Friends I want to talk to you about something. let me ask you a question
have you ever been awarded a position our promotion either at a place of
employment or given a prestigious role at school or in an organization and
after all of your efforts to be great at that you still either quit failed or
were fired?? Yes, me too. welcome to the club and this is
surprisingly common and if this is you you've ever experienced it I think we
need to get to the bottom of it there was a point in my life where I went
homeless because of this problem and I had to learn the hard way so let me give
you everything that I know about failure in five minutes or less plus give you a
solid book recommendation that was the catalyst for my change that you can walk
away with on this and hopefully you come out the other side just like I did and
build all the businesses and have all the fun so let's talk some personal
development alright five minutes or less welcome back air B&B family so this
started in 2007 I took a job as a salesperson for a company and I was the
top performer for like a year straight because I was this highly successful
salesperson they gave me a job promotion to Sales Manager move me down to Houston
this was the hardest year and a half of my life trying to become a Sales Manager
I sucked at it and I eventually figured it out over the course of a year and a
half but is a little like too little too late because of all the scar tissue that
built up between me and the company I ended up leaving I try to start my own
company and I failed at that eventually and went homeless evicted I'm a car
repo'd flat broke chase bank account was negative like $4,000 bad situation by
the way though I still have that account that went negative with the DBA for my
first company I actually keep it as a way to remind myself of where I've been
so I did end up paying that debt off and chased and shut me down but in that time
of my life whereas living out of this Mazda MPV van
a business banker at Bank of America gave me a book the book was called the
leadership pipeline and it talked about the transitions that you
go through when you're an employee and you move up the ladder in an
organization and all the challenges you face along the way all the way up to CEO
write this book help me forgive myself for being a bad manager and tell me why
I was never supposed to be a manager in the first place right
so that first rung you're an individual contributor like a salesperson or an
accountant and then you're great at it right so they promote you because you're
awesome and when you're a manager it's no longer about you being awesome you
see you had a high amount of workload or high amount of productivity as an
individual contributor because you could manage yourself at that task you could
get a lot of work done outpace other people you're more charming as a
salesperson better closer you're just more organized yet a better mind for
numbers something like that these are the things that make you good but when
you get promoted to management it's not about your work anymore it's about the
other people's work it's about understanding what's required of that
role that you were in just it's a knowledge of the role helping people
acquaint themselves with that role and do good at their task and problem solve
and then delegate out the things that the office needs to be done
this is management so many of us fail at this because we were top performers
before in that role that we're trying to hire people to do we don't understand
why people can't work like we could or our nearly half as good or don't want to
do the work so what we do isn't to make sure that our office succeeds we jump in
and do the work for our people right how many of how many of you do this right
you carry the sales quota or you stay late at the office to do all this extra
work right it's because you care and it's because you're good at what you do
and you won't see your organization fail because the people under you can't do
the work that they're supposed to right but there's a huge gap in understanding
here and let's talk about that gap and understanding because this matters for
you you're good at something you're the exception to the rule somebody else is
being as good as you is not going to happen it's rarely gonna happen that
you're the best at something and you're gonna acquire a peer that works for you
unlikely you can grow people to be good if you've read that previous book that I
recommended multipliers you can get the best out of people but that doesn't mean
that their best is your best okay understand that and work with people at
their level and you cannot do people's work for them because what
you do people's work for them they feel like they've been disempowered let's
make up that word and they step away from their work they detach from it
because they feel like they're never gonna get it right you're always looming
over their shoulder and it's just it's just never gonna happen they have they
don't have the tools to become good they don't have the tools to figure it out
because you jump in and you do the work for them right that's bad you need to
let people fail you need to ask people questions to get their brains working
and let them grow the next challenge are the the other large challenge at this
book resonated with me on is once you have moved up in management right and
now you're given a interdisciplinary role where you're not only managing your
salespeople or your sales managers or the accountants or the you know
accounting finance managers but you're managing it all you're managing
salespeople accountants research and development logistics everything the
