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Speaker 1:

This is The Ultimate Advisor podcast, the podcast for financial advisors who want to create a thriving, successful, and scalable practice. Each week, we'll uncover the ways that you can improve your referrals, your team, your marketing, and your business operations, helping you to level up your advising practice, bring in more assets and create the advising practice that you've dreamed of.

 You'll be joined by your hosts, Bryan Sweet, who has more than half a billion dollars in assets under management, Brittany Anderson, the driving force for advisors looking to hire, improve their operations and company culture. And Draye Redfern, who can help you systematize and automate your practices marketing to effortlessly attract new clients.

 So, what do you say? Let's jump into another amazing episode of The Ultimate Advisor podcast.
 

Brittany Anderson:

Hello, and welcome back. This is Brittany Anderson with your Ultimate Advisor podcast. And I have got with me, Mr. Bryan Sweet and Mr. Draye Redfern. And we're going to continue right on the bandwagon of leadership. Today we are going to talk about leading by example. I know, don't let your hats fall off or fall over on the floor because I know this isn't a new concept, but I promise we have some interesting spins on it. It's a little bit different than what some of you may have heard or learned over the years.

 So leading by example, to add some clarity to what we're going to be talking about today, it's not just the idea that, well, I've done every position here, so I know everybody's jobs. So I can lead by example because I've done it and I've processed paperwork and I've talked to clients and I've answered phones and all of that good stuff. So I can lead by example.

 That's not what I mean. Rather, what leading by example truly means, is leading with pure tenacity to know that you refuse to fail. So we talked about this a little bit last week when it comes to confidence, is that when you look at how you model for your team, how you show up for your team, how you show up for your clients, you have to be a leader to a lot of people right now. You're looking at being a leader... If you're a business owner, you're the primary advisor, you're having to show up for your team, for your clients, for your family, for your friends. People are watching other people right now, and they're looking at how they're responding to adversity. They're looking at how they're responding to challenging times. So you have to choose how it is that you are going to show up.

 And leading by example, again, is leading with that tenacity that you're like, "You know what? Whatever's thrown at me, it might be scary and there might be challenges and there's going to be hurdles, and there's going to be tough times, but I know that regardless of what is in my way, I'm going to get through it." It's that grit. It's knowing that you are going to show up. Leading by example. It means showing your team and your clients alike, that you stand strong, regardless of what is put in your path, but that you are also humble enough to show some vulnerability. So we talked about vulnerability last week and we talked about the power in that and really how that is completely aligned with the concept of confidence. All too often, people think, if I'm going to lead by example, I have to be tough. I have to be somebody that shows up and I can't show fear and I can't show emotion and I can't show any of that, because I am an effective leader.

 That might've worked, how many years ago. That might've worked in more of that corporate structure. But the bottom line is when you look at what's going on in today's world, and you look at how people are showing up for the business that they work in. I've shared statistics and I'm going to share this again. There's a statistic out there for US employees that took a really broad range that said that only 60% are excited to come back to work. That's super alarming. That's scary as a business owner, because what that means is you have a chance that 40% of your people being totally disengaged, possibly affecting the culture overall, possibly being a negative cog in the system, and you don't want that to happen.

 So in order for you to help avoid that, that's why we're talking about this. We want you to keep your people. We want you to keep the culture alive. We want you to grow and not go the opposite direction. We don't want you to be stagnant. We want you to excel. So part of that is deciding that you're going to show up and be that example that you need. So there's, again, this misconception that leaders always have to have a brave face, and that's just not completely true. True leaders, true leaders who focus on leading by example actually are not afraid of being human. And they're going to encourage their teams to do the same.

 So I'm not talking about... I can't stand this term human error. People are like, "Well, I made a mistake and it's human error. It just happens." Well, no, that's not true. You're still striving for excellence, and I expect a lot out of you and I'm pushing my team. We've talked the last couple of weeks about how confidence is built by stepping outside your box and focusing on growth and doing all those things. And that's how I'm asking you to show up as a leader.

