We fired everyone who was late…this is why..

Summary

• I realized that setting a strong tone and maintaining high standards are pivotal in business management.
• I learned from a gym owner how enforcing punctuality by firing late employees establishes expectations and resets performance standards.
• My first job at Smoothie King taught me that even if you're trained to maintain a clean and stocked environment, a manager's lax approach can undermine the owner's intention and create a new, less productive norm.
• It's critical to recognize if there is a 'Vince' in your organization who might be lowering your company's standards and damaging its culture.
• Business is as much about heart (culture, soft skills, behavior) as it is about smarts (strategy, acquisition, pricing structures).
• Strategy in business is straightforward, but execution gets lost when employees don't understand the importance of their actions, leading to a lack of proper implementation.
• Consistent execution of the basics and fostering a culture of excellence will lead to disproportionate returns, growth, retention, and low employee turnover, regardless of strategy.
• As leaders, it's our job to focus on fundamental practices and be intolerant of anything but excellence, reinforcing these behaviors to maintain a high performance culture.
• Emphasizing soft skills and character traits can be more crucial than specific talents or competencies when building a successful team.
• Always executing the basics is what distinguishes advanced individuals and organizations, so it's important to regularly evaluate if you are maintaining those standards.
• Eliminate the 'Vince's in your business and cultivate a championship mentality for continued success.

Video

How To Take Action

A good way of doing business is to make sure everyone knows that being on time and doing jobs well is super important. If someone doesn't follow the rules, it's important to let them go. This shows everyone that you mean business and keeps things running smoothly.

Maybe you have a 'Vince' at work who isn't doing things the way they should. If you do, you should talk to them or maybe find someone new who will help make the team better.

Remember, having a good team isn't just about being smart with money or plans. It's also about making sure everyone works well together and cares about what they do. To make sure your team is awesome, teach them why their jobs are important and show them how to do things right every time.

Practice the simple stuff every day. This is what makes a winning team. Check often to see if you're all working to the best standard. Get rid of any 'Vince's and help everyone do their best. This way, your business will grow and be strong.

Look for people with good hearts, not just good brains. Choose people who are kind and work hard. And always ask yourself if you're doing the simple things right. If you do, you'll be ahead of the game. Don't let anyone in your team be like 'Vince'. Keep the team strong and you'll keep winning.

Quotes by Alex Hormozi

"Advanced people never don't do the basics"

– Alex Hormozi

"You've got the smarts and you've got the hearts and you have to have both"

– Alex Hormozi

"I'm looking way more for character traits now"

– Alex Hormozi

"The difference between somebody who yields disproportionate returns on advertising crazy profits good growth great retention on employees low turnover from a company that doesn't have that"

– Alex Hormozi

"As long as you have a relatively sound strategy like you're not selling things at a loss then the difference between the two is going to be your ability to execute and have people execute on your behalf"

