EP 72 | TeamWork Makes the Billions

so many good episodes that are coming to you from work. Woman, regarding this thing right here, my book teamwork. Now, it has officially been one year since I wrote teamwork. It's one year. Think about the time that I wrote this. It was June of a Post-quarantine world. Now we are out of quarantine for the most part. However, there has been things like the Great Resignation that has taken place and now with continued conversation about interest rates, rising, inflation

going crazy, a recession that's upon us. I think it is now more than ever the time to really implement these strategies. And I also want to give you guys updates on the things that I've learned over the last year while I've been implementing these strategies inside our own business. Cardone ventures to let you know, hey, like double down on this or hey, pivot this one a little bit

in order to achieve this result. And so this series is going to be diving into teamwork deeper than I go into the book and giving you some more behind the scenes of the questions that I get from clients constantly and the insights that I've had over the last year. So this is going to be a very exciting series. This is the first of the series and we're just going to dive right in. So Before, just like going

into the content. And oftentimes I don't think that like talking about the introduction of a book is the most sexy or interesting thing. However, the introduction to my book is something that is, to me, a teachable and notable concept. I'd like to read this to you. So this is how I open this thing. I'm no fluff. You guys know this about me. I'm like, no bullshit. Cut to the chase. My book is just as direct as I am on this podcast. And so this is how I

introduce myself on this podcast or on this book. I've dedicated the last decade of my career to understanding how to align team members goals to the business goals, in order to create a culture where everyone is winning. I've led my own teams and worked with over a thousand clients to help them create high performance teams. Building and scaling teams is my passion over the last two years, I have been responsible for hiring, training, firing, and operating

at an organization called Cardone Ventures. In our first full year in business, we generated $16.4 million in annual revenue. Freaking fantastic. I'm currently writing this in July of our second year of business. Exactly one year ago right now, and we're on track to hit $40 million in annual revenue. So, mind you, I was writing this halfway through last year, and I put this out here that we are on

track to do $40 million in revenue. We are currently at 66 team members and will end the year at 80. Fast forward to the end of last year, and we hit $39.5 million in annualized revenue, and we ended the year at 78 employees. So the team stuff on pause for a second. This is something that is a characteristic of a leader that absolutely has to exist for them to be successful. Your ability to see the future, to speak it into existence, and to be so confident that

you are going to get there is invaluable. Your team needs to know that you see where you're going, that you are crystal clear on how you're going to get there, and that you're taking steps forward with that each and every day. Last year at this time, we predicted the future. We said, this is what we're going to do. This is how we are going to do it. We're going to hire this many people. Guys, we have doubled our team since I wrote this book just one year ago.

We've literally doubled. We went from it says 66 employees. At the moment of writing this, at the moment that I'm talking to you right now, including our business, on the health side, we have 150 team members, 150 freaking team members. So a double. More than a double? Actually, a double would be 120. We technically have 120 at Cardone Ventures, so that's a double. And then the acquisition of Ten-x Health creates the 150. So how are you setting your team up to know what the target is?

How are you setting them up to have confidence in you as the leader for having a vision, creating clarity and allowing them to to really put work in, to say, okay, I'm up for the challenge to achieve this vision that you've put out there, because it's not just about having

all these high hopes. Building a high performance teams. Mean team means I have targets, I have these dreams and aspirations, but I'm also going to push and fight and grovel and beg and do everything I have, do everything I can. You get the point. Do anything that's necessary, that's still ethical for me to be able to progress this business forward.

So I love that I introduce this book like this because it's such a reminder of like, this was a moment in time and I will say, just so that there's not, you know, imposter syndrome going on for you that you don't think existed with me when I wrote this. It's like, shit, what if the business does not do this? And now it is written in ink in the first two paragraphs of a book that I'm going to look

at for the rest of my life. Like, that's going to be really freaking embarrassing if we don't actually do this. But then this alternative thought took place, which is, hey, if I'm committing to this and I am publicly stating this, I'm going to hold myself accountable to do this. I'm going to take myself seriously to do this, which actually increases the likelihood that I'm going to achieve this thing. It's scary. And yes, I feel that sometimes too, like,

am I really going to put this out there? Because what if I fail? What if I'm not successful? It's okay to feel like that. I give you permission to have that momentary thought. You have it, and then you continue to press forward. You don't erase that line from the book. You don't not have that team meeting. You don't not share the target. You still share it while

