Transcription

And we are back with the Dropout Multi-Millionaire podcast. And today I want to jump right in and I want to talk about money. Who has it? Who doesn't? If you do have it, what you should do with it. And if you don't, how you can get some. I see so many people who are out there, particularly online, on social media, and they are flashy rich.

They are showing the cars, the clothes, the clubs. You would think they've got a lot of money. But if you pull back the covers on most of these folks, you will find out that it is just an illusion. They are what I call bulls rich. They play the game. They have those cars. They like to drop money when they're out.

But truth be told. They're broke. And by broke, I mean that while they may have a good income, they don't have any financial security to back it up. And they are one bad month away from no cash and being in trouble. Now don't get me wrong. You can make a lot of money and be broke. I said this on a, on a reel the other day and somebody said, well, I make a lot of money.

I'm not broke. And I, and I said, there is a difference between being rich and being wealthy. Being rich simply means you make a lot of money. Being wealthy means you have a lot of money. And I would rather be wealthy. I can tell you in my first business, and this goes back to 30 some years ago, I was this guy.

I started having some success. I started moving my lifestyle up to match my income. I was living that financial lie. I was trying to impress people that didn't care about me with a lifestyle that I could barely afford. And here's the truth about that. By the way, most people that are doing this aren't trying to impress everyone else as much as they are trying to impress.

themselves. They're trying to overcome their personal self image issues. You know, if I have a Mercedes, I must not be the loser that my subconscious thinks I am. And so here's the lesson there. Don't be impressed with what somebody else has. Until you find out what they really have. Is it real or is it Memorex?

Now I just dated myself cause that was a commercial like from the seventies and eighties, but is it real or is it fake? Is it bullshit rich? Now the flip side of that is people who actually have money. My first mentor, who also turned into be a business partner of mine, was a guy named Steve. Steve had money. Steve was making millions of dollars a year and lived in a 200, 000 house when I met him. And he drove a pickup truck back and forth to work.

In fact, I remember when Steve built his first big house. It was about 13, 000 square feet. The thing was a monster. But he still drove the pickup truck back and forth to work. Steve had sold his last company and was probably worth 10 to 15 million dollars at this point. When we started our company, I was probably worth a couple hundred thousand dollars.

And I asked Steve one day, I said, Hey Steve, what's it like to be rich? What's it like to be wealthy? And he told me something that I have never forgotten. The best part about having money, he said, is not having to look at the price of anything that you want or anything that you do. He said, I go to nice restaurants, I don't look at the price.

If I go to a concert, I get the best seats. I don't care what they cost. If I play golf, I play on the nicest courses. If I go to a football game or a basketball game, I get the best seats. I'm in the clubhouse or in the front row. If my friends and relatives need something, I help them out, and I never worry about asking for that money back.

He said, I have enough money to live the rest of my life and never look at price tags if I don't want to. And that struck me when he told me that, and I was like, holy crap. I have a new goal in life. I don't want to look at price tags either. Now this is a guy who had called me one day and he said, Hey, you know, let's start this business.

The one I was just talking about, he said, I'll tell you what I'm going to do. I'm going to throw in a half a million to get started. You don't have to put anything up. Um, and I tell you what, when we start making money, we'll just pay me back then. And I remember thinking, Holy crap, this guy's just walking in here.

We've never done business before, and he's just going to throw a half a million bucks in. And, you know, we'll pay him back when we make money. Three years later, we sold that company to a private equity firm. It was an 80 million acquisition. And I was able to begin living that life. That I said I wanted that Steve had explained to me for the rest of my life. Now I'm not a billionaire. I'm not a hundred millionaire.

I don't have a jet, but I got a Cirrus SR 20. I don't have a yacht, but I do have a boat. I don't have a beach house, but I do have a condo on the beach. Don't wear expensive suits. I never wear a tie. I have a Ferrari, but it's not new. It's used. I bought it for half the price because I got it, you know, it's a couple years old, but I also don't have to go to work.

