If You Don't Understand Leadership, You'll Never Win

Leadership is just like this elevator. Everybody wants the top floor office. Nobody wants to be in the lobby. And that's exactly why you might be stuck between floors right now watching people less talented than you win more. So today we're starting from the bottom because leadership is not a soft skill. It's the skill. It sets the ceiling on your income, your business, and your entire life. Because the reality is none of you are getting rich alone. If you think otherwise, you might as well get off the video now. I've built three nine figure companies, and the people who stay stuck aren't the least talented ones in the building. They just never learned what the next floor costs. This is the leadership elevator. Floor by floor. This is going to show you you don't have to work harder, you just have to be smarter. All right, first level lobby. What a winner actually does.

Before you even get into the elevator, there's a lobby full of leadership lies. And it's why most people spend their careers on the ground floor working harder and becoming the most exhausted employee in their company. The lie that is the first and foremost in my mind is a really hard one. As a leader, you should be liked. Here's an underrated quality of awful leaders, which is they try to please everyone and lead by committee. Approval guys is a drug and leaders get addicted to it and then they become mascots. What legendary designer uh Johnny IV asked Steve Jobs way back in the day was Steve Jobs, he asked him to be less harsh with the team. And Jobs looked at him and the story is so good.

Jobs's response instead to Ives was, "Why do you care?" And he said, "Well, because I care about my team and I I don't think it's good for them." And he said, "No, you don't. You're being vain. You want them to like you. I thought you wanted to create the best products in the world. I thought you wanted to create incredible leaders and humans who were going to be better because you were hard on them. You aren't." And so IVive realized, he was pissed at the time, but he realized he wasn't protecting his people. He was selfishly protecting his need to be liked. And you know, Ives later admitted, "God, Jobs was right." He actually admitted it at Job's funeral. Real leaders say the truth even though it is hard. Your job is not to be liked. it is to be trusted. The second lie is that leadership is a democracy.

Sorry guys, your company is not a group project. So stop putting every hard decision up for a vote. In 2008, for instance, Howard Schultz shut roughly 7,100 company operated Starbucks stores for an evening. And he actually retrained all 135,000 baristas. Now he knew it would cause sales to fall and create some chaos but he did it anyways because Starbucks had in that time now not so much scaled this entire business because of this idea of incredible baristas. So Schultz didn't ask the company to vote on whether it needed to do this. He prescribed it. Committees well they basically sand every sharp edge off until your answer is just safe, agreeable and completely useless. Take input from everyone but take orders from no one. And line three, the leader should save everyone. So I call this the office firefighter. And basically, you look like a hero, but you quietly create a company full of arsonists. You rescue the deadline, calm the furious customer,

rewrite the terrible deck at midnight, and yeah, you feel good. You feel like a a hero, but it's actually your training. So you're teaching everyone around you that they can fail because mommy or daddy will just clean it up. I think micromanaging means you hired wrong or you led wrong. Every fire you personally extinguish is a fire your people never learn to prevent. So if everything needs you, you are not actually indispensable. You're what we call the bottleneck. Now lie four. Your team is your family. This one kills me. Please, for the love of all, it's holy. Stop calling your company a family. Families don't have performance reviews. They don't track quarterly KPIs. And they don't fire grandma because she missed a quota. You know, payroll is not actually the same thing as blood, right? You can care about your people, protect them, pay them well, and still decide they cannot stay in the role. And that is betrayal if it is a family, but it's not a family. It's a high performing team. And I think calling everyone family turns this like accountability then into what you know family breakups that allows weak performers to stay. Great performers then carry them. And

resentment is going to eat your company alive. No one should ever be surprised when you fire them. If someone is shocked when you fire them, you failed long before they did. Care hard. Tell the truth faster, even when it sucks. And don't confuse being loyal with permanent employment. I swear most new leaders and even people who have been leading for a long time suck at this. And it's the reason why you won't make more money. And oddly, it is the reason why people won't like you. Makes no sense, right? But actually, if you call people family, if you try to please everybody, if you try to be everybody's buddy, you become two-faced cuz that won't work in business. And at least if you're hard, they know that you're honest. Live five, the leader shouldn't work the hardest. Being the hardest worker in the company, that's not you leading. This is how you actually burn out as a CEO. And think about this for a second. If you burn out as the person in charge, your entire business burns down.

