Tree Ring Digital Marketing Paige Wiese and TED SuperStar Simon Sinek

“I really had nothing to lose. I didn’t know what I was doing…I was already at kind of a low for me at that point, and just put myself out there and started teaching myself website design and development.”
Paige Wiese

Paige Wiese is the founder and CEO of Tree Ring Digital, a top-ranked Denver-based marketing agency that develops high performance websites and digital marketing strategies for businesses nationwide. With 16 years of industry experience, Paige has seen companies and CEOs struggle to manage and maintain their assets through growth or transition. She has recently developed a proprietary digital asset management service to track and protect companies’ over 300 data points. Your brand is one of your most valuable assets—and your website and online presence are essential extensions of that value. My passion lies in helping businesses realize the full potential of their digital assets, transforming them into tools that not only support operations but also increase the overall worth of the company. Paige is a dedicated speaker and mentor on the topics of brand protection and business growth.

“You can take a good person and put them in a bad environment, they’re capable of doing bad things. Likewise, you can take a bad person and put them in a strong and positive environment, and they’re capable of doing good things.”
Simon Sinek

Simon is an unshakeable optimist. He believes in a bright future and our ability to build it together. Described as “a visionary thinker with a rare intellect,” Simon has devoted his professional life to help advance a vision of the world that does not yet exist; a world in which the vast majority of people wake up every single morning inspired, feel safe wherever they are, and end the day fulfilled by the work they do. A trained ethnographer, Simon is fascinated by the people and organizations that make the greatest and longest-lasting impact. Over the years, he has discovered some remarkable patterns about how they think, act, and communicate, and also the environments in which people operate at their natural best. Simon may be best known for his TED Talk on the concept of WHY, which has been viewed over 60 million times, and his video on millennials in the workplace—which reached 80 million views in its first week and has gone on to be seen hundreds of millions of times. He continues to share inspiration through his bestselling books, including global bestseller Start with WHY and New York Times bestsellers Leaders Eat Last and The Infinite Game, as well as his podcast, A Bit of Optimism. In addition, Simon is the founder of The Optimism Company, a leadership learning and development company, and he publishes other inspiring thinkers and doers through his publishing partnership with Penguin Random House called Optimism Press. His unconventional and innovative views on business and leadership have attracted international attention, and he has met with a broad array of leaders and organizations in nearly every industry. He frequently works with different branches of the US Armed Forces and agencies of the US government, and is an adjunct staff member with the RAND Corporation—one of the most highly regarded think tanks in the world. Simon is also active in the arts and with not-for-profit work, or what he likes to call the for-impact sector. In 2021, he founded The Curve: a diverse group of forward-thinking chiefs and sheriffs committed to reform modern policing from the inside-out. Their purpose is to build a profession dedicated to protecting the vulnerable from harm while advancing a vision of a world in which all people feel justice is administered with dignity, equity, and fairness.

Transcript

Welcome to the Small Business Administration Award-Winning School for Startups Radio. While we talk all things small business and entrepreneurship. Now, here is your host, the guy that believes anyone can be a successful entrepreneur because entrepreneurship is not about creativity, risk, or passion.

Jim Beach.

Hello everyone. Welcome to another exciting edition of School for Startups Radio. As always, we sure to appreciate you being with us. We’re here to try to motivate you to get off the sofa, go out there and take over your life and actually do something that you are proud of that you can pass.

Through the next generation. We’re trying to give you the tips, the tricks, and the techniques to be successful as an entrepreneur. And I appreciate you being with us. We have a great show today. Paige Wees is with us. She is with Tree Ring Marketing, has built an incredible business, bootstrapped it. She has a great, uh, ignition story or uh, birthing story.

It’s just a great interview. I’m really excited for you to meet her. She also gives out a free tool at the end, a great resource that you should go out and get. And then after that we have one of the most famous entrepreneurial thinkers, Simon Sinek. His video on why has some 30 million views, I believe, and it’s interesting because his thesis directly conflicts with our thesis here.

I don’t care what the why is, and Simon and I get into a little bit of an argument about it. It’s one of the feistier interviews that I ever remember doing. Simon is obsessed with why and so is the vast majority of the entrepreneurial world. All of them disagree with me, but. I’m still fighting my fight.

I feel that the why is almost an elitist response, trying to block other entrepreneurs from going out there and getting started. You know, you don’t have to have a license or anything to be an entrepreneur. You can just go do it. It’s harder to become a beautician than it is an entrepreneur legally, and that I think.

It’s part of the problem. All professions like to create barriers to entry so that they can do it, and it’s harder for you to do it. And when the government doesn’t step in and help with that, when the government doesn’t create silly rules, the. To help big business against little business, then the entrepreneurs have to come up with something on their own, and I think that’s what we are encountering here.

I believe that you could be very happy with your why, being I want to make money. Oh, that drives them crazy. They just hate that. They think that, oh no, you have to be, you’re there for the environment. You’re saving the environment. You’re saving children. Your business is designed to sell, but in the end, it’s going to save children, whatever, whatever.

I believe. That’s great. If you can have a why you are in the bonus territory. However, if you don’t have a why, I don’t want you sitting on the sofa waiting until you find your why to get started. That’s the worst thing that can get happen, and so many people hear Simon talk and say, why? Why, why? And they go, oh, I don’t have a great why.

I won’t start my business. Very frequently I have discovered that the why comes after the business. I started a business. I had no idea what my why was. My why was to have a job to make money so I could feed me myself, and Simon hates that. What your why has to be there. Well, my first business, I didn’t discover the why until I was three years in.

It was a great business and no one would start it and look at it, oh, you can’t do that business. You don’t have a why. The why came eventually, and that’s good enough. And so I don’t want you sitting doing nothing and blaming it on the why or the creativity or the risk, and so. Listen to Simon and I talk about this.

