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

I'm going to take you on the Journey of how I went from hating the business I had built and feeling like no one was on my side to today building a business where I'm pumped to hang out with my team in love every second of my day and it all comes down to this one skill leadership the first part of leadership that you need to understand it's this your team doesn't work for you you work for your team so I moved to Silicon Valley and I got exposed to a completely different way people let I

had these 26 yearold kids running around raising hundreds of millions of dollars leading these companies of a thousand employees the way I thought you managed people was a certain way and I was exposed to a completely different style that's when I learned the three levels of leadership the first leader is the title leader this is maybe the person you've worked with when you worked at like a entrylevel job or just starting in your career this person pretty much says the words I'm your boss do what I tell you to do because they have a title

they think everybody's got to listen to them so most people get it wrong and then they have people that are leaving them all the time because they're paying them a little bit more an hour an extra 50 cents an hour person leaves they don't quit the company they quit their boss usually a title leader worst way to lead people the second level is the trader this is a person that says if you do this for me I will trade you for these things the challenge with that style is that the moment somebody else will trade

them for more they're going to bounce they're going to leave you the highest level of leadership the third level is the servant leader when you show up as a servant leader every meeting isn't about let's get done it's literally starting with the intention of how do I help these people how do I show up for this team it's I'm not here to get them to produce for me I'm here to support them in their production it's a different intention but it changes the whole frame the whole conversation and it builds trust no leader will be

able to affect massive change if their team doesn't trust them when all you're doing is trading with other people or telling people do this cuz I'm the boss then it doesn't create trust the servant comes in and says hey I just want you to win and if we all win we all get to succeed together how can I help that is a person that's being of service most people start off and they're just like I paying you do what I told you to do that's the title leader the trader is like okay how do I

get them motivated all right I'll give them an incentive program the problem is is that if all you're doing is an incentive program there's no commitment to the mission there literally just there because it's transactional the servant leader has stickiness because they're there to serve the individual and the person respects the leader that says hey I'm not telling you what to do I'm here to support you where are you stuck where are your challenges my job is to unblock you that team member will be loyal to the leader which brings us to the second part

of leadership which is leading without doing their job most people the way they lead it's not their fault they were never taught any other way they hire people and then as they hire people they tell them what to do they go off they try to get busy with their own projects and they come back they check in on people and make sure they're moving forward and they're doing what they do the challenge with that is that there's only so many people you can do that with until you wake up in the morning and you spend

your whole 8 hour maybe 10 hour day just telling people what to do and check in on people and it feels heavy the different style is what I call transformational leadership in that style we focus on a completely different set of objectives and by our example we unblock people so they can do more without needing us and that way the bigger the business gets the less time it needs from the leader so you don't end up building a business you grow to hate here's exactly how it works transactional leaders do this they tell people what

to do they check that they got it done and they tell them what to do next I call it the tell check next Loop and it sounds great this is what I've been taught this is how my first boss delegated to me they told him what to do the check they got it done they told me what to do next of course very productive until you get to about 10 or 12 employees and the whole thing breaks apart you feel overwhelmed transformational leadership is completely different number one is we want to start with an outcome

let's say the goal was to climb Mount rineer we're not going to tell them how to climb the mountain we're going to tell them what 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 to be healthy you're going to feel vibrant you're going to be with this crew of people you're going to look around it's going to feel amazing you're going to be in great shape you're going to post the flag down there you're going to take a picture and you're going to let

everybody know you made it to the top of reineer it's going to feel great we really want to find the definition of done this is what completion looks like then we use measurement that's number two we got to measure measure exactly what progress looks like so we can use a simple thing like elevation gain per day so you just ask at the end of every day text me the elevation gain per day that way we can start figuring out is the person on the right track and are they making enough progress each day step three

is coach at the coach level now what we do is anytime there's a measurement that's off let's say that one day they made 1,000 ft of gain the next day they report back and they only make 10 ft well on the coaching step you say hey I noticed you went from 1,000 ft one day to 10 ft and the next day what happened well I got lost interesting well what happened I didn't know and I went down this path and ended up in a ravine so I had to circle back so I didn't make a

