Watch these 57 minutes if you want to 10x your business in 2022..

Summary

• As the co-founder and co-CEO of Acquisition.com, I focus on sharing our best practices with the entrepreneurial community for free, without selling courses or coaching.
• In a recent talk, I emphasized the importance of understanding why people get stuck in their growth and advocating doing the opposite to succeed.
• Leadership growth requires self-awareness, breaking limiting beliefs, setting ambitious goals, knowing how to motivate a team, and maintaining humility.
• It's crucial for individuals to be coachable, willing to adapt, humble in their approach, and ready to commit to continuous learning and improvement.
• Through various roles in my career, I learned the significance of being both a high-level producer and a capable leader, inspiring others, and adapting to the needs of a scaling business.
• Success often involves discomfort and the willingness to step out of one's comfort zone to achieve growth.
• As a leader, it's necessary to develop the ability to command respect and to motivate and guide a team toward shared goals.
• Managers should seek to help their teams grow, as this will directly contribute to business growth.
• To foster a successful culture, I stress the importance of transparency, clear expectations, and a shared understanding that all team members must contribute to growth for a company to thrive.
• Handling staff turnover in a high-growth environment requires clear communication of expectations and the understanding that not everyone may grow at the pace required by the company.
• I recommend focusing on self-improvement through targeted learning, seeking the right books or resources to address specific areas where growth is needed.

Video

How To Take Action

I would suggest starting with self-awareness. Identify any limiting beliefs holding you back and work to break them. Set ambitious goals and reflect on what fears may be keeping you stuck. Do the opposite of what's keeping you in place.

A good way of doing this is to be coachable and humble. Adapt to new situations, learn continuously, and seek out resources that target your specific areas for growth, such as impactful books or articles. Remember, being coachable doesn't just mean being willing to change – it means actively pursuing it.

To inspire others as a leader, you must be both a high-level producer and adaptable to your team's needs. Show your ability to step out of your comfort zone, command respect, and guide others towards shared goals. Emphasize transparency, set clear expectations, and make sure everyone understands their role in the company's growth.

Managing a team well means focusing on helping them grow. This growth directly links to the business's success. Regularly communicate their progress and be clear about your expectations. Everyone won't grow at the same pace, so be prepared for staff changes and maintain clear communication throughout.

Lastly, I would say success involves discomfort. Don't shy away from it but embrace it as a sign of progression. Be a source of inspiration and guidance for your team and always remain open to learning and improving, no matter your current level of success.

Quotes by Leila Hormozi

"I would rather people have more on their plate than not enough"

– Leila Hormozi

"I didn't hire you to check a box, I hired you to solve a problem that I have"

– Leila Hormozi

"If you are the leader and you want to be a leader in this company… you have to see your team as the product that creates the other thing"

– Leila Hormozi

"I would rather hire people who like work and are high producers"

– Leila Hormozi

"I think a lot of people want to move up very quickly and they want to skip all the hard to become a leader and you cannot because you won't have poise"

