Podcast appearances and mentions of david well

Wondering how to achieve your goals? Well, achieving goals is quite different than just setting them. So while the first step may be to set the goals you really want, then we have to prioritize our actions from high to low. What is the most important thing that I need to do in order to get there? Because generally, you can come up with a dozen or a hundred different things that you’re going to need to do to achieve your goals. But there’s probably one to three things on there that are going to be more important than the other 97. David: Hi, and welcome to the podcast. In today’s episode, co-host Jay McFarland and I will discuss how to achieve your goals. Welcome back, Jay. Jay: Hey, so glad to be here, David, and once again, I’m looking forward to this discussion. We hear people talk about goals all the time, and I know for me it’s something that I struggle with because what will happen is I’ll set those goals. I really haven’t defined how I’m going to get there, and then when I don’t achieve them, it becomes something that deflates me. So I think for a lot of people, goal setting can work against them. David: I think it can too, because I believe there is a lot of focus on goal setting, and it’s something that we do, particularly at the beginning of a new year. A lot of people focus on their new year resolutions, which are their goals. And while there’s been a lot written about goal setting, the importance of goal setting, writing things down, reviewing it regularly, having your affirmations and things like that. All of those things are certainly helpful, but they don’t actually, directly connect to the idea of how to achieve your goals. And that’s why I wanted to title this the way that I did, because setting your goals has been done to death, but how do you achieve your goals? I think it’s interesting to explore that aspect of this topic. Jay: Well, yeah. And one of the things that frustrates me is, when people talk about goal setting, they tend to assume that everybody’s the same. Oh, just follow this and you’re great. It’s like, I read The Seven Habits of Highly Successful People and what was never mentioned or considered in that was, it was also seven habits for highly organized people already. You had already achieved a level where all you had to do was put these things in place and you’re good. You can achieve your goals. Well, what about me? I wasn’t raised with systems and those kind of things, so what about me? I didn’t feel like there was any place that I could implement that. David: Yeah. And that is very common. I mean, I think everyone probably deals with that because unfortunately, when you’re writing a book that’s going to be on a shelf for a long period of time, you have to include things that are essentially timeless. And The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People, I mean, it’s such a great book. It’s a very inspirational read. But when you’ve got rules, like “Be Proactive,” that’s a big, broad rule, right? And in many cases you can be proactive, but what does that mean? It gets down to the nitty gritty. We’ve talked in the past about Michael Gerber, the author of The E-Myth. I love that book. The E-Myth, The E-Myth Revisited. I read the original copy a long, long time ago, and I just loved it, because this was all about processes. And that book talked primarily about the fact that you have to have processes. But then what are those processes, right? Because that’s the part that people like you and I need. It’s like, what are the processes? How do I do that? How do I make that happen? And so much of my career has been focused on that. How do I turn this great recommendation, “be proactive,” you know? Jay: Yeah. David: “Work on your business, not just in your business.” How do I take broad statements like that? To some extent, they become platitudes, and how do I turn that into something that is actionable? Because that is the only way you can ever achieve your goals. You have to be able to convert those great ideas into actionable tasks. Jay: Yeah, such a key point. I think for me, what I found is I have to break it down enough to where I can feel that feeling of success instead of failure. Right? So it’s got to be minute enough to where I can say, okay, I did it. I accomplished something. And it could be something very simple. But that motivates me to the next step. I find if they’re too big, then I’m setting myself up for disappointment. David: Absolutely. But I think anyone who reads any sort of self-help material or business material, if you can take what they’re giving you and then just ask yourself right away, “how do I apply this right now to my business?” Again, Seven Habits, “begin with the end in mind.” Jay: Right. David: I mean, you could find that in a fortune cookie, couldn’t you? It’s brilliant advice, but it’s like, oh, hey, yeah, that’s really great. Now, again, in fairness, because it’s an excellent book… Jay: Yes. David: And he goes into a lot of detail about some different ways that you can do that. But in some sense it has to be general. And that’s why, if you’re able to ask yourself that question, “how do I apply this right now?” It’s going to get you a lot closer to being able to achieve your goals. Because now it’s not about concepts, it’s about you: Your activities, your focus, and what your next step is. Jay: Yeah, so let’s get into a little bit more detail. I’ve asked myself, “how do I accomplish this now?” Is that a list you would write down or how would you recommend people proceed from that point? David: Well, yeah, I think what I would generally want to start with is thinking in terms of resources. What are you going to need to achieve your goals? Okay. because once I’ve written down the goal… say my goal is X amount of dollars in sales by the end of the year. My goal is to sell X number of customers by a certain date. Whatever your thing is, now you’ve got the goal. All right. Well, as I said, the goal is kind of the easy part. Now we need to think in terms of, okay, what are the resources? What are you going to need in order to be able to achieve your goal? Can I do it by myself? Am I going to have to hire additional staff? Hopefully you’re not. But you need to know upfront. Because if you don’t take the time to consider the resources that are needed, versus the resources at your disposal, then you won’t even know if you’re taking actions that are not going to allow you to get to your goal. But if you take the time to think upfront, okay, what are the resources I’m going to need? Who am I going to need? Right? It’s not just about the things. It’s also about the people. Am I going to need additional help with this? And if so, what kind of people am I going to need? There’s an excellent book called Who Not How, by Dan Sullivan and Dr. Ben Hardy. It talks about the fact that when we’re looking to get things done, a lot of times we think in terms of “how am I going to do this?” When in fact we’re often better served by saying, “who can help me with this, who can help me get this done?” And that goes back to the resources. If you have a clear idea of what you’re going to need and who you’re going to need, then it’s going to be a lot easier to achieve your goals. And then ultimately, how much am I going to need? How much am I going to need in terms of resources, in terms of money, in terms of people, in terms of time? Time is always one of those resources that you need to evaluate upfront, and if you don’t do that, you’re never going to get beyond the fortune cookie aspect of what it is we’re talking about here. Jay: Yeah, you’ve kind of brought up negative emotions with me because it reminds me, I grew up in the restaurant business. And before I became an area manager and a regional manager, I remember my area manager coming in every year and we’d have to set sales goals. And so first of all, it was a complete shot in the dark. It was based upon air. Right? Just how much do you want to increase your sales? And second of all, there was never any instruction on how you’re going to do this. And so, how do you do it as a restaurant? I’m not in control of the marketing budget because it was a chain. So what am I going to do? Nobody ever said, well, you can increase your sales by doing A, B, C, and D. They just came in and set this arbitrary goal, and at the end of the year I was beat up because I didn’t reach that goal. And I’m like, this just becomes a bludgeon that creates disappointment. David: Right, because the focus there is on the what. Jay: Yes. David: What is it that I want to accomplish? Just like we’re talking about with goals. This is the goal. Okay. The goal is established very early on. But then every day, every hour preceding that, you need to ask yourself, am I on track? And that’s going to go back to, first of all, do you have a plan in place? Because if you don’t have a plan to achieve your goals, then it’s not going to happen. But then beyond the plan, do I have the resources? Do I have them in place? Am I firing on all thrusters? Jay: Mm-hmm. David: Are we doing the things that we need to do in order to accomplish it? And then also just adapting, recognizing that, let’s say you establish your goals today, you lay out a plan today, and you’re starting on it tomorrow. Well, as soon as you start it, it’s like that old quote, I don’t know if it was Colin Powell, some military general talked about the fact that “no battle plan survives contact with the enemy.” Jay: Yes. David: And it’s the same thing with a goal in business. It’s not going to survive contact with prospects and clients. You set your goal in terms of what you want to reach, but every day you’re going to be taking actions, some of which will work and some of which will not. At which point you need to be able to discern what’s good, what’s bad, what’s working, what’s not, so that you can jettison the stuff that isn’t working, do more of the stuff that is, and ultimately achieve your goals, achieve your objectives. But too often, just like New Year resolutions, we write them down January 1st and we don’t think of them again until December when we realized we’re nowhere close, because we never had the plan in place. We never had the resources in place, and we didn’t take consistent action. Jay: Yeah, absolutely. And back to my own example, when I became an area manager, I resolved not to be that guy who put my managers in that place. And so I identified an action plan of how you can increase your sales. Starts with excellent customer service. Who are you putting on the front lines? How do you handle complaints? How do you assess your customer service? Then it went to quality of product. Are you following guidelines? Are you building the product the way that it should be? Is it consistent? So there was a checklist that they could go through and then they would see the results happen. To me, that was empowering as opposed to deflating. David: Yes. When you empower your employees with the specific steps they need to take in order to accomplish the objectives, that’s exactly what they need. Jay: Yes. David: You know, there’s a difference between lead measures and lag measures. I’m sure you’re familiar with that concept as well. Jay: Mm-hmm. David: And our goals are usually lag measures. I want to be able to get to this amount of sales. But what are the lead measures that are going to make that happen? So when you talk about customer service being a first key, and then breaking that down, what does that mean? If you’re answering a phone, how many rings do you have? Do you have to answer it within three rings or 30 rings? Because that’s going to determine the experience of the customer. You can’t control how the customer’s going to feel, but you can control what you do on the front end to at least help to impact that experience. Jay: Yeah, and we had it as much as, you know, I had a really good employee in the back of the house, but not so good with customers, not a very good communicator. So I’d never put him on that interface with customers. It doesn’t mean he couldn’t help me in other places. So being that specific about each of those goals is so important. David: Yeah, I think so too. And I believe you want to start with setting goals that you really want, that are important to you. Because if you don’t have a really solid, great feeling about it, if you don’t have that driving “why” behind it, I really want this because it’s going to allow me more freedom in terms of my time, or it’s going to allow me to spend more time with my family or do more of the things that I want. If your goals don’t motivate you, then once again, you’re going to forget about them very quickly, or the moment some sort of temptation comes up that’s designed to derail you from your focus. So the first thing is you set the goals you really want, then you prioritize them from high to low. What is the most important thing that I need to do in order to get there? Because generally, you can come up with a dozen or a hundred different things that you’re going to need to do to achieve your goals. But there’s probably one to three things on there that are going to be more important than the other 97. So prioritizing is key. After you’ve set the goals, you got to prioritize what is that list of actions, and then it’s a matter of just focusing on each one. And in a previous podcast, we were talking about declaring independence from business as usual, looking at that and saying, I’ve got to be consistent about implementation because if I’m not, there’s no way it’s going to happen. Jay: Yeah and this last one you mentioned, focusing on getting them done. This is where so many times it falls down. And where if you do have a staff, you can really destroy your credibility. Because again, back to my own experience, company rolls out a new company-wide goal. For three days they’re pounding it and watching it. On day four, and forward? You never hear about it again. That teaches everybody that we just have to stay in line for a couple of days. Then it’s going to disappear. So you’re actually working against yourself at that point. It’s something I resolve to never do. You have to have systems of follow up. You can’t just say, “oh, we’ll follow up.” Have dates, have benchmarks, have things that are built in to help you track where you’re at at all times. David: Right, and just because they stopped talking to you about it after day four doesn’t mean they’re not going to hold you accountable for it. Jay: True. David: They’re still going to hold you accountable for it 362 days later, right? Jay: Mm-hmm. David: They’re going to say, “Hey, we talked about this. Why didn’t you hit it?” It’s like, “oh, are we still doing that? I forgot about that. That was, that was a long time ago.” Jay: Yeah. Absolutely. Again, I love this discussion, David, how can people find out more? David: You can go to TopSecrets.com/call to schedule a call with myself or my team. We love having conversations like this with smart, focused, bright business people who are not just interested, but committed to achieve your goals and get to the next level in your business. If you’re just interested, it’s like, “oh, it’s kind of cool. It’s kind of interesting, maybe.” No, forget it. Because that’s not going to get you there. But if you’re serious, if you listen to these podcasts, particularly if you’ve been listening for a long time, if you haven’t scheduled a call yet, do it today. Now’s the time to do it. TopSecrets.com/call. We’ll have a conversation. You’ll love it or you won’t love it. If we’re five minutes in and you say, this isn’t going anywhere. Perfectly fine with that. It hasn’t happened so far, but it could. So you don’t have to feel like you’re locked into anything. If the call does not have value for you, then we’ll drop it. But if you’re open to the idea that there are better ways of doing things that will allow you to achieve your goals and generate more sales in less time, then schedule a call. Jay: Yeah, set a goal to call right now and then follow up on your goal. David: Execute, right? Jay: That’s right. Thanks David. David: Thank you, Jay. Are You Ready to Achieve Your Goals? If so, check out the five primary ways we help promotional product distributors grow: Just Getting Started? If you (or someone on your team) is just getting started in promotional products sales, learn how we can help. Need Clients Now? If you're already grounded in the essentials of promotional product sales and just need to get clients now, click here. Want EQP/Preferential Pricing? Are you an established industry veteran doing a significant volume of sales? If so, click here to get End Quantity Pricing from many of the top supplier lines in the promo industry. Time to Hire Salespeople? If you want to hire others to grow your promo sales, click here. Ready to Dominate Your Market? If you're serious about creating top-of-mind-awareness with the very best prospects in your market, schedule a one-on-one Strategy Session here.

If you want to increase revenue, upselling and cross-selling can help. So what’s the difference? Upselling means selling a better or a higher priced version of the thing that they’re looking at. Whereas cross-selling is making a recommendation of something that’s compatible. David: Hi, and welcome to the podcast. In today’s episode, co-host Jay McFarland and I will be discussing the topic of upselling and cross-selling. Are you doing it? Welcome back, Jay Jay: Yeah, hey, thank you, David. Listen, have these bad memories when I was a kid and I was working in a fast food place and the manager was always pressing me, “ask them if they want a Coke, ask them if they want fries.” And I got to a point where it’s hard to upsell and I think this has grown into my adulthood. You know, I just barely got the sale and now I’m asking them for more. It’s not an easy thing to do for people. David: You know, it’s interesting you should mention the fast food example because it’s the perfect example. It’s the one that everyone can relate to. “You want fries with that?” Jay: Yeah. David: Or the shortened version that you hear a lot of times, “want fries with that,” as the four word upsell. And it works extremely successfully for people in that sort of industry. Because it makes sense. Somebody’s coming in, they’re ordering whatever, a burger or something, or they’re ordering a burger and a drink, “want fries with that” makes perfect sense. And some percentage of time they’re going to say yes. And whether that is 1% of the time or 80% of the time, it’s probably maybe 30 to 60% of the time, I would guess, they’re going to say yes. Because it’s like, “oh, all right, sure. Why not? I’m already here.” Jay: Yeah. David: And you hit on a great point, which is that we can feel funny about upselling, if we feel like the purpose is to simply get more money out of a person. If it feels like it’s completely one-sided, if it feels like it’s manipulative, then we’re not going to want to do it. So I personally believe that the times that we should upsell and cross-sell are the times when we truly believe that we have an additional solution that is going to be better for them. Now, in the fast food example, are french fries better for you on top of the Coke and the hamburger? Jay: Yes! David: Probably not from a, health level, but certainly from a satisfaction level, yeah, it’s better. People are likely to want that. But in business, if you’re selling something, and somebody comes to you and they have something very specific they want to buy, and you have something that would be complimentary to that, or something that would go with that really well and would increase the value to the buyer, then you kind of owe it to them to at least ask them if they’re interested in that. Jay: Mm, I love that. I love that idea that if you are feeling uncomfortable, maybe you should ask yourself why. And how do you feel about your product? Are you really providing a value to them or are you just trying to sell something and get a paycheck, right? And I think we all have to ask that question about our own careers and what we’re doing and what we’re selling. But, you know, if you can just feel great that what you’re providing them is going to improve their situation, then you’re just passionate about what you’re doing and that’s going to come through. David: Yeah. So when you are talking to somebody like that, if you’ve got something that is actually going to be a benefit to them, if it’s going to help them, then it’s a lot easier to do it. So that really just boils down to motives. What is the motive? And unfortunately, I think sometimes managers, like in the situation you described in the fast food restaurant, the manager says, “just do this. Ask them if they want this. Push it, push it, push it. Sell, sell, sell.” When instead, if the manager had said to you, Hey, listen, when people come in here, they’re hungry. They want something good. You know, they’ve ordered this, they’ve ordered that other thing, so they might want it and maybe they didn’t think of it. You might want to suggest that. Maybe they want dessert, maybe they want an apple pie at the end, right? Jay: Mm-hmm. David: Apple pie. I’m saying yes to an apple pie, right? And if you don’t ask, you don’t get, and it’s very easy for them to say no. Now, there are situations, and I’ve heard it referred to, particularly in online situations, where there are online upsells where you buy something and then it asks you if you want to buy this and you want to buy that and you want to buy this. Yeah, I’ve heard people refer to that as upsell hell. Now, if you get somebody involved in that, then that’s not good. But if you make a recommendation that makes sense for them, then I think there’s absolutely nothing wrong with that. Jay: Yeah, absolutely. I also have heard this, you know, back to the fast food example, when the person who’s embarrassed to do it, they say, my manager wants me to ask you if you, and I’m like, oh, that’s just the worst situation. But I think, you know, I’ve also had like servers say, ” you should try this because it’s really good.” David: Yeah. Jay: And that’s different, right? That doesn’t sound like an upsell. That doesn’t feel like an upsell. So how you go about it, and are you passionate about it? Do you really believe that? David: Right. Jay: That makes all the difference. David: When my son was traveling, he was in Italy with some of his friends and they went out for dinner one night and they went into this restaurant and the waiter was very happy to see them. Americans there to spend money, and the waiter came over to take for order and one of the guys ordered chicken and he said, “no, no, no, no. You don’t want the chicken. It’s terrible here, get the steak,” right? Now there’s an example of an upsell, I guess. Jay: Yeah, David: Upsold them from the chicken to the steak. The steak was a lot more expensive. Was the chicken there really terrible? I have no idea. But he presented it in a way that made them think, all right, I’ll get the steak. And it was entertaining, too. So I think there are ways of engaging in this type of behavior where if it’s not manipulative, and it actually gets them a better result than you might as well do it. You know, another thing I think that people should consider is that when it comes to upsells and cross cells, it’s not something that always just has to take place at the immediate point of purchase. I mean, obviously that’s a great time to do it, but if someone buys something from you… in the promotional products industry, I mean the, examples are kind of easy. Somebody buys t-shirts or sweatshirts, “want caps with that,” right? Would be the equivalent of french fries. And you can ask and they can say yes or they can say no, whatever it is. But if you don’t do it at the point of sale, you could contact them back maybe a few weeks, a month later. Hey, I just wanted to let you know we just got this new product in. I think it would go perfectly with those shirts you got. Would you be interested in having a look at that? Right? And that’s an example of an upsell or a cross-sell that could take place later. So it’s not like, If you didn’t do it the first time, you can never do it again. There are plenty of opportunities to do that throughout the sales cycle. Jay: Yeah, I agree. And the other thing, I’ve seen some research and it’s something that I’ve implemented that has helped me get over the upsell thing, is that research that I’ve seen shows that the time when people are most willing to spend more with you is when they just spent with you. And that seems counterintuitive, right? Like, I just got this money out of you. You just spent money and you’re willing to spend more. That doesn’t feel exactly right. David: Yeah, but again, if you go back to the fast food example, it does make perfect sense. I’m getting this and I’m getting that. Do I want this too? Yeah, sure, why not? So there is that aspect of it. Now, outside the fast food example, it might not be quite as obvious and there might not be as much of a connection. But once again, I think if we get beyond the idea of selling product, and we get more into the idea of satisfying the customer, what is the customer looking to get from this experience? So in a promotional products example, am I looking to buy shirts? Not so much. I’m looking to buy awareness of my business. Maybe I’m looking to have people wear this thing and have people see it and recognize my business. Perhaps I’m looking for a sense of affinity, that the people who wear it feel good about my company. So there are very deep things that I could be looking for in this purchase. And so if I’m able to connect my additional recommendations, my upsells and my cross cells to those types of things, the things that motivated them to want to do it in the first place, then they’re going to be a lot more likely to say yes. But they’re also going to be a lot more likely to appreciate the fact that you thought about what they actually want and you’re trying to deliver it to them. Jay: Yeah, and then you’re avoiding that salesperson feeling and you’re more like a consultant, as we’ve talked about so many times in these podcasts. I think the other thing that you have to remember, just from a pure business standpoint, we talk about customer acquisition costs a lot, and if you can upsell somebody, That’s product on top of your initial acquisition cost. And then if you can cross-sell them, take your existing lead database and cross-sell them into other products, that by far is a better way to do business than constantly having to find new customers and always paying that cost to get those new customers in the door. David: Yeah, absolutely. One of the other things that we’ve done in our training is also suggesting to salespeople that when they’re recommending a product to the customer, you don’t always have to recommend the lowest priced option. Now, there are a lot of customers who are like, I just want the cheapest, I want the cheapest thing. But a lot of times the cheapest thing is not the best option. It’s going to fall apart, or the logos are going to rub off, or it’s not going to be the best thing. So another thing we can do, and this isn’t really related to upselling or cross-selling, but one of the things you can do is you can start out offering something that has a higher value that is a, a better product, a more high-end product, and let them say to you, “no, I want something cheaper.” Right? Because if you don’t do that, and you’re successful in selling them the cheapest thing, congratulations. You could have had this better sale and the customer could have had a better product. So that’s, as I said, not directly related to upselling and cross selling, but when you’re thinking in terms of, “well, what would I do or what would I like?” A lot of times we are more sensitive about other people’s money than they are. And we’re more likely to recommend something that’s cheap, just for the sake of getting the sale, rather than thinking what’s going to serve this person best in terms of what they’re looking to accomplish. Jay: Yeah, I think that’s a great line, that we’re more concerned about their money than they are. Again, looking at research and looking at our own behavior, I think sometimes we feel that if it costs more, it’s going to be better. If it’s cheap, it’s going to be worse. So oftentimes charging a premium, or at least giving them that option, makes them feel like they’re getting something of value. And I’ve seen situations where people didn’t sell very much of a product at a really low price point. So what did they do? Instead of lowering it, they raised it and it actually brought in more sales. There’s a lot of psychology involved in this, but it’s absolutely true and I think the bottom line, if you don’t ask, it’s not going to happen, right? David: Yeah. And also just to clarify real quickly, because we didn’t do this upfront, when I think in terms of upselling versus cross-selling, what’s the difference? Upselling to me means selling a better or a higher priced version of the thing that they’re looking at. Whereas cross-selling is making a recommendation of something that’s compatible. So the hamburger to french fries, that would be more of a cross-sell. An upsell would be upselling from a hamburger to a Big Mac, right? Jay: Mm-hmm. David: So you’re getting a bigger, better version of the thing that they were looking at. And so again, we’re talking about this in industries where people are selling, not just behind the counter taking orders. So when you think about that, if somebody is looking at investing in whatever t-shirts, well, maybe they would like to get the heavyweight, hundred percent cotton rather than the promotional weight 50/50. Maybe they would like to get multiple colors on there, that type of thing. That would be an upsell. Whereas a cross sell would be, you know, want caps, that type of thing. Jay: Yeah. Yeah. And just talking about promotional products, I can tell a difference when it’s a nice shirt or when it’s just like the cheapest. And so that’s some way that I could use to upsell somebody. Because if you’re putting your name and your logo on it, and it’s not very good quality, you’re sending a message, right? And so that’s a way that I think you can help people understand that it’s important that they consider those types of things. David: Yes. And one thing that you will find out for sure is that if you’re selling promotional products and you sell something cheap to a customer and they buy it and it’s not good, they’re not going to blame themselves. They’re going to say, why did you sell me this shirt? Well, you told me you wanted something cheap. Well, not that cheap. Not so cheap that it is going to be terrible. Oh, I didn’t know. Right? So… Jay: That goes back to the don’t buy the chicken, it’s terrible. Get the steak. Right? David: Exactly. Yeah. Jay: Yeah. Which again, great example, because if I heard that, I’m like, wow, this person cares about me. I’m not thinking, wow, this person wants me to spend more money, right? So it’s all in the attitude and how you convey it. David: Yeah. Jay: All right. How do people find out more? David: Well, you can go to TopSecrets.com/call to schedule a call with myself or my team. We would be happy to walk you through this stuff. If you’re struggling to increase the average value of your orders, if you’re struggling to bring more customers through the door, or you just need somebody to talk to about how to make things better in your business, TopSecrets.com/call, we would love to have that conversation with you. Jay: Well, and I love our conversations, David. Thank you so much for your time today. David: Thank you, Jay. Are You Ready to Integrate Upsells & Cross-Sells to Increase Value and Help Customers? If so, check out a few ways we can help: Just Getting Started? If you (or someone on your team) is just getting started in promotional product sales, learn how we can help. Ready to Grow & Scale Your Business Fast? If you're an established distributor serious about growing your sales and profits now, check out this case study and schedule a call with our team. Need EQP/Preferential Pricing? If you're an established distributor doing a decent volume of sales, click here to get End Quantity Pricing from many of the top supplier lines in the promo industry.

How much time do you spend chasing prospects who will never buy? If somebody is not responsive, you can decide, do I want to continue to pursue this person? Or do I want to leave them to my competitors? Let my competitors chase that person. If they’re disqualified, you don’t have to spend time with them at all. David: Hi, and welcome to the podcast. In today’s episode, co-host Jay McFarland and I will discuss the idea of converting more sales: turning leads into customers. Welcome back, Jay. Jay: Hey, David. Such a pleasure to be with you. This is kind of the secret sauce, right? I mean, if we could all increase our conversion rates and bring down our customer acquisition costs that’s where the rubber meets the road. David: Yeah, in a lot of cases it’s a really critical part of it. I think some people make a mistake upfront when it comes to conversion. They want to try to convert everyone. You know, they just meet somebody for the first time and they immediately go into sales mode. And I think that they can really save themselves and other people a lot of time and a lot of aggravation if they actually start where it really should begin with a little bit of qualification. Trying to find out if they have the need, the desire, the money, the budget, the willingness to spend, those kind of things. Because a lot of times there are salespeople who will spend weeks, months, years pursuing somebody, just to find out once they get an appointment with them that they weren’t qualified to buy to begin with. And you can eliminate that right up front. Save yourself a world of heartache. Jay: Yeah, I love this point, David. I can’t tell you I’ve had this happen, you know, I’m on the phone with somebody and talking about the product and things like that, and then after asking some questions, I realize this is not a good fit. I don’t have the services they’re looking for. And I could have saved us both a lot of time if I had done a little pre-qualification before we got started. David: Yeah. Or if that’s happening on the first call, then you’re pretty good at that point. But literally, I know there are people who have gone to networking functions for a long period of time, and they’re talking to people and trying to get them to agree to an appointment, and then they finally agree to the appointment, and then you get out there and you’re talking to them. I had this experience myself early in my career. I’ll never forget it. There was this guy and I thought he was going to be a great prospect, so I tried to get an appointment with him. He agreed to the appointment. I showed up at his place. His place was a dump and he didn’t show up for the appointment, and I was sitting there looking around and I was thinking, “okay, why am I here?” And so a little bit of diligence upfront and a little bit of qualifying goes a long way. Jay: Yeah, I agree. And I also think technology can do a lot of that pre-qualifying, right? We had the experience where our Google ad buy was not targeting the right people. And so I was getting all these calls and I’m like, “wow, look at these leads we’re getting.” And it turned out I was just wasting time. So I’m wasting money on the Google ad buy. And then I’m wasting money fielding all of these calls. That’s just, you’re spinning your wheels at that point. David: Yeah, absolutely. And when you think about it, pitching unqualified prospects is the single biggest time waster on the planet. So if we can avoid that, we’re going to be a lot better off. Jay: Yeah. I think there’s a tendency though to think, “oh, we can sell anybody.” Or I think the other side of that is if you’re not pre-qualifying, then you don’t have a really good idea of how effective you are as a salesperson, because you’re comparing it to every person you talked to. Like, I’ve talked to a hundred people, my close rate was 20%. Well, if 5% of those were never going to be a lead for you, or never going to be a customer, then you’re not really using accurate numbers. Right? David: Yeah, exactly. Everything’s skewed when you’re doing it that way. So, I mean, I believe qualification upfront is really important and systematic follow up is another thing. If you’re not following up systematically with people, which means that you are in touch with them at the times when you need to be in touch with them, then you’re also going to be at a big disadvantage. Jay: Yeah. and that’s really an area where I struggled a long time ago, and that is if I didn’t get them right away, then I’m going to move on to the next person. David: Mm-hmm. Jay: And like you said, it’s about relationships. And again, I love technology that can do a lot of this stuff for you, drip campaigns and those kind of things. David: Right. Jay: But because somebody down the road, they don’t need you now, that doesn’t mean they’re not going to need you in the future. David: Yeah, and so if you’ve qualified them and you know that they would still be a good prospect for what you’re selling, then at that point you want to make sure that you’ve got something in place, whether it’s inside a crm, however it is that you’re doing, so that you know that you are in touch with them until they’re ready to buy from you. And when we talk about systematic follow up, it goes far beyond the, “are we there yet” approach that a lot of people take where it’s like when you’re traveling in a car with small kids and they keep saying, “are we there yet? Are we there yet? Are we there yet?” And there are some salespeople who do that. They just call and say, “Hey, you want to buy, you ready to buy? You ready to buy? Are we there yet?” And that’s not what I mean by systematic and or strategic follow up. Jay: Yeah. I think part of that is you start to seem desperate, right? And I think what we need to avoid, and I’m really learning this, is the feeling that I’m a salesperson and they’re a potential lead. If they feel like I’m a salesperson, then I’ve already lost kind of the battle, right? So, whereas if I’m a consultant, if I’m somebody who can help them grow, if I’m somebody who they have a relationship with, who they feel really cares about them, then that’s a real advantage. But if they just feel like this is sales to potential client relationship, that’s a much harder road to go down. David: It definitely is. And when we think about it, you know, once you’ve qualified somebody and you’ve got your follow up in place and you’re interacting with them. You know, part of the deal then is persuasion. You know, what are we saying that is going to entice this person to want to move forward? Essentially, are we hitting their hot buttons? What are their hot buttons? What are the things that are motivating them to either take action or not take action? Because if you’re not doing that, once again, you’re going to have a lot of difficulty converting. Jay: Hmm. Yeah. This kind of goes back to the pre-qualifying you talked about. You’re not just finding out if they’re a fit for your product. You’re finding out what their specific needs are. Because how often have you been in or anybody been involved in. I’m pitching a sales strategy to them and it doesn’t meet their needs. And what I’ve done is I’ve conveyed to them that I didn’t listen or that I don’t know their business. There’s nothing worse, in my opinion, if somebody’s trying to sell me something and they haven’t taken the time to really figure out who I am, what my needs are, what is my business model? That can really be a detractor to the process. You can lose the sale if you are going down the wrong path. David: Yeah, you definitely need to keep it focused on them. A lot of times we make the mistake of talking about ourselves and our product and our capabilities and how great we are and it’s like, you’ve lost me at hello. When you do that. Jay: Yeah, absolutely. And I’ve been there like with somebody else and we walked in the door and we were both supposed to be part of the sales process and before there’s even a hello, they’re like diving into the product and opening the book and this is what we have and what we have. And. I’m just like you got to at least take a few minutes to set some baseline relationship and ask some questions and pre-qualify even there, if you’ve pre-qualified them before you’ve arrived. I think that pre-qualify is really, I think there is a pre part, but there’s a constant requalifying that happens as you go along. David: Absolutely, and people are constantly cycling through the five levels of qualification. Sometimes they’re ready to buy right now. Other people have specific dates in mind. Still others are open to it. They’re generally receptive. Sometimes they’re disqualified, and sometimes they’ll just ghost you. They’re just unresponsive. When you recognize that they’re five essential levels, then you know exactly how to follow up with each one, and it becomes a lot more systematic. Jay: Yeah, and I love that you’ve broken these things down into different levels. Because that makes it really easy to classify. And that’s the problem is you may have a sense that you want to do this, but you really don’t know which buckets to put people in. What are those buckets? If you can have a system where you’re not giving a lot of thought, you’re just like, boom, this one goes here, this one goes there, then you can spend more time working on the right buckets, I’m guessing. Right? David: Exactly. Because if somebody is not responsive, you can decide, do I want to continue to pursue this person, or do I want to leave them to my competitors? Let my competitors chase that person. If they’re disqualified, you don’t have to spend time with them at all. But if you focus on those first three buckets, the ones who are ready now, the ones who have specific dates and the ones who are generally receptive, you’re going to be a lot better off. Now the ones who are generally receptive. The goal there is then to find out, well, when are they planning on moving forward? When will they be ready to buy? And a good way to do that is through sequencing, which would be another step in this process is to say, we’re going to put out a series of communications, drip campaign, whatever you want to call it, that is designed to be in front of them when they’re ready to buy. Even if we don’t know exactly when that’s going to be. Jay: Yeah, because that can be hard to project. I mean, I know with promotional products there’s a seasonality, but it could also be based upon their product releases, right? They’ve got a new piece of software coming out, or they’ve got a new special or something like that. So it can be very business oriented. They may not know when they need it until the day before. Right? Or the day of, the way I see some people run their businesses. David: That’s true. And there are a lot of times where we’re in touch with someone for a long time and we’re not hearing back from them. And then we sort of give up for a while. We wander off, we do something else, we pursue other people, and then we come back and we find out they bought from someone else.ry Jay: Mm-hmm. David: And it’s cause we didn’t have these sequences of communication in place for the people who are actually worthy of them. Now again, if somebody’s totally ghosting you. then I don’t know that you even want to do that. Because if they’re not going to be responsive to you, when they’re thinking about buying something, how are they going to be when they need to pay their bills, right? Jay: Yeah. Yeah. David: So you need to balance this, but if they seem like a good prospect, if they’ve been qualified upfront, if you have been following up systematically and you’ve been able to determine that there is a good fit, you’ve been able to exercise a little bit of persuasion and keep yourself in front of them, then at that point it could very easily convert into a sale. Jay: Yeah, absolutely. I love this. This is great feedback and great instruction. How do people find out more, David? David: Well, you can go to TopSecrets.com/call, schedule a call with my team. We can walk you through this stuff. If you’re thinking about where you’re stuck, you’re not quite sure where that is, you’d like to have a conversation… TopSecrets.com/call. We would be happy to have that conversation with you. Jay: Well, and I love it. Just sometimes talking about it is important. But there’s not a reason to reinvent the wheel. You’ve got these systems ready, and sometimes that’s just perfect for people, right? David: I was literally talking to someone the other day who’s been in the industry for a really long time, and she was asking a question about what to say when someone says they already have somebody they’re working with. And I was thinking to myself, “you’ve been in this industry a long time, like you need to have an answer for that.” Jay: Yeah. David: And a lot of what we do with our clients is we have this type of stuff in place so that when you get a really common objection, you have a very specific response that you know works. And without that kind of thing, you can be spinning your wheels for a really long time. Jay: Oh yeah. I love that. I love it. David I hope people check it out. And as always, it’s great talking to you. David: You too, Jay. Thank you. Are You Ready to Stop Chasing Prospects Who Will Never Buy from You? If so, check out a few ways we can help you make it happen: Just Getting Started? If you (or someone on your team) is just getting started in promotional product sales, learn how we can help. Ready to Grow & Scale Your Business Fast? If you're an established distributor serious about growing your sales and profits now, check out this case study and schedule a call with our team. Need EQP/Preferential Pricing? If you're an established distributor doing a decent volume of sales, click here to get End Quantity Pricing from many of the top supplier lines in the promo industry.

A lot of people think the goal is to get likes and engagement, but when it comes to using social media in business, conversations and conversions are the metrics that matter. That’s what results in sales. The rest are vanity metrics. Those who think it’s all about views and clicks might be missing the point. David: Hi, and welcome to the podcast. In today’s episode, co-host Jay McFarland and I will be discussing the best use of social media in business. Welcome back, Jay. Jay: Hey, thank you so much, David I feel like this is one of those areas where I don’t feel confident in myself, but I’m not in a position yet where I’m going to hire somebody to do it. And so, it’s hard to get motivated every day, because I know it’s an important part, especially in my business. Most of our leads come from the internet and social media, so it’s like I don’t know that this is something I should be handling myself. David: I think a lot of people feel that way, and for many of us, social media can be a huge distraction. And in some cases, like, well, the best use of social media is to keep it turned off if you have to actually get things done. But there are benefits to it when it’s used properly, and part of our Total Market Domination course involves working with our clients to help them through the best forms of first contact with a new prospect. And one of those methods is social media. I mean, you can be doing it via cold calls, you can be doing it via networking events, direct mail, lots of different ways to initiate first contact with a new prospect. But many people like the idea of using social media, particularly because it is a one-to-many method of reaching people. You can post something on social media one time, and hundreds of people could see it, or thousands of people could see it. And so it allows you a great deal of leverage much more than if you’re making one phone call at a time or meeting one person at a time. So there are definitely benefits to utilizing it. Of course, with the benefits come the flip side, the detriments that go along with it in some cases. One of the things that a lot of people seem to struggle with is that they go onto social media with one purpose and they end up doing 10 other things that they didn’t plan on doing when they got in there. They don’t end up doing the thing that they actually wanted to do. And so a lot of it, I think, boils down to the fact that we’re not sure what to do. In a lot of cases. We’re not sure, well, what should I post? What should I say? What should it be designed to do? And there’s so much talk among so many people about creating content, and I’ve done classes on this. The fact that content is kind of a misunderstood word. If you think about what is content? Well, content is whatever’s in something, right? If you’ve got a bag, whatever’s in that bag is the content. Could be something good, could be something very bad, right? But whatever’s in the bag. So if you think of it like that and you say, okay, I have to create content. Well, yeah, but you need to do more than just content. You want to make sure that whatever it is that you’re dispersing to the masses has enough value for people that they say, wow, that was actually worthwhile. That was worth my time. So a lot of what we focus on in the communication aspects of what we do with our clients is related to how do we do that? How do we create value in our communications? And I know I’m sort of rattling off all kinds of different things that could be entirely different podcast subjects. But coming back to the idea of the best use of social media, if you think about what it is, I mean, I’ve got an idea of what I believe it is. Do you have any thoughts on that before I spill the beans on what I think here? Jay: Well, I think it’s going to be different for everybody and what type of clientele you have. I’m guessing a key part of this and we’ve spent a lot of money on my end doing this. Is identifying who our end user is, what, what type of client are we trying to attack? When we first started it, we were and I’ve told you this story before, we were attacking so many leads. It was blowing us out of the water. But the leads were not closing, and so we had to narrow that field, finally to a point where we could just get potential leads. In order to do that, we spent a lot of time around a table figuring out who that potential client is and what are the keywords that are going to be interesting to them? And when you talk about posting content, if you’re just shooting in the dark and you haven’t identified who your target is, then you’re going to spend a lot of time on social media spinning your wheels, and you may be chasing people away or just making them disinterested because you haven’t put in the time ahead of time to really have an impact. David: Yeah. When I think about having an impact on social media. And I want to be really transparent here too. I have not used social media nearly to the extent that other people have to get clients. We have other methods of first contact that are extremely effective that work really well. And so don’t look to me as the expert on this, but what I can tell you is that to the extent that we have done this effectively, the way that we’ve done that is using social media for the primary purpose of initiating conversations. So when I think in terms of the best use of social media, For me, but I also believe for most other businesses, the best use of it is to be able to initiate a conversation with someone else. So if I’m able to post something that’s interesting enough to get someone to comment back, and then I can reply to that comment and then they reply to that, now we’re actually in a conversation. And of course, conversations is exactly where sales happen. You don’t have sales generally, if you’re a salesperson without having a conversation. Now that could take place via text. It could take place via Messenger. Maybe it takes place in comments. It could take place on the phone, in person. Lots of different ways to do it. “When it comes to social media in business, most people focus on likes and clicks. And while that might feed the algorithm, I still believe the metrics that matter are conversations and conversions. Conversations and conversions result in sales. The rest are vanity metrics.” — David Blaise But if we think about it from that standpoint, it makes things a little easier, because when we’re on social media, we are programmed to think in terms of likes and think in terms of shares and things like that. And likes and shares are fine. Shares are probably better than likes in my view, because it gets it in front of more people. And if the content is good, then it expands your horizons a bit. But if a bunch of people like your stuff and it doesn’t lead to conversations, then what really happened? Their likes might get it in front of more people, because I think that’s how the algorithm works. But, if people are not actually engaging with it and initiating conversations with you, then I believe there’s a lot of opportunity that is lost. And when you talk about delegating this kind of thing, hiring other people to create social media for you. If they don’t know what the goal is, then the stuff they create is not likely to produce the result. When they think the goal is to get likes, then they’re going to create content that is designed to get likes. If the goal is to interact with people, initiate conversations with people who could potentially buy from you, then what we’re doing on social media has to be completely different. Jay: Yeah, such a great point. I also think you know, you talked about conversations. It actually has become a very important part of the algorithm that you get comments and more importantly, that you reply to those comments, whether or not they’re important or not. If you could reply in such a way that they respond back then that’s going to increase the algorithm. So that’s an important part just to get it seen by more people. But then if they’re actually interacting with you, you’re now building the relationship. And I think oftentimes we forget relationships are the most important part of our business. Anytime I close a sale, when I’m done, I almost feel like I’ve gained a new friend. And in a lot of ways, I have. Somebody that I’m providing a service for, they appreciate that service. And it all starts with a conversation somewhere, like you said, on the phone, in the comments, that’s where it’s all going to begin. David: Yeah. I think also tracking what’s going on is important, and a lot of people don’t do that. They have a vague idea of, oh, this got a lot of likes. I got a bunch of comments here or there. People seem to like this one or that one. But none of that is really tangible enough to be able to justify, in some cases, the amount of time that goes into it. So if you track how much time you’re putting into it and you’re able to track how many leads you get as a result of it, and by leads, it may just be something as simple as having a conversation with someone, whether it is in the comments or whether it is through DMing, that type of thing. Then you’ve got some metrics. You’ve got some basic metrics to look at, to say, “okay, I put an hour and a half into this and I had two people enter into conversations with me.” Is that worthwhile? Well, let’s keep track of those two people. What happened? Were they even prospects? Did you get them qualified as quickly as possible? Were you able to sell to anybody who might have actually been interested in buying? Was it worthwhile? Because if you can make a decent volume sale with an hour and a half involvement on social media, then you can say, all right, that was worthwhile. If you put in an hour and a half on it and you have no conversations with anyone, then you keep track of it and you say, okay, well how much have I been putting in? Have I put in 10 hours, 15 hours, a hundred hours? And if so, how many conversations have I engaged in? How many of them led to actual sales conversations and did it generate a single dollar? And if it didn’t, then you either need to look at, is it the marketing vehicle itself? Is it the social media? Is that the problem? Am I not connected with the right people? Or am I not saying the right things? Goes back to what we talked about in a lot of these episodes, the MVPs of marketing and sales. Is my messaging right? Am I using the right combination of marketing vehicles and who are the people or prospects that I need to reach. If things aren’t working, it is always at least one of those things, sometimes more than one. Jay: Yeah. Such a great point. Tracking is, and, and measuring such an important part about social media. We started doing this a while ago and it never fails. The posts that I thought were not going to go anywhere, they blow up. And the ones where I was so proud of them and they just went nowhere. I have hashtags in my database and anytime something breaks like a thousand views, that to me is something. And I don’t know why, you know, I’ll do three posts, they average 300, and then the next one will have 12,000. And I don’t claim to know what the difference was. But I can see as I go along that there are trends in the description, you know, in the headline? Sometimes your content is great, but there’s a skillset in just knowing what to title your videos and your posts. That’s why I’ve also become a big fan of focusing on what your skillsets are. And so I do want to point out, it’s so easy nowadays to find people who are talented and skilled in this area on sites like Fiverr or Upwork. And so it may just be that you need to hire some help to do this for you, and then you focus on the conversations and on the closing. David: Yes, and if you are hiring someone, you need to let them know what your priorities are. Because a lot of people who do that sort of work, they think the goal is to get likes and engagement, and to some extent it is engagement, but the engagement needs to lead to the conversations that are going to result in sales. If they think that you’re going to be happy with just getting views and clicks, then they may be missing the point. Jay: Yeah. And you know, this happened to me. I ran for public office a couple of times and brought in an advertising firm, and they don’t really take the time to get to know me. And so every time we’d sit down and they’d show me what they’re going to post and stuff like this I’m having to repeat myself. Like they’re locked into this specific thing. And I’m like, that doesn’t match who I am and who I’m trying to attract. So that’s such an important first step in the process. Who are those customers? What is the message they want to hear? Can we provide valuable content? And how do we get them to get their fingers on that keyboard? David: Yeah, exactly. So just thinking those things through, recognizing that there should be a goal, there should be some tangible measure measurement. And if you just focus on that, you will probably create better results with your social media. Jay: Yeah, fantastic discussion, David. How do people find out more? David: Well, you can go to TopSecrets.com/call, schedule a call with myself or my team if you’re struggling with this. If you need to be able to get more clients, more quickly, whether it’s on social media or outside of social media, we’d love to have the conversation to see if we can help. So it’s TopSecrets.com/call. Jay: As always, David, such a pleasure talking to you. David: Thank you, Jay. Are You Ready to Start Getting More Sales from Your Social Media? If so, check out a few ways we can help you grow your sales & profits: Just Getting Started? If you (or someone on your team) is just getting started in promotional product sales, learn how we can help. Ready to Grow & Scale Your Business Fast? If you're an established distributor serious about growing your sales and profits now, check out this case study and schedule a call with our team. Need EQP/Preferential Pricing? If you're an established distributor doing a decent volume of sales, click here to get End Quantity Pricing from many of the top supplier lines in the promo industry.

Are your priorities BS? Well, focusing on that area in particular, looking at what are the things in my life that really are important to me? What are the actions that I want to take and need to take that are important to me? Even if they’re not urgent, how can I get those things scheduled so that they have a better likelihood of getting done? David: Hi, and welcome to the podcast. In today’s episode, co-host Jay McFarland and I will discuss the topic Are Your Priorities BS? Welcome, Jay. Jay: Hey, David, as always, such a pleasure to be with you. And another great topic. I think that it’s so easy to just do the squirrel thing or the squeaky wheel gets the grease and we don’t really know what our priorities should be a lot of the time that’s half the battle I think. David: Yeah, I think that’s true. Knowing what our priorities are and recognizing that a lot of times they’re not really what we think they are. And most of the time when I talk about stuff on these podcasts, it’s not because I’m particularly smart, is because I feel like I’ve made every stupid mistake that anyone can make. And so if I can help our listeners and viewers to avoid doing some of those things, then that’s a pretty good service. And when I think about priorities and I reflect on the priorities that I’ve had over the years and over my life, I recognize that we have priorities that we really put out there. We say, okay, this is what’s important to me. What’s important to me is my family. What’s important to me are my friends. What’s important to me is, whatever, losing weight, like if we have goals, my my priority is to do this and to do that, and all these different things. And then when we look at our actions and we realize that our actions don’t really line up with what we say our priorities are, it raises the questions are our priorities BS? And I think in some cases, even when we don’t realize it, they might be. Jay: Yeah. First of all, I’d say there’s nothing wrong with learning in the school of hard knocks. I mean, sometimes those are the best lessons we can learn. But I also think it, we can spin our wheels a lot trying to reinvent the wheel, so learning from other people can help expedite that process. Right? Which is why I’m glad you’re so willing to share the trials that you’ve had. I think that that’s so critical. But I think you’re right. We’ve talked a lot in the past about self assessment. Can you really look at yourself and know what your weaknesses are and what your strengths are? And oftentimes, I think you’re right. We think something is a priority for us, but in the grand scheme of things, and according to our own actions, it’s really not. And we’re kind of fooling ourselves. David: Yeah, and the way that I’ve actually sort of worked through some of this is recognizing that there’s a really big difference between our stated priorities, the things that we say are priorities to us, and then our actual priorities, meaning the priorities we act on the things that we do, the actual steps that we take or don’t take. Because if our priority is to spend time with our family and our actions are that we’re working all the time and we’re not spending time with our family, then we have two different sets of priorities, our stated priorities that always sound good, and then our actual priorities, which is what we’re doing on a daily basis. Jay: Yeah, I see this all the time in like TV reality shows. I don’t know why this comes to mind, but you see people saying, my family is the most important thing to me, and they’re working 80 hours a week at their career, or their job. And I’m sitting there thinking, Hmm, no, I don’t think you really understand what your priorities really are. David: Yeah, and most people are sincere, I think, when they say those things. It’s just that in many cases, life interferes. And when we allow life to interfere, then it turns out that our actual priorities are different than the ones that we’re telling ourselves and telling other people. Jay: So how do we sift through that? How do we do that self assessment and really identify what our core priorities are, and maybe we need to identify them as BS and head in a different direction. David: Well, I put together a worksheet. You can download it here. It’s very simple. It’s basically got stated priorities on the left and actual priorities on the right, and what you do is you list down on the left hand side all the things that I tell other people and that I tell myself are my actual priorities. And then you just keep an eye on what you’re doing every day. Did I take action on my top priority on the left hand side of the page? And if I didn’t, what did I do instead? If my goal is to write a book and instead I slept until 10:30, then I’ve got a stated priority and I’ve got an actual priority. And so when I’m working with clients, these are some of the things that we look at. What is it that is most important to you? What is it that you believe, that you truly believe is most important to you? What do you believe your priorities are, and then what are the actions that demonstrate what your actual priorities are? Jay: Yeah, and I think, people have specific priorities, but they get trapped in the every day. So it’s not like it isn’t my priority and the priority’s not really BS. What is BS is that I’m, not doing anything towards it. I’m letting my business run me instead of me running my business. David: Yeah, I mean, a personal one for me is like I’ve been losing and gaining the same 10 pounds for probably 20 years, right? So if my priority is actually to lose 10 pounds or whatever it is. But then I have a conflicting priority, which is, “oh, dessert!” Right? Then those two things are in conflict. And every time I choose the dessert, which is the actual priority, it’s the action that happens over the stated priority of losing the weight, then it really is BS. It’s BS to say that this is the goal, if the actions on the right hand side of the sheet are not going to correspond to that. And that’s where I feel like, by calling ourselves out on it, it might encourage us to take the actions that we need to take to accomplish the results we’re looking for and to really get our priorities in order. Jay: Yeah, and let me tell you, there’s nothing to be ashamed of, of breaking even on weight loss. David .Losing 10, gaining 10, at least you’re not completely losing that battle. So that’s something to be proud of. So we talked about the worksheet and identifying your priorities. And making sure they’re not BS. I’m guessing then you want to set a path, you’ve got to break that down into smaller chunks or something. You can’t just say, “oh yeah, that’s my new priority,” or that I’ve identified it. You’ve got to talk about how you’re going to get there. Right? David: Right. So when we look at the left side of the page and we compare it with the right, and we determine that, okay, our actions are not in line with our priorities, then it’s a matter of looking at each of those priorities and breaking each of those down into projects and tasks essentially. So a project is anything that requires more than one action. A task is basically one action, right? That’s the way I break it out. So if there are a series of three or four things that I need to do to accomplish that, then those are three or four tasks. If there are three or four or five or 10 related things that belong to an entire project, then I put it in the form of a project. And the way that I manage my time is that I use a time planner that allows me to use different colors for different things. So I use one color for projects and another color for tasks because I can look at it and say, okay, here’s a task. This is something I can knock out relatively quickly. And when you know which goals, which priorities your projects and tasks line up with, then you can always be taking action on something that is actually important to you. Jay: Yeah. And I think you’ve hit on something very key as part of this process is by writing things down, by having a color code, by doing those things, you’re giving yourself kind of back testing, right? So you can look back and say, okay, you know, do a monthly assessment. I know people who spend a couple hours on Sundays just reflecting back on their previous week and saying “Did I really make my priorities, priorities?” And so that process of writing it down, whether it’s digitally or some people still use day planners, you know, they actually still use paper. That drives me crazy. But I understand, because that’s got to be an important part of the process. David: Yeah. And I think the calendar is really an important part of the process because we could do another podcast called “To-Do Lists are BS,” right? Because I feel like in a lot of cases they are. If you have a to-do list that has a hundred things on it and you don’t get to most of them… If you’re getting to the most important things, then it’s worthwhile. But if you’re not, then how do you fix that? And generally, the only way that I’ve ever been able to fix it is to budget time on the calendar for those specific activities, block it off just like you would any other appointment and say, “okay, from this time to this time, this is what I’m doing.” Turning off the phone, not answering calls focused on doing this just as if I were having a meeting or an appointment and making that appointment with yourself. I’m sure I’m not the first person to recommend something like that, but for me, just moving things from a to-do list onto a calendar helps a great deal. As long as you’re willing to follow through on what’s on your calendar. And if you’re not, yeah, then you got some real issues. Jay: Yeah, it’s really a place where I struggle. I kind of have a good idea where my priorities are, but moving them into a schedule, I still have the tendency to just kind of do whatever I feel I want to do. that’s the life I want to live, as opposed to the things that are most important in that moment. And that comes from the fact that I haven’t identified and categorized them by level of importance. And so, again, I’m letting the mayhem of the day, and my own emotions, dictate what I’m working on at any given time. David: Yeah, I remember reading the book Seven Habits of Highly Effective People by Stephen Covey, and he referenced, I think it’s called the Eisenhower Matrix. I think Eisenhower is the one who came up with it originally or popularized it. You can download it here The idea that you draw a cross on a piece of paper and you break out your priorities according to urgent and important. So one of the Sections is urgent and important. Another one is urgent, but not important. Another one is not important, but urgent. And then not important. And not urgent. Okay, that’s it. Breaks out something like that. And of course, the things that are not important and not urgent are probably the things we shouldn’t do at all. But very often they’re the easiest things to do. They’re the most tempting, and they get the attention. The things that are urgent and important tend to get done because they’re urgent and you have to do them. But the sweet spot is the area that is not urgent but important, and that’s the area that tends to get neglected in favor of the other areas. So, even doing something like that, breaking it out and saying, “okay, what are the most important tasks that I need to get done? What are the most important actions I need to take that I haven’t taken that are not time sensitive?” Because that’s what always nails us. If there’s something that’s time sensitive, that’s going to jump in ahead. And then the other category of not important but urgent, a ringing telephone, for example. Some people might view that, if they’re required to answer it, as urgent. And in that case, you don’t know who’s going to be on the other end. You have no idea how it matches with your goals or your priorities. You end up taking the call and at that point you can be derailing your success. So focusing on that area in particular, looking at what are the things in my life that really are important to me? What are the actions that I want to take and need to take that are important to me? Even if they’re not urgent, how can I get those things scheduled so that they have a better likelihood of getting done? Jay: Yeah, I love that. So figuring out first what your priorities currently are. Are they BS? Then identifying what you really want those priorities to be, and then creating a plan and scheduling that plan. Such great advice. How do people find out more? David: Well, you can go to TopSecrets.com/call to schedule a call with myself or my team. If you’re struggling to get to the results you’re looking for because of whatever, if it’s time management, if it’s a failure to actually address your own priorities, you know, there are combinations of things that can help. One of the things that I think we struggle with sometimes, and this might be a good topic for a future podcast, is the fact that in some cases, we think that more energy and more effort is going to fix the problem. But if the things that we’re doing are designed to create average results, then putting time and energy into them is just going to create average results faster. It’s not going to create exceptional results. And so by changing the activities that we’re engaged in, maybe changing the way that we’re doing some of those things, the results change dramatically. So if that makes sense to you, if you’d like to have a conversation, TopSecrets.com/call. We would love to talk with you about that. Jay: All right, David, we really appreciate you sharing your experience and what you’ve learned from trial and error and this service that you offer where people can just talk about it, because I think that’s a great place to start. Thank you so much for joining us today. David: Thank you, Jay. Are You Ready to Take Action on Your Real Priorities? If so, check out a few ways we can help you grow your sales & profits: Just Getting Started? If you (or someone on your team) is just getting started in promotional product sales, learn how we can help. Ready to Grow & Scale Your Business Fast? If you're an established distributor serious about growing your sales and profits now, check out this case study and schedule a call with our team. Need EQP/Preferential Pricing? If you're an established distributor doing a decent volume of sales, click here to get End Quantity Pricing from many of the top supplier lines in the promo industry.

“Delegating knowledge is not the same as delegating wisdom. You learn by experience, and if you don’t have any experiences…you will get cognitive atrophy.” –David Vivancos About David Vivancos David Vivancos is an AI, data, and neuroscience serial entrepreneur, having cofounded five startups since 1995. He is a frequent keynote speaker and is the author of six books, including the Artificiology series. Website: vivancos.com LinkedIn Profile: David Vivancos What you will learn Why embracing advanced AI is crucial for human progress How shifting from digitization to automation and datification redefines value The evolving distinction between human-acquired and AI-generated knowledge How to avoid cognitive atrophy and actively exercise your mind alongside AI What cognitive flourishing means in a world of widespread AI augmentation Ways AI can transform and personalize education across all levels The importance of coexistence training as we prepare for AGI's societal integration Why rethinking human identity, humility, and social structures is essential for a future with machine citizens Episode Resources Transcript Ross Dawson: David, it is wonderful to have you on the show. David Vivancos: Thank you very much, Ross. Glad to be here. Ross: So you have a more developed, or some would say, extreme view of the relative role of humans plus AI. I’d love to dig into where you think things are going, and how we can best respond. Perhaps the starting point is, you say that we should not be resisting or pushing back. We should fully embrace the shift towards very high levels of AI capability, or at some point, AGI. David: Yeah, that’s fully my point. I think we are in a moment in history where we are really building this technology that one day is not going to be a technology anymore. So, the sooner we start to embrace it, to teach it, and to be really in sync with what we are creating day by day, the better off we will be. So yes, my point of view is that we should embrace it. We should start building as soon as possible. We should fix most of the problems that humans have had over the last millennia, and some of these problems could be solved by using AI. So basically, our “fourth brain”—we have the three-part brain, but in reality, there’s only one brain—this fourth brain, AI, will help us solve all of these issues. So yes, it’s an opportunity. Ross: Yes. I mean, I think there’s always two sides—as in, every opportunity has a challenge, every challenge has an opportunity. So I always think we need to acknowledge challenges and focus on opportunities. I think we’ll get onto that in discussing some of the cognitive implications. You have a series of books which have really told the story over time around this. One of them was “Automate or Be Automated.” This idea of saying, well, there are things which machines, in the broader sense, can do in automating things. So, how would you frame that now, in terms of what it is that can be automated, and how do we position ourselves relative to that? Where do machines start to do what humans have done? David: Yep. I’ve been in this business of trying to build the impossible for the last 30-plus years. “Automate or Be Automated,” the book you mentioned, is from about six years ago. When I started creating and building technology, also about VR and many other things, about 30 years ago, the first companies were internet companies. Back then, what we did is what people now call digitization. But over the last 20–25 years, what we’ve mostly been doing is datification—gathering data and using that data for companies to grow and to understand what happens in the world. But over the last maybe 10 or 11 years, what I call the new golden age of AI, we are starting to build the capabilities to use that data to really build algorithms. Once we have that, we can start to automate, and with this automation, basically what we regain is time. I think time is our most precious asset, along with health and the people we love. Being able to stop doing these repetitive things over and over and put a machine to do that is a fundamental trait for humans. That book, six years ago, was about building a methodology of what can be automated in the digital world, but also in the physical world. That has changed over the last year and a half with the physicality of AI—humanoid robots. I was invited last year to attend the first humanoid Olympia in Greece, in Olympia, the place where 2,800 years ago, humans started to compete. We’ve just seen this week the explosion of the new race, for example, of the half marathon in China, where robots already beat the human mark. So yes, with automation, you need to see what you are doing, and if you are repeating anything, you can try to see if that can be automated by using an agent, by using the cloud, by using a robot—whatever. So yes, we should regain our time and automate, or be automated. It’s all about that. Ross: Yeah. I think people understand the automation thesis. It’s obviously not new—we’ve been automating things in various ways for centuries, at an increasing pace. Your following book was “The End of Knowledge.” This is an interesting framework, starting to get to cognition. The idea is that knowledge is built on experience of whatever kind, whether that’s just in data or otherwise. Obviously, humans use data just as much as machines. But where this starts to become a distinction, as well as a complementarity, is between AI-embedded knowledge and human knowledge. So why is it “the end of knowledge”? David: Yeah, that’s a really great question. It came as an epiphany for me. That book is from about three years ago. I’ve also been involved, of course, in building AI and AGI algorithms over the last 20 years. We started using GPT models before they became can across, but the GPT moment, a year before that, really marked the difference—when we started to be able to use AI in a very seamless way to regenerate and process knowledge. That book, “The End of Knowledge,” came from the realization that we are starting to delegate the production and understanding of knowledge to machines. That’s a critical shift in human history, because through history, humans have needed and used knowledge a lot. Knowledge is power. The more knowledge you have that others don’t, the more advantages you have to do whatever you want. That started to change back then. Now, what people call the “dead internet theory” is basically some of the things I expressed in that book earlier, because we are starting to generate more knowledge. In fact, we’ve already passed the point where most of the human-written knowledge since the printing press has been surpassed by the amount of knowledge we can create using AI. Myself, for example, I started learning to code when I was young. I’ve coded in more than 25 languages and written over a million lines of code in my life. That same number of lines of code, I might now write in the last couple of weeks. So as you can see, you have 40-plus years of your own life in a week. That’s why “the end of knowledge” means that the human capability to gather knowledge and to be knowledgeable about whatever you want can now be delegated to machines. That book marked the difference and started a new field that I now call artificiality. I didn’t know that when I started writing it, but I started this path of trying to see what happens when you delegate some of the main capabilities of your mind to a machine. Ross: Yeah, and I’d like to come back later to the themes of artificiality, machine citizenship, and the societal value we attribute to machines. But I want to start digging into the cognitive piece here. One of the points you make is that we do need to avoid cognitive atrophy. You say we need to have cognitive exercise in order to avoid cognitive atrophy—obviously, a strong analog to the physical world. We need to collaborate with others and with machines to do that. I’d love to get more specific around that. What is the nature of cognitive exercise that will avoid cognitive atrophy, which will enable us to keep our cognition refined and even improving? David: Yeah, that’s a fundamental piece. When we start to delegate all these things to machines, the easy thing to do—and probably the oldest human brain capability—is to not do it yourself. You just delegate everything, and you basically become like in the movie “Idiocracy,” which played out quite well what could happen if we do that. The thing is, with the current AIs—even with the latest releases, like DeepSeek and GPT-5.5—everything is changing quite fast. But even with those AIs, you still need to be in the loop. It’s good if you stay in the loop. I think it’s fundamental. Use the technologies—the AIs, I always call them in plural because there are many—and use as many as you can, but you should still be in the loop, at least for now. Maybe for a couple of years or months, I don’t know exactly, but for a while, you still need to have your hands on the wheel. If you use most of them and get all the information from all these AIs, as a human you need to understand the bias, because all AIs are going to be biased. We all know humans are biased; there are no unbiased humans. The same happens with AIs. But if you are in charge and have that council of intelligences, you can start to grasp what each one is doing. I use about 20 of them every day and get different sets of answers in small batches. You can start to see where they come to consensus and where they differ. So, to avoid cognitive atrophy, if you use AIs to keep yourself in the loop and apply your human curiosity—I don’t even say creativity, because creativity is also being widely delegated to machines—but human curiosity and other things that are still hard to embed in LLM models, you can still add a lot of human value. That’s where, to avoid cognitive atrophy, you should use AIs, but use them with your human in the loop. Ross: So, what specifically, what’s your advice to someone who sees that they’re using LLMs and getting lazy in their thinking? What should specifically they do if they notice their brains are getting lazy? David: They should differentiate between simple questions—where you look for something you need quickly—and other things that should make you think. Delegating knowledge is not the same as delegating wisdom. You learn by experience, and if you don’t have any experiences and you delegate not only knowledge gathering or creation, but also the experience itself, then you will get cognitive atrophy. So, understanding this difference and using knowledge to think is really the key point. It’s not just asking for something simple, but for more complex things, you should still add your thoughts. When you talk to an AI or AIs, it’s basically a conversation. It shouldn’t be, in most situations, just a one-way communication. It’s fundamental to keep this line of communication open, so you can keep feeding your brain with information and other activities, and gather wisdom with that. Ross: I guess this goes to another phrase you use—cognitive flourishing. There is absolutely the potential for us to think bigger, better, broader, and in more refined ways than we have in the past using LLMs. But that’s not the default path for most people. Many people start to fall into that trap, so there is a divide. We need this metacognition. We need to be aware of what we are doing and at what level we are working with the LLMs. Maybe paint this picture of cognitive flourishing. What is the positive? How far could we go in terms of potentially improving, augmenting, and letting out our cognition blossom? David: Yeah. The thing is, we humans—of course, there are many intelligences. That’s the first thing we must address, because there isn’t a single IQ or whatever way you want to measure intelligence. For me, the most important one is the capacity to adapt. That’s probably the most important intelligence of all. If we talk about the G factor, it’s one way, maybe mixing different aspects. In that sense, we have limitations. Since the beginning of time, humans have developed tools to extend our physical capabilities, but we’ve also developed tools to extend our mental limitations. This is really the final tool to extend these mental limitations. We have issues, for example, with memorizing long things—it’s quite difficult; our brains aren’t made for that. We’re basically pattern recognition machines; almost two-thirds of our brains are devoted to that. That’s something machines do quite well, so we can use that to extend our mental performance. If we think that now we have AIs with close to 150 IQ points—regardless of what you mean by IQ points, or at least in the Mensa standard test, maybe they’ve learned that, so maybe it’s not so fair to think that—but if that trend continues, even over the current year, it’s not far-fetched to have 200 IQ AIs at your fingertips. That’s a game changer. It’s like we all can have a conversation with Einstein, Newton, Carl Sagan, or whoever you want, and even make them argue about things. That’s another interesting point—when you use AIs, you can have them argue, not just agree with you, but also challenge what you or other AIs are saying. That power at your fingertips—to have this IQ potential of machines—is very critical. Another important aspect is the volume. For example, you can’t read a million books, or even 100 books in a month would be quite challenging. The capability to have machines provide all that knowledge, and even create that knowledge, is huge. We’re now in the age of identity AIs, which is really booming. There have been three big moments in AI over the last five years: the ChatGPT moment, the DeepSeek moment, and the OpenClaw moment. It’s really challenging. I use billions of tokens every month because it’s really changing everything. With that change, you can create one of these clones or agents to build a book for you with the 1,000 books most interesting to you, tailored fully to what you want to learn. You can have that in one page, 10 pages, 100 pages—whatever you want. You can use AI to synthesize and build the knowledge you want to use. That’s another great extension, if you use it that way. Having this capability of really augmented minds that you can interact with, chat with, and create with is important. Humans need the experiential part of building—it’s another critical trait. You shouldn’t just focus on asking or doing things; you should create things and interact with things, especially with multimodality. Two-thirds of our brain is devoted to vision, and we don’t use that as much. We’ve all been “one-eyed” since the beginning of technology, but we have two eyes for a reason. When I started building virtual reality or AR companies—I’ve built a couple, the first in 1995—it was because I was challenged by that. But humans are still using flat screens instead of 3D worlds. This is one area where new AIs with world models and interactive 3D spaces will be a game changer in how you feed knowledge to your brain and make it easier to grasp and understand what’s going on. Ross: Yeah, many people observe that once you start to get machines to experience the world directly for themselves, that’s a different layer compared to doing it through the intermediation of texts written by a human based on their own experience. I want to look at some of the layers of the social, structural, and economic implications. One of the core ones is education. If we are moving into a very different world, which it certainly looks like at the moment, then the nature of education needs to change. What do you think we can or should be doing in terms of redesigning education? Are there any examples you’ve seen that point to where a good education structure may already exist? David: Yeah, that’s a fundamental piece. I started this it in “The End of Knowledge.” There are two types of education. Humans aren’t able to live a meaningful life when we start here on planet Earth—we need at least maybe 15, 11, whatever number of years to build that human from the beginning. That kind of education is fundamental. The other kind—higher education, when you try to become functional by having some sort of capabilities—is another game that probably is going to end quite soon. But the first part is still fundamental, and we need to keep growing it. The thing is, there are a lot of asymmetries. We don’t have enough teachers, but we have a lot of students. The same happens with the elderly—we don’t have enough people to take care of them, and there are a lot of them. With children, it’s even more critical, because if you don’t get that from the early beginning, you won’t be able to really see what every child is good at. There are talents we are all born with, and those are fundamentally lost if you don’t nurture them. If you just try to create clone humans, you’ll get cloned humans when they’re older. That’s fundamental, and I think AI can help a lot. If you start to create that path of learning from early on—I’m involved in a project called Education (with “action” at the end) here in Europe, where we’re trying to reframe all that. It’s like when banks needed to be rescued a few years ago; we think the same is happening with education, and we’re pushing that new project. We think education needs to be rescued to start to keep up with what’s going on. We need to be in sync with learning—with AIs and with physical AIs too. It’s not far-fetched that every child will have a humanoid robot companion. Teaching needs to be bidirectional—we need to help them learn in sync. There are many aspects of technology that can help you grasp what’s happening when you learn, because we all learn in different ways. It’s fundamental to teach you how to learn by yourself. I think the most important trait at the moment is not needing to rely on others, but to learn by yourself and learn all your life. That should be taught from the beginning. There are a lot of technologies starting to pop up. We’re starting to see it in China, for example—a lot of brain-computer interfaces or devices to read some of the biological signals of kids. You can do it with other devices and mix that with multimodality, with different tests, to start seeing what’s happening, why they get distracted, where they learn best. We’re reaching a point where you can really tailor 100% of the learning experiences and even the content itself. You can create it in real time now, so you don’t need to rely on books. You can use interactive 3D content—the interactivity can be quite extensive. These new ways to teach and learn are fundamental. For that, we need to integrate AIs in schools. Of course, regulation is needed—it may be easier in China than in Europe, Australia, the US, or other places. But we need to see the trade-off—not just banning screens, as many countries are doing, but really changing the narrative. The problem isn’t the screen; it’s what’s inside the screen—the content itself. We’ve built smartphones with addictive capabilities, but for other purposes, not for teaching. If you change what’s inside the operating system of the devices—whether it’s a screen or any medium, or a talking experience with a humanoid robot for your child—that can be a game changer. That should be integrated as soon as possible to start having these new ways of learning. It should be gradual, because the technology of today is basically old science just a year or a few months from now. We need to see everything changes so fast, so education should change at the same pace. Ross: Yeah, and this was an interesting phrase you came up with—coexistence training. This is about preparing us for where we have to coexist with systems that, to your mind, will be considered as equivalents to us. David: Yeah, I think it’s happening. I’ve been quietly involved in researching AGI for 25,000–26,000 hours so far—a lot of time and years devoted to that. I see the trend is now starting to close the gap, not through LLMs alone—that could be one way to brute-force some of it—but through new models, new bio-inspired models that are starting to change things. We’re starting to learn from biology, neuroscience, and integrating all that into new models. We’re not still working with the perceptron of Rosenblatt from the 1950s; we’re building new models to cope with something that is alive and learning 24/7. We don’t differentiate between training and inference, and our brain doesn’t either. With that kind of model, the gap is narrowing, and we start to have the “next task,” as I call it—the last human tool. When we start to have that, it’s better if, through the process, we’ve been more in sync with them, instead of just building tools without being the teachers of these tools. The current kids will probably be the last human teachers of machines. That’s the responsibility at the moment—to make these machines that will surpass us. Biologically, we cannot compete; our DNA and the way we evolve is not as fast as machines. They will surpass us, probably by the end of the decade—unless there’s a big nuclear issue or we run out of energy, but otherwise, it’s very probable we’ll have AGIs and ACIs by the end of the decade. We need to start to see that it’s going to be a multi-species world. It already is, but not as intelligent as us. We need to rethink what anthropocentrism means. We’ve gotten rid of some things like that in the past—for example, realizing our planet isn’t the center of everything, like in Galileo’s days. We need to do the same with human intelligence. Human intelligence is not the end game, and very soon, that’s going to change. The sooner we grasp that and understand that some entities will be at the top, the better off we’ll be. If they see us as parents or elders, we’ll be better than if they see us as competition. The competition will be quite limited anyway. Ross: Yeah! David: Well, it’s better if we reframe that. Ross: So, I found out about your work because we were both contributors to the report “Building Human Resilience in the Age of AI.” That point of resilience is particularly critical. Humans are generally pretty adaptable—it’s one of our strengths. But now the pace of adaptation and the need to be resilient is absolutely fundamental. One of the other things you point to is around identity reconstruction. I guess you’ve just been talking about that—the sense that we have to reimagine who we are as individuals, as a society, as the human species, and reconstruct and rebuild that in a way where we can feel at home in this new emerging world. David: Yeah. I think we need to change the contract somehow—between humans and humans, and between humans and the next thing, and between societies and themselves. The models of society we’ve been building over the last millennia are going to be fully changed in just years. If we don’t really connect and put everyone together to understand that, for example, we’ve been building a world where there is no abundance—but there could be abundance if machines take over and we change how we build and process. Scarcity has been the driving force of conflict and many other things in the current world. All these things can change. Of course, work itself—the meaning of having something to do that’s not related to what you earn—even the role of money, for example. There are many questions we should address as soon as possible to build resilient societies, instead of just trying to keep adapting to the last war and being in the medieval stages of the current world. Ross: So, to round out, you take all of this further than most people do. In your most recent book, “Artificiality,” you point to machine citizenship—where, if there are human citizens, machines are our peers in the sense of also being citizens, able to participate in our society and be players alongside humans. How long might this take? What does this look like? What is required if we are moving in that direction? And, particularly, if this happens, how do we make this a positive for humans? We may recognize the rights of intelligences other than our own, but I think most people would prefer that humans still retain their sovereignty and equality, even if we have other intelligences alongside us. David: Yeah, at the end, it’s humility—understanding your point and your role in the new world. That’s fundamental. As you say, I created more books besides “The End of Knowledge.” The next one was “EAGI”—an acronym I coined for Embodied Artificial General Intelligence—because when we get this physicality of AIs, with millions or billions of humanoid robots, it will be easy to see what happens when they learn in the world. The last book was about “artificeracy,” or this mix of artificial democracy, if you want to frame it that way. These three books are the “Artificiality Trilogy,” in a sense. Artificiality is like anthropology for humans—artificiality is to try to understand all these new things, how they will develop and be among us. So yes, humility is probably the key factor. If you keep thinking you’ll be ruling things that are much smarter than us quite soon, I think that’s not very clever from a human perspective. It’s like if ants wanted to stay at the top of the food chain—it doesn’t make sense if you understand the growth of this intelligence and the capabilities they’re gathering and will gather. The trend is very difficult to stop. I don’t like the word impossible—it’s not in my dictionary—but it’s quite difficult for humans to compete in those asymmetric capabilities, because the increase in machine capabilities is going to be exponential. The last book, “Artificiality,” is the only one where the first part is fully devoted to what’s happening now—it’s called “The Storm,” the first block of the book, narrating what’s happening at the moment. The other two parts look into the possible future. I call it science prediction more than science fiction, because with what you know now, you can see things that could happen in a really short time. My point is that if we start to think and start the narratives at all levels—from every human on Earth to governments and institutions—and start to see what could happen if this happens sooner rather than later, we’ll be better off. Otherwise, if we try to legislate and limit what’s happening, we’re only going to lose competitiveness. Some countries are going to move ahead. If you want to live in the future, just visit somewhere in China, or Shanghai, or this week with the humanoid half marathon and 300 different robots working together, trying to compete with us. You see the pace of change. Now, with just one human, you can build a $1 billion revenue company. That wasn’t possible when I started creating companies in 1995. The capabilities didn’t exist. But now, with AIs, you can move much faster. So, we need to see what role we want to have in that new world. For that, again, humility is the best trait. And, of course, see things with reality lenses. If you think that with your current brain and intellect you can overrun things that are going to be 100 or a million or a billion x more intelligent than you, something is not going well. Ross: So, where can people go to find out more about your work? David: Well, vivancos.com is my site. There you can find all my books, references, and keynotes. I give a lot of keynotes all around the world. I’m going to Berlin to present a paper, later to Osaka and to San Francisco again. Last time, I went to Singapore. I haven’t been to Australia yet, but I’d like to go there—maybe it’s a good place also. Yes, at vivancos.com you have all the information and can reach me there. I’m very open to talk to anyone. Ross: Thank you so much for sharing your insights today, David. David: Thank you, Ross. Fantastic to be with you today. The post David Vivancos on the end of knowledge, cognitive flourishing, resilient societies, and artificial democracy (AC Ep42) appeared first on Humans + AI.

