The 4 Things That Quietly Decide If You’ll Win as a Leader

Introduction [0:00]

Charles Eide: Welcome to Cleared for Takeoff. As you can see, it looks a little bit different today because today we’re going to be reflecting on some of the great conversations that I’ve had with some amazing guests that have changed my perspective on some big ideas. The first one is about personal branding and understanding as a leader what that actually means.

The second one is around your identity and. What it means to work on the identity that you have internally. The third one is clarity. We’re gonna talk about, and I love this topic. I can’t wait to share with you some of the things that have given me more clarity so I can help my team. And the fourth one is people decisions.

Personal Branding [0:39]

Charles Eide: As leaders, we are faced with people decisions every single day, and there couldn’t be a more important conversation for leaders than people conversations. So the first topic that I’ve had some incredible conversations around is around your personal brand. And this is something I didn’t understand at all, especially in starting a [00:01:00] podcast.

I thought you just start recording videos and put it out there. But what I’ve learned from a lot of my guests around personal brand is that being intentional on how you show up online and in person and at your team, it all is connected. And so. I hope you enjoy this clip. This is one that really hit home for me.

Maha Abouelenein: Everyone needs to think about building their personal brand because it’s, it’s something that you can control, right? So one of the thing, one of the mistakes I see is people don’t think it’s important, so they don’t pay attention to it. So they don’t have a good LinkedIn profile. Like that is your real estate, where you can have something online that represents who you are that you actually can control.

So when people Google you or people look you up, I want them to find things that you put there, not what other people put there. So the biggest mistake is not doing anything. And I always say silence doesn’t scale. If you’re not [00:02:00] visible, you’re invisible, right? So how can you get a partner or find a job or get a investor, or get a client or find a customer if you’re not where customers are?

You have to be where customers are. So the biggest mistake people make is they don’t put in the effort to build something online. 

Charles Eide: If there’s something I learned from Maha, it was about reputation. And reputation is an age old thing that we’ve all known to be a thing, but. What does reputation mean in today’s world?

When you’ve got LinkedIn and you’ve got social media, you’ve got the opportunity for YouTube publications, pr. How do you do that? And I think learning from Maha that being intentional about being the same person across all the different platforms and outlets there are, that’s huge. But something that hit me harder was.

You have to be putting in the work. You can’t expect to see your personal brand grow or [00:03:00] people build a relationship with you if you’re not putting in the work. And that doesn’t just mean posting a lot. That means engaging with people. That means talking with them and replying to comments and. Looking at other people’s content too, and being present in a community.

No different than an in-person community except online. I thought Maha was so good at helping me understand that I haven’t been doing the work either and that I need to get to work. So since that episode, I’ve spent a ton of time looking at the entire landscape of all of the brands, especially my own, and trying to bring all of it down to one consistent message, and it hasn’t been easy.

It’s been a lot of fun to dive into what that means for me and how that impacts my customers, and almost more importantly, my team. 

Maha Abouelenein: I have been doing communications my whole life, and people hear the term personal brand, and they think it’s about being a social media influencer. What I want you to do is take that term outta your head and throw it [00:04:00] away and replace it with the word reputation.

Your personal brand is your reputation. How do people see you? How do you show up in the real world? How do you show up online? What do people think about you? Your reputation is the only thing, Charless, that you actually own. It’s what’s gonna open doors for you. Build relationships for you. Keep relationships for you.

So I really want everyone listening to the podcast to think rethink about what do they think of when they think of personal brand. It’s not about being a social media influencer, it’s not about self-promotion, it’s about idea promotion. What are you an expert in? What value can you bring to others? Start there.

Charles Eide: Something Giselle taught me that I thought was so interesting and stuck with me is that being consistent is so big, and it’s not just about being consistent, it’s about being the same person. Every single day when you show up, I think the investment that you make, a lot of times it’s like going to the gym [00:05:00] where you don’t see the results immediately, right?

You go to the gym for a day or two or three days, and it’s not like you’ve seen measurable change. But if you do it every day and you look back a month, two months, three months, six months later. You see measurable results, but it doesn’t happen in one day. And Giselle really helped me realize that being consistent, even despite my insecurities or my, uh, you know, my laziness or my frustration, that things aren’t happening fast enough to me, that really stuck because it’s easy to give up when you’re not seeing immediate change or subscribers growing like crazy.

I’ve dealt with this myself. I look at the subscriber count on YouTube constantly, and I’m like, why aren’t we getting more subscribers? But the truth is that it hasn’t been long enough and we haven’t provided enough consistency in the marketplace. And if I was YouTube, I [00:06:00] wouldn’t just hand a million views to somebody that was popping on for a month or two.

I’d want to see consistency in. Giselle helped me see that, and it’s something we’re implementing right here on this very podcast every single day. 

Giselle Ugarte: It doesn’t matter if you are building a new business, if you’re building a podcast, or who knows, maybe you’re taking a next step in parenting. If you are growing, if you are doing something that you’ve never done before or that has never been done before, self-doubt is gonna happen.

