xfinity gives you more to stream to more screens. good morning. coming up on "your business," lessons on leadership from the united states air force weapon school in nevada. what businesses can learn from the men and women guarding this nation. an entrepreneurial veteran repurposes military surplus into a fashionable handbag company. plus, how this rope company made the leap by marketing to the needs of cowboys and ranch hands. information to help you grow fast, go far and work smart, coming up next on "your business." >> announcer: "your business" is sponsored by american express open, helping you get business done. >> hi, everyone.

i'm jj ramberg. welcome to "your business," the show dedicated to helping your growing business. for us, a strong leadership may be the difference between the life and death of our companies. for those in the air force, it could be the difference between life and death. we recently visited the exclusive united states air force weapons school in nevada, where the colonel is obsessed with ensuring that he trains his students to become the best leaders out there. we wanted to learn what characteristics and values are at the core of their education and how those qualities can translate to the business sector. ♪ known as the home of the fighter pilot, nevada's air force base is just a short ride away from all the glitz of the las vegas strip. it's also home to one of the most prestigious training programs in the military. the united states air force weapons school.

twice a year, some of the most gifted warriors of the sky are chosen to attend the phd level program there to learn the art of the most advanced, integrated combat, across land, air, space and cyber domains. not only do weapons school students become tactical experts in all areas of warfare but they also received an unmatched education in leadership. these airmen have to be the best of the best leaders. they're called upon for the most complex and dangerous situations. faced with decisions that are often the difference between life or death. colonel mike drowley believes leaders who have the highest level of integrity can consistently deliver successful results. not only in military but also in business and in life. and they all possess these key traits. they're selfless. >> when you go into an extremist

situation, where lives are on the line, your life is on the line, it's not about you. the very first thing that goes through your head is what can i do to help? i've got friends, comrades, that are on the ground under fire. what can i do to support them? >> they think of themselves as of service. >> we tell them the school, the institution, is all about you. it's all about making you better, making you a better leader, a better person, a better tactician. but we're doing that so that way, you can give back. it is all about helping othersf >> they're humble. >> every time i'm engaging with my team, i do a cross check of what i'm about to say. am i being humble, learning as much as i can, checking my eg t ego at the door? everybody is fallible. if somebody doesn't own up to the mistakes, it causes you to lose trust. >> they're approachable. >> we want somebody we feel has a vested interest in us that we can talk to. there is a level of trust there and it helps you relate to the

leader. >> graduates become instructors to the air force instructors and many serve as advisers to some of the military's most senior leaders. >> it is an amazing transformation. when the students show up to the weapons school, they know they're in for a five and a half month marathon of experiences. >> it's said you'll never be as smart as the day you gradual weapons school. our students feel they can conquer the world. >> the lessons learned at weapons school and the front lines of battle are invaluable and can easily translate from the military world to the business sector. hire people who are confident in navigating through the unknown. mitigating the unknown in combat is impossible. the same applies to any business venture. so building a team of people who can face uncertainty with confidence is critical. >> they have the trust and the empowerment to say, even though i'm in the unknown, i know where i need to be going. i've been empowered to get there. they have the right vector in place to get to where the leadership asked them to go. >> whether you're building an

integration strategy for combat or a company, knowledge of all moving parts, players and departments is critical. >> the familiarity needs to run deep. you don't want to micromanage but you want to enable wherever possible. i'm not a cyber expert but i know what can make them more advantageous in what they need to do. some companies are only worried about the success of their department and it is not integrated with the rest of the strategic vision. >> that's not an option for weapons school students. they must execute an integration strategy that's seamless every time. at the end of their journey, they're put to the test with a keystone mission called joint forcible entry. >> our joint forcible entry mission brings all the capabilities together to do a complex and difficult mission, to drop an air bouborne force o and own terrain for a period of time. the only way to do that is if you take everybody's capabilities, maximize them and integrate them across the board.

