The A Method for Hiring and Developing A Winning Team

Speaker 1 I think it's hard to set a goal for some people psychologically because they figure, oh, what if I don't hit it? Or you know, like that kind of thing.

Speaker 1 Like, it's there's some kind of hesitancy I see in managers, entrepreneur types, like your listeners, or even big corporate types.

Speaker 1 Like, they don't want to be pinned down by numbers, but that's the best way to set a clear goal for someone.

Speaker 1 Like, hey, look, we're trying to do 30 garage doors a week or 10 or 100 or tell them like the scope specifically of what you're expecting.

Speaker 1 And then and only then can they and you create plans to achieve a specific goal.

Speaker 1 And when it comes to hiring people or setting expectations for folks, I'm a huge fan of the more specific the target, the better.

Speaker 1 The more vague and general the target, the harder it is to both hire or manage folks to achieve great results.

Speaker 2 Welcome to the Home Service Expert, where each week Tommy chats with world-class entrepreneurs and experts in various fields like marketing, sales, hiring, and leadership to find out what's really behind their success in business.

Speaker 2 Now, your host, the Home Service Millionaire, Tommy Mello.

Speaker 3 All right, ladies and gentlemen, welcome back to the Home Service Expert. I've been trying to get Jeff on this podcast for a long time and finally got through to him.

Speaker 3 And he wrote one of my favorite books of all time. I just was talking to him about how important it is to hire people.
Jeff Smart wrote the book, Who?

Speaker 3 He's an expert in leadership hiring, human resources, management, team, and organizational effectiveness, career growth, and success. He's based in Denver, Colorado.

Speaker 3 He's the GH Smart chairman and founder since 1995 to present.

Speaker 3 And he's also Claremont Graduate University, Doctor of Philosophy, Psychology, graduated number one in his class, youngest person to be awarded a Ph.D. in the school's history at age 25.

Speaker 3 Jeff Smart is a chairman and founder of GH Smart, based in Denver, Colorado, United States, founded in 1995, helps Fortune 500 CEOs and boards, billionaire entrepreneurs, and heads of state and confidently achieve their goals through hiring, developing, and leading talented teams.

Speaker 3 He published three best-selling books, Who, a Method for Hiring? New York bestseller, currently ranked number one on Amazon on the topic of hiring talented teams.

Speaker 3 Power score, your formula for leadership success, is a Wall Street Journal bestseller. And the CEO next door is a critically acclaimed New York Times bestseller.
Aside from this, Dr.

Speaker 3 Smart published Leadocracy, hiring more great leaders like you into government, a New York bestseller, which won the IPBY Award and Axia Book Award for number one best book of the year.

Speaker 3 I mean, the list keeps going, but

Speaker 3 it's pretty amazing, Jeff. I'm really excited that you're on today, and it means a lot to me that you took the time to do this.

Speaker 1 You bet. Well, Tommy, congrats on all your success, and it's a pleasure and a privilege to be on the show.

Speaker 3 You look, I can't believe 1995. I was 12 years old.

Speaker 3 You look great.

Speaker 1 I was 23. So I had, it's funny.
I was telling someone yesterday, I've never had a real job. I've been an entrepreneur since the very beginning.
So at age 23, started my company.

Speaker 1 I just turned 50 this last year. So.
Yeah, I don't know. If you get the formula right and you learn from the school of hard knocks, you can stay in this entrepreneur game a long time.

Speaker 3 Well, what I love about you, and I get a lot of best sellers. I had Michael Gerber in my office a couple of years ago.
Work on the business, not in the business.

Speaker 1 I love that saying. Like, it's Michael Gerber saying, I've heard it from others, other entrepreneur buddies.
That's an important theme for, I think, this talk today.

Speaker 1 Work on your business, not in your business.

Speaker 3 Well, it's like we talked about earlier. The fact is you've taken a company from zero to 100 million.
You didn't have it sounds like to me a golden spoo. No one.
really assisted you along the way.

Speaker 3 You built it from ground zero. And it's the people.
And regardless of if you hate or like Donald Trump, I heard him say this before he became president.

Speaker 3 He said, the worst employees in the world is a good employee. Because a bad employee you fire, a great employee will take you straight to the top.
Good employees just get by.

Speaker 3 And I've always said three B players is equal to one A player. And

Speaker 3 Tony Robbins said as well, if you hire the right people, they'll take you to the top because they've been there. Right.

Speaker 3 And your book literally, the story goes, my cousin told me it was the best book he ever read, Fortune 500 company. And I got obsessed with it.
We started building the systems.

Speaker 3 And I just graduated 50 technicians this month, earlier today. Great.
So, thanks to your book and some of the know-how. What I like to do, Jeff, is just let the audience get to know you a little bit.

Speaker 3 Tell us your story. Tell us how you got started in business in about the last, you know, couple decades.

Speaker 1 Yeah, I'll be super brief. I'm a suburb kid from Chicago.
Always wanted to be an entrepreneur.

Speaker 1 Didn't really feel like lining up in the herds of of folks graduating Northwestern or studied economics as an undergrad, going off to finance jobs and that kind of thing.

Speaker 1 And, you know, I've always wanted to build a culture and create a meaningful business. So in grad school, I studied, you know, Peter Drucker.
He's like one of the original. Yeah, the original.

Speaker 3 He's an economics guy.

Speaker 1 Yeah. Yeah.
like the father of management. So he was my professor.
He was like 80 years old where I got my PhD at Claremont out in LA. And I wrote a freaking business plan for GH Smart for my company.

Speaker 1 I I was like, hey, I want to serve CEOs. We want to help them use data to make better people decisions.
I want to hire all these geniuses. It's going to be great.

Speaker 1 And he, he was like, all right, look, he's like, I like your idea. From the customer standpoint, there should be a firm that brings data and rigor to making good people decisions.

Speaker 1 He's like, but I don't know how you get from here to there. You don't have any money.
You don't have any knowledge or noticeable skills of any kind. You don't know anybody.

Speaker 1 He's like, he gave me an A-min on this business plan. Well, Peter Drucker, you know, 27 years later, you know, we cleared 100 million in revenue this last year.

Speaker 1 You know, very profitable industry leader in culture. And like our people like actually like working at my company, like they love working at your company.
I'm super proud of it.

Speaker 1 So the two interesting parts of my background, I've technically studied and written on and done nothing other than hiring and developing. great teams.

Speaker 1 So from when my company was smaller than all of the listeners companies until today, we've focused on that and promoted ideas and best practices around what not to do, what to do to build great teams.

