Episode 23 | How to Build an Indestructible Team

In this powerful episode of Disciplined to Win, hosts Nick Subich and Nick Frazetta dive deep into the strategies behind building an indestructible team to help you scale your business and dominate the marketplace.

They break down the key elements of identifying top talent, fostering a culture of excellence, and leading with vision and purpose. Whether you’re an entrepreneur, a business leader, or simply someone looking to level up your team dynamics, this episode will equip you with the tools you need to create a winning organization.

Tune in and discover how to recruit, retain, and motivate a team that thrives under pressure and performs at the highest level.

Transcript

Alright, we're back. This is one to win, episode 23. Today we're going to talk about how to build an indestructible team for you to scale your business and win in the marketplace. Follow us, subscribe on Instagram, YouTube, TikTok for all of our latest and greatest tips, techniques, suggestions on you to build your personal life, build your business life, and be better in every possible way.



 Alright, Nick, today we're going to talk about one of the most important things in our journey, which has been the team that walks the halls and is in the trenches with us every single day. You have seen 95% of the growth in our team, minus the 5% of some interesting characters in the very beginning, but really to the audience and everybody listening, I think in both of our experiences, we've witnessed that most businesses never break out of the six-figure revenue range or even get into the six-finger revenue range because they cannot figure out how to get other people to work with them, figure out how to collaborate, how to delegate, how to build a team and work with other people and they just keep it really small and work with themselves and usually a family member is what you see in most businesses. So I guess talk through the first couple businesses that you worked for or worked in were like very small, two, three, four person teams. Talk through the constraints that you've seen and a lot of small family-run businesses and how that sort of holds them back from growing. Yeah, I mean there's strength in numbers and there's only so much that one person can do no matter how smart they are, no matter how hard you work. If you want to go out and achieve big things and you want to impact the world in a big way, you need a lot of people in order to do that and I think the number one thing that kind of hinders people from developing a team is they can't let go of the control aspect because a lot of small business owners, they're like they want their name on everything. They want to touch everything in the business. They think that the way that they do it is the best way possible and nobody else could do it as well as they do where you have to reframe that mindset and what we like were able to do. I think very early on was reframe the mindset of yes at the time when we were at the beginning we did every single aspect of the business, but we took the perspective of well, let's go try to find people who are better at what some of the things that we're doing and plug them into our business so that we like that specific part of the business can continue to excel and can get to the next level. I think a lot of the like you said three to four person teams that maybe do a hundred to three hundred thousand dollars in revenue. The main owner can't get past that of like wow, maybe there is somebody better and maybe for a short period of time. I may have to take money off the table for myself or food off of my plate to give it to somebody else with the long-term goal of this is going to make more money. This is going to impact more people. This is going to provide more opportunity. I think that's where a lot of people get hung up because when you do start to build out and develop a team, they cost money like especially if you want to get a good team like you need to go out and pay top dollar for people that are good at what you're trying to have them do within your organization. And yes for a short period of time, you need to build out that team and that infrastructure before maybe you have the business to support it because if you have the business to support it and you don't have the team that it's too late. You're going to lose the business. You're going to lose your reputation that everything goes on Hill. So you have to incur some of that expense and kind of bet on yourself that hey, I'm bringing these people in I'm going to be able to lead them. They're going to be able to do certain things in my business that yes, I can do but they can do better and then they're going to allow me to focus on the bigger and better goals, which is the vision the ideas the pushing the ball forward with the entire organization. So because really the alternative piece to that which we've failed at I would say for a year or two where we spun our wheels is essentially, you know, not betting on yourself of hiring the subject matter expert employee that you're going to be able to now support them and get the business now if they're in the doors versus hiring a average to below average employee that you're betting on yourself that you're going to be able to train and develop and we would you know, so extremely high turnover in the business early on because we're hiring, you know, 40, you know, or even actually, you know, $32,000, you know, a year employees and we would try to pour into them, you know, for it right away and it's just like, yeah, this is isn't going to work out because these people just aren't high level enough to where and and it takes a long time to develop somebody whereas after we, you know, kept trying to try and try and had the business to support higher level people you go and hire a six-figure person you have results you should have results immediately to where there is no year-long or year and a half or two year long development period. You know have somebody that like you said like has done this longer than you might be, you know, a little bit more well-rounded than you to where they have the experience and the subject matter expert knowledge for they've been in situations that you haven't been in so they know exactly how to react in that situation where you just might not see that yet. So I know for us that has added to the velocity that we have been able to scale by being able to plug those people in to where you take a you know, there's a reason that somebody in the same job at one company might be making 50 grand and then at the same job at another company is making 150. You know, there's a reason those people someone's paying them 3x that cost. So as soon as you can bet on yourself to be able to bring those people in I think that's where you have a lot more velocity and scale a lot quicker. Yeah, because ultimately building out a team in the most effective way is you're going out and paying for experience that you do not have. Yep. And to your point of what you talked about that is so valuable to do especially if you have different arms of your business like we do we have a ton of different arms of our business. So our idea was why don't we go out and get people who have done this for years. We've only been in the game. Let's say three or four years. Why don't we go out and get someone who's done it for 10 years get someone who's done it for 20 years and this specific arm and then their job though as an effective team member is to come into your business and provide solutions to what you're doing. They're not their job is not and we talk about this all the time. You don't hire like a director level position or somebody who's going to be leading others and then come into your business and you teach them things right they like once they get an understanding of the landscape of your business and what you're trying to achieve from a vision standpoint. They should