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Elena Cardone: Find the One You Trust and Build an Empire
- Leo Pareja
- 4 days ago
- 3 min read
🎧 Listen now to hear why Elena thinks the biggest lie in business is “I can’t find good people,” the audit she runs every time a hire doesn’t stick, and why she says replacing yourself is almost always a team sport and not a solo hire.
Almost every founder I know has said some version of this.
“I can’t find anyone as good as me.”
The morning Elena Cardone came on the pod, I’d just posted about that exact line. I said it was probably the biggest lie in business. She’d seen the post and came in ready to go even harder on it.
Her take was simple. If you’ve hired six people for the same seat and none of them have worked out, the problem isn’t the people.
It’s you.
When you’ve already decided good people don’t exist, you stop looking carefully. You hire fast. You skip the uncomfortable reference call. You ignore the thing that felt off in the second interview because you’re tired and the seat’s been empty for four months.
The hire fails, it confirms what you already believed, and you run the same play again.
Elena said the only way out is to turn the question around on yourself.
She runs a short checklist every time a hire doesn’t stick.
Is there a mission clear enough that anyone in the company could repeat it back to you.
Are your values specific enough that a new person would know when they crossed one.
Did you actually train them, or did you tell them to shadow you for a few days.
Did your interview catch the red flags that ended up showing up three months in.
And is the environment you dropped them into one where a good person could actually do good work.
None of those are questions about the candidate. All of them are about the leader.
Elena learned this the long way. She spent years running every part of the business herself because she believed nobody else could do it to her standard. What she eventually figured out is that holding onto everything wasn’t making her stronger. It was making her smaller. She couldn’t do her own job because she was trying to do everyone else’s too.
The fix wasn’t finding one incredible person to replace her. It was building out two or three people who could each carry a piece of what she used to do. That’s the part most founders miss. Your replacement is almost never one hire. It’s a bench.
The day she stopped hunting for a clone and started building the bench is the day her side of the business actually started moving.
Here’s what I’m taking from it. The people you end up with are the result of the process you built to find them, train them, and hold them to a standard. If the result keeps coming back wrong, the process is the first place to look.
Here’s to being honest about who’s actually the problem,
Leo
P.S. We also got into why Elena says swapping the 50/50 marriage for a 100/100 version changed everything for her and Grant, the rule in the Cardone house that had her kids emptying their piggy banks to pay for their first ride on the family plane, and the gene test that told her alcohol isn’t just unhealthy, it’s literally poison her body can’t process.
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