Hey MFM fans, it's Sean here. And I want to let you know about something pretty cool. You have an opportunity to get on to my first million. How does that work? Well, we're going to be doing a live episode on June 8th. And it's going to be our first demo day. A few lucky startups are going to be able to pitch us. Their company live on my first million soon. It's gonna be like Shark Tank. You're going to hear them pitch. You're going to hear our reaction and we might actually invest our money into these companies if they're any good. It's like a live episode of Shark Tank done. The my first Million Way, which is going to be
I see a little more real talk than what you see on Shark Tank. We're doing this in partnership with our friends at stock.com. If you're looking to raise some money, go ahead and apply its stumps sto. NK, s.com, / MF M as in my first million so stocks.com MFM that's where you apply. If you want a picture start up to us now, on to the show. Alright, let's take a quick break to talk about success story, a new podcast by the HubSpot podcast Network. Success story, features, Q&A sessions.
Successful Business Leaders keynote presentations and stuff about sales marketing and business. They have episodes. For example, the Dark Side of venture capital sounds interesting Discord was built for gamers and took the World by storm. It sure did. So listen to success story wherever you get your
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I feel like I could rule the world. I know, I could be what I want to travel. Never looking puts up y'all. Sean here. Sam is in Europe, traveling around
with the fam. And so I'm on my own today and I
wanted to do something cool and I think I got a great idea. So I believe, here's my guess. I think this pod is
going to be one that people really really like because I know I would have wanted to hear this at some point in time. And the
reason why is because most of the people who listen to the podcast
Are some form of leadership, right? You might have started your own company or your own business. You might be kind of an exact somewhere or a manager somewhere or you want to be a leader. Right?
So most people who don't want to be leaders are not
listening to a podcast like this.
So, the problem is me and everybody else sucks. You know, everybody
sucks. The first time that they are managing people and
and this isn't like, you know how to manage
people 101.
There's a lot of books that are written about this. There's some best practices, there's common
sense, but I wanted to share some of the unorthodox. Some of the weird
things that I do that I have found work for me and they might not work for everybody, but they work for me and not all of these people are going to agree with. Not all these will work for you. But again, they
all work for me. Nobody. I couldn't find any of this stuff in a book. I heard about these either from somebody or I just kind of made
it up on my own.
And so I think I have five maybe six different things that I do that are unorthodox, but
work. Okay, so let me start with number one, and this is called dr.
House. It's inspired by dr.
House. So if anybody watches the TV show House, he always does his
thing. The shows like, there's genius doctor, but he's kind of like a curmudgeon and
all the other doctors really respect him because he's
amazing, but he's kinda hard to work with one of the things he does that.
Is amazing about her to work with is,
yes. He's like three, Junior doctors, who were kind of, like he's
advising them or whatever they work under him.
And when a patient comes in and they run a test to try to figure out what's wrong with the person. He doesn't just look at it and say, Here's what's wrong with the person, right? First of all, it's usually not that straightforward. Second of all, even if he kind of has an idea, he doesn't spoon-feed it to his, to his team. Instead. He will usually slap the resistor,
the like maybe the scan or the
Ada or the the X-ray, or whatever up on a screen and he'll
say, what do you see here? Or he'll say, what's weird about this or he'll say
what's interesting about this
and then the team has to start thinking and getting curious and looking at the
thing and saying, well, there must be something there. What do I
see? And this is really effective. I do this all the
time. I will take, let's say some data. I'm looking at when I'm curious about something. I see something that makes me go. Hmm. And
what I used to do is I used to just like share that with the team. Hey guys, here's what I found.
And look at this data, this data shows that a is B and
C. Right? I like give them a conclusion. I'm
basically spooning spoon feeding them and answer they'll read it. They'd say yeah that makes sense and then they would go on with their day, right? Because they didn't have to struggle to understand it. They didn't have to be curious enough to go find it. They just got spoon-fed an answer and they say, yeah. Yeah, I'm not surprised by that. All right, I'm gonna move on or oh, that's weird. Okay. Sounds like you got the answer. I'm going to again, move on. So I do it the other way, which does three things. One it trains the team to be curious.
And clever, right? Because you're not looking for some look. I'm not
telling you to go do 10 more analyses. I'm saying there's something
in this. What is it? A little bit of a riddle. The second is it's not a gotcha. Right? Like I'm genuinely asking because they will see things that you don't see. So even if you saw one of the interesting things they might find to others that you didn't
really appreciate.