problem here is your bias is that an accountant will think that all the
problems in his whole organization can be fixed with finance right that's a
finance problem or a budgeting problem or something like that salespeople are
like well it's a revenue generation problem or a pipelining problem get it
you need to learn to step away from your role and give respect to all of the
roles within your organization now this one applies to your Airbnb business so
if you're a subscriber to the Airbnb channel this is where it comes around to
you you might have found this video for its generic business advice so stay
tuned because this is not only about Airbnb but this is actionable to my
audience so you're good at something you are there are great at turning over
apartments quickly you can clean a bunch of apartments on your own you're either
good at customer experience so that way they show up to your home and they love
it right you're good at customer service like conflict resolution with guests
were upset because they had a bad flight because you're an empathetic person this
might be your strengths your strengths might be in numbers you might be really
good at occupancy optimization so your calendar is always like near 100% full
and you get really good prices really good bookings for your for your nights
you know you might be really good at that side of it you might be really good
at interior design making it look good or photography making your listings just
pop these could be your strengths the things that you're not strong at are
just as important as the things that you are strong in right you should hire
somebody to do the stuff you're bad at because you're essentially denying your
business the ability to catch up to you where you are good right a lot of times
small business owners do-it-yourself business owners like us we try to run
the whole business with our strengths and then hire somebody to replace us
where we know we can be excellent and keep the company running excellent there
and then try to learn the other things that were bad at how many of you try to
learn to get average at something you suck at yeah okay so stop trying to
become average at something you're bad at hire somebody that's above average at
that thing you're bad at get better now get better immediately because you can
hire that somebody and give them money right just pay the person and let them
help your business growth okay this is one prime part of delegation in
management respect people for their strengths and their diversity and build
a diverse team of great people and when you hire people at things that you're
bad at you'd be surprised so much more gratitude you have for that person when
if you hire somebody to do something you're excellent at you might have this
bias like you should be better at this I was expecting more under the person that
I hired right I wanted somebody who could do at least half the work that I
could do right and then you have this expectation from that person instead of
an appreciation from that person and that becomes a cultural problem when you
run your company this gets pretty deep doesn't it so another benefit of hiring
people is because you do six things at the same time even if you're ten times
the person of the person that you're hiring that person is going to develop
like or did like they're gonna dedicate a hundred percent of their mind at work
so the one task you gave them right which means that an average person is
going to outperform your excellent self because you're diluted between five or
six different roles get it so you still get better results by hiring an average
person this also allows you to start to work outside of your business start to
hire the people to replace things that you're the worst at get good at hiring
and training and mentoring where you are not good in your organization and the
last thing you should hire is a replacement for something that you're
excellent at your alpha right once you've hired everything right you can
finally step out of your business and work on your business now I will do a
separate video on working on as opposed to in your business because it is
important to but I want to kind of leave it here take that
book the leadership pipeline the previous book that are recommended
multipliers which is how to get the most out of people and be a better manager
the critical business skills for success book that I mentioned so you can start
to understand all of business as a whole invest in yourself as a businessperson
because you're not just an Airbnb host anymore you are competing across your
entire value delivery chain right how much you're spending on your furniture
how much you're spending on your rents if you're renting instead of buying how
you market your property the photos that the the themes the congruence or the
what do they say in film school I'm learning this stuff right now I'm
actually self educating myself on cinema and they talk about it's like affinity
right the continuity where things are similar right with your color schemes
and stuff understand understand as much as you possibly can about about business
right read these books invest in yourself continue to grow as a
businessperson and you'll come away ready for more and that's what really
this is about you're preparing yourself for the unknown so I hope this was under
five minutes geez Ryan I get carried away so thank you for
watching everything be automated I expect some of you guys have some
questions so leave it in the comments I'll do videos based off if you're
bouncing off of this right I'm sure this hopefully is inspired you to ask other
strange questions so I will see you on the other side