants to work with a jerk and even a talented jerk. And I love that because a talented jerk can be do all the right things and still be a bad teammate. He could score the most points, he could do whatever and still be the worst teammate and he would still be a bad player. He'd probably be considered a C player. And that's why you really want to focus on who you're surrounded yourself with. So you want to avoid toxicity. And this next thing that Brad, Brad brings up in his book is assessing team players. A, B and C players to be exact. So players in a business are ranked. An A player would be, well, an A player is a top performer who is critical to your team's success. Basically, losing this player can be a major setback. A B player is a functional team member who, who does a good job. But they're easily replaceable. I could go out tomorrow and say, all right, this person looks better or just as good and I could easily replace this person. A C player is someone that drags the company down and you just let them go their best to avoid. And this is how Brad assesses. He uses this thought experiment to assess different team players. And so what he does is he imagines an employee quitting without warning. So the scenario is if he were sitting in his office and this employee came in and said this is the scenario that he just quits just out of the blue randomly. I love what Brad says is this thought experiment is his reaction to that, his internal reaction. So for a C player, he would be relieved. He'd be, oh, we were going to fire this guy anyways. They're not going to be missed. A B player would come in and say, hey, you know, I, this is unexpected, but I'm quitting. His reaction, it would just be, oh, I can easily replace this person. Like it's too bad, but I'll just replace this person. And then if an A player quits, his internal reaction is, oh no, we're screwed. What do we do? It's panic. It's like, oh shoot, what did I do wrong? Like what do I need to do? And something that I would be advising you guys to do is how do you go from being a C player to a B player or a B player to an A player? You want to be an A player and a vital person in your company. An A player is a vital person, A B player is a functional person and a C player is no one you want to be and is Easy to fire that. That's ultimately what that hierarchy is. And this is the consequence of hiring people like that. If you hire a B player, they're probably going to hire C players and then you'll have C players led by B players. That's terrible. This scenario is disastrous for a growing company. And that. That whole sequence in the book is so revolutionary and so good in the way that just really benefits your company if you have a company. Because you need to know you cannot have a C player in your business. You can afford a B player, but you got to make sure that a B player does not hire a C player because they are. They tend to. So you need to make sure that they don't hire C players. Another thing that Brad goes into is a comp compensation strategy. So you need to invest in talent. If you aim to make a few billion dollars, you need to put together an amazingly talented management team and be prepared to pay them well. How he does this is through bonuses and incentives, which is really smart because you want to align the incentives with the company's goals. And you do not. You, you cannot be cheap. You have to pay for the top talent. And it might cost more upfront, but it saves millions and in his case, billions. In the long run. He said he's probably paid a hundred million dollars in bonuses and incentives, but it's helped his shareholders because he's saved or he's made billions of dollars. And another thing he mentions is tying the compensation to performance. Ensure that these top performers, the A players, are rewarded appropriately. You want to foster. You want to foster excellence. You want to foster that continuing excellence. And this is great because if you own a business, this is the perfect book for you. You need to get this book. This book will change your whole philosophy on business. He really has some revolutionary ideas. That is just insane. And now we segue into chapter five, which is how to run electric or exciting meetings. Basically, these are the key ingredients for dynamic meetings. And he has like three main ingredients. And so one is the right people. You need to only invite the most engaging and capable team members. Number two would be a crowdsourced agenda. You need to let the team determine the most critical topics to discuss. And then three, it's. You need to have a safe environment and it's not what you're thinking of. This means you need to foster a culture where everyone feels secure to respectfully disagree and share ideas. That. That's something he talked about. He wants pushback. He wants people pushing back and going against the status quo. But he Also wants people to have a good environment where they can do that in. He says this quote, I believe lively discussion is the best way to encourage people to learn in a business setting. And he goes through some practices in his meeting that he goes through. So like one of them or a couple of them is you want to eliminate distractions, you want to turn off all the devices to ensure everyone is fully present. You want only one person talking at a time. You want active listening and you want respectful disagreement. And some other things he mentioned as like side notes, not really to the meeting, but you want to have essential communication. You want to resist flooding the discussion, whether that's the meeting or just in anything in work that you do. You want to resist flooding the discussion with non essential information. You also want to have a shared team mindset and this applies to the whole business. You want to be ready to jump in and help solve problems regardless of where they arise in the business. And this is very important for us because when you're in a business, you want to make sure that you can help with something else if need be. And that will help you take the next step to being more trusted and to be the top of the top when it comes to your leaders trusting you and who you are and what you do and your identity in that. And then now we go into kind of chapter six and this is how to Kill the Competition instead of Killing each Other. I love that title. It's really funny because it is true though, right? You can, you can kill yourself, right? You can kill each other in your team. And, and like the competition sees you guys fighting and