A-Player Culture With Cortland Brady

Cortland Brady: How do you measure core values and say this person does or does not live them?

Rob Monson: It's a fascinating process. And when you get people out of the standard mindset that I have to tolerate a ton of B and C players on my team, you get them into a new mindset, which is something we call one equals three hiring. And the new manager of that department said, we need to hold on to this person because they have expertise that they've learned by being here for years. I challenged that.

Carlos Soza: Did you have people in your circle asking if you were crazy? And how did you navigate?

Cortland Brady: Welcome to hello, The Growth Lab Grow.

Carlos Soza: The number one growth podcast in the world.

Cortland Brady: Today we have Rob Monson with us. Stoked to have you, brother.

Rob Monson: Thanks. Happy to be here.

Cortland Brady: Thanks for being on. So Rob is a business coach. You've been my business coach over the years and have done amazing things. I can't sing your praises high enough.

Rob Monson: Thank you. You've always been a big fan of mine. I appreciate everything you've ever said nice about me. Some of the mean things.

Cortland Brady: It's only been nice things and you've deserved all of the praise because of the massive positive changes you've helped us. Just make it Aspen, so I really appreciate you. Today we're going to talk a little bit about your journey from going from the corporate world to making this leap to being a business coach and some of your thoughts and impressions, what you thought it was going to be like, what it was actually like, and then we're going to go through for all the entrepreneurs listening and talk about those things. You've seen 35 organizations now, some with that you're currently not consulting coaching that are doing hundreds of millions in revenue.

Massive, massive companies. And what makes those companies successful? What makes those companies fail? As you've tried to implement some of those practices at other companies, what were some of the fastest adopters?

What did they do? And then some of the slowest adopters or non-adopters, why didn't they adopt? What were some of those friction points? And then advice along the way.

So stoked for you to be on the show.

Carlos Soza: Sure.

Rob Monson: Thanks. Glad to be here.

Cortland Brady: Your background, you were born in Ogden, Utah.

Rob Monson: I was.

Cortland Brady: And then you went to Weber, got.

Rob Monson: Your- Weber State University.

Cortland Brady: Got your degree. Then you went on to a marketing career and you worked at Golf Channel, you worked at Compass, and then you took a leap and started your own company. So let's start there. I'm curious to know like where were you at in life?

Why did you take this leap? How did you expect it to go and how did it actually pan out?

Rob Monson: Well, it was really interesting because, you know, back in 2017, I was working for a company. We did marketing in the automotive space. And we went through kind of the last phase of being part of a merger with a company called PureCars and I transitioned out and decided to get another job. And it was interesting because I realized that I hated being the head of marketing.

For any of you who have ever been the head of marketing, you'll know that it's a role that is primarily governed by opinion all the time. You're processing a lot of opinion about what you should be doing on a day-to-day basis and that actually just got really tiresome. On top of that, it was changing constantly, right? And I love change.

I love to learn new things, but it was one of those things you had to get so much tactical knowledge of on a day-to-day basis. It was hard to keep up with so many things. So what I really realized that I'd love to do more than anything around that time is I realized the only time I was happy at work was when we were using a method called the Rockefeller Habits. And that was a method that I had learned at a company called Compass Knowledge Group in Florida.

When I was there from 2004 to 2008, Rockefeller Habits and another system for hiring called Top Grading. We used those to grow very, very rapidly, had the best time of our lives. We helped big universities like Boston University and University of Florida take their degree programs online. I ended up trying to install the same system at Golf Channel.

Had some success with that. Golf Now, as far as I know, still operates by scaling up principles. It might not, but it did back in the day. Walk in the door still a couple of years later and still see scaling up books and realized that was when I was happiest was when I could bring that kind of order to chaos.

And I realized that I could be a different asset to a CEO than I ever was as a head of marketing. There's not a lot of trust with CEOs and their heads of marketing. And if you look at the stats, there's something like eight out of 10 CEOs are unhappy with their head of marketing. It's a very, very difficult job because we expect the head of marketing to be all things all the time.

Left brain, right brain, perfect in every way. It's a really, really hard job. So there tends to be like a low trust threshold I found at least. Maybe that was something I did too, but between the head of marketing and the CEO.

So what what that led me to was back to becoming a certified coach in what's called the Rockefeller Habits or Scaling Up Philosophy back in 2017. And it was a big leap of faith, probably, I think that year made less than I had in 15 years. And managed to get certified in about six months, which was through a fairly rigorous certification process. There were some things that we didn't learn, but in terms of the curriculum and kind of the method behind the curriculum, they had a pretty good program.

And what that helped me do was to get in a position to be a coach here in Utah. And sorry, by the way, my voice isn't perfect.

Cortland Brady: I've never been speaking at all the conferences.

Rob Monson: I've been talking.

Cortland Brady: World traveler.

Rob Monson: World traveling a little bit lately. So realizing there was not a scaling up certified coach in Utah gave me a little bit of an advantage. And as a matter of fact, before I was even fully certified, I actually been helping a few clients like to get certified, my brother-in-law and his law firm, my friend John and his marketing firm. A couple others that helped along the way.

But my first client here was City Creek Mortgage. And their founders, one of the founders was in entrepreneurs organization, EO, for those of you who aren't aware of what that is. And that's a group of CEOs that meet as peers once a month in a forum and talk about the most critical things. So that's a support for all entrepreneurs.

And one of those two was a member of EO and was at the time reading Scaling Up. And that's when they brought me into, they said, we need a coach to get all this in place. And they looked online, Scaling Up website, found me, and then found me on Facebook and said, Hey, we'd like to talk to you. And Toby Roberts said, you know, she would probably say this to this day, that she said, I'm gonna eat him alive.

Toby's one of the nicest people to ever meet, but she thought he's way too nice for me. And I guess she learned a little bit differently over time, but. And Toby and Mike are great friends to this day, love them forever. And they were really kind of the first key client that took me into EO.