I think what people think a CEO's job is is like be available, answer fast, know more than anyone else. That's not true. What is it actually? Hire people better than you. Build clear standards for them. get out of their way. The unhinged hours can get you from zero to one. And you probably have to do it to do that. Like there's kind of no other way. And you kind of keep doing all five jobs from one to 100. Well, that's not going to work. You won't scale. Like you just sweating all the time is not a system. That is actually just using your horsepower. And it means you're being needed for every decision because you think it's a flex. It's not. It's actually evidence that you failed to build anyone who can do the job almost just as well as you can. And the best leaders, they fire themselves from as many roles as possible. So at some point, this, you know, hey, I'm doing everything stops being the truth. And instead, the thing that's cool about your business is how much it wins without you. And that test starts the instant you hand one important result to another person.

Floor number one is all about giving instructions that don't immediately bounce back to you. So, it starts the first time you delegate something and get back a steaming pile of technically it is exactly what you asked for, but you wish it wasn't. And your first instinct, if you're like me, is like, I'll do it myself. But you just doubled your work and then you realized you're actually undoing their work. I did this for years. So, I had a company full of smart people who wouldn't move an inch without asking, "What do you think?" You know, our president called it a stable of assistance, which is kind of funny.

And then I would blame them. But the real problem was me. I'd hand someone a fuzzy thought and then expect them to read my mind and then get pissed when their work didn't match the finished product I had imagined but never explained. So micromanaging means you either hired the wrong person or you're leading wrong. And like let that sink in for a second. The fix to this is just one simple tool that changed how I run my companies. It's called smart. And smart basically means that the way you instruct people falls into five categories. So when someone gives me an instruction that isn't according to the smart rules, I hand it back because decoding a lazy ask should not actually be your job. And there's a lot of research that backs this up. So Lock and Laam uh basically took 35 years of goal setting studies to find that challenging goals consistently beat vague ones like do your best as long as people had commitment, feedback, and actually knew what they were performing on. So the first part of smart is specific and that

means a clear deliverable. Improve our marketing. Well, like how? There's 452 million ways to do that. As opposed to create a three email sequence for customers who abandon checkout. That's really specific. Measurable is the next one, which means an objective test. Hey, what's the number of emails here? It was three. The response you want for customers who the metric that proved it works. more abandoned carts get filled and closed. Next, we've got achievable. And achievable means they already have the time, resources, skills, and authority to deliver them. So, if you give someone responsibility and they don't have any authority, for instance, you may hand them blame for decisions they actually couldn't make. An example of this would be telling your assistant they need to increase your sales goals by talking to the sales team. Well, that's not really in her purview. She can't have any influence over that.

Next, it's relevant. So relevant connects the work to a real priority. At Contrarian Thinking, for instance, we run something called customer success Tuesday. So the whole team hears real wins from our members like this person who just closed on their first business or this person who finally hired their virtual assistant or this person that their business grew triple digits. So when the work starts to feel like just a list of tasks, then people actually stop caring as much. When you can make it relevant to them, they can see the human on the end of it. And lastly, it's time bound, which means you need an exact deadline. This is like I swear you guys, if you check and see how often you do this, you're going to be shocked by how often you don't. Everybody thinks they're a good communicator. And I'm a pretty commu good communicator, and I mess this up all the time. If you use the word soon, that means nothing. End of the week. Okay, that could be fine, but what time? What date? Another person might think end of the week is Friday.

Another person might think that's Sunday night. >> There's a new path to wealth. Small business. The side hustle that grows with you. From window cleaning to flower shops to car washes. Read Own or Be Owned. Apply the lessons and watch it grow. Results not guaranteed. No purchase necessary for the own or be owned book launch. Floor number two is all about communicating like a leader. Here's a hard truth. You don't need a title. You need a spine. Leaders control the [ __ ] frame. Soft leaders are usually followers. They're sheep. They let whoever is loud and annoying define the problem. They let meetings wonder.

