Hitting Business Home Runs: Leadership Lessons from the Dugout with Trent Clark

Brent Peterson (00:02.136)
Welcome to this episode of Uncharted Entrepreneurship. Today I have Trent Clark. He is the CEO of Leadershipity and has just come out with a new book. I'm going to let Trent give you that. Trent, go ahead, do an introduction for yourself. Tell us about your new book, Leading Winning Teams, and maybe one of your passions in life.

Trent M Clark (00:25.409)
Yeah, for me, thanks so much. I'm so excited to be here. Brent, excited about the book, Leading Winning Teams, just came out in August. And of course, the Audible will come out November 12th. And one of the passions in my life is, man, right people in the right seats right now.

Brent Peterson (00:42.19)
That's awesome, yeah. So that's right at the EOS alley, right? People right seat. GWC them, right? we're gonna use them. Great, so Trent, before we get started in content, we're gonna talk a little bit about your book. We'll talk about some leadership ideas and maybe some things you've gone through. even as a baseball coach, I'm always interested in that. we'll talk, of course, we'll just exclusively talk about the Minnesota Twins. Maybe bring up 1987, 1991, which were.

Trent M Clark (00:49.463)
Yeah.

Brent Peterson (01:10.99)
pretty good years for us. But first, you have volunteered to be part of the free joke project. I have super funny joke for you today. Just give me a rating one through five. So here we go. My friend Jack thinks he can communicate with vegetables. Jack and the beans talk.

Trent M Clark (01:12.227)
Good years.

Trent M Clark (01:32.611)
Nice dad joke. That's pretty decent right there. That's gonna take a second for people to get. I'm gonna give that a four.

Brent Peterson (01:39.136)
Alright, thank you. They're all thinking jokes and that was a dumb thinking joke, but anyways, we'll leave it at that. So Trent, tell us a little bit about your background and how you got where you are today.

Trent M Clark (01:53.271)
Yeah, CEO of Leadershipity. I've run like three brands and companies all in different spaces. STR, short-term rental, we own and manage those. The leadership development firm, which is a lot like EOS, we build and double EBITDA and companies very quickly. And then I have an NIL education company, which is so hot right now in college sports, it's crazy. Now high school sports, it's going to go mad. And so...

I've spoke all over the world, 17 different countries. I love it. I just spoke for EO Pittsburgh for their new member drive and just a ton of fun. And I love the entrepreneur environment. Most people know me, know Brent, as you said, like, you know, through World Series, you know, coached for 13 years in professional baseball, coaching for the Tigers, Indians, and Agiles. I got to coach with Coach Saban and Coach Izzo at Michigan State as a strength coach there. So I've had a lot of fun on that. My passion right now is really

really getting teams aligned, getting people to understand how they can operate better and build a winning team. And I did a TEDx called the Pain Exchange, talking about the pain of discipline versus regret. And I highlight that in the book through some exercises. So that's where I spend most of my time with just helping people get better.

Brent Peterson (03:13.806)
That's great. Yeah. I'm a big believer in pain exchange. So I'm a marathon runner. just ran Chicago this last weekend and in the marathon you, hit pain and you have to have that will to finish. And then I think the part that I'm still working on, and this was 20 number 29 for me, but the part that I'm still working on is that getting that pain aside, it's all mental, right? Keep moving. And I always tell my, well, I'm a,

Trent M Clark (03:20.589)
Yeah.

Brent Peterson (03:43.726)
I do some run coaching and I tell my run coach or my my coachees or whatever you want to call them that it's 90 % mental and the other 15 % is in your head.

I usually say that around 20 miles.

Trent M Clark (03:59.974)
If you haven't read You Can't Hurt Me to understand how the power of the mind is so powerful over the body, it's crazy. I also like the longtime owner of the twins. He's featured here, Harvey McKay, on my book here. Harvey said a quote in one of his books that I really loved.