lot of progress that day what are some options that you could have evaluated to help you avoid doing that in the future hm well I could have bought that map from the guy at the beginning of the trail yep that sounds like a great idea you coach the person on the strategy to avoid making the same mistake or make better decisions and that's the difference is when you follow the transformational leadership approach you're transforming the way somebody works so that that way you don't always have to be the smartest person in the room most people

get stuck at a level because their team can't grow with them transformational leadership is all about developing your people so that they can give you more so that you can go further which brings us to the third part of leadership which is to build your talent engine I have a ton of friends that have business businesses and they end up in a position where there's key people that aren't performing but they can't fire them because it would cause so much pain in their life they keep them around in many ways they feel Hostage to an

individual they know they're not great but they're not that bad but they're definitely the reason they're not able to grow and that becomes really tough and what I've discovered is that if we don't build a process for identifying great people and bringing them onto our team and developing them and keeping them around then we'll always be at the mercy of the worst performing person in our company and for many businesses that person's holding back all the potential growth in profit so to do this at the high level there's three things you got to get great

at you have to acquire talent you have to train talent and you have to retain Talent so the skill we need to develop is acquiring Talent every business has two engines they have the engine that gets the customers and they have the engine that gets the talent or the team and if all you do is spend 99% of your time building the customer engine to get new customers but you don't build the engine to identify and bring in great talent into your business then you won't be able to synchronize with the demand maybe you've experienced

this where you feel like you've grown a lot and your calendar just explodes and you're overwhelmed and you just want things to slow down because you can't hire fast enough not being able to hire fast enough is just as bad as not building a marketing engine to get customers those are two things that have to happen in parallel so they come together at the exact same moment you add 10 new clients you got that new hire you add 10 new clients you add that new hire you add 10 more clients you add another hire and

because you know how long it takes you to hire them you never feel like you're behind because both of them are coming together at the exact same time that is building a talent acquisition engine number two is you got to train your talent you have to develop your people I remember one time a person at event said what if I hire somebody and I train them all up and then they leave and my response was what if you don't and they stay what I've discovered is training your talent provides a huge uge Roi on you

saving your time My Philosophy is very simple we build the people the people build the business so you have to invest in not only hiring talent in the right time but also developing them so they can give you more inside the business so this is my process to train my team in a way that doesn't take any extra time from me and gets the work done at the same time I call it the camcorder method so I always ask myself what does a 10 out of 10 look like if somebody's going to do something for

me what is that criteria I would use to evaluate a 10 out of 10 and then I list what questions I might ask the recipient of that work if it's delivering something for a customer or having somebody build something for another person on the team we Define the criteria of what 10 out of 10 looks like then using that criteria we create training around doing that work typically it's just recording yourself doing the work so if you're doing marketing right now and you're creating Facebook ads what does a 10 out of 10 ad look like

well it's got a good hook it's got great copy it's got a clear call to action so you can kind kind of write out the criteria of a great Facebook ad then next time you're creating one just record yourself and talk out loud while you're doing it creating the Facebook ad for example you can record yourself creating the training to teach somebody else why would you do it this way because when I hire somebody I want to be able to go from Zero to Hero as fast as possible which means if I can hire somebody

today sit them in front of the laptop and have them go through all the training Links of me doing the work or somebody else on my team that's recorded themselves do doing the work and at the end of the week 40 hours of recording and watching and taking notes I give them a little assessment to see if they picked up what we were throwing down I can see if the person picked it up without having to do all the training literally 40 hours of my time bought back while I was doing the work that need

to get done using the criteria I've already defined of what 10 out of 10 looks like this strategy will transform the game for you as you build and grow your business especially around roles that are repeated administrative roles people that do the work that you so get your team to start recording these and put them all in a Google doc or whatever system you use for your standard operating procedures and that's called training the hack here is to train your team on principles not tasks talk about the right way to do things don't tell people

