Darius Mirshahzadeh
Appearances
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Darius Mirshahzadeh: How Core Values Unlock Massive Business Growth | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
And I click send and I send it across to all the interns and it goes viral inside the white house to all senior staff and everything. So I get pulled aside and, and now they had heard that my dad was sick and I think they were cutting me some slack. And this guy sits me down. He's like a senior, senior, senior white house, like staff member.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Darius Mirshahzadeh: How Core Values Unlock Massive Business Growth | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
This guy's like head of some, I think he was head of my department actually. It was the only time I ever met him. So he's head of presidential scheduling for the president of the United States, scheduled for the whole world. He's like, listen, man, you don't know me. I heard what you did. Don't rock the boat. This is the president of the United States. What are you doing?
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Darius Mirshahzadeh: How Core Values Unlock Massive Business Growth | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
And I held my ground for a second. And then I was like, look, I'm sorry. I apologized. And they basically let me off. And they did not fire me. And I think, honestly, the only reason I didn't get fired was because my father was so sick. But I was like, this is such bureaucratic bullshit. And I ended up leaving a few days later. But yeah, it was it was really eye opening.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Darius Mirshahzadeh: How Core Values Unlock Massive Business Growth | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
I was like, wow, this is like weird that you would give this big thing to go work for free and not get the one thing you want and have no control over it and do all this admin work. And I was at this great opportunity. And yet all I saw that it wasn't a good fit for me. And at that moment, I sat down and I said, I am 100% unemployable. Like I can never have a job.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Darius Mirshahzadeh: How Core Values Unlock Massive Business Growth | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
And it was this thing where I was like, if I ever take a job, it'll be to figure out what they do to go do it for myself. And I was 100% convinced of it. And it never changed after that ever.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Darius Mirshahzadeh: How Core Values Unlock Massive Business Growth | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
Yeah. You know, also like this is 2000. So being 22 and being like, I'm going to go be an entrepreneur in the year 2000 was not normal. That was really rare. Right. And so it was a great lesson to learn, but it was very rare. And it was a gift that led me to be able to then go and build.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Darius Mirshahzadeh: How Core Values Unlock Massive Business Growth | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
I moved back home after my father passed away. We had this event promotion business. It tanked. It was the first business I ever had that lost $100,000, which is like, that's a lot of money to lose when you're 22. But I lost that business. My brother was in the mortgage business. So I have a twin brother. I was always kind of like the student leader jock and he was like the troublemaker.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Darius Mirshahzadeh: How Core Values Unlock Massive Business Growth | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
but we're twins. And when we were in senior in high school, he got a job at a mortgage company and he realized he was like a savant at sales. I mean, he was like unbelievable. And so when I was in college, he kind of was in college, but he was really in sales and he was selling mortgages. And by the time I was graduating college at 22, my brother was making six figures. He was like killing it.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Darius Mirshahzadeh: How Core Values Unlock Massive Business Growth | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
And so I was like, well, I could go get a I have a degree in economics and accounting. I can go do that while I figure out my business stuff. Or I could just go sell loans. And so I got a job in mortgage. Long story short, that didn't work out. I moved to San Francisco. He was down in LA. And I pivoted a lot for 23 and 24. But I got back into mortgage. And I started doing really, really well.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Darius Mirshahzadeh: How Core Values Unlock Massive Business Growth | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
And at 25, I decided to start my own company. I don't know if you remember, there's a supplement company called Twin Labs. You ever heard of that before?
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Darius Mirshahzadeh: How Core Values Unlock Massive Business Growth | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
It's a really popular supplement company. And I found out the guy named it after his twin children. So I was like, oh, I'm going to name my company after us being twins. So I named it Twin Capital Mortgage. Now, funny enough, I tried to get my brother to come join me, but he was making like three times as much money as I was. So he said, why would I leave my job?
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Darius Mirshahzadeh: How Core Values Unlock Massive Business Growth | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
I'm making like 30 grand a month and you're making 10. I said, well, hey, listen, I hate your fiance, number one. And number two, I'm going to make more money than you are. So if I with a month, I make more money than you do in a month. You have to break up with your fiance and move to San Francisco and be my business partner. And he's like, we're on. And that was in July or June or July of 2003.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Darius Mirshahzadeh: How Core Values Unlock Massive Business Growth | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
And by September, I made I had a month that was way bigger than his. And so literally within one week, he broke up with his fiance.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Darius Mirshahzadeh: How Core Values Unlock Massive Business Growth | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
She knew I hated her, so. I was transparent. Within a week, he quit his job, broke up with his fiance, moved to San Francisco and became my business partner. It was amazing because my brother and I are kind of yin and yang. I mean, we're both are good at sales, but he's unbelievable at sales. And I'm good enough. I like to operate and build and be a visionary.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Darius Mirshahzadeh: How Core Values Unlock Massive Business Growth | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
But when he came, I mean, our business that first year, he came in November. It's when he got there. That year, I think the business grossed $300,000. The next year, we grossed almost 2 million. The year after that, 5. The year after that, almost 10. And so this business grew 2,500% in three years. It was the 40th fastest growing company in the Inc. 500 in 2007. So it was an amazing run.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Darius Mirshahzadeh: How Core Values Unlock Massive Business Growth | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
And I learned a couple of things. I learned like find a partner that's going to complement your skills and really go lean into scaling a business. And for us, it was the business has its own horror story because it was a subprime mortgage lender and it blew up in 07. So I joked that when I went to the Inc. 500 conference, it was in Chicago that year, I'm wearing a black tie.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Darius Mirshahzadeh: How Core Values Unlock Massive Business Growth | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
And I joked that we were the saddest people in that conference because I literally was probably the 40th fastest shrinking company in the United States when I was at the 500 conference. Yeah, it sucked. The business ended up imploding because of subprime meltdown. We went from 150 employees. I grew that thing for myself to 150 employees in three years.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Darius Mirshahzadeh: How Core Values Unlock Massive Business Growth | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
And then within 90 days, I was back to 10 employees.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Darius Mirshahzadeh: How Core Values Unlock Massive Business Growth | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
Yeah, honestly, I spent five years and I called it entrepreneurial purgatory. So 07 was early, like the economy didn't falter till 08. But my business, the mortgage business got crushed. The number of people in the mortgage business that worked in the mortgage business in 06 was 400,000. It shrunk to 100,000 by 2011.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Darius Mirshahzadeh: How Core Values Unlock Massive Business Growth | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
So three quarters of the industry went away. I always said it would be kind of like, most people don't know this, but I said it would be like if I said, hey, Uber, Twitter, Meta, Google, they all go out of business. That's what happened to that industry all at once. So it was brutal. I pivoted. I pivoted for almost five years.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Darius Mirshahzadeh: How Core Values Unlock Massive Business Growth | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
I literally showed up to work for five years straight, 07, 08, 09, 010, 011, and literally did not get a paycheck. I just cut checks and went to work. Now, I'd made a lot of money in the previous year. So we used that to survive. But most of it, we spent a lot of it and just trying to rebuild. And it just took a long time. And I was young. Mind you, I started the business in 03 when I was 25.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Darius Mirshahzadeh: How Core Values Unlock Massive Business Growth | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
So by 07, I was 27, 28. So this all happened before I was 30 years old. And then I spent my late 20s, early 30s rebuilding, figuring out what was next. And I have a friend... Ryan Levesque, who owns a company called The Ass Method, he called me Tenacious D. He said, you just don't have any quitting you.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Darius Mirshahzadeh: How Core Values Unlock Massive Business Growth | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
And I was like, man, I wish I did because that it was probably the most painful five years I've ever lived in business. And I wouldn't do it over again. If I had to do it, I wouldn't.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Darius Mirshahzadeh: How Core Values Unlock Massive Business Growth | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
So Naval Ramakant says, you need to pick the right space to be in. And that space was a dead space and it was broken and I just couldn't win in it. But I just didn't have any quit. So I just kept fighting for it. I was standing on a broken foundation.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Darius Mirshahzadeh: How Core Values Unlock Massive Business Growth | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
So knowing what I know now, it was, there was a lot of time and anguish spent and there was opportunities all around me that I was, I was living in San Francisco. So what was happening in 09, 10, and 11 in San Francisco? Airbnb, Uber. You go down the list of all these amazing companies that were born then, and I'm over here getting my teeth kicked in in this space that's just demolished.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Darius Mirshahzadeh: How Core Values Unlock Massive Business Growth | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
And so was it the right thing to do? I don't know. Hindsight's always 20-20. But yeah, the pain sucked. Like it just wasn't worth it. I had some amazing things happen to me during that time. I had my first child and I got married and I did live in a great city. But professionally, I struggled so badly for so long that it just it wasn't fun. And I think that there's an element of grit to win.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Darius Mirshahzadeh: How Core Values Unlock Massive Business Growth | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
Like in order to win, it doesn't always come easy. And you have to have some thick skin and you have to be willing to overcome obstacles. But to a point. I was very depressed during that timeframe and I just couldn't get out of my own way. And I learned a lot about how do you, how do you re-engage to activate yourself if you get stuck? So I learned a lot then about that.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Darius Mirshahzadeh: How Core Values Unlock Massive Business Growth | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
And the big thing is you have to win a little bit. You can't just lose constantly. And for us, because the foundation of that industry was broken, it was a ton of false starts. It was like five false starts. I probably started seven different companies then. And I just couldn't get any traction. But eventually, you know, Tenacious de-worked. We had a really big win in 2011.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Darius Mirshahzadeh: How Core Values Unlock Massive Business Growth | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
And then our biggest win was after that in 2013, which is the business I just exited a year and a half ago.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Darius Mirshahzadeh: How Core Values Unlock Massive Business Growth | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
Hey, Hella.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Darius Mirshahzadeh: How Core Values Unlock Massive Business Growth | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
Yeah. So because I didn't have enough capital and mortgage, you need to have capital to build your platforms because it's not like VC. VC, you use capital to burn your runway to then get to your next round of capital. Mortgage, you need to capitalize the platform to go lend against it. And so I didn't have enough to really do it competitively. So what I ended up doing was doing partnerships.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Darius Mirshahzadeh: How Core Values Unlock Massive Business Growth | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
So I did a partnership with this company called Pacific Union Financial in 2011. And we grew it from essentially nothing to about $75 million in revenue overnight. We had not a perfect exit from it. We had a disagreement with some of our partner there.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Darius Mirshahzadeh: How Core Values Unlock Massive Business Growth | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
And we ended up basically getting bought out, had a very short non-compete, took all that capital and went out to go buy a platform, raised $40 million. And we couldn't find the platform we wanted. One of the platforms we were talking to buy was this company called The Money Source, which was this really small little company in Long Island, New York.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Darius Mirshahzadeh: How Core Values Unlock Massive Business Growth | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
30 employees, a couple million dollars net worth. There's a small little regional lender. And he said no to selling to us, this guy named Stavros, who ended up being my business partner. But he said, well, what if you want to do a partnership? I said, oh, hell no. I just did a partnership and I'm not doing another one. But after a while, we couldn't find what we wanted.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Darius Mirshahzadeh: How Core Values Unlock Massive Business Growth | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
We go back to him and I said, Hey, listen, the 40 million bucks we raise it. I didn't call capital on it. I just went and did a partnership, but I made it this like bulletproof partnership agreement so that what had happened in the previous deal wouldn't happen in this deal. And it was off to the races. This business grew from, yeah, it was like a J curve.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Darius Mirshahzadeh: How Core Values Unlock Massive Business Growth | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
Like we went 30 to a thousand employees in three years. And it's a complicated story, but essentially, we crushed it. I mean, the business now is one of the largest lenders in the United States. It manages $100 billion of mortgages. It's a game changer in the mortgage industry. And we built that from the ground up. I mean, there was something there when we got there.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Darius Mirshahzadeh: How Core Values Unlock Massive Business Growth | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
They had their licensing and they were a small company. But it was a company that had grown from nothing to call it 30 employees in 17 years. And then in three years, it went from 30 employees to 1,000. So that kind of shows you the difference of what happened when we all got together.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Darius Mirshahzadeh: How Core Values Unlock Massive Business Growth | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
I don't know. It's hard to say. I mean, obviously, like you fail till you win, right? And you learn in the process and winning is a failure mitigation game, right? It's how do I reduce the failure to get to the win or reduce the speed or speed from fail to win, right? Yeah, we learned a lot.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Darius Mirshahzadeh: How Core Values Unlock Massive Business Growth | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
What I learned at the win before that, I took that blueprint from there and I brought it over to this next place. And there was a lot of pain to figure that out there. So had I just gone straight there, I wouldn't have known what I knew. But yeah, I mean, look, you either grow or die, right? It's like there's no real middle. You either give up or you keep fighting.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Darius Mirshahzadeh: How Core Values Unlock Massive Business Growth | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
And for us, you know, I have no end of fighting me. For me, it's like, if I'm not getting what I want, I will obsess about it till I either figure it out or I figure out I don't want it, right? I'm like, ah, that's what it's going to take for that to win. I'm not doing that. Thank you. Thank you.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Darius Mirshahzadeh: How Core Values Unlock Massive Business Growth | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
You know, like half of me wanted to do that. And the other half of me wanted to like become an actor and a comedian on Saturday Night Live. Like if you had asked me when I was 18, I was like, actually, I wanted to be Howard Stern. So like, which is not ironic that now I love podcasting. But yeah, no, I was like business and like enjoying experiences with people were like my two things. So yeah.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Darius Mirshahzadeh: How Core Values Unlock Massive Business Growth | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
Thank you.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Darius Mirshahzadeh: How Core Values Unlock Massive Business Growth | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Darius Mirshahzadeh: How Core Values Unlock Massive Business Growth | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
Yeah, I know. I always felt like an affinity towards I love making money and I love selling. I was always like the kid that would win the candy selling competitions. I mean, crush those competitions. So for me, like starting a business or was not like this far out idea that was kind of a natural next step for sure.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Darius Mirshahzadeh: How Core Values Unlock Massive Business Growth | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
Thank you.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Darius Mirshahzadeh: How Core Values Unlock Massive Business Growth | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Darius Mirshahzadeh: How Core Values Unlock Massive Business Growth | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
