How to Become a Stronger Leader

Mike Hambright (00:00.507)
Hey everybody, welcome back to the show. Today I’m here with Trey Taylor, good friend, and he’s the author of a book that we have here called, CEO Only Does Three Things. If you’re a CEO like me, you’re like, what are those three things? Because I feel like I’m doing 3000 things. But we’re going to talk about as a leader, and I think we all aspire to be better leaders today, what are the main things that you should focus on and what are the things that you should delegate in? And you know, sometimes these are, this is an exercise in.

a roadmap for how to get there, right, ultimately. So Trey, why don’t you tell us a little bit about your background and how you got to this point in your life.

Trey Taylor (00:35.662)
Yeah, Mike, good to be with you. Good to catch up with you, man. It’s been a little while since we were able to sit down and have a chat. So I appreciate the opportunity to do that. Yeah, so, you know, I run a family office, headquartered in Georgia. And, you know, we have various different investments that we do, but, you know, I run the family business, which is an insurance and investments business. And then, you know, the profits from that business over the past 58 years have gone into our family.

Mike Hambright (00:41.297)
Yep, yep, absolutely.

Trey Taylor (01:03.776)
investing pool in real estate, early stage startups, friendly allied companies and all of that sort of thing. so that’s sort of my background. I’m a lawyer by training, a venture capitalist in my early life profession. And then came to the idea that I needed to be a CEO because of some family circumstances that happened. We lost my dad unexpectedly and I had to step into his business and take that business over. And so

That’s sort of what teed up the conversation of me sort of scratching my head and saying, okay, now I’m a CEO, but what does that mean? And I think that is way more common than we think it is. mean, nobody’s born a CEO. We have to learn it. And so all I did was sort of try to commit my learnings to paper so that I could share it with other people.

Mike Hambright (01:50.269)
Yeah, that’s great. And I think, you know, guys like you and me that have been around for a long time, getting some gray hair here, you you start to realize where the wisdom’s at in your circles, right? The people that have been through the proverbial storms, right? Pardon me. So one of the things that you said, pardon me for a second here.

Trey Taylor (02:15.918)
I didn’t mean to choke you up.

Mike Hambright (02:22.897)
boy. Okay. So one of the things that you said, you were a keynote presenter at Investor Fuel last summer, and you said something during that presentation. don’t know if you’ve, I’m sure that you’ve said this before. It wasn’t part of your presentation. It was off the cuff. And I, and I always remember this. I want to ask you about it. You said, cause I think this is going to resonate with everybody that’s listening to this right now, is you said a lot of CEOs role ends up being doing all the crap that other people can’t do or they don’t do well.

And that’s true, right? Like that’s why the phrase CEO and chief bottle washer comes up because it’s like, Hey, I’m the CEO of the company. But right now the toilets plugged up in my common space office here and somebody needs to deal with it. It’s got to be me. So let’s talk about that a little bit because I feel like a lot of people are going to resonate with the fact that they want to be a leader. They want to be, they want to elevate up, but they get stuck doing a whole bunch of other junk or they don’t have redundancy in their business. They don’t have redundancy on their team. like

Trey Taylor (02:52.494)
Totally true.

Trey Taylor (03:12.29)
whole bunch of stuff.

Mike Hambright (03:17.551)
If a key salesperson leaves and you got one, well, you’re the sales guy now. And if this happens, you know, you get pulled back in. So let’s talk about that for a moment.

Trey Taylor (03:24.952)
Yeah, for sure. There’s a big piece of that. And what I think about all the time is the CEO is the only position in a company that doesn’t have a job description. So at no point would we just hang out a sign out front that said, now hiring. And somebody that walked in, we would say, OK, you work here. Figure out what you do. But we do that to ourselves all the time. And what it eventually evolves into, the first phase is, well, I’m going to do everything I can do to keep the business going forward.

And then if I have to go do some work that other people are doing or not doing or leaving undone, then that’ll be just be part of my job as well. And then this really insidious thing happens after success where basically we train our people to do about 85 % of the job and bring us the last 15 % for us to do and be the champion and make them feel good that the boss supported them and that sort of thing.