>> we want our students to be well versed in how to understand all the mission and planning complexities, how to understand all the execution complexities and how to deal with all the contingencies that may potentially arise. >> and when students graduate, they receive the weapons school patch, a damage of incredible honor given to some of the most resilient and remarkable leaders, who will stop at nothing to protect our nation's safety. old is becoming new again in the hands of these entrepreneurial sisters who are no strangers to the military life. their company recycles old military goods and transforms them into fashionable bags and accessories. employing veterans and giving back to the military community in the process. these bags used to be military tents. the company takes old, recycled military goods and turns them into bags. not only that, it is owned by

and employs veterans. >> what in my life is sometimes wasted that could be harnessed and turned into something really beautiful with a powerful mission? >> the nunez sisters started their company in 2012 with a kick starter campaign. >> we've worked with everything from shelter tents to parachutes to repurpose uniform fabrics to repurposed .50 caliber shell casings. >> emily is a former u.s. army captain who served in the tenth special forces group. >> our business model embodies this life cycle. we're repurposing this material and giving back and empowering the community from where the bags materials are coming from. >> according to the bureau of labor statistics, in 2016, there were 453,000 unemployed veterans. >> it is also really meaningful to us because we personally know

just how amazing veterans are to the civilian communities and civilian work force. so i think the more that we can do to communicate that veterans are empowering assets to civilian workplaces, that that's a really huge part of our mission, too. >> the sisters have repurposed more than 35,000 pounds of military surplus and supported more than 65 veteran jobs. >> the fact that we're able to build a business that has a quadruple bottom line and give back to the community we're most passionate about supporting, and that we grew up in our entire lives and emily served in and our dad served in and so many of our family members have been a part of, i think it is an immense feeling of pride but also joy. >> and they give back even more. sword and plough donates 10% of their earnings to veteran organizations. >> we're extremely, you know, hopeful and excited to hear that

the bags are conversation starters. i think we just hope that they have the opportunity to share their experiences within their service with the entire civilian community as well as really anywhere that they are because we know their experiences and their leadership and their technical skills. it is something that everyone can learn from. when we're coming up with ways to move our business forward, we shouldn't be constrained by looking only to our own industry for inspiration. for example, when the owners were creating packaging, they looked at candle and shoe boxes to come up with their signature look. when steve, a owner of a rope making business wanted to grow his company, he took a page out of the book of the fishing industry.

♪ growing up in idaho, there's always been two constants in steve's life. horses and business. >> i always tell people it is a hobby gone bad. >> when he wasn't loworking at s father's farm, chances are, you could find him at a local rodeo. it was one of those events that steve got his inspiration to start his own rope making company. >> i was actually on college rodeo. there was a horse for sale. i went down and i was looking at the horse. he said, i think i sell this kind of rope that you guys use. i said, really? he said, yeah. i said, could you show it to me? >> though it was typically used for japanese fishing nets, steve knew the rope would be great for his rodeo needs. with a few adjustments. >> the problem is, those guys don't rope. we could give them specifications how we wanted it made, but it would either come in maybe too soft or too stiff, you know. not really within our specifications to use. i thought, man, there's got to be a way to fix that. i invented a machine to run the

rope through to make the road, no matter how bad it was, we could straighten it and fix it. >> his invention made it possible to customize the rope to specific customers needs and also resalvage inventory that would have been wasted otherwise. it's made a loyal customer out of rancher jay hogan. >> they'll make them anyway you want them. they know what i want. i don't have to screw with the ropes when they come. they're just how i want. >> cowboy cordage is one of the industry's leading distributors. they sell direct to consumer but also have their ropes stocked in places like smith and edwards. >> i'd think they'd be up in the top five. i know they're the main distributors on the coiled stuff. >> the brand includes rocky mountain ropes as well as two other brands that they acquired over the years. it's their consistent quality that has the old-timers coming back. the way they reach some of these

