Sean: From your experiences meeting different leaders, what are the qualities all leaders need to have? Wow, big question.

Edwin: I think I've interviewed almost 200 business leaders on my podcast called the Business Leadership Podcast and everything from super excited tech founders. But what I find is that they are visionary in the sense that they know what they want to achieve, but they are also humble, and empathetic that they don't know everything. So they want to build a super team around them, and they want to have them and treat them like, you know, with respect and want to empower them and get them out of the way.

Edwin: But that's what I find, really quickly in terms of what is like - to get out of your own ego. And you know, we all love the title CEO-Founder. Ultimately, we're at the bottom and we're trying to raise everyone else up. We're there to make everyone successful, and there's no job, no role that we can't do to help them. You know, at the end of the day as the founder and the entrepreneur. If everyone fails, it comes to you, and you gotta do it. And that sort of comes with the job description. It may not be written anywhere.

Edwin: Because it's not your people's, you know after they quit, you know, you can't expect them, you need them to have a life. So that's also the empathy and life balance that you want to give your people. But I think my answer is 100 percent visionary, empathetic, and humble.

Sean: Really good qualities. I run a lot of - pre-pandemic, I do run leadership conferences, and I ask people this question: What is your idea of a leader? And then I proceed to write it on the glass board or whiteboard. And you know, some of the most common things that people would say - humility, it's there. Empathy, initiative, execution, diligence, integrity, the list goes on. It's an amazing list, that is what I could say, it doesn't run out, right?

Sean: People expect all of those qualities, right? Kind takes care of people, thinks about their people. Generous, honest. There are just so many qualities of a leader that people look for. And these are people who are team members, their employees, their team members, team players. They look for so many things with a leader that it is hard for even me to say, what are the qualities all leaders need to have? If I'm going to have to say the top three, top four, it doesn't encapsulate what kind of leader you and I should be. Because people expect it to be all of those things. And whenever you and I are not all those things, we're failing as a leader in their eyes, it's that they hold us to very high standards. That's really the job of a leader.

Sean: I would just add integrity to the mix, be a one-man person. When you know how I am here in Leadership Stack, talking to you guys who are tuned in. This is how I am with my team. This is how I talk with them. I'm a one-man person, who I am at home, when I talk with my kids and my wife, I'm a one-man person. It's the same way I talk with them. And I treat everyone the same.

Sean: When you have a private life, and public life, and a different persona at work, it's tough for people to see you as a good leader because you're two-faced and it's hard for people to also trust you, and you're also unpredictable. And when you're unpredictable, that means you're inconsistent. And when you're inconsistent, that means you're not accountable. People can count on you. So integrity is one of the biggest things that I think a leader should have. Otherwise the foundation of people trusting you and allowing themselves to be influenced and led by you. It's not going to happen. So I hope that helps.

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Sean: What are the challenges you faced when starting up your tech company?

Edwin: You know, a lot of the challenges, like any entrepreneur, is the ability to do many things. So it all depends if you're coming with a large team. But most entrepreneurs, most tech founders, they're doing many things. They're not only building out their stack or their tech stack, their MVP but they're also needed to - we built our business on paying customers. We bootstrapped it, right? The biggest challenge I found was finding that balance of finding new customers, delivering a product, a superior product. The challenge that I'm seeing is finding that rhythm, right, and that balance. But if you want to grow in scale, you got to exit yourself from these different positions.

Edwin: And this is something Sean talks about a lot in terms of and I know we talked about, you know, firing, getting, and how to grow. But ultimately it's finding that rhythm carving out the time to build out the system. So when you hire someone, they're not just there waiting for you to tell them what to do, that there's a system and a process for them to follow. Otherwise, they're just sitting there twiddling their thumbs. So I would say the biggest challenge now that I said that out loud is doing the work when it happens. When I say doing the work is to write out the process right away, like, OK, I close a deal. This is what I have to do next. I got to send an onboarding email. So here's the template, and then I got to do this. I got a log into this system, so they're there. Or what if it's all integrated already, but write down that process right away.

Edwin: I've seen entrepreneurs not have a process after running their business for 10 years, and they're wondering why it's difficult to hire people because you know, "the people come and go. And when I don't know why, I can't keep people" and I say, Well, do you have a specific job role or do you have the process for them? What are they doing when you hire them? You can't just hire them and let them sit there. They get very quickly unmotivated. If you're not empowering these people, then they don't feel worthy or not motivated to work, they're already leaving. That is my biggest challenge - is probably on the scale, understanding processes and systems. It's easy to - especially today, Sean, there are so many tools out there. Like I said, like Bubble, you could resell a tech stack and just label it and you could sell right away. But the problem is scaling the sales, scaling the customer support, scaling the billing, and doing all those types of stuff.

