Your Personality Is NOT a Business Plan

Brad Johnson: Welcome back to another episode of Do Business. Do Life. Have Alex Judd here with us today. Welcome to the show, Alex.

Alex Judd: Brad, I’ve been looking forward to this. Thanks for having me.

 

Brad Johnson: Well, excited for this connection. Well, I know we have a mutual friend in Patric and then sounds like also Jason Khalipa was circling around there somewhere as well. So, once again, back to the thesis of good people, know other good people, and bring them into your lives, nice to connect in person.

 

Alex Judd: That’s right. Whenever you I think emailed in conjunction with Patric, anything with Patric Yumul’s name tied to it, I’ve just learned I say yes to that. So, I was really excited about this conversation.

 

Brad Johnson: It is cool how that plays out in life. That lesson actually just did a podcast, the Jim Rohn quote, “You’re the average of the five people you surround yourself with,” and I just see it continue to play out over and over in life where you’ve got great people. Yes, Patric’s in the restaurant business, you’re in the coaching business, but somehow all of these orbits tend to come closer and closer the older I get. Have you found that to be true on your side?

 

Alex Judd: Oh, yeah. I think it’s so true, and I think one of the principles that stands out to me associated with that is something that I think I learned a little bit the slow way. And maybe the hard way is just that kind of idea that you don’t attract what you want, you attract what you are. And so, like, it’s kind of wild and it’s something that I constantly feel convicted and challenged by is like, if I want to be around hungry, humble, intelligent, smart, faithful, passionate leaders, like the single best way to go about being around those people is to start doing the things that those types of people would do.

And then you look up and you’re like, “Oh my gosh, I’m hanging out with all these wonderful people.” And I think that like my connection with Patric is, I mean, honestly like I met him just because I started taking steps towards being more of the type of person that I wanted to become. And then you start looking around you and saying, “Oh my gosh, these are the type of people I really want to be more like.”

 

Brad Johnson: Yeah. Well, and sometimes the hardest part about doing that is your own mindset, right? Do I deserve to be in this room? The imposter syndrome. I was just trading texts with a guy that’s taught me a ton about high-end the sports card market. And I was just sharing how, you know, I was helping him. There was a friend of his that was just getting into the world of finance and he said, “Hey, really appreciate you helping him out.” And I was like, “Well, I have to. Somebody did the same for me.” And if somebody sends the elevator down for you, you ride it up, make sure you’re sending it back down for others.

And he said something about, “I hope I can be that someday.” And I said, “You already are. Like, do you not see how you’ve coached me on a subject matter you know so deeply?” And he is like, “Yeah, you’re right. I need to get rid of that imposter syndrome.” It’s so true though. We all have it. What got in your way in the early days when you found yourself in those sort of rooms or maybe scared to step into those sort of rooms?

 

Alex Judd: Man, well, I appreciate that you don’t really waste time with shallow questions, Brad. I really like the way that you’re taking this. I would be willing to bet that you and your audience being in the world of finance gets to see this idea of imposter syndrome played out probably in the most tangible and visceral way, right? Because I think our finances, you can literally see the visual evidence of it’s kind of like this internal thermostat we’ve had. This is how I experience it, right? And this is the metaphor that I resonated with years ago is we have this internal thermostat where we have defined, maybe it’s in my finances, maybe it’s in my physicality or my physical appearance, maybe it’s in my intellect, maybe it’s in my leadership capacity, or the type of business I run.

We’ve defined like I view myself as a seven and maybe a seven out of ten, right? And to the degree that I view myself as a seven, well, the way you view things absolutely undeniably impacts the way that you do things. So, to the degree that I view myself as a seven, I may have anomaly moments where I act like a five. I might have anomaly moments where I act like a 10. But by and large, if you average my standard performance, it will always come back to a seven. And anytime I try to take steps to say, “I’m going to start leading like an eight. I’m going to start influencing people like a nine. I’m going to start treating my physical body like a 10,” every single time, particularly for me, it was in the arena of business ownership, I would try to take that stride forward, you feel that thermostat saying, “Dude, what are you doing? You’re not a nine. You’re a seven. Get back down here.”

And I think it actually goes to the point that we’ve already discussed, Brad, is you have to surround yourself with people that can believe in you maybe more than you might believe in yourself and that can see you as the type of business owner, the type of leader, the type of advisor that they know you could be, not what you actually are. And in doing that, I think we actually start to reform our belief systems and then our beliefs start to drive our behaviors.

 

Brad Johnson: So true. There actually have been studies in the world of finance around people that won the lottery and all of a sudden they have this windfall of money. And maybe they didn’t ever have money before and it’s almost this reversion back to the mean of they will blow through $1 million, $2 million, $5 million because it’s almost like inside they don’t believe like they’ve earned it or they’re worth it. And so, it does truly play out in the finance world. But back to mindset and beliefs, so true. I’ve literally seen people self-destruct themselves where they start to go down a path of success and then they’re almost like, “I don’t deserve this,” and they revert back to prior behaviors.

So, I love that you hit that and, unfortunately, I’ve seen that show up to be really true but I’ve also seen the reverse of that, where when you instill those beliefs and those different mantras and thought processes. And to your point, I love that you hit, sometimes it just takes other people further down the road than you that say, “You know what, Alex, you got this too. I’m no different than you are right now. I’m just two years ahead of you and here’s what I took to climb the mountain before you.” Those are like my favorite rooms to be in, the energy, the transfer of belief that can happen in those rooms, which is why Triad exists today, is we’ve tried to create a room of specifically for that in finance, the top 1% that are also people we want to do business and do life with.

So, you said something that I wanted to make sure we get into, so maybe this is tiptoeing down the road. Your personality is not a business model. What does that mean?

 

Alex Judd: Well, this is another lesson that I learned the hard way, I feel like, because whenever I went into business, I was like my personality is the thing that I’ve got to bet on, right? Like, I can be energetic, I can communicate, I can persuade people. I love wooing people, right? And so, it’s like my personality I felt like was a strength. And so, my thought process was I want to sell my personality. And also, I’m a people person, right? I absolutely love people. I love being around people. I love talking to people.

And the way that I first heard it was we all kind of enter into business maybe in one of these three archetypes. You can be the artist. You can be the people manager or leader. You can be the entrepreneur. There’s a bunch of people that have talked about this. The person that I first heard talk about it was Tony Robbins. But the artist, you might be the painter or the singer or the photographer. That is a certain type of art. But really what we’re talking about in business, when we talk about the artist is you’re the person that your predisposition is just that you love to do the thing, right?

For me, I love coaching and teaching leaders. That’s what I love to do. There are some financial advisors out there that probably love the hands-on work of financial advising, and they really enjoy the kneecap-to-kneecap interactions associated with helping people steward and maximize their finances for a greater return. Then there’s the people manager or leader. This person, their natural predisposition is to rally different sets of strengths around doing the thing at hand. And then there’s the entrepreneur. A lot of people think of the entrepreneurs, “Oh, that’s the person that loves to start things.” In reality, I think that’s actually an incorrect definition. I think the entrepreneur is someone that loves to sell things.

And yes, they might sell one-off products and services, but more than that, they think of their business and everything that they do as an asset. And they’re saying, “How do I build this asset?” as something that they may not even want to sell it one day, but they’re building it as something that could be sold. And I’ll never forget where I was whenever I heard someone using this framework and they were talking to someone in particular that’s self-identified as the artist, right? That’s me. And I bet you that’s a lot of people listening to this podcast too is like you love rolling up your sleeves and doing the work. You love working in the business. And he just said, “That part of you that’s the artist, man, that person is such a beautiful person. Like, they love people, they love eye contacts, they love serving, they love just going above and beyond to surprise and delight their customers in so many ways.”

