$100M Business Playbook: If You Want To Succeed In Business, Do THIS Today.

I've been an entrepreneur now for 27 years. I've started businesses in multiple different industries. Raised my first venture capital round when I was 20. Had my first exit at 24. Then went on to start multiple different companies in multiple industries. I was a venture capitalist. Invested in companies, sold companies, bought companies, all kinds of stuff like that.

And so I've been doing this so long that I can look at one business very quickly and perhaps see the next chess moves that the business should make and then move into another business very quickly and say, "Okay, we need to change this around." and then jump from chessboard to chessboard to chessboard all day long. And I have a lot of fun doing it. I I love the game of business. And to me, it really is just a game that we get to play. And it's a game that gives us feedback as to where we need to grow in our character, where we need to grow in our skill sets, where we have fears, where we have anxieties, where we have emotional challenges, where we have triggers.

Entrepreneurship is the most spiritual profession that we can uh engage in because we're going in fact I have friends that are rabbis and pastors and thought leaders and I often tell them you know entrepreneurship is the most spiritual of all them because we get humbled more so than any other profession. We have employees get upset quit refuse to work. We have investors leave commit to investing and quit. We have macroeconomic changes. We have tariffs. We have all kinds of things uh that impact us day in and day out to humble us. So the reason why I call it the most spiritual profession is because it's the most humbling of professions.

Now I attempt to apply conscious principles in the building of my my businesses. I say the word attempt because it's not perfect by any means. I was trained in the venture capital, private equity, build revenue, scale, exit, you know, drive people off of cliffs, be relentless. That's the way I was trained, right? And I had an awakening in 2017 and came to some different conclusions as to how I wanted to build. The awakening is a long story. I won't go too much into detail in it, but I realized that there has to be a better way of building.

And the way I equated is you have fuel sources for building and in the standard way of building the fuel sources are competition, fear, uh greed, ego, uh pride and perhaps even anger. And you know these fuel sources and they work really well to build things. Um, you see people build out of competition all day long but the fuel source is not sustainable and the fuel source eventually becomes toxic and then there's ramifications to the use of that source. So when we're sitting here attempting to build with conscious fuel sources, we often will think we'll look at, you know, our peers across the street and we'll be like, they're building so much faster than us or they're building so much more effective than us and they're using a different fuel source that will eventually run its course with them and they'll either have to choose a new fuel source or they'll suffer with the source of fuel that they're using and they'll continue using it. Uh perhaps never changing, there's a price that they ultimately pay.

My uh life's work is to try to figure out how to use higher octane fuel sources, higher vibrational, higher fuel sources. Like how do you build with the fuel source of love versus the fuel source of fear? How does that play out with regard to your relationships, your team members, your hiring, your firing, your uh people development, right? How do you actually love people so much that you can part ways with them compassionately? How do you love people so much that you take action immediately when you recognize behavior that isn't in alignment with your values or isn't going to further your your company's uh purpose or mission. Right? So, a lot of these principles and practices are fundamental to how I build businesses. But I know you guys are all conscious, so I'm not going to go into too much detail on that. But if you want to dive into any of these subjects or anything that I touch upon, take notes. Feel free to ask questions and then with our time today, I can hot seat your businesses and give you some like hardcore consulting on, you know, what we got to do to take your business to the next level.

I'm working on the inside the walls right now in companies and consumer products, manufacturing, lots of different technology. In fact, Al is my head of AI for one of Wolf for Alterall, which we're building an autonomous coaching platform. and uh he's a former NASA scientist, PhD candidate building brilliant product right now. And uh he lives not too far from here. So he came to join us. My wife who's going to be coming in at some point, also a former NASA scientist building rad stuff right now. So I've got some really rad people that I get to work with and build with. And on the inside of my walls and on the outside of the walls, you know, we try to bring that wisdom to the clients we serve. And we have a team of people that are far more brilliant than I am in particular practice areas. So we have a recruiting group. We have a group in the paid media marketing side. Uh we have a group on brand. We also have a group on AIT technology that Al leads and I don't think I'm missing anyone. Oh, we have an analysis group that does some analytics on financial analysis and so forth. And we're scaling that up right now.

So I have a a company with a lot of different practice areas and oftentimes I'm just routing traffic. So I'll meet an entrepreneur and I'll say you need to talk to this person. You need to talk to that person. And then of course if we don't have somebody to serve you, we have lots of people within our network. We're in a very fast momentum business. So like we're scaling. Last month we grew by 96%. Uh this month we're on uh double digit growth again doing many millions a month in revenue and and scaling quite rapidly ourselves. And then we support other companies doing the same. So we're not just kind of talking about this stuff like we've done it in the past. And no, we're actively applying these principles in real time to the things we're building and then we're sharing them with other companies that are a part of our community. So it's it you know it's an interesting use case uh because you know we're testing these principles, testing these methods, these frameworks, these practices, deploying them, seeing how they work, seeing how they can be optimized, optimizing and then deploying across lots of different companies. And our um platform right now reaches you know several hundred companies, thousands of employees cumulatively and that's growing like every day non-stop right now to give you an idea.

Um, all right so I'm just going to give you guys some simple fundamentals to start and then we can dive into hot seat coaching. This is a workshop format. I have hundreds of principles, practices, frameworks that I can teach that I've brought with me in my head and I've got some notebooks here if we want to dive in deeper into any of these. I'm going to give you a couple just to start with just to give you an idea of how to organize things. I start first with the framework of thinking. So thinking, speaking, acting. And I break this down because every organization, and we're just going to start with culture because this is what we're all seeking to build is a great culture. We want to build a company. And I've built companies to the tune of I had one company with 4,500 full-time salespeople to give you an idea of the size and scale. And I watched culture get away from me. I watched infighting, conflict. I watched all kinds of challenges happen. I thought to myself, how do you crack this code because I had built a business that I was suffering in uh it was taking life from me as opposed to giving life to me.

So I I break it down into just three simple categories. We all want more action. We want more precise action. We want action that creates more value. We all want more action, right? And the way we get more action is we change the way people think. Now thinking is beliefs, thinking is values, thinking is principles, right? We have to change the way people think in order to get more action. So if you have an environment right now and you want more action out of that environment, we have to look at how they think. Acting is how people behave, right? We want positive behaviors within our culture and organization. And we also are going to have negative behaviors in our culture and organization. And that's just the natural aspect of it. So anytime I'm talking about the subject of a business just zero to one is you know you have to start actively building culture right away. When I started my company uh alter call I started working on culture day one. You know I had weekly culture calls with my contractors and consultants and just was really focusing on culture culture culture culture because I did not want to accidentally create an environment that took life from me. I'm at the stage of life where the environment that I create has to give me life. Meaning I want to show up to my team meetings and I want to be energized. I want to learn something. I want to be excited. I want to be motivated. I need my team to give me energy, not just take energy. Does that make sense?

So philosophy is very important here. Many founders make the mistakes when we're scaling from zero to one or from five. They just don't have the right philosophies. They think they think they got to do it all themselves. Uh which might be an issue with control. Um, they might have delegation issues which might be you know they don't want to make people feel bad about taking on too much. Uh they might have a desire to be the hero in the environment and so they want to do all the hard problems themselves and hand people the easy problems. Philosophically a lot of times that becomes uh the hindrance to that founder scaling is they just have a philosophical issue with exactly how they're distributing the workload across the organization.

So when I'm working with founders, I'm trying to analyze how they're thinking and the way that I do that is I look at their speech. So the AI software that we're building and I'll just share this with you as a fundamental evalu uh the speech across an organization and it sees the type the use of language, the type of language and we can actually score the language and help them improve the way they speak because you think as you speak and you speak as you act, right? These are just fundamentals of consciousness. but to break down this. So, when we're talking today about hot seat coaching and so forth, I'm probably going to dive into how you're thinking about certain things. And my job with, you know, the most gentle hand possible I can is to try to help you maybe think differently, maybe uh choose more expansive beliefs, uh maybe choose uh better ways to, you know, look at a a problem set or an alternative perspective on a problem. So that way we can just expand the way we think about these things because as founders we get so narrowly focused, right? And sometimes we need to get out of that narrow focus and take on new perspective and think about problems differently. So hopefully I can help you do that.

I'll give you the simplest turnaround on thinking that that I know and it's a framework that I learned by reading one of Daly Lama's books. The way to turn around negative thinking is to immediately find the alternative positive thought to that negative thought and then to evaluate the underlying misconception or limiting belief. So as a founder, for example, if I wake up and say, "Oh, it's going to be a hard day or it's going to be a long day, right?" Well, that's a negative thought, right? That's that's not going to create any more pleasure and any more happiness and any more uh enjoyment out of my day. So, I immediately have to say, "Oh, no. This is going to be a day where I get to know myself more. I get to test my endurance or a day where I get to see how to fill my cup as I pour out my cup and figure out a better sequencing method so that way I can end my day in a peak state as opposed to a drained state. Right? Because if you've ever had 20 meetings back to back, you might end the day saying, "This doesn't feel well." Well, that's that's because we didn't fill our cup as we were impinging our cup throughout the day. Right?