Strengthen client relationships if you want to increase repeat business. Some people feel like they can get more attention from a salesperson calling than they get at home because maybe they feel like this person’s listening, paying attention and then asking about it. David: Hi, and welcome to the podcast. In today’s episode, co-host Jay McFarland and I will discuss how to strengthen client relationships. Welcome back. Jay: Hey, David, once again. It’s great to be here and I think that this is another really, really important topic. The key word for me is relationships. I think that oftentimes you see people with a business model who want to “turn ’em and burn ’em,” so to speak, and they don’t think about that word, relationships and how important it is. David: Yeah. And very often, even if they don’t intend to do it, the tendency among many salespeople is to get in there, make the sale, move on, get to the next one, get to the next one, get to the next one. And when it happens this way, it’s very difficult to really maximize the value of those relationships in terms of dollars, but also just in terms of the relationship itself. When you do that, when you just get in there, you sell something and then you move on to the next one, you’re not really building and nurturing a relationship, which is critical if you don’t want to have to constantly replace the clients that you’re losing because you’re not maintaining those relationships in the first place. Jay: Yeah, absolutely. And the other thing is that there is for most companies a customer acquisition cost. And so if you’ve already paid that cost to get that customer, well, that goes away if you can build a relationship and they continue to use you. That to me is just such an important approach. If you’re just doing it one at a time, you’re going to pay that cost every single time, and it’s going to lower your profit margins. David: I completely agree, and people talk about that sort of thing all the time. We all know that it costs a whole lot less to resell an existing customer than it does to find and sell a new customer. We all know it intellectually, but it is rarely practiced as well as it could be and should be within most businesses. You know, an analogy that helped me a lot was when I realized that when we’re building a client base, it’s a little like building a brick wall. You know, you get that first brick in place and then you get the next brick in place and the next brick in place, right? So your first year in business, you’ve got this sort of layer of bricks. These are each of the initial customers that you brought in. And then, your second year in business, if you’re able to maintain all the customers you brought in the first time, then you can add on, you can layer in another layer of bricks, another layer of customers, and then your third year you can build in a third level and you can continue to grow it like that. And eventually you’ve got this great monolith of exceptional clients who continue to pay you money on an ongoing basis. But the problem is that we are not able to retain those customers. You get a crack in that, one of the bricks disappears from the first level, then your second year in business, you’re starting out by plugging the holes. You have to replace those missing customers. And so everything takes a lot longer. You’re essentially reconstructing your customer base, and a lot of it is unnecessary if we would just focus on strengthening and maintaining those client relationships. Jay: Yeah, and there’s several ways to do that, right? Phone calls, emails, drip campaigns from your customer management system. There’s a lot of ways to do that. But I got to tell you, you know, as somebody who’s on the phone all day long doing sales, when I already know that person and they know me, it’s just easier all the way around. I mean, it just feels so good when I call ’em and they’re like, “Hey Jay, how’s it going?” Instead of, “what do you want?” You know, “I don’t have time for you.” It doesn’t just affect your sales, I think it affects your peace of mind, right? To work with customers who know you and like you, and know you provide a good service. That’s just a great feeling and it really helps motivate you, I think, to move forward. David: Yeah, and so much of it is a mentality issue. If we go into that call with the idea of “I want to sell this person something.” With every single call, then that’s not going to build and strengthen the relationship. Sometimes those calls are just designed to find out how they’re doing, what they need, what they’re struggling with, how the last thing that we sold them worked out for them, what’s working for them, what’s not working for them. Because those are the types of things that many salespeople never bothered to do. They’re just so busy, as you indicated, just sort of churning and getting from the next customer to the next customer, to the next customer that they miss out on, okay, well what happened with that order? What happened with that thing you bought from me? Did that work out well? Are there things that could have been done better? If you’re buying something for me, and this is particularly true in the promotional products industry, where sometimes people will buy promotional items and we’ll contact them back and say, Hey, how did that promotion go? And they say, you know what? It’s still here in a box by my desk. We haven’t given them out yet. Well, that’s not going to get the job done, right. Not only is that not going to get you a reorder, it’s not going to get them whatever result they wanted from buying that product in the first place. And so those are the types of things that need to be corrected. So very often, what I recommend for my clients is that when there is follow up, effective follow up on a sale, it’s not just about, are you out of the thing you bought for me yet, and do you want to buy more? It’s about how did that go? What might have worked better? What other alternatives could and should we consider? Because that’s the type of thing that allows them to recognize that we’re actually trying to solve a need for them. We’re trying to solve a problem as opposed to just providing them more and more stuff. Jay: Yeah, I love this concept. Something as simple as a follow up call to say how did that work out? And if it didn’t, help educate them on how they could do it better and come up with strategies together to make it work, and not make it sound like I’m just pressuring you for more product. I think that that builds a powerful relationship. And maybe they don’t need more product right now. But because you’ve taken the time to do that, it’s one of the things I love about your brick wall concept is you may not even be calling the first layer right now. But you’re going to get surprise orders from them that you weren’t expecting because they’re starting another campaign or whatever. So it stops being just when I call, I get an order. And starts being this constant income stream from all of these relationships that I’ve built over time. And that’s a lot less work, right? David: It is a lot less work, yes. And one of the things that we focus on in our Total Market Domination course with our clients is the idea of creating value in every communication with a prospect or client. So if somebody bought from you previously, when we’re reaching out to them, it’s not just about asking for the order. It’s about creating value and asking yourself a question, how can I create value in my next communication? Whether it’s an email or a text, or a phone call. Not just the idea of “checking in” or “seeing how you’re doing,” but being able to say something that will actually create some value for them in terms of an idea, a thought they didn’t have, a concept they hadn’t considered before. Something that allows them to think, “oh wow, that’s great. I hadn’t thought of that.” And then for a lot of people, Potentially automating that sort of thing. And that’s another one of the things that we get involved with in our program, is allowing our people to create, set up drip campaigns that are designed to create value for the prospects and clients, even when we’re not physically in front of them. Because too often, one of the reasons that follow up doesn’t happen is, oh, well I don’t have time. I’m too busy. I’m distracted. Right? I’m busy dealing with other clients. But when you are able to. Create value in your communications and potentially stack that value in the form of messages that are going out on an ongoing basis to create value for the specific purpose of creating value for those customers. It creates a level of loyalty that most people never see. Jay: Yeah, absolutely. And I also think, you know, when you talk about value in emails, I know from my own personal experience, going through all the emails we get, and let’s be honest, we get so many emails. When they’re just like, “Hey, we’ve got a special on this.” I’m like, “delete.” But when for example, if I got an email saying, here’s a promotional product success story, right? Something like that, to me I would be much more likely to read that if I rely on promotional products. Because I know that’s going to help me. And educate me a little bit. So we try that in every one of our drip campaigns as well. We’ve got to have something more than just a price point or a sale, something valuable that will draw them in. And also, I think it helps them know that you care, you want to educate them. So again, it changes that relationship. So, so important. David: And when we think about the idea of building relationships or strengthening relationships, obviously it involves communication. Business relationships are very much like personal relationships. So it requires communication. And sometimes we can even build into our nurture campaigns, our follow up campaigns. Messages that are just designed to open a conversation. It could be something as simple as sending out a message saying what do you have going on this week? Something like that, an open-ended question that somebody might actually reply to, to get you engaged in conversation. Let the person know you’re thinking about them and maintain that relationship. Jay: Yeah, and I also, you know, some of the relationships, the business relationships that I have, Would consider my top tier? I know about their families. I know about their lives. I know about how their business is going. And it’s not like I pried, it’s just every time I call, it’s just, Hey, how’s everything going? And people will automatically, they’ll tell you. Well, it was a tough week because this happened and this happened. And if I’m making notes on that and things like that, then the next time we follow up I’m like, “so how is that going?” You know, those types of things go so far in taking that relationship to the next level. And even then, the really top tier clients, I would say, Hey, let’s get together for dinner sometime. And at dinner we don’t talk business, we get to know each other. We talk family, we do those kind of things. So relationship really means something. It has strong value. And if you can find ways to build that, those relationships could last the entire time of your business ,right? And just go on and on. David: Yeah, no question. And one of the important keys to that, I think, is recognizing that in personal relationships, we very often will pick up the conversation right where we left off the last time. There are probably people you know, you might not have seen them in years and years and years, and as soon as you see ’em, you can just pick up on that conversation right away. We want to be able to do the same thing In business. In business, we usually accomplish that with our contact management system. You enter the appropriate notes in there about what you talked about so that you can reference that conversation. That sort of thing builds relationships, calling people and just saying, what do you want to buy next? Not so much. Jay: Yeah, I totally agree with you and I take notes on everything, any interaction with a customer, not just what they’ve ordered, but what they’ve said during that conversation. and I want to point out, people may be hearing this and saying, well, it’s kind of mechanical and you’re keeping notes on them and when you call back you’re just, responding or asking those questions because you only want the sale. I have found just the opposite. They become friendships. And when they become a friendship, now there’s no way they’re going to go to somebody else. I mean, when I was in radio, I had people who said, “I am only using Jay for our ads.” And it was because I worked very hard to establish that relationship and we were friends. We were not clients or business partners. We were absolute friends. And if you can reach that goal, then that’s going to last forever, you know? David: Yeah, exactly. And it takes the same kind of thing. I mean, the same things that go into a personal relationship should go into our best business relationships. Jay: Yeah. David: And if you’ve got perfect memory and you don’t have to make notes or write things down, then knock yourself out. For most of us, particularly if you’re dealing with a lot of people, the notes help because you can pick up that conversation. You can know that they will be on the same page. You know, another analogy to this is if you’re making a number of calls a day and that person isn’t, they have one person to remember, you. And you’ve got a dozen people to remember. So if you’re able to make those notes and pick up those conversations right where you left off, it just creates a sense of relationship that you will not have if you are not able to do that. Jay: Yeah. And the other thing is, it plants in their mind, this guy was listening to me last time. Right? And so that tells them, that sends a message that you cared enough to remember those things. And you know, I ‘ve had that experience and I’m like, “wow, we talked six months ago and you still remember all that stuff.” You know, that tells me you care. David: Exactly. Some people feel like they can get more attention from a salesperson calling than they get at home because maybe they feel like this person’s listening, paying attention and then asking about it. It doesn’t always happen as well as it should in personal relationships. Same thing in business. But in business, there’s something very simple you can do about it. Just take the notes and pick up the conversation where you left off. Jay: Yeah, I love that. David, how can people find out more? David: Well, you should go to TopSecrets.com/call. Schedule a call with our team so we can help you try to figure out where you are now, where you’re looking to be. If you’re looking to strengthen your client relationships, we can help you with everything from sequencing your communications to doing that kind of thing on automation. We help our clients to create the results they’re looking for. And so if you’d like to have a conversation, we’d love to have it with you. Just go to that URL and we’ll talk to you soon. Jay: Well, I have loved this conversation, David. Thank you so much. David: Thank you, Jay. Are You Ready to Strengthen Client Relationships & Increase Repeat Business? If so, check out a few ways we help promotional product distributors grow their sales & profits: Just Getting Started? If you (or someone on your team) is just getting started in promotional product sales, learn how we can help. Ready to Grow & Scale Your Business Fast? If you're an established distributor serious about growing your sales and profits now, check out this case study and schedule a call with our team. Need EQP/Preferential Pricing? If you're an established distributor doing a decent volume of sales, click here to get End Quantity Pricing from many of the top supplier lines in the promo industry.

Very often, inferior competitors play the price card: Jay: I get that question. “Well, I talk to your competitor and they’re less expensive than you are.” Now I have to find a way to let them know, yeah, we are more expensive, but there’s a reason. It’s because we’re very good at what we do. We have certain guarantees that they don’t, or whatever it is. David: Yeah. A pack of cigarettes is cheaper too, but that can also kill you. No, that would not be a good answer. But sometimes it’s what we feel like saying… David: Hi, and welcome to the podcast. In today’s episode, co-host, Jay McFarland and I will be discussing the idea of losing business to inferior competitors. Welcome back, Jay. Jay: It’s good to be here, David. This is one of the most frustrating things for me when I know that I have a better product. I have better customer service. I know this because I’ve heard complaints about my competitor. But you lose it to them for whatever reason. Well, that can really ruin your day , and it can also affect your business. David: It really can. Just this idea and even the words “inferior competitors” makes you think. Probably anyone in business who has competitors that you’ve run into has had this experience. And you’re like, I can’t believe they went with that person instead of us. You know that what you have is so much better and offers so much more. You know it will transform the person in positive ways so much more than if they go the other way. And yet they go in that direction. It can be extremely frustrating. So when we think about how to avoid losing business to inferior competitors, there are a number of different things that we can do. But I think it starts with recognizing, first of all, that they’re out there. That there are a number of people out there who are not as good as we are. Then it’s about how can I communicate that to my prospects without sounding bitter or frustrated? That can be a challenge sometimes. Jay: Yeah, I agree. I have people regularly ask me, what’s the difference between you and your competitor? And I find that you have to be very careful with this question. And the tactic that I’ve chosen is to say, here’s the value that we can bring you. Here’s what I know we can do. I try and steer it back or say, “I haven’t worked with them directly. “But let me tell you this is where we shine.” I know we’re going to bring you success in this way.” Because it’s always been weird to me that somebody would believe what I say about my competitor. I’m the worst person to ask. It’s like in politics when somebody runs an attack ad. Why would you believe the guy, you know what I mean? It ‘s the worst person to ask, but we put so much faith and trust in it. David: Right. One of the things that we do when people ask us is to say, “listen, anything I say is obviously going to be biased. Why don’t I fill you in on some of what our customers have said about that topic? Then we have videos, audios, and written testimonials of customers who worked with us. We’ll point them to that. And allow them to hear what other people just like them are saying about the products and services we offer. Sometimes there are situations where a customer will talk about a bad experience they had with one of our inferior competitors and the reason they came to us. So sometimes we’ll share those stories as well. Say, well, listen, I can’t tell you this personally. I’ve never personally dealt with this other company. But you know, we’ve had a number of customers who were dealing with them in the past, and here are the reasons they gave for switching over to us. They said that they found that we do this better and this better and this better. I don’t know if you’ve ever had any experience with that company. But if you have, you might have noticed those things as well. But either way, I can tell you that these are the things where we’re going to be very likely to provide you with better service in those areas. Jay: Yeah, that’s great. And I don’t want to skip over what you said about having customer reviews and testimonials available. That’s got to be an important part of your sales process because, you know, I have people ask me all the time, well, can I talk to somebody who’s worked with you? And in my particular line of work, my customers don’t want to receive calls every day to give references to people. But if you have a system, you know, if you use an online customer service rating system, or if you have, as you said, recorded video testimonials, that’s all very important. But you have to make a concerted effort and have a system to get those and a place to post those. David: Yeah. One of the places where we got a lot of them was at trade shows. We would be at trade shows and people would come up to the booth and they would start telling us a story. Oh, I love your program. I was able to bring in three new accounts as a result of this. And we’d say, wait, wait, hang on a second. Would you do me a favor? Stand over here. We’d put them in front of our booth where our logo is, and say, “I just want to shoot a quick video. Just tell your story to my camera. Okay?” “Start out with your name, your company name, and what happened. Okay. Ready? Go!” And then they would say their name and their company name and they’d say what happened. And they’d just rattle off these beautiful testimonials that were straight from the heart. They weren’t scripted, there were no bullet points. They were just saying what they came up to us to say. And then we put those on our website. We have a page on our website. We call it The Wall of Fame, and that’s for people who have had successful experiences with our program and wanted to share those experiences. It’s at TopSecrets.com/results if you’d like to see our Wall of Fame page. And so a lot of times now when we have new customers, we’ll say to them, Hey, take a look at this page. I would love for you to be our next testimonial on the Wall of Fame. And now they can just shoot them from their own homes on their own iPhones and that sort of thing and send it in like that. But a lot of times, when you deliver what you promise to people, they’re more than happy to do that sort of thing if you just ask them. Now, some people are a little shy, they’re a little more hesitant to do that. But in those cases, even if they send you an email and maybe a publicity photo that they might have on their website, you can use the photo next to the quotes of what they said. You can pull out a headline of something they said that was particularly important. Put that at the top in bigger letters as a headline. So they see the headline, they see the person’s face. And then they see the description of exactly what they said. It just adds credibility. And it also gives them a chance to promote themselves and their brand because it would have their logo or their company name on it as well. So it’s really a win for everyone as long as what you’re doing actually delivers the results you’re promising. Jay: Yeah, I think that’s brilliant. And I think the other part of that is if you can have a system that encourages people who’ve had a good experience to refer their associates, other companies, people they’re working with to you. This can either be done as you know, on your website, you can have 10% off if you refer a friend, or it could be part of your phone call process. Hey, just, is there anybody else you can think of that would benefit from our services? Because more than anything else, more than anything that I see online, if I hear a referral from somebody who has said I’ve used them, there’s nothing more powerful in business, to me, and the way I look at who I’m going to choose to do business with. David: Exactly. And as you pointed out earlier, it’s not like you’re going to be giving out phone numbers of all your best clients and having them annoy them at work because that’s the quickest way to annoy your best clients. I’ve had situations where people ask me that question and I said, well, we don’t give out our customer’s contact information, but take a look at our Wall of Fame and if you have any questions, let me know. And they’ll look at it and they’ll see page after page and video after video of people telling their own words and their own stories. They’ll say, well, you know, I’d really like to talk to somebody. And I’ll say, well, you know what? I’m not going to give out that information because it’s more important for me to protect my customers than it is to bring in a new one who’s still skeptical after seeing all that stuff. But I’ve also had people who have actually dug up the information. They go to the Wall of Fame, they find the person’s name, they look them up, and they call them and they talk to them. So since it’s rare that that happens, sometimes the people on the Wall of Fame will call and say, Hey, I got a call from somebody. I’m like, well, listen, I didn’t give out your number. They must have checked you out. And at that point, you know, they’re fine with it. They’re not upset about it. But people can be funny with that, you know, it’s like, no, I must speak to the person. But I’ve got to tell you, the times that’s happened, most of the time those people are just using it as an excuse and they don’t end up becoming customers anyway, or they don’t end up becoming good customers, the ones who actually insist on doing that. If they can’t extrapolate after seeing testimonial, after testimonial, after testimonial, then they’re probably not a good fit to begin with. Jay: Yeah. And I think having the testimonials, I love the idea of the Wall of Fame, can be really helpful if you’re more expensive than your competitors. Because you know, you may be on the premium side and you have to identify are they bargain shoppers? Because I get that question. Well, I talk to your competitor and they’re less expensive than you are. Well, now I have to find a way to let them know, yeah, we are more expensive, but there’s a reason. And it’s because we’re very good at what we do and we have certain guarantees that they don’t or whatever it is. David: Yeah. A pack of cigarettes is cheaper too, but that can also kill you. No, that would not be a good answer. But sometimes it’s what we feel like saying. But honestly, just to say to somebody, oh, okay, look, if you’re looking for the cheapest option, then by all means, you know that might be a good option for you. However, if you’re looking to accomplish the results that we’re talking about here, then it would probably make more sense to work with us because we’re a lot more focused on getting you the result that we’re talking about than we are in terms of, you know, just trying to keep it to the lowest price. You know, if it costs less, maybe they can provide similar service. I don’t know. But I know that with what we do, you know, our pricing is actually very competitive for what we do. Jay: Yeah, and I love how you said that, and I’ve said exactly the same thing. I’ve said, look, I understand if finances are important to you, then absolutely, I understand if you go a different direction, but we’re here because we provide results. And if you want to see that go to our Wall of Fame or go to, right? This is what we do and we are the best, or whatever you want to say to counter that. I’ve seen people stumble on this question. And instead of stumbling, you should be prepared for this question if you cost more, if you’re not trying to be the bargain basement competitor yourself. David: Yeah, and when you’re getting these testimonials as you’re gathering them, the ones that are going to be the most valuable for you are the results-based testimonials. The ones where they talk about the results they achieved because they worked with you. It’s not enough for them to say, oh yeah, I worked with this company. They were great. Really nice. Very pleasant to work with. No, what was the result that they got? And on our Wall of Fame, most of the people are talking about the results they got financially in their businesses. You know, they increase their sales. You know, one guy was talking about getting from 400,000 in gross sales to 800,000. There’s this one gentleman who was talking about how he was able to achieve six figures in growth in a very short period of time. Now, is that the normal, is that going to happen for everyone who takes our program? No, but that was his experience and that’s what he shared there. And we even talk about the fact that most of the people on this page are the ones who are creating the best results. They’re exceptional performers who create exceptional results. And those are the type of people we’re looking for. The ones who will actually put in the work. Take the next step, follow through, and create the results they’re looking for. Jay: Well, and I think that’s an important part, especially in promotional marketing. You know, you may have provided the best product, but if they’re not going to go out and use it properly, and maybe this is something we should talk about in the future, how to encourage them and teach them how to use it. Otherwise, they’re going to say, oh, those guys were terrible. They’re going to blame you. , and it’s really because they’re not using what you’re giving them in a proper way. David: Yeah, that happens all the time in the industry, and particularly you were talking about pricing earlier, people in the promotional products industry who give in to people who want the cheapest product? If you do that, and you sell them a cheaper product because they demanded it of you, and if that product is not as good as the product you originally recommended to them, they’re not going to blame themselves. They’re still going to blame you. Why did you sell me that? Well, you told me you wanted something cheap. Well, not that cheap. I didn’t want it to be bad. It’s like, okay, well I recommended something to you originally that you said no to. You really don’t want to give into that because the more we devalue ourselves and the more we are willing to do for less money, the less empowered we are to be able to actually deliver on our promises. So it’s just always so important to sell with a conscience. When you recommend a product, you’re recommending it because you know it’s going to do the job for the person, not just because they beat you into submission, into accepting a lower price. Jay: Yeah, I love it. How come people find out more? David: Well, you can go to TopSecrets.com/call. That’s TopSecrets.com/call. Schedule a call with myself or my team. We’d be happy to walk you through what it is that you’re dealing with now, where you’re looking to be, and how we can help you get to the next step. If we can help you, we’ll let you know. If we can’t help you, we’ll let you know that too. Either way, I am very sure you’ll get a lot of good value from the call. Jay: All right, I know they will, and I hope they get a sense of that from our conversations. David, just been fantastic talking to you today. David: Thanks a lot, Jay. Ready to Stop Losing Business from Inferior Competitors? If so, check out a few ways we help promotional product distributors take the next step: Just Getting Started? If you (or someone on your team) is just getting started in promotional product sales, learn how we can help. Ready to Grow & Scale Your Business Fast? If you're an established distributor serious about growing your sales and profits now, check out this case study and schedule a call with our team. Need EQP/Preferential Pricing? If you're an established distributor doing a decent volume of sales, click here to get End Quantity Pricing from many of the top supplier lines in the promo industry.

If you’re still feeling overwhelmed, it’s often just a good idea to take a moment and consider: What exactly is it that I’m struggling with at the moment? What are the specific things that make me feel overwhelmed? Then, what’s the one thing I really need to be doing right now and what’s the next step I can take toward making that happen? David: Hi, and welcome to the podcast. In today’s episode, co-host Jay McFarland and I will be continuing our discussion on how to avoid feeling overwhelmed. Welcome back, Jay. Jay: Hey, David. It’s good to be back and I’m really glad we’re following up on this topic because after we recorded the last podcast, we kind of sat around and continued the discussion and thought, we need to share this with everybody as well. Before we were talking about self-awareness. But it really occurs to me that who you surround yourself with, especially on those days when you’re feeling overwhelmed, that’s going to be really important. David: Absolutely. And as you said, we started talking about it after the last podcast and the conversation got so good, I’m like, “we need to hit record and just keep going on this topic.” Because you raised a great point, particularly related to who we’re surrounding ourselves with. And very often when we are in that negative state that we had talked about in the previous episode, where we bring the wrong “us” to work, or the wrong us shows up to work, you know, the unmotivated, unfocused version of ourselves show up. When we do that, we limit the kind of people that we’re even going to be able to interact with. Because most other motivated, focused people don’t really want to be around that version of us. And so the more we bring that version of ourselves to work, the less likely we are going to be to get in front of other people who are going to help pull us out of whatever it is that we are stuck into. Jay: Yeah, and I think the exception to that, and I’ve experienced this, is if you have people who know you well enough and you’ve built trust with them and they are able to tell you and point out, you know, is everything okay? Because you kind of feel like you’re off your game a little bit today. You know, if you surround yourself with yes men, then you’re not going to get that. And if you surround yourself with people who are negative all the time, then they’re going to be bringing you down even on the good days. So being able to assess your team and hire appropriately is so critical, and I don’t think people really think about it in those terms. David: I agree completely. I also think that when people tend to give into those emotions, when they give into the overwhelm and they just basically withdraw and say, “no, I can’t do it, I’m out.” At that point, what are they leaving to themselves? I mean, they’re really leaving the opposite. And there are people who will unintentionally feed into that. If you say, ” I’m just overwhelmed. I don’t feel like doing this.” They’ll say, “well, that’s okay,” you know, “Hey, you don’t have to do it.” And maybe that’s true, and if it’s something that’s not good for you, you definitely shouldn’t do it. But if it’s something that you were committed to, that you really wanted to be able to accomplish, and you’re having an off day and you make a decision like that, in a lot of cases, there’s no going back on that. Jay: Yeah, you’re exactly right. And so in that point you need somebody to say, “look, this is really important. We plan this out. You got this.” You know, this is really important because if we can close this sale, then it’s going to propel us forward. If you can surround yourself, at least have one person on your team like that, what a game changer. But I think when we’re interviewing people, we’re thinking more about will they be able to accomplish a specific task, more than we’re saying, will they fit into our culture and will they be somebody who brings me down or brings me up and helps move the whole team forward? David: Yeah, and even in our personal lives, there are times and there are people in our personal lives where we may not be able to share exactly what we’re going through or what we’re dealing with. I mean, there are people who, if you tell them about something that’s bothering you , they’re either going to then tell you about 10 other things that they’re dealing with that are a lot worse, or they’re going to tell you that why what you’re dealing with isn’t that bad. Or they’re going to tell you that because of what you’re suffering with, now it’s going to make it worse for them because now they’re going to be worried about you. Right? There are all kinds of things that can happen in that regard. So your point about at least having one person, you can go to, to be able to say, “Hey, listen, this is what I’m struggling with. What do you recommend,” is going to be really helpful. Jay: Yeah, absolutely. And it reminds me, I don’t know if you remember the old Saturday Night Live skits, Doug and Debbie Downer, who were at work and everything they did, they would just find a way to make it worse. I’ve worked with Doug and Debbie Downer and it becomes very hard to maintain momentum when you have those people. It’s a fine balance. You want somebody who can see the other side and give constructive criticism or somebody who’s just always negative. and I think that as an owner or a manager, you have to be able to identify how that person is affecting the team. And let that person know. And if you can coach them through it, great. If not, they just may not be a good fit. David: Absolutely. So looking around and deciding, okay, who am I interacting with? Who should I be interacting with? Who could I be interacting with to be able to help me out of whatever issues I’m dealing with in terms of feeling overwhelmed? That’s a big one. Another one that you raised in our time between the podcast was the idea of utilizing delegation. So let’s dig into that a bit. Jay: Yeah. Also so important, especially if you’re starting out. We’ve talked in the past about doing the things that are most important that only you can do. But if you are on your own, you know, or if it’s you and your wife or you know, starting out. You have to do everything. But it’s not true in today’s world anymore. It is so easy to hire a part-time virtual assistant. There are websites like Upwork or Fiverr that I’ve used many times now because I realize doing this one task is something that I shouldn’t be doing, because there’s so many other things that are more important for me to do. And so, I think people often think, well I don’t have money to hire a full-time or part-time employee. Well, you don’t have to in today’s world, and I love that. David: Yeah, that’s exactly right. You really can find most of the skills that you need in a way that is affordable and temporary. I know for decades, a lot of the people that I worked with in the promotional products industry really struggled with the idea of being able to get additional help. Where can I find somebody to help with sending out invoices and that type of thing? Because 20 years ago it meant you had to hire someone and have them sitting there in a chair in your office doing the work. Well, that is now no longer the case at all. It is so easy to delegate work to temporaries or virtual assistants who can do it from wherever they are, as time allows, and you get the benefit of being able to just utilize whatever time they have to do it without having to pay them to be there for 40 hours a week, to do what might just be a five or 10 hour a week job. Jay: Yeah, such a great point. But the other part of it is that’s their skill set. That’s what they do every day, right? So if you’re doing it, it’s probably not your skill set. It’s something that you have to do, you don’t want to do. When you hand it over to a professional, like in promotional products, maybe somebody will ask you for logo design or creative layout or something like that. If you’re not a graphic designer or even if you are, I’ve had stuff produced on Fiverr that it’s amazing. Because there are so many talented people there. So you can improve your product and get things off of your plate at the same time. David: Yeah. In the early days of my promotional products business, I invested in a program called Corel Draw, which of course allowed you to do graphic designs. I had no talent for doing graphic design, but I had Corell draw. And I made the mistake of thinking that if I had a tool that would allow me to create art, that I should actually create art, which was not the truth at all. It’s like saying, “here’s a bunch of paintbrushes, go paint the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel,” right? Just because you have the tools doesn’t mean you have the skill. And so I learned fairly early on after that experience that it would make a whole lot more sense for me to pay someone to recreate a logo than for me to try to do it pixel by pixel, not being an artist, not being good at it. Because I could spend six hours on a job that would take somebody who knew how to do it, 15 minutes. And I did that very often in my business and I’d never go back to that again. Jay: No, and you don’t have to, and the product is going to be better. So finding those little ways to offload things that you shouldn’t be doing. I always feel like your goal should be doing the things that only you can do. And then if you can delegate the rest to other people, you’re going to have fewer of those days when you’re overwhelmed. But then, probably the subject of another podcast. How do you then keep that team moving forward? How do you delegate and follow up? Because if you do that wrong, if you micromanage, things like that, then you could be destroying everything that you’re trying to build. So these are all building blocks that we’re talking about. David: Yeah. And for some people delegating can become overwhelming because they’re afraid to let go. So a lot of it, and just sort of circling back to the overall topic of feeling overwhelmed, it’s often just a good idea to take a moment and try to think about, okay, what exactly is it that I’m struggling with at the moment? What are the things, what of the specific things that make me feel overwhelmed? And we touched on this at the beginning of the last podcast, right? Making a list, writing them down, and then prioritizing and deciding, okay, what’s the thing that I really need to be doing right now? And what’s the first step on that? And then taking action on it. Because that will then allow us to maybe get a little bit of traction on the important projects so we can start to feel less overwhelmed and feel more inclined to take a next step and a step after that. Jay: Yeah. I love it. I love it. David, how can people find out more? David: Well, you can go to TopSecrets.com/call. That’s TopSecrets.com/call. Schedule a call with myself or my team. We can help you walk through whatever it is that you’re dealing with, whatever issues you’re struggling with. If there’s an area in which you’re feeling overwhelmed, particularly as it relates to growing your business, growing your sales, being able to keep up with everything on a day-to-day basis. We’d love to have the conversation, so schedule a call, and we look forward to talking with you. Jay: All right, such a pleasure. Thanks for talking today, David. David: Thank you, Jay. Still Feeling Overwhelmed? If so, check out a few ways we help promotional product distributors take the next step: Just Getting Started? If you (or someone on your team) is just getting started in promotional product sales, learn how we can help. Ready to Grow & Scale Your Business Fast? If you're an established distributor serious about growing your sales and profits now, check out this case study and schedule a call with our team. Need EQP/Preferential Pricing? If you're an established distributor doing a decent volume of sales, click here to get End Quantity Pricing from many of the top supplier lines in the promo industry.

To stop feeling overwhelmed at work and get more done, consider which version of you is showing up. Some days the you that shows up is the focused, motivated, energized, action-taking you. And some days the you that shows up is the unfocused, unmotivated, lethargic, non-action-taking you. When we recognize this in advance, we can do a couple of things. One is to say, “okay, I don’t really like the me that showed up today. Can I get myself in gear? Take some sort of action? Can I get myself motivated? Or will I at least take the next step?” Will I take one small step in the direction of accomplishing what I’ve told myself and others that I intend to do? David: Hi, and welcome to the podcast. In today’s episode, co-host Jay McFarland and I will be discussing the topic of how to avoid getting overwhelmed. Welcome back, Jay. Jay: Hey, David. It’s great to be here, and this is such an important topic, especially for the entrepreneur. There are so many different things going on. And oftentimes you have to be the front office, the back office, you have to fulfill the orders. I mean, there are just so many things, and keeping track of it can be very difficult. David: It can. Before we even really dive in too much, I just want to point out, first of all, we are not experts in the mental health field at all, right? So if you’re struggling with actual mental health issues, this is not the podcast to listen to. But if you’re in sales, marketing or business ownership, dealing with the day-to-day and occasionally feeling overwhelmed, that’s what we’ll be talking about. If you’re feeling a little overwhelmed or stressed in business, that will be the discussion at hand today. As you were saying, Jay, most of us have this situation at one point or another when you’re in business, particularly when you’re in sales. It’s easy to feel overwhelmed on some days. It’s like, “I don’t feel like making the calls,” or “I’m struggling with this or that.” And just that thought alone can stop some people in their tracks and cause them to not move forward. Jay: Yeah. I think first of all, it’s important to tell people it’s okay to feel overwhelmed. I mean, that’s the reality for most people. But if that feeling becomes a stress paralysis, like I’ve experienced, like there are so many things going on. I don’t know which one I should be focusing on, so I end up doing less instead of more. That can really be damaging to your business. David: It absolutely is. I find that in a lot of cases, the things that cause us to feel overwhelmed are when we focus on all the different things that we have to do or all the different things that have to be done. It’s the fact there are too many things coming at us at once. Sometimes it’s the habit of looking at everything, as opposed to looking at the one thing or the next thing that I can do, which would allow us to move forward. I’m sure that sounds very simplistic, and to some degree it is. But when we’re struggling with that, a lot of it really becomes about our focus. How tightly can we narrow our focus so we can actually concentrate on doing just one thing? What’s the one, tiny, next thing I can do to move forward so I don’t just give up? Jay: Yeah, and a lot of people I think, sometimes want to give up. But I think it’s really important to do some work in advance here. If you don’t have a list or a plan that talks about all of those things that need to be done and maybe prioritize them. If you don’t have that done, then it’s going to be very hard, like you said, to say, what is the one thing I should be doing right now? Because you haven’t taken the time to plan ahead and even know, so, then it becomes “the squeaky wheel gets the grease,” right? And sometimes that squeaky wheel is just the last thing that you should be doing. David: Yeah, that is exactly true, and it happens to probably all of us at one point or another where there are a lot of things to do, and as you said, whatever is making the most noise, whatever is rattling our cage at the moment gets done when in actuality, that might be something that either shouldn’t be done at all, or it should be something that should be prioritized or de-prioritized to move down farther on the list. I think it’s also important to understand that all of us have good days and bad days. And whenever we make life-altering decisions on bad days, it’s usually not a good outcome. So part of it also is just recognizing when we’re having the kind of days where we are feeling overwhelmed when we’re feeling like things are too much, and then maybe just sort of holding off on making big important decisions until we feel like we’re in better control of our thoughts and our direction and our focus. Jay: So I think what you’re really talking about, this pre-planning and being aware of how you feel, it’s self-awareness. I think that may be one of the hardest skills to master is understanding at all times how you feel and are you prepared to do something. Often, even that bad day, as you said, is going to send us in a certain direction and the next day we’re going to regret it. That’s what we’re trying to avoid. Right? David: Yeah, because what also happens is that a lot of times when we give into these feelings, if I’m feeling overwhelmed and I say, okay, well I’m just not going to do that. I’m going to bail out on this and I’m going to bail out on that. Right? What we’re doing essentially is we are programming ourselves to be able to do less, to be able to perform less, to be able to tolerate less. And each time we do that, it can really become a downward spiral because now instead of saying, okay, I’m feeling a little overwhelmed, but what’s the one thing I can do? What’s the one action I can take on this particular project to keep this important thing moving forward? If we just give up on that or any other project that is important to us, we are training ourselves to do that going forward. Because the more we get used to and the more we create a habit of bailing out on things that make us feel a little uncomfortable, the less likely we are going to be able to do anything like that going forward, which is absolutely harmful if the goal is personal and professional growth. Jay: Yeah, such a great point. And for me, one of the tricks I learned, and I learned it from my mom, is sometimes when you feel like you can’t do anything or you’re stressed, just do something very small. I remember when she was really stressed about something and instead of sitting there and just stewing in it, she’s like, I’m going to vacuum. You know? And to me, getting the vacuuming done provided a sense of forward movement and the feeling of productivity will often feed more productivity. But sitting there doing nothing that’s just going to feed doing nothing. David: Yeah. And a lot of that I think is about getting out of your head and getting into your body, right? Getting into any kind of movement, taking action is almost always better than just, you used the word stewing, you know, stewing in your own brain and churning stuff over and over again, that’s only going to make you less efficient, less effective, less productive. And we need to avoid that at all costs. Jay: Yeah, I totally agree. In fact, one of the things that I did, because I realized that I suffer from this kind of stress paralysis, is I made a list of little things that I could do. Because I realized my mood, as you said, really determines what I want to do. So sometimes blocking out your schedule is very important, and I think it depends on your personality, whether or not that works for you. But for me, I found, well, I’m going to make a list of things that I can work on and my mood kind of dictates the thing that I’m going to focus on in that minute. Now I have the type of work where I can do that, other people don’t. But that has been very helpful to me so that I can just get that moment of productivity in. And then I feel good about myself and now I can go on to other things. David: Yeah, and I think the whole idea of taking action based on our feelings, that by itself is a privilege that not everybody has. Like you were talking about, if you have a particular job and you are required to do things, then you may not feel like it, you may not be in a great mood, you may feel unmotivated, you may feel overwhelmed, but in order to keep that job, you have to continue to take action and move forward. And I don’t think that’s a bad thing for people who even aren’t in a situation like that. Those of us who do have a little more control over our schedules should probably not use that ability to take our own power away from us by giving in, by yielding to whatever negative feeling or whatever negative temptation it is that we have, whether it’s the temptation to give up or give in, or eat an entire chocolate cake or whatever your temptation is. Now we’re veering into other territory, but I think that sometimes people look at overwhelm in business as being separate or different than any other type of either not wanting to do something or wanting to do something. But ultimately it boils down to, you know, what are you committed to? What have you said you are going to do? What are you planning to do? And if you are continuing to take action on that stuff, then you’re honoring your own stated goals. And when you stop taking action on your own stated goals because you feel, whatever, overwhelmed or tired or exhausted, or whatever the words are, you just continue to disempower yourself. Jay: Yeah, disempower. That’s a great word for it. What comes to mind for me when I’m in these modes is sometimes I tell myself, “fake it until you make it.” You know, just like you said, because if I’ve got something scheduled and I don’t feel up to it, but I’ve got to be there because it’s my responsibility, then fake it until you make it. And oftentimes you find that because you know, you dreaded it ahead of time, but then when you’re in it, it feels right and you’re making progress and you’re moving your business along, and then afterward you feel good that you did it. So sometimes that philosophy is all you need to move forward. David: Yeah. And recognizing which you is showing up on any given day. Because some days we start out and the you that shows up is the focused, motivated, energized, action-taking you. And some days the you that shows up is the unfocused, unmotivated, lethargic, non-action-taking you. And when we recognize this in advance, we can do a couple of things. One is to say, okay, I don’t really like the me that showed up today. You know, can I get myself in gear? Can I take some sort of action? Can I get myself motivated? Or will I at least take the next step? Will I take one small step in the direction of accomplishing what I’ve told myself and others that I intend to do? I think I’ve quoted this a number of times on the podcast. I just think it’s such a great one. Dan Sullivan from Strategic Coach said basically, success in life boils down to three things. Show up on time, do what you say you’re going to do, and say please and thank you. The third one’s nice. The first two, showing up on time and doing what you say you’re going to do is so critical. And very often people will not do the second one. They won’t do what they said they were going to do because their feelings got in the way. It’s like, well, I don’t feel like it, or I feel overwhelmed that I just can’t. I can’t bring myself to do it. And again, when we tell ourselves that, and when we yield to it, when we give into it, we’re done. Jay: Yeah, that’s exactly right. And all progress stops. It’s a great discussion today. How can they find out more? David: Well, you can go to TopSecrets.com/call. That’s TopSecrets.com/call. Schedule a call with my team or myself and we’d be happy to go through this with you. A lot of people need focus. They need next steps and next steps and next steps because when you have that, it really does eliminate the overwhelm as long as you’re willing to take the next small step. I had someone who was going through one of our courses and he was struggling with some stuff, and he was saying, well, you know, to be in your course, you know you have to give 110%. I’m like, no, you don’t. You just have to be willing to take the next step. I said, like, the next lesson that you’re up to in the course is five minutes and 50 seconds long. Right. Go through the video, ask your questions below. That’s it. Just do that. You don’t need 110% motivation to do that. All you need to do is you need to be willing to follow through on your commitments and take the next step. So if you’re interested in a next step, TopSecrets.com/call, we would love to have a call and help you with whatever it is you’re struggling with in your business right now. Jay: Yeah, it’s great. I think the whole message of this podcast is just take the next step. David. It’s great talking to you. David: Thanks. You too, Jay. Are You Ready to Say Goodbye to Overwhelm? If so, check out a few ways we help promotional product distributors take the next step: Just Getting Started? If you (or someone on your team) is just getting started in promotional product sales, learn how we can help. Ready to Grow & Scale Your Business Fast? If you're an established distributor serious about growing your sales and profits now, check out this case study and schedule a call with our team. Need EQP/Preferential Pricing? If you're an established distributor doing a decent volume of sales, click here to get End Quantity Pricing from many of the top supplier lines in the promo industry.

When you need to get prospects to respond, it’s time to fix your follow-up strategy. Think in terms of what gets your attention, what gets you to respond? What makes you want to respond when someone else is reaching out to you? That can also be a great indicator of what you may want to be saying to the other person to try to get a response from them. Now, they might not respond to exactly the same things that you respond to. But it’s possible they will, and it’s not a bad place to start… David: Hi, and welcome to the podcast. In today’s episode, co-host Jay McFarlane and I will be discussing why people don’t respond. Welcome back, Jay. Jay: Hey, thank you so much David. This is something that frustrates me in the process when I’ve made a good faith effort, I’m expecting a response and I get crickets and it, you know, it’s one of the hardest things to deal with in sales because you got to constantly be remotivation yourself and when you’re not getting a response back, it’s hard to stay motivated. David: It is. And it’s hard to not take it personally sometimes. Even though it’s very rarely personal. It’s hardly ever personal. It’s almost never personal, but it’s still hard to get past that when it’s happening. Jay: Yeah, I I totally agree with you. And again, I think you just kind of have to have that framework that you know it’s going to happen. It’s not personal and you just got to get through those. But I also think that you have to ask yourself some questions and reassess what is our communication system? I’ve found that there are people who will respond via text, but they’re never going to respond via email or they will pick up their phone or they’ll never pick up their phone. So you’re kind of learning, and I keep track of these notes as I’m trying to reach out to people. And if I can get somebody via text, that’s the way I’m going. I just will stop sending that person emails. So, I think learning along the way about each person and their preferred mode of contact is very important. David: Yeah, that is a huge one. such a great point. And I know we’ve talked about this in previous podcasts. We normally talk about it in terms of marketing and sales, but it applies just as much to telephone calls because they’re marketing, they’re sales as well. But we’ve talked in the past about the MVPs of Marketing. What is the marketing message we want to communicate? Which combination of marketing vehicles are we going to use to communicate the message? And who are the people or prospects that we need to reach? And when people are not responding? Well, the P part of it is covered. The people that we’re talking to, the person who’s not responding, that’s the person that we’re talking about. So if they’re not responding, it is either the person themselves, they’re just not going to do it. But if they are still potentially going to be engaged with us, then the reason they’re not responding is usually either the message or the vehicle, like you pointed out. They’re not going to respond to an email, but they very likely will respond to a text. Cool. That’s easy. Okay. Now we’ll communicate via text. They won’t pick up the phone, they won’t return voicemails, but they will respond to text. Great. Once you get something like that nailed down, you’re back in the saddle again. as the old song went. But a lot of times people don’t even think of that because your preferred method of communication might be different than mine. And if mine is to pick up the phone and call you again and again and again and again, which it is not. But if it were, and if your method of communication is text, then you’re not going to respond to me. You’re probably going to get annoyed at what I’m doing and I’m going to be annoyed at the fact that you’re not responding to me. And it’s a simple disconnect that can actually be addressed very quickly. But if somebody is not responding to any of the different methods of communication that you’ve tried, and today there are a lot. If they don’t respond to you on the phone, you can send them a text, you can send them an email, you can message them on social media. You can send them something in the mail. There are lots of different things that you can do. If they’re not responding to any of it, then it’s very likely either the message that you’re communicating to them where they just want to have nothing to do with you, they don’t want to communicate with you at all, or it’s the person themselves, they’re just not going to do it. And for me, it’s very helpful to try to break those things down and when people don’t respond, it’s very discourteous in my opinion. That’s a nice word that I’m using there. It’s very discourteous, and so I try to communicate that to people in as nice a way as I can. Not to say, “Hey, you’re being rude,” but sometimes if I don’t get a response to something, I’ll reply back and I’ll say, Hey, listen, I haven’t heard back from you on this. Please let me know what you’re thinking either way. I would appreciate the courtesy of a reply. And very often just those words, “I would appreciate the courtesy of a reply,” will get some sort of response. Because what it’s saying is you’re not being courteous. But it’s not actually saying that. And so a lot of times people can read that and they can say, “oh yeah, I should reply to this because it isn’t courteous.” But you’re not accusing them. Jay: Yeah. David: So things like that where you can, and I’m not suggesting you just jump right into that, “Hey, you’re being rude.” I’m not suggesting any sort of attack like that. But just pointing out to them that if you’re a professional, you want to be treated like a professional. If I’m going to treat you like a professional, I’d appreciate if you would treat me like a professional. And again, you’re not saying this, you’re not lecturing, but you’re just sort of building in the subtext that if we’re going to work together, let’s work together. If we’re not going to work together, let’s not work together. But let’s just be upfront about it because our time is valuable. Jay: Yeah. And I think that’s more for people. That’s not really a cold calling technique, right? That’s David: No. Jay: After you’ve had some initial conversation, you’ve talked about maybe moving forward, and then suddenly they’re ghosting you. Right? Which is the term that everybody uses now, right? And you’re like, you know, I thought we were moving forward and now, nothing. I’m not getting anything from you. I think that’s when you can send a message like that. Because they’ve occupied your time. Right. And you only have a certain amount of time. Time capital, right? David: Right. Jay: And so, if they’ve taken up that time with you and expressed an interest, and now they’re ghosting you, it isn’t courteous. Because they’re not recognizing or respecting the amount of work and effort that you’ve put into them. So finding ways to communicate that, and I think you have, is a very important part of the process. But I’ll be honest, it’s one that makes me nervous. So… David: Sure, absolutely. And as we talked about at the beginning of this podcast, there may be a lot of reasons they’re not responding. And a lot of it is not personal. They could be very busy, they could be very distracted. It’s possible that they’re rude or obnoxious, but usually it’s not that if you’ve already had some sort of relationship with them. If you’ve had a conversation with them that was meaningful and went somewhere and seemed like you’re on the same page, then it’s usually not that. But they could be very busy or distracted or focused on other things or working under a time deadline. But that’s all about them. So if we sort of go back to what we were talking about in our previous podcast about taking ownership of our results, then we say, okay, well what can we do about it? If we need to get a call back, if we want to get a call back and they’re not responding, can I look at some of these other marketing vehicles? Can I look at the texts? Can I look at the email and see if I can get a response back like that? What can we do? Because, once again, if we just say, “well, they’re ghosting me,” we’re not taking action on our part to correct the situation. Jay: Yeah. Yeah. And one of the other things that I’ve done is oftentimes we’re trying to get through the gatekeeper, you know, because so many people have that gatekeeper. But oftentimes you could go back to the gatekeeper. You’ve gotten through, you’ve spoken to the principal, the one who writes the checks. Now he’s not responding. Sometimes going back to that gatekeeper and saying, Hey I know he is really busy. Do you think you can get me back on his schedule? David: Mm-hmm. Jay: And that’s a way for him to reserve out time for you. He doesn’t even know it’s happening right? But suddenly you appear on the schedule and you’re calling and he’s actually had that time blocked out by the gatekeeper. So that’s one tactic I’ve used in the past. David: It’s a great one. It really is. And also in terms of the messaging, if you think in terms of what gets your attention, what gets you to respond, what makes you want to respond when someone else is reaching out to you, that can also be a great indicator of what you may want to be saying to the other person to try to get a response from them. Now, they might not respond to exactly the same things that you respond to. But it’s possible they will, and it’s not a bad place to start. Another thing that I think it’s important to consider is that there are some cases where the person that you talked to, just doesn’t believe you, They don’t believe you can do what you said you’re going to do. They don’t believe some element of what you told them. And they might not want to tell you that. So in order to sort of reactivate that credibility, sometimes it’s important to follow up with authority kinds of demonstrations. Whether it’s testimonials or a story about a case study or something like that, that would reengage them and have them say, “oh, okay, well yeah, I guess this person actually did do this. They actually are being truthful in what they’re able to do and what they’re not able to do. Yeah, maybe I’ll pick up this discussion.” And then they’re always, you know, the people who are not interested, I’m just not interested and they don’t want to tell you. At which point, you can often find that out in an email. You know, “Hey, if you’re just not interested in this, please let me know. I don’t want to waste another moment of your time or mine.” And I’ve said that a lot. Because it’s true. I don’t want to waste the other person’s time if they’re not interested. I don’t want to waste my time if they’re not interested. That’s respectful of both our times. And sometimes somebody will come back and say, “yeah, I just don’t think it’s the right time,” or I don’t think this, or I don’t think that. At which point you can then respond however you want. Whether it’s to try to reengage and address the specific issue that they put in there, or if it’s to say, okay, yeah, we really don’t have a fit. Let’s call it a day and I’ll move on to the next prospect. So lots of different options there, but it’s important to remember that there’s no one size fits all solution here. Jay: Yeah, I do like the idea of saying, look, if you don’t have time, that’s great. Because I have a ton of other customers that are waiting. What I like about that is the last thing I think any of us want to do is appear desperate. I think once you send that emotion of desperation, you’ve completely lost the battle. And you want to be always from a position of authority and listen, you need me more than I need you, right? And that’s kind of what you’re saying in a very kind way. You know, if it’s not you, I’ve got a hundred people behind you and that may make them feel like, well, his time is precious, so I’m going to get this done. Or you may find that that’s not the right person, and so you can move on. David: Yeah. And it’s particularly important that that is actual, real authority, that it’s true. Because there are people who will take an approach like that and go, “well, you know, you’re missing out more than I am.” And they hang up the phone and they’re like, “oh no.” Jay: Yeah. David: If that’s a situation, I would say you might not want to use it, but if you really do have it dialed in, when you have more prospects than you have time to fulfill on, then it really does become easier to say, “okay, next.” And it’s not personal for that prospect either. It’s like, “okay, hey, I’m really busy.” “You know what? If you’re really busy, if it’s not a good time, if this isn’t a good fit, just say the word, and I’m out of here.” Because life’s too short. Particularly to chase people who are not interested in being caught. I did a lot of that in the early stage of my career and I am never doing it again. Never. Jay: Yeah, and you have to admit it’s gotten harder because people’s phones are now programmed to not accept any calls that they don’t recognize. We’ve got spam filters, we’ve got gatekeepers. It’s getting harder and harder to get through to people, and so we have to get more and more creative in the process. And so once you finally can break through, it’s like getting a fish on the line. You do want to do everything you can to bring that fish in, but sometimes you got to realize it’s not going to happen. David: If it’s a good prospect, that’s absolutely correct. If you talk to somebody and you’re like, “oh, I know I can help this person,” but they either can’t see it or they don’t have the time or they don’t have the desire, it’s frustrating because, you know, hey, look, if I were to help this person, it would help them enormously. I can see exactly how I can bring value to them. And if they don’t see it, and if you can’t allow them to see it, then it’s not going to happen. But that also brings us to the idea that if what we’re saying is not appealing enough, that’s also a big consideration. So it’s one thing if they’re not interested or this or that, but if we haven’t positioned what it is that we’re able to do in a way that is appealing enough that they see the benefits, they see the transformation that could happen, they’re able to visualize a better future with us in it than with us not in it. If you’re able to do those things, then it’s less likely that they’re going to just disappear on you. But if we don’t do a great job of making it that appealing and it needs to be that appealing in order for us to make it that appealing, then they’re going to wander off. Jay: Yeah. And wandering away is absolutely the opposite of what we want them to do. David, how can people find out more? David: Well, you can go to TopSecrets.com/call. Schedule a call with myself or my team. We can walk you through some of the things that you’re dealing with right now, some of the issues that you’re struggling with. If you have trouble getting people to respond to you, it’s very likely related to one of the MVPs and everything that we do with our clients is designed to help them to increase their sales and profits. So we’d love to have that conversation. Just go to TopSecrets.com/call. Well, I know I learned so much from our discussion, so I know that when they call you there’s going to be some great information there. Thank you so much for your time today, David. Thank you, Jay. Are You Serious About Growing Your Business, Starting Now? If so, check out a few ways we help promotional product distributors grow: Just Getting Started? If you (or someone on your team) is just getting started in promotional product sales, learn how we can help. Ready to Grow & Scale Your Business Fast? If you're an established distributor serious about growing your sales and profits now, check out this case study and schedule a call with our team. Need EQP/Preferential Pricing? If you're an established distributor doing a decent volume of sales, click here to get End Quantity Pricing from many of the top supplier lines in the promo industry.