That is the reason why your business exists because your founder was an artist that saw a need in the marketplace and moved everything they possibly could to go meet that need. That artist part of you is a beautiful person, but that artist part of you is a terrible business owner. And if you want to actually own a business and not just a hobby, you either need to find an entrepreneur or tap into the part of yourself, and that’s what I would encourage everyone listening to this do, tap into the part of yourself that can view this business as an asset that you own instead of something that is entirely reliant on your personality and gifting.

And for me, that’s when it clicked is I started to realize, “Man, although I might love to do all the work right now, the version of Alex that’s going to exist five years from now would probably way rather own a business where I can do the work and I often do enjoy doing the work, but I don’t have to do the work. The survival of the enterprise is not dependent on my personality.” And so, that’s a little bit deeper into that idea of your personality is not a business model.

 

Brad Johnson: Yeah. You choose. You get the option to choose to do the work, but we hit this last time, you said, “Hey, I like this soundbite, so I’m going to bring it back.” You don’t want your revenue to go on vacation when you go on vacation, right? And that’s the difference between an artist and a business owner that happened to maybe be an artist in a prior life. Would you say that’s fair?

 

Alex Judd: Oh, man, Brad, you shared that statement with me, what was it? A handful of weeks ago. I kid you not, I have used that statement five times in conversations with business owners since you said it. So, I call that R&D, right? Rip and duplicate.

 

Brad Johnson: Hey, I’m cool. I gift you that one. I’m sure I’ll receive a few back here already.

 

Alex Judd: That’s great. Yeah. But I mean, that’s a great litmus test for people to say like, “Does my revenue go on vacation when I do right now? And do I want that to be the case?” Number one, you got to give yourself permission to ask that question. Do I want that to be the case? And then here’s the really mature leadership question. Will I want that to be the case in three, five, and ten years? I think we often have to manage the tension as leaders of you need to manage the business that you have while, and that ‘while’ word is the hard part, while building the business that you want.

And we don’t get to just choose to do one, right? We have to manage and steward the things that have been placed in front of us, I believe by God right now. We got to do that really, really well with excellence. And in doing so, what are we buying ourselves? We’re buying ourselves the ability to help build the business that we want in service of others.

 

Brad Johnson: Cool. Well, let’s dive in. This fun fact didn’t come out until about 10 minutes ago, but I just put together the fact that you grew up in the Ramsey organization. You used to actually, I believe, co-host the podcast. Is it The EntreLeadership Podcast? I know Dave’s got a few different ones.

 

Alex Judd: EntreLeadership. It’s the passion of the entrepreneur and the polish of the leader is how we would always describe it. Yeah. EntreLeadership.

 

Brad Johnson: Cool. And so, you had a pretty good petri dish to experiment because that’s a pretty incredible organization that Dave has built. But I want to get your take on this. You said one of the things that you see a lot with business owners is by definition, they’re a CEO, but they actually are doing non-CEO activities in our world, maybe more financial advising activities 80% of the time as opposed to the CEO activities that are needed to grow and scale a business bigger than you.

Dave is one of the few that I’ve seen take an individual personality-based business and actually scale an incredible organization much larger than he is individually. Are there some lessons you took from that now apply to your coaching model? Or how did you see that play out in person when you were there?

 

Alex Judd: Oh my gosh, it’s one of the greatest gifts of just getting to be there for the period of time that I was there is I got to witness that occurring in real-time and everything that goes into that. If you asked me to make a list of a hundred things that I learned in observing that particular thing going on, I would tell you, can we make it 200? I mean, just so many, so much intentionality. And Dave, I can say this without a shadow of a doubt, he’s one of the if not the strongest leaders I’ve ever worked with and worked around. And part of the evidence of that is the caliber of people that he’s surrounded with. But let’s get into like some of the lessons.

This is actually a statement that was told to me by someone else, but I think it directly applies to what I observed at Ramsey. Ego is dilutive to net worth. I will never forget, it was my first Monday on the job at Ramsey. I was Hire #523. This was back in 2017 or something like that. Hire 523. They’re now over a thousand people. And I think, gosh, over the four and a half years that I was there, they scaled to over a thousand in that time. So, you got to see so much growth happen in a very short period of time. Nearly doubled. So, first Monday morning, all staff meeting. They still do it every single Monday with all thousand team members.

Think about the investment of payroll that is. And I will never forget that at that first Monday morning staff meeting that they’re referencing this acronym that’s NDR. And they’ve got goals around NDR and they’re focused on NDR and they’re looking at initiatives associated with NDR. And, obviously, my ears perked up because I’m like, “This seems like really important. What are they talking about whenever they say NDR?” And I’ll never forget that they clarify for the people that are new like me, NDR is non-Dave revenue. It’s any revenue that is coming to the organization that is not the result of Dave’s personality, platform, or charisma.

And, man, that was such a powerful thing for me to see Dave championing that as one of the goals of the company not because it, like, what an example of humility to say this thing is so much bigger than me. However, they would’ve said, “Whenever I entered the organization…” that my friend always calls it the Red Truck Test. If Dave had gotten hit on the sidewalk by a red truck that day, it would not go well. Today, I think because of their intentionality, you could look up and God forbid something bad could happen, or just natural succession could happen, I think that organization’s going to be okay, which is a testament to his leadership and his humility in so many ways.

 

Brad Johnson: The red truck, we always call it the hit-by-bus test. So, it’s interesting they visualized it a little better. They put a color. They put a certain vehicle. What were some things like if you look back, because you were there four and a half years and so you were at 500 and change and the organization doubled, what were some tests that test would not have passed when you got there, but four and a half years later, 500 additional team members later, you would have, if you remember any?

 

Alex Judd: Yeah. One that stands out and I don’t think they would mind me sharing this is I felt like whenever I got there, staff meetings, it often felt like staff meetings were, I don’t know what the proper language is. Like, the vision was still coming from Dave. The integration was coming from the team. He was already doing an exceptional job of dispersing responsibility and dispersing leadership responsibility throughout the organization. So, that was going on. But I think whenever I got there, day one, I feel like the vision casting, the motivation, the energy was coming primarily from Dave himself.

I think over a period of time and it happened really gradually, and I think it’s probably still happening right now, I think you started to see key leaders in the organization starting to gain the influence and credibility because of both their proximity to Dave, but also because of the intentionality and effort and development they’d received. You started to see them going from strictly focused on management and execution to start being able to take on some of that visionary capacity and have a little bit of the chutzpah to be able to actually be trusted by people instead of just look like a charade or an imitation of Dave or something like that.

 

Brad Johnson: Yeah. I think that’s a really interesting lesson because one of the things, the analogy we use at Triad is you pass the baton like a relay. You don’t throw the baton. And one of the things we see a lot when a founder comes in and they see kind of a different blueprint to build a business bigger than them, you want to get there like so fast, like two weeks ago. And so, you want to speed everything up. Some stuff cannot be sped up, humans, this transfer of trust, this leadership that the company was built on a certain personality and individual. Unfortunately, it’s not like the matrix where you just plug it in and it’s like, “I know kung fu.” Right? That’s not how the game works in leadership.

