Dan Martell - August 09, 2024


the only skill you need to build a $1M company…

Topics
training team on principles
Hosted by
Dan Martell
Mentioned
Ronnie Coleman Schwarzenegger Seabomb Alan
The reason why most people have a hard time buying back their time You will not attract a penny more than you think you deserve

Episode Stats


Length

15 minutes

Words per minute

221.92

Word count

3,480

Sentence count

144


Summary

Summaries generated with gmurro/bart-large-finetuned-filtered-spotify-podcast-summ .

In this episode, I talk about the 3 levels of leadership, how to lead a team, and how to unblock your team so they are willing to do what you tell them to do. I also talk about how to make sure your team is loyal to the leader and unblocks them so they will be loyal to you.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Topics generated with Qwen2.5-3B-Instruct.
Hosts, guests, and mentioned names generated with spaCy (en_core_web_sm), reconciled against Wikidata.
00:00:00.000 going to take you on the journey of how I went from hating the business I had built and feeling
00:00:04.960 like no one was on my side to today building a business where I'm pumped to hang out with my team
00:00:09.740 and love every second of my day. And it all comes down to this one skill, leadership.
00:00:16.480 The first part of leadership that you need to understand, it's this. Your team doesn't work
00:00:21.300 for you. You work for your team. So I moved to Silicon Valley and I got exposed to a completely
00:00:27.680 different way people led. I had these 26-year-old kids running around raising hundreds of millions
00:00:33.780 of dollars, leading these companies of 1,000 employees. The way I thought you managed people
00:00:39.920 was a certain way, and I was exposed to a completely different style. That's when I learned
00:00:45.040 the three levels of leadership. The first leader is the title leader. This is maybe the person
00:00:49.900 you've worked with when you worked at like an entry-level job or just starting in your career.
00:00:54.020 this person pretty much says the words I'm your boss do what I tell you to do because they have
00:00:59.460 a title they think everybody's got to listen to them so most people get it wrong and then they
00:01:03.560 have people that are leaving them all the time because they're paying them a little bit more an
00:01:06.840 hour an extra 50 cents an hour person leaves they don't quit the company they quit their boss
00:01:11.380 usually a title leader worst way to lead people the second level is the trader this is a person
00:01:16.660 that says if you do this for me I will trade you for these things the challenge with that style
00:01:21.840 is that the moment somebody else will trade them for more,
00:01:25.220 they're gonna bounce, they're gonna leave you.
00:01:27.380 The highest level of leadership,
00:01:29.220 the third level is the servant leader.
00:01:31.680 When you show up as a servant leader,
00:01:33.700 every meeting isn't about let's get done,
00:01:36.440 it's literally starting with the intention
00:01:38.200 of how do I help these people?
00:01:40.120 How do I show up for this team?
00:01:42.040 It's I'm not here to get them to produce for me,
00:01:45.160 I'm here to support them in their production.
00:01:47.260 It's a different intention,
00:01:48.620 but it changes the whole frame, the whole conversation.
00:01:51.840 and it builds trust.
00:01:53.180 No leader will be able to affect massive change
00:01:56.300 if their team doesn't trust them.
00:01:58.000 When all you're doing is trading with other people
00:02:00.420 or telling people, do this because I'm the boss,
00:02:02.360 then it doesn't create trust.
00:02:03.500 The servant comes in and says, hey, I just want you to win,
00:02:06.740 and if we all win, we all get to succeed together,
00:02:10.200 how can I help?
00:02:11.580 That is a person that's being of service.
00:02:14.200 Most people start off and they're just like,
00:02:15.780 I'm paying you, do what I told you to do.
00:02:18.140 That's the title leader.
00:02:19.320 The trader's like, okay, how do I get them motivated?
00:02:22.280 All right, I'll give them an incentive program.
00:02:24.220 The problem is, is that if all you're doing
00:02:26.380 is an incentive program,
00:02:27.260 there's no commitment to the mission.
00:02:29.520 They're literally just there because it's transactional.
00:02:32.120 The servant leader has stickiness
00:02:33.980 because they're there to serve the individual
00:02:36.280 and the person respects the leader that says,
00:02:38.600 hey, I'm not telling you what to do.
00:02:39.800 I'm here to support you.
