The Leadership Stack Podcast

Sean: I want to start with a question. What's the big difference between a leader and a manager? Darby: Yeah, well, first I will say, in our world in general, we love to have this or that. You can be this or you can be that. And I actually start off the whole premise of my book with this idea of you've heard the question or you may have been asked the question, are you a manager or are you a leade...

Got a plan on starting a business but are worried about how much money you need to spend? Don't worry! This video is for you. Starting a business can be exciting. However, the idea of this gets pushed back most of the time because of the amount associated when starting one, especially when you are just a fresh graduate. That is why Mr. CEO at 22, Sean Si, provided you with some low capital busines...

Darby: The first thing is, as a leader, I want you to always be curious, be constantly learning. Your goal should be a lifelong learner that's going to help prepare you for change. Change is going to be constant. It's going to help you continue to evolve and grow your business as an entrepreneur. If you're running your own business. So make sure that you just stay curious about things. Constantly...

Sean: What coursed through your mind in deciding that 'okay I'm going to try nonprofit this time, I'm going to try a leadership organization at this time?' Darby: Yeah, it's kind of one of those things when I coach young people in particular that were just exiting college and getting into their first career. One of the things I tell people is that, what you believe your career is going to be, is p...

Sean: But what's going to be your advice for me, for example, when I'm faced with these kinds of offers, and let's just say I'm open to it because I wasn't open to it when these companies approached me. So, number one, why would I be open to that? What are some of the good reasons why I should be open to that? And number two, should I give them my information, the books that they're asking for? An...

Sean: If, for example, I approach you and say, Jeremy, I have a startup and I need funds and I know you're an angel investor, what are the questions that you start asking? What are the things that you want to know first?   Jeremy: The first question is, why do you care about this problem? And then the second one is why and how it has become $1,000,000,000 company. And the third is what's the harde...

Success. Such an elusive word, right? Something we all want to attain and yet so few of us ever consider ourselves to be.  But how can one know if they have already achieved success? Is it measurable? Is it by having these materialistic things? Is it having all the riches in the world? Some people say that success is relative, so what is it for Mr. CEO at 22? Tune in as Mr. Sean Si will be explain...

Sean: I'm wondering, how much autonomy did you give this person? Did you let go of your control of the company to this CEO that you hired? And just to give people like me an idea like how much equity are we talking about when we're going to give them a slice of it? Is it like 1%, 5%, 10%? Hopefully not, but I have no idea. And I'd like to learn from people like you've done it before. Jeremy: So, I...

Sean: But when you hire your own CEO, that means that you found someone who is very capable of replacing you and running the business so that it can work on its own. How did that look like for you? What are some key traits that you were looking for? Was it so expensive to do that? Jeremy: Yeah, I think the fundamental fact is that, you know, work is work. And, you know, companies are made of peopl...

Sean: When facing obstacles and conflicts, how do you keep your team motivated? Alright, I'll let you answer this first Le-an Le-an: The interesting thing with 2XYou, Because with 2XYou we only have a few clients who have more than two assistants. Like most of them are like 1 to 1. So when it comes to obstacles and conflicts between the team, there's rarely any, which is, I'm really lucky to say....

Sean: Next question. This is specifically for you, Ms. Le-an. How do you find the right virtual assistant for your clients? There you go. Le-an: I have a whole YouTube video on that. Anyway, so the main one is actually the values, that's the biggest one is I do kind of have all of the questions that I have the interview questions when I'm interviewing the potential assistant is based on those five...

Creating leaders is tough. If it wasn't, we would have a lot more leaders in our world today. Watch this video and learn how you can raise one! There’s a thin line that separates a manager from a leader. But every business needs both. You can easily find managers in every company, but a real leader is hard to find. So how can you train and raise leaders as a mid-level manager? Listen up as Mr. CEO...

