What's going on everyone? Welcome back to the game. Where today I have a special co-host. Depending on where you look at the internet, my daughter, my sister, distant relative, or for those of you who know the truth, my wife, Layla Hormozi, is here with me. And so for those of you who actually knew who didn't know that, we still get probably like one comment a day. It's like, "Wait, are you guys related?" I have her here today because I'm recording this podcast on a Sunday. We've been working this morning since about six. 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 I'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 zillion errors on stage saying, "Hey, you just have to hire great people." And then the local barbershop guys like, "Yeah, sure, you got to 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. - Hmm. 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 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 has 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 two million, five 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 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. - 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 motivations to equal opposite of deprivation, meaning 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 at acquisition.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 almost mark the huge material changes in Layla and I'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 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. I think our YouTube performance tremendously increased as a result of that. Not even for many 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 is gonna jump on this, but we had a team that came with 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, 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 what 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. - 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 and that and I think until you work in acquisition.com and you see that we are here both for 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 one of zero looks like in real life. - I'll get all choked up here in it. No, but it's one of these things where there's a short last 30 seconds or some Instagram reel. And to be really clear, I'm not saying that, 'cause I think either of us is saying, hey, go sacrifice your life, do something you don't wanna 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's 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 take some time off. And I was just like, why? - Yeah. - And he said that right after saying like, it's so cool what you've accomplished and all the stuff and blah, blah, but it's like, they go together. And also, when I have a day off, and this isn't gonna, I'm not gonna go to work ethic stuff with this, but I'm just making this point, is it like, we take rest when we need to rest. There's this idea that there's something wrong with not having a hobby, or there's something wrong with 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 does it. - 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 them have ever talked smack or been like, do you guys work too much? Like don't forget to, like every single one of them's like, dude, keep crushing. Anyone who's below is the ones who have something to say. - 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. - 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 gonna 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 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 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 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 a, it's a pejorative term for like corporate man in the sky, but that everyone's like, man, you're a big, big boss man now. You know, like when you become the man, like where is that transition? And my opinion to 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 wanna 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 of you who don't know us that well, we completely disregard intention. - It's irrelevant. - Completely irrelevant. - We only focus on behavior. - Yeah, if you accidentally kill somebody, like, or you purposely kill them, as far as I'm concerned, you killed them. Now that has lots of tendrils attached to it and I'm not gonna get into that. But the reason 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 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?" They're like, "You know, all the pre-production "for the videos that you make." And I was like, "Ah, you know, we kind of, "you know, I have a couple bullets, you know." And he was 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 gonna do "and how it's gonna transition in what first, "five seconds, certainly in 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." - It's funny you say that 'cause 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 wanna 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 a 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 gonna 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 front line, making sure that this plan is gonna fucking work. And it's like when people are like, "I don't know why my business isn't growing." I'm like, "Do you put two months into planning "what the next year is gonna look like? "I doubt it." Well, I'm gonna piggyback one that I'll shut you out on this. Layla is militant when it comes to, again, standards, but for people. So, you know, standard says lots of different functions that 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're hired for a senior director of marketing at acquisition.com to take some stuff off my plate. When the candidate got on with Layla 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, you know, 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, is that if you listened to all of those, one, oftentimes you can just not have the interview that you were gonna have with them and just cancel it 'cause you're like, "No, I don't wanna do, I don't wanna do it 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. - 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 gonna 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 gonna catch that thing better than anybody else will. And so basically what I come up with and then every candidate is what's the one thing that I'm not sure if it's up to standards. And so for this person at speed, I don't know if they're gonna be fast enough. And so that's why I'm gonna hammer home on the interview. I'm gonna see, I'm gonna 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 gonna 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. - 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. - We've just grown really fast. - Yeah, which is great. The types of videos that Layla and I pass to each other, like the little reels are, I mean, she said the names earlier, like Jensen Wang from NVIDIA. We still looked at lots of job stuff, some stuff from all the lots of stuff from Elon, Bezos. And more recently, I've had this like 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 is that like as a company grows, you inherently add head count, 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 front line roles, it means that you have to really one, the front line 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 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 100 or 200 or 500 across an organization. - Yeah, and I would say this probably applies mostly to like knowledge workers in the companies 'cause there are some companies where I think that's tough for somebody with a high level of intellect to want to keep doing. - You look at Chick-Flase employees versus like McDonald's. - 100%, but they're not directors at average. - Oh, for sure, but standard relative standards. So we'll say shoulder to shoulder standards. - Yeah, have higher standards than your competitors. - Yeah, actually, easiest way to win. - 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 warnings. I want you to be knights. I want you to be this. I want you to do this, like, well, if you're not doing it, I can guarantee you that they're not gonna 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. - It's a shopping cart test. - 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. 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. - 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 hired. 