00:02:41.060 Where are you stuck?
00:02:42.040 Where are your challenges?
00:02:42.900 My job is to unblock you.
00:02:44.780 That team member will be loyal to the leader,
00:02:47.420 Which brings us to the second part of leadership, which is leading without doing their job.
00:02:52.820 Most people, the way they lead, it's not their fault.
00:02:55.900 They were never taught any other way.
00:02:57.440 They hire people and then as they hire people, they tell them what to do.
00:03:01.140 They go off, they try to get busy with their own projects and they come back,
00:03:04.240 they check in on people and make sure they're moving forward and they're doing what they do.
00:03:07.540 The challenge with that is that there's only so many people you can do that with
00:03:10.940 until you wake up in the morning and you spend your whole eight hour, maybe 10 hour day
00:03:15.520 just telling people what to do and check in on people
00:03:18.640 and it feels heavy.
00:03:20.040 The different style is what I call
00:03:21.600 transformational leadership.
00:03:23.100 In that style, we focus on a completely different set
00:03:25.760 of objectives and by our example, we unblock people
00:03:30.000 so they can do more without needing us.
00:03:32.480 And that way, the bigger the business gets,
00:03:34.500 the less time it needs from the leader
00:03:36.300 so you don't end up building a business you grow to hate.
00:03:38.780 Here's exactly how it works.
00:03:40.700 Transactional leaders do this.
00:03:42.080 They tell people what to do,
00:03:43.380 they check that they got it done
00:03:44.760 and they tell them what to do next i call it the tell check next loop and it sounds great this is
00:03:49.560 what i've been taught this is how my first boss delegated to me they told him what to do the check
00:03:53.240 they got it done they told me what to do next of course very productive until you get to about 10
00:03:57.240 or 12 employees and the whole thing breaks apart and you feel overwhelmed transformational leadership
00:04:02.200 is completely different number one is we want to start with an outcome let's say the goal was to
00:04:07.240 climb mount rainier we're not going to tell them how to climb them out we're going to tell them what
00:04:11.400 the outcome is which is we're going to get to the top it's 14 000 some feet at the top you're going
00:04:16.200 to be healthy you're going to feel vibrant you're going to be with this crew of people you're going
00:04:19.720 to look around it's going to feel amazing you're going to be in great shape you're going to post
00:04:23.400 the flag down there you can take a picture and you're going to let everybody know you made it to
00:04:26.920 the top of rainier it's going to feel great we really want to define the definition of done this
00:04:32.280 is what completion looks like then we use measurement that's number two we got to measure
00:04:37.080 measure exactly what progress looks like so we can use a simple thing like elevation gain per day so
00:04:42.680 you just ask at the end of every day text me the elevation gain per day that way we can start
00:04:47.960 figuring out is the person on the right track and are they making enough progress each day step three
00:04:53.960 is coach at the coach level now what we do is anytime there's a measurement that's off let's
00:04:58.680 say that one day they made a thousand feet of gain the next day they report back and they only make
00:05:03.320 10 feet. Well, on the coaching staff, you say, hey, I noticed you went from a thousand feet
00:05:06.900 in one day to 10 feet in the next day. What happened? Well, I got lost. Interesting. Well,
00:05:11.520 what happened? I didn't know. And I went down this path and ended up in a ravine. So I had to
00:05:15.480 circle back. So I didn't make a lot of progress that day. What are some options that you could
00:05:19.540 have evaluated to help you avoid doing that in the future? Hmm. Well, I could have bought that
00:05:24.580 map from the guy at the beginning of the trail. Yep. That sounds like a great idea. You coach
00:05:28.780 the person up on the strategy to avoid making the same mistake or make better decisions and that's
00:05:34.340 the difference is when you follow the transformational leadership approach you're transforming the way
00:05:39.260 somebody works so that that way you don't always have to be the smartest person in the room most
00:05:44.080 people get stuck at a level because their team can't grow with them transformational leadership
00:05:48.160 is all about developing your people so that they can give you more so that you can go further which
