How VaynerMedia is Using Kind Candor To Put Employees First

if one person listening to this podcast tomorrow sets up a meeting with their actual boss and actually delivers what's on their mind that may save them for being able to stay in a company they actually like a lot of things of the garyvee audio experience podcast friends how are you uh very excited about this as all of you know i'm not doing a whole lot of original um interviews these days kind of busy head down but uh very special guest here uh um in a second i'll let him i'll let beth really introduce herself in her own words and i'll go into a series of questions but uh this has been a long one in the making that i'm excited about and hopefully a lot of people get a lot of value out of it so without further ado beth why don't you take the floor for three or four minutes here and give everybody a little 4-1-1 on what you and your sister and organization do a little bit about yourself and then we'll go into some q a all right sure hi gary hi everyone listening i'm beth weisenberger co-founder with my youngest sister lauren zander of handel group we built handel group 17 years ago and it was our first year like is there such a thing as executive life coaching 17 years ago we were made fun of we were not you know the first question out of everyone's mouth is are you a doctor and we're like yeah no we're not we are executive life coaches and we gave ourselves a year to see if we could build a company or not and here it is 17 years later we're the largest executive life coaching company and we have about 70 people who work for us and i coach c-suite executives like gary so yes i am gary vee's coach um and about 21 22 other executives leadership um executives in his org and then about total of about 500 people are engaged in the coaching in one way or another through interview or one-on-one coaching and that is what i do for a living is i go into companies triple their businesses and raise the bar of humanity and learning to human better um with all the people that we coach so that's me in a nutshell prior to you and your sister going into this let's go back to little beth i always like to do a little you know a just to paint pictures for the audience like what kind of girl were you growing up like creative were you athletes were you student where did you grow up give us a little context i want to get to i want to do three minutes to the moment of you and your sis and then we'll go into you know executive coaching and common themes we have a lot of entrepreneurs a lot of executives who listen to this so i want to spend a lot of this on common themes and i'll go into it you know one of the breakthroughs no question that i think you've been instrumental in for vayner and me uh but let's go go a little bit further back like to my childhood yes so i was raised so i'm 62 years old i'm the oldest of three other siblings um my brother matthew my sister marnie and sister lauren we were raised as i said orthodox jews in long island so i'm from the five towns lawrence none of the four children turned out orthodox jews um we honor spirituality and i you know i dig being jewish about as far as it goes my father is 85 still a modern orthodox jew mother never really was um she told us the secret she was keeping um for 50 years is that she never cooked you know you're not supposed to eat um dairy and meat together and my mother said confessed to my father oh i always cooked with dairy and milk it would only make it better and all he did was spit his food up he laughed because you know what's he gonna do they're 85 years old now i love it i um was an athlete i was number one on my tennis um team volley uh you know in high school volleyball team track meet i did all of that um when i was older um my daughter had me um start riding horses at 50 years old so i rode for eight years and um and now i water scheme my boyfriend made me get up on water ski so i do that too what about from a student or entrepreneurial lens horrible bad girl do not anyone my lesson in life was if i could do it again i would do it better you know in high school i had to i was punished by my parents brutal brutally if i didn't get b pluses anything less than a b no sleepovers no phone calls you know for me right so i was bro i was punished constantly oh yeah i was grounded literally from fourth grade to senior year of high school i stayed grounded yeah mine was although i never tell the act the accurate story because i used to say my mother used to hit me which she did but my mother had five rules the fifth rule was if you don't follow the four i'm gonna sock you so she won right i was the rebel i was like yeah you i ain't listening to you and so i in high school obviously i wanted sleepovers and a phone so i kept the promise of replacing by the way for all the kids that are listening the phone was not the mobile phone it was having access to water bring it downstairs and plug it in the basement so no one could hear you right and then um college i finished i started university of michigan and finished at nyu i studied to be an actress never did that um how was michigan was that a fun experience or did you talk about fun year and a half um i was there for a year i did college in three years so a year and a half there love did it was [ __ ] cold as goddamn hell um but you know i loved the football and i loved all that stuff i got out of the small