This episode get’s personal! I talk about a couple of my biggest mistakes in business (and what YOU can learn from them), how your squad can make or break you, the importance of creating infrastructure, and motivation!
[Transcript]
On today’s episode, we’re going to talk about building the perfect team, both personal and in business, the infrastructure and the new podcast.
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Hey, everyone. This is Adam Steele and this is Episode 6 of the Steele Entrepreneur Show, and we have a pretty good show lined up for today. We’re going to do it totally, sort of, off the cuff. I’ve got a few ideas of things that I want to talk about that I think you will like. This last couple of weeks, not a lot of inspiration. While we’ve been kind of rolling episodes, we had like one episode banked so I kind of bought myself a little bit of time to kind of figure out that inspiration. Maybe that’s something we can talk about a little bit later. But just kind of wasn’t coming to me. Mind you, something you should definitely check out is we have been banging out lots…and by “we,” me actually, just been kind of sitting at my desk, turning around, grabbing my camera and filming these Adam Answers SEO. You may not be doing SEO so it might not be of any interest to you. But I think they’re kind of cool. I think we cover…I think I know we cover a lot of really good material in there. I think some of you folks are agency owners or work for agencies or do your own marketing or that kind of thing, so I do believe there is some value there. We talk a lot about local stuff because that’s kind of my specialty, is the local SEO, or a local Search Engine Optimization. Like think things like Google My Business or what was formerly known as Google Places or Google Local or what have you. I talk a lot about that because that is sort of the nature of a couple of the businesses that I run. So it’s something I interact with a lot. So do check that out.
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I think we’ve got…I don’t know, six, maybe seven episodes taped so far. And I’m trying to do…right now my goal is about three, four per week, see if I can keep up with that. And it’s just, they’re just pretty much derived from I get a call and somebody has a question and I think it’s a pretty unique sort of situation or one that comes up all the time and, you know, maybe one of you folks might earn some benefit or get some benefit form hearing the answer, I suppose. Which is kind of how this show came about. And I want to sort of take the first bit of this episode to kind of talk about context, just to basically restate the context of this show and sort of why I’m behind the camera and speaking to you. This show was started just because I was having a lot of these conversations already but with other people. And I thought, you know, a lot of them were really, really fun conversations. And I just felt like if they were recorded in some way, like if some of the information was recorded in some way and then put in a format, whether it’d be a podcast or a show like this, that it would be really valuable to somebody. Maybe not somebody in sort of the…maybe somebody who’s been in business for 10, 15 years, but certainly for somebody who’s been in business for the last maybe 1 to 5, six, maybe just under 10 years. So, that’s the idea behind this show. And what I kind of get out of it is I’ve always had this desire to teach a little bit and I think that’s what I get out of those conversations that I’m talking about, is I’m teaching these individuals, [[00:04:02]] which helps me not only better hone my skills, think like in jiu jitsu for example. There’s a lot of guys who are so eager to teach and I think that’s partly their demeanor, they’re just tremendous human beings and they want to help people get better. But it’s also honing their craft. They’re able to run through the steps of each particular move or something like that over and over and over again and they get a heck of a lot better over and over…you know, through those repetitions. So, while I get the pleasure of teaching, I also sort of get the benefit of understanding stuff a little bit better. If I don’t understand it perfectly before I get to this, you know, taping it, I dive back in, I read a book and then I bring it to you. Context-wise, I’ll sort of restate this. I stated this in the first episode, I’ve stated this in some intro material, but basically the reason I’m behind the camera, or rather in front of the camera, is I have built a few businesses in my time, my time being I think we’re approaching, I want to say and I always say “we,” it’s a habit. But my team and I have been together for seven years just about, so approaching on seven years…six, seven years. I’m not even sure. We have built a number of different companies namely a digital marketing agency based here in Vancouver but also a few others, again, namely an outsourcing company, so digital marketing agencies or other. Businesses come to us when they don’t want to do their marketing, especially agencies. Agencies being our biggest sort of clientele. And there’s a few others, smaller ones. But we have amassed a tremendous team, [[00:05:59]] some great clients and are doing some pretty…I mean, relative to what I’ve made in the past, some pretty killer revenues between the company we’re making a few million dollars a year which is pretty freaking amazing. I’m 28 years old, Vancouver. Not born but certainly been here long enough to call it home. And, like I said, this show is just about taking what very little, really, relative to what I intend to have in the future. Taking what little I have learned so far and trying to not only learn it a little bit better myself but also get the pleasure of teaching you and maybe you won’t pick up some things, maybe some episodes you will, some episodes you won’t. If you pick up one thing, then I’ve won, then I’ve done something that’s tremendously valuable to me. So, let’s get on with it. Since we’re talking about companies and businesses and things like that, the first thing I think I want to touch on because it’s something that I think is a little bit unique and I think is interesting and I think would be helpful perhaps if people did the same or thought the same, is infrastructure. My digital marketing company, while it was born of passion, passion for marketing, passion for helping businesses grow and things like that, it is not…I don’t consider it to be sort of my, I guess, life’s passion. It’s not something that I intend to do forever, or really for too much longer. It is sort of…it’s a means. It’s a means to whatever comes after. And I’ll give you some examples.