So, there's some technique here that I'll I'll share with you if you want to dive in deeper on the business side. I'll share with you a simple framework and that is people structure process product. When I look at a company and I'm looking at a team with three 400 people and they've come to me asking me how can we you know scale how can we be more efficient the first thing I do is look at all their people. When I do an acquisition for example I'm evaluating their people. I'm evaluating every aspect of every piece of data that they can give me on their humans. I'm looking at their language. I'm looking at their uh actionality which is the you know the amount of action that they're initiating in and engaging in and completing and I'm looking at the capacity of those people. I'm looking at the desire of those people. How hungry are they? How hungry are they to learn? How much desire do they have? And I'm looking for evidence to support uh my assessment of each of those individuals based on how they show up to the office, how they engage with other employees, how they resolve conflict, and a variety of other key data points. Right? I'm also looking for the maturity of those people and and not maturity in terms of age, but I'm looking also at the maturity in terms of things like how generous they are. You know, how they turn toward their colleagues to resolve conflict as opposed to turning away from their colleagues to resolve conflict. Right? You might have a a player that's a high producing individual that's very immature. I like to call those mercenaries versus missionaries, right? So sometimes we hire people that are mercenaries and then we have to deal with divas and we have to deal with challenges as a result of that and I've uh hired you know thousands of people and I've made a lot of mistakes in that department. I've had bad hires. I've hired people that were good people that I didn't get launched correctly and onboarded correctly costing me many millions of dollars in both real cost and loss opportunity. I've had every mistake, every problem that you can imagine in the subject of people, right? having a company that, you know, wrote checks. I I had 120,000 people I sent checks to a month that sold my product. 4,900 or so were full-time. And then in my corporate office, 590 people and then I had offices all around the world. And so the people part of it was something I spent majority of the first part of my career trying to figure out. And I'm still trying to figure it out because people are very interesting and uh and unpredictable as we all are. And there's many parts of us that we get to learn about as our work helps us discover those parts.

Now the structure structure is how we organize those people, our management practices, our meeting practices, our accountability practices, our project management practices, our incentives, how we structure them in terms of equity, profit sharing, cash comp, bonus comp. All of this is structuring, right? Getting the structuring right is very difficult uh because there's not a one-sizefits-all approach. You can't read my book and say, "I'm just going to do the comp plans the way Ryan does them." You have to figure out your own compensation formulas and plans based on the talent that you're seeking to recruit on, you know, the other companies that you're recruiting uh you're competing with inside the industry for talent and the norms and practices in each in particular industry and so forth. and then your own creative desires for how you're going to reward people for, you know, achieving results within your organization and creating value in your organization. This is a hard one for early stage founders to get. Like if I gave you a a problem, like if I said, okay, you're in zero to one, how are you going to hire a person that makes $500,000 a year and you don't have venture capital and you don't have $500,000 a year to give them, right? So, how do you hire them? Yes, sir. >> Equity. E. >> So, equity. Now, some people value equity, some people don't. Like some people that are more employee-minded, they value cash. Yeah. So, you could have them take some risk with you. More seasoned people might be riskadverse. They might say, "I, you know, so forth." But yes, that's great creative way. So, get an old retired guy like me to uh come advise and all a sudden I get a full-time job. That's a good way to get us on. I I I've had people try to pull me in that way a few times. All of those were brilliant answers, right? And in those answers, there's multiple different ways that you could actually bring a person on. I was a founder of a telecom company, wireless broadband company for that matter. And my investor said, "You need to hire a person who was older than me. He was like 50. I was 20, maybe 21. And uh he had been a CEO of a company. He had made a $500,000 a year salary. This the company he was running was doing 500 million a year and he was a CEO. And my investor insists I figure out how to hire him. And I'm making at that time $75,000 a year." And I was perplexed that I'm making 75 and you want me to figure out how to hire a person making 500, right? That didn't seem fair. And then the investor pulled me aside and he's a famed venture capitalist and he said, "You're working for equity. You're not working for cash comp." See, the more cash that you give to people, the less valuable your equity, right? So, your job is to try to bring in the greatest talented people at the least cash value you possibly can. So that way you can use the cash that you're saving and invest that into high growth initiatives to create more equity value for you. So one of the mindsets, the thinking that we have to figure out as founders is how do I get my head around hiring people that are more expensive than me, that are smarter than me, that are more seasoned than me, that maybe even intimidate me or even bring out fear or anxiety within me. So that way I can build equity value because the inverse of that is hiring people that make less than you that are often less competent than you uh that need your direction at all times and that aren't going to you know create value in your absence. you know, I took this trip to Singapore and Bali and my company grew uh without me and it's a dream come true that you can take time and you can go, you know, on an adventure 15 hours ahead and uh and your company is going to continue to grow and accelerate without you. In fact, it will grow more if you don't uh show up to the office than if you do show up to the office. Right? That's what we're trying to get to. So I've cracked the code at this level of company and at every level you know there's a new code to crack but you know people and structure are key to that.

Now process okay process is one of those things that I think I I got religion on uh later in life. Excuse me because I would just bring people in try to get them compensated and then let them figure out the process. Uh obviously process is extremely important. One of the key things that I do to drive process, well, one philosophy on process is very few people can both create a process and run a process. You got to write. There's only a few of us, maybe founders, highly uh motivated people, people that are super intelligent and very creative can create a efficient process and actually run it. Now, I don't mean just I sometimes I have engineers create processes and they overengineer them and those are not processes that we should run, right? So you need very few people that should create the process and run the process. I as a founder am in charge of creating the initial processes for the vast majority of the company and then getting them running and I often run them myself and then I hand them off to other people to run. Right? So that's why founders have an instinctive knowledge those people that are actively building in almost every aspect of the company. I spent some time with a close confidant of Steve Jobs and I asked him like what was it like and he said Steve knew every detail about everything going on in his company. Steve other entrepreneurs uh have you know similar disposition. They're in the weeds. It's because they're there activating the core processes not necessarily the subcore or the you know the secondary or tertiary processes but the core processes are generally initiated by those founders. They get them up and running. They get them working. Then they get the teams refining and making them even better. And so that's very important. For example, in sales, many founders that I know, we all need revenue. They uh they think I'll outsource sales. I'll hire a sales manager from a company doing x many uh dollars. I'll pay this person quarter million a year and my sales problem solved. And they hire the person. Person shows up and now they have a $250,000 a year problem and they still don't get sales, right? I see that day in and day out because the founder doesn't want to lean into the skill sets of sales or the skill sets of marketing or the skill sets of paid media or the skill sets of supply chain. And so we have to be able to lean into each of those particular skill sets and whatever uh skill sets are necessary for our company, you know, to grow and scale. uh get those processes set up at least at the beginning of those departments and then hand them off to competent people to run them. And then it's much better to do it that way because you can then hire a person, share with them your process, get them to run your process and if they can make it better and more efficient, you simply hand them a process to run as opposed to bringing them in to try to create a process and run a process which may or may not work and may may take a very long time to get the job done. So that's in every function of the business. So you break it down, you have marketing which you know has a series of skills and processes. You have sales, you have product, you have supply chain, you have finance, you have IT and then you know there's subcategories across all different companies tax, treasury, finance and so forth.

