Learning Leadership Skills, with Lamar Tyler

by | Jun 16, 2021 | Podcast | 0 comments

EEP 92 | Leadership Skills

Episode 92: Learning Leadership Skills, with Lamar Tyler

 

What You Will Learn:

  • How Lamar and his wife Ronnie went into business and created the Black and Married with Kids blog, learning leadership skillsand growing it into a powerhouse brand
  • How, after achieving their first million in revenue, Lamar realized that the next necessary step was to focus on further education and finding the right mentors
  • Why being a successful entrepreneur isn’t the same as being a great leader, and why the growth of your business depends on learning leadership skills
  • How Lamar was able to utilize his strong marketing skills to attract talented new team members
  • What unique considerations Lamar and Ronnie have had to make as first-generation entrepreneurs looking to create generational wealth for their kids
  • Why Lamar has made what a prospective employee does in their personal time a key consideration in the hiring process
  • Why building a great team so that your business doesn’t depend entirely on you is crucial for growth
  • How a strong meeting cadence of daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly and annual meetings has been a big component in the success of Lamar’s company
  • Why a successful business needs both team members with big, bold ideas and with careful planning skills
  • Why one of the biggest things Lamar sees that slows down entrepreneurs is allowing their focus to be spread too thin

 

About Lamar Tyler:

Lamar and Ronnie Tyler are the husband-and-wife power pair behind Black and Married with Kids, the largest independent African American marriage and parenting site on the web.
Lamar and Ronnie were so fed up with the pervasive, negative and distorted images of black marriage that they channeled their frustration into a passion for curating online media properties that celebrated and honored black families.

 

Armed with this vision and expertise in social media, Lamar and Ronnie have taken Black and Married with Kids from a small personal blog to an international brand under their own Tyler New Media, they now have 7 independently produced films and over 540,000 Facebook fans.

 

Black and Married with Kids has been recognized and honored by some of America’s most established and respected media outlets. In 2010, Black and Married with Kids was named by Parenting Magazine as one of 2010’s Must-Read Blogs. In the same year, Lamar and Ronnie were inducted into Babble’s Top 100 Bloggers Hall of Fame. In 2012—for the second year in a row—they were included as two of Ebony Magazine’s Power 100, a list of country’s top 100 African-American movers and shakers, keeping company with President Barack Obama, Beyoncé Knowles, and Jay-Z. In 2014, the Tylers were finalists for the Black Enterprise Family Business of the Year Award. And in 2015, the Tylers were also named finalists for Infusionsoft’s Small Business ICON award.

 

Along with writing for and managing Black and Married With Kids, which now employs more than 40 staff writers, Lamar and Ronnie stay busy running Tyler New Media—producing, directing, and traveling across the country screening Tyler New Media films and speaking on marriage and business-related topics for a variety of churches, organizations and media outlets including ESSENCE Magazine, Parenting Magazine, Ebony Magazine, Sirius/XM, TV One, HLN, NPR, Atlanta Journal-Constitution and The Washington Post.

 

Lamar and Ronnie are the happy parents of four children and call Atlanta home.

 

Resources:

 

Additional Resources:

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Listen to the podcast here

 

I’m thrilled to have another special guest with us. His name is Lamar Tyler. He is the Founder of Traffic Sales and Profit, but when I met him and his wife many years ago, he was doing some other things. Lamar is a multiple-time entrepreneur. He’s built several successful brands. I’m thrilled to have you here. Thank you, Lamar, for joining us.

No problem. Thank you for having me, Brett.

Let’s talk briefly about the story. You and your wife, Ronnie, who I also know, started a business and did some things well. You learned how to market well and grow a following. You grew up a business together and that led to some other things. Rather than me telling it, why don’t you tell that version? Give the people some context here, and then we’ll be going.

I am a career entrepreneur. I’m not always a good entrepreneur. I’ve been a good entrepreneur all my life, but I always knew I wanted to own a business and be an entrepreneur. Even when I work corporate, I work primarily through contracts. I have an IT background. I would only take 3 to 6-month contracts. If somebody would try to hire me, I’d say, “No, I’m good.” I met my wife, Ronnie, who was the total opposite.

