All right, today we're talking about something that is the brutal truth about startups, which is that your business success is completely dependent on your growth as a CEO. And so we're talking about from starting a company to getting to that first one to three million in revenue, what you need to be doing as a CEO, and then Sam was sharing, you know, basically examples of after three million and scaling up from three to the tens of millions to get to 100 million in revenue. How do you have to make this brain shift and what do you got to do as a CEO mistakes? We've made stuff that works for us tactics, techniques, specific frameworks we're using.
It's all again. I feel like I can rule the world. I know I could be what I want to. I was right like journaling this morning.
Can I tell you what I was writing about and tell me if you've ever experienced this way? Yeah, but you have to start with your diary. So I was realizing and tell me if you ever had this realization that my company's growth is limited by my personal growth. My company can only grow as fast as I can grow as a leader.
Have you ever experienced that? Yeah, I have a similar belief, which is like the bottleneck of any business is the psychology of the founder. That's kind of the way I've always said it. So it's not necessarily my growth, but like my psychology is the limiting factor.
Yeah, your business is basically a mirror of your strengths and weaknesses. And here's what happens is a lot of people, they don't realize that. I haven't realized that until recently, because the early stages of a business, and I don't know where that would be some number between the huge number of one and 20 million revenue. Honestly, it probably starts at three million revenue where you're out of the brute force stage.
And it depends on your business, but something like a million a year in profit, maybe where you're out of the brute force stage. And what happens next is actually the hard part. The hard part is like, how do you scale as a leader because your job then becomes leading people, not actually doing. And so I was thinking of like what where that shift is and the big shift or like not the shift, but what like tactics or strategy needs to change.
And I was trying to list out what those were. And let me explain if you agree with each of these. So the first one is abdicating versus delegating. So let me walk you through a scenario.
Tell me if you've done this exact same thing. I hire someone or I get a freelancer and I sit down and I go. So and I sit next to me on a chair and I'm looking at them and go, all right. So here's what I do.
I do this, this, this and this. All right, great. There you go. Talk to me later.
Let me know how you've made this better. Have you done that? Yeah, yeah, you got this, right? Yeah, yeah, I got this.
Cool. You're probably not mine. I'm mentally relieved of duties. And you say, all right, next week, how did, how did you improve it?
Why are the numbers going up? It's been a month, man. Why are the numbers going up? What the hell?
I showed you how to do this like that conversation. I've had so many times in my life and I'm having to break it. I cannot do that anymore. And so the difference between the bottleneck that I'm having to grow is abdicating versus delegating.
That's a huge thing. And the second one is having hard conversations. By the way, you just play it back of what is the good version of it. So the abdicating is basically you take the ball, you put it in somebody else's plate, you mentally relieve yourself of duty.
And then the sort of like, in your mind, what the blame, the blame of potential failure or issues lies with them. What is the, what is the, give me the definition of abdicate there? What's the problem with abdicate? Well, let me tell you the other way around.
Let me tell you what the solution is, which is proper delegation. And so how do you properly delegate? You do, I actually have it written down right here. This framework that I've been trying to learn, which is what, how, when in motivation.
And so what that basically means is training. So you explain what you expect of someone, you show them how to do it by training them and then you give them very specific deadlines and then you have scheduled follow-ups and sometimes it takes months to properly train people. So a really easy example is with sales people. So how do you train a salesperson?
You watch their sales calls and you sit down with them for two hours every single week and you say, instead of saying this, try this next time and let's see what happens. Or if you said this, oftentimes that doesn't get the solution or the answer you want because of X, Y, and Z, do this instead. And here's a script I want you to follow. And then app you do that for three or four months and then you're going to start, they're going to start learning to be better than you.
And they're like, hey, by the way, you didn't think about this? I actually went this way this time. And here's the better result that I got. So the opposite of abdicating is properly delegating, which includes training and communicating with clarity, which expectations.
Yeah, have you ever used the race model? What's that? R-A-C-I. So one thing that happens in a company is that it's unclear who's got it.
So imagine we're playing catch. I throw the ball. You know, if I threw the ball, you're the only one there. You better catch this ball.
And whether you catch or not, maybe that depends a little bit on your skill, but there's absolutely no doubt that you need to go after it and catch the ball. There's nobody else there. Now, you had a second person. What changes?
I throw the same ball. I didn't say who it's for. I don't know if you're getting out. I don't know if I'm supposed to fight over it.
I don't know if I'm supposed to just back off. And I don't know if we're going to have a quick conversation about this. I don't really know what to do now. I'm not an other person.
