CEO Only Does Three Things | Trey Taylor on Leadership, Focus, and Building Great Businesses

Chris sits down with entrepreneur, investor, speaker, CEO coach, and author Trey Taylor to discuss leadership, business growth, productivity, mergers and acquisitions, focus, networking, personal development, and what separates successful executives from everyone else.

Trey shares the story behind his bestselling book CEO Only Does Three Things and explains how great leaders create clarity by focusing on culture, people, and numbers instead of getting lost in day to day operational distractions. The conversation explores Trey’s journey from studying economics and law to working in M&A, venture capital, AOL, WebMD, and eventually leading family businesses, coaching CEOs, and investing in companies across multiple industries.

Throughout the conversation, Trey discusses:
• Why focus is one of the most important leadership skills
• How successful CEOs structure their time and priorities
• The importance of building strong systems and culture
• Lessons learned from mergers and acquisitions
• Why most acquisitions fail after integration
• Productivity, delegation, and avoiding burnout
• The value of mastermind groups and surrounding yourself with smart people
• Networking, relationships, and creating opportunities through conversations
• How curiosity and asking questions can expand your business and career
• Why leaders must stop doing jobs they should delegate to others

Chris and Trey also discuss:
• Brian Tracy and early personal development influences
• The movie Wall Street and entrepreneurship inspiration
• Private equity, investing, and business acquisitions
• Building intentional relationships and high level networks
• Learning through mentorship and surrounding yourself with high achievers
• Books that shaped Trey’s mindset including The Alchemist, Making It All Work, and Rumi’s poetry

One of the most fascinating parts of the episode centers around Trey’s personal strategy of paying to have conversations with investors, founders, private equity professionals, and executives simply to learn from them and better understand business, markets, and leadership trends. That intentional approach to learning and relationship building has helped him dramatically expand both his network and perspective.

If you are interested in leadership, entrepreneurship, business growth, productivity, investing, executive coaching, personal development, networking, or scaling a company successfully, this episode is packed with practical insight and valuable lessons.

Books Discussed:
• CEO Only Does Three Things
• The Alchemist
• Making It All Work
• A Year with Rumi

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Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:15

Controlled and uh so we haven't had much uh much challenge from that. One day I was gonna fly out of the airport though, and the and the fire to the east was just pouring smoke this way, and I'm VFR, so I wasn't flying instruments and uh I just had to ground it and not go up.

SPEAKER_00 0:29

So yeah, I was actually uh I was in Atlanta the like a couple days after you and I first connected, and a lot of those guys I was meeting with had family down south. Yeah, and they were like, man, we're just getting tormented down there.

SPEAKER_01 0:43

You know, with these wildfires happen, I'm always amazed, no matter where they are, like how many acres it is. There's like 12,000 acres that burned.

SPEAKER_00 0:52

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 0:52

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 0:53

Yeah. No, it goes fast, man. It goes fast. But Trey, no, man, I'm excited to have you on the podcast today.

SPEAKER_01 1:02

Just gotta do better than Tommy. That's the that's the goal here.

SPEAKER_00 1:05

Well, you're up first, so yeah. I won't I won't give Tommy, uh I won't I won't send it to Tommy, so he won't know what to do. Give it give him harder questions. That's the thing. Yeah, I can do that. I can do that. But Trey, no, I've got your book here. CEO only does three things, and I appreciate you sending that to me as I'm working my way through it. And uh man, I would love for you just to talk a little bit about your story because when we first met, my first impression of you is just you're very business savvy. You do a lot of deals, you do a lot of different things, you speak, you coach, just your personal career. You've done a lot of things, and I would love to know just kind of how all that started and have you always, I guess, had that mindset of doing deals and being in these high-level leadership positions, or how that all transpired. Yeah, it's it's sort of funny.