Thank you.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Darius Mirshahzadeh: How Core Values Unlock Massive Business Growth | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
Thank you. Thank you.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Darius Mirshahzadeh: How Core Values Unlock Massive Business Growth | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
So my dad was old school, born in 1939 in Esfahan, Iran. His father was a business person, was a really successful business person. He was kind of like ADD business guy. I mean, some of it was a victim of circumstances. There was a revolution in Iran. He moved here. He had to support his family. Didn't have a great speaking of the language, although he did get his MBA in the United States.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Darius Mirshahzadeh: How Core Values Unlock Massive Business Growth | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
So core values of the opportunity, again, to become the personality or the, sorry, the language of accountability for the organization. It's not like it's like this thing, like until it becomes a thing, it's not a thing, right? So what ends up happening is a company like Yap Media, you have 60 people and they all have their own individual values.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Darius Mirshahzadeh: How Core Values Unlock Massive Business Growth | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
And if you don't define what Yap Media stands for and then hold people accountable to it and create a system where that can scale, what ends up happening is you end up getting kind of this like hodgepodge of values. And their values will show up in their actions consistently.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Darius Mirshahzadeh: How Core Values Unlock Massive Business Growth | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
And so once we pay homage to the fact that, hey, look, if the company doesn't have them, you're going to get what's there just by default because individuals have their own values. My belief is, is like they still have them even if you define what you are and screen for them and make them come to life. But what they do instead is they attach their values to your values.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Darius Mirshahzadeh: How Core Values Unlock Massive Business Growth | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
So in core value equation, we say core values for you need to discover what's authentic to you, discovering your values, you need to design them to be viral and sticky, then you need to roll them out. So you need to teach people what they are and indoctrinate them into them. And then you need to implement them ongoing. And then you need to measure for efficacy and do that consistently.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Darius Mirshahzadeh: How Core Values Unlock Massive Business Growth | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
And so the process, the book really teaches how do you do that so that when I get that individual that shows up that has their individual values, that they figure out how do they leverage their individual values. And we do that as part of the rollout. How do you leverage your individual values to make the company values become more alive and well? And the answer is this.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Darius Mirshahzadeh: How Core Values Unlock Massive Business Growth | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
It has to happen organically. But you have to have a process to create that organic interaction, which is essentially what I figured out is you got to make it easy. You got to make it organic. It's got it takes time. It's like, again, like you don't learn a language overnight. So it takes time, but you have to create those opportunities. And it has to be easy.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Darius Mirshahzadeh: How Core Values Unlock Massive Business Growth | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
And so really, the book core value equation walks you through how do you do that step by step.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Darius Mirshahzadeh: How Core Values Unlock Massive Business Growth | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
He came here late in life. So for him, that's how he had to support his family. And again, he grew up around entrepreneurs. So for him to start gas stations and do real estate and stuff like that was not unusual. My mom was a social worker, which is the other end of the spectrum, who worked for the county.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Darius Mirshahzadeh: How Core Values Unlock Massive Business Growth | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
I ended up in 2019, I ended up getting into this program called Stagen, which is conscious leadership program. They have a program called Integral Leadership. And like in my class was the CEO of Whole Foods, Jason, and I were in the same class and the CEO, Doug, who was a former CEO of Crate and Barrel. And so there's some, you know, big shots and there's only 20 of us in the class.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Darius Mirshahzadeh: How Core Values Unlock Massive Business Growth | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
Smart lady, social worker, father that's getting up and building his own businesses every day. When you see that, you're like, oh, that's an option. Like going to college. I mean, both my parents had their master's degree. So going to college was not that was definitely an expectation as well. But I remember my dad would always say, like, I'm building these for you guys.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Darius Mirshahzadeh: How Core Values Unlock Massive Business Growth | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
It's a one year long program and we're in the program. And this happened, by the way, this is February of 19, a month after I had said, I'm going to quit my job and we're doing our personal values. And I realized I'm like the core value King, right? I'm starting my, I'm literally that same month writing my book on core values. And I realized I had not done my personal values, which is super weird.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Darius Mirshahzadeh: How Core Values Unlock Massive Business Growth | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
I wrote them very quickly because it was easy for me because I had experience with it. But yeah, my values, I have six values. I always tell people you get out of five. I couldn't just land on five. I gave myself six. And so number one is happiness called heart. So I like to like think of sticky viral language to describe a value.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Darius Mirshahzadeh: How Core Values Unlock Massive Business Growth | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
And there's a description of what that looks like for me and for my family. Love is my second one, and that is besos, which is kisses in Spanish. Eye of the Tiger is passion. That's my third one. My fourth one is curiosity. I call it cinco, which stands for what, where, who, when, and why. Creativity is number five, and I call that boom. And my sixth one is balance, and I call that movie night.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Darius Mirshahzadeh: How Core Values Unlock Massive Business Growth | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
Yeah, it's just, I always measure myself against them. Again, like, you know, when you're going against your values, because that's when friction starts to get created, whether in your organization or in your life. And for me, I'm always, I always have my eye out. Like, what am I not living right now that I know I want to live? And I always tell people core values can be slightly aspirational.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Darius Mirshahzadeh: How Core Values Unlock Massive Business Growth | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
For me, my values that are aspirational or as balanced, like that's hard. And happiness, like I fight to be happy. I fight for balance. The other ones are a little bit easier. I'm naturally curious. I'm a pretty passionate person. Curiosity, again, natural. Creativity, natural. But happiness and balance, I fight for those a lot.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Darius Mirshahzadeh: How Core Values Unlock Massive Business Growth | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
Again, if you believe that core values the language of accountability, then the language matters. Words matter. Like literally like empires have grown and fallen because of words. I'm reading a book with my son and we're reading actually about the, it's about the history of the world. And we're on the chapter about Islam right now.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Darius Mirshahzadeh: How Core Values Unlock Massive Business Growth | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
And you realize that Muhammad basically built an entire empire, the Islamic empire, off of just words. Like he went out and talked about Allah, right? And that created this entire empire that got all the different tribes to come together. So words are so powerful. That's just one example. There's been empires built on words.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Darius Mirshahzadeh: How Core Values Unlock Massive Business Growth | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
Like you look at the United States of America, built on the words of our founding fathers, right? So why would you not pick viral sticky language that stands for what you stand for? Or you could be like everyone else and pick boring words like integrity. It's like, well, yeah, everyone has integrity in their core values or driven or, you know, excellence.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Darius Mirshahzadeh: How Core Values Unlock Massive Business Growth | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
It's like, well, what's the difference between Yap's excellence and the guy down the street? And I'm like, how about you say it a different way? It makes it where it sticks in people's minds. There's a reason people do it in branding. And there's a reason that you should do it in core values, which is like, if it's going to be language of accountability, let's give them some language to work with.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Darius Mirshahzadeh: How Core Values Unlock Massive Business Growth | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
And now I had to go to work in the gas station at a young age, too. He was like, hey, you're 10. Great. You're going to work. So my summer vacations and I grew up in upper middle class, Southern California. So all my friends were like going to summer camp and, you know, having fun and going to like the water parks and the magic mountain and six flags and stuff like that.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Darius Mirshahzadeh: How Core Values Unlock Massive Business Growth | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
And I love viral sticky language.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Darius Mirshahzadeh: How Core Values Unlock Massive Business Growth | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
Well, again, going back to your question before is like people have core values, companies don't unless you create them in your company. So what ends up happening is if you don't have a core value driven organization, all that is, is me defining what I stand for and holding the organization accountable to it consistently and making it drip throughout the organization. So what does that mean?
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Darius Mirshahzadeh: How Core Values Unlock Massive Business Growth | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
Does that mean that you're always living those values? No, it means you're always trying to live those values. And when you fall off, you fix. So you get back to center, the core, right? A non-core value-driven organization is someone that just shows up and does what I call BAU, business as usual. You get what you get.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Darius Mirshahzadeh: How Core Values Unlock Massive Business Growth | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
Oh, hey, Johnny over there has shitty work ethic, but Sally over here has great work ethic. There's a value misalignment, by the way. You think that doesn't create friction? Your team will manage themselves to the lowest common denominator. So if you let losers hang out in your company, no offense, losers, but everyone else can be like, well, I guess Hala lets losers hang out here.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Darius Mirshahzadeh: How Core Values Unlock Massive Business Growth | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
So I don't have to try as hard. Like they put up with bullshit. And so my belief is, is like, if you have a, let's say your values around work ethic or excellence, but you let mediocrity hang out. Well, do you think you're going to really have excellence happen? The answer is absolutely not. You're going to have mediocrity.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Darius Mirshahzadeh: How Core Values Unlock Massive Business Growth | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
You have pockets of excellence that happen accidentally, or you could do it my way and be super intentional and hold everyone accountable and the organizational accountable to this idea of excellence. And when someone shows up and they can't measure up to that, they get to leave. And what happens then is you have accountability around those values.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Darius Mirshahzadeh: How Core Values Unlock Massive Business Growth | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
And the people that love those values, they'll be like, hells yeah, I'm in the right place. And the people that don't are going to be like, hells no, I want to get out of here because they're going to find out that I don't like this. And it's not to say they're bad people. It's just not the right environment for them. So that's how I characterize it, at least.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Darius Mirshahzadeh: How Core Values Unlock Massive Business Growth | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
your organization has a way you guys speak. And there's tough, gritty organizations. And there's really buttoned up, pretty organizations. And then there's middle ground, hippie organizations. Your values are the personality of the organization. So there's different personalities, just like there's different personalities with people. So a bad value is one that's not authentic.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Darius Mirshahzadeh: How Core Values Unlock Massive Business Growth | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
I.e., you say, I value showing up for the team, and yet you don't, and you're the CEO. That's a problem. And in my book, I say that the minute the CEO doesn't live the values, you just put a bullet in the head of the values. So bad values are ones that aren't true. They're ones that are not authentic. Because again, there's five steps to creating a core value-driven organization.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Darius Mirshahzadeh: How Core Values Unlock Massive Business Growth | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
Discover, design, roll out, implement, measure for efficacy. If you discover and you are trying to please imaginary people, clients, team members, and that probably aren't going to be there in the future anyway, because you're out of alignment with your values, then you may pick values that are not authentic to who you are.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Darius Mirshahzadeh: How Core Values Unlock Massive Business Growth | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
So I see people do that all the time where they'll pick really like warm and fuzzy values, but they're not a warm and fuzzy organization. That's a bad value. Just say that you don't put up with bullshit. The people like Travis Kalanick, I just finished watching the show, super pumped. Dude, that guy, one of their core values was called toe stepping. That was core value number seven for Uber.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Darius Mirshahzadeh: How Core Values Unlock Massive Business Growth | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
And I'm like legitimately putting on a Texaco t-shirt, getting up and going to work at a gas station in the middle of nowhere. Cause my dad's gas stations were kind of outside of LA and in a hundred degree heat cleaning gas station bathrooms when I was 10. So it wasn't a very glamorous entrance in the world of business. It was like, oh, this is what running your own business is.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Darius Mirshahzadeh: How Core Values Unlock Massive Business Growth | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
Toe stepping. Does that connotate like niceness? Hell no. That connotates fucking people up if they don't live your value. Toe stepping, stepping on someone's toes. Have you ever had someone step on your toes, Hala? Yeah. Yeah, it hurts a lot. Toe stepping is their number seven value. Well, he ended up creating a toxic culture because of it. but he created something amazing too.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Darius Mirshahzadeh: How Core Values Unlock Massive Business Growth | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
It scaled till it didn't there. So that's a bad value from a design standpoint. And that's actually a perfect example that core values don't need to be nice. Hey man, if you're a toe-stepping organization, just say what you are. Here's what happens if you don't. Sally, the flower-loving hippie shows up and she sees Travis toe-stepping on Johnny and she's like, whoa, where do I work?
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Darius Mirshahzadeh: How Core Values Unlock Massive Business Growth | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
And that's a misalignment. Whereas Bobby, who's a badass, likes to toe-step. He's like, oh, cool, we toe-step here. No friction. And what I say is, you know, and I do a lot of coaching now and advising with companies, is I say for scale specifically, I say, look, scale is a friction removal process. You want to scale fast, remove friction from your business.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Darius Mirshahzadeh: How Core Values Unlock Massive Business Growth | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
The way you remove friction is by eliminating problems before they become problems. And what we're talking about right now, a value misalignment is one of the worst problems you can have in your business. That's where you get infighting and politics and drama and all that bullshit. And I don't want any of that stuff. That's just slowing you down from winning.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Darius Mirshahzadeh: How Core Values Unlock Massive Business Growth | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
And so scales of friction removal process, and it starts with values being aligned properly.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Darius Mirshahzadeh: How Core Values Unlock Massive Business Growth | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
Well, I go step by step through my book. So you need to do the discovery process, which is there's so many different values you can stand for. So you need to really pick what are the top, you know, three to six, I say. Four is the good, I like four or five. This is a good sweet spot. And there's a book called Built to Last by Jerry Porras and Jim Collins.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Darius Mirshahzadeh: How Core Values Unlock Massive Business Growth | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
And in that book, they went and studied visionary companies and they found out one thing. Visionary companies stand for no more than seven and no less than three values. And this is studying some of the most iconic companies of the last century. So for me, let's pick out of that 100. In my book, we give a list of 105 words that you can, in the book, if you pick up the book, it's in there.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Darius Mirshahzadeh: How Core Values Unlock Massive Business Growth | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
Yeah, so it's in there. There's a guide for this. So we have a guide that we give when you buy the book. And so you just eliminate those 105 words and you pick your top 15 and you rank them in order because values have a hierarchy. So you want to put them in order that now you've discovered what are your top five values? What matters most to you?