– Leila Hormozi

Full Transcript

what is up welcome to my channel my name is layla hormozy and if you don't know me i am co-founder and co-ceo of acquisition.com which is a portfolio of businesses that does about 85 million per year in revenue i don't have anything to sell no courses no coaching nothing to that sort uh our goal really as a company is actually just to document and share all of our best practices as a company and put them out there for free to the entrepreneurial community and so this is part of that and so i actually want to share with you today a video or a video a talk i did for dan martell his company and dan martel is a friend of mine and also somebody who i've learned so much from dan is actually you should really need to go follow him on youtube he puts out so much insane knowledge and he is one of the best in class at scaling sas businesses and i was absolutely honored to talk to his company because honestly he runs insanely tight ship he is a great culture and just like absolutely hungry driven teammates and so if you want to figure out how to build business uh like dan's just go follow his stuff on youtube but that being said i talked to them really about 10x leadership growth the theme for them this year was really how do you 10x and you know looking at our companies and how fast they've grown he said i want you to come and talk about the experience like how do employees and leaders and owners get to the next level and so that's really what i break down is like what are the levels in the business for leaders for owners etc and then why do so many people stay stuck at certain levels and then how do you get past that and that's really what i break down and so i like to approach it from how and why are most people stuck and let's go do the opposite of that rather than like how do you grow i think everyone knows how you grow it's like be ambitious and hungry and all this it's like okay that's though let's talk about why you actually stay stuck and let's not do those behaviors and so i hope you find this valuable and i will see you on the next video i'm gonna kick this off by um letting everybody know who layla is to me and why i appreciate her so much but um layla we probably met a couple of years ago like i don't even know it was through taki yes yeah that was the first time we met taki brought you and alex in to speak uh to his high-end mastermind talk he's my coach and you stuck around uh for a bit and we had like dinner together and that was the first time i'd heard of gym launch well not heard of it i heard of it prior just because you guys came out of the world and just did this and what i loved about listening to you and alex share your your journey uh alex being your uh other half um was that you guys brought a real operational mind to things as and as we've talked about this hundreds of times layla is in the world of coaching um there's very few operational people many of them are just trying to sell you the next kind of hot you know amazon you know crypto like they're just they're jumping on the next thing but they actually don't want to scale and grow and run businesses and um you know you guys were building gym launch and then you had alan the software company i had the opportunity to work with you and alex directly on the software side for a year and just see you guys grow and continue to push things is super inspirational and when kelsey and i were talking about who would we like to come in and breathe some thoughts into the team obviously i thought of you so layla could you give the the quick short story on the gym launch journey uh where you got started where you're at today yeah yeah um you know we started gym launch uh alex and i actually started it from the ground so we went out to gyms and we would do marketing for them and we would go into these gyms and we would sell so i'd fly to hawaii he'd fly to virginia whatever that was how it started turned into deploying a sales team to do that model not very scalable and so reluctantly we ended up out of desperation almost going bankrupt saying i guess we should do this whole coaching thing we see everyone talking about which we were super reluctant to do because it looked scammy right and so we turned it into a coaching business which we call the licensing business and that is when the business took off and so i think the first year which we switched the model in the beginning uh we ended up doing like seven million that year and it was only for really a half year of the new model the second year we did uh i want to say was it 27 million and then we did 35 million and then we did 37 million and then covet hit and we did like 30 million not a good industry to be in yeah yeah but you know this year coming back uh we're going to secede that number again and probably do around 40. so it's um it's which is freaking awesome so it uh it grew really really quickly um and because of that you know i had no management experience at all um i had no leadership experience in fact i turned down all management jobs i've been offered prior to that because i was like yeah it doesn't sound fun to me uh and then i became kind of the internal leader of the company while alex was the external leader and that's how we kind of have grown each of the companies uh jim launch was our first then we did prestige labs which was a supplement line and then alan which dan knows of uh was a software company and now we are focused on what we call acquisition.com which is really a holding company and what when you look at that journey layla what are kind of the two biggest challenges along the first four or five years that you guys had to overcome i think that you know it's funny because like there's all the operational challenges but i honestly think it's just beliefs and then it's um thinking how do i break my own beliefs and then how do i break the beliefs of everyone on the team so that they can stay here you know and i i went up to my team actually in 2019 and i said based on the stats 90 of you won't be here in five years like based on the stats of the fast growing company and i was like and here's why and i want to give you all of the tools possible so that you know what to do so you can be here in five years because like i'm gonna do what i have to do to serve the company and serve the clients but i need you to keep up that's essentially what i'm asking you to do and like i'm keeping up it's hard as hell but i'm keeping up but i need everyone else to keep up and so i think it's being able to break your own beliefs and then help break everyone else's beliefs around you because i think that's what a true teammate does and when you say beliefs what were what were some of those that come to mind for yourself i mean i think some of it is like you know the goals that you set for the company like dan i think it's what is possible why 10x right so well why not that's really the question it's like why should it not be 10x well i hang out with you and alex so i can't i feel stupid even saying 100 million like he like this is that's another thing that everybody hears but i you know i was just with alex and layla in phoenix like i texted them almost every week like you got to get around people that make you feel like you're just not playing bigger and then it's the jeez i can't i can't not do it you know but so but i mean this is interesting because you had to go to the team in 2019 and say like we want you to be here but the truth is is that there's a series of beliefs that you may or may not even be aware that you have that's going to stop you from taking action that's going to support the customer and the team and that will be the reason that you're not here not because you're not a good person not because you didn't try hard or you didn't do the work but it's because there might be just what do you think the the beliefs are that they they need to kind of start auditing for themselves like how did you do it for yourself as a leader yeah i think most of the beliefs that people have are just beliefs rooted in fear right and so something i really like that i can't remember where i heard it which is um believe the evidence rather than your own beliefs that you know squirm around your head because i think a lot of times the beliefs that keep people stuck where they are stuck like not performing where they want to perform are not rooted in any evidence at all they may be rooted off like a one-off time that they did something incorrectly or they didn't perform or they're they're not based on the evidence of the hundred other times you did anything or that all the companies that have been able to do this it's based on fear and so i think that if everyone can just look at what the evidence is and base their behaviors off of that and just act like the evidence is the belief and ignore the crap that goes on their head and remember that's just survival um i think that that's what i try to encourage my team to do at least i say that saying a lot i say you got to prove yourself wrong because the things that are in your head like just because you don't believe you can most people before they achieve something don't actually believe they can do it and i think there's like this false belief that like i should believe in myself before i do i'm like are you i think kidding me i didn't believe i could do gym launch i didn't believe that we would hit the numbers we said we were going to i was like i was terrified the whole time i was like i don't know how this is going to happen but like i'm just going to try as if it were possible even