Leadership Secrets: How to Build a $100M Company Culture | Brett K Oubre DSH #1011

It's not like the old days.

Worked one job your whole life and got retirement money.

The reason that the fear worked in the 40s and the 50s and the 60s was because the lack of decent jobs in the state of the economy all the way to like the 80s.

If they got whacked, there was no other place to go.

Now there's millions of options.

There's more jobs than there are people willing to take them.

All right, guys, out here in Vegas with Brett, who has an event in town tomorrow.

Thanks for coming on, man.

Thank you for inviting me.

Of course.

Yeah, I saw your event with Michael Francis tomorrow and John Maxwell, right?

Yeah, it's going to be Francis and Maxwell and I.

And what was the purpose of this event?

We're going to call it the, you know, John's going to talk about his new book, you know, High Road Leadership.

Michael's going to talk about being a remade man.

And I mean, you know, he was a made member in the mafia.

Yep.

And, you know, he kind of transitioned from that in 85 after he went to prison.

And then mine's going to be remaking the man, if that makes sense.

Talking about, and of course, we're using that, you know, saying man, but we mean either gender.

But in terms of remaking yourself, whether you're just getting started, whether you're in the middle and you kind of got stagnant, or you're towards the end of your career and you want to get started again and make that legacy impact for you quit.

Right.

So the 12 steps, that's the book you just released, right?

It is.

And that was about remaking yourself as a person?

Well, the 12 steps is, you know, when I got started,

my dad was a minister and not that that wasn't great.

I mean, he had a lot of great values that he taught me as far as family values,

as far as keeping your word and doing great things and

work ethic and those type of things.

But when it came to business acumen and some of the things that will make you career successful outside of the religious community, he didn't have that.

So, you know, one of the things is a lot of people, the reason why history repeats themselves inside family, because they say, well, my dad did it like this, or my dad did it like this, or my mom did it like this, my mom did it like that.

And what at the point I remember when it happened, I realized that my parents don't have all the stuff.

And that's okay.

Because you meet other people that come alongside of you and make up for what your parents are not strong at, which doesn't make your parents negligible in those scenarios.

It means it just helps you get further faster.

So in my particular situation, I wrote this book, 12 Steps, which is, you know, not, I wake up in the morning at 5 a.m., I go to the gym, I eat right.

It's not a book like that.

We all know those things.

It's, you know, I would get up, I would take off, I'd hit that wall, pull back, I would kind of learn from the concept, I mean, from the mistake on my own with no guidance.

And I said, if I can write this book about the concepts that you can apply to your own life, I could help people get further faster.

I love that.

And you've been through some stuff, my man.

We got to get into this.

Yeah, a few things.

Quite a few things.

Quite some traumatic incidents, right?

There's been a few.

So I know you have the paralysis, the health crisis, the plane crash.

I don't even know where to start.

Which one of those came first, I guess?

I mean,

if you put it in that

context, I mean, in 2012,

I was getting ready to go to a college football game, and my son was sitting there, and he said, Dad, would you watch Star Wars with me before you leave?

And I said, sure, son.

I had to move a table upstairs.

And as I'm getting ready to go upstairs, this arm comes up and I'm fighting with all my might to get it down.

Then the next thing I knew or remember, I'm in an ambulance going to the hospital.

Whoa.

Well, obviously I had a seizure.

They thought I had a stroke, but it was a seizure.

Went to the hospital.

They did a brain scan.

The ER doc, which I don't think he was a bad person, but he didn't have all the information.

And he came back and says, you have metastatic brain cancer and you got six to ten months to live.

Well, obviously, I didn't, you know, I'm not going to just, it's not that I'm not going to trust my doctors, but I'm going to do more research.

I'm not going to go just based on one opinion.

And so

got out of the, they kept me overnight at the hospital.

Had a a couple of friends that knew a neurosurgeon in New Orleans.

Went to see him.

He also trains all the residents for neurosurgery out of the LSU system

and came out of one of the other major universities.

And he's one of the best, probably top 5%.

He did surgery on it.

He came to me and he said, all right, well, let's do it.

Tuesday.

I was like, give me one more week.

I said, let's do it the Tuesday after.

So So went in, came out to surgery.

I'm laying in the recovery room.

He comes in.

Well, I woke up about seven minutes after surgery.

And when I wake up, you know, they have that trach in your mouth.