He said, everybody wants to win the day of the game, but few are willing to prepare for it. And I love that because he has a marathon or you know it's this day for that day. And you have hundreds of this day's training, training, eating right, resting, recovering, getting it for that day on the day you run the Chicago Marathon, right? There's a lot of this days for that days. And that's how discipline works. It's the discipline to do everything this day. So you get the opportunity on that day.

Brent Peterson (04:54.092)
Yeah, absolutely, and I think it's the pullettes that own the twins still. McKay might own part of the wild. But anyways.

Trent M Clark (04:58.083)
Yes. Does he still does Harvey still own? Yeah, know Harvey's got to be in his 90s, right?

Brent Peterson (05:04.268)
He was part of the wild team or the wild ownership. don't know if he is anymore, it's always been, it's been, call it the pole ad, the pole ad family has owned the twins since, geez, think since it, before the eight, before in the eighties, yeah. When they won their first world series.

Trent M Clark (05:07.745)
We have a...

Trent M Clark (05:22.405)
Okay, wow, that's crazy

Brent Peterson (05:23.916)
Yeah. Carl was part of the big contraction talk. So they tried to contract the MLS and get rid of some teams and he put out Minnesota, it'd be one of those teams because he'd get a big payout. But I think that the Polad family in the long-term has done much better by having the twins in as a team still. So anyways.

Trent M Clark (05:44.715)
Yeah, yeah, was, you know, Harvey owned a big envelope company there in Minnesota, right? He owned that group and he wrote, of course, he's more famous for the books, right? How to swim with the sharks, you know, never be cautioned, beware of the naked man who offers you a shirt, all those good ones, right? Like he had great titles.

Brent Peterson (05:49.356)
Yep, that's right.

Brent Peterson (05:54.62)
Yeah

Brent Peterson (06:04.942)
Yeah, absolutely. So you mentioned earlier just the right person, right seat, tell us that concept and why did that come to the top of mind today?

Trent M Clark (06:15.619)
Well, I like the quote from Bill Belichick, know, a long time Patriot head coach and long time NFL coach who said, I'll know I have a great team when everyone knows their role and they're doing it. And you know, for me, when I go into most organizations, Brent, there's probably 25 % or more who don't really know their role. It's not well defined for them.

And then there's another time, you know, where I go in and probably there's 40 to 50 % of the people who know their role and they're not doing it. And no one's holding them accountable. Like it's crazy that people can show up every day and do even 60, 70 % of their role. I mean, can you imagine Brent, if you paid me $200,000 and I only did 50 % of the role and then you'd like, how about I just give you a hundred? Cause you're kind of showing up halfway here and you

No one ever wants the half salary, right? They want the full salary, but they don't give the full contribution and own their responsibility. And owning your responsibility doesn't mean I have to do everything, right? It means I got to surround myself with a good team, delegate the responsibilities inside the organization and the key team members that I'm hiring to surround myself with that can help me achieve the results of my role at 100 % every time.

and contribute to the organization. And when people really get that, companies really start firing.

Brent Peterson (07:48.418)
Yeah, I think there's a two-sided table, and it's usually the employee doesn't understand that importance of being accountable and what you're accountable to. If you aren't doing your role or you don't have KPIs and in EOS, everybody should have some kind of a number, if you don't have responsibility to anything, then it's easy for the employer to come back to you and say, you're not fulfilling whatever you're supposed to be fulfilling. So there

there is a responsibility on both sides. I think it's definitely on the employer to apply whatever expectations they have on the employee. But in the cases where employers don't understand or don't know, and I think you mentioned that maybe higher income people are one of those sometimes that if the employer doesn't feel as though they are fulfilling what they're obligated to fulfill,

They're just going to let them go. And if you don't have any metrics behind that, it's very easy to make that decision as an employer.