though i don't even believe it myself yet i love that the the yeah i think a lot of times we look at the historical track record to predict the future but we don't look at like the evidence of of the growth to say oh well i'm going there there there not this way um so that sounds like a big one 2019 was probably a big year for you guys to kind of like communicate that to the team try to get them on board what what other big challenge did you face as an organization you know in that early days i think the biggest challenge is always leadership because um the biggest challenge i had was bringing people in in the beginning and they were fit for the company at that time but when the company is at 10 million versus 40 million the kind of leadership that's needed is very different and not everyone's going to have the same motivation that alex and i have to grow as people because it's very uncomfortable you know i think everyone congratulates you that congratulations on the growth but you're like it feels terrible at the time because you're just constantly shedding who you were and the things that worked for you and it's like now you know you've been hitting everything with a hammer and you're really good at hitting things with a hammer and now they're like here's the screwdriver and the saw and you're like i don't know how to use this and i don't think that everyone has the tenacity to get through that and so i think the hardest line as somebody that owns a company runs a company is when do i know if it's me versus them right like how do i know if this and i try to hire for that i think everyone does right um but i i just do my best to communicate to them what i'm trying to do and what i need them to do to meet me halfway so that we can create the kind of people that we need out of the people who are already here who can propel this to the next level if i can go from a company that's at zero to 50 to 100 million why can't you right like i'm not special we're made of the same sorry i don't know if i can swear um you can totally swear i'm just oh okay i thought you said don't i was like oh gosh no no no no we uh no we're a colorful team what what did anybody make the transition from 10 to 40 and if so what did you think you saw in them that was different from everybody else yeah um i want to say we have about out of the leadership um like right now i want to say that we have 10 core leaders and out of those 10 there's three people who made it from like they grew from the ground up and are now in leadership roles and not disclosed but in about a week one of them is getting announced as the new ceo um and that there's actually interesting transition that i think they're able to make they were able to go from high level producer to managers to leaders to owners right and i think there's only a few people that can make it to owners because there's not many needed in the company and it's a really hard thing to do but for them it was their absolute coachability like they were the most moldable people that i've ever met and it actually so happens that they are a married couple who have replaced alex and i um but i think that what i what i saw in each of them and what i saw on the husband because he came in first was absolute humility like if i told him he was it's like he already knew everything he had done wrong he never had an ego about anything he still never does he has no ego it never gets in the way he always puts the company first he always puts the team first he always assumes he is wrong first he never puts himself on a pedestal um almost to a fault that's what we have to probably work on more than anything and then on the other side the other woman um again her willingness to learn anything you know i told her in the very beginning she said you know i think i'm cut out for this operations director of operations role in the co role and i said well because i just let go of my co at the time um and i said well i'm going to do the role for a while and i just don't know if you have the experience i probably want to bring in some with more so you're gonna have to really prove it to me and her ability to um i think a lot of times people wonder why they don't get promoted it's because you're doing two-thirds of your freaking job right like anyone could look and be like yeah dude because you don't do half the on your job description she did everything on her job description plus like ended up getting to like half of mine and then eventually she literally told me that she would look at my job description i had for myself and just start taking everything and she would do it without asking before i even knew it was done so like the last two quarters ago for the quarterly meetup i do all the planning and i used to run it and all that stuff um i was getting ready for it and my assistant was like oh don't do any of that i was like wow she's like oh maggie did literally all of it already i was like what she made the presentation she already outlined the company goals she believes they're correct she did everything and i you know i went looked at it and i was like honestly some of this is better than what i would do you know and i think that's because she just has that drive that she's like i want to succeed and i want to do that and so i think it's taking that initiative and taking being sure you're doing 100 of your job and then if you want to level up go take go do half of the person above you's job right um and then the other side of that is i think that for anyone in a leadership position is the humility um and i think that sometimes it's misconstrued which you've probably seen in the stand which is like there's being insecure and then there's having ego and it's neither of those right um it's in the middle which is you have a good sense of self and you are um i think you have a proper view of yourself like you're not insecure you understand that you're a fallible human you make mistakes sometimes but you're not inflated ego where you think you're right all the time and it's hard to find people that sit in the middle because i think especially once you have more to lose because you've made it higher and higher in the company you start acting like you've got more to lose and acting arrogantly and getting an ego about things and being less amenable and less open to what others have to say because you've made your way up and you think you know more i love that layla uh before we get to other stuff i think you had a presentation you put together um i did yeah i didn't know i just didn't know well yeah i did honestly i i could just do q a with you you can do whatever you guys want to do yeah no no let's let's i'd love to see what you put together yeah your clarity of thinking is is always off the chart so i'd love to well what kelsey kind of explained was that um and i don't know if we have time for the we have 40 minutes yeah that's fine um is that you guys were talking about 10x leadership growth and how to grow in the company i think some of you kind of said like how do you know obviously not everyone can be a quote leader in the company but i think it's just like what does the term of leader actually mean and it's like distinguishing that between like a job and a position in the company um versus like the culture so i kind of put something together based on that so um the quote that i wanted to start with because this is something i share with my team a lot and especially people are new in our company this is on our culture deck which is what should it feel like to work at gym launch right and what should it feel like to work here um i said it's sort of like learning to ride a bike down a steep unpaved hill with no brakes um i think that the number one piece of feedback that i hear from people when i say like how's the new job going which is whether it's in one of my companies and one of the companies we have acquired they're like oh i feel like i'm drinking from a fire hose and so i think that's just like the first expectation is that it should feel uncomfortable the whole time i think that if you're not uncomfortable in the business then the business probably isn't growing and you're just maintaining or you're slowly dying and so it's good to be uncomfortable and i think eventually uncomfortable becomes the new comfortable um that being said what i kind of wanted to go over is just um three levels of growth that i see for teammates um and then the beliefs the traits and skills that go with those i'm not going to go into the skills so much because that's a little bit more nitty-gritty and i'd rather focus on the beliefs and traits because i feel like this team that's probably what you're looking for it's like in order to get to the next level what do i need to believe and who do i need to become right and then the skills kind of go along with that because if you are that person you believe those things you will go acquire those skills and then lastly is i like to think of things in um how do i mess this up right so if i'm like how do i grow the business i think a lot of people are like that's such an amorphous question i don't know how to grow the business so i'm like well how do you ruin the business right and so what i ask people is they're like well how do i grow in my job i'm like well how do you you know stay stuck and they're like what i'm like yeah how would you guarantee that you never get a promotion they're like uh and i'm like tell me and then they write it down and then i say cool now do the opposite and then you'll probably get a promotion right and so i like to use that frame