Most founders think they have a team problem. Deadlines missed. Quality slipping. Constant firefighting. Sound familiar? 

But here’s the brutal truth I unpacked in this week’s Focus Hour: Your team isn’t broken. They’re a mirror, reflecting exactly what you’re showing them.

Whether you’re leading a startup team, managing a growing company, or trying to get your kids to eat their broccoli – this principle will punch you in the gut. Because once you see it, you can’t unsee it.

Watch the Full Session on LinkedIn Live: 

https://www.linkedin.com/events/focushourforfounders-teamcultur7371980194796146689/theater

What You’ll Learn

• The Mirror Principle: Your team reflects your standards, not your expectations. Your confusion becomes their chaos. Your absence becomes their avoidance. Your inconsistency becomes their infrastructure.
• Trust is Everything: No follow-through equals no trust. Period. This applies in the boardroom and the playroom.
• You Can’t Lead Like a Follower: If you’re trying to manage people without managing yourself first, you will fail. Not might. Will.
• Culture = Standards + Trust: Most leaders build backwards, starting with shortcuts instead of standards. They throw money at ads, rebuild websites, hire fast – anything to avoid the real work.
• Belief Before Ability: You don’t have a delegation problem. You have a belief problem. If you believe “I do it best,” you’ll never let go.
• Everything Flows From You: This isn’t about making you feel terrible. It’s about recognizing that as a founder, you’re the source. Fix yourself, fix your business.
• Legacy Through Standards: Your legacy isn’t the company or the money. It’s the culture that survives without you.

Key Takeaways

Misalignment: Most companies don’t fail from bad marketing or team issues – they fail from misalignment between founders and their business. 

Trust as the Foundation: Trust isn’t taught – it’s transferred. 

Personal Mastery Before Leadership: Leadership flows from personal mastery. Conquer before you coach.

Building Backwards: Real growth starts inside and works its way out.

Key Problems Addressed

• Does your team reflect your standards or your shortcuts?
• Why do most founders and companies fail?
• What’s the biggest problem across businesses and founders?
• Why does my team have performance problems?
• What are leading indicators versus lagging indicators?
• How do I get a high-performance team?
• Why can’t I manage my team effectively?
• Can you lead followers if you’re leading like a follower?
• Why doesn’t my team trust me?
• What’s the connection between follow-through and trust?
• Why is my company culture weak?
• What happens when leaders are confused, absent, or inconsistent?
• What stage of founder development am I in?
• Why am I stuck at my current revenue level?
• What mistakes keep founders from scaling past $1M?
• Should I be a problem solver or a standard setter?
• Why isn’t my team performing at a high level?
• How do personal standards affect team performance?
• What’s the formula for building culture?
• Why do founders start with shortcuts instead of standards?
• How do I identify my shortcuts?
• How do I raise my standards effectively?
• Why should I conquer before I coach?
• What is a founder’s true legacy?
• How can I test if my standards affect my team’s culture?

Summary

Team Culture and Standards

Simon hosted a live video discussion about team culture, standards, and shortcuts for founders, sharing his personal experiences and insights about leadership and business growth. He emphasized the importance of building trust, setting high standards, and focusing on internal development before external expansion, using examples from his own journey as a founder. The session concluded with plans for future weekly discussions on key topics like vision, identity, and leadership, while highlighting the central theme that culture is the true legacy of a leader.

Next Steps

• Identify one standard you’ve been tolerating and raise it for yourself this week
• Examine what shortcuts you’re taking instead of setting proper standards
• Evaluate if your team culture would stand or collapse without you
• Identify blind spots where you need to raise your own standards first

Key Discussion Points

The Misalignment Problem Most companies don’t fail from bad marketing or team issues – they fail from misalignment between founders and their business. As Simon’s mentor said: “The only ship that doesn’t sail is a partnership.”

Trust as the Foundation Trust isn’t taught – it’s transferred. Simon shared how his parenting experience taught him that his son didn’t trust him because he didn’t consistently follow through on what he said. The same dynamic was playing out in his business.

Personal Mastery Before Leadership Back in 2021-2022, Simon was 50 pounds overweight, a functional alcoholic drinking bottles of whiskey weekly, Netflix binging, hungover daily – and wondering why his team wasn’t performing. Leadership flows from personal mastery. Conquer before you coach.