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Darius Mirshahzadeh: How Core Values Unlock Massive Business Growth | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
From there, you have to go through a design process, which is making them viral, sticky, and making them... I have some tests I put them through. Do they stand the test of time? Is there any negativity in there? Do you have product? Remove product? So I have a laundry list of checks and balances. But they have to be designed to be able to scale as you scale.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Darius Mirshahzadeh: How Core Values Unlock Massive Business Growth | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
In order to do that, they need to be designed so that they can become viral and sticky. So you go through that process and then you got to bring them to the team and teach the team so that they learn what they are and create systems for that in the business. And in the book, I talk through step by step. How do you do all those things?
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Darius Mirshahzadeh: How Core Values Unlock Massive Business Growth | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
But it did teach us work ethic. And I think that's such a big part of being an entrepreneur is not being afraid to go work your ass off. And we weren't and we didn't.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Darius Mirshahzadeh: How Core Values Unlock Massive Business Growth | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
Yeah, there's a word in Japanese called shibui. Have you heard of this word before?
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Darius Mirshahzadeh: How Core Values Unlock Massive Business Growth | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
Okay, so shibui, it means that there is complexity and simplicity. There's complexity and simplicity. So even with the core value equation, it's around creating something that's simple. I'm a chronic person that makes things complex. So I have to simplify it or else I'll never do anything. And the core value equation is all around how do you simplify the process to make it work?
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Darius Mirshahzadeh: How Core Values Unlock Massive Business Growth | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
When I left my business and COVID hit, I was sitting on the sidelines and did my book launch. Then when I came out of that, I got asked to advise some entrepreneurs on scale because I was always the scale guy. How do you grow your company fast? Having grown a company that quick, the first leg of that growth was 30 to 300 employees in 18 months. Which is crazy. It's a 10x, right?
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Darius Mirshahzadeh: How Core Values Unlock Massive Business Growth | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
And by the way, when I did that, we had off the chart record engagement scores and like zero growing pains. And then we went from 300 to 1000. And so this is all around scale methodology. So the other thing I learned and got to play with during this time was these different scale systems.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Darius Mirshahzadeh: How Core Values Unlock Massive Business Growth | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
And I learned something really simple is that you need to have scale systems to complement your cultural systems. And I always tell people scales about three things. You need to have execution systems, strategic systems, and cultural systems. And they need to talk to each other, and they need to be simple. And so ScaleMap was really born out of me starting to help other CEOs grow their companies.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Darius Mirshahzadeh: How Core Values Unlock Massive Business Growth | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
And right now, we have ScaleMap method. We coach right now, gosh, almost 30 different companies. And we teach them the process. It really comes down to three things. And ScaleMap itself is the execution side of this. What is the execution asset that I built in the business? And there's three parts, mission, which is where are you trying to go?
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Darius Mirshahzadeh: How Core Values Unlock Massive Business Growth | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
And we want to look at that in three different increments, 10 year, three year, one year. And when I would say, what's going to happen in the next 12 months, month by month? What's going to happen in the next three years? And then I just want you to lean into the future and have some faith. And where do you think you take the thing in 10 years?
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Darius Mirshahzadeh: How Core Values Unlock Massive Business Growth | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
For some people, they say, well, I want to sell before then. I go, fine, five years. Once I define where I'm trying to go, and I want to look at that in a few areas, revenue, income, staff size, ethics. Am I building a business that's sustainable? Revenue and income will tell me that. How many people do I need to get them there? And I want to look at that again, 10, three in one year.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Darius Mirshahzadeh: How Core Values Unlock Massive Business Growth | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
And then ethics. Am I creating any future liabilities for myself? Subprime mortgage lending, I created future liabilities for myself, my first business. So I learned you have to be cognizant of that. Then what we do is we create accountability systems around that. And that comes in a meeting structure. So in mission, we teach how do you build quarterly plans? And so this is what I teach CEOs.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Darius Mirshahzadeh: How Core Values Unlock Massive Business Growth | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
How do you have simple systems to do this consistently? A is accountability. If I build a quarterly plan and I have my mission and where I'm trying to take the business to, and again, what do I do with that? My team knows what they need to work on. They understand the priorities. I understand it. It's mapped out. I have a plan to work with.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Darius Mirshahzadeh: How Core Values Unlock Massive Business Growth | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
Well, a plan is as good as the paper it's written on if you don't have accountability around that plan. And so A stands for accountability. And we do that in two different ways. Number one is what we call rule of one org chart, which is who owns what, defining who owns what in the business. I don't want overlapping responsibilities. I want people to understand who owns what in the business.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Darius Mirshahzadeh: How Core Values Unlock Massive Business Growth | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
I want to spell that out and document it. And I want that to be a strategic tool for growth. I.e., if I map out your entire organization, what are the top two hires you want to make in the next 12 months? Strategic hires. What are the top two hires you want to make in the next three years? Strategic hires.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Darius Mirshahzadeh: How Core Values Unlock Massive Business Growth | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
The people you bring into your organization in the next year and three years, leadership-wise, are going to define where you go in that time period. But I want to map that up so there's clarity. The next thing I want to do is I want to build a meeting cadence.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Darius Mirshahzadeh: How Core Values Unlock Massive Business Growth | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
And what I tell people is accountability comes through cadence, cadence comes through rhythm, and it's the heartbeat of execution in your company. And we do that through a meeting structure we call 1590 meeting rule and 30 every 30, which is your team meetings and your one-on-ones. All right, you got mission, you got accountability.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Darius Mirshahzadeh: How Core Values Unlock Massive Business Growth | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
Well, what's going to happen is, Halaz, you're going to start to get performance metrics. Data is going to come out of the business. Well, what do you do with that data? And so P stands for performance. And that's looking at the data that comes out of the business. And we do that in three areas.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Darius Mirshahzadeh: How Core Values Unlock Massive Business Growth | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
One's called a five-question pulse survey, which is me understanding my customer experience and my team experience. The second is what we call three-by-three KPIs, which is how do you build KPIs that, again, going back to what I said 15 minutes ago, scales a friction removal process. I want data to tell me what's breaking before it's going to break. So we have a whole system around that.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Darius Mirshahzadeh: How Core Values Unlock Massive Business Growth | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
And then last but not least, it's called C3P&L, which is how do you look at financials so they tell the story of growth.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Darius Mirshahzadeh: How Core Values Unlock Massive Business Growth | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
And so it's a really simplistic, going back to this idea of Shibui, is there complexity and simplicity? I want to really focus on the 20% that's going to move the needle. And I want to get everyone aligned around that and then sit that on top of a cultural asset known as my values. And when you do that, you grow like crazy.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Darius Mirshahzadeh: How Core Values Unlock Massive Business Growth | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
My dad was like, you know, there was a huge cultural difference between me and I have a twin brother. So it's me and my twin brother and my dad. And I have a younger sister as well. But in Persian culture, like it's very patriarchal. And although my mom was American, like my dad was straight up Persian. So he was like, the boys come with me. I toughen them up. The mom raises the daughter.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Darius Mirshahzadeh: How Core Values Unlock Massive Business Growth | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
First of all, most people think meetings suck and they usually do. And so if you have bad meetings, then that means you have bad execution. So if you have ineffective meetings in your business, and we use a tool that we teach in scale map called the meeting autopsy, which is you just like kind of do an autopsy of what your meetings look like and how good are they.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Darius Mirshahzadeh: How Core Values Unlock Massive Business Growth | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
And usually people have one or two issues. They have too many meetings or not enough meetings. And so for me, I'm like, let's just keep it simple. Like the daily huddle is the 15 minute meeting and it needs to be done a certain way to maximize daily accountability. So the 1590 meeting rules around the huddle and then the 90 minute meeting is your weekly execution of your quarterly plan.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Darius Mirshahzadeh: How Core Values Unlock Massive Business Growth | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
Like I want to build a plan for the quarter and then I want to hold people accountable to it week in and week out. And what I do is I look at the business in 13 week sprints. You have four 13-week sprints that come out to 52 weeks a year. I want every week, every five business days, your team has to show up and say that they are either on track or off track on their goals.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Darius Mirshahzadeh: How Core Values Unlock Massive Business Growth | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
And if they're off track, we're going to have a discussion about it. And in my businesses, there is no being off track. Like someone has to have died for you to be off track. So yeah, so scale is a friction removal process. And what I teach CEOs and my entrepreneurs that I work with, I say, hey, look, we want to get really clear on creating a culture of accountability.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Darius Mirshahzadeh: How Core Values Unlock Massive Business Growth | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
But you got to make it simple or else your team is going to vote with their feet. They'll be like, oh, Hala has us doing all these things. This sucks. I hate it here. And my perspective is like, no, let's make it really simple. And then they'll get ROI out of it. You will create an organization where nobody can hide.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Darius Mirshahzadeh: How Core Values Unlock Massive Business Growth | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
And when nobody can hide, like there will be people that like to hide who will leave. And I say, great, sayonara. And the people that don't, but then there's the other side, which people that like accountability and they'll be like, hells yeah, like Hala's got a great business.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Darius Mirshahzadeh: How Core Values Unlock Massive Business Growth | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
I love our meetings because we get so much stuff done and everyone's always hitting their goals and the business is growing and we're getting more organized, not less organized. So that happens because you have good meeting cadence around your quarterly plans and around your daily accountability. The 30 every 30, it's the 30 minutes you need to spend with each team member every 30 days.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Darius Mirshahzadeh: How Core Values Unlock Massive Business Growth | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
And I built this framework around how do you do one-on-ones. And so I teach that in our bootcamp. And then also we have a mastermind. I teach that to that. And I also teach them to my one-on-one clients. But it's really focusing on the one thing that matters most to your team. And you know what that is, Hala?
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Darius Mirshahzadeh: How Core Values Unlock Massive Business Growth | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
Themselves. Yeah.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Darius Mirshahzadeh: How Core Values Unlock Massive Business Growth | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
You got to make it about them. And you got to pour into them. And if you do it the right way, you can figure out what's slowing them down. And then once you pour into them through a really nice framework, you can then hold them accountable to what you want them to be held accountable to.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Darius Mirshahzadeh: How Core Values Unlock Massive Business Growth | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
But what a lot of managers do is the only time they meet with their team is when it's bad news or to give them a shit about not hitting their numbers. And I'm like, yeah, you're just the dad that's overcritical. Nobody wants to hear that, right? So my question is, what are you doing to make them successful? And are you creating an opportunity, a nice consistency around one-on-ones?
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Darius Mirshahzadeh: How Core Values Unlock Massive Business Growth | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
And one-on-ones is the biggest area. Some of my clients that I have 500,000 employees, and they have 33% of their managers doing one-on-ones. And I'm like, you're telling me that two out of every three people don't do one-on-ones in your business? You can't tell me that's not affecting your ability to win. I know it is. So for us, we created a nice system around that.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Darius Mirshahzadeh: How Core Values Unlock Massive Business Growth | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
And then what's cool is if you do it one way, then you can hold all your managers accountable to that same way. So you have what's called consistency. And with consistency, you remove friction from the business. And scale is a friction removal process. So that's what you're doing.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Darius Mirshahzadeh: How Core Values Unlock Massive Business Growth | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
That's just how it is. And that's how it kind of was in our culture. family. And so I was either working at the gas station, or I was working around the house. And so it wasn't like this, like me and my dad throwing baseball in the backyard. I don't think I threw one ball with my dad. It was always business. And but yeah, he did not take care of himself.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Darius Mirshahzadeh: How Core Values Unlock Massive Business Growth | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
So you could go to do dariusscale.com. So that's where you can learn more about the bootcamp and about the coaching. That's kind of my give back right now. I love pouring into CEOs and entrepreneurs. So dariusscale.com is a good place to do that. You can go to The Real Darius for all things Darius. And that kind of has the book and podcast and stuff like that.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Darius Mirshahzadeh: How Core Values Unlock Massive Business Growth | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
But a lot of this also is on podcast. So that's the greatness machine. And on that one, we're interviewing a lot of these experts that have built these amazing businesses. And there's a lot of learning there too. So those are the three places, but all things, the real Darius, that's all things Darius.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Darius Mirshahzadeh: How Core Values Unlock Massive Business Growth | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
Oh, yeah. That's like drinking from a fire hose for 3 days. So it's really 3 days. You come in. We teach you. We build your rise targets. So we build your 10, 3, and 1-year plan. We teach you how to build quarterly plans so you can start to do quarterlies the right way in your business. And I mean, so many entrepreneurs do those wrong. And they build these crappy plans that don't do anything.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Darius Mirshahzadeh: How Core Values Unlock Massive Business Growth | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
So for us, it's how do you build like these rock solid accountability plans. And then we really take you through teaching how do we do the meetings, showing you how to roll it out, teaching you how to build KPIs, showing you how to roll that out.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Darius Mirshahzadeh: How Core Values Unlock Massive Business Growth | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
So it's a three day boot camp where people leave and they're like, all right, it's a lot, but I have a lot to work with now that I can and we'd show you how do you bring it back into your business.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Darius Mirshahzadeh: How Core Values Unlock Massive Business Growth | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
Yeah, it's a group. We do small group. I run it. So it's you get to spend three days with myself, which is always fun. And we do a lot of open coaching. So I mean, I'll do stuff where I just like you can bring me any problem. And mastermind, we do that too. But yeah, like it's you and I let people bring their number two. So it's you and your number two. It's small group.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Darius Mirshahzadeh: How Core Values Unlock Massive Business Growth | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
It's a lot of one-on-one time. I have coaches that will meet with you before and after and during. And we do a lot of breakouts. It's a workshop. So it's interactive. There's like you're working. Like there's a lot of interactivity.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Darius Mirshahzadeh: How Core Values Unlock Massive Business Growth | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
And the idea is that you're building, you're really building these things for your business that you need to get yourself organized and learning the framework so that you can then come go back and apply it to your business. Because so many people are just guessing. And the problem I find with a lot of these other scale systems is they're, you know, by the way, like I didn't make all this stuff up.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Darius Mirshahzadeh: How Core Values Unlock Massive Business Growth | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
I did the other scale systems. They're hard. I quit them. You know, I'm a creator. I'm like, this is a better way of doing it. I'm going to do it this way. And I kept like retweaking other systems and also creating my own stuff. So this is all born on the back of other systems that are, God bless them. They're great systems, but this is a better technology from my perspective.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Darius Mirshahzadeh: How Core Values Unlock Massive Business Growth | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
And when I was 18, he got diagnosed with multiple sclerosis. And by the time I was 2021, his MS had gotten really bad, it turned into dementia. And He loves cigarettes. My dad was like an avid smoker. He ended up getting diagnosed with lung cancer in my senior year of college.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Darius Mirshahzadeh: How Core Values Unlock Massive Business Growth | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
So here's something I tell everybody, and I call it my fulfillment formula, which is, and if you do these three things, I think that this is at least what I've learned over my life. I'm 44, so I'm young, but I'm also old, right? Like I'm on the fence.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Darius Mirshahzadeh: How Core Values Unlock Massive Business Growth | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
Yeah, I'm medium. Well, yeah, I'm experienced, right? So are you living in your values? So get clear on what your values are because the minute you ever feel icky or like friction in your life, it's you're rubbing up against your values. So get clear on what your values are and start to look at them on a regular basis. And so I always say, are you living in your values?