to think um now i don't do anything like fancy and i don't have any cool names for anything in here because this is just like what i have communicated my team and what makes sense to me and it's just easily laid out and so nomenclature is not something that's super important to me um so if it's a little dry that's just how i kind of do things um i think of it like three levels first level is going to be a producer right it's someone who's able to create positive business impact through their technical expertise their influence and their vision i think that a lot of times with loss on people they think producer they think oh you don't have any power you have any influence and that's just absolutely absurd and wrong some of the best people in my company are absolute producers they're not leaders and they're not managers but they are leaders in who they are as a person the second level to that would be a manager right i consider that to be somebody who's responsible for supervising and motivating employees that are in the direction that the business is going and i think that that is a very important point because dan you've probably seen this you bring in someone that's a manager at one company you bring them to this company they're motivating and they're supervising in the wrong direction because maybe it's what the last company wanted them to do maybe it's the culture of the old company and so i think it's really important as a manager you don't bring those old practices you have to adapt to the company that you're in and make sure that you can motivate and supervise people within the constraints of the culture that you're in and then there's leaders and that is uh when i think of a leader and what's the biggest difference between a leader and a manager right and people ask this a lot because i think in our company we have a decent amount of leaders who are like how do i or at least manders who want to know how they can be leaders and i said you have to gain more leverage is essentially what it is and you gain that through rallying people to move toward a vision you have to become inspirational essentially like i don't think i would have any leader in my company who's not inspirational oftentimes people say well i'm not a leader i said i'm not inspired by you like have you heard honestly i'm just like dude have you heard yourself talk do you see how you show up like it's just not inspirational and so i think that people kind of you know brush those things aside but it's like if you can't inspire people they're not going to want to move in the direction you want them to so when i think of a manager i think of someone with two hands when i think of a leader i think of someone with 10 hands and that's just kind of the visual that i put in my mind and i tell my team and then you've got the last level which i you know i'm not really going to go into depth here but i think owner right which is dan right you are essentially resource allocator the person that's ultimately responsible for the results of leaders managers and producers and when i say resource allocator it's fiscal and human capital i think a lot of people just think fiscal but i think the most important is human capital and i think dan would be able to speak to that you know it's who are you bringing into the business how are you attracting talent how are you creating a the business into a product that attracts people that want to work there kind of like what you said like i'm not gonna you're not gonna work here if the goal is one million it's like well because you're looking what resources can i bring in to allocate to this and so i think that looking at what you guys want to do for next year because the goal is 35 million is that correct yep or no next year is 24. 24 million okay the the phrase that i imprint in my mind this is actually from a presentation that i did from when we met went from uh doing about 25 million to i think it was 36 million i don't i had a slide with the numbers and i didn't know if i should have it but um efficiency is important adaptability is imperative and i think that the reason for that is a lot of people get really stuck on making something really perfect and being absolutely perfect rather than focusing on adaptability and most importantly adaptability as a person you know what i mean because of this which is technology is going to keep going and you guys are front line of that you know this is sas academy this is you know you guys are involved with software every day it's growing extremely fast and we can't even keep up with it and so it's like if you want to have even a slight chance to keep up with what's happening in the world right now you have to be an adaptable person efficient companies and efficient people are as successful as their environments allow them to be whereas adaptable companies create their own success despite the environment i look at the year of covid think how many companies said well i'm i'm in you know in person i can i mean i can tell in person gyms in person restaurants they're like i'm screwed i know people that made more during the year of covid our most successful gyms actually made more during covid than they did the year prior and that's because they succeeded despite their environment that's because of the kind of teams they were i looked at them i was like i know the reason they're succeeding it's because of who the owner is and who the people on their teams are because i know them they hop on calls like this and so what i want you guys to be able to identify right now is if you could put in the chat do you consider yourself one a producer drop a one two a manager drop a two or three a leader drop a three i just want you guys to be able to identify so as we go through this you can kind of it's catered to you and you can take it personally the second thing is i would love if you guys could you know whether it's a notepad on your computer a notepad on your desk or on your phone just write down just make a little column and on one side you can just write strength and on the other side write area of opportunity because what i want to talk about is what it looks like to be at each of those levels and then what keeps you stuck if you can identify what that is or where you're lacking right now then you can say cool i know all my goals for this next quarter but like what am i going to work on as a person where am i actually just did this exercise layla with the whole company the strengths and weaknesses so they they just got out of that so they've got it front and center oh well then just keep it to the side right but you can add to it yeah so the first one is when i'm thinking of producers and i'm thinking of in a fast growth company i think that's really a caveat to this guys i think the reason dan you probably wanted me to talk is because the company grew quickly and you want these companies to grow quickly that's what you guys are aiming to do and so it's like how do people in these kind of companies grow quickly well one is i look for people when i'm hiring someone for a producer position right which is you could call it a high-level individual contributor and i say high level because i don't want just an individual contributor i want someone as a high level individual contributor right the belief is that to lead the way you must first go the way so i can give you an example of this which is the reason i was always offered management positions at my job is i remember i worked at the smoothie cafe and it was in the engineering campus of a college and i worked there for five years and when i came in i was like this job sucks i was like everyone here is so upset every day like if you've ever met engineers where like mechanical electric whatever when they're going through their phd programs they like hate the world they hate their lives they're just very upset all the time and i was like this is no fun i'm like a fun person i'm like upbeat like this is not my good time and i remember talking to my dad about it and he was like you know i mean you could probably make a difference and i was like i don't know i don't fit in here like i'm like everyone else's engineers that are working here i'm like in exercise science and like working out and all this stuff and so i said you know what i'm gonna treat it like a game and i'm just gonna say i wonder how many people i can get to smile here and so i worked the cash register and i looked at it like a video game i was like how i'm gonna smile all the time and i'm gonna smile my co-workers i'm gonna smile people coming in and all i'm gonna do is aim to just make their day amazing and so i was like if i give everyone a compliment it'll make their day amazing and so i looked at it i remember thinking of it like a video game probably because being a cash register person is not exciting anyways um and i would as everyone came in i would always look at something that they're wearing something that they were doing something about them and just try and give them a compliment and sometimes they thought it was even weird cause i'm like one guy i was like oh you have really pretty blue eyes and he was like okay but i mean everyone laughed right and um within like three weeks of me doing it the boss at the time came to me was like i need you to be the manager here and i was like why she's like you've literally transformed the culture within a couple weeks she's like people are like happy she's like the co-workers are like it like coming to work she's like you just have an attitude that it inspires people around you and i was