3 Degrees of Freedom

Ep 184 - How to Scale Your Business Without the Drama with Daniel Marcos

• Derek Clifford • Season 3 • Episode 184

Share episode

Joining us in this episode is Daniel Marcos, an accomplished entrepreneur and CEO coach on a mission to help business leaders scale their impact and reduce drama. As co-founder and CEO of Growth Institute, Daniel provides powerful training to over 70,000 members globally.

👉In this interview, Daniel shares how he overcame adversity after having to shut down a business during the 2008 financial crisis, and how that led him to partner with Verne Harnish to bring executive education to the masses.
👉He provides insights on avoiding common leadership pitfalls like micromanaging and poor listening skills, and stresses the importance of implementing systems and processes to reduce entrepreneurial drama.
👉Daniel also discusses his unique perspectives on achieving freedom through focusing on time over money, the power of knowledge as your #1 asset, and how to plan your ideal future through consistent self-reflection.

If you're looking to scale your business the right way, avoid drama, and maximize your potential, don't miss this inspiring interview with serial entrepreneur Daniel Marcos!

Connect with Daniel thru the social links below and learn more about his business:
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/CapitalEmprendedor
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/danielmarcos.scale/
Tiktok: https://www.tiktok.com/@daniel_marcos_scale
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/danielmarcos/
Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@daniel-marcos-english
Website:  https://danielmarcos.co/homepage

Unlock 3+1 degrees of freedom (time, location, financial + health) with our 5-Point Blueprint! https://elevateequity.org/podcastgift

If you really enjoyed this content and are looking for more, you can continue to learn more about us in several different places for free!

If you'd like to have a FREE copy of our 7 Ways Commercial Real Estate Syndications Protect and Build Wealth, simply click the link below. We are here and vested in your long-term success! elevateequity.org/7waysEbook

Welcome to the three degrees of freedom podcast, where we explore lifestyle engineering with our expert guests to bring you in alignment with your own three degrees of freedom, location, time, and financial independence.

Derek:

Hello, everyone. Welcome back to the show today. We've got Mr. Daniel Marcos and an accomplished entrepreneur and CEO coach. On a mission to help business leaders scale their impact and reduce drama as a co founder and the CEO of the growth Institute, Daniel provides powerful executive training to over 70, 000 members globally with a natural ability to create strong empathy bonds with executives. Daniel helps CEOs evolve beyond bottlenecks, holding their companies back and having built and sold a business. By himself at age 25, he overcome later adversity to partner with Vern Harnish in 2012, democratizing executive education once reserved only for the elite firms and Daniel's passion is helping leaders, not just grow their companies, but also develop the mindsets needed to reduce drama and maximize their potential. Daniel, it is awesome to have you on the show today. How are things?

Daniel:

Thank you. They're super excited to be here. I'm happy talking about freedoms. That's why we all become entrepreneurs, but that's right. We become slaves of our businesses more than freedom. So quick story. I have a friend that sells education online and his first course was make money while you sleep or something like that. And he told you PDF and we make a joke and laugh about it. So yeah. You work 19 hours a day, so you could make money the five that you're sleeping.

Derek:

You build everything that you can, and you don't sleep for three, four, five years straight working on your business so that later you can sleep in for the rest of your life. To make up for all that time.

Daniel:

Some of you have, there's this Mexican problem. That this American guy goes to Mexico to the beach to one of these resorts. And there's this fisherman fishing for an hour and fishes enough and goes to bed. And the guy's you're such a great fisherman. You should fish all day and teach other people and buy boats and blah, blah. And then at the end said, what for? So you could then move to a resort in Mexico at the beach and fish for an hour. I was like,

Derek:

that's what I do. I love it. No, that's awesome. That's fantastic. This is why we do everything that we do. Now, speaking of that, I want to start with the way that we always start with each one of our guests, which is which one of those three degrees of freedom that's location, time or financial. Do you feel like you're the strongest in right now? And second part to that is which one do you feel like you want to develop or work on further?

Daniel:

Most of us start to be entrepreneurs for the freedom, one, of money. But once you cross a certain level that you have a good cash flow coming in, and I've been an entrepreneur for 25 years, so I better be doing this early. You start caring more about time. It's an example. The first half of your life, you invest time to make money. The second half, you invest money to so I'm already in my fifties and I really believe my first half was all about investing time to get money. And my second half is more about how to use that money to get more life and more time in my life. So that's why I'm striving more. But it was not like that since I started. It's been very different. Depending on the ages, but today freedom of time is it's one of the most important ones.