And I'm sitting there going,

trying to say, hey, this trache in my mouth.

And the nurse goes, he's fighting us.

He's fighting us.

And they come in and they're trying to hold me down.

And the doctor comes walking through.

He goes, he's not fighting you.

He's awake.

Take the tube out of his mouth.

So they took the tube out of my mouth and the doctor goes, I got some good news and I got some bad news.

And I said, what's the good news?

He goes,

I think you got some time.

I don't think it's as bad as what the diagnoses was.

Although it is cancerous, I think it's a slower-growing cancer, and I think

some things we can throw at it.

He goes, the bad news is, try to move that arm.

I couldn't.

Whoa.

It was paralyzed.

And he said, well, you know, when we do that, sometimes we cut some of the electrical connection that

causes that to be able to move.

We'll get you into physical therapy and see what you can do.

And I said, well, you know what?

I'm alive.

That's great.

I can cut the other arm off and I can go with just one arm.

So to me, that's a lesson is no matter what, it doesn't matter what happens to you.

It's how you react or respond to what happens to you right because you could have been so pissed you could have caused a scene you know how many people lay in the bed and start going oh I can't believe that happened to me and I

you know the world's being unfair the world if we looked at it like that the world's unfair to everybody right you know even the people that you think are the most successful you look at them you got big homes nice cars they got these great memberships and everything and businesses I promise you, there's plagues in their life if you dived in and dug deep that it may be as bad or worse than what you're plagued with.

100%.

Because money is not what buys happiness.

And that's what they try to teach you.

That's what is trying to be taught.

It's

reaching your full potential by finding out what your true talents are and going to work and exercise that on a daily basis.

And so, you know, we went on and, you know, I got

about

probably a week later.

He had told me when we initially went in to

before the consult,

he said, we're going to do the surgery and, you know, probably next day you'll get out.

He said, we'll wrap it up.

You'll be fine.

He said, take it easy when you get home.

And so

He comes in the room that afternoon, that evening, he goes, well, you know, we're going to have to keep you 30 days.

And I keep me 30 days for what?

He goes, well, you know, you're having the problems with the arm.

And I said, man, I'm not staying 30 days.

He goes, well, you're going to need to go to physical therapy.

I jumped up and take off walking down the hall.

And because I was trying to show him that I can move, he came walking down the hall and goes, hey, man, hey, man, you convinced me.

You convinced me.

But he said, the fact that that's arm's hanging like that, he said, you can mess up your shoulder and your rotator cup and and everything else.

So the next day I got out.

Wow.

And you just did PT later on?

I started doing PT.

Let's see, I got home that day.

I think it was

a day later, day and a half.

I went to the office the next day, and I think the day after that I started PT.

That's crazy.

You were still working right off the house.

I had the thing on my head.

Wow.

So you were able to fix the paralysis, though, obviously.

Well, I mean, I strapped it up like this at first.

I mean, you just do this, but I mean, you know, I remember when I was doing it, first thing I did is I learned to tap my finger like that, and that's all I could do.

Wow.

And I just tap, tap, tap, tap, tap, tap.

And like I said again, not to praise me, because there's people that have gone through more and have accomplished more.

But the point is, is that A lot of people would look at it and go, I can barely tap my finger.

And I went to bed that night and I'm doing cartwheels in my head for being able to tap that finger.

Beautiful.

If that makes sense to me.

No, it does.

Have you always had that positive mindset or was that something you learned throughout your life?

I think I had

a desire

to be positive, but that's one of the things that's the thing in the book is talking about retraining your brain

is I think when we're born, we're all born with this, I can do anything.

anything it's like mommy i want to be a fireman daddy i want to be a a lawyer i want to be a policeman i want to be and then over time

whatever that whatever causes that no you can't do this no don't do that

some kid makes fun of you on the on the playground you start feeling insecure about yourself as you realize that there's competition and that there's other people that can do things a little better than you and that slowly lowers that self-esteem over time.

And I think the first thing you got to do is fix that self-esteem.

So that was a long way around to answer you is I started out and I while I knew I had talent and I knew I had ability,

I felt that low self-esteem because I was scared to fail and scared to get out there.

Yeah, I can relate to that.

Yeah, I feel like as children, there's something pure about it and positivity is there.

And then throughout life, it kind of gets drained or something, you know, we start losing that creativity almost.

That's part of the whole retraining your mind is, you know, one of the things I talk about is go back

to the last time you had success.

