Masterclass: How to go from founder to CEO (without imploding)

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 you know to get to a hundred million in revenue how you have to make this brain shift and what do you gotta 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 could rude world i know i could be what i want to from at all in in like a days off i was right like journal morning can i tell you what i was writing about and tell if you've ever experienced this way yeah but you have to start with dear diary so i was realizing and tell 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 always said it so 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 you a lot of people they don't realize that i haven't realized it 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 in twenty million in revenue honestly it probably starts at three million in revenue where you're out of the brute four 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 words and let me explain if you agree with each of these so the first one is ab advocating versus del 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 they sit next to me on a chair and i'm looking at i'm gonna go alright so here's what i do i do this this this and this alright great there you go talk to me later and let me know how you've made this better have you done that yeah yeah i've you got this right yeah yeah i got this cool your problem not mine i'm mentally relieved of duties and you say alright next week how did how did you improve it why aren't are the numbers going up it's been a month man why aren't the numbers going what the hell i showed you how to do this like that conversation i've have had so many times in my life and i i'm 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 ab advocating versus del that's a huge thing and the second one is having hard conversations by the way just play it back of what is the good version of it so the ab advocating 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 in your mind what the blame the blame of you know potential failure or issues lies with them what what is the what is give me the the definition of ab advocate there what's the problem with ab 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 a written done right here this like framework that i've been trying to learn which is what how when and 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 it sometimes it takes months to properly train people so for a really easy example is what sales 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 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 after you do that for three or four months and then you're gonna start they're gonna start learning to be better than you and they're like hey by the way you then think about this i actually went this way this time and here's the better result that i guess so the opposite of ab advocating is properly del which includes training and and communicating with clarity which expectations yeah have you ever used the race c model what's up r a c i so one thing that happens at 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 it or not maybe that depends a little bit on your skill but there's absolutely no doubt that you need to go after and catch the ball there's nobody else there to do 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 i don't know i'm gonna i don't know we're supposed to fight over it i don't know if i'm supposed to just back off and i don't know if for me we need to have a quick conversation about this i don't really know what to do now add another person add another person and 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 resent 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 one fix i learned is the racing model so you define up upfront when you do the project you don't just set 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 it is which is who is responsible for doing it okay so that's the person who's like driving the action forward in the 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 you know go from a fifteen percent close rate to nineteen percent close rate and so he's responsible for implementing the plan that you had 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 and activity so he's accountable to the result he's just not responsible for doing the work to get the result yeah okay then you have c which is the consulted party so who else do i need to talk to maybe i needed to be talking to the head to delivery because i'm closing a bunch of sales but i'm overloading the delivery team which is causing us to like have customers churn and you know like not actually like get the product or service that they wanted and so i because i didn't tell him that we're gonna 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 you know yeah nobody likes to bring legal in but you know if there's gonna 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 the responsible party but they get to be consulted yeah and i think the last one is informed and so informed is basically like who needs it 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 dynamic and pro companies and i know a lot of people listening to this are entrepreneurs meaning they want to eventually start a company and then there a smaller percentage has started something and then a much smaller percentage already has something that's thriving and so i wanna speak to the first category 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 gonna happen faster than you think and the transition for me and if 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 the 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 they say screw the rules but i have noticed that what separates the the the the pretty decent to what the great from the great is actually following these rules do agree with that when you say these rules what do you i 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 listen to this and like i'm not gonna inform people like i'm just gonna make their decision and go i 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 how he trying to improve it that's the thing you gotta commit to so like one simple way of think about this is this happens all the time with founders if you like consult them they'll be complaining about something no there's no bigger pack of whine than a group of founders and ceo so if you get them if you get them to be honest there's no bigger group of whine and when they start whining and they start whining about how this person isn't doing this and how the this other company is doing this and how this isn't working and how that isn't working right like you just start with the people problems right because anybody knows in a company like i would have certified more companies if i didn't have people problems i don't know about you but like 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 the hustle with whether it's staff or trunk or some these people or you're 