Why Working Harder Won’t Make You Rich - Codie Sanchez

I'm bringing a brand new live show across the UK and Ireland this October. It's stories, psychology, audience Q&As, and whatever happens when thousands of overthinkers voluntarily leave the house and end up in the same room together. I'd love to see you there. The last tour completely sold out, so make sure you snag tickets now using the link in the description or heading to Chris Williamson. Dublin's already sold out, and tickets at many venues are very limited, so get yours now.

What's the biggest lie that people are told about getting rich?

The biggest lie people are told about getting rich is actually about looking rich, not getting rich. Especially for men these days, it's all in your face—on social media you can see just about everywhere what somebody's success level appears to be, except if you pulled up the balance sheet, it would be something very different.

I think being rich is really two things. One: do you have enough money to have the life that you want? And two: do you actually like the life you want? I love Naval's quote—basically, the definition of success is having what you want out of life, and the definition of happiness is the same. I think we've all kind of trauma-bonded as business owners over the idea that we should be miserable when we run our businesses. It's hard, but I don't think being rich or being an owner has to be miserable—and that's a great lie. I wonder how many people love the idea of working for themselves until they realize they end up trapped by their own business.

The numbers back that up. 46% of business owners aren't profitable—most business owners aren't profitable, ever. 64% of business owners are profitable, but they make less than minimum wage in California, which is wild. The average business owner makes somewhere between $40,000 and $60,000 per year, while working full-time at California's minimum wage shakes out to about $75–78,000 a year. So as an employee, you don't need to take your job home with you, you're not stressing over whether you can make ends meet inside the business, and you're not skipping your own paycheck to frontload the staff's wages for next month.

I get a lot of crap for talking about wanting to buy businesses instead of starting them, but it's mostly because it's really hard to start one, and most of them fail. The ones that do win—well, that means you paid for the right to one day, eventually, make some money, three to four years down the road, and people don't think about that. If you actually have a business that makes money right now, you're in the top 10%. If you have a business that makes a million dollars a year, you're well above the top 1%, even though you're probably only taking home $150,000 a year. And a $10 million-a-year business? That's 0.1% of all businesses. It's way harder than anybody thinks.

Does that mean very few people should start businesses or become business people? The speaker's answer is that you have to know what you're getting into. Anyone selling you the idea that you can have everything you want within 30, 60 or 90 days, with little or no money down and no effort, is not offering something that will work out.

The only way to see it clearly is to look at the math. Looking at the spreadsheets for buying a business, the lowest default rate you can get is with an SBA loan — and 13% of those businesses fail per year. That's just public math. Startups are worse: 90% fail within a 5 to 10 year period. So you have these wildly different success rates. Given that, most people should probably go work in somebody else's really successful business first before ever thinking about starting their own. You'd be much better off.

The interviewer adds that while the question of whether anybody could become a business owner is probably yes — with enough childhood trauma, caffeine, sleep deprivation and obsession, almost anyone could — that doesn't mean anybody should. He saw this a lot during his nightlife years: lots of people had the ability but not the capacity, or perhaps the disposition. You may have all the component parts of the talent, but what it does to you and what it requires in sacrifice — especially at the beginning, which is the hardest part — is the real test. The challenges get more complex and more difficult in some ways, but momentum is a hell of a drug, and habits like being a business person, knowing what time to get up and how to switch off take a long time to build. The Dunning-Kruger "messy middle" is where it really hurts.

The first speaker agrees, noting that most businesses fail not just because of cash but because the founder gives up. That's why venture capital loves two founders, sometimes even three — the likelihood of you burning out in your own business is actually higher than an employee burning out in theirs. Most entrepreneurs just don't make it.

But his counterpoint is that almost anybody can own part of a business pretty quickly, and people overestimate how hard that is. Every business owner he's ever met complains about the same thing — thousands of applicants, yet "where are the competent people?" So you can go inside somebody else's business and carve out a piece of equity if you're super valuable, and you're still a business owner. Nobody looks at Sheryl Sandberg differently for that, or at Bali Savvasian because he was CTO — the guy's still worth hundreds of millions of dollars. So it's totally feasible; people just don't think about it that way.

Asked about turning down Richard Branson, Codie explains that early in her business career she was a terrible operator with what she calls the "hero complex": the belief that if you're not the savior in everything, your business won't survive. Most entrepreneurs tell themselves this because they're unemployable, have a bit of a god complex, and carry some trauma from whatever pushed them into the masochism that is entrepreneurship.

She was a huge Branson fan — and still is — because he got to live a crazy life while building a business. How many billionaires travel across the world in a hot air balloon? She likes adventuring, so when Branson invited her to his island, it was tempting. (She jokes that she doesn't go to billionaires' islands — "that's our own side's bad rap" — and after some banter about whether those invitations should come back, she admits she'd probably go now.)

At the time, she told herself she didn't have time: if she left the business, it would fail. Looking at the activity list — water bicycling, whatever that is, days without your phone — she decided there was no way she could get away.

Since then, friends have gone on similar trips, done business deals, and met power players — opportunities that are asymmetric to what shows up in business spreadsheets. She missed out because she told herself a total lie about building businesses: that the business is centered around you, that you're the most important part, and that without you driving revenue it won't make revenue. "Now that's not true at all."

The host points out the irony: she told herself the business couldn't survive without her, while Branson was snorkeling and running billion-dollar businesses — multiple ones. At the time, her business was probably doing $5 million a year, not a big business at all. It was growing and profitable, with no fire to put out. It was just a lie she told herself.

"How much responsibility is really just ego, do you think?"

That's an interesting question. I think when it comes to business building, we wrap our identity so much in the thing that we call ourselves CEO, founder, creator—and we don't realize that one day your business will have a giant gaping hole of failure in it. You'll sit alone in the dark with no idea what to do next, wondering why you ever started this thing, really worried that it's going to fail—and that it's going to fail because of you. We will all have that moment.

And when that moment happens, if the business is your entire identity, then what do you do? Then you're a failure, because you couldn't figure out this one business issue. Branson has had something like 60-plus businesses over his career, with multiple huge failures. So how much of us wrapping our identity in one thing is what's holding us back? Probably a lot.

And is that actually healthy for you at all? What if the people who work for you are more competent than you think, and might be better than you at something? It's taken me—I don't know—15 years to figure that out.

The interviewer asks the guest to walk through the story arc of the typical founder or business owner: who they are, how they start, how that changes over time, what problems they face, and what the path out looks like.

There are really 12 types of owners, and the three most common are what we call the closer, the visionary, and the founder. We've run about 15,000 people through a survey to identify the most common types and their strengths and weaknesses. What's fascinating is that all three share a very similar story arc: "I worked for somebody else, they wouldn't listen to me, I wanted to do it differently, I didn't fit into the mold." So they had to go create their own thing—either because they became relatively unemployable or because they were faster, better, stronger than everyone else.

Each type has a defining strength:

• The closer is really good at selling anything—you could probably sell ice to an Eskimo. It's one of the most successful archetypes, and we have lots of friends who are great salespeople.
• The founder wills something into existence that just hasn't existed before, creating a product nobody else has had.
• The visionary sells dreams. If you want to succeed as a CEO, you have to sell a vision bigger than what your employees could see by themselves. You need to be able to raise them up—otherwise, they don't need you.

