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Show Notes
Too many companies treat their core values like wall art – nice to look at, easy to ignore.
In this episode, Brad sits down with Robert Glazer to explore how to make core values real in the day-to-day, not just on paper.
Robert is the founder of Acceleration Partners, a global affiliate marketing agency he scaled to multi-eight figures with a fully remote team of 300+ people across 40 countries. He brought on a private equity firm, took some money off the table, and now serves as chairman of the board. He’s also a bestselling author and a recognized expert in values-based leadership and company culture.
In this conversation, Robert shares why values should guide every decision – from who you hire and fire to how you handle a million-dollar client who crosses the line. (Spoiler: he let the client go.) He also breaks down his Open Transition Program, an alternative to the two-week notice that prioritizes transparency and dignity on the way out, not just on the way in.
From there, the conversation moves into the evolution of affiliate marketing, the structure behind high-performing remote teams, and how to grow under private equity without losing what matters.
If you care about scaling with integrity, this one’s worth your time.
Tune in now!
Inspiring Quotes
- “If the only expression of a company’s core values is on the wall, they’re not real values – they’re just wall art.” – Robert Glazer
- “In most organizations, there’s a say-do gap. You’re either saying things you’re not doing, or doing things the culture values, but they’re not explicitly stated as values.” – Robert Glazer
- “I’m not telling the leadership team what their values are – I’m interviewing their people, pulling out what they’re saying, and presenting it back.” – Robert Glazer
- “Sticking to your values always has a cost – and that’s why most people don’t do it.” – Robert Glazer
- “Having conviction and integrity in your values allows you to feel good about the cost of sticking to them, as opposed to having it be painful.” – Brad Weimert
- “I think we’re moving from an era of employer abuse to one of employee abuse. I don’t think either of those is great – it’s just an unfortunate pendulum.” – Robert Glazer
- “The true test of your culture is how you tolerate two people. One is the brilliant jerk. And the other is the friendly incompetent.” – Robert Glazer
- “The way we’re going to get back to growing companies is growing the people along with them.” – Robert Glazer
- “Private equity is like the institution of marriage. It is not good or bad. It depends on who you marry.” – Robert Glazer
Key Takeaways
00:00:00 Intro
00:03:01 Making company values actionable beyond just wall art
00:09:56 Embedding values into hiring, firing, and promotion systems
00:21:14 Turning down a $1M client for violating core values
00:24:58 Remote work demands freedom paired with accountability
00:31:09 Team dynamics in remote settings
00:40:50 Open Transition Program as an alternative to a two-week notice
00:45:58 Capacity Building framework (spiritual, intellectual, physical, emotional)
00:49:27 Challenges in affiliate marketing
00:59:15 Navigating private equity deals with a long-term mindset
01:09:05 Outro
Full Transcript
Robert Glazer 00:00
Sticking by your values has a cost, and almost always does, and that’s why people don’t do it. It’s easier to change your mind or change your opinion or change your team and not have to pay that cost. The true test of your culture is how you tolerate two people. So one is the brilliant jerk right on the one side, they’re really good at their job, and the other is the friendly incompetent, the person who figured out 10 hours a week how to get a better result for the client, I want to reward them over the person who spent 90 doing the wrong things. I think we’re moving from an era where there was more, I would say, employer abuse, to more employee abuse. And I don’t think either of those is great, but it’s an unfortunate pendulum to me, private equity is a little bit like when you talk about it’s like the institution of marriage, like marriage is not good or bad. Really depends on who you marry. What advice
Brad Weimert 00:47
do you have for leveraging affiliate marketing to grow their company today in 2025 what
Robert Glazer 00:52
you absolutely shouldn’t do is
Brad Weimert 00:57
Congrats on getting beyond a million. What got you here won’t always get you there. This is a podcast for entrepreneurs who want to reach beyond their seven figure business and scale to eight, nine and even 10 figures. I’m Brad Wymer, and as the founder easy pay direct, I have had the privilege to work with more than 30,000 businesses, allowing me to see the data behind what some of the most successful companies on the planet are doing differently. Join me each week as I dig in with experts in sales, marketing, operations, technology and wealth building, and you’ll learn some of the specific tools, tactics and strategies that are working today in those multi million, eight, nine and 10 figure businesses, life can get exciting beyond a million. Robert Glazer, it’s great to see you, man, wish it was in person, but thank you for carving out
Robert Glazer 01:42
time. Thanks for having me, Brad. I got a got one kid on the way home from semester abroad tonight. Another kid had surgery yesterday. So I have to go. I have to go with virtual get,
Brad Weimert 01:51
goodness gracious, well, quick backdrop. I’ve known you for a few years socially, and I got some bullets. We were just talking from grok. And some of this I knew. Some of it. I didn’t know. Seems
Robert Glazer 02:01
like it knows me better than I might know myself. So
Brad Weimert 02:07
acceleration partners, you started many years ago. You built it up to multi eight figures, with 300 plus employees, over 40 countries, all remote. You brought on a private equity firm that came in at some point. So you took some money off the table, and today you’re still chairman of the board. That all sounds accurate, correct bullets so far. Here’s what I did know about you. You’ve written a ton of books, so you’ve got books on bestseller lists. I think you’ve got seven now, and you’ve got a new one coming out shortly. You have the Elevate podcast. And then the thing that I learned is that you’ve gotten all these accolades for being a phenomenal leader from Forbes to glass door, etc. Sound accurate so far. Yeah,
Robert Glazer 02:48
some of that’s past tense, but, but, but it’s all accurate. Yes. Love and on the books, what I always say, what I what I lack in quality, I make up in quantity. So I’ll just keep, keep pumping them out.
Brad Weimert 03:01
What since you are known as a value driven leader, how do you make values more than just wall art?
Robert Glazer 03:10
Yeah, so I spent a lot of time both talking about kind of individual values and a framework behind them, and that’s what the new book is about. And I’ve also been asked to help a bunch of companies and organizations with their corporate values. I think, you know, if the only expression of the values is on the wall, then that would sort of be the definition of of wall art. And so I think for for both individuals and organizations, it is, it is the wording and construct of values that are action oriented, that meet certain thresholds, and you hear them, and they show up, in fact, like when we’ve done some of these core value I wouldn’t call them, they’re kind of augmentation projects with companies, because you can’t go into a company, has to be willing and wanting to fix its value. And so usually there’s a new CEO, there’s new leadership, or there’s a couple of mergers, and they want to kind of revisit it. And we also, we talk about these points of implementation, like hiring, reviews, awards, celebration, you know, off boarding, like these are normally, and give a bunch of examples. You know, these are things where that go well beyond, you know, wall art, a friend of mine’s company has very serious core values, and they have this baton that gets passed along each month from to the next core value winner with a whole big ceremony. And then they get this huge painted parking space in the front of the thing. So look, we’re all still little kids running around, and we’re, you know, you’re, you’re, whatever gets rewarded, you know, you do more of and what gets your hand slapped, you do less of. And that’s how, that’s how values work in organizations, core
Brad Weimert 04:48
values and all the things behind it. You kind of like we grow up in entrepreneurship with this idea of, you need a mission, vision and values in your company. And that’s how that ends up being wall art, right? Um. Yeah, and to some people, it seems to be very effective, and some not at all. Do you think that every entrepreneur, from jump needs to have clarity on mission, vision and values in order to create the organization? Or do you do that at a later point in time? It’s interesting.
Robert Glazer 05:13
I think it goes back like individuals. I think need to figure out their values, and then they can kind of figure out their personal mission or vision, right? I think core purpose, like I that’s, it’s almost easier to figure out your values. Organizations go the other way. Usually, the founder started for a reason, right? They want to put a a man on the moon. They want to eradicate cancer. They want to do, you know, change marketing and move it all to performance based. Or the things that we do that aren’t as sexy as putting people on the moon and, you know, solving cancer. So there’s a reason that it started, and there was sort of a, ironically, the vision is the mission, right? The mission sort of the longer term thing, and the vision is the shorter term. So I think if you’re clear about those things, it’s super helpful. And then you can go get those things in service of values, or not in service of values. But the values in a company come out when you get sort of 10 or 15 people, and then you start to say, hey, what’s the best DNA of all of us? Like, if Brad is the shining star example in our company, what is it about him? Like, what does he do? And what are the behaviors? So I don’t think you can do if you try to do company values from the beginning, you’re basically trying to do the founders values. And while there should be some dotted lines, some pretty strong dotted lines between the founders values and the company values, those tend to be a little more expansive.
