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- [00:00]
A
What's up, guys? I have a special episode for you today. In this episode, Alex and I actually are talking about the importance of standards in business. And so we had some time on a Sunday and felt like doing a podcast together. Actually, Alex is recording podcasts because he likes to batch them back to back, and we wanted to hang out, and so I joined him. If you are somebody who's growing a business or wants to grow a business, and you want to understand what it takes and what kind of standards you need to uphold, this episode is for you.
- [00:34]
B
I wanted to talk about something that I feel like will be a meaty subject for both of us with regards to business, but it probably does have some tendrils that extend to regular life, and that single prompt or word is standards. The reason I thought it'd be really good topic is because as a business owner, I have a few themes of lessons that I have to continue to learn over and over again. Like, I feel like the concept of the lesson stays the same, but my understanding of it deepens. You see the zillionaires on stage saying, hey, you just have to hire great people. And then, you know, the local barbershop guy is like, yeah, sure, you gotta hire great people. But there's just so many levels to great people for standards. It kind of works the same way, which is in a lot of ways, you get the business you tolerate. Layla made this tweet earlier today, and I think in seeing that tweet, I thought to myself, I think it'd be fun if we did this together. So I will read you the tweet that you had. The reason your business is shit is because you are comfortable with a shit business. If a shit business made you uncomfortable, you wouldn't stop until it was fixed.
- [01:46]
A
Yeah, that was really on my mind because people tell me all the time how desperately they wish to have a great business. But the truth is, is that I know the way we are, which is like, I will not stop and you will not stop until we don't have a shit business, or. And I wouldn't say any of our businesses are shit, but I would say a decade ago, maybe. And so it's just a matter of, like, are you willing to put in the work it takes and run your head against the wall a million times, or, you know, fail 10, 15, 20 times to figure it out? And I think a lot of the times, building a great business is just failing over and over and over again. Just figuring out what works. Because learning how to lead people, learning how to Build a culture, learning how to build a team. It's not like any of that is like one skill. People are like, tell me how to lead people. I'm like, yeah, let me give you 50 skills in one conversation. Like, write a book on leadership. Okay? I could write you a fluffy bullshit book, but it actually is so many micro skills that bundle up into this one word the concept of holding standards for ourselves. I think a lot of people, in the beginning, it's really easy because you see, oh, I have nothing. These people have something. I need to raise my standards to get that something. And then when you're making a million dollars, you're making 2 million, 5 million, 10 million, 20 million. So you keep raising your standards. And then as you get further along, I think a lot of people tend to plateau. And I think a lot of the reason that they plateau is they don't know who to look for to set the new standard for what's required to grow. And the reality is, is that in a business, people always ask, well, why is it that, you know, you need to continue to set the standard higher and higher? It's because as your business grows, you at the top have to be the most potent source of those standards. Because as more people get on your team, as you have more people under you, those standards only dilute. They only get worse. And so if you don't continue to raise the bar and to raise the standards of who comes in and what the standards are, then they dilute even more. And so it's like fighting natural inertia of like, if we're not trying to make things better, things will get worse.
- [03:42]
B
Two things. So first off, I've been spending a lot of time thinking about motivation. Dr. K, who's my very close friend, basically brother, at this point, we talk about this a lot because it's kind of one of these quintessential concepts. And you're like, how does motivation have to do with standards? Well, let me explain. If we define motivation as the equal opposite of deprivation, meaning if you are. If you have not eaten in a while, you have great motivation to eat, you are hungry. If you haven't slept in a while, you have great motivation to sleep. And so you will be more likely to go to sleep. The issue with motivation is that you cannot measure an action until it is taken. So you don't know how motivated someone is until after they take action. And so I think the reason that standards are so important and so amorphous for entrepreneurship is that they are the thing. They are the line in the sand that separates you from where you want to go. And the further you are from your standard, the greater the deprivation. And the greater that deprivation, the higher the motivation to fix it. The reason I think standards are so important is because they actually are the seed. They're the catalyst for the actions that we have to take. And so I have this theory on business in general, which is that within any team, the person, the individual who has the highest standard, should be the one who makes the decisions. And so if there's ever a day where there's someone@accentility.com who has a higher standard of excellence for this business than Layla and I have, then that person should run it and not us. And so I think it's a wonderful litmus test to also identify, like, up and coming leaders in the business. You look at a department, you say, who here in this department has the highest standard? Who here raises the bar, and who here says, we are deficient compared to this ideal? I think the reason that I have gotten more value in terms of changes in my life, like, I can. I can almost mark the huge material changes in, you know, Leilani's income through interactions that we have oftentimes with people ahead of us or ahead of us within a function, Right? And so, I mean, when Layla and I wanted to get on YouTube, we went to this little meetup with these YouTubers that I think the smallest person there had, like 20 million subscribers. But the thing is that they reset our standards for how much more work we could be doing on the YouTube side. And I think we had a lot of takeaways from that. And I think our YouTube performance tremendously increased as a result of that. Not even from any of the tactics, but simply from an understanding of how much more work was required. And it's very difficult to translate that via a podcast or a blog article or something like that, but seeing it in person, in the flesh, and I'll tell one little story, and I know Layla's going to jump on this, but we had a team that came to the building and we talked to some of the teammates in this particular company. And immediately afterwards, Layla and I both met and we were like, that is a higher standard than we have in this particular field. And it created tremendous change in terms of our thinking process around who, what, how, for, how we were going to execute to now resolve this much larger discrepancy between where we were or even the discrepancy between our ideal and what supposedly, or at least looked like their ideal. And so they created More motivation by showing us what was possible. And I think that's actually the biggest gift of, like, being in the room with people who make significantly more than you, more than any tactic will ever give you.
