Natalie Dawson - Co-Founder of Cardone Ventures | How She Went From $0 - $84 Million in 2 Years

97% of businesses fail because they aren't focused on the right things. Instead of focusing on the things that they like to do, they have to start focusing on the things that have to be done in order to skill their business. Playing a game with finding great people is a business owner. If you're playing this game of people, you're really thinking about, I need to create a brand as a place where people come to find success. When you think you've gotten good at something, you might not be so good at that thing. I do find that a lot of business owners really struggle with that level of seriousness and that level of commitment because they create a business around a lifestyle. If you don't have people around you telling you what's next or helping you prepare for what that experience is like, you feel like your purpose is gone. Bigger things in life, it's making sure that the perfection that you want isn't the thing that actually stops you from continuing to move forward. Welcome to Success Story. I'm your host, Scott Clary. The Success Story podcast is part of the HubSpot podcast network. Now, HubSpot is the resource that you need to tap into if you are an entrepreneur. It's no secret that starting a business is hard. Even if you have an amazing idea, bringing it to life can feel overwhelming. With HubSpot's new entrepreneurship kit, you can go from idea to IPO with the help of a company that knows a thing or two about growing better. This all-inclusive kit gives you step-by-step guidance and frameworks to help you crush every stage of starting a business. With tools tailored to help all steps of the entrepreneurial journey is packed with templates for project management, emails, skill development templates. There's also a solo-prenure guide. It's got freelancing, pricing worksheets, and lots more that you can use to get up and running immediately. And best of all, it's free. With expert guidance and frameworks from HubSpot, starting a business doesn't have to be hard. So don't wait to start yours. Go to HubSpot.com slash ENT to download the guide right now. Natalie, I'm very excited to sit down. We're going to have a lot of fun. I want to start off with this. So your thesis is that 97% of businesses fail because they don't start the work. Now, I wanted to start the work because most entrepreneurs would think, I've started my business. I've started the work. This is not the work you're talking about. Why do 97% of businesses fail? 97% of businesses fail because they aren't focused on the right things. I believe that if you see a business in the ECOM space, you see a business in the HVAC base space. You see a business in the Chiropractic space. Whatever business it is that we're talking about, there is another business in that same industry that is winning, that is succeeding, that has figured out how to adapt to whatever the market conditions are. Even if you are a printer and we know that there is less printing demand today than there was 20 years ago, there are still examples of somebody being successful in that space. And so the question has to become, what did that business owner and that team of people spend their time on that is different from where you are spending your time? They figured out something different. They figured out a better product market fit. They figured out how to message their product and service better. They figured out what they needed to tweak and they really learned through the process of growing and scaling their business. Now, once you have achieved product market fit, my perception and working with the business owners that I work with is that, instead of focusing on the things that they like to do, they have to start focusing on the things that have to be done in order to skill their business, like creating systems and processes and truly putting the foundation in place. But until they get product market fit, until they're able to figure out who they're selling to, how they're talking to that person, all the things that you know so much about, they don't need to focus on starting the work, which is the book title that I'm coming out with, and how I'm really framing that because the work that they have started is good work. It's important work, but they do reach what we call a break point. This break point happens around the $3 million in revenue mark for the majority of businesses. And when that mark happens, when they figure the way to message their product and service to their clients, and they have continued to consistently shown that they can do that, the work is an entirely different set of challenges, and it is an entirely different way of thinking that they need to start prioritizing. And what I find is the majority of business owners just don't start prioritizing those things. They continue to focus on if they like the sales aspect. They're going to continue to stay close to the customer and figure out how to be a better salesperson. At a $3 million business, you do not need to continue to focus on being a better salesperson. It is an entirely different set of things that you have to start doing and force you and your team to put in place in order to truly scale that business. So I have an interesting story. So I will not name the name of the business, but I know a business founder, it was a 10-year-old business, and the company was doing about $10 million in revenue. And the founder was responsible because he held all the main accounts since day one, because he was door knocking to close business when he first started, and he was probably responsible for about $4 million or that $10 million in revenue, which is absolutely wild. So think about problems with exiting, scaling, all of it, right? So that breakpoint at $3 million, you mentioned a couple things that I want to unpack so it's clear. So you mentioned product market fit, you mentioned breakpoint at $3 million, you mentioned focus of things, focusing on things that are fun to do but not necessarily scaling. So let's unpack maybe some of those concepts first just to provide some context and framework. So product market fit, how do you define product market fit for a business? Once a business has determined what their product is and that they are able to sell that product consistently through a single channel, through whatever their acquisition channel is, and I don't have a metric that I use that I'm like, you are the, and you understand the marketing and the sales, the CAC, the LTV ratio to CAC, what we're looking for is in a standard businesses, HVAC, chiropractic, marketing agencies, at $3 million in revenue, if you are not the person continuing to sell that product in your business, you have figured out how to have a product or a service, whatever it is that you're selling, that you're able to grow if you were to add an additional channel outside of that first channel. That's what we're looking for in the businesses that were defining as product market fit for the SMB space. Okay, cool. So they have one revenue stream and they have one channel that trying to figure out how to diversify but they do have paying customers, everything's working, they're hitting a $3 million dollar and I actually think this is actually interesting because I thought a break point in the business was, I thought it was 10 million and about 50 employees. So when it starts to get complicated and that's when you have to hire, you know, talk about COO with EOS, it's called an integrator, there's all these different versions, right? So what happens at $3 million? Because $3 million, I'm assuming, because a solo printer could scale to $1 million, I'm assuming, in most cases, $3 million, what's happening in most businesses in SMB space? Processes break. The business owner. At $3 million? Well, they can't continue to be the person that's leading their business. They have to have other people. Some sort of leadership team and does not see suite. It's probably not even a VP suite. They're bringing in directors. Think of a state or sales team. You have a salesperson. That's how you start your business. Most business owners might even be the salesperson. In order to duplicate themselves in the sales function so that they can actually focus on operations, some HR things, maybe some marketing pieces, they have to hire a second salesperson. That is responsible for sales. Then, when that salesperson is continuing to do what they need to do in order to sell inside the business with only one salesperson, they can only figure out how to... I feel like I just lost my whole train of thought. Well, no, they have one salesperson and they need to replicate that. But obviously... Have to then hire more people. Of course, yeah, but it's difficult, because if the first salesperson is the founder and they pass it over to one salesperson, performance is going to drop immediately because they're not as invested in the business as the founder was. They're already like, okay, so now I'm investing in this person, even though they're getting 20 leads a week, they're not converting at 30% or converting at 10%. Then all this starts to break down. The machine doesn't scale because that one person they hired. More often than not, they'll be benchmarking against their own performance as a founder and it's scary to continue to grow, so then they default back to doing the stuff themselves, which is not good, and they don't want to lose the relationship with these high value accounts and whatnot. And then they're back inside the function. Exactly. It has the salesperson. Okay, so that particular break point, what is best practice? Because you work with, and I want to learn more about where you came from, how you built this month, because now you have over a billion undermanagement, which is absolutely phenomenal. So now you can test stuff at scale, which is always fun. But this $3 million break point, people are selling, founders are selling to hire one salesperson. It's not working. Very common problem and SMB, small business. What do you do with that? When they know that it's not working, when they know when it's not working, when the people is at the process is what is it that takes it to like over that $3 million? They have to duplicate themselves because they are still the ones that are in these functions because they've hired the person. They've hired the salesperson. They've hired the head of marketing. They have some form of a leadership team in place, but they are not actually the ones that know how to do what is needed to get done inside these businesses. And so what we're looking at at the $3 million mark is how does the founder take the skill set that they have and truly duplicate through looking at measurements? Every single day, what are the metrics inside that business to let that founder know? Is this working or is this not working? When they have the measurements in place and they see what's not working, ideally, you're not just looking at what's broken and you're trying to fix as if you're a firefighter every single day. What's broken? You're looking at what has worked as a business owner. What worked for you? When you were in the sales process, what was the documentation and all of the recorded sales calls for you in that function? Same with your marketing. If you're not looking at your leads every single day and it's shocking when you work with business owners who are in smaller industries and who are more fragmented, they don't have access to things like CRMs or they don't think that they do. They don't perceive that that's a problem. They might not even be looking at their financials on more than a quarterly basis. And so you're really putting this structure into place inside the business to let the founder know or the entrepreneur know what's broken today, assembling a team to help solve that problem is their next set of challenges because they now see what's broken, but then they're playing firefighter by them being the ones that's fixing it. So we find that you have to put this foundation in place. What