Brad Weimert 06:31
I repeatedly see new entrepreneurs get stuck in the minutia. And one of them seems to be this, Hey, somebody told me I needed to have mission, vision values, so they spend all this time doing it, but I love the thought of it’s kind of irrelevant until you have a big enough team where you can see the values emerge, or see what they are, even if it is guided by the founder in the beginning. So
Robert Glazer 06:51
I was recently helping a major hospital that’s going through a bunch of changes and a new leader sort of re establish the values for a division. By the way, this hospital has, like, one of these, you know, kind of core value things that you know this word for the hospital, core values, that people remember the word but, but they don’t remember the actual values under it, because they’ve gotten so, you know, people focus on rise and it’s our something or impact. I mean, like, it’s catchy, but you don’t even remember what the values were underneath it. Was meeting with this team, and we were talking about, what I talk a lot about is, like, explain to me, in our projects, we ask the same question five different ways. That’s what any good assessment does, right? I want to know the characteristics. I’m trying to, like, extract the DNA of, like a brad. And in this conversation, I don’t remember the woman, but, but three or four people brought up this woman, and they just talked about, like, what she did, and like, they didn’t know they didn’t have the right nomenclature around their core values, but they just knew that she embodied it. It was like the perfect example. Like everything she did was just what people wanted to be and what they respected and what they appreciated. And so we were trying to, like, decode her genome a little bit, you know, in terms of figuring that out, you
Brad Weimert 08:06
were going back into it to try to further articulate and find out what the values really were. Even though they had them defined,
Robert Glazer 08:11
they just, yeah, they had values that were, there’s always a say, do gap. You’re either saying things you’re not doing, which is one set of problems, or there’s some things that the really culture really values and does, but aren’t said explicitly as values. And there had been a really, you know, leader that had really, I think, brought the culture down. A new leader came in. I had worked with before for a process where he was on a board where there was a whole mess, and actually they wanted to update their values, because they felt like in the mess, they couldn’t call out board members for explicitly violating the values. So they had the wrong values. And when they fixed that, one of the things we did was we back tested all the values and like, yes, if these had been the clear that these were the values, we could have sat up in the meeting and be like, Brad, this is not who we are, and you’re out. So this guy ended up, later taking over a division of a hospital, and so we went in to take a look at them, and I call it like an augmentation, because you’re not starting over, but and we say, Look, you either you got to get on the same page about what you’re doing and saying, I can’t make you if you’re going to say these things. And I said it to another CEO, you are going to be held to these things, like, if you say our value is be a team player, then someone needs to be able to call you out and being like, you’re not being a team player. But I’m trying to just get rid of this mess between what people are saying or doing. And look, I get it. People are so distrustful. They’ve had all these terrible consultants, and I’ve seen their work where they come and tell them what their values are. I’m not telling what their values are. I’m interviewing all the people and extracting what they’re saying and presenting it to the group and saying, here is what people in your organization say that they value. You probably want to make that explicit and start implementing it in some way, so
Brad Weimert 09:56
you kind of cracked cracked the egg. On the rest of this question. But a lot of people look at values as sort of a fluffy, soft exchange. How do you make it tactical to implement and instill values throughout the organization from the entry point to later on, whatever it looks like. What are the core elements that make sure that you can establish values in a company and that you’re actually living to them?
Robert Glazer 10:25
Yeah. So first of all, I share their skepticism. I was that person. I see these things. I walk into companies and see this crap on the wall. You know, famously, Enron had, like, integrity, respect and humility as their values like as they’re like, but what they actually rewarded was extreme risk taking and back. Stat, that’s actually what the culture was, right? So saying this one thing, I would say, like, colleges don’t a big, you know, liberal arts university doesn’t present to be in a city, doesn’t present to pretend to be a small conservative college, you know, in a rural place, like they understand that there’s different environments for different folks, rather than trying to say things that appeal to everyone. So when we talk about, how does that wake up in every day in the culture, you should hear those things, right? So onboarding? Do you have behavioral based questions around hiring? Do you have a cultural onboarding process? Are there stories that are told in the company about these values. Are these stories lore? When I would do our onboarding, I still do it to these days, they’re stories I’ve been telling for 10 years, right? Do check ins and promotions and recognition systems all talk about core values, right? Are there awards, like we have the core value awards, my friend has that baton award. There’s, like, a whole bunch of things like this that fall in these six buckets of and when you start to show these to people, they go, ah, like, I don’t know, we’ve never done any of these things, but this way you start hearing it right. I start interviewing Brad for core values questions. I nominate Brad for a core values award. I call out Brad for a decision that doesn’t align, you know, with our values. It’s on his check in. When I promote Brad, it’s like, Brad is a star at own it, right? Humans start to get, oh, this is like, just like dogs do. This is behavior. This is behavior good. This other behavior not rewarded. The problem most companies is they’re not. Again, if you reward 80 hour hero work weeks, you’re going to get 80 hour hero work weeks. That’s not ever what I want to reward. We ran a performance based marketing agency. I wanted outcomes for our clients, the person who figured out 10 hours a week how to get a better result for the client, like I want to reward them over the person who spent 90 doing the wrong things.
Brad Weimert 12:37
Yeah, I like that. The you know, I like, I think that the the notion of values from a strategic perspective people grasp easier than a tactical perspective. And they’re like, yeah, yeah, it makes sense. We want to be aligned with this thing. And even the strategic thing took me fucking years to figure out. Because, like, truly, I mean, I was in business 10 years before, yeah, I was like, oh shit. If everybody sees it through the same lens, then they’ll make decisions that I would make.
Robert Glazer 13:04
You took the words out of myself. It is a decision making rubric. So Gary Ridge, a friend of mine, who’s the CEO of WD 40, took it over little oil lube spray can grew at 10x and took the employee net promoter, from 20% to 90% over those 10 years, and Chris, he always said, If anyone in our company makes a decision in the service of one or more in our core values, they are always safe. That’s putting money, your money where your mouth is. That’s we don’t need a lot of rules. Like, you can take all the combination of these core values, and you should know how to make decisions. Therefore, be like, super careful around values. Like, do whatever it takes, you know, or, you know, and person said, Oh yeah, I took the client out to the strip club last night, and we got the deal, and we did that. Like, technically, that’s do whatever it takes. So you got to be really careful. You got to be willing to let you know. Say, pretty much anyone who behaves in these ways is, is is okay? Yeah,
Brad Weimert 13:57
I like that a lot. That’s a very hard one for me to basically forgive decisions that are not optimized because they did fit the values. And to me, like what I heard there is, as a leader, maybe it’s your opportunity to reevaluate the values and how you’re managing if people are making decisions within the construct of your values, and they’re still not the decision that
Robert Glazer 14:23
you want. Yes, I think if they are making decisions within your values, and you feel like it’s consistently not producing the right outcomes, and you you probably value something you’re not saying, and you’re probably saying something that you don’t value. Yeah,
Brad Weimert 14:36
that’s awesome. So the tactical side of this where, like, the rubber meets the road, you mentioned a couple of things that I like, and I want to try to and I want to try to find a couple more. But one is, through onboarding, are you asking the behavioral based questions? Is the way you framed it, but questions that are going to uncover the values. The other is, you mentioned lore and stories and the that. One’s an interesting one to me, because. Because I think some of those self present, you know, you’ll find them, but they’re also things that you can go find. And I’ll use the term architect, but really, like, you know, be an archeologist, like, uncover people that are showing them, and that’s a really good way to demonstrate stories sell, right? Yeah, and then you talked about awards. Are there other areas that you can think of that people can implement quickly to, you know, highlight their core values more, get more buy in from the team.