Sean: And that is true 100 percent. But that is also something that you're going to want to do as you scale. Otherwise, you're building the company in a linear way. And the problem is when you lose someone's key while you're building it in a linear way, you're in line suddenly goes flat or goes down because you lose a key person. But if you have your processs documents to back you up when you hire, it's automatic. You hire, they get onboarded, they learn stuff, they read the process document.

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Sean: What are important things to consider if you are planning to start your own tech business?

Edwin: I mean, that's a great question, Pam. I mean, I would have to - that's a whole can of worms. I'd be asking you, Pam, like, what's the tech business? Do you know? Are you a tech founder or are you looking to partner with a tech founder? I guess depending on those answers, you know, understanding where you're fitting this technology in, you know what the pain points are, how did you find those pain points? Where were you connecting with?

Edwin: At the end of the day, whether it's a tech business, a service business, you got to know that there's a need for it and you're filling a gap, because all of us have a billion ideas and whether it's technology or service or whatnot. And we got to make sure that it works well. The challenge, if you're not tech, is finding a partner or someone to help you develop your MVP. Having said that is, if you want to build out an MVP, you don't need to know code anymore.

Sean: Really good stuff. Like Edwin, it has to boil down to what kind of tech business you are planning to start. It's hard to answer this question with just an open-ended, vague assumption that is any tech business because there are just so many tech businesses that you can start today. So many problems you can solve.

Sean: It's going to have to be number one, can you be the best in something in that tech startup that you're going to try to get into? So what is going to be your number one-shot or number one feature if you want to try and go head to head with these other startups because it is a global business, when you start a tech startup, if it's a software as a service business, it is on a global scale and platform, and you're going to have to compete on a global scale.

Sean: And competing globally is very, very tough. A lot of players don't play fair, they don't play nice. I've had the experience of starting a SAS business - Qeryz. It's still up, it's still running. We still use it and a lot of our clients use it as well. And my experience in running that, there's just so many dirty players that you're going to have to go up against. And I'm sure Edwin you've experienced your fair share of that with Slingshot VOIP. So that's something that I would strongly consider. Like, what can be the best? Like who's your target market? Are they startups? Are they scale-ups? Or are they at the big enterprise level? And what will these features fit very well with them?

Sean: So there are so many factors we could go on and on, and Edwin mentioned is a can of worms that you're going to be opening. Yeah, that's true. So qualifying the question further would help a lot. If you're still in discord, you might want to qualify it further so we can help you out better. But otherwise, for me, it's going to be like, what's that one thing you can be the best at when you're starting your tech startup?

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Sean: When will you get funding, like taking SEO Hacker to the next level?

Sean: Oh, I've been getting a lot of those questions recently. Strangely enough, this is the fourth time that I've gotten it in a four to five-day span. Seems like a lot of people are interested in investing in SEO Hacker. I think that if I could keep it 100 percent owned by me, like what it is now, I would go for that. It's hard for an entrepreneur to always have someone telling him or her what to do, and I'm the type of entrepreneur where I like being at the helm. I like being on the hill.

Sean: So it is hard for me to tell you when I will get funding because honestly, right now, SEO Hacker does not need funding. We need to invest as well. That's all we need because when you're in the services industry, you usually cannot just buy more stock and sell it for a higher price, like when you're in the merchandising industry. the merchandising or trading industry, like the retail industry, they buy stuff, they sell it in the malls or online, whatever. And what they use with the money when they sell stuff, what they do with that money is they buy more of those stuffs that they think they can sell. So the money just circulates.

Sean: The difference between that and a service company like SEO Hacker is we don't have stocks to buy. So the money does not circulate in that way with SEO Hacker. As the CEO and founder, we have this stockpile of cash, and we do need to invest it somewhere because just leaving it in the bank is not the wisest thing to do. It is not the best thing for me as the CEO and founder to do.

Sean: So if I do need to get funding, it would be for a huge reason. It should be for a huge reason. And I don't believe that we would need funding for the next few years unless we want to buy out a competitor, who is also selling. A really good competitor who's selling. I might get investors just to buy competitors. That's it. Otherwise. I don't think we're going to really need or get funding. Hope that helps.