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 ever done them and i don't have to worry about that anymore like holy this is like this like it's a next level heaven as a ceo and the exact opposite is true too when somebody is not doing what you expect them to they're not doing it better than you would have done it you're constantly having this like going for walks with your dog who bites other dogs or other people like have you ever had one of those dogs i've have one of those dogs every dog she sees it's exhausting because like you walk around the like oh like you're always on edge it's horrible and people will ask is she friendly i'm like no you need to get away so okay what but then you talk to that founder and you just all you gotta to ask is one simple question oh yeah that person did that they they're bad at that they're not doing this they're not delivering 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 gotcha alright cool so like that problem actually rolls up to you and same thing with oh they said they were gonna do this and then they didn't do it so they weren't gonna they didn't get they weren't accountable for what they said they were gonna 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 sides oh my god tariffs are so crazy it's like i didn't build a robust and resilient supply chain so yeah i'm i'm mercy to this to this new tariff policy or whatever right all you're the root cause of all the problems which it also means you are the root cause of all the solutions you have you have the power to do all the solutions and so then the question is like what are gonna do to do it and you're talking about best practices i think one of the like big realizations that i had that sounds very elementary but i 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 wanna i wanna have this like you a 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 celebrating the wins do you give them enough ownership and equity like do you do all those things if you're not doing those things like what's gonna happen hey everyone if you're liking this episode on how to be a better ceo well i've got good news 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 and you could download it it's completely free or just scan this qr code i sent a voice note to my piano teacher at 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 just wanna 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 gotta do find songs you're 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 in practice and she was just like yeah like and in doing that we're learning site reading we're learning playing by ear we're learning how to like control volume control between right and left hand wait was she 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 oh got it these are this is the way and if i look at like all the areas of my life i'm working on right now was like fitness like great guess what no secret strategy gonna show up to the gym or not you get eat clean or you can eat shitty which one you gonna 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 gotta like do these best practices on diet do these batch practices on 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 your 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 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 your 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 the strengths start asking questions for a lot of people like me and you start going to like this is when like tony like tony robbins are gonna see both losers and really successful people because they they they both need the same thing because for a lot of people particularly people like me i'm am basically like slightly autistic and like slightly meat head where you get to the same thing where i'm gonna like pile drive through this like brute force this thing i'm never just you're just gonna put your head down it's like well you actually have to learn how to have a conversation with someone on 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 to read a whole book on how to have a how to have a difficult conversation which is like the second or third thing i was gonna bring up which is like if you i 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 him wedge like call the nerd and push him out the room have you read nonviolent 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 so 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 you get it early on so if you're in a meeting and you see it someone isn't paying attention you actually don't wait for it to fix itself you you correct small things and you correct them fast because that will have a lot of leverage later on so they're gonna know very early on based up the 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 that sound good is that okay with you like there's a way to like have that conversation which is i would a be i wanna correct that person who am i to like tell them that they should not look at their phone at a meeting and b like it's they're probably it was just a one time mistake they're probably gonna like figure it out and the book the motive it actually says no nonsense it it says no that is nonsense you wanna correct this early early on today's episode is brought to you by hubspot being a know at all used to be considered a bad thing but in business knowing it all it's everything because right now businesses are only using about twenty percent of their data unless you have hubspot that's where they take data that's buried in emails and call logs and meaning notes they become insights that help you grow your business because when you know more you grow more you see being don't know at all isn't so bad after all visit hubspot dot com to learn more today have you ever read the one minute manager years ago what was the takeaway i can't remember so it's just very thin look love it because it's very short you can read the whole thing in probably twenty five minutes thirty minutes something like that and the idea is it's it's almost like written like a fable and it's or like you know the a mist or something like that where it's like so i went to this you know i wanted to do this i wanted to be a better manager and i heard about in the town next door there was this great manager and so i went there and i met the first employee and he meets these three employees sort like this three wishes from a genius essentially and the guy basically has you know there's sort like three like you wanna see how to do how i do it come tomorrow six am and i'll i'll tell you the one thing the one that the most important thing basically it does that three times and so the core of that book i would say is like two things that i changed from from doing it so the first was planning so i used to either be top down or bottoms up meaning i would be like i'm gonna tell you exactly what we're gonna do how we're gonna do it how this needs to work blah blah i'm gonna hand you this thing and you need to go execute this and then i'm basically