Your Best Employee Is About To Quit. Here's The Fix.

Growth Newsletter: https://levelingup.beehiiv.com/subscribe Need marketing help? Visit: https://www.singlegrain.com/ and https://npdigital.com/ Want to recruit great marketers? Find them here: https://marketingschool.io/hire It starts with a message Eric got about a team member's wife being hit by a car, and turns into the clearest thing either of them has said about keeping good people. Neil lays out how he thinks about founder retention after an acquisition, they debate what Single Brain should actually be, and Eric closes with the GrokBot marketing playbook. Key takeaways◾How you behave in someone's worst week is the retention strategy. Everything else is a policy document.◾Brand recognition you already have is worth more than the product name you are attached to.◾Multifaceted marketing wins now: shipping fast, engaging in public, DMing influencers and bundling. Chapters00:00 Looking After Your People02:20 Founder Retention Matters05:31 Building Single Brain08:56 GrokBot Marketing Playbook

• 0:00Speaker 00

  Finding customer information shouldn't mean digging through emails, call notes and spreadsheets. HubSpot Starter Plan brings all of those details together, so it's easier to track what's happening with every deal and what to do next. It pulls information from calls and emails. Then it gets to work, logging and summarizing them. Right after your call ends, HubSpot pulls next steps from your call notes and drafts suggested follow-ups. And it stays up to date for you, so you can build demand, win more deals and spend less time on repetitive work. Your records, insights and next steps are ready for you to act on. And you don't have to miss a beat searching for any of it. Try the Starter Plan for $10 a month. Learn more at hubspot.com. Let's talk about this for a second, because we had someone from my team. His wife got hit by a car, right?

• 0:40Speaker 00

  And so, and then he's like sending me a message saying, hey, my wife got hit by a car. And then, and I'm like away from the computer at this point, right? And then, like 30 minutes later, you see another message come in. Hey, I'm standing by right now. Can I go? I'm like, what? Like, why are you even messaging me about this, right? Yeah, and so like, by the way, notice one thing. The A players, they don't need to be told to work hard. They don't need to be managed. They kind of self-manage themselves. The only thing I'm concerned about with the A players, not even just executives, the A players, is that they're working too hard and it's leading to burnout. That's the only thing I'm concerned about.

• 1:13Speaker 01

  Totally agree with you. And that's one problem. It's like, the A players have this issue where they worked too much and you gotta actually pare it down a bit and be like, no dude, slow down here. You need a balance. You know, I was talking to one of my executives and he was, literally before I came here, and he was telling me how he wants to buy a house in, I think it was like Mexico or somewhere like that. And how they have some immediate family who lives there and they want to spend more time with them. So they want a house down there and he was just trying to figure things out. And he's just like, yeah, you know, I need this kind of, he's not looking for much. This guy is more frugal with money than most people I know, and I don't mean that in a bad way.

• 1:59Speaker 01

  I was like, dude, you should just go buy something nicer. And he's just like, oh, it's expensive or whatever. And I was like, dude, it could all be figured out. Just go do something that you enjoy, so you can spend the time. And when you're in that house for three months out of the year, you actually enjoy being there versus just being miserable. But some of these people are just working and he's just like, yeah, when I'm there, I want more space, so that way I can just work uninterrupted for three months out of the year. And I think it was a vacation home. And in this country, homes aren't as expensive. I was like, you should just get oceanfront. And it's not that much more, like maybe 100 grand or 200 grand, but this is executive, like they can easily afford it plus more.

• 2:40Speaker 00

  They make good money, yeah.

• 2:41Speaker 01

  Yeah, they make really good money. They can buy it with cash if they really wanted to, plus more. But it's just sometimes pushing these people to adjust a little bit of their values, especially if they have kids and stuff. I'm like, you would enjoy life a bit more if you did these things.

• 2:54Speaker 00

  But you see the difference here? That's a lot easier to manage versus having to manage pushing someone to work, like that's a mindset thing, you know what I mean?

• 3:02Speaker 01

  No, no, you cannot push someone to work harder. That's called you fire them and you move on.