- [07:00]
A
I agree. I also do think, though, like, some people use it as an excuse, which is like, at least I hear this all the time. They're like, well, I can't get in a room with you. I can't get in a room. It's like, okay, well, look at the Internet. You and I send each other snippets from Elon Musk, from Steve Jobs, from Jeff Bezos all the time. And we don't need to sit in a room with them. We can just say, you know what? I'm just going to take the fact that they're that much more ahead of me, that I'm going to apply that as truth, and I'm going to see how it goes. We don't have to necessarily. It is easier to be in the room with the person, but you can see something they say, you can read something in an interview or you can watch a video on YouTube and you can raise your standards, right? Then you know what I actually think it is, is that people don't believe it until they see it. Often when you have insurmountable proof like Elon Musk or Jeff Bezos or somebody like that, then it makes it easier. And we also just know that there's just no effing way that they got there by having the same standards as other people. And so it's easier for us to do that. I actually want to read an email that we got from somebody who spent some time with Alex the other day because I think this demonstrates, you know, people hear us talk all the time about, you know, working hard and putting in the hours and this, that. And I think until you work in acquisition.com and you see that we are here before you every day and that we leave after pretty much most people every day, then you don't really know what it looks like. So this email. Hey, guys. As I'm heading home from the airport, on my way home, I want to take a moment to express how much I personally appreciate the experience with acquisition.com team and everything you've been creating. Seeing Alex yesterday, delivering at the highest level, nonstop for nine hours straight without literally leaving the room has completely reset the bar for work ethic and dedication for me. I recall Layla's post on his birthday where she praised his work ethic and commitment, something few people get to witness. Now, witnessing myself and knowing that I only caught a brief glimpse, it really hit home on an entirely different level. I've attended quite a few business workshops and I know many are successful and many high performing entrepreneurs as well. But nothing has even come close to Alex's delivery yesterday. I genuinely don't know if anyone else could sustain that level of focus and excellence. Thank you for all you do. And a special thanks for Alex for raising the standard and demonstrating what's truly possible, what 1 of 0 looks like in real life.
- [09:06]
B
Man, I get all, I'll get all choked up hearing it. No, but it's one of these things where like, you know, there's, you know, a short last 30 seconds or some Instagram reel. And to be really clear, I'm not saying, because I don't think either of us is saying, hey, go sacrifice your life, you know, do something you don't want to do. I think that if you happen to be fortunate enough to have a big goal that propels you, then I think a lot of it is just basically ignoring everyone who tells you that there's something wrong with it. And I think that it's okay to behave differently than most people. Like I had. My father called me today and he said, hey, don't forget to, you know, take some time off. And I was just like, why?
- [09:45]
A
Yeah.
- [09:46]
B
And it. And he said that right after of saying like, you know, it's so cool what, you know, what you've accomplished and all this stuff and blah, blah, blah, but it's like they go together. And also when I have a day off and this isn't going to, I'm not going to go into work ethic stuff with this, but I'm just making this point is that like, we take rest when we need a rest. There's, there's this idea that there's something wrong with not having a hobby or there's something wrong with, you know, not taking vacations. And the thing is, if you want that, then do it, but you do not need to command other people to do it or say that there's something wrong with someone who doesn't.