And that may be as far as in a positive mindset to that seven-year-old mind.

And think about what that seven-year-old mind had to experience to feel that way.

And then start from there as you apply it into your adult life.

I love that.

So the plane crash, that happened after this or before?

I mean that was the I'm getting my the brain surgery was in 12 that was in 19.

Oh God, it was seven years after that.

Wow.

And what was the details of that incident?

Well

I wasn't supposed to fly with him that day.

I was going to let the pilot go get her.

And I was just going to stay home and wait for her to come come back.

And but I was bored, didn't have anything to do.

And so I called him up and I said, James, you mind if I ride with you?

And he said, no, come on.

I'd love the company.

So we flew down there, landed, went to eat with them,

came back to the airport.

you know, did our normal stuff, got in the, did our pre-checks of the plane.

We go to take off.

As we're taking off, we're climbing through.

We get to 3,000 feet.

And then all of a sudden,

the plane stops accelerating and the propeller stopped, was still operating at this point, but you could see it slowing down.

And it would be like you and I being on the interstate, and then all of a sudden I took my foot off the accelerator, and you're going, Brett, why are you doing that?

So

I wasn't the pilot.

I was just the passenger.

I was flying it, which you can under a pilot's supervision and the proper protocol, as you say, your

flight controls.

So I handed the flight controls over to him.

And when I did, he turned back towards the airport, but he was coming down at 127 or 128 indicated airspeed.

Best glide, which means how far you can glide that plane, is 88 knots.

Whoa.

Okay.

So he's going way over that.

And he's going way over that, which means

we're losing high altitude at a much quicker rate to be able to make that airport.

We should have been able to make that airport.

And then he just freaked out and let go of everything.

Whoa.

So I reach up, I grab it, I trim it out.

Now, you got to realize from the time I'm talking about, this sounds, it's kind of like watching a play in sports on replay, but you see it in live.

I mean, that's things like 10 seconds long.

From the time this starts until the time that we hit the ground is less than three minutes.

Holy crap.

And so

we're making that turn.

I grab the thing.

I trim it back to 88.

And I'm watching the altitude and I'm looking at it.

And, you know, you're really, the best place to pull that parachute, that particular particular plane is equipped with a parachute.

It's supposed to be 3,000 feet, but I knew that 1,000 feet, if you didn't pull it there, you don't really have any chance.

Well, at the same time, the girls are beating the seat and saying Brett and hollering and screaming and all kind of lights and buzzing and beeping are going off.

literally I had two or three seconds to make the decision.

I said to him, because

remember he's supposed to be pilot in command, I said, hey,

do you want to pull the parachute?

He hesitated, boom, I pulled it.

As soon as we pulled it, you stop in mid-flight, you go straight up to the air, and you're coming down nose down.

Whoa.

And we come down nose down and we come down nose down.

When you get to about 200 feet, the levelers pop and it does this

and then it lands on the ground.

And when it lands on the ground, I immediately knew that

a plane can explode that quick whenever you hit the ground because of the

spark fire from the fuel.

So this particular plane had doors that opened up like that.

And so I opened the doors and I told the girls, I said,

y'all go ahead of us and I'll come behind you.

Well, they didn't say, no,

we want you to go first.

Not that they would, but they didn't say, no, you come with us.

As soon as I said that, Lily hit the back of my head, Heather hit the back of James' head, and they were gone.

And so I got out of the plane.

They had went the opposite way.

They went out towards the...

the one little wooded area and it was full of thorns and they were wearing those

jean shorts that ladies like to wear that are kind of fashionable.

And

they're going the opposite way.

I see the firemen coming through, so I go catch them.

And they're freaked out.

And I said, hey, come on, let's go this way.

Well, we go this way and we get towards the ambulance.

I looked at them and they were going, oh my God, oh my God, oh my God.

I said, hey, settle down.

I said, the majority of people that go through what we just went through died.

We're not lucky.

You got to figure out what your purpose is and why we're still here.

Whoa.

And the other part that I think is a lesson is most of life's moments is preparing, training, doing what you're doing right now.

You didn't walk in here and throw everything on the table

in relates to the daily activity.

It may be starting the business.

You might have said, hey, but from once you get get the training

you've got just a few

short time to make a decision to either go this way or go that way that is a crazy story you know because it sounds like the pilot in command just shut down and you were just reacting he's not a bad guy he just he froze right

And that's the point with the training yourself and preparing yourself for the moment.

