Former Harley Davidson Chief Communications Officer (Ken Schmidt) Shares How to Move Beyond Being a Reactive Business Owner

Show Notes

Are you finding yourself perpetually putting out burning fires and reactively dealing with daily office and employee drama? On today’s show, Ken Schmidt the former Chief Communications Officer shares why nothing works unless you hire high quality people.

According to Jack Welch, differentiation is a process that requires managers to assess their employees and separate them into three categories in terms of top performance: top 20 percent, middle 70, and bottom 10.


“Now let’s talk about the more controversial topic, differentiation among people. It’s a process that requires managers to assess their employees and separate them into three categories in terms of performance: top 20 percent, middle 70, and bottom 10. Then— and this is key—it requires managers to act on that distinction. I emphasize the word“act” because all managers naturally differentiate—in their heads. But very few make it real.

Top 20%

When people differentiation is real, the top 20 percent of employees are showered with bonuses, stock options, praise, love, training, and a variety of rewards to their pocketbooks and souls. There can be no mistaking the stars at a company that differentiates. They are the best and are treated that way.

Middle 70%

The middle 70 percent are managed differently.  This group of people is enormously valuable to any company; you simply cannot function without their skills, energy, and commitment. After all, they are the majority of your employees. And that’s the major challenge, and risk, in 20-70-10—keeping the middle 70 engaged and motivated.” – Jack Welch (The former CEO who GE by 4,000% during his tenure)

Business Coach | Ask Clay & Z Anything

Audio Transcription

I don’t want to be surrounded with dorks and losers and Dillard’s. I can’t find the Ras with both hands. I want to be surround by somebody want to go out and have a beer with after work. Otherwise, what’s the point? If we can’t be friends and get along and be awesome together, go work at the phone company.

That’s amazing. I love that.

On today’s show, the former chief communications officer for Harley Davidson, who famously led the 1985, turned around at the company, which was literally within hours of bankruptcy before he arrived, shares with us how to move beyond being a reactive entrepreneur who is always running around with your hair on fire because there is no structure and there are no systems, my friend. If you want to move beyond just owning a job and to actually move into a place where you own a business that creates both time, freedom and financial freedom for both you and your family, your going to want to listen to today’s show. Today’s show features live audio from the December in person. Thrive time show workshop starring Kimmy Schmidt and Marshall Morris.

This is what clay found is he could either be the one to go out and dj every single event and it was going to be awesome. He was talking before the break about how he would go out and he would get three referrals, five referrals from every event that he did, but he realized that if he ever wanted time freedom, then he was going to have to hire people in, train them up to be able to produce it, an acceptable quality standard. Otherwise he was going to have to do every single event that just wasn’t ever going to allow him to scale. So for most businesses, where it falls down is we don’t have a training program or a hiring system in place, and then we’re. We’re, we’re going to talk about this tomorrow. Recruiting high quality people, but you never can prepare for when that five hour curve ball’s going to come in where a contractor has messed something up on the job site, right?

Or they’ve ordered the wrong thing and then you have to go do that. But I see clay and the biggest way that he doesn’t allow the five hour curve balls to happen. He doesn’t know about them. Right? He’s ordained is day. We put out the packets every single for on all the different desks the to do list. Okay. And then the schedule. Did you guys get a copy of the schedule of the calendar? Did we. Did we pass that out and you guys see that? Okay. So if it’s not on the schedule and it’s not on the calendar, then it’s not going to get done. And what he’s done is he’s actually trained up a whole team of people to answer the phone calls and they know the parameters for which to take something to him. So if somebody’s not hurt, if somebody is not threatening to sue him, if somebody not, you know, cut their foot off.

This is a true story. We’re building out one of the elephant in the room’s Vanessa. Do you remember this? You remember this phone call? Okay. Building out one of the elephant in the room’s real talk contractor, not even the contractor. They. You guys have hired the contractor and he had hired a subcontractor to come out and they’re doing the refinishing of the concrete in the man sawed off a side of his foot. He forever has become known as triangle foot. Okay, and so immediately, okay. The subcontractor is starting to threaten to sue clay. Well, because Vanessa and clay have been proactive in what they’re doing. They have the liability insurance. They have the LLC, they have the protection of that. They’re not immediately that that that burning fire hasn’t become a a issue immediately because they know that’s an issue in the subcontractors shouldn’t even be suing them.

They should be suing the contractor right now. This would all be derailing the entire operation of all of the other businesses that clay’s been doing, if he knew about it, but because he was only focused on the things that were on the calendar and on the to do lists, he found out about it. They escalated it. At the end of the day, say, hey clay, how do you want to handle this issue? Because at the time, what is clay going to do? I don’t know. Get them to the hospital. I like, I’m not the. I’m not the emergency responder. I should not be the one that you’re telling him about this. We’ll figure it out on the back end, but we can’t do that in the middle of the day. Anybody been in a business meeting where somebody is checking their phone the entire time, whoever’s had this happen. You’ve seen somebody you’ve seen, hello, I’m in a meeting.

