EntreLeadership - #150: Craig Groeschel—The Key to Successful Delegation

Episode Date: June 6, 2016

Delegation may be something that everyone knows about but few know how to do it well. On this week’s episode, we’re talking to someone who excels at it. Craig Groeschel is senior pastor of Life.Church, the largest church in America with 570 team members, 25 campuses and weekly average attendance of more than 70,000. It might be a church, but it’s also one of the best-run organizations in the country. Craig shares some of his top tips for leading and growing an organization, including proper delegation. entreleadership.com/podcast The EntreLeader's Guide to Delegation Infusionsoft's Webinar Guide Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

helping business leaders grow themselves, their team, and their profits. This is the Entree Leadership podcast. Now here is your host, Ken Coleman. Broadcasting from the Music City, this is the podcast of leaders, by leaders, for leaders. Thank you so much for joining the conversation. We're kicking June off, and that means we have a new theme that we're going to be focusing on through all the different platforms at Entree Leadership. And remember, as we talk about this, the theme and everything around it that we're offering. you. All of it can be located at Entreeleadership.com.

The theme this month is delegation. I'm going to get to that in just a moment, but let me tell you what's coming up on this episode. Craig Groschelle is the senior pastor of the largest church in America, and we don't normally have a lot of pastors on here. I know if you're not a person of faith, don't freak out. This is a straight-up leadership interview, and you're going to love that. And then we have a clip of Dave teaching in our staff meeting. Remember now we are over 560 team members, and so every week out of the year, very few exceptions. all meet together. And many times Dave will teach because he is constantly reminding us of our core values, the things that we live out every day, and what is most important to us. And so Dave

teaches on excellence in the ordinary in this episode. We pulled a little bit from a recent staff meetings, so you're going to love that. And of course, we have more free stuff coming to you, so you're going to love that. I'm fresh off the high of the Entry Leadership Summit. Our second summit event, it was unbelievable. Jim Cawley. Seth Godin, Pat Lynchione, George W. Bush, Chris Hogan, Christy Wright, Dr. Henry Cloud, all joining Dave. And it was a phenomenal event. I just want to mention this. Our 2017 summit speaker lineup actually went live. We announced it at the event. Pat Lynchoni coming back, joining Dave, Christy Wright, Chris Hogan from our team. And then we've brought in Simon Seneca, the legendary coach Lou Holtz and Mr. Leadership himself, John Maxwell. and we've got some other big surprises that we're going to tell you about.

So we're not done tinkering with this lineup, but it's going to be great. It's going to be in Orlando, Florida, May 21 through 25 at the J.W. Marriott Hotel, Entree Leadership.com slash summit to get your information. We had hundreds and hundreds literally sign up buy their tickets on site. It's going to be another sellout. We had 1,500 plus leaders, and what an incredible week it was. So I wanted to at least tell you about that. A couple of calendar items there for you.

And then, of course, don't forget our Entree Leadership Master Series will be here in just a few months, October 23 through 27. That's Chris Hogan and Dave Ramsey teaching for four days. The last day is straight up application. Femomominal lineup there of content, but we really make it practical. So again, those are your calendar events that we'll be telling you more about, and we'd love to see you at either one of those events. Well, the theme this month is delegation. And this is kind of interesting because Eric, the producer and I were meeting before we went live here as we record. And delegation is a word that honestly, I mean, it's just so tired. Everybody knows what it is. Everybody knows what it means. You don't get too excited when you talk about delegation. It's not

something people sit around and go, hey, let's brainstorm about delegation. So just for fun, I typed in on the dictionary, delegation. The actual definition is very, very boring. It basically says prioritizing tasks for delegation. It's like, okay, thanks. But then the Senate Sentinims caught my eye. Here's three real quick, and I think it's huge to really think about as we dive into this conversation with Craig Grishell, who gets this. Here's three synonyms. Assignment, entrusting, giving. Now, at its most technical form, delegation is the act of assigning a task. But the other two synonyms are what give it its power. Entrusting, giving. True delegation requires that you trust. the people that you're assigning the task to. And I think that giving is an even better form of delegation. I've entrusted you to do it, but more importantly, I've given you my trust. I've given you