Sean: Taking SEO Hacker to the next level, the answer there is we're always taking it to the next level. So during this pandemic, where we have a slew of inquiries, and a slew of customers coming in, clients coming in. We are able to already see the trajectory on where we should go and we are leveling it up. We're actually professionalizing the entire company and we are hiring executive-level people already right now. So that is hopefully going to double, or allow us to double or triple our revenues when we professionalize in the next three years.

Sean: My target is the CEO and founder, and the main salesperson of the company is to grow 100 percent each year. So far doing great. Can I take it to 200 percent? I don't know. That's the next question, but 100 percent every year is great for me, and that has been my target ever since I started the company. So we have grown more than that when we were at the very beginning. When you're at the beginning, it's possible to grow 300-1000 percent. But when you scale to a 50 man team, it's already hard-hitting 100 percent sometimes, especially when you're in the SEO industry, not in the tech industry. So I hope that helps.

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Sean: From Viane, how should I or how do I go all-in with what I've started?

Sean: When you go all in, that means you're sure you're doubling down on what you have. That means, for example, with me, that's when I resigned from HP and finally just went full time doing SEO Hacker because I was so sure that SEO was going to be big because I was an avid user of Google before. Now I keep searching. I'm a very curious guy. How I learned stuff is by searching for it in Google and learning it on my own. That's how I learn SEO on my own. That's how I experimented on the ranking factors. That's how I put up my first blog. That's how I learned to do certain kinds of coding. That's how I learned to edit some plugins and so on.

Sean: And curiosity. Google serves curiosity. Google serves desire. How can it go wrong? How can it not grow? So I doubled down on SEO because I saw how powerful Google is. In fact, today there are people asking Google, Where can I find God? How do I get a love life? Stuff that you usually ask your parents or a close friend, you know? So, you know, given that thought, which is not that, you know, when you think about it, it's pretty sad that people are asking Google that.

Sean: But that shows you how powerful Google is, and that showed me how powerful SEO can be. And so during 2010, 2009-2010, no one knew what CEO was, but I was doubling down on it. I quit my job, which was my only job, and I was very fortunate to have that job because I feel 28 units college. I didn't know why they hired me, but they did. They took a risk with me and I quit, you know, how bad that feels. But I doubled down on SEO and I knew this is the way to go.

Sean: And looking back, it's now 2021. That was over 10 years ago. I'd say it's one of the best things I've ever decided on and I've ever doubled down on. And building the brand SEO Hacker up to this point. This, I believe, is the time for me to finally see how the seeds I planted are growing, because now I can see how many people are just saying, "SEO? If you need SEO, SEO-Hacker." I don't even know some of these people, but they keep referring SEO Hacker to people who are looking for  SEO, which is great and I love them, and I'm going to be forever grateful to these people, referring SEO Hacker to all of these clients that also, I don't know, but that's the power of word of mouth. That's the power of doubling down on what you believe in. That's the power of branding.

Sean: Invest in good branding. Make sure you do business ethically and with integrity. You take care of your clients and go the extra mile for them. They'll love you. They will share who you are with the rest of the world who need your stuff as well.

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Sean: How can I make more enticing copies on my social media accounts?

Sean: A lot of people forget social media is not about selling stuff. Social media is about connections, that's it at the get-go. And I was there when Facebook was starting. I was one of the people who hopped in. I was one of the people who ran ads for the very first time when Sheryl Sandberg finally released the ability to run ads on Facebook. I was there when it was full of Facebook games. I was there. So I've seen the growth of social media, and it didn't grow because it was a great place to sell stuff. Social media grew because it's a great way to connect with people, how you share your ideas, how you share memories, how you are able to consume other people's memories and ideas, and thoughts. It's about connections, so copies on social media that are meant for you to connect with other people, are the copies that will do really well. When you say enticing copy, it's not a copy that should sell, it's a copy that should connect to your target users. That is pretty much the only way you can do it to make it “enticing”.

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Sean: What are the best ways to grow organically, especially when your startup is still in the early stages?

Sean: The best way to actually generate a lot of words is word of mouth about your business, about your product, about your service because that's free. And that is very, very effective in the sense that when you get referred by someone to another person who might want to get your product or service. That is a very powerful referral right there. And I know because my clients who are loyal to SEO Hacker and what we do and who have reaped the benefits of our work have been referring us left and right, and I'm so pleased and happy whenever I am personally tagged in Facebook groups, whenever there are people looking for SEO makes me so happy.