The arc for almost everybody is: you're highly qualified, you're good, you're in business, you're outperforming other people, they're not listening to you, so you go execute on your own. The problem is that all of that is about you. None of it is about you as a leader—as a builder of a real business putting in systems and processes. That's a skill you have to learn, and I had to as well. You have to learn it even more when you're outside an organization creating your own.

What makes a great founder

If I break down what the best founders have, first, they hate repeating themselves. How many times have you as a leader said, "I swear to God, if I have to repeat this one more time, I'm going to lose it"? That annoyance with repetition actually leads to systems, and systems are the only thing that allow you to scale. You can be an incredible salesperson, but if you're a salesperson of one, you'll only get so far—I've seen some businesses reach a few million in sales with one salesperson, but that's it.

Second, you love one thing about your business more than anybody else: selling the client not on the product, but on the problem you're solving. Take Newtonic again—you might not really know what's in the drink, but you're selling "maybe I want to be like Chris Williamson, maybe I want to be super productive, I have this brain fog." You have to be obsessed with that problem set. I think the problem with a lot of young entrepreneurs today is they say, "I'm starting an AI services business." Well, why are you obsessed with that? Can you not sleep for the want of it? If not, you shouldn't start it.

Third, other people have to believe you might actually follow through on the dream. A lot of entrepreneurs fall down here. They'll say, "There aren't A players anywhere." But how many times, as an A player, have you wanted to go work for a C player? You have to be a winner if you want to attract winners.

The interviewer notes that's really hard to look in the mirror and ask yourself, then asks: is being indispensable a compliment to founders?

No. If you could take one thing as a founder to heart, it would be that your revenue should have nothing to do with you. The more you are the driver of your revenue, the less you have a business and the more you have a highly paid job.

I think of it as an entrepreneur pyramid with three levels. At the bottom are the entrepreneurs — we all do it together, but really, "I do everything." The next level is the manager: they do things, but I micromanage and oversee them. At the very top, as a CEO, I do very few things and the team does everything else. It's also called the generalist-to-specialist curve — you move from doing many things kind of well to having a few specialists who run everything really well.

You say the most dangerous addiction for a founder is being needed.

It's true. In your business, there's nothing better than feeling like you can come in and save the day, make the money, and do the closes. We have a lot of entrepreneurs and founders who are men — that's about 95% of the companies we have — and I see it a lot with them. Women typically want to be needed by their employees; men want to be needed for the business. If the business needs them to close and grow revenue, they feel really excited about it. And the thing that got them the ability to be a founder ends up becoming the reason they'll never succeed.

We have one founder whom I adore, and he's built a really big company — it's a nine-figure business now. If that business fails, it will be one person's fault, and that's him, because he will not get out of the way to hire people better than him. A lot of the time we get scared of hiring people better than us because of what that means for us as founders: do we have guilt, do we have shame, could they take over our position? It's kind of not normal.

You might be right that lots of founders have access to a talent pool better than them, but I get the sense that finding people who are competent, hardworking, and have initiative is an unbelievably rarified skill set. I'd guess more founders struggle to find the candidates and staff than find them and have some existential fear about bringing them into their organization. What do you think?

I think the fear is subconscious, so it's hard to know. The real problem is what Charlie Munger said: you or I are probably not good enough at setting up incentives properly. The reason you're scared of somebody in your business being better than you is often that you don't know how to corral them as a force inside your business. If you're really good at incentives, you could hire just about anybody, point them in the right direction, and get out of their way.

To get the most out of your staff, nail the incentives. If you want to win, always follow the incentives. There are really only five reasons why anybody does anything in your business:

1. They want to make money.
2. They want relevance.
3. They want to lead — to have a team and not be a doer on top of everything.
4. They want significance, not just relevance — being higher in the hierarchy or holding a higher title than someone else.
5. They want work-life balance or freedom.

These are the five main levers we use when we want to incentivize someone. The biggest mistake you can make early on as a founder is thinking that everybody is like you. I like money, so if I'm incentivizing myself, you'd give me a comp plan that shows I can make millions of dollars and I'd run. If you showed me a comp plan with lots of work-life balance — Fridays off, a foosball table — I wouldn't care. But if you're in Austin, freedom actually matters more than money, given the culture here writ large. You have to know your people. We make all of them take a personality score. This comes from private equity — it's not that I'm smart, I stole all of it. Private equity makes every single employee take personality tests and then drives their incentive comp plan to match. If you hire somebody who's balance- and freedom-based but is a genius at creative insight, engineering, or product, that's a win. But if you put them on a comp plan that's only about money, you're going to lose — and so are they. It's a dance, and I wish it were the same every single time. It's not.

The Most Overlooked Levers: Significance and Relevance

Probably significance and relevance. A lot of people today say you shouldn't care about titles — no title creep. I don't know that that's always true. If somebody wants a high title and it's really important to them, you can pay them way less money and give them less time off, but give them a higher title. That's just a lever. We all know people in our industry who use the title game to compensate for the salary game. Most founders actually put "founder," "entrepreneur," or "visionary" next to their name — that one makes me want to die — while their business makes 30k a year, but that significance is important to them.

Relevance is slightly different. At my company — 100-plus employees across the media company and advisory business — probably 15% of them really care about impact and relevance. They could have been in private equity; some were before. But they say, "God, I don't want to die on Wall Street doing deals. I want to feel like what I did meant something." You can pay that person less — in fact, we often do — but they can have more impact, and that might be why they stay.

What interests me most is the transition from founder mode to owner mode over time. I've seen this three times now in my life: first running the nightclubs, then running Modern Wisdom, and now also running Newtonic — less so with Newtonic, I've been good with that.

Here's the problem a lot of people face. A founder initially has to become psychologically fused to the company. They are the company. They work harder than everyone, they know every customer, they take every "just checking in" call. That intensity is what gets the company off the ground — that is the fuel. Then at some point the rules reverse. To become an owner, the founder has to dismantle that identity. They have to tolerate other people doing things differently, lose the dopamine of saving the day, let other employees become more important or make mistakes, allow customers to form relationships with other people inside the company, and accept that the ultimate evidence of their success is that things can go perfectly well without them. That's the arc.

The problem is that entrepreneurship rewards narcissistic levels of self-belief in the beginning, and then ownership punishes narcissistic levels of self-importance as you grow.

How does an owner know when they've stopped being the hero and started being the bottleneck? Unless you buy the business — and I guess you can leapfrog and get yourself out of a bit of founder mode because I wasn't there at the very beginning — lots of people are going to found businesses. Many will fail, some will succeed. For the ones that want to not fail: how do you coach people through relinquishing that control? They've wrapped their existential sense of well-being, their personality, their whole connection to the world around this thing. "I'm the guy. I took every damn call. This podcast — I did thousands and thousands of ad reads. I signed every single invoice. I made sure every single guest was booked for 800 episodes with no assistance: scheduling, researching, booking things in, title, thumbnail, everything." And now they need to relinquish all of it.

First, our line at our company when we bring anybody on to advise them is: being the hero is taking heroin. You have an addiction, and it is to your business. If you continue to be the hero, that's a four-letter word at your company. Second, I think you need to flip the entire script. This is super unpopular, but people used to say you have to serve your employees. Actually, the best way to serve your employees is to make sure you don't flame out miraculously and become unable to pay them and fail. So your employees actually have to serve you in some ways, and they need to get on board with that.

