Should You Listen to Stephen Bartlett? Let's Discuss

Michael Zuber (0:01)

Should you listen to Stephen Bartlett? The YouTube channel is called The Diary Of A CEO. There are lots of options out there for you, but should you add Stephen Bartlett to the Rolodex and see what he's got going on? Bo, you were just at the Vault Conference put on by Patrick David, and you had the opportunity to see Stephen speak.

What say you? What's the deal with Stephen?

Bo (0:28)

Yeah, I didn't get to go to the full conference. I had clicked on a link months back, and one of Pat Rep called me probably 50 times.

And I'm like, dude, I'm so busy, I can't go. And he said, just buy a general mission ticket, go for one day, it's going to be worth it. And I essentially did that. And I went yesterday.

And granted, they have like platinum and CEO, people were paying like 18, 20 grand a ticket for these most. And it's at the MGM Arena. Okay. So I didn't know this. But yesterday, Stephen Bartlett was one of the featured guests.

Michael Zuber (1:13)

Okay.

Bo (1:13)

And I had listened to his book on Audible before. And I was like, yeah, this guy is impressive.

But let me tell you something. When I heard him riff yesterday, I have not been that impressed.

Michael Zuber (1:23)

Wow.

Bo (1:24)

I don't think in a very, very long time, I would put him up there with any thought leader, entrepreneur I've ever listened to. And I will make that statement on record. That guy is truly amazing. And he's probably like 30 something. I mean, I mean, he is amazing.

And I'm going to follow him more and more now. But, you know, high level.

Michael Zuber (1:49)

He gave you eight things, right? There are eight things that he kind of tried to communicate. Is that right?

Bo (1:52)

Yeah. Yeah. So basically, the way he drew his YouTube channel from zero to now 20 million people.

He tests every freaking thing. So stop guessing and start testing. One of Stephen's biggest themes was testing instead of relying entirely on intuition. Right? That's why he's, it's not that he's the greatest interviewer. It's he tests and he's okay with failing. He wants to fail fast. He talked about that.

That's his second thing I took away.

Can you outfail your competition?

He pulled up research papers. It's shown that if you can fail more than your competition, you're going to end up winning because he moves so quickly. He also talked about how everything is moving so much faster in business, in social media, in technology, that you have to be moving quick. You can't listen to what somebody told you a year ago. Because he's on the train of all of this kind of automations and AI. He runs a nine-figure investment fund, and he uses AI.

That's the only person in his business that manages everything. I mean, the guy is like, it's number three.

The 1% improvements matter.

There probably wasn't one thing that made the diary of CEO successful. It appears to have been hundreds of thousands of improvements stacked on top of one another. He talked about that. He said, most people won't do the 1%. They won't save the $1 per day over a long period of time. He made that a big point, and that's why he's constantly winning at the things. And it makes a lot of sense, right? Like, he's just constantly stacking over a long period of time.

He says, number four, you have to earn attention. You can create the greatest content in the world, but nobody benefits from it if nobody clicks it, right? Same thing with business. A great product with terrible positioning can lose to an inferior product with much clearer positioning. Number five, how versus who? This might be the biggest lesson for established business owners. Entrepreneurs constantly ask, how do I do this? At a certain point, the better question comes, who can do this better than me? Stephen spends 30 to 40 hours a week recruiting and growing his organization, hiring people from Amazon. He told us a story how he stocked one of the Amazon's people and finally flew there and met with her and got her to. So he's big on cultural index. He's constantly hiring and growing. That's what he's doing. And number six, culture isn't what's written on the wall. Culture becomes visible when things go wrong. Customer's angry, what does the employee do? So he's really big on people that have the, he gives them cultural index. And if they're alignment, then they would probably get hired. If not, they're not getting hired. I mean, that's his, you know, he wants people that have same mentality as him. And actually what was interesting, Patrick, that David's seconding control of, I think it's called lining, lion holdings, they were doing a bit yesterday. And it's amazing what Pat has done, right? He's just sold his insurance company for 350 million, give or take.