Robert Glazer 15:32
Well, let me look back. I’ll look backwards, because I think your detective is so if you do something like a core value award, and you make peer submissions, you’re going to start getting all these stories right that people are telling you about how they lived these values. And I don’t know whether you do that monthly or quarterly. We just did ours at our annual thing. It’s like an Oscars award ceremony. They’re peer nominated. It’s hugely emotional. The past winner gives it to the new one. Like this is a it’s a big deal to win the one of the core value awards are the core value. There’s a core value all around award too. And you know, that’s pretty awesome. You can also do something like easy as a Slack channel, where you have, like, a cheers channel. And in ours, it’s coded that when people put something in there, they tag it with one or more of the core value. So there’s an organic channel that’s literally getting filled every day with people saying, like, shout out to Brad who totally, like, one of our things is own it, who totally owned it? Yesterday, on that client call, there was a problem, he told them he’d fix it. He was a boss. He just, you know, totally owned it. So those all go hand in hand. Back to the interviewing. Look, if you get the core values wrong, the person’s dead on arrival. If you get the capability to do the job wrong, you might have one more chance if there was a different thing in there your organization that they were good at. So, so all of our interviews were split between behavioral based questions around each of the core values I’ve worked with Jeff smart. He’s like, the top interview guy in the world. You think he’s down near you, maybe, or Nashville. And Jeff has says, Ask hypothetical questions, get hypothetical answers, right? So Brad, like, how would you handle this? You know, otherwise? So, you know, we probably have a bank of embrace, Excel and improve is one our core values. I know there’s a question I they haven’t let me interview anyone for years, but it’s a question like, Brad, tell me a time in the last couple years when you’ve taken a course or gone back to school or done something or done a training to get better at something. If you’re crickets over the last five years, you’re not our definition of Excel and improve. Our people are always learning something getting better. It doesn’t matter whether it’s cello or black belt or a language or otherwise, right? They are a learner or an improver. Own it like, Tell me about a time when you were given responsibility and you blew it, and what did you do back then? That’s Jeff’s whole thing is back then? Oh, well, back then I screwed the pooch on this thing, and it was Barry’s fault and it was Jenny’s fault. And you could, like you could when people tell these stories you can hear. You know what you want to hear. So I we always give. When I do projects to help companies with this, I give them sort of a forced negative question too. Tell me about a time when you didn’t own it and what happened, right? So if you filter in two or three of these across three rounds, and then have everyone get back at the end and say, shining star, not shining star. Example of the core values. Those
Brad Weimert 18:27
are all really good examples, because I think when people think about interviewing, what you what you ask, Why you ask it, what outcome you’re after, can be murky for many, many, many, many entrepreneurs. And I mean, as somebody that’s, you know, interviewed 1000s of people at this point, there is no question. I fell on my fucking face a lot. And even even still, I find myself periodically in an interview, like wanting to socialize more than, you know, ask productive questions. And
Robert Glazer 18:56
if we’re time, we’re not listening more than we’re talking. And I am like the number one guilty of this, he did an interview. Awkward silence is your friend. We often jump in to rescue the person, or you didn’t really mean that, right? So Jeff has a famous story of, get a little off track here, but this is worth telling of the $3 million slap that I told in one of my books, where he has these two questions, and then what happened? And tell me more. And then he’s just quiet, right? So this guy, sales guy, gregarious, he tells you, we left this company because of some unreconcilable differences with the founder. So a lot of people would say, okay, and Jeff go, Okay. Well, then what happened? Well, I was in a board meeting, and we got in a fight, and he made some comment about my numbers not being there. Tell me more. You know, again, pausing well, when he said that, I ended up calling him a name. You know that that’s an abbreviation of his first name. Interesting. What’s his first name? Rich. Shirt. So you know that there’s three more of these questions, and what you learn is they ended up back in the CEO’s office after the meeting, screaming at each other, and the guy slapped him across the face, and even Jeff asked, was it like a closed handed fist or like an open handed fist? And so it’s the $3 million slap, because this guy lost all of his stock options because of this, because of this, irreconcilable differences, and he also found out that he was a hockey player and led the league in penalty minutes. So most people would have given up like nine questions before Jeff did,
Brad Weimert 20:33
yeah, well, I think that’s, first of all hilarious, and I have actually heard that story before. Second, I think that there’s outside of that’s a great, great takeaway for interviewing. It’s also a great takeaway for life in general, which is, if you stay curious, you’re so much more likely to get to the answer or to get to a productive answer than if you breeze by to the next thing
Robert Glazer 20:58
and to listen, right? So, so I think in this case, you’re listening, I’m like, again, I’ve interviewed in a while, but no one likes the awkward silence, but, but let that person, let them fill the awkward silence. Not, not you, right? You’re trying to learn about them.
Brad Weimert 21:14
What’s a, what’s a value driven decision that you’ve made that has resulted in losing a lot of money,
Robert Glazer 21:23
great example. So a few years ago, we had a client who we were super happy to get. It was a marquee name client, and like many of the marquee name clients, enterprise clients you get, they were just terrible to deal with, constant turnover, horrible to our team, shifting expectations, and we just had turnover, company turnover on that team twice. That was normal. So we kept restocking the team and doing this, and then finally, we’re in a leadership team meeting. And you know, it was a million dollars a year client, and we were coming up for renewal. Someone’s like, look, the elephant in the room here is that this client does not embrace relationships, which is one of our core values. In fact, they just burn through our team, and people don’t want to be in this account. And we can tell ourselves all the things we want to tell ourselves, but this company violates our core values, and so we decided not to renew the account. And yeah, it was painful. It’s painful to lose a million dollars. We weren’t like a billion dollar company. It was me. It was meaningful. But, you know, I think we just felt like that wasn’t sustainable either. And but I will tell you that the the trust and respect we learned from our team, where we said, hey, we’re just, we’re we are moving away from it was kind of the elephant in there. We are telling this client, no, we don’t like how they’re treating our team. We are going to take the hit. We’ll figure it out. We’ll move on. Otherwise, it just, I think people were pretty surprised by that. It’s got to love that the thing that people don’t understand these days, and I hate to say kids these days, but, but particularly, a lot of these, a lot of these, virtue signaling, protesting, like sticking by your values has a cost, and you have to be and you often have to pay the cost. And what I see these days people are, you know, they just can’t believe when there’s actually a cost to what they’re what they’re doing, and they’re they’re outraged by it, and then they want to make themselves the victim, like we didn’t make ourselves the victim in that case, like, sticking by your values has a cost, and almost always does, and that’s why people don’t do it. It’s easier to change your mind or change your opinion or change your team and not have to pay that cost. And I just, I’m we’ve let a whole generation kind of get away without understanding cause and effect and consequences, and I just think it’s setting them up for failure in the real world, as we’re starting to see.
Brad Weimert 23:47
I think that having conviction and integrity in your values, ie yourself, allows you to feel good about the cost, as opposed to have it be painful.
Robert Glazer 24:00
That’s actually an excellent point, right? I bring up because a lot of people talk about try to compare some of the things today to civil rights. And example I brought up, and was like, Look, Rosa Parks, like knew she was gonna get arrested obsessively when she did this. And that was sort of, she didn’t fight getting arrested. She actually wanted to show that that law and her arrest itself were so ridiculous that people would be outraged by it, and that it, you know, that they would drag this woman off the bus. People miss, tell this story today, and they miss. Tell a lot the people in the Civil Rights paid heavy costs. What they hoped was that as people looked at history, they would say, you, you paid that cost, but you were on the right side of history that has been lost in a lot of the fake advocacy you know today, where people, they don’t want any cost, and they’re shocked when, when it, when it comes for them. Because, as you said, I don’t think they really believe in it. If they believed in it, then the consequent would be worth would be worth bearing.
Brad Weimert 24:58
Okay, so. So the value driven thing, the values in a company, this ties greatly into the next part of this, which is you have hundreds of employees, and they’re all remote. So that sounds
Robert Glazer 25:13
like a before COVID. Well, that
Brad Weimert 25:17
was actually going to be a question, but so you chose to build a remote team. What sparked the decision to be remote? First?
