Aaron Young is a renowned entrepreneur with more than 40 years experience and several dozen multi-million dollar companies under his belt.  Aaron has made it his life’s work to arm business owners with success formulas that immediately provide exponential growth and protection. Fully embodying his concept of the Unshackled Owner, he inspires others to do the same by empowering them to build strong companies while proactively protecting their dreams.

> Here’s a glimpse of what you would learn….

In this episode of the Ecomm Breakthrough Podcast, host Josh Hadley welcomes Aaron Young, a seasoned entrepreneur and author of “The Unshackled.” Aaron shares invaluable insights on scaling e-commerce businesses from seven to eight figures. Key topics include the importance of building autonomous business systems, defining personal success, and leveraging team strengths. Aaron emphasizes hiring for cultural fit, creating forward-looking organizational charts, and implementing KPIs for accountability. He also discusses the significance of a strong corporate culture and legacy building. This episode offers practical strategies for business owners aiming to achieve sustainable growth and long-term success.

Here are the 3 action items that Josh identified from this episode:

1. Systematize and Automate for Scalability – Develop detailed operating procedures and leverage automation to reduce manual effort. This ensures the business can run efficiently without requiring constant oversight, freeing up time for strategic growth.

2. Build a Team That Complements Your Skills – Identify your strengths and weaknesses, then hire team members who fill the gaps. Prioritize cultural fit and empower your team to make decisions, fostering a self-sustaining and innovative work environment.

3. Set Clear, Incremental Goals with a Defined ‘Why’ – Clearly define what success means to you and break down large objectives into manageable milestones. Understanding your motivation behind these goals helps maintain long-term focus and drive.

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Episode Sponsor

Sponsor for this episode…
This episode is brought to you by eComm Breakthrough Consulting where I help seven-figure e-commerce owners grow to eight figures.

I started my business in 2015 and grew it to an eight-figure brand in seven years.

I made mistakes along the way that made the path to eight figures longer. At times I doubted whether our business could even survive and become a real brand. I wish I would have had a guide to help me grow faster and avoid the stumbling blocks.

If you’ve hit a plateau and want to know the next steps to take your business to the next level, then email me at josh@ecommbreakthrough.com and in your subject line say “strategy audit” for the chance to win a $10,000 comprehensive business strategy audit at no cost!

Josh Hadley 00:00:00  Welcome to the Ecomm Breakthrough podcast. I’m your host, Josh Hadley, where I interview the top business leaders in e-commerce. Past guests include Kevin King, Aaron Cordovez and Michael E Gerber, author of the E-myth. Today I’m speaking with Aaron Young, the author of the book The Unshackled. This episode is brought to you by Ecomm Breakthrough, where I specialize in investing in and scaling seven figure ecommerce brands to eight figures and beyond. If you’re an ambitious e-commerce entrepreneur looking for a partner or a coach who can help you take your business to the next level, I bring hands on experience, strategic insights, and the resources needed to fuel your growth. So if you or someone you know is ready to scale or looking for an investment partner or coach, reach out to me directly at Josh at Ecomm Breakthrough dot com. That’s e-comm with two M’s and let’s turn your dreams into reality. Today I am excited to introduce you all to Aaron Young. He is a renowned entrepreneur with more than 40 years of experience and several dozen multi-million dollar companies under his belt.

Josh Hadley 00:00:48  Aaron has made it his life’s work to arm business owners with successful formulas that immediately provide exponential growth and protection. Fully embodying his concept of the unshackled owner, he inspires others to do the same by empowering them to build strong companies while proactively protecting their dreams. So with that introduction, welcome to the show, Aaron. It’s great to be here with you, Josh. Thank you Aaron, I’m super excited to have you on the show because I feel like what you’re going to be able to do is give an outsider’s perspective. You’re not living and breathing in the e-commerce industry 24 over seven. No. And but you’ve got a plethora of experience in other businesses, which I think is going to provide immense value to these business owners in terms of understanding structure, operating systems, and just ultimately like how to protect businesses and set them up to be able to scale into the future. Most, most of these entrepreneurs listening started their brands on their own, their single owner operated brands that have hit seven figures on their own, which is quite an accomplishment.

Josh Hadley 00:01:41  But it’s that scaling, building out teams and, you know, protecting things that make it the challenge to get to eight figures and beyond. So, Aaron, why don’t you tell us the genesis of your book, The Unshackled and why you think this is going to be applicable to these e-commerce brand owners?

Aaron Young 00:01:55  So the book and I’ll just I have it here in front of me because I thought we might talk about it. So unshackled. was written, co-authored with a fellow named Robert Andrus. Now, put a pin in that. Okay, you’ve seen it. You know, there’s a co-author. Put a pin in that. 40 years ago, I, was a freshman in college. I hated school. I had done very badly in high school. Now I’m in junior college going, this sucks. I didn’t love it. I bet a lot of your e-commerce success stories had a similar experience. Like, I don’t want to fit into somebody else’s box. And I started a little business out of Christmas money desperation, where I’d heard that old newspapers were being.