Derek:

Of all the people that we've had on the show, we haven't had someone quite give an answer like that, which was awesome about how freedom. The type of freedom that you're looking for changes with time. And of course it does as you go throughout your journey. And I love how you're breaking it down. And that's one of the reasons why we separate them is look, if you're really intentional about what you want out of life, then go for location freedom. First. If that's really what you want, you don't have to get to financial freedom to have location, freedom, or even time freedom, right? Or vice versa. So we encourage people to think about those three different degrees. They operate independently and you can pick which one you want to pursue first. So that's the beautiful part about it.

Daniel:

So let me get a couple of perspectives on this. Last year I go to a program in MIT called gathering of Titans and we meet in MIT 19 years in a row, a group of 70 entrepreneurs. And every year we change the theme. And we kind of change of the objective and theme of it. And last year was halftime. And it's precisely that very few people prefer, prepare you for your first half. But really no one prepares you for your second half. And that's why a lot of us get into midlife crisis and the rest. Because we have no idea about our second half. And really on our second half it's very different than the first half. And that's important. And second. At the beginning, I didn't care where I had to live to make money when I was in my 20s. And they asked me to go to the smallest town or the ugliest city. You move because you need to make money. With time that should change. And for me, to be able to spend a dinner with some really good friends and have a laugh and have a bottle of wine. I will pay whatever to do that. So an example, there's a party of a friend Friday. I live in Austin. He lives in Dallas. He has cancer and I'm going to drive three hours to have dinner with him for an hour and then drive back just to be able to spend an hour, two hours with him. It's extremely worth it for me. So I really believe time helps you make that

Derek:

change. Yeah, no, I love it. And again, I think that goes full circle back to what you were talking about before with the answer to the first question that like, as life goes on, your needs shift, right? And I just love that complimentary example of it. By the way, you said that you're in Austin, Texas right now. Actually, I was in Austin, Texas about a month ago. I've been there for about three months as part of our entrepreneurial digital nomad journey. And so I just missed you. That's crazy. But don't worry. We'll be back in Austin again. I think in April we'll be back.

Daniel:

Where do you went now? Where,

Derek:

what part of right now? Yeah, right now we're in Washington state. We're in a place called Bellingham, Washington, which is really like closer to Vancouver than Seattle.

Daniel:

I think that's where you get on the ferry from Vancouver Island, right?

Derek:

Yes, there's a lot. There's a lot of places. Apparently we used to live here before or at least in like the, in, in the Puget Sound area out in Washington. And this is one of our favorite places in the country. Don't ask us what we're doing here in the winter. I don't know why we're here in the winter time, but we are. It is. Yes, it's much nicer. Anyway, I want to go back to you and I want to talk a little bit more about, your career coaching executives and entrepreneurs. Can you talk about like how that got inspired? Like, where did this come from? This is not something that you do, after. Creating this this business and selling at age 25. How did you decide to go into this?

Daniel:

So it's a little bit of a long answer, but I, my, I, my first company I built in 1998 I'm originally from Mexico. I was living in Mexico city back then. And I built the first FinTech company in Mexico. Was the first one to put financial information online and do stock trading the Mexico market. Interestingly, what brought me to that. During college, I was working in the brokerage house as a trader. So my last three years of college, I went to work between 7 AM and 2 PM and at 2 PM went to college and did like full time job and then college. And when I finished, I got a job in Hong Kong. To work in the Mexican consulate in Hong Kong for two years. And I went there and I wanted to continue doing stock trading. It was impossible. I couldn't do stock trading from the Mexican market. I had to call in the middle of the night my broker in Mexico to do trades. And I'm like, that doesn't work. Let's do it online. The US already had a lot of brokerage houses, E Trade and the rest doing it online, and I tried to do the same. And that was how I started and that I sold it to Argentinian competitor, and then we, he joined a Brazilian company, the Argentinian myself, and then we raised a bunch of money just to give you an idea back in 1998, 99. Venture capital didn't exist in Mexico. There was no venture capital or private equity fund in Mexico in 1998. So we wanted to raise money and we went to New York and got JP Morgan to lead a round for us. We raised 53 million, but back then it was like doing a 200 million round today. And that of course gave us a completely different playing field and competitive landscape against anyone else, and we just crushed it. And after that, I said, okay, I have money in the bank, just married, no kids, let's travel a little bit. So I did a round the world trip with my wife. And during that I applied to an MBA in the U S I was I finished college just by pure luck. I really didn't care about college. I had the worst grades in college. And when I was in my company, I was hiring all these MBAs from Harvard and from Stanford. And they used to do this jargon and knew how to do PowerPoints that I had no idea. So I felt really bad that my team members knew more than me. So I said, whenever I sell this or whatever, I'm going to start an NBA, even an executive, just to even understand what they're talking about. So when I did that, went to travel the world, apply for my NBA and end up in Babson doing my NBA most entrepreneurial NBA in the world went to Babson and after that moved to Austin. To build a mortgage bank. Back then there were two big trends in the U. S. That were important for me. The first one was the mortgages. They were throwing you money for mortgages. So it was a big one. I started 2004, that was the epicenter of the bubble. And then the other one that was very unique for me is the U S corporate market really realize. The size of the Hispanic purchasing power in the census of 2000. That was the first time the census as a conclusion had the Hispanic market, all the undocumented and documented Hispanics, they didn't realize how big was their purchasing power. And that's in the 2000 census. That's when they realized that. So I said, okay, great. I'm going to build a mortgage bank. To serve undocumented Hispanics and give them a mortgage. And because they were throwing you money, you could give mortgages to people that were undocumented in the U S and we started doing that and start growing really fast, open offices, hire employees, raise money, everything. And then when the market shut down, I was the subprime of the subprime. There was no one more subprime than me. And of course the market closed and it was a disaster. It was really painful. I had to fire 120 employees in a week. It was really tough, lost a lot of money. It was bad. I even got depressed. It was not a good moment in my life. And that's when Vern called me. I had studied with Vern Harnish before he coached me in my first company. And when he heard I was having a rough time, he called me. And I remember I even cried on the phone and complained. It was, I was in a really bad moment in my life. And Vern said, okay, great. Are you done? And I was like, what do you mean? Are you done complaining? And I was like, yes. So he says, what are you going to do next? And I was like, I have no idea. I need to get a job just to put food on the table. And Vern said, why don't you go back to Mexico and teach scaling up? It was so good for you. You're the best executor that I know in Latin America for scaling up. Why don't you teach it? And I was like, no, I'm not a coach. And at the moment I had a big debt that I had not even an idea how I was going to pay it. So Vern said, if you get a job, how are you going to pay the debt that you have? And I was like, I don't know. And I really don't care now. I just care to put food on the table for my kids. And Vern said, why don't you coach on the weekends and everything you make from coaching, you put it towards the debt. And I was like, that's a great idea. I had to do to work to be able to pay the debt. So I started coaching and he went amazing. He was just game changer. We started scaling like crazy. And after four years, I came to her and said, Hey, I'm doing amazing. I'll pay all the debt. I already left my job. I'm a full drop North. The problem is I just don't have a life. At that moment I was on the, I was the only scaling up coach in Latin America. So I was on the plane to a different country every week and I was sleeping probably 250, 260 nights away from home every year. So I told her, I need to stop this. And he said, so what are you going to do? I said, I'm going to put it online. And it's a great let's build it online. And that's how we started growth institute. And it's been amazing. The changes and support we've done for companies, not just Latin America worldwide, we have served companies in over 70 countries around the world, implementing scaling up and many other methodologies. So it's been a lot of fun.

Derek:

Wow. Congratulations. I have so many questions. Thank you for sharing your story. I have so many questions that I want to ask you based on what you just told me, but then I also have so many questions in front of me right here that I want to ask also based on where we're yet to go. So you see the issue that I'm on right now. Let me start with this. I want you to go back to age 25 or, in your early twenties looking back that type of success that you had, would you say that all of that kind of served you and set like a foundation for the beginning of your journey? Or what was your mind like now? What do you wish you could go back and tell your early, 20 year old self about the success that he's having at that age? If knowing what you know right now,

Daniel:

so the good thing about that age is because I knew I didn't do anything. I was a sponge. I was learning everything. Yeah. And with time you begin having your own rules and that's the way I do things. So at the moment that was great. But really I didn't understand the importance of discipline. And systems and processes today. As soon as I know I need to do something and I need to do that repetitively, I build a system, a process and train someone for them to do it. Before I was doing everything myself and I thought, by the way, I thought that was the best one to do everything around me and now I realize. There's so many people that are much better than me doing stuff. So today instead of deciding what do I need to do, I always ask the word, who is the expert on the subject? I learn from the expert and then I just follow that. By the way, that's why I read so much books. It's, and that's something I learned from Vern. I, every time I ask Vern, hey, how can I do this? He's Oh, just follow whatever. And I was like, who's that guy? Go to this book, read the book and follow it. And I follow it and it's amazing. So we started precisely the company because of that. I became an avid reader and realized that any promo or opportunity, someone already knew how to figure out how to do it. And my job was to find that person and then read their book, take their course, whatever. And then apply that with delivered practice. And that's how a coach in the gym tells you. So for me, that's the biggest one. Be disciplined in the way you implement new systems of process. And once you understand that what it's important, it's not the idea. Is the execution of the idea, the execution of the process that makes a difference. That was game changer. Once I understand

Derek:

that, it's such straightforward, simple advice that most people will step over it. What do you say to those people who are out there, right? Maybe they're entrepreneurs. Maybe you're speaking to them right now who are, and let's face it. There are a lot of people that can't help, but look for this looking for a silver bullet. For their solution to, for a solution to their problems. And looking for shortcuts and looking for Oh, I just I got to do this, so let me just, this is how you do it. Or they're looking for that really easy fix. What do you have for advice for people who are doing that right