And from there, I met a lot of other great people like Ron Nielsen of Ubik, Mai Winn from Sapa, Sapa in downtown Salt Lake and was introduced to several others. And so within a very short period of time, I'd say about nine months, I had almost a full book of clients, which is actually fairly rare. But I had some good fortune along the way of really getting introduced by a couple of very influential people in Mike Roberts and Ron Nielsen with their EO forums. Ron happened to be in, like, two forums, so that didn't hurt.

And one of the things that, you know, early on as a coach, I remember that I had to rely on a lot of the materials that they gave me to be a coach. And a lot of them were even paper-based back in the day, like how people fill out sheets instead of even post-it notes, because I was so scared of kind of operating the system and the methodology on my own. I kind of feel bad for those early clients that had to deal with some of my inadequacies as a coach. And there are so many ways I would teach another coach how to do it now knowing what I know.

But they worked with me, they were great, and the principles we implemented, they did the same thing they did previously, which is they really helped them get from point A to point B. And it's a whole operating framework that we put in place that affects people, culture, strategy, day-to-day execution and cash flow, managing all those decisions around those things. And if we do them correctly, it scales the company dramatically. And it affects everyone, but it starts through the lens of the CEO and the leadership team.

So, you know, what I thought this was going to be, and then you asked the question, what did you think it was going to be when you became a coach? I thought I'd be spending most of my time on strategy and execution. And what I found is that about 50, well, really it's more like 60% of the job is people. It is very much a people based job, which surprised me a little bit.

Yes, I'm a coach. I would interface with people. I thought I'd be more teaching and honing in on process and system. And yes, we do do that, but in a lot of cases it is really a people job.

So I'm in one-on-ones all the time with my CEOs and their leadership teams. I'm learning about the strengths and weaknesses of each person and trying to help them get to a different place in their career. And I'm trying to help them understand what the strengths and weaknesses are of their team. And that is a huge portion of what the job actually is.

Cortland Brady: One thing that I have loved about you, in addition to all the positive things that you've brought to Aspen, is that before we started working together, I just hit you up and said, Dude, I have all these questions. You said, Let's go to lunch. Let's go chat. And I think one of the mistakes that I would call you a solopreneur, right?

You have your company, you have an executive assistant, but you're the business. You are tenfold advisors. And I think one of the mistakes that people in your situation make is they hoard the information. They don't want to give anything for free.

And yours has been the opposite. Just there's so much, like, let me help you. Let me help you over and over and over again. And then it gets to a point where it's like, I need to start paying you because you're so impactful to our business.

And it makes sense that you have more clients like you're not taking clients. I know from time to time as clients churn and sell their businesses and those things, you bring on more clients, but I think that's probably a big part of why your book filled so fast.

Rob Monson: Yeah, no, so coming back to that and where that came from, someone recommended to me pretty early on in the coaching practice to read the book, Getting Naked by Pat Lencioni. Okay, and one I highly recommend, it's nowhere near as inappropriate as it sounds, but it's about not being able to do something for free to show value to win a client over is basically what it is. Not being afraid to share that intellectual property.

Cortland Brady: And.

Rob Monson: For me, that never seemed like a big deal. I always wanted someone to work with me in some capacity anyway before they invested any money in me. So I never thought of that as a restraint or a constraint on my business that actually helped me quite a bit.

Cortland Brady: Well, I want to jump right into the things that you do for businesses and those things that you see that work and don't work and you got to work with Rob.

Carlos Soza: Changed my life.

Rob Monson: My life, too.

Cortland Brady: So let's start with stories we tell ourselves as entrepreneurs and leaders that make our lives amazing and that also keep us stuck. Yeah.

Rob Monson: Well, there's a few good ones out there. And it's interesting because you, as a business coach, you get to see the patterns. And that's one of the reasons I say, you know, you, you benefit from having a coach is because we get to see patterns across multiple businesses that people just don't see what works and what doesn't work. And it's actually surprising what really works and what really doesn't work to most people.

So one of the stories we'll tell ourselves and there's several, I'll give you one that's pretty fascinating. It's that, hey, my business is going to be successful because there's either going to be enough demand or I'm going to succeed or fail because of demand or competition. Out of the 35 clients that I've coached, I can tell you there's only been a real long-term hit to demand twice. That's 6% of the time.

Kind of once you get into the mid-market and you prove value and get past a couple of few million dollars in revenue, there tends to be demand for a product or service, right? And most people in business think that's the same way. It's gonna all be success or failure based on demand and based on competition. And again, demand never the problem, or you know, 6% of the time has been the problem.

Competition, 0% of the time has been a problem. And I've coached in heavily, like ridiculously competitive spaces. Mortgage, plumbing, electrical, restaurants, it is never an issue with competition, not one time.

Cortland Brady: You know what's so interesting on the demand side? That concept of what got you here won't get you there. And when you're starting a business, so many entrepreneurs, businesses don't get off the ground because there's not a demand. The problem that they solve doesn't actually exist in their client's mind.

But you're saying that once you hit the seven-figure threshold, you've proven that there is demand, stop focusing on that and focus on what instead?

Rob Monson: Well, so we have to start thinking a little bit differently. We have to start thinking about self-inflicted wounds. And your business will mostly succeed or fail because of self-inflicted wounds. And self-inflicted wounds are things like the people we hire, it's usually the biggest one, or don't hire, right?

The mistakes we make in the hiring process. You know, it is tolerating poor performance, poor behavior. It is not optimizing process consistently. Thinking of new systems to put in place to grow and scale your company.

And a system can be, you know, not like a physical system or a tool, it can be how we run our day-to-day lives with things like daily huddles and, you know, how we manage strategy. It's, those are the gaps that kill businesses all the time. Biggest one is we've under hired by far.

Cortland Brady: Under hired from headcount or from talent?

Rob Monson: Oh, talent. Talent big time. So, you know, and this By the way, there's a, I'll say what book this is and I'm sure I'll get in trouble for this because never read this book. It's called Top Grading.

It's the worst book in the world. It is the greatest business process in the world. Say, how can those things possibly work?

Cortland Brady: I don't think I ever finished it. It is so dry. I'd rather read Ezekiel. Now you'll look miserable.