You have to rep it like a golf swing. You have to learn it. And there has to be that trust and familiarity that I’ve seen where the team is now like, “Okay, cool. Dave was the guy. Now, there’s somebody that he’s passed the torch to that still cares as much.” Maybe they message it a little different because they’re a different personality, but it’s the same core belief system or vision. You think I could miss any of that, or was there a different way you saw that play out inside of Ramsey while you were there?

 

Alex Judd: Man, it actually factored in my decision to leave, right? Sometimes I jokingly say, “Man, it would’ve been so much easier if the organization was awful and I hated my job.” That wasn’t the case at all. I loved my job. It was a dream gig in so many ways. And the organization is just, I mean, it’s one of the best in the country. I actually believe that. However, I’ll never forget I was in a small group. It was like a group of influential leaders speaking thing that they were doing and they were having a couple of people from the outside and a couple of people internally come and speak to this group of people.

And so, there were a couple of talks given throughout the day. And I’ll never forget, we had seen a couple of different talks be given by different influencers and people that had a following and stuff like that. And then there was a talk at the end of the day that was just different. It was just absolutely different. And that talk was given by Dave. And it is not like he was, everyone on the stage that day was a polished communicator. Everyone on the stage that day like knew their stuff and was really good at what they did. So, it wasn’t that. But it was just like when he got up there, it’s like the room went quiet and everyone listened more intently.

Everyone was like, “Man, I got to hear what this guy has to say.” And my takeaway from that particular moment was like, “Oh, that response there is strictly because his entire talk was talking about things that he had done, that he had learned over the course of 25 years.” And I just kind of realized, man, that’s the type of dynamic in a room that the 25 years buys you. And I don’t know that you can microwave that. I think that’s a crockpot thing. And I just kind of realized like, what’s the crockpot that I want to be in? And I realized, man, like I just have so much respect for Dave starting this company at a card table in his living room with nothing because he’s so deeply passionate about what he does and what it’s going to do for people.

And I just said, “Man, if I wouldn’t step out and start my own business in the business and leadership space with something like that, that scrappy startup story, I would spend my entire life wondering what if.” And so, I wanted to not take on 500 pounds overnight. I said I want to add five pounds a day, and we’re going to do that for 25 years. And if we do that, I think we might look up and really be stoked about the influence and the ability to serve people that we end up with.

 

Brad Johnson: That resonates with me. I was also in an incredible organization that I learned a ton in and I think sometimes you don’t really choose entrepreneurship. It kind of chooses you.

 

Alex Judd: Sometimes you’re like, “Dang it, why did you choose me?” Like, what are you doing?

 

Brad Johnson: Exactly. And it chooses you before you know the full truth, where it’s still the rose-colored glasses. You’re like, “Oh, this’ll be amazing. Look at all those cool IG posts from other entrepreneurs.” And sometimes it can eat you alive in the early days when you’re not quite ready for it, which Shawn and I can definitely speak to that. We were joking. You’re like, “Hey, I checked out the website. It looks amazing what you guys are building.” I’m like, “Yeah. We’re all in. We’re so passionate about it. And also, there have been a lot of lessons and mistakes made along the way.” I think the cool thing is we talk about a lot of them too, because there’s a lot of learnings if you’re willing to set your ego aside and be real with yourself as an entrepreneur. So, I’m sure you’ve had a few of those bumps and bruises along the way as well, Alex.

 

Alex Judd: Oh, for sure. And I bet you resonate with this too. It was so easy to critique decisions and ask like, it was so easy to ask the question, “What were they thinking?” And now I sit and like I’m in the driver’s seat with all this responsibility, right? I’m like, “Oh, that’s what they were thinking. Like, I understand now.” And so, I feel like, it’s one of the things that entrepreneurship has built in me, a lot more empathy and grace and just realizing like everyone from myself who started this business five years ago in the basement apartment that I lived in to Dave Ramsey with a thousand people to Elon Musk.

Like, literally, everyone is making this up as they go. And I think the people that I see that are really effective are just the ones that embrace the fact that they’re making it up as they go and can receive grace along the way for whenever they inevitably screw up.

 

Brad Johnson: Yeah, it’s the old, it’s the Teddy Roosevelt quote of the man in the arena. It’s super easy to sit in the stands and judge the person sitting in the middle of the arena. And I was guilty of that too. That was one of my realizations. I used to, when I was an employee, run into a founder’s office with my hair on fire like, “How could you do this? How’s this division not picking up the phone, answering the email?” And you don’t realize the amount of angles and things that an entrepreneur gets bombarded with on the daily, let alone to actually do the job of while they’re there but the other stuff flying at them on the get-go.

So, let’s get into, because we talked about a few frameworks, and we can start to unpack this a little bit. You mentioned kind of a four-step process: standardize, document, evaluate, improve. So, maybe this is for those advisors out there that are like, “Hey, I’ve been a great advisor. I’m kind of that artist, I love what I do, I love relationships, but it’s time to take a step down the path of transforming into a business owner, transforming into a CEO.” How would those four steps apply, or what advice would you give them?

 

Alex Judd: Yeah. So, what you’re referring to there is what we teach on about operationalizing your business. And so, if we were to apply a functional definition to operationalizing, it’s to make excellence predictable and repeatable instead of haphazard and accidental. So, there was a period in my business where, I mean, we were getting incredible results. The business was growing. People were literally coming to us and saying, “Oh my gosh, my business has transformed, my life has transformed, my marriage is better. I’m healthier as a person. I’m playing the role of CEO working on the business, not in the business.” Like, all of this was happening.

And then if you came to us and asked us, “Oh, can you show me the process of how you all did that?” we would be like, “No, we can’t.” It’s like we have no idea. We’re saying praise God that it happened, but we have no idea how that occurred. And so, what that is like is that is like to use something from Patric’s world. That’s like the celebrity chef that has zero recipes, right? You could ask them, “Hey, how do you make this thing?” And they’re like, “I can’t really tell you. I can show you and you can watch me do it, but I can’t really tell you.” I think when someone makes the transition from I’m going to operate strictly as an artist to operate as a business owner, and I would even say there’s a lot of business owners that might have internal artists that they need to coach in this area as well, it always goes through this commitment to operationalizing.

And so, what we say is you want to apply these four steps to the essential functions of your business. And when I say essential functions, I’m talking about the things that we dedicate our time and money to. So, roles, these are the people and the jobs that they play. Projects, these are the bulks of work that we do on a recurring basis. And meetings, right? Anytime you have a meeting that is such an expensive proposition and so many meetings at the worst, it’s wasting time. Mediocre, what happens most times is it’s spending time, which I mean, you all are financial. That’s incremental return. Great meetings are investing time. It’s expectation of an exponential return is what a great meeting is. And so, how do we apply these things? Well, first we want to standardize.

 

Brad Johnson: Can I pause you right there? Because I love the framework you broke down. So, at the lowest end of a meeting that probably has the wrong people, no agenda, the standard haphazard meeting that happens all the time in business is you’re wasting. The next level up is you’re spending time, but probably not always the right time with the right people or the right purpose to the highest level, investing. Now, there’s an ROI on this time. Were those the three levels you just broke down there?

 

Alex Judd: You nailed it. Yes. And I appreciate you for clarifying that. And there are three legs of meetings.

 

Brad Johnson: How do you tell the difference? Are there metrics where you’re like, “Oh, here’s wasting, here’s spending, here’s investing”? Do you have a framework where you kind of unpack that or rate the quality of meetings?