Argue it out a little bit and make your own decision. And if you love my idea, great. If you love Simon’s idea, great. Go find your why. I hope you can. A lot of people don’t and then they sit on this sofa and work for the man. Anyway, great show. Thanks for being with us. We’ll get started.

To talk with no action on climate change. Introducing the real environmentalists, the Bold new book by Jim Beach. It’s not about activists, politicians, or professors, it’s about the entrepreneurs real risk takers, building cleaner, smarter solutions, not for applause, but for profit. The entrepreneurs in the book aren’t giving speeches.

They’re in labs, factories, and offices. Cleaning the past and building clean products for the future. The real environmentalists is available now because the people saving the planet aren’t the ones you think. And go to Amazon and search for real environmentalists. Thank you.

We are back in again. Thank you so very much for being with us today.

I’m very excited to introduce my first guest. Please welcome Paige Weis to the show. She is the founder and CEO of tree ring digital.com. They are a high ranked Denver based marketing agency that works with high performance websites and they have a particular niche. They deal with companies that have many, many different brands.

They’ve just released a new digital asset management service to track and protect. All of your brands across 200 different data points. Very impressive. Paige, welcome. How you doing today?

Doing well, thank you. Thank you so much for having me. I’m excited to be here.

My pleasure. So, I mean, I have my brand trademarked and stuff, and that’s really all I need to do.

My lawyer said.

For, for your brand. It’s a very, very good start. But when we look at what is the full brand online, what does your full digital presence look like? Your website is still a part of that. You still have copyright to your website. Um, all of those things go into it. So while there is just a trademark, there’s way, way more that goes into it.

But I think that’s a very common misconception that, uh, people run in, like business owners run into, especially as they’re getting started.

So tell us about your clients and the problems they’re dealing with.

Yeah, so we work with a variety of clients across a variety of industries and the types of things that we kind of get the phone calls for is while we focus on website design and development and online advertising, we see a lot of clients enter the door with, I don’t understand why this is happening.

I don’t understand why my website’s down. I don’t understand why my emails are working. I don’t know why I can’t move my email from here to there so that I can, um, you know, use. Google Workspace instead of Outlook. I don’t understand why I can’t log into my Facebook business account to actually run ads.

All these different types of things that come up when they’re trying to either run it on their own or a marketing team that’s trying to like get a little bit further, but maybe a little bit outside of their, you know, skillset if you will. That’s where we really start to see, you know, clients coming in the door so that we can start building long-term relationships with them.

And how many brands does a typical client have?

Typically, like most businesses are gonna have one brand. However, as you start to merge and acquire, you’re gonna develop multiple brands. And how do you want to start focusing on that integration piece as well? Are we bringing over the branding of all of the brands and keeping everything independent?

Are we merging them into one brand? What does that look like? So typically we’re working. With clients that have the one, but as we continue to see our clients grow, we do start to see that they have more and more brands start to come into play.

I just bought a new step in repeat, and then I have five logos on it.

So I have five brands, right.

Um, if you’re, if it, those aren’t sponsors and those are your brands. Yes, absolutely. Got five brands are my things. Yep. So exactly. You’ve got five brands around that then and how you’re working. I for example, true and digital. We’ve got about two or three different brands that we operate under.

And so you’re correct, you know, as a business and from a strategy side and a marketing side. You do start to develop a variety of brands. And with that, I always tell clients those like 200 assets that we are talking about is now a minimum of 400. Or in your case with five, we’re now moving it into like a thousand different assets and data points that go into having that many, um, brands.

So just to let everyone know you, I, I was, I want to say 48 years old before I found out what a step in repeat is. How do you, how old do you think you were, Paige, and what do you think the average I, I don’t think the average person knows what a step and repeat is. What are your thoughts?

If I hadn’t been to so many like awards or nonprofit events, I probably wouldn’t have known either.

Even being in marketing, um, it’s not necessarily to, you know, to your point, one of the things they talk about right away, just the way that we work with clients. I probably had a little bit of a jumpstart, I would say, uh, probably. 28 or so when I found out what it was.

Okay. Yes. So for those of you who don’t know, a step and repeat is a backdrop.

It is usually vinyl. It rolls up and is on the metal rack and you can put it up in the middle of a convention center hallway and everyone stands in front of it and gets their picture. I have one that I’m going to use for my video calls with my brands behind me. If I’m on a video call, I might as well be advertising my brands, don’t you think Paige?

Absolutely. And I think, you know, instead of Yeah, like, which one do I do for this call? Or having a different backdrop, depending on why not put ’em all up there. Right.

Well, I have School for Startups radio. I’ve just started my own publishing company. This is the first time ever saying that This is, you’re the, the, oh, congratulations.

Want to bring this out of me? It’s called Startup Publishers. And if I have the brand behind me, one out of every 10 guests will ask. I’m assuming.

Exactly, and I mean, yeah, I’ve been on podcasts here where they’ve got their book right behind ’em and it’s like, oh yeah, sure. That too. Oh, that’s super helpful.

Like I prefer that you have that than your actual logo. Like this is something I can go buy right away instead of, oh, I’m just staring at a logo of a company I may or may not already know something about.

Yes. How did you birth tree ring? Did it hurt? Giving birth to a whole tree?

I, I mean, I was already at a pretty low, I was coming out of architecture and, uh, coming outta of architecture.

You’re an ex architect. Yep. Yep. Love 2008 is not the time to be doing that. Thank you. Yes, I, I got asked to,

uh, a quarter before graduation at Georgia Tech Master’s Program of Architecture.

Oh, it might have been a blessing. I mean, look at where we’re both at now, right?

Uh, well, it, you know, it of course it wa I never wanted to be an architect.