customers hasn't changed a lot over the years. >> a lot of our industry isn't necessarily on the web yet. we're a little behind with the farmers and ranchers. some don't even have internet service. we really waned ewanted to hav catalog, have our name out and pull the brands together. >> they've attracted new business by constantly updating and growing. first up, their marketing. the internet opened them up to a whole new customer base. international ones. elaina, steve's daughter, came on as general manager a few years ago. she says that rounding up what the next trend will be isn't an exact science. >> and some of it is going to be great, and some of it is going to be terrible. we have to market our way through it. >> marketing isn't the only department that's bep fnefitted from thinking outside the box. one of their most successful products was inspired by one of steve's side hobbies. >> my boys and i are competitive shooters. i was coming home one day, and i'm like, you ask about an ah-ha

moment, and this was it. we all wear shooting glasses, similar to these, and it enhances the colors. i thought, man, if we could get a neon rope and do that, that'd be amazing. and it just really changed a lot of things. >> when it came out, it exploded. everyone had to have the bright, crazy colors. i'd say most of the industry, no matter what brand you go to now, everyone has something similar. >> but the company's biggest influencers have been and always will be their cowboy boot wearing, rope throwing, four customers. >> the industry has gotten bigger in the past couple years and we've listened to a lot of our customers and take what they think would be best for them. everything from the ropes being really soft to the ropes being a certain length that they want. we try to adapt to the latest trends and get a product out there that they can use. >> and steve says the best way to know your product is to continue to be your own customer. >> you can't be in the rope business and not rope.

seo, search engine optimization, can be a scary term for those who don't understand how it works, which is most people, but it is so important to come up high on the list when potential customers do ani online search. many of us don't know how to get up there. i recently went down to blog her in orlando, where i chatted with a specialist, who gave me helpful tools and advice on how to rank high in seo. how important is it for companies to think about seo? >> absolutely crucial. you need to be building that traffic from the search engines to get the sales you want. you need to be ranking in google. >> when you think about seo, how much of it is technical, things you can do to your site that you might not understand, versus, hey, have a great site that people love and they're come back. >> it's both. you need to create compelling content, and you need to do the technical tweaks, as well, which

sometimes you need an expert to do for you. they're equally important. >> tell me mistakes people make. >> three top mistakes. number one is the gut check mistake. this is when you're picking your key word using your gut instead of tools. choose your key words based on popularity. it is counterintuitive, which synonyms and variations are the best. free, top tools are ask the public.com. the best paid tool is moz key board explorer. number two is the broken record mistake. you need to be placing your top key words in the title tags, headings and page copy, but you don't want to be stuffing key words repetitively throughout your content. it can get you penalized. then having links pointing to your site is crucial but don't buy links for cheap. it is all about quality, not quantity. instead, focus on building

authoritative, trusted links. >> are there any shortcuts to seo? are there tricks that people need to know, or is it just, hey, you need to do this over time and really build authority and, again, have a great site? >> sure. well, there's definitely a few tips and tricks. for example, i have an seo formula. seo standards for search engine optimization, but you can remember top three factors of seo using the same acronyacrony. s is strategy. it is a game changer and your road map to online success. e is for expert. you need to position yourself as the expert in your industry, and only be providing really compelling content to your users. and then o is for on page. off page seo is only half of the equation, link building. so you need to be not forgetting about on-page seo, your title tags, keyword placement and technical tweaks, such as page speed, a ranking signal. >> when you talk about link building, you mean having other

people talk about you. google uses it as a sign as, hey, this is an important web site. >> it's one of the main, core pillars of seo. you need to be building up your inbound links. >> get people to talk about you, like public relations. >> absolutely. that's why you need to be providing only really compelling content. then it'll actually increase your trusted links from other sites and building those natural links. >> how much do i have to pay for an seo consultant if i'm listening to you and think, this is overwhelming. i don't want to think about it myself? >> absolutely. seo can range anywhere from a few thousand a month, which is really, really low, up to $25,000 a month. >> wow. >> it really depends. you get what you pay for. >> right. also, there's a lot of information if you're just starting out online you can learn for yourself. thank you so much. this is really, really helpful. again, i think it is a scary term for some people who haven't gone into it yet, and we all need to be paying attention to it. >> absolutely. thank you for having me.