 

Alex Judd: I would say, yeah, so let’s look at meetings in particular and make this really practical. And I think it applies directly to the standardized step. When we say standardize, we want to look at the, not the tasks. We want to look at the outcomes that we want to be accomplished. And basically, what we’re saying there is we’re saying, “What does winning look like by the end of this meeting?” And so, the way that we answer that within path for growth is with something we call success statements. And that’s just three to five statements that answer the question, what does winning look like?

In many ways, this is the difference between wasting and spending. It’s just saying like, no-brainer, like, “What do we actually want to accomplish in here?” And so, a good example of that is everyone in the meeting voiced their opinion related to the topic at hand. The proposals were reviewed intentionally and attendees were given the opportunity to ask questions. Decisions and actions were discussed and thoughtfully worked through. Decisions and actions were documented out of the meeting and assigned to owners. Those are four success statements for a hypothetical meeting. And that oftentimes is the difference between wasting time and spending time.

Because if you just write those four statements on a board at the beginning of the meeting or on your task management system, it’s wild. People actually do them and they actually focus on those outcomes. So, that’s standardized. I would say do you want to highlight a little bit of the difference between spending and investing then? Can I zoom in on that a little bit?

 

Brad Johnson: Yeah. Before we move on to that, we’ve been guilty of it back to the early days of Triad and it was like the band of misfits of the Frosty the Snowman movie from our childhood.

It was like we all like, “We’re going to do this. We don’t know how.” And I remember showing up to a meeting and five people show up and nobody knew what the meeting was for. It was like literally, “Why are we here? What’s the purpose of this meeting?” “I don’t know. It just showed up on my calendar.” So, we have a rule of no agenda, no meeting. But back to just simply like what’s the win? Start with the end in mind. Like, what is the purpose of us even getting together to talk about something?

It’s crazy how oftentimes in a lot of businesses, they don’t even know. And it’s like, well, why are we carving all this valuable time out on our calendars if we don’t even know why we’re getting together to talk? Have you seen that play out? I’m assuming you’ve seen it at a time or two in coaching where just everybody’s running so fast, nobody slows down to figure out the why behind it.

 

Alex Judd: Oh, and for myself, right? It’s not even just in the people we coach. I still lead as the CEO of our business. And so, I go to a lot of meetings and some of those meetings I’m assigned to run and lead, right? And this is maturity in me. There would be times where I would come in on two wheels and just say like, “Okay, we’re going to meet,” and not know exactly what we were there to accomplish. What I would tell myself is like, “Oh, I’m going to wing it.” Like, I’m going to wing it. We’ll figure it out as we go. And with a certain type of personality, you can do that. I think that’s actually dangerous. As a visionary leader, you have the ability to wing something that other people work for and that’s actually really bad. And you have to guard against that with everything, right?

You should put in the work because it will benefit you and others. And so, it is now gotten to the point, I think this is maturing in growth that’s occurred in me, is I’m not perfect. So, I still have days where I roll in on two wheels. I don’t know exactly what we’re trying to accomplish in the meeting. I have learned that if we’re supposed to meet for 45 minutes and I haven’t yet defined success statements for the meeting, it is better for me to hop on the Zoom call or hop into the room with everyone and say, “Hey I’m going to give you 10 minutes right now. Do whatever you want. I’m just going to take the first 10 minutes of this meeting and just quietly write success statements.”

And the reason why I do that, it’s selfish, right, is because I know that the 35 minutes taken intentionally is always more effective than 45 minutes taken unintentionally. And so, just taking the 10 minutes to say it’s way better if it happens before the meeting, but if it doesn’t, do it in the first 10 minutes of the meeting to say, “What are the success statements of what we want to accomplish by the end of this meeting?” You know, Brad?

 

Brad Johnson: Yeah. It’s like a little mini vision statement just for that meeting.

Alex Judd: You nailed it.

Brad Johnson: Just as it’s important for your business to know where you’re going 12, 24, 36 months out, the North Star, that little smaller subset of that, it’s like, “We’re not going to get anywhere we plan to go unless the team is aligned on what’s the purpose of us getting together.” So, it’s just almost like fractionalizing something that works on a larger scale down to the individual scale. So, I paused you there a little bit. What’s the difference between spending and investing like if you were to take that to the next level up?

 

Alex Judd: Yeah. Well, we kind of highlighted already a little bit from my experience at Ramsey, and then we do this within our organization, and it’s part of our 12 fundamentals that we coach businesses on too, is the value of an all-team meeting, right? And a lot of people say, “Oh my gosh, that’s such a massive waste of time and money,” because, I mean, especially if you’ve got a thousand people, but even if you have 20 people saying to everyone, “Take an hour off. We’re not going to be on the phones. We’re not going to be creating value. This is for the internal to serve the external,” that is an incredible investment of time and money.

How do you get a return on that investment? Well, I tell you how you don’t do it. The success statement for spending or wasting time would be we provided updates on the status of the company. Wha-wha. That sucks, right? You’re never going to be able to create a return on something that could have been an email, and that’s the phrase we always use whenever we’re talking about wasting time. How do you create exponential return on 20 people being together? Here’s a success statement that does that. The entire team left feeling unified, aligned, and energized.

This is the power of a leader like Dave Ramsey is he can get a thousand people into a room, and by the time everyone’s leaving that room in an hour, potentially 900 of those people can be leaving with 5% more clarity and 5% more energy with regard to how they approach their job that week. And if you take 900 people and make 900 people 5% better because of an hour you invested, what the heck? So, oftentimes, we’re just not focusing on the right outcomes whenever we bring people together. And the question we’ve got to ask is, what could we focus on and accomplish that if we were to hit a home run, it would create an exponential return from this time together?

 

Brad Johnson: Yeah. It’s like dispersing the energy among the room, but I love that you put clarity in there too. What I’ve heard, and I’d love to hear your definition, I’ve heard with CEOs, two roles they cannot delegate is vision and inspiration, or transfer of energy, another way to say inspiration. Do you agree or disagree with that or is there anything else you’d add to the list?

 

Alex Judd: Well, I think I am often shocked at what can be delegated if given enough time and intentionality. But I would say like if it’s certainly like, “Oh, over the course of the next couple weeks, I’m going to delegate vision and inspiration.” Like, no you’re not, right? So, I mean, we’re talking about a multi-year process if you’re going to give that up. Right?

 

Brad Johnson: Yeah. So, let me unpack that because I love I think where you’re going with this, so kind of the four phases of scale we coach on a lot. We call it the Advisor in Charge model, which is kind of everything orbits around the advisor, which basically goes back to you go on vacation so does your revenue to business owner, which is kind of the formal structure of marketing, sales, ops, clarifying that as a true business; to CEO, which is an expansion upon that; to then board member, which if Dave, for example, we’ve used Dave a lot growing up in that organization, if he were to move to a full-on board member, now, he would just be a shareholder at that company. He would not be showing up on the daily, all of that, which obviously then he wouldn’t be there to do the vision, the inspiration.

So, what I think I hear you saying is even in a CEO seat, you can start to delegate pieces of the vision and inspiration to other C-suite or what’s your take on that?

Alex Judd: Yeah, I think you have to be able to. But I think a lot of people, this is their thermostat, right, is they think that that’s not possible. And to the degree that they think that’s not possible, they never invest any effort towards doing it. But I’m spending a lot of time thinking about this topic actually right now because we’ve got an experience coming up in October in Austin. Part of what we do is in-person experiences, and the theme for this experience is long-game leadership.