Sean: It's word of mouth, right? Can't beat it. And one of the other things that I used to grow my business organically, SEO Hacker, is to do content marketing, and I was writing, so it was free for me. That was organic-free growth for me. When I was blogging about SEO, everything I was learning, I made sure that people could subscribe and tune in whenever I had news about the SEO industry or new strategies out there about the SEO industry. And we still blog about new strategies and updated strategies.

Sean: We were able to publish earlier about SEO copywriting, by the way, for those of you who subscribe to the SEO Hacker newsletter, sorry for the double send. The first send was completely broken and we were testing things out I really am really sorry about that, but we were able to fix it. And now, if you want to go ahead and read the SEO copywriting article - How to do copywriting right? Then just go ahead and tune in to SEO-hacker.com, you will be able to find it. So, yeah, definitely content marketing. Write the content yourself. If you're a thought leader like myself during the early days of SEO Hacker, that is one big way for us to do it, and word of mouth marketing is generated when you have a word of mouth marketing strategy.

Sean: And for SEO-Hacker, we follow the Purple Cow principle, which is to make your product or service so good and so great. Go the extra mile that people can't help but talk about you. That is the strategy I use for SEO Hacker, and it worked mighty well.

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Sean: So what do you mean about being strategically unpredictable?

Len: You do want to be consistent in terms of the brand that you deliver? Right? But as you said, you can become so predictable that you become vulnerable. So what this comes down to, and one of the things and what I talk about in this chapter in the book is what's called the OODA loop.

Len: So it's O-O-D-A, It's an acronym. O-O-D-A right, OODA. It stands for Observe, Orient, Decide, Act. OODA loop. Observe, Orient, Decide, Act. This was born from the military where they were trying to come up with How do we understand how fighter pilots make their decision process and how do we win more fights in the air? And so what they began to understand is that we all, everybody goes through this OODA loop. Every time we make a decision, we go through the OODA loop. But here's the trick. If we're going through the OODA loop, we observe, we orient, we decide, we act. If something happens that disrupts us. We have to go back to the beginning. We have to re-observe, reorient, re-decide, and re-act.

Len:  OK, well, let's talk about basketball. So you're a basketball player, right? The guy you're guarding is coming straight down the court, going right towards the basket, you're in the corner somewhere. You don't have to be a mathematical genius to figure out at what speed and what angle to run, to intercept him or her. Right?

Len: Now, when you get up to that person, if they juke, if they dribble behind their back, if they fake or feint and move, that's when we start seeing those ankle-breaking videos where people fall all over themselves, right? Because what's happened is when you observe, you orient, you decide, and you act. You've observed you've oriented yourself. You decide and then they move and everything changes, and your brain goes back to the beginning. It's too late for your body. It's already moving. It already has inertia and momentum, and then you fall over, right?

Len: But how you get there can dictate how successful you are, based on how predictable you are. In business, if we're doing the same things all the time, the same way. And we do and it's all the same, how hard is it for our competition to be able to meet us?

Len: One of the things that you can do is self-disruption. The best type of disruption is self-disruption. As an example, I use Netflix. Everybody knows that Netflix disrupted the movie rental business, right? And you know, that's a big story about what they did to Blockbuster and all that, and Blockbuster's gone and all that. But to me, the bigger story with Netflix is what they've done since. Because they did not stop, they could have stopped and just been this company that delivers DVDs through the mail. Yeah, but they did. They moved to stream right?

Len: And then did they stop there? No, they didn't. They then moved to original content production where they're producing their own content. And did they stop there? No. Now they're getting into game development and gaming. Every time they do that, they force their competition to rethink what they're doing. You know, the competition at first was like, OK, how do we deliver movies through the mail? And then the competition was like, Wait, that's not the game anymore now we got to figure out how to do this streaming thing. Wait a minute.

Len: Now we got this figured out and now we've got to figure out how to do our own content. The more that you force your competition to move by disrupting yourself before they can disrupt you, the best type of disruption is self-disruption. That is a concrete way that you can remain strategically unpredictable. You are not unpredictable in terms of what your goals are, but you're unpredictable in terms of how you get there, which forces your competition to slow their decision process down.

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Sean: How do I, or all the business owners who are to actually, keep at the edge of our seats, not in paranoia, but in vigilance, in our own lives, in our own habits? What's the mindset that we have to have?

Len: I think what I hear from you is, you know when I hear about where you might be becoming complacent. I don't think about you becoming complacent in terms of the business that you have - that business, that you have people running, You're in danger of becoming complacent in life. Right.