I can’t talk right now. Anybody had that and that frustrate anybody else. So like if you’re in a meeting, why did you answer my phone call? Right? I don’t need to just let it go, but the powerful thing for I’ve seen clay and Vanessa and something that I’ve taken away a John up in our office who manages just about everything is just completely, entirely unreachable during the day because they’re engaged with doing something else because the thing that is the most important is the task at hand. So you’ve got a couple of steps. Number one is you got to proactively schedule out your time, okay? Schedule out your mad at time of your both of your calendar and your to do list. Okay? Number two is you have got to create. You’ve got to make your focus. Getting yourself out of the business, okay? Creating the processes and the checklists so that you’re the backup.

So the first step for clay was, hey, I need to train other people so that other people are going out to go dj. So I just need a higher ed or rate to find those high quality people. Okay? But once I’ve hired them, what are they going to actually do? What are the processes? Okay? So I want to. I want to brag on one of my clients real quick. I want to brag on Kelly on or Brag on you because you’ve, uh, you’ve almost entirely removed yourself from doing the shredding, right, but how long did it take you to build the processes and get that into place so that you could focus more on customer facing things and ensuring up and creating a more stable infrastructure for the business? Eighteen months. Right? And we’re almost there, right? But for the most part, now you can focus on what your highest and best uses, which is what working on the company, building the systems, but you can’t work on the systems full time until you are out of actually working in the business. Does that make sense? This is helping somebody. So step number one is you got to build those systems and build those processes. Yeah, clay,

18 months, 18 months.

So it took a long time, right? But you were committed to the overall goal. You’re committed to the long term goal, the focus on the goal and getting yourself out of the daily operations of the business. But you wouldn’t have ever had to have time to do that. Okay. So sir, in the back, the first step, daily, a time daily to do lists, daily schedule. Got To have that as a, as an end all be all. Then number two is you’ve got to create the processes. Okay, you have got to get yourself out of working in the business and focus on working on the business and from there you will find yourself getting a much better return. Does that answer? Is that, is that helpful? Is that it? Create the step by step process for. For where to start in doing that. Does that make sense? You follow me on that, Ken Schmidt, I’m going to pitch it over to you. Let you describe how, how, how at Harley or how your other business ventures you’ve been able to do that.

The slightest do idea how to answer that question. Oh, just do it through a personal experience. Probably about 86 or 87. I get called down to the CEO’s office and he said, get on a plane, fly out to Boston. You’ve got to meet with fidelity tomorrow. And Fidelity was the largest investor in Harley’s business at that time and they’re pissed off and I said, I’ve never, I’ve never met with them by myself before. I’ve always been kind of the color guy, but there’s, I don’t have the time to go. You go carry the ball. So I, after I went and put some fresh underwear on, I went out and got a shave and a haircut, flew to Boston, scared because the line was like, don’t over promise anything because if you do and they make an investment decision based on something you tell them it’s not true, they’re going to sue us for billions of dollars.

And we had already been sued and had several multibillion dollar lawsuits filed against us at that point. So I was kind of nervous when met with the client, brought like a ton of swag, a harley shirts and models for everybody. The meeting went really smooth. I got back to Milwaukee, said, I’m never going to allow somebody to experience what I just did a, I’m going to now train the person below me how to do this. I’m going to make sure the client knows who these people are, not in the knows who they are, but trust them enough to believe every word that’s coming out of their mouth is in fact legit. And coming down from the mountain brought those people out, introduce them to every one of our major investors, sort of formulated a team at that point that no longer involved the CEO or the CFO.

They put full faith, trust their investment decisions on us. We loved it. These two, love that responsibility, absolutely loved the responsibility. Are both young guys at that time. Uh, just a quick look through the turns example, one of those guys now is the number three guy at Oshkosh truck, the largest commercial truck manufacturer in the world. And the other guy is the president of Royal Enfield, the second largest motorcycle manufacturer on the planet. Uh, those guys that’ll getting. But the bottom line of that was, unless you’re training somebody else to be you, you’re always going to have to be you and there’s only one of you and you’re going to get split down the middle of eventually. So I have have a lieutenant that knows what he’s doing and have that lieutenant, a train other lieutenants.

Can you. Can you say that one more time if you don’t want to. If you want to move beyond. If you don’t want it to be you, then you’ve got to train somebody else to be

absolutely because it. Everybody sees that, especially people in leadership, they want to do everything until they reached the point that they can’t and then when they can’t, they make that panic decision of sending somebody in blind, which creates a tremendous amount of fear and bad things happen when people are scared. So if you think ahead of that, say, all right, we know this is going to happen. I’m going to have to handle the reigns over to somebody else. Let’s get that person trained to do that and have that person that’s trained. Then train their backup.