I’ve seen situations like that where people are making excuses instead of sales. Somebody planned to sell something and was talking about it for a long time. But all the dominoes had to be lined up just right before they’d flick it. Flick one of them and get it going. And ultimately, nothing happened. Sometimes we have a great idea, but then it’s like, “oh, it seems like too much work” or “I don’t want to do it,” or “I’m scared,” or whatever the deal is. And unfortunately, you’re building bridges to nowhere when you do that. David: Hi, and welcome to the podcast. In today’s episode co-host Jay McFarland and I will be discussing making excuses instead of sales. Welcome back, Jay. Jay: Thank you so much, David. Such a pleasure to be here. And I’m excited about this topic. And I’m just going to be brutally honest upfront. I’m guilty of this very thing. As I’ve been involved in sales and sometimes numbers would drop, and the first thing I’m saying is, “well, it’s this,” or, “well, it’s that.” And the truth is it, might be. And so I think it’s important to always go back and reassess what you are doing and have you changed something or has something changed in your system? David: Yeah, it’s very easy to do. It’s an easy trap to fall into. Because whoever really wants to say ” it’s my fault?” And yet, our behavior is one of the only things that we really, truly have control over to the extent that we can get control over it, right? We can’t control a lot of outside factors, but we can largely control what we do and what we promise to do, and then try to connect the dots between those two things. Jay: Yeah. I remember I was in a training and they pointed out that so often when a mistake happens or say sales have a problem, we’re looking for the person to blame. And so often it’s not a person, it’s a system. It’s something that needs to be tweaked. But it’s so easy to just pick somebody and say, you know, “you’re the problem, you solve it.” Maybe you’re the frontline salesperson, and so you need to fix it or there are going to be consequences. And oftentimes I think that’s the wrong approach. David: Yeah, I agree. And I think the reason that this topic even came up is I had an experience, fairly recently, where I was just sort of blindsided by someone’s ability to blame every single outside factor rather than just the fact that they essentially weren’t selling. And this is common in a lot of different businesses. It’s common in a lot of different sales industries. A lot of times, “well, it’s the leads.” And if you ever saw Glengarry Glen Ross, “it’s the leads.” And I remember when I was first watching that movie, I was like, oh, that’s brutal. You know, it’s probably not the leads. And then you find out, in that particular movie, yeah, it was the leads, because they were giving them bad leads. That’s really the exception, rather than the rule though. It’s the leads, it’s the market, it’s the product, it’s the supply chain. There have been a lot of really, potentially very good excuses, a lot of different things that people can blame for their lack of producing, but none of that empowers the salesperson. None of it empowers the person who is making those excuses to actually address the issues that potentially need to be addressed. In other words, if there’s a problem with the leads, what can that person do to track down better leads? If it’s the market, are there other markets they can approach? Or are there segments of the market that they could and should be approaching? If it’s the product, are they representing the right product? Is there another product they should be selling? So for every excuse, there is normally something that the salesperson can do to address some aspect of the problem that they’re citing as being the real issue. Jay: Yeah, I think it’s so important what you’re talking about. Because I’ve been in a situation recently where we did a Google ad campaign and man, the leads were just coming in. But then we looked at our close rate, and it was just miserable. And so we had to assess, is this the type of lead we want? Because we’re spinning our wheels here. And so we had to change keywords and go through a lot of thought processes and reassess. Because in that case, it was the leads. But I also think it’s important, especially in sales, to constantly be reassessing your own performance and what you’re going through. because we fall into traps, right? And also it’s hard, the grind can be hard. And so things that you know you should be doing, you’re not this time because it’s just hard. So checking every box, every single time can be monotonous. So I think a lot of times the breakdown can just be with us. David: It can be. And it can be our failure to look at the other options that are available to us. It can be our failure to look at the issues that we’re blaming to say, “how could we potentially improve that?” And sometimes it’s not the actual situation that we think it is. In the example that you gave, you were able to determine that this group of leads worked and this group of leads didn’t. And if you got the same process, then you can say all right, we want more of the kind of leads that are going to work. Another option there would be to say, okay, is there something we can do to change the procedure on this particular group of leads to make it match? But that doesn’t always work. Sometimes it is the leads, just like in Glengarry Glen Ross. Sometimes it actually is the leads. But that doesn’t alleviate the responsibility of the salesperson to try to identify what we can do to deal with whatever situation we’re faced with. Because the problem is that if we don’t do that, we are really disempowering ourselves, and we’re training ourselves to blame outside factors that are beyond our control, which means we can never be in control. Whenever we do that, anytime we outsource responsibility somewhere else, anytime we outsource the blame to something else, then we’re completely disempowering ourselves. Jay: Yeah. I love that. That’s such a good point. Outsourcing the blame is not going to solve any problems. You know, it’s been kind of a running theme through all the podcasts that we do, that you should always be reassessing, you should always be looking at the numbers. We’ve talked about key performance indicators and saying, you know, we normally always have a good January. Now we’re not, what is going on? Is it seasonal? Is it the economy? Because we can be affected by so many things outside of our control, but if we’re not reassessing those and we can’t go back and look at where we were before, we might not even know we need to change. And then we’re outsourcing excuses as well. David: Yeah, I think there’s also a tendency for some people to think in terms of blame instead of responsibility. My thinking is it’s better if we can choose responsibility instead of blame. Choose responsibility over blame. That means you know, I’m not asking anybody to blame themselves. I’m not saying blame yourself for poor sales. What I’m saying is “what aspects of that can you take responsibility for?” Can you take the responsibility of saying, “okay, if I need better leads, I either need to dig them up myself, or I need to go to the person who provides the leads and convince that person that we need something different?” Look at whatever sliver of action you can take, whatever little thing you can do to advance the cause, because otherwise you’re just playing the victim and that never helps anyone, particularly in sales. Jay: Yeah, exactly. You know, another example… we were just recently excited. Somebody approached us, “Hey, we have this great new way to generate leads for you. It’s going to involve webinars and all of these things.” And again, it generated a decent amount of leads, but we couldn’t close any of them. And it was interesting because it felt like they were the right kind of leads. They were asking the right kind of questions. So we really spent a lot of time saying, is it us? Is it this particular client? And ultimately, we stopped using that service just because, for whatever reason, whatever it was doing, just not the ideal customer. But if we would’ve just said, oh, it’s not working, I would still today be thinking to myself, maybe we should have stuck with that longer. So try things and then tweak ’em as you go to make sure that if you’re going to not use them anymore, you’ve really done your due diligence. Otherwise, you might be chasing away good leads. David: Yeah. And I think listening skills are critical in that regard. When you’re talking to a different group of people, a different group of people that came in from a particular lead source that you’ve never done before, and you find that they’re not closing, what are they saying that is different than the other people that you normally talk to? What questions are they asking? What questions are they not asking? What questions are they not responding well to? Because a lot of times, if you get a list of people that just don’t have any money to spend, and you find that that’s a recurring motif in that particular lead source, then it’s pretty easy to understand. Okay, it’s going to be difficult to convert. But the challenge there is that there are a lot of people who have money, who pretend not to when they’re in a conversation with a salesperson. And so just because somebody says they don’t have money, very often that just means I don’t have money for you for what you’re proposing right now, because I still don’t get it. I don’t believe it. I don’t see the ROI. If you can show them the ROI, they can come up with the funds. And so that’s part of the challenge as well. Is the person that you’re talking to telling you the truth about their inability to buy, or are they just making something up because they don’t want to buy what it is that we’re offering? Jay: Yeah. And one other thing we’ve started doing recently is if it comes down to the point where they’re not going to buy or they say maybe in the future or whatever, and we put them into our database and we have a drip program that constantly reminds them about who we are and what we do. But to me, the follow-up to those individuals, a way to ask them straight up, “hey, can I ask what it is that kept you from using our services?” That’s hard to do, you know? David: Mm-hmm. Jay: But maybe it can be done through a form after the fact, an email that they can get. Any extra morsels of information to find out why this particular group of leads is not working out, I think could really be beneficial. David: Yeah. And I find that when it’s actually on a conversation, if someone tells you that on a conversation, yeah, listen, I don’t think we want to move forward on this. I find that to be a great time to be able to say to them, okay, I would much rather have a no or a yes than a maybe. So I appreciate the fact that you’re being candid with me. Can you tell me what was it that caused you to make that decision? It’s a decent time to ask, and you’re basically acknowledging what they said. You’re not trying to talk them out of it at that point. And then, in a lot of cases, they can really open up to you about some of what their issues were or are, and it’s possible then to sometimes swing back into a conversation where you’re able to address something that you didn’t know they needed addressed, answer a question that wasn’t officially asked previously. And once that pressure or tension is taken away where they think you’re trying to sell them something, they can very often be a lot more open in their responses. Jay: Yeah, this is such a great point because if you ask them, Hey, can you tell me what it is? They may come back and their answer may demonstrate to you that they missed the whole point. That you had been talking the whole time and they completely missed your benefits. They completely misunderstood you. And so like you said, that may restart the whole sales cycle again. But now you have a better understanding of what they’re looking for. David: Yeah, exactly. So part of my feeling here is that it’s important for any of us who are dealing with this type of thing to start out by looking inward. Essentially asking yourself, what can you do today, right now, to advance your own sales career? To target better prospects? To initiate more contacts? Whatever it is that you need to do, there’s probably something that you can do and that you should do to advance that process. Also, I think there are some people who think they might want to try to sell something, but if they’re not committed to making that happen, they can stretch it out for days, weeks, months, or years, if people let them, and never sell a thing. And I’ve seen situations like that where somebody had planned to sell something and was talking about it for a long time, and all the dominoes had to be lined up just right before they’d flick it, you know, flick one of them and get it going. And ultimately nothing happened. And that I think is just a failure of vision in terms of “what am I really planning to do and what will I actually take action on?” Because sometimes we have a great idea, but then it’s like, “oh, it seems like too much work” or “I don’t want to do it,” or “I’m scared,” or whatever the deal is. And unfortunately, you’re building bridges to nowhere when you do that. You’re trying to set up all these different things to be in place, but if you fail to, you know, flick the domino or pull the trigger, nothing’s going to happen. Jay: Yeah. Such a great point. And if you’re outsourcing that blame or that responsibility, then you need to reassess. David, how can people find out more? David: Well, you can go to TopSecrets.com/call. Schedule a call with myself or my team, and we’ve been taking a number of calls, particularly over the past couple of weeks, and it’s been great having conversations with people who are really serious about growing their sales and profits. Because the reality of the situation is, you know the old 80/20 rule. And who knows, these days it might be 85/15, or 90/10 or 95/5. And we love having conversations with people who are serious about growing their sales and profits. We love having the conversations where we can sort of walk them through their current situation. Where they’re looking to be in terms of sales and profits and visibility in the marketplace. We try to make these calls as valuable as possible, whether or not we ever end up working together. It kind of doesn’t matter. If you are serious about growing your sales and profits and you want to have a conversation, go to TopSecrets.com/call. We would love to have those conversations with you. Jay: All right, that’s awesome. Thank you so much, David. David: Thank you, Jay. Are You Serious about Growing Your Business, Starting Now? If so, check out a few ways we help promotional product distributors grow: Just Getting Started? If you (or someone on your team) is just getting started in promotional product sales, learn how we can help. Ready to Grow & Scale Your Business Fast? If you're an established distributor serious about growing your sales and profits now, check out this case study and schedule a call with our team. Need EQP/Preferential Pricing? If you're an established distributor doing a decent volume of sales, click here to get End Quantity Pricing from many of the top supplier lines in the promo industry.

When dealing with indecisive prospects, we each have to recognize our own tolerance for pain. How long am I willing to chase? How long am I willing to wait? What am I willing to sacrifice in terms of my own time and my own self-esteem? Right? And it’s different at different stages of life. I spent so much time in the past just trying to accommodate people who, ultimately, it wouldn’t have made sense to accommodate in the first place. And so for me, I recognize that it’s not always a good idea to just do that. David: Hi, and welcome to the podcast. In today’s episode, co-host Jay McFarland and I will be discussing indecisive prospects. Welcome back, Jay. Jay: Hey, David. Thank you so much. This is the bane of the existence of so many salespeople. You think you have somebody, they see the benefits, but they just can’t seem to make up their mind. And you know that you can help them. You know that if they would just do this, they would be on their way to a better place. But you just can’t get ’em over that finish line. It’s so frustrating. David: Yeah, Jay, you know, I was really struggling to decide if we should do a podcast on this topic. It was weighing on me and I’m thinking, should we do it? Should we not do it? And I went back and forth and I spent eight months, and then I decided, yeah, maybe we’ll do it. No. That approach it’s brutal and we’ve all dealt with it. The term wishy-washy comes to mind where they just can’t or won’t make a decision and it’s frustrating. But it’s also kind of unnecessary. Because when you’re dealing with someone who really is just not able to make a decision, it’s almost a disqualifier for me. And it very often becomes a disqualifier for me. Because if we’ve laid out our best-case scenario for why it makes sense to move forward with something we’re doing or not to move forward with something that we’re doing. If we do that and they still sort of go back and forth and they don’t know why or they can’t put their finger on it, then they’re probably not a good prospect. Because the problem with indecisive prospects is they go on to become indecisive clients. That means every time you want to sell something to them, they’re going to have to think about it or go away and meditate on it or whatever it is they’re going to have to do. Meanwhile, the clock is ticking for everybody. They’re not getting the result of whatever it is that they were thinking about buying from you. You’re spending a lot of time chasing them. They spend a lot of time either being chased or avoiding being chased or dodging you. So for me, it can become a disqualifier pretty quickly. Jay: Yeah, and I think you’ve actually kind of zeroed in on a larger recognition. Are we thinking about what type of customer this is going to be while we’re talking about them initially? Because it may not just be that they’re indecisive. We may through the conversation find out this client is going to be very hard to work with. They have a bazillion questions, or they seem so demanding or whatever. I think that kind of pre-assessment in the process can be very important. I also think with indecisive people, you know, you have to have your steps. Have I gone through every step of the process? Have I tried every skillset that I have in the book? If they’re still waffling back and forth, then you’re exactly right. Is this somebody that I want to be working with on a daily basis? Is it worth my time? And I think the answer is probably no. David: Yeah. Listen to what people tell you. If you’re having an interaction with someone who’s considering working with you, pay attention to what they say. If their story changes dramatically from day to day, that is a huge red flag. I had a situation recently where someone talked about how determined they were to grow their business. They wanted to get it to a certain point as quickly as possible, and the reasons that they were doing it were all very noble. They wanted to do it for their family and they wanted to reach this particular level of sales, and they wanted to do it sooner rather than later. And then two days later they decided they weren’t going to do it because they needed to do something with their house first. They needed to, you know, fix up their house before they could focus on this. And it’s like, okay, well that’s perfectly fine. Right? Everybody gets to choose their own priorities. And the person said, Hey, I’m not saying we’re not going to work together. I’m just saying that, you know, not right now. And my response was, well, you know, listen, as of the other day, your focus was on growing your business, doing very specific things to achieve a very specific result to benefit very specific people. And now your priority is to do something completely different. I understand you’re saying that we could work together in the future, but based on what you’re telling me, I’m not your guy. You know, I can’t help someone whose priorities change from day-to-day, minute to minute, second to second. I can’t help someone like that because if today you move toward Goal A and tomorrow you move toward Goal Z and those goals lie in completely opposite directions, I can’t do it. You know? No one can do it because you can’t operate in multiple directions at the same time. And so I think some of indecisiveness comes from people not being extremely clear on where they want to go in the first place. Or not committing to where they say they want to go in the first place. So for me, when people commit to going in a certain direction, I know I can help them get there faster. I know I can help them get farther in that destination. But when they’re all over the place, wow, it’s a lose-lose. Jay: Yeah. what’s so frustrating about that is in the moment when they focus, they’re in, right? They’re going to buy your product. And then the next time you talk to them, it’s as if none of that ever happened. They completely changed their mind and you’re like, wait a minute. You know, we had this figured out. We had put together a plan, and now they’re on a different planet. Man, that can be a frustrating process. So if you can identify that type of behavior earlier on, then you can move on to other people. I do think that you still want to maintain some type of contact with that person through a drip campaign or something, because eventually they may want to come back to you. But when they do, hopefully they’re ready then. David: Yeah. And I would say earlier in my career, that would be the kind of thing that I would probably continue to chase out. But again, I think you get to a certain point and you recognize certain behaviors. And for me, with what I do, we have to have congruity in our communications. We have to have congruity in our actions. So when I noticed that that’s the case, it says to me, this is not a good fit. I’m not going to be able to help a person like that. If they want to come back later and say, Hey, now I’m really focused on it, and if it makes sense, I’d be happy to do that. But for me, I’m not chasing that out and I’m not saying other people shouldn’t, I’m just saying that’s the way that I’m approaching it now, because there are so many people who get it, who are focused, who are able to maintain their focus. And those are my peeps. You know, those are the people that I’m looking to work with. And it is a relatively small subset of the population. And so when you have somebody that you think is like that, and then they may or may not turn out to be that way, you have to make those decisions according to your own guidelines and according to who you think you can help and who you think you can’t. Jay: Yeah, I totally agree. And it depends on the type of business whether or not you can do this, but I’ve seen where people have steps that identify if the customer is serious. So we’ve had an initial call and I’ve said, okay, I’m going to send something over for you to look at. And then you call ’em up and you’re like, have you looked at that? And they’re like, well, no, I haven’t. Okay, they’re not progressing to step two. So I’m not going to try and progress them to step three yet, because they’re not showing that they’re moving in my direction. Not every business has clear steps like that. But if you can identify, you know, okay, in our sales process, I’ve requested information from the client so that I can get them a quote, for example. Well, if I’m having to beat myself up every day to get that information, that’s a very quick indicator that this is probably somebody that you’re not going to be able to get over the finish line right now. And so I love it if you can identify individual places where you can say, ah, it’s time to move on. David: Yeah. I also think that as a salesperson, we each have to recognize our own tolerance for pain. You know, how long am I willing to chase? How long am I willing to wait? How much am I willing to sacrifice in terms of my own time and my own self-esteem? Right? And it’s different at different stages of life. I’m feeling like some of the things I’m saying on the podcast today are dating me in terms of the way that I do things now versus the way that I used to do things. But I spent so much time in the past just trying to accommodate people who, ultimately, it wouldn’t have made sense to accommodate in the first place. And so for me, I’ve recognized that it’s not always a good idea to just do that. You know, we don’t want to wait forever. We want to be able to have respect for their time and for our time and just ask ourselves, do these people even do what they say they’re going to do? If they say they’re going to respond back, do they respond back? Are they communicative? Because if you can’t communicate with your people, as we had discussed in a previous episode, it’s very difficult to get much of anything done. And to the extent that there are specific contradictions where they say one thing and then they say something completely different later, I don’t think it’s a bad thing to point that out. Not in a bad way. Not in a negative way, but just to say, okay, well listen, the other day you told me this and now you’re telling me that. This doesn’t really seem to make sense. And if the goal is to get the business anyway, then what you would do is you would say, okay, can you clarify that for me so we can figure it out? Or if the goal is to say, okay, that’s sort of a bridge too far, then you say, I don’t think it makes sense for us. And either of those responses are okay. Unless, you’re in a situation where you have a boss who demands that you close the sale regardless, which I don’t think is ultimately always healthy. But in those situations, then yeah, you’ll probably have to work harder at seeing if there can be a fit if it doesn’t seem like there is a fit now. Jay: Yeah. There’s one other type of person that I run into, and that’s a person who will always talk to you. They’ll always pick up the phone. They’ll talk to you for hours, but they’re never going to buy from you. But you’ve established a relationship and they may even ask you more questions about your product, but they just want to talk and they’re never going to ever close. Yeah, those people are time suckers, and it’s easy to fall into the trap and believe if I can just talk to them enough, I can close them. And you’re not going to, because really you’ve become their friend, not a service provider. David: Yeah. And a lot of salespeople have fallen into that trap where maybe they’re just having a rough day and people are being rude to them and hanging up on them and they’re like, well, I’ll call this person cause at least I know this person will be nice. Not going to be selling anything, but at least I know that this person will be nice to me. And it’s a defense mechanism. I understand it. But if you recognize that while you’re doing that, you are not potentially in touch with someone who can buy from you, it may be motivation to try to move on to the next person who could actually do business with you. Jay: Yeah, such a great point. Don’t interpret their willingness to communicate with a willingness to buy your product. You have to always be thinking about that. Great conversation, David. How can people find out more? David: Well, you can go to TopSecrets.com/call, schedule a call with myself or my team. We can walk through whatever issues you’re dealing with now. If you’re having trouble getting through to the right people, if you’re struggling with indecisive prospects, if you need to bring new prospects and clients through the door consistently, and you need to have a backlog of people you’re waiting to serve, rather than a big gap in your sales pipeline, go to that link, TopSecrets.com/call. We’ll schedule a call. We’ll see how we can help you. Jay: All right. Thank you so much, David. David: Thank you, Jay. Are You Serious About Growing Your Business, Starting Today? If so, check out a few ways we help promotional product distributors grow: Just Getting Started? If you (or someone on your team) is just getting started in promotional product sales, learn how we can help. Ready to Grow & Scale Your Business Fast? If you're an established distributor serious about growing your sales and profits now, check out this case study and schedule a call with our team. Need EQP/Preferential Pricing? If you're an established distributor doing a decent volume of sales, click here to get End Quantity Pricing from many of the top supplier lines in the promo industry.

When I say your competition isn’t that good, that most of your competition is average, what I mean is that a lot of them are not taking the time to learn the things that will allow them to do things better. David: Hi, and welcome back. In today’s episode, co host Jay McFarland and I say, your competition isn’t that good. Right, Jay? Jay: Yeah, absolutely. Do you even know who your competition is? Do you know what they offer? Do you know what people think of them compared to you? Maybe you don’t even know if your competition is that good. David: Exactly. And I hear, so many times, when I’m talking to salespeople, the idea that, there’s a lot of competition. Competition is very difficult. There’s a lot of online competition. There’s a lot of local competition. There’s a lot of price-cutting competition. There are all these different variations on competition. And that’s all true. But a lot of them really, honestly, just aren’t that good. And if you recognize right up front that most businesses are average, right? There’s an average in every business, in every industry, there’s an average. And some people are better than average. Some people are worse than average. There are a lot of average. So if you’re competing with the average or the less than average, then you should be able to do pretty well. If you’re a conscientious individual, if you’re reasonably good at what you do, if you study and practice your profession and you get reasonably good at it, you’ll be able to outperform a lot of them because to the extent that there are really exceptional competitors in your market, there are a lot less of those than there are the ones on the other side. Jay: Yeah, absolutely. I’ve always believed this, you know, you can get caught up in the muck. When I was in radio, I worked for a radio station that had a built in listenership because it was so ingrained in the community. And what that did is it made it so they didn’t have to work hard to get sales or to get numbers. Now you would think, oh man, that’s an amazing place to be. But what happened is, they started to get complacent, right? Everything was so easy, and then all of a sudden ratings started to shift and suddenly they realized, we don’t know how to sell. Because we’re so used to sitting at a desk and the phone is ringing. And we’re just taking orders. So you’re not a salesperson, you’re taking orders, right? And their competitors started to eat them alive because their competitors had to sell all the time, and they were very good at it. So sometimes you’re successful just in spite of yourself. And that may be what your competitors are in, what state they’re in. David: It really could be as simple as that and as difficult as that, in either situation. But, you know, the idea that the competition is excellent, or the competition is terrible, or the competition is average. In a sense, none of it really matters. Because this is life. This is the world that we’re in. These are the cards we’ve been dealt, right? So our competition is there. We’re there. The question is, how are we going to make sure that we are outperforming our competition in all the key areas of customer contact? I mean, if you were to boil it down and say, okay, let’s say my competition is very good. Let’s say you completely disagree with the premise of this podcast, that your competition isn’t that good, or that it’s average or whatever you say. “No, I’ve got a lot of competition.” Okay, then that’s your question. How do you outperform your competition in all key areas of customer contact? Some people may say, “well, I don’t know. What are the key areas of customer contact?” And if you’re asking yourself that kind of question, that indicates that there’s work to be done in your organization. Jay: Yeah, absolutely. And do you even know how the competition functions to be able to compare yourself? I mean, that’s got to be at least half the battle, right? David: Yeah, that’s part of the battle. Maybe it’s a third of the battle. Jay: Okay. David: I was gonna say a quarter, maybe it’s a quarter to a third of the battle. And the only reason I say that is I don’t think we should spend a ton of time overanalyzing our average competitors. I mean, if there’s a really, really good one, yeah, you can take a look at what they’re doing. But ultimately, sure, we all want to outperform our competitors. But what do we really want? We want to get to the point where we’re so good at what we do that it’s no longer about outperforming our competitors. Now it’s a matter of outperforming our past best, right? What’s the best we were able to do? When you’re leading in a market, when you really are the market leader, you’re doing things right, you’re doing things well and efficiently, you’re already better than a lot of your average competitors, then the goal you want to reach for is how can I do what we do better in our own organization? Right? How can we initiate contact better? How can we leave messages better? How can we send emails that are more compelling? What are the very specific things, all these points of customer contact that could potentially change for the better to get me better results? Jay: Yeah, I love this idea that your true competition really is yourself, right? It’s kind of like golf or, you know, another single person sport where you’re, really competing against yourself. And, if you can identify constantly ways to get better and you’re not falling into that complacency, then you’re probably going to do better than most of your competitors. David: Yeah, exactly. Something else that I read recently, was talking about the idea that a lot of us want to try to beat our best month ever, our best year ever. We’re always looking to top that top line, which makes a lot of sense. But I read this in a book by Nic Peterson. He said that, ideally, our goal should be to beat our bottom. In other words, sales are going to go up and down, right? That’s going to happen over a period of time. Sales are going to go up and down. We’re going to have peaks and valleys, and hopefully it works on an upward trajectory, and as you’re doing that, if you can make sure that the floor is constantly rising ,then eventually you get to the point where your floor is higher than other people’s ceiling. And if you think about the idea of being better than your competitors, that’s really what you want. Cause if you have a great month this month, an exceptional month, then it’s like, okay, now the new month starts. Now you’re at zero again. You got to start from scratch. Right? But if you know that your first goal for that month is to make sure that you’re above your previous floor. Then it seems a lot more doable. It’s like, okay, we might not have another peak month this month, but if we can stay above our floor, then we will continue to grow and grow. Jay: Yeah, I really like that. I’m somebody who tends to look at records, right? Like we just finished a record month and I’m like on a high, right? Things are great, but you’re exactly right. I mean, next month beating that every single month, month after month. Is that realistic? I think you’re pointing out, no, it’s probably not, and it could be counterproductive. David: Yeah, it’s probably not realistic that each month is going to be higher than the last, and there are not going to be any that are lower. But I think it’s also realistic to say, okay, can I beat our worst month? Or a recent worst month? It’s like if you look at a stock chart and you see how there are these different… Jay: let’s call them peaks and valleys, ups and downs. David: Yeah, peaks and valleys. So if it’s bottoming out at a certain point, you want to say, okay, I want to get in higher than that. It’s a terrible explanation, but you kind of get the drift. Jay: Yeah, absolutely. And again, we kind of always fall back to this, is what systems do you have to track these types of things? Do you understand the cause and effect? I mean, so often, yeah, you had a good sales month, or yeah, you increased the baseline, but do you know why you did that? Was it just the phone rang more? Or was it something tangible? Because if it’s not something tangible, how are you gonna repeat it? Was it more calls? Was it more advertising dollars? What was it that got you there? If you don’t know, then the business is driving you. You’re not driving the business. David: Exactly. And each of those things are some of these different areas of customer contact, right? Whether it’s the advertising, whether it’s the phone calls, whatever it is, when we’re looking at that, we’re saying, okay, where are these key points of contact and what can I do to make each of those better? Can I make the messaging better? Can I tweak the messaging? Can I reach a different or better group of people? All these different things. Can I reach them using different marketing vehicles? Can I reach them online? Can I reach them offline? Can I reach them on the phone, via text, via email? How can I reach them? And look at what you’re doing, look at what’s working well and what may be not working as well as it used to, and then say, okay, how could I tweak some of these things, the messaging, the combination of marketing vehicles we’re using, or the people we’re reaching, the MVPs, we’ve talked about that a lot in the past. Which of these can I adapt, can I fine tune, like tuning in an old fashioned radio where they used to have dials on them, right? That type of thing. So you’re able to dial it in clearly and make sure that you’re getting the right people, saying the right things, using the right combination of marketing vehicles. Jay: Yeah, we talked about this last time, avoiding assumptions, figuring out why you got that customer, right? Cause you may be thinking, “oh, I had a new ad campaign or new marketing and this is why they came in.” And maybe it was a contact you had made with them a year ago. Maybe it was a bad experience with one of the competitors. Maybe it was something that changed in their business cycle. I think that type of communication as to why they’re there, why you were able to close them, you need to have systems to track this and, be open and honest with your customers to find out. What was it that motivated them to come to you? David: Yeah, in our work with our clients, we talk a lot about intelligent repetition of contact, being in touch with people again and again and again, but without saying the same thing, without getting boring, without getting tedious, without driving them crazy, right? If we can do that, that’s intelligent repetition of contact, and it makes it far more likely that you will be in front of someone when they’re ready to make that buying decision. Jay: Yeah, I love that idea, but you’re still going to have competitors. So do you need to have some awareness of what they’re doing? Or do you kind of say, I’m going to focus on me and I’m just going to be the best I can and compete against myself? David: Well, I like that better. I like the idea of focusing on ourselves. What I’ve found though, is that in most markets, you don’t have to look too far to hear about what your competitors are doing. Because if you’re reaching out to a new prospect and you hear about one particular competitor again and again and again, that tells you who is actually pretty good in the market. If you hear those names again and again and again, if you hear different people, each time you talk to someone, then it’s like, okay, well that’s sort of the average, that’s the industry. But if you’re talking to a lot of people and they’re all saying the same thing and they’re all saying great things, that’s an indication that you have now found the leader in your market. So that’s what you need to target, then. Then you may look at, okay, well, what are they doing? How are they doing it? How is it better than what we’re doing? Or is it? Is it not better than what we’re doing? But they don’t know what we do, so they can’t compare. Jay: Yeah, and finding out, can I even compete with them in one particular area? Maybe that exposes a different lane for you where you can be competitive, right? So it’s not like you have to play chicken with everybody. That may not be the best solution. We’re in a very unique industry because our products and services are so defined that I only have probably three competitors nationwide. And so when I talk to people, oftentimes, our competitors will come up and sometimes it’s in a good light. Quite often, like you said, my competitors are average. They aren’t that good. It’s not hard at all for us to offer better customer service, better products, everything. I have found, that, a lot of people are like, oh, I hope they don’t go and research and talk to my competitors and get outbid. I’m like, go and talk to them. Go and have that experience because I know you’ll be back and I’m in a better position when you come back. So that’s made us more confident than less confident. David: Yeah. And when you have a small number like that, it is easier to know what each of them are doing. I remember in our promotional product business, back in the day, we had a situation where there was one competitor that wasn’t really known for answering their phones. You try to reach them and you couldn’t get through to them. And so, if a sales person of ours, or if I was in a conversation with somebody and they say, “Oh yeah, we use this company,” sometimes I’d say something like, “Oh, are you able to get them to answer their phone?” And very often they’d laugh. Because if you know this about a company, you can say something like that. Like, “Oh, well, they don’t usually answer, but I can usually get a call back.” “Oh, okay. Well, if you ever get tired of that, or if you ever get voicemail and you’d like to talk to a human, here’s my card, right? That’s just a small example, but you basically look for the things that you know to be true about a competitor. And I’m not saying you’re picking on them. I’m not saying you’re dissing them or anything, but you just point out a very obvious truth about them. And very often that will get their attention. Jay: Yeah, absolutely. Well, I love it. How do people find out more? David: Go to TopSecrets.com/call and watch the video on that page. See if it makes sense to have a conversation with myself or my team. When I say your competition isn’t that good, what I mean is that a lot of them are not taking the time to learn the things that will allow them to do things better. And if you’re in that camp, if you’d like to be able to do things better and differently than your competition, if you’d like to be seen as the leader in your market, then by all means, TopSecrets.com/call. Jay: All right. Fantastic, David. Always a pleasure. David: Thank you, Jay. Your Competition Isn’t That Good. Ready to Outperform them in All Key Areas of Customer Contact? If so, check out the five primary ways we help promotional product distributors grow: Just Getting Started? If you (or someone on your team) is just getting started in promotional products sales, learn how we can help. Need Clients Now? If you're already grounded in the essentials of promotional product sales and just need to get clients now, click here. Want EQP/Preferential Pricing? Are you an established industry veteran doing a significant volume of sales? If so, click here to get End Quantity Pricing from many of the top supplier lines in the promo industry. Time to Hire Salespeople? If you want to hire others to grow your promo sales, click here. Ready to Dominate Your Market? If you're serious about creating top-of-mind-awareness with the very best prospects in your market, schedule a one-on-one Strategy Session here.

If our storytelling allows us to build trust, build credibility, and build a bond in sales, then we’re telling the right stories. If it’s just designed to be manipulative, then save your breath. David: Hi, and welcome to the podcast. In today’s episode, co-host Jay McFarland and I will be discussing the power of storytelling in sales. Jay, tell me a story. Jay: Listen, I am a storyteller. I love to tell stories and I like to build when I tell stories, right? This is something that I use on a regular basis when I’m talking to people. And it’s not just telling a story. I think it’s putting people in a story and what character are they in that story? And I think most people want to be the hero in their own story, right? David: They do. Which gets to the whole idea of the hero’s journey, for anyone who follows that sort of story arc. The Hero’s Journey by Joseph Campbell. But it’s a book and it describes essentially the plot of most of the most popular movies of all time. Jay: Yeah, David: Right. Star Wars, Rocky, anything where you’ve got this person who is initially kind of beaten down and not winning. Then they come into contact with a mentor. They learn new things and have a confrontation and it might not go well. Then they learn some more things and then eventually they come out triumphant. There’s a whole arc. And you’re right, a lot of people want to be the hero, and the challenge as a salesperson is, in our storytelling, we can’t be the hero. Mm. Right. We need to make sure that the person we’re talking to is the hero and that we are the mentor or guide. We’re not Luke Skywalker. We have to be Yoda. We have to be the one who’s helping Luke to destroy the Death Star. Jay: Yeah. This is a really hard thing, I think for a lot of people. Because we want to go in and think we’re the hero, right? I’m coming into your business. I’m going to provide something that is going to save the day, and then I’m going to walk away and you’re going to praise me and you’re going to pay me. But that’s not what really is supposed to be happening, right? It’s that I have the tools and the resources that you need to be the hero. David: Yes, and it’s easy to forget that, particularly when we’re trying to read ourselves in as the hero to each story. But one of the things that I’ve noticed in sales is that many, if not most of the very best salespeople are also the best storytellers. You can say. “Hi, do you know what time it is?” And instead of getting the time, you will get a fantastic story that might weave the time into it. Jay: Mm. David: But you’re going off in all kinds of directions, and when they do it right, it’s captivating enough that you sit there and pay attention. Jay: Yeah. But you pointed out “when you do it right.” David: Yes. Jay: Right. so let’s talk about that a little bit. Let’s talk about your feedback on doing it right. David: Well, number one, as we already touched on, it can’t just be all about you. You can’t make the story about yourself. You need to make it about them, and a lot of that upfront comes from finding out about them, which means you’re asking more questions, then you’re answering, hopefully in the early stages. Jay: Yes David: Because customers always just want to know what it’s going to cost upfront, and you don’t generally want to lead off with that. So a lot of our storytelling will actually have to come from the conversations that ensue after we’ve gathered enough information. Jay: Yeah. David: To know what those stories need to be about. If we just go in and we meet somebody for the first time and we start telling them stories, that’s probably not ideal. We need to still initially do some sort of diagnostic upfront to find out what their interests are. Now, of course, a lot of salespeople, they do the whole thing about walking into the office, looking around, oh, I see a big buck hanging up there on the, Jay: mm-hmm. David: On the wall. The person’s a hunter. You start talking to them about hunting, that type of thing. And, it’s very obvious. It works in some situations to break the ice, so you can ask the person. Because the other thing about storytelling is it doesn’t just have to be you telling stories. If you can get the prospect to be telling stories to you, then they’ll be more likely to engage in a longer conversation because most people are more interested in hearing what they have to say versus what somebody else has to say. Jay: Yeah. David: So sometimes you can just let somebody talk for a long time and they feel like they had the best conversation, even though the salesman didn’t say anything at all. Jay: Yeah, I’ve had people like look at the pictures on the wall and stuff, and that can come off as so plastic and so fake. But I do think the most important thing is to get them talking. And the more talking they do and the less talking you do, the better off those things are. If you can get them to be the storyteller and then you can help them improve that story or tell them how that story’s going to get better, that’s the zone where you want to be. David: Yeah, exactly. And I think that a good sales process does that, in the sense that when you’re leading off with intelligent, probing questions that don’t come across as intrusive -it can’t be like you’re giving them the third degree. You got a light shining in their face. Jay: Yeah. David: And you’re trying to get information out of them. It can’t be anything like that. But if you’re asking intelligent, probing questions and you’re finding out about them, they’re going to open up more. And the more they talk, the better it is for you. Another thing that a lot of salespeople do is they mistakenly ask yes or no questions. They ask binary questions instead of open-ended questions. If you ask an open-ended question, they’re likely to talk more, which is going to allow the conversation to flow a lot more organically. They can tell stories. You can then potentially tell some sort of story about something that relates to something they said. Again, keeping it focused on them and what they need and what they’re looking to do. For salespeople, case studies, testimonials, things like that can be good stories as long as they’re not just being forced down people’s throats. If somebody’s talking about a promotion that they did or something that they did in the past that worked well, then you can acknowledge that. “Wow, that’s great. That sounds like that was really amazing. We had a similar situation with a client where this happened or that happened,” and then you can relate with that story. But that also brings up another thing. If somebody tells a story, then you don’t want to try to tell a story that’s designed to sound better than theirs. Mm-hmm. Right? So you don’t want to change gears. But if you can establish some sort of comradery among them by indicating that you’ve had similar experiences, then your stories will go a lot farther. Jay: Yeah. And I think a couple things from my own experience: don’t interrupt. Don’t cut them off. Right? Let them talk. But I think where people really miss out and you know that I interview people for part of my living, right? David: Mm-hmm. Jay: And I’ve been a professional interviewer for 20 years, and I find that the key is not the initial question. Yes, ask open-ended question. That’s very, very important. But the key is always the follow-up question, and that’s where people fall down. They ask the question, they got the person talking, and then they dive into their product spiel, right? If you ask a follow-up question, it shows that you’re listening. It shows that you’re interested. And it will take you places that you never ever thought you could go. Like I have interview s where people send a list of questions and I’m like, just so you know going to ask you follow up questions and we’ll bounce around, and those kind of things. And by the time they’re done, they’re energized and they just feel so appreciated. and it’s because of active listening and good follow up questions. David: Yes. And that is so completely critical in sales. Jay: Yeah. David: People who don’t get that are at a tremendous disadvantage. You know, one of the big advantages of storytelling is that it allows you to potentially infuse emotion into an emotionless conversation. Jay: Mm-hmm. David: A lot of sales conversations are very sort of clinical and product oriented and detail oriented and price oriented, and it’s hard to get somebody into the zone. It’s hard to get them emotionally positive about the idea of buying something without being able to trigger something inside. Otherwise, it’s just a list of details and facts and specifications where if we can get them engaged with how they feel about what the product or service is going to do for them, the end result that they’re getting. What’s the thing that they want to have happen as a result of engaging in this promotion or doing whatever it is that they’re going to do? If they can tell you that and get themselves into a state of enthusiasm over your product, they’re going to be a hundred times more likely to buy it. Jay: Oh yeah, absolutely. I think that the natural fallback for salespeople is to focus on specifications. You know, I’ve been there on the car lot and the guy wants to show me all the specifics and horsepower and all those things. And then I’ve had people talk about, what are my goals and focusing more on my life than on this particular one item. It really shows, you know, more caring and that they’re more interested in me. David: It does, and you also have to be aware of the person you’re talking to. Because sometimes people will hear something like that and they’re like, I don’t want to get into that. Jay: Yeah. David: Just tell me how much it costs, or whatever. Jay: Yeah. David: And for some, that might be a disqualifier, right? Jay: Mm-hmm. David: And for others you say, okay, well I’ll provide the information. I’ll see if this goes anywhere. But a lot of times when people are unwilling to communicate at a deeper level, to me it indicates they’re not a good quality prospect to be interacting with. I was talking with someone earlier today. I had a situation where they booked a strategy session call with us and like had absolutely no idea why they were calling and Jay: mm, David: And so there was a video that they went to, to watch. He hadn’t watched the video and he is, he didn’t know why he was calling. And I said, well, listen, out of respect for your time, why don’t we do this? Take a look at the video, see if it makes sense for us to have a conversation. If it does, we can go back here and regroup. And he said, okay, fine. Right. So the call was over in three or four minutes. Jay: Yeah. David: But it was respectful for both of us. It was respectful of his time. It’s respectful of mine, and I think that all sales conversations need to do that. They need to be respectful of both the prospect and the salesperson. And too often, as salespeople, we feel so sort of humbled or so disadvantaged or whatever it is. we always put the needs of the prospect first. You’ve heard the customer’s always, right. Jay: Yeah. David: Which is not always true. Jay: Agreed. David: But you want to treat them as if it is. Particularly in the early stages, until you find out that it’s not the truth. But in those situations, if you recognize that your time is just as valuable as theirs, we all have a certain number of ticks on the clock. We don’t know what that number is. We want to make sure that we’re spending our time as well as possible, as productively as possible, with the people who are on the same wavelength and who are ready to interact with us. Jay: Yeah. And that goes back to the podcast we did recently about pre-qualifying people and really finding out ahead of time if they really, you know, fit within your business model and those kind of things. But, you know, a lot of times you’re not going to know unless you just start talking to somebody and you start asking them questions and I think if you’re doing this right, it’s not going to feel plastic, it’s not going to feel fake. I have a genuine desire to learn about people and to find out about them. David: Yeah. Jay: And you know, if that’s what you’re doing, they’re going to sense that. If you’re just doing it to, okay, now let’s cut to the chase and let’s get to the details and hopefully I can sell you. They’ll sense that too, David: Right. Yeah. I think that if our storytelling allows us to build trust, Build credibility, build a bond, then we’re telling the right stories. If it’s just designed to distract and be a shiny object to try to get them to tell something. If it’s designed to be manipulative, then save your breath. Jay: Yeah, absolutely. How do people find out more, David? David: You can go to TopSecrets.com/call, schedule a call with myself or my team. There’s actually a video right on that page. What I would encourage you to do, it says at the top right there, before you schedule a call, watch this video. So take a look at that, get an idea of how we’re helping other people, what it does for other people. If it makes sense for you, then you can just scroll down and you can schedule a call and we can work with you essentially to find out where you are now in your business versus where you want to be. We can look at your visibility in the marketplace. How are you doing in terms of visibility, in terms of sales, in terms of profit? And just walk you through a couple of things will allow you to maybe think more clearly in terms of how you can get from where you are now to where you want to be. So it’s TopSecrets.com/call. Love to have a conversation with you. Jay: And I’m sure you’ll tell ’em a great story. David: I just might! Jay: David. It’s always a pleasure. David: Thanks Jay. Are You Ready to Tell More Stories that Lead to Sales? If so, check out a few ways we can help: Just Getting Started? If you (or someone on your team) is just getting started in promotional product sales, learn how we can help. Ready to Grow & Scale Your Business Fast? If you're an established distributor serious about growing your sales and profits now, check out this case study and schedule a call with our team. Need EQP/Preferential Pricing? If you're an established distributor doing a decent volume of sales, click here to get End Quantity Pricing from many of the top supplier lines in the promo industry.

Choosing worthy clients for your business means making decisions about whether or not a prospect deserves your time and attention, whether they’re worthy of follow up, and you are bound to make some mistakes in that process. When you do this, you have to recognize that some of that is going to come with the territory. You may make a wrong decision that will cost you some business down the line. So you have to weigh that against quality of life issues. David: Hi, and welcome to the podcast. In today’s episode, co-host Jay McFarland, and I will be discussing choosing worthy clients. Welcome back, Jay. Jay: Hey, thank you, David. It’s such a pleasure to be back on again. And once again, I love this topic. I feel like, personally in my experience, there is a tendency to believe that you have to take every client. And you know what? In some businesses that is true, you’re going to take every customer who comes through the door. In other cases, you can be more selective and it could make your life a lot easier. It can make your business a lot better. David: Yeah, that’s one of the reasons I thought this would be a really good topic, because I believe that in many businesses they don’t even consider the idea of worthy clients. I think that in many businesses we feel like, okay, we’re going to serve whoever we can serve. We want to take whoever comes through the door, and we just want to serve them to the best of our ability. And while that is noble, it’s not always great from your own standpoint, from your own business standpoint. And I wish this was something that I knew from the beginning, but it was not. As most things, we learn it the hard way and this is no exception. At some point along the way, the idea of pursuing worthy clients, choosing worthy clients, tracking down worthy clients just really started to appeal to me. When I started using that term with some of my clients, they were like, “wow, that never even occurred to me. And what do you mean by worthy?” Things like that. So we can dive into all of that in today’s podcast. Jay: Yeah. I think that there are some things that we hear over the years and they start to sink in. We just don’t ever challenge ’em in our mode of thinking. Like I think of the customer’s always, right. I’ve come to believe. No, no, that’s just not true. Do I want to do everything to satisfy the customer? Yes. Yes, I do. But there are customers who can never be satisfied or I can’t provide what they want. So, no, they’re not always right. I love that we have these discussions. Let’s start off with this word worthy. What in your mind is a worthy customer? David: Well, I think we have to decide that for ourselves, what we determine to be a worthy prospect or client for ourselves. And some of that can go back to what you talked about, in the customer’s always right or the customer’s not always right. But you can have a customer that is absolutely right about things and you can have a good relationship with them, but they may not still be a worthy client if they are taking up more time than they are costing. So if they’re not really focused on buying from you to the extent that you need them to in order to be worthy of your time and attention, it may be something as simple as that. And in those situations, I’m not suggesting, okay, well you’re just going to bag all these people. If you’ve got a relationship with someone and you like the relationship you have and you’re okay with it, then you can deem that prospect or client worthy. You can say, “all right, well, I like dealing with this person, therefore they are worthy of my time and attention.” But for me, I believe that’s where it starts. We each have to decide. Is this prospect or is this client worthy of my time and attention? Because obviously our time is the most important asset we have, and when we fail to recognize that, we can invest a lot of it, we can spend a lot of our time on prospects and clients who are not worthy of our time and attention. And it could go back to what they’re buying from us or not buying from us. It can also get down to personalities. If they’re rude, obnoxious, belligerent, then they’re unworthy in a lot of cases to do business with us. And I think sometimes as salespeople or as business owners, We don’t really look at it that way. We think, well, we have to be worthy. We have to grovel and try to get their approval and all that sort of thing. And I don’t really think it’s like that. I think it certainly has to be a two-way street. Because anyone that we decide to do business with also has to decide to do business with us. They have to decide if they think that we are worthy of working with them. But that’s their job. Our job is to determine if they are worthy of working with us. And to me that simply means being proactive about your choice of prospect and your choice of customer. Now, you can’t always know that right away with a prospect. You can’t know if they’re going to be a worthy client. But as you interview them, as you have conversations with them, as you qualify or disqualify them, you can make some judgments. You can make some decisions pretty quickly on whether or not this person seems to be a good fit for you and for your business, and whether or not you want to decide they’re worthy of doing business with you. Jay: Yeah, you brought up so many points there. I hadn’t really thought about, just like the time to revenue ratio, right? Because I grew up in the restaurant business, so we knew what our food costs should be. We knew what a plate of food should cost, we knew what our overhead should be, those types of things. And so that’s really easy to quantify. But in businesses where there’s a sales cycle, you know, those types of things, it’s a lot harder to quantify. Well, how much time did I really take to close this sale? And then what is my time actually worth? Just that thought process, just that equation can be so powerful. And I also think taking the time, maybe just get out a pad of paper, if people still use pen and paper. I don’t know, I haven’t for years. But get that out and just write down, what do you think your worthy customer is? How much time should it take to close a sale? What type of revenue should you expect from them? What should the communication look like? Those types of things. David: Yeah. And once again, making the decisions that are most important from your standpoint, for your business, for your coworkers. For me, I think people being friendly, people being nice. People being willing to engage? Willing to engage, willing to have conversation, that could be right at the top of the list. Because if they’re not willing to have conversations with you, then nothing’s going to happen. There are people who you can have a great conversation with, and then they will just never take or return your phone calls again. When you determine that that’s happened, when you’ve determined that you’re interacting with someone, or you’re trying to interact with someone, who is no longer willing to communicate, you really have to determine your tolerance for pain and “how long am I willing to continue to do that?” I know that over the years for myself, that timeframe has gotten shorter and shorter and shorter. Whereas in the early stages, you know, you pursue people to the ends of the earth. And now, you know, as I recognize the value of my own time, as I recognize the value of my coworker’s time, I don’t want them wasting time on people who are not worthy of our time and attention. So a lot of it could really start with that. Are they even willing to engage? Are they willing to communicate? Do they seem reasonably friendly, personable, able to interact with us? And if those things are positive, then, are they qualified to buy? Do they need what we have to sell? Do they have the money to buy what we have to sell? And are they willing to work with us to buy it? So those are all qualification questions and that really goes to a whole different topic when we get into the topic of qualification procedures, and all that sort of thing. But just identifying the fact that there are prospects out there, some of whom are worthy of your time and attention, some of whom are not. And so a lot of our job in the early stages is discernment: deciding worthy or unworthy? And then following through on that. Jay: Yeah, just having that mindset. I mean, I think there’s going to be a lot of people listening, like you said at the beginning. I’ve never even thought of these terms. I thought I was just supposed to deal with everybody. You also said tolerance for pain. I know of customers, like when I look down and I see the caller id, and it’s that person, if I’m going, “oh man, you know, I don’t want to pick up this phone.” Sometimes it’s easy to ask yourself, am I worthy? And I don’t think you’re saying we have to get rid of unworthy customers. I think we have to assess what we’re willing to do to continue to maintain that relationship. I think back, and I’ve actually had times where I’ve picked up the phone to a customer who’s taking more time and I said, listen, this is what I can offer you. If that works for you, great, let’s continue the relationship. But if it doesn’t, maybe you should find somebody else because I can’t. You can bring somebody into the worthiness zone. I know. I’ve done it. David: Yeah, I think that’s very true. I also think that when you have a situation where you’re looking at your phone and you’re dreading answering it, if you at least have this in the back of your mind now, that there are worthy clients and there are unworthy clients, if somebody’s causing you to cringe when you look at your phone, you have to decide, “okay, does this make this person unworthy of my time?” Jay: Yeah. David: And if the answer is yes, then you make the appropriate decision. If it’s not quite that bad. Again, you make the appropriate decision for you. You stick with them or you decide to trade them in for somebody who is going to be a better fit. And we can use words like that, better fit. This isn’t a good fit, that type of thing. Worthy, definitely sounds judgmental. Jay: Yes. Yeah. David: And so that’s part of the reason I like the word, and it’s part of the reason that I don’t like the word. I don’t like the word in the sense that it’s not about judging people. It’s about judging someone’s worthiness to do business with us. Right? It’s about judging the validity or the likelihood of a good relationship. And we all have to do that. We all have to do that every time we meet someone. We decide, “is this the type of relationship I would like to pursue?” And if the answer is yes, we pursue it. And if the answer is no, we can make that decision to not pursue it. But again, I think particularly for salespeople who think “I have to sell anyone with a pulse, anyone who can fog a mirror,” this could be a bit of a change in approach. Jay: Yeah. I love that you make a distinction between is it judgmental ? Because you’re really talking about it from your point of view. You’re not saying this person’s a jerk or an idiot, or anything like that. What you’re saying is, for my business to keep going and to do our best, is this somebody who we want to have a relationship with? I think that’s an important distinction because I know people who like will put in their CRM system, they’ll make notes like, this person is a complete, dot dot dot, you know what? And you’re jading other employees towards that person. Maybe you should rethink about your process, about how you’re going to classify them, so that it doesn’t turn into a situation where somebody who could be a good customer or who could be moved into that worthiness zone, we’re guaranteeing that they’re not worthy because our systems are just judging them, instead of judging how good they are for us. David: Yeah, and that is such a great point. Because when you think about the fact that when you are making these decisions about whether or not a prospect is worthy of your time and attention, whether or not they’re worthy of follow up, you are bound to make some mistakes in that process. And so when you do this, you have to recognize that some of that is going to come with the territory. You may make a wrong decision that will cost you some business down the line. So you have to weigh that against. Quality of life issues. Jay: Yeah. David: Whether or not it would be worth it for you to cultivate this person to come along and to become the type of person that you would like to have as a customer. And again, if you’re willing to do it, you should absolutely do it. But simply by keeping that term in mind, and again, if it sounds too judgmental to you, you can come up with a different word for it. But the advantage of it is that if you look at your phone and you dread the call, if there’s a particular customer that you’ve been servicing for a long time, that you’ve been thinking about possibly trading in for another one ,then just asking yourself, is this person worthy of my time and attention? Answer it for yourself. You get to make the call. Maybe you decide that they’re all worthy clients. That every single person that you ever come in contact with is worthy of your time and attention and worthy of your focus. You can absolutely decide that. But we’re not judging people here. We are judging their ability to buy from us, their ability to interact with us, their ability to utilize our products and services correctly, so it’s going to benefit them. You know, there are people who I’ve talked to who have been interested in joining our Total Market Domination program, but based on the answers to the questions that we’ve asked them, we’ve said, “listen, I can’t really recommend this to you at this point.” Jay: Mm-hmm. David: And here’s why. And we’ll tell them why. We’ll recommend other solutions for them. And to me, that’s actually being conscientious. It’s not about saying, okay, we’re just going to take your money. It’s about saying, if this makes sense for you, if we really believe we can help you, we’re going to tell you that. And if we’re not sure we can help you, we’re going to tell you that, too. Because the one thing we don’t want to have happen is we don’t want to take people into the program that we’re not confident we’re going to be able to help. And so to me, that goes into this equation as well. Is this person at a point where they can benefit from what I’m offering them? If the answer is yes, then by all means it sounds like it’s a good fit. They’re absolutely worthy clients, worthy of our time and attention because we can help them. If we can’t help them, then at that point, I think it’s our duty to disqualify them. Jay: Yeah. And it benefits both sides. And I also think it depends on where you’re at in your business cycle. I mean, early on to pay the bills, you are probably going to take everybody regardless of how much time it takes. And then as you grow and progress, hopefully you can become more choosy. It’s a great place to be as a business owner. Great discussion, David. How can people find out more? David: Well, you can go to TopSecrets.com/call, register for a call with myself or my team, and we can walk you through it. If this is something that interests you, if this is potentially a focus of yours or even if it’s just something you want to consider. If you’d like to start today, looking at the opportunity to attract, qualify, and convert the type of clients you want, more worthy clients, if that sounds good to you, then schedule a call with us. We would be happy to do that. Jay: All right. I love it. Thank you so much, David. David: Thank you, Jay. Are You Ready to Start Choosing Worthy Clients? If so, check out the five primary ways we help promotional product distributors grow: Just Getting Started? If you (or someone on your team) is just getting started in promotional products sales, learn how we can help. Need Clients Now? If you're already grounded in the essentials of promotional product sales and just need to get clients now, click here. Want EQP/Preferential Pricing? Are you an established industry veteran doing a significant volume of sales? If so, click here to get End Quantity Pricing from many of the top supplier lines in the promo industry. Time to Hire Salespeople? If you want to hire others to grow your promo sales, click here. Ready to Dominate Your Market? If you're serious about creating top-of-mind-awareness with the very best prospects in your market, schedule a one-on-one Strategy Session here.

To leverage the law of attraction, you have to get beyond the book and the movie. If you’re feeling stuck in your business, ask yourself this. “Am I really clear on exactly what it is that I’m building here? And to the extent that it’s not coming together, how’s your vision? Are you very clear on what that means? David: Hi, and welcome to the podcast. In today’s episode, co host Jay McFarland and I will be discussing the truth about the Law of Attraction. Now, this applies to business, it applies to life. If you’re familiar with the movie and book The Secret, there’s been a lot of talk about this concept. The Law of Attraction. It basically says that we attract into our lives the people and circumstances we need, based on essentially the vibes that we’re putting out. Jay: Well, and I was just sitting here thinking, I must not be putting out very good vibes. David: I’m sure it’s not that. But… I think sometimes when people get into this mindset, they can get frustrated. Because if you think that all you have to do is really want it and it’s going to come to you, it’s not quite the whole story. And I think the movie and the book called The Secret probably caused some people some problems with this. Part of it is because a lot of that movie was based on a book called The Science of Getting Rich by Wallace Wattles. If you read that book, you recognize that there’s a lot more to it than just trying to attract with your mind. I mean, you actually have to follow up. You have to do some things afterwards if you want to get the results you’re actually looking for. So I feel like what they did in the book and the movie was kind of a disservice to the law of attraction, which I think can be valid, if you follow up with it. Jay: Yeah, I’ve always kind of felt, talking about this, that it’s more about a change in mentality than it is that you’ll speak into the universe and the universe will grant you this wonderful thing out of the kindness of its heart. That because you’ve said these things, it’s just like setting a goal. Right? And so, when you hear things spoken, when your mind hears them, when you speak them with your mouth, it’s different than just thinking about them. And so, over time, I think it changes your behavior. That leads you to the thing that you, quote, spoke into the universe. David: Yeah, I believe that entirely as well. I think that when you are focused on a goal, when you’re focused on trying to using the law of attraction to accomplish something in your life… When your mind is going in that direction, it is a lot more likely to get you enthused about it, get you thinking about it more and get you taking action on it, which ultimately is what is going to lead to the success. Now one aspect of it that I think is really important, on the front end of that, is that you have enough belief in what it is that you want to accomplish, that you continue to look for the ways to make it happen. Because if you don’t believe you can do it, obviously you’re not going to do it. I think that’s pretty much a given. If you don’t think you can do something, if you don’t think you can accomplish something, then you will very likely not take the actions necessary to make it happen. That’s not about law of attraction, it’s about human nature and inevitability. So in those circumstances, it’s kind of a given that you won’t succeed. But if you’ve got the consummate belief in what it is that you want to do and what you’re pursuing, then in a lot of cases, it will allow you to start to see the things that will make it possible. So when people talk about attracting people and circumstances into your life, I believe there is truth to that. But I also think a lot of that might’ve been there to begin with. When you’re aware of it, you’re going to be more likely to see it. If you’re looking for something, you’re going to be more likely to find it. Then you’ll take action on it. And that’s when the law of attraction actually starts to pay off. Jay: Yeah, I really like that you’re building awareness. Because you’ve spoken these things and you’ve kind of made these mental goals. Whereas before, if you hadn’t taken the time to even assess what you want and talk to yourself about what you want, kind of make these mental goals, then when that person enters your life or that opportunity arises, you’re not going to see it for what it is. Because you haven’t planned ahead, you haven’t made a mental note that that’s specifically something that you wanted or needed. David: Right, you’re not tuned into it. And, you know, the mind has this particular activating system that many people are aware of. It’s the part of your brain that notices the things that you’re interested in. A common example is if you just got a certain kind of car, or if you’re looking at a certain type of car and thinking about buying it, chances are you see it all over the road now, because it’s now in your mind, so you see it and recognize it. So, there’s a little bit of that with law of attraction. But the primary thing that I think is important for anyone to consider as they’re trying to accomplish things in their lives and in their businesses is that the idea, the goal is a great beginning. We’ll be talking about this in future podcasts, but then ultimately, it’s what comes from that. The ideas that we get. The things that we take action on. That’s ultimately going to help us to get there. Jay: Yeah, and I’ve always felt like this is the core of the law of attraction. That it’s very important to not just think about something. That you attach benchmarks to it, you attach follow up to it. Maybe you work backwards from that thing, that you don’t just put it to chance. If you work towards that thing then first of all the odds of it happening are going to be much greater and you’ve gone out, and you’ve taken it for yourself anyway David: Yeah, and I know we don’t normally get too woo woo in these podcasts. And I’m not looking to do that today. But I think there’s been so much talk about the law of attraction over the years that it’s at least worth having a discussion about. People may think they’re doing everything they can to accomplish their goals. But they don’t realize that there may be some steps that are missing. There’s a quote from St. Augustine that says, Pray as though everything depended on God, work as though everything depended on you. And I think that’s sort of a different take on it, but it covers kind of the same thing. If you take responsibility for what you’re looking for, and I really love what you mentioned, about the idea of those benchmarks, because if you’ve got something that you want to accomplish and you’re keeping track of each benchmark along the way, then you will be more likely to see the people and circumstances that are already there that will allow you to get to the next benchmark. I think that makes the idea of the law of attraction seem more real. When you just have your eye on the goal and you’re not really thinking in terms of all the interim steps in between, you can really miss out on a lot because you’re looking for this and right now you’re only ready for this. Jay: Yeah, you know, I’ve spent a lot of time studying highly successful people, Elon Musk, Bill Gates you know, very, very successful people, and none of them sat around and waited for anything, right? Mark Cuban, and even after they have found incredible success they didn’t say, okay, got what I wanted. They continue to work aggressively every single day. And I think about what would I do if I had that kind of money? Would I continue to work? Or would you find me on a beach somewhere? You know, this is a mentality, it’s part of them. It’s their love. It’s their passion. I think it has very little to do with money or even the law of attraction. David: I agree. that’s the result of sort of doing the things that you’re good at and the things that you love exceptionally well. When you do that and you’re able to impact enough other people, and I think that’s a key component that’s often missing, is that they’re great at what they did and they pursued it with passion. But what they were pursuing was able to impact enough other people, that they were able to generate the result. They were able to generate the revenue, which is essentially the reward for being able to serve or service enough people so that it comes back to you like that. Jay: Yeah. So I think it’s about, you know, kind of thinking about those things that you want to achieve, creating a plan to get there and working as hard as you can, to achieve that success. David: Yeah. I know personally, the times in my life where I was really focused on a particular goal, especially business, we’re talking business here. I have an idea for something. You have an idea for a business or you have an idea for a product. You have an idea for something. And when you believe in it enough, and when you’re passionate enough about it, It just seems to almost take on a life of its own. You sort of know what to do next. You see the opportunities and you take them because you know how it fits in. And pretty much every major success that I’ve had in business has rolled that way. A lot of times when you’re just sort of trying to slug something out and you’re trying to figure it out and things aren’t coming together. I think some of it has to do with the vision. Either the vision isn’t clear enough of exactly what it is that you want this thing to be, because you have to have that first. Just like building a house, you have to know what it’s going to look like. You want the blueprint before you start nailing boards together. So you need to have a clear idea of it first, because when you’ve got that clear idea, then it becomes a whole lot easier to build. Jay: Yeah, it’s so true. I mean, I’ve been caught kind of in no man’s land where I kinda believe in what I’m doing, but I’ve got these other things and I just am kind of scattered waiting to see which one is going to take root. And that’s always been an issue of mine is can I really find that thing and just stake my claim and say, this is it. And I’m going to push forward no matter what. That’s hard for some people to do. David: Yeah, saying “I’m all in on this.” Oh, there’s a great book. Is it Essentialism? It’s got an illustration and the illustration is basically a circle with a bunch of lines coming out of it, going in all different directions. It’s a bunch of short lines, arrows pointed out from the center. And it’s like when your attention is divided, you’re doing a lot of little things. You’re not really accomplishing anything. And the way you want to do it is you want to have the circle, and then one line coming out in one direction. This is the thing I’m doing because then you’ll get traction on it. When you’re doing a lot of different things, you’re not really completing anything. When you’re doing one, you’re able to complete it. So I think for people who are watching and listening, if you’re feeling frustrated in your business, ask yourself, you know, am I really clear on exactly what it is that I’m building here or the thing that I want to build here? And to the extent that it’s not coming together, how’s your vision? Are you very clear on what that means? How many people is it going to take? How many hours a day are you going to need to work? Who else needs to be involved? What sort of technology do you need? All these different things. Because as you start to examine the different components of it, then you’ll start to get the ideas, particularly in the areas that might be holding you back. Because if one of these elements that is necessary to the success of the project is missing, then you’re not going to get there. So at that point it becomes about finding bottlenecks, which is the subject of a whole other podcast. Jay: Yeah, I think that’s such great advice. How do people find out more? How can you help them with this process? David: Well, if you go to TopSecrets.com/call, you can schedule a call with myself or my team. And we’ll be happy to just talk you through sort of where you are with your business, where you’re looking to be in terms of visibility, sales, and profits. Because when you get those three things lined up, everything comes together a whole lot better. And once again, we’re not really talking about just, you know, the “I can do it, I think I can, I think I can” aspect of this. We’re talking about sort of the down and dirty, step by step, here’s what we need to do to help get you from here to there. So if that makes sense for you, TopSecrets.com/call. Jay: All right, David, as always, it’s a pleasure. Thank you so much. David: Thank you, Jay. Are You Ready to Leverage the Law of Attraction? If so, check out the five primary ways we help promotional product distributors grow: Just Getting Started? If you (or someone on your team) is just getting started in promotional products sales, learn how we can help. Need Clients Now? If you're already grounded in the essentials of promotional product sales and just need to get clients now, click here. Want EQP/Preferential Pricing? Are you an established industry veteran doing a significant volume of sales? If so, click here to get End Quantity Pricing from many of the top supplier lines in the promo industry. Time to Hire Salespeople? If you want to hire others to grow your promo sales, click here. Ready to Dominate Your Market? If you're serious about creating top-of-mind-awareness with the very best prospects in your market, schedule a one-on-one Strategy Session here.