But the problem is, and what my book is really ultimately about, even though I never use the word, it’s about burnout, right? So if you do everybody’s job for the extent of your entire career, you’re never going to be fulfilled in what you’ve actually accomplished, nor are your people going to be fulfilled because you’re only letting them have a certain amount of success. So that’s why I say a CEO only does three things. And everybody gives me the reaction that you gave me, which is, yeah, I wish, man.

Mike Hambright (04:48.765)
That’s

Trey Taylor (04:48.79)
I wish I had three things to do, right? But my point is that there’s an intentional place that we can get to where we do those three things that only we as CEOs have the responsibility and authority to do. And those are the major three things.

Mike Hambright (05:05.309)
Yeah. And I’d like to talk to you too about one of the things that I talk a lot about because I obviously I mentor hundreds of professional real estate investors and entrepreneurs. And if I always I typically refer to Robert Kiyosaki’s cashflow quadrant because everybody knows that. But if you think of a lot of people are you know a lot of entrepreneurs are stuck in that lower left box which is a self-employed box. So they’re the CEO but they’re also the chief bottle washer because they don’t have a big enough team and their business isn’t big enough to support a team or the team that they need. Right. So

Let’s talk for a moment about, you I always talk about the best part, like all the things you want are on the other side of essentially that area. Like you’ve got to scale your business up so that it can afford to pull you out of a bunch of seats so that you truly can be the CEO and maybe not just play yourself out of the seats, but instead of having one salesperson have at least two. So you got a backup plan if one doesn’t work out or it gets hit by a bus or something like that. And so talk about the importance of being able to set yourself free as a leader.

because you have a business that can support you not sitting in every seat.

Trey Taylor (06:06.648)
Yeah, I think that’s super important. think it’s becoming easier and easier as well. So 10 or 15 years ago, you if I wanted to hire an assistant, I had to go interview somebody. I had to pay them 40 hours a week, whether I had enough work to fill that time or not. I had to worry about payroll and all of that sort of stuff. Today I can call one of what 900 VA companies. You know, my buddy made a joke that I could, you know, I could throw a rock out the door and hit nine of them, right?

Mike Hambright (06:27.154)
Yeah.

Trey Taylor (06:32.711)
And it’s very much the truth so that my team, the technology of using AI and those kinds of things, the technology and the declining costs of outsourcing labor overseas and that sort of thing, I can really buy some of that stuff and that should help me get farther, faster. So that’s a key point that I think people overlook when they’re especially in that bottom left quadrant. The second thing there is that,

It all comes down, you know, the genius of executive development all comes down to what are you willing to say no to? And that’s what a job description really is. A job description isn’t so much what you do, it’s what you don’t do as well. And so the CEO needs what I call the negative job description, which is, you know, I do these three things, but I very specifically don’t do any of the rest of it. That’s what I pay other people to do. And if those people aren’t capable or

Mike Hambright (07:14.002)
Yeah.

Trey Taylor (07:29.048)
talented or gifted at what they’re supposed to be doing, then we probably have to change the people or we have to change something else, but we really have to defend the border. We have to defend the frontier. Those tasks cannot come over the border to make it to my to-do list.

Mike Hambright (07:45.841)
Yeah, and some of that can be done by scaling your business up to have, to be able to afford people in those seats. And then some of it can be done through cross training too, right? It’s like, well, if something opens up here, this person can do that role. That’s not really the role that they should be doing, but temporarily they could cover for me to protect me as the leader.

Trey Taylor (07:52.524)
Absolutely.

Trey Taylor (08:03.746)
Yeah, you know, I think Elon is pretty famous for something similar to what I’m about to say, because he’s always copying me, you but, you know, you got to automate something. If you can be automated and it takes a little bit of time and money to automate it, then you should automate it. Like the system should take care of the system, right? And then if you can’t automate it to the cloud, basically, then you need to delegate it and you need to delegate it to somebody who can take it and keep it until it is producing the results.

that you want. If you can’t do those three things, you probably need to eliminate it. And that doesn’t always feel good to us as entrepreneurs. We have a line of business right now that we sell in our insurance business and we don’t make any money at it. You know, and it’s not strategically important. It’s just we’ve always done it. And so we feel like we have to do it. And it forces a whole bunch. It’s the same amount of work as anything else that we do. And so

You know, that was my task to the team and in the first quarter of the year is you have to answer this automate, delegate or eliminate question. And they were all passionate that we were going to fix it and it was going to be done. And now they’re all looking at it saying, you know, if we give it up, we’re not giving up that much. And what we recapture in return, we can definitely put into things that we can make more money at.