While I probably work at 25 to 30 different places as an IT contractor, she has worked for seventeen years for one company, IBM. It was literally like the most vanilla standard company you can work for. I was like, “What are you waiting for?” A gold watch or something? I was like, “Nobody in our age works for one company their whole life.” She couldn’t understand how I lived the way I lived. She’s like, “What happens if you don’t get a new contract? What is this life that you live?”

We got married. She wanted me to get a regular 9:00 to 5:00 every day W-2 job, which I did. I ran the IT department at a TV station in DC. While we were there, I was doing a lot online and on the internet. Blogging was out. People aren’t making a lot of money from it like you hear about it now, but it was out there. We said, “Let’s create a blog of something we are passionate about that people read and want to talk about.” That was around relationships.

We just got married and didn’t like the negative views and perceptions around marriage in the African-American community, inside and outside the community. We said, “Let’s create a blog called BlackAndMarriedWithKids.com so we can uplift support and courage in marriage in the Black community.” The site took off. We learned a lot during that process and building that brand. We went from zero people to a point where we were doing over 1 million unique visitors every quarter.

One million people organically every quarter. We have brand partnerships. We work with a lot of America’s largest brands from Disney, Hanes, Pampers, Consumer Reports, and a bunch of them. We were featured on CNN, HLN, Good Morning America, Today Show, and all over the place. We were growing this brand very publicly very large and then we got into creating products around it as well.

At first, everything was tied around advertising, but what I didn’t like, Brett, was that the advertisers controlled my revenue. In one quarter, they were like, “We’re interested in the African-American market reaching African-American consumers.” Everything was good. The next quarter, they say, “We pivoted to Latino consumers and Latino market,” or, “We want you to be the spokespeople for this widget that we have,” and then the next quarter, they don’t care about that widget because they got a new widget.

I didn’t like the fluctuation. I had a good friend who said, “You need to sell a product.” We started doing documentary films and have no previous experience. We went from selling documentary films to selling a ton of them to selling out theaters and creating our own tours, and that eventually led to us doing what we do now at Traffic Sales and Profit, helping entrepreneurs. It’s because people saw that journey and they eventually came and said, “We see what you guys are doing. We see what you’ve built. Teach us how to do it.” That’s how Traffic Sales and Profit were formed.

I met you and Ronnie when you guys were on the rise and other people were already starting to say, “You guys know how to do something. Can you share some of your secrets about marketing and growing your brand? I saw you at a conference telling your story. It was at an Infusionsoft conference and I think you and Ronnie were up for one of the Ultimate Marketer finalists for that.

It was the Small Business Icon Award that year, but I was mad they called it because Ultimate Marketer sounds so cool.

Before that, it was called Ultimate Marketer and I will always remember it as that. I don’t care if they call it Small Business Icon. You are an ultimate marketer. The market that you serve recognizes that. That’s why they go to you. They say, “We need help with Traffic Sales and Profits.” It was a very well-named company. You seem to have a gift for naming your business in a way that is going to elicit the growth that you need and attract the right people. Well done on that.

Everyone here is probably relating to you in some way. They’re saying, “Lamar’s like me. He couldn’t work for somebody else. He took a job because he got married and the wife said, ‘I’d like for you to have a job.’” We can also relate to that. Sometimes that happens, but it didn’t last too long before you started to create your own thing.

Here you are a lifelong entrepreneur and you’ve had some successes. I love that you said, “I haven’t always been a good entrepreneur.” That’s what makes you a good entrepreneur is that you’ve learned a lot of things. We’re not going to focus now on the startup to $1 million journey. We honor and respect that part of it. It’s real. It’s awesome. That’s not who we serve. We serve seven-figure business owners. Let’s talk about the lessons you began to learn after you had initial success with the brand and then began to try to grow it from there. Also, some of the challenges that you may have run into as you begin to grow.

Specifically, Lamar, you could talk to us about any changes you had to make yourself because I think there’s a shift we have to make as entrepreneurs and there are some things we have to do in the business to build the business the right way. There’s a personal thing and some business things. If you’re okay with it, I’d love to focus on the shifts that you had to make personally post-million in sales to keep growing this business. What did you have to do to allow that to happen?

I would say, Brett, probably the biggest piece and the biggest thing I had to do was to focus on education, which sounds weird. However, when we got to the first million, one of the immediate things I remember thinking and beyond, I was so mad because you probably took twice the time that it needed to. What I realized is that if we had had coaches, consultants, programs like Elite, and all the stuff before we had got there, we literally could have cut that time in half and shaved years off of the process.