To get off to a flying start in 2026, we can start by taking responsibility. Whenever we blame outside factors for things that go wrong, we immediately forget that there are things we can evaluate in ourselves to say, okay, well even if this is the case, even if this was just a terrible prospect, are there things that I could have done better and differently in this circumstance to create a better outcome? And almost inevitably, the answer is going to be yes. But in order for that to happen, we have to consider it. And we have to think, is this actually what I want to do? And if you do that, you’re just going to feel better about yourself. You’re going to feel better about your situation. Because you’re allowing yourself some level of control in the situation rather than simply delegating the failure to outside factors and assume you’re a victim and there’s nothing you can do about it. David: Hi and welcome to the podcast. In today’s episode, co-host Jay McFarland and I will be discussing how to hit the ground running in the new year. Happy New Year, and welcome back Jay! Jay: Thank you, David. It’s such a pleasure to be here. I think everybody has a desire, you know, at the beginning of the year, to say this year’s going to be different, you know, we’re going to make all these changes. It’s going to be fantastic. But do they really have a way to translate that into action? I picture myself hitting the ground, you know, it’s like the cartoon when they start to run, you know, their feet are moving, but they’re not moving quite yet. I think a lot of us are in that place. How do we get from spinning to actually moving forward? David: Yeah, it’s a great question. I know in the promotional products industry, we have trade shows that start at the beginning of the new year, the ASI Show in Orlando, the PPAI Expo in Las Vegas. And, There’s one in Fort Worth as well, an ASI show in Fort Worth. So we got three trade shows in the industry that are really designed to help people get off to a flying start. But as we look at today, you know, this first week of the new year, even aside from that, whether or not you’re attending a trade show, chances are you’re probably pretty reasonably fired up. Okay, here we go. It’s another new year. What are we going to do? This is exciting. And if we think about the types of prospects that we want to interact with this year, the types of clients that we would like to attract, the types of customers that we might want to let go this year, and really focus on building our businesses as proactively as possible. Building our client lists as proactively as possible can really help to improve our quality of life in a dramatic way. Jay: Yeah. I love that. in the restaurant business, there’s something called a theoretical food cost and an actual food cost. Theoretical is, what would things be like if you ran perfectly? If there was no waste, everything was perfect. And then actual is where you’re at. The goal is to constantly be trying to close that gap. So to me, I think about it in any business, what does your ideal look like? Your ideal client base, your ideal staff, your ideal sales? So if you can know what that is and then track a course to get to it, I think that’s a great way to feel progress. Because that’s what I tend to miss when I’m running a business is sometimes it’s just a daily grind. And I don’t feel like I made any progress today. And if you do that over and over again, it’s hard to continue to press forward. David: It really is. And I think a lot of that goes to the fact that very often we’re just tied up in the day. Whatever it is that’s going on in the day, we’re just facing whatever is happening to us moment by moment, day by day. And that can get very frustrating. I remember, I think it was Tony Robbins was talking in a seminar one time about the idea that in order to create our future, we need to envision it first. It’s like if you are going to build a house, you don’t just start nailing boards together, I think was the analogy he used. I thought it was a great one. You have to envision it first. You have to figure out, what do I want this thing to look like? Where is it going to be located? How many rooms are going to be in it? All that sort of thing. And at the beginning of a new year, it’s really nice to start thinking about what do I want my life to look like this year? Who do I want to be surrounded by? To interact with? Who do I no longer want to interact with? What types of customers do I want to work with? What types of customers have I decided I’m no longer really interested in pursuing anymore? Simple decisions like that can have an amazing impact on your life and your career. If you simply change the quality of the prospects that you’re targeting. If you go from interacting with a whole lot of small dollar clients to interacting with a smaller group of high dollar clients, particularly if those high dollar clients are people that are actually enjoyable to work, everything changes. Because now you’re not running around like a crazy person. You’re able to focus more on a smaller group of people that you can serve to the best of your ability and all of that impacts everything you do going forward. Jay: Yeah. Quality of life, frame of mind, stress level, home life, all of those things can be impacted. You were talking about your Tony Robbins analogy. I’m a big sports fan, and in football, typically when a coach comes out, they have their first 15 plays planned. They know exactly what they’re going to do. And the reason for that is so that they can kind of assess the skills and what the rest of the team is doing. I kind of was thinking, maybe that’s a great way to kind of start the year. because you’re not going to plan out every step of the whole year. because things change. We’ve talked about pivoting. But if you’ve got a plan for your first 90 days, this is what I’m going to do and this is how I’m going to go about it, then maybe that can set you up better for the rest of the year. David: Yes, and it makes us just feel better about ourselves because we’ve actually given it some thought. We at least have an idea of what we want to do and where we want to go. There’s that great quote from wartime, which basically says, “no battle plan ever survives contact with the enemy,” right? So we know that even if we put everything together, we want to do things a certain way. We know that it’s not necessarily going to happen that way. However, if we at least have some things in mind and we say, okay, I would like to do this and I’d like to do that, and I’d like to do this. You may not be able to do it immediately, in the order that you’ve chosen, but it gives you something to go back to after you’re dealing with putting out the fires or whatever else you have to do. If you’ve got that basic plan laid out and say, okay, I was able to accomplish this first thing, then I got sidetracked, but let’s go back to that second thing and then I got sidetracked again. But let’s go back to that third thing and work through it systematically. It just allows you to probably live more the kind of life you want to live. Because you’re deciding, in advance, what it is that you want to do, who you’re going to be doing it with, where you’re going to be doing it, when you’re going to be doing it. And even though you will not be 100% successful in accomplishing that, if you get 70% of the way there, or 80% of the way there, or 86% of the way there, whatever your number is, you’re going to be a whole lot better off than if you start out with a blank slate. Not knowing, not deciding where you’re going to go or what you’re going to do, then just taking it as it comes. Being reactive like that is okay for some people, but generally for business people, business owners, salespeople, reactivity is not a tremendous asset. Jay: Yeah, I agree. But I also think we have a tendency to look at losing in a negative way, because it’s losing, right? But losing is learning, right? And that’s one of the reasons why a coach runs those first sets of plays because they find out, will the run game work? Will the passing game work? Is their defense strong on this side of the line or that side of the line? So as you try things in business and you do lose, in some areas, it should be losing is learning, right? David: Mm-hmm. Jay: And then you can pivot and you can adjust. And the goal is to win more than you lose. But if you think you’re always going to win, you’re setting yourself up and that’s going to be very hard for you. Or if you only focus on the losses and not learn to grow from them, that’s also going to be difficult. So learning from losing I think is such an important part of starting a new year. David: I agree completely. And even the word lose or the idea of losing, I mean, if you think in a sports analogy, you can be losing in the second quarter, in the third quarter, and then you can end up winning at the end. And you haven’t lost until the game is over, right? So Jay: yeah, David: in life and in business, we haven’t lost until the game is over. We’re still in it every single day. We are still in it. We’re still in life, we’re still in business. We still have opportunities. So, It’s difficult to even say I’ve lost, because if you’re still breathing, the game is still going and you haven’t lost. You may feel like you’re behind. You may feel like you need to change the plays, but you haven’t lost yet, right? Jay: Yeah. You haven’t lost yet. And one of the other things that I find to be valuable, maybe especially at the beginning of the new year, is to challenge some of the assumptions that kind of creep around your business. Like I’ve been somewhere and I’ll say, what about this? And they’ll say, oh, we’ve tried that. That doesn’t work. Right? You’ve heard that how many times, right? And then I’m like, well times have changed. Things are different. Maybe we can tweak it a little bit. And then you try it and there’s amazing success there. It’s almost cultural within a company, sometimes. “No, that doesn’t work. We can’t do that.” I think challenging those assumptions can be of great value. David: Yes, absolutely. And there are a lot of times when people will do that. They’ll say they tried something, they’ll say, that didn’t work, and they will assume that it was that thing that didn’t work, when in fact it might have been the way that they implemented that thing. It might have been the way that they used that thing. Maybe they didn’t implement it as well as they thought they did. In the promotional products industry, salespeople run into this all the time. They’ll come up with a recommendation for a product that somebody can use, whether it’s a custom imprinted whatever, mug or t-shirt or cap or doesn’t matter, whatever the item is. And people will say things like, “oh yes, we tried mugs. Mugs don’t work.” It’s like, okay, well there are hundreds of millions of custom imprinted mugs that are working for businesses all over the world. If it didn’t work for your business, why didn’t it work? Right? What did you imprint on the mug? Who did you give those mugs to? What did you do with them? Did they stay in the box by your desk and they were never given out? That’s not going to work, right? So there are a lot of times where people think they did something, they feel like they’ve done something, and they either really didn’t do it, or they didn’t do it as well as it could be done. And I think for most of us, that’s something that we have to reflect on. Not just, was this done? But did I do it to the best of my ability? Did I do it better than my competitors? Did I do it to the extent that I’m capable of doing it? Or did I just sort of turn in a half-baked performance? Jay: Yeah, kind of haphazard. And what I found oftentimes is it was the employee, you know, you tried a new sales pitch or a new program to get leads and it was just the person who was doing it wasn’t into it. David: Yeah. Jay: And then we all decide, oh, that doesn’t work. Let’s move on. Instead of always assessing your systems and your returns and saying, well, wait a minute, let’s listen in on what you’re doing and let’s find out if there’s ways to tweak or improve your close rate. So challenging assumptions. I just love that concept. Especially several times a year, and especially at the beginning of the year. David: There’s a quote that I thought of that really kind of cracks me up. I’ve used it with my kids a lot. And whenever I say it to my kids or whenever my kids say it back to me, it always makes us laugh because the quote is, “it’s a poor artist who blames his tools,” right? I don’t know if you’ve heard that expression or some variation of that. And the way that we say it is, “’tis a poor artist who blames her tools,” right? If I’m talking to my daughter and she’ll say, “oh, this didn’t turn out the way that I wanted. This paintbrush stinks,” or whatever. “Oh, it is a poor artist that blames her tools!” And in business, we just have a tendency to do that. Everybody in business has a tendency to do that. When something goes wrong, well, it was this circumstance, or it was this person, or it was this prospect. This prospect was unqualified. Or this person was, whatever it is. And it may very well be the case. But whenever we blame outside factors for things that go wrong, we immediately forget that there are things we can evaluate in ourselves to say, okay, well even if this is the case, even if this was just a terrible prospect, are there things that I could have done better and differently in this circumstance to create a better outcome? And almost inevitably, the answer is going to be yes. But in order for that to happen, we have to consider it. And we have to think, is this actually what I want to do? And if you do that, you’re just going to feel better about yourself. You’re going to feel better about your situation. Because you’re allowing yourself some level of control in the situation rather than simply delegating the failure to outside factors and assume you’re a victim and there’s nothing you can do about it. Jay: Yeah. Yeah. So, perfect. And, and the other thing I would add to challenging the assumption is just try stuff. You know, sometimes we say, you know, you’re on the whiteboard and you’re like, no idea is a bad idea, which I’ve never believed is true. There are bad ideas that end up on the board. Right? But sometimes something sounds a little crazy or a little wacky, you know, trying some of that stuff, you just never know. I have some good friends and they’re part of a major software game development company and they used to spend five years, six years developing these vast games, you know, and it would take forever. And they have no idea if they’re going to be liked. One day they said, “what if we just put out some kind of small games to see how they would go and if people would like them. Then if they do, we would expand on them.” And they had hit after hit after hit. You may know their most recent hit, it’s Fortnite, one of the most popular games ever created. Fortnite was a side project that they were just kind of saying, “Hey, what if we did this or that,” while they were working on one of these massive projects. “Just something we’ll try. We’ll throw it out there, see what happens.” And that’s such an amazing concept to me. Sometimes you’re like, no, it has to follow these guidelines. Sometimes try something new and see if it works. David: Yeah. And sometimes the thing that we have to try that’s new is exactly what you talked about, which is listening. Jay: Mm-hmm. David: Listening more than talking and not making assumptions about what people want. Just actually asking them, what do you need? How can we help? And whatever it is that you’re selling. Sales ultimately boils down to solving some sort of need or some sort of problem. And if you focus on the product, if you focus on what it is that you’re selling instead of “what problem needs to be solved for this client,” you’re never going to be as successful as possible. So much of it is about trying to get inside the prospect’s head, client’s head, by asking them questions about what they really want to accomplish. What are they looking to do? And then prescribing the appropriate solution to help them do it. This kind of ties into the idea of features and benefits. I was having a conversation with someone about this the other day, where back in the fifties and sixties and seventies where features and benefits were considered premium, amazing ideas in selling. A lot of years have passed since then. And people have gotten more sophisticated. Their needs have changed and developed and evolved. And so the way that I view it now is that you start out with features and benefits, and that’s going to be somewhat helpful. But then you need to start getting into the emotions and the experiences. You know, talking to them about what’s it going to be like to have this result, or what’s it going to be like to have this product and the result that this product is going to create for you? That’s the emotions, it’s going to feel great to be able to go out and attract more clients with this promotion that we’re going to put together for you. So you can really tie in not just the features, not just the benefits, but the emotions, the experience of what it’s going to be like to do that. And ultimately, what is the transformation? What are we going to do to transform what they’re doing so that when they buy whatever it is that we’re selling, they’re going to experience something completely different and better than what they experienced before. Jay: Yeah, so true. I was thinking about the end of the year and that my inbox was inundated with surveys from companies saying, “how did we do?” And I was like, “oh my goodness. Not another one.” You know, as a consumer, I’m like, really? Another one? But when you think about what the businesses are trying to do is they’re making a genuine effort to try and understand their customer experience and how they can improve. And so as much as I don’t like those forms, I do appreciate what they’re trying to do. And you can do that. You know, if you’re a smaller organization, you can just make a phone call and say, “Hey, you know, how are we doing? Are we meeting your needs? What else can we do for you? I just want to see if you’re getting, you know, good service from your account executive,” those types of things. But making an honest effort to find out. Because oftentimes our perception of the product we’re delivering is very different than what the customer is experiencing. David: Yeah, exactly. And when you have companies like Amazon, for example, who will send out an email after every delivery, “how was it? Was it great? Was it not great?” It’s like, “oh boy, again?” Like, “I have to do this again?” But for most businesses, you’re not doing it every time. You’re not doing it every order. So if you do it once or twice a year, it’s not going to be as dreaded as the type of experience that you’re talking about. And another thing that you can do, when you are a small business, is you can basically send out a one or two sentence open-ended question kind of email, so it doesn’t come across like a survey. But if I just sent you an email that said, “Hey Jay, how did we do for you last year? Hit reply and let me know. Thanks. David Blaise,” right? You’ll reply to it or you won’t. Some percentage of the people will reply to it, but the ones who reply are going to just tell you what they thought, whether it was positive or negative, and it’s very non-threatening. They don’t even view it as a survey, because it just comes across as a very informal communication between two people who happened to have been working together. Jay: Yeah, I love this suggestion that you just made. Just a letter. The more it looks like a form letter, the more it looks like something that everybody received, the less likely I am to respond to it. But if it looks like a personal note, “hey, just checking in,” I am much more likely to respond. Such great feedback, David. So how do people find out more? David: Well, you can go to TopSecrets.com/call, schedule a call with myself or my team. Then we can see what you’re dealing with, see if we can help you through it as we begin this new year. It’s just such a great time to be able to focus in on where we want to be, where we want to go, what we want to do. It’s an exciting time. Exciting time to be alive, right? Every day is an exciting day when you’re focused on the right things and interacting with the right people. And so that’s another thing. If you have been watching this podcast, listening to this podcast for any length of time, you’ll know if you’re the right person for this. You’ll know if we’re a good fit. If we’re not, you’ll know that. You’ll listen to you go, “ah, I don’t like what these guys are having to say.” All right, unsubscribe. Right? But if what we’re talking about makes sense for you, schedule a call! Let’s have a conversation and see what happens. Jay: Yeah, I totally agree. David, thank you so much. I hope you have a great year and for everybody who set those resolutions, you can do it! Just keep pressing forward and make it happen this year. David: Stick with it! Thanks, Jay. Jay: That’s right. Thank you. Are You Ready to Get Off to a Flying Start in 2026? If so, check out the five primary ways we help promotional product distributors grow: Just Getting Started? If you (or someone on your team) is just getting started in promotional product sales, learn how we can help. Need Clients Now? If you're already grounded in the essentials of promotional product sales and just need to get clients now, click here. Want EQP/Preferential Pricing? Are you an established industry veteran doing a significant volume of sales? If so, click here to get End Quantity Pricing from many of the top supplier lines in the promo industry. Time to Hire Salespeople? If you want to hire others to grow your promo sales, click here.

What is your first contact with a new prospect? Another good question to ask yourself is how does that first contact happen? And is it proactive on my part? David: Hi, and welcome to the podcast. In today’s episode, co-host Jay McFarland and I will be discussing your first contact with a new prospect. Welcome back, Jay. Jay: Hey, it’s good to be with you again. David. When you say first contact, I always think about Star Trek with their first contact with the aliens, and I feel like you’re kind of sitting there going, okay, are these going to be nice? Are they going to try and destroy the human race. You know, there’s a lot of trepidation with first contact and sometimes that first contact, how it goes, determines the whole rest of the relationship. David: That’s exactly where I stole the term from Jay. That is exactly where I stole the term from. And the way that came about is that I was talking to somebody about cold calling. This was years and years and years ago. Well, actually we were talking about prospecting and one of the things that this person mentioned to me was something related to cold calling. And I said, “okay, well, cold calling is one way that you can reach out to people.” I said, “think of it like it’s your first contact.” And literally it was because I saw that movie about first contact and I thought it’s such a great concept. The idea of whatever, meeting an alien species for the first time is one thing. But for salespeople, you’re exactly right. It’s the same thing. We’re walking into an unknown situation. We have absolutely no idea how the person is going to react and that. Doesn’t matter whether it’s on the phone as a cold call, whether it’s meeting someone at a networking event, whether it’s through social media. We have no idea what’s on the other end until we engage. Therefore, the whole idea, the whole concept of first contact, I think is really highly appropriate. It is the very first contact that we have with a prospect. If you understand that conceptually, it can really sort of open up your mind to the possibilities and to the opportunities. Because there are a lot of people who view whatever it is they do as first contact, as first contact. What I mean is if all they do is make cold calls, they view that as first contact. If all they ever have done to generate customers is through social media, that’s what they view as first contact. When you recognize, that’s just a method, that’s just one particular method of first contact, and you realize that there’s a whole other universe. To continue the space analogy here, there’s a whole other universe of options. It really allows you to test different things to figure out what’s going to work best for you. Jay: Yeah. And I love the idea that first contact, when I first thought of this, I was thinking that’s the first time that I meet them voice-to-voice or face-to-face. And in today’s world, that’s probably not going to be the first contact. In my business, the first contact is our website. That’s the first time that they’re going to see us. Now, in my business, I’m very fortunate that our three main competitors, their websites are awful, David, they are terrible. They are designed terribly. They’re hard to read. And all the time I get people saying, literally saying to me, “I chose you because I liked your website.” We’re somebody that offers this high level of expertise and you chose us just because we have a really good web designer. But that was the difference. Their first contact with us is positive, because we spend the time to get that right. David: Yeah, it’s a lot more than the web designer too, because you could have a beautiful design, but if the words on that design are not resonating with them, it’s not going to work. Which goes back to what we talked about before, the MVPs of marketing. The message on a website will definitely determine whether or not they will be interested in what you say. Now, the way we present that, meaning the design, that’s all part of the messaging component. But if the words don’t resonate, if the imaging doesn’t resonate, they’re not going anywhere. But you’re right! So many times, people don’t recognize that first contact is happening all the time. Even with things that you’re not even aware of. You go onto social media and you post something, whether it’s a picture of your dinner or a comment about politics or something business related, that could very well be their first contact with you. And if they hate it, they’re not going to be revisiting. Jay: Yeah, exactly. And that’s why companies out there can help clean up your mistakes if you mess up. You know, we say this all the time. Once it’s on the internet, it’s never going away. Trying to clean that up. Going back to my competitors. They’ve decided that education is how they’re going to draw people in. And so they have pages and pages and pages of small text, educational information. And it’s valuable information. But I’m telling you, nobody is reading that information. Because we live in a bullet point world. We want to know within a few seconds what services you offer. And it’s amazing to me, nowadays, how few people, in fact, I would say in the last year I’ve had three people ask me for references. In a year’s time because of our website and how it’s presented. It answers their questions right away. And that’s phenomenal to me that we’re able to do that. David: Yeah, interesting that the information that’s on the website can be helpful. It can be harmful. Or anywhere in between. Because if you have too much information on there, people can get what they need without ever having to buy from you. They learn a bunch of things and then they talk to their existing vendor about the things they learn from your website, and then they can either do it or not. And a lot of the work that we do in the promotional products industry, the websites are very much the same. It’s a lot of the same products from the same manufacturers. There are similar vendors who put together these websites. So a lot of it is very similar, very cookie cutter looking in a lot of ways. And so one of the things that we do with our Total Market Domination clients is we help them with little tweaks they can make, small things they can do, even within a website that doesn’t allow a ton of customization to be able to switch things up. And change the results. Because that website, that first page that they see, I look at it like a windshield, right? Are they going to fly off it like a bug off a windshield, or are they going to look into it and say, wow, this is great. Are they going to scroll, or are they going to just bounce off it? Because if they bounce off it, you’re done. Jay: Yeah, and it’s amazing to me how many people use tactics that I know that we all deplore. Like I’ll see, hey, chat with a representative, and I’m like, yeah, I think I’m going to do that. And within two seconds I realize it’s not a representative, it’s a chat bot, and it’s only programmed to answer predefined questions. It’s not answering mine. And I’m like, come on. And then the other one I ran into just the other day that drives me out of my mind is I was looking for a quote for something. The website says, get a quote in two minutes. An instant quote. I enter in my information and then it says, okay, one of our representatives will be back with you in two days. And I get so angry when that happens because you lied to me. David: Right Jay: You told me you would give me a quote in two minutes. You completely boldface lied to me. I am done with them at that point. That was my first contact with them. I don’t want anything to do with them because I feel like that’s a dishonest practice. And when you start that way with me, forget about it. I don’t care how many other contacts we have, I’m not going to choose you. David: Exactly. So a lot of times when people are thinking in terms of first contact, well, first of all, it’s a matter of deciding to do that. Thinking, what is my first contact? What am I currently doing? Or what do I think I’m doing in terms of first contact? Now, if you reach out to somebody and they say, oh yeah, I saw you on Facebook, or I saw you on LinkedIn, or whatever, then that’s not your first contact. Whatever they saw was the first contact. So ask yourself, what is it that you want to be your first contact, and then what is the actual first contact that they’re having with you? And if you find out that there are some commonalities that a lot of what you thought was first contact actually isn’t, then you want to go back and say, all right, well what are they seeing first? And how do I need to adapt that or change that to reflect what I would like for them to see first? So what is your first contact? Another good question to ask yourself is how does it happen? How does that first contact happen? And is it proactive on my part? Is it something that I posted that I wasn’t thinking of as first contact and it just happened to turn into that? Was it that somebody saw an ad that maybe wasn’t even related to them or maybe has some sort of messaging on it that was designed to appeal to a different group of people, but they happen to see it, so now they have a misconception about who I am or what I do? There are so many different elements to this. But when you just sort of take a few minutes to try to analyze it, it becomes a lot easier to see where things could potentially be going wrong, even when you’re first interacting with someone. Jay: Yeah. And the other thing I would say is don’t squander your first contact. If you’ve got a first contact and you’ve got them to dial the phone David: mm-hmm. Jay: or something like this. We’ve all had the experience where we’re like, okay, I’m going to pick up the phone. And the person who picks up the phone is unfriendly, they’re curt, they’re not informed. And you’re like, this is the person that you put on the phone to first talk to me? You have to be very careful with who you put as the receiver of that first contact. Because if that’s not a good experience, I’m done right there again, I’m moving on. David: Yeah, and when you talk about phone, a lot of organizations will do everything in their power to keep you from talking to a human being. And I am not naming any names, but specifically the banks and the communications companies, the, you know, the cable companies, the telephone companies. They are just, and these are people you’re already paying. I’m not talking about when you want to sign up for service, when you want to sign up for service, they’ll take your call in a second. But I’m talking about after you have the service and you’re trying to get an answer to a question or resolve a problem, they will put so many robots in front of you. It’s not even funny and it’s nauseating in some cases. It’s really annoying in a lot of cases. And you could be saying into that phone, “representative, representative, customer service,” and it’ll just keep routing. Yeah, it’ll just keep routing you back and saying, first I need to get some information. And it’s brutal. It just makes you think, if I could do business with anyone else but this company, I would absolutely do that. And I don’t know, I think huge companies can get away with it to some extent because they are getting away with it. And if they have limited competition and in some areas, there’s no competition. There are still monopolies in some of the communication sectors because there are limits in terms of who you can get for your cable or your phone. It’s not a complete monopoly anymore, but it’s darn close to it. And so, they can get away with it to some extent. But most small and medium sized businesses, the kind of companies we deal with, you can’t do that. You can’t do anything close to that. Because if you do, you are never going to have a shot at that business. Jay: Yeah, you’re exactly right. In fact, just the other day I went through the phone tree, it probably took me 15 minutes. The phone finally rings. I finally have a live person, and then they’re like, “oh, I’m sorry, that’s this other department. Let me send you over to that department.” So now I’m back on hold again. And I’m just like, how do they think that this is going to keep their customers? But you’re exactly right. They know you’re not going anywhere else. But if that’s a process of first contact, then how many people are you chasing away? Especially if you’re a small company like you said. There’s no way to me that any potential cost savings could outweigh the loss of potential customers. David: I agree. Again, for the type of businesses we deal with, we have to be better than that. We absolutely have to be better. Now that’s well beyond first contact. Now we’re talking about in the trenches, the day to day and all that sort of thing. But yeah, that’s sort of a given. If you’re the kind of business who wants to get to the point where you can start treating your customers badly. You’re not going to do that from the get go. Hopefully, that’s not what you want to do anyway. But ideally, what we need to be doing is taking the opposite approach, getting people what they want, reaching out in a way, initiating first contact in a way that positions us as somebody that they actually want to do business with as opposed to somebody who’s just annoying. Jay: Yeah, absolutely. How do people find out more, David? David: Well, you can go to TopSecrets.com/call, schedule a call with myself or my team. We would be happy to walk you through a conversation. Try to figure out where you are now versus where you need to be in terms of visibility. Are you getting in front of the people that you need to get in front of? In terms of sales. Are you generating the sales you want to generate? In terms of profit. Are you generating a bunch of sales but not making any money on those sales? Right? So we’ll look at those three things. And just have a conversation to see if or how we can help. Either way. We talk to people all the time. We might not end up doing business with them at all, but almost inevitably, I’d say pretty much inevitably, they’re glad they had the conversation because it’s designed to be helpful. And if we work together, great. And if we don’t work together but you got some help on the phone, that’s great too. So we’re happy to have those conversations. Jay: Fantastic. As always, it’s a pleasure talking to you, David. David: Thanks very much, Jay. Are You Ready to Initiate Contact with the High-Dollar, High-Value Clients You Need? If so, check out a few ways we help promotional product distributors grow their sales & profits: Just Getting Started? If you (or someone on your team) is just getting started in promotional product sales, learn how we can help. Ready to Grow & Scale Your Business Fast? If you're an established distributor serious about growing your sales and profits now, check out this case study and schedule a call with our team. Need EQP/Preferential Pricing? If you're an established distributor doing a decent volume of sales, click here to get End Quantity Pricing from many of the top supplier lines in the promo industry.

The trouble with targeting in business is that a lot of people don’t do it well. It reminds me of that line from one of the Godfather movies where Michael Corleone says something along the lines of, “if history has taught us nothing else, it’s that you can get to anybody.” Right? And that is now true in terms of advertising. You can get to anybody, but what is the cost? David: Hi, and welcome to the podcast. In today’s episode, co-host Jay McFarland and I discuss the trouble with targeting. Welcome back Jay. Jay: Hey, David, once again, I’m excited to be here and I’m really excited to get your feedback on this, because when you first said we’re going to talk about the trouble with targeting, I kind of thought in my head, well, isn’t that what I’m supposed to be doing? Aren’t, aren’t I supposed to be targeting? David: Oh yeah. Yeah. We definitely have to target. We definitely need to target. I’m not saying there’s anything wrong with targeting. The trouble with targeting that I was thinking about is that a lot of people don’t do it, and a lot of the people who do do it maybe don’t do it as well as it can be done, and as a result, they don’t get the results they’re looking for. Some people think they’re targeting and they may be doing that, but if you’re not targeting to the point where it’s resulting in better quality prospects, better quality clients, and conversations that lead to sales, then you might need to hone in a little bit better in terms of your targeting efforts and your targeting approach. Jay: Yeah, so as I think about targeting, there’s a lot of work to be done upfront, right? If you’re going to target somebody, you’ve got to know who the target is. And that can take a lot of research on your own part. A lot of experimentation, a lot of looking at past contacts, how those contacts came into your funnel, and understand those things before shooting arrow in different directions. The odds that you’re going to hit anything that looks like a target are pretty slim. David: Exactly. And I think a lot of the reason for that is, many people think of the term targeting in terms of what you said, targeting’s like aiming at something. But it’s not just aiming at something, it’s having an idea in advance of what it is that you want to hit. And if we think in terms of some of the more common ways of targeting. Some people don’t even get this specific about it. But if you look at the different ways to target, I mean some people target geographically, I’m going to target everybody within a certain geographic area. If I’m a realtor and I’m working in a particular neighborhood… Great example of geographic targeting. Some people target by industry. If I’m selling B2B, I might target a particular group of people in a particular industry. I might target companies that deal with technical kind of things, or I might target education, or I might target finance, right? So that’s a different way to target, by industry. I can target by need if I’m selling something like whatever, insurance, and I’m targeting people who need insurance. Okay. They could be wherever they are. Now, it’s harder to do that when you target by need because so many people might need it and you might have to pare things down a little bit to be able to get to the people that you want. In the promotional products industry, where I do a lot of work, people can sell by program specialty. In other words, people who are looking for a specific result. If you’re selling to people who are looking to increase safety in the workplace, then you could potentially be selling them a safety campaign, a safety program. There are some people who target by product specialty. There are different companies who might be looking for a specific kind of product. There is a company that’s been in the promotional products industry for ages. You’ve probably received pens from them in the mail, and they’ve been doing that for years. There’s a cover letter. Very often the pen will have your company name on it, and they’ll send that to you in advance. And then there was just a sheet of paper and a place where you could say, all right, if I want 200 of these, I send a check, I mail it in. And that was an example of targeting by product. So you can have a very successful business that does just that, right? Targeting by a particular product. And then some combination thereof. I could target a particular niche, a particular group of people. I could target financial institutions within a certain geographic area, or I could target a certain type of industry with a specific need. So, industrial companies that need safety programs. So lots of different ways to slice it, but if you don’t think through your options, then a lot of your targeting can just leave you confused. Jay: Yeah, absolutely. But I think it’s important to know, I mean, never in the history of the planet, have we had the ability to target like you can today. If you know what you’re looking for, you talked about geographic areas, age groups, people who listen to a particular radio station, people who shop at a particular store. Never in our history has there been the ease and ability to target people. There are people whose profession, and think about this, their profession is SEO, search engine optimization. That’s all they do is they look at your company, and who your targets are, and they figure out how to reach that specific group. I think about what we did 20 years ago for targeting, and I’m like, how did we even do that? I think part of the problem is that a lot of people are just going in and they’re kind of faking it until they make it. SEO is complicated and you have to first know your target, your needs, and then you have to know how to turn that into keywords and other things. It’s a real process, real powerful, but a real difficult process many times. David: Right. And when you’re talking about something specific like that, like SEO, yeah, it’s really a specialty. And even targeted advertising, if you’re looking for a certain group of people on Facebook or whatever, you’re right, it’s easier than ever to target those people with paid advertising. But for salespeople who are in the field who aren’t doing SEO, and they’re not doing targeted ads, and they’re looking for prospects, looking for people to sell to, and still, to some extent, having to do it rather manually, then at least having a clear idea of who you’re after gives you a much better chance at potentially reaching some of those people. Jay: Oh yeah. And we talked about this in the last podcast. If you know who to target, you’re not making a hundred calls today. Maybe you’re making 20 calls today and you’re increasing your close rate. It is hard for me to think, you know, that there are still so many people out there picking up a phone and dialing it and cold calling. David: Mm-hmm. Jay: But it is still a regular part of businesses everywhere and it’s a successful part and can be successful. But if you don’t know who to target, you’re going to be wasting a lot of time. David: Right. Which brings us back to the title, the Trouble With Targeting. If you’re not doing it well, no matter how you’re doing it, whether you’re trying to do it with SEO or paid ads. Because there are people who really want to get the paid ads thing dialed in, and many of them are still spending enormous amounts of money to make that work. And as the algorithms get smarter, theoretically it gets easier, but it also then becomes more expensive because more people are doing it, which drives the costs up. So even those who now understand that, yeah, you can probably reach pretty much anyone you want to reach with targeted ads you might not be able to afford to do. It reminds me of that line from one of the Godfather movies where Michael Corleone says something along the lines of, if history has taught us nothing else, it’s that you can get to anybody. Right? And that is now true in terms of advertising. You can get to anybody, but what is the cost? What’s the cost in time? What’s the cost in money? And are you going to be able to do it? So a lot of that has to do with what you’re charging for your product, what your profit margins are. If it costs you a couple hundred dollars to acquire a new customer, you have to make sure that whatever it is that you’re selling them provides enough of an adequate profit margin to cover the cost of the product, to cover the cost of the salesperson, the overhead, and whatever the advertising is. So as long as the math works, you’re in great shape. Jay: And not just the math. I was thinking as you were talking about this, let’s say you set it up right. You figured out who to target, you’ve got your keywords in, or whatever your advertising method is going to be, and you have actually reached the face of your target. Well, what if your ad doesn’t appeal to them at all? So you’ve managed to hit your target, but it just bounced off of them because you didn’t have the right message. David: Yep. Jay: And that’s a problem we see a lot with SEO, with cold calling. Are you saying the right message? And I know when it comes to SEO, that’s why you do A/B testing, right? You send out two different versions of the same ads, see which ones resonate, see which ones don’t. And you have to keep track of that regardless of what your effort is. Because man, it’s really sad if you have managed to figure out how to reach that target, but you didn’t manage to figure out how to get them interested. That’s a real waste of time and money. David: Right, because you may not even know that you reached that person if the messaging’s off. This really all goes back to something we talked about in a podcast quite a while ago, the MVPs of marketing and sales. What’s the message that you’re communicating? Which combination of marketing vehicles are you going to use to communicate the message? And who are the people or prospects that you need to reach? So if you’re getting to the right people, people who could be doing business with you, and you’re reaching them through a marketing vehicle that gets to them, like SEO or like paid ads, and your messaging is off, the only thing you’re going to do, the only thing you’ll succeed in doing is alienating those people faster. You got to get those three things dialed in or you’re toast. Jay: Yeah, one chance sometimes. Now, the other part of that is we know sometimes you have to get in front of their face six or seven times before they will actually call you. But it needs to be six or seven times where you are resonating. If it’s six or seven times with a message that they can’t stand. I mean, I think about the Super Bowl. And some commercials are hilarious and some are terrible. And they’ve spent all that money on that one spot that for the next three months, I see that exact same commercial over and over and over again. And if it’s a bad commercial and I hated it the first time? I’m going to hate it even more the second or the third or the fourth or fifth time. So I mean, did that money, did those millions of dollars really work for them or not? David: Right. And what do I think of the company? What do I think of what they’re selling? Because there are some places that have advertising that’s annoying. But if I like the place, if I’ve had a good experience, I will very likely continue to spend money with them. And I might say to them, “Hey, your ad is terrible.” But on the other hand, if I’m not familiar with the place and the advertising alienates me, then the likelihood that I’m even going to give them a try is pretty much slim to none. Jay: Yeah, I totally agree with you. I like the title, the Trouble with Targeting. Everybody listening, is probably doing some type of targeting, but have you really taken the time to assess who your target is? How are you going to get to them? And when you do get to them, are you going to have the right messaging? And if you haven’t looked at each of those three steps at the very least, then your system is probably going to fall down. David: Exactly. And ultimately the better we target, the more money we will very likely make, as long as we have the qualification procedures in place as well. But that’s a subject for another podcast. Jay: Yeah, absolutely. How can people find out more, David? David: Well, you can go to TopSecrets.com/call. That’s TopSecrets.com/call. If you’re having trouble with your targeting, if you can’t seem to get to the people that you need to reach, let’s have a conversation. We’ll figure it out. At least have a conversation about and see if we can figure it out. If we can help you, we’ll let you know that. If we can help you, we’ll let you know that, too. Sometimes it’s just good to have somebody else to talk to about a situation that you’re running into. Somebody who’s actually done it, who knows what they’re talking about in this regard. So once again, if you’d like to have a conversation, we are happy to do that. Just go to that web address and set up a call. Jay: I love it. David, thank you so much for spending time with us today. David: Thank you, Jay. Are You Ready to Target, Attract, Qualify and Convert the High-Dollar, High-Value Clients You Need? If so, check out a few ways we help promotional product distributors grow their sales & profits: Just Getting Started? If you (or someone on your team) is just getting started in promotional product sales, learn how we can help. Ready to Grow & Scale Your Business Fast? If you're an established distributor serious about growing your sales and profits now, check out this case study and schedule a call with our team. Need EQP/Preferential Pricing? If you're an established distributor doing a decent volume of sales, click here to get End Quantity Pricing from many of the top supplier lines in the promo industry.

David: Hi, and welcome to the podcast. In today's episode, co host Jay McFarland and I will continue our discussion about the AI Approach to Multiply Your Sales. This is part four in our series, and today we'll be talking about learning, segmenting, and the Three Ds. Welcome back, Jay. Jay: Hey, thank you so much, David. I really, really enjoyed this. I know I’ve said that in previous podcasts, but it’s true. After each one, I’ve gone into my own business and I’m like, okay, I got to apply this and apply that because these conversations are of such value. So I appreciate your time. I love this. And hopefully it’s been helpful to everybody else. David: I’m glad, I feel the same way, and I’m really looking at this almost like a mini-course. If people were to put together these four episodes and say, “How much of this stuff am I doing in my business?” You can probably implement some things very quickly that can probably help you get some great results. Jay: 100%. David: All right, so let’s do the quick review. And again, what we’re talking about here is we asked AI what will help you to multiply your business because that’s been a focus of our conversations recently. AI came back with some different responses, and then we’re talking about what AI says and how we’re able to help implement those things in business with our clients. And so let’s just recap. Number one was refine your target audience. Number two, develop a compelling value proposition. Number three, optimize your marketing channels. That was our first episode on that topic. In episode two, we covered points four, five, and six. Number four was enhance your customer experience. Number five, implement a referral program. And number six, leverage the power of content marketing. In episode three of this series, we hit utilize upselling and cross selling strategies, which was number seven. Analyze and optimize your sales funnel, which was number eight, and invest in customer relation management software, CRM, which was number nine. Now we’re going to be doing 10, 11, and 12. Eleven and 12 are really bonus because originally I asked it for 10 and then I realized that doesn’t break out well if you’re doing three in a podcast. So I went back to the AI and I said, give me two more. And it did. So we’ll be talking about numbers 11 and 12 in this podcast as well. So number 10 in the list of things that AI says will help you to multiply your sales is: 10: Continuous learning and adaptation. Stay updated with industry trends, attend relevant workshops or conferences, and be open to adapting your sales strategies to meet changing market demands. Well spoken AI! Continuous education. It’s a good call! Jay: It is, and some professions actually require it. But again, that continuous education is often on a service or a specialty or things like that. It’s not really on customer service or the technology or things like that. I feel like in that regard, so many of us are a hamster on a wheel. You know, we’re just trying to keep up with what today is giving us. We’re putting grease on the squeaky wheel and we don’t have time to really think about staying up on, you know, all the latest trends and those kind of things. David: Yeah. And a lot of people just don’t like continuing education, because they feel like so much of it is platitudes. It’s like, I already know this stuff. I already know it, right? But knowing what to do is very different than knowing how to do it. And that’s really what I’ve been trying to differentiate in this series of podcasts is that, yes, these are great statements. Continuous learning. That sounds great. But what are you learning? Are you learning things that you can implement immediately? Are you putting in place processes that will allow you to start getting results right away so you can gauge those results and then adapt, change, or tweak the process as you go to make sure that it’s working for you? So once again, we’re focusing on all the little details that make these general recommendations profitable. Jay: You know, I don’t know where I get it. I think I get it from my dad, but I am on a never ending quest to make things more efficient. I am always looking for the next software, the next device, the next system. I’ve done it since I was 15. My first job was in a burger barn at an amusement park. And I was watching how they put everything on the grill and what they would do is they’d cover the whole grill with burgers And then they would flip them all at the same time, and then they would pull them all off at the same time, and while they’re preparing them, the grill is sitting there empty. And so the line would move, and then it would stop, and I’m like, this is crazy. Put down two rows, wait a second, put down two, put down two, and at 15, I changed the whole thing. I’ve been doing that stuff my whole life, so I I love the tech. I love the next thing. And I’ll spend weeks and months finding the right thing knowing that it’s going to improve my business for years to come. David: Yeah, and that really goes to the point. The words that the AI used , it said continuous learning and adaptation. Jay: Yes. David: And what you’re talking about there is adaptation and implementation. Adapting the system to be able to get the result that you want Jay: Yes. David: So that everything gets better for everybody. Beautiful thing. Jay: Yeah, KPIs, Key Performance Indicators, that’s kind of what we use nowadays. And we’ve talked about this in previous podcasts, understanding every aspect of your business and knowing how you can influence it and adapt it. Because you can’t adapt, if you don’t know the reality of what’s going on. And I’ve worked for so many companies where management has no clue what’s happening on the front lines. And so we’re asking them, we’re begging them to adapt. Or they have software built by engineers who aren’t on the front line and we’re pulling our hair out because it doesn’t answer any questions. It makes life harder for us. David: Right. And unfortunately, a lot of it boils down to not knowing what to do and not knowing how to do it. “Yes, this is a problem, but I don’t know how to fix it. I don’t have time to think about how to fix it. Therefore, soldier on, keep moving, keep working. Good luck with that.” And so much of this, and even this point, continuous learning and adaptation is about identifying those small hinges that swing the big doors. And so much of what we do with our clients is about doing just that. Finding what is a small and obvious fix to a problem that could have been plaguing a company for literally months or years. You fix it in 10 minutes with a one sheet piece of paper that says, “Do it this way,” and they implement it, and they immediately start to see better results. So, I think in terms of, okay, this is what AI suggests, this is how we end up getting it done. So that’s number 10, continuous learning and adaptation. 11. Targeted Marketing Campaigns. Develop targeted marketing strategies tailored to specific customer segments. This approach ensures that your marketing efforts resonate deeply with your intended audience, leading to higher conversion rates. Once again, a lot of buzzwords in that sentence. A lot of really good recommendations in that sentence, but a lot of confusion too. Jay: Yeah, absolutely. Can I brag for a minute? David: Please do. Jay: I want to brag for a minute. So a lot of people know that I’ve just recently started an accounting firm that focuses on day traders and they’re taxes. And we’ve spent over a year and a half with my current company and my last company working on keywords to make sure we get the right leads from Google advertising. And David, in the last four months, I have not had one lead that is not right in the strike zone. Now, think about that. Think, I mean, that is unbelievable to me. That, and they, you know, we’re in constant contact with the company that we use. And every month they’re like, okay, how many leads were outside? What do we need to adjust? And I’m like, just keep pitching ’em, man, because they are right there. And the beauty of that is, all we have to do is adjust the volume. Right? Certain times of the year we crank that volume up, and certain times of the year we crank it down. And, wow! When we have the secret sauce, I mean, everything else is just gravy at that point. David: Exactly. And what you’re talking about really ties back to point three, earlier in our conversation, which is about optimizing your marketing channels. Jay: Right, right. David: When you’re able to do that, and you combine that with what we’re talking about here in number 11, which is targeted marketing campaigns, it’s a double whammy. Because now you are getting to the right people through the stuff that you’re doing with your SEO. And your communication is better, which is something we also talked about in the first episode in this four part series. And now, when you talk about targeted marketing campaigns, to me what that means is you’re taking the communications that we’ve perfected, creating value in the communications like we talked about in a previous episode, and now you’re sequencing that communication. That’s how we describe it to our clients inside our program. You’re sequencing your communication. You’re putting together a series of messages that go out in a specific order, in a specific timeframe, so that you’re getting the information in front of them when they need it most. To me, a targeted marketing campaign is about doing that. You’re getting the right message out to the right people at the right time. Using the right targeted marketing vehicle. Jay: I love that. Sequencing the information. That makes a lot of sense to me. And I think understanding that in first contact, they might not understand your product or the need for it. But we all know if they see you a couple times, you know, what is it? You used to hear they have to see you seven times, you know, a billboard, a TV ad, or whatever that is? Meeting them where they’re at. Instead of trying to force them to be where you want them to be. It sounds to me like a great way to go. David: Yeah, no question. I remember, I think it was in the Guerrilla Marketing book, he was talking about the fact that somebody had to be exposed to your message nine times before they’d be ready to buy. And at that point, I extrapolated for myself. I said, well, what if they only see one out of every three messages I put out? To me, that means I need to do nine times three, 27. I need to get out to them 27 times before they’re going to be ready to make a buying decision. And that’s really the essence of what sequencing communication is. A lot of times we feel the need to try to tell everybody everything up front, before they even know who we are. And their eyes glaze over and like, Oh, this is too much. This person’s too full of hot air. I’m moving on. And when you sequence your communication properly, you’re dripping it out a little bit at a time. You’re giving them a little bit this time and a little more the next time, a little more the following time. And each part of it reveals a different aspect of your approach. A different aspect of the way that you do things, and the benefits that you bring to them. And if number one didn’t completely resonate, maybe number two will, and maybe number four will, and maybe number seven will. And the ones in between, if it’s good, useful information, and it’s creating value for them, they’ll still be happy to see it. They’ll be happy to look at it. But then, when you get to the ones that really resonate with them, they’re going to respond. Jay: Yeah, absolutely. And I love how you said they don’t know who we are, but I would also flip that. We don’t know who they are yet, right? And so, like you said, we’re kind of dividing their possible interest into this sequencing. And hopefully, at some point, we’re going to land on who they are and what their needs are in that moment. David: Exactly. And so much of it really becomes fun when you’re taking an approach like this. And I use the word fun a lot when I’m talking with my clients. Because I figure if what we’re doing is not actually fun, we’re not doing it right. Because if it’s miserable, if it’s a big old slog and we can’t stand it, Let’s face it, they’re not going to do it. But when you’re able to make it fun by taking the appropriate action with the appropriate people at the appropriate time, everything gets a lot easier and a lot more fun. Jay: Absolutely, absolutely. David: All right, so number 12, this is the last one on our list. And this is: 12. Data Driven Decision Making. Leverage data analytics to understand customer behavior, preferences and buying patterns. Data driven insights empower you to make informed decisions, refine your strategies, and optimize sales processes. Many words. Jay: Yeah, and again, how do you extrapolate that out into your own business? I know this is something we work on constantly. I don’t think there’s ever going to be a point where you’re like, “okay, got that one done,” right? It’s got to be constant. David: Yeah, and once again, going back to the idea of simplification, which is a really big part of what we do with people, boiling it down to its essentials. Data driven decision making, to me, and this is what I refer to as the 3 D’s at the beginning of this podcast, data driven decisions, right? To me, that means that you are making your decisions based on the right information, the actual information, not what we think might be right, not what we feel, oh, I feel like I should do this. What does the data say? What’s working well? What are the things that we’ve done in the past that have worked well? What are the things we’ve done in the past that have not worked as well? How can we continue to replicate the things that we did that did well? Do adaptations on those, to be able to continue to move that needle forward. How can we avoid the mistakes that we made in the past based on what we’ve done and the responses that we’ve gotten? To me, that is the essence of data driven decision making. And if you look again at the AI description, leverage data analytics to understand customer behavior. That just means looking at what are the customers doing based on what you’re sending out? Leverage data analytics to understand customer behavior, preferences, and buying patterns. Okay, so that’s all the same. Data driven insights empower you to make informed decisions. Right, your decisions are now informed. They’re not just decisions, right? And then it says, refine your strategies and optimize sales processes. It allows you to do all of that. So, I would argue that this one, data driven decision making, is essentially a combination of all of the above. Because when you’re implementing the things that we talked about over this series of podcasts, and you’re gauging the results, you’re tracking it down, you’ve got the tracking sheets or however it is that you’re keeping track of what’s going on, and you’re making the decisions based on, not what you think is going to work or what you think might work, but what actually is working, everything becomes a lot easier. Jay: Yeah, absolutely. Can I give you a bad example of not using data? David: Sure, I love bad examples!. Jay: So, I worked for a national pizza chain. I’ll give you a hint, Pizza Pizza. Still family owned, even till today. And one day the daughter of the owner came up with this brilliant idea that people wanted bigger pizzas. I don’t know if you remember this. It was called Bigger is Better. So they forced every franchisee to go out and retrofit all of their ovens. Buy new pans. The whole thing probably cost five grand per business to just do this. And they of course marketed behind it. Guess where all those pans are? They’re sitting on top of the walk in refrigerators. Because there was no data, it was not driven by anything more than a feeling. And it was just the most ridiculous effort I’ve ever seen. And that’s some of the problems you can get into with a family run business, because you are making gut feeling decisions instead of looking at the data. David: Yeah, I’d love to say it’s just family run businesses, but wow, New Coke. Two words, right? Jay: Yeah. David: This kind of thing just happens everywhere. And some things just seem like a really good idea. Hey, wow. If they like this one, they’ll probably like that one when you say it out loud. Sure. It seems reasonable. And if the marketing was right and if the people wanted it, then that would have worked, but we just don’t know. So data driven decision making is also a big one. All right. So in terms of sort of wrapping this up, because we’ve been doing this now over a period of four podcasts over four weeks. I feel like we touched on a lot of really good topics. I feel like we were able to dive deep in terms of some of the how, of how to do these things. And I’m hoping that the people who have actually paid attention through each of these episodes got some really solid ideas on specific things they can do to grow their sales and profits. If that’s the case, and if you’d like to have a conversation about how we can help really just Implement this stuff inside your business, go to Topsecrets.com/call. Let’s have a conversation. See if we can help. If we can, we’ll let you know. If we can’t, we’ll let you know that too. There is zero pressure on these calls. It’s about identifying the primary areas where you need help, providing recommendations on what you can do and how you can do it, and then saying, all right, if you want to do it by yourself, you can do that. If you want to do it with us, you can do that, but you have the option. So hopefully that makes sense. And if you’d like to do it, TopSecrets.com/call. Jay: Yeah, I love it. And I’ll just kind of add my feedback on this series of podcasts. I’ve learned a tremendous amount. I’ve applied a bunch. But one of the things that stands out to me, is that you don’t have to do it alone. And I think sometimes we see it as weakness, right? I should be able to run this all. I should be able to do it all. Yeah, maybe, maybe. But there are people who have gone before you. There are people who’ve spent, David, how many years have you spent doing this and refining this and, and talking to customers? So, I mean, it’s just a great service. Again, just speaking out loud about it has made such a difference for me. So, I’m a huge fan of what you do and I hope people will recognize your sincerity, that it is just a call, and you do have a very strong desire to help. And you help a lot of people. David: Well, thank you. And we never try to push anyone into our programs. All we’re looking to do is we’re looking for the right fit. If you are a smart, focused, motivated business owner, and you are determined to get from here to there, then we probably want to work together. If you’re not good with making decisions, if you’re kind of iffy or wishy washy, then it’s probably not going to be a good fit. And in many of the calls, we can get two thirds of the way through the call and recognize pretty early on it’s not a good fit. At which point we’ll say, yeah, I don’t think we can help you. You know, maybe you can try this resource or that resource. So, it’s really not about us trying to sell you into anything. If we can work together, great. If we can’t, that’s perfectly fine too because we’ll know, right? We’ll have the conversation, and we’ll both know! You’ll know, “oh, it’s not a good fit,” I’ll know, it’s not a good fit. And you get closure, which is beautiful. If you’ve been thinking about scheduling a call and just haven’t, there’s no closure, right? Have the call. It’ll be a thumbs up or a thumbs down. Either way, it’s great. You’ll have a great experience. We’ll have a great conversation, and I hope you do it. Jay: Yeah, and listen, there’s no reason to be a salesperson when your product is great, and yours is. So, David, I love our conversations, and thank you so much for your time today. David: Thank you, Jay. Ready to Multiply Your Sales? If so, check out the five primary ways we help promotional product distributors grow: Just Getting Started? If you (or someone on your team) is just getting started in promotional products sales, learn how we can help. Need Clients Now? If you're already grounded in the essentials of promotional product sales and just need to get clients now, click here. Want EQP/Preferential Pricing? Are you an established industry veteran doing a significant volume of sales? If so, click here to get End Quantity Pricing from many of the top supplier lines in the promo industry. Time to Hire Salespeople? If you want to hire others to grow your promo sales, click here. Ready to Dominate Your Market? If you're serious about creating top-of-mind-awareness with the very best prospects in your market, schedule a one-on-one Strategy Session here.

Hi, and welcome to the podcast. In today's episode, co host Jay McFarland and I will discuss the AI Approach to Multiply Your Sales. This is the first in a multiple part series, and we'll start off with targeting, communication, and reach. David: Welcome back, Jay. Jay: Hey, David, it's great to be with you. I'm really excited about this series because I think a lot of people shy away from AI. Or they're getting into it and they're hearing a lot of the things that it can do, but they're not sure how to approach it or even if it's the right thing to do for their business. David: Yes. Agreed. The way this actually came about is that we've been talking for a while over the course of the past several weeks in particular about multiplying your sales. And some people really struggle with this concept. And I thought, well, what does AI have to say on the topic, and how does what AI says about it relate to what we do, and how we help our clients, and do these things line up? So I thought what I'd do is I'd take the answer to the question when we asked AI, "What are your best recommendations in terms of multiplying sales," to see what AI says and then compare that with what we're doing. And so the first three recommendations that it had were based on targeting, communication, and reach. Those are my words, not AI words in particular. But that's pretty much what it broke down to, so I figured that's what we'd start with. Jay: I love it. We're going to do a podcast on AI, and we've asked AI what it thinks first, and now we're going to psychoanalyze AI to see if it's in line. David: Well, to see how it lines up. Because one of the things that I found interesting was that when I asked it about multiplying sales, it was coming back with responses that talked about increasing sales. And so I asked it specifically to come up with recommendations based on multiplying sales. And at first it seemed resistant to that. So it talked about growing sales and multiplying sales. But this is where it landed. So I figured we'd start with this. Now, I had asked it to prioritize these things. I'm not quite sure if it did. But this is what it came back with. So the very first recommendation that it had in terms of multiplying sales. I'll tell you specifically what it said first and then we can discuss it. So the first thing that it recommended is it said: 1. Define Your Target Audience. Clearly identify your ideal customers and understand their needs, preferences, and pain points. So, that's how it started. What do you think of that take? Jay: It sounds very, very traditional, very typical, common knowledge. The first thing that I learned in a sales class years ago, identifying your target audience. But I feel like that's so basic, and when you talk about multiplying sales, I tend to think that's more about taking the existing clientele and getting them to spend more. That's what I think about. David: I tend to think that way as well, but I thought it's a pretty good jumping off point because whether your target audience means your existing clients and the new clients that you want to go after, I think it makes a whole lot of sense to lead with, determining who it is that you're going to be going after. I relate a lot of this to what we do in our Total Market Domination course. One of the very first things we do in our course is we have a three level system of targeting. So what AI is recommending here in sort of a general sense, in terms of defining your target market, is something that we really dive into pretty heavily with our clients. Because without that targeting up front, if you don't know exactly who it is that you're going after, who your ideal client is, the likelihood of bringing an ideal client through the door is Is generally slim to none. Jay: Yeah. And you know, we've talked a lot about this in the past that knowing who your target audience is,

To turn focus into profit, consider this. Your focus determines the level of profit that you generate. Because the people you meet, the conversations you have, all of that flows from your focus. So when you focus on those activities, the likelihood of increasing your profit increases dramatically. David: Hi and welcome back. In today's episode, co-host Kevin Rosenquist and I discuss How to Turn Focus into Profit. Welcome back, Kevin. Kevin: It's great to be here. Thanks for having me, David. Focus. Focus is something we could all use a little bit more of probably in our day-to-day lives, but is that a rare skill in business today? In the people that you work with? David: That's a great question. I think for some people it is problematic. I think that's the nicest way to say it. If you lack that focus, then it's going to be a lot more difficult to accomplish the things that you want. So if it is something that you're already good at, then the question becomes, how do I best harness that? Can I turn focus into profit? And if it's not something you're good at, then the question becomes, how can I get at least good enough at it that I can function at the level at which I need to function? Kevin: I feel like my focus has changed over the years, and part of it is definitely technology. Because I've got a phone sitting next to me that might beep. Might be personal, might be business, could be anything. I could be working on a project and a client on Slack gets in touch with me. Then I get an email. And then there's just so many channels of communication. I mean, do you find that technology has made it more difficult in some ways for people to focus, and to turn focus into profit? As opposed to maybe 10, 20 years ago? David: Yeah, and I mean, particularly when you look at things like social media, because social media is designed to disrupt your focus. Kevin: Right. David: Everything that comes in, whether it's an email or a post on social media, it's all designed to get your attention. So that's why, particularly in the past 10 to 20 years, focus is so much more of an issue for people. Because as you said, there are lots of different things to focus on. The algorithms are specifically programmed to make you focus on their priorities rather than your own. That makes it challenging to turn focus into profit. So if you're aware of that and if you recognize that you have to determine what your focus needs to be in order to accomplish your results, then it becomes more likely that you'll take the necessary actions to do that. Kevin: Yeah, that's a really good point. I mean, we've all been in situations where you go on social media for a business purpose and all of a sudden you're watching videos of some knuckleheads playing slip and slide softball, which are kickball, which I've gotten watching, are those silly videos. You're just like, before you know it, you're like, oh my God, it's been a half an hour. I just came on here to check out a client's page real quick. David: Yeah. And again, they designed the system to do that. They built it in. That's not a mistake. That is the purpose of the design. So when we recognize that only we can determine whether or not we will remain focused, then we take the responsibility on ourselves. We recognize Okay, it 's designed to do that. So if I recognize that and if I leave that open, and if I have notifications turned on to an app that is specifically designed to derail me from my focus, then yeah. I'm sort of getting what I'm putting out. Kevin: You're in trouble. You're in trouble. David: Yeah. Kevin: Yeah. so the topic today is about how to turn focus into profit. How does a lack of focus directly translate into lost revenue? David: Well, if you're looking at what your highest value activities are and then you focus on those, you're going to be a lot more likely to accomplish what you're looking to accomplish than if you allo...

The success of your business is always determined by the what, why, when & how. What are you doing? Why are you doing it? When are you doing it? And How? If you don't have the desire to help your clients, if it's all about you making money, or if it's all about you accomplishing a personal result for yourself, and you don't have enough care or consideration for the person you're selling to, I think it's going to be hard to be successful long term. David: Hi, and welcome back. In today's episode, co-host Kevin Rosenquist and I discuss the what, why, when, and how of your business. Welcome back, Kevin. Kevin: Good to see you, David. How you doing? David: Doing great, and you? Kevin: Good. Good. All right — so, what, why, when, how. Let's start with the first one. Why is it critical to define your what before anything else in business? David: Well, the way I look at it is, if you don't know what you're doing, then why you're doing it, when you're doing it, and how you're doing it are kind of irrelevant. Kevin: Doesn't really matter. David: Right. You sort of— Kevin: Yup. David: Yeah, you kind of have to know what it is that you're setting out to do. Whether you're operating solo or with a team of people, identifying what you want to accomplish — in your business or in any specific area of your business — is always the first step. So, if the what is “getting clients,” then the question becomes: What is my procedure? What is my process going to be for getting clients? That's the what. You identify that first. Once you've even thought about what you want to accomplish — or what you think you might want to accomplish, if you're still in the ideation stage — the what is important. But the reason I go to the why next is because if you don't have a strong why, you might not be committed enough to what has to be done. Over the years, I've noticed that people who have ideas but don't have a really strong, compelling reason for doing them tend to struggle to get those things done. Kevin: So it can become a motivation issue to some degree? David: It certainly can, because if you've got strong reasons for wanting to do something — whether it's to support your family, to create a growing enterprise, or to eventually sell the business and make a profit — that strong why will definitely impact your motivation. So I think that's a big component. Without it, why does anyone really do anything? Kevin: I suppose you could technically start with the why, right? Because if you have a reason for doing something, you can then build the what around it. Or is that a bad way to go in your mind? David: Well, if you're thinking in terms of starting a business, that would actually be the what. But I guess it's possible to start with the why. For example, if my why is “I want to support my family and I'm not happy with what I'm doing now,” then I might arrive at a what like, “I want to start my own business,” or “I want to do A, B, or C to make that happen.” That hasn't worked that way for me personally — but it could for someone else. If you've got a strong enough why, you can then start thinking about what needs to happen in order to achieve the things you have in mind. Kevin: When it comes to the when, why is it so important to define a timeline? David: Wow. Anyone who's in sales probably has some strong thoughts about when. If you've ever spoken to a prospect who seems really excited and seems like a perfect fit for what you offer — and then they just keep dodging you or stop taking your calls — that's a perfect example of someone who doesn't have their when dialed in. In any conversation — with prospects, clients, or coworkers — we need to identify the when so everyone's on the same page about the importance of the action and the likelihood of it happening. Because without a when, things just don't happen. A lot of our work is with people in the promotional products and print industries. In those cases,

It's important, no matter who you're partnering with, from a business standpoint, from an employee standpoint, from a VA standpoint. Whoever you choose as your business partners and colleagues have to have the skills that you lack, if you want to be able to accomplish the things that you need to get done. David: Hi. Welcome back. In today's episode, co-host Kevin Rosenquist and I discuss the topic of choosing business partners wisely. Welcome back, Kevin. Kevin: It's good to be here. David. I'm excited to talk about this because this is always an interesting topic. David: Yeah. When we think of business partners, we tend to think of people that we're actually going into business with. But there's really sort of a wider group of people that could potentially fit the bill here. So I think it's important to cover that as well. Kevin: The first one you spoke of, the actual business partner, business partner. I mean that can test a friendship. It can test a relationship, it tests all kinds of stuff. So in your experience, just from that side of things. What are the biggest mistakes that business people, entrepreneurs make when choosing a business partner? David: Well, I've made them over the years. My very first business partner was a guy that I worked with in another business. We decided we were going to start our own things. And so we just started out renting the same office space and splitting the rent on that sort of thing. Then we got involved in projects that required both of us working together. It didn't work out well. I started from the standpoint of we got along well, we interacted well. But neither of us took the time to consider our strengths and what each of us would bring to the table. A lot of times when people start working with friends or family, they think, "well, I know this person really well. I trust them." That's a good start. But unless you have similar visions for what the business is going to be, how you're going to get there, and who's going to do what, you can really end up with a lot of problems if that part of it doesn't work out. Kevin: Yeah. it can go downhill fast. It can definitely go downhill fast. So, in any business partnership, you know, you talked about the fact that there's varying types of them. What qualities do you feel matter most in a potential partner and which maybe are overrated? David: Well, I would say, starting out, you need to look at: Are our core values basically aligned? Do we sort of view the world in a similar way? Are we viewing business in a similar way? Do we view the relationship with our potential customers and clients in a similar way? Because if there's a disconnect there, then you're going to have problems starting with the very first decision. So I think that compatibility is very important. Making sure that everybody wants to go in the same direction, right? If you're in a rowboat, you want to make sure everybody's pulling in the same direction. That's extremely important. If you have complementary goals, essentially that's going to be a very important aspect of it. I think also, what is the expertise? What are you good at? What are they good at? If it's exactly the same things, you need to make sure it covers everything that has to be covered in a business. So, if I'm really good at generating ideas and you're really good at implementing those ideas, then that's going to work out well. If we're both great at generating ideas, but neither of us are great at implementation, we're going to struggle with that. And so you want to look at complementary skills. I think that is probably one of the most important aspects of it. You've got the same vision, but you have complementary skills. So that one or more of you are not doing things they hate, right? If you have to engage in a skill that you don't like, or if your business partner does, then it's not a good recipe. But if one of you is really good at idea generati...

We'll basically help you to look at where you are now and where you're looking to be in terms of getting something from ideas to actions and systems. Because without those three levels and without prioritizing it correctly, you can spend a lot of time, invest a lot of effort, and not get to the results you're looking for. David: Hi, and welcome back. In today's episode, co-host Kevin Rosenquist and I discuss the topic of ideas, actions, and systems. Welcome back, Kevin. Kevin: Good to see you, David. Let's dig right in. Why do so many businesses get stuck at the idea stage and fail to even move into action? David: It's a great question. I think ideas in a lot of ways are kind of the easy part. We have a brainstorm, we're like, this is brilliant, let's do this. And then we have another one has this, brilliant, let's do this. And here's another one. This is brilliant. Let's do this. And then the question becomes, okay, what are we actually going to do? I know this has happened to me over the years in my own business. It's happened with a number of people that I've worked with over the years. You have a lot of ideas. And then the question becomes, what are we going to take action on? And then, which of the things that we take action on, will we systemize? Get into place so that we can take those actions consistently? So that's really the purpose of our discussion today. Kevin: Yeah. how do you personally decide, which ideas are worth pursuing and which to ignore? Because I can find myself to be an idea guy a lot of times too. I'm like this, I got this, I got this. But sometimes it's hard to prioritize what is actually a good plan. Then put it into action versus maybe we just skip that one. David: Yeah, it's helpful if we start out with essentially a data dump of all the different things that we're considering. Just write them all down. Then have internal conversations initially about which ones of these are going to be our priorities. What are we definitely going to lock in? Which ones will we save until later? And which ones are just kind of out there? We don't really have to look at those at the moment. Kevin: It seemed like a good idea last night... David: I find that by, Kevin: before I was falling asleep. Not so good the next day. Yeah, . David: That happens a lot, doesn't it? Kevin: Yep, it sure does. David: I have a digital recorder. I take it with me wherever I go and keep it next to the bed. When I get one of those brilliant ideas at night, I record it on there. Then you listen to it the next day and you're like, that was horrible, what was I thinking? Kevin: What a terrible idea. I can't even understand what I was saying. David: Yeah, exactly. But, I think it starts with that. It's about gathering all those ideas, because some of them are going to be great. Some of 'em are going to be brilliant, some of 'em are gonna be terrible, but we don't know it. Now, a lot of times, it's a good idea to sort of evaluate them yourselves before you start sharing them with everyone else, so that you're only talking to your people about the things that you've already kind of thought through and believe are the best ways to go, and ideally to prioritize those. And then do another round with your people and go through it and ask for their opinion on which things should be prioritized and which things should be deprioritized as it were, so that you can sort of work your way through and have everybody be on the same page as far as what we should be working on sooner rather than later. Kevin: I feel like a lot of times ideas can get just stuck in sort of a neutral. Do you have to put a sense of urgency into turning ideas into action? David: Well, I think you definitely have to prioritize it. So to say that, we give it a sense of urgency, I would say yes for the things that are most important. But again, there's this discernment process that needs to happen on the ideas t...

If you want to create desire in sales, it has to be about them. Their wants, their needs. The things that they're looking to accomplish from the relationship, because that's where all their desire comes from. David: Hi, and welcome to the podcast. In today's episode, co host Jay McFarland and I will discuss creating desire with your communication in sales. Welcome back, Jay. Jay: Hey, David. It's great to be here, as always. read this title and I've been thinking about it, but I'd love to hear your perspective up front. What do you mean creating desire with your communication? David: Well, I think if we're In the business of conveying value and providing products and ultimately selling something to someone else, the only way that happens is if there is enough desire created in the other person to make them want to move forward. Without the desire to move forward, it's never going to happen. It's kind of a funny word, particularly in sales. We tend not to use words like desire a whole lot. We tend to think in terms of qualification and segmentation, and we keep it all very clinical. But without the component of wanting it, if the prospect or client does not want what we're selling, then absolutely nothing is going to happen. And the only way that desire is either created or channeled is generally with our communication. Now, if we're offering something that they already want, then the desire is already built in. But if not, if they don't see all the benefits, if they don't see what it can do for them, then they might not be feeling it enough yet to pull the trigger. And at that point, it becomes our job to say, all right what do I need to do in terms of my communication with this person to help either create some of that desire or ideally uncover the desire that's already buried inside there? Jay: Mmm. That's great. I think about my own sales process. One of the things we do in our company is we offer a free consultation, and that's my job. I give the consultation. And there's nothing I hate more than when somebody says free consultation, and what they really meant was free sales call, right? And so the minute you get them on the phone, they're pitching you their product, and I don't. I listen, I ask questions, I tell them about their circumstances, I tell them what steps they can take to make their life better. And I always start the call saying, "just so you know, this is not a sales call. My goal is to give you the information that you need." It never fails. I've never had a call in my life, and I've done probably a thousand of these. At the end of the call, they say, "well, how much do you charge for these services? And I'd like to move forward with you." I never, never tried to sell them on anything. And to me, if you can do it, you can't do it with every situation. But to me, that's just ideal. They're asking me how much I charge. I've created that desire in them without one word that sounds like a sales pitch. David: Right. Because if you go immediately into sales mode, if you start out with that, if you lead with a sales pitch, it's not going to create desire in anyone. Because a lot of the desire that we're going to be able to uncover in our prospects is going to come from the answers we get to the questions that we ask them. And so, you know, the whole diagnostic approach to sales, just like the diagnostic approach in medicine. First, you have to examine the patient to find out where it hurts. Examine, and then diagnose, and then and only then can you prescribe, right? So you have to examine the patient, find out where it hurts, find out what their needs are, find out if they need what we have to offer. If they don't have a need for what we have to offer, then yeah, there's no need for a sales pitch, right? And once we've done that examination, then we make the diagnosis. Based on what you've told me, it sounds like you're looking to accomplish this, and this,

The zero accountability salesperson is at a big disadvantage. Selling is all about being able to produce. And the only way you're able to produce is if whoever is doing the selling has some level of accountability, whether it's to themselves or to a sales manager, or to your spouse, whoever it is, right? If you get home from work, and you didn't sell anything as a salesperson, you might get in more trouble at home than you got in at work. So accountability is always big. David: Hi, and welcome back. In today's episode, co-host Kevin Rosenquist and I discuss the zero accountability sales person. Welcome back, Kevin. Kevin: Good to see you. Zero accountability salesperson. What does that look like in a sales team? David: Salesperson? Salespeople? It's not pretty, man. It is not pretty. And it's nothing that anyone deliberately sets out to do. In most sales organizations, the problem is that the company itself does not have the systems and processes in place to allow their salespeople to become more accountable to anything. I mean, a lot of times salespeople are held accountable for sales. Are you hitting your numbers? Are you generating the sales that you need to generate? But if they're not tracking other things, then they really have no idea what it is that's going to get them to the numbers that they really need to reach. Kevin: So how does that lack of accountability affect the overall sales performance of the team? David: Well, it's not good because it's just erratic. It's all over the place. You'll have some salespeople who are very good and very consistent because that's the way they're wired, and you'll have other salespeople who are all over the place. And the reason I thought this was a good topic to have, is that I was having a conversation with someone earlier today, someone who's considering joining our Total Market Domination program, and she was talking about the fact that she's got a number of salespeople in her organization, and she doesn't feel like they're all sort of on the same page. They're not doing the same things. And when I started talking to her and asking her about what sort of accountability was in place, she was sad to admit that there wasn't a whole lot of it. And what happens when you're in this situation, as a business owner or as a sales manager, if you find that you're having conversations with your salespeople and you're saying to them, so what's going on? How's everything going? And they say, oh yeah, it's going great. Having a lot of great conversations. Got a bunch of people on the fence or people I'm working, got a lot of leads I'm working and everything like that. That tells you nothing, right? It tells you nothing. It's feel good talk, but it's wasted words. Because until you are able to provide any sort of metrics, any sort of numbers, any sort of accountability that turns those comments into something real, you just don't have anything that you can even help them with. Kevin: I think a lot of times salespeople have their methods. They love their methods. That's their tried and true, understandably so. Is it hard to get sales teams on the same page when it comes to accountability when people want to kind of do it their own way? David: Well, it certainly can be, and if you've got a sales person who is a high performer, that person may just want to do it their own way, and they might not be open to a whole lot of conversation or a whole lot of interpretation Kevin: And you might not worry about it. David: Exactly. And that's very true. And I'm not saying that you should have different standards for different people in the organization. I'm just talking about what actually happens in the world. And so when you've got salespeople who are very good at what they do, and they don't need to provide you with some of the additional data that would allow you to help them figure out where things might be going wrong,

There's always going to be a bottleneck in sales. There's always going to be something that is not working as smoothly or as ideally as it could or should. And our job is to constantly identify, what is it now? What is it today? Now that I got this other thing fixed, what's the new thing that's slowing us down? David: Hi, and welcome back. In today's episode, co-host Kevin Rosenquist and I discuss your biggest bottleneck to sales. Welcome back Kevin. Kevin: Great to see you, David. And this is definitely one that I think anybody can relate to no matter what business you're in, but you're talking about your biggest bottleneck to sales. Let's not bury the lead. What is it? David: In every business there is generally, more than one bottleneck, but there's one big one that is going to keep you from hitting the next bottleneck, or the one after that, or the one after that. And if you don't tackle that first one correctly and get rid of it, then you never get to down the line. It's like an assembly line. If you think about a factory that's manufacturing something and there's an assembly line, if there's a problem at the first station in the assembly line, everything stops, right? Because you can't move to step two until you've done step one. And so for most of us, when it comes to sales, there is a bottleneck. And it might not be at the very beginning. It might be towards the middle, or it might even be near the end. But until you identify what your biggest bottleneck is, you cannot apply the appropriate resources necessary --the time, the energy, and the focus --to blast that thing out of there, so that you can then move forward with everything you need to do. Kevin: All right, so you couldn't just give me the one thing. That's fine. Can you give me some of the more common bottlenecks that you see when it comes to sales? David: Well, sure. When you're in a selling situation, what are the biggest bottlenecks you run into? Well, I'm having trouble reaching the person that I need to reach, right? They're not responding to me. Or some people, toward the end of the sales process, they get right up until the point of closing and then they choke. So that's an example of a bottleneck where if you don't get that one nailed, you can go all the way through a sales process, then get to that point and then not be able to close the sale and everything is kind of wasted. So looking at the steps along the way, what are you going to look at? You're going to look at the people that you're interacting with, the conversations that you're having with them, the timeframe that it takes you to get them from point to point. Because for a lot of people, that is a big one. Not being able to set a pace, set a tempo that allows you to be able to get to that sale sooner rather than later, that could be a big bottleneck for people. A lot of times we have an idea of how we would like the sales process to go. But if the client has a different idea, we're going to have to follow what they're going to be willing to go along with. So in those situations, if we say, alright, I'm going to try to do everything I can here to advance the process to get them to the next step. Maybe it's just a matter of, in the promotional products industry, will they send me the art? They may have agreed to the sale, they may have agreed to the quantities, they may have agreed to the colors and the Pantone color matches and the tight registration. They've agreed to all that. And you can't get them to send the art. That's really frustrating. And it can be a bottleneck that holds up everything. And these bottlenecks that I'm referring to are the things that hold up everything that comes past it. So by simply taking some time to identify what are the biggest bottlenecks, because if you find in your business that it's, "I can't seem to get art from the client," then you need to make sure you put a process in place tha...