significance. I've given you responsibility. People shine when they're given a task that matters. So just three words there. Assignment is the functionality. Entrusting is huge as a leader. You've got to really entrust to truly delegate, but ultimately what you're doing is you're giving your people significance and the organization's significance. So it's really fun, three words here. So as we go into this conversation with Craig Rochelle, I mentioned at the top of the podcast that he's the senior pastor of life church, the largest church in America, but I want you to really soak on these data points. 25 physical campuses, 26, if you include their online gathering where people are coming in from literally all around the world. Listen to this. 570 team members. Their weekly

attendance, as of the month of May in 2016, their average weekly attendance, 73,648. Now, when you begin to process the sheer machinery of their systems to be able to move that many people through 25 campuses, multiple states, the teaching is synced up online, pumped into all those locations. It's truly extraordinary. And Craig Groschelle, you're going to hear this in the conversation, but this is a guy who really lives what we teach at Entrade Leadership, this idea of they are a cash business, if you will. Let's just be honest. The church needs to run like a business. And they get it. They get systematizing. They get delegation. This is, I'm telling you, Even though it's a pastor, you're talking about the largest church in one of the best-run organizations in America.

That's why you need to tune in. So let's get right to it. Get ready to learn. Here's my conversation with Craig Rochelle. Craig, it's fun to have you on the phone just recently with you and Dave and some of the pastors of the largest churches in America talking about stewardship and leadership. And this is really fun for me, for business leaders, to hear from someone who is leading essentially a nonprofit organization, if you will, you are leading it in my mind, much like a business. The largest church in America doesn't happen by organizational accident. I want to spend some time talking through several different key pieces

that hit our audience where they're at. And let's start with just give us a little bit of the backstory so people can figure out, okay, this is the journey to the largest church in America. That doesn't happen overnight. Give us a synopsis of when you started it and then when you began to see some exponential growth. Sure. Well, Ken, thanks for having me on. I'm just, you know, you're a great friend, and of course, Dave is an amazing friend and mentor, so it's an honor to be with you guys. Ken, we just celebrated a 20-year anniversary as leading the church.

20 years ago, we actually started in a two-car garage, and so we really literally had startup organization with nothing at all. We grew from there and moved into a little elementary school, and then a bicycle factory. It took us three years to build our first building, and it was in the first kind of real building that we started to see some growth. When we ran out of room, we didn't know what to do, and we were turning people away. And so somebody said back in 1999, what if we had churched at another location? And we kind of laughed and thought, is that legal? Can you do that? And we didn't know of anyone doing it at the time. There were actually a few others that were experimenting with that

about the same time we were. So we went into a movie theater, and I would teach at one place, drive seven miles down the road and teach at a movie theater. And we kind of stumbled on to becoming one church at two locations. If you fast forward to today, in fact, just last weekend, we launched our 25th location. We meet in seven different states. One of the coolest stories along the way was that we were blessed to be able to create the U-Version Bible app, which is kind of a, it's underneath the church, but it's like its own organization underneath the church. And that's, we've given away about 200 and probably 30 million of those free Bible apps. And so we've got a whole team that helps create that.

And so when you talk about a leadership podcast, it's really fun to talk about how do you create organizations that can function mostly without you and still be very effective. Yeah. So that's a perfect lead in. I want to spend some time talking about people, the greatest asset and resource to an organization. So we're going to talk about finding and then empowering. So let's spend some time just on the finding part. in 20 years, what have you figured out that works for your organization, your church, in finding the right people for your organization? Yeah, Ken, that's probably one of the top questions

that other leaders will ask me. How do you find the right leaders? How do you find the right leaders? And what I always try to tell them is, better than finding the right leaders, we want to try to develop the right leaders. And it's really, really important because if I just found a great leader from some other organization and brought them in here, they may not have the right DNA, the right core values. They might be effective leaders, but they may not be effective here. And so the best case scenario is when we as leaders don't go and try to find someone who's already everything that we want them to be, but instead we find people near our organization, people that we like, people that we care about, and develop them to become great leaders. In fact, it's often

surprising to people, but all the top leaders in our church came from within the church. They didn't have church ministry background. This is kind of rare, hard to believe, but my top four leaders that we've been together as a team for 17 of the 20 years. So we've developing them and had the team assembled by the time the church was three years old. And we stayed together. One was an architect, building a pilot. One was a district manager for Target. One was business major just graduated from college.