town and got far away from my parents and then i came back to nyu and graduated there is that because you wanted to do actress life and you needed to be in new york i was going to be an actress and daddy i need to be at nyu right so you know spoiled total royal brat that i was and you know my poor dad i have apologized and i would never do it this way again and just for my own fun because now i'm enjoying myself here when did you realize actress life was not how quickly into that journey did that happen that i ended that at about 21 i graduated college and then i got into the whole world of humaning and transformation and wanting to save the people and so i left acting right away interesting yeah what uh talk to me about your sis because i know this offline a little bit your sis came like was doing her thing like give me there's a lot of lauren xander yeah lauren xander is 11 years younger than me she is no kidding um the genius she is the chairman to my vice chairman in the company i'm running the company day to day uh she is my boss deserves to be my boss and she invented all the method that were teaching at vayner media and you know and um and all the different companies like nation and insurance companies is all my sister's method that she invented and then i took it and figured out how to get it grounded and sold you know to clients big ones talk to me about let's jump around here a little bit so tell us you know she comes with this stuff you guys sit down you decide to start this business yep a lot of people who listen to this also want to be in the service business like hey hire me to do x whether that's be an nft artist right now whether that's to be a content creator a

consultant how did you get your first clients raid making baby it's rain making you know my sister and i are rain makers right so you know we were not we had a method my sister's method right and then we were just we had a rolodex we did not believe in cold calling let me go cold call all the linkedin connections i got we're not that gang right like you meet us you love us you want our method we're getting in and so we really were um all our relationships is who we you know went and spoke to and when we got our first big corporate client um we then knew we had to deliver and we tripled his business and then it just became word of mouth we're still in the word of mouth business um in the company that we're in we're i'm not gonna have people cold call i'm not that girl right so it's all relationship building so i get my job done with you garyvee and then someone's gonna recommend or hear about that and then they want to know can you do that for my company of course always worked like that so literally again because what i try to use this platform for is really help the people on the other side okay you you believe 17 years of success that when you have a quality product if you're able to you know remember you and your sis had a rolodex to kind of tap into from your years of doing whatever you were doing in the past you were able to kind of land you know in that in that networking of the people that you've had relations with both of you you're able to get one of those several dozens of people to say yes you were able to execute thus it created leverage for word of mouth going forward yes you're uh what would you say to the person that's listening right now and saying beth i've got the husband like you me and my sister just like you guys but we're both 25 and we really don't have that much of a roll of dex and thoughts on that just out of curiosity where yeah one thing that we believed that we did right like what got us into mit so we wanted to make a difference in the whole university world education world help the students help the administrators and so one of the ways that we worked is we would go hey gary you're a professor at mit we knew that this professor happened to want to get married and had an awful love life my sister said all right i'll coach you on my diamond get you married you get me into mit and they made that deal and we got in same way we got into stanford and we teach there for credit now right same way um and most of the corporations in the beginning that i got in i would either with the president or the head of hr your you know your chief human resource officer um or someone accountable for marketing i go let me give you 30 minutes or an hour you see and then tell me if you want to bring us in so we stay there for a second one thing that i hear a lot about is people um demonizing free work and you just you know put it on a pedestal curious to you know i'm sure you've seen this over the last five to seven 10 15 years there's a lot of conversations like never do spec work never do free work it doesn't seem like you know i'm not on that camp yeah no if you're 25 years old and you say you have a product that rocks and you want in my business i'm not going to pay for it i don't know you don't come with anything so give me a trial and then if i love it i'm going to i'm going to want tell my other people about it so we were what do you and what do you say i got some of my biggest nfl players was like let me give you i don't want they all think i'm going to come for your money no i'm going to give you two free sessions and if you like what i just gave you then you buy if you don't like what i gave you what's the big deal you got two free sessions i met an nfl player i