Billion Dollar Business Coaching: How To Start And Scale a MASSIVE Business w/ CEO Coach Matt Mochary

All right, ladies and gentlemen, the day we are joined with a buy one get one free entrepreneurship special. We have Matt and Quinn. Welcome guys. This is gonna be an amazing episode. And I'm very excited to get into it. So we will go around the horn and let everyone introduce themselves to the audience. We'll begin with you, Matt.

So I'm Matt Macari. I'm a CEO coach, and I wrote a book called The Great CEO Within. . And what I realized is that I love writing and I love sharing. But there are better coaches out there than in the world than me. So rather than me coach everyone I partnered with some of those coaches. Quinn is one of them. He's a better coach than I am. And

we work together.

Hi everyone. I'm Quinn. I'm a coach here at Machar Method. Matt is way too kind with the introduction. But just a little bit about me and my background. I've coached a lot of different startup founders in the past. Everyone ranging from nine figure traders to series a, back founders to boarder under 30 members. And I'm just taking a lot of the different experiences that I've had growing a crypto fund myself or angel back startup and hopefully I can give you some value today. So I look forward to jumping.

Perfect. And this is gonna be a really interesting conversation. So for people listening to know that you guys have a bunch of different businesses and a bunch of different avenues. So today we'll begin the conversation with a little bit about finding what's called product market fit, which is what establishes your company and establishes your service. And then we're gonna start going into scale conversation. So Quinn, that's gonna be really cool for you cuz I know you just recently scaled and exited a bunch of companies and that's what you help people do specifically. So before we begin, I'm curious, I'll throw this to you. What do you see in Quinn that makes him stand out to you, man? Cuz you immediately are singing the praises from the mountaintop right out the gate. So I'm curious from a hiring perspective, what you are seeing before we get into it. . Yeah.

What Quinn does, and the other coach that we work with do that, they do much better than I is. When you talk to someone about what their issue is, whether it's a customer or someone that you're coaching or an investor they have a perspective. And they want, they will trust you if you understand their perspective. And the way to understand it is first to ask. , what is your perspective? That sounds stupid, but they won't tell you unless you ask. But then the second part is to prove to them that you understood what the hell they said. And I find the easiest and best way to do that is just literally repeat back to them what they just told you in a way that they go, yeah, that's it, Scott. Guess me. And once they say, you get me. Exactly. Then they're completely open to hearing what you have to say. And Quentin does that maybe better than anybody I know.

Quentin, you wanna hit a little bit about that, about your first introductions to Matt and how you knocked this out of the park. , quinn: Sure. Like a lot of startup founders, we sometimes get a little bit too addicted to Twitter here and there. So I was honestly scrolling Twitter and I found a job opening from Matt saying, I'm looking for some great coaches out there. And I kid you now, when I was, I believe I was 22 years old, I wrote down a piece of paper, man, what I thought it was outrageous at the time, but I said, what would be my $1,000 an hour activities? And on that list I said, okay, if I can learn how to empathize with if I can teach people how to deal with growth startups, if I can show people or using my past experience with I have a sister with Down Syndrome and. growing up with a sister in that state and with my family dynamics growing up, it was just a little bit tricky at times. So I learned how to empathize really early on in my development and I was going, man, I'm not sure if I can mix coaching CEOs with. Teach them how to be able to listen more empathetically and be able to handle their emotions better or to be able to manage their emotions better. And when I saw this, I was going, man, I have to jump in right into this. This is the most aligned job opportunity I've ever seen in my entire life. So I started working with Matt. I think we've been together now for about three months, give or take. and yeah, I'm happy to go into any detail about what it is within our coaching methodology or just making people heard that makes it so unique for you. But feel free to add in a little bit there, Brian.

So I think that's actually a perfect segue into something that's important to you, Matt that I've. You talk about recently, and Quinn, you just perfectly personified this. You talk about not making decisions outta fear or anger, right? So yeah, let's hit about that because you said that this is a realization that you've come to relatively recently out of these decades of coaching experience, you've coached Naval Rav, you've coached Brian Armstrong, the CEO of Coinbase. Let's talk about this cuz what Quinn just said plays perfectly into that. It's like that tactical. . matt: I definitely think that we feeling joy, excitement, peace, tranquility, contentment, and we make very bad decisions when we're feeling fear and anger. But where do you want me to go with that?

Let's talk about your advice to CEOs that are operating from that perspective and maybe not even realizing it because I know that a lot are probably not intentionally saying, Hey, I'm really pissed off right now. I really feel like being just a terrible person on my team. But they do it anyways. And especially when a company is brand that could be the thing that completely cancels the entire company. So can you speak a little bit about recognizing triggers and how to pivot through?

Yeah, so let's take it first from the CEO E side. What the CEO is seeing. When you're happy, your brain gives you thoughts and you do those things. And when you're angry, your brain gives you thoughts and you do those things and you don't actually notice the difference in your own emotions. Often it takes a lot of meditation and a lot of self-awareness to become. Aware of when our emotions change. And frankly, I don't think any CEO has time to do that much meditation. But there's a really easy way to find out when I or you are in a state of anger or fear, and that's simply to give permission to the people around me, to say, if you ever notice me in anger or in fear, please raise your finger. and I will know immediately that I need to stop whatever I'm doing, and then I'm just gonna listen to you and tell me what you perceive my state to be. And when people do that, they say, Matt, I perceive you to be in fear. I go, whoa, okay. And then I look, I stop talking, and then I look at myself and I go, is that possible? , wow, yeah, that's true. I guess I am. or state of anger, and that prevents me from acting on the thoughts that are in my head until I can take a break and let the fear or anger pass out of me. Sometimes it takes a minute, sometimes a day, sometimes a week, whatever it takes before I go ahead and make those decisions. That's a way that, that you can tell, you can outsource the monitor. to the people around you, it's much easier than meditating an hour a day for the next 40 years.

