Bedros Keuilian Podcast Show - How to Man Up and Dominate Your Path - 023

Episode Date: November 29, 2017

If you want to make more money, have a bigger impact, and execute your vision, then you’re ready to MAN UP. In this episode, Craig and Bedros share the 5 principles you need to follow to become the massively successful entrepreneur you were born to be. Man Up: How to Cut the Bullshit and Kick Ass in Business (and in Life) is your guide to stop making excuses, take control of the situation, and rise to your fullest potential in business and every other aspect of life. Go to ManUp.com to order your copy!   Here’s what you’ll discover: 1:21 - How Bedros took control of his life, “manned up”, and became an effective leader. 3:57 - How to be more decisive in your everyday life so that you can make quick decisions for your business, and course correct if needed. 6:13 - Why you need clarity of vision and path so that you can effectively lead your team to your goals. 9:50 - How to stop reacting under stress and start responding so that you can strategically problem solve. 13:24 - Why you need to eliminate the crop dusters and hire a high performance team in order to grow your empire.

Manning up is a work in progress. You know, going back to driving a five-mile stretch of road and the 1,000 mini-micro corrections that you need, the moment that you decide that you're not going to correct anymore to stay between the lanes is the moment that your life or the car runs off the road. Hey, do you want to be more successful, make more money, and overcome those obstacles that are getting in your way? Well, if you do, I have two words for you.

But before I tell you what those words are, I want to welcome you to another episode of the Empire podcast with my good friend, Badros Kulian. Say hello, Bedros. Hello, Bedros. All right. So, listen, you know what those two words are, B? What are those two words? Those two words for people who want to have more success in life are man up.

That is the name of your book, Good Sir. And you know what? Can you share a few little principles about it? Maybe five principles of how to man up and become a more effective leader and dominate your path? Yeah, absolutely. So the reason I wrote the book, by the way, is not because I know everything about everything. The reason I wrote the book is because I was suffering with massive anxiety attacks in the year late 2012, 13, and up to mid-2014.

And the reason was I was an ineffective leader. I had the potential to create a massive business with Fit Body Boot Camp, yet it was struggling, it was suffering. In fact, Fit Body Boot Camp, the franchise was on its deathbed. And it's a bit embarrassing to say that now because of the leader that I've become. But I had a business partner that I was unhappy with, who I believe was toxic to the business, even though he was a good human being. He just was not a good business partner for me. And I had employees who at the time were very adversarial with me, yet I chose to ignore that. I chose to not part ways with them, and I thought that I could just somehow work around them in my business.

And that led to not only anxiety attacks, but essential tremors where I would lock up in the middle of the night and start what felt like I was freezing. Well, you know, I would say a big lesson here, just before we get into those five pillars of man up, is simply that you were suffering in silence, which is something that a lot of entrepreneurs do, a lot of especially female entrepreneurs. You suffer in silence and you just don't want to tell people the struggles that you're going through. But that led to a lot of consequences. And then when you decided like, okay, something's got to change. It's either give up on this thing or man up on this thing and you chose the latter. I did. And I told myself that those five words that I repeat over and over again in the book, which is,

it's time to man up. You know, and when you tell yourself, it's time to man up, there really is the only thing you can do next is to take action or execute on the thing that you need to man up on. And so one, it's time to man up at a time. I literally fixed my life, fixed my business, fixed my partnership, fixed my team. And it wasn't a light switch. I always share this with people. It wasn't a light switch.

it's more like a dimmer switch where you slowly do this. You can't turn a corner and go from being a crop duster of a leader to a fighter jet of a leader. That doesn't happen. But if you're only commit to these five pillars, you will get the outcome. And pillar. Yeah, so I will say one thing is I've been repeating your message to some of my business partners, to some of my friends, to a lot of my coaching clients. And like you said, it was like the first time they got it, they understood it,

they came back with the same problems next week. I repeated the message. Then they came back with a little more action. They came back with a little more this, a little more that every single time I said it. And then now the room is really bright for a lot of those folks. That's a really great analogy. And I'd love for you to start off for everybody listening who doesn't know the five pillars, who hasn't been fortunate like me to read a copy of the advanced copy of the book or to get some coaching from you.