• 3:05Speaker 00

  Exactly. And you know who said this? Steve Jobs, Steve Jobs said this, right? In his entire career, he has not found that you can make someone work hard who doesn't want to work hard. Like, that's a mindset thing that you have to transform. Like, you have to go on your own spiritual journey to learn how to work hard, right? Whether it's something that happened to you in your childhood or whatever it is exactly, or you're just a competitive person. But that's why, like, that's why I push, sometimes my team thinks I'm crazy on the AI thing, but I'm just like, dude, it's so easy. If they're into the AI stuff, it means they're going to push themselves hard, right, at this point in life.

• 3:36Speaker 01

  And if they're not, there's no point in hiring them, because you don't want to train them and have to convince them. It's a waste of your time. You're only a single founder. It's easier if you had double founder, maybe.

• 3:45Speaker 00

  It would be way easier with double founder. I'll tell you that much, right?

• 3:47Speaker 01

  Why not just go find another co-founder and bring him into the business?

• 3:51Speaker 00

  I wouldn't be opposed to that, but I think once we start ramping up these acquisitions again, I think naturally you're going to try to keep some of these founders, right? And you've kept a lot of these founders, right?

• 3:59Speaker 01

  We only try to keep the founders. We do not try to do deals without the founders.

• 4:02Speaker 00

  So, okay, if you look at the net amount of deals that you've done, how many deals have you done in the last five years?

• 4:07Speaker 01

  I don't know.

• 4:08Speaker 00

  20, 30?

• 4:09Speaker 01

  No, less than 20.

• 4:11Speaker 00

  Okay, so let's call it 15, okay? How many of those founders are still with you today?

• 4:17Speaker 01

  Out of all the deals we've done, only once where we got rid of the founders. Technically, actually three times, but two of them, we didn't want the founders. We just wanted the technology.

• 4:30Speaker 00

  Okay, so 13 of 15. Let's just call it that.

• 4:34Speaker 01

  But there's only one time where the founders wanted to leave and we accepted it. So call it one deal out of all the deals we've done where we accepted it. The other deals where we didn't want the founders, we went into trying to buy the company without the founders.

• 4:47Speaker 00

  Okay, so let's say you kept 93% of the founders. That's a huge number. Now, let me tell you the mistake I've made in the past, just so you can learn from both of us here. So, the two, the two deals that we did, right? In the last five years or so, one of the founders should have kept. The other one, like, and I didn't structure the deal that way. I structured it where it's like, you let him walk, but I've learned my mistake there, right? The other one, like, we shouldn't have even done the deal in the first place, right? But all that to say is, again, if it's a very people-driven business and people look up to the founder, like, you gotta keep them, because it's gonna keep the other people glued in as well. So, is that the three things that you mentioned?

• 5:19Speaker 01

  Uh huh.

• 5:19Speaker 00

  Okay.

• 5:19Speaker 01

  But what kind of companies do you want to buy?

• 5:25Speaker 00

  Not right now.

• 5:26Speaker 01

  None.

• 5:26Speaker 00

  I'm not looking at anything right now, yeah. I'm looking at what's, like, I'm looking for signal versus noise right now, right? If I'm hearing more data integration, security, all this stuff over here, and we're getting more and more of it, and we're piloting more and more of it, then that's a signal to me. And then, at the same time too, it's like, the way we're grading people right now, when it comes to hiring, is very different. It's almost, like, to your point, you said, remember I did that talk at that conference in Manhattan Beach? And you're like, you know, the talk is ahead of its time, right? And sometimes I'm a little ahead of my skis on this stuff. And so, I need to, I want to wait to see how the market settles a little bit for the next 12 months. Because we're getting signal from too many different places right now, and we want more signal.

• 6:05Speaker 01

  You want to know what I would do if I was in your shoes? I'm not saying it's the right thing.