And the last is it trains everybody on how to because, you know, maybe one person out of the group will see the interesting thing, but the other four will say
Why didn't I see that? And, that trial and error that like, guess and check is how people get better at stuff. So, you'll train a team of curious, clever people who get
good at finding insights and data.
And so,
that's the dr. House technique. I recommend you try it, rather than spoon-feeding, your team answers.
Okay, the second one I learned from my wife. My wife was a consultant and she used to go to these companies and I was like, it was always like I'm getting alignment, right? You're going to be a
board meeting of like, you know, Yahoo's board.
It's like you have 10 Executives at Yahoo,
and they cannot they, you know, they all think they're on the same page. And then only when you ask them certain questions, do you
realize that like everybody has a different, you know, game plan vision of what we're trying to do here. Etcetera. Etc.
So she got good assessing that out but people are a little bit not defensive but they're a little bit limited when you just ask them very literal, logical questions that tap into only the analytical part of their brain. Like if you say what are our three key objectives for the year, they've sort of
It feels like they're taking a math test. And so she does this thing. That was called the holiday party. The holiday party tactic, is she had me. She had to go to a whiteboard and she goes. All right. Let's fast forward. It's Christmas Eve of this year. And we're at the company holiday party. I want you to start drawing. What's that? That company
holiday party? I'm like, what do you mean? Just like just
draw things that would make it an awesome company holiday party, so I'm like, okay, so all of a sudden I'm having kind of fun. I'm something creative. I'm drawing. I'm just
Of course, yet that could be at a party. Right? So my guard is down and so, you know, I'll draw like whatever
there's a DJ and I we kind of laugh because the DJ booth is like, you know, my drawing is bad and then I'll draw the next thing. And then she'll
say, okay, what's on the script? What are you celebrating? And that question? What are we celebrating is? Like that's kind of like what are we trying to do this year? Right? What's the Milestone that we hit and instead of saying what are we trying to do? It's assuming it's already done that we're already celebrating or popping bottles because we hit 1 million users or 10 million downloads or
Hundred million in Revenue, whatever it is. And so I'd say, you know, we'd say our big North Star goal because it's like that screen. Can only have one big thing on it that were all cheersing our glass to so what
is that North Star metric
and then she would say a cool. Let's walk around like you know who it was at this party and you know, there's a little exercise and as she unfolded as party a kind of review it first it got me in the mood for winning, right? Because it's like I'm already working backwards from the assumption that we've won, then I identify the North Star goal and then
We do that little game and only takes two minutes then we would say. All right. So, how are we going to get there? Right? What would be the things that we would need to do now? So that that party happens and all of a sudden were were talking and brainstorming from a place of certainty and confidence rather than fear and doubt about not being able to pull it off in distress, right? Because when you're in fight or flight, your brain only works in a very limited capacity
compared to when you are, you know at
ease relaxed which is why you know, great ideas come to you in the shower because you're you're relaxed, you have
Warm water pouring on top of your head and so your brain kind of
melts away and can start to, you know, put together different data points that that are not there when you're tense. And so I love this tactic of the holiday party drawing game. It really
loosens people up, it gets them thinking. Focuses them on the North Star goal. And then when you make a plan after that, they go into that
plan from in a state of mind of we already won.
Okay. Now here's the opposite. This is called the the misery misery loves company tactic. Okay, so whenever we're making a plan at the beginning of any plan, everything seems Shiva
Bowl and
up never runs
optimistic and it's hard to
say. It's one thing to ask somebody, what are
the key risks in this and then people, you know, again, they get a little defensive, the using the logical part of your brain. So a better question is,
you know, if I was to
Let's say, you know, we we, you go do this, I go do my thing, and we get busy and, you know, six months from now, 12 months, from, now, we catch back up. We're getting a beer here at the local pub in the afternoon. It's 4:00 in the afternoon. We go, grab a beer and we say, man, that idea was so cool. Let's assume it went wrong, right? So man, that idea was so cool. I can't believe it didn't work out. And what happened? What is the what is the most likely reason we would give
That things went South. And this is a way to identify the core risk. The chief assumption, the riskiest
proposition in your plan
is to sort of work backwards from, we're getting a beer, we're hanging out. It's already failed and we say man that thing had so much potential. What went wrong. What do you think is the number one reason it might go wrong and then because you are identifying that upfront, you can
now like work against that you can get you can game plan around
it.