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 shop on time. It's like, well, are you on time? - Yeah. - 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 it something when they get home after they have their first week at the job, they tell their wife, they tell their spouse, they're like, dude, these guys are insane. Like these guys work, I think it's nuts. Like, man, they're attention to details. I've never seen people with higher standards. - 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 seven or at eight or whatever, and they're like, they've been here. - At seven or eight, 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. - You know, our team knows if they come in on a Sunday, they're gonna see us. If they come in on a Saturday, they're gonna see us. Like, if you get here at six, you're gonna see us. I mean, we're here, we're here for it. - 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. - 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. It just takes, eventually though, I feel like you and I, like, we reprogram, where it's like, if people are telling me, I'm obsessed, something's wrong to me. I'm like, oh, I'm on the right path. 'Cause what everyone else is doing, I don't wanna be like that. - It's clearly not working. What happens though, as 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 blow, you'll get too many, you know, 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. You know, 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. Like, you have to keep the most concentrated version of it. And I like accordion as a visual. 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 jobs a lot, because I think about what people he had in his immediate vicinity. Like, who are 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 out with that? Hey, where are you out with that? That's not the caliber of person at this level that needs to be here. Accountability, which I've made a little formula. I don't know if you know this or you've seen my YouTube video. Yeah, I have a formula. - You have a YouTube channel? - Yeah, I have a formula. Expectations. 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. There'll be an 11 out of 10 or a 12 out of 10. If somebody, and this is actually, I was talking about with Alex today, I was like, oh man, I really worry about people taking all the things I talk about and applying it to shitty teammates. Nobody who reports to me is someone 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 gonna keep someone as 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. That's just one thing that I keep thinking about with the accountability piece, which is what people miss is they think that one, that setting expectations, I have a whole video on that on my YouTube channel, but 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, I'm losers. If I have to constantly tell somebody what they're doing wrong, if I have 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. - I'll read this tweet that I wrote the other day and I don't, of course, anything that's like the operational higher value gets to 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 and 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 wanna take over an underperforming team, like the first thing that's gonna 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. - It's the number one rule if you're taking over at the department, you have to be better. If you're not gonna be better, don't take it over. - No, 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 wanna be liked by everyone. And that's 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 a department or a function or whatever, that maybe half the team isn't a standard or when Elon went into Twitter, 80% were to his standard, right? - 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. 'Cause 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. - It's really good. - But it's weak. - It's really good. - The kind is doing what's difficult right now, even if it's difficult. Because you love somebody, because you wanna invest in somebody, because you believe in somebody. 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 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 the departments, the question I ask myself is this, which is, I look at 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 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. And I think a couple of vectors to kind of measure this on, mentally, is if you look at someone and say, okay, 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 doing enough. Do they meet my speed standard? Do they do it fast enough? And so those are just some different 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 feel like someone's deficient, and like I think one of the biggest things that 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. And 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 spend about twice as much time 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 of quality, you can think of quantity or you can think of 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. - 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. Because what happens is they start to question, maybe I was just too hard on them. Maybe I, this was unrealistic. Maybe I, and you kind of have to be a little unrealistic. 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. - After all that work? - Yeah, after all that work, this is the best we've got. 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. - No. - And I think that if you are the steward of everyone's feelings, it makes being the steward of the company very fucking hard. - There's a tweet in there. - Is there a tweet in there? - There's a tweet in there. - I'm the master of not tweeting so you can have it. - No, no, there's something pithy in there of like, you need to be the steward of the company, not the steward of 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 is 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. - Yeah. - And we would have then taken the over woman 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 gonna 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 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. We were 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 gonna get to where I wanted to go. - 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's 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 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 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. Cashy, actually. And I was like, what happens over time is that I get so busy that I'll have 12 meetings a day. And my one meeting at 10 a.m., 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 look up, 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 monument to 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. - 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 wanna just say like, hey man, this sucked. I expected that you would have worked hard 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. - It's fine that 'cause 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. - Totally. - 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. - So suck less. - No, that's exactly that. Like if you go to, let's say, I'll use video editors 'cause I have a media team as a simple example. But like if I went to a media, an editor and said, hey, this real sucked, that hurts, right? But it's also not helpful. It hurts and he's unhelpful. And so everyone has these fears around those exchanges almost rightfully so. But if you just said, hey, this hook was off and it 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 just saying that it sucked to help? No, just 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. 'Cause like in the moment, they basically, you know, insult you basically by putting the workout that might have been low quality compared to your standards, right? And this infuriates you because you know, customer sawed or vendor sawed or other employee sawed or whatever it was. And this makes you very angry. But if you just think from the perspective of 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. For it to your teammates, if a bar needs to be reset, you need to reset it first. Then reset it. All right, have a good one. Bye. - If these kind of higher level strategies and in-depth tactics that I've shared on my podcast are things that you would like us to personalize to your business to help you get to the next level. And you're a million dollar plus business owner, then I'd like to invite you out to a scaling workshop at my headquarters in Vegas. And just to give you some context, the average business owner in the room does just about $3 million in revenue. And we turned down about 65 to 75% of applicants that apply on a weekly basis. And so we try to keep the room really legit. And the scores that we get in terms of NPS so net promoter scores have been kind of off the charts. And so people seem to really like it and get a huge amount of value from it. And so if that's at all interesting, you can go to acq.com/go. All right, so I try to make this URL as easy as possible because you can just type it in. So it's acq.com/go, as in geo, go versus stop, go. That's it, so acq.com/go. And I hope to see you in Vegas soon.
