MONUMENTAL MASH-UP // Building A Winning Team

Evan Holladay: Hey guys, welcome to Monumental. I'm your host, Evan Holladay. Today we're going to be doing another mashup episode. This week I want to round up some top, top guests for you guys to really talk about the secrets to great leadership, and also building a team for success.

I've decided to create a mashup of four previous Monumental episodes to really dive in specifically on these topics, and give you that mid-week motivation that we all need. If you want to improve your leadership skills or be able to grow your team successfully, then this episode is for you.

First up, we have Greg Dickerson. He's a serial entrepreneur, he's a real estate developer, a mentor and a coach. Next we'll hear from Chris Powers, who is a serial entrepreneur and has over 16 years of experience in real estate investment and development in building quite a substantial team around him, and being able to elevate himself out of the CEO role.

Then we'll hear from Trevor Mauch, who is CEO of Carrot, where they have helped real estate investors and agents pull in over three million leads in just the last five years. Finally, we have Elena Cardone, who has inspired a legion of followers to create and build their own empire.

All four of these guests bring an amazing perspective to both team building and leadership, so make sure to stay tuned to the end. If you guys appreciate today's episode and you really get a lot of value out of this, please make sure to take a screenshot wherever you're listening to this, and share on social media and tag me @evanholladay or one of our guests today. All right, guys, enjoy today's episode.

Greg Dickerson: You asked me earlier about the number of clients I have and I've had over the years, and how I keep track of all that. That's how, it's through leading, delegating, motivating and having people execute for me. What I was very fortunate learning and understanding early, and a lot was through the military, learning about chain of command, discipline, things like that.

Leading, becoming a leader, delegator, motivator was getting results through others by inspiring. Leaders inspire results out of others. Leaders set the pace of the pack. Leaders motivate the team to achieve the end goal, so it's all about impact, number one. So again, I'm just wired that way.

Number one, I'm wired to solve problems. Number two, I'm wired to give back. My goal has always been when I started out in business, little remodeling handyman guy was me. Then I hired one person, and then I hired another. I was literally working in the field with my hands, doing the work, going out, giving the estimates. I would do the work in the field with the guys.

When I hired my third person, I was able to step out of the field. Then I hired an office manager administrator, and then I grew and scaled from there into different avenues. My whole process was to find people better and smarter than me at these areas, and then put them in a position to succeed and coach them to success and let them do what I brought them in to do.

I was very fortunate early on to realize you needed to surround yourself with great people, people that were better than you and smarter than you. All of my executive team had degrees, MBAs. My chief financial officer and bookkeepers and the president of my companies, they were all highly educated, very well-trained people.

Here I am, just a kid who grew up with a GED in my senior year, I left school and got my GED so I could join the Navy and built this company and these businesses from the ground up. So very early on, I was very fortunate to come across some books and start pouring into myself, developing myself, educating myself, and realizing that in order to achieve anything, you have to achieve it through others.

The only way you can do that is number one, you have to be a servant leader. Bottom-up leadership, not top-down. I came up very top-down leadership. My dad was very disciplined, military strict type of a leader. The military that I joined was very much follow-orders-or-people-die kind of thing.

I learned in my career through the organizations that I was involved in and through developing myself as a leader that leadership works from the bottom-up. You have to serve. The leader has to give everybody in the organization everything they need, tools, training, systems, and support to be successful. Clear direction, and no uncertain terms. Exactly what's expected, and when.

Then you've got to put the right people in the right places, aces in places. More importantly than that, you got to let them do their job. You bring Tom Brady into Tampa Bay to win a Super Bowl, do you tell him how to do his job? He's already won seven or six or whatever it is before he met you.

You bring him in, you pay him whatever it takes to get him in and you say, "Go win a Super Bowl." You let him do his thing. That's what I was very good at doing is putting that ego aside, realizing that none of us are as smart as all of us, that I don't know anything. The more I learned, the more I realized I don't know.

