EntreLeadership - #407: The EntreLeadership Podcast 2020: A Year in Review

Starting point is 00:00:03 Well, if you're like a lot of people, right now you're saying, thank God, 2020 is over. Because it's been filled with a lot of stuff that we have not really liked. Working from home, Zoom meetings, pivoting. Unprecedented this, unprecedented that. It's been for a lot of businesses, the hardest year and the worst year ever. And for some of you, it's actually been more growth than the best year you've ever had. It's been crazy out there. But whether you've had a great year or a terrible year, I hope that the Entree leader,

Starting point is 00:00:33 podcast has been a lifeline for you, a place that every week you can turn and trust that you're going to get great content, inspirational, and practical information every single week. That's why we're here. From the Ramsey Network, this is the Entree Leadership Podcast, where we help business leaders grow themselves, their teams, and their profits. I'm your host, Daniel Tarty, and I wasn't even the host of the podcast six months ago. Talk about another change. Alex Judd was hosting for the first half of this year.

Starting point is 00:01:03 But today, we're going to wrap up 2020 with some of the best episodes that we've had, the ones that you guys have listened to the most, as well as our favorite moments, and we've compiled them into a summary of the things that we think you need to take forward into 2021. Let's not throw everything away from 2020 because there was some good stuff in here, and that's what this episode is all about. Now, there's a lot of clips in this episode. It's a little different format. It's going to be longer than the typical episode. and to make it easy for you, if you don't want to listen to every minute and you want to skip straight to some of the things that you think are going to be the best for you, you can just click on the link down in the show notes. There's a timestamp for each segment, and you can skip straight to that segment if you want to do it that way. So just keep that in mind.

Starting point is 00:01:51 Our first clip today, a lot of fun. It's with James Clear. James wrote the book Atomic Habits. And this clip is all about leveraging your time. Personally, the book Atomic Habits, I read it a couple times this year. It was a game changer. So let's jump right in. Here's Alex Judd interviewing James Clear.

Starting point is 00:02:11 One of the concepts that I like to think about with regards to productivity is this idea that I refer to as time assets and time debts. So a time asset is something that you invest your time in now that pays you back in the future. It's a commitment that you make to work on something. I think we can summarize it by saying, What is the work that you do that continues to work for you after it's done? Okay. So is it fair to say that delegation, like delegating real responsibility to an individual on your team, that's a time asset?

Starting point is 00:02:42 Yeah, I think that is true. So like any time you train somebody, right, it's the work you do now that will continue to work for you after it's done. So if you are processing your emails and then you train an assistant to process them for you, that's work you do now that will continue to work for you every time they go into the inbox. But that's also super challenging because it takes a ton of time to train the assistant for you to reap those rewards. For sure.

Starting point is 00:03:07 And I think sometimes, you know, as an entrepreneur, so I've had my own business for eight years now. And I think one thing I've realized is that growth in your own business is often not like this linear trajectory. It's almost more like a step change in the sense that whenever you try to jump to that next level where it's like, all right, I'm doing all the emails now. But then I'm going to hire somebody and train them to do it or whatever the task is. In the short run, it's always faster for you to just do it. And so it's so easy to rationalize that when time is tight or resources are tight or you feel like you don't have enough space anyway. I think one way to consider this is to think more about the frequency of the task over time.

Starting point is 00:03:47 You know, it's like, yes, it'll take you an additional 20 hours this month to train the person to do that task. That's 20 hours you're not going to have. But they will do the task two times a week. for the rest of the year, and that's going to earn you back 60 hours. And so it's going to be a huge net positive by the end of the year. It's just a tough bill to swallow up front. So this idea of time assets, though, I think it does apply to training, but it also applies to strategy. So I think about this practically. I was, I was on a coaching call the other day,

Starting point is 00:04:20 and there was someone that was saying they were spending so much time individually training people. And one of the other business owners on the call, they said, well, you just need to take a YouTube video of how you change those people and then you'll have that YouTube video. It's almost like both were time assets, but one was a greater investment because that YouTube video would live on for the rest of time. 100%. That's actually a very good point. So you're right. Both were time assets, but one was much higher leverage than the other. And so this is kind of this weird challenge that you face as your business starts to grow and things expand and go well. You're never going to have a

Starting point is 00:04:55 life that doesn't have any problems, but you're really just trying to upgrade your problems over time. That's kind of a bleak outlook, James. Well, there's always something to solve, right? There's always any entrepreneur could tell you. They're just that, you know, there's always something that's on the list to work on. And so as you move through that trajectory, as you kind of gradually upgrade and move up that line, you're looking for higher leverage uses of time and so on. So that gives you the idea of a time asset, right? Something that continues to work for you after it's done. But then we also have this concept of a time debt. And this is a choice that you make in the present that forces you to spend time in the future. So anytime you commit to a meeting, you put it down, that's a choice you make

Starting point is 00:05:39 right now that you now have a debt to pay. You have to give back that hour for the meeting next Tuesday. Anytime that I agree to an interview, same thing. I'm like I'm now committed to show up and do that. And time debts, this could also be something like poorly written code the first time around. You know, you don't have time to do it right the first time. When are you going to have time to do it better the next time? And so now you've got to go back and revise old work and so on. We see sometimes a leader will, because they don't like challenging conflict or difficult conversations, sometimes they'll have a conversation, but they'll take it easy.

Starting point is 00:06:14 And in reality, they think they're like, oh, this is much easier, right? We got out of the woods. And in reality, they never actually addressed the problem. So it's almost like what could have been a time asset that could make sure you never have to solve that problem again has now you've turned it into a time debt. Yeah, you now have this social debt that has to be paid back. It's like the underlying tension, the underlying problem among the employees or in this particular circumstance has not been resolved.

Starting point is 00:06:39 And it's just sitting there waiting to be paid, right? Is email a time debt? Email is an interesting one because the more that you send email, the more you get it back, Right? If you reply, that's why I hate it so much, James. Yes, I know. So yes, I would say that it is a form of time debt. Every time you send an email, you are now indebting yourself to the response, at least reading it, if not responding to it, well, the next time. So you can already see that it's necessary to spend some time on time debts because of how things function. But you can also see the value of focusing on time assets, particularly high leveraged ones, that really can pay. you often scale in the long run. So the more that you can shift your attention from time debts to time assets, I think the more productive you're going to end up being. Our next clip is with Michael Hyatt. Mike's the founder and CEO of Michael Hyatt and company. He's also a great personal friend and has been for years. And we talked with Mike about why meetings can be a total waste of time. And you're going,

Starting point is 00:07:41 amen to that. I've been in those meetings. But he also gives us some good information about how you can plan to make them better and productive for you and your team. So with that, here's Alex Judd's conversation with Michael Hyatt. Most meetings are a waste of time by virtue of the fact that they're not run well. They're not planned. And honestly, they sometimes substitute for things that could be done in a completely other way. For example, this often happens in corporations where somebody doesn't really want to make a decision. They've got some ambiguity about some topic that they need clarity on. And so instead of actually doing the hard work of thinking for themselves or making the decision, they schedule a meeting. So it's kind of a fancy way to

Starting point is 00:08:23 procrastinate. Oh my God. Organizationally. And it also is a fancy way to kind of share the blame or the responsibility. So instead of me having to come up with a solution, I'm going to get a bunch of people in a room and I'll have a group decide and then it won't be my responsibility. But in doing so, you're slowing things down so much. That's why I think meetings, if you're not careful can kind of create this undergrowth in your culture that absolutely slows everything down. They don't have to be that way, but they can be that way if you're not careful. And that was something that you said in your book that really stood out to me is that a lot of times we have this underlying assumption that may actually be a lie that meetings are work.

Starting point is 00:09:02 And in reality, it seems like a lot of meetings aren't work at all. So I guess how should we look at what warrants a meeting? What defines what is worth having a meeting about? Yeah. So this kind of goes to the first point in my book, No Fail Meetings. And that is you've got to decide. I think you've got to first determine, do we need a meeting? So one of the worst possible uses of a meeting is to disseminate information.

Starting point is 00:09:25 You know, it's the slow way. It's the painful way. And if you ask employees, it's the number one thing that they hate in a meeting is a status update meeting. That's like the death meeting. Nobody wants to go to those status update meetings because you start asking yourself the question, is there a better way to disseminate disinformation? Why do we have to get everybody in a room, all the small talk, all the time that's expended, all the payroll that's expended on something like that, just to inform them of something that we could do in a much better way. We could do it through an email or if you use Slack in your organization, you know, some way, just internal communication to update people.

Starting point is 00:09:59 So that's a bad reason to have a meeting. So that's the negative side of things. What are the topics or what are the kind of the arenas that do warrant getting a group of people together and sitting down? Yeah, I think whatever you're trying to plan work, you know, and you're trying to brainstorm a topic and you realize that you don't have all the resources or have a limited perspective, you know, as a manager or a leader, and you want to involve people that bring different perspectives so that you've got a much richer conversation and a better full-orbed perspective on that topic. Also, when you want to make a decision, you know, making a decision, that's a key thing that these are good for, that meetings are good for. But they need to lead to that. They need to either better thinking or they need to lead to better decisions. but it doesn't need to be dissemination of information.

Starting point is 00:10:42 And I think that kind of hits on this idea that it's like they should be driving towards something. Totally. It's got to be an outcome. Yes. Okay. So explain what is the difference between a well-run meeting that has an outcome and one that doesn't. Okay. It all starts.

Starting point is 00:10:57 Well, I was going to say it all starts with the right agenda. That's the first thing. But you've also got to have the right people in the room. So it's got to be the right people in the room and it can't be too many people. If you have too many people in the room and we don't want to leave anybody out, But if you have too many people in the room, that also slows down the conversation. And you know there are too many people in the room when you've got people that are not commenting, they're not engaged.

Starting point is 00:11:18 You know, maybe the conversation is between three or four people. The meeting probably should have been with those three or four people, right? But you've got to have an agenda. And there's a specific format that I advocate for an agenda in the book, no fail meetings. And so I think that's where it starts. But the last part of that is you've got to be really focused on what the outcomes. What are the decisions that we made? What's the follow-up we expect?

Starting point is 00:11:39 And we're going to hold people accountable to those follow-up actions so that we don't have to keep having the same meeting over and over again. So it sounds like a lot of whether a meeting is a failure or a success depends on the actions you take well before the meeting actually begins. Totally. That really falls on the leader. You know, it's up to him to first of all decide who's going to be in the meeting. What the overall purpose of the meeting is going to be. There's a novel idea, you know, just so that people walk in knowing why we're here. and then creates the agenda because you need to know when the meeting is over. So like I serve on the board of an academic institution.

Starting point is 00:12:15 And one of the things I discovered about academics that's different than business owners and the people that listen to this podcast is they just love to talk. They love to hear themselves talk. The meetings can go on forever and ever. If you plan a three hour meeting, you will fill it up. In fact, it would probably go four hours. But in business, we can't afford that. You know, that's not the, we don't have that luxury.

Starting point is 00:12:32 We got to get to the point, finish the meeting, get on to the next thing. So being outcome focused and knowing the purpose of the. meeting is critical. So how do you get into a spot? Because it takes more time on the front end, but you're going to reap the rewards of the preparation. So how do you get into a spot where you discipline yourself as the business owner or as the business leader to really take that time on the front end and actually prepare? Well, let's talk about recurring meetings. So these are meetings that are like standing meetings that happen over and over again. So it might be a one on one meeting with an assistant or somebody in your team. It may be a team meeting that you have like a team huddle

Starting point is 00:13:07 once a week. First of all, I always have somebody taking minutes. If I'm going to be in 15 meetings a week or even 10 meetings a week, I'm going to forget. I'm going to sleep since the last time I was in that meeting. So I want a record of what we discussed. Now, I don't want detailed, you know, Alex said this and then Michael said that. No, no, just mostly the decisions that we made, you know, just a summary of that. But I also want to summarize and put at the top of the minutes, the follow-up items that we outlined. So this is critical. We want to have the follow-up items and we want to have an own for each of those follow-up items. And we want to begin the meeting by reviewing what we said we were going to do last time.

Starting point is 00:13:43 What were the outstanding items? And you asked the question about preparation. So one of the things to be a good meeting participant or a good meeting leader is to review those before you come to the meeting. So you don't show up. And then you're embarrassed. You're like, I didn't get to that. Or I forgot I was supposed to do that.

Starting point is 00:13:58 But what you really want to do is show up and say, yep, I got that done. Because I agreed to it beforehand. I had a date on it when I was going to get it done. and that's my responsibility before I show up at the next meeting. So I end the meeting and I start to meeting with those two things. But I think you hit on that idea already that it's because you are expecting to have to give that update in the next meeting that you actually get to work. And so that goes in line with what you already kind of alluded to with establishing an agenda

Starting point is 00:14:25 for the meeting. So I'd love for you to dive into, because this doesn't have to be as complicated as some people make it, I think. What makes for an effective agenda for a meeting? Yeah, I would say this. I mean, first of all, start with the basic information, you know, who the participants are and all that, and then get to the purpose of the meetings. So I would literally state the purpose and the desired results. Like, we're here to do this. We're here to make a decision on Sarah's marketing proposal. You know, so that, though, decision on Sarah's marketing proposal, that is remarkably specific. Super specific. And is that important? It is important. You know, like one of the meetings that we had yesterday and the purpose was we're here to discuss our October financial. results and find out what gap we have between now and the end of the year and then brainstorm ways to fill it. So sounds kind of long, but that's a specific outcome. That, by the way,

Starting point is 00:15:16 was the entire result that we wanted for the meeting. Make sense? Yes, it does. And that's the type of meeting that I would walk into almost expecting something positive to happen. If I'm a participant, when I read that purpose on an invite or when someone tells me, hey, this is what we're going to do, I show up into that almost expecting that we're going to do big things in that. Yes. Which that changes the tone of the room. Changes the tone of the meeting. Then people look forward to the meeting they anticipated.