I don't have any real debt, not in relation to my income and assets. I can live the rest of my life and not look at price tax. That's the life Steve showed me. That's the life I wanted, and that's the life I got. So don't be fooled by flashy people. Most of the time you will find that under the covers of flash, it's just not real.

So what is it you want? Do you want the flash, or do you want the security? If you're coming from the bottom up, by the way, like I did, the flash is probably what drives you. That's just human nature. Just make sure that if and when you get there, you don't let all the toys take over. and ruin your opportunity for having lasting wealth.

I can tell you personally, I went from 100, 000 a year to a million a year in one year and then it went up from there and I blew through a few million dollars when we did that. I did it both quickly and I did it over time. I can tell you sitting in my garage at the time was, uh, An SL 600 V12 twin turbo Mercedes, a Hummer H2, a BMW 650, two motorcycles.

I had a boat out at the lake, two wave runners. I had an airplane down at the, at the airport. I had a house on the beach, a house on the lake. I lived in a 10, 000 square foot house. House had seven fireplaces, six HVAC systems. You know how much it costs to service an HVAC system? I had six of them. We had four separate surround sound systems in different rooms of that house.

Full house automation, a heated pool. Twelve hundred bucks a month to heat the pool, by the way. Two hot tubs, because, you know, you need two hot tubs, right? I had stuff, and that stuff constantly broke. As I used to say, the more stuff you have, the more stuff breaks, the more stuff costs. That house had, think about this for a second, that house had 240 light bulbs.

Go around your house and count how many light bulbs you've got. I had 240 plus an outdoor illumination system. It was ridiculous how many light bulbs I had to change every month. The cars, the wave runners, and the motorcycles, all the batteries would go dead. They'd constantly be dead every time I tried to use them because I couldn't drive that many vehicles all the time.

It was honestly ridiculous. Maintaining all that stuff was really expensive. I mean, really expensive. I was literally trying to have everything I ever wanted in life all at the same time. Fortunately, I came to my senses at some point and I started selling all that stuff off. I uncluttered my life. I got back to basics.

I cut my expenses, but not before I went through about four million dollars in lost value. And maintenance costs on all that stuff. I personally fell into the trap of having it all. And that was a product of getting a lot of money really quickly from a couple companies. We sold. I was fortunate enough, however, that I got out of that trap before it was too late.

And then I went back to work, created a few more companies, created more wealth, secured my future and learn that you don't need to own everything to have your best life. So what is it you want? You want to be rich. You want to be wealthy. Wealthy is better. Here's the deal though. You got to be rich first so you can make enough money to become wealthy and you got to do that for an extended period of time and then you have to start investing that money properly to create that wealth.

Personally, I like real estate. Real estate is my favorite investment these days between the tax advantages, the cashflow, the equity appreciation, but you need money to do that. So first, if you're trying to build wealth, you need to invest in yourself and your business, whether it's your business or somebody else's.

That is the single greatest income source you're going to have. Most of your wealth will be created by investing in business, not in stocks. It's funny. I, this goes back to my first business. Again, it was landscaping and I was landscaping for one of the baseball players here in Atlanta. His name's Terry Pendleton.

And I remember talking to Terry one day and we were talking about why all these athletes lose all their money, right? What's the average net worth of an NFL player five years after the NFL? They're broke. And I said, Terry, why do all these athletes lose all their money so quickly? And he said, Brian, most of these guys have no financial background, don't know what they're doing.

Uh, from a financial investment standpoint, suddenly become multimillionaires and think that they are now financial geniuses and they're going to turn their millions into billions. And so they invest in all kinds of crazy, risky things that are never going to work. He said, I make my money playing baseball, not.

Investing in stocks and bonds. He goes, I will make my money playing baseball until I can't. Until then, he said, all my money is sitting in treasury bills and bonds. My house is paid for, my cars are paid for. I know when I stop playing baseball, when my income, my massive income production stops, all my cash is still going to be there.

