Show Notes:

Execution is more important than ideas. “I think many times — especially when you see Shark Tank culture and entrepreneurship culture — there’s this over-glamorization of ideas and ideation. People almost place this greater weight on coming up with the idea. Now, in my experience, I have found that ideas are really a very small part of creating anything great. In fact, I would say maybe the idea is 5% or less of the value. If someone says, ‘I have a great idea,’ I say, ‘Well, how much do you want for this idea of yours?’ You can have a great idea with terrible execution and fail miserably, but you can have an okay idea with incredible execution and be incredibly successful.”

Great marketing is operations. “When you look at a marketing function in a business or in a law firm, I think sometimes people see that and say you should have a lot of ideas for different types of campaigns and different initiatives and things that we can do. But now that we look at it as our marketing function has grown, it is largely an operational function. With everything that people see, even listening to this very podcast, we’ll spend an hour recording, but then the majority of the work that’s involved in what people see as the deliverables is all in the execution, from the actual post production of the episodes to the show notes, to the quote cards, to the vlogs, to the video bits, to the social implementation, to the paid ad spend, to the reporting, to the data and the analytics — all that is an operational function. And to be able to do that consistently day in and day out, week in and week out, month in and month out — and that’s just one initiative. That’s just the podcast. There are hundreds of other things that we have going on in the marketing team — and that is largely an operational function.”

How to decide which ideas to execute. “The filtration process that I go through is essentially weighing things on three real aspects. One is time: the amount of time investment necessary to execute on this initiative. Two is money, which is the financial investment or even the investment of resources. And then the third one is impact. What type of impact will this make within the organization? So you’ve got time, money, and impact. If you can find something that is low time, low money, and high impact, absolutely do it. Those are like the lowest hanging fruit. Those are the honey pots. Absolutely execute. But generally what you find is the ideas or initiatives that have the highest amount of impact typically also require the highest investment of resources of time and money. And then on the converse, if you find something that is high time, high money requirement, and low impact, throw it out. Generally at this point, we will not do anything unless it has high impact because it’s just not the highest and best use of our time.”

Executing with an Operator. “When we’re mapping anything out, I start with mapping out the scope of something and we sit down and go through it. From there, she maps out the execution plan, including every single deliverable that must be met, who’s going to be accountable for what, what the timelines look like, what the milestones look like, and then we are meeting on a consistent cadence and she’s providing me with those updates. Now, it’s not always her even doing every step of it. Sometimes she’s delegating that to let’s say our Director of Operations, who’s delegated to somebody else. It just kind of moves through the chain of how we really expand our capacity and execute multiple projects at the same time, but have good rhythms and consistent updates to know how things are progressing, if they’re stuck, so we can kind of go through those and address any challenges or any problems.”

Resilience. “Whenever the question comes up of ‘What is necessary for success? What is the differentiator amongst people?’ That is the success criteria. I always say it is resilience. If you really were to break that down, it’s just that you just don’t give up. You can’t fail if you don’t quit. You can experience setbacks, but if you keep going, you eventually get there. Of course it’s important to have a learning process involved there, where your habits and behaviors change when you’re getting certain types of feedback loops that may tell you that the things that you’re doing are not successful and you have to adjust and make pivots and that’s absolutely fine, but the biggest thing that I see that sabotages people’s success is they quit four feet from gold. They basically don’t even know how close they are to that next breakthrough, but they simply give up. If you never give up, you can eventually get there, whether that takes you a year, or five years, or 10 years, or 20 years, or more. But you eventually get to where you’re going.”

How to build your team’s resilience. “Allowing your team to experience failure and setbacks and not stepping in the way, not coddling. Now, you don’t want someone to be completely without any help, without any support, because then they’re just going to flounder. But it’s knowing that if you solve that problem for them, you have robbed them of the opportunity to actually learn and grow. That is exactly what you were doing. If you were jumping in front of that obstacle and you were saying ‘Here’s exactly how you solve this problem’ before they can encounter that point of pain or frustration that is a necessary part of any sort of growth or evolution, you were robbing them of their own personal growth and their professional growth.”

RESOURCES & REFERENCES
Shark Tank
John Morgan
The Game Changing Attorney by Michael Mogill
Crisp Game Changers Summit
Mercedes-Benz Stadium
Principles by Ray Dalio