Aaron Young 00:02:36  There was a recycling commercial recycling business. This was before recycling was a thing. This is 1983, and I heard that they were paying $60 a ton for old newspapers. So I borrowed somebody’s pickup truck on Christmas break and just started knocking doors asking for old newspapers. People were happy to give me their musty, moldy old newspapers, and I picked them up and threw them the truck and went down in 60 bucks a ton. And before I know it, I made a little over $3,000 and I thought, oh, and then it was time to go back to school. I went back I organized myself in a very analog way on paper and created route lists. And I looked at a map of Portland, Oregon, and I thought, where are the rich people? Because I was from a poor people neighborhood. And who has the newspaper? I never noticed anybody in my neighborhood or in my neighborhood with a newspaper. There’s no paper boy going down my street. Okay. so I built this thing out of that truck again, got another guy.

Aaron Young 00:03:24  We started going pretty soon. We had a bunch of clients, got a second truck, bought a truck, got a second truck, had two crews, and we have about 5000 monthly customers were picking up from. And I’m making money. While I was a very active in those days in the Mormon church, and I was coming up on 19 and it was time to go on a mission for the church. It’s just what you did as a 19 year old boy in the Mormon church. So off I went for a couple of years, actually 18 months. And, the whole time I’m gone, the company is running both trucks for guys every day. Money is being put into my bank account. I want you to think about this in 1983. This was this was weird for a 19 year old to have something operating that he’s multiple states away, but I’m getting paid every day. Now, your e-commerce people get that because you build a system, you build a funnel, and if you get it right, things just happen while you sleep.

Aaron Young 00:04:14  Right. So I found out at 19 this can work. Then I came home, I met this cute girl and I want to get married. And I think this cute girl is not going to want to be married to a garbage man. Which is basically how I felt out dirty, sweaty old trucks thrown in newspapers. I was pretty buff from picking up big loads of newspapers, but I didn’t. I was it was a sloppy, dirty job, and there was no big future in it that I could see. So at 22, I sold the company. It had never occurred to me that I couldn’t have a business that ran when I wasn’t there, or that that was weird, nor was it weird that I could sell the thing I’d created. It just seemed normal. Other people, even to this day, that come to my events, that read my stuff, that want to work with us, they go well, but isn’t that hard to have a company that runs without you? Isn’t that, like, really difficult to find somebody to buy your business? I’m like, I don’t know.

Aaron Young 00:05:01  I’ve been doing it for 40 years. So that thing left. The new company that I started, which was in cellular, ended up with five stores, had to learn how to run five locations without having to be there all the time. Then that the world kind of changed around that. So we closed it down. I got recruited to be VP of sales for a company that 350 offices all over the world. I was part of the small senior leadership team that took the company public on Nasdaq. I made a ton of money as the VP of sales, and after three and a half years at that company, I resigned in glory. They even kept me on for another year as a consultant to find somebody to replace me. And I started buying companies that, and I fixed them up so they could operate even if I wasn’t there. Okay, so from recycling to cellular to financial services to owning a portfolio of companies, I started buying companies in 1997. So that’s probably longer than a lot of your students have been alive, right? A lot of young people in e-commerce.

Aaron Young 00:05:52  So Several years ago, people started asking me, well, I don’t really get it. You say you don’t have to go to work, but that’s B.S.. I don’t believe you. You know, and I thought, well, I don’t get it. Why is this so confusing? Because to me, it was just how it was. This is just how you do things. And people didn’t understand it. So I said, if I, if I create a course, will you come to the course? And the first time I taught it, now these numbers are going to seem so small in an e-commerce world. But let me tell you, I put it out there. I said, first of all, like a gazillion people wanted the course. It was it was a flood. Then I put a price on it, and then that very quickly shredded down to a small percentage of the people who showed interest. But I charge $7,500 for this eight week course. And 13 companies took me up on it, and they were all companies with employees.

Aaron Young 00:06:40  One of them had over 3000 employees. One was a publicly traded company in Canada. So these were not little micro companies. These were companies that had a lot to gain by getting things dialed in a little bit more tightly. anyway, taught the class. I thought everybody would want their money back. I don’t know if any of your people understand that feeling. When you make an offer and you go, I don’t know if they’re going to like, love my offer. I think it sucks, but I did it. Nobody wanted their money back. We got good reviews and we’ve now had about 600 companies go through the class, with zero marketing spend. Okay, I talk about it. It’s it’s a, it’s a one off from my primary businesses. It’s something I teach. And the more other businesses I’m involved with, the more interesting stories I can share when people go through the class. So go back to the beginning and the cover of the book and Robert Andreas. So Robert heard me giving a talk about this in London, and I took the class.

Aaron Young 00:07:30  He’s from Romania, he’s a tech guy from Romania. He was 28 or 29 when I met him. He was doing about a million and a half dollars a year. So he was one of your seven figure barely. Guys took the course 7 or 8 times in a row, because once you’re in the course, you can just keep taking it live. You can watch videos, but you can also, every time I teach it, you can come back on as alumni. Well, in about four years, he scaled from a million and a half to $50 million And he came back to me and said, your book has changed my life or not. Your book, your course. We need a book because what you taught me and what I did worked. And now there are all these people in Eastern Europe who can’t afford $7,500. An engineer in Eastern Europe makes about $500 a month. So he said they can’t afford 7500 bucks, but they could afford 25 for a book. So we need a book.

