Episode Transcript

What’s up, everybody? Welcome back to THE a.m Guys, welcome back to five minute rants. Hope life’s treating you good.

Well, today, guys, I’m just going to jump into it. I actually want to talk about leadership today, and I want to talk about one of the interesting facts and one of the interesting pieces of leadership so along the journey, and along Andrew and I really building and creating together, and where we’re at now, we have gone down the journey of do everything ourselves to the team is really doing everything. And in that and in that journey, it’s been so important to recognize and see that at some point along the way, there’s a transition from Andrew and I doing everything to all of a sudden Andrew and I doing nothing, and a couple things really had to occur to make that transition possible.

And before I go into those couple of things, I want to say this. There’s a huge difference between an entrepreneur or founder and a CEO. The entrepreneur and the founder can be visionary and have an idea for a product or a service to solve a problem, and is more like an inventor in a in parts and ways, right? But then to actually be a CEO, to lead the company, and then to lead the people who are actually driving the company forward. That’s a whole nother matter.

I was listening to a podcast. I don’t know who it was by, but one of the things that they said they actually wanted to talk to Jeff Bezos about this phase in his journey, when he went from being an entrepreneur to a CEO. He went from just being a founder to a leader in the company to drive the company forward, and what that was like, to really document that. And so as I’m talking about this, keep these things in mind, because when Andrew and I started business, we really thought that cool. We’ve got an LLC, we’ve we’ve incorporated, great. We’re business owners. Nope, we’re leaders. Nope. Those things don’t make you leaders. Those are pieces of paper. How does a piece of paper make me a leader? Interesting, right?

And so part of the journey was actually learning how to lead, learning how to lead with kindness and empathy, and yet be established in boundaries and know that there’s authority there to make decisions and to drive the plane forward, being able to create a culture where there’s no politics, and I’ve talked about that before, Lencioni and his Book of Five Dysfunctions of a Team, you should read it, if you haven’t, and creating that culture and then working with the team to facilitate how do we keep their hopes and dreams alive too? Because the team members don’t own the company, and so we’re there to help them achieve their dreams, their lives, what they want to do.

And so I’m saying all that because in our journey going from doing everything to not doing everything, one of the key things that has happened that I believe has to happen as you grow in business, you have to learn to lead through people, and you have to learn how to accomplish the work through people. And what do I mean by that? I mean that you actually have leadership, you have shared responsibility. You have trust with people inside the company who are going to make decisions, they’re going to make calls, they’re going to decide things. They’re going to think about how stuff is built, produced, made. How are they making those decisions that are aligned with the vision for the company? And then how do you as the founder, then begin to lead these people to think the way they need to think, and then to have that heart position of what really is best for the company.

And the company, in my mind, is defined like this. The company is made up of people. Business is done with people, and it is made by people. And if people are not at the center of business, you don’t really have business. So that being said, how do you teach people to lead and think, how do you teach people to come in, accept the culture? How do you teach people to be passionate about processes? And how do you lead? And so these are questions you need to begin asking yourself, and then you also need to know what you’re great at, what you’re bad at. You need to know your strengths and weaknesses, and then you need to be able to actually bring people in from the outside to take care of the places where you’re weak. And then you need to bring people in from the outside to also help take care of the places where you’re strong in because just because you can do it doesn’t mean you should do it.

I can do this as a really bad reason for doing anything. Just because you can do something is a really poor reason for doing something. The question needs to be, should you do this? And if so, why? And so as you go throughout your journey, you’re gonna have to experience a pivot point to where all the work has got to be accomplished by somebody else, and if your team is failing to accomplish the work and not meeting the goals. It’s because you’re not a good leader.

I’ve had to learn that and also accept those things with humility, where there’s been lots of failure in leadership. Andrew and I still talk about things where it’s like, oh, this was a failure in my leadership, and here we are. We can see it more plainly, and that’s important to have. I encourage you, especially if you’re in a place of leadership, the more humility you have, the better things are going to go forward, because in the journey of entrepreneurship, you will fail guaranteed. Period.

Anyways, guys, I’m waiting on time. I’ll catch you later. Peace.