Sean: Do you have any pointers on how to properly manage a newly opened business?

My biggest advice would be to always be on the block. Always make sure the revenue is greater than expenses. That's the biggest thing right there. So if your expenses are lower and you're selling more, you're making more profits, you're making more avenues, for me, you're doing a great job. That usually entails you being very hands-on, working long hours, wearing different hats, and sacrificing yourself, you know, for starting that business. That's what it takes. If you're not willing to pay that price, do not start a business because you're probably going to be on the red and bleed out expenses, probably going to be greater than the revenue.

Apple: For my advice, that would be to think ahead before you implement rules, before you implement perks for your team, for your company. Think ahead. Am I still going to be willing to give this to 100 people next time if I have that many people under my wing? Will this rule be practical, even if I grew up to this size? So those types of things, that's my pointer.

It's really fun actually how Sean and I experienced this, especially Sean and Kevin. He started this business with his brother, Kevin Si. But when they were starting it, he was also “consulting”, consulting with me, sharing with me his ideas. And I was sharing with him that, yeah, you ought to really be careful of the rules and of the perks that you will be giving your team because in the end you can never take it back.

When a group of people, for example, the first hires are already used to the set of rules, then you suddenly have to change them, to adjust, for example, working hours from it used to be half day and then now you have to work full time, same pay, that would just create chaos and a lot of disagreements with your team. Or the number of leaves, for example, you gave up five VLs and then you said you suddenly want to make it three for a year. Yeah, again, that would definitely create problems.

Also another pointer, which hopefully you already know is to do everything that our government does, at least bare minimum, do everything that our government is requiring even for a small startup business because that would prepare you. That would prepare you for when you are going to scale up and when you have more people under your wing.

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Sean: Now as a leader, here's the thing. How do I identify that they are meant to do this and that? Because people want to do what they want to do. They want to grow and flourish where they want to be in, but they're not always going to tell you that.

And they don't always recognize that they're Eagles. They don't always recognize that they're penguins or ostriches. So how do you identify that? And then how do you lead them to be more of that?

Jason: [00:05:10] So, this is a great question.

And when I coached many directors in MNCs and business owners, this one question as well, how do I understand the strengths so that I can deploy them better? Most of the time, I'll say 99% of the time people, managers would deploy based on this. They ask certain questions; "are you good at it? You're good at it?. Okay, great that's one box. Do you have experience? Your have experience. Oh, five years? Okay, great. That's another box."

So your competency becomes the only;  competency and experience so l put that together as very much competency - the only benchmark. So if you're good at something, I give you the task to do it. The funny thing about this, if you think about it, Sean. There are some things you do that you do quite well, that you hate doing. It drains the heck out of you, right?

And that is the trap that most leaders fall into. The assumption that the leader will make is that Sean, if you're good at this, I would dare say that you like it, but it's not true. So we have a framework called primal greatness, where we actually break up the entire work that you have into four quadrants.

And the Y axis is competency, high competency or low competency. And the X axis is what we talked. We talked about this whole idea of: Are you energized or are you drained? So if you break down all the tasks that you do. The first task you think about you break it down to, do I feel energized or drained and do I feel competent or not competent?

You've got a very beautiful four quadrants where there is a task in everything. And what a leader needs to know is that leader needs to know, "Hey, you know what? There are things that energize you and things that drain you. I want to try to focus on the things that energize you on the right hand side." So if I understand that, then most likely there are things that energize you that you're not competent.

Which is the lower quadrant now, but they're things that energize you, you are competent. What I want to do as a leader is to understand that, hey, you know what, you're competent in it and you feel alive doing it. I will give you more opportunities. So those are the strengths that you have. Those are the things that I will say that I can depend on you and you feel that, "yeah, I want to work on this."

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Sean: The next question from Erika is, do you consider yourself as a leader or a manager? 