like oh i don't want to be a manager but you see my point right which i didn't know at the time what entailed um it's that i think that people underestimate as a producer what you can do and they think oh i can just hide over here because i'm not responsible for people like i don't need i don't have responsibility like the rest of people in this company that's not true at all it's like if you ever want to whether you want to stay in a producer role because there's nothing wrong with that some people get paid a ton of money just stay producers and some people like doing that but if you want to stay in the company because you know you have to continue to grow people don't want to see that you flatlined right because nobody that's an a player wants to work with somebody who's a b or a c player that's just the truth of it so other people are going to point to be like sally hasn't done crap in three years you know what i mean you may have in the first 90 days but you haven't in three years then i think that you have to really think about embodying these traits and when i think of a producer i think of these three that make the triad which is their autonomous just because you have somebody that is overseeing you doesn't mean you don't manage your own time you don't set your own goals you don't uh manage your own growth plan you're driven so you are self-motivated i think oftentimes we think how do i motivate people what i tell my managers a lot is i think how would you demotivate somebody and just don't do any of that a lot of studies have shown you don't motivate people you just demotivate them that's what bad managers do and so the goal is that you find people who are driven and you just let them be driven and then the third piece is industrious which is doing the hard work um i think that everyone wants to like i'm sure dan just like me i want to hire people who are producers who can do the work of five people that's my goal and so as a producer that is what it looks like to be fulfilling that role now if you are somebody who is interested in how do i become a higher level contributor how do i uh contribute more to this team add more value or maybe maybe move up at some point these are the three things that i've seen have been what have debilitated people on my teams from moving up right lack of awareness of their own deficits which i think that's an obvious one if you don't know where you're deficient which it sounds like you guys already did an activity which is awesome um you can't move up but the other two i think are the most important which is because i don't think they're talked about often the first one being the inability to delay gratification so i'll tell you the conversation i had which was with shawn and i can publicly share this sean wouldn't care uh sean is one of the top producing sales guys one of our company and he said i want the chance to be a sales manager and so we're like sean you know the stats on that which they're pretty bad and you're like really good sales guy we don't really want you to even want to be manager but you've been here for a long time we're gonna give you the chance right and about three weeks in he messaged me and he's like coach he's like i just like hate this and i was like what do you hate he was like i just like love the feeling of making a sale and getting money and seeing the commissions and seeing the revenue go up and i hate having to work through other people to do it and i said well of course it's like you're human we all hate that because we want instant gratification because when you do it yourself immediately get the reward laila you did a great job laila did this on the company meeting leila leilala right but when you go through other people you get one thing taken away which is it's not layla anymore it's layla's team leila gets forgotten and the second thing is you don't get that instant gratification you have to work through the other person and then maybe you see the result on the other side and it's not that there's anything wrong with you or you shouldn't be able to be a manager because of this it's that you haven't trained yourself you haven't given yourself enough opportunity to learn that eventually it becomes normal and you and then you seek gratification from watching other people successfully do things that's the first thing the second thing is a lack of people and linguistic skills and i say linguistic because i think language is very important and i think that the way you speak to people often the biggest issues that my leaders have right now is they don't know how to communicate something to somebody without offending them or without causing more conflict it's because i don't think that they have studied language and so i'll tell you about mel mel was our customer she was our customer service lead and at that point i was looking for a customer service manager she said she wanted to shop i was a little nervous because i was like listen your communication skills are not the best people on the team have a hard time communicating with you if you want to go in this position i need you to be able to communicate effectively i do not want to jump in there and communicate on your behalf right and so she said give me two weeks i gave mel two weeks and we met every day and we coached and we talked about it what mel was unable to do was that when somebody had a problem when somebody was complaining about a customer when somebody said something how to step on a meeting mel had no idea how to effectively communicate to that person if they were out of line what they needed to do it's like the words wouldn't come out of her mouth she was so good at what she did people could tell she cared but it was just like the skill wasn't there and so she ended up trying for two weeks and then we actually ended up hiring somebody else she worked with us for about four years but that's why mel said suck and that's why sean is still in his position right those two things these are all learnable we are all humans we're all learning machines so we can all learn anything it's just do you have enough self-motivation to learn it and do you really want what you want now as for managers i think that if how many people in here on a management position need to raise your hand um the what a lot of people see and i'm sure you guys have seen other companies that maybe you've been in is that a lot of people seek management not because they want to serve but because they want to control and so that is why fundamentally when i'm looking at somebody from management position that's the tagline i put in the job description is like management service not control right the best managers i've ever had i'll tell you about lilly for example lily was a frontline customer service manager this is in a different company and she i didn't know this i found out weeks in when we were hiring people that lily was staying for two to three hours after her shift ended to train new people and help them and coach them on how to do their job lily was not a lead she was not a manager she didn't clock in she actually i was actually upset because i was like legally you can't do that um but she literally went behind and i i met with her i said lily why are you doing this she said well they need help and i know how to do this and i was like wow so i actually put lily in that position she ended up being one of the best you know customer service managers that we ever had because her intent was that she cared she didn't want control she felt obligated to hold them accountable and she felt like in order for them to be better people she had to hold them accountable that was her true belief she's like if i care about these people i need to tell them how to be more efficient i need to hold them accountable i need to coach them and that was why lily did such a great job in the role she ended up becoming director of customer service for two of our companies now the traits that someone like lily had she was reliable she was like a freaking rock nobody wants to work for someone that they feel unsafe with they're not going to be able to be creative right so you have to be able to learn how to become the rock for others right the second issue is confident but she wasn't arrogant you know and i think that especially in a company that's looking to grow like you guys are this coming year confidence is being able to say i haven't done this yet but based on my track record i can figure it out and so when a challenge is presented to you you're not concerned you're not wavering you're okay i've not done this but i've done things similar and i can recall that i have overcome those and then organized because i think that um oftentimes i have had great managers who have all those aspects and they think oh i'll have other people on my team be the organized ones it's like no that's not true somebody has to organize all of the people to go in the right direction to align for the business and i feel like this team is very organized but i think it's important to point out that being said how do you stay stuck in a position right and i think that actually this is in my opinion this is you know going from a producer to a manager a leader i think a lot of people know if they want to move out of that role or not and they kind of go into the role with the intention of hey i want to be in this role for a long time or hey i do want to move up but i think the hardest one is actually going from a manager to a leader and i think that these are the reasons that i've seen why people have not been able to move past a lead