SPEAKER_01 1:55

We joke about it in the family sometimes. When I was in the sixth grade, two things happened. My dad had a business partner, and she gave me a set of tapes back then, and they were Brian Tracy tapes, and the program was called the Psychology of Achievement. So every morning on the way to school, I'd make my mother put these tapes in and we would listen, and they were fascinating to me. Like, how do people become successful? You know, what goes on? He had a lot of stories in there, so that was good for a kid. And about three months after I got those, I listened to those things over and over throughout high school. And I even go back to that program from time to time. Now I've gifted it out to people, that sort of thing. I met Brian Tracy one time and told him the whole story. I was real thrilled about that. And uh, and then about three months after I got those tapes, the movie Wall Street came out and I went to see it. And then after that, I was just so enamored of business and like I remember thinking, oh, you can buy a building. Like somebody owns that building, you know, and it was fascinating and intriguing to me. And uh for Christmas, I got a little briefcase that I would take to school and, you know, stuff like that. So, you know, super nerdy, but uh I was always interested in business and how people put things together. When I grew up, um, you know, I went to uh took an undergraduate degree and studied history and economics. I did that at uh Emory in Atlanta and at Oxford in the UK. And it was interesting to see how those different systems sort of um, you know, sort of things that basically the guys teaching it had never done. So that was really interesting. And then I decided to go to law school and I was gonna get this JD MBA program. Uh so I went to Tulane and I ended up not taking the MBA because the the program rankings dropped while I was there, like 50 spots. And I went to see the dean and I was like, what happened? And he goes, We don't know. And I said, Well, what are you gonna do to fix it? He goes, We don't know. And I said, I'm out, baby, because I'm not hanging around while you figure it out, which was probably the wrong decision, but I was so sick of school, I was ready to get to it. So I came home and uh, you know, you do summer clerkships and internships and things like that. And I I wormed my way into a uh clerkship with uh the company that eventually became WebMD. It was really early, and I was like maybe the hundredth employee at WebMD, just doing deals, helping out, you know, papering transactions when they needed to do that. And I got a ton of MA experience in that first basically first 14 months that I was there. We bought 70 companies. And and I had I had hands on every one of those transactions. And I wasn't leading any of it, you know, I wasn't the chief, but I was touching all of it. It was just absorbing it. And so I really love that. And then we had a family tragedy. I had gone on to some other, some other work. I started a venture fund. Uh, that venture fund was doing really well until some idiots flew planes into the trade center and the whole world changed. And so I had to go in-house at a company called Earthlink and then was eventually hired at AOL to do divestitures. So they had bought all of these companies over the years, and they're like, we don't know what they're here for. We want you to come in, figure it out. The ones that we want to keep, we'll keep. And the ones we want to sell, we want you to run the process and sell these companies. Like dream job for me. And I was sitting out front of my house in Atlanta, and they the movers were coming to get my stuff. AOL had said, we don't have time for you to sell your house. Here's a check. They had bought it and the movers are coming. And um, and my mom calls and she says, Hey, your dad's in the hospital. They were in Las Vegas, they had gone for the like the new year, and um, and he's in the hospital. And I was like, Okay, I got the movers coming. Let me know how it goes, what you need. And she was like, No, you need to be on a plane right now. So I ran to the airport. My brother had flown up, we flew out to Vegas, and two weeks later we brought my dad home, but not the way we wanted to. So then I'm sitting there, like, well, what do I do? I have my dream job, this life that I've created. I have this girl that I love, that we're probably gonna get married, all of this stuff, and sh and she and it is there. And then I have my family business and my family here, you know, where am I, where am I pulled to go? And uh, and I was really torn by that. So I came home for a week to like help out what I could do. And it became clear to me that we didn't have a good succession plan. And I really sat up late one night. I remember it was uh Valentine's Day weekend and and my poor girlfriend had come down to hang out, you know, and and I was sitting there and I was like, my dad never told me no once. Like every time I asked him for something, it was okay, let me figure out how to do that. And here's my obligation and here's my privilege, but here's my responsibility to to do that too. And so I kept the family together, I kept the business together. I lost the girl, you know, she moved home. I didn't, I didn't go down that path. I found a a a new girl that was good too. And I won't say better because that would be rude, but uh better for me, let's say. And uh so that's how it sort of all came together. And then as I was learning the business, I had a legal pad. And every time I'd make this big learning, right, I'd jot it down. And uh a lot of what I jotted down became the framework for the book because when I consulted with companies, they would ask me, How do you how did you do this? or we want to look like you and you know, how does our business do this? And uh, and they would say, like, we wish you had written a book. So that's where the book came from, ultimately.