Imagine once you get to seven people, what starts to happen in a company is that some people just have sharp elbows and they try to fight for it. Some people just don't want the ball to drop. And they're sitting there like frustrated that other people are just standing around doing a whole lot of nothing. There's some people that feel resentful that they're not being included.
They never get the ball. Right? And so this is what happens inside of a company. And so how do you solve this?
One fix I learned is the racing model. So you define up front when you do the project, you don't just have the goal of the project and the deadline of the project. You also need to define the racing model. So what you say is R-A-C-I.
Which is who is responsible for doing it? Okay. So that's the person who's like driving the action forward in the project. A is who's accountable for it.
This is usually that person's boss. So let's say you're the chief revenue officer and under you is the head of sales. Okay. So the head of sales is the one who needs to get the sales team to go from a 15% close rate to a 19% close rate.
And so he's responsible for implementing the plan that you made or maybe even coming up with the plan. But ultimately the buck stops with the chief revenue officer because it's a revenue activity. So he's accountable to the result. He's just not responsible for doing the work to get the result.
Then you have C, which is a consulted party. So who else do I need to talk to? So maybe I need to be talking about delivery because I'm closing a bunch of sales, but I'm overloading the delivery team, which is causing us to have customers turn and not actually get the product or service that they wanted. And so because I didn't tell him that we're going to all of a sudden start doing this free promotion and get it flood us with customers, he now is on the other side of something that he wasn't consulted on.
So sometimes it's a lawyer. It's like, hey, we got nobody likes to bring legal in. But if there's going to be a legal component to this, they need to be consulted in this. They don't get to be the one driving it because they're not responsible for it, but they get to be consulted.
And I think the last one is informed. And so informed is basically like, who needs an FYI? Who needs to be in the loop? But they're not, I don't need their input nor do I need their action to make this happen.
And so you define that at the beginning. And that's how you prevent the like, I threw the ball. There's seven people there. And somehow when there's seven people, the ball hits the floor more often than it did when there was one, which is like all the dynamic in companies.
And I know a lot of people listening to this are watchmenures, meaning they want to eventually start a company. And then their smaller percentage has started something and then a much smaller percentage already has something that's thriving. And so I want to speak to the first kind of people who don't have a thing, which is for the first, let's say, three million in revenue, maybe a little less honestly, you can kind of ignore this. You can brute force your way, but it's going to happen faster than you think.
And the transition for me and for a lot of people, I think it's going to be harder than you think. But what separates the winners from the losers is embracing this stuff. And it doesn't feel natural. It actually feels incredibly unnatural because for a lot of people who start stuff, this is not the, they say, screw the rules.
But I've noticed that what separates the pretty decent to the great from the great is actually following these rules. Do you agree with that? When you say these rules, what do you mean? Sorry, these best practices of like creating process or like having these cute phrases or constantly reminding people of like within your company what you have to do because someone can be listening to this and they're like, I'm not going to have foreign people.
Like, I'm just going to make the decision and go. I totally agree. And I think that you know, you have to figure out which of these work for you, but the act of hunting these down and constantly trying to get it right, constantly trying to improve it. That's the thing you got to commit to.
And so like, one simple way of thinking about this is this happens all the time with founders if you like consult with them. They'll be complaining about something. No, there's no bigger pack of winers than a group of founders and CEO. So if you get them out, if you get them to be honest, there's no bigger group of winers.
And when they start whining and they start whining about how this person isn't doing this and how this other company is doing this and how this isn't working and how that isn't working. Like, you just start with the people problems, right? Because anybody knows in a company, like, I would have started five more companies if I didn't have people problems. I don't know about you, but like people problems is the one that drains you.
That's the one that that hurts you. It's also the thing that feels magical inside a company. When you just get some star people, like, I'm sure you had this hustle with whether it's staff or trauma or somebody's people are just like, Oh my God, this is kind of amazing. Like, yes, they're just doing all these things better and differently than I would have done them.
And I don't have to worry about that anymore. Like, holy, this is like, this is like, it's the next level heaven as a CEO. And the exact opposite is true, too, when somebody is not doing what you're trying to do. They're not doing it better than you would have done it.
You're constantly having this grief. It's like going for walks with your dog who bites other dogs or other people. Like, have you ever had one of those dogs? It's exhausting because like, you walk around the corner like, Oh, like, you're always on edge.
It's horrible. And people ask, she friendly? I'm like, No, you need to get away. So, okay, but then you talk to that founder and you just, I'll get asked this one simple question.