Starting point is 00:15:41 Like, I love my executive team meetings because it's always something like that. All right. Next up is Pat Lanchone, owner and founder of the table group. And we talked with Pat. This is fun. This is a conversation about the motive behind why people actually want to be leaders. And then what the motive should be for great leaders, because it's not always the So here's Alex Judd's conversation with Pat Lanchone.

Starting point is 00:16:09 I think a person in order to be a great leader has to be just a little geeky, just a little kooky about their mission. You know, if people don't say, wow, that guy is really into that, then there's probably something missing. And that's what passion comes from. You know what I mean? I don't think you can be a great leader if you're not passionate about the mission. It doesn't mean you have to be the founder and all that,

Starting point is 00:16:31 but although many times in an entrepreneurial business, somebody said that problem is really worth solving. When I go to Entree Leadership conferences, I meet these people and they're just like so, so passionate about what they're trying to do for people. And in the world, you know, when you're in school and you're passionate like that, people make fun of you. And even in the world, people will go, okay, that's enough. They're so passionate about that.

Starting point is 00:16:54 It's like, no, that's great. And if Dave goes to a cocktail party and is talking to people about getting out of debt, it's not like okay enough about that. He's like, no, this is going to change your life. And so, you know, I was just here yesterday talking to a guy who was the founder of a company. It's named Sangram Vajre. I don't know if I pronounce it. V-A-J-R-E.

Starting point is 00:17:14 He has a company called Terminus. And he walks in, we're talking to him. I look down at his shoes. Now, this is a successful business guy. He has a marketing company called Terminus based in Atlanta, really good company. And he has on his shoes the acronym for account-based marketing. was ABM and ABM equals B2B. And this is a guy who's a successful businessman,

Starting point is 00:17:38 he's wearing shoes that say, ABM equals B2B. It's written on his shoes? On his shoes, not professional, like printed on his shoes. And I'm like, he's on an airplane or at a meeting and people are like, what's the deal with your shoes? And he's like, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Starting point is 00:17:55 So account-based marketing, that's what I do. And that's what business to business really is. And see, people ask me about this, and I get to tell them about it. And people are like, but I don't know if that's cool. And it's like, it doesn't matter. See, I'm really passionate about this. And that's why 700 companies are using our stuff because they know I care about it as much as they do. So think about that.

Starting point is 00:18:16 When you look at Dave and you look at this guy and you look at Alan Mulally, they're a little bit geeky in their own way. But they're geeky around something that they believe that matters. and the world tells you not to be that way. And to be the leader of anything, you've got to be geeky about something. People that are leaders for the right reason are willing to be geeky. People that aren't probably won't do it.

Starting point is 00:18:43 So that is almost an indicator. Yeah. And it came about on your show, Alex, because you asked these questions. One of the indicators is, would you be a geek for your... Because if you're willing to be a geek, you're probably willing to have a hard conversation.

Starting point is 00:18:55 You're probably willing to do team building. You're probably willing to lead a good meeting. You're probably willing to manage your people and to repeat. Okay. So there you go. You just pitched it about as well as you possibly could, Pat. Why is this all worth it or why should people be leading? Right.

Starting point is 00:19:11 And this is going to be disappointed in some ways, but I think it's simple and hopefully profound. It's probably not even new. But that's this. When you ask somebody why they're a leader, there's one of two choices they have. And that is, I'm doing it because I think it's a reward for my talent. I'm the leader and I've finally arrived and I'm being rewarded for that. And because I see it as a reward, that means I'm now entitled to pick and choose what I do based on what I enjoy and what makes me comfortable.

Starting point is 00:19:38 The other motivation is I'm the leader and that's a huge responsibility. It's a burden and I have to be willing to be burdened for others. And that means I have to do whatever my job entails, especially if it's something that nobody else wants to do or can do. If I see my job as a responsibility and I say I owe it to those people that work for me and to my customers and to this mission, then I have to do those things. And when I don't want to, that's probably a sign that it's especially important. But why would a person who took the job or worked hard for the job or seized the job as a reward for them, why would they choose to do it actually makes no sense? Why would you do uncomfortable,

Starting point is 00:20:20 unpleasant things if the reason why you want the job is for yourself. Why would I want to look like a geek? Why would I want to ruin a really nice pair of shoes or walk through an airport and people think I'm some technical guy instead of some cool guy? It's because this is going to sell more. It's going to help more clients. It's going to help my employees. It's going to advance something that I believe is worthwhile. So geeks are usually geeks for others. People that want to be cool or usually cool for themselves. Next up is Jenny Britton Bauer. She's the founder of Jenny's Splendid Ice Cream.

Starting point is 00:20:59 Best ice cream on the planet. I got to tell you, if you're ever in Nashville and you can get Jenny's ice cream, believe me now. Thank me later. Jenny and Alex talked about what they learned at Jennings through a crisis back in 2015 when a pint of their ice cream tested positive for Listeria. And this is cool. Based on that crisis, they took away some values and some principles.

Starting point is 00:21:22 that help them weather the storm in 2020. So check out the conversation with Alex and Jenny. Your CEO gets that phone call in 2015. He tells you this information. What was your initial feeling? What was your initial thought whenever he tells you we had a pint test positive for Listeria, Jenny? My goodness, I don't know what my initial thought was.

Starting point is 00:21:46 It was fear. It was, I'm positive it was fear. And John's probably too. And I think in those moments, or fear may not even be the right thing because when you get that kind of a call, it's hard to explain what that actual emotion is, this whole bunch of things at once. You can either in that moment be paralyzed or you can stop and face it. And I think John and I are both the kinds of people, and we've proven that now, who stop and face it and face into the challenge, look at it, don't let our fear get the best of us, and then make a plan and go forward. And I think both of us did that in our very unique ways. And that is, you know, he put a plan into place immediately to keep people safe, to work

Starting point is 00:22:30 with the FDA and to get back on our feet as fast as we could, to get money had to come from somewhere. And it wasn't going to come from sales. And I got to work reformulating our ice creams and figuring out how can we, who are we as a company? When we emerge from this, what has to stay and what can we let go of? And that was a really interesting exercise that I actually think we had to go through to be who we are today. And so it's really weird how crisis is not something you'd wish

Starting point is 00:22:56 on your worst enemy, not even your worst competitor enemy, you know, or anyone. But it can be the best thing that ever happens to you. And I think that that's true. And I think a lot of people I've talked to who've had a personal crisis even have said that. So the idea now that we're in another crisis, sort of just knowing after you've been through it that there's a light at the end of the tunnel that you have to just keep, you have to find your one step forward. That's so good. And I love that you say, fine, you're one step forward because it seems like there's a challenge in this season that I'm sure is a parallel to the challenge that y'all faced in that information doesn't come to us all at once. And it seems like we get new information on how the market is unfolding and how

Starting point is 00:23:36 the pandemic is unfolding. And I'm sure you were getting details not all at once, but as they were unfolding in that situation, what did you learn in that whole season, Jenny, about leading and working through ambiguity? I don't know that we've ever faced the ambiguity that we're facing right now. Really? Even then because it was just us and because we had control. None of it was easy. These were not easy choices to make, but it was, you know, this or that. Right now, what we're facing is we're slivered in a 200 million opinions. And everyone thinks they kind of know what the answer should be. And it doesn't matter what we do as a company. There's a contingent of people who think it's the wrong thing. Because we don't have top leadership saying this is what we are,

Starting point is 00:24:19 we've taken the scientists, you know, information, we've taken the economists, we've taken everybody's, we put it all together and this is why we believe what we believe and we believe this. We all do as a group. Instead, we've got just too many opinions. It's really hard and I watched John, our CEO and we're all working together to try to, you know, make these decisions. But, you know, I watch his eyes too and know, you know, he's really struggling with this. Like, we put our customers first always in our team. And how can we stay alive in a way that services them, but also keeps everyone really safe? Should we open? Should we not open? Should we require masks with everything that's going on out there? I mean, our team, they don't want to work in a store where customers are showing up without masks.

Starting point is 00:24:57 Not all of them, but many of them. And it depends on the region that we're in. And so how can we require it? We certainly can't put it on them to enforce that. And that brings fear to them. And so, you know, the idea is that it's just really hard to be a decision maker right now. And I think that these times are, if you're a leader in your company, know that this is what you're built for. This is the time that people need you. And so, you know, John made a decision that we were going to open and we were doing, and we've been just working on this for a long time and like, you know, putting plexiglass up and doing all of that and working on our systems, working with our teams. But I could tell that it was a really hard decision for him and for all of us. I mean, we all kind of, this is the time when I get to sit back and be like, well, you know, I don't have to make the final decision. But truthfully, we've all been a part of it, of course.

Starting point is 00:25:45 But that's when you're in that position. You have to make that call. And then you have to stand by it. Now, the great thing about leadership is if you're a really good leader, it's not just about decisions. It is that because you have to be decisive. But first, before you do that, you have to get a good team. And you've already done that work, hopefully, right? You've already done that work of getting only good people around you and they're all smarter than you in their own great way.

Starting point is 00:26:05 Now, whatever decision you make, you can trust that they'll be okay. They're good leaders in their own worlds. And that fellowship, you know, because I love Lord of the Rings and it's the sort of idea of fellowship where everybody brings their awesomeness in. And so you've got this awesome fellowship and that fellowship's going to get the ring to Mordor, whatever your decision is about the path. You know what I mean? And that's what is kind of, you know, if you're willing to step back and look into it and find something interesting about what's going on now, it's fun to look in on your teams and see how they're behaving it now at this time. It's amazing how revealing it is both in terms of personality style but also in terms of decision making. I'd be interested for you and for the other leaders that you're working with to make decisions about moving forward.

Starting point is 00:26:48 How are y'all staying centered in this time? And how are you making sure that you're making decisions from a place, both of compassion but also from logic and facts and really, really driving the organization the best direction that you know possible right now? And any time we've had sort of big things happening at Jennings, we pull together a special sort of unit. And so at Jenny's, our leadership team is six people. It's our CFO, our chief human resources officer or whatever, our chief commercial officer, and then our chief retail officer, and then our CEO and me. During crisis, we add two more people to that, and they're both communications people. One is an external communications guy who's been with our company forever, and the other one

Starting point is 00:27:27 is sort of internal to our shops teams guy, and he's also been with our company forever. So they're really plugged into the people that we serve, both in our shops and out in the world. And so the team of eight meets every single. single day at noon. And even on the weekends, I mean, we've stopped doing that now, but for a while. During crisis, you'll meet every day. During crisis. Every single day at noon.

Starting point is 00:27:51 We touch base. We have a little thing that we run through so that we can look at everybody's contribution where people are struggling, where people need help, where we all need help make a decision. And we're just really, really tight. This is not the way we normally do. Normally, we meet maybe once a week every two weeks, and we're kind of scattered and we're working on our awesomeness out in our worlds.

Starting point is 00:28:12 But during this time, we're meeting daily. And so I think there are no secrets. You know, there's nothing that's happening without all of us knowing and then we can all really work together tightly. It's really, really important that you are working in lockstep during crisis. And so I think that's been just really, really important for us. And was that a pattern that y'all established? I think you alluded to the fact that that was something y'all did in the Listeria crisis as well or when that occurred. Was that the group that you spent the 15 hours with that night?