Trent M Clark (08:49.047)
I think it's a great point from an employee standpoint. Like, hey, if there's a measurement on how I contribute, no one gets rid of contributors. Like, everyone wants more. You and I, Brent, as coaches and leaders and business owners, we've said this at least 20 times in our life. Diana, she's the best. Love her. I'll take 10 more just like her. What are we actually saying? We don't need a clone of Diana. We need the right attitude, the effort.

the attention to detail, the results in her KPIs, like exceeding her number, like her number's a minimum, not a maximum. She's not going to trying to hit it. Every number that she is measuring is well beyond the minimum standard. And so I think it's a great way for employees to recognize like, hey, this is how I contribute. This is how I show up really well. And I think the other thing that's really important for employees who want to advance.

who feel like, Brent, I could be part of your executive team and I should be in that. And you're like, great. The only thing Brent can measure them on is how they're doing in their current role. Like, I could be one day the vice president over all of sales in North America for Starbucks. And I could be great at that job. But today, I'm running a store in West Michigan, one of 12 in our district.

And my next step is to become the district manager. Well, if my store is the 14th out of the 15 stores in West Michigan in the district, I'm probably not being considered for district manager, right? Like, because they're considering the people who run the top two stores, not only in our district, but they're probably also considering the top two people in the neighboring districts who might be upgraded and say, hey, you can come over and run this district that's close enough to you.

that you could come over and do it and you've done so well at running your store, we'd love to see you run the district as well as your store. Meanwhile, Trent, at number 14 in the district, is not getting an opportunity to run anything because I'm not managing very well right where I'm at. So I tell a lot of people, be present. Be where your feet are at, right? This is where you've got to show up and contribute right where you're at and be the best you can be.

Brent Peterson (11:13.078)
Yeah. What do you say to the business owner? say it's store number 13 and he's hearing from his manager all the time, all these excuses about why their store isn't performing and they're not actually giving you anything that's concrete or objective. They're just giving you some subjective things. Do you lean in and just start applying more more KPIs or more and more objective criteria that they can then perform on?

Trent M Clark (11:36.759)
Yeah, yeah, that's really fair, right? Like if I'm gonna have the 14th ranked store because of geography, this store doesn't have the same level of bandwidth and the right corner of town that everyone's passing through and it doesn't have as much sales, great. I certainly understand that, but let's just go, we've got a historical number on this store, so let me run this store at a greater and higher percentage.

than this store has ever run. Now that may only put me in number eight in the 15 districts, but how I'll overcome it to become the district manager is I will take a store and I will have gained and created two times the value of whatever that store has ever done. And now it may still not be number one or two, but they can see the improvements I've made inside that store.

that has never been ranked inside the top eight and go, wow, this is crazy. This store has actually never finished higher than 12 in our district. How did Trent do that? Let's look at that and let's look at what's going on because that's just as good, if not a better story, than, hey, I'm running the number one store and it's always been number one.

Brent Peterson (12:53.346)
Yeah. So, I mean, it brings you back to a lot of ideas around the, just a percentage increase and not just looking at raw numbers, but looking at how well you're performing according to the numbers you have. If we take a sports analogy, in baseball, if you're hitting the ball one out of three times, you're incredibly successful. And if you're taking that into a business analogy, you could be losing, right? So that's just, that's a good indication of like applying the numbers in the right way.

Trent M Clark (13:14.22)
Yeah.

Trent M Clark (13:23.875)
Yeah, that's exactly right, right? You're exactly right. You hit a ball in play for a hit one out of three times in that league, that's worth $25 million a year. And everyone else considered 33 % is failing, right? But the context is, is this is a David and Goliath story, right? It's Brent's pitching and he gets eight of his closest friends to help get Trent out the batter, right? And it's like one versus nine and I'll even add ...

sideline Sam and sideline Steve as you got the first and third baselines, you've got 11 defenders out there. Because no matter how hard you hit it, if you hit it foul and it doesn't go in play, it'll never be a hit, but you can still make it out. So there's a lot of challenges that stand up against that hitter. So as David takes his little swing out and throws his little stone out, listen, if he's successful one out of three, it's worth a lot of money. So in context.

man, if I only made one out of three payments to my banker, he'd probably be coming from my house, right? So like, it's all relative to how we're gonna do that. So we have to take it in context and we have to understand our numbers.

