Love Your Sales

Unlocking Sales Success with SEO: Featuring Eric Vallee

Ready to unlock the secrets to amplifying your sales through unbeatable SEO strategies? In this episode of "Love Your Sales," host Leighann Lovely sits down with SEO expert Eric Vallee to dive deep into the world of search engine optimization. Discover how Eric catapulted companies like M3 and DuPont to new revenue heights by mastering the art and science of SEO. Learn the three pillars of website optimization and why constant content updates are crucial for sustained success. Explore the importance of brand recognition, immediate response to leads, and how integrating sales and digital marketing can create a powerful synergy for your business. Tune in and transform your approach to find, attract, and engage clients in our digital-first world!
Contact Eric
Website -  www.silverfoxmke.com 
LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/in/eric-m-vallee/ 
 
Special Thank you to our Sponsors – Genhead – www.genhead.com and Sales Rescue – www.rescuemysales.com
Robb Conlon – Intro and outro – Westport Studio - https://www.westportstudiosllc.com/
The Brave Ones – Instrumental Version Song by Jan Sanejko - https://artlist.io/royalty-free-music/song/the-brave-ones/119489
 
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Welcome to another episode of Love Your Sales. I am extremely excited because I am joined by Eric Vallee. Eric is an expert [00:01:00] in generating leads and revenue from websites. During his past 15 years, he has specialized in search engine optimization and recently launched his own SEO consulting firm, silver Fox M K E during this time, he has worked with numerous companies, including M three and, and DuPont to help generate leads and revenue during the last, his last position as a digital marketing manager.
For a plastic and adhesive manufacturing. He oversaw all aspects of the website, as well as partnering with the sales team to drive and close sales. He consistently generated more than 2000 leads each year. Uh, he also helped bring in more than 1 million in revenue , from new customers each year. That is absolutely awesome.
Eric, I am so thrilled to have you join me today and talk about. Well, how SEO can you know, really how important SEO is. [00:02:00] So welcome to the show. 
Eric Vallee: Yeah. Thanks for having me on. I'm very excited. I've, uh, I've been listening to your podcast for a while and I, I think it's a great podcast. I've worked with, I've had the opportunity to work with many sales people and I find some of the.
Insights that your podcast provides to be just exceptional. 
Well, thank you. That's, that's a huge compliment. And I, um, you know, I love working with, salespeople have to be able to rely on a lot of, a lot of tools, right. Or we should be. And if, and if you're a salesperson out there not relying on all of the tools that are available to you, you need to really, you know, take a look around and, and lean into those.
And one of those. Being somebody like yourself, um, because we live in a digital world, , but that digital world is only as good as the, as the people who are actually helping behind the scenes make. You know, us visible, right? And that's what, 
Eric Vallee: yeah, 
that's [00:03:00] what SEO is. 
Eric Vallee: Yeah. SEO. So basically just to give a primer on SEO, SEO is basically it's part art, part science, a lot of experience in what you're trying to accomplish is you're trying to an SEO specialist, their goal is to understand how search engines like Google and Google is the big player.
How they. Analyze and look at websites so that you can, by understanding how Google looks at a website, you can understand and help businesses become more visible on, Google and Bing is also important. A lot of people discount Bing. Google has somewhere around 70 percent of the market, but Bing actually has about 18%.
They also have Yahoo that goes in there. But the big thing that's really important with Bing is that, uh, GPT 4, the AI is actually pulling from Bing. So as [00:04:00] that continues, Bing is going to become more and more important, but getting back to SEO, what SEO is really is looking at a website. Understanding what it does well and how it could be improved to get better visibility on.
Interesting. I, I did not know that about Bing, , and I'm sure that that's common knowledge in, in your, um, in your circle. So, so explain to me what, you know, SEO, you explained what it is, but how does one even begin to. Better understand what's happening when you say, I'm going to improve your SEO. Okay.
Well, what, what does that mean? Like, what are you, what are you doing? 
Eric Vallee: Absolutely. That's an excellent question. So basically when somebody like me, like a consultant comes in and looks at a website, I'll look at a variety of factors. The first thing I always look at is I'll try to get an estimate of how their organic traffic is performing.[00:05:00] 
And let me go back a little bit on what organic traffic is. A website gets. Visitors from four different sources. One is direct traffic. If you give somebody your business card, it's got your website on it. They type that domain into a website that's considered direct traffic. They're on, say if somebody's on this podcast and you have a link on it, that's called referral traffic and websites will get referral traffic, or like if they're listed on Yelp.
They would, and somebody goes on Yelp and, and then clicks over their website. That's referral traffic. The other source is paid. So like, if you do what's called pay per click or paid advertising, that's another source. The fourth is organic and it's called organic because. When Google looks at your website and they put things in results, they consider organically how the website comes into their search engine results page.
[00:06:00] So they call it organic traffic because of that. But it's basically traffic from search engines. So. Those are the four types. So when I look at a website, what I do first is I want to see how much organic traffic, because those other ones are important, but I can't have as much of an impact on them as I can on search engine traffic or organic traffic.
So I look to see how well somebody's doing in organic traffic. I will typically Make that as a benchmark against how they're doing with some of their closest competitors. So if I looked at a website, uh, say, , your website for rescue my sales, I might look at it and try to ask, what are some of the, give me two or three of your competitors that you regularly see in the marketplace.
And then I would look at their website to determine how well they're doing. For instance, if you're getting, uh, a hundred visits a month, you might feel very good with that. But if I tell you that your closest competitors are both getting well over a thousand visits [00:07:00] a month, then you're not going to feel so good about it.
Right. So 
Eric Vallee: the first place we look at is that then we start to look at some of the reasons why you're doing either well, or you could do better. And so. What a search engine specialist will do is they'll look at how does a website perform in on page, which means how much content do you have? Is the content driving the type of traffic that you want?
And so let me, you know, I'm following. So when you do this analysis, when you're, when you're sitting and I'm trying to get in your head now, when you're sitting here doing this analysis, you're, you're, you know, figuring out, you know, where these are coming from. Um, and then you're going to, you're going to try to optimize this.
I'm assuming there's different places in the background where you can put keywords, but I'm going to guess also that it's the language on [00:08:00] the actual website as well. 
Eric Vallee: It is. Absolutely. So, so really, with with search engine optimization, there's three pillars. There's on page. , there's technical and then there's off page.
On page is anything like it describes on page, so like if I look at the content that you have, how is it written? Is it written to appeal to the audience that you're trying to target? That's where the keywords come in. And if you have keywords, how well is it aligned with those keywords that you're trying to target?
Okay, 
Eric Vallee: off page is links. So what. What Google, when they first came out, when Sergei and Brin first created Google, back in the time when they were doing it, you could, the search engines that were around were like Ask Jeeves, things like that. You could actually buy your way to the top of an organic ranking.
You could give them money, and they would put you at the top. Sergei and Brin said, that's not how we [00:09:00] want to do it. We want the World Wide Web to make this happen. The decisions. So when somebody gives you a link when they take a hyperlink from their web page to your website, that's basically a referral.
It's that that website saying, I recommend going to this. This is a good source. So Off page is basically how many links you get from other websites and how good they are. For example, if you get a, if you get a link from an education, a website that ends in edu, extremely valuable. If you get a website from a org, very valuable.
If you get a website from a com, Could be valuable, might not be. It depends how good it is for your site and how related to it. The whole aspect of it. I don't want to get too much into the details of it, but 
this is, I mean, this is now that you're like, you're explaining it in, in layman's term, right? This is no, [00:10:00] no different than.
Being out in a networking at a networking meeting, for instance. 
Eric Vallee: Absolutely. 
I mean, this is like sales 101. They created, they created it so that. The better you are, you know, I shouldn't say, well, yeah, it's like a popularity contest almost with, value with the five star review. Right.
I'm not going to get a referral from Eric. Um, if I'm not, if I haven't proven that I am a good. Or that I'm good at what I do in my business. 
Eric Vallee: Yes, exactly. It's the same 
thing, like, so if a org refers me, which, you know, we can, we could equate this to, you know, somebody who's really high or highly respected in, you know, in a networking group says, Oh, you should go to Leanne for that.
That may hold more weight than if somebody who's, you know, brand new, never used me, [00:11:00] barely knows me says, Oh, you should go talk. Wildly interesting. 
Eric Vallee: Well, and the thing is that a lot of people don't understand is that, so with dot orgs and dot edus, you can't just have those. So there's a, there's a whole organization that oversees things.
And when you go to like a GoDaddy or any type to buy a domain, you They won't let you buy a dot edu domain unless you have the accreditation. So that's why those are so valuable. So like I, I graduated from the university of Milwaukee. If I was able to get a link from a UW Milwaukee dot edu, Google knows that those are very limited.
And so they're so much more valuable. So like you, you did it, you did have a very good analogy. Link building in a way is like a popularity contest. The more links that you get, the better your site is going to be. However, it does get a little bit more complex because it's not just the matter of the number of links.
It's also the quality of link 
[00:12:00] quality, right? Which means that you can't just go and buy. You know, link, how would I say that? No, 
Eric Vallee: you're, you're absolutely right. There's, there's a lot of, there's a lot of problems when you try to buy links. Google does not want people to buy links. So yeah, so you can't just buy your way to the top.
And the thing is, is if, say if you do something that gives you a ton of links overnight, Google will usually spot that, flag it and manually review your site. Right. Right. Right. Uh, the third, I did want to go back. So the first two areas that I mentioned were one was on site on page. The other is bought page.
The third is technical. So technical is how well your site performs. Google is very easy. Very, uh, concerned about mobile websites and how on the phone, because I know most people will access websites from their phone. So they're always looking to see how quickly your website loads on a phone. And you've done this where you load, you're at a, you know, [00:13:00] maybe you're at a basketball game or you're at a party and you look, you open your phone, you open a browser and you click on a link and the browser loads.
The website doesn't load. The first thing you do is you click back. Cause you're like, well, this website's broke. Yeah. Google knows that they want most websites to load within three seconds. And what that means is it actually, they have different terms for it, but basically that you can actually see that it's loading.
If it, if you get like a webpage on a mobile browser on a phone and it doesn't load within three seconds, where you're getting nothing, 99 percent of the people are going to just break the website. Click back and Google knows that. So what they look at is that they want your technical aspects of your website to be in tip top shape so that on a mobile phone, it loads quickly.
And that is of utmost importance for Google. 
Interesting. So, and I love, so we was literally, Google was built, on sales, on a [00:14:00] sales model. Possibly. Yeah. I mean, and that's, that's everything that you're saying is kind of what I'm hearing is that you can't, I mean, yes, you can, pay to, they have paid advertising there, which Yeah.
They've got to make money. Right. You, that's great. But on an organic level, really the only way to the top is to have the proper, almost like networking is to, is to have all the proper keywords in there is to have all the prop saying the right thing, singing the right song. And that's the same thing when you go to a networking meeting.
Eric Vallee: It's like Zig Ziglar. Everybody knows Zig Ziglar. Yeah. He's written a lot of books, very good in sales. If you get a link from a website that is associated with Zig Ziglar's organization, people are going to recognize it right away. Right. Google's going to recognize it. So it is, you're saying the [00:15:00] exact right thing.
It's, how you network, how you build your brand. And that's how valuable links are. When you have a very valuable brand like Zig Ziglar. It's going to be very valuable for those links to get that so that that's so basically what I do is I'll look at all of those aspects of a website to try to figure out whether or not somebody can do better and how they can do better because one of the things that I've seen in the course of my career doing SEO.
Organic traffic or traffic from search engines for most websites is about 40 to 60 percent of their traffic. So it's usually the lion's share of their traffic is coming in from organic. And so it's very important to try to make sure that they're maximizing that, traffic. 
Right. And having as a salesperson, if I could spend.
Less time making phone calls because every salesperson out there is like, yeah, I'd love to make, you know, have less time [00:16:00] making phone calls and more leads actually landing on my lap. That would be app. That would be amazing, which is why, you know, all of, you know, people are like, well, everybody knows target.
They don't have to advertise. Um, wait, I'm sorry. Does every single. Like, I get hit all the time by the big box stores, by all of the big name companies. Never stop marketing. Never. They never, they're known by everybody, but they never stop marketing. 
Eric Vallee: Well and that's, that kind of goes, so like I did lead scoring for four years in my last job and in the previous job I worked on, I, I helped out a lot with inside sales and one of the.
One of the rules that I have with leads is when leads come in, the first rule that I have is you've got to get on them quick. Oh, and the second rule, which is kind of where we're going with this. keep on marketing [00:17:00] is when you look at hunters and you look at hunters and farmers. There's two type of sales people that I'm aware of.
Um, hunters who generally will cultivate and do a really good job of cultivating their existing clients. And then there's hunters, hunters who want to always try to find that next deal. They're both valuable for organizations, but they're different types of People, organic search and website leads can help both of them.
And one of the reasons with hunters that it's really critical is when you talk about like big box, you said like target. If you see, if you go on a, uh, on Google and you type in, I'm looking for, Anything like golf clubs or tennis shoes or whatever. If you see target come up because you have a good experience with them, you're more likely to click on that.
And so that's how farmers can be. Can benefit from organic traffic. Because what [00:18:00] happens is a lot of people are like, well, companies know about us. We've got them. We signed a contract and , they've got my number. I can tell you from experience, a lot of existing customers will go into Google.
They'll say, if they're looking for tennis shoes, they'll look for tennis shoes. And then all of a sudden they'll see their company that they work with come up. They'll click on that link and they'll fill out a contact form rather than working with their salesperson. And we see that regularly. So brand recognition is always important.
And like you, like you said, Leanne, you want to always be marketing. 
It's the number one mistake that I see companies make is while we're doing really well, um, we're getting in a ton of business, let's pull a little bit of the budget from marketing and you know, like, because we're doing really well and I'm like, you're doing really well because you're marketing.
And if you stop, it's the [00:19:00] same thing with the salesperson. I, it's like the 30 day rule. You're making a ton of calls. You're making, you're going out there, you're knocking on doors, you're getting all this business in. And then all of a sudden you, you get really busy, you're now managing your clients that you just brought in.
And. You're not making all those phone calls and you're letting 
Eric Vallee: the, you're letting the funnel go. Right. Your, your, 
your funnel is starting to go down. And, and again, this is something that every salesperson struggles with a little bit because you do, you have, you get pulled into, you know, now managing the clients that you just signed.
And so there's, there's always that push and pull depending on, you know, your role. If you, if you eat what you kill. You're going to be in a constant cycle of up and down and up and down and up and down. Um, you know, if you're in a sales role where you literally, you sign that client, you bring them in, you kick them to a, you know, a team that's now going to, you know, manage them.
You should stay, you know, fairly steady. If you're making the calls.
Eric Vallee: [00:20:00] Absolutely. 
It's the exact same thing with your marketing plan. Like you can't, you can't market, market, market, and then stop because you're going to get an influx of clients and then you're going to have no clients. You're going to have an influx of clients.
Absolutely. Absolutely. I've never understood that mentality with, with businesses, with companies. Like if, if it's working, then stop, don't break the system. Now, if it comes down to budgetary, then you need to find, you know, a budget that you can, that you can sit comfortably and consistent with for the long term.
And as the clients go up, your budget's going to increase and then you can build upon that. And I've just never understood why companies like don't get that. It seems like an obvious thing, doesn't it? 
Eric Vallee: Yeah, it does. I mean, I think that a lot of people, they do that. They're like, well, we're doing really well with sales, so we don't need to put as [00:21:00] much into marketing.
We don't need to put, but you always have to think about the funnel. That's something that has to be top of mind because if that funnel is not constantly being filled, you are Really putting yourself in a precarious position. You want to always be filling that funnel. And, you know, the thing is, is when I was working at, uh, my last company, we would have customers that would come in that we weren't sure if they were going to sign right away, but they might sign in a year.
And so if you, if you stop that, who knows what's going to happen. 
Right. Right. Customers who are wildly interested today, but if you go dark for the next year, they're going to forget about you and they're going to sign with somebody else. 
Eric Vallee: Yeah. 
Oh, especially in a wildly competitive industry, depending on the industry that you're in.
If you're a marketing company, that's a saturated industry. If you're a staffing company, saturated industry. You're a, you know, and I can list off [00:22:00] a. You know, a million and 10 saturated industries that, and then there are the, you know, the, the few that, you know, have that corner, their particular industry.
And it's literally said to me, we don't even need a website. And I'm like, good luck when you have a competitor pop up. 
Eric Vallee: Right. Well, that's true. And you know, one of the things I wanted to mention that a lot of people don't realize is with. Leads that come in from your website, something that is really important.
And a lot of companies don't realize, understand where those leads are going, because a lot of times people don't understand that they'll, they'll have a number of different phone numbers that are coming into their website, whether they're using a call center or how they're doing it. They have multiple different places where their emails might be going.
Check those at least A couple times a year to make sure that they're active because nothing is more [00:23:00] frustrating for a customer or a prospect to get to a location. They contact you. They spend the time to reach out and get get to you. And they do it. Never hear back. And one of the challenges with that is that sometimes phone numbers, um, especially now, cause more people are using voice over IP.
And a lot of times these phone numbers aren't going to a voicemail box or, uh, you know, a typical, like a phone number. And so they're just ending in a dead end and people are leaving messages and they're never getting returned. And then it looks bad for that company. So. Right. So 
we, we live in a, we live in a, um, instant gratification world.
Eric Vallee: So if 
I'm looking for a plumber and I always use a plumber or a, you know, cause plumbers, electricians, you know, all of the trades, um, unless I have somebody or somebody has referred a person to me, I'm one of those people who will go [00:24:00] on, you know, like Google and look for. The, you know, the best star review and then start calling down the list and till somebody answers the phone.
If they don't answer the phone, I'm like, I'm moving on because. If they're, and again, I know that there's a lot of, you know, places that are brand new, but like, if you can't answer your phone or respond with a, Hey, like, and I love the text message of, Hey, you know, see that you called to call you back in a couple of minutes.
Great. I'll give them, I'll give them a chance to call me back. But if I don't hear from them within like a reasonable amount of time, I'm moving on. Absolutely. 
Eric Vallee: Absolutely. Absolutely. And, you know, it's so funny that you mentioned that because one of the things that I think is most important with website leads is find a way to get back to somebody Right away, because the thing is, is we're in a society right now where Amazon [00:25:00] has changed the game.
Amazon, you can order something on Amazon at 8 in the morning and have it to your house by noon. And so people have a very high expectation of how they can get in touch with companies. And the, the reality is 77 percent of leads that are submitted through a website. Never get followed up on. 
Mm-Hmm. . 
Eric Vallee: And it's scary because the thing is somebody's reached out to you and they said, I'm interested in your products.
And a lot of companies aren't following up. If you follow up within an hour, you have a much greater chance of getting responded because I, I know that like if, if somebody doesn't have chat on their website. They aren't necessarily expecting that somebody is going to be able to get back to them. A lot of people are conditioned to know that if you call on a phone line, you're probably going to go through voicemail challenges.
And so they understand what [00:26:00] that is. Now, in the case of like a plumber, like you said, I think that's a little bit different. They're probably going to have a call center. But if you contact somebody that's a big company and say, if you're looking for steal, you're probably not going to get in touch with the person right away.
But if you send, if you submit a form, whether it's a request for quote or a contact form, I would encourage anybody, if you can, even if it's just to send them an email and say, Hey, we got it. We got your information. We're looking at it. We'll get back to you. And I'm not talking about the automated one because Most websites have an automated response.
When somebody fills out a form, it'll tell them, we got your information. We're going to respond within a certain amount of time. Right. What I'm talking about is reach out with the salesperson or the person who's managing the leads and say, Thank you for getting back to us. We are working on this and we will get back to you as soon as possible, because then that person knows, Hey, I've reached somebody and [00:27:00] they're going to be more likely to stop looking as hard for another website.
Just like you said, Leanne, if you call a plumber and they don't answer, you're onto the next one. Right. And it's no different with any type of sale. That's how it is. 
Right. So I recently was on a trip and my, um, my girlfriend, , she bought a new car, she bought a Tesla and she asked, or I asked her like, Oh, you know, tell me about like the buying process, blah, blah, blah.
And this was the most insane story I'd ever heard. She's like, yep. We went in, we test drove it. She goes, we filled out everything on an app. And it literally took 15 minutes. We went through it. They, here's the price, here's your, you know, you're putting this much down. This is how much it's going to be, you know, monthly.
She goes, there was no negotiation. There was no, it was, you're pre qualified. This is the price. This is the, you know, how much you're putting down and it's all done in an app. And she goes, it was done in 15 minutes and we drove out with the, with the car. [00:28:00] And I was like, Oh my gosh, like, I know that is like unbelievable.
Like if, if buying a car was that simple, like it would, it wouldn't give me anxiety every time I look at my car thinking I need to buy a new car. If 
Eric Vallee: you talk to, if you talk to, like, if I talked to my mom about it, she'd be like, no, you have to go in and you have to negotiate and you have to go in and yeah.
Right. Holy crap. We're revolutionizing the way that we, that we do like, do just simple things because of technology. And then she went as far as to say, Oh yeah, like you have to, because of the weight of it, you have to have your tires rotated. She goes, I pull up the app. I tell them that I need my tires rotated.
They come to my house. They text me, we're here. She goes, I don't even have to walk out of the house. If it's parked in the garage, they have access through an app. [00:29:00] They rotate the tires and they leave. She goes, it is the most convenient, um, car experience ever. She goes, I love it right now. We're not talking about a 200, 000 car.
We're talking about a, a reasonable. You know, for somebody, some people depend, you know, it's a reasonably priced vehicle that when you talk to somebody who owns one, they're like, Oh my God, I love being a Tesla owner. And I'm like, why? Like I don't get, and then you hear about the experience. This is what the world wants.
Eric Vallee: Absolutely. 
We live in a world in which immediate gratification, simplification. Of the buying process. Is what every single person wants. They want to be able to go on a, they want to go on a website. They want to see what they're buying, [00:30:00] understand the product and then have complete ease in that process, which is why Amazon's, you know, process of.
Like, Oh, here's what I need. I can click on a button and have it delivered to my home. I can even put it on auto ship when I know that I use laundry detergent. You know, I need to restock my laundry detergent and my toilet paper and my every month or every two months it auto ships to my house. Like, 
Eric Vallee: Well, and you know, it's so funny that you're mentioning that because one of the things that I always like to talk to when I talk to salespeople is because salespeople will be like, well, how can I get involved in the SEO process?
And one of the best ways is to be a resource. So some companies will have a digital marketing department. Some might have a marketing manager that and either one might oversee the SEO of a company. Some will hire a consultant like me. What [00:31:00] we really don't have that salespeople do is direct connection to the customer.
And salespeople are talking to customers all the time. So they understand from your business. What are your strengths? What are your weaknesses? What are your competitors strengths? What are the common questions that people ask? All of this information is gold for a website person, because one, it helps us build better content.
Two, it helps us find more unique keywords. Three, it helps us create an experience. Like you said, experience is important. It helps us create an experience that's going to talk to our core customer. So salespeople, I encourage all salespeople, Make friends with your, uh, digital marketing partner because they can be a very good resource for you.
You can be a very good resource for them. [00:32:00] And it's just, it's a great, it's really a great relationship to have. 
Very interesting. So once you have the SEO, like you've created this, you've created the website. Are you good to go forever? 
Eric Vallee: That's a great question, Leanne, because the thing is, is one of the reasons that I got into search engine optimization, when I first started doing digital marketing, I could have went.
Paper click. Um, but I chose to go SEO because the work that you do with SEO, it lasts for a long time. I'm not going to say forever. But it lasts a long time. If you do pay per click or paid advertising, as soon as you stop your paid advertising, it goes away. And so. But as you mentioned, no, you don't want to set it and forget it.
So say, for instance, we have a website that builds widgets and we get all of our pages optimized, we get all of the content that [00:33:00] we want, do we let it go? No, because there's constant changes. It's like a garden. You constantly need to give it attention. Maybe it's the links are break breaking and what a link might be is like on a page you might link between two pages on a website.
Maybe you change the URL of one of the, uh, websites and that breaks. That leads to poor user experience. You, a lot of people don't realize with content, it needs to break. Say if you wrote an article on widgets and we talked about composite widgets, but the composite widgets changed last year, but we wrote this article four years ago.
Well, if somebody goes on that article and they look at composite widgets, they're going to like, well, these guys are behind the times. You know, so you've constantly got to look at your content. Is it updated? You also have to try and look at how can you keep getting your name out there? Once you have a website built.
What other [00:34:00] things can you include in it? The more pages that you have on a website, the better you're going to have to bring in traffic. Because it's like, I try to look at it like when you look at like, where they go after the crabs, and they have all these nets. Each page on your website is like a net, where you're trying to, instead of trying to catch crabs, you're trying to catch customers.
And each page on your website can, can bring in new. Customers and the way you bait that net is with keywords. You find the right keywords that are going to appeal to those, and that will help bring in traffic. Now, that's not to say that you want to just. Have as many pages as you can, and they don't really serve a purpose, but you wanna try to keep building your pages.
There's always ways to build pages. If you look at a, if you have a product page, maybe you have a product page that links to commonly asked questions or your warranty or your returns [00:35:00] or comp, how, how you compare to the competition. There's so many different aspects. So yeah, you. You never want to stop growing your website and you never want to stop managing it and maintaining it.
It's an awesome answer. Um, and, and you're totally right. Like, obviously, but hey, we are coming to time and I want to give you your 30 second shameless pitch, um, before we wrap up. 
Eric Vallee: Okay, great. Yeah. , like I said, I work with people. Big companies, small companies, solopreneurs, uh, you can find me at silverfoxmke.
com. Um, I have a lot of experience in manufacturing. I've done a lot of work in other industries, and I'd be happy to help anybody if they're looking to figure out how they can do better with websites, how they can do better on Google. 
Awesome. And how, what is your, what is your website or how did LinkedIn, how can they reach out to you?
What is the preferred way? 
Eric Vallee: The best way is to go on my website. [00:36:00] It's silver Fox. It's www. silverfoxmke. com. 
Perfect. Well, again, I really appreciate, and that'll be in the show notes, my apologies. So that'll be in the show notes, but I really appreciate you coming on, Eric. It's been an awesome conversation with lots of gold nuggets.
Eric Vallee: Yeah, this has been great. I've really enjoyed it. And thank you for having me on. 
Yeah, it has been my pleasure. 

Expanding Inclusivity: The Neurodivergent Advantage

Join Leighann Lovely on the Love Your Sales Podcast as she dives deep into an enlightening conversation with Denise Schamens, co-founder and executive director of Good Friend Inc. Discover Denise’s personal journey inspired by her son's autism diagnosis and how it led her to create an inclusive community and successful nonprofit. Learn about Good Friend Inc.'s mission to develop films and training curriculums that promote neurodiversity in schools and workplaces. Explore the challenges and successes Denise faces in advocating for neurodivergent individuals in the corporate world. This episode is packed with insights on the importance of inclusivity and the unique strengths neurodivergent individuals bring to any setting. Tune in for an inspiring discussion that highlights the value of diverse thinkers and the push towards more inclusive work environments.
Contact Denise –
Website – www.Goodfriendinc.com
Email - Denise@Goodfriendinc.com   
 
Special Thank you to our Sponsors – Genhead – www.genhead.com and Sales Rescue – www.rescuemysales.com
Robb Conlon – Intro and outro – Westport Studio - https://www.westportstudiosllc.com/
The Brave Ones – Instrumental Version Song by Jan Sanejko - https://artlist.io/royalty-free-music/song/the-brave-ones/119489
 
Ready to grow your business? Schedule a call with us today  - https://api.leadconnectorhq.com/widget/bookings/discoverysalesleighann
Channel Subscribe link - https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC-O7W9DzaRv4waodQKCprIg?sub_confirmation=1
 
