The Home Service Expert Podcast - The A Method for Hiring and Developing A Winning Team

Episode Date: February 17, 2023

Geoff Smart is the Chairman and Founder of ghSMART. Founded in 1995, ghSMART helps Fortune 500 CEOs & boards, billionaire entrepreneurs, and heads of state to confidently achieve their goals through hiring, developing, and leading talented teams. Dr. Smart is also the New York Times bestselling author of Who, Leadocracy, and Power Score: Your Formula for Leadership Success. In this episode, we talked about team and organizational effectiveness, hiring, company culture…

I think it's hard to set a goal for some people psychologically because they figure, oh, what if I don't hit it or that kind of thing. There's some kind of hesitancy I see in managers, entrepreneur types like your listeners, or even big corporate types. They don't want to be pinned down by numbers, but that's the best way to set a clear goal for someone like, hey, look, we're trying to do 30 garage doors a week or 10 or 100. Tell them the scope specifically of what you're expecting. And then and only then can they create plans to achieve a specific goal. And when it comes to hiring people or setting expectations for folks, I'm a huge fan of the more specific the target, the better. The more vague and general the target, the harder it is to both hire or manage folks to achieve great results. Welcome to the Home Service Expert,

where each week, Tommy chats with world-class entrepreneurs and experts in various fields, like marketing, sales, hiring, and leadership, to find out what's really behind their success in business. Now, your host, the home service millionaire, Tommy Mello. All right, ladies and gentlemen, welcome back to the Home Service Expert. I've been trying to get Jeff on this podcast for a long time and finally got through to him. And he wrote one of my favorite books of all time. I just was talking to him about how important it is to hire people. Jeff Smart wrote the book, Who? He's an expert in leadership, hiring human resources, management, team and organizational

effectiveness, career growth and success. He's based in Denver, Colorado. He's the G.H. Smart chairman and founder since 1995 to present. And he's also a Claremont Graduate University doctor of philosophy, psychology, graduated number one in his class, youngest person to be awarded a PhD in the school's history at age 25. Jeff Smart is a chairman and founder of GH Smart based in Denver, Colorado, United States, founded in 1995. Helps Fortune 500 CEOs and boards, billionaire entrepreneurs, and heads of state, and confidently achieve their goals through hiring,

developing, and leading talented teams. He published three bestselling books, Who? A Method for Hiring, New York Bestseller, currently ranked number one on Amazon on the topic of hiring talented teams. PowerScore, your formula for leadership success, is a Wall Street Journal bestseller, and the CEO next door is a critically acclaimed New York Times bestseller. Aside from this, Dr. Smart published Leadocracy, hiring more great leaders like you into government. A New York bestseller, which won the IPBY Award and Axiom Book Award for number one best book of the year.

I mean, the list keeps going, but yeah, it's pretty amazing, Jeff. I'm really excited that you're on today. And it means a lot to me that you took the time to do this. Yeah. Well, Tommy, congrats on all your success. And it's a pleasure and a privilege to be on the show. You look, I can't believe 1995. I was 12 years old.

You look great. I was 23. So I had, it's funny. I was telling someone yesterday, I've never had a real job. I've been an entrepreneur since the very beginning. So at age 23, started my company. I just turned 50 this last year. So yeah, I don't know if you get the formula right and you learn from the school of hard

knocks, you can stay in this entrepreneur game a long time. Well, what I love about you and I get a lot of bestsellers. I had Michael Gerber in my office a couple of years ago. Work on the business, not in the business. I love that saying. Like it's Michael Gerber saying I've heard it from others, other entrepreneur buddies. That's an important theme for, I think, this talk today. Work on your business, not in your business.

Well, it's like we talked about earlier. The fact is you've taken a company from zero to 100 million. You didn't have, it sounds like to me, a golden spoon. No one really assisted you along the way. You built it from ground zero and it's the people. And regardless of if you hate or like Donald Trump, I heard him say this before he became president. He said the worst employees in the world is a good employee because a bad employee, you fire

a great employee. We'll take you straight to the top. Good employees just get by. And I've always said three B players is equal to one a player. And Tony Robbins said as well, if you hire the right people, they'll take you to the top because they've been there. Right. And your book, literally the story goes, my cousin told me it was the best book he ever read, Fortune 500 company, and I got obsessed with it. We started building the systems and I just graduated 50 technicians this month earlier today. Great. So thanks to your book and some of the know-how. What I like to do, Jeff, is just

let the audience get to know you a little bit. Tell us your story. Tell us how you got started in business in about the last couple decades. Yeah, I'll be super brief. I'm a suburb kid from Chicago. Always wanted to be an entrepreneur. Didn't really feel like lining up in the herds of folks graduating Northwestern or studying economics as an undergrad, going off to finance jobs and that kind of thing. And, you know, I've always wanted to build a culture and create a meaningful business. So in grad school, I studied, you know, Peter Drucker, he's like one of the original. Yeah. The original economics guy. Yeah. Yeah. Like the father of management. So he was my professor. He was like 80 years old

where I got my PhD at Claremont out in LA. And I wrote a freaking business plan for GH Smart for my company. I was like, hey, I want to serve CEOs. We want to help them use data to make better people decisions. I want to hire all these geniuses. It's going to be great. And he was like, all right, look, he's like, I like your idea from the customer standpoint, there should be a firm that brings data and rigor to making good people decisions. He's like, but I don't know how you get from here to there. You don't have any money. You don't have any knowledge or noticeable skills of any kind.

You don't know anybody. He's like, he made an A- on this business plan. Well, Peter Drucker, 27 years later, he's cleared $100 million in revenue this last year. Very profitable industry leader in culture. People actually like working at my company. They love working at your company. I'm super proud of it. The two interesting parts of my background, I've technically studied and written on and done nothing other than hiring and developing great teams.