Daniel:

now? There's one of the, this is one of my favorite chapters. In any book great by choice Jim Collins he's the blue book. I think that's his best book written for us, by the way, the chapter that I like the most is return on lock is my favorite chapter of every book in the same book, but that book has a chapter number two, it's called the 20 mile March and the importance of doing some control growth and be very stable. You're running a marathon. You're not running a sprint whenever you're doing a company. I've seen a lot of companies. They do millions in a year, and then the next year they disappear. Just because they don't build the systems and processes and really build a company. The other day I got invited by a company in Columbia. It was run by an Austrian guy, an Australian and a British entrepreneur in Columbia. They met playing poker online and they did 30 million one year in revenue. And they did 45 million the next year. And that's when they invite us to come in to help them implement scaling up. And I went and showed them what they had to do. And they were like, that's so boring. I don't want to do it. And I was like, build a company, right? The company was bankrupt next year. Imagine doing 30, 45 bankrupt. Oh, their money got to their heads. They fight, whatever they shut down the company. That's what happens if you don't, if you don't build a marathon and build the right,

Derek:

Daniel what advice do you have? Cause like right now I'm seeing this happen more and more especially in my generation, I'm a millennial I'll call myself an older millennial, but I still see it within people born around the 1990. And since they grew up with the internet or they were comfortable with the internet in their teens or early twenties, right? You had this similar experience, right? Where you've been, you did something with technology, with brokerages, and then you use technology to help scale yourself up over all these different careers throughout, that's the common thread throughout a lot of what you were doing. I imagine we have this technology, we have this slant to want things instantly. How do you help coach people? To start with that discipline, instead of like, how do you start to identify that there's a problem with trying to look for the silver bullet and then trying to tease out that you have to run the marathon? How does that conversation go when you're coaching them about this type of thing?

Daniel:

So I usually tell them a story. By the way, I teach Kelly Hopper online and coaching all that. And I get a lot of companies. Tell you, I'm going to scale my company really fast. I'm going to scale really fast. So I'm going to make an analogy. Imagine you have a boat and you want your boat to go really fast. So they show me the engine they're going to buy. There's like this 2000 horsepower. Amazing engine, right? Because, and by the way, this is one of my mentors and faculty of growth Institute. John Mullen says it's easier to convince one investor to write you a check that could be a thousand clients to buy from you, the entrepreneur that figure out how to get a thousand clients to buy Has a much stronger company, but the one that convince one investor. Yep. So imagine you're going to be an investor because you're going to scale really fast and you buy a really big engine to your boat. So they show me the engine. It's an amazing engine. I'm like, wow, now show me the boat. Where are you going to put that engine? And they show me the boat. They were like, Oh my God, it's just like a wooden boat. And I was like, you're going to put that engine on that boat and they were like, yeah, it's going to sink. Cause you put it. No. It's going to go really fast. Yeah. If the water is perfect like that, it's going to go really fast. If you get a wave of this height, it's going to turn you over. Of course not. The water is this is flat. Interest rates have been flat for five years. And then you get 1 percent interest and just wash you out. They don't see that. Like when I built my first company, Mexican interest rate was like 18%. So I was getting loans at 25. Yeah. Today, it's a gift at five and people say Oh, how can you live in the 20 in the 5 percent interest rate? I was at 25 when I did my first company and you still made money. You still figure out how to make money and pay interest. So those are the kinds of things that if you're an entrepreneur for the first time, you don't see it. And in today's world, the world's technology and interest rates on the right, you think it's really easy and fast. And then when things get complicated, they have no idea how to go through that. And I try to explain this, I think I've been this game for Longer time. And this is something I learned from a mentor of mine when I was younger, he said, entrepreneurs for the first time, they don't know what they don't know. He said, my job is to tell you what you don't know. And I was like, but how do I know he's right? And I was like, you're going to have to trust me, right? Because you really don't know if you don't know it. When you're going, when you're scaling for the first time. So I tried to explain to them, and I run scenarios of saying, okay, imagine the interest rates at one. What happens if they go to five? Oh, they will never go to five. Let's run some numbers and get them some data. And I kind of start showing that, and I try to put a perspective of where we are and where we've been. And some of them, they get it and some of them said, nah, it's that's so difficult. I'm too good. That's not what I'm good.

Derek:

I'm good with my engine. I'm just going to keep motoring.