still feeling like, oh my God, this is scary. And I might feel like an imposter and I might, I might fail like there's an option, but it's not really an option because I'm not going to let myself get there. Okay, so teamwork. I started chapter one of teamwork, talking about the employee engagement cycle. And now more than ever before, I see this as one of the number one challenges for business owners to overcome with their mindset around their

employees development inside their business. Like the when people get it, they change the culture When people don't get it, they don't change the culture. And then they still wonder, man. Like, why is my team stuck? Why can't I find great people? Oh, it's so hard to find remarkable talent. Oh, the Great resignation took all my best people away. Let's just be really clear. The Great Resignation did not take all your best people away. A challenged economy did not take your

best people away. People having side hustles and the growth of the MLM market. That is not the reason that you don't have great team members. You do not have great team members because you have not clarified for them how they're aligned with the business. You have not helped them develop. You have not allowed them to have success through working with you, because it's not something that maybe is top of mind for you, and then you also

haven't shown them, hey, what is transition? What does progress look like here? And so this employee engagement cycle I'm just like going to say this. I might say this for every single chapter because every piece is so Important in this puzzle. But if you don't understand the framework, to me, this employee engagement cycle, it is the picture. It's like the box for the puzzle. If you don't have the picture with the box, there's no way you're going to put the puzzle pieces together in the most

accurate and timely fashion. You might never put them all together. So this employee engagement cycle is like the framework. And to the extent we get the framework, all of these pieces are going to fall into place. I do on page 11 say, that's exactly what this book is going to give you. The whole system it takes to create a people process within your business, including the resources, including the resources and structure you need to create cultural, operational

and financial scale. Now, what I've learned since writing this book, and now with talking to so many business owners, is it's really easy for people to cherry pick. I'm going to do one on ones, but I'm not going to do the performance review. And instead of doing a daily all team meeting, I'm going to do a weekly all team meeting. Listen, I do this every single day in order to give you a blueprint of actual success. This is what we do every freaking day. This is what's

worked for us. You're not going to hear anything in here about what's not working. You're only going to hear in this book about what's working. And it is an entire system. So if the employee engagement cycle that I'm about to go through is the picture, all of the chapters, all of the the individual nuggets, those are the puzzle pieces. And still you don't have a complete puzzle if pieces are missing the fulfillment of, oh my gosh, I finished

the puzzle and look at how beautiful it is. That's never going to happen to you if you have these objections internally about moving forward with some of these recommendations. I had a meeting an hour and a half ago, about one of our clients who says they're so bought in and says all of the right things and shows up and seemingly does all the right things, and yet they're working with our managed services team, who is actually in the weeds with them on a day to day basis,

understanding what they're implementing. They freaking cherry pick things, and then they wonder why they're not growing. They're not growing because they're not implementing the full system. And it's my job to give people a slap in the face, not a literal slap, but like, give them some hard truth. Give them some. Like, hey, where's your commitment? Why is your commitment so low? That's my job. Because I know that this system works. I have that much confidence in

all of the pieces. And so again, me going through this with you is like, I want to be able to give you some additional context that I wasn't able to provide in the book, because I ran out of space and I ran out of time with that employee engagement cycle. The biggest things I see as a challenge with the employee engagement cycle is the lack of understanding of how all of the pieces come together. So think

about it like this. When you read the book, you're going to you're going to visually see and you can like see that I have like all of these visuals. The visuals inside the book were so important to me. You're going to visually see that the top part of this cycle, it literally is a cycle with arrows. So for those of you who aren't watching it, it's like I'm making a circle motion with my finger to say, like it starts, but then it continues. Like there's this

continued circling. It's not like you make one loop around the circle. It's like a clock right where the hands just continue and continue. That is the idea of an employee going through this cycle with you who is successful in your organization. The first step is aligning an employee. Everything that you do to align an employee is seated

in the introduction that they have to your business. It's seated the onboarding process that they have with you, which is so critical to getting somebody spooled up as quickly as possible to what your business does, how your business does it, who the important players are in your business and your team for them to get to know. There's so much intentionality that should go into onboarding many problems that come along in that development phase. Remember, I call

it development purgatory. When team members are stuck in a position in the same role in your organization for a long period of time, like three years in the same role, that's of course, somebody is not going to be motivated and excited because they're stuck in development. So alignment is step one. Then development alignment really ends after the person is onboarded and is fully capable of doing their role without you explaining new things to them the first time.

