Your Success Framework With Alex Charfen

Co-founder and CEO of CHARFEN – Alex Charfen

Here’s what you’ll learn about Your Success Framework:

– The reason why you still feel like a “solopreneur” even with a team around you.

– The problem with the current trend of glorifying hustle and why you must avoid it at all cost.

– The one surprising thing all billionaires have in common. (You haven’t heard THIS one yet!)

– Discover the four entrepreneurial personality types and how to leverage each one of them.

– Do you feel like your team is driving your crazy? THIS might be the reason why.

– All entrepreneurs think they’re great at THIS ONE THING… but the reality is totally different. (Discover why.)

Tune in and listen: Your Success Framework With Alex Charfen

Alex’s Website:

Charfen.com – How Entrepreneurs Think

Charfen.com/bookandaudio – Entrepreneurial Personality Type eBook and Audiobook

Transcript: Download

Video Transcription provided by GMR Transcription Services.

Jaime Masters:	Welcome to Eventual Millionaire. I'm Jaime Masters and today on the show I finally have Alex Charfen. Now we live literally probably like 20 minutes away from each other. We have 500 mutual friends and yet we haven't actually connected before now except chatting for a very long time beforehand. Go check on alexcharfen.com. He also wrote the Entrepreneur's Personality Type which is a whole test that we're gonna get into and he's a personal coach to billionaires and wrote The Billionaire Code, all sorts of craziness. Thank you so much for coming on the show today, Alex.

Alex Charfen:	Oh, Jaime. We've been so excited about this. Thank you.

Jaime Masters:	So it's so hilarious. Our kids are the same age, we do similar things like we are supposed to be best friends and we didn't know it until now. So tell everybody - except he talks to billionaires and I talk to millionaires. What the heck? Alright. So you tell me how you got started in all this because you consult with some pretty amazing companies.

Alex Charfen:	Yeah. If you start at the beginning, Jaime, I was always a different kind of kid. And I think it's hard to talk about like how I ended up doing what I'm doing without talking about that. I didn't play team sports or do a lot of the stuff that other people did. I read obsessively and I was one of those kids that was the behavioral disorder, not trying to be. I never wanted the attention, but I was always out in the hallway or in trouble or didn't do very well and so I obsessed over how do you make things work? How do you actually create success? 

	I felt like I was so divorced from what success looked like that there was no chance. And I obsessed over people who had been successful and what happened was when I was about - as a kid, I started businesses. First one was like 8-years old I sold candy at school. Then in my teens, I had a window washing company that I ended up having to sell because I had signed a whole bunch of paperwork under the age of 18. Then - yeah, it was great. Then I started a financial company in college and I sold it to my partner. I moved across the country and I was working with an organization called Envirocheck and I was working for someone for the only time in my life. Other than my dad, that was the only time I worked for someone. It lasted eight months out of a 1-year contract.

	That's not how it's supposed to work and here's what happened. I was in Florida. I had built a relationship with a guy who ran a consultancy in New York. He was working with some major brands. I was leaving that organization and I ended up going on an interview with him for Fuji Media. Fujis like Fortune 100, Global 100 massive company. And we went to this interview where we were gonna try and interview for New York and if we got Florida, I was gonna run an office in Florida.

	We got Florida. We didn't get New York. So I was 21 years old. My first client was a Fortune 500, Global 100 organization. And it was like, "I guess this is real." And so I started with Fuji, then I got SanDisk, then I was representing Fuji digital cameras, Logitech, Targus, Belkin, Microsoft. Through the "90s I worked with and early 2000 some of the biggest brands in the world."

Jaime Masters:	Why did they trust a twenty something-year-old kid by the way for all that?

Alex Charfen:	It was interesting, Jaime. I grew up in the consumer and computer electronics industry with my dad. And so from a little kid, I had been working with him. So we went to that first meeting with Fuji, and the language was just kind of second nature to me. And I had been studying business for so long that they ended up giving us a shot. And we took it and ran with it. I ended up building a company that our best year was about 250 million. Our average year for about 5 years was about 150. I had 14 offices in the United States and Latin America and it was huge.

	But I don't wanna make it sound like it was all awesome because it wasn't. I'd still be doing it if it was.

Jaime Masters:	That's exactly what I was gonna ask. Okay. Keep going. Yes.

Alex Charfen:	So what happened was I built this organization and Jaime, when you're young, you don't understand how to build a team. I didn't understand. And I ended up getting this opportunity and I started hiring people and building the organization and growing it. And I ended up essentially building almost like a solopreneurship with a team. If I didn't show up every day, it didn't work. And if I wasn't there, things didn't happen. And so I built myself into a massive organization and about 150 hours a week. And yeah, it sucked. It was overwhelming. I tell people when I was 21 years old, I signed Fuji and I started holding my breath and I learned how to breathe again at about 33.