00:05:53.980 brings us to the third part of leadership, which is to build your talent engine. I have a ton of
00:05:58.880 friends that have businesses and they end up in a position where there's key people that aren't
00:06:04.180 performing, but they can't fire them because it would cause so much pain in their life. They keep
00:06:08.700 them around. In many ways, they feel hostage to an individual. They know they're not great,
00:06:13.360 but they're not that bad, but they're definitely the reason they're not able to grow. And that
00:06:17.820 becomes really tough. And what I've discovered is that if we don't build a process for identifying
00:06:23.620 great people and bring them onto our team and developing them and keeping them around then
00:06:28.360 we'll always be at the mercy of the worst performing person in our company and for many
00:06:33.280 businesses that person's holding back all the potential growth in profit so to do this at the
00:06:38.320 high level there's three things you got to get great at you have to acquire talent you have to
00:06:42.700 train talent and you have to retain talent so the skill we need to develop is acquiring talent every
00:06:48.340 business has two engines they have the engine that gets the customers and they have the engine that
00:06:53.140 gets the talent or the team.
00:06:54.920 And if all you do is spend 99% of your time
00:06:57.720 building the customer engine to get new customers,
00:07:00.820 but you don't build the engine to identify
00:07:03.160 and bring in great talent into your business,
00:07:05.760 then you won't be able to synchronize with the demand.
00:07:08.320 Maybe you've experienced this,
00:07:09.420 where you feel like you've grown a lot
00:07:11.120 and your calendar just explodes and you're overwhelmed
00:07:13.820 and you just want things to slow down
00:07:14.920 because you can't hire fast enough.
00:07:16.740 Not being able to hire fast enough is just as bad
00:07:19.880 as not building a marketing engine to get customers.
00:07:22.500 Those are two things that have to happen in parallel,
00:07:24.520 so they come together at the exact same moment.
00:07:26.620 You add 10 new clients, you got that new hire.
00:07:28.820 You add 10 new clients, you add that new hire.
00:07:31.280 You add 10 more clients, you add another hire.
00:07:33.980 And because you know how long it takes you to hire them,
00:07:36.640 you never feel like you're behind
00:07:37.920 because both of them are coming together
00:07:39.900 at the exact same time.
00:07:41.480 That is building a talent acquisition engine.
00:07:44.300 Number two is you gotta train your talent.
00:07:46.400 You have to develop your people.
00:07:48.320 I remember one time a person at an event said,
00:07:49.860 well, what if I hire somebody and I train them all up,
00:07:52.200 and then they leave.
00:07:53.320 And my response was, what if you don't and they stay?
00:07:56.040 What I've discovered is training your talent
00:07:58.440 provides a huge ROI on you saving your time.
00:08:01.920 My philosophy is very simple.
00:08:03.340 We build the people, the people build the business.
00:08:06.420 So you have to invest in not only hiring talent
00:08:09.060 in the right time, but also developing them
00:08:11.160 so they can give you more inside the business.
00:08:13.400 So this is my process to train my team
00:08:15.600 in a way that doesn't take any extra time from me
00:08:18.140 and gets the work done at the same time.
00:08:19.860 I call it the camcorder method.
00:08:21.640 So I always ask myself, what does a 10 out of 10 look like?
00:08:25.040 If somebody's gonna do something for me,
00:08:26.500 what is that criteria I would use to evaluate
00:08:29.280 a 10 out of 10?
00:08:30.220 And then I list what questions I might ask the recipient
00:08:33.700 of that work if it's delivering something for a customer
00:08:36.800 or having somebody build something
00:08:38.260 for another person on the team.
00:08:39.500 We define the criteria of what 10 out of 10 looks like.
00:08:43.260 Then using that criteria,
00:08:44.980 we create training around doing that work.
00:08:48.040 Typically, it's just recording yourself doing the work.
00:08:50.720 So if you're doing marketing right now
00:08:52.020 and you're creating Facebook ads,
00:08:53.440 what does a 10 out of 10 ad look like?
00:08:55.140 Well, it's got a good hook, it's got great copy,
00:08:57.280 it's got a clear call to action.
00:08:58.900 So you can kind of write out the criteria
00:09:01.180 of a great Facebook ad.
00:09:02.540 Then next time you're creating one,
00:09:04.260 just record yourself and talk out loud while you're doing it.