Okay, here's another one. I find that
people get very defensive about
the status quo, especially the leaders, because as a leader, you're sort of responsible for the way that the company works, right?
Your response. Like
you're responsible for how many people work at your company, right? If I said, did you hire too many people? Most people don't want to say yes, and the reality is
that certainly I don't know, 20, 30, 40 percent of the
time the answer truly is yes, you've hired to many people.
But if you ask CEOs, they'll
Rarely ever say yes. And in the same way, you'll say, are you working on a bunch of useless stuff,
or are you working on a
bunch of extraneous things? It would say. No. I mean, these are all important. They're valuable. Right? So people get defensive about their current plan. And so, how do you get, how do you get people to
identify the fat in there? Their plan, right? Be able to
trim the fat without the pressure and the stress of them feeling like they're wrong, or they're being blamed or that. They're gonna have to make some tough decisions. Have some hard.
Relations, and because of that, they just want to avoid it. So here's what I do. We play a game. It's sort of like that. You know, that F murder Mary game,
right? Where you decide, you know, out of these
three choices, who would you, who would you murder? Who would you marry? Who would you f? So similarly? Let's just focus on the murder part, which is like
If I asked you, right? So I could sit down with some with
any manager in my company, I could say in your team.
If you I know you love your team,
and I know they're girl great. They're all great in their own
ways. But if you had to do it, what would be the three? Who would be the three people that you would cut? If you had to cut, not say any well where you're not going to cut anybody, but who would those three people be similarly like out of all the projects that initiatives are doing? What are the three that you would cut? If you had to cut three initiatives off, which one would go?
You could do this with anything right. Customers of all your customers on the roster, your clients, who are the three that you would cut, where they're just a pain in the ass. It's not worth. The juice is not worth the squeeze, and if you can create a safe, a safe space basically where somebody can freely, identify what they would cut if they were gonna cut, but don't worry. We're not asking you to cut anything and you do it yourself, right? You're not just asking others to do this, but you do it
yourself and you think aloud, maybe do it as a group, like, hey, what would
we, what projects would we?
Cut, you know, which team members are really not, you know, are at the bottom right there. Certainly is a top and a bottom who was that, right? Which customers are the top and the bottom and if you can identify those it plants a seed and people once they've said it out loud, they've heard of truth. It's very hard to unsee a truth and it might be a month later or two months later three months later, but eventually they will decide to trim some of the fat either on their team, their projects of The Client List that will help the team grow.
So that's the primary tactic. Okay, I think I've done.
Is that for tactics? Okay, let's do another one.
This is the super power 1. So this is a way to build people up. So I did this at my last startup and people really resonate with this which is I made a presentation about each person. The team I do this on a
Friday afternoon. I said, hey guys, let's go do a little happy hour and I said, I got a presentation for you guys. I said,
you know, I've learned that in it in any team, you can, you can look for two types of people, you can look for people who
Lack weaknesses. Meaning, they're pretty well-rounded. They have no fatal flaws, but they may not be great at anything. Right? They're just good there. At least good at everything. Or you can have some people that are amazing at some things and kind of weak in other areas. And I've learned that the the best performing teams are filled with people who are amazing and at least one area. So you're hiring for an extreme strength. Not a lack of
weakness, right? That's it Andreessen, Horowitz framework that I really
loved. And so I said, I'd like to
I said, but the funny thing is, for most people, they don't, they're not even aware of what their extreme strength
is. And
because you're too close to it. So normal for you to be great at it. You don't even really realize
you're great at, at some
point. It's other people who pointed out. So I'd like to point out for you, this superpower that I've seen each of you have, and then I would give. And so I put each person's face on a slide. I would say. Hey, this is like, for example, hey, this is Derek Derek's our designer Derek. What I've noticed is
Your superpower. I don't know if you're aware of this, but most designers that I've worked with their creative
types. They're sort of, like, you know, messy desk, procrastinator types, they pull all-nighters, when they get creative inspiration and they do
amazing work sometimes. And other times, you know, they get stuck with sort of a
creative writers block of sorts.
I said, Derek your superpower is that you're a great designer, but you're like, the mailman you deliver every day at the same time, right? Like I give you the the brief. I scribble a scribble.