I no, I, I, I would give anything to be an architect, but by the point, this was back to 1996, now the Atlanta Olympics were coming and they lost the entire campus because of that, and. Uh, on an ongoing basis. I bought for the summer rights for, guess what? Guess what? Guess what? The architecture building was mine every summer for the next 10 years and kicked all of the architect professors out of their offices for June, July, and August.

They weren’t allowed in the building ’cause it was mine. And here I am going into my Christmas time desk. Pritz right is my, in my graduating gear. Oh man. That’s a story, isn’t it?

Yeah. I mean, it is the, the way that it, just like the architecture industry is so crazy and I really enjoyed it too, and like they’re all wish.

Tell me briefly about, give,

give the listers a brief rundown of why it’s so crazy. Give us a little recap.

I mean, I got into it ’cause I wanna do line drawing. I wanted pen and paper to the, you know, like that’s how I wanted to do it. I showed up to class the first day and they’re like, pull your computers.

We’re diving into cad. And I was like. Oh, I thought that’s just what they were teaching me in high school. I didn’t realize like we weren’t ever touching a pencil when we get into this if z, right? I want the blueprints, like physical blueprints, not, oh, we mask printed on a large printer. And so, you know, that was part of it.

And then as I’ve like watched it all evolve. I wanna design really nice homes. That’s what you think you’re gonna get into. And then next thing you know, it’s nothing but a bunch of like rinse and repeat apartment complexes or you know, commercial buildings that are almost all identical. And I’m just like, I would be bored.

I would be bored out of my mind, especially using a computer because it is just copy paste, copy paste, copy paste. And so you know those pieces. And it’s just so unpredictable. And overly build apartment complexes due to where everything is at and how people are moving in. Or are we gonna switch back to residential?

Are we doing town homes now? And like you have to just quickly like, oh, okay, well I guess we’re shifting gears. That’s what we’re gonna do. So yeah, it, I think I would’ve been way too bored had I stayed in it, even though I absolutely love the component of building and I love the component I’m drawing

very well said.

Uh, I, that is very good description of the industry from what I understand. I have one good friend who does super high-end houses. He’s from my class, and he’s now at Atlanta’s number one firm that does the $5 million homes and stuff. Mm-hmm. He said the hardest part of his job is that the average client is spending more on doorknobs than he gets paid a year.

Oh, I could see that. I could see that. I think it was the third, or no, it was only a two years at school, like a year and a half in, um, I remember one of the professors saying to us, like, by the way, if you came here to make money and that’s why you chose this industry, like you chose the wrong industry.

And I was just like, why? Why did you have to wait like a year and a half to tell us that? Like you probably could’ve started out on like day one, but like we were already a year and a half into a two year program and it was like, oh. Okay, so there’s that. Um, but you’re right. I mean, it really is interesting how much they’ll spend or they just don’t appreciate architecture anymore.

You know, like the little details. How do we do this? The builders don’t wanna build the little intricacies that go into it. They just wanna get it up and get moving to the next. And so I think the art of architecture has also really been lost over the years.

Uh, I wanna get back to tree ring, but just I wanna throw out one more thing.

I’ve been obsessed recently with YouTube videos on Chinese construction and all the things they’ve built in the last 20 years. That concrete, you can grab it with your hand. Oh yeah. And destroy it with your hand and rip into the column holding up your house. Uh, or 20 story tower. Uh, all, all of this economic miracle that we’re seeing in China that we’ve heard about is built on fake concrete people.

Anyway, you obviously knew something you wanted to say about this.

No, no. I just, I was just saying like, one of the ones earlier was the forms and the way that we use cinder blocks and then they come in with, um, concrete forms to get some of the decorat on the concrete sides Right. And how they, um, make that happen so that they’re still getting the art into it.

Instead of let’s just throw a bunch of cinder blocks down and cover it with, you know, a light coated concrete and call it a day.

Alright. Back to tree ring. So you were, uh, decided to leave architecture and,

and I was unemployed. I was just like, what do I do now? Like, okay, this is twice in this industry that I’ve been laid off.

I’m 23. I don’t know what to do or where to go, and I was just like. I don’t know, like, let me just try to build a website or two. Let me just put some ads up, see if I can get some work. I don’t, you know, what is it gonna be? Is it graphic work? Is it websites? I don’t care. And uh, but I had never built a site before, so that’s where I was saying I really had nothing to lose.

I didn’t know what I was doing. I was already at kind of a low for me at that point. And. Just put myself out there and started teaching myself website design and development, and really found a knack for it and enjoyed it. Starting with HTML and, uh, WordPress all the way back. WordPress, H HT ML first, and then learning into WordPress from there.

It was still really early days for WordPress. Yeah.

Okay. WordPress is visual. People like what you see is what you get. Visual, HTML is behind that, so it’s easier to learn WordPress than it is. H, tm L behind it. I recommend to everyone learn WordPress and then start hitting the code button and seeing the code that produced what you just did visually.

And so that’s a way to start learning it. Very impressive page. And so, uh, have you gotten to Python and stuff? Where did you quit? And just outsource.

Um, I mean, I have a good understanding of everything through PHP, MySQL, JavaScript, um, all of that. And that’s kind of, you know, where we, because of how WordPress is structured, that’s really where we need to stay.

We are diving a little bit deeper into some of the React stuff and different things as it starts getting into how do we start bringing AI integration into websites. AI is a very powerful tool, as we all know. Point and how do we start merging and bridging that gap between AI and uh, website interface?

Well, let me just share this story. I was obsessed with. Uh. Couple of things this weekend. One was obviously YouTube and the other was chat, GPT. And I was working on a website in YouTube in not YouTube, in WordPress. And I got stuck and it was broken. And so you know what I did, Paige? I loaded. Into chat GPT and said, this is not working.