So from when my company was smaller than all of the listeners' companies until today, we focused on that and promoted ideas and best practices around what not to do, what to do to build great teams. And then we've eaten our own cooking, Tommy. We actually use all this stuff. So we're not just an author. I'm not an academic. I'm not sitting here telling you you should do something we don't do ourselves.

I love that. One of the things I consult a lot of small businesses and I'm 100% a visionary, right? I don't like the details. I'm very ADHD like most entrepreneurs. I need people around me that are organized. I need C-type micromanagers. And they say, well, how do I find an integrator? How do I find this great person?

And I'm like, it's not easy because they need to be able to work with you and understand managers, and they say, well, how do I find an integrator? How do I find this great person? And I'm like, it's not easy because they need to be able to work with you and understand you. But what do you recommend? Because it's so important to get that right hand, that person that's going to help, whether it's getting a CRM or a price book, or really even dialing in QuickBooks or whatever, Intact, whatever you're using. What would you say to get that right person? Because we're talking about home service. Someone that's going to dial in the details, the manual standard operation. Yeah, it's great.

I was faced with that back when I was a small company. One of my biggest clients took a QuickBooks invoice that I had sent from my computer. This is back in the 90s. We printed it out and put a stamp on it, mailed it. He looks at me right in the face. This is at a dinner, just one-on-one. He goes, sorry, are you sending me invoices directly from your computer?

He's like, what kind of popcorn stand are you running over there? And I felt really embarrassed because I hadn't hired that strong number two or the kind of person that do the details in the back office stuff so that I could do what I'm good at, like you, which is more visioning and business development, marketing, and that kind of thing. So that was a wake-up call. We were probably $3 million in revenue. And I hired an actual CFO, kind of head of back office, to do all the admin stuff to free up my time so I could be more effective with my time on the front office.

So I guess step one is like, whether it's you, Tommy, giving folks a wake up call or them just kind of realizing, wow, there aren't enough hours in the day for me to do everything. I need to get a strong person to compliment my strength. So one is just having the mindset like, oh my gosh, this is worth it. It's worth the money. It's worth putting investment dollars into hiring someone to do that work. We can talk about the tactics around how to not make common mistakes around hiring, but I think it all starts with just really convincing yourself that it's time. Congratulations, you've graduated your $3 million of revenue. It's time to make a couple of key hires, invest in your business, and just start to narrow

your role around your biggest strengths. Yeah, that's really smart. A lot of people try to be well-rounded. They try to understand everything I say. I really have a lot of weaknesses that I've identified and I just hire for my weaknesses or no, there's a lot of them. One of the person that I'm looking for now is like a chief of staff, somebody that understands everything I'm going through because every year, and it sounds crazy, but I'm trying to get my efficiency up, like become 10 times more efficient. How do you manage your time right now with everything you got going on? You've got all these books.

You're obviously running a very successful business. Thank you. I appreciate that. The short answer is I have a great president who runs the business. So I'm chairman. I'm the biggest shareholder and I'm the chairman and founder. I have a president who runs the business and I'm on my second president who runs the business. My previous colleague was the president.

I had asked him to do the role for three or four years. He did it for 12 years. So I had a 12-year-long president. Now the new one who's handed the baton, the previous one, to actually Randy Street, who co-authored the Who book. We wrote the book together right after that book project. We got along so well. We were so complimentary. He's like an engineer, and he's brilliant, and he's steady, and he's great at systematic, and I'm an arm-waving visionary founder. So we were like peanut butter and jelly

on the book. And I decided at that point, hey, you want to run the business? So he did an amazing job. So I don't know if people are listening or watching this thing, but check this out. This is Randy's growth rate over the 12 years he was running our firm. We got 24% compound annual growth rate and profits for 12 years. So if we're going to talk about how I manage my time today, what I do today, and this last year, Randy, after 12 great years, was like, hey, bump me up to vice chairman. I'm done running the day-to-day. Let me go be an ambassador. Let me do business development. Let me mentor and train the next generation of partners. I said, great. That sounds great. So we did a nine-month long search. We looked at 12 internal candidates. I hired a way too expensive search firm that went out and generated another

hundred candidates. We did interviews up the wazoo. I spent a day a week for nine months. It's a lot of time commitment. So the message to your listeners is like, you want to turn the keys over to someone, a strong number two or a great team, it really does take work to pick the right people. Thrilled with my new colleague. His name is Jeff, spelled the normal way, J. Jeff. We had a record year the last year he was off to the races. So how do I manage my time? Manage my time by hiring great people and then staying in my lane. So I think as a founder, maybe, I mean, you tell me what you've seen, Tommy. I think you've got visionary founders. You've got product expert type, especially in the technology fields.

For home service, you might have like sales and rainmaking founders. Like you're good at something. Like that's your main superpower. And then you're like not good at a lot of things. That's basically my impression of crazy people who actually found companies like you and me, right? And your listeners. So if you could hire people to cover things you're not good at, and then when you get, I don't know, some level of scale to really hire a great number two to run a lot of the day

to day. I mean, I'm just constantly trying to like hire great people and then elevate my role, elevate, elevate, elevate. So you're talking about being more efficient. I try to think in terms of like how to really narrow the focus of what I'm working on. International expansion, big focus area right now. Digitization of our service offerings. There are a couple of big strategic priorities that I'm pretty involved with, pretty interested in. Recruiting. But everything else comes up through a great team. So that's it. It's basically the headline is, hire well and do as little as possible. Otherwise, you're literally standing in the way of these great people you've hired, you

know, their ability to do their jobs. Yeah, you know, the question I get a lot, too, is I've got a mentor named Al Levy. He wrote the book, The Seven Power of Contractor, and he taught me about manuals and systems and standard operating procedures and checklists. And I could make amazing technicians, CSRs, and dispatchers. He calls it the triangle of communication. But when it comes to CFO, VPs of corporate development, and it comes to these head levels, one of the things that work for me is building an equity incentive program and giving people a bigger why in the business