So I want everybody to write this down. Okay? Is as you’re going through your day, whether it’s a typical operations item that you’re doing in execution and action step for within your business is how do I need to document this? Okay? How do I document would need to document what I am doing so that this time that I do it is the last time that I have to do it. Okay. How do I need to document it? Does it need to be a video of me doing it? Do I need to create a step by step checklist? Is it a script? How do I need to document this so that this time that I do it is the last time that I do it? Okay. Is that helpful, sir? Is that, is that they answer your question. Okay. Robert, keeping everything for yourself as a habit, uh, and delegating things is also habit. So you can get in the habit of trusting your paypal. They, first of all, they’re going to rise to the challenge every time that they take all that weight off of your back.


how do you find successful people to surround yourself with and how do you initiate a conversation with them? How do you find a mentor?

Well, I’ll answer this first. The thing that I did is I figured out where do I want to go? This started with my f six, what do I want to achieve, where do I want to go, what is the path and the direction for my life, and then find people that have already done that. So I know that when I was working down in Costa Rica and I had reached out to clay, one of the things that I wanted to do was I wanted to work with a lot of different small businesses. This is about the time that, uh, that thrive is getting going and I want it to be able to have the same business acumen in the learn from clay. But I was very proactive in identifying where I wanted to go with my career and what I wanted to do. So it starts there is having a very clear depiction of where my path is headed and working back from there.

Okay. So if I want to be a business coach or I want to be a music producer or I want to be successful in this particular industry, you’ve got to ask yourself, who is the goat? Who is the greatest of all time in that industry? What is the best practice in that industry? And you just got to make a list of all of those people. So I know that when clay, uh, he’ll tell the story of working with um, chat and Chester Kadjol and being able to meet with them. It was at the point of needing to scale the DJ company. And so he made a list of who are all the people that are the most effective at growing businesses. Dr Zellner, jet and Chester Cadieux, founders of quick trip founders, the founders of Quiktrip, David Greene of being able to reach out to these people and how are they able to scale their businesses? And then you got to ask yourself, is who, who’s willing to meet with me? Now, most of these people put yourself in their shoes. They’re going from meeting to meeting their executives at all of these multimillion dollar companies. Do they really want to meet with me?


because how am I ever going to be valuable to them? So this was a move that, uh, I know that a clay had to endure and go through and um, he’ll, he’ll tell you about it, but a lot of times he said, hey, you know what? I know that their time is very, very valuable. Okay. I’d be happy to, in willing to make a donation to a charity of their choice just for 15 minutes of their time. I’d love to be able to meet with them. Just ask them a couple of questions. I’ll come prepared and with Dr Z, clay did this for years. Hey, I’d love to meet with Z. I’d love to be with Z. I’d love to meet with CSI and consistently Kylie’s stallion. Nope, not gonna happen. Nope. Not available. Quit asking. And month after month that she shut them down and month after month he kept asking will eventually Kylie’s like, wow, this clay guy married to Vanessa is, you know, month after month.

And he’s persistent. I kind of respect it so I’m not going to set up the meeting, but I’m going to slip him a little bit of insider information. He likes the crew tons. At Ruby Tuesdays, is that right? He likes the crew tons. I Ruby Tuesdays, he’s actually planning to have lunch there coming up next week. He’s like, Oh yeah, I got this now. So he sends a note, say, Hey, Dr Z, I know that you have to eat. I would love to buy you lunch out at Ruby Tuesdays and you don’t even have to answer. I’d love to just spend some time and ask you questions and you can nod yes or shake your head no it just do whatever. And that was the very beginning of a relationship because Dr Zoellner was so impressed with how prepared that clay was with the notes and the questions that he asks that that forged a relationship.

He goes, nobody’s ever prepared these questions. Check casual. When clay met with him, said, oh my gosh, I was only expecting a 15 minute meeting and you were so prepared. I would love for you to just come shadow the rest of the day. See all the different operations of quiktrip and that’s really cool because of the proactive activity of valuing the mentor’s time, valuing that person’s time. But most people are just going to say no. So the step number one is prepare yourself for a lot of rejection and don’t make only one mentor your only mentor that you’re going after because there’s a lot of people that have had success in the previous field that you’re wanting to get into. So you gotta identify where you’re going. Then you’ve got to make a list of all of the mentors, not just the one that you want to reach out with and mentor with. And then the third is create value for them. Prepare the questions, prepare what you want to ask prepared to be mentored. I think that’s a lot of the times, uh, a big hurdle is you want a mentor but you’re not ready to be mentored. And so reaching out to these people and being accepting of their coaching, go accepting of what they’re. Being Open minded. I think that’s a very, very important thing. And Ken Schmidt, I don’t know if you’ve seen this in, in the Harley as well as his mentorship within the company as well.

