Episode Transcript
[00:00:02] Speaker A: This is the podcast for small business owners and entrepreneurs who want to learn how simple ideas can lead to big wins for your business. I'm your host, Ryan Delello, professional dancer from TV's So You Think You Can Dance turned entrepreneur and business owner. I'm on a quest to discover the most creative ideas that have made all the difference for successful businesses. This is the idea. Podcast.
Hey, guys, welcome back to the Idea Wins podcast. Today we have Tom Sharp on the podcast. Tom Sharp is a leadership expert for entrepreneurs. After moving from Europe to America, he is now generously publishing and sharing all his tips, techniques, and tools in English for all entrepreneurs who want to transform their team into a motivated machine. Tom loves sharing stories and tips about freeing up massive amounts of time, about building teams you can actually trust, and about how he has helped ordinary entrepreneurs solve impossible problems. Tom, great to have you today.
[00:01:05] Speaker B: Thank you so much, ryan, thanks for having me.
[00:01:08] Speaker A: Absolutely, yeah. It's great to meet you. I know you mentioned something about it's great to connect with a dancer turned entrepreneur. So I'm going to have to ask you a little bit more about that. And yeah, just tell me more about yourself and what led you to becoming a leadership expert for entrepreneurs?
[00:01:26] Speaker B: Oh, man, those are so many questions in a rolling one. So I did a lot of dancing myself. I did a lot of modern jazz and modern dancing. So envision me. I'm six foot six wow. In a group of, I don't know, 20 ladies, all in front of the huge mirror. And maybe there was another guy every once in a while, but I really loved that. And I studied photography, so I did a lot of photography, dance photography as well.
[00:01:55] Speaker A: Very cool. And you're from? Tell me where you're from.
[00:01:58] Speaker B: I'm from the Netherlands.
[00:01:59] Speaker A: Netherlands, okay. Beautiful country.
[00:02:02] Speaker B: I joke that I'm born in a tiny, small village somewhere to the east of New York.
[00:02:09] Speaker A: Kind of just a little east, just.
[00:02:12] Speaker B: A little couple of miles.
But I started to delve into leadership, especially for entrepreneurs, because I am a high, quick start guy. And I started a couple of companies myself, and in one of them, I realized that I've done a lot of leadership in more, like the informal session, informal world. But now that people are really dependent on me for their job, their work, I'm dependent on them to create the results that my clients need. That's a whole different ballgame. I don't know about you, but most people that I've encountered as leaders, they have never done any leadership training when they started to professionally lead other people, which is insane to my mind, because if there's one thing that's really important for people is to have good managers and great entrepreneurs that they're working for. Right?
[00:03:07] Speaker A: Yeah. 100%. Your leadership can completely make or break it does. It makes or break the company yes. And how important it is then, if you get that role, to have some skills. I mean, in any role, I mean, you think about any role, you need skills. You need to know what you're doing.
[00:03:27] Speaker B: You wouldn't want the captain of your airplane to have no education, right. Or your surgeon. But why are we allowed?
I'm not about making everything illegal, but in a way, it's weird in our culture that we just dive in. I threw myself into the deep end. I thought, I know a bit about leadership. We'll figure it out. These people are just like me, right? They're all motivated because otherwise I wouldn't hire them. And then so together, we'll make this work. Well, that turned out quite a little bit different than I envisioned when I hired my first employee. And so over time, I started to realize, this is not going to go well. I really need to figure this out, how this will work, what my people need, what I need to change in me or in my communication or my leadership style. And I learned a ton, especially because my own personality is not geared towards managing at all. Like, I am the opposite of a manager.
[00:04:30] Speaker A: Which is cool, because people watching this need to understand that. Don't put yourself in a box. Don't say, well, I'm just not that leadership type of person.
There's a lot of people like, when I've taught people dance, they're like, oh, I'm just not a dancer. And I've proven them wrong every single time. Every single time. Anyone can learn.
I'm excited you're on today because I'm excited to learn. I'm excited for our audience to learn. The idea wins. Podcast is about small, simple ideas, things that you can do that make an impact, a big impact. So let's dive into some of those. What would you say right off the bat? What are some of the best things that you teach? Let's just jump into some of the meat of simple things that leaders can do that will make them more effective.