Leighann Lovely: Welcome to another episode of Love Your Sales. I'm very excited today. I am joined by Denise Shamans. She is the co-founder and executive director of Good Friend Inc. Welcome, Denise. I'd love for you [00:01:00] to introduce yourself and your business.
Denise Schamens: Yeah. Hello. Hello. Hello. Um, my, my business is called good friend.
Inc is a nonprofit and we, uh, started back in 2007 and it really, uh, came out of, um, the experience that I was having in my family. So my background is, uh, I'm a creative. I went to school for fine art and commercial art. And then I started having my boys, my two boys, um, who are only 19 months apart. And then I do have a third, my daughter who is college age.
Um, but my middle son, Sam was diagnosed with autism just at three. Uh, so I've been in the autism neurodivergent space for over 20. Five years, he's going to be 26 this week. Um, and it, um, really came out of a desire for a community that was [00:02:00] accepting of his differences. And I found, um, along the path. I had many other hats.
I was a. Parent liaison for the school district of Waukesha. I did that for about 10 years and had a support group, um, was only reaching just a handful of families at the time and, uh, was a large district. We had over 150 families that had some sort of disability or in place. Um, and I couldn't reach them, but what I ended up doing was going into my son's classroom in first, second grade and sitting down with his peers and telling them about him and how they could relate to him, understanding that his autism affected him mostly in his speaking ability.
Um, Not to say that he's nonverbal, he has a lot to say, but can't really get it out. And so, uh, forming friendships was difficult for him. But what I did find was, you know, 27 of his peers were more than happy to be his friend. They just [00:03:00] wanted to know what was up and at the time there was only 1 guidance counselor traveling to all of those 17 elementary schools.
So we weren't talking about differences back then. Um, so I saw a need there. And, uh, there was another mother that was coming to my support group who she was the one that had all the binders on the resources. Like, this is a dentist. Do you want to take them to? This is the camp. You want to send them to all these inclusive communities that already existed.
Um, and so I decided to have a meeting with her and really talk about what we could do with our own. And, um, I wanted to make a film and she came at it from a different perspective, wanting to create, um, a curriculum to surround that film. So we joined forces that was back in 2007 and good friends started.
Um, we created our first film within 3 months. We were in the schools presenting and as. Our kids grew, our company grew. So once our kids got into middle school, we created our [00:04:00] middle school film and curriculum. And then since then we've remade both of them because we've gotten better at videography.
We've gotten better at storytelling. Um, and the language has changed around autism and neurodivergence. So we've made four. To date, we've made now five, um, uh, short documentaries. Um, so as our, as our children grew, our company grew, um, we were up to seven employees at one time. And, uh, we started business coaching right at year 11, and that helped us look at our, our nonprofit as a business, understanding our cash flow, understanding our sales process, understanding, um, all of our procedures, and it was life saving for us, but it was also.
An interesting time in our organization's life, because now our kids were becoming young adults and we as parents were in the transition program. So we didn't know what that meant. We didn't [00:05:00] really know where our space was, um, in the employment space for a while until about 2 and a half years ago, when we finally decided, why aren't we doing what we always do?
And that's create environments that are inclusive. And by doing that. so much. Um, we educate them, um, employers and peers as well on how to be inclusive, how to understand neurodivergence. Cause now, as we've gotten into the adult space, we've expanded it beyond autism. It's now neurodivergent and it, it's all of these brain based conditions that fall within neurodivergence.
So now we're, we've expanded our message to include neurodivergence. All of these conditions, um, and then of course, what we're offering and the education that we're giving is really helpful to everyone. Everyone will benefit from it.
Leighann Lovely: So before we, sorry, I don't want to cut you off, but that is, first of all, it's amazing.
Um, [00:06:00] to, you know, to start from a personal place. Yeah. Um, coming from a personal standpoint to something that's, you know, impacting you on a personal level, but to take that, you know, cause truly this is, this is your, your child's life that you're following. I mean, And, and that in itself is, is absolutely amazing as you've, as you have grown, as your children have grown, you have been able to step into, I don't want to say step into his shoes, but try to help him, you know, grow.
But so let's, let's talk about where you're at right now, because this is where I find it. Vitally important and a shift that has kind of taken place because when you, when you started, there wasn't information and what that was, you said 11, no, he's 20. Yeah, he's 26. So yeah, [00:07:00] what? 20 years, 20 years ago. Yeah.
Talking. Yeah. So when you started, there was no place for people. To get information, there was, I mean, yes, the library, um, but it wasn't, you didn't have, you didn't have your cell phone and I'm holding my cell phone here to be like, Okay. What is this? What's happening?
Denise Schamens: I'll tell you though. It was, you know, at the time the, the diagnostic criteria and the way that we talk about and diagnose autism is different now than it used to be.
There used to be Asperger's, PDD, NOS, and what they used to call low functioning. They blew all those out of the water. And so now when you get an autism diagnosis, it's by level. And I don't really care for level either because I feel like at any given time, it's based on. Support need. So at any given time, you could present as a level two.
Um, but say you're having a really great day and everything's clicking. You could be now a [00:08:00] level one or you're having an off day and nothing's working, then you're a level three. So, um, isn't that for most humans? I know. It's just so. Bizarre, because it's just such a snapshot of time when you're testing, right?
And, um, so yeah, so when I looked online, he was diagnosed with PDD NOS, which is sort of, if you're going to look at it as a spectrum, he's kind of in the middle. And so when I type that into my computer, into the great Google, um, space, I got just not great news. It was kind of like, well, get him into therapy and maybe he'll, you know, have a job or maybe he'll have friendships.
It was dismal. Although now if you put that information in, there's almost too much information and it's like, how do you filter what's, what is good for you and what is not? So. Yes, information has improved. The outcomes have improved. I will say that, um, social media has [00:09:00] been awesome. Knowing, seeing how the landscape has changed in my son's life from me having to go find an adult on the spectrum to be able to see what my son could do.
Accomplish, um, to now you look on tick tock, you look on Instagram, you look anywhere, right? LinkedIn, they're everywhere and they're voicing what their experiences are. So it's like, what an amazing place to be that now they have this voice. So that's cool.
Leighann Lovely: Being, having an outlet to share experiences. To other people, because I mean,
we as humans want to be able to talk to other humans that are experiencing similarities in what we're going through. And often those who may maybe don't have the [00:10:00] verbal ability, like you said, just because you don't speak well, doesn't mean you don't have a ton to say. And sometimes communication in a different way allows for that outlet.
Yeah. Which is, is amazing. Absolutely. It also allows for the ability to find other people. Exactly. Find your community. Your tribe. Yeah. Yeah. Correct. So now, as you've, you know, watched your son grow up, you know, he's, he's going into, you know, different season of life, right? Yes. Yeah. And so this is the thing that I find the most exciting because now you're, Going into a different season in your business where you no longer, and of course you're still catering to schools.
You're still out there doing that. But now you've pivoted to educating employers, which to me is, is, is awesome because employers always seem to be the [00:11:00] last people to go. Oh, yeah, I didn't like, right. Right. There's a wildly brilliant human being that may be. Horrible at interviewing. Yeah. Again, they've got so much to offer.
Yeah. Exactly. Or they may need special accommodation that is really not that hard to accommodate. Right. And they could be Often free. Yeah. Right. Right. There's the simple things. I mean, if, if you have, if you have a, a, an employee in your office that has diabetes and they need, you know, to check their Blood levels or whatever, so that there's an extra time that they spend in the bathroom doing that.
You're not going to say, no, sorry, we can't hire you, right? It's a simple special, and that's probably a bad analogy here. I was just spitballing trying to grab something, right? [00:12:00] The point being, though, is that, you know, you don't automatically say no to somebody simply because there may might be an accommodation that that needs to be made.
If the person can do the job, right? Exactly. Let's talk about the shift that you've made and how has, how has that been different than what you were doing in the past?
Denise Schamens: Well, yeah, like I said, we weren't really sure where our space was. And so I think we kind of avoided it for a while until we just went back to what we always do.
And that's create a film and create a training curriculum to surround that film. Um, so what we did was we put an ask out there for, um, To find a near divergent employees that were successful in their career, um, successfully employed and, um, that was all neurodivergent. And so we put that out. I put it out on LinkedIn [00:13:00] and we got quite a few candidates.
that came forward on their own, not because their employer asked them to come forward. They came forward because they wanted to make a difference. They wanted to share their story. And so like all the training that we've ever done, when it's in video format, we do a, we do a documentary style so that you can connect and hear their story, their own personal story.
It's not me telling you what it is, um, as an ally. I'm only here to amplify their voice. I'm not their voice. And so I needed to make sure that we had an age range. So I think it's 22 to 52 and, uh, half women, half men, and, uh, It was an interesting experiment because each of them had their own journey of to be successfully employed.
And so this film highlights them highlights and shows their diagnostic story. Um, more than half of them were late diagnosed. Uh, so they went to [00:14:00] seek out a right diagnosis later in life. Um, so it touches on some things that I think are inherently wrong with our. Our testing process, um, number, the biggest one is trying to find someone who diagnoses someone as an adult, um, and then making that more cost effective for them because that's out of pocket to do so.
And then once you have that information, what do you do with that? And so many of the people in our film took that. Now correct diagnosis and just gave themselves more grace in their workplace and in their setting goals for themselves, um, with this new lens of being autistic. So it was, uh, it was really an interesting, um, and still is the film is just powerful for you to see how different each individual is and.
What it took for them to get that diagnosis. And then with that, we took additional footage with them and then brought in some subject matter experts. So we have 5. Individual [00:15:00] training modules that kind of dive deeper into what made them successful in the workplace. And so that's all offered as a course.
So it's great for employers. It's great for anyone. That is, um, working with someone who's neurodivergent. And if you look at. What all falls under neurodivergence that's about 40 percent of our population. So we need to be talking about this. We need to have this training. Um, I just recently did a really powerful screening and talk back.
With, um, UW Madison's, uh, School of Theater and Drama. And that was amazing because they had two, um, individuals on their, as colleagues on their staff that were neurodivergent that wanted to help run this. And it was beautiful because we took the film by chapter by chapter, and we were able to have such a rich discussion around what made them successful and, um, what, you know, didn't work out for [00:16:00] them.
That was an amazing thing. So it's like when you think about what's the perfect client, the perfect client is anyone who is employing other people, right? And
Leighann Lovely: So, um, you threw out a number there. 40 percent is neurodivergent. Do you think, do you, do you think that that number could potentially be higher because there are so many people that are late diagnosed? I mean, or undiagnosed or right. Or undiagnosed. And cause I think about that and there are people that I meet and I think to myself, and this is horrible.
Maybe it's not horrible, but I think to myself like. Especially being somebody who has bipolar disorder. Right. And I talk about this all the time and I, and I see, I see certain signs in them and I'm like, have you, have you ever. See a psychiatrist, have you? And I say it in the most loving and caring way, but they'll come to me and they're, and, and a lot of people talk to me [00:17:00] about mental health because I am open about talking about mental health.
Yeah. Right. I'll say, have you ever seen a medical, you know, a psychiatrist or a therapist and talked about some of these signs and sign? No, no, no. I would never do that. And I think, God, I swear. Yeah. Like at least 80 percent of the population is, is somewhere. On some spectrum of something.
Denise Schamens: Yeah. I think those numbers would be staggering
Leighann Lovely: if it was more accurate for sure.
As do I. And that's why, you know, having a platform, a comfort, you know, a place of comfort to, to talk about this and why I think it's so wildly important that this type of training take place. And this brings me to my next question. How is it going with getting. Buy in from these companies in comparison to, you know, you can walk into a school and say, Hey, this is great.
I'm going to guess schools were much [00:18:00] more like, yeah, let's bring this in because it was kind of a no brainer. Let's educate, but where, where is it standing right now with getting the buy in from. Employers.
Denise Schamens: Yeah. Well, I'll tell you it's, it's not as quick. So the corporate world to your point is really slow to make decisions like this.
And, and I don't blame them because there is a cost involved. It costs, you know, to, um, have this training to implement this training to more than 1 person. And it needs to be in your budget. And so we are running across those kinds of situations where they have to. Find the number 1, see the value in a training like this.
And then where does it fit? Or are they already paying what we're running into with some of the larger financial industries is, you know, we've already contracted with this large training organization that does all of these D. I. [00:19:00] trainings and safety videos. And why would yours be any different? And it's like, but ours is ours is it's not It isn't, it all is these people that have such great, um, impact and you learn from them.
You learn from hearing in their story. And so it's been, it's been a little slow, you know, trying to get people to see the value in this. And we're so small, like we have a, we have a contracted marketing company that's doing amazing things for us. Um, but it is literally just meeting with everyone. I have to have, Probably, oh, four to five one on ones every week just to show them what this product is.
So it's a, it's a slow sale.
Leighann Lovely: And I understand that. And it, it makes sense budgeting. You know, I've been in the training and development where, you know, companies, well, we've got X amount for budgeting, but when we talk about 40 percent of the population and you and I talk about, Yeah, right. It's [00:20:00] not 40%. It's way up there.
My question to them would be, how are you not immediately putting this in the budget when you're talking about one, increasing the population of people that you could hire when how many people who are neurodiverse Go without a job. I know that, you know, a number around there somewhere. It's like one 80%.
Yeah. I was going to say 80 percent like one in four or something. Yeah. Or is that backwards?
Denise Schamens: Yeah. It's definitely like 80 to 85 percent are under or unemployed. Okay. Right. Everybody's
Leighann Lovely: looking. Correct. And if an employer right now is suffering to hire the correct or hire more people and they understand what it might look like and what it takes in order to hire a population of people that right now are [00:21:00] under or unemployed, how can you not try to understand how to do this?
Most employers, if you are a large employer. If you have, you know, 100 employees, I guarantee that you have somebody who is neurodiverse working at your company. You may not know it, right? Or you may think you might, they may have not disclosed to you out of fear. And there's a lot of people out there that don't disclose out of fear.
But if you were to get this, you know, if you get this training going, right? Yeah,
Denise Schamens: it's to, to kind of put it in perspective. I mean, an ideal world world for me and what I'm kind of trying to achieve and I probably won't in my lifetime. Is a workplace or is all workplaces that are so inclusive and so universally designed that you don't even need to disclose.[00:22:00]
Correct. It doesn't matter what whatever the label is, whether you're diagnosed or not diagnosed. If everything, if all these accommodations are already there and you've been taught to be an inclusive. Thriving company, then. That's perfect, right? That's what I'm trying to gain from this and the larger companies that are in the thousands or global organizations that are looking at us, which is lovely.
They want to know if it's culturally. Sensitive to their global partners. And I get that. And I, and I think it would be, I think that once we can get that, um, underway and they can see the film and the value of what these people are bringing, that's the thing. It's not me talking about their autism or their neurodivergence or how to hire them.
It is. Them talking about what works for them. How can you argue with that? How can that not be culturally sensitive, right? Because it's their own personal stories of success. So [00:23:00] it's really, uh, for some of these larger organizations that have DER, they're DEI groups or ERG groups or BRG groups, those business resource groups.
Those are the ones that are already thinking inclusively. So this is perfect. This rolls right into their initiatives. But what I feel like is the companies that don't even realize. That they need this training. Um, those are the ones that I need to try to speak to because they already have them. It's, it's different when you're trying to hire and attract that talent, which we can help you do that.
But it's also retaining what you already have and understanding that they may need to go and get a diagnosis or they may be just finding out while they're working for you. So those are important things to, to think about too, is just retaining what you already have, the talent that you have. And then, of course, we're all about collaboration.
So what we're trying to do is just on the front front end. We're just trying to help change hearts and [00:24:00] minds, helping employers see the value of it. And then we're connecting them with the organizations that are doing the placement, like the engage, like thinkability, like mind shift, right? There's so many organizations out there that are placing.
Neurodivergent people in their field, whether that's manufacturing or tech or HR or whatever that might be. So we're not doing all of it. We're just trying to help them see how you can build that framework to accept, um, all those diverse thinkers. Right.
Leighann Lovely: And
having that diversity. And we, we talk about this all the time. If you have a room of all the same person, Right. No new ideas ever will come out of that room. Or growth. Or growth. Right. But if you have. You know, [00:25:00] a wide variety of people, and we're talking about race, we're talking about religion, we're talking about neurodiverse individuals.
Think about all of the different viewpoints that could potentially come out of that room. I mean, especially. You know, I, I, I, some people hate when I say like, Oh, my superpower is some people like eat, but I truly believe that along with what people consider and I don't like saying like, Oh, I bipolar, my, my disability is I have bipolar disorder.
I don't think of it as a disability.
Denise Schamens: Right
Leighann Lovely: now it's a hurdle that at one point in my life, I, I had to, You know, get diagnosed. I had to get on the right medication. I had to get on the right, you know, regiment of life in order to, you know, function in what society would call a norm. But along with that, there are things that are different within my own brain that I consider to be [00:26:00] kind of a superpower.
Yeah. I mean, because my, for, I don't mind doesn't function the same way as what we. Consider the norm. What is the norm in your own majority? It's
Denise Schamens: the majority. That's becoming we've already proven that the party is not anymore.
Leighann Lovely: Right? I mean, if when information goes in to somebody's brain, Everybody processes it so completely differently.
I like that. I do too. I like that the way that I think, you know, my husband will look at me and go, what's, what is going on in your brain right now? And I'm like, I'm, you know, I'm, I'm a puzzle. I like to put, pieces together. Like I like to, you know, I'm an op, right now I'm working in operations. I like to figure out how do I put this together with this together with this to make the complete Yeah, puzzle work.
Yeah, you know, and like my husband will make [00:27:00] reference to something and all of a sudden it triggers somebody in my head and I'm off and doing this and doing this and then I'm writing on a little sheet of paper and he's like, what are you talking about? And I'm like, Oh, I need to introduce this to this to this.
And he's like, I referenced a movie. And I'm like, yeah, it made me think of this. Yeah. That's how my brain works. Yeah. I, I love that about every human is uniquely different. I love the stories about how, you know, everybody processes that information in their own way to make them uniquely them. Yeah. And the more that we have that, The more powerful we are as a company, as a society, as a world.
And if we allow people that instead of trying to say, Oh no, you have to think like this, right. Well, what,
Denise Schamens: yeah, the biggest takeaway that I've, I've been able to give when we [00:28:00] present, um, neurodiversity at work. Is really to just be curious and it's okay. Give them permission. It's okay to ask questions. It's okay to pull together a group.
Um, of unique thinkers and get their input and get there. I mean, that's the best thing in the world. I think is asking as many questions. Like, what do you need to be successful in your workplace? What can I do to help you be successful and ask them just ask them questions? How do you like to be identified?
Right? When we're looking at identity and. And all of that. So it's just being inquisitive and it's being, it's okay to ask questions. There's no taboo against it. It's okay. And I think that's been the biggest thing for employers to wrap their head around is that they don't need to have all the answers.
They just need to, to ask the people that are working for them.
Leighann Lovely: I think the other thing is, is that so many employers are afraid of making a mistake. Yeah. And therefore they [00:29:00] just shy away. Yeah. From what they don't know. Right. Ask.
Denise Schamens: And it's bringing value to your, your employees then too. I mean, you're placing value on them by asking.
Their opinion on something, or ask how, you know, they could make improvements or what the suggestion or advice would be. How can you, you have to, you have to use those people in your life and use them. Like you said, the, the superpowers that they have. There may be things that you just hadn't even thought of that they can bring new perspective to it.
Leighann Lovely: Absolutely. It's just like bringing in, you know, I'm, I'm 43 bringing in a young, young buck into, sorry, I shouldn't say, but bringing in a young mind, as scary as it is because they're talking about all these, I'm like, I don't even know what that is. And they're like, Oh, it's the newest bubble. And I'm okay.
Great. But it's scary. Cause they're talking about things that I don't even know what they are, but it's [00:30:00] great. That's where we are. Right. Bringing a new perspective. So we are coming to time. Um, this has been an amazing conversation. I love the growth that, um, that, that you have. And I love the fact that you're moving into employers.
Um, yeah, it's just Denise, it's been such a great conversation. Um, and you know, for those of you who have followed my, um, my podcasting career, Denise was actually, um, On a previous podcast that I had, um, so if you want to check out that original episode, you can actually reference back to let's talk HR, um, where she actually, um, had joined.
Those are still live, but you can get that original one out. But again, Denise, it's been such an awesome time. I really appreciate it. Yeah. Thank you. Thank you for the opportunity. Yes. Oh, and I, I give everybody their, their, their 30 second shameless pitch. Um, I think we've talked quite a bit about everything, but please, um, if you want to drop anything [00:31:00] where people can reach out to you, go ahead.
Denise Schamens: Yeah, I mean, please find me on LinkedIn. I'm a huge connector on LinkedIn, and I love to make to do one on one. So if you have interest and you want to sit down and talk about what we're doing and what we need as far as time, talent and resources, um, you can find me on LinkedIn, Denise Shamans, as well as, um, feel free to email me at D E N I S E at Goodfriendinc.
com and that's mine. And then our website is goodfriendinc. com. So those are all the all places you can find me. And that'll be in the show notes. Thank you so much. Thank you. Take care.
Genhead: This [00:32:00] podcast is presented by Genhead. Genhead leverages AI so small and medium sized businesses can find their ideal clients to make more sales. Other companies talk about AI, but we are using it every day to drive down marketing costs and increase revenue. Learn more at genhead. com. That's genhead. com.

Sales, Success, and Stabilizing Hypochlorous Acid: A CEO's Journey

On this enlightening episode of the "Love Your Sales" podcast, Leighann Lovely sits down with Bill Maher, an esteemed business leader and current CEO of Curitiba Bay Incorporated. Bill shares captivating stories from his remarkable career, including his military service, the successful sale of his electrical engineering firm, and his venture into stabilizing hypochlorous acid—a game-changing product with vast potential in healthcare. Their discussion encompasses the challenges of entrepreneurship, the importance of maintaining strong organizational culture, and the evolving dynamics of modern business practices. Bill's incredible journey offers valuable insights and inspiration for aspiring entrepreneurs and seasoned business professionals alike. Don't miss this episode filled with real-world wisdom and innovative ideas.
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Leighann Lovely: Welcome to another episode of Love Your Sales. I am so thrilled. I am joined by Bill Maher. He is a business leader known for his innovation and expertise in technology and healthcare. Currently holds the position of CEO at Curitiba Bay Incorporated. Maher is responsible for overseeing the production of stabilizing hyperchlorous acid, a natural antiviral agent recognized for its effectiveness in fighting [00:02:00] pathogens.
 Curetiva Bay, Maher successfully led a respectful electrical engineering firm with a global presence. Under his guidance, the company expanded to five offices across the United States and Hong Kong, solidifying its position as a key player in the industry. Mayor played a pivotal role in the development of more than 6, 000 critical power systems, including the renowned launch pad 39A for the space shuttle program.
Mayor's leadership and strategic Acunam propelled the electrical engineering company to unprecedented success, accumulating in its. Acquisition by NASDAQ list Corporation. With a proven track record of leadership and innovation, Bill continues to drive progress and excellence in the technology and healthcare sector, leaving a lasting imprint on industries that shape our [00:03:00] future.
Bill served in the U. S. Navy from 1971 to 1975, specializing in air launched weapons specialists
abroad, the U. S. S. Forrest, all CVA 59. Additionally, he holds a pilot's certificate bill. I am so happy to have you join me today.
Bill Maher: It's a pleasure. Thank you very much.
Leighann Lovely: Yeah. So obviously I read this, you know, little bio on you, but is there anything that I missed?
Bill Maher: Uh, no, no, just, uh, that's pretty much it in a nutshell.
Leighann Lovely: So why don't you tell, you know, currently you are the CEO of Curitiba Bay. Tell me a little bit about, you know, what this business is. What, what do, what do you do?
Bill Maher: Well, it was kind of a mistake. It was nothing I planned. Um, I had just, uh, came out of selling my company to a NASDAQ listed company. So it turned into a publicly [00:04:00] traded company. And, um, and I left that company after about a year and I was with a friend and he asked me, have I ever heard of something called hypochlorous acid?
And I said, no, never heard of it. And he said, well, there's a doctor down in Fort Lauderdale, which we're in Tampa Bay. He said, let's take a ride down. This is supposed to be pretty special and he wants us to help him sell it. So we went down there and when I, I never heard of hypochlorous, but when I found out that it, it kills all viruses, it, um, it's so safe that you can drink it.
It's made out of dead sea salt and purified water. And we put an electrical current through it and it brings out something called hypochlorous acid, which is in your, in the human immune system. If you didn't have it, you wouldn't heal wounds, wouldn't get rid of colds. It's pretty important for the human body.
Um, after a couple of hours, I was blown away by it. I was getting pretty excited. And then I found out that it was not stable, which means you cannot keep it in a bottle for longer than maybe 3 days. And it would it turns right back to [00:05:00] salt water again. So I didn't see any. Future in that, uh, the next day I was called to Seattle for, uh, for a consulting, an engineering consulting job.
And I thought, I'll take that, you know, nothing else to do. So I flew to Seattle the next day.
Leighann Lovely: Nothing else to do this. Sorry. I'm sorry. Nothing else to do. You're you just sold your company and you're you're how old at this point?
Bill Maher: Oh, when I sold the company, I was
Leighann Lovely: So you, you could have just, you know, gotten on your boat and, and retired at this point.
Bill Maher: Yeah. Well, you could have, but I started thinking the older you get, the more wisdom you have and you think in yourself, well, how many times can I go drinking beer on my boat? So this is,
Leighann Lovely: so I just want to point out, this is the true entrepreneurial spirit of someone who, Just loves what they do and does what they love.
So, sorry, go ahead. It was good.
Bill Maher: So I flew to [00:06:00] Seattle and we did the 1st full day and it's in his plant. And it's building and and then he's invited me out to dinner and he also brought a friend of his had nothing to do with our meeting. Just a friend was. Hanging out with him. So I asked the friend, you know, what do you do for a living?
And he said, well, you probably never heard of this, but we figured out a way to stabilize something called hypochlorous acid. And I almost fell off my chair and I thought, well, this is, this is a divine intervention or something, something, some, it just, the odds, I should have stopped in Las Vegas. On the way back, so I decided that I, I knew that the spray itself, I could say that it, it gets, it'll relieve people of acne in about four days.
You just spray it on your face. It's like, uh, salt water, but it's not gonna right. The hypochlorous in it, it clears up the acne real fast. Uh, it heals wounds really quick. So that was another application, um, and and also it kills all viruses, although we make no claims about that, you know, so, [00:07:00] um, it's I've never done this business before.
This is a. Online business, we have a little store here too, but. Uh, if I didn't have the experience of operating a business for 30 years, um, I probably would have gone out of business the 1st year. It was just a money hungry machine. And, uh, it was terrible. Uh, at 1st, you know, because I didn't have any marketing experience.
No social media experience. You know, I do. I did things like I answered the telephone and talk to people and they didn't even know how to do it. You know, they were ready to leave a message, you know, so it was hard. I think the first year, second year, we lost huge amounts of money. And now, now, and I, we were the first people in this space.
So nobody knew about it. Nobody understood what I did. I don't do it now sell on Amazon, but when I tried to sell on Amazon, it took them six months to approve it because they never heard of it before. Now there's now that now I came out [00:08:00] and didn't do any advertising. I just basically got the sales up and now there's probably about 15 competitors.
And they're in all the beauty stores and everywhere, you know, and I'm still just selling out of our office here,
Leighann Lovely: but
Bill Maher: we're doing quite well now and growing every day.
Leighann Lovely: Interesting.
Bill Maher: And then there was a little stint I did between the electrical engineering business and this business. Uh, I was in, we did a lot of work in Hong Kong and China and I found these little microscopic balls that they made out of bauxite ore in China.
They're the size of a pencil tip. But if you were to take a hammer and hit them, you couldn't hardly break them. They would hold 20, 000 PSI pounds per square inch. Right? So I thought my friend who was in the oil business, he was a petroleum engineer. I said, how do they open up the fractures when they fracture a well, because it's so deep and he says they use sand.
And I said, do you think we can get them to use these, these balls? And he said, well, let's because they're not, they're not [00:09:00] they're natural. Right. So we went to Halliburton and after about a year of begging, they finally gave us a chance and they improve their, their well, um, their, their production by 600 barrels a day.
So we, we started importing, we would bring 3000 pounds, super sacks, 10Million pounds at a time from China to, um, to, uh, the port city. And we ship it across the ocean to Seattle and put it on it. We rent a whole train and put it on a train. We're delivering 10 million pounds a month to Palo Verde and whiting oil and gas.
And that went on for got the 1st year. We did that. We did 32Million dollars in business, just 2 people. And it was a fun business, but boy, it was hard. We're in the oil fields at 40 below 0, you know, where you can pinch the cheeks and it would stay that way and stuff. And I'm for it. I'm a Florida guy. So.
Leighann Lovely: Right.
Bill Maher: Um, we had to, we had to give that up in 2014 because they had a manipulated oil price. Crude price went from [00:10:00] 95 a barrel down to 30 a barrel. And uh, we were the most expensive thing on the, on the well. Um, we were 600, 000 a well for products. So they went back to sand.
Leighann Lovely: So that's three businesses.
Yeah. So
Bill Maher: let's,
Leighann Lovely: let's go back. So you know, you, you were in, uh, you were in the Navy. Let's start with this. You got out of the Navy. And did you immediately have the itch to become an entrepreneur?
Bill Maher: No, I didn't know I was not educated. And you know, for me to start my electrical engineering business, I had to be, uh, I had to have a BS degree, put it that way.
And, uh, but you know, God has given me miracles all my life. And I was man, I was, my job was managing the construction of data centers. When data centers, the dotcoms are out a lot, you know, and, and, uh, [00:11:00] one of the guys I befriended took him fishing on my boat and everything like that, all the time. He came to me one day and he said, Hey, you know, I'm so mad at these electronic engineers because we have these big power systems and they, they won't touch the batteries.
I wish I knew somebody who could maintain the batteries. And I said, what would I, what would, what would you do? He said, well, I'd give him all my work. He, he's, uh, a manager of a $60 billion company. Um. And they do big power systems manufacturing. Right? So I went down at Reagan was president then, and I went down and started my business in about a day for 50.
It wasn't like it is now and opened up my shop. And he came in the next day with a stack about that, that high of folders. And he said, here's all of our customers. Leave us 15%. So I went out and started doing maintenance by myself on all these battery systems, right? Cause it wasn't that hard. And next thing you know, you know, I'm by myself.
And back in 1989, I was making 35, 000 a month.
Leighann Lovely: And [00:12:00]
Bill Maher: then we, we turned that into stationary power was the name of the company. And when we sold it, we were, we were revenuing 50 million. And it was so funny because when I started this business, I had a little baby, my daughter was a baby, you know, I was watching her and I was actually working in her bedroom.
So I would have these old phone where people would call and I say, oh, I don't know. Hold on a 2nd. Let me hook you over to engineering. And then I put it on hold and I come back, say engineering, you know, change my voice. I imagine many people could probably come up with what they did when they started their business, but stationary power was we were in 5 states, you know, and it was a great company.
Um, and it was purchased by a NASDAQ traded company, a public publicly traded company.
Leighann Lovely: Yeah. And
Bill Maher: they ran it out a bit. They ruined our, our culture, ruined the culture for the customers. NASA used to come to my office and change into shorts when they were discussing change orders for the space, the launch pad.
Right. And, and then, so they [00:13:00] went out of business in three years. Not that not the whole company, but they had to fold the division that when they bought our company,
Leighann Lovely: right?
Bill Maher: No, which wasn't cheap. And, uh, so that was unfortunate. But
Leighann Lovely: yeah, you can't, uh, you can't continue to maintain. Um, well, If you're, if you're not willing to understand the organization and the way that it was built when you buy it and you just go in and start strong, strong arming or not paying attention to the way that it was originally run, it's, it's unfortunate that that that happens with, with companies.
So how many
Bill Maher: college educated people. No, no offense to them. I'm not at all tend to be younger when they get into these positions and it takes wisdom,
Leighann Lovely: you
Bill Maher: have to have wisdom to think about what, do I want to change that culture to my culture, which is strictly wrong it's, you know, it's, it's. But in fact, when I mentioned that [00:14:00] to the board of directors and they called the president about it, he fired me.
Leighann Lovely: Wow.
Bill Maher: It's not a big deal. I didn't need to work there. I didn't do nothing when I sold it anyway, but you know, it's like, he didn't want me to go around. I've talked to him already. I said, you're going to run this company out of business. I said, it's three years. It's gone. And it was three years. Right.
Leighann Lovely: Wow.
And so let's talk about that because, you know, there's a lot of young entrepreneurs that are popping up and which is awesome. I love to see, um, you know, younger people coming in and, you know, really showing what they're capable of doing. I will tell you myself that when I was in my twenties, um, I didn't have the wisdom that I have now, and I, I wouldn't have been able to start and maintain and run my own business.
I know this of myself now. I'm not saying that that is that that's everybody. Um, [00:15:00] but there is something to be said about life experience. Um, that cannot be taught, that cannot be trained, that cannot be in any way given to somebody else without living and going through the motions of, of life.
Bill Maher: Yeah.
Leighann Lovely: So tell me a little bit about, you know, I guess that journey, the, the pains, the hardships of your previous, you know, business, your, your business today.
Bill Maher: Well, I mean, okay. So I made some mistakes that I learned from, and I would probably make the same choice if I, if I went back. So September 11th came. And we were, I had all my core group of people were working here and I had 5 other offices, but they were not my core. My core was here. They were all with me for 15 years.
I watched their kids grow up when [00:16:00] September 11th hit and the dot coms had a failures had failures. We were, we were shorted 800000 dollars on jobs. We did for the dot coms that we had to go through and all that kind of stuff like that. And so we got in a bad, bad way for a couple of years where it was extremely successful, extremely, uh, uh, stressful.
So, uh, I didn't want to lay off any of these people. And all my friends were saying, man, you're going, you know, you're having these problems and I went 2. 8 million into debt, uh, just keeping them employed. Cause I, I just knew that something was going to come right. And, uh, and we had to do a lot of things like they might not think about unless they had the experience.
For instance, after we fixed all that problem. And we're back after we, uh, we, we sold 1 division of the telecommunications division to, to a publicly traded company and got some cash was able to pay that debt off. But during that time, you know, we wanted to get another credit line. We needed a credit line to run the business.
Our cash flow was at that time with 800, 000 a month. [00:17:00]
Leighann Lovely: So,
Bill Maher: um, so what, uh, we had a guy, one of our best engineers bought so much of this equipment that was the wrong voltage. We couldn't return it.
Leighann Lovely: Oh my God. It was
Bill Maher: getting over in our other warehouse for a long, long time. And I thought, how am I going to get this credit line?
How am I going to get the credit line? You got to be patient, right? So I, I wrote off that inventory, which is if you're a publicly traded company, you just can't, if you write it off, you can, but you got to throw it away. We didn't throw it away. So the next year we were doing a lot better and we were, that voltage for that machine that we didn't need, now we needed it.
So we started selling these big jobs with these new 480 volt systems. And, um, we, uh, We were realizing a lot, a lot of a lot of revenue and no cost because we had no cost that was written off. Right. And that made our bottom line look really good. And we were able to secure a 5M credit line. [00:18:00] So, um, you know, it just took a lot of, you know, what you don't know how to solve the problem.
And 1st, you just have to go through it and you have to say, do I go this way? Do I go that way? And sometimes you're right and sometimes you're wrong, you know, you want to make that ratio a little bit better on the right side. Right. So that's what, you know, then we started getting, we were lean and mean, everybody was experienced.
We, we, we beat the, we beat a union up in Pennsylvania that was trying to knock us out of business. You know, that's a long story. It was Verizon, but, uh, we finally got to a point where we were doing really well, and we had a good name. A really good name. So,
Leighann Lovely: you
Bill Maher: know,
Leighann Lovely: I commend you, um, you know, businesses today and I, I don't, I don't want to pick on businesses today, but I'm going to.
I don't want to, but I'm going to. You know, businesses are not like they were there. There was [00:19:00] loyalty in employees and there was loyalty in businesses today. It is so not that way. There is no loyalty towards, you know, if. If an employee screws up, there's, there's, they're quick to get them out the door and just say goodbye.
Employees, the same thing. Employees are like, yeah, I don't like it here anymore. And they're just quick to jump ship. And, but you know, but you're talking about, I mean, 9 11, that was, you know, God, I, I, I'm dating myself when I say, you know, like I remember sitting at work the day that that happened, but that, that was so long ago at this point, like my, my, and it's really funny cause yesterday my husband made a comment about Janet Jackson in this incident that she was on stage and I'm like, Oh, that wasn't that long ago.
And he goes, yeah, it was.
Bill Maher: And
Leighann Lovely: I'm like, what? No, it wasn't. And he goes, we were watching a show and he goes, this kid just said he wasn't [00:20:00] born when that happens, when that happened. And I went, Oh, Oh my God. Like there's people out there who are old enough to be like adults and they weren't born when that happened.
I'm like, wow, I'm getting old. But anyways, I digress. I, you know, you don't realize like how long ago these things happen. And anyways, the point that I'm making is the loyalty that you showed. The, by, by keeping your employees employed and going into debt that much, that, that shows an amazing one culture, but wow, that, I mean, that's, that's a company that I would have wanted to work at.
And when you have a company that people want to work at, want to stay at, that's a company that I, as a consumer want to work with. [00:21:00] It, it, cause it, it go, it, it all trinkles down, right? Happy employees, happy culture usually means happy clients because they have a smile on their face when they're picking up the phone and working with their, their consumers, their clients.
They're so it sounds just from the way that you described that short thing, you did have an amazing culture and it's unfortunate when you turn around and sell that, that it's so quickly was squashed.
Bill Maher: Well, the culture, I mean. When you go to lay off people, you're not just laying off people and wrecking a family for a little while,
Leighann Lovely: you're laying
Bill Maher: capabilities.
And
 when you lay off capabilities, your companies, that's what I think some people don't realize is you're laying off capabilities. You can't get them back. You know, you can't get the people that, you know, can lace cable and do all these specific jobs that we had. And, uh, and plus, you know, they, they were with me when they, they were, you know, got married.
They had kids. We saw him at the Christmas [00:22:00] party and that sort of thing. So you have to have the problem with today. What I see in running this business right here is that nobody talks to each other anymore. Nobody communicates if they don't want to talk to you. They just don't call you. They don't answer the phone.
And, um, that's 1 of the reasons it's my company. I said, the only job I had at the end was I sat in my office. I got the service reports from the service text that went out to all my customers. And I called every single 1 of them every month, every 3, every 90 days. And we had conversations, friendly conversations, so I could keep figuring out if they were okay with what we were doing.
Um, and I remember the customers calling me and, you know, giving us jobs that we didn't think we were going to get. You know, the, the communication was great in this business. Uh, today you can't, everybody has to do everything electronically. They hide behind it, you know, and we answered our phone here at this company every day.
I do every day for every customer. We take care of problems just like that, you know, and you can see it in our reviews. [00:23:00]
Leighann Lovely: And that makes all of the difference, the, the. And you're right, people do hide behind, and it, and it makes it easier for people to brush things, conflict, brush it away as if it doesn't exist when you're hiding behind, you know, you and I are talking in Zoom.
It's, it's much easier for me. It's not for me, but much easier for people to be like, uh, I, I'm not thinking of that person as a real person with real emotions, with real family issues, with real, when you and I have never actually met in person,
Bill Maher: you
Leighann Lovely: know, because you're not, it's easier for somebody to think that they're not a whole person when I'm only seeing you in a box.
Bill Maher: And,
Leighann Lovely: and again, that's, you know, with the whole pandemic businesses saying, we want you back in the office. We want the human contact and, and [00:24:00] the younger generation is arguing what we do. We, we talk this way. We talk on tax. We talk, it's not the same.
Bill Maher: Not
Leighann Lovely: that I'm arguing that every job has to be done in an office, but relationships are struggling because of that human interaction that not zoom human interaction, not phone human, talking about actual in person interaction.
There's something to be said from standing next to somebody and being able to see their facial expressions, their body reaction. If I step closer, do they move away? Like, are they, are they the kind of person that doesn't like to be in close proximity? That says a lot about a personality and to get to know that personality, it really, truly does.
The
Bill Maher: human touch, we call it. You know, you need to have the human touch and, and, you know, it's, it seems like society at some point is going to spiral out of control because, uh, because of it, [00:25:00] you know, we're getting too much technology, um, and not enough, um, talking to each other.
Leighann Lovely: Yeah, I am in a, in a pool league and there is, um, 1, 1 gentleman who's 21 and 1 gentleman who's 25 and I find it, they always have earbuds in.
Yeah. Yet when I approach them and I say something to them, they respond right back. And so one day I said to them, what's with the earbuds? Because you can hear me. You talk to me. If I talk to you, you respond, but you always have them in. And so. One of them said, well, I'm listening to music, but really low.
So I can still hear. And I said, well, there's music in here. And he goes, yeah, it's not my type of music.
I'm like, like, so this is, this is the younger generation coming up is that they walk around with their own personal music in their head it's low enough. So they can still [00:26:00] talk. So they're like. They want to be out in society, but they also are like in their own heads. It's it is a bizarre and I don't think of myself as old.
Like, I'm, I'm 43 years old. I, I feel like I'm still in touch,
Bill Maher: but
Leighann Lovely: clearly I'm not
Bill Maher: happy to be how old I am.
I've, I've been through the best of time. So. You know, uh, it was, it was actually really good up until about 4 years ago. You know, that then people started getting. You know, we're being pushed apart, uh, in certain ways that we all know, and, and against each other, one's against this one, this one's against that one, and people have no problem saying the nastiest things when all they're doing is typing it out and they don't have to see you.
Leighann Lovely: Correct.
Bill Maher: And that that's turning the society into kind of mean streak, you know, and
Leighann Lovely: I [00:27:00] guarantee that if you were to, you know, especially when it comes to politics, especially, and I'm not going to get into any, trust me, I'm not going to start, I guarantee that if all of a sudden you took like, and some of these strings where it degrades into these horrible, if you were to say to all these people, Hey, Hey, I'm going to take you into a room with all of these people that you have screamed at, yelled at, called names, and you have to stand in a room and face them.
They'd be like, no, no, no, I'm not going to do that. I'm not, I'm no, I'm not. But you're more than willing to say these horrible, nasty things, name, call them, tell them how stupid they are for their own personal beliefs online.
Bill Maher: Yeah. I think, I think it's going to, a lot's going to change, uh, in the next. Four or five years for the better.
Leighann Lovely: I hope a
Bill Maher: lot of people are realizing, you know, when they see this, that, you know, we're going in the wrong direction, but [00:28:00] we'll see, you know,
Leighann Lovely: yeah. So we're, we're getting off topic here. Let's get, let's, I'm going to revert back here. So, so you, you've obviously, you owned a wildly successful business for many years.
And so now you, you've. We're gonna bring this back to current. You had dinner, you know, with a friend that now has sparked this. Oh my gosh, I can stabilize this. Hypochlorous Chlor. Yeah. Yeah. Hypochlorous acid. So you then went back down the path of I'm gonna create this business. At that time, you were the only one in the market.
You now have competitors. So let's talk a little bit more about where you are currently with, you know, your product and you know, what, what, what sparked this. New [00:29:00] entrepreneurs, you know, ship journey and, you know, yeah, let's talk a little bit more about that
Bill Maher: 7 days a week. Um, you know, I'm, I'm not living the perfect life right now.
It's, it's been a difficult track, uh, going way out of my comfort zone. We did. We have moved probably in the last 5 years, about 80, 000 bottles of the product. It looks, looks like this and, uh, we have, uh, we do no advertising. We do no social media.
Leighann Lovely: We
Bill Maher: might, we might, I think we found somebody though, it's going to help us with that.
But all we want is word of mouth. It's it. We have 4700. Uh, roughly 4, 700 customers that we, that we know of their subscribers. Right. Um, we probably needed 20, 000 to, to, to have a, you know, and we're, we're moving toward it, it's, uh, people are starting to realize what this product is. And, and I, one of the things that used to scare me is, uh, and, or hurt my feeling, I was expecting somebody to say, oh, [00:30:00] that stuff's no good or whatever, whatever, but we have five star, a hundred percent, five star ratings about the quality of the product and what it does, people write like stories in the, in the reviews about.
You know, got rid of my acne, I had a stye in my eye, I sprayed it and it was gone the next day. Um, it's anti aging, it's um, yeah, it's a fantastic product, so if it wasn't so good, I would have quit it five years ago. But I, people, what happened to me, what happened to me, I can tell you a little bit about what happened to me when COVID came out.
There's 50 years of science behind this product. It dates back to the 1800s. A scientist couldn't figure out how do we heal ourselves inside? How do we heal our burns, cuts? How do we get rid of the cold? How does it go away? What is it? And they found that the electricity and the salt and water in your body combine to make hypochlorous.
So he would, he's, he, the scientist, I can't remember what his name is, but he was a French scientist. He [00:31:00] used electricity and water and salt to make it. So it's been around for a long time. Um, I, uh, you know, looking back about the, um, uh, about what what happened to me with the FDA is terrible because I didn't know anything about the FDA rules and regulations.
And I knew looking at the government National Institute of Health studies over the last 50 years proved that this stuff is absolutely off the charts, right? So when COVID first came out, somebody must've known in Tampa at the news station and said, Hey, hypochlorous, we got to find somebody who's make this hypochlorous.
That's all I can't figure out any other way. They called me one day and they said, you, you manufacture hypochlorous. And I said, yes, they said, well, we'd like to interview you. And I said, okay, but I can't make any claims. So don't ask me anything about claims. And so, and they said, okay, so I came over, it was a great interview.
After the interview, we were selling like products were going out. The door is [00:32:00] incredible. All local, right. Well, when they did the interview and I looked at it, they, they, uh, put a guy in there from the University of South Florida, who's a doctor. They edited him, his interview in with mine, and they asked him about hypochlorous.
And he said, Oh, it kills COVID, kills all the viruses, blah, blah, blah. And then the FDA came after a little old me. You know, in a little office, it was this big, you know, and, and, uh, they, they, I said, well, can I, uh, I'll stop. I won't make any claims, but can I get this tested? It's already been tested, but can I test it myself and get Google during this pandemic?
Because it could really help you out a lot. And they said, don't waste your time. We'll never approve this. Right. So, um, and then what they did was they put a warning. If you go on Google to search for my company, you'll see the, you know, the company here. If you scroll to the bottom, it's an FDA warning that will never come off.
And that's, that's what ruined the company. Basically, it hurt the company bad or bad, and they'll never take it off
Leighann Lovely: an FDA [00:33:00] warning saying what
Bill Maher: we made fraudulent claims about, about type of chorus and COVID. We didn't make any claims.
Leighann Lovely: You didn't right. I was to say you didn't make any claims. That was
Bill Maher: a desperately did not want this out because with a with a nasal passage cleanser, uh, and a skin spray.
Um, well, I don't have to tell you, you can make a guess what that was. It is. It is so safe. That if you, it's just water, salt water. Basically, if you spray it, you can spray it in your mouth
Leighann Lovely: in
Bill Maher: your eyes. You can put it anywhere you want. It's, it's organic. It's natural. Right? So it's nothing going to hurt you, but it's been proven to be 80 times the virus killing power of bleach.
Leighann Lovely: And yet it is a hundred percent natural. So you don't have to deal with the fumes of bleach. You don't have to deal with the chemicals. You don't have to deal with the, all of the things that come along with using a harsh product. Alcohol or, or some of the,
Bill Maher: they use in [00:34:00] restaurants, uh, they use, uh, you know, the, uh, the, um, a lot of bad chemicals and the stuff they use restaurants to clean tables and things like that.
So, so people are starting to understand it now. And we're in the word of mouth is going from, I mean, word of mouth is incredible. It's not.
Leighann Lovely: And this is where it, where, where our world is, is broken and government can come in and basically say, don't believe them. And everybody goes, well, if the government saying it, right.
So you, what is your future look like? And you know, that was kind of your 32nd pitch as far as the product, um, cause we are coming to time, but I want to give you the opportunity to also tell me, what is your future look like in this? Thanks.
Bill Maher: Well, uh, you know, I'm, I'd like to find at some point, I'd like to, to, you know, sell, sell the company when I retire, go do things I want to do for a change without having this on my, a lot of stuff like this on my back, um, or, or attract a [00:35:00] partner that might want to invest and be a marketing person that would might, might want to invest so that we can grow that part of the company to get to where the EBITDA is enough to get a good price for the company.
Um, but I'll stay here as long as I have to. You know, I'm going to, I've already committed myself to two more years, so I don't want to go too much further than 72 years old when I, you know, with doing this kind of stuff.
Leighann Lovely: Well, you, it's, you have built an amazing one. Sounds like an amazing product. Um, where can somebody reach out to you to one, check out your product, purchase your product, learn more about it, and you know, how would they go about doing that?
Bill Maher: Well, our, our website is curative obey. It's C. U. R. A. T. I. V. A. B. A. Y. curative obey dot com. And, um, you can get us, you can reach us on email at [00:36:00] info at curative obey dot com. And if you really want to get ahold of me, I answer the phone at 7 to 7, 7, 4 to 6, 6, 3, 6. So, that's.
Leighann Lovely: And that information will be in the show notes.
So if you are looking to reach out to learn more about, um, you know, bill, you're looking to reach out to learn more about curative obey. Um, definitely go ahead, check out the show notes. You'll be able to find that information there, but bill, um, you know, your journey has definitely been one that is amazing.
Um, and I really appreciate you coming on and talking with me today.
Bill Maher: Okay. Well, I appreciate the time.
 