 So what I mean by humanizing yourself and allowing your team to do the same is by showing up and being like, "Hey, this was maybe a tough week. Maybe we dealt with some interesting client calls. Maybe we've just kind of been in a rut a little bit. Maybe the mood's been a little bit off." Whatever that is, we're going to honor where we're at, but we're also going to commit to being the example that we want to see in the world, and we're going to come out better next week. Or we're going to come out even better tomorrow or whatever that gut check is. That's what leading by example is really about. It's not focusing on the rainbows and the sunshines all the time, but it's by standing true and being steadfast in your actions.

 So, Bryan, I think that one thing that you have modeled is that you've chosen over the years, your definition, really of leading by example, if I could sum it up, is in your drive to never stop learning. So I would love for you to talk a little bit about that because I think this is going to resonate with a lot of advisors out there. I mean, we see it in the mastermind. We see it in our accelerator. This is a huge draw, is that you're a lifelong learner and you are never going to stop. So let's talk about that.
 

Bryan Sweet:

Well, I guess I'm guilty as charged on that one. As some people might know, I think we've kind of told my story a little bit over the podcast, but growing up, I spent a lot of time at my aunt and uncle's home and he was an implement dealer and my aunt was a principal. And one of the great things that occurred by getting exposure to my aunt was her being a principal and a teacher. She really instilled in me the benefits of learning and to constantly strive to get better.

 And so I kind of got that from a very young age when I was 10, 12 through my teenage years, and it really continued when I got into the business right out of college. And one of the things that I did was right out of college, I started studying for my CLU and ChFC designation, which originally started in the life insurance arena.

 And when you pass those things, we talked earlier in a podcast or so ago, how that gives you confidence. And so then you find out, well, what other things do I want to learn? And what other goals and classes do I need to get better at the things that I think I want to excel at. And so I would tell you today, I probably, other than you, Brittany, I probably take more classes and read more books than anybody in the office. But one of the things that we do is we have a learning goal for every single individual to help them get better in their position, or those things that they want to get better at, if they're maybe trying to climb the ladder in their career.

 And I will tell you that the biggest success story on why do you want to push yourself, and why do you want to get better, and why do you want to get comfortable being uncomfortable, is you, Brittany. Because every time you've taken a step, I've just seen you grow and your confidence get better and you've taken on more. And then all of a sudden we take the next step. And it's absolutely been amazing. So I can see it in my career, but it's really great to see somebody that has always said, "Yes, I want to get better. I want to grow." And literally anything that I've asked you to do and grow and get better at, you've said yes. And boy, proof's in the pudding, and I don't know how it gets any better than that. So kudos to you.

 But the reason I say that is, it does lend us some amazing results. So a lot of you that said you'd like to have another Brittany, well, make sure you keep encouraging your team to get better and push them because they do want to get better. And when they have some success, then that just breeds more success.

 The other thing that I would mention is I think one of the things where we could be so helpful to a team and clients, as far as that goes, is to make sure that they understand that their dreams can come true, regardless of any circumstances that they were born into or even where they're at today. And when I was young, my mom got divorced when I was three, my dad never paid my mom a dime of child support. And through my aunt and uncle and my mom working hard, I just learned that one, you've got to be self sufficient. Do you want to thank people for encouraging you and people that encourage you is very, very important. And I will tell you, it's one of the most important things that you can do to any human being is catch them doing something right and letting them know.

 If you think back, and I always think back to one thing in my career, is I always tried hard and did things well and pretty good producer, but it wasn't until the president of our broker dealer came up to me one night after an event and essentially said to me, "Bryan, you have all the skills and talent to be in our chairman's council, which is our top group of typically half of 1%." And I had never qualified for it, but literally the year after he said that, I qualified for it because he gave me permission and the confidence. And I think one thing that I maybe helped Brittany with is I've been encouraging her to be her best self. And then she's taken the action to do it.