[00:05:18] Speaker B: I would say that the first thing is to really figure out who you are. And that's like an open door, but it's really important. And that's another thing that we don't really learn in school. So one of the tests that worked really well for me and for most of my clients is called the Colby Test by Kathy Colby. It shows you what your coronation is. And when I refer to I'm a high quick start, that's about the Colby Test. My natural inclination, my instinct of the way that I try to do things, realizing that I'm a high quick start and I'm, for instance, really low on follow through gives me the kind of the opportunity to figure out that I need other people on my team who are high on follow through. When I have follow through work to be done, like bookkeeping or administration, customer support, and it gives you an obligation to find people that are different from yourself, which is hard to do, but is really freeing in the end. So figuring out who you are, which roles you have in your team, and what kind of people you need to fill those roles, it's not necessarily simple, but it's a huge game changer for everyone that I work with.
[00:06:37] Speaker A: So would you say that getting your ego out of the way is kind of pivotal because it's about admitting your weaknesses, and you need to be open and free to say, yeah, hey, that's not a strength of mine.
[00:06:52] Speaker B: True.
[00:06:52] Speaker A: So let's bring in somebody who has that strength. And these are my strengths, and I'm going to really focus on those. And not that you can't improve and get better, but maybe it's more effective. Have you seen in your experience, it's much more effective to just, hey, we have people on our team. We need to have people on our team, so let's just make sure we have someone who has those strengths.
[00:07:14] Speaker B: I think you're completely right. On the other hand, I myself experienced it more as an excuse.
Instead of me having to force myself into doing all kinds of work that I really don't enjoy, that don't give me energy that I basically loathe doing. I suddenly had this excuse. Like, there's this report, my Colby test says I'm a high quick start. So I have this excuse that I need to hire other people to do different kinds of work. And in my mind, when you're an entrepreneur, that's not for nothing. It's not the easy path for most people. Right. So there already is something wrong with you, just as there is a lot wrong with me.
Once you figure out, oh, I enjoy this entrepreneurial lifestyle, you know that you're not standard.
Which means, in my mind, that for most of us, doing the work that other people can do as well as we can do, or even better, makes no sense.
[00:08:17] Speaker A: Right?
[00:08:17] Speaker B: So I talk about nickel work, silver work, and gold work. If I'm doing the nickel work that I can hand off to other people, delegate to them, spending 2020 $5 an hour, it makes no sense. But because of this sense of obligation and follow through and perseverance, I'm still doing this planning, or I'm still doing these emails, or I'm still doing this admin.
[00:08:40] Speaker A: I'm laughing because my wife and I and one of the businesses we run, we're in that situation right now where she doesn't want to get a virtual assistant. She just knows how to do everything, get it all done. But then at the same time, she's kind of complaining, like, I don't have time to do everything. And I was like, we need a virtual assistant. You don't need to be doing all these other tasks that someone else is like, they're really trained in doing. That's what they do for a living. Right? And you can then focus on you called it the gold.
[00:09:07] Speaker B: Yeah. Silver and gold. Silver is really hard because that's like sales calls and stuff that maybe generates $100 an hour. It's hard to let go of those tasks. But going to the gold is like your marketing, your mission, your vision, thinking about your strategies. That's like the real that's where you're making the money. Right?
[00:09:28] Speaker A: Yeah. Or even like, speaking events or being on podcasts or promoting yourself and being out there. Right.
[00:09:33] Speaker B: One on many that becomes gold work pretty easily. But what you find in your wife is what most of us have found throughout the years is that there's this barrier between doing everything yourself, like most people who are entrepreneurs or become entrepreneurs, we are hard workers.
We just put in the hours, right? Yeah.
[00:09:57] Speaker A: If you want it done right, do it yourself. We always say that. Right.
[00:10:00] Speaker B: So that's basically our approach. And so any problem that is thrown at us, we fix it by working harder.
And I feel that if you would sit with your wife and just make a list of everything that makes her hesitant to hire a VA and then you categorize those issues.
All of them are solvable. Yeah, but it's mostly a mindset issue that our culture doesn't teach us to delegate stuff to other people who enjoy doing the work that we really hate.
[00:10:34] Speaker A: I've asked her to create that list, but I think I need to sit down with her and do it with her.