Speaker 1 And then we've, we've eaten our own cooking, Tommy, like we, you know, we actually use all this stuff. So we're not just an author.
I'm not an academic.

Speaker 1 I'm not sitting here telling you you should do something we don't do ourselves. I love that.

Speaker 3 One of the things I consult a lot of small businesses and I'm 100% a visionary, right? I don't like the details. I'm very.
ADHD like most entrepreneurs. I need people around me that are organized.

Speaker 3 I need C-type micromanagers. And they say, well, how do I find an integrator? How do I find this great person?

Speaker 3 And I'm like, it's not easy because they need to be able to work with you and understand you. But what do you recommend?

Speaker 3 Because it's so important to get that right hand, that person that's going to help, whether it's getting a CRM or a price book or really even dialing in QuickBooks or whatever, intact, whatever you're using.

Speaker 3 What would you say to get that right person?

Speaker 1 Because we're talking about home service, someone that's going to dial in the details the manual standard option yeah it's great i was faced with that back when i was a small company um one of my biggest clients took a quickbooks invoice that i i had sent from my computer like this is back you know the 90s where we printed out and put a stamp on it mailed it he looks at me right in the face this is at a dinner just one-on-one he goes sorry are you sending me invoices directly from your computer.

Speaker 1 He's like, what kind of popcorn stand are you running over there?

Speaker 1 And I felt like really embarrassed because I hadn't hired that strong number two or the kind of person to do the details in the back office stuff so that I could do what I'm good at, like you, just more visioning and kind of business development, marketing, and that kind of thing.

Speaker 1 So that was a wake-up call. We were probably 3 million in revenue.
And I hired an actual CFO kind of head of back office to do all the admin stuff.

Speaker 1 uh to free up my time so i could be more effective with my time on the front office so i guess step one is like whether it's you tommy giving folks a wake-up call or them just kind of realizing, wow, there aren't enough hours in the day for me to do everything.

Speaker 1 I need to get a strong person to complement my strengths. So one is just having the mindset like, oh my gosh, this is worth it.
It's worth the money.

Speaker 1 It's worth putting investment dollars into hiring someone to do that work.

Speaker 1 We can talk about the tactics around how to not make common mistakes around hiring, but I think it all starts with just really convincing yourself that it's time.

Speaker 1 Congratulations, you've graduated near 3 million in revenue.

Speaker 1 It's like time to make a couple of key hires, hires, invest in your business, and to start to narrow your role around your biggest strengths.

Speaker 3 Yeah, that's really smart. A lot of people try to be well-rounded.
They try to understand everything. I say, I really have a lot of weaknesses that I've identified and I just hired for my weaknesses.

Speaker 3 Lord, no, there's a lot of them.

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 3 One of the person that I'm looking for now is like a chief of staff, somebody that understands everything I'm going through because every year, and it sounds crazy, but I'm trying to get my efficiency up, like become 10 times more efficient.

Speaker 3 How do you manage your time right now with everything you got going on? You've got all these books. You're obviously running a very successful business.

Speaker 1 Thank you. I appreciate that.
The short answer is I have a great president who runs the business. So I'm chairman.

Speaker 1 I'm the biggest shareholder and I'm the chairman and founder, but I have a president who runs a business. And I'm on my second president who runs the business.
My previous colleague was the president.

Speaker 1 I had asked him to do the role for three or four years he did it for 12 years so i had a 12 year long president now the new one who's handed the baton the previous one to actually randy street who co-authored the who book with we wrote the book together right after that book project we got along so well we were so complimentary he's like an engineer and he's brilliant and he's steady and he's like great at uh systematic and i'm you know an arm waving uh visionary founder so we were like peanut butter and jelly on the uh on the book and i i decided at that point hey, you want to run the business?

Speaker 1 So he did an amazing job. So I don't know if people are listening or watching this thing, but check this out.
This is Randy's growth rate over the 12 years

Speaker 1 he was running our firm. We got 24% compound annual growth rate in profits for 12 years.

Speaker 1 So if we're going to talk about how I manage my time today, what I do today, and this last year, Randy, after 12 great years, was like, hey, bump me up to vice chairman.

Speaker 1 I'm done running the day-to-day. Let me go be an ambassador.
Let me do business development. Let me mentor and train the next generation of of partners.
I said, great, that sounds great.

Speaker 1 So we did a nine month long search. We looked at 12 internal candidates.
I hired a way too expensive search firm that went out and generated another 100 candidates. We did interviews up at Wazoo.

Speaker 1 I spent a day a week for nine months. It's a lot of time commitment.
So the message to your listeners is like, you want to turn the keys over to someone, a strong number two, or a great team.

Speaker 1 It really does take work. to pick the right people.
Thrilled with my new colleague, his name is Jeff, spelled the normal way, JJ.

Speaker 1 Um, we had you know a record year this last year. He's off to the racist.
So how do I manage my time? Manage my time by hiring great people and then staying in my lane.

Speaker 1 So I think as a founder, maybe I mean, you tell me what you've seen, Tommy. I think you've got visionary founders, you've got product expert type, especially in the technology fields.

Speaker 1 You know, for home service, you might have like sales and rain making founders. Like you're good at something and like that's your main superpower.
And then you're like not good at a lot of things.

Speaker 1 That's basically my impression of crazy people who actually found companies like you and me, right? And your listeners.

Speaker 1 So if you could hire people to cover the things you're not good at, and then when you get, I don't know, some level of skill to really hire in a great number two to run a lot of the day-to-day.

Speaker 1 I mean, I'm just constantly trying to like hire great people and then elevate my role, elevate, elevate, elevate. So you're talking about being more efficient.

Speaker 1 I try to think in terms of like how to really narrow. the focus of what I'm working on.
International expansion, big focus area right now.

Speaker 1 Digitization of our service offerings like there are a couple big strategic priorities that i'm pretty involved with pretty interested in recruiting but everything else you know comes up through a great team so that's it it's basically the headline is hire well and then you know and do as little as possible otherwise you're literally standing in the way of of these great people you've hired you know their ability to do their jobs

Speaker 3 yeah you know the question i get a lot too is I've got a mentor named Al Levy.

Speaker 3 He wrote the book, The Seven Power Contractor, and he taught me about manuals and systems and standard operating procedures and checklists. And I can make amazing technicians, CSRs, and dispatchers.

Speaker 3 He calls it the triangle of communication. But when it comes to CFO, VPs of corporate development, and it comes to these head levels,

Speaker 3 one of the things that worked for me is building an equity incentive program and giving people a bigger why in the business that they were running towards the same way.

