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The best leaders I know never skip Sunday planning. If you skip preparation, you borrow time from your future self and with interest, right? And then what's the interest rate on that borrowed time? It's high. What's up, guys? Welcome back to Build. And today I want to talk about something that every leader faces. Every leader deals with, whether they are aware of it or not, which is preparing versus repairing. This is top of mind for me because today is Monday, and I love Mondays. I love Mondays because I feel like I get so much stuff done and I get to walk in my week, and I'm like, I have already. I feel like I've already conquered the day when I walk into Monday. And the reason is not because of what happens on Monday, but it's because of what happens on Sunday. It's because of all the time I spend in preparing. My weeks preparing, so that every moment I spend during the week is focused on executing rather than debating, deciding, or planning. And I was thinking about this this morning because one of my newer teammates said something to me to the degree of, like, you know, I did some Sunday planning, and I realized, like, how much more effective I was. And I was like, oh, my gosh, like, who. Who plans Monday morning? Like, what are we talking about? But then I realized I was like, oh, wow, this person, you know, they're newer to leadership. They haven't been in this position before. This is something I've been doing for, gosh, like, a decade. And so it's something that a lot of people don't even know exists. And that is such a fundamental practice of leadership. Right. And the thing is, is this. As leaders, we're constantly making decisions that either set us up for success or leave us scrambling to fix problems later. And so if we don't spend time preparing, then by consequence, we just spend time repairing. It's like, if we don't take the time to plan, we have to take the time to fix. And the cost of repair, whether it's gonna be wasted time, whether it's damaged relationships, whether it's lost trust or lost opportunities, is far higher than the time that we could have just spent preparing in the first place. And I think that this is something that a lot of people don't talk about enough because it's more work, right? Planning takes more work. Planning takes putting side time aside. And a lot of people say, I don't have time. I'm just underwater. I don't have enough help. Listen, you don't have enough help because you're not proactive enough. You don't have enough time because you haven't prepared enough, and you don't have enough bandwidth because you haven't delegated enough, because you don't have to take the time to plan, to figure out how much time you're going to need in the week. And so all these things go back to the same thing, which is that you're not stepping in to the role that a leader really needs to play. And it's the harsh truth, but it's the fucking truth. Which is like the best leaders I know, they do not tolerate a chaotic week. They don't tolerate walking into the Monday morning not knowing what they're going to work on. They don't do that. They walk in knowing exactly what they're going to tackle. They know exactly the things they're going to work on, and they know exactly where they're going to spend their time. Now, here's the thing. You always have to prepare for the unexpected. I'm not saying the unexpected doesn't happen. Things go wrong, unexpected things pop up. But of the things that were planned, of the things you did know you needed to do, did you set yourself up for success ahead of time? And now here's the thing. This doesn't just go into planning, right? This goes into, or at least it doesn't go into weekly planning, it goes into planning in your business in general, taking the time to make decisions and plan versus execute. Something that I was telling one of my new leaders the other day is I said, I don't mix my execution and my decision or planning time. He said, what do you mean by that? I said, I set aside specific time to make decisions and make plans, and then I set aside other time to execute on things. And I don't like those wires to cross. The reason I like those wires to cross is because when I'm in execution mode, I'm not in my best thinking mode. And when I'm in thinking mode, I'm not in my best execution mode. And so the two of them don't do that good when they're mixed. And that's why I wanted to make this podcast, because I think a lot of people don't really know the amount of intention and the amount of preparation that goes into succeeding in business. And whether you are new to business, this is your first business, you're growing really fast in business, or maybe you're growing a team for the first time. This is for you to listen to. And so I want to unpack this idea and how it really applies to Anybody in any leadership position. So, so the first thing I want to talk about is the cost of repairing, the cost of neglecting planning, the cost of not getting ahead. Okay? Why is preparation so critical? Okay, most leaders I talk to are like, yes, be proactive. Proactivity is important, right? And then they're just spending all their time chasing fires, right? And so I think a lot of people can say that proactivity is important, but it takes somebody with more skill to actually do those things and show them on a daily basis and how important they are to getting their job done, right? And so most leaders I talk to, you know, they understand the importance. But here's the thing. Once the pressure's on, once something goes wrong, once Monday morning hits, everything goes out the window. They are too busy putting out fires, they're too busy remembering deadlines they forgot about. And they're too busy just trying to survive day to day. But here's the harsh truth, okay? Every time you skip preparation, you borrow time from, from the future. Think about like this, you don't prepare on Sunday for Monday. And listen, I know people like, oh my gosh, Leila, you asking people to prepare on