just gonna be disappointed that you didn't execute it the way i envisioned in my head when i first came up with this right because at that time it was gonna work and there's no problems and so like you're on the hook for all the delivery and i will hand you this thing and you're never fully bought into this because you didn't write 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 and you know people inevitably come up with some sort of like half baked plan and then you're sort of disappointed it and they're like let me see that you fix it and you're you try to improve it and you've criticized them and you try to improve it i this just guy talk about like basically like a one minute plan and so the idea is like a one minute plan essentially creating like a one pager where the employee writes what they think they just focus on what they're gonna do and there's like a revision process where the manager basically gives some feedback and then the employee goes back and tries to work on like you based on the feedback until you arrive at a solution that they wrote but you agree with and so you get sort of the best of both worlds they have the ownership of 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 with a thing so that's like one thing that i shifted of like how i how i do that the second one is around praise and criticism and so like from a a separate thing i learned this acronym picks and nic so pi ics and and ics and so pi is basically like how do you get feedback so you want it to be if it's fixed it's positive immediate and certain if it's negative it's negative immediate and certain and so how do people get feedback wrong they try to do the feedback sandwich where they say a positive thing a negative thing and another positive thing and the person's is like a little confused about the whole process they delay it so if there's something negative they let it slide next one they let it slide next one 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 bothered i'm just gonna fire you and i come at you with an avalanche and you're like that came out of nowhere what a jerk and i'm like you've had such so many attempts to do this and you haven't gotten the right how dare are you right and so it's like no but nobody wins in that scenario so you wanna do it immediately so right after the meeting right after the call right hey i really like the way you did that hey i noticed that you did that and that that felt new that felt like an elevated version of what you were doing before that's really awesome keep it up right the other thing is making it certain so don't be wishy washy about the feedback so say you know when you did this specific behavior that made me or the other people feel like this and therefore this conclusion do more or do less right like very clear that's a that's a non nonviolent communication example yeah like a framework of how you could do that and so like you know just little things about you know i agreed with that but was i actually doing it like was i actually doing it immediately no was i doing it you know in a with a with high certainty and high conviction no and so you know you just do those little things to get better yeah it's like these little things sort of stack up like you've read the story about like the this theory of marginal gains you know the the british cycling coach you know the story mh so it's like maybe it's an atomic hat or somewhere it's got popular for that reason but basically like the british cycling team was losing in the tour d france and this coach comes in and they're like okay new coach let's we got overhaul the strategy you gotta change all this big stuff one of the big swings this guy gonna do and he was like we're gonna adjust the bikes he make it like you know seven percent thinner we're gonna like grease this we're gonna do all these small things that individually sounded like inc like okay that's gonna make a big difference and his theory was like if we can stack one percent improvements across the board of what we do there's an accumulation of these marginal gains and the marginal gains become substantial if you if you stack them if you add them up and so like that's how you win in in most areas of life is you just start to stack a bunch of things that each individually don't sound like game changers like lead bullets right no silver bullet you just keep stacking them until you sort of overwhelm the situation with with you know your success and a lot of time you'll get guys like us who are saying this in the very tech bro away where you're like yeah this is how you give compliments and some like reasonable person listening is like duh and it's like well the problem is that what got you what gets you to the what the the brute force that gets you to the stage where you start worrying about this is actually the opposite like way of handling people the the way you start is the opposite of what you eventually need and so you get to this point and you're like what do i do now and i'll give you one less example for company values i've actually taken a different stance on this than i had before the different stance is when i started my last company i actually wrote the values out in advance and i failed to live up to them and i my premise one's 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 gonna see how it feels then i'm going to name the values later on jack smith baby naming my friend jack said something that he did something that honestly changed my life he did the weirdest thing 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 and i said jack why are you doing this he goes well i i should get to know her first before we give her her name and i said jack that's absolutely insane what are you doing and i started thinking about it more and more and i got to know the baby and we started calling her legal name was baby for the first year and i was like you know baby's kinda nice so this is kinda nice and then they like thought of all these names that represented her personality and now i know her as her new name and i realized that is actually sort of brilliant and i did and i did the same thing with my company where i purposely did not have values and i was like what bothers what attributes bothers me and what attributes do i particularly love when i see us do here and now after you know my company is weird i started it i had someone running it now and i'm back running it again so we're like a weird timeline but it still feels early for us and we are now but we're now like a couple years in just now naming our values and it has felt like that has been one hundred percent the better move and it's it feels great honestly to like stick to these values because before when i named values it seems kinda weak it seems kinda dumb you're like we're gonna i'm gonna hire people court in these values that i'd actually have made at in the the case of the hustle i made when i was twenty six i'm now twenty eight 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 