Daniel:

And then they put the engine and when you got a wave like this. The boat flips and that's a problem. So I tell them, Hey, I used to coach an entrepreneur. And he told me, you're the most pessimistic entrepreneur I've ever talked to and my company has been in operation for 13 years and growing every year, and he was under in two years and I was like, I'm pessimistic, but I'm here. Like I, by the way, I gave him the book Andy Grove, only paranoid survive. You want to know someone that built a great company, the founder of Intel. This is what they teach, right? I don't know Ben Horwitz, the hard things about hard things. Yeah. I've already read it. It's one of my favorite books. That tells you what really happens in life and how you go through it. So

Derek:

This is fantastic. I'm picking up a lot of gold here and I'm really happy that that we're on the call here talking with you because I think this is universal for all entrepreneurs and just people in general to try to get better and whatever it is that they're doing, even if they have a career and want to get better. This is a very rare glimpse of being able to talk with someone at your level here.

Daniel:

Let me just give you one thing that I'm very proud of. I've been paying payroll for 25 years, every two weeks or every week. I've never missed payroll in 25 years. And one of the things that I'm most proud, and young entrepreneurs, they look at me, it's like, why are you proud of that? Now, like in 25 years, I've never missed payroll. I missed payroll for me, but I've never missed payroll for an employee in 25 years. I, for me, that's huge. I, whenever you get in tough times, they don't pay payroll. Tell me how long your company is going to last. If you miss pay.

Derek:

Yeah. You don't have, if you don't have the support of the people around you that need that in order to survive, like you don't have a business anymore. And I know that lesson in 2008 that you learned, or maybe it was shortly before that it's obviously stuck with you. And I think that's a really big thing. So I'm, that's really cool to hear. Now I want to shift a little bit here. I want to talk about drama, right? One of the things that caught my eye is that you talk a lot about reducing drama in, in, in businesses that you're consulting, right? Can you talk a little bit about most. Mindset mistakes that leaders make when they're trying to reduce drama, or maybe even just, they're completely blind to

Daniel:

it. So first let's just, let's agree. What is drama is everything that happens in your business that is not planned. And a typical entrepreneurial company, 80 percent or 90 percent is not planned. And by the way, when I tell people, yeah, I'm going to help you scale your company faster. That's when they like, Oh my God, how are you going to give me that? And that's when we come in and say, okay, that's why you build systems of process. That's how you follow the best of leaders and follow what they teach. And you deliberately implement all their teachings. And things get just way, way easier. If you're doing it with intelligence and following. And we just come with a set of tools that once you put them all together, the probability of you reducing Rama is very high. And there's a study in Harvard that we show often that more companies die. for excessive opportunity than for lack of opportunity. So we said, Hey, there's a lot of opportunity in the world. Our job is for you to be able to take care of that opportunity more or take more opportunity. But for you to do that, you're going to have an amazing boat. Perfectly covered in the water, whatever that you could go through big waves and be able to service that, let's say, or go through it. And then we help them implement the right systems and processes and get the right people in the right seats and get cash on the back. As an example, I always recommend the companies that I coach, but they have six months of cash in the back. Fixed expenses times six in the back. And they, when I tell them the first time, I said, nah, you're crazy. That's, how much opportunity I'm going to miss if I have that money on the bank. And I was like, that's precisely why, because when things go bad, you will have six months of cash and you will survive and your competitors going to go under. So when I tell them that they immediately think I'm crazy, but the ones that I told them that, and they did something before the pandemic, they call me the other pandemic and said, Daniel, thanks to you, my company is going to survive because I went in a really tough situation. I got three or four months in the bank. And I was able to go through the pandemic because of what you told me. All my competitors are gone and I'm going to come back to the market. With half the competition in the market, and I'm going to win. And that's what usually happens.

Derek:

It's an amazing story. I really appreciate that. And I think that this also translates to people's personal financial lives in their, and their current capacity. Exactly. This is universal advice, right? That's just, that's common sense that people just forget in the name of greed or speed or all of those things. So

Daniel:

I was a consultant with scaling up and I was. Doing a lot of money, a lot of cash flow, no drama, no employees, no nothing. And then when I told my wife I was going to do another scale up, my wife started crying. Are you crazy? We have a great life, you take three months vacations. And I was like, I could not teach scaling up if I don't build another scale up. And I was like, my wife was completely against it, by the way. Completely against it, because she understands. The drama that comes with a scale up. And I told her, hey, really, I really have to do another scale up. Because blah, blah, blah, I really want to do it. I'm so young. And she was like, okay, let's put some rules. Six months on the bank. I want six months on the bank. So I had to open an account and put six months on the bank of the expense of the house. And it was a game changer to the family. Because at Growth Easy Dude, we had a couple of months that were tight. I paid payroll to everyone except to me. And I came to the house all stressed. And my wife was. Fine. I have the bank account here with six months. No worries. That was it.

