Speaker A
If you feel like you're not making progress, this might be why. In the earlier part of my career, I read a ton of self-help books, everything I could get my hands on. But I realized that my life didn't change. And so this video is
Learn why overanalyzing plans stalls progress and how consistent execution, culture, and talent drive business success.
Key Takeaways
- Stick with a sensible plan rather than chasing perfection.
- Execution quality is more important than the specific strategy chosen.
- Company culture and talent quality directly impact execution success.
- Most people quit when facing difficulty rather than persevering through the unknown.
- Improving execution and commitment beats constantly changing strategies.
Summary
- Many people fail to progress because they constantly switch strategies instead of committing to one.
- Success requires conviction in a plan and consistent execution rather than waiting for the perfect strategy.
- The analogy of climbing a mountain illustrates that multiple paths exist, but switching paths wastes time and effort.
- Most people already know what to do but fail to follow through consistently.
- The 'fallacy of the perfect pick' causes overanalysis and delays action.
- Execution is often hindered by issues in company culture and talent quality.
- Culture is defined by the rules of reinforcement—what behaviors are rewarded or punished.
- Having a high bar for talent and ensuring employees are fully committed is crucial for performance.
- Training and detailed observation help ensure the plan is actually followed.
- Switching strategies frequently is less effective than improving execution and addressing underlying talent and culture issues.
Chapters
- 00:00Introduction: Why You Might Not Be Making Progress
- 00:57The Importance of Execution Over Perfect Strategy
- 01:46The Fallacy of the Perfect Pick
- 02:29Personal Experience: Spreading Too Thin Across Businesses
- 03:19The Low Bar for Excellence and Sticking With It
- 04:04Why Switching Paths Slows Progress
- 04:54Execution as the Sharpness of Your Knife
- 05:46Understanding Culture: Rules of Reinforcement
- 06:43Culture and Talent: Key Drivers of Execution
- 07:37Training and Observing Details to Improve Execution
Full Transcript — Download SRT & Markdown
Speaker A
about why that might be the case, and more importantly, what you can do about it. If you think about, you know, climbing a mountain, a lot of people think that there's like what is the perfect path up the mountain. But in my
Speaker A
experience, there's usually multiple paths up the mountain that you can take. But none of the paths will work if you're constantly trying to jump from path to path. Because in the real world, one path might be direct and might be
Speaker A
steeper. Another path might have more loops. Now, you might see the other path and think, "Man, that one's not as steep." But we don't know about the path until you get on it. Is that, oh man, this one's actually going to take me way
Speaker A
longer to get up the mountain. And so most of the time, we need perfect conviction about our plan more than we need a perfect plan. And so, think of the paths up the mountain as your strategy. Like the mission is getting to
Speaker A
the top. That's what we want to do. But the strategy is how we're going to prioritize our resources to get there. Right? And so your ability to execute on the path, walk the path, stick to the path is ultimately the
Speaker A
thing that's going to predicate your success far more than the path itself, provided it's sensible. And what I found in my experience is that most people actually have a pretty decent idea what to do. I'll give you a different
Speaker A
analogy. So if I said, "Hey, you need to get in shape." If you know nothing about getting in shape, you still probably have an idea that you should probably stop eating crap and you should start moving more. And if you're trying to
Speaker A
gain muscle, you should probably like lift weights. And if you want to get bigger, you should probably make those weights or those reps go up. These are probably things you'd be like, I kind of already knew that. But the thing is,
Speaker A
people don't do that. And so the issue usually is like, I want to have this perfect plan. But like, if you just did only that for the next three years, you'd probably be way better off than the vast majority of people. And so this
Speaker A
was a big realization that I had, which is I had this overanalysis of like what is the perfect plan? And I call it the fallacy of the perfect pick, which is that we wait and we wait to try and
Speaker A
find the perfect pick. The thing is, this is a $5 million a year business owner. So this has nothing to do with where you're at. This happens at all levels, right? The mountain just gets bigger. But it's the same concept. And
Speaker A
so for me, there was a period in my life before I started making, you know, more money, where I had nine different businesses. All right? And I had nine businesses that I was CEO of and I
Speaker A
wasn't making any money. And we were making revenue, but because I was so spread thin, I couldn't focus on any of them enough. And so all I could do is just barely keep my head above water. I had, you know, a dental agency,
Speaker A
I had a chiropractic agency. I had my launch business where I was flying out.