are the financial review processes looking like? Are they even looking at their financials on a consistent basis and expecting from their outsourced bookkeeper because they probably can't afford to hire someone in house to see when it's happening to look at the correct numbers to be able to then formulate a plan if I'm off on my EBITDA, if I'm off on my revenue, then what do I actually have to do in order to fix that? But I don't even know if I have to fix that if I'm not looking at it. And so that first breakpoint really is those foundational elements through your financial review, your metrics, and the training and duplication of the owner into additional team members to allow that business to start to go into what would be the next breakpoint, which would be from $3 million to $8 million in revenue, which then you're looking at hiring an additional leadership player to actually put those correct systems and processes in place because they're focused on the measurements that they've been tracking. So you know that example that I mentioned, I think that example was only allowed to exist because the founder was so fanatical about closing deals. So he actually grew the business larger than probably he should have before implementing all of these different SOPs and systems and processes and standard operating procedures. Because he couldn't bring somebody in that could do 4 million in revenue? No, he couldn't. Absolutely not. No sales rep could ever do it. If I remember, each sales rep was doing just under a million and he was himself closing 4 million and obviously massive imbalance as to who he could hire. But I also think an interesting thing in the space that you deal with, which I think is more of an issue with entrepreneurship in general. We look at all these VC backed, angel backed, silicon valley tech startups and they build they build their businesses not profitably and they're burning cash raising next rounds, raising next rounds. And these are like the entrepreneurial influence that a lot of us succumb to. You just mentioned HVAC, you mentioned service-based, medical, dentist, agency. So I think the issue really is that you have somebody who built a great HVAC company and they're like, damn I'm doing a million dollars, million five. And like I can't hire a three person inside sales rep and account it and then another two account executives with a million bucks. And that's what screen people over because they're learning from the wrong, they're learning from the wrong people. There's no, I don't know a single HVAC entrepreneur thought leader on social, but I know Jason Calicanas. I know I know all the guys from Y Combinator. I know all those people that are super loud on Twitter and create podcasts and then you fall like the people like Adam Newman, who wild story, right. Those are the people that you look to and you're like, okay, how do I learn how to build a business like this? But first, I don't even believe that many people should build a business based on venture money. I believe building profitable businesses from the get go is like a superpower because it sets you have to be successful entrepreneur. So what's the playbook for somebody who is in a service based or even not service based? Who should they be looking to? Who should they emulate? Who's done this like very, very well repeatedly? Who's like a better entrepreneurial, no influence than all the stuff we see on social and YouTube and podcasts and all that stuff? Because we service all of these different industries were industry agnostic. We do have a couple of investments in health care. We have investments in HVAC. We have investments in roofing and dental. We find that in every one of those industries, there are micro influencers who have gone from being the dentist, having their hands and somebody's mouth and actually scaling to 15, 25, 45 dental locations. And they are creating content, but they are not creating content where they are getting millions of views and have all of these subscribers to their YouTube videos. It's such a niche audience that they are really talking to. And so for every one of these verticals, we do find that there are influencers, but they are not at the level. And they are so specific to, you know, I think of like Tommy Mello in the garage door space. It's not so, so neat. garage doors. Yeah. Yeah. He sold his business for half a billion dollars in the garage door space. Yeah. So there you have somebody who is now probably going to create a larger influence because he has done something that's so spectacular, but it started as just a guy figuring out how to sell garage doors. And so as people become more successful through the markets that I'm sorry, the industries that are hot right now and getting huge valuations, somebody like Ken Goodrich in the HVAC space selling ghetto over, he sold it now three times for over $250 million. They will start to come out and have more social presence, and they will be creating individual industry specific playbooks on how to do this, whether you are a chiropractor or a dentist or whatever the vertical that you are in. But the principles remain the same, which is why I feel very confident in writing a book like start the work or writing a book like teamwork where at the end of the day, if you're a business owner, taking VC money is a little bit different. And we don't we're not pro VC money for the majority of businesses, because you really shouldn't be accessing that capital unless you already know the basics of what it takes to run a business. And the majority of business owners are not trying to raise VC capital, but they think they think that oh, maybe that's interesting or exciting. They should really like get their teeth knocked in first by creating a marketing agency or hiring their first team or figuring out some of these standard foundational skill sets. How do you review financial set of documents in a business? Do you have that core competency before you go ask somebody for money, much less your friends and your family for money? Like you should have these very foundational business skills in place, where you've demonstrated that you were the right person for somebody to place money with you and not on like a hope and a dream, but on a real live example of this is me demonstrating that I actually know what I'm talking about, that I'm able to market, that I'm able to solve a real problem and you don't get that through not having some sort of experience. So the X factor and I agree completely. I mean, I think too many people raise money. I think that so yeah, if you don't know how to read a PNL or even create one, like that's a big issue. So the caveat that the takeaway is don't raise money for most businesses, build it profitably from the get go, but the X factor like you can build SOPs. People will understand the concept of building systems and processes around what they know. Even if they're not doing it, they can do it tomorrow. The X factor is people. The X factor is always people and I've heard this time and time again, especially post COVID and even I don't know what the rest of the US is like with the rest of the world, but I have friends that run businesses and I have not had to hire people in the US since COVID ended. So I've been able to hire all over the world. Pre COVID was a different story. We had people in Canada and the US, but post COVID, it's all been, it's all been all over, but I've friends who have tried to hire and they say that the talent landscape post COVID is very difficult. It's very difficult to get great people and these people are not bad business leaders, but it's like the wildest stories. Like somebody will be hired, W2 employee, and then negotiate a salary, and then the first week they'll say I want more money. Like things that didn't happen in my life at least. So the X factor is always people. The first person like that founder, lead business, they're making money themselves, the higher sales rep, maybe they're not closing as much as the founder does. So those first few hire are super important. How do you navigate the talent climate? How do you find the right person? What is your framework? Because now you have thousands of employees. So you figured it out. What is that strategy? I am a big believer that business is one through creating a people game and you have to think about yourself as a founder, as an entrepreneur, playing a game with finding great people. It's not just, oh, I'm going to find one person and they're going to solve this problem and I'm playing this game of checkers where it's just one piece at a time, oh, I need a marketing person. Oh, I need a sales person. Okay, now I'm going to go out and recruit. It is a game that you have to play for a long period of time to help the market understand why you are the founder or the entrepreneur or the business that great people want to work with. And so first it starts with how are you promoting that you are a great place to work at? Are you talking about? In our business, Cardin Ventures, are you talking about the fact that people are winning inside your company? Not just your clients, but your team members. We have team members who came to work with us who were making $60,000 a year and are now making $400,000 a year. We've only been in business for five years. We promote those stories, but we're thinking about that when we make that initial hire of somebody who is saying, I'm making $60,000 a year. I'm applying for a job here at this conversation, but I have radical goals. So how do you find people who have radical goals, but are at a starting point where the business can afford to hire that person? Most businesses cannot afford to hire somebody at $400,000. They can't afford to hire somebody who is hungry that's making $60,000 who has the vision for their life of wanting to make $400,000, but has actually no idea how to get there because if they knew how to get there, they would already be making $400,000. We live in a free market economy. If somebody could go down the street and make that amount of money, they would go and make that amount of money. And so as a business owner, if you're playing this game of people, you're really thinking about, I need to create a brand for our organization where great talent thinks of us as a place where people come to find success and to have their success be easier with me than they would be able to find success with somebody down the street. So how are you promoting that? How are you constantly recruiting for people and posting jobs, even if you're not hiring for those roles to tell the market that you are recruiting and you're constantly looking for great talent? And then once they come in the door, how are you exemplifying that you are actually interested in their success? I think what's made us successful in this hiring market over the last five years, pre-COVID, post-COVID, is you're getting an opportunity to work alongside real leaders in a non-virtual work environment. We have an office here. We have an office in Scottsdale. They're seeing how I work every single day. They're seeing how Brandon works every single day. They are like rubbing shoulders with us constantly to solve the the largest problems inside our organization. And if you take that and you apply it to a small business, we had the exact same principles five years ago as we do today. We create this environment that allows people who have this dream, have this hope for their lives because we're marketing to them as a candidate journey, not just a customer journey, as a candidate journey because we're playing this people game. And this candidate journey is telling them you can achieve your personal professional financial goals through working here alongside us. We've achieved our personal professional financial goals up to a point. So there is some success that you can follow, but we have radical goals for this organization and we are committed to growth. So once they're in the environment in order to keep them, they have to actually see that we're really doing the actions that demonstrate that we're