	And so when I met my wife, I had for a long time wanted to get married and be in a relationship. And I met Katie and within a few months, she ended up moving to Florida, we knew it was gonna work. And so I started selling my organization. I sold the company and I got out of it and essentially retired in my early 30s.

Jaime Masters:	Now you're trying to protect all of us so what doesn't happen to everybody else what happened to you because working 150 hours will kill yourself after a long period of time.

Alex Charfen:	No joke, Jaime. I think one of the biggest challenges in the consulting and the content industry today is that there's this new impression that it's like cool to hustle. It's cool to kill yourself. If you go on Facebook and you say, "Hey, it's 4:30 in the morning and I just went to bed after working for 24 hours," people say "Congratulations." And I always want to say, "There's a better way." And there's a way where you don't have to grind yourself down, hurt yourself, end up doing everything yourself. And it took me forever to learn that.

	I actually as a consultant, I got very close with people in the C-suite. I ended up building relationships with people. And Jamie, when people ask like, "Why did they trust you?" Here's my impression now as a 44 year old looking back. I was just as awkward as everyone of the billionaires, and if you've ever been around anybody who's at the C level of an organization that's that big, they're different. They're eccentric. If they weren't in that role, they'd be called crazy. But because they're in that role, they're eccentric. And I was just about as eccentric as they were. I built relationships with them. And here's what I watched as I grew up was that my friends were consistently like building companies, building teams, building support around them and here I was, doing everything for myself.

	And it took me a long time to learn that there's leverage in people, there's leverage in teams, there's actually a much better way to do this.

Jaime Masters:	Okay, I have so many questions. We're gonna have to do a second interview already. So first, I want to talk about the entrepreneur personality type because I feel like that will also leverage between what we talk about for teams because I know that this is a common problem for many people that are listening. So we are different. We're a different type for sure and I think we all know that we're different, but we don't know the instant I suppose. So tell us a little bit about the entrepreneur personality type and how you came up with it?

Alex Charfen:	Sure. So Jaime, when I say that I read obsessively, it's obsessively. I'm dyslexic and I have some stuff like when I'm in front of people if I pick something up and I try to read it, sometimes I'll stutter. I have a hard time. I can't see all the words. And when I write on a board, I often leave letters out and I miss stuff. I always tell people, "It's up there more for me than for them." But when I'm alone I can read. And I can read pretty quick and so as a kid I started studying self-improvement. And Jaime, anyone who studied self-improvement, by the time you get to book 10, you realize it's just like book 1. Right? Only the chapters are rearranged and the story is a little different.

	And so I started reading about successful people. If I turn the camera, there's always tons of bookshelves around me with biographies and stories of people. And when you read about ten, you start - they all look different. You read 100, they still look different. You get into like 500, 1,000, 2,000, you start really studying people. And here's what you see, Jamie. Successful people throughout history have all followed a similar path, and they're all like you and I. They're different. They're driven in a different way. They're motivated in a different way. They're willing to stand up for what they believe in. They're belligerently stubborn. They push harder than most of us.

	And when I look at the population of the world, I think there's everybody else and then there's us. And the entrepreneurial personality type if just different. When I talk to entrepreneurs, we're not motivated by feelings and by the stuff that other people are. You never hear an entrepreneur who say, "Oh, you know I just really want to have a great day by the beach." It's like, "I want momentum, I want to create something. I want to do something new. I see a better future. I want to pull it forward." And when you think about what it takes to be that person, Jamie - if you put on Facebook, "I just got a new job," 500 people congratulate you. If you put on Facebook, "I just started a new business," your mom says, "Is everything okay?" And because people don't think like we do.

Jaime Masters:	I know this all too well. This obsessive need and this is what I talk to clients about all the time because we all feel like,"Oh, we're different." But we don't realize how similar we are to other entrepreneurs. So we feel like we're in our own little bubble as if nobody else gets it. I mean that's one of the reasons why I started my show is I wanted to see if there was anybody else that could it in the timeframe - because I've got kiddos too. In the timeframe that I wanted to do it in, right? And make the momentum and progress because my mantra since I was 8 was the word progress which doesn't make any logical sense to most people in the world except for entrepreneurs hence the reason why we care so much about this.

	So let's talk about - I call it crazy brain, like entrepreneur - it's fine, it's your crazy brain's normal, don't you worry about that. How do we leverage that for what we're doing? Because sometimes it's a blessing and a curse depending on what we're working on, especially in the terms of building teams. So circling back to what we were just talking about because we think we can do it all on our own, and we know how we're really good and we can push that ball forward no matter what. Because we're stubborn as all heck so how can we mitigate our crazy brain along with what we "should" be doing as far as systems and building teams?