Speaker A
So I was in different cities every week doing these launches. And then I also had six locations of gyms that were running too. So I was so spread, I was stressed out of my mind. And so most people can't execute. And so what I
Speaker A
would think at that moment in time, like now looking back, it's obvious and maybe you hearing it's obvious, but for some reason it's kind of like the Yiddish seg where your nose is an inch above your mouth but you need somebody else to tell you
Speaker A
your breath smells bad. I think it's the same thing with this, which is that at the time if you, if I had asked younger me what do you think the problem is? I'd be like I think I need to change
Speaker A
my strategy up. I think I need to change all these things up. When the reality is that most times you don't need to change that much at all. You need to actually just do the one thing really well. And
Speaker A
so it's not about coming up with the plan or doing the plan. It's sticking with the plan, right? You can beat most people at anything if you just stick with it for a year. If you're willing to suck at something for 100 days in a
Speaker A
row, then you can beat most people at most things. The bar for excellence has never been so low. And so most of your competition quits after the first sign of difficulty, the first impasse on the mountain where they don't immediately
Speaker A
get it because they've never known what hard feels like. And so you having to figure something out, the unknown is the hard part. The figuring it out is the hard part. And so people think that, oh I should switch paths because I
Speaker A
understand the path of getting to here. So you might get this far up the mountain and you might be on this path and think, oh, I could do this path or this path or this path. The thing is
Speaker A
usually you have to go back down and then you got to go over and you got to go up again, right? So it's actually a lot longer to keep switching paths. But we don't think that because this path we
Speaker A
can see. We already walked down here. We already see the bottom of the mountain.
Speaker A
We can see the path to here. But then from here, we get stuck again. And so we keep, you know, releveling up and going from, you know, level one to level two, level three really quickly because we've beaten those bosses before. But then you
Speaker A
get to level four again and you're stuck. And so you have to grit through that period where you don't know what you're doing. And this took me so long to understand, like the not knowing part is the part that's hard and that is
Speaker A
where people give up. It's not usually the, like, oh, I just need to work harder. Sure, there's some people who are weak and they just lose there, but most of the times when I talk to business owners, that's not actually
Speaker A
where they lose. It's because they don't know what to do and so they think, "Oh I'll change my strategy rather than figuring out what to do is the strategy." And so most strategies do work. So I want to hit on this a little
Speaker A
harder. One of the misconceptions about business is that there's this one secret thing, right? There's usually lots of ways to win. There's a few ways to skin a cat, right? If you have a dull knife on the other hand, you're never going to
Speaker A
be able to skin the cat. And the sharpness of your knife is your ability to execute whatever path you have, right? Whatever way of skinning a cat, which is actually pretty visceral and
Speaker A
nasty. Like, who's actually skinning cats should probably retire that saying. I mean, think about a skinned cat, it's a little tough. Anyways, when I was talking back to the business owner, I said okay, so if execution is the issue, what's the, that's the, okay, that's the surface level problem, you're not doing what you know
Speaker A
you should do. The underneath of that is why is this not happening? And so I see this as a combination of two different things and so one is culture and the other is talent. So I'm going to explain
Speaker A
both in a more operationalized manner so it's not just these buzzwords. All right, so what is culture? So culture is the rules of reinforcement in a business.