And I'll have enough money to live for the rest of my life any way I want to live. And oh my gosh, that stuck with me for the rest of my life. I love that story. He said too many athletes don't do that. They think they're going to become billionaires, and they end up doing stupid stuff, doing stupid investments, and they lose all their money.

So, what I'm saying here is, stocks and bonds, while they're a decent long term investment, bonds for long term income, stocks for, for potential growth, that's not where you're going to create your wealth. That's what you're going to put your wealth into. to take care of you in the future. So investing order for wealth, invest in you, invest in your business, invest in real estate.

There's really no other investment quite like that. Then stocks and bonds to secure your future. Now, I'm not saying don't buy toys. Let's be honest. This is we're humans and we need to have fun. You know, we don't want to die tomorrow having never done anything fun. Just don't be crazy about it. Remember the long term goal.

The long term goal is being wealthy. Not being rich. So that's it for today. I appreciate you being with me on the dropout multimillionaire podcast. If you want more information go to my website That's brianwillmedia.com or the dropoutmm.com and remember you have to be in the game to win the game.

Transcription

And we are back with the Dropout Multi-Millionaire podcast. I am your host, Brian Will. And today we're going to talk about why starting your own business may not be the answer to wealth creation. Now, I know everybody's heard online, you listen to all the gurus. If you want to get rich, you want to get wealthy, you want to make money, your best opportunity is to start your own business.

Well, today we're going to talk about why that may not. Be the right answer. And by the way, stay tuned at the end of this episode. I'm going to give you a discount code to get a free copy of my intro masterclass in the psychology of sales and negotiation. It's a one hour summary course. I'm giving it away for free to you today, just for listening.

So let's start today's podcast with this statement. Business is tough. Most businesses fail. In fact, we know that 20 percent fail the first year, 30 percent the second year, and over half of them will fail in the first three years. And by the way, I own a chain of restaurants. Restaurants fail at twice that rate. Okay, most businesses fail.

And most of the ones that don't fail, by the way, I'm gonna give you some statistics here in a minute, they don't make any money. So why am I telling you this? Why am I being so damn negative about business? I mean, I'm a business owner. I build businesses. I coach businesses. And the answer is that most people only want to tell you the good stuff.

They want to make it sound sexy. You're going to be an entrepreneur. You're going to be a CEO. It's all going to be good. You're going to make a lot of money. But they forget to tell you the bad part. They forget to tell you the challenges you're going to have. Okay. And so today I want to walk you through some of those challenges and some of those statistics so that you have an honest, uh, understanding of what it's like to own your own business.

All right. So here we go. In America, roughly 5 million new businesses start every year. In fact, there are 33 million small businesses in America today, and that is a lot of businesses. And because we have such a big pool, we also have a lot of good data. So, we know, for instance, that 99. 9 percent of all businesses in this country Small business.

I actually didn't realize that when I read it, but here's another, here's another number for you. 80 percent of those have no employees. 80 percent of all businesses have no employees they're one man shops or consultants. Now how about this? We know the average salary. If you have a job in this country, the average salary is 54, 000.

However, the average small business with no employees, remember that's 80 percent of all small business. That's the average business. with no employees only does about 47, 000 in revenue, not income. That's gross revenue. 54, 000 average salary, 80 percent of all small businesses, 47, 000 in gross revenue. By the way, that means they ain't making no money.

The other 20 percent of those businesses employ about 50 percent of all the workers in this country. Half of the people in the U S. Work for a small business. In fact, 65 percent of all new jobs created every year are created by small business. We know that by the way, here we go again, only 40 percent of all small businesses, which are by the way, 99.

9 percent of all businesses, 40 percent of small businesses are profitable. That means 60 percent or not. That's a crazy number. 60 percent of all small businesses. Don't make any money. We also know that only 6 percent of all businesses in this country, only 6 percent will ever do over a million dollars a year in revenue.

So if you start your own business in America, you have a 6 percent chance of doing over a million dollars in revenue. 6%. The average small business owner in this country Looking at all of them makes about 60, 000 a year. Now this is someone who has invested their life savings. They're out there killing themselves 40, hours a week.