Robert Glazer 25:27
You know, it started. It’s interesting. It started sort of out of necessity. We were building the company. We were in this niche space called affiliate marketing, and the talent wasn’t concentrated in one area, and we weren’t. We were hiring experienced people. That was sort of our playbook. So there was a little here and a little there, and I think we said, oh, let’s just go grab the people where we get them. We had a lot of moms, and they were super appreciative of the flexibility, and actually it gave them an opportunity, you know, working moms, to have that flexibility, and they were incredibly loyal. That was a lot of our early customer base. And we’re like, yeah, eventually we’ll get offices. And then it just sort of became part of our culture, this notion of and this is where people, again, get it wrong. And we struggled after COVID, because everyone sort of copy catted on the outside, but not the inside, which was our culture was about freedom and flexibility. You got a lot of flexibility. Freedom, sorry, freedom and accountability. If you were accountable, you got a lot of freedom. If you were someone who did your work and got the results and didn’t disappear and whatever, then people gave you respect, and you could have that flexibility. You could have freedom and flexibility. That’s great. A lot of people came in excited about the freedom and flexibility, but sort of missed the accountability piece of it, and that was not okay. So that became part of our culture. Honestly, we had fortune 500 clients. We were like hiding it. We caught our stuff, distributed with all kinds of mental we want to best places. 25 Best Places to Work awards in America, from think Forbes. And actually the write up said, and apparently acceleration Partners is a great place to work, even though they don’t have one. So they were like, sort of in disbelief on this. And then COVID hits, and like, I’m writing books on remote work, and suddenly everyone knows how to do that. I had fought with people for years, like, how do you know your people are doing any work? And I was like, Well, look, we have these dashboards. We give each person the same number of accounts and the same amount of revenue. And if our clients say they’re really happy and their programs are growing with us, like, and somehow that person’s not doing any work all week. Like, I don’t know, like, Godspeed. Like, it just seems like we focused on the outcomes we were in an outcome oriented business. And I people like it would never work. And then, of course, it worked for a lot of people. But then again, to to the virtue signaling, I don’t think they really believed in it. I think they wanted to get employees, and they were reaction we lost, of a lot of employees, I would say the employees we lost, half of them, were onto new jobs, and less than a year later, because they were told, Oh, you can go work remote, Brad, and you’re in northern Pennsylvania, right for us, and the entire team is in the office in San Francisco, and there’s no systems and stuff designed to really do that. Everyone our company was on the same playing field because they we were and while we were distributed, we had very specific hubs and locations you could be in both for practical reasons about getting to the team and connecting them, but also for socialization and clients. We didn’t want people sort of everywhere. And I think a lot of companies started to just mimic the thing to get talent, but they didn’t have operational systems to support it, and then they’re all quitting on it and going back now, so we’re gaining that advantage back again. But it was actually hard for us after COVID, because people were reaching out to our employees. They were promising, you know, the same surface level thing that we provided, but, and they were throwing a lot of money at them, which people did in the great resignation. But it’s not until you leave. You know, someone was asking me for job advice recently. I’m like, Look, then come what the company’s not going to tell you is that they have four months of cash left in the bank, right? That’s just usually, like, there was someone we lost, they gave him, like, doubled their salary, and then they were, like, the whole company was upside down four months later. So, yeah, I’m, I’m about like, you know, you learn things over the long run about how someone behaves and how the company’s been through a few cycles. It’s really hard to tell in a fury how things are going, and I think we’re moving from an era where there was more, I would say, employer abuse, to more employee abuse. And I don’t think either of those is great, but it’s an unfortunate pendulum.
Brad Weimert 29:34
Well, you said a couple of things that I think are really worth highlighting. And the first is that your remote culture worked because there was a culture, and it was driven by the values that set the container for what it meant to work remote for your company, and specifically you said freedom and flexibility with accountability. And I had somebody recently that I was interviewing, say. They didn’t like to be micromanaged, which, by the way, is a weird thing to tell your employer when you’re getting interviewed, but, but I heard it, and I thought, that’s interesting. And I said, well, listen, we have a high visibility, high integrity, high accountability environment, so as long as you’re getting your things done, you will not feel like you’re micromanaged. If you’re not getting your things done, you can count on your manager holding you accountable to get that done. And you might feel like that’s micromanagement. It’s really you just not doing your job. And so I think the value based did they take the job, they took the job. And so we’ll see. There were some other litmus tests that went on in addition to that, insert funny advertisement here or just check out easy pay direct, it’s epd.com, forward slash, bam, and you can find out about credit card processing for your business. Lots of our guests use us for credit card processing, and this seemed like more fun than writing a scripted ad. You started to talk about mechanics, right? So top level, we’ve got the strategy, sort of as I see it, which is, and some of this is sort of tactical too, but which is the the culture and the vision and the structure and how, how that pushes the community to behave a certain way. The other is the tactical side of it. And you mentioned like they didn’t have Silicon Valley companies when they tried to push everybody remote. Didn’t have the structures and systems in place to make a remote team work. What are the rituals or practices that are totally necessary to make a remote team Excel. Well,
Robert Glazer 31:45
first of all, you have, if everyone’s on the same page, then you’re forced to do the same things. So you have maybe zoom check ins or some social hour, or we would fly to a city and meet with all the team, but all of the communication is sort of synchronous in terms of how it happens. So people feel like they’re on the same page in the same systems. I think what you had in that case is, again, back to the northwestern Pennsylvania person working on a San Francisco team. Oh, well, they’re all in the office having a meeting, and you’re the one person on the screen, right? These might be the things you didn’t think out of so I think it’s just a matter of being intentional. I knew some companies that made people pick they had to declare, are you hybrid? Are you fully remote, or whatever, because then they designed their check ins and social stuff and stuff around that you could change it once a quarter, but they asked people to be consistent. I also used to say when people are asking me, they just weren’t making a decision, they were hedging and trying to be everything to everyone. And I would say, look, however you do hybrid. Just tell people how you’re doing it. I actually, I changed my opinion on that. I think the hybrid where you just come in any two days doesn’t make any sense in retrospect, like if you’re going to come in, because then you’re not, because, then again, why are we doing this? Are we just doing that to make a point that you’re in the office, but you should be in the office because that’s the lunch day or the project review day or the training day. And so I think you should really strive, whatever those days are, to have people in at the same time doing things with their team or other people. I actually, like with hindsight, I think just work any two days doesn’t make any sense, right? Because that implies that you can come into work and just, you know, they’re, you know, close your door and work on something. Well, then why drag all the way into the office? There are, there are aspects of team building that are certainly easier in person. There are certain activities and types of work. Client Service is honestly one of the easiest things to be remote, because your your primary thing is you’re almost better off visiting the client, you know, and working with your team than you are being in an office. Sometimes that’s not true in a bunch of other if it was a product design firm, you know, I’m not sure that four remote days a week is the day to go. You need to be playing with stuff and passing around the office and otherwise, yeah,
Brad Weimert 33:54
what? I agree with you, and I think so we keep our we keep as much in house as we can. We have 30% of our company is remote. My preference is for everybody in house, and speed of communication and clarity of communication is better in person, or seems to be better for us. In person, you walk over to somebody’s desk, you can clear something up really quickly in a situation where you would otherwise have to open a video chat, which seems intrusive, or seems like you’re scheduling a meeting or something tempo moves quicker. What are the other tools, and I like what you just said, which is, if there’s one random person on a screen and the rest of the meeting is in person, they feel isolated, yeah. What are the other mechanics of a remote team that make it work? If there are any that you can think, I actually think I actually
Robert Glazer 34:40
think regular get togethers are important. So one of the reasons we had people in these hubs the airline strategy is because leaders from the company would go once a quarter and have a hub meeting, and they would meet with everyone, and the team could get together for stuff, and we could travel to events. I think having a big in person annual meeting as a remote company is important. So it doesn’t become about saving money. We just. Did this a week ago, like we could afford a lot of office space for bringing 300 people to Orlando for the weekend from all around the world. But it sets the culture. It’s those late night discussions or having a drink or getting to know someone like I had a couple conversations sitting outside, you know, during cocktail hour with someone that they never would have come up and talked to me about, you know, they said they commented on something I spoke about, and I said, I’m happy to answer your question. So I actually, for someone who runs an all remote company, I believe in getting in person, we just get together in person, in different ways, our two day, quarterly off sites with a leadership team. Also essential. Again, they’re done in a house 10 o’clock at night, sipping a glass of wine, playing a card game like that’s where the connection and the bonding happen.