Oh, yeah, that person did that. They're bad at that. They're not doing this. They said this, but they did this.
Who picks the people in the company? Like, who hires and fires? Oh, that's you. Okay, got you.
Cool. So like, that problem actually rolls up to you. And same thing with, oh, they said they were going to do this and then they didn't do it. So they weren't accountable for what they said they were going to do.
Who holds people accountable? Who sets the culture of accountability? Oh, that's you again. Right?
So at some point, you sort of realize like, Oh, I am the root cause underneath all of the underlying causes in my company. Even if it's something that you think it's side talk, Oh my God, tariffs are so crazy. It's like, I didn't build a robust and resilient supply chain. So yeah, I'm mercy to this new tariff policy or whatever.
Right? You're the root cause of all the problems, which also means you were the root cause of all the solutions. You have the power to do all the solutions. And so then the question is like, what are you going to do it?
And you talk about best practices. I think one of the like big realizations that I had that sounds very elementary, but I had to learn it the hard way, which is like, to get the results you want, you simply need to be the type of person for whom that result is inevitable. So you say like, Oh, I want to, I want to have this like, you know, well-run company. Cool.
Are you being the type of CEO who would have a well-run company? Like, are you hiring great people? Are you like training them? Well, are you holding them accountable?
Are you selling them enough ownership and equity? Like, do you do all those things? If you're not doing those things, like what's going to happen? Hey, everyone, if you're liking this episode and how to be a better CEO, well, I could do it.
So we actually went and just put all of the information from this podcast into a PDF that you can read and download. And we added a bunch of stuff. So word for word, emails that you could send scripts on how to have better or harder conversations when to delegate things like that. So if you're trying to be a better CEO, just click the link in the description.
You can download it completely free or just scan this QR code. I sent a voice note to my piano teacher the other day. And I was like, Hey, is there anything that I could be like, are we doing our sessions right? Is there like a different approach that we should be doing?
Like, she want to just check in and she's like, Hey, I thought about your question. So here's the thing to get good at piano. Here's what you got to do. Find songs are interested in and play them a ton until you can play them well.
And every song will teach you something. The only way to do to get better at the piano is to find things you're interested in playing because you have genuine motivation and then play it until you're good at playing it. And she was just like, yeah, like, and in doing that, we're learning sight reading. We're learning playing by ear.
We're learning how to like control volume control between right and left hand. Wait, what's he criticizing you because you don't practice? No, no, she was just saying like, there's not like, there's no third door. Like this is, this is the way.
And if I look at all the areas in my life, I'm working on it. I was like, fitness like, great. Guess what? No secret strategy.
You're going to show up to the gym or not. You're going to eat clean or you're going to eat shitty. Which one are you going to do? And so like, similarly with being a great like leader or CEO, it's like, hey, listen, it's not that different than, you know, being fit where you got to like do these practice on diet, do these factors on exercise and don't get lost in the weeds about it.
Like, just be honest. Are you doing those things or not? There's a version of that for managing a company. And what's interesting is I've noticed that like leading up to starting something, you read all the self help books that you possibly can and that gives you the motivation to start.
Then you get into it. And you think, I don't have time for that. I just need to like put my heads down and get after it. And then you get up to what I call the second mountain, which is you're no longer there to survive.
You for sure, you're default alive, but you're not default thrive. And so what do you do to actually thrive? You go back to the well and you actually start learning all this stuff. For a lot of people like me and you start going to like, this is when like the 20, like 20 Robbins are going to see both losers and really successful people because they both need the same thing.
Because for a lot of people, particularly people like me, I'm basically like slightly autistic and like slightly meathead where you get to the same thing where I'm just going to like pile drive through this like brute force this thing. I'm never just going to put your head down. It's like, well, you actually have to learn how to have a conversation with someone on having a like, you need to like correct someone effectively. And here's how you correct someone effectively.
I'm like, oh my God, I had a real whole book on how to have a difficult conversation, which is like the second or the third thing. I was going to bring up, which is like, if you have a meeting and the person is on their phone, there's actually a proper way to correct them. Snatch it or what do you do? Slap it down.
She just like give them a wedge of you like, call them nerd and push them out the room. Have you read it on violent communication? Yeah, I actually didn't like it as much as a lot of people did. What I preferred was the motive.
Have you read the motive? No, what's the premise of that? Basically, to be a CEO or to be a leader, you basically have to recognize that a large percentage of your time is going to be having difficult conversations. And the best way to have a difficult conversation is A, you get it early on.