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Let me come back a little bit. Infrastructure, infrastructure to me means it’s the ability to do stuff. So we have a full time designers, developers, programmers. We have virtual assistants, we have local search people, search people, so SEO people. We have people that rock at social media. We’ve got these two who are amazing at video, as you will come to see. We just have this amazing infrastructure underneath us that when we find something that perhaps we’re a little bit more interested in, right now we’re kind of heading towards building some software as a service, just a new interest. But we have the infrastructure to push it forward if that’s something that we do, indeed, decide to take to market, we’re ready to do that. If I decide to get involved in, I don’t know, I’ve always…and this is kind of a really strange thing, is I’ve always wanted to build a law firm, no idea why. It just seems like a really interesting thing to do. I’ve always had sort of an affinity for law. So if I’m able to hook up perhaps with a lawyer in town, him and I go into business together, although I think there are some rules around that that might get in my way. But let’s suppose there isn’t, I can help him build that law firm and he handles the client side. That would be amazing, right? And that is all afforded by the infrastructure that I have built. So, at the end of the day, it’s not the digital marketing side that I’m really kind of interested in. I’m interested in it, but I’m not exactly hugely passionate about it, it’s the building of businesses and this is, it’s purely what enables me to do that.
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So it’s, as far as how it applies to you, I don’t think it’s always necessary to do something that… At least when you’re starting perhaps that you’re necessarily super, super passionate about. It definitely helps, but I think, you know, approaching it with a longer term-plan, building something that will then allow…enable you to do something even better, or something you’re even more passionate about, that’s my plan. And I think it’s not a bad one to think about, to ponder about and see if it’s something that might be suitable for you. The next topic, one I am bound to go on a rant about, I think. And we’ll see if I do or don’t, because I’ve had this conversation with a whole bunch of people and definitely gone on a rant or two about it. And again, it’s relevant to sort of the last thing I talked about. It’s about team but it’s not necessarily just, you know, team as far as business is concerned. It’s also the team that you build around you personally, whether it’d be your friends or spouse or what have you. There is, as I’m sure everyone well knows, there is that saying that you are the… I don’t know exactly how it’s worded, you are the sort of…you are the people that you surround yourself with; the sum, I think it is, of the people you surround yourself with. And I believe in that a huge deal. In business, team has been everything and we’ve been successful only because of the people that we’ve surrounded ourselves, [[00:12:00]] whether it’s been the actual people on our team-team, our developers, our local search techs. Not only them but the people that we’ve met along the way have been a tremendous help because they generate leads for us and things like that. And if you surround yourself with the wrong people, it can go the absolute other way. And that’s happened, we’ve hired… I’d be lying if I said the number but we probably hired a good 100 people over the years and maybe even more than that, maybe a couple hundred. And, oh my, probably fired two-thirds of that. And most of them were quick fires, we test them out. They didn’t meet our expectations for which we weren’t super clear about in the start, we’re getting better at that. When you hire someone, best thing you can do is be crystal clear about what is expected. Don’t just bring them in the door and expect them to go off and do their thing and be a self-starter. Some people are like that, most people are not like that. And even if they are like that, it’s incredibly important that you define what it is that they need to do to meet your standards. And where I haven’t done that is usually where it’s bitten me in the ass the hardest. And I can think of folks that have come into our organization and totally poisoned it within a week. People were complaining, people were unhappy. We’d gone from having this really sort of happy, hard-working environment to one that, for lack of better phrasing, was just…it was polluted. It was polluted by this individual who I’d hired and had come in and had just started talking to people and putting like weird thoughts into their minds and stuff.