SPEAKER_00 7:22

Yeah. Man, I I love that you shared that. And I I I'm not too far into the book, but I I am on the the first part of it where I the word focus has already stood out to me. Saying no as is very important as someone like myself who's not at that level yet, it's still it's something I'm enjoying learning because I envision that for myself. And I think that's a good night, and I kind of heard you talking about that as you were answering that question. And it seems like everyone who is a high achiever or ultra successful, it starts at listening to tapes or listening to a CD or reading a book or just following people who have done it before and just soaking all of that knowledge in and then putting it into action and applying it, which is what you did and what all these others do. And so I'm glad that you say that because there seems to be a pattern there.

SPEAKER_01 8:16

Totally. I'm a believer in it. Like find a guru, you know, find your tribe. That's the most important thing. Um, the guru will always disappoint you, no matter what, because they're human, you know. But the people that that are in that tribe, the people that are trying to do what you're trying to do, and you can you can lean on them, you can pour into them. That is what the human experience is supposed to be about anyway. And so, yeah, man, I I I believe that and I participate today. I'm in two masterminds today, where I get around people that are doing what I'm doing and I learn from them. I'm putting together something right now called the Buttonwood Club for people that are in my position as a family office to come together with no vendors, with no outsiders in, but just people saying, hey, I don't know how to handle this issue and it's a succession issue or it's an investment policy issue or whatever that happens to be. And we're just gonna do like a two-hour meeting once a month and those kinds of things because every time I try to do that myself, I cut myself off from a lot of really good answers and influences. So if I have to form it, then I'll form it and do it. And then, you know, I'll run it or somebody else can run it. That's not important to me. I just want to be in the mix with people that are that are smart, committed, and going through on the same journey that I'm going on.

SPEAKER_00 9:33

Yeah.

unknown 9:34

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 9:34

Yeah, I love that. I I was kind of listening to a podcast yesterday too, and I think Kevin Hart popped up somehow. He was talking talking about meeting Jeff Bezos for the first time and him basically saying, like, I don't need to pretend that I know everything. I need to go get knowledge from this guy who's built this behemoth of an organization. He's like, I think that's the problem with people nowadays is you try to play it too cool and pretend you know it all instead of saying like I don't know nothing, and go surround yourself by people who are smarter than you and and can help you level up just by the knowledge they can provide. And uh I love hearing people say it talking about that, especially people who are successful, because they're saying, like, hey man, I'm still learning every day. I'm not every day.

SPEAKER_01 10:17

Let me tell you what I did this year. You log on LinkedIn, you get all these contacts from people like, uh, hey, we can get leads for you, right? Well, I don't need leads. Where we are in the business and them and my life, I don't need leads. So I was sitting there New Year's Day, and for no reason I just pinged a guy back and I was like, listen, I don't need you to make sales copy and book sales appointments for me. I want to have conversations with people that are VCs, private equity, real estate, private credit, you know, the things that that we do. I want to talk to those people and I just want to have a conversation. So there's no say I'm not gonna pitch them a deal. I'm not gonna talk to them about anything except I want to interview them over the course of 30 minutes, like a really quick call, and I'll pay a hundred bucks a call for those that you could put together. I've had 142 of those calls so far this year. And every call goes the same way. Like the f you know, they get on the call and they're like, what is this? You know, and I'm like, all right, I'm not selling anything, you know. I get that right off the bat. And then I just get them talking about what are you seeing in the market? Tell me about your company, tell me about your customers, what are you seeing? Was last month better than this month? That sort of thing. I'm gonna do it for the full six months of the year, is what I told him I would do. And I write down, you know, take my notes, I have the recording, and then I have my AI system put it all together so that it's in this knowledge base that I can pull. But what it's done for me is really deepened my understanding of how dollars are flowing, how people are investing, where they see benefit and that sort of thing. And then the other thing has been really awesome that I've been able to introduce a lot of those folks together as well. And uh, and that's been really cool. So, like there was a guy that was super high up at Amazon, and he found out that at the end of next year they're gonna phase his business out, his business unit's going away. And uh, so we were talking, and he just happened to mention that. And I said, Well, what do you want to do? And he told me, well, like two hours before I'd had a conversation with the guy that created that whole category. So I hooked them up and they're still in conversation. And I bet something comes of that, you know, which would be awesome. I had a another office that I met, they were in um in Norway and super into alternative energy and green energy and all of that sort of thing. And it's not my thing. We don't aggressively place assets there, but I meet a lot of folks that do, and I'm just introducing them all over the place, which is really fun for me. So for a hundred bucks per meeting, it's been super worth it, you know. And I'll probably be at K for the year, but I mean, come on, you can't you couldn't go out and buy a network of 150 people in that way for 15k. You there's nowhere you can write a check to produce that.