So if you're in a meeting and you see someone isn't paying attention, you actually don't wait for it to fix itself. You correct small things and you correct them fast because that will have a lot of leverage later on. So they're going to know very early on based on small things, what you expect on them, on the big things. The second thing is when you have a conversation, A, you do it privately and B, you tend to like compliment them and you say things like, look, I know that you don't mean to be this way, but here's how you come off and I would like it instead if you did this.
Does that sound good? Is that okay with you? Like, there's a way to like have that conversation, which is I would say, I don't want to correct that person. Who am I to like tell them that they should not like at the phone at a meeting and B, like it's probably just a one time mistake.
They're probably going to like figure it out. In the book, the motive, it actually says no nonsense. It says no that is nonsense. You want to correct this early on.
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Years ago. What was the takeaway? I can't remember. It's a very thin book.
I love it because it's very short. You can read the whole thing in probably 25 minutes. It's almost like a fable. The alchemist or something like that where it's like, I wanted to do this.
I wanted to be a better manager. I heard about the town next door that was this great manager. I went there and I met the first employee. He made these three employees, three wishes from a genie.
The guy basically has three. He's like, you want to see how I do it? Come tomorrow 6am. I'll tell you the one thing.
The one thing, the most important thing basically. He does that three times. The core of that book, I would say, is two things that I changed from doing it. The first was planning.
I used to either be top-down or bottoms up. Meaning, I would be like, I'm going to tell you exactly what we're going to do, how this needs to work, blah, blah. I'm going to hand you this thing and you need to go execute this. I'm basically just going to be disappointed that you didn't execute it the way I envisioned in my head when I first came up with this.
At that time, it was going to work and there's no problems. You're on the hook for all the delivery and I will hand you this thing. You're never fully bought into this because you didn't. You've got handed this thing.
The other way is bottoms up where you're like, you come up with the plans. Maybe I don't even tell you that. Maybe I'm just waiting to see if you come up with the plans. People never leave it.
People never leave it with some sort of half-baked plan. Then you're disappointed. You see that. You fix it.
You criticize them and you try to improve it. This guy talked about a one-minute plan. The idea is a one-minute plan essentially creating a one-pager where the employee writes what they think they should focus on what they're going to do. There's a revision process where the manager basically gives some feedback and then the employee goes back and tries to work on the feedback until you arrive at a solution that they wrote.
You agree with. You get the best of both worlds. They have the ownership of it. They're totally bought into the process.
They've done the thinking. They didn't outsource the thinking. But you're totally on board with the fix. That's one thing that I shifted.
How I do that. The second one is around praise and criticism. From a separate thing, I learned this acronym picks a Nix. P-I-C-S and N-I-C-S.
Pix is basically like, how do you get feedback? If it's Pix, it's positive, immediate, and certain. If it's negative, it's negative, immediate, and certain. How do people get feedback wrong?
They try to do the feedback sandwich where they say a positive thing, a negative thing, another positive thing, and the person's a little confused about the whole process. They delay it. If there's something negative, they let it slide. Next one, they let it slide.
Next one, they let it slide. By the fourth one, now I'm frustrated. I've seen four of these. You're unaware that this was even a problem or problem.
I'm just going to fire you. I come at you with an avalanche and you're like, I came out of nowhere. What a jerk. I'm like, you've had so many attempts to do this.
You haven't gotten it right. How dare you? Nobody wins in that scenario. You want to do it immediately.
Right after the meeting, right after the call. I really liked the way you did that. I noticed that you did that. That felt new.
That felt like an elevated version of what you were doing before. That's really awesome. The other thing is making it certain. Don't be wishy-washy about the feedback.
When you did this specific behavior, that made me or the other people feel like this. Therefore, this conclusion, do more or do less. Very clear. That's a non-violent communication example.
A framework of how you do that. Just little things about, I agreed with that. Was I actually doing it immediately? No.
Was I doing it with high certainty and high conviction? No. You do those little things to get better. These little things stack up.
You've read the story about the theory of marginal gains, the British cycling coach. Maybe it's an atomic hat. It's got popular. The British cycling team was losing the Tour de France.
This coach comes in and they're like, okay, new coach. We've got to overhaul the strategy. You've got to change all this big stuff. One of the big swings this guy is going to do.
He was like, we're going to adjust the bike seat, make it 7% thinner. We're going to grease this. All these small things individually sounded inconsequential. That's going to make a difference.
His theory was like, if we can stack 1% improvements across the board of what we do. There's an accumulation of these marginal gains. The marginal gains become substantial if you stack them. If you add them up.