 And that is just so helpful. Because people want positive things and people want reinforcement that they're doing good. In life today, it's pretty negative. You listen to the news and you might want to jump off a small curb or something, but it's really important. And I think one of the things why our culture is so good is we look for excuses to find people doing the right thing. And so I can't encourage that enough. And you need to kind of also remember that like young children, I've not had any, but from what I hear, they do what you do. And so if you do good things, they do good things. If you might slip that swear word and all of a sudden you hear them say that, you know where they got it.

 So remember that your team is going to follow the leader too. So if you do good things, they're going to do good things. If you come in late every day and you don't have your things done on time and you don't stay educated and you don't call your clients back, well, you've kind of given them permission to do exactly the same thing. So I think leading by example is so important and you just kind of take it for granted, but I think if you live and breathe it and try and emulate it every single day in your interactions with your team, that will be one thing that'll help ratchet the growth of them exceptionally. And maybe Draye, if you've got some thoughts and examples that you've used with your team, I'd love to hear them.
 

Draye Redfern:

Yeah. It's just such another topic. It's just so much fun to talk about. And so for me, from my standpoint, the drive and the motivation for me is to lead by example, because you're exactly right, Bryan. If someone sees you doing something, they're more inclined to be like that. And so, what good habits are you actually going to instill or represent or embody that your team can view? I say that also with the understanding that at least in my business, there's nothing that I can't do. There's just a lot of things that I shouldn't do. And so from my standpoint, I need to be less involved in more things than I am involved in. And that's the same thing with any business. The idea is we want to try and extricate ourselves or make ourselves replaceable as fast as we can, and that becomes the success catalyst in a lot of different capacities.

 In order to do that, you need to have a team that's robust enough, that's knowledgeable enough, that has the aptitude and the attitude to make it happen. So how do you do that? Well, leading by example, at least from my standpoint also, goes on to learning. And so I talk about my NET time. That's what Tony Robbins calls no extra time. And I talk about NET time a lot, basically how I spend my NET time. So literally this morning, before we did the podcast, I was in the car for an hour and a half. I was listening to a book and a podcast during that period. There's no extra time, it doesn't take any extra effort to make it happen, but I'm constantly digesting information and resources and insights and strategies that I can also share with my team.

 I give them content. I literally have tens of thousands of dollars of books and content and resources that I give them. They can pretty much choose whatever they want to, but I set it up in a way where they can, if they're driving to work, they can listen to these things. Or giving them books. I've got I don't know how many thousands of books at this point in time. They can have anything they want at any point in time to read, as long as it betters them. And I don't want them to feel like they have to go buy some extra book or program. I'll pay for it. I will pay for the program as long as it will benefit them, because I know in the long run that benefiting them, benefits the company as a whole.

 And so I like to lead by example of I actually do what I say. On top of the books and programs and online course, et cetera, we also get them involved in masterminds. They are a part and a party to our Ultimate Advisor Masterminds. Other masterminds that I'm a part of, they come to those when they can. The old principle of the five people that you surround yourself with from Napoleon Hill a hundred years ago, there's so much truth to that. And being around people who are smarter are something that I want to push my team to consistently do.

 But on top of that, leading by example, it's not just NET time. It's not just sort of helping them learn occasionally here, there. This is more of a new thing, and probably the last three to four months, we've started employee development days, where basically one day a month, or a half a day a month, we end up going through programs, products, courses together, or online trainings that are live. It just depends on the day. One day a month, half a day a month, in order to help everybody sort of foster growth. And that also creates internal dialogue and communication so that everybody heard the same thing.

 But the interesting thing, and Bryan will attest to this, that if you go to a mastermind and you bring somebody, even if one person said one thing, person A may have heard something different and person B may have heard something completely different. And the idea of getting your team involved in more of these learnings, whether it's online, in person, whatever else, is that the information may not change, but the perspective will, because each person comes from a different background.

 And so that level of learning allows you to onboard new content and information and resources so much faster because your team is all on the same page, but there's different perspectives that you may be able to implement things with a little edge, much faster. A little something, a little zest, a little zip, whatever it may be, into your marketing, into your messaging, into your client service at a much, much faster rate. So I like to embody that throughout the whole company and the culture. It's paid amazing dividends because we're seeing everybody grow so much faster.