SPEAKER_00 12:55

So that's an idea for people that um if you want to expand the network, that's an easy way to just about say you're you're you're giving me a business idea over here on uh just being a connector kind of. I love that you say that. And I I kind of I try not to use the word networking too much because people kind of overdo that, but it's genuine relationships and genuine curiosity. And I was thinking about this too of like I know in your book it's a little bit of a different meaning, saying no, but when it comes to meeting people and doing things where you can get introduced to others, the power of just saying yes and going to shake someone's hand, asking a question, being around someone in a room that you wouldn't be able to normally, just the more people you know, the more conversations you have, the more opportunities just seem to magically appear just from those relationships being started and those conversations. Completely agree.

SPEAKER_01 13:45

In 2014, my theme for the year was to say yes to everything, right? And every single thing I was asked for. Now I was specific, like I had to be asked, right? It couldn't be my idea. I had to be asked. But if I was asked, I got into it. And for a year, I said I'll do this for a year, and I did it forever, right? Up until probably 23 when I noticed, because I do an end-of-the-year analysis of my calendar, right? I go back and look through every single appointment that I had taken that year. And I just asked myself, on balance, was this good for me or was it neutral or was it bad? And very few of them are bad, right? But I was stunned by how many of them were neutral. And what I realized was I was doing a lot of free work for people that didn't really appreciate it at the end of the day, you know. And so I went back to those people and said, hey, this is the way it's been for us, but it's not going to be this way going forward unless some things change. And of course they would get totally torn out of the frame about, oh my God, it's so, you know, Trey's valuing his time all of a sudden. So there's an extreme on both sides of that. And that's why I went into this thing today. Like, I love having conversations with new people and I love learning from them. And some of the people man, if I tell you, uh Chris, like there was one guy and I noticed his name on the counter. I'm like, there's no way he's coming. Like he, I mean, he's a billionaire. There's no way he's showing up. I click the Zoom link, he's sitting right there, and I'm like, what are you doing here?

unknown 15:11

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 15:11

Like, literally, why are you on this call? And he said, Well, I've been in this business for 35 years. Nobody's ever asked me for a conversation. And I came to see if you were full of it. And I said, Well, let me be honest, sometimes I am, but I don't have anything to sell. I want to learn. I mean, this guy is a category creator. He made five billion dollars by seeing something in the market that nobody else saw and just sort of going and plugging that hole and just owning it, you know. And it was a great thing. I was like, I wish I could take selfies on Zoom. Yeah. So it was like I was fanboying on it. So I kind of replaced, you know, from say yes to say no a lot more, I replaced that with being more intentional with who I can meet.

SPEAKER_00 15:50

Yeah. And that and that's a good point. As someone like myself, saying yes means a lot more because I'm I'm not to a level yet to where that balance has happened. I need to be taken in everything that I can. So I can see when you get to a certain level, time becomes a little more valuable in the way you've got to approach things. No, that's a great, that's a great point. I was gonna ask you a question around like MA specifically, because it just seems like that is where the big money is and in these deals and and and just how what's the process like of determining if you're going to acquire a company or if they're going to acquire you? Like what how much work goes into that and how do you actually break down is this a good relationship? Is this going to lead to prosperity for both parties? Like, how do you actually work through the numbers?

