Your Best Employee Is About To Quit. Here's The Fix.

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0:56Eric Siu:So like, by the way, notice one thing. The A players, they don't need to be told to work hard. They don't need to be managed. They kind of self-manage themselves. The only thing I'm concerned about with the A players, not even just executives, the A players, is that they're working too hard and it's leading to burnout. That's the only thing I'm concerned about.

1:10Neil Patel:Totally agree with you. And that's one problem. It's like the A players have this issue where they worked too much and you got to actually pare it down a bit and be like, no, dude, slow down here. You need a balance. You know, I was talking to one of my executives and he was literally before I came here and he was telling me how he wants to buy a house in I think it was like Mexico or somewhere like that and how they have some immediate family who lives there and they want to spend more time with them so they want a house down there and he was just trying to figure things out and he's just like yeah you know I need this kind of he's not looking for much this guy is more frugal with money than most people I know.

1:54Neil Patel:And I don't mean that in a bad way. I was like, dude, you should just go buy something nicer. And he's just like, oh, because expensive or whatever. And I was like, dude, it could all be figured out. Just go do something that you enjoy so you can spend the time. And when you're in that house for three months out of the year, you actually enjoy being there versus just being miserable. But some of these people are just working and he's just like, yeah, when I'm there, I want more space so that way I can just work under uninterrupted for three months out of the year and uh I think it was a vacation home and in this country homes aren't as expensive I was like you should just get oceanfront and it's not that much more like maybe 100 grand or 200 grand but this is executive like they can easily afford it plus more they make good money yeah yeah they make really good money they can buy it with cash if they really want it to uh plus more but it's just sometimes pushing these people to adjust a little bit of their values, especially if they have kids and stuff.

2:48Neil Patel:I'm like, you would enjoy life a bit more if you did these things.

2:51Eric Siu:But you see the difference here? That's a lot easier to manage versus having to manage pushing someone to work. That's a mindset thing. No, no, you cannot push someone to work harder. That's called you fire them and you move on. Exactly. And you know who said this? Steve Jobs said this, right? In his entire career, he has not found that you can make someone work hard who doesn't want to work hard. Like that's a mindset thing that you have to transform. Like you have to go on your own spiritual journey to learn how to work hard, right? Whether it's something that happened to you in your childhood or whatever it is exactly, or you're just a competitive person.

3:23Eric Siu:But that's why I push, sometimes my team thinks I'm crazy on the AI thing, but I'm just like, dude, it's so easy. If they're into the AI stuff, it means they're going to push themselves hard, right? At this point in life.

3:33Neil Patel:And if they're not, there's no point in hiring them because you don't want to train them and have to convince them. It's a waste of your time. You're only a single founder. It's easier if you had double founder, maybe.

3:42Eric Siu:It would be way easier with double founder. I'll tell you that much, right?

3:44Neil Patel:Why not just go find another co-founder and bring them into the business?

3:48Eric Siu:I wouldn't be opposed to that. But I think once we start ramping up these acquisitions again, I think naturally you're going to try to keep some of these founders, right? And you've kept a lot of these founders, right? We only try to keep the founders. We do not try to do deals without the founders. So, okay, if you look at the net amount of deals that you've done, how many deals have you done in the last five years?

4:04Neil Patel:I don't know.

4:05Eric Siu:20, 30? No, less than 20. Okay, so let's call it 15. okay how many of those founders are still with you today uh out of out of all the deals we've

4:15Neil Patel:done only once where we got rid of the founders yeah technically actually three times but two of them we didn't want the founders we just wanted the technology okay so 13 of 15 so just call that but there's only one time where the founders wanted to leave and we accepted it so call it one deal out of all the deals we've done where we accepted it the other deals where we didn't want the founders. We went into trying to buy the company without the founders.

4:44Eric Siu:Okay. So let's say you kept 93 % of the founders. That's a huge number. Now, let me tell you the mistake I've made in the past, just so you can learn from both of us here. So the two deals that we did in the last five years or so, one of the founders should have kept. The other one, and I didn't structure the deal that way. I structured it where it's like, you let them walk, but I learned my mistake there. The other one, we shouldn't have even done the deal in the first place, right? But all that to say is, again, if it's a very people-driven business and people look up to the founder, you got to keep them because it's going to keep the other people glued in as well.

5:14Eric Siu:So is that the three things that you mentioned?

5:16Neil Patel:Uh-huh.

