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Welcome to Leading With Force — a podcast where seasoned entrepreneur Brian Force shares the invaluable lessons he's learned on his journey through this crazy, wonderful life. Having built several multimillion-dollar companies, Brian dives into the nuts and bolts of building successful teams, scaling businesses, and leading with passion and purpose.
Each episode offers practical tools to effectively cast your vision, build your team, boost productivity, and become the leader you were meant to be. Brian's mission is to inspire you to unlock the incredible power within yourself, achieve your goals, and make a meaningful impact on the world. Join us as we explore how to find your inner leader, empower others, and embrace your journey.
But finding and developing great people is very hard. We want our 📍 people to come packaged up, ready to go. When we bring on a new hire, we want them to come out of the box and just start doing everything we need them to do at an a plus level. And it doesn't work like that. People need development and leading and developing people is hard. Hey everyone. Welcome back to the show. I really appreciate you joining me for another episode. Before we dive in, if you're getting value from this content, if you're enjoying this podcast, please do me a favor and like share on whatever platform you're on and then send this to a friend that could use this message as well.
It really helps me with my mission to reach as many people as possible. And then when you're done. Go over to brian force.com and sign up for our newsletter where I work pretty hard to provide really actionable guidance every single week that you can implement to grow your business. Right now. That's it for the PSAs.
Let's get back to the 📍 episode.
I have a friend that I watch college football with Every week that the season starts, he's got a really beautiful house. We sit down on the back porch and it'll set up like five different TVs where we'll watch all the different games all day. It's like our one day a year that we just dedicate to just being sports nerds.
last year we're sitting out on his back porch watching football and he has two young daughters under the age of six, just kids. And they were both just super energized that day, running all over the place and being super loud and just being kids. And the adults were having a difficulty enjoying adult time and focusing on the game and having fun and having a couple of drinks and hanging out, uh, because the kids were just kind of all over the place.
And so I was asking my friend that day as I watched him try to control the chaos around him. What is it like to go from having no kids to having two daughters? Back to back in a very short period of time.
How does that change your mindset, the way that you look at the world, your day to day? What changes in that short three year period where you have two daughters almost back to back?
How do you change in that time?
and I'll never forget what he shared with me. He said it's basically the ultimate encapsulation of the 80 20 principle. 80% of the time you feel like you are so far in over your head, like you're not cut out for this. How did you get here? You ask yourself. Can I do this? Everything is chaos all the time. I'm not cut out for this. Why should they listen to me?
Who am I to be a parent? I'm still just a kid myself. I am so overwhelmed. I have no idea what I'm doing half the time, and I'm just learning it on the fly. I just show up every day and do the best that I can,
but it feels mostly like you're just treading water, making sure that nothing goes wrong and that everyone's safe and accounted for.
He's like, but then there's this 20%. there's this 20% of the time where you have these moments where it just clicks where one of them will do something or say something or act in a certain way, where I realize that I am getting through to them that I really am their father and I'm having an effect, a positive effect.
That we as a family are coming together and we're moving in the right direction. And these kids are growing up right before my eyes and I'm watching them progress. He's like, 80% of the time. It feels like it's all outta control and I have very little ability to influence it.
I'm just containing, but 20% of the time I realize how profound an effect I really am having. And I live for that 20% of the time
and I was like, wow, that sounds eerily similar to what it's like leading a business. Obviously there are some profound differences there, but that sounded a lot like the entrepreneur's journey in growing their business and building and leading a team.
About 20 minutes after all this had happened, we were watching the game and his favorite team, who he's a diehard fan for, scored a touchdown. When they scored a touchdown, his youngest daughter saw that and she came running over and she said, daddy, daddy, can we do the high five?
And they have like a secret handshake that they do every time their team scores. And she realized that and was so excited to do that. And so they did it and we sat back down and she ran off to play and he goes, that's the 20%. And I was like. Wow.
The point of all this is not some profound lesson in parenting. It's more of an observation of the 80 20 rule in parenting or in leadership, how pervasive the idea of the Pareto principle is in just about everything we do and leading your team, growing and scaling your business is no different.