But the beautiful thing is that you have all these experiences to build off of, to build the confidence to then. Put you into that, that next seat, that next position, that next flight. 

Charles Eide: It’s, it’s comforting to hear you say that self-doubt is, is a common thread. ’cause sometimes I, I have tons of it and I think to myself, am I alone in this?

You know, like I, I, I, I feel like maybe more people have the same feeling, but everybody now, especially on social media, makes it look like, uh, everything’s great. Everything’s fine. [00:07:00] I’m amazing. I have no issues. I’m so confident and secure, so it makes me feel a little better. Some of the ways that I self-reflect is I always block off time in my schedule where I’m not available and trust me all day long, I’ve got people wanting to chat about this or that, and it is endless, especially when you’re in a growing organization with.

Great team of people. There’s always someone that wants to talk. So what I do is I block off time in my calendar and I go into my office and I shut the door and I mute my phone and I sit down and I’ll either watch a podcast or I’ll journal. Sometimes I’ll meditate, I’ll turn on I some music just to spend time thinking.

But if I don’t put that white space in my calendar. I’m so busy running around from topic to topic and conversation to conversation, putting out fires all day. There’s never any head space left for me to create. I think at the core of who we are as humans, [00:08:00] creating is really important, and in the position I’m in in my business as the visionary, it’s so important that I have that white space and that time to be a visionary and truly.

Reflect and think and come up with great ideas that could help my team and my customers and my family and me. So Renee’s helped me do that by encouraging me to journal a lot, which is something I wish I did more of. But every day I block off two hours and I keep that door locked 

Rene Rodriquez: to me. True influence begins on the inside, like, who are you?

What’s your story? What do you believe? What are the values that you engage in? Do you have the ability to articulate an idea? So there’s a skillset to that. But then I think there’s also a journey into that. Like, like, like this podcast. I tell people the best thing about a podcast is that it allows me to regurgitate things that I’ve been just thinking and ruminating in my head.

Neal Foard: Mm. 

Rene Rodriquez: And so they’re like, well, you said this a while. I, well, I’ve said it a few thousand times in [00:09:00] here by myself and through boring conversations. And so there’s a time where I can just say, well, this is what I’ve been thinking. And if you don’t self-reflect you, I don’t know what else you have. And so might be the, the answer might be self-reflection.

Contemplation, running ideas through your head, testing them out, what I call open mic nights, like a a comedian before they come out on their main show, they’re gonna do open mic nights, they’re gonna test jokes, they’re gonna bomb a certain percentage. They’re gonna see which ones crush the audience, which ones are good.

Charles Eide: When I sat down with Neil, I immediately realized that I have a story, just like everyone has a story. And I think the common theme that I’m seeing from Neil and from Maha and from Renee. That if we’re not intentional about curating that story, then people make up their own stories. And the truth is, we have to become masters of our own story.

That doesn’t come on accident. That comes with reflection, that comes [00:10:00] with thinking. That also comes with deciding who you want to be, and this has been something that has been a lifelong journey for me is reflecting on. Who I want to be and making that story really clear so that it makes a lot of sense to people.

And over the years I’ve. Come up with a number of crazy ideas on my identity. Like, oh, I’m gonna be the king of events. I’m gonna be the go-to guy for events. I started an event podcast. The truth is I’m not an event planner. I don’t know enough about it. That’s the industry I’m in, but I’m much more of a builder of organizations in the events industry, and.

Over time, I came up with this understanding that if I can just help other people build great businesses, that’s really my purpose. I just so happen to be in the events business. 

Neal Foard: Everybody has a story, whether they like it or not. We live in the age where you are immediately discoverable. So I meet [00:11:00] you, Charless, at some function, and I decide, you know, I’m gonna do a little research on Charless.

So I go to LinkedIn and I go to YouTube and I go to, you know, Google. People are gonna find you. If you don’t curate what they discover, if you don’t take some pains to make sure that what they are gonna find is an accurate reflection of you, that’s a bit of a problem. And telling a story. The ability to tell stories, particularly in video, is a way for people to know you before they meet you or if they’ve just met you to get a bigger, more accurate sense of who you are.

Identity [11:36]

Neal Foard: And this is why brands. Nike, apple, what have you. You know, ims, this is why brands spend so much money on making sure to tell the story of their brand and tell the story of what they do and why they do it. 

Charles Eide: So the next topic that I really found fascinating that has been a repeat theme is identity. And I think identity is such a hard thing when [00:12:00] you’re a leader.

For example, I started my business when I was in high school. I’ve been doing the same exact business. For 23 years, maybe a little bit longer, and it’s hard to have an identity that’s outside of the work that I do, but I’ve learned through some of these really great conversations that having an identity outside of the actual work or your role is critical to your happiness.

I found myself trying to. Figure out who I am as a leader, as a person in the events industry. And I finally had to step back and say, who am I really? And what am I really trying to do? And who can I actually help with what I’ve learned, which is completely different than the events industry, even though I’m in the events industry.