committed to those things. So if they saw us on vacation all the time, or if they saw us not really being interested in their success, if they saw us just like half-assing the work that we do with our clients, it would be a different story. But instead what they see is a team of people and leaders back then when we had zero employees all the way up to today when we have hundreds of employees working on the weekends and being here before people and being here after people leave. And they really are understanding what it takes to be successful. So it's the entire package of we sold the dream. We're marketing two candidates that this dream is possible here because we have this target of where this business is going in the future and we're really clear about that target. And then once they come in, they are testing and watching and seeing how serious we are. And so we have to be serious every day. And I do find that a lot of business owners really struggle with that level of seriousness and that level of commitment because they create a business around a lifestyle. And if you want a lifestyle business, that's totally fine if that's your prerogative. But you are going to lose a people game if somebody else is not actually fulfilling their side of the public. They're not being role models for that. Yeah. You're going to lose that person and somebody else is going to find the better talent because they actually want to be around people who are able to make their success easy. Hey guys, Scott here. I just wanted to take a quick moment to say a heartfelt thanks to every single one of you. Six years of this show and it's really all because of you. Your listens, your support, your shares, it will keep this thing going. When I started, I had no idea how big this would get, how many lives we touch, the stories we share, the lessons that we learned together, it's truly humbling. And I believe that we're building something really special here. A community where no one has to reinvent the wheel. We're all in this together, learning and growing. And here's my ask, if you love this show, if it's made a difference for you, please share it with somebody who needs it. Hella friend, host on social, whatever works, it's the best way to keep this thing going strong, bring on even better guests and share more life, changing wisdom. And you can find us on all the spots. So you can go to successstorypodcast.com if you like listening to podcasts. If you like video, you can go to YouTube. It's youtube.com slash C slash Scott Declary or the newsletter newsletter. . Scott Declary.com just spread the word. I'm eternally grateful for each and every one of you. Let's keep learning, let's keep growing and let's keep making this world a little bit better together. All right, let's get back to the show. When you're trying to find that high performer, because you're talking about all super high performers, I mean, somebody's making 400 grand, obviously highly ambitious person. So how do you manage getting them to commit to your business? Well, not also getting them to commit to any other side hustle, any other thing they're trying to take on because now everybody is trying to be their own influencer. And I mean, I have my own thoughts about I do believe that if you hire people like I'm super happy if they build their personal brand, start something on the side, I think it helps them upscale. This is my personal opinion. There's a lot that goes into that. But for yourself, I'm curious, you know, when you hire somebody like this, there's a very high likelihood that they are either looking for the next thing, how to make more money. When you start making 400K, you're like comfortably poor at that point. So now you realize that then life is good, but I'm also in Miami. So how do I make a million dollars a year? And maybe it's not within organization or maybe it is, but the person who makes that kind of money, I believe is inherently very entrepreneurial. I think they are somewhat entrepreneurial because they're really striving. And if they put that much energy into their own business, there's a chance that they could actually succeed as well. So how do you manage that personality type? Because everybody wants that person, but then at the same time, maybe it's easier. Somebody is okay. Again, nothing wrong with how much money you make, you make 60K, make 400K, make a million, make 10, it doesn't matter. But if somebody's okay making 60K and they're not looking for the next thing and they're happy with that, then maybe it's less of a liability to the company. We start the conversation with our team members around their personal, professional and financial goals. That is a process in our business. They are sitting down with their leader and saying, this is what I want to achieve. So if that person is saying, I want to be making $400,000 a year over the next three years working here. I want to then understand what is five years for now. Look like because what I know about being a business owner is it sucks most of the time. And you could actually live a fantastic life working for somebody else, making more money than you would make by yourself. The stats with business do not lie. The majority of businesses do not make a lot of money. And even if you took a high performer inside a business, it does not mean that they are going to be a high performance business owner and come with all of those challenges and all of that risk. And so when we're having these PPF conversations with the team member, if they're telling me that they want to own a business one day, I really have to get down to like, why do you want to own a business? Is it because you have to be the guy? There's that quality where some people are just like, I want to be the guy. I want to be the person. I'm like, okay, that's cool. Part of that is a little bit of ego because they have no freaking clue what they're talking about. They're making $60,000 a year. They've never started a business before. They don't understand what those components are going to look like. And if they do think that they want to be the guy, we're probably not going to retain that person. To be honest with you in five years, that hasn't happened for us. Our high performers have not left us, especially the ones that started early on. The ones that are making, we have people making 400, 500, 600, the highest paid person probably makes $1.2 million a year in a starting salary. That's a lot of money, isn't it? It's good money. Going out and starting your business, there's a lot of risk for you, aren't going to be able to replace that income and all of the things that go into entrepreneurship. And so for that person, we're asking that they go all in on their goals by being really focused on the set of problems that we have. If we have a set of problems for somebody who is a high performer making $400,000 a year, that is not a nine to five job. And we don't expect that they are going to be able to solve those problems at that compensation level in a nine to five environment because there's just more complexity than you clocking in and clocking out. That's not the mindset. So when we have that person though that doesn't see themselves being an employee forever, how do we create the opportunity as Cardone Ventures as any small business to show them how they could be a future partner and build inside of what we want to create, which is a billion dollar organization. They could be the president of one of our verticals. They could be a president of our health vertical or our HVAC vertical or our roofing vertical or a dental vertical and see themselves growing inside our business because we don't want to lose those people. And then they would still get the flexibility, the autonomy that they're looking for. While still getting to do it with really cool people, the hardest part of starting a business is actually having to do it by yourself. And it sucks and it's painful and most people don't make it through that. So why wouldn't you want to continue to work alongside people who are always going to be pushing you and expecting more of you once you get to that level and partnering with you because there's more of a cushion there than you just going out and starting your own business. And this has been successful for us because it's an easy story to tell people. And it's also getting them focused on what the problems are today instead of I'm solving these problems in my day job, but now I'm also solving these side problems and now my focus is split in two different areas. That person is going to be less good at both of those things than the person who just does go all in and focuses on the one thing in their career. Yes, they're choosing to take a gamble on the organization, but if we continue to demonstrate that we're here, that we're pushing, that we're growing, then that confidence and that trust continues to build. So the concept of giving ownership to somebody, not just in their job, but like true ownership over a vertical or equity, I think that's such an underutilized tool, but it's underutilized for a reason is because founders and entrepreneurs are very scared about giving up a piece of what they've built. And they don't want to do it incorrectly. They don't want to give ownership to the wrong person. And I don't know if, for example, if somebody in Cardone Ventures, if they took over as president of an HVAC division, if they would be able to buy in and have equity in that, I'm assuming yes at some level, if they've shown that they can exceed and grow it and build it. So I think that, okay, so we talked about building SOPs, finding the right people, but then scaling out the management team, scaling out the people that are entrepreneurial, but within your own organization, maybe ownership is a key piece of that. So how do you take it from, let's tie this back into the book and the framework and the three million to the eight million breakpoint. Eight million dollar breakpoint, you have to start bringing in another level of management. That could be people that are super entrepreneurial, but they're taking a risk on your business, they're committing their time to your business. What is the playbook for finding the right person that you can give ownership to, that you can trust with that level of management and level of responsibility to get over that eight million dollar breakpoint? You're really marketing to this person through every touchpoint that your brand creates online, and my job in our organization is to be talking to that person, which is different than talking to our clients, because I recognize that we are not going to win this organization game if we cannot figure out how to find great people. So I'm marketing to the type of person that wants to leave a job. We just hired our CFO slash COO who left KKR. He was the head of treasury in order to inside our business, and he's totally badass. He literally moved from New York to join this like small little 125 million dollar company to be a part of what we're building, but that same thing that we are doing today to attract talent from KKR is how we started the business five years ago. It's talking about the fact that we are going someplace and having a big vision, and to me this is where most business owners just fail. They do not actually have clarity on what their 10-year vision is. You and I were talking about your 10-year targets and your 10-year goals and committing to something for 10 years. If you really had that mindset with your business, you should be sharing with every single person that you come in contact with what that big vision is. And if you don't have that big vision and you're not talking about those things, of course, you're going to get disengaged people. People who are not interested in even having a conversation about equity because they just looked at your position as a job. And your mindset because you're not playing a people game is I'm just filling holes inside this organization instead of really strategically looking at this is how do I find people who want to come on board to have a piece