Every Level of Business in 14 Minutes
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Summary
8 simple business rules that got me to the $100M level without working 100+ hours a week and hating my life. 1. Don't hire to grow the business, hire to buy back your time. 2. Find the people who have what you want and do what they did 3. Find a blueprint that has worked before to give you a foundation 4. Profit solves all problems 5. Focus on gross margin, not revenue 6. Hire to buy your time 7. Don t have a big idea? 8. Have an assistant?
Transcript
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An idea that could have saved me 15 years of business mistakes.
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And it's that a business will never grow past the growth of the CEO.
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And if you don't evolve and grow past these four levels of business,
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Level one is your first $100,000 is made from skills,
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Level two, your first million dollars is made from hiring,
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Level three, your first 10 million is from systems,
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Level four, your first hundred million is from building your people and coaching your leaders.
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And I made mistakes at every one of these levels. But today I'm going to share with you the eight
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simple business rules that got me to that hundred million dollar level without working a hundred
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hour weeks and hating my life. Starting at the hundred K level with rule number one, model,
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then modify. A lot of first time entrepreneurs make this huge mistake. They decide to get into
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business and create a product that's never existed before. And they try to make everything up as they
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go. They think if I do it this way, it'll be innovative. The problem is if you don't understand
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why certain things are done a certain way, then you're going to fail. It's like learning to play
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a guitar. You don't start by writing songs. You start by playing other people's music to understand
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how the notes work with each other. If you don't find a blueprint that's worked before to give you
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that foundation, then adding innovation on a sloppy foundation will only fail. So here's what you got
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to do. Find the people who have what you want and do what they did. One of the biggest mistakes
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people make is thinking they have to be unique to win. Even today, at $100 million in revenue per
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year, I still call people to get advice on how to start something new because they've been there,
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they've done it, and I can usually get there three to five times faster copying somebody else's
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process and trying to make it up myself. But now that you're up and running, your attention will
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get sucked into new problems. But before I share rule number two, we've got a goal of hitting 1
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million subscribers. So if you haven't already, take a second to hit subscribe. Which brings us
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a rule number two. Profit solves all problems. Oftentimes when I'm coaching new clients, I catch
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them working on things that are good for the business, but don't make them money. It's a lot
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of busy work, creating systems, creating content, fancy funnels. What they should be doing is
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whatever gets them to sell something. Anything other than generating revenue is just playing
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the game of business, but actually not being a great entrepreneur. Here's my philosophy. If the
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problem can be solved with money, then it's not a real problem. If you can pay somebody for the
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answer to your problem, then you have to get better at making profit to solve those problems.
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The other issue is that people confuse revenue with profit. That's why every one of the businesses
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I'm involved in, I focus on what's called gross margin. It's not what I sell it for. It's what it
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costs me to make. Things that have 80% or higher gross margin, like information or software,
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are the best businesses because what's left over
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after you pay people to operate the business is profit.
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but what they should do is focus on the profit,
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because I can't pay bills with top line revenue
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But if you wanna reach level two at a million dollars,
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After struggling for years and finally making it work at my third company, Spheric Technologies,
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I thought I had to work 100-hour weeks. I thought that my job was to keep all the plates spinning.
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What I didn't realize then that almost killed me was the fact that I should have took some of that
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profit and reinvested it in hiring people to actually get me my time out of my calendar.
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Instead, I just kept adding capacity to the business, which meant I had more people to
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manage and i didn't learn to let go so here's a big idea if you don't have an assistant you are
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one and you're probably overpaid and honestly you suck at your job here's why i say that everyone's
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first hire should be an executive assistant because it's the least amount of money you have
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to pay somebody to buy back the largest portion of your time if you look at your calendar where
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you're doing things that don't actually make profit it's things more like calendar and inbox
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it's not stuff you need to do what's cool is i actually wrote about this in my book buy back
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your time. On page 16, it's called the buyback loop. That's where we focus on three core areas.
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First, we have to audit our calendar for time and energy. Number two, we got to take the things that
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are taking our energy that we don't want to do, transfer it to somebody else. That's usually your
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executive assistant. Then we want to fill our time up with things that make us more money that we can
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charge for right now, or go learn new skills to up-level our abilities to grow the business.
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If you're struggling trying to figure out what you should give your assistant, then just find me on
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Instagram and message me the word YouTube EA and I will send you my internal executive assistant
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playbook that has the principles, the process, the agenda. It is the most complete system out there
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and it's my gift to you for free. But having the right people can make or break your business.
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Which brings us to rule number four, culture over cash. A long time ago, I was operating my business
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and everything was going great until I realized I had people I was working with that weren't
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aligned with my vision. It got me so upset that after weeks of feeling like I was starting to
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hate interacting with my team members, I decided to do something crazy. I went into Slack and wrote
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this post. This is the vision I'm after. These are the kind of people that are going to support
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that vision. If for whatever reason you don't feel aligned with that, feel free to resign and I will
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pay you $15,000 cash. No questions asked. Just resign as soon as possible. Now, the essence was
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there, the execution could have been done better. The unfortunate part is that people that I loved
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actually decided to take the money because they were concerned. Why would he say this?