Alex Charfen:	So that crazy brain that you talk about, we have ten attributes of the entrepreneurial personality type and one of them is innate motivation. And not everybody in the world has innate motivation. Here's how I describe that. It's that engine in your head that turns on at some point in time in your life and says, "Go forward," and it doesn't stop. And it only gets louder and it drives us. And you hear it in the language of entrepreneurs when we say things like, "I'm spinning my wheels, but I'm not going anywhere." It's like that thing's running and I'm not getting traction.

	And so the key for us is to understand that we can't turn it off. To accept who we are because there's no way that you can make that go away, and what happens is when you have that innate motivation to drive forward to improve things, to make things better and it's not focused on a result, that's where we can literally start acting crazy. In fact, there's not an entrepreneur I've ever worked with that can't be symptomatic of ADD, ADHD, autism, Asperger's, bipolar, all that stuff. I'm just giving you my diagnosis.

Jaime Masters:	Everyone's raising their hand like, "Shoot, he named me. Darn it."

Alex Charfen:	Right. No kidding. And it's that motivation, Jamie. I have this crazy theory, but when I share it with entrepreneurs they just say, "Gosh, I think that's kind of the truth." I think there's four types of people in the world, and they're all valuable. They are can help the team. But when you look at it, there's the people who like to support people. And I'm not saying like you support people, I'm saying they like to change bedpans or make people feel better. But Jaime, you make that face?

Jaime Masters:	Oh, thank goodness. Yeah.

Alex Charfen:	I talk to people and I'm like, "Hey, so how do you feel about changing bedpans?" And they'll say, "Well, if it makes that person feel better than that makes me feel fulfilled." And I'm like, "Writing the check would make me feel fulfilled but I'm not gonna do that." But we need those - 

Jaime Masters:	Yep, I'm so thankful we have them. Exactly. Not me.

Alex Charfen:	That's one. That's big supporting group. The second group is the talkers, the people who want to share, and not like again, not like you and I. But it's the people who will share about anything. You walk up to them and they say, "Hey, did you see the game last night?" Or they want to talk about the weather. They just want to talk. In our evolutionary tribe, we needed somebody to carry on oral tradition. It's that group. 

	Now there's the third group. This is the one that we conflict with. I call them the organizers and the memorizers. They're the ones who want to categorize, put things in committees, make rules, make laws, make - I mean if there's anyone that entrepreneurs clash with, it's the organizers and the memorizers. But - 

Jaime Masters:	Public school. Huh? Who knew? No, sorry. Go ahead.

Alex Charfen:	Well, and that's exactly why we do so shitty in things like public school because we get into a system where there's no self-determination, there's no reason why we're doing what's in front of us. And if an entrepreneur's not motivated to do it, they just can't. It's not like they want to - you can't. And so that group, evolutionarily, we needed organizers and memorizers. So if you look at it, we have the people who take care of each other. We have the people who talk; we have the people who organize and memorizers. There's only group left, the evolutionary hunters.

	And entrepreneurs carry that gene, that code of the hunter because you tell me, Jamie. Haven't you known ever since you were 8 years old and you decided that was your word? That you had to go over the next hill, discover the next thing, hunt the next things down? You can even hear it in language like with - It's hilarious. You ask a 35-year old female entrepreneur - you ask a normal 35-year old, "How was your kid's birthday?" "Oh, it was lovely. Everybody came. It was so wonderful." You ask a female entrepreneur. "Killed it."

Jaime Masters:	Seriously. Daughter's birthday coming up. You have no idea what we're doing. 

Alex Charfen:	But when we talk about it, we actually out loud say like, "Hey, I killed it." Or "I crushed it.' Or "I murdered it." We're hunters in our language, and when you think about what does the human tribe need to survive long-term, it needs a sub-section of the population crazy enough to get up every day and say, "I'm gonna change things." It needs a population that says, "It doesn't matter what you say about me. It doesn't matter what criticism I get, how much headwind I face, I'm going to continue to go forward, get over that mountain and make something happen."		

	Because the rest of the world, they strive for average and they cling to the status quo. Most people don't want things to change. Entrepreneurs wake up every day and go into conflict with those people. There's a reason. We are programmed to keep this tribe alive. And if we're not hunting, we feel uncomfortable.

Jaime Masters:	See, but that's - so mitigating that uncomfortableness to have a life that you actually enjoy if you aren't moving as fast as you want to is also a pain in the butt and difficult. What do you say to that?

Alex Charfen:	Jaime, I don't think you're ever gonna move as fast as you want to.

Jaime Masters:	Right. Okay. Yeah, but then we're screwed forever. That's the thing I feel like - 

Alex Charfen:	Not really.

Jaime Masters:	Well, there's always the gap. There's always more. There's always more.

Alex Charfen:	And here's the problem though. Most entrepreneurs haven't identified what that gap is. It's like, "Hey, I wanna do more but what's the gap?" Here's the gap. There's the level of contribution we want to make, and there's the infrastructure we build today. And most entrepreneurs don't identify that. It's like, "I need another funnel. I need another website. I need another this. I need some other strategy." But the fact is, until you start building the infrastructure around you, you're not going to get to the contribution level you want. And here's what every entrepreneur wants whether we admit it or not. We want leverage contribution. We want what we do to get leveraged over and over again so that it makes a massive dent in the universe.