Speaker A
Okay. So, what are the things that govern what gets rewarded and what gets punished? And so, if you think about culture, there's probably a hundred or thousand behaviors that exist within any business or any environment, right? When we learn a culture as a society, there
Speaker A
are things that we do. You hold a door. That's one thing that you do and it gets rewarded and if you don't do it, it gets punished, right? If you cut somebody off in traffic, it gets punished, right? And
Speaker A
so, each of these things are things that get rewarded or punished. And that's what creates culture. But within every business, there's kind of a subculture within the larger culture where you have more and more nuance of things that are
Speaker A
your preferences as a business owner. But if people are not workin
Speaker A
one, who you hire and who you fire. So who you allow to exist in the business tells more to your team about what you think is acceptable. Number two is the behavior that you do not allow to change. So if someone does something
Speaker A
good and you don't reward it, then they learn that they don't get rewarded for doing that thing. On the flip side, if someone shows up 5 minutes late to a meeting and no one says anything, then you teach everyone it's okay to be late.
Speaker A
And so the first issue with his business was that there's probably a culture of non-performance. And we have to get very specific with what makes somebody not perform. And sometimes it's only two or three behaviors. Often times it's like
Speaker A
20 or 30. And you have to be able to observe what are the things that makes me not like my team and what would I rather them do instead. And so I use the format of start, stop, keep. So what I
Speaker A
want you to start doing that you're not doing, what I want you to stop doing that you are doing, and what do you need to keep doing that I'm going to keep reinforcing. It's a very simple way to
Speaker A
give feedback that I really like. Now what about talent? Because that's the second half. This is one is the cult is the rules, right? The talent is the people who are actually doing the behaviors, doing the stuff. And so from
Speaker A
a talent perspective, a lot of businesses can't expand anymore, not because they uh don't have the model to do it, but they don't have the ability to execute on the plan. And the ability to execute on the plan comes down to the
Speaker A
quality of the people that you have in the business. And I can tell you this firsthand, you probably don't have high enough bar for who should be working for you. And I say this for myself, too. the moment I increase the quality of the
Speaker A
people who work with me, the more money I make, right? And so what's really interesting is that I think that this is one of the greatest arbitrage opportunities that exists in business to this day still, which is that the 50%
Speaker A
mark for a role is $75,000 a year. Now for you to pay 90th percentile, it might be $115,000 per year. Right now, you might be like, "Wow, that's a big difference." But here's the thing is that this person is probably like five
Speaker A
times more effective than this one, but they only cost 30% more. That's a great deal. That's a good investment. And so at this point, all I really try and do is just find rain makers. I want people who are exceptional, who are obsessed
Speaker A
with this task. Now, how do you differentiate the people who are good versus not? I'll give you a tactic around this. So, when you're interviewing, I like to know what someone's doing in their off time. And if what they do in their off time is not
Speaker A
what I want them to do in their full-time, then they're not going to be full-time, right? They're going to be always moonlighting to their other thing. And so, I'd rather say like, what are you obsessed with? And I like asking
Speaker A
that question. What are what are your extracurricular activities? Now, if they're like, "Honestly, all I do, let's say I'm hiring a videographer. They're like,"All I do is video stuff. Like this is what I'm really passionate about. This is what I spend my time
Speaker A
watching on YouTube is like, "How do I improve the lighting? How do I improve the audio? How do I improve the sets?
Speaker A
Like, this is the stuff that I like really obsessed about." I probably know that that person's going to do a pretty good job because also, if I tell them "Hey, you need to improve this stuff." They're like, "Great. I love this
Speaker A
feedback. I want to get better." Now, if somebody's like, "Oh, I love, you know uh, pickle ball and using, you know, and working out." There's nothing wrong with that. It's just that is that the thing that you're obsessed with? And so asking
Speaker A
that question in a couple ways in an interview will tease out whether someone is spending their discretionary, effort and time on the talent or the skill that they need to win in their role in the business. And so that's on the pick
Speaker A
side, right? The third element of this uh, here we go, is training. So if you have rules that govern reinforcement in the business, okay, this is what we like, this is what we don't like, and then you get really good people in, you
Speaker A
still can have people who have potential versus actual. And so obviously the higher up in the business, the more you're hiring for actual, the less you're hiring for potential. The lower someone is in the business, the more you're hiring for potential and less for
Speaker A
actual. And so when we're picking somebody, it's like I'll pick somebody who's just generally intelligent and has work ethic over somebody who might be more experienced in the career but doesn't demonstrate the same level of intelligence because I think the smart
Speaker A
person will be able to catch up to that dumber person really quickly and then pass them. And so what does training look like? And so training in the business in order to execute, I'm going to be really clear here. The reason that
Speaker A
your plan isn't working is because no one's doing the plan. So why aren't they doing the plan? These are the reasons right? And so from a training perspective, it typically comes down to observing the details. I'm going to give
Speaker A
you a story about this. So I was meeting with a different business which is a solar sales company that was doing, you know, multiple figures, which is great goodiz business. And the founder was telling me that they were struggling to
Speaker A
develop a sales leadership within the business. And he said they did an off-site and they came up with like their six pillars of sales leadership.