made a difference but guess what every nfl player that i ever gave two free coaching sessions to my clients beth what about the people who took three sessions and didn't become clients what do you say i send them away with love they don't either have the money what i did they didn't like who cares that was 30 minutes out of my friggin life maybe an hour out of my entire life that i gave it away i believe in sorry it's weird but i believe in paying it forward you pay it forward it's coming back now i don't pay it forward to get it back but why wouldn't i do that like if i want to start in this build a sports division and i've never done that before like i could say well it translates from business to sports now i know it does but the athlete doesn't so let me just do this for you and i that's how we started our business and it worked and here we are for the

individuals who um who have companies yeah and have 6 12 22 212 employees let's rattle off in this podcast themes that you see that are common i want to say universal because every situation is different but there's a lot of commonalities yeah these things what are some of the things that you see that are common in companies that lead to bad cultures or vulnerabilities or limited growth well i'm gonna say one of yours you ready i'm ready all right so i know you gave your culture a b minus and so once you know we raised the bar and now it's a b minus okay far out so then what's in there and so last week i did a session with nick and a bunch of his svps on removing gossip from the workplace gossip is one of the main culprits that if you do not remove it from your culture and then put in how do you have hard conversations so we can talk about klein candor but you got to teach people how do you do candor right like if i'm not gonna gossip and talk about you know go to somebody who can't do anything about it and tell you crap right i gotta take that out but then i gotta teach you go have the courage to go have the conversation whether it's with garyvee whether it's with this executive or this person so gossip is one of the main culprits in an organization give me i love that and i couldn't agree more give me a couple more because i really want people to leave here with like huh that is going on in my shop you

know what are what talk to me about actually let me throw a couple things at you and then you'll add what about insecurity of upper management when you hear that how does that play out in your mind so if someone comes to me who's like ins has a whole negative dialogue about the leadership before i'm gonna go anywhere near the leadership you know i really do believe in accountability so what is this human why is this human sitting around complaining to themselves and likely other people about they're not digging on the leadership all right well what the frig are you doing about it so i would start with there being what we call a chicken and avoiding the conversations i would then help them to stop being a chicken and script the conversation that they have to go have with leadership right like so if you've got your junior people talking trash about the leaders it's twofold you got junior people being chickens not able to go speak to them and then leaders why do you have people so scared of you that they can't come talk to you so it works both ways they don't feel safe enough to go up and then i'd have to talk to the up the leaders and go what are you doing not making it safe enough for people to come to you to let you know what's not working but from your perspective all these years what perce this is such an arbitrary question and you'll do your best to answer it but i'm really just fascinated what percentage of companies do you think are being led by fear and optimism and offense and trying to eliminate fear just from your perspective through the years i'm just curious all the doors that you've brought you see i think no matter in every company i've been in and like i've told you i loved that you had created in your culture the honey empire right but we had to deal with that it was a lot of honey and not a lot of us you know can you to your point earlier the big breakthrough you've done for you know me which you know has is a really important part like this term kind candor and to your point now we have to operationalize it but even in standing up and having an entire company meeting and explaining to everyone you know back to accountability hey i have very big ambitions for our culture we've done a lot of things right by standards one of the biggest compliments in my 23 years of operating was your assessment when you came in and said hey you actually have a lot of good [ __ ] going on here you know and our entitlement and our you know my inability and this always blows my fans minds i always tell them i'm like public figure me great at candor because there's no human on the other side i'm speaking into truths right i'm speaking on stage so garyvee brings a lot of value to people calendar-wise but gary vaynerchuk the ceo really struggled you know and you know through another part of my life i was able to realize my dad's negative vessel to delivering candor was what i was not fond of the energy of the candor i had to take years to separate the vessel from the actual thing candor and the way that i've tried to position it kind candor i think is now an essential element of our culture and is moving us up um we needed that bad um and it's really made a huge impact um but uh but i think it's always interesting to see what commonalities and shortcomings companies have yeah let me give you another one so another one

