Darius Mirshahzadeh: How Core Values Unlock Massive Business Growth | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic

How do you make the best decisions, maintain company culture as your business grows, and attract and retain incredible talent? Serial entrepreneur, business founder, and bestselling author Darius Mirshahzadeh believes the answer lies in core values. By properly leveraging and implementing core values within your company, your teams will speak the same language, make better decisions, build a thriving culture, and scale to incredible success. In this episode, Hala and Darius discuss his unique journey into entrepreneurship, how to build a core value-driven organization, Darius’s six core values, the difference between good and bad core values, and the Scale M. A. P. Method for business growth. In this episode, Hala and Darius will discuss: (00:00) Introduction (01:12) Meet Darius: Entrepreneurial Beginnings (02:48) Lessons from a Hardworking Father (04:49) A Life-Changing Loss (08:01) Interning at the White House (17:48) The Birth of Twin Capital Brokerage (21:39) Struggles and Resilience in Business (25:01) Building The Money Source (29:41) Stepping Down as CEO (35:09) Travel Plans Disrupted by COVID-19 (35:50) The Accidental Personal Brand (36:05) Introduction to Core Values (38:16) The Importance of Core Values in Business (41:52) Personal Core Values (45:30) Creating a Core Value Driven Organization (50:11) Developing Core Values for Startups (52:12 The Scale Map Method (01:01:09 Bootcamp and Mastermind Programs Darius Mirshahzadeh is a high-growth CEO, serial entrepreneur, and culture-building mad scientist who was ranked #9 on Glassdoor’s list of Top CEOs of Small and Medium Companies in the US. He is the author of the bestselling book, The Core Value Equation, and the host of The Greatness Machine podcast. Darius has led organizations that have won numerous Stevie awards, been named “#3 Best Place to Work” by the San Francisco Business Times, and have landed at #40 on the Inc. 500 list of fastest-growing companies. Sponsored By: Shopify - Sign up for a one-dollar-per-month trial period at youngandprofiting.co/shopify OpenPhone: Streamline and scale your customer communications with OpenPhone. Get 20% off your first 6 months at openphone.com/profiting Airbnb - Find yourself a co-host at airbnb.com/host Indeed - Get a $75 sponsored job credit at indeed.com/profiting RobinHood - Receive your 3% boost on annual IRA contributions, sign up at robinhood.com/gold Factor - Get 50% off your first box plus free shipping at factormeals.com/factorpodcast Rakuten - Save while shopping at rakuten.com Microsoft Teams - Stop paying for tools. Get everything you need, for free, at aka.ms/profiting LinkedIn Marketing Solutions - Get a $100 credit on your next campaign at linkedin.com/profiting Active Deals - youngandprofiting.com/deals Key YAP Links Reviews - ratethispodcast.com/yap Youtube - youtube.com/c/YoungandProfiting LinkedIn - linkedin.com/in/htaha/ Instagram - instagram.com/yapwithhala/ Social + Podcast Services - yapmedia.com Transcripts - youngandprofiting.com/episodes-new Entrepreneurship, entrepreneurship podcast, Business, Business podcast, Entrepreneurs, side hustle, Startup, Starting a business, Passive income, Online business, Solopreneur, Founder, Networking, Entrepreneurship, entrepreneurship podcast, Business, Business podcast, Self Improvement, Self-Improvement, Personal development, Starting a business, Strategy, Investing, Sales, Selling, Psychology, Productivity, Entrepreneurs, AI, Artificial Intelligence, Technology, Marketing, Negotiation, Money, Finance, Side hustle, Startup, mental health, Career, Leadership, Mindset, Health, Growth mindset.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Hala Taha?

  Today's episode is sponsored in part by Pranuvo, AG1, Whatnot, and MOD. Pranuvo offers radiation-free, whole-body MRI screening to give you a detailed look at your health. Get $300 off your whole-body MRI at pranuvo.com/hala with code HALA. That's H-A-L-A. Terms and conditions apply. AG1 is a daily nutritional drink with 75-plus ingredients in one scoop. For a limited time, get a free immune support bundle with your first AG1 Next Gen or Pro subscription at drinkag1.com/profting. AG1 is a daily nutritional drink with 75-plus ingredients in one scoop. For a limited time, save 25% off your first AG1 Next Gen or Pro subscription at drinkag1.com/profting.

• 0:45Hala Taha?

  Whatnot is a live shopping app where you can sell everything from fashion to collectibles and connect with buyers in real time. Search Whatnot, W-H-A-T-N-O-T, in the App Store. Download and start selling right away. MOD connects qualifying patients with licensed medical providers who may prescribe a modifinal drink to keep you energized, focused, and alert throughout the day. Visit mod.com, M-O-D dot com, for a free consultation. 10% off your first order and free shipping with promo code PROFITING. See their website for important safety information. As always, you can find all of our incredible deals in the show notes or at youngimprofiting.com/deals.

• 1:35Hala Taha?

  Hey, Yap fam! What if the secret to scaling your business effectively was just two words? Core. Values. As your company grows, everything gets more complicated. Hiring, decision-making, keeping your culture strong. But if you've nailed your core values, they become your North Star. That's exactly what Darius is all about. He's a serial entrepreneur, bestselling author, and culture-building fanatic. And in this Yap Classic episode, originally recorded in 2022, Darius shares the secrets behind his game-changing framework, the Core.

• 2:10Hala Taha?

  Value equation. We dive into what makes core values truly work, how to spot the difference between good and bad ones, and how to make them so sticky, they go viral inside your company. You'll also hear some wild stories from Darius's entrepreneurial journey, including a memorable stint interning at the White House. If you're trying to grow your team without losing your culture, this one's a must listen. Let's jump in.

• 2:36Hala Taha?

  Hey, Darius, welcome to Young and Profiting Podcast.

• 2:39Speaker 01

  Hi, Ella.

• 2:40Hala Taha?

  Super hyped to be here. You're my good friend. Always happy to have my friends on the show. You are a serious serial entrepreneur. You have so much to say about the peaks and pitfalls of entrepreneurship, and I can't wait to get your core value insights and more information about your scale map methodology. So from my research, I found out that you've had an entrepreneurial spirit from the very beginning. Your dad was an immigrant from Iran, literally the epitome of the American dream. He was an entrepreneur. He had many gas stations, real estate businesses. Did you always know you were going to follow in his footsteps and become an entrepreneur?

• 3:17Speaker 01

  You know, like, half of me wanted to do that. And the other half of me wanted to, like, become an actor and a comedian on Saturday Live. Like, if you had asked me when I was 18, I was like, actually, I wanted to be Howard Stern. So like, which is not ironic that now I love podcasting. But yeah, no, I was like, business and then and like, enjoying experiences with people were like my two things. So yeah, I know, I always felt like an affinity towards, I love making money and I love selling. I was always like the kid that would win the candy selling competitions. I mean, crush those competitions. So for me, like, starting a business was not like this far out idea. That was kind of a natural next step, for sure.

• 3:58Hala Taha?

  Yeah, and I think that's a lot different from a lot of the immigrants that grew up in America. A lot of their parents, you know, had regular jobs or were doctors or engineers or and kind of were told to follow in that traditional path. And so your father, he taught you that you don't make the money selling the gas. You make the money selling the gas station. So talk to us about some of the entrepreneurial lessons that your father taught you.

• 4:23Speaker 01

  So my dad was old school, born in 1939 in Esfahan, Iran. His father was a business person, was a really successful business person. He was kind of like ADD business guy. I mean, some of it was a victim of circumstances. There was a revolution in Iran. He moved here, he had to sort of support his family. Didn't have a great speaking of the language, although he did get his MBA in the United States. He came here late in life. So for him, like, that's how he had to support his family. And again, he grew up around entrepreneurs. So for him to start gas stations and do real estate and stuff like that was not unusual. My mom was a social worker, which is the other end of the spectrum. Worked for like the county. Smart lady, social worker, father that's getting up and building his own businesses every day.

• 5:06Speaker 01

  When you see that, you're like, oh, that's an option. Like going to college, I mean, both my parents had their master's degrees. So going to college was not, that was definitely an expectation as well. But I remember my dad would always say like, I'm building these for you guys. And now I had to go to work in the gas station at a young age, too. He was like, hey, you're 10, great, you're going to work. So my summer vacations, and I grew up in an upper middle class, Southern California. So all my friends were like going to summer camp and, you know, having fun and going to like the water parks and the Magic Mountain and Six Flags and stuff like that. And I'm like legitimately putting on a Texaco t-shirt, getting up and going to work at a gas station in the middle of nowhere, because my dad's gas stations were kind of outside

• 5:51Speaker 01

  of LA and in 100 degree heat, cleaning gas station bathrooms when I was 10. So it wasn't a very glamorous entrance in the world of business. It was like, oh, this is what running your own business is. But it did teach us work ethic. And, and I think that's such a big part of being an entrepreneur is not being afraid to go work your ass off. And we didn't, we weren't, and we didn't.