be bringing solutions in of like hey we need to do this this way. This is how we need to do this like we need to completely scrap what you're doing here and pivot here. That's the value that they should be adding. And if they're not then you need to let them go and you need to get somebody else that can because ultimately especially once you cross over and you're paying somebody in the six figures and continue to go up from there. That's their job because ultimately if you're giving them the solutions then you might as well just do it anyway or you can go and hire somebody for $45,000 and tell them exactly what to do and give them the blueprint and they can go out and do it. So I think like if you and we learned from this but like if you're starting from ground zero and you're still in that like six figure business range like go pay the person top dollar even if you can't afford it like in even if you know like man this is really going to sting for a little bit for me like go do that. And I think like the number one place and obviously like that's how we met and like what I originally like quickly started doing for the business was like the operational aspect like if you're a true CEO slash like founder slash leader that wants to go and like you have a vision and you want to grow something you got to bring somebody in to run operations which is how we met and I think like if you would talk a little bit about like how when you realize that in the business to where like obviously you had vision you knew where you wanted to go but you needed someone to like still run ops and like optimize what you were doing as the business continued to get it's I think the biggest restraint or constraint that every owner operator allows to keep them in the same place for their entire business career 20 to 30 years to our guys like there's all kinds of different arms in the business there's sales there's ops there's like you said vision there is you know people that are actually then doing the actual grunt work and the average American small business owner tries to do all seven things because in their mind no one knows this better than me. This is my business and when I initially you know was started the business in the very beginning I was doing all seven things is that is what you have to do for a period of time before you have money to actually pay someone else to start doing certain things and for you know about two years I found myself doing all seven things. I'm selling all day long. I'm then doing all of the ops which is if you're if you're doing the ops at night and you're paying the least amount of attention to ops your business is not going to be efficient. It's not like at that point and you remember this I wasn't even tracking expenses like you know that like for years I ran the business on I am going to make as much money as possible every day and I'm going to trust that like we're going to have enough money. We're like obviously that's not the right answer when you're running and scaling a business but like there is only 24 hours in a day and if you're going to try to do everything you're not going to be as efficient as you can you're not going to be as lean as you can there's going to be money that's being spent that you don't even know it's being spent there's going to be people doing things that you don't even know they're doing them or they should be doing something better to where like the missing piece for me was I did not have a partner or really anyone else in the business that could dedicate 70 hours a week to ops to where I was dedicating probably 15 or 20 hours a week to ops like actual operational management plus then you know doing everything else to where that is what unlocked the ability to really just maximize the output that a company is capable of and then to keep like building out from there it's not like you know you took over ops and then it was just like over could you think of how many people now report to you in ops as a whole to where we probably have 10 12 people operationally in the company at this point that all funnels up to you to where like you can never invest I think too much amount of enough money on the operational side of your business because that's where you're getting the biggest bang for your buck because like not many business owners are actual operators. They were good at solving a problem where they might have a good product or they might be a good practitioner at something they might be a great physical therapist or a great chiropractor or a great doctor dentist, but they're not a great operator. They've never had experience doing that they had experience being you know, the best physical therapist in the world, but have no idea how to do ops, but they just they try and then they won't spend what it takes on something like that to where you know, the biggest thing is where I think you're going to get the biggest reward and again, you got to get over a minor setback like for me like giving up significant, you know ownership in the business is obviously, you know plus significance is obviously like a temporary step back, but I like as we see today where we have, you know, multiple partners in the business. I think that the more like-minded people you can bring in to share the weight with I think your output and the ownership that you have left is going to be worth way more if you just try to do everything yourself. Totally. We've seen hundreds of people that hang on to all of the ownership and they never go anywhere. They stay completely stagnant, but they're like I own it all. This is mine. Like my is like the big word that everybody uses and they'll just stay small forever and never actually achieve scale or accomplish anything like at some point the large at the largest scale. They've had to let go of pretty much full control. You have a board of directors. You have shareholders, you know millions of shareholders and all these people that own part of you know, the collective business and that is how you accomplish the largest scale is what we've said a hundred times. If you want to grow you have to let go and like think about just from when we met how many things I controlled everything in the business day one to like at this point like not that I couldn't go and impact change wherever I wanted but how many things I just let happen and get briefed on you know at the end of every week and then I add my input on like three four or five things that are most important to me where I want to add some input to where you have to be okay with seeing other people fail. You got to be okay with people making decisions that you don't agree with like how many times just in the last 12 months have I like, you know talked with you of like where we like disagree, but I'm not going to like, you know step over your shoulders and like say like no like you're not doing this like unless it's illegal and moral or unethical or it's like I am completely in my mind certain that something is you know, a bad decision. I will let everybody roll and I think as a leader in any team you have to have your teams back, especially your subordinate leaders to like let them operate and make decisions and if you don't it's point like there's no reason that you're like paying or have those people then yeah, like that's what they're here to do and I think that like if you listen to us and you're like, okay, I'm now motivated. I'm going to go hire subject matter experts to do all these things for me, but you don't listen and then like, you know, don't actually allow them the freedom to make decisions then like then you're really like in a bad spot because you're not going to get the results you want. Yeah, totally to where like you got to just give them that freedom to operate in the freedom of maneuver to get those results. Yeah, and I think that like one thing I want to talk about too is for people out there that are like, okay, I want to start building a team.