That's the number one sign of a bad leader. And they leave with 12 opinions but no decisions. Real leaders are kind of tough, but they decide what matters. They're going to force you to have a conversation about it and then tell everyone what happens next. I have a belief that in leadership, whoever controls the frame controls the debate. Now, this isn't about dominating people. It's about refusing to let the first person who speaks define the problem fully. Someone says, "We need to hire three more people." A weak leader starts debating headcount and budgets. a strong leader says, "We were actually talking about a problem with capacity. We're not sure yet that the solution to capacity is a headcount problem. We have 14 priorities. Nobody knows which three matter. Before we add people, we've actually got to make sure that that is the real solution to this problem." So, the first frame asks, can we afford more people? The better frame asks, why does the current team have too much lowv value work? Why is there a capacity restraint? You do not want to fight inside somebody else's frame. This is a great lesson for life. So, here's what you want to say instead. I think that's a separate problem. Let's back channel that for a second or let's hold that to

the side. This is the real problem today. This is first principles. And you're going to drag the room back to what actually matters. Next, when you communicate as a leader, I call it speaking in headlines. Speak in headlines. Start with the point, not the preamble. So, have you guys ever experienced this? Like you're in a meeting, people give you six minutes of background, three disclaimers, two apologies before they even talk about anything. That is a nightmare. There's nothing worse as an employee than having a poor leader as a communicator that rambles. This is how we get taken hostage by our own company. And that's how your employees feel sometimes, too.

So, stop the apology, kill the backstory, just say the damn thing. I I call this cutting words adding weight. So, a weak version might be something like, "I've been looking through the reports and I'm not totally sure, but maybe onboarding is causing churn. So, maybe we should talk to more customers and we should figure out the solution to the problem." Instead, a strong version, cut words, add weight, is churn increase this month. Maya is going to interview 10 canceled customers by Thursday, present the top three causes Friday and recommend a fix. The first asks the room for, I don't know, emotional permission, and the second gives it a priority and an owner and a deadline. And we like those. I think the other thing that most owners do that they don't realize or most bad leaders do that they don't realize is they talk too fast. They rush through some of this. instead of cutting words and adding weight, they're they're sounding anxious, not authoritative. And so we call this being a gravity focused leader. So stop machine gunning words like the meeting room is on fire. Make the point, then shut up. Don't be long and long-winded just cuz you can, but

take a pause. Most people destroy their strongest sentence by panicking and adding five weaker ones. You know, you might say like, "We all know we're avoiding the real problem." Pause. the first person who rushes to fill the silence. That's usually exactly where the problem is. So after being really grave and non- anxious, I want you to also think about calm. So typically, who do you follow in a crisis? Do you follow the one that's like fire starts running around? No. You follow the person whose nervous system isn't actually sitting in the bed. People trust leaders who seem unshakable. I like to think about this as like your job as a leader is to not look like you're freaking out while you're actually freaking out because everybody else is freaking out around you. But you know, your one job as a leader is not to freak out. So your job is to seem unshakable. Certainty is contagious. If you're panicking, that's going to spread. If you're calm, that's going to spread. So choose which one you want multiplying through the company or through your teams. I think you know the line that people hate that I get so much crap for on the internet. You guys can

tell me what you think. There is no crying in business. Do not cry in meetings when things are going sideways. Do not show that type of emotional non-regulation. It's not that you can't cry at all. Go home and cry in the shower like an adult. Cry later. Vent privately. When the building is burning, though, your team doesn't need to watch the fire chief collapse. Right? That sucks. I'm sorry. That's the job as leader. Now, if you're an employee and you don't aspire to leadership, cry all you want. Totally fine. But nobody's going to put you in charge of hard things if you're crying all the time. And this is not popular and people will lie to you on the internet about this.