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Darius Mirshahzadeh: How Core Values Unlock Massive Business Growth | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
Are you working in your strengths? Are you doing work where you are working within your talents? And I like Strength Finder. That's my tool that I use and that I teach. So go pull your Strength Finders. Go look at your strengths and ask yourself the honest question. Am I actually living in these strengths? And then start to measure yourself against it if you want. But am I living in my strengths?
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Darius Mirshahzadeh: How Core Values Unlock Massive Business Growth | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
You're working in my strengths, living in my values. Am I doing it with a high level of awareness? And I have a buddy who is Marco Gargenta. He's the CEO of a company called Plus Plus. He says, fulfillment comes through, again, living in my values, working in my strengths, and doing it with a high level of awareness. And awareness comes through three, four areas. Number one, am I being mindful?
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Darius Mirshahzadeh: How Core Values Unlock Massive Business Growth | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
Do I have a mindfulness practice? Am I exercising? Am I dieting consistently, eating a good diet? Am I sleeping well? So are you getting rest? Are you practicing mindfulness? Are you treating your body like a temple, right? Doing the right things for my body, my working and my talents and living in my values.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Darius Mirshahzadeh: How Core Values Unlock Massive Business Growth | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
And so my answer to your, your yap crowd is if you're doing those things and start to pay attention to those things, the good things just happen.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Darius Mirshahzadeh: How Core Values Unlock Massive Business Growth | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
I think it goes back to what I just said. I really think it's finding that cross section between what you love to do. There's a word in Japanese called ikigai. And so it's really finding that cross section between what you love to do and what people will pay you for and really going all in on that. And so for me, it's like, how can I do more of that?
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Darius Mirshahzadeh: How Core Values Unlock Massive Business Growth | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
Thanks, Hala. I love being here.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Darius Mirshahzadeh: How Core Values Unlock Massive Business Growth | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
And so I saw this person who was a workaholic, who was all about business, who basically by the time I was old enough to maybe have a relationship, because again, in that old school culture, you start to have a relationship with your dad like when you're a man. He was downward trending really quickly then. And it was my 22nd birthday. My dad got diagnosed with stage four lung cancer.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Darius Mirshahzadeh: How Core Values Unlock Massive Business Growth | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
And we didn't even tell him he had it because he had such bad dementia at that point. And he passed away in August of that same year. So yeah, it was hard. And there was mixed emotions. I had a pretty complicated relationship with my dad because of how I was describing our background together. And some people would say, my dad was my best friend. And I was like, yeah, not me and my dad.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Darius Mirshahzadeh: How Core Values Unlock Massive Business Growth | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
I respected him. He was a hard guy and he was hardcore. And so to lose your dad at that young of an age is hard for anybody. But it just gave me an insight into life's short. And I had lost my grandmother when I was 14. She was 62. My dad was 60 when he passed away. My mom was 48 when my dad passed away. She got diagnosed with cancer right after that.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Darius Mirshahzadeh: How Core Values Unlock Massive Business Growth | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
So by the time I was 22, I had lost my grandmother, my dad, and my mom was a survivor of cancer. And so I had set a really different perspective, which was, I don't want to live a life that I just go work my ass off, and then 20 years, 30, 40 years from now, I'm done. And it was, hey, how can I live a much more engaged life? And I didn't really understand that then.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Darius Mirshahzadeh: How Core Values Unlock Massive Business Growth | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
It wasn't until much later that I realized that that's why I kind of got into some of the things that we're going to talk about around
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Darius Mirshahzadeh: How Core Values Unlock Massive Business Growth | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
values and purpose and how do you be live and engage life but for me that was a lesson taught at a young age which is hey life's short and you need to go and like make it happen and really make the most of your time because you're gonna blink and it's gonna be over with
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Darius Mirshahzadeh: How Core Values Unlock Massive Business Growth | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
Yeah, so when I was in college, I had to work a lot. So again, my dad being kind of a hard ass was like, yeah, I'm not paying for your college, you got to pay for your own college. And so I was always working. And I was always, again, ambitious. So I always had internships. And I had a really good friend from student government in high school. Her name is Prita Shah.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Darius Mirshahzadeh: How Core Values Unlock Massive Business Growth | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
And she ended up her sophomore year working for the Clinton administration. And I'm kind of like you, I'm like a networker. So I'm like, hey, I want to work at the White House. I literally like there was a conversation she and I had. And she said, well, all right, let's do it. And so she had a friend that came into town in LA. We were on the Sunset Strip.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Darius Mirshahzadeh: How Core Values Unlock Massive Business Growth | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
And what happens at the White House that I didn't know at the time is a lot of the people that end up working there, they go and intern there. And then they actually take a pause from college and stay at the White House and become staff. And so this gentleman, I don't want to name his name because of what I'm about to say, but he basically did that.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Darius Mirshahzadeh: How Core Values Unlock Massive Business Growth | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
And he comes to LA and we go to this place on the Sunset Strip, which I'm blanking on the name right now, but Dublin's, which was this famous Irish bar on the Sunset Strip. And we're in LA and it's the summer going into my senior year of college. And basically where they're drinking and all these girls come in from where I go to school that were these like really pretty girls.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Darius Mirshahzadeh: How Core Values Unlock Massive Business Growth | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
And I'm like, hey, and I wave them over and I basically hook him up with these girls. And so I said, I'm talking him up. I say, Oh, give Tim, give him your card. And so anyway, he's like, loves me. He's like, this guy's the best. And so then I said, Hey, you got to get me a job at the White House. And so he said, Listen, you get your application, send it directly to me, and I'll get you in. So
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Darius Mirshahzadeh: How Core Values Unlock Massive Business Growth | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
I had good credentials beyond that, but I worked every angle I could get. I send it directly to him. I get the acceptance letter from the White House. And I got accepted to be an intern in the Office of Presidential Scheduling at the White House, summer 2000. So it was quite an honor. And it was interesting to get to be in the... You're in basically the business of running the world, right?
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Darius Mirshahzadeh: How Core Values Unlock Massive Business Growth | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
Now, what I realized really quickly was as an intern, total hierarchy exists in this thing. If your mom is the head of the DNC for the state of Washington, you get to work in the West Wing. I had never met so many people from Arkansas in my whole life because President Clinton's from Arkansas. So there's all these people who are friends of the family working there. I never, I mean, it was insane.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Darius Mirshahzadeh: How Core Values Unlock Massive Business Growth | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
It was like every one out of every two people.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Darius Mirshahzadeh: How Core Values Unlock Massive Business Growth | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
So there's all these people from Arkansas, their parents are connected in politics. And then there's me, who has none of that. And I'm not getting any special treatment. And I got some really crappy job. It's actually hilarious. Basically, what people do is they send letters to the President of the United States to invite him or her to all their events.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Darius Mirshahzadeh: How Core Values Unlock Massive Business Growth | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
So like, we get letters from like, Little Methodist Church in Podunk Nowhere is inviting the president to come to their annual barbecue. Every single one of those requests gets a response. So I was in the Office of Presidential Scheduling. So we had to respond to every single one of those letters. So we read them all. And then you got to write them. And this is also, this is 22 years ago.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Darius Mirshahzadeh: How Core Values Unlock Massive Business Growth | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
So we're in some DOS-based system, like filling out these like fillable forms and then triple proofreading it because you can't have a typo in a letter from the White House. And then it goes up to this machine that signs his name with the pen, essentially, and goes out. And every now and again, you'll get invites from a prince in Africa. And those get escalated.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Darius Mirshahzadeh: How Core Values Unlock Massive Business Growth | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
So I'm in this department doing total admin work. And I was like, there's got to be a better way than this. So my business self's like, all right, how do I get out of this work? And I figured out that the interns have a president of the interns. And so I run for president of the interns.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Darius Mirshahzadeh: How Core Values Unlock Massive Business Growth | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
It's me versus, and by the way, there's two groups of people in this internship program. A ton of kids from Ivy Leagues, Harvard, Yale, Princeton, and a ton of people from Arkansas, and then me. And I go to UC, and they're like, I'm a smart guy. I'd probably go to an Ivy League if I applied myself, but I didn't. I went to UC Santa Barbara, which is like a party school.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Darius Mirshahzadeh: How Core Values Unlock Massive Business Growth | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
And I'm there, and it's me versus this nerd. And by the way, I'm graduating college. So a lot of the people are younger than me. So I'm 22. Most of the people there are probably 20. So I'm 22. I'm definitely way cooler than the kid I'm running against, who's this kid from Harvard. And I just crush him and win. And I become president of the interns.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Darius Mirshahzadeh: How Core Values Unlock Massive Business Growth | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
And this was something I realized when I was in high school, because when I became president of my class and vice president of my school, I got to get out of everything because I was the liaison for the teachers. And I'm like, oh, this is the way to do it. You go become it's like student leadership, but for the interns.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Darius Mirshahzadeh: How Core Values Unlock Massive Business Growth | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
And I ended up spending the whole summer putting on throwing parties for interns and social events and organizing them. And it was, it made a really boring job, a really fun job. The part that answer your question though, is, is I realized I was doing this admin work. This is my third internship that I had. And I called my mom up and I go, mom, I had a realization. She said, what's that?
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Darius Mirshahzadeh: How Core Values Unlock Massive Business Growth | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
I said, I am never going to have a job as long as I live. And I said, the only way I will ever have a job where I'm not the boss, and let's use the White House, for example, is if I was president of the United States. So it was this epiphany that like, I have to be the boss.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Darius Mirshahzadeh: How Core Values Unlock Massive Business Growth | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
And literally in this job in the White House, I said, I would never work for the White House again, unless I was president of the United States. Now I'm 22. Maybe I'd take an advisor role now if they wanted me. But yeah, it was a really eye-opening experience to be at this top-of-the-game, best internship that you could have in the whole world and to say, I don't want to do this.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Darius Mirshahzadeh: How Core Values Unlock Massive Business Growth | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
I want to work for myself. But yeah, it was a cool experience.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Darius Mirshahzadeh: How Core Values Unlock Massive Business Growth | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
All right, look, while this is going on, my dad's sick at home. It was a complicated situation. I had chosen to do this. My dad's sick at home. My family was not stoked that I was at this thing. By the way, they don't pay. Maybe they change now. Back then, they don't pay you. So I'm using my money I'd saved to go to Europe for graduating college. I'm using that to go live in D.C.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Darius Mirshahzadeh: How Core Values Unlock Massive Business Growth | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
and work for free for the White House. So I was already a little pissed off about that. And the one thing you get when you work at the White House as an intern is you get a picture with the President of the United States in front of the White House on the steps of the South Lawn. So it's like a picture that commemorates that you worked at the White House.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Darius Mirshahzadeh: How Core Values Unlock Massive Business Growth | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
And it's got to be in front of the White House. Well, they had some sort of staff picnic. And they're like, yeah, you're not doing the picture in front of the White House. What most people don't know is next to the White House is a building called the Old Executive Office Building, which is actually where almost everyone that works for the White House works inside of this office building.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Darius Mirshahzadeh: How Core Values Unlock Massive Business Growth | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
So we're going to do the picture in front of the steps of the OEOB, the old executive office building. I was like, fuck that. So I was pissed. And I pulled a straight Jerry Maguire. I wrote this really long email that said, this is unfair. The White House is lucky to have us. We're not lucky to have them. I demand that we either cancel the picture or they reschedule us in front of the White House.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Darius Mirshahzadeh: How Core Values Unlock Massive Business Growth | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
And I click send and I send it across to all the interns and it goes viral inside the white house to all senior staff and everything. So I get pulled aside and, and now they had heard that my dad was sick and I think they were cutting me some slack. And this guy sits me down. He's like a senior, senior, senior white house, like staff member.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Darius Mirshahzadeh: How Core Values Unlock Massive Business Growth | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
This guy's like head of some, I think he was head of my department actually. It was the only time I ever met him. So he's head of presidential scheduling for the president of the United States, scheduled for the whole world. He's like, listen, man, you don't know me. I heard what you did. Don't rock the boat. This is the president of the United States. What are you doing?
