How McDonald’s Taught Me to Fix My Business

Hiring people will teach you more about leadership, patience, and your own blind spots than any business book ever could. I spent years blaming lazy freelancers and “bad hires,” until I realized the real issue was me. I was expecting passion from people just showing up for a paycheck. In this episode, I’m breaking down how I went from micromanaging chaos to finally scaling without losing my mind. If you’re done playing team babysitter, let’s talk.

[0:37]
I’m Igor Kheifets, and this is The ListBuilding Lifestyle. The podcast is for anyone who wants to build a wildly profitable email list working from home. If you’d like to make six figures, travel the world and help people improve their lives in the process, this podcast is for you. I also invite you to claim a free copy of my best selling book, The List Building Lifestyle Confessions of an Email Millionaire at www.igorsbook.com
Get the free book plus $3,000 bonus package that includes my best capture page templates, email swipe files and traffic blueprints, visit www.igorsbook.com for details, And now it’s time to claim your List Building Lifestyle!

[1:23]
One of the biggest shifts in how I had to behave happened when I started growing my team, and I basically started bringing in people to work with me and educating them about what we’ve done. And at the time, I didn’t understand anything about different personalities and how different people have different talents and different tempers and different love languages. I basically was improvising just like most of us, or should I say, everybody!

And as I was improvising, my first two, three years hiring people or even working with freelancers, it was very difficult! I had people miss deadlines, I had people flat out lie to me, I had people steal from me, both money and leads. Surprisingly, the person who stole leads from me was my brother that I mentioned, because he worked for me for a period of time as well. And then I had like, unintentional nasty things happen, like, for example, an email being sent out to 100,000 people with a dead link, which ends up costing me money, all kinds of stuff like that! I’ve also been hacked many times, I’ve been hacked by Russian hackers, I’ve been hacked by Anonymous hackers, I’ve been hacked by Bitcoin ransomware hackers. If you don’t know what that is, it’s when they steal all your files and they encrypt them and they demand several bitcoins as payment.

[3:03]
So, all that happened, and like, for example with hiring people to do work for me, I had to learn a lot of patience. My first six months were the most painful, because I thought that people were just, that they could be better, but they were, on purpose, lazy! Then, at some point, I changed my approach to building better systems. It was after reading books like “The E-Myth Revisited” by Michael E. Gerber, “Work the System” by Sam Carpenter.

Basically, I had to take responsibility for the fact that my systems were crap, and I was trying to replace myself with people who didn’t have 1/10 of the same passion for what I was doing as I had, and so, they weren’t willing to put in as much work, as much attention to detail and as much commitment. So, this taught me to build systems so foolproof that I could put a person who didn’t even care, but they could just execute mechanically, and the system would continue to work. Now, that alone doesn’t sum up the whole thing, but that was like at least 60% of the battle, is to create better systems that leave fewer opportunities for mistakes, and at that point, you just gotta make sure that that person is trained to run the checklist.

[4:38]
On this whole premise McDonald’s built one of the greatest franchises in the world and launched the whole franchise industry because they figured out, Ray Kroc figured out that it’s not the fries that was the reason for McDonald’s success, it’s the fact that they systematized their whole delivery system and the product creation system to a point where they had teenagers running the show, and they could produce the exact same burger, the exact same fries and the exact same milkshake every time, thousands of times a day. So, that’s an example!

[5:12]
You assume that that’s the game, and you play the game, right! So, have you ever heard the famous saying, “Don’t hate the player, hate the game”, something like that! What I really think it should be is that you play the game the way you’re supposed to play it to win. You don’t complain about the rules, and you don’t complain about the game. You just play the damn game, right? If you don’t want to play it, don’t play it! But if you play, don’t complain about it. Just, figure out a way to play it so you win.

[5:47]
Thank you for listening to The List Building Lifestyle, get access to the previous episodes, transcript of today’s show, as well as other exclusive content at www.listbuildinglifestyleshow.com. Also remember to claim your free copy of my best selling book at www.igorsbook.com. It explains how I made millions with list buildings starting from scratch, plus I’ll give you $3,000 worth of free bonuses, including my best landing page templates, email swipe files and traffic blueprints. Go to www.igorsbook.com, now to claim your free package!