of this business to help grow this business. So every single thing that you do when it comes to how you show up with your team every single day, how you interview the candidate, what you're asking them to demonstrate to you in the interview process. Are you asking them what their goals are? That to me is the lowest hanging fruit for a business owner. If you are not asking somebody what their goals are prior to them joining you, it's akin to somebody getting married, falling in love, deciding to get married in a very short notice. And then once you're on your honeymoon, you're having this conversation. You guys are blissfully in love, but you're having this conversation about the significant others saying, oh, I can't wait for us to move into the country and for us to be able to have farmland and get out of the city. I hate the city and we can have all of these kids. And you're like, wait a second, I love the city. I always want to be in the city. I didn't think we were going to have kids together. I thought it was just going to be you and me till the end and we were going to build this empire. There was no coordination on the goals for those groups of people. We do this to our team members all the time. We're secretly as business owners wanting to create these large organizations. We have these dreams. We don't communicate them. We post a position assuming that we're going to get the best talent, the most engaged talent somebody who's finally going to help me in my business. All of a sudden they come on board. We didn't ask them what their goals were. They're expecting to clock in and clock out or they have other priorities that we didn't even ask them about ahead of time. And yet we're expecting them to help take our business from $3 million to $8 million. We didn't we didn't even contextually put that person into the role of what does it take to go for $3 million to $8 million. Do you know what it's like to work at $8 million our business when you joined your last company that I'm so impressed with as an entrepreneur that was doing $50 million in revenue. Were were you there only when they were doing $50 million or were you there when they actually grew from $25 to $50 so that you have context to be able to help us not just go to $8 million but actually hit a $50 million target. And so in this conversation with the candidate you have to be framing what the goal is for the organization. And then once they're on board with you you're crystal clear on what the expectation is. Are they hitting metrics? Are they clear on what their job description is? Do they know what success looks like in the first 30, 60, 90 days? And at that point for us at least that's when we start issuing equity because I'm not going to give equity to somebody on a hope and a dream and a promise but a lot of higher level executives are wanting that promise when they start an organization. And because we've tried doing that a handful of times I'm at the place today where I will not do that because they come in with these big degrees or they come in with this this 14 years at Ernst Young and they are about to be a partner and then they come in and they expect that our environment is a cushy one. And so it really depends on what the business owner is trying to create but if you are really serious about your goals and you are really clear on where you're trying to go you have to be communicating that with the person the entire time you almost have to promote that more than your promoting your client journey more than your promoting you bringing on new business because at some point that is not the thing that's going to stop you from growing your business. It's going to be this people piece and if you're not focused on this people piece when you start you're just playing this whack-a-mole game and filling positions and filling roles and you have this duct tape together team once you've got all of these clients that are inside your business and the business isn't set up to actually scale. I'm super curious because so your husband brand in and yourself you had 151 million dollar eggs which is phenomenal right so obviously like first of all you just said you brought some KKR which is like well I think that at this point the second or third largest private up firm in the world still phenomenal you're still doing it but when you when you started working with Grant I want to unpack even your experience because what he built out and how he partnered with both of you so branded in yourself to build a card on ventures this is kind of it's an example of exactly what you're telling businesses to do so I mean not a lot of businesses can attract somebody who had 151 million dollars exit to come and partner up with them so you know obviously I think it's good just to get a little bit of your backstory and where you came from but then tee it up with how did this partnership happen because this is what as a business owner if I can attract somebody who had that level of exit nine figure exit like that's phenomenal like I can only dream like right that's what I mean I'm trying to attract people from from fang from Facebook from Apple let alone like an exited entrepreneur it was a very serendipitous event in our lives and I honestly think that this is the greatest gift of my life up until this point which was I watched my now husband build this business as an entrepreneur he founded it in 2004 I worked in the business the last handful of years while he was going through the road show and the exit of this organization so the wire hits the bank account we were in Spain and within moments of that wire hitting I just watched the anxiety flood through him because you have this thing that happens that you've always dreamed of but if you don't have people around you telling you what's next or helping you prepare for what that experience is like you feel like your purpose is gone and this is exactly what happened his purpose was gone and for two years we went around hanging out with everybody who has had done a similar thing they had exits what do people do when they sell their business they start investing in golf memberships they start traveling more they buy homes they might buy some stupid stuff what has been happened to have a car a car a little addiction there for a while think about like six cars in a matter of two months it was ridiculous it was a lot of cars he likes cars he still likes cars but there was no influence around us saying this is what's next and so at the time I was 23 years old he was 48 years old we have a little bit of an age difference and I was like this is not what I signed up for I signed up for us to build a business I signed up for us to have a purpose and a mission and I'm not cool with us talking to your golf buddies every single day about the one shot that we missed every day it was like the same conversation the one shot is with golfers the one shot that like took the whole game out like I can't do this and so I started looking at all these social media influencers because my husband is brilliant and he's engaging in dynamic and funny and he's sharp I was like if these guys can do it you can freaking do it you've done more from a competency standpoint than most of them have and have this incredible story so I started looking all these social media people and I showed Grant to him and the first time he saw Grant he was like this has to be a joke like my husband was a very like traditional business person he was thinking that our next iteration was going to be going through private equity and I was like what if we went this social media route so I found this list showed him Grant he was not interested I instantly was like this is the guy I just could tell through the content but more importantly his relationship with his wife and his relationship with his kids not only was he creating this financial success and have this big mission to help all eight billion people on the planet with financial literacy like the mission's insane Grant like when he talks about 10x that push that he has is very real because he has this big mission but it's not just about the cars and the planes and the watches and all the success which is what I was seeing so much of it the golf course it was for him more about how do I create this life and this legacy for other people and also have an incredible relationship with my wife and also be a phenomenal dad and so I was very interested and attracted to this life this 10x thing that they were promoting online and so I read every single book I practically watched every single YouTube video and put this in front of Brandon when we were going on a four hour car ride I put the 10x rule on after I had read it like two times at that point and at first he's like no no no we're not listening to this luckily he has no idea how to work Bluetooth the age difference helps me with this so I forced him to he couldn't he couldn't turn it off we were in the car for four hours and it clicked for him so when we met Grant and Elena it was really us validating are they who they say they are and is their audience somebody that we know that we could help they at the time had a Cardinal Capital which is an investment firm for multifamily real estate and they had Cardinal University which is sales training but what we know how to do is leadership development and hiring and operations and how to look at financials and all these other components of growing and scaling a business so we met this audience at GrowthCon in 2019 this big event 35,000 people in it we met this audience we're like yeah we know we can help these people because they're only getting serviced through these two channels that Grant currently is offering and we watched Grant and Elena like weird little stalkers like we just like watched every little move and when we finally got the opportunity to meet them we said what would it take for us to have a conversation around being partners and creating a billion dollar organization together servicing business owners and Grant kind of blew us off a little bit at first but you know we know how to follow up and we continue to follow up and when that conversation became real it was so obvious that this is a need in their organization and this is what we are good at doing and we had been able to create this track record and so for the last five years that's what we've been busy building but for me maybe you and I might have a little bit of a different philosophy on this actually and I would love to like debate this potentially like I think it's really hard when you're like picking and choosing pieces of mentors because I don't want to be watching somebody who has all this business success and is telling me what it takes to do to be great in business but is a shitty dad like I don't want to be listening to that person and I have a hard time bifurcating that it's one person because to me they're they are one person and I want to learn from people who really do have it all if there is somebody who has exactly what I'm looking for I want to listen to that person and I used to listen to all of these different podcasts and YouTube like I'm a student of this this content and I used to listen to couples who did business separately and then all of a sudden I was like picking fights with Brandon or having issues in our business because I was listening to content that even though maybe I was listening to them about marriage content it infiltrated the fact that they weren't working together and that wasn't my path my path was working alongside my husband in a business and having to figure out this this way forward while also being a business owner a wife being supportive in all of these roles and it was confusing to me when I was trying to just like study one part of somebody and so for us granted Elena really were that like family, husband, wife, kids, ridiculously successful from a financial standpoint and impact driven and what I found them to me I'm like I'm going all in and five years later I am more putting them on a pedestal today than I was back then and that is so rare in