5:16Eric Siu:Okay. But what kind of companies do you want to buy? Not right now. None. I'm not looking at anything right now. Yeah. I'm looking at what's good. I'm looking for signal versus noise right now, right? If I'm hearing more data integration, security, all this stuff over here, and we're getting more and more of it, and we're piloting more and more of it, then that's a signal to me. And then at the same time too, it's like the way we're grading people right now when it comes to hiring is very different. It's almost like to your point, you said, remember I did that talk at that conference in Manhattan Beach and you're like, you know, the talk is ahead of its time, right?

5:49Eric Siu:And sometimes I'm a little ahead of my skis on this stuff. And so I need to, I want to wait to see how the market settles a little bit for the next 12 months because we're getting signal from too many different places right now. And we want more signal.

6:02Neil Patel:You want to know what I would do if I was in your shoes? I'm not saying it's the right thing. Go ahead.

6:06Eric Siu:If you're building an e-commerce brand, you should check out DTC Pod, hosted by Ramon Berrios and Blaine Bolas on the HubSpot Podcast Network. They speak with founders, marketers, creators, agencies, and platform experts about what it actually takes to grow a direct-to-consumer business, from paid ads and influencer marketing to conversion, email, brand building, and consumer trends. I particularly enjoyed their conversations around scaling a brand without losing what made customers care in the first place. Listen to DTC Pod wherever you get your podcasts. All right, so I wanted to take a moment to tell you about my podcast co-host, Neil's agency called NP Digital.

6:41Eric Siu:And they work with a whole host of global companies or a global organization. Also, Neil has SEO tools such as Ubersuggest and Answer to Public. All you have to do is go to npdigital.com to learn more and we'll see you on the other side.

6:55Neil Patel:your single brain is getting good brand recognition i hear it enough and i hear enough from people who don't really know how well i know you or don't know you these are a lot of these people don't listen to the podcast so some people would be like hey have you heard of this single brain thing yeah you do you know this guy named eric he has this company called single brain i actually hear it more often if i look on a quarterly basis my traveling is not consistent every single week or month so it's just easy to look at corley but it's a drastic improvement on how many times i'm hearing single brain i hear single brain way more than i ever hear single grain i'm not trying to throw a diss i'm telling you reality i have a response for that go ahead go ahead okay yeah and i'm not saying that's a bad thing or any of that yeah but i think the future of your business is in single brain which i think you already agree with and you already know and you knew before me hence you made that change but and here's the big caveat i think the one thing that you're lacking that i would focus on over the next six months if i own single brain finding that guy who worked at a sas company as a ceo who grew up from 3 million to 100 million or 5 million to 100 million literally was there helped it raise money has the relationships to bring in customers and those customers will sign on right away enterprise customers with big checks and have that guy go and help run it because they will drive revenue in essence you're bringing the person who will go and bring you the large enterprise contracts because of the relationships and they were in a related enough field.

8:43Neil Patel:You can't be 100 % related because it's new tech, but it's related enough where they know the decision makers for your exact company because their old company that they were at was selling into that same exact person.

8:57Eric Siu:And he has the relationships or she has the relationship.

8:59Neil Patel:Yes, I think that would cause you to, I'm not saying you're not growing fast, but that would cause you to grow much faster, close a lot more revenue. that is what I would say could really change the trajectory of your whole business if you can find that person in the next six months.

9:14Eric Siu:So you know how I said in my three recruiting? So that's in there for the recruiting. And I think that's a great idea and I'm glad you called it out. And here's the thing, when people talk to us about single brain, oh my God, so much excitement, ready to do it. How do we do it, right? On the single brain side, right? I was listening to some of these client calls when I'm just like, yeah, you know, just when I ask our little brain thing, It's like when we do things that are off, right? When the client's about to churn, what's happening? Not proactive enough, not urgent enough, not creative enough, right?

9:41Eric Siu:But like the ironic thing is all that is just downstream from hiring good talent, right? And so that's why recruiting is so big for me right now. But I also look at recruiting kind of as marketing because I'm just like messing around with these flows that tie into sales outreach or marketing outreach or just recruiting outreach. So this is why, by the way, let's talk about GrokBot for a moment. So thank you for that. But GrokBot, it has taken X by storm naturally because Elon owns X, right? Well, it's also really cheap. Yeah. Well, now they've made it even cheaper. They made it more available on Super Grok Plus, Cursor Pro, and Cursor Team subscribers.