 Where do I start like what are the roles that you need to start hiring and in my opinion, you can tell me if you agree, but the one thing that you can never have enough of is sales is business coming in the door like that is the number one thing that drives every single business is money that comes in the door. So like if you're looking to allocate money to something and as if you're the owner and if you're you're either sales oriented or ops oriented like to start not to say that you can't do both, but like usually you have a strong suit in one of those. So like you have to understand that within yourself and be self-aware and be like, okay, if I'm the sales guy, then all I'm going to do is go out and sell and then I need to hire an operator. Right. If you're the operator guy, then you need to recognize I'm really really good at ops and like making things efficient and I've really good SOPs in place and I know how to develop that then I need to hire like a master sales guy because ultimately above everything else. We have all these other arms of our business now. We have marketing. We have all these departments. We have all these different directors that are in place within our departments, but the two core aspects of any business are sales and then how efficient can you make anything so that you can do more more sales depending on your business might be like heavy logistics totally and that's and that's a complete you have to understand that within your business like we know for it's like more how many people can we be in front of on a week-to-week basis more process and efficiency driven exactly not wasting time on that's right and like how we don't have like cost of goods really correct like how efficient can you make the team that you have right serve the most amount of people with that so like I think for any business owner out there if you're trying to assess like okay, I need to start building a team underneath me. That's what you need to recognize internally and be like okay. Am I like do I want to do sales or do I want to do ops and then make that decision and then whatever you're doing you need to go higher the highest level person that you can find and that you can afford on the opposite side of that and that's going to lead you to then start building out the departments and start being able to do other arms and be able to kind of jump to that next level once you figure out this is what I'm good at. I need to go hire somebody else that is a master in either ops or sales and then that's how everything kind of runs and that's what we did at the beginning and and it worked out I think really really well now some of the things that we didn't do as well is we try to cut corners on other spots which like we learned like oh well we have the sales and ops in place like maybe we'll like not hire somebody as like expensive or we could like take the person who doesn't cost as much in this area or that area and we learned every single time or most entrepreneurs. I would say are the type a like alpha personalities and when you are and this is a a positive to you as an operator but when you are that person you pretty much think that you can teach anybody anything and you're usually very optimistic about like how quick you can get somebody spun up and that is where I'd say we were a little naive in the beginning of we were like oh like as long as you know, someone's got a smile on their face like we'll we'll teach them everything they need to yeah and get them spun up really quick and I would say we like got our ass handed to us a little bit for about a year. Yeah in that department. I'm sorry might have went through like I don't the turnover was crazy. Yeah for a minute because like that's the thing too is when you're building a team like when your team is very small. Let's get back to that when you have two or three people on your team. You have a lot of control around how the public is perceiving your team and everything that people are saying or doing but at some point when you get larger and larger and larger and you're in multiple locations, you obviously can't be everywhere to where you are completely disconnected with how a lot of people on your team are interacting with your with your customers or clients with the general public and the culture that you build has to dictate exactly how your people are a taking care of others be treating others and see how they're representing themselves and you have to have all of those things cohesive and that all comes down to the culture and the things you're going to tolerate or not tolerate and something that I don't know if we've ever been wrong maybe once but something that we've gotten really good at is knowing pretty soon if someone is just not a cultural fit and they're just not going to be successful in our organization and I think that the more mature and the more we learn in business the slower we actually get at hiring because we really want to make sure it's the right person and the faster we have gotten at firing totally because we know immediately almost that it's not the right person. Yeah, if you think if you have any doubt in your mind like at the beginning not to say that people can't be developed because we've developed a lot of people but a lot of times those people that we've developed they've had a couple of attributes and it's been positive activity willingness to learn and can do attitude for the team. Yeah, super can do attitude. They're super positive and they have some type of skill set in whatever it is. They have like a base skill set of some sort when somebody doesn't fit the first two which is positivity and willingness to learn and they don't have a ridiculous skill set on the back end. You got to just fire them immediately like you really do it's like as much as you think like oh well like I learned how to do it and I can probably teach somebody how to do it back to your point like you can't and you're just going to waste time and energy and money on that person wasting their time. Yeah, and at the end of the day, it's like if you know in your heart of hearts, it's probably not going to work out. They could be going somewhere or looking for somewhere else where it might work out for them because it might be a cultural fit. Yeah, and really I think like the hiring slow firing fast mentality. We've gotten way better at that. We're still not where we need to be but we have gotten a lot better and it's tough like if you get if you jump in like how we are right now and we're rapidly scaling so like at very quick moments in time like we need bodies like we need like somebody in the door because we have XYZ that we need to execute on and like it takes people to do that. So that's what sometimes for us and for any scaling business that's what expedites the hiring process a little bit and that can the downfall of that is it can lead you to poor hires which will then cause turnover but you cannot be afraid of that because you never want to be the person that has opportunity on the horizon and you are like waiting waiting waiting for the absolute perfect person because then it's like you might not be first and you can lose the opportunity. So I would rather us like hire somebody them not work out but like at least we learn and at least we were able to like move the opportunity forward a yard and then get somebody else and that's able to do the job. So I think that awareness back to your original point of is somebody a cultural fit are they going to carry out the vision and align with what I'm trying to build within all of my people and if you have the slightest bit of doubt in that probably should just get rid of them immediately there.