Mike Hambright (09:15.805)
Yeah, yeah. So let’s talk about the three things. As you define them, what are the three things, and then let’s kind of dive into each one maybe, that a CEO should only focus on.

Trey Taylor (09:26.22)
Yeah. So remember, you know, it isn’t that I think a CEO shows up and does three things and then leaves for the day, right? You don’t show up at eight o’clock and leave by eight five because they did their work for the day. I understand that there are still things that you put your energy into, outside of these core tasks, but these are really umbrella level tasks. And they are the things I’ll just repeat that only you have the authority and responsibility to complete. You do not automate, delegate, or eliminate these three things.

Mike Hambright (09:32.218)
Right.

Trey Taylor (09:55.478)
And those are culture, people, and numbers. And the reason that they only are, are yours to do, because if you let anyone else participate at the executive level on those things, then the company begins to look like, somebody else’s company, somebody else’s vision, somebody else’s expression of what we want to be true in the world. That’s my definition of a company, right? Before I came to this present, job that I have.

I worked for corporate companies and I had a lot of friction with that life because I thought the world needed to look different than what that company thought it needed to look like. And that is the germ of entrepreneurship. And the way that we express that is here’s the culture. This is the, you know, this is the agreement amongst people that work here. We’re going to find the right people and we’re going to measure success on this set of numbers. And that’s how that all sort of fits together. Yeah.

Mike Hambright (10:49.629)
Yep, yep. So let’s dive into these three things. So culture, like talk a little bit about what, you know, how to set that, how to keep your finger on the pulse, how to disseminate that so that everybody lives and breathes it. Let’s talk about that a bit.

Trey Taylor (10:57.794)
For sure.

Trey Taylor (11:03.33)
Yeah, so culture shares the same Latin root with the word cultivate, right? So if you think about it in terms of a garden, you know, it’s what you allow into the garden, what beautiful thing you want to be happening in that garden, and then you cultivate that, you give it nourishment, but you also protect it from things that would choke it out, weeds, you’ll move it so that the environment is better, maybe it gets more sunlight, it gets the right amount of…

rain and it gets protected from the wind or whatever that happens to be. And if you think about the company in terms of that, I think it’s really interesting. To mix a metaphor, I like to think about it in terms of the fish tank as well, because I have to keep the water in the fish tank. And that’s really what the culture of an organization is, is that water in the fish tank, the fish people can swim around in and be healthy and protected and be the best fish that they can be.

And that’s really the way that I think most positively about culture. But that doesn’t really answer what makes up the molecule of the water, right? And the molecule of the water is made up by the values. And this will be a throwback to what we were just saying. When I start a company, I start it because I think that the culture, the way that I want to work with other people is the way that the world should look. This is my miniature version of it, but this is the way that the world should look. So when I’m coaching or

consulting with companies for the organizational design work that we do, we really spend a lot of time getting people to articulate the values that they want to see in the world. And that becomes super important, number one, because it says, yes, this is what we want. We’re very specific about it. We theme it. We make fun parts of it and that sort of thing. But it’s very important to have that. If you don’t, then that is

ambiguity. It’s ambiguous. Anybody coming into the company can say, you know, I like to work hard. Well, what does that mean for you? well, it means that I work 30 hours a week, leave my work and go home and never touch it again until I come back to work. It’s a different definition than an entrepreneur might have in the same business. I just saw this great quote from Martin Luther the other day and it said, ambiguity is the fortress of heretics.

Trey Taylor (13:19.148)
Right? And I think the point there is that anybody can believe what they want if their rules are ambiguous. And that’s fine in society at large, but it doesn’t work in our companies or in our churches or in our, even in our families. The more specifically can be about what we value in the world, the better that is for everybody.