• 6:13Hala Taha?

  Yeah. So your dad clearly was a workaholic and you say that it led to sort of his early death, right? So when you were 22, he ended up passing away. He had cancer and that must've been super difficult for you at such a young age, but it also kind of guided and shaped the way that you thought about the rest of your life and your purpose. Can you talk to us about that?

• 6:36Speaker 01

  My dad was like, you know, like my, there was a huge cultural difference between me and I have a twin brother. So it's me and my twin brother and my dad. And I have a younger sister as well, but, but in Persian culture, like it's very patriarchal. And although my mom was American, like my dad was straight up Persian. So he was like, the boys come with me. I toughen them up. The mom raises the daughter. That's just how it is. And that's how it kind of was in our family. And so I was either working at the gas station or I was working around the house. And, and so it wasn't like this, like me and my dad throwing baseball in the backyard. I don't think I threw one ball with my dad. It was always business and, but yeah, he did not take care of himself. And when I was 18, he got diagnosed with multiple sclerosis.

• 7:17Speaker 01

  And by the time I was 20, 21, his MS had gotten really bad. It turned into dementia. He loved cigarettes. My dad was like an avid smoker. He ended up getting diagnosed with lung cancer in my senior year of college. And so I saw this person who was a workaholic, who was all about business, who basically by the time I was old enough to maybe have a relationship. Cause then again, in that old school culture, you start to have a relationship with your dad, like when you're a man. He was downward trending really quickly then. And it was my 22nd birthday. My dad got diagnosed with stage four lung cancer and we didn't even tell him he had it because he had such bad dementia at that point. And he passed away in August of that same year.

• 8:00Speaker 01

  So yeah, it was hard, you know, and there was mixed emotions. It was, I had a pretty complicated relationship with my dad because of what, how I was describing our background together. And some people will say, oh, my dad was my best friend. And I was like, yeah, not me and my dad. I respected him. He was a hard guy and he was hardcore. And so to lose your dad at that young of an age, it's hard for anybody, but it just gave me an insight into life's short. And I had lost my grandmother when I was 14, she was 62. My dad was 60 when he passed away. My mom was 48 when my dad passed away. She got diagnosed with cancer right after that. So by the time I was 22, I had lost my grandmother, my dad and my mom, like was a survivor of cancer. And so I had set a really different perspective, which was I don't want to live a life that's

• 8:46Speaker 01

  I just like go work my ass off and then 20 years, 30, 40 years from now, I'm done. And it was, hey, how can I live a much more engaged life? And I didn't really understand that then. It wasn't until much later that I realized that that's why I kind of got into some of the things that we're going to talk about around values and purpose and how do you be, live and engage life? But for me, that was a lesson taught at a young age, which is, hey, life's short and you need to go and like make it happen and really make the most of your time because you're going to blink and it's going to be over with.

• 9:16Hala Taha?

  Yeah, we'll definitely get more into your purpose and all of your core values and things later on to learn more about your philosophy on life, basically. Your later years in college, you ended up working at the White House. You worked as an intern for the Bill Clinton administration. And so you've got some amazing stories with this internship. It was right up your alley, considering you were involved in student government. It should have been your dream job, I think. I could have imagined you taking that path all the way. But it turns out it taught you that you weren't cut out for typical employment and it solidified for you that you would never again have a regular job. So I'd love to hear more about that experience.

• 9:54Speaker 01

  Yeah, so when I was in college, I had to work a lot. So again, my dad being kind of a hard ass was like, yeah, I'm not paying for your college. You got to pay for your own college. And so I was always working and I was always, again, ambitious. So I always had internships and I had a really good friend from student government in high school. Her name is Priteshaw and she ended up her sophomore year, working for the Clinton administration. And I'm kind of like you, I'm like a networker. So I'm like, hey, I want to work at the White House. I literally like, there was a conversation she, she and I had. And she said, well, all right, let's do it. And so she had a friend that came into town in LA. We were on the Sunset Strip. And what happens at the White House that I didn't know at the time is a lot of the people that end up working there, they go and intern there.

• 10:37Speaker 01

  And then they, they actually take a pause from college and stay at the White House and become staff. And so this gentleman, I don't want to name his name because of what I'm about to say, but he basically did that. And he comes to LA and we go to this place on the Sunset Strip, which I'm blanking on the name right now, but Dublin's, which was this famous Irish bar on the Sunset Strip. And we're in LA and it's the summer going into my senior year of college. And basically where they're drinking and all these girls come in from where I go to school that were these like really pretty girls. And I'm like, hey, and I wave them over and I basically hook him up with these girls. And so I said, I'm talking him up. I say, I'll give Tim, give him your card. And so anyway, he's like, loves me. He's like, this guy's the best. And so at the end of the night, I said, hey, you got to get me a job at the White House.

• 11:22Speaker 01

  And so he said, listen, you get your application, send it directly to me and I'll get you in. So I had good credentials beyond that, but I worked every angle I could get. I send it directly to him. I get the acceptance letter from the White House and I got accepted to be a intern in the Office of Presidential Scheduling at the White House, summer 2000. So it was quite an honor and it was interesting to get to be in the, you're in basically the business of running the world. Now, what I realized really quickly was as an intern, total hierarchy exists in this thing. If your mom is the head of the DNC for the state of Washington, you get to work in the West Wing. I'd never met so many people from Arkansas in my whole life because President Clinton's from Arkansas.

• 12:07Speaker 01

  So there's all these people who are friends of the family working there. I never, I've been, it was insane. It was like every one out of every two people. So there's all these people from Arkansas, their parents are connected in politics. And then there's me who has none of that. And I'm not getting any special treatment and I got some really crappy job. It's actually hilarious. Basically what people do is they send letters to the President of the United States to invite him or her to all their events. So like, we get letters from like, little Methodist church in Podunk nowhere is inviting the president to come to their annual barbecue. Every single one of those requests gets a response. So the, I was in the Office of Presidential Scheduling, so we had to respond to every single one of those letters. So we read them all, we gotta, and then you gotta write them.

• 12:50Speaker 01

  And this is also, this is 22 years ago, so we're in some DOS-based system, like filling out these like fillable forms and then triple proofreading it because you can't have a typo in a letter from the White House. And then it goes up to this machine that signs with his name with the pen essentially and goes out. And every now and again, you'll get invites to like, from like a prince in Africa. So, and those get escalated. So I'm in this department doing total admin work. And I was like, there's gotta be a better way than this. So my like, business self's like, all right, how do I get out of this work? And I figured out that the interns have a president of the interns. And so I run for president of the interns.

• 13:30Hala Taha?

  This is so like me. Like, I feel like we're so similar, but go ahead.

• 13:34Speaker 01

  It's me versus, and by the way, there's two groups of people in this internship program. A ton of kids from Ivy Leagues, Harvard, Yale, Princeton, and a ton of people from Arkansas, and then me. And I go to UC, and like, I'm a smart guy, probably go to an Ivy League if I applied myself, but I didn't. I went to UC Santa Barbara, which is like a party school. And I'm there and it's me versus this nerd. And by the way, I'm graduating college. So I'm, a lot of the people are younger than me. So I'm 22. Most of the people there are probably 20. So I'm 22. I'm definitely way cooler than the kid I'm running against, who's this kid from Harvard. And I just crush him and win. And I become president of the interns. And this was something I had realized when I was in high school, because when I became president of my class

• 14:16Speaker 01

  and vice president of my school, I got to get out of everything because I was the liaison for the teachers. And I'm like, oh, this is the way you do it. You go become, it's like student leadership, but for the interns. And I ended up spending the whole summer putting on, throwing parties for interns and social events and organizing them. And it was, it made a really boring job, a really fun job. The part though, to answer your question though, is I realized I was doing this admin work. This is my third internship that I had had. And I called my mom up and I go, Mom, I had a realization. She said, what's that? I said, I am never going to have a job as long as I live. And I said, the only way I will ever have a job where I'm not the boss, and let's use the White House, for example, is if I was president of the United States.