Starting point is 00:28:44 Or was that night with you and John? It was a group, but it wasn't the same people. Okay, yeah. So we had just a lower level sort of directors sort of people, not sort of chief. You know, we didn't have like a real C suite the way that we do now. How big was your team back then, Jenny? Gosh, it, you know, honestly, it might not have been that much smaller, but it was just not as many top talent leaders. executive leaders. You know what I mean? Yeah. And so now we have this just really, really incredible

Starting point is 00:29:14 team that we had, we fought really came together only in the last couple of years. What is the dynamic of that room whenever you get in there, especially as the crisis is unfolding and it's still in a little bit like we're meeting every day at noon. Can you speak to the dynamic of that room and what makes those meetings effective versus ineffective? It is really cool to watch now. So me, I'm a founder. I get to like, first of all, I always feel like my role is to earn my spot on that team. So I don't show up as the queen be or a founder or whatever. I never do that in our company anyway. I'm there to earn my place there the same as everybody else. And I know I have a role in this. But in the beginning, my role is probably not in the beginning. And so I get to kind of watch

Starting point is 00:29:54 how these leaders sort of just start to unpack what they're doing and they bring it. And it's really interesting to watch it. I learn a lot from them when I'm watching that. At some point within a, I mean, already my brain is thinking about what can I do. do right now that's sort of in terms of like flavors. I mean, we just release sunshine, which is a flavor that's gray, but it tastes like sun. And so the idea, it's a metaphor that the sun always shines again, and it's perfect for right now. So, you know, I'm already kind of thinking about what can I do to whether it's menu, whether it's communication, whether it's getting out and, you know, I'm always out on the road. I can't do that now. How can I communicate with our

Starting point is 00:30:30 customers? But they are really kind of triaging everything and trying to figure out if we can predict anything. I mean, in the beginning, it was like, as soon as you made a predict, about what was going to happen, the ground would fall out again. And this happened for a week, at least, pretty big. And then it began to sort of plateau and stabilize. And then we were able to kind of make a plan that we could stick with. And we actually ended up making five plans for stores and just waiting to see which one we were going to follow. It was like one, two, three, four, or five. And I think right now we're at number three. And so... Really. So you had five, it's kind of like a choose-your-own adventure book where it's like, if this occurs, then go this way. And you had five

Starting point is 00:31:08 different kind of contingencies to determine which way you were going to roll out reopening jenny's also closing so closing and reopening and so how are we going to close where are we going to close why would we you know and so there were five levels of that just not knowing what was coming and this is very early you know in this whole thing we had this so it was pretty you know step one you know we just decided and and went from that plan what's been the biggest takeaway from the listeria crisis because you came out on the other side of that better than what you were. You said, and it obviously took some time to recover and build back up, but y'all are all over the country now. I mean, y'all of locations. I didn't even realize. Whenever I moved to Nashville, I was like, oh, Jennings must be

Starting point is 00:31:51 a local Nashville brand. And then I was like, oh, they're in Ohio. Oh, they're also in Austin. Oh, they're in Los Angeles. And y'all are all over. It's exploding. And so you came out on the other side of 2015 pretty strong. What was the biggest takeaway from that crisis that you've taken in and has given you the ability to lead well through this crisis. I think just stillness, I mean, finding stillness into a place where you can make a decision, an informed decision, instead of reacting and instead of letting fear take over, I mean, that's really easy, especially as a founder. But I mean, I think that for anybody, because, you know, we're talking about the potential for this to be a game-ending situation. For many, many companies, it may be. And ours is one of those companies

Starting point is 00:32:33 kind of on the edge of like, can we survive this? I mean, we don't have six months of, you know, capital just sitting away ready to like help us. And we're coming out of winter, which is not a great thing either. So I think that that's it. You know, just stillness, finding your move. And that's been everything, I think. Our next clip is with Sam Walker. He's a journalist and the author of the captain class. We talked with Sam about the traits of elite team captains in the sports world and how we can take those traits and apply them to our leadership in the arena of business. So, Here's Alex Judd's conversation with Sam Walker.

Starting point is 00:33:13 I realized that these captains were freakish in that it was their relentlessness. And when I say relentlessness, I don't say that lightly. I mean, you would expect that a great leader would be relentless. But they had this style of play where they only had one speed, which was flat out. And what was fascinating, it didn't matter if they were losing by, you know, 20 goals or they were up by 50. It didn't matter. They played at the same rate all the time. And they just had one approach.

Starting point is 00:33:41 It was everything all the time. It was maximum effort. And I thought, well, that's great. But how does that actually help the team over the long term? So I found this study, which is a famous study, it was done in 1911 by this French engineer who had his students pull on a rope. And he had them do this as a group and then together as individuals. And he would measure the force they exerted on the rope. It was like a tug-a-war rope, right?

Starting point is 00:34:04 Yeah, it was like a tug-of-war rope. And they would pull, and there was a weight attached to it. and they would see how much you were pulling. And his theory was that a team is better than the sum of its parts, basically. He thought every time you add someone of that pulling group, there'll be an exponential increase in the total force applied. That was his theory. He was totally wrong.

Starting point is 00:34:24 His favorite was a failure, complete failure. Because every time he added someone to the pulling group, what he found was that the average force that each individual applied actually fell. So in other words, when you're in a team setting, you don't work as hard on something as you would by yourself in isolation. It's just human nature. And this has been replicated thousands of times. It is a fact of human nature that we do not,

Starting point is 00:34:47 we're not inclined to work as hard in a team on the same task as we would work on that task by ourselves. And that's what social loafing is. I assume that's because you have like internally, you're probably not making conscious decision like, oh, I'm going to work less hard now because there's other people. It's just internally you're not feeling the individual responsibility that you would if it's just new? Yeah, exactly. I think that's it.

Starting point is 00:35:09 I think it's a sense of shared, we're all sharing the responsibility. So I'm not going to be the one who's, it's not all on me. So there's less pressure maybe or less inducement. Plus, maybe if you succeed, there's not as much reward for you individually. I think it's a risk or reward sort of thing. But this is human nature. And I knew about social loafing when I knew about the relentlessness. But then I made a connection, which is there, there's a studies that were done to try

Starting point is 00:35:34 to see, how do you get around social? if it is there an antidote to it. And the antidote is fascinating. So it was very simple. They would go and they would get these people together to do a group task. But before they did it, they would tell them that one member of that group, usually the leader of the group, they would just tell them high effort, 100% performer, always gives 100% this person that you're going to be on your team. And just that perception, even if it wasn't true, that perception was enough to get everyone to raise their level so that they would work just as hard in the group setting as the individual setting. And to me, that's exactly what these leaders do, that are relentlessness, that's always giving 100%.

Starting point is 00:36:10 There's no social loafing on those teams, right? You know, it doesn't make a huge difference, but over time, if you think everyone's working six percent harder all the time, you know, because of the effort that you're putting in, I mean, over time, that's huge. That's how you sustain excellence. That's how you do it for a long time. And so it's contagious. That relentless effort and a part of a leader.

Starting point is 00:36:32 And so for business people, I mean, the fact, and most of the problem with these lessons is that they're simple, but they're not easy, right? It's hard to actually do. And the hard thing is, the lesson is, there's no off-day, there's no chill day. I don't care if you just closed a huge deal. You just had an incredible quarter. You know, you got to go and roll up your sleeves and work just as hard as you always do. I don't care if you're demoralized and things look terrible. You've got to put in that same level of effort if you want to sustain greatness. You know, if you want to just be great for a little while, then go back to being mediocre, then don't. But I mean, if you want to be great for a long time. You have to put in that level of effort.

Starting point is 00:37:09 Man, and I love the reasoning behind why. It's not just because, because I think there's a lot of conjecture right now, and a lot of it happens on Instagram about the hustle and the grind, and we just push all the time, you know, we stay up until midnight, we wake up at 4 a.m. And we eat, you know, we eat fiber every morning and protein power. And that's our entire diet. But it's a very selfish, individualistic picture of hustle. But in reality, what you are saying is you are not just hustling for you. You are hustling because your hustle as the captain of this team has a cascading effect and you are literally the antidote to social loafing on your team because people are watching. Is that, I mean, is that a fair assessment? That's what you're talking about.

Starting point is 00:37:51 That's exactly it. I mean, we don't think enough about contagious emotion and leaders, you know, what you project is more important than what you say. And that's one of the things I learned doing this research because these captains didn't give speech. They hated giving speeches. They weren't people that motivate you with words. They were people who motivated you with their behavior. And when you think about contagious behavior from a leader, there's really only two kinds of contagious behavior that are always positive. There is relentlessness and there is emotional control. And that's another one of the things that these leaders all had. It's incredible ability to control and regulate their emotion to let it out when it was helpful and to restrain it when it wasn't.

Starting point is 00:38:33 And those are the only things that are contagious that are always positive. Like you can be contagious and be very joyful and you can be a very optimistic person. And that's contagious in good times. But in bad times, no one wants to hear your positivity. You know, they don't want that. It doesn't work. You know, we're seeing that during this pandemic. Like anyone's a cheerleader.

Starting point is 00:38:52 It looks like a moron right now, right? I mean, it's like this is not the time for that. So it only works some of the time. And anyone who projects, you know, frustration or anger, I mean, that's toxic and that's going to hurt you. So there are only those two kinds of leader emotion that I think are always positive. And that's the relentlessness and the ability to control and regulate your emotion, which is something I never thought about as a manager. You know, and I realized when I did this research like, wow, it's really important. How does a business owner go about creating a culture in which the two things you're talking about,

Starting point is 00:39:25 relentlessness and emotional control, are celebrated and cultivated in people instead of what I feel like, like a lot of corporate America does is they stifle relentlessness, right? They just say, just do your job, just stay in your lane and clock out at five and we'll be golden, right? So how do you make sure you don't become that as you're growing your business? I think a lot of it is what you do personally and being very aware of how you respond to certain things and really thinking about what you're projecting with what you say and what you do and your body language and your, you know, all the things that are not.

Starting point is 00:40:02 verbal that you do. It's so important. They really set a tone and people really do follow you subconsciously. I mean, not even in a conscious way, but they'll follow you. Some of it's your behavior, but you know, the lesson for people in business is similar to the lesson in sports, which is, you know, you need to redefine what a leader looks like, you know, what a captain is. Because, you know, we're wrong. And I don't know why. I mean, we're all wrong. It's not our fault. I just think, you know, Hollywood and we've been socialized to see leaders. in certain terms. And that's really not the model that sustains excellence.

Starting point is 00:40:37 I mean, if that's your goal, should be sustaining excellence. A lot of companies think, well, if we can just get to this level of sales or this milestone we've been chasing, then that's great. But no, that's not it. And that's what I work with a lot of sports teams. And that's the first thing I'm trying to get through to them, which is getting to greatness is one thing. You know, and it takes a – there's a million ways to get there, but only certain tiny

Starting point is 00:41:01 number of teams can stay there once they get there. And that's what you should be doing. While you're building that great team, you need to be thinking about how you're going to stay there once you get there. And the way to do it in business, you just have to start looking for different things, because leadership is really about behavior. And that was the thing that shocked me about the seven traits of great leaders. The one thing that wasn't on, it was God-given talent, ability, charisma, anything you're born with, it's not on there. It doesn't matter. Leadership is not something you're born to do. It's about the way you behave and the choices that you make in every single leadership situation. Any day, there's going to be 150 choices you have to make as a leader.

Starting point is 00:41:41 You just have to make better choices. And if you make the right ones and know what the right choices are, you're going to do better. And behavior can be copied and behavior can be learned and modeled. And any of us can get better at it. You know, it's really about what you do. And one of the things for when you're hiring and looking for team leaders and captains inside your own team, the mistake we make is that we think leaders are supposed to be obvious, right? They're supposed to be the person who looks like the leader or talks the most or has the most charisma or the person who's just the best, has the highest sales totals, whatever. You know, everyone promotes the person. This team has a great job. And they're like, who do we promote?

Starting point is 00:42:19 Oh, the guy who's had the highest individual sales, right? No, that's not the reason the team was great. Like, there was something else going on that you just totally missed. So one thing that I advise people to do, and it sounds crazy, but when you're thinking about who the leader of your team is, just walk into that room and look around and think, if I didn't know these people, who's the last person I would ever think was the leader of this team? Who's the last person?

Starting point is 00:42:45 And it's probably not that person over in the corner eating paste or whatever. And don't pick that person. But you're going to be closer to the truth than you would be if you started with who's the most obvious person because the people who really do the hard work of leadership and care more about the team than they care about themselves and are really going to pull you through a crisis, those are the people who have the relationships and are doing the hard work that they're not getting any credit for because most of leadership is just hard work behind the scenes that no one ever sees. And it's that person. So when you say, who wants to be a leader and six people raise their hands,

Starting point is 00:43:19 you know, you got to kind of look around that group to the person that's not raising their hand, because they know how hard it is and they don't care about the prestige or the adulation. They figure I'm just going to keep doing what I do anyway because that person is probably your leader. And I think if you acknowledge that that person is your leader, what I've seen, and I've done this now enough with different kinds of teams to see, just everything falls into line. It's beautiful. I mean, everyone will rally around that person because that person gives. That person is there and they all know that person cares more about the collective than themselves. and just allows everybody to relax into their roles they're supposed to play.

Starting point is 00:43:58 Okay, this is fun. Next up is Dave Ramsey. Of course, you guys probably know Dave's the founder and CEO of this company, Ramsey Solutions. Alex and Dave sat down to talk about the issue of debt in business. A lot of people go, I understand the debt thing personally, but business is different, right? Guess what? The same principles apply. And Dave talks with Alex about how making the decision to never take on any debt has been a huge part.