Speaker 3 But ultimately, it's really tough to find those people because you're not going to find them on Indie Glassdoor, Monster, Zip Recruiter, even LinkedIn.

Speaker 3 You got to kind of go get them because they're already working somewhere else.

Speaker 1 That's right. Yeah.

Speaker 1 So here's what not to do. So don't hire unemployed people.
Don't hire your cousin Sally, who's just freshed out of rehab. Don't hire, you know, rehab's great.

Speaker 1 You know, like give her a few years and then, you know, maybe hire. Like, don't hire the convenient family member, friend, buddy, roommate, right, to be your entrepreneur in crime.

Speaker 1 Like, don't do that.

Speaker 1 Don't hire people by asking them hypothetical questions and interviewing people about if you like them or not and you know using your just like heavily biased gut feel approach to interviewing.

Speaker 1 Like, don't do that. This is like bad news land.
So get out of the bad news land of convenience hires or using flawed methods for interviewing and selecting people.

Speaker 1 What to move into the kind of good news land, the good practices of hiring are there are these like four steps in the who book.

Speaker 1 I'll just like tell your listeners what they are and then you know we could like figure out more about what they look like.

Speaker 1 But it's like step one is write down a scorecard of what you want them to accomplish. Not what the profile is.

Speaker 1 Not, oh, I need a head of whatever sales who's got five to eight years of relevant industry experience, blah, blah, blah. Not writing a job description.

Speaker 1 Instead, writing an actual sort of like, what are the outcomes you want them to achieve in the role? And be really specific.

Speaker 1 I just like put out a thing on LinkedIn, an article, right while I was sitting there waiting in your waiting room on the importance of numbers. So Tommy, you see this, right?

Speaker 1 Entrepreneurs, we're so busy, we're so ADD. You know, we hire on gut feel, we're disappointed.
Peter Drucker, my mentor, said there's a 50% failure rate among entrepreneurs when hiring their teams.

Speaker 1 50% failure rate. Like one in two people entrepreneurs hire.
as defined by a year after you hire them. You wish you hadn't.
So that's a horrible failure rate. 50% success rates, lousy.

Speaker 1 If you follow these four steps, you can and will hit a 90% hiring success rate.

Speaker 1 And the steps, I started, number one, write a scorecard, write it down, be specific, write numbers down, what you expect the people to do. Number two, source candidates.

Speaker 1 And to your point, yeah, you know, it's very difficult to use some very sort of like digital marketing, large, spammy kind of way of sourcing good candidates.

Speaker 1 We prefer to either incent your existing team, hey, hey, go help find a new such and such.

Speaker 1 We'll give you a thousand dollar bonus or getting your existing team, even if it's small team, to really be on the lookout for great talent is a great, great thing entrepreneurs do.

Speaker 1 Pay your existing people to recruit the next generation of leaders. So, you know, that kind of stuff sourcing.
Step three is called the select step.

Speaker 1 This one's the hard one where this is about having the right interview formats. And

Speaker 1 our hoop book lays out the like screening interview when you have a first chat with someone, someone, like what should you talk about?

Speaker 1 And then it gets down to like when you have a couple key candidates, you're down to two or three finalists.

Speaker 1 You do this like in-depth who interview where you really understand what they've done across their whole career.

Speaker 1 You ask them a bunch of smart questions and then you gather data on what they've actually done. And then if you're, and you do some reference calls, reference calls are kind of key.

Speaker 1 If it's a senior, pretty key hire, you're hiring, like talk to two or three or four. previous bosses, et cetera.
And that's it.

Speaker 1 So step three is the select step where you're gathering information, you're gathering data, you're making a good decision of who to hire.

Speaker 1 Step four is the sell step where then you have to use your sell checklist. There's at least like five things in psychology in my world that make someone take an offer.

Speaker 1 And you got to like hit these notes. And the five notes are fit.
So you sell fit. Hey, you want to come here and work at my garage store company? Here's how your previous career.

Speaker 1 you know, your talents and interests, your future goals fit coming to work here. So that's number one is is show them how what they're good at, what they want fits what you have to offer.

Speaker 1 Number two is family. And I don't mean like asking people illegal questions about if they're planning on having a family or are they pregnant or anything like that? Of course not.

Speaker 1 But I am talking about checking in with your candidate and saying, hey, look, you know, do you have a significant other, a spouse, someone who's going to be in favor or against you joining my company?

Speaker 1 And sometimes you have to go sell the spouse or sell the partner, right? Number three, freedom. Everybody wants freedom today.

Speaker 1 So show them how working at your company they'll have some freedom and flexibility they can work hard be incented and rewarded for great results but like give them a more freedom and flexibility and you'll get better talent next was it number four fortune tell them how much money they're going to make and don't be vague be specific i want one of the big takeaways from this call to be specificity is good and hiring and setting expectations and how you reward people be pretty freaking clear on how they can make money and then you know share with them what what they're likely to make over the coming months and years and the last one's just fun sell the fun of of your work like whatever impact you're making positively in customers lives and employees lives you know the positive impact like sell the fun of working at your company those are like the five psychological triggers that make somebody say yes to a job offer so i've gone over this stuff quite a bit with plenty of different home service businesses.

Speaker 3 And the hardest part, I think sometimes I love talking about Henry Ford because he invented the assembly line, what we know of it today. And he got a specialist instead of a jack of all trades.
Yes.

Speaker 3 There was one guy focused on one thing. And I think a lot of times his home service and probably a lot of businesses, we say, well, this person answers the phones.

Speaker 3 They do the dispatching and the bookkeeping. And they greet the people when they come in.
And then when they fall short, we don't really have the KPIs to dial them in.

Speaker 3 And I like what you said with the first step is really work on the outcome and key results that you expect from this person. That's right.
And then build a way to get there.

Speaker 3 And I think the businesses that I see succeed, the biggest thing I see is they have a budget. They have a plan.
They have it written down. They know what their key performance indicators need to be.

Speaker 3 That's right. And they understand directly what they're responsible for.
So they could go home, tell their wife or husband, spouse, this is how I'm paid and here's how I win.

Speaker 1 And a lot of people don't do that. I agree.
I don't get that part. I think it's hard to set a goal for some people.
psychologically because they they figure, oh, what if I don't hit it?

Speaker 1 Or you're like that kind of thing.