EEP 92 | Leadership Skills

Leadership Skills: By having business coaches and consultants, you can shave off a lot of time in developing the skills of your team.

 

One of the things that most people realize is that once you hit these revenue goals that you have for your business, it’s easy for you then to see the path to get there. Somebody with a six-figure business can make another one like that. Somebody with a seven-figure business can make another one like that, just the same thing up the path and up the stream, but it’s because now you know.

One of the things we realized is that we always have to stay connected to people, to groups, to organizations, and to conferences. We always have to be tied into something that’s going to educate us about what the next level looks like. It was too much of us trying to figure out stuff on our own and that wasted so much time. Going forward, always realizing, always keeping, and always saying, “We got to stay connected. We’re always interested in continuing education and how can we get those lessons so we can shortcut the process.”

I want to emphasize what you’re saying. I love that you went right to learning because it’s necessary for the business to make it to that point. The entrepreneur did have to be gritty. He did have to figure it out. It’s like, “How do you take that away from someone? You can’t.” It’s important that they were that, but then at some point, what you realize was, “That grit, and tenacity and pouring more of myself into it doesn’t get me to the next place.” I got to learn what does. I love that you figure that out. That’s a classic response from you because I know you’re like, “I could have done it faster.”

I’m wasting years of my life struggling through the process for no reason.

What else were you going to say as something else that you learned?

Something else I learned was a lot about leadership and people and the importance of the people that you bring in. We made a shift. Once we got past seven, I think we began to make a shift from the old way of doing things to the new way. The old way was, “We don’t have a lot of money to bring in top people, so we’re going to bring in people and train them up and get them where we need to be.” However, that has its own pitfalls and everything related to it.

What we realized going forward once we got past that level was even though it may be more of an upfront initial cost, it makes you more and it saves you more in the backend if we can bring in people that already know some things. They already have life experience. They have lessons that they have learned on the job somewhere else that they can then bring into you and then that helps you advance your actual processes, your SOPs, and things that you’re doing because now you’re figuring out how this other brand or company.

You can save a lot more by bringing in people into your business who already have lived experiences and earned lessons from their previous jobs that they can bring into you. Click To Tweet

They might have been much larger, but you did things. Having those different brands and then having people at a high level that are all accountable and responsible that you can delegate things to and they go through. They get those things done and you don’t have to babysit the process. Those pieces that we had to learn around shifting away we hired. Shifting away, we identified talent and also became better leaders in the process ourselves. It’s because those types of people want to be led by strong leaders.

You should talk about that, Lamar, because being an entrepreneur does not does not necessarily equal being a great leader. You might call all the shots and maybe you’ve hired some people to do some tasks for you, but that’s different than becoming a good leader. You’re saying that we realize the benefit of bringing in amazing people, but those amazing people require great leadership from you. You got to have to level up as a leader, it sounds like.

Definitely so, and I think what you said is so important because being an entrepreneur and even being a successful entrepreneur or making money to a degree, at some point, you’re going to bump your head, but making money to a degree depends on leadership. You could be a great marketer and know how to sell widgets so the cows come home. That might easily blow you up past the six-figure mark. It could get you up to the seven-figure mark.

As you said, at some point, you’re going to have to start infusing and bringing in other people. Those alpha performers want to be led when you talk about top talent. They want to be led by somebody strong. They want to be led by somebody with a strong vision. “This is where we’re going. These are the things that we’re going to do. This is the hill we’re about to take. Come on and follow me. Everybody go with me.”

Alpha performers want to be led by a strong individual with a strong vision. Click To Tweet

They want to go yelling and screaming behind you. What they don’t want is somebody that they see as weak that when you paint a vision for them, they roll their eyes and say, “This is what I have to look forward to every day when I come to work and when I try to live this thing out that we’re trying to do.” That’s something that we had to learn.

How can we be stronger? How can we always be advancing ourselves?” I get back to education and how we can then use what we learn to identify and attract the top talent. It’s because identifying talent is not enough if you can’t attract them to come on board with you, but that’s where there’s strong leadership. That’s when having that vision ties in together.

I hadn’t thought about this before, Lamar. You can tell me if I’m off base, but I’m guessing that some of your strengths around marketing to customers served you well when it came time to learn how to attract great talent. How are marketing and hiring great people similar in your minds?