Again, finding great people that have been where I wanted to be and surround myself with them, learn from them, and then inspire them to achieve the results through a vision of a mission to impact the community around us. That's what it is. It was the ability for people to come alongside me, join me in these organizations to be able to make an impact, give back and accomplish the things that they wanted to do, not only in their lives, but in the community at large.

We were always looking, how can we serve? How can we serve the community? How can we serve our employees, and ultimately, how can we give back as an organization? All of my business plans were always reverse-engineered. Number one, keep people busy. Create opportunities to keep other people busy, create jobs, create opportunities, solve problems.

Number two, give back. We created an organization that would fund community events so that we can make an impact in the community and the world that we were in.

Evan Holladay: What advice would you have for our Monumental listeners trying to build a great team, and be able to take some of the principles you're mentioning about building great quality culture and trying to make just a fun, unique place to work, where people are excited to come in every day and make cool things happen?

Chris Powers: Well, you talked about the building early on. I think the first thing I would say is the first few employees in a business are so critical. They're unbelievably critical, and what you usually find in a small business that's moving fast is they don't really have great hiring techniques. They're just trying to get warm bodies in the office to do the work.

The afterthought is the culture, and so to the extent you can, I think the cliché is be slow to hire and quick to fire. You have to be super intentional early on about who's coming in. The truth of the matter is as the company grows, you have to be able to continue leveling up, because what works early on doesn't work at 20 people, at 40 people. There's different skill sets.

One is just making it a focus. Two, be relentless. The people that you work with are with you eight hours a day, or you often see them more than you see your families. I don't think people, especially first time founders or first time CEOs, maybe they don't think about that as much. It's more like hey, just come join the fight and we'll figure out the culture thing later.

What they don't realize is the culture is created day one, you just don't know it. It is just really intentional. We've had a lot of amazing hires and the team is in incredible shape. Early on, there were times where we regretted who we hired. They weren't bad people as people, they just didn't fit what we were trying to do.

We didn't really know that until after and looking back, it's probably something we could have known during the interview process had we been more intentional about it. Your culture is everything, and I didn't know that originally. I knew I wanted to work with smart people, but I just thought, "Everybody will just arrive, and they'll just do what I think."

What you realize is having a culture is super easy. Everybody will get it. I think culture is if you're in business school or coming out of college, you just think of it as this word in your textbook, but it's something you fight for every single day. One person can change a culture dramatically, and so I always tell people, your culture is what you're willing to accept in your business.

It's not the top of your business, it's what you're willing to accept at the bottom. What you find in companies that don't work out long time is that bottom keeps getting lower and lower. They keep accepting less and less, and to maintain a great culture that bottom bar needs to keep raising. You need to be relentlessly focused on not compromising what that is.

The truth is if you can get it right, and I'm not saying we've got it right, you're always working on it. Great people want to be a part of a great culture. You can't get great people to show up and last very long in an organization that doesn't focus on that. If we were to relate it to sports, Alabama wins the National Championship every year not because they're using the same players every year, but because they have an amazing culture and way of doing things that makes great people arrive and not only arrive, but then flourish once they're there.

It's a lot like parenting. If some of your listeners are parents, the biggest impact on a kid's life I think it's unequivocally we can all say this, is who are their parents? How are they raised? What values are they given? We're dealing with adults in business, but it's very much a lot of the same concepts. You got to invest in these people and you got to put the time in, and they need to know it's genuine. Again, it's not like you invest in somebody for a day and you're good. It's an ongoing process forever, and that's how you hear these stories that we read of the janitor that became the CEO.

Well, the theme in that story is that person was invested in every level. Not only were they invested in, but they're also obviously people that took the initiative to run with that investment. It's a lot of work. To be candid with you, just so I'm not sounding like I'm somebody that I'm not, that constant investment in people and managing of people day-to-day and accountability was really what fatigued me.

I knew I could lead people, but the day-to-day grind of working with people wasn't my strength. Originally I was like, "Man, I'm just a bad person." I put a lot of shame on myself for that. In that two-year process of exploring what I realized is no, there are people on this planet that love to manage people, and love to work with them day-to-day. I just said, "Great, then I'm going to have somebody do that so that I can do what I'm better at."