Apple: I would really prefer that it would be my people answering this, but I would have to honestly say that I'm both. I am a leader in the sense that I know I could give them a bigger picture of where we're planning to go as a team. I also lead in the sense that I lead from the front. So when I tell them to do something, I make sure that I do it myself and that I do it alongside them. I lead, especially in a crisis that I'll make sure I'm with them when the going gets tough. So that's how I see myself as a leader.

As a manager, a manager helps people get things done and tells people how to get things done. So I would suggest, I would answer it, not really suggest, but I would answer it as I am both.

Sean: Brilliant. Maybe if you asked me a little over a decade ago, I'd say that I think all people should be leaders. But now that I've been running SEO Hacker for more than a decade, I've learned so many things and I would say the companies need both leaders and managers. And often if you're the C-level executive or the founder, you're going to wear both hats.

Now, a lot of big companies don't need leaders. They need managers. And I learned that in one of our podcast episodes, actually, because they want the status quo. They don't want people who are changing things almost all the time in their direction. And leaders do that. A lot of leaders tend to do that. So a lot of companies, I realized, need and want managers. And they got the definition wrong, they keep saying they want leaders.

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Sean: Now there are some listeners here may be wondering, okay, how can I do that? How do I know my strengths? What's the next step for them?

Jason: One of the ways that - one of the best ways that you can actually understand what is your strengths, imagine this like, so Sean when you first started doing your work and all that, right?

When you're doing certain things about your work, are there some tasks that you look forward to?

Sean: Yep, for sure.

Jayson: You enjoy doing you look forward to, and when you're doing that task as time kind of stand still, Like "Hey what three hours has passed?" You get great satisfaction as well.

Sean: Yeah.

Jason: Yeah. So all these things are clues to the strengths that you have.

So one best way. And I called it the whole idea of your emotional compass. Let your emotions be the compass of where your strengths are. So give you an example. If you're doing 10 different tasks at work, I can almost guarantee you maybe three are things that energize you. Rest of them you are okay doing, maybe four. The last few, it drains you, emotionally it drains you.

So one best way really is to take stock of all the things that you do. You can be an entrepreneur, you can be a business unit leader, or you can even be an individual contributor. Of all the things that people ask you to do or you must do, what are the things that energize you the most, you feel alive when doing it? And when you feel alive, you must like, when you're doing the task, you look forward to that task. Then while you're doing it, wow time goes past, really fast. You get into this thing called the flow. And when you understand that when you finish that task, you look back, Hey, I want to do more of that.

So your emotions play a great part in understanding how you navigate, what are strengths that you have and what are some of the things that you may be not using your strengths. So use the emotional compass that you have to say that, "Hey, yeah, I do feel energized during this." That's a clue.

And after a while, when you take stock of all these things, and if you go back into time, the last five years, 10 years, and you put in more different tasks that you do, and another 10 tasks, different tasks you've done over the last 5-10 years, you will see a pattern.

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Sean: From Erika, how do you effectively manage your team mostly made up of young people, millennials or gen Z? I'm going to let you answer that first.

Apple: We do it how we would like ourselves to be managed. So we don't micromanage people. We give, we set the goals and we respect how they will do it, when they will do it. Well, of course, that is also setting the deadline. Young people, older people would like to be respected, would like to be listened to, and would like to grow. So that's something that we promise our team.

We grow them. We make sure that they won't leave our team as is where is how they work. They will definitely learn skills. They will definitely learn how to lead other people as well. That is if they have the initiative to want to learn that. But we always give that opportunity to other people. And we welcome suggestions as well. So how we lead is how we want to be led. And that is being given direction and being given the freedom on how to do things the way we do best. We also allow them to go from one team to the other to explore if they would like to do that. So another way we lead is to give opportunities for more growth.

