What if I told you that building a billion dollar company from zero has nothing to do with working harder and everything to do with building better systems? I went from working at Subway, being the CEO of a $500 million portfolio, and I have learned that there is a reason that 99% people stay stuck, and it is not lack of effort. The first one is culture as a system, okay? Whether you have a company or you're just starting one or you're a leader in one,

this is a sign that you want to understand, which is that culture is going to start with you. When you're a kid and you go over to somebody's house and you go over to one friend's house and like it's like no elbows on the table, always take out the trash. If you're here, you got to take your shoes off. And it's like if you don't do those things, they're like you don't get invited back. You have your other friend where it's like you go over, it's like you could wear your shoes through the house.

They don't give a shit where you sit and eat.

There's food on the ground.

That's a culture. could invite it back. Then you have your other friend where it's like you go over, it's like you could wear your shoes through the house, they don't give a shit where you sit and eat, there's food

on the ground. That's a culture. Now culture is a system that governs people when you are not in the room. Early in my career at Gem Launch, we had hit like 50 million revenue. I remember I was literally on a walk the day that I found out that we hit 50 million. I was like, holy shit, this is crazy.

At the same time, I'm like, dude, my fucking operator just quit. I lost my three best salespeople.

I had these... The day that I found out that we hit 50 million, I was like, holy shit, this is crazy. At the same time, I'm like, dude, my fucking operator just quit.

I lost my three best salespeople.

I had these giant clients who had left and they, like, made a huge storm on the way out and

like start a fucking Facebook hate group.

It was fucking awful.

At the same time, these two things are happening.

I remember thinking, how is it possible to be winning so much on paper and feeling like so shi about everything else

that's going on. And that is when I learned that growth actually does not fix broken systems

or broken culture. It actually multiplies all of those things. And so what I realize is like we

had these values in the company and I explained them a lot. Like I told people of them. I had

them everywhere. I said them all the time. I did not enforce them. Culture is not what you say. It's what you tolerate. It's what you enforce. So if you tolerate lateness, that's your culture. If you tolerate low standards, that's your culture. If you tolerate people who are rude to other people, that's your culture. So for a lot of you, what happens is that you keep people on your team who don't abide by the culture because they are good performers. Congratulations. Now, your whole team thinks that behavior matters less than output. So if you keep high performers who have low culture, or if you keep low performers who also have low culture, you lose respect from the great people on the team, the eight players who have abided by your culture. And now you have nobody that's good. So how do you actually do this? How do you make a culture into a system? The first thing is that it's okay, we have values, we're honest, integrity, all these things. Well, what the fuck does that actually mean in terms of observable behaviors? What can I see with my eyes? How do I know that somebody's honest? What do they do? What do they say? And so when people say,

oh, we value integrity, well, what the fuck does integrity actually look like? We need to know how to observe it. If we can observe it, we can enforce it. You have to be able to observe what you want to enforce. You need to break these things down into observable behavior. I'll give you an example. we have competitive greatness.

It means that when the game's on the line,

they decide to stay until after dinner or maybe even later to get the job done because the game's on the line. They don't say, hey, you know what? I'm going to go home for dinner. They say, I'm going to finish this because I need to finish it. That's competitive greatness, in my opinion. Now, is that for everybody? No. And I make people well aware of that before they come to work here. So you can second that we want to do. Build rituals that reinforce those behaviors. Okay, so this can look like daily recognition, weekly shoutouts, monthly awards. Recognition is literally free. And there's a quote by Mary Kaye that supports this very beautifully. The only thing that people want more than money and sex is recognition. And I truly believe that. Something that we do all the time is like, I will come back to my phone after this actually. And there's a Slack channel that says shoutouts. It's just people shouting people out for following the values. That's it. It's just all day people are doing that. It's reinforcing the behaviors we want. That's the first thing. Now, the second thing is to enforce the behaviors we don't want, which I use what I call an enforcement matrix for this. It's essentially evaluating the people on your team because the biggest way to enforce behaviors is by showing people by who you hire and who you fire. That is like the biggest thing you can do to reinforce a culture is like who they see go out the door and who they see come in. That's who you tell people. Like, what is most important to this company is the people in it. And who you decide to bring in, who you decide to kick out, that's going to tell people everything. Use an enforcement matrix. I use this matrix like this and on this end of the axiom, you have skill and then here you have will. I use will as I say culture fit, like how much do they embody the values? How much skill do they have to do the job? People who have high skill and high will or values fit, I would say those are stars. I want to keep reinforcing and publicly recognizing those people. Promote them, shout them out, put them in front of people, give them more opportunity. People that have neither

of those things, you want to kick out. If somebody has low values and low skill, why are they in your company? I don't know, because you're lazy and don't want to get them out or you're passive aggressive. You got to get them out, though. That's terrible signaling to these people. These people hate being in a company with these people. They'll leave if you don't get these ones out. Here, you have people who have high values fit but low scale. That's good. That's not a bad thing.

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