Poorly written address of where where I'm trying to get this package and you're able to interpret it like a mailman as a, oh, I know where this is trying to go and then you
deliver it every day at 5:00 p.m. Before you leave. And I said,
I you're like the mailman. I said and, you know, you don't work on the weekends. I know that you're not the type of guy that I should be hitting up
for that. Like that
crazy project. We're going to do the weekend. So you're like the mailman you deliver every day of the week except for Sunday's. And so I gave them basically a superpower, which is you have this amazing ability to consistently, take a loose set of
instructions and deliver on it.
And I gave him a nickname. That goes with it. That's why I call you the
mailman.
And then yeah, that's your super and I gave it a little symbol
and then I like, you know what the next person I said. Oh this is for confer. Conned is,
you know, he's not going to win any
awards for being the most eloquent speaker or the most politically, you know, polished kind of guy.
But man when you talk to ferc on it's almost like he's allergic to bullshit. Like, you know, when someone's allergic to peanuts you can't even have a peanut dish. Are you? You feel uncomfortable?
Taking peanuts around them because you might kill them. I said, that's what it's like when I bring bullshit around you. I don't even feel comfortable saying, bullshit around you, because you're so good at seeing through bullshit and saying, that doesn't make
sense or
wait. I thought you said this other thing. So the how can both of those be true? Right? And so, I, you know, you were like you're allergic to bullshit. That is your superpower. You just can't stand it and that because of that, it makes the rest of us up our game and not bring that, bring half-baked plans or incongruent illogical.
Hands to you because you'll sniff it out in a second. And the Beautiful Thing is these things are both true and aspirational. Meaning they are this way, but by giving it their superpower, they then want to live up to that identity, you've given them and so you can kind of architect. The type of Team you want by calling out areas, they're good, but they not be not be the best at it, or they may not
be doing it all the time. But by giving them their super power, they will start to do it more often. Okay. So that's the super power technique, you know, as a leader, you're always on the lookout to arm yourself with knowledge, the books, the
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Okay, I'm gonna give you three quick ones, the Tesla master plan. If you've never read it, Elon Musk
wrote a master plan for Tesla, you know, back when it started. So he wrote The Master Plan V1 like 10 years ago and then a movie too. And
basically said master plan
V1 basically was like, you should
go read it. I've handwritten his many times and
then wrote ours, wrote my own plan for my own business after writing
his. And so his plan basically says, Tesla's job
is to accelerate, you know, the
Societies move off of fossil fuels ought to sustainable energy to do that. We need to create a car that's high performance and high efficiency. And so we're going to start with the Roadster. The expensive car. Then we're going to make the next car. Then we're going to make the the mass Market model. 3
car, blah, blah
blah. And he's like, you know, so in summary, here's the master plan, build an expensive car too, dumb to build the brand build, a
less expensive car to get more people on it. Then build.
Use the economies of
scale and the learnings from production to build a mass-market card that will get to everybody, right? That's the master plan
and then he wrote a mess, my V2. But it is very, very powerful. If you can write the master
plan for your company, right? It's
basically any and it doesn't have to be right, right, but it's you putting it out there. What are we here to do? How do we
plan to do it?
And like, you know, here's the takeaway and if you look at his writing style, it's very pop empowering style. And so I like to take his master plan and then write my
own.
Our, the next one comes from the CEO
coach called Matt macari or some like
that, because this technique called the calendar audit, is very simple. Imagine you to print out your calendar from the last week, and you look at every every meeting that was scheduled every kind of block of time that you used. You take three highlighters. You take a green highlighter that says, that was something that I
enjoyed. That gave me energy. You highlight, those in green and you take a red highlighter, you say
these ones that I highlighted in red are the ones that I felt
Like my soul is being sucked out of my body. Right? Like these are the soul-crushing energy-draining things
that I'd read Parts things of my day that I don't look forward to. You put those in red
and then you have the yellow that are like neutral. And you look at that. And you say, okay. This is an audit. I now need to take these red things and I need to figure out over time, how I'm going to get more
green than red. Right? How I'm going to face all the red away and get to only green and that might be hiring. Somebody who doesn't, who likes doing that thing, because what's red for you might be green for them.
Just getting rid of it or minimizing the time. You do it and saying it. Do you really need three meetings for this? Could we not just do it in one? Could this meeting be an email right or
whatever? So, calendar audit is a very valuable technique. Okay. So that was
so so far. We've had number one. The doctor house, screenshot technique. Number two.