Uh, not as it exists within the company, but it’s very, very strongly encouraged. Uh, I was mentored, I mentored a lot of people, had a hard time saying no to people had asked me that. But from an outsider perspective, especially as the company started getting hot is I would probably get 100 voicemail messages a day from people saying stuff like, Hey, I’m going to be in the area on Monday at 1:00. Can I stop in for 15 minutes? And I really learned to figure out this, the, that I’m going to be in the area, stuff is built. Or Hey, I’m down in the lobby right now. Can I come up? And this is like a no, very, very disrespectful of, of my time and I can appreciate that people wanted to come in. But what starts to happen is every now and then I would do something and land on my desk and it opened it up.

It’d be like a box with like two fishing lures in it. And this is somebody who did some research come on up or come up tomorrow and we’ll. And we’ll talk. And I said, how’d you know I love fishing? It’s called last year, your secretary or assistant. And she told me that Bingo up made an effort. Come on in, we’ll talk. I really appreciate the fact that you were willing to try a little bit harder than other people to come in and see me. And what I’ve always found with mentorship is pretty much everybody that somehow deleted me on the selling price, on their approach to me in some way ended up helping me. I hired a lot of them, a lot of them became there, were hired as interns that went on and 99 point nine percent of them, frankly, because a lot of people do, especially young people coming right out of school. But when they win you over with that level of enthusiasm and passion. So these are people that you can mold a in your own image into the company and to get the work done. And the efforts spoke volumes and those people, I can promise you to this day, you know, 30 years, 25 years later are mentoring people as well. Once you’ve been mentored and see the value in it, you will. You will want to pass that up.

I want to ask you this question real quick because tomorrow we’re going to take you through the entire hiring process and what you just said there was was phenomenal because a lot of the people that were asking to be mentored or or were mentoring you, they didn’t necessarily like their resume wasn’t the most spectacular resume. How, how valuable are the intangibles of the things that might not appear on a resume to deciding whether or not you would like to mentor them or or invest into them?

I, I learned to not rely on resumes at all. I just learned to rely on resume for the background. Then maybe there’s some relevant industry relevant experience because you find so many times that people would call in for an interview or you know, run through her for an interview because they look fabulous on paper. Would come in and be a stuffed shirt or really boring. It didn’t feel immediate chemistry and I’d always have to go back to her, why didn’t you hire this person? They’re incredibly qualified because I didn’t like them or I didn’t like her period. I mean I want to be surrounded with people. I like, you know why? Because I’m a freaking human being and that’s how we do things. I don’t want to be surrounded with dorks and losers and Dillard’s. A can’t find their ass with both hands. I wouldn’t be surround by somebody wanted to go out and have a beer with after work. Otherwise, what’s the point? If we can’t be friends and get along and be awesome together, you go work at the phone company.

That’s amazing. I love that. That’s great.

There’s so many. A lot of business owners, they’ve missed the boat on that and they missed the boat and a lot of young people, especially young people coming straight out of college because they don’t get it and they don’t understand because they’re not being instructed properly on how to find a job. You get a cookie cutter resumes and we’ve all seen them because that’s how they’re instructed to do it and I said, for Christ’s sake, we’re looking to hire people that are to make us more competitive. You don’t know how to compete if you don’t know how to compete because you’re sending me the same thing that 800 other people just sent me in the last week. What am I supposed to do with that? What does that tell me about you and what it tells me is that you’re a drone, right? You do things the way everybody else does it, and that’s not attractive enough to me as I’m hiring somebody, as I’m hiring personality every time I’m hiring passion, every time you know it, when you see it, and when do you see it? You see it immediately. People who stare at their shoes are going to be sales people, period. They’re going to be bad ambassadors for the business. People who can’t look somebody in the eye and have a pleasant conversation with them and ask awesome questions and light up and be delighted in reacting to what other people are saying. You pick up on that immediately or you don’t. That’s amazing.


Robert, what’s the next question? Do we have time for another question? Play one more. One more question. Okay. Um, how do you determine budget amounts? Ford’s a facebook, youtube, and adwords. How do you determine what to budget towards facebook? Youtube and. Okay, so if everybody in your boom book, there’s page one slash 24, I want you to go to page 1:24 and as it relates to youtube, facebook, retargeting ads, the whole nine yards, all of the different marketing systems. We have that on page one, 25. All of the different marketing systems. Okay. The first thing that you have to identify as who are you marketing to? Okay, so with Harley, did you guys have a profile of the type of person? Did you. Did you describe this person in a very specific type of way? How did you describe your ideal and likely?

Well, like any other business,

we had tremendous demographic data on who is buying our product by age, by Zip code, by career, marital status, all that other stuff and what a. unfortunately what that was doing was making us really myopic and we are only focusing on that specific group in. Back in the days when we used to buy advertising Richard to come, it doesn’t do much anymore. It was always aimed specifically at that niche and the counter to that sort of logically would be we’re trying to build our business, we’re trying to attract other people who haven’t gotten our message that haven’t been turned on by us. Why are we talking to the same people? Why aren’t we talking to minorities, which hardly had never pitched. Why aren’t we approaching white people or white collar people, professional people, uh, because the date we didn’t have the data to back that up because they don’t buy from us.