So I think sometimes we have to separate the [00:13:00] identity that we have from our work. From the identity that we were made to live out, they’re totally different. The work you do is just part of who you are, and for me, it’s completely changed. About a year and a half ago, I bought a ranch and moved my family there.

I live on a ranch. I own cows and animals and chickens, and it is hilarious because I’m like, you know, I grew up loving this kind of stuff, but I, I went from my, my family and I went from a cul-de-sac to a ranch and it completely changed my perspective on who I am. It brought out parts of me, and it has nothing to do with the work that I do here at Icom.

It’s so amazing when you step out of just identifying yourself as one thing, as it’s associated with your work, and you look at who you actually are and what do you believe, and who do you wanna help. [00:14:00] You know, I hate seeing people struggle. I love seeing people happy in what they do. I’m also a huge proponent of personal growth.

And I’ve realized that my real purpose in life is to help other people figure out what makes them happy so they can go do that. So I think identity from your work and identity from your, uh, you know, your whole life are two different things. And if you don’t take a pause and spend time discovering what that whole person is, it’s so easy to get wrapped into it just being the work you’re doing.

You’re so much more than just what you do from nine to five or for your entrepreneurs out there from five to 5:00 AM to 10:00 PM You know, I had a girlfriend one time, her dad, he said to me one day, he says, I said, how are you? And he goes, oh, I’m doing great. I’m working [00:15:00] half days these days. And I said, what do you mean half days?

Like little retired life? He goes, oh, no, no, no. I work from six to six. And I thought that was so funny ’cause I was like half days, six to six. Yeah. That’s not a half day. That’s a long work day. But when you’re an entrepreneur, that’s what you do. You work, you work half days or even more. You work full work days plus then another work day.

Like Ed Millet says, 

Ed Mylett: I’ve compressed and condensed time. I’ve bent it. My day is 6:00 AM to noon, and I’m not crazy. You are crazy for thinking it takes 24 hours just like some dude in a cave did 300 years ago. That’s bananas that you still think that way, and it’s unfair that people have taught you this.

My second day starts at noon and goes till 6:00 PM That’s day two. But what the cool thing is at the end of day one, this clock goes off about noon every day, bro, and goes, what did I just get done? What didn’t I do? What do I need to be accountable for? What do I need to double my efforts just like you do at the end of most days?

Right. And then the next day is 6:00 PM to midnight. 

Charles Eide: Ed [00:16:00] Millet, I love you, ed, if you watch this ever. He, it made me think differently about life. He basically accomplishes three days of work in one day and I’m like, yeah, over time that adds up. And that’s what the whole grind is when you’re first starting a business, is getting, going early in the morning and not stopping until you literally have to go to sleep.

And anything shy of that. You know, they call it balance. I, I think it’s so funny ’cause I don’t actually believe in work life balance. I think that you have to pull who you are into what you’re doing every day. And I know it sounds a little counter what I was saying about your identity, but when you’re first getting going, you have to live and breathe and there is no balance.

I hate to say it, but. You know, you can’t burn a candle from two ends ’cause you’re not a candle. Grant Cardone always says that. He’s like, I’m not a candle man. I can’t burn up. I’m a spiritual [00:17:00] being. And that resonated with me. ’cause it was like, yeah, you know what? You’re right. As long as you love what you’re doing and you’re helping other people and you’re happy, it doesn’t feel like work.

None of this has felt like work. And I think that’s why I’ve struggled with my identity only being this. So when I sat down with Ben Utech, one of the things, he’s a Super Bowl champ. Like that’s the top of the mountain when it comes to achievement, right? If you’re an NFL player or football player winning the Super Bowl’s kind of the top of the mountain, and when you’re in your twenties and you achieve that, how do you come down from that?

And Ben addressed some really interesting things, and that’s that Tony Dungy. Basically addressed the team and said, if your whole identity is wrapped up in football, you’ve missed the purpose of your life. And I think that comes back to your identity has to go beyond just who you are at work or in that achievement of work.

It comes down to who are you becoming and who do you want to be. [00:18:00] I was listening to Tony Robbins talking with Alex Ramey. Tony Robbins had such an interesting thing talking about astronauts and how do you go and walk on the moon and then you come back to Earth and you’ve done this insanely big public thing, whether it’s winning the Super Bowl or walking on the moon.

And a lot of those guys had problems with depression and, and anxiety and uh, you know, drug use and alcohol abuse and all kinds of stuff. And I think it came down to. Having an identity beyond just the work and finding joy in life, not just in achievement of the thing you’re doing at work. Could you imagine winning the Super Bowl?

I mean, the high that would be, and then it’s like, what’s next? If, if you don’t keep doing that, at some point it’s over. So then what do you [00:19:00] do? You go become a sportscaster. That doesn’t compare to winning the Super Bowl or walking on the moon or any of these big work accomplishments. There’s so much more to life than just the work.