Building Backwards Most leaders start with shortcuts: throwing money at ads, rebuilding websites, making tons of content. These are at-scale tactics that avoid the real work. Real growth starts inside and works its way out.

The Challenge Take one standard you’ve been tolerating. Raise it for yourself this week – without announcing it. Don’t tell anybody what you want. Just be it. Do it. Watch your culture follow.

Full Transcript

Wow! Here we are, welcome to today’s focus hour for founders. It is awesome to be here. This is Thursday, September 11th. We’ve got a great topic today on team culture, standards and shortcuts, and I am stoked to unpack this. This is, I think, number 5 of the live videos that I’ve been doing.

Yeah, it’s been great. It’s been really fun to share some of these ideas. And I hope that we get some people who join today. So if you’re here, if you join at all, or if you’re watching later, just say hi! Put your name in the comments. Just so I know that you’re here, and I can say hi. If you have questions as I go through this live presentation, just holler in the comments and ask. I’m gonna follow and jump in with answers and commentary as we go, so I will try to keep watching for comments.

Let’s go from here. I’m gonna share my screen and I have a little deck to walk through.

Does Your Team Reflect Your Standards or Your Shortcuts?

All right. Here we are. Does your team reflect your standards or your shortcuts? This is today’s topic. And this is a tough one. This is a really good one. Every time I write a LinkedIn post, put up a TikTok or Instagram video, or talk in any way about team, about leadership, about culture, it’s always a hot topic. Because it’s a hard topic. And so I’m really excited to hit this today and see what comes out of it.

Before I jump in, one more note of setup here is I do this every week, every Thursday for founders, and these are 6, 7, 8 figure founders that I’ve worked with, and I’ve formed this content for, because that’s who I am.

I’ve been through that process of building a business, starting a business, scaling a business, cresting over revenue ceilings, breaking through them, struggling, failing, hiring, firing – the whole gamut – building my marketing agency Structure, which still exists, which still operates.

And what I learned in that process was one big thing over 10 years, and that big lesson was this: Most founders, most companies don’t fail from bad marketing. They don’t fail from external growth. They don’t fail from a bad market. They don’t fail from just team culture issues. They fail because of misalignment.

Misalignment between the founder and the business, between the founders and the business, and the biggest problem across the board is misalignment.

There’s a phrase that a mentor of mine used to say: “The only ship that doesn’t sail is a partnership.” And I’ve heard that a few times. So true.

It’s so hard to make a business run and work with multiple partners. So if you have multiple partners and you’re on here, just holler and say something, because I want to know. Because that is a hard place to begin. That’s a hard business to start. It’s so helpful because you have someone to bounce ideas off of. You have someone who’s there with you. You have someone to complement your weaknesses. However, it does not help the alignment problem. We have enough trouble staying aligned with our own personal vision and values and execution. When you add another person or 3 people into the mix, it is almost impossible.

That’s my mission. That is my message – to help with misalignment across businesses and founders. I’m here just to help. I know you don’t want to settle. I know you don’t want to fail. I know you don’t want to drift. And so I want to help you have clarity, have focus and have alignment so you can grow. Because that’s what I needed, and I know that’s what we all need.

The Mirror Principle

Here’s a question: Does your team reflect your standards or your shortcuts? Most founders think they have a team problem. I did. I thought I had a team problem. Deadlines were missed. Quality was slipping. I was constantly firefighting. But the hard truth here that I’m gonna unpack throughout this talk is: Your team isn’t broken.

Your team isn’t broken doesn’t mean you have the highest performers in the world, doesn’t mean they’re the most experienced, doesn’t mean they don’t have problems. But what it does mean is they’re a mirror, and they’re reflecting you. Let’s dive in.

Here’s the big idea. I want to help turn that mirror that your team already is so that you can see that feedback that they’re giving you through their performance, through their energy, through their communication.

Three quick things right off the bat:

Ability follows belief Culture follows trust

There’s this massive concept, a data concept that I really want to share. It’s this concept of indicators in any relationship – leading indicators and lagging indicators.

Leading indicators are the inputs to the actions, the activities to get what you want. The lagging indicators are the outcomes of those inputs and time and process.

Do you want a high ability performance team? Yes, here’s what you gotta do. You got to input belief. And if you’re not getting performance and ability, you’re missing belief.

Same thing – culture follows trust. Build trust, build culture.

Peter Drucker’s Truth

Peter Drucker, the management consultant, author, speaker, said this quote: “Executives who do not manage themselves cannot expect to manage associates.”