- [10:17]
A
Actually, I would like to go in that direction for a moment because I actually think that the standard is low. And that's the issue is that the standard for what excellence looks like is low. And then people throw rocks at people like you and me who are actually trying to fucking make the world a better place and actually produce jobs and actually help people. And so I would like to ask everyone who's listening, the people that tell you that you're too obsessed, that you work too hard, that it's not normal, that it's not healthy. What have they produced for the world? Like, for real, Anybody that we know, we know people who really make this world a better place, and they work their fucking ass off, and none of.
- [10:48]
B
Them have ever talked smack or been like, you guys are working too much. Like, don't forget to. Like, every single one of them is like, dude, keep crushing. Anyone who's below is the ones who have something to say.
- [10:59]
A
I made a tweet the other day actually, though, and I was thinking about this because it was really bugging me. What has become normal in the last few years is just unacceptable. Most people just try to distract themselves with useless activities until they die. Don't apologize for attempting to make something useful with your life.
- [11:14]
B
It's funny that you bring that up, because I also had a tweet that I have written and rewritten multiple times, and I haven't gotten it to hit the way I want. So maybe I'm going to try and do this on this podcast live. If there were an immigrant who came here and was working three jobs, right, and basically put everything on the line in order to make his family successful and set them up, and he did. He barely saw his kids, he barely saw anything just to help his family survive, everyone would be like, man, that's so great. Then if an entrepreneur who happens to. Let's play it out. Let's say that guy keeps working his three jobs, and then all of a sudden he does set his family up, and he does, you know, his business does grow and he does make it work, then what is that person supposed to now stop successful actions? Are they supposed to do something entirely different as a result? And then all of a sudden, they go from being the underdog to the man. And I always. I always wondered about this. Like, at what point do you become the man? And I say the man for those of you who are younger, like, it's kind of like it's a, you know, a pejorative term for, like, corporate man in the sky, but that everyone's like, man, you're a big boss man now. You know, like, when do you become the man? Like, where's that transition? And my opinion of that transition is when you do better than the person who's making the judgment. If we look at the behaviors, the immigrant who's trying to set their family up versus the entrepreneur who's trying to set the world up, the actions are the same. And so it's this whole fallacy of intention is that people want to somehow like say that there's something wrong with the intention behind something. And all you and I at least obsess over is we just, for those who don't know us that well, we completely disregard intention. It's irrelevant, Completely irrelevant.
- [12:51]
A
We only focus on behavior.
- [12:53]
B
Yeah, if you accidentally kill somebody, like, or you purposely kill them, as far as I'm concerned, you kill them. Now that has lots of tendrils attached to it and I'm not going to get into that. But the reason on this is that we focus on behavior. We focus on the actions that people take and do. These things propel us towards our goals. And I think that having standards to circle the wagon, having standards will create a larger deficit. And so the reason getting around people who are way ahead of you in a function or in general resets the standard. And what's often happens is, and this is, I mean, this has happened multiple times in my life. When I see someone who's far ahead of me and then I end up finally meeting them, I find out that they're not working twice as hard as me. I found out they're working 20 times as hard as I am. And that was like the example with the YouTube guys when we met them. And they were like, oh, well, send me your brief. And I was like, what are you talking about? And they're like, you know, all the pre production for the videos that you make. And I was like, you know, we kind of, you know, I have a couple of bullets. And he's like, well, yeah, no, I mean, obviously, like we spend an entire week, like five guys in a room to figure out every single frame of what we're going to do and how it's going to transition and what, first five seconds, certainly, and all the props. And then we source it all. And I was like, wow. Well, it makes sense that Your videos get 20 times more views than mine do.
- [14:11]
A
It's funny you say that because it's like another one that I think about a lot because obviously I focus more on like the people, culture stuff, meetings. People are like, well, I don't know why my meetings are so bad. I'm like, I spent today two and a half hours prepping one fucking meeting because I want to make sure that I have outlined everything so that If I pull 15 people into a room, it is worth the money. But does anybody else spend two and a half hours to prep one fucking meeting? Probably not. Same goes for planning for the company. People are like, how does the company grow so fast. I don't know. I've probably spent two months planning, two months planning what a year of growth is going to look like. Every weekend, every Saturday, every Sunday, every morning, going through every model, talking to every person on the team, talking to you, talking to all the executives, talking to the frontline, making sure that this plan is going to fucking work. And it's like when people are like, I don't know why my business isn't growing, I'm like, did you put two months into planning what the next year is going to look like? I doubt it.
