Wins, Meetings, Leading and Skills

Welcome to the Inner Edge, where I explore insights on wealth, fulfillment, growth, and mastery.

Building a business is hard.

I’m still figuring it out + I don’t even know if I’m doing it right.

But I’ll be sharing what I’m learning along the way to hopefully save you some time.

Here are a couple of things that happen while you build.

Meetings get messy. Wins get ignored. Leading feels like babysitting. And half the time, you wonder if you even have the skills to pull it off.

This week, I learned a few things about fixing all that.

Let’s break it down 👇

1) Meetings

Meetings can get boring.

That's why it's easy to push them off when you're the one responsible for conducting them.

I was guilty of this (especially when meeting with my co-founder/brother).

Every week, we’d push our meeting. It felt like no big deal at the time.

But later, I realized that meetings are the backbone of our business.

We started having regular meetings (which we never did before).

And it completely changed the game.

Since then:

1. The team is fully aligned.

2. Morale is through the roof.

3. Systems are working great.

We now apply the same structure across every role in the business.

Here’s a simple meeting structure that’s been helpful:

Wins/Losses: We just go over wins/losses for specific roles

Progress: Mostly just how things are going (projects, tasks etc.)

IDS (Identify, Discuss, Solve): This is where we identify big projects and how we can tackle them

Action Items: We always set clear action items before hopping off so people have stuff to do

If you can conduct productive meetings, you can get pretty far.

On the other hand, don’t organize meetings for no reason.

That can be a bore for everyone.

2) Wins

In business, there’s always ups and downs. At least, that’s what it feels like.

That’s why I’ve found it to be important to celebrate wins consistently.

Progress + motivation = super useful

We do this in two simple ways:

1. Review wins (and losses) in our weekly meetings.

2. Celebrate wins in a dedicated Slack channel called #dubs.

Btw: why would you not want to celebrate along the way? The journey is the fun part 🙂 

3) Leading

Leadership is tough. But leading from the front is super important.

I’ve noticed this time and time again.

If you’re undisciplined, that sets the standard for everyone else.

One thing that’s helpful for me to ask myself is: am I setting a good example?

I always ask myself that question when I start to feel lazy.

Remember: the person with the highest standards should be the one leading the company AKA you.

This doesn’t mean you need to know everything.

Honestly, I barely know much about media buying (something I should probably work on).

But leadership isn’t about being the most knowledgeable. It’s about being disciplined and consistent.

Another key part of leadership is knowing how to communicate well.

Your ability to articulate ideas and give feedback will really determine your ability to lead effectively.

Tip: Something that worked for me here was just talking to strangers. I used to be nervous, until I did it over and over again.

The more comfortable you get talking to people, the more confident and clear you’ll become in every situation.

It’s uncomfortable at first, but it can build a pretty useful skill.

Here are a few specific areas in business where communication will help (in case you’re wondering):

1. Bringing on people smarter than you (or bringing on people in general)

2. Firing people when you need to

3. Closing deals with clients

4. Empowering your team to work better

4) Skills

You don’t need all the skills in the world, but you do need some skills.

Here’s why:

Your business can only go as far as your knowledge and capabilities allow.

1. If you have no technical skills, you can’t build or sell anything.

2. If you have no people skills, you can’t hire, sell, or build relationships.

People skills are great, but stack it with other skills, and it’s a killer combo.

You don’t need to be an expert, but having a baseline understanding is so useful.

Let’s take our team for example.

My brother is solid at media buying. He’s not the best in the world, but he’s good enough to oversee our media buyers and catch mistakes.

I’m decent at building systems. I’m not insane at it, but I know enough to hack together systems that get us moving a lot faster.

These are the things which helped us progress in the business.

One thing to note: There’s an interesting nuance here. Some skills, like systems building, aren’t always something you can just “learn” in a traditional sense.

For me, it’s always felt innate. I started using systems to help me progress since I started getting disorganized in middle school.

It’s a framework I’ve always leaned on and that carried over into business.

But not everything works like that.

Some skills (like media buying or sales) can be learned and you can get better at them over time.

Even then, you’ll have better natural salesman for ex, because they were good at speaking since a young age.

But the key is knowing the difference.

Tip: Lean into the things that come naturally to you, but don’t shy away from putting in the work to pick up skills that don’t.

Mastery = strengths + leveling up where you’re weaker

That’s where I’ve found progress actually happens.

All of these things were crucial for us to make our first $ online and build a real business. I just hope it scales.

Anyways, that’s a wrap for today.

Feel free to reply directly to this email. I’d love to hear your thoughts.

Thanks for reading!