remember, if i can do it when i was 14, anyone can do it. when you grow a business or a department from the ground up, it can be so hard to let things go. it is normal to want to be involved in every aspect of everything that's going on, but at some point, you have to learn to delegate if you want to scale your operations. we've got these five ways for managers to master the art of delegation. one, prepare diligently. if you don't fully develop your ideas, you risk setting your employees up for failure. think about the budget, the time line and the end goals before reaching out to your team for help. two, assign tasks according to your employees strength. even the best laid plans will fall apart if you choose the wrong person for the job. three, check in but do not micromanage. you've already planned your project. you've delegated the task to competent people. trust them to get the work done.

but remember, they say trust but verify for a reason. schedule time to check in with your teams and track their progress so that you can change anything if necessary. four, provide constructive feedback. even if your employees do a great job on the task you give them, you have to give them feedback. you want them to know what they did well, why they did it well and what they might need to work on so that they can grow and do better in the future. five, celebrate wins publicly. your employees work hard for your company every day. celebrate them as often as you can. you don't need to throw a party for every effort, of course, but a little recognition can boost morale and show other employees how you like to see work done. when we come back, why you need to pay close attention to online reviews of your business and our brain trust tackles the tricky question, what do you do when your most productive employee is also the most toxic person in the office?

so that's the idea. what do you think? hate to play devil's advocate but... i kind of feel like it's a game changer. i wouldn't go that far. are you there? he's probably on mute. yeah... gary won't like it. why? because he's gary. (phone ringing) what? keep going! yeah... (laughs) (voice on phone) it's not millennial enough. there are a lot of ways to say no. thank you so much. thank you! so we're doing it. yes! start saying yes to your company's best ideas. let us help with money and know-how, so you can get business done. american express open. the question we would have with baby boomers is how can we come across that they understand

that going online it to look at google reviews is very important for their business. >> the best way to communicate to baby boomers the importance of checking reviews of their companies and services is to communicate the value of being able to read people's minds. i always it tell people the most valuable superpower you can have in most people's estimation is to be able to understand what people are thinking about them. well, we had live in a day and age now where it's public and you should be able to check google alerts and other resource s to find out what do they really think about your company, about your business. it's market research totally invaluable. if you communicate it in those terms everybody will get it. >> this is the brain trust where i get to ask some of the smartest minds in business, people who who are really going through it or have successfully, some of the most complicated, the trickiest or the most controversial questions. so today in the brain trust i have cindy whitehead, the founder and see receive of

sprout pharmaceuticals known for pushing the female viagra through the fda. you've sold that company for a billion dollars which congratulations. that is so fun to say. >> thank you. >> and president of she knows, which is one of the top five media companies online for women, also you run the biggest blogger conference for women as well. >> yes, i do. >> you've been this for a while and you've helped the company grow three time. >> three times in revenue, twice double audience reach. >> congratulations. you have really done it. the question we will talk about today is employees. and i find this to be a really tricky one because there is a pat answer everyone gives, and i don't think it's the truth of what everyone does. and the question is what do you do if your number one employee, the person who if you had to look back on the last three years, came up with the ideas that propelled your company forward. it weren't pour this person your company may very well be in the dumps. is also poison when it comes to

culture. right? >> fire them. >> is that the answer everybody gives? i did it. it was my number one sales person in the company, and you are never going to live on one person's contribution alone, and it created paralysis of everybody around him. so he was so toxic to culture that nobody else was was performing. >> okay. let me say a baby step version different than that. you have to create competition with that individual for two purposes. "a," it will keep them at their game and intellectually stimula stimulated. if they think they always have it in the bag, they're always number one, they're not going to compete. you actually have to have somebody come in who thinks they can beat it and then you start to change it. >> your situation is a sales person. so presumably the fear is this person leaves and my revenue goes down 50% or whatever they're responsible for. it's scary. but you can start to fill that it in, right?