I want it to do this. How do I fix it? And chat GP gave me an answer and I played with that and I couldn’t get it to work. And I went back to chat GTP, and said, I can’t get that to work. And it said, okay, we’ll do it your way. Which I just loved. I just loved when chat GPT told me that I’ll do it your way.

And it gave me a different way to solve the problem. And I did. And I got the website I wanted. Through using chat GTPI was really impressed with myself.

Yeah, it’s, you know, I, if you can guide it well enough, it, it’ll get you someplace. I mean, I, but to your point, you know, there’s a lot of people that think they can just jump into chat GPT and build a website or even so many of these AI tools and just build a site.

But so much more so goes into it as far as user experience, what type of content. Do you know what kind of messaging is gonna sell on your website? Do you know where and why? You’re placing call to actions, where you’re placing those? Do you know what to consider a conversion when you’re setting it all up?

How do you link your email and like email marketing into the website? Those are all things that it’s like. Yes, chat, GPT will get you mostly there, but you still have to understand the terminology and like what your actual desired output is. Otherwise, you’re right, it’s gonna give you something or it’s just gonna give you, okay.

I added that code, but I didn’t know where to add it, so I just broke my site and. We get that call a lot. I broke my site. I don’t know what to do. How do we recover it? And, and thankfully being in business this long at 16 years, like we’ve seen a lot, so it’s usually pretty quick for us to fix, but it’s, it’s stressful for a business owner trying to do it on their own of like, who do I go to to find extra help when I am not getting what I need outta say something like, Chad,

now I just want our listeners to do it for the first year in the first a hundred thousand dollars and then hire you.

Yep. Oh, absolutely. I think, you know, how do you get started? Kind of, and that’s how I got started, right? Like exactly when I started Tree ring,

we interrupted the story, but keep going. We’ll come back to the story. Oh yeah.

I was just like, I have no money. I’m literally just like taking an unemployment check and putting it towards my bills.

I’m like, that’s all I have to live off of. So I, you know, was like, I have to build my own set. I have to figure out how Craigslist, you know, works to generate business, like all of these things. And so I absolutely agree. Like. Get an understanding of why, what you know, what is the most important thing to get your product to market, and then start fine tuning, or I also tell clients, start with the five page site just to understand and have a professional presence, and then build into all the individual service pages, or add all the extra products or whatever that looks like.

But I’ve pivoted my business a couple times because. They thought, oh, you only do websites. All right, let me rebrand so they understand. I do more. Oh, I don’t understand what that is. What do you do now? Okay, well let me rebrand so I can do this. And like we’ve got about a hundred pages or more on our site now, but that’s an evolution of time.

That was us listening to the customers. And so I very, very much think you’re right of, hey, just get something up. You will be fine. Like, uh, fine finessing it the entire time as you continue moving. And that’s a lot with the digital assets too, is it will continue to evolve and you need to be ready for that.

So tell us about your new product for protecting multiple of 200 brands at one time and or the, the data points.

Yeah, exactly. So it’s really 200 data points per like one brand, if you will, one company. And so what it looks like though, is what we started to see is there’s this gap and disconnect as businesses continue to grow, which is, hey, the owner handles so much upfront.

Then they started bringing on other VAs or employees and then they started bringing on vendors and outsourcing it. And then they started bringing on, you know, outsource teams, whatever that looked like. And everything has been pieced together over the years. There’s no one really taking ownership of like.

This whole digital presence that exists out there. And so there’s a lot of confusion and a lot of business centers just don’t actually understand even what they’re buying. Sometimes when they’re working with a vendor or a lot of times they just tell a employee like, yep, go for it. You’ve got my approval.

Sign up. But you know, if we kind of take that employee route a little bit further, what email address did they use to sign up? What credit card did they put on file? Do you know when that credited expense comes out? Do you know how to recover that account? Should something happen to that employee and.

What does that all look like? And that’s just for one, you know, like third party tool if you will. It could even just be a plugin to your WordPress website. Who owns the license key that is making your builder work? Is that you? Is that the developer? If you aren’t working with that developer anymore. Do they remove the license key or do you get to keep that?

So those are, that’s just like one little example, but it covers everything from like domain names, emails, and hosting to your marketing tools, which could be social media platforms, it could be your Google Analytics and Google my business. And to what you mentioned, brand assets like the logo files, um, step and repeats, your marketing collateral, all of that into your third party tools.

And then also looking at backups and crisis prevention and compliance. So there’s about seven different pillars that these different assets fall into, and we just, no one’s really taking control of what that looks like. And that’s where we’re starting to see a lot of digital chaos as we go through.

How did you get your first $10,000 customer?

How far in was that? Year two? Year three.

Uh, that’s always a, that’s a good question because 10,000 can come in two different ways. It can be is it like a $10,000 website? Is it a $10,000, um, you know, ongoing monthly marketing. What does that look like? And I guess the way I’d really rather position that is you don’t know the value of a client until you start working with them.

I had a client that I was literally just doing tutoring once or twice a week for a couple hours at their office or their home. Show up, we throw a computer down and I just start teaching him WordPress ’cause he just wanted to know. And he has been a client of mine probably since 2011. I can’t even tell you.

You know what? Just this hourly consulting has turned into one for like our, my business, our relationship, the amount that I’ve learned in return. So, you know, I, I really like to stress that with businesses getting started is it may feel like, Hey, it’s 85 bucks. Why am I doing? But you don’t know what the lifetime value of that customer really is because, yeah, 10,000 probably added up pretty quickly, but I wouldn’t be able to tell you which specific client, you know, got me to 10,000, um, you know, as a client income right off the bat because those little things added up for us more.

How many employees do you have now with, we’ve a team of 15. I’m sorry.

We’ve got a team of 15.

Very impressive. So cool. Have you ever brought money in, or do you still own the a hundred percent of the business?

Oh, thankfully I still own a hundred percent of the business. It’s been very nice. Do you hear the applauses?