But when you’re first getting started, it doesn’t feel like that. And I think the, you know, something I’ve really dealt with is I’ve grown up in my business. I don’t know any other way. Except I am my work. And my work is me. And to hear that Tony Dungy said that if football is the meaning of your life, then you’ve missed the purpose of your life.

And I’m thinking to myself, well then what is the purpose of life? Why are we all here? And I think when we achieve a lot of big things, a lot of times, because we like the chase and we like to achieve, we have to find other ways to be happy. Not just in achieving all the time, [00:20:00] and that’s not easy to do.

And Ben has done an incredible job after winning the Super Bowl and playing in the NFL of going on to become a speaker and an entrepreneur. And I have nothing but admiration for him because he’s been to the top and he’s realized that that’s not where his happiness is rooted. 

Ben Utecht: Tony comes in and the very first thing he says to us, Charless, is if you are sitting in this room.

Your entire identity is wrapped up in a sport. You’ve totally missed the purpose of your life. He said that you wanna talk about sucking the oxygen outta the room. If you’re sitting in this room and your entire identity is wrapped up in a sport, you’ve totally missed the purpose of your life. And I just remember thinking, I have never heard anything like that.

Come out of a head coach and I’m looking around the room and people are just locked in, like they’re just nodding. I mean, it’s, it’s just, it’s, it’s a belief [00:21:00] system that everybody has bought into, and that’s what I experienced over those four years. And so when I retired and began building my speaking business, what was my first question was, well, what is my story?

And I couldn’t get past this powerful. Culture that Tony Dungy created, right? Because he, he also taught me that you will always have a culture by designer default. You will always have a culture by designer default. 

Charles Eide: Amber Lee, this is a story that I can’t even imagine being a part of. She’s riding her motorcycle.

She’s an active, athletic person doing big things with her life, and she gets. Hit by a car and her leg is absolutely destroyed. I mean, could you imagine losing your leg? And they told her she had a 1% chance of keeping [00:22:00] her leg, and she thought to herself. So you’re telling me there’s a chance. It reminds me of that funny clip and Dumb and Dumber when Mary says, your chances aren’t good, like one in a million.

And he’s like, but you’re telling me I have a chance. And it reminded me of that because I think we, we have a choice in life and that is that we can’t control everything that happens to us. We can only control how we respond to it. She said that that doctor put her mangled but repaired leg in his lap.

He realized, or she realized from his perspective that it was a masterpiece and that she would put in the work to go on and live her life and inspire others that even when you feel like you want to quit, that quitting is actually not an option and that you only fail if you quit. And so she lives with this.

Regional pain syndrome that is excruciating. She said it’s worse than childbirth all day, every day, and this is not something that can be solved. She lives [00:23:00] with it, but yet she comes on podcasts and shares the message of never quitting and never giving up and staying positive. If anybody has a reason to be mad at the world, it’s somebody who got their leg destroyed on accident.

Amber Lee comes in here with a smile. She gives me a big hug. We talk all about the accident, and she has made it her life’s mission to show people that even when you feel like you should quit and give up, you always have tomorrow. 

Amberly Lago: What he did to shift my perspective, changed my life. He sat down in front of me and he grabbed my leg and he put it in his lap, not on the table.

What they usually do, he put my leg in his lap. He, the way he looked at it, he looked at it like it was a masterpiece. And I mean, I get emotional thinking about this ’cause I was like, wow, he’s looking at my leg like it’s masterpiece. I’m looking [00:24:00] at it like I am so disgusted with it. Look at all these scars and it’s deformed and ugly and it gives me pain.

And something shifted and I thought, wow, if he can look at my leg like that, maybe I can learn to look at it too. Like that. And day by day it wasn’t easy, but day by day I started to be able to look at my leg as, wow, look at how the body can heal and look at how powerful the human spirit is, and. I can walk on my leg and I looked at my scars at everything.

Look at what I survived and I overcame and it shifted everything for me. 

Charles Eide: So Chris Lindell is like the king of billboards here in the Minneapolis area. If you live in the Twin Cities, you know that. But what Chris is pointing out is that people assign identities to him all the time. Like he’s the billboard guy.

And yeah, to most people, I guess that’s what you would think he is, but. When you get to know [00:25:00] someone like Chris, you start to realize there’s a hundred other things associated with this individual and who they are. And it just reminds me of from an identity perspective, people can only gauge your identity on what they see and what they hear.

And that all goes back to reputation and. Creating brand reputation. Chris has done a great job of controlling his image, but at the same time being the master of his own image. People still make all of these assumptions about who he is, and it makes me realize like that happens to all of us because we’re all so much deeper than what everyone sees us to be, and the only one that can really have any impact on what that is, is you and Chris taught me that.

Yes, you can control the outward perspective to some degree, but ultimately people are gonna make up their own minds about you, and you’re gonna have people that [00:26:00] love you and people that hate you. I mean, there are people that don’t know him that love him, and there are people that don’t know him that hate him.

