Momentum Podcast: 507

Part 5: 5 Reasons Why Companies That Should Scale, Don't - People

by Alex Charfen

Episode Description

When you have the right people, in the right places on your team, it will drive your company forward. As entrepreneurs, we get to a point where the momentum we create alone is no longer enough, and this is when we need a team. As entrepreneurial personality types, we need more protection and support than the average person to get where we want to go. 

The shift from “me” to “we” in a team setting is one of the most transformational and profound changes a person will go through. Remember, the right person in your company should create massive momentum for you. The wrong person can distract or destroy your entire team. Put the right people in the right places in your team, and you will see your business increase momentum like never before. 

Full Transcript Below

Over the last few days. My team and I have gone through annual planning for our company. It's been our executive team with input from our greater team, and I have never been this excited or this optimistic to go into a new year with a group of people on my team than I am right now. But it wasn't always that way.

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.

This is podcast number five of the five reasons why companies that should scale don't scale, and it's having the right people in the right places on your team. People drive a company forward. Once you get to the place as an entrepreneur where you can't drive it forward yourself ... In fact, as an entrepreneur, here's what happens. We are momentum based beings. We are physiologically sensitive momentum based beings that are highly reactive to constraint. And what happens is, for a period of time in most of our lives, we can create momentum on our own and that feeling of momentum is incredible. It makes us feel like we're alive. It makes us feel like we're accomplishing. It's who we are meant to be. We are the people on the planet that are meant to be in momentum most of the time.

Now, here's the challenge. We get to a point where the momentum we can create on our own just isn't enough and we start feeling it, but we don't admit what it is and what we really need is a team and we start doing everything bad, we hire coaches, we go to more events, we go to more conferences. We try and avoid the fact that what we really need is people on our team to help us move forward. It's the entrepreneur's dilemma. Here's the issue. The entrepreneur's dilemma, and this is what the entrepreneur's dilemma is. We as a personality type, the entrepreneurial personality type needs far more protection and support, far more help than the average person to get to our destination to get to where we want to go.

The challenge with that is that any requests for help makes us feel vulnerable and exposed. I don't want you to feel that way. And so with the right process for identifying, analyzing, prioritizing, recruiting, hiring and onboarding and developing the right people, it will get easier. And I know I just named a lot of things because here's the reality. When you're hiring people, there's a lot to the process when you're hiring people.

The problem is most entrepreneurs, when it comes to hiring, people we'll hire anyone who shows up. In fact, entrepreneurs do a lot of stuff reactively. We don't tend to strategically plan, like I talked about four podcasts ago. We don't tend to communicate things to our team as well as we should. We do things in a lot of ways just based on what's around us or based on what shows up. We're so used to being reactive. We will maintain that reactivity even in places like hiring where we should be completely proactive.

And here's how I've watched it work. At first, very few entrepreneurs are excited to build the team. We might be excited for the company growth. We may be excited for more impacts, for more contribution, for more revenue, but growing a team is something that holds challenge for us. It's hard to get over that entrepreneur's dilemma that any requests for help, that really does make us feel vulnerable and exposed. But here's what I want you to know, the epiphany I want you to have. The understanding I want you to know about your life is that the shift from me to we in a team setting where as an entrepreneur you go from worrying about yourself most of the time from being concerned with what you can do or should do, from being concerned with what you are doing, to bringing on a team and coaching that team and developing that team, is one of the most transformational, profound shifts in an entrepreneur will ever go through.

You want the best personal development program in a world, you don't have to go pay anybody for personal development. Hire a team, work with that team, learn what it takes to, to actually manage people, and every company has to be a benevolent dictatorship, there's a person who's in charge and then everybody else has to be willing to be there even though there's someone in charge. When you learn how to do that, you can do just about anything. And so here's why this is so important.

Number one, the right person in your company should create massive momentum for you. When they come in, you should feel like if it's the right person, right position, you've done things correctly, you should feel an immediate shift in momentum. It should actually start feeling better immediately. We just hired recently hired a new writer. Her name is Nicole and she's fantastic. And within days through our onboarding process and recruiting process within just days, Nicole was writing and taking work off of Dustin's plate and making things easier, creating momentum, making all of our lives easier on our team. That will move you forward like crazy as an entrepreneur.

So you want to make sure if you go out and start recruiting, you're getting the right people. So you get that type of momentum, that type of forward progress. Another reason why this is so important, the wrong person can distract an entire team. In fact, a wrong person can even destroy an entire team. There was a time ... When I think of the wrong people on my team, I think of one person in specific that I had years ago. He was a writer. It's ironic, I'm talking about two writers because I love working with Nicole, but a while ago we had a writer on our team who was just the contrarian. He had to argue everything and he didn't like what we were doing, and he always had something to say about it. And he never had, he never went over the line of complaints to the point where it was so bad that we terminated him, but in retrospect, I shouldn't have worked with him because I didn't like him and I didn't trust him.

I didn't trust him because he didn't really seem to want to do anything. He didn't have any innate motivation. He didn't really seem like he wanted to work everything in every conversation we had, it felt like he was trying to get out of getting stuff done and it felt like he was trying to avoid work. And I remember just through the comments that he made and the distraction that he caused, and the arguments that he created, he distracted my entire delivery team whenever we were in a meeting. Because everybody would be watching what we were doing and talking about the project and excited and he would be the person saying, "Should we really do this? Does this make sense? Is this right?" And not in a way that was productive, just in a way that was completely and totally consistent. He was always that guy.