- [15:07]
B
Well, I'm going to piggyback one that I'll shout you out on this. Layla is militant when it comes to, again, standards, but for people. So, you know, standards has lots of different functions that you can, you can relate it to, but standards with regards to bringing people in. And so I'll give you a tactical example of this. You know, we were hired for a senior director of marketing@acquisite.com to take some stuff off my plate. When the candidate got on with Layla for her interview or for his interview with her, he said he was shocked that both you and I had watched the recordings of all the other interviews that he had had prior. And so at this point, I think he'd had three other interviews, full 30 or hour long interviews that had happened prior to that. You might be thinking, well, wow, what a waste of time. It's like, well, the thing is that if you listen to all of those one, oftentimes you can just not have the interview that you were going to have with them and just cancel it because you're like, no, I don't want to deal with this guy or this gal. On the other hand, you can also create a significantly better experience for that candidate because they're not being re asked the exact same questions yet again.
- [16:09]
A
Okay, so actually this morning I spent again two hours. I watched every interview of somebody who's coming into a very high level senior role in the company, who everyone said that they love. And I have the next interview with. And so my goal is I'm going to watch every interview because guess who has higher standards than fucking anybody? Me. And so the reason really is actually it comes back to this video, which is there might be something that they say to someone else on my team, but if I have the highest standards, I'm going to catch that thing better than anybody else will. And so basically what I come up with every candidate is what's the one thing that I'm not sure if it's up to standards. And so for this person, it's speed. I don't know if they're going to be fast enough. And so that's why I'm going to hammer home on the interview. I'm going to see, I'm going to test them on speed. But again, it's just like a matter of standards. And it's, again, it's funny. People ask all the time. They're like, I don't understand why I hired the wrong person. Well, did you watch every interview? Did you listen to every single interview they had with your team? And did you take the time to distill five questions to review over an hour that you're going to deep dive into and, like, really understand who this person is? But that's how you uphold a strong team. And the standards of it is you don't let the wrong people in.
- [17:13]
B
I think Layla and I right now, like, there's a big theme, like, internally, I mean, I'll say this is that, like, right now we're definitely in a season of standards.
- [17:20]
A
We've just grown really fast.
- [17:22]
B
Yeah. Which is great. The types of videos that Layla and I passed to each other, like, the little reels are. It's. I mean, she said the names earlier, like Jensen Huang from Nvidia. We still looked at, look at lots of job stuff, some stuff from Altman, lots of stuff from Elon Bezos. And more recently, I've had this, like, this, this very short sentence in my mind that's kind of been like, front and center, which is fewer better people. And the thing is that, like, as, as a company grows, you inherently add headcount. Right. But what I want to do is add IQ per capita. I want the average IQ of the company to go up. And if you know that you're hiring frontline roles, it means that you have to really. One, the frontline roles in general have to get better. And then the people who are coming out, you know, at the top, like even higher level than that. And companies dilute, I think Layla said it earlier, like your culture dilutes, your standards dilute as it grows, unless you are incredibly forceful and intentional about it, partially because people hire people who are not as good as them because they feel safe in their roles. And that's a huge, A huge risk to a business. But fewer better people also require significantly less overhead in terms of management. And so if you think about the perfect company in terms of effectiveness, as 100% individual contributors that had zero management, that would be the perfect organization of human Beings. Now, the difficulty would be aligning their actions and aligning goals and then, you know, aligning resources across departments. And that's why, you know, these, these lines of communication exist. But fundamentally in a perfect world, and this is a hypothetical ideal that would never get achieved, you would have people who just work all the time and don't spend any of their time needing to communicate, finding people who require less communication and less accountability and less repeating yourself and less having to explain down to a two year old what has to occur in order for their job to be successful or for them to be successful at their job. Makes such a big difference when you multiply by a hundred or two hundred or five hundred across an organization.
- [19:18]
A
Yeah, and I would say this probably applies mostly to like, knowledge workers in companies, because there are some companies where I think that that's tough for somebody with a high level of intellect to want to keep.
- [19:27]
B
Well, look at Chick Fil A's employees versus, like McDonald's 100%.
- [19:31]
A
But they're not directors at.
- [19:33]
B
No, for sure, I'm saying. But standard, relative standards. So we'll say shoulder to shoulder standards.
- [19:37]
A
Yeah. Have higher standards than your competitors.
- [19:39]
B
Yeah. Actually easiest way to win.