Starting point is 00:44:24 part of the success and growth of Ramsey's solutions. So here's the conversation with Alex and Dave. You had decided that you were not going to go into debt to build this business. Can you speak to the value of having that decision made from the beginning? Yeah, once you've got your values in place, most of your decisions are already made. You just have to figure out how to live in that world then. because what happens from that day forward to this day this morning here this morning I've got a project I want to do I don't have the money to do today at right before I walk down here to do this podcast I'm looking at a deal it's got zeros on it I don't have the money so what's that make me do I got to do it later I got to not do it I got to change

Starting point is 00:45:13 how we're doing it but in no case I'm going to end up in debt to do that deal it's a pretty good deal. It's a pretty good deal. I'm kind of excited about it. But that is so different than a lot of times the mindset we see business owners operating with on masterminds or people that we coincide with because people often leave themselves up to the winds of opportunity or of crisis and they always keep the loan or the line of credit at arm's reach just so they can. But it sounds like what you're saying is it's not even a temptation. We have decided. Well, I mean, if I borrow money, it would be such a damaging thing to our reputation to start with. But I'm just not going to violate it because it's worked. That's right. It's 100%. You know, my pastor used to say a man with an experience is not at

Starting point is 00:45:56 the mercy of a man with an opinion. And so everybody's got opinions about this stuff. Let me just tell you, there's no situation that you use debt that if things don't go well, that it turns out okay. And in business, sometimes things don't go well. And we've done projects. We've done projects, you know, we lost $278,000 on a project. Yeah. You know? And to me, I'm from Antioch, Tennessee. That's like a lot of money, you know, and, but we were, you know, we were funding it as

Starting point is 00:46:27 we were going. The stupid thing just didn't work. And I just pull the tent stakes out of it, fold it up, pack it away in the memory drawer, stuff that sucked that I tried, right? And you know what? It hurt. But if I still paying payments on it today, it would hurt twice as bad. That's right.

Starting point is 00:46:41 You're going to make mistakes. You're going to launch stuff that fails. And the debt on it is going to put you out. out of business. It's going to take away your dream and turn it into a nightmare. Grow slower. Be on the cover of Slow Company magazine. Grow slower. Is there a specific moment or a specific story where you remember sitting back and saying, thank God we didn't borrow money because that would have blown up in our face? Almost every mistake. Because what happens when you borrow money, you do whatever you're getting

Starting point is 00:47:11 ready to do bigger and you do it faster. That's right. And so the amount of money that you you lose on a mistake is always magnified when you borrow because you do it bigger. Yeah. You know, I'll order some more of those. You know, and then they don't sell and they're in the dumpster. What was the story? Was it Chick-fil-A that y'all were making those children books for? Yeah.

Starting point is 00:47:33 And, you know, we violated a trademark in one of them. That you could have never expected. Was space camp. I had no idea of Space Camp was trademarked. And we violated, you know, we had a book called Space Camp. And not only we violate the trademark, we made fun of this mythical, what we thought was a mythical space camp, but turns out there was one. And so we had to pull the stupid things off the market.

Starting point is 00:47:51 And, you know, if any of you out there that are in the business like we are, where we buy printing, you know, books or workbooks or whatever, anytime you're buying printing, the more of it you buy, the cheaper it is per unit. Yeah. And so, you know, if you got a big hit, you load up. And so we get ready to do a Chris Hogan book. You know, we buy 100,000 copies to put them out there because we know we're going to move two or 300,000 in almost every case.

Starting point is 00:48:16 And if we get a big hit, we'll move a million of them. But if you're going to borrow money, you could order 500,000 and then end up selling $100,000. And so it turns out your per unit cost of the ones you actually sold will kick your butt. And you got payments on it, you know, and you got stress and you can't make payroll and you got anxiety. Nothing works in business like you think it's going to.

Starting point is 00:48:39 Everything takes twice as long, costs twice as much, and you're not the exception. Those are the three rules. And so that's why you move at the speed of cash. You don't do anything else. We move at the speed of cash. Everything is at the speed of cash. And it just gives us incredible peace. And so, I mean, we have things we get frustrated with and things we push against that don't work.

Starting point is 00:48:57 We have things. We're normal business people. I mean, we're always trying something that we go, God, you look back on it, man, I was stupid. What was I thinking? All of us have had those thoughts that run businesses. But if you don't have payments on them, it hurts less. Yeah, that's right. Okay, so before we get to the practicality of how to actually operate and run a debt-free business, I think probably listening to this, and we've already addressed this a little bit, but it's probably a lot like the listeners to your radio show. You've got the people that call in and they want to call in and argue with you sometimes.

Starting point is 00:49:28 No. Pretend you've got one of those people in front of you right now, or you've got them calling you on the phone. How do you respond to the person that wants to argue with you about this? a hundred percent of the time that you're borrowing money, you're borrowing it on assumptions. You're sitting on your assumptions. And when you sit on your assumptions, you're always going to have a problem. Because the only set of assumptions that borrowed money turns out is if everything goes exactly like it's supposed to, which is a dumb up way of looking at the world because it never goes the way it's supposed to go. nothing goes the way it's you know people ask me all the time did you ever have any idea crap no i had no idea

Starting point is 00:50:11 i had no idea how much work this was going to be i had no idea i was going to have 934 people i had no idea how some of those people were going to misbehave i had no idea how what great joy some of them were going to bring me i had no idea the things that we were going to try were not going to work 90% of the time we've made all of our money and brand penetration on about 10% of our ideas over 30 years of doing this business the rest of it is trash in a drawer and embarrassing and if you borrow on all of that, dude, you are going down. You're not going to make it. Well, you don't understand.

Starting point is 00:50:42 It's the only way I can get started. No, it's not the only way you can get started. You don't need a food truck until you've been a caterer out of your kitchen. You don't need to go $250,000 in debt to buy a dadgum truck with a grill on it. Oh, my God. Unbelievable. Okay. And you never grilled anything.

Starting point is 00:50:59 You just hate your job and wanted to start a restaurant. But I thought this is the way to do it. No. No. I mean, grill something and sell it to somebody. Grill some more and sell it to somebody. Go rent the backside of some restaurant on the weekday when they're closed and use their stuff to move up a notch.

Starting point is 00:51:14 Do in-house catering, in-house catering, in-house catering, in-house catering, learn to sell food and make food before you start going, I'm in the restaurant business, which has the highest failure rate of any industry, by the way. I love that example because you're highlighting the fact that you are not encouraging people not to start a business. That's not what you're saying. You're saying start it the right way and iterate as you go. Be willing, listen, don't despise small beginnings. I started selling books out of the trunk of my car. And it was operating out of my living room. And it was off a card table. It's actually a Sam's folding table. But I mean, still a car table, right? And so don't despise small beginnings. You don't have to walk in looking like you know what you're doing when you don't.

Starting point is 00:51:56 Why don't people do that naturally? Because of pride. I'm going to say I got this and I just started my business. And instead of getting dirt under your fingernails and go over there and crawl before you walk, you know, scratch and claw and get some stuff done, you know, we saw those little blue financial piece books out of the trunk of my car. They were stacked in my living room. I didn't even rent an office. You know, I mean, we didn't, we didn't have the money. We made the books sell. We made the business model work.

Starting point is 00:52:26 We proof texted it in the marketplace. I didn't even know that's what you called it, but we did it. And we walked out. We walked out. We did a little bit. And then we made a little money and we put it all back in. Yeah. We made a little more money.

Starting point is 00:52:38 We put it all back in. We made a little more money and we put it all back in. And every time we put it all back in, some of it worked, some of it didn't. But more of it were, enough of it worked that we made profit. And every time, you know, Sharon and I lived on nothing. And we just rolled it back into the business. I don't want you to not live your dream. I don't want you to turn your dream into a nightmare.

Starting point is 00:52:54 Yeah. And you don't know what you don't know until you've done it. And so get out there and proof text this stuff, meaning prove your idea in the marketplace. Make people give you money for your idea. They're called customers, not theories. Let's talk about the other person that is listening to this right now or that calls into you. And they are willing to be coached, but this is rocking their world. And they have never looked at business from this perspective.

Starting point is 00:53:24 And they say, okay, but I've got debt on my business. Where do I even begin, Dave? If you've already got debt on your business, then you develop a game plan to pay it off. Okay. And so there's two things that businesses have to have to survive long term. Zero debt and piles of retained earnings. Business version of an emergency fund. Okay.

Starting point is 00:53:45 And so how do we build those two things? Well, you need to quit taking all the money home from the business. And so what we tell folks is figure out what your living wage is if you own the business. What do you need to take home to survive? Yeah. No fancy cars, no luxury items. You got debt and no money. Okay.

Starting point is 00:54:05 So let's call it $60,000. Okay. So you're going to put yourself on a $60,000 salary in your profit and loss statement. Then that creates, after you are paid your $60,000, what profit comes to the bottom line. When that profit comes to the bottom line, put the lion's share of it on debt and some more of it over into retained earnings. So let's say you paid your, yourself 60,000 bucks, and this month, $10,000 came to the bottom line, put eight of it on the debt and put two in the bank. Okay. You know, 80-20 or 70-30 or 85-15. I don't even some

Starting point is 00:54:36 ratio like that, 90-10, I don't care. How fast you want to get out of debt? But put the bulk of it on the debt and yet still save some money. That's different than we teach. That's what I was going to say. That's not rice and beans, beans and rice necessarily. Well, it is because you're not really taking any luxuries out of the business. Okay. A lot of people are used to live a little higher on the hog out of the business. And you cut that back to where you can alleviate this, in quotes, business debt that you personally signed for by hammering it with the lion's share of the profits. Meanwhile, you're setting aside some cash. Now, what's that cash do? That cash gives you the, you become your own credit line. So when there's a flex and there's a problem and a receivable doesn't

Starting point is 00:55:14 come in, you can make payroll. And you can use that cash to buy stuff that you used to go into debt to buy. Okay. And so we're, we're funding out the other side so we can keep growing the business and keep the business surviving with that retained earnings portion, that 2,000 out of 10,000. The other 8,000 thrown at the debt. And then beat that debt up, and a lot of businesses are out of debt in three or four, five years that way, even if they got millions of dollars of debt. I've seen it done lots of times. I had a friend that had a big, big new car dealership in a major city. It was a big operation. And he became convicted in his spiritual walk. that the Bible said don't borrow money.

Starting point is 00:55:53 It wasn't Day Ramsey talked him into it. In other words, it was God. And so he just said, out of every car we sell, here's what our margin is, and we're going to set aside this much. And pretty soon he looked up and half his floor plan was cash. The other half was financed and a little bit of time. And here's what's interesting. He started buying differently. He was buying a little more aggressively from the manufacturer.

Starting point is 00:56:16 He was keeping too much stuff on the lot that didn't turn well. And he started being very selective when he started using his. own money for his inventory. And his inventory got smarter. Plus, his inventory didn't cost anything because he didn't have interest cost on that inventory. So it makes you a better business person. It makes you think. When you spend your money instead of the bank's money, you are more diligent. Every one of us are. Okay, guys, next up, Jocka Willink. Jaka's a retired Navy SEAL and the co-founder of Echelon Front. Jocko and Alex had an interesting conversation about this paradox in leadership, and that is that if you want to be in charge of everything, your goal should actually

Starting point is 00:56:58 be to be in charge of nothing. So check out this conversation with Alex and Jocko. If you don't have three people on your team that you know of by name that aren't ready to do your job as good as you or better than you tomorrow, you got a problem. You got a problem. In combat, it's a real straightforward case. Hey, what if I get shot? Someone's going to need to step up.

Starting point is 00:57:25 But in business world, hey, what if I'm sick? What if I'm not on that client call? What if my computer goes down during a web call and someone else need to step up and take over? So out of the gate, if you think about that from that perspective, other people need to be trained. Well, how do you get those other people trained? You get those other people trained by allowing them to step up and do the things that you normally do. or at least do their own job without you holding their hands and micromanaging them. So that should be your goal.

Starting point is 00:57:57 That should be your goal. A thing that confuses people when I initially say it to them is I say, if you want to be in charge of everything, your goal should be to be in charge of nothing. To be in charge of nothing. When we would roll out on a combat operation, the smoothest, combat operations that we would go out, I'd be the ground force commander, meaning I'm in charge of everyone on the ground. The only thing I would say during the entire operation is when we got to where we were going, we got to our target building, we'd roll up in our Humvees and I would say

Starting point is 00:58:35 execute, execute, execute. And after that, after those three words, I wouldn't say another word, because everybody on the team knew exactly what to do, knew exactly where to go. If they had problems, they'd deal with those problems. If things weren't going to plan, they'd make adjustments based on what the overall mission was, they complete the whole operation, get back in the vehicles, we'd leave, we'd get back. Think about the power of that. Because, look, when I say all I'd say was execute, execute, execute, execute,

Starting point is 00:59:01 let me tell you what's really happening. I say execute, execute, execute. They start that portion of the mission. What am I doing? I'm communicating with the aircraft overhead. I'm tracking enemy movement in the area. I'm coordinating with other forces for when we move through their parts of the battle space.

Starting point is 00:59:16 I'm monitoring any other. friendly force operations that are taking place. I'm making sure that the road going back to our base isn't being set up on by the enemy. I'm doing all these things. I'm able to look up and out because my team is handling what's going on. So every day that you are doing the job that someone below you in the chain of command is doing, you're wrong. Now look, does that mean if you're working for me, Alex, and, you know, I task you with a mission

Starting point is 00:59:44 and you start getting off course that I don't get down there and say, all right, Alex, hey, look come on over here let's go let's bring this in let's make this adjustment let's move in this course over here i'll go down there and make adjustments you know if i have to as soon as i get done making adjustments and you're back on course cool i'm going to be right back out of there i'm going to be right back looking up and out instead and look if alex is a problem child which i know could be suspect at this point if you're having real problems i might be side by side with you for more extended amount of time i might micromanage you for a while to make sure that you understand understand what the expectations are, what the standards are, to make sure I see how you're thinking.