That's how you win in most areas of life. You just start to stack a bunch of things that each individually don't sound like game changers. Lead bullets, right? No silver bullet.
You just keep stacking them until you overwhelm the situation with success. A lot of times you'll get guys like us who are saying this in a very tech bro way where you're like, yeah, this is how you give compliments. Some reasonable person listening is like, duh. It's like, well, the problem is that what gets you to the brute force that gets you to the stage where you start worrying about this.
It's actually the opposite way of handling people. The way you start is the opposite of what you eventually need. You get to this point and you're like, what do I do now? I'll give you one last example for company values.
I've actually taken a different stance on this than I had before. The difference stance is when I started my last company, I actually wrote the values out in advance and I failed to live up to them. My premise when I was getting Hampton working was I was like, I'm actually not going to write down values. I'm going to start this company and I'm going to see how it feels.
Then I'm going to name the values later on. Jack Smith, baby naming. My friend Jack said something and he did something that honestly changed my life. He did the weirdest thing I'd ever heard of and I mocked him at the time.
He did not name his baby. Jack had a baby and he refused to name her for the first year. I said, Jack, why are you doing this? He goes, well, I think I should get to know her first before we give her her name.
I said, Jack, that's absolutely insane. What are you doing? I started thinking about it more and more and I got to know the baby and her legal name was Baby for the first year. I was like, you know, baby is kind of nice.
This is kind of nice. They thought of all these names that represented her personality. Now I know her as her new name and I realize that is actually sort of brilliant. I did the same thing with my company where I purposely did not have values.
I was like, what attributes bother me and what attributes do I particularly love when I see us do here. And now after my company is weird, I started it. I had someone run it now. I'm back running it again.
So we're like a weird timeline. But it still feels early for us and we are now a couple years in just now naming our values. And it has felt like that has been 100% the better move. And it feels great, honestly, to stick to these values because before when I named values, it seems kind of weak.
It seems kind of dumb. I'm going to hire people according to these values that I actually made in the case of the hustle. I made it when I was 26. I'm now 28.
I don't even align with them anymore. But I'm stuck with this. I don't like this feeling. I feel like I'm in prison.
I'm just going to look stop. I'm not following the things that I was going to follow. We did things differently this time. And it's been so much better.
What's an example of a value that emerged? I can give you the three. The first person to ever ask me about my complete values, actually. So the first one is fun.
So I just value fun. And so fun means in our copy, I want to do silly stuff just because, but also I don't want to follow data all of the time. Sometimes we're going to do stuff just because it's exciting or it's fun. And I'm going to hire people who I have fun being around.
The second one is speed. So I realized I valued moving fast a lot more than I previously thought. And the third one, which is actually kind of controversial or doesn't feel right at first. But I'll explain is pride.
So what does pride mean? I told my company they're like, gay pride? What do you mean? I'm like, no, guys, I mean, you can have that.
That's not what I'm referring to. Like, grab it. There we go. Yeah.
Yeah. It's just a bunch of bros being dudes. Pride meaning I want us to have pride in our personal lives and our work lives. And so what that means is we started off virtually and the data showed that we could sell it and make money for it.
But it didn't feel good. I didn't take pride in that. I took pride in saying we have in real life. Even though the data didn't exactly show up the time we showed up, I'm doing it anyway.
Or if we're going to lay people off, I'm going to go above and beyond and I'm going to give them more seperance in the market rate because it just makes me feel good. Or if we can afford it, which we can, would have ended or submits their bill to us, even though we have a bit of 90. I'll pay them that day because it feels good to do the right thing and to treat people well, to have this reputation as someone who does something a certain way. And that gives me a lot of pride to do that.
Or when someone was in, and I tested this, I would tell a couple people here's a value that I'm doing and someone showed me a text message that we're setting to potential customers to remind them of something. So like a reminder text message. And I was like, you know, show some pride. Like that's just a boring boilerplate message.
Show some pride. Make it something special. And so like that is a way where I started like throwing this out there and like using it. And I'm like, oh my God, that actually changed behaviors.
I told someone to show some pride. And they like, in this really small thing, they're showing pride. Or we had a work event and a couple of the guys there, they just dressed sloppy. Like some of the other people like literally nice and I don't expect everyone to wear a suit or anything like that.
But they just like their beard was all out of like wack and they had kind of a dirty shirt on. I'm like, dude, that's a fucking pride, man. Like you don't have to go buy to clothes, but like show up a little bit better than you are now. And so that's been the values are speed, pride and fun.
