Hey Guys.

At Cardinal House, we are building a business to a $100M brand and failing in front of you. That way we learn together!

This is our way of sharing with you the glamor of failure, long work weeks, and startup salaries.

Here’s what we got this WEEK:

• The Need for a Quality Team
• The Best Practices for Accountability on a Team
• Founders Thoughts
• Tweets of the week

The Need for a Quality Team

Let’s break this down into bite-size pieces. There are 3 main aspects to a quality team. There are skill sets, aligned vision, and commitment.

Skill sets: It’s crucial to surround yourself with teammates that have different abilities and experiences.

You can’t have 4 artists and expect to have a marketing agency. I mean you can, but it’s going to suck! The bottom line, a successful team has specialists.

A specialized team is overall more well-rounded than a team with well-rounded members. You want your core team to be able to handle a sector of your business in their respective niche.

That means you want experts with very different expertise.

This allows you to build teams around them in the future. It’s imperative to set yourself up for scalability as you build a business.

Aligned Vision: These are the intangibles of your business. Your culture matters more than anything.

Think of tug of war. You’re all pulling in the same direction, and Billy Joe has different ideas. He does what he wants, and has his vision for your company.

Billy Joe is going to be the first to be fired. HAHA.

Dead weight is extremely harmful to business. The results are wasted dollars, unhappy customers, and a negative experience.

Cultural alignment is mandatory to have the same vision, values, and execution.

Commitment: This is the simplest aspect of a quality team member, but the most difficult to find. Nowadays with OUR generation, it seems people are less driven.

We have way too many options. People take and quit jobs more times than your grandma loses her phone.

Commitment requires character and employees with this attribute are extremely valuable. People who are willing to hustle and get SH** done!

Those are the guys you want by your side.

The Best Practices for Accountability on a Team

1. Set goals publically

For us, it’s been as simple as documenting our journey through content. There are a few reasons to do that.

We want to provide people value in their entrepreneurial journeys and hold ourselves accountable to growth and our mission as a business.

We have let the world know that we want to build a $100M brand. Now it’s our job to bring that to fruition!

2. Have accountability partners

Put one team member in charge of tracking each individual’s goals. For us, we start the first question of our team meeting with accountability.

We have individual goals and share our progress from the prior week.

This is great because it allows you to publicly shame anyone that doesn’t meet the standard.

KIDDING! But it does allow you to challenge each team member to do their share of improving themselves and the company.

It puts responsibility in the hands of your team and gives you a measuring stick to track their progress.

3. Assigning clear ownership to projects and initiatives

This one has worked miracles for us. If you break down your goals into clear projects and tasks and you put a name behind them, it often forces accountability.

We used to struggle with daily tasks. We would show up to meetings expecting someone else to get a task done.

And NO ONE WOULD DO IT.

Here’s why:

If you don’t know your role then it’s easy to assume other tasks are going to get done by someone else.

It’s crucial for the leader of a team to delegate properly. This will allow you to assess abilities and hold individual members accountable.

We found that as soon as clear responsibilities were set, tasks were getting done on time with higher quality work.

The more specific the better. You want to make it so hard for your teammates to fail, that it takes more effort to fail than succeed

With bad instructions, you might end up like this guy! 🤣

4. Prioritize the growth and development of your team

If you want your business to develop and mature, then that directly correlates to the development of your employees that represent you.

It’s the job of a leader to put all the tools and resources in front of their employees to best help them grow in their positions and as people.

You start to realize as an entrepreneur how much success stems from your mindset.

Or what we like to call “THE GRIND SET”. So you not only want to aid your team in skillset growth but also personal growth.

Here are a few examples of how our CEO encourages growth at Cardinal House:

🔺 Public Goal setting

🔺 Weekly one on ones with Zach(CEO) where our individual needs are addressed

🔺 Encouragement to read different mindset books, advice on specific aspects of work, and helping to decrease the daily friction at work

5. Lead by Example

This is cliche but is extremely necessary. It’s self-explanatory.

As you begin to scale your business, it will be crucial that you are the model of the culture of your business.

No one likes hypocrites!

So we do our best to live by the principles we want our employees to live by.

Make your culture clear and then live it out!

These 5 tips have substantially increased our efficiency, productivity, and accountability.

Founders Thoughts

We let you virtually interview us, see what our daily work life is like, and take a peek into our personal life.

Let’s get into it.

Founder: Zach Medin

Position: CEO

Q: What previous job experience do you have?

A: My past job experience consists of working in a wood shop, house remodeling, working under a financial advisor, but most notably, my eCommerce store that earned me over $100,000 in profit by age 19. I've always been very entrepreneurial and looking for great opportunities which has brought me to the web 3 world.

Q: What is your greatest fear?

A: My greatest fear is probably that there are people out there that will always outwork and outsmart me, ultimately preventing me from being hyper-successful. I know it's probably not healthy, but it's what drives me to be improving as a person and a leader constantly.

Q: At a young age, what made you interested in finance and building wealth?

A: I was 8 when I first learned about the stock market and got hooked ever since. The idea that you can get your money to work FOR you instead of the other way around has always seemed like the obvious choice to me.

Q: What’s the craziest experience you ever had?

A: This is random, but the craziest experience I've ever had was when I was playing Minecraft on an airplane and my laptop started on fire. I started yelling "Dad! MY COMPUTER IS ON FIRE!" with an aircraft filled with a couple hundred people and may or may not have startled a few of them... whoops. I was in 4th grade at the time.

Tweets of the Week

AND NOW FOR A HEAVY HITTER TO END THE DAY!

The end.

Next week we will dive into onboarding new clients and the successes and failures of selling our services.

Until then use this knowledge to go build your team and start your own business!

Peace ✌️