Balancing Sales and Leadership in Luxury Real Estate Market

In this engaging episode of "Love Your Sales," Leighann Lovely chats with Andy Daro, a seasoned real estate professional and commissioner of North Bay Village in Miami, Florida. Andy shares insights from his 12 years of experience in luxury sales, discussing the unique challenges and rewards of managing a successful real estate team. He also delves into his role as commissioner, focusing on community development projects like the Island Walk. Listeners will gain valuable advice on balancing sales and management responsibilities and the importance of hard work and personal growth. Tune in to discover how Andy navigates the world of high-stakes real estate while juggling multiple roles
 
Contact Andy
Website – compass.com/agents/the-daro-team/
compass.com/agents/andy-rotondaro/
LinkedIn – linkedin.com/in/andy-daro-b7838471
 
Special Thank you to our Sponsors – Genhead – www.genhead.com and Sales Rescue – www.rescuemysales.com
 
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Channel Subscribe link - https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC-O7W9DzaRv4waodQKCprIg?sub_confirmation=1
 
Leighann Lovely: Welcome to another episode of Love Your Sales. Um, I am joined today by Andy Daro. Andy is the commissioner of North Bay Village in Florida, Miami, Florida, and the founder of the Daro team at Compass, a leading real estate team in South Florida. With over 12 years of experience in luxury sales, Andy has established a reputation For exceeding exceptions and building lasting relationships within his [00:02:00] community. I am very excited to have Andy join me today. Welcome to the show.
Andy Daro: Hi, Leighann. I'm excited to be here. Thank you for having me on your show.
Leighann Lovely: Yeah. So why don't you expand on that, that brief intro and tell us a little bit more about yourself.
Sure. Thank you.
Andy Daro: Sure. Um, I lead a team, as you mentioned, at Compass, uh, located in Miami. There are nine, uh, of us on my team, uh, international. We deal mostly in luxury residential sales, condominiums, and single family homes, uh, a lot of them waterfront in Miami, Florida. And also, uh, recently I've became commissioner, as you mentioned, of North Bay Village, which is a 9, 000 island, um, 9, 000 resident, sorry, island community in the middle of, uh, the heart of Miami Bay between Miami and Miami, Florida.
Leighann Lovely: Wow. Okay. And how, how does one become commissioner and [00:03:00] what is that role?
Andy Daro: Well, it's an elected position. Uh, so it is, uh, elected, uh, as I mentioned, though, we have a, it's a small island, so there's only about 9, 000 residents. Um, and it's a, it's a four year term and I'm currently serving my second year. Um, as commissioner.
Leighann Lovely: Okay. And so what, what are some of the responsibilities with that? And forgive me for being naive.
Andy Daro: Sure. No, it's a, it's a local municipality. So, um, there's been a lot of, especially in Miami where Uh, the kind of crossroads with my real estate is we currently have a lot of development happening into the area.
So it goes from development laws to development agreements, uh, planning and zoning. Um, but then it also ranges as just kind of anything that happens in our community, from our infrastructure projects, uh, to our school, our police department, um, funding and budget, uh, anything [00:04:00] that goes into running a city.
It's a board of five. So I'm, you know, and then of course we have a great team at North Bay Village, uh, that are employed by the city. Um, so it's a big, it's a group effort, uh, but it's, it's been a good experience so far.
Leighann Lovely: Yeah. Awesome. So let's, let's talk a little bit about you. So you're with what, 12 years of experience in luxury sales.
So and you run a team of, of nine. So let's, let's talk, let's dive into that. You know, tell me a little bit, well first, I guess before we get into that, let's, let's back up. Have you always been in sales? Have you always been in the real estate kind of industry?
Andy Daro: I have mostly always been in sales. I've been in fortune 500 sales, corporate sales prior to getting into real estate, which you mentioned was about 12 years ago.
It was in New York city. And I was licensed two years as a realtor in New York city before coming down to Florida. Um, I [00:05:00] have now been here in Florida for about 10 years and I started my team in 2018. So, uh, maybe about what's that six years now I've had my, my own team running.
Leighann Lovely: Okay. And how does one go from New York to Florida?
I mean, those are very different landscapes,
Andy Daro: is it? But yeah, um, there's actually, I mean, actually, it's one of the most common routes, I think, for relocation in the United States. Uh, New York to Florida is very common. And my My, well, I always kind of envisioned myself being in South Florida, but I came, uh, to, I was working with a team from New York when I first started real estate and they were looking for a representative for the Miami area.
Uh, and that, that was what originally brought me to Miami.
Leighann Lovely: Okay. And let's talk about the different type of sale that must be. I'm assuming. I mean, that's got to be a [00:06:00] very different.
Andy Daro: It is. I always found it much easier in Miami. I mean, we have beautiful weather all year round. We have better tax policies.
Um, it actually, it's sold for much less than New York City. Now that gap has been changing. over the past 10 years, you know, we've seen such a high increase, uh, in the cost of, of real estate in South Florida, in Miami. So I think the gap has closed some, um, but nonetheless, yeah, uh, I've always, you know, New Yorkers have always gravitated to investing or coming to live in Miami.
Leighann Lovely: Right. I mean, you go from SkyRise, you know, buildings and not all of New York, I suppose. I mean, depending on where you are, there's beautiful parts of, of every state where you can get out into. But when we hear New York, we think of all of the flashing lights, the, the city that never sleeps, the, the tall, you know, SkyRise buildings, that kind of thing.
But, [00:07:00] so tell me what, and when you got the itch to run your own team?
Andy Daro: I yeah, it You know, it kind of happened naturally. Um, it started when I was still working with the team from New York and I kind of, You know, was able to our business was growing down here and I had the freedom to hire, uh, one agent, you know, to come under us here.
And then it became a 2nd agent and we were working as kind of a team of 3 at which time we were with the Corcoran group. If you're familiar, it's a large agency in New York. Uh, and in 2018 was when, you know, we kind of positioned or 20, you know, during the pandemic, um. Um, when we started to switch over to Compass, uh, which is where I've been for the last three years and is where we've kind of expanded our team from three agents under a New York umbrella to our own team down here in [00:08:00] South Florida.
Leighann Lovely: And so tell me, you know, how that, how that shift evolved and, um, you know, what your, uh, you know, are you running the team? the operations on that? Are you still out there day to day selling? Are you really a little
Andy Daro: bit, a little bit of both? I mean, most of all of the team that I manage are Sales agents themselves.
So I carry a little bit of a sales manager role, but of course I am still heavily involved in sales myself. That is still my priority to be out there, closing deals, um, finding new places for my clients at the best deals that we can do.
Leighann Lovely: So what would, I mean, do you, do you like wearing both hats? Do you like the managing of the sales?
Also doing the sales? Do you, what is the, because, and I ask this question [00:09:00] because often they say a great salesperson struggles to also manage. Or to really manage a team.
Andy Daro: Uh, that's a good question. Again, I think, you know, the growth kind of happened organically. It wasn't something, it was on a need basis.
And as our, our brand kind of expanded, more people came to us asking for opportunities that were a good fit. Um, but the management role itself, uh, there are certain days where I would agree, um, it kind of takes you back from growing your own personal sales as a person, you know, where you're helping others grow.
Um, so there is a part of that, but I, I enjoy it. I'm, I have all great people that work for my team. So I'm very lucky to have such, you know, everybody is very high energy. They're all, uh, you know, they're all able to carry their own, uh, Workload without needing such a, a micromanagement, uh, manager to kind of show [00:10:00] them the way.
Um, you know, I think that's, I think that's important and, and kind of takes off a lot of the work of a manager so I can still kind of just focus on doing what I do best and that I still think is, uh, is selling.
Leighann Lovely: And that's, that's awesome. And so I guess. When you say what I do best and, and here's what I'm going to dig in on Andy.
Andy Daro: Sure.
Leighann Lovely: So again, me being a salesperson and often I've been told in my life, Hey, you're really, really great at selling. So stay in your lane, right? And people will say that like, if you're really great at selling. Don't become a manager, but it sounds like you found a balance of being a, cause you have a team of nine.
That's nothing. A team of eight include or nine, including you.
Andy Daro: Yeah.
Leighann Lovely: Semantics. Yeah. That, I mean, [00:11:00] it is hard to jump from salesperson to manager. To manager and I'm making a, you know, putting on a different hat type, but to be able to, and, and let's not forget the commissioner of the North Bay village. So you're, you're juggling a lot.
Andy Daro: It's, it's certainly time consuming. And I think you are absolutely right. When you talk about the balance, which I think I am still. Learning, you know, I think I'm still finding my highest level of efficiency. Um, but on that note of efficiency, perhaps you're right. I mean, when you're, when you're talking about just trying to gross the highest level of personal sales, I think if I stayed an individual and didn't kind of grow the brand, or, you know, there is something that.
Is to be said about maybe it would be best just being able to focus on yourself and only having to deal with their own problems. But at the same time, I think, you know, [00:12:00] I've learned that through teams, we can do so much more, uh, so that we've been able to grow our volume number wise. Um, and able to also kind of delegate and prioritize, I think is very important when you have a team so that, you know, I haven't been always.
Brought down with the same type of administrative issues, which take up a lot of time. Um, you know, we want to help everybody. We want to work with everybody. So, you know, I never, I never like to say no to people. So it's, we're able to help more people this way. Um, so I think that that part of having a team has led me to be able to grow my business, but definitely finding that right balance is important and something I'm still working on.
Leighann Lovely: Well, that's, and it's good that you recognize you're still working on it. Some people think, Hey, I'm great at everything I do, right? But it's that, that constant evolving. So if you are going to talk to somebody and give them advice on how to hone [00:13:00] in and get better, what do you, you know, do you have anything in place where you're like, you know, checks and balances on your own personal growth?
Andy Daro: Hard work. I mean, what's the only thing we can actually control is being able to put in the work as a salesperson, being able to put in the effort, being there, being present, willing to, you know, go the extra mile for your, your clients. I think this is really the only controllable in, in what we do. Yeah, I mean, so much.
Uh, there's so many variants that happen. I mean, interest rates, uh, you were dealing and especially in real estate, you know, you can't control everything. There's so many emotions that go into it where, uh, there's so much of people's personal lives that get involved, you know, half of what we do with sales and real estate.
Um, it is considered sales, but I think it's so much different than other types of sales. We aren't, for example, uh, Always handling three [00:14:00] objections, you know, this is like something that they teach you in sales and when they're trying to sell you something, well, what about this? Or what about that? And it isn't always that way.
When you deal with real estate, you really have to understand people's feelings, uh, what they really want to achieve. And that is the sales process in real estate, um, which I think differs from a lot of other sales that I did prior to getting into real estate
Leighann Lovely: because you're selling. Well, because ultimately, somebody is coming to you saying, I'm, I'm ready to buy.
Usually they're pre approved by a bank. Well, they should be, right?
Andy Daro: Yes. Hopefully.
Leighann Lovely: And so they already, they already have their dollar amount. And so you're working with them on a emotional level, and I'm going to, I'm going to guess that there's a lot of emotions that are running high, running low, [00:15:00] running all over the place, especially, you know, and, and I'm going to pull from my parents were in real estate.
So I'm going to pull from, you know, my years of listening to that and my experience in buying my own house. You know, you put in a, an offer and now you're all bundled up in like, I want this and if it doesn't go through,
Andy Daro: yeah, you feel a bit responsible. You always want to, you know, especially when you're working with a client on the buy side, as you've been mentioning, uh, You know, you don't have the, as persuasive as I can be, I don't, you know, you don't have the full ability.
Uh, if somebody else is out there in this instance where you manage, you know, you're managing a client with, uh, uh, pre approval or who's plans to finance, if somebody else is coming in with a stronger cash deal, I don't think there's anything that I can say at this point that would make a seller [00:16:00] wish to, you know, accept our offer.
Which has a lower probability of closing, you know, unless we were willing to pay an over asking price, um, which is, you know, that that is one of the situations, uh, You know, that that's definitely where you aren't in control, um, on the buy side and, you know, and if half of the time, uh, we're on the sale side dealing with the sellers, you know, and there's a whole different set of emotional circumstances when you're working with a seller and their home, whether they're being emotionally connected to a place where they've raised the family or, you know, there's so many different things that can go into it.
Um, that you're, you're always dealing with this in real estate. Um, but that's, you know, I, at the same time, that's, but that's part of the job that, that we enjoy. So,
Leighann Lovely: right. The emotional side and most sales
Andy Daro: people.
Leighann Lovely: Right. Dealing with people. And, and, and most consumer sales of some [00:17:00] have emotion tied to them.
You know, it's obviously for going into an extremely large corporation as a salesperson pitching to a board of directors, it's very non emotional, um, in the sense that, well, you have a product they have, but people buy an emotion justify it. on logic at the end of the day. I mean, that's, yes,
Andy Daro: I, I, I think that's, I think that's correct with, uh, well, yeah, uh, yes and no, uh, there's still a lot of logic and I think numbers that go into real estate.
I mean, you always have to have the right value, the right price per square foot. So there is this numerical sales component to, to what we are doing, but the additional Um, that I don't think is if you're selling medical devices, so to say, uh, is all the emotional, personal, um, intertwines that that are involved in real estate and making real estate deals happen.
[00:18:00] Uh, Sometimes I call myself a firefighter, you know, and they're like, what are you doing? I'm a firefighter because you're just constantly, uh, solving issues or putting out fires is what, you know, I think I spend half of my time doing is just, uh, problems will arise in real estate. How can you deal with that and keep people, um, level, you know, from not wanting to do, uh, to do stuff, cancel a deal or, or move elsewhere in another direction.
Leighann Lovely: Right. Interesting. A firefighter, right? Well, anybody who's, you know, an operationally, you know, on the side of sales, but it's pretty much what they are. Right. Hey, go to work. I'm going to go up pretty much put out fires all day long as my clients are calling me and they need this or they need that or some deal is blowing up in our face.
Right.
Andy Daro: So some deals are definitely easier than others, but I always say that I, in 12 years, I don't think I've had one [00:19:00] easy deal where everything just goes smooth. So there is always some, uh, expect the unexpected,
Leighann Lovely: right? And you still are in it, which means you're okay with that.
Andy Daro: Yeah, I'm still here. Um, yeah.
So I've had a, an ability to endure it or that, or we have, uh, fortunately we've had some success in the recent years, which always makes it easier. Um, when you are closing deals, it will get you through, uh, the, the ones that don't go your way.
Leighann Lovely: Right. Right. Absolutely. So obviously the real estate industry, and I guess you being in luxury sales, it's been Probably not as impacted as just the general because.
People who have money, have money, have money.
Andy Daro: I have
Leighann Lovely: money.
Andy Daro: I think that's accurate. Yes. Uh, in South [00:20:00] Florida and Miami, we deal with a extremely high percentage of cash deals. Something like over 50 percent of the deals that we do are, are cash and they're often, uh, multi million dollar deals. So yes. Um, I think in down economies or in situations like we're experiencing now, Uh, on the domestic level where we're hearing that interest rates are really high.
You know, I think that unfortunately, you know, these interest rates are affecting more of our middle class who are reliant on getting a mortgage to purchase their their home and whether it's 3 percent or 7 percent makes a huge difference. But, uh, when you're dealing with the cash buyer, there is that quote, unquote luxury to just be able to.
Purchase with cash and not be reliant on a bank to make the deal that you want.
Leighann Lovely: And what, what better industry to be in that it, the dips and valleys [00:21:00] don't, aren't as reliant on the state of the economy because you're dealing with a population that they have money regardless of whether the economy is high or low, because.
Andy Daro: Well, I mean, it seems that way. Uh, Miami is, uh, some people say it's not a real place. I mean, the amount of wealth that you see coming to here, often it isn't made in here. Uh, now we do have For the first time, we're experiencing a lot of corporate relocation. Um, seat to Dell Amazon. A lot of the tech companies are starting to come to Florida.
So I think we are going to see a lot more jobs and a lot more wealth creation being made in Miami. But I think this is all this is all something new for the city. It's. historically been known, I think, as a place where you vacation or maybe have a second home. But I think that there's a whole new, um, and [00:22:00] again, spared by the pandemic of people living here with their primary residence and choosing to call Miami their home.
Leighann Lovely: Interesting. And, you know, we, we see different flexes of, of that happening in different cities from time to time. Um, do you see that continuing to, I mean, you're, you get the first indicator, right?
Andy Daro: I do think it will continue. Uh, At the level that it's been continuing where you've seen in some cases prices up 30 40 percent year after year.
Is that sustainable growth at some level? I would have to say no, nothing can continue to grow at the level that's we've been experiencing in South Florida. But do I see a reason that the market should be as cyclical as it's been in the past or prices crashing? No, I think there's still a very high demand to be in Miami.
We're still experiencing a lot of relocation. And so far, the [00:23:00] people that have moved here, uh, have not been wanting to leave here, you know, so there's still, they're not going back to New York. Like a lot of people have said in my experience, well, once the pandemic is over, then they'll be back. Uh, so far in my experience, that, that hasn't been the case.
Leighann Lovely: Interesting. And, and you, the pandemic definitely shook up a lot of, you know, I mean, a lot of people relocated to, um, a lot of different places. Um, you saw a lot of people leaving California, um, the L. A. area. You saw a lot of people leaving and going to places that maybe were more lenient on
Andy Daro: Ubi. Policies may be lenient, uh, and definitely tax friendly.
I would say this has to be, uh, a big part of it. So it goes in, um, I think the largest is that. A lot of people started [00:24:00] working from home also in the pandemic. So I think this kind of spirited. And when you're no longer going into an office, why are you going to justify paying a 10 percent tax to your state when this is no longer mandatory?
Or, I mean, it's not mandatory in the sense that you're working from home. So, uh, whether your home's in New York or California, or in this case, Florida, uh, there is a difference to your take home, even though you're working.
Leighann Lovely: Absolutely. And I, I, you know, I live in, in the state that I live in, I'm in one of the highest tax, you know, as far as the property tax that I play or
Andy Daro: find you, Leah, can we find you a place in Miami, Florida?
Leighann Lovely: I don't know. I think that might be outside of
Andy Daro: podcasts. I'll give you, I'm sorry. Usually I have a much better background. I'm in my office today, but I'll get you a beautiful ocean view in the background for your podcast. I think it would be, [00:25:00] I think it would be great.
Leighann Lovely: That's awesome. Will you fly me out there on your dive to look at homes?
Andy Daro: Yeah, we'll talk about this.
Have you ever been sold yourself, Leighann, on your podcast and they try to sell you their own product? Yeah, this is Again, it happened naturally. It wasn't my plan either, but this is Right.
Leighann Lovely: That sounds amazing, though. I would love, I would absolutely love It really is. I mean,
Andy Daro: that's the easiest part of selling Miami.
I've always told people it kind of It has the ability to sell itself. Uh, we live in such a beautiful place here. It really is amazing to be home here.
Leighann Lovely: Yeah. And I love, I love Florida. I visited there many times. Um, my, my other favorite place is, is, uh, you know, San Diego, California, but here's the, here's the thing is that I don't have to write well, and I wouldn't, I work from home, so I wouldn't have to drive anywhere.
I can't stand traffic. So when I have to go to the grocery store, I want it to [00:26:00] take me two minutes. To drive there and 2 minutes home.
Andy Daro: Yeah, that
Leighann Lovely: is my only and I don't want to become one of those people that never leave my home and have to order groceries.
Andy Daro: Yeah, that's a good point. I also, uh, love a walkable community.
I think this is a great. Um, and there are plenty of, you know, I think South Beach in Miami or Brickle, if you're familiar with this neighborhood, they do have this walking community. But one of the main things that as I switch hats here and I talk about my role as a commissioner that I am working on as commissioner is really improving the walkability of our island.
Because I think, you know, that people really like this and that you don't have to get into a car to go to your supermarket or a restaurant or to go get your coffee. So we are Definitely one of the roles that I'm looking to play in our community is to improve our walkability, um, not just with our, our sidewalks and infrastructure, but we're also having an amazing project we call called the Island Walk, where we're building a waterfront, uh, walkway [00:27:00] for a waterfront boardwalk for our pedestrians.
So we have about, uh, it's one square mile, our Island, and we're trying to connect most of the areas that have commercial zoning all by this route called the Island Walk.
Leighann Lovely: Wow.
Andy Daro: Yeah, that
Leighann Lovely: see that just that seems like a dream to me. This
Andy Daro: is the dream for me too. Yeah. Uh, and a lot of it is, um, time. Yeah, it's time consuming isn't right where we're waiting.
I mean, there's a lot of development that's coming and it's a lot of it is reliant on the new developments that are coming, which are helping us build the infrastructure. So there's a lot of public private, uh, collaboration in, uh, Seeing this dream fulfilled. Uh, but I do think that the pieces are in motion and in about five years time, I think we'll really start to see some of the benefits of the work that we're putting in now.
Leighann Lovely: That's amazing. So, um, we're, we're coming already. We're coming to time. So I want to give you your, um, I give [00:28:00] everybody their 30 second. Shameless pitch. Um, but before I do that, I want to ask you one question. Um, you know, as, as a sales. As a sales professional, as a manager of people, as a commissioner, if you had to give advice to your younger self or to somebody who's coming up, um, seeking, you know, what do they want to do with their lives?
Do they want to go into sales? Do they want to go into real estate? You know, what advice would you give to some of the younger listeners?
Andy Daro: Oh, this could be, uh,
Leighann Lovely: I know it's a broad question, isn't it?
Andy Daro: Yeah, but, uh, I mean, getting into sales is something I wish I did earlier. Uh, and I'm not even sure, you know, college is a great path for some people, but I don't think it's for everyone, especially if you need to be in this entrepreneurial sales role, you know, I think we were built to kind of go.
Uh, college is where we wanted to go corporate and there are certain things [00:29:00] where, of course, you'll need this education to do, but I don't think it, you know, if you have your heart set on being a salesperson, um, it really just comes down to your personal, uh, work ethic, you know, what you're going to put into it.
Um, and especially in real estate, you know, I could have, if I could have gotten going on in my career 10 years earlier than I did, um, that would have been something that if I went back in time, I would have just done from the time I was 18, I would have been in real estate, uh, but I'm happy. I found it, uh, still later in my twenties.
Um, you know, so it's, uh, I, I got there in time, but, um, maybe that's some advice I would consider, uh, as my earlier self.
Leighann Lovely: That's awesome. And now your 32nd shameless pitch and how people can reach out to you.
Andy Daro: Sure. Uh, again, my name is Andy Daro. Um, the leader of the Daro team at Compass. We do sales for residential in Miami and Miami beach.
And if you're happening to listen to this podcast today and you [00:30:00] have interest in South Florida real estate, we'd love to help you out. So, uh, please feel free to get in touch with me and we'll find you your home down here.
Leighann Lovely: And Your website, will be listed on the, show notes. That's and andy Daro.com.
So you are welcome to reach out that way. Is there another way that you would like to me to reach, reach Out? Yeah, that's a
Andy Daro: personal website that'll connect to me, but, uh, if you, Andy Daro at Compass, um, if it Google, it'll, it'll find its, it'll find itself, um, as, as well on Facebook and Instagram.
Leighann Lovely: Awesome.
Perfect. Andy, this has been such an amazing conversation. I really appreciate you coming on and joining me today.
Andy Daro: I enjoyed talking to you. Have a wonderful day. Thank you.