And then product right so when you have A+ people and you know these are high performing you know best in best team members you can imagine that's an A and they're in an A+ structure they should create A+ process and A+ product right it's a dream right when you have you know B people in an A structure they create B process and B products when you have C people in an A structure they're going to create, you know, D product and uh sorry, Dprocess and F product, right? Um, and I'm just using standard grading terms, but you get the picture here. You have to have all of these categories locked in in order for you to create great product, right? A people in a B structure will jump off cliffs and create conflict and they'll have the greatest challenges ever. Now, what do I mean by an A person? For each of you, you should define what an A person is uh in your environment. Every company has a different character set that they're looking for. For me, I'm looking for highly intelligent people that want and love to work because I love working. I love it. You know, it's this is fun. I like creating stuff. I like building stuff. I like, you know, I wouldn't do anything else. So, I I need people that love that stuff because if they're like, "Hey, I got some hardcore boundaries. Like, I'm not gonna take a call past five. I'm not gonna take a call over the weekend. I'm not, you know, that's not a bad person. It's just not going to work for me because like I'm texting you at 5:00 am and 4 a.m. when I have an idea, right? Like, you know, I I need people that are going to be like, "Yeah, let's do that. I want to run with that." Like, "Ow, I wake him up all the time saying like, "Oh, let's go. What are we working on?" Right. Right. And and and Al's like, "Let's go. I'll I'll outpace you. I'll outwork you all day long. He's got more energy than me." He's like young NASA guy. But now another person would say that is the most horrible thing I've ever heard in my life. I would never work in that environment. So when I'm interviewing people, I'm trying to explain to them the truth about my work style, about my expectations, uh about how I, you know, really come alive in in my, you know, work relationships. And then, you know, obviously allowing people to say that's just not for me at this stage in my life. So, you know, that's part of my recruiting because if I put a person in to this environment and I have a B person show up for my environment, not in terms of they're a bad person, but they're just like, "Hey, I don't like this place." They're going to uh slow down and dilute the effectiveness of the organization. They literally will reduce efficiency. So, when you're hiring, you're hiring to improve efficiency. You're hiring to improve amplify, right? You're hiring to get multiplication. And oftent times when we hire people we actually get reduction right we're trying to get you know a new hire we should get more value more revenue more cost savings you know more process more efficient operations and we often get less efficiency and so I see that dilemma all day long with founders or they're like I've got 20 people and this place is worse than it was when I had 10. And that's a function of leadership management practices philosophy and all of the things that I'm I'm here to share with you. So it's just ex I just want to reiterate here we have to get a people into the best structure we possibly can in a structure we have to create a process and then we'll create a product and anytime I'm looking at organization I'm looking at the people and now if they're not a you can get them you can upgrade them you can develop them you can have a talk with them and say look I see you're like you're operating at a B+ right now and this is what it's going to take to get to A and take them on the journey of that you can help them change their thinking, their speaking and their acting to become uh you know people that you're like I would restart this company. A a player is somebody that you would restart your company with all over again tomorrow if you had to. So you know very important structure.

Now I'm going to pause here and then take uh some questions. >> Your definition for structure is specifically comp structure. >> Organizational structure, reporting structure, compensate reporting compensation go hand in hand, right? But I'll give you an idea and this is for us founders. We all want to hire that that brilliant CTO or that brilliant, you know, marketing person and that that super brilliant person that's highly competent, highly driven, very good at what they do. They're going to come in, they're going to work with you, and they're going to assess whether or not you're operating at their pace. Can they fulfill their career goals based on working with you? So if you're not operating at your highest form of brilliance, if you're not operating in your greatest energy and your greatest creativity and your greatest excitement, enthusiasm, great people are going to come into your organization and they're not going to connect. They're going to say, "This isn't for me." And they're going to leave. Or you're going to not attract those people in the first place. So you're going to have, you know, people say, "It's just hard to get good help." I hear that all the time. That is just a purely a matter of consciousness and who you're attracting. or you might even attract some weeds that come into your garden. So, it's very key that you take your personal practices, you know, your energetic management system, everything that you're doing on the inside is absolutely important that you're an A person to attract those A people. Um, but yeah, structure. So, reason why I got into that rant on that was an A person does not want to work for a B person and an A person does not want to work with a B person. like they they will literally like for example I remember having a management consultant that was a brilliant guy came in and and he wanted to move quickly. He wanted to get things done. We were launching a new country and he was like ready moving moving moving and he had to show up to these meetings with people that were not as motivated, intelligent, ambitious and he would get really frustrated because he couldn't get his job done and achieve his objectives. And so I had to make a choice like do I get rid of the A player or do I get rid of these B players that are slowing down my A player? uh because that that you know an A player they're they're internally motivated. They might have a perfectionist thing going on. They want to see you know things move quickly. They want to advance their career. They want to learn more about themselves. They want to accomplish great things. Like that's what they're driven by. That's what we need in our companies, right? So we have to be very careful even though we're very kind people that we don't we don't recruit people out of our kindness. They're going to slow down those people that have a desire to change the world. Right? Because if you have this innate desire to change the world, you want to move quickly. You know, you're not going to do it if you move slowly. Uh one of my favorite philosophies is Elon quotes Elon Musk. He says, "If you set out to clean a house in three uh 30 days, it'll take you 30 days." You set out to clean a house in three hours, it will take you three hours. I want people to clean a house in three hours. I don't want people to clean the house over 30 days.

So um I have engineering and business backgrounds and because I'm so early in this stage it's very hard to find like and get the A players and that's why I was hiring people and I'm like because I have this perfectionism too I'm like okay this is not good enough let me try to focus on this and I'll do it in the end I do a lot of things so if you would go back and start from the scratch how would you like your question a while ago how would you convince a players to work with you. >> So, if I may just give you some hot seat coaching, you said it's hard to find, right? So, the word hard is is that's in the language department, right? So, it's hard to find. So, that's a belief, right? That that we all we all it's easy to catch that because everybody walks around. It's hard to find a player. It's hard to find great people. It's not hard to find them. Like, I'm sure that if you and I sat there and said, "Where do these people go eat? Where do these people socialize?" We're among some eight players right now. Like I always think about it like what watering hole are these fish in? Like what kind of lake do they operate in? What kind of So they're out there. We just have to get very uh precise in exactly how we're going after these types of individuals. Now the precision might be in our ads that we're posting for on the job boards. It might be how we reach out to our network to discover them. And then it also is in the filtering of these people through our interviewing processes and making sure that we're really seeing a minimum of like 10 candidates per one hire. Oftent times as founders we want to get the hire done. We see one person, two people. We hire the best of the worst as opposed to the best of the best. Run everything is a process. So like my recruiting is a process. I have recruits coming in all the time. Uh they're being filtered based on my value system. They're being filtered based on the job criteria. And then I'm meeting with people all the time that are in alignment with what I'm looking for and then I'm making the decision as to whether or not I hire them. So that's a function of recruiting basically and you have to build a recruiting system specifically to your company at the stages and to find those highc caliber people because they are out there and then from a spiritual conscious uh level you have to be that person that you're seeking right so you have to look yourself in the mirror and say how am I exemplifying the behaviors of this type of person that I want and when they show up they're going to be like this person matches my my vibe and they're going to want to work with you >> regardless of the compensation I Well, it depends. You have to figure out a way to stake them in at a startup level. You can find people that will join you. Now, sometimes you might find people that come in for a season, meaning they're going to be here for a few months. Sometimes you'll find people that'll be here for life. As companies scale, the people will leave. You know, many people will, some will stay. Some people are love an environment of like 510. Other people love an environment of 20, 30. Some people really thrive in a 50 person environment, 100. Some people that are really good people will be like, "At 100 people, this isn't fun anymore. I just don't like it. There's too much process. There's too much structure." Right? So, you know, at every level, people will leave. And that's not a bad thing. That's a good thing because they just they enjoy working in in different size of groups. Um, the larger the group might be not as fun to work in. And also, some people like to work more in a general as opposed to specialist role. And as the group scales, you need more specialists and less generalists, right? So you start with a bunch of generalists and then you move into a bunch of specialists. So you might have an A player for this season that comes in and that's just fine. And then they're no longer an A player and then you have to figure out how to coach them out of the organization because they're no longer really acclimated to the level of company that you're at.

Another way to look at this is, and I equate it to mathematics. I'm a math guy. You have to forgive me. Every company is just simply a series of of of mathematical transactions. So you're in finance, right? So if I have a CPG company like yours, you know, you have to manufacture the product or you have to purchase the product from a manufacturer. You have to package it. You have to ship it. If your average order value is a hundred bucks and there's three things that go inside each order, a leaflet of this, that, and the other, there's like 20 transactions for that $100 order, right? or more like depending on, you know, how the build of materials and all that other stuff, right? Maybe 50 transactions for that $100 order. And as a company scales, a CFO, you know, could come in and sell thousand orders a month. No big deal. I can do the math on that. I can do the reconciliation. I can do the cash. I can manage inventory. At a million transactions a month, that same CFO might say, "This is at a transactional load beyond my desire and beyond my capacity." So some CFOs come in and they're like10 million transactions a month, no problem. Other CFOs are going to come in and say, I don't like this environment anymore. They they don't have the capacity at that transactional level. And by capacity, I mean uh leadership capacity. I had a a finance department that had 25 full-time people inside of it uh to manage the transactional volume in one of my CPG companies. And you know in other environments I've had to mult many times upgrade different key leaders and management team members as the transactional volume increases for people that are more qualified to work in those transactional uh levels.