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Darius Mirshahzadeh: How Core Values Unlock Massive Business Growth | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
And I held my ground for a second. And then I was like, look, I'm sorry. I apologized. And they basically let me off. And they did not fire me. And I think, honestly, the only reason I didn't get fired was because my father was so sick. But I was like, this is such bureaucratic bullshit. And I ended up leaving a few days later. But yeah, it was it was really eye opening.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Darius Mirshahzadeh: How Core Values Unlock Massive Business Growth | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
I was like, wow, this is like weird that you would give this big thing to go work for free and not get the one thing you want and have no control over it and do all this admin work. And I was at this great opportunity. And yet all I saw that it wasn't a good fit for me. And at that moment, I sat down and I said, I am 100% unemployable. Like I can never have a job.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Darius Mirshahzadeh: How Core Values Unlock Massive Business Growth | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
And it was this thing where I was like, if I ever take a job, it'll be to figure out what they do to go do it for myself. And I was 100% convinced of it. And it never changed after that ever.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Darius Mirshahzadeh: How Core Values Unlock Massive Business Growth | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
Yeah. You know, also like this is 2000. So being 22 and being like, I'm going to go be an entrepreneur in the year 2000 was not normal. That was really rare. Right. And so it was a great lesson to learn, but it was very rare. And it was a gift that led me to be able to then go and build.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Darius Mirshahzadeh: How Core Values Unlock Massive Business Growth | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
I moved back home after my father passed away. We had this event promotion business. It tanked. It was the first business I ever had that lost $100,000, which is like, that's a lot of money to lose when you're 22. But I lost that business. My brother was in the mortgage business. So I have a twin brother. I was always kind of like the student leader jock and he was like the troublemaker.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Darius Mirshahzadeh: How Core Values Unlock Massive Business Growth | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
but we're twins. And when we were in senior in high school, he got a job at a mortgage company and he realized he was like a savant at sales. I mean, he was like unbelievable. And so when I was in college, he kind of was in college, but he was really in sales and he was selling mortgages. And by the time I was graduating college at 22, my brother was making six figures. He was like killing it.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Darius Mirshahzadeh: How Core Values Unlock Massive Business Growth | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
And so I was like, well, I could go get a I have a degree in economics and accounting. I can go do that while I figure out my business stuff. Or I could just go sell loans. And so I got a job in mortgage. Long story short, that didn't work out. I moved to San Francisco. He was down in LA. And I pivoted a lot for 23 and 24. But I got back into mortgage. And I started doing really, really well.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Darius Mirshahzadeh: How Core Values Unlock Massive Business Growth | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
And at 25, I decided to start my own company. I don't know if you remember, there's a supplement company called Twin Labs. You ever heard of that before?
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Darius Mirshahzadeh: How Core Values Unlock Massive Business Growth | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
It's a really popular supplement company. And I found out the guy named it after his twin children. So I was like, oh, I'm going to name my company after us being twins. So I named it Twin Capital Mortgage. Now, funny enough, I tried to get my brother to come join me, but he was making like three times as much money as I was. So he said, why would I leave my job?
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Darius Mirshahzadeh: How Core Values Unlock Massive Business Growth | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
I'm making like 30 grand a month and you're making 10. I said, well, hey, listen, I hate your fiance, number one. And number two, I'm going to make more money than you are. So if I with a month, I make more money than you do in a month. You have to break up with your fiance and move to San Francisco and be my business partner. And he's like, we're on. And that was in July or June or July of 2003.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Darius Mirshahzadeh: How Core Values Unlock Massive Business Growth | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
And by September, I made I had a month that was way bigger than his. And so literally within one week, he broke up with his fiance.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Darius Mirshahzadeh: How Core Values Unlock Massive Business Growth | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
She knew I hated her, so. I was transparent. Within a week, he quit his job, broke up with his fiance, moved to San Francisco and became my business partner. It was amazing because my brother and I are kind of yin and yang. I mean, we're both are good at sales, but he's unbelievable at sales. And I'm good enough. I like to operate and build and be a visionary.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Darius Mirshahzadeh: How Core Values Unlock Massive Business Growth | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
But when he came, I mean, our business that first year, he came in November. It's when he got there. That year, I think the business grossed $300,000. The next year, we grossed almost 2 million. The year after that, 5. The year after that, almost 10. And so this business grew 2,500% in three years. It was the 40th fastest growing company in the Inc. 500 in 2007. So it was an amazing run.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Darius Mirshahzadeh: How Core Values Unlock Massive Business Growth | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
And I learned a couple of things. I learned like find a partner that's going to complement your skills and really go lean into scaling a business. And for us, it was the business has its own horror story because it was a subprime mortgage lender and it blew up in 07. So I joked that when I went to the Inc. 500 conference, it was in Chicago that year, I'm wearing a black tie.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Darius Mirshahzadeh: How Core Values Unlock Massive Business Growth | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
And I joked that we were the saddest people in that conference because I literally was probably the 40th fastest shrinking company in the United States when I was at the 500 conference. Yeah, it sucked. The business ended up imploding because of subprime meltdown. We went from 150 employees. I grew that thing for myself to 150 employees in three years.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Darius Mirshahzadeh: How Core Values Unlock Massive Business Growth | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
And then within 90 days, I was back to 10 employees.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Darius Mirshahzadeh: How Core Values Unlock Massive Business Growth | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
Yeah, honestly, I spent five years and I called it entrepreneurial purgatory. So 07 was early, like the economy didn't falter till 08. But my business, the mortgage business got crushed. The number of people in the mortgage business that worked in the mortgage business in 06 was 400,000. It shrunk to 100,000 by 2011.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Darius Mirshahzadeh: How Core Values Unlock Massive Business Growth | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
So three quarters of the industry went away. I always said it would be kind of like, most people don't know this, but I said it would be like if I said, hey, Uber, Twitter, Meta, Google, they all go out of business. That's what happened to that industry all at once. So it was brutal. I pivoted. I pivoted for almost five years.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Darius Mirshahzadeh: How Core Values Unlock Massive Business Growth | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
I literally showed up to work for five years straight, 07, 08, 09, 010, 011, and literally did not get a paycheck. I just cut checks and went to work. Now, I'd made a lot of money in the previous year. So we used that to survive. But most of it, we spent a lot of it and just trying to rebuild. And it just took a long time. And I was young. Mind you, I started the business in 03 when I was 25.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Darius Mirshahzadeh: How Core Values Unlock Massive Business Growth | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
So by 07, I was 27, 28. So this all happened before I was 30 years old. And then I spent my late 20s, early 30s rebuilding, figuring out what was next. And I have a friend... Ryan Levesque, who owns a company called The Ass Method, he called me Tenacious D. He said, you just don't have any quitting you.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Darius Mirshahzadeh: How Core Values Unlock Massive Business Growth | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
And I was like, man, I wish I did because that it was probably the most painful five years I've ever lived in business. And I wouldn't do it over again. If I had to do it, I wouldn't.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Darius Mirshahzadeh: How Core Values Unlock Massive Business Growth | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
So Naval Ramakant says, you need to pick the right space to be in. And that space was a dead space and it was broken and I just couldn't win in it. But I just didn't have any quit. So I just kept fighting for it. I was standing on a broken foundation.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Darius Mirshahzadeh: How Core Values Unlock Massive Business Growth | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
So knowing what I know now, it was, there was a lot of time and anguish spent and there was opportunities all around me that I was, I was living in San Francisco. So what was happening in 09, 10, and 11 in San Francisco? Airbnb, Uber. You go down the list of all these amazing companies that were born then, and I'm over here getting my teeth kicked in in this space that's just demolished.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Darius Mirshahzadeh: How Core Values Unlock Massive Business Growth | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
And so was it the right thing to do? I don't know. Hindsight's always 20-20. But yeah, the pain sucked. Like it just wasn't worth it. I had some amazing things happen to me during that time. I had my first child and I got married and I did live in a great city. But professionally, I struggled so badly for so long that it just it wasn't fun. And I think that there's an element of grit to win.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Darius Mirshahzadeh: How Core Values Unlock Massive Business Growth | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
Like in order to win, it doesn't always come easy. And you have to have some thick skin and you have to be willing to overcome obstacles. But to a point. I was very depressed during that timeframe and I just couldn't get out of my own way. And I learned a lot about how do you, how do you re-engage to activate yourself if you get stuck? So I learned a lot then about that.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Darius Mirshahzadeh: How Core Values Unlock Massive Business Growth | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
And the big thing is you have to win a little bit. You can't just lose constantly. And for us, because the foundation of that industry was broken, it was a ton of false starts. It was like five false starts. I probably started seven different companies then. And I just couldn't get any traction. But eventually, you know, Tenacious de-worked. We had a really big win in 2011.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Darius Mirshahzadeh: How Core Values Unlock Massive Business Growth | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
And then our biggest win was after that in 2013, which is the business I just exited a year and a half ago.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Darius Mirshahzadeh: How Core Values Unlock Massive Business Growth | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
Hey, Hella.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Darius Mirshahzadeh: How Core Values Unlock Massive Business Growth | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
Yeah. So because I didn't have enough capital and mortgage, you need to have capital to build your platforms because it's not like VC. VC, you use capital to burn your runway to then get to your next round of capital. Mortgage, you need to capitalize the platform to go lend against it. And so I didn't have enough to really do it competitively. So what I ended up doing was doing partnerships.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Darius Mirshahzadeh: How Core Values Unlock Massive Business Growth | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
So I did a partnership with this company called Pacific Union Financial in 2011. And we grew it from essentially nothing to about $75 million in revenue overnight. We had not a perfect exit from it. We had a disagreement with some of our partner there.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Darius Mirshahzadeh: How Core Values Unlock Massive Business Growth | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
And we ended up basically getting bought out, had a very short non-compete, took all that capital and went out to go buy a platform, raised $40 million. And we couldn't find the platform we wanted. One of the platforms we were talking to buy was this company called The Money Source, which was this really small little company in Long Island, New York.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Darius Mirshahzadeh: How Core Values Unlock Massive Business Growth | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
30 employees, a couple million dollars net worth. There's a small little regional lender. And he said no to selling to us, this guy named Stavros, who ended up being my business partner. But he said, well, what if you want to do a partnership? I said, oh, hell no. I just did a partnership and I'm not doing another one. But after a while, we couldn't find what we wanted.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Darius Mirshahzadeh: How Core Values Unlock Massive Business Growth | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
We go back to him and I said, Hey, listen, the 40 million bucks we raise it. I didn't call capital on it. I just went and did a partnership, but I made it this like bulletproof partnership agreement so that what had happened in the previous deal wouldn't happen in this deal. And it was off to the races. This business grew from, yeah, it was like a J curve.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Darius Mirshahzadeh: How Core Values Unlock Massive Business Growth | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
Like we went 30 to a thousand employees in three years. And it's a complicated story, but essentially, we crushed it. I mean, the business now is one of the largest lenders in the United States. It manages $100 billion of mortgages. It's a game changer in the mortgage industry. And we built that from the ground up. I mean, there was something there when we got there.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Darius Mirshahzadeh: How Core Values Unlock Massive Business Growth | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
They had their licensing and they were a small company. But it was a company that had grown from nothing to call it 30 employees in 17 years. And then in three years, it went from 30 employees to 1,000. So that kind of shows you the difference of what happened when we all got together.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Darius Mirshahzadeh: How Core Values Unlock Massive Business Growth | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
I don't know. It's hard to say. I mean, obviously, like you fail till you win, right? And you learn in the process and winning is a failure mitigation game, right? It's how do I reduce the failure to get to the win or reduce the speed or speed from fail to win, right? Yeah, we learned a lot.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Darius Mirshahzadeh: How Core Values Unlock Massive Business Growth | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
What I learned at the win before that, I took that blueprint from there and I brought it over to this next place. And there was a lot of pain to figure that out there. So had I just gone straight there, I wouldn't have known what I knew. But yeah, I mean, look, you either grow or die, right? It's like there's no real middle. You either give up or you keep fighting.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Darius Mirshahzadeh: How Core Values Unlock Massive Business Growth | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
And for us, you know, I have no end of fighting me. For me, it's like, if I'm not getting what I want, I will obsess about it till I either figure it out or I figure out I don't want it, right? I'm like, ah, that's what it's going to take for that to win. I'm not doing that. Thank you. Thank you.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Darius Mirshahzadeh: How Core Values Unlock Massive Business Growth | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
You know, like half of me wanted to do that. And the other half of me wanted to like become an actor and a comedian on Saturday Night Live. Like if you had asked me when I was 18, I was like, actually, I wanted to be Howard Stern. So like, which is not ironic that now I love podcasting. But yeah, no, I was like business and like enjoying experiences with people were like my two things. So yeah.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Darius Mirshahzadeh: How Core Values Unlock Massive Business Growth | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
Thank you.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Darius Mirshahzadeh: How Core Values Unlock Massive Business Growth | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Darius Mirshahzadeh: How Core Values Unlock Massive Business Growth | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
Yeah, I know. I always felt like an affinity towards I love making money and I love selling. I was always like the kid that would win the candy selling competitions. I mean, crush those competitions. So for me, like starting a business or was not like this far out idea that was kind of a natural next step for sure.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Darius Mirshahzadeh: How Core Values Unlock Massive Business Growth | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
Thank you.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Darius Mirshahzadeh: How Core Values Unlock Massive Business Growth | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Darius Mirshahzadeh: How Core Values Unlock Massive Business Growth | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
Thank you.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Darius Mirshahzadeh: How Core Values Unlock Massive Business Growth | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
Thank you. Thank you.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Darius Mirshahzadeh: How Core Values Unlock Massive Business Growth | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