Speaker 1 Like it's, there's some kind of hesitancy i see in managers entrepreneur types like your listeners or even you know big corporate types like they don't want to be pinned down by numbers but that's the best way to set a clear goal for someone like hey look we're trying to do you know 30 garage doors a week or 10 or 100 or tell them like the scope specifically of what you're expecting and then and only then can they and you you know create plans to achieve a specific goal since you and i are like riffing on all these like great thought leaders uh do you remember zig zigler from like a million years ago

Speaker 1 Sales, yeah, like guru.

Speaker 1 He had this like metaphor where he's like, look, I can train any one of you to beat a gold medal world class archer in an archery battle, provided that we can blindfold the person and spin them around, you know, and keep them blindfolded while they shoot their arrow.

Speaker 1 And it's like, well, yeah, obviously. And he's like, well, yeah, obviously.
Right. But the point is, how are you supposed to hit a target you can't even see?

Speaker 1 And when it comes to hiring people or setting expectations for folks i'm a huge fan of the more specific the target the better the more vague and general the target the harder it is to both hire or manage folks to achieve great results

Speaker 3 one of the person that i study the most is elon musk you know him and i and you all have one thing in common is we both have 24 hours in a day Everyone that has that, the one thing that you can't buy is time.

Speaker 3 And so by finding people with really good delegation skills and putting objectives and due dates and delegating properly, there's so much more that can be done in a day. And

Speaker 3 unorganized as I am, I've become avid to my calendar and just I've dived in deep. You know, now I'm getting

Speaker 3 two more executive assistants, a personal assistant, a chief of staff, and two people for project management just for me.

Speaker 1 Sure.

Speaker 3 And it's crazy because each time I get somebody, it almost 5X is my time as long as they're very good, right? They got to be amazing because I don't want them learning on the clock.

Speaker 3 I literally need people that come in and they just like, I know exactly what you need done. And I'm very competent.
Competency is like, there's not a whole lot of competent people out there.

Speaker 3 And sometimes in my world, at least. But here's the one thing I want to dive into is a lot of times these business owners.
Jeff, they tell me that they can't find anybody good.

Speaker 3 They tell me millennials suck. They tell me.
And the one thing I say is look in the mirror, you're an asshole, no one wants to work for you because you're a jerk, you get in the way every time.

Speaker 3 You expect people to read your brain. What do you say to some of these people?

Speaker 3 And I listen, all the listeners are great people, but you know, sometimes you got to take personal responsibility for the outcome of the culture and why we can't find great people.

Speaker 1 Yeah, no kidding. It reminds me of: I was talking to a group of entrepreneurs at this event, and this guy was wearing a

Speaker 1 like a workout penny, you know, like it was like a normal, it was like a business casual thing, you know, you have like maybe some khakis on and a nice shirt where like that's ever and this guy had this like muscle shirt on and he raised his hand.

Speaker 1 He's like, he's like, hey, I can't find enough good people.

Speaker 1 And, you know, when we start to interview people, sometimes they, they voluntarily like leave the interview process, you know, before we can even give them an offer or not.

Speaker 1 I said, well, you know, walk me through your approach. And he's like, well, yeah, it's really easy.
He's like, I like to sit people down and really stress them out.

Speaker 1 And I like to ask them questions like, you see this pen? Sell me this pen. And then he literally goes, and then I go, hey, oh, your resume? Oh, am I supposed to be impressed by this?

Speaker 1 You know, tell me why I should hire you. And so he's like going on and on.
All the rest of us in the room are like, oh, okay, stop, stop, stop.

Speaker 1 We're like, okay, look, first of all, it sounds like, you know, you have a special approach to hiring, but it kind of matches maybe your management style or your culture of your company.

Speaker 1 And I said, if you'd like to remain in business, I strongly recommend pretty much stopping everything you're doing and do it differently differently because no one wants to work for someone like that.

Speaker 1 And so to your point, Tommy, it's basically like, I believe, so this is controversial, like what causes what in entrepreneurland and businesses?

Speaker 1 I think culture of your business, which is set largely by the personality of the founder, drives your ability to attract the talent.

Speaker 1 The talent drives your ability to design and deliver great products. to customers who then if you do a good job at that are going to make plenty of revenue and profits and you know everybody's happy.

Speaker 1 So I think it all starts with culture. So yeah, all this hiring best practice stuff doesn't amount to a hill of beans if you have a lousy culture in your little business.

Speaker 1 So starting with, I don't know, get a coach, get someone who's willing to tell you the truth, look in the mirror, be like, is this a good place to work or not? Look on Glassdoor.

Speaker 1 Even if you're a small company, your people are writing your reviews on Glassdoor about if you're. you know, they like working there or not.

Speaker 1 I was giving a talk to this billionaire family who owns a bunch of small companies in Chicago.

Speaker 1 I was given a keynote a little while ago, and I looked up some of the companies, their glass door ratings. So it's out of five.
Five means you're awesome. It's perfect five.

Speaker 1 Some of them were like low fours, which is really good. Some of them are high threes.
That's like fine. A whole bunch of these companies were like in the twos.

Speaker 1 Like they had really, really bad reviews from their own employees about what it's like working there. And there are a lot of criticisms about the founder.
And I just thought like, I can't help you.

Speaker 1 Like if you're going to show up with a 2.5 out of five glass door and you've got employees after employees saying senior management's disorganized they're dishonest they're you know uh mean there's no hiring method that's going to fix that so you got to start with making a great culture for folks and then you add the jeff smart you know world's greatest who approach to hiring and then you're now you're a rocket but yeah if you have a really lousy culture you got to start there i think and uh along the path to building a great valuable company Look up real quick, just type in A1 garage doors.

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 3 What is it you said?

Speaker 1 On Glassdoor?

Speaker 1 glass door yeah all right well let's see let's see let's go ahead and uh tell me how much of a loser i am i'm curious are you oh look it's you four seven out of five that's great right you're amazing we're right there we're four seven four eight you're i i literally haven't met someone who has as high a glass door as you have or i have it's very rare to have one that that's that high and you have a bunch of reviews i just have you know have a smaller number of people here so great job but like that's it i mean it starts with culture if you build it put the energy into really being kind to people providing great training being clear about expectations being transparent being honest being you know super high integrity all that stuff create a great culture and then you use that and then you know kind of inspire your folks to help you hire great people and the whole thing you know kind of like takes off on its own power but if you have a lousy culture yeah there isn't any best-selling book on hiring that's going to help i read this to everybody and i'll read it to you real quick i just read this but this gal graduates high school and her father bought her a car before she was born.

Speaker 3 And he gives his daughter this vehicle. She's 18 and a half.
And he says, Hey, sweetie, I want you to take this car over to the local car dealership. I want you to see what they offer you for it.