Rob Monson: See who, which is Top Grading written by Brad Smart, the book who, which is right here behind me, was written by his son, Jeff Smart. Probably a little bit easier digestion of top grading. Than the top grading book itself. But Brad Smart was a brilliant researcher and helped put this hiring process in place for GE back when GE was GE, back in the 90s when...

Cortland Brady: They were the apple of the world.

Rob Monson: Yeah, my CEO's name just eluded me, but what's interesting is the research showed that when Brad Smart did a ton of research multiple organizations and found that most companies only had about 25% A players.

Cortland Brady: What's an A-player?

Rob Monson: An A-player is someone who consistently lives your core values 90% plus of the time. Core values are important people, oh, it's the soft stuff, no, that's the hard stuff. You actually, to get a consistent outcome, you have to have consistent values that you're coaching people on. So 90% of the time lives the core values 90% plus of the time hits KPI driven goal.

That's an A-player. And most organizations will only have about 25% A-players. And what that does, that's a really terrible drag on everybody else.

Cortland Brady: I can understand how you can mess how you measure core values, or sorry, how you can measure performance, but how do you measure core values and say this person does or does not live them?

Rob Monson: It's a fascinating process and it starts with the leadership team. And what we do is we go through and we grade as far out as we can in an organization. If you get over 100 employees, you have to take the first couple groups out from the leadership team, you know, middle management team or extended leadership team, whatever you want to call it, and maybe their direct reports. And what we do is we go through and grade them on each core value privately as a leadership team.

And again, you know, the label, it tries to serve from the label of A, B, and C, but the label is useful for us as leaders to be able to sort of know where someone is and where they can go. By the way, what's fascinating is in this process is once you see someone get graded, I see the opposite of what people would expect, which is people think, oh, that person must get pigeonholed there. Actually, leaders and coaches tend to fight quite a bit harder to get that person out of that particular spot. So the coaching becomes more effective after that.

But back to this, so what happens is to get to a core value score, a leadership team has to look at a 1 to 10 scale. Really, their manager looks at a 1 to 10 scale all the way from this person never lives the core value all the way to exemplifies the core value and have to select which one that is. And then they get challenged by other leaders. And what that happens in that challenge process is that is a norming process among the leadership team.

Like you start to understand, hey, what does it take to make to be a 9 living this core value or what does it take to be a 1? Yes, we usually have criteria that come along with our core values to make it easier for us to understand. We usually have some understanding of hey this core value actually means you have to do this, this and this. But we do start to align around definition and after a couple of times doing that, you see a very aligned leadership team in terms of how they score and evaluate people on core values.

So you can do it, you know, it's kind of like you can make any number predictive over time. Of what it's going to be on a relative scale and that's what you're doing with this is you're assigning value based on what people agree and believe on. It's kind of like talking to someone in a development organization when you start with doing points, right?

Cortland Brady: Everyone will... Story points, yeah.

Rob Monson: And then you'll go, well, one, two or three. Over time you will norm on that score and align and agree that this is the actual score of that person. So weirdly enough, and this is the shocking part, is that regardless of the grade this is probably the fairest shake anyone will ever get in their entire life. Because what happens is organizations aren't that thorough.

Assessment of performance is way more arbitrary, it's way less consistent, and we actually know what it means to have good performance or bad performance. Very different animal than someone who goes, oh, I gotta do a performance review once a year and give this person a raise. It's a very different animal when your leadership team is focused on. Where is this person?

How can I help them grow? But in this process of going through this, what you find is that the math holds up to what Brad Smart, the data that Brad Smart had, which is about 25% of the organization are A players to start. And what it comes out as to me usually the first time around is the team grades them as 30% to 35% A players. And they've all overgraded a bit early in the process because they just don't know yet what an A player is.

So it takes a few months, six to nine months, to really understand what that A player is in the organization. And the true examples of it. So, you know, when you see those numbers, yeah, it's probably about 25. That's usually what it is.

They usually overgraded a few people.

Cortland Brady: I think we were at 19 when we did this.

Rob Monson: That's right.

Cortland Brady: The first time.

Rob Monson: You did have the low score at the time. There has been, and he probably let me tell you his name, but I won't. But we did have someone get to six. No, no way.

Cortland Brady: I take that.

Rob Monson: He was at eight, and then someone came in at six, and he was super bummed that, that someone had, had. Beat him on the lowest a player percentage score. He's really happy to report though that that's, you know, now upwards of 50 plus percent. Yeah.

For a year and a half.

Cortland Brady: Us too.

Rob Monson: Well, and that's, and that, you know, if you go back to Jim Collins, and I actually got to see Jim Collins speak last year in Chicago. Nice. And, yeah, it's great. And by the way, he's gonna speak again next year.

You guys want to go?

Carlos Soza: We'll go.

Rob Monson: Jim Collins comes out on stage, and the first thing he says, which about made me jump up in the air. He goes, First two, then what? If you've ever read Good to Great and some of his other books, he put more emphasis on that. Funny enough, beyond entrepreneurship, he didn't put much emphasis on that in the first book.

And in Beyond 2. 0, he actually makes a point to come back and correct that he wasn't as aware that getting the right person in the right seat has as big of a value as it does. And I tell people all the time, Look, there's a lot we will go through and every Percentage point at 100 points is valuable. It will go through everything on a scale of 1 to 100.

Percentage of 1 to 100, it's all valuable. But getting the right person in the right seat is literally about 51% of everything we ever do. And that is a critical thought process for everyone in business, is that you can eliminate, we absolutely can improve process, we can absolutely change how things go, we can change outcomes, we can get a more differentiated strategy, which we want. The biggest, fastest path from point A to point B is to look at my team honestly and assess them, coach them up to A-player status, or get in team members who are A-players.

Because here's what happens when you get people who are A-players. It becomes the best day of everybody's life. I saw this when I was at Compass. I loved working at Compass.

I mean, we had no drama, we had no politics. You know, we always used to say, DDSS, don't do stupid stuff. Stuff. And we didn't.