Totally so, and that’s something I say all the time. I say this to my clients all the time. Everything is sales. It’s like I’ll try to sell a customer on the fact that my product or service overcomes a challenge or an issue that they’re facing. I’m selling a potential recruit that what we’re doing here overcomes a challenge or an issue that our community faces or that the customer may face. Them coming on board, as you said, is part of something bigger than themselves.

Their coming on board is different than everywhere else that they’ve worked. The way we regard them is different from how everybody else is regarding them and selling them on the fact that “This place is different. What we do is different. The mission and way we operate is different. They are trying to paint a picture in their mind where they can see themselves as part of the thing that we’re building.

You talked about needing to level up yourself and your own learning and education. You talked about realizing that paying a little more for somebody who’s amazing is going to go a long way in saving you a bunch of pain and heartache. Also, benefit from all the learning that they’ve done prior to working with you.

Those are great lessons. We just talked about how to maybe think about attracting these people that you’re selling and marketing when you go to hire. What other lessons did you and Ronnie work through post-seven figures that you wish you had learned previous to that and maybe would have allowed you to go even faster?

I think of a few things. I keep coming back to educate. I feel like everything is tied to education. I’m a really big education person. One of the things is even once we began to build a business and begin to make money, there were new things that we had to learn. There is always another level that you have to learn. Once we felt like we were pretty good at marketing, then we had to learn how to be better leaders and better at running the company.

EEP 92 | Leadership Skills

Leadership Skills: Once you begin making money through your business, you will always discover another level that you have to learn.

 

We had to find out and learn how to be better at operations and operating the company. We found out, “Money’s coming in. We had to be better and learn more about the actual financials and how the financials inside of the company work?” We have financial people and teens, but what is it they should be doing? What are the things that we can expect them to bring to us that we should review? How do we review them and those types of things?

Even in a journey to, “We have a company that begins to spin off money and create cashflow and wealth.” We had to educate ourselves about wealth. We have this money. What do we do if it is? How do we protect the wealth and how do we pass the wealth down to generations behind us when we are first-generation entrepreneurs? Ronnie has entrepreneurs in her family. I don’t, but nobody in our family has gotten to the place where we’re at now. How can we see this thing through entrepreneurship so that our children, their children, and children come out to have opportunities that we never had?

If anything, we might have thought, “We have to master this marketing or master the thing that we do.” We found out that there are so many other layers and with each level that you rise to, there are new things, new challenges, new obstacles, and new things that you need to learn and tap into to become a better CEO.

There are new things to learn at each stage, but there are fewer and fewer people out there that can teach you about that. The circles become smaller to where you can go and get this help. You know this because we talked about it in the Elite Forum years ago, but the people who are reading this, these seven-figure business owners represent somewhere between 3% and 5% percent of all businesses that ever start ever make it to $1 million in revenue.

It’s a small number, which is why we call them Elite. They are elite entrepreneurs, but as you grow to $3 million, as you grow to $10 million, that pool becomes smaller and smaller. It almost becomes more challenging to find places to go to learn the things that you have to learn. Let me summarize one other point because I want to not talk as much. I want you to talk more, but I can’t help it. It’s screaming in my head. You’re talking about growth so much. It’s almost as if you believe that your company’s growth is directly tied to your own growth. If you stop growing, your company stops growing. Am I making that up, Lamar, or do you believe that?

Totally. That’s why I said I’m always reading. I’m always in the program and coming to an event because if you put a cap on your learning, you put a cap on where the company goes and where the company grows. That’s why we talked about, “We need people to come in with insight and information so that we can grow in those areas because the further they grow, then we can move as well.” One of our core values, it’s all about the fact that we support personal and promote personal development. I’m like that, but I want all of the people and everyone from the top leaders to all of the team to be people that are always improving in personal development.

If you put a cap on your learning, you put a cap on where the company goes and how it grows. Click To Tweet

I feel like if that’s something that we go after and that we’re strategic about. Also, not just things we’re passionate about. You have a company of people who always want to learn more and always want to do better. One of the main things I try to hire towards now is, “What do you do in your personal time? Does your personal time reflect what we’re hearing you for here?” It’s because I want people that are die-hard and passionate about that thing.