The Path to Success: Lessons from a Third-Generation Entrepreneur

In this engaging episode of the "Love Your Sales Podcast," host Leighann Lovely sits down with the dynamic Chanel Rose, a seasoned business developer and entrepreneur. Chanel shares her journey from political campaign manager and fundraising director to the owner of an international consulting firm. She delves into her sales background, influenced by her entrepreneurial family, and offers actionable insights on pivoting into profitable businesses, even amidst challenges like the pandemic. Leighann and Chanel discuss the ever-evolving sales landscape and the importance of leveraging relationships and strategic engagement to achieve success. Tune in for practical advice and inspirational stories that can drive your sales strategy to new heights.
Contact Chanel –
Website - ceareagency.com
LinkedIn - linkedin.com/in/chanelrose
 
Special Thank you to our Sponsors – Genhead – www.genhead.com and Sales Rescue – www.rescuemysales.com
 
Robb Conlon – Intro and outro – Westport Studio - https://www.westportstudiosllc.com/
 
The Brave Ones – Instrumental Version Song by Jan Sanejko - https://artlist.io/royalty-free-music/song/the-brave-ones/119489
 
Ready to grow your business? Schedule a call with us today  - https://api.leadconnectorhq.com/widget/bookings/discoverysalesleighann 
 
 Channel Subscribe link - https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC-O7W9DzaRv4waodQKCprIg?sub_confirmation=1 
 
Leighann Lovely: Welcome to another episode of love your sales. I am so thrilled today. I am joined by Chanel Rose. She is a trailblazer in the world of business development and philanthropy with 15 years of experience under her belt.
She's been a powerful force as both a political campaign manager and a fundraising director, and with her skills as a successful business developer and consultant, she has been sought after by companies and organizations [00:02:00] around the globe today. Rose is proud owner of CR agency, LLC, an international consulting firm that specializes in helping businesses.
And organizations develop strategies for growth and long term success. Her wealth and knowledge and expertise has been honed through a diverse range of expertise, including time spent in politics, large member organizations, financial services, and many other industries. But Rose's credentials don't stop there.
She's also is certified in project management and leadership development from Northwestern University in Chicago and has earned a business analytics certification from the Harvard University in Boston. These qualifications combined with her hands on experience, make her a valuable asset to any organization looking to make a real impact.
Whether you're a business looking to expand or an organization looking [00:03:00] to. To make a positive difference in the world. Chanel Rose and her team at CR agency have the expertise and drive to help you succeed with her at the helm. You'll have the confidence charming guide to navigate today's fast paced business landscape and achieve your goals.
This is going to be an amazing conversation with your wealth of experience, your background. I'm so thrilled that you're joining me today.
Chanel Rose: Thank you so much. Whenever I hear my bio, I'm like, wow, that's me. I've been busy. Yes, you have.
Leighann Lovely: So, you know, is there anything that I missed?
Chanel Rose: Oh, well, my favorite thing, I stop everything I do and tell people that I'm from Chicago.
That's the only thing that's not in that bio. Um, that is, you know, that's probably my favorite thing. If you would have asked me. Um, the running joke is like, it's God, Chicago and everything else, right? Like, when you're from [00:04:00] here, it is very much so. How do you describe your personality? Chicago. Um, and I mean that as a joke, but mostly that is the quickest way to describe my background, um, in the most succinct manner.
The only other thing it doesn't mention is, um, yeah, I'm from here.
Leighann Lovely: That's awesome. Proud of where you are or proud of where you're from and, and who you've, you know, really how that's built you up to be, you know, who you are. And, um, and, and I think it's important to mention you, you are, and I don't know where I read this, but third generation or fourth generation entrepreneur.
Chanel Rose: I am. Yeah. It's in my blood. It's in my roots. Um, so, Ooh, I guess the family started in farming. And up until the late 90s, we had a lumber farm, and then my grandfather was him and his cousin started a transportation logistics company that [00:05:00] grew into both fleet and logistics. And then, um, that second generation is like my mom's generation or the transportation industry.
And then. Right. I'm an entrepreneur. I do business development and sales. So if you were to ask me how I got here, I fought it. There was so much friction for me around landing and entrepreneurship and sales. I thought that. I got hired in corporate America after working, um, in campaigns and fundraising for so long that corporate America was my great hope.
It was my white picket fence. And even in corporate America, I was in sales. And when I got fired, uh, in the pandemic, no less as a top performer, I had to figure it out. And even in the beginning of that, I ran away from who I was meant to be. And when I finally owned the fact that business development and sales at the core, all I do is [00:06:00] revenue generation, no matter where I'm at in any business, it lands itself.
Smack dab on the money side. Um, and so even when I was a kid, I remember my grandfather, one of my favorite memories about him is we would be on the expressway and you know, in the eighties and nineties, there were no cell phones. Uh, they just barely had PC. So personal computers, right? Like that's how long it was.
And Who would be on the expressway and he had a notepad and a pen and he had me in the car and he'd say remember this phone number from this company and I'd have to like memorize the number and like give it back to him and I'd run in the office type it in and he'd call right like he was definitely an action taker and I mean I saw all sides of the business but my two favorite parts were making the money in the payroll right so like providing You know, commission for folks and a lot of them just a lifestyle they would have otherwise not been afforded had they have not been working for my family's company.
And so to [00:07:00] sit here today, you know, starting that same type of business, right? Like sales leaning, but just own the part that I really enjoy. It feels. The most natural
Leighann Lovely: and that's so there's a couple of things that you mentioned in there one, you know, being fired as a top producer that that's a, it's a hard pill to swallow, but so many people experienced that during the pen.
I mean, the, the pandemic shook the core of many people's, you know, lives and homes, and then to, you know, fight fight fight that. I very similar like. I was told to to follow that path. Corporate America, corporate America. Don't don't try to do the entrepreneur thing. I mean, it was that that that that's. A lot of people found themselves in that boat.
[00:08:00] So, you know, 1st, I commend you for being able to finally.
Your brilliance, despite the fact that it, I can't imagine that that was a good time for you being fired. I mean, it's not
Chanel Rose: easy, but here's the weird thing and it's kind of a hard dynamic to really dig into. So. I was a top performer. I hated my job. I was miserable. I was boxed in, ignored, not, you know, recognized as a number, but not as a person and company.
My why? And I feel like I had outgrew my role for a long time. And part of the reason why I was unable to advance is because I was doing so well, right? Like, I was with a good team. And so when it came time to ask, you know, can I get transferred? Right. A lot of times people will get hired within the firm and they will say, Oh, we need six months before we can let them go.
And [00:09:00] the rest of the company would say, well, We have six months, six months, we have six weeks, maybe two months. And so so many people, it would be like, well, if I quit, then I can't get hired. Right. Cause there's like all this stuff, this red tape. And so, um, when I got fired, I mean, I knew, right. So on a Thursday I was on medical leave.
The whole thing is messed up. But really quickly, I was on medical leave, had medically approved. This woman from HR calls me and says, Oh, well you're on unapproved leave. And I was like, no, I have documentation in my, my leave has been approved. She was like, no, well. We looked, and the person who authorized you to go on medical leave is not somebody who actually can't authorize you to go on medical leave.
I was like, but I did all the things. I did the things. And so, essentially, on the Thursday, she said, we have until Monday to come back. And I said, okay. And then she told me on Monday, I got sat down. I said, what can I do? I started with Airbnb, [00:10:00] right? Like in Airbnb, it's a little marketing platform. I lived in a great place.
And I have from Thursday to Monday to figure it out. I used all my money down to 4 cent to pivot it to Airbnb and grew to six figures in like 10 months, less than 10 months. And grew that to multiple six figures in two years. And it started like, I wish I could tell you that Unfortunately, let me frame this a little differently.
It started from survival mode, right? Like it was a pandemic. And really, I was like, well, you know, not even people are just dying everywhere. And this might be the only time in my life that I'll ever get the chance to believe in myself. I'll ever get the chance to trust myself. And My timing is terrible, but I don't, I don't know when the time, right, would be right.
Like, when does it come? How do I know? Does it show up in a certified messenger with a letter with my name on it? Like, and I just felt like. Well, all these other impossible things, like you [00:11:00] couldn't have told me that, you know, there would be the things that happened in 2020 and like in that time. And I mean, I was on medical leave.
I couldn't work anyway. And back against the wall, I literally just used what I had and like at the core of sales and starting a business and entrepreneurship. I wasn't good at Airbnb. I don't know anything about Airbnb. I had, I have my investment licenses, so I wasn't even really on social media. Right.
Um, I'm intelligent though. I worked in politics for a long time. So when you work on campaigns and you win campaigns, you know how to successfully create strategy. And I mean, my goal was just initially, I just didn't want to be homeless. I didn't want to get evicted. I didn't understand like the rent moratorium thing and it was just so much at once.
Right. And so when that salesperson kicked in, it was like, Oh, I could just sell what I have. Well, what do I have that I can sell? You know, this place that I live in. And I mean, again, [00:12:00] going back into default mode, right? The road most traveled. I know people say it's the road least traveled, but it's the road most traveled.
Right. It led me where I needed to be.
Leighann Lovely: Right. And now, so now I'm going to go back to something else you said initially you, you had, you That experience with your grand because I love the story about being in the car with your grandfather. So I want to, I want to pull that out for a 2nd, because I, I too grew up in a sales family.
Not not, you know, I don't have those types of, you know, I had real estate parents, parents in real estate. Sitting at the dinner table and talking about this deal, and you could always tell the mood. In the room when they would walk in, it was like, Oh, something's falling apart right now. But you're the story of your grand sitting in the car and having that, because I remember, you know, the eighties, the nineties, the, you know, you didn't have a cell phone where you're like, Oh, okay, let's quickly call this.
Yeah. Nails have [00:13:00] changed so much, but let's talk about what hasn't it's that, that drive that you're talking about.
Chanel Rose: Yeah,
Leighann Lovely: it's telling you to write down that number and it's the actions that come next, right?
Chanel Rose: Yeah, it's that
Leighann Lovely: write it down. Go back because you don't have cell phone. You know, you're going back into the office, right?
Yeah. So I'm going to guess, you know, this, this ingrained. You know, I guess it's almost like a muscle movement that you learned from what I think you referenced at one point, like eighth, eighth grade, ninth grade, where you are already learning this muscle movement of this is how it works.
Chanel Rose: Yeah. And so I want to make sure I highlight my grandmother.
Cause my grandfather's cool. But like my grandmother's really the star of the show. So as a kid, my grandmother was the executive director of a nonprofit. And a grant writer. And so I think [00:14:00] I learned my hardcore sales, getting the boom, don't take no for an answer, negotiation strategies from. You know, my grandfather's just blind belief that he deserved everything that he wanted, um, and my, but my grandmother was an executive director.
She was, you know, a standout leader. She has her master's degree. Um, I don't know many women today in their 70s that have a master's degree, right? It was a master's degree at the time she was going to University of Illinois here in Chicago. It was one of the best social work programs. In the country, right?
So here my grandmother was this, you know, four times single mother from originally from East St. Louis, Illinois, had moved to the South, had been in Omaha, Nebraska, and made it to Chicago, big old Chicago, small town girl made it to big old Chicago. And she was at the helm. She [00:15:00] was the boss. And, you know, in her office, there were So many different types of people like this is diversity for diversity was diversity like she just believed in talent and that for me is probably the strongest foundation and like when times get hard.
You know I got I have the grit I can make the calls I can do the emails but like. You burn out, right? So my longevity strategy is relationships. It is, you know, she was a grant writer. I was writing grants in high school when I remember getting the commission from my grandma, my grandfather from like, if I would help him figure out how to close deals with people, or I will make the calls and the messages and they will call back and I would answer calls at the office.
But like when my grandmother, my grandmother had this white collar role. Um, and I just remember. You know, watching her write grants, like, multi million dollar grants and getting them and, you know, giving people raises and, you know, in a community, [00:16:00] I always say, like, she took them from the basement of a church in the projects to a high rise in downtown Chicago.
Like. That is what her discipline, consistency, relationship, understanding, and back then, remember, like, if you were getting grants, right? Either you had to know somebody who was writing the grants, or you had to, like, go to these meetings and go get this list and print it out and bind it and do all these things.
And she's doing this as, because, you know, when you're the executive director, um, you are also the salesperson and responsible for fundraising and funding. Right? Right, right. We're simultaneously dealing with, you know, the fallout of the crack 80s and the gang 90s here in Chicago, and you still have to provide the highest quality services while doing this work and go ahead.
Leighann Lovely: So I just want to so we're not we're talking about writing a grants during a time. Now, this was in. The eighties and nineties.
Chanel Rose: Yeah.
Leighann Lovely: So during a time when we're not, we're not sitting down and emailing this, [00:17:00] we're talking about the old days, typewriter, finding it, hand delivering it. I mean, we're, we're talking this, this was not, and I remember, I mean, I remember when I had to, and this was dating myself, but when I had to write just a proposal and then we went and had to bind it and I mean, that is, that's That's a process.
Chanel Rose: Yeah. Yeah. So when you, when people see me and I'm so passionate about sales and you know, shameless plug, if you see me on Lincoln, I'm always telling people like sell your products, sell your services, tell people what you offer, articulate your value. And it's literally because, you know, I watched, um, you know, my, my grandfather who was this, you know, I talk about legacy a lot, but just to get help people understand.
You know, he was from the South. He had an absolutely awful, terrible, not even suitable for TV childhood. And for him to [00:18:00] grow from that into the successful entrepreneur who had multiple offices, like dumbest, like we're talking about like real deal office, two offices in Chicago, an office in Atlanta, um, two offices in Charlotte, an office in Alabama.
It is all like. Came from monetizing an idea, you know, like somebody who decided to believe in themselves. And so as an entrepreneur today, I mean, certainly, I guess you probably could do things on a typewriter, but I would argue that I think the crushing back then was finding opportunities, right? Like trying to find a room to get into needing to know somebody to know somebody to know somebody at a conference is coming up.
Right. And in 2024, I feel like there is information overload. Right? Like I tell my clients all the time, you know, you go on LinkedIn because I'm a firm believer in that any business can find business on LinkedIn. And so I, you know, I think about [00:19:00] like those trucks passing by. And when you're on the interstate, it's hundreds of them.
Right? Which one is it? You got to find one, pick one, get the number. Right? Right. The internet, our scroll feed is very similar to that. And I think the reason why I don't find it intimidating is probably from those same lessons I learned, you know, from him and from my grandmother is that like, you got to know, so he would go to truck stops, right?
Eventually we would do, um, we would ride on expressway a lot, but we would go to truck stops, right? Like get in front of your people. So if you're an entrepreneur getting started, you know, find your truck stop, find your people, right? Because. Really quickly, you need to think about truck stops. I might, I don't work for a while.
I'm advocating hanging out at truck stops, but. This is even playing field, right? It's the same thing with politics. You can apply this in any, any business, right? You're looking for people who have what you have, who can give you real time information, who can provide you with resources that otherwise wouldn't be available to truck stop, right?
So yeah, we would ride on the [00:20:00] expressway sometimes, right? A lot, because we were out doing things, but we would also go to different truck stops because he knew that, and eventually he got so good at it, he knew based on it. The type of parcel, the type of the time of day, they may be either gassing up like taking a break.
And so he would pick different ones because he would know which routes they would go on. Right. And you have to be that intentional about your business. Right. So like, An example of this would be like Facebook, right? Like, maybe a lot of people say you get on every platform, private platform. Maybe I tried that right?
But if you get really good at one platform, right? And that becomes your metaphorical route, right? And then you create your truck stop, which is your page and your community. Then you can duplicate that process over and over again. But a lot of people are just like, you know, we would do the highway [00:21:00] thing, right?
But that's like that quick cash that fidget spinner thing. And it worked, right? We would do that. And those memories are there. But I also remember we would drive around the truck stop and he would write down a business name. And if he saw the trucker, he would get their information because we offered, um, Employment for truck drivers, right?
And so then it would be like, Oh, well, you can come work for us on the side. Yeah. So the, the business grew from just like literally finding his truck stop. If that makes sense.
Leighann Lovely: It absolutely makes it, it completely makes sense. And, and Chanel, this is so wildly interesting because you bring so much.
Together, because over the years, you know, sales has changed. It's changed in a sense of, you know, obviously, during the pandemic, we weren't going to in person networking meetings anymore, right? You're no longer being able to get in front of. The people that you would create those long term relationships with and, and, and I, I remember the days where [00:22:00] I'm, I'm knocking on doors, I'm, I'm driving through business parks.
You knocking on doors saying, Hey, I'm here. I'd like to drop off some information, try to gather the informant, get past the gatekeeper that all went away.
You know, when I left corporate America, um, it was, you know, shortly after, well, I worked for a little while in corporate America after the pandemic, but even after that businesses just started locking their doors and never unlocked them and it, and it became, okay, how do I find my truck stop? How do I find my audience?
And I preach that and I'm sure you do to your clients all the time of, well, do you know where your audience hangs out? Have you, have you even created your, you know, your ideal? Audience, have you even figured out who they are? And once you do that, figure out where they hang out because you can't, it's not as [00:23:00] simple as just driving to a truck stop these days and being able to go, okay, here's all of the businesses, business names.
And depending on the industry, obviously then, you know, you, you have to shift in, but that metaphor is beautiful because it's truly, if you, if you understand it, that is how you would implement that in almost any business. Real estate.
Chanel Rose: Yeah.
Leighann Lovely: I mean, print magazine. And I think you referenced a couple of different industries that you've been, you know, newspaper subscriptions, magazine ad space.
I've I've also sold magazine ad space.
Chanel Rose: Yeah.
Leighann Lovely: How do you find those people and figure out how to get in front of them, you know, on a mass scale, if you're looking for that, you know, is that a trade show that they all go to that would be interested in the magazine and then obviously, sprinkling and cold calling there.
Those who believe cold calling is dead. I'm not 1, [00:24:00] it's, I mean, you at a very young age, figure it out. Wow. Okay. Okay. This is how, this is how my grandpa gets in front of his audience, because that is the only way that you could at that time. Right. Well, I mean, network, network meetings weren't booming
Chanel Rose: at that, not in transportation, not, I mean, not for, at the time it was him and his cousin, he lived in Atlanta, the offices of Chicago, they had an office in Charlotte.
Um, I mean, my thing is always like ABT, always be testing ABT all the time. Right. Right. Right. And so you're looking to get in front of your audience, I think in the beginning, people tell you to niche down. And so my concern about niching is that there's no aerial view in niching, right? If you're trying to niche down, it's like the opposite end of a funnel, right?
So like typically a funnel is, you know, the big, big, little, right. And I think if you try to start at your niche, it's this [00:25:00] very laser view into trying to cast a wide net. And, and that doesn't promote. I mean, quite frankly, it doesn't promote confidence. It doesn't promote flexibility and part of being a leader, right?
If you're going to be an entrepreneur, you need to know that you're a leader. Even if you're a party of one, you have to lead, you could have to lead yourself to your desk when you don't want to, you have to lead yourself away from one to say comments to people who are not very kind to you. Right. Um, and so I always recommend when you're getting started, which of your talents or skills do you want to use to make.
Other people's lives better, have less risk, make more money, whatever, what you do provides to a business. I always say it's two things, either you're making money or managing risk. You got to fall in one bucket, right? And ultimately whatever you're doing to help them manage risk in turn should buy them back some time and in turn show up on their bottom line.
But either you're like straight up sales or [00:26:00] you're straight up service. But if you're in the service industry, it's almost always. Again, going back to the sales or managing risk. And so I think in the beginning. Talking to people like data is, listen, it's cashflow because in the beginning, um, and I'm not talking about just like market research zooms.
I think people are a little worn out on those. Um, I mean, it's literally asking people, I do a poll on LinkedIn at least once a week. And I ask anything I ask people like, what day of the week should I have an event? Where should I go? Like what time of day should it be? And I'm getting votes and I'm making sure that the people Who I would want to come to my event are responding to my polls, and if they aren't, I'm deeming them.
I'm asking questions. I think there's so often people talk to you and they tell you to post, right? So you made it to this point. You're in the podcast. You're like, but she didn't say post. Well, here's the thing. Post. Congratulations. But [00:27:00] if you post, a lot of times, That's not when the engagement really happens.
It's a relationship. Sales is a relationship. So could you imagine being in a relationship with a guy or a girl or, you know, just a non binary person and you were never able to speak. All they would do was talk. That would be exhausting. That's the equivalent of you just posting and not talking to people.
So I will post. And then I spent at least an hour a day. I know they say 15 minutes, but I spent at least an hour a day off and on all day on LinkedIn commenting on other people's stuff. And like, I'm all over and not just people who I'm connected with. I look up my keywords, right? So I'll look up leadership development.
I will look up sales. I'll look up training. I'll look up, um, employee resource groups. I'll look up insurance sales or real estate sales or whatever. Right. And I look up posts within like the last week. This is my secret sauce. So hopefully y'all pay attention. Right. [00:28:00] And then I started commenting on people's stuff and almost always right.
They will come and look and see my page. So now my page, after I made my post is going to get more looks, it's going to get more impressions and it'll get, it'll promote more engagement. And in case you missed it, get off your front porch and go out and talk to people. So yes, Keep your lights on in your house, but go see your neighbors.
I think that's too important and we miss that, especially in sales.
Leighann Lovely: I love that. Get off your front porch, but leave your lights on. That is, that is absolutely, you know, and when I work with a lot of entrepreneurs, they're like, I don't even know where to begin. And I'm like, well, where do your people hang out?
And they're like, well, but I don't get out a lot. And I'm like, no, no, no, no, no. That's not what I mean. I'm like, when was the last time you looked up a hashtag on LinkedIn or on Facebook to see what is happening on that page? [00:29:00] You know, what is you need to utilize not only those hashtags, but you need to go and see what is happening over there.
Like, if you utilize a hashtag that you think is cool, but there's only, you know, 400 people following that. That may not be where you want to go. You need to look for, like, the. You know, 2. 5 K or the 100 K or the, and then see who's there and then see what they're posting and engage with them and actually put an effort in.
Chanel Rose: And they
Leighann Lovely: go, Oh, I'm like, if nobody is posting or nobody is responding to your posts, you need, you need to switch it up. Like just because you post doesn't mean people will come. This is the whole, like, if you build it, they will come. No, I'm sorry. That doesn't work that way. Like, right. You, you actually have to actually engage in the audience to get them to engage back, to get them to.[00:30:00]
Go back to your page to view you to find interest to, and, and that is the, the thing where people assume like, well, if I go out and post people will, will read it and they'll like it. No, no, they won't.
Chanel Rose: No, no, no, they not. I think that the other demystification, if you will, I like to implore people to do is that.
If you're using Instagram, Facebook, TikTok, Twitter, I need you to start a new page. Here's why. If you're on Facebook, first of all, marketing on Facebook without starting a new page is hustling backwards. Because you're gonna be like, oh, let me post. Oh, look at my niece, she's so cute. Oh my God, the neighbor's dog died.
What is this terrible recipe? And now you 45 minutes in, right? And you wedged in between the girl from high school who has polarizing views and underneath there, there's some other drama that has none of [00:31:00] your business and you're. Three hours into a doom scroll and none of these people who you want to work with.
And also it is a self defeating action to try to sell in front of your friends and family for two reasons. One, they're not your target audience. Right. Um, and, and, and two, they're not going to support you because they aren't your target audience. But then we expect for our family to repost our stuff, comment on every post.
And then like, quite frankly, do you want your mother to be the only person posted on your business posts?
Leighann Lovely: It's great, like, and it's awesome that, you know, you get some likes, but. It doesn't it means nothing and somebody 1 said to me a popular if you want to win a popularity contest. That that's that's great go and post on your personal Facebook page, your friends and family will go and say, oh, that's that's really great.
I'm happy for you, but we're not here to win a popularity contest. Period and somebody 1 said that to me and I went. Oh. [00:32:00] Right. And so they actually, and this was a long time ago, they're like, if you have a tick tock page that was dedicated to something unrelated to your business, shut it down and restart it because all of your followers, they're following you for something totally different.
You need to start it for the business. And find the people you want to follow you. And I went, Oh,
Chanel Rose: I would make
Leighann Lovely: sense
Chanel Rose: today. I would argue that today. And I would even go further to say like, um, it's like in my business, I was going to name it like Chanel robes. And then I was like, man, if I ever sell my business.
I have to sell the rights to my name. And so then, you know, I do public speaking, I do all kinds of trainings and I've licensed in my work to people and the impact of that, like, I mean, obviously, you know, I'm manifesting selling my business, but even from the beginning, I thought to myself, you know, sales focused, this is not what I want.
[00:33:00] Um, and that same vein, I would have to turn over all the intellectual property of the business as sales. And so if my brand is Hello Chanel Rose, right, and I'm marketing my business under Hello Chanel Rose, I have to turn over Hello Chanel Rose. And so a lot of what I've been working on is stepping away from being the face of the business, um, being the spokesperson and not the product.
Right. Um, and my pages now, I could care less if I have to let them go today. Right. Um, and the, the important thing I know is that when I started to sell a product, it got a lot easier. The problem for me a lot was. I didn't want to be the face, right? Because selling stuff makes you so much money than selling yourself.
Like I use this example, Kim Kardashian, right? I know you're about to say something really quick, like Kim Kardashian. So when Kim Kardashian was Kim [00:34:00] Kardashian, she was doing club walkthroughs and sitting front row at fashion week. And by all means, listen, that's not a bad way to live, but you know why she's a billionaire, her cosmetics company and hers, her skincare and the game.
And I'm sure there's a whole bunch of other stuff, but I'm obviously not here. She's not paying me. But what I'm trying to articulate is that promoting things, um, May have so much money, more money than her being in the room,
Leighann Lovely: right? And that, and to your point, is that an entrepreneur who understands that like, yes, they, in the beginning are the face.
In order to, for you to scale and become more of that, you have to be willing to step back and allow it to grow beyond you. If you are an entrepreneur who is too self centered to be able to step back and let that animal or that morph [00:35:00] beyond you, you're never going to be able to scale. If you want to continue to always hold onto that and have it all be about you, And there are some entrepreneurs who, who want to keep it small.
They want they want to be 100 percent the face. They want to be that person. Who's the business they want to sell themselves. Unfortunately, they're not going to be able to scale in order to scale. You have to be able to take a back seat and allow others. To step in eventually and become more than what you are.
And that's that's the also the most successful people understand that they have to hire other people to do what they can't do to and and level them up to be. Um, to stay in their area of genius Chanel, your area of genius is sales is now I'm going to guess that, you [00:36:00] know, and I shouldn't guess mine. I'm going to just point out mine instead accounting.
It's not my thing. In order for me to really grow and have somebody sit down and go, okay, here's what your numbers mean. I have to, I have to have somebody sit next to me and go, here's what your numbers mean. Here's what all of this stuff, because I know that's not my working genius. And
Chanel Rose: you, and you have to stay in your lane, right?
Like, I know people always say like, you have to take, I see a lot now about taking the road, less traveled, and you got to have some losses to have some wins. And there's like all this fluffy crap about sales out there. And the reality of it is that like, lean into what you do well, and let other people lean into what they do well.
And find some synergy, right, like find some synergy around how you all can promote one another, how you all can help one another. And like, for me, I'm not good with technology. And so I really want to grow an [00:37:00] agency for people to like, you know, do their CRM stuff, especially for solo open doors. It's like a one stop shop.
And my biggest concern is that I'm not a tech person, so I don't want to fiddle with the things that don't work. I don't want to answer tech questions. I want to be able to, like, sell the product. And so, what I've been working on lately, right, because, you know, you iterate. We didn't talk about that very much here, but, like, as an entrepreneur, you iterate.
Like, where you start is usually not where you end. Jeff Bezos started off selling discount books. Hello. Here we are, what, 20, 30 years later. And I mean, I imagine Amazon still sells books. I couldn't tell you they have a Kindle. Um, but that is not their primary source of revenue, but the thing about him and how you can be in your business is just to get smarter and smarter at what's working, get smarter and smarter about what the base needs are, get smarter and smarter about how you can deliver it better, faster, smarter, and ABT [00:38:00] always be testing, um, And
Leighann Lovely: that goes back to the, the book, good to great, you know, where, and I don't know if you've read good to great, but they really do, you know, they really studied businesses and the businesses that really with.
You know, the, the people who are running the businesses were very not, they were not focused on, on the arrogance of them being great. They were focused on the businesses being great and really honing in on what they, the business itself did great. And that, that's the whole point. That's how you scale.
That's how you become, you know, the ones that thrive, the ones that do become sellable from that single entrepreneur who had a great idea and decided I'm going to go out on my own. I'm going to give a, you know, I'm going to give it a run for its money. That a [00:39:00] girl that, uh, you know, shot and, and, and see, you know, what happens.
And, you know, there is a great deal of, um, it's a, it's a fine line between somebody who can be an entrepreneur. Because there is a little bit of arrogance in us because we're like, yeah, we, I can do this better than anybody else yet in order for us to truly succeed, we have to have the humility. Yeah. Yeah.
Chanel Rose: Yeah. Yeah, a flexible leadership is something I talk about all the time. Um, so I, especially when I talk to women, I try not to talk about humility and being humble and no, like, and trust. And the reason why is that it's been stuffed down our throat. I've never seen a podcast TV show or anything geared towards.
Men and masculine that tells them don't buy coffee. Listen, if coffee and a vacation is stopping you from buying a house, coffee and a vacation is not [00:40:00] what's stopping you from buying a house. Because we're talking about, and I read this somewhere, um, years ago, and it was like, if you stop buying a fi, like $20 a week is what?
20 $80 a month, which ends up being like a thousand dollars a year. If you need $20,000 to save for a house, it would take you 20 years. And if I listen, I'm not a mathematician, so nobody correct me, but whatever. Right? The point is that like, if all you're doing is seven $20 a week to get you towards a house, babe, rent.
Sprint, right? Luxury rentals exist. Billionaires rent all the time, right? Like, don't let somebody else's idea of the white picket fence and the dream trick you into thinking that success has to happen one way. We're not monolithic. And the same thing like inside of your business. As soon as you can, invest in other people.
As often as you can, invest in other people. As fast as you can, offload tasks. Because ultimately the goal, the biggest, best companies in the world, they have figureheads, right? Like, [00:41:00] There's no scenario where, you know, pick a CEO, they're like, how much does a general make in the, in the building. I mean, from a perspective standpoint, they might know, but they don't, they're not gonna be like, oh, that's Leighann.
Right. We're me and you can both be generous. Lizzie Leighann makes. 1. 12 an hour and Chanel makes 1. 12. 2 because she's been there a week longer, right? No, no, right? Like you have to be the spokesperson. You have to be, you know, a focused, flexible leader and that flexibility comes from confidence. And I know I'm confident the more people I work with, right?
Because I'm constantly being able to basically, for layman's terms, right? A factory. Right. Right. Right? So, I'm excellent at what I do. You're excellent at what you do. I'm not coming over to tire manufacturing when I'm on handles. Right? And if I do, it's going to take me a long time. I'm about to start [00:42:00] from the training and go through and go through and go through.
You can't do that in your business. You cannot get excellent at everything. You won't ever get go to market.
Leighann Lovely: Absolutely. And this conversation has been amazing. And we've actually, I can't believe how much time has gone by. So, um, I want to one, um, uh, Your grandmother is, I didn't get a chance to say, um, it is amazing the time period in which she was living in to have a master's.
Did you say master's degree? That is, it is phenomenal. I love to hear about powerful women having powerful roles. So that is awesome. Um, I want to give you your 32nd shameless pitch before we wrap up.
Chanel Rose: Okay. Um, well again, my name is Chanel Rose. If you are looking to pivot into a profitable business, I'm your girl.
Um, I help high achieving freedom seekers start businesses so that they have a soft landing into entrepreneurship. I'm not somebody who will [00:43:00] tell you to quit your job. I believe in duality. So you can be excellent for Google and excellent in your own company. Most of my clients are Typically mid career looking to leverage what they know and turn it into a profitable business.
So if that sounds like you, um, definitely reach out. I'd love to help you, you know, I'd love for you to be my next million dollar story.
Leighann Lovely: That's awesome. And Chanel, you are clearly a very powerful woman, a woman following in your family footsteps. So thank you so much for joining me. This has been just a fabulous conversation.
Chanel Rose: Thank you. for having me. It has been so fun. It went by so fast.
Leighann Lovely: Yeah, it, it always does when we're having a great conversation. So I agree.