Derek:

Thank you for sharing. That's awesome. Now, can I also ask you to what Leadership qualities do people have to have in order to not be the bottleneck in their own business. I'm talking to those out there who maybe have tons of stuff going on and they're feeling it, right? Like they've got their jobs maybe, or they have too much business to be able to take on themselves. I know you talk about systems and everything, but the word bottleneck to me is very visceral. And I'd like to help you help these folks like walk through. Unbottlenecking themselves from the business. And I think you've alluded to it a little bit, but I want you to put a little bit more detail if you can. So

Daniel:

I always think who before what, and I, there's. always someone that is more intelligent than me and is much better than me in doing things. And here I'd like to tell a story that I really and this story you could read in Think and Grow Rich by Napoleon Hill. And I don't remember the story exactly, but Henry Ford was, the founder of Ford, and he got attacked by a reporter that he was like an uneducated person. And Henry Ford, like, pushed back and there was this, Push me to a report in the hundred for it.

Derek:

I know this

Daniel:

story. It's amazing. No, sorry. And one day he said, Hey, let's get this clear out. We're going to meet in a place. It was like a judgment, something that they meet and they were going to prove that he was a educated man or not. So the reporter looks to the people and said, I'm going to prove he's a non educated man. And he asked 10 questions to Henry Ford. And he was not able to answer any of them. Who wrote the Odyssey, the novel. And Henry Ford has no idea. And what is whatever, and he has no idea. And he asks all these questions, and Henry Ford is not able to answer any of them. And then Henry Ford said, but can I explain what is intentions for me? And he was like, yeah, so what do you think is intentions? He said, I have a box, a wooden box in my desk. With 40 buttons, if I push button number one, I get the best lawyer in the world running to my office. Sir, how can I help you? And I could ask him any legal question and he will answer it better than me. If I push button number two, I get the best engineer. If I push button number three, I get the best hydraulics, whatever. I have 40 buttons and 40 of the most intelligent people in the world come running to me to answer my questions. Being intelligent. Is be able to have the best people in the world helping you get your things done. For me, that's a bottleneck. How can you get the best person in the world to help you do what you need to do? And if you can have the best people in the world doing that, then you're free. If you have to do everything yourself and you think you have to be the best in doing everything. You're going to be a slave of your company and a lot of us become slaves of our company.

Derek:

And sometimes this happens out of not intention, but just the way things evolve, right? And the lack of awareness. And that's why working with someone who can coach or help provide some perspective like yourself can help you understand this is something that needs to be like unbottlenecked from the business. Now I have 15

Daniel:

employees. You have to do everything. Sure. Yeah. What was it, around 1520? That's when you start really delegating and getting writing.

Derek:

Yeah, absolutely. Thank you for that. I have one last question before we head into our rapid round, which is five questions that we like go real quick into. So this last question here is what is the most overlooked skill that you often are coaching people through and then how do you get it to stick? Or I guess it's a two part question. What's the most overlooked skill and then how do you get people to stick to the changes that you go through in these consulting calls or in these. Consulting meetings,

Daniel:

going back to base again, listening, getting a CEO to listen to the team. It's really hard. And they say I'm here to tell people what to do. And I was like, no, up to 15 people. Yes. You're telling people before after that. No way. So as an example, I really believe around 15, 20 employees have to change your hat from being their boss and telling them what to do to being their coach. I hope that my head of finance. Knows way more of finance that I know. So I could not tell him what to do. I could coach him for him to do better. I could tell him what the company needs, but then coaching for him to come with the right answer. Same with my head of sales, same with head of operations. My job is to write, to get the best ones and then help them run as a team. And for me to do that, I need to listen. What they're telling me and then ask questions. Hey I'm going to do this. Do you think that's the best way to do it? Yes, it's great. But what happened if this happens? How do you think it's going to react or what happens? And they just start bringing other ideas into the table and start bringing other ways of thinking and then coach them with questions to get them to get the right answer. Without me telling them what it is and listening to them. One of the things that you're going to laugh about, but it's often I do planning sessions and I get all the team to discuss and agree and do the planning on the quarter on the year. Sometimes I need to get the CEO out of the room because he doesn't allow the team to participate. So we've had meetings. That we have to go to coaches, uh, to the room. And then one of the coaches gets a CEO and said, you and I are going to whatever and just get them out of the room. So the team could really think and build a plan. Wow. It's hard, but it's common. I've been coaching companies. That I am with a brilliant entrepreneur. And this happens usually with the most brilliant ones that I'm trying to do a session and then they hijack the session and he ended up doing his session with his format and his ways. So when we finished, I was like, Hey, thank you very much. I learned a lot. I'm never going to coach her again. And the guy's like, why not? It was amazing. No, you did all you hired me to come and lead your coaching session. And then you took over of a meeting and finished with a plan that it was completely done by you without hearing to your team. Then I bet you,

Derek:

I bet you that's common more than not, because usually most CEOs are those types of people that in order to be in that position. They have to do that, right? They have to attract people to them, to, to either move their agenda or move the company's agenda forward. So I bet you that, that happens a

Daniel:

lot. And it's very difficult for someone. That is a self made, usually very intelligent person to having to start listening and ask questions. Of course. To tell people what to do. It's really hard.