They will lie to you. You will make less money if you cry. Period. In business, end of story. Not going to happen. It's not okay. It's not you letting your feelings out. And because you're more empathetic, maybe you are all those things. It doesn't [ __ ] matter. I hate to tell you this, but I wish that somebody would tell me the unpopular truth, which is calm doesn't mean you don't feel it. And authority doesn't mean that you're screaming at people. It means I'm emotionally regulating myself right now. I'm not going to push all of my emotions onto somebody else. I'm going to stay useful when everyone else is losing their [ __ ] Next, I want you to obsess on one word, action. Like, every important conversation that you have should end with three things. A decision, an owner, and a date.

Actually, my chief of staff, Azad, is incredible at this. I left a meeting yesterday without getting that, which is a little bit unlike me, but uh you're going to do this, too. And he literally goes, "Wait a second. Can everybody please stay? Cody, you know, you can leave, but who is in charge of these? What are the deliverables?" and what date are they due by? If it ends with great job everybody, well, God, you're wasting their time. Your employees don't need somebody to waste their time. They need somebody who's going to help them get a clear action so they can actually work less on the things that they want more to get better and get paid more for it. So, always try to finish with a clear action. Influence without direction, that's just you being noisy and doing a power play. So, don't leave it open-ended. Say, "I think the summary here is we're choosing option two, which means Sarah's going to own it. The first version is due by Thursday at 3 and we review it Friday morning. Is that right everybody? Yes. No. Maybe. So then you put it in writing. You put it in your to-do list. There's no mystery. There's no plausible deniability. And no one thought, "Ah, somebody else had it."

This is how you lead from below. You also stop wasting and dumping unsorted problems onto your boss like a wet bag of garbage. I know employees bosses suck. Plenty of them are terrible. It's really hard to be a boss. So maybe give your boss a little bit of credit. Takes way more than anybody thinks to actually be able to lead a full team. And by the way, when you're in charge, people don't listen to you all the time, even if you pay them. It's a very funny thing. So if you want to actually get paid more and become a better boss for if you want to run your own things one day, then when you bring them a problem, bring them the options, your recommendation, and the risk of following it. So don't say, "Huge problem. What do we do?" Say, "Here's what I think we should do.

Here's why. Here's what's happening." That's how you earn authority before you have to be the one that actually pays for payroll. Let's talk about ownership really quick. When you're wrong, don't hide behind, I don't know. I don't know who did that. Just say, "I made the call. I underestimated the risk. We're going to change the plan. Sarah owns the correction, but I own the review of it by Friday." That's going to be on me whether that that falls or not. You're never going to be a good leader without accepting ultimate ownership. And actually, a friend of ours, Jaco Willing, has an entire book about extreme ownership. Even when a problem is not of your creation, own it. Be like, "That is my fault. You're right.

Yeah, I wasn't the one that wrote the script that was bad. Yeah, I wasn't the one that didn't have this fully outlined. Oh, yeah, they did tell me this. No, no, don't tell me any of that. That tells me you're not really a leader. You're a manager. You know what you should do instead? Shoot. I told you this and it was that. That is on me. I'll do everything I can to not have that happen again. People will forgive your bad decisions. What they stop forgiving is watching a leader bend reality to protect their ego. By the way, they already know what's going on anyway. Most leaders who have gotten there after a while pretty smart. And this floor, it does still have a ceiling. You can only communicate so well with the wrong people. So sometimes the problem isn't your voice or you taking ownership, it's the other people in the room. And so floor three is how you hire a players who don't just understand the standard, they raise it.