And so, the way that we’re defining long-game leadership is expanding your time horizon in service of others. And so, if you’re just looking at, man, how do we hit our goals this quarter or even this year, and like, what’s the best way to achieve those, you really probably don’t invest any time or energy into strategies associated with you delegating and developing other people to be able to cast vision and inspire people in your company. The minute you start looking up to 3, 5, 10, 20 years down the road of what’s the business that I want to own in service of others, well, then it starts to become like, well, I better be able to do this, because otherwise, if not, you’re building it around your personality.

And so, for me, it clicked whenever I saw some friends of mine and their mentors of mine in business do it. I watched them successfully build a company over the course of 10 years, sell 85% of that company, and just retain 15% just because they believed in the future of where it was going and go completely hands off as board members that literally just looked at the quarterly statements and were available in an advisory capacity to the CEO that they helped a point. And the minute I saw that happen, I thought, oh, my gosh, it’s possible. But people often say, oh, that’s possible for other businesses, that’s possible for other leaders, it’s not possible for me. Stop saying it’s not possible. You may not want to and that’s okay, but don’t do yourself and your team the disservice of saying it’s not possible because there’s just enough evidence that would suggest that it is.

Brad Johnson: Yeah. You know what’s interesting? I’m assuming your time in the Nashville/Franklin area, you probably– I know Chick-fil-A, it’s Atlanta, but I feel like the Ramsey Circle kind of intersects with the Chick-fil-A kind of leadership style, Truett Cathy. So, we just did a private mastermind there with, Michael Hyatt actually helped guide it. We do a group with him, and one of the things I wrote down that relates to what we’re talking about was, I believe Truett Cathy’s exact words were, a lot of people are so concerned about growing the business, they forget to grow the people. And they don’t realize if you grow the people, the people will grow the business on your behalf.

And back to leadership and vision, it’s not a snap your fingers, and oh, now, such and such, the new C-suite can kind of carry the torch. But if you continue to do the reps and invest in the people, the people, the people, here’s why we exist, here’s what we’re about, it’s only a matter of time before they absorb that and then they carry that torch on the founders or the CEO’s behalf. And I just feel like such a simple statement, so many businesses get wrong, and which is why they struggle with that. So, I love the story you just shared with your friend that built a really big business and was able to pull that off successfully. What are other things that get in the way? Maybe of your best students and clients that kind of like get it, they hit this kind of glass ceiling, they learn some new skills and grow through it, versus those that do not, they get stuck.

Alex Judd: Yeah. I think it’s often the same thing for most people, and I’m experiencing this right now in a part of our business, your greatest strength is your greatest weakness if you want to build a business, because your greatest strength is the thing that you don’t do because you learned the process. Your greatest strength is the thing that you do because you just have this intuition and gifting about you. And when you’re starting your business, that’s such a God-given gift, right? Like, thank God you have that intuition. And because that’s what gives you the ability to serve people, to have a competitive advantage in the marketplace, to be able to move at an incredibly fast pace, right, that’s your greatest strength. But then the minute you’re trying to scale beyond yourself, you can train, you might even be really good at delegation and you can train just about everything else because you learned everything else.

But then someone looks at you and says, “Oh, okay, well, how do I do this thing that you do?” And you’re like, “I don’t know. I never learned that thing. I’ve been doing that since I was in second grade,” right? And so, what I have found is the process of delegating my strengths always happens with and through other people. I’m too much of a knucklehead to see how I do it. And I’m just like, my delegation strategy for those things too often is like, well, just watch me do it, and then you do it like that. And people are like, Alex, it doesn’t work that way, right? You have like 20 years of experience in the leadership space, like thinking about this stuff and talking about this stuff, there’s so much just assumed knowledge in your head.

And so, for me, on our team, like my go-to person in having conversations around this is– her name’s Olivia, she’s our coaching manager on my team. And she helps me recognize, what is the stuff that is Alex’s quirky personality? Because we don’t have to train that. And what is the stuff that is like, man, this is actually the stuff that we need to replicate? So, recognize is step one. Distill, the thing that you have to remember is simplicity scales. And scaling a business is a complex activity. And I think a lot of times, because it’s a complex activity, we think that the process to scale is going to be equally complex.

In reality, we have to counter that complexity with outrageous simplicity. So, it’s recognize, distill, and then train. And I am not the go-to person for training my strengths to others. I work with the manager on our team to recognize, distill, and then she’s got a nail system for going from Step A to Step Z on how to get these skills to them so they can replicate it in service of others.

Brad Johnson: All right, Alex, so you hit a couple things there that I want to kind of go back to. Number one, what I heard is you’ve hired your compliment, not your clone. So, you took…

Alex Judd: Oh, man, well said.

Brad Johnson: I’m not, and I can relate to a lot that you just said, where my team jokes are like, Brad, you just like to have bullets and then go up there and just speak. I don’t need to rehearse. It’s like what comes from the heart enters the heart. As long as I know the key points that I need to hit, I feel comfortable enough at this point, it’ll come out, where different personality types, I don’t know if you’re an Enneagram guy, but Enneagram 1, very perfectionist, attention to detail, they need to rehearse like two weeks in advance to feel comfortable. And so, what’s interesting…

Alex Judd: Or maybe two months in advance, maybe two months.

Brad Johnson: Maybe. Depends on the person, right? But what’s interesting is if you put those sort of personality, so Brooke, who’s EA on my team, she’s an Enneagram 2, but she definitely has some heavy wing 1, high attention to detail, very process driven. She can kind of package what sometimes I spew out if we’re in the same room, right, which now can turn into a system and a process that others can learn. But you hit something else that I’d never thought of before, which is the hardest stuff to delegate potentially is the stuff you’re the most gifted at, because it just happens kind of intuitively and you didn’t really have to learn it and create a process to figure it out yourself. So, is it the same model where you just get a process-driven person in the same room as you and you kind of do your thing and they model it? Or what have been the best ways you’ve seen to kind of break through that for the stuff that’s a lot more intuitive?

Alex Judd: Yeah. So, I would say a lot of observation, a lot of verbal processing is really helpful, a lot of whiteboarding, and that’s all at the recognition stage. And if you can find someone that, Olivia, on our team, she’s outstanding and asking curious questions. And so, this is the equivalent of you’ve got your world-class chef and he makes the single best molten lava chocolate cake that’s ever been known on the planet Earth. But you ask him, what’s the recipe? He’s like, “I have no idea.” And so, you say, “Okay, I’m going to watch you make it and I’m just going to sit here with my notebook and I’m going to see like, oh, hey, you whisk the eggs counterclockwise instead of clockwise, why did you do that?” And he says, “Oh, I didn’t even think about that, but I know that when I whisk counterclockwise, it gets more air folded into the eggs.” And they’re like, “Okay. And like, when you did this, how much salt did you put in there?” And he is like, “I don’t know, I just put a pinch.” And like, “How much is a pinch? Let’s measure that and figure that out.” And like, “Hey, why did you do that?” Right? Ask all these curious questions.

The goal here is just to get everything on paper and then we engage in the distill process. So, the way that we did this for coaching is she literally watched a bunch of my coaching calls, was around a bunch of my coaching conversations, asked me a ton of questions about the way that I think about coaching. I would watch recordings of other coaches of ours and she would pay attention to the feedback I was repeatedly giving to people reactively instead of proactively. All of that was stuff we did.