SPEAKER_01 16:46

So the answer to that is no, right? Because we know from like some of the uh studies that have been done academically in some of the trade groups, like 91 or 93% of MA activity produces zero shareholder value. Right. So most of the time it is that case. And I've I've bought companies for myself and bolted them onto existing businesses, or I've helped out with portfolio companies. And we always start from that standpoint. Like, are you sure? Are you sure that we can't do anything to grow except this? Like, if we if this wasn't available, what would we be doing? And I always push back really hard on that. Having said that, acquisitions are a great way to get further down the track, you know, than you would usually be able to do organically. And so you know and I know that there's a tremendous, you know, it's not even a cottage industry anymore. It's a separate category industry and roll-ups now. They roll up everything. I met a guy six months ago who was rolling up laundromats. And I'm like, they still have those? And he was like, yes, it's a fabulous business. And he's just rolling them all together and he's putting technology, totally boring, but he's putting a technology layer on top, right? So that you can walk in and swipe your card or swipe your phone and the thing comes on, and then he's got all the you know security footage, he's got all the stuff. He's really into it and he's gonna, he's gonna do really well. Somebody eventually, that that free cash flow of that business will be big enough that he that somebody wants to own it for more than he paid for it. Um so there's that. I think uh I always, when I'm in counseling with somebody who wants to sell their business, I always say, look, we can't move forward until you tell me your number. And then they'll give me the number. And then I show them the financial rules around that number and they they get brokenhearted really quick, right? Because if you're making, let's just say you make a million bucks a year today as an income from a business, you say, I just want to sell my business and I want to keep making that million bucks, then you have to sell that business for a lot of money, right? Because all of the sort of Monte Carlo style analysis that goes on there is that you can touch roughly 4% of the principle afterwards. And so it makes people really focus on, oh, well, maybe I don't hate this business so much that I want to sell it. Maybe I want to get back into it and fix it. So we use the principles in the books a lot of time to do that. But sometimes it is the right time, uh, personal circumstances or hey, I don't have a good succession, you know, plan or something of that nature. So, you know, the whole MA circle cycle is really interesting to go through in that way.

SPEAKER_00 19:17

Yeah. And I get, and you're right, I hear like, you know, VCs, it's like, hey, if one out of whatever works, then it was worth it. But it seems like everybody's trying to swing for the Grand Slam. And as long as a couple of them work, it's great. But it seems like everyone's at least trying to build it. We get it backwards. Yeah, we get it backwards.

SPEAKER_01 19:39

So we think that the tip of the iceberg, the, you know, the part that's sorry, the part that's underwater, it's integration. That's the that's the thing that nobody does well. And we think that the tip of the iceberg is the hard part. Like just getting the transaction together and, you know, oh, we did the deal and now the deal's done. No, no, no. You just brought on a completely different team, a completely different culture. They use different tools and all of that. And and honest to God, man, there are not 15 companies in the world that do integration well. And think about that. I mean, if I'm wrong, I'm wrong by a factor of two. So there's maybe 30 companies in the world that do it really well, and everybody else doesn't. We just funded a company that the guy had built some software. He sold it, he sold the company to another company. He worked there for like six years. They never touched any of the stuff that he had done. They then were getting acquired by another company who said, we don't want that, go sell it. We're not going to pay for it, so go get rid of it. So they went back to him and said, We gave you $6 million six years ago. Why don't you buy it from us now? And he said, Okay, I'll give you $100,000. They settled on $600,000. We bought it. We helped it. We invested with him, you know, bought it through it in another company. And all he did was go to the same customers and say, hey, send the check here instead. And he he'll do $7 million, knock on wood, he'll do about six or seven million this year. And uh, and that was the result of just, you know, failed MA activity that they never integrated.

SPEAKER_00 21:10

How do you specifically, obviously, it's a numbers game, like that the main part of it, but how do you personally uncover opportunities that you see like this one? Hey, we should invest. I feel good about it, you know, growing to something else. Do they come to you? Do you consistently search out these opportunities? What's that offered?