I don't like to talk about it as founder versus owner mode. I ask: are you self-employed, or are you an owner? Self-employed is what 95% of businesses are. Most businesses don't have any employees, and even the ones that do have such micromanagement oversight on the business that you're addicted to Slack — your wife and your friends know it, and you feel good every time you get the dopamine hit of a ping. If that is you, the question is: what is the opposite of that?

The only reason I can own a ton of businesses today is because I never want to be self-employed again. It was miserable. It probably led to me not being able to get pregnant for so long.

Congratulations.

Oh, thank you.

I think it led to the stress of feeling, for the last five years, like: what if the business couldn't go on without me?

Meanwhile, the business is growing faster than ever. So the difference between self-employed and owner really comes down to two things. First, if you're self-employed, that means the fulfillment of the product, the sales of the product, or the distribution of the product falls entirely in your hands. If any one of those three falls entirely in your hands, you're still self-employed — those have to be removed first.

Second, being an owner requires the one thing most business owners don't have: transparency. I don't believe you should hire great people and get the hell out of their way. I used to think that, but it's actually a disaster, because they're never going to care as much as you do about your business. You need a way to see under the hood — a dashboard. Most owners are flying an airplane without a cockpit and without a dashboard.

The way to move from founder mode and self-employed to owner mode is this: what if you could see the most important metrics in your business every single day, across the two types of scorecards that matter? Activity-based metrics, which you can control — has my team reached out to everyone they need to, done a certain number of cold calls and emails? And outcome-based metrics — are we hitting our revenue goals, our close goals, is our conversion rate right, is churn down? Most people only measure the outcome-based goals, with very few predictions, so it's hard for them to project what the future might look like. Very few people measure both activity and outcome and have forward-looking projections. You'll know you're an owner when those three things — fulfillment, sales, and distribution — aren't completely reliant on you, and you have a cockpit and a dashboard so you can actually see where the business is going.

This sounds really complex to build. It sounds like a big unwieldy database I'd have to track everything in — am I going to have to hire McKinsey to build this for me?

Absolutely not. Your business should really run on two main oars, in my mind. I don't believe in north stars. Imagine you're in a boat with your team — have you ever talked to a team and they say they feel whiplashed? One day you say revenue, the next day you're asking where the follower metrics are: "Our followers are down but revenue is up — we're annoying people too much with our ads, right?" And the team is like, "Come on." You're pulling a boat left, right, left, right. If you actually want to win in business, you have to set expectations with your employees. Tell them: imagine you're in a boat and you only have one oar — what happens? You go in a circle. You can't go anywhere. So we can't only focus on revenue, as great as that would be. We also have to focus on some top-of-funnel metric — maybe that's followers, leads, and so on.

Most businesses have two metrics you can run the entire business on, and if you find those, your dashboard can actually be pretty chill. It takes a little work to figure out the two of them, and they're not always revenue and followers. If you're an auto mechanic, you might care about the average order value of every car that comes through, and about car count — how many cars come through in total. If you just nail those two things, you'll know whether your business is winning or losing, and that should be it. But most business owners don't even know that.

Those are outcomes, right? What about the other side — linking all of these together?

Okay, so what are the determinant factors that decide how many cars come through? Maybe it's the outbound calls we've been sending, maybe it's the money we've spent on a direct mail campaign, maybe it's how good the sign twirler out on the street is. Maybe — but usually it's Pareto's principle: the 80/20 rule applies almost everywhere. Most of us get overwhelmed because we try to do 552 things, then realize that no — Facebook ads and cold calls are typically going to drive most of my conversion and my leads.

Here's how we like to run scorecards: your two metrics go at the top — car count plus average order value, meaning how much people pay each time. Then those cascade down to each of your teams. Every team gets two metrics — for the sales team, that's probably leads and conversion rate, or something like that.

Think of it as a little drop-down, but there are really only seven parts or business units in every business, from finance to ops to marketing to sales. That means you'll have 14 metrics, with a leader in charge of each one. That's actually a really clean way to run a business. You'll be wrong sometimes, and that's okay, but at least you'll know that at any given point there are only two things the company cares about overall, and every number you care about needs to roll up to those two.

And if it doesn't roll up to those two, don't talk to me about it until we're hitting around $100 million in revenue, because we don't have enough cash to do it.

That makes running a business a lot easier, at least from what we've seen.

The interviewer asked how much they think about introducing AI into businesses, noting that while 76% of small businesses now use AI according to a Goldman Sachs 10,000 Small Business Voices survey, only 14% have it fully embedded in core operations. Everyone is dabbling, but almost nobody has rebuilt their operations around it. He questioned whether trusting AI to run a business is a good idea right now, since it could be a dangerous place to leverage — we don't know where it's going — pointing to the incident where Claude erased an entire company's database and all of its backups.

The guest agreed that letting AI run your entire business would be a terrible idea. Have you tried having AI write something in one shot? It's pure AI slop — the same list of questions, "it's not X, it's Y," rules of three, every time. One-shot writing to your boss is the number one way not to make more money as an employee.

The data actually says AI is not that important for most small businesses, which runs counter to the narrative. What's far more important? Answering your phone, responding to emails, answering texts. Most small businesses respond on average 18 to 24 hours after getting a lead — and most owners will fight him on that, insisting they respond immediately. They don't.

If he's choosing between AI and response time, it's response time all day. Roughly 80% of the reason a small business wins against a competitor is simply responding faster. That's why point of sale matters at the grocery store, and why the first plumber who responds back wins. Yet we spend all this time AI-optimizing because of nerds on Twitter. For most small business owners, you need to earn the right to use AI by doing standard business practices first — then you can play around with the fancy stuff.

The interviewer said that reminded him of one of the best hacks they found when running their business: pay invoices as quickly as possible. Every business needs a graphic designer at some point. When the designer sends the final version of the flyer after a ton of amendments, pay that moment, that day. If you're the person who pays quickly, the next time you go back to that designer, they'll remember that they didn't even need to chase you. Or if anything, push them for the invoice — "send it over now, I want to get it paid today."

In my experience, that puts you straight to the top of the list, because even if you're being charged the same rate as everybody else, they know you're easy to deal with. Maybe there's a little bit of pain on the back end—you have to be a bit charming—but that's one.

Here's the other one, which I don't know whether it puts you in the realm of an owner, but it certainly gets your foot in the door in rooms you shouldn't be in. This is how most of the guys I've worked with ended up getting in with me. If you're good at something, go to someone and say: "I'm a videographer, and I want to work for you as this particular person. I'm going to come across and work for you for 30 days. I'm just going to do it—I'll give you everything in 30 days' time." If you're as good as you say you are, they won't be able to let you go. They'll have to pay you, and you can call that out.

We do this with partners. I don't talk much about how I do deals on the show, but one way I've always done them is: "I'll do a probation period with you—90 days or 6 months—and once that's done, I'll give you the deal of a lifetime. I'll give you way less than I should. In 6 months' time, I'll come to you with my hand out, and you'll have to pay me—and I'll make you pay—but I'm telling you now this is what's going to happen." I call out the game up front, and if I don't deliver, I've taken on all the risk. That's how we used to get deals back in the day.