They're taking financial risk and they average about 60, 000 a year. By the way, you remember that average salary if you just go get a job is 54, 000 with no risk, Only 14 percent of small business owners Make over a hundred thousand dollars a year. So if you start your own small business, you have a 14 percent chance of making over a hundred thousand dollars a year.

And only 1 percent Remember all those people that tell you you're going to get rich starting your own business? Only 1 percent of people that start their own business make over a million dollars a year in profit. Only 1. So here's the deal. Why am I telling you this? I'm telling you this because I want you to understand that business is tough, but if you have a business, by the way, and you have employees and you are doing over 1 million in revenue, that means you're already in the top 6 percent of all businesses nationwide.

You, my friend are a badass in business. If you're in that top 6%, however, but you're not making what we would consider a lot of money, or you are not creating the wealth that you thought you were going to when you started, or if you're out there killing yourself working 40, 50, 60, 70, 80 hours a week just to maintain what you're doing, maybe it's time you step up your game.

Maybe it's time to bring someone in who can help you scale, become more efficient, and make more money. Maybe it's time you try to move from the top 6 percent to the top 1%. And start creating the wealth you dreamed of when you started this venture. Making money, or more money, is not hard, but it's also not easy.

It's really both. There's an art and a science, by the way. The easy part is that creating wealth and making more money in your business is a math problem. And this is something nobody's gonna tell you. I've never heard another financial coach or consultant tell you this. But creating wealth, making money, and building your business is a math problem.

Okay? It's all about the numbers. The hard part of building your business is the understanding of that math. Following that math, instead of your ego, instead of your feelings, instead of your general lack of understanding about what you're doing, it's following the math. Okay? Here's the secret. If you are not where you want to be, and you're not getting any closer, and you don't understand the math, the truth is, it's because you just don't know how.

And you need some help. So that's a lot of negative. How about some positive, right? How exactly do you level up? How do you learn the math? And it all starts with what I call the four questions. These are the big ones. I ask anybody that comes to me that wants to do consulting these four questions, and so I'm going to give them to you today.

Okay? Now, the answer to these questions will be different for every single business that I ask it to, but the questions are always the same. And so here they are. Who are you in your business? And who are you not? In my book, we talk about the entrepreneur, the manager, CEO, the salesperson, or the technician.

That's four different people. The problem with most small business owners is they think they can be all of them. And unfortunately they can't even more. Unfortunately, they're probably trying to be the wrong one. Okay. Just because you start a business doesn't mean you're a CEO or a manager. If you're trying to be the wrong one, or you don't understand who you are in your own business, and you're not willing to bring in the people to help you.

Your growth will be stunted. Second question. Why should anybody buy your product? And why should they buy it from you? This is a critical question. If you don't have this answer, you're nothing but a commodity and you'll never grow. Okay. Why should they buy your product and why should they buy it from you?

Number three, we're going to get into some of that math, a tough part. Remember, what are your historical core metric trends? What do they look like? And what do they tell you about your future? What do your historical core metric trends look like? And what do they tell you about your future? That's a big one That's one of the training tracks we do in our coaching programs. If you are not using pattern recognition on your historical core metrics Then you are absolutely guessing at what decisions to make in your business and most of those will probably be wrong Okay, that's a big one And that's math.

Number four. And again, back to math. Have you built your goal proforma? Your goal proforma. And what does it look like? What steps is it telling you to take to get where you want to go? And if you haven't built this goal setting tool, I'm going to tell you right now, your growth is a crapshoot. Once again, you're guessing with no basis in fact.

So one and two, three and four, and three and four are the math ones. Now, if you can't answer these questions, and your business is not where you want it to be, then you might want to look at getting some help, okay? If you're ready to step up your game, if you want to grow this thing and make a lot of money, you need to bring in a consultant or a coach that knows how to do those things, that understands the math and can show you how it works. If you want to move from that top 6 percent to that top 1%, you need to find somebody who has been there and done that. They can come in and show you how. Okay. And by the way, shameless plug, that is what I do in my coaching and consulting practice. I help businesses grow, become more efficient and make more money.