- [19:41]
A
Yeah. If you have low standards for employees, then you have a lot of them. And if you have high standards for employees, then you don't need as many of them. Even further, what's the elephant in the room, at least when I think about this conversation, is that people rise to the standard that you set with your actions, not the standard that you request with your words. And the difficulty of everything that we talk about right now is that if somebody's listening to this podcast and then they go to their team and they say, I want you to be doing this on weekends. I want you to be mornings, I want you to be nights. I want you to be this. I want you to do this. Like, well, if you're not doing it, I can guarantee you they're not going to do it either. Or they might do it once and then never again or they'll resent you. That doesn't create loyalty. You know, I talked about it with the team when I said, I said our culture, competitive greatness. What does that mean when it comes to how we treat our office building? I said, listen, if I walk in and the coffee machine doesn't have water, that does not show competitive greatness. Refill it after you're done. If it's low on water and you walk away. I was like, competitive greatness is being the type of person that you Refill it before you walk away. And so if you don't do that, you're not upholding our standards here.
- [20:42]
B
It's the shopping cart test.
- [20:44]
A
It is. And it's funny because what happened was about five days after that, I was refilling the coffee machine and one of our teammates walked in and she was like, fuck. I was by myself. I. It was like, you know, six something here. It was like the end of an event, whatever. And that was when I was like, damn, she really means it. Another guy who's taping the event, he came over. Somebody had thrown a donut into the trash and it had like hit the trash, sprinkles everywhere, right? I was there picking up little sprinkles. He walked in, he taped it, and he came to me, he was brand new. And he said, I just want you to know everything that you have said and everything I've ever heard you say just became validated in that moment because I saw you picking up the fucking sprinkles from the floor around the trash. So it's like, if you guys are listening to this and you're thinking, like, how do I raise the standards? Like, you must be the standard.
- [21:29]
B
It's. It's like you have to be almost an exaggeration of the standard. Everyone is going to be a dilution of that standard. If you want everyone to be a 10 on something, you have to be a hypothetical 21 out of 10. Like you, if you want everyone to behave a certain way. And I think one of the tough parts for entrepreneurs is that, like, in order to embody that. Yes, that means that your standard for yourself always has to be higher. No one has an issue with a boss who asks something of them that they clearly demonstrate in excess of the ask. Like, just really think about it. Like, man, I can't get my team to show up on time. It's like, well, are you on time?
- [22:01]
A
Yeah.
- [22:02]
B
Hey, I can't get my team to follow up. Do you follow up? Hey, I can't get my team to be more logical. Are you logical? And how logical are you? So it's not just yes, no, are you? But to what extent? To what degree? Is it something? Is it, Is it wow, worthy? Is this something? When they get home after they have their first week at the job, they tell their wife, they tell their, you know, they tell their spouse. They're like, dude, these guys are insane. Like, these guys work ethic is nuts. Like, man, their attention to detail is. I've never seen people with higher standards.
- [22:26]
A
The coolest thing about getting the office the headquarters has been seeing how people watching our, how we actually work in person has changed the work, the standards of the teams. I think that's the one advantage that we have of the in person teammates that we have because we're hybrid. We have some people who are fully remote. But I think that the people who really want to learn from us and that come into the office get to see. Because they walk in at 7 or at 8 or whatever and they're like.
- [22:52]
B
They'Ve been here at 7 or 8.
- [22:54]
A
I'm talking about, you know, and then they leave before we leave. You know, it's just like it's setting the standard for everybody else. And I think about that all the time, every single day.
- [23:03]
B
You know, our team knows if they come in on a Sunday, they're going to see us. If they come in on a Saturday, they're going to see us. Like, if you get here at 6, you're going to see us. I mean, we're here, we're here for it.
- [23:12]
A
I mean, that ties back around to like, I think that the issue has been for a long time. I think a lot of people are too apologetic about raising the standard. Because the reality is if you raise the standard, you are the few, not the many. And therefore other people tell you there's something wrong with you. And if other people are telling you that there's something wrong with you, you're probably on the right path.
- [23:30]
B
And it feels tough because you will be again in the minority. And so it's very hard for like, I think humans like cognitive programming. If the majority of people are telling you that something's wrong, you have this very deep desire to change it.
- [23:42]
A
It just takes. Eventually though, I feel like you and I, like we've, we reprogram where it's like, if people are telling me I'm obsessed, something's wrong. So I'm like, oh, I'm on the right path. Because what everyone else is doing, I don't want to be like that.