• 14:58Speaker 01

  So it was this epiphany that like, I have to be the boss. And literally in this job in the White House, I said, I would never work for the White House again unless I was president of the United States. Now I'm 22, you know, maybe I would, maybe I'd take an advisor role now if they wanted me. But, but yeah, it was, it was a really eye opening experience to be at this like top of the game, best internship that you could have in the whole world and to say, I don't want to do this. I want to work for myself. But yeah, it was a cool experience.

• 15:22Hala Taha?

  But there was something else that kind of triggered you to want to work for yourself. It was something that you did. You almost got fired, Darius. So don't skip out on that part of the story.

• 15:31Speaker 01

  All right, look, while this is going on, my dad's sick at home. It was a complicated situation. I had chosen to do this. My dad's sick at home. My family was not stoked that I was at this thing. By the way, they don't pay, maybe they change now, but back then they don't pay you. So I'm using like my money I'd saved to go to Europe for graduating college. I'm using that to go live in DC and work for free for the White House. So I was already a little pissed off about that. And the one thing you get when you work at the White House as an intern is you get a picture with the President of the United States in front of the White House on the South, on the steps of the South Lawn. So it's like a picture that commemorates that you worked at the White House. And it's got to be in front of the White House. Well, they had some sort of staff picnic. And they're like, yeah, you're not doing the picture in front of the White House.

• 16:15Speaker 01

  What most people don't know is next to the White House is a building called the Old Executive Office Building, which is actually where almost everyone that works for the White House works inside of this like office building. So like, we're going to do the picture in front of the steps of the OEOB, the Old Executive Office Building. I was like, fuck that.

• 16:31Speaker 01

  So I was pissed and I pulled a straight Jerry Maguire. I wrote this really long email that said, this is unfair. The White House is lucky to have us. They're, we're not lucky to have them. I demand that we either cancel the picture or they reschedule us in front of the White House. And I clicked send and I sent it across to all the interns. And it goes viral inside the White House to all senior staff and everything. So I get pulled aside and, and now they had heard that my dad was sick. And I think they were cutting me some slack and this guy sits me down. He's like a senior, senior, senior White House, like staff member. This guy's like head of some, I think he was head of my department, actually. It was the only time I ever met him. So he's head of presidential scheduling for the President of the United States, scheduled for the whole world. He's like, listen, man, you don't know me.

• 17:16Speaker 01

  I heard what you did. Don't rock the boat. This is the President of the United States. What are you doing? And I held my ground for a second and then I was like, look, I'm sorry. I apologized and, and they basically let me off and they, they did not fire me. And I think honestly, the only reason I didn't get fired is because my father was so sick. But I, I was like, this is such bureaucratic bullshit. And I ended up leaving a few days later, but yeah, it was, it was really eye opening. I was like, wow, this is like weird that you would give this big thing to go work for free and not get the one thing you want and have no control over it and do all this admin work. And I was at this great opportunity and yet all I saw that it wasn't a good fit for me. And at that moment I sat down, I said, I am 100% unemployable. Like I can never have a job.

• 18:00Speaker 01

  And it was this thing where I was like, if I ever take a job, it'll be to figure out what they do to go do it for myself. And I was 100% convinced of it and it never changed after that ever.

• 18:10Hala Taha?

  I love this story so much. And I know I keep saying I'm like relating so much to your story because when I was 22, I was also like president of the interns at a radio station. And also I got fired. You didn't get fired, but I got fired for putting like a text message and sending a text message to my coworker that got went viral across the station. And I got fired, you didn't, but we did the same thing when we were 22 because when you're 22 and you're feeling unfair and you're ambitious and driven like us, you kind of just go haywire sometimes and make mistakes. But hey, it taught you that you didn't belong in that kind of environment and that you wanted to actually work for yourself and not work for free and be treated unfairly. So there were some good lessons, I think that you got out of that.

• 18:54Speaker 01

  Yeah, you know, also like this is 2000. So being 22 and being like, I'm going to go be an entrepreneur in the year 2000 was not normal. That was really rare, right? And so it was a great lesson to learn, but it was very rare and it was a gift that led me to be able to then go and build.

• 19:12Hala Taha?

  Yeah. And so speaking of that, you built your first business with your twin brother called Twin Capital Brokerage. And by the time you're 25 years old, you built an INC 500 company and you were the 40th fastest growing company in the U.S. So that's crazy. Tell us about how you started that business with your brother.

• 19:29Speaker 01

  I moved back home after my father passed away. We had this event promotion business. It tanked. It was the first business I ever had that lost a hundred thousand dollars, which is like, that's a lot of money to lose when you're 22. But I lost that business. My brother was in the mortgage business. So I have a twin brother. I was always kind of like the student leader jock and he was like the troublemaker, but we're twins. And when we were in senior in high school, he got a job at a mortgage company. And he realized he was like a savant at sales. I mean, he was like unbelievable. And so when I was in college, he kind of was in college, but he was really in sales and he was selling mortgages. And by the time I was graduating college at 22, my brother was making six figures. He was like killing it.

• 20:12Speaker 01

  And so I was like, well, I could go get a job. I had a degree in economics and accounting and go do that while I figure out my business stuff. Or I could just go sell loans. And so I got a job in mortgage. Long story short, that didn't work out. I moved to San Francisco. He was down in LA. And I pivoted a lot for 23 and 24, but I got back into mortgage and I started doing really, really well. And at 25, I decided to start my own company. I don't know if you remember, there's a supplement company called Twin Labs. Have you ever heard of that before?

• 20:42Hala Taha?

  It rings a bell slightly.

• 20:44Speaker 01

  It's a really popular like supplement company. And I found out the guy named it after his twin children. So I was like, oh, I'm going to name my company after us being twins. So I named it Twin Capital Mortgage. Now, funny enough is I, I tried to get my brother to come join me, but he was making like three times as much money as I was. So he said, why would I leave my job? I'm making like 30 grand a month and you're making 10. And I said, well, hey, listen, I hate your fiancee, number one. And number two, I'm going to make more money than you are. So if I, with a month, I make more money than you do in a month. You have to break up with your fiancee and move to San Francisco and be my business partner. And he's like, we're on. And that was in July or June or July of 2003. And by September I made, I had a month that was way bigger than his. And so literally within one week, he broke up with his fiancee.

• 21:29Hala Taha?

  She hates you.

• 21:31Speaker 01

  She knew I hated her, so I was transparent. Within a week, he quit his job, broke up with his fiance, moved to San Francisco and became my business partner. It was amazing because my brother and I are kind of yin and yang. I mean, we're both are good at sales, but he's unbelievable at sales and I'm good enough. I like to operate and build and be a visionary. But when he came, I mean, our business that first year, he came in November is when he got there. That year, I think the business grossed $300,000. The next year we grossed almost 2 million, the year after that, five, the year after that, almost 10. And so this business grew 2,500% in three years. It was the 40th fastest growing company in the Inc. 500 in 2007. So it was an amazing run and I learned a couple of things.

• 22:14Speaker 01

  I learned like find a partner that's going to complement your skills and really go lean into scaling a business. And for us, it was, the business has its own horror story because it was a subprime mortgage lender and it blew up in oh seven. So I joked that when I went to the Inc. 500 conference, it was in Chicago that year. I'm wearing a black tie and I joked that we were the saddest people in that conference because I literally was probably the 40th fastest shrinking company in the United States. And when I was at the 500 conference, yeah, it sucked. The business ended up imploding because of subprime meltdown. We went from 150 employees, I grew that thing for myself to 150 employees in three years. And then within 90 days, I was back to 10 employees.

• 22:54Hala Taha?

  Wow. And so that was a failure. How did you overcome that failure? Because you went on to start a couple more businesses after that.

• 23:02Speaker 01

  Yeah, honestly, I spent five years and I called it entrepreneurial purgatory. So oh seven was early, like the economy didn't falter till oh eight, but my business, the mortgage business got crushed. The number of people in the mortgage business that worked in the mortgage business in oh six was 400,000. It shrunk to 100,000 by 2011.

• 23:22Hala Taha?

  Wow.

• 23:22Speaker 01

  So three quarters of the industry went away. I always said it was, it'd be kind of like, most people don't know this, but I said, it would be like if I said, hey, Uber, Twitter, Meta, Google, they all go out of business. That's what happened to that industry all at once. So it was brutal. I pivoted, like I pivoted. For almost five years, I literally showed up to work for five years straight. Oh, seven, oh, eight, oh, nine, oh, 10, oh, 11, and literally did not get a paycheck. I just cut checks and went to work. Now, I'd made a lot of money in the previous year, so I just, we used that to survive. But most of it, you know, we spent a lot of it and like just trying to rebuild. And it just took a long time.