or a management position into a true leadership role and so the first one is being that they stay stuck in the details rather than being able to zoom in and zoom out and i think this is really relevant because when you're a manager you're talking to people who are most likely interacting with the vendors or the customers or something at the ground level every day and so those people every day don't have the perspective that any leadership has because they're in the nitty-gritty you guys know if you're someone that's doing this and so what seems like a big deal to you might not actually be a big deal to the business and this is what happened with allison allison was in finance and she was a administrative role and she really wanted to become a lead for the the finance department and lead the billing and the ar and all that and i remember that we had a company meeting like this and allison brought up hey you know when we pay out our affiliates uh i really think we need venmo it's becoming a problem and i was like well we pay them out we have wire transfer bank to bank and we have paypal why do we need venmo like how how many people is this a problem she's like a lot of people it's like we need to make this an initiative this quarter and we were like i mean that has a lot like so i said allison can you please go pull up how many people out of our thousand affiliates have asked for this and so she's like okay and she goes and she was like well four over the last six weeks i was like so four people out of a thousand of the last six weeks have asked us and you think it should be a company initiative she was like yeah it's like no and so that's a it's a clear reason why i was like allison i can't promote you because she constantly did that she constantly stayed she was overly concerned with things she should have just been mildly concerned about and sometimes people think oh no it's my my high concern and anxiety that makes me good at things like no it's too detriment much of the time you can be concerned concerned that's great that's going to help you drive the ball forward that's enough to make you move overly concerned debilitates you and gets you to focus on things that don't matter and that is probably the first thing i see of why people can't move out of that management into that leadership the second piece is that they don't take the time to solve their own problems i've seen this a lot in management where especially if they come from companies prior where there's a lot of red tape and there's a lot of approvals and checks and balances if they come into an entrepreneurial company like this or like the one that i run and they're they're not able to solve their own problems and i tell them i'm like i didn't hire you to check a box i hired you to solve a problem that i have i say that to everyone that comes on the team but sometimes it's not taking a heart and sometimes it takes people too long and it's like they can't there's for some reason they don't trust themselves to solve the problem and so what i tell them to do often and what i tell you to do if you don't often solve your problems you constantly just immediately slap kelsey or dan or jared or somebody else on the team have the discipline to sit for 10 minutes alone and say i'm going to make myself sit in silence with nothing around me for 10 minutes and see if i can solve this problem myself almost every time i do this the problem is solved and then they run it by me and i'm like that is exactly what i would have done but it's that it's disciplined thinking right it's saying i need to think about this alone in isolation first before i bring it to anybody else i can probably solve this myself and then the last one is probably the most important in terms of in order to be a leader and to move out of management you have to command respect from others you have to have respect for the team right i would never put someone in a leadership position if the team didn't respect them right the team can drive a leader out is treating your team like employees rather than loyal followers and this is a conversation i had with um my now uh chief operating officer maggie we talked about a year and a half ago about this she said layla she's like what is what's missing for me to really step into this next level role and i was like man it's really hard to put my finger on it because like technically you take all the boxes you hold everyone accountable like she does the job on paper and like excels at it i was like what's that like nuance that's missing i was like i get it it's like you look at them like employees or teammates but not like they should be your loyal followers i was like i look at the team like they are my followers and that's how i treat them that's how i talk to them like i would educate them i would want to them to succeed i would pour into them like i would to the clients that we coach it's the same in fact probably more for the team she was like huh and it was funny because she immediately made the switch and so to kind of uh what showed me that she kind of had made that level up was two quarters later at our leadership meeting we said who wants uh i made an activity together and it was basically to deliver to the executive team and every person had the opportunity to ask an executive for insight on themselves feedback etc and she had twice as many submissions as i did because she literally was able to turn the team into her followers and that's why i told her i said this if it's my team and my followers i can never level up you have to go in there and insert yourself and somehow persuade them to follow you and she was able to do it i thought that was like one of the coolest moments for me but i think a lot of times people see themselves they're like i'm managing i'm doing a job but there's a lot of intangibles you don't think about what makes somebody worth following i think that's a question you have to ask yourself why should people follow me that's what when i do the things i do every day and stay integrity with myself i ask myself that i'm like would i follow me i always want to make sure that what i'm doing behind closed doors i would be proud to tell my team i never want to keep anything i want to be absolutely transparent there's no doors there's nothing it's a window and then the last level is leader right and so i think that this is in one of your your core values dan which is uh the belief of leaders that they grow the team and the team grows the business i think that's the fundamental belief because if you've gone to a level of leadership most likely you're at a point where you cannot yourself do everything right and you can't meticulously even manage it all at a point you have to oversee it in looking at what that looks like i think that in the beginning you asked me the traits that created those people that were able to stick along and that's why i put the first one here is humility which i think i already explained but the other two i think are the two most important for longetivity which are empathy and poise uh poise i would consider is a kind of confidence you cannot get without experience so that is why a lot of people i think want to move up very quickly and they want to skip all the hard to become a leader and you cannot because you won't have poise like people when they see uh i would say two years ago when alex and i would talk on team meetings versus another leader people would say i just know what it is like they just don't have the it factor you guys have i'm like well there's no it factor it's poise it's because i slept in the motels it's because i dug it from the ground up it's because we were there when it was almost gonna crash it's because we got through covid right i didn't quit because if you quit on yourself you don't get poised and i think a lot of people look like how do i become a leader and how to become as good as you know these people on the team or dan without doing that it's like you don't right it's earned and so that's why poise is there it's what you earn in order to become a leader and then lastly is empathy i think that empathy um comes from an ability to when you talk to somebody and this is just the way i like to put it is you're not on opposite sides of the table you sit on the same side when you have conversations it is small but nuanced in sales if you sit on the same side of the table you are more likely to close the sale try it i did it in person all the time i would just pull their chair around it's like we're on the same team yes we can disagree yes we can have differences opinion but we have the same end goal in mind and if you're on the same team if you're in this call right now you have the same angle in mind and so most importantly how do you stay stuck at a level of leadership right because especially in this company i'm sure based on looking at the work terms there's different levels to leadership i think there's three things and if you're even just looking to improve in the state that you're in as leader i think that the first is thinking of i think it's the mindset switch between oh what's the product that we're creating two my product is my team if you are the leader and you want to be a leader in this company of i want to say more than 10 people right you have to see your team as the product that creates the other thing and that's something i explained to my co in the recent past because she was talking a lot about tactical things i said why are you talking about this i said you should be talking about your team she's like oh it's like i don't want