- [23:53]
B
It's clearly not working. What happens though, is you raise the standard. And this is where it gets really tough. So I'm rubber hitting the road here is that as the company grows, whatever stage you're at, the bar will always have to get reset. And if you don't reset it, you will eventually dilute. You will bloat, you'll get too many unintelligent people, people who don't work as hard, who don't share the values to the degree that you need them to. Or want them to. It's kind of like an accordion or kind of like a tree where it grows, and you have to prune the tree to keep the tree healthy. You have to keep the most concentrated version of it. And I like, according as a visual, it's like. It's like it goes in and then it expands out, then it goes in and then it expands out. And it's this distillation process. I mean, like, I think about this with. With jobs a lot because I think about what people he had in his immediate vicinity, like, who were the people that really drove things. And what's interesting is that, like, Gmail, for example, was like a team of five. And, you know, the team that built the original iPhone, Very, very small team. Now you have these, you know, huge, huge organizations, but they're still these very small teams that are incredibly effective of highly intelligent and motivated people who have leadership that just simply aligns the vision and then more or less gets out of their way. And I think this is something that I've been using as my own personal litmus test for the people that are in my vicinity. I will hold people accountable through the standards that I uphold for myself if I have to keep moving a task along. Hey, man, where are you at with that? Hey, where are you at with that? That's not the caliber of person at this level that needs to be here.
- [25:21]
A
Accountability, which I have, I've. I made a little formula. I don't know if you know this or you've seen me. Yeah.
- [25:27]
B
You have a YouTube channel.
- [25:28]
A
Yeah. Expectations plus measurement times. Reinforcement. Set the expectation, put in a tool to measure if the expectation is being met. And then your job as a leader manager is reinforcement. I call it like reinforcements, the only multiplier. So for me, when I talk about accountability, I'm talking about it because I know that if I reinforce the activities that somebody does to uphold those expectations, then I get even more. They'll be an 11 out of 10 or a 12 out of 10. If somebody. And this is actually what I was talking about with Alex today, I was like, oh, man. You know, I really worry about, like, people taking all the things I talk about and applying it to shitty teammates. Nobody who reports to me is someone that I have to ride their ass about something. And I promise you, if it's somebody who I have to ride their ass, then they're gone. I'm kind. I'm not nice. I'm not going to keep someone who's ineffective on my team because that actually just screws up the whole thing. And your job as a leader is to protect the entire company, not one person's feelings. You know, that's just like, one thing that I keep thinking about with the accountability piece, which is, like, what people miss is they think that, one, that setting expectations. I have a whole video on that on my YouTube channel. But, like, they think that setting expectations means constantly giving someone instructions. Two, they think that measurement means that they are measuring the person, whereas all the examples I give are how that person measures themselves. And then, three, they think that constant feedback means that that person's probably fucking up and you're having to constantly tell them what they're doing wrong. It's like, no, I'm trying to get winners into my accountability formula. I'm not trying losers. If I have to constantly tell somebody what they're doing wrong, if I had to repeat myself three or four times, if somebody is unable to do something, sometimes it's just not worth the return. And you have to ask yourself that, which is like, is this worth my time as the CEO or the founder of the company? Should I be spending hours and hours a week trying to train one customer support rep on how to manage tickets? Probably fucking not.
- [27:26]
B
I'll read this tweet that I. I wrote the other day, and I don't, of course, anything that's like, operational, higher value gets zero reach. But a lot of young leaders think that the point of their job is to keep everyone on their team happy, when in fact, it's to keep the best people on their team happy. That means that you have to allow the rest to rise to the occasion or weed themselves out. And that means that low performers will whine and then leave. And so when I say whine, it's easy to hear the word whine complain, but you have to think about them. Like, you raise the bar. Like, if a new sheriff's in town, let's say you want to take over an underperforming team. Like, the first thing that's going to happen is you reset the standards. If the. Like every single sports movie where the new coach comes into town and it's the loser team, what do they do? They reset the fucking bar.
- [28:18]
A
It's the number one rule. If you're taking over a department, you have to be better. If you're not better, don't take it over.
- [28:24]
B
Yeah. And I think right now, many, many businesses and many business owners who are listening to this, it's either the entire business or function within the business has a leader there who is too lax. They are not strong enough. They are people pleasing. They are being nice, not being good. They're not being kind. They're being nice. They want to be liked by everyone. And that is not the way. That is not the way. And the thing is, it's uncomfortable because you might find out that if you go take over an apartment or a function or whatever that maybe half the team isn't a standard. Or when Elon went into Twitter, 80% weren't to his standard. Right?
- [29:05]
A
Yeah. I think there's actually two things that I would give as, like, you know, nice versus good. I would say nice versus kind. That I talk about that a lot because I think people. I wouldn't call myself nice, but I think I'm kind. Because nice is about avoiding conflict. Right. And it's disguised. It's basically weakness disguised as being polite. But it's weak. Being kind is doing what's difficult right now, Even if it's difficult because you love somebody, because you want to invest in somebody, because you believe in somebody.