• 24:01Speaker 01

  And I was young. Mind you, I started the business in oh, three when I was, I was 25. So by oh, seven, I was 27, 28. So this all happened before I was 30 years old. And then I spent my late twenties, early thirties rebuilding, like figuring out what was next. And I have a friend, Ryan Levesque, who owns a company called The Ass Method. He called me Tenacious D. He said, you just don't have any quitting you. And I was like, man, I wish I did because that, it was probably the most painful five years I've ever lived in business. And I wouldn't do it over again. If I had to do it, I wouldn't.

• 24:34Hala Taha?

  You're saying that you wish that you shut down that company earlier, that you just were beating a dead horse basically for five years?

• 24:41Speaker 01

  So Naval Ravikant says you need to pick the right space to be in. And that space was a dead space and it was broken and I just couldn't win in it. But I just didn't have any quit. So I guess kept fighting for it. I was standing on a broken foundation. So knowing what I know now, it was, there was a lot of time and anguish spent. And there was opportunities all around me that I was, I was living in San Francisco. So what was happening in oh, nine, 10 and 11 in San Francisco? Airbnb, Uber, like you go down the list of all these amazing companies that were born in then. And I'm over here like getting my teeth kicked in, in this space that has, that's just demolished. And so was it the right thing to do? I don't know. Hindsight's always 2020, but yeah, like the pain sucked. Like it just wasn't worth it.

• 25:25Speaker 01

  I had some amazing things happen to me during that time. I had my first child and I got married and I did live in a great city. But professionally, I struggled so badly for so long that it just, it wasn't fun. And it, I think that there's an element of grit to win. Like in order to win, it doesn't always come easy. And you have to have some thick skin and you have to be willing to overcome obstacles. But to a point, I was very depressed during that timeframe and I just couldn't get out of my own. Way and I learned a lot about how do you, how do you reengage to activate yourself if you get stuck? So I learned a lot then about that. And the big thing is you have to win a little bit. You can't just lose constantly. And for us, because the foundation of that industry was broken, it was a ton of false starts. It was like five false starts.

• 26:08Speaker 01

  I probably started seven different companies then and they, and I just couldn't get any traction. But eventually, you know, tenacious D worked. We had a really big win in 2011 and then our biggest win was after that in 2013, which, which is the business I just exited a year and a half ago.

• 26:24Hala Taha?

  Yeah. So tell us about the money source. I want to understand how you ended up creating that business, how you grew it to a thousand employees, how you exited. I'd love to learn more about that.

• 26:35Speaker 01

  Yeah. So because I didn't have enough capital and mortgage, you need to have capital to build your platforms. Cause it's not like VC, VC use capital to burn your runway to then get to your next round of capital. Mortgage, you need to capitalize the platform to go lend against it. And so I didn't have enough to really do it competitively. So what I ended up doing was doing partnerships. So I did a partnership with this company called Pacific Union Financial in 2011. And we grew it from essentially nothing to about 75 million in revenue overnight. We had a, not a perfect exit from it. We had a disagreement with some of the, our partner there. And we ended up basically getting bought out, had a very short non-compete, took all that capital and went out to go buy a platform, raised 40 million bucks. And we couldn't find the platform we wanted.

• 27:19Speaker 01

  One of the platforms we were talking to, to buy was this company called The Money Source, which was this really small little company in Long Island, New York. 30 employees, a couple of million dollars net worth. There was a small little regional lender and he said no to selling to us. This guy named Stavros, who ended up being my business partner. But he said, well, what if you want to do a partnership? I said, oh, hell no. I just did a partnership and I'm not doing another one. But after a while, we couldn't find what we wanted. We go back to him and I said, hey, listen, the 40 million bucks we raised it, I didn't call capital on it. I just went and did a partnership, but I made it this like bulletproof partnership agreement. So that what had happened in the previous deal wouldn't happen in this deal. And it was off to the races. This business grew from, yeah.

• 28:01Speaker 01

  It was like a J curve, like we went thirty to a thousand employees in three years. And it's a complicated story, but essentially we crushed it. I mean, the business now is one of the largest lenders in the United States. It manages a hundred billion dollars of mortgages. It's a game changer in the mortgage industry and we built that from the ground up. I mean, there was something there when we got there, they had their licensing and they were a small company. But there was a company that had grown from nothing to call it thirty employees in seventeen years. And then in three years, it went from thirty employees to a thousand. So that kind of shows you the difference of what happened when we all got together.

• 28:36Hala Taha?

  Yeah, so question for you, you know, you've had many different entrepreneurial experiences. Would you say that you would have been as successful at the money source had you not had those other failures previously?

• 28:48Speaker 01

  I don't know, it's hard to say. I mean, obviously like you fail till you win, right? You learn in the process and winning is a failure mitigation game, right? It's how do I reduce the failure to get to the win or reduce the speed or speed from fail to win, right? Yeah, I, we learned a lot. What I learned at the, the win before that, I took that blueprint from there and I brought it over to this next place. And there was a lot of pain to figure that out there. So had I just gone straight there, I, I wouldn't have known what I knew. But yeah, I mean, look, you either grow or die, right? It's like, there's no real middle. You either give up or you keep fighting. And for us, you know, I have no end of fight in me.

• 29:27Speaker 01

  For me, it's like I, if I'm not getting what I want, I will obsess about it till I either figure it out or I figure out I don't want it. Right? I'm like, God, that's what it's going to take for that to win? I'm not doing that. But like, I'll make that decision, but I won't make the decision of like, oh, I, I didn't do well. Like, I guess I suck. Like that thought never crosses my mind. It's like, all right, I just don't know enough yet to win, so I gotta go figure it out. But yeah, we figured it out and like I said, like you don't build a hundred billion dollar mortgage platform without literally from startup. Like not startup, but from very small. And by the way, we did it bootstrapped. We didn't raise capital. So like, we would go like, once we got it big, I'd be on Wall Street. I'd be meeting with like JP Morgan and Bank of America Merrill Lynch and all these investment bankers on Wall Street.

• 30:12Speaker 01

  And they're like, so, so tell us about how, well, you know, how did you guys, um, you know, raise the capital to do this? I'm like, uh, we made money.

• 30:20Speaker 01

  And they're like, how did you do that? I'm like, magic. I mean, what we did is I cannot give you one example of any mortgage company in the whole country that did it the way we did it. It was a cool ride and one of the biggest tools I used was building a world-class culture.

• 30:35Hala Taha?

  Yeah.

• 30:36Speaker 01

  And I leaned into that. In that industry, it was lacking because of what had happened in oh seven and oh eight. It was like a graveyard for culture and I was all in on culture. So it was, that was one of our secret weapons was how do you leverage culture and scale systems and do those, these best practices that are maybe in other industries are not in this industry. We brought them in and really leveraged that.

• 30:56Hala Taha?

  And that's, this is a great segue to get into core values and scale map. But before we do that, I was pretty surprised to learn that you stepped down as CEO of this company, especially given all of your leadership background and student government and all these other ventures that you had. It really surprised me that you decided to step down as CEO. What happened? What kind of impacted you to make that decision?

• 31:19Speaker 01

  Well, I told my partners once, I said, you'll never have to fire me. I'll quit way before. The minute I'm not happy, I'll quit. And so, you know, we grew this business to this like massive business. I mean, the business won all these Stevie awards for ABA awards. I was ranked the number nine highest rated CEO in America on Gloucester.com in this business. Right? So we had a like list of accolades. Business was a private equity business. We ended up buying a bunch of companies. I had checked all these boxes on my list of things I wanted to accomplish as an entrepreneur. My first was I want to build a hundred million dollar company. And how, do you want to know what, how big my company was when I made that goal?

• 31:53Hala Taha?

  How big?

• 31:53Speaker 01

  It was $2 million in revenue. And I was like, I'm going to build a hundred million dollar company. And that was in 2010, when I was like failing in my previous company. And I'm like, I'm going to build a hundred million dollar company. And it took me five years until that happened. So I checked all these boxes that I thought were these like, I climbed this mountain that I was like, I'm going to go build a set nine-figure company and I'm going to win all these awards and I'm going to get written up an entrepreneur and all these things I thought that mattered. And then I did it all and I'm like, eh, just doesn't feel any different. And something happened in that we ended up selling one of the businesses because 2017, 18 were really hard years for the mortgage industry, kind of like 2022. This is a hard year for the industry right now, too. And I ended up selling a business and it was in December that year.