	And the impression that's out there today that somehow as a solopreneur like sitting in your bedroom with virtual assistance somewhere, you can go change the world. You can make a dent, but there's not a single person in history like us who ever did it alone. Entrepreneurs are tribal animals; we've just forgotten we are. I mean, let's be very clear. For most of our lives, people like us are told, sit apart from each other, don't talk. Don't collaborate. Don't work with each other and because we're already naturally different than the rest of the tribe, when we go through school, when we go through most of those learning experiences, we don't naturally say, "Hey, I wanna build a team." In fact, most of the time we're forced onto teams, committees, or organizations where we feel like we were taken advantage of or we did most of the work.

	So reprogramming that is not impossible. It's not easy. But here's what I want everyone to know is that I have a building full of entrepreneurs that work with us. And there are people who are just like me in this building, but they just have a little bit less of the percentage of the thing that says, "You should be out in front." But they are more than happy to be here, creating new outcomes, changing the world, making things happen, working 10-hour days. We have to send people home because we interview specifically for entrepreneurial personality types.

Jaime Masters:	Okay. So many questions on this too. Because building, I wanna know the how of the building systems and the team because that's scary to a lot of people. And then after, I need to ask how you hire entrepreneurs because most of the time people are like, "They're gonna just leave. They're just gonna go." So first, how do we take - let's say we even hired a few because this is what people come to me all the time on. "I hired two people and oh my gosh, they're driving me crazy." Or "They're not good." Or "I'm not sure." Or "I'm a bad leader or manager." And then they get stuck there, and now they're not focusing on sales. And then they feel like they're not making that progress and hate themselves. So tell me how to solve that problem because I think it's a lot of people listening.

Alex Charfen:	Yeah, so Jaime here's what I share with every entrepreneur. The management mistakes of your past do not equate to the leadership successes of your future. Because the issue for most of us is that when we go out and we first start hiring, we do what I did, Jamie. I didn't hire someone to help me. I didn't hire someone to take pressure and noise off of my plate. I didn't hire someone to lower the noise, to increase support for me. Here's what I did. I had a business, it was growing and I'm like, "Hey, I think I need a sales guy." So I hired a sales guy. Then it was, "Hey, I got a business, It's growing. I think I need an assistant." So I hired an assistant who did all the stuff outside for the business.

	Then it was; "Now I need an AP and I need somebody to handle some paperwork and I need a guy who runs this office." And here's what happened. I ended up with over 50 people, not one of them directly supporting me. Supporting the organization, but not supporting me. And when I work with entrepreneurs in those early hiring stages, we go through a process where first we lower noise for the entrepreneur. And it's this easy. You look at the average person who says, "Hey, I think I need to hire someone." I sit down with them first and say, "Let's look at a 2-week time study. Let's look at everything you're doing and figure out what you really need to do."	

	And it's crazy. We've been able to double people's times with things like Instacart and Amazon Prime and Fiver and going on and getting people the support small things in their lives. Then they bring in the person who's gonna actually help them. And so when you do that, when you bring in someone who's supporting you as the entrepreneur, that's where things change. We hired two or three people, they start driving us crazy, it's usually because they can't read our mind, they don't know where we're going, and they don't know how to get to the next step.

Jaime Masters:	Okay. A thousand times yes. And what's funny is my personal assistant's actually downstairs. She just took my car to the shop because I ran over a nail. And I'm like, "We're driving far away, fix this now. And don't open the door because I'm doing interviews." So I totally get it. And she's a lifesaver, thank goodness. The thing though is, is that because we're entrepreneurs and we see the vision so clearly like you said, and we aren't necessarily great at explaining what our vision is to the people underneath us. Personal assistant makes a lot of sense because that seems logical and easy, but even somebody on your team that has to see the vision, what do you give us for tips on working with your team, on communication and making sure that we are the best leader or working onto it as much as humanly possible?

Alex Charfen:	So Jamie, the biggest issue that entrepreneurs have is that we think we're really good at communication but we suck. We're terrible. And - 

Jaime Masters:	"But you should just get this. Come on. Let's go." Yeah.

Alex Charfen:	Well, most entrepreneurs it's like, "Wait, I already told you once." And here's the challenge is that the vast majority of - I don't mean to throw business consultants under the bus because I am one - 

Jaime Masters:	And most suck. I'm sorry. They do. Most coaches do too. So go ahead.

Alex Charfen:	So then let's go down that path. There's a crisis in the coaching and consulting industry.

Jaime Masters:	I agree.