Aaron Young 00:08:14  And I said, well, I’ll tell you what, if you if you will write it with me, we’ll use here’s what I taught and here’s how you applied it, and we’ll show that this works from a guy in his late 50s in the United States and in business services, and a guy who’s 30 years old in Romania. Write in tech can this can work. Same rules apply. It doesn’t matter. And that’s where the book came from. And it’s been endorsed by all kinds of fabulous people. The foreword is written by the former CEO of Warner Brothers, the creator of Teladoc, a $34 billion online telemedicine company, kind of the inventor of telemedicine. We sit on some boards together. He came back. The founder of WebMD came to me and said, nobody. I went to Harvard Business School. Nobody taught us this stuff. And so the genesis of the book is just real world application of things that I learned. You mentioned Michael Gerber in your introduction. Michael Gerber offered me to take over, and I’m happy to say this.

Aaron Young 00:09:08  His wife, Lou, has approached me and said, would you be willing to take over E-myth? And I said, I love E-myth. It was one of the most inspirational books of my early career, but I’ve built all on top of what I learned, so I don’t want to go back to that because as entrepreneurs, we need to never stop learning. And and so I said it would be silly to go backwards, but, I appreciate and I give a lot of credit to E-myth and other books. and, the thing that we learn and the reason this book exists and the reason it’s doing well, is because all I’m doing is saying we hear all kinds of stuff. We people listen to podcasts, they read a book, or they buy a book. Most of them don’t read the books, but they will read a chapter or two. all I’ve done, the only thing that made me different than a lot of people, was I learned stuff. I rapidly tried stuff, measured it, figured out what worked and what didn’t in my world, and then added the things that were good.

Aaron Young 00:09:56  E-commerce has learned how to do this right, so we learned how to do it in a funnel. We learn how to do it in a marketing campaign, but do we learn how to do it as a business? Whereas everything we’re doing just transactional. I’m going to create something new. I’m going to futz around that. I’m going to work 16 hours and measure, measure, measure, measure and try something to do and throw more money. Okay, but what’s going on in your life back here? And are you creating something that will, over time, just keep working with very little, touching by you? And the other thing is, how do you put people around you that will do the heavy lifting of things that you suck at doing, so that you only do what you’re great at and everybody else is doing what you’re not great at, and it’s all organized. It’s all focus on the same goal, and you don’t have to babysit them because you can see every day if you’re working or not working.

Aaron Young 00:10:43  That’s the whole premise of the book. And it’s also the whole premise of these many, many companies that I currently own or that I’ve bought and sold over the years. We do that, that same stuff everywhere. And in my experience, it’s a formula that works. Is that the only formula? I’m sure it’s not. Does it work? Yeah, it does. And I promise your audience, whether it’s my formula or somebody else’s, if you follow a recipe for, you know, sourdough bread, you’re going to get sourdough bread. It may not be the best bread you ever ate, but it’s going to get you bread. It’s not going to get you a trombone or brownies or a Volkswagen. It’s going to get you sourdough bread. And if you want an outcome, that’s going to be the thing you’re dreaming of, follow a recipe that’ll get you there.

Josh Hadley 00:11:22  Love it. So, Aaron. So let’s let’s dive in. I want to make sure that we leave the audience with some tangible nuggets that they can go immediately apply into their business.

Josh Hadley 00:11:30  So absolutely. Why don’t you walk me through like, maybe let’s start first with like, give me a high level overview of what your formula is. And then from there we’ll dive into each of those different formula. Formula steps, with as much detail as we can in the amount of time that we have remaining.

Aaron Young 00:11:43  So of the of the nine modules in the training, I’ll give let’s, let’s talk about five of them because they’re, they’re the most, critical, they’re all important, but some of them are talking about financial statements and understanding how to adjust your financials. Some are about how to what you do with the extra time you’ll have and and so on. But let’s have these five things. one is what is the one that seems the most like yeah, yeah buddy, get on with it. But it’s the most important one. Okay. So folks, please check your ego at the door for one second. Okay. Stephen Covey talked about begin with the end in mind. Okay. What almost zero business owners that I meet and I currently have 48,000 and change clients just at Laughlin Associates, let alone all the other companies that I own significant stakes in.

Aaron Young 00:12:28  Almost everybody starts out, I want to make money. I want to be my own boss. I want to have more freedom. But they never define what is success exactly. In other words, how am I going to know when I got to my dream? So the very first thing we talk about is let’s identify the outcome in very specific detail, folks, If you the reason we use GPS like Waze or Google Maps or whatever is because we want to get somewhere specific. And if I start here on the Oregon coast, right outside of my window, here is the beach, right? I live in Oregon on the beach. if I want to go to a specific apartment in Manhattan, New York, I can get up like most business owners and go, well, I know the sun comes up in the east and I’m on the west, so I’m just going to aim toward the sun and start walking. Right. You can do that. And eventually you’re going to get somewhere where the ocean stops you from going any further.

Aaron Young 00:13:20  Now, I don’t know where it’s going to be along North America, but you’re going to be somewhere because you just kept following the sun. you can do a little bit more and say, well, no, I know if I follow these freeways, I’ll get to New York. But if you don’t have a guide to tell you how to find precisely the place you want to land, you’re going to spend a hell of a lot of time, even if you get the right block in New York City, if you had to get to a specific door, didn’t know which one it was, you’re just going to grope around. There’s a lot of doors and a square block in Manhattan, so you’re just going to spend a tremendous amount of time dinking around. So if we can get very, very clear on what success is to Josh Hadley, not what somebody else some guru told you, success is supposed to be not some Lambo parked in your driveway, not some McMansion somewhere. I mean, what does it mean to you that’s going to give us now a way to plug in the coordinates and reverse engineer a path to the destination.