that they were running towards the same way. But ultimately, it's really tough to find those people because you're not going to find them on Indie Glassdoor, Monster, ZipRecruiter, even LinkedIn. You got to kind of go get them because they're already working somewhere else. That's right. Yeah. So here's what not to do. So don't hire unemployed people. Don't hire your cousin, Sally, who's just fresh out of rehab. Don't hire, you know, rehab's great. You know, like give her a few years and then, you know, maybe of rehab. Don't hire... Rehab's great. Give her a few years and then maybe hire her. Don't hire the convenient family member, friend, buddy, roommate to be your entrepreneur in crime. Don't do that. Don't hire people by asking them

hypothetical questions and interviewing people about if you like them or not, and using your just heavily biased gut feel approach to interviewing. Don't do that. This is bad news land. So get out of the bad news land of convenience hires or using flawed methods for interviewing and selecting people. What to move into the good news land, the good practices of hiring are there are these four steps in the Who book. I'll just tell your listeners what they are. And then, you know, we could like figure out more about what they look like, but it's like, step one is write down a scorecard of what you want them to accomplish. Not what the profile is not, Oh, I need a, you know, head of whatever sales who's got five to eight years of relevant industry experience, blah, blah, blah.

Not writing a job description. Instead, writing an actual sort of like, what are the outcomes you want them to achieve in the role? And be really specific. I just put out a thing on LinkedIn, an article, right, while I was sitting there waiting in your waiting room on the importance of numbers. So, Tommy, you see this, right? Entrepreneurs, we're so busy. We're so ADD. We hire on gut feel.

We're disappointed. Peter Drucker, my mentor, said there's a 50% failure rate among entrepreneurs when hiring their teams. 50% failure rate. One in two people entrepreneurs hire, as defined by a year after you hire them, you wish you hadn't. So that's a horrible failure rate, 50% success rates, lousy. If you follow these four steps, you can and will hit a 90% hiring success rate. And those steps,

I started, number one, write a scorecard, write it down, be specific, write numbers down, what you expect the people to do. Number two, source candidates. And to your point, yeah, it's very difficult to use some very digital marketing, large, spammy kind of way of sourcing good candidates. We prefer to either incent your existing team, hey, go help find a new such and such, we'll give you a thousand dollar bonus. Or getting your existing team, even if it's a small team, to really be on the lookout for great talent is a great, great thing entrepreneurs do. Pay your existing people to recruit the next generation of leaders. So that kind of stuff, sourcing. Step three is called the select step. This one's the hard one

where this is about having the right interview formats. And our Who book lays out the like screening interview when you have a first chat with someone, like what should you talk about? And then it gets down to like when you have a couple of key candidates, you're down to two or three finalists. You do this like in-depth Who interview where you really understand what they've done across their whole career. You ask them a bunch of smart questions and then you gather data on what they've actually done. And then if you're, and you do some reference calls,

reference calls are kind of key if it's a senior, pretty key hire, you're hiring like talk to two or three or four previous bosses, et cetera. And that's it. So step three is the select step where you're gathering information, you're gathering data,

you're making a good decision of who to hire. Step four is the sell step where then you have to use your sell checklist. There's at least like five things in psychology in my world that make someone take an offer. And you got to like hit these notes. And the five notes are fit. So you sell fit. Hey, you want to come here and work at my garage door company?

Here's how your previous career, your talents and interests, your future goals fit coming to work here. So that's number one is show them how what they're good at, what they want, that's what you have to offer. Number two is family. And I don't mean like asking people

the legal questions about if they're planning on having a family or are they pregnant or anything like that. Of course not. But I'm talking about checking in with your candidate and saying like, hey, look, do you have a significant other, a spouse,

someone who's going to be in favor or against you joining my company? And sometimes you have to go sell the spouse or sell the partner, right? Number three, freedom. Everybody wants freedom today. So show them how working at your company, they'll have some freedom and flexibility.

They can work hard, be incented and rewarded for great results. But give them more freedom and flexibility, and you'll get better talent. Next, what is it? Number four, fortune. Tell them how much money they're going to make. And don't be vague. Be specific. I want one of the big takeaways from this call to be specificity is good.

And hiring and setting expectations and how you reward people. You're pretty freaking clear on how they can make money and then share with them what they're likely to make over the coming months and years. And the last one is just fun. Sell the fun of your work, whatever impact you're making positively in customers' lives and employees' lives, the positive impact. Sell the fun of working at your company. Those are like the five psychological triggers that make somebody say yes to a job offer. So I've gone over this stuff quite a bit with plenty of different home service businesses. And the hardest part, I think sometimes, I love talking about Henry Ford because he invented the assembly line, what we know of it today. And he got a specialist instead of a jack

of all trades. There was one guy focused on one thing. And I think a lot of times it's home service and probably a lot of businesses. We say, well, this person answers the phones, they do the dispatching and the bookkeeping, and they greet the people when they come in. And then when they fall short, we don't really have the KPIs to dial them in. And I like what you said with the first step is, well, they work on the outcome and key results that you expect from this person. That's right. And then build a way to get there.

And I think the businesses that I see succeed, the biggest thing I see is they have a budget. They have a plan. They have it written down. They know what their key performance indicators need to be. That's right. And they understand directly what they're responsible for. So they could go home to their wife or husband, spouse.