So my dad was old school, born in 1939 in Esfahan, Iran. His father was a business person, was a really successful business person. He was kind of like ADD business guy. I mean, some of it was a victim of circumstances. There was a revolution in Iran. He moved here. He had to support his family. Didn't have a great speaking of the language, although he did get his MBA in the United States.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Darius Mirshahzadeh: How Core Values Unlock Massive Business Growth | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
So core values of the opportunity, again, to become the personality or the, sorry, the language of accountability for the organization. It's not like it's like this thing, like until it becomes a thing, it's not a thing, right? So what ends up happening is a company like Yap Media, you have 60 people and they all have their own individual values.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Darius Mirshahzadeh: How Core Values Unlock Massive Business Growth | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
And if you don't define what Yap Media stands for and then hold people accountable to it and create a system where that can scale, what ends up happening is you end up getting kind of this like hodgepodge of values. And their values will show up in their actions consistently.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Darius Mirshahzadeh: How Core Values Unlock Massive Business Growth | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
And so once we pay homage to the fact that, hey, look, if the company doesn't have them, you're going to get what's there just by default because individuals have their own values. My belief is, is like they still have them even if you define what you are and screen for them and make them come to life. But what they do instead is they attach their values to your values.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Darius Mirshahzadeh: How Core Values Unlock Massive Business Growth | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
So in core value equation, we say core values for you need to discover what's authentic to you, discovering your values, you need to design them to be viral and sticky, then you need to roll them out. So you need to teach people what they are and indoctrinate them into them. And then you need to implement them ongoing. And then you need to measure for efficacy and do that consistently.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Darius Mirshahzadeh: How Core Values Unlock Massive Business Growth | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
And so the process, the book really teaches how do you do that so that when I get that individual that shows up that has their individual values, that they figure out how do they leverage their individual values. And we do that as part of the rollout. How do you leverage your individual values to make the company values become more alive and well? And the answer is this.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Darius Mirshahzadeh: How Core Values Unlock Massive Business Growth | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
It has to happen organically. But you have to have a process to create that organic interaction, which is essentially what I figured out is you got to make it easy. You got to make it organic. It's got it takes time. It's like, again, like you don't learn a language overnight. So it takes time, but you have to create those opportunities. And it has to be easy.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Darius Mirshahzadeh: How Core Values Unlock Massive Business Growth | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
And so really, the book core value equation walks you through how do you do that step by step.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Darius Mirshahzadeh: How Core Values Unlock Massive Business Growth | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
He came here late in life. So for him, that's how he had to support his family. And again, he grew up around entrepreneurs. So for him to start gas stations and do real estate and stuff like that was not unusual. My mom was a social worker, which is the other end of the spectrum, who worked for the county.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Darius Mirshahzadeh: How Core Values Unlock Massive Business Growth | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
I ended up in 2019, I ended up getting into this program called Stagen, which is conscious leadership program. They have a program called Integral Leadership. And like in my class was the CEO of Whole Foods, Jason, and I were in the same class and the CEO, Doug, who was a former CEO of Crate and Barrel. And so there's some, you know, big shots and there's only 20 of us in the class.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Darius Mirshahzadeh: How Core Values Unlock Massive Business Growth | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
Smart lady, social worker, father that's getting up and building his own businesses every day. When you see that, you're like, oh, that's an option. Like going to college. I mean, both my parents had their master's degree. So going to college was not that was definitely an expectation as well. But I remember my dad would always say, like, I'm building these for you guys.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Darius Mirshahzadeh: How Core Values Unlock Massive Business Growth | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
It's a one year long program and we're in the program. And this happened, by the way, this is February of 19, a month after I had said, I'm going to quit my job and we're doing our personal values. And I realized I'm like the core value King, right? I'm starting my, I'm literally that same month writing my book on core values. And I realized I had not done my personal values, which is super weird.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Darius Mirshahzadeh: How Core Values Unlock Massive Business Growth | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
I wrote them very quickly because it was easy for me because I had experience with it. But yeah, my values, I have six values. I always tell people you get out of five. I couldn't just land on five. I gave myself six. And so number one is happiness called heart. So I like to like think of sticky viral language to describe a value.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Darius Mirshahzadeh: How Core Values Unlock Massive Business Growth | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
And there's a description of what that looks like for me and for my family. Love is my second one, and that is besos, which is kisses in Spanish. Eye of the Tiger is passion. That's my third one. My fourth one is curiosity. I call it cinco, which stands for what, where, who, when, and why. Creativity is number five, and I call that boom. And my sixth one is balance, and I call that movie night.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Darius Mirshahzadeh: How Core Values Unlock Massive Business Growth | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
Yeah, it's just, I always measure myself against them. Again, like, you know, when you're going against your values, because that's when friction starts to get created, whether in your organization or in your life. And for me, I'm always, I always have my eye out. Like, what am I not living right now that I know I want to live? And I always tell people core values can be slightly aspirational.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Darius Mirshahzadeh: How Core Values Unlock Massive Business Growth | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
For me, my values that are aspirational or as balanced, like that's hard. And happiness, like I fight to be happy. I fight for balance. The other ones are a little bit easier. I'm naturally curious. I'm a pretty passionate person. Curiosity, again, natural. Creativity, natural. But happiness and balance, I fight for those a lot.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Darius Mirshahzadeh: How Core Values Unlock Massive Business Growth | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
Again, if you believe that core values the language of accountability, then the language matters. Words matter. Like literally like empires have grown and fallen because of words. I'm reading a book with my son and we're reading actually about the, it's about the history of the world. And we're on the chapter about Islam right now.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Darius Mirshahzadeh: How Core Values Unlock Massive Business Growth | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
And you realize that Muhammad basically built an entire empire, the Islamic empire, off of just words. Like he went out and talked about Allah, right? And that created this entire empire that got all the different tribes to come together. So words are so powerful. That's just one example. There's been empires built on words.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Darius Mirshahzadeh: How Core Values Unlock Massive Business Growth | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
Like you look at the United States of America, built on the words of our founding fathers, right? So why would you not pick viral sticky language that stands for what you stand for? Or you could be like everyone else and pick boring words like integrity. It's like, well, yeah, everyone has integrity in their core values or driven or, you know, excellence.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Darius Mirshahzadeh: How Core Values Unlock Massive Business Growth | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
It's like, well, what's the difference between Yap's excellence and the guy down the street? And I'm like, how about you say it a different way? It makes it where it sticks in people's minds. There's a reason people do it in branding. And there's a reason that you should do it in core values, which is like, if it's going to be language of accountability, let's give them some language to work with.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Darius Mirshahzadeh: How Core Values Unlock Massive Business Growth | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
And now I had to go to work in the gas station at a young age, too. He was like, hey, you're 10. Great. You're going to work. So my summer vacations and I grew up in upper middle class, Southern California. So all my friends were like going to summer camp and, you know, having fun and going to like the water parks and the magic mountain and six flags and stuff like that.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Darius Mirshahzadeh: How Core Values Unlock Massive Business Growth | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
And I love viral sticky language.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Darius Mirshahzadeh: How Core Values Unlock Massive Business Growth | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
Well, again, going back to your question before is like people have core values, companies don't unless you create them in your company. So what ends up happening is if you don't have a core value driven organization, all that is, is me defining what I stand for and holding the organization accountable to it consistently and making it drip throughout the organization. So what does that mean?
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Darius Mirshahzadeh: How Core Values Unlock Massive Business Growth | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
Does that mean that you're always living those values? No, it means you're always trying to live those values. And when you fall off, you fix. So you get back to center, the core, right? A non-core value-driven organization is someone that just shows up and does what I call BAU, business as usual. You get what you get.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Darius Mirshahzadeh: How Core Values Unlock Massive Business Growth | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
Oh, hey, Johnny over there has shitty work ethic, but Sally over here has great work ethic. There's a value misalignment, by the way. You think that doesn't create friction? Your team will manage themselves to the lowest common denominator. So if you let losers hang out in your company, no offense, losers, but everyone else can be like, well, I guess Hala lets losers hang out here.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Darius Mirshahzadeh: How Core Values Unlock Massive Business Growth | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
So I don't have to try as hard. Like they put up with bullshit. And so my belief is, is like, if you have a, let's say your values around work ethic or excellence, but you let mediocrity hang out. Well, do you think you're going to really have excellence happen? The answer is absolutely not. You're going to have mediocrity.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Darius Mirshahzadeh: How Core Values Unlock Massive Business Growth | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
You have pockets of excellence that happen accidentally, or you could do it my way and be super intentional and hold everyone accountable and the organizational accountable to this idea of excellence. And when someone shows up and they can't measure up to that, they get to leave. And what happens then is you have accountability around those values.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Darius Mirshahzadeh: How Core Values Unlock Massive Business Growth | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
And the people that love those values, they'll be like, hells yeah, I'm in the right place. And the people that don't are going to be like, hells no, I want to get out of here because they're going to find out that I don't like this. And it's not to say they're bad people. It's just not the right environment for them. So that's how I characterize it, at least.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Darius Mirshahzadeh: How Core Values Unlock Massive Business Growth | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
your organization has a way you guys speak. And there's tough, gritty organizations. And there's really buttoned up, pretty organizations. And then there's middle ground, hippie organizations. Your values are the personality of the organization. So there's different personalities, just like there's different personalities with people. So a bad value is one that's not authentic.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Darius Mirshahzadeh: How Core Values Unlock Massive Business Growth | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
I.e., you say, I value showing up for the team, and yet you don't, and you're the CEO. That's a problem. And in my book, I say that the minute the CEO doesn't live the values, you just put a bullet in the head of the values. So bad values are ones that aren't true. They're ones that are not authentic. Because again, there's five steps to creating a core value-driven organization.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Darius Mirshahzadeh: How Core Values Unlock Massive Business Growth | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
Discover, design, roll out, implement, measure for efficacy. If you discover and you are trying to please imaginary people, clients, team members, and that probably aren't going to be there in the future anyway, because you're out of alignment with your values, then you may pick values that are not authentic to who you are.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Darius Mirshahzadeh: How Core Values Unlock Massive Business Growth | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
So I see people do that all the time where they'll pick really like warm and fuzzy values, but they're not a warm and fuzzy organization. That's a bad value. Just say that you don't put up with bullshit. The people like Travis Kalanick, I just finished watching the show, super pumped. Dude, that guy, one of their core values was called toe stepping. That was core value number seven for Uber.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Darius Mirshahzadeh: How Core Values Unlock Massive Business Growth | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
And I'm like legitimately putting on a Texaco t-shirt, getting up and going to work at a gas station in the middle of nowhere. Cause my dad's gas stations were kind of outside of LA and in a hundred degree heat cleaning gas station bathrooms when I was 10. So it wasn't a very glamorous entrance in the world of business. It was like, oh, this is what running your own business is.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Darius Mirshahzadeh: How Core Values Unlock Massive Business Growth | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
Toe stepping. Does that connotate like niceness? Hell no. That connotates fucking people up if they don't live your value. Toe stepping, stepping on someone's toes. Have you ever had someone step on your toes, Hala? Yeah. Yeah, it hurts a lot. Toe stepping is their number seven value. Well, he ended up creating a toxic culture because of it. but he created something amazing too.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Darius Mirshahzadeh: How Core Values Unlock Massive Business Growth | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
It scaled till it didn't there. So that's a bad value from a design standpoint. And that's actually a perfect example that core values don't need to be nice. Hey man, if you're a toe-stepping organization, just say what you are. Here's what happens if you don't. Sally, the flower-loving hippie shows up and she sees Travis toe-stepping on Johnny and she's like, whoa, where do I work?
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Darius Mirshahzadeh: How Core Values Unlock Massive Business Growth | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
And that's a misalignment. Whereas Bobby, who's a badass, likes to toe-step. He's like, oh, cool, we toe-step here. No friction. And what I say is, you know, and I do a lot of coaching now and advising with companies, is I say for scale specifically, I say, look, scale is a friction removal process. You want to scale fast, remove friction from your business.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Darius Mirshahzadeh: How Core Values Unlock Massive Business Growth | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
The way you remove friction is by eliminating problems before they become problems. And what we're talking about right now, a value misalignment is one of the worst problems you can have in your business. That's where you get infighting and politics and drama and all that bullshit. And I don't want any of that stuff. That's just slowing you down from winning.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Darius Mirshahzadeh: How Core Values Unlock Massive Business Growth | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
And so scales of friction removal process, and it starts with values being aligned properly.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Darius Mirshahzadeh: How Core Values Unlock Massive Business Growth | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
Well, I go step by step through my book. So you need to do the discovery process, which is there's so many different values you can stand for. So you need to really pick what are the top, you know, three to six, I say. Four is the good, I like four or five. This is a good sweet spot. And there's a book called Built to Last by Jerry Porras and Jim Collins.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Darius Mirshahzadeh: How Core Values Unlock Massive Business Growth | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
And in that book, they went and studied visionary companies and they found out one thing. Visionary companies stand for no more than seven and no less than three values. And this is studying some of the most iconic companies of the last century. So for me, let's pick out of that 100. In my book, we give a list of 105 words that you can, in the book, if you pick up the book, it's in there.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Darius Mirshahzadeh: How Core Values Unlock Massive Business Growth | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
Yeah, so it's in there. There's a guide for this. So we have a guide that we give when you buy the book. And so you just eliminate those 105 words and you pick your top 15 and you rank them in order because values have a hierarchy. So you want to put them in order that now you've discovered what are your top five values? What matters most to you?