>> you must fill that in or think how vulnerable you are. if you're dependent on one person as your lone contributor and they're devastating to the culture, he is peespecially in businesses, we talk about culture in big companies, but in a small business you have one person who doesn't fit, it's just completely -- >> it is, it's toxic. which is why you always want to say get rid of them. >> it is hard. >> i love your decisiveness about that because i'm going to the place of how are we defining toxicity. how old, experienced is the person. maybe we go through a wave of thinking we know everything before we learn that we don't know anything. i also think sales person and likewise i've managed and revered salespeople for two decades, really good salespeople are often very difficult people in my experience. >> can you also put them on the si side? >> if they're individual

salespeople. if they're managers, toxicity is, i think, untenable in a manager. and speaks to things that are probably not going to work out in the work place. but i think it is rehab -- you can rehab toxicity in some situations. we talk about this but i go with, do i like this person, trust this person, respect this person? if you have two of those, toxicity usually to me relates to trust. you don't trust, you're not aligned. >> let's say you trust them, you like them, but no one else on the team can relate to them. >> i think i like the competition idea. >> not knocking them down in a malicious way but humanizing them to everybody else. my feeling is if there's toxicity it's a lack of humility if they're a star contributor and they can start to connect. >> just bad communication skills. >> fair enough. i think creating humanity around them and a couple shots at them

that brings them down to everybody else's level -- >> give them a more challenging as task, also. we're so comfortable with people, it is easy to manage that person. it's easy for him or her to communicate quickly, rapidly with me. but maybe their job isn't hard enough which tends to turn us into far worse versions of ourselves. maybe if you give them a herculean task that will cause them to struggle and have to reach out. one thing i wouldn't do that i think we're all jumping around is telling them to not be a jerk never works. explaining to them how they hurt people's feelings never works. it's got to be intrinsic. it has to be like they feel they need somebody else and they do need somebody else. >> what i get from this is don't send them out for coffee. bad idea, j.j. very jv. thank you both. one of the apps we use is

called groupme that allows us to have a social component where we all talk and communicate together. we have a daily theme like freaking awesome friday where we talk about how awesome we are and what we did that caused success in the organization. >> one of the apps we use that we recently started using is called refersion. an app you use to set up an affiliate program. a big part of our business is referrals. we get a lot of referrals from word of mouth, people who tried the product, love it, and want to refer to other people. we thought of a way to provide an incentive for other people if they want to share the product. refersion allows you to set up an affiliate program. when someone signs up as an affiliate they get their own dashboard, can track sales and commissions. all of payments are made seamlessly through pay pal so people who want to share the product and want to share it with other people can get an incentive for doing that. >> personally i like the app

dark sky. it's a weather app. dark sky is pretty accurate up until almost a minute. it will alert me based on my gps and area if it's going to rain. it will tell you, take cover. you're about to get rained on. >> this week's selfie features a grammy winner turned entrepreneur. art school, the victory spot in fayetteville, georgia, created by speech. the leader of the alternative hip-hop group arrested development. the victory spot has classes in dancing, acting, and it teaches people how to play instruments as well. now we would love to see your business. so pick up your phone, take a selfie of you and your company and send it to us at yourbusiness@msnbc.com. include your name, the location, and foent forget to don't forget to use the #yourbizselfie.

if you want to get in touch with us e-mail us at yourbusiness@msnbc.com. we posted all of the segments from today's show plus a whole lot more for you. also, please connect on all of our digital and social media platforms, too. we talk on there all weeklong and give you more information. we lock forward to seeing you next time. until then i'm j.j. ramberg. remember, we make your with business our business. thank you so much. thank you! so we're a go? yes! we got a yes! what does that mean for purchasing? purchase. let's do this. got it. book the flights! hai! si! si! ya! ya! ya! what does that mean for us? we can get stuff. what's it mean for shipping? ship the goods. you're a go! you got the green light.

that means go! oh, yeah. start saying yes to your company's best ideas. we're gonna hit our launch date! (scream) thank you! goodbye! let us help with money and know-how, so you can get business done. american express open. good morning and welcome to "politics nation." i'm down in new orleans for the annual essence music festival. and we will be talking shortly with the mayor of the whole city, mayor mitch landrieu, about many things including him being one of the leading figures against president trump's policies. but first as we continue to see republicans are still stuck in th