is um and again in your culture and i'm starting to work on it with your executives and will with you in our coaching session tomorrow is that the language of accountability so garyvee you got a language for sure for um wine right so like there's languages i don't have any language for wine i go i like it i don't like it is the extent of my language the language of accountability is very important in fact i think that's what will impact the empire side of your honey empire what i mean by the language of accountability first and foremost is the ability to own when you're not going to keep a friggin promise that does not make you a bad person at all it depends on how you own it when you just blew a promise so if you blow a promise i don't want to hear gary i didn't do it i said cause you know this happened and this and they didn't return my email and then so there's no like there's just hi i know i said i would do that i didn't do it that is clearly unacceptable here's what i'll do about it here's when it will be done and did you know i'm a little concerned that i'm not going to be able to deliver on this exactly on wednesday before the deliverable is due on friday even though i know you're hoping you will get it done and that you won't get in trouble and it won't no one then says on wednesday okay listen i'm a bit i'm behind i'm messed this is dude friday it's not gonna happen here's what i'm gonna do about it did that mess you up etc so there's a language of owning when you're not going to do what you said even the ceo gary every ceo is allowed to change their mind you could have said i love changing my mind right i know you do but you i do i mean i know but you have to be able to own it rather than explain it because at the end of the day no one wants to freaking hear your explanation about why you just freaking changed your mind again or are not going to do what you said they just want to be able to hear beth listen i know i told you i was going to do that not going to do it with you but here's what i'm going to do about it and then let them speak so there's a language of accountability that's

missing in most companies love that beth how many people end up leaving companies that were actually good jobs for them strictly because they were unable to have the proper conversation you know when i think about all the people that have left you know i get it on the receiving end i get people that email four or five years later that regret leaving because they didn't take care of one little thing that became a big thing you know and by the way i have enough self-awareness and accountability to know that if i didn't have the luxury of being a ceo and like being a business owner my lack of wanting to have confrontation and candor would have meant that i probably would have been that kind of employee that [ __ ] things are it's easier for me to move on then i mean i think about it in a lot of parts of my life when i was you know why i broke up with girlfriends as a kid when it could have been addressed but because i didn't want to address it yeah you know so what when you hear me frame up that question cause i'm trying to think about like there's a far majority of people that are listening right now that are employees that have little micro problems and i just think that whole framework that you and your cis have around the chicken could be stunningly impactful on if one person listening to this podcast tomorrow sets up a meeting with their actual boss and actually delivers what's on their mind that may save them for being able to stay in a company they actually like a lot of things of yeah i feel that a lot of people leave a lot of companies or let a seed become cancer please yeah let me address it so it's actually and i've done this with a bunch of your people it's in inner you in module seven it's called career haunted why don't you tell everybody how you expanded your business to not just be human but platform yeah so let me answer this and then i'll tell you so this is i'm speaking about everyone inneru which is our online coaching module 12 modules so interview life career love student we have different ones but in module 7 in the career one it's a career haunting now what's a career haunting it's something that happened so let's say however old you are you've had a million experiences and when we ask you for your career haunting let's say you've got five to ten of them the question is why does that haunt you and the other 999 000 experiences don't because the way you tell that story has a lie in it or you didn't learn the right lesson so the and most people the right lesson is speak up use your voice why did you let that person do that to you when you didn't say anything and then they leave the job and you learned the wrong lesson called hello use your voice go ask your boss why did you do that when you said you were gonna do this like there's a conversation and so the hauntings will keep happening to you in your life over and over until you learn the right lesson beth how when people come to you and say beth i hear you shoot it straight i love this set you know long island you and gary spent you know if they hit you up on social or something for