Sean: A lot of people, Simon Sinek and all the other speakers whose voices are generally heard about the millennials and the generation Z. Well, we've seen this in the YouTube videos that the difference between millennials and the boomers or the gen X-ers is that when millennials and that includes me, by the way, and Apple, we're both millennials. When we work, we want to work with a bigger purpose than just having a paycheck. We want to know that what we're doing matters in the grander scheme of things.

And so in SEO Hacker, we do our best to show people, this is what your work is doing. Oh, you're writing articles. It's not just because we want to share that on social media. It's because that article that you wrote is actually getting traffic for the website perpetually every day from people who matter and who become customers for our client. So we connect those dots for them and that gives a sense of purpose that's bigger than the day-to-day grind. That's super important.

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Sean: And you talk about spokes and I'm wondering during this pandemic, what happened to be new spokes?

Because I'm pretty sure with the way things were going on for you, you've managed to figure out some new potential spokes, or you actually built those spokes already by now. I'm wondering how did you discover them and how did you get them connected to your business?

Sensei: I'll stick with real estate right now. My real estate business is the largest business out of all my businesses. Be honest with you. I haven't had to create new spokes for this business. I already had them. I lost a few spokes because my real estate business is education. We offer nine different educational courses to teach people either to build a real estate business or build a real estate portfolio.

We have coaching consulting. Those two things are completely different. And then we have the investment opportunities, where we help people build a real estate portfolio for residual income so they can retire financially secure. The spoke that fell apart in this business here is our education. I do live events.

I believe and I know for fact that I get better statistics teaching people hands on how to build a real estate business than to do it over online or from zoom or an online course. The pandemic hits. I can no longer do that. I can't go out in the public and do that anymore. I'm stuck. So I've lost a lot of revenue on the live education side. That hurts, but it doesn't hurt me as much as it hurts my competitor. Because I have a lot of competitors that solely focus on that. Now, maybe they've been able to make up a difference because they have some online classes, but people like to commune. They like community. So when they want to learn how to build a real estate business, you will have a good percentage of people that want to learn online.

But I find those people that want to learn online are really not the ones that going to be successful because they want the easy way. I can't kick you online, but I don't mind getting in your face and making you do something when we're in person. Cause I'm going to make you do it, whether you like it or not, because you're going to learn how to do it.

And I'm going to make sure that you're going to become a positive statistic for my business because ultimately it helps me and it helps you. Even though that I've lost revenue there. I have been able to focus my energy more on real estate sales, which make more money. On my education, education makes money, but I find more enjoyment out of the education.

My investments make much, much more money than the education. I don't find as much enjoyment because I'm really behind a computer screen all day doing it. There's no physical activity with that. So even though I lost revenue there I've gained revenue over here. And in the meantime, like I mentioned to you before, I've been invited to do several reality TV shows.

That's a hit and miss. There's no guarantee that you'll make it. And I don't even want to do that. I want to be more like the United States Navy seal - it's under the radar, able to capitalize on things that no one else can find it. I don't want to be in the spotlight where everybody's looking at you. I don't need the fame.

I got a radio voice. I don't have a TV face. So now I'm thinking, you know what? Okay. So I can't teach live. Now. It's time for me to open up a podcast and I want to be like Sean.

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Sean: We have one from Erika. Do you have any tips on how to build an effective team? A team that does not need supervision and consistently delivers great results.

Wouldn't we all want to have that kind of team?

Apple: First off, thank you, Erika, for your question. I believe it first applies to who you let in your team. So it's very important how you filter the good from the rotten eggs out there. Secondly also is, well, I do this, I do this quite often. Before I allow one team member to continue on the process of being hired, I pray. I pray for this person first if he or she is really a good fit for the company. I look at three C’s. That's chemistry, competence, and culture. So with these three, if it's a good fit, then he or she gets to the next stage or next phase.

Sean: You have to build it from zero, meaning, you hire them one by one. And when you hire, you have to make sure that the people you hire are the people you want. They're self-motivated. They have their own initiative to get stuff done. They have initiative to improve things, innovate, improve the process, and deliver results. These are things that a lot of business owners love to hear because there are people who are the wrong kinds of hire.