This is how I'm paid and here's how I win. And a lot of people don't do that. I agree. I don't get that part. I think it's hard to set a goal for some people psychologically because they figure, oh, what if I don't hit it? Or that kind of thing. There's some kind of hesitancy I see in managers, entrepreneur types, like your listeners, or even big corporate types, like they don't want to be pinned down by numbers. But that's the best way to set a clear goal for someone like, hey, look, we're trying to do 30 garage doors a week or 10 or 100. Tell them the scope specifically where you're expecting and then and only then can they

create plans to achieve a specific goal. Since you and I are riffing on all these great thought leaders, do you remember Zig Ziglar from a million years ago? Yeah, like Guru. He had this metaphor where he's like, look, I can train any one of you to beat a gold medal world class archer in an archery battle provided that we can blindfold the person and spin them around and keep them blindfolded while they shoot their arrow. And it's like, well, yeah,

obviously. And he's like, well, yeah, obviously, right? But the point is, how are you supposed to hit a target you can't even see? And when it comes to hiring people or setting expectations for folks, I'm a huge fan of the more specific the target, the better. The more vague and general the target, the harder it is to both hire or manage folks to achieve great results. One of the person that I study the most is Elon Musk. Him and I, and you all have one thing in common is we both have 24 hours in a day. Everyone has that one thing that you can't buy is time. And so by finding people with really good delegation skills and putting objectives

and due dates and delegating properly, there's so much more that can be done in a day. And unorganized as I am, I've become avid to my calendar and just i've dived in deep you know i'm getting a two more executive assistants a personal assistant a chief of staff and two people for uh project managers just for me sure and it's crazy because each time i get somebody at almost 5x is my my time right they're very good. They got to be amazing because I don't want them learning on the clock. I literally need people that come in and they just like, I know exactly what you need done. And I'm very competent. Competency is like, there's not a whole lot of competent people out there, sometimes in

my world at least. But here's the one thing I want to dive into is a lot of times that these business owners, Jeff, they tell me that they can't find anybody good. They tell me millennials suck. They tell me. And the one thing I say is look in the mirror. You're an asshole. No one wants to work for you because you're a jerk. You get in the way every time you expect people to read your brain. What do you say to some of these people? And I listen to all the listeners are great people, but you know, sometimes you've got to take personal responsibility for the outcome of the culture and why we can't find great people. Yeah, no kidding. That reminds me of,

I was talking to a group of entrepreneurs at this event and this guy was wearing a workout penny. It was like a business casual thing. You have maybe some khakis on and a nice shirt. And this guy had this muscle shirt on. And he raised his hand. He's like, hey, I can't find enough good people. And when we start to interview people, sometimes they voluntarily leave the interview process before we can even give them an offer or not. I said, well, walk me through your approach. And he's like, well, yeah, it's really easy. He's like, I like to sit people down and really stress them out. And I like to ask them questions like, you see this pen?

Sell me this pen. And then he literally goes, and then I go, hey, oh, your resume? Oh, am I supposed to be impressed by this? You know, tell me why I should hire you. And so he's like going on and on. All the rest of us in the room are like, oh, okay, stop, stop, stop. We're like, okay, look, first of all, it sounds like you have a special approach to hiring, but it kind of matches maybe your management style or your culture of your company. And I said, if you'd like to remain

in business, I strongly recommend pretty much stopping everything you're doing and do it differently because no one wants to work for someone like that. And so to your point, Tommy, it's basically like, I believe, so this is controversial, like what causes what in entrepreneur land and businesses? I think culture of your business, which is set largely by the personality of the founder, drives your ability to attract the talent.

The talent drives your ability to design and deliver great products to customers who then if you do a good job at that, are going to make plenty of revenue and profits and everybody's happy. So I think it all starts with culture. So yeah, all this hiring best practice stuff doesn't amount to a hill of beans if you have a lousy culture in your little business. So starting with, I don't know, get a coach, get someone who's willing to tell you the truth, look in the mirror, be like,

is this a good place to work or not? Look on Glassdoor. Even if you're a small company, your people are writing your reviews on Glassdoor about if they like working there or not. I was giving a talk to this billionaire family who owns a bunch of small companies in Chicago. I was giving a keynote a little while ago and I looked up some of the companies,

their Glassdoor ratings. So it's out of five. Five means you're awesome. It's a perfect five. Some of them were low fours, which is really good. Some of them are high threes. That's fine. A whole bunch of these companies were in the twos.

They had really, really bad reviews from their own employees about what it's like working there. And there are a lot of criticisms about the founder. And I just thought, I can't help you. If you're going to show up with a 2.5 out of 5 glass door and you've got employees after employees saying, senior management's disorganized, they're dishonest, they're mean, there's no hiring method that's going to fix that.

So you've got to start with making a great culture for folks. And then you add the Jeff Smart, world's greatest who approach to hiring. And now you're a rocket. But yeah, if you have a really lousy culture, you know, world's greatest who approach to hiring. And then you're now you're a rocket. But yeah, if you have a really lousy culture, you got to start there, I think, along the path to building a great, valuable company. Look up real quick. Just type in A1 Garage Doors. Yeah.

What is it you said? Oh, on Glassdoor? Glassdoor, yeah. All right. Well, let's see. Let's see. Let's go ahead and tell me how much of a loser I am. I'm curious.

Oh, look at you, four, seven out of five. That's great, right? You're amazing. We're right there. We're four, seven, four, eight. I literally haven't met someone who has as high a Glassdoor as you have or I have. It's very rare to have one that's that high. And you have a bunch of reviews.

I just have a smaller number of people here so great job and but like that's it i mean it starts with culture if you build it put the energy into really being kind to people providing great training being clear about expectations being transparent being honest being you know super high integrity all that stuff create a great culture and then you use that and then you know kind of inspire your folks to help you hire great people and the whole thing that and kind of inspire your folks to help you hire great people. And the whole thing kind of like takes off on its own power. But if you have a lousy culture, yeah, there isn't any bestselling book on hiring that's going to help. I read this to everybody and I'll read it to you real quick. I just read this, but

this gal graduates high school and her father bought her a car before she was born. And he gives his daughter this vehicle. She's 18 and a half. And he says, Hey, sweetie, I want you to take this car over to the local car dealership. I want you to see what they offer you for it. And she comes back the next day and she says, dad, they offered me a thousand dollars because it's, it's an older vehicle and he's a lot of work. And he said, okay, take the same vehicle to the pawn shop now. So he takes it over to the pawn shop. She comes back the next day and she says, father, they only offered me a hundred bucks. They said, it's old. The paint's bad. The interior screwed up. And he said, very good. He goes, I want you to take it to the classic car dealership tomorrow.