It’s because if you go home and love to do the thing you do on your own here in the office, and I can support you and give you resources, classes, tools, software, and all these other things, you love everything you’re doing. You’ll love coming here and doing work and making things happen. The results that you’ll get, you’ll be in a happy place producing amazing results. We’ll produce amazing results for our clients, customers, and community. It’s a win-win across the board.

What would you say, Lamar, to somebody who’s reading that that’s thinking to themselves, “That’s a lot of investment? What if I spend all that time, money, and energy developing someone and then they leave to go somewhere else?” What would you say to that?

That’s interesting because that comes up from time to time. I have a few things to say. One is that I’m a big believer in what’s supposed to happen will happen. You can’t change people down. You can’t lock them down. I’m a big believer in this. If they’re not supposed to be there, somebody better is waiting to come through that door. The longer they are there occupying that seat, you cannot get the better person in because there’s no room for them to come into the room. There’s no room for them to come to the building.

That’s one of my things. My other thing is that when you don’t do those things, it stops you from attracting top people because, again, that’s one thing that attracts top people to you when you say, “We care about your personal development. We want to make you better. We don’t want you to sit in your seat and do these mundane tasks every day, but we want to provide tools and resources for you to be the best you can be. It’s because when you become better, we all become better.” You start attracting better talent and getting better people. These are the kind of people I found to be a joy to work with.

Thank you, Lamar. There might be somebody reading this who has a great information product and they’re keeping their teams as small as possible. They’re trying to grow that thing. Leverage the information product and grow as much revenue on that as possible. Outside of that scenario, the only way to grow a business is through adding more people. If you want to invest in people’s growth, then you’re going to have more business. They’re going to grow your business.

You can hire a quantity of people at lower levels of capability or you can pay fewer people well to produce amazing results, but you have to be developing them. I think you’re right, Lamar. If we get into this scarcity mindset of, “If I just train them up and then they leave, I’m wasting all this money,” then you’re not seeing it right. These people are the people who are helping you do what you want. It’s going to help you attract more people. I found when I pour into folks, even if they have a path that takes them away from me at some point, they’re way more loyal to me.

They give me tons of heads up. “Brett, I’m thinking about doing my own thing. It’s 6 or 12 months down the road. We can then prepare for it. However, it’s only because I care enough about them to develop them and work with them. They’re like, “I don’t want to do wrong by you, Brett. I’ve got other plans and I need you to know.” I can support them in their plans and we have a smooth transition. That amazing person that’s waiting out there that you talked about, now there’s room for them. What else, Lamar? These people are getting tons of gold coming out of your mouth right now.

I think you hit on it. I know this is a people-heavy conversation, but when I looked at other companies we work with, the fastest or the biggest companies have the most employees and not that they go out and just try to hire a bunch of employees. The thing is that they’re not bottled about what the actual CEO or the CEO and their husband and wife or CEO or their COO or partner can do because they multiply efforts by bringing in the team and developing people.

EEP 92 | Leadership Skills

Leadership Skills: The biggest companies are not bottled to the CEO alone. They multiply their actual efforts by bringing in teams and developing people.

 

We work heavily in the internet space. I think a lot of times, people within the information product businesses and people with online businesses sometimes gravitate too much towards, “I’m online so I don’t need people.” All I need is a couple of VAs. All I need is this or that. There’s so much adverse to bringing people in that it slows down the growth of their businesses to the next level because they don’t have somebody who’s dedicated. There is a difference.

We got some 1099s on the team and they’re amazing, but they are not in step, in line and dedicated to the core mission the way our W-2 employees are. We can’t legally support them the way and do some of the things that we can do for our W-2 employees. They are a much tighter knit and a lot of times, we see companies where we’re like, “You need to get some real people on the bus or in the company that support you every day, that are ride or die for you, that are in tune with the mission.”

“They say, ‘I go with these company goals, so I need to pour in everything that I have into this company. The company is going to pour everything they have to me, so it’s a win-win on both sides. It’s not only a whole entire team of people where you’re one of many people that they serve.” It does make a difference.

It makes a huge difference. I’m not speaking against information-based businesses, but I’ve experienced the same thing you described, where they’re not just avoiding people. They’re like, “Having people is a bad idea,” in their mind. More people do mean more complexity. There’s more burden. There’s more stuff there, but there’s more opportunity. There’s more growth. There’s more enjoyment if you do it right. If you don’t do it right, then it’s all headaches. This has been very people-heavy. Let’s talk about anything around processes, systems, or meeting rhythms that help you lead a growing team.