Len: And you know, when you talk about what the mindset is, the mindset that I tell people is, and this is why this is so important. The goal, the end goal is not success. The end goal is keeping it. So becoming successful is not the pinnacle. It is the start. How do you keep that success in business and in life? Right. So you're at this position now where you have a successful business and you have taught people and you've given people the right skills and the right autonomy to be able to run that successfully.

Len: So now what's your purpose? Right? So how do you remain useful to your family, to your friends, to whatever relationships you have? Right? How do you push beyond? How do you look at where that next step, right? The goal is not success, keeping it is. And success is not money. Success is happiness. Success is productivity. Success is a purpose, right? And so, you know, you said, you know, after 10, 11 years, I think you said you finally came up with a purpose for your business. Right? Do you have to start spending a little bit of that time thinking about what is your personal purpose? What is your purpose in life? Because what entrepreneurs have a tendency to do is define themselves as their business. But you are not your business. That is not your legacy. Your legacy goes beyond that.

Len: And that's what you have to figure out is, what is my legacy? Do I want to create another business? Do I want to create ancillary businesses as I come out of this? Do I want to be a philanthropic person? Do I want to be, you know, the best father, or the best husband, or the best partner or whatever? I can be, right? What is your purpose that goes beyond that business? Because it sounds like you've done a great job to set that business up for success. And now it's like, what's the next stage for you?

Len: So this applies to personal life as much as it does anything. We have a tendency as entrepreneurs also to further our business to the detriment of our personal relationships. Our personal relationships become second seats to what we're doing. And so, you know, here's a great opportunity to evaluate that for yourself. Where do you stand in there? Like how do you feel about that? What do you want to do about that? So, you know, the way to not be complacent is to continue to ask, why? Why am I doing this? Why am I here? Why am I moving forward? What am I moving forward towards right? And where could the threats come from? If you do that in your personal life, in your business, life will always continue forward.

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Len: That idea is, what this builds into is being able to articulate your 'why.' We talked about this a little bit already, but what this gets into is understanding what your true purpose is.

Len: So, you know, if someone walks into a store and steals something from a store, that person, if caught, can go to jail or they can walk away with a ticket, or they can walk away with a warning. Right. It all depends on a lot of different factors. Right. And I have that discretion to be able to do that. But I also have to understand what the law is. So within your own organization, you have to understand what is the law right? What are the parameters that we work within? Right? It's not willy nilly. It's not like everybody gets to decide what we do. There are laws, right? We have to document that. We have to make it clear what we can do, what we can't do and where the middle ground is right, where we can play.

Len: But the second piece of that is really understanding your purpose. And this is the hardest thing, I think, for entrepreneurs, because your purpose is not making money, that is not what differentiates you. What is your purpose in this world? Why does your business exist beyond making money? And then you have to be able to focus each one of your employees to be able to make decisions within that 'why', within that purpose. Right? So my purpose when I go out into police work is to maintain the peace and provide safety and protection, right, but also to provide the best outcome for all involved.

Len: Sometimes that outcome has nothing to do with somebody going to jail. Right. That is not what they need. That is not the best for anybody, but I have to understand what that means. Right, and that's why we spend so much time going to academy and field training and all the things that we do. Because we have to understand what we can do. What is the law, right? And then where do we have that discretion? But then how do we use that discretion to further our why to further our purpose?

Len: And it's not our personal purpose, it's our organizational purpose that kind of gets you away from like "this person believes that that person believes this." You know, everybody, if they're going to work with any organization, they have to be aligned with that 'corporate why'. Why do we exist? What is success for us beyond money, right? What are we trying to do for this world? What would happen if we weren't here? And then how do we make sure that everything we do falls within that?

Len: So again, there still could be mistakes. There are always going to be mistakes. Everybody makes mistakes. But if we're making mistakes with the right purpose in mind, those mistakes are not going to be too bad. Right? You know, maybe you refund somebody that shouldn't have got a refund. OK, that may cost some money, but the reason? What was the reason, why? Why did you do it, right? If the why is right, you're not going to be too far off base? So to me, those are the two most important things as it relates to a business, especially an entrepreneurial business, because they're hard things to do. You have to document what the law is. What are your procedures and your policies? And what do you do? And then you have to make sure that everybody understands why we're here. What are we here to do? What is success for us?

Len: Yeah. And I love the fact that you just said that time because of a purpose statement, right? So many organizations spend so much time on their mission and their vision that nobody ever understands what it is, and nobody even understands what the difference is between the two of them. The most important thing that a lot of organizations don't do is a purpose statement, and a purpose statement is the one that actually will guide people the right way.

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