Between those two things: if you have a skill you think this person needs, go to them and say, "I'm going to do it for you because I care about what you do, and I'm going to show you that you need me." They can't not pay you at the end—if you're as good as you say you are. The same goes for pitching a service to someone's business: if you think you can do the thing, they won't want to let you go. There's this weird karmic psychological debt where they think, "Damn it, he put his money where his mouth was and actually delivered what he said he would."

So it works on both sides. If you want to get into the room, just work for free for 30 days. If you're trying to get a deal across the line, say, "I'll give you the deal of a lifetime, and in 30, 60, 90 days or 6 months—whatever—I'm going to come with my hand out and make you pay for it, but you're going to want to." And on the other side, if you're somebody who receives invoices, just pay the thing straight away. Those, at least for me, have been step-change business hacks that keep on working. I can't believe they still work two decades later, but they do.

That goes back to the law of reciprocity. Why do car dealerships give you a hot dog and a Coca-Cola even though most of the time you don't buy a car? Because there's an innate human belief that if somebody gives us something, we have to give something in return.

I owe you.

Exactly. And the higher the value of what you give, the stronger the belief that something must be given in return. I think the law of reciprocity is super underused in both sales and employment. There's something else—it's chapter seven in the book, all about pitching—what I've realized is that most people don't show enough proof. We talk about having a proof vault. With how the internet is and the lack of trust that exists, there is nothing you can say to me now that would be stronger than showing me, live, right now, what this tastes like.

So why do we talk so much and show so little? If you want to get a job and get paid quickly, one of the best ways is to show proof — even if you're not yet in a position to work for 30 days. People will push back and say, "Must be nice — Chris and Cody, you're rich, that's why you can do that." I don't think that's true; I did a bunch of free work when I was super poor.

I like people to show me in Loom videos. What's the point of an interview anymore? There's no point in submitting résumés — we get probably 2,000 résumés for individual jobs open across our companies. That's insane. Instead, show me what you'd do. If you're a salesperson, pull up Google and show me your calendar: these are all the calls I have every day, here's how I stack them. Show me the list of people you reached out to. Show me your process and how your CRM works. You don't even have to do a project for me — just show me how you work right now. Most people can't do that.

The second step is: "Now show me what you would do with what I've got" — give me a project. Most people we hire have to do a project, and we pay for it, because I don't want to deal with getting yelled at. But it's something really tiny: here's how I'd put together your 30-day sales process if I were going to do it.

If you don't sell enough in business right now, you don't have enough proof — not enough "show, don't tell," not enough of "show me right now what you could do for me." With AI, you could do almost all of that. Show me a clean house: take a photo of my house from Google Maps and show me what it would look like if you painted it. Going one step further than the next guy will help you close so much more — and that's one way to use AI really cheaply and fast.

Asked how business owners should find the right talent—especially when they feel their business is their baby and they've been burned by bad first hires—the guest laid out an 80/20 approach to finding and training great staff.

Your first hires will probably be bad

Your first hires are almost always going to suck, because you kind of suck when you start. Don't feel bad about hiring bad people in the beginning; it's totally natural, and there's probably not much you can do about it.

The hiring matrix: three steps

There are three steps to getting great people: you have to know what they look like, find them, and close them. Most people say they can't find great people anywhere because they don't know what they're looking for—like people on dating sites listing criteria that aren't actually what they want, so they end up reverse-optimizing for the wrong thing.

The known candidate matrix

Five factors predict whether someone is likely to succeed in your business, each rated out of five:

1. Proven experience — they've already done this task before, e.g. been a CEO or CFO.
2. Sector experience — they've worked in your specific sector.
3. Size — they didn't work at Google if you're a startup; that's a big jump.
4. Problem set — they've already nailed the problem you have. Someone from a growth-stage startup may be wrong for a turnaround situation.
5. Network — does this person know anyone in your sphere, so you can get a real gauge on whether they're good?

A top performer scores 25; a bottom performer scores zero. Across hiring thousands of people, the higher someone ranks on this matrix, the more likely they are to win over time.

Cheetahs vs. house cats

Knowing what a cheetah looks like isn't enough—you also have to decide whether you want cheetahs or house cats. Most employees are house cats: they work 9 to 5, stay in their lane, and won't hunt for their own meals. Cheetahs are your 20%—the killers who really go after it. But you don't need a company full of cheetahs; that's a misnomer. They're expensive and hard to manage.

Hire divas whenever you can, because divas are the ones who perform over time—but you'll hear the most complaints about them, since anyone who's really good is impossible to manage. You couldn't have a company that's 80% A players; you'd drive everyone crazy. Most people fill roles fine once you have a system and an incentive stack: do this, then this, and if you do that, you get that.

Where to actually find them

The hardest part is figuring out whether these people exist in the world. The only consistently effective channels, in order, are referrals, recruiters, then job websites. Recruiters are underused right now—expensive, but worth it. Your best recruiters will be your own employees, which only happens if you've built a culture that isn't terrible, so people come because they want to work with others like you.

Asked what the biggest wastes of time in hiring are, the guest pointed to unnecessary traditions people feel obligated to follow.

First, never do hourlong interviews. He would never hold an hourlong recruiting meeting until he knows he's obsessed with a candidate and wants to hire them—and even then, he'd probably set it as a 30- to 45-minute meeting. You can extend it if you want, but he thinks 15-minute meetings are totally underutilized. He finds it strange that in corporate settings people default to "let's follow up next week" with an hour or 30-minute slot, without asking whether the topic actually required that much time. Half the game, he says, is getting to first principles in business: how do I do the most amount of stuff in the least amount of time—and not apologize for it.

In their hiring process, the meetings are deliberately short and to the point. There's little chitchat: "Hey, how's it going? You mind if I get right in?" and then straight to the questions.

Second, you're hiring wrong if you don't have a set list of questions. Everyone on the team has assigned questions—different ones, not the same—and all the notes get accumulated. You can feed those into AI, which stack-ranks and scores the candidates. Everybody claims they do this for hiring; nobody actually does.

Asked for his favorite interview questions, the speaker said his favorite isn't just a question — it's about getting an answer. If you want to find an A player, an A player is largely determined by how hard the things they've done are: have they done something really hard?

A month or two earlier, he had a candidate he really liked — a smart woman who would be highly competent in marketing. He asked her what the hardest thing she'd done lately was: "Give me the last 90 days. What has kept you up at night? What has pushed you further than you thought?" She answered that she had gone on a really hard hot yoga retreat. His reaction: if the hardest thing you've done is a hot yoga retreat — which he'd consider a vacation — you probably won't like this job very much.

So if you want a high performer, try to figure out when the last time was that they stayed up all night. A good version of the question is: when was the last time you couldn't sleep because you wanted to work on something so badly? You can tell from their eyes — if they're slow to respond, or they hedge with something like their sister's bachelorette party and booking flights, that's not a winner.

He acknowledged this is super unpopular and he'll probably get in trouble because people say it's too hard to work at his company. But the flip side is that it filters correctly.

The anti-sale

He also uses something called the "anti-sale," learned from Amjad at Replit — the fastest company from zero to a billion dollars in sales in that period of time, though not from the true beginning, since Replit spent eight or nine years at zero revenue. For new employees, the anti-sale puts contentious requirements up front like a billboard: on Amjad's website — and now on his own, since he stole the idea — it essentially says, do not join if you do not love hard things that almost break you, or if you do not want to be on the frontier of open source rather than closed source.