It's either you hire them and they're the wrong fit, or they're not in the right position, they're not in the right place on the bus. And what they're doing is something that drains them instead of energizes them. And if they are drained, then you will have a team full of people who are slow moving or non-moving, and they become a source of frustration rather than a source of joy. So you have to build that kind of team one by one. That's my answer to you. And I have a lot of episodes about how to hire the right people.

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Sean: There is a way to delegate and you know how it is. Can you share that with us?

Sensei: I had a hard time. I had a big struggle learning how to delegate. Like I said, in the beginning, I'm a control freak. And then the next thing you know that, okay, I delegate a job, but then I'm micromanaging. You know, I'm looking over your shoulder. That drives me nuts.

It was driving me nuts to micromanage because now I'm looking over your shoulder, but I'm not doing what I'm supposed to be doing over here, not being productive. And if I'm looking over your shoulder to see if you're doing it right or for me to not critique but criticize, then I'm not being productive and creative and making money over here.

So I had to learn by stepping out of myself and looking back in, what am I doing? Can I be honest with myself on how I'm trying to delegate and manage versus micromanage and critique and criticize? And so the first time delegating a job out was a job that I would absolutely hated to do and, or a job that was so remedial that I didn't want to spend time on it.

Something that was easy. And so my first delegated job in the real estate business, I ended up just hiring a kid in school to do some simple math, adding and subtracting. Which is, you know, smarter than me because I'm still using my fingers, honestly. So it was very easy task. All they had to do is take a look at this number here, subtract this number here, put it down on paper over here.

That was it. Now, do I really want to spend my time doing that? So I delegated it out, look over the shoulder and I wouldn't, you know, I do it this way. I do, I file things this way. All right. So what I ended up doing is this. I said, I have to stop doing this. I'm driving myself insane. I drive a lot over the years and I love road trips.

I'll go and say, step one, go to www in Finland. URL step two. Here's the credentials to log in. Step three, go click on this taboo here. Step four, do the, and I go through the step by step bullet pointing things out on my phone, voice dictation. Next thing you know, I'll send it over to myself. I'll clean up real quick. Great. I got a page in the manual to do step-by-step for this specific task.

And I kept doing that over and over again. So I will work during the day in real estate, but then I would drive an hour to get to one of my martial arts schools, seven days a week. That's round trip. That's 14 pages in my manual. I just got completed.

I would clean it up, put this manual together and I - "look, come over here." So I'm hiring a kid on Monday. I got I've already hired him. He doesn't even know. I know he has the heart and I know he has the smarts. But he's never gone through an interview process before. And so I'm going to put him through the interview process, but he's already hired because I know no that he has the same core values I have and he's right out of high school and he's wanting to be an entrepreneur and he's already started a very small graphic design business.

But what I'm going to do is I'm going to sit them down, take them through the interview process. I'm looking at his communication skills. I'm looking at his heart and looking at his smarts. And when I bring him in and train him, look, it's simple. My manager, assistant manager will take them to say, okay, we have a manual for this task right here. We will walk you through it a few times. Great. You got it. You're on your own. Finish that task. You did it well. Great. Let's upgrade you to something a little bit more difficult.

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Sean: From Patrick. Question is, who do you consider your mentors in life?

So for me, if you have more mentors for different areas of life, because a mentor who is great doesn’t really mean that he/she can mentor all areas of your life that you want to grow in. So I would say, like, get one mentor per one area of your life that you want to grow in. For example, for stocks, it's definitely Marvin and it didn't have to be like a long mentorship relationship. Sometimes I just ask him via Facebook messenger like, what he thinks about this, what his insights are about either this stock or this cryptocurrency. And then for finance, I have a different mentor for my spiritual walk, which is an everyday discipline. I have a different mentor for business, especially when I was starting to try and understand valuation of a business: How do you sell a business? How do you value a share? I also have a different mentor there.