Can you talk about the importance of how you just phrased that because it's extremely important. You said that your team members are instructed to tell you, I perceive you to be angry. I know that there's three different ways that you can go about giving feedback to somebody else if they're angry, and this, if this works with your spouse, this works with your friends. Hit on this and then Quinn, I'd love your perspective on this. Right. .. So yeah, so

what I've found is when I'm in a state, for me it's people either usually show up in fear or anger, one or the other, and I'm predominantly anger. And so when I do, and I've had people tell me, Hey Matt, you're in anger, and I instantly get more angry because they're telling me you, I feel like judged. Then I've had people tell me, Hey Matt, Are you in anger, like asking me a question and then that feels like indirect and passive aggressive. And I'm like, and that makes me more angry, . And then I've had people say, Hey, I perceive you to be in anger. And for whatever reason, that's able to slide right through the anger into my brain. And I hear it and I get it. And the reason I think is because they're not judging me. They're not telling me I'm in anger. They're not being passive aggressive or indirect. They're not asking me a. , they're saying what's going on for them, they perceive, okay, that's they're the judge of what they perceive or not. That's no comment on me, and therefore my brain doesn't react negative to it, and I can hear it. Perfect.

Yeah. Quinn I'm curious about your perspective on that, let's talk from a leadership perspective. About how to catch yourself when you're leading a team, when you're leading a company. We'll talk every question will be from the helping the CEOs that are listening today, how to better manage their team. Yes. How to check themselves, how to communicate more effectively. . quinn: Yes, so . I can This was actually a recent coaching call I had was exactly this issue with investors In a board meeting, we had this issue come up. So the challenge is when you get into an angry state, you have a stimulus that hits you immediately in that moment. And if you react to it right away, and you are not choosing what you get to do next. Whatever comes outta your mouth. Next is gonna be coming out of fight or flight mode. You're in your amygdala and you're saying yourself, like they say an amygdala. You say, am I safe? Do I matter over a thousand times a second? And right there it's saying, I am not safe right now. I need to fight or I need to get out. So when you're in that moment, the thing that I always tell the CEOs that I'm coaching is, the simplest thing can do is to leave a space in. because if you leave a space, it goes from stimulus to reaction to stimulus to response, where you get to choose the actions that you have. Now, of course, if you have good cultural values already where someone else, if you don't, you're not always gonna be perfect. And someone else says, Hey, I perceive you to be an anchor right now. Is that right? And then you can go back and say, yes, let's take a moment or take a breather before we get back into the conversation. But you have to be able to get in the habit of identifying. And being aware of as soon as that happens, so that you can take a breath and then be able to choose the reaction that you come out of. And I wanna speak a little bit further to this because my CEO said, Hey Quinn, I think it's sometimes necessary to be in anger. I need to show 'em that this is important to me, that I need to show that if I didn't show my anger right now to the investors, then I'm not saying my boundary. I'm not saying the point where saying, no, I'm drawing a line here. I said to him, is it really for the other person? or is it for everyone else in the room that you're talking to right now? Because if you're in anger, especially when you're in a bigger group environment, you are signaling to everyone else in that room, Hey, if we bring up something where it gets heated, I'm not gonna be emotionally safe, or I'm not gonna be able to actually share what's really on my mind. Wow. In order to be able to have that transparency and that communication to get to the point where someone, no matter what it is, no matter how bad the news is or how hard of a challenges they need to work through, they can still say, Hey, we can work through this together.

Let me jump at there for a second. The point of a boundary has been crossed is an important one. Anger and fear are very good flags. They're very good warning signals. The problem is they exaggerate. They exaggerate what my response should be, and it's this space that Quentin talks about. What does a space look like? This is what a space looks like. One breath in, one breath, half. That's it. That's a. . So if you give yourself that, that was five seconds, that's all that's needed to go from. I'm going to say something to someone that's going to damage our relationship forever to, I'm gonna say, Hey, a boundary was crossed there. That's not okay. Here's why it's not okay to cross that boundary. That is not gonna damage the relationship. and is gonna let that person know that there's a boundary that it's not okay to cross. So you'll get them to change their behavior. . And it's one breath. That's what's needed. , brian: I'm curious selfishly as somebody journey as well, which makes this show pretty fun because I get to interview billionaires and also be in the trenches. So it's perspective from every angle. I was listening to two gentlemen, Tom Bill U and Alex Versi both have a hundred million dollar plus companies. And they both echoed a similar sentiment where they were saying that in the beginning of their companies, in the beginning of their businesses as CEOs, they were very passionate and aggressive kind of in the hunt stage. And I'm sure you, yeah, you're both, you are nodding and smiling. So wild emotions. A lot of crest and valleys, where you're super passionate, but that also leads to what, like intense. , right? Both of them gave the feedback that as they've progressed through business, they've become much more even keel. And that it's almost a necessity. So a question that I have is, how do you maintain that evenness to be able to take these pauses and be cool when the storm is happening, but also maintain those intense levels of passion and joy as the leader of this company that you've built. Does that make sense? I think the one method. That doesn't work is to simply suppress, say, okay, I'm feeling this anger. I'm just gonna hold it aside. I'm gonna hold it. I'm not gonna say anything. I'm gonna, and the problem with that is that all it does is it keeps it bottled in, and then one day it will explode a hundred times worse. And by the way, everyone can tell when you're going like this, people know you're in anger. That's, that is the equivalent of yelling at someone that's how they're interpreting it. So you're not actually not even successfully suppressing it. They're still picking it up, , they're still picking it up. It's, so the key is to share it, but it's how you share it. And so what I do with my coachee is I role play with 'em because it is shocking if I do something one time. So if I say, okay, we're gonna role play you being in anger and taking a. And then saying, Hey, a boundary was crossed. That's not okay. If I say that to someone and then they try to go, they never are able to do it, but I say, we're gonna role play it right here, right now. , I'm gonna show you how to do it and then we're gonna reverse situations and you're gonna do it. And they role play it one time. That's enough for the brain to create a neural pathway that when it comes up in real life, there's a pathway for them to. But if it's just was heard verbally, there's no action pathway, neural pathway in the brain, they can't access it in the moment. So that's one way because you should never let go of your passion. You should never let go of how important this is. This is a boundary. It's not okay to cross. You just create one little neural pathway of saying it that way . Instead . brian: So the passion remains, but it's That's right. I want to throw this to Quinn first and then Matt. What makes a great c e o opposed to a terrible c e o? O