Alex Charfen:	And it's a crisis because they best marketers, the people with the best sales pages, the people with the best lead generation devices are the ones who are getting the clients. And here's the challenge. The vast majority of consultants; and this kind of gets me ticked off because it's where people go bankrupt and feel really bad about themselves; they get you all riled up about a long-term vision like, "Hey, get crazy about your vision, 3-year, 5-year, 25-year." I've heard all kinds of shit. And then now let's build a whole bunch of meanings to get there. So here's what happens. Your team has no clue what that vision is. They have no clue.

	So now they have the hall of fame goal. They know the hall of fame goal, but they don't know the Superbowl, they don't know the schedule, they don't know the game next weekend. And the teams left to say, "How the hell do we get there?" And that's when they start driving us crazy. I think it was Michael Bell that said, "Give me a model, a framework, and a market and I'll make a billion dollars." So as an entrepreneur here's the framework we all need but we don't go and get. How do we work from the vision back to each day? And we work with entrepreneurs on a process where you clarify the vision, you tell your team the 1-year, then we build all the way back so that they have that schedule. 

They know exactly how they're gonna win. They know what the Superbowl is. And here's what happens typically is we go into an organization and if they have a small team and they haven't really had clear communication, as soon as you show a team, "Hey, here's where we're gonna go long-term. This is what we're gonna do in a year. These are the 90-day projects and the 90-day measurements. This is the next month. We're assigning resources in the week. Now let's get after it in the day." We see companies double and triple in size within 12 months all the time. Because finally, they can translate what the entrepreneur has been saying out there to what do I do today to make this get there?

Jaime Masters:	Okay. Yes, 1000% on this too. Everything you say it's not necessarily good, but I keep saying the same - it's a 1,000%, not even a 100%. So listen everybody. What I think is interesting is that because we are entrepreneurs and we have this vision and we don't break it down to KPI's or key performance indicators or whatever that right now things is, we feel clear. Our team doesn't feel clear. But is there any way to do it without hiring a consultant or - I mean, we're both them so of course, hire us. Yay. Go us. But in general, I find it's so much easier for me to do with clients than it is for me to do on my own. I hire coaches too. And I feel like the system's set up - there should be one system. There should be a robot that just tells us how to freaking back - this is not rocket science, people. I'm sure you don't think it's rocket science either when we start going back through. Yes, there's tactics and stuff like that - 

Alex Charfen:	Here's where it is though. Here's where it's hard, Jaime. See if you can relate to this. Here's what's really hard. When you start your business, you run systems that grow the business. Depending on who you are, you might run Infusions Op, Mail Chimp. You might be running a podcasting program. You might be running some click funnels, whatever it is. There's this transition that's very dramatic for entrepreneurs where the business can no longer run the systems without a system to run the business. And that's what we train. We have a program where entrepreneurs acquire that system, but here's why it's so hard. If you're building a company, that's a full-time job. You're deliverable, your products, what you give your clients is a full-time job.

	Creating the infrastructure within the business is also a full-time job. So can entrepreneurs do it on their own? Honestly. I've never seen anybody do it. I've never seen a person scale a team that's significant without some type of consulting, even when I was doing it in my twenties, I had consultants. I was a consultant, of course, I had consultants. They didn't help me relieve the pressure off myself, but I think that's why I came back and that's the type of consultant I am today.

Jaime Masters:	I love it. Well, and it's funny because we think as a visionary entrepreneur, we're sort of at the top, but even if you read books like Rocket Fuel and stuff like that, we still need an integrator. We need somebody to actually cross all those "t's" and dot all those "t's" because that's not us, thank goodness. Someone else to run the systems, don't think for a second that you're gonna be the person to run the systems because we're not very good at that. I don't think we are, at least the people that I'm working with.

Alex Charfen:	I had to have somebody come in and sign me into this today. I don't really use computers. No, I'm not kidding. Most of my stuff's all handwritten. Computers - 

Jaime Masters:	See.

Alex Charfen:	I'm surrounded by technology but I rarely use it.

Jaime Masters:	You can be like him. Hilarious that you're wearing the glasses though for the blue light.

Alex Charfen:	Well, because I mean I avoid computers like crazy. Here's why I avoid computers, Jaime. There's no people in them. And the size of business that I have today, if I'm not in contact with people, if I'm not talking to people, if I'm ' when I say I avoid computers, we use Google, we use Slack, we use everything. I just don't use it as much as my team because what I'm doing is the thinking, the coaching, the talking to people, making sure we're going in the right direction, bringing in the right types of clients and doing this kind of stuff. Going on and publicizing our company.

Jaime Masters:	You're the talent and the visionary. Though it is funny because you're like, "There's no people in the computer." I'm looking at a person in the computer right now. Wait a second. No, I get it. I get it. I mean - 

Alex Charfen:	So here's the difference, Jaime. I don't use email. My assistant does all my email. But I use Zoom constantly because I'll jump on and I'll talk to somebody face to face. But I think most of entrepreneur's time today, we feel very productive when you sit down at a computer, you wipe out your email box, you go through your Facebook, you do this, you do that. But dude, seriously, did you have to? That could have all been productive time.