[00:10:41] Speaker B: When it's about things where you feel this hesitation, it always helps to help somebody. Or just ask Chad GPT. Like, what are probably my why am.
[00:10:53] Speaker A: I hesitating just ask Chad GPT. Right.
Well, actually so let's dive into I was looking at your website, which let me pull that up. Buildcoolthings co, right?
[00:11:07] Speaker B: Yes.
[00:11:08] Speaker A: And one of the things that was on there was freeing up. I think it was up to 8 hours a week that you can help leaders do that because time is money. I really believe that time is money. And we're kind of talking about that, getting a virtual assistant and freeing up time because with that time, you can focus on the gold. Right. So maybe share with us a couple of tips about that strategy.
[00:11:34] Speaker B: So what we do with our clients is that we have them create a time X ray before we actually start working with them, which is basically where we figure out where all their time is going right now. If you spend an hour on nickel work, you're not spending that same hour on your gold work or even your silver work. And once we have that X ray, most of the time there's one or two exceptions. But most of our clients, it's relatively easy to help them figure out ways to delegate or outsource or optimize or automate the work that is taking so much of their time right now. And for most of us. It's also like a revelation where you don't really know where your time is going. You just feel that you're working all the time. You don't necessarily feel the impact or the satisfaction of your work, especially if you're doing a lot of nickel work. You will probably not have a lot of satisfaction, not a lot of creativity. But you feel that you're on this threatmill that you cannot exit because who will do what needs to be done?
[00:12:38] Speaker A: Yeah, and the domino is crazy because like you said, the creativity, it is scientifically proven that we cannot be creative in a stressful environment. Your brain doesn't work that way. So just relieving that stress, the domino effect, that the impact that that can have on your business of having more creativity, more clarity of thought.
I think that's huge. That's what we're all about. That's a simple thing you can do that can have a huge impact.
[00:13:07] Speaker B: And that's where I feel that virtual assistants can be really valuable. Because you can hire a virtual assistant to work for you for two or 4 hours a week. Try it out for three months. Hand over the kind of work that may not be necessarily business critical right away, but that really drains you, that takes a lot of your energy. And then figure out in two or three months how you respond to that.
[00:13:34] Speaker A: Love that.
[00:13:35] Speaker B: So instead of hiring a full time employee right from the bed for 38 hours, I loved creating small experiments instead of going all in all the time.
[00:13:46] Speaker A: So where do you recommend, just to follow up on that, where do you recommend finding the best VAS that you can trust?
[00:13:56] Speaker B: So that's a whole kind of worms by itself. What I find is that a players, the people that you really want in your team, they normally are not looking to find another job because they are a players. They probably already have a job and there are exceptions. But most of these people are not actively looking to find a new place to work. That's different for virtual assistants because by nature they work for multiple clients. So most of the time it's much easier to find a really good virtual assistant instead of finding somebody that's going to work for you on the admin side and is really good, or as a manager is really good.
So when it comes to virtual assistants, my recommendation is to just experiment. And it might be number three, four or five that you hire where suddenly you feel like we have this click together, connect. Yeah, but the foundation of all of this is that you write down what you need this person to do for you.
Jeff Smart calls it the scorecard. That's the system that we work with. This is the mission of the job, these are your responsibilities, this is what we expect from you. And you just list it all out and you'll probably as an entrepreneur, when you hire your first employee or your first virtual assistant, you're probably looking for somebody to take over a lot of admin stuff, which in my mind means that you're looking for a person that scores high on follow through. He or she really enjoys doing these day by day activities.
They're kind of the same every day. And where you and I would not like that type of work, there are people who actually enjoy doing that.
[00:15:45] Speaker A: They like checking off the absolutely. The bullet points. It's like a gamification for them.
[00:15:50] Speaker B: Yeah. They like to have the plan. There's not so much ambiguity. It's just like, no. If I clear out his email inbox, then I feel this accomplishment for today.
[00:16:02] Speaker A: Right. Awesome. Okay. I love that. Let's dive into a couple of other questions.
[00:16:08] Speaker B: Sure.
[00:16:08] Speaker A: So I'm looking here.