Speaker 3 And she comes back the next day and she says, Dad, they offered me $1,000 because it's an older vehicle. It needs a lot of work.
And he said, okay, take the same vehicle to the pawn shop now.

Speaker 3 So he takes it over to the pawn shop. She comes back the next day and she says, father, they only offered me 100 bucks.
They said it's old. The paint's bad.
The interior's screwed up.

Speaker 3 And he said, very good. He goes, I want you to take it to the classic car dealership tomorrow.
I've already got you a membership there and see what they say. She comes back.

Speaker 1 She's like, dad, they offered me 200 grand because it's very rare.

Speaker 3 It's hard to find it. It's in great condition.

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 3 And the father says, I want to let you know that you are not worth anything if you're not in the right place. You're not appreciated, don't be angry.
That means you're in the wrong place.

Speaker 3 Don't stay in a place where nobody sees your value.

Speaker 1 There you go. And so we read that.

Speaker 3 I think it's important because I want everybody to know I said, you guys are in the right place. I think the main thing is I want to see you accomplish your dreams.
And I want your dreams to be big.

Speaker 3 I'm going to dare you to think bigger. I want you to have five houses.
I want you to be able to go on vacations for months.

Speaker 3 I want you to be as happy as you can ever be and have freedom to do what you want. And I can tell you that I know my dreams got to be big enough to help you guys accomplish your dreams.

Speaker 3 And if you accomplish your dreams, my dreams are already coming true. And I look at them sincerely and I mean every bit of it.

Speaker 1 Well, apparently I mean it because 12 of your reviews have the theme of this place will mold you into a better person and leave you wanting to be the best version of yourself each and every day.

Speaker 1 What an incredibly positive thing for people to say about your company, Tommy. So, yeah, I mean, and that you can't fake that, right?

Speaker 1 Like, either you are genuinely wanting people to have a great work experience, make impact, make money, have freedom, have a great life outside of work.

Speaker 1 Like, either you actually want that for them, for them to achieve their dreams and goals, or you don't. And they know,

Speaker 1 they know, you know, if it's true or not, and it'll show up in Glassdoor.

Speaker 3 You know, indeed's a big one, too. I tell the people, listen, guys, a lot of people say to me, I hate sales.
And I say, you know, have you ever gone on a date? And they say, what do you mean?

Speaker 3 I'm like, well, you sold your significant other on you. I'm like, one of the things we always talk about is just being able to ask, you know, be able to ask questions.

Speaker 3 And people say, well, I hate selling things people don't need. And I go, do me a favor, pull out your cell phone for me.
I go, what kind of cell phone is that? They go, well, it's the new iPhone.

Speaker 1 And I go, So your old phone must have been busted, right?

Speaker 3 And they go, no, I just, I wanted the new one. And I go, see, that's what I do.

Speaker 3 I sell things people want not what they need i give them options because if you're not giving options you're giving ultimatums and one of the things we teach at my training program is to smile eye contact how to get financial control over yourself i teach a little bit of dave ramsey the one thing i can tell you that i love about dave ramsey with his recruiting because you're the recruiting master is he said i always take their significant other out right i take them to dinner Not because only we have to sell the significant other, but I want to see how the mutual respect with one another.

Speaker 3 Because if you could tell that they have animosity in their relationship, how are you going to be happy at work when you have a horrible home life?

Speaker 3 And I think that's really kind of like a secret that not a lot of people know about.

Speaker 3 I love this stuff. I can talk to you all day about this.
And

Speaker 3 here's kind of a question that I was thinking about earlier.

Speaker 3 I played a lot of sports and some of my coaches made me. from a C athlete to an A athlete.
Like literally, they were able to shape me and lead me.

Speaker 3 And I love the word coach over manager.

Speaker 1 yeah like i've seen c players turn into a players under the right management and i've seen great people completely fall apart under bad management yeah what's your theory on that yeah okay so i've got i have a controversial point of view on that that we can discuss and debate together for the pleasure of your listeners i'll start with a quote from billionaire entrepreneur john malone who built from pretty much scratch the highest stock performing business of like the 90s or something, which is like a TCI cable.

Speaker 1 All right. So this guy, I sit down with him in Denver.
I interview him for the Who Book. I'm like, hey, tell me about, you know, hiring and like, how do you do it and secrets of success?

Speaker 1 So his whole deal was, he goes, look, I love to hire people where they supply 100% of the energy and I supply a little bit of the direction. He goes, that just works.

Speaker 1 for me, you know, or like that, that's what I want, especially when we're starting out as entrepreneurs.

Speaker 1 If you hire people where you feel like you got to motivate them every day because they're not like showing up and doing the work, that's a hiring mistake. That's not an opportunity to coach

Speaker 1 someone. I think there are 20% of the people in a given moment are very coachable.
And like, if you just give them better direction, you believe in them, you know, right?

Speaker 1 How coach or someone believes in you. So, you know, I've had it happen in my career early on where someone says like, hey, I think you're going to really hit the ball out of the park.
It matters.

Speaker 1 It really like lights your fire and like away you go. Right.
So I think it's like 20% of the time, if there's a performance issue, really great coaching can be a life changer and turn around.

Speaker 1 I think 80% of the time, if you're having a tough time motivating somebody on your team, it's like a hiring mismatch. They could be an A player somewhere else.
but maybe they're not set up to sell.

Speaker 1 Maybe they're not set up to work the kind of hours or be as self-directed as you need need them to be you know in your business and that kind of thing so i'm a big fan of kind of empathetic firing which looks a little bit like hey look i have this great client i won't say who it is because i don't have permission to share his name with the story i have this very kind midwestern ceo run small companies medium sized and then bigger companies and he said here's what i do when someone's not working out I sit down with them and I say, hey, look, things aren't working out.

Speaker 1 And I say,

Speaker 1 are you having fun in this job? And they say yes or no. And then he asks them a second question, which is, do you think you can be successful in this job?

Speaker 1 And what the CEO told me was, he goes, like, hey, look, he goes, I'm not going to fire you, but just so you know, like your performance is like not good. It's not hitting the mark, right?

Speaker 1 We both know that because there's a clear mark and it's not hitting it. But I will coach you.
I will work with you. And you and I are going to have a conversation every Friday.

Speaker 1 And we're going to talk about these two things, which is like, you know, are you having fun? And do you think you're going to be successful here?