today's world where you put somebody on a pedestal because you think that they're this great person from everything you've watched on social media YouTube Instagram all the fun stuff you're like oh they're this person but then you meet them oftentimes and you have a lot of experience with this you meet them and and don't meet your heroes right they're not yeah you like that's it real advice don't meet your heroes yeah to me I respect them more after spending thousands of hours with them then today then I did back then because they actually are who they say that they are and to me they're better like I wish somebody I wish they were better promoters of who they are because I think so much gets missed with the two of them and so that's why we decided to literally go all in we move from Washington move between here and Scottsdale to build this business over five years because we found people that had the life that we wanted who were willing to mentor us and we also brought a significant amount of credibility and influence and hard work and strategy to the table to make this partnership makes sense I just want to take a second and think the HubSpot podcast network for supporting success story the HubSpot podcast network has incredible podcasts like the product boss hosted by Jacqueline Snyder and Mina Kuhnlo Sithep if you want to take your physical product sales and strategy to the next level to create your dream life you need to listen to the product boss they sit down for an hour they do a workshop style podcast they're gonna talk about everything that you need to know to up level yourself social media marketing if you're a consumer package goods if you have any sort of physical widget you need to tune into the product boss wherever you get your podcasts so it's interesting that you that you you say that you found this one person that sort of encapsulates everything it's very hard to compartmentalize one particular aspect of somebody's life and then ignore the rest and I think that's actually very wise I think that the reason I have the view that I have is because it's very rare to find somebody that encapsulates everything that you would look for in a person and I think it's because people are so easily influenced by social media I think it's dangerous I think it's less risky to look at a few different people than to go all in on one person because if I say go all in on one person there's a there's a high probability that person is not who they say they are that's the concern and I think that we talk about access all the time and I'm gonna give you an impossible question to answer because you asked me some impossible questions as well but when you look at the exit and the access that you had someone will be like okay so I didn't have a hundred and fifty one million dollar exit how can I have a sit-down conversation with all the people that I look up to to make sure that they are who they say they are because I do want to go all in on one person that's a very difficult thing to replicate so what would be the advice for somebody who's looking for mentor advice all the people online if you can't meet them in person and spend one on one time with them how can you study every other aspect around them so with Grant and Elena before we sat down and met with them I watched every single thing that their kids were putting out I watched all of the behind the scenes of their team's content because do they have great people around them that are vouching for them if they don't have great people around them but they're they're promoting that they know how to do all of this stuff and that they are these great people great people have other great people around them that is a fact and so do they have a big enough business or group of leaders around them that do vouch for them that do show up and promote them and believe in them and still say the things I mean to me like I am their greatest billboard but it's because I mean it and it's to my core that I believe that those two individuals are just the greatest people that I've ever met but do they have a lot of successful people around them and what do their lives look like are the people around them winning and achieving things and succeeding or the people around them actually doing worse or do they not promote the people around them at all so I would really be looking at not just the one person you're not just looking at Kylie Jenner or you're not just looking at you know whoever your influencer of choices what is the group around them like and are they winning or are they losing and are they when they get in proximity to these people are they doing worse off than they were beforehand and that to me is such an easy tell if the person truly is influential and actually able to create an environment where the people around them become more successful my definition of leadership is making other people success easy so if you really are a leader how can you demonstrate that you have made the people around you their success easy through the environment that they are in now because of you through the example that you are creating inside their presence like you do rub off on people grant did rub off on people Elena did rub off on people are those people doing better and to the extent that they are that's what those are the people you should be going all in on if they aren't then I would second guess are they really the right person to be listening to because the people who are close to them know like where the bodies are buried if the bodies aren't buried and there aren't any bodies hope like praying that they aren't actually any buried bodies or any dead bodies yes figuratively um then you know I watched so many social media people and people that we've partnered with and I wish that I would have taken my advice earlier on when it comes to investing in businesses because what I see a lot of people who are in this game that we're in which is investing in businesses they don't they don't really critically look at their partners when you look at a business deal that you're about to do what is the family and the friend and the co-worker situation I get that you're looking at the founder or the entrepreneur but it's hard to tell just through financials and through somebody doing an interview if they're the real deal if I can get access to having dinner with the founder and the spouse I'm interested like what what's the dynamic between the two of them can I actually meet with the team and understand how that founder shows up with their team members because they're going to show me one thing but they're going to be an entirely different person and the people around them are going to demonstrate a totally different side of them and if I can get access to that when I get access to that we do better deals when I haven't done that those nine times out of 10 are the deals that have failed for us it's because we just thought this one person was great but we didn't have the rest of the picture and they didn't have the same core values that we have they didn't demonstrate these things that are really important to us not just inside work and not just being a high performer when they show up but the rest of their lives and you know when somebody is a fraud and the rest of their lives when other people in their lives aren't gouging for them and when you agree when you I love that process I mean I've been part of a lot of investment conversations and I think that a lot of the focus is on like the P&L and that's that's really where it ends and then you have a founder interview and you figure out the founder is good but sitting down with somebody's spouse meeting their friends I don't know you just hired somebody from KKR do they do that I don't I don't know if they do they do that level of do they know when they buy a business I don't think so no I just don't want to do business if we are smaller than KKR because we're not willing to put up with the bullshit that they're willing to put up with I'm okay with that we have done enough bad deals for me to know that I only want to do deals with people that I trust that believe in me that are rooting for this organization that are ethical that actually are what they say that they are and when you come into an environment that is all of those things the people are where they say they are they're authentic they're genuine they're high performing ideally that repels that the bad ones but sometimes people just get so money hungry or they think that you're going to give up sooner than you really are they have a short-term time horizon and you have a long-term time horizon like my life is too short to have to deal with those people there are enough great business owners out there that are the type of people that I want to spend time with that if we have a billion dollar fund instead of a hundred billion dollar fund like I'm good because I don't want to have to deal with the headaches and the the sheer torment to be honest and I know you have experienced like this the torment of founders who are just complete assholes there you couldn't you could pay me enough but it's so much more than what they're actually able to bring to the table that it's I'm not going to do that and I do think that there's an alternative route early stage founder is listening to this thinking okay I'm not I'm not a bad person I'm an ethical person I I check all those boxes but you mentioned something that's very interesting you want your definition of leadership was making success easy for other people amazing love that definition founders like shit I'm just trying to build a business I don't know how to make success easy for other people I'm just hiring people and I have SOPs and I hopefully find some talent and it's like it's it's so much that what you know I'm trying to figure out how do I create success for other people maybe I kind of know where their career aspirations and goals are but it's a startup everyone's struggling everyone's stressed out everything's on fire every single day and I'm doing my best and I'm working from six in the morning till 11 at night how am I really supposed to invest more into my people what is like a very easy way to invest into my people so that their success is easier because of me because I don't even feel as a business owner my own success is easy and I think that's a reality for a lot of people especially in the in the SMB space in the people you serve sub 10 million dollars nothing feels easy your own success is not just pretty doesn't feel easy so how am I going to give my energy and my time to all the people that work for me so that Natalie comes in she wants to buy my business they don't say that yeah it's not a bad guy but I mean I haven't upskilled I haven't learned anything new I kind of just do my job sometimes like we get stressed out and things aren't working which is I think is pretty like this is like a standard definition of almost any business so what's the what's the strategy to make people's success easier when you're already stressed yourself it's a great question that one's like the deep one for me I would say that if you're starting the conversation with their goals somebody is coming to you making $60,000 I'll give you a real example someone's coming to you making $60,000 a year they want to make $400,000 a year you want to drive that person to the things that would allow them to make $400,000 a year we had a team member come to us that was making $60,000 a year and her goals when we sat down and talked to her having this PPF conversation was in the next 18 months you wanted to make $250,000 like in the role that you're in right now it was an operations function there is no possibility of you making $250,000 a year this is not real in the next 18 months this is the business owner this is me being a coach in the situation because you're telling me you want to do something and if I believe you that you want to do this something I have to tell you when that doesn't make sense here but ideally you're able to create a different path to keep this really engaged person somebody who wants