One was a guy that had sold to tech companies that he built. And so they had no pastoral ministry experience. They were great leaders of their own part. But with work, we developed each other to become great ministry leaders. Well, I love that, that you're developing leaders from within. But I want to stay here on this finding people, because you do have a process. I know that of finding people as they come in and fill all these different roles. For instance, one of the unique things of what you do is when you launch a new campus.

And so you've got the mothership, if you will, the main location. And then you're in all these different cities and states. And when you're looking to bring someone on, no matter if it is an administrative, role or what have you. What is the process by which you are interviewing people and then making the decision, okay, this is the type of person we're looking for? Well, the interview process is really, really rigorous. There'll be pre-interviews long before someone ever comes on site. What we now do, Ken, is we have total interview rounds. So like the last round, we had 30 people come in for a day. And so we're not just trying to fill one role. We might be trying to fill four different roles.

What's really fun about our organization is we have the same roles at all the different churches. And so when we start one, we'll start with five or six staff members to launch a location. And every single church will have those five or six. Once they get bigger, they'll have more. And so it's kind of like a piece and a chess game, you know, a pawn is a pawn and a rook is a rook. So we're looking to fill those certain roles. And once the people really are gifted, they can be transferred to other locations and have room to move up. So the interview process is if we have 30 people come on, we bring all of our team members in.

They're trained to interview, so you're not allowed to interview once you've been through a two-day training. And then you are mentored as an interviewer, so it's a real skill that goes into it. We test them for a half a day, and so we have lots and lots of data before us. And then they go through multiple rounds of interviews. We also like to interview the spouse because that's a big part of what we do. I talk to Dave a little bit about this, too. I think the organizations that are best at hiring are best at interviewing. And you don't just talk to somebody.

You really develop a system and a process. Here's how we do it. Here's what we value. We interview toward values. We have certain questions. We cross-interview. We test like crazy. They kind of joke around and say it's almost like hazing kind of what we put them through.

And it really is because we want the best of the best to rise to the top. And it's not something that happens by accident. You have to do it on purpose. You said something there that I want to spend some time on, and that is the system. But before we get there, because folks that are listening in here, what I love and admire most about what Craig is doing is how he has systematized things. And I think there's great power there. But let's talk about the other part of the people equation, and that is empowering them.

You've already given us a sense of what it's like. Each campus has the same staff set up, and rooks are rooks, ponds are ponds, bishops are bishops. I love that. And then you send them out, and you're not there, you're, you know, and you've got the this spread out situation. I think it makes a lot of leaders uncomfortable. But how do you empower these people within a very clear role? Yeah, that's a great question. And so if we get really basic, it starts with the power of delegation. And most people think that delegation is me telling someone what to do. If I delegate tasks, what I'm doing is I'm creating a follower.

I'm creating someone that does what they're told to do. So what we want to do as leaders is we don't want to delegate tasks, we want to delegate authority, meaning you're not just doing what I ask you to do, but you're creating something. You have the authority to make it better. If we delegate tasks, we're creating followers. If we delegate authority, we're creating leaders. So what I want to do is I want to give away as much of the ministry as I possibly can. In fact, when I teach on leadership just about empowering, I go through a little exercise and I ask, which of these staff roles do you think that I'm personally involved in on hiring? Would I be involved on hiring my assistant? And everybody says, says, yes, my assistant's assistant, they say, probably.

The pastors of our 25 churches, everyone says, of course you would be. The worship pastors, maybe, youth pastors, maybe, I'm not sure, kids pastors, maybe. The people who are their bosses, the regional pastors, who oversee the campus pastors, of course. And so we go through the whole list. And then at the end of it, I say, well, in the last 10 years, the only interview that I've done was for my assistant. And that's it. And everyone's like, oh, my gosh, you know, you're kidding. Are you lazy?

What's your problem? and then I try to explain that I've empowered the right people to do the hiring process. I've empowered the right people. Next week, I will go and do a vision night at one of our churches that I have not yet seen. I've never seen the building. It is a church that runs over 3,000 people. I've got the right people who built the building, picked the location. I've not yet seen the building.