Jaime Masters:	See. But, if they don't have the team or the systems then they're still checking off boxes in the sauna. 

Alex Charfen:	No doubt.

Jaime Masters:	Unfortunately. Or fortunately, right? Everybody's on their own path and just knowing those pieces. So give me some ideas because I know you've got a wealth of information on systems. And whenever I go into business, systems are very similar across the board. We all have specific types or maybe even different software, but a lot of them are very, very similar. And I would love for somebody to just take - and we've been collecting them, all the SOP's from all of the millionaires and all the stuff to try and just pull together a resource. How do you go in and help them create systems? Do you have a franchise model where you go and you sort of slap them all together because they're very similar or do you help them create their own? What's the best way for somebody to create a system?

Alex Charfen:	So the system that grows the business is not an app. It's a schedule and what we call a cadence. And so what we do is we create a process through which the team wins in the cadence. And here's what that means. A communication cadence is, "Here's where we're going in a year. This is the next meeting we have. This is where we're going in 90 days. This is where we're going in 30 days. This is the day that we have our weekly meeting." So in our company, we have prescribed times where we know exactly what we're doing. So as an example in our meeting, we review for each person what went right and where do you need support to move forward - 

Jaime Masters:	Sort of like a scrum or a scorecard or is it your own process that you guys sort of came up?

Alex Charfen:	It's our own process. We built the process. We help companies install it. But here's why Jaime. If you go out and you try and buy an app to run the company, apps exclude people. And I know that sounds like craziness, but you dump things into an app and there's no interconnection between the people. So we go into an organization and we help them build the schedules through which their team wins. And here's what happens. In most companies, meetings are like a four letter word. Like, "I don't want to be in a meeting. I don't want to talk to anybody." And here's what the result of that is, most entrepreneurs either have too many meetings or not enough. But they're unproductive. So what we do is we create targeted interactions for the team. We say, "This is a weekly meeting." There's only one outcome of a weekly meeting. You assign resources for the week. You all go in. You discuss what went right the week before, where do you need support to move forward, figure out what you're going to do that week. You make the commitment to it and you're out. It takes us about an hour and a half.

	Same thing for our monthly, same thing for our quarterly. Each one has an outcome because if the team knows what they're doing, they win. Jaime, today most people show up to a meeting and they either look in their phone to figure out what the agenda is or they lean over and say, "Hey, what are we covering?" In our team, people show up, they know exactly what we're doing. We accomplish what we need to in the meeting, and then we can go forward with momentum.

Jaime Masters:	Do you ever do check-ins then? Or is it just one weekly meeting all the way through? Because I know with scrum you have different - well, there's a whole bunch of different thoughts.

Alex Charfen:	I'll give you our whole cadence. We do an annual meeting where we confirm our client-centric mission where we're going and our annual objectives. Then we do a 90 day meeting each quarter where we decide on what are the projects that are gonna move us towards that 1-year. Then every 30 days - and by the way, when we're done with the 90-day meeting, we stop asking a very critical question. Where are we going? Most companies are constantly saying, "Where are we going? Where are we going? Where are we going today?" And you hear it in their language. It's like, "Hey, are we gonna do click funnels or this? Are we gonna bring in a new person? Are we gonna do this thing over here?"

	We want to be clear. "Hey, here's where we're going. That's set in stone." Then our 30-day meeting is just a calculated percentage of the 90. Then we have weekly meetings where we assign resources to get to our 30-day goals. And then our daily huddle. And what ends up happening is if something's going to get missed in our organization, it doesn't fall through the cracks, we push it through the cracks. We say, "Hey, we don't wanna do this." But in most organizations here's what happens. "Here's our vision, our long-term goal. We're gonna meet every month and beat each other up over the fact that we're not moving fast enough." Right?
Jaime Masters:	So much fun. Yeah. Totally. But you do daily huddles? So you do some sort of whatever the check-in - okay. Perfect.

Alex Charfen:	And Jaime, in between here's what I do. I set up - I never walk in or I try to do as much avoiding of, "Got a minute?" or interruptions of my team as I can. Management by walking around is one of the dumbest concepts in the history of end, and I used to rail against consultants who would tell people to manage by walking around. You think it's cool as an entrepreneur, but let's be honest. Most of us should never be walking through a building, looking for anything because we have a negativity bias. So we walk through the building trying to manage, what we really do is find shit that looks wrong. We start asking questions so we're supposed to be supporting the team, making them feel better and building relationships. And what they have is an interrogation interruption. And then they just want to get out of there.