 But that sort of leads me to the last point that I want to make here is that it's opened up a lot of different opportunities. And you've probably heard me talk about it before with our clients, with our mastermind members, with our accelerator members, we like to over promise and over deliver. The old adage is like under promise and over deliver, where you set the expectations very, very low. And for me, I'm Mr. Hype. I'm Mr. Positive. I love this stuff. And that's so important because I want people to get excited with me. Otherwise it's lonely, and that's not fun.

 So I want people to be coming along, I want to over promise because that's the reality. I want them to come along for the amazing journey and hop on the positivity train, and implement stuff like crazy, and have great results, and have clients that adore them, and have a business that they're not just stepping into every day. They are on a rocket ship that they can't wait to get to work every day. Those are the people that I want to work with and I want to embody with. Those are our mastermind members. That is the level of people that we want to work with.

 So we over promise on that. But we also over deliver. So the things that we say, we go above and beyond. We give additional things that aren't even talked about. We do additional steps or additional things that aren't even expected because we like to over promise and over deliver. And it's a cultural representation that everybody in my company embodies. So if somebody calls in and they need help, we drop what we're doing and we make it happen. Sweet Financial is the same way. They embody that to a T. The second someone comes through the door, they've got the cookies there waiting for them. If they don't want the cookies, they get the water bottles branded, they'd know what the exact coffee that the person likes to drink. It's a level of personalization that really just completely over delivers. And I think we try to instill that in everything that we do.

 Is it always perfect? No. That's just the honest truth, but do we strive to make it perfect? Yes. And that idea, that concept, that thinking is what allows us to keep making things better and better and better and keep moving the envelope forward. Whereas other people will probably be moving slower and offer a lower caliber of service. And that's not the kind of people that we are. So that's just my two cents on leading with example and how we do that, both with the team and the clients. But Brittany, I know you probably have a couple of things to tie that off of other lead by example examples.
 

Brittany Anderson:

Yes. And actually, I'm so glad you brought up the whole component of encouraging your team. So you bring them to masterminds. You bring them to trainings. You do training days. I mean, we do very similar things too. We look at it and we just had a conversation today actually, where we're looking at, okay, so we already decimate information and involve different people in the company when we have additional trainings, whether it's virtual, in person, how can we make the decimation of information even better? So how can we get more people involved? How can we get them up on the right foot, so that like Draye said, everybody's coming with a little bit different perspective? So you're absorbing so much great content, great information, then your team growth just explodes.

 So Bryan, being that person that's hungry, that's like always learning, that's been a huge inspiration to me, because I look at that and I'm like, "I resonate with that." I don't think I'm ever going to be to the point in life where I'm like, "Oh, you know what? I've learned enough. I think I'm good now." It's just not how I'm wired. It's not how Bryan's wired. It's not how Draye is wired. And when you look at people that join our mastermind, that's not how they're wired. We actually changed, because of this concept of bringing your team along and having them involved and being that true example and leading by that full definition, we've actually changed the entire compensation structure on how we handle our mastermind members. We just changed it to have one flat price because we so badly encourage you to just bring your darn person. Whether it's a business partner, it's your second in command. I mean, bring that person that's really helping you to escalate your business, because we've seen the results.

 We have seen what happens with that and how much of an impact it makes on the bottom line. It's more than the bottom line. It's the culture of the company. It's how people work. It's how people work together. It's the collaboration, it's the net effect of everything that you could think about as it encompasses your business. There's power in it. So we encourage you as you look at leading by example, to really dive into who else on your team can you bring along and who can you encourage? Like Bryan said, who can you catch doing things right? Because that's when confidence is built. That's when people see, "Hey, you know what? My leader is somebody that's never going to be cool with the status quo. So I'm not either."

 And then what happens too, it's just like in marketing, it's like that attract and repel factor. If there is somebody on your team, who's like, "Yeah, this is not the direction I want to go with my life. I'm not cool with this push." They're going to find their way out. So that's how you really vet an A team. That's how you surround yourself. Like Draye mentioned, you surround yourself with amazing people who are going to help you get to the next level, because you always want to show up for them because they're showing up for you.