Mike Hambright (13:40.829)
That’s great. Yeah. And any tips on how to kind of maintain that? it’s like, it’s almost like a, I think of it like a relationship or your car, right? You’ve to go for a checkup every once in a while. You need to tune up. Like, is that something that just happens during the annual planning process or how do you kind of, you know, everything kind of people start to like, people start to get loose. It’s like, okay, we need to tighten it up, tighten it up. Like, what do you, how do you, how do you kind of manage that on ongoing basis?

Trey Taylor (13:56.748)
Yeah, unfortunately, no.

Trey Taylor (14:02.542)
That’s right. Yeah, so we believe in the power of cultural rituals. It isn’t enough just to take some really good value statements and engrave them on marble with gold lettering and put them on the walls. Enron had some of the greatest value statements you’ve ever seen. And one of them was like, ethical. And right behind that, there was a conference room where they were like stabbing investors in the back and stealing money and all that sort of thing. They all went to jail for it. It isn’t enough just to have cool ones and hang them down.

You have to live them and you can only live them if the people around you share those values to a large extent, which we’ll talk about. What we do is encourage the right kind of cultural ritualization. So the core exercise that I typically have clients do and we have done for the last probably 11 years is a weekly discussion of the value of the week. So we have 13 B attitudes in my business.

13 goes into 52 four times, so it’s perfect. Like I can go in and do, you know, each week of the year, we can explore one of the Beatitudes. We do it on our all hands call on Friday, our staff call, and somebody is randomly assigned that value. So this week, the value was be fun, loving and determined. And so, you know, it’s the work hard, play hard value, for example. So we read the value statement, and then the person selects other people that they

caught doing that value correctly. And they say, hey, you we were just in New York because we want an incentive trip or something of that nature. And this is a special place that would do that. And they have stories about it and that sort of thing. And it keeps the culture fresh and relative. We don’t allow pontification. So somebody doesn’t come and say, well, you know, the ancient Greeks would have said, no, no, that’s not what this is about. We want you catching somebody doing something right. And we share that. It goes out by email as well.

so that we’ve got this sort of continuing archive where we can look back and say, oh yeah, this person lived that value in this way, that sort of thing. We also do some other types of activities which are more sort of tailored to the organization themselves. So we have a client that’s in the entertainment space. They build floats for these massive parades, pride parades and Mardi Gras parades and all of that sort of thing. And so as you can imagine,

Trey Taylor (16:27.458)
You know, they have a culture built largely on fun and creativity and they have what’s called the fundamentals, right? So every quarter they go and they take the entire staff, 230 employees go and they do one fun thing that quarter. They go to the ball game, they go to the zoo, the park, you know, they have, they buy out a restaurant, they go to bowling. It doesn’t matter, but they do one thing and there’s no business discussed and there’s no present PowerPoint that gets delivered, nothing like that. They just have fun together.

once a quarter and that fits into their values very well.

Mike Hambright (17:01.393)
Yep, that’s great. So the second one is people, kind of managing the people, making sure you have the right people in the right seats. Let’s talk about that.

Trey Taylor (17:07.842)
Yeah, so it’s so much deeper than that too. is, you know, do you have the right bus in the first place? Is the bus too small? Is it too big? You know, have you over hired? Have you under hired and understand the stresses that that creates to the good and to the bad? Is the, is the bus fueled up? Is there money in the tank? Like there needs to be, if the team is going to be taken care of, are you checking tickets when people get on? Like, do you know who’s getting on that bus?

Are they sitting in the right seat? Are they sitting next to somebody who wants to be with them on the journey? That’s, know, the metaphor can just be tortured out so beautifully. But yeah, it is all about, I want the people that believe the same things I believe to be on the journey with me. And that also means on the flip side, on the shadow side, that if you don’t believe what I believe, I don’t want to fight this battle with you. That doesn’t mean I have to have a problem with you.

Like you just need to go somewhere else and do the kind of things you want to do. And I’ll support you a hundred percent in that. But as far as us getting together, we have to ultimately not ever have to worry is there sunlight between our values? And it is a beautiful thing. I used to work with a staff that I inherited that did not share the same values that I did. And it was super profitable because their values were, you know, make money at all costs. But it kept me awake at night.

worrying about what they were saying on behalf of my family, my business, and that sort of thing. And I just had that epiphany one day and we shed about 40 % of the staff over the following 12 months because I didn’t want those people on the journey with me. And then the way that I shed it was to put my 13B attitudes on the board and said, if you have any challenge with any of this, this is not the place for you. And one by one, they peeled off over the course of that.