>> If you can give a couple of examples or an example each for a with your A+ players how you take care of them knowing that they drive themselves super hard. >> Yeah. And B, because you're thinking through this consciousness lens, how do you keep them at a place where they are motivated enjoying themselves and have the next thing to work for because that's how they're orientated? >> Yeah. >> And then the next question is for a B or C player B to get to an A+. Do you have an example of how you influence their thinking? >> Yes. Um, let me answer the first one, then if you can hold the second one for a second, I'll come back to it. The first one, I use a framework called Lara. L A R A uh it's based on Stanford research listen affirm respond and ask all of my management syncs all of my interactions with people I listen and if you have people on your team and they say you don't listen uh and I mean genuinely listen they're not going to feel heard they're not going to feel witnessed they're going to leave right so you have to listen to people now some people, engineering people, not going to name the guy that I brought to the room here. Sometimes they they don't want to speak like they don't want to share, right? So, you have to ask them great questions, right? To to really extract what what's going on, what's on your heart is one of the questions I like to ask. Uh I use this framework to make sure that in my people dealings, I'm in empathy and I'm constantly, you know, getting out of transaction mode and getting out of analytic mode and getting into leadership mode. So listening deeply, affirming their experience because a lot of times people will say, "I heard every word you said, but they don't give you confirmation that they heard it and affirm the experience and then responding is synthesizing what they've said and giving, you know, what I heard you say is X, X, and Y, and then asking and asking open-ended questions in order for you to go deeper into relationship with them. I sync and now on the management practices side I sync with my direct reports that I'm most actively working on projects with once a week where I'm I'm having a non-transactional sync with them. It's you know let's connect what's going on with you how are you doing I really care about my people. People need to know you care. There's an old saying was John Maxwell. He said people don't care about how much you know until they know about how much you care. Something paraphrase it right? So they have to know that you care. And then keeping them motivated is they need to understand what the the the what you're building, the potential impact of what you're building, the meaning of that. It's very important. You you have to correlate everything they're doing to something meaningful. And you have to find meaning in the mundane. I remember back in the day, we used to staple invoices. And an office manager was stapling these things. I walked by and I saw that, you know, the invoices were big and uh the staples weren't like placed at it correctly. They're kind of halfhazard and the staplers were broken and the invoices would be broken apart. And I walked over and I said, "This is the lifeblood of our company. Like these invoices are how we get paid. If you don't do this properly, the customer is not going to pay the invoice and then we don't, you know, we don't uh live, we don't work. Like all of our incomes come by way of this work here." And so I'm I'm attempting to create meaning in something that might be considered very mundane at all times within the organizations in every function. That's the other thing. And then the vision and mission of the company and and the importance of it and you know being in collaboration with them on that is very important.

>> I'm just looking at so I I'm gathering that that the way you built your company was through sales teams. So you're always going to have A, B, and C players in every team, but your A people are going to be able to motivate your B and C players and the using structured process and product or mot are motivations for different people. So if you're opening other set of countries, you're kind of sorting in the processing and I guess your comp plan, my guess is self-fulfilling. It's it's sort of it works differently for different people. Some people just want to be there as part of the team. No, I I built companies that are engineering specific teams. I built companies in manufacturing. I built companies, right? This process applies to all human beings in all different types of environments. You know, people are most important thing you got to get right. You got to structure them correctly, which means you got to organize them. To be organized, right? Get a bunch of people not organized correctly, they're not going to do much. They have to create process, right? In order for them to, you know, ship product and uh create value and so forth. So this structure works across all companies and you know and and then the grading of A, B and C you could apply toward engineerings. You have A+ engineers those are the people that we call 10x engineers the ones that can engineer 10 times the rate of an average engineer right? You have B+ engineers maybe 5x engineer and you have c engineers uh maybe a 1x engineer right so you can grade uh you know and you can create whatever grading system you want. I like to use simple A, B, and C because I can look in an organization, talk to the managers, say, "Give me a list of the A players. Give me a list of the B players. Give me a list of the C players. Now, give me a plan to get the C players to B. Give me a plan to get the B players to A." Do you follow me? And so, it's just very simple grading. And the A players are real easy to identify. These are the people that you could not do life without. These are the people that, as Jim Collins says in the book, could degrade, that if they wanted to leave, you would do anything you could to retain them, right? You'd be devastated. You'd say, "No, you're not leaving. That's not happening." Or alternatively, you'd be pleasantly surprised if they left. They're like, "Hey, I'm leaving." You'd be like, "That's fantastic. Let me throw you a going away party. I'm so excited. You can wrap up now. No need for two weeks." Right? The smell test is, would I be pleasantly surprised if this person came to me with their resignation tomorrow, or would I be devastated? Right? Your A players, you'd be devastated. You'd do anything you could to retain them. your B players or C players, you throw them a going away party that day, right? And so, you know, those are some of the the smell tests that that you know, you have to operate. And and as a founder, an entrepreneur, oftentimes, you know, you're lying there at night trying to go to sleep and this person just keeps popping up in your brain. You're like, why am I thinking about this person before I go to sleep? Oftentimes, it's because you got to make a change with them. One other tip that I'll share with you is I used to avoid conflict because I felt bad about it. you know, I would avoid it. And I've learned that my next level of success comes from the uncomfortable conversation that I'm avoiding.

Having, right? So, I have to turn toward the uncomfortable conversations, and that's where I learn more about myself. That's where I break through tension or friction, reset expectations.

So, I'll write a list up of the uncomfortable conversations that I need to have that I'm not having, and then I'll just, you know, push myself to go have one of those conversations at a time. And it's very important. That's that's how you resolve conflict.

Conflict is important to resolve because when when you resolve conflict, think of it like tearing a muscle. And when you tear the muscle and heal it correctly, uh it grows back much stronger. But if the conflict's there uh and it's not healed, it just it creates more separation and more separation and eventually over time it'll either require one of the two of you to quit. If you're a founder, that's that's a bad place to be.

We've done well in direct to consumer and uh on the B2B side we are just barely dealing with the inbound requests for partnerships and such and there's no strategy to it. Yeah.

>> It's spaghetti on the wall. We have everything from Hollywood celebrity clinic to violent crime response centers. It's like all sorts of things.

>> Yeah. And um because I've had a lot of um like founder issues to deal with in the last 12 months more or less including fundraising and a legal case and all sorts of things.

>> This is I quote myself when you were talking thinking having thought like I just need to hire someone to sort out this problem and at the same time it's actually something strategically I would really like to dig into.

>> Yeah. And so yeah, I mean that's where I'm like a senior person that can kind of because there needs to be some time to actually assess the different ver verticals, the slice of opportunity so that we focus.

>> Um and so I'm yeah I'm just finding myself there being one of the things like just can't deal with this right now. Just need to hire someone to to help me sort this out.

>> So great question. Thank you for asking it. Your current acquisition channel is that through how are you acquiring customers presently?

Yeah, it's been mainly direct to consumer. Um, and then actually we have about 60 partners that have all been inbound, but they're very diverse and so uh clearly it's a huge opportunity for us to expand in that area and I want to and it's important for our growth. Direct consumer will obviously help from branding even in in the other channels but for growth that is important and definitely um an untapped channel.

>> Yeah. May so may I ask out of your current revenue what percentage is in direct to consumer versus partner?

Yeah. 75% in direct to consumer.

>> 75% 25% but it's 25% now.

>> 25% which is B2B other online retail affiliates. So a little bit of a mix.

>> And how much of the 25% is the actual B2B component of it?

>> Probably less than 10.

>> Less than 10. Yeah.

So I like to drive one revenue stream up as hard and as far as I possibly can until I know that it's at double digit monthly compounded growth and beyond very profitably. You know, I'm scaling that. and then I initiate my next revenue stream. I don't want to put split my focus to two revenue streams at once until I really get the one that I'm my core offer, you know, dialed in.

I look at it and there's just a framework. For example, I'll say 70, 20, 10, and these are percentages. So 70% of all my resources and energy is focused on my core offer. And this is at a larger size company and a smaller company that might be more like 90. 20% of my resources and attention to energy will be on adjacent to the core. So for example, if you have direct to consumer, adjacent to the core offer might be an upsell, an upgrade, getting the direct to consumer, another add-on product or something that still uses the direct to consumer core energy and resources and you know and these are easy to do and they can often be very lucrative and then 10% are like venture bets. So venture bet meaning I think this partner channel could be huge, it could be big. I would say I'd put 10% of my energy toward that and be really building up my core and building up my adjacent to my core. And then if I got something humming over there in the adjacent to the core, the partner channel or some of the other things that you're thinking about, then I greenlight more resources on that and then maybe that then becomes the core at some point in time.

>> So for example, in my own clinics, that was very low hanging fruit. We just set up an affiliate because they don't even need to make the revenue. They test all sorts of different products and they find that this is the product that really works with patients and clients. So they come to us and say, "Hey, I'm already recommending this to my patients. Do you have something where set it up?"

>> Yeah.

>> So is that an affiliate situation where

>> they're affiliate affiliate clinics? Uh but then there is such a diverse range of other opportunities that I don't know what I would put in that and that's where I felt like I need someone to help me out here.