Speaker 1 and as long as you feel like you're having fun and that you can be successful here you're welcome to stay here i'll coach you we'll work on this together and then the ceo goes like but if you feel like you're coming into work you're not having fun or you just don't feel like you're going to be successful in this job i strongly recommend you start looking for something where you could be successful and have fun and like this guy fired more people than you can count, you know, that way when he'd like come into a new job and there's just a whole kind of mixed bag of talent, you know, but he didn't fire anybody he didn't fire anybody he'd compassionately sit with them he'd be like hey i have all the time in the world for you but if you're literally like deciding you're miserable and you're not gonna be successful take your time go find something better and we'll throw up a party for you when you when you leave kind of thing so i'm a little bit i'm a little more pull the higher fire lever than you might be which is like hey really believe in everybody you know more people and like give them a chance kind of thing but i do think there's a margin there in there you know i'm a 20 80 person where i think 20 of the time coaching is the solution 80 of the time, helping someone either make the bar or move on to a job where they could be more successful is the right answer.

Speaker 3 You know, it's interesting because you don't always know until you get the person doing the work, if you got the correct answer.

Speaker 3 But, you know, one of my managers came up to me a couple of years ago and we used to do this pay structure where it was minimum wage or the performance pay.

Speaker 3 And I said, listen, minimum wage, when they hear that, it was like $11 an hour. When they hear that number, they think that's automatically what they're going to make.
I'd like to get them in it.

Speaker 3 It's $16

Speaker 3 or whatever is better. And she goes, well, the reason I love the minimum wage is because they quit if they're making minimum wage.
And I said,

Speaker 3 yeah, but why are you hiring somebody that's not hitting the performance pay? Like that, you've got to take some personal accountability because right now we're not getting.

Speaker 3 the type of people that are going to get the performance pay when they see that minimum wage. So I think having the right lures out there for the right fish, right?

Speaker 3 And I've got people that make several hundreds of thousands of dollars a year.

Speaker 1 And I don't. You guys are performance cop.
Well, you're not jealous because by definition, you're making lots of money if they're making lots of money.

Speaker 1 That's what I love about performance pay, like what you're talking about.

Speaker 3 It's the only way to pay. I mean, if I could do.
I agree.

Speaker 3 So here's a question for you, because I'll tell you what, Brie is my, you know, she, we've got a relationship as well, but she started out as an executive assistant, which I could go go into the HR nightmare there.

Speaker 3 But the deal is, is I think a lot of people, I noticed the president of our company, the COO, the majority of the people never had an executive assistant or even a personal assistant.

Speaker 3 And it's not an easy role because you're dealing with them all the time. They look at your email and it's so hard because.
I don't look at my own mail. I don't look at my own email.

Speaker 3 I don't know about my own packages. I mean, I probably have too much trust, but I think that's one of the most crucial roles.
And I tell people, everybody, take out an old-fashioned calendar, right?

Speaker 3 Take out a calendar and I want you to write down everything you do. And every time you get distracted, write down what you get distracted.

Speaker 3 And at the end of two weeks, let's highlight all the wasted time.

Speaker 3 And then let's make sure to get you somebody. And I say, I say this all the time, record everything you do on your computer.
Just open up a Zoom, record your screenshot.

Speaker 3 and talk out loud when you're doing stuff. And that becomes the learning management system for your executive.
What are your thoughts? Because it's such a hard position.

Speaker 3 And I think so many people could use this person.

Speaker 1 Yeah, I mean, my gosh. So here's a, since we're talking books and frameworks and everything,

Speaker 1 this is on this, on this front. Time Smart, How to Reclaim Your Time and Live a Happier Life.
All right, that sounds pretty good. Like, who doesn't want to reclaim? And this is by Ashley Willens.

Speaker 1 W-H-I-L-L-A-N-S. Time Smart won some awards.
It came out a year ago.

Speaker 1 Good book. I read it.
I loved it. Ashley, what's that?

Speaker 1 What's that?

Speaker 3 Ashley

Speaker 1 Willens is her last name. W-H-I-L-L-A-N-S.
Time Smart is the name of the book. So she's a Harvard business school professor who collected a ton of real data on people's happiness at work.

Speaker 1 And she looked at stuff like, were people happier who had assistants or not? You know, like people who outsourced.

Speaker 1 things that they didn't get positive energy from and then really focused their time on the things that give them positive energy, whether it's professionally or personally.

Speaker 1 Her whole big deal is we're all a bunch of morons because we don't outsource as much as we should if we really looked at the things that deliver value, the things that are good uses of our time, and how inexpensive it is in the grand scheme to hire assistants to do stuff that you shouldn't be doing.

Speaker 1 So I'm a huge fan of that. Back around, you know, million years ago, when I hired my first CFO, I also was a big fan of offloading, you know, all my admin stuff to my assistant.

Speaker 1 It does take a lot of trust. That's why it gets back to the whole, you got to hire well, right? So follow the four steps to good hiring.

Speaker 1 Make sure you hire a great assistant and make sure you give that person a ton of freedom to do their job well.

Speaker 1 And I think on the spectrum assistants, I think the worst assistants take a lot of your time actually. Right.
That's like the whole point is to save your time.

Speaker 1 So the worst assistants take your time and they constantly are asking you questions and you can't really figure stuff out.

Speaker 1 Medium assistants, you know, it's sort of like figures part of it out, but then are constantly coming to you for like approvals or tasks and that kind of thing. That's like a medium assistant.

Speaker 1 I think the best assistant, my current assistant, Ashley's great, my previous assistants, I've had just a small number of them over the 27 years I've been growing my firm.

Speaker 1 The very best ones anticipate and they figure it out. And then maybe they tell you later, like, oh, hey, this thing came up and here I handled it.
And like, that's what you want to hear.

Speaker 1 You just want to hear it's been handled. You don't want to have to like do the thinking for them.
So I'm a huge fan of that.

Speaker 1 The Time Smart Smart books basically like, here's what's going to make you miserable: long commute times,

Speaker 1 bullshit meetings. Oops, sorry.
I don't know if this is like a, you know, BS meetings, right? Meetings where you're just like in dumb meetings, like waste of time, wasted time.

Speaker 1 Bosses that waste your time, right? By sending you on fool's errands or wild goose chases or asking you to do a bunch of rework, not having assistance and not having good people to delegate to.

Speaker 1 All that's like time-wasting, soul-sucking. She's like just a clear statistical relationship to misery.

Speaker 1 And then the positive side of that is people who know their value, know what are good uses of their time, and then like really both for free by saying no or for money because you got to pay people to do stuff by delegating.

Speaker 1 They really offload the vast majority of stuff to others. Those people are the most happy.
And like, you know, you could want to be something in this lifetime, but like, why not try to be happy?