One of the best examples, he said — though people on the left wouldn't like it — is The Daily Wire's recruiting page, which puts one of their most inappropriate memes front and center with a joke that you won't like it there if you don't find it hysterical. It's effectively a recruiting shibboleth test. The same trick works on the left: a UK outlet like Navara Media could say, if you don't think this Elon Musk meme is funny, go away.

You probably don't want to go that polarizing — most companies shouldn't. Instead, find what your top performers all agree with that your mid-performers would actually get ticked off about, and put that on your anti-sale. It works for specific types of organizations.

If you're hiring aestheticians or salon workers, they probably don't need to have cheetah energy in quite the same way. But you could do it in a fun way — something like, if you think Taylor Swift's got swag, then this place isn't for you. Someone like that just isn't cool.

A canonical example from my learning about business was when Elon bought Twitter. He posted basically the same thing: he was looking for people who wanted to attack the hardest problems in the world, that there would be very little rest, that you'd work harder on the biggest problems to try and create the new town square — if you're interested, apply at twitter.com/job or something. There was a big furor around it: 80 or 90 hour weeks, no spare time, no PTO, nothing. You come here, your eyes bleed, you go home — or maybe you don't go home, you just sleep under the desk and get back up again. But what that didn't account for is that there is a cohort of people for whom that sounds like a good time — that actually is what you want. In the same way as, who are you to kink shame me? Don't say that me being walked on a leash with a dog mask on shouldn't be allowed. That's what I'm into. They're into that. The world is split into people who want to send it professionally and people who don't, and the people who don't won't really understand the people who do. When I saw that, it reminded me: you're allowed to own your intensity — and to actively seek people by positioning yourself as not the opposite of it. That's a really great way to say this is what we stand for by saying this is what we stand against.

And I think: do you really not like being intense, or do you just not like the things you're doing right now? I'd hazard a guess that most people, if they could do the thing they really want to do deep inside, would go full boar and do it. Everybody has had that feeling where you get lost in something, lose track of time, get into flow state, become obsessed with what you're making, building, reading, watching — but you haven't figured out a way to do that for a living, or to have some aspect of it in your day-to-day life. I don't love everything about running a business; there are so many things I hate about it, and I just try to do less of them. So: are you burnt out, or are you just not doing enough of the things you actually like?

I keep getting in trouble every time I try to say this on the internet, so I'm going to try again and get in trouble again. I don't think introverts truly exist — I think most people's friends just suck. Every time some midwit who once watched a psychology video goes, "Well, actually, introversion and extroversion is a measure of where you take your energy from — whether from being on your own or being around other people," I'm like, okay, I know the literature. My point is that even the most introverted person on the planet, around the right group of friends, doesn't want to leave the conversation. And I think it's the same thing here.

I think you're right. Even the most workshy, lackadaisical, 3 p.m. wake-up, weed-smoking person, given the right concoction of life, will want to send it. That being said, I also believe some people are serial obsessives while for others the obsessions come once in a blue moon. I've been serially obsessive across my life: obsessed with getting in shape, with running nightclubs, with DJing, with business, then CrossFit and Thai boxing, then yoga, then podcasting, then moving to America.

I became obsessed with a country for a while, then with the beverage industry and CPG, and now I'm obsessed with cinematography. It's just been stacking these things side by side. Fortunately for me, it's been relatively linear — I haven't whiplashed myself with very spurious pursuits. So I've been able to build a set of dominoes that have almost compounded. Some people are like that; others are less so.

This is my pitch to people who have obsessions. I often get messages saying, "I'm obsessed with this thing and it's kind of ruining my life and I can't stop." My answer: that's not going to last forever. That fuel is going to run out at some point. Your fear is that you have no work-life balance and it's never going to end. But the freest discipline and motivation you're ever going to get is when you're obsessed. This hierarchy of discipline, motivation, and obsession is all to do with friction:

• Discipline is friction accepted. "I will pay the price. It's going to hurt, but I'll pay it."
• Motivation is friction removed. "I want to do this thing."
• Obsession is friction inverted. "I can't not do this thing. I'm pulled toward it."

Your level of obsession around CrossFit or Muay Thai or your business or your girlfriend is not going to last forever, so allow it to wear you for a while. I think it's cool to be a serial obsessive, because the obsession will cool down and harden into what looks from the outside a lot like your identity. After a while, what you are is the residue of your past obsessions. You might have been obsessed with business in a way you're not anymore, but elements of that are no longer active — they're just a part of your personality.

I totally agree. The only thing I would add is: have you done what you want to do, or have you done what's required? A lot of the time when you get obsessed, you get selfish about the thing you're obsessed with, and most people don't think about how to connect the dots into a series of dominoes that fall. You get obsessed with one thing but never think about stacking a bunch of chains so you actually build something that creates leverage or pull for you over time. You wouldn't be so freaked out about being obsessed with something if you saw that the obsession would lead to a little more freedom eventually, a little more money, and to a "still want to" instead of a "have to."

I've been there. I was in a business so miserable that I wanted to walk away from my equity entirely while making seven figures a year, because I was so obsessed at some point. I never built the chain to where I had an out — I built myself a really tall pedestal I couldn't jump down from.

That's the difference: yes, be obsessed, but think about the chain link. Yours is like that — you're obsessed with cinematography, but you're not saying "screw the podcast, I'm going to go start a documentary and never do this again." You link the two. Even if you have that moment, I call it a "someday/maybe" list. If you're a little bit ADD like I am, always adding things to your plate or getting distracted — you've got the golden retriever thing — I keep a list on my phone. It's not so little, actually; it's huge. It's called "Someday Maybe," and on it is a bunch of stuff I'd like to do one day that I'm just not going to do right now.

Everything — I do want to own a puppy farm. That's my rich-people thing. Have you met a lot of rich people who do weird things? I never really understand it; I'm not into fantasy. I'm looking for a golden retriever breeder at the moment, so if you can hurry up and get that sorted before December or January, that would be great.

That's my retirement plan. I want to be like Oprah Winfrey, but not just with golden retrievers — equal opportunity, no dog-specific breeds. But a lot of the list is like: write this next book, build this next business, buy this next business. I've bought a lot of businesses in my day, and I had to stop buying so many because they didn't make sense for our new ecosystem.

My team would yell at me, "Can we focus for a second?" Focus is like a laser: the wider it is, the less intense it is. If you can narrow your focus, you can really win. So that would be my only caveat: be obsessed, but try to figure out a way that can lead to some freedom or some money for you, because then it'll be an option in the future.

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If someone running a business has turned it into their identity, what happens to their sense of self-importance when they slow down or start using more leverage? This is one of the mistakes people make when thinking about scaling up: they assume that doing less grunt work means less importance, when it's actually more leverage. More leverage looks less busy from the outside, but it's the first time someone has to finally face themselves—they've built up all this self-importance and now they're objectively slowing down.

If you're an obsessive type of person, you're probably never going to slow down. You're just going to change lanes. You won't feel like you have to drive 75 on something you don't want to—realize you can always just change lanes.

"What would be an example of that?"

