Part 2: Getting out of the Day-To-Day

Jeremy: Hey everybody, this is Jeremy checking in again from Alex Charfen's team. This is part two of the panel discussion we had last week at the Billionaire Code Summit. If you didn't hear part one, definitely go back and listen because we get into some awesome topics around what it's like to have real momentum in your business and you'll hear it from their mouth. It's amazing.

In this episode, they continue to talk about what it's like to begin to build a team and to get behind a team that begins to support this amazing company and how these entrepreneurs start to get out of the way and really allow their teams to thrive and their companies to grow and scale. I think you're really going to love this episode.

Alex Charfen: I'm Alex Charfen and this is the Momentum Podcast made for empire builders, game changers, trailblazers, shot takers, record breakers, world makers and creators of all kinds. Those among us who can't turn it off and don't know why anyone would want to. We challenge complacency, destroy apathy and we are obsessed with creating momentum so we can roll over bureaucracy and make our greatest contribution. Sure, we pay attention to their rules, but only so that we can bend them, break them, then rewrite them around our own will.

We don't accept our destiny, we define it. We don't understand defeat because you only lose if you stop and we don't know how. While the rest of the world strives for average and clings desperately to the status quo, we are the minority, the few who are willing to hallucinate there could be a better future and instead of just daydreaming of what could be, we endure the vulnerability and exposure it takes to make it real. We are the evolutionary hunters, clearly the most important people in the world because entrepreneurs are the only source of consistent, positive human evolution and we always will be.

Audience: So up to this point, I feel like a lot of the innovation in my business has come from me, but what Alex was saying earlier is like it begins to come from the team, but like the amount of innovation I've done, I have a hard time just envisioning that. So maybe you could, one of you could speak to that.

Speaker 4: Yeah, I actually have a specific example from the last week, but so first of all, Alex has to beat it into all of our heads, like you are totally replaceable. Like you think you're a special snowflake, you're not, which is a little ego hit maybe, but it's totally true. In the last week, one of the things we do is some of the clients we serve happen to cause a huge influx in our daily shipments out the door for about a week period of time. And when we started with Cadence a year and a half ago, every time that happened it broke our delivery like beyond belief. It was the biggest problem we had when we started. And so we fixed it and got better and then when things grew, we broke delivery again. We broke delivery three or four times now.

But the last time this happened, it was so completely seamless that what work capacity that we put out in like a week and a half, a year and a half ago, happened before 2:00 p.m. in one afternoon with the same sized team, by the way. We aren't adding a whole bunch of people to that division. They can just do like many times the amount of work. And almost the entirety of innovation that allowed that to happen came from the team that was actually implementing it. Like they are pure brilliant and they're doing that process every day and I have been surprised and blown away that as soon as you just let people know what the goals are and you let them know that they have permission to innovate and make our company better, they all have freaking brilliant ideas to do that. And I'm like, "Wow, I should've thought of that a long time ago. That's really, really good." But our company is so much better for creating a wider brain trust than just me.

Emily: Yeah. This one has been huge for me because you'll actually really hurt your company if you think you're the only one who can come up with new ideas, seriously. Because, like ideally you're not in the day to day. So how are you going to know what needs to be fixed and what's the problems? So what I have done is anybody reports to me that if they ever come to me and they're like, "Man, we really struggled with this or whatever, and like, well what do you think we should do? I never come up with an answer like never. And then I'll give feedback on it. And I usually have better feedback than if I had to come up with the whole answer because I've got like a foundation to work with and I can just put like a cherry on top of that.

But you really will hurt, like they know better because they're actually doing the job all day long and so you have to create an environment and a culture that they feel like I can come and say, "Hey, why are we doing it this way? It's taking double the time or like this is a better way or our clients would be happier doing it this way," whatever it is. You have to be the leader to say like that's okay here, and then once you do it's amazing.