they're just like, all right, we're going to leave them because they'll eliminate themselves. We'll just get on ahead because we're actually being a good team. And so you need to promote collaboration over internal strife. How you do this is you make the mission bigger than yourself. How do you do that? Right? Simon Sinek start with why his book is incredible. You need to listen to it. You want employees. Well, first off, employees want to be part of something larger. They need clarity on their role within that vision, but they want to be a part of something bigger than themselves. They don't work to just make money for themselves. They work for the people that they love. And if they love your business, then they are willing to work, you know, their butts off for you now. But they need clarity on their role within that vision. And you need to tell them that you need to define their role for them so they can fit into the so that they can fit in that little, the puzzle that be the missing puzzle piece. Right. And another thing that I mentioned earlier is over communicating. There's no such thing as too much communication. When you build trust and alignment, you want regular, transparent communication that fosters honesty and unity. Something that I thought was really interesting that Brad brought up was he has a personal newsletter that goes out every month or every week, something like that, where he has a newsletter that goes out and it keeps like an internal social media going to where people can interact with each other. And I thought that was a really interesting and really great idea. You also want to harness the power of listening. This is going to be an incredible skill for anyone listening because you want to harness that power. It truly is a superpower. You want active engagement. He says being fully present, even just for a minute can create a deep connection with someone. It can create, it can be that kind of relationship, relationship builder or starter. You want to listen as a superpower. It truly is a superpower. There's certain types of listening, there's deep listening, there's all types of listening that he has delve. He's gone into the deep end for and really learned about. And the ability to hear, truly hear another person is a critical skill in business and leadership. That's something that anyone and everyone should be working on because it truly is a skill. Learning and listening from other people is one of the best things that you can do to help yourself succeed in life. I truly believe this for myself and I truly believe it for anyone listening to this podcast, which, that sounds funny, but truly when you listen to this and digest the information, you will be far superior and farther ahead than all of your competition that there won't even. It won't be a competition at that point. This leads into the next point. You want to build a winning culture. I love what Brad does. He wants people that face hard realities. He wants to create a culture that can honestly assess challenges and then overcome them. This goes into customer relationships. So you want to treat customer relationships like any other personal relationship. You want to value them clearly and work continuously to improve them. Another thing just on customer relationships is you see Amazon, you see all these different major trillion dollar, billion dollar platforms that have nailed this down to the T. You want to be the next Amazon. If you want to be the next Amazon, you need to nail down your customer relationships. And if you can nail those relationships, you will be far superior and so far ahead than your competition. Another thing that was mentioned is quality and speed. You want to achieve a World class status by. But in order to do that you have it requires a balance of rapid execution with uncompromising quality. I love this. I'm reading a book right now that I'm actually going to do for my next podcast episode, which is going to be next week on Isadore Sharp, the founder of Four Seasons, the luxury hotel. And it is amazing so far and he is uncommon and excellent in everything he does. But something he works on that I've noticed in that book is he is focused on the quality and the speed. He has become a world class hotel. He is one of the. His hotel business is one of the best and greatest hotels there is in one in the whole world. And that's a. That's saying a lot. If you haven't looked into him, you need to because it's insane. And so something that he really focuses on is quality and speed. How can you apply that to your own business? You need to start with quality and quality comes with your product. Customer relationships speed you. You need to be effective quick and fast. I read Elon Musk, the book by Walter Isaacson, and he also, Elon also focused on having really good speed. The quality wasn't always there, but it always made up because he was always faster. And he made mistakes faster than his competition and learned from those mistakes faster than his competition as well. This is where you need to take all of that and speeding up your process and achieving a high quality that can benefit the customers. Work on your customer relationships, but also work on building a winning culture. It starts with your culture. You don't get to have a good football team overnight or you don't get to have a good team overnight. This is in everything and in life. You need to build a winning culture and you need to face hard realities. You also need to have a good attitude in those hard realities. You need to create that type of culture that can assess those challenges and then overcome them triumphantly. I love that word, triumph. Triumph over the challenges, triumph over the trials. I love that. And that is something that everyone can take away from when they're listening to or reading this book. It truly is a amazing experience when you can build a team like that. And it all starts with listening. It starts with your attitude. It starts with communication. But ultimately, I love what this, what Brad says. It's the joy of creating value. There's joy in creating value and an even greater joy in knowing that so many other people are benefiting from our accomplishments. That's a direct quote from Brad at the very end, at the Conclusion of this book. And he mentions the joy of creating this value. I love that because it ultimately is a value exchange. What are you giving to your customers that is free, accessible? If you haven't already, you should look into Daniel Priestley. Daniel Priestley is this guy that has