10:11Eric Siu:So you don't have to pay 300 bucks a month anymore. I noticed something. I was flying back yesterday and I was like, I was trying to cancel because I put it on the wrong account, right? The 300 bucks. And then it's like, wait, don't cancel. If you pay us$100 for the next three months, every, like, okay, we'll give you Super Grok Heavy, which includes Cursor and everything, right? I'm like, wait, everyone should cancel right now. So I'm messaging you Yaniv. I'm like, hey, you should sign up and cancel it right now, right? But they only do that on iOS, just FYI for now. But the cool thing with that, by the way, so GrokBot will give you the super heavy, right, which is 300 bucks, but you get Cursor Ultra, which is 200 bucks.

10:48Eric Siu:So you're actually getting for$100, I think, or maybe$300 for$1 ,500 worth of value. You can do that, right? Now, I want to call out some Nikita Beer. Everyone over thinks marketing. For every product launch we did at X, I write the X announcement 20 minutes before clicking a post. better to be launching something every single week instead of focusing on how to make a single day traffic spike largely larger. So the GrokBot team, by the way, they're DMing me. They're like, hey, we really liked the article you shared. We're gonna give you more usage. We're gonna top you off, right? And then like all these people are tweeting and they're kind of retweeting each other.

11:19Eric Siu:Their enterprise salesperson at GrokBot, he's like, GrokBot for GTM. Everyone retweets it, right? And you have Elon retweeting people that are using it. So he's just using that marketing engine. They have people that are reaching out to KOLs or influencers and giving them all this stuff. and the product's good enough on its own where like all the stuff you're talking about with like reaching out to people daily or different languages and all that, I'm like, dude, your daughter can set it up for you. Your son can set up. It's so easy to set up that I'm like, this is like the Hermes and OpenClaw moment, but for everybody, because it's so simple and so reliable.

11:49Eric Siu:And affordable. And it does 85 % of everything you need. Exactly, right? So, and it has all these connectors. Like, are they thinking about Sock 2 Compliance? Sock 2 Compliance is in there. Multiplayer with agents, multiplayer with humans that's all going to come and so now we're going to see agents being used a lot more now with grokbot so i think they're doing a great job with their launch one it's a great product two everyone from their team is kind of uh promoting everything right and um they have a really good deal for you too because they're just bundling things together and just giving it for free so it's like multiple marketing attacks um from all angles dude it's funny because i started

12:24Neil Patel:looking at spacex stock i was waiting for it to drop to 70 something but it didn't i'm not no

12:29Eric Siu:financial advice by the way you know what's funny so i was with syed and yaniv right and we're we're all on the same page we're like yeah we're gonna wait for that shit not that shit it's a great stock guys but we're gonna ship ship yeah we're gonna wait for that ship to drop the 70 bucks yeah yeah yeah yeah because it's it's a lot of money right now it's 1.85 trillion or whatever it is right now it's not worth that right now but they will become worth way more of course i think

12:53Neil Patel:it's again not financial advice i think it's one of the i personally am willing to bet a lot of my money on them for the whole future for the next 20 years yeah you know what i mean i i'm in it for around 5 10 but i'm not saying i wouldn't hold longer but for the next 5 10 years i don't see anyone taking them over at least in the space race in the western world i'm not saying someone in china can't do some miraculous things but on the western world a lot of the stuff is regulated and is very hard. I just hope Elon stays safe. Yeah. And he doesn't say

13:25Eric Siu:I hope he stops saying stupid. I think he said another stupid thing this week. What did he say? I think it was something along the lines of God here let me look it up real quick.

13:35Neil Patel:But speaking of that I was watching an interview of Elon and he was talking about how he can't go to Target or anything like that. Someone was asking he's like yeah he's like I have to worry

13:45Eric Siu:about my life. Oh wait I remember I remember he made a comment about the Odyssey and something about the Odyssey oh the movie yeah the movie and saying like it's too woke or whatever right and i think that dude you just don't need to say those things you know what i mean but yeah continue your thought i thought he's talking about that oh he he talked about the the the death the the george floyd thing did you read about that no okay this he shouldn't have said so elon musk shared and endorsed arguments from conservative conversators claiming derek shalvin did not cause george floyd's death whether it's true or not just not worth talking about because that that was the whole the whole BLM thing.

14:19Neil Patel:He needs to stay out of politics and, you know, current events. He needs to just focus on SpaceX and Tesla. There's enough for him to focus on. Yes, and I don't know why he has to open his mouth. And like 12 kids. 12 kids, I thought he had 60.

14:30Eric Siu:60?