I've already got you a membership there and see what they say. She comes back. She's like, Dad, they offered me $200,000. It's very rare. It's hard to find it. It's in great condition. The father says, I want to let you know that you're not worth anything if you're not in the right place. If you're not appreciated,

don't be angry. That means you're in the wrong place. Don't stay in a place where nobody sees your value. There you go. And so we read that. I think it's important because I want everybody to know, I said, you guys are in the right place. I think the main thing is I want to see you accomplish your dreams and I want your dreams to be big. I'm going to dare you to think bigger. I want you to have five houses. I want you to be able to go on vacations for months. I want you to be as happy as you can ever be and have freedom to do what you want. And I can tell you that I know my dream's got to be big enough to help you guys accomplish

your dreams. And if you accomplish your dreams, my dreams are already coming true. And I look at them sincerely and I mean every bit of it. I will apparently mean it because 12 of your reviews have the theme of this place will mold you into a better person and leave you wanting to be the best version of yourself each and every day. What an incredibly positive thing for people to say about your company, Tommy. So yeah, I mean, and that you can't fake that, right?

Like either you are genuinely wanting people to have a great work experience, make impact, make money, have freedom, have a great life outside of work. Like either you actually want that for them, for them to achieve their dreams and goals, or you don't. And they know, they know if it's true or not. And it'll show up in Glassdoor. You know, and Dean's a big one too. I tell the people, listen, guys, a lot of people say to me, I hate sales. And I say, have you ever got on a date? And they say, what do you mean?

I'm like, well, you sold your significant other on you. I'm like, one of the things we always talk about is just being able to ask, be able to ask questions that people say, well, I hate selling things people don't need. And I go, do me a favor, pull out your cell phone for me. I go, what kind of cell phone is that? They go, well, it's the new iPhone. And I go, so your old phone must have been busted, right? And they go, no, I just, I wanted the new one. And I go, see, that's what I do. I sell things people want, not what they need. I give them options because if you're not giving

options, you're giving ultimatums. And one of the things we teach at my training program is to smile, eye contact, how to get financial control over yourself. I teach a little bit of Dave Ramsey. And one thing I can tell you that I love about Dave Ramsey and his recruiting, because you're the recruiting master, is he said, I always take their significant other out. I take them to dinner, not because only we have to sell the significant other, but I want to see how the mutual respect with one another. Because if you could tell that they have animosity in their relationship, how are you going to be happy at work when you have a horrible home life?

And I think that's really kind of like a secret that not a lot of people know about. I love this stuff. I could talk to you all day about this. And here's kind of a question that i was thinking about earlier is i played a lot of sports and some of my coaches made me from a c athlete to an a athlete like literally they they were able to shape me and lead me you know and i love the word coach over manager yeah like i've seen c players turn into a players under the right management and i've seen great people completely fall apart under bad management.

Yeah. What's your theory on that? Yeah. Okay. So I've got, I have a controversial point of view on that, that we can discuss and debate together for the pleasure of your listeners. I'll start with a quote from billionaire entrepreneur, John Malone, who built from pretty much scratch, the highest stock performing business of like the nineties or something, which is like a TCI cable.

All right. So this guy, I sit down with him in Denver. I interview him for the who book. I'm like, Hey, tell me about, you know, hiring and like, how do you do it? And secrets of success. So his whole deal was, he goes, look, I love to hire people where they supply 100% of the energy and I supply a little bit of the direction. He goes, that just works for me. That's what I want. Especially when we're starting out as entrepreneurs,

if you hire people where you feel like you got to motivate them every day because they're not showing up and doing the work. That's a hiring mistake. That's not an opportunity to coach someone. I think there are 20% of the people in a given moment are very coachable. And like, if you just give them a better direction,

you believe in them, you know, right? How coach or someone believes in you. I've had it happen in my career early on where someone says like, hey, I think you're going to really hit the ball out of the park. It matters. That really like lights your fire and like away you go, right? So I think it's like 20% of the time, if there's a performance issue, really great coaching can be, you know, a life changer and turn around.

I think 80% of the time, if you're having a tough time motivating somebody on your team, it's like a hiring mismatch. They could be an A player somewhere else, but maybe they're not set up to sell. Maybe they're not set up to work the kind of hours or be as self-directed as you need them to be in your business and that kind of thing.

So I'm a big fan of kind of empathetic firing, which looks a little bit like, hey, look, I have this great client. I won't say who it is because I don't have permission to share his name with this story. I have this very kind Midwestern CEO, runs small companies, medium sized and bigger companies. And he said, here's what I do when someone's not working out. I sit down with them and I say, hey, look, things aren't working out. And I say, are you having fun in this job? And they say yes or no. And then he asked them a second question, which is, do you think you can be successful in this job?

And what the CEO told me was, he goes, okay, look, he goes, I'm not going to fire you. But just so you know, like your performance is like not good. It's not hitting the mark, right? We both know that because there's a clear mark and it's not hitting it. But I will coach you. I will work with you. And you and I are going to have a conversation every Friday. And we're going to talk about these two things, which is like, you know, are you having fun? And do you think you're going to be successful here? And as long as you feel like you're having fun and that you can be successful here, you're welcome to stay here. I'll coach you.

We'll work on this together. And then the CEO goes like, but if you feel like you're coming into work, you're not having fun, or you just don't feel like you're going to be successful in this job, I strongly recommend you start looking for something where you can be successful and have fun. And like this guy fired more people than you can count, you know, that way when he'd like come in a new job and there's just a whole kind of mixed bag of talent, you know, but he didn't fire anybody. He didn't fire anybody. He'd compassionately sit with them. He'd be like, Hey, I have all the time in the world for you. But if you're literally like deciding you're miserable and you're not going to be successful, take your time, go find something better. And we'll throw a party for you

when you, when you leave kind of thing. So I'm a little bit, I'm a little more pull the higher fire lever than you might be, which is like, Hey, really believe in everybody, you know, more people and like give them a chance kind of thing. But I do think there's a margin there in there.