Speaker A
And it was like accountability, time management, blah blah blah blah, right? They had like six things. I don't remember where they were. And he said after the two-day, you know, two-day event where everyone came together and agreed on those principles, they went
Speaker A
back and no one changed their behavior. And I said, "Okay, well, what does accountability mean in terms of behavior? What is like, show me what someone who's holding someone accountable does? How would I know that accountability had occurred?" Right? And
Speaker A
so what happens there's he was like wait so I need to be like oh you need to text your team every morning and you have to do end of week reports with every person review and you need to at the end of the
Speaker A
day give kudos to the people who did well and then ask the people who didn't do well what they were struggling with and then drill them on how to improve that skill. He's like oh I was like right say that. Don't say
Speaker A
accountability. No one knows what it means. We have to translate these big words into smaller actions that we want someone to make. And then it's very easy to say, "Hey, you didn't do these four things rather than," you didn't hold
Speaker A
someone accountable because they're like "I don't know. I thought I was holding him accountable." Because we both have different definitions for the same thing. And if this sounds more nuanced, guess what? Welcome to business. Right? These are skills that
Speaker A
you just need to develop at some point because changing strategy forever over and over again is never going to get you up the mountain. All you're going to do is keep going down from this one over to this one and then maybe you get to here
Speaker A
and then you change over and then you go over to here. And so each time you're wasting all of the extra effort keeping switching paths rather than saying, "Oh the issue I have is talent, which means I need to recruit better. Oh, the issue
Speaker A
is culture, which means that I have to show my leaders how to punish and reward behavior in the business. Oh, we're getting people in, but they're not being productive. So, we need to improve our training rather than just say, "Oh
Speaker A
everyone sucks." Right? And so a lot of success comes to sticking with something long enough to make the number of mistakes required to actually figure it out. Otherwise, you just keep starting from zero every single month. And you
Speaker A
can beat 99% of people without being smarter or luckier, but by being willing to endure pain and uncertainty for longer. That's the path up the mountain.
Speaker A
Hey guys, real quick. If you want to have a blueprint of how to get up the mountain, um this is the free 100 million scaling road map, the zillion dollar scaling road map. Um, this is something that was actually an internal
Speaker A
tool that we made for ourselves so we could better identify at every level of scaling what a company would probably have to work on in order to get to the next level. And then we just decided to make it free. And so if you want this
Speaker A
you go to acquisition.com/roadmap and you can enter business information and grab it. And if you like my team to give you personalized tactics that on the next page, you can book a call. We'll get to know you, get to know the business, and
Speaker A
ultimately invite you out if it makes sense. And at that point, we'd actually meet with you in person and say, "Hey these are the things that we think are going to be the unlocks for your business right now. These are the things
Speaker A
that can help pay down the uncertainty on the path you're already on." So, hey just look around the edge, you know just here's a drill bit so you can get through the rock, right? Rather than say, "Oh, we have to reinvent the
Speaker A
business." Because most time we just need to do what we're doing a little better, a little different. And by doing that, it unlocks the path of the mountain so you can see it. So, click the link and uh maybe I'll see you here
Speaker A
in
Topics:executionbusiness strategyself-helpconsistencycompany culturetalent managementoveranalysisbusiness growthmotivationentrepreneurship