In your business right now, you might be what we call a ball hog who closes every deal. Every deal has to go through you: you get the sponsors, you get the partnerships, you close everything. If you stop, you won't be seen as a sales god anymore, and you worry that if you transition those relationships, other people will steal them from you. Instead, you offload that one part and ask: I was pretty good at selling one-to-one—what about selling one-to-many? Let's do content now. Could I figure that out? Just change lanes slightly and add a new skill with higher leverage. Business is really only so many things: can I sell something for more money than I paid for it? If that's all business is, we can just change the segments of the business and do a different part of them.

It could allow you to go learn how to write more, or hire people better. But about that deep, dark part of you that feels like if you're no longer the man, you aren't a man—or a woman at all—anymore: ask yourself, what's more valuable? A business where you can sell a job to another human—jobs aren't transferable—or a business that's so good, where you are so good, that it runs without you?

The way I usually get out of being upset about something like that, or worried about my identity, is to look at a person in the future I'd like to be like in that business sense. The GOAT is obviously Warren Buffett, who religiously talks about how little he does. Does anybody think less of the man? No. It only takes one example to realize: that's a complete mental fallacy I have—why did I hold on for so long to something that is so not true?

The Puritan work ethic—coming from the northeast of the UK, it's almost like a religion. A good example from my last industry: we ran nightclubs. As a club promoter, you don't own the venue, but you have marketing, networks, 500 staff who bring their friends down, DJs, social media—people think you're cool. Venues have a building, a license, door staff who punch people, speakers, DJs. The gap between a building with no one in it and people who want to party—that's where the relationship lies.

There's no reason I need to be on the front door of a nightclub. If anything, I need to be down in the DJ booth so I can see what's going on: what's the atmosphere, did the most recent pyrotechnic show go off correctly, what's happening with the till. You sort the bar, keep the lights on, I'll do everything else—just get out of my way. The problem is, if it's the middle of November, it's freezing cold in Newcastle, and the venue manager is outside making sure his big hairy door staff don't punch seven shades out of everybody—he expects me to be out there as well. There's this mentality of: if you're not suffering along with me, you're not in it with me.

Unwinding the Puritan Work Ethic

That mentality took a long time to unwind, and I think lots of businesses still have it: the idea that if you achieved something but didn't suffer for it, it doesn't count — that you have to be the first person in and the last person out. There are kernels of truth in that, which is why it's so pernicious. You think, "I do know that," and yet you're also trying to hire the cheetah who stays up all night to get things done. After a while, you can't lead from the front anymore, and it took me a very long time to accept that.

It also means separating out your actual contribution, especially when other parties are involved — say, partnerships around the front door of a nightclub. You have to have a serious conversation about where your value adds: it is not my highest point of contribution to stand on the front door at 1 a.m. freezing with you. My highest point of contribution is dealing with DJs and bookings and making sure the accounts are right at 9 a.m. tomorrow. So we need to change how this works — but unwinding that Puritan work ethic is very, very difficult.

If I might make a suggestion: it works best when you don't make it about you, you make it about them. In conversations with my team, I try to say almost nothing about what my highest value is. My conversation with your doorman would go something like: "All right, Brad, dude, freezing out there today. It's going to be intense, people are going to be rowdy, you're probably going to want to hit them. I feel like I should be out there, but you've been doing this for months now — you're a pro. You don't actually want me over your shoulder, because you want us to earn more, bring more people in, get the club full. Is that right?" You'd have to know that's what he wants.

Yeah, I actually do want that. Or you know that we're having problems in the back end — I can't get them to spend enough, so I'm going to go back there and try to get them on bottles.

Exactly. That way you're getting their buy-in to your highest and best use, as opposed to declaring your highest and best use yourself. What do people always like? One, hearing themselves talk, and two, believing everything is their idea. So if you can get your employees to think it's a good idea for you not to be there, that's when you've got them. Then you go back to that five-quadrant framing: if Brad really cares about money, play with money; if he cares about relevance, he'll say "I don't need you over my shoulder" — and you can respond, "Honestly, I'm not as tough as you, you do it."

I think we don't sell enough inside our companies — to our bosses, to our co-workers. We try to be a dictator to our employees ("you have to do this, why haven't you done this?") or a doormat ("okay, I'll do it, I'll be fine"). You're either a dictator or a doormat, and most of us oscillate between the two extremes — employees do it too. Instead, why not be so persuasive to the people around you that you get them to do the things you want without them realizing it was your idea, not theirs? That is when you really win in business.

It takes a minute. Early on, I had to do a ton of psychological sales — learning about priming, for instance. When I have that conversation with Brad, I'm not going to do it while he's outside, cold and already pissed. I'll do it when he's inside and feels good: bring him a hot coffee, sit him down. That's called set and setting — priming him to feel important, like we're having an intimate conversation, and then sending him back out.

It's the same with your significant other. How many times have you had a fight where she's raging at you and you say, "Let me rationally explain why I'm right" — and she listens? That doesn't happen. So when's a better time? You listen, and the second she's no longer pissed, you hand her a glass of wine, sit down together, and say, "Let's talk about this — here's my perspective." So with your team, ask yourself: do you really need to be the hero, and do they want that from you — or are you just not a good salesperson to them yet?

Asked about the other side of leadership—disciplining staff and saying, "Brad, we need to have a really serious conversation, because things aren't going well and I need to tell you where I'm at"—the guest argues that most people quit jobs because they have terrible bosses. Those bosses aren't bad because they discipline too much; they're bad because they never tell the truth. They gaslight people, tell them they're winning when they're not, wuss out on tough conversations, and explain why someone isn't winning without ever telling them how to win. Most people don't like conflict, and most leaders aren't good leaders because good leadership takes a lot of training.

When asked what leaders who dislike conflict should do, his advice is to reframe the conversation entirely: you don't think of it as conflict. You sit down and say, "I want us both to win. I'm the leader here. I have these metrics for you as an employee and these metrics for me as a manager. You're not hitting yours, which means I can't hit mine. What's going on?" Then you listen—a lot.

He runs all of his businesses on 90-day sprints, which he calls a core owner beyond, because humans work in cycles—birth, growth, decay; winter, summer, spring, fall—and quarterly cycles work well for businesses. So the conversation continues: "Over this 90-day period, we have to start hitting these numbers. If we don't, how do you think I can keep running a business where the team doesn't hit their 90-day numbers? Could we keep doing that and still pay everybody?" The answer is obviously no. So: "Over the next 90 days we'll check in every 30 days, and if we don't keep hitting these numbers, I can't keep you here."

He then invites the employee into the solution: "That's reasonable, right? Am I crazy? Is there a way I could keep you even if you don't hit all the numbers?"—letting them propose alternatives. But he holds the line: "We have to be fair to everybody. You might be my favorite person, but if you're not doing it, I can't say that's okay just for you. So we'll check in every 30 days and see whether we're hitting these numbers."

He finds this approach foreign to most people because corporations are full of politically correct hedging—"I don't feel like you're doing that well," "Sally said," HR in the middle. His challenge: how often have you just sat down and said, "Here's what you're supposed to do. You're not doing X. Why not? What can I do to help? And how do we fix it within 90 days? Otherwise we have to part ways—maybe you'll go be a superstar somewhere else."