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Darius Mirshahzadeh: How Core Values Unlock Massive Business Growth | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
From there, you have to go through a design process, which is making them viral, sticky, and making them... I have some tests I put them through. Do they stand the test of time? Is there any negativity in there? Do you have product? Remove product? So I have a laundry list of checks and balances. But they have to be designed to be able to scale as you scale.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Darius Mirshahzadeh: How Core Values Unlock Massive Business Growth | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
In order to do that, they need to be designed so that they can become viral and sticky. So you go through that process and then you got to bring them to the team and teach the team so that they learn what they are and create systems for that in the business. And in the book, I talk through step by step. How do you do all those things?
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Darius Mirshahzadeh: How Core Values Unlock Massive Business Growth | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
But it did teach us work ethic. And I think that's such a big part of being an entrepreneur is not being afraid to go work your ass off. And we weren't and we didn't.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Darius Mirshahzadeh: How Core Values Unlock Massive Business Growth | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
Yeah, there's a word in Japanese called shibui. Have you heard of this word before?
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Darius Mirshahzadeh: How Core Values Unlock Massive Business Growth | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
Okay, so shibui, it means that there is complexity and simplicity. There's complexity and simplicity. So even with the core value equation, it's around creating something that's simple. I'm a chronic person that makes things complex. So I have to simplify it or else I'll never do anything. And the core value equation is all around how do you simplify the process to make it work?
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Darius Mirshahzadeh: How Core Values Unlock Massive Business Growth | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
When I left my business and COVID hit, I was sitting on the sidelines and did my book launch. Then when I came out of that, I got asked to advise some entrepreneurs on scale because I was always the scale guy. How do you grow your company fast? Having grown a company that quick, the first leg of that growth was 30 to 300 employees in 18 months. Which is crazy. It's a 10x, right?
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Darius Mirshahzadeh: How Core Values Unlock Massive Business Growth | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
And by the way, when I did that, we had off the chart record engagement scores and like zero growing pains. And then we went from 300 to 1000. And so this is all around scale methodology. So the other thing I learned and got to play with during this time was these different scale systems.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Darius Mirshahzadeh: How Core Values Unlock Massive Business Growth | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
And I learned something really simple is that you need to have scale systems to complement your cultural systems. And I always tell people scales about three things. You need to have execution systems, strategic systems, and cultural systems. And they need to talk to each other, and they need to be simple. And so ScaleMap was really born out of me starting to help other CEOs grow their companies.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Darius Mirshahzadeh: How Core Values Unlock Massive Business Growth | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
And right now, we have ScaleMap method. We coach right now, gosh, almost 30 different companies. And we teach them the process. It really comes down to three things. And ScaleMap itself is the execution side of this. What is the execution asset that I built in the business? And there's three parts, mission, which is where are you trying to go?
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Darius Mirshahzadeh: How Core Values Unlock Massive Business Growth | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
And we want to look at that in three different increments, 10 year, three year, one year. And when I would say, what's going to happen in the next 12 months, month by month? What's going to happen in the next three years? And then I just want you to lean into the future and have some faith. And where do you think you take the thing in 10 years?
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Darius Mirshahzadeh: How Core Values Unlock Massive Business Growth | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
For some people, they say, well, I want to sell before then. I go, fine, five years. Once I define where I'm trying to go, and I want to look at that in a few areas, revenue, income, staff size, ethics. Am I building a business that's sustainable? Revenue and income will tell me that. How many people do I need to get them there? And I want to look at that again, 10, three in one year.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Darius Mirshahzadeh: How Core Values Unlock Massive Business Growth | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
And then ethics. Am I creating any future liabilities for myself? Subprime mortgage lending, I created future liabilities for myself, my first business. So I learned you have to be cognizant of that. Then what we do is we create accountability systems around that. And that comes in a meeting structure. So in mission, we teach how do you build quarterly plans? And so this is what I teach CEOs.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Darius Mirshahzadeh: How Core Values Unlock Massive Business Growth | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
How do you have simple systems to do this consistently? A is accountability. If I build a quarterly plan and I have my mission and where I'm trying to take the business to, and again, what do I do with that? My team knows what they need to work on. They understand the priorities. I understand it. It's mapped out. I have a plan to work with.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Darius Mirshahzadeh: How Core Values Unlock Massive Business Growth | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
Well, a plan is as good as the paper it's written on if you don't have accountability around that plan. And so A stands for accountability. And we do that in two different ways. Number one is what we call rule of one org chart, which is who owns what, defining who owns what in the business. I don't want overlapping responsibilities. I want people to understand who owns what in the business.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Darius Mirshahzadeh: How Core Values Unlock Massive Business Growth | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
I want to spell that out and document it. And I want that to be a strategic tool for growth. I.e., if I map out your entire organization, what are the top two hires you want to make in the next 12 months? Strategic hires. What are the top two hires you want to make in the next three years? Strategic hires.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Darius Mirshahzadeh: How Core Values Unlock Massive Business Growth | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
The people you bring into your organization in the next year and three years, leadership-wise, are going to define where you go in that time period. But I want to map that up so there's clarity. The next thing I want to do is I want to build a meeting cadence.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Darius Mirshahzadeh: How Core Values Unlock Massive Business Growth | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
And what I tell people is accountability comes through cadence, cadence comes through rhythm, and it's the heartbeat of execution in your company. And we do that through a meeting structure we call 1590 meeting rule and 30 every 30, which is your team meetings and your one-on-ones. All right, you got mission, you got accountability.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Darius Mirshahzadeh: How Core Values Unlock Massive Business Growth | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
Well, what's going to happen is, Halaz, you're going to start to get performance metrics. Data is going to come out of the business. Well, what do you do with that data? And so P stands for performance. And that's looking at the data that comes out of the business. And we do that in three areas.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Darius Mirshahzadeh: How Core Values Unlock Massive Business Growth | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
One's called a five-question pulse survey, which is me understanding my customer experience and my team experience. The second is what we call three-by-three KPIs, which is how do you build KPIs that, again, going back to what I said 15 minutes ago, scales a friction removal process. I want data to tell me what's breaking before it's going to break. So we have a whole system around that.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Darius Mirshahzadeh: How Core Values Unlock Massive Business Growth | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
And then last but not least, it's called C3P&L, which is how do you look at financials so they tell the story of growth.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Darius Mirshahzadeh: How Core Values Unlock Massive Business Growth | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
And so it's a really simplistic, going back to this idea of Shibui, is there complexity and simplicity? I want to really focus on the 20% that's going to move the needle. And I want to get everyone aligned around that and then sit that on top of a cultural asset known as my values. And when you do that, you grow like crazy.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Darius Mirshahzadeh: How Core Values Unlock Massive Business Growth | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
My dad was like, you know, there was a huge cultural difference between me and I have a twin brother. So it's me and my twin brother and my dad. And I have a younger sister as well. But in Persian culture, like it's very patriarchal. And although my mom was American, like my dad was straight up Persian. So he was like, the boys come with me. I toughen them up. The mom raises the daughter.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Darius Mirshahzadeh: How Core Values Unlock Massive Business Growth | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
First of all, most people think meetings suck and they usually do. And so if you have bad meetings, then that means you have bad execution. So if you have ineffective meetings in your business, and we use a tool that we teach in scale map called the meeting autopsy, which is you just like kind of do an autopsy of what your meetings look like and how good are they.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Darius Mirshahzadeh: How Core Values Unlock Massive Business Growth | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
And usually people have one or two issues. They have too many meetings or not enough meetings. And so for me, I'm like, let's just keep it simple. Like the daily huddle is the 15 minute meeting and it needs to be done a certain way to maximize daily accountability. So the 1590 meeting rules around the huddle and then the 90 minute meeting is your weekly execution of your quarterly plan.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Darius Mirshahzadeh: How Core Values Unlock Massive Business Growth | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
Like I want to build a plan for the quarter and then I want to hold people accountable to it week in and week out. And what I do is I look at the business in 13 week sprints. You have four 13-week sprints that come out to 52 weeks a year. I want every week, every five business days, your team has to show up and say that they are either on track or off track on their goals.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Darius Mirshahzadeh: How Core Values Unlock Massive Business Growth | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
And if they're off track, we're going to have a discussion about it. And in my businesses, there is no being off track. Like someone has to have died for you to be off track. So yeah, so scale is a friction removal process. And what I teach CEOs and my entrepreneurs that I work with, I say, hey, look, we want to get really clear on creating a culture of accountability.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Darius Mirshahzadeh: How Core Values Unlock Massive Business Growth | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
But you got to make it simple or else your team is going to vote with their feet. They'll be like, oh, Hala has us doing all these things. This sucks. I hate it here. And my perspective is like, no, let's make it really simple. And then they'll get ROI out of it. You will create an organization where nobody can hide.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Darius Mirshahzadeh: How Core Values Unlock Massive Business Growth | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
And when nobody can hide, like there will be people that like to hide who will leave. And I say, great, sayonara. And the people that don't, but then there's the other side, which people that like accountability and they'll be like, hells yeah, like Hala's got a great business.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Darius Mirshahzadeh: How Core Values Unlock Massive Business Growth | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
I love our meetings because we get so much stuff done and everyone's always hitting their goals and the business is growing and we're getting more organized, not less organized. So that happens because you have good meeting cadence around your quarterly plans and around your daily accountability. The 30 every 30, it's the 30 minutes you need to spend with each team member every 30 days.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Darius Mirshahzadeh: How Core Values Unlock Massive Business Growth | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
And I built this framework around how do you do one-on-ones. And so I teach that in our bootcamp. And then also we have a mastermind. I teach that to that. And I also teach them to my one-on-one clients. But it's really focusing on the one thing that matters most to your team. And you know what that is, Hala?
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Darius Mirshahzadeh: How Core Values Unlock Massive Business Growth | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
Themselves. Yeah.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Darius Mirshahzadeh: How Core Values Unlock Massive Business Growth | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
You got to make it about them. And you got to pour into them. And if you do it the right way, you can figure out what's slowing them down. And then once you pour into them through a really nice framework, you can then hold them accountable to what you want them to be held accountable to.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Darius Mirshahzadeh: How Core Values Unlock Massive Business Growth | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
But what a lot of managers do is the only time they meet with their team is when it's bad news or to give them a shit about not hitting their numbers. And I'm like, yeah, you're just the dad that's overcritical. Nobody wants to hear that, right? So my question is, what are you doing to make them successful? And are you creating an opportunity, a nice consistency around one-on-ones?
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Darius Mirshahzadeh: How Core Values Unlock Massive Business Growth | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
And one-on-ones is the biggest area. Some of my clients that I have 500,000 employees, and they have 33% of their managers doing one-on-ones. And I'm like, you're telling me that two out of every three people don't do one-on-ones in your business? You can't tell me that's not affecting your ability to win. I know it is. So for us, we created a nice system around that.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Darius Mirshahzadeh: How Core Values Unlock Massive Business Growth | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
And then what's cool is if you do it one way, then you can hold all your managers accountable to that same way. So you have what's called consistency. And with consistency, you remove friction from the business. And scale is a friction removal process. So that's what you're doing.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Darius Mirshahzadeh: How Core Values Unlock Massive Business Growth | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
That's just how it is. And that's how it kind of was in our culture. family. And so I was either working at the gas station, or I was working around the house. And so it wasn't like this, like me and my dad throwing baseball in the backyard. I don't think I threw one ball with my dad. It was always business. And but yeah, he did not take care of himself.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Darius Mirshahzadeh: How Core Values Unlock Massive Business Growth | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
So you could go to do dariusscale.com. So that's where you can learn more about the bootcamp and about the coaching. That's kind of my give back right now. I love pouring into CEOs and entrepreneurs. So dariusscale.com is a good place to do that. You can go to The Real Darius for all things Darius. And that kind of has the book and podcast and stuff like that.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Darius Mirshahzadeh: How Core Values Unlock Massive Business Growth | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
But a lot of this also is on podcast. So that's the greatness machine. And on that one, we're interviewing a lot of these experts that have built these amazing businesses. And there's a lot of learning there too. So those are the three places, but all things, the real Darius, that's all things Darius.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Darius Mirshahzadeh: How Core Values Unlock Massive Business Growth | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
Oh, yeah. That's like drinking from a fire hose for 3 days. So it's really 3 days. You come in. We teach you. We build your rise targets. So we build your 10, 3, and 1-year plan. We teach you how to build quarterly plans so you can start to do quarterlies the right way in your business. And I mean, so many entrepreneurs do those wrong. And they build these crappy plans that don't do anything.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Darius Mirshahzadeh: How Core Values Unlock Massive Business Growth | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
So for us, it's how do you build like these rock solid accountability plans. And then we really take you through teaching how do we do the meetings, showing you how to roll it out, teaching you how to build KPIs, showing you how to roll that out.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Darius Mirshahzadeh: How Core Values Unlock Massive Business Growth | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
So it's a three day boot camp where people leave and they're like, all right, it's a lot, but I have a lot to work with now that I can and we'd show you how do you bring it back into your business.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Darius Mirshahzadeh: How Core Values Unlock Massive Business Growth | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
Yeah, it's a group. We do small group. I run it. So it's you get to spend three days with myself, which is always fun. And we do a lot of open coaching. So I mean, I'll do stuff where I just like you can bring me any problem. And mastermind, we do that too. But yeah, like it's you and I let people bring their number two. So it's you and your number two. It's small group.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Darius Mirshahzadeh: How Core Values Unlock Massive Business Growth | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
It's a lot of one-on-one time. I have coaches that will meet with you before and after and during. And we do a lot of breakouts. It's a workshop. So it's interactive. There's like you're working. Like there's a lot of interactivity.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Darius Mirshahzadeh: How Core Values Unlock Massive Business Growth | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
And the idea is that you're building, you're really building these things for your business that you need to get yourself organized and learning the framework so that you can then come go back and apply it to your business. Because so many people are just guessing. And the problem I find with a lot of these other scale systems is they're, you know, by the way, like I didn't make all this stuff up.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Darius Mirshahzadeh: How Core Values Unlock Massive Business Growth | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
I did the other scale systems. They're hard. I quit them. You know, I'm a creator. I'm like, this is a better way of doing it. I'm going to do it this way. And I kept like retweaking other systems and also creating my own stuff. So this is all born on the back of other systems that are, God bless them. They're great systems, but this is a better technology from my perspective.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Darius Mirshahzadeh: How Core Values Unlock Massive Business Growth | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
And when I was 18, he got diagnosed with multiple sclerosis. And by the time I was 2021, his MS had gotten really bad, it turned into dementia. And He loves cigarettes. My dad was like an avid smoker. He ended up getting diagnosed with lung cancer in my senior year of college.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Darius Mirshahzadeh: How Core Values Unlock Massive Business Growth | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
So here's something I tell everybody, and I call it my fulfillment formula, which is, and if you do these three things, I think that this is at least what I've learned over my life. I'm 44, so I'm young, but I'm also old, right? Like I'm on the fence.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Darius Mirshahzadeh: How Core Values Unlock Massive Business Growth | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
Yeah, I'm medium. Well, yeah, I'm experienced, right? So are you living in your values? So get clear on what your values are because the minute you ever feel icky or like friction in your life, it's you're rubbing up against your values. So get clear on what your values are and start to look at them on a regular basis. And so I always say, are you living in your values?