I've not yet even been by there yet, and it's been functioning for a year without me because I've got the right people in the right places. So as a leader, you can have control or you can have growth, but you can't have both. What I want to do is I want to trust people to do what they do. If I want to attract, build, and retain the best leaders, I have to empower them to lead. If I need to know it all, do it all, and control it all, then I'm not giving them the freedom to lead. You can have control or you can have growth, but you can't have both. I need to trust people to do what they're called to do or I will not keep them or they will not get better.

You know, listening to you talk about this, no question, right? people, right place, but the system, the system, the system. Our audience, Craig knows this. I'm a big sports fan. There are coaches in Oklahoma who have won for 25, 30 years, and they keep cycling new kids in. They're not recruiting. They're in a public school situation, and they win because of a system. Am I over-emphasizing the power of the system within Life Church and your organization? No, not at all. We all have systems. Some of them are intentional. Some of them are accidental. And I think it was Andy Stanley. He did a talk years ago that was really powerful. He said something like the result of what you have is a direct result of the system that you created. Your systems

are designed to bring about the direct result. If you don't like the result, you have to change the system. And that's just so true that when you hire, you should have a system for hiring. When you're training leaders, you should have a system for training. If you're launching new franchises and business, you have a system for launching them. If you're managing your money, you should have a system for And so at the core of everything we do, we need to have values that drive us. Then we need to have systems that take us to the desired result. We need to focus on communication, getting the right people, doing the right things right now.

I think in most organizations, if you're going to look at probably the two or three biggest problems, it would be lack of attention to culture would probably be one of them. And then certainly probably in the top three in most organizations would be lack of systematic structure designed to bring about the end result. Because the system, the example here is you're going to go to this church, you haven't even set foot in. But you expected it to work because you had the right people, you got the system they're going to follow, and you've got a track record built on success that should work. And to me, that has to be a tremendous freedom for a leader to make decisions when it comes to growth. But that leads me to something you talk about all the time. And when we look at Life Church and

all the success, we sometimes forget that you've had some failures when you, you know, launched campuses. You've talked frankly about that. And failure is such a huge part of developing that system and knowing what won't work, why it won't work, and what we need to be doing. I want you to talk some about how the organization there and you as a leader and your leadership team have filtered failure and then used it. Yeah, that's a great question. So first of all, what we have to do is we have to create a culture that allows for failure. I'm going to talk to our staff next week and what I'm going to tell them again is that I would always prefer aggressive, faith-filled, active mistakes rather than passive ones.

We're always going to make mistakes. What I want to do is I want to make the ones trying more rather than doing nothing. And one of the big reasons, Ken, that we're able to launch a church last week, and we launched in Kansas City in the Overland Park area. We had nobody there, no building, sent a team there, and had 846 people on the first weekend. And the reason is because we developed a system in order to go and really get this done. And we failed in not doing it right several times before. In fact, years ago, we tried to launch two churches in Phoenix.

It was the first time we went out of state. Two of them didn't work. We combined them into one. Everything that we're doing today well was born out of lessons that we learned from the failure then. And someone said that failure is often the tuition that you pay for success. it really is true. We have to create a culture that allows for failure. If we're always succeeding, we're not thinking big enough. And the problem is a lot of times people, you'll say, you know, we cannot afford to fail. I would argue back, failure's not an option. It's a necessity.

We talked offline, you and me before we started about working out. If we want our muscles to grow, what do we do? We push them to the point of failure. And that's at the point of failure that we see growth. And so in an organization, it's really, really important not to personalize failure. Failure is an event. It's not a person. Failure is not something we're afraid of. It's something that we embrace because we're going to learn the best lessons from failure on the other side. In fact, the Uversion Bible app, which is one of our favorite stories, it was born out of a failure. We tried to create a website that was kind of like years ago, it was like a combination between Facebook, YouTube, and the Bible. And we tried to engage people in the Bible in an all.

online community, and it simply didn't work. And days before we were going to pull the plug on that, Bobby Greenwald, who's on my staff, said, hey, Apple's going to launch some apps. I think if we play it right, we could be the first to market with the Bible app. And so that's what we did. We took the platform that didn't work, changed the platform to an app, first to market, had 88,000 downloads on the first weekend. We launched the Bible app, and then the rest is history.

Yeah, see, I love that. And I want you to speak to our listeners here. all different positions, all different walks of life. And I love that, again, this Uversion story is a failure, but you had the courage to kind of step into it. It's not fun to dissect failure. And for somebody who hasn't developed that habit, because you clearly have, and it's in the culture now, what would you say to folks about facing that?