Aaron Young 00:14:11  So that’s the first thing we have to do. The second thing we have to do second module is I don’t call it this, but I’m going to just say it because everybody will get it. What am I great at and what do I suck at? And most entrepreneurs rightly believe they can probably figure out how to understand their CRM, probably figure out how to build a funnel. Probably figure out which software services can be linked together to automate things. But I don’t know if that’s what you’re great at. You’re probably not the same person who’s great at being on camera or being on stage or writing, because if you’re super technical, that’s usually a different skill set than being super relatable and presenting if you figure out what you’re specifically good at, you’re going to have 1 or 2 superpowers that if you really look at your whole life and everything people come to you for, it kind of boils down into 1 or 2 buckets. If you really get honest, and all the other things that you can probably figure out are just going to be a waste of your time trying to figure them out.

Aaron Young 00:15:04  A great book. So here’s the second book I’m going to mention, and neither of them are the are my favorite book. But if you’ve ever read the book, who not how it’s all about. Instead of trying to figure out how to do it, find somebody else who’s already excellent at doing it and enlist them. So the second thing is, let’s just get honest with here’s what I should be focused, by the way, I might be the owner, but maybe I should not be the president because maybe I’m not the best operator. Most business owners are so gripping so tightly the control that they may mess up their ability to get where they want to go. So we need to surround ourselves with people who I love this, this saying, surround yourself with people who play at things you have to work at. Because we know Statistically and historically. People will. Will work much harder for something they enjoy doing than they will for money. So if you hire somebody at a fair market wage, but give them not only an assignment, but free rein to do the thing they’re great at, they will run and innovate in ways that you will have never you would have never figured out the innovation they’ll come up with because they’re just built for that thing.

Aaron Young 00:16:07  So you want to surround yourself with great people who augment your strengths with their strengths. And then hard thing, leave them kind of alone once they know where they’re aimed at that door in Manhattan. leave them alone and let them work. Number three is really about, I say, hire these people, but most, most business owners. And if the people that are listening to me now will be honest, they’ll probably know this. Most entrepreneurs suck at hiring people. They’re really bad at it. And the reason is because their creative mind, their systems brain, they know how to put disparate pieces together to to deliver something that an audience was going, oh, I want to buy that. That’s what entrepreneurs are going to be creative thinkers. and how can I make something happen? that is a very different skill set than somebody who’s operating. And so they hire people that seem like them. Or I can be friends or, you know, that girl is cute, or they do all kinds of dumb things when they’re getting started, rather than understanding what their strengths are and what strengths they need to bring in.

Aaron Young 00:17:02  So in the third thing, in the third module, I talk all about hiring great people, what makes a great employee, how to identify them, and how to write job descriptions that, will will very explicitly, inform someone of, okay, I like you. Here’s exactly what you’re being brought in to do. And I use a system that I learned from, Stephen Covey early in his career. I was VP of sales of this financial services company. By then we were on Nasdaq, and he was kind of just getting big. And we went to a small one day event that he did, and I got to meet him and sit right ten feet away from him while he’s training. And, I was taking notes, taking notes feverishly for the first hour. And I thought, you are so dumb, and put your notebook down by the book at the end of the deal, because everything this guy says is gold. And one of the things that I learned was his methodology for writing job descriptions.

Aaron Young 00:17:53  And I went and I tested it. And here’s some actionable here. Write this down, you guys. If you’ve got a piece of paper in front of you from top to bottom, write these letters down d, g, r a c d g r a, c d is desired results. What exactly are you bringing this person in to do? How will you’re going to define success? This is desired result G guidelines. We work from 8 to 5. We have this kind of a dress code. This is our employee manual. This is you know you here’s you put things in the system. You write things in the CRM whatever. That’s guidelines are resources. Here’s your desk. Here’s your computer, here’s your phone, here’s your mentor, here’s this ongoing training. Here’s whatever we’re going to give them. Here’s leads. Here’s a budget, right. That’s resources A is for accountability. What reports do you turn in? To whom do you turn them in? What meetings do you show up at? And so on.

Aaron Young 00:18:48  How are you going to be able to show evidence of what you’re doing and then see is consequences, consequences for success as well as for failure. So we usually think of consequence that word as like a negative. But if you run an ad campaign and it just blows up, goes viral, you make $3 million in three hours. Well, that’s a consequence of successful activities. Consequences of of activities that are not successful. Unsuccessful. Not bad. Not you didn’t do anything bad. But you may have done something wrong. And there’s a big difference between those two. So consequences for failure might be retraining repositioning the company or replacement. You can write those three R’s down retrain reposition replace. Consequences for failure could be, a gold star on your forehead. It could be a new job title. It could be a raise. It could be, you get to come to this outside event somewhere, you get promoted. Whatever, I don’t know, but what are the consequences for success and failure if if an owner before you remember, when you hire somebody, you’re hiring them to be an extension of you, your vision and what the company is trying to accomplish.