People make up their own minds, and your identity can’t be tied to what everybody else is assigning to you. You have to decide what your identity is and own that. Regardless of what public perception is, most people see you or think of you, they think of the billboard guy, right? They’re like, Chris Lindell is the billboard guy, and I see his billboards everywhere.

How the heck did you get started putting up all these billboards everywhere? 

Kris Lindahl: Yeah. And I, yeah, that’s, I love that you brought that up. ’cause I do think that’s what people think. ’cause I think that’s what. A lot of people see, you know, whether it’s so what 

Charles Eide: everybody, by the way, in the whole state of Minnesota sees, 

Kris Lindahl: right?

And also like in the other markets we’ve been in or online and, and, and even some of the national campaigns that we’ve done that, that everyone has seen, that’s what they think. And this is the illusion of, of business in general. Like a lot of times it’s like our [00:27:00] eyes and ears tests. It’s like what we see and hear are the assumptions that we make.

Hmm. And so what most people don’t see and are, are unaware of. Are the, you know, 10 plus years of grinding before we were ever in a position where we could pay for one billboard, let alone thousands of ’em. 

Charles Eide: Mm-hmm. 

Kris Lindahl: Right. But now it’s so interesting how so many people bring up billboards and bring up that conversation, but they have no idea all the things we did along the way that either, uh, worked really well or were learning opportunities that we got completely wrong.

Clarity [27:33]

Kris Lindahl: That led us closer to being able to do billboards. 

Charles Eide: We hear the term clarity all the time. I need more clarity on that. Could you be more clear? Something I’ve realized is that as a leader, one of our biggest jobs is creating and repeating clarity over and over again. And without clarity, people get burned out, they get tired, they get frustrated, they, it’s almost like they don’t have a vision.[00:28:00] 

Right. To follow or a mission. I’ve been interviewing a number of people for some positions here at the company, and what I’ll tell you is that. I always ask them, so why are you looking for a job? Why, like, why did you decide to start taking interviews? And it all comes back to the same single answer over and over again.

I’m unclear of what my future looks like at my current place. It’s the same answer for every single person I interview. I’m unclear what the future looks like for me here. And that’s not a good feeling when you don’t know what the path is to success. So Ryan Es has shares with us about clarity and how using clarity can make a huge difference in the retention and the growth of your team, but also for you in communicating that to your people.

Ryan brings up a quote. From Jim Rohn, [00:29:00] who’s a world famous leadership expert, and that is that you have to study yourself. And I think in studying yourself, you gain clarity on where you’re going, but also who you can lead to their destination as well. I’ve seen people come and go from not only my organization, but companies that are around me, and it all came down to a lack of understanding where.

They or the organization is going, and sometimes both. And Ryan has a really great point that if we set our ego aside and we think about how can we best provide clear future looking ideas to our team, not only are they gonna be more energized, they’re gonna get less burned out, but they’re gonna have more success.

And I keep repeating to myself over and over again. Be clear. Be clear. [00:30:00] Even if it’s muddy. I need to come up with a way to be clear. And a lot of that comes down to simplifying messages and ideas. But if I’m not clear inside me, I can’t be clear to the people around me. So taking that time, like Renee taught me to spend thinking.

So that I can be clear is absolutely critical to the growth of you personally, but also your business. 

Craig Leipold: How did you go from a place where it was all about you to making it not 

Charles Eide: about you, like mentally? How do you, how do you shift gears and justify your mind like. Now it’s not about me. And how do you kill your ego?

Yeah, a failure will do it really quick. So, a year into my first leadership role, my two top producers left. The two new people I hired into the region were on the verge of washing out. My previous territory was underperforming. And I, I literally went from being a top producer to questioning whether I even had a future in [00:31:00] the organization anymore.

I mean, I, I had to confront. Tell you what, man, I got lucky. Uh, I ended up random occurrence. I ended up as I was going through that, um, downtown at a seminar. It was Peak Performance Network way back in the day. But a speaker by the name of Jim Rohn. Oh, love Jim Rohn. I mean classic legend. Legend, right. And, uh, right up there with Zig Ziglar.

Yeah, he, he said a couple things. I mean, one thing he said was. That I still hold tightly today. He said, leaders are learners. If you’re gonna lead other people, you gotta stay a student. But the kind of study you have to do now isn’t just about business acumen and technology in the marketplace. He said, you have to understand psychology and human behavior.

And then he, then he dropped the real bomb, which we’re talking about self-awareness, and he said most importantly. You have to study yourself. The best leaders are acutely self-aware. [00:32:00] They have, they have line of sight into how their presence impacts everybody else around them. And I had never heard somebody talk about self-awareness that way.

Right. So shifting gears a little bit to a conversation, I actually. Took tactical information that I could take to my team, was a conversation I had with Casey Brown where we talked about pricing. The biggest takeaway I had from Casey was that price and value are connected and they have something to do with perception.