- [29:34]
B
Yeah.
- [29:34]
A
I am very kind. I am not nice because I am constantly telling people the truth about where they stand in the company. And it always means that it's uncomfortable in the moment. The amount of. Every. Every time I see it, I have to say it, because it's like, if I don't, then who else does? When people are looking at these within their departments, the question I ask myself is this, which is, I look at my. My leadership team, I look at people who report to me, I look at people in the company in key roles, and I just ask myself this one question, and this is honestly it for me, which is, is this person making it easier or harder to achieve our goals? And like, at the end of the day, if somebody makes it harder for us to achieve our goals as a company, then either something has to change or they have to leave.
- [30:16]
B
And I think a couple of vectors to, like, kind of. Kind of measure this on mentally, is if you look at someone and say, okay, is there. Do they meet my quality standard? Okay, maybe they meet the quality, maybe they don't. Do they meet my quantity standard? Are they doing. Maybe they have quality, but they're not. They're not doing enough. Do they meet my speed standard? Do they do it fast enough? And so those are just some different, like, vectors you can consider when you're talking to someone. When you're like, I don't know, is so and so up to standard? It's like, well, having different frames or lenses to look through can kind of guide that conversation. If you. If you feel like someone's deficient and you like. I think one of the biggest things that I've. I've. I've gotten significantly better at over the years is being able to put words to discrepancies between desired and actual. And so I think, like, in the beginning, for example, when I would communicate somebody was not doing a good job, I'd be like, hey, you're not doing a good job. That is actually very difficult for someone to hear because it's basically generic and not specific behaviors that they can change in communicating. A standard, having clear examples of it is a standard that you work six days a week. That is a standard. But if you're like, ah, they're just not working. If it's like translating to, like, I need you to work harder, which no one knows how to do, to. I need you to show up earlier, I need you to stay later and take more calls. I need you to. I need you to spend about twice as much time on these. On these shorts. I need you to make sure that these transitions are smoother than they are. Like, I need them to take less time. I need you to send more out per day. Like, again, you can think in quality, you can think in quantity, or you can think in speed. There's obviously other vectors, but those are the ones that come top of mind in terms of, like, large, generic things that you can kind of zoom in on.
- [31:57]
A
Yeah. The last thing I'll say, just in terms of, like, where I see this go wrong, is that I just feel like a lot of people are. As the company grows, they accommodate mediocrity and low standards rather than upholding the high standards and. Because what happens is they start to question, maybe I was just, you know, too hard on them. Maybe I. This was unrealistic. Maybe I. And, like, you kind of have to be a little unrealistic, you know, like, the amount of times that a final candidate gets to me, and I'm like, I'm not taking this call. People are like, why? And I'm like, this is not the person.
- [32:32]
B
After all that work.
- [32:33]
A
Yeah, after all that work, this is the best week. It's the best we've got. It's not the best we need. I feel zero bad about that because I know that my number one job is to be the steward of the company.
- [32:47]
B
No.
- [32:47]
A
And I think that if you are the steward of everyone's feelings, it makes being the steward of the company very fucking hard.
- [32:53]
B
There's a tweet in there.
- [32:54]
A
Is there a tweet in there.
- [32:55]
B
There's a tweet in there.
- [32:56]
A
Well, I'm the master of not tweeting, so you can have it.
- [32:58]
B
No, no. There's something pithy in there of, like, you need to be the steward of the company, not the steward. People's feelings. Yeah, I think that's really good. I would say that, like, when we first met years and years ago, I think you would have been very influenced by, like, people having a bad day, people complaining. And I say complaining as in them generically saying, like, oh, this is hard, or like. Or I'm overwhelmed. I think you, in the earlier days would have felt more empathy towards them and being like, oh, maybe I am overwhelming them, rather than thinking like, they are just not at the standard of person that we need.
- [33:35]
A
Yeah.
- [33:36]
B
And we would have then taken the overwhelm and said, oh, we're being too demanding. And so it's. Honestly, it's a little bit of push and pull because some founders are going to hear this and be like, I'm going to immediately raise the standard on my entire team. But here's what happens. So this is what happens. You go run there, you hear this podcast, and you have this. You have this, you know, come to Jesus with your whole team. And then here's the next thing. They just go back to living their lives because you don't enforce it. And so what you allow to exist, what you tolerate, becomes the standard. It's the lowest thing, not the highest thing. That's what's crazy, is the one time you let someone be late to a meeting and you don't say something, you have now demonstrated to everyone that that is acceptable. And so you have to pair it with likely, if you have. If you feel like you need to change the, you know, turn the tide or change the ship is that if you do have a new standard, you set the standard. And if people don't meet it, it means, yes, you might need different people. And that means that you might have to go through a period of time where you're rebuilding, because you have to basically cycle through a new team and bring in and reset the culture, reset the standards. And honestly, every single entrepreneur that I've heard has been in business for an extended period of time has had to do this one, two, sometimes three times throughout the company's history where you're like, I just needed to set the bar higher. And I knew that the team that got me here wasn't the team that was going to get to me where I wanted to go.