SPEAKER_01 21:32

There's an entire industry of sales side folks that will bring you as many deals as you could possibly look at. But this is all the result, it should be the result of strategic planning. The first time you think of acquiring a company should not be the result of a sales side conversation where you're like, oh, I never thought about that. Let's do it. You should have a strategic awareness of your company of what you are really good at, right? And what you're not good at. And you need to be thinking in terms of if I'm not good at that, should I be doing it? At all, right? And if I shouldn't, if I determine that that's just not part of what we do, you should take and get rid of those assets. You should sell those assets or spin them off. So we've done that before. We used to have a line of business in a company that I owned and it was sort of big enough. It was, it was just a little too big just to shut it down, you know? But we didn't like it. We every time any of the execs had to deal with it, we were furious, like, oh, I can't believe I have to spend my time on this. But the per the two people primarily that were running that business, they love that business. Total nerds about it. They thought about it all the time. So we went to them and said, look, we're gonna spin this out. You're gonna own it. We're gonna keep 50% the first year. And as you scale revenue, you'll buy us down in these chunks and we'll we'll bottom out at 30%. We're gonna keep 30% of the business. But don't, you know, at the end of 12 months, don't ask us for anything, you know? They took that business and tripled it. That was never a massive business. I think they got it up to about $4 million a year. You know, it was never massive, but they ran that thing for a long time. And then like five years later, they called and said, Hey, we're gonna sell it for this multiple. Your 30% is now worth what the hundred percent was when we first did it or something like that. We're like, Yeah, yeah, this is great. This is a great transaction. We hadn't talked to them in like five years, you know. So you have to know what you're good at and what you're not, and then you figure out what the transaction is. So we weren't good at that line of business. We very well could have said, hey, this thing is not scaled enough. We need to go buy some other people that are doing more of this so that we pay a lot more attention to it and we can put management discipline around it and things like that. We could have done that. We could have just shut it down. But, you know, we tried to sell it in t in a way that made a lot of sense. So you should have a strategic plan where you know what you're really good at, right? And in those categories, can you buy other people that are really good at it as well? If not, what are you really bad at? Right. And get rid of that and see if you can, you know, on the sell side, give that problem to somebody else.

SPEAKER_00 24:00

Yeah. Is this a like a trial by fire type of skill that you learn and that's the only way you figure it out is by failing, succeeding, and kind of hands-on, or is it like a skill that you can learn from someone else and be good at just from from shadowing? That's a great question.

SPEAKER_01 24:18

I can only answer you because I shadowed my way through it. You know, I was in one of my masterminds two weeks ago, and the speaker, they brought in a speaker, and the speaker was, here's how you get acquired by private equity. And they were going through it. And the guy was good. He knew everything that he was he was talking about. But the rest of the group was staring at me the whole time. They're like, that's what you've been saying. That's what you've been saying. And it wasn't because I've done so much of it, it's because I've seen so. If you want to get practiced at it, you know, talking to these sales site guys and saying, hey, if I were to buy a business, this is what I would look for. Let me see some deal flow and then just start the analysis process, your internal analysis process on what those look like and what they, you know, what they should do for you and those kinds of things. A lot of deals are self-financing deals. It's really amazing. So if you buy a company and and they're spitting off just to say a million bucks a year, that's $88,000 a month. The financing on it's like $15 or 20, you know, depending on the price, that's sort of a self-financing deal, depending on, you know, the other overhead that you have to go with it. So are you really at that much risk if the business can pay for its own acquisition? Those are fewer and far between than they used to be, but I still see some of those from time to time.

SPEAKER_00 25:33

Interesting. Interesting. Trey, just a couple more questions for you. From a work standpoint, what's the what's your favorite part of your day? Is it just conversations with interesting people? Is it making deals happen? Is it coaching? What what do you get the most enjoyment out of between the things that you do?

SPEAKER_01 25:51

So, Chris, I'm in such a good place now where I have constructed my day that it is only full of things that I really love to do, which is all of those things that you have mentioned. My life hasn't always been that way, right? But when I hired my EA Gillian, who I think you've corresponded with, I did so because a friend of mine had hired a speaker to come in to address his company on like productivity and work hacks and things like that. I was so into that. So he invited, he said, Hey, if you want to bring your company, come on. And she's here for two days, and these are the two days. And I got the days confused because I was trying to do it myself. And we showed up on the wrong day. I had like 15 people. We showed up on the wrong day, and it was so embarrassing. He was so gracious about it, but I was mortified. I drove immediately back home. I got on upwork and I drafted this job posting. And I had like 40 people, and I interviewed every one of the 40 people because I was like, I'm never going to do this again. She was the first one that I interviewed, and then she was the one that I was, you know, gauging everybody else against, comparing against her. So we get to the end of it, and I said, okay, I'm going to offer you the job. And I took this breath like I was about to tell her all this stuff. And she was like, okay, good. I knew you were going to do that. And here's the thing, you work for me. And I go, what do you mean? And she was like, you don't touch your calendar again. And when I tell you that you're going to be somewhere, you be there and you be prepared and you kill it. But you don't have to do all of this other stuff. So then she said that now was like, what? So then she goes, uh, now tell me what your ideal day looks like. So now I'm feeling like a smart ass because, you know, she she said something that challenged me. And I said, All right, I go to work at 9:30, I take a two-hour lunch from 12 to 2, and I leave at 4:30. For 11 years, I live that life. And she only puts things in my calendar that are coaching, are looking at deals, are meeting people, or are working on real problems that I need to be in in the business that the management team has requested me to come in on, right? And I live my entire day that way. And I'm home at 4 30. Like I still fool around and email and you know, I'm super into all the clawed code stuff now and that kind of stuff. But, you know, the day that I spend is doing the things that I yeah.