You can't freeze.

And most people do what?

They run away from their problem.

They freeze.

No matter what it is.

They have a financial problem, they freeze.

They go

the opposite way and ignore it, thinking it's going to go away.

It's not going to go away.

And you ignore it, then you're creating yourself, or you'll hear people, they go drinking and doing drugs or gambling or whatever it is.

I have employees that have gone through those problems and I sit down with them and say, hey, if you do all this thing and you're ignoring all these other personal problems, at some point, this stuff's going to clear up.

But when it clears up, now you're going to have two problems instead of one.

Right.

Yeah, I used to run away from problems, ignore problems.

My style was to like walk away from arguments, but that doesn't work long term.

No, and you don't really have to argue.

You just put down your points and try to have an intelligible discussion.

Yeah.

Which is hard these days.

It's certainly with the division in

politics and business.

And everybody's so far off.

I don't think it has to be that way, regardless of what your views and opinions.

That's why I like business, though, because it's more of an even playing field.

Pretty much.

So I'm a fan of just capitalism, entrepreneurship.

I don't care what you look like.

Let's do some business.

I mean, I don't care what you do, who you are as long as it's ethical ethical legal and moral

and you and we can put revenue on the books let's roll absolutely that being said when you have somebody that's working for you you give them every effort to succeed before you just got them

and you do that for one reason number one it's the right thing to do with the employee you need to make sure you put them in a spot where they have the skill set

If they don't have the skill set, you give them the skill set, the talent set.

If they don't have the talent, you look for some other areas in your organization that may help them.

Now, when I've had a bad attitude, I've never been able to change somebody's attitude.

But the fourth thing is that

when you get to the point and you come in, and you do, you cut somebody ahead of time.

Everybody in that organization is looking there and going, well, he did that to him or her.

He's not about to do that to me.

And all of a sudden you create this divisionary culture.

And what you want your culture to do is you want them to get to the point where they've watched all the steps you've taken and they go,

he finally got rid of her.

Got it.

If that makes sense.

Yeah, so when you hear that quote, like, hire quick, but fire quicker, you're not a fan of that then.

No.

Because that's what's being taught to people.

I'm not a fan of it because culture is the only thing.

Everybody's in this podcast world.

Everybody can buy the equipment.

Everybody can go and get on to different platforms and do those kind of things.

But let's say you had a team around you, and I don't know what your team is, but your team around you, and you treat them in the way that allows them to take down their curtain, curtain and they know that they're their wall and they know that they can operate here and they can let their creativity flow.

And then, when they have issues, they know you're going to sit down with them, help them overcome their issues.

And, like I said, if it's a talent set and you got something else in your organization that can work for them, not only does that help them, it helps all the people around them because they look at him and go, man, he generally cares about people and their opportunity to succeed.

Absolutely.

Yeah, the traditional work environment is to rule by fear, right?

To be scared of your boss.

That's 1940s, 1950s stuff, and it didn't work.

Your generation, it doesn't work for him.

You know,

if you come in and start doing that in your generation, you walk in, there won't be a soul in there.

Yeah.

Yeah, we're pretty quick to just find a new job.

It's not like the old days where you worked one job your whole life and got retirement money.

I think we're,

I've seen some stats saying we're getting a new job every year or two, something crazy like that.

Well, I think we've been successful holding on to the younger folks, but it's because some of the things that I shared with you.

But the reason that the fear worked in the 40s and the 50s and the 60s was because the lack of decent jobs in the state of the economy all the way to like the 80s.

And so people would get that job and they would

take whatever abuse that it took because they wanted to hang on to that.

They wanted to hang on to their benefits.

They wanted to hang on their insurance because if they got whacked, there was no other place to go.

No fallback option.

Now there's millions of options.

There's more jobs than there are people willing to take them.

Yeah, you go on LinkedIn these days, Indeed, wherever, Craigslist, you could find a job in a day.

100%.

Easily.

100%.

Yeah, we got a lot of options, but at the same time, I don't want to be bouncing jobs.

I want to be at the same company or doing the same thing.

Well, I think you can still have that loyalty with the younger folks, but you got to create that loyalty.