man, that's a loaded question my friend. I

got podcasts, brother . You think, just throw you curve. Just . quinn: Softballs, man. Can you repeat the question just to make sure I understand the key words? Sure. What makes a great ceo? What makes a great ceo? O And if you could pinpoint maybe what are some differences between a shit CEO and a great CEO that's really gonna.

Okay. So this depends on scale of your company as well. If you're at the beginning of your company or if you're a venture back company, post Pmm f let's, there's

different frameworks I, let's than you need to, let's do bootstrapped, let's do bootstrapped beginning stage. Okay, sure.

So the beginning stages, and I think they've done a lot of studies on this too, the most important step of whether or not a startup is gonna succeed or. Is execution speed, that you can't be always in the ideation mode. You can't be researching for too long without making a decision on what's gonna work and what's not gonna work. You need to be able to move quickly and effectively to be able to get your startup to the point where you say, Hey, we have enough traction. Then now we can start putting all the systems in place to make sure that we can scale this thing into the moon afterwards. But if you don't have that to start, it's very tricky. And even with through Y Combinator, any of their top CEOs that are going through it, the ones that make it first, the ones that don't, they're the ones getting things out the door as much as living possible. So there's, however, when you. Yes, they ship faster. However, when you get to a point where, let's say you raised your series A round, or you're at the point now where you've scaled your company from, instead of having your initial five or 10 employees, now you're at 20 to 50 employees and you have two degrees of separation from you to the next person that you're talking to. things start to break a lot more often and a lot faster, and your kind of move fast and break things, approach that got you to that initial level, it's not gonna work as well when you get to that level right above that. So if you want to be able to move faster, we've done a lot of . There's a lot of things within the Mahar method that we use to be able to help coach clients on being able to say, Hey, if you wanna be able to retain your people for longer, or if you wanna hire the rock stars for your company, and how do you keep your team lean and nimble as long as you can before having to hire out more? Ideally, you never have to do that, but how do you only hire the rock stars to be able to really grow your company at that stage? All these other skills on how do you actually become a better manager? Become a much bigger part of the conversation so we can go into more detail about any one of those things in particular. But I'd love to shift it over to Matt and talk about the

specifics. Yeah. Quinn, you just turned me on, man. We're absolutely talking about that . Yeah, that is exactly where we're gonna go. That is fantastic. How do you hire the freaking rock stars, how do you hire, how do you inspire, and how do you maintain those people through scale? Matt, first we'll go ahead and throw it to you. Same. , what makes a great CEO e o and what are the differences between a crap CEO o and when that makes it?

Yeah I'm going to piggyback on what Quinn said and say why. When he said execution speed in pre-product market fit, what he, I think what he meant was getting product out in front of customers so that they can use it, react to it, and you can see what they do and don't like about it, so that you can iterate on it and change with real user feed. That's the key. The thinking about what would be great and building something perfect and not releasing it and designing the crap out of it turns out is ineffective. Turns out building a long product roadmap. That's the old way, the new way is building a prototype in a day, throwing it out there tomorrow, building another prototype, throwing it out there the next day, building it. So each day is a new iteration of the product or the features that you. and let customers tell you what they do and don't like. Forget about a designer telling you that, I think is key to get to product market fit. Once you have product fit, market fit as Quinn says, it's about managing the team successfully. , and there's two ways to do that. One is learn how to become a great manager. You know what? , there's no guarantee that's gonna happen. And by the way, it takes a while. And by the way, it's usually the way you do that is by watching a great manager for three months, six months, a year, and going, oh, now I get what they're doing and then copying it. We don't have time to do that. . And so the other way is recognizing, hey, this isn't my strength. This is not what I love to do. What I love to do is find out customer problems and create solutions for them really quickly. , that doesn't include doing one-on-ones and team meetings and pipeline reviews and holding people Quinn about

smiling

Exactly. But there are people out there that do love to do this and already are great at it and know how to do it. So why not hire one of them? to go manage the team and operate the company. And that means hire a coo. What Zuckerberg did with Sheryl Sandberg, what Brian Armstrong did with Emily Choy, what Antonio, D Y D X did with George Zang. These are, that I consider those to be great CEOs because they recognized what they didn't love and what they weren't yet great at, so they hired someone to go do it. Now they watch those people and they can learn from. They could still, they could do it, but they realized they still don't love it. What they love is product. And by the way, there's actually no one else in the company, I believe, than the founder who will ever have as much knowledge about the customer problem and the potential solutions than the founder. So therefore, why not have them continue to focus on product vision, but operating let's someone else do.