Brad Weimert 35:52
Yeah, I couldn’t agree more you. We touched on it really briefly. But do you hire differently when you’re hiring a remote person versus an on site person. Are there different questions you’re asking? Are there different traits you’re looking for when you know they’re going to be
Robert Glazer 36:09
remote? Yeah, I think you want to if the person would really rather be in an office, right? If this is not a core value proposition of of why they want to work remotely. That’s a little bit of a red flag I like. Again, whether it’s a working parent, someone who likes to travel and be a vagabond, someone who’s a competitive athlete and wants to travel, if that flexibility is not in their top five and they would rather be in an office, it feels like you’re trying to put a round peg in a square hole a little bit. And I think there’s some how people work their independence. We have this own it and embrace relationships as values we talk about that combination is something called interdependence, and you could see this in our company. We need people because of the fast acting client service thing that we do, to be able to act quickly and be willing to make decision. Decisions, but they also believe that they’re better as part of a team, and they want to be a team. This is not a company of lone wolves. I had a guy reach out to me. He was really struggling with his team and hybrid and remote. And this one person was like, Look, I don’t want to come to these things. I just want to there’s this notion these days I want to do what I want, when I want, and how I want it right? Like, that’s not a and I was like, he’s like, What do you think? I was like, what kind of culture do you want if you want a free agent, e culture, and it works with your company, and he’s good at his job, great. The real test, again, your values have to cost you is if you say Brad’s actually good at what he does, but he doesn’t want to integrate with the team, and this is not a good example. And so I need to part ways with Brad, because Brad is not willing to, you know. So I said to him, what kind of company do you want? Do you want a cohesive company, or do you want a bunch of free agents? There’s not a right or a wrong answer, but there are logical consequences from going in either of those directions.
Brad Weimert 37:56
Yeah, that’s beautiful. I believe that to be true with almost everything in life, there is not a right or a wrong answer, but relative to the outcome that you’re after, yeah, yeah, relative to the outcome you’re after, there’s going to be a consequence, right, right?
Robert Glazer 38:09
I was on a, I was on a, this was 2023 and I was on like, a panel right after COVID, 2022 it was like five people for this big online event. Was like, What do workers want? And everyone went around and, you know, the fourth person was like, I think people want to work the trends for the next year. And I said flexibility. And someone said, workers want to work what they want, where they want, and how they want, on what they want and where they want. And I just couldn’t leave that alone. And afterwards, I’m sorry. I need to, I got to comment on that like, I I understand that that’s what workers want, but that is not how you run a business. And being on a team, by its nature, involves sacrifice. As someone once said to me, imagine a college kid walking into, you know, Nick Saban’s program in Atlanta and be like, Look, I got my own style, and I’m going to do this how I want. They’d be like, Hell, no. You’re out of here. Like we have a culture and a playbook so that that individualistic attitude that’s not look if you want, that you can go start your own business, you can drive for Uber you can do DoorDash like that is a free agent mentality. And while businesses use a lot of contractors for stuff these days, I think you have to be really careful about being on a team is inherently a sacrifice.
Brad Weimert 39:24
Yeah, you can be an independent salesperson doing that. Yeah? Yeah. We actually take our contractors through a very short form training that also aligns values, who we are, what we do, how we operate, the language that we use, etc, for that purpose, because we don’t want to have contractors involved. And I say contractors, I don’t want vendors, you know, marketing agencies, or other agencies involved that don’t have that alignment either. Yeah, no, for sure. I mean, it’s, it’s if you have the culture set of who you want to be, how you operate, what you believe, and you bring. A third party that’s very good at what they do, but they’re totally misaligned in how they communicate or the choices they make horrible.
Robert Glazer 40:06
The true test of your of your culture is how you tolerate two people. So one is the brilliant jerk right on the one side, they’re really good at their job, and the other is the friendly and competent everyone loves this person, and man, do they disappoint over and over again. I think people make more mistakes with the friendly incompetence than they do with a brilliant jerks. Brilliant jerk is usually in sales like that. That sort of is the one that, because it’s so tangible their outcome, that people put up with it. But, but both of those tell you what kind of culture you have. Like, look, we care about performance more than behavior. Or, you know, as long as you’re nice, performance doesn’t matter around here, those both send messages to the rest of the people on your team.
Brad Weimert 40:50
That’s great. You wrote a book called rethinking Two Weeks Notice, and in your world, OTP does not stand for one time password. It’s a path to eliminating two weeks.
Robert Glazer 41:01
No, it’s not. It’s not, it’s not a two factor thing that you have to worry about. I can’t even, like, open anything without two factor anymore. Yeah,
Brad Weimert 41:11
it’s the worst one. Like, your phone is next to the computer and you’re like, motherfucker, I’ve been here all day. Why are you doing this to me right now? Yeah,
Robert Glazer 41:18
or like, like, to get the sports scores you need, like, two factor like, I don’t, I don’t understand.
Brad Weimert 41:23
What is OTP in your world, and how does it fit into the two week framework?
Robert Glazer 41:29
Yeah, so the two week notice came from my TED Talk, sort of on this, on this process, and OTP is an open transition program. So we have a really old operating system that most companies are running, which is, we know that people aren’t going to work for life, right? We don’t give them pennant pensions, and we don’t promise them a job forever, but we still kind of act like when they leave, it’s more like a relationship ending than a professional sports contract ending. And these endings don’t go well, and it’s just like this treasonous thing, either you fire the person, or they leave and give you two weeks notice and you’re really pissed. And I think we know that even in the best companies to work every year, the average tenure, particularly under probably 35 is is 18 months or two years. So let’s just embrace this. Let’s, let’s have these open transition programs, which means, like, if I’m starting to sense it doesn’t work, I sort of say, Hey, Brad. Like, this doesn’t seem to be working. I address the problems, and I say, I don’t need to fire you. But like, maybe join this transition program. And you start looking for a job, and we start looking for your replacement, and we’ll give you a couple months. Or conversely, you come to us and you say, look, I really want to do something new. I want to start interviewing. And so there are people working there, just like sports. There’s people finishing out, and I don’t get like, they’re finishing out a free agent contract, you know, they’re not signing they’re trying to win basketball games. They want to look good, right? They want to go forward. And I just think business has this opportunity to stop this, you know, move to sort of like a no fault car accident system, rather than this, the way that these relationships end. Look, they’re bad for the employer, like, you know, angry people or people that are blindsided or whatever, they go right to Glassdoor and they trash the company. They’re bad for the employee. They might not realize it. But look, if you’re any decent at hiring, you should be doing black channel references, right? I look and I see that Brad knows Cindy. He worked with Cindy before I call Cindy. I don’t ask Brad about Cindy, right? So employees, employers get these calls year later, and they’re like, Oh yeah, Brad, he left us high and dry, like I mentored him all, like a bad ending can ruin everything, like you were my mentee. I mentee user. You leave suddenly they ask you to go to the job quickly. It’s 10 days. I’m not feeling great about that, and then someone reaches out to me two years later. How do you think about Brad? And what I remember is the ending. So the whole process, to me, is broken. We’re running a really old playbook, and we should realize that people are going to leave our organizations and design a more healthy way for them to do that.
Brad Weimert 44:06
That’s awesome. I like the I like the reframe on that. I think that you know both from a it’s interesting because surface level when I think about values, or when I hear people talk about values, and surface level, when I hear somebody say something like unlimited vacation or no two weeks notice, I sort of the the seed that gets planted is this fucking New Age bullshit. And I’m like, yeah, yeah, okay. And it’s soft and fluffy and airy, and I hate it. And I love it when somebody has
Robert Glazer 44:38
right. It’s just a their virtue signaling. Or, yeah,
Brad Weimert 44:42
that’s what hits me in the head anyway, right? But I love it when somebody can give me the logical construct and rationale behind it and say, no, no, this is a better approach. And here’s why. And I think you just did that, which is awesome,
Robert Glazer 44:55
yeah? And look, it came from I was running a company that was trying to have a great culture. Her and people would leave and give us two weeks notice. I’m like this just doesn’t this feels wrong with what we’re trying to build, but it’s the only thing they know how to do, is what their parents told them do, or otherwise. So if we’re going to change it, we got to really make a big deal to change how people behave.