- [34:48]
A
The play behind that is the you that got you here is not the you that gets you to the next level. You know that when you say me 10 years ago, you know, even six years ago, I mean it's been an ongoing thing for me because. And, and that's why I'm so vicious about making sure we have the right people. Because I will be as loyal to the right people as they are to me. And I will pour a lot into them, I will invest in them. But when one thing that I have done away with is being nice, which is in my opinion, sacrificing the long term, sacrificing what's best for the whole team for one person. But I will say this, which is you're so caught up in the day to day and you're so caught up in everything that's going on that you don't catch these things that slip your standards. I was talking to one of our friends about this, Dr. Kashi actually, and I was like, what happens over time is that I get so busy that I'll be, I'll have, you know, 12 meetings a day. And my one meeting at 10am Somebody says or does something that's not to standard and I'm so focused on getting to the next meeting that I forget about it. And so I have to put reminders every day to ask myself was there anything like. Basically I put what I call like a lookup which is like look back up at the rest of my calendar and say like did anything go wrong that I need to address before tomorrow? And I try to give that feedback immediately. And honestly that's kind of all it takes is like resetting the standards is not some like monumentous event that occurs. It's you giving feedback every single fucking day, not forgetting to do it on every call, on every one on one. Your reaction to every mistake. It is all the little things. It's just a hundred golden BBs. There's not one silver bullet. But I think a lot of people that's very overwhelming because it means that you have to change your way of existing as the founder or the CEO of the company. And that's hard to accept.
- [36:28]
B
And I was just gonna say that a lot of people I think are afraid of, I was gonna say confrontation. Like a lot of people are afraid of confrontation. They don't want to just say like, hey man, this sucked. I expected that you would have worked harder on this. Or hey, I'm surprised that this took so long. What else got in the way that I don't understand? Like help me Understand why this took a week.
- [36:48]
A
It's funny, though, because I just made a podcast on this because I think people are afraid of, quote, confrontation, because all they do is insult people. They don't actually know how to criticize people.
- [36:55]
B
Totally.
- [36:56]
A
So it's like, yeah. I mean, I give so much feedback and I critique people all the time, but I never make people. It doesn't feel bad when I deliver it because I don't tell them that they suck. I just tell them what to do differently.
- [37:06]
B
To suck less. No, but it's exactly that. Like, if you go to, let's say I'll use video editors because we have a media team as a simple example. But, like, if I went to a media, an editor and said, hey, this reel sucked, that hurts. Right. But it's also not helpful. It hurts and is unhelpful. And so everyone has these fears around those exchanges, almost rightfully so. But if you just said, hey, this hook was off and needs to be cut this way, can you do that going forward? I think most people would be like, yeah, sure. Did the thing before that suck? Yes. But does saying that it sucked help? No. Does explaining what they should do differently? Is that the feedback you need to do? Yes. And so, like, this is for all the hotter heads, founders who are out there, my homies. It has been one of the biggest breakthroughs in my ability to lead and not blow up on people was if I'm upset, asking myself the question, what do I want them to do? Instead being as specific as humanly possible with that, a laundry list of how to behave. And by doing this one, it slows me down so, like, gives me time to think because, like, in the moment, they basically, you know, insult you, basically by putting the work out that might have been low quality compared to your standards. Right. And this infuriates you because, you know, customer saw it, or a vendor saw it, or other employees saw it or whatever it was. And this. This makes you very angry. But if you just think from the perspective of what do I want to. What do I want them to do instead, this then creates a much more useful frame to then approach the person. And if you can't articulate that, then don't talk to them until you can, because then they will actually be able to change and you'll be able to measure and say, yes, you did a good job afterwards, which gives you more opportunities to not be the dick and just say, great job. So with that being said, that is standards by Alex and Layla, a joint pod. If you like the joint pod. Let us know. If you didn't, then you can also let us know. Otherwise, have an amazing day. Forward it to your teammates. If if a bar needs to be reset, you need to reset it first, then reset it. All right, Have a good one. By.