• 32:36Speaker 01

  I ended up basically moving 300 employees to a new company and laying off another 150. And it was the seventh time I had done layoffs because that industry is super cyclical. It's really cyclical. You have interest rates will drop 2% and that's why we stacked up so much. And what I didn't tell you is I went to 1,000 and then in 2017, when Donald Trump got elected, rates went up. And we ended up laying off 400 of those people. And then I ended up over three rounds of layoffs and I had done some layoffs before that. Because the industry is so volatile that we're always having to lay off, grow, lay off, grow, lay off. That's totally normal in mortgage. And I had this epiphany and I was like, I don't think my core values are aligned with this industry. I'm a person that pours into people and pours into leaders and like goes out of my way.

• 33:22Speaker 01

  I'll recruit someone for three years to get them to leave to come join me. And here I am like two years later saying, oh, sorry, it didn't work out. And I was sitting in my car and I had just done this massive layoff sale thing. It was not like a sale where you make a lot of money. It's like you sell it because you're trying to give people a soft landing. And I'm sitting in my car, it's January 9th. This just happened on January 8th. I ruined yet another Christmas dealing with bullshit. And my family is like in some art store and I'm in my car and I'm just sitting there and all of a sudden, I'm telling you, there was no cognitive thing that happened. This was a, came from my body. I'm a somatic intuitive, like my body talks to me. And I literally threw up the words, I'm going to quit. And I was 40, I had just turned 40 and I was like, whoa.

• 34:06Speaker 01

  Like first I said that and then I was like, whoa, what the fuck did I just say? And I was like in shock and my wife came back into the car and I was like, I think I might quit. She's like, are you serious? And I'm like, like, I'm going to give it a year. You know, I'm like, I'm not going to be impulsive about this. Like, I can't even believe I just said this. I'm going to give it a year. And it was like God just grabbed me and threw me off the cliff. God was like, you know, give it a year, buddy. And by November, it was, that was about 11 months later.

• 34:34Hala Taha?

  And what year was this?

• 34:35Speaker 01

  Two thousand nineteen. By November, I was like, I can't do it anymore. I was like, I was a wreck. I hated it every moment. It had nothing to do with even the company at that point. It was just like me being in the space like, I don't know. It was like out of body experience. And I just went flew to New York, met with my business partner and I said, I called my other business partners. One of my brother, I told him I'm done. I flew to New York and told my business partner and like, yeah, like my company had like a funeral for me. Like I, I did not stay. I left and I was done.

• 35:04Hala Taha?

  Wow.

• 35:05Speaker 01

  So I stayed on the board. I mean, you know, this is a big company. So I was on the board. I was, I was board of directors for seven, eight months while we figured out my exit, but yeah.

• 35:13Hala Taha?

  And you had no plan, right? Like you quit with zero plan. How did you then decide to pick up the pieces? Start your own personal brand, start a podcast, launch a book, all those things. What made you decide to go that path?

• 35:27Speaker 01

  During two thousand nineteen, like my one respite from like obsessing about whether I wanted to stay or leave was I wrote my book. So I was writing the book for fun. So I wrote my book, The Core Value Equation, which is all about how do you build a core value driven organization? But I was like this project that I was like pouring myself into kind of side project. It was just for fun. I'd wanted to start a podcast. These are all things that like, I'm a super creative person. So for me like, but I was not being able to be creative because I was doing, I was running my companies. There was no plan for any of that stuff. November thirteenth, twenty nineteen, I resigned. I went to Asia with a CEO forum of mine for Christmas and New Year's and I was buzzed on Belgium beers in Ho Chi Minh City, Saigon, Vietnam. And I told my wife, I'm like, let's go travel the world for a year.

• 36:11Speaker 01

  And that was like January seventh, two thousand twenty. And I was like, let's go move to Spain. Fuck it. Let's take a year off. Like we've always wanted to do that. I wanted, my goal was always like sell my first company by thirty and go travel the world. And that clearly didn't happen. Cause what happened to my previous business? At that point, it was like a six and a 10 year old. I'm like, yes, let's go travel. Let's go have fun. I'll go figure out what's next. And so March of twenty twenty, I had a trip planned to go to Barcelona to go look at schools and houses and, and then COVID hit.

• 36:42Hala Taha?

  And the world, the world ended.

• 36:44Speaker 01

  Yeah, that my take sabbatical trip around the world trip blew up. It went away. And so there I was kind of stuck in my house like everybody else, kind of sheltering in place, trying to figure out what the hell I want to do with myself. And I was like, well, I wrote this book. My book was done at this point. I'm like, I wrote this book. Maybe I should go do something with it. You know, I just took that entrepreneurial hustle and I poured it into the book and then started the podcast. And that's where I spent all most of 2020 was doing that. And the personal brand was just kind of by accident.

• 37:17Hala Taha?

  I love that. I love this story and kind of the lead up to everything. So let's talk about the core value equation. You help companies determine their core values. First of all, how did you first get introduced to core values? And what do they mean?

• 37:30Speaker 01

  Yeah. So in oh, six, when I was running my first company, I was getting my teeth kicked in. I had about 40, 50 employees. I was really young. And back then, by the way, if you're an entrepreneur, like there was way less resources for entrepreneurs, way, way, way less. Like, like now, like everyone's an entrepreneur. You know, people email, what do you do? I'm an entrepreneur. I'm like, no way. Okay. Do you make money? They're like, oh, not yet. And I'm like, okay, sure. So back then, it was like, nobody was an entrepreneur. There was no resources, especially a young entrepreneur. There was very minimal resources. I mean, this is like pre Twitter and like Facebook was barely being used at this point. This is like MySpace times. So just to put it into context. And so I found this program

• 38:11Speaker 01

  called birthing a giants at MIT, which was put on by a guy named Vern Harnish, who has this business called scaling up. And I got in the program and I was introduced to core values. And I don't know what it was, you know, maybe going back to this thing with my dad, but like, how do you live and engage life? Values is a big part of that. And it just resonated with me. And year three at graduation, we did this exercise where these two founders who had this really successful company in Vancouver called Nurse Next Door, they said, please stand up if your company has core values. So with graduation night of birthing a giants at MIT, and everyone stands up, and they say, please stay standing if you know your company core values, you can say them off the top of your head. Everyone sits down. Like, I'm sorry, excuse me, half the room.

• 38:54Speaker 01

  Sits down, then they say, please stay standing if your employees know your core values. Half the room sits down. They say, please stay standing if your customers know your core values. Everyone sits down and I'm looking at this room of 60 entrepreneurs. I mean, some of them like Kendra Scott graduated from this program. I don't know if you know she is, but she's a famous entrepreneur. So there's a lot of entrepreneurs, like the guys that did like 100 flowers and rack space. I mean, there's tons of amazing entrepreneurs that go through this program and they're all sitting down. And I'm like, well, we're all the CEOs. Like, what do you mean? We're all sitting down like that doesn't make any sense. And that was the pivotal moment for me. I realized that like they say, you have to have mission, vision, values for your business, but nobody really knows how to do that. And I spent the next few years kind of obsessing and what I realized was that building a core value or core purpose driven organization.

• 39:39Speaker 01

  Most people just think it's like a box you check, like it's when you get your like a thing you do through your MBA program. And my take is yes, you have to figure out what's meaningful for you and you got to check that box, but you have to design it to be viral and sticky in your organization. During those five years of me getting my ass kicked in business, I spent a lot of time experimenting and I figured out, how do you design values and purpose and mission? How do you have to design it? So people can actually use it. And the book is really a step by step manual. And how do you build a core value driven organization? Cause my belief is that core values of the opportunity to be the language of accountability for your organization. And when it does that, it starts to attract people of like mind and like belief. And again, values are the fundamental beliefs of an organization, the personality of the organization.

• 40:22Speaker 01

  So if I could get a bunch of people to show up who believe what I believe, who talk the way I talk about these beliefs. That I have a much higher likeliness of them doing things like working the way I work and caring the way I care. All these like soft skills that are so meaningful to execute properly, but people don't know how to do it. So the book is really a step by step process and how I, I learned to do it and how I teach people to do it.

• 40:45Hala Taha?

  Yeah, I find it super, super interesting. So for me, when I had a company of 10 people, it was super easy to run. You know, everybody, you get to hand train them. But now we're a company of 60 employees at Yap Media and we need things like this, designing a mission, designing core values, because I don't even know everybody who works at my company anymore. And that's why you need like that structure. So I find this super valuable. So one of the quotes in your book that you say is that companies do not have core values, people have core values. Can you explain what you mean by that?