Aaron Young 00:19:54  You’re not hiring them because you’re desperately stupid on how to do sales. And so you hire somebody randomly and say, just go sell stuff. And then when they don’t hit the numbers or the get the right clients that you wanted, you go, you suck, I’m going to get somebody else. That’s unfair. We need to know why we’re hiring somebody. Are they better? Have we learned some things about sales? Yes. Do we need somebody better than us at sales? I think so, so let’s figure out that give question.

Josh Hadley 00:20:18  Yeah. So real quick on that. So Aaron how do you how do you spot a level talent I guess is my bigger question. Right. And how are you attracting them? I think the job description is important. But like where are you finding these people. Are you finding success mainly through LinkedIn right now or is it indeed. And then what is your process to like actually spot and identify talent? Because theoretically people should be getting 100, 500 resumes Is your magic bullet like, hey, I’ve got a magic way that I look at resumes.

Josh Hadley 00:20:44  Or there’s magic questions that I ask in the interview. How are you able to spot from 500 candidates? Who is the right A-level talent that is going to be able to, like, take that load off your shoulders and move mountains in your business?

Aaron Young 00:20:54  Absolutely.

Josh Hadley 00:20:55  Well.

Aaron Young 00:20:56  For I’m going to answer your question, but first let me say I don’t do any of that. Years and years ago I did. But I’ve built up teams and processes where I don’t look at them anymore. I don’t do any hiring and firing anymore other than VP level people. here’s what I do. Here’s what we do. We first of all, we write very explicit, job notices. What I notice in most people is they try to make these fabulous, beautiful words and paint this glowing yet fuzzy kind of impressionistic, job notice. And then they get a bunch of people that are unqualified and maybe a few people that are qualified by luck. If you write a very explicit notice, here’s exactly what we’re looking for. And I in almost every case, I don’t believe you have to have this many years experience in that.

Aaron Young 00:21:43  What I’m saying is we’re looking for somebody to do this. And if you believe you meet some or all of these criteria, then we want you to send a video along with your resume that explains to us why you think you’re going to do this. Well, the first thing first filter is if they don’t send a video, if they just are automated, it’s got an automated process to send a resume. Well, they’re automatically out. We don’t we don’t even look at it. They could be the greatest person in the world. If they can’t read instructions, then they don’t. They don’t have a place. Then from those videos we look and go, is this person? Does this person come across as somebody that culturally is a fit more than their job experience? Are they going to fit my experience and after I mean, I don’t know, I don’t have any idea how many employees we’ve had, but let’s say over a thousand amongst all of the projects, it certainly would easily be that. But I don’t want to throw a weird number out.

Aaron Young 00:22:32  I’ve discovered that unless somebody needs a license or, you know, you need an engineer, you need a medical doctor, you need a lawyer, you need a CPA, not an accountant, but a CPA to do certified public accounting. Like, you know, doing audits mostly. If you can find somebody with the right attitude, you can train them to do what you want them to do. And I’m more interested in a cultural fit and a and a willingness to learn, a curiosity to do the job and, and a courage to say, yeah, I think I can do that. Give me a shot. Put me in. Coach. Right. I’m more interested in that than in somebody who’s going to come in with a bunch of preconceived ideas of how they’ve done it in a different environment. So I’m looking for people who can read something that’s explicit and go, I think that’s me. They can follow instructions and that by following instructions will see that they seem to be a cultural fit for how they’re presenting.

Aaron Young 00:23:21  We don’t give them any hint of what that should be, and I can usually tell pretty quick when I meet somebody, there’s there’s energy here, there’s juice here or there’s not, there’s a, there’s some connection or there’s not. My best sales guy ever hired had been a house painter, and he came in in an ill fitting suit and no resume at all for anything besides painting houses. And I said, I’m really curious. You’ve been painting houses for like 15 years, and now you want to do an inside sales job. Tell me about that. He goes, I am so sick of climbing ladders. I will do anything I need to do to be safer, to be more comfortable. I have a better chance of building a future for my family than I can as a house painter. And so just tell me what you want me to do, and I will. I will do it. I will do exactly what you tell me to do. In that 350 office company publicly traded on Nasdaq offices all over the world, he became the number one salesperson in the company.

Aaron Young 00:24:12  He had a strong enough drive, and it was a cultural fit. And he did it. And I’ve seen evidence of this all over the place in my career. So that’s how I find the people is there’s no there’s not magic that I can force, but magic can be created if we create an environment. It’s kind of like taking somebody on a date, you know, if you create the right environment, magic can happen. If you get the wrong environment, it’s going to be crappy and there won’t be a second date, right? Yeah. So we’re glad we have indeed and LinkedIn and all these other job posting. But just like in e-commerce, you can have all the opportunity in the world. But if you don’t put the right information out and I’m going to call it bait, you know, if you’re not attracting the right person, if anybody’s ever been fishing, you know, you can’t just put any old bait on and catch the fish you want to catch. You have to give them what they’re looking for.

Aaron Young 00:24:57  And it’s the same in hiring people. And so that’s how I do it. Then I answer the question, yeah.

Josh Hadley 00:25:02  Yep, I love that. And I know we’re running up on time here. So Aaron give us point number four of your blueprint. And and number five. And then we’ll try to put a bow on this thing.