Because it's a painful process. Give us something practical there on how to begin to develop that habit of facing that nastiness, the insecurity, the whatever comes with that human condition when we have to look at failure in order to be able to learn from it. Well, I think the question you asked was good. How do we dissect it? And I think we need to dissect failure and we need to dissect success, you know, because if we don't know why something is working when it is, we won't know how to adjust it when

it's not. And so I think we need to analyze everything. On the backside of failure, like when our churches didn't work in Phoenix, we went down and we made a list, and I'm telling you, it was 32 major mistakes that we made. We put it up on the wall, and we read it again and again and again. What's funny, Ken, is once we started to learn to do it right, the list grew from 32 to 49 things because there were mistakes that we made that we didn't even know we made until we learned how to do it right.

And so we continue to go back and take those failures, add on to it the learnings, and then we teach them so that we don't do it. just internalize them and say, yeah, here's what we did wrong, but we help the whole organization understand. The reason we do these things today is because of the mistakes we've made in the past. And, you know, I'm just absolutely and completely convinced that unless you're failing regularly, you will never succeed to the extent that you could because you're not pushing it enough and you won't be learning unless you make some mistakes. That's really good. I want you to talk for a moment about how Life Church, how you lead the budget,

how you budget because this is so relevant to the business leaders. I think this is, it's simple, but it's profound. And I want you to share how you budget each year, how you stick with it, because you're always growth-minded, yet you're doing it so smart. It's really Entree leadership exhibited. So I want you to share that. Well, first I want to say that Dave Ramsey, I was in my late 20s when I discovered him. He is my mentor, my friend. And so everything I've learned, I've learned the vast majority from him. So we try to implement what he teaches in my You said earlier, you know, we really try to run the church like it is a kingdom business because it is. I don't make any apology for that.

So we're a debt-free church in Overland Park, Kansas right now. We just launched in a middle school, but we have a building going up right now that will be completed later on this year. And it was paid for in cash before the day we broke ground. So last year we launched four campuses and all the buildings were paid for before we broke ground. So we have the money set aside. how do we do this because that's really difficult to do in the church world what we try to do can is we really try to work super super hard to create margin in every area of our lives the best things happen in the margin so one of the areas is financial margin and we do that several different

ways one way is that we always budget lower than the previous year's revenue we expect growth so you know this year our attendance is up 13% over last year but our budget we budgeted at 89% of last year's revenue. So already I've got significant margin built into it. Then we're going to try to create margin. In my world, your two big expenses are going to be salary, your staff members, and you're going to be your buildings. And so what I want to do is be efficient in both those areas. In the buildings we build, we don't build them big, we don't build a lot of extra space, and then we use them multiple times. So most of our churches have seven or eight services on the weekends. If the normal church has two services and mine has eight, I'm getting four times the return

out of the building. So what have I done? I've created margin financially. The same is true with the staff. We have one of the smallest staffs in numbers for the number of people who actually come to our church, probably most any church anywhere, and we do it by efficiency, meaning I've got a central staff and I've got campus staff. Central exists to support the campuses.

and so when we create something that's going to be used one time, it's actually used at 25 different locations. So I've got efficiency there. I don't need to have big campus staffs because I've got the central organization carrying so much of the weight. And so when the normal church puts 55 or 60 percent of their budget towards staff, the last several years we have not been above 28 percent. So what I've got is efficiency in my staff, efficiency in my buildings, that creates margin that we can use toward growth. And that's the way we have. we were able to fund four brand new buildings last year for cash. We're doing that again this year, and we do it by creating margins.

So we budget lower than revenue, and then we create margin and efficiency, and that's a business model. That's no doubt about it, and it's a kingdom business model, and we believe that's how we honor God by a wise use of resources. The people in our church love it because they feel like when they're giving, they're giving to something that's efficient, to something that works, that's something that has a real spiritual return on their financial investment. So we're bold about it and we believe in this philosophy.

Look, folks, I'm going to tell you something right now. Whether you're in business, we have a lot of nonprofit leaders who are listening in. That formula works. Rewind it, listen to it, have your leadership listen to it. I'm telling you that works. You said something, and I wrote this down, Craig, at the start of that last answer. And I think it's absolute gold. And so we've got to stay here.