a prison and so now i'm just gonna look soft i'm not following the things that i said i gonna follow we did things differently this time and it's been so much better what's an example of a a value that emerged i can give you the three the first like and you're the first person to ever ask me about my company values actually so the first one is fun so like i just value fun and so fun means in our copy i wanna do silly stuff just because but also like i don't want to file data all of the time sometimes we're gonna do stuff just because it it's exciting or or it's fun and i'm gonna 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 kinda controversial or it doesn't feel right at first but i'll explain is pride so what does pride mean i told my company and they're like gay pride what do you mean and i'm like no guys i mean you could have that but that's not what i'm referring to like grabbing fun there we go yeah what yeah it's just just a bunch of good a bunch of burrows being dudes knows 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 show that we could sell it and make money for but it didn't feel good i didn't take pride in that i took i took pride in saying we have in real life even though the data didn't exactly show we should have done that i'm doing it anyway or if we're gonna lay people off i'm gonna go above and beyond and i'm going to give them like more severance than the market rate because it just makes me feel good or if we can afford it which we can when a vendor submits their bill to us even though we have a that ninety i'll pay them that day because it feels good to do the right thing and to treat people well and 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 and and i tested this i would tell a couple people here's the value that i'm doing and they someone showed me a text message that we're sending 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 boiler plate 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 like 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 looked really nice and i don't expect everyone to wear a suit or anything like that but they just like their their like beard was all out of like whack and they had like kind of a dirty shirt on and i'm like dude has some fucking pride man like you don't have to go buy new clothes but like show up a little bit better than than than you are now and so that's been the the values are speed pride and fun that's interesting yeah i'm curious how it's gonna play out mean i've never heard of somebody do that where you do it later and also you know i think it's a i think it's very rare for values to like actually show up i would say that out of a hundred companies who took the time to set values percent would you say actually like you know live by those live by those i mean per perfectly i guess what i mean is compared to a similar company like them they do things differently because they valued it like what what percentage say actually do very few but i think to be light of a hundred what would you like ten percent mh but i think to be a ninety percentile plus company i actually do think you have to like do things like living to your values i think in order to you see and do that you seen anyone like have you kind of not gone into a company and been like wow they actually keep well like the companies that i tend to admire or the books that i read of the people who i admire they're kinda 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 stand that they're gonna be remote first but their offices they just put this video out where their offices are gonna be like the best and they wanted it to be beautiful and they wanted it to be people that they love it they love working there they didn't have to do that but it just seemed important to ceo and now to the rest of the company or with jason free from from base camp like he does things that are a little bit different than normal and i think that it 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 gonna happen at my company by value the values that we have are they are gonna turn some people off and eventually though they're just not gonna work here anymore which one do you think can turn people because this all sound pretty un to me i wanna not have fun i wanna take no pride i wanna move slow don't think anybody would say that dude everyone wants to move slow like movie so does nobody states that yeah yeah but you could tell like when someone like says like this is gonna take six weeks and like well what it look like if it's a two weeks that makes so many people uncomfortable so we've talked about this before i'm surprised you didn't do it z had this thing back in the day where he he said one of the great lessons he got when he was a because he was a young ceo i think he was eighteen 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 we all wanna 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 gonna it's not everything's gonna be done you know perfectly neat literally like things are gonna break things are gonna 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 smith if i'm being honest this but but i i think that speed and pride actually are can be inverse and it's they can be the opposite but i actually don't think that most people i 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 gonna take a quarter and i will pose the 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 kind of have an interesting question i guess if 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 experience that no a hundred percent i just don't think that if you say the word is my value is speed i think when you say who agrees with this hundred percent of people raise their hand he say and nobody will say you know 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 un uncomfortable fast right or or you know break the speed bar so what we do is whatever would be normal for this project we're gonna cut that in half as a default we're gonna take we're gonna have a different speed bar than everybody else or then whatever you your default 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 words but things a lot of the stuff but i'll give you an example for speed is like if you go to join hampton dot com and you sign up or you submit this this increment if you just pay me no no if you like if you're if you it doesn't work perfectly right now but if you apply and you fit our our criteria i meaning you have a couple of that does at least three million revenue and you're one of our thirteen chapters helen who works at a company it's gonna call you right now the it's sixty minutes but we're trying to reduce it to fifteen minutes you're gonna get a phone call from someone who works at a company and all they're they're gonna do is say i see you thank you for applying we have to review the all the application but what i'm here and you can text me if you need anything thank you so much so that's an example of moving fast i think you should be