updates about these projects like tell me what's going on with the team you know where are we deficient where do we need better people where are you supported right who's doing two-thirds of their job i like to say that a lot it's like who's doing two-thirds of the job description the second piece to it and i think this is for anyone especially who's a newer leader and it looks like we have a lot of new people who could be newer leaders on this call is that you have a too short of a time horizon i think this is a conversation i had with kale and kale a year and a half ago said you know i just you know i don't know really what role is next for me i don't have a super clear vision for myself and i said well i do he was like well what and i was like i mean i think you could be ceo he was like he's like oh i don't think so i said oh that's weird i was like who else would be better in the company i was like who else was here from the beginning did a sales role sales manager role coaching role coaching manager role product role marketing role it's like and now is the manager of the whole company he's like i guess me i was like right he's like well i just don't feel like i'm there and i'm like there's only one reason why he's like what was like all the decisions you propose are short-term minded everything that you propose on the meetings short-term minded you're not thinking of the long-term i said you have to think if this is your company and you're building to a legacy and you want to get to this number in this many years how do you make decisions and it was like the moment that he got that switch the entire team how they how they treat him and how they see him has completely changed because i think the one thing like dan you can look at is you can see the future and you can project out and you can say this is what it's gonna look like in five or ten years and if someone can do that they can cast vision he uh actually recently last week uh did our annual vision presentation to the team and it was like so good i got chills and was crying because i was like this is amazing like he's got it now he's got the vision right and i think that if you want to become a true leader and level up in your leadership skills you have to be able to paint that vision for people if you can paint it for the company they can paint themselves within it and if you can't paint it long enough there's not a long enough road of where the company's going how are they going to see themselves and all their careers and aspirations within it they're not going to and then the last piece is seeking approval and boosting your ego rather than doing what's right for the company and i think i kind of hit on this again with your question dan which is i think a lot of people once they get to a level in the company they're so afraid of losing it and they're so afraid of saying that other people who are newer and have less of a title and who have less experience are right and they dismiss those opinions and that is one thing that i'm really lucky that i had mentors in media that were like never skip past anybody in the decision making process ask frontline ask managers ask leaders ask everyone don't ever skip and it's something i noticed that i didn't do a good job in the beginning of teaching my leaders and so i would have people come to me and like this is what we need to do and i'm like uh well what does jake and paul and mark think and they're like i don't know but they don't really know i'm like dude missing all the gold like every like the whole team together the more people that make a decision the more people have input in the decision the better the decisions outcome is going to be and there's some studies on that so it's making sure that you can put your ego aside and not say just because i have this title and i have this responsibility that i have to be right all the time and that i'm the right person for everything and that i'm always the best of these things i think it's the leaders who are able to be humble enough to admit um when maybe their idea isn't right for the company or maybe they're not right for their role anymore those are the best people i've had people who have told me i don't think i'm right for this role anymore and i just don't know where else in the company i could go and they are some of the best people i have to date it's because they were doing what was right for the company first and foremost even though they were i think terrified to tell me um and it ended up working out for them so i'm going to skip over that little uh you know but if we want to open it up to questions um i hope that was a useful framing oh my gosh layla that was incredible let's give some love to layla everybody that's how we do it here um you know uh i just want to acknowledge layla like you're your brilliance of the what is it what does suck look like like so everybody's always like how do i how do i how do i it's like what does it look like if you're doing it bad and if all you did was not do that that's a that's a material impact improvement to to the team and then it's like what's the opposite of that okay how am i showing up on that those levels so i just love that reframe it's just and i can use that in every aspect of my life it's like well how do i get better it's like what does shitty look like let's like let's just not do that and then there's opportunities i want to hear from everybody in the chat uh what was your number one takeaway from what layla shared with everybody below i know they were posting it in real time as you were you're teaching um but that's my big takeaway is just uh what what does shitty look like let's not do that and then the opposite and i just love the the reframe of like manager versus leader because you're right it's it's inspirational and followers it's like if i'm not inspired by this person i wouldn't want to follow this person and you you that's not you're not a leader right you're just a title manager and it's and and the idea of being a high producer i think some people think they're high producers and they're only doing two-thirds of their job right layla i love that um cool uh we're gonna go to q a thanks so much for posting in the chat uh but let's go with karen hi leila hi karen it's lovely to meet you thank you so much that was amazing i have uh two quick questions number one was um i'm wondering what your process was from stepping back from uh the management of your businesses to the overseeing role um and the second question is um can you speak to failure and your view of how failure works within your companies i'm a massive brene bound fan and she was talking about this you know there's no innovation or creativity without failure and so i wondered what your thoughts were on that yeah um in terms of stepping back it was you know i'm like how would one step back and really become an owner and i'm like well there has to be a person you know there has to be that leader that inspirational figure for people to rely on um and have that influence over the company and so i said is that external or internal and i had somebody internally who i was like i have a lot of faith in her and i think i really think based on her track record she can do it and so i decided about two years ago that she was the person i wanted to mentor like very very closely and pour into and so you know i communicate that to her i said what do you want and it aligned with her career which is very important if it didn't align with her career i would never try and fit her in it um and it's worked out really well i think that's been the number one relationship i focused on in the business and because of it you know i just poured as much as i possibly could into her over time um and our communication is immaculate so focusing on our communication relationship and then transfer of skills over that two years so it's like every quarter more responsibilities go her way see how they do give her feedback you know i think it's you can't just delegate you have to qa after you delegate it um and so it was a process that took time and on the failure side layla how do you encourage i think that the only reason that people have to even consider anything about failures because they're judging themselves i think it's that we have this like view that like what you know i think if you read anything on like human nature and like how our brains work right it's like what you we take people at face value so you see me you think layla that doesn't have any problems i have tons of problems right you see other people in this call you're like oh they don't have it as hard my problem is better than your problem and like my failure is worse than your failure and failure feels terrible like you're gonna die for most of us every time but i think that what makes it so much worse is when you think you shouldn't and that's like for my team when they think they shouldn't fail i'm like dude you're a human like you're you are part of the human species you are if you're a monkey you you know what i mean like it's like you're a human you fail you are fallible you will make mistakes and you will do things that are not in your best interest even though you think you know better and even when you know better and it's just like the judgment that we put on ourselves we're so harsh for ourselves in our head that's what makes failure so terrible failing itself like if i were to just like absolutely uh show up and just do a terrible job like on this presentation for example it'd be like okay i didn't do a good job on the presentation or it could be