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That was a really bad hire and I didn’t have a lot of expectations for the guy, didn’t have like a plan for him or anything. He just seemed like a really talented dude. And it doesn’t matter how talented they are or how smart they are. That doesn’t matter. It’s how suited are they for the position. How effective will they be doing the tasks that you’ve set in front of them? A lot of people can do tasks and they don’t have to be incredibly intelligent, which leads into another hire I made, a good friend and a guy that I have more respect for than I’d say just about anybody I’ve hired. An absolute genius. Actually, I swear to God, if you tested his IQ, he would be a genius. And he has the EQ to match it, too. It’s incredible. I remember we brought him in and we went from having a culture of nil to a culture of amazing. A remote company with an actual culture. And I got to credit a little bit to Slack for that, slack.com the…I don’t even know what you call it, workplace app I guess, work place messaging app, collaboration app, whatever you want to call it. But, again, that was his idea. But, big “but,” it wasn’t the right fit and I didn’t define his position. And so, I put him in the wrong position. I bet if I had taken a little bit more time and put him in a job that was…put him in a position, given him tasks that were more suited to what he wanted to do, he would still be with us. [[00:15:59]] Now, he isn’t and he’s off doing something way more awesome, but I lost out on that opportunity. We were lucky enough to have him while we did, but we could have had him for a lot longer if I had the foresight and I had the knowledge and experience to have done that right. And that isn’t a hell of a lot different from personal life, right? You need the right people around you at the right time to do what you want. And I like to revert to my own experiences because that’s really where any of this advice comes from, is I’ve failed. I’ve failed over and over and over again and at some point I kind of figured it out. I’m still figuring it out of course, but I’m getting a little bit closer to the next time it happens, I’m not going to make that mistake again. So, in my personal life, I spent a number of years just very simply with the wrong partner, wrong partner for the time, wasn’t a bad human being or anything but just wrong partner for the time. And that became more and more clear as time went on. Things changed about a year and a half ago, different partner and what I needed at the time was more discipline, like just straight up, I needed more discipline and I’m a pretty disciplined person but in my personal life, I wasn’t as disciplined as I needed to be and that transferred over to my business life and things suffered big time. And I don’t need to go into how bad it was, but two years ago, had I not made a change, I would not be in front of this camera today, absolutely not, no chance whatsoever.
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But, because I realized that change needed to happen in my personal life, and I needed to surround myself with new people, different people, I was able to draw on their discipline, on their motivation, on what they’d accomplished. I’m talking about friends, I’m talking about my current girlfriend. She had accomplished so much for her age, for anyone, even for people beyond her years, but she had that discipline. She had that motivation to do more and to be more. And once I sort of was able to, I guess experience that for myself, see that first hand for myself, it was a giant kick in the ass. And I started to sort of look into my self and say, “Could I be that? Could I do that? Could I be more?” And that’s when things started to change. And so, if you want to just… We’ll just give some hypothetical numbers, I suppose. I went from being tremendously, tremendously in debt to now having lots of assets to my name in a very tough city to amass assets like real estate. And that is because I surrounded myself with the right people, drew on their motivation, their discipline and was able to look deep into myself and ask myself, “Is that what you wanted for yourself?” And everything just sort of switched around. So, I believe strongly if you want to improve yourself, start by surrounding yourself with the right people both in business and in your personal life.
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And things will just by… There’s probably a law, a law of just being near awesome, it changes things. So I would take a hard look. I’m not saying get rid of the people in your life, but just take a hard look at what value you’re bringing to the people around you and the value that they’re bringing to you both in your organization and in your personal life. There’s a saying that I…I don’t know where I heard it, but I use it often when I’m trying to make hiring and firing decisions. I swear it’s probably from one of the…I think it’s from one of the, either the Netflix CEO or one of the LinkedIn founders. And they say something like, and I’ll leave this thought here, “If somebody was to come along and want to poach one of your employees, take them away, hire them, steal them from your company, would you fight hard to save them?” And if the answer is “no,” get rid of them right away and fill that position with somebody else. And I haven’t thought about it much, but I would have to say that probably translates a little in your personal life as well. So, just a little bit of food for thought, I think. So that’s that. I told you I would rant a little bit. But I think that’s something I’ve been thinking a lot about lately, I’ve been doing a little bit of reflection, and just looking back at how things have changed so much for me in the last year and a half, two years, since I wanted more.