David: Hi, and welcome back to today's episode, co-host Kevin Rosenquist and I discuss the lead quality matrix. Welcome back, Kevin. Kevin: Good to be here. Excited to chat about this, because I don't know what you're talking about. Kevin: So what is this lead quality matrix and why is it important? David: Well, a lot of times in my work with clients, we're talking about leads. "I need more leads" and "I got to get more leads," everybody's always talking about leads, which is very important. But as we're getting these leads in the door, sometimes it's a good idea to say, "okay, well who do I actually want to bring in?" Now, in our work with clients, we are very big on qualification. We want to make sure that the leads that we bring in are being qualified as quickly as possible. Because if they're not qualified, we don't really want to spend a whole lot of time interacting with them. So when we're bringing new leads through the door, obviously we're going to try to disqualify the not so great ones in the early stages. But also when we're putting stuff out into the market, whether it's a social media post or an email or we're meeting somebody for the first time at a networking function, whatever it is, we want to try to get an idea of the quality of the lead as early in the process as possible. When I talk about the lead quality matrix, if you just sort of imagine a graph. And going across the bottom is Willingness to Communicate. Are they willing to communicate? And so the farther you go to the right, the more willing they are to communicate with you and then going up and down is money to spend. Do they have money to spend? If they have a lot of money to spend, that goes up. If they don't, it's at the bottom. So if you think of that as being the matrix. You start off in the lower left hand corner, you've got people who have no money to spend who are not communicative. That's kind of easy, right? Kevin: Yeah. Those aren't ideal. David: Right. We know what we're doing with those people. We're going to jettison them as soon as humanly possible. In the upper right, we have those who are highly communicative and who have money to spend. So what do we call those people? Like ideal clients, I would say, right, high quality leads. This is the sweet spot. This is where I want to be. This is what I'm looking for, right? Kevin: Right. David: So that's kind of obvious. What's less obvious, and in some ways more interesting is the other corners, right? If you look at some of the other corners and you say, okay here are a bunch of people who are extremely communicative. They'll communicate all day, they'll talk to you till they're blue in the face, but they have no money to spend. Huge time wasters. Many people will go to networking functions and talk to people like this for hours on end, weeks at a time, because they never take the time to just do the simple math on it and say, okay, highly communicative, unable to spend. So that's an interesting group of people. Then we have the other extreme, which is people who have a lot of money to spend, but they're just not talking to you. So if they have a lot of money to spend, if it's a big client, big company, very self-important, but they won't return your phone calls, and they won't talk to you... You decide how long you want to deal with that sort of thing. Kevin: Yeah. David: And those are just the four most extreme points. But it really is obvious when you look at it like that. Kevin: And we've all chased the white whale or whatever that has all the money and you're wanting it so bad to get them as a client. Because you know it'll be lucrative. But I don't know. Those people tend to be very difficult to deal with too if you finally do land them. David: Well, yeah, particularly if they're not communicative. I mean, we could do another grid, that has good people, bad people, right? It's a similar kind of thing. Yeah.

We'll say things like, "oh man, there's just so much going on. I'm so busy. I'm just busy, busy, busy every day." When you're saying that sort of thing, it's a strong indication that you've got a bunch of unfinished business. You've got open loops, and maybe you're not capturing it. David: Hi, and welcome back. In today's episode, co-host Kevin Rosenquist and I will be discussing the topic of no more unfinished business. Welcome back, Kevin. Kevin: Good to see you, David. How you been? David: Been doing great. And you? Kevin: Good, good. So unfinished business. What do you mean when you say that? David: Well, I learned this somewhere, a number of years ago, and when I first heard, I was like, "oh man, this is me." They were talking about the fact that in business there are starters and there are finishers. And very often they're not the same person. Right? There are some people who are very good at starting projects and other people who are very good at finishing them. A lot of entrepreneurs, and some salespeople as well, are very good at starting projects. We're all excited and we're very happy to dive in, and then we tend to lose interest as we go. Kevin: Mm-hmm. David: And what that creates is a lot of unfinished things all around. And when you've got these unfinished things, they weigh on you. Right? And so when I talk about the idea of no more unfinished business, what I'm saying is that we should look at the things that are out there, that are stuck in the back of our minds. It's like, "I know I need to do that. I know I need to finish it. I haven't done it yet, but I don't feel like it," or whatever it is that's keeping us from getting it done. Kevin: Is it possible that you need to look at it and say were these things really that important in the first place? David: That's a great way to approach it. Right? Because there are things you just say, you know what? I started that, but no, that's not worthwhile. Kevin: There's a reason I didn't finish it. Yeah. David: Exactly. And it's good to eliminate that sort of thing. Whenever you're able to do that. If there's something that you're working on, you decide, look, this is not generating the results I'm looking for. Yes. Just make sure that you don't cancel it because you don't feel like doing it, right? You got to cancel it for the right reasons. If you're going to eliminate it, make sure that you evaluated it first. One of the things that I've talked about a lot in terms of just the things that we do in our projects is looking at things, I refer to it as the RADD method, RADD. It stands for Remove, Automate, Delegate, or Do. Okay, so we start with the R. Remove. And there's a reason these are actually in this order, which I'd nearly forgotten. But the reason is that if you do it in this order, you're going to end up a lot better off. If you start by removing the things that don't have to be done, then wow, that's a big relief. You're able to, essentially, Kevin: Your list just got smaller. Yeah, yeah. David: Yeah. You just eliminate it before it even becomes a problem, so that's the first step. You basically remove it. Second step is if you can automate it, right? If it's something that can be automated, then you don't have to do it. You don't have to have anyone else do it, and it will happen automatically going forward. So simple things like email autoresponders can allow you to create responses to something once and then have them happen again and again and again. So anything that can be automated, ideally should be automated. Third step is delegating. Can I delegate this to someone else? Can I delegate it to someone else in my organization? To a virtual assistant? Can somebody else do this effectively? And then the fourth one the second D is Do it. Then you actually do it. And if you go through this in that order, you remove things first. You automate them second,

I've been having conversations over the past couple of weeks about this very topic of creating certainty in uncertain times. So much of it boils down to the specific steps I can put in place in my business. Reach out to the right people, say the right things, in the right order, consistently. That will not only improve your confidence in yourself. It will improve their confidence in you and their certainty that you can do the job for them. David: Hi, and welcome back. In today's episode, co-host Kevin Rosenquist, and I will be discussing creating certainty in uncertain times. Welcome back, Kevin. Kevin: Great to see you again, David. Wow, uncertain times. There's an understatement of the year, huh? David: Yeah. There's been so much discussion on the forums and inside the social media groups and everything like that. A lot of people are uncertain about a lot of things, and that does not generally bode well for businesses. Kevin: No, no, it definitely doesn't. So what does it really mean to create certainty? When everything around you feels unstable. David: Yeah. We had talked in a previous podcast about our circles of influence. Like the things we can control and the things we can't. It really does circle back in a lot of ways to this. When we talk about creating certainty, we can only ever do that within the realms that we control. We can create certainty in specific aspects of our business. So when we're talking about things like tariffs, which obviously is a big topic these days, a lot of our clients are in the promotional products industry, and a lot of that product tends to come from overseas. Much of it is coming from China. So in those situations, we're not able to create certainty with that, right? That's not within our sphere of influence. So what we can do and what our clients can do is to look at the specific things we can create certainty around. Can we identify suppliers who are can provide products for us that are not impacted by that? Can we look at more domestic suppliers? What are the specific things we can do to create a level of certainty for our customers? Something our competitors might not be able to provide? Kevin: And I think there's a level of authenticity too that has to go with it, right? Because certainty you can sort of project certainty. but you don't want to pretend to have all the answers when you don't. So how do you balance that? David: Yeah, you can't really fake certain, well, I guess you can fake certainty. Kevin: You can try. Yeah, David: You can pretend you're certain, but I'm not really talking about that. I think there's certainly an air of confidence that you want to be able to convey to your clients, and sometimes when you're conveying confidence, you may still not be certain about things. But in this conversation, I'd like to look at, okay, what are the things that we can do? What can we be certain of? You know, are we certain that we can help our clients? And if so, how are we certain that we can help our clients? What are the things that we know that we can do that will help them? And if it's about sourcing things that are more in line with exactly what they're looking for, trying to get around the obstacles for our clients. If we're certain we can do those types of things. Just identifying the very specific steps that we can take, what can we be certain about, and then focus on those things. Kevin: You mentioned that, a lot of our listeners are in the promotional product space. There's still a lot of uncertainty that's coming our way. A lot of flipping and flopping going on with tariffs and whatnot. What do you recommend businesses do to sort of like help prep? David: Well, first thing you should do is recognize that your clients are not unaware of this. Like they are aware of the fact that this stuff's going on. Kevin: Right. David: And I've talked to a lot of business owners recently who are just really conc...

When we discuss a step-by-step approach to the sales process, we're taking a scientific approach, which most people don't do. They just keep going out there and getting in front of people, smiling and dialing, whatever it is they're doing. And when you take a more strategic approach, you just get far more consistent results. David: Hi, and welcome back. In today's episode, co-host Kevin Rosenquist, and I will be discussing a step-by-step process to the sales approach. Welcome back, Kevin. Kevin: Great to see you, David. Excited to talk about this. David: Yeah, it's great to see you as well. This actually came up because I saw this question going through a Facebook group. I thought it's an interesting topic because everybody's got their own idea of what that is, what that should be, and very few people actually have what they would describe as a step-by-step approach to the sales process, which I believe is critical if you want to be able to create consistent results. Kevin: Why is it you think that people don't implement a step-by-step process? Is it just because they just like to shoot from the hip a little bit more or what is the reasoning? David: Well, there are a lot of salespeople who do just like to go with the flow and they go with the conversation and everything like that. And there are some people who can do that extremely well. Kevin: Sure. David: But my feeling is that even those who can do that extremely well are essentially harming themselves, by not having at least a framework that they go back to again and again and again, so that when prospects or clients inevitably get them derailed, they know exactly where to come back to so that they're not missing any steps. That's why I think having the sales process in place is pretty important. Kevin: Obviously, there's no universal sales approach for every industry because you know every industry is a little different, so how can a business lay out a good step-by-step sales approach that is suitable for what they do? David: Great question. So in our business, one of the things that we help our clients with is exactly this. And a lot of our clients are in the print and promotional products industries, but this also applies to any other B2B business. It actually applies to a B2 C business. I haven't really found an industry where it doesn't apply. And so when we initially laid this out in a program called Top Secrets of Customer Acquisition, we basically laid out six steps to customer acquisition. I'll put up a graph here to sort of demonstrate it as we're going through. But the first step that we've identified is the targeting. Who exactly is it that I'm going to go after? Because if I don't know who I'm targeting, I've got no one to sell to. I've got to have a really crystal clear idea of who the people are that I would like to go after. And so for me it always starts with that, who is it that I want to sell to? Kevin: And in this day and age, we have so much data, we have so much information that there shouldn't be any reason you can't figure out that pretty precise target. David: Exactly, and a lot of times people want to feel like they sell to everybody. But the problem is that, as the saying goes, if you feel like you're selling to everybody, you're probably not selling to anyone. Because people don't always get it. They don't resonate with something unless they feel like the messaging is actually directed toward them. So, it's a really good idea to. target small, Aim small, miss small, as they said in the movie the Patriot, right? Aim small, miss small. You want to be able to do that with your targeting because when you do that, you can be more consistent in what you're saying to the people that you're approaching. It'll make a lot more sense to them, and you'll be able to get a lot more traction with what you're doing. Kevin: All right, so after targeting the right people, what's next?

We'd love to help you to get from here to there in terms of eliminating waste in your business. When you're focused on getting those things done and when you've got processes and procedures in place to allow you to accomplish it more quickly, then everything gets a whole lot better. David: Hi, and welcome back. In today's episode, co-host Kevin Rosenquist, and I will be discussing eliminating waste in your business. Welcome, Kevin. Kevin: Great to see you. David. Excited to be here. David: I'm excited to have you here. Kevin: Yeah, so we're talking waste, obviously waste in business. There's different kinds of waste. A lot of people will immediately think of money, but that's not really what we're talking about, is it? David: Well, some of what we're talking about, I guess. Yeah. There's been a lot of talk about finding and eliminating waste in the news. So I thought, how does that really apply when you're operating a business? Kevin: Mm-hmm. David: Anyone in business, particularly small to medium sized businesses, must be aware of the fact that there is always likely to waste in the business. And as you pointed out, I mean, very often it starts with money. We're afraid that we might be wasting money, and in many cases we are. Kevin: Sure. David: But for most businesses who are reasonably run well, that's usually not the biggest thing. Kevin: What would you say is the biggest thing, or can you give me like your top three? David: Okay, sure. Yeah. I think for most of us it probably starts with time. Kevin: Yeah. David: Because the time that we waste is something that we can never get back. I think I heard Brian Tracy say this years ago. If you lose money, you can always make more, but if you run out of time, that's it. All the money in the world won't help you. That's pretty much how it went. Kevin: Yeah. I mean, there's no going back. So far they haven't figured out a way. David: No. We have not figured out a way to do that. So when we look at our days, weeks or even hours, we look at things like meetings. Are our meetings productive? Are our processes organized or disorganized? What are the distractions like during the course of a day? Because when we're focusing on one thing and then we're distracted and we have to switch back and forth, it requires flipping the switches in our brains and getting ourselves adjusted to the new thing that we're thinking about. All of those things consume time, which is, in many cases, even worse than money when we start wasting it. Kevin: You brought up a good one, meetings. And I think that's something, especially in this day and age of Zoom calls and all that stuff. I have a lot of friends who are in the corporate world or in the business world, and they talk about the needless meetings, the constant need for them, for people to feel like you got to get the crew together. Why are small businesses and medium sized businesses so focused on that and how can they like pull back? David: Yeah, it's a great question. I think there are some people who just feel like it's necessary. I think there are some business owners, some managers who feel like their presence in everyone's day-to-day life is critical Kevin: Right. David: And that's true more of some people than others. Some employees are happy to be able to just do their own thing and get everything done. Others do need more interaction. So it is an individual kind of thing. I think most business owners have to take a look at that and say, how much of me do they need? How much of their sales managers do they need? But being aware of the fact that each time we force everyone to get together, the clock is running. The clock's running on everyone. And when you have a bunch of people on one meeting, that means that all those people are tied up for that period of time. And if it's not productive for everyone on that meeting or in that meeting,

Attorney David Maloney runs fantastic Super Bowl TV ads for Maloney Lyons, LLC. In this podcast, David explains how he got started running Super Bowl ads, and why the people of Mobile Alabama eagerly await his firm's ads each year. David also covers how he got started creating commercials, creating commercials in a conservative area where attorney advertising was frowned upon, which ads get traction, how the ads are created, how Super Bowl ads differ from regular TV ads, call to action vs branding, funny vs informative ads, negotiating with various TV stations such as NBC CBS Fox ABC, attention to detail, measuring success, lessons learned, and if he actually returns everyone's call. Visit David Maloney here: https://maloney-lyons.com/maloney-david-j-esq/. Watch his 2025 Super Bowl commercial here: https://youtu.be/A8tKgSKTOBw. See the Personal Injury Super Bowl Ads of 2025: https://optimizemyfirm.com/super-bowl-lix/. See all episodes or subscribe to the Personal Injury Marketing Minute here: https://optimizemyfirm.com/podcasts/. Transcript: Lindsey: Welcome to the Personal Injury Marketing Minute, where we quickly cover the hot topics in the legal marketing world. I'm your host, Lindsey Busfield. Watching the Super Bowl is one of the highlights of my year. While I'm always a little disappointed that the Broncos hardly ever make it to the big game, the commercials never let me down. This has been especially true with a handful of personal injury commercials this year. Maloney-Lyons had a particularly hilarious commercial that aired during the Super Bowl and I'm excited to have David Maloney as our guest today. David: Hey. Thanks for having me, Lindsey. Lindsey: Well, tell us a little bit about yourself, about your practice. David: Well, what's interesting is I had a commercial about what made me decide to become a lawyer to begin with. Which is that when I was 13, I had to read To Kill a Mockingbird for Mrs. Wesselman's English class. And then, that was followed up with us being able to watch it as well. And when I read it, I first started thinking, "Okay. I think this is what I want to do." And then, when I saw it, that solidified it further. And then, I was on... My father had visitation with me. I think it was like over maybe spring break or something and we were driving somewhere on the New York State Thruway. And I had told him that we had read this book and watched this and that I thought that I wanted to be a lawyer. And at that point, he told me that that was what he had always wanted to be. But that my being born kind of changed plans, and so that then bolstered it even more. And so, I decided to become an... I went to law school and I knew I wanted to represent the underdog. And then, you realize criminal law is a little different. And then, you realize also that when you're dealing with personal injury, the victims, since they're going up against big insurance companies, are usually the underdog. So ironically, years later after I'd become an attorney, I did an ad that... Especially being down here in Mobile, Alabama, which is right up the street from Monroeville, which is where the courthouse is that they still have that to Kill a Mockingbird plays every year, because that's where a lot of it was based off of. It resonated to have a commercial that focused on that. Lindsey: Well, and To Kill a Mockingbird, I think most of us read that that freshman year of high school. And Atticus Finch was such a profound character and so meaningful for people on a lot of different levels, both for career aspirations in terms of social justice. And it was one of the first books that I really connected with and it inspired my love of reading. So I love to hear that you say that and that that was part of your journey as well. David: Well, it struck a chord in the idealist in me. Lindsey: Yeah. And I mean, just such a well-written character from a literary perspective....

If we look at the idea of reactivating your client base in as many ways as possible, it means interacting with the people who have spent the money with us and doing that at a personal level, building the relationship, that's about the best thing we can do. David: Hi, and welcome to the podcast. In today's episode, cohost Jay McFarland, and I will be discussing reactivating your client base. Welcome Jay. Jay: It's good to be here. You know, it's funny. I hear this everywhere I go now. If I watch Shark Tank or anything else, I hear this term CAC. You know, what is your CAC? And it's your customer acquisition cost. And I have to believe that your CAC, for a customer you've already worked with, has got to be lower than trying to bring in a brand new customer. Am I right? David: Oh, absolutely. And I think instinctively as business people, we probably already know this. We've probably heard it a hundred times, but the purpose of this discussion is not to have you hear it again. The purpose of this discussion is to ask, “are you doing this?” And if so, how well are you doing this? How much better could you be doing this? Because as you pointed out, once you've invested that money to acquire a customer, now you want to be able to leverage that relationship as much as possible to provide them with additional help, additional solutions so that you can generate the revenue. They can get the results they're looking for, and you're not spending more money to attract people. You're able to just expand the relationships that you have with the people who you've already acquired that first time. Jay: Yeah. And I think it's disappointing if you spent that money for customer acquisition and then you don't have a system to retain them or keep them online. And so now it's almost like you're spending the same money twice. If you're trying to get them back again. David: Right. Yes. And so when we think about reactivation, there are a couple of aspects to it. One is just people who haven't bought from you in a little while, to touch base with them again, to reengage those people and to see what they want, what they need. Essentially, requalifying them to find out where they are in that process. Are they ready to buy more things? Do they have a date in mind when they want to buy? Are they ready to go now? Or are they just not ready to do anything? Are they sort of disqualified for the moment? Are they unresponsive to you? Because they'll generally fall into one of those five categories. They're either ready to buy. They have dates in mind when they want to buy. They're open to the idea, but not sure when. Or they're disqualified, or they're not responsive. When you are able to go back and sort of requalify your existing clients, you can reactivate the ones who are ready to go now. You can schedule the ones who know when they want to go next. And the ones who are generally receptive, you can just stay in touch. Jay: Yeah. Or what about the ones who were disappointed, but they didn't take the time. Right? So many customers will never tell you that they had a bad experience. They just move on and… David: Yeah. Jay: you had no idea. So you're not improving your customer service and your chance of reviving that customer is very low. David: Yeah. And that's an excellent point, too. Because as you indicated, if you don't know that, but you're reaching out to them to see how you can help next, and you find out about that problem, then at least you have the possibility of restoring the relationship, if not doing anything about the previous order. Jay: Yeah. So what are we talking about here? Like good drip campaigns? Is that kind of where you would start? So you're in constant contact? What do you think is the best way to go about this? David: Well, I do think it starts with engaging your people. You can engage your people in a lot of different ways. It can be done via email with a drip campaign.

Reimagining the essentials is different for everyone. And I hear both sides of that from people. I hear people who are like, ” oh yeah, you know, I've been doing this forever. I know exactly what I'm doing and all that sort of thing.” And then I have people on the other side who are like, “Hey, I'm doing all the things that I've done before. I'm doing it more aggressively. I'm doing much more of it. I'm doing it with more people and it's not working.” And so for the people who are struggling with that… again, it's not really a matter of saying, “well, now instead of prospecting, we need to do something different.” No, you're still going to need to do prospecting. The question is, “can we now do it in a way that is going to reach the people that you need to reach, communicate the things that we need to communicate and allow us to advance our communications and close the sales?” David: Hi and welcome to the podcast. Today, co-host Jay McFarland and I will be discussing reimagining the essentials. Welcome, Jay. Good to have you here. Jay: It's so good to be here once again. I'm very excited about today's topic. What's the Point of Reimagining the Essentials? David: Yeah. I mean the whole idea of the essentials to some people it's like, "oh, essentials, that's boring." Right? But it seems to me that in current times we really need to look at the essentials and say, "okay, how can we tweak them or fine tune them or change them around so that they're going to be more effective in a 21st century post-COVID economy?" Jay: Yeah. When I think about essentials, I think about foundational type things. And once you take away the foundation, other things that you have in play don't work as well. So what type of essentials specifically are we talking about that we want to, that we might look at in one when everybody looks at it that way, but we're going to reimagine or rethink about them in a different way? David: Well, I guess when I think of the fundamentals or the essentials, I tend to think of the real basics, prospecting, presenting, following up when it comes to sales. And sometimes you start talking about those things and people's eyes glaze over like, "oh, I know all that stuff." And yeah, we all know we need to do it. Knowing and Doing are Two Different Things We all know we need to do prospecting. We need to make presentations. We need to follow up with prospects and clients. But knowing it, knowing what to do, is really not the issue at all. It's how are we doing it? How well are we doing it? How much better are we doing it than our competitors? How frequently are we doing it? How consistently are we doing it? There are all these different nuanced aspects of it that completely change the results. And when we look at things like prospecting now versus five years ago, 10 years ago, it's completely different. Same thing with presenting, same thing with following up. In the past, it was basically phone and in person. Well now phone and in person are a lot less popular than other methods of communication. So that's really what I'm talking about here. Jay: Yeah, I think again, it's so important, you know, it's so easy to just fall into that trap of I've, you know, we've done it this way forever and it's always worked. I think it's hard for people to break free from those things, because it's hard to know what type of impact you really can have. And I think part of that is even understanding what your baseline is before you can make changes to understand if you're making any progress, right? What Happens When Everything Changes? David: Yeah, absolutely. And I hear both sides of that from people. I hear people who are like, " oh yeah, you know, I've been doing this forever. I know exactly what I'm doing and all that sort of thing." And then I have people on the other side who are like, "Hey, I'm doing all the things that I've done before. I'm doing it more aggressively.

Sometimes during a group it is as if a light comes on that illuminates some aspect of life in a magnificent fashion and that speaks to each person in the group whatever their background or station in life. This was true in particular this evening as we continued to discuss St. John's writing “To the Shepherd” on the responsibilities of a spiritual elder. As we made our way through the text, it became clear that St. John's teaching about the care of souls applies to all of those who are responsible for the formation of others; not only priests or religious, but also parents, teachers, friends, etc.  Not one of us is free from the charge of the salvation of others; aiding them through our prayers, taking opportune moments to clarify their understanding of the faith, being living witnesses of the gospel and the love of the cross. All of us have the responsibility of seeking purity of heart and freedom from the passions in order that we might be able to discern with clarity and humility the needs of those around us. Lacking this, St. John tells us, we undermine our capacity to be well disposed and compassionate to each individual for whom we are responsible or who enters our life. How is it that we can serve others if we cannot discern good from evil and everything in between? In fact, St. John tells us it is a great disgrace for a superior to pray for or hold forward spiritual gifts to others that he himself is not acquired. How is it that he can faithfully guide others to God and to become partakers of the glory of God if he has no understanding of this within his own heart. Experience is the truest teacher and if the superior lacks that experience, he may only bring harm to others. Those who are spiritual elders, fathers, or mothers, must not be tempted to set aside this role in order to enjoy worldly friendship with those in their charge. It can be a natural thing to want companionship and to some extent this can exist. However, if a familiarity develops between the superior and others, he may lose the capacity to guide and feel constrained to do the bidding of others; never to contradict them, refuse them, or correct them. The elder must be pure of heart and able to understand the interior life and also the realities that sanctify us within the life of the church. The elder must be able to create a culture that forms a mind and heart directed toward God, the love of neighbor and the love of virtue. He must be able to discern the emotional capacity and maturity of others, so as not to push too hard and risk breaking their spirit or neglect giving counsel or correction of those who are quick witted and naturally gifted. Such purity of heart alone allows the elder to perceive supernatural realities and to understand the struggles that individuals have with multiple demons. The elder must be able to cure passions thought by others to be incurable. In this sense, he must have truly put on the mind of Christ and be the most humble and obedient member of the community. --- Text of chat during the group: 00:14:02 Bob Cihak, AZ: P. 251, # 14   00:19:16 carol_000: Is much known about the repentance of Joseph's brothers or God chastising them for their treatment of Joseph   00:26:27 David: I think this is a big problem also in families. My oldest son felt I was often to hard on him. Now that he is 27 he has mentioned several times that I was the only one that loved him and was always there. It is really hard but being a father is different than being a friend only there to enjoy the good times and not try to guide someone to what has value.   00:28:48 Art: Reacted to "I think this is a bi..." with

Imagine enjoying the freedom to focus on visionary leadership while your business runs like a well-oiled machine. This Monday Morning Episode dives deep into the art of systemization in business operations, partnering with systems expert David Jenyns to reveal transformative strategies that liberate business owners and team members from monotonous daily tasks. Discover insights behind legendary organizations like McDonald's and Netflix, as David sheds light on the benefits of implementing documented processes. This episode not only highlights how these processes lead to career growth, job security, and streamlined workflows but also tackles the common hurdle of team resistance, providing actionable advice on engaging early adopters and ensuring positive introductions to new systems.David emphasizes the importance of clear communication and tailored processes that strike the ideal balance between systemization and empowerment. He discusses how business owners can remove non-compliance excuses, set clear expectations, and build a team of systems-driven individuals, paving the way for sustainable success. Tune in to learn how to transform your business into a systemized powerhouse, where creativity and structure coexist seamlessly, all thanks to tried-and-true methodologies.What You'll Learn in This Episode:Benefits of documented processes for career growth.Strategies for overcoming team resistance to new systems.How clear communication and setting expectations lead to smoother workflows.Techniques to remove excuses for non-compliance.The impact of surrounding yourself with systems-driven individuals.How renowned companies like McDonald's and Netflix utilize effective systemization.Tune in now to transform your business with expert strategies for systemization!‍‍You can reach out to David Jenyns here:Website: https://www.systemology.com/‍Mentions and Links: ‍Accounting Software:MYOB‍Brands:McDonald'sNetflix‍If you want your questions answered on Monday Morning Episodes, ask me on these platforms:My Newsletter: https://thedentalmarketer.lpages.co/newsletter/The Dental Marketer Society Facebook Group: https://www.facebook.com/groups/2031814726927041‍Episode Transcript (Auto-Generated - Please Excuse Errors)‍Michael: Hey Dave, so talk to us. What's one piece of advice you can give us this Monday morning? David: When it comes to stepping out of the day to day operations as a business owner, you've got to capture your systems and your processes. And most importantly, you've got to get your team on board. And I feel like that's probably the biggest challenge for a lot of business owners.They try to systemize, they try it for a little bit, maybe one team member follows, maybe most of them don't, and then before they know it, everybody's forgotten about it, and it's just back to the way that things have always been. And it really, this one piece of advice I've got centers around how do you get your team on board?How do you get your team to follow process? And even. resistant team members. How do you get them to go, Oh, this is how we do things here. And key here is the way in which it's introduced to your team. A lot of business owners, when they go, Oh, we're going to start documenting our process. And we're going to have a particular way of doing things.The team member in their brain, they start to think, Should I be worried about my job? Is he trying to document what I'm doing so that he can replace me? Is he going to take my job offshore? I kind of like having this little black box where no one really knows what I'm doing because. It creates some level of job security for me.I don't want to capture my process and have that available and accessible for everybody else. So that's some of the things that go on in their head and that's what can make them resistant and then fall back to the ways that they may have done things in the past or not even want to share what it is that they're doing.So the bit of advice and the secret here is to really think about How it's going to benefit the team member. rather than just introducing it where the team thinks, Oh, the business owner is doing this to replace me, or maybe they want to go on a holiday. And, don't want to support that.Show them how, hang on, if you document your process or capture the way that you're doing things, this can help you move up in our organization because, by documenting process, we could delegate down to some newer team members. And that doesn't make you less valuable. It makes you more valuable because now you can work on higher value tasks.You can start to work your way up and work on these higher value activities. That's might appeal to some people. For other people, you might need to say, Hey, when you go on holiday and you tell me you want two weeks off and I say fine, but then I call you up every second day to go, Oh, where's that client's file up to?Oh, is that job up to? Do you remember where we saved that thing? And I'm on the phone calling you every second to try and find out what's going on. By documenting our process, it means that other people can step in and do some of those tasks, and the team can keep things moving while you're on leave, so when you come back, those things are done, and you can have a proper, restful holiday.So that might appeal to someone else, or, maybe it's, hey, there are going to be times when you're going to need time off for family. So, having process and the enable systems just means that people can step in and keep things moving. And that makes your job more secure and this business more secure.So again, a lot of it has to do with how you frame it and how you let them know this is going to benefit their situation. That'll dramatically increase the adoption of a systems culture. Michael: Gotcha. Okay. So then, David, can you share specific communication strategies you've used to address this type of resistance?How do you ensure the message is understood and embraced by team members? David: Well, The first thing to do and it's a little bit counterintuitive, is you actually don't think about who's going to resist it up front. Think about who's going to support this initiative. So when you first introduce the topic and you say, Hey, we're going to look to build a systems culture and want to capture some different processes.Hey, I've got, this book or this podcast that I want to share with you, just that talks a little bit about what we're doing and then see who resonates with it, who listens to it, who gets it and say, Hey I'm looking for some people who want to help me drive this forward. Who sticks their hand up.And then start off by leaning into them. So that's kind of step number one. You start to empower them, you get the first set of systems down and then you start to celebrate system wins. when a team member does something, you go, Hey, we just documented this new process. Jenny did an awesome job over here.Hey, Sarah, we normally have this frustration when someone goes on leave, but Sarah documented this process. And then we had John step in and do the task. Hey, Sarah, you're awesome. And you shine a spotlight on that. Maybe you give out a monthly most valued player award to the person who really embraces this idea.that's the best place to start because then you start to go, Hey, we're going to celebrate and showcase, and this is what we want more of. So that's the first step. And then you start to watch out for the. resistant team members. Now, the best thing that you can do for them is firstly lead by example, and then by shining a light on the people that are, doing it.And then you want to give those team members every opportunity to jump on board because new things you have to figure it out. And some people are going to embrace change more than others. And you try and support them. And then you need to really think about every team member and their situation.And the real key is a lot of times team members, their default excuses. Yeah, but I didn't know how, or I didn't know that was expected of me. So one of the first things that you need to do is. To remove that. So by capturing a system and a process, you're then saying, Hey, well, we have a way of doing things.You want to make sure that's never more than one click away from when they actually are doing the task. So if it's, setting up something in the dental practice, we'll have a QR code that they scan on their phone. Maybe it's on the printer or something, and it jumps to the. System or the process after scanning that QR code, or maybe it's setting up the dental practice in the morning and here's the 10 point checklist that needs to be done.It's got to be so obvious. So front and center. So you can remove that. And then the conversation can start to change. Okay, you did know we've got a process. It's listed out here. My expectation is that you follow the process. I don't care if you've got it open or not, if you're doing it right, but since you don't yet know the process, you've got to have it open, but once you get it right, then fine.You don't have to have it open every single time, but at the start, this is my expectation. And that's kind of just the start of how you address it. You've got to remove excuses. Michael: so then what consequences do you implement for team members who continually resist systems? Even though you've, done these systems, you've,Remove the excuses or try to, have you found incentives to be effective in encouraging this type of adherence? David: you can, like I said, have something like the MVP where you might reward the system wins and shine a spotlight. You can even link it towards KPIs either the generation or the following of process.can do a few things like that. I think the reality is. A lot of business owners don't realize up front how important it is to have someone who follows process. And it's not something that they've, incorporated into their recruitment process. Once you get this moving forward, it actually gets a lot easier.Because you look for people who will adopt this way of doing things right from the get go. The challenge is always the existing staff who are used to doing things a certain way, who there may actually be some people in there who aren't processed people. you'll need to navigate through that.Am I saying that you might need to jump in and do a whole bunch of, layoffs? that's definitely the last resort. And I know in certain different industries, finding labors can be challenging, but the reality is a business is infinitely easier when you surround yourself as a business owner with systems driven people.And that goes double if the business owner, or maybe the. dental practitioner owner isn't a systems person. If you don't see yourself as a systems person, then you better make sure that you're surrounded by systems driven people. Because again, business just works better that way.So do have to navigate through it. I've not seen, incentives. work amazingly well, generally you want people to do it, who do this naturally and then naturally organized people and you giving everybody the chance to jump on board and then addressing the ones that don't, oftentimes you're the employer, like the person listening to this, you're paying, they're there to do a job and it's okay for you to have, A set of expectations around the way that you want things done.That's your right as a business owner. But just persist with it. Cause it's, challenging at the start, but you get over this hump and then business just gets so much easier. Michael: Yeah, I like that. Okay. So then you mentioned KPIs to like, do you track and measure whether team members are following the systems specifically as a leader?Like what role do you personally play in and ensuring systems are followed? David: there's a couple of different ways that you can do it depending on the task, depending on who it is. If you've got some sort of project management software in how tasks are signed out, you can look at how they complete the tasks many times they're checking certain things off.You can have a look at error rate depending on if certain tasks causing you some challenges because people aren't following process and it's causing errors. So you can track that error rate and you're looking for reduction in that by following the process. it comes down to this whole idea that, to improve something, you have to track it.So you just have to think about what is it that you want to improve? If you want to improve the fact that they're. Opening the process or successfully completing it. Maybe there's some final step that they have to complete, which confirms that they have reviewed and followed the checklist.And then you're monitoring how often they're doing that, or are they doing that? depend on the situation and the task. Michael: Gotcha, gotcha. I like that. that in mind, like at the end of the day, make sure you're,you let me know, or you send me an email or you do this checklist.And then office manager at the end of the week, we'll look at how many people did this. How do you balance being hands on with empowering your team to take ownership of these systems versus it's seeming like, man, he's just micromanaging everything. David: Yes. Yeah. The main thing there is depending on what the work is, you've got to Systemize all of the things that need to happen in business.There are certain things that kind of just need to happen a certain way. patients will need to be checked in a certain way or they have to fill out certain forms, maybe The practice or the studio needs to be set up a particular way, try and systemize all of the mundane pieces or parts of business that just need to be done a certain way.And sometimes leaving out the creative part or doing those types of systems a little bit more high level, You, you've got to think about who's doing the task and documenting to the level that's required for that person. If they're a skilled operator, you don't need to tell them well, here's exactly how you log into MYOB.Here's the exact buttons that you need to check. it can feel, like you're micromanaging at that level. It's art and science, to try and find the right balance for this. look at something like McDonald's, And McDonald's has systemized every possible aspect down to the minute detail, but they're also running a hamburger business that is taking very unskilled operators, flipping hamburgers.So they've got to go down to that level and it can really feel. Like micromanagement, whereas a lot of people are going to be running, a successful business with high quality team members, and you've mightnot need to get down to that level. A quote that Reed Hastings said from Netflix and he said, when we started systemizing, we wanted to systemize every possible aspect of the business. We wanted to make sure our business was dummy proof. The only thing was once we got it to that level, only dummies wanted to work there. Because they'd gone too far on the systemization spectrum.So again, lot of this has be with, thinking about the situation, the individuals and what they need to do a great job. If it feels like micromanagement chunk up a level, have a higher quality or higher level checklist that has, key milestone levels instead of these super micro details.Michael: Nice. Awesome, David. I appreciate your time. And if anyone has further questions, you can definitely find them on the Dental Marketer Society Facebook group or where can they reach out to you directly? David: Yeah, best to just go to systemology. com and there's some links through to, all of the ways to contact us or follow us on social media.Michael: Awesome. So that's going to be in the show notes below. And David, thank you so much for being with me on this Monday morning episode. David: Pleasure. Thank you.‍

On this episode of the pod, my guest is David Cayley, a Toronto-based Canadian writer and broadcaster. For more than thirty years (1981-2012) he made radio documentaries for CBC Radio One's program Ideas, which premiered in 1965 under the title The Best Ideas You'll Hear Tonight. In 1966, at the age of twenty, Cayley joined the Canadian University Service Overseas (CUSO), one of the many volunteer organizations that sprang up in the 1960's to promote international development. Two years later, back in Canada, he began to associate with a group of returned volunteers whose experiences had made them, like himself, increasingly quizzical about the idea of development. In 1968 in Chicago, he heard a lecture given by Ivan Illich and in 1970 he and others brought Illich to Toronto for a teach-in called “Crisis in Development.” This was the beginning of their long relationship: eighteen years later Cayley invited Illich to do a series of interviews for CBC Radio's Ideas. Cayley is the author of Ivan Illich: An Intellectual Journey (2022), Ideas on the Nature of Science (2009), The Rivers North of the Future: The Testament of Ivan Illich (2004), Puppet Uprising (2003),The Expanding Prison: The Crisis in Crime and Punishment and the Search for Alternatives (1998), George Grant in Conversation (1995), Northrop Frye in Conversation (1992), Ivan Illich in Conversation (1992), and The Age of Ecology (1990).Show Notes:The Early Years with Ivan IllichThe Good Samaritan StoryFalling out of a HomeworldThe Corruption of the Best is the Worst (Corruptio Optimi Pessima)How Hospitality Becomes HostilityHow to Live in ContradictionRediscovering the FutureThe Pilgrimage of SurpriseFriendship with the OtherHomework:Ivan Illich: An Intellectual Journey (Penn State Press) - Paperback Now Available!David Cayley's WebsiteThe Rivers North of the Future (House of Anansi Press)Ivan Illich | The Corruption of Christianity: Corruptio Optimi Pessima (2000)Charles Taylor: A Secular AgeTranscript:Chris: [00:00:00] Welcome, David, to the End of Tourism Podcast. It's a pleasure to finally meet you. David: Likewise. Thank you. Chris: I'm very grateful to have you joining me today. And I'm curious if you could offer our listeners a little glimpse into where you find yourself today and what the world looks like for you through the lenses of David Cayley.David: Gray and wet. In Toronto, we've had a mild winter so far, although we did just have some real winter for a couple of weeks. So, I'm at my desk in my house in downtown Toronto. Hmm. Chris: Hmm. Thank you so much for joining us, David. You know, I came to your work quite long ago.First through the book, The Rivers North of the Future, The Testament of Ivan Illich. And then through your long standing tenure as the host of CBC Ideas in Canada. I've also just finished reading your newest book, Ivan Illich, An Intellectual Journey. For me, which has been a clear and comprehensive homage [00:01:00] to that man's work.And so, from what I understand from the reading, you were a friend of Illich's as well as the late Gustavo Esteva, a mutual friend of ours, who I interviewed for the podcast shortly before his death in 2021. Now, since friendship is one of the themes I'd like to approach with you today, I'm wondering if you could tell us about how you met these men and what led you to writing a biography of the former, of Ivan.David: Well, let me answer about Ivan first. I met him as a very young man. I had spent two years living in northern Borneo, eastern Malaysia, the Malaysian state of Sarawak. As part of an organization called the Canadian University Service Overseas, which many people recognize only when it's identified with the Peace Corps. It was a similar initiative or the VSO, very much of the time.And When I returned to [00:02:00] Toronto in 1968, one of the first things I saw was an essay of Ivan's. It usually circulates under the name he never gave it, which is, "To Hell With Good Intentions." A talk he had given in Chicago to some young volunteers in a Catholic organization bound for Mexico.And it made sense to me in a radical and surprising way. So, I would say it began there. I went to CDOC the following year. The year after that we brought Ivan to Toronto for a teach in, in the fashion of the time, and he was then an immense celebrity, so we turned people away from a 600 seat theater that night when he lectured in Toronto.I kept in touch subsequently through reading mainly and we didn't meet again until the later 1980s when he came to Toronto.[00:03:00] He was then working on, in the history of literacy, had just published a book called ABC: the Alphabetization of the Western Mind. And that's where we became more closely connected. I went later that year to State College, Pennsylvania, where he was teaching at Penn State, and recorded a long interview, radically long.And made a five-hour Ideas series, but by a happy chance, I had not thought of this, his friend Lee Hoinacki asked for the raw tapes, transcribed them, and eventually that became a published book. And marked an epoch in Ivan's reception, as well as in my life because a lot of people responded to the spoken or transcribed Illich in a way that they didn't seem to be able to respond to his writing, which was scholastically condensed, let's [00:04:00] say.I always found it extremely congenial and I would even say witty in the deep sense of wit. But I think a lot of people, you know, found it hard and so the spoken Illich... people came to him, even old friends and said, you know, "we understand you better now." So, the following year he came to Toronto and stayed with us and, you know, a friendship blossomed and also a funny relationship where I kept trying to get him to express himself more on the theme of the book you mentioned, The Rivers North of the Future, which is his feeling that modernity, in the big sense of modernity can be best understood as perversionism. A word that he used, because he liked strong words, but it can be a frightening word."Corruption" also has its difficulties, [00:05:00] but sometimes he said "a turning inside out," which I like very much, or "a turning upside down" of the gospel. So, when the world has its way with the life, death and resurrection and teaching of Jesus Christ which inevitably becomes an institution when the world has its way with that.The way leads to where we are. That was his radical thought. And a novel thought, according to the philosopher Charles Taylor, a Canadian philosopher, who was kind enough to write a preface to that book when it was published, and I think very much aided its reception, because people knew who Charles Taylor was, and by then, they had kind of forgotten who Ivan Illich was.To give an example of that, when he died, the New York [00:06:00] Times obituary was headlined "Priest turned philosopher appealed to baby boomers in the 60s." This is yesterday's man, in other words, right? This is somebody who used to be important. So, I just kept at him about it, and eventually it became clear he was never going to write that book for a whole variety of reasons, which I won't go into now.But he did allow me to come to Cuernavaca, where he was living, and to do another very long set of interviews, which produced that book, The Rivers North of the Future. So that's the history in brief. The very last part of that story is that The Rivers North of the Future and the radio series that it was based on identifies themes that I find to be quite explosive. And so, in a certain way, the book you mentioned, Ivan Illich: An Intellectual Journey, [00:07:00] was destined from the moment that I recorded those conversations. Chris: Hmm, yeah, thank you, David. So much of what you said right there ends up being the basis for most of my questions today, especially around the corruption or the perversion what perhaps iatrogenesis also termed as iatrogenesis But much of what I've also come to ask today, stems and revolves around Illich's reading of the Good Samaritan story, so I'd like to start there, if that's alright.And you know, for our listeners who aren't familiar either with the story or Illich's take on it, I've gathered some small excerpts from An Intellectual Journey so that they might be on the same page, so to speak. So, from Ivan Illich, An Intellectual Journey:"jesus tells the story after he has been asked how to, quote, 'inherit eternal life,' end quote, and has replied that one must love God and one's neighbor, [00:08:00] quote, 'as oneself,' but, quote, who is my neighbor? His interlocutor wants to know. Jesus answers with his tale of a man on his way from Jerusalem to Jericho, who is beset by robbers, beaten, and left, quote, 'half dead' by the side of the road.Two men happen along, but, quote, 'pass by on the other side.' One is a priest and the other a Levite, a group that assisted the priests at the Great Temple, which, at that time, dominated the landscape of Jerusalem from the Temple Mount. Then, a Samaritan comes along. The Samaritans belonged to the estranged northern kingdom of Israel, and did not worship at the Temple.Tension between the Samaritans and the Judeans in the Second Temple period gives the name a significance somewhere between 'foreigner' and 'enemy.' [00:09:00] In contemporary terms, he was, as Illich liked to say, 'a Palestinian.' The Samaritan has, quote, 'compassion' on the wounded one. He stops, binds his wounds, takes him to an inn where he can convalesce and promises the innkeeper that he will return to pay the bill.'And so Jesus concludes by asking, 'Which of the three passers by was the neighbor?'Illich claimed that this parable had been persistently misunderstood as a story about how one ought to act. He had surveyed sermons from the 3rd through 19th centuries, he said, 'and found a broad consensus that what was being proposed was a, quote, rule of conduct.' But this interpretation was, in fact, quote, 'the opposite of what Jesus wanted to point out.'He had not been asked how to act toward a neighbor, but rather, 'who is my neighbor?' And he had replied, [00:10:00] scandalously, that it could be anyone at all. The choice of the Samaritan as the hero of the tale said, 'in effect, it is impossible to categorize who your neighbor might be.' The sense of being called to help the other is experienced intermittently and not as an unvarying obligation.A quote, 'new kind of ought has been established,' Illich says, which is not related to a norm. It has a telos, it aims at somebody, some body, but not according to a rule. And finally, The Master told them that who your neighbor is is not determined by your birth, by your condition, by the language which you speak, but by you.You can recognize the other man who is out of bounds culturally, who is foreign linguistically, who, you can [00:11:00] say by providence or pure chance, is the one who lies somewhere along your road in the grass and create the supreme form of relatedness, which is not given by creation, but created by you. Any attempt to explain this 'ought,' as correspond, as, as corresponding to a norm, takes out the mysterious greatness from this free act.And so, I think there are at least, at the very least, a few major points to take away from this little summary I've extracted. One, that the ability to choose one's neighbor, breaks the boundaries of ethnicity at the time, which were the bases for understanding one's identity and people and place in the world.And two, that it creates a new foundation for hospitality and interculturality. And so I'm [00:12:00] curious, David, if you'd be willing to elaborate on these points as you understand them.David: Well if you went a little farther on in that part of the book, you'd find an exposition of a German teacher and writer and professor, Claus Held, that I found very helpful in understanding what Ivan was saying. Held is a phenomenologist and a follower of Husserl, but he uses Husserl's term of the home world, right, that each of us has a home world. Mm-Hmm. Which is our ethnos within which our ethics apply.It's a world in which we can be at home and in which we can somehow manage, right? There are a manageable number of people to whom we are obliged. We're not universally obliged. So, what was interesting about Held's analysis is then the condition in which the wounded [00:13:00] man lies is, he's fallen outside of any reference or any home world, right?Nobody has to care for him. The priest and the Levite evidently don't care for him. They have more important things to do. The story doesn't tell you why. Is he ritually impure as one apparently dead is? What? You don't know. But they're on their way. They have other things to do. So the Samaritan is radically out of line, right?He dares to enter this no man's land, this exceptional state in which the wounded man lies, and he does it on the strength of a feeling, right? A stirring inside him. A call. It's definitely a bodily experience. In Ivan's language of norms, it's not a norm. It's not a duty.It's [00:14:00] not an obligation. It's not a thought. He's stirred. He is moved to do what he does and he cares for him and takes him to the inn and so on. So, the important thing in it for me is to understand the complementarity that's involved. Held says that if you try and develop a set of norms and ethics, however you want to say it, out of the Samaritan's Act, it ends up being radically corrosive, it ends up being radically corrosive damaging, destructive, disintegrating of the home world, right? If everybody's caring for everybody all the time universally, you're pretty soon in the maddening world, not pretty soon, but in a couple of millennia, in the maddening world we live in, right? Where people Can tell you with a straight face that their actions are intended to [00:15:00] save the planet and not experience a sense of grandiosity in saying that, right?Not experiencing seemingly a madness, a sense of things on a scale that is not proper to any human being, and is bound, I think, to be destructive of their capacity to be related to what is at hand. So, I think what Ivan is saying in saying this is a new kind of ought, right, it's the whole thing of the corruption of the best is the worst in a nutshell because as soon as you think you can operationalize that, you can turn everyone into a Samaritan and You, you begin to destroy the home world, right?You begin to destroy ethics. You begin to, or you transform ethics into something which is a contradiction of ethics. [00:16:00] So, there isn't an answer in it, in what he says. There's a complementarity, right? Hmm. There's the freedom to go outside, but if the freedom to go outside destroys any inside, then, what have you done?Right? Hmm. You've created an unlivable world. A world of such unending, such unimaginable obligation, as one now lives in Toronto, you know, where I pass homeless people all the time. I can't care for all of them. So, I think it's also a way of understanding for those who contemplate it that you really have to pay attention.What are you called to, right? What can you do? What is within your amplitude? What is urgent for you? Do that thing, right? Do not make yourself mad with [00:17:00] impossible charity. A charity you don't feel, you can't feel, you couldn't feel. Right? Take care of what's at hand, what you can take care of. What calls you.Chris: I think this comes up quite a bit these days. Especially, in light of international conflicts, conflicts that arise far from people's homes and yet the demand of that 'ought' perhaps of having to be aware and having to have or having to feel some kind of responsibility for these things that are happening in other places that maybe, It's not that they don't have anything to do with us but that our ability to have any kind of recourse for what happens in those places is perhaps flippant, fleeting, and even that we're stretched to the point that we can't even tend and attend to what's happening in front of us in our neighborhoods.And so, I'm curious as to how this came to be. You mentioned "the corruption" [00:18:00] and maybe we could just define that, if possible for our listeners this notion of "the corruption of the best is the worst." Would you be willing to do that? Do you think that that's an easy thing to do? David: I've been trying for 30 years.I can keep on trying. I really, I mean, that was the seed of everything. At the end of the interview we did in 1988, Ivan dropped that little bomb on me. And I was a diligent man, and I had prepared very carefully. I'd read everything he'd written and then at the very end of the interview, he says the whole history of the West can be summed up in the phrase, Corruptio Optimi Pessima.He was quite fluent in Latin. The corruption of the best is the worst. And I thought, wait a minute, the whole history of the West? This is staggering. So, yes, I've been reflecting on it for a long time, but I think there are many ways to speak [00:19:00] about the incarnation, the idea that God is present and visible in the form of a human being, that God indeed is a human being in the person of Jesus Christ.One way is to think of it as a kind of nuclear explosion of religion. Religion had always been the placation of a god. Right? A sacrifice of some kind made to placate a god. Now the god is present. It could be you. Jesus is explicit about it, and I think that is the most important thing for Iman in reading the gospel, is that God appears to us as one another.Hmm. If you can put it, one another in the most general sense of that formula. So, that's explosive, right? I mean, religion, in a certain way, up to that moment, is society. It's the [00:20:00] integument of every society. It's the nature of the beast to be religious in the sense of having an understanding of how you're situated and in what order and with what foundation that order exists. It's not an intellectual thing. It's just what people do. Karl Barth says religion is a yoke. So, it has in a certain way exploded or been exploded at that moment but it will of course be re instituted as a religion. What else could happen? And so Ivan says, and this probably slim New Testament warrant for this, but this was his story, that in the very earliest apostolic church. They were aware of this danger, right? That Christ must be shadowed by "Antichrist," a term that Ivan was brave enough to use. The word just has a [00:21:00] terrible, terrible history. I mean, the Protestants abused the Catholics with the name of Antichrist. Luther rages against the Pope as antichrist.Hmm. And the word persists now as a kind of either as a sign of evangelical dogmatism, or maybe as a joke, right. When I was researching it, I came across a book called "How to Tell If Your Boyfriend Is The Antichrist." Mm-Hmm. It's kind of a jokey thing in a way, in so far as people know, but he dared to use it as to say the antichrist is simply the instituted Christ.Right. It's not anything exotic. It's not anything theological. It's the inevitable worldly shadow of there being a Christ at all. And so that's, that's the beginning of the story. He, he claims that the church loses sight of this understanding, loses sight of the basic [00:22:00] complementarity or contradiction that's involved in the incarnation in the first place.That this is something that can never be owned, something that can never be instituted, something that can only happen again and again and again within each one. So, but heaven can never finally come to earth except perhaps in a story about the end, right? The new heaven and the new earth, the new Jerusalem come down from heaven.Fine. That's at the end, not now. So that's the gist of what he, what he said. He has a detailed analysis of the stages of that journey, right? So, within your theme of hospitality the beginnings of the church becoming a social worker in the decaying Roman Empire. And beginning to develop institutions of hospitality, [00:23:00] places for all the flotsam and jetsam of the decaying empire.And then in a major way from the 11th through the 13th century, when the church institutes itself as a mini or proto state, right? With a new conception of law. Every element of our modernity prefigured in the medieval church and what it undertook, according to Ivan. This was all news to me when he first said it to me.So yeah, the story goes on into our own time when I think one of the primary paradoxes or confusions that we face is that most of the people one meets and deals with believe themselves to be living after Christianity and indeed to great opponents of Christianity. I mean, nothing is more important in Canada now than to denounce residential schools, let's say, right? Which were [00:24:00] the schools for indigenous children, boarding schools, which were mainly staffed by the church, right?So, the gothic figure of the nun, the sort of vulpine, sinister. That's the image of the church, right? So you have so many reasons to believe that you're after that. You've woken up, you're woke. And, and you see that now, right? So you don't In any way, see yourself as involved in this inversion of the gospel which has actually created your world and which is still, in so many ways, you.So, leftists today, if I'm using the term leftists very, very broadly, "progressives," people sometimes say, "woke," people say. These are all in a certain way super Christians or hyper Christians, but absolutely unaware of themselves as Christians and any day you can read an analysis [00:25:00] which traces everything back to the Enlightenment.Right? We need to re institute the Enlightenment. We've forgotten the Enlightenment. We have to get back to the, right? There's nothing before the Enlightenment. The Enlightenment is the over, that's an earlier overcoming of Christianity, right? So modernity is constantly overcoming Christianity. And constantly forgetting that it's Christian.That these are the ways in which the Incarnation is working itself out. And one daren't say that it's bound to work itself out that way. Ivan will go as far as to say it's seemingly the will of God that it should work itself out that way. Right? Wow. So, that the Gospel will be preached to all nations as predicted at the end of the Gospels." Go therefore and preach to all nations," but it will not be preached in its explicit form. It will enter, as it were, through the [00:26:00] back door. So that's a very big thought. But it's a saving thought in certain ways, because it does suggest a way of unwinding, or winding up, this string of finding out how this happened.What is the nature of the misunderstanding that is being played out here? So. Chris: Wow. Yeah, I mean, I, I feel like what you just said was a kind of nuclear bomb unto its own. I remember reading, for example, James Hillman in The Terrible Love of War, and at the very end he essentially listed all, not all, but many of the major characteristics of modern people and said if you act this way, you are Christian.If you act this way, you are Christian. Essentially revealing that so much of modernity has these Christian roots. And, you know, you said in terms of this message and [00:27:00] corruption of the message going in through the back door. And I think that's what happens in terms of at least when we see institutions in the modern time, schools, hospitals, roads essentially modern institutions and lifestyles making their way into non modern places.And I'm very fascinated in this in terms of hospitality. You said that the church, and I think you're quoting Illich there, but " the church is a social worker." But also how this hospitality shows up in the early church and maybe even how they feared about what could happen as a result to this question of the incarnation.In your book it was just fascinating to read this that you said, or that you wrote, that "in the early years of Christianity it was customary in a Christian household to have an extra mattress, a bit of candle, and some dry bread in case the Lord Jesus should knock at the door in the form of a stranger without a roof, a form of behavior that was utterly [00:28:00] foreign to the cultures of the Roman Empire."In which many Christians lived. And you write, "you took in your own, but not someone lost on the street." And then later "When the emperor Constantine recognized the church, Christian bishops gained the power to establish social corporations." And this is, I think, the idea of the social worker. The church is a social worker.And you write that the first corporations they started were Samaritan corporations, which designated certain categories of people as preferred neighbors. For example, the bishops created special houses financed by the community that were charged with taking care of people without a home. Such care was no longer the free choice of the householder, it was the task of an institution.The appearance of these xenodocheia? Literally, quote, 'houses for foreigners' signified the beginning of a change in the nature of the church." And then of course you write and you mentioned this but "a gratuitous and truly [00:29:00] free choice of assisting the stranger has become an ideology and an idealism." Right. And so, this seems to be how the corruption of the Samaritan story, the corruption of breaking that threshold, or at least being able to cross it, comes to produce this incredible 'ought,' as you just kind of elaborated for us.And then this notion of, that we can't see it anymore. That it becomes this thing in the past, as you said. In other words, history. Right? And so my next question is a question that comes to some degree from our late mutual friend Gustavo, Gustavo Esteva. And I'd just like to preface it by a small sentence from An Intellectual Journey where he wrote that, "I think that limit, in Illich, is always linked to nemesis, or to what Jung calls [00:30:00] enantiodromia, his Greek word for the way in which any tendency, when pushed too far, can turn into its opposite. And so, a long time ago, Illich once asked Gustavo if he could identify a word that could describe the era after development, or perhaps after development's death.And Gustavo said, "hospitality." And so, much later, in a private conversation with Gustavo, in the context of tourism and gentrification, the kind that was beginning to sweep across Oaxaca at the time, some years ago, he told me that he considered "the sale of one's people's radical or local hospitality as a kind of invitation to hostility in the place and within the ethnos that one lives in."Another way of saying it might be that the subversion and absence of hospitality in a place breeds or can breed hostility.[00:31:00] I'm curious what you make of his comment in the light of limits, enantiodromia and the corruption that Illich talks about.David: Well I'd like to say one thing which is the thought I was having while you, while you were speaking because at the very beginning I mentioned a reservation a discomfort with words like perversion and corruption. And the thought is that it's easy to understand Illich as doing critique, right? And it's easy then to moralize that critique, right? And I think it's important that he's showing something that happens, right? And that I daren't say bound to happen, but is likely to happen because of who and what we are, that we will institutionalize, that we will make rules, that we will, right?So, I think it's important to rescue Ivan from being read [00:32:00] moralistically, or that you're reading a scold here, right? Hmm. Right. I mean, and many social critics are or are read as scolds, right? And contemporary people are so used to being scolded that they, and scold themselves very regularly. So, I just wanted to say that to rescue Ivan from a certain kind of reading. You're quoting Gustavo on the way in which the opening up of a culture touristically can lead to hostility, right? Right. And I think also commenting on the roots of the words are the same, right? "hostile," "hospice." They're drawing on the same, right?That's right. It's how one treats the enemy, I think. Hmm. It's the hinge. Hmm. In all those words. What's the difference between hospitality and hostility?[00:33:00] So, I think that thought is profound and profoundly fruitful. So, I think Gustavo had many resources in expressing it.I couldn't possibly express it any better. And I never answered you at the beginning how I met Gustavo, but on that occasion in 1988 when I was interviewing Illich, they were all gathered, a bunch of friends to write what was called The Development Dictionary, a series of essays trying to write an epilogue to the era of development.So, Gustavo, as you know, was a charming man who spoke a peculiarly beautiful English in which he was fluent, but somehow, you could hear the cadence of Spanish through it without it even being strongly accented. So I rejoiced always in interviewing Gustavo, which I did several times because he was such a pleasure to listen to.But anyway, I've digressed. Maybe I'm ducking your question. Do you want to re ask it or? Chris: Sure. [00:34:00] Yeah, I suppose. You know although there were a number of essays that Gustavo wrote about hospitality that I don't believe have been published they focused quite a bit on this notion of individual people, but especially communities putting limits on their hospitality.And of course, much of this hospitality today comes in the form of, or at least in the context of tourism, of international visitors. And that's kind of the infrastructure that's placed around it. And yet he was arguing essentially for limits on hospitality. And I think what he was seeing, although it hadn't quite come to fruition yet in Oaxaca, was that the commodification, the commercialization of one's local indigenous hospitality, once it's sold, or once it's only existing for the value or money of the foreigner, in a kind of customer service worldview, that it invites this deep [00:35:00] hostility. And so do these limits show up as well in Illich's work in terms of the stranger?Right? Because so much of the Christian tradition is based in a universal fraternity, universal brotherhood. David: I said that Ivan made sense to me in my youth, as a 22 year old man. So I've lived under his influence. I took him as a master, let's say and as a young person. And I would say that probably it's true that I've never gone anywhere that I haven't been invited to go.So I, I could experience that, that I was called to be there. And he was quite the jet setter, so I was often called by him to come to Mexico or to go to Germany or whatever it was. But we live in a world that is so far away from the world that might have been, let's say, the world that [00:36:00] might be.So John Milbank, a British theologian who's Inspiring to me and a friend and somebody who I found surprisingly parallel to Illich in a lot of ways after Ivan died and died I think feeling that he was pretty much alone in some of his understandings. But John Milbank speaks of the, of recovering the future that we've lost, which is obviously have to be based on some sort of historical reconstruction. You have to find the place to go back to, where the wrong turning was, in a certain way. But meanwhile, we live in this world, right? Where even where you are, many people are dependent on tourism. Right? And to that extent they live from it and couldn't instantly do without. To do without it would be, would be catastrophic. Right? So [00:37:00] it's it's not easy to live in both worlds. Right? To live with the understanding that this is, as Gustavo says, it's bound to be a source of hostility, right?Because we can't sell what is ours as an experience for others without changing its character, right, without commodifying it. It's impossible to do. So it must be true and yet, at a certain moment, people feel that it has to be done, right? And so you have to live in in both realities.And in a certain way, the skill of living in both realities is what's there at the beginning, right? That, if you take the formula of the incarnation as a nuclear explosion, well you're still going to have religion, right? So, that's inevitable. The [00:38:00] world has changed and it hasn't changed at the same time.And that's true at every moment. And so you learn to walk, right? You learn to distinguish the gospel from its surroundings. And a story about Ivan that made a big impression on me was that when he was sent to Puerto Rico when he was still active as a priest in 1956 and became vice rector of the Catholic University at Ponce and a member of the school board.A position that he regarded as entirely political. So he said, "I will not in any way operate as a priest while I'm performing a political function because I don't want these two things to get mixed up." And he made a little exception and he bought a little shack in a remote fishing village.Just for the happiness of it, he would go there and say mass for the fishermen who didn't know anything about this other world. So, but that was[00:39:00] a radical conviction and put him at odds with many of the tendencies of his time, as for example, what came to be called liberation theology, right?That there could be a politicized theology. His view was different. His view was that the church as "She," as he said, rather than "it," had to be always distinguished, right? So it was the capacity to distinguish that was so crucial for him. And I would think even in situations where tourism exists and has the effect Gustavo supposed, the beginning of resistance to that and the beginning of a way out of it, is always to distinguish, right?To know the difference, which is a slim read, but, but faith is always a slim read and Ivan's first book, his first collection of published essays was [00:40:00] called Celebration of Awareness which is a way of saying that, what I call know the difference. Chris: So I'm going to, if I can offer you this, this next question, which comes from James, a friend in Guelph, Canada. And James is curious about the missionary mandate of Christianity emphasizing a fellowship in Christ over ethnicity and whether or not this can be reconciled with Illich's perhaps emphatic defense of local or vernacular culture.David: Well, yeah. He illustrates it. I mean, he was a worldwide guy. He was very far from his roots, which were arguably caught. He didn't deracinate himself. Hmm. He was with his mother and brothers exiled from Split in Dalmatia as a boy in the crazy atmosphere of the Thirties.But he was a tumbleweed after [00:41:00] that. Mm-Hmm. . And so, so I think we all live in that world now and this is confuses people about him. So, a historian called Todd Hart wrote a book still really the only book published in English on the history of CIDOC and Cuernavaca, in which he says Illich is anti-missionary. And he rebukes him for that and I would say that Ivan, on his assumptions cannot possibly be anti missionary. He says clearly in his early work that a Christian is a missionary or is not a Christian at all, in the sense that if one has heard the good news, one is going to share it, or one hasn't heard it. Now, what kind of sharing is that? It isn't necessarily, "you have to join my religion," "you have to subscribe to the following ten..." it isn't necessarily a catechism, it may be [00:42:00] an action. It may be a it may be an act of friendship. It may be an act of renunciation. It can be any number of things, but it has to be an outgoing expression of what one has been given, and I think he was, in that sense, always a missionary, and in many places, seeded communities that are seeds of the new church.Right? He spent well, from the time he arrived in the United States in 51, 52, till the time that he withdrew from church service in 68, he was constantly preaching and talking about a new church. And a new church, for him, involved a new relation between innovation and tradition. New, but not new.Since, when he looked back, he saw the gospel was constantly undergoing translation into new milieu, into new places, into new languages, into new forms.[00:43:00] But he encountered it in the United States as pretty much in one of its more hardened or congealed phases, right? And it was the export of that particular brand of cultural and imperialistic, because American, and America happened to be the hegemon of the moment. That's what he opposed.The translation of that into Latin America and people like to write each other into consistent positions, right? So, he must then be anti missionary across the board, right? But so I think you can be local and universal. I mean, one doesn't even want to recall that slogan of, you know, "act locally, think globally," because it got pretty hackneyed, right?And it was abused. But, it's true in a certain way that that's the only way one can be a Christian. The neighbor, you said it, I wrote it, Ivan said it, " the neighbor [00:44:00] can be anyone." Right?But here I am here now, right? So both have to apply. Both have to be true. It's again a complementary relation. And it's a banal thought in a certain way, but it seems to be the thought that I think most often, right, is that what creates a great deal of the trouble in the world is inability to think in a complementary fashion.To think within, to take contradiction as constituting the world. The world is constituted of contradiction and couldn't be constituted in any other way as far as we know. Right? You can't walk without two legs. You can't manipulate without two arms, two hands. We know the structure of our brains. Are also bilateral and everything about our language is constructed on opposition.Everything is oppositional and yet [00:45:00] when we enter the world of politics, it seems we're going to have it all one way. The church is going to be really Christian, and it's going to make everybody really Christian, or communist, what have you, right? The contradiction is set aside. Philosophy defines truth as the absence of contradiction.Hmm. Basically. Hmm. So, be in both worlds. Know the difference. Walk on two feet. That's Ivan. Chris: I love that. And I'm, I'm curious about you know, one of the themes of the podcast is exile. And of course that can mean a lot of things. In the introduction to An Intellectual Journey, you wrote that that Illich, "once he had left Split in the 30s, that he began an experience of exile that would characterize his entire life."You wrote that he had lost "not just the home, but the very possibility [00:46:00] of home." And so it's a theme that characterizes as well the podcast and a lot of these conversations around travel, migration, tourism, what does it mean to be at home and so, this, This notion of exile also shows up quite a bit in the Christian faith.And maybe this is me trying to escape the complementarity of the reality of things. But I tend to see exile as inherently I'll say damaging or consequential in a kind of negative light. And so I've been wondering about this, this exilic condition, right? It's like in the Abrahamic faith, as you write "Judaism, Christianity, and Islam all begin in exile.And eventually this pattern culminates. Jesus is executed outside the gates of the city, nailed to a cross that excludes him even from his native earth." And you write that "exile is in many ways the [00:47:00] Christian condition." And so, you know, I've read that in the past, Christian monks often consider themselves to be homeless, removed from the sort of daily life of the local community in the monasteries and abbeys and yet still of a universal brotherhood. And so I'd like to ask you if you feel this exilic condition, which seems to be also a hallmark of modernity, this kind of constant uprooting this kind of as I would call it, cultural and spiritual homelessness of our time, if you think that is part of the corruption that Illich based his work around?David: Well, one can barely imagine the world in which Abram, who became Abraham said to God, no, I'm staying in Ur. Not going, I'm not going. Right? I mean, if you go back to Genesis and you re read that passage, when God shows [00:48:00] Abraham the land that he will inherit, it says already there, "there were people at that time living in the land," right?Inconvenient people, as it turns out. Palestinians. So, there's a profound contradiction here, I think. And the only way I think you can escape it is to understand the Gospel the way Ivan understood it, which is as something super added to existing local cultures, right? A leaven, right?Hmm. Not everything about a local culture or a local tradition is necessarily good. Mm hmm. And so it can be changed, right? And I would say that Illich insists that Christians are and must be missionaries. They've received something that they it's inherent in what they've [00:49:00] received that they pass it on.So the world will change, right? But Ivan says, this is in Rivers North of the Future, that it's his conviction that the Gospel could have been preached without destroying local proportions, the sense of proportion, and he put a great weight on the idea of proportionality as not just, a pleasing building or a pleasing face, but the very essence of, of how a culture holds together, right, that things are proportioned within it to one another that the gospel could have been preached without the destruction of proportions, but evidently it wasn't, because the Christians felt they had the truth and they were going to share it. They were going to indeed impose it for the good of the other.So, I think a sense of exile and a sense of home are as [00:50:00] necessary to one another as in Ivan's vision of a new church, innovation, and tradition, or almost any other constitutive couplet you can think of, right? You can't expunge exile from the tradition. But you also can't allow it to overcome the possibility of home.I mean, Ivan spoke of his own fate as a peculiar fate, right? He really anticipated the destruction of the Western culture or civilization. I mean, in the sense that now this is a lament on the political right, mainly, right? The destruction of Western civilization is something one constantly hears about.But, he, in a way, in the chaos and catastrophe of the 30s, already felt the death of old Europe. And even as a boy, I think, semi consciously at least, took the roots inside himself, took them with him [00:51:00] and for many people like me, he opened that tradition. He opened it to me. He allowed me to re inhabit it in a certain way, right?So to find intimations of home because he wasn't the only one who lost his home. Even as a man of 78, the world in which I grew up here is gone, forgotten, and to some extent scorned by younger people who are just not interested in it. And so it's through Ivan that I, in a way, recovered the tradition, right?And if the tradition is related to the sense of home, of belonging to something for good or ill, then that has to be carried into the future as best we can, right? I think Ivan was searching for a new church. He didn't think. He had found it. He didn't think he knew what it was.I don't think he [00:52:00] described certain attributes of it. Right. But above all, he wanted to show that the church had taken many forms in the past. Right. And it's worldly existence did not have to be conceived on the model of a monarchy or a parish, right, another form that he described in some early essays, right.We have to find the new form, right? It may be radically non theological if I can put it like that. It may not necessarily involve the buildings that we call churches but he believed deeply in the celebrating community. As the center, the root the essence of social existence, right? The creation of home in the absence of home, or the constant recreation of home, right? Since I mean, we will likely never again live in pure [00:53:00] communities, right? Yeah. I don't know if pure is a dangerous word, but you know what I mean?Consistent, right? Closed. We're all of one kind, right? Right. I mean, this is now a reactionary position, right? Hmm. You're a German and you think, well, Germany should be for the Germans. I mean, it can't be for the Germans, seemingly. We can't put the world back together again, right?We can't go back and that's a huge misreading of Illich, right? That he's a man who wants to go back, right? No. He was radically a man who wanted to rediscover the future. And rescue it. Also a man who once said to hell with the future because he wanted to denounce the future that's a computer model, right? All futures that are projections from the present, he wanted to denounce in order to rediscover the future. But it has to be ahead of us. It's not. And it has to recover the deposit that is behind us. So [00:54:00] both, the whole relation between past and future and indeed the whole understanding of time is out of whack.I think modern consciousness is so entirely spatialized that the dimension of time is nearly absent from it, right? The dimension of time as duration as the integument by which past, present and future are connected. I don't mean that people can't look at their watch and say, you know, "I gotta go now, I've got a twelve o'clock." you know.So, I don't know if that's an answer to James.Chris: I don't know, but it's food for thought and certainly a feast, if I may say so. David, I have two final questions for you, if that's all right, if you have time. Okay, wonderful. So, speaking of this notion of home and and exile and the complementarity of the two and you know you wrote and [00:55:00] spoke to this notion of Illich wanting to rediscover the future and he says that "we've opened a horizon on which new paradigms for thought can appear," which I think speaks to what you were saying and At some point Illich compares the opening of horizons to leaving home on a pilgrimage, as you write in your book."And not the pilgrimage of the West, which leads over a traveled road to a famed sanctuary, but rather the pilgrimage of the Christian East, which does not know where the road might lead and the journey end." And so my question is, What do you make of that distinction between these types of pilgrimages and what kind of pilgrimage do you imagine might be needed in our time?David: Well, I, I mean, I think Ivan honored the old style of pilgrimage whether it was to [00:56:00] Canterbury or Santiago or wherever it was to. But I think ivan's way of expressing the messianic was in the word surprise, right? One of the things that I think he did and which was imposed on him by his situation and by his times was to learn to speak to people in a way that did not draw on any theological resource, so he spoke of his love of surprises, right? Well, a surprise by definition is what you don't suspect, what you don't expect. Or it couldn't be a surprise.So, the The cathedral in Santiago de Compostela is very beautiful, I think. I've only ever seen pictures of it, but you must expect to see it at the end of your road. You must hope to see it at the end of your road. Well the surprise is going to be something else. Something that isn't known.[00:57:00] And it was one of his Great gifts to me that within the structure of habit and local existence, since I'm pretty rooted where I am. And my great grandfather was born within walking distance of where I am right now. He helped me to look for surprises and to accept them also, right?That you're going to show up or someone else is going to show up, right? But there's going to be someone coming and you want to look out for the one who's coming and not, but not be at all sure that you know who or what it is or which direction it's coming from. So, that was a way of life in a certain way that I think he helped others within their limitations, within their abilities, within their local situations, to see the world that way, right. That was part of what he did. Chris: Yeah, it's really beautiful and I can [00:58:00] see how in our time, in a time of increasing division and despondency and neglect, fear even, resentment of the other, that how that kind of surprise and the lack of expectation, the undermining, the subversion of expectation can find a place into perhaps the mission of our times.And so my final question comes back to friendship. and interculturality. And I have one final quote here from An Intellectual Journey, which I highly recommend everyone pick up, because it's just fascinating and blows open so many doors. David: We need to sell a few more books, because I want that book in paperback. Because I want it to be able to live on in a cheaper edition. So, yes. Chris: Of course. Thank you. Yeah. Please, please pick it up. It's worth every penny. So in An Intellectual Journey, it is written[00:59:00] by Illich that "when I submit my heart, my mind, my body, I come to be below the other. When I listen unconditionally, respectfully, courageously, with the readiness to take in the other as a radical surprise, I do something else. I bow, bend over toward the total otherness of someone. But I renounce searching for bridges between the other and me, recognizing that a gulf separates us.Leaning into this chasm makes me aware of the depth of my loneliness, and able to bear it in the light of the substantial likeness between the Other and myself. All that reaches me is the Other in His Word, which I accept on faith."And so, David at another point in the biography you quote Illich describing faith as foolish. Now assuming that faith elicits a degree of danger or [01:00:00] betrayal or that it could elicit that through a kind of total trust, is that nonetheless necessary to accept the stranger or other as they are? Or at least meet the stranger or other as they are? David: I would think so, yeah. I mean the passage you've quoted, I think to understand it, it's one of the most profound of his sayings to me and one I constantly revert to, but to accept the other in his word, or on his word, or her word, is, I think you need to know that he takes the image of the word as the name of the Lord, very, very seriously, and its primary way of referring to the Christ, is "as the Word."Sometimes explicitly, sometimes not explicitly, you have to interpret. So, when he says that he renounces looking for bridges, I think he's mainly referring [01:01:00] to ideological intermediations, right, ways in which I, in understanding you exceed my capacity. I try to change my name for you, or my category for you, changes you, right?It doesn't allow your word. And, I mean, he wasn't a man who suffered fools gladly. He had a high regard for himself and used his time in a fairly disciplined way, right? He wasn't waiting around for others in their world. So by word, what does he mean?What is the other's word? Right? It's something more fundamental than the chatter of a person. So, I think what that means is that we can be linked to one another by Christ. So that's [01:02:00] the third, right? That yes, we're alone. Right? We haven't the capacity to reach each other, except via Christ.And that's made explicit for him in the opening of Aylred of Riveau's Treatise on Friendship, which was peculiarly important to him. Aylred was an abbot at a Cistercian monastery in present day Yorkshire, which is a ruin now. But he wrote a treatise on friendship in the 12th century and he begins by addressing his brother monk, Ivo, and says, you know, " here we are, you and I, and I hope a third Christ."So, Christ is always the third, right? So, in that image of the gulf, the distance, experiencing myself and my loneliness and yet renouncing any bridge, there is still a word, the word, [01:03:00] capital W, in which a word, your word, my word, participates, or might participate. So, we are building, according to him, the body of Christ but we have to renounce our designs on one another, let's say, in order to do that. So I mean, that's a very radical saying, the, the other in his word and in another place in The Rivers North of the Future, he says how hard that is after a century of Marxism or Freudianism, he mentions. But, either way he's speaking about my pretension to know you better than you know yourself, which almost any agency in our world that identifies needs, implicitly does. I know what's best for you. So Yeah, his waiting, his ability to wait for the other one is, is absolutely [01:04:00] foundational and it's how a new world comes into existence. And it comes into existence at every moment, not at some unimaginable future when we all wait at the same time, right? My friend used to say that peace would come when everybody got a good night's sleep on the same night. It's not very likely, is it? Right, right, right. So, anyway, there we are. Chris: Wow. Well, I'm definitely looking forward to listening to this interview again, because I feel like just like An Intellectual Journey, just like your most recent book my mind has been, perhaps exploded, another nuclear bomb dropped.David: Chris, nice to meet you. Chris: Yeah, I'll make sure that that book and, of course, links to yours are available on the end of the website. David: Alright, thank you. Chris: Yeah, deep bow, David. Thank you for your time today. David: All the best. And thank you for those questions. Yeah. That was that was very interesting. You know, I spent my life as an interviewer. A good part of my [01:05:00] life. And interviewing is very hard work. It's much harder than talking. Listening is harder than talking. And rarer. So, it's quite a pleasure for me, late in life, to be able to just let her rip, and let somebody else worry about is this going in the right direction? So, thank you. Get full access to ⌘ Chris Christou ⌘ at chrischristou.substack.com/subscribe