 So before I round out with the key takeaways, Draye, Bryan, anything else that you would like to say?
 

Bryan Sweet:

Brittany, you made me think of one thing I just wanted to emphasize is you talked about our mastermind and we just opened it up, so that it's one price. You bring your second in command or another person. But I would say, do that for literally any kind of a training thing you're doing, whether it's our mastermind or anything else. I have to say, we do a lot of things, but literally since I brought Brittany along to our coaching and our genius network and other things that we attend, and she hears what I hear, but she's the actual one that gets the team engaged to do it. The implementation is two, three, four X what it used to be, because one, she heard it, two, she gets the context and three, she can better tell the message in what we're trying to do now than I could ever have done.

 And so, if you're not doing it, just start doing that. I know it takes people away from their job, but short term pain for longterm gain is definitely in that area. So I would just say, start doing that on literally all your educational oriented things.
 

Brittany Anderson:

I think that's a really great point. And it made me think of something else we've talked about when it comes to mindset. We talk about this quite a bit because it's so powerful and important, but it goes back to the whole notion of the reticular activating system in your brain. So your brain looks for evidence of what you're putting in front of it. So if you're sitting here and you're encouraging your team to grow and to learn and to become even better individuals, well, what's going to happen is they're indirectly going to start looking for those opportunities themselves, because their brains become wired to it. So it's like, "Oh, I've been pushed into growth and that's something that we're focused on in my job and in the culture. I'm going to start looking for other ways."

 So now it's to the point where I'm involved in platforms and masterminds that Bryan's not involved with, just because it's become part of who we are as individuals. So I think that's something that is really powerful and it's kind of a side effect of really encouraging people to step outside their box and to grow and to put themselves around people.

 I remember stepping into some of these masterminds that we're involved with and a couple of the first meetings, I was like, "What the heck am I doing here? These people are brilliant and they're successful and they're so smart and they've accomplished so much." And I mean, that's part of the thing, when we have these conversations around our mastermind with advisors, they're like, "Well, I don't know what I don't know. I don't know what I'm stepping into. These people have been with you for a long time. They know more than I do." And it's like, "Yeah, that's the point. Join, come with us, come along the way."

 So again, it's whether you're looking at our mastermind, you're looking at some other growth mechanism. It is so darn important to make sure that you're bringing your team along for the ride, because you are going to see things happen that you couldn't have dreamed possible.

 So to round us out, the top three takeaways. Number one is going back to the humanization. So be human, encourage your team to be human and do that through vulnerability. Be transparent. Make sure that you're showing up for them because they're then in turn going to show up for you.

 Second big takeaway is to encourage others to grow and to grow yourself. Don't ever get to that point, and we talked about this earlier today too, is don't ever get to the point where you're looking at it saying, "You can't teach an old dog new tricks." Because it's not true. I know a lot of old dogs who do a lot of new tricks. So you cannot tell me that you are the anomaly. You are not the anomaly. You're not the only person in this world that can't learn anything new. I don't believe you. And you can argue with me and I'm going to fight you on it. I don't get aggressive very often, but that's a strong one. So always work on growing yourself and growing others around you.

 And then finally, define your definition of leading by example. And through that, focus on being transparent in speaking with conviction and being the example that you wish that you saw more of in this beautiful world.

 So that rounds out this episode of The Ultimate Advisor podcast. We will see you right here next week as we continue on our journey together.

 Hey there, Brittany Anderson here. If you are loving what you're hearing on our Ultimate Advisor podcast, don't keep us a secret. Share us with other advisors that you think would benefit from the messages that you are hearing. The easiest way to do that is just simply send them to ultimateadvisorpodcast.com. And if you want to learn a few other ways that we could potentially serve you as an advisor, go check out ultimateadvisormastermind.com. As always, we are so happy to have you here with us as part of the Ultimate Advisor community, and we look forward to a continued relationship.