I helped them learn the math behind scaling revenue and profits. Personally, I've built multiple companies into the eight figures of revenue with evaluations and the nine figures consulted for companies with billions of dollars in revenue, trained thousands of salespeople who sold billions of dollars in sales.

I've been there, done that. I do this today for other small businesses. This is what I do and I can help you. If you're ready, make the decision and let's go.

Transcription

Welcome to this episode of the dropout multi millionaire podcast, where we talk about tactical business strategy, building high performance sales teams and growing your business. If you're ready to break free from the status quo and join the ranks of the Mavericks, the rebels and the renegades who refuse to conform and instead build multi million dollar businesses, then buckle up.

Here we go. What's going on everybody. We are back the dropout multimillionaire podcast. As always, this podcast is based on my bestselling books, the dropout multimillionaire, which is 37 business lessons and how to succeed with no money, no education, and no clue. And my latest book, which is no. The psychology of sales and negotiation both ways.

Both of those are Wall Street Journal bestsellers, number five and number three. Today, I'm actually rerecording a podcast I did a year ago. It might have been the first or second podcast I'd ever done, and it was on a New Year's Eve when I was staying home instead of going out and then everything to do.

So I recorded like six podcasts, but we've gotten much better at this since then. And so we're gonna rerecord this one 'cause I think it's a good one. And this podcast was about the question, why, and I've covered a lot about this question over past episodes. Um, but why we've talked about, why are you here?

Why are you in business? In today's episode, we're going to talk about why people should buy from you. Why should they buy from you and why should they buy your product? Okay. This is kind of a tricky question and I'll be honest with you. A lot of business owners can't answer that. And even more salespeople can't answer that.

And that is a challenge. Building a business is both an art and a science. And the why question is a little bit of the art. So I want you to think about that question. Why is your product unique? Why is your selling unique or is what you're selling or is your business just another commodity? Are you the only company in town selling what you sell?

Are you the only salesperson out there selling your product? What makes yours different or can they get it from anybody? So, I want to tell you three stories to kind of highlight where I'm going with this. The first one, Uh, I was working as an interim, uh, president of this insurance company out in Portland, Oregon, maybe 10 years ago.

And I had left the company, had come back to Atlanta, and one of the salespeople who worked for me out there had left, and he was starting his own agency. And he called me one day and he said, Hey, Brian, can you help me? I'm trying to figure out how to get past the gatekeeper to get in and talk to the decision makers in these companies that I'm pitching.

And by the way, if you're in sales, that's a pretty common thing, right? We've got to go through these gatekeepers trying to get to the people who make these decisions. And I said to him, I said, Matt, let me ask you a couple of questions before I, I help you here is why should they buy from you? He was selling insurance at the time.

He's trying to sell group health insurance. I said, why should they buy your insurance from you? Why? And he said, well, because I give better customer service than everybody else. And I'm kind of a harsh guy. I said, yeah, who cares? I mean, that, that means nothing to me. Everybody says that the walks in the door, every salesman says I give the best customer service.

You need something better than that. And he said, well, I care about your employees. And I got to be honest, I almost laughed about that one. How can you possibly care about my employees? That's just, doesn't even make sense. Why would you even say that you don't know my employees and you don't care about them?

All you want is. My money. I said, so that's not going to work either. So you're going to have to give me something better than that. And he said, well, I don't know. I mean, that's why I called you. What should I say? I said, Matt, here's the thing. If you can't tell me why a customer should buy your product and why they should buy it from you.

Then they probably won't. You're the one selling it and you have no idea. You need to go figure that out. Talk to your friends, your wife, your spouse, your… Figure out why anybody should buy your product and why they should buy it from you. And when you figure that out, you're going to have your answer.

That's how you get past the gatekeeper. The next question, or the next story, was, uh, mine actually. I was, I have a little chain of restaurants, uh, that I own and we were looking at opening another one and I was kind of debating on where and… I was sitting in my hometown here in Alpharetta, Georgia, and I was sitting at a restaurant, sitting at the bar, watching football one night.