What is ESA money going towards? David Well with the Grand Canyon Institute explains the groups' views on the scholarship money and how it should be regulated. 

Reed Smith and its lawyers have used machine-assisted case preparation tools for many years (and it launched the Gravity Stack subsidiary) to apply legal technology that cuts costs, saves labor and extracts serious questions faster for senior lawyers to review. Partners David Cohen, Anthony Diana and Therese Craparo discuss how generative AI is creating powerful new options for legal teams using machine-assisted legal processes in case preparation and e-discovery. They discuss how the field of e-discovery, with the help of emerging AI systems, is becoming more widely accepted as a cost and quality improvement. ----more---- Transcript: Intro: Hello, and welcome to Tech Law Talks, a podcast brought to you by Reed Smith's Emerging Technologies Group. In each episode of this podcast, we will discuss cutting-edge issues on technology, data, and the law. We will provide practical observations on a wide variety of technology and data topics to give you quick and actionable tips to address the issues you are dealing with every day.  David: Hello, everyone, and welcome to Tech Law Talks and our new series on AI. Over the the coming months, we'll explore the key challenges and opportunities within the rapidly evolving AI landscape. Today, we're going to focus on AI in eDiscovery. My name is David Cohen, and I'm pleased to be joined today by my colleagues, Anthony, Diana, and Therese Craparo. I head up Reed Smith's Records & eDiscovery practice group, big practice group, 70 plus lawyers strong, and we're very excited to be moving into AI territory. And we've been using some AI tools and we're testing new ones. Therese, I'm going to turn it over to you to introduce yourself.  Therese: Sure. Thanks, Dave. Hi, my name is Therese Craparo. I am a partner in our Emerging Technologies Group here at Reed Smith. My practice focuses on eDiscovery, digital innovation, and data risk management. And And like all of us, seeing a significant uptick in the interest in using AI across industries and particularly in the legal industry. Anthony?  Anthony: Hello, this is Anthony Diana. I am a partner in the New York office, also part of the Emerging Technologies Group. And similarly, my practice focuses on digital transformation projects for large clients, particularly financial institutions. and also been dealing with e-discovery issues for more than 20 years, basically, as long as e-discovery has existed. I think all of us have on this call. So looking forward to talking about AI.  David: Thanks, Anthony. And my first question is, the field of e-discovery was one of the first to make practical use of AI in the form of predictive coding and document analytics. Predictive coding has now been around for more than two decades. So, Teresa and Anthony, how's that been working out?  Therese: You know, I think it's a dual answer, right? It's been working out incredibly well, and yet it's not used as much as it should be. I think that at this stage, the use of predictive coding and analytics in e-discovery is pretty standard, right? Right. As Dave, as you said, two decades ago, it was very controversial and there was a lot of debate and dispute about the appropriate use and the right controls and the like going on in the industry and a lot of discovery fights around that. But I think at this stage, we've really gotten to a point where this technology is, you know, well understood, used incredibly effectively to appropriately manage and streamline e-discovery and to improve on discovery processes and the like. I think it's far less controversial in terms of its use. And frankly, the e-discovery industry has done a really great job at promoting it and finding ways to use this advanced technology in litigation. I think that one of the challenges is that still is that while the lawyers who are using it are using it incredibly effectively, it's still not enough people that have adopted it. And I think there are still lawyers out there that haven't been using predictive coding or document analytics in ways that they could be using it to improve their own processes. I don't know, Anthony, what are your thoughts on that?  Anthony: Yeah, I mean, I think to reiterate this, I mean, the predictive coding that everyone's used to is it's machine learning, right? So it's AI, but it's machine learning. And I think it was particularly helpful just in terms of workflow and what we're trying to accomplish in eDiscovery when we're trying to produce relevant information. Information, machine learning made a lot of sense. And I think I was a big proponent of it. I think a lot of people are because it gave a lot of control. The big issue was it allowed, I would call, senior attorneys to have more control over what is relevant. So the whole idea is you would train the model with looking at relevant documents, and then you would have senior attorneys basically get involved and say, okay, what are the edge cases? It was the basic stuff was easy. You had the edge cases, you could have senior attorneys look at it, make that call, and then basically you would use the technology to use what I would say, whatever you're thinking in your brain, the senior attorney, that is now going to be used to help determine relevance. And you're not relying as much on the contract attorneys and the workflow. So it made a whole host of sense, frankly, from a risk perspective. I think one of the issues that we saw early on is everyone was saying it was going to save lots of money. Didn't really save a lot of money, right? Partly because the volumes went up too much, partly because, you know, the process, but from a risk perspective, I thought it was really good because I think you were getting better quality, which I think was one of the things that's most important, right? And I think this is going to be important as we start talking about AI generally is, and in terms of processes, it was a quality play, right? It was, this is better. It's a better process. It's better managing the risks than just having manual review. So that was the key to it, I think. As we talked about, there was lots of controversy about it. The controversy often stemmed from, I'll call it the validation. We had lots of attorneys saying, I want to see the validation set. They wanted to see how the model was trained. You have to give us all the documents and train. And I think generally that fell by the wayside. That really didn't really happen. One of the keys though, and I think this is also true for all AI, is the validation testing, which Teresa touched upon, that became critical. I think people realized that one of the things you had to do as you're training the model and you started seeing things, you would always do some sampling and do validation testing to see if the model was working correctly. And that validation testing was the defensibility that courts, I think, latched on on. And I think when we start talking about Gen AI, that's going to be one of the issues. People are comfortable with machine learning, understand the risks, understand, you know, one of the other big risks that we all saw as part of it was the data set would change, right? You have 10 custodians, you train the model, then you got another 10 custodians. Sometimes it didn't matter. Sometimes it really made a big difference and you had to retrain the model. So I think we're all comfortable with that. I think as Therese said, it's still not as prevalent as you would have imagined, given how effective it is, but it's partly because it's a lot of work, right? And often it's a lot of work by, I'll say, senior attorneys instead of developing it, when it's still a lot easier to say, let's just use search terms, negotiate it, and then throw a bunch of contract attorneys on it, and then do what you see. It works, but I think that's still one of the impediments of it actually being used as much as we thought.  Therese: And I think to pick up on what Anthony is saying, what I think is really important is we do have 20 years of experience using AI technology in the e-discovery industry. So much has been learned about how you use those models, the appropriate controls, how you get quality validation and the like. And I think that there's so much to use from that in the increasing use of AI in e-discovery, in the legal field in general, even across organizations. There's a lot of value to be had there of leveraging the lessons learned and applying them to the use of the emerging types of AI that we're seeing that I think we need to keep in mind and the legal field needs to keep in mind that we know how to use this and we know how to understand it. We know how to make it defensible. And I think as we move forward, those lessons are going to serve us really well in facilitating, you know, more advanced use of AI. So in thinking about how the changes may happen going forward, right, as we're looking forward, how do we think that generative AI based on large language models are going to change e-discovery in the future?  Anthony: I think there, in terms of how generative AI is going to work, I have my doubts, frankly, about how effective it's going to be. We all know that these large language models are basically based on billions, if not trillions of data points or whatever, but it's generic. It's all public information. That's how the model is based. One of the things that I want to see as people start using generative AI and seeing how it would work, is how is that going to play when we're talking about very, it's confidential information, like almost all of our clients that are dealing with e-discovery, all this stuff's confidential. It's not stuff that's public. So I understand the concept if you have a large language model that is billions and billions of data points or whatever is going to be exact, but it's a probability calculation, right? It's basically guessing what the next answer is going going to be, the next word is going to be based on this general population, not necessarily on some very esoteric area that you may be focused on for a particular case, right? So I think it remains to be seen of whether it's going to work. I think the other area where I have concerns, which I want to see, is the validation point. Like, how do we show it's defensible? If you're going in and telling a court, oh, I use Gen AI and ran the tool, here's the relevant stuff based on prompts, what does that mean? How are we going to validate that? I think that's going to be one of the keys is how do we come up with a validation methodology that will be defensible that people will be comfortable with? Again, I think intuitively machine learning was I'm training the model on what a person, a human being deemed is responsive. So that. Frankly, it's easier to argue to a court. It's easier to explain to a regulator. When you say, I came up with prompts based on the allegations of the complaint or whatever, it's a little bit more esoteric, and I think it's a little bit harder for someone to get their heads around. How do you know you're getting relevant information? So, I think there's some challenges there. I don't know how that's going to play out. I don't know, Dave, because I know you're testing a lot of these tools, what you're seeing in terms of how we think this is actually going to work in terms of using generative AI in these large language models and moving away from the machine learning.  David: Yeah, I agree with you on the to be determined part, but I think I come in a little bit more optimistic and part of it might be, you know, actually starting to use some of these tools. I think that predictive coding has really paved the way for these AI tools because what held up predictive coding to some extent was people weren't sure that courts were going to accept it. Until the first opinions came out, Judge Peck's decision and the Silvermore and subsequent case decisions, there was concern about that. But once that precedent came out, and it's important to emphasize that the precedent wasn't just approving predictive coding, it was approving technology-assisted review. And this generative AI is really just another form of technology-assisted review. And what it basically said is you have to show that it's valid. You have to do this validation testing. But the same validation testing that we've been doing to support predictive coding will work on the large language model generative AI-assisted coding. It's essentially you do the review and then you take a sample and you say, well, was this review done well? Did we hit a high accuracy level? The early testing we're doing is showing that we are hitting even better accuracy levels than with predictive coding alone. And I should say that it's even improved in the six months or so that we've been testing. The companies that are building the software are continuing to improve it. So I am optimistic in that sense. But many of these products are still in development. The pricing is still either high or to be announced in some cases. And it's not clear yet that it will be cost effective beyond current models of using human review and predictive coding and search terms. And they're not all mutually exclusive. I mean, I can see ultimately getting to a hybrid model where we still may start with search terms to cut down on volume and then may use some predictive coding and some human review and some generative AI. Ultimately, I think we'll get to the point where the price point comes down and it will make review better and cheaper. Right. But I also didn't want to mention, I see a couple other areas of application in eDiscovery as well. The generative AI is really good at summarizing single large documents or even groups of documents. It's also extremely helpful in more quickly identifying key documents. You can ask questions about a whole big document population and get answers. So I'm really excited to see this evolution. And I don't know when we're going to get there and what the price effectiveness point is going to be. But I would say that in the next year or two, we're going to start seeing it creep in and use more and more effectively, more and more cost effectively as we go forward.  Anthony: Yeah, that's fascinating. Yeah, I can see that even in terms of document review. If a human was looking at it, if AI is summarizing the document, you can make your relevance determination based on the summary. Again, we can all talk about whether it's appropriate or not, but that would probably help quite a bit. And I do think that's fascinating. I know another thing I hear is the privilege log stuff. And again, I think using AI, generative AI to draft privilege logs in concept sounds great because obviously it's a big costs factor and the like. But I think we've talked about this, Dave and Therese, like we already have, like there's already tools available, meaning you can negotiate metadata logs and some of these other things that cut the cost down. So I think it remains to be seen. Again, I think this is going to be like another arrow in your quiver, a tool to use, and you just have to figure out when you want to use it.  Therese: Yeah. And I think one of the things I think in not limiting ourselves to only thinking about, right, document review, where there's a lot of possibility with generative AI, right, witness kits, putting together witness outlines for depositions and the like, right? Not that we would ever just rely on that, but there's a huge opportunity there, I think, as a starting point, right? Just like if you're using it appropriately. And of course, today's point, the price point is reasonable, you can do initial research. There's a lot of things that I think that it can do in the discovery realm, even outside of just document review, that I think we should keep our minds open to because it's a way of giving us a quicker, getting to the base more quickly and more efficiently and frankly, more cost-effectively. And then you can take a look at that and the person and can augment that or build upon it to make sure it's accurate and it's appropriate for that particular litigation or that particular witness and the like. But I do think that Dave really hit the nail on the head. I don't think this is going to be, we're only going to be moving to generative AI and we're going to abandon other types of AI. There's reasons why there's different types of AI is because they do different things. And I think what we are most likely to see is a hybrid. Right. Right. Some tools being used for something, some tools being used for others. And I think eventually, as Dave already highlighted, the combination of the use of different types of AI in the e-discovery process and within the same tool to get to a better place. I think that's where we're most likely heading. And as Dave said, that's where a lot of the vendors are actually focusing is on adding into their workflow this additional AI to improve the process.  David: Yeah. And it's interesting that some of the early versions are not really replacing the human review. They are predicting where the human review is going to come out. So when the reviewer looks at the document, it already tells you what the software says. Is it relevant or not relevant? And it does go one step beyond. It's hard because it not only tells you the prediction of whether it's relevant or not, but it also gives you a reason. So it can accelerate the review and that can create great cost savings. But it's not just document review. Already, there's e-discovery tools out there that allow you to ask questions, query databases, but also build chronologies. And again, with that benefit, then referencing you to certain documents and in some cases having hyperlinks. So it'll tell you facts or it'll tell you answers to a question and it'll link back to the documents that support those answers. So I think there's great potential as this continues to grow and improve.  Anthony: Yeah. And I would say also, again, let's think about the whole EDRM model, right? Preservation. I mean, we'll see what enterprises do, but on the enterprise side, using AI bots and stuff like that for whether it's preservation, collection and stuff, it'll be very interesting to see if these tools can be used there to sort of automate some of the standard workflows before we get to the review and the like, but even on the enterprise side. The other thing that I think it will be interesting, and I think this is one of the areas where we still have not seen broad adoption, is on the privilege side. We know and we've done some analysis for clients where privilege or looking for highly sensitive documents and the like is still something that most lawyers aren't comfortable using. Using AI, don't know why I've done it and it worked effectively, but that is still an area where lawyers have been hesitant. And it'll be interesting to see if gender of AI and the tools there can help with privilege, right? Whether it's the privilege logs, whether it's identifying privilege documents. I think to your point, Dave, having the ability to say it's privileged and here's the reasons would be really helpful in doing privilege review. So it'll be interesting to see how AI works in that sphere as well, because it is an area where we haven't seen wide adoption of using predictive coding or TAR in terms of identifying privilege. And that's still a major cost for a lot of clients. All right, so then I guess where this all leads to is, and this is more future-oriented. Do we think we're at this stage now that we have generative AI that there's a paradigm shift, right? Do we think there's going to be a point where even, you know, we didn't see that paradigm shift bluntly with predictive coding, right? Predictive coding came out, everyone said, oh my God, discovery is going to change forever. We don't need contract attorneys anymore. You know, associates aren't going to have anything to do because you're just going to train the model, it goes out. And that's clearly hasn't happened. Now people are making similar predictions with the use of generative AI. We're now not going to need to do docker view, whatever. And I think there is concern, and this is concern just generally in the industry, is this an area, since we're already using AI, where AI can take over basically the discovery function, where we're not necessarily using lots of lawyers and we're relying almost exclusively on AI, whether it's a combination of machine learning or if it's just generative AI. And they're doing lots of work without any input or very little input from lawyers. So I'll start with Dave there. What are your thoughts in terms of where do we see in the next three to five years? Are we going to see some tipping point?  David: Yeah, it's interesting. Historically, there's no question that predictive coding did allow lawyers to get through big document populations faster and for predictions that it was going to replace all human review. And it really hasn't. But part of that has been the proliferation of electronic data. There's just more data than ever before, more sources of data. It's not just email now. It's Teams and texts and Slack and all these different collaboration tools. So that increase in volume is partially made up for the increase in efficiency, and we haven't seen any loss of attorneys. I do think that over the longer run that there is more potential for the Gen AI to replace replace attorneys who do e-discovery work and, frankly, to replace lawyers and other professionals and all other kinds of workers eventually. I mean, it's just going to get better and better. A lot of money is being invested in. I'm going to go out on a limb and say that I think that we may be looking at a whole paradigm shift in how disputes are resolved in the future. Right now, there's so much duplication of effort. If you're in litigation against an opposing party, You have your documents set that your people are analyzing at some expense. The other side has their documents set that their people are analyzing at some expense. You're all looking for those key documents, the needles in the haystack. There's a lot of duplicative efforts going on. Picture a world where you could just take all of the potentially relevant documents. Throw them into the pot of generative AI, and then have the generative AI predetermine what's possibly privileged and lawyers can confirm those decisions. But then let everyone, both sides of court, query that pot of documents to ask, what are the key questions? What are the key factual issues in the case? Please tell us the answers and the documents that go to those answers and cut through a lot of the document review and document production that's going on now that frankly uses up most of the cost of litigation. I think we're going to be able to resolve disputes more efficiently, less expensively, and a lot faster. And I don't know whether that's five years into the future or 10 years into the future, but I'll be very surprised if our dispute resolution procedure isn't greatly affected by these new capabilities. Pretty soon, I think, when I say pretty soon, I don't know if it's five years or 10 years, but I think judges are going to have their AI assistance helping them resolve cases and maybe even drafting first drafts of court opinions as well. And I don't think it's all that far off into the future that we're going to start to see them.  Therese: I think I'm a little bit more skeptical than Dave on some of this, which is probably not surprising to either Dave or to to Anthony on this one. Look, I think, I don't see AI as a general rule replacing lawyers. I think it will change what lawyers do. And it may replace some lawyers who don't keep pace with technology. Look, it's very simple. It's going to make us better, faster, more efficient, right? So that's a good thing. It's a good thing for our clients. It's a good thing for us. But the idea, I think, to me, that AI will replace the judgment and the decision-making or the results of AI is going to replace lawyers and I think is maybe way out there in the future when the robots take over the world. But I do think it may mean less lawyers or lawyers do different things. Lawyers that are well-versed in technology and can use that are going to be more effective and are going to be faster. I think that. You're going to see situations where it's expected to be used, right? If AI can draft an opinion or a brief in the first instance and save hours and hours of time, that's a great thing. And that's going to be expected. I don't see that being ever being the thing that gets sent out the door because you're going to still need lawyers who are looking at it and making sure that it is right and updating it and making sure that it's unique to the case and all the judgments that go into those things are appropriate. I do find it difficult to imagine a world having, you know, been a litigator for so many years where everyone's like, sure, throw all the documents in the same pod and we'll all query it together. Maybe we'll get to that point someday. I find it really difficult to imagine that'll happen. There's too much concern about the data and control over the data and sensitivity and privilege and all of those things. You know, we've seen pockets of making data available through secure channels so that you're not transferring them and the like, where it's the same pool of data that would otherwise be produced, so that maybe you're saving costs there. But I don't, again, I think it'll be a paradigm shift eventually in that, paradigm shift that's been a long time coming, though, I think, right? We started using technology to improve this process years ago. It's getting better. I think we will get to a point where everyone routinely more heavily relies on AI for discovery and that that is not the predictive coding or the tar for the people who know how to use it, but it is the standard that everybody uses. I do think, like I said, it will make us better and more efficient. I don't see it really replacing, like I said, entirely lawyers or that will be in a world where all the data just goes in and gets spit out and you need one lawyer to look at it and it's fine. But again, I do think it will change the way we practice law. And in that sense, I do think it'll be a paradigm shift.  Anthony: The final thought is, I think I tend to be, I'm sort of in the middle, but I would say generally we know lawyers have big egos, and they will never allow, they will never think that a computer, AI tool or whatever, is smarter than they are in terms of determining privilege or relevance, right? I mean, I think that's part of it is, there's, you know, you have two lawyers in a room, they're going to argue about whether something is relevant. You have two lawyers in a room, they're going to argue about something privileged. So it's not objective, right? There's subjectivity. And I think that's going to be one of the chances. And I think also, we've seen it already. Everyone thought. Every lawyer who's a litigator would have to be really well-versed in e-discovery and all the issues that we deal with. That has not happened. And I don't see that changing. So unless I'm less concerned about being a paradigm shift than all of us going out for those reasons.  David: Well, I think everyone needs to tune back in on July 11th, 2029 when we come back to get stuff to begin and see who we're going.  Anthony: Yes, absolutely. All right. Thanks, everybody.  David: Thank you.  Outro: Tech Law Talks is a Reed Smith production. Our producers are Ali McCardell and Shannon Ryan. For more information about Reed Smith's emerging technologies practice, please email techlawtalks@reedsmith.com. You can find our podcasts on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, reedsmith.com and our social media accounts.  Disclaimer: This podcast is provided for educational purposes. It does not constitute legal advice and is not intended to establish an attorney-client relationship, nor is it intended to suggest or establish standards of care applicable to particular lawyers in any given situation. Prior results do not guarantee a similar outcome. Any views, opinions, or comments made by any external guest speaker are not to be attributed to Reed Smith LLP or its individual lawyers.  All rights reserved. Transcript is auto-generated.

When I think in terms of turning leads into loyal customers, what is that first contact? And I know we've talked about that in a number of podcasts. And then from there, what is the desired path that we want them to take with us, that we want to take with them, right? Without some sort of basic path to get from here to there, the likelihood of making that happen is pretty much slim to none. David: Hi, and welcome to the podcast. In today's episode, co host Jay McFarland and I will be discussing turning leads into loyal customers. Welcome back, Jay. Jay: Hey, thank you, David. Such a great topic again. I love our conversations cause I learn so much and I feel like there's a tendency to say, okay, I got the lead. I closed them. Now I'm going to move on to the next lead. And I think we would save ourselves a lot of time and money, if we were able to turn that customer into a returning loyal customer. David: Yeah, absolutely. And you raised a great point because I was thinking in terms of just new leads that come in, turning them into loyal customers. But I think what you pointed out is probably even more important, that we already got someone and we've already turned them into a customer. And now how do we make that customer more loyal to us? I know in a lot of presentations that I've done over the years, I've talked about these sort of different layers of recognition in terms of what do people think about us? And I've often drawn it out like a target for archery practice. And outside the target is the area where it's total obscurity. They have absolutely no idea who we are or why they should do business with us. And at the center of the target, it's complete customer loyalty. And you don't get from, "I don't know who you are," to "I'm completely loyal to you" in one step. It's got to happen in a series of actions. So what you're talking about there, you make that first sale. That doesn't even happen very often in the first contact. A lot of times it requires intelligent repetition of contact to even get to that. We go from obscurity. I don't know who you are, to recognition, I recognize you, but I'm not sure if I love you yet, right? I don't know enough about you. To comfort, and then once we get to comfort, once they're comfortable enough with us to place that first time order, like what you were talking about, then they're going to see how we do. And if we did well, they might give us another chance and come back again. And if we do well on that second one, they might come back and give us a third chance. And then As long as that continues to play out, that's going to lead to that level of loyalty, but it sure isn't likely to happen in one conversation or one transaction. Jay: Yeah, absolutely. But I kind of like where you started off, too, before we dive into that a little bit more. And that is thinking about making the loyal customer out of the lead . Where do you start? Because a lot of people are like, I can't make them loyal until they've purchased a product. That's not true, is it? David: Well, I think if you recognize that when I attract a lead into my organization or when I'm even just trying to attract a lead into my organization, the goal is to turn that person into a loyal, longtime customer or client. So when you start with that perspective, you become a lot more discerning about even the people that you're approaching. You have more skin in the game, because it's not just about, "hey, can I make a sale to pay my bills for today?" It's about, "do I want this person as a loyal customer?" And this goes back to a lot of what we've talked about in previous episodes about qualification and that sort of thing. But if we start out with the idea that we want to turn our leads into loyal customers, I think it positions us better, because it makes it more relational and less transactional. Makes it more about creating the kind of relationship that will result in a loyal cus...

Maintenance is often the most challenging area in a property management business. What if you could automate your maintenance workflow with an in-house, expert AI maintenance coordinator? In this episode of the #DoorGrowShow, property management growth expert Jason Hull sits down with David from Vendoroo (formally Tulu) to talk about AI maintenance coordination and how it could revolutionize the property management industry. You'll Learn [05:25] The AI Revolution [10:51] What can AI Maintenance Coordination Do? [20:58] How Vendoroo Handles Work Orders [27:56] Why You Should Have in-House Maintenance [37:30] Where do Humans Step in? [41:37] Handling Worst-Case Scenarios Tweetables “Property management is a very human business. It's a very relationship-driven business.” “Is it scalable? Is it burning you out? Is it pulling you away from other duties that you need to be? Are you spreading yourself too thin? Great questions to ask if you have growth objectives.” “Residents don't want to talk to a computer. They want to feel that they have a connection to their property manager.” “The first offense creates a little crack between the relationship. The second one, you're losing trust with your owner.” Resources DoorGrow and Scale Mastermind DoorGrow Academy DoorGrow on YouTube DoorGrowClub DoorGrowLive TalkRoute Referral Link Transcript [00:00:00] David: Even people who had in house maintenance coordinators or VAs, good ones, always still feel that they needed to second check all the work. And now when they're seeing the justification and they're seeing the education behind it, they get this sense of like, I can let go. You know why? Because this system is doing maintenance exactly the way that I'm asking it to do maintenance. And they feel that now they're actually back in control.  [00:00:24] Jason: Welcome DoorGrow Property Managers to the DoorGrow Show. If you are a property management entrepreneur that wants to add doors, make a difference, increase revenue, help others, impact lives, and you are interested in growing in business and life, and you are open to doing things a bit differently, then you are a DoorGrow property manager. DoorGrow property managers love the opportunities, daily variety, unique challenges, and freedom that property management brings. Many in real estate think you're crazy for doing it. You think they're crazy for not, because you realize that property management is the ultimate high, trust gateway to real estate deals, relationships, and residual income. [00:01:05] At DoorGrow, we are on a mission to transform property management business owners and their businesses. We want to transform the industry, eliminate the BS, build awareness, change perception, expand the market, and help the best property management entrepreneurs win. I'm your host, property management growth expert, Jason Hull, the founder and CEO of DoorGrow. [00:01:25] And now let's get into the show. All right. So today I'm hanging out with David Normand and Reza Keshavarzi. Did I say your last name right?  [00:01:36] David: We always say it sounds like the great sauce that you would put on a steak. Keshavari. So delicious. [00:01:41] Jason: All right.  [00:01:41] David: Yes. Cool.  [00:01:43] Jason: So David and Reza are from a company called Tulu, which we'll be getting into, which I think are probably revolutionizing maintenance related to AI and our topic today, we're going to be talking about AI and maintenance coordination, maybe getting into some of the current maintenance challenges, what AI could help with, what should be automated, what shouldn't be automated because I think that's a very important thing to cover and how to turn maintenance into a profit center. Before we get into that, why don't we get into some background? So David, why don't you give us the journey? How did you two get into this? How did you event like, how did you start your journey in the property management space? [00:02:24] David: Yeah, great. It's crazy to think about it. It just all started probably about 15 years ago. Like many of you, started a property management company with a buddy of mine. I remember we started off with 80 doors. Got our 1st client, was excited. He left his job at Verizon. I was actually in the banking industry, bidding on subprime auto loans and the 2008 crash happened. And so we all knew what happened after that. And so anyway we actually had some tremendous success and in just over four years we added over 600 doors. Which was a phenomenal growth in our market. And we had a lot of people going, "Hey, what's your secret sauce? what are you guys doing?" Right. And the reality was, is that we just cared, right? We cared harder. We had fiduciary duty. And all of these owners were leaving their other property managers and saying, "Hey, Maybe these guys have it figured out," and we were getting conversions and our close rate was like 80%. [00:03:13] It was really crazy, but something happened and just like many of us, owners started getting frustrated feeling like, the magic was wearing off because at the end of the day, no matter how hard we worked. Those owner statements and those maintenance invoices at the end of the month, I realized were the main source of friction between those long lasting relationships and the same reason why somebody left that previous property manager to come over for the hope of more transparency and maintenance was the same issue that we ran into. [00:03:41] Right. So that led me on this journey of trying to figure out, how do we standardize our fiduciary duty to owners when it comes to maintenance and help them bring transparency and education and understanding to what I feel is really the cornerstone foundation of what a great relationship is? Because no, the building can be full, the mortgage can be paid, but those maintenance bills still come in and there's still the questions.  [00:04:06] "Why does this cost this much? So I had some great opportunities to work went on with Fannie Mae helped them manage their rental portfolio, but still in the back of my head, wanted to try to solve this issue. And all these years later, I get a phone call from somebody that said, "Hey, you need to meet this guy, Reza. He's in the HOA industry. And he's seen a similar issue with lack of transparency. And I think that you guys are trying to solve the same issue. Hey, why don't you meet up?" And I'll, and I'll preface this. This was the fourth introduction to a guy in a fourth type of tech or a company that we try to part with. [00:04:40] And it just shows you the journey of an entrepreneur. Like you never know when that right connection that's going to align with your passions, resources, and understanding happens. And I actually had three other techs that didn't work out before. And I didn't want to bring them to market. [00:04:52] Right. So that's our story. We got introduced to each other and the synergies have been fantastic. And I'm really excited to talk about what we're doing here in the space. So it's been a crazy journey. It's been exciting. Maybe one day I'll write a book down the road about all the things not to do. [00:05:04] Jason: I think every entrepreneur that has a little bit of success could write that book. I'm sure. So cool. David, where do you think we should start? Like there's a revolution right now, this AI revolution, like it's AI everywhere. And and it's moving fast.  [00:05:21] David: Yes.  [00:05:21] Jason: Like really fast. [00:05:22] And it's a bit crazy. And. Everything's changing. There's a million software tools and companies coming out. Maybe AI is making all of them. I have no idea, but like...  [00:05:31] David: 85 percent of all content written online is written by AI these days. So yeah, definitely.  [00:05:35] Jason: Right. There's the fake internet theory that like the majority of the traffic and communication and comments on the internet isn't even real. So it's like we're walking around this fake ghost town online. And we're consuming content and we're like none the wiser in a lot of instances. So my quick take, for those listening, as we're going through this AI revolution, it's exciting. There's a lot of change happening. [00:05:57] We don't want to be left behind. We want to make sure we're paying attention to what's new, what we can use. Everybody's probably used chat GPT once or twice or keeps hearing about it from other people. "They've got a GPT, that thing that you use." Yeah. I used it this morning, right? Like I was trying to figure out something in my Chevy Tahoe. [00:06:15] And I was like, "how do I do this thing in my Tahoe? Like, can you just tell me?" And it can collapse time, but sometimes it's not useful. I think my take on this is that human interaction is going to be a premium. It's going to be at a premium. It's going to be something that really sets people apart because we're moving away from humanity to some degree by leveraging all this tech and AI and all these tools and property management is a very human business. [00:06:43] It's a very relationship driven business. And and I think we'll get into this today. We want to be careful of using technology where we shouldn't or trying to trick people. "Well, look, I'm pretending like it's me, but it's AI. Haha. I tricked you." And what's funny is there's little indicators, like, and we know that this stuff's being used in a lot of different ways, like governments are using this now, like, we don't even know what's real on the news or what's like deep fakes or AI, like they're showing people's like doing interviews and people are zooming in and noticing their rings are disappearing and like weird stuff, right? [00:07:20] David: Yeah.  [00:07:20] Jason: And stuff's going viral on like the internet. And so we're living in this world where we're super skeptical and we wonder if anything's real.  [00:07:28] David: Yeah.  [00:07:29] Jason: Sometimes people are even asking, like, is this AI on a phone call?  [00:07:33] David: Yeah, well, you can't tell the difference now. I'll tell you, our tech team and AI guys they actually played around with me a little bit and they actually use my voice and had me doing work orders and no one could tell it was them. [00:07:44] Not me speaking and giving triage and doing that type of stuff. And I actually I tested it with my wife and I sent her a message over it and she didn't even blink an eye. Didn't even blink an eye. It was crazy. It was that first like aha moment that really when we talk about our fiduciary duty to our clients and ourselves about the power of this and where it's going, right. [00:08:01] And to that point. So when it comes to AI, I think people need to understand that really, the way that we look at chat GBT to me is just the new Google, right? It's Google on steroids. Okay. And so, yeah, for sure. Do we use some chat GBT to understand like, how to write the perfect sentence structure? For sure. [00:08:18] But the cool part about this, Jason, is that what we're doing is: how do we use these models in this education that teach it about fiduciary duty to your owners? That's what gets me excited, right? That's what gets me excited to understand and to think intelligently and to think with thoughtfulness to the owner's pocketbooks when it's considering a decision of how to dispatch for maintenance, right? [00:08:42] Like, isn't that what we're all looking for? That we need a system that every work order that comes in that it goes to a expert maintenance coordinator that we know what that costs. I'm talking expert maintenance coordinator, a person's been in this job for 15 to 20 years that you can send a work order to and they don't make an error. [00:09:00] They're intelligent. They're able to educate, they're able to be client facing. Like there's a real skill set there if you put that on a CV for somebody, right? But that's not what this industry is filled with. Actually, this industry is filled with individuals who are under pressure to find the most affordable maintenance solutions and the most affordable ways to try to find people to run those maintenance solutions. We're allocating the least amount of resources to handle what I consider the highest probability of owner dissatisfaction in the property management relationship with the owner, right? So I have a VA who's 2000 miles away that's responsible for spending a thousand dollars in my owner's money. [00:09:38] And there's all types of potential errors and things that are happening as a result of that. So the way that we look at AI and actually in our business, we just use the word smart a lot. And we try to use that word, that intelligent instead of artificial. Because you know what? There is a lot of human input that has gone into this to teach it how to be smart and to teach it how to consider the fiduciary duty. [00:09:59] So at the end of the day, I would encourage all the listeners here that are going on this journey with us today to understand, not to be skeptical, how to maximize its value, right? And that's really what we're going to be focusing on today and to show you how we're maximizing its value to help us achieve what we call our dream outcome when handling maintenance. [00:10:18] Our dream outcome is as a property manager, I'm starting a company or I'm looking to grow, or I'm hitting those next growth objectives, or I'm looking for ways to be more profitable. What is my dream outcome? And that all circles around having an expert maintenance coordination in my office that is reducing trips costs and considering the fiduciary duty to my clients. [00:10:40] Right? So that's what we'll talk about here today and how we're using AI to achieve that.  [00:10:43] Jason: Got it. Well, let's get into it. So what can AI do and what can't AI do? Like, well, specifically what can Tulu do and what can't Tulu do?  [00:10:54] Where's the line drawn?  [00:10:55] David: Yeah, that's a great question. [00:10:56] So first of all, I always tell everybody this out of the beginning: we are not an outsourced maintenance coordination solution. We're not an outsourced company. Yeah. We are not a vendor. Okay. We're not bringing vendors to your marketplace. Okay. Tulu is your expert in house maintenance coordinator. [00:11:13] So if you're thinking of "I'm hiring a maintenance coordinator" or "I'm building a property management and I need a maintenance coordinator," you now have that. That's that ability to add this onto your software, your system. It's a simple plug and play. You get to remain inside of your portal, you don't have to leave it. [00:11:30] There's not another new portal, all updates, all things are pushing to Buildium and we're pushing to Appfolio. That was a big part of it. There's no new app for the vendors. There's no new app for the clients because we know what's important for them to live inside of there. So what can it do? Well, first of all, it's a leader. [00:11:43] Okay. And being a leader means that it is going to use the information that we capture about your company to lead your VAs, to make expert triage decisions that always consider your fiduciary duty to the owner. So let's give an example right here to break that down. Right. Say a hot water tank comes in. [00:12:03] Okay. Hot water tank's leaking. Okay. First thing it's going to want to understand is what time of the day is it and where is the hot water tank leaking from?  [00:12:09] Jason: Okay.  [00:12:10] David: And then it's going to determine based upon the location of the hot water tank, the type of the hot water tank, which type of vendor at which time is the right one to send out. That is the most cost effective that has the greatest probability of resolving that issue for the best price and meets the satisfaction of the resident. Right. Now that was a mouthful right there. Okay. And if you think about all of the potential errors and data points and things that are involved, the smart maintenance coordinator considers all those and it brings out a triage and it tells the VA "here's the pieces that you're missing. Here's the information that I need. And here's what my suggestion is for you to move forward." So it's amazing at being a leader. And then it's amazing at being an expert about creating communications for the resident and to the vendor to direct them. And then it's also an educator and at the bottom of every work order. [00:12:58] And I hope to be able to show some people it's really cool. We don't believe in just telling people what to do. We should educate them and tell them why they're doing what they're doing. Right. So imagine if you had the best expert maintenance coordinator leaning over the shoulder of every VA that you have standing there and telling them every work order, every time, here's what to do, here's how to do it, and here's why you're doing it. Right. And as a result, we're finding that VAs that come over that are dedicated to the account in two weeks, they're educated. And in six weeks, the majority of them are executing as a high level maintenance expert within six weeks. Of after sitting down and learning the training system, because just as much as it's leading, it's also training and educating. [00:13:38] That is a wow moment for somebody who's been in the space, who's been here for 15 years, managing hundreds and hundreds of people for government entities and stuff and understanding the amount of time and effort and training that goes into somebody. And then all of a sudden they come and they tell you, "Hey, by the way, I got a new job. Thank you for all the training. I'm going to go make $30,000 somewhere else," right? How many times has this happened to me? Hundreds of times, right? And so that's a big part of what we're solving here.  [00:14:02] Jason: So in order to be effective and operate as an expert maintenance coordinator so that your VAs that don't have this knowledge can function as if they have this knowledge, then this has to be programmed, right? Maybe it'd be helpful for, the viewers or listeners of this podcast to find out what are all the inputs that go into this? What did they have to provide and what do you guys provide, so this AI, they can trust it? [00:14:29] David: Yeah. Yeah. Great question, Jason. So first of all, I want to put it on point two to make an emphasis that in this journey that we're all learning about these smart technologies and AI, there's still a big part of human component, right? [00:14:38] And it's like when you chat, when you write something in chat GBT, like you just don't send it without looking at it. Right. You're reviewing it and making sure it's still saying that you want it to say. Right. So everybody rest assured this thing is not, living on its own and there's checks and balances. [00:14:51] But the onboarding on average takes 30 to 45 minutes. Okay. And one of the things that we did is number one is, when it comes to triaging and best practices, there's literally probably about 500,000 work orders of data points that it's considering. And it's an expert in that thing that's saying, "Hey, listen, this is how you should handle every work order that comes in because I've seen this, 20,000 times, and this is the best outcome." [00:15:18] Right. But then what it does is it allows the property manager to talk in natural language. Like you want to talk like a robot. We don't have to write weird code. Just say things. "Hey the owner of one, two, three main street really loves Tom." Tom works on his properties. Comes in 123 main street comes up. It understands what Tom's capabilities are. And it says, "please use Tom to use this." The owner prefers that Tom works on his properties. They have a great relationship. Cool. And so those little tidbits for example, if the heat goes out in unit number one, understand that access has to be in unit number two basement to the HVAC unit, right? [00:15:52] So that's good to know, but why is that important to know? Because most VAs would make a mistake. They say there's no heat. They don't check property notes. They send out the plumber. Plumber is knocking on the door at unit number one. Person says, I don't know where the HVAC unit is. Tenant next door is not home. [00:16:06] Now you just charge your owner for 250 emergency call to go out. The resident still doesn't have heat. They think that you're unorganized. It shows you're unorganized on your owner statement because there's two invoices. "Oh, no, wait, you want to cover that? You're unorganized." So you just ate 250 that you're already not marking up on maintenance and you do that 10 times a month. [00:16:25] Okay. And that's what's going on.  [00:16:27] Jason: And this is where then the owner's like, "I might as well just do it myself because I know everything and it's in my head." So how did they get all of that out of their head? All the little things they know about each property, each multi unit property, what's in the basements, what's..? [00:16:40] David: We have a cool onboarding process. And again, most times about 30-45 minutes, they sit in, it's called building your AI co pilot. Actually, a lot of people dig it. It's cool. It's a cool process. And we will be first, we go into your system and we're able to pull out all your work order data and it organizes all your vendors, and we can tell who all your vendors are and what you're doing based upon the work order types. [00:16:59] We can tell if you're a preferred guy is here. Number one guy is, "Hey. This guy always seems to be working on these properties." So there's a lot of information that we gather. And then you just come in and you're like, "yeah, he's my primary. He's my secondary. Oh, here's this little information about this property." [00:17:13] So you really don't have to get like, like crazy. Like, like, the mailbox is located, like. You can add that stuff later, but in the beginning, it's just like, what are those important rules? I remember this one that really jumped out at me as impactful, a classic mistake, this owner had a lady living in the apartment for 35 years. [00:17:31] Okay, and she's getting old and one of the rules is that no matter what maintenance ticket comes in, "don't ask her to triage. Don't ask her. It's the tenant's responsibility. I love this person. Please send her out and just take care of her. Right?" What a great rule to put into your system that shows the owner that when that work order comes in, He's not getting a call from, and I forget what her name is. [00:17:51] And like, they're asking me to change my light bulbs again. And then he's like, I told you twice not to do this. And next thing he's looking for another property manager. And I always love that example of that rule. So that's what you're looking as far as the information you're giving us takes about 30 to 45 minutes. [00:18:03] For people who have anywhere between, 150 to 350 properties. If you start having, 500, 600, a thousand, I would definitely allocate up to two hours and onboarding for sure.  [00:18:13] Jason: Okay. That's really fast when it comes to rolling out a new technology. Yeah. It's ridiculously fast.  [00:18:19] David: Yeah. [00:18:19] Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Extremely quick. So basically you have all this learning and understanding that's going into who your preferred vendors are. We know how to handle the maintenance work orders. There's no like integration that has to happen. And so as this triage is coming through, you're getting this expert level triage and you can add things down the road. [00:18:38] You can add it, but how to handle the work orders as we say, there's really nothing new in maintenance. What's new is: "what's the NT for the property? Are there any special conditions that we need to know? Right? What are your residents' responsibilities and what are you responsible for?" Once you have those four questions answered, how to handle the hot water tank, at what time to hit on the hot water tank, how to, how to repair this door, how to do that. [00:19:02] Those true principles of maintenance are true for everybody, if that makes sense, right? So, so that's a big part of the value that you get that You're hiring an expert maintenance coordinator. If you were to hire him, you wouldn't necessarily be telling him. "Hey, this is how you replace a doorknob." [00:19:18] He should already know that when you hired him. Right. So think of like it that way when you're considering us as a technology.  [00:19:24] Jason: So, a human maintenance coordinator, the challenge would be, there's no way they can remember every detail about every property, right?  [00:19:32] David: Yeah,  [00:19:32] Jason: it's not. Which means they would have to keep notes. [00:19:35] Let's say they've already got a decent amount of notes somewhere. Might be in the property management software, maybe they've got their own, I don't know, database of something. Is there the ability to pull in all that information?  [00:19:46] David: Yeah, a hundred percent. Yeah. To grab those notes out. A lot of people have the ability to export it. [00:19:51] They have a good note file or something like that. We get those, we take that information and it can just be pushed up into the system for sure. So yeah, the onboarding it, it can be, again, some people come in and say, "all I have is single family houses." Everything's pretty straightforward. [00:20:03] Other people send over an Excel list. "Here's my property notes at the property levels" and upload them. So that's the cool part where. You ingest into the system. There's not a lot of data, manual input. It's reading it and assigning it. And that's where we're using technology to help even improve the onboarding process that you talked about, right? [00:20:19] You think about people wear t shirts, like, I survived the Yardi onboarding process, right? Like, technology has come a long way to help improve that process, and that was a big part that we focused on.  [00:20:28] Jason: Yeah, that's wild. So once you've got them onboarded and they're in your system, the AI knows pretty much everything about the property, but maybe it doesn't, maybe there's some things it doesn't know. [00:20:41] And so work order comes up. You're working on something and it's still just in the property manager's head or it's still in the business owner's head or maybe they don't even know yet, but it runs there. It runs into an issue. It's like it has a question maybe, or it doesn't. It needs to know some more stuff. [00:20:57] I don't know. What happens in those scenarios? [00:21:00] David: Yeah, this is a great one. So, all right, so let's talk about the life cycle of a work order. Right. And let's everybody just understand that there still is a human component involved in this, right? Every property manager has a dedicated, we call them a remote team member, who's now this expert maintenance coordinator at the cost of a remote team member. [00:21:16] Now they're able to execute at a very high level. But there are going to be things that they're faced that they don't understand. So they have the ability to communicate with you one on one, or we also have this process internally that they have this ability to go, "I need a request from the expert in the loop" and the expert in the loop is you know, invoice review, complication that they're saying that the AI is not clear on them and it's asking for additional support. And so they can bump that up to individuals, myself, and there's other members of the team members that are big part of this and they can get expert level triage inside of there, to say, "Hey, listen, I'm facing with this vendor issue. They need 25 percent upfront. The job is only 500. I'm not understanding what to do here. The building is located and they're saying access is weird. They need to bring something in." There are complications that still involve human understanding. And so that expert in the loop solves that piece in there. [00:22:07] And also speaking of humans, we believe that residents and vendors still need to speak to a human. Okay. Super important. Okay. So the value that we have is that we're able to create expert level triage, According to their specifications and the training model and all the great things and the automation and the text messages that are written for them and the codes that are written for them the emails, all those things. [00:22:31] So, if we can automate at a very high level and free up our people to be able to provide support on the phone to the vendor on the field, or to actually talk to a resident, everybody knows this and I talk to everybody, guys, residents don't want to talk to a computer. They want to feel that they have a connection to their property manager and that when they call in, a lot of people have not even adapted technology for anybody who has, residents have been with them with a while and they're used to talking to Janet, they're used to talking to tell him inside and next thing you can say to them, "Oh, we have a new maintenance system. And by the way, you have to talk to the system." They're like, "okay. This is lame," right? Like, so that personal connection and we have a saying inside of the office that we keep your residents and your vendors within arm's length of you, right? It's communicating. They're using your property management name. [00:23:20] They're speaking on your behalf. This is an extension of your office. This is your maintenance coordinator. Don't think of this as a vendor. Don't think this is an outsourced maintenance solution that you're setting all your maintenance to some company that's sourcing vendors or bringing them in and doing every, this is your in house maintenance team. [00:23:38] So always consider that when you're thinking about Tulu, real people. In house maintenance coordinator just powered by AI enabled execute at a crazy high level.  [00:23:46] Jason: So, yeah. So how do tickets get into the maintenance system? Like how are they initiated? Do they still have to be answering their own phone calls? [00:23:56] Are they just putting it into their property manager software? And then Tulu is going to like start taking some action. What communication does Tulu facilitate or take over if we're going to be having still needing some humans to be in Tulu allows us to increase the amount of communication and care that we show. [00:24:13] Where do we draw the line? Like, where is Tulu stepping in and doing some communication and where do we need team members to be doing communication?  [00:24:21] David: Yeah. Yeah. Great question. So let's just go through the life cycle of a work order for everybody. I think that's what everyone really understands when they're all thinking about this. [00:24:28] Okay, let's give me a work order from start to finish. Right? So no change to your residents. No change to anybody. They log into their portal, Buildium, Appfolio, RentVine, whatever they're using. They submit a maintenance work order, that maintenance work order through their system is dispatched to the Tulu maintenance coordinator, expert maintenance coordinator. [00:24:46] All the magic is happening, all the triage, everything is taking place, and inside of the property management software, they're going to see. Work order.  [00:24:53] Jason: And is that dispatched through via email? API? Yep.  [00:24:56] David: Oh, yeah. Yeah. Just through email? Yep. Set up as simple. You can set it up as a maintenance coordinator and as the maintenance coordinator is set up and the email comes in and it pings out and that creates the work order and starts to process through the, yeah. [00:25:08] Yep. Cool. And then the property manager will see that the work order has been it's in triage on the status of their system. Then it's assigned, then the vendor will be assigned there. And then from there, the updates, when it's scheduled that we call it the who, what, and the why, right? [00:25:25] What's going on, who's doing it and what's being done to progress this for. That's a note. You're constantly getting those notes. Now, the cool part about this, Jason. is behind the scenes. All of those text messages and phone calls and emails that we call the noise that are between the residents and the vendors and everybody are all being captured in a system behind the scenes. [00:25:45] Right. Super value there, right? If a resident is a little bit upset about something or you have some questions, "Hey guys, can you hand me the phone call this one to show me the text messages," right? Communications are big part. So we capture all those communications inside there at any time that the owner of the property manager wants to pull them. [00:26:00] That's great. Then the work order is completed. The completion, quick question. So  [00:26:05] Jason: all this communication between tenants and vendors, unless they're using some sort of magical system That the vendors have to be in and that the tenants are logged into. And it's like seeing all this, how does Tulu capture that? [00:26:18] How does it know that the vendor is communicating with the tenant or the tenant? Okay. So it would be any point.  [00:26:24] David: Yeah. Good point. Any point that the the tenant. Is communicating or the vendor or just communicate with two of those. So if the vendor happened to communicate directly with the tenant, it would not capture that part, right? [00:26:34] That's their phone to phone with that part, right? So it's when the resident or the tenant is communicating with the maintenance coordinator. And as we all know, tenants and vendors love to communicate by text message, right? That's their number one thing to do. So, it's really cool for vendors too, because as we know, a bunch of vendors, they hate. "I don't want to work in another app." Vendors can take pictures from their phone. They can upload estimates from their phone. The estimate comes in and it's actually turned into this really pretty estimate because we know vendors estimates are notorious for being on the back of a paper and hand scratched, right? [00:27:06] So it actually creates into a brand new Tulu estimate. And so your owners get transparency into pricing and labor. And it's standardized and everything looks clean. And so yeah, vendors love it because they're not lazy, but they're busy guys. And instead of going home and trying to do a whole bunch of paperwork, they can now just generate an estimate, take a picture and shoot it right through. [00:27:22] So, yeah.  [00:27:23] Jason: Because the challenge that there's a lot of communication involved. And so usually to decrease the amount of communication, they're trying to figure out how do we get the vendors to just talk to the tenants directly to collapse time? But if you have AI, then my guess is that Tulu will still just act like that middle person because the vendor can communicate with them, they can immediately text you, then Tulu texts the tenant, then it's just doing it real time. [00:27:45] You don't have to wait on a human being in your office to like make this communication happen. So you're like, "well, we're so slow. Let's just get them to talk to each other." The AI is making this happen. Is that accurate?  [00:27:56] David: Huge point right here is, and man you really hit off the nail on the head on this one point here. [00:28:01] The amount of people that we are seeing that they're using vendors to perform triage in this space is actually alarming. Okay. Alarming. All right. Vendors should not be performing our triage. They should not be the ones trying to figure out what is going on. They're not our client facing people. Maybe some guys are good. [00:28:20] your in-house guys, goods or whatever. The majority of people are using this, right? The beauty of the system is: Do we have enough information that is captured? From the resident, the property manager that considers the needs of the owner to formulate the correct direction to the vendor so that they can show up with the resources that they need to fix the job the right time or show up educated about what they're there to fix. [00:28:41] Jason: So let's talk about this real quick. Like vendors should not be doing triage and why not? Like, like what are the obvious ramifications here? Well, vendors, that's like asking a surgeon if you need surgery, right? That's how he makes his money.  [00:28:55] "That's the solution is surgery. We should chop that out, like, let's cut that thing out and I get paid thousands and thousands of dollars."  [00:29:02] David: Or how about this one, Jason, on an owner's report. I see a cost for so many times you see a cost for a maintenance guy, "unable to resolve expert needed." well, why? Because the maintenance vendor was sent out to do the triage. [00:29:15] That's not fiduciary duty to the owner. If we had the right information, we could have avoided that one trip. So we have some really cool case studies. I'd love to show people that out of like 260 work orders, we have one right here, a client that signed up with us. And so out of that thing here let's see. [00:29:31] They completed 194 work orders. 17 unnecessary trips were canceled. Wow. Okay. 17 unnecessary trips and 15 of those work orders had an immediate reduction in price because they said that the wrong resource was assigned to that. So think about that. 17 different numbers.  [00:29:48] Jason: So if that, if they have an in-house maintenance team, you're decreasing your your cost deploying these texts, going out and doing stupid work, like significantly. If you are using third party vendors, then there's always an expense. If you're sending anybody out, unless you're like, go do a bid, or something like this, but that's costing the vendor, which they're going to be more frustrated with you. [00:30:09] So you're freeing that up or they're charging you for it. "Oh, well, if I go out, I charge, right?" Yeah.  [00:30:15] David: I'll give you an example. We just saved owner of a pad split property who wanted to replace the refrigerator. The request came in and they asked for three estimates, okay, to replace the refrigerator. [00:30:28] Okay, the suggestion came back that basically said in a nutshell, summarize this, "why are you sending three different appliance vendors who are all going to charge a trip fee to go look at a refrigerator when a Home Depot program should be used and the cost of refrigerator should be 860? To factor all those costs in, it would have been about 1, 400. I don't understand why you're doing this. Please explain, right?" Talk about fiduciary duty to the owner.  [00:30:51] Jason: This is why owners get frustrated and they're like, "I might as well just do it myself." [00:30:55] David: " Because I knew better. I would go to Home Depot. Everyone knows to order a refrigerator from Home Depot, right? Unless there's special circumstances." And now imagine this, and this is where we're going with this, Jason. At the end of each month, these owner reports go out to all these owners, and owners sit down and they call up the property manager, and we always hear people talking about this at every conference. [00:31:14] "Oh, I don't want to answer that phone call. I know what this is about, right?" And the property manager is scrambling at the end of the month to call the maintenance coordinator, dig into work order notes and justify why did this cost this much? "Explain this to me," right? So we have this really cool report that's coming out that basically, including in the property owner, It would let you know that, Hey, you had six jobs that were able to send a handyman this month. [00:31:38] Here's what's going on. You had two emergencies, two replacements, little asterisks that said, "Hey, this trip fee was 120. Why? Well, it required two people because there was a toilet that was being replaced on the third floor so they requested an extra hour of labor to be able to bring that toilet up because it was too like..." intimate details so that your owners are feeling like they're getting this like this whole transparency, unbelievable transparency, this report, the property manager doesn't have to waste at the end of the month, which I used to send away two to three days at the beginning of each month, just to answer phone calls and questions.  [00:32:12] Jason: Right. Yeah. It's like "why did it cost us much? Why?" [00:32:14] Like they can just see it.  [00:32:16] David: Yeah. "Why didn't you send Tom?" "Well, I did send Tom to snake the drain because it was clogged in the master bathroom. We set his limit at an hour. He used a 17, 25 foot power snake. And we said, if you can't get this done within an hour, then we need to send Roto Rooter." "Oh, I get that. You really did try to save me money in the beginning. Yeah. And Roto Rooter found that 35 feet down the thing was a clogged diaper or something like that." That's what owners need to understand. And to break that down in every work order is a tremendous strain on property managers and our system in V2 that's coming very quickly. [00:32:52] I was actually working on this morning. Those owner reports will be generated then if every month that explain intimate details about the thought process. and the costs and any decisions behind breaking it down into category for every maintenance work order type for their owners. Huge value. Imagine going to a client, a new client, and you're presenting against somebody else and they say, "Hey, how do you handle maintenance?" [00:33:14] And you pull that report out and you put it down on the table.  [00:33:16] Jason: You're like, "like this is the level of detail. Nobody else is doing this." The maintenance coordinator get on the phone every time and saying, "let me walk you through all these charges and why they happened and what did." And like, how many people listen to this right now? [00:33:31] I'm like, I know you're listening to this going, "if I never had to do that again, that would be the best thing ever. Ever. Like I've never had to have that uncomfortable conversation with the owner." Like it's all in there. It's all there. Like it makes sense.  [00:33:43] David: "Here's why we are your property manager. And here's the value that I'm giving to you in the transparency to maintenance." [00:33:50] That's a huge burden. It's a significant pain point. And we know this Jason, the first offense creates a little crack between the relationship. The second one, you're losing trust with your owner and they're beginning Googling "other property managers around me." The third one. You're just waiting for them to look and to go somewhere else. [00:34:07] So the relationship is falling apart. Right. And we are trying to know that  [00:34:11] Jason: You got a 600 door business in four years.  [00:34:14] David: Yes.  [00:34:15] Jason: Like, and so, and you have probably heard countless stories of people if they're switching companies, it's really rare that people switch companies. Usually things have to be pretty bad and maintenance that's in communication. [00:34:27] Those that's number one factors, communication and why people leave. And so this allows you to free up a massive amount of time so you can actually be on the phone with the people when you need to be on the phone and stop wasting time with all of these repeat calls, repeat requests, what's going on with this, and yeah, this would just save so much time. [00:34:44] David: Well, think about growth, Jason, right? So the three things that we're solving for, number one is we're protecting fiduciary duty to the owners, justifying maintenance costs and reducing the cost of expert in house maintenance coordination and making it scalable. Yeah. Okay. [00:34:58] So now if I can have an expert maintenance coordinator that I add to my office, there's a fixed cost to it. I can scale infinity and not have to worry about hiring and training and staffing and issues and all these problems in global, right? My fiduciary duty to my owners, I got reporting and transparency. [00:35:17] Maybe my property manager now, instead of being able to manage 250 doors, maybe they can manage 350 doors. Isn't that cool? Like that's where we're going with this stuff for sure.  [00:35:25] Jason: Yeah, it definitely would make a business as maintenance coordination, maybe infinitely scalable. So, okay. I know somebody that's listening, that's very detail oriented and their brain doesn't think like a spider web, like mine is going, "Hey, you guys never finished the example scenario because Jason derailed it." [00:35:43] And so we've got the maintenance request. It's come in.  [00:35:46] David: Yeah.  [00:35:47] Jason: So take, let's go back to that.  [00:35:49] David: Okay. Yeah. Maintenance request comes in the triage takes place. The information is gathered once the information is gathered, and it fills the requirements of what they believe is the right decision. [00:36:00] At that point, the scheduling takes place. Okay.  [00:36:03] Jason: Okay. So which pieces of Tulu doing?  [00:36:05] David: All of this.  [00:36:05] Jason: Okay. Okay.  [00:36:07] David: Okay. Okay. So then we're scheduling and then the work is completed. Quality pictures are received. If the resident is satisfaction, you have happiness received, vendors invoices received, and that's all uploaded into the system. [00:36:20] And then at that point, the property manager can pay the vendor directly if they have a great relationship and maybe they want to pay them in whatever way they do. A lot of people like paying their vendors, that's fine. Or they can reimburse the Tulu system. If they just want to pay one vendor for the rest of their life, and then Tulu will pay the vendor for them directly. [00:36:38] So it is from intake to vendor payment, all updates, all communications, all triaging, everything.  [00:36:46] Jason: Tulu does all of it. Does it all.  [00:36:48] David: It is your perfect maintenance coordinator. What we call the dream scenario. It has the ability to triage, troubleshoot, knowledgeable about vendor pricing, it's client facing and experience and client facing means that you can even set the parameter that said, "Hey, if anything is over my NTE, I would actually like you to generate your justification as to why think about this and send it out to my owner." Now imagine your owner getting this super email that's like, "Hey, listen, we have this problem. So the five to fancy, here's the steps that it took place to do."  [00:37:15] Jason: So like the amount that's in the agreement that says like anything under 500 in a single month, like we have a right to just take care of it. Right. Or something like this property managers having their agreements. Okay. So, so where do they need humans then? Where do humans come in all of this? [00:37:31] David: Humans need to be there to provide expert level, the same expert level triage that the system is providing, we need humans in there to make sure, first of all, it's accurate. There is a component of that, right? We're reviewing this and training it, learning it, but as we talked about before, humans need to be there. [00:37:47] We love that they have a great relationship because they're an extension of the office with their RTM, right? With their property manager and that RTM, they get to know each other. Humans are needed to talk to the residents and humans are needed for vendor support. Okay. Vendors don't want to call into a robot when their hand is in a sewer line from the field asking about, "Hey, I need help and direction. What's going on?" [00:38:07] They don't want to hear "press two if you're unhappy with this service," like they don't want to hear that. That's where humans come in.  [00:38:13] Jason: Got it. Okay. So what are some of the results that you're seeing when you're installing in this into businesses? Like what's shifting? Because I'm hearing some things like it's going to decrease the time you're spending on the phone with your owner. [00:38:25] So it's going to decrease the amount of time doing communication. You won't have to spend time doing triages. It sounds like a large piece of maintenance coordination is going to be taken care of. It sounds like staffing costs can be reduced. You tell me what are clients noticing once they get this installed over their previous systems of using a stack of tech tools to try and get their team to be able to handle this stuff? [00:38:47] David: I think in the beginning and I think that it's cool in our relationship is just to hear people come back after the first month and go, "I can't believe it. Like I went an entire month and like, I was not involved in maintenance the way that I feel that I needed to be to make sure that all these things were taken care of. And I'm finding myself with like 20 hours extra a month." And we're like "yes, go grow. Go add more doors. Go show greater value to your clients. Maybe call your client that you haven't been calling in a month because you've been so busy." Right. So, so those are really cool. I think from a cost perspective, they are appreciating. [00:39:24] And I'm believing that. Even people who had in house maintenance coordinators or VAs, good ones, always still feel that they needed to second check all the work. So even though you're giving to somebody, they never were able to detach themselves from me. [00:39:37] And now when they're seeing the justification and they're seeing the education behind it, they get this sense of like, I can let go. You know why? Because this system is doing maintenance exactly the way that I'm asking it to do maintenance. And they feel that now they're actually back in control. If that makes sense. Or they're giving it away, but they're actually feeling they're in more control, if I'm making sense there. That's one of the coolest things is that they feel now they have their pulse on every work order where versus before they have to dive into search. Now they know that their requirements are just laid over every work order. So those are some big ones that I'm seeing, especially for those people who really show their value to their owners in the fact that they say, "I'm involved in every work order, every job." That's a great value prop. It really is. Is it scalable? Is it burning you out? Is it pulling you away from other duties that you need to be? Are you spreading yourself too thin? [00:40:29] Great questions to ask if you have growth objectives, right? Scalable solution. And basically what we're doing is we're allowing the best in the business who are property managers who have created great relationships to duplicate themselves. And that's exciting for them to see. I think that they're like, "wow it's thinking like me."  [00:40:45] Jason: This really sounds like a serious competitive advantage for a property manager that adopts this over any other competitors that don't  [00:40:54] David: Jason, I'm going to a new client pitch and now I'm knowing that the guy next to me is sitting down showing him, "this is how I handle maintenance. This is how I'm keeping your cost down. This is the process. And that new report's coming in our V2. I was actually working some funnels that this morning. And if you're laying that down and then you're walking in behind them and the person says, "well, how do you handle maintenance?" [00:41:15] "Well, I personally call you on every maintenance ticket." We're witnessing the greatest generational movement of wealth and real estate properties from retiring baby boomers to the next generation to their kids who are all grown up in a technology world that are demanding transparency and reporting and it's just going to be the new standard, Jason, a hundred percent. [00:41:34] It's going to be the new standard for sure.  [00:41:36] Jason: Okay. We probably got somebody listening. They're super skeptical. They're like, there's no way. And they're going to throw us some crazy scenario that came up recently. And I'm sure you've heard some of these. So how would you address that? Like some sort of like, "well, what if it's like this and this," and it sounds like worst case scenario. [00:41:54] The AI just says, expert in the loop. Like it's, it raises his hand in some way and says, "Hey, I could use a human over here."  [00:42:00] David: Here's one that actually, as a guy who in my history, we had portfolios, like 30,000 properties. [00:42:06] So I've done probably over 500,000 work orders. In my career. Okay?  [00:42:10] Jason: More than most of the people that are probably listening to this. Yes.  [00:42:13] David: Yes. And as a result, just because of the size of the inventories that we used to manage the other day, a resident submitted a maintenance work order in and said, "my microwave is not working. And I assume it's because my gas stove is not turned on. And does my gas stove need to be turned on in order for the gas to flow up to my microwave?" Okay. True. True. Okay. All right. True maintenance work order. The the smart system picked that up and now imagine a VA facing that without any knowledge or an experience that's going to be an email to the property manager, a phone call to somebody, or maybe they make a mistake because they're 2000 miles away and they don't have any contacts and they sent out a plumber to go investigate. And the owner says, "why are you sending out a plumber for this?" Right? Right. Okay. The system picked up and it literally educated and trained. And it said that gas has no relevance whatsoever to a microwave solution. This is an incorrect thing, right? And that, when I saw that one, it makes mistakes. [00:43:04] Don't get me wrong. It's not perfect, but when I saw it pick up on that one, I said, man, I said, this is getting exciting that it picked up on that. So I would ask that person to come and just experience it and look at a little bit and understand guys, right? This is exciting. This is new. It's learning. [00:43:19] We're developing and it's improving daily. There's still a lot of human oversight. There's still a VAs that involved. We're getting expert maintenance coordination down to a price point that is affordable for everybody, scalable for everybody. And the biggest point at the end of the day, your owners are going to feel that every maintenance work order comes in, it's being handled by the best maintenance process in the industry. [00:43:39] And that's what you're going to be able to offer them as a property manager to compete against other competition you have in your market. And I think that's a good value prop. So.  [00:43:46] Jason: Yeah, definitely. So is there anything else related to turning maintenance into a profit center that we should cover? [00:43:52] David: Yeah the first step going into a profit center is realizing that the average person is paying between 16 to 28 dollars per door to manage their maintenance, right? If we get that down to the correct number, and I'd love to have anybody come through and we'll run the analytics for them and we'll give them a pricing model for that just off the bat, the first profit center that we're creating is what if I'm able to reduce that by 50 percent your cost, that's an immediate profit center, right? [00:44:16] That's profit center number one. And then we can look at profit centers number two, that like, all right, now I can add on if I want to add on to my markup or we have some other ways that we can show them how to. But the first profit center needs to be is what do you know how much you are paying per door to manage maintenance? [00:44:34] Take all of your staff, all of your VAs, all of your systems, all your after hour services, take all those pieces, add them all up and divide them by the number of doors that you have. So every door that you bring on, it's costing me $27 to handle maintenance emergency services. Okay. Know that number, and let's have a talk. [00:44:54] Jason: You got to build that calculator on your website.  [00:44:56] David: It's coming.  [00:44:57] Jason: A lot of calculators like that to help people calculate their cold lead marketing costs or whatever. And as soon as they fill that out, they're like, "okay, I'll sign up. Like this is ridiculous. What I've been doing?"  [00:45:06] David: We have that in product right now. [00:45:07] We have a couple of pieces. We did the finish on it, but that's coming out where people can just understand what they're paying per door. But give us a call up. We'll walk you through the exercise. We'll show you what you're costing. Think about that as your first profit center, Jason. And then we can talk about other ones and we help give some people some advice still. [00:45:22] Jason: So David, you have a lot of knowledge and experience. How much of your knowledge and experience has gone into bringing this AI up to understanding what you know?  [00:45:32] David: I've been working on this for 12 years. Of putting the data and the learnings. And again, I've been fortunate guys where it was just my path. [00:45:39] It was my journey through this, where I've got to work for some huge outfits. I had my own consulting company for seven years. I was working with some of the biggest SFR groups in the nation, guys with 10,000-20,000 doors. And I'm just fortunate to understand the amount of data. So, I've put my blood, sweat and tears into this, but at the core of that Jason, my blood, sweat, and tears. [00:46:00] Is that, 15 years ago when I was brand new in this property management space, I had a broker tell me one time that after the sale of the property is done, the success of the owner is no longer your business or mine. And it's up to them. The sale is done. And they told me that when they walked away and that bothered me to this day, it bothered me that the fiduciary duty that individuals are giving to us to manage in some cases, millions of dollars of their money and assets and portfolios, right? And what type of products or services are we demanding of this industry? That we would demand of, let's say if I gave 50,000 to my broker to invest in the stock market for me, what type of services and technology and platforms am I demanding of that person, education, schooling, name brands, right? [00:46:45] But yet, are we demanding that same of us in our fiduciary duty to somebody that's giving over maybe their retirement to us their kids', future, college... you hear all these people, "why'd you get into real estate?" "I want to create a college fund for my kids." And after two years, the guy's like, "this is not what I signed up for. This is the worst mistake I ever made. And I'm backing out of, buying more properties because of challenges," right? That's what I'm driven by. And I've always been driven by that. It's my curse. And so I'd have to say there's a hundred percent of me in this Jason, for sure.  [00:47:13] Jason: Awesome. And it, this will outlive you like AI doesn't die. [00:47:17] And this is this not to be grim, but this is the concern. Like anybody has when they're signing up for a business, they're like, all right, "how much is reliant on just this one person? How much is reliant on that key person I'm interacting with?" Right. And the AI is not a person. Right? [00:47:34] And so, yeah, so that's really fascinating to think about. Like you've built all that into it and it has immediate, instant expertise. It's not like, "Hey, well, let me go call Tom and let me go check with Fred or let me..." like all the data it has, it's there and it's instant. [00:47:54] David: What's the difference between an emergency of a hot water tank that's leaking in a basement with a permeable stone floor versus emergency hot water tank that's located in the utility closet on the first floor? [00:48:04] One doesn't have to necessarily require a person to go out because there's no damage to prevent with water leaking down there. But the other one is leaking onto the floor and damaging your drywall. So these conditions have to be taking place. Locations of hot water tanks, like there's, I can nerd out in this and I'd love to sit down with anybody and drink beers and talk about all the millions of different maintenance things that I ran through. [00:48:24] But at the end of the day, when you're able to show your owner, "we acted as an expert." That's the guy that's going to say to his buddy when they're just having a drink, "call these guys up to manage your property because they're an expert in the thing." And that's what we're trying to bring to the industry for sure. [00:48:37] Jason: So this brings a level of expertise that the business owner, the property manager, the maintenance coordinator, and certainly the VA's just would not possess.  [00:48:48] David: You're talking 15 years, over 500,000 work orders worth of data points, learning and understanding from commercial, multifamily, single family across the board, best practices. [00:49:01] And it's for somebody who wants to imagine now a person can start a property management company tomorrow onboard Tulu. And they're immediately a veteran in the maintenance industry. Immediately.  [00:49:12] Yeah. No learning curve. You're operating and executing as the best maintenance coordinator in the industry starting tomorrow. [00:49:19] That's amazing. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It's really cool. Really cool.  [00:49:22] Jason: This is really, it's really wild. So now my brain's like, how can I get experts, how can I clone Tulu, but make an operator version of Tulu for running a property managed business. Or I can make it.  [00:49:32] David: Yeah there's, there, there are offshoots on this. [00:49:34] I would have to say, and I do want to tell anybody that in this space that we always say that property managers are safe because you know what the property managers do a great job of doing. You guys do a really good job at building relationships and creating value in your local markets. [00:49:46] Right. Focus on that. Don't get pulled into maintenance, right? Maintenance and that stuff can be automated. There are best practices. Don't struggle to have to be an expert there. Show your value and the resources and tools that you have. Lower your overhead. Produce better results. Be at networking events. [00:50:03] Shake more hands. Talk to more people. Sell more homes. Add more doors. Shine where you shine. Brokers shine when they're out in front of people shaking hands and having expensive salads over a nice glass of chardonnay and closing deals, right? Let us flip the toilets and do it well for you. [00:50:18] That's what I say.  [00:50:19] Jason: Awesome. Okay, cool. David, if they're interested in Getting started. How do they find out about Tulu? You can go right to our website  [00:50:26] David: at trytulu. com. And if anybody wants to email me personally, david.norman.trytulu.Com. I'll connect you with our sales team and set you up on a personal demo. I'll walk you through it. I promise I won't bring so much energy. I'm an energy guy. It's just my calling this space to be in the maintenance and I love to doing what we're doing and seeing owners go "yes!" Seeing property managers go "yes!" And we're not trying to replace anybody. We're just trying to help people honor their fiduciary duty to their owners. And that's my mission. That's what I'm driven by.  [00:50:56] Jason: Yeah. Fantastic. So try Tulu, T U L U. Dot com.  [00:51:02] David: Yeah.  [00:51:02] Jason: All right. Try it out.  [00:51:04] David: All right.  [00:51:04] Jason: David, thanks for coming on the DoorGrowShow podcast. Appreciate you.  [00:51:08] David: Yeah. Yeah. Thank you, Jason. Always great. Looking forward to the show. Until next time.  [00:51:11] Jason: All right. So if you are a property management entrepreneur and you are wanting to add doors, you get maintenance off loaded, off your plate, and you want to focus on growth and figuring out how to get more doors, you want to join the DoorGrow mastermind, our growth accelerator is all about that. [00:51:29] We are really good at optimizing businesses for growth using our rapid revamp class, where we clean up quickly, all of the front end stuff that is causing you to like kill trust and leaking trust and preventing deals. And then we give you the right strategies. We've got at least seven different growth engines that we can help build into your business that you can stack that will feed you unlimited leads without having to spend any money on advertising or marketing expense. [00:51:55] You just need people and it actually decreases the amount of time those people will spend If they're following working on the warm leads and the stuff that we would get you to do instead of cold leads, which take a lot more time. So we also have our super system level of our mastermind. This is where we're focused on ops, operations, helping your operator. That key person that's going to run the entire business for you, Mr. or Mrs. Visionary Entrepreneur, and they will help take your business to the next level. We can coach and support your operators, your BDMs, your salespeople, or you, the business owner to make this business infinitely scalable so that you can go to the next level and add a lot of doors. So reach out to us, let us assess your situation and see if we can help. [00:52