I mean, I never heard on day-to-day basis because the communication with them we haven't really talked about yet, but we communicated pretty consistently in our meetings. And what that meant was you never heard anybody say, I never heard that before. I mean, I literally could, I couldn't walk down a hall in golf channel without someone saying that to me. Sorry, Golf Channel.

I love you still. But point being, that's the, that's a very big difference when you if you think about an organization that is disciplined people, disciplined thought, disciplined action, has a group of eight players working together, it's the best day of everybody's life. They're going to be higher paid than everybody else. They're going to be paid for the value they create, right?

As opposed to other companies that have weird artificial wage scales, pay for the value they create. We're going to have to hire fewer people because we actually have a team of eight players that can do more. We're going to have less drama and stupid.

Cortland Brady: So how do you manage this? You go into an organization that has 19% eight players or 25% whatever it is, and the business This is got some drama, got some baggage, having some tough times, maybe at break even, losing money, maybe making a little bit of a profit. Do you say, okay, here's the path. We're gonna wait three months and then we're gonna start letting go of C players or do we, tell me how you go about that process.

Rob Monson: Maybe. So what we usually do is, the process we talked about a minute ago, we go through and we grade and we hold each other accountable for our scores. One of the really cool things is the leadership team after they grade all the team members will go through and share their scores with all the other leadership team members. It actually creates accountability.

And it's actually a weird level of catharsis as well because people are able to actually grapple with why they've struggled in their department. They're able to actually point into whether it's someone struggling with a core value. By the way, really weird thing. If there's an issue in productivity, there's very likely an issue in core values about eight out of 10 times.

You can trace it back to core values. Core values are behavioral. Usually it's something with how they're ineffective at living one or more core values. And that's why it's so sad when you see the ones that are based on capability, but a lot of the reasons that people get in trouble are because of values.

And a little bit of will, but usually it's not skill. So anyway, but back to this. We go through this process of grading people.

Cortland Brady: Because you already feel understaffed, right? You already feel understaffed.

Rob Monson: Here's the problem you don't understand. For every C player you're holding on to, it's about a 30% drag on any department or team.

Cortland Brady: It's not helping. Just having a warm body is not helping your company.

Rob Monson: Oh, and I understand there are going to be people that say, Hey, you know, like we've got to hold onto this person because there's no one left to fill the seat. No one will work this weekend. I get it, right? I get it.

You're going to have to work that. Yes, if there's one or two people, you might have to think a little bit differently just to get by with sanity. But I still, in seven years of doing this, haven't heard anybody say, well, I really wish we would have held onto that C player longer. And, you know, without being remotely, so we'll go through this process.

We'll actually see where our team is graded. They'll go through and review the grades and then they'll commit to a coaching action for the next period, whether that's we're going to grow them, we're going to coach them on core values to get them up to where they need to go, and hopefully that lifts their productivity. They get productivity coaching, we put them on a performance plan, we terminate. All those things could be options.

And if they're a C player, in a lot of cases we have to ask the coach or the leader, what are you going to do? What are you going to commit to, to the rest of the team that we're going to hold you accountable to? If they're a C player, they have to, in a lot of cases, they'll terminate or put them on a performance plan. And that's pretty tough for a lot of people.

It's very hard. We care about people. We care about their livelihood. We don't want to be cavalier with their livelihood at all.

We want to be able to support, grow and coach people. But if they've toxified the organization for X amount of time, and there's a lot of people that do, by the way, the opposite of that in Brad Smart's research is about 25% of most organizations are filled with C players. So 25% A's, 50% B's, 25% C's. And every C is a drag.

It's weirdly consistent. You'll see it be 30% drag on productivity. When that person gets removed, productivity automatically goes up.

Carlos Soza: And that's because of morale and also people are doing that person's job.

Rob Monson: Correct. Good. Yeah, exactly. That's because we're, you know, what's happening is we're always stepping in to make up for where this person is not doing their job or their behaviors aren't in the right spot or so they're just dragging down the team because of their behavior or morale.

So yeah, a good example of this, I had an accounting team once that we actually had two, it's interesting, they had a person accounting for a long period of time, nice person, loved him to death, wasn't very effective at the role unfortunately, and it was kind of, you can have people that they're unintentionally violating the core values, right? It doesn't mean they're a bad person because they're violating the core values, it just means they just can't always do it correctly. They can't always live by those values. They're just not built that way.

They don't see things that way. Someone was very productive, I mean, it wasn't very productive and we finally actually got an A player on that team. And by the way, the reason you have to move on quickly from C players is because they're going to repel A players. So we're not getting one but two A players on that team.

And the new manager of that department said we need to hold onto this person because they have expertise that they've learned by being here for years. I challenged that, right, as we tend to do and say, are you sure? And he said, yes. And a few months later, I think four or five months passed and he ends up moving on from that person.

And then all kinds of stuff comes out of the woodwork that this person had not been doing correctly that they were then making up for. But what was interesting was that team of two in this accounting team were able to absorb all that information, everything this person had been doing. And not only get the work done in an even more effective way, but even took two days off as a department, like three months later, which is fascinating when you think about it. But I've asked clients consistently, and I was on lookout, how much productivity go up?

And you can see in the KPI metric in the metrics too, 30% almost without fail.

Cortland Brady: So you implement this and coach a lot of different businesses. I'm guessing you've had a lot of first conversations with businesses that didn't go into second conversations, or you've had first, second, third conversations that potentially didn't progress. What stops the leadership team from adopting some of the stuff that you're talking about?

Rob Monson: Ego.

Cortland Brady: Tell us about that.

Rob Monson: You know, it's interesting because there's, like I said, a lot of stories we tell ourselves. We only really talk through a couple, but you get people that think, hey, if you're a coach, you gotta know our business. I remember I once met with a trucking company and they said, well, we don't wanna meet with you. We want a trucking coach.

And my answer was, why? So you can be just like all the other trucking companies? And some people will say, well, yes. And we will tell you that actually different is good.

It's better than copying someone outright. But here's what's interesting. As a consultant, you want people in your space that know your space. I'm not a consultant.