make you know some companies just 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 on 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 how much is being added to that you can see who's adding to it because that's the person who's actually like living by the values and then you'll when you do that when you actually write it down you'll realize like dan we say that but like what do we actually do that's fast right or we say take 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 i think when you do that it actually becomes real like that's a good idea 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 you know come company avery company b is so small i think ten percent is extremely generous i think the mountain nine number's is probably closer to one percent 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 hand information or you got you know got acquired twitch i don't i don't even 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 them and so i think that you know the 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 you know he drives a hardcore 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 like right now if you go look at like x ai you know z is throwing huge pay packages that people open ai has the most popular product why would i if i'm a top research go work at at g right this is the question they have to answer and what what they do if in their propaganda is basically they show how you know quote unquote cracked the team is how hardcore they are about what they're doing the culture and taking pride and over working 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 bulk isaac in book about him that that jason fried actually told on the podcast and is basically like they they were ready to launch it was a it was they were doing some project with nasa they were ready to launch the rocket so hap the 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 gonna be like we need to delay the launch there's a crack in the there's a crack in the rocket and he goes and he looks at 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 you know so what happens if we take the skirt off if what if we you just cut this what if we removed it like there's just like like a set of shears over there like what if 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 he himself takes the shares 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 us 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 this 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 the those are the concrete anecdotes where you're like company avery company b company 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 gonna be like three months or something like that and so he's like could we drive it there and they're like drive the rocket piece like you know drive that i think i saw that wasn't they put it on like a bunch of trucks in the in the and the car was five miles an hour 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 with the rocket could like go go under and they now basically like a redneck you are overpass they were like oh we're gonna have to driver around here go that way to get there and they did it there right but like that's like the equivalent of being like it's like i got a guy you need the headlight you you need the wire removed i got a guy yeah just grab that old broom over there i got a guy yeah so i so i i just think pretty pretty broadly like whatever percentage of energy you're gonna great you got the free values i would just be like it's not what we say it's what we do and so we're gonna track what we do that's in line with these and like you know who you know that's what i'm that's what i'm calculating and every every week every month i'm gonna 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 who moved fast and even if it was a bad thing let's like talk about it you know you do that with like sales calls you're like alright let's look at like the blu of the week alright here do there were know why the yeah yeah like a good job trying and let's improve this way so i used to give out i mean this is i'm not like this is not what they teach teacher at harvard business school but here's what i did i used to i bought this replica wwe championship belt and every friday i would give i would basically i would call the team over so get everybody away from the computer we would all grab a beer or drink or whatever and we would stand so we'd stand a little huddle you know we could twelve fifteen people at the company at that time and i would basically give the belt to somebody and they got to keep it like kinda on their shoulder on their desk for that week and the belt holder got these like small perks like you got dessert first at launch 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 you know in line with one of the values and i would tell the value story and i'll 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 i don't hand them the belt and like guess what you do that fifty two weeks in a row like people start to get it it's like no different than secondary grade class like people start to people start to understand like what gets rewarded around here what gets you know what 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 so i'd to give like i know i was like a thousand dollars in cash and the rule was you can only spend that thousand dollars on something that is a story that you're gonna tell us you know 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 be like i paid my rent with it or like i paid groceries it's gotta be something that's like stored 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'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 product ties it alex mo says something cool he is 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 gotta constantly remind everything they it's all almost always a lack of reminding not a lack of teaching right and i thought that was really good that's true i mean it's true for myself too right like what are the most valuable lessons like the ones that i keep having to learn again and again right like i've learned this all i like i don't need knowledge i need wisdom and just like you need like for reminded me 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 we're 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 three million dollars 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 potential that you're a afraid that you have no one else to talk to about growing your company in fact when you even go out in public you probably don't even like 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 twenty million dollars 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 ten years from now you look back and you realized i missed this amazing opportunity i didn't grow i plateau in life and in business my company hampton we changed that if you're running a company that does at least three million in revenue you can apply at joy hampton dot com we vet you we curate you and we