And when you have that situation where you're not providing that culture in an area where they can let their wall down and grow and let them know that you truly care about their success, and

it's more important with your generation because you do feel like i can go wherever i want to right

if that if that makes sense it does yes you're making the younger guys feel comfortable right feel like a safe environment 100 and you're getting involved with their personal lives a little bit too 100 i mean i don't i don't get involved in far as unless they ask me specifically but i get to know them i get to know who their wives or husbands are i get to know who their kids are you know where they go to school what they like to do.

Are they having an issue today?

Because when you walk around your company,

your culture is almost like leading a music orchestra.

You know, you're going up here, a little bit down over here, and then they do

too far down.

All right, bring it back up.

And if you don't do that every day, your culture gets out of control before you even realize it

took a turn.

That's impressive that you're doing that because you have a $100 million company.

so the fact that you're knowing about their lives is hots off to you, man.

Well, it's the same thing.

You know,

we've got leaders.

I don't want to lead anybody to believe that I'm doing everything because there's no such thing.

Anyone who says that is not being truthful or honest.

But what we've done is equip our leaders to, in their individual areas of influence, to do the exact same thing.

And then I go around on a regular basis and enforce those things from knowing that I care about them as people.

When you look back on the growth, was it a few key decisions or was it more of a gradual growth for this company?

For this company,

it's a sum total of lifetime of failures.

And I think you probably heard that before.

You know, I didn't make the decision

to do what I was doing until, you know, I had all these ideas that I wanted to do, and I had all these things.

I wrote down, I have a that I used to carry a wallet, I had it down in my wallet that I wanted to write a book, that I wanted to have 66 dealerships, that I wanted to be a motivational speaker.

But it kept being, well, I'll do that next month, I'll do that next quarter, I'll do that the quarter after.

And I kept kicking

the ball down the road until

the doctor comes in and says you have a brain tumor.

Then all of a sudden, the shorten of time becomes a reality.

And that's what it's hard for people to understand.

The hardest thing to do

is to experience every lesson yourself.

And you hear so many people say, well, I can't learn anything.

I got to learn it myself.

If you've got to learn it yourself, you'll never get as far there as you want to go.

I would rather take some people that are trustworthy,

that have experienced some things, and take their lessons that they've already learned and apply.

I'm still going to learn mine anyway.

There's still going to be failures.

And there's going to be certain things that I say, well, I've listened to this person and I've listened to this person.

And that's two alternative views.

I'll take four or five of this one and four or five of that one.

But the point is, I'm not having to learn every lesson myself.

By failure, I can pull from some other people's failure, which is what I meant a while ago when I said get further faster.

Right.

Because now you could save time on, because people failed for years, but you could learn that quick and implement it right away.

You could tell, as young of a guy as you are, you could take other people's failures and bypass.

that kind of like you're going on the interstate you could get off on a bypass and skip all this other road and get further away, right?

And that's there quicker.

Yeah, I just learned this about Bezos.

So, whenever he enters a new industry, he'll poach the top guys of his competitors in that industry because he wants to learn about all their failures and save time.

It's brilliant, right?

Right.

Yeah, so I think just failure in general, we should reframe the mindset around it.

People are scared of it, but you should be honestly excited about it.

Failure is an opportunity to

the only way failure is is failure, if you are unwilling to see the lesson in it.

And I think there's more people that are unwilling to see the lesson than are willing to see the lesson.

Most people, they jump out and see, that's what I was talking about, is going back to that time in your mind when you didn't see that failure.

You didn't see those as not possibilities.

And you go back in your mind and you retrain retrain that brain because the majority of people when they get to that point they're not going to try anything right

and that's where the self-esteem comes in because they're afraid if they try something the scenario that they've already ran in their mind is going to become true but guess what

whatever you think about is what becomes reality

And so it already going to come true unless you retrain that brain.

Right.

Yeah, self-esteem and ego.

They destroy a lot of business, a lot of relationships.

You should stand in the crowd and pump your people up instead of pumping yourself.

Yeah.

Brett, it's been awesome, man.

Anything else you want to close off with?

We'll link the book in the video.

You can get this on Amazon.

We have the audio book on there as well.

Of course, we're on Audible, Apple.

platform and all the platforms that are major that you can see because I know there's more folks that are doing the downloads now than using the physical book.

You can get it on all of our LinkedIn, you can get it on Instagram, you can get it on TikTok, and you can follow us all there for fresh daily content.

Perfect.

We'll link it below.

Thanks for coming on, Brad.

All right, appreciate you.

Thanks for watching, guys.

Peace.