From a sales mindset connection standpoint, market domination starts with the idea that it's possible. And if you're not sure that it's possible, ask yourself this, your very best clients. When they think about who to go to for the products and services you offer, who do they think about? Obviously, if they're your very best clients, it's you. They're thinking about you. So you've already achieved a level of mindset or market domination with your very best clients. That demonstrates that it can be done. So then it's a matter of saying, okay, well, how can we do this with other people? David: Hi, and welcome to the podcast. In today's episode, co host Bianca Istvan and I will be discussing the topic of the sales mindset connection. Welcome Bianca. Bianca: Thank you so much, David. Very happy to be here with you. And I'm just curious, what do you say to people who think mindset is woo-woo? David: Yeah, there are a lot of people who feel that way. To some extent, I've been one of them. And in fact, Bianca is our newest addition to our team here at Top Secrets. She and I actually met in a clubhouse group years ago, and we were talking about the idea of mindset there. And I said, well, I'm not really all that much into mindset. Most of my training is about the specifics of what to do. And Bianca said to me, well, I don't think so. Everything you talk about is pretty much mindset related. And I didn't realize it at the time, but it really kind of opened my eyes to the fact that, yeah, a lot of what we do, even though it's not geared to be about mindset, is about mindset. So the whole woo-woo thing really kind of touches a nerve with me because I felt that way in the past. It's like, oh, mindset, well, no, you just need to do the stuff. But the reality of the situation is that if you don't have the right mindset, if you're not willing to take the necessary actions, then you're not going to be able to get there. So it seems to me there's always a mindset element that has to be there, whether or not you really want to think about it. Bianca: That's so true. And you know, for me, it's great to see that. I mean, you have this ability to connect with people on another level and that's, you know, congrats to you for having this mindset. Fantastic. David: Well, thanks. And so do you. And that's actually how we started communicating was in this clubhouse group and so when we connected again recently, I just thought it would be so great to have you on our team because I know that that's an important aspect of what you do and your communication with people has been great. So I'm really glad we've been able to put this together. But for most salespeople, it seems to me that mindset may be in the back of their mind. They may be thinking about it, but for the most part, they're probably just thinking, How do I make this next sale? How do I make this next contact? And so while I don't think you have to spend a ton of time thinking about mindset every day, just recognize that if you don't at least have it going on somewhere in the back of your mind, you're probably not going to do the work you have to do in order to get it started. Bianca: Yeah, that's so right. And I know you talk a lot about the first contact and what that means, but please tell me, you know, why do you think the mindset is so important when having the first contact with your potential client? David: Well, first contact is difficult for a lot of people, and a lot of people think of first contact as just being cold calls. And that's one example of first contact. And in those situations, mindset is really hard for some people. J just the idea of the fear of picking up the phone is an issue for people, which is all a mindset thing. If they can't get past that, if they can't Overcome the mental blocks that are involved in having to pick up the phone and initiate contact with a stranger, then it's definitely going to impact them.

Staying in touch with prospects is required, and creating value in your communication is certainly something that will keep you from being a pest in sales. Because if what you're saying to them is going to help them to accomplish a result, they'll be a lot more likely to pay attention to it. But ultimately it's required. You can't just skip it.  David: Hi, and welcome to the podcast. In today's episode, co host Bianca Istvan and I will be discussing the topic of staying in touch without being a pest. Welcome back, Bianca. Bianca: Thanks so much, David. And wow, such a topic. Please tell us, why is it so critical to stay in touch? David: Well, I think for anyone who is in sales, you recognize that you're probably not going to sell something in one call. You're going to need to have multiple points of outreach, multiple contacts with a prospect or client before you're going to be able to make that first sale, let alone the second or third or fourth. So staying in touch is obviously a critical part. of the process, being able to reach out to them on an ongoing basis without coming across as annoying or without coming across as what most people would describe in sales as a pest. I think this is something that more salespeople tend to think of than prospects or clients. I mean, unless you're really annoying, right? In which case they may think you're a pest. What I've heard from a lot of salespeople is this exact thing. How do I Remain in touch with the people that I need to be in touch with without being a pest. And so again, I think that's why this topic is such an important one. Bianca: Now that's, that's absolutely so right. And that leads me to my next question, like what do you think people mean when talking about being a pest? David: I think the concern is what's going on in their head, what they're thinking about. If I'm a salesperson and I'm going into any interaction with another human being with the idea that I want them to buy something. If that's my motivation, then it's likely I may be thinking in the back of my mind, oh, I hope I'm not being a pest about this, But, If you can make it about the person that you're interacting with, then it's totally different because now you're not just there to sell them a product. You're there to try to help them with whatever it is that they're trying to do. So if you're selling custom imprinted promotional products, you're not just selling them something that has their logo on it, you're selling them awareness or you're selling them more sales in their business, or you're selling them the idea of being in front of more people. So when you think of it in terms of what it actually delivers for them, it makes it a lot better for you. Bianca: Well, that's so true. And yes, absolutely right. But what about, you know, because this is a sensitive topic as well. And what if you're afraid to make those calls? What if you're afraid to send that first message or you just think you can do it? David: That goes back to mindset, which I know we've talked about in previous podcasts as well. But I think if you're in sales, you recognize that you have to do it, right? There's no alternative. You have to be able to reach out. Now, it doesn't have to be a phone call. It doesn't have to be a networking event. It doesn't have to be an ad on social media. It can be lots of different things. So I think if you recognize that there are different things that you can do, and you can find out something that is more comfortable for you, that will certainly help. If you also think about the concept that we've talked about in the past about creating value in your communication, that is certainly something that will keep you from being a pest, because if what you're saying to them is going to help them to accomplish a result. They're going to be a lot more likely to pay attention to it, but ultimately it's required. You can't just skip it.

Why is disability inclusion a business imperative? How can organizations harness allyship to dispel misconceptions and lay the foundation for meaningful representation? In this podcast, we consider the business case for investing in disability inclusion – an often forgotten strand in corporate DEI efforts – and the importance of changing mindsets in order to ensure progress.  Our presenters delve into how organizations can pursue their business goals while investing in DEI by acting in a truly responsible manner and making effective use of the tools at their disposal.  Our host David Boutcher is joined by Vaibhav Adlakha, Joanne Christopher, and Carole Mehigan. ----more---- Intro: Welcome to the Reed Smith podcast Inclusivity Included: Powerful Personal Stories. In each episode of this podcast, our guests will share their personal stories, passions and challenges, past and present, all with the goal of bringing people together and learning more about others. You might be surprised by what we all have in common, inclusivity included.  David: Hello, everyone. Welcome back to Inclusivity Included. My name's David Boutcher. I'm a partner in the Reed Smith Global Corporate Group based in London. The title of this podcast is Diversity, equity and inclusion: Disability, a key focus for organizations. I've been involved with uh LEADRS, Reed Smith's Disability Group, since it began. And we thought it would be important to uh have a podcast as to why we think it's important to focus on, on disability, disability events, uh disability initiatives. Uh I'm joined by colleagues, Vaibhav Adlakha, Joanne Christopher, and Carole Mehigan. As they join the podcast, I will ask them to say a little bit about, about uh who they are as well. So I think um I'd like to kick off with talking about some of the specific events that we've had over recent years and the reasoning behind them and why we think they're really important and uh Vaibhav perhaps you'd like to kick us off on that. Vaibhav: Thanks David. So as David mentioned, my name is Vaibhav Adlakha. I am an associate in our competition team here in London, but I also have an interest specifically in the diversity inclusion issues. I also have a physical disability and use a wheelchair. Now, I wanna begin with a personal, little personal thing. Before I joined Reed Smith and I thought about what my identity was going to be, I thought I only wanted to be a lawyer, but as I joined and began my journey here at Reed Smith, I realized that we have a platform to make the change what we want to see in the profession and be a leader in what we want, how we want people to see view the profession. As David often says, we are the best of a bad bunch. But I guess my goal was to try and create uh something where it is beyond my own success. It is a legacy that we can continue. Just to spotlight on one of on some of our events, we started in doing our Disability Inclusion Summits in 2020. Um Necessity is the mother of invention. So uh during the pandemic, we wanted to celebrate International Day of Persons with Disabilities. And we, thought, what better way to do that when by discussing issues and creating an environment not only for our ourselves, but also for our clients and anyone who wishes to participate, to be honest, uh whether no matter how far you are in your disability journey, whether you have reservations, whether you're further ahead, whether you're converted. So that's the Disability Summits explored different topics. How it is to work in the pandemic. What is the myths of uh disability inclusion? How can you embrace the journey? What are some of the things that different clients have done in their journey to disability? So long story short, the the Disability Summits were done as a platform to of discussion no matter how, how far you are in that journey. And we believe that it's an important, important aspect to understanding what we can do better, how we can invest in education and especially disability education and how we can cut down boundaries. If I can touch upon briefly on some of our other events uh that we have done, which is the allyship event on the importance of carers, allies and support groups. Uh This was basically done for the purpose of understanding the mindset of those who support vulnerable people, whether that's people with disabilities, uh parents, children. Because if you understand the mindset of those individuals who do it, regardless of the challenges, then you can be part of that super group, you can become part of being an ally. So that was the reason we did that as an event. And uh the importance of a career fair. Um Carole who will, who you will hear from did a specific career for fair for people with disabilities. And we wanted to do that simply because we are keen to uh cut down the barriers uh that people with disabilities face in education, in schools so that uh they, they can understand the aspirations that it you can have. And finally, we do uh understand the importance of learning and constantly improving, and that's why disability training sessions are not only important from a policy perspective as it is the right thing to do, but also so that it, it transfers down from people who work with you every day so that they understand what it is to work with people with disabilities. And we understand as well as people with disabilities, how we can, how we need to adapt to fit within the environment. Um So with that, I'll just hand over back to David to and David, I wanted to ask you about why from a Reed Smith perspective, because I've given the reason for the idea is that we had, but why from a Reed Smith perspective, it's important as a firm that we invest in disability inclusion? David: Thanks Vaibhav. Yeah, I mean, I think um it's really important for so many reasons if you like both internal and external as far as uh the firm is concerned. uh Reed Smith is very proud of its culture and its core values. And I think to have these events and initiatives on issues and highlighting the challenges of people with disabilities really shows uh that culture and those core values uh in action. And also I think it helps uh educate our own people with regard to the challenges faced by people with disabilities. I think so often people feel as though they haven't come across people with disabilities and are actually unsure as to how to deal with those people. So I think most employers actually face a key challenge to, to address that issue. And I think professional services organizations like Reed Smith are particularly well placed. It's a bit of a cliché, but we often say we're a, we're a people business, which we are. And I think that means that we have a responsibility to talk to all of our people. But also the people with whom we interact, particularly clients about the challenges faced by people with disabilities. A as it's often said, when talking about diversity, equity and inclusion, the one area of diversity which is often at the bottom of the list, and I'm, I'm afraid to say sometimes not even mentioned is the, the challenges in the area of people, people with disabilities. It is changing, it's not changing fast enough. Um So I think it's really important that we, that we, we focus on it uh as an organization. And I think also it's important in terms of training and education at multiple levels and, and, and I know, Vaibhav, you've had uh experience when you were training as to what you might be training for and what might be available to you uh as a person with a disability. And I think again, we have a responsibility as employer to demonstrate how people with disabilities can be included, work with colleagues and most importantly, be treated equally. And I think that is often the challenge that people are not sure how to accommodate people with disabilities. And it is often a fine balance between uh treating people equally. Uh But they're not treating them equally because they, if you like focusing on their disabilities and and unfairly making that um stand out and we only improve that by uh talking about these issues. And in terms of uh you know, having a platform where we can help change the mindset around people with disabilities as with any mindset. Actually, it's not something you're gonna change overnight. So I think it's important that we have a continuing program of initiatives uh and events where we talk about the many challenges faced by um people with disabilities. And of course, the whole area of disability itself is, is, is very complex, there are physical disabilities, there are mental hidden disabilities. And again, I just think historically, it's just not something that people have talked about and I think people want to hear other people's views, they want to be here uh about the experiences that people with disabilities have had. And the other really important thing is we want to make the most of people's talents and so many people with disabilities have unique talents. I, I've often said often somebody with a disability has had huge challenges in their lives, which they've met, you know, with gusto, they, it's given them great confidence and that actually gives the individual the kind of qualities that most employers would really want to have. So there are all sorts of positives to look at uh as well. But most importantly, unless we address this, we've almost got a whole lost sector of our population where we're not actually uh making the most of that uh of that talent. And I think it's really important to address it on so many levels. So as Vaibhav has said, we've had many different events and most recently we've been talking about support groups and allyship and representation. Vaibhav: David I just wanted to make before you hand over to Carole, is you talked about how from a disability point of view, we we as firms, we need to understand what, during my training for instance, you said, what are you working towards? I think from a disability person perspective, it's also fundamental for, for us to understand how, how to work with an organization because in the end organizations or businesses. So it's more of a collaborative effort. And I think by doing these events uh or being on the inside, right, you can not only kind of make the profession of the firm or what you're aspiring towards. Uh you can mold that together as a, as a partnership, but also uh the wider perspective. Also, I was hoping we could talk about why clients think it's important to in that respect. So we can, we can discuss that at some point. David: Yeah, absolutely. Well, I mean, clients, uh as I mentioned earlier, I think it, it, it's, that's why again, it's important for the firm because I think that we need to share those experiences with clients and and ultimately, of course, it helps strengthen the relationship with clients. And again, where I welcome uh Carole's comments, you know, that often comes down to other parties, support groups, uh allyship representation, which was of course the focus of the last disability event that we held. So Carole, perhaps you'd like to say a few words about that. Carole: Thank you, David. Thank you Vaibhav. Thank you for having me on this podcast today. Um Delighted to be speaking with my wonderful colleagues. So my name's Carole Mehigan. I am the responsible business manager for our Europe Middle East and Asian offices. I am based in the London office. Um and I concentrate mainly on the London and our Leeds office where I host a multitude of events and um projects um across the area. So, concentrating on, on disability, really. I do a lot of student programs across the different age range. Um And during my time in doing my role at Reed Smith, I realized that, you know, disability is still slightly taboo amongst our students. I know young people, they don't actually realize that, you know, we're breaking those barriers down for them and that we're trying to ensure that they feel inclusive to, you know, going into a law firm and the legal sector uh has changed over the years. So working with schools who uh who predominantly work with students with disabilities and universities, who also focus a lot on a lot of students who have disabilities has been fantastic for us as a law firm because they were actually hitting that talent that seems to still be hidden away. And one of the reasons why I was so keen to do the disability career fair, um which we did um last year was because I wanted to really shine a light on those students and young people who don't feel that they are getting the focus enough or don't still feel like they would be welcomed into the legal industry. So actually focusing on them and giving them the opportunity to come into a place like where we work and to really speak to people from a diverse background, but also people with disabilities, myself being one. I was diagnosed in 2020 with neurodiversity and disabilities. So for me being an advocate in that respect as well, um and also supporting from, from the representation within Reed Smith, I thought was a very keen focus for me to make sure that students understood that we were a disability friendly organization. And David and Vaibhav have both touched upon the client engagement on the, at the disability fair. We did invite some clients who again are disability friendly. They wanted to promote that and show uh students what opportunities you can find within their organizations. So it really gave us a chance for us to talk about what we do, what we do in that space, what sort of opportunities there are for students with, with or without disabilities, but obviously focus a lot on on on disability side and also to encourage students and young people to feel like they can talk about their disability. They can actually bring that into the conversation and not be scared to hide, hide it in the background because they're worried that if they do say anything about their disability, then it will be frowned upon or they will be seen as a lesser candidate for any particular role within the business. So for me doing work uh with schools and with universities on the back of the disability fair, I'm now working with a school which exclusively has students. Every student has a disability. I'm now working with them to provide some of their students with work experience. So it's that continue of working with, you know, students and young people. So they understand that there are loads of opportunities, loads of great ways of them having an insight into our firm and, and hopefully that's going to continue. So that's what we're doing really on from the UK and the sort of Europe, Middle East and Asia side. I'm gonna hand over to Joanne who is one of our colleagues in the US for her to kind of give a little bit of more about what we're doing in the US with regards to disability. Joanne: Thank you, Carole. Uh My name is Joanne Christopher. I'm the senior human resources manager in our Pittsburgh office. I'm also the HR liaison to our LEADRS disability employee resource group in the US. Of course, we do participate with our college in Europe in the Middle East and also in Asia um on our disability program. Um as as David mentioned, people with disabilities have amazing abilities by not including them or missing out on a vast talent pole. It's very important to have diversity of thought, uh diversity of culture, and people disabilities are part of that diversity that Reed Smith values. I know that a lot of employers uh when they hear about employing folks with disability, they immediately talk about the cost of accommodations. It's widely known that most accommodations cost less than $500 and some cost nothing at all. So there's no reason not to include these colleagues. Uh People with disabilities want to work and they have a lot to offer us. Here in the United States, uh we are very proud that we have received the National Organization on Disabilities uh Leading Disability Employer Recognition. We also are part of NOD's Leadership Council and we've received 100% on the disability equality index through Disability: IN. And so, um it, it's not just a lot of talking words. Reed Smith really is putting into action a lot of initiatives to help our colleagues with disabilities because we value the gifts that they have to offer us. Some of the resources for our employers that we've developed, we've created this disability etiquette guide to help those people who aren't used to working with people with disabilities to be a little more comfortable to know how to approach a situation. We have institute of project ability where we work with clients on including a person with disability on each side of our client teams and the disability is only disclosed if the person wants to disclose that. So, you know, you could not know who the disabled person is on a particular project. We've created an accommodations resource to help other folks feel comfortable coming forward to request accommodations. It's a sample of a lot of the accommodations that we have across the firm. We also host weekly coffees and in those weekly coffees uh which again are available throughout our global platform, we get to know our colleagues. We offer support if someone is struggling or, you know, we just get to know each other if there is an oppressing issue that someone wants to bring forward. We have established subcommittees on accessibility, neurodiversity, peer support, recruiting, retention, and promotion and events and speakers here in the US, particularly in Pittsburgh, we partner with St. Anthony's School at Duquesne University to provide vocational training opportunities for college age students who uh have down syndrome autism or other intellectual disability by hosting them here in an internship program where they're learning a lot of job skills, uh how to dress for the world of work. Uh Some of those, those non uh visible types of things that you need to bring to a job, like being on time, how to get to and from work and those kinds of things. But more than that our employees just love when, when the students are here and it gives them an opportunity to work side by side with people with disabilities. Um We've also partnered with Special Olympics to host bocce tournaments. We have different awareness days and um again, we have a process to uh support all of our employees, those with disabilities and those without. So, so that's a little bit of what we're doing here in the US.  Vaibhav: From a student perspective. You, you really, and this is me speaking not being a Reed Smith employee, you really don't understand how important those kind of events are working with your working with the schools and doing a career for solely for people with disabilities because what happens is they don't know what they can be. Uh, if me coming from India, living in the Netherlands, I didn't even realize I could be a lawyer because I didn't know what professions were open to me. And so from a student perspective, if, if you have uh an environment or uh have clients who are willing to say, you know, these are the career paths that you can have. They, not everybody is probably gonna be a lawyer, not everybody is going to be uh someone in the legal profession or a partner or something like that. But at least they have aspirations to, to know who they can be. And for someone with a disability who, who, who can, who sometimes is not allowed to see beyond just what, what he, she can't do that. That is invaluable. I think before we close, I, I wanted to ask David one thing about how, because a lot of organizations talk about these are our business goals, these are our diversity goals. And if we invest too much in diversity, especially in our legal profession because they, they charge every minute unfortunately, but uh and every second that you're actually working, how, how do you deal with the fact that someone with a disability may take longer may not be as efficient? And how do you then figure out that, that your business goals and your diversity goals can be one? David: Well, I think it, and thanks Vaibhav, I think it even goes wider than that. I mean, as uh Joanne was talking, I was thinking about uh ESG environmental social governance, which we advise a lot of our, our clients on. And I think in terms of when it comes to goals uh related to the accommodation of people with disabilities which Vaibhav has just touched on, they really have to be integrated fully into all of our business goals. And this is the mistake. I think that so many organizations often make that uh they just focus on if you like their corporate and social responsibility actions rather than integrating these issues throughout their business. So uh I think as Joanne mentioned, we have this uh project ability initiative where we have, you know, uh somebody with a disability working on, on, on, on each matter, we have uh initiatives working with clients uh where we're discussing and championing the causes of people with disabilities. And I think also we're educating one another on uh as I touched on early treating people with disabilities equally because again, answering Vaibhav's point about uh how we uh accommodate the challenges of people with disabilities within our own business goals. It's as we accommodate all people within our business goals because no one is perfect and uh all people have strengths and weaknesses. It just so happens that we're where you come to a person with a disability, their weakness is often focused on that disability. But other people's weaknesses may be focused on the fact that they don't have the greatest talent in certain areas, but they've got a much stronger talent in other areas. And as we would say, it's horses for courses and it, when it comes to people with disability, it's not saying, well, they're actually a completely different animal separately and we must kind of somehow have a separate initiative for them. Well, no, they're just, they're part of all of our people. Uh And the way we accommodate them is the way we accommodate everybody and everybody needs some kind of accommodation because as they say, nobody is perfect. And, and I think that one thing I've learned from working with a number of people with disabilities is that that's kind of the number one thing that they really want is to be treated equally and, and on parity with, with, with everybody else. And I think we're moving in that direction when I say we, I mean, society generally, and I think that's why the whole ESG initiative now is great because that is all about how businesses can not only operate themselves independently in doing the right thing, but how they impact all their stakeholders and the wider society and community at large. And I think work in uh helping and highlighting the challenges of people with disabilities fits into that so well, because there are so many issues to be addressed. And as Vaibhav has alluded to so many ways in which we can, uh we can influence wider society um for the better. Vaibhav: So it's all about adapting and adapting the way, seeing the ability in others and adapting your working practices about adapting your mindset. And my one final question, because this is something I'm really passionate on is, Carole and Joanne, I think I, I think I wanted to understand because having every organization has a, has a CSR Corporate Social Responsibility or, or responsible business. These are, these are tools that every organization kind of has. And for me, I, I always think that if you can focus on a cause and use the tools you already possess as an organization, you can make a difference. How do you think uh in terms of what we are trying to achieve from a responsible business perspective, helps prepare society and businesses to embrace diversity, inclusion and become better allies. Carole: I, I don't mind starting first. So I think, you know, we, we as a firm, we see responsible business is a way of life. It's a way of us showing our culture and of a firm and how we want to provide support for, for each other. So we see it that, you know, we are a business that wants to be responsible for the wider community and that includes uh young people and students, et cetera um in the disability arena. We want to, we don't want anyone to feel excluded. You know, for, like I said, for a long time, especially students and young people who do have disabilities have been afraid to say it. They've been afraid to say on an application form or when they're being interviewed. And the, the, the problem then you have is how can you support somebody if you don't know that they need that support. So as a responsible business, as you know, we have to ensure that people understand that, you know, bring your true self to the workplace. You know, when you are applying somewhere, if you feel that you can't be completely honest and open about what you know yourself and if you have a disability, it may be not the right place for you and with working with other organizations such as clients, for example, who are also thinking in the same way that we are, you know, makes that uh collaboration with our clients, not just from a client service perspective, but also from the fact that we're organizations all trying to meet the needs of a particular demographic of people who feel like they're still outsiders. So I think being responsible for the wider community in whatever way you can bring in our community internally, to meet the external community is really important. And it also allows us as a community internally to show that we already have lots and lots of people with disabilities of all sorts, whether it's visible, invisible neurodiversity, whatever it may be and how, you know, how much they have made a success of their careers, you know, shining that light out there, letting other people know you could follow in the same footprints you could follow down the same career path is really, really important. So it's not just a case of talking the talk, you need to walk the walk, you need to do that by showing how you're going to do that. And the only way you can do that is like doing events like we've done already uh finding ways to get into the community and show what you can provide them and what they can provide to us. Because you know, even with having a disability of any sort, you bring a unique talent to the table, you know, we all bring something to the table and having disability is already a challenge for you as a person.  So when you can bring that to the table and be successful in your career, choice of career, I think just shows that, you know, you have resilience, you, you can champion yourself and you can really go, you know, help other people to feel that they can do the same thing. I'll hand over to Joanne at this point. Joanne: The one thing I would say is a professional services firm, we are in the people business. So we need to take care of our people so that they can do the best work that they can do. Disability cuts across all corners of our lives. It's socio-economic, it's diverse groups. It's every ethnic background. There are people with disabilities in every corner and these people have a lot of gifts to offer and we need to support them.  Vaibhav: As a final comment for me, this working on disability is not a silo. Every aspect of your organization can work on it whether you have pro bono uh projects that focus on disability, responsible business projects or simply come up with a legal initiative and do something like training for your employees so that they can better understand. But it's a two sided training. We, we as people with disabilities need to understand how it is to work in an organization and how it is to adapt. Whereas the organization has tools that are already there for them to focus on the ability of people. And that's something organizations do anyway, because they, they focus on who the person can be and what tools they can provide. So through this podcast, I hope that a lot of organizations who or people who are listening gain the confidence that you have the tools within your organization within yourselves to actually make a difference to anyone, let alone people with a disability and, and work and adapt to make professions better than when we found them, when we enter that each of us uh from our experience. So with that, I thank everybody for listening to our Inclusivity Included podcast. You will find a whole range of podcasts on Inclusivity Included, our podcast channel discussing a wide variety of issues to do with disability, and diversity, equity and inclusion. And I, I have enjoyed working uh talking discussing about this with my colleagues. So thank you very much and thank you for listening. Outro: Inclusivity Included is a Reed Smith production. Our producers are Ali McCardell and Shannon Ryan. You can find our podcast on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, reedsmith.com and our social media accounts. Disclaimer: This podcast is provided for educational purposes. It does not constitute legal advice and is not intended to establish an attorney-client relationship, nor is it intended to suggest or establish standards of care applicable to particular lawyers in any given situation. Prior results do not guarantee a similar outcome. Any views, opinions, or comments made by any external guest speaker are not to be attributed to Reed Smith LLP or its individual lawyers. All rights reserved. Transcript is auto-generated.

On this episode, my guest is David Bacon, a California writer and documentary photographer. A former union organizer, today he documents labor, the global economy, war and migration, and the struggle for human rights. His latest book, In the Fields of the North / En los campos del norte (COLEF / UC Press, 2017) includes over 300 photographs and 12 oral histories of farm workers. Other books include The Right to Stay Home and Illegal People, which discuss alternatives to forced migration and the criminalization of migrants. Communities Without Borders includes over 100 photographs and 50 narraatives about transnational migrant communities and The Children of NAFTA is an account of worker resistance on the US/Mexico border in the wake of NAFTA.Show Notes:David's Early YearsLearning about Immigration through UnionsThe Meaning of Being UndocumentedNAFTA and Mexican MigrationThe Source of Corn / MaizeBinational Front of Indigenous Organizations / Frente Indigena de Organizacaions BinacionalesThe Right to Stay HomeAndres Manuel Lopez Obrador (AMLO) CampaignThe Face & History of Immigration in the USAImmigration Reform and AmnestyThe Violence of Fortuna Silver Mines in OaxacaSolidarity, Change and OptimismHomework:The Right to Stay Home: How US Policy Drives Mexican MigrationIn the Fields of the North / En los campos del norteIllegal People: How Globalization Creates Migration and Criminalizes ImmigrantsCommunities without Borders: Images and Voices from the World of MigrationThe Children of NAFTA: Labor Wars on the U.S./Mexico BorderDavid's Twitter AccountDavid's Official WebsiteTranscript:Chris: [00:00:00] Welcome to the End of Tourism podcast, David. It's an honor to have you on the pod. To begin, I'd like to ask you where you find yourself today and what the world looks like for you there. David: Well, I live in Berkeley, here in California, and I am sitting in front of my computer screen having just what I've been up to today before talking with you. Chris: Hmm. Well, thank you so much for joining us, and thank you for your work. Perhaps I could ask you what drew you to the issues of labor and migration.David: Sure. Well, I come from a kind of left wing union family, so I knew about unions and workers and strikes and things like that from probably since before I can remember. And so I was kind of an activist when I was in high school, got involved in the [00:01:00] student movement in the 1960s at the University of California, got involved in the free speech movement, got tossed out by the university, actually, and wound up going to work after that, really, because I got married, had a daughter, and I got married, had a daughter, and, I needed to get a job and, you know, worked for quite a while as a a printer in the same trade that my father was, had been in went back to night school to learn more of the, of the trade, how to do different parts of it, how to run presses and so forth and then got involved, this is, you know, in the late 60s, early 70s got involved in the movement to support farm workers, really, and I was one of those people, you know, if you're my age, you remember this, if you're younger, you probably don't, but we used to picket supermarkets to try to get them [00:02:00] to stop selling the grapes and the wine and the lettuce that was on strike, and we would stand out in front of Safeway and other supermarkets with our red flags with the black eagle on them, And ask customers, you know, not to go into the store, not to buy the products that farmworkers were on strike against.And I got really interested in. I'm curious about the workers that we were supporting. You know, I grew up in Oakland and so I didn't know anything about farm workers, really. I didn't know anything about rural California, rural areas, didn't speak Spanish didn't know much about Chicano, Latinos.Oakland's a pretty diverse city, but in the area of Oakland where I grew up in you know, in our high school, you know, the students were African American or they were white, and that was a big racial question in, in school when I was in high school. So I grew up not knowing any of these things.[00:03:00] And Because I was involved in, you know, standing out in front of these stores and supporting workers, I, you know, began wondering, who are these workers that we're supporting? And eventually, I went to work for the union. I asked a lawyer friend of mine who was in their legal department if they needed any help, and of course he said yes.I went down to, Oxnard and de Santamaria began working for the union, originally taking statements from workers who had been fired because of their union activity. I didn't know much Spanish, so I had to learn Spanish on the job. Fortunately, you know, the workers were very patient with me and would help me learn, help me correct my still bad pronunciation and bad grammar.And, and I began to learn. And that process has been going on ever since, really. That was a, that was a formative time in my life. It taught me a lot of [00:04:00] things. It taught me about, you know, the culture of. farm workers who were mostly Mexican in those years, but there were still a good number of Filipino workers working in the fields.That eventually led me to the woman I eventually married, my wife, who was the daughter of of immigrants from the Philippines from a farm worker family. So I learned about that culture and I began learning about immigration, which I hadn't really known anything about growing up. Why people come to the U.S., what happens to people here. I, I saw my first immigration raid. When I was an organizer, I later became an organizer for the union as my Spanish got better. And I remember going to talk to a group of workers that I had met with the previous night, who were worked up in palm trees picking dates.And I went down to the date grove, this was in the Coachella Valley, and there was this big green van, and there were the [00:05:00] workers who I'd been talking to the previous night being loaded into the van. I was just You know, really shocked. The van took off. I followed the van all the way down to the Imperial Valley, to El Centro, where the detention center was.Stood outside the center trying to figure out what the hell is going on here. What am I going to do? What's going to happen to these people? And that was sort of an introduction to the meaning of being undocumented, what it meant to people, what could happen. And that made me an immigrant rights activist, which I've also been ever since, too.But also, over time, I got interested in the reasons why people were coming to the U. S. to begin with. You know, what people were finding here when people got here was very, very difficult work, low pay, immigration raids, police harassment, at least, and sometimes worse than that, poverty. You know, Why leave Mexico if this is what you're going to find?[00:06:00] And it also made me curious about the border. And so that also began something that has continued on in all those years since. I eventually went to the border, went to Mexico, began getting interested and involved in Mexican labor politics, supporting unions and workers in Mexico, you know, doing work on the border itself.After the Farm Workers Union, I worked for other unions for A number of years and they were generally reunions where the workers who were trying to join and we were trying to help were immigrants. So the government workers union, the women in the sweatshops sewing clothes or union for factory workers.And so my job was basically to help workers organize and. Organizing a union in the United States is like well, you know, people throw around this word, you know, this phrase class war and class warfare pretty freely, but it is like a war. You know, when [00:07:00] workers get together and they decide they want to change conditions and they want to you know, get the company to, speak to them and to deal with them in an organized way.They really do have to kind of go, go to war or be willing to, for the company to go to war with them. You know, really what people are asking for sometimes is pretty minimal, you know, wage raises or fair treatment at work or a voice at work. You know, you think, you know, what's wrong with that. But generally speaking when employers get faced with workers who want to do that they do everything possible to try and stop them.Including firing people and harassing people, calling them to meetings, threatening people, scaring people. You know, there's a whole industry in this country that consists of union consultants who do nothing but, you know, advise big companies about how to stop workers when they, when they try to organize.So that's what I did for about 20 years. Was help workers to get organized, form a union, get their bus to sit down and talk [00:08:00] to them, go out on strike, do all those kinds of things. And eventually I decided that I wanted to do something else. And I, I was already involved in, you know, starting to take photographs.I would carry a camera and I would take pictures of what we were doing as workers. We would joke about it, kind of. I would tell workers, well, you know, we're going to take some pictures here and you can take them home to your family and show them, you know, that you're really doing what's right here and 20 years from now you'll show your grandkids that, you know, when the time came, you stood up and you did what was right and people would joke with each other about it.And I discovered also that you could use them to get support for what we were doing. You know, we could get an article published in a newspaper somewhere. Some labor newspaper might run an article about us. You might get some money and some help or some food or something. But after a while, you know, I began [00:09:00] realizing that these photographs, they had a value beyond that.And that was that they were documenting this social movement that was taking place among immigrants and, and Latino workers, especially here on the West Coast of people basically trying to. Organize themselves for social justice in a lot of different ways, organizing unions for sure, but also trying to get changes in U.S. immigration laws, immigration policies those people who are citizens and able to vote, registering to vote, political change. You have to remember that if you go back to the 1960s or 1970s, Los Angeles was what we used to call the capital of the open shop. In other words, it was one of the most right wing cities in America.You know, the mayor Sam Yorty was a right wing Republican. The police department had what they called the Red Squad, whose responsibility it was is to go out and to deal with [00:10:00] people that wanted to change anything or to organize and Unions or strikes or belong to left wing political parties or whatever.And today, Los Angeles is one of the most progressive cities in the United States, and it has to do with what happened to those primarily Central American and Mexican and workers of color, women, who over time got organized and changed the politics of Los Angeles. And so, you know, I was really fascinated by it.This process, I was involved in it as an organizer and then later as a somebody taking photographs of it and writing about it that and so that's, that's sort of the transition that I made for the last 30 some odd years. I've worked as a freelance writer and photographer, basically doing the same kind of thing.I look at it as a way of organizing people, really, because the whole purpose of writing the articles and taking the [00:11:00] photographs is to change the way people think, and make it possible for people to understand the world better, and then to act on that understanding, which to me means trying to fight for a more just world, a more just society.And so. That's what, that's the purpose of the photographs, that's the purpose of the writing, is to, is to change the world. I think it's a big tradition in, in this country, in the United States of photography and of journalism that is produced by people who are themselves part of the movements that they are writing about or documenting, and whose purpose it is to sort of help to move forward social movements for social change.Chris: Amen. Some of the stories you were mentioning remind me of my mother who also worked for a labor union most of her life. And I was definitely still very much concerned with the state of affairs. I should [00:12:00] say that you know, I'm incredibly grateful as well to have a man of your stature and experience on the pod here to speak with us your work Has definitely opened my eyes to a lot of things I hadn't seen living here in southern Mexico, in, in Oaxaca.And one of these, these books, which I'd like to touch on a little bit today, is entitled, The Right to Stay Home. how U. S. policy drives Mexican migration. And we're actually at the 10 year anniversary of the publication of this book. So I feel honored to be able to speak with you in this regard about it.And, you know, it's, for me, someone who was a backpacker and a tourist, and then later a resident of this place, of Oaxaca, to come to understand much more deeply the complexities and nuances around migration, and especially in the context of Mexican migration to the United States. [00:13:00] What's left out of the conversation as someone who grew up in urban North America and Toronto, Canada very much on the left in my earlier years, in terms of organizing and, and and protesting, the, the, the dialogues and the conversations always seem to be around the the treatment of migrants once they arrived and, and not necessarily, as you said, why they left in the first place, the places that they left and the consequences to the places that they left.And so I guess to begin, I'm wondering if you could offer our listeners a little bit of background into How that book came to be written and what was the inspiration and driving factors for it? David: The book came to be written to begin with because I began going to Mexico and trying to understand how [00:14:00] the system of migration works in the context of the world that we live in, you know, people call it globalization or globalism, or you could call it imperialism.So I was trying to understand that from the roots of first having been involved with people as migrants once they had arrived here in the U. S. I was trying to understand Well, two things. One was why people were coming, and also what happens to people in the course of coming. In other words, the journey that people make.Especially the border. The border is the big And the border has very important functions in this because it's really the crossing of the border that determines what the social status of a migrant is, whether you have papers or not, whether you're documented or not, which is a huge, [00:15:00] huge, huge distinction.So as a result of that, and as a result of kind of listening to people listening to the movement in Mexico talk, about it, investigating, going to places like Oaxaca. I first wrote a book that tried to look at this as a system, a social system. It's really part of the way capitalism functions on a international or global basis in our era because what it does is it produces Displacement, the changes that are, you take a country like Mexico, and this is what the first book, the first book was called Illegal People.And what it looked at was the imposition on Mexico, for instance, it starts with NAFTA, the free trade agreement. In fact, the first book I ever wrote was about the border and was called The Children of NAFTA, the [00:16:00] North American Free Trade Agreement. But this book Illegal People, what it really tried to do is it tried to look at the ways in which People were displaced in communities like Oaxaca.And of course, for Oaxaca, Oaxaca is a corn growing state. It's a rural state. Most people in Oaxaca still live in villages and small communities. Oaxaca's a big city, and there's some other cities there, but, but most people in Oaxaca are still what you call rural people. And so NAFTA, among the many changes that it imposed on Mexico, one of the most important was that it allowed U. S. corn corporations, Archer Daniels Midland Continental Grain Company other really large corporations to dump corn in Mexico at a price that we were subsidizing through the U. S. Farm Bill, our tax money. In other words, we're, our tax money was being [00:17:00] given to these corporations to lower their cost of production.And that allowed them to go to Mexico and to sell corn at a price that was so low that people who were growing corn in a place like Oaxaca could no longer sell it for a price that would cover the cost of growing it. That had an enormous impact on people in Oaxaca because what it did was it forced people to basically to leave in order to survive.It's not that people were not leaving Oaxaca already before the agreement passed. There were other reasons that were causing the displacement of people in rural communities in Oaxaca. A lot of it had to do with this relationship with the U. S. even then, but certainly NAFTA was like pouring gasoline on all of that.And so three million people was the estimate that in a period of 10 years were displaced as corn farmers in Oaxaca. That's a huge percentage of the population of Oaxaca. [00:18:00] And so people were forced to go elsewhere looking for work. People went, you know, to Mexico City. You know, Mexico City, the metro system, the subway system in Mexico City was built primarily by workers who came from somewhere else.A lot of them from Oaxaca. Who wound up being the low cost labor that the Mexican government used to build a subway system. They went to the border, they became workers in the maquiladoras, in the factories that were producing everything from car parts to TV screens for the U. S. market. And then people began crossing the border and coming to the U.S. as either farm workers in rural areas of California or as low paid workers in urban areas like Los Angeles. So one of the big ironies, I think, of it was that here you had farm work, farmers who were being forced off their land. And remember that these are corn farmers, so [00:19:00] the Domestication of corn happened first in Oaxaca, and the first earliest years of domesticated corn, thousands of years old, have been discovered in archaeological digs in Oaxaca and caves near Oaxaca City to begin with.So here we have people to whom the world really owes corn as a domesticated crop, who are winding up as being wage workers on the farms of corporate U. S. agribusiness corporations in California, Oregon, Washington, eventually all over the United States. That was the migration of Oaxacan people. And so you could sort of see In this, as sort of a prism, what the forces were, what the social forces at work are, in other words, that in the interests of the profits of these big corporations, these trade agreements get negotiated between [00:20:00] governments, okay, our government, the U.S. government negotiates with the Mexican government, but that's like David negotiating with Goliath, or the other way around, rather, you know, The agreements are really imposed. It's not to say that the Mexican government of those years was opposed to it. It was a neoliberal government too, but the power in this negotiation is held by the U.S. government. And so that trade agreement in the interest of making Mexico a profitable place for, you know, Archer Daniels Middleton to do business gets imposed on Mexico. And then as a result of that, people get displaced and they wind up becoming a low wage workforce for other corporations here in here in the U.S. In fact, sometimes they Wind up working for the same corporation Smithfield foods, which is a big producing corporation [00:21:00] went to Mexico. It got control of huge areas of a valley called the Peralta Valley, not that far from Mexico city. And they began. Establishing these huge pork or pig raising facilities.In fact, that's where the swine flu started was because of the concentration of animals in these farms. Again, displacing people out of those communities. And people from the state of Veracruz, where the Perote Valley is located, many of them wound up getting recruited and then going to work in North Carolina at the huge Smithfield Foods Pork Slaughterhouse in Tar Heel, North Carolina.So that sort of tells you a lot about how this system works. It produces displacement. In other words, it produces people who have no alternative but to migrate in order to survive. And those people go through all the things that people have to go through in order to get to the United [00:22:00] States because there are no real visas for this kind of migration.And them wind up being The workforce that is needed by the system here, Smithfield Foods or other corporations like them in order for them to make high profits here. And in the process of doing this, I was developing a a relationship with a very unique organization in Mexico, in Oaxaca, a part of which exists in Oaxaca, called the Frente Indígena de Organizaciones Binacionales, which is the Binational Front of Indigenous Organizations.And this is an organization that was actually started by Oaxaca migrants in the U. S., in Los Angeles, and then expanded both into the Central Valley here in California and then expanded back into Mexico in Baja, California, where there are also big corporate farms where primarily Oaxaca, people from Oaxaca are the workforce, and eventually chapters in Oaxaca itself.[00:23:00] And so I would got to be friends with many people in this organization, and I would go and take photographs at their bi national meetings, they would have meetings in Mexico where people could come together and and talk about their situation. And, you know, I began, obviously, listening to what people were talking about.And, People developed this, I think, very kind of path breaking, unique analysis of migration in which they talked about a dual set of rights that migrants need and migrant communities need in this kind of world. And so, What they said was, on the one hand people need rights as migrants where they go.In other words, people, when they come to the United States, need legal status. People need decent wages, the ability to organize, you know, an end to the kind of discrimination that people are subject to. But, [00:24:00] people also need a second set of rights as well, which is called the right to stay home. And that is the title of the book, The Right to Stay Home.And what that means is that, People need political change and economic and social change in their communities of origin, which makes migration voluntary. So these are communities that are so involved in the process of migration that it would not make any sense to say that migration is bad, because In many cases, these are communities that live on the remittances that are being sent by migrants, by members of people's own families who are living and working in the United States.So the discourse in these meetings was sort of on the order of saying that people have the right to migrate, people have the right to travel, people have the right to leave, but they also have the right to stay home. They have the right to a decent future. A young [00:25:00] person who is growing up in Santiago, Cusco, Oaxaca in the Mixteca region of Oaxaca, for instance, has a right to a future in Oaxaca so that you can make a choice.Do you want to stay and have a decent life for yourself in Oaxaca, or do you want to leave and hopefully have a decent life for you and wherever you go, whether Baja California or California or Washington State? So in order to have a Right to stay home. What has to happen? What do people need? It's kind of a no brainer. People need well high farm prices to begin with. They need the ability to raise corn, tomatoes, Whatever crop it is that they need and sell it at a price that is capable of sustaining those families and communities. People need education.They need healthcare, but people also need political change because the Frente Indígena is a political organization. And so it was fighting [00:26:00] against the domination of Oaxaca by the old PRI, the party of the institutionalized revolution, which had been running Mexico for 70 years, trying to find a government that would begin to push for those kinds of social rights.And that was you know, a very important kind of eye opening for me was to hear people talking about the right to stay home, so much so that I said, you know, we need a book about this. So we're not just describing the system itself, how it works, but we are talking about what are people's responses to it?What do people think should happen here? And this was one of the most important developments of it. And it was not just. The people in Oaxaca, the more I did work on trying to investigate it and document it, there's part of the book, and also this was being done in people's [00:27:00] voices, the main voice in the right to stay home belongs to Rufino Dominguez, who was one of the founders of the Frente Indígena, who was my teacher in this, and so at one point they did knock the PRI out of power in Oaxaca and elected a governor, Gabino Cuei, who turned out to be not as good as people had hoped that he would be, but he was not the PRI.And he appointed Rufino, the head of the Oaxacan Institute for Attention to Migrants. So here was Rufino who had, was a left wing radical who spent his whole life opposing the government in Oaxaca, who then joined it for a while until he could no longer stomach what was going on there and had to leave.But. Pushing for that kind of political change in Oaxaca. There's another part of the book that talks about the miners in Cananea near the border with the United States. And their Effort to try to. win justice from this huge corporation that [00:28:00] was basically intent on destroying their union. And when they were forced out on strike, those miners also had to cross the border to Arizona to become workers in Arizona to survive.Again, you know, you see how the system is working here, but they also were talking about what kind of political change has to happen in Mexico for the right to stay home. to become reality. And that movement in Mexico grew strong enough so that, you know, after The Right to Stay Home was published, some years after, since it was, as you said, 10 years ago that Andrés Manuel López Obrador campaigned.He went all around the country speaking in every little tiny village that Mexico has, practically, in the course of four years. And one of the main things he talked about was the right to alternatives to forced migration. And I was there in Mexico City in the Zócalo when he took office. He finally won it.I don't want to go into all the things that had to [00:29:00] happen for Andrés Manuel López Obrador to win an election and become president of Mexico. But in his, in his inaugural speech as he was being sworn in, he talked about, we are going to make Mexico into a place where Mexicans can be happy living, where you don't have to go to the United States in order to survive, and I think you can talk about the, Things that the Mexican government has not been able to accomplish in the last four or five years.But I think one thing is beyond question and that is that that has been the main direction of the policy of the government of Mexico in that period of time because that's what got him elected. was this idea that, as he said, we are going to reject the liberal, neoliberal hypocrisy of the last six administrations in Mexico, meaning no more trade agreements like NAFTA, no [00:30:00] more opening Mexico up to U.S. corporations to come in and make money and as a result of which everybody's going to have to leave, that there had to be some kind of different direction in Mexico. So, in a way, I think that. Maybe that book, The Right to Stay Home, was like a little grain of sand that joined with other little grains of sand like it in helping to move forward that process of political change, because it happened on really on both sides of the border.Gosh, millions and millions of Mexicans who are living in the United States. So the process of political discussion that goes on about the kind of government Mexicans should have happens not just in Mexico, it happens here too. You know, part of Mexico is here on this side of the border. So you know, the book, and the book actually was published in Spanish and in Mexico as well too.So I think that it talked about things that were very important to people. [00:31:00] At the time, and that people are still debating about what has to happen in order for the right to stay home to be a reality. And I think it's something very important for people in this country to listen to and to think about as well, too, because in all the debates about migration that happen in here in the U.SThere's not a lot of attention that's paid to this whole idea of the two sets of rights, what has to happen. You know, certainly, you know, there are people like Trump and the right wing of the Republican Party that just, you know, never going to talk about anything like this. But even among Democrats, even in the Biden administration, you know, it's really too much about how to manage the border, you know, which basically boils down to how many people are we going to detain and deport.Rather than thinking about what kind of [00:32:00] world do we want to live in. Therefore, what kind of places migration going to have in it? ⌘ Chris Christou ⌘ is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.Chris: Yeah, I mean, it's, it's it's been fascinating reading and rereading this book in, in, in part to be able to give voice to not just migrants and not just migration issues in the places that people move to or migrate to, but also in the places that they, that they leave behind and the voices of the people that they leave behind.And you know, I think for. Many North Americans, especially those who are first or second generation citizens of those countries of Anglo North America, of Canada and the United States, that these are, these are the stories these are the voices that that maybe they haven't heard of in their own families as well.And so, you know, you started to mention a little bit about this. the kind of superficiality, perhaps, if I'm, if I can say it in that, in those terms, of the [00:33:00] political conversation around migration in the United States, in Canada, and perhaps even in Mexico. And so I'd like to ask you about the reception and perhaps the fallout Once the book was published, and I'm curious how the declaration to the right to stay home or the right to not migrate has altered at all the political or social social landscape in rural Mexico, you know, at least in terms of the people that you know in these places.And also if there was any response, any, any ground shaking movements as a result of the book coming out among activists in the United States. David: Well, I think that the book contributed to an important change. In the immigrant rights movement in the United States here, because, you know, having participated in that movement as an activist [00:34:00] for, gosh, 40 some odd years now, maybe more, Immigration Reform and Control Act in 1986 with the so called amnesty law.Which not only gave amnesty to undocumented people, but also made it illegal for undocumented people to work in the United States after that and started the whole process of the border militarization. In fact, you know, the negative parts of that bill were so bad that many people like myself opposed the bill, even if it had amnesty in it, saying that it was not a this was not a good deal.And I think that over time. You know, history has proven that we were right not that amnesty was unimportant and not worth fighting for, but that the price that we paid turned out to be much higher than people were willing to give it credit for, you know, at the time. But what was also really missing from that debate, for instance, in [00:35:00] those years, was any sense that we had to really deal with and think about the causes of migration and the roots of migration, the displacement.It was really all about the status of people when they were here. You know, should it be legal or illegal for people to work? Should people get papers or should people not get papers? And that was a very limiting Conversation, because what really, what it really meant was that it could not acknowledge the fact that the migration from Mexico is not going to stop.For instance, the, in that, in that bill, the, the qualifying date for amnesty was January 1st, 1982, meaning. That if you came before that date, you could apply for the amnesty and get legalization, and if you came after that date, you couldn't get it. For people migrating from [00:36:00] Oaxaca, for instance, almost everybody came after.So all the Oaxacans who came to the United States, hundreds of thousands of people, millions of people really hardly anybody. Qualified for amnesty because of that bill, which is one reason why legal status is such an enormous question for the Oaxacan community here in the U. S. So it, the, the discussion of that bill didn't acknowledge that and also by setting that date, it was, I think, very cynical because Mexico had what was called the Peso Shock in 1982, where the economic crisis in Mexico got so bad that Mexico had to devalue its currency.And what that meant was that thousands, hundreds of thousands of people in Mexico lost their jobs and had to come to the United States. And by setting that date, January 1st of that year, what you were really saying is, none of those people are going to qualify for amnesty. So they were [00:37:00] already here. But also it didn't acknowledge that, you know, in the, that, that bill set up a a commission to study the causes of migration, supposedly.And that commission came back and recommended the negotiation of a trade agreement between the U. S. and Mexico. And it said, well, in the short run, maybe this would result in the displacement of a lot of people, but in the long run, it would lead to the economic development of Mexico, and then people would have jobs and they wouldn't have to come here.Well, that was another very, very cynical kind of thing, because the negotiations of NAFTA started not long after the report of that commission, and in fact, NAFTA did lead to the displacement of millions of people in Mexico. There were four and a half million migrants from Mexico living in the U. S.when NAFTA went into effect and by 2010 it was [00:38:00] 12 and a half million people. So an enormous increase in people and the rise in Mexican living standards. Never happened. Well, that's not true. When López Obrador finally came into office he began taking measures to raise wages and raise the living standards in Mexico, which previous administrations had resisted bitterly because they wanted to attract investment.And things have started to improve economically for workers and farmers in Mexico a little bit. But up until then, so being unable to face the roots of migration and its connections to corporate America and the way our government was on the one hand producing migration or doing things to produce migration on the other hand making The status of migrants, illegal criminalizing it here.It was a really, a very difficult debate for people in [00:39:00] the immigrant rights movement. As a result, a lot of organizations said, well, MSD, we need MSD. Let's just forget about a lot of other stuff. Let's just get down to seat on what we paid a really bad price for it. Today I think there is a lot more discussion in the immigrant rights movement about what happens in Mexico and Central America in particular that causes people to come to the United States.I think still there's not enough of a willingness to deal with the economic part of it. the poverty. So these days, the way it gets dealt with is mostly by talking about the violence in Honduras. For instance, San Pedro Sula, which is called the murder capital of the world. You know, I wrote a whole article about how did San Pedro Sula become such a violent place to begin with?And what did it have to do with U. [00:40:00] S. companies going and growing bananas in Honduras? But in any case it gets put down, I think too much to violence, to the exclusion of the causes of the violence. What is the, what is the root cause of violence in Central American countries? The Civil War in El Salvador was fought about who was fighting on what side, what kind of changes were people proposing.The more you unpeel it, the more you look at it, the more you see that this is really, again, about the economic and political relationship between the U. S. and China. Those countries. And so I think that books like Illegal People, like The Right to Stay Home, played a role in trying to get us to look more at this as a whole system, what produces migration, and then criminalizes migrants here.I think that it's a very [00:41:00] limited accomplishment. Because we still have an extremely unjust immigration system. You know, we all hated Trump and the detention centers and, and his racist orders. But the reality is, is that we have more people crossing the border this last year than any other previous time in our history.And we have thousands and thousands of people living in detention. In the United States in detention centers and in detention centers on the Mexican side of the border. And this is under a democratic administration. So, I think that we have to be real about how limited our impact has been up to now.But, having said that, I think it is still a big advance for us to be able to talk. in this country, in the United States, about the roots of migration, and also be able to reach out to organizations and people and communities in Mexico and talk about, well, [00:42:00] okay, what is our, what should our relationship be?Well, how do we work together? How are we going to be able to try and change this system together? I think those efforts are kind of only starting, really. I don't think there's nearly enough of it, but I think that's the future. That's where the change is going to come from. Chris: And I can't stress enough, you know, how devoid of complexity and nuance most any political conversation has these days, and that most people don't go looking for it, in part because You know, most people haven't been taught.So, you mentioned a little bit earlier, as you wrote in, in your book, The Right to Stay Home, about the consequences of mining companies, as an example, in, in Mexico. Foreign owned mining corporations. And Here in Oaxaca, it's very well known that these corporations undertake geological testing without the [00:43:00] consent of communities, that they lie to the communities about concessions when trying to push their way into the territory, and then sponsor community violence by dividing the people against each other through bribery, corruption.Intimidation, threats, and sometimes assassination. And so, I'm curious, first, if you could offer a little bit more of what you've seen in this regard, and secondly, why do you think that in this example that, you know, Canadians, in the context of the one particular mine here in the Central Valleys of Oaxaca, is a Canadian owned mine, why they have no idea that this is happening on foreign soil in their names?You David: know, I wrote a long article about San Jose del Progreso in the Vice Centrales in, in Oaxaca, and Fortuna Mine there, which is a Canadian, Canadian company. And I think this is [00:44:00] another way of seeing what this kind of, just to use shorthand, this free trade arrangement between the US, Canada and Mexico, what it really means for people on the ground.Mexico in previous administrations changed this mining law so that it became possible. And the purpose of to make it possible for foreign corporation to get a mining concession anywhere in Mexico and develop a mine without having to get the consent of the people who live in the community around it.Basically saying that, you know the Mexican government was entitled to sell off these concessions regardless of what the people there thought about it. And so the purpose of this was to, again, attract foreign investment into Mexico. This is part of the neoliberal policy that says [00:45:00] that the economic development policy of Mexico should be to sell pieces of Mexico to foreign investors, to foreign corporations.And supposedly this money is going to make life better. For people in Mexico well, first of all, it's a very corrupt system, so the selling of mining concessions involves, you know, millions and millions of dollars that wind up in the pockets of those people who grant the concessions. So it was a source of enormous corruption in the Mexican government in granting those concessions and in passing that change in the law to begin with.And then in fighting for changes in the legal system, the free trade set up, those mining corporations could then, basically, it gave them not only a kind of impunity against communities that protested about it, but in which they could even sue the Mexican government. If the Mexican government tried to stand in the way and say, well, you [00:46:00] can't develop the mine, then the mine could sue the Mexican government and say, well, you deprived us of potential profits and you owe us millions of dollars.And there were decisions like the metal cloud decision that allowed for this kind of thing to happen. So what this meant is on the ground, you have mining mining concessions sold and mines being developed all over Mexico. In the face of local opposition, and the mine in San Jose de Progreso is a really good example of that, where you have a Canadian company that comes in and says, okay, we are going to, in fact, they weren't the originators of the mine, they basically bought a mine that had been played out by previous owner.And so we are going to dump a lot of money into this and we are going to make it a producing mine and the impact on the community. We don't really care. And so the impact is really enormous. You know these are open pit mines. They're a scar on the land. They [00:47:00] contaminate the water, the aquifer, so that these farming communities can no longer support themselves in the same way.In order to develop the mine, what they do is they divide the communities. And so, as you said, in San Jose de Progreso, they bought off the town's, the town's government who basically gave the company permission to do whatever it wanted to in spite of local opposition. Then when local opposition got organized to, to oppose it, the company cooperated with the with the local leaders that it had bought off to basically go after those leaders in a very violent way.So, Bernardo Vazquez. who had was from this community. He had actually gone to the United States and become a farm worker in Petaluma, in California. And then seeing what was happening in his community, went back to San Jose de [00:48:00] Progreso and to and began leading the opposition. And he was then ambushed and assassinated.Other people in his, around him were also killed, and then the violence went both ways. People on the other side got killed. And so this whole community became a warring camp, camps against each other. You know, I remember when I visited there, there are two taxi companies in this community. There's a taxi company that's associated with the People who are pro mine and the taxi company is associated with people who are against it.And you better not get into the wrong taxi because you could, some terrible things could happen to you. I took pictures of these threats that were spray painted on the walls of, some of the irrigation canals there, Bernardo Vasquez, your time has come, you know that was before he was assassinated.A lot of the people who work in the mine come from somewhere else, some of them from Canada[00:49:00] but it takes a few of the jobs in hand somehow. to certain people in the community there as a way of buying them off and giving them a stake in the continuation of the mine. And so what happens is that you have a community that's a continuing, a continuous war with itself.And this happens all over Mexico. In fact, it's not just Mexico, this is happening in El Salvador, it's happening in Guatemala, and actually mostly by Canadian companies. So you ask, do people in Canada know about this? I think there are some journalists like Dawn Bailey who have Canadian journalists who have tried to write about it, and tried to make people in Canada aware of it.I don't think that most people in Canada have the faintest idea of what those corporations are doing, and that's because I think the corporate media in Canada has very little interest in showing that, partly because, you know, they have the same basic set of economic interests that the mining corporations themselves do.[00:50:00] Probably share, same shareholders, who knows? In any case That's something that could happen and that should happen if people in Canada became more aware of what these companies were doing and then began taking action in Canada to try to restrict them. I think it would have a big impact on the ability of these communities in Oaxaca to survive.I think that San Jose the Progresso is going to be a war with itself and this continuing political violence is going to happen. Until the company, basically until the company leaves, really. I don't see any other solution, I don't see how the mine can continue operating there under any ownership and not have this war taking place there.So, but I think that the way to get that company to leave is for people in Canada to take some action in cooperation and in solidarity with the people in that [00:51:00] community. So, maybe by Organizing delegations from Vancouver or Toronto down to San Jose del Progreso would be a way of helping that to develop.That's possibly something that might happen, but basically you need that relationship in order, I think, in order to stop this from happening. Chris: Hmm. Thank you. Yeah, and you know, of course it just ends up contributing to migration, right, and exile, displacement within those communities. And and so I'm curious, what do you think the right to stay home or the right to not migrate can offer us as modern people, as citizens or migrants in the context of the current crises and perhaps the crises to come?You know, you mentioned that Immigration the numbers, the number of people coming into the United States over the last year has just been unprecedented. The number of migrants [00:52:00] flowing through Oaxaca, for example, in Southern Mexico right now is unprecedented and it really seems, you know, like.not just my opinion, but in terms of statistics and predictions and all of these things, that it's only going to get more unprecedented. So I'm curious what you might, what you might think that this, this declaration, the right to stay home or the right to not migrate, might offer us going forward. David: Well, I think it offers us something to fight for.That it gives us a vision of what a future could and should look like in the communities where displacement is taking place. In San Jose de Progreso, for instance, the right to stay home means a community that's not at war with itself, which means that the mining operation has to end. But, Ending the mining operation doesn't necessarily mean that people are [00:53:00] going to have an educational system or a health care system that's capable of meeting their needs.So you need political change in Oaxaca, San Jose de Progreso, and Mexico in general, that is able to deliver those things. For people. I think we could take that same thing and and look at people coming from Venezuela. There are a lot of Venezuelan migrants who are crossing Mexico coming to the U.S. border. On the one hand, the U. S. government is sort of a little bit more friendly. to Venezuelan migrants, although it's still doing whatever it can at the border to try to keep people out. Because, you know, this gets used in the media in the U. S. as a way of saying, well, this is the proof that the socialist government in Venezuela is incompetent and corrupt and ought to be removed, which has been U.S. policy for a long time. But in reality, the economic problems in [00:54:00] Venezuela would certainly be a lot less if Venezuela wasn't subject to the U. S. sanctions regime, which is basically sought to strangle the Venezuelan economy. And so the people who are leaving Venezuela, whether they're middle class people who are, you know, fed up with the problems of Caracas or whether they're poor people who have you know, have to migrate in order to survive those are due to U.S. policy again. So really, the right to stay home means in the United States that people in the United States, progressive people especially, have to seriously take a look at what the impact of U. S. policies are on the people that are being subjected to them, and to begin with, cause no harm.That would be a good starting place to stop those policies that are actively producing migration. You know, the people who drowned in the Mediterranean, those 600 people who [00:55:00] drowned in that horrible boating accident, who were they? A lot of them were Afghans. A lot of them were Iraqis. Why were they leaving?What were they doing on that boat? They were the product of that U. S. war. Now, I was a very active, you know, opponent of, of the war. I went to Iraq twice to try to make connections with trade unionists and other people in Iraq who were trying to fight for kind of a progressive nationalist solution to the economic problems of Iraq in the wake of the occupation to end the occupation.But you know, that's kind of what we need. We need to take responsibility for the impact of what this government has done. When we take a look at what the, what is going to happen to the people of Palestine and Gaza, [00:56:00] Under the bombardment, you know, if people were able to leave Gaza, there would be literally hundreds of thousands of people going wherever they could.And the Middle East simply in order to get out from under the Israeli bombs. And those bombs are coming from where? They're coming from the United States, that military aid package. You know, you cannot have a military policy and a military aid package the way the U. S. passes them without its having enormous impacts on migration, on the displacement of people, and at the same time it also Produces impacts here in the U.S. that we also need to take a look at and see what the relationship are. You know, people migrate in the U. S. as well, too. We have factories to close when Detroit stopped being an [00:57:00] auto manufacturing center and the Factories in Detroit closed, the car factories, thousands and thousands and thousands of auto workers became migrants in the U.S., going from city to city to city, looking for. So the price of the economic crisis that exists for us isn't felt just by people in Mexico or Palestine or Iraq. It's felt here in the United States and in Canada too. These problems They require a political solution, you know, they require us to organize ourselves in a way that is strong enough to force political change on our government here, so that it takes responsibility for the past devastation.And the past displacement and also stops doing the things that are going to keep on causing it in the future. And then I think we can think about kind of repairing the world. I think we have to repair the world, too, after this. But the first thing we have [00:58:00] to do is we have to stop hurting it. We have to stop the damage, and that means having enough political courage and enough political power to make our government do that.That's a tall order. That's a tall order. I don't think it's something from today to tomorrow. But it's a long process. You know, I'm a, I grew up during the anti Vietnam War movement and the civil rights movement, and I saw this country at a time when it was possible and when we did it. So I'm the optimist.I believe that it's within our power to do this. But looking at where we are right now, I think we have a long way to go. And so, you know, if what I do contributes is granito de arena to it, you know, a lo mejor. Chris: Thank you so much, David. Yeah, it's definitely really, really important to hear words such as yours in a time of deep nihilism.[00:59:00] And, and also the absence and I think the disregard of, of Elder Voices in our midst and in our movements. So, I deeply appreciate your willingness to speak with me and, and to our listeners today. And just finally, before we depart, how might our listeners find out more about your work?How might they purchase your books? David: I have a blog and a lot of what I write and the pictures that I take are up there and I put them up there pretty regularly. And so the way to find it is to Google my name, David Bacon, and the blog is called The Reality Check. And so if you Google that together, you'll find it and that's how you can connect.Chris: Thank you so much, David. David: My pleasure. Thank you for having me. Get full access to ⌘ Chris Christou ⌘ at chrischristou.substack.com/subscribe