Starting point is 01:00:22 Because if you're making decisions that don't make sense, I want to understand what is leading you to make those decisions. What is it that you don't understand? What can I help you understand so that you can make the right decisions without me being there? And then as you start making decisions correctly, I'm going to start giving you a little bit more room. I'm going to start giving you a little bit more responsibility. You continue in the right direction. You continue doing well. I'm going to give you more room and eventually I can not micromanage you anymore. I can send you out there on your own to get after it. So, yes, not raising people up below you to where they can take your job is one of the biggest

Starting point is 01:00:57 mistakes. And just to tie this back together to the beginning of this conversation, one of the things that makes us do that is our ego. And it's really, I think, two parts of it. One part is, I like being the guy with the power. Every time when Alex comes to me and says, hey, Jocko, this is the problem. What should we do? And I got to say, well, young, Alex, here's what you do.

Starting point is 01:01:19 Here's how you make this happen, right? That's a problem. That's my ego. The other part of it is, you know, Alex, just let me do it. I'm better at you than this. I might not say those ways. Hey, Alex, just let me do this. You know, I've been doing this for a long time.

Starting point is 01:01:33 I just, I need to do this. The guy how insulting that is to you, Alex, if you're working for me and I'm coming down there saying, hey, I'll just do it. That means I don't have confidence in you. That means I don't believe that you can do it. And look, if I don't think you're capable of the job, and I don't think you're capable of stepping up and growing, I don't really want you here. The reason you're here, Alex, is because I want you to take my job. I want you to be able to do everything I can do

Starting point is 01:01:56 better than me. That's my goal. So here's this project. Start working on it. If you run into some problems, hit me up. I'm not going to be the easy button. I'm not just going to answer anything you want, but I'll guide you in the right direction. And then you look at me and go, wow, Jocko trust me. I want to do a good job for Jocco. I trust Jocco. That's how we end up with a relationship and that's how we end up with a winning team. I talked to a guy in construction the other day, and I think he was running like a $25 or a $30 million business, and he was still spending, I think, like 90% of his time out in the field doing the work. He was executing. And I realized that maybe there was a little bit of ego in there, and there was a little bit of exactly what you're saying,

Starting point is 01:02:35 like, I just want to do it because it's faster and I've figured this out. But there was also a part of it that he just took great joy in doing the thing, right? He took great joy in executing So how do you balance the need to work on the business while simultaneously recognizing that, like, well, this is kind of why I got in in the first place was to do the thing and to provide the service. What are your thoughts there? If you've got to occasionally get your hands dirty because it makes you feel good, that's great. We all fall into that trap. We all, you know, most of us are doing something that we really like doing. You know, when I was in the SEAL teams, I talked about, hey, when you're in a leadership position, you shouldn't be shooting your gun because you should be looking around.

Starting point is 01:03:14 Does that mean I never shot my gun? Oh, no. When the chance was there, I always shot my gun. But that wasn't my primary mission. And you have to realize that I realized, just like this construction guy, needs to realize. Every time that he's doing that, there's some other part of the business that he's letting everyone down. He's letting the entire team down.

Starting point is 01:03:36 Not only is he not training them, not only are they not getting the experience, but he's not looking at the, you know, what's the next job going to be? where can he build a relationship? What can he make happen that will move the company forward? And look, this is where sometimes you end up with good partnerships. Because if he brings on a partner that doesn't like to get dirty, or maybe he hires a C-O that doesn't like to get dirty. And he says, hey, listen, C-O, I'm the CEO,

Starting point is 01:04:02 but I'm going to be down there getting after it sometimes. I'm going to spend some time on the job site. What I need you to do is do what you're good at, build these relationships with the clients, figure out what the most important link in our supply chain is, figure out what we need to focus on as far as getting better. And then you end up with a good complimentary situation where you're both kind of doing what you're good at.

Starting point is 01:04:23 But I think the key thing is, when you're in that situation, you've got to recognize that you are hurting the team by doing that. You're not allowing the team to grow. You're not allowing the team to develop. And even worse, you're not looking at the strategic view to figure out what's the big picture on progress for the whole team. Okay, our next clip is with bestselling author and speaker Dan Heath.

Starting point is 01:04:50 We talked to Dan about why we've got to get out of reaction mode. We've got to think upstream so that we keep the little fires that seem innocent from spreading and becoming big fires in our business. So here's Alex's conversation with Dan talking about why as leaders were susceptible to perpetually being in reaction mode. Well, it reminds me of this study that was done that speaks to this. It was done by a woman named Anita Tucker who did this research as part of her dissertation at Harvard. And she followed around a bunch of nurses for hundreds of hours just to get a feel for what their day was like.

Starting point is 01:05:29 And she wanted to understand how they solved problems. And so in a typical day, the nurses would deal with broken equipment or missing supplies or improper prescriptions. One nurse might discover she needed a towel for a patient, but they're out of towels. And so she has to dash over to a nearby department and steal some of their towels and come back and deal with the issue. Anita Tucker talked about this one day when there was a nurse who dealt with a new mother about to be checked out of the hospital with her baby. And as part of that, they have to remove the security ankle that's around the baby's ankle to keep them from being abducted. And it was missing. And so they had to scramble around, look for it.

Starting point is 01:06:08 It turned out it was in the baby's bassinet. problem solved. So the mother was checked out. About three hours later, almost the exact same situation happens. It's a different mother, different baby, but again, the ankle is missing. They do another frantic search. This time they can't find it. And so the nurse goes to her boss, and they figure out another way to safely discharge the mother and her child. And so Anita Tucker shows this is what a nurse's life is like. It's constant problem solving. It's improvisational. It's reactive. It's prideful. You know, nurses don't go running to the boss every time something goes wrong. They like the idea that they're scrappy, they're resourceful, they can deal with it themselves. And there's a lot to

Starting point is 01:06:49 admire in that portrait until you flip it around and look at it from the system's angle. Because if you see that work as a system, what you realize is something pretty horrifying, which is this is the description of a system that never learns, that never improves. What these nurses had honed was ability to work around problems, and they were brilliant at it. But the thing about working around problems is they're going to persist. Every time you work around problems, it's a guarantee that that same class of problem is going to recur in the future. Now, to be clear here, the point of this is not to throw stones at nurses, right? We all do this. This is not a nurse thing. I think Anita Tucker could have studied small business owners or flight attendants or lawyers or anybody. And this is a trap

Starting point is 01:07:40 that I want to call tunneling. And that's a word I'm borrowing from a psychology book called scarcity. And tunneling says that when we feel like we have a scarcity of resources, whether that's money or time, we adopt this kind of tunnel mindset where if you just picture yourself visually in a tunnel, there's only one direction to go, right? Forward. We've got to just keep scrambling forward. If we run into a problem, we run out of towels, can't find a security anklet on a baby,

Starting point is 01:08:09 What do we do? We do whatever is necessary to get by it so we can keep tunneling forward, right? And that's a pretty good description of what most of our work lives are like. We're trying to get forward. We run into something. We get it behind us. But of course, the great trap there is any problem that is worked around rather than solved is one that will recur. We can doom ourselves to staying in the tunnel forever. And I think that's really the crux of the issue that keeps us downstream rather than upstream. Wow. We talk a lot about the difference between working in the business and working on the business for small business owners. And we had Dr. Henry Cloud on this program not long ago. And one of the things that he talked about in our conversation with him is he said working in the business, activities related to working in the business are always characterized

Starting point is 01:09:01 by the fact that because you're doing it today, you're going to have to do it again tomorrow. And it sounds like that's what you're talking about with regard to tunneling is because, yes, you're solving the problem you're putting out the fire. But at the same time, you're also not really solving the source of the problem. Is that right? That's exactly it. And so if you just kind of admire and appreciate this horrible trap, and the trap is to be crystal clear about it. And by the way, this is not a new idea or insight that I have. We've all recognized this trap in ourselves. This is like Stephen Covey's important, urgent distinction. I mean, we've all grapple with. this in some way or another. But just to put a fine point on it, the reason we get in this trap is because we lack time and we lack resources. We're scrambling, which forces us to work around problems. Why? Because we don't have the time or resources to deal with them at a systemic level.

Starting point is 01:09:53 But the very fact that we do that guarantees we can't get out of the tunnel. And so the obvious question is, well, are we doomed to do this for the rest of our lives? Is this a horror story? Sounds like whatever is the picture of the guy rolling the giant boulder up the hill. This is the myth of Sisyphus reenacted every day. I think the good news part of this story is it really doesn't take much to begin to fight against this if we're disciplined about it. For instance, in health systems, they've become well aware of this problem and many of them have adapted routines that fight the tunneling instinct. One example is what's called a safety huddle where everybody, doctors, nurses, staffers will get together for a very quick meeting, say every morning for 20 minutes.

Starting point is 01:10:37 And they'll talk about any safety near misses from the day prior, you know, medications that were almost given improper doses or equipment that would malfunctioned or it would have been the perfect opportunity for this nurse to say, had this weird thing happened yesterday where two different babies had their ankle fall off. And I'm just curious what's going on with that. That is, in essence, a way to escape from the tunnel for a precious period of time. to get everybody out thinking, as you said, about the business rather than being stuck in the business. And it doesn't take long. And it takes 20 minutes. And even better than that, it feels good. Tunneling is stressful. Being out of the tunnel and reflecting on the work is less so. It actually

Starting point is 01:11:20 becomes a kind of highlight of the day. And so one, if you're a small business owner listening to this, think about what's that tradition or that habit that you can build among your team to allow them, some regular guaranteed escape from the tunnel. I think that's part one. So if you're talking to a small business owner and they say, okay, Dan, I am in the tunnel. I'm smack dab in the tunnel and I'm just continuing to drive down the tunnel. I've probably been in the tunnel for a year now. And this is where I am.

Starting point is 01:11:49 And I'm telling you, or you're telling me even, that the reason why I'm in this tunnel is because lack of time, scarcity, but then you're telling me that the solution to get out of the tunnel is more time. How do I reconcile that? How do I do that? What are your thoughts there, Dan? I deal with this as a father all the time. I'm kind of an older father. I have a four-year-old and a 19-month-old. You know, things like teaching your child to put on their shoes, you know it's going to be a huge pain in the butt to teach them to put on their shoes, right? And on any given day, if the choice is, do I just put the shoes on my daughter or do I teach her to put on her shoes? I mean, guess what the lazy father is going to pick? I mean, every day I'm just going to take the two minutes. It takes for me to put on the shoes.

Starting point is 01:12:35 And some other day, I'm going to worry about teaching her how to do it herself. And so that's the tunneling trap, right? I have a scarcity of time. I'm always going for the easy solution. But notice the fallacy there, right? That it might take a hundred times as much time to teach her how to put on her shoes herself as it does for me to do it. So in a day, it's like 100 to 1 loaded for the short term. But then I do that a thousand days in a row, you know?

Starting point is 01:13:03 And so if you think of it over the long term, you're actually just burning up time, right? Over the long term, solving these problems systemically does you a favor. And so I don't dispute at all that in the short term, this may be a net add to your time allotted. I think that may well be true. I mean, if you've got fires to put out, they've got to be put out. where's the extra time come from? You know, maybe up front, it does take a little extra time in the morning or at night. But the point is that this is high return on investment, that what you're buying yourself is a future free from firefighting. And that's pretty attractive. I love that you talk about that mindset shifts because one of the other kind of shifts or perspective shifts that you talk about in the book is the fact that a lot of times putting out the fires or solving the one-off problem. or dealing with the customer issues or things like that, those can appear to be very heroic. And so can you speak to that distinction between that appearing heroic versus what is actually

Starting point is 01:14:04 heroic? Absolutely. And this is one of the biggest ahas I had in researching this book. It really speaks to our definition of heroes. So if you think about who is a hero, you think of a firefighter, you think of a cop or a first responder, a lifeguard, you know, people who save the day. Those are our heroes. Or Captain America or Thor.

Starting point is 01:14:28 Captain America. Yes. Exactly. Exactly. And then there's this whole other class of people who keep the day from needing to be saved. You know, rather than needing to put out a fire in a burning building, somebody invented smarter building codes that made things less flammable. Or there was a high school coach who was such a good mentor for a bunch of teenagers that kept him out of trouble with the law. or there were really boring safety protocols embraced by the public pool that kept a lifeguard from needing to jump in and fish out a kid. And I started to get really interested in that idea of upstream heroes. Their work is often invisible. If someone jumps in the YMCA pool and saves your child, they're an instant hero.

Starting point is 01:15:13 I mean, they're going to be in the newspaper. You'll remember them for the rest of their lives. But how would we ever recognize that person like the police officer, remember at the busy intersection, who kept your kid from ever being in the situation of drowning. It's almost impossible to answer. And so I got really interested in this idea of heroics. And when I started talking to business people about this idea, they spotted it immediately in their own culture.

Starting point is 01:15:36 And they said, you know, we reward the firefighting. You know, somebody stays up all night to deal with a critical client problem or to respond to an RFP or whatever. And those are the people that get the praise. And then they started to catch on like this kind of heroics can actually be poisonous because what we really want is quiet competence in our organizations. I mean, we don't want firefighting. The need for heroism is often a sign that you got a bad system, to be honest. And I heard from this one reader who had this wonderfully practical tip, I want to pass along.