12 months, I replaced some of them, not all of them. And we have a much better business today. I sleep like a baby, not ever worrying about those kinds of things. And, and we also as a side benefit of that, have this shared language where we can talk about things. I had a young person take me to lunch yesterday and say, I’m having trouble with somebody that I work with in the organization. And I want to go through each one of these Beatitudes with you as a sounding board.

Trey Taylor (19:31.02)
so that I can get grounded in where I should be, where I feel like they should be, and how do I have that conversation with them? It’s the most positive exercise I’ve ever been a part of. I didn’t do anything but eat a hamburger and nod my head while she walked herself through the values. It was beautiful. If I didn’t have those values articulated, she couldn’t be self-managing in that way. And that’s something that I’ve

Mike Hambright (19:53.499)
Yeah, that’s great. I think it’s so easy as an entrepreneur to allow the wrong people to stay on your team because it’s hard because again, if you don’t have redundancy on your team, you’re like, gosh.

Maybe they’re not the right person or they’re not, salesperson’s not performing or whatever, but you’re like, the lesser of the evil is to keep them, the greater of the evil is for it all to fall back on my lap. Right, so we tend to tolerate things that are not ideal, but it’s a struggle as a small business, because you got, know, often you’re doing too many things, quite frankly, right?

Trey Taylor (20:16.216)
Right. We totally do. Yep.

Trey Taylor (20:26.338)
Very much the case. One of my mentors was famous for saying, you know, if I talk to a CEO, I ask him, what do you need to do? And he says, I need to change my people, right? And in reality, to change the people, you have to change the people sometimes. And so the best way to make a happy employee is to fire an unhappy one, you know? And then the rest of the organization sort of wakes up to the idea that, we don’t have to work with people that aren’t on the team with us.

Mike Hambright (20:53.253)
Right, right, yep. So the third thing that a CEO does is focus on the numbers and talk about that.

Trey Taylor (20:58.882)
Yeah. The numbers are just the quantification. It’s just a scorecard. It’s just, you know, so that we can look up and say, Hey, you know, are our people living in a culture that produces something that is valuable that we have agreed on? Right. Obviously we need to make money to pay our bills and to exist as people in our society and that sort of thing for sure. But that threshold is not that high. You know, there’s, there are easy ways to make a lot.

of money and I’m constantly amazed. follow this one person on Twitter who only gives crazy ways that people make their money. There’s a guy in Florida that’s the only thing he does is takes one piece of a train, a railroad car, and polishes the connecting knob that connects it to the other thing. And the guy makes like a buck 50 a year doing it. It’s just him. He’s got like a piece of equipment in the backyard and he’s got more work.

than he can ever do. No one else on earth is wanting to do that kind of work, but it’s necessary work that they know that they have to do on a maintenance schedule. And, you know, he just gives all kinds of stuff like that. So making money is not the really hard part. It’s what else is important on that? How do you do so in an excellent fashion? You and I were talking about that earlier, right? How do you make sure that you’re doing so in an ethical fashion? How do you make sure that you’re doing so in a way that justifies a return on the resources that you put into it?

So my point about us having this line of businesses, you I could pull the resources from that line of business and go invest in a multifamily or any other thing and probably get a better return than just keeping this zombie product alive on our platform. So the numbers, the KPIs and the OKRs are the ones that let everybody know what that’s supposed to look like, what success is supposed to look like. And we have a principle that everybody carries a number.

Though my receptionist doesn’t have a sales number that she’s got to go sell a certain amount of insurance or anything like that. But her number is, know, every phone is, every phone call is picked up within two rings. You know, two rings good, three rings bad is the way that we talk about that. And so if I don’t quantify her in that way, she

Trey Taylor (23:17.356)
She might think it’s okay to ring three or four times or let it roll to voicemail and she’ll get it later and that sort of thing. But that’s not the way that we want to be excellent. So everybody carries a number and it’s a lot of work sometimes to figure out what that number is. And it’s a lot of discomfort when you find somebody that you can’t put a number on what they do. It’s time for that person to go find a number or find another place to live.