to be able to create something great and share with them what success could look like so this person had never sold anything she actually was working on her doctor of chiropractic so she had just finished chiropractic school and when she said found and told me this I said the only way that I see you joining this organization she was our 12th employee and being able to make $250,000 a year is through becoming a salesperson and if you become a salesperson and you learn the most valuable lesson that a business like ours is struggling with which is how to get customers in and convert them into our products and services you would be paid that and then some so she thought about it for a week and half and she's like sure I'll become a salesperson and so we transitioned her over two months because she's still fulfilling that operations function so business owners like they're still in the function that they're originally in but she pivoted over to sales she cried every single day for the first 90 days like it was like a patch up job every single day being told no 250 times most of the time people not even answering the phone call fast forward one year later she had made $250,000 think she made like 280 then she made 350 then she made 400,000 but ultimately she never wanted to be a salesperson she wanted to make $250,000 a year to then be able to service people in healthcare space so as an organization we bought this little company called Streamline Medical rebranded it to 10x health bolted on another company in order to grow its revenue and we needed a director of sales this team member is now the director of sales at 10x health leading a 50 person team all because when she was 24 years old she was very honest by saying I'm making $60,000 a year my value and contribution today is $50,000 or $60,000 a year but I have these goals and we shoved her to where the business needed help right then and there and it eventually ended up leading her back to what her goals were originally which was to be part of a health and wellness company that was tied to ice you into chiropractic school to begin with and so when you really take it as like it's not this overwhelming concept of tying your team members to the goals of the business this is a hand-to-hand combat one-to-one conversation you hire somebody they tell you that they are making $80,000 but they only want to make $90,000 is that person really going to be the person that helps you create this next level of growth in your business probably not early on you only want to be hiring very growth-oriented team members because you need them to want to grow and then when you're talking to them and they tell you that they have these large growth goals how do you craft this doesn't take hours it probably takes 30 minutes with each individual person you have 12 team members okay if Bob wants to go from 80,000 to 120,000 what would he actually have to do in our product team in order to drive $400,000 of additional revenue for him to be able to make this additional 30 or $40,000 a year and if the gap between what they want to make and where they're making is so large but they think that they can do it why not have them proposed to you what value they could add what skill set they could bring to the table what they would need investment in for them to go learn to invest in education and courses and content to actually get those skills that you're specifically looking for from that person and so the less you think of it as like a general how do I as a business owner overcome this and you think about it individually and you're crafting these plans for your team members the more success you're going to have with actually creating the success because you need those team members to uplevel their skills to grow you're just helping them make their success easy by saying great this is the marketing course this is the funnels course this is the sales content and training and plan this is what this is going to have to look like and you're demonstrating that success as a business owner because if you're doing eight million dollars a year and you're trying to get to 50 you're listening to a podcast like this you're up leveling your skills you're sharing this stuff with your team you're sending that example of what it takes you have a goal you get really technical about what skills you need to learn right now in order to get to the next step and then you're duplicating that across the other team members who are looking at you as the person who's the example for the success inside the organization i think you're doing it very well and i think that people may not understand how impactful and useful that strategy that you just gave is because i've seen the other side of it i've seen the market where people are planning on jumping between competitors because it's easier to advance your career by going from company one to company two because nobody invests in them and i think the bigger company some do it okay i think a lot of the miss the mark on that i'll even tell you a wild story early on in my career i was trying to move from a small market to mid market sales and there was a base and a compensation package and my director at the time he was arguing for a higher compensation they were offering candidates were coming from outside the organization as opposed to what they could offer people that were internally promoted and for some reason it was like a ten thousand dollar difference so if you're internally promoted you get say like 65 if you came from the outside you can make 75 and he's like this is the dumbest thing i've ever so what we actually ended up doing is i ended up resigning and then applying and then he brought me in as an external candidate like how stupid how stupid is it for a business to do that like that that's absolutely ridiculous so this is obviously the complete 180 of that type of mindset um i know i just think it's amazing i think it's i think it's a very smart way to foster talent from within yeah just one more thought on what you just mentioned because i love this um i think sales is such an important strategy obviously cardone is a very sales heavy organization is how it all started out um do you believe that and i believe that at least entrepreneurs should be sales people like that's one of the most important skills to a point like you mentioned but do you believe that anybody can become a salesperson absolutely every single person in your organization unless you have some licensure issue like in a legal business or in a handful of medical businesses you can't have your front office person selling certain procedures or certain services but outside of some license issue every single person in an organization should be training every day on the products and services and how to overcome objections for that business because that is your expansion especially if you are a small business if you're a small business you have five people to help you hit your growth goals if you do not equip those five people to help you whose job is it to hit your growth goals it's yours you are entirely like holding all of this responsibility yourself instead of saying hey wait there's five people all of us are joined together through this mission all of us are tied financially to the success of this organization so i'm going to equip you guys with the right skills so that when you're having a conversation with somebody in an elevator when you're having a conversation with somebody some business owner that would be the perfect fit for our organization at a coffee shop or a smoothie shop or at a restaurant or at a networking event you can confidently talk about what your products are and move them through a close and if you're not training your people on how to do that you're just accepting the fact that it is your responsibility but then you're also wondering why everybody in your organization is disengaged well of course they're disengaged because they don't know how to make any more money you've hired them you've set a salary for them you don't have incentive compensation created you don't have a commission structure in place you're not training them on how they can make more money so why would they stay engaged the only reason that somebody is listening to a podcast like this is because they are interested in growing some skill set if you're a value prop in your podcast was success stories how to be the same in one year from now as you are today no one would be listening today is a terrible tagline but that's what we do to team members that's what corporate America does to team members they say come in we're going to set a base for you we're not going to be smart enough to figure out what incentive metrics are we're not going to have a conversation about what your goals are because heaven forbid you tell us something that is important to you and then you sue us because you said something like we've just created all of these weird structures and all these weird weird rules were business owners actually are creating a game where people only can be disengaged that's their only default is to be disengaged because why else would I be engaged they don't think of this people strategy as a game where they're playing something and every single day they get to figure out this different way to engage great people to get the best talent to them themselves be people and an organization worthy of having the best people and so it said they just bitched their significant other all might long about how terrible Sally is or Bob is or Susan is and nobody wants to help them in their business well if you allowed people to sell in your business you'd at least be giving them a game to figure out how they can make more money which is actually the contract that you guys have even if you're in a family business the contract between team members if you are working inside an organization and you have employed somebody the contract is a financial one if you stopped paying them they would not show up on Monday morning and yet we don't continue to create on the contract we think that because they're nice or their family member we don't want to upset them that we're not going to hold them accountable it's ridiculous and then we also bitching complain about why people aren't helping us grow our businesses we've never created a structure for them to do that that's an interesting so it's interesting because I've seen the exact opposite where part of the variable comp is tied to the company's performance yet the person has no direct impact or perceived direct impact I mean everything impacts but then it just creates this apathetic like well whatever happens happens and I'm going to show up on clock in and clock out how do you get people on board with becoming evangelists sales people for the company how do you remove the stigma of sales because there's there's always a stigma around sales and there's a certain kind of person that likes to do it and there's a lot of people that don't like to be sales right so how do you get somebody to buy into this concept because once they once the money comes in it's easy but there's so much pressure and negativity around the concept of sales that for a lot of people the gap between the first commission check and where they're at now and a product manager role is too big for them to understand okay I'm going to start to go down this path and I'm going to start to be okay with rejection I'm going to start to be okay with putting myself out there and calling people and emailing people and having conversations and evangelizing the company I'm working for what's the what's the way to tie it together I have such a hack for this or wild for this since we started this organization we've had a daily multimedia with every single person in our company so today at 1145 Eastern and 45 Pacific our entire company will hop on a call and there's a bunch of things that we do operationally and culturally on the beginning of that call but the end of that call every single day we pull up what's called the Cardone U wheel and the Cardone U wheel Cardone U