All right, so an observation and a couple of follow up questions from that because this conversation's freaking sick, man. I love this. Everyone start a podcast. First off, isn't that exactly what you went through with Naval, with Angel List to where he wanted to just focus on the product and I believe he has a quote I'm gonna butcher it, but he was saying something like, sales is just bad marketing. It's just bad product. . He goes, you build the best product . It markets and sells itself. So I'm curious about you working with Naval in that transition period from him being like, Hey, I'm doing a decent enough job of this. , but I hate this.

Luckily Naval has shared this publicly, so I can as well, because otherwise I would never, I wouldn't share a word. I don't share any of the content of my coaching with someone. Absolutely. I share who I coach, but not what the content is. But Naval has already shared this publicly. In fact, we did a podcast together in this and so now I can share. So what happened was the very first time that I met with Naval he came to my house. We spent about an hour and a half together, and he shared with me, I said, what's the. issue you have. And he says the biggest issue I have is not solvable. I was like okay what is it? He said I just I don't like being ceo. like, Great, we're gonna solve. He's no, we can't solve that. We can't solve that because I'm the famous one and everybody knows me, and the investors have all put their money behind me and I'm the only one who can attract the companies and the cat. It's just, it's all about me. It's all goes through me, so I have a responsibility here. I said, really? And then I said Naval, my PO is that if you don't love. It. You're actually shitty at it. Let's talk about that. What are you not doing here? That, that, if you were really into it, what would you be doing? He started listing all the things that he had seen other people who are really into being CEO O do, and he doesn't do any of them. He said, so Naval, you're not doing those things. How can you say you're actually even good at being ceo. He's wow, man, you're. . I said, okay, who would be good? Who in the company could do this right now? Who actually enjoys it? And he mentioned it, guy. I said, great, why don't we put him in the role? And Naval was like, what? Ego?

Ego hitting.

Let's do it. Now. At that point, Naval didn't know what else he wanted to do. He just knew he hated that role. And so he put Kevin Laws in that role. Kevin stabilized the company, and all of a sudden Naval was able to back off and. , oh my God. It's actually operating as well as when I was operating. And then he eventually hired the current CEO who's doing an even better job. And now the company's absolutely soaring and Naval still didn't know what he wanted to do at the time, but now he had time, he had space. And so with that space, he went and for a lot, for, in the beginning it was a lot of self-reflection and a lot of personal growth stuff. But that led to idea. and those ideas. He then came back to Angelist with and said, what about this? And they. Fantastic. No, some of the ideas they didn't do, but some of the ideas they did do, and those have led to multi-billion dollar outcomes. I think AngelList now latest round was like a $5 billion value. Yeah. Whereas, which is a dramatically and maybe even more at this point. I just think, cause I think that round was probably two years ago.

So one last follow up que follow up question for you, Matt, and then Quinn, I want to throw it to you right afterwards so we can begin the scale conversation with team. So Matt, I'm curious. I know that is you, the answer you're probably gonna give. , it depends, right? But I'm curious from your perspective. I'm someone that I just, so I was a real estate guy and a lot of people that listen to this are real estate guys, and I'm around a bunch of a hundred million dollar real estate guys. And what I've learned from them is you need to be a businessman and an entrepreneur that happens to invest in real estate instead of a real estate investor that happens to be an entrepreneur. So that's the pivot I made. I created a mastermind recurring business. I just hit a hundred K a r r in 10 weeks. So baby business, right? But I've got product market fit there, and now I'm going to the period where I'm like, okay, now let's scale for 500 recurring members, a thousand, 5,000, 10,000. And I'm like, okay, I can't do this by myself. There's gonna have to be, and I'm already realizing that. I'm like, I wanna work on the product. I hate doing the operational stuff, the organizational stuff, at what revenue? , is it time to have that conversation and then that would be a beautiful transition into the partnership and like kind of equity thing that you guys were talking about as well when it comes to companies beginning.

So at what point is it at what point in terms of revenue, is it time to talk about bringing on someone to help you operate?

Correct. Okay. To be able to be like, okay, I don't like doing this anymore. I would like somebody else to run the operational side of this and me focus on this.

Yes. So the point that is relevant, and I think, and Quinn, I'd love to hear your thought, is the point at which you realize you don't love doing it and you can afford to bring on the

next person. That's the que that's the question. When can you afford it? When is it dumb as shit? When's too early? Early you can afford it.

When you can afford it, when if you're profitable bringing on this person, you will remain profitable because you are self-funding. So it's your profits that are funding you. , have to make sure they continue. Or it's when you have external funding and even after paying this person and bring them on, you still have three, four years of runway. Got, I think three to four years of runway is probably where you want to be if you're not profitable. If you're profitable, then you wanna stay.

Got it. Cool. All right, sweet. Perfect transition over to you Quinn. Let's talk about that founder maybe you have. And you mentioned Y Combinator as well. So I'm curious about this as somebody that's doing this solo dolo. I know YC doesn't like companies that are solo, like they like partnerships, correct. where they're like, we want ] , two to four kind of in that founding team. And so that may be an area where I'm Laing. So I'm curious, can you walk us through Stage where you're going from the first couple founders of this company into how do you scale that slowly, because you both were talking about you don't want to really grow your headcount. Past six was the number, I believe, before you get to a certain revenue mark. Correct. Can you talk, walk us through that transition.

I hate to do this, Quinn, unless you have a Yes.

I was about to say, Matt would love to answer this question. I'm happy

right after run it would

run that. Okay, great. Yes. YC says you must have a co-founder. Why? because from their perspective, they've seen much better outcomes for yc. When you have a cofa, why? Because you have an emotional partner and if one goes into a funk, the other one continues. And if the other one goes into a funk, the first one continues. So there's always, there's a, there's someone who's not depressed at any one moment, Got it. Fair. Great point. Right on. But that doesn't mean it's the best outcome for the founder. Why? Because most co-founders give up 50% of their business in order to get this emotionally in this emotional stability. Again, okay? The YC doesn't care. They're taking 7% no matter what. They don't care how it's divvied up in at the 93. but you care. There are other ways to get emotional stability. There are other ways to get a part, an emotional partner. You don't have to give up 50% of your company to do higher therapist.