Jaime Masters:	Or we're like, "Squirrel. Wait, here's a thing." Wait. Let me on - 

Alex Charfen:	You're like, "Hey, what are you doing there'" And you don't realize - see as a CEO, everything you say is heard through a megaphone and everything you do is seen through a microscope. So I come in and I'll set up time with people. And I'll say, "Hey, let's get together at 2:00. Let's go through this one thing and let's make sure that we understand where we're going." And we go for a walk or we go and talk outside or we go into a conference room and get it done. But it allows you to be the coach of your company rather than having to come in every day and feeling like you're strapping it on or pushing it uphill.

Jaime Masters:	Clarity, huh? Who knew? I feel like we, in general, think that clarity is just a squishy word, and you're like "No, no. There are metrics associated. This is something very easy to see people." Harder to do and harder to implement for sure. I'm sure people have heard this before, and it's way harder to get them to do it themselves hence the reason why it does make sense to hire somebody to help them totally understand that side of the coin too. And once the systems are set up, do you feel like you have to - like you guys are really solid at this. I'm assuming, you created it. Right? You're really, really solid at this. You wouldn't hire a consultant to come in to refine it or would you if you feel like it's slacking?

Alex Charfen:	Since it's exactly what we do, we teach this and so we refine our own systems each - 

Jaime Masters:	Oh, we have to do it.

Alex Charfen:	But Jaime, I'll tell you that in the last week I've had four consultants in here. We have somebody working on branding. We have somebody working on our exposure. I had a consultant in here yesterday whom I partner with us on a product. I mean, I am in constant either hiring a consultant, bringing somebody on, getting advice. Just like we offer to other people so where we're not strong, we go and get input. But in a specific process, we typically work with companies for multiple years. We kind of end up being a CEO wingman and helping them - we have a whole platform so if the CEO doesn't want to train people how to do the weekly, the monthly, their weekly reports, what to do in a daily. When they hire someone, they put them in front of our platform. They get on-boarded into the system and they understand how to move forward.

Jaime Masters:	I love this. Yeah. Well and hiring the consultant just speeds up the process. We are big on speed and progress so of course. I mean, it's not like they can't do it on their own, it's just there's a lot more learning and time and stuff like that. So sometimes if you don't have the cash to be able to hire four consultants or whatever it is, it'll just take longer. And we're not very good with liking things that take longer.

Alex Charfen:	And we just in our case, we actually have options for just about any size company to understand this up to and including the entrepreneur who's just getting started, just thinking about leaving their job. What's interesting Jamie, is we start with people on what call our personal planning program. And the personal planning program is the exact same cadence that you will eventually run your company under. So they learn it here working by themselves, and then they start hiring people and those people kind of get indoctrinated to the same thing. What in our larger organizations the CEO runs the company on the cadence, but then we train each individual to run their lives on our planning system.

	And so here's what happens. I just got off the phone yesterday with one of our clients. He went back from one of our events, started telling everybody about the planning system, how you set goals, how you do all this stuff, drinking more water and - We get people pretty excited. One of his team members started using our planner, set a 90-day goal that he was gonna drink more water and get in better shape. And he's lost 35 pounds in the last quarter. We hear that stuff all the time because when you - the gift we have of business is that for the people who work with us, that business is one of the most influential things in their lives. And every entrepreneur wants to be a leader. But what I share with entrepreneurs all the time is it doesn't matter how big a crowd you lead, how big a tribe you lead, how big a tribe you have out there. The people you will have the most impact on, the people you will have the most influence on, the people whose lives you're truly gonna change are the ones who are most proximate to you, your team.

	And so I come in every day thinking, "How do I make my team better? How do I help them be better at what they do? How do I help them improve?" That grows the company.

Jaime Masters:	Now I wanted to ask so many questions about hiring entrepreneurs. So one quick because I know we have to start wrapping up in a second. But one quick thing, why hire entrepreneurs because a lot of them could leave and go start their own thing? Right after you train them too.

Alex Charfen:	I look for people who are like me. I ask questions in interviews like, "Does it bother you when you get something wrong?" And then when someone says, "Well, yeah. It kind of does." I say, "Does it ever keep you up at night?" Because I want to know they're crazy. And I ask, "Tell me a project or something that you've done." And I wanna hear the person who got crazy over something, went out and built something, changed their school, staged a protest, whatever it is. Because I wanna know that they're people who have that same innate motivation that you and I do. 

And so I've never been afraid of people leaving my company. In fact, it just happened in the last few weeks, our COO left. He's been with us for six years. And he left to start an organization on his own. And I think that it would be incongruent and somewhat suspicious if I got angry when somebody who worked with us went and built a company. We look at it and when we say, "This is who we are. This is what we do. We have to support it. We go and find the person who wants to be part of a team. And Mark, who's now running a company on his own, I wouldn't trade the last five years for him for anything because of how much progress, and how much he helped us with.