Asked what a founder should stop personally approving first, the guest offered a general list. If you're a founder doing any of these, you're working at a virtual assistant's wage:

• Administrative work, above all responding to emails — this needs to go immediately.
• Automated reporting — reading out numbers, scorecards and the like, which is common in many businesses.
• Approving invoices below roughly 1–10% of revenue, depending on business size; for a very small business it could be up to 10%. That's not something you should keep doing continuously — instead use a tool like Ramp (with which she has no affiliation) to track all employee expenses.

The next thing to reconsider is how available you are to employees. She argued leaders were told a big lie: the open door policy. An open door policy just means you're on everybody else's schedule, not your own — and employees should guard against it too, not letting people access them every second of every day. Instead, set up a way for people to reach you only when they have what she calls "the three": the problem, a potential solution, and the risks to that solution. If you have all three, let's talk; if you're just bringing a problem, you're not ready — go back and work on it.

She acknowledged this sounds harsh — people will say you're a terrible leader. But in her view the worst leaders are the ones who seem nice yet never help you make more money, progress your career, get better, or get promoted. Who wants to work for that person? Her co-host agreed that this describes most managers, which is why so many people hate their jobs and don't earn what they want.

Why are so many entrepreneurs afraid to charge more? The answer, in short: you don't have a pricing problem, you have a confidence problem.

One of the first things I tell business owners is that I can read their lack of confidence in themselves and their business straight from their price. Most people price according to market pricing — they look at what others charge. But why would you assume anyone else has any idea how to price in your space? They don't. Everybody is basically guessing, and most people haven't done any research at all. So there are three failures here: people lack confidence, they default to market-pace pricing, and they don't understand value-based pricing — which means saying, "I deliver this much value, whether in savings, revenue, or freedom, and I'll take somewhere between 10 and 30% of the value I create for you." That's just the standard number. Yet when you look at how few business owners actually do this, the reason is fear: we've all been scared of being told no ever since our first high school date rejected us, and I think it translates straight through to our prices.

More insidiously, many entrepreneurs have a martyr complex — we believe it makes us a good person not to charge. "I don't sell expensive things, so I'm good."

The counterargument is blunt: get the money. The thing you should actually worry about is selling a shitty service — not providing enough value. You should never worry about charging too much. If you provide enough value, the price spectrum is unlimited.

The wallet share phenomenon

One last, slightly nerdy point: the wallet share phenomenon. In a fascinating study, pricing experts and ordinary people were repeatedly put in rooms where their net worth and annual income were known. You'd expect the pricing experts — it's their job — to be better at determining the right price than a random group. In fact, they were no better, and actually priced about 15% lower than the random group.

The explanation is wallet share: most people only price about 10 to 15% above or below what they themselves could afford, and this holds across almost every business. You are restricted by your own income without realizing it — it's a subconscious bias. Meanwhile, out there sits somebody like Chamath who would spend a bajillion dollars on a sweater, and you can't even conceptualize why that would be worth it to someone.

So in business right now, ask yourself two things: first, what's holding you back because of how much you make; and second — even more important — what about the other people on your team? Employees on average have a pricing range about 30% lower than owners assume.

That means your employees may be dragging down your profits by 30% without you realizing it. When I heard this, I went and analyzed our own business and found it was true for me too. It's a good realization to have: you don't have a pricing problem, you have a confidence problem.

Even proven success doesn't fix it

So many people undercharge — almost all of my friends, especially in service businesses. It's insane. I have friends who've done featured verses on records that went on to tens or hundreds of millions of plays — they were an integral, unique part of a music track. Even in retrospect, they don't think they undercharged. This is one of the biggest things that's ever happened to them, and they still can't bring themselves, the next time the opportunity comes around, to turn the screws. You almost want to shake them and say: you don't understand how good you are at what you do — you can charge more.

That's exactly why we built OwnerScore, which I mentioned earlier. It's free at ownerscore.com. People like those musicians usually score as either the artist or the dreamer — and fittingly, in this case, they literally are artists.

But the artist almost always underprices everything they do. Even if they're at the top of the food chain in their industry, they have a predilection to think that charging more is actually greedy.

The part of business that got me ticked off at some point was this: have you ever watched really good business people online—like Elon Musk—and thought, "If I just follow Elon's directions, my business will grow. I'm just going to listen to his advice because he's a mega billionaire"? That's problematic for a couple of reasons. First, you and I aren't as good as Elon Musk. If we were, we'd be billionaires. He's an anomaly. Second, I don't want his life. With much love—and we know a lot of people in common—I'm happily married, I'm going to have a kid, I like to hang out a bit. I want to enjoy life. I want to be fit. Not now, but eventually.

So it fails on two fronts: I'm not Elon, and I don't want his life. If you take business advice from somebody whose life you don't want and who has skill sets you don't have, you'll be screwed—even if the business advice itself is great.

That's why I started thinking: we have thousands of companies. Why can I have an HVAC company, an HVAC company, an HVAC company—all the same information, same revenue, same team—and see total variance?

Wildly different performance.

It's because of the founder. If I know founder A is an artist, he's probably underpricing right out of the gate, so I can give him different advice than I'd give a closer-type founder, who I know probably doesn't have as strong fulfillment or creative work in his business. It seems standard, except nobody does it. Everybody starts with "what's the best business advice I can get" instead of "who are you?"

It's one size fits all.

And I just don't think that works. There are some core business principles, but you have to apply them to who you are as a human—otherwise you'll be miserable even if you end up getting rich.

Asked when a founder should start paying themselves properly, the answer is: almost immediately, even if you can't afford it. Record it on your profit and loss statement as a loan to yourself, or track it in a spreadsheet so it's visible going forward. The danger of not doing this is that founders spend years not making any money while believing they have a profitable business, when the only profit is their own labor—and at that point it's essentially unpaid labor. The founder's free labor is disguising bad economics inside the business, and you can't fix a business if you don't understand the underlying math.

The starting point is a market-rate salary. It's easy to figure out: go online, look up the market rate for a company of that size, industry, and location, and pay yourself that. If you can't afford it in year one, that's okay. If you can't afford it by year two, that's not okay—you're doing something wrong, which usually means raising your prices, selling more expensive things, and finding richer customers who like to pay more.

The scale of the problem is striking. Last year about 5 million businesses were created—the most ever in history. Around 2019 (he asks to check the math) it was somewhere between 200,000 and 500,000. Yet we have fewer profitable businesses than ever, and entrepreneur wages keep going down. Online, everyone looks like they're in Gucci and driving Lamborghinis, but they're not—they're actually poorer than most employees. It would be a thousand percent better to work for the business than to run it. So be honest with yourself and admit, "I'm not quite ready for this game yet."

If your company becomes enormous or reputable and it still owns your life, that isn't winning or success. He'd love to ask many founders: if nobody ever knew that you founded the business, would you still want to own it? He suspects a lot of them wouldn't.

The best example is Ben Francis, Gymshark founder, who was on the show a few years ago. He owns 70% of the company, completely bootstrapped apart from some advisory arrangements and a few small percentage holders, and is worth around £2 billion (about $3 billion). He was co-founder and CEO, then stepped out of the business entirely as it went from 100 million to 500 million—the former Reebok chief came in—and stepped back in at 500 million. Francis offered this line:

When your aspirations for the business are bigger than your aspirations for yourself, you'll become a successful entrepreneur.

His reaction: that's caring more about the success of the business than your own ego.

