Right Person, Right Seat

I was fortunate enough to be able to attend a CEO summit at Harvard a few months ago and one of the things that they asked all the CEOs in advance was, what is the biggest constraint in your business? And out of the 100 CEOs who were present, 90 of them said people. And you know, when you listen to the answers from the other 10, you kind of got behind the scenes on them. The other 10 were probably lying to themselves, to be quite honest, it was still people.

And the biggest challenge is getting the right person in the right seat. We usually, you've heard me talk in the past, we usually hire like total garbage. We hire for expense instead of ROI, which is a huge mistake. We don't have any coaching systems in place.

We don't have a hiring system in place. We don't have an evaluation system in place that can help people grow and consistently succeed in their careers. And what you're gonna find in business is getting the right person in the right seat is half of everything that we do. Is figure out how to get that right person in the right seat and coach them up into their best version of themselves.

And what's interesting is that hardly anyone does what is necessary nor has the systems in place to be able to do those things, to be able to hire, coach, evaluate. You know, I've been asked over the years, hey, would you, you know, what's more important to the business? Would it be, you know, having the right person in the right seat or is it all the other habits, routines, everything else you teach? First and foremost, get the right person in the right seat.

The habits, routines, the right strategy, the right plan are all very, very critical, but 51% of everything that's critical in business is getting that right person in the right seat. And we want to be able to have an A-player team. And if we can grow that A-player team, we can actually hire fewer people, we can pay those people more money, and we can get more done consistently. So the challenge I have for CEOs and for leaders, so for CEOs, the challenge is to get to 100% a player leadership team in the next year.

By a player, what I mean is you can sit people that 90% of the time, they live the core values, 90% of the time they hit KPI driven goal. Those two things have to be met to be an a player. Gotta live core values, hit KPIs. We want an a player leadership team, 100% within one year.

And the rest of your leaders, I would say at least get to a 50% a player team. Over the course of the next year. That is an incredible goal. Doesn't matter what size organization can you get to a 50% A-player team through coaching?

Unfortunately, some subtraction and addition. But if you set those goals for 2025, you're gonna come out of that with one incredibly profitable company, two, everyone's gonna be happy on a day-to-day basis, three, everybody's gonna get paid more for the organization is going to be able to scale and do whatever it wants. And it will have the kind of team that makes other leaders jealous. So if you want to learn more about how to install these concepts, including everything that helps you manage the biggest decisions in business around people, strategy, execution and cash, CEOs apply for my roundtable, where you can bring not only yourself, but your other leaders to a virtual environment, where you learn about all these incredible growth concepts and install them, not just learn about them, but install them in a very cost effective environment.

So you can find that in my bio.