You said the best things happen in the margin. So if I add one word in there, the best thing is, the best thing is that you're not. things in life happen in the margin. I think that is absolutely breakthrough stuff. And I'm going to put you on the spot here because I've had the privilege of knowing you from a distance, but getting to spend some time with you and observe you. And you're very intentional. This is ultimately a time management question as well, but this margin thing, this financial margin, family margin, physical margin, emotional margin. You're very intentional about this. And I want to just let you to be free here to talk about those different categories and this concept of the best things happen

in the margin. Well, I haven't always been good at this. In fact, I had, back when I started out, I was forced to go to counseling for being a workaholic. And then I didn't get anything out of it because I was forced to that my boss has made me do it. And the second time I was older and wise enough to say, I actually need real help with this. And so I went in and a counselor helped me to realize that I was trying to prove something to someone, and that the reason I work so much is because two reasons. One is pride. Two, is poor leadership, and both those really ticked me off. You know, like, don't tell me that.

You know, you're too proud. You think you need to know it all, do it all, and you're going to be the lids of your organization. And then two, is poor leadership, meaning you don't trust other people, and you're not going to have great people unless you trust them. And so so much of what I do was born out of that counselor's help and advice. Sure. What I really, really live and believe is that the greatest things we do are born out of opportunities we cannot predict. People say, okay, Craig, what's your five-year plan? I used to try to create that.

I don't create that all anymore. What I'm trying to do is create margin that helps me prepare for opportunities I cannot predict. We did not predict the U-Version Bible app. We didn't predict multi-site. We didn't predict church online. We didn't predict all these things. But what we had was we had the time margin, the people margin, the emotional margin, the financial margin. to seize these opportunities.

This is so true in marriage. If I get home and I've got nothing left for my wife and for my kids, then I'm not going to see the best things happen in my marriage. I need to guard my day off with a passion so that I'm healthy. I need to put a lid on the end of my day and say, you know, this time I'm going home. When I put a hard end of the day like that, it makes me do three things during the day.

It makes me delegate things I shouldn't do. It makes me make faster decisions. And number three, it makes me say no to things I shouldn't be doing in the first place. And so I am more efficient with a hard end of my day than if I had an open end and said, I'm just going to stay until I'm done. I'm never going to be done. So we have to create artificial barriers in all areas of our life. I'm not going to spend more than this. I could, but I'm choosing not to. I'm not going to work more than this. I could, but I'm choosing not to. When we create those artificial barriers, then we're creating margin so we can have emotional

energy for our kids, emotional energy for our spouse, extra resources to, for example, I love what you're doing on the podcast. I started a leadership podcast this year. How did I do that? I had the margin to do it. I had time set aside to invest in something new that I believed in, and I couldn't do that if I didn't have margin. The best things happen in margin.

Artificial barriers, artificial stops, financially, work-wise, that creates space for you to invest in new opportunities and important places. If we don't have that, we're going to be miserable, burnout, flare out, and such. We see it all the time. That's so good. I think your leadership podcast is good stuff for anyone, so tell us what you're trying to do there and how people can connect with your new leadership podcast. Thank you. Yeah, it's just the Craig Rochelle Leadership Podcast, and they can go to life. com slash leadership podcast, or they can get it on iTunes, subscribe on iTunes. It's on

YouTube as well, and we have show notes on the church website and such, and hopefully it's helping some people. Are you doing interviews? Are you speaking? What's the format. I'm doing once a month. Right now, I'm doing just straight teaching on different subjects. I'd spent the last two talking about creating a value-driven culture and then talked about different types of leaderships. And so Andy Stanley and I do one-day leadership events in cities, six or seven cities every year. And so it's real practical leadership. And that's what the content is here, real tactical, something that could be great for a stay-at-home mom, someone starting a business or someone running a business with hundreds of employees.