stands for Cardone University has this like wheel of fortune type thing on an iPad and we spin the wheel and every single person in the company's name is on this wheel and so it spins and it lands on one person and that one person shares with the whole company whether we were 12 employees or now 350 employees what they learned the day before from Cardone University and then they role play in front of everybody that's so stressful for against building into that you build it into the culture of the company it's so now you don't want to be the you don't want to be the the outlier right that doesn't know something that can't role play yep so you set the expectation but they also know what everyone's doing it every single person is doing it whether your product tech recruiting videography obviously sales are the best at it but sometimes we have people in finance who just crush it like oh my gosh you should be a salesperson you could make more money if you were doing this versus doing that but so we normalize this culture of everything that you want in life is a sale so if you're saying to us you want to make more money this is exactly what this looks like and we're going to give you the tools to help you get better at this we're not going to let you fail the purpose the purpose is not to make people look silly but imagine you're showing up to to your first day of work inside our organization like it is just part of the culture and the team is supportive in the chat and they're giving pointers and they're sharing what the links are carnamentures.com forward slash people that's for upcoming essentials workshop and they're just like figuring out how to help the person who's working through the sales process but you're doing your team members a disservice if you are not addressing that the number one skill that they can learn in a business is to sell you are selling yourself you are selling your team you are selling the product you are selling the opportunity you are constantly selling in any successful role and so why do we think that we shouldn't allow people to hone that skill set to develop that to overcome that negative mindset to me it just demonstrates that a company isn't really willing to have harder conversations about what true value creation looks like in a business true value is being able to overcome things that you're uncomfortable with if my head of product cannot figure out how to intelligently speak and talk to the value proposition of our organization to a potential client they're not the right product officer inside our organization they can go work they can work for Facebook they can work for some other place they're not the right person for us because we want people I want that product officer to be able to sell to me why should listen to their idea if they can't do that with me and they can't do that with a customer they're not the right person yeah I think that that's an incredible it's an incredible strategy I don't think many companies do that and most companies fail I'm 97% yeah so because they're not willing to have the conversation and we become so complacent with like oh I'm just going to let my recruitment people be who they are well they developers are a certain personality type recruiters certain I mean and then there's this whole animosity between marketing and sales because marketing is like you know like we were the intellectual component of the revenue and sales is like oh well no we actually make the money and then you have all this these compartmentalized siloed business units that don't play well together I mean go to any company and I mean it's not a hard and fast rule but go have a conversation between a CRO and a CTO and it's like they're speaking different languages from different planets and there's no cohesion and I think it actually really inhibits I mean I've been on I've been on zoom calls where CTO refuse to even turn on a camera or does it like work still for in the morning so they don't show up for morning meetings like like just completely different cultures and you end up disrespecting each other and you end up making all of your jobs harder too it's worked well I'm assuming this it's worked I never heard anybody say this before it's a great sale to your organization but it's very interesting it's a new concept I've never heard you have to cut the shit yeah like what is the purpose of a business it is to service customers in order to service customers you have to get customers you have to sell like sales is a part of the CTO and the CRO having a conversation we have to remember and realign our teams with why we're here and if we're here to solve customers problems by selling them on why we are the best let's let's make that the DNA of the company I don't want to hear the conversation between the CRO and the CTO having their like fiefdoms and I'm going to be in my side and our team is going to be against you we are one team we are one team that has one expectation and if you the further you get from why the business exists which is to sell customers to move the business forward and ideally offer a great product and service a solution to their problem the further you get from that you spend time and your executive spend time dealing with this bullshit of different opinions how we're going to work in certain ways so us in graining this into our culture sure we've had people that don't want to be a part of it that has not stopped us from growing we will find people who are interested and are okay with this and it's the way that we want our culture to be created and so maybe for the business owner or the the listener who's in our organization right now you're like this could never fly inside our business you have to ask yourself why why would this not work inside your organization who would you be pissing off and when you think about those individuals it's likely handful of people it's not a group of people it's a handful of people they all have egos yeah but then why are we being reasonable to the egos if we know that this is what's beneficial not just to your CTO your CTO probably knows how to sell because that's how they got the job they got like selling themselves they have some sort of confidence they have some sort of skill set that they're able to say this is my resume because I was able to do these great things but what what are we doing to help that CTO actually develop their team members to have those skills or or letting the person who sleeps in until four o'clock doesn't show up to team meetings setting the worst example but they're supposed to be helping the people underneath them get to the next level of success it's very unlikely that those people are actually going to be able to develop the right skills because they don't have a leader who's focused on the right things if you're focused on the right things sales the business growth through sales it doesn't grow through anything else there's no magical thing that happens that doesn't allow the business to grow through sales if we're not teaching that to people we're actually doing them into service and not teaching them what the value is of their role regardless of their in HR counting tech whatever and when you see this when when you don't solve this problem early on and when you don't create cohesion throughout all your team members well you see as the company scales is you'll see different departments actually like fighting each other and this is I mean I've seen this several times where a company was acquired and then a certain a certain tech piece of the business with building a competitive product to the company that was just acquired and basically you're cannibalizing yourself you're competing yourself or you're you have two similar products and tech is pushing one and then marketing is pushing one and it's just messy it's very messy if everybody feels like like a fiefdom I love that like everybody is sort of king of their own little part of the business it creates a ton of mess and it will only get worse and it'll make everything more difficult to scale as you grow and I think that this is probably why now I'm unpacking why you've been able to grow so quickly you focus on cohesion you focus on everyone in the brand being an evangelist you focus on being a people first business but you're doing and you found ways to build process around it even at a billion dollars assets under management even with hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue so I think a lot of people start out with the right intentions but I think as they grow I think they lose sight and then the corporate America example is what happens not the card on ventures card on capital card on example which is really what you're trying to preserve so you don't sacrifice that at the for the sake of scale and grow for sure and the small business owner if I can just urge them to not be reasonable with their first 50 team members can we not allow the excuses and the personalities to get in the way of what the mission of the organization is you start to build this strength where you're like wait a second just because Bob has this great resume and he comes from this pedigree doesn't mean that he gets to run a train in my business and make all of these decisions in a way that is not in alignment with who I am if you can do that with your first 50 team members and have your leaders be the type of people that actually represent your brands and that you like working with and that are an example of what you want future team members you're 200th team member you're 500 team member to be like if that's not how you feel about your first 50 team members then keep weeding out the people that you are being reasonable with so you keep this philosophy of I'm going to be unreasonable because then when you have those people those first 50 people they will help you scale and grow the departments the right way but if you start being reasonable with your fifth employee and people become reasonable for all sorts of reasons because they don't think they can find better people they think that the problems that Bob has are better than the unknown problems that Joe is going to bring in the business they don't think that there's enough talent they hear these stories like what your friends were telling you about somebody in their second week renegotiating their salary like all of these random things in a business happen but you have to stay true to this is what I'm trying to build these are the people I want to spend my time around if you do not fit this I am confident that I will find somebody who will so no thank you thank you but no thank you I'm going to replace you with somebody who is in alignment with what I want this business to look like and if you can stick to that early on as a small business owner you'll be able to have the confidence to reset with a problematic CRO and CTO because it's just the same thing on a larger scale and with more team members I love this so start the work you can get it anywhere you can get books obviously so Amazon will put links in the show notes what would be one thing that you wish you put in the book that you maybe left out oh that's such a good question I'm sure there's a lot but such a good question you know I teach all of the content that's in the book and so funny enough I just came off of two days of teaching this specific content and the group of people in the room are business owners and leaders navigating metrics and quarterly team meetings and they're like in the thick of it and if I could include anything which I still technically can because the resources can be added and changed I would just give more tangible examples of what success looks like with metrics tracking because it's not the same across every single business and so I'm a big visual learner I think a lot of times business owners get confused because something doesn't instantly apply to their business and they can't contextualize how it could apply to their business and so they just don't do the thing like they don't understand what a P&L is and so they kind of always push this thing off