give you eight handpicked founders who have similar businesses similar sizes as you who will challenge you who will hold you accountable and who will give you perspectives that you cannot get anywhere else and this all happens in real life so check it out join hampton dot com slash network can i ask you about this thing that you have on here about i wanna i wanna tell you about something but i first wanna hear about this edge 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 and i think there's a lot of entrepreneurs who have that same you know that's the kinda of guy they are right that's that's the kinda of gal they are they're into that i think everyone has that everyone has it a little bit and there's so i don't know if these other people are just better at resisting it or they have the opposite 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 at a top you know protein bar basically sold it for whatever what was it five hundred million dollars in more park six hundred million something like that and we were talking to him a couple years later and we're like peter what's up and what are you excited about what you're interested what are you doing now what are you gonna do next what's the next move he's like i'm launching a protein bar like what and he basically was going back to the back to the market that he knew better than anyone else with a new product david barr which is by the way now already like multi hundred million dollar company faster than rx bar ever was because in terms of revenue right because he's yeah because he's playing i think think we talked about this i i think they said they're were over a hundred million of revenue and he's what less than two years post launch so you know so incredible success and it kinda makes sense it's like when you see people playing a video game and you see those guys who they're not buying the next game and starting that they go and they basically speed a video if you ever seen people speed mario or something like that i mean they just know the level like the back of their hand and they're able to like do it with a level of mastery that you know any newcomer including themselves would not have been able to do and so this fa me because i'm so opposite you know if i have a success in something the last thing i wanna do is go do that again boring no not interested and yet there's this group of people that do this and the reason why this came up for me was i was looking at carb pasta sauce do you know the story yes amazing amazing amazing amazing do you wanna tell a little bit of it and i'll fill in some gaps okay so i believe ro is a restaurant in manhattan and i think it's actually only one restaurant like a small restaurant it's a family italian restaurant not even i think in a popular area of manhattan but it was still a very popular restaurant and now a lot of people know ra tomato sauce like that's the pasta sauce which is it's not like gourmet level but it's like of significantly elevated rag where it's like eight dollars a bottle versus like the four dollars a bottle and so approachable but definitely elevated and it's crushed it it's killed in and it basically took this very small manhattan one store restaurant and made this massive potentially multi billion dollar brand now this other company called car which is a a little bit more less of a family it might be a family restaurant but a little bit more flashy and i think they have like amazing that i think it had an amazing leader the basically the ceo of ra has done the same thing with car bones so now you can buy car sauce and it's the same thing where it's slightly elevated but still approachable and just crushing it is that right yeah you you nailed it so just to fill in some of the details so ra sold it scaled up and sold for four hundred fifteen million in twenty seventeen and since then has sold one or like private equity sale and then sold one or two more times last last one at two billion so here's this two billion dollar pasta brand and the ceo runs and scales that company and separately carb basically kind of goes through a similar model when the pandemic hit carbon the restaurant which had this incredible reputation tries to figure out like okay well now people are at home our business took a hit it became this incredible forcing function right so like sometimes you turn your disadvantage into your advantage if you're a great entrepreneur that's the key so you look at this situation and you're like alright what am i gonna do am i gonna flip this on its head and not just survive this but can i do something with this and so they decide hey we're gonna come up with a jar version of it we'll do we'll sell it direct to consumer on our website okay great so they goes through dozens of trials they're getting the flavors right and you know they launch and it does okay not great so this guy eric comes in and he comes over from ross he had a non compete his non compete expires he says alright great i'm gonna do this and they spend kind of like four months just working on recipes flavors trying to figure it they're in the lab they're in the lab they're grinding they're grinding with the with the sauce flavor they're growing garlic yeah they're in the lab the problem is know it's a pretty competitive category and so you know pasta sauce which was you know obviously like not a new category it's like where's is the opening and he goes he thinks with my reputation my connections i'll be able to get us into retail he goes and he knocks on all the doors and no interest and so he's like shit alright what are we gonna do and for basically i think he said like eighteen months they you know he was struggling to get people to call him back and he could not get his foot in the door and so then he had to think about alright we need to come up with a value proposition we need come up with the position that's gonna be different enough where the retailers wanna carry us and so he's like alright listen he puts part of his hat as like a don draper hat the other part of the economic the don draper hats had like alright we need to market this differently this is restaurant quality sauce we use san mar tomatoes we cook them on an open kettle on fire right like you know who knows how maybe that's how all sauces are bit who knows but starts to build a little bit of a story and because this is so premium he's like you know what we're just gonna price this at twice the price of the other what's that what's their price double it that's our price and so now it's priced at seven to eleven dollars it's it's a very expensive item but the what that means is that a retailer who normally takes you know us a portion of that sale instead of making fifty cents on a sauce they're now making two dollars and fifty cents so they had a big incentive to carry it because they're like hey if this sells we make way more way more per per jar than we are going to otherwise and so this becomes the pitch and that this pitch starts to