If you think about it, when someone’s beating you up on price, but they’re talking to someone else, then what that means is they think your product or service is better. They want you to do it for a lower price. Arguing with you about price, in other words, is a buying signal. And at the end of the day, if we can understand that the value we provide as businesses is truly there and our pricing is reasonable or [00:33:00] fair.

People will pay more if it’s a better product or service. And if you’re really clear on your pricing and your value, you can easily communicate that to your customer. And in doing that, the customer gets a better experience, even though they’re paying more. For something that they couldn’t get somewhere else.

Casey Brown: This answer that I’m about to give applies both in the product space and the service space. ’cause it’s really all the same. And it kind of goes back to the first question you asked, which is, what’s pricing pricing’s just a measure of value. So we have to understand how, what we do, what we produce. What we provide, how that solves a problem for someone and the value that they place on it.

And so what does solving this problem mean to them? How important is that to them? And how uniquely positioned am I to solving it? If I have something that’s like everybody else, then I’m gonna have relatively limited pricing power because the market’s gonna have a lot more say over what I can charge if I’m like everyone else.

But using your industry as an example, I mean. Event production for a specific event, somebody might [00:34:00] say, oh, that’s 10,000. Someone else might say 200,000. And maybe it’s even a wider range than that because it’s a really differentiated space where people have really different value propositions. But even in a.

Like a manufacturing space, which might be really competitive and commoditized like, you know, bulk chemicals or tonnage steel or something where you say a ton of steel is like any other ton of steel. Steel, yes, but how’s your inventory position? How’s your response time? How’s your lead time? How easy are you to buy from?

How much extra service do you get? So no one’s like anyone else. Not exactly. And so the degree to which we can understand that and how the customers value those differences, that’s where our pricing power lies. 

Charles Eide: On the same topic of being clear, when I sat down with the owner of the Minnesota Wild, Craig Leopold, Craig instilled in me this idea that if you are clear on how you want to be treated and how you want to treat your customer, your whole team understands that expectation.

It also then shapes [00:35:00] the hiring, the firing, the rewarding around that value. But if we’re not clear as leaders about the values. We hold dear to us and how important they are that we give those to the marketplace. Then everyone’s running around doing something different. That’s where you get a business with inconsistency, and if you look at a winning team, whether it’s a hockey team or a business, the clarity around the values that we hold dear, so that we can provide better to our customer, it all comes down to clarity.

All of this does, whether it’s the sales process or the delivery of the product on site. In fact, we had a guy who was, uh, a lighting designer and he was a freelancer. He was, he was super talented, but he was negative. He was like a dark storm cloud. And every time you’d walk in the room, you could feel this negative energy.

And we only used them one [00:36:00] time, and in fact, we replaced them before the show even started because. Our whole team was so clear on the values that we have, that when we got on site and he turned on this kind of angry demeanor, it was a no-brainer. He doesn’t belong here because that’s not what our customer expects.

But if we weren’t clear about that, we never would’ve taken action. We would’ve let him continue on doing the show, and everybody on the crew would’ve been miserable. So would the customer, they’d feel it. So being clear on the values that you have as a business to everybody, even if you have freelance work, that is absolutely key to the success of any good business.

Craig Leipold: When you think about building a winning 

Charles Eide: culture, whether it’s a hockey team, right? 

Craig Leipold: Yep. 

Charles Eide: The back office. 

Craig Leipold: Yep. 

Charles Eide: Or one of your companies. What are the philosophies that you kind of live by every day when it comes to building those teams? 

Craig Leipold: Well, I am, I, I [00:37:00] am very fortunate in life that I had a father who was, uh, a business person, uh, and, and worked his way up from the bottom of a company to become the senior vice president and.

Had a lot of people that he managed. Hmm. And the, uh, he would always talk to my brother and I about leadership and about how to treat people. 

Charles Eide: Hmm. 

Craig Leipold: Really how to treat people. And that was absolutely his, his secret sauce. 

Charles Eide: So when you’re building a world class brand, that gets a lot of attention. The clarity that people see comes down to what the leader sets from the very get go.

And if you look at what Chris Lindell has done, he’s created clarity across all of the media and marketing [00:38:00] platforms. And if you tie this all the way back to brand identity and having a brand, these are common themes that kind of all stick together and that is. Whether you’re sending a message out to 10 people or 10 million people, if that message isn’t clear and all the different mediums aren’t saying the same thing, you get this like vacuum that doesn’t produce anything.

And so a lot of people, they look at Chris Lyal as like this brilliant monster machine of marketing, but what they don’t realize is that it feels that way. Because of how clear he is on the messaging and when he rolls out a new campaign, it’s everywhere, all at once, and it’s the same message every time.

And I think that’s a page outta his playbook that I’m using is being really, really crystal clear. Across every [00:39:00] single medium, whether it’s in a meeting with our team, an interview with an employee, or the marketing message we put out, it’s the same messaging. And that all comes back to core values, which is at the center of any powerful business.

We started here with core values, positive, creative, effective, and team player. And that’s all for a reason because everything is painted with those colors. 