Based on what you just described, having done some marketing in the space, I would be focused primarily on just setting up that one specific vertical, say clinics as an affiliate and get uh perhaps a project manager at this stage. I like hiring project managers to start uh projects because they can build out the process, they can build out the systems, and I can work with the project manager to get it out of my brain and get it done and I'm getting the process done with the project manager. Once that process is built, then I can bring in more of an executive to run it. Executives with lots of experience, they often come in and they'll sell you, oh, I'll do it. And then they need three people to do it. And then pretty soon you've hired six people and you've gotten no results, you know, to because they need all these resources if they've got all this experience. So I like to I like to start very lean. I if I'm going to initiate any resource other than me, it's a project manager to get it's only a project that I'm greenlighting. Everything I think about in terms of life is projects. You know, all these things are projects. So, I don't try to over complicate them. This is a project. I'm going to see if this project uh or an experiment rather, and I'm going to initiate the experiment. I'm going to run it as a project. I'll cancel it if it if it doesn't work and give me the feedback that I need. And I'll learn from the experiment and apply it to other parts of my business. If the experiment works, then I bring someone in to continue running the experiment. But I never bring in somebody to run a process and create a process at the same time. Generally speaking, those people will they'll have a long learning curve. They don't know the business like you do. They won't do it like you do. They won't have all the ways to glue it together. And it's just a slow build process. So, yeah.

And you have the sales experience. So, if I put 10 clinics on the phone with you tomorrow, you would enroll them. So, I'd have the project manager sitting on those enrollment calls, working through all the details, building all the systems in place, building out my structure and my process, getting the thing working. And then once I got it working, and I was like, "Okay, this works." Then I I get somebody to come in and run it. and I'd have a person specifically running that initiative. Um, I'm a firm believer that you want to have a owner of the initiative and maybe your project manager gets upgraded to the owner of this initiative and they come in and run a whole department down down the road. Um, and that would be a great career path for them if if they do build this out. But I'm a firm believer that you want to have one person owning, you know, unless you have somebody with super high capacity. Most people cannot own multiple roles in a company. So, one role, one focus, uh, one revenue stream.

Within the first 30 days, I know whether or not a person is for me. I will often give them a second chance. After I've come to the conclusion, this probably is not going to work. I try to get it done within 30. I might give them another 30. You know, the gap between when, you know, and when you let them go is the most difficult gap possible. And it used to be like eight months for me. And I do the math on that. I'd be like, I spend eight months with an executive. hypothetically, let's say, making $20,000 a month and they were supposed to capture a million dollar opportunity and I spent, you know, hundreds of thousands of dollars and put all this time and energy and I got to the eighth month and I let them go. And then so looking at that, when did I know when did I know? And it's not that they're a bad person. It's just that maybe I didn't get them maybe I didn't hire the right person. Maybe I didn't get them onboarded correctly. Maybe I, you know, didn't have the time and energy to give them the precise instructions and by month eight I just have given up on the fact that I'm ever going to be able to get them to be successful in the organization.

So, how do I reduce that amount of time so that way I fail very quickly? We're going to get it wrong statistically somewhere around 50 to 60% of the time. Every hire that you make is about 50/50. Even if you are brilliant and you're interviewing candidates and you're doing all the math and you're doing everything you can, you're going to get it wrong a significant portion of the time. So, I share that number with you because you you should not expect that you've gotten it right ever. You should expect that you're likely to have gotten it wrong and try to get it right because we don't want to, you know, we want to try to derisk that situation, but assume that you got it possibly wrong. do everything you can to onboard them as a aggressively as possible so that way they get to full production as fast as possible and you know right away because the most expensive thing you can have is an unproductive team member because it brings down the quality of everyone else's work on the team.

So that is the most important thing you can do is eliminate people very quickly and it's hard to do but you got to do it for the and I don't do it out of ego. I do it because I've come to the conclusion that they need a better mentor than me. That that if I allow them to stay in the environment, they will be suffering. And an act of compassion is to alleviate suffering. Right? That is why we you know that's compassion. So if I've come to the conclusion they need a better mentor than me, they will not grow in this environment. I will not grow in this environment and their colleagues and team members won't. Then I have to remove them from the environment with compassion so that the marketplace can give them a better opportunity than the one that I've given them. If I hold them into this opportunity, I've actually stopped their soul from growing. I've actually harmed them. So it's the inverse method. Like I'm not doing any harm by letting them go. I'm actually freeing them from something so that way they can do something far more beneficial to them.

Now the marketplace will tell them what where their skills are at. And if I've made a mistake, the marketplace will grab them up and pay them more. If I haven't made a mistake, then the marketplace is going to tell them that they have some work to do, that they weren't listening to me to do it, right? Because if I'm telling them, you've got work to do, this isn't working for me. You know, you need help, like you need to make these changes, you need to, you know, up level here, and they don't do it under my stewardship, then the marketplace will tell them to do it. Otherwise, they'll, you know, not get a job or they'll repeat the same pattern with someone else very quickly, right? So, the marketplace is the ultimate test as to whether or not you did them a favor or, you know, the marketplace will tell them where they need to do the work. So, our ego makes us think, oh, they'll never get another job and I'm the sole provider and they need to work for me. That's all ego. The marketplace is far more powerful than you, right? And so our egos think that, oh, I can't let this person go because, you know, it's going to be so tough for them. No, there's that the marketplace will pick them, right? If they're a good person, the marketplace will get them employed immediately, right? And if they're not so good, the marketplace will tell them that and they should go do some work.

So that's the hard truth about uh and I I've come to these conclusions by the way because I think in conscious circles the the biggest challenges that we have is you know how to part ways with people that are past their season with us, you know, and and I I had a CEO who hired me, it's a manufacturing company doing 120 million a year in sales, 30-year-old company, and he hired me just because he could not bear the thought of letting go any of his team because he felt that they were family. And he loved them so much and they took advantage of that. Like I came in, I said, "As your family member, I can't let you operate in an environment like this anymore. These people, they're taking advantage of your heart here. They're not showing up. They're not fully engaged. They're saying one thing to you and doing another thing, you know, and and this is the environment that you created because you've kind spoiled your children a bit, right? And when you have a bunch of spoiled children, as you know, in the parental context, you know, there's ramifications to that. We gave them all improvement programs. We gave them coaching sessions. We brought in coaches. We evaluated them. We, you know, we've worked hardcore with every one of these team members to try to, you know, keep them in the environment and to get them to upgrade. So, he did not want to fire them. And so, you know, the alternative to that is we're going to torture them to success, right? That's what uh the CEO, someone's writing that down. That's what the CEO of Nvidia says. He says, "I'm not I don't fire anybody. I torture them to success." Meaning like, you know, torture is a strong word, but he is going to be on top of them until they make the transformational changes that they need to to be successful in his environment. And he'd prefer to do that and be really intense with that than to uh fire them.

As CEOs oftentimes and entrepreneurs, we often really have a victim mindset. Like we oftentimes, although we claim to not want to be victim mindset, we tell our team, you have a victim mindset, we often blame our team for everything. We have to say, "Oh, my team's just not getting the job done. My team's not productive." And that's a victim mindset. That's like, "It's not my fault. It's my team's fault." And uh we got to look ourselves in the mirror and say, "What I need to change about me? What am I doing wrong here?" You know, what about my character? What about my competency? What about my communication? And what about my organization? What about my structuring is causing this effect, right? And you it's like we got to do the work first and then we got to look at them and we got to say, "I need you to change and I'm going to change, too. like I I'm I got some things I need to change to create an A player environment and here's how I am not being an A player right now, right? And here's a long list of all the things I'm doing that are not A player. And I here's I need you to do some things too to be an A player and then let's all become A players together.

And the other thing I'll share with you culturally it's very important is I roll out across my organizations that I support and that I you know I'm owner and I call it the SOE program. I do this for every department. It's called standards of excellence. In every department I have standards of excellence that I point to. So what are the standards of excellence in my customer service department, my coaching department, my software engineering department and I write up those lists of excellence. Every department has a list of standards of excellence and every team member knows what the standards are. So I'm not making it about them. I'm making it about our standards as a team. So you're either operating with excellence or you're not. And lots of times I'm not. But we have the standards of excellence that we point to and we're constantly pointing not to you being at fault. This is not excellence and we need to focus on operating with excellence. Great. You know, so this is this was a game changer when I rolled this out across sales teams and I rolled this customer success teams was we're all going to focus on what the standards of excellence are. We're all going to be accountable to our own standards and we're going to count daily as to how we're adhering to the standards of excellence. So my daily standups, the teams go over and they cite out how they're adhering to the standards of excellence. So we have them rolled out and then they say here's how I'm adhering to it. They and a lot of times this is quantifiable in different departments like you know you might call center have it being their average uh pickup times or sales team might be a speed to lead or quantifiable metrics are very important here and they'll say I'm off on my standards here's what I'm going to do to make up for it. They take responsibility they take ownership and they account for it and if they're off they make up for it. So you know this is a very important uh program I've rolled out across many different teams and many different companies.