That's interesting. Yeah, I'm curious how it's going to play out. I've never heard of somebody do that where you do it later. And also, you know, I think it's very rare for values to actually show up.
I would say that out of a hundred companies who took the time to set values, a percent would you say, actually like, you know, live by those. I mean, perfectly. I guess what I mean is compared to a similar company like them, they do things differently because they valued it. Like what percentage would you say actually do that?
Very few. But I think to be like, ten percent. But I think to be a 90 percentile plus company, I actually do think you have to like do things like living to your values. I think in order to be seen and do that.
Have you kind of gone into a company and been like, wow, they actually keep. Like the companies that I tend to admire or the books that I read or the people I admire, they're kind of quirky and they're very different. And so I think Coinbase was a good example where they took a stand. I think they said no politics.
They also took a stand. They're going to be remote first, but their offices, they just put this video out where their offices are going to be like the best. And they want to be beautiful and they want to be people that they love working there. They didn't have to do that.
But it just seems important to the CEO and now to the rest of the company. Or Jason Free from Basecamp. Like she does things that are a little bit different than normal. And I think that what it does is it turns off a lot of people, but the people who truly love it, they absolutely love it.
I think that's what's going to happen to my company. But by value, the values that we have are they are going to turn some people off and eventually they're not going to work here anymore. Which one do you think some people are? Cause those all sound pretty uncontroversial to me.
I want to not have fun. I want to take no pride. I want to move slow. I don't think anyone would say that.
Dude, everyone wants to move slow. Like moving that's the same. Nobody states that. Yeah, but you can tell like when someone like says like this is going to take six weeks and like what it looks like it took two weeks.
That makes so many people uncomfortable. So we've talked about this before. I'm surprised you didn't do it. Zuck had this thing back in the day where he said one of the great lessons he got when he was a young CEO.
He's like you need to acknowledge the trade off in the value itself. So, you know, instead of saying speed, because everybody says, yeah, of course we all want to move fast. He would say move fast and break things. That was the value.
And because he said move fast and break things, you would explicitly acknowledge the trade off that. Hey, when you move really fast, you're not going to. There's not everything's going to be done perfectly and orderly. Like things are going to break.
Things are going to happen. And by putting it in the value, it made it real. It made it something that not every company would agree with. It made something that you could be criticized on.
It made some acknowledge what will be uncomfortable about doing this. And so I'm surprised you didn't do that. I'm still working on Word Smithing, if I'm being honest. But I think that speed and pride actually are, can be inverse.
And they can be the opposite. But I actually don't think that most people, I don't have a cute phrase yet, like move fast and break things. But I don't think that most people are comfortable when you say move fast. And I think that at my company, I've noticed that someone will say something.
This is going to take a quarter. And I will pose a question. What do I have to do to see results for this in two weeks? What's that look like?
That actually rubs a huge percentage of people the wrong way. The type of people who kick ass at my company, they say, oh, you know, that's not an interesting question. I guess we do this, this and this. And maybe that would be exciting.
We could actually pull that off. But a huge percentage of people, I think, are very nervous about speed. They're very nervous about moving fast. I mean, have you not experienced that?
No, 100%. I just don't think that if you say the word is my value speed. I think when you say, who agrees with this? 100% of people raise their hand.
And nobody will say, no, I disagree. I think we should be moving slow. I think zero percent of people do that. So that's why I'm like, in practice, what you're saying is actually more like, uncomfortably fast, right?
Or break the speed bar. So what we do is whatever would be normal for this project, we're going to cut that in half as a default. We're going to have a different speed bar than everybody else. Or whatever your default is.
And so I think I would have pushed you to be like, hey, I think you should make that actually say what you're trying to say. Yeah, admittedly, I'm still word-spitting a lot of this stuff. But I'll give an example for speed is like, if you go to join him to.com and you sign up or you submit a statement. If you just pay me.
No, no, no, if you're like, if you, it doesn't work perfectly right now, but if you apply and you fit our criteria, I mean, you have a comment that does at least three minutes. And you're one of our 13 chapters. Hell, and who works at a company is going to call you right now. It's 60 minutes, but we're trying to reduce it to 15 minutes.
You're going to get a phone call from someone who works at a company. And all they're going to do is say, I see you. Thank you for applying. We have to review all the application.
But I'm here. You can text me if you need anything. Thank you so much. So that's an example of moving fast.
I think you should make. You know, some companies have a wall of love. I think you should make a public or at least public in your company list of right the value at the top. So you write whatever your thing is like move on comfortably fast.