One of the things we learned at the Elite Forum that we’ve been using for years is the importance of meeting rhythm. We do daily, weekly, quarterly, and annual. One of the things that shocked me as I began to talk to other entrepreneurs was how much they did not meet. I’m not talking about mom and pop. I’m talking about other seven-figure companies that did not do meetings. I’m like, “Do you do an annual plan?” “No. I won’t do the annual plan.” I’m like, “Why not?” They’re like, “We pretty much do the same thing every year, so we don’t need it all. We’re moving too fast. We don’t need it.”

They have all of these reasons and when we look at the path to our growth, it is directly tied into that annual plan that we create. The meeting rhythm we use throughout the course of the year to make all those things happen. What’s crazy, Brett, is that at the end of the year, before we go into the next annual plan, we sit and review what happened to the previous year. It’s a weird feeling for us to look and see that we’ve accomplished most of everything on the plan, but it makes sense because we always meet to make sure it happens, but it still feels weird.

The path to business growth is directly tied to your annual plan. Click To Tweet

That’s what you’re trying to do, but it still feels like, “It all happened.”

We did it. We look at it like, “We did it.” We feel good about it, but a lot of times, we are making it happen. You hit this thing and you missed this. You’re trailing and lagging a little bit behind on this. If you get a new idea, you implement it. It feels weird when you get to it and you’ve done it, but the only reason we’ve done those things is that we plan to have a structure in place and those things. The other thing I would say, because I’m sure there are a lot of people like me where I’m the visionary in the business. I always say, “I’m the cowboy.” I got two six-shooters on my hips. I got new ideas and I’m always like, “Where am I shooting to next? Let’s go, cowboy.”

To me, it’s Ronnie, my wife. You need somebody who isn’t an operations-type person in the business. If you are the visionary, there’s danger in that. I always say like, “If I did not have Ronnie,” she was a project manager. For years, at IBM, she’s been a project manager by trade. She is the operations personnel in our business that when we sit down, we meet. We came up with these plans. She can say, “That’s way too much to get done in one year.”

It’s only logical that if you want to grow from here to here, you do these things. I don’t know how they’re going to happen, but we will make them happen. A visionary will say, “We will make them happen.” Your operations person says, “No. We can’t make that happen.” We need to strip some back,” but I think that’s the perfect dynamic and balance that’s allowed us to grow. It’s the fact that I’m always pulling us to the next level and saying, “Sitting here where we are is cool for now, but there’s more over there. We need to get over there.”

She’s always pulling us back to say, “We can’t implement every single idea that you have. We need to slow down and think.” I think every business would benefit from that type of balance. If you are more of the operations, the conservative person, or the planner, you may need somebody who can come in with bigger and bolder ideas to push the business forward. If you are the visionary person pushing the business forward, you may need somebody to slow you down just a bit so you don’t take as many risks.

Also, the risk isn’t as huge, so when something doesn’t fire off or a launch doesn’t go as planned or you can’t implement the thing you want to implement in the third quarter and it gets pushed back on quarter two because of people, the pandemic and of all the things that can happen, you still are there to live and see another day.

Not everybody here is married to the right balance. Maybe their spouses or significant others are not even involved in the business. Let’s extrapolate for them a little bit because it’s not just you and Ronnie who run the company.

We have a team of about over twenty now. We’re half W-2 and half 1099.

There’s a core team that does this plan and makes sure we’re staying on track. The use of a well-designed team would have enough of that balance that you’re talking about where some are visionary and some are execution. You can’t have one or all of the other. You got to have a nice combination but the meeting rhythm enables you to keep the right amount of focus on each. I think that’s what a lot of those seven-figure business owners that you talked about are missing.

“We don’t have time for meetings. We’re too busy doing stuff.” They’re not likely to make a bunch of strategic progress towards a defined destination without a meeting to coordinate efforts or to say no to some things. A lot of entrepreneurs will miss out on the beauty of a meeting rhythm. They feel like it’s too restricting or there’s no time for it. It’s the mechanism through which we can get this balance of long-term vision versus the operational excellence of executing now.