Derek:

Of course. Absolutely. Last part of my question, before we go into the rapid round, is how do you get these things to stick? Maybe you'll come in for a coaching session. What do you find that when you're working with students or with teams that once the light bulb goes off, like they, it sticks, like it stays, is there a critical point or what is that shift that needs to happen to make that change permanent?

Daniel:

So I tell them that for my work to work, I need two things. First one is I need a champion inside the office. That I could train for that person to follow what I'm doing. So if I leave, a lot of things will fall. But if you have someone that is an expert on the subject, I train them a lot, the probability of that sticking is much higher. So I usually implement a champion and over educate or over train the champion for the champion to do a lot of the work. And then the second one is I tell them if you want this to stick, I need to do it for a year. The first quarter, you're going to see a lot of progress. You're going to see dashboards and rhythm of meetings and everything. Then you're going to say everything is done. And I was like, half of the data is going to be wrong. But most importantly, your team has no idea how to read the data and act on the data. I need three to four quarters to train you and your team. And my job, the next three or four quarters, you're just challenging them. Hey, you've seen that number is red. Oh yes, it's red. Why is it red? I have no idea. Go and check. And they come back and said, now I know why it's red. Okay, great. What are you going to do about, well, let's figure it out. And I asked him questions and guide them and all that for the team to understand that at least a year.

Derek:

So it's, it has to be like you have to have a champion number one, and you also have to have a consistent focus on it, otherwise it's something that. People will come in and say, Oh, that was a nice little exercise. And then nothing gets implemented. Cause there's not enough time,

Daniel:

right? It's like going to the gym. If you come to one day and I'll give you a routine, you were like, perfect. I have no routine. You don't have, I don't have to pay you anymore. I'm going to come to the gym every day. I'm going to follow the routine. No, it doesn't work that way. You're going to do it bad. You're going to crook your spine. You're not going to come to the gym. Like you have to go every day to the gym with a, with the same coach. And we feel we're throwing money away, but that's what makes the small differences. Absolutely.

Derek:

Daniel, this has been amazing to hear your story and also hear all of these experiences coming in. And I'm sad to say that we're winding down towards the final segment of the show, but what we do have is five questions. 30 seconds answers for each one of them, and it's called the rapid round. And if you're ready, we're just going to rapidly ask them to you. You ready to go? All right. Number one, can you name any resource that was, or is still essential in your journey to pursuing your freedom?

Daniel:

Scaling up for me is being game changer. It has given me, for me, scaling up is being a CEO. Paint by the numbers, remember the booklets of kids that were, they were white with some concern. That's it. Paint all the tools with yellow, paint all the trees with red and the kids paint, I'm a great painter. For me, scaling up is like that. If you follow the systems of scaling up, read all the meetings, dashboards, exactly same. You will be a much better CEO because you're going to really build a company with people, systems, processes, decision making, and

Derek:

all that. That's really great. That book has changed your life completely and the life of the people around you, because you were able to build your coaching business based on applying the principles in that book on a disciplined way. So that's amazing.

Daniel:

I'm still a CEO of a company. We're scaling fast. We've been in 5, 000 four years in a row and I'm CEO of my company one day a week. Yeah, that's

Derek:

awesome. Congratulations.

Daniel:

Coaching or. Being a teacher in my company, being a faculty, but all my decisions as CEO are taking one day a week.

Derek:

Love it. Awesome. Number two, if you woke up and your entire business was gone, all of them, and all you had was 500, a laptop, a place to live and some food. What do you think you would do? Absolutely. First to rebuild

Daniel:

coaching. Coaching is a very profitable very needed, big impact job. If you have a lot of expertise, you could do small changes in very little time. Like the typical story that you're gonna, you need someone to operate on your brain. And the doctor said, yeah, I'm going to take 15 minutes. I'm going to charge you 50, 000. Yeah. All right. You're gonna charge me 15, 000 for 15 minutes? Yeah. It's not the 15 minutes. It's a 30 years of experience to know exactly where I cut for me. That's what scaling up or being a consultant, like I come to a company and I identify the problem immediately. And I'm able to know exactly where to cut. So very profitable with my experience, or if I lose everything, I could build a business of a million dollars a month. I

Derek:

love this. This is exactly why Warren Buffett says that the number one asset you can invest in is your knowledge and your experience because it never goes down in value. As long as you're building something in the right direction, you'll always be able to have to benefit from that knowledge that other people will be trying to catch up to and so on and so forth. So I absolutely love that. All right. Number three, what does your self reflection and goal setting practice look like if you have one?