wrote. He wrote Key Person of Influence. It's a book bestseller. He wrote oversubscribed. He wrote Entrepreneurial Revolution. He is insane. And he kind of talks about this. Not necessarily the joy of creating value, but the idea of a value exchange where you're providing value for the customer. And in exchange, they're giving you their email or they're giving you something that is really worth their time. And you want to provide as much value as you can for that type of person that wants to learn more from you. And ultimately that's what you want to do. You want to create value, but you also want to have fun doing it. You know, you want to have fun in creating value, and you want to have an even greater joy in knowing that a lot of other people outside of your community or in your community are benefiting from what you are doing and through your accomplishments. Something that my goal, My goal would be is to have a free email for my podcast, email list for my podcast so I can provide. So I can provide free value for you guys listening to this. That is my goal. That is something I've com. I am committing to and something I want to do by the end of this year. I want to create value and I want to benefit everyone listening to this. I love what the last thing that bride says with this is. This is his final kind of farewell from the book. And he says, I'm inspired daily by people charging toward their passion. I have faith they'll persevere because those who push for extraordinary outcomes are inherently winners. I hope you're inspired to run hard at making a few billion dollars or achieving some other big dream. And I wish you the exhilaration of seeing it through to success. I love that. And Brad did an amazing job with this book. It. It's insane. He's really good at what he does. I would definitely recommend buying this book. If you want to make a few billion dollars, you need to know what to do and how to do it. You got to find your why. This goes back to Simon Sinek and start with why. You go to that. You find your why. You find first you find what you want to do, you find what you love to do. Then you find why you want why. Why you love to do that. Then you find what you do, which is what we just talked about, and then you find how you do it. So if you're starting a business, let's say in. I. I don't know, the retail industry, like a Walmart, right. You. Your why is. Why do you love being in the retail business? It's because I love providing cheaper prices to people so they can get more bang for their buck or they can get more for their. Their money. And that's something that can provide a lot of value for someone, and you just gotta figure out how to do it. But it all starts with why. Why do you do what you do? In order to make a few billion dollars, you need to find your why. Why are you inspired to do something? What is that thing that you want to do? This isn't a new concept. This is something that is embedded in human philosophy and the culture of humans throughout every generation, every culture and society, going back dating to the first. The first. Just mankind, the whole history of mankind is starting with why. You know what? Why do you want to fight these people? Well, you. Cause they upset us or they did something wrong. All right, great. Let's go fight them. World War II, like, I don't know. There's something like that, though, where it's just. There's why behind what people do. Why do you want to start that business? Why do you want to become an influencer? Why do you want to do what you love to do? Do you want to be financially free? But it all starts with why. And through that, why, you can make a few billion dollars. And that's why. Funny. That's why he, Brad and Simon Sinek actually kind of crossed between, like, you need to have people charging towards their passion of what they want to do and love to do. And if you want extraordinary outcomes of what you want it or through what you want to do, then, like what Brad says, you are inherently a winner. And that doesn't mean, you know you won something. That's. That's. That just means that you have a winner's mindset, and it's really incredible and really insane and really smart. And that's something that I want to provide through my premium podcast or my premium version of this podcast, where I want to give to you guys a way to implement everything that you see here and put it in your own lives and find a amazing way to find your why. Simon Sinek does a great job of this. And being able to pull Simon Sinek and Brad Jacobs and mix them together is an art. And this is what people need in order to take the next step to making that few billion dollars through what you love to do. I was listening to this podcast of Simon Sinek on the Diary of a CEO by Stephen Bart Bartlett and Simon said he was making a ton of money. He, he. Well, he was making a lot of money. He did everything that he used to love and then he didn't love it anymore and he wasn't happy. And it all came down to happiness for him at the very end. And that's why he created his book Start with why he published it. And that's kind of his brand brand now his podcast is called A Bit of Optimism. So happiness related to the happiness theme and that's the whole idea behind Simon Sinek and that that is something that you're going to need to have when it comes to business. What makes you happy that you can provide and create that joy inside of you to create value for other people. And I think Brad did an incredible job here. He has a great book and it's something that you're going to want to read along with, start with why and you're going to want to read those to in order to grasp how, how to jumpstart your campaign into greatness and do uncommon. You want to do uncommon things, but you want to do it in a detailed and excellent way. And that's what ultimately this whole podcast is about, right? We study uncommon, uncommon people that had excellent, excellent ideas or businesses. And I take that, I distill that and give it to you guys and you can create a masterclass for your own life and do what you love. I hope you had a great time listening to this podcast episode and I will be back next week with the founder of four Seasons, Isadore Sharp. Isador Sharp. Insane. And it's going to be a great part one of that book series. I hope you enjoyed this podcast episode. Please go share it with your friends if you love this and I really hope this can change your guys's life. If you want to take that next step, join the Uncommon Excellence premium version and I'll talk to you again soon.