SPEAKER_00 28:08

Love that. Love that. With your book specifically, Trey, when someone reads it, if there's only one thing they take away from it, what do you hope that one nugget is they take away from reading your book?

SPEAKER_01 28:19

Yeah, I wrote the book because too many of us are doing the jobs that we pay for other people to do. And the way that you fix it is to use the matrix that we build in the book, which is uh pay attention to your culture, your people, and your numbers. And we have structures built under each of those, you know, so that you can analyze your own business to see, do I have the right culture? No. Do I have the right people? Also, no. And do I have the right numbers? You'll see. You know, you've you don't, but you'll see how that is is possible. The book has been, it's been its own little thing, man. I thought we'd sell 500 copies of this book, and like my mom would buy 200, you know? It's over 100,000 copies. I don't look anymore, but it's over 100,000 copies. And the reason is, and I hear this all the time from people I read it, is I had fallen out of love with my business because I wasn't doing my job. And in fact, nobody was doing my job, and I had to get back into it and start doing my job. The other thing that I find super interesting is there's this thing called Secret Mastermind, and there's like 50 Fortune 500 company like CFOs and CEOs that go to it. They invited me to come, and the deal is you send them the book, everybody reads it, and then they interview the author for uh basically an hour and a half. So I go out and I was like, this book is like for little businesses, you know, not for these guys. There was one guy in the room that said he didn't think the book had any application to him. All the other guys in the room, 49 of them, are like, I'm taking this back, I'm getting back into my business, that kind of stuff. And then the host told me, pulled me aside, and he was like, that guy needs this book more than anybody else, which is why he didn't like the book, you know. Uh so my point in saying that is I think the book has a really wide appeal because the systems that we talk about are just uh elementally true for every business, but every seed.

SPEAKER_00 30:11

No, that's great. And we could we could spend a whole nother segment talking about systems, I'm sure, and how to implement those correctly. But last question for you, Trey, for you personally, what's a what's a book or two that's meant a lot to you personally or professionally? And what's a book that you love to recommend to others?

SPEAKER_01 30:28

I have gifted the alchemist probably 200 and something times. It's buy 10 or 12 of them at a time, keep them in the office, hand them out to people, send them through Amazon to folks, all that kind of stuff. So that's one of them. Uh, there's another book that I won't say he was a friend of mine, but he's a guy that I would run into a lot when I lived in Athens at UGA. His name was Coleman Barks. He was a professor of English, but he started translating Rumi poems. Rumi was a 13th-century Sufi mysti, Persian mystic. And so he wrote a like a year with Rumi, and I gift that book all the time. Men get into stages of their life where we don't feed our souls at all. And I start my day every single morning with a 13th century Muslim poet because it feeds my soul, and I give it to people all the time. And then on the drier side, you know, I love the book. It's called uh Making It All Work, and it's by David Allen. David Allen wrote Getting Things Done, which I don't think is a very good book. I think making it all work is the central unlock for how do we use productivity systems and all of this kind of stuff to actually make sense of what's coming our way, how to handle it. And it's like this judo manual on how to, you know, somebody throws something at you, how do you, how do you dodge it, how do you take it, how do you get it done differently? I think it's brilliant. So those are probably the three books that would come top of mind. Love that.

SPEAKER_00 31:53

Love that. Well, Trey, man, this has been awesome. I appreciate you. Love it, Chris. Yeah. And providing your insight. And so, man, keep doing what you're doing. Really appreciate it. All right, good. Appreciate you having me on the body.