 I don't know correct me if I'm wrong, but I don't think there's really been to this point anyone in any department in the organization that's been like a first time go for us for like success of like man. It was the right thing. So yeah, we've had to go through I mean two or three sometimes four sometimes five six people in the same seat to find the right person and a lot of people a lot of companies I think it's somewhere down the line. They just accept. Well, you know what at least they could do this and they just accept mediocrity to where you have to hold yourself accountable to whatever the culture is you are trying to uphold and you just can't accept someone that doesn't align with that and what we've built when you get to a point where you have a larger team that you okay, you've built that culture of whatever you want that to be for us. It's positivity collaboration teamwork can do attitude, you know a almost sometimes unhealthy willingness to win to where you know, no one on our team will give up. They will do anything and when you build that ecosystem, it's your own team then at a certain level that will come back and tell you hey this person they got to go. Yeah, they don't work here. Yeah, and that is when you know, okay, we are on to something where we've built a culture to where when the team starts keeping the team itself accountable and cohesive and tries to weed out the bad eggs for you. That's when you're really heading in the right direction because at the end of the day, I mean, we've got people that we may have talked to at this point for 90 seconds. We obviously are you know, I at this point don't interview that many people unless it's really high role to where there's people that are brought in to where if it's not somebody in the team telling us that hey, they're not it. I would never even know you know, what I mean? So like building that culture of people that fit your ecosystem and what you want to help you keep that standard. I think is crucial because however, you know, John Doe that comes into our organization. They could treat somebody on our in our client base somebody in the community terrible and whether I brought them in or you have any interaction with them at all. It's a direct reflection of you and I yeah, and whether it's right or wrong. That's just the way the world work because ultimately however team however good your team is you could have the best team in the world. But if you have a weak culture when times get tough and shit hits the fan and you need to like buckle in and execute on something because it's life or death the culture is what it's going to fall back on not the skill level of the team to where yeah, we want to go out and get the best people possible. We want to always make sure that all of our leaders are highly skilled. They have tons of experience. They're able to come in and add value, but they could be the highest of highest levels somewhere else. But if they come in and it's not a culture fit, we know that like when we're in the trenches and when shit needs to get done and like it's life or death scenario. If they're not aligned with the vision and they're not bought in they're not going to have a spot on our team because ultimately that's like the most important part is like you have to build a team and you have to build a foundation that revolves around that to where when things get hard and when we need to have all hands and like when it needs every single person's effort to get towards over the finish line or to get to the next step. That's ultimately what you build a team for so and I think the only way you keep that is like once you you will know when you have a culture established and when like people are all on the same page, but once you have that you can't then neglected and let it go. Yes, just as quickly as you've built that good capital with your team and they all are bought in and have that together if you would neglected it's it could just as quickly be gone. So it's your job to any really good culture. I think you only achieve by pushing people to reach their max capacity and constantly push them to be better and have very high expectations, but be the leader that is also displaying