You know, I'm a 20, 80 person where I think 20% of the time coaching's the solution, 80% of the time helping someone either make the bar or move on to a job where they can be more successful is the right answer? It's interesting because you don't always know until you get the person doing the work if you got the correct answer. But one of my managers came up to me a couple of years ago and we used to do this pay structure where it was minimum wage or the performance pay. And I said, listen, minimum wage, when they hear that, it was minimum wage or the performance pay.

And I said, listen, minimum wage, when they hear that, it was like $11 an hour. When they hear that number, they think that's automatically what they're going to make. I'd like to get a minute. It's $16 or whatever's better. And she goes, well, the reason I love the minimum wage is because they quit if they're making minimum wage. And I said, yeah, but why are you hiring somebody that's not hitting the performance pay? Like that,

you've got to take some personal accountability because right now we're not getting the type of people that are going to get the performance pay when they see that minimum wage. So I think having the right lures out there for the right fish, right? And I've got people that make several hundreds of thousands of dollars a year. And I don't- Because it's performance comp. Well, you're not jealous because by definition, you're making lots of money if they're making lots of money. That's what I love about performance pay, like what you're talking about.

It's the only way to pay. I mean, if I could do- I agree. So here's a question for you, because I'll tell you what brie is my you know she we've got a relationship as well but she started out as an executive assistant which yeah i could go into the hr nightmare there but the deal is is i think a lot of people i noticed the president of our company the coo the majority of the people never had any executive assistant or even a personal assistant and it's not an easy role because

you're dealing with them all the time. They look at your email and it's so hard because I don't look at my own mail. I don't look at my own email. I don't know about my own packages. I mean, I probably have too much trust, but I think that's one of the most crucial roles. And I tell people, everybody take out an old fashioned calendar, right? Take out a calendar and I want you to write down everything you do. And every time you get distracted, write down what you get distracted in the end of two weeks, let's highlight all the wasted time. Yeah. And then let's make sure to get you somebody. And I say, I say this all the time, record everything you do on your computer, just open up a zoom, record your screenshot and talk out loud when you're doing stuff.

And that becomes the learning management system for your executive. What are your thoughts? Because it's just a hard position. And I think so many people could use this person. Yeah. I mean, my gosh. So here's a, since we're talking books and frameworks and everything, this is on this, on this front, time smart, how to reclaim your time and live a happier life. All right, that sounds pretty good. Who doesn't want to reclaim? And this is by Ashley Willans, W-H-I-L-L-A-N-S. Time Smart won some awards. It came out a year ago.

Good book. I read it. I loved it. Ashley, what's her last name? What's that? Ashley. Willans is her last name. W-H-I-L-L-A-N-S.

Time Smart is the name of the book. Got it. She's a Harvard Business School professor who collected a ton of real data on people's happiness at work. And she looked at stuff like, were people happier who had assistants or not? People who outsourced things

that they didn't get positive energy from and then really focus their time on the things that give them positive energy, whether it's professionally or personally. Her whole big deal is we're all a bunch of morons because we don't outsource as much as we should if we really looked at the things that deliver value, the things that are good uses of our time and how inexpensive it is in the grand scheme to hire assistants to do stuff that you shouldn't be doing. So I'm a huge fan of that. Back around a million years ago when I hired my first CFO, I also was a big fan of offloading all my admin stuff to my assistant. It does take a lot of

trust. That's why it gets back to the whole, you got to hire well, right? So follow the four steps to good hiring, make sure you hire a great assistant and make sure you give that person a ton of freedom to do their job well. And I think on the spectrum of assistants, I think the worst assistants take a lot of your time actually, right? That's like the whole point is to save your time.

So the worst assistants take your time and they constantly ask you questions and they can't really figure stuff out. Medium assistants, you know, it's sort of like figures part of it out, but then are constantly coming to you for like approvals or tasks and that kind of thing. That's like a medium assistant. I think the best assistant, my current assistant, Ashley's great. My previous assistants, I've had just a small number of them over the 27 years I've been growing my firm. The very best ones anticipate and they figure it out. And then maybe they tell you later, like, oh, hey, this thing came up in here.

I handled it. And like, that's what you want to hear. You just want to hear it's been handled. You don't want to have to like do the thinking for them. So I'm a huge fan of that. The Time Smart book's basically like, here's what's going to make you miserable. Long commute times, bullshit meetings. Oops, sorry. I don't know if this is like a BS meetings, right? Meetings where you're just like in dumb meetings, like wasted time, wasted time. Bosses that waste your time,

right? By sending you on fool's errands or wild goose chases or asking you to do a bunch of rework, not having assistance and not having a good people to delegate to. All that's like time wasting, soul sucking. She's like just a clear statistical relationship to misery. And then the positive side of that is people who know their value, know what are good uses of their time. And then like really both for free by saying no, or for money, because you got to pay people to do stuff by delegating. They really offload the vast majority of stuff to others. Those people are the most happy. And you could want to be something in this lifetime, but why try to be happy? So yeah, she makes a huge trade-off for bad mindset is time is money, but good mindset is money is time.

Meaning the important thing is your time, to your point. They're not making any more of it. You can't buy more of it. So really treasuring your time and using money as a way to get more time. She's like, that's the mindset of real winners. There's four ways to handle a problem. And I've whiteboarded this quite a bit over the last 90 days. You do it yourself.

You solve it. You delegate it internally. You delegate it externally, or you find a recruiter or get with your personal recruiter, whoever it might be and hire it internally or externally. Yeah. And that's what I'm literally almost like. I think one of the biggest things I also learned from Al is don't build a box around a person,

build the box to find the person for the box. I think a lot of times we put people in these weird positions that never needed to exist. And everybody's, what's the first thing? There's nobody in this. I've got about 120 people here, 700 in the company. Yeah. And none of them tell me that I've got about 120 people here, 700 in the company. Yeah. And none of them tell me that they've got enough people.