And then it was out of that we created our playbook, which is five qualities of effective coaching. And we’ve got a ton of documentation on how we train this, but it’s relational, curious, assertive, directional, and principle based. And she helped me identify, like out of all the things I care about, these are the things I really care about. This is Path for Growth coaching at its core. And what’s so cool is the minute we identified that, we could create a playbook around how to do that, and then we were able to train that to other people so that they weren’t just focused on everything that felt like a random assortment of feedback. They have real clarity on what quality they’re focusing on and what they needed to embody to be a Path for Growth coach.

Brad Johnson: I love that. So, that reminds me of the model that the bestselling book in the world, how it was written. Are you familiar with that?

Alex Judd: Well, that’s encouraging to hear.

Brad Johnson: Well, this is a little bit of a trick question. I’m guessing you’re very familiar with this book. It was written by a guy named Jesus.

Alex Judd: Okay. I thought you were going to say the Bible, yeah, I guess.

Brad Johnson: But what’s wild is Jesus didn’t write a word of it, right?

Alex Judd: Yeah.

Brad Johnson: Others observed his actions and his stories and wrote it on his behalf. And what’s cool is you just shared a very similar method. And I think a lot of times for founders and business owners, it becomes this excuse of I don’t have time. Well, it’s the Dan Sullivan, Who Not How, you found the who, Olivia, on your team, brought her into the conversation. She’s now creating the how. And I think oftentimes as founders, we get stuck in the how, and then we’re stuck in it forever versus finding the right who and bringing them into the conversation. And I think that is so spot on.

The equivalent we see a lot in our business is the founder, the head sales guy, the head chief revenue officer, basically, because unless he’s sitting across the table from a potential client, there is no revenue coming into the business, but that’s 20 years of knowledge and experience and asking the right questions. The model you just explained is exactly how we recommend coaching, shadow, watch, take notes, ask curious questions. When they’re ready, flip chairs, where now the student becomes the teacher, but the teacher does not leave the room so they can save them if they get in a little too deep.

But I think the air that I see oftentimes is it’s not being willing to slow down enough. Like, it’s that instant gratification where, oh, I’ve got to have help. I’m slammed with appointments. And then they throw somebody into the deep end before they can swim and then wonder why they blew 20 appointments without bringing on a client. It’s because they tried to accelerate it too fast. So, what advice would you give the founder that doesn’t have the patience they need to execute a plan like that?

Alex Judd: I would say from experience, patience can be developed, right? And impatient is not a statement of identity. It’s a statement of personality that can be shifted and changed. So, maybe focus on growing a little bit in patience because it’s going to benefit you and others. But then I think the other practical thing I would say that was really helpful for me out of the process that we’re talking about fits into the evaluation piece of operationalizing as well is that my picture or perspective of good leadership for a period of time was like, okay, I’ll watch the recording of your coaching call or watch your coaching session or something like that and then I’ll come to you with my list of 80 feedback points that I’ll give you. And it’s like that, dude, that’s not helpful. I mean, maybe for a very particular personality type, they love that, but it’s like, that’s just a smattering of too many things to focus on.

But I thought that was a good thing to do because I was giving feedback, right? What helped for us is when we created the standard, relational, curious, assertive, directional, principle-based, establish success statements with that standard, then what we’re evaluating is that standard and we just go down in red, yellow, green. Hey, let’s look at how you did compared to what we said we wanted to do. And the principle there is what you look at moves, and if you’re constantly looking at different things, like you’re just going to be pointing their focus in a billion different directions and they’re never going to have the sustained improvement that it takes to get excellent at anything.

But if we just look at five things after every single one of their calls, relational, curious, assertive, directional, principle-based, then they’re going to start remembering those for every single call and they’re going to start applying themselves to reps of improvement on those five areas. And that’s where we see, like man compounding growth over time actually starts to occur.

Brad Johnson: Well, Alex, even your grading system, you just simplified it. I’m assuming red is bad, yellow’s like could use some work, green’s good, right? I mean, even how you simplified the grading model, so really there’s only five criteria and there’s only three scores in each of those five. So, at the end of the day, 15 total outcomes for each. I’m assuming I’m doing my math proper there, but– which really simplifies. It’s like at the end of the day, it’s not that hard, right?

Alex Judd: That’s exactly right. And we always have people be like, well, I think it was orange. And it’s like, no dude, there’s– I mean, I’m a University of Texas fan. I went there, right?

Brad Johnson: They’re trying to blend two of the colors together.

Alex Judd: Yeah, exactly. It’s like we don’t do orange. And what we have to remember there, this is probably a 1 on the Enneagram, right, or something like that, where they want it to be exactly right. It’s like the evaluation, first of all, we’re evaluating the result, not the person. The person is not red, the result is red. And it does not have to describe everything about the performance, it just needs to get the conversation started, right?

And so, I always say like, well, I might as well call it red because like, if I’m between red and yellow, then let’s just call it red and then I can ask the question, what would it take for this to be a firm yellow the next time I do this call? And then what would it ultimately take for it to be green the next time I do this call? And so, I mean, we use red, yellow, green everywhere in our business, including at the end of the aforementioned meeting. We look at the success statements for the meeting, and as a team, we will read the success statements and then say, red, yellow, green. Red, success statement is not true. Yellow, it’s inconsistently true. Green, it’s consistently true.

And especially for recurring meetings, I have seen us meet and it’s like red and yellow all over the place once and then we meet again and we’ve got some greens in there. And then in three weeks, we’ve been doing this meeting for three weeks and we’re nails all green. And now, we’ve learned how to do it, right? And so, you used the phrase earlier, Stephen Covey said, start with the end in mind. Obviously, that’s brilliant. You should do that. But also, like end with the end in mind, right, and ask like, “Did we do what we said we were here to do?” is a really important question to ask and answer.

Brad Johnson: Yeah. And the other thing that I’ve found in the top performing organizations I’ve had the fortune of being involved with, you’re not fearful of feedback. It’s almost like you’ve established a culture of feedback is okay and you made a statement that I want to double down on. You are not judging the human, you are evaluating the actions and behaviors, which are two separate independent things. And I think oftentimes as young leaders, it’s like, oh, I don’t want to hurt their feelings. It’s like, but I also want to be invested in their growth. And the only way they’re going to grow is if they know the truth.

And so, my favorite, I’d love to hear kind of your framework, love in one hand, truth in the other. Too much love, oh, yeah, you’re great, buddy. You got this, but not enough truth to where they see the blind spots. Too much truth, you feel like you’re berating somebody every time you coach them or give them feedback. So, I found the balance of those two to be really helpful inside of our business. But do you have a different kind of filter of how you’ve embraced feedback inside your organization?

Alex Judd: Well, you referenced Jesus once and now you’ve referenced him twice, right? Like, his framework was love and truth too. So, that’s good enough for me. But I would also say we have a whole teaching on healthy accountability and I think one of the things that we’ve got to remember is like, 95% of organizations that people have worked for don’t practice healthy accountability or healthy feedback. And so, this is something that you should assume has to be trained.

But most of those 95% of organizations probably told these people, oh, we value clear feedback and healthy accountability. It’s just not true, right? And so, the metaphor that continuously sticks with me that I try to share with our team in their first week of being on the job is, hey, I’m going to give you feedback. It’s not if, it’s when I’m going to give you feedback, and I just want you to take that as spinach in your teeth, right? If you ever have spinach in your teeth, would you rather someone not tell you, or do you just want someone to tell you and then think about the way they tell you that, right?