– Alex Hormozi

Full Transcript

i've had a massive shift in how i view business and it has fundamentally transformed everything that i'm doing [Music] hi my name is alex for mozy um i own a portfolio of companies that has 85 million a year in revenue and this is purely because i just want to help more people not be broke so that's the goal all right so one of the things i'm going to tell you two stories that significantly changed my uh career all right hopefully you'll be able to you'll be able to take the the message from the story because i think they're they're really really good so when i was just starting out in my gym launch business i had a gym owner who said hey let's partner on this like you keep filling these gyms up in full capacity why don't you just fill them and i'll come behind you and operate them and i had a gym that was doing 4.2 million dollars a year um this is what he was telling me and i really know how to operate the business you know all the acquisition stuff so let's just partner up on this and i said sure sounds fair enough it ended up being a horrible partnership but that's not the point of the video the point is what i learned all right and so we had two locations and the newest location had a whole new staff and they were just lackadaisical right they weren't they weren't they weren't caring they weren't really doing a good job and he said you know we need to we need to you know have a meeting and i was like okay and so he said we'll have a meeting at the first location call everyone there tell them to show up at four o'clock and the first location was probably like 45 minutes away from the second location right and at four o'clock so everyone's everyone's everyone's coming in everyone's sitting down it's kind of awkward it's silent there's clearly like some tension right and so at four o'clock he looks at uh his assistant and he says hey go down to the front um lock the door right of the gym and she was like okay so she goes and locks the door mind you some people hadn't shown up to the meeting yet right they were a couple minutes late whatever and so all of a sudden as they lock the door like 30 seconds later someone's like banging on the door and it's like hey open the door and he's like ignore him and and they're like like why aren't you letting me in because obviously there's a meeting going on right and then another person comes knocks on the door another person comes knocks on the door now there's like three or four people and they're like what the hell like why aren't you opening the door whatever right and so he tells uh his assistant he says go outside and tell them they're all fired and he says this before he starts the meeting and so i'm sitting there right and everyone in the room is like oh right he just set the tone all right and he reset the bar and i remember witnessing this and being like wow so what he did was he reset the bar of this is how we perform when we say we're going to be somewhere we're going to be somewhere at that time if we say we're going to clean up after the session we're going to clean up after the session if we say we're going to follow up with leads we follow up with leads and what i have figured and i'm going to tell you one more story and then we'll tell you the moral of both of them all right so pause on that for a second now when i had my first job i was a actually i think it was my first it was my first job i was a blender tender at smoothie king all right and so um i learned a lot about what to do what not to do when i was this business it was a small business owner i think he had two locations three locations at the time his name was dave really nice guy what's up dave and i was trained personally by dave so dave trained me and i was you know enterprising young man i wanted to do a good job and so i started my first day at work um at one of his newer locations you know after you know between people walking in you were supposed to like mop the floor clean the counters like just clean it just make it look good restock the shelves and so i started doing that when someone walked out the door it's my first shift right and the manager was like what are you doing i was like i thought like i was worried i was in trouble so i was like i thought i was supposed to am i not supposed to restock the shelves like i thought i was supposed to do that right now because like there's no one here and he was like oh yeah you don't need to worry about that he's like we don't do any of that stuff and i was like oh okay boom new cultural norm all right so what i was supposed to do and what the owner had trained me to do and then was always complaining about how no one ever did what was supposed to do the manager was telling me that i didn't need to do that stuff what i learned from this right and i'll just call that manager john right actually i'll call it manager vince this is the name i'll use so i said so do you in your business have events are you the vince in your business do you have someone in your in your business that's the vince that's secretly destroying your business all right so let's rewind to the the original story about the first show that i was talking about so think about the difference between both of those styles of management i'm not saying the first is writer the second whatever the second one is definitely wrong right but when you look at that what it was was setting the tone and the reason that my views on business have dramatically shifted is that i have always had a tendency to lean towards strategy acquisition monetization pricing structures and all of that stuff is important but i think within a business there are two components to it you've got the smarts and you've got the hearts and you have to have both and i think that most people overestimate the importance of smarts myself included and i think that there's a lot to do with the hearts because business strategy overarchingly is not that complex like you really think about it right it's like you got to find something that's good that people want and you sell it for a lot more than it costs you to do it and you do as much of that as you possibly can like that's kind of the idea right and the thing is is it gets lost in the execution it gets lost in the doing right as soon as you hire first employees you're like no employees can't boys can't do what i can do it's like well that's a horrible belief you should probably change that before you try and move forward that's a limiting belief right do you want to have a big business and so when i think about this from a cultural standpoint and this is what has shifted for me is that it's become so much more about the soft skills it's so much more about coaching and developing the leaders of the company it's so much more about addressing behavioral dynamics of someone that are limiting them more so than it is about tinkering and i can't help but think that so many entrepreneurs myself included i spent so much time tinkering and tweaking things what if we change this in our sales process what if we change this on this page what if we change the offer like this would you change this on the price and what if the payment turns blah blah blah all these different things right and think about this for a second for yourself how many things have you tinkered with in your business over the last however many years how many months and your business hasn't changed at all right because the real problem is not the strategy the problem is not the smarts right the problem is the heart right the people are not doing what you want them to do because they don't understand why they need to do it and why it's important right and that's the soft stuff and you've got you know people who don't want to talk to each other because they don't like each other because one guy's really annoying and so it's like it would be it would better serve you to fix that problem than to try and come up with some new strategy right realizing that has been one of the biggest breakthroughs that i've had in my career those two stories should illustrate the difference between having a championship mentality and having a loser mentality and what might be going on in your business and i'll leave you with one more story really quickly so if any of you has ever been on a championship team right if you've ever played in a sports uh arena or whatever and you've been on a winning team you've been on a losing team right and you've probably been on a losing event a lot of good players but you guys were not connected you weren't concerted you weren't aligned right on the flip side you had a winning team and it was like everyone showed up to practice everyone you know tried their hardest it was the effort and the consistency and the alignment of the team that accomplished the goal the rules are the same everyone was trying to do the exact same thing and so when you think about the entire business landscape right your competitors have access more or less to the same talent pool that you do they can see what your strategy is overall and most people are not that dumb right and so as long as you have a relatively sound strategy like you're not selling things at a loss right then the difference between the two is going to be your ability to execute and have people execute on your behalf and so that's going to become that like for us as ceos we do shift towards becoming championship team coaches which is why john wooden if he had run a business would have had a championship business because he focused on the fundamentals and one of my favorite sayings of all time is advanced people never don't do the basics advanced people never don't do the basics i would go to i would go to these stages and i would watch guys get on stage and they'd say you know we follow up with all of our leads you know within five minutes you know when we get on sales calls we always ask them why they're there we label them a problem you know we overview some of the passings they've done and then they felt they follow a clear framework then as soon as someone buys we you know we have a good onboarding process and nothing they say is revolutionary it's just that they actually do it and the people are actually on their behalf they're not the vince or don't have a manager like vince who's telling them they don't that they shouldn't have to do that work right who's sabotaging the business what they did is they set the tone and then they carry the bar and so their job is to be intolerant of anything but excellence and to reinforce that in the culture so that it's consistently executed across the company because that between two companies with the same strategy will make the difference between somebody who who yields disproportionate returns on advertising crazy profits good growth great retention on employees low turnover from a company that doesn't have that right even though they both have the same strategy even if the smaller company has the better strategy this guy will win and this has been one of the most profound shifts that i've had as a ceo now owner of companies is what i'm looking for is i'm looking for just as much soft if not more soft skills interpersonal dynamics self-awareness then i look for skill in particular you know like this guy's really good at finance which is a really good product this person's really good at marketing sales like i'm looking way more for character traits now and now that i think about it when you if you're thinking about yourself right then i would look in the mirror and say like am i really are we always doing the basics because if we always do the basics we will be advanced because that is what advanced people do is they never don't do them and they have a culture that reinforces that standard so i hope you enjoy the first story hope you enjoyed the vint story make sure you don't have any vince's in your business uh my name is alex shmozey i own a portfolio companies like i said earlier that there's 85 million in revenue lots of broke people on this channel to make sure that you are not one of them keeping awesome click subscribe and i'll see you next video bye