Yeah.

What’s the number one factor that got you to hear? Was it patience, skill, connections, haircuts. Why? Why did you make it? 15 years where so many people tried that exact same model and petered out.

Yeah, that’s a great question. Especially in this space with freelance and how many like contractors exist in website design, marketing, all of that.

I would say our ability or my ability to listen to clients and really move and adapt and like shift what we’re doing and offering based off of the feedback that we’re receiving and what we’re seeing is working and not working. And two is, is mentorship and like getting a business coach surrounding myself, I took.

Every free course I could when I got started, because my background, as I mentioned, was not in business. So, uh, you know, as you can imagine, learning taxes, payroll, hr, legal, all of that stuff, in addition to just trying to learn your trade in general. I really just dove in and like, what can I do in town that is free that’s gonna get me someplace?

Because again, I bootstrapped I didn’t have the money and I couldn’t invest $10,000 into some big sales, you know, thing for just to know. It may or may not work. So, um, those would be the two big tips that I would say really got to us to where we’re at today is tree ring.

Great. Great advice. Paige, how do we find out more follow online hire tree ring.

Yeah, you can follow us [email protected] and also on LinkedIn. I am more active on page lease on LinkedIn than the company page specifically if you’re looking to connect with me. And then you can also go to truing digital.com School for startups. We’ve got a little bit more information on our digital asset management, but more specifically, we also have a digital asset management checklist that you can download for free.

But we’ll start walking you through what are these assets that I need to be paying attention to? What should be on my radar and how do I start closing some of those gaps? And, um, just a really, really amazing tool. I think that businesses need to be, you know, taking a look at, at any phase of their business.

But also as they’re kind of getting started, we might as well start with a really good foundation first.

Thank you so much for that free tool. We’ll put that in the notes and blast that out on the social media as well. I love your logo, the tree ring logo. It also looks like a hand to me. Is it supposed to, have you thought of anyone?

Never said that.

Oh, it not the hand. Uh, sometimes I wonder if it looks like a clock. Oh, it does, but um, for the most part, for the most part, representing the tree rings and, uh, a very modern version of

why does it have the cuts in it.

Just the tree’s unique. You know, they’ve got little hiccups along the way and things that come up.

Great stuff. Paige, thank you so much for being with us and we’d love to have you back.

Absolutely. Thank you so much for having me. I enjoyed it

and we’ll be right back.

Tired of talk and no action on climate change. Introducing the real environmentalists, the Bold New book by Jim Beach. It’s not about activists, politicians, or professors, it’s about the entrepreneurs real risk takers, building cleaner, smarter solutions, not for applause, but for profit. The entrepreneurs in the book aren’t giving speeches.

Welcome back to School for Startups Radio.

Thank you so much for being with us today. I am very excited and honored to introduce you to our next guest. His name is Simon Sinek, and of course, he is one of the most famous authors and thinkers out there. He is best known of course for his book, came out in 2009 called. Start with why, how great leaders inspire everyone to take action.

Just two years later, it was ranked the number one top bestselling, uh, corporate read by CEO. Uh. I don’t know, 1 8 1 1 800 CEO. Read. I’m not sure what that is. But anyway, he started off in the advertising space and in 2002 he started his own company called Cynic Partners. He has got a new book out last year called Eat Uh Leaders Eat Last, why Some Teams Put Together, or Some Teams Pull Together and others don’t.

Simon, welcome to the show. Thanks for being with us.

Thanks very much. Thanks for having me.

Oh, I’m very fascinated. You know, I’ve read. Start with why, and I have also taught for about 10 years at a big downtown university. I’m concerned that the youngsters today, the 20 year olds don’t even have any clue of their why.

Why for them is almost the furthest thing from them. Do you have this concern with me, Simon?

Well, you know, there’s a lot of data that says that young people today, you know, wanna work for a company with purpose, which is a funny, which is a funny conclusion because everyone on the planet wants to work somewhere that has a sense of purpose.

It’s not exclusive to any, any age group. But I will agree with you that I think this youngest generation, um, doesn’t understand or struggles, um, to really find that thing that they’re looking for. Um. And I think partially, it’s partially because of the world they grew up in. You know, they grew up in a world of instant gratification.

Uh, they grew up in a world where if you wanna watch a movie, you can watch it whenever you wanna watch it. You know, you want to, you can want to watch a TV series right now. You don’t have to wait till the following week. Um, you can order something on Amazon, it’ll arrive the next day. You can text your friends or respond to you immediately.

You don’t have to leave a message on a machine and wait three hours for them to, for them to call you back. Everything, everything is instantaneous. And the thing that I’ve found in talking to, to them. Is that they view that their job, their jobs and their career fulfillment the same way, which is, I meet so many of them.

They’re smart, they’re driven, they’re got good work ethics, and yet they, they work at a company, they’ve worked there for one year, they’re entry level, and they, they want to quit because they don’t feel like they’re doing anything of value. And uh, what they realize is these things take time. That living a life fulfilled is not something that happens at the click of a button.

There’s no app for that. So I think there’s this, this strange sort of. Strange, uh, impatience in an entire generation. Really fascinating. Yeah. I mean, just look at the way they’re taught to build businesses. You know, they see all of these tech startups that go from zero to multi-billion dollars after being in business for two years.

You know, that’s the equivalent of making a business plan based on winning the lottery. That’s what happened. Those companies won the lottery. That’s not actually how you build a business. And yet they feel if they’re not billionaires in three years, there’s something wrong with their businesses.

Can they be changed and fixed?

Should we even try? Or do they just need to wait? Course, course. Wait. Just let them grow up.

No, no, absolutely. Absolutely. The, the, the challenge is again, as they explain it to me, um, this is based on, based on relationships, as you and I both know, great companies are. Don’t win the lottery. Great companies, um, have people who feel a part of something and have devoted their lives and all of their blood, sweat, and tears to help that leader’s vision come to life.