And so you really have two choices. You can work with people who aren't motivated and they annoy you and they make you frustrated. Or you can work with entrepreneurial personality types, bring in the right people to the company, experience incredible momentum, and every once in a while you have to congratulate one of them on leaving.

Jaime Masters:	I love it especially since we love entrepreneurship so much, why would we want to keep it away from the other people who actually want to go out and do it on their own too. So I love all of this. And of course we could talk forever and we can't so I have to ask the same last question that I always do. But I know you have a book link to get The Entrepreneur Personality Type book in just a second. So after this question, we'll tell everybody where to get that book for free. So what is one thing listeners can do this week to help move them forward towards their goal of a million?

Alex Charfen:	So Jaime, we have what we call the contribution equation and it's four steps. But it's just one equation so I feel like it still meets the answer this question. I'll go fast though. Here's what every billionaire in history has done. First, lower pressure and noise for yourself. Look around your life. Get rid of anything that you don't really want. Start looking at the people, the places, and the things. They're either giving you momentum or they're taking it away. And start really being judgmental about where you're going because pressure and noise is what makes people like us symptomatic.	

	The second step is, ask for protection and support. So lower pressure and noise, and start getting protection and support. People like us don't ask for help. Every time we ask for help, it makes us feel vulnerable. And the whole thing, "Fake it until you make it," what that really is lie and deny. Go tell people what's really happening, and you'll start getting the help you need. 

	The third step is if you do those two things, lower pressure and noise, increase protection and support, your strengths and abilities will just show. Because you ask any great entrepreneur like, "Hey, did you go to school for this?" And they'll laugh at you. Where do we get that stuff? It's from the in betweens. Let's make those bigger. And if you lower pressure and noise, increase protection and support, your strengths and abilities show and you can go make your greatest contribution. And when you really look at what is every entrepreneur want to do, we all want to make money.

	We all want influence. We all want affluence. But when I sit down with people, even at the top of the food chain, the ones who have teams of 10,000, 100,000 - My friend Dave in Colorado has a team of 94,000 people at ReMax. That's a nation state. If ReMax got credit for every house it sold like Walmart gets credit for every product it sold, it would be the biggest company in the world by far. And Dave's all about making a contribution.

	When I was up there in the real estate crisis, I'm standing next to a guy whose worth 4 billion dollars on stage, and he was crying because they had just let people go. When you look at that, you can argue that Dave has everything in the world anybody would want. The largest house in Colorado, largest house in all of Arizona. He just expanded it. He was the second largest, but he had to win again - 

Jaime Masters:	Entrepreneur personality type. Alright. Continue.

Alex Charfen:	When I was working with him Jaime, he had a big jet and a small jet. But here's what's interesting about that. Any one of us would say, "Oh, yeah. I would be totally satisfied with that." Why was he crying on stage? Why was he upset? Why was he so emotional? Because what he's really all about especially at the point where you got that much money like you can just go drink it all away if you want to. The reason he gets up every day is to change the world. And the fact that he had let some people go who are on an executive team got him emotional enough that he got - it wasn't teary eyed. He actually cried a little bit in front of his entire executive team on stage with me.

	That tells you what we're hardwired to do. So the contribution equation; lower pressure and noise, increase protection and support, let your strengths and abilities show so you can go make your contribution; that's really what we're all about.

Jaime Masters:	Please, everybody that just listened to that especially if you're driving or anything, pull over and write down the things that you're gonna do in order to make and actually take some action on this. Because if we don't do anything with it, you're just gonna keep going at the same pace that you were before and just be frustrated. So thank you for that, Alex. Big time. So tell us where we can find the book, especially about entrepreneur personality types because we don't want to feel alone.

Alex Charfen:	You got it. So it's charfen.com. It's my last name. C-H-A-R-F-E-N. com. And you know what, Jamie? We were earlier gonna do the print book, but I'm gonna give you a link to the book or audio so you can listen or read. So anybody in the audience can get it. So just go to charfen.com/bookandaudio and you'll get both copies free.

Jaime Masters:	Smart man. We are podcast listeners, best place we don't - 

Alex Charfen:	Just relax now.

Jaime Masters:	Yes, exactly. Very, very smart. Good adaptability you've got there. Thank you so much for coming on the show today. Everybody check that out. Let Alex know how much you appreciate it. I appreciate your time, Alex. Thanks so much for coming on.

Alex Charfen:	Oh, Jaimie. This was awesome. I can't wait to do it again.

Tags: Alex Charfen, business goals, business processes, business tools, communication strategies, critical success factors, entrepreneur podcast, entrepreneurs, how to be a leader, how to start a successful business, jaime masters, millionaire entrepreneurs, millionaire habits, professional development goals, strategic goals, top, what does success mean to you

Categories: All, Featured Millionaire Interview, Goal Setting, Goals, Millionaire Interviews, Systems/Processes

Hi I’m Jaime. Each and every week I bring you the top business advice from the people who know best.

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