Speaker 1 So yeah, she makes a huge trade-off for for bad mindset: is time is money, but good mindset is money is time. Meaning, like the important thing is your time.

Speaker 1 To your point, they're not making any more of it. You can't buy more of it.
So, like, really treasuring your time and using money as a way to get more time.

Speaker 1 She's like, that's the mindset of real winners.

Speaker 3 You know, there's four ways to handle a problem. And I've really, I've whiteboarded this quite a bit over the last 90 days.
You do it yourself, you solve it.

Speaker 3 You delegate it internally, you delegate it externally, or you find a recruiter or get with your personal recruiter, whoever it might be, and hire it internally or externally.

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 3 And that's what I'm literally almost like,

Speaker 3 I think one of the biggest things I also learned from Mal is

Speaker 3 don't build a box around a person. Build the box and find the person for the box.
I think a lot of times we put people in these weird positions that never needed to exist.

Speaker 3 And everybody's, what's the first thing? There's nobody in this. I've got about 120 people here, 700 in the company.
Yeah. And none of them tell me that they've got enough people.

Speaker 3 They always want to add seats.

Speaker 1 Sure.

Speaker 3 And I'm like, what can we do to use technology and possibly overseas VAs? Whatever we need to do. And it's interesting how people like to throw people at problems.

Speaker 1 Right.

Speaker 1 Yeah, I think that's bad in small companies. It's horrible in

Speaker 1 large companies. I was at the

Speaker 1 government yesterday. I want to say what government.
And there's like more than a little bit of waste where you throw lots of bodies at and salaries and FT, you know, sort of dollars at problems.

Speaker 1 So yeah, I don't know. Like I'm with you.
There's like a four D's thing that I kind of like, which is like how to protect your time. One, delete.
Just don't do it. Don't do it.

Speaker 1 Like, oh, oh, there's an, yeah, guess what? Don't do it. How about that? That should be like your first instinct.
Oh, I got invited to go do this thing. Like, well, don't do it.

Speaker 1 Like, that's number one. D, don't do it.
Or delete. The next one is like, you know, delegate.
So, okay, here's this something worthwhile doing, delegate it.

Speaker 1 That's the next thing, you know, you're going to want to do. And then, like, if you can't delegate it and like you have to do it, then maybe third D is delay.

Speaker 1 Be like, great, I'm going to stick that in my calendar in a place where it's more convenient for me to get it done. And then the fourth and final D is like, do it now.

Speaker 1 And that's very expensive to do it now.

Speaker 1 Yep.

Speaker 3 The Eisenhower matrix, right?

Speaker 1 I don't know what that is, but like, yeah, what is it?

Speaker 3 It's called the Eisenhower Matrix. And what it does is you build a matrix, right? And you put not important and then you put important above it.
Then across, you put urgent and not urgent.

Speaker 1 Right. That's right.

Speaker 3 And if it's important and urgent, you do it. Yeah.
If it's not urgent and important, you decide, schedule a time to do it. If it's not important, but it's urgent, you delegate it.

Speaker 3 And if it's not urgent and it's not important, delete it.

Speaker 1 Yeah, great. Love it.
That.

Speaker 1 I love it.

Speaker 3 What do you tell people that say, I just can't find anybody good out there? And they've struggled in business. They've been in business a decade and their mindset is broken.
It's a rat race, right?

Speaker 3 It's a race to the bottom. They're just, they're not happy.

Speaker 1 To me, it's like about job fit. It's sort of like, okay, so

Speaker 1 maybe they shouldn't be an entrepreneur. Maybe they shouldn't do the things.

Speaker 3 Good. You're the first one that ever said that.
You don't have to be an entrepreneur.

Speaker 1 You have to be an entrepreneur. Oh, yeah.
You don't like selling? You don't like hiring? Don't be an entrepreneur. Sorry.
Like, it's not for everybody. Okay.

Speaker 1 Like, you're really good at project management, but you don't really like talking to people. Okay.
Go get a job, James Project Manager. Oh, you really like editing words,

Speaker 1 but you don't like selling? You don't like hiring? Great. Go be an editor.
Like, I'm a huge fan of like this. This whole was it, the gig economy today.
You can freelance anything these days.

Speaker 1 I mean, honestly, you could go work for someone or don't work for someone, be a freelancer, but really figuring out what you're good at, what you feel like you have meaning doing, what comes naturally or skills to build on, like do that for your job.

Speaker 1 You'll find plenty of employment, I think. And like, you know, maybe give up the dream of being an entrepreneur for now.

Speaker 1 Or if you can be an entrepreneur, do your superpower and hire whether it's a founding team or a couple other key role players to do the other stuff. Great.

Speaker 1 Those are like three options are basically keep failing and sucking doing what you've been doing or get a job either working for someone or freelancing doing what you're good at or fine, stay in the entrepreneur game, but hire well, delegate, share real money, real ownership with others, and then you can play to your strengths and be successful.

Speaker 3 You know, you've mentioned several times about some of your different clients, these Fortune 500 CEOs.

Speaker 3 And you've owned GH Smart, your company since 95.

Speaker 3 Can you give me just an overview of what exactly you guys provide and the services that you guys help business owners and leadership with?

Speaker 1 It's pretty narrow and we don't really work with small entrepreneurs at all. Like I love talking to you and it's fun sort of riffing on these themes and stuff.

Speaker 1 So, but the actual business is, it's management consulting. So it's helping CEOs hire and develop.
talented teams. We're not a search firm.
So we don't like go find the people.

Speaker 1 It's It's more like a strategy firm like a Bain or McKinsey or a BCG where those folks help CEOs solve what problems. What product should we offer? What should we charge for our product in China?

Speaker 1 You know, like those big management consulting strategy firms help big companies solve what problems.

Speaker 1 My firm is kind of considered the gold standard of the management consulting firms that specifically focus on solving who problems. So we do a lot of like CEO succession.

Speaker 1 So like a board or some super high net worth person who owns a big chunk of a public company will say, hey, look, get in there. There's some leadership turmoil.

Speaker 1 There's some management changes happening. We need GH Smart to basically get in there, figure out strategy wise, what's this company trying to do?

Speaker 1 Let's write the scorecard for who should be running it. Let's interview people in depth to make sure the right either internal or external candidates get hired.

Speaker 1 Let's onboard that person so they can be successful. Let's help that new person really get to know his or her team and kind of rinse and repeat.

Speaker 1 So it's basically like very high-end succession strategy, talent strategy, but mostly it's around hiring and developing talented teams.