When I was running a weight loss company, I was direct to consumer and it was a very big company and a major gym chain requested a meeting and of course I thought this could be big. My products will be in all of their gyms. And I went in there and they wanted a massive discount on the product. They wanted me to do this, to do that, all these different things. I thought to myself, well, I'll get your customers anyways, right? Like you'll have my product in your gym whether you like it or not, right? Like this, I'll target your parking lot. I'll geofence every parking lot of every gym that you have and I'll market to every one of your clients and my product will be in here with without you, right? Like, you know, I I don't need you to get to your customers, right? So, I share that with you because with direct to consumer and our ability to target, our ability to, you know, really ramp up paid media. You can get to every one of those customers at every one of those clinics without having to go to the clinic.

Yeah. So maybe if you could acquire the customers of those clinics and then in the process uh onboard the clinic as well. So is there a way to reverse onboard these clinics right? So the post go to the clinic to try to get to their customers can you go to their customers to get to the clinic >> right in your marketing campaigns. So perhaps asking the customers on their onboarding you know if they're involved anything and then using that as initiation. So if you already have a couple of their customers call them up and say I already have a couple of your customers. I'd love to do greater business with you. That would be one way that I would approach it.

So, I worked in a a software technology uh company that scraped the web and when you uh Google searched, you found your name and then you click on it and then you'd want to they basically got you to create an account with them so that you could get leads. It was like a Yelp kind of concept. I don't know if you know how Yelp uh spread the web. They basically scraped the web. They they put all these small businesses in their platform and then when the small business went and searched their name, they saw them on Yelp, they clicked on Yelp and then Yelp upsold them into a small business account. So they pre-populated all their accounts with all these things. So you could pre-populate all these clinics on your platform and you know when the clinic goes out there and go wow uh there's already a connection here to this this company. So that might be one way that you could bring the clinics on. There's many different clever ways to to get to your audience. And part of the thought experiment and just critical thinking is just to sit there with that and say what are the 20 what are some different creative ideas as to how I can get this job done more efficiently? I like to get things going and get the engine building. I look at every function of a company like an engine that I have to get firing in all cylinders and I move on to the next engine. So you know that just to stimulate some ideas and creativity with you.

>> Our mission is to building the sales mission that we can scale to you know the $10 million and I'm really impressed how you're approaching to you know the hiring A plus people. Uh I would just you know it will be more specific about the sales people. What are the specifics you are looking for? you know to understand their motivation in sales and their own profession.

>> Yeah. What what kind of um uh company is it? What kind of product is it?

>> It's a software product.

>> Software and it's selling to who? What's the audience?

>> The large brands which they have you know the e-commerce websites.

>> So it's a longer sales cycle of course.

>> How long does it take for

>> around 6 months?

>> 6 months. Do you have active customers using it now as case studies?

>> Of course.

>> It's a process to sell to enterprise. One you have to have a decent business acumen. Two you have to be able to understand the politics. We use a framework called BANT uh budget, authority, need, and timeline. Right? So, you have to have a person that's skilled in and identifying all the different players inside the companies. And I've done a B TOC or a B2B uh sales early on in my career, you know, for large very large companies. So, you know, you have to understand purchasing manager, you might have to talk to a sea-level person and you get handed off to, you know, another person and, you know, you have to work your way around the organization. So it requires a person with some experience and and how to manage that process that have to have some success in doing it. You need people that are extremely hungry that are uh willing to do whatever it takes to succeed and have a you know an intense desire to be successful. However you measure that I look for people and I lead my sales teams with service over sales. See with service comes sales right? So sales is the skills the skill to take a person through a structured presentation to ask for an order to be able to uh handle handle their objections to figure out what their problem set is so that way you can bring them solutions right that's that's the skill so I'm looking for salespeople that are service centric that they're here to serve that they they want to serve the company serve the client and they have to have the skill of selling but I want uh sales people that are more missionaries than mercenaries and so leading with service is very important. A salesperson has to have belief in the product. They have to have belief in the company. You know, that's and at a young uh stage company, founding company like yours, you can get some sales people that this is a massive opportunity for them. You can stake them in with equity. They're going to have an opportunity to grow and expand. As the company grows and expands, they're going to grow and expand versus a later stage company, their opportunity is much smaller, right? So, you know, there's a massive opportunity for you to bring in great sales people. I highly recommend building out all the systems, all the structures, the CRM, all the processes in advance and building out that sales process and then bringing people in to run process, right? Not bringing in people to tell you how to run the process, but bring people in to run the process that's already working in your environment because if you bring in people to create process on the sales side of it, they will often uh waste a lot of time.

I have a similar question in the sense of like right now I'm involved in all the processes and I'm trying to right now I'm trying to outsource like my supply chain to um a partner that has been great and they're building good systems in that front and then like I'm trying to pull myself out of all these different processes right now. So would you recommend like going like like literally one at a time of like this department build process hire someone to run it move on slowly extract yourself from the business? Um, and I'm a little specifically also concerned cuz like things are clicking really well right now and I'm like I can sense that I should probably go faster. Especially in this category like a lot of people say like I'm a customer for life. Like if it works for them, there's no reason to switch it. Like and it's the space is wide open right now. So, like how do you balance like going out and fundraising and like growing faster, capturing that market versus like entrusting people to build those processes for you is like doing it all yourself.

>> The source of truth is our calendar and this is the most important thing. This is it. If you want to know how productive I am, I should hand you my calendar and say, "Take a look." Right? And you can evaluate my time and look at where I'm spending it and look at a week and say what buckets do I put my time into? I put two hours into finance, a couple hours into product, couple hours into this. You know, how am I spending my time? Right? So, we have to evaluate our time and look at how we're spending our time in the core buckets of our our company. So, finance, uh, supply chain, customer acquisition, whatever your buckets are. And then look at where you're spending those time. And then ask yourself, you know, which of the buckets, you know, brings me life versus takes life, right? So, which are the buckets I love working in versus the buckets I don't love working in because those are the buckets that we want to get other people to do. And then get other people doing those buckets as fast as you possibly can. And, you know, and start handing off those things. There's a concept called restriction where we basically say no to things so we can say yes to things that are higher value, more impactful. So I have to look at a list of all the things I do and I have to write up the list of the things I need to start saying no to so I can say yes to more impactful things. It's about subtraction at this stage for your company, not addition because if you add anything, you just basically get more work and you know and that that's not going to get you to where you want to go. So, you have to take things off your list and you have to hire people that take things off your plate. You have to be careful with this. I tell every team member that I hire, I say, "Your job is to take things off my plate, not put things on my plate." If you don't train your team that you'll go to a meeting and they'll hand you more tasks, and they'll think their job is to give you more work as opposed to give you less work, right? So, and it's a simple nuance. I tell teams, you know, I have this entrepreneur I coach, she's got a team of like 400 people. And I just observed her and her team and I said, "Basically, they're giving you more work all day long. You have like 400 people trying to make your life harder all day as opposed to make your life easier." Said, "You need to train them as opposed to them training you, right? You're either training them or they're training you. They're training you to make their lives easier and make their lives more comfortable, you know, to take work off their plate or they're training you or you're training them to take work off your plate, be more effective, and so forth. So, you know, it's like at that stage, it's like a propaganda machine where you're having to train them non-stop. But at at your stage, you need, you know, people to take things off your plate left and right. If you've documented the process and you've created systems, you can get things off your plate and you can get them in an automated systematized way, particularly in a company like yours to my understanding of it so far, just having been in some industries around it, that you can get things off your plate in an automated fashion. And that's what I'd be looking at. how to automate, how do I get things off my plate, and how do I take things that are less fulfilling to me off my plate so I can work on the more fulfilling things.