• 6:08Speaker 00

  Go ahead. Frictionless Growth Marketing, hosted by Sonya Thompson, is brought to you by the HubSpot Podcast Network, the audio destination for business professionals. Frictionless Growth Marketing, hosted by Sonya Thompson, shows how modern brands grow by removing the friction in their marketing and customer experience that pushes customers away every single day, often without leaders even realizing it. Each episode delivers practical insights, real brand examples, and conversations with marketing leaders, showing brands how to win with the new rules of growth, identity-driven marketing, cultural relevance, and frictionless customer experiences. Listen to Frictionless Growth Marketing wherever you get your podcasts. All right, so I wanted to take a moment to tell you about my podcast co-host, Neil's Agency, called NP Digital.

• 6:51Speaker 00

  And they work with a whole host of global companies or a global organization. Also, Neil has SEO tools such as UberSuggest and Answer2Public. All you have to do is go to npdigital.com to learn more, and we'll see you on the other side.

• 7:05Speaker 01

  Your single brain is getting good brand recognition. I hear it enough. And I hear enough from people who don't really know how well I know you or don't know you. These are, a lot of these people don't listen to the podcast. So some people will be like, hey, have you heard of this single brain thing? Do you know this guy named Eric? He has this company called Single Brain. I actually hear it more often if I look on a quarterly basis. My traveling's not consistent every single week or month, so it's just easy to look at quarterly, but it's a drastic improvement on how many times I'm hearing single brain. I hear single brain way more than I ever hear single grain. I'm not trying to throw a diss, I'm telling you reality, okay?

• 7:46Speaker 00

  I have a response for that. Go ahead, go ahead.

• 7:47Speaker 01

  Okay? And I'm not saying that's a bad thing, or any of that.

• 7:52Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 7:53Speaker 01

  But I think the future of your business is in single brain, which I think you already agree with and you already know. And you knew before me, hence you made that change.

• 8:03Speaker 01

  But, and here's the big caveat. I think the one thing that you're lacking, that I would focus on over the next six months, if I own Single Brain, finding that guy who worked at a SaaS company as a CEO, who grew up from 3 million to 100 million, or 5 million to 100 million, literally was there, helped it raise money, has the relationships to bring in customers and knows customers will sign on right away, enterprise customers with big checks, and have that guy go and help run it, because they will drive revenue.

• 8:43Speaker 01

  In essence, you're bringing the person who will go and bring you the large enterprise contracts because of the relationships, and they were in a related enough field. You can't be 100% related, because it's new tech. But it's related enough where they know the decision makers for your exact company, because their old company that they were at was selling into that same exact person.

• 9:07Speaker 00

  And he has the relationships, or she has the relationship.

• 9:08Speaker 01

  Yes. I think that would cause you to, I'm not saying you're not growing fast, but that would cause you to grow much faster, close a lot more revenue. That is what I would say could really change the trajectory of your whole business, if you can find that person in the next six months.

• 9:23Speaker 00

  So you know how I said my three, recruiting? So that's in there for the recruiting. And I think that's a great idea, and I'm glad you called it out. And here's the thing, when people talk to us about single brain, oh my God, so much excitement, ready to do it, how do we do it in my heart, right? On the single grain side, right, I was listening to some of these client calls. When I'm just like, yeah, you know, just, when I ask our little brain thing, it's like, what's, when we do things that are off, right? When the client's about to churn, what's happening? Not proactive, not urgent enough, not creative enough, right? But like, the ironic thing is, all that Is just downstream from hiring good talent, right? And so that's why recruiting is so big for me right now. But I also look at recruiting kind of as marketing because I'm just like messing around with these flows that tie into sales outreach or marketing outreach or just recruiting outreach. So this is why, by the way, let's talk about Grokbot for a moment. So, so thank you for that.

• 10:08Speaker 00

  But Grokbot has taken X by storm naturally because Elon owns X, right?

• 10:13Speaker 01

  Well, it's also really cheap.

• 10:14Speaker 00

  Yeah, well, now they've made it even cheaper. They've made it more available on Super Grok Plus, Cursor Pro and Cursor Team subscribers. So you don't have to pay 300 bucks a month anymore. I noticed something, I was flying back yesterday and I was like, I was trying to cancel because I put it on the wrong account, right? The 300 bucks and then it's like, wait, don't cancel. If you pay us a hundred dollars for the next three months, every, every like, okay, we'll give you a super Grok heavy, which includes cursor and everything, right? I'm like, wait, everyone should cancel right now. So I'm messaging you, Yaniv, I'm like, hey, you should cancel, like sign up and cancel it right now, right? But they only do that on iOS, just FYI for now. But the cool thing with that, by the way, so, so Grokbot will give you the super heavy, right? Which is 300 bucks, but you get cursor ultra, which is 200 bucks.