I think it was Superbowl season several years ago. Bunch of dudes were all sitting at the bar and the game's on TV, but we're listening to, you know, music. In the background and one of the guys grabs a bartender says, Hey man, can you put the game on? I mean the sound for the game on so we can hear what's going on and the bartender said no that's against company policy We're not allowed to play the game We're only allowed to play this specific music and remember like three guys looked around each other like there is no place in this town Where we can go and watch a game and listen to the sound This is ridiculous.

And I was sitting there and I was thinking, aha, if you're looking for a reason why people should come to your business, there's a reason why, right? There are no sports bars. In Alpharetta, Georgia at the time. So, I went out, I found a space, I built a sports bar, it's called Central City Tavern. And guess what?

We are the place to go to watch sports in this town now. One of the most successful restaurants down here. Because we found a reason why, okay? Third story, my editor when I wrote my last book. I remember, I would, it was my first book actually. I had written this book and I needed an editor to help me and I was looking all over the internet.

And looking at publishing companies and editing companies and I found three companies that were out there. And That, uh, did book editing and they wanted, you know, five, 10, 15, 000 to do all the work and get your book published. And I remember I posted something on social media, I think it was Facebook. And I said, Hey, I'm, I'm looking for an editor.

And lo and behold, the same guy was just telling you about Matt, about the insurance, uh, guy sends me a Facebook message and he says, Hey. You need to talk to my friend Hillary. Hillary's an editor. And so, I looked this woman up and I, I found her and I called her and I said, Hey, I'm, I'm looking to have a book published.

Need to get it edited and published and, uh, I've looked at three big companies and my friend Matt said that I should talk to you before I make a decision. So, that's why I'm calling. And she said, that's awesome. Were you looking at XYZ company and, and, and… And I said, yeah, that's what I'm looking at. She goes, yeah, actually they want me to come to work for them, but I don't want to.

And I said, that's interesting. I don't understand what you mean. She said, well, they use all subcontractors to do the work for them. They don't really do the work. They get your money and then they hire me to do the work. They pay me. And then of course they keep the override. And she said, I know what I charge and I know what they charge.

And they charge way too much. And I said, so you're telling me that if I hire them. They're going to hire you or someone like you to do the work, or I can just skip the middleman, save half the money and have you do it directly. She said, that's exactly right. And I was like, well, that is a deal. That is why I should do, that's why I should have you do my editing.

So I ended up hiring her. She had no idea what she was doing. She was instinctively giving me in our conversation, the reason why I should use her service and why I should use her, her specifically as a hell of a story. I actually wrote that in the first or the second book. I can't remember, but that's an exact example of what made her unique, same product, same service.

Less money. That's a deal. So those are three stories. Um, I'm going to have to cut that off cause I only did two stories. So that was right at eight minutes, by the way, you're going to go backwards. Um, what was the third story? Oh, that was the three stories. Okay. I'm going to, I'm going to jump back in here.

So those are my three stories of why. Okay. Why should anybody buy your product and why should they buy it from you? If you can figure out the answer to those questions, you will create something that is unique in the market that will draw people to you. It will allow you to stop being a commodity. Which is they can buy your service from anybody, anywhere, and it will allow you the opportunity to scale because of that uniqueness, that is the why.

So that's it for today. Uh, if you're interested in any more, any more information on me, uh, you can go to my website. It's brianwillmedia. com. Uh, my books are on there. My podcasts, my blogs, my sales training courses. Uh, in fact, by the way, I have a sales training course. It's called the masterclass to sales and negotiation, which is based on my last book.

If you go to the website, you go to the coaching session, go down to the training session, click on the sales and negotiation tab, enter the code sales, S A L E S. That will give you a discount coupon that will bring that cost down to zero. You can take that class for free if you like. Uh, if you do drop me a message, let me know your thoughts.

If I can help you in any other way. Let me know. Otherwise we'll see you next time on the dropout multimillionaire podcast.