They always want to add seats. Sure. And I'm like, what can we do to use technology and possibly overseas VAs, whatever we need to do. And it's interesting how people like to throw people at problems. Right. Yeah. I think that's bad in small companies. It's horrible in large companies.

I was at a government yesterday. I won't say what government. And there's more than a little bit of waste where you throw lots of bodies and salaries and FT, sort of dollars at problems. So yeah, I don't know. I'm with you. There's a 4Ds thing that I kind of like, which is like how to protect your time. One, delete. Just don't do it. Don't do it. Like, oh, there's an it? Yeah, guess what? Don't do it. How about that? That should be like your first instinct. Oh, I got

invited to go do this thing. Like, well, don't do it. Like that's number one, D, don't do it. Or delete. The next one is like, delegate know, delegate. So, okay, here's something worthwhile doing. Delegate it. That's the next thing you're going to want to do. And then if you can't delegate it and you have to do it, then maybe third D is delay. Be like, great, I'm going to stick that in

my calendar in a place where it's more convenient for me to get it done. And then the fourth and final D is like, do it now. And that's very expensive to get it done. And then the fourth and final D is like, do it now. And that's very expensive to do it now. Yep. The Eisenhower matrix, right? I don't know what that is, but like, yeah. What is it? It's called the Eisenhower matrix. And what it does is you build a matrix, right? And you put not important, and then you put important above it, then across you put urgent and not urgent.

Right. That's right. And if it's important and urgent, you do it. If it's not urgent and important, you decide, schedule a time to do it. If it's not important, but it's urgent, you delegate it. And if it's not urgent and it's not important, delete it. Yeah. Great. Love it. That. I love it. What do you tell people that say, I just can't find anybody good out there and they've struggled in business. They've been in business a decade and their mindset is broken. It's a rat race, right?

It's a race to the bottom. They're just, they're not happy. To me, it's like about job fit. It's sort of like, okay, so maybe they shouldn't be an entrepreneur. Maybe they shouldn't do the things. Good. You're the first one that ever said that. You don't have to be an entrepreneur. You don't have to be an entrepreneur. Maybe they shouldn't do the things. Good. You're the first one that ever said that you don't have to be an entrepreneur.

You don't have to be an entrepreneur. Oh yeah. You don't like selling. You don't like hiring. Don't be an entrepreneur. Sorry. Like it's not for everybody. Okay.

Like you're really good at project management, but you don't really like talking to people. Okay. Go get a job doing project management. Oh, you really like editing words, but you don't like selling, you don't like hiring? Great, go be an editor. I'm a huge fan of this. This all was the gig economy today. You can freelance anything these days. I mean, honestly, you could go work for someone or don't work for someone, be a freelancer,

but really figuring out what you're good at, what you feel like you have meaning doing, what comes naturally, your skills to build on, do that for your job. You'll find plenty of employment, I think, and maybe give up the dream of being an entrepreneur for now. Or if you can be an entrepreneur, do your superpower and hire, whether it's a founding team or a couple other key role players to do the other stuff, great. Those are like three options are basically keep failing and sucking doing what you've been doing or get a job, either working for someone or freelancing, doing what you're good at or fine, stay in the entrepreneur game, but hire well, delegate, share real money, real ownership with others, and then you can play to your strengths and be successful. You've mentioned several times about some of your different clients,

these Fortune 500 CEOs, and you've owned GH Smart, your company, since 95. Can you give me just an overview of what exactly you guys provide and the services that you guys help business owners and leadership with. It's pretty narrow and we don't really work with small entrepreneurs at all. I love talking to you and it's fun sort of riffing on these themes and stuff. But the actual business is management consulting. So it's helping CEOs hire and develop talented teams. We're not a search firm. So we don't go find the people. It's more like a strategy firm like a Bain or McKinsey or BCG, where those folks help CEOs solve what problems, what products should we offer,

what should we charge for our product in China. Those big management consulting strategy firms help big companies solve what problems. My firm is kind of considered the gold standard of the management consulting firms that specifically focus on solving who problems. So we do a lot of CEO succession. So a board or some super high net worth person who owns a big chunk of a public company will say, hey, look, get in there.

There's some leadership turmoil. There's some management changes happening. We need GH Smart to basically get in there, figure out strategy-wise what's this company trying to do. Let's write the scorecard for who should be running it. Let's interview people in depth to make sure the right either internal or external candidates get hired. Let's onboard that person so they can be successful. Let's help that new person really get to know his or her team and kind of rinse and repeat. So it's basically like very high-end succession strategy, talent strategy, but mostly it's around hiring and developing talented teams.

We used to do work with smaller companies. As we've gotten bigger, as we've become better known, the buyers just sort of started getting bigger and bigger and bigger. So today about 60% of our revenue comes from huge companies, like the biggest companies there are. And about 40% come from private equity investors who are buying and building medium-sized companies. What's the revenue? What's a mid-sized company, like 200 million? Yeah. Mid-sized companies like $200 million. Bigger companies are sort of a billion and up in revenue.

Okay. So you mentioned a book earlier. What are the questions I love to ask? Well, I'll kind of get to the closing questions. Sure. If someone wants to reach out to you, Jeff, I know your time is a treasure. But if they wanted to reach out, everybody's been commenting, best book ever. Oh, great.

Thanks. Amazing stuff for your book. So congratulations on everything. Oh, great. Thanks. Made and stuff for your book. So congratulations on everything. Oh, yeah. I guess I have to click on the comments button here. Oh, you're all so sweet. Thank you. I really appreciate it.

It was fun writing it. I really love it when it helps people and it's useful for your entrepreneurial success. What do people do if they want to reach out to you? Is it just LinkedIn? Yeah, LinkedIn's pretty good. That's like the easiest place where I interact with people. I'm not on Twitter a whole lot. So yeah, LinkedIn's probably the best place.

