5 Steps to Building a Team that Gets You to Multi 7-figure Businesses

Reid Hoffman, the co-founder of LinkedIn, once said, "It doesn't matter how smart your brain or plan is, if you're playing a single game, you'll always lose to a team.”?

History glorifies the lone-wolf entrepreneur, but outstanding teams play an equally significant role in the success stories of modern conglomerates. Think of Google, Ford, and Walt Disney. None of these companies were solo operations – they were created by a team.?

As an 8-figure entrepreneur, I can’t emphasize enough the importance of building a team. I have built 15+ businesses, and my successes wouldn’t be what it is today without a team behind me.?

Building a team is not easy. It involves bringing in the right people, giving every person a clear role, and so much more. It took me YEARS to finally have a high-performance team that best supports my personal and professional goals. So what exactly should you be looking for??

Build a Resilient Team

Your business is going to experience rough times. Even if you’re Apple, Google, or Tesla. Business is full of ebbs and flows – and that will never change. So when building a team, you want to make sure they’re able to perform to the best of their abilities in both ups and downs.?

There is a saying that change comes from the top down, but I like to think that change comes from the inside out. If one of your team members is unable to push through in trying times, that affects not just the entire team morale, but overall success.?

Create a team full of motivated, resilient leaders, and the harder times your business faces will be fewer and far between.

How do I do this? I make people clearly accountable for their jobs. I put it on them to be successful and have measurements that clearly show when things are not working. So when things fail, I ask them “well, what is the solution?” Instead of staying stuck in the problem, you have to keep moving forward.?

Aligned Team Dynamics?

Teams with similar goals tend to perform better.

Having a team that shares common goals and feels that they can communicate openly is critical. The last thing your team needs is errors in communication.

A team's productivity is greatly boosted by the presence of a strong sense of mutual trust and open communication among its members. For example, a team that has the belief that you can win as a team leads to higher productivity than a team that has a mixture of leaders that prefer to work alone and leaders that thrive off of collaboration.?

How do I do this? By bringing people along for the ride. Literally. I constantly am bringing my team to my events, giving them revenue share, and providing them with opportunities to join meetings that allow them to see the bigger picture. If you just keep people behind the just simply doing their job, they will never see the bigger picture of where the company is heading. By allowing them to see behind the curtain and even get a piece of the action, it builds much better alignment.?

Create a culture of open communication

As we briefly talked about before, open communication is essential for a thriving business. As a leader, you have to make an effort to create an environment where people feel comfortable enough to share their thoughts. Having a team culture that encourages creativity and helps implement new ideas can stimulate employees and keep them engaged in their work.

How do I do this? Be open yourself! To have a culture of open communication, you must practice this too. I am almost too honest with my employees with what is going on. When I am mad, I tell them I am mad. When things are not going well, I tell them. When something amazing happens, they are the first to hear about it! When they do a good job, I tell them. If I am having a bad day, I tell them! I tell them exactly what is on my mind and how I am feeling. By being open yourself, you open the door for them to have open communication back. But most importantly, you must be willing to listen and to ask your team how they are doing for it to work.?

Emphasize the value of learning

To establish a high-performance team, it is important to cultivate a culture of continuous learning to address the challenges the market brings.?

Emerging technologies, in particular, are constantly evolving. As a result, businesses place a high value on the capacity of their employees to pick up new skills quickly and consistently.?

Developing a high-performing team requires not only individual team members' ability to learn from one another but also the team's ability to improve through the use of documentation and training. Look for team members that are hungry. If they want to learn more and do better, you’re on the right track.?

How do I do this? I encourage my team to learn and to find the solutions themselves. Sign up for other courses, see what others are doing, go to conferences, sign up for networking, and build your own brands. I want my team to feel the ownership of learning to enhance our team knowledge to help build the company. When you empower team members to do their job and take ownership of their results, they are excited to learn and bring new things back to the team. What’s important here though is to be careful to say “no” too much. Let them learn through trial and error.?

Identify Measurable Indicators

To create a high-performing team, it is essential to establish specific objectives that are both measurable and effective. Goals and KPIs are important for any business. But, sometimes we get caught up forgetting to set goals or to set macro goals that ladder up to the bigger goals. If your team does not know what goals they need to achieve, they won’t achieve them. High-performing team members are more motivated, energized, and innovative when they have a common goal that can be objectively achieved.?

The hallmark of a high-performance team is the ability to accomplish more in a shorter period of time. Such teams are more productive when they are rewarded and recognized for their good work. But to do this, you have to make the common goals clear and make sure your employees have the right mindset to get the job done.?

How do I do this? It’s simple. Set goals for each team member that ladder up to the overall goal.?

Conclusion

In today's highly competitive business environment, high-performing teams are essential to the success and survival of businesses.?

In creating teams, the most important thing to do as a leader is to be intuitive. By knowing yourself, you will know what kind of employees are the best fit for you. Look for resilient, open-minded, and verbose employees.?

It might seem daunting, but with the right team behind you, your successes will grow – and so will your company.