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Take the first step and streamline your operations today as we discuss strategies on how to get started from this episode.

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Transcript

Today, I'm going to talk about transparency, and why transparency can be your best friend or your biggest liability. And it's so critically important. So if you are the visionary entrepreneur or the operator on the team, this is for you. Because the real transparency, the absolute transparency has to be between the two of you. You must be open books to each other. And I'll go through a couple different examples of why this is important, and how to do it. But I'll also leave this with a warning guys, I GM for real here, I left a seven figure company that I was the director of operations in because my CEO was not transparent with me. That was at the end of the day, what red pilled me, I'd wanted to do something different for a while anyway. But it was gonna take a red pill for me to pull the trigger. The Red Pill was the moment where we had to get transparent in a hurry. And I discovered things I found things out. That ultimately tipped me over the edge that made me say, Is this really what's going on here?

How did I not know all this. And it led me down the path of quitting. So if you're not being transparent with your operator, if you're not being transparent with your team in certain areas, and absolutely with your operator, fully and entirely, and the operators, if you're not being transparent with your CEOs, it will come back and it will bite you right in the ass someday. So demand it. If you're the operator, and you're not getting transparent information, you need to demand it. If I could go back several years ago to old self Adam and tell him one thing it would have been to not accept that lack of transparency, to not accept it, to demand it. So which areas are we talking about? The first is earnings, what is the company earning that needs to be an open book, it needs to be on a spreadsheet or some kind of dashboard, something that is visible to not just you not just the operator, not just the CEO, but the entire team, everyone on the team must be in the loop on where your earnings are. Everyone, Adam, that's crazy. That's crazy.

But then my people are gonna know how much we make. They already know, dude, they already know. They're not stupid. You hired people that are smart, right? You want to hire people that are smart. They know what sales are. They know what the figures are, they know what you're earning, they can do the math. So I mean, what kind of respect are you giving them? If they don't know their earnings. This also gives you an incredible opportunity to dissuade or let them avoid them taking the wrong assumptions. So let's say someone comes into your, your world, and they see that your main product sells for $1,000. And they hear 50 sales and they think we just made $50,000. But what they might not know is you're running 50% sale. So now they're making the wrong assumptions. Because they're smart, and they're using the information that they have. So get radically transparent with your earnings. And that must be dovetailed, then with the second part, you must be fully radically transparent in your profit and loss statement. How are you looking every week? Are you profitable? Are you losing money? What is the year long projection look like? What is the quarter protection? You know, don't just let him see things or don't just make those figures available in a limited duration period of like a week or a month? Because let's face it, I mean, we just had Black Friday, Cyber Monday. You know, a lot of companies make a lot of money during that week. But it doesn't mean the whole year looks like that, right? So give them profit and loss in context. That way they can take that earnings figure and make sense of it. So they see they might see oh man, we had to enter $50,000 earnings this week, because we had a huge Black Friday deal. Well, but did they See the 50,000 hours and Facebook ads over that same duration?

No. Oh, so they're making incorrect assumptions, all of these things, guard you against people making incorrect assumptions about this status of the company about the health of the company about how much money you as the evil CEO, because we've all watched too many Hallmark movies are actually making out, you have to be transparent about this guy. So there's no excuse for this. Because you're leading yourself up for failure if you're not. And this was one piece of that component that led me to leave that job I talked about, it was finding out after the fact that we had been in lost territory, and where it all went, and I was apoplectic, I'm like, I could have helped brother, I could have helped prevent this, if you would have looped me in. But you kept it to yourself, brother and I it's not acceptable. Lee lead with those things. Okay. Another area to be radically transparent is relationships and masterminds. Like the type of people you're out there meeting. If you're an operator, and you're not out there trying to meet operators, other operators, brother, you got to and you just do it, you're gonna learn so much from them. I have a mastermind group that I've started, and it's me and some buddies. To be honest, it's not like a professional mastermind that I've joined, I joined those two, but this is a mastermind just for me. And it's where I can be like really super vulnerable with people and I can get really good advice, I can bring my major problems to them. When you're setting up these relationships, so you CEOs and operators, so you got to be transparent and accountable to each other. Let them know what you're doing. Let them know the type of people you're meeting. Let them know the type of relationships, your format formatting, because they might lead to other stuff. Imagine if I made the operator for this company. And while they have a CEO to write, what if I can like my CEO and add them together? What if my CEO forms a relationship with another CEO, and I look and I'm like, I'd really like to meet their operator.