This is a massive mirror. When I read this in his book, The Effective Executive, it was right at the beginning. It was mind-blowing. I realized I had spent years with my team trying to manage other people.

If you’re a founder, a parent, a friend, family member – which you are in some way – you are in charge of managing people. And if you are trying to manage people without managing yourself first, you will not be able to do it. You will fail.

Here’s a translation with both of these two keys that I want to share. This is the foundation of this whole talk: You can’t lead followers (team, children, spouse, friends, community) if you’re leading like a follower.

A Story About Trust

I want to tell a story, because this is something that isn’t just theory. I’ve lived this very practically on a day-to-day basis with my home and with my family, and I’ve learned it in my business too. Sometimes some of the biggest business lessons that we can learn don’t come from the boardroom. They come from the playroom.

I had this moment with my son Peter that I really want to share, because this was a playroom lesson that I brought into the boardroom and has transformed my leadership as an executive and founder.

We were begging, bribing, threatening our son. But nothing worked. If you’re a parent, you’ve been in this. You want your kids to listen. You want your kids to obey. You want your kids to respect. I see this at restaurants all the time: “If you don’t eat that now, or if you don’t stop jumping on this booth, we’re going to go home.” Or at the store: “If you don’t stop, then we’re gonna leave right now.” For us, we were trying to get our son to eat: “If you don’t eat that broccoli, you can’t have dessert.”

And then what happens? You don’t leave. You still give him dessert. You always find a way to slip, to justify, to tolerate, because you don’t want them to fail. You don’t want them to lose. You don’t want to be mean.

We were doing this with our son, but he wasn’t listening. He wasn’t obeying, and we were constantly nagging and coercing, bribing, begging to get our son to do what we wanted him to do. This was our first son. We were very early parents and we made a lot of mistakes.

But we had this friend couple. They had more kids than us. They were older than us. And I remember one moment they looked at us and said, “Hey, can we tell you something?” I said, “Yeah, go for it” because I was frustrated. And they said, “Your son doesn’t trust you because you don’t do what you say.”

It hit me like a truck. A gut punch. It was so true. The same thing that was happening in our life was also happening in our business and was happening across all of our relationships.

I’d never really thought about it from his perspective. I’d only thought about it from mine. For him, I was setting a standard, I was setting a culture, I was setting an expectation that changed his behavior, changed how he showed up in our relationship.

So my question for you is: Do you trust yourself enough for others to trust you? Or do others not trust you because you don’t trust yourself or you don’t follow through? No follow through equals no trust.

The Reflection Principle

If your culture is weak in your company, it’s not their fault. It’s yours. You hired them, you started it, you’re calling yourself a founder or a CEO. It’s yours. They’re reflecting you.

Your confusion becomes their chaos Your absence becomes their avoidance Your inconsistency becomes their infrastructure

Your leading indicators here are confusion, absence, and inconsistency. You’re saying one thing, doing another. You’re showing up sometimes, not showing up other times. You’re showing up at different times. You’re inconsistent.

And you know what you get? You get chaos, you get avoidance and poor infrastructure. If you’re experiencing any of these things, it’s because of the inputs.

The Brutal Reality

Everything flows from you as a founder. And I don’t want you to sit here and watch this and think you’re terrible. That’s not my goal. I’m not here to tell you that you’re bad. You are a leader. You are a CEO. You are driving your business no matter what stage you are in.

People measure where they’re at as a founder based on revenue. That’s one way to do it. Another way – and I’m working on this right now, about to come out with it – is more of a storyline of developmental stages of a founder that don’t necessarily follow revenue but follow experience, development, growth stages.

I want you to know that if you are struggling with this, you are not alone. You are very normal. You are just in the stage of struggling with this. You are basically in the bottleneck stage, likely around a million, likely somewhere around there. That’s probably where you’re at, and you might be between 300,000 and 3 million. But the point is, that’s very normal.

My Turning Point

My turning point happened around this same point. I was starting to feel it at 300,000. It kept me from getting to a million. I finally broke through because of the leadership lessons I learned.

At this point in my company, we had 10 team members, a million dollars in revenue, a dozen clients, and I was carrying my family and team, not building a culture. Mind you, I have 4 children and a wife. My mistakes were lowering my standards and rushing hires to offload pain, not build the future. I was acquiring team members, having more kids, building without really building, if that makes any sense.