And so I've beat that into my team of like, I've told my team the only time I will be mad is if we do something and you didn't tell me you thought it was going to be a bad idea and you just let it happen and you didn't speak up. But like, so I want that. And so I teach it to my leadership team too, is if someone's coming to you with an idea or a problem, don't solve it for them because that's just like enabling it forever that you're going to solve all the problems and come up with the solutions. And so that's like the rule. You have to come with an answer. And if they don't, I just ask them, "Well what do you think we should do?" And so now they're used to it. They never come to me with a question without an answer.

Alex Charfen: So if you want a mantra for that one, the thing for you to think when you're talking to your team is, solving does not serve. Like somebody comes to you with a problem, do not solve them. It does not serve. In fact, there's such a massive difference. If somebody comes to me with a problem and you coach them to the same solution you would have created, it's infinitely more effective than if you just tell them what to do. So, sorry, Dan.

Speaker 6: Oh, and also to further answer your question, you know, you created your business from nothing. Am I right? You didn't create it from nothing.

Alex Charfen: No, his dad did it.

Speaker 6: Oh, okay. Well you and your dad, your dad is somebody that most of us here did you create your business from nothing?

Alex Charfen: Yeah.

Speaker 6: I mean I always equate it like pushing a boulder up a cliff and it's just like doing the impossible. And if you're in this room, you've gotten up there and by the time you get up there and you're tired and you've lost all perspective and the people coming into your team have a fresh perspective. So they're going to have fresh new ideas that are awesome.

Alex Charfen: Yeah, no doubt. And let's throw the mic right over there. Gosh, I love this panel. I don't want it to end. Okay.

Audience: Hey guys, could you just talk about what a normal day looks like for you now after you're out of the day to day?

Emily: Daniel's on Facebook all day. I mean I'm on a lot of team meetings, two days a week. So Mondays are like my heaviest meeting days. So I'll go to like a leadership meeting with my leadership team. I'm on the marketing meeting, right now I'm super involved with marketing. I will go on... Sometimes I'll go on team meetings and I've had to like coach myself through like I don't say anything because I get so much intel. So I have... My company's in agency. And so my biggest part of my company is all of our ads managers and our ads team. And so they have a weekly Monday meeting and I go to it as much as I can. I don't absolutely have to be there for it to run. But what I do is I get so many ideas by listening to them talk because we'll ask them questions like, "What went well last week and what didn't?"

And they'll just like talk and I've made it a rule. Like I cannot come up with a solution on that meeting, but I get so much from it because then I can see things that nobody else really can. So that's how I treat team meetings for the most part. I don't run them, but I go to them. I'm still connecting with my team. I'm still brainstorming with them, especially the people who report to me. And then on the days that I don't have team meetings, for me it's a lot of content creation. I have a podcast, we send out videos for potential clients. So it's going to look different like what you have to do. But for me, my job is content creation and then also honestly like I have two days where like I said, I create time to do whatever. So I go to an acupuncture appointment, I go to EMDR therapy, like I do those things so I can better myself so I can become a better leader so that we can go to the next level.

Speaker 6: And to take you back on that, I'm also, I'm doing all the things now that I couldn't do when I was in all those years of pain and putting out fires and all that pain and putting out fires took its toll on my body. It fucked me up. I gained a ton of weight. And so now I'm spending time on self care, which I never... I thought it was weird when you were talking about that when I first heard it. But I'm doing it and doing all the other things that I didn't have time for like living in the future and thinking about what's going to grow the movement and what's going to motivate our customers and finally doing a podcast and really doing more of the high level thought about the future. And since I've let go, we've grown faster. Yeah. So my day is a lot of that. And I have a four hour doc so I know what to do. [inaudible 00:10:03] wrote it for me.

Emily: Alex I think it's until 16:15, I have no idea what time it is, but if you want to push it.

Alex Charfen: But if we can go 15 that awesome. Okay, good, good. So [inaudible 00:10:16] do you want to answer the same question about why does your day look like?