That's the value. And then I think you should have a running list of concrete anecdotes where that's true. And then you just see how long you can get that list to be and you can see how much is being added to that. You can see who's adding to it because that's the person who's actually living by the values.
And then you'll when you do that when you actually write it down, you'll realize, like, we say that, but like, what do we actually do that fast, right? Or we say, pride, what's an example of something we do with pride that like others wouldn't, right? Or we weren't before. We actually like did this.
And I think when you do that, it actually becomes real. Like, I think most values just are like, I think that percentage of companies who actually live their values in a way that's different than the company Avers company B is so small. I think 10% is extremely generous. I think that number is probably closer to 1%.
Who have you seen? Well, you know, the hard part when you're an entrepreneur is that you don't really work in many other companies. And so you only hear like secondhand information or you got, you know, we got acquired Twitch. I don't think I don't know what the Twitch values were, but whatever the hell they were, they were not very powerful and they were not we weren't doing them.
Or at least I didn't see anybody doing them. Right. Nobody talked about it. And so I think that, you know, a couple times that I've been in other people's companies.
I haven't felt it. I think it's quite rare. You know, I think Elon does this really well where he drives a hard core sleep on the factory floor mentality. So you see it with like stories of him.
You see, you know, literally sleep on the factory floor. You see it with his company. So right now, if you go look at like X AI, you know, Zuck is throwing huge pay packages at people, open AI as the most popular product. Why would I, if I'm a top researcher, go work at at Gruck?
Like this is the question they have to answer. And what they do if in their propaganda is basically they show how, you know, quote, quote, quote, quote, crack the team is how hardcore they are, but what they're doing to culture and taking pride in overworking. And so like he does that. He also does it on the speed bar.
Like there's a story of, there's a story in the bulltrisings and book about him that Jason Frieda told on the podcast. And it's basically like they, they were ready to launch. It was a, they were doing some project with NASA. They were ready to launch the rocket.
So half the NASA team was there to watch and then there was the SpaceX team and they discover a crack in the skirt of the rocket. And they're like, Oh shoot, like there's going to be like, we need to delay the launch. There's a crack in the, just crack in the rocket. And he goes and he looks at it.
He's like, why don't we need the, why do we need the skirt of the rocket anyways? And they're like, well, it's for additional thrust. He's like, will we have enough? So what happens if we take the skirt off?
If we just cut this, what if we removed it? Like, there's like a set of shears over there. Like, we just cut it off. And they were like, well, you'll lose thrust.
He goes and he does some calculations, like on the side. And he comes back. He's like, we'll still have enough thrust. Let's do it.
And they, he himself takes the shears and he cuts around the crack and basically removes it. And then that's the rocket that crashed. And he totally didn't have enough thrust. It was insane.
No, no, it actually the launch goes well. And the NASA director wrote about this afterwards. She was standing there and she goes, she's like, I've never seen anything like that. The NASA engineers, all we could do is stand there and watch.
Like, this would never be the way that we would do a launch. Like, well, you, this was unfathomable. And, but that's what they did. And so those are the Concrete anecdotes where you're like, company Avers, company B, company A does something different.
There's another story of like, they needed to get a rocket from like one place to another and the ship, you know, you'd only put a huge rocket on like a ship and take it from, you know, point A to point B, but it was going to be like three months or something like that. And so he's like, could we drive it there? And then like drive the rocket piece? Like, you know, drive that thing?
I saw that wasn't they put it on like a bunch of trucks and the drive in the car with the five miles an hour. They had like a car in front that was basically like clearing the way and literally when there was power lines, the guy would stand up in the truck on the front truck and with a stick and push the power lines up so that the truck would the rocket could like go on and they now need to ride neck. You know, like overpasses. They were like, Oh, we're gonna have to drive around here.
So that way to get there. And they did it there. Right? But like, that's like the equivalent to being like, it's like, I got a guy.
You need the head like you need the wire removed. I got a guy. Just got that old broom over there. I got a guy.
Yeah. So I just think pretty broadly, like whatever percentage of energy you're going to get, you got the three values. I would just be like, it's not what we say. It's what we do.
And so we're going to track what we do that's in line with these and like, you know, that's what I'm calculating. And every week, everyone's going to see how much we add to this list. That's a great idea. I didn't think of.
So we have a thing where we give examples of like we celebrate them, but like, you know, who moved fast and even with the bad thing. Let's like talk about it. You know, you do have sales calls. You're like, all right, let's get like the blender of the week.