Accelerate Your Business: Holistic Strategies for Sustainable Growth

Join host Leighann Lovely on the "Love Your Sales Podcast" as she dives deep into an illuminating conversation with Katherine Breuss, a seasoned business strategist and growth coach. Together, they explore the critical aspects of business growth, from the importance of strategic structuring and the holistic development of business owners to overcoming the dreaded "hamster wheel" syndrome. Katherine shares invaluable insights on how to identify growth gaps, implement effective strategies, and foster a thriving company culture. This episode is packed with practical advice and actionable steps for entrepreneurs looking to scale their businesses smartly and sustainably. Tune in to discover how you can transform your business with a balanced approach to growth and personal well-being.
Contact Katherine -
Website – https://www.accelerategrowth45.com/
E-mail – katherine@accelerategrowth45.com
LinkedIN - https://www.linkedin.com/in/katherine-breuss/
 
Special Thank you to our Sponsor Genhead – www.genhead.com
Robb Conlon – Intro and outro – Westport Studio - https://www.westportstudiosllc.com/
The Brave Ones – Instrumental Version Song by Jan Sanejko - https://artlist.io/royalty-free-music/song/the-brave-ones/119489
 
Ready to grow your business? Schedule a call with us today  - https://api.leadconnectorhq.com/widget/bookings/discoverysalesleighann
 
Channel Subscribe link - https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC-O7W9DzaRv4waodQKCprIg?sub_confirmation=1
 
Leighann Lovely: Welcome to another episode of Love Your Sales. I am excited. I am joined by Katherine Breuss. , Katherine is a dynamic and accomplished business strategist and growth coach with a proven record of success in guiding emerging and established leaders and business owners toward achieving overall business performance
and optimal wellness. Katherine is recognized for her results-oriented, highly intuitive and empathetic [00:02:00] coaching style, coupled with a goal-oriented approach aligned to the client's wellbeing as a certified focal
point business coach, CEPA and ICF. PCC certified, qualified Katherine has coached and consulted for over 20 years. She runs her us business Accelerated Growth 45, which was originally founded in 2004 as Royce Consulting
in Asia Pacific, Katherine's clients consist of fortune 500 companies and small to midsize businesses, working with CEOs, senior executives, leadership teams, and entrepreneurs. Katherine specializes in business strategy. Exit planning, coaching, and facilitating incorporating mindset, clarity, effectiveness, growth, succession, and leadership through her integration of the whole person with purposeful business [00:03:00] strategies.
She enables business leaders and owners to produce results and enjoy the journey.
She has lived the world, four countries, three businesses, and four kids. Katherine has a bachelor's degree in business from the U.S.
And four fun studies of undergraduate degrees of chiropractic medical sciences in Australia. Katherine is originally from Wisconsin and returned home in 2022. Strategic acumen and commitment to comprehensive growth. Katherine consistently influences the financial effectiveness, physical and mental health of businesses, individuals, and organizations worldwide. Katherine, I am so excited to have you join me today.
Thank you. I'm excited to be here. Yeah. So why don't we start off with you? Tell me a little bit about [00:04:00] your, you know, accelerate growth 45.
Katherine Breuss: Yes. So, um, I opened up this arm of the business, um, in, well, gosh, it was 23. June of 23, where, uh, the focus is on small to mid businesses, uh, to support them in their growth endeavors.
Um, and that's not just only in terms of the bottom and the top line of the business, it's also growth in themselves. Uh, because I say to people that you are your business, uh, because the person behind the business is the one who's creating the experiences, making the decisions and taking the action. So it's focusing on, on their growth too.
And also their, um, you know, personal wealth and wellbeing growth. Uh, so it becomes a very holistic, um, approach because [00:05:00] my, uh, philosophy is, is okay, great. You can work really, really, really hard, make tons and tons of money, but if you're miserable, what's the point,
Leighann Lovely: right? Absolutely. And this is, um, Obviously as, as you know, the world knows is, is the wellbeing and the happiness of the entrepreneur of, of not just the entrepreneur, but everybody has, this has become the forefront of all, not all, but so many more conversations that people are having, you know, the looking at people as the whole person, not just.
One thing, it's, it's ever more important. We can't just go to work and be miserable and come home and you have to find a way to find fulfillment, I guess, in what you do the majority of your life, which is work. A hundred percent. And as I say that it seems so backwards, like why, [00:06:00] why do we spend the majority of our life working so that we can live?
Katherine Breuss: I know it's crazy. It really is. And, and, you know, you hear a lot of senior leaders or business owners use the term hamster wheel and they feel like they are on a hamster wheel and they cannot get off and I've been there. I, you know, I know, I know what it feels like. Um, I've had, uh, businesses that have succeeded.
I've had ones that have failed miserably. I've worked in jobs that I've hated, um, and ones that I've loved. And so, um, It's really about helping people to create value, um, not only in their business, but in their life. So they don't feel like they're on that hamster wheel and they can actually get off.
Leighann Lovely: Yeah, absolutely. And, and you're right. The feeling like you're just constantly running and never getting anywhere is it's a horrific, it's a horrific feeling. And I've, I think that everybody is at one point or another experience that in their life. [00:07:00] And, um,
yeah, it's not, it's not fun. So let's, let's talk about that. Let's talk. How do you, how do you begin to work with somebody and to, I guess, shift that mindset and. Yeah, the right terminology
Katherine Breuss: it is a mindset. There's a, in many ways. Um, but the 1st thing I do is I go in and really kind of look under the hood of a business.
Um, as well as the person running the business and. It's finding the gaps, um, and once the business owner sees the gaps, um, normally, there's this kind of eyes wide open. Uh, and it's really getting that mindset shift. And from the business perspective of looking at your business as a value business versus just a lifestyle, just basically being an [00:08:00] employee of you.
So, you know, it's actually like, are you building something that, um, not only gives you, uh, the profit that you want, um, it gives you time back. And when you build a business in a, um, you know, in the right way, you know, ultimately that's what will happen is that you will make more money and you will get more time.
Um, and from that, um, you're creating, if you have a good strategic, um, plan in place, you're creating your own personal wealth. Um, and all of that begins to lead to a much more increased well being, um, because when your overwhelm is down, you're making money, uh, and you're while enjoying what you do and you're getting time back.
You know, you're getting the results and you're enjoying the journey. So that's really [00:09:00] important, um, in terms of when I work with
Leighann Lovely: people. Very interesting. And so you said that they kind of have this, you know, Oh, moment. Like, so obviously I'm going to guess that there are so many different, not one business is going to look like another business when you finally, you get in there and you're like, okay, so here's, here are the gaps.
And when I hear growth, of course, as a, As a salesperson, my first go to is, well, growth it that sales, right? But there's so much more that goes. Absolutely. Into that. So let's kind of break down some of the, the buckets as to where that can potentially fall and how you begin to kind of, I guess, peel back the onion.
Katherine Breuss: Yeah. So the first thing to growth and not all growth is good, by the way, um, you know, people hear the word growth and there are so many businesses out there. They're growing too fast. They're not ready for it. Um, and it's, [00:10:00] it's not landing well, you know, they're losing business because they're not able to service the customers in the way that they should.
They're leaving money on the table and they are absolutely miserable because they're so overwhelmed. So it's about growing smartly. And, um, So the first thing with growth is de risk. And so when looking under the hood, that's usually the first point of call is, all right, where are those gaps and the biggest risk for, um, that will actually stop, inhibit that business from growing any further or growing well.
And There's about there's 4 intangibles really to look at. And the 1st, 1 is structure. So, so many of the businesses when I go in the, there's a real lack of structure. And because most people, when they're starting their business, they're wearing all the hats. They're running around like a headless chicken.
You know, we've all been [00:11:00] there, you know, and that's just what you do to get it started, but then as you're growing and you're going into that growth phase, the owners are still running the business in the same way, and you just cannot run the business in the same way as you did when you started. And so putting structures and systems in place, it's incredibly important in order for them, the sales to be able to sell because you could have.
The best sales team out there and, but if you don't have the capacity behind the scenes to actually, um, fulfill what the sales team has sold, you're in a lot of trouble. So, um, so the 1st thing is structure, uh, would be, you know, it's normally where I see a lot of the gaps. So that goes from anywhere from financials to technologies to systems to workflow, um.
Then it's also the, [00:12:00] the human side. It's the people. So it's looking at, you know, do they have enough people? Do they have the right people? Um, what does that look like? How are they retaining, um, and attracting, you know, with so many of these businesses, labor is such a big issue. So again, you cannot grow if you don't have the people to, um, You know, support those sales.
Um, and then it's the customers. So then it's looking at the customers who are your customers and who are, you know, where do you find them? And how do you find them? And how do you convert them? And, um, you know, what is it that you're selling to them? And then lastly, you know, through all of that, as you grow, you want to ensure this kind of goes throughout as you're doing all of these pieces.
Um, and depending how big a business wants to go, you want to ensure that you are building a, a culture that people want to work in and that actually stays with as the company is, [00:13:00] um, getting bigger. And that takes, um, that really does take thought in terms of how to ensure, um, well, first of all, know what that culture is and then do you want it?
And then how do you keep it? Right.
Leighann Lovely: And so again, being a salesperson, I'm thinking I've been at a company before where they're like, we need you to stop selling. And I'm like, wait, wait, wait, what do you mean? Because they realized they had one or maybe even two of those problems. They're like, we, we can't execute.
You're going too fast. We can't execute on the work you're bringing in and that is one of the most Crushing you want to retain your sales team make sure that you can execute on the work, right? Otherwise, you know you tell your sales team you got to slow down they're gonna go Um, nope, I got to go. Yeah.
Katherine Breuss: And, and [00:14:00] especially that's a shame too, because you, if when a business is in that situation, they have a really great sales team and they have a great product and they're, and, but they don't have the backend to fulfill, um, what's necessary. And, and really it's. It is a shame because when you have good people, you don't want to lose them, especially right in this day and age where it's really getting hard to find, um, good people.
Leighann Lovely: Absolutely. Right. Yeah. So the, the definitely the execution, you know, on. The sale is one of the, um, most important as in my head, I'm think obviously there are so many other important aspects, you know, that you just mentioned, but if you can't execute on what you just [00:15:00] sold, not only is the client going to leave, but the salespeople are going to leave.
Katherine Breuss: Yeah, and that's, you know, there's there's a not a client of mine needs to be. I'm trying to get I'm trying to keep talking to them about, um, that they are really in trouble and the demand for their industry is. Huge. So they don't have to market like it's just, it's already there because there's such a shortage of, um, this particular industry, uh, but they don't have the capacity to fill.
So they are doing quotes. And they're not getting back to the people they are doing jobs and they're doing half of it. And then they cannot finish it because they have other stuff that's going on and taking it away. So the reputation in the market is, um, yeah,
Leighann Lovely: [00:16:00] exactly. And for those of you who are just listening, I just pointed down, um, and that can kill a company.
Katherine Breuss: Absolutely. Absolutely. And the other thing is that, you know, the owner is so stressed, right? I mean, it is, it is just blazing, you know, those cartoons where there's like smoke coming out of the head, you know, and it's, and miserable and you know, and when you're in the weeds like that, and you're in that kind of tornado of.
of hell, you know, it's really, really hard to zoom out. It's really hard to see past all the work that's, that's, you know, surrounding you. But actually, you know, by zooming out, even if it's just for 45 minutes a day, and really, Looking at that one thing that is going to make [00:17:00] the difference because there is, there's one thing that will actually make the difference in all of that.
And then it's just small building off of that, it's life changing. And I've had clients say to me, you know, Katherine, gosh, working with you and doing this has been life changing in all aspects. And when I step back, I sit and I think, I go, gosh, but it's only been a, it's only been a few simple things that we've shifted and the impact is huge.
And then the sales can go out and they can take on more customers and then they end up having more revenue and profit and. Right.
Leighann Lovely: Right. And that's, and you know, it's interesting, I'm in a position right now with my business where things are just exploding and I'm constantly running from one, you know, I feel like I'm constantly doing a sprint from one end, you know, to the other end to, and, and as you are speaking, I'm going, Oh my gosh, this is sometimes how I feel.
I'm like, I, [00:18:00] but it, and you know, and now of course you're getting me thinking, Katherine, I'm like, well, What can I shift? You know, and I, and in my head, I think, well, yeah, I could hand this off, but as a high I and a high D on the disc, I the worst, um, ever, because I have a, this desire to control. And I'm like, well, nobody can do this better than me.
Do you, do you come up against. Well, not being able to
Katherine Breuss: let things go. Well, yes. I mean, first of all, I am a high D and a high I as well. So I know I I'm right there with you. I'm right there with you, Leighann. Like it's, um, I get it. I get what you're saying. And, but most business owners are, um, similar, whether they're a deer or not, they like to hold on to their baby, which is their business.
And [00:19:00] they, and, and actually, I mean, when you, when you hire people or you add more, um, yeah, when you add more people into your business, it gets more complex. That's just the bottom line. You've got to manage people and people, you know, we are a very interesting species and sometimes not the easiest in the world.
Leighann Lovely: Uh,
Katherine Breuss: but one of the things that I. You know, ask, um, you know, people who I work with and even people I don't work with is like, where, when is it that you hit capacity that you no longer can serve and do your job with only you and then it's actually going, you don't want to get to that place. You need to see you need to be 5 steps before that and start thinking about who's going to be that person that can help if you want to get that big.
Now, some people are very happy to just say, no, I'm happy to just be me. I'm happy to just take on enough work. That's. It's [00:20:00] just that I can handle and that's fine. Just know, you know, know where you, um, you know, you're playing field, but I, the ideal situation is to actually sit and go, okay, I am 20 in 20, 30%, uh, more business.
I'm at, I'm at capacity and you don't want to get there. You want to start thinking about it before that and go, what do I need to do to allow me to continue to grow. And usually that's hiring usually, you know, at something that you're doing or something that I'm doing. It's, it's having tiring.
Leighann Lovely: Right. Well, and that's another, that's, that's a whole nother thing, right?
What comes, I'm now, you know, and this is, I'm going to say it as if I'm me, but this is not necessarily my situation. So let, you know, you're, you're at this point really comfortable as a business owner going up. I'm making exactly what I need to make, but then you hire somebody. Your [00:21:00] income goes down for a while because now you're, you're, you got to pay that person, which means now you need to scale up.
So that's that constant push and pull, right?
Katherine Breuss: Yes. Well, and again, though, there's different ways of doing it. So it can also be a lot of people start off in doing, you know, 10 99s. And so when the work comes. Yeah, and it's looking at that person that actually it's like, and again, it's, there's, uh, you know, there's pros and cons for everything, but this is what's so important about knowing who you are as a business, knowing who you are as the owner, what's important to you will help you decide who to hire and will help you to decide the right person to hire because that is.
Everything. Um, and so, um, you know, having that 1099 and, you know, contracting out when the business comes and you know that you have it and training them up to be ready, um, and finding that person that they might have other gigs on the side and they're happy with just getting some, you know, they don't want to market, they don't want to sell.
They don't [00:22:00] necessarily want to run a business. They just want people to feed them the clients. I mean, that can be an ideal scenario for somebody like yourself or even myself. Um, But yes, it can, it can definitely mean that, um, you know, as you grow cash gets tighter until you reach that next level.
Leighann Lovely: Very interesting.
And that's exactly what I did is, uh, you know, I have a 1099 now and, but, but it's, it's that, that entrepreneur, you know, what comes first, the chicken or the egg, you know, you become a one person business, then you become a two person business. Now I'm a three person business. You know, and that, that, that growth journey of, you know, how does that, and then at what point does that culture start to really become an actual culture?
Katherine Breuss: Well, it already, it is already. [00:23:00] Oh, oh no. It will already because the culture really starts with the owner. You're right. However the owner is showing up, how the owner is engaging with customers, engaging with employees or contractors or whoever, that culture is already building. And it's
Leighann Lovely: about being
Katherine Breuss: intentional.
Leighann Lovely: Well, then my, my culture is showing up to the office in my PJs.
I probably should start, you know, Of course, you know, I work from home, but probably should start to shift that a little bit, huh?
Katherine Breuss: Well, no, not necessarily. Cause the question, you know, for me, my question would be like, well, what's important to you about that? Because there's something, there's a value there that's important.
And then those are the types of people, you know, you're not going to hire someone that is going to have a problem with that.
Leighann Lovely: That's you. You're right. You're right. And there's a very casual [00:24:00] casual off the cuff kind of personality, which is
Katherine Breuss: probably for you also being comfortable being having fun, you know, you know, being yourself.
Um, so these might be things that are really high values for you. And so it's really. Knowing, you know, and it doesn't mean that everyone has to have same values, but there does need to be a couple that are very much in line, um, in terms of. Um, you know, those, those values that if someone steps on, you're like, uh, you gotta know what those are.
And, and those are the people you
Leighann Lovely: don't hire . So, and, and do you work with companies? I mean, I'm gonna guess that you've walked into companies where the culture, the, the, the value, the, their actual. What am I looking for? Um, they don't have that. They haven't [00:25:00] written out their company values. They haven't written out what their company stands for.
Well,
Katherine Breuss: what's interesting is I've worked with a lot. Yes, I do. And the smaller businesses, most of them haven't, they haven't really thought about it and I get them thinking about it. Cause it's incredibly important. It helps you make decisions. Um, Um, and as you're growing, you really need to, to know these, um, you need to know them even when you're not growing, but, um, but what's interesting is like, I actually have worked with many, um, companies, small and large who have all that written out in some shape or form, but you ask them, please.
What are they? And then I don't know. And like, so they're not living by it. It's just because something's written down. It's about how you utilize it and integrate it. And if it's just stuck in a desk somewhere, never looked at, or these long mission statements where people are like, you know, yawning and going, I know, you know, what does that mean?
They're, they're pointless. So it's about really, [00:26:00] um, and actually to be fair, It's depending on how big an organization is. If there is a toxic culture or not a great culture, um, in that business, it is incredibly hard to change that. And usually if people who do go in to do that, it fails because it is very, very difficult.
And so that's why it's really important in the, you know, in the, to always in the back of your head, even when you're just one, and then you get to two people of thinking of going, okay. Okay. What is it that we are doing? What is it that is our purpose, our drive? What kind of customers or clients do we want?
Who are we? How do we want to show up? It's really important to already start cultivating that and being more intentional because you have a brand anyway, it's more about controlling, but influencing it. And the more that you have the clarity [00:27:00] about who you are, what's important to you, you know, the values, purpose, all of that.
You start to show up intentionally and it's more consistent.
Leighann Lovely: Interesting. And, and you, you're right. Um, you know, I've been, I have worked at companies that have, um, very, very solid mission statements, very intentional culture. Um, and then I've worked at companies where you're like, what, what is this all about?
Like, and you have no, like, absolute no idea, um, from one day to the next, depending on, you know, and you've got managers going every which way doing, um, and then I have been at some volatile companies where it was like, this is not working, um, you know, strong arming employees, intimidating employees, um, where it was just a revolving door.
And it was like, um, And that company doesn't exist anymore. [00:28:00] Um, you know, because it, you can't run on that. A company can't survive on that. Employees will never stay.
Katherine Breuss: No, and especially, you know, this day and age, I mean, the younger generation and good on them for this is, you know, they demand more than probably I'd say my generation did growing going up the ladder.
You know, we probably accepted. In fact, we did. We accepted more of that strong arming and I'm the boss do as I say. And, you know, the, um. You know, a lot of issues that happen within, within the workplace, whereas the generation coming into the workforce, um, and some who've been in, they are demanding more, they're demanding more in terms of going, actually, you know what, I don't want to work all these long hours and kill myself and for what, you know, they, they are looking at it, uh, more.
Holistically than definitely my generation. Um, and so employee employers [00:29:00] have to shift, you know, sometimes I will hear businesses going.
Yeah, we've done this. We've always done it this way. This is how we're going to do it, and we're not going to change and it's like, well, you know, you probably won't be around for much longer because we are in 1 of the biggest industrial revolutions, the quickest, the fastest and if you don't keep up, you're going to be obsolete.
And many companies have ignored the shifting, you know, um, changing in the market and, uh, you know, Blockbuster, Blackberry, all of these, they're gone. They're gone because they didn't listen. And, you know, employees in terms of in how you engage with, um, uh, people today is very different than 10 years
Leighann Lovely: ago.
And, you know, we're coming to time, but I just want to make one more point. To what you were saying with that, from a sales standpoint, I was working with a company who it's been around for many, many, many years. They have some, a product that is [00:30:00] highly, highly specific, industry specific. Their clients come to them because they're very, very niche.
They don't have a website. And one day I said, you know, you don't, you don't even have a website and they're like, we don't really need one. All of our clients come directly to us. And I wanted to say to them, like, You, you understand what's happening in the world. Like if another company, when another company starts making what you make and they have a website, you're obsolete.
You're done because your customers are going to go, Oh, look. I can find, you know, I can Google this and all of the sudden you're going to, you're, you're going to be wiped off the map, like, but they've always done it that way. These, you know, a couple of core clients that completely keep them in business.
And it's like, right there, it makes me [00:31:00] go
Katherine Breuss: big risks, big risks, big
Leighann Lovely: flags. And it's, and I just, and, and the reason, and I'm not even, I, I only noticed this because I was recruiting for them and candidates wanted to go and look at their business to see what they were all about and I'm like, Oh, they don't have a website.
And the candidates were even like, what do you mean? Like, how does a company. Not have a website. And it's, you know, I'm like, even just for recruiting employees, like you can't exist like that anymore. And, uh, we've always done it this way. We've never needed that. The, if anyone ever says that
Katherine Breuss: in any industry.
Or even if it's a personal relationship or anything says, well, I've always done it this way that should just go bing, bing, bing. I know, and it's not to say that what they're doing is wrong. Necessarily. If they do say that, it's not necessarily all the time, meaning they're wrong, but what that's showing you immediately is they're [00:32:00] not willing to open up and listen and actually see what else might.
Um, Work or what else they could do. So they're not willing to grow and evolve. And that right there is a very closed mindset, which will get them, you know, not very far, my
Leighann Lovely: humble opinion. Right. I, I agree. It's you're shutting down the opportunity for continued growth. And to evolve with the changing world.
And for me, my goal is to learn something new every day so that I'm not left behind. And today, I mean, we live and breathe technology. We are constantly getting alerts. And if my business or your business is not out there alerting other people of your existence, I mean, you're not, [00:33:00] you don't exist as far as the world is.
Katherine Breuss: I mean, can you imagine a salesperson, you know, if they actually said that to say, well, we've always done it this way, right. You know, if they, or I've always done it this way and not even, and maybe how they do it does work. I'm not necessarily, but just that mindset, right. Marty would tell me what kind of a salesperson that is.
Leighann Lovely: That salesperson isn't going to be a salesperson for very long. Correct. They, they're, I mean, from the way that I do sales today, from the way that I did it 10 years ago is completely different. Completely. So we are coming to time. You get your 32nd, you get your 32nd shameless pitch. Um, before we wrap up.
My shameless
Katherine Breuss: pitch.
Leighann Lovely: Oh
Katherine Breuss: God. Now you're asking me to be a sales person.
Leighann Lovely: Represent yourself, Katherine.
Katherine Breuss: Uh, well, like, you know, it's simply put [00:34:00] accelerate growth. 45 is very much about helping business owners get the results they want and enjoying the journey. And the key is creating value. And you do that by starting with a strategy.
And a very well thought out strategy and then executing it and we help them, these businesses all along the way so that ultimately you're making more money in the present as well as in the future, you get time back and you enjoy your life a lot more than what you probably currently are.
Leighann Lovely: That's awesome.
And how would somebody reach out to you if they wanted to do so?
Katherine Breuss: Well, they can, um, Katherine at accelerate growth, 45. com. They can go to my website, which is accelerate growth 45. Um, by the way, I [00:35:00] will tell you what the 45 means because people normally ask like, what is the 45? And, um, it's 45 seconds to change a mindset, 45 minutes to increase worth and 45 days to accelerate growth.
And so when people are quite purposeful, uh, about what they're doing. That's really how long it takes to shift those areas in your life.
Leighann Lovely: That's awesome. That's amazing. And I was actually thinking, what does the 45 mean, but, um, just didn't have a chance to ask. So thank you for that. Yeah, you're welcome.
Thank you so much for coming on. It's been an amazing conversation. I really appreciate your insight and, um, yeah, thank you,
Katherine Breuss: Leighann. Thank you so much for having me. And I really appreciate, uh, appreciate our time together. Always enjoy having these kinds of conversations. I could do it for hours and hours.
So could I. And I do.
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Robb Conlon: Thanks for joining us for Love Your Sales. For More, connect with Leighann on LinkedIn and be sure to subscribe to the show and leave us a rating in review. We'd love to hear what you think, looking for a way to take your sales process to the next level. Visit us@loveyoursales.com to find out more about how Leighann can take your [00:37:00] organization to new Revenue Heights.
And be sure to join us next time for more great ways to love your customers so they love your [00:38:00] sales.

Revolutionizing Sales in Commercial Real Estate with AI-Driven Tools

Join Leighann Lovely and Bryan Hayes in this engaging episode of the "Love Your Sales" podcast, as they dive into the intricacies and challenges of the commercial real estate market. Bryan shares his journey from an entry-level sales rep to founding ElevateX Sales, where he leverages his expertise to revolutionize sales consulting through AI-driven insights. Bryan discusses the often-secretive nature of the commercial real estate industry and his mission to bring innovation, transparency, and engaging storytelling to property marketing. Highlighting the importance of authenticity, Bryan advises young sales professionals to stay true to themselves. Tune in for valuable insights, humorous anecdotes, and inspirational advice on succeeding in sales and beyond.
 
Ready to grow your business? Schedule a call with us today  - https://api.leadconnectorhq.com/widget/bookings/discoverysalesleighann Channel Subscribe link - https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC-O7W9DzaRv4waodQKCprIg?sub_confirmation=1
 
