The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett - CEO Diaries: The Mistake That Nearly Derailed MrBeast’s Entire Empire

Episode Date: June 11, 2025

In this episode of CEO Diaries, MrBeast dives into the real challenges of building a business from the ground up. He shares his journey of scaling from a small team to 500+ employees, offering valuable insights into why surrounding yourself with A-players is crucial to success. From navigating the complexities of leadership, to balancing innovation with structure, MrBeast opens up about the lessons learned, and how he’s shaping his company’s future. Whether you're an entrepreneur or just interested in how top businesses thrive, this moment is full of wisdom on scaling, team building, and leadership. Visit - ⁠⁠www.linkedin.com/DOAC⁠⁠ Listen to the full episode here - Spotify - https://g2ul0.app.link/yzN2XAsY3Tb Apple - https://g2ul0.app.link/lyW0n2BY3Tb Watch the Episodes On YouTube - ⁠⁠https://www.youtube.com/c/%20TheDiaryOfACEO/videos Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Today's Moment episode is with MrBeast and he has one of the most incredible teams in the world. But I guess the question is, how? The reality of running a small business is that switching off is never really an option. Even when you try, the ideas, the excitement and all the responsibility is always there. And because you're always switched on, it's only fair that your hiring partner should be too. LinkedIn jobs, who are the sponsor of this moments episode, has been that hiring partner for me and for years. Because it's always working away in the background. My team can post our jobs for free, share them with our networks and reach top talent all in the same place. So let's get into today's conversation. Great people just love working with great people. They

do. And there's something about being around great people that pulls some kind of animal out of you that just makes you want to do more and push more and believe things aren't possible. And I don't know, when you put me around a bunch of other successful entrepreneurs, I just turned into a different human. Then if you put me around, I don't know, a bunch of people who are just running small businesses

and don't really care and don't really have much ambition, I'm like two completely different humans. And you see that same thing in full effect. You put a bunch of A players around more A players. They just build off of each other. But you like put two or three C players amongst a bunch of great people and they'll start pulling them down.

They'll start making them not wanna work as much and make work not as fun. And so everyone knows, get rid of the C players, right? Obviously get rid of people who aren't all in, blah, blah, blah. It's the ones that are like, they're not an A player but they're not a C player. So it's kind of hard because you still feed off the energy. And if you get enough of them,

it just drags the overall culture down. So those are like the worst. I mean, not everyone can be these like world ending monsters that, you know, there are a lot of mundane things like, you know, I mean, the book controller and accounting, I mean, probably doesn't have to be the best in the world, but you know, when it comes to like the mission critical things like making videos and things like that, you like just the great people got to be surrounded. Like that's one

of your number one jobs as leaders just to make sure your great people are working with other great people. Because that's like, that's like the number one reason why people leave jobs isn't money. You know what I mean? It's like number four on the list. Don't ask me to list them all. I don't remember. I just know the number one thing is, do they enjoy who they're working with? And people will leave their job because they hate working with people way before they'll ever leave because of money. Have you ever been frustrated that the people you've hired don't match your level of obsession?

No, because I just find the people that do. Are there people that do? Oh yeah, there's so many people in my business. I mean, obviously you have to take care of them, pay them well. Like they're not the kind of people that'll just make the standard rate. But yeah, like people like Tyler, Klitzner, Russ, and you know, people on our editing team, I mean, they're putting in most weeks, same amount of hours as me, and they're all in, see the vision.

It's like, it's hard to find those kinds of people, but you know, when you do, you got to treasure them and recognize that they're unicorns. And you have almost 500, roughly 500 people? Probably, I think the production company were around 300, Feastable's around 100, and then probably another 40, 50 scattered amongst everything else. Most founders that I speak to describe scaling head counts as the kind of worst part of the job. More people, more problems, right? Yep, that's an understanding.

Especially as someone like you who's a creative at heart and who is very focused and obsessed on, I guess, the show and producing, as you say often, I want to produce the best videos we possibly can. Of course. And then all this other shit comes with it. Which is like HR, which every fan that I speak to hates. I mean, yeah.