Yes.

I'm not joking.

Or

coach.

That's right. Or

frankly, hire and someone that you can talk to, who will come into the company a day a week and give them 1% of the company, but giving up 50% of the company to satisfy the emotional stability that your investors want to see is the most. Hire. I can imagine. It is the most expensive hire that exists. Peter Teal,

eat your heart out man. Alright, but what'd you wanna add?

I'd love to add to this. So there's one important. Paradigm shift. I'd say that's happening right now, which is, ai of course, we've seen the effects of chat, G P T three, we've seen the effects of low-code, no-code automations that you can build with cards. You can build a Zapier, you can build with every low-code, no-code tool, and make a business from scratch with very little funding to get started. . And I think that a lot of people think that, oh, I have to go to the YC route, perhaps go to a VC backwell business to a billion dollar unicorn status company, we don't need to, or A, I don't think everyone needs to do that or even wants to go in that direction. And B, we are seeing a lot of founders now today that are doing it without going to the venture capital route. I'm not saying that it's not a good route for everyone. There are certain companies where, yes. Go vc, go hard. This is what you need to be able to scale it up to the level that you want to. But there's so common now that you can get up to revenue or its profitability with very few people on your team. And the way we like to talk about it at a Maari method is we talk about this thing called the zone of genius, where you wanna be doing things that you're a really good at. , and B, you really enjoy doing at the same time. And if you're at the point where you were talking about before, it's like, when can I hire the person to take care of all the operational things? I don't have to do anything I hate. It's like sometimes that difference between the two, you might not quite be there yet and but you still don't wanna be doing all the manual labor that takes to just get your startup to that point where you're at pmf. So if you're at that point we say that you try to do three things, you try to eliminate it if you can. in some cases, you just can't get rid of certain manual tasks you have to do in a startup. Sure. So you can eliminate it, you can delegate it, which for me, one of my favorite things to do in delegation is if you can have a really good executive assistant or virtual assistant, yeah. You can pay a lot lower than hiring another COO or chief of staff on board and get a lot of the little pain points. Were going, oh my gosh, just those three hours free per day that I had to do before, now I get to work. I think I had listened to one of your podcasts before those green level activities where this is really,

ah, man, he did listen to one of my podcasts. Yeah,

I did. I did my homework. Yeah, that's right. Exactly. Or third one, which, or the third one, which is some of the things where you're like, man, I'm the only one that can do this right now, and I still hate doing it, but I have to do it. Then in those cases, you find ways to make it delightful, where you could say, okay, if it's how to do financial reports, can you get someone else on Zoom with you to be able to do it? Can you get your favorite song on while you're listening to it so that if you absolutely have to do it, then find the ways to make it so that you can actually be an enjoyment? Cause the more you're in enjoyment throughout your entire day, the better you're gonna come across as a founder, the better you're gonna go into your marketing and sales calls. Everything else is just an amplification.

And what quit means by make it exquisite is ask yourself the question, knowing that I have to do this and I'm the only one who can, this would be fun for me as long as what? And then just whatever thoughts come make those happen.

Matt, talk about spending two hours a day on your most important task and how you would kidnap somebody in your room to to sit and hold you accountable to it.

Yeah. Yeah. That's what happened to me. I would say, God, I really don't want to sit here, doing these tasks, but I know that I have to get them done and I'm the only one that can do them. So I'm gonna block off time to do them. But God, this is gonna be painful. What would make this fun for me? What would make it fun? , it would make it fun for me if there were another human being sitting with me, whether virtual or in person. So I was like, okay, I'm just gonna hire someone to sit with me. And I do, I hire people and what do I have them do? Nothing. A literally a warm body in the room with me while I'm doing these tasks. And you know what? . It works. . Talk about accountability.

Talk about accountability. Man, I love that. I want to, so before, before we jump into hires in general I want to talk about one thing specifically which is near and dear to my heart, coming from a guy that was an enterprise corporate sales, and that's the world that I left. And I love how you talked about building sales organizations and building sales teams, because in my world, the advice that I've gotten is like the first couple of hires that I would need to. For my, like mastermind, my business would be either doing like the personal assistant, like you said, and sales, so right after, so something that would produce more revenue. And so I'm curious, let's begin when it comes to the hiring conversation, let's begin with sales, because I like what you said in the book, and I think it's insanely awesome because I've witnessed the opposite from what you preach. So can we talk about building up hiring out those top line like revenue production positions in an early stage company and what would that look like? Maybe some best practices and things to avoid. . matt: Hiring out salespeople There's it one way. It's easier. In one way, it's harder than any other position in the company. It's easier because there's a very defined metric of success. It's very objective. It's dollars that come in. So the typical rule is for every one salesperson you want to have hire. Because you're eventually gonna get, you're gonna let one of them go within the first three months. But there's a very, cuz you have a measurement of which one's performing and which one isn't. That makes hiring a salesperson easier. Here's what makes it harder. If you're have a product that you think is great. and you want customers to go buy it, but you haven't yet sold it to customers or this type of customer. Let's say you're moving into, mid-size enterprise and you've only sold to small, and you hire someone to go sell to this new customer, good luck. Ain't gonna work. Here's what salespeople do. Salespeople follow a process that you have already developed that works and they can repeat it. What they can't. Is they can't figure out what the process is that will work. So don't be under the illusion that you can hire someone to figure only you can figure that out. You've gotta go talk to these new customers. You've gotta figure out what their pains are. You've gotta figure out if your solution matches that painting. You've gotta present it to them and. Figure out what pains you actually do solve that they have, and then go find customers with those pains. Once you've figured out the types of customers that resonate with you and what questions you need to ask and response you need to give to get them to realize that yours as a solution, then you can write that all up and somewhat a salesperson can follow it. , but make sure you have the process. . brian: And also we tend to hire L word, which is leads, . And I love that you led with that in the book. You're like, you don't have a salesperson problem, you have a lead problem. Because what you do is you hire top performers and they're murdering it and they're doing what they're designed to do, which is close big deals. And that's what my role was. But then what happens? You close your deals, you do fantastic. You look, you give them the. Stars and then they bring three more people into your territory because they think that it's gonna increase production without any increase in lead flow. So can we talk a little bit about lead flow and then I guess that will be a pretty easy transition into hiring because the revenue's now increasing.