That’s kind of an asinine way to approach the work unless you are so incredibly successful at marketing to the same people over and over and over again. You gotta expand the sphere. We need to expand. Yeah. So the first thing is we have a list of all of the different types of demographics which those different programs and platforms will allow you to market to. So we have on there, number one, are you marketing to men or women or both? I have a question for everybody. Did everybody fill that out? Do we tackle that? Generally get that as anybody here stuck. You don’t know who you’re marketing to. Does anybody not know who you’re marketing to? Does anybody? Because I want to make sure if you guys haven’t been able to fill that out, I want you to get stuck there. Okay. Do you have any questions?

Ask us on that. Um, do we have, we. Does anybody have any questions about implementing those marketing systems? You had the three legged marketing stool. Is anybody have any questions about that? But we have Marshall can and myself up here. Any questions about implementing your marketing stool? Anybody? Bueller? Okay. We had a question on the board that I loved and I want it to a, tee it up here. Uh, this is a question on the board. Ever read this to you? Going along here, it says, what of your discoveries or ideas I think are too far ahead of our time. The experts will not consider them possible. I like this question. Wow. So who’s asking this question? Who Am I speaking too? Alright. So you guys are from Hawaii.

Okay. Tucson. Awesome. So here is, I want to encourage you guys to write this down on your marketing stool. Okay? You know the marketing stool we talked that there’s all the different martial. What page is that with all the page one, 25, 1:25. I want everyone on top of that and write something down that you really give you really care about, something you really, really care about. But that does not pay. You don’t pay something. You’re just into. I’ll, I’ll, I’ll, I want to ask him this question.Ken Schmidt wants something you deeply care about. You’re into it. It’s a hobby. You know, like I’m into silky chickens. I love silky chickens. You should come by our house before you leave. I’ve got still get chickens. They looked like little footballs. Live behind a wall you’d love. Oh Wow. So you got to put a pancake tonight. Yearly. Love it. It’s a deal. But I don’t make money as a, as a farmer. It’s just something I’m doing. It’s, it’s a fun thing. People don’t get it. I’m into, is there something you’re into that it’s not a. didn’t pay it, but it’s just kind of a fun hobby.

Yeah. I’m gonna the fishing and hunting,

fishing and hunting. If you want it to make it into a business, do you think you could just. You could. How would you do that? Awesomely good though.

Actually what goes myself and my buddies when we, when we drink and we sit around the fire, this is stuff we talk about is, is how do you combine something that you really love and do it in a way that nobody else is doing and the way that we always wanted to do in. The way I would do it is at the highest level possible. That’s provide premium experience, premium everything at a premium price, a shoot for the high shoot for the one percenters, but people that are willing to pay for something awesome.

So he just said something because his worst. This is where it began. So, but we hadn’t rehearsed this before, but shoot for the one percenters. These are called the sneezers are the early adopters. So let me tell you something that was stuck in my head and 2002. That was ahead of the. What is it? Hand people can’t understand it. I went to college, university, good school. A lot of great things. Okay. I’m there. I’m talking to my mass media teacher and I said, hey, I get a degree in this program. How much can I make? And he told me a number and that number was entirely too low, so I thought I’m just gonna drop out of college kind of, but still go. I’m just going to take different classes to learn what I need to learn a to quote Steve Jobs. I’m gonna drop out of college so I can drop into the classes I want decide to go to the admissions and I’m like, I’m going to take accounting this semester.

Like accounting, like, oh yeah, I want to get a one to become a CPA. That’s my vision. They’re like, are you sure? And then I change it next semester, I want to take multimedia and I just started taking the classes that taught me practical skills and then I dropped out and I would say for the vast majority of Americans, not everybody, but I think that I see too many people that are getting out of school and they don’t have practical education. So I started building this thing. And Marshall, you’ve known me for nine years, started building this thing. I’m sure you walked into what exactly what I thought I’m going to build up an entrepreneurship school that’s kind of free if you just listened to the podcast and we’re going to charge people $250 for a ticket. And if it can’t afford it, they can just tell us how much.

So some of you are here because you said I can’t afford it. And then we said how much you said $6. And we did that and I’m going to say I don’t even care if you can talk to each other and go, I can’t believe you paid 2:50. I paid $7. I would say if you paid $7 because you lied to me, you’re going to hell. Okay, so moving on. I don’t care, but I’m going to teach you what I need to know because my goal is to mentor millions, but nobody has understood. My wife got it. Marshall picked up on it, but very few people got it, but now you guys kind of get it right and then we’re getting 500,000 downloads a month. More people aren’t getting it. The founder of Ritz Carlton emailed me and said, I want to be on your show, but combining business and comedy and you’re listening to some of the podcast and thought, are you high?