Aaron Young 00:25:10  Yeah I appreciate you being cognizant of my time, but we’ve got 10 or 12 minutes if you want to use those okay. So number four is so if you if you know where you’re going and you’ve, you’ve figured out the other thing I didn’t tell you about module number two because I didn’t want to go too deep. But let me say, when you figure out what you’re great at and what you suck at and who you what kind of people you need to attract, we create a a forward looking, a future looking organizational chart. So it’s like if you have a baseball roster, you know, you need a pitcher, a catcher. First, second, third base, and so on.

Aaron Young 00:25:37  In your company, once you know the vision, you say, what do I think the company has to look like at the time of the vision? And you create that roster and you know you’re not going to fill it right now, but at least it helps you decide. So you’ve created that org chart in module two. Module three you start hiring the next right person. I need a I need a shortstop right now. So we’re going to hire for that person. Bring them in. So now you have a vision. You know you have a plan for growth and you’re surrounding yourself with the right people. So now that’s a pretty good start. Now you’ve given them in their job description the outcome you want. So now we need to measure. So we talk about creating scoreboards for the company but also for individual departments or unique job tasks. And when you build scoreboards you know every minute what the score is, how much time is left, how many files somebody has. Right. You have all this critical information like 9 million pieces of information, but you have key performance indicators, 4 or 5 things that tell you if you’re healthy or if you’re sick.

Aaron Young 00:26:31  Right. And when those things get dialed in, it may take a little while to iterate on those those scoreboards. But once you dial in the scoreboard and it’s up where everybody can see it, that becomes motivation for everybody in the office that’s looking. And we went from on building scoreboards. Now remember, we’re only keeping score on what’s critical to our getting to our outcome. Okay. There’s a million things we could look at and we should. But for what the what the all the spectators need to see. It’s just what’s on the Megatron. And it’s only 4 or 5 pieces of information. when we do, when we put that up, everybody can tell. Are we moving towards the goals or not? If this is the goal. Are we here? Where are we on the scale? Are we? And then not only do we say, here’s the company’s top down, here’s what we’re measuring you on as an employee. We do something interesting and I teach about this. And what we do is we say, okay, Josh, you’re our you’re our senior tech guy.

Aaron Young 00:27:23  And, you know, this is what we need to do technology wise, okay? So every week I ask you what what are the 3 or 4 items that we’re going to put on your massively important outcome list for this week. What? You’re going to do 100 things this week. What are the 3 or 4 that you think you’re going to accomplish this week that will be most critical to moving the ball? So you’re not just doing what you’re being asked to do or told to do from the ivory tower, but also, here’s what with my funnel or not, my funnel, with my pipeline, with my I’m kind of sick this week. I’ve got a broken leg, right? It’s not at full capacity or I just got hired versus I’ve been here for ten years, so those are going to be different, same people. People have the same job description but different ways of saying, here’s what I’m going to do to move the ball. Now we’ve made it. Entrepreneurs, they’re figuring out what to do on their own, and they start to own the job.

Aaron Young 00:28:10  Not just be a robot being told what to do. And we keep score, and the scoreboard gives us the opportunity for them to self-govern and for me as the leader to go, oh, it’s working or it’s not working. If it’s not working, where is there a clog in the pipe? Okay, with those things in place, the company will work pretty damn well, but I still may need to have to be there to watch. So number five is corporate culture. You will get a culture in your business, whether you’re a company of one person or 100,000 people, a culture will emerge in your business. So the question is, do you want it to be an organic culture or an intentional culture? I suggest intentional culture because if I’m starting the company and I’m going to bring other people in, it’s still my business, my vision, what I stand for, what I stand against. I’m trying to attract people that resonate with that message. If I create a good, intentional culture and bring people along and we show over time, this is how we do things and this is how we would never do.

Aaron Young 00:29:10  We would never talk to a coworker. This way we would never treat a client this way. We would never what it feels like, or we would always do this. This is who we are, what we stand for. After a little while, people that love that culture will glom onto it and will not want to let go. And the people that come in and don’t really fit the culture will self-select out. You don’t even have to let them go. They’ll go, this is not for me. And people say, how do you how did you take a company that had 300% turnover when I bought Laughlin Associates? There was already a 29 year old company, 300% per year turnover. That is so expensive. So it’s such a horrible, toxic culture. If you don’t even know if the person sitting next is going to be there tomorrow. Right. That’s that is a scary, bad way to live. And you spend most of your waking hours doing the work you do. We went from that to now our average tenure is north of 14 years.

Aaron Young 00:30:00  How do we do it? Well. People now know exactly where we’re going, exactly what the company wants to accomplish, what role they play in it. Here’s how we’re doing. And then we’ve created a safe culture that recognizes excellence, that gives people, encourages people to make mistakes. not over and over again, not the same mistake over and over again, but try stuff we talk all about in the book. I talk all about lead measures. That’s something we’ve never done before. We’re going to try something new and see if it makes things better or worse. Well, if an employee comes to me with a great idea and says, I think this would work and then we do it. Or their neighbor comes with a great idea and we try that. Everybody around them goes, wow, management listens. They try stuff. It doesn’t always work. We don’t get fired if our idea doesn’t work. As a matter of fact, we might even get a bonus because you came with an idea. This is how you build companies that all of a sudden now nobody’s knocking on my door asking what to do because everybody knows what they’re supposed to do.