That 80 20 principle shows up in so many different ways, and we're gonna talk about quite a few of them today. But we're also gonna talk about what we can learn from the 80 20 principle, how we can apply it in your business to fundamentally change your results for the better.
now just briefly, if you're not familiar with the 80 20 principle, it's simply a principle that states that 80% of outcomes come from 20% of causes, and it shows up pretty much everywhere in our world. You spend about 80% of your socializing time with 20% of your peer group. That's a really good example. 80% of your meals utilize about 20% of the same ingredients over and over and over.
We have patterns in our lives in the 80 20 principles deeply woven into all of them.
And so how does this show up for entrepreneurs and business owners? Well, there are many ways. 80% of your sales likely come from 20% of your customers in certain businesses.
80% of your headaches probably also come from 20% of your customers as well. But the most important way that it shows up in your business is that 80% of your results are going to be from 20% of your inputs. And that's what we're gonna talk about today as a leader. We're gonna talk about that in the way that you coach and guide and lead your team.
We're gonna talk about that in the way that you manage your time. We're gonna talk about that in the way that you spend your money. The 80 20 principle shows up in every one of these aspects.
And when you can not only understand it, but start to train your brain to see these patterns over and over, you can fundamentally change your behavior and the way that you interact with your business for the better.
So to that end, there are three particular concepts I want to focus on today that really drive home the 80 20 principle in your business.
The first one is that 80% of your results come from 20% of your activities. The second is that 20% of your team members provide 80% of the outcomes in your business. And the last is that 80% of the impact that you have on your team comes from 20% of your interactions with them.
These three concepts when you not only understand them, but can apply them in real time, will fundamentally change the trajectory of your business for the better.
So let's talk about what each one of these principles means and how we can use it in your business.
The first concept is the simplest to understand 80% of your results are going to come from 20% of your activities. And as entrepreneurs, sometimes we secretly don't like knowing that because the reality is that 20% of activities that are going to drive 80% of our outcomes are a lot of times the hard things that we don't really feel like doing.
We get addicted to the idea of being busy. Sometimes as entrepreneurs, we get addicted to this idea of putting in more hours of spreading ourselves super thin. We really glamorize the idea of grinding and out of burning, the midnight oil of always being busy. But the reality is about 80% of what we do doesn't really move the needle forward for our business.
It's really only about 20% of the activities that we do are truly meaningful in the long term in our business.
And when we start to realize that it challenges us to ask ourselves the hard questions around how we spend our time. Are we really leaning into those 20% activities or are we tinkering? Are we distracting ourselves with the 80% of details and minutia that if we did more, 20% work would become irrelevant or we'd have the revenue to hire someone to do it?
And that is a key concept here, because I don't mean that the 80% of other stuff doesn't need to get done. We're just probably not the right person to be doing it. But at times we will allow that creative avoidance to keep us from doing those 20% things instead, focusing on those 80% things.
I remember a time in our career where I just realized that all of our businesses, websites had just been set up completely wrong in the past. They weren't optimized for speed and they weren't really generating good SEO juice, and
they were really just bland. And I realized if we had done a better job on the front end, we would be generating way more organic traffic and in these particular industries that really could make or break a business. And I found myself because at this stage in our business, we didn't have a ton of revenue just yet trying to learn how to optimize our websites for speed by myself. And if you know anything about me whatsoever, I am like the last guy that should be doing that.
I'm pretty tech savvy, but I don't build websites from scratch or anything like that. And learning how to optimize a website for better search traffic is something that's way, way, way above my pay grade.
But at the time, I used the fact that we didn't have a ton of revenue just yet to justify me spending seven or eight hours a day trying to learn how to become a website developer and an SEO expert, when the reality is there are millions of people out there that are going to do a better job at that than me, no matter how many years I dedicate to becoming an expert in something that I was only really ever planning on using once.
Once I had gotten our websites to where they needed to be, I never had any interest in pursuing that passion any further. So what was I doing? What I was doing was justifying spending my time on 80% activities when the reality is I should have been out generating more business.
I should have been taking 80% of my time and pouring it into the 20% of activities that would grow the business to the point where we have the money to go and hire somebody to make better websites and get that problem off of my plate. What I was really doing at the time was avoiding leading people.