• 41:16Speaker 01

  So core values have the opportunity again to become the personality or the, sorry, the, the language of accountability for the organization. It's not like it's like this thing, like until it becomes a thing, it's not a thing, right? So what ends up happening is a company like Yap Media, you have 60 people and they all have their own individual values. And if you don't define what Yap Media stands for and then hold people accountable to it and create a system where that can scale, what ends up happening is you end up getting kind of this like hodgepodge of values and their values will show up in their actions consistently. And so, once we pay homage to the fact that, hey, look, if the company doesn't have them, you're going to get what's there just by default because individuals have their own values. My belief is, is like, they still have them, even if you define what you are and screen for them

• 41:59Speaker 01

  and make them come to life. But what they do instead is they attach their values to your values. So in Core Value Equation, we say core values, you need to discover what's authentic to you, discovering your values, you need to design them to be viral and sticky, then you need to roll them out. So you need to teach people what they are, indoctrinate them into them, and then you need to implement them ongoing, and then you need to measure for efficacy and do that consistently. And so the process, the book really teaches, how do you do that? So that when I get that individual that shows up that has their individual values, that they figure out how do they leverage their individual values? And we do that as part of the rollout. How do you leverage your individual values to make the company values become more alive and well? And the answer is this, it has to happen organically, but you have to have a process to create that organic interaction,

• 42:42Speaker 01

  which is essentially what I figured out, is you got to make it easy, you got to make it organic, it's got, it takes time. And it's like, again, like you don't learn a language overnight, so it takes time, but you have to create those opportunities and it has to be easy. And so really, the book, Core Value Equation, walks you through how do you do that step by step.

• 42:59Hala Taha?

  And so you have your own core values. You have six of them. Can you talk about what each of them are and what they represent?

• 43:06Speaker 01

  I ended up in 2019, I ended up getting into this program called Stegen, which is Conscious Leadership Program. They have a program called Integral Leadership. And like in my class was the CEO of Whole Foods, Jason and I were in the same class and the CEO Doug, who was a former CEO of Crate and Barrel. And so there's some, you know, big shots and there's only 20 of us in the class. It's a one-year-long program and we're in the program and this happened, by the way, this is February of 19, a month after I had said, I'm going to quit my job and we're doing our personal values. And I realized I'm like the core value king, right? I'm starting my, I'm literally that same month, writing my book on core values. And I realized I had not done my personal values, which is super weird. I wrote them very quickly because I, it was easy for me because I had experience with

• 43:49Speaker 01

  it. But yeah, my values, I have six values. I always tell people you can get out of five. I couldn't just land on five. I gave myself six. And so number one's happiness called heart. So I like to like, think of sticky viral language to describe a value. And there's a description of what that looks like for me and for my family. Love is my second one and that is besos, which is kisses in Spanish. Eye of the tiger is passion. That's my third one. My fourth one is curiosity. I call it cinco, which stands for what, where, who, when and why. Creativity is number five and I call that boom. And my sixth one is balance and I call that movie night. Yeah, it's just, I always measure myself against them. Again, like you know, when you're going against your values, because that's when friction

• 44:33Speaker 01

  starts to get created, whether in your organization or in your life. And for me, I'm always, I always have my eye out. Like, what am I not living right now that I know I want to live? And I always tell people core values can be slightly aspirational. For me, my values that are aspirational is balance. Like, that's hard. And happiness, like, I fight to be happy. I fight for balance. The other ones are a little bit easier. Like, I'm naturally curious. I'm a pretty passionate person. Curiosity, again, natural creativity, natural. But happiness and balance, I fight for those a lot.

• 45:02Hala Taha?

  Yeah, I like that you kind of give everything a catchy secondary name so that it's super memorable. And I think this is super important for organizations because when it comes to building a community, having a common language and things that you guys only know about is really important for bonding. So tell us about why you say that you need that like sticky version of the core value as well.

• 45:23Speaker 01

  Again, if you believe that core values, the language of accountability, then the language matters. Words matter, like literally like empires have grown and fallen because of words. I'm reading a book with my son and we're reading actually about the, it's about the history of the world and we're on the chapter about Islam right now. And you realize that Muhammad basically built an entire empire, the Islamic empire off of just words. Like he went out and talked about Allah, right? And that created this entire empire that like got all the different tribes to come together. So words are so powerful. That's just one example. There's been empires built on words. Like you look at the United States of America, built on the words of our founding fathers, right? So why would you not pick viral sticky language that stands for what you stand for? Or you

• 46:07Speaker 01

  could be like everyone else and pick boring words like integrity. It's like, well, yeah, everyone has integrity in their core values or, or driven or, you know, excellence. It's like, well, what's the difference between yaps excellence and the guy down the street? And I'm like, how about you say it a different way?

• 46:23Speaker 01

  It makes it where it sticks in people's minds. There's a reason people do it in branding and there's a reason that they usually do it in core values, which is like, if it's gonna be the language of accountability, let's give them some language to work with. And I love viral sticky language.

• 46:35Hala Taha?

  Yeah, I love that tip. So talk to us about what a core value driven organization looks like versus one that has no core values.

• 46:43Speaker 01

  Well, again, going back to what your question before is like, people have core values, companies don't, unless you create them in your company. So what ends up happening is if you don't have a core value driven organization, all that is, is me defining what I stand for and holding the organization accountable to it consistently and making it drip throughout the organization. So what does that mean? Does that mean that you're always living those values? No, it means you're always trying to live those values and when you fall off, you fix. So you get back to center, the core, right? A non-core value driven organization is someone That just shows up and does what I call BAU, business as usual. You get what you get. Oh, hey, Johnny over there has shitty work ethic, but Sally over here has great work ethic. There's a value misalignment, by the way. You think that doesn't, that doesn't create friction? Your team will manage themselves to the lowest common denominator.

• 47:26Speaker 01

  So if you let losers hang out in your company, no offense losers, but everyone else is gonna be like, well, I guess Holla lets losers hang out here, so I don't have to try as hard. Like, they put up with bullshit. And so my belief is, is like, if you have a, let's say your values around work ethic or excellence, but you let mediocrity hang out, well, do you think you're gonna really have excellence happen? The answer is absolutely not. You're gonna have mediocrity. You'll have pockets of excellence that happen accidentally. Or you could do it my way and be super intentional and hold everyone accountable and the organization accountable to this idea of excellence. And when someone shows up and they can't measure up to that, they get to leave. And what happens then is you have accountability around those values. And the people that love those values, they'll be like, hells yeah, I'm in the right place.

• 48:12Speaker 01

  And the people that don't are gonna be like, hells no, I wanna get out of here, cuz I'm gonna, they're gonna find out that I don't like this. And it's not to say they're bad people, it's just not the right environment for them. So that's how I characterize it, at least.

• 48:24Hala Taha?

  Yeah, I think those are great tips. So there's some mistakes and some common mistakes that people make when it comes to their core values. First of all, they make them too wordy. They're not simple enough. They're too complex. And sometimes they're too nice. So I'd love to get your feedback in terms of like, what good core values sound like versus bad ones.

• 48:42Speaker 01

  Your organization has a way you guys speak. And there's tough, gritty organizations, and there's really like buttoned up, pretty organizations. And then there's like a middle ground hippie organizations, like everyone's, your values are the personality of the organization. So there's different personalities, just like there's different personalities with people. So a bad value is one that's not authentic. I.e. you say, I value showing up for the team, and yet you don't, and you're the CEO. That's a problem. And in my book, I say that the minute the CEO doesn't live the values, you just put a bullet in the head of the values. So bad values are ones that aren't true. They're ones that are not authentic. Because again, there's five steps to creating a core value-driven organization. Discover, design, rollout, Implement measure for efficacy. If you discover and you are trying to please imaginary people,

• 49:27Speaker 01

  clients, team members that probably aren't going to be there in the future anyway, because you're out of alignment with your values, then you may pick values that are not authentic to who you are. So I see people do that all the time where they'll pick really like warm and fuzzy values, but they're not a warm and fuzzy organization. That's a bad value. Just say that you don't put up with bullshit. The people like Travis Kalanick, I just finished watching the show, Super Pumped. Dude, that guy, one of their core values was called toe stepping. That was core value number seven for Uber. Toe stepping. Does that connotate like niceness? Hell no, that connotates fucking people up if they don't live your value. Toe stepping, stepping on someone's toes. Have you ever had someone step on your toes, Hala?

• 50:07Hala Taha?

  Yeah.

• 50:08Speaker 01

  Yeah, it hurts a lot. Toe stepping is their number seven value. Well, he ended up creating a toxic culture because of it. But he created something amazing, too. It scaled till it didn't there. So that's a bad value. From a design standpoint, and that's actually a perfect example that core values don't need to be nice. Hey, man, if you're a toe stepping organization, say what you are. Here's what happens if you don't. Sally, the flower-loving hippie shows up and she sees Travis toe stepping on Johnny. And she's like, whoa, where do I work? And that's a misalignment. Whereas Bobby, who's a badass, likes to toe step. He's like, oh, cool. We toe step here. No friction. And what I say is, you know, and I do a lot of coaching now and advising with companies.