Starting point is 01:16:17 And he said he had worked at a company where this kind of glory from fire. fighting had started to become a thing. And in fact, some of his colleagues actually whispered that that they had team members who would kind of lie to fire for the sake of putting it out for the glory. That's called being an arsonist is what that's called. Yes, right. And so they were struggling with what to do about this. And one thing we know for sure about human nature is that you get more of what you reward and what you praise. And so they said, we need to start praising people who prevent crises. And so they created what they called the Smokey the Bear Award for Problem Prevention. And I just love how kind of corny that is, but it's perfect, right? Because you're saying,

Starting point is 01:16:58 let's stop praising the last minute heroics. Let's start praising Marge from accounting who figured out a way to keep us from staying up all night every month as we close out the books, you know, a smarter process, a more enduring process, a more sustainable process, though, or our organizational heroes. Gosh, that's so good. And I love that you use that phrase, quiet competence, because it seems like so often

Starting point is 01:17:26 those heroes that are actually doing the work that saves people a ton of time, if business owners and business leaders aren't careful, those people will be completely unseen, unheard, and absolutely anonymous to the organization. That's exactly it. And that's the trap. So I think as small business owners,

Starting point is 01:17:45 you're in a wonderful position to be an antidote to that and to start paying attention to who are those people who are just making the systems run smoothly, who are attentive to them, who are tweaking the knobs of the system rather than doing this kind of roller coaster ride of heroics. I mean, what we want are people who just get the job done, slowly improve over time, squeeze out errors and defects from processes, and let's hold those people up. All right, guys, next up, we've got Dr. John Deloney. He's a leading voice on relationships and emotional wellness, and he's the newest Ramsey personality. Dr. Deloney and I got to sit down and talk about what we need to do to avoid a leadership crash.

Starting point is 01:18:32 And the key is paying attention to some of the early warning signs that were headed towards a crash. We talked about those, so you don't want to miss this. Here's my conversation with Dr. John Deloney. Here's a couple things off top of my head. Number one, sleeping, intimacy, going to the bathroom. Those are basic biologic functions. If you are taking medication for one of those three things, talk to your doctor about stress and environment also.

Starting point is 01:19:03 This isn't a medical show, and I'm going down some of those roads, but I can't tell you how many people have been like, oh, I haven't slept in years. And so I'm taking X, Y, and Z. I took sleep meds for years. here's Daniel. And no one ever questioned, hey, why aren't you sleeping, man? That's a, that's a core basic biological function is to your body to repair itself. Why is your body so on alert that you can't sleep a full night? Why are you sleeping next to somebody that you love

Starting point is 01:19:31 and your intimacy life is shot? Something, there's a gulf there. That's not, that's not the way we are biologically designed. What's going on there, right? So begin to ask questions about our physiology. A second thing is, if you can't get out of your chair, if it hurts to move to the front door to go get in your truck, that constant living in pain all the time, my knees hurt, my back hurt, my shoulders hurt, honor yourself and the people who love you enough to get that work done, right, to take care of yourself. Well, that means you're going to have to lose some weight. You're going to go as a surgery you've been putting off for years. You're going to go have to deal with the physical therapist. Those are the kind of pains. Again, the body keeps the score.

Starting point is 01:20:10 and some people stress and broken relationships will end up in anxious anxiety. They'll end up in depression and some will end up in knee pain and back pain. And then the other big one, man, is when you find yourself having divided the world up into us and thems. That's a thing our brain does to protect us. When our amygdala gets fired off, right, when it detects threat, it immediately says who's with me and who's against me. and there's a cool feature that gets people in trouble, gets all of us in trouble, where your brain will switch from accuracy,

Starting point is 01:20:44 it will trade accuracy for expediency, close enough, right? That's how a young man might get shot holding a cell phone. It looked close enough, right? And our brain is saying, I'm going to trade accuracy for safety. I'm going home, right? And when you feel yourself saying things like, if they would jest or it's those idiots who keep fill in the blank and usually that's political but

Starting point is 01:21:10 it can also be local business it can be your employees if your employees are constantly doing things that are hurting the culture of your company that could be a leadership issue right it could be a clarity issue it could be a mission issue or it could be you have a bunch of knuckleheads working right who knows but you've got to stop and ask those questions when you feel your world as us as and thems me versus the world that's your brain telling you you're not so safe. You're talking about these physiological symptoms, sleeping, intimacy, using the restroom, pain in your body. When I started having all this anxiety, depression, crazy stuff going on, I didn't understand it. And my doctor said, are you stressed? I said, no, I don't think I'm stressed. He said, you might be a little stressed.

Starting point is 01:21:51 Here's an ambient. Here's Alexa Pro. And I took it for a while and has all these crazy side effects, and it's not getting better. And I go back and talk to the doctor. And I'm going, it's not working. What do we do? He never talked to me about stress. He said, well, I've got some more pills you could take. And that's when I was like, whoa, time out. I'm not going down this path. And I had to go find people that weren't just going to hand me another pill. Who were the right people to talk to that don't just get you into this, you know, okay, you're going to stay in a tailspin, but we're going to make you feel a little bit more numb while you're in it. There you go. I feel like that's, I mean, I don't like how the medical community approaches this sometimes, because it's not necessarily designed to get you out. It's designed

Starting point is 01:22:29 to medicate. Right. I look at this the same way, the Rams that you, ecosystem tells folks to work with a smart bester pro or a one of the entree coaches, which is I have just continued to work to find doctors and I've got two great. I've got a, a call her a sorcerer. I've got a holistic doctor and I've got a traditional medical doctor. And they both are teachers with me. They teach me why are we doing what we're doing? Here's what this is going to benefit. Here's the side effects of this. They don't get upset when I send them an article. And I'll literally email them an article and say, what do you think about this? And they don't get upset about that. They consider themselves teachers, not automatrons and not kings and I'm a minion, right? And so I think it's

Starting point is 01:23:15 being real intention about finding a doctor that is willing to go on a journey with you and letting them know up front, I want medication to be a last resort for me. And they may say, this is that last resort. Great. Or if you're really struggling with anxiety, there was a season why I needed anxiety meds to turn the alarms down so that I could even hear a counselor so that I could even sit down and talk to my wife, right? The alarms were so loud by the time I actually started dealing with them. I needed something to help shut them down. Some don't need that. I did. And then finding a great relationship counselor, finding a professional who will sit there and help you learn some of these skills, how to be in relationship, how to feel, is that, is that a feeling I have, right?

Starting point is 01:24:00 How to check your own feelings for whether they're being true or they're being dishonest, because feelings will lie to you, right? And so it's, those are skills we've got to learn. And we don't like to think of feelings as skills. We don't like to think of relationships as skills, and they are. I want you to say more about the, the counseling aspect and why that matters so much. I went to the hospital thinking I was having a heart attack. I go on the are my body's feeling real pain it wasn't like this imaginary i'm having a panic attack and it's all in my head and i just need to think happy thoughts i mean that there was pain in my chest and my muscles are twitching and there's like crazy stuff my body's doing and they check me out and they run all these

Starting point is 01:24:42 tests and they go hey you're you're fine you should probably talk to a counselor and i thought that is so confusing how does talking to a counselor about feelings get this pain in my chest to go away Like, that's fine. We can talk. But I didn't understand the connection between the mind and the body. And how is that a helpful resource? So what I would tell you is there is no connection between the mind and body because they're not two different things. They're the same thing. Our body holds so much. What we say in counseling is it's leakage. You can deal with trauma. You can deal with broken relationships or they will deal with you. Eventually, your body will say you're not hearing these alarms. We've been telling you for a year. We're not sleeping. I'm waking you up every night. You are 35 and robust and your testosterone is scoring so low it doesn't even register. We're telling you and you're not getting our signals. So we're just shutting you down, right? We're taking the car off the highway, right?

Starting point is 01:25:37 And that's just your body disconnecting itself, right? And good for it, right? It's just getting your attention. What a counselor will do is it will teach you how to be vulnerable, how to be whole with somebody, how to have a relationship. and we could get in all the psychiatry and all the biology at the end of the day, we store those things in our body. We store old traumas. We store old family histories.

Starting point is 01:26:05 We store that stuff in our body. And what a conversation with a therapist does is it releases it. It lets it out. And it also teaches us how to have conversation, how to listen, how to look somebody in the eye. And so a good counselor is also a great teacher. they are someone who reflects with you and they talk to you and they say you've been telling yourself for 15 years

Starting point is 01:26:25 that this is all on you. You know it's not, right? You've been telling yourself for 15 years that your wife only loves you because she doesn't. You know that, right? And it just reintroduces new thoughts because when you feel you're alone then your body cascades the chemicals through your body. Did you know that there's some remarkable research

Starting point is 01:26:45 the actual biochemical poison of being lonely? Really? When your body feels lonely is more damaging to your physiology than smoking. There's like a loneliness chemical. It will kill you from the inside out. The stress response in your body saying find your tribe, find your tribe, find your tribe, find your tribe. Think about it 200 years ago.

Starting point is 01:27:05 If you're out in the plains of West Texas and you wake up and you're alone, you're dead. You will die. And everything about your body would say, find your people, find your people, find your people. And we can be alone in a crowded room. Yeah. And there are people listening to this podcast right now with headphones in in the same room as their family. And they are 10, 10 feet apart from their family and 2,000 miles away from their family. All right, guys, Seth Godin is up next.

Starting point is 01:27:33 You guys know and love Seth. Author, speaker, marketing expert. I got to talk with Seth about the practice of shipping creative work. Not like designing and creating things that are visual, but creative problem solving. That's what leaders do. and doing it in a way that solves problems for our customers that sets our companies apart from all the rest. So with that, here's my conversation with Seth Godin. Let's get real practical. I think you only have two choices. Either your motto is you can pick

Starting point is 01:28:05 anyone and we're anyone, or your motto is we're the only one and we're worth paying extra. You'll pay a little bit more, but you get more than you pay for. It's one or the other. If it's the first one, if you are following in the footsteps of so many you have come before, then in the old days you'd buy a bigger yellow pages ad than anybody else. Or in the old days, you'd hire a salesperson who would call businesses in your community one after another. In the new days, maybe you hope that you win in Yelp or Google when someone searches on you. But basically, you're a victim. You're a victim of, did I get picked?

Starting point is 01:28:40 If I got picked, can I get away with charging a nickel more than the standard price? But if all you're doing is making average stuff for average people, showing up for average customers and doing an average job for an average price, why exactly are we calling you the boss? You're doing very little. Your technicians are doing all of it. The alternative is to say what we really sell in addition to reliable heat and air conditioning is a story, a story of peace of mind, a story of what you tell your spouse,

Starting point is 01:29:11 a story of more than just nickels or dimes. And I can tell you about a super successful business in my neighborhood that does exactly what you did. I called five people when our furnace went out in our 100-year-old house. And I don't care. They're all the same. Let them all come and give me a bid. I'll just pick the cheap one. Wouldn't you, if they're all the same?

Starting point is 01:29:35 And the first person came and he put booties on. And I'm like, the stairs are right to the basement or two steps away. wait, just go ahead. He said, no, no, we want to treat your house like our house. He said, I'm going to go downstairs and check it out. But while I'm downstairs, would you take a look at this? And he hands me a two-page, single-spaced, typewritten sheet, and on it are names and phone numbers. And he says to me, these are your neighbors. You might recognize some of them. They've all volunteered to add their name and phone number to our list of references. We're hoping you will too when we're done. I'll go downstairs and look at the furnace now. And after I got to the fifth name I recognized, when he

Starting point is 01:30:18 got to the top of the stairs, I said, you're hired. I called the other four people and I canceled their appointments. Wouldn't you? Who's going to say to themselves and their spouse? Oh, well, we had the best person here, but I shopped around and saved 50 bucks. And now I have to live with everything that goes wrong forever. Right. So my question, David, is, what would it take for your organization to have a sheet of paper like that one. Or let's just think about how the Internet of things and technology changes because you didn't sign up to understand TCPIP and always on and the rest of it. But guess what? One of your competitors is going to show up and say with 24 hour a day monitoring, I'm going to be able to cut the cost of this and this and this and I'm going to build a

Starting point is 01:31:04 network effect and it. Well, that's scary because no one in Kansas has ever done that before. but the first person in Kansas who does it is going to clean the deck because that person is going to have every single business, the ones who have the most money at stake, hiring them to set up that sort of network effect monitoring because it's too expensive to be left out. Again, we're seeing technical change, emotional change, marketing change all show up forcing you to lead instead of waiting to be picked. So I'm curious, that moment when your friend, the HVAC guy, comes upstairs and you say, you're hired. What was the magic? You didn't know in that moment whether he was qualified to do the

Starting point is 01:31:46 job or not at a technical level, but there was something that you felt that was very significant that he intentionally created. How would you summarize the art in that moment? What is it that we're creating as leaders? Okay, so the first thing is I will never be technically qualified to know if an HVAC person is competent, particularly since he's not going to do the work. His technician is So I have to start by saying your customers aren't as smart as you. But then the second thing is that many customers still want the cheapest one. And you know what? They shouldn't be your customers.

