Recruiting Is the #1 Skill in Business… And You’re Not Doing It Enough

Most leaders say recruiting is important.

But their calendar says otherwise.

In this episode, I break down why recruiting is the single most important skill in business and why most leaders avoid it, even though they know it matters.

If you’re spending more time tweaking your sales presentation, fixing systems, or staying “busy” instead of finding the next great person… you’re capping your growth.

Every elite organization understands this.
From the Navy SEALs to the NFL to companies like Apple and Amazon… they don’t wait for talent to show up. They go find it.

Because your business is not your product.
 It’s not your comp plan.
 It’s your people.

I also break down the hidden cost of not recruiting.
 What happens to your culture.
 Why your best people leave.
 And how slowly drifting is actually worse than failing fast.

Including the story of the shark… and why your best performers will eventually leave if your “tank” isn’t big enough.

This episode will challenge how you think about growth, scale, and leadership.

If you feel stuck, plateaued, or like you’re carrying the weight of your entire team… this is why.

Recruiting is not just something you do.
 It is the growth strategy.

And if it’s not your dominant thought… your business will reflect that.

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

What's up, everybody? Welcome back. Today I want to talk about something that I believe is the single most important skill, the single most important activity that exists in any business, right? And that's recruiting. Now I know some of you might be here and saying, well, you know, yeah, that's obvious, or well, I think it's sales. But here's the thing. If it's so obvious, right, then why aren't you doing it? And I'm gonna maybe rearrange some of your concepts around sales. Yes, sales is the one of the most important things that you can do, but you can lower the gravity of what it takes to do sales and increase the amount of sales that you have if you have the right people in the right seats. So recruiting is the most important skill first that you have to be able to develop. And so if that's the case, why isn't it the most dominant thought in your business right now? Why are you spending time right now tweaking your sales presentation? You're spending more time doing that than you are finding the next person who's going to change the trajectory of your entire organization. Okay, let me break this down for you. Every great and elite organization on the planet recruits for talent. Every single one. Okay, Navy Sales, guys, we don't just take whoever walks in the door. We go find the best. We recruit for talent. The NFL doesn't wait for athletes to show up. They have an entire combine, an entire scouting system. And it's all built around one thing finding the right talent, finding the right people, right? Apple, Google, Amazon. You think those companies got to where they are by accident? Absolutely not. They're obsessed with talent acquisition. They understand something that most people in business, they just tend to never figure out that your people are your business, all right? Not your product, not your comp plan, not your marketing. It's your people. Yes, all of those things help, right? It's like baking a cake and everything has its own ingredient in that cake, but one of the most important ingredients is your people. So look at the most elite military units in the world. Look at the most successful sports franchises. Look at any organization that has dominated in its space for decades, they all have one thing in common. They recruit relentlessly. Okay, and they put the right people in the right seats. And there's a cost for not recruiting. Let me flip this on you because this is where it gets real for you. What happens when you don't recruit? What happens when you stop being obsessed with finding talent? Well, you die. You slowly go backwards. And in my opinion, it's worse than dying fast because you don't even realize that it's happening a lot of times. It's just drifting. And over time, you don't even know how far you've drifted until your numbers start to set in, until you're you're sitting there in a seat by yourself and you have to constantly feel like that hamster in a wheel that's constantly having to continue doing the same thing over and over again, expecting things to change, but it never does. Okay. Your best people start to getting, they start getting restless. Your culture starts getting stale. Your energy drops. The vision shrinks. And before you know it, you're looking back a year from now, wondering, man, what happened? And Ed Milette talks about this and he tells a story about a shark he had in a tank. And it's a great story. He kept asking his fish guy if the shark was getting too big for the tank. And he knew he needed to scale the tank, but he didn't move fast enough. And that shark, that stud that he had, that thoroughbred that was sitting in that tank, started eating all the other fish. It started destroying the culture from the inside out. All right. And then one day Ed was out of town and and and the shark literally jumped out of the tank, obliterated the front of his face, just jumped out and died. Think about that for a second. The shark would rather die than stay in a tank that was too small. And that's exactly what happens in your business when you're not scaling, when you're not focused on recruiting, when your vision isn't big enough. Your best people, your thoroughbreds, they're going to eventually leave. They will go compete against you. They will find, you know, somewhere else to go. And even if it costs them everything, they will leave a tank that's too small for them. I used to think that when people left my team, you know, back in the day, when I was still trying to grow my understanding of what it takes to win in leadership, that, you know, they were the problem. They had a bad attitude and that they were just disloyal. And honestly, looking back at it, you know, 10 years ago, right? That's a cop-out. That's that's the it's just the honest truth. The truth is they didn't believe the tank was going to get was going to get big enough for them. My vision back then wasn't compelling enough. I wasn't talking about growth enough. I wasn't talking about recruiting enough to show them that this thing was going somewhere. I needed to cast the vision, right? The Bible says without vision, people perish. I wasn't, I had the vision, but I wasn't giving the vision. And when I started giving the vision, when I started realizing how I had to constantly be casting the vision for them, showing them how bright their future can be and how tomorrow is going to be better than today. And this is the right place with the right leadership team and the right company in the right industry. Man, everything changed for me. Okay. Growth is not optional. Here's what you have to understand growth is not a nice to have. It's it's not, you know, something that you get around to when everything else is figured out. Growth is the thing. All right. Even Ed Milette says it. He says, you're either growing or you're dying. And he's absolutely right. That implies to everything your relationships, your