Mike Hambright (23:30.523)
Yeah.

Mike Hambright (23:39.323)
Yeah, yeah, I found and we’re probably at a stage now where we need to revisit a lot of this stuff because I’m the type that’s like, I want to keep the reporting simple. And the next thing I know, it is like a of spaghetti. And it’s like, but we need this, we need that. And next thing you know, it’s so big that you don’t even look at it very often because it’s too complicated to just glance at. Yeah, yeah.

Trey Taylor (23:48.353)
Agree?

Trey Taylor (23:58.38)
You don’t and you’ve aggravated your team to produce this TPS report that literally prints off the printer and falls into the garbage. You know, I mean, it’s it’s that way. I mean, the Dilbert life is real sometimes.

Mike Hambright (24:09.669)
Yeah, no, but I think there was a period, which we need to get back to, where it was very clear, it just, the team can kind of self-manage if they have KPIs that they’re responsible for. Sometimes, like you said, when nobody was responsible for a number, it’s easy for them to, you know, from their perspective, they’re working hard, I’m doing a bunch of stuff, and it’s like, yeah, but it’s not the productive stuff that we need, right? So there’s a lot of people that are content being busy, not necessarily productive.

Trey Taylor (24:37.56)
Well, our buddy, Trevor, he’s given a great speech that you and I have both listened to before, which is red light, green light, right? He says, hey, your number is either red or green, which is it? It isn’t yellow, okay? And if it’s red, you need to talk to us about it. We need to get it green. And if it’s green, we don’t need to talk about it at all. And so you really come in and you start to do much more efficient and focused work.

When you’ve got your KPIs, we do this on our managers meeting every week. Everybody reports their three top metrics, red light, green light. It takes literally 15 minutes. And then the other 45 minutes we spend on, okay, how do we get red light to green light? And it’s very efficient. Yeah.

Mike Hambright (25:18.493)
So Trey, what are some ways we talked about the primary things that a CEO needs to be responsible for, but what are some ways to become a great CEO and not just a good CEO, I guess?

Trey Taylor (25:29.484)
Well, the first way to become a good CEO is to buy the book, obviously. So we have to have that out there for sure.

Mike Hambright (25:33.469)
We’ll add a link by the way for you guys. This is a great book guys, by the way. You definitely should pick it up on Amazon or if Trey has another place to go, you can get it there. But great book that you need to check out.

Trey Taylor (25:45.966)
For sure. I appreciate you saying that. But the way to be a great CEO, think back to my, my sixth grade algebra teacher and her name was Madeline Brownlee and she wore these, these like pants suits that were made out of bulletproof polyester, you know, and she had this bouffant hairdo. Like I didn’t go to school in the sixties. You know, I mean, this was way past the time to have these kinds of funny hairdos. And she always had like these little,

brooches or pins that were like butterflies or bees or something like that. She just had this like style that she got comfortable with in 1968 and she wasn’t moving off of it. And she was tough as nails, man. You didn’t, you know, smart off to her. You didn’t ignore her suggestions or anything like that. And she was amazing. She was amazing because she evoked from people that best part of who they were when they couldn’t see it.

So I think that if we think of ourselves as CEOs, we don’t often think that the real beautiful work that we can do is inside the hearts and minds of people around us. And I think back to how Ms. Brownlee would do that. So for example, I remember, chill bumps on my shoulders every single time, walking down the hallway and she’s coming the opposite direction. You’re kind of looking for the exit, because you’re about to get in trouble for something. And she looks up on the…

wall and there’s this signup sheet for the student council election. And she looks, she says, why is your name not on that list? And it was like, no, I’m never going to do that. She said, put your name on that list. And so I did just to shut her up and, and then I won the election and all that kind of stuff. The point is not that the point is to this day, I’m in politics. One of our gubernatorial candidates for my state was on the phone with me just as I was, just as I was getting on with you.

calling and saying, I think I’m gonna make this run. Who do I need to talk to? And that sort of thing. so politics is part of my life. She saw that in me when I was 12 years old, 13 years old, and she called it out of me. Another day, probably same hallway, I’m walking down the hallway and she’s walking this new kid in. And she says, Mr. Taylor, she was always very formal that way. Mr. Taylor, come over, meet Mr. Cannon. I want you to take care of him. You show him you’ve been here a long time. You show him the ropes.