Great. Yeah. What do you wanna know about lead flow or Quinn? Go

for it. And really quickly, Brian launch the one other point to the previous conversation too about hiring good salespeople. . I'm always surprised by how many companies don't do this, but having, there's two things in my mind. One is having a 30, 60, 90 day window saying, what do you want them to do by those timeframes in their first three months? They know the expectations ahead of time. , and you'd be surprised if someone hires somebody to say, what do I want out of this person in 90 days? And a lot of CEOs can't answer that question. So if you say, Hey, if you're on track, if you're hitting these markers and you touch and base with them on a regular cadence, whether every two weeks, every month, and maybe even that weekly when you're first starting off with them to make sure they're on path for that's one thing that absolutely needs to get done. And a second is a lot of people talk about shadow. . And that you need to shadow someone who's already done it. Watch them until you say, man, I am so bored because I understand this so well. Put me in. Please put me in. I wanna do it now you wanna give 'em to the point of boredom, as funny as that sounds, and then once they're at boredom and you give them in to the arena, usually some people say okay, I got it. They're hands off stop. I'm like, no. The next step is you have to reverse. , you have to be able to give 'em feedback on saying, okay, how did they do now that they are in the arena? And if you have that moment where you say, okay, I'm showing you exactly how to do this now I'm gonna make sure they're giving feedback, then you're at the level you need to. And then once you're there, and once you're competent and feel joyful doing this, okay, now I can take a step back. It seems like more work initially, but it's gonna save you so much effort in the long run by doing that simple thing. So I just wanted to add that as one more point of clarity for how to maintain good sales.

Perfect. Love it. And then so from my perspective, like I said, I just, I'm just shooting this from experience and then just like seeing what works and what doesn't, and just following what you guys say. So it's from my understanding, it's like I've got lead flow from this podcast that fuels a backend business. So I'm able to close those because that's my specialty. Like I'm a sales guy, like that's where I come from. I'm like that type A, like the visionary and the Geno Wickman methodologies, that's where I'm at. And so once I have enough leads to where it's overwhelming for me, then that's when I would hire that next person to come in because then my efficiency is dropping. So Matt, you ask, what do I want to know about lead flow? Everything, brother. Everything about lead flow. , matt: what are you talking about? Just gimme a little bit about leads. No, let's talk leads. Man. That's revenue, baby . matt: Okay. Leads is really about identifying people who have the problem that you are the best person in the world to solve. So first you have to know what is that problem, and when you know what the problem is. Then creating the bleed flow is actually pretty easy. You just put out the question, do you have this problem? And you get very specific about what that problem is, and you put that in the places. that people will, who are likely to have that problem, will hear it, will see it. So you put it, your Facebook ads target that type of person, you get podcasts when people will hear it. Once you then, but then you have to have a way of getting them to you. So in this, you have obviously a landing page from the podcast. People come to it. You only have one method. You have this podcast that's bringing all your leads. So for you, it's actually fairly simple. Which lead generation mechanisms is working because you only have one now. Most companies can't do. , most companies need more lead generation than what would come out of a podcast. So they have to have more methods. But now they're gonna spend money on Facebook ads. They're gonna spend money on going to conferences. They're gonna spend money on other types of electronic, on blog posts, et cetera. Now they have to know which ones are working. So now we're getting into the scale situation. But in a scale situation, I can't tell you how many times a co said to me, , I've got this VP of marketing and I have no idea whether they're performing or not. I know they're not performing, but I can't prove it. And they, don't gimme any metrics that are meaningful. And so I, and when I try to hold them accountable in metrics, they just say, oh, they gimme all kinds of excuses, fingers, everybody else. And it's making me crazy. And the company in my portfolio that does the best. of growth Marketing grew six times in revenue last year, or probably growth three times revenue this year. We're talking hundreds of millions already. They did one small change to what everybody else does. They don't put growth marketing in marketing. They realize that most of the outbounds are some form of a digital outreach, so they put in charge of growth marketing an engineer. who's got a pretty good design sense because you're gonna create a Facebook ad and then you're gonna have a landing page that they go to. So the hat landing page has to look decent. So they pick an engineer who had a decent design sense, bill's, decent looking landing pages, but absolutely knows how to write the code to identify the user that saw the ad and then came to the landing page. So he knows exactly the correlation and the attribution of which outreach methods we're working to create leads. Whereas you get someone from market, who grew up in marketing, the landing page will be absolutely gorgeous. , and they'll have no idea how to write the code to track the attribution of who landed there. Got it. So it turns out attribution is everything, and it turns out if you can attribute, then you can see the methods that are working and pour more dollars into those experiments and shut off the other experience. I don't know that really applies to you because again, it completely applies. Okay. It completely applies to me. So what you're saying, let me see if I can break it down for the audience. So essentially the process that you're talking about would. Going from having the beautiful landing page, the beautiful workflow to essentially being able to create that pixel that will track that person and be able to pinpoint them at every single other area and corner of the internet they, that they are to, maybe then you can hit 'em with a banner ad and you could say, Hey, like this is something that you're interested in. Here I am again, surprise. And then you can have a better follow up because now you have more information and data on your customer.