Sunday? No, I'm not asking everyone. Let me just go on a little tangent for a second. I'm saying if you want to be in a leadership position in a fucking fast growth company, an amazing company, and company that's doing amazing, if you think that you're not going to be able to prepare for the week and that you're going to walk in Monday morning and nothing's going to disturb you and you're going to have time to just decide what you're doing that morning, you are awakened to a harsh reality, my friend. Because that is not the case. The best leaders I know never skip Sunday planning. Or maybe it's Friday planning, maybe it's Saturday planning. But all I know is this, it's not done Monday morning, It's done a few days ahead of time. It's done in a different kind of mode. It's done in a different thinking space. So back to the main point. If you skip preparation, you borrow time from your future self and with interest, right? And then what's the interest rate on that borrowed time? It's high. And so you pay for it with a few different things, right? If you are a leader and you don't properly prepare, you will pay in having a misaligned team. Because imagine that, right? You're the one steering the ship and you don't decide until the day you take the ship out to sail where you're going, can they pack enough food? Can they. Did they pack the right clothes? Did they let your guests on the ship know all the right things? Can they plan the trip? If you haven't planned the trip, it is ridiculous to think that as leaders and as people who have people that report to us, we cannot plan until the day of. Listen, if you are a leader, you do not have the luxury of last minute planning. You do not have the luxury of being reactive because you decided to lead people. And that is a choice. Nobody has to do that. That is a choice that you have stepped into. And so you will pay for it. Your team will pay for it more than you ever will. And that is the one reason why I am so adamant about this is because if you don't, if it's not enough for you to be stressed and to be disorganized and to feel like you're constantly reacting, then I just want you to remember this, your team is also doing them. Your team is the one bearing the cost, even more than you, of all the things that you have not planned for. And I will say this, it is easy to overwhelm a team who does not have anything prepared. It is hard to overwhelm a team who is properly prepared. The same amount of tasks can be given to a team three days ahead of time, and they will be able to complete all of them within two days. But if you give them all the morning of a day that they already have things planned, I can promise you, and it will take them twice as long, plus they will mess something up. And so you will have misaligned teams, you will have poorly executed projects, and you're going to have to apologize constantly for things that could have been avoided. Okay, think about it like this. Have you ever come off a meeting that completely ran off the rails? Because nobody prepared for it, nobody prepared data, nobody prepared who's in this meeting? Is this meeting even relevant? Should we have this meeting? Have you ever apologized for. For hiring someone without properly vetting them? Because later you realize, oh my gosh, that's not actually the role I need. I actually needed this role instead. But then I hired this person, they have this experience and now I'm stuck with them and oh, shit, I think I hired the wrong person. That all is repair work and repair work. It's fucking exhausting, guys. It's exhausting. You lose trust with your teams and it damages morale. And so the question is this, right? What does preparation look like as a discipline of leadership? Okay. It's not just about planning. It's also about holding high standards for. For yourself and your teams. Because if your standards are not high, whose are? If you're the top of the pyramid and everybody rolls into you and you don't have high standards, then, gosh, who does have high standards? Whoever has the highest standards should be the leader of the team. So let's go through a couple common examples of places where preparation is a leadership discipline. All right? And I want. I want to share this with you guys, because these are the areas that I pay the most attention to. And I'm going to go from tactical interest, strategic. Okay. Tactically, meetings never waste a meeting. Meetings are so costly. Think about all the time you're taking of disrupting someone's day of pulling them away from something else, and of asking them to give their attention to this meeting. You owe your team this, you owe your team that. Every meeting before you have, every meeting, you ask yourself, what's the goal of this meeting? How do we know if this meeting is successful? How do. Who do we need on this meeting to make it successful? And do we have the right information to distribute to everybody to make it successful? If you prepare, you make sure that the time spent in that room is productive rather than a waste of time. Guys, meetings inherently are not stupid, and they're not a bad thing in business. Bad meetings are. It's just like that girl who's like, oh, my God, all men are toxic. It's like, I feel like corporate CEOs, like, all meetings are toxic. We need to get rid of them. And I'm like, dude, it's because you were dating a guy who was fucking cheating on you. It's like, it's because you were running a bad meeting. You don't know how to run meetings, and you don't know how to delete meetings. You don't know how to uninvite people for meetings. You don't know how to prepare meetings. You don't know how to get the most out of meetings. And here's the thing. Meetings with clear agendas are literally. This has been studied twice, as productive as those with no agendas. Okay? Another piece of that. Teams that assign action items at the end of a meeting to ensure that the plan is executed are 42% more likely to follow through. And projects decided on a meeting that outline a clear plan are 2.5 times more