Starting point is 01:32:25 Send them the phone number of your competitor. Send your competitor every single person who thinks price is the most important thing. And you will be left with the smallest viable audience. The smallest group of people who value something other than price. because there are two ways to look at the world when you're buying something. And you don't need want or deserve every single customer. You just need your customers. You know, Dave has, Dave Ramsey has one of the most popular radio shows in America.

Starting point is 01:32:56 And yet, 90% of the people in America don't listen to it. I write bestselling books. And yet 99% of the people in America have never read one of them. Fine. It's enough. Focus on your people. ignore the rest. What's the drawback on competing on price? It sounds like you're saying it's a race to the bottom. You're never going to win that race. First of all, you commoditize kind of what you do

Starting point is 01:33:20 and it just becomes a transaction. But as leaders who really want to build a lasting legacy, impact, build a great team, do something remarkable. Why should price be a non-issue? Well, every once in a while, someone can actually systematically, structurally win on price. Walmart pulled it off for 20 years. That's really rare. Instead, what you end up doing is apologizing all the time and using price as your excuse. Well, what did you expect? It was cheap. And I think it's better for our peace of mind and our career to apologize once for the price than over and over and over again for everything else. And the second thing is that in order to win on price, you have to cut more corners than anybody else. That's how you do it. And some corners are easier to cut than

Starting point is 01:34:13 others, but there's always going to be someone who's going to cut one more corner than you. And that means you don't get to work with the people you want to work with. It means you don't get to treat people the way you want to be treated. That maybe you believe you shouldn't be dumping your used gas without putting it in the proper storage container. Yeah, but you have a competitor who's doing that. And if you don't do it too, you're going to lose. Well, all of a sudden, we end up with, you know, a doping scandal. We end up with somebody who says, well, everyone did it so I had to cheat. Yeah, you don't have to cheat because you don't have to race against those people. Our next clip is with Casey Graham, CEO at Gravy. I got to sit down with Casey and talk to him about

Starting point is 01:34:57 what businesses can do to create what he calls sticky customers. These are customers that keep coming back to your business over and over again. And we all want more of those. So check out my conversation with Casey Graham. What we've seen from the businesses that do it the best and what we've seen for the business to do at the worst. And there's four things that we've seen that businesses that keep customers for long time do very well. And the first thing is, is they make it super easy for their customer. And so the phrase of what we say is that you've got to make it obvious for the oblivious, obvious for the oblivious. Now, here's a practical example. that. My mom was late to getting a cell phone. And so I told her because she kept saying,

Starting point is 01:35:41 I'm calling you, I'm calling you, and I wasn't answering enough. I'm sure we've all had these kind of things. And so I was like, Mom, if you just get a cell phone, then you can text, you know, and I'll text you back. So she comes in town two months later and she's mad. I mean, she's hacked off at me. We're sitting eating some wings. And mom's mad at me. And she says, Casey, you told me if I got a cell phone that if I texted you, you text me back. I was like, mom, I haven't gotten a text. And so I pick up her phone. I look at it. And my mom somehow was texting herself. Not me. You got to give her an A for effort. I mean, mom's trying to stay with the technology, right? I do. And so what I learned from that was, you know, you've got to make it obvious

Starting point is 01:36:21 for the business. She just hadn't done this before. And so this is how every customer is when they interact with your brand for the first time. So what I suggest for every single person in this Zoom world to do. Literally go get somebody who is not your target audience. They know nothing about what you do or care about it and get on a Zoom call and literally let them have their screen and pay them for 30 minutes and pay them and watch them go through your website, what they click on, what does that phrase mean to you, and literally it's a look over the shoulder. They used to do it in like the 90s. You just look over the shoulder and you would watch, but now you can look over the shoulder on Zoom and watch people. pay people, five or ten people.

Starting point is 01:37:03 Yes. And you'll see how oblivious people are to your insider language, to what you think is being said, and what to do. You know, one of the biggest things is they don't know where to go after they buy. They don't know who to contact. They don't know what to do next. And so oftentimes we spend all of our effort on getting them to buy, but then after that, how clear is it where do you go? What's the next thing you buy? All of those different things.

Starting point is 01:37:25 And so that's what we mean by make it obvious for the oblivious. Well, you're hitting on something that's really important. My friend Donna Miller talks about the curse of knowledge. When we live so close to our stuff, it's actually a curse that we know so much about our landing pages because we just look at it and things that are obvious to us. Well, you just go here and you click this and we know that they're going to get this and that, you know, the workflows of our website even can be really confusing if you've never been there before. And what you're talking about is getting people who don't have that native experience, that knowledge that they've been working on it as a project. It's fresh eyes, and you go, oh my gosh, it's right in front of them. Why are they not clicking it? You know, and then you realize the messaging is off. And I think it's a great exercise. In fact, there's services. We use one that lets you do this en masse, usertesting.com.

Starting point is 01:38:13 And they find people, and you can pay them, and these people sign up and say, yeah, I'll be someone that'll test drive your website for you and give you the kind of the brutal, honest feedback. And actually, usertesting.com just called us the other day and said we're running too many tests through their site per our agreement. We're going to have to, but that's how much we believe in it because we get so many insights. We're like, oh, my gosh, you know, if we'll just test some of this stuff and how many customers are we losing if we never test it? And we never realized that thousands of people were putting all this money and energy to drive traffic to our site.

Starting point is 01:38:42 And then they're just bouncing right off because it's confusing. And we didn't fix the thing that once they got to the site could have been a natural conversion point if we just worked on that and did exactly what you're talking about. That's it. Another one's called Full Story out of Atlanta. It's an Atlanta-based company. It kind of does the same thing. It shows you the full story of what they're doing. But those are the digital versions.

Starting point is 01:38:59 I'm even talking more analog of like literally when people click on stuff like in your product or the other thing is let them buy all the way through the process. And so even if you are shipping a physical box to their house, have them on Zoom and watch them open the box and ask them every step along the way like, what do you think this is? Why do we do that? You know, just asking questions and get the analog data back. And some of that, some of your best marketing materials and some of our best marketing materials. and some of our best marketing materials that we've ever done. Wow, really good. I love it.

Starting point is 01:39:29 So make it obvious to the oblivious. And then the next step is to make it simple. Yeah, make it simple. So in my previous company, I laughed because we were selling these courses to church leaders. And because churches were broke. And you guys know all about churches being broke, I'm sure. And so a lot of these churches were broke. And so I built this thing called Giving Rocket back in the days.

Starting point is 01:39:55 and I taught them how to raise money without being a televangelist, okay? Like how to do it properly. And I built this whole system and 12 modules and all these coaching videos and documents and downloads and all you have to do is pay $90,000. We're going to give you all this stuff. And so we started selling the crap out of this thing. I'm talking about that we went from $0 to $500,000 in ARR in under 90 days from scratch. And it just started taking off.

Starting point is 01:40:23 But then just as soon as the roller coaster went up, about three months. months later, the roller coaster started going down. People started leaving. And so I started calling customers and I would say, I don't want you to come back. This is not to win you back. I want to know, why are you leaving? And they were like, well, there's too much stuff. I don't, I'm not using it all. And I was like, okay, well, is there anything you are using? And they kept telling me about this one document that was the easiest thing that we make that was this one thing called a giving talk. And the giving talk was literally, here's what you say this week when you stand up on stage to take up your offering. That's all it was.

Starting point is 01:40:57 And we just wrote it for them. But I had all these wonderful videos of my wonderful coaching and teaching and stuff that they just didn't care about. And so I started calling people that were staying. And I was like, what are you using giving talks? Oh, I'm actually hearing these customers say that. So we stripped the program out of everything. And the easiest thing to make was the thing that delivered the most value the fastest, which is the giving talk. And so we made the whole program about giving talks, which was cheaper for us to make.

Starting point is 01:41:25 It was better. And then people stayed longer and we sold millions of dollars of this thing. The point of this is you've got to give people inside of your product a magic moment within the first seven days of buying. And that psychological win of the magic moment of them winning, even if it's a psychological win, keeps them staying and paying longer than trying to deliver on all these big wins that happen over time. And so we do this at Gravy. As soon as somebody comes on, we save the first payment. We make the biggest deal out of the first payment say because it's a psychological win. And so my question is, what's the magic moment for your product?

Starting point is 01:42:01 What's the magic moment for your service? What's the one thing that you can do that's like this is the feature or this is the thing that if they do that, then we celebrate it to the customer and we reinforce that. That's the magic moment. We see people that don't do this and they just go, oh, we hope the product makes them happy. it doesn't work and it's too complicated. You got to keep it simple. I love that story. It reminds me of about 10 years ago here. We had a website service. It was like a blog with a membership called My Total Money Makeover. And Dave Ramsey wrote the book, The Total Money Makeover, and it was a New York Times

Starting point is 01:42:35 bestselling book. And we thought, let's have an online community where people can have, you know, they can chat, they can get answers. And we probably had 15 different things in there. We had a budget template. We had a forum. We had, we would take clips off the radio show and dump those things in there, tools and calculators. And we had a decent little following because we had a lot of people that were just big fans and they'd jump in there. But a guy, a really great product guy, Michael Finney, who's on our operating board today and oversees all of our technology and digital product. He came in to that team, kind of entry level, and he said, hey, guys, they're only using one thing. What are they using? What are you talking about? And this was a sacred cow. I mean,

Starting point is 01:43:14 we love this thing. My total money makeover and it was a business unit. And he started challenging that it shouldn't be everything we were trying to make it. And he said, guys, the thing they're using is the budget. It's all about the budget. Everybody comes to Ramsey. They hear they want to get a financial freedom. And then they're going, just show me how to do the budget. Get rid of all this noise and all these articles. And essentially they took that entire, what was a line of business, shut it down, sunseted, and relaunched what today is every dollar, which is our budgeting app. And it's the most popular thing that we've ever done from a digital product. And it's blowing up.

Starting point is 01:43:48 And it's got a five-year just up into the right hockey stick. If you look at that thing, you go, okay, one guy came in and noticed that there's one thing that's the magic moment. This is the core part of the product that everybody really cares about. And it takes a lot of courage to do that. And so I think as founders, as leaders, as entrepreneurs, we're just idea people and we're constantly thinking about, okay, they need to know all this stuff. and you're calling out that we've got about 30 seconds of their first day with us of attention span to really win them and create that magic moment. How do we figure out what that thing is?

Starting point is 01:44:23 Because, I mean, we're proud of all of our things. We like all of our ideas. We want them to sit down and read and read for hours, all the brilliant stuff that we came up with for our customers. And the reality is they're not going to do that. How do we decipher? How do we filter down to, well, this is the thing that we need to double down on? I literally think it comes down to doing the unscalable questions that you ask.

Starting point is 01:44:45 And you can do the scalable technology of watching what they do to when they stay, right? And so that works. But then the unscailable thing is getting down and asking, or you can send the survey out and ask the question in their language, which is, if you had to boil it down to, what is the one reason that you bought this product? What is the one outcome that you want from this? and getting it that clear and that simple, that's what, that's what helped me. So a company called InfusionSoft, I was one of their first early customers like 10 or 11 years ago. Yeah, I love it. Great friends of ours.

Starting point is 01:45:19 Really good company. Yeah, yeah. And so when I started, one of the things that they found out from the founder Clayt Mask was, if they can get me to send out my first email campaign, that's it. If I get one email campaign and get my contacts uploaded, I'm stuck. That's it. And so they created success coaches around that. And so they found that by looking at what are the actions and the activities through

Starting point is 01:45:44 personally talking to people and seeing via the technology what they do. And so I really think it's that simple. Here's the deal with all this. If I was listening to podcast, it's the whole like, no doubt. There's not been any magical things that we've talked about. There's no unicorn ideas here. This is all about giving a crap. That's what it's about.

Starting point is 01:46:03 It's all about saying I'm going to wake up and I'm going to actually. do things and talk to real human beings and watch what real human beings do instead of living in my fantasy world of what I think they care about and how cool my product is and what I'm trying to celebrate in my cool company and while we're so good, I'm going to just wake up every day with the humility to talk to people and learn. And I think that's what this is more about than if you do this strategy or that strategy. Our last clip of this episode is with David Salyers. David spent 37 years at Chick-fil-A. He started the marketing department and under his leadership for all 37 years.

Starting point is 01:46:43 Chick-fil-A grew and grew and, you know, also the whole Chick-Flea cow. That was this guy's idea. This guy's brilliant. You're going to love it. I got to talk to David about why hiring a person instead of hiring for a job description is a much better way to build a rock-star team. So here's my conversation with David Saliers. You know, it's interesting.

Starting point is 01:47:03 Just philosophically, Daniel, I never started with the job. job or the job description. I started with a person. And I think that's philosophically the difference. When you start with a job, then you can squeeze a square peg in a round hole just because they're smart enough, driven enough, and they can do the job. But when you start with a person as your starting point, and then say, okay, given their strengths, their passions, their value, what job makes sense for them to do? When you start with a person and find the job, it's very different than start with a job to find the person. there's a lot of small businesses that may listen to this and say, I would love if we had enough seats to move people around like that.

Starting point is 01:47:42 But there's just a few of us, and we all have to wear a lot of hats. And maybe someday when we have a few hundred employees and we've got the luxury of kind of shifting people around and trying different things, how do we do this when we're small? Great question. In fact, nowadays, I retired from Chick-fil-A about two years ago. So I've got a number of small businesses that I'm involved with right now, but one of them comes to mine. I'll give you an actual example. I'm involved with a business in Atlanta, Georgia, called Rome, R-O-A-M. We call it an innovative workplace, a collaborative workspace.