There it is, folks. I'm telling you, this is extremely practical. You'll absolutely love it. So make sure you check out Craig's podcast, the Craig Groschelle podcast on iTunes, of course, at their church website and beyond. We'll give you that link in our show notes here on the Entry Leadership podcast page. Craig, you're a great friend, and we as an organization love what you and your team are doing. We admire you. You know that. Dave and I certainly do, and we appreciate you taking time out of your busy schedule to hang out with us. We're better for it. Well, I'm better for you guys. Everything we do is a direct result of what you all do. So thank you, and we're always honored to partner with you. All right, here is our Entrade Leadership tool for this month

on the theme of delegation, the best way to build a business bigger than you. So this is great. Let me just give you a couple things that I noticed I highlighted in this tool. We're going to give you 10 basics of delegation. I mean, this is where you have to start. And then we give you this time audit worksheet, now this is kind of interesting. For somebody like me, this is great, because I need visual reminders. And this time audit worksheet, it really becomes, I think, this visual, you know, like the bumpers they put on at the old bowling lanes, you know, for the kiddos so they don't throw a gutter ball every time. This kind of works this way for me. You know, this is making sure that I'm using my time wisely.

It helps you figure out, well, who else needs to be doing this as opposed to me? So this will give you a really clear picture of the time audit worksheet. so you can truly assess where you're at and make sure that you're bringing others into this process and hand off stuff when you need to. Then we have a delegation checklist with some basic steps that you'll need to get started, and then we get some delegation tips

from entree leaders who are doing things really well. And isn't that true best practices? I mean, that's where you need to go. So that's all coming to you in this tool, the Entree Leaders Guide to Delegation. Here's what you need to do to get it. You have been trained by this point. If you're new to us, two ways to get it.

one, you can text a word. I'm going to give it to you momentarily, or you can always go to Entreeleadership.com slash podcast. Go to this episode for the link. Okay, but here's the word to text to text to delegation. Delegation. Text delegation to 33444. Or again, you can go to Entreeleadership.com slash podcast. And in this episode, you can get the link to download it as well. All right, We're going to move on right now to Dave. This is seven minutes of gold. Seven minutes of Dave teaching our entire team on such a great topic. One of our core values.

Excellence in the ordinary. You know, when you look around and you think about things that are unbelievable experiences or people that have unbelievable careers at the very, very top echelon, you know, they do excellence in the ordinary. And they've done it over a large number of years. You don't accidentally win the Super Bowl. You never see him interviewing a player after the Super Bowl, and he goes, I have no idea what happened.

We just won. It's amazing. Like they hit the lotto. They never say that. They go, I've been dreaming and working towards this day my whole life, don't they? That's what they say. And they've been doing the reps. They've been looking at the mechanics or their throwing arm.

They've been thinking about how they run their routes and whether they're tight. They do excellence in the ordinary. And the ones that don't, don't make it. It's a very fine line. Same thing with people that play a musical instrument at a world-class level. 10,000 hours of practice. Same thing when people speak for a living. It's not an accident when people do graphics or video work at a senior level.

It's not an accident marketing at a level where you just think differently about the whole email process and social media. And you see it differently because you concentrate and concentrate and care about excellence in the ordinary. So what I started backing into is I started figuring out that diligence is not excellence. It's more than just excellence. Diligence is excellence over time, over an extended period of time. I'm going to take what I do and I'm going to do every part of it so well that it doesn't become something I take for granted. I'm going to be entrepreneurial, I'm going to be thoughtful, I'm going to see problems coming before they get here, I'm going to start solving stuff, I'm going to take emotional ownership of the space I'm

walking in, and maybe the two spaces I'm adjacent to. I'm going to move stuff around. And that's not a little one-day thing. It's not a little one-day. Oh, I'm motivated, wee, one day. It's not even a one-week thing. It's not even a one-year thing. The people who you know their names, because of their level of excellence in any given space, acting, sports, ministry, any space, the best of the best, weren't excellent for a week, and they weren't diligent for a week. They had diligence, which is excellence over an extended period of time. Over an extended period of time.

They leaned in and stayed in. They didn't let their foot up off the gas. And they weren't bouncing around. It wasn't just activity for activity. sake. It wasn't just running around, get your head cut off. It's like, what I have in front of me today is what God has given me today, and I'm going to do my work as unto the Lord. I've got to bring it. This is game on, baby. I've got to bring it. This is, I'm playing for the Super Bowl every day. If you play for the Super Bowl every day, you know what? You get to play in the Super Bowl.