I don’t know what you’re doing it. I’m not. I’m a dad. Five kids. I’m just having a good time so I want to combine business and comedy, but I also had to pay the bills in the meantime so I make money cutting hair, which is not a metaphysical idea. Even though many of the things I believe in our metaphysical. Does that make sense to you guys? So I’m paying the bills. I’m a partner with a guy. We change oil and we fix cars and I make money and helping him do that. I’m not super excited about it, but he makes money and it’s great and I get a percentage, but I’m really into or are we getting this idea? So if you’re ahead of your time, a tesla, we all know the story of Tesla. Tesla was way ahead of his time and nobody understood him for like 20 years.

And then Thomas Edison, I think maybe stole some of his ideas. A Albert Einstein. Nobody listened to Albert Einstein at all, but why aren’t we speak in German now? Anybody know about that letter he sent to Fdr? Albert Einstein said, here’s the deal. The Germans don’t think I’m crazy and they’ve actually taken my ideas and they’re building an atom bomb and you guys are going to get it dropped on you soon so you better come up with a way to split an atom and I can show you how hire Robert Robert Oppenheimer. But at the meantime, and people don’t realize Einstein was kind of destitute for a long time. So if you got something that you want that is way ahead of the time, I’d find something that pays the bills that’s maybe not awesome, but just do it just enough so you can focus on the awesome is are you getting that idea like I spend like 45 hours a week preparing for the podcast and recording it, but it doesn’t pay me.

You realize how you get to the top of the podcast chart, don’t you? You spend 10 grand a month on adwords and it’s free. If you hit the subscribe button today, that’s free for you. And I dropped like 10 grand a month on ad words. Thank you. There it is. And then Paul Hood came along and Paul’s like, well I’ll buy some ads. And I was like okay. Then I’m only eight grand a month. And then RFC auto specialist, it’s like I’ll spend $1,500. Okay now we’re only out 6,000 kept doing and now we’re still only going backwards by about 2000, 3000 bucks a month. But you just gotta but we can pay the bills in the meantime. Is that, is that helpful?

What you have to have is you have to have advocates and you have to have people that will do your bidding for you, not just you, but the influencers that you are trying to reach. Be that the, the tech sphere, health tech, sphere, insurance sphere, who, whoever that is, because unless or until you have that, you’re always going to be the voice in the wilderness with a an obviously sooner or later some of those things gain traction, but almost everyone that does gain traction does because it’s got influential people that liked the idea that are able to spread message faster than just one person or one business can.

You’re gonna you’re gonna. You’ll go, you’ll find them. I just want to encourage you, you want to make a dream 100 list, just so you know on our podcast is kind of crazy. Marshall knows this. We invite 900 people a week

onto the show,

but we get like three yeses. A Dan millman wants to be on the show. We’ve got A. John Maxwell wants to be on the show and I’m like,

you want to be on the show, but you just, you gotta find those influencers that believe in you and you just got to get more rejections is my answer for you to sum it all up, more rejections and get an influencer. It’s going to happen for you. Let’s do another question on the board while we have Ken Schmidt in the House with Marshall Morris. I’m Kent. Somebody is asking about how to set goals. I guess that would be like if you feel stuck in your career, kind of how to do that. Let’s say there’s somebody out there who, uh, hypothetically managed, uh, uh, made a big, had a big impact on Harley Davidson. Let’s say hypothetically between 85 and 99, whoever that may be, and a chief communications officer, you, not you, but other people, they retired. How do you, how did they, whoever they are, find their goals and their next thing after you’ve been on a wild ride for so long and you view other people, do they get off that and they go, wow, I’ve achieved my goal. How do you, how do you set goals?

Wow, that’s probably half the people I’ve met in life. Either have goals or assemblance of goals in half, don’t want be perfectly honest. I’d never had goals than my life because I never really knew exactly what I wanted to do when I grew up, but at the same time I knew that I. It was kind of a zen thing. I have to do better this week than I did last week. We got to do more business. I got to make more money this year than I did last year, whatever. Those are the. Those are goals, tangible goals, but at the same time I could never imagine going through life without knowing exactly early, at least having an idea of what you want it to become and working toward that. I mean strictly from a business standpoint, goals can be linear and measurable. That’s x number of percentage increase in revenue, a growing income faster than revenue. The things that businesses need to do

sign idea though. Just getting a little bit better, incrementally better every day.

Continuous improvement. I mean, it’s not so much a goal as it should be a bit. It’s like oxygen in business. If you’re not getting better every day, somebody is and they’re going to beat you.

I, I just for our workshops, those of you who’ve been to three of them or four of them, I try to make everyone a little bit better. I’m not saying we are getting better. I did something to you to decide, but we try every time. We’re trying to make it a little bit better. Little bit better, little bit better. Final question I wanted to answer before I have some housekeeping notes. We had somebody who wrote the question, how does state dilligent wouldn’t discouraging stuff happens. I’m going to ask Marshall, how do you see me handle stuff? I’ll tee up some examples that you could probably see. One, my dad got als. He got Lou Gehrig’s disease. Then my dad died two years ago. You watched that? You saw that. You knew my dad. His Dad’s a cardiologist by the way, and he wasn’t my dad’s cardiologist, but he checked on my dad just to be a good guy. Saved my dad’s life twice because some of the medication was causing heart issues. You’ve seen that happen though. You’ve seen that happen. How do I handle something like that?


you retreat to go create more structure in order for your life so you can be proactive for things that might be unpredictable to other people, but you know that something at some point is going to happen. So you create enough order for that. So, um, I don’t know if you want to talk about what you did, but you had to entirely rearrange your schedule. Yeah.