Brent Peterson (14:38.763)
How do you apply what you've learned in the professional sports world to business? And I've heard a lot of people talk about that, but what is your sort of high level application of how you've gotten good feedback from sports and then applied it to business?

Trent M Clark (14:47.619)
Yeah.

Trent M Clark (14:54.731)
Yeah. Well, there's so many things that cross over Brent. It's amazing. It's literally what leading winning teams is all about. It is literally about all the things I've learned from athletics and sport that now transition into leading your church, you know, being a contributor to society. Like what are all these valued things I got? And first of all, the first one is probably the most important, which is, you know, a discipline, right?

Sports gives us discipline, sports gives us this is what we're going to learn, and we get coaching and feedback, so we get coachability, which is a huge asset. So if I'm gonna hire anybody inside my organization, I want like ASIS, so I want this card, right? So sports is great at giving you coachability because you get the best in the world and pro sports, and then you get the best coaches too, and they come alongside you and give you feedback and guide you. It always throws me, Brent,

When I run into someone how we're coaching and my organization goes into an organization led by a 45 year old or let's say a 47 year old who hasn't had a coach since they left high school sport or high school music, whatever it is. That's 30 years without a coach. Like that's crazy. So having a coach and being coachable is really a big deal. The next one is hyper learning, right? It's...

You know, if you can't learn fast and adapt and then execute on what you have to adapt to, that is a huge skill. Adaptability is one of those huge itties that we have to have. And hyper learning is in like three real true environments I've seen in my lifetime. Pro sports, if you can't learn fast and you can't execute, you die. They don't need you. You're, you're fired. Literally in special forces, you have to adapt fast or you literally could die or worse.

help facilitate death with your team members. I mean, it's awful. Everyone's hands are in each other, right? So adaptability becomes that. And then of course, entrepreneurs are that third group because if you're an entrepreneur and you have to always be vying out your SWOT analysis, how do we adjust? Where are our strengths? Where are our weaknesses? Where are threats to our organization? How do we adapt and look for that and remove obstacles and identify opportunities for us to move forward? So that's a huge one.

Trent M Clark (17:17.047)
Then there's the big R word where athletes really understand responsibility. Like you are responsible for your results. So no one else is coming. I'm not a victim. I've got to take my responsibility for my results. And so when we have our role, responsibility becomes a big thing. I'm responsible for my role. They've laid it out. Now I have to take that responsibility and how do I get that done? That's a huge thing for me. It's right back to my podcast, Winners Find A Way.

I love the quote, winners when shown data that they are losing, find a way to win from the four disciplines of execution. So when I see that, these are entrepreneurs do so well. This is where I surround myself with people like this in my life. It's so great because they're solutions minded, right? They will take responsibility. Wow, here's the data. We're not winning. We have to do something different in order to get more sales in this category, to get our message out better, to hire more people to get this done.

So we adjust to that very well and winners find a way. So we have coachability, adaptability, responsibility. And then in sports, you really get the fact of time management and how time is your friend and taking care of yourself is so important. And your body is your temple and your body actually is creating your tool to compete. So our body and mind are so critical. So we have those four key things. We're always training physically, mentally.

emotionally and then morally as well. And that was one of John Wooden's big ones. Like you've got to get those four things trained up well and they all got to be moving together up. It's not like you can go, it's not like a stereo system where you can go, well, I'm going to turn the treble up here and I'm going to drop the bass to zero because one category falls out and it's all of sudden a gap and people will come in and attack you in that gap, right? All of a sudden you are up for threat. So those four things have to be trained up.

If you really have true aces in your organization and athletes become true aces because they have coachability, they have adaptability, they take their responsibility, and they do it over and over again, Brent, proving dependability, and that's when you've got a card, and that's when you've got the right people in the right seats.