We had a sales manager that wasn't doing so well that I really needed to lead and coach and train,
but I was uncomfortable doing it at the time, and honestly, I didn't feel like we really even had the right person in the right seat on the bus there. And looking back, I realized I was probably avoiding difficult conversations, which would've ended up with us replacing that person with a better suited person for that role, which is my 20% activity is finding and developing great people.
But finding and developing great people is very hard. We want our people to come packaged up, ready to go. When we bring on a new hire, we want them to come out of the box and just start doing everything we need them to do at an a plus level. And it doesn't work like that. People need development and leading and developing people is hard.
And so sometimes we'll bring someone on, we will watch them not develop very well on their own with the resources and tools that we've given them. We'll watch them flounder, we'll realize relatively quickly whether or not they're the right person. And if they are the right person, we tend to have an easier time jumping in and helping develop them because they just need a little nudge.
They need a little guidance in the right direction, and that's when we really feel like a genius in our business. But the reality is we're not a genius. We got lucky that time. Hiring people is very difficult. You're gonna hire just as many people that aren't the right person as you are that. Are the right person in your career, and when you end up realizing that you probably brought the wrong person on for that role, rather than stepping up and doing the 20% thing, a lot of us tend to go and focus on 80% activities we kick that can down the road because we realize subconsciously that either this person's gonna require a lot more development than we were prepared to pour into them, or we're gonna have to let them go.
And it's a very difficult decision to make, and it's a very difficult string of conversations to have. And so instead, we'll go focus on building our websites and becoming an SEO expert, because if we just get that organic search traffic going, we don't need a sales manager anymore. That's the dumb way that we justify things sometimes in our head as entrepreneurs.
The reality is there are no awards given for busyness. There are no awards given for how thin you can spread yourself. There are no awards given for how many different roles you can play in your business at any given time. There's just you and the success or failure of your business, and as a leader, that's your responsibility and the way that you act on that responsibility is to identify the 20% of things that move your business forward.
And you do those every day. If you are a legitimate sales person, and that's how and why you started your business, then your main focus should be on driving new business on sales and sales is very difficult. Getting up every day and failing forward.
Setting appointments, booking calls, doing all of it. It can be very, very difficult. I came up in the sales world just like everybody else, and it is a rollercoaster. There are times when you're on top of the world. There are times when it's difficult to get out of bed, but if you're a legitimate and talented salesperson, you should be focused on sales until you can duplicate yourself, which will be the last role in your business that you duplicate. Then you step out and you are leading your salespeople and your operations. People should be smarter than you at operations. And then as that grows, you bring on an operations director that runs your operations side
the best thing that you can do for your business is stop trying to focus on the 80% of stuff that you should never be doing in the first place. And as entrepreneurs, that's where creative avoidance lives. That's where my 20% feels very hard today. So I'm gonna focus on being learning based and become more well-rounded.
And that's just a fancy way of saying I'm gonna waste my time and kick my can down the road and watch my business hit a ceiling because doing the hard stuff is hard. I totally get that mentality, and when you're able to recognize it and see it for what it is, then you're able to summon up the discipline and the willpower to get back into 20% mode.
So that is the first key concept No matter how much revenue you're making or not making, it is no excuse to go focus on your 80%, identify the 20% of things that only you and your business do better than anyone, and focus on that 20%. At all times, and that 20% will develop over the years.
If you're a true salesman, you will be the best salesperson, I hope, in your business in the beginning, and so your 20% should be sales. But I also hope you're developing into the best leader. Because over time your role will develop from you being the best salesperson to you, being the best leader of salespeople, and then to you being the best leader of your entire organization.
That's the idea of focusing on your 20% is when you do that, it will continue to evolve. Because your business will evolve around you. So that is concept number one. Stay focused on your 20%.
The second key concept to really understand and to get behind is that 80% of your outcomes will come from 20% of your team members, and that is both negative and positive, but the reality is you're going to have a level players in your organization. And you're going to have a hierarchy of a, B, and maybe even some C level players depending on the size and structure of your business.
But the reality is 20% of your team members will have 80% of the impact and influence on your business. And so ensuring that your A level roles are filled by a level players is absolutely crucial in your business.
A good way to think about it is this, as your business scales, you will not be the only leader in your business.
What is likely to happen is that there will be a layer of leadership between you and your front facing team members, so your team members that are directly interacting with clients on a day-to-day basis, or your team members that are running the operational side from a task management standpoint.