Trevor Mauch: There's the indirect impact that I think a lot of us forget about, and this is what we really honed in a few years ago after trial and error, is how can we make this business sustainable so it's not all about hitting the next number of dollar? We've got to grow to create more opportunity for team members, and so we can impact more people. Growth is a part of that, and it's fun to grow. It's not fun to go backwards.

The indirect impact where you're looking at too, and this time I want to challenge every listener too, is what are we doing and how are we operating as a business that we can inspire others to operate business at a better level, where they can add more humanity to business in their business? Where they can actually show up with more morals, more values, more ethics, actually with a core value set on their wall that they follow a business by.

That when someone reaches out to Carrot, we hear all the time, "Man it's the best support I've ever experienced anywhere in my 30 years in business." That's the indirect impact that the rest of our team is pumped about. It's how can we show up and just be a better example? It creates this butterfly effect to the 8,000 customers that we're working with.

Then there's a spot, Evan, right when we were probably around one to two million a year. I can't remember exactly how many people, maybe 15 people on the team, 10 people on the team. This was the second biggest pivot is I had to make the decision myself, am I going to hold this business back or am I going to learn how to grow and actually build a real team?

It was when we were eight people actually is when it was, and here's exactly why. I didn't know it at the time, but in hindsight I know now is you can really only manage six to eight people effectively and still be able to do your job. I don't care if that's outsourcers or employees or whatever. We're sitting here at eight employees and I'm just going, "I have no time to do my work."

It feels like I'm putting in 60 hours a week and I'm still not getting my stuff done, and I don't feel like I'm serving my team members well either. In that moment I said, "I'm either going to dial this business back and make it a lifestyle business, or I'm going to learn how to be a leader and grow a team." That's a whole other call, and we could dive into that as much of that as you want.

That moment there in 2016 is when I made that choice. I'm like, "I don't know how to do it, but I'm going to stop being scared of employees and growing a team. I'm just going to see where we can take this company." That mindset shift was big.

Around that same time as that mission and purpose started to bake in, because I had to make that decision. Am I going to dial this back to be a lifestyle business, which that's a whole other - I've done podcasts on that, man. I don't want to build lifestyle businesses. You don't get freedom from those.

You get freedom from those for six months, eight months, 12 months, maybe 18 or 24 months. Eventually, you're going to have to go back in and rebuild the system that broke down or rebuild the thing. It's stressful. With this, man, around that time that's when I said, "Shoot, this is where I get to actually learn how to build a business that gives freedom. Let me figure it out and let me then teach as many people as I can in our customer community how to do the same thing."

Evan Holladay: For you to make that switch, what did that look like? Was that a team-wide and then also, was it certain hires that you made that helped you unlock more of your time and also allow other people to take on more ownership?

Trevor Mauch: There's a couple of things, man. I've got a friend, his name is Alex Charfen. He created something called the Billionaire Code, and you guys should go look it up. It's Alex Charfen, Billionaire Code is this really cool graphic that shows that every level of business and it goes to by revenue.

What the entrepreneur, the founder is going through. What questions he or she needs to ask and how they need to answer it. I didn't learn this until two years ago. I wish I would've seen it earlier. Essentially at that eighth person mark, what it was for me, Evan, was people were coming to me for so many decisions. Tons and tons of decisions, and I could immediately make them because I knew where the company was going.

But they couldn't make the decision because they really weren't clear where the heck we were going with this thing. I would talk about it, but they couldn't go back and say, "This is where we're going over the next three years, and here's our goals." I hired a coach. That was the first time I'd ever hired a coach in my life in 2016.

He was a leadership coach. He came in every single Tuesday for 90 minutes. It was like entrepreneurial therapy, and he would come in here with no agenda. We would just talk, and he would start asking questions. Then he would always give me a prescription based on what I'm going through in that moment.