So I like to think of alignment as like the first somewhere between the first, um, 1 to 6 months. Some roles are more complex and complicated than others. Um, traditionally it would be like three months is where somebody is fully in alignment. They understand how the business works, they understand the customers, the team members, etc. and how to be successful in their role. So that's the alignment

phase then development. Now I describe this as a cycle, but for many of you, you don't think of this as a cycle. You think of it as steps. Step one is I onboard my team. Step two is they're part of my team and there's no cycle. It's just that's the end. Well, it's not the end because in the development phase they should be focusing on how do I get better at my role, how do I get better to where I'm adding more value, I'm contributing more, I'm excited about the work that I'm doing. I'm solving

bigger problems. And the reason that they're going to be so excited about those things is because they have the opportunity to transition. Transition looks like a promotion. So this is like if if I don't ever see how I could get promoted, why am I going to work my ass off for you? Ask yourself that question. If you were one of your team members, why would you give

it your all? It's easy as a business owner just to think, oh well, they could be doing so much more and there's so much opportunity and why don't they work harder and yet take that hat off as the owner and put on another hat? Which is why would I work this hard? Is the leader inspiring? Am I coached on how I could get better? Are there resources available for me to learn the things that I don't

know to add more skill sets? Are are there transparent numbers to where I even understand how close I am to my target every day so that I know if I am even getting better? So some of these things are just feelings that we have because we see these little momentary cracks in a team members performance. But this system of, oh, it's not just A12 step, it's not somebody onboarded and they're just an employee. It's actually somebody onboarded. They're aligned with me. Now I'm developing them so that

I can transition to the next role. There's going to be a whole slew of issues and potential opportunities in there that you are wrongfully assigning as, oh, it's just because the person is lazy or not motivated, or they're from some XYZ generation that isn't as hard of workers as mine was, which is all a bunch of bullshit.

It really is. The reality is, if somebody has a picture of where they're going, if they have a picture of where the business is going, and they understand what it's going to take for them to get to from where they are to where they want to go, you're going to have aligned engaged team members unless they're just not really interested in working that hard, which, to be honest with you, what we see here at Cardinal Ventures. That's maybe 15% of the staff that we hire. It

is not 100% of the staff. It's maybe 15 where they're like, Holy shit, I had no idea when you guys said that you were all of these things that you actually are all of these things. When you guys said we were ten x, I didn't really understand that you were ten x. We're like, yeah, we were as clear as possible about that on the front end. We put it everywhere, but we really are these things. So again, I will get into some of this nuanced stuff in

later podcasts and later, um, chapters of this book. But this overarching framework, once you have this in place, what you can more properly do, the way that this becomes so workable is identify a team member that you have an issue with, and then figure out the step which is always going to be backwards, right? It was something from the point in which you had the issue behind you,

not forward that created this problem. Once you start being more prescriptive in thinking of it in this cycle, you're going to come up with better solutions and better ways to get in front of these things, because logic is going to state for you to scale your business. You're just assume you're going to have this problem a hundred times over until you fix it or provide some sort of answer and then some sort of solution to whatever

the problem is. And as we go through this, I'll give you as many examples as I can of employee issues that we've had, where all of a sudden it became really obvious to me, oh my God, we just never put this in onboarding. I can give you guys an example of this right now. Uh, we had team members in our last big meeting who decided to go to a strip club, two separate team members, two separate

strip clubs with clients. One of the individuals actually posted pictures at the strip club with a stripper behind them in their Cartoon Ventures gear, and the other one did not post a picture, but a client came up to one of our team members at 4 a.m. in the morning. When they were back at the hotel, the team member that they approached was leaving for the airport because it was a 6 a.m. flight, and the client came up to the team member and was like, oh my gosh,

I just saw you at XYZ strip club. And the team member is like, uh, no you didn't. I just woke my ass up after working five straight days and barely sleeping in order to work this event. Like, what are you talking about? And they're like, yeah, I saw you there with the hat on that had the ten x, and it was another one of the team members who was actually at the strip club. So here, same night, two entirely different instances with team members going to strip clubs.

So can Natalie or Cartoon Ventures really get involved with what our team members do in their personal lives? In most cases, no we cannot. However, as soon as our brand is brought through and represented at these places, all of a sudden we can absolutely have a say. And yet we had never had a policy about this. It wasn't something that I had encountered before. It wasn't an issue that we had really thought through, like this wasn't

something that had actually happened already. When I think about that issue, you could just write it off as, oh, that's just a one time thing. Or hey, maybe your culture is good with that kind of thing. Our culture is very much opposed to that. We do not fraternize with our clients. Our team members are not allowed to drink with our clients so that we can protect our brand and the guidance and the advice that we give.