I met the director of operations for some pretty amazing companies, because we were really transparent about our relationships. So make sure you're doing that make sure that's part of that conversation between you and your better half your your second command or your owner, your boss. Be transparent about those relationships. You'll find interesting things come out of this guy's so trust me on this, it might seem weird, just trust me on it. Another aspect you need to be radically transparent on is the team itself. The team strengths the team's short fallings everything. If there's something that the CEO thinks about one person on the team, you need to know about it, and vice versa. You need to communicate this stuff, because it's gonna allow you both to then come from a place of highest contribution, a place of help for each other. So if you see someone's performance is dwindling, and you bring it to the CEOs, desk, or vice versa. Well, now we can team strategize, we got two heads thinking of the same problem. And we all know that helps, right? So do get radical about that. And share that make that part of your cadence, part of your communication strategy. I put it on the agenda when we're meeting. Because I never go to a meeting without an agenda. If you haven't guessed that part yet. I should probably do an episode on that. Yeah, well, we'll do an episode. So look for that in the coming weeks. The final area of radical transparency. And this is, so these last two the teams and what you're thinking about team members like this is just you and you know, this is just sea level talk discussions. So leadership discussions. The final thing is compensation.

This can catch up with you in a hurry. And if you are not being adequately compensated in comparison with other people on the team, it's only a matter of time before you find outcand then it's going to be too late. Get radically transparent with compensation, especially if you're on some kind of a profit share mechanism.

Salary salary versus hourly. This needs to be out there and needs to be communicated. Because you need to have a say in this. You need to have a piece of this table, your leadership. If you're listening to the show and you're the CEO or the operator you are leadership you are responsible So how can you make decisions without this information? How can these decisions be made without your ability to influence them? And if you're not influencing them right now, when when will you have a seat at that table? If the answer is never brother go find another job. If the answer is never, if you are not in that position, to have a say, in things like this, and you are the number two at a company, quit, quit now. Go find another job with someone that's willing to let you be a leader. hard thing to say hard thing to do. But imagine if you go through a whole time period, and you find out that you weren't being adequately paid. And someone else was being unfairly paid much more? How would that hit you be a red pill moment, right? Red Pill moments. Now, if you have someone on the team that demands a sum that is not in line with anything coming close to reality?

Well, that's part of the reason we're sharing our p&l. That's part of the reason we're sharing our earnings statements. Because what you're gonna have without being transparent about earnings, being transparent about profit versus loss, is you're going to have people make these bad preconceptions about the health of the company and how well things are going in the organization. And what are they going to do, they're going to demand money, without full understanding of the status of the company. I believe in entrepreneurial organizations. If you're hiring people that are entrepreneurially, only entrepreneurially minded and fit in with your culture, they are not going to demand something that's out of bounds with reality. And they're not going to demand compensation that could jeopardize the health of the company, that are going to make necessary short term sacrifices to ensure the health of the company. But if they're coming at it with a position that the company is doing incredibly well, what's going to happen, they're going to want their peace, and I don't blame them for wanting their peace. But that peace must be done in fairness with how the company's doing and where everyone else's compensation is. Having one person make radically more than the others. It's just not fair. And it's going to catch up, and it's going to bite you right in the eyes someday. So this was just a quick dive into areas of transparency and why this is so important and ways you can be transparent. And I just, I can't stress this enough, guys, I really can't. You need to be an open book. This type of relationship that occurs at this level, and entrepreneurial organizations is one of the most closest relationships that I can think of in terms of how close you have to become, to really get to that level, that level that you're striving for.

You know, let me just ask you an example. How close do you think Russell Brunson, and Todd Dickinson are. Like, if you think they're not brothers from another mother, I got no sorry for you, like they are. So you have to get to the brothers from another mother level of closeness with your people. And that will help you that will serve your company well, it will take you to new heights and bounds. It will enable everyone to feel like they have a piece and they are going to work their faces off for you. Because it's not just a job. But to do that, and to keep it going. Be an open book, man. Just trust me and know that this is coming from a place of history. My own personal history. But it's not just me that says this. It's not just me. So anyway, how transparent Are you being? And what are you going to do today, right now, to become more transparent? answer that question for yourself, and you'll be well on your way. And if you're not fully transparent, yet, take the steps to do it. ease into it, and communicate it openly.