At some point as your business scales, let's say you elevate your first assistant from your assistant to your director of operations, and now she's running your entire operations team of three, four, or five people.
She is an A level role in your business. The same on your sales side. When you elevate someone to a director of sales opportunity, they are running your sales team. They need to be an A level player because they are in an A level role.
And the reason for this is twofold. It is always going to be difficult to find A and B level players beneath your first layer of leadership if you don't have a level leaders. And it's going to be very difficult to get people to live up to even 80% of their potential if they're not led by a level leaders.
Let's talk about the sales side. That's a really great example. Very talented, very effective salespeople are very difficult to recruit and even harder to retain. If you've ever worked in a sales based business, you know that absolutely like the back of your hand.
A level salespeople are hard to recruit and they're even harder to retain but they're very valuable for your business. One great salesperson can outsell three to four to five mediocre salespeople, but when they show up every day and they're not surrounded by other a level players in an A level culture, they don't want to be there very long. They're constantly looking for the next opportunity because they wanna be surrounded by a culture that helps them grow and pushes them forward.
And as you step out of that sales role and bring on a sales director, that person now owns your sales culture. They're the ones that set the tone. They're the ones that set the standards and the accountability. They're the ones that coach and guide and lead and set the tempo
if they don't do an A level job of that, you're not going to recruit, nor are you gonna retain very many A level salespeople. And what's also going to happen is you can elevate C plus and B minus level salespeople to a whole nother level.
You can take mediocrely, however you say that, talented salespeople and help them develop and grow and really evolve into a level talent in an A level culture led by an A level director of sales. But if you have a salesperson who is an A level salesperson, that's a c plus level leader of salespeople.
You're not going to be able to recruit a level salespeople or retain a level salespeople, and you're never going to elevate B level salespeople to a level. Salespeople, sales and leadership are entirely different. And it's one of the things that you really need to understand as a leader is that your 20% is to develop other people.
And a massive opportunity for you and your business is to learn how to develop someone like a great salesperson into a great leader of salespeople. And that's really actually quite challenging in my lived experience because salespeople are incredibly dominant personalities
and if they don't already have a lot of inherent leadership qualities, it can be very difficult for them to become malleable enough to learn how to lead others at a very high level, I actually find it less challenging to develop operational leaders because their role is so task oriented.
It's a simple, repeatable process every single time that they tend to do better at hiring other people like them, communicating with people like them, and teaching processes to people like them. I actually have had more luck building out robust operational infrastructure that we can repeat over and over and over then maintaining a high level of a plus culture. On the sales side, that's like an endless recruiting game, but the only way to preserve it long term is to develop great leaders.
I say all of that to say 20% of the people in your business will have 80% of the impact because the way in which they influence the rest of your team and lead them. And so what you need to do is identify those 20% roles in your business. And make sure that you have a level players in those roles.
If your focus is on recruiting a level salespeople, but you don't have an A level sales leader, it won't matter what you put in place to bring those people on. You'll never retain them long term. I hope that makes sense. I know I went a little bit down a rabbit hole there, but identify your 20% roles that will have that 80% impact and refuse to put anybody but a level players in those roles.
And the last concept is very, very important. 80% of the impact that you have on your team is going to come from 20% of the interactions that you have. So the best way that I can encapsulate this is just to be anecdotal. I spend a lot of time with our team, the different organizations we run. We run out of one large office. I see all of my team members pretty much every day.
They're like my family. I spend a ton of time with them.
And so logic only follows that 20% of the interactions that I have with my team are really gonna be what make 80% of the impact. And I structure my day knowing that. So I wanna make sure that I have impactful time with my team every morning, because I know that's gonna be some of my 20% time.
So one of the things that I started doing years ago was having mandatory power up calls with our team every single morning, 9:00 AM either in person or virtually, depending on the day we all meet. We set the tone for the day, we talk about where we're at, what the scoreboard is, what the game plan is to execute that day, where we are in relation to our short-term goals, and then we do any minor housekeeping that we need to do that absolutely cannot wait until later.
And I've worked hard to really develop a cadence around this throughout the years. It's primarily just based on the scoreboard. You've probably heard me talk ad nauseum about the scoreboard at this point, if you followed my content for any period of time.