Let's see the trap of starting your day with urgent work. That one really stood out to me. Maybe dive into that. That's something that you mentioned you can talk about.
[00:16:21] Speaker B: Absolutely. So the problem with urgent work is that it kind of screams for your attention.
And this makes us uncomfortable in our body even, or in our mind.
But it makes no sense to start your day working on the urgent work because it will get done anyway.
If it needs to be ready by 04:00 p.m., or you need to ship it by five and you start doing that around 03:00 p.m., it will still get done.
[00:16:56] Speaker A: That's true.
[00:16:57] Speaker B: And the other stuff that you are postponing, the stuff that's like the gold work, the strategic work, the thinking, the connecting, the marketing kind of jobs, if you start your day doing them, you will have the satisfaction early in the day. You will actually make progress.
It doesn't necessarily have to be your entire morning. One of the things that works really well for our clients is what I call the rule of eleven, where you're not allowing yourself to open your email before 11:00 a.m..
Wow.
[00:17:35] Speaker A: Yeah. That's going to be really hard for people.
[00:17:37] Speaker B: Absolutely.
[00:17:38] Speaker A: It's the first thing they do when they wake up oftentimes. Yeah.
[00:17:42] Speaker B: So what you're actually doing when you're doing that is you wake up, you grab your phone, and then you start checking the to do lists of the people around you. That's basically what you're doing when you're looking at your inbox. Right. You are looking at the to do lists of other people.
[00:17:59] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:18:00] Speaker B: Why would you do that? Makes no sense in my mind.
[00:18:03] Speaker A: I love that it feels like if you start with that urgent work, that busy work, you just kind of like just keep doing the busy work and then you never get to the goal. You never get to this strategy because you just kind of get in this mode of, okay, now what's the next urgent thing I need to do?
[00:18:21] Speaker B: That's completely true. So another concept that works really well for me is to think about entropy, where there's just too much details, too much that's trying to grab my attention.
I have that in my meetings. So I have two team leaders and I meet with them every three weeks or so. And we may have one or 2 hours of discussions and meetings where they come with their problems and they immediately also suggest solutions because that format is so efficient and because they do most of the thinking instead of delegating it upwards to me, which is a real problem when you're having a team.
These meetings tend to be draining for me because in the span of an hour, we are talking about maybe 30 different things.
[00:19:11] Speaker A: Right.
[00:19:12] Speaker B: And I find that in the morning, if I can get myself to the point where I'm going to sit behind my computer and I'm going to work on thinking, strategy, content, the stuff that really matters for me and for my clients and for my business in the long term, it makes my life much more quiet. In a good way. And the excitement will come. After eleven. There will be enough excitement left.
[00:19:40] Speaker A: I love that. I think that's awesome.
It's essentially to me, because I've done a lot of research into starting your day with meditation, right.
How important that is for your mental health. This is essentially doing the same thing for your business.
It's taking that time in the morning, which is critical, and your brain is the sharpest when you wake up and working on that goal.
[00:20:08] Speaker B: For most people, it is, absolutely. So I really like the book Rest by Alex Pang and he talks about all the scientific proof for how it does not work if you spend too many hours a day trying to think.
[00:20:24] Speaker A: I love that. I'm going to write that down, add it to my book.
[00:20:28] Speaker B: A I love it. It's a great book.
And for me, I already understood that if I don't give myself enough rest and not enough time to recuperate, then my creativity will go down a drain. However, when I read his scientific explanations, it started to really impact me. I started to get convinced, like, oh, this is something that I need to take really seriously. If in the course of my life I really want to have the impact that I'd like to have in helping as many people as possible, becoming better leaders, then I better make sure that I'm not falling into the trap of working too many hours a day.
[00:21:09] Speaker A: Yeah, and who wouldn't want to work less hours per day?
Everyone wants to free up time.
[00:21:17] Speaker B: Yeah, I don't know about that. I feel that many of us, especially entrepreneurs, but also managers, we are addicted to the cycle of what is it like dopamine cycle of troubleshooting. Troubleshooting. Troubleshooting. And we call it the firefighting. Right. And I feel that sometimes we ourselves are the one that light the fires because we crave the excitement.
But that's not the kind of guy that I'd like to be.
[00:21:47] Speaker A: Yeah, for sure.