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So, like I said, a little food for thought. Now, the next thing I want to talk about, I want to talk really quickly about we have finally put together the podcast version of this show and just when I thought we weren’t…we were doing so much, we decided, okay, let’s start putting…let’s start basically taking the audio track from this video that we’re doing right now and then uploading that to iTunes, where we just got set up. Thank you, Apple. Google Play, though, I think we’re still screwing around there. We’re still trying to figure that out. SoundCloud and I want to say…ugh, it starts with an… You guys know what it is? S-sticks? [SP] Ugh, I don’t remember what it is off the top of my head. It’s another… I think it’s similar to SoundCloud but I think it’s more specific to podcasts. So if you frequent any of those, be sure to subscribe to the podcast, especially…I mean, I know there are a lot of good YouTube shows out there that I’m not…I don’t make the time to just sit down in front of my computer and watch the actual video. Instead, when I’m at the gym or when I’m, I don’t know, doing the dishes or just whatever, I’ll just plug in and listen to the podcast version. So it’s a good way to, if you’re not able to sit down and really focus on the video part of it, you can get just as much value from the podcast versions. So, I think that will be helpful and we’re kind of breaking down the show into other sort of differently digestible pieces, whether it’d be blog posts or what have you, we kind of… The idea is to make it digestible for everybody.
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Some folks just don’t like videos, some people just don’t like podcasts, some people love blog posts. So, I wanted to make it accessible to everyone and that’s sort of the idea behind the blog posts, or the podcast, rather. The next piece that I’d like to talk a little bit about, the next topic that I’d like to cover, is a little bit about motivation and motivating the people around you, motivating yourself for that matter. But usually, in the case of motivating myself, there really isn’t any…there’s a reason why I’m doing what I’m doing. I’ve already explained that to myself, whether I’ve done it consciously or it’s been done subconsciously. So, I don’t know how much I’ll cover about motivating yourself. But as far as motivating others is concerned, it’s been a more relevant or a more sort of… It’s been a bit more top of mind lately because we’ve been thinking about doing a lot of new things, starting a lot of different… You know, either just different, building different products within a business unit or starting new businesses entirely, like the one I’d mentioned before, the SaaS product that we’re working on. I have a tendency to just do and not explain. And so I would say, I’d say, “Serge, I need you to build me a website,” and kind of leave it at that, and I would expect him to be like, you know, just ask me the questions. And I think it’s totally the wrong way to do about it, totally the wrong way to go about it. But I do a lot of assuming unfortunately that everybody is on the same page as me which is absolutely not true. And I would say, “Alex, look at the SEO considerations and John, I need you to do some research here,” and so on and so forth. And somewhere down the road, I might decide to tell everybody what we’re doing.
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And by that time, I’m getting a question like, “Why am I even doing this?” Or like, “What is this for?” Nobody is on the same page whatsoever. And so I’m trying to, as we go into these things and I’m trying to think a little bit more about why we’re doing these things or these…maybe not so much why am I doing these things but why should they care about…why should my team, why should the people that I employ, why should my contemporaries or whatever, why should they be interested in coming along for the ride. And I think “why” and motivation have a lot to do with each other. And I think about motivation as…or when someone asks me how do I motivate my team, I think about, “Okay, well what is to motivate?” It’s to have a motive. And a motive is a reason and a reason goes back to why, right? So why is it that I am doing this? Why does it matter to me? What is going to come of it? And so, lately I’ve been going back to different projects that we’re working on, that we had started previously and taking the time to sit down with the folks that are involved with it and just say, “Why are we doing this? Why is it important to you?” I’ll give you a perfect example. Why… I lost my example. I need to come up with a new example. Why do we do what we do as a digital marketing agency? I mentioned that it is not my true passion.