• 50:50Speaker 01

  As I say, for scale specifically, I say, look, scale is a friction removal process. You want to scale fast, remove friction from your business. The way you remove friction is by eliminating problems before they become problems. And what we're talking about right now, a value misalignment is one of the worst problems you can have in your business. That's where you get infighting and politics and drama and all that bullshit. And I don't want any of that stuff. That's just slowing you down from winning. And so scales are friction removal process and it starts with values being aligned properly.

• 51:18Hala Taha?

  Okay, so here is some advice that I'd love you to give. So let's say you're a company like mine. My company like blew up so fast. What advice would you give in terms of the executives at my organization or any new startup to begin to develop their core values? Like, what are the first things that we should do to kind of brainstorm and hit the drawing board for our core values?

• 51:39Speaker 01

  Well, I go step by step through my book. So you need to do the discovery process, which is there's so many different values you could stand for. So you need to really pick what are the top, you know, three to six, I say, four is the good, I like four or five. This is a good sweet spot. And there's a book called Built to Last by Jerry Porras and Jim Collins. And in that book, they went and studied visionary companies and they, they found out one thing visionary companies stand for no more than seven and no less than three values. So, and this is studying some of the most iconic companies of the last century. So for me, it's let's pick the out of that hundred. And in my book, we give a list of 105 words that you can in the book, if you pick up the book, it's in there.

• 52:18Hala Taha?

  And I highly recommend it and we'll put it in the show notes.

• 52:20Speaker 01

  Yeah. So it's in there. There's a guide for this. So we have a guide that we give when you buy the book. And so you just eliminate those 105 words and you pick your top 15 and you rank them in order because values have a hierarchy. So you want to put them in order that now you've discovered what are your top five values? What matters most to you? From there, you have to go through a design process, which is making them viral sticky and making them, I have some tests I put them through. Do they stand the test of time? Is there any negativity in there? Do you have product? Remove product? So I have a laundry list of like checks and balances, but they have to be designed to be able to scale as you scale. In order to do that, they need to be designed so that they can become viral and sticky. So you go through that process and then you got to bring them to the team and teach the team so that they learn what they are and create systems for that in the

• 53:05Speaker 01

  business. And in the book, I talk through step by step, how do you do to all those things?

• 53:09Hala Taha?

  Yeah. And I can't wait to take my team through this exercise. I'm super excited about it. So you're known for two things, core values, which we just covered in a lot of detail, as well as scaling businesses. So you have this methodology, the scale map method. MAP stands for mission, accountability, and performance. So could you go over MAP and your scale map method and what each section is? And I can kind of just ask you a few questions about each area.

• 53:35Speaker 01

  Yeah, there's a word in Japanese called Shibui. Have you heard of this word before?

• 53:40Hala Taha?

  No.

• 53:41Speaker 01

  Okay, so Shibui, it means that there is complexity in simplicity. There's complexity in simplicity. So even with the core value equation, it's around creating something that's simple. I'm a chronic person that makes things complex. So I have to simplify it or else I'll never do anything. And the core value equation is all around, how do you simplify the process to make it work? When I left my business and COVID hit, I was sitting on the sidelines and did my book launch. And then when I came out of that, I got asked to advise some entrepreneurs on scale because I was always the scale guy. Like, how do you grow your company fast? And having grown a company that quick from, I grew my, the first leg of that growth was 30 to 300 employees in 18 months. The next leg, which is crazy, that's a 10x, right?

• 54:24Speaker 01

  And by the way, when I did that, we had off the chart record engagement scores and like zero growing pains. And then we went from 300 to 1,000. And so this is all around scale methodology. So the other thing I learned and got to play with during this time was these different scale systems. And I learned something really simple is that you need to have scale systems to complement your cultural systems. And I always tell people scales about three things. You need to have execution systems, strategic systems and cultural systems. And they need to talk to each other and they need to be simple. And so Scale Map was really born out of me starting to help other CEOs grow their companies. And right now, we have Scale Map method. We, you know, we coach right now, gosh, almost 30 different companies. And we teach them the process and really it comes down to three things.

• 55:07Speaker 01

  And Scale Map itself is the execution side of this. What is the execution asset that I built in the business? And there's three parts, mission, which is where are you trying to go? And we want to look at that in three different increments, 10 year, three year, one year. And when I always say, what's going to happen in the next 12 months, month by month? What's going to happen in the next three years? And then I just want you to lean into the future and have some faith. And where do you think you take the thing in 10 years? For some people, they say, oh, I want to sell before then. I go, fine, five years. Once I define where I'm trying to go and I want to look at that in a few areas, revenue, income, staff size, ethics. Am I building a business that's sustainable? Revenue and income will tell me that. How many people do I need to get them there? And I want to look at that again. Three in one year and then ethics, am I creating any future liabilities for myself? Subprime mortgage lending, I created future liabilities for myself, my first business.

• 55:53Speaker 01

  So I learned you have to like be cognizant of that. Then what we do is we create accountability systems around that. And that comes in in meeting structure. So we teach admission, we teach, how do you build quarterly plans? And so this is what I teach CEOs. How do you have simple systems to do this consistently? A is accountability. If I build a quarterly plan and I have my mission of where I'm trying to take the business to. And again, what do I do with that? My team knows what they need to work on. They understand the priorities. I understand it. It's mapped out. I have a plan to work with. Well, a plan is as good as the paper it's written on. If you don't have accountability around that plan. And so A stands for accountability. And we do that in two different ways. Number one is what we call rule of one org chart, which is who owns what? Defining who owns what in the business. I don't want overlapping responsibilities.

• 56:37Speaker 01

  I want people to understand who owns what in the business. I want to spell that out and document it. And I want that to be a strategic tool for growth. I E, if I map out your entire organization, what are the top two hires you want to make in the next 12 months? Strategic hires. What are the top two hires you want to make in the next three years? Strategic hires. The people you bring into your organization in the next year and three years, leadership wise, are going to define where you go in that time period. But I want to map that up so there's clarity. The next thing I want to do is I want to build a meeting cadence. And what I tell people is accountability comes through cadence. Cadence comes through rhythm. And it's the heartbeat of execution in your company. And we do that through a meeting structure. We call 1590 meeting rule and 30 every 30, which is your team meetings and your one on ones.

• 57:20Speaker 01

  All right, you got mission, you got accountability. Well, what's going to happen is how large you're going to start to get performance metrics. Data is going to come out of the business. But what do you do with that data? And so P stands for performance. And that's looking at the data that comes out of the business. And we do that in three areas. One's called a five question poll survey, which is me understanding my customer experience and my team experience. The second is we call three by three KPIs, which is how do you build KPIs that again, going back to what I said 15 minutes ago, scale is a friction removal process. I want data to tell me what's breaking before it's going to break. So we have a whole system around that. And then last but not least, it's called C3P and L, which is how do you look at financials? So they tell the story of growth. And so it's a really simplistic, going back to this idea of Shabooie. Is there complexity and simplicity?

• 58:05Speaker 01

  I want to really focus on the 20% that's going to move the needle. And I want to get everyone aligned around that. And then sit that on top of a cultural asset known as my values. And when you do that, you grow like crazy.

• 58:18Hala Taha?

  Yeah, I love some of these ideas. I've never heard before and I love them so much. Like rule of one org charts, the fact that everybody knows exactly what they're supposed to do. One person is assigned to one specific task. There's no confusion. That is so important when you're trying to scale a team. And I love building the org charts for the future because that really helps you understand like how to budget, what hires you need to make, who's going to come into your company and really help scale things. And then your, your rules around meetings are super cool. So I'd love to kind of get a little bit more detail about that. So you have the 1590 meeting rule and you also have 30 every 30 rule. So let's hear about those two rules regarding meetings.

• 58:55Speaker 01

  First of all, most people think meetings suck and they usually do. And so if you have bad meetings, then that means you have bad execution. So if you have ineffective meetings in your business and we, we use a tool that we teach in Scum Map called the meeting autopsy, which is you just like kind of do an autopsy of what your meetings look like and how good are they? And usually people have one or two issues. They have too many meetings or not enough meetings. And so for me, I'm like, let's just keep it simple. Like the daily huddle is the 15 minute meeting and it needs to be done a certain way to maximize daily accountability. So the 1590 meeting rules around the huddle. And then the 90 minute meeting is your weekly execution of your quarterly plan. Like I want to build a plan for the quarter and then I want to hold people accountable to it week in and week out. And what I do is I look at the business in 13 week sprints.