Daniel:

So when I went under with my mortgage company I was waking up at two o'clock in the morning sweating cold and feeling bad for myself. And I used to go to my sofa and just laying my sofa. And at that moment I rewrote how I want my life to look when I was 55. I wrote it 16 years ago and I did a 20 year plan and I read it every day in the morning as soon as I wake up and I break it down in core priorities. For me, for my family, and for my business, every quarter, it's game changer. Few people really think about their life and what they want, which is go through life, getting things done. If you stop and think and prioritize, game changer,

Derek:

game changer. Daniel, like there are people out there that spend more time planning a vacation for a week than they do planning their whole life, right?

Daniel:

All the time. I do it with CEOs. I have a, like a three month. Planning that I help them design their next 20 years. And in the first call, it was like, I thought more and I plan more of this last hour that I've done last 10 years.

Derek:

Yeah, that's incredible. It's a leverage. I love that. Love it. Number four, what are the core work habits or your personality traits that you attribute most? To all of your success. Now, nowadays,

Daniel:

For me, my morning routine, more than anything I wake up at 5 00 AM two hours before my kids and I start working and I dedicate two hours for myself every morning. I'm between five and seven. I do exercise. I have a really good cup of coffee. I read, I need to read probably 10 or 15 pages. Need to put food on my brain every day exercise, meditate at a quiet place. So by seven, when my wife and my kids wake up and I start working. I feel amazing. I'm really strong and with a good mindset. If I wake up late rushing with the alarm and all that, I have a really bad day. So for me, that's by far the most important one. And then after that getting the right people. I'm pretty much systems of process to get

Derek:

things done. I love it. It sounds like you're doing a savers or a miracle morning that how everyone put together, probably before he even wrote the book.

Daniel:

I'm a huge, I'm a huge fan of how he lives here in Austin. I read from him, but I've been doing that before the book, but the book gave me a great framework that I follow today.

Derek:

Yeah, that's fantastic. Okay, last question I have for you in the rapid round. What tool or process has become one of your most important time, money, or energy saving ninja magic tricks that you use every

Daniel:

day? Daily Harl. I have a meeting with my team, all my team, for 15 minutes every day. I love it. And people think I'm crazy, and when I tell them, everyone's Are you nuts? I could not do that. Once they have a good daily huddle, it was like, Oh my God, it was game changer. So you play football, football. Yesterday was a couple of really important games. Have you ever seen a coach, sorry, a quarterback playing a play without a huddle? No,

Derek:

never. That wouldn't end very well. No,

Daniel:

you have to plan every call or every day or every play. Agree with all your team, what you're gonna do every day, eight or seven in the morning. In my company, we all come in Zoom with cameras and we align everything in the company by know,

Derek:

set. You know what I'm thinking, Daniel, is I'm thinking through what your day looks like and this is what success looks like. You wake up early. You get all of your personal stuff taken care of. So you're already successful there on the from a personal sense. And then everyone has clarity on what they're going to be doing for that day, right? Or for setting goals for, the month, the weekly, whatever the targets are that you're setting from, the book and from those principles and getting your system set up. Daniel. So such an inspiration hearing your story and hearing you talk about all of this stuff. And I'm sure there's people out there, including myself that want to learn more about what you have out there online. And how can we find out more about you and connect with you and learn a little bit more about what you've got going on?

Daniel:

In growth institute. com, we have everything, all the course that we teach. And we usually help around 1200 companies all over the world. We have clients in over 70 countries around the world. It's been awesome to be able to lay back. And if they want to follow me personally, LinkedIn or the other one is Instagram Daniel Marcos scale. And that's where I have all my content in English.

Derek:

I'm not surprised there. I'm not surprised that the word scale is in your name. It should probably be your middle name is what I'm thinking.

Daniel:

It's a lot of people know me as a scaling guy. I've been partnered with Vern for 15 years and he's been game changer. Yeah,

Derek:

he's fantastic. I met him one time in San Diego in actually how Alrod's event for cause we run in, in the same circles. I'll tell you more after the show about that. So we can talk about that a little bit more after the show, but in any event, Daniel, it was a pleasure having you on. Thank you so much for being on the show today.

Daniel:

there. for your time.

Derek:

Yeah. And for you listeners who have listened to all the way to this point in the podcast, I want to thank you guys as well, please, wherever you are listening to this or watching it on YouTube. Please make sure that you thumbs up like subscribe or comment, because we want to hear from you so that we can attract more listeners just like you. And also bring on more superpower guests, just like Daniel to come on the show and share their wisdom. So Daniel, once again, thank you so much for being on the show. All right, you take care of everyone. We'll see you guys next week on the show. Mhm. Yeah. Mhm.