Um. And the, the, the thing that that is required for that is relationships. Deep, meaningful relationships, trust, cooperation. You know, we care about the people within, we work and our leaders care about us, and we can feel it. And, and I’ve spoken to, to lots of this generation, and they tell me they’re very candid about it, that they struggle to form deep, meaningful relationships.

And so I think as leaders, you know, for people who, who, who have companies who, who have these young people who work with us. It is incumbent upon us to help guide them like we would our own kids, to, to, to form those relationships. For one. Um, are we taking a chance on them or, you know, are we telling them our failures and giving them opportunities to fail?

Or are they, are we holding them to the or do they believe that there are these standards? You know, I’m very often leaders say, you know, my door’s always open. You can always come to me. And yet we forget that sometimes they don’t have the courage to ask the support that they desperately need. Are we teaching them human skills?

In other words, how to communicate, how to have conflict, how to negotiate, you know, um, you walk through an office these days and people, so many Gen y have their cell phones, you know, between their arms in front of their keyboard as they’re typing them. You know, it’s, it’s, it’s, they’re actually not, they’re not actually engaging with each other.

They bring cell phones to every meeting. You know, they can’t go out for dinner with each other without putting their phones away, and it actually does great harm in their ability to form deep, meaningful relationships. We, as leaders, can create better conditions. We as leaders can create conditions, we can create environments inside our companies where our people fall in love with each other, where it becomes a real family.

Um, and it’s incumbent upon us to do that. And absolutely they can change and when they do, they will fall in love with the company they work for and be devoted tirelessly to help that leader’s vision.

Alright, excellent. Simon. Awesome. How can we then, as small business owners, when there’s say, three to five employees and that’s the major demographic of this listening audience today?

Yeah. Uh, speak to leadership. Uh, to that demographic, how do you lead and inspire that when there are three people in the office? And maybe, and let’s be very honest, one of them is probably your brother-in-law, because so many entrepreneurial companies are built incestuously.

Sure, sure. Now let’s, let’s be clear what leadership is, right?

Leadership is not a rank. Leadership is a choice. Leadership is a responsibility. Leadership is not about being in charge. Leadership is about being responsible for those in your charge. And so I know many people who own companies, but they’re not leaders. You know, we do as they tell us ’cause they have authority over us, but we wouldn’t follow them.

And yet I know many people who don’t own companies, who absolutely are leaders. They may be very junior in the company and they’re leaders because they’ve made the choice to look after the person to the left of them and to the right of them. And for one part, it’s for those, those leaders of those companies with even if three to five employees, to understand that, that the success that you hope to enjoy is incumbent on the hard work of the people who work with you, not for you.

Right? And that we work for our people, that we have to afford them opportunities. We have to give them responsibility. We have to offer them vision, clarity of vision. We have to offer them, um, uh, uh, the ability to learn and hone their craft and try and make mistakes and fail and try again without fear of losing their jobs.

You know, just if they happen to have, uh, uh, make a mistake or have a performance issue, that we coach them to see them grow. That is, that is the responsibility of the leader, and especially in a small company where we all know each other’s names and, you know, we all, sometimes we are family for that leader to devote themselves not to their own success, but to the success of their people.

That’s a huge, huge, huge transition. A huge step for many business owners to make, but, but it’s absolutely essential to enjoy that long term success. And in time what starts to happen is, is your own people come into work more devoted to your company and success of the company, success of the company than they are to themselves.

You know, it’s, it’s really a magical thing when, when a company with two to three people that one of the employees comes in and says, Hey boss, I need you to cut my salary because we can’t make payroll this week. As opposed to, what are you gonna do? Uh, it’s pretty inspiring when your own people are willing to sacrifice because they believe in you.

The only reason they’ll believe in you is if you believe in them

or if you eat last, the perfect segue to your correct book. Right? And I love, and when I was thinking about this, it also comes to mind. That the boss has to work harder than everyone else. I worked for the Japanese government, Simon, as my very first job out of college.

My boss took a nap every afternoon and woke up at five or six and we weren’t allowed. Yeah. You know, and it infuriated me and it drove morale down. Yeah. Then I built a business in the nineties, uh, to 700 employees and I worked harder than anyone else, and I never ever had any morale issues. That’s correct.

Speak to, to your new book In Eaters Eating Last.

Yeah, so, so that’s entirely right. Too many, too many people who, uh, achieve a position of rank or authority. Notice I’m not saying leadership right, to achieve a position of rank or authority. Think that because they’re senior in the pecking order, that entitles them to do less.

Nothing could be further from the truth. If you choose to be a leader and you accept all the perks that come with rank, you make more money, you get a better office. You know, people hold the door open for you, they make you tea, things like that, you know, if you choose to accept all the perks that come with rank.

It comes at personal sacrifice. And that personal sacrifice means you have to work harder. You set the tone, leaders, set the environment, leaders set the tone, you know, and so, um, uh, to say that I’ve earned the right to take a nap is absolutely backwards. If you don’t afford your people the same, same luxury.

If we all take a nap, that’s fine. Um, but yes, that’s correct. Leadership is like parenting. It’s a 24 7, uh, responsibility. Um, it’s not something you do just at work and you stop doing it when you go home. It is, it is a, it is a lifestyle. It is a lifestyle you choose to live. Um, and it’s, as I said before, taking responsive responsibility for the people in your charge, which I don’t know how you turn that off,

Simon.

You’ve lived all over the world. I remember. Uh, Hong Kong, South Africa, London, and New Jersey of all wonderful selection there. Exotic New Jersey. Yeah. Should you went from Hong Kong

to exotic New Jersey. That’s true.

When you look at leadership around the world, I, as I mentioned before, worked for the Japanese government.