My wife's holiday party work backwards question. Number three. The,
if we got a beer saying,
you know saying man, it's a bummer that thing failed. Why did it fail, right? That's number three. Number four
is creating a safe
space for the
EF murder Mary game, right?
Who were the three that you would double down on? Who are
the three that you would cut? Three is just a magic number might be 3,000 for you. I don't know, whatever. It doesn't. The number doesn't matter. Same idea. What are the
bottom? 20% of things? What are the top? 20% of
things? So what you're trying to identify and with the promise of, we're not taking an action on this right now, so that's what for, yeah, that's for number. Five was tell each person their superpower and give it to your team. As a presentation. They will live up to that reputation. Number six is the Tesla master plan number.
Evan is the calendar audit. Okay, I'm
gonna do two more. Maybe
three number eight is peer groups.
So anytime I have an objective, like let's say, I
want to become a great poker player, or I want to get to a hundred thousand Twitter followers, or I want to build a DDC brand, that does 50 million dollars a year.
I will create a text chat
group of five other people who have were in the same kind of ballpark as me of where they're at now
and have that same ambition as their top
ambition,
mentors and advisors overrated peer group.
Underrated. And so that's what I would do and I would start by texting them and then I would do like a once-a-month kind of call where we spent three hours on the phone or in person hanging out. Shootin the shit together. It's sharing tactics and strategies what's working for them in trying to achieve your mutually, shared goal.
Okay. Last one is the kickoff
document. I think this is number 9,
a kickoff. Document is a
template that I have and I could share this, but if you subscribe to my newsletter, I think you get it. So just go to Sean, poor e.com and
And I think you can get it or if not, just email me at Shauna
Chomper.com., Okay, so the kickoff document is basically something I do
before I start a project because I believe that Clarity is power. And I think too often people
go into doing something without actually being
clear of, what are we trying to do here?
Why are we trying to do it? How will we measure success? And what's the
first thing that we should really do? And that's what a kickoff? Document does. So the kickoff doc has three sections. The first is, what are we trying to do one liner? The next is what's a win?
Look like and I Define a win in two ways. I say what's the
floor of this wind? Meaning? What is the minimum that I would consider like a
successful good outcome, like what's
achievable thing? And then what's
the FBI win? Which is the like the
the result that would make me safe F yet and
that really worked.
And so now I get kind of like a
range. I have like the bottom goal, my floor goal, and then I have my stretch goal. And and
then I also do an anti goal. Meaning, what are some traps that I could
fall.
All into along the way that would like,
make this whole thing. Even if I hit my goals, I would
feel bad at the end of it because I like did this other thing, right? Like, for example, we all have these in life. Like,
you know, I would love to
be
successful but I don't want to let you
know, Screw over people along the way and carry that guilt with me, right? So that's like
being successful financially would be your
goal. I mean, you put some numbers around it, but then your anti goal would be I don't want to do this in a way that
Makes me feel unethical or ashamed in any way of what I did. I'd like to feel proud of it. Right? So, those become your anti goals or like, you know, I'd like to be successful, but I want to be able to make sure I'm home with my kids every day at 5 because that's really important to me. So an anti goal would be. Yeah, I made it happen, but I've never home, right? So my anti goal would be, you know, never getting home before, you know, next time. And so it's important to identify your anti goals. They're very clarifying for you.
And the kick off the ends with one hour or your power. Our basically,
like what something I could do in the next
hour that would just get like, create like momentum, get me to a win. And so this is not like do some research or make a list. It's like
get momentum towards the
actual outcome. So if I want to, you know
increase sales, that's like make a sale, make one sale or like if I wanted to grow my list, my email list. It's like, I don't
know. Post a thread on Twitter in the next hour that will get some subscribers to my
list. Just something.
Get the ball rolling. That's action-oriented. So you're not just always in planning mode.
So those are nine different little tips and
tricks that really work for me. That I don't
think you'll learn most of those and I don't know business school
or, you know, at your job that even if people try to do Management training, it's usually not things like this. These are my kind of like, you know, unorthodox pet tricks that I like to do that helped me, you know, with my companies. And so I hope that's helpful for you. If it is, let me know. You can tweet it at me at Shawnee P. If it's
Not helpful tweeted at me saying they you know, wasn't that helpful honest feedback. I love honest feedback. So either way works for me. I'm at Sean VP, which is sha a n VP on Twitter. All right.
Not here. I feel like I could rule the world. I know I could be what I want to put my all in it. Like a Days on the Road Less Traveled never looking back.