Brent Peterson (19:30.338)
You think a lot of budding entrepreneurs or people that are moving from a job into a paycheck to an entrepreneur that often miss out that responsibility and they don't have anybody to blame but themselves and then they may fail as an entrepreneur? Is that something that has to be self in yourself not to blame somebody because you can't blame anybody if something fails?

Trent M Clark (19:55.605)
Yeah, I think there's two sides of that, One is, you know the budding entrepreneurs have all been through challenges, right? They've been through oftentimes horrific, tragic things. They've been through terrible things and pro athletes are very similar in that because the hard work and discipline it takes, it pales in comparison to things they've been through before. So when you do hard things, you get used to being uncomfortable, right?

And so when I think someone takes a leadership role, they realize I am responsible and they have this concept of I will, right? I will take the trash out because our cleaning system is not able to work. They're on strike. No one's coming to clean up the office. I will take out the garbage. I will come in early. I will call that hard client and see if we can get them back. I will go in and have that tough conversation. I will go to our team and help them get through this challenging time.

These are what we're looking for on our teammates, but as entrepreneurs, we have to be the people to say, will. And then we look for other people that help us along the way that are also, I will folks. So for people who don't get that responsibility, they have those losing behaviors, right? They have four losing behaviors. They have, first of all, excuses. Then they have blame. Then they quit when it gets tough. It's a terrible losing behavior is quit when it gets hard.

And then the worst one is really what I call the ostrich method, Brent, is like they bury their head in the sand and they ignore the data. Like, no, we're not losing, it's not bad. Like, no, no, we're losing and it's not going great. And if we don't fix it, everyone's gonna lose their job. And like, we've got to have sustainability around here. And when we ignore that data, like you're just putting off the inevitable and it makes for a long death march.

Brent Peterson (21:51.49)
Yeah, the part where the responsibility is there, then the dependability. one of the things I think that it's hard as you grow as an entrepreneur is that letting go of the vine as an EOS term or as an attraction term. How do you get help people? And that's the hardest part, right? That's the hardest part is adding employees. I think looking at EOA, the accelerator program,

The hardest part is scaling the people part of it. How do you help coach people then?

Trent M Clark (22:26.539)
Yeah, I think it's really important to live off your values, right? Because we need people who are gonna come alongside and be able to be in a position where they can grow, where they can develop, and we wanna have a lot of trust. If you've ever seen the five behaviors of a cohesive team, right, by Patrick Lencioni, it's first, trust, right? That is the foundation. We have to have trust, then we have productive conflict.

Then we have accountability amongst each other and we keep going right up to results. We don't get results until we get the first two right. Conflict is part of being in work. If we never had any conflict, we'd probably need half the people that we do have. We have no conflict, so I can automate everything, but we need humans to deal with the challenges and be solutions-minded.

And we need to operate inside our values. And so I love Ted Lasso. I love that whole series. And for the people who have trouble letting go of that vine quote unquote, and letting your team members really uphold that you and I have both seen this where the sometimes the best thing that's ever happened to a leader in an organization is, is they had to disappear for three months. either got ill there, someone in their family got ill and it was like, Hey,

We've worked all this thing up to this time. You guys just gotta go do it without me. I've gotta go take care of my mother. I've gotta deal with this in my life. And whew, they're out. And they come back 120, 150 days later to an extremely better organization. And they're like, holy crap, I had no idea that maybe I was the bottleneck in this thing. Because if you have trust in your team, and I like the Ted Lasso where everybody puts their hand up like we believe.

We believe in each other. You have to believe in your team and you have to trust them. And if you don't believe and trust them, you won't delegate. You won't give them anything because I'm the only one who can do it around here, Brent. Like, come on, that's so not true. You've hired high quality people. You've got to believe in them and trust them to get that done. And if you don't have that, you'll be holding on the vine and your growth is limited because if you're holding onto it so tight.