 even higher expectations for yourself. Yeah, so that you give people something to follow like nobody wants the person that's expecting perfection, but they're just like a complete bag of ass and it can't you know, really produce any of the thing themselves. So you have to set extremely high expectation on yourself. If you were going to ask a lot of your people and then you have to constantly push them to achieve more and more and more in in their personal professional life. I think to maintain the highest caliber team of people because there was I don't know. I can't remember who it was that told us but you know Eagles don't want to fly with Turkey's. You know what I mean? They want to fly with other Eagles. So if you want to keep the top talent just like you might have went through hell to finally get top talent and attract them to keep them you can't let Turkey's infiltrate the organization or you know Turkey's run around in your organization. You need nothing but Eagles to soar together because that's just how those types of people are. Yeah culture needs cultivated all the time in the way that you cultivate culture is you lead by example and you don't ask we never ask anybody in our organization to do something that we have one not already done or two will not get right there in the seat next to them and do with them and that has been the biggest thing. I mean just for example this morning. We're up still dark out. We have 15 people on the team. We're running on the trail like weighted run and we have all people bought in they don't have to do that. Like they're not required to do that like they are to show up or work at 8 o'clock. We have people on there an hour and a half earlier running in the dark and 40 degrees out because like they truly believe in what we're trying to do and they know that like when things do go wrong or that they need help that we're going to be there to support them always. So that's I think what we have done well and that we're going to continue to just continue to cultivate is that culture. We've built and it's above all above the skill level and all those other important things. It's the most important thing if you want to continue to grow and scale and it's the most valuable. I mean we're constantly meeting with people in business obviously you know selling our organization and just talking about our organization and we start to talk through the cultural norms in our firm that are like taboo and it like go to any company in America and tell everybody hey we'll see you 7 o'clock on Monday. You know rain shine snow. Yeah, you know and because we're going to go and get after it together. They would say like you're joking like yeah, no shot. You'll see me there because they're they're not they don't care. They're not bought in. It's just a job, but we treat people here. You know a lot more than just employees or a lot more like we're just showing up together and going through the motions like every day is crucial like every day means something every week means something or people show up ready to go and just fire it up to crush the week and because that is how we show up. You know if we're never showing up and going through the motions every day we're showing up trying to make impact for all of our people's lives our customers lives and just getting the most out of life that we can and I think that if you the last thing I will sort of close with is you're not going to get more out of your people than you're willing to do yourself. So you just have to display the will to win the will to fight the win to do anything and just set that example and just give your people something to look up to it all starts with you totally leader. Yeah, and what I'll close with is just like a recap if you're a business owner you're starting out and you're ready to take that next step and start scaling go back to what we talked about you got to recognize what you're good at hire somebody else who's better than you at the other thing and then you got to develop that culture. It's the it's the most important thing to building a successful team and to be able to continue to scale because if you don't have those things at the foundation like as you get to a certain point it will crumble behind you and that's what you ultimately have to work towards every day of not letting that happen and to your point the way that you do that is lead by example and you develop a kick-ass culture that nobody else has and your people will buy in and everything else will take care of itself from there. Awesome till next time stay disciplined.