exactly how to do them because the principles are Universal and Evergreen meaning that regardless if the system changes behind the scenes the principles will always hold true telling somebody how to click a button and go and create an email that'll become stale very quickly number three is to to retain the talent one of my favorite ways to do this is use fiveyear goals see I learned a long time ago if my vision is big enough for everybody in my team's goals and dreams to sit inside of it makes their selfishness and their Drive aligned with

mine so in the first interview that I do which is usually the last interview amongst my team I always ask them 5 years from now I want you to paint me a picture professional personal what does that look like and I write them down I really want to know because then I use that to Peg the work we're doing to their own goals to share with them how what we're trying to accomplish now is aligned with their goals so we can do something bigger together it allows me to push them to become better but it's

self-invested they want to do it so that they get to develop into the person that achieves the goals they set out for themselves my whole philosophy is I want to invest in their development I want to build the people one time I was hiring an individual to join my marketing team and that team was going to grow and honestly what I really need is to hire somebody that has experience building a marketing team I remember this person I was interviewing said to me my 5-year goals is to have my own marketing agency which is awesome

because I need somebody to come in and learn how to develop the team to essentially act like an agency for the rest of the business that's an aligned goal once I knew that then I could map all the training all the projects all of their desires to developing themselves and understanding the skills I taught them how the business worked all with the mission that someday they could be ready to go start their own agency now some people would say that's crazy why would you do that and then they leave the truth is if you do

that they'll probably stay because they continue to grow and develop people want to stay in an environment where they get to become more where they get to become better where they get to sharpen Steel by working with other people they respect and admire and usually by the time they want to go do their own thing they've been with you for four or five or six years honestly that's a long time and if they've shown up every day driven to learn how to do that for themselves to support you that's better than the person not having

that desire not investing in themselves not wanting to become that person and you always having to push them forward which brings us to the fourth part of leadership which is simple become the person the big idea is that leadership is about becoming the person the person who can recruit develop and retain top talent the person who can show up powerfully all the time not just sometimes all the time and at the end of the day that's really what leadership is it's in many ways becoming the person you needed in your dark days because that person

that shows up with kindness directness have achieved these levels of success that you admire that's really what we're striving for and that's what your team's going to see remember one time I was coaching with my fitness coach Allan and I asked him why don't you post on social media I mean your 250 lbs of lean muscle you're incredibly inspiring your physique your commitment all these things he's like man I just don't want to be one of those guys and I'm like what's one of those guys he's like you know just person always posting their photos

and make it all about social media and this and that and I go interesting and as we were working out I looked around the room and you had Schwarzenegger you had seum you had Ronnie Coleman and I said did those people inspire you he said well hell yeah they're the people that made me want to become the person I am today and I said interesting imagine if those people never posted a photo I want to encourage you to consider maybe you're being a little selfish cuz I know that there's a kid that follows you and

because you don't post he's not being inspired and it was crazy cuz when I asked him that he then told me he's like it's kind of nuts cuz I used to weigh 320 lbs I'm like what he's like yeah man I lost 100 lb in like 6 months and I decided to get into fitness that story those photos that Journey that's inspiring he became the person he needed most in his darkest days but he didn't tell anybody so at the end of the day leadership is not only about developing yourself but it's sharing your transformation

with the world that is the big idea the more you become the more you can give the better you get the better your team will get the bigger your team is the bigger you will be it's a forcing function most people don't want to share online because they're worried that people that follow them are going to judge them because they judge other people it's kind of funny because how you judge other people is the fears you create for yourself it's like my father-in-law where he's always leaving reviews on other people's site and then he won't

post his artwork on the internet because he's worried people are going to judge his artwork well of course cuz you're the person judging everybody else's service leaving reviews everywhere you can't be a pro-rated level reviewer and not have a fear that people are going to judge and review your artwork when you post it so a lot of people they fear the Judgment but it's self-inflicted because of the way they see the world the world isn't as it is the world is as you are so the way to overcome that fear is make it about serving

people make it about the other person don't make it about you don't make it about I'm worried what other people are going to think make it about I wonder how many people I could Inspire that shifts everything and it makes it about others not about themselves leadership that's where I spend 99% of my time but if you want to learn the only four skills you need to build a billion dollar company click the link and I'll see you on the other side