Transcription

And we are back. How's everybody doing out there in podcast land today. Welcome to today's show. And let's jump right in. I wrote an article, uh, four or five months ago, it was published in Forbes magazine and it was called the five keys to success in business. And coincidentally, these are also what I call the same five keys to failure.

Now Forbes and their infinite wisdom decided to change my title before it was published. And today it's called why do so many business startups fail and ways to set yourself up for success. Personally, I like my title better, but Hey. Who's going to argue with Forbes magazine. They have a little more experience in this than I do.

Anyway, in that article, I talked about business startups and the fact that the U S census Bureau tells us that 450, 000 new businesses start every month, not every year, that's every 5. 4 million new businesses start every year. They also state that 50 percent of those will fail in less than five years, and 70 percent will never see year 10.

That is a huge failure rate. By the way, I also own a small chain of restaurants. Restaurant failure rate is twice that speed. I think it's 50 percent in the first year. Business failures are staggering. So the question is, Why are all these businesses failing? And as you know, I do coaching and consulting for businesses all the way up to Fortune 500 companies.

And what I have found is that most businesses do not fail for what we call technical or mechanical reasons. Most fail because the owner just doesn't know how to run a business. And to use an example in my book, I talk about Joe, the plumber. And by the way, that's the dropout multi manner book. That was a wall street journal, bestseller and Joe, the plumber.

And my example, we have this guy named Joe, right? Joe works for a plumbing company. And Joe's making 50 bucks an hour working for the plumbing company. The plumbing company bills Joe out at 150 bucks an hour. And Joe does this for years. But one day Joe wakes up and he says, you know, why am I only getting 50 bucks an hour when they're charging 150 an hour for my time, I am going to quit my job and I'm going to start my own business.

And so Joe quits and he starts essentially Joe's plumbing. Now, here's what we know. We know that if Joe's plumbing ends up failing because it follows. The statistics that the U. S. Census tells us. It will not fail because Joe doesn't know how to be a plumber. Joe is clearly a good plumber. Joe's plumber, Joe's plumbing will fail because Joe doesn't know how to run a business.

And that. Is why most businesses fail. It's not for the technical. It's not for the mechanical. It's not because they don't know what they're doing in whatever it is they're selling. It's simply because they don't know how to run a business. So with that in mind, I came up with what I call the five keys to success in business, right?

Things that Joe needs to know or Joe needs to learn.

So if you are first starting out, here's what you need to know. You need to know that you have no idea what you're doing. That's number one. And I'm not talking again about the technical side. Joe knows how to plumb. If you're a chef, you know how to be a chef. You know how to cook. That's not what we're talking about here.

What I'm talking about is you need to understand the business side. Things like paperwork. Things like banking. Estimated payments on your taxes. Matching taxes. How about marketing and sales? That's business. You understand labor costs as it relates to revenue. How about customer relations and a hundred other things that can trip you up?

This is what we call the business side of business. And you need to understand how that works. If you're going to succeed, if you're going to succeed, because if you don't, you better find someone else to bring in as either a partner or an employee that does know those things before you have created such a mess in your business.

That's something or anything can eventually take you down. So rule number one, understand what you don't know and get some help, a mentor or a coach or hire a professional manager, whatever you want to do, but get some help. Number two, if you are starting out or if you are already in business and you are not growing like you want.

You're not as profitable as you want. Here's a little secret. You, my friend are probably the problem. It's probably not your business. It's probably you. You are probably not making the right decisions about how to grow your business. And here is the reason why, and I'm going to be redundant here. But the reason is because you don't know how once again, if you've never built or scaled a business successfully, you just don't know how, unless you have experience in growing a business, unless you have failed enough.

to learn your personal filter, which is in your subconscious making decisions day in and day out without you even realizing it. Your personal filter is just guessing on what to do. Now I have another episode I did called the personal filter, so I'm not going to go into the details. But if you're interested, you can go back and find that episode and learn more about what that personal filter is.