Trey Taylor (28:13.026)
You get him some friends and you take care of him like you’re supposed to do. And then she just walked off and left Todd Cannon in my care. Todd Cannon is my best friend to this day. You know, not that we talk every day or something like that, but she had that idea that she could look inside you and evoke it. She could bring it as the term comes from the Latin ex voca to call from within and put that together. And we should do that as CEOs.

Mike Hambright (28:34.247)
Hmm.

Yeah.

Trey Taylor (28:39.246)
We shouldn’t just say is this person in my bookkeeping office, is she doing a good job balancing my QuickBooks every day? We should make the effort to know them at such a deep and personal level that we know that they have always wanted to own a Harley and drive away on the weekends and that sort of thing. And we should want that for them in a way that we help them. Now, do we have to write a check for a Harley? That’s not what I’m saying. What I’m saying is we should look for opportunities where they can succeed.

Maybe we even see a Harley on the side of the road for sale. Whatever it happens to be, it doesn’t matter, but we need to know our people well enough and call from them the gifts that we can see in them that they can use in their own lives to lead a more full, a fuller and happier life. That’s what I think great CEOs do.

Mike Hambright (29:23.133)
Yeah, that’s great. That’s awesome. That’s awesome. Well, Trey, thanks so much for sharing some lessons with us today. Guys, you gotta check out this book. We’ll put a link down below. You want people to go to Amazon, Trey, or is there a better place to go? Okay.

Trey Taylor (29:34.582)
Amazon’s the easiest way. We sell more audible than Amazon these days, which is amazing. Yeah. Thank, thankful for that. We also just published this book in translated version in the Spanish language. The publisher came and said, Hey, we’re seeing a whole bunch of Spanish speaking countries by this book and we want to have that version. So that also is on Amazon and audible. I’m not reading it in Spanish, but it is on, it is on there for sure. Yeah. Somebody is. Yeah.

Mike Hambright (29:39.087)
Okay, yeah, yeah.

Mike Hambright (29:47.601)
All right.

Mike Hambright (29:56.765)
Great. Somebody is. Yeah. And if folks want to learn more about you or connect in any way, is there anywhere else they can go?

Trey Taylor (30:05.986)
Yeah, so the book has a website at CEOOlingdoes3things.com. My personal website is trey-taylor.com. A little bit of bio and a contact form if I can be of assistance to anybody there. And then, I do a newsletter. I think you actually get the newsletter. It’s Plant Your Flag is the name of it. The website for sign up, it’s a free newsletter, is plantyourflag.live.

And so it’s just sort of a collection of thoughts that I put together over the course of a week or a couple of weeks. I don’t write it on any regular schedule. It’s only when something, when I feel like I really have something to say and I write about almost all topics there.

Mike Hambright (30:39.725)
Yeah. Yeah, that’s awesome. Well, we’ll add links down below for that in the show notes for those of you that are driving right now or weren’t able to write that down. But Trey, thanks again. Great to see you always. Thanks so much for sharing some lessons. And I think that’s one of the things that us as real estate investors and entrepreneurs, real estate entrepreneurs of all stripes, you know, we all want to level up. And it’s one of things I see a lot of my mastermind is people are very self aware that they need to become a better leader. I think it takes it takes a while to get that, especially if you’re a young entrepreneur, you’re just

Trey Taylor (30:49.656)
You too.

Mike Hambright (31:07.431)
you’re trying to hustle your way to success, which, you know, we kind of like to say hustle is a season, it’s not a strategy. And sometimes you get pulled back into that season, but the goal is to become a great leader and to do that, you you need to build a great team as well. So, appreciate you joining us today and everybody, hope you got some great value from today. Share this podcast with some friends. If you’re not subscribed yet, make sure you subscribe.

Trey Taylor (31:11.234)
We’ve all done, yes.

Mike Hambright (31:29.393)
publish it everywhere we possibly can, obviously YouTube and everywhere where you can get an audio podcast at. So thanks so much for following along and we’ll see you on the next show.