There is, though, an acceptable honest answer to the ownership question. You can say: I take pleasure from being a business owner, from playing the game of business—even if I'm playing it badly by most metrics—and I love the impact and the significance, the identity of it being my thing and my baby. That's fine. But don't kid yourself that you're doing business; you're playing the game, and by most metrics playing it badly. If nobody knew you founded the business, would you still want to own it? He thinks it's a great question.

Eyebrow raised — I saw that. Now I can eyebrow raise again, because you can't get Botox while pregnant, which is a real tragedy. But it took me a long time to take the risk, and I actually think that's totally fine. If you're scared and you want to stack cash and only build on the side, that's totally fine. You have to stop listening to people who try to pull you into entrepreneur porn, when in fact you could just own part of a business, invest in a bunch of businesses, or be really successful as a number two and be way happier. That's okay, and we need to normalize people saying it.

In the same way I mentioned before, you can go to somebody who has a business in an industry you're desperate to work in. I bet you could roll the dice and say: "I've worked in a similar or completely symmetrical industry for a very long time. I think you need an operator. I'm going to come in and be your right hand — the sword that cuts through all the mess inside this business — and I'll do it for next to nothing, and in 60 days we'll have a little review and see what happens." You could tell that person you want 50% of market rate salary plus 10% of the business over the next couple of years, and see how you get on. Then you build it up and build it up, and as long as you've got a good enough contract, you're a legitimate business owner without any of the issues of having to start it, fund it, and win your market position. I think it makes sense.

Ultimately, the challenge for most people this relates to will come down to an emotional one. Can you relinquish your identity as the person who supposedly fixes all the things and keeps on top of everything? Can you deal with problems occurring? Will you be able to have the hard conversations when you need to? If you can do those things, I think you'll be successful. If you can't, you'll stay trapped in the same hamster wheel.

And I think it's not just about whether you want the business to win more. You really start winning in business when you want your customers to get bigger than you because of what you did for them. You want to be the mentor with a bunch of mentees who are way bigger than you, and the employer who invests in employees' futures. Many of the greats did this — take Antonio Gracias, head of Valor: he made something like $40 billion on Elon Musk's SpaceX transaction, probably more than he'd ever made in his life, because he invested in Elon. And Elon himself was an employee, kind of ousted from PayPal by Peter Thiel and the Founders Fund guys. He didn't have an ego about it — I'm sure he was super pissed and felt he could have taken that company to the moon — but he ate it and said, "I'm going to keep a relationship with these guys; they're going to fund me in the future." And they did come in and save him later when he almost ran out of capital. Because of that, Elon was able to continue his company and take it to new heights, and now Luke Nosek and a bunch of guys in Austin are going to make billions of dollars not off their own work, but off Elon's.

And those are people he used to report into or partner with. That's one of my favorite things about finance and investing: it teaches you that you don't always want to be better than your employees. You actually want winning employees, because when they leave, you should go, "What are you doing? Can I throw some pennies at that? Let me in there."

Rich people don't think in terms of their labor. They think: where can I put some money and leverage so I can do less and make more — and they feel no shame about it. I came from nothing, and my entire identity was that of a workhorse: Cody's good because Cody works a lot, and I feel bad when I don't work. Because of that, I've actually missed a ton of opportunities to invest in somebody else who works harder than me, where I don't have to do anything and still make money from it. What a beautiful thing.

This has totally changed my perspective on investing over the years, because as an investor you don't look for where you can put in the most effort. In Contrarian Thinking Capital we have around 33 to 36 companies in the portfolio, and there's a crazy thing about them: the companies that want the most from us—do you think those are the winners or the losers?

Losers.

Those are the losers. The ones I have to work hardest on are typically the ones that will give me the least money. The winners, I'm like, "Cool, saw you did another hundred million," and they don't even respond—because they're busy running the business.

Exactly. And think about that with your top employees, the A players in your business. Sadly, the worst leaders are bad leaders because they spend all their time with the losers. As opposed to saying, "Hey, you're a stud—what else do you need? Let me get out of your way." That's what I think a real leader increasingly does: get out of the way of the winners, stop spending all our time on the losers, and get more winners on board. Though that's probably not that profitable or popular either.

Yeah, a gifted-and-talented program for the people inside your organization, as opposed to raising up the bottom percentage, is usually not where people apply their attention.

For anyone listening who is ready to relinquish control and go from being owned to owning, I'd start with one hire to highly consider: who is going to be your right hand in business? Do you have a number two that you trust? It's really hard in the beginning to just implement a ton of systems. Typically, if you're the founder, you're the visionary, the one with the crazy ideas, and your execution is probably not as good as it needs to be for most people who aren't running multi-million dollar businesses. If you don't have a number two, if you don't have an assistant, you are one.

One of my mentors, Bill Perkins, famously told me when I wanted him to invest in one of our companies that he wouldn't do it unless I had not one but two assistants. I said, that's the most elitist thing I've ever heard in my life, Bill. And he was like, I don't give you my millions so that you can go do minimum wage work. You need to have junior people. It comes down to: do you want to be right or do you want to win?

The other hire I'd recommend is a chief of staff, one of the most underrated hires out there for anybody making seven figures plus. You're going to train a number two, and they're not much more expensive than an assistant.

Ours is named Aad, and he's a stud. Chris, my husband, worked with him in Iraq—he was Chris's interpreter when Chris was a Navy SEAL there. During the pullout of Iraq, Azads were prosecuted, so Chris had to call in a bunch of favors to get Aad out of the country, and we got him here. He immediately worked at Starbucks and a grocery store, two jobs at once, just to pay rent. The second he got his green card, he applied for the Marines, joined, and was first in his class. Then he became an electrical engineer and was about to start an internship program at AMX when we pulled him to be our chief of staff.

He had none of the background or knowledge, but I knew I was going to hire him. After breakfast with him, I told Chris, I think we should hire Aad. He's just a killer. He wants it. He's so hungry. He has none of the experience, but I think he's going to grind and we can help him be really successful. We called him—he was 20 minutes away, having just left us—and Chris said, "Hey, can you come to the house?" Any normal person would have asked why. He came, we made the offer, and before I even got out what the pay was, he said, "Yeah, I'll take it." I knew this guy was going to win.

All around you, without realizing it, there's some young gun or hungry person—age unrelated—who would kill just to be next to the owner, next to one of the winners at the company. You don't have to pay that much, but the second they start outperforming, start paying them more. Those people have almost every time become the ones who eventually ran my companies, and I could see Aad doing that one day too.

Codie Sanchez directs people to ownerbook.com, where her team is trying something they've never done before: a massive giveaway. She didn't want the book launch to just be about how many books she'd sold as an author, so she asked what would happen if they gave away a million dollars in cash and prizes live at the launch — so people could say they made money right now, today.

Like Oprah Winfrey, they'll hand out a bunch of business grants to business owners, along with prizes to help with productivity, all while trying to help business owners actually make money live during the launch. She doesn't think there's ever been a million dollar book launch before. They're also partnering with charities like the Navy Seal Foundation, which will get live videos and access they wouldn't otherwise have thanks to everyone coming and buying books.

As she puts it, it could totally implode, but it's going to be really fun to try. The host jokes he'll watch either the fireworks or the dumpster fire, depending on which way it goes, and thanks her for coming on.