Today in 5 minutes or less:

✔️ Become a Band-Aid Destroyer

✔️ Sorry, You’re Not Top Talent

✔️ You Can’t Outwork a Lack of Focus

✔️ The Single Biggest Unlock of All

CONTRARIAN FRAMEWORK

Become a Band-Aid Destroyer

If there’s anything we want you to learn today about being an effective owner, it’s this — an ugly truth: Band-aids will kill your business. Slowly. Quietly. Painfully.

Every time you delay the inevitable — whether it’s firing that dead weight, killing a project that’s going nowhere, or hanging onto a half-baked strategy — you’re slapping a band-aid on something that needs a tweezer, or better yet, a sledgehammer.

Being anything but a band-aid destroyer is cowardice disguised as caution, and it’ll cost you in the long run. Think of it this way, have you ever tried to do something with a splinter under your fingernail? You can’t focus on anything else (and you shouldn’t).

Fail to destroy them and all of a sudden your company’s bleeding resources, your team’s losing faith, that one underperformer is a cancer spreading through your culture, and your competition is gaining ground.

A question we ask thousands of owners:

“How many of you have fired an underperformer and regretted it?” Guess how many hands go up every time? Zero. Not one person regrets it. And yet, we all wait. We all delay.

We’re afraid to cause a little short-term pain, but we don’t see the long-term damage being done by keeping that splinter lodged in our business.

We’re not just preaching this, by the way. We’ve lived this. Do you want to know the best advice we ever got: “What are you, the CEO or an employee? Just rip off the band-aid!”

Rude, but fair. And that’s the thing: as CEO, it’s your job. The great owners? They rip that thing off in one shot. They don’t tiptoe around tough decisions, they make the cut. Fast. Clean. Done.

You want to be a killer in business? The best owners don’t wait for the perfect moment — they manage and move, manage and move. They rip off the band-aids and don’t look back.

Sorry, You Are Not Top Talent

Want to be an owner? Here’s another tough pill to swallow: You’re not top talent.

At least, that’s how you need to think. The moment you start believing you’re the smartest person in the room is the moment you’ve already lost. Being a top 1% owner is a relentless, never-ending effort, not some finish line you cross.

You’ve got to assume your competition is smarter, hungrier, and working harder than you. Every. Single. Day. You want to know why ownership is utterly brutal? It’s cause the best owners wake up every morning with one thought in mind: I’m not good enough yet.

But it’s that same insecurity, that constant push to improve, that keeps them ahead. They don’t settle for good; they chase greatness like they’re always behind.

Consider this for a second. Does a lion want to work for a gazelle? No, they want to eat that b*tch.

Yet, a common challenge we often hear from owners is that they can’t find top talent, so what do we tell them? If you can’t find top talent, that could very well mean you are not top talent.

Top 1% owners know how to call themselves out on this. Because being an owner isn’t about reaching the top — it’s about continuously climbing toward it.

If you’re lacking in a certain area, call yourself out and then hold yourself accountable to improve on it.

Sounds simple. Rarely done. And the latter is what makes an owner great.

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You Can’t Outwork a Lack of Focus

Sorry, it’s true. The ability to cut through the noise and lock in on what matters for a an extended period is the secret 80% of the time. It isn’t sexy, but you know what is? Winning.

And across all the best owners we’ve met, there’s only one equation for success that holds true every time: FOCUS = TIME + CONSISTENCY + WORK ETHIC.

Relentless focus often leads to a very technical, scientific curve that looks something like this…

Perhaps more than anything, the best owners know how, when, and where to focus. No matter how many hours you log, if you’re chasing everything, you’re catching nothing.

There’s a reason Facebook was able to hit a billion users, then 2 billion, then 3 BILLION plus. A really specific, surprising reason — focus. (Early on, the team realized that if a user had 7 friends within 10 days, they were hooked. So that became the ONLY thing they focused on.)

Archimedes famously said, “Give me a lever long enough and a fulcrum on which to place it and I can move the world.”

Most business owners have no idea what their lever is. A good place to start is focus. A good thing to focus on? Culture.

Culture Starts From the Top (WRONG)

We’ve been sold this myth our entire careers. All our life, we’ve all been spoon-fed the same line: Culture starts at the top. Culture starts at the top. It sounds good, right? The CEO sets the tone, and everyone falls in line. But here’s the inconvenient truth that’ll put a dent in your ego — it doesn’t. At least not always.

Sometimes it just slides right down from the middle. The truth is, it doesn’t matter how many leadership seminars you attend or how many LinkedIn posts you write. Your employees aren’t looking to you as their example — they’re looking at the people directly above and around them.

Think about it:

• Your employees see you as the person who naturally works 80-hour weeks because it’s your company.
  
  
• Your grind makes sense to them, but it’s not their grind.
  
  
• They’re not going to put in that kind of effort for someone else’s name on the building.

So, what they are paying attention to? The people right above them — managers, senior staff. Those are the people they look to for how hard they should work, how they should behave, and what the culture really is on a daily basis.

You Need a Bobby

Let us quickly tell you about Bobby. Bobby leads one of our new business units, and Bobby is a force of nature.

Money isn’t what drives Bobby. It’s the game that drives him. The thrill of building something big, crushing competition, and knowing he was the one pushing the limits. When we tried to hire Bobby, something weird happened. Something great… He started interviewing us.

• How big do you think this company’s going to get and why?
  
  
• What’s your vision for it? In 1 year? 3 years? 10 years?
  
  
• What are your plans for the summer? (an odd ask, not gonna lie)
  
  
• What does the worst person who’s ever partnered with you think about you?
  
  
• When was the last time you fired somebody for underperformance?
  
  
• What will you do if the company runs out of cash?

At the time, Bobby wasn’t an owner in our business, let alone a damn employee, but this is what elite ownership looks like. Bobby wasn’t just interested in a paycheck; he was gauging whether we were serious enough to match his ambition.

That’s what top owners do. They don’t just slot into a culture; they seek it, they define it, and they build it. They set the standard for everyone around them.

The Single Biggest Unlock of All

Here’s the thing they don’t tell you in business school: The most important partnership in your life isn’t with your co-founder, your investors, or your biggest client — it’s with the person you marry.

Not a joke. You can chase all the deals or build the most profitable company, but if you come home to chaos, resentment, or worse, indifference, none of it matters.

Don’t care how talented you are, how big your business is, or how many zeros are in your bank account — if your personal life is a dumpster fire, it will bleed into everything.

You can’t build an empire with someone who drains you. Marry well, and you’re not just doubling your odds of success, you’re setting yourself up for a life where the ceiling is higher.

The truth is, no balance sheet, investor, or market trend can offer you the same return on investment as a partner who challenges you, supports you, and pushes you to be better.

At the end of the day, it’s the only investment that consistently pays off.

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Cool things to check out:

Read: So… Apparently, Codie is right up there with Ray Dalio on the list of top CEOs to follow on LinkedIn.

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