Sean: All right. Next question. As a leader, how do you manage a team or a team member that broke your trust? There we go. Le-an: Very interesting question. So like I mentioned, I've had times in my leadership that - I've been very honest with this with people, they know - mostly if they ask some things, I do forget because I don't know. I don't know how to bring that up. But like, whenever people...

Sean: From Alana, what lessons you've learned from your past mistakes can you advise a new business owner? Le-an: I've been a business owner for like six, seven years now, for like multiple different businesses. There's a ton. I think I'll pick my top three. One is, to surround yourself with the right people, which is what we've been talking about this whole time, is you could have the best copywr...

Sean: From Pam. What are the most important attributes of successful leaders today? Alright. Very good question. What is it for you Le-an? Le-an: Someone's always curious? That's the biggest - that's one of my core values, is if you want to be successful in anything, whether you want to be a successful leader, you want to be a successful entrepreneur or you just want to be successful at your job....

Sean: How do you prevent the power of being a leader from getting to your head? Alright, this is about ego. Le-an: Yeah, that goes back to the beginning of my story of like - when I became CEO, I was 20 years old when I became CEO. And I let the power go into my head immediately, and I had to be brought down also immediately. Basically, the fastest way to do that is to realize that you are not the...

Content is King. That is what Bill Gates had coined. But how will you be able to stand out among the other pieces of content out there? Watch this! Listen up as Mr. CEO at 22, Sean Si, discusses why you should invest in content marketing. Also find out what content you should create, how it’s going to be original, and how you can market it for it to be able to compete among the others. Learn all o...

Sean: There are some things that for me are extremely difficult for someone to be able to do. And I would say that I know human nature to do to a certain degree, I am a lot younger than you are. So I know you have much more wisdom to share and, you know, human nature much more than I do because you've read tons of books. I haven't read any of them. But I know that when you have that kind of discip...

Sean: Hey, Dave. Just want to say you're a modern-day hero to a lot of people. Dave: I'm not a hero. I'm just someone that's trying to give back in a really small way. And it's really one of the prongs of my efforts around helping the community, particularly the Asian-American community. I would say, you know, we can talk more about it, but there are really three things I'm really focused on. One...

Sean: You don't need to tell us the number, but how many months of your personal expense would that be before you finally threw in the towel? Dave: Yeah, it's a little different than that. The way I do things is I and I advocate this actually for people that are looking for yield and chasing opportunities, investment opportunities. I think that fundamentally when you chase investment opportunity,...

Sean: And I know you mentioned that it took three years for you to turn over everything and for you to make sure that you're leaving on a good note, what hinted you that it's high time to do this now and then on the third year, what made you realize that? Okay, you can't wait any longer - you just have to do this? David: Yes. So I would say that it was actually in the running you know, I was plann...

This pandemic has caused a lot of businesses to shut down, but some pivoted and some worked on their digital presence. Watch this video to know why! In this era, the first thing we do when we want to look or know something is a search on the internet. As a business owner, you are missing a lot in this time if your business does not have a website, a blog, or it cannot be found on any social media...

Sean: And I'm wondering, aren't a lot of companies good at hiring people? A lot of companies have their HR team? Ugis: Oh, they're terrible. Terrible. They don't know what they're doing. Sean: Why is - why is it? Ugis: I don't know. That's why I have my business. I really don't know. Well, first of all, you have to try. And a lot of people just think, "okay, you know, for some reason, this is not...

Sean: And what would be some of your best tips? And I'm not sure if you're going to be monitoring the A-player all the way, but a lot of companies also suffer from attrition . And I'm wondering if you hire an A-player, how do you best keep an A-player in the team? Ugis: I can't say it's necessarily my specialty, but at the same time, I've been a business owner and that's kind of a really important...

Sean:   And I love the definition that you gave earlier for what an A-player is. Can you define that for the listeners? Ugis: Yeah, absolutely. And just kind of as a side or background, you know, it is a job market, we call it the job market. And when you go to the market and you're shopping, one of the things that you're looking for is the best prices as well? So that's a part of, you know, getti...