And we want people to be in a sober state when they're communicating with our clients is just important to us. So when this happened, is it because the team member is an idiot? Well, there might be that that like maybe potential however like what what Responsibility can Natalie take to say, how could I have been more clear with these team members? So now our policy has been updated. It now says, hey, when you go to an event with us, these are the things that you cannot do.

And we spell it out. And not only do we spell it out, but it created this opportunity for us to revamp our entire events training process to have our team members read the events training. But now one of my greatest tips on this is we have them take a quiz. Anything that you know is going to be important in your business. You have somebody read the information

about it, but then you also quiz them later. So now there's this whole events quiz on the things that you can or can't do, so that I feel confident growing and scaling my business forward. So this cycle, when you think back, it would be easy just to assess the situation as, oh, it was just this one person. Oh, it was just Sally. Oh, it was just Joe. Well, no, not really because you could hire ten more Sally's and ten more Joe's, and you're gonna have to deal with

this 20 more times. That's not that's not ideal. So what do you do in the alignment phase? That's that first bucket in the talent engagement cycle. What are we doing to align people to say these are our expectations. If you don't if you're not clear, if you're not, if you're not setting an expectation, that's so crystal clear with people on the front end, then of course it's just going to kind of happen by default. You don't

want things happening by default. As Sharon Lechter says, you either have your culture be by default or you have it be by design. So when you think about the employee engagement cycle, what's really going to help you actually crystallize this path is putting your team members inside it. When you open up the book, this one is on page 14, the first like big cycle. Make a list of all of your team members and identify which phase they're in. Are they in alignment? Are they in development

or are they in transition? Transition would look like, hey, they're transitioning out. Maybe they're taking another job. They are on a performance improvement plan. There's like some sort of transition to where they potentially are no longer going to be with you, or they are transitioning into a new role because they've been promoted, because there was some growth there. Now, I have this sinking suspicion that once you do this activity, you drop your employees into, hey, are they aligning? Are

they developing? Are they transitioning? As you look at that list, what you're going to find is probably the majority of your team is going to be in that development phase. That's okay. There's nothing wrong with that. But we have to have a clear path for how they move to the next phase. When you look at your team members,

how many of them have been stuck? One of the criteria that you should be looking at is if a team member has been in the same role for more than a year and a half to two years, there's likely a problem there. There's some caveats to this, of course. What if somebody is just good being where they're at. They're not really interested in growing. They're not really excited

about that. I would tell you this if you have a team member like that and you have less than 50 employees, that's going to be a struggle for you. And the reason why is you need people who are excited about growing. You need people who are going to help you grow. And if you don't have the majority of your team saying, I'm all in, I will do whatever it takes. I'm excited about this opportunity. I will

develop myself. I will go above and beyond, and instead you have people who are just like, ah, I'm good where I'm at. It is going to be extremely difficult for you to grow. Extremely, extremely difficult. So if you know that your growth is the target, why are you going to put barriers in your way? That's going to cause difficulty in doing that. You need team members who have that thing inside them. And I don't know where that thing comes from. I do believe it can be developed.

I don't believe people are born with that tenacity, but it needs to be present across all of your team members if you're below 50 team members. So you got your activity. You know what you're doing. You're all good. If you are not good and you're not clear on the activity, just rewind this about two minutes. Take a moment. Do this so that you can really start to to crystallize this concept of the cycle. Because the rest of the book hinges on understanding where team members are at.

And then once we know where they're at, we can better assess what the challenges are, how to get them to overcome those challenges so that you have an aligned and engaged team. If you have not picked up a copy of teamwork yet, my friend, now is the time to do it. This is going to be an in-depth series.

You're not going to want to miss out on the additional context that the book gives you, so that you can supplement it with the conversations that we're going to be having over the course of the next few weeks on this podcast, so you can find a copy of Teamwork at Cardone ventures.com/teamwork. It'll come to you by giving it to you for free on that link. All you have to do is pay for shipping and handling and that book will come right over to you. I'm excited

to kick this off. I'm excited that you are investing in yourself, in your business, in your leadership skills, and most importantly, your team so that you can create the environment that you have always dreamed of and not just settle for people around you who might be holding you back. Because really, that's only holding yourself back to where you want to go with that. Have a spectacular day and make sure to do the activity. I can't wait to see you next week!