Impact.
It's about making impact. All right, so let's dive into another question.
Let's change it up a little bit. What are the six words and what makes them so powerful?
[00:22:02] Speaker B: So this has been really valuable for me when I started to delegate, and as the founder of the business, I knew everything.
So for many entrepreneurs, especially technician entrepreneurs, that's the case. Right.
You are the expert in what you do, and then you start building your business because you're growing. More people are being added to your team, but you still know everything.
So the six words are I don't know how that works.
I don't know how that works. It doesn't have to be true, but it means that when you are opening a spreadsheet and you want to analyze some marketing stuff or some I don't know, whatever, you have a spreadsheet, you want to analyze something, and you see that it has not been updated. My natural inclination would be to go to the server to download the SQL query again, to update the Excel, and then do my own analysis. And instead of doing that, I've learned to call one of my team members and say, hey, Eve, I don't know how that works. I need this, but I don't know how it works. Can you please do that for me? And basically, my idea is that you need to shrink your own comfort zone. We're always talking about expanding your comfort zone. Right. I feel that you need to shrink it. So basically what I do is I write down, this is my work. Words on paper.
That's my work. Everything else is not my work.
And it might not be literally words on paper. Might be words on the computer screen, might be talking to Ryan in the podcast, might be walking outside with my notebook or my voice recorder, thinking about a new article I'm going to write or a new training course that we're going to start. Might be coaching my clients in one on one zoom calls. But in my mind, that is all words on paper. But it's not administration, it's not bookkeeping, it's not customer support. It's not all the other stuff.
[00:24:16] Speaker A: Right.
[00:24:17] Speaker B: I don't know how that works. This client needs an answer. I don't know how it works.
[00:24:22] Speaker A: So you're narrowing your focus into which is great, because then you're like, I am really good at this, and if I focus my time on this, I'm going to get better at it. In fact, I'm going to become the best at it. Right. Instead of trying to juggle so many different hats. Right.
[00:24:42] Speaker B: That's pretty much what you absolutely. So you can work really hard on your weak points, and then you will end up with really strong weak points, and that makes no sense. Right.
So one of the other things that I work on with my clients is that I feel that oftentimes their focus is on the product or the service that they deliver to their clients. So the product has to be great or the service has to be amazing, which makes a lot of sense, but that's what you do when you have a job.
So when you are an entrepreneur, you really want to build a team. I think that it makes sense to figure out ways to have your team create the products, to have your team deliver the service as much as they can. And then your focus needs to be on how do I improve the quality of my team so that they can in turn deliver the absolute best product and service to my clients.
That's great, but it changes everything because suddenly I make my team members responsible for their jobs instead of every time that I see that something might be going wrong a little bit, then I'm jumping in, taking over, shoving them out of the way, I'll fix this, I'll fix this. It makes no sense.
[00:26:02] Speaker A: So you have to find a good team.
[00:26:04] Speaker B: Absolutely.
So that's why you need to focus on finding the A players and basically create dream jobs for them instead of just putting I need somebody on a job seeker's website where these people are not looking anyway.
[00:26:22] Speaker A: So let's finish with that. So what are your best tips for building an A team for finding them, those A players?
[00:26:29] Speaker B: I would start with inviting you to create a dream chart, which is basically an.org chart for maybe in two years or so. So we completely lose from our current team. We are thinking about our dream team. How would we want it to be in two years then for each department in your business? Could be a small department, could be a small business, but basically you write out the departments. I think Mission Vision Strategy is one for you as the entrepreneur. Then you have team or HR, finance, research and development, marketing and sales, operations and quality assurance.
I nick these from David Allen from GTD. And I added research and development. But it makes a lot of sense to my mind. Then you try to find the roles of the people that you will need to run these departments.
For each role you create a scorecard, mission requirements, kind of energy that you need to bring. Are you going to bring blue follow through energy or are you going to bring yellow creative quickstart energy?
And so now you know the kind of people that you're going to need.
And then it becomes a question of marketing the other way around. Where you're not marketing to find new clients, you are marketing to find the best candidates.
[00:27:56] Speaker A: Right?