Kris Lindahl: Like to me, like I, I’ve always been a student first. I was so intrigued with things that didn’t work and why like, because at the, ’cause a lot of times I started, I was like, this is amazing.

This is gonna work so well, and then it didn’t. Hmm. And I was like, why did that not work? 

Charles Eide: Yeah. You’re like, 

Kris Lindahl: ouch. Like why did that not work? I spent all this time and energy in this. I thought I had a clear winner and it bumped. And so that’s like I got, I learned more from the things that went wrong than I did from the things that went well.

Yeah. Right. And I think a lot of entrepreneurs could probably share that same sentiment, but that’s when I started like getting really curious about marketing and [00:40:00] branding and, and getting really obsessed with it. And I think what makes. Me So unique is really the amount at bats, right? The hours, right?

It’s like anything, like you wanna become an expert in anything. You need at least 10,000 plus hours of doing anything. Mm. Right? And so that’s what I have. I just have so much time in the seat of trying things that didn’t work, that, that I’ve, that then given myself the ability to, to pivot and do that. So I was on that path early on.

But there were some breakthroughs along the way that I had that really helped me. One clear obvious is the market went up pretty much from 2009, almost the entire way through I was doing this. So the fortunate, so I was fortunate in the sense of like, if you’re gonna make costly mistakes and, and they’re gonna be expensive.

People Decisions [40:42]

Kris Lindahl: It’s really nice to do them when you have a tailwind. It makes it a lot easier than doing those when you add a headwind. If someone tried to replicate even remotely close to what we, what we’ve built today and they started right now, they’d be bankrupt in less than 12 months. 

Charles Eide: So the last topic I want to talk to you about is [00:41:00] people decisions, because as an organization is growing, people are going to be at the heart of it.

You look at these monster companies like Amazon, and you push a button on your phone and a product shows up, but what you don’t realize is there’s. Hundreds of thousands of people involved in that process. People are at the heart of all of this. And so the topics that I have learned through these conversations center around how do you know when somebody’s a great core values match?

How do you know when somebody is maybe a top performer, but they’re not great for the organization, and what do you do? How do you figure out somebody’s loyalty versus their performance? Like somebody could be extremely loyal, but if they’re not performing, what does that say to everybody around? So. I think people issues are the number one common theme that we all deal with as a business owner or as as an entrepreneur.

And when we get them right, it goes great, [00:42:00] and when we get them wrong, it’s the worst thing that can happen to you. So I had the good fortune of getting to know Craig Leopold, the owner of the Minnesota Wild an NHL hockey team. He shared with me an interesting story about hiring the wrong general manager.

Of the team. And that blew me away because he talked about, as a general manager, he was amazing. He, he, he was very good at his job, but he didn’t treat people the way Craig believed. People deserved to be treated. At the end of the day, Craig ended up terminating him after seeing and hearing all the rumblings of the pain points that this individual was creating.

He, this person was. Maybe toxic to the organization and sure they were great at their job, but at the end of the day, being great at your job is only part of the equation. Being a great human being is far more important, and I’m so [00:43:00] glad Craig shared that with me because deep down sometimes I ask myself like, oh wow.

What if you have a superstar salesperson and they’re really good and they crush it and bring in a lot of revenue for the business, but what do you do? If they’re terrible culturally and they disregard people, they don’t care. Which leads me to my next clip with Mike Peyton, where he talks all about that topic, 

Craig Leipold: wait a minute.

Culture is more important than performance. 

Mike Paton: Culture is more important than performance when it comes to evaluating people, and you have to believe that because one bad apple can spoil the whole lot. And this experience, I. You’re describing this setup that you’re giving me, I see all the time, and it leads to unbelievable negative consequences.

So you’ve established a set of core values that say, people who behave this way fit our culture. We’re gonna celebrate that. You’re gonna help perpetuate that culture with [00:44:00] everybody else. We want you each to hold one another accountable. If you are in the warehouse and you have an interaction with an employee and it doesn’t go well, don’t be afraid to say, hey.

Sam that didn’t really feel like help first or grow or die or whatever the core value is to be, be comfortable speaking up, right? Hold one another accountable. Okay. Likewise, if you’ve got a coworker who’s killing it culturally. Please let them know, Hey man, what you just did for me is exactly what our core values demand from every employee.

I’m gonna let my boss know. I’m gonna let the leadership team know. I just think you ought to be recognized for that. Like that’s what we’re teaching. So what ends up happening is, first of all. A lot of those people who aren’t aware that their brashness might work in closing deals, but rubs everybody else the wrong way, [00:45:00] sometimes those issues get solved by the people they’re steamrolling in order to get the stuff done that they want to get done because they’re confronting those people directly.

Charles Eide: So when Peyton talked about how somebody could be crushing their goals. If they’re not a nice person and they’re not a good cultural fit, you gotta let ’em go. There was part of me that like panicked a little bit, right? Because I’ve held onto people that are toxic too long ’cause they, they perform really well and it is not easy to let someone go, especially if they’re contributing at a high level.