• 59:37Speaker 01

  You have four 13 week sprints that come out to 52 weeks a year. I want every week, every five business days, your team has to show up and say that they are either on track or off track on their goals. And if they're off track, we're going to have a discussion about it. And in my businesses, there is no being off track. Like someone has to have died for you to be off track. So yeah, so scale is a friction removal process. And what I want, what I teach CEOs and my entrepreneurs that I work with, I say, hey, look, like, we want to get really clear on creating a culture of accountability. But you've got to make it simple or else your team is gonna, they'll vote with their feet. They'll be like, oh, Hala has us doing all these things. This sucks. I hate it here. And my perspective is like, no, let's make it really simple. And then they'll get ROI out of it. You will create an organization where nobody can hide.

• 1:00:20Speaker 01

  And when nobody can hide, like, there will be people that like to hide who will leave. And I say, great, sayonara. And the people that don't, but then there's the other side, which people that like accountability. And they'll be like, hell's yeah, like, Hala's got a great business. I love our meetings because we get so much stuff done and everyone's always hitting their goals and the business is growing and we're getting more organized, not less organized. So that happens because you have good meeting cadence around your quarterly plans and around your daily accountability. The 30 every 30, it's the 30 minutes you need to spend with each team member every 30 days. And I built this framework around how do you do one-on-ones? And so I teach that in our bootcamp and then also we have a mastermind. I teach that to them and I also teach them to my one-on-one clients. But it's really focusing on the one thing that matters most to your team.

• 1:01:05Speaker 01

  And you know what that is, Hala?

• 1:01:06Hala Taha?

  What?

• 1:01:07Speaker 01

  Themselves.

• 1:01:10Hala Taha?

  And that's the truth.

• 1:01:10Speaker 01

  You gotta make it about them and you gotta pour into them. And you gotta, and if you do it the right way, you can figure out what's slowing them down. And then, once you pour into them through a really nice framework, you can then hold them accountable to what you want them to be held accountable to. But what a lot of managers do is the only time they meet with their team is when it's bad news or to give them a shit about not hitting their numbers. And I'm like, yeah, like, you're just the dad that's over critical. Like, nobody wants to hear that, right? So my question is, is what are you doing to make them successful? And are you creating an opportunity, a nice consistency around one-on-ones? And one-on-ones is the biggest area. Some of my clients that I have 500,000 employees and they have 33% of their managers doing one-on-ones. And I'm like, you're telling me that two out of every three people don't do one-on-ones in your business?

• 1:01:54Speaker 01

  You can't tell me that's not affecting your, your ability to win. I know it is. So for us, we created a nice system around that. And, and then what's cool is if you do it one way, then you can hold all your managers accountable to that same way. So you have what's called consistency. And with consistency, you remove friction from the business and scale is a friction removal process. So that's what you're doing.

• 1:02:15Hala Taha?

  Amazing. Oh my God, Darius. All this information was super valuable. I feel like there's a lot of things that people can take away, but I feel like there's so much knowledge that we haven't uncovered yet that is in your bootcamp, that is in your mastermind. So tell us about how we can find out about those resources.

• 1:02:32Speaker 01

  So you could go to do dariuscale.com. So that's where you can learn more about the bootcamp and about the coaching. That's kind of my give back right now. I love pouring into to CEOs and entrepreneurs. So dariuscale.com is a good place to do that. You could go to the real Darius for all things Darius. And that kind of has the book and podcasts and stuff like that. But a lot of this also is on podcasts. So that's the greatness machine. And on that one, we're interviewing a lot of these experts that have built these amazing businesses. And there's a lot of learning there, too. So those are the three places, but all things, the real Darius, that's all things Darius.

• 1:03:05Hala Taha?

  Yeah. And I'll put all those links in the show notes, but selfishly, I want to understand what can people expect in the bootcamp? Like, what is that like?

• 1:03:12Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah, that's like drinking from a fire hose for three days. So it's really three days. You come in, we teach you, we do, we build your rise targets. So we build your 10, three and one year plan. We teach you how to build quarterly plans. So you could start to do quarterlies the right way in your business. And I mean, so many entrepreneurs do those wrong. And they build these crappy plans that don't do anything. So for us, it's how do you build like these rock solid accountability plans? And then we really take you through teaching, how do we do the meetings, showing you how to roll it out, teaching you how to build KPIs, showing you how to roll that out. So it's a three day bootcamp where people leave and they're like, all right, it's a lot, but I have a lot to work with now that I can then, and we'd show you how do you bring it back into your business?

• 1:03:52Hala Taha?

  And is it typically like a CEO and entrepreneur? Or is it like you bring your exec team and you do this? Is it virtual? Is it with a group?

• 1:03:59Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's a group. We do small group. I run it. So it's you get to spend three days with myself, which is always fun. And we do a lot of open coaching. So I mean, I'll do stuff where I just like, you could bring me any problem. And mastermind, we do that, too. But yeah, like it's you and I let people bring their number two. So it's you and your number two, it's small group. It's a lot of one on one time. I have coaches that will meet with you before and after and during. And we do a lot of Breakouts, it's a workshop, so it's interactive. There's like, you're working, like, there's a lot of interactivity. And the idea is that you're building, you're really building these things for your business that you need to get yourself organized and learning the framework so that you can then come, go back and apply it to your business. Because so many people are just guessing. And

• 1:04:42Speaker 01

  the problem I find with a lot of these other scale systems is there, you know, by the way, like, I didn't make all this stuff up. I did the other scale systems. They're hard. I quit them. You know, I'm a creator. I'm like, this is a better way of doing it. I'm gonna do it this way. And I kept like, re-tweaking other systems and also creating my own stuff. So, this is all born on the back of other systems that are, God bless them, they're great systems, but this is a better technology from my perspective.

• 1:05:07Hala Taha?

  Yeah, well, I'm super excited about it. I'm gonna pitch it to my team for us to do the scale map bootcamp with you, Darius, and hopefully we get to do that. So the way that we close our episodes here on Young and Profiting Podcast is we ask the same questions to every guest at the end of the show. The first question is, what is one actionable thing our young and profiteers can do today to be more profiting tomorrow?

• 1:05:29Speaker 01

  So, here's something I tell everybody, and I call it my fulfillment formula, which is, and if you do these three things, I think that this is at least what I've learned over my life. I'm 44, so I'm young, but I'm also old, right? Like, I'm on the fence.

• 1:05:44Hala Taha?

  You're medium.

• 1:05:46Speaker 01

  I'm medium. Well, yeah, I'm experienced, right? So, are you living in your values? So get clear on what your values are. Because the minute you ever feel icky or like friction in your life, it's you're rubbing up against your values. So, get clear on what your values are, and start to look at them on a regular basis. And so, I always say, are you living in your values? Are you working in your strengths? Are you doing work where you are working within your talents? And I like Strength Finder, that's my tool that I use and that I teach. So, go pull your Strength Finders, go look at your strengths, and say, ask yourself the honest question, am I actually living in these strengths? And then start to measure yourself against it if you want. But am I living in my strengths? You're working in my strengths, living in my values, am I doing

• 1:06:27Speaker 01

  it with a high level of awareness? And I have a buddy, who, his name is Marco Gargenta, he's the CEO of a company called Plus Plus. He said- fulfillment comes through again, living in my values, working in my strengths and doing with a high level awareness and awareness comes through three, four areas. Number one, am I being mindful? Do I have a mindfulness practice? Am I exercising? Am I dieting consistently, eating a good diet? Am I sleeping well? So are you getting rest? Are you practicing mindfulness? Are you treating your body like a temple, right? Doing the right things for my body? Am I working in my talents and living in my values? And so my answer to your, your yap crowd is if you're doing those things and start to pay attention to those things, the good things just happen.

• 1:07:10Hala Taha?

  Hmm. Okay. And our last question is, what is your secret to profiting in life?

• 1:07:15Speaker 01

  I think it's, it goes back to what I just said. I, I really think it's, it's finding that, that cross section between what you love to do. There's a word in Japanese called ikigai. And so it's really finding that cross section between what, what do you love to do and what people will pay you for and really going all in on that. And so for me, it's like, how can I do more of that?

• 1:07:35Hala Taha?

  I love that. Thank you so much, Darius, for sharing your wisdom and sharing your story. It was super valuable.

• 1:07:41Speaker 01

  Thanks, Hala. I love being here.