So I write kind of spicy LinkedIn articles every few weeks. And I like to interact with people on LinkedIn. So yeah, I don't know. Just look me up. Dr. Jeff Smart, G-E-O-F-F, spelled the weird way. Smart. There you go, on LinkedIn. And that's the best way to engage.

There's actually free tools too, Tommy, for the Who book. I don't know, like I'm stupid. I should figure out how to monetize this, but like the actual interview guides and like scorecards and stuff, they could go to my author's website. It's called Smart Thoughts. So smartthoughts.com,ff smart smart thoughts whatever all they had

to do is throw their email in there and they can download our who power score and i don't know if the ceo next door or other book by elena vitello one of my colleagues i can't remember if we put templates and tools in there but it's all free it's just like go for it use it go forth and conquer but it helps people kind of go forth and conquer. But it helps people kind of go from theory to practice just so they have some of the actual tools there they can download and use. Now, one of the things I always ask everybody, and thank you for the source, that's going to be smartthoughts.com. Three books that you recommend. You mentioned Time Smart, and I know, of course, your books are amazing. What are two books that really

helped you out in your entrepreneurial journey? I really like Four Disciplines of Execution by the folks over at Franklin Covey. I'm sure you have it. You talk like someone who... There you go. A few of them. There you go. So that book's great, as you know, Tommy, because it helps you with goal setting.

I think people stink at goal setting generally. I don't know what's a good method for goal setting. Their whole thing from X to Y by a certain date, leading and lag measures. I think it stink at goal setting generally. I don't know what's a good method for goal setting. Their whole thing from X to Y by a certain date, leading and lag measures. I think it's great. So that's a great one. Four disciplines of execution. I don't know.

Let's see. How many books have I recommended so far? Time Smart. That's on managing your time. We're not pumping my books. We've got four disciplines of execution. For entrepreneurs, I don't know. lean startup stuff's like pretty good. You know,

the Eric Reese book about it's like test and learn and, you know, really quick minimum viable products. I think that's helpful for product development. There's tons of like inspiring biographies that, you know, you and I read on entrepreneurs, like the Steve jobs ones,

like amazing jobs, but it's like one of the best books I've ever read. So yeah, those are a few of my favorites. You know, one of the interesting things that Steve Jobs said right before he passed away because of cancer, he said, you should be ingesting your food as medicine. Otherwise you're going to be taking medicine for food. Yeah, there you go. It's interesting. I say it's a concept that I just, one thing I've realized is I've become more successful is I can't buy health and I can't buy time. So those are two things I need to focus on.

You know, Jeff, I really wanted to tell you, I appreciate your time. What I like to do at the end of the podcast is we talked about a lot of cool stuff and I've got note after note after note. I absolutely love this podcast. I love that you came on here. I appreciate it.

I just want to give you a chance to close us out on anything we might have not talked about. Maybe some things that the listeners should go do today or whatever you want to end in. I'll give you some final thoughts. All right, fine. Let's do it. Just for fun. Since we're talking about overall success and happiness.

Oh, you mean like ask you a question or just like close it out myself? Yeah. Okay. This is for you. Okay. So putting all this together, all this together, I think making time for family, friends, you know, faith, just the other stuff in your life is really important also. So I've personally interviewed like over a thousand really successful people just through my daily work.

And my colleagues and I together have interviewed 30,000 people, successful and unsuccessful entrepreneurs, business builders, etc. And there's a very clear theme that's clear to me. Maybe we'll write a new book one day called something like how to have a successful life. But basically, if you block time for personal stuff, and you really like stay true to that on your calendar, if you set ambitious goals for your business, and then just hire amazing people, align their incentives with your incentives. And then like, get the heck out of the way, say please and thank you, and good job, and high five them. I think you got it. Life's going to be great.

You're going to have plenty of time for family, friends, and other stuff. You're going to be able to pick a strategy for your business, hire well, and then really support the wonderful people who work in the company. We talked about some really advanced stuff on this call, but I just want to cap it off

with really blocking time for the personal outside of work stuff and staying true to that. And you put all this stuff together and you end up building an impactful business you feel proud of and having a life while you do it. Sometimes we forget about life. And it's hard. Some people work to live. Some people live to work. I'm probably the latter. But I really appreciate you doing this.

I know you're a busy man. I appreciate the accolades that I read for you are just, you should be very proud of yourself. Thank you. I hope I get to meet you in person soon. I appreciate it. Listeners out here. When do you come to Phoenix?

My folks have a house out there. So maybe I'll get out there in the not too distant future and give you a shout. I would love that. Thank you so much. Tommy. Thanks for having me. Thanks. Have shout. I would love that. Thank you so much, Jeff. Pleasure, Tommy. Thanks for having me. Thanks, everyone.

Have a great one, my friend. Thank you. Hey, guys, I just wanted to thank you real quick for listening to the podcast. From the bottom of my heart, it means a lot to me. And I hope you're getting as much as I am out of this podcast. Our goal is to enrich your lives and enrich your businesses and your internal customers, which is your staff. And if you get a chance, please, please, please subscribe.

You're going to find out all the new podcasts. You're going to be able to ask me questions to ask the next guest coming on and do me a quick favor. Leave a quick review. It really helps us out when you like the podcast and you leave a review, make it four or five sentences, tell us how we're doing. And I just wanted to mention real quick, we started a membership. It's homeservicemillionaire.com forward slash club.

You get a ton of inside look at what we're going to do to become a billion dollar company. And we're just, we're telling everybody our secrets basically. And people say, why do you give your secrets away all the time? And I'm like, you know, the hardest part about giving away my secrets is actually trying to get people to do them. So we also create a lot of accountability within this program. So check it out. It's homeservicemillionaire.com forward slash club. It's cheap. It's a monthly payment. I'm not making any money on it to be completely frank with you guys, but I think it will enrich your lives even further. So thank you once again for listening to the podcast. I really appreciate it.