So floor three is all about hiring people who raise the ceiling for everybody. So in this instance, I like to think about four sections. Let's start with define. If we want to find other A players to do things with us, whether these are co-founders, colleagues, people to rely on, it starts with defining even what an A player is. So the best people are obsessed with the result. You know, it's just really hard to beat somebody who is doing the thing that you call work and they call fun. So if they're not obsessed with the game, one that probably means that they aren't able to see the levels of the game. Like business, whether I'm selling laundromats, whether I'm selling baseballs, whether I'm talking to you on YouTube is all the same game. And so a lot of times if you don't like something, it's because you don't actually realize the game you're playing and what it's leading to next. So it doesn't mean you're burnt out. It actually means exceptional outcomes require periods of intense or maybe exceptional intensity. A player is not someone with a polished resume who

interviews well. Here's what it is. It's they have a history of winning. They create momentum without permission and they raise the performance of everyone around them. We call these bar raisers. So they actually walk into chaos and they kind of like it. They bring some recommendations when there are problems cuz problems just spell profit in business. So if you have to supply all the urgency and judgment and they're not bringing any of that, you didn't hire an A player. You hired basically somebody else who will do tasks for you. The second is protect. Here I want you to protect the standard. And what do I mean by that? An A player cannot survive inside a B player culture because performance is contagious and A players don't want to be around B players. So there's a ton of research that shows if you sit near a top performer, you're about 15% more likely to perform well.

But if you sit next to an underperformer, you're 30% more likely to underperform. So your A players actually notice who gets promoted, rewarded, and who gets allowed to do half-ass work. How annoying is that? Do you guys ever have a boss and there's that one person that everybody's carrying all the time? That's why A players will leave. So protect your A players. Okay, next we've got filter for evidence. So how do we filter for evidence? Actually, can I steal that hiring matrix? Let me show you guys something live. Thanks. This is actually the process of how we hire. And if you want this, you can click the link below.

We actually will give it to you for free. So, most hiring mistakes begin when a leader gets tired of searching and they just like meet somebody kind of charming and you know, they'll hire somebody. But I've realized you don't actually have a hiring problem. You have a filtering problem. And that's why I use this hiring matrix every single time. Inside the hiring matrix are a bunch of different things, but the most important thing is an actual matrix that takes you through five categories. The first one is called known candidate. So someone on your team, have they worked with them? They have a referral to them.

A warm reference beats a cold resume every single time. Two, proven experience. Have they done the exact job before? Adjacent experience, not the same thing. Then we've got proven industry. Do they understand the market's customers, margins, constraints, specificity? because every industry has really expensive unwritten rules. And sometimes when you get somebody who hasn't done the industry before, it's like uh it's like having a different type of species inside of the zoo. Proven problem set. Have they solved the specific problem I need to solve? So the same title can hide actually a totally different battlefield. Like what would I mean by that? You hire somebody from Google who is a hyperrowth venture capital business and you are a startup that is actually kind of struggling. You're like failing.

they're not growing very fast. You need somebody to reverse growth as opposed to this candidate is really good continuing growth or being able to manage through growth. Two different things. Then proven scale would be like your company has 10 people. This person was at Google. Well, have they won at the size we were trying to reach? A corporate exec with unlimited resources can drown inside a 10 person company. And in fact, mostly they do. So in the hiring matrix, which you can download, uh, every single candidate's going to get this score, right? Five out of five for all of them. That's a 25. Great. We're hiring that bad boy. That's 100%. Anybody below 18 out of 25, I'm probably not going to hire. And the reason why I like this is cuz when your team hands you this or when you hand it to your team, it helps you make sure that that urgency exhaustion and just like, oh my god, get somebody in here doesn't become the hiring criteria. This is really, really important. And lastly, I want to talk about building a real pool or a bench.

Most companies interview five applicants and hire the least bad one. That is not actually how you recruit. The best person is probably already winning for somebody else. So you want to little secret hack, find the companies solving your problem. Well, then find the humans inside of them who are responsible for that and then steal those mothers. Uh I do this by something called the 50 to one rule. So for every 50 profiles, you're going to interview 10 of them, sometimes 20, and then you're going to make one offer based on that. I also like to require work samples. Use small paid projects. We'll pay people to do the work. And call people who have watched the candidate perform, not the ones that are written on their resume.