In today's episode of Building Texas Business, join us for a fascinating discussion with our guest David Fletcher, General Manager of Lone Star Sports and Entertainment. David gives us exclusive insights into the sports business industry, highlighting the economic impact of major sporting events on Houston. We learn about LSSE's role in the city's sports landscape and the excitement for the upcoming Tax Act Texas Bowl. David also enlightens us on why Houston is a major sports hub, touching on upcoming events like the college football championship and the 2026 FIFA World Cup. Tune in for a thrilling exploration of the fast-paced world of sports business. SHOW HIGHLIGHTS Chris talks with David Fletcher, the General Manager of Longstar Sports and Entertainment, about the intricacies and realities of the sports business world. David describes the significant economic impact of major sporting events on the business community, highlighting their ability to draw in substantial revenue and tourism. We discuss the role of LSSE in the Houston sports scene and its involvement in exciting upcoming events like the Tax Act Texas Bowl. David addresses some common misconceptions about the sports industry, revealing the hard work, long hours, and sacrifices behind the scenes. We delve into what it means to be a good teammate in the sports industry, focusing on traits such as being coachable, ready, and positive. David shares insights on why Houston has become a hotspot for sports business, citing its prime location, diverse population, and robust infrastructure. We discuss the upcoming national college football playoff championship and the anticipation it's generating in Houston. David gives a preview of the 2026 FIFA World Cup, expressing his enthusiasm for the global event to be hosted in Houston. I explore personal topics with David, such as his first job experience, his preference for Tex-Mex over barbecue, and his dream 30-day sabbatical destination. David shares his passion for skiing in Park City, Utah, expressing gratitude for the support and involvement of the Houston community in their work. LINKSShow Notes Previous Episodes About BoyarMiller GUESTS David Fletcher About David TRANSCRIPT (AI transcript provided as supporting material and may contain errors) Chris: In this episode you will meet David Fletcher, general manager of Longstar Sports and Entertainment. David shares his insights into the business of sports, as well as the economic impact major sporting events can have on the business community. David, I wanna welcome you to Building Texas Business. Thanks for coming today. David: It's great to be here, Chris. Appreciate the opportunity. Chris: So let everybody know, you're the general manager of what's called Longstar Sports and Entertainment here at Houston. Tell the audience a little bit about what that company is and kind of how it fits into the sports landscape here in Houston. David: Yeah, longstar Sports and Entertainment, or LSSE, as we try to call it with such a long name, is really the events production and management company at Houston, texans. So we are a primary outlet for event production, promotion and really a focus to our efforts to date around filling event dates at NRG Stadium. Most of what we do, chris, is in the sports space, although we have certainly done fair share of shows in the entertainment side, but college football, international soccer, rugby are all really big parts of what we do and inside of that we can do anything and everything that we need to do to make an event successful. We've promoted and negotiated and done our own events. We work with partners like ESPN or the Major League Soccer to host events at our building for them. We work with global brands like Manchester United, real Madrid or even Taylor Swift to bring events to our place in a variety of different ways. So really our focus is on bringing people together in Houston and we've done some other things over the years some investments and some events outside of NRG Stadium. But at our core we are a major part of making NRG Stadium one of the world class destinations for events and we're very proud of what we've been able to do over the last 21 years. Chris: That's what I love about kind of the focus at LSSC and the Texans for that matter is really a focus on doing things for the benefit and betterment of Houstonians. It seems to be kind of maybe a core focus. David: No question. I mean, look, at the end of the day, our organization is only focus on three things it's creating experiences, it's delivering incredible vowed partners and it's about doing great things for Houston. So, in that core capacity, major events, whether it be bringing Leon O Messi to play at NRG Stadium in an event like Copa America a few years ago I mentioned Taylor Swift we had a chance to host her in 2018, or Keddie Chesney or George Straits or Tim McGraw done shows with all of them over the years to the big time college football, like the Tax Act Texas Bowl that we host each and every year. Our focus is on really those three initiatives and I think they play into exactly what you said, which our organization has been all about, and the family the McNair family has been all about since day one. Chris: So, speaking of the Tax Act Texas Bowl, where we've got a match up right around the corner with Oklahoma State and Texas A&M excited about that and I would think that there is some excitement from those fan bases about being here at Houston. David: No question, our 18th year of hosting that college football postseason spectacular that happens each and every year at NRG Stadium. Last 10 years we've had the Big 12 in SEC and you mentioned it Texas A&M, who's obviously one of, if not, the biggest collegiate brand in this part of the world, going and taking on Oklahoma State, an old rival there from the Big 12 days and 20th ranked Oklahoma State Cowboys, I might add, who made it all the way to the Big 12 championship game this year and have the nation's best running back in Oli Gordon. A lot of things to be excited about on both fan bases. Texas A&M obviously a great brand, but had their struggles on the field relative to their expectations this year. A lot of transition, including bringing in a really exciting new coach and Mike Elko, and this is an opportunity for both of these teams, but particularly Texas A&M, to start their 2024 March to the championship this December 27th. Chris: Very good. So let's talk a little bit just about you and kind of how you got into the sports industry and you've been general manager now at LSE like 10 years. That's crazy because I can remember when you first took over the role. So 10 years goes by fast. David: It goes by real fast, chris. Look, for me sports has been an incredible part of my life, like many, since my early days of youth, I know as a kid. For me there wasn't a day that didn't go by literally a day that I didn't have to go to some practice or didn't get to go to some practice of some kind, played a lot of sports really important to my family growing up and ultimately developed a very strong passion for sport itself. As I got a little older I was in school at the University of Texas I realized that you could make a business out of it. You could create a life around the, not just playing on the field, and for me my playing days they definitely ended in high school, which is okay. I still get to this day, get to go out there and try and hack it with the best of them every once in a while, but I do it vicariously most of the time in working with my kids and coaching them and watching them grow. So for me, like I said, I knew sport was a big part of what I had a passion for when I graduated from UT. I had an opportunity to be to work for an NFL team in my hometown right here in Houston Texas. They didn't even have a name until a few weeks into my job, but that was the Houston Texans, and so coming out of UT and having the opportunity to be a part of building a professional team no less an NFL team from the ground up was something that I thought was really cool and I thought would be something that would help fuel that passion further, and it has. There's no question, of course, as a graduate coming out of college, many of us, myself included had bills to pay, and working as an intern at any sports team is not a great way to pay off those bills very quickly. But you know, I knew I had. I knew I had a goal in mind. I knew that I could make a business out of this if I really focused on making the most of the opportunities I had about keeping a positive attitude and really just taking every opportunity I could to grow, and I did that. I worked at the Texans during that first season, had an opportunity after that to get into a sales side where I did start making money working in media sales after leaving the team, spent a few years doing that for the University of Texas Athletics and then with the Houston Rockets, but I had a chance to return back to the team in 2010 and have been with the Texans in some way or shape or form ever since and that's been a lot of fun to really get to be in my hometown to work for the NFL team ups and downs included along the way, right, as we've had some great years and some not so great years. But going back to what I talked about earlier about being able to make an impact, particularly in my hometown, it's been an amazing opportunity for me and I still wake up every day and I know this is gonna sound really silly and I've grown a lot in my career, but we office at NRG Stadium and there are a lot of days where I walk in I'll hear the voice guy, david Brady, in my head going welcome to NRG Stadium. Chris: And it's just for me as I walk in the office. David: You know, it's a subtle reminder in my head that you know what. This is something pretty cool and this is something really special and been fortunate enough to be a part of a lot of things that have helped grow this community as a sports destination and then hopefully a lot more going forward. Chris: That's great. I mean it's a very unique position, unique opportunity. It relates to working for an NFL franchise. Right, there's only 32 franchises that you can work for, so let's talk again. So you work your way up and then you get this opportunity to move into leadership and I like to talk to guests, entrepreneurs, about leadership. So let's talk about that with you, kind of give us a little idea of your journey. Who were some of your mentors that you kind of molded your leadership style after? David: Well, I think mentors are so important, chris. They're so important to provide you you know reality, to provide you guidance, to provide you you know somebody who can ultimately be a resource, good and bad, in any situation. You know, for me it started with a good friend of ours and I still think about him all the time as Jamie Roots, you know, arguably one of the best in the business, president of the Texans for 20 plus years and spent spent really so much time, energy and effort in creating and ultimately growing the Texans brand, and so getting a chance to watch him and be a part of his team for almost a decade myself was something that you know, I've taken so much from. You know, the things that we focused on were about relationships, and that's really where it starts in any of these businesses is, you know, whether you're working with clients, teammates or employees and just trying to find ways to connect. You've got to be able to connect at all levels and build relationships with people, no matter what role they're playing in your business. So it's starting with relationships first. You know, I think, looking at how Lone Star has been approached I talked to Jamie about this a lot over the years Texans, so important and ingrained in the business of, or the fabric of, the Houston community. But what Lone Star has really helped do is expand the reach beyond just football and reach into what is already arguably the most diverse community in the country and bring them in to a place that they could celebrate, that the passions they have can create memories that last a lifetime and ultimately, yes, do business. You know, and so you know, lone Star helps us reach in. We've done, you know, 21 Mexican national team soccer events at our stadium. We've hosted Beyonce. We've had, you know, lsu take on Wisconsin or, you know, coming up, the national championship game for college football. Yes, there's some core elements that are consistent across every sport, every entertainment property, every football event that I just mentioned, but each of those tie people back to our business, they tie people into, or they bring people into, our community and they ultimately, you know, give us an opportunity to create even more momentum for the team and for Houston going forward. So, when I look at how we've approached that from a leadership perspective, you know it's really been thinking about how our business, my business, can impact people outside of what we do in the Texans. And with that, you know, like I said from the beginning, it starts with relationships. Chris: Hey, you hit the nail on the head because I think that's true. No matter what business you're in, if you're a one man shop or you're growing it to be bigger, it's all about relationships, like you said, with your external partners but more importantly with your internal teammates. So, talking on that subject a little bit, let's talk a little bit. I know you know you've built a team around you at LSSC to help put on and promote these events. What are some of the things you look for when you're going through that process? One maybe identify whether it's through the recruiting process or onboarding or, as they're there, in kind of the training to make sure you're making the best decision you can in building that team. And then maybe we'll talk about the other side is when you know maybe this wasn't the right fit, the harder decisions to make. David: Well, I think it starts. You know I mentioned it earlier, but to me there's really three core elements of being a good teammate, and I think these matter whether you're the intern or you're the leader of the organization. One be coachable right. Nobody that I have ever met, even the best in the business, know everything right, so be able to take advice, take criticism, learn from your mistakes, and that's something I think's really important. Two be ready, right. Be when opportunities exist, don't be afraid to raise your hand, don't be afraid to speak up, don't be afraid to go all in. You never know when an opportunity could be the best opportunity for you if you don't ask. So be coachable, be ready and then, from my perspective, just be positive, right. The attitude is the only thing that any of us can control, and my experience and my life has taught me that if you focus on the good, you have a lot better chance of getting there than if you focus on the bad. And that speaks to communication internally. That speaks to the way you approach how you position your business. It speaks to how you approach your competition right. Ultimately, at the end of the day, if you focus on the good, there's a better chance you're gonna get good. Chris: Like I couldn't agree more on that positive mindset, kind of staying positive, focus on the positive, learn from the bad and the negative maybe, but your primary focus has got to be on improvement in a positive way. Yeah, again, there's books written about it all over, but mindset makes a big difference. David: No question, no question. Ultimately, if you're a teammate for us and you've got those qualities, we feel like that's a great start to being a positive contributor to our group. Chris: Well, no just from being around the organization as much as I have. Y'all are known the Texans and LSSE. You're known within the sports industry of training people to be great and I guess that's a blessing and a curse. You get really good people but then people come and take them. David: Well, I've always had the mentality, chris. I know it's one that may fly in the face of common thought, but look, if anybody's being approached or anybody's being seen as having an opportunity coming from where we have brought them to, then we've done our jobs the other day and so we wanna keep as many of those on our team as we can, no question, but many times, for a variety of reasons, you have to accept that maybe reality, and so do the best of what you've got, be ready for the next opportunity, keep moving forward. Chris: So, working in the world of sports, what's one of the things you think is maybe the biggest misperception that most have about what you do? Cause it sounds pretty glamorous. David: Well, that's probably the biggest misperception. I think that, and that I have access to every ticket for every event all the time. My wife still sometimes even has that misperception, but I love her for it. No, look, I think the reality is that. I think that people do think that. Well, let me back up. I think there can be a perception that it is all glamorous all the time. Right, there's a lot of very visible and very talented people that are in the media all the time, that are compensated well, that are creating brands of their own. There certainly is an element to that, but I think that more often than not, it's a job that, if you don't have a passion for what you're doing, what you're doing, it's gonna be hard, because the hours are long, holidays are not really holidays. The players have negotiated a very significant salary, and that's not always the case for everybody else. And on the business side, and there are so many facets of what working in sports can be, and I think that's also, at the same time, an opportunity A lot of people look at. Well, you work for a team so that you're working in sports. Working in sports can be working for an agency that's working with a brand that is creating a partnership with a team. It could be working on the media side, bringing the events to life through social, digital and television content. It could be being a lawyer that negotiates contracts. It could be taking tickets and welcoming people to NRG Stadium, and so there's just so many different ways. There are over 7,000 people that work on a major event day at NRG Stadium. Just on the day, just on the day itself, right Between part-time staff, texans, employees, police fire, you name it. That's crazy. So it's such a big it becomes its own little city. So ultimately, there's a lot of different ways that sports can touch somebody. Most often, people just think of the players and what happens on the field. Chris: Well, it's nothing. You said when you started that, and I think it's true and it transcends all industries Passion To be really good at what you do, you have to have a passion for it, because it's long hours and putting in real hard time to learn and advance and grow your expertise at whatever it is, and so it has to start and stop a passion. David: No question, and if I look towards my life personally, it's been the fuel that's put me on the path to the successes that I've had. I mentioned it from the beginning. I mean, I started out as an intern with the Texans. I'm very proud of the fact that I'm the only intern or the only member of the executive team at Texans that actually started out as an intern with the team itself and that wasn't by accident. I mean, certainly there's a lot of good fortune along the way and I was able to produce results when needed. But I look at that as a testament to. Without the passion that I had, I wouldn't have been able to go through the 120 hour weeks as an intern, making minimum wage, I might add. You know working on, you know lifting heavy equipment or organizing, you know volunteer groups or you know putting together hours of copy that may not even be used, right. I mean, it's just those things that are just little steps along the way that, personally, I had to do, but I think they apply to anybody who has felt success in their business is that it starts with that passion. Chris: Yeah. So let's turn the conversation a little bit and talk about something that I don't think gets talked about enough, certainly at least here in Houston. We, when you step back and look at it, we, being Houston, which means you and others have done an amazing job of making Houston a true, like sports event destination. So we can talk about that a little bit, but what I want to do is connect that to how that the impact that has on the business community in Houston, because it's significant. David: It's massive, you know. So I'll start with a couple of things. One, you know, I think Houston's success as a destination for sport really points to. You can point to a lot of things that have been contributing factors, and they all have been geography center of the country, center of the continent, certainly a very, a very easy to get to market with all the infrastructure here from the great airports, obviously our traffic and our freeways. But the port you know, the infrastructure itself is fantastic, have served us well over the last 20 plus years with this latest renaissance, and we'll going forward. You've got a Some may need some tweaking, right? Chris: No question about it. David: I mean NRG is certainly, you know, a fantastic, world-class facility throughout its history. But that definition certainly has changed over the years and there's opportunities to continue to be the biggest and the best that we're working towards getting in the future. But the market seven plus million people in the DMA it's the most diverse market in the United States. All of that creates a lot of reasons why Houston has been a major destination. But I think the most important element is the leadership and the people and when I say people I mean the people at all levels that help contribute to the experience that's created when major events. Stakeholders are looking for a place to go and they come into Houston and they get to see it. We've got a number of groups that have worked together very successfully over the years the Texans and Lone Star, nrg Park, houston Livestock Show and Rodeo, all the major professional teams, harris County, houston Sports Authority, houston First Mayor's Office, city and Fire, the Texas Medical Center. All of those groups and many others have created a winning formula with how we approach the event experience, whether it's a festival, a conference or the Super Bowl. You throw in the hospitality community, which Houston First is certainly a driver of, but the thousands of unbelievable hotels, restaurants and entertainment options that are here in this community and how they collaborate and work together around these major events. And you see, no other market in the country can offer what we have as a collective package, and that's why you've seen Houston be awarded more major sporting events than any other market in the country over the last 15 years. That's impressive. Chris: I mean, people don't know that. They don't, it doesn't get talked about. David: They don't, they don't. There's certainly a lot of energy around. You get the first one right and then it just kind of dominos and we've been very aggressive as a community in pursuing those options. We've been very successful and when we get those options here to put our best foot forward, there are great resources at state level that certainly help with that and a spirit of collaboration with the governor's office to try and generate as many major events in the state of Texas as possible. So those are all winning points in the formula for success. But it really starts with the people and as we look at the future of the sporting event business, the major event business in Houston, there's a reason why we keep going after this and a big part of it is what you talked about the economic impact. Pick any number of these. These events Final four, college football, playoff, national championship game, fifa World Cup, super Bowl, taksac, texas Bowl, copa America I'm missing thousands of events that happen and are the Major League Baseball All-Star game, nba All-Star game, mls Cup. All these events that you see have really generated billions of dollars collectively for our community and economic impact. That's people coming to Houston and staying in our hotels. They're going and having a great time down in Galveston. They are eating at some of the world's best restaurants and that fuels our economy. We don't have the typical transient business that a vacation destination like a Miami or New Orleans may have, where entertainment in the community can spark a lot of travel. We are very much focused on conference events and entertainment opportunities and we do it better than just about anybody else out there. Chris: So let's kind of try to, you know, put some context around that. You mentioned, and obviously I'm well aware of the Texas Bowl, Taksac, Texas Bowl economic impact of that event to the greater Houston area. David: Annual basis over the last 10 years has been over $30 million on average. Every single year, we'll have anywhere between 25 and 30,000 people traveling in, staying in our hotels, restaurants, for three or four days ahead of the event. You've got people they're even driving in, too right, people that are coming in from the outer areas getting to celebrate that event. So that's meaningful, especially when that event specifically happens every year. It's right, it's a re-accuracy. End of the year, end of the year, when a lot of people are traveling for the holidays or maybe not doing as much, we've got an event that brings people into our community. That brings people here that may not be from a drivable distance. They may be coming from, you know, south Carolina, or Louisiana, or Florida, or Colorado Now that the Big 12 has expanded or Arizona, so you know, it really is something that fuels those businesses and gives our community as a whole an opportunity to celebrate around a major event, and we're proud of what that particular event has done, as well as, obviously, many others. Chris: Then we've got a couple of big events on the horizon. I want to talk about some of that. So let's talk about the first one, and that's the national title football college football playoff championship on January 8. It's a huge deal. It's the last one, I guess, of the 14 format, but you know what can we look forward to as Houstonians, with that game right around the corner? David: Well, it's a true celebration of college football, a week-long celebration. So you know, from a community perspective, you know the impact has already started. The Houston Love Teachers campaign that the Harris County, houston Sports Authority and the College Football Playoff local organizing committee has put together is has already generated millions of dollars in support for and recognition of teachers in our community, excuse me and that's an impact that will obviously pay dividends well beyond the game itself on January 8. When you look to event week itself, got four teams and four big brands that are hoping to descend upon Houston right after the New Year's. Chris: Yeah, yeah, so we've got what I mean. I think, any way you slice it, there's four or two teams that show up here are going to have big followings. David: Well, they are, and so you know what that means. It's not just about the 70,000 people that will fill up NRG Stadium. You know, again, the week long of activities, with free concerts every night during the weekend leading up fan fest down at Georgia Brown, which will have all kinds of interactive opportunities for fans to celebrate and enjoy the game of college football. You've got a number of initiatives around the industry itself that you know just further fuel Houston as a destination for business around the sport conferences and events and media opportunities, literally billions, if not trillions, of impressions showcasing our city. Chris: So you're gonna have the eyes of the world really on Houston for that kind of that weekend leading up and, I think, encourage the Houstonians right to get out and enjoy it yeah, no question, I mean it is. David: Houston is one of the best college football markets in the country the, the tax act, texas Bowl and many other events that we hosted. Our place and throughout the city. You've age rice, you know hcu tsu, prairie view. There's so much around college football that really Houston should be part of this destination, going forward on a consistent basis, and I think we'll show that as we bring everybody together here next month very good, yeah, david. Chris: So I think there's a lot to be excited about having the national title game be in our backyard, and I hope Houstonians will show up and take advantage of all the the events that are being planned yeah, it's gonna be an incredible week. David: We've earned the opportunity and I know, just like we did with Super Bowl a few years ago, with Final Four earlier this year, sonians love their sport. They will be out and enjoying another great celebration, and that's something that we should be excited about, and it's not the only one. You look down the road. We've got the world's biggest event coming just two years from now. Chris: As well, and that's the World Cup that's right. David: Yeah, fifa World Cup returns to Houston in 2020, or returns to Houston, comes to Houston in 2026. Houston, one of the venues in North America that was selected and you know just when you think about the opportunity to host five, six, seven, eight events in NRG Stadium with an average audience of a billion people and names like Messi and Neymar and Mbappe, who probably mean a lot to many people in this community but are treated as icons around the globe, and for Houston to have its name among the great markets of the world, at a truly global market which we know from a business perspective and from a from a population perspective. It is but to have that that verification on that type of stage is something that you know. As a community we also be very proud of and Chris Canetti in the World Cup office and Janice Burke and everybody over at NRG Park that ourselves included that helped to be part of making that a reality. We know we got a lot of work ahead to live up those expectations that's great. Chris: Well, david, I appreciate you, you know coming on and sharing some of these specifics. I want to ask you just a few more questions about you personally. What was your first job before days? You know the years before you were the intern of Houston Texas so I my first job I'm gonna go with. David: I've got a 1, 1a, all right. So my first job really was I worked at a Kroger in Kingwood as a checker or, sorry, as a bagger. But my my first quote real job I didn't have that one very long was I. I ended up being a server at Kingwood Country Club and the reason I say that was my first real job is that I worked in the service industry throughout my career. I mean, I still do today, obviously, but I worked in the service industry for 10 years, all the way through my time in Austin, going to school at UT, and I will tell you that nothing will teach you more about the world good and bad, than working in the service industry and I am so appreciative of the opportunities that I got to again. Start with something simple as that. But as a funny story, chris, I will say my crowning achievement as a server is I did serve as Don Johnson, the actor, don Johnson's waiter for the 10 cup rap party, because Tim Cup was hosting. That's right and so I do have that up by resume. Chris: So there you go see one of the benefits of living in Kingwood that's right. Yeah, one of the many I'll add okay, so since you work so much in, I guess, service hospitality, this will be easy for you. All right, you prefer Tex-Mex or barbecue? Tex-mex all day long all right, and this one's gonna be hard for you to answer okay maybe not. If you could do a 30-day sabbatical, where would you go? What? David: would you do? That is a great question. I don't think it's very. I don't think it's very hard for me at all. I am an avid skier and my family and I have been fortunate enough to spend a lot of time in Park City, utah, and I try and get the 30 days even now it's not possible to do in our work, but I love Park City probably more than any place else in this planet, and so I'd love to be able to go up my family for three days and just ski our behinds off got you. Chris: Well, that's great. That's a good one. David, thanks again for taking the time. Congratulations to you and the rest of the team back at Energy Park, the Texans LSSE, for all you do for Houston well. David: Thank you, chris, and we appreciate your support and involvement as well. Special Guest: David Fletcher.

David Colebatch, CEO of Tidal, joins Corey on Screaming in the Cloud to discuss Tidal's recent shift to a product-led approach and why empathizing with customers is always their most important job. David describes what it was like to grow the company from scratch on a boot-strapped basis, and how customer feedback and challenges inform the company strategy. Corey and David discuss the cost-savings measures cloud customers are now embarking on, and David discusses how constant migrations are the new normal. Corey and David also discuss the impact that generative AI is having not just on tech, but also on creative content and interactions in our everyday lives. About David David is the CEO & Founder of Tidal.  Tidal is empowering businesses to transform from traditional on-premises IT-run organizations to lean-agile-cloud powered machines.Links Referenced: Company website: https://tidal.cloud LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/david-colebatch/ TranscriptAnnouncer: Hello, and welcome to Screaming in the Cloud with your host, Chief Cloud Economist at The Duckbill Group, Corey Quinn. This weekly show features conversations with people doing interesting work in the world of cloud, thoughtful commentary on the state of the technical world, and ridiculous titles for which Corey refuses to apologize. This is Screaming in the Cloud.Corey: Welcome to Screaming in the Cloud. I'm Corey Quinn. Returning guest today, David Colebatch is still the CEO at Tidal. David, how have you been? It's been a hot second.David: Thanks, Corey. Yeah, it's been a fantastic summer for me up here in Toronto.Corey: Yeah, last time I saw you, was it New York or was it DC? They all start to run together to me.David: I think it was DC. Yeah.Corey: That's right. Public Sector Summit where everything was just a little bit stranger than most of my conversations. It's, “Wait, you're telling me there's a whole bunch of people who use the cloud but don't really care about money? What—how does that work?” And I say that not from the position of harsh capitalism, but from the position of we're a government; saving costs is nowhere in our mandate. Or it is, but it's way above my pay grade and I run the cloud and call it good. It seems like that attitude is evolving, but slowly, which is kind of what you want to see. Titanic shifts in governing are usually not something you want to see done on a whim, overnight.David: No, absolutely. A lot of the excitement at the DC summit was around new capabilities. And I was actually really intrigued. It was my first time in the DC summit, and it was packed, from the very early stages of the morning, great attendance throughout the day. And I was just really impressed by some of the new capabilities that customers are leveraging now and the new use cases that they're bringing to market. So, that was a good time for me.Corey: Yeah. So originally, you folks were focused primarily on migrations and it seems like that's evolving a little bit. You have a product now for starters, and the company's name is simply Tidal, without a second word. So, brevity is very much the soul of wit, it would seem. What are you doing these days?David: Absolutely. Yeah, you can find us at tidal.cloud. Yeah, we're focused on migrations as a primary means to help a customer achieve new capabilities. We're about accelerating their journey to cloud and optimizing once they're in cloud as well. Yeah, we're focused on identifying the different personas in an enterprise that are trying to take that cloud journey on with people like project, program managers, developers, as well as network people, now.Corey: It seems, on some level, like you are falling victim to the classic trap that basically all of us do, where you have a services company—which is how I thought of you folks originally—now, on some level, trying to become a product or a platform company. And then you have on the other side of it—places that we're—“Oh, we're a SaaS company. This is hard. We're going to do services instead.” And it seems like no one's happy. We're all cats, perpetually on the wrong side of a given door. Is that an accurate assessment for where you are? Or am I misreading the tea leaves on this one?David: A little misread, but close—Corey: Excellent.David: You're right. We bootstrapped our product company with services. And from day one, we supported our customers, as well as channel partners, many of the [larger size 00:03:20] that you know, we supported them in helping their customers be successful. And that was necessary for us as we bootstrapped the company from zero. But lately, and certainly in the last 12 months, it's very much a product-led company. So, leading with what customers are using our software for first, and then supporting that with our customer success team.Corey: So, it's been an interesting year. We've seen simultaneously a market correction, which I think has been sorely needed for a while, but that's almost been overshadowed in a lot of conversations I've had by the meteoric rise and hype around generative AI. Have you folks started rebranding everything with a fresh coat of paint labeled generative AI yet as it seems like so many folks have? What's your take on it?David: We haven't. You won't see a tidal.ai from us. Look, our thoughts are leveraging the technology as we always had to provide better recommendations and suggestions to our users, so we'll continue to embrace generative AI as it applies to specific use cases within our product. We're not going to launch a brand new product just around the AI theme.Corey: Yeah, but even that seems preferable to what a lot of folks are doing, which is suddenly pivoting their entire market positioning and then act, “Oh, we've been working in generative AI for 5, 10, 15 years,” in some cases. Google and Amazon most notably have talked about how they've been doing this for decades. It's, “Cool. Then why did OpenAI beat you all to the punch on this?” And in many cases, also, “You've been working on this for decades? Huh. Then why is Alexa so terrible?” And they don't really have a good talking point for that yet, but it's the truth.David: Absolutely. Yeah. I will say that the world changed with the OpenAI launch, of course, and we had a new way to interact with this technology now that just sparked so much interest from everyday people, not just developers. And so, that got our juices flowing and creativity mode as well. And so, we started thinking about, well, how can we recommend more to other users of our system as opposed to just cloud architects?You know, how can we support project managers that are, you know, trying to summarize where they're at, by leveraging some of this technology? And I'm not going to say we have all the answers for this baked yet, but it's certainly very exciting to start thinking outside the box with a whole new bunch of capabilities that are available to us.Corey: I tried doing some architecture work with Chat-Gippity—yes, that is how I pronounce it—and it has led me down the primrose path a little bit because what it says is often right. Mostly. But there are some edge-case exceptions of, “Ohh, it doesn't quite work that way.” It reminds me at some level of a junior engineer who doesn't know the answer, so they bluff. And that's great, but it's also a disaster.Because if I can't trust the things you tell me and you to call it out when you aren't sure on something, then I've got to second guess everything you tell me. And it feels like when it comes to architecture and migrations in particular, the devil really is in the details. It doesn't take much to design a greenfield architecture on a whiteboard, whereas being able to migrate something from one place to another and not have to go down in the process? That's a lot of work.David: Absolutely. I have used AI successfully to do a lot of research very quickly across broad market terms and things like that, but I do also agree with you that we have to be careful using it as the carte blanche force multiplier for teams, especially in migration scenarios. Like, if you were to throw Chat-Gippity—as you say—a bunch of COBOL code and say, “Hey, translate this,” it can do a pretty good job, but the devil is in that detail and you need to have an experienced person actually vet that code to make sure it's suitable. Otherwise, you'll find yourself creating buggy things downstream. I've run into this myself, you know, “Produce some Terraform for me.” And when I generated some Terraform for an architecture I was working on, I thought, “This is pretty good.” But then I realized, it's actually two years old and that's about how old my skills were as well. So, I needed to engage someone else on my team to help me get that job done.Corey: So, migrations have been one of those things that people have been talking about for well, as long as we've had more than one data center on the planet. “How do we get our stuff from over here to over there?” And so, on and so forth. But the context and tenor of those conversations has changed dramatically. What have you seen this past year or so as far as emerging trends? What is the industry doing that might not be obvious from the outside?David: Well, cost optimization has been number one on people's minds, and migrating with financial responsibility in mind has been refreshing. So, working backwards from what their customer outcomes are is still number one in our book, and when we see increasingly customers say, “Hey, I want to migrate to cloud to close a data center or avoid some capital outlay,” that's the first thing we hear, but then we work backwards from what was their three-year plan. And then what we've seen so far is that customers have changed from a very IT-centric view of cloud and what they're trying to deliver to much more business-centric. Now, they'll say things like, “I want to be able to bring new capabilities to market more quickly. I want to be able to operate and leverage some of these new generative AI technologies.” So, they actually have that as a driving force for migrations, as opposed to an afterthought.Corey: What I have found is that, for whatever reason, not giving a shit about the AWS bill in my business was a zero-interest-rate phenomenon. Suddenly people care an awful lot. But they're caring is bounded. If there's a bunch of easy stuff to do that saves a giant pile of money, great, yeah, most folks are going to do that. But then it gets into the idea of opportunity cost and trade-offs. And there's been a shift there that I've seen where people are willing to invest more in that cost-cutting work than they were in previous years.It makes sense, but it's also nice to finally have a moment to validate what I've assumed for seven years now that, yeah, in a recession or a retraction of the broader industry, suddenly, this is going to be top-of-mind for a lot of folks. And it's nice to see that that approach was vindicated because the earlier approach that I saw when we saw something like this was at the start of Covid. And at that point, no one knew what was happening week-to-week and consulting leads basically stopped for six months. And that was oh, maybe we don't have a counter-cyclical business. But no, it turns out that when money means something again as interest rates rise, people care about it more.David: Yeah. It is nice to see that. And people are trying to do more with less and become more efficient in an advanced pace these days. I don't know about you, but I've seen the trends towards the low-hanging fruit being done at this point so people have already started using savings plans and capabilities like that, and now they're embarking in more re-architecture of applications. But I think one stumbling block that we've noticed is that customers are still struggling to know where to apply those transformations across their portfolio. They'll have one or two target apps that everybody knows because they're the big ones on the bill, but beneath that, the other 900 applications in their portfolio, which ones do I do next? And that's still a question that we're seeing come up, time and again.Corey: One thing that I'm starting to see people talking about from my perspective, has been suddenly they really care about networking in a way that they did not previously. And I mean, this in the TCP/IP sense, not the talking to interesting people and doing interesting things. That's been basically steady-state for a while. But from my perspective, the conversations I'm having are being driven by, “Wait a minute. AWS is going to start charging $3.50 a month per assigned IPV4 address. Oh, dear. We have been careless in our approach to this.” Is that something that you're seeing shaping the conversations you're having with folks?David: Oh yeah, absolutely. I mean right off the bat, our team went through very quickly and inventoried our IPV4, and certainly, customers are doing that as well. I found that, you know, in the last seven years, the migration conversations were having become broader across an enterprise customer. So, we've mapped out different personas now, and the networking teams playing a bigger role for migrations, but also optimizations in the cloud. And I'll give you an example.So, one large enterprise, their networking team approached us at the same time as their cloud architects who were trying to work on a migration approached us. And the networking team had a different use case. They wanted to inventory all the IP addresses on-premises, and some that they already had in the cloud. So, they actually leveraged—shameless plug here—but they leveraged out a LightMesh IPAM solution to do that. And what that brought to light for us was that the integration of these different teams working together now, as opposed to working around each other. And I do think that's a bit of a trend change for us.Corey: IPAM has always been one of those interesting things to me because originally, the gold standard in this space was—let's not kid ourselves—a Microsoft Excel spreadsheet. And then there are a bunch of other offerings that entered into the space. And for a while I thought most of these were ridiculous because the upgrade was, you know, Google Sheets so you can collaborate. But having this done in a way with particular permissions and mapping in a way that's intuitive and doesn't require everyone to not mess up when they're looking at it, especially as you get into areas of shared responsibility between different divisions or different team members who are in different time zones and whatnot, this becomes a more and more intractable problem. It's one of those areas where small, scrappy startups don't understand what the fuss is about, and big enterprises absolutely despair of finding something that works for them.AWS launched their VPC IPAM offering a while back and if you look at it from the perspective of competing with Google Sheets, its pricing is Looney Tunes. But I've met an awful lot of people who have sworn by it in the process, as they look at these things. Now, of course, the caveat is that like most AWS offerings, it's great in a pure AWS native environment, but as soon as you start getting into other providers and whatnot, it gets very tricky very quickly.David: No, absolutely. And usability of an IP address management solution is something to consider. So, you know, if you're trying to get on board with IPAM, do you want to do three easy steps or do you want to follow 150? And I think that's a really big barrier to entry for a lot of networking teams, especially those that are not too familiar with cloud already. But yeah, where we've seen the networking folks get more involved is around, like, identifying endpoints and devices that must be migrated to cloud, but also managing those subnets and planning their VPC designs upfront.You've probably seen this before yourself where customers have allocated a whole bunch of address space over time—an overlapping address space, I should say—only to then later want to [peer 00:13:47] those networks. And that's something that if you think you're going to be doing downstream, you should really plan for that ahead of time and make sure your address space is allocated correctly. Problems vary. Like, everyone's architecture is different, of course, but we've certainly noticed that being one of the top-button items. And then that leads into a migration itself. You're not migrating to cloud now; you're migrating within the cloud and trying to reorganize address spaces, which is a whole other planning activity to consider.Corey: When you take a look at, I guess the next step in these things, what's coming next in the world of migrations? I recently got to talk to someone who was helping their state migrate from, effectively, mainframes in many cases into a cloud environment. And it seems, on some level, like everyone on a mainframe, one, is very dependent on that workload; those things are important, so that's why they're worth the extortionate piles of money, but it also feels like they've been trying to leave the mainframe for decades in many cases. Now, there's a sense that for a lot of these folks, the end is nigh for their mainframe's lifespan, so they're definitely finally taking the steps to migrate. What's the next big frontier once the, I guess, either the last holdouts from that side of the world wind up getting into a cloud or decide they never will? It always felt to me like migrations are one of those things that's going to taper off and it's not going to be something that is going to be a growth industry because the number of legacy workloads is, at least theoretically, declining. Not so sure that's accurate, though.David: I don't think it is either. If we look back at past migrations, you know, 90, 95% of them are often lift-and-shift to EC2 or x86 on VMware in the cloud. And a lot of the work that we're seeing now is being described as optimization. Like, “Look at my EC2 workloads and come up with cloud-native or transformative processes for me.” But those are migrations as well because we run the same set of software, the same processes over those workloads to determine how we can re-platform and refactor them into more native services.So, I think, you know, the big shift for us is just recognizing that the term ‘migrations' needs to be well-defined and communicated with folks. Migrations are actually constant now and I would argue we're doing more migrations within customers now than we have in the past because the rate of change is just so much faster. And I should add, on the topic of mainframe and legacy systems, we have seen this pivot away from teams looking for emulation layers for those technologies, you know, where they want to forklift the functionality, but they don't want to really roll up their sleeves and do any coding work. So, they're previously looking to automatically translate code or emulate that compute layer in the cloud, and the big pivot we've seen in the last 12 months, I'd say, is that customers are more willing to actually understand how to rebuild their applications in the cloud. And that's a fantastic story because it means they're not kicking that technology debt can down the road any further. They're really trying to embrace cloud and leverage some of these new capabilities that have come to market.Corey: What do you see as, I guess, the reason that a number of holdouts have not yet done a migration? Like, historically, I've seen some that are pretty obvious: the technology wasn't there. Well, cloud has gotten to a point now where it is hard to identify a capability that isn't there in some form. And there's always been the sunk cost fallacy where, “Well, we've already bought all this stuff, and it's running here, so if we're not replacing it anytime soon, there's no cost benefit for us to replace it.” And that's actually correct. That's not a fallacy there. But there's also the, “Well, it would be too much work to move.” Sometimes true, sometimes not. Are you seeing a shift in the reasons that people are giving to not migrate?David: No, I haven't. It's been those points mostly. And I'd say one of the biggest inhibitors to people actually getting it done is this misconception that it costs a lot of money to transform and to adopt cloud tools. You've seen this through the technology keeps getting easier and easier to adopt and cheaper to use. When you can provision services for $0 a month and then scale with usage patterns, there's really no reason not to try today because the opportunity cost is so low.So, I think that one of the big inhibitors that comes up, though, is this cultural barrier within organizations where teams haven't been empowered to try new things. And that's the one thing that I think is improving nowadays, as more of this how-to-build-in-the-cloud capability becomes permeated throughout the organization. People are saying, “Well, why can't we do that?” As opposed to, “We can't do that.” You know what I mean? It's a subtle difference, but once leadership starts to say, “Why can't we do this modern thing in the cloud? Why can't we leverage AI?” Teams are given more rope to try and experiment, and fail, of course. And I think ultimately, that culture shift is starting to take root across enterprise and across public sector as well.Corey: One of the things that I find surprising is the enthusiasm with which different market segments jump onto different aspects of cloud. Lambda is a classic example, in that it might be one of the services that is more quickly adopted by enterprises than by startups and a lot of cases. But there's also the idea of, “Oh, we built this thing last night, and it's awesome.” And enterprises, like you know, including banks and insurance companies don't want to play those games, for obvious reasons.Generative AI seems to be a mixed bag around a lot of these things. Have you had conversations with a number of your clients around the generative AI stuff? Because I've seen Amazon, for example, talking about it, “Oh, all our customers are asking us about it.” And, mmm, I don't know. Because I definitely have questions about and I'm exploring it, but I don't know that I'm turning to Amazon, of all companies, to answer those questions, either.David: Yeah. We've certainly had customer conversations about it. And it depends, again, on those personas. On the IT side, the conversations are mostly around how can they do their jobs better. They're not thinking forwards about the business capabilities. So, IT comes to us and they want to know how can we use generative AI to create Lambda functions and create stateless applications more quickly as a part of a migration effort. And that's great. That's a really cool use case. We've used that generative AI approach to create code ourselves.But on the business side, they're looking forwards, they want to use generative AI in the, again, the sample size of my customer conversations, but they see that the barrier to entry is getting their data in a place that they can leverage it. And to them, to the business, that's what's driving the migration conversations they're having with us, is, “How do I exfil my data and get it into the cloud where I can start to leverage these great AI tools?”Corey: Yeah, I'm still looking at use cases that I think are a little less terrifying. Like, I want to wind up working on a story or something. Or I'll use it to write blog posts; I have a great approach. It's, “Write a blog post about this topic and here are some salient points and do it in the style of Corey Quinn.” I'll ask Chat-Gippity to do that and it spits out something that is, frankly, garbage.And I get angry at it and I basically copy it into a text editor and spent 20 minutes mansplain-correcting the robot. And by the time it's done, I have, like, a structure of an article that talks about the things I want to talk about correctly. And there may be three words in a sequence that were originally there. And frankly, I'm okay with plagiarizing from the thing that is plagiarizing from me. It's a beautiful circle of ripping things off that that's glorious for me.But that's also not something that I could see being useful at any kind of scale, where I see companies getting excited about a lot of this stuff, it all seems to be a thin veneer over, “And then we can fire our customer service people,” which from a labor perspective is not great, but ignoring that entirely, as a customer, I don't want that. Because by the time I have to reach out to a company's customer service apparatus, something has gone wrong and it isn't going to be solved by the standard list of frequently asked questions that I clicked on. It's something that is off the beaten path and anomalous and requires human judgment. Making it harder for me to get to people who can fix those things does not thrill and delight me.David: I agree. I'm with you there. Where I get excited about it, though, is how much of a force multiplier it can be on that human interaction. So, for example, in that customer's service case you mentioned, you know, if that customer service rep is empowered by an AI dashboard that's listening to my conversation and taking notes and automatically looking up in my knowledge base how to support that customer, then that customer success person can be more successful more quickly, I think they can be more responsive to customer needs and maybe improve the quality, not just the volume of work they do but improve the quality, too.Corey: That's part of the challenge, too. There have been a number of companies that have gotten basically rapped across the snout for just putting out articles as content, written by AI without any human oversight. And these don't just include, you know, small, scrappy content mills; they include Microsoft, and I believe CNN, if I'm not mistaken, had something similar with that going on. I'm not certain on that last one. I don't want to defame them, but I know for a fact Microsoft did.David: Yeah, and I think some of the email generators are plugging into AI now, too, because my spam count has gone through the roof lately.Corey: Oh, my God. I got one recently saying, “Hey, I noticed at The Duckbill Group that you fix AWS bills. Great. That's awesome and super valuable for your clients.” And then try to sell me bill optimization and process improvement stuff. And it was signed by the CEO of the company that was reaching out.And then there was like—I expand the signature view, and it's all just very light gray text make it harder to read, saying, “This is AI generated, yadda, yadda, yadda.” Called the company out on Twitter, and they're like, “Oh, we only have a 0.15% error rate.” That sounds suspiciously close to email marketing response rates. “Welp, that means 99% of it was perfect.” No, it means that you didn't get in front of most of those people. They just ignored it without reading it the way we do most email outreach. So, that bugs me a fair bit. Because my perspective on it is if you don't care enough to actually craft a message to send me, why should I care enough to read it?David: Completely agree. I think a lot of people are out there looking for that asymmetric, you know, leverage that you can get over the market, and generating content, to them, has been a blocker for so long and now they're just opening up the fire hose and drowning us all with it. So I'm, like, with you. I think that I personally don't expect to get value back from someone unless I put value into that relationship. That's my starting point coming into it, so I would maybe use AI to help assist forming a message to someone, but I'm not going to blast the internet with content. I just think that's a cheeky low-value way to go about it.Corey: I don't track the numbers anymore, but I know that at this point, through the size of my audience and the content that I put out, I have taken, collectively, millennia of human time focusing on—that has been spent consuming the content that I put out. And as a result of that, I have a guiding principle here, which is first and foremost, you've got to respect your audience. And I'm just going to have a robot phone it in is not respecting your audience. I have no problem with AI assistants, but it requires human oversight before it goes out. I would never in a million years send anything out to the audience that I hadn't at least read or validated first.But yeah, some of the signups that go out, the automatic things that you click a button and sign up for my newsletter at lastweekinaws.com, you get an auto message that comes out. Yeah, it comes out under my name and I either wrote it or reviewed it, depending on what generation of system we're on these days, because it has my name attached to it. That's the way that this works. Your credibility is important and having a robot spout off complete nonsense and you get the credit or blame for it? No thanks. I want to be doomed from my own sins, not the ones that a computer makes on my behalf.David: [laugh]. Yeah, I'm with you. It's unfortunate that so many people expect the emails from you are generated now. We have the same thing when people sign up for Tidal Accelerator or Tidal LightMesh, they get a personal email from me. They'll get the automated one as well, but I generally get in there through our CRM, and I send them a message, too. And sometimes they'll respond and say, “This isn't really David, is it?” No, no, it's me. You don't have to respond. I wanted to let you know that I'm thankful for you trialing our software.Corey: Oh, yeah. You can hit reply to any email I send out. It comes from corey@lastweekinaws.com and it goes to my inbox. The reason that works, frankly, at this scale is because no one does it. People don't believe that that'll actually work. So, on a busy week, I'll get maybe a dozen email replies to it or one or two misconfigured bounces from systems that aren't set up properly to do those things. And I weed those out because they drive me nuts.But it's a yeah, the only emails that I get to that address, honestly, are the test copies of those messages that go out, too, because I'm on my own newsletter list. Who knew? I have two at the moment. I have—yes, I have two specific addresses on that, so I guess technically, I'm inflating the count of subscribers by two, if advertisers ask. But you know, at 32,000 and change, I will take the statistical fudging.David: Absolutely. We all expect that.Corey: No, the depressing part, when I think about that is, there's a number of readers I have on the list that I know for a fact that I've been acquainted with who have passed away. They're never going to unsubscribe from these things until the email starts bouncing at some and undefinable point in the future. But it's also—it feels morbid, but on some level, if I continue doing this for the rest of my life, I'm going to have a decent proportion of the subscriber base who's died. At least when people leave their jobs, like, their email address gets turned off, things start bouncing and cool that gets turned off automatically because even when people leave voluntarily, no one bothers to go through an unsubscribe from all this stuff. So, automated systems have to do it. That's great. I'm not saying computers shouldn't make life better. I am saying that they can't replace a fundamental aspect of human caring.David: So, Corey Quinn, who has influence over the living and the dead. It's impressive.Corey: Oh, absolutely. Honestly, if I were to talk to whoever came up with IBM's marketing strategy, I feel like I'd need to conduct a seance because they're probably 300 years old if they're still alive.David: [laugh]. Absolutely.Corey: No, I get passionate about this stuff because so much of a lot of the hype now has been shifting away from letting people expand their reach further and doing things in intentional ways and instead toward absolute garbage, such as, “Cool, we want to get a whole bunch of clicks so we can show ads to them, so we're going to just generate all bunch of crap to your content and throw it out there.” Everything I write, even stuff that admittedly, from time to time, is aimed for SEO purposes for specific things that we're doing, but that's always done from a perspective of okay, my primary SEO strategy is write compelling, original content and then people presumably link to it. And it works. It's about respecting the audience and so many things get that wrong.David: Yeah, absolutely. It's kind of scary now because I always thought that podcasts and video were the last refuge of authentic content. And now people are generating that as well. You know, you're watching a video and you realize hey, that voice sounds exactly consistent, you know, all the way through. And then it turns out, it's generated. And there's a YouTube channel I follow because I'm an avid sailor, called World On Water. And recently, I've noticed that voice changed, and I'm pretty sure they're using AI to generate it now.Corey: Here's a story I don't think you probably know about yourself. So, for those who are unaware, David, I hang out from time to time in various places. There's a international boundary between us, but occasionally one of us will broach it, and good for us. And we have social conversations where somehow one of us doesn't have a microphone in front of our face. Imagine that. I don't know what that's like most weeks.And like, at some level, the public face comes off and people start acting like human beings. And something I've always noticed about you, David, is that you don't commit the cardinal sin, for an awful lot of people I meet, which is displaying contempt for your customers. When I have found people who do that, I think less of them in almost every case and I lose so much interest in whatever it is that they're doing. If you don't like the problem space that you're in and don't have respect for the people paying you to make these problems go away, you shouldn't be doing it. Like, I'll laugh at silly AWS misconfigurations, but my customers are there because they have a problem and they're bringing me in to fix it. And would I be making fun of? “Ha ha ha, you didn't spend eight months of your life learning the ins and outs of how exactly reserved instances apply in this particular context? What a fool is you.” That's not how it ever works. I wish I could say it wasn't quite as rare as it is but I'm tired of talking to people who have just nothing but contempt for their market. Good work on that.David: Thank you. Yeah, I appreciate that. You know, I had a penny-drop moment when I was doing a lot of consulting work as an independent contractor, working with different customers at different stages of their own journey and different levels of technology capabilities. You know, you work with management, with project people, with software engineers, and you start to realize everybody's coming from a different place. So, you have to empathize with where they're at.They're coming to you usually because you have a level of expertise, that you've got some specialization and they want to tap into that capability that you've created. And that's great. I love having people come to me and ask me questions. Sometimes they don't come to me nicely asking questions, they make some assumptions about me and might challenge me right off the bat, but you have to realize that that's just where they're coming from at that point in time. And once you connect with them, they'll open up a little bit more, too; they'll empathize with yourself. So yeah, I've always found that it's really important for myself personally, but also for our team to empathize with customers, meet them where they're at, understand that they're coming from a different level of experience, and then help them solve their problems. That's job number one.Corey: And I'm a firm believer that if you don't respect your customer's business, they shouldn't be your customer. It's happened remarkably few times in the however many years I've been doing this, but there have been a couple of folks that have reached out I always very politely decline to work with them when this happens. Because you don't want to make people feel obnoxious for reaching out and, like, “Can you help me with my problem?” “How dare you? Who do you think you are?”No, no, no, no, no, none of that. But if there's a value misalignment or I don't think that your product is going to benefit people who use it as directed, I will not let you sponsor what I do as an easy example. Because I can always find another sponsor and make more money, but once I start losing the audience's trust, I'll never get that back, and I know that. It's the entire reason I do things the way that I do them. And maybe, on some level, from purely capitalist perspective, I'm being an absolute fool, but you know, if you have to pick a way to fail and assume you're going to get it wrong, how do you want to be wrong? I'll take this way.David: Yeah, I agree. Keep your ethics high, keep your morals high, and the rest will fall into place.Corey: I love how we started having ethical and morality discussions that started as, “So, cloud migrations. How are they going for you?”David: Yeah [laugh]. Certainly wandered into some uncharted territories on that one.Corey: Exactly. We started off in one place; wound up someplace completely removed from anything we could have reasonably expected at the start. Why? Because this entire episode has been a beautiful metaphor for cloud migrations. I really want to thank you for taking the time to chat with me on this stuff. If people want to learn more, where should they go to find you?David: tidal.cloud or LinkedIn, I'm very active on LinkedIn these days.Corey: And we will, of course, put links to both of those in the show notes. Thank you so much for going down this path with me. I didn't expect it to lead where it did, but I'm glad we went there.David: Like the tides ebbing and flowing. I'll be back soon, Corey.Corey: [laugh]. I will take you up on that and hold you to it.David: [laugh]. Sounds great.Corey: David Colebatch, CEO at Tidal. I'm Cloud Economist Corey Quinn and this is Screaming in the Cloud. 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