Even more than that, when the person finally comes to you and says, Hey, I wanna buy your product, you can figure out what they sold, where they want.

Exactly. Yeah. Cool. All right. There we go. Just one step closer to the millions, baby. Let's rock and roll . So as we finish up here in the last 14 minutes, okay, let's now start talking about the rockstar conversation. Quinn, I'll throw that one to you to lead off with and then Matt can fill in all the details that he wants. So you talked about how in the Mahari method, how do you hire these rock stars, these A players to start with because your first key hires. Like the make or break of the company. So how do you attract rock stars and how do you keep them happy? Ooh. Okay.

Great question. So I'll start with the attraction first, and I think this actually leads back into the previous conversation we had about getting leads into the door. If you're not just getting leads for. customers, you're getting leads for the best employees and the best rock stars you can attract possibly. And I think the best long-term strategy for creating that is to have the best personal brand possible. Like for Matt, he has the name brand and recognition. He has coached X, Y, and Z founders. He even coached them for free initially so that he can get in saying, Hey, I gave them value now. Okay, and now I will charge for my experience, right? So if you do that first, then the best people are gonna want to come to you. Cause it's not just enough to say, okay, I'm writing up a good job description and putting on LinkedIn, right? It's yeah, maybe you'll get some leads, but are you really getting the best leads upfront? You're even if you have a good siphoning process, you're gonna siphon out so many unqualified or bad leads for good positions for a role. So the first thing I always say is be able to get yourself to the point where, like the thing that you're doing is so attractive that people want to come to you and you have that inbound without even having to do that outbound marketing. Matt's had one tweet and that was enough to be able to attract these two of the current coach coaching clients that we have today, right? So I'd say that's one. And oh my gosh, I think Matt's again looking, said, Hey, I'm looking for. There's the link for the job description. And up. Exactly. So maybe go onto a little bit more of the assuming you have a good name brand or you've worked your way up to that point, like what are some of the manual processes? Be able to get to the point where you're closing that last person that can note a few of them. And we've been call, it's at two or three minutes. So one thing is people think you need a lot of time to be able to. If someone is a good fit or a bad fit for a role, now you can say a little bit, or I you can tell on a resume or with what's sent to them, or if you give 'em an application, okay, you get a general idea of it, but we didn't say the method. It's like there's a difference between verbal communication and written communication, so you only get a little idea of what that person is like in it. But you can know within, I think, what. Make a judgment of someone within the first half, a second of meeting someone, and within the ten first 10 seconds, we have a solidified idea of what we think of that person. You can get an initial vetting process out in 15 minutes. So if you have that first 15 minute call and you know right away, most times when the first minute, okay, this person is definitely good for this person's not gonna be a good fit for my culture, you get to siphon out so much faster because if someone's recruiting, you can do 20, 15 minute conversations immediately, quickly, and save them the hour long initial conversation saying, man, am I really doing this well? So that's the first thing is having that quick vetting process for the 15 minutes. And the second thing, and this is the one that I wish I knew when I did my first startup. Is that before I said, okay, your grade, grade track record. I'm gonna hire you. Let's put you in. And I put him in. I'm going, oh crap. This person would talk to big game, but he really doesn't know what he's doing or he or she is doing in this role. So instead, I always say, it's good to have a, you can call it a vetting process. You could have it be a trial period. So for Mass, what he did with us was he said, Hey, we're gonna bring you into a bootcamp for. you're gonna learn a lot if we're gonna pay you for that week, but we're gonna really see if you can do what you say you can do, and you, instead of spending thousands of dollars, onboarding them, needing to fire them. All these logistics, once you put someone in the door, which is really time intensive and costly from the company, do that trial run and you'll know right away, okay, this is a good person or not. And then that final step. And once you've hired them, it simplifies 90% of your issues that you're gonna face if you didn't hire some of those rock stars initially. So I'd say those are the key points that I would have for hiring rock stars.

Yeah. And that goes back into the same kind of thing that we're talking about with the sales position, right? Like the, what a win, what would a hell yes look like? 30, 60, 90 days down. , what am I quantifiably expecting here? Yes. And my takeaway from what you said about being the attraction personal brand, my takeaway from that is if you want to attract exceptional people be exceptional. Like just be that person. And so I feel like that's where a lot of people mess up. It's the

exceptional publicly. Yes, you can be exceptional on private, nobody knows about. . Right

on. Yeah. So yeah, it goes back to this whole personal, so now it's become a conversation on personal brand. And so that is where most people get it backwards, so most people are trying to document all this cool shit that they're not really doing. But the reality is just do cool shit, , do cool shit. Document it. yes they have

it backwards, , brian: and that's where the And then your authenticity is out the window. So it's like even as a ceo, like you're gonna be like, okay, cool. Now you're not who I thought you were from the beginning. So I love that.