Big difference. I don't own the problem for you. I'm a coach. That means that I am market and industry agnostic.

And that has never been a factor. But I've seen that a lot. I've seen leadership teams and CEOs push back. It's made me learn something very, very important.

That I don't meet with the leadership team anymore. I only meet with the CEO.

Cortland Brady: Tell us why.

Rob Monson: Because this is the one decision the CEO must make on their own, because that entire leadership team is under a spotlight, not just by me as the coach, but more importantly by the CEO after that process begins. And people will fight to defend mediocrity like crazy. And fight to defend once there's a control aspect of it that can't be given up by some people. It's so sad.

Great people I've met along the way on leadership teams, awesome people could not give up control over what they thought was their day-to-day world to evolve into a new world of systems and best practices. And that's tough. So we've seen, I think, you know, we've probably saw a couple of instances of ourselves over the years, right? Back in the day, we'd see a top people couldn't evolve.

That's unfortunate when that happens.

Cortland Brady: So as you're in teaching company, coaching companies, what are the two or three things that the companies that are Again, I love that you have this data set that you're intimately familiar with these 35 clients. What are the highly successful ones doing that are the same across the board? And what are those struggling companies doing that are similar or not doing that's similar across the board?

Rob Monson: So the most successful one starts with the CEO. The CEO insists that we're going to follow the system from day one. That's the number one thing that will make you successful. By the way, the CEO could be the most B player among us, as long as they're coachable, as long as they have some risk tolerance, and as long as they're disciplined, we can do whatever with any weaknesses they have.

Starts with the CEO saying, We're going to do this and we're going to lean all in. And then what we see leadership teams that are successful do is the ones that are successful, number one, they actively work on growing their team. Meaning we're in a one-on-one coaching meetings consistently. We are talking about, we are trying to help that person as much as possible.

It's a way for them to get help on a weekly basis. If you're not coaching weekly, you're making a big mistake. Companies that coach weekly grow a lot faster. People go, I don't have time to coach.

No, no, no, no, no. The reason you have no time is because you will not coach. And you see such a massive difference in people that are in weekly coaching. And it's not because people say, oh, an A player, they really need weekly coaching.

A players respond great to getting aligned on a weekly basis to priorities, KPIs and what must not be done. And don't underestimate that, by the way. It is what must not be done to be successful that week that makes us good at prioritizing. That has to usually be aligned by supervisor and by team member to be effective.

So we see companies that do one-on-one coaching very effectively. We see them, they know and understand what their A player percentage is. So all my teams know what their A player percentage is down to the team level. Everyone has an eight player percentage goal on the leadership team based on where they are today.

They've got to grow to here by the end of the year. So they're 25%, they've got to be to 50% by the end of the year. Those are the companies that tend to do very, very well, particularly in year one, because really year one is about just process systems and getting the right person in the right seat, more importantly. Beyond that, the ones that you'll see successful, so The ones that are successful, they will follow top grading process.

So again, very thorough interview process. We install that very early. They will not tolerate poor behavior, right? Or so what happens is the plight of small business is that we tend to tolerate people that violate our core values if they're really performing well, right?

I mean, that's just, that's, oh, this person's a great salesperson, right? Therefore, we have to put up with their antics. And we realize what a true A-player is, which by the way, the A-player changed the definition of what's possible. So when we hire a salesperson in top grading, then suddenly you realize that salesperson you've had in house for the last couple of years is really a B, probably more like a C, because of the way they're treating people.

Then suddenly we're very open to being able to move on from that person. So we try to give people an excuse very long to hang on to someone who's toxic in the organization. So those that move on from toxic people, those can follow a simple rhythm. Company has a handful of priorities.

They have data to be able to use to see if those priorities are effective. Meaning they can pull KPIs regularly and they have a very consistent meeting rhythm where they meet and touch base often so that we make sure that we're on pace to our priorities and KPIs.

Cortland Brady: Tell us about the other side of the coin, those that are not growing or staying stagnant.

Rob Monson: Well, I mean, so dysfunctional leadership team, right? And again, we talked about that for a minute. Meaning they don't trust each other, they don't even talk in a lot of cases. If they're dysfunctional, right, you can see even really highly intelligent people cannot even get the words out.

In a leadership team meeting. Five Dysfunctions of a Team, by the way, is the one book I'd recommend everyone read at some point in life because I wish I would have read it earlier just knowing my role. What you have to understand when you're on a leadership team is you're a member of a leadership team first, you're not an advocate of your team first. You're a coach of your team.

Big difference. You're an extension of the will of the organization, a living embodiment of the core values. And that's a very different animal when you think about it and process it for a few minutes. And if leadership team members have problems with that, you will have a dysfunctional leadership team.

Meaning they cannot get results consistently because they can't have healthy conflict, they don't trust healthy conflict, they can't commit, they don't hold each other accountable and therefore they fail. That's number one. Number two, they won't commit to really actively moving out C players in the organization. One of the things I say all the time, it's like, hey, if you have a highly functional leadership team, you move out to see players and you do consistent one-on-one coaching, that's more effective than a thousand employee surveys in terms of the impact it makes on people's lives.

Because it really, really is. A player leadership team, they're cognizant of the core values, they treat people well, they want to know what the problems are, they surface them in those weekly one-on-ones, and they get rid of people that are distracting or harming the culture. So very, very critical to do all those things. Those that can't follow that simple execution rhythm, they can't, they don't, they they're squirrely with priorities, meaning they shine the object and go, hey, I want to go do this priority instead of the one we already agreed to.

That can be a problem.

Cortland Brady: You're a good coach keeping me on.

Rob Monson: Yeah, exactly. I love that. We all have entrepreneurial ADD, right? So that's the other two that are really fascinating.

So I had companies that were pretty good at the first three, but then they still struggled. And I realized there was a couple of things. And one, it's kind of a coherent or rational understanding of how your your brand and your company is oriented around price, quality, speed.