So I had to realize like, okay, for me to spend the time with my dad that I want, I can’t do this current schedule. So I’ve got to change many aspects of the schedule. For me, one was like I love working out every day, but from my, until he’s dead, I got to give that or something up because I’ve already got commitments for partnerships. I’ve got to do something. He didn’t got to quit working out, quit reading books, quit. I don’t know, something has to stop. I got to figure that had to reconfigure my schedule for that window of time. The other thing that I do is I say thank you every time, years in the movie, Animal House, Animal House, you know, that scene where it’s taking you Sarah and have another. That’s what I do. But I think when I say sir, I remember praying to God because strength is gained through struggle as part of the quotes kind of covered today. But strength is gained through struggle. Whether you’re working out, whether you’re becoming a better leader, whether you’re so every time when the printer’s quits working, you’ve seen when the power goes out in the building, when the power goes out, sometimes it’ll flicker. You know, when a big storm, what do I say typically?


we got to say in your face adversity every time, like in your face at varsity lakes, bring it on, you know, because every TV screen goes off and then I’ll usually start singing a song like, yes, yes, yes, yes. Talk, you know, and you’re like, wait, get out the mobile hotspots. And we just keep on going. But I don’t lament, and I don’t know anybody who is successful, who romance. You had to have situations that were horrible, many of which you discussed today. How do you handle when a terrible, no good, very bad, rotten, terrible thing happened in Harley Davidson.

Surround yourself with other people will say, look, we after the end of the quarter to get this done, I know we can’t do it. You know we can’t do it, but do it. Let’s make this. What do we got to do to make this happen? Who else do we need to get involved to make this happen? We jump now. A other stuff that was your priority just became your secondary priority. We’ve got to go.

I, I just, I, I, you need to meet failure and adversity with aggressive, massive action and not with lamenting.

No, it is that. Is that making sense? I mean, example, when my dad passed away, I remember that. Well, the worst part in Vanessa knows my dad got sick with a Lou gehrig’s disease. I was out in the parking lot. My Dad never calls me during the day because we have that rule. Don’t call me during the day while I’m working. He calls, Hey son, can you talk? And I knew right away something was bad and he’s like, I have Lou Gehrig’s, aren’t you remember going, how long says got probably nine months. Right. Okay. So I came into work, did my day, got to the creek turnpike there and could not drive a car. Pulled over and could not stop weeping for hours. And then I called my dad up. I said, let’s make the next nine months. Awesome. Windsor high school reunion. He said, well, it’s going to be here in Waco and I probably will be able to talk at that time.

So I said, we’re going. So we booked the trip and we had to take all this medical stuff and they told us we couldn’t go because he might die. We get there. Everybody who is alive from his waco high school attended because they wanted to meet him, talk to him how you doing? And my dad could barely talk, but the words he said, he looked at me and he takes the mask off. He said that was the best day of my life and but I put all my energy into. Then we, through my dad a going away party while I was still alive and John Kelly, I can’t thank him enough for doing it Vanessa, but we called him all of his friends and we said my dad’s going to be dead soon and he wants to talk to you. So coach Eddie Sutton, you know the legendary basketball hall of fame coach Eddie’s like, I’m coming.

What time? And we had, he couldn’t talk so you had to get next to its mouth to hear him talk. He whispered to you, but we had every five minutes, 10 minutes. Another person came in, hundreds of people all day, all of Grand Bank. They shut down the bank for half the day to let all the tellers come in to meet my dad, but it’s like I can sit there and lament about it or I could go, what can we do? I mean, how many people get to hear good things about you before you die? You the funeral were like, this person was awesome. This was great. But he got to here before he died and that was a thing that we did together, but I could have lamented about it. I don’t care what situation we’re going through. We have to find a way to fight the negativity with action, massive activity, do what you can do. Don’t lament, don’t go on facebook and post a picture of the cloud and say why me? Don’t do it. Because then people will say it’s not fair, and you’ll say it’s not, and then someone will like it and then they’ll share it and next thing you know, you’re a depressed and nothing changed. You got to have massive action. Do you want to add or anything about massive action? Just the mindset of fighting adversity can do anything you have about that.

Yeah, that was really good stuff you just said. Oh No. Not to add beyond that. Other than you know, if you’re not moving forward, you’re moving backward. Some sometimes you gotta in a life sucks and it sucks a lot, especially with people who work for a living. If you can’t, don’t Yank it up and focus on what needs to get done. You’re going to get passed by a and that’s a really bad lesson. Teach people that are working with you and under your things that things are really shitty today, so take an extra long lunch versus these a really shitty today. Take a five minute lunch. We got a lot of stuff we got to get done and know it sucks, but we’re going to do it and people will do it.