Tell us what those pillars are. Yeah. So pillar number one is to be decisive. Indecision has cost entrepreneurs more money than making the wrong decision. And in fact, the reason I came up with this whole man-up philosophy was I was the guy, like you said, suffering in silence. I knew my business had massive multiple eight-figure, nine-figure potential, yet I was nowhere near that kind of potential or the impact that I could make. And most of it was because I knew the decisions I needed to make, but I was constantly looking for more clarity to make these decisions. Really, when we don't make decisions, it is a way of avoiding the necessary things that you've got to do.

And unfortunately, I realized very quickly that not making a decision is making a decision. It is letting circumstances take control of the outcome. And when you let circumstances take control of the outcome, 99.9% of the time, the outcome is not in your favor. And so you must be decisive. So people always tell me like, well, give me an example of being decisive. Well, I said, you might be deciding whether you're going to use Blue Host or Host Gator for hosting your websites. Now, the reality is they both have something like 98% uptime, and they both are. comparable in their price rather than constantly fact-finding getting more

information and trying to figure out what's the best avenue for you why don't you pick one and execute one you'll start making money you'll start getting more websites up you'll see if you reach a point where you break the hosting service platform and realize gee this was not the right decision for me and then you can course correct so it's not that every decision you make has to be the right decision but you must make a decision quickly in general Colin Powell talks about this in his book. He calls it the 40-70 rule, which is 40% of the information, about 40% of the information, up to 70% of the information you need, you are ready to execute and make a

decision. So I teach people in Man Up that start making the small decisions now. If you're going to go on a date with your honey, you decide where we're going, what we're eating, are we going to eat or see the movies first? Am I going to wear loafers or tending shoes or flip-flops? Make those small decisions fast. Am I going to wear a suit or am I going to wear a vest? and tie today. When you can make the small decisions quickly, you're really training your decision-making muscles to make the bigger decisions quickly as well. So you've got to be decisive where that's concerned. That's thing number one. Thing number two, to become an effective leader is to have clarity of vision and clarity of path. Now, again, this is embarrassing for me to say, but in Fit Body Boot Camp,

I didn't know if I wanted 100 Fit Body Boot Camp locations, 1,000, 2,000, 5,000. I didn't know if I wanted 2,000 locations with 2,000 owners or 2,000 locations with 500 owners, meaning they each own multiple locations. For me, this was a big struggle. What it showed to my employees is that we've got a leader who's a drifter, right? We've got a leader who is unsure of his outcome, and that creates a sense of insecurity amongst their employees. They start looking outside for an opportunity to go maybe leave and find a more secure job.

And so once I got clear on my vision, I want 2,500 locations by the year 2020, and I want less than a thousand owners because I can service a thousand owners better than I can service 2,500 owners, right? So I want 1,000 owners or less to have 2,500 locations, so each of them would have an average of 2.5 locations, easy enough. Great. Okay, now I need to go to clarity of path. So we've got clarity of vision. I know what I want, and I know what I want it by, but what is the path we're going to get there? I was the guy running the marketing. I was the guy doing all the sales, and I was wondering why I was also the bottleneck. So I had to outsource the marketing, the lead generation. I had to replicate myself in getting more salespeople on board,

and all of a sudden, our number of new locations per month went from three to five locations to now 25 to 30 new locations per month. Can I stop you there for a second? You said two words in the first answer, in the first pillar that have stuck with me and have really applied to each one of the pillars that you've gone on with, and it's the word course correct. Now, when you make a decision quickly, you can course correct and get back on the path, where if you didn't, you'd be straying off and off and off and off and it's harder to get back on path. Clarity of vision, well, if you have that clear vision and you get a little bit off, you course correct and you get back on track to it and you know what the straight line of success is.