Trent M Clark (24:53.347)
They're not growing. And that's gonna be an early exodus for your top talent, right, Brent? Because if you're my best guy and I'm trying to be like, man, Brent, we gotta keep Brent motivated around here. I gotta keep giving Brent the next thing because every time I give him something, he knocks it out of the ballpark. It's amazing how good it is and I'm like, whoa, next challenge. This was almost too easy for Brent. So I gotta keep pushing that envelope because I'm a carrot guy.

I'm not a stick like, well, Brent, if you don't double it next week, then we're not gonna give you your bonus because that's stick crap, right? That's not gonna be so effective as a motivator, but because I show, well, I believe and trust in you, I wanna push you out to your potential and keep challenging you to do hard things because that keeps growing in you. And listen, if we're all growing together, what's happening to the organization? Just by osmosis and by default, the organization's growing because

We have better people growing inside of it and it's just creating capacity all over the place.

Brent Peterson (26:00.15)
Yeah, I mean, think a big Otani and compared to the Dodgers compared to the White Sox this year, you see two ends of the spectrum, right? And one, and by the way, do you think Ted Lasso is gonna come onto the White Sox team next year as their head coach to try to save them?

Trent M Clark (26:17.185)
Yeah, yeah, yeah, I would love to see. Yeah, that might be season four. know, Ted's back and now he's taking on baseball and he's got the Black Sox of Chicago. He's got to turn around a program that nearly set the all-time record for losses in a season. And yeah, it's time for a turnaround, but they do need something, right? We need something more and we need to get something stronger there.

Brent Peterson (26:23.31)
Yes.

Brent Peterson (26:29.453)
Yeah.

Trent M Clark (26:44.931)
And man, leadership's a big deal. And it's not all about personnel. But the personnel at that level, it's so fractional, the difference between them. It's really gonna come down to how well you can get your leadership to continue to help each one of those folks grow and develop, because that's how you change organizations.

Brent Peterson (27:08.216)
Yeah, that's, mean, right there is the quote of the interview, getting those leaders to help develop that talent. And baseball is a great example of, of there's only so much talent in the league. There's so much talent outside of the league and the best ones bubble up. Trent, we have a few minutes left and we, we, have so many more things we could talk about today. As we end the podcast, I gave everybody a chance to do a shameless plug about anything they'd like. What would you like to plug today?

Trent M Clark (27:37.985)
Yeah, I'll just plug the book, man. Like, thank you. the book. to have you a part of leading winning teams. I take a read, love your review of it. It's a great walk through my kind of career and my journey to excellence where I talk a little bit about this period of my life from a sophomore to my, the time I was 27 years old, about 11 year span where I either played, coached in seven different championships, three at high school, state championships, two at the...

college and the national championships and then two World Series. And all the time I'm just, you know, I'm auditing like, wow, in this journey of excellence, why do you win? Why do you lose? What are we doing right? What are we doing wrong? All those things. And we know Brent as leaders, it's really about not knowing everything. It's often about asking the right questions of the right people. And, you know, there's so many good people out there. Get a good team around you. Start asking the right questions.

and then position yourself for growth because that's where it's going to be. as you talk about that with like the Dodgers and the White Sox, the Dodgers have positioned themselves for championships. They've positioned themselves to continue growing and the White Sox have not. They put themselves limiting their ceiling of growth and that'll change. They'll figure it out. They'll get better, but it's going to take a minute and it's hard.

For everybody out there, yep, I speak all over the world. Love to have a chat. You can reach me at trentateleadershipity.com and I'm on LinkedIn everywhere. I'm pretty easy to find on social. So I speak all over the world and coach a lot of teams. So if you're looking for that, love to talk with you.

Brent Peterson (29:20.514)
That's great. I'll make sure I get that into the show. No, it's Trent Clark, the CEO of Leadershipity. Thank you so much for being here today.

Trent M Clark (29:27.789)
You bet. Thanks, Brad, for having me.