>> Have you found a process that you think is highly efficient for hiring in terms of um how many interviews over how much time, personality assessments, uh skills assessments, um we've tried so many different things. So we have a trial period now where we test them and consult them before we hire them full-time which extends the period the hiring process but we're finding it's more effective but still haven't feel like we haven't completely cracked the code

>> with the finance person. I sit on a couple boards that have private equity involved and like let's say we got to replace a a CEO or a CFO. In those scenarios we run simulations. So, we'll give a a potential CFO a bunch of data and we'll say make a story out of this and present it to the board and we'll see if we like this person. Do we like the story? Are they telling an honest story? Are they are they, you know, are they evalu analysis that we are? Are they seeing the same things that we are? So, I I like to run simulations and and have them do a simulation. In other positions, it might be a presentation. So, if I'm hiring a head of marketing, I want them to come in with a 90-day plan and present their 90-day plan. And if I like the way they present their plan and the way they think about their plan and the way they've created their plan, then I'll hire them. I want to get maybe 10 candidates for every one hire and I want to get uh 10 presentations. And in the process of getting those 10 presentations, I learn I might get new ideas and then I pick the person I think is most suited to work with me. So yes, I personality test, yes, I do other various assessments, but simulations, I want to simulate how they're going to be working with me. So that way I understand like this person can work with me. Now there's another couple things I look for. I look for people that have rad hobbies. I want to see that they exemplify excellence outside of work because that's an indicator that they'll exemplify excellence inside of work. Right? If I can't find any excellence outside of work, like if they have a bonsai garden or they have something rad or they're an amazing virtuoso on the violin or something outside of work they're really good at and passionate about and they love, that tells me that they're going to have, you know, be able to find something that they love and be passionate about inside. I like people with the shared sense of humor, right? Because you got to laugh at this stuff. If you can't laugh at, you know, some of the challenges that come your way and you don't have a shared sense of humor, that can be challenging. And I obviously I talked about work ethic and values and some of the other aspects. And then I'm I'm always asking I'm probing deeply into like how did you do it? How'd you do it? How'd you do it? I'm asking the question how did you do it? Because I'm looking for doers. And a lot of times people will take on their resumes they'll mention the success that they've had in their environments. Everybody takes credit for success. No one takes credit for failure, right? So I'm trying to see who is actually the person who did the thing that they're taking the credit for. Was it them? There's people right now taking credit for the success of my company that aren't even at the company right now. They're like, "Oh, I built that." Right? And it's great. Everybody shares in and the success, but then there's the person who could say, "No, I was on the phone when Ryan cracked the code on this particular equation and then the thing took off and, you know, started working." And you want the person that was there doing the work. So, I'm looking for doers.

And then after I get them enrolled that they want the job, I then try to sell them not to take the job. So, I tell them everything that's terrible about the job, everything that's going to be hard about the job, every every uh thing that's annoying, you know, I want them to be super clear and I want them to say I agree that I want the job after all of this. Like, so I'll take them through the process. I'll say, "I want to give you the job." If they say, "Okay, I'd like the job." And I said, "Well, before you say yes, let me tell you on all the, you know, things that are, you know, nuances here that, you know, might not necessarily work for you. And I want you to be fully clear. So I even will tell people I'm going to micromanage you. Right? And nobody likes to be micromanaged. Right? So if you take the job with me and I say I will micromanage you. Now I I'm not a micromanager but I want to set the expectation so low uh with working with me that that I can easily beat it, right? I will be so involved in the weeds and the details of what they're doing so that I can transfer my decision process. I can transfer and build trust with you that over the first 90 days it might feel like micromanagement. That's not my intention. That's not who I am. But I use words like that just to see if they're like, "No, you know, I don't want you calling me every day, seeing how I'm doing, checking in. You know, I don't want you texting me on the weekends, right? I I want to set their expectations like that. It's going to be hard." And when I onboard them, I onboard them as hard as I can to try to get them up to speed as fast as possible. So that way they can be self-sufficient on their own very quickly. If I go slow, they go slow. So that's, you know, I set like really high expectations and tell them it's going to be very hard and I have a a lot I expect a lot of them. The other thing is I'll tell them what my ROI thesis is on them and then I'll get them involved in proving the thesis. So, you know, for example, if in your case, if they got to see 50 customers per month in order for them to, you know, get a return on what we're investing in them to be sufficient, I'll tell them this is my ROI thesis on this hire on you as a hire and I need you to help me prove that thesis, right? Because then they know what success is and they know when they're contributing enough value to ask for a raise and they know when they're contributing enough value be secure in their position with you versus when they're not contributing enough value to be secure in their position with you. They need to know where they're at, right? So, I try to explain to them my value equation and then try to get them to help build that value.

>> Hi. So, sort of off the same question that we're doing everything, but in our scenario, um we're a consultant. We run the lean. We have the whales. Um and but and by working with them, we've learned of like new lines that we can introduce, but now we're doing everything. And then we're ironically marketers that don't market ourselves very well and hate sale, right? So we have product pro um product up like every single day we have a new product that my partner who's also my husband can come up with things and SOPs we have somebody that's helping us with SOPs. I am so all over the place like I don't know where to focus. Last year I shared I had a little bit of health issue but last year we put so much money into trying to bring third parties in to help us with sales and nails. We didn't do paid because our usually because um like one of our clients ironically will hire us that we're David, right? And their company has 6,000 employees, but they're hiring us to do their market research. Go figure. You know, this story. So, I don't know where to focus.

>> You know, it's it's extremely important that you exemplify the skill sets that you bring to your clients, right? And so your practice area for your internal marketing and sales will exemplify to your clients that this is an area where you can build that skill and build that practice and really exemplify the essence of the company. So if you've not put attention on that, I would say that would be a high value area to put attention on because as you really build the process and the structure and the skill and the you know you exemplify marketing um you then can bring that you know that to your clients, right? So it's it's like you're getting paid to as you market yourself, you're getting paid to learn and to experiment and you bring those experiments to the clients that you're supporting and so it'll really add life to you as opposed to just say creating new product, right? Because you're doing marketing consulting as I understand it.

>> We do I mean we get hired to do everything from um market research to doing thought leadership and AI and handing these off to the companies to SEO but from content strategy. We don't do implementation. We do all high strategy level. So if we're not our best client is somebody who already has an existing market.

>> Yeah. I I think that any area that we're avoiding in our own business is an area that we need to build out as a practice area, right? So like if I'm like I'm avoiding building out a sales team, why is that? Right? What beliefs do I have? And so I I'd look at any area that we're avoiding because there's areas we're great at and it's like really good to work in our give zones. But if there's areas that we have resistance toward, it's we need to turn toward that resistance and inspect that and figure that out. That's my advice to you. And then my mindset is I'm a linear thinker. Step one is get the revenue engine rocking. All right? Get that thing going. Get that engine building. That looks like marketing. That looks like sales. And then once I have that building, I go build the product engines and all the other engines because the revenue brings in the cash to go hire the people to build the other engines. So in in in a business like yours, in another business, you might have to build the product first, get the product shipping, and then you can go work on revenue or or you got to get a virality going in the product to then start working revenue. But in a business like yours, the revenue engine is extremely important to building out the other functions because with the the profit from the revenue you generate, you can then afford to go hire, you know, area people to focus on those practice areas.

>> I have the thing where everyone loves what I'm doing and they're like, "Oh my god, this graph evangelist, it's a perfect thing." I I live in a world where a lot of people were making two, three, $500. Guess what? It's gone. 60% of the business is gone. But people are still looking for anywhere they can to get paid. is supposed to be entrepreneurial, which they'll have to be because there's going to be a whole lot of realtors coming out of there or interior designers or something. Um, and they don't see it yet. They haven't yet readjusted their own expectations yet. They have a skill set that I can use, but they want to come at it as a job.

>> Yeah. How many how many employees do you have?

>> Three. But pretty much a lot of it's me.

>> My advice always is focus on the next hire. Just one hire. That's it. We got one hire. or one hire away from our next level of success. So, who is that hire? Uh if there's hundreds of people circling you or there's always we just got we only need one person to get to that next level. And then once we get that person operating, efficient, profitable, successful in their role, then the next one. And then once you get that and and the faster you speed their onboarding and and so forth and get them up to your ROI thesis, then you move on to the next one. And the mistakes I've made have been hiring too many people too fast, bring on too many people to work on the environment and not getting them fully efficient up and running and then I have a environment where I'm bringing too much anxiety to it and fear to it and you know because I'm like these people are taking all this money and I'm not getting effectiveness out of them and so it then perplexes me and I'm losing sleep at night. So one person at a time. So who's the next soul that you need to call in to get to your next level of success as you get good? It's like one person every day you can be hiring, but one person at a time. You know, I I've made the mistake in thinking my HR department will just handle my recruiting. And as founders, we need to be the number one recruiters in the company. And I'm talking for the highest talent. We need to lead the way in recruiting. The best founders that have built the greatest companies. They were phenomenal recruiters. They they lived for the recruiting of that because talent's the most important thing. Now, all the stuff that we don't want to do like employee uh performance reviews and all that stuff, that's great for the HR environments and practices, but when it comes to recruiting, I keep my eye on that. You know, it's uh never take my eye off that at all. Making sure that you are recruiting the best of the best, that you're holding things to higher standards, that you're running the most disciplined recruiting process is extremely important. And so HR obviously would report to me after I built out the recruiting processes and I have something really working. Then I've handed that off to a great HR person and I'm making sure that we're recruiting great talented people in the company. There's a space company that I was recently hearing about their process. The final interview is with the CEO and it's like 700 plus people out of Long Beach and it's a fast growing startup in space and the CEO is meeting every high caliber person as the final interview right at that st even with 700 people on the team. So, you know, we we want to make sure we're very close to this process because if it culture gets away from you, it is much harder to change a culture than it is to be proactive and to build out your your processes early and keep very close to them. But talent is everything, you know, and

If you're not getting good talent, if you're not seeing, you know, the highest quality of people, then, you know, you've got other problems, right? And so, you got to work on that. But, yeah, talent is everything. Yes, sir.