Cortland Brady: Can we go into this? I want to talk about strategy. I've heard, I've experienced with you and then heard from so many people that you've coached that Rob was a business coach, but really, after you can get through the processes and the people, if you can get into strategy, that's really where the gold is. So will you talk us through what your strategy approach is?

Give us a little bit of a master class in strategy.

Rob Monson: And you know, I've got to give a lot of credit to It's funny because there are aspects of strategy that I knew over the years, but strategy is a very overused word and a lot of us tend to know bits and pieces of what we think strategy is or even just being different really is. But I read books back in the day, Crossing the Chasm, Positioning, the modern equivalent of that, it's a book called Play Bigger. And those get into really differentiated strategy. But what we want to do is, and this is really hard for entrepreneurs, by the way, is they think they're in business to be the best at something.

And it's a very different animal when we go, you're not in business to be the best. You're competing to be unique. And when I'm unique, what that means is I have a white space, meaning I have position in the market, how I do something that is unique and valuable to my company.

Cortland Brady: I was just thinking about Planet Fitness. I don't know if you guys know They're a value proposition.

Rob Monson: No, what is it?

Cortland Brady: It's a judgment free gym.

Rob Monson: Oh, yeah.

Cortland Brady: So they do like pizza party Fridays. They have bowls of Tootsie Rolls at the front of the gym. It was like, you guys are literally insane. Like, you're helping people stay fast so they come to your gym.

It's not making any sense. They're wildly successful. There's so many Planet Fitnesses and it's a gym to not make you look good. How is that going to be the best gym, but somehow, of course, different?

Rob Monson: Well, a couple of really interesting examples. The one that I find really resonates with people is Trader Joe's. All right, think about Trader Joe's. How does Trader Joe's succeed?

I don't know.

Cortland Brady: I hate Trader Joe's.

Rob Monson: Not the answer I was looking for, but look, I mean, Trader Joe's has, they have a cult.

Carlos Soza: They do, sure. It is crazy.

Rob Monson: It's crazy and as a trader, you'll.

Cortland Brady: Drive miles and miles to get to a Trader Joe's.

Rob Monson: Oh, totally. Well, so keep this in mind, entrepreneurs, CEOs and strategists, any strategy that results in a cult, is a good strategy. But strategy to them is not just a plan to get from point A to point B, it's how they're different. So when we say, okay, how is Trader Joe's different than a Walmart, for instance?

Well, they're very small stores. They only have a handful of SKUs, right? Each aisle?

Carlos Soza: Their shelves are short?

Rob Monson: Short, short shelves, right? They are, they are, they're one of the first, I think they were the first white labeler in retail. They would buy products and have them labeled as their own back in the day. They have a very unique growth strategy that is focused on the number of rumored to be, by the way.

No one can really verify this for sure, but if you look at the ones in Utah, probably pretty accurate. They select locations based on the number of degree holders in an area. Number of bachelor's, master's degrees. Makes sense if you think about Joe, who was the original trader Joe.

Joe Colombe, I think that's what his name was, he started this business because his parents were university professors and he wanted to give them an opportunity to get fresh fish and wine at an affordable price. And Trader Joe's, by the way, we talk about price, quality, speed and strategy, they're oriented around quality affordable, or affordable quality, but it's really quality first at the right price. So price is sort of the second variable they manage and then they intentionally suck that quality and they're not bad or not speed. Speed, excuse me.

Thank you. That speed and speed can be interpreted as convenience or speed of delivery or availability and what happens at Trader Joe's they stock out all the time. It's a limited product selection. It actually becomes a strength because you have to buy here and that's when your weakness becomes a strength.

People know they got to buy it or they're not going to get that Kringle pastry right in that visit or that won't get it the next time. So that makes them think about that highly successful. I mean, can you imagine, like, I don't think there's ever been a Trader Joe's and current layoff. As a matter of fact, I have no doubt they'll be just fine in a recession.

It'll be like recession proof. They're not going anywhere. That's differentiated strategy. That means I don't have to be Walmart.

I can be in retail. I have to be Walmart. I have to be Kmart. I don't have to act the same way.

I don't have to do the same thing. But dang, we'll better know where I'm going to trade off. I've got to know what I'm going to be really bad at to be really, really great at the value I deliver. And that's what we mean by price, quality, speed, which is usually there's one outcome in the mind of the consumer that we're known for.

There's a variable or value that you manage to get to that point and there's one that you're really bad out of those three. So one of the fun things we do really is to try to figure out in any business what are you? Any price, quality, speed? And you think, well, everybody knows that.

Nobody knows that.

Cortland Brady: We're all three.

Rob Monson: We're all three.

Cortland Brady: We're the best.

Rob Monson: And it actually gets into this really deep discussion. What we have to eventually get to is we go through a very, very fun but challenging process of looking at what are the market attributes that are important to all the consumers in the market. We pair that down to our core customer and from that we actually determine what are our current differentiators or what are the differentiators we have to have in place to be able to fill the needs of our core customer, of our ideal customer. And that process is process of putting in place three to five how-tos in a business that are fundamentally when you tie them all together they make them unique.

So again, a how-to, you know, it's white label purchasing, right? At, you say, well, everybody does that. Yeah, but they don't do it on a small footprint. They don't do it on a weekly stock out, right?

Those are differentiators, right? If you look at a company like Crumbl, some of the differentiators are pretty interesting, right? Rumor is they have a couple hours a week of weekly team training. They have a weekly rotating team menu, I mean, weekly rotating cookie menu.

And then they have so many team words. And then they have the social media worthy brand, right? And those things make Crumbl kind of fundamentally unique. That's the unique recipe that Crumbl acts by.

So all my clients over time have this unique recipe that they fight to over time. So we don't just get operationally better with our planning, that we put in place, we get incrementally different. And what that means is we are impenetrable from the competition over time, meaning you cannot take us out. We might get, you know, recession could hit, we get hit a little bit, we're not going to get hit like anybody else.

One of the clients that did have a demand issue that I was mentioning earlier, you know, it's interesting because they had a real systemic hit to demand, but we had built up so much in that company that it really didn't hurt. I mean, it hurt it didn't hurt compared to everybody else. There are whole companies that got taken down because of that and yet we were fairly well off compared to everybody else. So it's amazing what you do when you get a differentiated strategy, A players, disciplined execution allows you to keep cash flow running where you're banking cash consistently.