But the scoreboard sets a baseline for the conversation that I'm gonna have with my team every single morning. Basically, we are in the locker room. What is the score? Are we winning or are we losing today? That means we're looking at our major KPIs that we can affect right now. And then we're going, okay, what's the plan to go out and affect these KPIs today?
What is the plan to go out and put points on the board? So every person in our business, from our salespeople to our operations people, they have a scoreboard. Are our processes getting completed on time? Are our customer interactions up to our standards? Are we bringing in enough new business?
We look at all of those things for 30 minutes in the morning, we hold one another accountable, we develop a plan, and then we go and execute on it. That is pure 20% time because here's the thing, I'm gonna go get coffee after that and I'm gonna BS around with some of my team at the coffee machine.
And that's not gonna be 20% time, it's gonna be 80% time. That's just me at work, having fun, loving what we do, but I'm not making a massive impact there. But that 30 minutes is gonna be more impactful than the next four hours because I've set the tone now and then what it also does. Is it makes my development meetings, my coaching meetings with my team that much more impactful because I've set the tone with the scoreboard and we've developed a game plan and everybody knows the part they need to play.
When I sit down with you in our meeting one-on-one every week, and we go through our coaching cadence, I have a tone that we've already set. And we've done it every day on our morning calls. What that does is it keeps me from having to spend the first 15 minutes of our coaching session getting caught up on what the heck you've been doing all week.
So that becomes 20% time as well. So when you build these cadences into your day to day, you have your power up call, which also empowers your coaching sessions. You start to realize only 20%. Of my time with my team, my interactions with my team really have any meaningful impact on my business. And when I realize that I can structure that 20% time, my 20% time with my business is basically built into my calendar because it's every morning and then every coaching session I have with my team throughout the week, and I add it up and it pretty much adds up to 20% of my time.
I spend 20% of my time straight in people development mode, and the other 80% of my time I spend looking at KPIs, putting out fires and emergencies, hiring and finding talent, looking for new opportunities and, you know, helping our accountants do our, our taxes every year, pretty much.
But I spend that 20% of the time really developing my people. It makes a massive impact. I'll tell you a great story that I think will really drive this point home. This is how you can start to see the impact of your 20% time with your team.
I turn over the power ups these days for other people in our organization to lead. Depending on the day and who's leading and what the game plan is and what the scoreboard looks like, I will have other people lead the meeting and I'll beyond.
For years, I would end the meeting the exact same way. I would say, I love you guys. Now let's go kick some butt today. That was like my signature sign off. For years I did that and it was a really interesting thing to see when I finally started turning over the power up calls to other people in our organization and I would just observe and only interject when I had serious questions and things like that.
How quickly other team members started to say, let's go kick some butt guys whenever they signed off the meeting. And I truly don't even think in my heart of hearts that any of them ever meant to do that on purpose.
I think it had just become so ingrained in them. Because they had been on so many power ups that I had run, that it had become genuinely important to them to have that sign off to go send the team out there with some energy. Let's go kick some butt. It was amazing to me the first time that I heard that it was just like my friend and his daughter having their secret handshake and him coming over to me and saying, that's the 20%.
To me. That's when I realized that that was the 20% that every 30 minutes that I had ever spent with my team in the morning was 20%. And if you don't have a cadence like that right now, if you're not regularly meeting with your team, even just for a few minutes each morning, if you're not setting dedicated time aside to coach every one of your A player roles.
That is 20% time. Your job as a leader is to develop your people, and you do that with only 20% of the time, find that 20% of the time when you can have the biggest impact and really lean into it. So those are our three concepts surrounding the 80 20 principle. 80% of your results will come from 20% of your activities. So find your 20% activities and don't fall victim to creative avoidance. 80% of your results will come from 20% of your players.
They'll be in your A player roles, and it's really hard to get a level results when you don't have a level leaders. And lastly, 80% of your impact will come from 20% of the time that you spend with your team. So build a cadence around it, make it ritualistic, and really go deep in that 20%. I really hope that this episode had an 📍 impact on your business that you have some takeaways you can go implement right now, and I would love to know how you've recognized the 80 20 principles showing up in your business.
So drop a comment, get in touch me. Let me know how this has worked for you. I really appreciate you listening to another episode, and I look forward to talking soon.