And do you mind if I add one point there really quickly? for sure do. This is the hard part for people when they're starting to hire. I just wanna add one last nugget for here is there's, I'm not sure if you can cuss on this, I'm just gonna

we already have

run it. We've already cussed a few times on this, but it's like there are the yes people and there are the fuck yes. People in people's minds, right? And you only wanna hire the FDS people, but you might get someone that comes in saying, man, this person is incredible. He's really good. , but he's not at that next level is even if you still think he would do well to come, even though you think he's one of the best that you've seen is like still, if he's not at that level, you still have to make the hard decision to say no. it's the FS or the No, because when employees take up so much of, or just so much of the company, oh my gosh. You have to be so careful about who you hire, and it's better to say small and nimble and to get just the rock stars in than it is to be able to hire out. We've seen it a lot with the layoffs right now. Apple as an example, only. Gosh, I don't think they both, they're the only big company that hasn't let go of anyone right now because they've increased their employee count by 20% when everyone else has increased that hundred, 200%. Yeah. And now they're making the big adjustments.

What's some advice that you can give to somebody that's establishing that Fuck yes employee. Because my mind instantly goes to, okay What if there's a CEO that's new to the game and maybe they're, they don't have the judgment skills to determine what's the difference between this and just good. But what if they don't know what great looks like? What does great look like?

Let me jump in there. Because there, there is a balance here cuz people can say, okay, I'll only hire great. And then they get so nervous if they just don't hire anybody. . It's dating . Exactly. The key I think actually it's like a tub of water and if you just press the faucet in but there's no drain, then it's eventually gonna over. And so if you just hire people, but you don't have a way of letting, then you really know how someone performs after you in the first three months of them working with you. That's when everything is becomes real. And so you can do all the interviewing you want a much better way of knowing people's performance is going and talking to the people they've worked for in the past. They're former managers and that's pretty good at predicting, but it's not perfect. The only perfect is what they actually do in They're with you and as soon as you get the inkling, . Netflix has the great question, which is The keeper test. If this person said to you today, Hey, I'm leaving this job for another company, what would you do? Would you go, oh my God, no. I desperately need you. I'll do anything to keep you. Or would you be like, yeah, okay. If you're anything, but I would do anything to keep you, then you should be letting them. And the thing is, most people, if you have the ability to let people go, then you can take more risk on hiring. Then you can say, I think this person is great, but I'm not really sure. Okay, hire them. But if you don't have the ability to let them go, then you're screwed. So to me, one of the most important skills for any manager is to let someone go. And frankly, I don't believe someone can. Until they've done it, because there's so much fear that first time. And the reason there's fear is because they don't want to hurt the person. Okay, don't hurt the person letting someone go causes trauma. Great. Be there. Listen to them. Listen to their fears and their angst in their pains, or get them a therapist. Two, they need the income. Great. Help them find their next job. I don't mean be willing to do references, Actively become their agent. Figure out what they're actually really good at and passionate about. Find a role that fits that passion and go, you reach out to that employer and say, Hey, I've got someone who kick ass in this role for you. Great. It's a hundred times easier for me to represent you than for you to represent yourself, especially when you're in this state, like your world has just gotten knocked out, you've just been fired, and you're like, you think you're worth? So if you actively help someone make it non-traumatic, I have let go of, I don't know, 30 people in my life. I believe that I'm friends with all of them. Why? Because I helped every single one of them get an even better role than the one they had with me. And so they're appreciative of that. And if you have that skill, then you can take more chance on hiring. That's my.

Yeah, there you go. There's another one of my friends named Mark Moses that's got CEO coaching. And he talked about he's if you ever wondered, should I fire this person? It's already too late. It's like they should have already been gone, . He's there's very rarely a time where you he asked, there's about 400 of us in a room, and he said, raise your hand if you've ever regretted firing. And then nobody knows their hand. He's He's raise your hand if you regretted holding onto someone and you wish you would've fired him sooner. . And then every hand went up and I was just like, oh, yep. Cool. Sounds good. So it's interesting for me to deal with all of be able to analyze all this feedback at the stage that I'm at right now and be able to be like, okay, cool. Like I can see the breadcrumbs being laid out here. In closing, I don't wanna take up much more Utah. Coming up on the top of the hour here. Where can people find you guys? Who are you looking for as a client and what is your service?

Quinn?

Okay. Sales hack comes on for a sec.

No, I'm just kidding. Put it on. No, it's on baby. Run it. You've earned it. . quinn: Okay. So if anyone would like to learn a little bit more about what we're doing, so if you go to coach method.com, you'll be able to see a list of all the bios of all the coaches we currently have on staff for us. So typically the type of companies that we're helping right now I say on average they're post series. That they have enough runway to be able to survive for at least the next two years. And typically their biggest pain points are, man, I need to know how to be able to manage my team better. Or I've seen a lot of conflict resolution that's needed between their co-founders. I've seen. , they need to be able to hire the rock stars, as you said, and they need to find that one person or even sometimes co saying, oh God, I don't wanna do this anymore and I need to be able to get myself out of this role and into what I truly love in my zone of genius again, which for 90 or most of founders, is usually in the product side and building and talking to customers, right? . If you fill any of those buckets, please reach out to us. We. More spots available and we just onboarded. I believe, Matt, you've hired four new coaches simply and myself, and we'd love to be able to have a conversation and work with you. And Matt, if you have any other additions you'd like to have, I'd love to hear them. That's it. There we go. That's it. Rock and roll. You know where to find 'em. People. Any specific industries that you guys focus on or agnostic to? Industry, just size,

agnostic. We're, our history is tech, but we're agnostic. Perfect. Yeah.

All right. You heard it here first, guys. All right. I appreciate it. This has been a freaking blast. I literally put in the email, I was like, Matt, this will be a fun one. And man, I hope, hopefully from y'all's end, I didn't lie, man. This was a fricking blast. This is so much fun. Thank you both for coming on. I think we crushed it for all three of us. I think we did good. Hopefully the audience agrees, man. Yes. Thanks. Thanks. Thanks for coming on. This has been Matt Quinn and Brian with the Action Academy Podcast. Sign it off.