I had a few shifts that I want to share with you:

Mindset Shift

I had to stop being the savior of every problem. Stop fixing, and start being the standard bearer. Big difference: If you want to fix a problem, be the savior. If you want to build a legacy, set standards. Your legacy is based on the standards you set that others hold when you die. Because if you’re the savior, as soon as you’re gone, it’s over.

Performance Shift

You can’t expect high performance results from low performance standards. I was expecting high performance from my team without really setting a bar or setting my own bar. I was living a low bar on my own.

Back in 2021-2022, I was 50-ish pounds overweight, a functional alcoholic, drinking a couple bottles of whiskey a week, Netflix binging at night, hungover every day, trying to make it through the day, wondering why I wasn’t growing and building my team. I had clients following me. I had kids following me. I had team members following me. And I was expecting prolific performance from all of these people. But I was – not to put too fine a point on it – not living up to my own standards.

Legacy

Trust isn’t taught. It’s transferred. When I trusted myself enough to raise my standards for myself, my team then learned to trust me. Only when I could get to this point was I able to build the team, and the team would build the business.

Culture = Standards + Trust

Culture is a combination of standards and trust. When you have standards and when you have trust, it equals culture. But here’s the problem: Most leaders build backwards.

If you’re like most founders, you start with shortcuts, not standards. Every time we want to grow, every time we want to build, every time we want to create, we start with the easy route, and we try to go at scale with the shortcut. Isn’t that funny?

For example, clients come to our marketing company wanting to grow their business. They want to market and sell. They want to increase revenue. They come in with massive goals – 10x revenue. But what they want to do is throw money at ads, rebuild their website, and make a ton of content.

Nothing wrong with ads, website, and content. But those are at-scale ways to grow a following, to grow a business, to build a brand. They are not aligned with you doing anything. You’re just outsourcing a bunch of work. That’s a shortcut to growth. Growth starts inside.

Most leaders build backwards. They start with the outside, all the external things. Real growth starts inside and works its way out.

Practical Shifts

Here’s how you can take this topic and work it out in your real life:

1. Sniff Out Your Shortcuts

What shortcuts are you trying to take in order to accomplish something? List the behaviors, shortcuts, or compromises you’ve been accepting. That’s really hard to think about, so if you have to ask someone, ask someone. Your spouse knows. Your kids know. Your team knows.

For me, instead of dealing with my feelings and my fears back in 2021-2022, I drank. That’s a shortcut because it cuts short my feelings, and I couldn’t even see clearly.

2. Raise Your Standards

Raise your standards before expecting things from other people that you are not doing yourself. Model it. Your family, your team, your friends – they watch what you do, not what you say.

If you want sales to be done a certain way from your sales team, model it. Sit in the chair and do it.

3. Conquer Before You Coach

Don’t just model it and send it. Show them the proof of the results, the outcomes. Master your disciplines, habits, and standards before trying to instill them in others. Leadership flows from personal mastery.

I didn’t start talking about leadership the moment I realized I needed to grow as a leader. I made a big shift a few years ago and spent a few years working this out. I wanted to make sure I could exercise consistently before talking about health. I didn’t talk about that when I was 50 pounds overweight, when I hadn’t run a half marathon, when I wasn’t going to the gym, when I was eating donuts. That was something that I mastered – my health – and I can talk about that now.

A Unified Team Is The Only Way

Relationships determine results. If you’re a founder, if you’re a leader, you started this thing because you wanted to build something beyond yourself. You wanted to build something that was bigger than you. You wanted freedom of some sort.

Your legacy isn’t the company you build or the money you make. Those are material tools, resources on the way to building a legacy. Legacy is the culture that survives without you. Your standards are your legacy, not your standard of living. When you’re gone, all that remains is the standards you set for others because of the standards you set for yourself.

This Week’s Challenge

Take one standard you’ve been tolerating. Raise it for yourself this week and watch culture follow. Watch culture in your home follow. Watch culture at work follow.

Don’t say anything. Here’s the challenge: Don’t tell anybody what you want. Do this as a test. Don’t say “I want you to do this.” Just be it. Do it yourself.

It’s not gonna happen instantly. But what you embody will permeate.

That’s the talk. That’s what I got. Thank you for joining. Every Thursday, 1 PM Mountain Time. Hope to have you join and watch in the future. Have a great rest of your day.