And if you're not hiring yet, run the matrix on yourself for the role you want next. And your lowest score is going to show you what proof you have to have before even asking for the job or the promotion. Floor three gets A players into the elevator, but floor four keeps them from becoming expensive B players. So a leader can't hire talent and hope motivation magically appears. You build a system where winning changes somebody's future. If great and mediocre work both get the same amount of money, time, recognition, you have trained everyone to be super mediocre. So that's like having accountability without consequences. You know, you don't want that. Your team already knows what you value if you've gotten to this floor.

Now they're going to watch what earns those five currencies and what behavior you tolerate without consequences. The most obvious one is money, right? Everybody wants to make more of it. Money is obvious, but I still think a lot of times you don't have the incentives perfectly tied to income. Busy is not a business model. A lot of times people say to me, "Well, I've been working really hard 12 hours." Well, what did you produce? If you didn't produce anything, then yeah, you just like took a scenic route. That's kind of sad. Maybe you need to get better and uh when you get better, we'll pay you more.

But sales people don't get paid for calls made, right? They win for collected revenue and customers who stay. So content teams should not win for the number of pieces published. They should win for views, watch time, follower growth. Activity is one scoreboard that tells you somebody moved. But results or outcomes tell you whether they actually moved the company and really revenue. So for senior operators, I do profit sharing or earned equity because their upside should grow with the value they create. So, if you're trying to negotiate a salary uh and you're more senior, you could say instead of saying here's 5% of the company, how about here's a path to 5% if you can create measurable value. So, do not reward people for looking productive. Pay them for moving the scoreboard. And that is exactly what we do at Contrarian Thinking. And actually, every single thing from the hiring matrix to how we tie income to incentives is in this book, Owner Beyond. It's the full hiring process to

stop hiring on gut feeling and start hiring on evidence to have more profit and less pain in your business. In fact, it's not just about the entire chapter that's on people. It's about how to increase your profit. It's about how to increase the freedom in your business. It's about how to increase your pricing. It's about how to become an owner. So, on September 18th, I'm going to teach it live at a free virtual event. We're giving away over a million dollars in cash and prizes. If you want the playbook and a shot at the giveaways, register free at the link below. I'll see you there and I'll give you all of this we're talking about. And it's really important to me that we do this fast. So, this is a one-day event that's never going to happen again because time is our most precious commodity. Time is actually compensation, too. A leader who pays well and then waste 20 hours a week in meetings. That's misery. Like, do everything that you can to decrease the meetings. 1 hour times 16 employees equals how many days lost? Two. Every meeting is a tax on the team. And so if you're a member of a team, I think it's your job to say to the leader, "This is not very wellrun." If it has no decision to make, owner to assign or problem to

solve, kill the meeting. If you still got to have it, use an agenda and end early. And a good leader is actually going to protect people's time and judges what they produce. If you're ever in my meetings, you'll see me all the time go, "Why are you in here?" I don't think you need to be in here. Like, go out today. You know, there's a crew in here filming this video with me. But one of our heads was like, "I'm not going to be in there today cuz I want to work on this other thing." like [ __ ] great, amazing. Like you are an independent center of gravity. Give your best people their hours back. That signals more trust than another motivational speech. Now, one of the other levers that's really important is recognition. And actually, for some people, this is more important than money. People repeat what gets noticed. So, make the right behavior impossible to miss. So, for instance, uh every other week, we have a companywide meeting where at every single one I make sure to call out a few people who are actually winning. Like don't say great work everyone name the person the result the behavior that produced it because when you give public recognition and one person credit everybody else goes kind of I want that

and build public recognition in when you build public recognition into the company's operating rhythm then the company starts to strive for it. So we have flat Slack channels for wins in our our all hands meeting. We name specific people who moved the scoreboard like our top salespeople or winners in content. I give random weekly awards for specific things. And if you do this while the win is still fresh, not 6 months later in a performance review. People see that as a reward cycle like a mouse with cheese, right? And it should be a spotlight indirectly at the behavior you want repeated. The next one, actually, the bigger you get, the more important this is, which is responsibility and access.