Brad Weimert 45:14
Do you have that framework structure? Do you give it out? Is it hidden within your company?
Robert Glazer 45:20
No, I wrote the book because I took the whole framework that we did, and you can read half the book for free on my sub stack, on the Friday forward sub stack, or it’s like five bucks for the e book. But I people ask me about a lot, and my motivation after I give the TED Talk and just write the book was like you can have if you’re willing to do this, because I think it’s a better way, and that’s my purpose, to share ideas that help people in organizations grow. Like, I’ll open source the playbook for you, because I know that so few people are willing to do this if you want to do it. I had people who just watched the TED Talk and were like, I tried this, and it’s so much better, and they didn’t even have any of the details. So I that the book is literally the playbook for anyone who wants to
Brad Weimert 45:57
do that. That’s awesome. Well, I’ll link it for sure. I love the idea. The other framework that you have is the capacity building framework. Tell me about that and how that fits into the rest of your ecosystem and business building. Yeah. Capacity
Robert Glazer 46:10
building framework came because I wrote a synopsis, a sort of summary book, of my Friday forwards that was like 52 of the best Friday forwards, and all the different publishers rejected it because they were like, yeah, it’s a compilation. And then I found an agent who was like, yeah, it’s a compilation. But clearly these stories and messages are resonating with someone’s like, what is it? What’s the message behind it? And I went on, like, a year process to deconstruct these and say, what’s the meaning? And I came realized that how I improved my life was basically the same structure we were using for our company, and that was growing the organization by growing the people. And it fell across this framework called capacity building, and these four pieces that kind of go in a logical order, spiritual, intellectual, physical and emotional. And I think this is the framework for how we get better. And you need to have all of those kind of working in tandem and growing, and the ball gets bigger and rolls faster, and if a couple of them get out of whack, the ball goes all over the place. So yeah, we I’ve used that as sort of a personal development framework, and we used it as an organizational development framework. We helped our people figure out their core values, what they were good at, what they wanted to do, which meant some of them left, which was fine, you know, we helped them get better at things like thinking about morning routine and budgeting and planning and execution and discipline, because these are all holistic qualities. We first tried not to make their physical mental capacity worked, and then encouraged them to do, yeah, you’re running a triathlon. Go train at one to two in the afternoon. If you ever on your team who’s running a marathon or triathlon like let them go practice, they will be in peak mental and physical. You know, performance while
Brad Weimert 47:51
they’re in Texas in the summer, buddy, not in Texas in the summer, might be dead in Texas in
Robert Glazer 47:55
the summer. So in the winter, they can practice. And then emotional capacity is like relationships and the people you connect with, and focusing on the things that you can control and psychological safety. So I this is just, I think, in the terms of used in energy. But to me, this is anyone who’s working on all of these things is getting better. They’re growing their capacity. We’ve had the zerp error is over, where we just, we grow the company and burn out the people like everyone’s too fried. They’re too kind of stressed. The way we’re going to get back to growing companies is growing the people along with them. Yeah,
Brad Weimert 48:31
I think all of this works together, right? So having the right culture and structure that encourages that, having a framework to facilitate that goes hand in hand also with your OTP structure, which is, yeah, look as we help develop you, which will make you a better employee while you’re here. It might also make you a better person that realizes that you don’t fit in this value structure anymore, in this culture anymore, and maybe that means you should go somewhere else, and we will create the path for you to leave. And
Robert Glazer 49:03
by the way, if that was the case, because, because it’s more of the edge case. But people always ask me about that to help people figure out their figure out their personal core values, might they realize that this company is not a fit like if that’s the case, you’re having problems already. They’re gonna get worse. You’d be better off that that person did you the favor and opted out, rather than you firing them and dealing with severance and stuff, you know, a year down the line.
Brad Weimert 49:27
So I want to, I want to back out and talk about the growth of acceleration partners. So affiliate marketing, some people, I sort of grew up. I grew up in sales and hardcore sales, but then I found marketing. And I specifically found internet marketing. And that used to be, like a category of things right now, all marketing is sort of internet marketing, but the internet marketers in the early days, like early 2000s a path that you could go down was just affiliate marketing, which, there’s a there’s some people. People look at that and it’s a dirty label. Some people look at it
Robert Glazer 50:02
as dirty. I mean, my book performance partnerships, the whole chapter was like, I was like, the self deprecating lawyer. I’m like, yeah, all these things you heard of true And
Brad Weimert 50:10
okay, so I want to talk about what affiliate marketing is and what the agency was, because I think that there’s, there are tons of lessons in there, but let’s start
Robert Glazer 50:20
with that. Yeah. So the affiliate marketing is very simply, it’s kind of a financial relationship. So instead of getting paid per impression or per click, you you the publisher, take on the risk, you market and promote and have access to a company’s catalog of products, and you get paid on a performance basis, whether something sells or there’s a lead, or, technically, it could be, could be a click. And so the model is great. You know, for the brand, they just put out what they’re willing to pay, and they get and they pay for their marketing after their sales extensively. And for the publisher, they get a lot of control and access to all these brands. Let
Brad Weimert 50:58
me say that without those labels, because publisher and brand get confusing for people. So brand, being some company that
Robert Glazer 51:05
sells and publisher is a shoe blogger or influencer talking about sneakers, perfect. Yeah, it’s great point, because they get, they get thrown around, and they are, I agree, they are confusing. So that’s the simple thing. And publishers are always innovating. They’re gonna they were the first to figure out paid search, then they figured out SEO. My bet is they’re the first to figure out AI, and so they it’s like recruiting a whole bunch of people into your marketing marketplace that are trying new ideas, and you’re paying them all on spec. So that’s great in it, where it goes off the rails is when you don’t know what those people are doing or who they are, and there’s a whole bunch of anonymity. And that’s what happened in sort of gen one. It was like, as long this is when they were pure play, e commerce companies without brand departments, and it was like, give me $1 and I’ll pay you 90 cents and I won’t ask any questions. As the large brands started to come in, they got increasingly uncomfortable, and for the right reason, because they already had existing color customers and brands and not understanding what people were doing. And a lot of affiliates got really smart on how to, like, find customers that were already in the buying process, already shopping a lot of coupon, lot of loyalty and kind of being non, non incremental. So it had to get back to, like, it’s sort of basic roots of, hey, this is a partnership. I know what you’re doing and who you are, and I help you, and it’s transparent. And the best programs in the world all moved away from what I would call the Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell, phase to the we need to know what you’re doing. You’re a licensee partner of ours. But can
Brad Weimert 52:38
I, can I re recap that real quick. So what I heard is, there are, there are two major problems in the affiliate marketing space. The first was affiliates, which are people that are basically have a commission program with the brand. Yeah, and going out there and gaming the systems. They’re like, basically this buyer is already in your pipeline. They’re already going to convert. And so I’m not bringing you a new buyer, which is the hope as an affiliate, I’m going to game the system, so I’m taking the commission that you would have gotten for yourself. That’s problem number one. Problem number two is, and you didn’t hit on this really hard, but I know it’s there, which is message misalignment with the brand, and specifically with a large brand that has a concrete framework around who they are, how they talk, what the brand is. You’ve got these affiliates out there that can say whatever they want, as long as it gets the click to get the sale, which means your marketing message is shot.
Robert Glazer 53:32
Yeah. So pets.com in internet 1.0 didn’t have a brand department, and if you sold dog food, they didn’t care how you sold it in internet 2.0 go back to Adidas. Adidas had a brand department, and they were not comfortable with, you know, the messaging that people were using, or the, you know, the missed messaging, or the off brand, or how they were sending newsletters. And so the folks who oversaw these programs started to ask some, some hard questions, and they didn’t, didn’t love all the answers.