like you're terrible person you shouldn't be a leader you're not you should never do a presentation again for sure you're gonna mess up next time definitely and then the next time you go to do when you're like terrified and nervous and because of the nervousness because of the self-criticism you it up and then you prove to yourself that you're a failure and it's only because of the junk in your head and so i think that for most people i tell them i'm like dude you just gotta identify the junk in your head and start training yourself to think differently talk to yourself differently and i it sounds simple but it's just like it just makes the fall that much harder if you're not actually catching yourself you're just kicking yourself when you're down i love that for karen everybody thanks for the question karen question for layla hey laila um great session by the way i loved it um sam here from the east coast of canada um on the marketing team i'm just curious how do you look at pushing your direct reports with fear of breaking them or giving them too much to do and other places in their their uh in their work falling apart i think there's a couple things which is um one i would rather people have more on their plate than not enough so that's the first stance i'll take if if i i want to hire people who like work and are high producers i would rather they're a little overwhelmed than less to do because then they really start to get wonky um the second piece of that is i think it's all about communication like when someone asks me they're like well i just don't know if we can take on this project i said well why don't you ask and then like every day check in and say how's it going how many hours are you working you know are you work you know just i think that it's just keeping the open line of communication like i'll tell my assistant for example i'm like i'm going to keep giving you stuff until you tell me to stop you know and i'm obviously going to help monitor with you because we have transparency through where they're documenting what they're doing but i think a lot of it is reminding people that there are full-grown functioning adults who have to raise their hand and say i have too much work on my plate i can't keep working till midnight and i think that you just have to be the one to initiate conversation and say the door is open and say on the one-on-one ask but if they don't tell you that's on them this is a team of adults that's a weekly or daily thing just keep doing it i mean i think weekly is fine yeah thank you i appreciate it sam everybody great question we are all adults dan dc hey layla thank you so much i got a lot about um out of your session on what not to do that's been amazing but it it feels weird because i watch your videos analysis every day you guys are my gym buddies so to actually get down really really cool um uh so i alex and and you talk a lot about like skill acquisition and doing to learn right but if you're coaching someone on your team on a more granular level on on on acquiring a new skill what path do you lay for them and what kind of feedback loops do you create for for for quicker skill acquisition um it depends is it a skill that you already have either getting better at it or even something brand new um if if that helps so if it's a skill that i don't have then i'm going to hold them accountable to the process of acquiring the skill if it's a skill that i have then i hold us both accountable to me coaching them on the skill and i i prefer to do it quickly and i think alex is the same way which is if i'm trying to train someone on something new i think lots of repetition in a short period of time is better than like one time a week trying to focus on this skill and so i feel like you can just go faster with more like for example if we're training actually it reminds me of the marketing team because when we have new people that are in marketing like editing videos for example like i know that our marketing manager gets on with them every single day and goes over the videos and critiques the videos live with them on a zoom and he does it every day until they're where they need to be and i used to hop on them you know say four years ago in the beginning to watch and i was like oh my gosh this is like but then they get better so much faster and so that's how i would do it if i was training them on the skill if it's a process that i'm holding them accountable to um i would have them let the team know the skill that they're looking to acquire and then set themselves the goals of how quickly they're going to learn to skill and then i would be checking in with them that they're setting the time aside to train themselves on the skill and i would hold them accountable to that which is the process you know putting the time aside uh to actually do that in the workday awesome thanks of course cool next up we got jeff there's like a theme to my questions uh leila what's the next book i need to read or we all need to read other than the one dan sending of course i what is dan sending you he won't tell me it's christmas present it's on it's on okrs though layla i think you can figure it out uh oh yeah yeah okay yeah yeah um you know i recommend this to my team still because i think that it's a really good book and i know dan you like the the book but i think like the hard thing about heart things is a great book um for this team you know i felt it's really hard but patrick lencioni like i just think if you read all of his books all of them there's like 12 i think i think those are the best ones for teams to read so i've had my team we used to do uh lots of like reading sessions so we went through and one team read all of them in one year i think we did like one a month great thank you very much you know it's fine that's people ask me like what's the one book i'm like there's not one yeah it's always the right book for you right now so jeff it's kind of like you know how we did the feedback session and people gave you feedback and there was like the weaknesses yeah go read the book that would probably answer and support you the best there beauty thanks awesome jeff everybody we're gonna wrap it up with johnny johnny question for layla hey layla um thanks so much for everything you shared today i'm curious uh of how you manage the dynamic of such a high growth team where you know some make the growth we'll call it the leap and others don't had it from a cultural perspective how did you manage that dynamic when you know the proof isn't how they how they grow and you only find that out they may look good on the way in they just may not make the leap how did you manage the culture um do you mean mitigating like terminations and turn yeah just you know eventually they become not the right person for the role right like if that if you're growing really really quickly if not everyone if 90 of people there aren't there in five years there's a this needs to become a practice i think it's kind of what i was saying with the transparency about it i said you know to make this um okay and to make sure our culture can withstand you know this fast growth and a lot of the changes that have to happen i just have to be i just have to give them the same information i have which is like this is what i'm operating with my belief is that i am here to serve the business because the business serves the clients and it pays everyone at the end of the day and if you're not able to keep up despite all of our efforts and all this it's not that i don't like you or that you're not right for the job in a year but you're not right for it right now and i cannot risk the team and their payroll for everyone else's families to keep you here and so that's always been my belief and so i think if you have that belief when you speak to the team and they're like why did this happen i'm like dude he just like not a bad person not this not that just not right now not this team not gonna guess where we need to go and i think a lot of times people get a little too romantic about jobs you know some people know that they're only a cfo for businesses that go from 100 to 500 million and they just go do that at every single company and there's a lot of people who you know they're not going to be able to continue to grow they should just go do that that's just not what we i mean i don't think that's what anyone wants but i think that um i think there's a lot of uh how do you put it um negativity around turn and it's like well is it good turn or bad turn that's also something you should manage uh and you should look at which is like the reasons why people leave and aren't the company and if it's because you know you guys have grown too much and you have to see people out i think you've heard like in blitz scaling and read off and all them they're like that's normal so i think it's setting expectations in the beginning when people come in i tell people when they come into our companies how it goes you know what it looks like like you can read reviews online you'll see that people like oh they kept me for only you know two years and then they said i wasn't able to grow fast enough and i was like well they weren't i was if you don't like that you need more security which security's pretty fake anyways then go somewhere else love that so johnny everybody and with that uh ladle i just want to thank you so much for the time i appreciate you and alex so much and can't wait to hang out in the near future enjoy the holidays i will see you soon let's give some love to laila thank you so much leila thank you thank you