because they don't understand this one word and all of a sudden they're now operating a business without financials and so as I was teaching this content this weekend we had different groups of people in the room and I was like man I would love to give the example of a quarterly team meeting for a business services organization versus an HVAC business because there are nuances and building out a library of more tangible things that people can really see like aha that's me I'm going to pick this resource I am a super tactical person the book is super tactical I want to just give all of the solutions for people to be able to implement and when I look back on it I'm like oh there's still so many more examples that I can give so I probably am going to actually add more resources to the book um I think I think that some of these things can be overwhelming for people that are just operating a business especially one to three million you probably you may or may not know what KPIs are you may or may not know what a P&L is okay ours are a various you know a version of KPIs that maybe are a little bit more confusing and complex quarterly meetings I mean you have meetings but like what's the point of a quarterly meeting what's the point of an annual meeting if you were going to look at all the different metrics and and and things that people should look at as a business owner maybe just very briefly because obviously they're going to go to the book to get a lot more nuance what are the main things that are important what are the things that maybe can be pushed off even till the eight million dollar break point I would push off quarterly team meetings to the eight million dollar break points I would absolutely have a daily metrics tracker inside your business at the start you looking at 15 things that are happening in your business every single day between your marketing sales cash collected and operational functions those initiatives you should be looking at the changes daily what's working what's not working and really understand the pulse of your business you don't have to look at them weekly if you're looking at them daily and when you're looking at them daily I wrap this into a daily multimedia because from my standpoint if you're a 15 team HVAC business and you're doing a million or a million half dollars in revenue you're going to know what's working so fast if you're looking at the daily change it's not it doesn't take a rocket science figure out oh we got all of these leads yesterday what do we do right yesterday oh we didn't get very many leads yesterday what happened was something broken was something not connected you're so much more in tune with looking at and understanding what's happening in your business when you're actually doing this daily and it's a practice that if you wait until your financials come back to you a month later you're not actually able to impact revenue you're not able to make a change and I strongly encourage business owners to schedule their day around what's happening inside the business how am I looking at these daily metrics how do I have time for myself and the key people that I'm dependent upon to make a change that day based off of what's not working any longer if something didn't work yesterday how am I making time for my day today to fix or to look at what's not working any longer because how many days am I going to go how many weeks how many months am I going to go before I realize that the leads aren't connected or that my salesperson is reading the wrong script and their conversions are going or are going down the smaller you are the more easy it is to be able to see those things that are working and are working do less of the things that aren't working do more of the things that are working and you're going to be able to make time for making those tweaks quickly if you're looking at those numbers every single day it's not metrics for metrics sake it's metrics so that I can actually reorganize my day not to fight fires not to deal with the BS that my team is created on some issue it's to actually fix something that's not working would you say daily metrics or daily meetings are more important both daily metrics and then and then a daily meeting that's what it looks like for us even today I have a daily metrics report that gets sent into my email as soon as the day starts from yesterday that is aligned with our daily all team meeting and then immediately afterwards there's a leadership meeting for us to block and tackle what happened why is this thing off how are we doing more of that and then there's obviously time to look into the future and to say okay how are we strategically planning and how are we fixing things and what where are we going and how are we aligning the initiatives with that stuff that stuff needs to happen but most business owners in order to get from one million or three million and actually hit an 8 million or 10 million or 15 million dollar target they're they have to pay attention to what's actually happening in their business today not future casting and shiny penning all the different initiatives that could be happening right now and also like leading indicators as opposed to lagging indicators for success too I think that we get caught up in vanity metrics and lagging indicators way too much okay if you are going to anything that we didn't cover we went to a lot so anything that we didn't cover that you wanted to go into from the book anything you can talk about stuff you're working on now that's not the book because you have like these we you present all the time so constant workshops obviously we can talk about just where people can connect with you as well and get all the social in the handles but anything that we didn't go into you know it's funny this is the first podcast that I've done in four years where this thing happened and I want to talk about this on the podcast this thing happened five minutes into the podcast and this thing that used to plague me and not allow me to publicly speak I was terrified publicly speaking five years ago six years ago eight years ago I had no confidence because every time I would get into a room after I had this horrible nightmarish public speaking event this like thing would happen in my brain where I would hear 15 different voices all at the same time and instead of being able to communicate what I want to communicate 15 different people were talking to me and like I almost couldn't hear my own thoughts and so I worked with a speaking coach I when you talk about reps like I put in reps for every opportunity I could get to make a toast to host a group meeting to record myself I would do that so I could get over this thing that was happening to me and the craziest thing happened ten or maybe even five minutes in where that took place and I thought that I was over that and what I want to share with the audience through this podcast experiences even when you think you've gotten good at something you might not be so good at that thing and you're never over those pieces that you're worried about or might have had insecurity about years ago and so this game of creating a business and being a public speaker and figuring out how to get confidence and figuring out how to host a podcast or launch a social media platform whatever it is it is a continuous evolving learning opportunity and when you make mistakes or when you mess something up it's so easy to just like internalize and I think that this is one of my superpowers even with the book there are tons of things that after you hit publish you're like I want to fix it and I want to do more but that's the exact thing that I think plagues people and stops them is they get so caught up and I want to do more I have to perfect it or they're so hard on themselves that they don't just keep moving forward and they don't figure out how to overcome from a mindset standpoint those those moments where they're embarrassed or frustrated or disappointed in themselves and so we didn't talk too much about mindset things but I know I'm going to rewatch this podcast I'm going to listen to the podcast and be like me and what happened there and how could I have done that differently but at the same time five years ago I would have just beaten myself up for this like thing that I perceive I can't control of course I can control it I know I can but in the moment it feels like it's uncontrollable and just urging the the person that's listening to this right now that if you're struggling through something where you're feeling like you have to take two steps back and you just continue to take two steps two steps back it's okay that that happens to you it's okay that there are moments where you're not perfect you just have to keep going on with the thing and you have to just keep remembering that the target is in this case it's a finished podcast right but in bigger things in life it's making sure that the perfection that you want isn't the thing that actually stops you from continuing to move forward I would say that also I mean it's never as bad as you think it is I mean it's really it's never bad as like we are our perception conflates this issue in our mind and it causes panic and stress and it's never that bad and it's honestly never even noticeable sometimes it is that bad sometimes it can be pretty free and bad like have you ever had one of those moments where it's pretty bad something you do just sounds horrendous or you jack something up listen back to it it's never as bad as I think it is interesting and I also I also understand now because I've usually it's in some sort of like performance based like speaking on a podcast or speaking on stage what it actually is it's it's a protection mechanism and your cortisol increases and you get a small little panic micro panic attack and then your body just has to like level out and normalize but the thing is when we get this panic attack if we don't know that it's actually a natural response to being put on stage or being put on the spot we we think there's something wrong with us and then we'll be thinking about that thing as opposed to like what we're actually trying to do and it will actually we will create this this mindset where we keep thinking it's happening to us even though it's not and we'll keep stumbling and we'll keep and and you can usually for me at least I can tell when I'm stressed out about something because my mouth gets dry that's like the one sign now by doing it 500 times or by speaking on stage not 500 times but enough I can perform through it but that's again just because of doing the reps it's 100% doing the reps by the way we could do a whole mindset podcast but I want to get the tactics out I love the tactics the tactics are important taxes are very important um if people want to connect with you where should they go Natalie Dawson I am super super involved on Instagram I answer all my own DMs I love Instagram it's my platform of choice so find me there perfect last question if you were going to tell your 20 year old self one thing what would it be I would tell my 20 year old self to go all in I was so worried about what people thought of me and got so wrapped up in my own limitations that I just like tried a bunch of things that I never wanted to commit to something even things that I liked I used to like scrapbooking scrapbooking was like my thing but I had some friends that made fun of me for scrapbooking and so I stopped doing the scrapbooking which sounds ridiculous but today you see people who have built a million dollar or 10 million dollar 100 million dollar scrapbooking business because they were just really passionate and into that thing and so for so long I really felt like I held myself back especially at the age of 20 from going all in on the things that interested me because I was fearful and insecure and really worried about what other people think and today the interest and passions that I have I'm like I'm crazy and a freak and a fanatic about those things and I slowed my growth by eight to 10 years by not having that mentality a lot sooner