Boy does that make a big difference in how to grow a company.

Carlos Soza: Have you ever had an instance where you said my work here is done at this company? Or never, it's never done.

Rob Monson: It's never done. No, I mean, what's interesting is you can always work on something, right? You can always improve on something. And yeah, there are times when you kind of can get to the point though where you're like, okay, it might be a little bit monotonous because we're getting good at a lot of things.

Like, you know, most companies will get to where we need them to go in about 36 to 48 months. Right? So after that, it might get a little bit monotonous, but there's some, it's not like I've been with one client, Ron Nielsen at Ubiquiti since the very beginning and we always find fun stuff to work on every single month and we always grow like crazy. We're having too much fun and that's why you just keep going.

We had too much fun.

Cortland Brady: I had lunch with Ron and it's cool to see these companies that know Ron's a pilot. Like you have companies and CEOs that you're coaching that have their own planes, have their own empires, companies that have had multi hundred million dollar exits because of, I mean, obviously a lot of things, but you were their coach through that process, which is really cool to see and gives a lot of validity to your words. They carry a lot of weight.

Rob Monson: Thanks, man. Appreciate it.

Cortland Brady: I have a couple, just two more questions left, but, Carlos, do you have any before I have a couple wrap up questions?

Carlos Soza: I did have, I do have one question. Well, two, actually, one of them is kind of what we're talking about. So you're working I I read this in Portuguese and then I wanted to translate it to English and I wanted.

Rob Monson: To get.

Carlos Soza: Your opinion on it, Rob. So it goes like this, Don't try to save money on intellectual capital. This is one of the laws of business. The mediocre wants to have the best by his side but pay very little.

Who wants to eat filet pays for filet. You don't eat filet by paying for skirt steak. Share wealth so you don't have to share poverty. And you talked about that a little bit.

I wanted to get your thoughts on this.

Rob Monson: Yeah, well, you know, it's interesting. When you get people out of the standard mindset that I have to tolerate a ton of B and C players on my team, you get them into a new mindset, which is something we call one equals three hiring. So I never talked about it this way originally, but one equals three hiring says, I'd rather have one great person than three good people. And I could pay that one great person up to two times their salary.

And I'm still winning. That comes from the Container Store. Container Stores kind of fallen on hard times because, you know, market demographics just changed over the last few years, but they were successful for about 45 years and growing like crazy and doing their own thing. And even during the downturn, 07, 08, they only had to give everybody a 10% reduction in salary and still moved right along, which is fascinating.

But that's their philosophy, and it is a wildly smart philosophy for hiring, so. So what we'd rather do, yes, is wealth distribution. The nice thing is I'm fortunate that I work with CEOs and leaders that are very much into paying more for their team. They would rather pay, we'd rather hire fewer people, pay them more money, and that doesn't mean those people are overworked.

Again, if you have a big percentage of A players around you, you're going to get more done and you're going to economize and optimize output a lot faster. Than with the C players dragging you down.

Cortland Brady: And it's so much less drama and more enjoyable for all your team members.

Rob Monson: So much more enjoyable. But yeah, I would say that, you know, so the probably the biggest testament to all this is if you go back to when supposedly we had the Great Recession, and I say supposedly because yes, I know there were a lot of people leaving jobs during, was it 2021 from like April to August or September, but you know, Carlos probably remembers this back when we do the operations mastermind with all the ops leaders from all my company, I gotta restart that again. At some point. But what was interesting was we have people come to that meeting all the time and I go, who's leaving?

Do we have anybody at risk? Nobody's leaving. Nobody. Because nobody leaves an A-player team.

Nobody. And that's because you're already well compensated. You're already having the best day of your life at work. I'm never going to leave.

It was almost a myth to us at that period of time that it was happening around. It's like, really? It's not happening in our world. So fascinating to see it from that perspective and, you know, showed the true value of wealth creation is over time these people are, you know, have met their dreams too as well.

Well-compensated personally or professionally so they can live out their personal dreams. They tend to get more vacation than everybody else can do more with their time because they're part of a player teams.

Carlos Soza: Can you say that, Matt? I've heard you say it so many times, but I, I just, I love it. The one person, three, one great person.

Rob Monson: Is better than three good people. And I'd rather pay that one great person up to two times the average salary for the role and I'm still winning.

Carlos Soza: I love it.

Rob Monson: That's a brilliant way to think. Like I said, this comes from the container store and it really hit me that that's kind of the essence of the top grading philosophy. Top grading says exactly that. Hire fewer people, pay more.

That goes back to a Google study as well from 2015 that was pretty impactful as well in terms of how we coach and lead but you find most successful organizations understand that philosophy. What that means is you move on from lesser, more low paid talent and you get into higher priced, better talent and that scales you faster. So, last great example this I'll share. I had a client that, and they were pretty low on the A Player Percentage Score.

I think our profitability was literally negative because we had some issues, we had some defect issues the year before I started as the coach. And after kind of getting them turned on to the A Player idea, we were able to grow it so dramatically. I think their profit went up 800,000 profit in the first year. And so, you know, we blow up, the team blows up profitability overnight because they went from 25% A players to 60% A players.

All the problems go away. The defect rate issue goes away. A person who was in the back who had to manage the entire back shop, who actually was a great team member, he was really struggling because he'd always poor talent around him. And just the fundamental shift it made in a course of a year and a half was mind blowing.

So, you know, talk about getting yourself from one spot to another, you do that by getting the right person in the right seat. And, you know, again, I, you said, hey, strategy, that's the thing you want to focus on. You're right. I would rather do big picture differentiated strategy.

It's really hard to get to and really fun, but we have to grapple with people first and foremost in the most positive way possible. Meaning we have to know what our team looks like. We have to be able to practically help that team get from point A to point B or move on from the ones that don't or add team members that will get us there. And that's kind of the first starting point.