Speaker 4: Man, I'm embarrassed to tell everybody what my day looks like. But we just created space for a lot of stuff that I thought wouldn't possibly fit in. So for me, the things that have wedged in have been self care items and have been chances to be with our kids. So really, my whole team shows up. We still work in like a brick and mortar office. We don't have a virtual team, but my whole team shows up at 8:00 AM, I by 8:00 AM have been to the gym and had breakfast and maybe sat in the sauna and maybe gone for a walk. Ashlin and I have spent a little bit of time together. We'd done daily planning.

So as everybody's rolling in, I'm like getting my kids ready for school and Ashlin and I are dropping the kids off. And really the hard start for me to be engaged after all of that is our huddle we do at 09:45 AM. So that really is my hard start at 09:45 so do the huddle, any Cadence meetings we need to be a part of. So for example, coming up on Monday, I've got a 09:45 huddle, we do a 10:00 AM weekly commit meeting. I do my three weekly one on ones on Monday and that is all that I have scheduled for Monday because I've been able to create space in the rest of that to do content creation or just, you know, if there's a project coming up, anything we're thinking about and my days on Tuesday and Wednesday look really similar to that.

Oh, I also didn't mention, everything is done so that by three o'clock we can go pick up kids from school as well. So my days look like that. Basically Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday. Thursday and Friday, I don't have anything scheduled on my books, except for the daily huddle. You know, it's not that I don't work. I work, it's just we created wide open space so that when something hits, when we have this huge project I now need to take up, I don't have to go, "When in the world am I going to work on that?" I know I have like a solid percentage, solid 40% of my workweek time cleared so that I can work on that. Or if an idea comes up, if there's something I want to pursue, you know, sometimes we'll get really excited about, "Hey, now's the time. You know, we have this in on our monthlys and like now's the time. We can hit this really hard for two days. That space is already there."

Alex Charfen: Yeah. That's so awesome. Wallace, just this is for all of you objectively, do you feel like having less responsibility in the business has made you more effective in the business?

Speaker 4: Massively because the things that that I think I'm best at, I can actually do now. So in any of those real responsibilities that I had that were like hard scheduled or that put out a fire, most of those were really outside of my real area of brilliance. So what all this space does is it allows what I'm really good at and what I'm passionate about. It allows me to put the time into that, which is the way that I can be the most valuable for the business for sure.

Alex Charfen: Heck yeah. Emily, same thing for you. Like same question. Here's the fear, the unspoken fear in the room is if I give up control, it's not going to run as well. Right? How many of you guys are feeling that way? Like you just can't possibly see how you can give up this level of control and what was that? So how has it worked for you Emily?

Speaker 4: Like quickly, can I touch and say all these things we're talking about, I think this is true of all three of us. It's not that the business works, like we're breaking records monthly on production in the business. So it doesn't just work like it works better than it ever has worked ever in the past.

Emily: Oh yeah. So as far as that, for me, I think the biggest thing that slowed me down was that I... And I didn't realize until you get out of it, is like the decision making fatigue and I'll note it that I get back in it where I'm like just maybe have a crazy week because I was on vacation the week before. Whatever happens and it's like, man I can not be as effective as I am when I have that space. So that's why the business grows because you're able to see so much farther ahead and so much clearer and be able to make decisions easier than when you couldn't and when you like could barely see to the end of the day. And I think, for me that's been the biggest thing is like I didn't know I needed that space until you have that space and then you realize, I am never going back to not having that space and your business keeps growing. It's not like tomorrow like, "Okay, like I'm giving up all the control." You're putting in systems and then giving up the control. So you build the confidence to do it once you see how capable your team is with the right system in place.

Speaker 6: Sure. For us, we keep growing. I'm still new to feeling like a passenger, so I'm still figuring out what I should do each day. It's still confusing.

Jeremy: Hey everybody, thanks a lot for listening again this week. We always appreciate it and if you're looking to lower the pressure and noise in your own business, really start to build game changing teams and scale your contribution to a massive level. Then head on over to billionairecode.com/apply-now. That's billionairecode.com/apply-now.