He's like, "Sounds like your people don't really know where you're going. You really can't get freedom unless they know what's in your head and where you're going, so do you have a written vision?" Well, I'd say it all the time. I say where we're going. He's like, "Well, can you tell me right now, where are you going?"

Of course, I couldn't. It's just a random smattering of stuff. He said, "That's the first thing you need to do." I labored over that for probably three months and we wrote our very first ever, I called a vision story in 2016. That ended at the end of 2020. We rewrote the 2023 vision story a few months back.

That was the first thing, dude. As soon as you get that vision on paper, then you're talking to your team and say, "Hey guys and gals, this right here, this is where we're going. This is why, and these are the core strategies that are going to get us there, and get the buy-in from it." Then they get excited about it, and then you can keep on coaching back to vision.

Hey, awesome. Great question. How does that help us get closer to vision? That was the biggest unlock for me, for sure. Then there's a whole series of other things. Delegation and communication cadence, stuff you learn in EOS. Those types of kinds of things and how to run the business, but the vision and the vision story and communicating that well was the key.

Elena Cardone: Well, I had spoken at the 10X Growth Con two years in a row, and I had so much feedback from the people in the audience telling me their success stories. Wow, you changed my relationship with my husband or my wife or my boyfriend or my girlfriend or whomever. Thank you so much, and that was so impactful and you changed the way I think about things.

I was just under the assumption that the majority of people knew what I already knew, but from hearing it from so many people, I really cognized that people don't think how I think, and they are struggling in their relationships. That's what inspired me to really put this into book form, so that anyone who was really looking to build an empire or get on the same page with a spouse.

This book is for either or, but I really wanted to just document what it is and what role I do. That's what inspired it. Also, if you go back 10 or 15 years, there wasn't a woman that I could look to that was behind this big entrepreneurial guy. They don't let me see into their life. I mean I know Zuckerberg, but I don't know what she did.

You can just take the list and go down the list, and I don't know what she did, like Bezos. I know a little bit about her, but I don't know how they did it together. Not a lot of people before this book really know what it is that I do. They just see that I'm always around, but they don't understand every little thing that I do.

Not that they still do, but this was just more of an opportunity to expose that to other people, to fast-track them to cut down all that learning curve that it took me to just say, "Hey, you know what? If we did this, because it is small little tweaks. If we just did small little tweaks, we can boost ourselves so much." We have the advantage over so many people who just don't know certain little things.

Evan Holladay: I think you're 1,000% right because that's something that my partner, Jined and I have talked about is there's not enough people talking about what does it take for a couple to be successful? That partnership that you're having every day and how you have to think of yourself as a team first, because that's conversations we have all the time.

If we get into an argument or silly little arguments we're like, "Wait a second, remember we are on the same team, we are trying to get further together." How are you and Grant going through this on a day-to-day basis? How do you all push each other and make sure, remind yourself that you are on the same team every day?

Elena Cardone: Well, we meet pretty much weekly, but we have our goals and we have our couple's goals and what we want to achieve together so in the forefront of our minds. It is so massive and so big that when you set them, when you actually have the audacity to set a goal so huge and so outrageous and bold, you then realize that the benefit of that is that you can't afford to waste time being petty with each other.

We really have to understand who does what, and what our roles are. Then like you said, function even in the face of when we aren't getting along from day-to-day or some, “You irritated me there, you did this” whatever. A lot of that stuff we do just let go and function anyway. Now, if it's a reoccurring problem that happens over and over, then it's the time to okay, we got to address this because it's -

Evan Holladay: Before it becomes an elephant in the room.

Elena Cardone: Yeah, exactly, because now it's a reoccurring. But most arguments that couples have aren't going to be reoccurring, they’re a one-off, and the more you can start letting the one-offs just roll off for the big picture, you're going to get so far ahead. When you think about it in a week from now, I don't remember half of the stuff that irritated me about Grant.