Leighann Lovely: Welcome to another episode of Love Your Sales. I am excited. I am joined today by Bryan Hayes. He is the founder and the sales guy of ElevateX Sales, Incorporated with 15 years of dedicated sales experience. He has journeyed through several diverse industries, each contributing to his growth as an entrepreneur and sales leader. His role started in 2008 when as an entry level sales rep at a small remodeling company in [00:02:00] Salt Lake City. He transitioned to operations manager to weather the storm in 2008 and really honed in on his customer service experience and skills.
Breakthrough came when he discovered his sales superpower in Texas and became a daily practitioner of empathy in sales. He learned the true power of empathy by transforming body and mind through health and fitness, cultivating lasting client relationships by understanding their unique needs, desires and goals.
 however, he quickly moved into commercial real estate, leaped out of the fitness industry and became a CRE real estate broker at a top five firm.
He is now the founder of ElevateX sales. An innovated sales consulting firm that started in 2023 with a mission to [00:03:00] revolutionize sales consulting through AI driven insight, Bryan, welcome. I'm excited to have this conversation with you.
Bryan Hayes: Thank you. for having me.
Leighann Lovely: So why don't we jump in? You started, um, elevate X sales in 2023. I did. What drove you to do that?
Bryan Hayes: Well, I left commercial real estate because interest rates were rising and I was like, well, I don't think deals are going to get done for a little while. And in commercial real estate, you don't get paid until you do a deal.
And so I was like, let's try to find, you know, some sort of salary position. I've never in my life, I've always been a sales guy. That's why I call myself the sales guy. Uh, and so I've always been, you know, either 1099 or a hundred percent commission. And so I was like, let me get my first salary job. I did, but it was, [00:04:00] unfortunately it was at a debt collection agency.
And it just wasn't the good fit, you know, when you have to explain yourself, you know, it's like, Oh, they ask you, what do you do for a living? You're like, Oh, I'm in debt collection, real estate debt collection. And they're like, Oh, so You know, I have to always say, don't worry, I'm not here for you. It's the worst.
And I'm like, I don't want to set up for the rest of my life. So I left that agency, went to another one. Cause you know, I doubled down and so silly. I was there three months. They wanted me to do marketing and then they started getting me to do sales. So I was like, okay, I didn't sign up for this. Like I took the position because you wanted me to do social media, marketing management.
You wanted me to do ad spend management. You wanted me to kind of manage the actual exterior. Presence of the company. And then it turned into, Hey, can you make cold calls? [00:05:00] It's like, like I, yeah, I can do cold calls really well, but I don't want to do them for you. And so I left the company and really was just unsure what the future was going to hold.
And so I was like, okay, what do I have? Like, what do I have of value? And then I realized that was my experience. So I founded ElevateX sales to be an e learning company. Where I was going to teach my empathy based approach to sales, which I learned in health and fitness, took to commercial real estate and made sure it wasn't ruined by debt collection.
Uh, and then when I started the company, I actually had a couple of missteps. I had a terrible media company that took some money from me, didn't do a very good job. They edited one of the videos. We spent three days in the studio, recorded over three hours of content. They edited the first [00:06:00] video, the first module that you would have, that I would actually give away as a teaser.
And it was done, I could have done it better. It was so terrible. And so I was like, okay, so maybe we shouldn't do e learning. So then I was third party outreach. We'll all reach out for you. And I picked five different industries. Real estate was one of them, but I actually focused on the others because I thought that was an easier barrier of entry, took a couple of clients, found out that it wasn't an easier barrier to entry.
And then I was, you know, not even a week, two weeks ago. So we're almost in a year, you know, we're seven months in and I am revamping to do commercial exclusively, commercial real estate exclusively. And that's really what I'm passionate about. Elevate X sales. We're passionate about revolutionizing the way commercial real estate properties approach marketing and sales.
You know, we believe in the [00:07:00] power of innovation and the importance of building genuine connections. So we've crafted a dynamic suite of services designed to really help the online presence. Of a commercial property, be it office building, retail, shopping center, or multifamily is there as well, or industrial, industrial property.
And if you look at anything real estate related and you look residential, it's all nice, flashy. They have great videos. It's all fun, entertaining. Well, let me ask you this. What have you heard about commercial real estate?
Not much,
Leighann Lovely: not much, not
Bryan Hayes: much. It's kind of like kept quiet and it's like silent. It's like they're moving silently. These deals are done, but the people that sign the leases are the business owners and they buy everything else just like they buy. [00:08:00] Everything else now they're buying this one thing differently.
So it's controlled by the brokerage community and in commercial real estate, you know, insider trading is a thing, you know, it's like, I have information about a deal, you know, I don't have to share it with you. Now, if you want to be a part of the deal, I will. And so they'll. Pick and choose who gets the information and it's, it's unfortunate, but none of that information gets out into the, so not, not the general public, but you have to have a broker in order to get that information,
Leighann Lovely: right?
Bryan Hayes: And I, this has got to change. And so I'm not destined. That's a terrible word. I was going to say destined, but I'm determined to bring a new light to commercial real estate. Take away from the boring dreary, Ooh, it's just a building. It's this, it's that to something exciting, something [00:09:00] fun, something entertaining, guided tours.
You know, some, uh, not only the guided tours where I'm actually taking you through the office and painting the picture of what the space could be for your business, but also interviewing tenants, finding out the local community. Cause let's say if it's an office building and you're moving from one office building to another, what are the amenities within the building?
And then what are the amenities around it?
Leighann Lovely: And that's important.
Bryan Hayes: Yes, because that is what retains. Your talent.
Leighann Lovely: Absolutely. I, I worked for a company that went from, um, you know, and people aren't going to reference this depending on where you live, but from a, a quieter community to downtown and, and it was like,
Bryan Hayes: That's a big change.
Leighann Lovely: Well, it is. It's kind of a shock. You're like, Whoa, okay, I, you know, in that quieter community, I could go out to lunch. I didn't have to worry about finding [00:10:00] parking if I was going to go to a downtown where it's like you might as well not try to drive because you're going to spend 15 minutes of your lunch hour just trying to find a parking garage.
Just
Bryan Hayes: getting out of the parking garage.
Leighann Lovely: Correct. Correct. Correct. And so some people like that environment. They like getting out, you know, walking to a local restaurant. Other people, especially if you're used to for the last three years working in a, in a building where you could just drive down the street, go to a nice cozy little restaurant, have your lunch.
Some people like that environment. Other people love working in a city where they're like, yep, I'm going to go for a 10 minute walk down to wherever a coffee shop, whatever. But that's a completely different.
Bryan Hayes: It is a
Leighann Lovely: total different atmosphere, often a different mindset. Like some companies purposely get downtown versus in a more rural area because of the people that they want to draw in.
Bryan Hayes: Yup. And nobody's telling that story. There's no, [00:11:00] there's no story. There's no, there's no, I'm not going to say that there's a TV show that needs to happen with me, but a TV show will be sparked hopefully from my idea. But it's. Touring and taking a business owner through multiple office buildings or restaurant spaces, touring them and finding out what's the best place for their business.
You know, kind of like a profit. And
Leighann Lovely: it's, so before we get in the weeds here, there was a couple of things that you had said.
Bryan Hayes: We're already in the weeds. Oh,
Leighann Lovely: I know we already, and I'm, and I'm actually already forgetting what I was going to, um, what I was going to say. Well, so I guess I'll just forget that.
Here's what I'm kind of envisioning here. It's it's, it's, you know, you know, you can do these virtual tours now and you have the. What are the things that fly in the sky
Bryan Hayes: drone
Leighann Lovely: drone, [00:12:00] there we go. Dread word. Um, the drone, I mean, so easily now you can, you can have all of that done and basically present like, Oh, here's one option with your bird's eye view from a drone from virtual tours to, I mean, that's, that's absolutely.
Bryan Hayes: And they're doing that, but they're not telling the story. There's no one there to tell the story. Like there is in residential where there's someone like, Oh, here's the bathroom, here's the master bedroom. There's no one there directing traffic and they're not putting as much, I like to call it razzle dazzle.
They're not putting that into it.
Leighann Lovely: Right. You don't stage a commercial building.
Bryan Hayes: No, they're not. And they should. At least stage it with renderings and that's very simple. That can be done in post production. And you know this, they can make it look like it's a, uh, Occupied office. [00:13:00] And so that's what I'm trying to bring to light is painting the picture to make the decision process easier, but also getting the word out because the brokers, they don't have enough time to talk to everyone.
So they're going to go to the, okay, I know a guy that has a client that had told me he was looking in this area, so let's go give it to him or they'll go to the trade show or they'll go to a networking event and hopefully someone knows someone. Okay. I want to take a step further, not only marketing the online presence of it, social media and SEO management, but it's also the sales outreach where we are stepping in and saying, Hey, we're going to do mass emails to every single restaurant tenant in a specific geographic area or of a specific type or whatever the qualifications are for that space.
Present some of the opportunity [00:14:00]
Leighann Lovely: that I find that extremely, um, that's, it's really cool now. So how do you leveraging your experience and, and your, your background and what you've done in the past, how do you even begin to, and again, you come from this industry. Yeah.
Bryan Hayes: Yeah. Yes. I was a broker myself. Yeah.
Leighann Lovely: Yeah. So how do you, and I'm forced them
Bryan Hayes: to change,
Leighann Lovely: well, yeah, force them to change, but so you must have, I haven't got who to reach out to, who to, where do you begin that process? Because for me, I'd be like, well, I don't know. I mean, I know somebody who may need a space. I know somebody who might be, you know, and I, I know how to start, Beginning to create channel partners and that kind of thing.
But where do you begin [00:15:00] commercial real
Bryan Hayes: estate? You go to the direct hop, you go to the decision maker, you go to the owner of the property, the ownership group, or the owner himself, depending on what type of property it is and how large the property is. And the property's value and location and you present them the opportunity to come alongside the broker's relationship saying, Hey, I don't want to do the deal.
I don't want to mess with any commission. You're going to pay me a small fee on a monthly basis for a specific period of time. To provide content for you, shoot the content, release the content. Uh, manage SEO for a certain point, kind of get you up and running and then present the opportunity to these tenants where the brokers can't do those calls.
They're the brokerage companies are trying to do it. You know, I worked for, for one for many years, four years. And my fiance [00:16:00] actually still works at the same company and they don't have enough time to do that and software is changing so rapidly. So since the year and almost a year and a half that I've been out of the industry, I've learned so much about software and because I wasn't so just inundated with being a broker, because it takes its time in your day.
That you have to make those calls and you have to talk to people and you have to do the tours and it takes so much out of your day that you can do everything. So we're coming alongside that relationship kind of like a support staff. So we're not competing. So we have to tell the story to the landlord, to the person that's going to pay the bill.
And where I'm starting is the lowest hanging fruit people I know. So there's a, there's a ownership group based in Canada. Actually, they own one high rise building in downtown Dallas and one mid rise building. A little farther north of Dallas, [00:17:00] kind of almost in the suburbs, um, I call mid cities, but, uh, they have elected to get us to kind of, because they know that if we can prove it, it's going to be very successful because there is a company that has a monopoly on the data for commercial real estate.
And you have to pay, they're paying 10, 000 a month to host four of their 300 properties on essentially a landing page. That is ranked in Google that has none of their logos, nothing. It just is like a data sheet. Has nothing.
Leighann Lovely: So why is, here's, there are certain industries out there, and I know that some of these industries are heavily regulated, which is why it's like, uh, to break into it, you know, when it's, when it comes to buying a business, for instance, buying a business, there's hush, [00:18:00] hush license
Bryan Hayes: and stuff like
Leighann Lovely: that.
Right. And there are people who obviously, if you're in the middle of selling a large business, a longstanding, you know, 20. 40 plus year business. You're the owner of it. You're like, I'm going to sell. You don't want your employees to boycott because they find out what the business is.
Bryan Hayes: Right.
Leighann Lovely: So, you know, I understand why that's such a hush, hush, you know, mergers acquisitions, all of that is, is so, but why do you think that the commercial real estate, when you're talking about an empty building, for instance, or, or a building that has tenants, but it's just looking to change hands and really that's not, if they're renting the space, it shouldn't necessarily.
Affect the renters, unless they're looking at completely.
Bryan Hayes: It doesn't affect the rent. Actually, if they, if a new owner comes in, it's typically improves the property because they need to put money away because it's a tax shelter. So they need to make capital expenses.
Leighann Lovely: So then why is it, why is it so hard for, let's say I want to buy a property.
Why does it [00:19:00] seem so hard for me? Say I have a, you know, a million dollars. I'm looking to go, it's probably a hell of a lot more than a million dollars, but
Bryan Hayes: No. Well, that's a good place to start. You can buy a property. Absolutely. You leverage it.
Leighann Lovely: But so I'm looking to invest in commercial real estate. Why does it seem like it's so hard for like a person to just go out and say, okay, let's see all of the listings.
Bryan Hayes: Simple answer. Control. Because it is. A sexy industry. It's cool. Everyone's intimidated by it. I say I'm in commercial real estate and they're like, Oh, you must be a multimillionaire.
Leighann Lovely: It
Bryan Hayes: hasn't been punched yet. They, they just assume certain things, you know, I was a urban retail specialist. And so I dealt with uptown, downtown, the urban areas, the high dense [00:20:00] areas.
I represented several high rise buildings in downtown Dallas. And, and those typically those, those owners are billionaires. So they're intimidating to talk to. And they're the decision maker on whether they're going to sell the building or not. They typically do the negotiations. And so a lot of people are scared to have those conversations
Leighann Lovely: and
Bryan Hayes: they also like the power.
Leighann Lovely: Let me ask you, let me ask you a question as a salesperson, and this is me personally as a salesperson. Early on, I was intimidated early on, but I have to say that as a seasoned salesperson, I've gotten over that, like completely gotten over that.
Like either they like me, they don't like me. They buy from me. They don't buy from me. Ultimately, at the end of the day, I don't care. [00:21:00] Like, if you don't like me, that's fine. Don't buy from me. I am going to be who I am. I stopped trying to put on fancy suits and show up as a person that I'm trying to say, you look great.
Bryan Hayes: Thank you.
Leighann Lovely: Sorry.
It comes down to like, Yeah, we're going to negotiate everybody, either you're going to come to everybody being happy a win win and you shake hands and the deal's done. Oh, nowadays you 58 billion signatures and the deal is done. But the point being is that, I mean, are, do you still have any uncomfortable?
Are you still intimidated at this point in your career by anybody?
Bryan Hayes: Um, I, yeah. I get excited because I'm like, Ooh, it's someone else that [00:22:00] I can, it's like another notch on my belt. You know, I was like, I just talked to another billionaire and he, I referred to him by his first name. He called me, he answered my call and he spoke with me like that.
To me, I liked that part. That part was the very sexy part about the industry, but I really think that it's so hard to break into it because. It's on purpose. So much money to be made. These guys are, these brokers are making millions and millions of dollars a year. And they're transacting with millions, depending on what industry, of course, industrials doing the best retails, not as much office.
If you're in leasing, that's great. If you're in office sales, high rise sales, which I took a swing at, I'll tell you those big fees. They're elusive. Um, they, I [00:23:00] feel like all of money is
Leighann Lovely: elusive right now.
Bryan Hayes: Yeah. Yeah. I got a check. I need a check. I need my, my podcast check. But, uh, they, I think they like that feeling of not superiority.
I don't want it to be a negative thing, but I think it's like, uh, I can do something you can't. And so I like that feeling. And so it's almost like gatekeeping in a way. And I'm just a bull in a china shop. Like, no, I came from small town Salt Lake city, Utah. I had a team mom, like, uh, like you can't scare me,
but I just get excited.
It's really, you just have to flip the script. You know, it's, I get the nerves. Like I, even before I was going to meet with you, I got the little nerves, but it wasn't. No,
Leighann Lovely: and I love the, my, my father [00:24:00] always tells me that I'm a bull in a China shop and that I need to, I need to bring it down. I'm like, I am not apps.
He goes, every room you walk into, you destroy in some way or another, whether it be a positive way or a negative way. He goes more positive, which is a good thing. Now that you've gotten a little older, he goes, it used to be the other way around. And I'm like, well, great. But he goes, you're, you're absolutely, uh, but I think that most, uh, I think that most Great salespeople, the way they are.
Bryan Hayes: Yeah. It's like, sorry, like I'm coming through. Sorry.
Leighann Lovely: Watch out. I was at a networking meeting the other day and I'm sorry. I I'm going to bring, I was at a networking meeting and I, I'm sure my listeners know that I talk with my hands. I was talking to somebody with my hands and of course this place is packed.
I poked somebody in the eye. Oh no. He had glasses on. He had glasses, but I still,
Bryan Hayes: oh, so he, so his nose, he's like my nose.
Leighann Lovely: It was more his glasses that I poked him in. I was like, oh my God. [00:25:00]
Bryan Hayes: Jesus.
Leighann Lovely: So when you said that, I'm sorry, I had to jump on. Absolutely. Bull in a China shop. So
Bryan Hayes: Bull China shop.
Leighann Lovely: So do you use a different approach when it comes to, okay, here's a billionaire versus here's a guy who's, yeah, he's well off.
Obviously. He owns a, he owns a building.
Bryan Hayes: Oh, yes. Very different. You actually treat the ones, the billionaires worse, not worse, but you treat them. You don't have to treat them as nice as the guys that just own a couple, let's say a couple shopping centers really. And they're just barely over multimillion.
They have a, there was one in particular, he owned a, uh, an old outlet mall that was It's never going to come back. And it's in a small town, not small town, but outside of Dallas, Fort Worth. He went to Harvard. He's, [00:26:00] he's the smartest guy in the room. I won't say his name, but he knows I'm talking about, but, um, I had to treat him with white gloves and I had, um, just.
Three, four days ago, I had called one of the high rise owners in Dallas. And I wanted to ask him a question about marketing. It was like, Hey, I want your opinion on my stuff. We calls my cell phone. It's like, so Bryan, and it's like a, just a conversation, you know? So it depends on the person's personality, really.
Because there are some billionaires where you're like, I need to, I need to look good. I need to present myself well. I need to act proper. Uh, you really just have to kind of roll with the punches. Some of them are going to be casual. Some of them are going to be official. Some of them are going to want certain things a certain way.
So you just have to, you have to be able to spot that [00:27:00] real quick.
Leighann Lovely: So it sounds like it's not much different than working at a company. You know, any level you have to match their personality. Understand, know your audience. It comes down to that. It doesn't matter if they're a millionaire and you're right.
There are some people who, you know,
Bryan Hayes: 30 K millionaires and the a hundred K. Yeah,
Leighann Lovely: they, and I've known some very, very wealthy people who will walk in the room and you would think that they are dirt poor from, because Because the guy that called me said, what's up, right? Because either they've, they've come from nothing and built it and they still understand what it's like to grind or
Bryan Hayes: they've,
Leighann Lovely: and maybe they've always had it and just still.
Maybe not. I don't know. I guess I, I don't know that I've ever known. They're trying to
Bryan Hayes: fit a mold. They're trying to fit like their royalty. I'm the [00:28:00] landlord, you know, so it could be that.
Leighann Lovely: And I've met both people who have come from money, who are more, more down to earth than anybody that I've ever met.
And people who have, um, you know, had nothing and then rose up and then become complete Like, who are you, I know you, what happened to you and then people who have, you know, in the flip side of that, like it's, so I guess it ultimately when it comes to sales, I still hold true that you just got to walk in and to be a great salesperson, you got to quickly understand, be, you know, know your audience.
Adjust accordingly. And I always go back to the mimicking of if you, if you're not understanding what's happening right now, mimic them, you know, right. Until you can shift to figure out like, okay, what's, what's the mood in the room?
Bryan Hayes: Yep. If they lean to one side, if they fold their [00:29:00] arms, absolutely. They hold the fork a certain way.
I always, the one, okay. So I always get nervous. And I truly get nervous when I eat with a client. I don't know why it is. It could be my grandmother. She's like, you need to sit up, keep your elbows in, make sure your pinkies are up. She was so like, she taught me the proper way of eating and dining. And so I'm always very self conscious about that.
And so I think when I'm eating with somebody, you know, mirroring is perfect, you know, cause you don't want to be scarfing down your food and they're like going slow. Cause you're like, well, I guess you're just going to sit there as I finish eating.
Leighann Lovely: And I've, I've, I've had, I've had meals with people that You know, they're taking the bread that was on the table and double dipping into it.
It's all over the place, and you're like, I thought you were [00:30:00] supposed to be the proper person. I thought I was supposed to be the one that
Bryan Hayes: Raisin Barn. Golly, that is number one pet peeve right there. Oh my gosh. And this,
Leighann Lovely: this was with the CEO, the owner of the company I worked at with the, at that time we were going and tag teaming this meeting and I watched him like push the plate all the way over to the other side.
Oh yeah, oh yeah, there's, it's.
Bryan Hayes: I was like, that's yours now
Leighann Lovely: that, that it's, I don't like it. It's yours. You, you can have that.
Bryan Hayes: I had a last time.
Oh,
Leighann Lovely: so Bryan, if you could give advice to the younger sales generation coming up, what, what advice would you offer to, to help them level up?
Bryan Hayes: Ooh, level up. You need to decide who [00:31:00] you are and be that person. Like 100%. It's, it's very black and white. It's, I am this, I am not this. It's I do these things, I don't do these things and you need to decide which, like who you are.
And when you figure that out, you'll be able to go into rooms with billionaires and wear your Louboutins and Gucci belts and you know, and that doesn't matter. You're just wearing that because it's costing, you know, it's not, that's not what gives you the confidence because that only, that's very surface level.
They used to get teased, you know, cause I would wear, I was actually going to wear a three piece suit to this because that's what I was known for. Like I love vests. I don't know what it is. You take off your suit coat and you're still wearing a suit. And, uh, it's like half suit. And everyone at the broker's firm would always be like, Oh, what's up, [00:32:00] Mr.
Three Piece? You know, like, oh, going to see the king. You know, silly stuff like that. And I just enjoy wearing it. But it's not what gave me the confidence, ultimately.
Leighann Lovely: And I have a great, I have a very good friend of mine who every time he shows up, no matter where he's going, same thing. He's in a complete, like, dressed to the nines suit, his shoes match, he is like, he's, he's just He all matches
Bryan Hayes: his shoes?
Leighann Lovely: Yes. I mean, he's drop dead gorgeous, like all the time. And I'm like, you, you put the women to shame. Like you in a room, nobody is looking at the women who like everybody, the guys, the girls, they're all looking at you, like
Bryan Hayes: you put us to shame. That's why you wear a suit. Okay. There's another form of advice for the young.
I'm not wearing a tie because. I just, I don't know, I'm figuring it out, but when you [00:33:00] wear a suit and I, and I promise you people treat you differently and you act differently to, uh, give you a great trial and error on this one, where a suit and go to Walmart, you know, figure out that people treat you different.
They'll be like, Oh, King's coming. All right. All right. Watch out.
Leighann Lovely: That's awesome. That's awesome. So we are coming to time. I want to give you your 30 second shameless pitch.
Bryan Hayes: My shameless pitch. Oh, 30 seconds. You're going to time me.
Leighann Lovely: Timer starts now.
Bryan Hayes: The distracting, uh, um, Elevate X sales. We believe in the power of innovation and the importance of building and genuine connection. That's why we've crafted a dynamic suite of services designed to skyrocket your online presence and attract a flood [00:34:00] of high quality leads to sign deals. In today's competitive market, the good old time tested standards don't cut it anymore.
What you've done in the past isn't always going to work. So don't think, hey, if it ain't broke, don't fix it. This is where we go above and beyond, tailoring our cutting edge strategies to your specific needs and goals. That you have for the property in those vacant spaces. It's time to ElevateX Sales your property today.
That was 30 seconds?
Leighann Lovely: Awesome. You did great. I wasn't timing you.
Bryan Hayes: Oh, I thought you were. You made me all
Leighann Lovely: nervous. Um, and how can somebody reach out to you if they wanted to do that?
Bryan Hayes: I will provide my email address and my mobile number because I am that cool. Uh, Bryan, B R Y A N, at ElevateXSales.[00:35:00]
Com and good number to reach me is area code 9 7 2 3 9 9 6 4 4 8. Like to help any property owners, be it retail, office, industrial, anything that you wanna bring. Some relevance, you wanna bring some attention. You want to get some exposure for your commercial real estate property here to help.
Leighann Lovely: Awesome.
This has been an amazing conversation. I really appreciate you coming on. It's actually been a really fun conversation. So even
Bryan Hayes: before we got bothered by the, we were having such a great conversation before the podcast and we had to do this thing.
Oh, too funny.
Robb Conlon: Thanks for joining us for Love Your Sales. For More, connect with Leighann on LinkedIn and be sure to subscribe to the show and leave us a rating in review. We'd love to hear what you think, looking for a way [00:36:00] to take your sales process to the next level. Visit us@loveyoursales.com to find out more about how Leighann can take your organization to new Revenue Heights.
And be sure to join us next time for more great ways to love your customers so they love your [00:37:00] sales.

Blueprint for Sales Success and Entrepreneurship

In this engaging episode of the "Love Your Sales" podcast, host Leighann Lovely interviews Ryan Atkinson, a young and dynamic entrepreneur who owns and runs two companies—Spacebar Visuals and Magic Media. Ryan shares his journey from working at HubSpot to starting his own businesses, delving into his strategic approach to business development, hiring, and leadership. He discusses the importance of identifying an ideal customer profile (ICP) and leveraging outbound marketing techniques to drive growth. Ryan also highlights the significance of working within one's area of genius and outsourcing tasks that aren't core strengths. The conversation offers valuable insights for small and mid-sized businesses looking to enhance their marketing efforts through multimedia content. Listen to learn actionable strategies and be inspired by Ryan's entrepreneurial spirit.
Contact Ryan -
Website – https://www.spacebarvisuals.com/
LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/in/ryan-atkinson17/
 
Special Thank you to our Sponsor Genhead – www.genhead.com
 
Robb Conlon – Intro and outro – Westport Studio - https://www.westportstudiosllc.com/
 
The Brave Ones – Instrumental Version Song by Jan Sanejko - https://artlist.io/royalty-free-music/song/the-brave-ones/119489
 
Ready to grow your business? Schedule a call with us today  - https://api.leadconnectorhq.com/widget/bookings/discoverysalesleighann
 Channel Subscribe link - https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC-O7W9DzaRv4waodQKCprIg?sub_confirmation=1
 
#sales #businessdevelopment #entrepreneur #entrepreneurship #selling #relashionships #customerexperience #podcast #loveyoursales #lastingrelashionships #salescareers #salesmanager #salesdevelopment #traininganddevelopment #leadershipdevelopment #salespodcast #salestraining
 
Leighann Lovely: Welcome to another episode of love your sales. I'm really excited. I am joined by Ryan Atkinson. He is 25 years of age and entrepreneur who owns and leads two companies, Space Bar Visuals, and Magic Media. Ryan grew up in Iowa and attended the University of Iowa. After graduating, he moved to Boston to work as a BDR at HubSpot.
After a year, he pivoted to a new role in marketing [00:02:00] for a health tech company and also moved to Austin, Texas. At that, at this time, he started his first company. Magic Media, which is a podcast agency providing production needs and interview needs. A year ago, he started Space Bar Visuals with his co-founder Brandon in which they create.
Animated videos for SaaS companies in early November, Ryan left his full-time job to run these companies full time. Ryan has managed 70 plus people in his career already hosted up. 185 interviews created 125 K in revenue in the past year and partnered with some of the biggest brands in the world in his free time.
He enjoys working out, reading, traveling, and being with friends, Ryan. I am so thrilled to have you join me on the, , on the podcast today.
Ryan Atkinson: Yeah. Super excited to be here. The, the intro is nice. You read that off like very nicely. So yeah, super, super pumped to be here and yeah, chop it up with you and your audience, I guess.
[00:03:00] Super excited.
Leighann Lovely: So you are, um, a very young entrepreneur, um, you know, right out of the gate, it looks like you've, you've, you know, explain, have you always had that entrepreneurial experience or, or, um, you know, I guess what would be the right word, um, bug.
Ryan Atkinson: Yeah, I gotcha. Um, yeah, so I was actually very lucky and very grateful to have, uh, my stepdad, my mom, they actually both run their own companies.
So my stepdad owns a flooring business up in Minnesota. My mom owns her own hair salon. And even my dad like dabbles in like short term like Airbnb rental. So I was always raised by entrepreneurs and I knew I wanted. Once I got out of school to do my three W's and that's work whenever I want work with whoever I want and work like what on what I want to do.
Um, so I knew coming out of school that I wanted to be an entrepreneur. I was part of the university of Iowa was like founders clubs. Um, I had my own podcast interviewing entrepreneurs when I was a senior in college. So yeah, from a young age, like I knew I wanted to start my own [00:04:00] company. And it wasn't a matter of like.
If it was more a matter of when. And so when I was like 23, 24, however old I was, um, that came to fruition. And yeah, now 25, um, have done some fun stuff. Very grateful for what I do have been built an awesome team. So yeah, very grateful for what I do. And yeah, I started basically from my parents though, that entrepreneurial bug.
Leighann Lovely: That's, that's amazing. Um, and you know, I think that you're, you're doing it right. You're doing it at an age where you, and I don't want to say lower risk, but it's, you don't, you don't have the. And again, I, I don't know you extremely well, but I'm going to say you don't have that house. You don't have the kids.
You don't have the, all of those extra. And again, some people can,
Ryan Atkinson: but
Leighann Lovely: you don't have all of those, those weighing responsibilities where you're like, oh, okay, do I, I have to have this paycheck coming in all of the time. Yep. Um, it's great to get that started when you have that opportunity and, and to really, Just dive in full and I'm [00:05:00] not saying that everybody out there should do it because you have to have a certain, you know, mindset to be able to, to do that.
So let's start with, I guess, how, what steps did you take? Who did you lean on in order to really figure out and navigate the world of business ownership?
Ryan Atkinson: Yeah. I mean, it's a learning process. Um, it always is a learning process, but any business owner will be able to relate. Like you learn something new, like every day, just like the skills you acquire and everything, but the process really got started.
Um, going to space, our visuals, um, basically November, 2022. Um, I was just mindlessly scrolling on Twitter and I came across a tweet that was like, Hey, I just sold my last company looking to start another company. Um, Looking for like a co founder to help me do it. And that was Brandon. And so kind of just shot my shot through email, sent him an email, uh, attached like a little loom video on it, like going over my resume and being like, Hey, like I always want to start a company.
We'd love to do this with you type of thing. Um, and [00:06:00] the stars aligned, we hit it off very well. And that's kind of how space bar visuals is born. So Brandon. Brandon's 30 right now. He's about five years older than me. And I've leaned heavily on him for like mentorship. And how do I run a business? How do I actually act as a CEO act as like someone that needs to actually run a company?
That's not just like for fun, but like actually generates revenues, like hits revenue targets and has certain profitability margins. Um, so leaning a lot on him just for mentorship has been awesome. Uh, but a lot of it is navigating business ownership always just comes down to making mistakes, learning from those mistakes, kind of building the ship as you go.
Um, so yeah, it's, I like to think that I'm starting to get a little bit of the strap, the handles on it, but I still have like a very long ways to go, which is very exciting because it just at the very, very beginning of like business ownership and like actually running a company, company successfully.
Leighann Lovely: And I love that.
I, you know, every entrepreneur, salespeople, people are out there who are [00:07:00] literally laying their, you know, their cards on the table saying, Hey, like work with me. Come in. I love, there's a common thread among, among all of them, which is, Hey, I'm willing to make mistakes. I'm willing to. And I love that about, um, Um, I love that about those individuals that they're not only are they willing to make the mistakes, they're willing to own those mistakes and then learn from them and move on.
So let's talk about that. You had, you mentioned a three step process that you used to, you know, to bring space bar visuals, um, you know, to really grow that revenue to what a hundred and K a hundred one K in year one. So let's, let's talk about how you, let's talk about that process. Let's talk about how you did that.
Ryan Atkinson: Yeah. So the three step process. So basically what happened is we got to about a hundred K over a hundred K in revenue in our first year. And like, I was working on this on the side for the first like eight months of it. Um, and so we hit on a trend K and once you hit a hundred K, you're kind of like. Like we actually got to have [00:08:00] something here.
It's, it's like crazy to say like your agency, is it like a six figure agency? Like, I think that is still like crazy to think about. So a three step process that we used here, um, at space heart visuals, um, kind of giving the secret formula out on how someone else could do this is basically. It's kind of like a four step step.
One was it's kind of like a five step step. One is identify your ICP here. Uh, like we really nailed our ICP to start out with our ideal customer profile. We knew we were going to go after marketing directors. We knew we were going to go after SAS companies and we knew we were going to go after like smaller to midsize companies, employee size, like 11 to a hundred.
We really nailed our ICP. So if you are wanting to start a company, if you are wanting to grow sales, definitely nail your ICP. That's how you're messaging, who you're messaging to and make sure you know it.
Leighann Lovely: Say what, explain what an ICP is.
Ryan Atkinson: Yep. Ideal customer profile synonymous with like target audience.
Who are you actually selling to? So we really wanted to hit that and nail that to start. And that's [00:09:00] the foundation of like everything that we do. So kind of going to that next process. Then what we did is we do a lot of outbound here. We're trying to ramp up our inbound, but I can't give advice on that. I can give advice on outbound and how to do that effectively.
Um, so what we did is once we had that ICP, we just got a list from Upwork. We hired someone for like 15 to get us like. 150 contacts, like whatever that comes out to be. Um, from there, then we got their emails. We got their phone numbers and you hit them in three ways here. So you'll upload this list into whatever platform you use HubSpot instantly, Salesforce, et cetera, et cetera.
You have one list. We cold email them. We send them a message on LinkedIn, and then we also will cold call them. So we're hitting them three different ways, three different touch points. You're sending five emails, three LinkedIn messages, and then cold calling them as well. And that was one of the most effective ways that we grew from basically zero to 50 K was pretty scrappy, but 50 K to a hundred K is truly how we got that, uh, to [00:10:00] that next level is through that three, four or five step process.
Leighann Lovely: And that's amazing. So, and a lot of people are sitting there, even myself who runs my own business, you know, sitting there going, okay, that's great. You bring in the clients, but then there's the execution.
Ryan Atkinson: Yeah. Yeah. The good.
Leighann Lovely: No. And I was just going to say, so you bring these, these clients in. So now you have to execute on that work.
So I'm going to, I'm going to guess that you have a process, a solid process, because you can't survive if you're bringing in business and not. Probably.
Ryan Atkinson: Yeah, definitely. Um, and we actually, so up until about May last month, late April, I was actually handling all the account management of like video projects, doing this, doing that, doing this, doing that, just moving the projects along.
But we actually brought someone on to do that for me because my unique skills. And I think it's very important if you. [00:11:00] Our leader, if you're wanting to start a business, like what's your unique skillset and how can you free up your time as much as possible to really dive into that? And my unique skillset, like truly is like selling, like actually closing deals.
It's not dealing with video projects and all that stuff. So we brought, uh, Matthew Chin on who's awesome. Matt, if you're listening to this, I love the work that you do. And I'm very grateful for you. Uh, but essentially he handles now all of our account management. We have our SOP standard operating process in place.
We have our video editors. And so, yeah, him doing that is freed up. 50 percent of my time, which has been humongous for our sales process and actually refining that sales process to make it better and more efficient.
Leighann Lovely: That's awesome. And so something else that we talk about that I've talked about a lot on this podcast is working in, you know, making sure that you are in your working genius.
Like, because when you, when you fall outside of that, what takes somebody, you know, what, when I'm in my area of genius, I can execute on that work. It takes me.
Ryan Atkinson: Yeah. [00:12:00]
Leighann Lovely: Five minutes to do a function when I'm outside of my area of working genius, what would take somebody five minutes to do that? Takes me a half an hour because I'm like, Oh my God, how do I wait?
I know, I know how to do this, but it just, it drains you, right? And all of us, especially when you start as a solopreneur or a two person team, you're like, okay, well we can, I'm great. I can bring in the sales like all day long. I can sell, sell, sell, sell, but then I have to execute. And that, especially for a true salesperson, they're like, wait, what?
I have to, I have to execute on this. Um, okay. And that's a lot how businesses start. Like either you're really great at the thing you're selling, but you're a horrible salesperson, which means, and again, I say that lately, you're not the greatest salesperson because you're, you want to do, let's say you're a coach.
As an [00:13:00] example, I'm a great coach, but selling it. Now you have a problem because how do you scale? If you can't sell, you bring in a coaching client, then you, so that's, that's awesome. Um, and that's, but it always comes down to what comes first, the chicken or the egg.
Ryan Atkinson: Exactly. So that's, um, a funny enough today.
I was actually. On a sales call or someone was like pitching me their like, copywriting services and like their copy to get me on that call for their email was incredible. I was like, I was like, oh my gosh. Like, like I'll book a meeting with you right away. I think I booked a meeting in like 10 minutes.
'cause I was like, this is like incredible copy. Like I will do this. Got on the call with them and it was like the most awkward, like disgustingly awkward sales call I've ever had in my like entire life. I'm not even kidding. Like I was like asked, I was having to like probe him. Like, so what do you do?
Like, what's your process like? It was just so hard and it just left such a bad taste in my mouth or like the sales was so bad that like, I can't, I just can't move forward with it. It is like so hard, but I'm sure it's good, but I just can't move [00:14:00] forward
Leighann Lovely: because the person's a copywriter. Not
Ryan Atkinson: exactly
Leighann Lovely: right.
And that as a salesperson, when somebody reaches out to me and like. They have a really, really good pitch. I'm like, okay, I'm intrigued. Like you did a really good job to intrigue me. And I'll, I'll, I'll actually like meet with that person, but you're right. Often all of a sudden they're like, uh, and if you're, and if you have to get them to sell you, it's like, okay, I'm moving on.
I'm moving on. Like, but cause it's not their area of genius.
Ryan Atkinson: So I think, um, if you are like wanting to start a company or scale, like definitely find your area of genius and then hire someone to cover up your weaknesses for you. And that's been like, that is easily been one of the best things here at, um, space, our visuals for us is getting someone to do account management where like I could do it and like, maybe like, I think I like to think I do a good job managing [00:15:00] clients, but like, at the same time, my time could be freed up somewhere.
Somewhere else to actually like grow this company instead of doing the account management. So yeah, I a thousand percent agree. Find your area of expertise and double down in that area of expertise.
Leighann Lovely: Right. And that's the same way that you should, you know, that I've talked to other people's the same way you should manage people.
Now you've managed what 70 plus people. So let's talk a little bit about that. What are these? Are these salespeople? Are these all different types of people?
Ryan Atkinson: Yeah. So it's all different types of people. It's, I mean, it's truly has ranged from age ages, like 15 to like 65 plus. Um, I was grateful enough. Like when I was 18, I got my first management gig at a pool, which was great.
I like managed the concession stand. So then that next year I got promoted to manage the concession stands and lifeguards. And that was like 36 people in one summer that I'm like directly managing, um, at age like 19, which. It was probably the best job I've ever had, honestly, being a pool manager. Uh, then I've had like a few other leadership [00:16:00] positions within some athletic clubs.
And then space, our visuals were at like 15, 16 people I'm managing right now. So yeah, it's been, it's been a great experience to be able to gain like leadership, leadership, um, skills like at a pretty young age, but yeah, my leadership principles is like always treat people right. And like, always be there for them.
I don't view it as like, if someone works for me, like I tell everyone that I hire this, everyone that I work with, like, if you work for me, like I will look out for your best interests in any way that's possible. Like, what are your personal goals? What are your professional goals? And like, how can I help you get there?
Cause how I view it is if your people succeed, you succeed. It's not you succeed first and then your people succeed. You need to have your people, the people that you hire succeed for you to succeed. So giving them the resources, giving them the time, giving them the energy that they deserve is one of my biggest, like leadership principles.
And I am very grateful for the team at space star visuals. Like they, we've got some amazing people on the scene. I'm so happy. I get to work with, I have great working relationships with, but yeah, you got to make your people successful for you to be successful. [00:17:00]
Leighann Lovely: That's awesome. That's, and you know, a lot of people that I talk with, they always, we talk about the, what we were.
Just talking, you know, the area of genius and then their weaknesses and. Um, helping them leverage that working, that working. And I keep talking about working. It's a book, that anyways, but, um, now I'm in, I have to remember the,
um, and I'm trying to remember, but, um, I can't remember off the top of my head anyways. Um, I talk about this a lot because as I, as a manager, you want to, you want to basically ignore their, their strengths, right? Yeah. Yeah. You. Let them let them fly.
Ryan Atkinson: Yeah.
Leighann Lovely: And then, and then help them with the weaknesses, remove any roadblocks that they may have so that they can continue to fly and succeed.
And we, and I've talked a lot about that, especially, especially [00:18:00] salespeople. Do you manage salespeople?
Ryan Atkinson: Yeah, so we, we have a BDR on our team that I like directly manage. Um, so yeah, I manage him, I guess. Uh, but yeah, Cody, his name's Cody Tran. He's also incredible. Um, I love Cody death. He's good stuff. But yeah, I manage him.
Leighann Lovely: So let's, let's shift a little bit. What do you think that the greatest challenge that you have, have had? Thus far in your career.
Ryan Atkinson: Oh man. The biggest challenge. Um, I think, I don't know the biggest one is, I think we've had some unexpected challenges being like a CEO. Um, honestly, like one of them is just like, quite frankly, like owning up to the role.
Um, like I'm 25 and it's like crazy to think like when I actually talk to people, it's like. And they're like, Oh, what do you do for work? Or like, what's your job title? It's like, I'm a CEO. And so it's acting like a CEO and like actually putting those systems in place. So understanding the duties of like what a effective CEO does.
I'm still learning it every day. Like I am [00:19:00] far from perfect on how I operate here. Um, but I'm learning it every day. Another unexpected challenge, honestly, is hiring. Hiring was one of the, one of the hardest things I have done. Like you just get so many applicants, a lot of them, like, there's some that like really stand out the ones that really stand out, you interview them and like, they're all like kind of the same, so it's like, Oh, who's going to be good?
Like, what do we do? So I would say like owning up to the role and like, Taking ownership of the role is super important, of course, but like, it's just a learning process of like how to be an effective CEO and then also hiring. Hiring has been a very unexpected challenge, but it's something that you absolutely need to get right.
Leighann Lovely: So, and I think hiring is probably the, one of the biggest challenges for any organization. Cause you're right. You have to get it right. Um, because it's, it's, it's. It's extremely expensive to hire somebody and then have to fire somebody if they're not living up to that, to the expectations. And we [00:20:00] all hope that the people that we hire are going to hold themselves accountable the same way that we hold ourselves accountable.
And most entrepreneurs set their own bar, you know, If it's a normal average bar, you know, we're usually like a little bit higher,
Ryan Atkinson: definitely
Leighann Lovely: higher somewhere in the clouds. And everybody's going, why do you put this pressure on yourself? And you're like, I don't, am I?
Ryan Atkinson: Yeah. Yeah.
Leighann Lovely: What do you think? Um, what do you think?
What characteristics do you think that you have that Help those people really, what, what do they see in you that makes them, you know, want to truly succeed for your organization?
Ryan Atkinson: Yeah, that's a great question. I think like they true, like people that truly like work for me, like can feel that, like, I am extremely grateful that anyone that takes a chance on like space bar visuals to like actually work here, like I am incredibly grateful for that.
And I feel like they didn't really feel that they get the. I like to think anyways, obviously I'm saying my own thing. So it's all bias here, but I [00:21:00] like to think I give them like very good support on like what they do. Like, how can I be a resource for you? What do you need from me? Like, how can I help you succeed?
I feel like that's like something I, like I said, like I am very invested in like your own personal development and professional development. And if you're at space art visuals, like I'm going to find a way to make you succeed. I cannot promise I'm going to get you there. Like, I can, I just can't promise that, but I can promise you, like, I'm going to actually Try to get you there.
I'm going to work very hard for you to fulfill all your goals. We, um, I read traction recently. I don't know who the author is. I keep referencing this book, but, uh, traction. Uh, yeah, yeah. And a lot of business owners have read it. It's a very executive book. Um, but they, uh, we got our core values actually from that.
We did like a core values exercise. So next time we do go to hire, like we really do want to. Hire based on our core values and make sure that they're aligning with it.
Leighann Lovely: And what are your core values?
Ryan Atkinson: Yeah. So it's, um, we actually have an acronym, it's, uh, Reflect, Reflect. So it's, uh, resilience, entrepreneurial mindset, have fun, fun, [00:22:00] whatever, um, reflect, uh, make sure I'm saying this right.
L is a leadership, I is integrity, and C is like collaboration. So we want people that have those core values and it's just some of the core values and common characteristics that we have here at Spaceport Visuals.
Leighann Lovely: Right. And that's important. It's important for your team to, to know what is a value to you and to your co founder.
Um, that it's, it sounds like you have created a company that people want to work at
Ryan Atkinson: and
Leighann Lovely: therefore will work harder, right?
Ryan Atkinson: Mm
Leighann Lovely: hmm. And, and I shouldn't say harder work. Um, I, I don't like saying work harder, but right, work smarter and, and do a good job for your organization. So tell me a little bit about, [00:23:00] a little bit more about what your, your company does space bar visuals. Thanks.
Ryan Atkinson: Yeah. So what we do is we are a video production agency.
So we do animated videos. We do like product demos, customer testimonials. We'll do event videos. We'll repurpose like a blog or white paper into like a 60 second video. Um, and yeah, we handle the script writing, the storyboarding, the animation, the voiceover. So, like I said earlier, we work with best with like marketing people, uh, with smaller companies.
And our value proposition like truly is like. You're a marketing director. You wear 30 different hats. You don't have time to do video. You want to do video. We help with all that to make it a really streamlined process for you. So that's truly like. What we do and kind of our value add
Leighann Lovely: all the things that, you know, pretty much every company needs when they're a growing organization and they don't have time to, and that, that goes really well with your previous venture or your, I'm sorry, not previous, [00:24:00] but you're also running the, the other organization, but magic media.
So. It sounds like that marries extremely well with.
Ryan Atkinson: Yeah. I've always been super interested in like media and just like content, I guess you can say that that's always just been something that I've been personally interested in. And yeah, I remember when I spoke with Brandon actually, uh, back in November, 2022, um, we were like, uh, what do we want to do together?
And we were like, well, what are we interested in? And it was like media. We're interested in selling to B2B. We're interested in selling to marketing people. And so we originally came up with three different ideas of either like a ghost writing agency for executives, a newsletter growth agency. A ghost writing, then newsletter growth, and then like a video production agency.
So we wanted to blend our interests. So like media selling to B2B selling to marketers into a company. And so, yeah, that's something I've always just been super interested in. That's more advice I'd give to someone. If you are starting a company, find what you're interested in, know what you're interested in and [00:25:00] create something based on that,
Leighann Lovely: right.
And that's, that's awesome. I mean, um, Marrying those, you know, what you had previously. Been running and then kind of shifting that to almost be able to support clients that you had brought in in the past.
Ryan Atkinson: Exactly. Yeah. And magic media. Um, a lot of that is just like podcasting stuff. Um, so it's been, that started basically from freelancing as well.
Um, just doing like simple, like guest outreach. And I was like, Oh, maybe I should actually create a company that like does all this for. Create a company that does all this for companies. So like guest outreach, podcast production, I'll even host like interviews for companies. So yeah, it's been, it's been a lot.
It's been a lot of media, a lot of content, a lot of video. Um, and I think that's been an intersection of like both of those. So yeah, I'm very. Very media driven, I would say.
Leighann Lovely: Well, and the rise of the rise of social media and the [00:26:00] cons every company that I go to every company that I speak to. And of course, obviously love your sales being a, you know, A sales company where we become salespeople for, you know, we don't do marketing.
And so often those organizations are like, Oh, okay, well, what do we, what should we do on the marketing side? And I'm like, I don't, I I'm a salesperson. Like I know marketing at a high level, but they all want content and they, they want it easily to be able to post on. LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, all of the, and to create, and I don't know, you know, but I'm not sure the audience knows, but all of those different platforms sometimes require different format.
I mean, you can't post the same thing on LinkedIn that you do on, on Twitter. Tick tock.
Ryan Atkinson: Yeah.
Leighann Lovely: Because you have to have a different format and you have to have a different length and you have to have, and so sitting down and [00:27:00] creating all of that is for an entrepreneur, for a small business. It's a nightmare.
Ryan Atkinson: It's a lot. It's too much.
Leighann Lovely: It is. You, you need an entire, another human being just to create. And so you're either hiring an entire marketing team and then when you flex, you need even more and then your marketing team is not only creating all of that stuff, but then on top of that, you're like, Oh, by the way, you have to put this in all of these other formats.
Ryan Atkinson: It's too much. Um, Yeah. So that's what like, we really like hit home on is like, it's for those marketing teams that one video, but just like, don't have that time. Don't have the resources don't have, they just don't have it. So that's why we prefer to work with like those smaller brands. Cause I love talking with like small business owners, um, not small.
Yeah. Like small business owners, mid market, mid, mid market size companies. Uh, just because like, we can relate to them in such a better way. And that's who I, that's why I sold this to at HubSpot. Um, that's just like those conversate people in marketing and sales are like the absolute best. Like [00:28:00] there's so much fun to talk to.
So yeah, that's a definitely hammering home. Like who we're trying to sell to within like the intersection of media and the value points that we're trying to hit on.
Leighann Lovely: Well, and they're the greatest people to talk to because they understand, they understand you go to an owner of an organization and they're like, well, What's my immediate ROI.
And you're like, well, I mean, I can explain the ROI you're getting in front of it, but the immediate ROI it's like,
Ryan Atkinson: it
Leighann Lovely: is because my first podcast that I ever had was for a, for a company I worked at and after it, you know, after like maybe 15 episodes, the owner came to me and goes, okay, can you explain what the ROI is now and how is it going?
And I'm like, uh, well, no, I can't give you what your ROI is yet. Like, we're literally just getting this up and running and we're starting to get views. I'm like, there's not a number to give you yet.
Ryan Atkinson: Yeah, that's um, [00:29:00] podcasting is for any company too. That's smaller. I think I actually think podcasting is like a gem just because one, you get a long form content in a 30 minute video.
You can get short form content, you can get a blog out of it. You get to connect with potentially how you do it. You can connect with your ICP. I think podcasting for small businesses is like a great lead gen magnet to actually get content out in like kind of one way. Um, so that, that's a great investment.
So after 15 episodes, though, it's kind of tough to do it, but still you could get 45 pieces of content out of 15, 15 episodes,
Leighann Lovely: right? And, and you're building a company is building themselves as. An expert in their fields.
Ryan Atkinson: Exactly.
Leighann Lovely: And that company is now becoming, wow. Okay. I, I want to go and talk to that company cause they know exactly what's happening in the market of XYZ.
Ryan Atkinson: Exactly. So
Leighann Lovely: anyways, I digress. Um, I'm, I'm a salesperson too.
Ryan Atkinson: Yeah.
Leighann Lovely: Um, so, you know, we're, we're coming to time. I want to give you, I know we've talked [00:30:00] obviously already a little bit about your background and your company, but I want to give you your 32nd shameless pitch to Get it out there and hopefully get some, some customers out at this, or at least some appointments.
So
Ryan Atkinson: yeah,
Leighann Lovely: go ahead, Ryan.
Ryan Atkinson: Yeah. If you guys are like a sales leader, a business owner, entrepreneur or whatnot, um, we do work with companies similar. We've worked with like ISO, the international standards organization, us army, we've worked with startups like GPR, butter, CMS, Vanta. They're not a startup, but we've worked all these companies to develop some awesome content that they've used on like their website, social media, sales, collateral, email collateral.
Also. If you're looking to build out your sales funnel with like great modern content, then video is a great way to do that. And yeah, we can help you guys do that in a very easy way for you. Um, and I think you'll find that our pricing is much more friendly to you guys compared to some of the bigger names out there.
So yeah, if anyone is interested, yeah, definitely please reach us out at, uh, www dot spacebar visuals. com. Let us know that you listened to this episode and we'll probably cut you a deal. So, uh, yeah, definitely. That's [00:31:00] kind of the little pitch right there of who I am, I guess, and what we do.
Leighann Lovely: Amazing. And, and again, Ryan, how can they contact you?
I know that you just gave your website. Is there any other place that they should reach out to you on?
Ryan Atkinson: Yep. So you guys can reach out as our website, uh, spacebar visuals. com. You can also reach out to me on LinkedIn, Ryan Atkinson, CEO of spacebar visuals. There should only be one. So, uh, it should be pretty easy to find on LinkedIn.
Leighann Lovely: Perfect. And those, um, those, that contact information will be in the show notes. So if anybody does want to reach out to Ryan, you will be able to go right to the show notes and find the website as well as, um, his LinkedIn profile. So, um, Ryan, I really appreciate you coming on and talking with me today.
It's been an amazing conversation.
Ryan Atkinson: Leighann. Thank you so much. This is awesome. A great interview. You did a phenomenal job. So yeah, thank you so much.