All right. Here's what I know why. Yeah. Yeah.
Like good job trying and let's improve this way. So I used to give out. I mean, this is not like this is not what they teach at Harvard Business School, but here's what I did. I bought this replica W.
Championship belt. And every Friday I would give it. I would basically call the team over so can everybody away from the computer. We would all grab a beer or drink or whatever.
And we would stand we stand a little huddle with 12 15 people at the company at that time. And I would basically give the belt to somebody. They got to keep it like on their shoulder on their desk for that week and the belt holder got these small perks. Like you got dessert first at lunch.
You got this thing. Whoever had the belt that week. And then that was basically my opportunity to shout out the person who did the thing. That's the behavior that's in line with the values.
And so it was never like the person in charge. It was the person who did something above and beyond the call of duty or like in line with one of the values. And I tell you what the person did that was like out of the ordinary that was in line with the value that that's what we're all about and on hand on the belt. And like guess what you do that 52 weeks in a row.
Like people start to get it. It's like no different than secondary class. Like people start to people start to understand like what gets rewarded around here. What gets.
You know, what is the what is the benefit. And then what I did was like assigned a prize to it. So you would get some cash. I was like $1,000 in cash.
And the rule was you can only spend that $1,000 on something that is a story that you're going to tell us the following week. So the belt holder would be like, yeah, I got the thousand bucks. And what I did was like, you can't just like I paid rent with it or like I paid groceries. It's got to be something that's like story worthy.
And so then that person got to stand up with pride and like do the thing. They got to come home that day and tell their girlfriend or their wife, you know, like, Hey, like I won a thousand bucks. I got the belt. I like did this thing.
And you get it. It's like you. That's how you make it like deep inside of a company is like, you know, reinforce it on a weekly basis and almost like productize it. Alex or Missy says something cool.
He's like, most of your team, they don't need to be taught. They need to be reminded for the majority of things you teach them once and then just got to constantly remind everything. It's almost always a lack of reminding, not a lack of teaching. Right.
I thought that was really good. That's true for myself too. Right. Like one of the most valuable lessons is like the ones that I keep having to learn to get in the game.
Right. Yeah. I've learned this all. I like I don't need knowledge.
I need wisdom and just like you do like for my name in order to make this wisdom sick. Yeah, exactly. I think you guys like this podcast for two reasons. One is if you are building a business, it's lonely and listening to Sean and I were sort of like your friends.
And the second reason is you know that we are builders. We love building companies. It's kind of our life's vocation. So if you have a business that does at least $3 million in revenue, I think I know exactly what you're experiencing.
You've built a great business. It's working and you finally have a second to look up. You're young. You probably run an internet company in your town.
There's a potential that you're a freak that you have no one else to talk to about growing your company. In fact, I'm even going public. I'm probably telling people what you do for a living because you don't feel like explaining it. If you fall in this category, that means you're making the biggest decisions of your life.
Ten $20 million decisions all by yourself alone. And without that push, in my opinion, the risk is not blowing up. It's drifting into good enough territory into becoming mediocre. And the worst thing that can happen to you is 10 years from now.
You look back and you realize, I missed this amazing opportunity. I didn't grow. I plateaued in life and in business. My company, Hampton, we changed that.
If you're running a company that is at least $3 million in revenue, you can apply at joinhampton.com. We vet you, we cure at you, and we give you eight hand-picked founders who have similar businesses, similar sizes as you, who will challenge you, who will hold you accountable, and will give you perspectives that you cannot get anywhere else. And it's all happens in real life. So check it out, joinhampton.com slash network.
Can I ask you about this thing that you have on here about? I want to tell you about something, but I first want to hear about this edge. What are the founders who go all in the second time on edge talents that they have? Yeah, basically, I'm the type of entrepreneur who seeks variety.
I get excited by new things. I think there's a lot of entrepreneurs who have that same, you know, that's the kind of guy they are. That's the kind of guy they are. They're into that.
I think everyone has that. Everyone has it a little bit. And there's some, I don't know if these other people are just better at resisting it or they have the opposite urge. So we had the founder of RX Bar on the podcast and Peter, and so he had come on and he had built RX Bar from his parents' kitchen table.
He built the number one or whatever, like a top protein bar basically, sold it for whatever. What was it? $500 million? Or more?
$600 million, something like that. And we were talking to him a couple years later and we're like, Peter, what's up? What are you excited about? What are you interested in?
What are you going to do next? What's the next move? He's like, I'm launching a protein bar. I'm like, what?