Aaron Young 00:30:54  Nobody’s going, Erin, do I have permission? Because they know they’re encouraged to try stuff, and all of a sudden I don’t need to be there very much. And all I need to do is look at the reports and maybe show up once a week on a zoom call, which is what I do with all of our companies. I do a weekly call on Tuesdays. My whole Tuesday is full of companies that I’m an owner, and where I’m coming in as chairman to look at it, and then I get out of the way. We can build businesses that will transcend us, that will outlive us, that will pay us way more money than we can make by ourselves. If we allow the company to grow and breathe beyond whatever’s in our brain. Because if we get a good team together, that team will become a mastermind and we’ll come up with cool stuff that the founder who had the great vision would have never thought of. And if the culture is, is, if the culture is valuable enough that people will embrace it and hold on to it.

Aaron Young 00:31:46  I love what goes on at Disney. Disney. If you go to work for Disney, I don’t care who you are in any capacity. For Disney Corporation, you go through what’s called traditions and they talk about the the values of the company, what we do and how we do it and why we do it. And still, I know people who work in Imagineering at Disney right now, and they still ask the question. Walt Disney died in 1967. We’re recording this in 2025. They still ask, what would Walt do? Because the culture way outlived the human. But the culture was great enough that they could build something magical. And it’s one of the biggest companies in the world, and it’s because they’ve put systems together that transcend the founder. And that’s what unshackled is. It’s just about I can do everything I love, to do everything I’m good at as often. And it’s not about retiring, but it is about not being a slave and being able to have a business or many companies work for you.

Aaron Young 00:32:40  You do the things you’re great at as much as you want. But just like going off on my mission or having multiple stores or having 350 locations, it can operate without you looking over everybody’s shoulder. And it’s how you build legacy. It’s how you build companies that can be sold, and it’s how you fix companies that you want to buy, or it’s just about having greater life and actually having freedom in the success that you’re building in your e-comm business, where you can go on a vacation for three weeks and not be constantly looking at your laptop or your phone, and you can go because it just flat works awesome.

Josh Hadley 00:33:11  I love it, Aaron. Very, very good insights today. I love to leave the audience with three actionable takeaways from every episode. So here are the three actionable takeaways that I noted there, and you let me know if I’m missing something. Action item number one I think most importantly, you talked about this is like you have to cast a vision for what you want, the end goal for your business to serve in your life, right? Yes.

Josh Hadley 00:33:28  Is it, do you want to build $100 million brand? Because if you’re building $100 million brand, there are different decisions that you need to make that are going to be different than the entrepreneur who is content with the million dollar cash flowing business and not having to manage people. $100 million business requires management. $1 million cash flowing business may or may not require too many managers, but you could have a bunch of Vas doing a lot of things for you.

Aaron Young 00:33:50  So absolutely.

Josh Hadley 00:33:51  I think that’s action item number one.

Aaron Young 00:33:52  Can I can I add a caveat? I know, I know, we’re on time. I know we’re watching the time. But let me just say this. If you start off and say I want to build $100 million brand or $1 million brand, that’s totally cool. But there’s it begs the second question, which is why? What does it other than, saying I had a goal that I hit, but my question is, what is the life you want to live and what will what will be the vehicle to get you to the life you want to live? Because it will probably change over time.

Aaron Young 00:34:22  So you may want to put a financial number on it, like 1 million or 100 million. But I’m going to ask everybody that goes through anything I do with them or any company I’m involved with. What is success to you as a human? I did this with CoverGirl, Max factor, when they were being sold by Procter and Gamble, and I worked with their C-suite to figure out how do we keep this band together. And we had to focus on what mattered to each individual because they were going to have a big shakeup in their life. And was this shakeup in alignment with their life goals? And thankfully, we found ways to structure the transition where we kept the team together. But at the end of the day, if it’s not somebody, if they can have all the success in the world, but if they don’t feel fulfillment, they will leave all of that and go live in an ashram somewhere where they feel happier. So remember, people work harder for something they love than they will for money.

Aaron Young 00:35:07  So number two, please, I’m sorry, I just I want to make that.

Josh Hadley 00:35:09  Love that point. That’s a very good point. And I think number two leads on to that, which is find what your end outcome is like. What what type of lifestyle do you want to be living? I think that’s the main end goal. But then number two is like, well, what are your strengths? Right? And you already talked about this, but I think that that really is like entrepreneurs really need to take an inventory to identify what is it that you are really, really strong with because what you what you’re going to do is because we talked about having KPIs, hiring people, creating a culture. All of that is only dependent on like, have you been able to identify the things that you need to get off your plate, right, so that you can operate in your zone of genius? Because here’s what I believe God. God put us on this earth with very different skills and talents so that we are forced to work together.

Josh Hadley 00:35:50  And when we’re forced to work together, we can ten x 100 x 1000 x what we’re able to do on our own, but only if everybody is operating in their individual strengths and really like harnessing their powers that they have. Amen. And then my third and final action item, you touched on this, but I think establishing those KPIs and a scorecard that allows you and anybody else that you hire to know when we are winning or losing, because when you hire people, most entrepreneurs that come to me, they’re like, hey, I haven’t heard from this team member for whatever. I’m not sure if they’re really performing well or not. And it’s very subjective. But if you have actual defined KPIs that are not subjective. They’re measurable. They can. It’s either a yes or a no. It’s either green or it’s minor.

Aaron Young 00:36:30  The ball went through the basket, or it hit the rim and spun out popped out. You don’t get points for almost it happened or it didn’t happen.