00:09:07.520 Creating the Facebook ad, for example,
00:09:09.660 you can record yourself creating the training
00:09:12.240 to teach somebody else.
00:09:13.480 Why would you do it this way?
00:09:14.740 Because when I hire somebody,
00:09:16.760 I wanna be able to go from zero to hero as fast as possible,
00:09:20.480 which means if I can hire somebody today,
00:09:22.580 sit them in front of the laptop
00:09:23.760 and have them go through all the training links
00:09:26.000 of me doing the work or somebody else on my team
00:09:27.960 that's recorded themselves doing the work.
00:09:30.080 And at the end of the week,
00:09:31.320 40 hours of recording and watching and taking notes,
00:09:34.220 I give them a little assessment
00:09:35.420 to see if they picked up what we were throwing down.
00:09:37.620 I can see if the person picked it up
00:09:39.240 without having to do all the training.
00:09:41.320 Literally 40 hours of my time bought back
00:09:43.840 while I was doing the work that needed to get done
00:09:46.200 using the criteria I've already defined
00:09:47.920 of what 10 out of 10 looks like.
00:09:49.300 This strategy will transform the game for you
00:09:52.520 as you build and grow your business,
00:09:54.020 especially around roles that are repeated,
00:09:56.560 administrative roles, people that do the work that you sell.
00:09:59.800 So get your team to start recording these
00:10:02.060 and put them all in a Google Doc
00:10:03.820 or whatever system you use
00:10:05.140 for your standard operating procedures,
00:10:06.820 and that's called training.
00:10:08.200 The hack here is to train your team on principles, not tasks.
00:10:11.760 Talk about the right way to do things.
00:10:13.760 Don't tell people exactly how to do them
00:10:15.520 because the principles are universal and evergreen,
00:10:18.640 meaning that regardless if the system changes behind the scenes the principles will always hold
00:10:22.960 true telling somebody how to click a button and go and create an email that'll become stale very
00:10:27.760 quickly number three is to retain the talent one of my favorite ways to do this is use five-year
00:10:33.360 goals see i learned a long time ago if my vision is big enough for everybody in my team's goals
00:10:38.960 and dreams to sit inside of it makes their selfishness and their drive aligned with mine
00:10:44.560 So in the first interview that I do,
00:10:46.840 which is usually the last interview amongst my team,
00:10:48.860 I always ask them five years from now,
00:10:50.580 I want you to paint me a picture,
00:10:51.980 professional, personal, what does that look like?
00:10:54.480 And I write them down.
00:10:55.500 I really wanna know because then I use that
00:10:58.220 to peg the work we're doing to their own goals
00:11:01.740 to share with them how what we're trying to accomplish now
00:11:04.420 is aligned with their goals
00:11:05.480 so we can do something bigger together.
00:11:07.320 It allows me to push them to become better,
00:11:10.300 but it's self-invested.
00:11:11.660 They want to do it so that they get to develop
00:11:14.280 into the person that achieves the goals
00:11:15.880 they set out for themselves.
00:11:17.200 My whole philosophy is I wanna invest in their development.
00:11:20.040 I wanna build the people.
00:11:21.940 One time I was hiring an individual
00:11:23.420 to join my marketing team and that team was gonna grow.
00:11:26.560 And honestly, what I really needed is to hire somebody
00:11:28.940 that has experience building a marketing team.
00:11:31.940 I remember this person I was interviewing said to me,
00:11:33.720 my five-year goals is to have my own marketing agency,
00:11:36.260 which is awesome because I need somebody to come in
00:11:39.500 and learn how to develop the team
00:11:41.260 to essentially act like an agency
00:11:42.980 for the rest of the business.
00:11:44.280 that's an aligned goal once i knew that then i could map all the training all the projects all
00:11:49.880 of their desires to developing themselves and understanding the skills i taught them how the
00:11:54.680 business worked all with the mission that someday they could be ready to go start their own agency
00:11:59.160 now some people would say that's crazy why would you do that and then they leave the truth is if
00:12:03.240 you do that they'll probably stay because they continue to grow and develop people want to stay
00:12:08.120 in an environment where they get to become more where they get to become better where they get to
00:12:12.600 sharpened steel by working with other people they respect and admire and usually by the time they