And then also with clarity of path, if you find someone or yourself getting off that path, it's course correct, get them back on track. And that course correction is so important. And that's what a leader does. That's what the vision does. And that's what execution allows you to do, right? That's exactly right. Everybody's under the impression that great leaders make the right decision every single time. That's not true. Great leaders make a decision every time. And if it's the wrong decision, they course correct.

If it's the right decision, they keep going. And the reality of the matter is that I read the statistic and it blew me away. When you drive your car from point A to point B, average five-mile drive, they say that there's over 1,000 corrections that you make of the steering wheel, just within a five-mile drive. So think about that. Even though you think you're going straight, thousands of corrections that you're making to stay on path, right? And so if that applies to driving,

that also applies to driving your business, your empire, into its ultimate destination. So we just need to make those corrections and decisions. When we choose not to make the decisions of corrections, the car will veer off the road, fall off a cliff, which is really what happens in business most of the time. The fourth pillar in the manner process is to not emotionally react and instead effectively response to situations. All entrepreneurs, all businesses, all people. If you are live, you have a pulse, then you have problems. Do you agree? Absolutely. And so the only people, I think it was Norman Vincent Peel who said, the only people who don't have problems are dead people. And so, hey, thank God we are all alive, we are going to have problems. Now you could either

emotionally react to problems and turn a molehill into a mountain. And when you're emotionally reactive, the people around you, whether they're your customers, clients, your team members, business partners look at you and go, this person is an ineffective leader. They're chaotic, and they are a danger to my financial security. And again, they start looking out to leave. However, instead of emotion reacting, if you can respond strategically. All right, for example, we recently had to go through an FTC audit. Not a bad thing. It is a time waster for us, and we certainly have to go through with a fine-tooth comb into 12 months of revenues and while the revenue came from.

But it's easy to freak out over that and go, oh, man, the next couple of months, sales are going to be low because it's all hands on deck. But that's such a good problem to have because I look at the reason why we're being audited by the Federal Trade Commission, and it's because our growth trajectory is so quick, so fast that we got on the radar. Why are you as a new franchise growing so quickly? I'm okay with having that. So I responded.

I created a team from three departments to take care of the FTC audit that's required, And I said, everybody else, ignore the FTC audit and keep making sales. The solution to all of your problems are more sales. Don't you agree? It's very, very helpful, that's for sure. So I could either emotionally react to the cost and the time and to the manpower that it's going to take, or I could respond strategically, come up with the plan and keep plowing forward with my vision. Yeah.

Isn't it funny that, you know, most people, they think, you know, back in the day that, you know, work was a stressful place and you go home and that was your sanctuary. But now, with these four pillars you've already talked about right now and not being a reactive leader, you're actually providing a sanctuary at work for people to come in, be high performers, have success, and not be stressed out. And they go home, and fortunately, hopefully they have a sanctuary at home too. But you're providing a place for them to be the highest performer possible in a safe space because you are not, you know, they're not walking around on eggshells thinking,

oh, the boss is going to blow up again today. and who knows what he's going to, you know, trying to be doing today. You know, what's he chasing, what shiny objects is going after? But you are providing them with the safety and security they need just to do their best job, and that allows them to become great business for you. You know, it's funny that you say that, and I think you know me well enough where I have a hard time accepting compliments from people. But one of the compliments that I've been getting recently, I guess over the last two years, especially from my leadership team here at the headquarters is, hey, boss, you know what?

You're always consistent. like we can count on when we have a meeting because I meet with my two VPs and then they meet with their leadership team that when we meet no matter what's going on you're always consistent in your attitude your personality your behavior your habits and that really does create a sense of security