We all know the person that is horrible at telling you, you have spinach in your teeth. They make a performance out of it. And it’s really awkward for them and you. And then there’s the people that just say, “Hey, just a heads up, I just want to make sure you know about this.” And I would want you to tell me, right? And like, that person is grace filled. They’re loving, they’re truthful. And that’s the way we like to think of feedback so that when we deliver it in the first week of someone on the job, they’re not like, oh, my gosh, my job at stake. They just learn people like us do things like this.

Brad Johnson: I love the spinach in the teeth analogy because the other back to doing it well or doing it where it’s a performance, I would assume part of the feedback, do you typically pull them aside where it’s private or have you gotten to the point where you’re just doing group coaching sessions and it’s everybody’s calling each other out on the spinach in the teeth in front of others?

Alex Judd: Yeah, I mean, I think probably wisdom and context sensitive like leadership is needed there, right? I think there’s certain things where we can give, if we are developing a lot of teachers in our organization right now and so, we’ll have multiple speakers at our next experience that are internal because all of our coaches have owned businesses in the past, so they’ve got brilliant thoughts to share. When we do reflection and evaluation on those teaching sessions, I actually think it’s really helpful to have collaborative learning. If there’s something that’s like, personality centered or chemistry centered or character centered or something with the culture of the team or something that might be sensitive to that individual as a person, no, I’m not going to make that correction in public. I’m going to make that correction in private, in service of them.

Brad Johnson: Yeah. So, it’s almost the more sense– so you’ve kind of trained them where, hey, this is actually helpful if you have more views on how to get better, right? But if it gets into something that could be internalized as something very personal to them, you’re going to hold them aside and do that conversation privately is kind of what I’m picking up on there.

Alex Judd: Yeah. And I mean, you know better than I do. You played college football. I didn’t play it, but I am an avid college football fan and it’s like they review game film and I know, I mean, Kirby Smart, Steve Sarkisian, Nick Saban, certainly, they will be vicious in the way they evaluate people’s mistakes and performance, technically, right? But if it’s probably a personality issue or something like that, it’s probably going to be more effective to address that and confront that privately with that individual and tell them like, dude, that is not you and you cannot do that, that’s not okay, than doing that out in front of everyone and airing your grievances with the whole team on board.

Brad Johnson: I will say from experience, the football film room has a lot more truth than it does love oftentimes. Not real heavy on the love part, but I think the best coach is, and I think anybody that, whether you played sports as a kid or made it to the college or the pros, you’ve got examples on both sides of the spectrum of the great coaches that did it in a way that you embraced the coaching and those that didn’t. And what’s interesting is what performance piece you just talked about, some coaches are out there performing and it’s more about them than it is about their players. And it’s really easy to see how the players respond to them.

Alex Judd: Oh, my gosh.

Brad Johnson: It’s pretty wild how that plays out.

Alex Judd: It’s as good of a time to learn leadership and business principles from watching college football as I think there’s ever been, because now you’ve got these 19-year-old kids that say, oh, you’re going to talk to me like that. I can go make half a million dollars more by going next door. And they’re free agents now. And so, like coaches in some ways are being held accountable for the culture that they create within their program.

Brad Johnson: Yeah. Well, what’s interesting is we record this on April 15th, 2025. It just played out at Tennessee, right? With their starting QB. I noticed it was all over the news. He was kind of, I believe this was the first example of a college athlete holding out for more money and at least publicly. And they kind of said, “Hey, this isn’t the culture we’re trying to build, see you later,” which it’ll be interesting to see how that plays out the next few years, but it’s definitely money and ego is very alive in college sports right now, so it’s going to take much stronger leaders than it probably has in the past.

Alex Judd: Yeah, that’s right. And it’s a great lesson for all of us. And the ego was always alive and well in college football, money just exposed it. And that’s true for my business too, right? My ego is always an issue in our business. I better watch out for when I get money because that’s going to expose it. And the more money I get, I should be asking, what is this money? What is this blessing? What are these resources exposing about me and my leadership that I now get to work on, is what I would say?

Brad Johnson: Yeah. Well, I learned a long time ago, money makes you more of who you are, which it’s an amplification tool. And if you want to do more good in the world, guess what? It’s a great tool to do that. But if your ego gets ahold of you, it’s also unfortunately, a great tool to amplify that. And I’ve seen that play out on both sides of the spectrum, and so, can be used for good or evil. And it’s always good to check yourself and put people, surround– kind of going back to where we kicked this off, surround yourself with the type of people that love you enough to tell you the truth of if it is starting to get to your head. And unfortunately, not everybody does that in life.

So, I’m curious, let’s tie this back to Dave. You said he was one of the best, most intentional leaders. He also has made a lot of money in his lifetime. Were there ways you saw him, and I heard the NDR, non-Dave revenue, not making it about himself, but were there clues in his leadership that showed you, hey, he was constantly checking himself and making sure that that never got ahold of him?

Alex Judd: Yeah, I mean this would be obviously a better question for him, but for me, observationally, I guess two things stand out. The first thing I would say is generosity is not a talking point for him, right? I mean, it is a talking point, but it’s so much more than a talking point is what I would say. And there’s the generosity that everyone sees, and I actually think that that’s good because it’s him publicly practicing the thing that he teaches. But the thing that I learned being in the organization that he probably would rather people have not learned is that there’s a lot of anonymous generosity that never gets seen. And it’s just like rumors being talked about of like, oh, this person that’s going through this really hard thing or this person that was really on the down and outs or this cause in the community. Like, he just wrote a check and took care of it, or he just stepped in and said like, that’s not going to be an issue for this person. And like, there was so much of that that isn’t applauded or cheered for or things like that, that literally no one hears about.

So, I would say number one is just, I think generosity is actually a really good way for us to keep our eyes on the reality that like, this business is not my business. This business is God’s business that I’ve been given to steward. These assets are God’s assets that I’ve been given to steward. And he lets me play with 90% of it, right? Like, that’s incredible. So, I think that would be the first one.

The second one I would say is more a story. I had a pretty intense meeting with him as we were kind of figuring out my career path and things like that. And it was actually at his house. It was with him and a couple other leaders. And I was going to be just sharing some stuff that was really personal to me about my background and where I’d been and all of that related to the trajectory of where I was going. And this is kind of intimidating. It’s not like I had regular one-on-ones with Dave Ramsey, right? We met a couple times, but like driving up to his beautiful house. You’re meeting with the CEO of the company. I’m like 26 years old at the time. Like, very intimidating.

And so. I go in, we have dinner, and then it’s very clear, like, okay, now the conversation is shifting gears. And I’ll just never forget, he just said, “Alex, as I was driving home this evening, I spent some time thinking about what it would be like to be in your shoes coming up here today to have this meeting and how this could maybe be a little bit intimidating because you’re going to share some of yourself. And so, before you share some stuff that you might not share with everyone, I’d just love to share with you something that feels a little bit vulnerable to me and like, I just want to share with you a little bit of my background.” And whoa, like, what a world-class example of leaders go first. And he built so much trust, loyalty, care in me in that moment. And man, I really just felt served in that moment in so many ways. And we ended up having a, I mean, wonderful conversation. And so, yeah, it’s why I just continue to be so grateful for him for that organization and for the example of leadership, honestly, that he continues to show.