So it would depend on what part of your life you want to grow in. You have to be very specific about it. You know, I learned that people, we fall into the trap of thinking that we grow personally in all areas of life, just by living. That's not true. And that's because, as we grow up and get older from a child, we grow taller, we grow bigger, and we grow faster. We can do a lot more things. We're more knowledgeable. We grow a little bit wiser with some experience in life. We get a lot of these things. And we think that growth is automatic.

Here's the problem. Growth is not automatic. In fact, after you graduate school, whether high school or college or post-graduate, you don't learn new things anymore, unless you're intentional about your growth. So being not intentional about growth is a problem because a lot of people think that after they graduate, that’s already it. That’s your education so you’ll stop there.

Don't let your schooling interfere with your education. Don't let yourself get into that trap. Get mentors because after you graduate school, they're going to be the ones who will hyper speed your growth in terms of wisdom, what you want to learn in business, or what do you not want to learn in stock trading, investing. Get mentors in those areas. Always desire and pursue growth. Be intentional.

Marvin: What I do is, if I know someone who knows something more than me, I just ask them. It’s like that for me. For example, I want to learn something about SEO from you, I just message you right away. Is this okay? Something like that. Or for example, with Carlo Ople, we talked about the Satan rubber shoes. I asked him: What’s your take on this? So if I don’t know something, I just like asking. And I think that's where I learn. So even with the investments that I try to make, I try to learn as much as I can, but I also try to learn from experience.

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Sean: Having the right people in the right team is extremely important, but not a lot of entrepreneurs know that, especially when they're starting out. I didn't know how important it was when I was starting out. All I thought was I have to have this position filled because I can't do the job anymore. And what that ended up for me is when I hired the wrong people, they would burn more of my stuff down and I had to fix that as well.

And it didn't make sense for me to hire them in the first place. You mentioned the word gossip. How bad is it when people gossip, because it's almost like a pastime culture here in the Philippines.

Sensei: I think that's everywhere.

Sean: Pretty much everywhere. Right? Cause we're human beings. You know, some entrepreneurs would just let it slide. They just think to themselves out as natural, that's normal people, gossip, but you single that out. There's something that you know about gossip that is dangerous for business. Can you tell us a little bit more about what you know, so we can learn from you there?

Sensei: Gossip is a killer. It's a killer of business. It's a killer of relationships. Business is all about relationships. And if you've got someone that likes to gossip in your business, you can expect to lose other employees or vendors or clients. Look, I nip it in the bud right away.

I'm not a boss. I'm terrible at being a boss, but I believe I'm a good leader. There's a difference. People, fear bosses, people follow leaders. See? And so I have to lead by example. I don't gossip. I'm very straightforward. Some people don't like the bluntness of being either black or white in conversation. They want me to go around. That's not what I do, but I'm not rude or crass or any of those things. I will approach you in a very professional, kind of a fun manner because I joke around and I love doing scare tactics to all my employees around here, but here's a thing.

If I've got someone that is producing any type of gossip, I will always have the manager of the office. Take them off to the side and explain, this is something that we do not do under this roof here or anything wearing the logo of this business. Gossip is not allowed, if you do it, it's in your own home.

We set the rules right away. We would draw the line in the sand. Don't cross that line because if you cross that line, you're in the wrong territory and we're going to push you back. I give one warning, second warning, I'm sorry you're done, you're out. Because I cannot afford to pay someone that is killing my relationship.

And unfortunately, like I said, there's no fail-proof system out there, but as a manager, as an assistant manager, as a leader, or as a boss, we must keep our eyes and ears open for these types of unwantedness in the office space.

And it must be nipped in the bud. Not what you said. It's kind of normal. No, it's not normal for Black Belt investors. No, it's not normal for 360 Martial Arts Academy. What's normal is being truthful and being helpful to our vendors and clients.

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