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If there is one passion that I get from it, one passion that it fulfills and it’s just helping, really. Helping businesses like my own be tremendously successful by leveraging these skills that they’re, quite frankly, paying me to hone. Now they wouldn’t have hired me if I didn’t already have them, or they wouldn’t continue to pay me if I didn’t continue to improve, but client work’s kind of sweet like that. They pay me to be better. It’s kind of an interesting way to look at what a lot of people consider to be kind of soul-sucking client work. But in any event, it’s awesome because of that, but more so it’s awesome because month after month we’re able to see that this is making a big impact in these people’s businesses which translates to a big impact in their lives and the lives of… I always forget about this, but these businesses that I’ve built, it supports people. It supports the people that work for me, but it also supports that people…their dependents, right? And in the same way what we are able to accomplish for these clients of ours, that helps their business and that helps keep the people that work for that business employed and with growth they’re able to employ more people. Just think about the impact, it’s kind of staggering. So when I need to remind people on my team why they do something, why we do what we do, why we’re around, I go back to that.
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But not everybody is going to be motivated by that necessarily. So, I find that I can sort of explain that to everybody and for some, that’s going to be what they need, right? But not everybody is motivated by helping people. That just is the way it is. They’re motivated by other things. Or, I mean that motivates them but that’s not their biggest motivation. And so sometimes, perhaps often times, the best thing that you can do to start is talk to your team members. And I am super guilty about this, or of this, is I don’t sit down one on one…and again, I’m remote so it doesn’t make it any harder but it just…you’re not belly to belly, for lack of better phrasing, with these people. So, I guess it’s just not quite as common to really get to know them and all that kind of stuff. So, I’ve recommended and I’ve taken it upon myself recently to…this desk moves…to spend a little bit more time getting to know them and getting to know what motivates them specifically. And a lot of people will be very frank with you, money. And that’s fine, there’s nothing wrong with that. I would be lying if I say money didn’t motivate me a little, right? But if I know what is their chief motivator, then I’m not going to waste time trying to explain why these sort of altruistic motives. I’m going to explain to them that we do better work, clients are happier, clients are more likely to refer other clients, if we have more clients we can pay you more money. It’s very simple, right? So, sometimes your approach…
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My mom would probably say, “I raised you two differently, right? My approach was different for each one of you,” my brother and I. And I think the same thing applies here, is people have different motives. And you need to either teach or lead them differently. So that’s my little piece on motivation and it’s not something I’ve mastered in the least. I think I’m a decent leader. I think I’ve kept a lot of people motivated for a long time but from time to time, that needs to be adjusted, and I need to go back and figure out where I’m failing. And I think regardless of how good or not you think you are at leading your team, or managing your people, it’s something to think about a little bit for sure. So I think that’s not only all the time we have today, but pretty much all I had to kind of go into. I had mentioned the last couple of weeks had been pretty lame on inspiration so it’s not like I’ve been just loaded with ideas. But I did want to leave you with a question. I’m trying to get to know you better, the people that I’m so grateful for, that give me just a little bit of your attention each day, a lot of your attention, really. There’s a lot of other great things, better things potentially and I’m sure, that can grab your attention and the fact that you’re spending just a little bit of time with me, it means a ton. So, my question is… Well, my question is, what do you do? What is your hustle? What is your job?
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What is your business? What is your “what”? I want to know because I want to do my best to sort of cater this show to my audience, to you guys and come up with content that would appeal to you and hopefully help you in your own journey. And that’s about it. So, thank you, as always, for joining us on Episode 6 of the Steele Entrepreneur Show. I’m going to try and keep banging these out every week, so you should have another one for you a week from when you watch this one. Well, assuming of course that you’re watching them when they come out. Please, if you haven’t already, subscribe. If you know anybody that you think might get some value from this, tell them about it, have them subscribe. We’ve got lots of content coming out on our podcast, the now podcast. It’s called the same thing, Steele Entrepreneur Show. So just search “Steele Entrepreneur Show, iTunes” or whatever and I’m sure you’ll find it. We’re on Twitter, @adamgsteele and a number of other things. We’re on Facebook. We’re trying to build that up a little bit. So please, please, please join us. And as I mentioned, if you have any questions, certainly if you’d like to answer the question of the day, which again is, what is it that you do? Please take the time, please help me out, please help me help you out and I’ll do my best to cater the show to you. Have a great one, guys.
