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

Transcript from https://podmenti.com/t/c1de7e724d9fafb6

Today's moment episode is with Mr Beast, 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.
Great people just love working with great people. They do. And there's something about being around great people that

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 turn into a different human than 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've like put two or three C players amongst a bunch of great people and they'll start
pulling'em down, they'll start making'em 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 kinda 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.
Um
I mean not everyone can be these like
World ending monsters. 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 gotta 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'cause that's like
That's like the number one reason why people leave jobs isn't
Money. You know what I mean? It's that's like number four on the list. Don't ask me to list 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.
Have you ever been frustrated that
The people you've hired.
Don't match your level of obsession.
No, because I just find the people that do.
Are there people that do? Oh yeah. I've there's so many people in my uh business um
I mean, obviously you have to take care of them well. Like they're they're not the kind of people that'll just make the st standard rate, but
Um
Yeah, like people like Tyler, Klitzner, Russ and
you know, even people on our editing team, I mean they're putting in
Most weeks same hour same amount of hours as me and they're all in, see the vision.
It's like
It's hard to find those kinds of people, but um
You know, when you do you gotta
treasure them and recognize that they're unicorns.
And you have almost five hundred roughly five hundred people? Uh probably uh I think in the production company were around three hundred, feast was around a hundred, and then probably another
Forty, fifty scattered amongst everything else.
Most founders that I speak to describe
Scaling headcounts is
the kind of worse past part of the job. More people, more problems, right? Yeah, that's uh that's an understatement. Yep especially as someone like you who's a creative at heart and who
is very focused and obsessed on
I guess the show and producing as you say often the
I I wanna produce the best videos we possibly can.
First. And then all this other shit comes with it.
Which is like.
Yeah.
Which every founder I speak to hates.
I mean, yeah. I the the worst part is
I just have this very once in a
Um I just very rare opportunity where I have so much attention and so many people watch my content and
And I wish I had I just wish I had more experience building businesses. You know, I'm only twenty six and
This is my first
Real business of
Every every employee milestone we hit, it's my first time hitting that, right? Like
I hit a hundred employees.
That was my first time getting there. And this th this was my first time going from a hundred to two hundred, two hundred, three hundred. And like
With what I know now, I could have done it so much faster, obviously.
And it's just you know, it's a little brutal.
Because like
You like sc scaling feasibles from you know
zero to hundred was way easier than doing my production company because I had been through the ringer before and I learned a bunch and I get better with time.
And I it's just the mo honestly the most annoying part is just ignorance, right? Like'cause a lot of things
Mistakes I make, I look back and I'm like, Oh
Yeah, I probably should have brought in people with more experience working
at a larger company earlier here, I waited a little too long here. I probably should have and it's just like
Brutal because if I had known these things I'd be way further along. But I mean, that's just how you learn. You just gotta make ten thousand mistakes.
Every phonist is the same.
Every finder I've spoken to says the same that unknown unknowns.
Exactly. So that's where
I mean, my big thing recently has just been trying to find people who have
successfully skilled businesses and like bring them into my organization and learn from them because I'm just so tired of
Like being like fuck.
I should have known better, but I didn't because I've never done this before and so I'm trying to
find a lot of great people who have been through it so they can like kinda mentor me along the way so I make
Less mistakes, which has been really good. Um we brought in a new C suite recently.
Um
I it's like always a hard balance because I try not to
In the past I
I've like, you know, decisions are kinda like pendulums and I have a
Uh
A problem where I like I'll identify something and I'll overcorrect the pendulum one way and then like uh no, I should have just stopped in the middle. And like my overcorrection of the past was like
corporate people try to build too many systems and they kill innovation and so I was very
Anti like
people with too much corporate experience'cause they're gonna just destroy all the creativity.
But you know, that's why we're making so many organizational fuck ups because we don't have anyone who's actually built the business at this size. And so, you know, the pendulum was on the right and I swung it all the way to the left of
No corporate and now I think we're in the healthy medium where
You know, obviously the people in our C suite and
the leaders should have lots of experience managing people at this size and scale, but it's just finding the right people
who can do it and build systems in a way where it doesn't crush creativity and they actually value the product.
Over ease.
Did I ever see you in my
I'm on the a T V show called Dragons that in the UK and
Um my
stuff is significantly smaller. It's like a percentage of your your viewership. But even I am slightly terrified.
with hiring people because it's quite clear to me that there's a huge incentive for anyone that I work with
To say that I did something bad. And in the early days of my first business.
Um, what happens is the journalists go to everyone that works there.
Yep. And they asked them what was he like?
You you have the same problem. You have the same conundrum where anyone has an incentive that works for you.
When they leave.
So many different incentives.
To throw an an arrow at you.
On the way out the door. How how do you
Contend with this.
Yeah, I mean you hit it on the head of uh you know, I have four or five hundred people right now, but we've also worked with thousands of people in the past and
So I think it's just what comes with it, but
At the end of the day, you know, as long as what we're doing is moral and ethical, like like you said, they're gonna throw arrows, but
You know, I I'm just a problem solver. It's like
Whenever I see the a metaphorical arrow, I just go
You know, what's the problem and if we did something wrong, how do we fix it? Or if it's not an actual problem, it's just rumors. I mean
It is what it is. And so
Yeah, I think it just comes with part of it. Um I mean it sucks and it's unfortunate.
You also to think like
Most people don't like their jobs too. And so it's not like this is even specific to our industry. Like, you know, just go ask a hundred random Americans of of all the jobs that worked in their life, how many did they deeply enjoy? And
D would they have nothing negative to say. So I think it's just
Part of it, you know, um it's almost like
A pastime for a lot of people just to like trash talk their old jobs or whatever.
I hope you found today's conversation helpful and insightful. If you're ready to join two and a half million other small businesses already using LinkedIn for hiring, head over to LinkedIn.com slash DOAC now. That's LinkedIn.com slash D O A C to find your next exceptional hire.