likely to succeed than those without. Now, here's the thing. You can't do any of these things if you don't Plan for the meeting. One thing I do religiously on Sunday is I look through my entire schedule and I say, do I need every meeting on my schedule? I look at Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday. I move my meetings as I need to. I decide who's going to be on them or not be on them. I uninvite people if I need to. I invite new people if I need to. I create agendas. Yesterday I wrote eight memos. Eight. I write memos. I send them out Sunday night to my team so they can read them ahead of the meeting. So that I make sure any meeting that I'm running with my executive teams, they have all the information I have to make the right decisions. How much time are you putting in to making sure that you don't have shitty meetings? If your whole team thinks meetings suck, it's because you suck at running them. And you don't know how to have a culture of good meetings. Okay? And so that is the first place and probably the most tactical. Now let me tell you the second place where preparation needs to come into practice. Hiring. A lot of leaders rush to fill roles because they are desperate for help. But when you don't take the time to really define what you need, really assess, is this the right title? Is this the right role? Do I need this person now, later and in 12 months, is this the type of person I want? If you don't take the time to assess candidates rigorously to onboard them properly, you will pay the price later. Think about the repercussions of not properly assessing the job. I have seen this before and I actually had a junior leader about six months ago not properly assessed jobs. And the that person placed about three people in the wrong roles. Now why was this? Because what he did is he just hired for what he knew he needed, right then he didn't think about, oh, gosh, is this going to create more strain on leadership? Is this going to create more strain on processes? If we hire more of this person, are we going to need more of the other person too? And so it created this like backwards department that had too much of one thing and not enough of another and also not enough management bandwidth. And that was because this person simply didn't think through all of these things. So when I'm looking at hiring right every week I look at all the open roles in our company and I think to myself, one, is this still the priority of our open roles? Meaning I force rank open roles for my recruiting team so that they understand what's the most important role at any given time, and then what are the rest that fall after that second sequentially? And the question every week is, is this still in the correct order? Right. Cause I want them to understand where things stand. The next question is, do we have the right titles? Right. I'm constantly reassessing it. Has any information that we've gotten from the marketplace told us that this isn't the right title for what we're looking for? Right. Is this the right pay based on. Now that we've taken the job out to market, do we have any feedback from the marketplace that tells us that our compensation's off? Right. And then when we're going through an interview process and we do have the right title, we have the right J.D. we have the right comp. Then I'm asking myself, do I have the right people assessing this role? Are the people doing technicals actually competent? Are the people doing cultures actually competent? Are the people asking the same questions? I'm constantly scrutinizing the process so that I can control for the outcome. And that's the thing. You can't control the outcome, but you can control the process to get there. And this is one of those places in your business where if you don't spend time planning, if you don't spend time thinking and you don't spend time contemplating, you are going to pay a high price later and everybody else involved as well. Do you know how many companies literally hire the wrong person because they just don't put the thought into it, only to later have to fire that person who quit their job, maybe moved across the country, maybe had their spouse get a different job, and then you're like, oops, I just didn't look at the title. Like, can you imagine how ridiculous that is? And so that's the second place you want to look. Now, where's the third place? The third place is strategy. You cannot wing your way into growth. Taking time to plan your business strategy, your priorities, your KPIs, your organizational design, your execution processes, it prevents you from constantly shifting gears and confusing your team and misusing your resources. So some interesting stats that I learned from reading a few articles from McKinsey is organizations that plan are 30% more likely to achieve their goals than those that don't. Why is that? I would say it's because of wasted time. It's like, because it's so much time wasted when you keep changing the plan and you keep not knowing what direction to row in. If your team doesn't know where you're going and they don't know how to get there, and they don't have a clear plan, then it's like, you could end up in the wrong direction and keep having to pivot. And so, like, planning now prevents pivoting later. That's the biggest thing that I've learned in business. Plan now so you don't have to pivot later. The second thing is that organizations that do this and they actually have a planning structure, are 12% more profitable. Why is that again? Because you're not constantly confusing pivoting and moving your resources. You have a clear plan and you know how to get there, and you can clearly explain it to your team. Preparation is the discipline of thinking ahead, okay? It's the process of asking hard questions up front. So you do not ask hard questions when you're towards the finish line. Nobody wants to be standing on the altar and say, oh, shit, do you want kids? Realize I didn't ask that. It's like, now we've had a wedding, our whole family's here, We've got, you know, all