If I can share real quickly. I read a lot of books. One of my favorite books is Extreme Ownership. It’s written by two Navy SEALs. One of the things they talk about in their book is that the more discipline you have in the organization, the more freedom that creates. I think if you sit down by listening and think about that, the more structure you have in place and the more systems you have in place. It gives you the freedom to do different things and try different things. Also, operate in different ways that you normally can’t because no matter what, you want to stay within the bounds of these things that won’t sink the company if they go to the left or if they go to the right.

EEP 92 | Leadership Skills

Extreme Ownership: How U.S. Navy SEALs Lead and Win

Also, you can operate in that place. The other thing I would say, because a lot of people say, “What you and Ronnie have is great, but you guys are married. I’m not married. My spouse doesn’t work with me, so it doesn’t work the same.” What I say is that’s an excuse because what I want you to do is, as I said, “Go out and get those right people and put them on your team.” Go out and get a mentor or some entrepreneur friends. Have them look into the business and show them inside the business.

When we were in Elite, we were able to do hot seats with other entrepreneurs. I know last time, you guys were saying, “Will you be attending the hot seats?” Definitely. Every single chance I get to go to a hot seat, I want to be on a hot seat because those same ideas I run past Ronnie, even though I have her, I’m running it past entrepreneurs because I want you to poke the holes in them.

I want you to stretch me in ways that I’m not thinking big enough. I want you to tell me, “Put the brace on and slow down a little bit.” There’s always somebody who is opposite of you who can help shape and form the vision of what you’re doing. If you don’t have that somebody in your life, you need to get into a program where that somebody’s already there.

Also, hire somebody. As you said, you don’t have to be married to the person to have this work. Most of the time, it’s not a spouse. It’s the people on the team. If you were to step back momentarily, Lamar, and say, “I’m looking back on all of our post-million dollar growth experience. We’ve talked about several key ideas that our readers are already well-fed. It’s like the thought you have after the interview and they say, “I wish I would have shared this. Can we pull that into this moment right now? Is there one thing you wish you would have shared?

It’s a singular focusOne of the things that slows entrepreneurs down more than anything else is the fact that they’re doing too many things and focused on too many different topics. They find success in this one place and as soon as they find success in this one place, they may plateau a little bit. Instead of getting even more focused to dig in, they say, “Here’s another opportunity to do this thing over here. Here’s another opportunity.”

The one thing that slows entrepreneurs down more than anything else is the fact that they do too many things and focus on too many different topics. Click To Tweet

Either they get to seven figures and then they got one seven-figure business that’s maybe doing $1 million and then they launched like these 3 or 4 other six-figure businesses. The other 3 or 4 six-figure businesses are slowing you down from getting to the one eight-figure business. What I see is singular focus because I think there are these levels where you feel like, “I had this goal and I made it to this goal. What’s next?”

That’s why it’s important for you to keep casting that vision further. Every time you start to get closer, you cast it out further and cast it out further because if you find it out further, once you get there, you get into a place of what’s next? You get into a place of complacency, which is, “Mr. Growth, we’ve been talking about it all day.” You get into a place of complacency and sometimes you get distracted because other people, as they see your growth come up with new ideas.

They come with stuff they want to structure. They come with programs that want you to lead things that you should do or things that you should say. “Can you come be a part of them?” What I found to be the fastest way to grow is for us to get super crystal clear on, “This is the thing that we do. How can we do it better? What will it take to get to the next level in this one specific thing?”

Thank you for adding that on. That’s the cherry on top for this episode. Lamar, if people want to learn more about Traffic Sales and Profits or they want to connect with you via social media, what’s the best way to connect with you and learn more about you and your business?

On social, you can find me everywhere @LamarTyler. If you want to find more information about Traffic Sales and Profit, you can visit our website www.TrafficSalesAndProfit.com.

Everybody who is reading, you got a feast. Make sure you go back and review some of the tidbits that Lamar shared. I’ve watched him on this journey. He is a die-hard personal growth person. If you want to grow the way that he has in his business, you keep pushing yourself. You invest in your people to grow. Please share, like, review, and do all those things to make sure other seven-figure business owners like you get to learn these lessons when we bring in guests every week. I appreciate you coming in again, Lamar. It’s been fantastic.

Thank you. I appreciate it.

Keep reading, everyone. We’ll see you next time.

 

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