Brand Identity and The Force Multiple Every Salesperson Needs

In this episode of "Love Your Sales," host Leighann Lovely chats with Randy Chafee, owner and CEO of Source One Marketing LLC and host of the Building Wins Live podcast. They dive into the importance of building a personal brand in the sales industry, with Randy sharing his journey and innovative strategies such as his memorable "Robo Randy" promotional items. The conversation highlights the value of leveraging social media and blogging to enhance one's professional persona while balancing it with company branding. Randy also emphasizes the crucial role of time-blocking and prioritizing revenue-generating tasks in achieving sales success. Tune in to gain insights on creating a lasting impression and effectively managing your sales efforts.
Contact Randy –
Website – www.ibuyfromrandy.com
LinkedIN - https://www.linkedin.com/in/randychaffee/
 
 
Special Thank you to our Sponsor Genhead – www.genhead.com
 
Robb Conlon – Intro and outro – Westport Studio - https://www.westportstudiosllc.com/
 
The Brave Ones – Instrumental Version Song by Jan Sanejko - https://artlist.io/royalty-free-music/song/the-brave-ones/119489
 
Ready to grow your business? Schedule a call with us today  - https://api.leadconnectorhq.com/widget/bookings/discoverysalesleighann
 Channel Subscribe link - https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC-O7W9DzaRv4waodQKCprIg?sub_confirmation=1
 
#sales #businessdevelopment #entrepreneur #entrepreneurship #selling #relashionships #customerexperience #podcast #loveyoursales #lastingrelashionships #salescareers #salesmanager #salesdevelopment #traininganddevelopment #leadershipdevelopment #salespodcast #salestraining
 
Leighann Lovely: Welcome to another episode of Love Your Sales. I am joined by Randy Chafee. He is the owner and CEO of Source One Marketing LLC,
a respected manufacturer's rep agency with a rich history spanning over four decades. Randy has built a reputation for excellence and reliability. In addition to his success in his, in addition to his successful business venture, Randy is also known for his involvement in various industries, [00:02:00] related activities and organization.
He serves on the board of directors for. For the national frame builders association and the Buckeye frames builders association, where he actively contributes to the growth and development of the industry. Randy's passion for communication and sharing knowledge led him to launch the building wins live podcast, which is awesome, by the way.
And establish himself as a prominent blogger and writer through these platforms. Randy explores topics related to metal roofing, building components and business strategies for providing . Valuable insight in and advice to his audience. Recognizing the importance of building a personal brand.
Randy has been cultivating the Randy Inc brand long before it became a popular trend. His commitment to developing genuine relationships with clients and partners is deeply ingrained a value he learned from [00:03:00] his father at a young age. As a salesman and entrepreneur, Randy has always prioritized offering value 1st and foremost, Randy.
I am so excited to have you come on and talk with me because, um, really what we're going to be talking about is. Building that personal brand. So welcome.
Randy Chaffee: Well, thank you, Leighann. Appreciate that. And, and thanks for having me on. And, you know, we talked off air about what we wanted to talk about and man, this is right up the, right in the wheelhouse of what I, I enjoy.
I mean, I love the, my industry, right. And I love my products and my manufacturers and obviously my customer friends, but I just, you hit us, you just nailed it. You know, the building that personal brand is, is so important and it's so missed by so many really, really good salespeople. And, and what they could do, however good they are, what they could accomplish, if they would work on building that personal brand.
And if they're not anywhere near where they want to be. All my, they haven't even scratched the surface, but so [00:04:00] thank you for having me on and thank you for sort of talking about something that I'm passionate about.
Leighann Lovely: Yeah, it's, it, for those who have really started or those who have like locked in how to do that, it, it feels like, well, God, it's so obvious why aren't you doing this?
But there is a large, well, majority of people out there who are not leveraging The world that we live in now, social media, the networking, the, and, and you had said a phrase here that I was like, Oh my God, that's so the, the social, um, force multipliers. Is that the phrase you use?
Randy Chaffee: Yeah. Yeah. I, and I just use force multiplier in general and, and, but, but you can add social to it, but it, everything that we're doing.
And everything you and I've talked about, and when you was on building was live not long ago, we talked about the same thing. If you, if you [00:05:00] take all the virtual, all the digital, all the social, all those things, and use those is such a compounding effect. That, uh, and it becomes a force multiplier, a 10 X, 100 X, 1000 X.
I don't know how many, how many zeros you want to put on that as a lot. And it's not that hard and it's fun. And it takes a very little time comparatively to what a lot of people think. One thing that I explained to people a lot of times is, man, you must spend it. I, we see all the time. You must spend so much time.
I spend some time. Of course, if it's worth doing, you spend some time with it, but the amount of time that it would appear that I spend versus the time that I actually spend, uh, is, is, is, is small really for, and the benefit is huge. I spend a few minutes putting together a. A blog or a post or write an article or articles take longer, but you know what I'm saying?
A lot of the [00:06:00] digital stuff we do It's it's two and a half minutes of a thought pops in my head and I grab my phone literally Writing down the road and do a quick video boom boom post it out to all platforms And I just talked to thousands of people While I'm still driving down the road to my next in person contact, right?
Leighann Lovely: And there are a lot of people who, who, I mean, they, they do their podcasts while they're and I don't necessarily recommend this, but they do their podcasts while they're in their car and all of a sudden they're. Like, oh, I have this brilliant idea. I got to get this. I got to get it recorded. Um, and, but you're right.
There's people out there and they're like, oh, my God, how much time do you spend creating all this content? Because you're all over the place. And I, I see you on tick tock. I see you here. And I'm like, yeah, but you can create one really solid piece of contact content and then slice that up. And put it everywhere and people are like, Oh my gosh, I mean, how much it [00:07:00] really, once you figure out how to do it, and that was the struggle that I had was, how do I even begin?
Like, where do I, what do I use to create? If it's, if writing is your thing, if creating a video is your thing, where do you, how do you begin? And then get it down to a science where you're like, oh, this is going to take me five minutes. Um, I can bang this out. I can get this thought out and then I can, I'll have three pieces of, of great content that I can use in different platforms, different ways that have, and here's the important thing and have value to an audience, you know, And, and for the most part, if you are intelligent, if you are, you know, giving value, you're going to find an audience that is going to be interested.[00:08:00]
Randy Chaffee: Absolutely. Absolutely.
Leighann Lovely: You know, obviously there's caveats to that, but how did you start? I mean, you said you started long before you even realized that you were,
Randy Chaffee: you know, I'll tell you the very first bit of brand ambassadorship. That we did was, uh, was way back and I don't say way back, uh, 20 years ago, which is way back in the world of what we're talking about.
Right? Um, We, uh, we developed this, um, it's a really funny quick story. So my, my, uh, business manager, my agency's also happens to be my wife. And, um, she came up with this really brilliant idea. We was going to give away these little apothecary jars with candy in them, with a, with a source one marketing logo and my, one of my taglines, which is if we ain't got it, you don't need it.
Cause I just thought that was funny and kind of to the point, [00:09:00] right. Um, because I used that with the customer once when. I, they, I said, well, you don't need that. And I said, what do you mean? I don't need that. I said, cause you don't need that. And they go, I still don't understand because I don't have it. I ain't got it.
So you don't need it. It was a joke type thing, right? And so we took that and put it on there. We was branding it. And this was idea was to just put it out for Christmas, right? A little gift to get all the sales guys at a location and all that. Well, quickly we came upon, why don't I just refill these every time I call on customers?
And so we started buying the great big. Bags of hard candies, right? That I could pack in a suitcase or, or if I'm traveling from car, from home office, for example, started going in and filling up their jar every time I'm in and became a thing. I mean, sometimes I'd walk in and they'd literally set it out on their desk.
Right. Uh, they'd call up and you know, it was working Leighann. When they, I'd had a customer one time. I remember they called up and they said, [00:10:00] we've got a real problem. I said, well, you know, as a customer, I knew pretty well. I said, well, I'm sure you do. You are a problem. What do you got? They go. My candy jars, my candy jars empty.
I said, I said, so I'll fix that. And then one other time, I didn't get to a customer by the end of the day. I told him I may stop by. I may not just depends. There was nothing we really needed to do. I didn't make it. So I call, I sent him a text. I'm not going to make it. He goes. Well, that's too bad. I mean, really didn't need anything other than my candy jars empty.
So I went to a dollar general or someplace now. Wasn't, I think I went to a Walmart and I elevated my game slightly from dollar general. So I went to Walmart and I got a little bag of candy and I went and I set it by the front step and put a card on it. And I had a little stapler in my car. I stapled my card to it.
And I, I sent him a text. I says, Make sure you go by your front door the first thing in the morning before anybody else does and so [00:11:00] I still left on the candy. So that's my first start with this idea of building the identity of Randy and, uh, and, and really probably actually, as I think about it, Leighann, it might go back a little before that.
Now that we're talking, because my website, I have several for the rep agency. But the one that I use for everything is I buy from randy. com or. net or whatever else dots we got. Um, and because what's the most important thing, and I use this as a joke, right? What's the most important thing for you to remember?
Do I buy from you? Yes. I buy from randy. com. That's all you got to remember. So that was probably actually, as I think about it, even slightly before the apothecary jars. And then from there, just, it just made sense to just, you know, and, and, and this is an area of that. If your personality is such that you're, uh, hesitant to think this way, you got to get over it.[00:12:00]
It's okay to be A shameless self promoter, if you do it the right way and you do it the right intention.
Leighann Lovely: I absolutely agree. Um, if you're doing it the right way, people are, people like you, if you're doing it the wrong way, people are usually running from you. Right. Um. But if you're doing it and that's what you're explaining is a shameless self promoter, but you're doing it in a way that people are like, Oh, I like Randy.
Like I buy from Randy and there's that, that a little bit of humor in that. There's a little bit of, you know, and they know what, every time somebody grabs a piece of candy out of there, they know where it came from. You're top of mind at that point.
Randy Chaffee: Absolutely.
Leighann Lovely: You're, you're always top of mind. And that, that, those little gimmicky things.
Become part of, part of their routine, part of their day they become. [00:13:00] And that, I mean, that's, it's a, it's brilliant. There's no way around it. It's absolutely brilliant. It's I once, um, you know, back in the day when you were still not road warriors were still knocking on doors, which there are still, but after COVID things changed a great deal.
I mean, I'll be honest. After COVID. I never really got back to being that true road warrior while I was knocking on doors. I think that kind of ended and, um, And it's, it's slowly gotten back out there, especially in a lot of industries. It's finally in full force, but for a long time, even after that, there, you know, companies were locking their doors so that you couldn't even walk in
Randy Chaffee: exactly
Leighann Lovely: like, okay.
You know, the tchotchkes that my company at that time would give me were like these pens that had like, you know, a little person with the hair, you know, like, Um, and then I had one that was a backscratcher, right? And I, [00:14:00] I had a client that became a client called me like six months after I had dropped off this stupid backscratcher and he goes, I'm calling you.
And he goes, you want to know why my, my three sons were in the back all arguing and driving me crazy. I was ready to just kick them all out of the car on the way home. And he goes, then I saw this stupid backscratcher that you had. And he goes, and I threw it back into the back car and I'm like, just play with this.
And he goes, and they all shut up and they all were now playing with this backscratcher and he goes, man, I really should call her. And I was like, seriously, that's how I got this appointment.
Randy Chaffee: That's amazing.
Leighann Lovely: But it's, it's those things that keep you top of mind.
Randy Chaffee: They do.
Leighann Lovely: And, and I'm not, you know, again, I'm Yes, that those stupid little tchotchkes, those, it is that [00:15:00] consistency of like, here's something, here's, you know, and every company tries to find that perfect little stupid tchotchke thing or whatever it might be, but it truly is when you, you're consistent.
Um, and you, and again, I'm also talking about like the company branding, but you need to find what your personal brand is, what sets you and, and I'm, everybody who knows me knows that I love the color purple, right? My logo is purple. I had my hair dyed at one point, not my whole head, but I had a streak of purple in my hair, you know, the heart, which came out of my last name, lovely, you All of that, like it's, it's me, that is totally my, you know, when I do postings on LinkedIn, I have a heart, I have, you know, purple.
It's, those are the things that [00:16:00] help people stand out in some way.
Randy Chaffee: Exactly. And it's, you know, and, and, and another really good example is you just talk and thinking about the Chotsky stuff. One time we got this little robo Randy, I call him. It was one of those little, remember Gumbo or Gumby or whatever.
There's this little robot like guy with, you could flex his arms and it had a little, uh, you, you pulled the little tab out of it and it's got a little, uh, um, hock in it, right? And so you could fold it. So what I would do is I take, you know, a pen and stick it in the one hand and in a, I'd set it with a business card in the other hand, and I'd walk in and set it on the guy's desk, right?
And give it to him. And people love that because it was goofy and had I buy from Randy on, on his belly, right? And it was, it was different, it was goofy. Everybody else gave him some pads and a pen and I do that too. But yeah, okay. That's I'll put that in a pile of a thousand other pens and pads I've got.
Right. And, and plus what I [00:17:00] found with pads and pens is most companies nowadays have their own anyways, they'd rather be handing out their own as opposed to mine. But the funny thing is that was years ago, Leighann and the other day, a great customer friend of mine, we go back 25 years, sends me a picture out of the he says.
Look what I found and it's a picture of this and it was like, I, so I posted it because it was like, this works.
Leighann Lovely: Absolutely. And people keep for, they'll keep sending. You know, I, there was times where I had like so many mugs from so many different companies and I'm, and don't get me wrong, like most of them are like these cheap mugs and there's a time and a place where you go out and you invest in for your clients or your customers, the nice ones, right?
Because they will [00:18:00] keep the nice ones and your branding will exist. For a long time running, or it's the goofy stuff that they're like, Oh my God, I can't get rid of this. It's exactly. It's too awesome. Like, and there were stuff that I had from years ago that I was like, I just can't. I mean,
Randy Chaffee: yeah, you never get rid of that.
Leighann Lovely: It's, you know, there's just goofy things where you're like, oh, I can't, I don't know, why would I throw it away? It's funny. It's it's, it's my daughter always tries to steal it, but those are like, anyways. Okay. We're, we're getting on a tangent. So let's, let's talk more now. Like, because. Blogging and social media and how do you, when you're out there speaking, when you're out there giving talks, how do you recommend, how do you teach, train people to utilize social to [00:19:00] really push themselves forward, especially if they are an employee?
How do you, you know, explain that you don't have to just brand yourself as. an employee, but you can level up as an individual selling a product for a company?
Randy Chaffee: Well, a great question. And it's so key to remember it's like basic one on one in sales. People buy from people, even if it's B2B, which is the world I live in.
It's still P2P. There's still a, a Buyer, whatever title they have, and there's still a seller, whatever title we have, but it's still you and me at the end of the day, unless it's these trillion dollars sealed bid deals. And that that's a whole different game, but that's not what any of us would do. It's still people buying for people.
So I think. You know, a statement that I wish I could remember to give him [00:20:00] credit for, but, uh, uh, if all things being equal, people buy from who they like, know, and trust, right? And I think that's very true. All things being equal, they're not going to buy from you, even though you're 700 percent higher, regardless, right?
There's, there's, there's factors. The more relationship building we do, the less. It becomes transactional because the problem we all have in the sales world, right? That's one of the scariest words. There is that T word transactional. If all we become as a transaction, we always lose on that because either we won today.
And I'm getting off the subject, but we won today because we just happened to be too cheap, apparently, or, or whatever the case may be. But we're only going to have that business probably until the next salesperson comes in that's a little bit cheaper. Uh, it's because there's no draw to buying from Randy or for buying from Leighann, right?
So we have to very quickly [00:21:00] develop a persona. And continue to foster that persona that, and you develop it by doing, not just telling, but you got to do it, but you also got to tell that you're doing it in a way that's not in their face. And that's where social media, I think becomes, uh, so powerful. I think it's where blogging and writing and, and doing talks shows.
If you get a chance, wherever that expertise takes you, the more you're in front of people and in, in, in a non intrusive way, in a non sales way. In other words, stop selling. And just be there as that expert, that, that trusted advisor. We use that term a lot. I think it's very true. The more we do those things in front of people with no sales efforts right now, I'm not trying to sell you anything.
I'm just here to talk to you all the day about X, whatever X is. I think the more we do those things, the more we naturally build trust. Our [00:22:00] personal brand and I, and, and, and when I'm talking about building a personal brand, I never, whether you're a work for a company or you're an independent agent, as I am, you always have to respect a, the wishes of who you work for, whether it's contractually as I do, or, or I guess contractually too, but, uh, you know, as a salesperson, uh, for a particular company, as an employee, you still got to honor those wishes.
Uh, and, and maybe fight those a little bit if you need to, if they don't understand what you're trying to do, but as far as you can go with that, maybe a little farther, you really need to push their brand, right? But also my brand, because the example, my, my rep agency is Source One Marketing. I never call them and say, Hey, this is Randy of Source One Marketing.
Ever. Say ever, probably ever. It's always just Randy.
Leighann Lovely: Right.
Randy Chaffee: Because the brand is just Randy. Hey, this is Randy, right? It's, it's, and this is getting way, [00:23:00] so I don't think I'm Michael Jordan in the sports world, in the entertainment world. That's the ultimate, right? Is if you say Michael, you know what you mean.
If you say magic, you know who they mean. You want to try to get to a point in your little niche, right? That, that I, that thus my, my website, iBuyFromRandy. I can't remember what the name of his, uh, I know the manufacturers, cause if I'm doing my job, I'm also going to be promoting my manufacturers full. Why would you not?
They're, they're, they're big names. You want to use all the marketing they do as well, right? To co exist, to cross pollinate with each other. But, um, most people would say, I think I know a guy I'm going to call Randy. And I think if you do it long enough and you do it well enough and you never are putting It's like the, the chase for perfection.
We're going to always chase it and we'll never reach it because [00:24:00] it's a line in the sand that continues to move and it should, that makes us get better. But if you're doing it and chasing perfection as much as you can, one of my favorite calls I get, uh, Leighann is when they'll come say, Hey, Randy, but we'll do a little chit chat.
Say, I assuming you probably don't have this. But I know you're the guy to call to find out either a, do you, or can you help me figure out where to get it? I will jump on that. I'll call competitors. I'll call anybody I can call to try to get that information for them, because that to me is probably one of the best calls you're going to get.
Okay, I'm a sales guy. I'll say, Hey, I'd like to order three truckloads of your product. That's kind of the best, right? That's right. Honest, right? But well, beyond that. Because that tells me that they believe in me, they trust me, and they believe the two things that I want them to get out of any social media, any [00:25:00] virtual, any digital, any in person stuff that I do is I am fun, friendly, a bit quirky and goofy at times, but I'm a pro and I know what I'm doing and I'll take care of you.
And if I can get that across. And so everything that I do. In any social media, digital writing, anything that, anything that I do is always geared to that end game. And, and as long as you keep doing that, um, you, you'll just continue to grow your reputation, I guess, within your industry and be the go to person.
And that's really what you want to be, right?
Leighann Lovely: Right. And, and, and you said reputation and that's what it comes down to is if you're creating a reputation for everything that you just explained, the, the go to person, the, the trusted advisor, the, the person that knows the guy or knows where to go to get the, [00:26:00] that's, the spot where you want to, to be, always want to be, right? Absolutely. Even if somebody's calling you knowing that you, you don't have what they need. But they know that, you know, where to go, who to call, what to do, how to get it.
Um, that is, that's, that's spot on.
Randy Chaffee: Yeah. You can't get, you can't get any better now, really?
Leighann Lovely: No. And those are the calls that, you know, I, I still, you know, I come from an HR world, right? I'm still getting people calling me going, Hey, can you help me solve this HR problem?
Randy Chaffee: Oh, sure.
Leighann Lovely: No. Like, but sure. Why not?
Randy Chaffee: I'll give you a little advice.
I may not have said this, but here's what you might want to do.
Leighann Lovely: Right. Because you know, in my previous life, that's how I branded myself. And then I did that shift and I'm like, and it was scary because when you're known so well in your community one way and you shift and go, okay, well, I'm going [00:27:00] to. I'm going to go from HR lady to sales lady, people go, wait, wait, I'm confused.
Um, and for me, the pivot was easy because I was a salesperson in the HR world. And then it was just like, Hey guys, you know that I was actually selling the HR services. I wasn't the HR. I know I have an HR background, but, and they went, Oh yeah, right. Okay. We get it. But again, that's powerful when, when people know you so well, one way, and.
You know, they just, they're like, I'll just call her because she knows somebody you want. You want to be the person that knows the person or has the solution.
Randy Chaffee: That's
Leighann Lovely: when you know, you've gotten to the next level.
Randy Chaffee: Right. And so, and, and, and you can't, uh, you can't even begin for people that want to quantify everything.
And I, I get reasons for doing that and I'm not as much of [00:28:00] a quantifier as, as maybe I should be. And maybe as some people are, but. I happen to believe some things just fall into that, that, that black hole I realized, but they just are what they are.
Leighann Lovely: And,
Randy Chaffee: and I believe when you come to giving back, doing the right stuff, whatever that is, that you can't always quantify that.
And you shouldn't even try to quantify that. I think if you just have to live with the idea that, that, um, if I continue to do this all the time and that's how I do it every day, at the end of the day, I'm just going to be way better off than if I didn't. And you just got to roll with that.
Leighann Lovely: Yes. And, and that is also what you just said, really hard for salespeople.
Um, because, well, I mean, let's just be honest. Salespeople are kind of, ah, spazzy. Oh,
Randy Chaffee: they [00:29:00] know that we are, we're a weird breed, I will say that.
Leighann Lovely: So in the beginning for me to be like, okay, I got to do this. I got to do, and here's my advice for, you know, some of the younger salespeople listening, um, if you're not already doing this, you need to start immediately.
Um, especially in the beginning of being a salesperson, time blocking on your calendar is going to be what. Um, really it's, it's going to put you at next level if you're not already doing that. Um, because until you become a seasoned salesperson that is capable of just do, and even seasoned salespeople do time blocking, um, I still have to do it otherwise I'm not, I'm not functioning.
I'm, I'm going, what am, where am I supposed to be right now? And I've got 3 million things going through my head and the fun stuff always goes to the top and the stuff that is not as much fun. And, you know, Never seems to [00:30:00] get done because that's the way that salespeople think is that we'll do the stuff that we enjoy doing and we'll push off all the other stuff.
And usually for salespeople, that's cold calling. That's their prospecting. That's there. We're always chasing. Oh, this one I know is going to close. So I'm just going to follow up. Well, what happens with that is your pipeline then dries up and you're wondering why in 30 days, 60 days, 90 days, you have no prospects, right?
Time blocking is one of the most important aspects to being successful. And that means, Hey, if you need to put an hour to the side to create your material. And if you work at a company, here's what's great. Your company probably already has intellectual, intellectual material that you can use for posting on social medias and platforms.
You just need to put your own spin on it, put your own verbiage to it, put your own fun flair to it. Right. And then you're [00:31:00] time blocking for your cold calling, you're time blocking for your contract writing, following up and all of that other fun stuff. And so I don't know how I got down that tangent, but.
Randy Chaffee: No, it's a great point though. I, because I, I have, I, I time block every day. That doesn't mean because one of the things that's in my phone every morning at seven 30 automatic doesn't mean I do anything with it at seven 30, but it's a reminder to myself that whatever I did the night before, which is at seven 30 needed being as prepare.
Cause I always believe in prepping, you know, today started yesterday, if not before, but at minimum yesterday, if you get up at whatever time and get a few coffees and that's about seven, seven 30, I suppose, what should I do today? Oh, you've already lost
Leighann Lovely: or
Randy Chaffee: you're not going to be near as effective as you could have been.
Leighann Lovely: So I'm still in bed.
You're an early bird.
Randy Chaffee: I'm a little bit, a little bit. But my, the point is [00:32:00] I like to prepare or make sure I'm prepared the night before. Now, if I'm doing it right, and I don't always do it right, but if I'm as prepared as I should be, I may have to do nothing, but look at that and go, are you prepared for the morning?
I look at my calendar tomorrow. Yup. Yup. Good for that. I've got that ready. That's on my desk. I know I've got to be up at seven o'clock or five 45, whatever the case is. Right. You're going no way. But, um, but when the morning comes, I have adapt. And that's to remind myself that I may block off things, for example, because I'm a believer that he who adapts wins.
And as, as focused as we need to be, as important as we need to be with focusing on the items that are important. For example, if I put in follow up with Leighann on. The quote I sent you now, if I had an exact time to do that, of course I need to do that, but if it was like, this is the time I'm, I sat, went [00:33:00] after I talked to you last week, you know, have given you time to review it, got the samples I sent you, whatever, that's a.
I plugged in to do. That's what I'm going to do unless 15 minutes before that this customer sends me a text says, Hey, I'm ready to get this order. Go and give me a call or you got to call me right now because I don't know what you guys did, but you just screwed me up every which way, but loose. I am not that all sudden took precedent, right?
That doesn't mean I don't call Leighann. It just means now I slide it over to a different time. That's all. So I think it's important to, I love the time blocking cause I do it, but I always try to do it based on the fact that there's, there's the negotiables and non negotiables, right? Right. Teams meeting with a manufacturer, it's pretty much a non negotiable, even though with that said, they would always understand if I sent them a quick text and say, Hey, I just got this guy just called out of the blue and he's losing his mind over something I got to take care of.
Oh God. Right. Customers come first. Right. Right. But, [00:34:00] but you know, I wouldn't. Right. Just say, well, I got this team's call that came in with a manufacturer. They want to talk about a new price increase, but I'm still going to call Leanna fall upon a quote. No, I'm going to take the team's call because that's non negotiable at that point.
So I think you're right though. The time blocking, uh, is because if you don't, you're right. We, by nature, Oh, believe me, you give me, I try to live a very fit, healthy lifestyle. I like living that way, but if you give me a choice, Between a Hershey's chocolate bar and a yogurt, I'm going to probably take the Hershey's chocolate bar.
Leighann Lovely: And you're, you're, you're absolutely right when you say the non negotiables and the negotiables. There's what I like to say is the revenue generating tasks need to take precedence, customers, customer satisfaction, customer, um, that is a revenue generating task. Like that is absolutely first and [00:35:00] foremost, keeping your clients and your customers accountable.
Happy or they won't stay. So that is, that goes in the bucket of revenue generating tasks, right? And that is how I organize my brain. What are the, what are the tasks that are revenue generating, but what is also as an entrepreneur, what are the tasks that keeps my business running? So there's also a level of priority, like, right.
I have to do a certain thing as an entrepreneur. Now, if you're an employee, you're, you don't have to worry about those things. You just need, you need to worry about customer satisfaction, keeping them happy, but then you need to be doing revenue generate and I'm. Using my hand here, you need to be doing revenue generating tasks at as much as you possibly can and staying away from getting in the weeds of, oh, I need to go and research this client before I call them so that I understand them.
And you haven't even made your 1st call and an hour later, you're still on their website or [00:36:00] wait, you got lost looking at a cat video. Now, your boss is wondering why you haven't made a single call. And trust me, we've all done it.
Randy Chaffee: Yes, we have.
Leighann Lovely: Maybe it's not a cat video. Maybe it's a dog or somebody making, you know, hacks, household hacks, whatever it might be.
Yes. We've all gone, Oh crap. I just wasted an hour when my intent was just to simply see what this company
Randy Chaffee: You know, you're what my worst one is right now is, is, you know, I have some customers that I follow on, on, on Tik TOK, right. And I do some stuff on Tik
Leighann Lovely: TOK
Randy Chaffee: and I'm okay until I see Caitlin Clark video come up playing basketball.
I, I, I, I'm going to lose an hour if I don't watch what I'm doing, because I'm going to watch every single one because I'm so amazed at the, at the talent of this, of this, of Of this young lady. Right? Right. And I can't, I watch one and it becomes, well, there's [00:37:00] another one. Oh, well, there's another one. Well, there's another one.
And it's all of a sudden, what did I get on here for now? So I'm as guilty of that as ever. I mean, and, and, and I don't know about you, but an hour can fly by awful fast when you get to doing that stuff.
Leighann Lovely: Oh yeah. Oh yeah. I look at the clock and I'm like, Oh my, I'm going to be late. I, I, I've got something that I've got
Randy Chaffee: exactly, and
Leighann Lovely: I was supposed to block this for cold calling.
Randy Chaffee: Yeah, exactly. You know what? It's, it's amazing. So, but, but that's part of, that's part of, that's part of learning who's the most important person to manage. My opinion is yourself. Right. Oh yeah. And that's part of managing yourself. Cause I, I know that if I get too far into stuff like that, I will literally set a reminder in my phone to go off and in 15 minutes.
And I look and I go, why is that going? Oh, I had something else I met to do you dummy, you know, but you almost got to break that reverie right of, of, uh, cause boy, it's, it's easy to get into that. Um, [00:38:00] and, and, and being a. A believer in and a lover of the force multiplying effects that we've talked to social, it's easy for me to get into that and then not get myself back out of it because I, I'm in there all the time.
Leighann Lovely: I've lost days because, and you're right, because I also am posting on Tik TOK and posting on Facebook. I've lost, I've lost a half a day where I'm like, I'm like, All I meant to do was go and update this post and somehow I'm watching household kitchen hacks or household hacks and I don't even care about them, but they're wildly interesting.
Randy, we are coming to time. I want to give you your 32nd shameless pitch, um, before we wrap up.
Randy Chaffee: Well, I appreciate that. Thank you for the time. This is a fun, fun conversation. If you're not, my shameless pitch is this, I'm Randy. Uh, building wins live, uh, podcast about once a week on Fridays. We drop them.
Leighann was just on, I think we drop you shortly. I don't know when this show [00:39:00] is going to drop, but, um, may have already been out by the time this drops, but we had a great sales conversation. Um, coming up with a new YouTube channel right now. Let's chat with Randy, which is going to be very industry based for the metal roofing and post frame industry.
Uh, like we talked source, one marking is my rep agency and we're in the metal roofing and, uh, post train building world. And I, uh, I also, as you said, do a lot of writing, a lot of talking, working on a book. Um, just a big believer in social media and a big believer in the force multiplying effect. And if I can ever help anybody, I love to talk about all these subjects.
And there's, I, I network, I love networking. So if you have an interest in chatting about anything, I'm always open. iBuyFromRandy.com is the easiest way to get ahold of me. You find my name anywhere on social media, it's probably going to be me. So, uh, that's it. I just. Love to love what I do and do what I love.
It's good stuff.
Leighann Lovely: Randy, thank you so much for joining me today. Um, your contact information will be in the show notes. So [00:40:00] if you're looking to reach out to Randy, you can find his contact information on the show notes. So thank you so very much. Thank you. It's been amazing.
Randy Chaffee: Awesome stuff. Thank you much.
 