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What I learned in that moment is that if you don't focus on creating the culture of your business,
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you may wake up one day and hate the company you've actually built. So my philosophy today
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is hire for the soul, train for the role. Most people will say to me, how do you find these
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great people? First off, you need to be the person that they would want to work for. You have to sell
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the dream. You have to have vision. Many entrepreneurs are just scared to state it
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because they don't want to scare their team or they don't want to be held accountable to having
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to build something big and massive. But the truth is, if your dreams aren't big enough for your
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team's goals and dreams to fit inside of, they'll find somebody else where that is true. So to do it
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right, we want to make sure that we hire people that have the skills. That's why I always do a
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test project. I call it the test first hiring method. Essentially, it's a 10 hour project that
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But it is a lot cheaper to pay somebody for a test project
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and he was like Mr. Chad, you know, Mr. Success,
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And we went on a hike and within three minutes,
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And I was curious to see if he would try to keep up.
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He fell back into the arms of my general manager
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can't fight to keep up to the CEO of the company
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or to the general manager who's involved in hiring him,
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that person was never gonna succeed in our culture.
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I first learned this concept in my teens as a software programmer because anybody that's ever written code knows that the best code is dry.
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I also take this philosophy and apply it to my life and my business where if I make a decision, I want to make it once and never repeat myself.
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Doing it twice just makes the whole business slow and inefficient.
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So one of the core principles for me is principles versus process.
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See, everybody knows what a system or a playbook, a checklist looks like.
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But what if you go one level above and think about what's the principle that drives that outcome?
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Teaching people how to think in principles is more scalable because then they'll have a framework to look at their work that applies to multiple different areas.
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The other idea is I like to use budgets, an allocate amount of money that I'm willing to spend per year, per month on different things.
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On a personal level, I might have a travel budget.
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On a business level, I might have a marketing budget.
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and they never have to come to me asking for approvals
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They know what their budget is, they operate within it
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you'll always hit the complexity ceiling in revenue
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you won't actually know if your processes are getting results.
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how many followers have you added in the last day?
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That answer shows me they're not measuring their revenue,
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they're probably not even measuring their profit.
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is that a scorecard measured daily will get you results.
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you can't improve it. Most entrepreneurs would rather live in this like fun land of creation
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and innovation. But the truth is, is for you to improve any aspect of the business, the precision
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of measurement and the frequency, if it goes up, the revenue goes up. That's why for me,
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it's all about being visible. I have it on dashboards all over the office. We have spreadsheets
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at full access. We even have these things called sensor. Think about like a water sensor in your
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basement of a house. If it goes off, it shuts off the water so you don't flood your whole basement.
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We do this for every department in our business
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so that if there's an issue with a customer or a funnel,
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it catches it early so that we can address it, fix it,
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because what that does is it brings attention to it,
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And what happens with sunlight, it sanitizes all problems.
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It fixes things before they ever become an issue.
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Which brings us to rule number seven, teach, don't tell.
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and the big idea behind this is your ability to scale
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depends on your ability to work through people.
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What I used to do is I'd tell people what to do,
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and then I told them what to do next, which sounds logical.
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That's how my boss did it with me when I started off
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but a better way is what's called transformational leadership
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I start with outcomes where I'm clear about the vision
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or how this thing gets done and it feels complete.
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Then I talk about the measurement we're gonna use
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to let the person know, are you making progress?
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If people don't know how you're gonna measure success,
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then how can they make better decisions day-to-day
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I write it down and I use our one-on-ones to coach them up
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That's why for me, I do a weekly leadership training
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where I'm writing down things I see in the business
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I have a chance to upgrade and coach the team up
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The reason why this works to get to 100 million
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or you went to seminars to learn or you read in a book.
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It allows you to take that and transfer it to them so they can feel like they're learning.
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And third, when your team feels like you're investing in them, they will show up excited,
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growing, learning how to use these new skills you've taught them.
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But you don't even get close to 100 million if your team isn't motivated.
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Which brings us to rule number eight, dream for your team.
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Recently, I was on a call with one of my private coaching clients and I asked them,
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tell me specifically what your executive leaders want to achieve in their life over the next five
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years? And they said, well, they want to make more money. I said, that's not what they want.
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I said, what are their personal goals? What are their personal dreams? What do they want to achieve
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in their life? What kind of impact do they want to make outside of the business? See, if you can't
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tell me those direct reports, dreams and goals, then you can't lead them. Your goal is to figure
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out where they want to go and map where you're going in your business to making those things
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a reality. These are non-negotiables. Number one is you have to know your team's goals. You need
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know the personal and professional goals i always ask this question on first interview doesn't
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matter who i'm interviewing for whatever role even if they never report to me see financial goals are
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simple what i'm more interested is the personal ones i want to know what is the title you want
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to have in five years where do you want to live what kind of work do you want to create if i can
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get you clear on that and connected emotionally then everything else gets so much easier because
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you'll be intrinsically motivated to push yourself forward then you have to map their goals to the
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work they're going to do in your company that way they'll be motivated to do the work to expand to
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grow so that they can get ready to maybe do their own thing someday or get in a position where they
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can grow and i also believe how you lead is how you will teach your leaders to lead and the best
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thing you can do is not only do this for your leaders but encourage them invite them to ask
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their team if everybody on the teams know what everybody else want to do personal and professional
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where they want to end up, they will just feel like a cohesive unit building and creating their
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future together. And it just makes it so much easier. These rules will save you years of
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mistakes, but it won't actually get you the freedom you're looking for. If you want to learn
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how to build a business that runs itself, click here and I'll see you on the other side.