Brad Weimert 54:03
So how did acceleration partners come into it, and how did you grow it?
Robert Glazer 54:09
So part of the problem at the time was that the networks, the major networks, which were kind of link, share and CJ, and otherwise they they were basically the platform that you use and also the agency. So it would be like having Facebook being your social agency or Google being your search agency, you know, they they would they’re not really kind of focused on yield or performance and incrementality. They’re gonna be like, you can buy more clicks. Like, that’s just, you know, obvious. And so we kind of came in and we were like, You should not have networks managing your program. This is where the problem is. They’re not telling you this affiliate’s not valid. This affiliate is low quality because they’re literally getting paid on this. In fact, they had this perverse incentive that if their compliance department took someone out of a program, they would lose money because they took a percentage on. On every sale. So we kind of came in and we thought there could be a more white glove, independent service provider to these large brands who cared about their brands, who didn’t believe in the Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell, and believed in knowing who the partners were, and much more transparency. And it seemed crazy at the time, but as more of these brands came into the market, as more of them started to decouple their service in the platform, they increasingly trusted us with their brands, and we’ve been trusted with some of the biggest brands in the world to manage and run their programs. Is
Brad Weimert 55:34
acceleration partners solely enterprise, or do you work with smaller companies as well? We
Robert Glazer 55:40
do have, like, one product, but we are mostly enterprise. A lot of friends who call like, we are set up to manage complex, fast growing programs that are global, or want to be global, or multiple product lines and languages. That’s really our competitive differentiation. So, yeah, we are mostly in the enterprise realm, and there’s a lot of different ways to make money, but it really helps to focus on doing one or two things really well
Brad Weimert 56:07
for the 99.9% of the audience that does not own a multi billion dollar brand. What advice do you have for leveraging affiliate marketing to grow their company today in 2025
Robert Glazer 56:20
Yeah, yeah. So think of the tech is just a way that you can scale business development, like with a tool that helps you track, measure and pay, you are much better off picking a low cost tool. I used to like share a sale a lot they’re merging with a win. I think everyone has an entry level thing and and get five or 10 partners and work closely with them and figure out what they need and who does well, and know what they’re doing, and then when you kind of get some sense, there go recruit some more. So I think you’re better off just starting small and figuring out what works what you absolutely shouldn’t do is do a set and forget it program. Do not just leave it open. There are a lot of nefarious affiliates and partners out there that have all kinds of new tactics to try to take your current customers and get credit for them. If you just auto approve and let people join your program, it will be filled with crap before you know it.
Brad Weimert 57:11
Yeah, well, I can tell you too what ends up happening with that. Ask me how I know is it sucks up your team’s time and energy and doesn’t make you any money, which costs you a bunch of money?
Robert Glazer 57:24
Yeah, I look the amount of the amount of times we had to come in and, like, clean up a mess. Like, that’s no fun. Like, we would rather help someone just start it correctly and then come back to them when they were big enough in a year or so, then have to come in and clean up a mess like new construction is a lot easier than cleaning up someone else’s shoddy work.
Brad Weimert 57:47
We had a we had an affiliate sign up again at the time. We had no no filter, so affiliates could just sign up to resell, easy pay direct years ago, so probably eight years ago, sign up and then they put their affiliate link in a course that they had of how to make money online, and the instructions they gave these people, they’re the buyers of the course, was to open the phone book, open the phone book and just put businesses name into our step one of our online application, because then our sales team would call them and follow up and be Like, hey, you wanted a merchant account, we got 1000s of applications inside of, like, a few weeks, which at the time was, you know, crazy disproportionate. So we clearly there was something going on. But of course, none of these were opportunities. None of them were even leads. They were just random names that somebody put in. So that’s like the far end of the spectrum of ridiculousness. It’s not
Robert Glazer 58:42
more more typical than I’ve seen, but, but tends to be again, people. What happened was, you heard you open a program, and it’s easy money, and it works quickly, and you don’t need a lot of effort. It’s like the tooth fairy. And so you do that, and then, oh, yeah, look at this. But like, but nothing’s that easy, right? And so that’s the moral of the story there’s got to be a catch.
Brad Weimert 59:02
Yeah. I think the bottom line is that you need to nurture relationships, period. Yeah. It doesn’t matter what kind of relationship it is, relationships will not grow unless they are nurtured. I couldn’t,
Robert Glazer 59:13
couldn’t agree more.
Brad Weimert 59:15
Okay, tell me about the leading to sale on this, because you built this team of hundreds of people, and at some point, pe came in and gave you some money, and you took some money off the table. Did you deliberately build it to be able to sell it? Did PE stumble across you? What was that relationship like? No,
Robert Glazer 59:39
we had no. I actually didn’t know what I wanted to do. And look, COVID was our deal was at the end of 2020. COVID was incredibly scary. I think a third of our business went away or froze up and told us they’d pay us in nine months, or whatever it was. Within 30 days, we turned it around. E com obviously had a crazy year, and we were kind of. On track and actually growing pretty, pretty fast. But what that, that I had bootstrapped the whole thing for 10 years, and you know, you’re when you’re growing like that, as you’re always doubling down, whatever your tax return says, it’s not your money, right? It’s going back into the business and the growth. And you sign these enterprise clients, and they’re great, but they pay 90 days later, and your employees prefer to be paid, you know, when they when they show up to work. So funny how that happened. So you’re constantly, you know, reinvesting. And look, I used to have a, I think it was like a half million dollar, or maybe like a $2 million line of credit that was basically secured personally and by my house, and that was sort of our emergency, and we were big enough by the time we got to COVID, where I was like, this used to last a year, and this might cover payroll for like, two months now. So I felt like I was living in this house that I couldn’t necessarily even afford. Like, your rich uncle gives you a house, and you, you know, you got to make pay the tax bills and the maintenance or otherwise. And it just felt people were kind of constantly looking to me, Well, what do we want to do that? And I was like, look after that. Like I want to just, like, take it easy and harvest for a little bit, like, I need to get some of my investment back. But people sort of still wanted to grow. So we had been in some conversations, and I’ve given a couple of presentations on M and A recently, I ended up selling a different company to you called Brand cycle around the same time, and one of the things that shows is like markets have their moments right where things are coming together. There’s consolidation. Consolidation is inevitable in almost every industry. It’s pretty natural and it’s inevitable. And when your industry starts rolling and people are interested. Those are windows, and people that missed that window in 2020, they have probably fewer opportunities today. So someone said to me, Look, when your industry starts rolling, you become a roller. You roll in, or you get rolled. And so we saw that consolidation starting to happen, and we wanted to be the platform. And we had a bunch of ideas, and none of us had built a business this big before. So if you know a lot of private equity, there’s a lot of, you know, I think negative. I think some of that is focused around buyout. To me, private equity is a little bit like when you talk about it’s like the institution of marriage, like marriage is not good or bad. Really depends on who you marry, and so your partner growth stage. Private equity is not about squeezing costs out of your business. It’s about growing the business 20% a year, finding additional services to pull in. And we’re like, this would be fun. It’d be fun to have a partner that has the capital resources to do this, that has the wherewithal none of us literally have ever grown a business this big before. And I think knowing what you don’t know is helpful, and it also allowed me to bridge that gap of growing the business without having to be the one funding it. And so the time the partner was right, the timing was right, everyone was excited about it, and they’ve, they’ve, we did our due diligence, and, you know, they’ve been a great partner almost five years later,
Brad Weimert 1:03:02
growth, private equity in particular, is what you wanted, yeah.
Robert Glazer 1:03:06
So we were, we were mid market, growth company, right? And growth private equity firms kind of have a thesis of a platform and roll ins, and you do a couple acquisitions, and you grow. I think people conflate it with a large scale private equity, which buys like a and they do like 10 of these platform investments with three or four add ons each in a fund. They can people confuse this with a large scale private equity buys a public company and strips the costs out of it, and, you know, Blue Star airlines out of what can I think of the movie now, Wall Street. But that’s just not what that’s just not what it is. I mean, these are companies that should grow tremendously, but you don’t. You don’t know how to buy companies. You know, you don’t have the financial wherewithal and how to deal with credit and debt and these transactions and audits and compliance and all the, you know, payroll systems and accounting, all the things that happen when you grow up as a business. And I, I try to not, like figure, have to figure out something for the first time by by screwing it up.