That's how you get there. You don't just like, you know, sort of kind of goof off and then a couple of things happen. Luck didn't have crap to do with this. Luck wouldn't have anything to do with it. It's had to do with, we have worked our tails off. Unbelievable, Herculean effort for 25 freaking years. You're so lucky? No, luck didn't have anything to do with it. We have been planting this corn. We've been planting this crop. We've been tending this crop. We've been weeding this crop. God made it round. God made it rain beyond our wildest dreams. And we thank him for that. He has blessed us. But there's two parts to this equation. There's the diligent prosper. That's where we get that excellence in the ordinary

front. So the thing I want to remember, because we're heading into summer, finishing up, we've got a couple big events, boom, boom, pop, and fall events are up for sale just about. A lot of are, you know, book plans. Rachel's got a book coming out in the fall. We've got a lot of stuff going on. We've got a lot of websites going nuts. We've got apps and things. We're building like crazy. There's stuff happening around here left and right. And do not let Memorial Day be the sign that you turn things off. You're not in elementary school when you're an adult. Summertime is not summer vacation. Isn't it funny how our minds still work on elementary school calendar?

It's like, summertime, let down. And lots of businesses do horribly in the summer. And I'm not saying don't recreate, don't recreate. Believe me, I'll be at the lakehouse this summer. You can just mark that on your dadgum calendar. I'll be down there riding the boat behind the boat with excellence. And so, but what Christy talks about, I just love her life balance talk. She says, life balance is not about how much time you spend on one thing or another.

It's about when you're somewhere, be present. So when you're at the lakehouse, be present. When you're on the beach, on your vacation, or on whatever you're doing for this year, whatever, be present, be there. But when you're here, be here. It's not a game, you guys. This is real.

This is a real crusade. And if you ever think it's not, find another place to work quickly before we find you. Please find something that you believe is your crusade. and plug into that. But while you're here, be here with excellence in the ordinary. Diligences, excellence over time.

Hey, our friends in InfusionSoft have a great tool for you this month. Webinars, everything you need to know about webinars, how do you use them? You know, why do you participate in them? Chad Kirby recently stopped by the studio and we talked about this. It seems like there's a new webinar I'm seeing like every hour. You know what I mean? This is the future.

Great tool. And so we want to help you maximize that. So I had Chad in studio and we asked him to talk about it. Chad, the landscape has changed. The digital world, it's here. And webinars. Everybody's doing webinars, but unfortunately not everybody's doing them well. And some need to be doing them that aren't.

Well, and the reason why everyone's doing webinars can is because they work. And it is a tremendous way to see success in your business. there are critical pitfalls. Yeah, you don't want to be the Wayne's world of webinars. Like, people are doing them well now. So you can't just, you know, throw out a laptop and think that it's going to work well. Exactly. But Ken, how do you know if a webinar is good fit? You know, what do I need to remember to produce a successful webinar? Those are all tremendous questions. They're great questions. But what we've done is we've gathered the answers to those questions and we've created a guide to creating a killer webinar that's going to wow your audience. And Ken, it's going to touch on things like how to determine if a webinar is a good fit. Eight steps to produce a successful webinar and the best practices for webinar delivery. You may, Ken, you may have the best webinar in the world, but if the delivery's not there, it'll fall on its face. And so we've created this guide to make sure you create a killer webinar.

All right, here's what we want you to do to get this tool, infusionsoft.com slash eight steps. That's infusionsoft.com slash eight steps. And eight is the number, not the word spelled out. That's infusionsoft.com slash eight steps. And folks, you need to take advantage of this opportunity. Webinars have completely changed the game, and we want you to be aware of how to leverage that for your business. Well, we want to thank Craig Groshell, Chad Kirby, and Dave Ramsey for their contribution to this podcast.

Hey, we love your feedback. We love it, love it, love it. So make sure you're emailing us anytime you got a thought in your head. Podcast at entreleadership.com. And we want to say a big shout out. Thank you one more time to those of you who participated in our survey. We're going to be sharing some of the results of that because it was so good. Thousands of you responded to our survey to tell us what you thought of this podcast,

what you'd like to hear more of. And so we are going to be providing that to you. You want to tell you what you said and then let you know that we're bringing it to you. Don't forget to text the word delegation. to get your Entree leadership guide to delegating better. Make sure that you do that. 3-3-444 is the text number. On behalf of our producer, Eric Anthony,

and the entire Entree leadership team, thank you so much for listening. We'll talk with you again very soon.