• 10:57Speaker 00

  So you're actually getting for a hundred dollars, I think, or maybe 300 dollars for 1500 dollars worth of value. You can do that, right? Now, I want to call out, so Nikita Beer, everyone overthinks marketing. For every product launch we did at X, I write the announcement 20 minutes before clicking a post. Better to be launching something every single week instead of focusing on how to make a single day traffic spike largely larger. So the Grokbot team, by the way, they're DMing me. They're like, hey, we really liked the article you shared. We're going to give you more usage, we're going to top you off, right? And then like all these people are tweeting and they're kind of retweeting each other. Their sales, their enterprise salesperson at Grokbot, he's like Grokbot for GTM. Everyone retweets it, right? And you have Elon retweeting people that are using it. So he's just using that marketing engine. They have people that are reaching out to KOLs or influencers and giving them all this stuff.

• 11:41Speaker 00

  And the product's good enough on its own, where like all the stuff you're talking about with like reaching out to people daily or different languages and all that. I'm like, dude, you could, your daughter can set it up for you, your son can set it up. It's so easy to set up that I'm like, this is like the Hermes and open claw moment, but for everybody. Cause it's so simple and so reliable.

• 11:59Speaker 01

  And affordable and it does 85% of everything you need.

• 12:03Speaker 00

  Exactly, right? So, and you, it has all these connectors, like are they thinking about SOC 2 compliance? SOC 2 compliance is in there, multiplayer with agents, multiplayer with humans, that's all going to come. And so now we're going to see agents being used a lot more now with Grokbot. So I think they're doing a great job with their launch. One, it's a great product. Two, everyone from their team is kind of promoting everything, right? And they have a really good deal for you too, because they're just bundling things together and just giving away for free. So it's like multiple marketing attacks from all angles.

• 12:32Speaker 01

  Dude, it's funny because I started looking at SpaceX stock. I was, I was waiting for it to drop to 70 something, but it didn't. I'm not, no financial advice.

• 12:39Speaker 00

  By the way, you know what's funny? So I was with Sayed and Yaniv, right? And we're, we're all on the same page. We're like, yeah, we're going to wait for that shit, not that shit. It's a great stock, guys, but we're going to wait for.

• 12:48Speaker 01

  Ship, S H I P.

• 12:50Speaker 00

  We're going to wait for that ship to drop to 70 bucks. And then we're all like, yeah, yeah, yeah, because it's, it's a lot of money right now. It's 1.85 trillion or whatever it is right now. It's not worth that right now, but they will become worth way more.

• 13:02Speaker 01

  Of course, I think it's, again, not financial advice. I think it's one of the, I personally am willing to bet a lot of my money on them for the whole future.

• 13:11Speaker 00

  For the next 20 years.

• 13:13Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 13:13Speaker 00

  You know what I mean?

• 13:15Speaker 01

  I, I'm in it for around five, 10, but I'm not saying I would not hold longer. But for the next five, 10 years, I don't see anyone taking them over, at least in the space race in the Western world. I'm not saying someone in China can't do some miraculous things, but on the Western world, a lot of this stuff is regulated and is very hard.

• 13:31Speaker 00

  I just hope Elon stays safe, you know?

• 13:32Speaker 01

  Yeah, and, and.

• 13:34Speaker 00

  And he doesn't say, I hope he stops saying stupid, I think he said another stupid thing this week.

• 13:37Speaker 01

  What did he say?

• 13:38Speaker 00

  I, I think it was something along the lines of, um, God, here, let me look it up real quick.

• 13:45Speaker 01

  But speaking of that, I was watching an interview of Elon and he was talking about how he can't go to Target or anything like that. Someone was asking, he's like, yeah, he's like, I have to worry about my life.