Nathan, you question which podcast was this? Yes. Okay. Yes.

Do something hard. Do something of. Do something fun.

It just real stuff. And the last like month. I mean just real stuff. We had a person who hasn’t worked for me for four years who now work somewhere else. She started her own business and that you didn’t pay taxes for all four years at the new business, but somehow claimed that she still works for me and D and we didn’t withhold unemployment or something, but just some weird scenario, but I have to talk to a lawyer about it. It’s just weird. I have people that claim that I fired them for things I didn’t fire them for. I mean, you, you deal with it everyday. There’s always somebody there, a competitor stealing something. There’s something, but you just, if you’re an entrepreneur, you become like a battleship and then the, the, the little issues become like bbs and being being. That’s how you deal with it tomorrow. Just what’s on tap tomorrow again, let’s, let’s hear it for Kenny Schmidt. Let’s hear from.

Thank you. Ken Schmidt will be speaking to with us. Super, super honored to have him here. Michael Levine, the PR consultant for Michael Jackson for Nike, for Prince George Bush. I just unbelievable his client list. He’ll be here speaking tomorrow and then tomorrow we’re having for lunch. We have Bellini’s I believe. Yup, and the ladies will be there and then we have a Christmas party tomorrow night at nine. Thirty PM is should you want to attend? Also clay stairs will be teaching how to hire people. Tim Redmond is gonna. Talk to us about the early days of tax and accounting software and how he grew it from two people to 450 people. We’re going to be teaching sales. We’re going to be teaching finance are going to be teaching at a manage humans had to recruit, recruit, recruit humans. It’s going to be great and I’ve got one I got right to asks before we leave. One is it before you leave the parking parking lot?

If you could subscribe to our podcast, it would be awesome and if not, I will not limit, but I will sprint home with massive action. So if you could subscribe the podcast, that would be great. And the second is we like to end each and every show with a boom because it stands for big, overwhelming optimistic momentum and we like to end up recurrence with the boomer every session. So our. Devin, are you ready for our music, my friend? Are you ready to hit the play? You ready over there? Marshall, are you ready for a bone? I’m ready for a Bill Kenny. Ready for. Are you ready for a drink?

I would encourage you to take the following action steps today while it is still hot

and fresh on your mind. Do you have a spreadsheet or a piece of paper and write down the names of all of your teammates, all of your employees, and I want you to rank them on a scale of a to B to c, so give them a rank. A, B or an a player is an employee who gets to work early, stays late, and is super coachable. That’s an a player to get to work early, stay at work late. They’re very coachable. They always go over and above a b player gets to work just on time and leaves just on time and frequently says, that’s not my job. Whenever you ask them to do something extra or they’ll say, do I get paid for this? Now a c player gets to work late, gets to work late, but then also leaves early. They get to work late.

They leave early. They’re constantly taking breaks. They’re bringing a lot of personal issues to work and they always fail to miss their deadlines because there was a miscommunication, a personal drama, or they simply forgot. So ranker employees on a scale of a, B or c, go ahead and put. Put a letter by their name, a, b, or c, and then and the next 60 days. Make it your personal mission to fire the c players, assuming that you’ve told them where they stand and you’ve written them up. Make it your mission to fire the seat players in the next 60 days. Make it your mission to motivate and inspire the b players to become a players and make it your mission, to take a players and push them to the next level, to promote them, to inspire them, to keep them engaged, and to find a way to use your a players to the to the absolute peak of their ability to find a way for your a players to shine.

Celebrate them, give them rewards, give them awards given the preferred parking space. Pay them more than everybody else. Frame a picture of your a players. Give them all of the perks, all the benefits, and let everybody know who those a players are. And if you do that, you will have massive success. Now think about it for a second. Jack Welch, the former CEO of Ge, who grew the company by 4,000 percent once said, he said this, he said that a players can only be 10 percent of your workforce, the top 10 percent. So forgiving everybody in a grade, you’re not doing this right. You just got to the top 10 percent of your team. B players comprise the middle 80 percent of your company in the middle of middle, 70 to 80 percent of your company. That’s the b players, the middle, 70 to 80 percent and the c players are the bottom 10 percent, but you simply cannot keep c players around.

Now you might be saying, well, they’re family. Uh, okay. Then I would definitely pumped them because it sends the wrong signal. When you promote family and you guard family, you shared family from accountability because their family, well, you might be saying, well, good friend. All the more reason to fire them, to punt them, to get them out of your organization. Because when you keep friends and family who are underperforming in your company, it sends the wrong signals to everybody and it really does create a toxic culture. My friends, if you learned something today, please feel free to share this with a friend, a friend on spotify, itunes, Iheartradio, or by sharing the direct link from thrive time Again, shirt with a friend and we’ll see you next time.


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