Brad Weimert 1:04:09
Yeah, well, I think, you know, you used a ton of words very quickly that will confuse anybody that hasn’t talked to private equity before. But I think it’s, I’d like to clean, clean that up a little bit before we wrap. Because when people think about selling, there are a handful of paths that you can go down. One of them is private equity. And private equity is some company that has some objective of aggregating companies to make a bigger value so that it’s worth more when they sell it later. That’s usually the overarching frame of private equity, right, right?
Robert Glazer 1:04:46
So a middle market company will like, if they, if they have $100 million fund, they will mark 10 million for each platform. So, and then they’ll probably each company they buy. Yeah, this is not real numbers. So, yep. So. So each platform, so it’d be 10 platforms, because a platform will have one platform company and then like, three or four add ons. So if, this case, it was 10 million, you know, for platform, you’d buy the platform company for 5 million, then you’d add on five, four, $1 million you know, companies got it that. So there are 10 and each one of those platforms represents a thesis. So that fund has 50 investments overall in it, very different than when, again, you use your entire fund to go buy a public company and say, there’s a lot of bloat in this, and we’re going to strip out the costs right and load on a lot of debt that is a that is also called private equity, but is a totally different model. A lot of times those companies aren’t even
Brad Weimert 1:05:44
growing. Yeah, I mean, I would encourage any I’ve interviewed a couple of PE guys in there. It’s interesting, because their their funds, their companies, are radically different. And so I would encourage anybody that is looking at or considering selling, or thinks they think they might in the future, to go watch some videos, educate yourself a little bit on kind of the different types of private equity companies and what the structures are, because if you don’t know what they are, you shouldn’t play in the first place. The number of people I know that have had PE come in and had a nightmare afterwards is disturbing.
Robert Glazer 1:06:21
You should, but you should also do as much diligence as they do. You are getting married, and the folks who never I mean, I did 20 reference checks, like on our partners, it’s like getting married and but you haven’t dated, you know, for very long, so I remember my reference checks. That’s what I joked. I’m like, Look, I feel like I’m getting married, and I’ve known this person for a few weeks. So want to hear about your experience. I think enough founders do not look at the reputation. People tend to behavioral based questions. They tend to behave how they behaved in the past. So a lot of folks are known for what’s called RE trading, getting you signed up for a deal, beating you down for months, and then when you’re worn out, kind of changing the price on you. For a lot of them like that’s a business model, and if you had asked around and asked the right questions and checkfont, you could have, you could have learned that. But people get really excited when people are interested in them. Get Smart, seasoned advisors. Do not try to sell your business by yourself. Find a banker, find a good advisor, find a broker, find a good accountant, find a lawyer who’s a transaction lawyer, not your cousin who does real estate. All these deals are a disaster, or where someone hires, not an expert, and someone that they have more loyalty to. You want someone who’s done these deals all along where they can go? Oh, yeah, these loi is like, this is these guys. They’re bad news. You know, run from them. That’s awesome.
Brad Weimert 1:07:39
That’s great advice. While we’re on great advice. What advice do you have for brand new entrepreneurs?
Robert Glazer 1:07:48
Yeah, look, as I’ve been saying to a lot of people, entrepreneurship is only sexy through the rear view mirror, right? It’s a slog. It’s hard. I think you got to check your values and your vision. Like, do you have a clear vision? The difference between an entrepreneur and non entrepreneur is like, look, I see this flag on the top of the mountain, sometimes not entrepreneurs like, but the stream and the side of the cliff and the how are we going to get here? And entrepreneurs like, I’m just going to get there. I’m resolute that I’m going to take this path, that paths not going to work, but then they’ll find a new path. And so I think if you’re clear about the vision and the why you’re doing something, and you’re clear on your values, you can push through it if you’re trying to do it for the wrong reason, if you’re just trying to make money that then when the going gets tough, like and it will, you’re not going to be super motivated to keep going. So it should not be easy or sexy until many years down the line, after many near death failures, if you ever want, you know to why I love the how I built this podcast is that, like all these super successful companies, you hear their near death moments, like where they were almost dead and they pushed through to the other side. So in all of them, right? Multiple times. And that’s sort of the truth of the entrepreneurial journey.
Brad Weimert 1:09:05
Bob Glazer, thank you so much, man, where should people find you? Where do you want to point people? You got a brand new book coming out? Yeah, it’s called, it’s
Robert Glazer 1:09:13
called the compass within, I just got my early, early copy, so it looks like that. Yeah, everything’s at. Robert glaser.com, you can sign up for my Friday for newsletter, which has like 150,000 subscribers all around the world. It’s a couple minutes every Friday. Podcast is on there. Books are on there. It’s Robert g l, a, z, e r.com.
Brad Weimert 1:09:34
Love it. Thank you so much. Man, can’t wait to get you into Austin when your kids are not doing all
Robert Glazer 1:09:38
the things. Thank you very much.
Brad Weimert 1:09:43
That’s a wrap for today’s episode. Please subscribe, and most importantly, leave us a review. It takes like 30 seconds, and it makes such a big impact, it helps other people find us also. You might not know this, you can watch over 100 episodes of beyond a million with guests like Grant Cardone, Wes Watson and Neil. Tell at beyond a million.com.
Robert Glazer
Robert Glazer is the founder and chairman of Acceleration Partners, a global affiliate marketing agency known for its award-winning company culture and fully remote team spanning over 40 countries. He scaled the company to multi-eight figures before bringing on private equity and transitioning to a chairman role. A bestselling author and sought-after speaker, Robert is widely recognized for his expertise in values-based leadership, organizational culture, and building high-performing teams. His innovative approaches—like the Open Transition Program—have helped redefine how companies hire, lead, and grow with integrity.
Resources
[guest_info]
Too many companies treat their core values like wall art – nice to look at, easy to ignore.
In this episode, Brad sits down with Robert Glazer to explore how to make core values real in the day-to-day, not just on paper.
Robert is the founder of Acceleration Partners, a global affiliate marketing agency he scaled to multi-eight figures with a fully remote team of 300+ people across 40 countries. He brought on a private equity firm, took some money off the table, and now serves as chairman of the board. He’s also a bestselling author and a recognized expert in values-based leadership and company culture.
In this conversation, Robert shares why values should guide every decision – from who you hire and fire to how you handle a million-dollar client who crosses the line. (Spoiler: he let the client go.) He also breaks down his Open Transition Program, an alternative to the two-week notice that prioritizes transparency and dignity on the way out, not just on the way in.
From there, the conversation moves into the evolution of affiliate marketing, the structure behind high-performing remote teams, and how to grow under private equity without losing what matters.
If you care about scaling with integrity, this one’s worth your time.
Tune in now!
Inspiring Quotes
- “If the only expression of a company’s core values is on the wall, they’re not real values – they’re just wall art.” – Robert Glazer
- “In most organizations, there’s a say-do gap. You’re either saying things you’re not doing, or doing things the culture values, but they’re not explicitly stated as values.” – Robert Glazer
- “I’m not telling the leadership team what their values are – I’m interviewing their people, pulling out what they’re saying, and presenting it back.” – Robert Glazer
- “Sticking to your values always has a cost – and that’s why most people don’t do it.” – Robert Glazer
- “Having conviction and integrity in your values allows you to feel good about the cost of sticking to them, as opposed to having it be painful.” – Brad Weimert
- “I think we’re moving from an era of employer abuse to one of employee abuse. I don’t think either of those is great – it’s just an unfortunate pendulum.” – Robert Glazer
- “The true test of your culture is how you tolerate two people. One is the brilliant jerk. And the other is the friendly incompetent.” – Robert Glazer
- “The way we’re going to get back to growing companies is growing the people along with them.” – Robert Glazer
- “Private equity is like the institution of marriage. It is not good or bad. It depends on who you marry.” – Robert Glazer
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