Josh Hadley 00:36:36  But that’s how you know if you have the right people on the on your team or not.

Josh Hadley 00:36:39  Right. And they also know when they’re winning or not. So those are my three action items for people to implement in their business. I know we’re out of time here today, Erin.

Aaron Young 00:36:47  I’ll ask you three questions.

Josh Hadley 00:36:48  I would love to ask you the three questions if you can. So, number one, what’s been the most influential book that you’ve read and why?

Aaron Young 00:36:53  I love a book called The Science of Getting Rich by Wallace Wattles. I was written in 1910, and it’s a funky little small book. You can read it really quickly. And, if anybody wants to write to me and ask me, there’s a reading assignment, a way to leverage this, I got it first from a woman named Mary Morrissey, who’s wildly successful in the coaching industry. She got it from her good buddy, Bob Proctor. and then Bob and I were he and I talked about it backstage before I was speaking right before him one time, and we got talking about it and he told me a funny story. And if anybody wants to reach out to me, if they get the science of getting rich and they read it and go, well, what’s the magic here? I’ll be happy to explain the reading sign, but not until they get the book and read it cover to cover it.

Aaron Young 00:37:35  You can read it in about an hour and a half. It’s only like 90 pages.

Josh Hadley 00:37:39  Love that. That is a brand new book I have not heard recommended on the show, so thanks for the new book recommendation. You’re welcome. Aaron, what is your favorite AI tool or ChatGPT prompt that you’ve been using?

Aaron Young 00:37:48  So I’m a I’m a big ChatGPT fan, but I just just have adopted operator and I am freaking out by what it can do. And maybe that maybe everybody in your group has already been there already. Experts of this thing that’s only a few weeks old. All I know is that I’ve started doing things with it that are blowing my mind, and we’re speeding up a bunch of initiatives because of that new tool.

Josh Hadley 00:38:11  So how are you using it?

Aaron Young 00:38:12  Oh, we’re using it for video content. We’re using it for podcast content. We’re using it for creating research papers on companies we might want to buy where I haven’t used it Transactionally I know you can, But now I’m using it to build content that, that rapidly infuses projects that were, were doing.

Aaron Young 00:38:29  And, and if you interview me again in a month, I bet I’ll have a new favorite tool, because this stuff is happening so fast.

Josh Hadley 00:38:36  So true, so true. Well, I love that that use case. All right. Third and final action item. Who is somebody that you admire or respect the most in the entrepreneurial space that you would recommend other people follow?

Aaron Young 00:38:45  So you warned me about these questions before we started, and I said, I’m not sure, but I will say this. Bob Iger, who’s currently running Disney, is a corporate guy but is an entrepreneur in the way he did things. He if you read his biography that came out a couple of years ago, he did things that took Disney off of a terrible trajectory, created a partnership with Steve Jobs, who’s another hero, who’s definitely entrepreneurial. But he looked at Disney Corporation differently than Michael Eisner had done before him and and created a way to play at a high level in a very entrepreneurial way. That was I’m going to give first before I take, and it turned into a juggernaut for this company.

Aaron Young 00:39:26  I remember in eighth grade. I was trying to figure out how to buy Disney Corporation because they were in bankruptcy. And I was a little kid going, somebody’s got to buy it. Why not me? I could figure this out as a little 14 year old or 13 year old. But Disney hasn’t always been what it is now. But it took Eisner to bring it back to life. But then Eisner was all ego driven and and Bob Iger came in entrepreneurially and fix things in a way that I think has it’s magical and it’s entrepreneurial in extreme. And when we’re looking to grow, don’t look at people at your level. Look at somebody who’s exemplifying who you’d love to be more like. And Bob Iger is somebody that I’ve seen over and over. Bill Ackman in the investment community, Bill Ackman does things differently than the institutions do. And I love him. So look look weigh up what is less Brown. Say it’s not that we aim to high and miss. It’s that we aim too low and hit.

Aaron Young 00:40:15  And so look look up to the greatest gods of business that you can imagine and and figure out what you can learn from them. And I really appreciate you having me on today, Josh, very much.

Josh Hadley 00:40:25  I love that. Well, Aaron, it’s been a pleasure having you on the show. If people want to learn more about you, your different courses, they want to buy the book. Where can people find you at?

Aaron Young 00:40:32  they can go to, Well, the book is on Barnes Noble, Amazon, all that they can write to me at Aaron Young at Nobody Ever writes. So I never mind giving out an email address. Aaron Young at Laughlin USA. Com and if they want to find out about us go to magnify your wealth com we do an event twice a year. and I’ll just I don’t know we’ll just let this last podcast last forever. But, if they ever go to magnify your wealth.com and want to come to an event, they can use the code wealth for a deep, deep discount.

Aaron Young 00:40:59  And that’ll just be for your people. And, we’ve never talked about that before, but. And you can cut this out if you want to use it, but put in wealth in the promo code. It gives them a deep discount. and let’s give people the tools they need. They’re already going to be smart in their business. Let’s give them the tools they need to build something that will give them a legacy.

Josh Hadley 00:41:14  Yeah, man, I love that. Well, we are going to keep that in there Aaron. So thank you so much for the generous offer and thanks for your time today.

Aaron Young 00:41:20  Absolutely. Thank you.