• 13:55Speaker 00

  Oh wait, I remember, I remember. He made a comment about the Odyssey and something about the Odyssey.

• 14:00Speaker 01

  Oh, the movie.

• 14:01Speaker 00

  Yeah, the movie and, and saying like it's too woke or whatever, right? And I think that, dude, you just don't need to say those things. You know what I mean? But yeah, continue your thought.

• 14:08Speaker 01

  I thought he was talking about the other.

• 14:09Speaker 00

  Oh, he, he talked about the, the, the death, the, the George Floyd thing. Did you read about that?

• 14:15Speaker 01

  No.

• 14:15Speaker 00

  Okay, this he shouldn't have said. So Elon Musk shared and endorsed arguments from conservative commentators claiming Derek Chauvin did not cause George Floyd's death. Whether it's true or not, just not worth talking about because that, that was the whole, led up to the whole BLM thing.

• 14:28Speaker 01

  He needs to stay out of politics and, you know, current events. He needs to just focus on SpaceX and Tesla.

• 14:34Speaker 00

  There's enough for him to focus on.

• 14:36Speaker 01

  And I don't know why he has to open his mouth.

• 14:37Speaker 00

  Kids, just.

• 14:38Speaker 01

  12 kids, I thought he had 60.

• 14:40Speaker 00

  Six, 60?

• 14:41Speaker 01

  Yeah, how many kids?

• 14:43Speaker 00

  How many kids Elon, let's see who gets it faster.

• 14:47Speaker 01

  This can't be 14, I thought it was a lot, I thought it was like 14. 14.

• 14:51Speaker 00

  14 with four different women.

• 14:52Speaker 01

  I read 60, it was a large number, like 60, like someone's like claiming, you know, it's probably fake social media.

• 14:58Speaker 00

  Yeah, Griffin Musk, Vivian Wilson.

• 15:01Speaker 01

  Or was it 60, the guy who created the, what Telegram? I think it's the Telegram, Telegram.

• 15:07Speaker 00

  Did I show you the?

• 15:08Speaker 01

  Founder, number.

• 15:09Speaker 00

  Did I show you the, the YouTube?

• 15:11Speaker 01

  Oh, sorry, it's over 100, but it was his.

• 15:13Speaker 00

  Did I send the Instagram reel to you where there's a guy and the journalist walks up to this guy in, I think Pakistan or something, right? And he's like, how many wives do you have? He's like, uh, how many kids do you have? He's like 70, right? And the guy's like, whoa, 70, how many wives do you have? He's like 16 and then the guy's like, how many wives do you have? He's like one and he just starts laughing, he's just like this, he just starts laughing and he's like, he's only one wife. But, uh.

• 15:35Speaker 01

  He was laughing at the guy with one wife?

• 15:36Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah.

• 15:37Speaker 01

  Oh, because he thought in his culture, it's not a good thing.

• 15:41Speaker 00

  I think in, I think it's in Muslim culture, it's, you can have multiples, yeah, like four plus.

• 15:47Speaker 01

  I thought that was like back in the day, I didn't know they'd do that in today's world.

• 15:50Speaker 00

  Active, I think, yeah, yeah. Anyway, but anyway, going back to Grokbot and this could be the last piece over here. I, I think the way you look at them, they're just shipping rapidly. Okay, that's one piece. The second piece is they have multiple people engaging with others and blowing up posts, okay? Third thing is they have people DMing key influencers as well. And, and the fourth thing is the way they're bundling with, with Cursor and, you know, Grokbot and like super heavy and all that stuff. And so it's actually, all of these things are marketing and I think we're going to see much more multifaceted marketing in the next, in the, just starting from now. And that's why like from a marketing angle, when you asked me, I'm like, there's so many things that we have to do. Same thing for you guys too.

• 16:30Speaker 01

  And, and it does 85%. It doesn't do 100%, it doesn't do 95%. I would say it probably does around 85% and it's one of the cheapest solutions out there right now.

• 16:40Speaker 00

  Yeah, anyway, go try it, Grokbot. I think I have, there's an article on my, on my X, my X account about Grokbot for marketing. So you can check that one out. So anyway, that's it for today and we'll catch you later.