And as we're doing that, we get a simple execution rhythm, we get goals in place for the company short and long term, and that's where we get started moving from point A to point B. But I'd recommend, if you're an entrepreneur, I would really want to know what my A player percentage is.

Cortland Brady: You have a software, we didn't talk about Grover in this, but you've recently launched another entity that goes through and people can track track and manage a player percentage through Grover, which they can subscribe to.

Rob Monson: Yeah, GroverTalent. com, that's where. So, took the same method that we would do on a spreadsheet and actually put it to the same method we were doing a spreadsheet and put it into a software. And really this is kind of a cool experience for me as an entrepreneur.

I got to kind of sit in your shoes for the first time, which is I built something to solve my own problem. This really was a problem for me because I had clients that wanted me to stitch together spreadsheets so they could still get access in the way they had previously and give people the right access. Now you can just do that on your own and grow over and track their performance over time. It solved a lot of issues, but yeah, it's something that's going to be available soon.

So you just load in your core values and start grading your team and get to your A-player percentage. Every CEO needs to know and understand the A-player percentage of the company and have a every leadership team member needs to have. Have an A-player goal they're fighting towards that are supporting that goal.

Cortland Brady: I love that. Yeah.

Carlos Soza: Thanks, Rob. My last question for you changes subject a little bit. So you left an executive role to start to go on this solo entrepreneur journey. You said that in your first year.

Cortland Brady: You.

Carlos Soza: Made less than in the 15, the the prior 15 years. My question for you is did you have people in your circle asking if you were crazy? And how did you navigate that? It's such a big change in pay, but what kept you going through?

Rob Monson: You know, it was interesting. I didn't have that many people tell me I was crazy. A lot of people didn't necessarily know what I was going to do, right? They questioned what that was.

And I did have a lot of support. I had a ton of support from my wife and from my kids. I mean, it felt like a stressful year. Year, right?

Because we just didn't know what the next month would look like. I'm happy to say now that, you know, marketing professionals tend to be decently compensated, but I probably make six or seven times more than I ever made as head of marketing. So that's a pretty interesting process, right, to be able to take that leap of faith. And quite honestly, I didn't.

I'm very fortunate that I had people like Mike and Toby and Ron that moved me along because I probably would have struggled a lot longer. I had some good fortune along the way. But that helped me get up and running fairly quick so I didn't feel much pain. I honestly look back at that, you know, people say they go through a struggle in life like when they don't have as much money and are, you know, just kind of struggling day to day and we felt a little bit like that in 2017.

And what was interesting about that is I look back at that, not as a stressful time, I look back at that as a very, very, as an awesome time in life, right? Like it was awesome to go through that experience. I learned so much along the way. There were some painful things that happened that year but I learned a lot and I'm grateful.

That same year I got introduced to all these coaches that I'm now friends with in these coaching communities. So I'm certified by two coaching communities, Scaling Up and Metronomics. Metronomics is a newer organization, but they kind of sprung out of a portion of the Scaling Up organization. Scaling Up, I got to meet 200 coaches that were instantly a new family to me.

And I can't tell you how much that's meant to my life. So I now have a network of friends all over the world, even people in South Africa. People in, people in Tampa, Florida, right? South Africa, Tampa, Florida, Pennsylvania, like all.

Carlos Soza: Over the world in Brazil.

Rob Monson: Yes, actually, I do. I do. Yes. And it's my friend Carlos actually do another, another friend Carlos is in Brazil.

And we had another, we had one Carlos from Juan Carlos from Colombia. We had Carlos from Brazil and Stephanie from Canada. And, I mean, we So many friends. So anyway, the great part about this journey was like, yeah, I might have struggled financially, but I got a whole new family out of this, a whole new outlook and a whole new job.

And I get to, you know, everyone asks me, are you ever bored? No. I'm a part of 13 different leadership teams simultaneously. I never feel like I'm alone.

It's great. It's a great job. I never go home at night exhausted, even if it's hard to Last question.

Cortland Brady: You'Ve kind of already touched on this, so combine the questions. Advice to yourself in 2017 when you're making the leap and advice to entrepreneurs that are at the $2 million run rate?

Rob Monson: Well, advice to myself back in the day would be to not worry as much as I did. It was a daily worry and concern to just sort of enjoy the ride of learning this new system and process and know the outcome was is going to be okay. And not even a plug for me, but I would tell every entrepreneur is you need a coach. And in Utah, we're not quite used to that yet.

Like I said, I'm very fortunate to have the clientele that I do, but I will tell you that most companies in Utah don't realize the value of a coach. And it's literally worth millions of dollars to an organization to have an outsider who can see the patterns in multiple organizations and be able to say, no, don't do that. Story you're telling yourself get rid of that immediately because no one is taught how to run a business. I've had CEOs that have Harvard certificates, right, that are extremely educated and very bright.

They didn't know everything about how to run a company. And as a coach, you get to see that in graphic detail. You get to see the patterns. So that's what the values of getting that coach.

I tell every CEO and entrepreneur, get yourself a business coach that can help you see the blind spots and give you feedback. Painful for the CEO. We don't always get to hear the truth, right? It's sometimes a lonely job at the top.

You need someone who's there to tell you the truth when everybody walks out the door. 'Cause you're the CEO, you gotta hear it straight. That is a very, very valuable thing. And from someone who's seen it and has the credibility, that's who you get from coaches.

Cortland Brady: I can attest to that, man. You made a massive impact at Aspen.

Rob Monson: I love you.

Cortland Brady: Appreciate you, brother. Love you too, man. Thanks, Rob. That's a wrap.

Rob Monson: I love you too, Carlos.

Carlos Soza: I love you too, man. You're amazing.

Cortland Brady: You've been watching hello Grow, the world's number one growth podcast. I'm Cortland Brady.

Carlos Soza: I'm Carlos Soza. If you've watched this video so far, it means that you like the content that we're putting out and the people we're interviewing.

Cortland Brady: We're putting together a community of business leaders, entrepreneurs and sales leaders. You liking, subscribing and sharing this content helps us reach those that are going on that journey.

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