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Darius Mirshahzadeh: How Core Values Unlock Massive Business Growth | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
Are you working in your strengths? Are you doing work where you are working within your talents? And I like Strength Finder. That's my tool that I use and that I teach. So go pull your Strength Finders. Go look at your strengths and ask yourself the honest question. Am I actually living in these strengths? And then start to measure yourself against it if you want. But am I living in my strengths?
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Darius Mirshahzadeh: How Core Values Unlock Massive Business Growth | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
You're working in my strengths, living in my values. Am I doing it with a high level of awareness? And I have a buddy who is Marco Gargenta. He's the CEO of a company called Plus Plus. He says, fulfillment comes through, again, living in my values, working in my strengths, and doing it with a high level of awareness. And awareness comes through three, four areas. Number one, am I being mindful?
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Darius Mirshahzadeh: How Core Values Unlock Massive Business Growth | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
Do I have a mindfulness practice? Am I exercising? Am I dieting consistently, eating a good diet? Am I sleeping well? So are you getting rest? Are you practicing mindfulness? Are you treating your body like a temple, right? Doing the right things for my body, my working and my talents and living in my values.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Darius Mirshahzadeh: How Core Values Unlock Massive Business Growth | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
And so my answer to your, your yap crowd is if you're doing those things and start to pay attention to those things, the good things just happen.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Darius Mirshahzadeh: How Core Values Unlock Massive Business Growth | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
I think it goes back to what I just said. I really think it's finding that cross section between what you love to do. There's a word in Japanese called ikigai. And so it's really finding that cross section between what you love to do and what people will pay you for and really going all in on that. And so for me, it's like, how can I do more of that?
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Darius Mirshahzadeh: How Core Values Unlock Massive Business Growth | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
Thanks, Hala. I love being here.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Darius Mirshahzadeh: How Core Values Unlock Massive Business Growth | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
And so I saw this person who was a workaholic, who was all about business, who basically by the time I was old enough to maybe have a relationship, because again, in that old school culture, you start to have a relationship with your dad like when you're a man. He was downward trending really quickly then. And it was my 22nd birthday. My dad got diagnosed with stage four lung cancer.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Darius Mirshahzadeh: How Core Values Unlock Massive Business Growth | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
And we didn't even tell him he had it because he had such bad dementia at that point. And he passed away in August of that same year. So yeah, it was hard. And there was mixed emotions. I had a pretty complicated relationship with my dad because of how I was describing our background together. And some people would say, my dad was my best friend. And I was like, yeah, not me and my dad.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Darius Mirshahzadeh: How Core Values Unlock Massive Business Growth | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
I respected him. He was a hard guy and he was hardcore. And so to lose your dad at that young of an age is hard for anybody. But it just gave me an insight into life's short. And I had lost my grandmother when I was 14. She was 62. My dad was 60 when he passed away. My mom was 48 when my dad passed away. She got diagnosed with cancer right after that.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Darius Mirshahzadeh: How Core Values Unlock Massive Business Growth | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
So by the time I was 22, I had lost my grandmother, my dad, and my mom was a survivor of cancer. And so I had set a really different perspective, which was, I don't want to live a life that I just go work my ass off, and then 20 years, 30, 40 years from now, I'm done. And it was, hey, how can I live a much more engaged life? And I didn't really understand that then.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Darius Mirshahzadeh: How Core Values Unlock Massive Business Growth | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
It wasn't until much later that I realized that that's why I kind of got into some of the things that we're going to talk about around
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Darius Mirshahzadeh: How Core Values Unlock Massive Business Growth | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
values and purpose and how do you be live and engage life but for me that was a lesson taught at a young age which is hey life's short and you need to go and like make it happen and really make the most of your time because you're gonna blink and it's gonna be over with
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Darius Mirshahzadeh: How Core Values Unlock Massive Business Growth | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
Yeah, so when I was in college, I had to work a lot. So again, my dad being kind of a hard ass was like, yeah, I'm not paying for your college, you got to pay for your own college. And so I was always working. And I was always, again, ambitious. So I always had internships. And I had a really good friend from student government in high school. Her name is Prita Shah.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Darius Mirshahzadeh: How Core Values Unlock Massive Business Growth | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
And she ended up her sophomore year working for the Clinton administration. And I'm kind of like you, I'm like a networker. So I'm like, hey, I want to work at the White House. I literally like there was a conversation she and I had. And she said, well, all right, let's do it. And so she had a friend that came into town in LA. We were on the Sunset Strip.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Darius Mirshahzadeh: How Core Values Unlock Massive Business Growth | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
And what happens at the White House that I didn't know at the time is a lot of the people that end up working there, they go and intern there. And then they actually take a pause from college and stay at the White House and become staff. And so this gentleman, I don't want to name his name because of what I'm about to say, but he basically did that.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Darius Mirshahzadeh: How Core Values Unlock Massive Business Growth | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
And he comes to LA and we go to this place on the Sunset Strip, which I'm blanking on the name right now, but Dublin's, which was this famous Irish bar on the Sunset Strip. And we're in LA and it's the summer going into my senior year of college. And basically where they're drinking and all these girls come in from where I go to school that were these like really pretty girls.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Darius Mirshahzadeh: How Core Values Unlock Massive Business Growth | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
And I'm like, hey, and I wave them over and I basically hook him up with these girls. And so I said, I'm talking him up. I say, Oh, give Tim, give him your card. And so anyway, he's like, loves me. He's like, this guy's the best. And so then I said, Hey, you got to get me a job at the White House. And so he said, Listen, you get your application, send it directly to me, and I'll get you in. So
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Darius Mirshahzadeh: How Core Values Unlock Massive Business Growth | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
I had good credentials beyond that, but I worked every angle I could get. I send it directly to him. I get the acceptance letter from the White House. And I got accepted to be an intern in the Office of Presidential Scheduling at the White House, summer 2000. So it was quite an honor. And it was interesting to get to be in the... You're in basically the business of running the world, right?
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Darius Mirshahzadeh: How Core Values Unlock Massive Business Growth | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
Now, what I realized really quickly was as an intern, total hierarchy exists in this thing. If your mom is the head of the DNC for the state of Washington, you get to work in the West Wing. I had never met so many people from Arkansas in my whole life because President Clinton's from Arkansas. So there's all these people who are friends of the family working there. I never, I mean, it was insane.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Darius Mirshahzadeh: How Core Values Unlock Massive Business Growth | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
It was like every one out of every two people.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Darius Mirshahzadeh: How Core Values Unlock Massive Business Growth | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
So there's all these people from Arkansas, their parents are connected in politics. And then there's me, who has none of that. And I'm not getting any special treatment. And I got some really crappy job. It's actually hilarious. Basically, what people do is they send letters to the President of the United States to invite him or her to all their events.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Darius Mirshahzadeh: How Core Values Unlock Massive Business Growth | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
So like, we get letters from like, Little Methodist Church in Podunk Nowhere is inviting the president to come to their annual barbecue. Every single one of those requests gets a response. So I was in the Office of Presidential Scheduling. So we had to respond to every single one of those letters. So we read them all. And then you got to write them. And this is also, this is 22 years ago.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Darius Mirshahzadeh: How Core Values Unlock Massive Business Growth | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
So we're in some DOS-based system, like filling out these like fillable forms and then triple proofreading it because you can't have a typo in a letter from the White House. And then it goes up to this machine that signs his name with the pen, essentially, and goes out. And every now and again, you'll get invites from a prince in Africa. And those get escalated.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Darius Mirshahzadeh: How Core Values Unlock Massive Business Growth | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
So I'm in this department doing total admin work. And I was like, there's got to be a better way than this. So my business self's like, all right, how do I get out of this work? And I figured out that the interns have a president of the interns. And so I run for president of the interns.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Darius Mirshahzadeh: How Core Values Unlock Massive Business Growth | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
It's me versus, and by the way, there's two groups of people in this internship program. A ton of kids from Ivy Leagues, Harvard, Yale, Princeton, and a ton of people from Arkansas, and then me. And I go to UC, and they're like, I'm a smart guy. I'd probably go to an Ivy League if I applied myself, but I didn't. I went to UC Santa Barbara, which is like a party school.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Darius Mirshahzadeh: How Core Values Unlock Massive Business Growth | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
And I'm there, and it's me versus this nerd. And by the way, I'm graduating college. So a lot of the people are younger than me. So I'm 22. Most of the people there are probably 20. So I'm 22. I'm definitely way cooler than the kid I'm running against, who's this kid from Harvard. And I just crush him and win. And I become president of the interns.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Darius Mirshahzadeh: How Core Values Unlock Massive Business Growth | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
And this was something I realized when I was in high school, because when I became president of my class and vice president of my school, I got to get out of everything because I was the liaison for the teachers. And I'm like, oh, this is the way to do it. You go become it's like student leadership, but for the interns.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Darius Mirshahzadeh: How Core Values Unlock Massive Business Growth | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
And I ended up spending the whole summer putting on throwing parties for interns and social events and organizing them. And it was, it made a really boring job, a really fun job. The part that answer your question though, is, is I realized I was doing this admin work. This is my third internship that I had. And I called my mom up and I go, mom, I had a realization. She said, what's that?
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Darius Mirshahzadeh: How Core Values Unlock Massive Business Growth | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
I said, I am never going to have a job as long as I live. And I said, the only way I will ever have a job where I'm not the boss, and let's use the White House, for example, is if I was president of the United States. So it was this epiphany that like, I have to be the boss.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Darius Mirshahzadeh: How Core Values Unlock Massive Business Growth | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
And literally in this job in the White House, I said, I would never work for the White House again, unless I was president of the United States. Now I'm 22. Maybe I'd take an advisor role now if they wanted me. But yeah, it was a really eye-opening experience to be at this top-of-the-game, best internship that you could have in the whole world and to say, I don't want to do this.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Darius Mirshahzadeh: How Core Values Unlock Massive Business Growth | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
I want to work for myself. But yeah, it was a cool experience.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Darius Mirshahzadeh: How Core Values Unlock Massive Business Growth | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
All right, look, while this is going on, my dad's sick at home. It was a complicated situation. I had chosen to do this. My dad's sick at home. My family was not stoked that I was at this thing. By the way, they don't pay. Maybe they change now. Back then, they don't pay you. So I'm using my money I'd saved to go to Europe for graduating college. I'm using that to go live in D.C.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Darius Mirshahzadeh: How Core Values Unlock Massive Business Growth | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
and work for free for the White House. So I was already a little pissed off about that. And the one thing you get when you work at the White House as an intern is you get a picture with the President of the United States in front of the White House on the steps of the South Lawn. So it's like a picture that commemorates that you worked at the White House.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Darius Mirshahzadeh: How Core Values Unlock Massive Business Growth | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
And it's got to be in front of the White House. Well, they had some sort of staff picnic. And they're like, yeah, you're not doing the picture in front of the White House. What most people don't know is next to the White House is a building called the Old Executive Office Building, which is actually where almost everyone that works for the White House works inside of this office building.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Darius Mirshahzadeh: How Core Values Unlock Massive Business Growth | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
So we're going to do the picture in front of the steps of the OEOB, the old executive office building. I was like, fuck that. So I was pissed. And I pulled a straight Jerry Maguire. I wrote this really long email that said, this is unfair. The White House is lucky to have us. We're not lucky to have them. I demand that we either cancel the picture or they reschedule us in front of the White House.