So it wasn't like every once in a while he found a problem, he was always finding a problem. One person like that on your team can distract everyone and he was not a cultural fit. He should have never been in our company. And it took me way too long to terminate him, and it distracted a lot of people for a long time. I don't want that to happen to you.

And then finally, here's why this is so important. When you bring on the right people on your team like I have today, I have the best executive teams that I feel like I've ever had in my entire career. We have Greg who's in in IT, he's one of the calmest, most focused IT people I've ever had and he's running that department in a way that he lets me know what's going on and tells me what we should be doing, which is exactly what I want.

We have Diana in coaching and content who is the consummate professional, knows her stuff like crazy, has been crushing it on a weekly and monthly basis and is now building out ... We are now building out her team. I have Haley in operations who is literally like a miracle worker on operations. She's awesome. She is incredible at communicating with our team. She's great at having the right systems in place. She has a complete understanding of what's going on in our business. And then Dustin in marketing is phenomenal. He's only been on our team in about 35 days. And the amount we've gotten done I think would overwhelm a mere mortal. But for Dustin, he's actually pushing himself harder.

And for Cadey and I, we were talking about last night, the two of us run the company, we both run the strategy high level. We have our own roles within the business, but we were talking about how we have never had a team that's this strong, that is this exciting that we feel this connected with. And when you have that feeling, I want you to understand something as an entrepreneur, it's like strapping on an iron man suit. You feel boosted, you feel gifted, you feel smarter in just about everything. This is how I feel and I know you'll feel the same way when you find the team that is therefore has back, actually trusts each other, works together.

And here's what's so amazing about it. Everything that each one of those people does, I have severe weaknesses. I'm terrible with systems. When it comes to coaching and content, I'm actually pretty good at that, but not the formal creation of content. I'm not a curriculum designer. And when it comes to day to day coaching over and over again, I have a hard time staying in the seat and doing it over. It would be hard for me to do operations overwhelm me, marketing does too. So I have people on my team who are in their zone of genius and their strengths are where I do not have strengths to put it really politely. And so it balances like crazy and it creates massive momentum. So here's what you need to know, just like process and projects for people. You start with the analysis of the five core functions and you look at your team's metrics and milestones or your metrics and milestones to see what you need next. This is a key.

The second thing you need to know about hiring, drive all of your hiring decisions with two week time studies. If you feel like you need an executive assistant or somebody to help you out, you're starting out as an entrepreneur, do a two week time study, write down everything you're doing every 15 minutes for two weeks. I have more than one podcast on this, go back and listen to them. Because if you do a two week time study and then mark everything in 15 minute increments. And then at the end of the two weeks you go back and you write an S next to everything that was strategic and you had to be doing and a T next to everything that was tactical and that you can get help with.

Drive hiring in a larger team the same way if you have a team member that says that they need help, get a two week time study, analyze that time study one or two things are going to happen. You're either going to realize or they're going to realize that they found efficiency and they don't really need help, or you're going to realize that they do need help. And the two week time study is going to give you the details of exactly what the person coming in needs to do. Always drive hiring with two week time studies.

And then third, create a process or come work with us, we'll give you ours, but you want to be able to analyze what position you need internally, which means reviewing the five core functions, reviewing your waterfall and what you're going to accomplish as a team, your metrics and milestones and two week time studies. You want to be able to document the position, create a full four R document. Then you want to go out and recruit, advertise the position, get the applications that you need, screen the applications, select the ones you're going to do a cultural fit interview with, conduct those interviews. Then create a field test where you're actually seeing the work product of the individual and then to your second interviews, whittle it down to three final candidates that you would be thrilled if any one of them joined your team and then hire one.

You follow a process like this. You're going to put the right person in the right seat over and over again and here's the result you will get. Like me, you will be excited about your team. Like me you will brag about your team. Like me, you will walk into rooms with a higher level of confidence because you know your team has your back and it's not just you alone. An entrepreneurial with a team never walks into a room alone and I want you to have that feeling. Put the right people in the right places in your team and you will see your business create momentum fast. And if you go through all five of the last podcast and you have a strategic plan, a communication structure, you have the right projects being documented, the right ... Sorry, the right processes being documented, the right projects being completed and the right people being hired and onboarded, you will create massive momentum and you will not be able to help but scale faster than you ever thought you could.

If you're ready to start scaling, if you're ready to do this, we have a new product for you. If you don't feel like you're ready for one of our coaching products yet, then this may be for you. Billionaire Code Foundation, our Billionaire Code Foundation products is a product all about strategic planning. We will show you the five core functions analysis. We will show you exactly how to analyze your business and look at what you need for the next year, and then we will help you build this strategic plan to get there.

Now for a limited time only, and if you're listening to this podcast after July of 2019, then the limited time is over, but you should still go to billionairecodefoundation.com and check out the offer that we're running now. But right now we are running a Beta offer where for the first six weeks of the Billionaire Code Foundation product, I will be the coach. This is a onetime purchase. We back it up with coaching. I'm going to be coaching the first six weeks.

And when you get to the page and you see the price, don't think that it's just artificially low or there's a problem or it isn't really what you're getting. We have put prices at a price lower than we ever have with my personal involvement in business coaching. So go to billionairecodefoundation.com let us help you create the first of the five reasons why companies that should scale don't. Your strategic plan, which will include a system to identify the right processes, the right projects, and the right people you need in your team. This is going to be a game changer. Go to billionairecodefoundation.com join now, this is a Beta only for my personal involvement in coaching and then we're going to relaunch it all again. But if you want to join the Beta, go to billionairecodefoundation.com.

Thank You For Listening!

I am truly grateful that you have chosen to spend your time listening to me and my podcast.

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With gratitude,

Alex

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