I mean we've got two guys behind the cameras here two team members and could you guys imagine if I just walking through those doors and you guys don't know what you're in for you don't know if it's angry Pete you know angry B upset B if it's if it's a happy B

if it's a Mood B, what if that was the leader that was walking in? Again, it creates a sense of discomfort and a sense of insecurity. And so that leads to our fifth and final pillar, which is you have to go out with your employees, get rid of all employees, and build a high performance team because you cannot replicate and duplicate yourself, and therefore you cannot take your business to its fullest potential of becoming an empire if you don't have a high performance team. A high performance team is a team that shows up early, leaves late, gets a job done,

crosses the ball across the finish line no matter what, has the attitude of, I will figure it out instead of saying it's not done. And that is the mindset of everybody here that we have. And it's been a building process. As I've built my leadership skills, I've coached them, and I've asked them to build their ability to become high performance. Because when you look at employees, the way I define employees as people who, the employees are people who clock in a little bit late, clock out a little bit early, do the

bare minimum to maintain employment. That is not how I'm growing this massive franchise. I'm growing it by having a high performance team. And if you look at the definition of a team, it's a group of individuals who are highly focused to produce an end result, to win the game, right? And so I just happen to be the leader of the team, but I'm so grateful to have a high performance team. And if you can meet those five pillars, you have manned up. And ironically, it bleeds into every aspect of your life. It bleeds into your health, your finances, your relationships, your relationship with your spouse and your kids and your friends and business partners.

Because I love nothing more than having clear, open conversations, being decisive in things, and constantly setting the bar high for myself, leading from the front, and then having the same expectations for my team members. And that's really been the reason we've grown so quickly in the last four and a half years. It's been leadership.

Leadership's always the problem. Leadership is also the solution. Awesome. And so, you know, as we're going through I'm thinking, you know, so many analogies to sports. And, you know, who gets a lot of the press and sports in terms of coaches? It's the ones who are throwing stuff against the wall. But then you look at those teams and they're not the high-performance teams.

But you're building a dynasty, much like Bill Belichick for the New England Patriots in the NFL, has built a dynasty. And what he has done is just followed all those five pillars. He's built high-performance team members. They have clarity of path, clarity of vision, everything that you've talked about. And that's why they win the Super Bowl or are in contention for the Super Bowl every year. And then one last thing, in a way that we can end this amazing show, is what you mentioned is how this bleeds into every area of your life. Because, I mean, I am just telling you, as much as I'm impressed by your ability to lead your company, to grow your empire, I just brag about you to everybody that I know in terms of the family life that you have,

the relationship you have with your wife, Diana, and the relationship you have with your kids who are just so fantastic. They're little mini adults that are just wonderful to be around and so well behaved. And I think that is just a great reflection of everything that you've done in the past few years, as you said, on your path to man up and be more successful in every area of your life. You know, I can tell you this, and that is one of the greatest compliments I can get. Thank you. I mean, that means a lot. Manning up is a work in progress.

You know, going back to driving a five-mile stretch of road and the 1,000 mini microcorrections that you need. The moment that you decide that you're not going to correct anymore to stay between the lanes is the moment that your life or the car runs off the road. And so manning up truly is a process of an ongoing feat. The moment you stop attempting to man up in areas of your life is the moment that you turn the dark corner. And so for me, it's a constant work in progress. And I believe that everyone should say those five words. It's time to man up and then take the leap and action into the next thing. Yeah, and so listen, I hope that everybody listening and watching is as excited as I am to get a final copy of the book. And so Man Up is going to be coming out in July of 2018.

Can you tell us about how we can get, you know, premier access to it and all the goodies that you're going to have? Yeah, yeah, absolutely. So everyone watching and listening to this podcast, if you just go to manup.com, a very simple domain name, manup.com. By the way, I got a $430,000 offer for manup.com, which we turn down. Not worth it. Yeah. So just go to manup.com. You'll get on the early bird notification list. So when the book comes out July of 2018, you'll be one of the first to not only get the book, but to also get my six-week follow-along course that comes along with the book exclusively to those who are on my manup.com early bird notification list. Oh, fantastic. So July 2018, go to manup.com right now and join us again soon for another episode of the Empire podcast. Until then,

iTunes, rate us, love us, share us, and get the word out so that other entrepreneurs and your friends, your colleagues, and your team members man up and live the life of their dreams. Talk soon. Thanks for listening to the Empire Podcast Show. Remember to subscribe on iTunes, share it with your friends, and give us a rating. We'd really appreciate that. And make sure to go to Empire Podcast Show.com to watch the videos as they come out.