[00:27:57] Speaker B: So just like in regular marketing you're thinking like, who are these people? I need this person on my research and development team. What kind of a person would that be? Where would he live? What kind of a job would he or she have? Where is their attention already? What is bothering them about their current job? Maybe they have commute that's too long. Maybe they need to use a computer that's too slow. Maybe their boss is an asshole. Whatever. Like anything that you can use as a lever to get their attention.
It's a bit more complicated than that. But I find that starting with the chart and the scorecard and then trying to figure out who are these people, where are they? How can I kind of lure them into looking at my job proposal and create a dream job for them that is making a ton of sense in my mind?
[00:28:49] Speaker A: That's fantastic. I think that's a great start for us. And to get it, just wrap it around our mind and understand where to begin. But then of course, from there, I'm sure you're going to might go through one or two people because you got to connect. But I think you'll find that person faster if you follow that model, which is huge.
That's the goal that I was looking for is kind of just a structure of a model, what you could follow.
So how can people work with you? Tell us. Obviously your website is buildcoolthings co.
[00:29:24] Speaker B: Yes, exactly. Or blog. And that's where you'll find my blog. I'm in the process of taking all the stuff that I learned over the last two, three decades and turning it into English so that the rest of the world can enjoy it. And then I work with a couple of entrepreneurs, one on one, or with my team. We have a pretty intense coaching program. It's called refactor. And what we basically do is we take our approach of figuring out what do you really want? What's the current bottleneck? Why is it not working? Why have you not accomplished where you want to be right now? We going to help you to solve those bottlenecks and then using small experiments to solve those problems and then attack the next bottleneck. And what we normally do is that we work mostly on freeing up time. That's our specialty. Like when you are into the thick of running your business and you feel like my potential is much bigger than I can see right now. Like my impact is not large enough. I'm doing too much nickel work. I need to free up my time to think about AI or marketing or whatever is happening in your business. That's what we really love doing, freeing up time for more impact.
[00:30:42] Speaker A: Fantastic. And how long do you normally work with your clients?
[00:30:47] Speaker B: We start with half a year, six months. And we take it from there. So what we need to do is all the time is help our clients see that they make enormous progress and they just don't want to leave us. That's basically the idea. But that is counter to my personality because I really love to help people think for themselves. And to be free and not be attached to us. So that's an interesting dynamic all the time.
[00:31:16] Speaker A: It is, because you're getting such amazing results for them.
They want to continue with you, but at the same time so what we.
[00:31:24] Speaker B: Do is we try to not make our clients dependent on us. We help them to do their own thinking. So we basically teach them a step by step process that they can still use. Like ten years later. I get emails from clients from ten years ago who say, the approach to solving problems that I learned from you is still impacting me so much. So that's where I'm really satisfied.
[00:31:53] Speaker A: Fantastic. And I'm sure people can book a discovery call where they absolutely talk to you and make sure and see if it's the right fit for them. Right.
[00:32:01] Speaker B: So they can hit me up on Twitter with a DM or can check out the website.
[00:32:05] Speaker A: What are your social handles?
[00:32:07] Speaker B: Build cool things. And Twitter doesn't allow me to use the I in the last word, but when you go to buildcoolthings blog, it's all okay.
[00:32:18] Speaker A: Well and we'll link it in the podcast description.
[00:32:21] Speaker B: Thanks, Ryan.
[00:32:22] Speaker A: Tom, great having you on just so much. I mean, talking about gold, I think you shared some real gold nuggets with us and really, really excited for our listeners to reach out to you so that you can help them free up time and make more impact.
[00:32:38] Speaker B: Thank you so much for having me. I really enjoyed our conversation. I hope we will have many more to follow on or off podcast. I don't care. I enjoy your enthusiasm and thanks for having me.
[00:32:49] Speaker A: Absolutely same. Have a great day, guys.
[00:32:52] Speaker B: You too.
[00:32:52] Speaker A: Thank you. All right, see you.
Thanks for listening. If you're looking for tools or resources to grow, optimize, and save money for your business, or if you have questions about today's podcast or a previous episode, go to ideawins.com. We believe every idea counts, and a small, simple idea might be the only thing holding you back from a big win for your business. Don't forget to subscribe to the podcast and your favorite Pod cast app so you never miss an episode. And as always, thanks for sharing Idea wins with your friends. I'll see you next time.