health, your money, your mind, and absolutely your business. Think about it. You know, we go to college, we get degrees to grow. We read books to grow. You go to the gym to grow. Every meaningful thing that you do in your life is in the pursuit of growth. So why would your business be any different? But here's what people miss, okay? They go in their business and they hit a rank, or they hit a level of income success. They close a big deal, and all of a sudden, their growth stops being that dominant thought in their head. They start thinking about systems and about optimization, about making things more efficient. And look, those things matter, but none of them matter if you're not growing. I can't tell you how many times I mentor seven-figure earners where their business might be going backwards and they're still focused on optimizing their systems when they need to be focused on scaling and recruiting and growing again. Okay, let me ask you something, and I want you to actually answer this honestly. Okay, what is the number one thing that you think about in your business? Write it down right now. All right, what is that dominant thought? If your answer isn't growth, okay, if your answer isn't how do I find the next great person, then I could tell you right now where you'll be in about a year. Okay. You'll be in roughly the same spot. Maybe, you know, maybe you made some nice improvements, maybe your systems are cleaner, but you didn't explode. You didn't reach your full potential, right? Because you you get what you're obsessed about. And if you're not obsessed about growth, you're not going to get it. Recruiting is your growth strategy. Okay, so how does this all connect, guys? It's very simple. Recruiting is the vehicle for growth. It's a the single activity that creates scale. Ray Kroc, the owner of McDonald's, right? He didn't say, you know what, nine restaurants, it's pretty good for me. Let me just optimize these nine. No, he wanted hundreds, he wanted thousands, right? And what happened? Not only did Kroc win massive, but he created an entire industry. The Wendy's came after, Burger King came after, the whole franchise model exploded because one man was obsessed with scale. Yes, he implemented systems. Yes, he did it right, but he was first focused on scale. What if America decided it didn't want to grow, right? What if we never built a global presence, right? We wouldn't have been able to protect ourselves. That offensive approach to growth became the greatest defensive strategy in history. If the US hadn't expanded its reach, we wouldn't, right now, we we would have um we would have been, you know, taken out probably decades ago, right? And then for my spiritual friends on the call, what if Jesus said, I got my 12 guys, I'm good. He didn't stop a 12, his movement is still scaling today. Billions of people, because the entire culture was built around growth, on expansion, on reaching the next person. That's what recruiting does for your business. Every person you bring in is another location, another branch, another multiplier. All right, every recruit doesn't just, you know, they don't just add to your, to your guys' team, man. They multiply it, right? And that's who you got to look for. You got to look for multipliers, not just addition, but multipliers, people who are hungry, people who have influence, right? People who are coachable. And the price you pay for putting people in the wrong seats is a hefty price. Now, let me talk about something that typically doesn't get a lot of attention. It's not just about necessarily recruiting more people, as I'm sitting here telling you guys. Yes, you got to be focused on scale and growth, but we also want to find multipliers. It's about recruiting the right people and putting them in the right seats. You can have the best person in the world, but if they're in the wrong role, they become a liability for you. You've got a closer sitting in operations, right? You've got a visionary doing admin work. You've got a leader buried in tasks that literally anyone can do. That's not a waste, that's not just a waste of talent, guys. That's a that's leadership failure. That's an organizational failure. Right. And the best organizations in the world don't, you know, they don't only just recruit, they assess, right? They evaluate, they figure out where someone's stripes are and they put them exactly where they can create the most impact. And when you get that wrong, it's expensive. It's not just in money, right? But in momentum, in culture, in a time that you never get back. Think of the Peter principle. The Peter principle is when you promote people past their competence in that leadership role. You know, you got a sales guy who's great at sales, and all of a sudden you put him in a leadership role, but he's not great at leading. So, you know, then your organization starts to slow down. So just because somebody is very competent in a skill doesn't mean they're necessarily the right person to be putting in that next seat. You have to make sure they're developed and they're ready for that next seat in order to put them in that seat. And if they're not there yet, then what do you need to do? Go recruit somebody, find the right person to put in that right seat. Okay, so what are you gonna do? Here's my challenge to you right now, today, not tomorrow, today. Make recruiting your dominant thought. Okay, make it the first thing you think about when you wake up and the last thing you think about before you go to bed. Stop hiding behind busy work and systems and you know, operations and all these different things. Yes, those things matter, but growth, recruiting needs to be your dominant thought. Stop telling yourself that you need to get your systems perfect, perfection is the enemy of progress before you start bringing in talent. That's just your fear talking, okay? And that's that's limiting beliefs. You gotta ask yourself these two questions. Number one, what am I doing right now that is causing explosive growth in my organization? Okay, number two, what am I doing that's making it almost impossible to grow? And you got to get brutally honest with those answers because the lack of growth, you know, it doesn't just hurt you, it hurts your team, man. It hurts the families who will never get your products or your services. It hurts your community, right? It hurts there's real cult carnage that comes from playing small. You have something to offer the world. You have a product or a service or a vision that can change lives. And the only way to get it to more people is to recruit more people who believe in it as much as you do, to put the right people in the right seats who can be multipliers and not just fill a seat, but be a multiplier of the vision, multiplier of the efforts. So go recruit, go find your next thoroughbred, go scale your take before they jump out of it. And that's what I got for you guys today. Share this with somebody that you know it's gonna bring value to them. You got to understand that every single talented elite organization on the planet is recruiting their focus on growth. And then as we continue down this series, I'm gonna get more tactical with you to help you understand how to actually recruit at the elite level.