this you guys spend a ton of time on shooting it straight and the candor thing which makes sense because that was such a big framework for us we had strengths but this was a weakness but but [ __ ] that you two were wrong i shoot it straight all the time and i'm always getting in trouble i'm always getting fired yeah the person who's listening here that that i got yeah because i think it's gonna help because i i've noticed that yeah let me finish this because i think you got me but i want to make sure everybody gets it for the person that hears this and says well this is the wrong advice i've had a very difficult time in my career because i've been fired multiple times because the boss doesn't actually want to hear the truth what's the common mistake for the person that finds themselves cancerous what are they missing you're missing empathy you're missing the kindness side you're missing your heart you can't hit somebody upside the head with the brick with no heart you'll leave them bloody so even though your message might be accurate if you do it with a punch with no kindness and no empathy and no caring about the human high you kind of deserve the smack right easy easy for people who are bosses or leaders or owners thoughts for the people a lot of times i find that employees don't feel they need to do that because the machine the bosses have the leverage do you know i've noticed you know i've tried to coach and talk to a lot of like i'm like look just because yes you're a junior employee bricks still make bosses bleed too correct incorrect what are your thoughts oh you can't you'll get it's disrespect i'm the boss gonna feel disrespected right and or that you're not loyal or whatever the pet peeve is for that boss there's no you don't ever want to disrespect someone it's always how can i let you know what isn't working for me from my heart so you can hear me right and then we can have a conversation people it's not you know your boss your manager they care about you i know you've come up with whatever story you now believe and gathering evidence for but you're gathering evidence and you're going to be walking right out the door so the main principle is whatever you believe you prove if you believe your boss doesn't like you you're going to keep proving it and therefore you won't go speak to them so you don't want to get stuck with that belief because likely it's not true even though you're gathering evidence for it the last three minutes of this podcast i want to give you the platform a how can people find you because i know plenty well b what did we not touch on that you'd love to touch on okay great thanks gary you can find me um at handel group beth

p-e-t-h at handel group h-a-n-d-e-l group. com um and then you can just shoot me an email or a note you can find me on instagram handle group you'll see all our content and go on there because we drop content all the time that you can listen to myself or any one of my coaches and help you whether it's in a you know you'll see like today i'm going to be doing boundaries around saying yes it is a nose um and then the other thing everyone of course for gary's listeners um and gary's got about 500-ish people in this program it's called inter-u it's our online coaching modules our coaching course and for the listeners you can get interu life for half off up until march 31st so for 325 it is a genius course it's our whole entire coaching program and you get one free coaching session with it not me but one of my coaches um and use the coupon gary who should they ask for on the one coaching thing no you're not them okay all right just having a little coupon garyvee the half off okay you created something so there's a garyvee for that gary thank you absolutely nice yes all right i'm coming for you tomorrow in your coach i know i'm looking forward to it team everybody's listening look i've i in another life will be able to like have beth at her sister's job i love this [ __ ] and i think that for me through the years i've been able to do a ton of this stuff insular but there's just something so incredible with different terminology different voices different energies it's like anything in life and i think the more everybody starts to expand on that awareness like no matter how good you have it it's like anything else it's good but there's always it's like a seesaw there's always the other things that come along with that good in vayner land over the last 20 years it's been really good by macro comparison but candor was an incredible the important one and standing up the term kind candor made it even more palpable and scaled and there's plenty of more things but that's for an instance so hope everybody continues on their journey beth thank you so much you and the handheld group for the impact you've had on our org other orgs and i hope this podcast leads to a couple other people getting uh getting some uh advancements in their journey i know you're in costa rica so go enjoy the weather thank you for being on bye-bye thank you so much bye everybody youtube watcher what's up it's garyvee first of all thank you so much i hope you're doing super well during these times i also want to ask you please subscribe because my commitment and exploration of youtube is about to explode stories polls more content more engagement more surprise and delight this is the time to subscribe i hope you consider it and i hope i see you soon