I also worked for Coca-Cola in Japan, and I see Asian leadership as very, very distinct. Uh, which leadership styles are you fondest of? Do you like certain things about certain leadership trends and characteristics that you’ve seen around the world?

Sure. You know, every culture, um. Has its advantages and disadvantages as it comes to leadership.

The fundamentals of leadership are exactly the same all over the world because the fundamental, the fundamentals of leadership are based on our own biology and anthropology. In other words, it’s about being human and how people work together in groups. Um, but of course there are advantages and disadvantages to every, every society.

You know, I’m a big fan of America, I’ll tell you that. Um, you know, America is, is, is a reason it’s such an entrepreneurial society is we don’t look down on failure the same way, say the Europeans do. In Europe, if you try and fail, it’s, it can really, really, that hurts. I, I met a Spanish entrepreneur who, he, he made a lot of bad decisions.

He takes full responsibility in his company and he lost everything. The company went bankrupt and he tells stories of how he would go into restaurants and people who were his friends would turn around and pretend they didn’t know him. Wow. Simply because he, simply because he had failed. We don’t have that attitude in the United States.

Here. We love that somebody tries, even if they fail, we just love that they tried,

especially if they dust off and go again.

Yeah, we love it. Dust off and go again. And that, that’s a very, that’s, that’s, that’s really something very special, um, in a society that, you know, for entrepreneurs that, that, that is the societal attitude.

Um, the other one is, is the way we view hierarchy. As you know, from working in Japan, hierarchy is very, very strict. This produces some problems. It produces some problems that when mistakes happen, people are afraid to say, Hey, boss, we have a problem. We know this from the Fukushima accident, that nobody spoke up that, that they all knew full well that that something bad was gonna happen, and they could have taken preventative measures.

Malcolm Gladwell wrote about this. He wrote about how Asian airlines have more accidents than American airlines, American based airlines, because of, uh, the strict hierarchy in the cockpit. You know, where, uh, where if there’s a mistake, if there’s an accident, if there’s a problem that the pilot, um, won’t question the captain, we in the United States have, uh, a much better, much better track record just simply for our ability to, to speak with each other and speak to each other.

Now, that requires a strong culture as well inside the company, and it requires good leadership as well. But as I said, there are some basic societal advantages, just, just just for the way things are. However, Japan, uh, in contrast, America offers intense loyalty to their people. So we use mass layoffs to balance the books.

Think about that, that, that we think it’s important to destroy someone’s livelihoods so that we can make the numbers for one year. So in Japan, that doesn’t happen. You know, you work for one company for your entire life. Uh, you offer loyalty to the company, but more importantly, the company offers loyalty to you.

Um, that’s a huge advantage that the Japanese have over us.

All right. Very good. Thank you. Uh, Simon. I love that, uh, especially the analysis of Japan. It’s interesting you mentioned that there are some fundamentals of leadership that are, are the same around the world. Give us one or two of those. What is a universal leadership truth?

So human beings are social animals. All of us. We respond to the environments we’re in. You can take a good person and put them in a bad environment. They’re capable of doing bad things. Uh, likewise, you can take a bad person, someone society has given up on May, has even, may, they even performed bad acts, and you can put them in a strong and positive environment, and they’re capable of doing good things.

They’re capable of turning their lives around. This is a universal truth. In other words, we all respond the environment we’re in, and no matter what the culture is, we will respond to the the environment we’re in when we sense that our leaders. Are devoted to helping us achieve success and helping us grow.

If we sense that our leaders would soon sacrifice the numbers, save our lives, then the natural human response, trust and loyalty. In return, we offer our blood, sweat, and tears to see that their vision grows. Um, in contrast, if we sense that our leaders would soon sacrifice our lives to protect their interests.

Sense that they would sooner, you know, force us to suffer, that they could protect their salaries or their bonuses. Then we respond biologically by putting up walls, mistrusting them, um, protecting ourselves and trust and cooperation start to break down what I think so interesting in, in this modern day and age, as you hear companies talk about innovation up the wazoo, and yet they ignore that the foundations of innovation are trust and cooperation.

If people don’t trust each other, if they don’t feel like they can trust leadership, then they’re not gonna try new things. If they fear that, if they make mistakes or if things don’t go according to rules that they could lose their jobs, then we don’t try new things. And innovation fundamentally is about sharing information, sharing successes, sharing failures, working together, helping each other up when we fall over, and the result is innovation.

That’s what happens. Um, it’s really, really funny to me that how often, uh, people in leadership positions ignore the fundamentals of leadership when they’re trying to achieve their own goals.

Uh, we never talk politics on this show, Simon, but boy, am I tempted to ask a political question right now. Go for it.

You can ask. You can ask. I’m afraid to. I don’t really even want to, you know, ’cause we don’t talk politics. And if I did I’d probably, uh, never. It, it’s a slippery slope. Let’s, let’s change it a little bit differently. Instead of asking, uh, about politics, let me ask you this. The media has created business icons.

Roberto, go wait. Uh, Jack Welch. Yeah, Robert Iger made $43 million at Disney this year. I just saw over the weekend. Yep. What do you think of the media’s gurus?

So you know the choices. You know, it’s not just immediacy. It’s the value, it seems to be the values of our, of our modern day, which is we believe that if someone makes a lot of money, that makes them a good leader.

Right? So let’s take Jack Welch for example, who is often hailed as a great leader that we should all admire and we should all follow his his charge. This is from a guy who believed that the way you build a company is you stack and rack everybody. You promote your top 10% of the people whose work contributes to the.

The stock value and you fire the bottom 10 or 15% of people whose work doesn’t directly contribute to the stock value. Um, the result is he, if you go look at the stock value of ge, um, it’s like a rollercoaster. It’s up and down and up and down and up and down. And if you’re lucky enough to exit at the right time, you could have made 1400% on your money if you invested in GE when Jack Welch took over.