Speaker 1 And we just, we used to do work with smaller companies, just as we've gotten bigger, as we've become better known, the buyers just sort of started getting bigger and bigger and bigger.

Speaker 1 So today about 60% of our revenue comes from huge companies, like the biggest companies there are, and about 40% come from private equity investors who are buying and building medium-sized companies.

Speaker 3 What's the revenue? What's a mid-sized company like 200 million?

Speaker 1 Yeah, mid-sized companies like 200 million. Bigger companies are, you know, sort of a billion and up in revenue.
Okay.

Speaker 3 So you mentioned a book earlier. One of the questions I'd love to ask.
Well, I'll kind of get to the closing questions. Sure.

Speaker 3 If someone wants to reach out to you, Jeff, I know your time is the treasure, but if they wanted to reach out, everybody's been commenting best book ever. Oh, great.
Thanks.

Speaker 3 So congratulations on everything.

Speaker 1 Oh, yeah. I guess I have to click on the comments button here.
Oh, you're all so sweet. Thank you.
I really appreciate it. It was fun writing it.

Speaker 1 I really love it when it helps people and it's useful for your entrepreneurial success.

Speaker 3 What do people do if they want to reach out to you? Is it just LinkedIn?

Speaker 1 Yeah, LinkedIn's pretty good. That's like the easiest place where I interact with people.
I'm not on Twitter a whole lot. So yeah, LinkedIn is probably the best place.

Speaker 1 So I, you know, write kind of a spicy LinkedIn articles every few weeks. And I like to interact with people on LinkedIn.
So yeah, I don't know.

Speaker 1 Just look me up dr jeff smart g-e-o-f-f spelled the weird way smart there you go on linkedin and that's that's the best way to engage there's actually free tools too tommy for the who book i don't know i like i'm stupid i should figure out how to monetize this but like the actual interview guides and like scorecards and stuff they could go to my author's website it's called smart thoughts so smartthoughts.com Jeff Smart, SmartThoughts, whatever.

Speaker 1 All they have to do is throw their email in there and they can download our who power score and

Speaker 1 i don't know if the ceo next door our other book by elena botello one of my colleagues i can't remember if we put templates and tools in there but it's all free it's just like go for it use it go forth and conquer but uh it helps people to kind of go from like theory to practice just it has some of the actual tools there they can download and use now one of the things i always ask everybody and thank you for the source that's that's going to be smartthoughts.com three books that you recommend you mentioned time smart And I know, of course, your books are amazing.

Speaker 3 What are two books that really helped you out in your entrepreneurial journey?

Speaker 1 I really like four disciplines of execution by the folks over at Franklin Covey. I'm sure you have it.
You talk like someone who, there you go.

Speaker 3 I have a few of them.

Speaker 1 There you go. So that book's great, as you know, Tommy, because it helps you with goal setting.
I think people stink at goal setting generally.

Speaker 1 Like, I don't know, like, what's a good method for goal setting? Their whole thing from X to Y by a certain date, you know, leading and lag measures. I think it's great.
So that's a great one.

Speaker 1 Four disciplines of execution. I don't know.
See, so how many books have I recommended so far? Time Smart, that's on managing your time. We're not pumping my books.

Speaker 1 We've got four disciplines of execution.

Speaker 1 For entrepreneurs, I don't know, the little startup stuff's like pretty good. You know, the Eric Reese book about, it's like test and learn and, you know, really quick, minimum, viable products.

Speaker 1 I think that's helpful for product development. There's tons of like inspiring biographies that, you know, you and I read on entrepreneurs.
Like the Steve Jobs one's like amazing.

Speaker 1 The jobs book is amazing. One of the best books I've ever read.
So yeah, those are a few of my favorites.

Speaker 3 You know, one of the interesting things that Steve Jobs said right before he passed away because of cancer, he said,

Speaker 3 you should be ingesting your food as medicine. Otherwise, you're going to be taking medicine for food.

Speaker 1 Yeah, there you go. It's interesting.

Speaker 3 It's a concept that I just, one thing I have realized as I've become more successful successful is I can't buy health and I can't buy time. So those are two things I need to focus on.

Speaker 3 You know, Jeffy, I really wanted to tell you I appreciate your time. What I like to do at the end of the podcast is we, we talked about a lot of cool stuff and I've got note after note after note.

Speaker 3 I absolutely love this podcast. I love that you came on here.
I appreciate it. I just want to give you a chance to close us out on anything we might have not talked about, maybe some things that the.

Speaker 3 listeners should go do today or whatever you want to end in. I'll give you some final thoughts.

Speaker 1 All right. Fine.
Let's do it. Just for fun, since we're talking about overall success and happiness, I would mean like ask you a question or just like

Speaker 1 this is for you. Okay.
So putting all this together, all this together, I think making time for family, friends, you know, faith, just the other stuff in your life is really important also.

Speaker 1 So I've personally interviewed like over a thousand really successful people just through my daily work.

Speaker 1 And my colleagues and I together have interviewed 30,000 people, successful and unsuccessful, entrepreneurs, you know, business builders, et cetera. And there's a very clear theme that's clear to me.

Speaker 1 Maybe we'll write a new book one day called Something Like, you know, How to Have a Successful Life.

Speaker 1 But basically, if you block time for personal stuff and you really like stay true to that on your calendar, if you set ambitious goals for your business, and then just hire amazing people, align their incentives with your incentives, and then like get the heck out of the way say please and thank you and good job and high five them i think you got it like your life's going to be great you're going to have plenty of time for family friends and other stuff you're going to be able to like pick a strategy for your business hire well and then really support the wonderful people who work in the company we talked about some really advanced stuff on this call but i just want to like cap it off with like really blocking time for the personal outside of work stuff and staying true to that.

Speaker 1 And you put all this stuff together and you end up building an impactful business you feel proud of and having a life while you do it.

Speaker 3 Sometimes we forget about life. And, you know, it's hard.
Some people work to live. Some people live to work.
I'm probably the latter, but I really appreciate you doing this. I know you're a busy man.

Speaker 3 I appreciate the accolades that I read for you are just, you should be very proud of yourself. Thank you.

Speaker 1 Appreciate it. I hope I get to meet you in person soon.

Speaker 3 I appreciate that.

Speaker 3 Listeners out here. When do you come to Phoenix?

Speaker 1 My folks have a house out there. So maybe I'll get out there in the not-too-distant future and give you a shout.
I would love that.

Speaker 3 Thank you so much, Jeff.

Speaker 1 Pleasure, Tommy. Thanks for having me.
Thanks.

Speaker 3 Have a great one, my friend. Thank you.

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