Mastering the Dance: Juggling W2 Roles and Entrepreneurship

This episode of we are joined by Scott Jacobson, founder of Onward Equity and a seasoned CPA with over 20 years of experience. Scott shares his unique journey of balancing his W2 role as a controller for a medical supply sales company while simultaneously growing his entrepreneurial ventures in real estate investing. He discusses the challenges and rewards of managing these dual roles and offers insights into the mindset needed to thrive in both. Scott also delves into his passion for real estate, the importance of stepping out of your comfort zone, and how he is helping others achieve financial freedom through passive real estate investments. Tune in for an inspiring conversation about resilience, growth, and the power of leveraging both your skills and your network to achieve success.
 
Contact Scott –
Website – www.onward-equity.com
LinkedIn – linkedin.com/in/scott-jacobson-cpa-47a605270
 
Leighann Lovely: Welcome to another episode of love your sales today. I am joined by Scott Jacobson. He is the founder of Onward Equity. Scott is a CPA and has been the controller for a medical supply sales company for the past 20 years. He also has 22 years of experience in active real estate investing, ranging from.
Single family homes and duplexes to large multifamily apartment buildings [00:02:00] and a medical professional office building. In 2013, Scott and his wife Denise founded a 501c3 nonprofit charity called the Sons Foundation or SON Foundation, which serves as a home away from home for cancer patients and their caregivers while they are in Indianapolis for treatments. Scott, I am so thrilled to have you join me today and, uh, and, and talk with me.
Scott Jacobson: Thank you, Leanne.
It's, it's an honor and it's a privilege. I appreciate you taking the time to chat with me today.
Leighann Lovely: Yeah. Looking forward
Scott Jacobson: to it.
Leighann Lovely: So you are not only a entrepreneur, but you are also a W 2 employee. Is that right?
Scott Jacobson: That's correct. Yeah, it's, it's, uh, an interesting dance sometimes trying to balance the two, but, uh, you know, I've, I've done both of them concurrently for, like you said, about [00:03:00] 20 years and, uh, I enjoy them both.
So, so far I've been able to, uh, uh, kind of manage them both at the same time and they give different, uh, different excitements to me, I guess, different parts of my life.
Leighann Lovely: That's amazing. And I have to say that that can be an extreme challenge for a lot of people because you really have to have it. Well, and some people have to have, you know, two different mindsets.
However, I will say that often in conversations that I have with people, sales individuals often have that entrepreneurial mindset to begin with. Right. So coming from that, you know, kind of sales background, if you come from a sales background, you already have that entrepreneurial spirit built into you, but you really, you come from, [00:04:00] You're the controller.
You are? Yes. . You know the, the CPA, the numbers guy? Yeah. The, the guy that
Scott Jacobson: sits in the back office and , uh, the stereotype is you, you, you sit and you don't talk to anybody and you don't, uh, no one bothers you and you don't bother anyone. Right? ? I try to be the anti CPA, to be honest. Uh, I'm not a big fan of the.
The connotation there.
Leighann Lovely: Well, so let's talk about that because that's definitely, you know, the, the stereotype is the numbers person, the numbers guy, the numbers gal, who's more of the introvert. So you're definitely swimming against the current here. When we, when we're talking about that true entrepreneurial spirit, the person who's out there selling themselves, let's, let's talk about, you know, how you've managed these two very different in some people's minds and in mind, because, and again, it's, I'm not saying it's not possible, [00:05:00] obviously it's possible, but the Terry, the stereotypical type is.
Those don't play well
Scott Jacobson: together,
Leighann Lovely: correct? So yeah, let's, let's dive into this. Let me tell, you know, tell me a little bit about what you've, you know, how you've reconciled these two different disciplines.
Scott Jacobson: Sure. Yeah. And so you're, obviously you're exactly right. They, on, on the service, they don't really mesh well together.
Right. And, um, I've always kind of considered, well, I've recently, Became, I guess, maybe more self evident to consider myself. I think there was a specific term for it, but it's either, uh, an extroverted introvert or introverted extrovert. Like I kind of, I definitely have, uh, parts of both I think in me. Um, but the, the entrepreneurial, uh, kind of bug for me started my first job when I got, when I was old enough or when I got my license.
I had a lawn mowing business to where, uh, I, I would, [00:06:00] I think at the height, I had 30, over 30 lawns that I was mowing. And I had, uh, I remember my, my mom helped me and we made some flyers and I put them up at the local restaurant or. Movie store back when there were movie stores. And, um, you know, I had to, I had to figure out how to, at that point, really get out of my shell.
I haven't, hadn't figured out that I enjoyed that kind of thing yet, but, uh, that was my first kind of foray into the entrepreneurship. Uh, and I loved it because at the time I realized that my friends at that point, you know, in high school were, were going to their, their jobs and they were being told when, when they had to be there.
And, uh, honestly, I was making a little bit more dollars than they were at that point because I was working for myself. So it was, you know, I, I saw it as a, as a win win, uh, and, and that was kind of really what planted the seed for me to. The entrepreneurial spirit, I guess you could say, but I've always, you know, as we've talked about it, I've got [00:07:00] that, that other side of me that, um, doesn't, that enjoys numbers and doesn't mind sitting at a desk for a while and kind of working through those as well.
So it's, it's been an interesting journey, I guess, to say, to sum it up.
Leighann Lovely: Right. I find it. I find it really interesting when you. When people start at such a young age with, I love it. I love when you hear about these young kids, you know, figuring my daughter always talks about, I want to have a lemonade stand.
And I'm like, okay, you know, let's have a lemonade. Go
Scott Jacobson: for it.
Leighann Lovely: Go for it. Go be an entrepreneur. Last night, actually, she said to me, she, she did this hand motion that, you know, the, the money hand motion and she goes, if you want to kiss and I'm like, what? And like, we're, we're charging for kisses, like, what's the, what is going on?
I'm like, this kid is like, she's six, but I, I find it wildly, you know, clever and interesting when kids [00:08:00] start realizing the value of money and then try to put that into the real world. Right. Try to figure out how do I, how do I monetize? Uh, at such a young age to like high school age, like, Oh, okay. I can go mow people's lawns on my own schedule.
And I can actually make more money than my friends who right now are working at the gas station or the fast food restaurant for six 50 or whatever it was at that time. I'm going to guess that you're in my, you know, my age group, which was like minimum wage back then was like 6 and 50 cents or actually I think my first job was like 4 Something, you know, it was like four bucks an hour.
Who would work for 4 an hour? That's what it was. And you're right. I mowed a couple lawns and every lawn I mowed, I got 25 bucks like, and it took me an hour.
Scott Jacobson: Yeah. Or less,
Leighann Lovely: less depending on the size of it. [00:09:00] I mean, I was like, totally rolling in the king of the
Scott Jacobson: hill, queen of the hill,
Leighann Lovely: right? Right. And you go, wow, okay, I can do that for 25 or 20, you know, 20 bucks a lawn, which to most people, Hey, here's 20 bucks.
You mowed my lawn. You just, you know, So I think that's the one thing that has, you know, I think that's the one thing that has eliminated the irritation of me having to do that. And for me,
Scott Jacobson: it was, uh, I had a great situation to where I, I locked into, you know, having a mower that I could use and transfer transportation, which was huge.
Of course, but for me, I guess it, once I realized that, yes, it was taking the burden off of somebody else. But I also had to grow that, that it was a business, right. I thought about it as business. So I knew if I just had one or two, then, you know, that, that would take care of me for a morning. But if I really wanted it to be a job that I had to really go out and kind of hit the streets a little bit and figure out how to, to grow [00:10:00] the network, ask for referrals, that type of thing.
So, uh, I, I stayed, I stayed busy, but I was within my, uh, I'm pretty sure I And, and total less hours than, than my friends at that point. And, uh, again, got to make my own schedule and got to, uh, you know, enjoy the benefits of a higher hourly wage as well.
Leighann Lovely: So you, and how old were you at this point?
Scott Jacobson: Uh, so I just got my license, so I guess 16.
Leighann Lovely: 16.
Scott Jacobson: Yeah. Right. And I think I did it for three summers, two and a half summers, maybe as I, I can't remember how the, whenever I left for college, obviously I couldn't do it again, but, uh, yeah, I
Leighann Lovely: That's, that's amazing. So you got the entrepreneurial bug and then you went to school and you became a CPA.
Scott Jacobson: Yes.
And. And. And that's, there's definitely a connotation there. And, and I, in a lot of ways I fit it, you know, mentally, but I've always kind of, I've resisted that, resisted the connotation because I, uh, I've always [00:11:00] had that, that entrepreneurial mindset as well, even like I said, I've been in the current role for almost 20 years.
Uh, at the medical sales company and, um, working with the, the owners, talk with them. I do my best to kind of think like, like they think and, and to, to figure out how to not just, you know, crunch numbers, uh, but to, to help run the business, uh, to the extent that I can from, from the seat that I'm sitting in.
Leighann Lovely: And that is, um, that's a powerful thing to, to be able to use numbers to scale a business. Is extremely, it's extremely powerful because numbers speak, I mean, they speak in black and white. And if you review them and understand them properly, and you will hear that, you know, from my audience, um, you know, previous guests that I had on, um, you know, really talked about how to use your numbers in order to scale your business because [00:12:00] that, you know, they speak black and white.
I mean, you're either succeeding or you're not succeeding when it comes to, and those numbers will tell you in areas that you're succeeding and not succeeding. And if you lean into that information, you can.
Don't ask me how to translate any of that, but
Scott Jacobson: that's right. They tell the story, right. Or they start to paint the picture that you can then interpret, um, with knowing more about what the influence are, influences are on, on the numbers, you know, and then you can start to pick them apart and figure out where you need to focus your time and energy.
Leighann Lovely: Right. And if you're able to look that, look at that from more of that entrepreneurial mindset and be able to talk to the owners in a way that they understand that's not just mumble jumble. And again, I'm clicking on the CPA here for a second because [00:13:00] often, and I, and I know this personally because my girlfriend is, you know, she's a CPA.
Uh, you know, an accounting firm, you know, often she's like, Oh, this blah, blah, blah. And she's going through my numbers and I'm like, okay, that's great. I have no idea what that means or what you're talking about, but if you're able to actually talk to them and you know, they understand what you're going through.
That that's powerful that there's so much power in understanding that. And then being able to go a step further now and. Get involved in real estate investment and being able to, you know, and again, I have to commend you for, you know, the 501 three C, uh, the, the nonprofit organization before I, that that's amazing what you do for, you know, for, you know, the, the caregivers, the cancer patients, I just have to commend you on that, but it's a
Scott Jacobson: blessing to us and them.
I think. [00:14:00]
Leighann Lovely: So, but then being able to transition this into the real estate investment and understanding that's, again, that's the true entrepreneurial mindset coming out again.
Scott Jacobson: And it's, I found that it's my passion, you know, I, I was introduced to, to that world, the world of real estate through the mentor who was randomly assigned to me as, uh, in my first accounting job when I was, uh, working at the, a big four accounting firm, uh, first job out of college.
And he was the first one that kind of opened that door to me or opened my eyes to the idea that you could kind of own something that you didn't live in, uh, in terms of a house or a building that you don't work in, you can still own it. Um, but yeah, that I, I found that I, I love it and, and it's a different part of the brain, you know, to, to go and try to, As compared to the comfort of a W2 job.
But it's also for me, it's, it's, it's an exciting, [00:15:00] exciting opportunity to go out and kind of create the, create the future that I want to have. Right. Sounds cliche, but you know, for me, it's true because I've always. Uh, well, once I was introduced to that, that world, I realized it's, it's, it's my new passion.
And that's kind of where my, when I'm outside of the, the, the walls of the W2 job, that's, that's where my brain is, is, is figuring out how to grow that business. And you know, what's the right, right way to do that so that I maintain, uh, proper stress levels and time with the family. Of course, it's all a managing, a balancing act.
Um, but yeah, it's, it's, it's definitely something that I've enjoyed now for, I'm going on my 23rd year of the real estate. Um, that's all you could say.
Leighann Lovely: So let me ask you, when you say it's a different part of the brain, elaborate a little bit on that for, for us.
Scott Jacobson: Sure. Well, I, I can speak from a non technical standpoint, you know, I, I don't know, you know, technically what, what parts of the brains are, are, are firing, uh, [00:16:00] this or that time.
But, uh, you know, from the CPA, it's a very, or, you know, any kind of numbers job desk job, it's very, you know, just kind of getting the, that get in the groove and, and focus on kind of what's right in front of you. But it's numbers based and it's, you know, looking for trends and formulas, formulas work or not work.
You know, I, I see it as very. I know empirical, you know, it's about the numbers. Um, when I put on kind of my, my real estate hat or try to think from an entrepreneurial mindset, then, then it's more of a globally or think, think big picture, like, how will this step get me to, you know, however big this step is?
How is it going to move me forward? Is it, is it a step in the right direction first of all, and then, you know, planning on a more macro scale, what's, what's my goal, um, for this week, for next month, for next year? For five years from now and, and just kind of figuring out how to, how to keep moving that ne needle forward, I guess.
So it's, um, I guess in summary, maybe it's [00:17:00] one's more the, the, the CPA or the W2 job for me is more of a, a micro level focus, and then the, the entrepreneurial is more of a, a global mindset, um, thinking more macro and, and how to see the big picture and then, and then drill down to what are the, the smaller action items that need to happen and in what order to, to reach the, the end goal.
Leighann Lovely: You know, I, I love how you, you, you break this down. Um, but what I, and I may be wrong when I say this, because there are a lot of pieces, but I like to say in, from the sales world is that, um, revenue generating tasks, so what I'm hearing. Kind of from you on, on the real estate side is that, you know, the accounting aspect is really, it's, it's very detailed.
It's very, and there are a lot of steps in there that you can't, that you cannot miss. But when it comes to, when it comes to the real estate is that you're really more [00:18:00] focused on those revenue generating tasks. What's going to, what's going to make the next step to making, and I'm dumbing this down to sound very.
Um, you know, but what's going to make the next step to make the next, the, the most money. Right. And those are very sales like, you know, thoughts like, what do I do right now to get me to the next sale, the next, the more money. Right. And again, I'm, I'm breaking that down and it sounds very almost sleazy, but that's in a sales mindset.
That that's what you're doing is. Let's wipe away all of the stuff and figure out from point, you know, point A to point B, what is the revenue generating tasks that gets me the next investment or gets me the next sale? Versus accounting tasks, which you [00:19:00] can't just eliminate all of the other stuff. You have to follow point A, point B, point C.
And sometimes you have
Scott Jacobson: to take those in order, in a certain order. Whereas what you were mentioning that the sales minded or the revenue generated tasks, they don't necessarily have to happen in a certain order, but I definitely agree with you. It's the, it's kind of how you mentioned is, is absolutely true, I think, in the basic form, but there's, and then there's many ways to get there, right?
And it's, um, Yeah, and then focusing, I think it's important to focus on what you find that maybe what you excel at or what I excel at and then do more of that. Right. And then so much of the other stuff, especially in today's world, it's easy to to delegate or to hire out, you know, find, find someone.
There's plenty of opportunities out there to find people that. Are very, really good at what you're not good at. And maybe, maybe leverage their time, uh, leverage, leverage a few of your dollars so that you can spend your time elsewhere because in [00:20:00] the end, you don't see it, I think it's our time. That's the most valuable and we can never get that back.
Right.
Leighann Lovely: Right. Well, and you're saying something that a lot of people struggle with and giving up
Scott Jacobson: control.
Leighann Lovely: Correct. And that's the number one thing. Um, one understanding what you're good at and understanding what you're not so good at is one of the hardest struggles that a true, like an entrepreneur Struggles with, and then to being able to identify that and give it up.
Um, the fact that you're well, and you've been in the game now for quite a while, you know, 23 years as an investor, 22 years as an investor. So the fact that, you know, you've, you've been around the block a couple of times, but brand new entrepreneurs struggle with that. Accepting that they're not good at something and then giving up control on it.[00:21:00]
Scott Jacobson: It's tough and it's scary, right? To, eh, to admit that you're not good at something. Most, most people are, are hesitant or are scared to admit that and I get it. It's a, definitely a A stumbling block that it took me a while to get over that. And, you know, in, in some ways I'm, I'm still trying to get over that, you know, in some ways, but, um, I think it's so important because it, once you realize a lot of times that we are, are, we are our own worst enemy or our own stumbling block, if we get up, get out of our own way, then, then the potentially opens up a whole new, whole new level of opportunity for us, I think.
Leighann Lovely: Mm hmm. Absolutely. Most, um, a lot of people who fail, fail because they couldn't get out of their own way and couldn't ask for help. And when I say couldn't, I mean couldn't ask for help because they just [00:22:00] weren't either self aware enough to realize that they were in their own way, um, or weren't self aware enough to realize that they weren't good at one or two disciplines.
That were vital to their success.
Scott Jacobson: Absolutely. And, and, you know, we're kind of talking about it in the business context, but I think just in life that applies to life in general, right? So many aspects of, of, of all that we do, you know, no one's good at everything, but everyone's good at something. Right. So finding, figuring out what we're good at and, and leveraging that and figuring, you know, in a perfect world, figuring out how to monetize that and to, to take advantage of, of that and create a, create the life we want.
I think that's, Maybe that's the secret to life, but it's not, it's not easy.
Leighann Lovely: That's that. Well stated. And so you help other individuals to my understanding with real estate investment, is that correct?
Scott Jacobson: [00:23:00] That's true. That's the focus I've taken the last two or three years now is really figuring out, you know, and that was a mindset shift for me as well, because I, the first 18, 20 years of my real estate.
Journey, I guess was, was all me. Uh, I had actually by choice, not really wanted to bring other people into the mix. I wanted to work by myself and I wanted to, you know, make my decisions and, and take my own risks. Um, but at some point I was introduced to, uh, another potential mindset and I, I decided, figured out that I, I really enjoyed it and at that point I was able to say, to kind of look inside myself and say, you know, this has been a great world for me for the last.
Couple decades, however long it's been. And at that point I realized, you know, there's power and teamwork as well in, in, in building a team and having others to come alongside and, um, [00:24:00] push that needle forward as well. So that's really what I've been bracing the last two or three years is, uh, reaching out, bringing others, trying to bring others along for the ride as well, um, teaching them, trying to educate about first of all, why, why real estate, why I believe personally that it's a fantastic investment.
One of the best investments. Out there, uh, cause most people don't even know that you can invest. And when I say invest in real estate, what I've kind of focused on is, uh, the passive investing side for people, for the kind of the, the working professionals that are too busy to go out and maybe, or, or too, uh, I don't want to say scared, but, uh, just not ready to kind of do something actively by their own home and manage it and work with tenants.
Uh, so bringing others along for a passive investment opportunity is what I've been focusing on.
Leighann Lovely: Interesting. And so how do you. I mean, go about kind of selling that idea to people.
Scott Jacobson: For me, [00:25:00] it's what I realized when I look back at my, you know, first 20 years or so of this is I realized that it's, it's.
Honestly, it's given my family and me some opportunities. I never would have imagined coming out of college. Like I, my brain just hadn't gone there. I didn't kind of dare dream that big, I guess, and to see how it's just kind of snowballed for me and kind of one thing leads to another and seeing the opportunities and, and what this really could look like, ultimately what I've boiled it down to is, uh, you know, we're all selling something, uh, in whatever we do, and I think I'm selling freedom, maybe life freedom, you know, and I think that The root of that is financial freedom, uh, but it leads to so many other, you know, when you're financially free or when you're financially comfortable.
Uh, then you, you have the freedom, the mind freedom to maybe take risks that you wouldn't take otherwise, or take, you know, maybe, maybe you decide to change jobs into one that you're, um, that, that feels a deeper passion for you, that kind of thing, [00:26:00] or, uh, that you can focus on what's more important to you.
So, uh, yeah, in short, I guess selling freedom and I kind of say life freedom. I think that's the ultimate. Goal for all of us. Uh, and again, it's, it's, it's rooted in where it starts with financial freedom, or that's a big component anyways, but there's so much more to it as well.
Leighann Lovely: Interesting. And that's, um, you're right.
It is definitely, um, that fear that I'm sure holds people back of, well, what, you know, what, but very, um,
very interesting on, um, very interesting on kind of that sale idea of. I would love the idea of financial freedom, but what does it look like? How does it, and, um, it's very interesting. I find it very interesting. So
if you had to give advice [00:27:00] to your younger self. What advice do you think that you would give your younger self?
Scott Jacobson: It's a good question. And I thought about it at different times. And I think the advice changes, of course, as you gain knowledge and you gain experience. But number one, I think, don't be afraid to step out of your comfort zone, because I've definitely had awareness of where my comfort zone is in the past.
And most growth, I think, comes from that. Just on the outside of that zone of that comfort zone. So it's something that, you know, I think I'm still learning to how to do that. Well, Um, you know, the, the first podcast I was on was, was definitely a, a step out of your comfort zone, uh, situation, but I, I found that, that, that I enjoy that.
So, um, you know, buying, buying the first house, absolutely out of the comfort zone. But when I had one house, I said, [00:28:00] all of a sudden it wasn't a foreign concept anymore. I had proof of concept and I, I had somebody that I could trust. Uh, talk to you and I could say those questions off of and learn from and at that point, then it was it wasn't scary anymore.
And it was just something that I need to learn how to do better. And we've all got those things that we need to learn how to do better. So I would say, yeah, number 1, don't be afraid to to get uncomfortable because I think growth and I think learning comes just on the on the other side of comfort, but then kind of always be, you know, Learning and that includes learning on your own, but it definitely involves or includes learning from other people as well.
Because, you know, when they say, why, why reinvent the wheel? Well, why take 5 years to learn what someone else has already learned in their previous 5 years of experience? Why not? Why not talk to them and kind of leverage their, their knowledge and say, hey, can I. Um, I don't know, some [00:29:00] people enjoy being taken out to lunch, take him out to lunch and really lean on them and learn as much as you can, or can I shadow you, uh, for this, or can I apprentice with you, you know, it sounds like it's a waste of time or waste of money, but I think it ultimately could be the best investment that I, that, that we make is learning how to, or who to, to reach out to, and, you know, don't be afraid to ask for help as well.
Most people I found, uh, are, are more than happy to, to share what they've learned. Uh, for people when someone wants to be taught and wants to learn.
Leighann Lovely: So what I loved about that is, um, and I say this all the time, especially in with, you know, when I'm coaching people on new entrepreneurs on how to get comfortable with the, you know, sales and that type of thing is get comfortable with the uncomfortable because in life, you Um, we are, especially if you are, you know, growing and this is really advice for, you know, the listeners right now is if [00:30:00] you, if you're, if you're looking to be an entrepreneur, if you're looking to put yourself out there, it's going to be uncomfortable.
But the only way that we as humans grow is to put ourselves out there and putting yourself out there, it's uncomfortable. There has been plenty of times where I have like you been on a podcast that's, that wasn't my own or. Um, even early on when I started podcasting that I was like, Oh my God, do I really want to.
Publish this like, uh, like how, how do I feel about what I said? Or, Oh my gosh, I just said that on that podcast. It's going to go live. Or, you know, I I'm uncomfortable with whatever it might be. Even early in my sales career, it was like, Oh, I don't want to make this call or I don't want to do that's part of life.
And the more we push through that, The better we get at it. I, I remember early on, somebody said, fake it till you make it. And I'm like, Oh, I can do that. I [00:31:00] can, I can do that. I can fake it that I, you know, I can fake that. I know what I'm talking about. And here's the thing is that the person that you're doing that in front of doesn't know any different, you know, as long as you're not lying to them, as long as you're not being dis, you know, dis genuine, what is, you know, as long as you're, you know, just, just trying to.
Get there, trying to learn, trying to, that's the whole, that's the whole point is that, you know, you're putting yourself out there on a regular basis. Yeah. It's going to be uncomfortable sometimes because you're like, am I doing this the right way? Well, nobody knows if you're not like, so go for it. So I love, I absolutely love that answer.
It was awesome. Um, and we are coming to time already. I feel like every time I talk with somebody like you, it just goes by so quick. So you are going to get your 32nd shameless pitch.
Scott Jacobson: Okay. Start the clock [00:32:00] down. Um, so onward equity is, is the name of my company. As we talked about, that's what I've been focused on in the last couple of years.
And it's, it's really trying to educate people to, uh, to the idea of, Passive investing in, in larger multifamily, um, apartment real estate projects, that's what we focus on. So, um, I think a lot of people just don't even know that that opportunity exists, that you can invest in an apartment building. Um, prior to, you know, seven, eight years ago, I had no idea that you could do that.
Uh, but I found that as it's, it's a super great way in my mind to diversify an investment portfolio and, uh, take some risk off and can create better returns, uh, but also ultimately just kind of leverage your time. It's not something you have to manage. I think a lot of people know that real estate is, uh, can be a great investment, but they don't want to deal with it.
So we deal with it so that you don't have to. And just quickly, my, my website is onward equity. com, onward equity. [00:33:00] com. And on there, there's a, an ebook, a book that I wrote called the, the top 10 reasons to be a passive investor in real estate syndications, which is what this is, where we do all the work and, uh, we bring investors along for the ride.
So if you visit the website that, uh, there'll be a link, a page that pops up and you can download that ebook. And I'd love to talk to anyone who, um, if this resonates and you'd like to learn more.
Leighann Lovely: Awesome. So you can reach him, um, at his website. Um, you can reach Scott at his website. Um, do you have a LinkedIn profile or any other place that you would like people to be able to reach out to you?
Scott Jacobson: I am on LinkedIn. Uh, I couldn't tell you exactly what that is. Uh, Scott Jacobson.
Leighann Lovely: And that's fine. I will put all of the places that you are able to reach out to Scott on the show notes. Um, Scott, I really appreciate you coming on and talking with me today. This has been an awesome, um, conversation.
Scott Jacobson: It's been a pleasure and time goes fast.
Thank you for having me.
Leighann Lovely: Yes. Time does go fast.