I was like, "I know I was really bugged out, but I don't even remember why." I'm really glad I didn't have a fight about it because it doesn't matter. It's like you live on a planet with other people, you're going to have to get along. Your partner is not going to be exactly who you want, say the right thing, give you the right attention, do this. They're not going to be perfect.

You just have to deal with that, and you have to find what I have found is that the more I can figure out how to handle myself in those situations to deal with it, the better off we are and the more we can get ahead together.

Evan Holladay: In the book you took us through your life's journey. Being raised in New Orleans, moving to LA all the way to here in Miami and that transformation you went through. A big part of your book was about if you're not building an empire, you're destroying one.

Could you talk a little bit about when you first realized that, and how that came to be a big part of your life?

Elena Cardone: Well, I realized the creating or destroying the empire came out of a fight that we had had one day. I was really upset about something, honestly, I don't even remember what it was, but I was really upset. I remember when he came home, I wanted to ignore him. In our relationship, I have made agreements to handle his hunger and get him food, so he's fed so he can focus on work and this and that.

That's one thing I agreed to, but this particular day I was like, "Screw that. I am not making him a meal. He does not appreciate me, he does not realize all the stuff that I do for him." This is all going on in my head. "Maybe if I stopped doing everything, he'll realize how much I do and maybe, just maybe I get a thank you."

I was building it all up in my head. Then I realized, okay, but if I flunked, that's my role that I've just now not done, not executed. Then what's the ramification? He's going to get irritated, he's going to lose focus. So I started just thinking about okay, then I'm going to do this and then he's going to get me back with that, whatever his thing is.

Then I'm going to one-up him because I'm very competitive and it's going to build and build, because I've been down that road before. That was the moment I realized no, Elena, that's destroying your empire and we don't have time for that because I want this. I want this thing so badly.

I am willing to forfeit that and not have the luxury to fight over stupid stuff, or put the ego aside or whatever. I can't afford that luxury, so I found myself forcing myself into the kitchen and making him a meal. Then I made him his meal, and then it was so crazy. He was like, "Wow, thanks for doing that for me."

I was in my head like, "Wow, that was really cool. Did he read my mind? I was just saying, I needed a thank you." But even had I not gotten a thank you, it was just, I have to be able to do my role no matter what. I had a viewer write to me recently and say from these interviews, “You just seem like your relationship is all business and this and this."

It brought it to my attention, I said, "Yeah, I can see that because I'm always in interviews talking about how we run our relationship, which is very business-like." A lot of times on social media, obviously you don't get to see all the intimacy. Not that intimacy, but even just intimacy. Just affection, so we also have that too and that's very important. But I wanted to say that because I understand how I present it in the book, it is very business-esque, but that's how we approach our relationship.

Evan Holladay: I want to step back a little bit because you hit on a great point, is you at that point where you realized you were looking to build and not destroy your relationship, you went into this position of like hey, I'm going to push myself into this uncomfortable spot and push myself to be uncomfortable.

At the end of the day, you are that much better and your relationship is that much further because of it. That's something I struggled with at the beginning of our relationship is I had constantly said, "I'm going to shut off. I'm going to put up this wall and I'm not going to say anything. I'm not going to talk. I'm just going to act like I have no emotions and not move forward." That's the worst thing I could have done, and I think a lot of couples struggle with that. You just have to be open, you have to be candid. You have to be realizing you're on the same team.

Elena Cardone: That's right. I do tell that to Grant a lot. I'm like, "Hey, if I feel like there's an attack coming at me…” Because he's on attack mode a lot and I need him to be that way. That's what he does with this business. That's how he is able to do what I can't do, but sometimes it comes to me. Sometimes I'm like, "Hey, I'm on your team." I learned that from a guy in the office, Ryan Tseko, who says that all the time, "Hey, I'm on your team, boss." Now I just say that.

Evan Holladay: Guys, that is it for today's episode. I really hope you enjoyed. I hope you got some monumental value out of this. If you are interested in hearing more, make sure to go to www.evanholladay.com/monumental to hear the full-length episode for each of these guests. With that, have a monumental day.