A new hire shows you their best in the first month. Pamela Dicso, CEO of ZD Stucco Repair, waits until month three and looks at the work. She also explains how she earned a skeptical team's respect and how a simple onboarding standard keeps quality consistent.

Key Takeaways:

• Judge a hire at month three, not month one.
• Evaluate the work, especially in areas where you aren't the expert.
• When authority isn't automatic, ask for help.
• Write the standard into onboarding.
• Communicate with clients before they have to ask, especially when weather changes the schedule.
• Growth shows up beyond revenue: with about 80 people on the payroll, the impact reaches that many families.

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Dianetics: The Modern Science of Mental Health

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AI will give you an answer in seconds, and most of the time it will be an average one. Dr. Jessica Wu, a Beverly Hills dermatologist building a physician-delivered women's health practice, calls that C-plus work. Here is how she uses AI for speed and research, and what she keeps for herself.

Key Takeaways:

• Treat AI output as a rough draft
• Give AI the full story before you ask for an answer
• Use AI to compress research time
• Build around what customers keep asking for
• Make hospitality a leadership priority
• Hire by showing a different way to work

Dr. Wu went from one doctor to four in three months and says finding doctors and support staff, not demand, is her biggest scaling friction. Her proof point is her own practice: 25 years, a long waiting list, and 3 doctors hired, with more to come.

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Feed Your Face: The 28-Day Plan for Younger, Smoother Skin and a Beautiful Body by Dr. Jessica Wu

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Most employers want to be good bosses, and most employees want to do good work. Most of them still walk into the next relationship carrying the last bad one. For Alex Tieu, CEO of JLG Lawyers, that gap is the part of business AI can't solve, and closing it is a leadership decision.

Key Takeaways:

• Name the baggage you bring to every hire.
• Alex calls it the ex-boyfriend effect: carrying the sins of a past employee or boss into a new relationship.
• Keep seeing possibility in people after being burned.
• Alex has had employees embezzle from her and still says a leader who stops seeing possibility becomes their own worst enemy in growth.
• Start before you have all the answers on AI.
• Nobody knows exactly what they're doing yet, and waiting for certainty is the bigger risk.
• Treat AI as an affirmation machine and build safe space for dissent.
• AI tends to tell you what you want to hear, so real change comes from teams free to tell you what they think.
• Design the architecture of your AI workflow.
• At JLG, nothing goes out without a paralegal and an attorney reviewing it, and who does what is tracked.
• Build career paths around where people are in life.
• JLG offers different tracks and a paid apprenticeship that lets paralegals become attorneys while working and without debt.

Alex grew JLG from 15 cases and six employees to more than 2,000 cases and 80 people in five years. She credits designing different roles (support attorneys, trial attorneys, lead attorneys who build mini firms) and a paid apprenticeship around where people are in their lives.

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Alex Tieu LinkedIn

Alex Tieu Instagram

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