CEO Diaries: The Mistake That Nearly Derailed MrBeast’s Entire Empire

Steven Bartlett (0:01)

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Today's moment episode is with MrBeast, and he has one of the most incredible teams in the world. But I guess the question is, how? The reality of running a small business is that switching off is never really an option. Even when you try, the ideas, the excitement and all the responsibility is always there. And because you're always switched on, it's only fair that your hiring partner should be too. LinkedIn jobs, who are the sponsor of this moment's episode, has been that hiring partner for me and for years. Because it's always working away in the background. My team can post our jobs for free, share them with our networks and reach top talent all in the same place. So let's get into today's conversation.

MrBeast (1:07)

Great people just love working with great people. They do. And there's something about being around great people that pulls some kind of animal out of you that just makes you want to do more and push more and believe things aren't possible. And I don't know, when you put me around a bunch of other successful entrepreneurs, I just turned into a different human. Then if you put me around, I don't know, a bunch of people who are just running small businesses and don't really care and don't really have much ambition, I'm like two completely different humans. And you see that same thing in full effect. You put a bunch of A players around more A players, they just build off of each other. But you like put two or three C players amongst a bunch of great people and they'll start pulling them down. They'll start making them not want to work as much, make work not as fun. And so everyone knows, get rid of the C players, right? Obviously, get rid of people who aren't all in, blah, blah, blah. It's the ones that are like, they're not an A player, but they're not a C player. So it's kind of hard because you still feed off the energy. And if you get enough of them, it just drags the overall culture down. So those are like the worst. I mean, not everyone can be these like world ending monsters. That, you know, there are a lot of mundane things like, I mean, the book controller and accounting, I mean, probably doesn't have to be the best in the world. But you know, when it comes to like the mission critical things like making videos and things like that, you like just the great people got to be surrounded. Like that's one of your number one jobs as leaders, just to make sure your great people are working with other great people, because that's like the number one reason why people leave jobs isn't money, you know what I mean? It's like number four on the list. Don't ask me the list of them all, I don't remember. I just know the number one thing is do they enjoy who they're working with? And people will leave their job because they hate working with people way before they'll ever leave because of money.

Steven Bartlett (2:41)

Have you ever been frustrated that the people you've hired don't match your level of obsession?

MrBeast (2:46)

No, because I just find the people that do.

Steven Bartlett (2:48)

Are there people that do?

MrBeast (2:49)

Oh, yeah. There's so many people in my business. I mean, obviously, you have to take care of them, pay them well. They're not the kind of people that will just make the standard rate. But yeah, people like Tyler, Klitzner, Russ, and people on our editing team, I mean, they're putting in, most weeks, same amount of hours as me, and they're all in to see the vision. It's hard to find those kinds of people, but when you do, you got to treasure them and recognize that they're unicorns.

Steven Bartlett (3:17)

And you have almost 500, roughly 500 people?

MrBeast (3:19)

Probably, I think the production company were around 300, Feastable's around 100, and then probably another 40, 50 scattered amongst everything else.

Steven Bartlett (3:27)

Most founders that I speak to describe scaling head counts as the kind of worst part of the job. More people, more problems, right?