However, when Peyton said that, it reminded me. How important it is not only for the organization to move on, because you’re providing a happier place for the other people that have been working with this jerk, but you’re actually helping that person by helping them [00:46:00] move on. And I know that sounds terrible, but if you let someone go because they’re a bad culture fit and they’re not nice to people.

It’s a hard lesson for them to learn, but they take that lesson and hopefully they learn from it. Hopefully, they learn that no matter how good you are, if you’re not a kind person to the people you work with, that it won’t be tolerated here or anywhere else. And I’ll think about this for a second. Think of how much effort it takes to find a great person who can perform and has good core value match.

It’s really hard. It’s a little easier to find somebody who can really perform and initially they come out of the gate crushing goals and then later you figure out they’re not great for the business. That’s really, really hard to come to terms with the fact that it’s best for your team that you let them go, but at the end of the day, you’re doing your team a service and you’re doing that person a service by teaching them, even if it’s a [00:47:00] hard lesson, that being a jerk doesn’t work here or anywhere.

Ben Utecht: Tony was the first to win a Super Bowl built on what’s called servant leadership. His belief was that if you build better men, you get better football players. How cool is that? If you build better men, you get better football players. 

Charles Eide: Hmm. 

Ben Utecht: Understanding that the most important asset that any organization has is its people.

Charles Eide: I agree with 

Ben Utecht: that. Right. So standing in the face of a transactional culture. To inspire the power found in a relational culture. 

Charles Eide: I mean, especially with something as transactional as the NFL where it’s all performance, performance, performance. 

Ben Utecht: It’s a metric based, performance based, um, industry. And so the belief that if, if we’re gonna build a culture of integrity and courage and excellence and execution, right?[00:48:00] 

We can’t just. Put these as value principles on a wall or a website and not have built a system of belief to practice the development of those principles. Right? He’s the one that taught me that culture doesn’t have to be subjective. It doesn’t have to be this ethereal thing that every company talks about, but it can be an objective system that you can practice in order to develop the best qualities within the human condition that are possible.

Because when you do that, you pour purpose into people. You pour significance into people. You give people value that they’ve never had before. 

Charles Eide: Something I loved about that was that. The idea of building better people gets better results is something that the old school ideas don’t resonate with. The truth is the future is building better teams of human [00:49:00] beings, investing in them and showing them how they can improve and be better, creating a, basically a culture of interest in self-improvement.

And Tony Dungy did that with a bunch of people playing football. Just think of what you could do with a bunch of people building a business like your building. And that’s how I’ve looked at my business. At every one of our quarterly state of the company addresses, I say, if there are resources that you need for self-improvement, if there’s a book or a course or something that will help you be better, I’m gonna be the first one behind it.

And that’s because I really believe what Ben just said, which is if you build better people, you will get better results. That’s not easy to put into action, especially in today’s world with the amount of confusion and, uh, selfish behavior that’s encouraged out there. So building a culture of self-improvement and pouring into [00:50:00] people from a servant leadership perspective is really hard to do.

But if you do it right, the results will follow and clients will seek your organization out because they want to work with. An incredible group of people who keep growing. Another thing I really took away from what Ben said was that culture isn’t some department or something to be relegated to an individual position.

Culture is everybody on the team. Culture is community. Culture is having each other’s back. Culture is the weather pattern that you as a leader bring into the office every day? Are you a rain cloud or are you a sunshine? Culture is a, is a. A role that every single person plays. It is not any one person’s job.

It is everyone’s job. And so, yeah, sure. Creating a lunch once a month or whatever is great, but how about encouraging your team to get to know each other? Uh, [00:51:00] earlier this week, or maybe it was last week, we did an exercise where we had a rock paper scissors competition, which lucid, like broke the ice, but then we went a little deeper and created little small groups of people.

Some of them didn’t even know each other. I was walking around the room observing. And there were questions on the screen and everyone had to go around and share their answers to the questions. Right? And it was amazing to see the smiles and the, uh, the new found joy that people had from the people that surround them.

Closing [51:36]

Charles Eide: Culture isn’t one single person’s job, it’s. An entire company’s job, and as a leader, it’s our job to help people participate in culture every day of the week. I hope you enjoyed that as much as I did. I will tell you that every single one of these conversations has deeply enriched my life. It’s kind of the reason I started the podcast is so that I could learn [00:52:00] from these incredible people and share it with the world.

The only thing I will tell you. Is that if you invest in yourself and you continue to grow, that is a skill you can take anywhere you go. You start a new business, you start a new job, you can take that skill anywhere. So never stop investing in yourself. Never stop believing in yourself. Just like Amber Lee.

Never quit. She continued to push forward, and if there’s one thing I can leave with you, it’s invest in yourself because you will never see that investment go down. I hope you join us next week for another great episode. We’ve got some incredible guest lined up this year. I know you’re gonna love them and we can’t wait to see you right back here on Clear for Takeoff.