Winners want to learn more and do more. Your strongest people do not always need another bonus. Sometimes they're like, I'm bored. I want a bigger problem. I want more responsibility. I want more control or I want to go sit in the leadership meeting. Responsibility for someone says, I trust your judgment. An access says your judgment matters here. I want you here. So don't reward the person who just ships early by dumping more level work on them. Give them real ownership and let them make the call. Bring them into the leadership meeting. Otherwise, you teach your best people that competence just gets you chores while leadership keeps all the leverage.

Let's talk about consequences for a second. Every exception you tolerate becomes permission. Let someone miss the same standard twice and the third one's on you. So for instance, uh we have these things called blackout dates at our company. So around big events, big revenue or earnings months, we have dates that people cannot travel. As you become an owner, you'll see you have to have this in business because you have surges in business. Not every month is the same. And so sometimes you just got to be there even when you got a wedding that you'd rather go to. So what do you need to do? You need to give clear feedback and a real chance to say, "Hey, during this time you actually can't travel. And I know we're buddies and I know you're an adult and I hate to tell you you can't go do anything in life.

That feels weird to me. But if I give you this opportunity off, what about everybody else? And and you can always negotiate. You can say, "Listen, I'm going to need you to work two Saturdays to make up for it." And then I can say, "He's done double the work to cover that one spot. Ready, go." Because floor three is getting that right people to the right elevator, right? But remember, floor four gives them that reason to keep climbing. And then the penthouse is where you build a system that actually climbs with you. The penthouse sets the tone for everything. So this is where owners and CEOs operate. And the job looks nothing like the work that got you here. You are not paid as a CEO to do tasks. You aren't even usually the one giving instructions to most of the team.

Your main job now is to set the tone for the whole business because everyone below you is watching you to decide how seriously to take the mission. So at the penthouse, I really think you lead through three pillars. And those three pillars are what you decide, where you point, and what you model. So the foundation for your business, it starts with judgment. So this is what your decisions are. Firstly, there is one thing you must stop doing here, and that's making a thousand decisions a day. It feels productive, but it quietly drags you down. So your value at the top is getting the few decisions that matter right, and then building people who can handle the rest. Your next job is really vision. So, the most valuable thing you can build clarity around is where are you going and then repeat it until every person can say it back to you. If you have a vision on a wall, but nobody's repeating it or engraving it in their daily conversations, then you don't actually have a real vision. You have to carry yourself in every part of your life and every part of your company as

the same part of the vision. And it's so important that we even have it on the walls and I'm constantly reminding people to look at them. Lastly, you have consistency. One of my favorite lines and also least favorite lines of all time because it's so annoying when it gets rubbed in your face is how you do anything is how you do everything. If you speak carelessly, can't hold a clear thought, or don't look after yourself or your word, people quietly wonder whether to put their careers behind you. They read the small things as evidence of the big ones. And the biggest one is this. Do what you say you're going to do. So everything you do at this level, I basically think of it as like a giant filter that's filtering down to the rest of the company. And everything across these five floors builds towards one shift which again is all in this book own or beyond. So a few years ago, you know, my number two, he actually quit over the phone. Uh and he was like I think the third key person to leave in a month. And I remember like very clearly I put my head on the desk and finally saw it. I like finally saw the truth that I didn't want to hear which was I wasn't running the business. I was the business and you know every important

decision was in my head. And so when this one person was leaving, um it could cater everything. And the question that turned it around was simple. Okay, what system needs to exist? So it doesn't matter who leaves. And that's why I wrote this book. I started it that many years ago. And I wrote owner beyond because this is the playbook of the shift for buying back your freedom even from the baby that you've created, the business that you've built. And this is the future. So the question to answer here is which floor are you on? Most people are going to spend their entire careers on one floor. And that is because you aren't yet a leader. And remember, leadership isn't a personality you're born with. It's really just a set of skills. And you just watched the ones for every level. So be honest about where you are. You can tell me in the comments. The full hiring matrix and the rest of the scaling systems are all inside owner beyond at my free event.

The elevator's open. Which floor are you getting off