the house together. We're going to Maui tomorrow. And now I just realized I haven't even asked you if you want kids. Can you imagine what that's like in business? Yet we do it all the time. Right? We do it all the time. Now, what is the ripple effect of preparation? Right? What's interesting about preparation is how much leverage it actually gives us as a leader. Because here's the thing, when you take time to prepare, it creates a ripple effect through your team and your business. Your team is going to model your behavior. If they say you show up prepared, they will show up prepared as well. Suddenly, meetings are more efficient. Suddenly projects run more smoothly. And here's the thing, the kicker, People start to trust you more. Why do people trust leaders who are prepared? Because preparation communicates competence. When you're prepared, you're not just reactive, you're proactive. And people want to follow leaders who have their shit together. Nobody wants to follow a leader who's, like, running around like a chicken with their head cut off, okay? Now, on the flip side, if you are that person, you're constantly repairing. It creates chaos. And then your team gets frustrated because they're constantly cleaning up your mess. They are professional, cleaner uppers. And instead of making progress, they spend all their time redoing and pivoting. If you don't prepare, you pivot. And over time, that kind of culture just drains energy and morale. And honestly, nobody, including the leader, wants to be involved in it. And so I understand that these Things can be overwhelming, right? Especially when we are stretched thin and we have shit going on. Trust me, I understand. Some weeks I'm like, I just. I don't want to spend those few hours to prep things out because I just want to get to it and get my shit done. Right? And so I understand. But it's not about perfection, okay? It's about making progress and taking small steps towards becoming more proactive and less reactive. The first off, if I was to give you three of my top tips, my first one is this. Schedule time every week for preparation. I will say this and I will repeat it, and I will die on the sword that. The best leaders plan on Sunday, not Monday. The best leaders plan on Sunday, not Monday. If you want your weekend plan on Friday, do not. Do not. Do not walk into Monday. Do not plan Monday morning. Do it the day before, the night before. Do it on Saturday. Do it on Friday evening. I don't care. Do not do it on Monday. I don't know how many times I can say this. I don't know many people who get to where the top of leadership are amazing leaders who plan so. So not far in advance, right? And if you have a team, again, this is not a luxury. This is a requirement. You don't have the luxury of not planning in advance. Put it on your calendar one hour, Sunday evening. Call it. Look forward. Review the week ahead. Review. Review everything. Take notes on this podcast. Review all the things I talked about. The second thing is get clear on priorities. Not everything needs to be now. You need to identify what are the most important things that you need to move forward this week and then plan around your priorities rather than planning your priorities around your calendar. It's the opposite. We need to make sure that we plan our priorities rather than trying to fit our priorities in based on what's on our calendar. And again, we can't do that. If we show up Monday and then we get on all these meetings, we say, why the fuck am I on all these meetings? Because this isn't my priority. Well, that's your fault, buddy, because you didn't tell anybody. And so, again, we have to be be clear on our priorities and ruthlessly plan our week around it. And I will say this. The best leaders that I work with, the best leaders in my company, the better a leader I am, the more I do this. The best leaders say no more than yes. I know it's crazy to think you would think that they would say yes all the time, but they don't. The best leaders say no. To most things, they are constantly saying no because they know that it is the best use of resources to focus. And focus is imperative for a team. And then the last thing that leaders do is leverage. Okay? Preparation does not need to just rest on you. Who can help prepare for you? What tools can you use? How can you delegate this and make it an opportunity for someone else? How could somebody else prepare a meeting? How could somebody else prepare memo? How could somebody else plan a project? The best leaders use others on their team to prepare, and they use it as a growth opportunity for those people. And so preparing doesn't just prepare you and doesn't just prepare your team, but also provides a lot of areas that you can help others grow. So if you've gotten this far on this podcast, I want to leave you with this, okay? Leadership is a choice. And if you choose to be a leader and you choose to move up in an organization and you choose to lead people, then you should choose to spend your time on preparing. Because otherwise you will spend it repairing. One of those paths is going to lead to growth. It's going to lead to trust and efficiency. The other one is going to lead to you and your team being burned out, being frustrated, and having a ton of wasted potential on your team. Preparation is not easy, but it is worth it. Okay? And as a leader, it is your responsibility, yours and nobody else's, to set the tone and hold the standards for yourself, your team and your business. And so here's what I will ask you guys to do. If you have gotten this far in this episode, take a moment to reflect. Where in your leadership could you invest more in preparation? And how would that change you? How would that change your team? How would it change the company if you just took an extra hour every Sunday to plan? How do you think that would look year from out? Thank you for your attention. Thank you for your time. I hope you have a fantastic rest of your day, walk, workout, whatever it may be, and I will see you on the next one.