He built a company with a weak foundation where the people didn’t trust and didn’t cooperate that in hard times. Remember, these were the eighties and nineties that Jack oversaw ge and Jeff Immelt, his successor, said himself that a dog could have run a company in the eighties and nineties. Now, granted Welch, now granted Welch may have done a better job, but these were, these were good times and we can’t judge the quality of a crew based on how the ship performs in calm water.

We have to judge. Uh, the quality of a crew, the quality of a company, how the ship performs in rough waters. And on that standard, GE and Jack Welsh’s style do not perform as well. Um, GE was built on this weak foundation and after 2008, they needed a $300 billion bailout from the government. Um, that’s not a strong company.

You compare that to a company like, uh, Costco. Where the Wall Street constantly complained that their stock value was flat, and if you looked at it on a quarterly basis, comparing it to ge, GE looked way more exciting and, and absolutely. Costco was flat, except it was a slow, steady growth. They didn’t have layoffs.

They, they contributed huge amounts to their people. They gave them insurance. They paid them a lot better than the industry average. They gave them training. It was a good, strong, cooperative company. If you invested a dollar in GE and a dollar in Costco, Costco in public, in 1984, Jack Welch had been in the office, in office about four years.

You would’ve made 600% on your money. In ge, you would’ve made 600% on your money on the s and p 500, and you would’ve made 1200% on your money in in Costco. That’s good leadership. Bob Iger actually respect and his people are actually proud that he makes that kind of salary ’cause he’s so devoted to that brand and what he was able to turn around based on staying true to his vision have been absolutely remarkable.

I’ll give you one amazing example of the discipline of Bob Iger and why he deserves he deserves his compensation. So under Mike Eisner, who was before Bob Iger, the company was obsessed with growth and world domination. And with that obsession with putting money before people, uh, money before brand, money before vision, um, the company went into disrepute and disrepair.

Um, we hated Disney. It was lumped in there with the other quote unquote evil corporations. Uh, people didn’t like working there, and quite frankly, they made a lot of missteps because they would, they would, they would pursue anything that could make them money. Bob Iger came in and he drew the line. And he said, we have a vision that Walt Disney gave to us and we have to uphold that vision.

He started by selling off some of the companies that even though they were profitable, didn’t, didn’t help advance the cause. For example, ENA Vista Pictures that made R-rated films. What’s a company devoted to making good clean family fund making R-rated pictures anymore? Sold it. And here’s to me the greatest proof.

Disney has never and will never own a casino in the Vegas strip. They understand the hotel business better than anyone. Plus they own all of the, uh, all of the intellectual properties, you know, the comic book characters and they own all the Star Wars characters and all the Disney characters. It would be the most incredible hotel ever.

It would literally be zillions of dollars of free, uh, money to the bottom line every year. And they will never do it ’cause it violates what they stand for. And it’s that discipline, that willingness to ignore the pressures from Wall Street, do the thing That’s right. Rather than that do rather than the, than do the thing that’s right for someone else.

That I think Bob Iger stands up as a, as a great modern leader that we should admire.

And was Eisner, I mean you Okay. You just said, um, some fairly critical things of him at the end of his career, at the beginning of his career. Perhaps before Frank Wells, the CFO was killed in the helicopter crash. That’s correct.

He was a hero. That’s, do you think that he was a hero in Wolf’s clothing or did he change, did the death of Wells change him? Did he get un absolutely un unchained?

Absolutely. Eisner did great things for the Disney Corporation. The first four years he was in office and the death of Frank Wells absolutely, absolutely killed his leadership.

Absolutely, and and I think it highlights. One of the truths of leadership, which is leadership is not a solo experience usually between every public, uh, behind every public great leader that we know, there’s somebody lurking in the shadows that’s actually their partner that helps make them great. They usually come in pairs.

They usually come in teams. You know, Walt Disney himself had Roy Disney, his brother behind him,

right?

Um, Walt Disney was the visionary, but, but Roy Disney actually ran the business. Uh, uh, George Balanchine might have been the visionary who reinvented American Ballet, but it was Lincoln Khristine hiding in the background, who actually, who actually built the organization.

You know, uh, herb Kelleher might have been the guy up front and, and running around, but there was always somebody lurking, lurking behind. There’s always someone lurking behind. In every organization and in, in this case, Frank Wells, his necessary partner, um, the Yin and the Yang when he died. I think Eisner never really, never really recovered and it absolutely affected his leadership style.

Absolutely.

Simon, I could, uh, ask you questions all day. Thank you so much for being with us. It’s been a real honor, I hope. Your second book, uh, which is out now, eaters Eat Last, also sells 400 million copies, just like your first book did. How can people learn more about you? I know they can go to y.com, just like as in the question is why uh, y.com?

Uh, anything else you want to, uh, Twitter handle or anything you want to throw out really fast?

Well, the website is Start with why. Oh, I’m sorry.

I’m sorry. Start with why. That’s

okay. Start. Why? I don’t know where the y.com goes. I should probably have a look. Um, start with y.com is the website. If people are interested in looking, more leaders eat last book.

Um, there are Ted talks. Go along with both of them if you’re interested. And for those small businesses owners who are interested in actually learning their why and articulating their vision in the manner that will inspire their people, um, if you go to start with y wy.com, we have something called the Y Discovery course, which is built specifically for individuals and small businesses.

And, uh, on that why discovery course, it’ll help, uh, give them the tools to articulate their why so that they too can, can inspire those around them, uh, uh, and really become the leaders they they wanna be.

Simon Sinek, thank you so very much for being with us today. It’s been our honor.

Thank you very much for having me.

And we are out of time for today, but back tomorrow. Be safe. Take care, and go Make a million dollars by now.