So, um, I mean, as founders, we build a product that we really believe in, and we're involving people who believe in the product too. Then, uh, you said you're not a micromanager, but what if you like try to micromanage everything because you know the product so well that, like, people are going to be like, "Okay, you're too much in my work." Uh, Steve Jobs said, you said you worked with him, uh, like Apple is the biggest startup on the planet. We hire people and we trust them that they're going to come up with their part in the next week when we get together.

Yeah. So, how, like, and also, I know he was a micromanager too, but, uh, how do you see the balance between trusting people and being so perfectionist and like being in their job too?

In Apple, they use a thing called the designation or a thing called the DRP, the direct responsible party. Every task, every project has an owner, and there's a DRP, there's a due date next to it, and that's how they do it. And then they're functionally organized. So they have one person running, you know, software, another person running hardware, and they organized by function. And then Steve had two meetings a week. He had operations meetings and he had a was like an all-day Monday meeting for the most part where they went over every aspect of the business every week. They had his marketing meeting on like Wednesday, and they went over every aspect of marketing across the company, and they ran the business that way. Very lean, very flat is the way he ran it.

There's no right way to do it. Every founder has to develop their way. There's a recipe that you have to develop. We, we do have to look at, though, are we able to hand off things, uh, to competent people and allow them, you know, to be able to experiment and go through trial and error so they can learn and grow, or are we taking it all on ourselves and exhausting ourselves?

So Steve had brilliant human beings. He was able to get the most talented, smartest people to work with him, and then he was a hard driver in that environment. So, same with Elon. I was, I was with, um, a friend that works for him, and, uh, I was talking to her, and she was leaving the office at SpaceX at 10:00 p.m. on a Saturday night. And I was like, "Where are you going?" She goes, "To the gym." Like, at 10:00 p.m. on a Saturday night, you're going to the gym. I don't go to the gym at 10:00 p.m. Saturday night. I was like, "What are you doing after the gym?" She says, "Going back to the office." I was like, "What time you gonna be at the office till?" "3:00, 4:00." "How many other people are at the office on Saturday night till 3:00, 4:00?" "Everybody." "What do you mean, everybody?" Like, "What's it like there?" Cafeteria is buzzing, people are walking around, people are getting the job done, people are working. And I was like, "How does he get thousands of people to do that, right?" Well, mission. And what she said was so telling to me. She said, "I give all of myself to this mission. And I want to work in an environment where I can give all of myself to my work." Now, that's not for everyone, but there are human beings out there that want to give all of themselves to their work, right? It's like an artist that wants to give all of themselves to a painting. You guys can appreciate that. Or an athlete that wants to give all of themselves to their athletics, right? We can appreciate that. Like, we're not going to look at the athlete and say, "Ridiculous. You give all of yourself to that stupid sport you're playing." It's like, "No, we iconicize the athlete that gives all of themselves to their sport. We iconicize the violinist that practices 12 hours a day and gives all of themselves to their violin, or the singer that gives all themselves to their vocals." We, you know, the giving all of yourself to your vocation is not a bad thing if you know it is in alignment with your mission. So, there are people out there that will give all of themselves to something, and that's what you're looking for, right? And, and our society gives work a bad rap because we call the person who gives all themselves to work a workaholic. But you don't call the athlete that gives all of themselves to their sport a workaholic, or the artist that gives all themselves to painting, you know, you know, a workaholic. You admire those people. So, I'm not, I don't want workaholics, which are giving all themselves to their work for the wrong reasons, right? You're giving all of yourselves to work because of fear and anxiety. That's, that's the workaholic, right? That's the person giving all of themselves for the wrong reasons, and that creates suffering and mental health issues and so forth. But if you give all of yourselves to something for the right reasons, it can be beautiful.

Yeah. I, I gave a speech in Norway. I was, I was invited to speak in their parliamentary hall where the Nobel Prize is given away. So I know the environment pretty well over there. And I just said, it's, you know, I said, you know, their infrastru their their economic system and their social system is set up, you know, to kill innovation, right? It's just, it's designed incorrectly for innovation that they were going to have to, uh, you know, make some changes if they really wanted to create innovation. And, you know, the richer the country, like Norway, Scandinavia, certain countries, uh, the harder it is for them to stimulate innovation in their countries, right? So, for as bad as America is in a variety of different things, we're really good at innovation because of the way we're structured capital-wise and and even some of the things that, you know, are painful, like our healthcare system and so forth, they drive innovation in weird ways, right? Because, you know, we have to create companies that, you know, make a meaningful living so that we can take care of our families and our health. And so, it, it does drive innovation in some ways. I'm not saying I'm, you know, a fan of not having a good healthcare system, but there's some intrinsic aspects of our system that drive motivation. So, I do believe that, you know, your environment is everything, and you have to be in an environment where you can innovate. That doesn't mean you can't do it in Norway. It just means you have to be very selective. You have to be screening out people. You have to find those people that are willing to give all of themselves to their work. And they're, they're the rebellious people. They're the crazy ones. They're the ones that go against the grain, that don't align with society, that aren't buying into the societal norms, right? And there's fewer of them. Uh, but you got to find them.

Unfortunately, with a lot of this research, the methods of how they do the research and, you know, if you look at large groups of people, but, and I, and I, I'll just share with you, and I, you know, this whole work hard versus work smart. Okay? You learn to work smart once you've learned to work hard. Okay? You don't learn to work smart until you have pushed yourself. You've burnt out. You've run too hard. You've taken on too much. You've suffered. And then you go, "I could do it better." So, you know, it's, it's not that we should work hard. Like, we should learn to work very hard, but we also need to know our limits. We need to know our energy. Every season's different. Some weeks, you know, I'm putting in, uh, 80 hours. Some weeks I'm putting in more. Some weeks I'm putting in 60. I have to dial in my energetic system based on my health. My body is going to tell me where I'm at. If my stress levels are high, you know, I got to pull it back a little bit because I need to bring the best energy I can to my work, right? So, I'm, I'm optimizing for energy management more so than for time management. But, you know, I'm, and I'm, I'm always looking at my personal practices and trying to improve upon them to ensure that I'm bringing the best energy I can to the day.

Now, as you do that, and and you're building, you're building your your character and your competency and your your upleveling your awareness and your consciousness, you have more energy to serve with. And pretty soon, a 12-hour day is easy. When you first start out, like, a 12-hour day is, you know, could be grueling. And then, you know, pretty soon it's like, "I did 12 hours, that's not a big deal, right?" But when you're, you know, first building your endurance, like running a marathon, you know, running a 12 miles, uh, is really hard. And then eventually, when you've run 20, 12 is easy. So you have to build that endurance. But, you know, I really believe that 12 hours of serving, uh, you have to sequence filling up your cup. You have to make sure you're doing things to energize as you're serving. You should end your day with your cup filled, not your cup empty. And that's how you sequence your work, doing the things that bring you life toward the end of the day. And, and then you should hold things lightly. You should dance with the challenges. You, you know, you should really do the work in such a way to where it energizes you, and that's a lot of care, a lot of nuance to how to handle that. And then you get to this place where you're like, "Wow, I can, I can serve longer than I thought I could, and I enjoy it." And then you're having to boundary. You're like, "I can, I can do this. I need to take some time and boundary." Like, right now, I'm going to take my wife out to dinner after this. We have to be able to, uh, know when to get to that peak energy of service and then, you know, call it in and say, "Okay, I got it for today. I nailed it. Now, tomorrow, let's go back and, you know, build the endurance all over again." And every day is a new lesson. Every day is a new ch endurance challenge. Each day you wake up, you look at the objectives and you go, "Okay, that's going to teach me something. Let's go." Every day. And your personal practices are key.

I have to tell you, I use that professional athlete analogy, and I'll just end with this. I see entrepreneurs as being, you know, professional athletes in the sport of business. And the athletics are how we taking care of our bodies. How are we taking care of our minds, our souls, and the various roles that we, we have. I have a role as a father. I have a role as a husband. I have a role as a brother. I have a role as a son. I have these roles that I have in my life. And I have to make sure that mind, body, soul, and role, and the various roles that I have are always a key focus. And, you know, I do have a role as an entrepreneur running a company, but I can't allow that role to destroy all the other roles that I'm, I'm operating in.

It's been an honor to serve you here tonight and answer your questions. Thank you for your time, and, uh, I appreciate you very much.