work it takes off and now they're north of a hundred million in sales they're in twenty seven thousand stores and it's just fascinating to me that this guy is just running this pasta playbook again and again and i started to think about that and i was like who else doing that so we talked about the rx bar friend of the pod na nikita beer did the same thing basically he's like cool i'm gonna make these like teen these sort of viral teen apps where you know teams are able to kinda like i don't know what you say like compliment or like give you you know like hey who's the most likely to do whatever who's the most bubble friend you know and then it sends them a message somebody said you're the blah blah blog click this to see who said that about you and for a teenager in high school like that's an irresistible text goes viral alright like and so he's done this a couple of times now and has par laid that into like now he runs product for for for x and works with i'd say which is which is which is that in in same career leap that should be studied okay but we have other friends so there's a friend of the pod we can't name them but in the d space similar to rx bars they built a brand and we have one friend that has now built four different hundred million dollar brands using the same e commerce playbook two of their brands literally compete head to head against each other if you search in this category on amazon the number one product is theirs and the number two product is theirs they look like two totally different competing brands healings owns both of them and i was looking at the revenue of these companies and it was like oh yeah this one did a little better this month they did eight million this month and the other one did seven point five million this month and i can't believe it and this is like almost like full self driving for him he's on autopilot he knows what to do with these companies i don't exactly know who you're talking about but i think i do and and answer this question is there a chance that the website of the two is the exact same like website template yeah why not right because i think i i think i don't hear talking if i don't hear you're talking about i think they owned one thing and then they sold it and they just basically it looked like they said so let's just say hypothetically care there no more clues we can't do any more clues would know no hypothetically just like a pen they were like alright this word for pens now let's do the exact like x export upload now we're gonna do the same thing for lighter but like same branding yeah yeah so so again if this sort of mindset of like going back and speed speedrunning the level again so different than me i mean what do you think about this do you don't do you have any examples of this what do you think of this model i one hundred percent the way to go i think but you don't do that i think i did yeah the reason i started hampton was because we at the hustle we owned a of a a community called trends and i realized all the mistakes that i made so i think it's the same thing yeah i mean i i my career started it felt like as a blogger when i was twenty years old and frankly i feel like i've doing the same thing for now fifteen or sixteen years so yeah i do think it's the same thing where explain your your thing when you say doing the same thing what's the thing for you it's all been set around content and community so basically when i move to san francisco i had a book club and that's actually how i met some of my best friends so like of the two guys who are in my wedding or the six guys two of them i met via my book club where we would have a monthly book club where we would meet up in real life and then from there i hosted a a handful events called bootstrap live in order to make these events popular i started blogging creating a newsletters that turned into a huge conference called hustle khan where i actually just launched the numbers last last night because we were thinking about doing some more events at hampton and we had ten thousand people in one year in two thousand and eighteen come to our events so i've been doing events in community for fifteen years now so it's been actually quite consistent eat even more specifically you're like i want to have this community be either personally be a part of it or attract this community and then you're like cool how am i gonna do that i'll use content as this magnet to bring people in whether it's the podcast it's a blog it's a newsletter it didn't really matter it's like i'm gonna go talk that's gonna track these types of people and then my business is the community whether trend you know hustle con was like i'm gonna charge you three hundred dollars once trends was like i'm gonna charge you three hundred dollars once a year ham is like i'm gonna charge you whatever eight thousand dollars once a year and you've just been doing that same playbook but smarter better each time yeah i i basically trying to make up for the mistakes had made in the previous thing and and you know like i think that when i started the hustle i think i told you this my goal was to get to a hundred million in revenue with a newsletter and at the time that was considered laughable and frankly i didn't entirely believe but i was like i don't i was the one laugh yeah i laughed at myself but i was like i don't for sure get to a thirty million but i have a feeling that if something can get to thirty million they could probably get to a hundred million and like there was no math behind it i was just guessing and i was proven to be right i'd unfortunately didn't do it i sold too early but my competitor now one of my best friends austin r actually did do it and so like the idea that i've basically have looked at either community or content and oftentimes they're married and i'm like i wanna get this to a hundred million in revenue i have never built a business to a hundred million in in revenue and like that's like the one thing i've been trying to do not for sixteen years and i hope i can pull this off but it's been content to community the whole time and frankly i didn't do it on purpose i was just like trying to do this something and i'm like oh this comes way easy i'll just do this i wish i would i don't think i think i've always failed at being reflective and being like oh like i made this mistake before i can avoid it so oftentimes i actually continued to make the same mistake over and over and over against but with like peter or the guy you're talking about or some of our other friends who are two times founders in the same industry they do a much better job than i personally have with using the same context the same group of people and just rinse and repeating so by the time this goes live i think the eric ryan podcast has gone will have gone online air eric ryan if it hasn't found it i think four companies that i to guess each of them was in the nine figure valuation and he just did the same thing over and over and over