Brad Johnson: And what a great reminder of vulnerability as a leader is a strength, not a weakness. I think so many leaders, it’s like, I’ve got to be perfect. I can’t show a chink in the armor, and it’s actually getting in the way of them connecting with their team. It’s wild.

Alex Judd: I so agree with you. Could I share one more story on that question?

Brad Johnson: Please, yeah.

Alex Judd: Man, this sounds like a Dave Ramsey commercial in some ways, but I’m just such a fan of the guy. So, I left to start my own business, right? I really worked hard and received a lot of outside counsel on how to do this with integrity, and they were incredibly supportive of helping me make this, I mean, life trajectory, changing decision over the course of six months. So, it wasn’t done rashly, it was done in full visibility of the organization. And they were incredibly supportive.

So, I had left, I was six months into running my own business. What we do is very different than what EntreLeadership does and what Ramsey does, but it does play in the same sandbox, right? And we definitely coincide with the same people, right? I’m in the content game. He’s in the content game, right? All of his people are in the content game. And so, I had left maybe six to eight months and was running my own business. And I just had this Holy Spirit little gut punch of like, hey, this would be a really good time to reach out to Dave and just see if he’d be willing to sit down and just have you ask questions. Just for like, mentorship, he’s someone that really inspires me. He’s a role model of mine. And it would be really good to reconnect. And I was like, ah, that feels weird, right? Like, I can’t do that. That feels incredibly odd. Is he going to shut me down? Is he going to reject me? Like, what does that even look like? But I was like, no, I mean, what harm is there in sending an email? I’ll never forget, he replied immediately, said, “Absolutely, would love to meet with you. Let’s do it at the office,” right? So, like, let’s make sure we carve out time. Is there anyone else you would like to be there? I want to make sure you get all the perspective you can.

And then I show up and there’s charcuterie board and bourbon and wine and it’s just like a celebration. And I’ve never experienced abundance mindedness lived out as viscerally as that moment, where he was just so supportive and answered every single question I had and then some, and was just so encouraging. And so, that’s just another inspiration towards me of the way I want to act towards team members that leave or customers that go on to other coaching companies or other coaches that we work with and things like that. Like, man, we’re all serving people and we’ve got to preserve an abundance mindedness about us because that’s what we’ve all received, whether we recognize it or not.

Brad Johnson: Glad you shared that. It’s interesting because unfortunately, in business, that is definitely the exception to the rule. But what’s interesting is that was a two-way street, the way I hear that story. Number one, you exited the right way transparently, with grace, with timing that didn’t just throw a bomb in the middle of their business. And then when you reached back out, it was reciprocated, probably times tenfold. And so, I think, obviously, at the end of the day, we’re only responsible for ourselves, the choices we make, but I think it’s cool to see how that played out because you did things the right way. Like, now you have a fan, one of the best fans you could have in the marketplace, in the coaching space that’s wishing you well and honestly, putting some wind in your sails, which is pretty awesome to see.

Alex Judd: Yeah. It’s interesting, my church that I go to here in Arizona as part of their membership class, they teach, hey, hopefully, it never comes to this, but here’s a short teaching on how to leave a church well. And I’ve always thought of like, I don’t know that we’re at the size or scope of business where we need that right now necessarily, but I’ve always thought like, it certainly shouldn’t be the entirety of your business’s onboarding is how to leave well, but it is kind of crazy that we do have an expectation that people will leave in a certain way, but we never teach that. And then we’re shocked when people don’t leave that way. And I just really admired, like maybe that is something that we should talk about because the number of people that are going to be with you forever is actually remarkably small. So, it might be something to have strategy around.

Brad Johnson: Well, and I think there’s this self-awareness. Triad is about four and a half years old now, and I think that first six months, the band of misfits that all jumped in well before they should have because there was no business to jump into, just an idea and a vision, I think what’s interesting is in that era of being a founder or co-founder at a startup, it was like, this is family. Everybody’s going to be here forever. And we all know that’s not how it plays out. People have different seasons of life, different things pop up. And the truth is like, it’s a lot more like a team. Like, I want the people to be here that are invested in the mission that this team is on. And if you’re not, I also want to give you permission done the right way to excuse yourself from the table, but we never train people on the right way to do that. So, there’s all this anxiety, there’s all this like, oh, should I hide it? Are they going to walk me out the door as soon as I tell them?

And I love that. I’m actually making a note of that one. We have a super intentional onboarding process, but we also don’t tell people like, hey, if at the end of the day, Triad is not serving you, then you’re not going to be serving Triad, and here’s the right way to go about that conversation. And that’s an interesting aha you just gave me. So, appreciate that gift. Now, hey, I can R&D that one.

Alex Judd: There, your R&D. And you just R&D’d R&D, which is great. Yeah, there we go.

Brad Johnson: Well, hey, my man, I know this is– man, this time’s flown quickly. I just have one final question for you, and this has been a blast, man. I’ve really, really enjoyed this. I’m glad Patrick made this introduction. This is the Do Business, Do Life podcast. We’ve talked about a lot of principles and fundamentals today of how to actually make that happen, but I would love to hear Alex’s definition of what does Do Business, Do Life mean to you?

Alex Judd: Well, I so appreciate the time today. I really enjoyed this as well and so appreciate the mission that you, but honestly, like, the more I learn about kind of what y’all are building, like it’s really the mission that y’all’s community is on. I think that’s really powerful. I think whenever I think about what y’all are building and what y’all are focused on, I think of actually a lesson that I heard one of my mentors teach a couple of years ago now, and it can actually be summed up in four words. He just wrote down on a whiteboard. He got up, wrote down on a whiteboard – God, marriage, kids, work in that order. And your work is not who you are, your work is where you serve. And remember, like, first of all, it benefits everyone. Everyone wins when you have a healthy, thriving relationship with the God that created you.

Out of that, the single most important commitment you’ve made in this world, if you have made it, is your commitment to your spouse. And that’s a lifelong commitment. From there, if you’re focused on making an impact, the absolute best opportunity that you have to make a lasting impact in this world is the kiddos that live under your roof. That is your opportunity for impact. And then it’s out of all that, that we don’t go to our work saying, who am I or am I valuable, or try to get a self-esteem boost or try to become famous. Rather, our work is where we go to, to say, what can I contribute and how can I serve? And your work is this playground where you get to go and love people exceptionally well by serving them with excellence and never get work out of order with those other things, because it’s just not worth it. So, that’s what Do Business, Do Life means to me, Brad.

Brad Johnson: I love that. I heard a slightly different version of that from Michael Hyatt, who’s been a huge mentor in my both business and life and he added one more layer below the work part, or actually, he kind of added two layers, it was your team, and then your customers or clients in that order, because if you don’t serve your team, they in turn can’t serve your clients and your customers. And I always thought that was interesting because I’d seen that flipped before and it just doesn’t work out very well. So, I love that definition. Very Do Business, Do Life definition. So, thanks for sharing that and…

Alex Judd: Yeah, hey, great to be with you, Brad. Thank you for just the killer conversation and the great questions.

Brad Johnson: Well, hey, as a fellow podcaster, both sides of the mic have their challenges and, I know that you can appreciate both of them because you’ve been on both sides of the mic, so appreciate it. Incredible conversation. Can’t wait to get this out to number one, our Triad community, but also the other advisors and founders and family members out there that it can serve. So, appreciate it. Until next time.

Alex Judd: Appreciate you, Brad. Thank you.

Brad Johnson: All right. We’ll see you.