00:12:17.960 want to go do their own thing they've been with you for four or five or six years honestly that's
00:12:21.720 a long time and if they've shown up every day driven to learn how to do that for themselves
00:12:27.000 to support you that's better than the person not having that desire not investing in themselves
00:12:31.640 not wanting to become that person and you always having to push them forward which brings us to the
00:12:36.040 fourth part of leadership which is simple become the person the big idea is that leadership is
00:12:41.800 is about becoming the person.
00:12:43.420 The person who can recruit, develop, and retain top talent.
00:12:47.700 The person who can show up powerfully all the time,
00:12:50.800 not just sometimes, all the time.
00:12:52.520 And at the end of the day,
00:12:53.580 that's really what leadership is.
00:12:55.380 It's in many ways becoming the person you needed
00:12:58.300 in your darkest days.
00:12:59.860 Because that person that shows up with kindness,
00:13:03.900 directness, have achieved these levels of success
00:13:06.980 that you admire, that's really what we're striving for.
00:13:09.560 And that's what your team's gonna see.
00:13:10.940 I remember one time I was coaching with my fitness coach, Alan, and I asked him, why
00:13:14.880 don't you post on social media?
00:13:16.760 I mean, you're 250 pounds of lean muscle.
00:13:19.440 You're incredibly inspiring, your physique, your commitment, all these things.
00:13:23.000 And he's like, man, I just don't want to be one of those guys.
00:13:26.140 And I'm like, what's one of those guys?
00:13:27.880 He's like, you know, just persons always posting their photos and make it all about social
00:13:31.840 media and this and that.
00:13:33.460 And I go, interesting.
00:13:34.760 And as we were working out, I looked around the room and you had Schwarzenegger, you had
00:13:38.700 Seabomb, you had Ronnie Coleman.
00:13:40.460 it. And I said, did those people inspire you? He said, well, hell yeah. They're the people that
00:13:44.660 made me want to become the person I am today. And I said, interesting. Imagine if those people
00:13:49.300 never posted a photo. I want to encourage you to consider, maybe you're being a little selfish
00:13:54.960 because I know that there's a kid that follows you and because you don't post, he's not being
00:13:59.740 inspired. And it was crazy because when I asked him that, he then told me, he's like, it's kind
00:14:03.500 of nuts because I used to weigh 320 pounds. I'm like, what? He's like, yeah, man, I lost 100
00:14:08.100 pounds in like six months and i decided to get into fitness that story those photos that journey
00:14:15.860 that's inspiring he became the person he needed most in his darkest days but he didn't tell
00:14:21.300 anybody so at the end of the day leadership is not only about developing yourself but it's sharing
00:14:26.740 your transformation with the world that is the big idea the more you become the more you can give
00:14:32.420 the better you get the better your team will get the bigger your team is the bigger you will be
00:14:38.580 it's a forcing function most people don't want to share online because they're worried that people
00:14:43.300 that follow them are going to judge them because they judge other people it's kind of funny because
00:14:47.540 how you judge other people is the fears you create for yourself it's like my father-in-law where he's
00:14:52.340 always leaving reviews on other people's site and then he won't post his artwork on the internet
00:14:56.260 because he's worried people are going to judge his artwork well of course because you're the
00:14:59.220 person judging everybody else's service leaving reviews everywhere you can't be a pro-rated level
00:15:04.100 reviewer and not have a fear that people are going to judge and review your artwork when you post it
00:15:09.780 so a lot of people they fear the judgment but it's self-inflicted because of the way they see
00:15:14.660 the world the world isn't as it is the world is as you are so the way to overcome that fear is
00:15:19.220 make it about serving people make it about the other person don't make it about you don't make
00:15:23.540 it about i'm worried what other people are going to think make it about i wonder how many people
00:15:27.300 I could inspire. That shifts everything and it makes it about others, not about themselves.
00:15:32.700 Leadership. That's where I spend 99% of my time. But if you want to learn the only four skills you
00:15:37.720 need to build a billion dollar company, click the link and I'll see you on the other side.