again with the same people and i definitely think a way to go and it could be way more fun and so you go back and you commit the same crime again and again and again and i i kinda love this model i don't do it myself i don't really have the that's not my wiring but i find it fascinating another example of this is the guys who started money twenty twenty i don't remember the name my god dude i've been begging him every month i sent him an email and say well you come on m mfa he has told me now that he's gonna come this november so i'm putting out in the brand it's happening so what was the guy's name again jonathan jonathan alright so what these guys did which is amazing is they basically figured out a model a blueprint and like a home builder who has blueprints for a home that they can just copy paste and just build again and again and again they've basically been doing that for i don't industry conferences i don't know what you would call it is or a different term for that so if you wanna figure out and follow along everyone should google this guy's name his name's is jonathan wei go to his linkedin and he originally started as a conference business i think in nineteen ninety six i think that was his first event and if you go to his website you'll see the name of something like six different events go to the website of each event it's the exact same website but in a different niche so he had money twenty twenty which was a payments conference and there was some there was a stick to all of his conference i think like you get a two thousand dollar ticket but you're if you're a vendor you're obligated to go to like three different meetings with different people i think that's like part of the whole thing so he did money twenty twenty which was a payments conference he did shop talk which was like an e commerce conference yep he did grocery talk which i some food the food business i guess and then now he has human x which is for artificial intelligence and he also has health which is for a health innovation and so he's done this we're i think he's got a fifth or six one but the previous four collectively at each time if you add it all up i think the public price is six or seven hundred million dollars so it was like one was a hundred and twenty five another one was like two hundred and he's done that four times so it adds up to like something like that yeah yeah actually it's the adding up is not even the most impressive it's the fact that each one succeeded and became a nine figure so over a hundred million dollar business again and again and again and again it's literally like having a money printer right so i like these people who have these blueprints and then go back to the well and they are these sort of repeat offenders and i think it's it's pretty fascinating and no the the problem of course with this is the psychology so one thing that a lot of founders struggle with is knowing too much and knowing too much hurts you in two different ways the first is if you've been in a space for a number of years and you met all the right people you learn all the hard lessons you know the nuances of that space you're the most equipped to do it but you also have the most scar tissue and so some people literally can't get past the scar tissue and the trauma of it and emotionally they don't wanna go back into that space again and they wanna go into a new space and get new scar tissue from new spaces and like that's very very very common thing what happens when it works is sometimes you then get a different problem right you yes you know a lot you know how to do it but your bored of it it's like sitting on a seesaw that's balanced you kinda wanna go up and down right like that's kind of the point so a lot of people were in the game of entrepreneurship and you succeed your maybe your money problems are solved now so now if you're playing you're not playing for the money as your top priority anymore you're playing because you like the sport of business and the question is if you're gonna play in the sport of business like where are you're gonna get more kicks are you gonna get it from going back and dominating and doing that again some people do do that and there's other people that need something new and i've always been in the need something new category emery really even it and over time i've met a handful of people that do this i i know one guy that did this with sports betting he built one you know the the most popular kind of blogs and sports betting and then he basically sells those leads to sports betting casinos or website or like you know fan dual draft games type of thing so he dominates the the lead flow and then he sells the leads and he sold one company for like forty million then he did the he i he's told the store in the podcast if you go look at when i sold the milk road go listen to kendall part on this basically he did it in i i'm wanna say like new jersey or he did it in the first state that it was legal so only new jersey was legal all of his competitors were like oh us market shut down only one state out of fifty is available it's a dead market we gotta go international and he had the opposite takeaway away from that he's like oh so i could just dominate new jersey he created like new jersey sports betting info dot com or whatever you know some website like that he owned all of the new jersey sports betting traffic and he sold it to one of the companies for i think forty something million then he did the same exact thing again minnesota opened up and he literally like repeated it did the same thing in minnesota sold it again to the same company for another forty five million but faster this time and this time they're were like oh yeah shit okay in the contract any other state you can't do this again like you can't do this we we didn't put that non compete in the first one like we didn't realize that oh you're just gonna do this again in the second one better than we're gonna do it and so he sold the same company essentially twice for forty million or something each and then by the way i just caught up with him recently guess what he's doing did it again he selling leads to the same thing in the same playbook i couldn't believe it and so actually vodka i totally could believe it it's actually the most believable thing in the world alright is that it that's it that's the pod hope that hope that stuff helps people i don't know run their companies better alright talk soon i feel like i could rule where to know i could be what i want to from at all in it like a days off on a roll less travel never look this episode brought you by hubspot media they have a cool new podcast that's for ai called the next wave it's by matt wolf and nathan lance they're basically talking about all to do tools that are coming out how the landscape is changing what's going on with ai tech so if you wanna be up to date on ai tech it's a cool podcast you could check out listen to the next wave wherever you get your podcast