The worst part is I just have this very once in a, just very rare opportunity where I have so much attention and so many people watch my content. And I just wish I had more experience building businesses. I'm only 26 and this is my first real business of, every employee milestone we hit, it's my first time hitting that, right? Like when I hit 100 employees, that was my first time getting there. And this was my first time going from 100 to 200, 200, 300.

And like, with what I know now, I could have done it so much faster, obviously. And it's just, you know, it's a little brutal because like scaling feastables from, you know, zero to a hundred was way easier than doing my production company because I had been through the ringer before and I learned a bunch and I get better with time. And it's just honestly the most annoying part

is just ignorance, right? Because a lot of mistakes I make, I look back and I'm like, oh, yeah, I probably should have brought in people with more experience working at a larger company earlier here. I waited a little too long here. I probably should have. And it's just like brutal

because if I had known these things, I'd be way further along. But I mean, that's just how you learn. Just got to make 10,000 mistakes. Every founder says the same. Every founder I've spoke to says the same, that unknown unknowns. Exactly.

And it's just like, so that's where, I mean, my big thing recently has just been trying to find people who have successfully scaled businesses and like bring them into my organization and learn from them because I'm just so tired of being like, fuck, I should have known better, but I didn't because I've never done this before. And so I'm trying to find a lot of great people

who have been through it so they can kind of mentor me along the way so I make less mistakes, which has been really good. We brought in a new C-suite recently. It's always a hard balance because I try not to, in the past, I've, decisions are kind of like pendulums and I have a problem where I'll identify something and I'll over correct the pendulum one way

and then I'm like, oh, no, I should have just stopped in the middle. And my over correction in the past was like, corporate people try to build too many systems and they kill innovation and so I was very anti people with too much corporate experience because they're gonna just destroy all the creativity.

But, you know, that's why we're making so many organizational fuck ups because we don't have anyone who's actually built the business at this size. And so, you know, the pendulum was on the right and I swung it all the way to the left of no corporate. And now I think we're in the healthy medium where, you know, obviously the people in our C-suite

and the leaders should have lots of experience managing people at this size and scale. But it's just finding the right people who can do it and build systems in a way where it doesn't crush creativity and they actually value the product over ease. The Diary of a CEO, I'm on a TV show called Dragonson in the UK and my stuff is significantly smaller, it's like a percentage of your viewership. But even I am slightly terrified with hiring people, because it's quite clear to me that there's a huge incentive for anyone that I work with

to say that I did something bad. And in the early days of my first business, what happens is the journalists go to everyone that works there, and they ask them, what was he like? You have the same problem. You have the same conundrum. Where anyone has an incentive that works for you, when they leave, so many different incentives

to throw an arrow at you on the way out the door. How do you contend with this? Yeah, I mean, you hit it on the head of, you know, I have four or five hundred people right now, but we've also worked with thousands of people in the past. And so I think it's just what comes with it. But at the end of the day, you know, as long as what we're doing is moral and ethical,

like you said, they're going to throw arrows. But you know, I'm just a problem solver. It's like whenever I see the metaphorical arrow, I just go, you know, what's the problem? And if we did something wrong, how do we fix it? Or if it's not an actual problem, it's just rumors. I mean, it is what it is. And so yeah, I think it just comes with part of it. I mean, it sucks what it is. And so, yeah, I think it just comes with part of it. I mean, it sucks and it's unfortunate. But you also think like most people don't

like their jobs too. And so it's not like this is even specific to our industry. Like, you know, just go ask 100 random Americans of all the jobs that worked in their life. How many did they deeply enjoy? Would they have nothing negative to say? So I think it's just part of it. You know, it's almost like a pastime for a lot of people just to trash talk their old jobs or whatever. I hope you found today's conversation helpful and insightful. If you're ready to join two and a half million other small businesses already using LinkedIn for hiring, head over to LinkedIn.com slash DOAC now. That's LinkedIn.com slash DOAC to find your next exceptional hire.