Dan Martell - August 09, 2024


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


Episode Stats

Length

15 minutes

Words per Minute

221.91519

Word Count

3,480

Sentence Count

125


Summary

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

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
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.