Starting point is 01:48:12 Some people would compare it to WeWork, but we think we're as different from WeWork as McDonald's is from Chick-Fillet. But that's a story for another day. But basically, it's a small business. We've got six locations in Atlanta. Each location has like four to five employees, so really small. So when COVID hit, all of a sudden we had six locations. we had to shut down for about three months, no revenue. So we're a real small business, and now we got real small revenue.

Starting point is 01:48:38 Getting smaller. Getting smaller. But what we decided to do is we felt like, just based on my Chick-fil-A experience, a lot of experiences I'd had through the years that we wanted to approach it, not in a defensive posture, where we immediately shut down and cut back on expenses, but how could we use the time to move forward? And so we took the entire organization and did some brainstorming, came up with 12 projects that we want to be able to work on.

Starting point is 01:49:05 And everybody got to self-select in to the project they were most interested in. And we worked on all those projects during the three months that we were closed down. And when we got to the other side of this, one of our managing partners said, I feel like we got three years worth of work done in three months. And that's exactly how it felt, because we were creating new revenue streams that we knew would benefit the business on the other side. But because we didn't have our day job to distract us, we could go really deep, really quick.

Starting point is 01:49:33 And we had literally a dozen different new value streams that have been created. So now that we're on the other side of COVID, all of a sudden, all those are starting to reap a harvest. And all these people got to work on things they were passionate about, you know, whereas with only four people, five people, you can't necessarily do it. But now this whole project team idea has really taken hold. So now people are volunteering to do. It's almost that 80-20 principle. We just talked about maybe 80% of their time is spent during their day job. but we use that other 20% to let them volunteer to work on things.

Starting point is 01:50:04 They're much closer to their passion level. And a lot of them are really finding that 20% is fuel for the other 80% if the other 80% is not, you know, ideally what they'd like to be doing. It just energizes them. It's the jet fuel they need. I get the sense that you have really figured out how to coach people and develop people through this process. And it sounds fantastic.

Starting point is 01:50:28 And a lot of what we have found is that. that intersection between skill and passion also says something about that individual's purpose in life. And we also talk about the purpose in our business and needing to have a purpose that's bigger than just your bottom line. Bingo. How in that process do you connect, this is who we are as an organization, this is our purpose, and tease out some of the, who did God make this person and how do we connect their purpose to our purpose?

Starting point is 01:50:56 Because, I mean, when you get that connection, it's magic. Well, I really feel like, like I'll continue with Rome since we already talked about that a little bit. As we started to build Rome when it was only one location, we said we're going to build a business based on culture because I feel like culture is the ultimate competitive advantage. If there's anything I learned at Chick-fil-A, it's the power of culture to do a lot of things. In fact, we had an outside board of directors that was created right after Truitt died and existed for the last couple of years. years of my time there. We had some major CEOs from major organizations that were on the board. And I'll never forget, I had dinner one night with a guy who had a storied background and

Starting point is 01:51:37 been the CEO of lots of different organizations. And I said, okay, I think the best learning is in the extremes. I said, tell me what you're most impressed with at Chick-fil-A, what you're most concerned about. The thing he was most impressed with was Chick-fil-A's ability to scale culture, is what he said. He said, I've never seen an organization with a better ability to scale culture. He said the fact your culture is so thick you can feel it at the support center, but he said, when I go to a location in California or Texas or Tennessee, it feels exactly the same. How do you guys scale culture? And so I was steeped in this scaling of culture idea and the importance of it. But if you can create a powerful culture, it becomes the magnet that attracts

Starting point is 01:52:24 the talent that you're looking for. Remember a minute ago we talked about, you got to become the organization, the people you're looking for are looking for. Well, one of the most significant ways you do that is to create the culture they're looking for and be very clear. In all cultures to me, at least the powerful cultures, are built around this sense of purpose. You know, there's some central organizing idea that helps create that purpose. And so the most simplified way I can think of to explain it for your audience is I feel like most most, you know, most businesses are started as what I would call a get rich scheme. They start their business because they want to get rich. And if that's the central organizing idea behind your business, then your whole

Starting point is 01:53:10 thought process is around how do I enrich my life at the expense of others? And so you're going to enrich your life at the expense of your employees, at the expense of your customers, at the expense of your suppliers, at the expense of your community that you serve. And it's this win-lose mindset. when a get-rich business is created. What I discovered at Chick-fil-A and what I'm trying to replicate in all the businesses I work with now is the exact opposite of a get-rich scheme. It's what I call a be-rich scheme.

Starting point is 01:53:45 How do you use your business as a platform to be-rich toward people, not get-rich from them? And this whole be-rich idea is about using the platform of business as an opportunity to enrich the lives of our employees. Use it as an opportunity to enrich the lives of our customers. How do we enrich even the lives of our suppliers? That's a whole other thing I saw at Chick-fil-A. Every supplier that was for Chick-fil-A said,

Starting point is 01:54:12 you are my favorite customer. Their eyes would say, you treat me so different because we're looking to create win-win, not win-lose with our suppliers. And then the communities that we serve, we always wanted it to be a point when a Chick-fil-A opens in your community, the community is celebrating because I know the community

Starting point is 01:54:27 you just got better as a result of that be rich business showing up. I don't think they celebrate when a get rich business shows up. Yeah. So I think that central organizing idea, going back to your original question, that the purpose of the business is not about getting rich, it's about being rich. Well, what you're saying is it's so much less about consumption and more about contribution. Yes. Right. And so, you know, a lot of business owners do start out with, I just got to pay the bills. Like, that's my purpose. I have to make enough. income from my family. And I think it's almost like a Mazel's hierarchy a little bit of like survival is our purpose. Yes. And so you and I have the privilege of being a part of organizations that were

Starting point is 01:55:07 started with a purpose. I mean, Dave Ramsey had his crash, bankruptcy. And so he started this organization with that very clear sense of a we're going to be a be rich organization. You left Chick-fil-A, you're starting companies with that. But for business owners who they maybe started in survival, they started in a get-rich, and they want to stay with that organization, but start to shift their purpose to a broader. How can we be rich organization? How do you do that mid-flight? Are you thinking? Because I've been asked this question from a corporate standpoint. Like, I have a department within a bigger entity, and how do I do it if I'm one department in a much larger entity, or are they the owner of the business, or I could actually speak to both? Well, I mean,

Starting point is 01:55:46 more often than not, we're working with small business owners who do have the autonomy and the ability to do some unilateral decision-making for their entire organization. And so if I'm a small business owner listening to this and I'm going, oh crap, I got a I got a get rich organization, but I want to have a be rich organization. How do I start to make that shift? I mean, my bills are maybe paid now. We've got some profit coming in, but I sense that we're missing that central theme of purpose. And it's showing up in our recruiting, showing up in the fact that people are burned out and they don't really love coming into work every day. If that's the secret sauce, how do I get from this purpose that's kind of about me and my family paying the bills to this broader sense of contribution?

Starting point is 01:56:24 Yes. Well, what I found, and maybe I'll go back to one of the ways in which this kind of was cultivated and developed at Chick-fil-A is when I would bring somebody on to Chick-fil-A, part of my thought process was that they've got to see things beyond a paycheck that they're excited about. So in a sense, if you're a small business owner, if you couldn't give people a paycheck, would they work here? Because a lot of the greatest organizations I'm aware of, they would. I remember a conversation with, like Andy Stanley one time, where early on at North Point Church, the organization he started, they were struggling financially. And he said, but I felt like if we ever got to the point that we were about to shut down, they'd go out and get a part-time job to keep the dream alive. So they go get a part-time job somewhere to keep their day job. Well, at Rome, I think if you talk to the employees at Rome, I'll keep using that as the exam. I think they would tell you, a lot of them took a cut and pay to come to work for Rome. At Chick-fil-A, for the first 20 years of money, people took a cut and pay

Starting point is 01:57:30 because they saw something bigger that they wanted to be part of. And I think the job of this entrepreneur, if they've only got enough money to pay the bills right now, is you've got to create a picture of a brighter future that people want to be part of. And that ultimately, you've got to get beyond paychecks. I used to tell people the final interview that I would do at Chick-fil-A, said, I want you to be able to look at, me in the eye at the end of your career and tell me this, the least important thing I ever got from Chick-fil-A was my paycheck. And then we'd have a discussion around what would it take to be true of your future at Chick-fil-A? So the least important thing you ever got from Chick-Fillet

Starting point is 01:58:11 was a paycheck. And I had a whole series of questions that I'd ask them, and I would take copious notes. And I'd usually end up with two or three pages of notes from every individual that I worked with. And you know what that three pages and notes was about the remarkable future they want to create for themselves beyond the paycheck so that the paycheck would be the least important thing? That was my job description as a leader, was to use our platform of business to help them accomplish what they dreamed of. And they weren't dreaming of just a paycheck. If they were dreaming of a paycheck, they were going to use that paycheck to accomplish a dream, right? Yes. Nobody really just needs the money.

Starting point is 01:58:49 the money is a tool to a much bigger picture in their mind. Yeah, where they're going in their life. So let's just start with those. And therefore it mitigates and minimizes the importance of the paycheck. Now, I know everybody's got to have a paycheck. Everybody's got to pay the bills. But I think we use this higher, you know, we fuel, use the platform business to help them accomplish their dreams. Not just to get a paycheck every two weeks.

Starting point is 01:59:17 All right, guys, I hope you enjoyed this, this montage, if you will, this collection of the best conversations of 2020. Here's the thing, I don't know if they're the best conversations. I want to kind of bust this myth or this misnomer, if you will, that there's a best, or that there's the most important or the most valuable. Our goal at Entree leadership is to bring you really, really good conversations. Don't get me wrong. And we're always striving for the best. But sometimes we get hung up on this idea that if we could just find the very, you know, very best conversation or read the very best book all our problems will be solved you guys know as well as i do

Starting point is 01:59:58 what matters so much more than pursuing the silver bullet the one book that's going to change your life or the one podcast episode that's going to make all the difference that one idea that changed your life you know what's better than that a daily habit of paying attention a daily habit of growing our ourselves as leaders, a daily habit of listening to podcasts and reading and talking to our coaches and then trying things and then failing a little bit and then succeeding a little bit and then getting stuck and then getting really curious about how to get unstuck because we got to learn new things and doing this over and over and over. That is what makes world-class leaders. It's the habit. It's the consistency over time. So don't get hung up on this silver bullet thinking.

Starting point is 02:00:48 Hey, what's the one book that changed your life? You know what? There's not a book that changed you. It's all the books. It's all the habits. It's going to the gym, day in and day out. And you better be doing that because if you're not, there's problems coming. Whatever is the problem that's going to be coming at us tomorrow.

Starting point is 02:01:06 I got a problem coming at me tomorrow as a leader. You've got a problem coming at you tomorrow as a leader. And today, I'm not the leader I need to be to face that problem. I got to grow myself today so that I'm ready for tomorrow's. problems. So thank you for listening this podcast. Thank you for growing yourself. Thank you for investing your time into building you and your leadership muscles. When you do that consistently over time, you will absolutely win. To make it even easier for you guys, in addition to the podcast, our team put together an incredible free resource, a hundred books that every leader needs to read.

Starting point is 02:01:44 These are not just our books. These are books that we've read that are really relevant to any small business owner who wants to win. So to get this list, maybe you're in a leadership rut. Maybe you're in a book reading rut. Maybe you need a little bit of inspiration. Here's a great place to start. Text 100 books to 33444. That's 100 books, no spaces to 334444.

Starting point is 02:02:08 Or you can just click on the link in the show notes. Be sure to check that out. Hey, I hope you enjoyed this episode of the Entree Leadership Podcast. Do you know somebody that would also enjoy this episode? Well, share it with them. You're the reason this thing grows, so thank you. Also, you can now watch interviews and highlights from this podcast on YouTube. So check us out over there.

Starting point is 02:02:28 Now, this is big fun. If you're a small business owner between two and, say, 200 team members, we'd like to have a conversation with you. Not just fill out a survey and do that. No, we want to talk with you. We want to learn about your business so that we can figure out how to make this show even more valuable for you. If you want to help us out with that,

Starting point is 02:02:47 just click on the link in the show notes to fill out a brief survey to schedule a call with our producer Tim. Also, you can follow us on social media at Entree Leadership. You can follow me on Instagram at Daniel Tarty. We'd love to hang out with you over there. This episode was produced by Tim Hull.

Starting point is 02:03:02 It was edited and mixed by Will Rudder. I'm your host, Daniel Tarty, and on behalf of the entire Entree Leadership team, thank you for listening. Until next time, keep learning and keep leading. If you enjoy this podcast, you should check out other great podcasts from the Ramsey Network, like Ramsey Call of the Day. Check out our new Ramsey Call of the Day podcast. It'll give you a quick hit of advice about life and money in under 10 minutes.

Starting point is 02:03:46 Listen to the Ramsey Call of the Day, wherever you listen to podcasts.

EntreLeadership - #407: The EntreLeadership Podcast 2020: A Year in Review

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