The quick and dirty here, you don't know how to succeed because you've never done it. You don't know the correct decision making process because you've never done it and most of what you're doing is just a guess. Business is both an art and a science. The science is the actual work. The rest is an art form.

So how do you fix this? Okay, so okay, Brian, you've told me I don't know what I'm doing. How do I fix it? Well, same answer I gave you a few minutes ago. You need to bring in a mentor or a coach to help you learn how to make the right decisions, or just to tell you what to do so that you do make the right decisions.

You need to find somebody who is 10 to 20 steps ahead of you and get their help. You need to borrow their success filter until yours is up to speed. We talk about borrowing someone else's filter in the other episode. Rule number two, hire a mentor or a coach. Yes, I know it's redundant, but it is that important.

Business lesson number three, and this is a big one. You need to figure out who you are in your business, but even more importantly, you need to figure out who you're not. Okay. Now if you're self employed and it's just you and the company, then you're everybody and you're good for now. But if you really want to build something big, if you want to scale, if you want to build intrinsic value, If you want something that you can eventually sell, you can't do it alone.

And chances are you may not be acting in the correct role in your company. Too many people think they started business. I'm the entrepreneur. I'm the CEO. Just because you have started a business does not make you a CEO. By the way, a CEO is a managerial, uh, tasked job. Okay. I did another episode again called the four personalities.

You should go back and listen to that one. So you fully understand what I'm talking about. Basically your business should have four personalities. It should have an entrepreneur. It should have a manager, it should have a salesperson, and it should have a specialist. That's the person who does the actual work.

Now, as an example, I find that most people who start businesses are specialists. They're like Joe the plumber. Joe was a specialist. He was a plumber. But he started a business, but Joe was still the plumber. Joe was not the CEO. He's not the manager, probably not the salesperson. Joe needs to do what Joe is good at and bring other people in to backfill.

Where he is not. The challenge is, again, most people that start businesses are not CEOs and they are not entrepreneurs. Sales people, as an example, are terrible managers. Entrepreneurs are great sales people. Technicians are terrible CEOs. Okay? You can't be everything. Figure out who you are, figure out who you're not, stick with that, and then backfill.

That person can either be a partner or it can be an employee, but either way you need to bring them in or you will not grow. You will not build value. You will not build something that somebody else is going to want to come in and buy at some point someday. So number three, check your ego. Get really honest with yourself.

Find out who you are and who you're not, and then bring in the talent you need to grow. Number four, oh my gosh. This is huge. You need to know your numbers. You would be shocked at how many people own companies. And I'm talking zero to 50, 60, 70 million in revenue who don't understand how to analyze a profit and loss statement.

They don't know their numbers. I've said this in so many podcasts and I'm going to say it here again. You need to track your numbers and you need to understand what your PNL is telling you weekly. At the very least monthly, you need to understand every cost, every revenue dollar, every percentage on every line in your PNL.

In fact, I did another podcast once again, called your magic crystal ball. You need to go back and listen to that one. Your PNL is a crystal ball. It will allow you to time travel into the future of your business and tell you how your business is going to do. So many businesses fail because they have no idea what's going on.

In fact, one of the, one of the things I hear from entrepreneurs all the time is, Well, I'm not good with, with the numbers. Okay. Well, you have two choices. Either get good with the numbers or find somebody who is good with the numbers and bring them into your organization. Because if you don't, you're probably going to fail.

And I love this story. I had a guy come to me. I own a little chain of restaurants and he had been in my restaurants, found out who I was and he came to me and he said, Hey man, can I, can I have 10 minutes of your time? And I said, yeah, sure. I'll meet you, uh, next week. But before we meet, he told me he had a restaurant.

He wanted to talk to me about building restaurants. I said, before we meet, I need you to read my book. And he said, okay, no problem. Well, the next week came around and I came out to sit down with this guy at one of my restaurants up in Sugar Hill, Georgia. And we sat down. I said, how you doing? And he said, well, I almost didn't come today.

And I said, why not? He said, well, because I read your book and I know the first question you're going to ask me. I said, okay, what question is that? He said, you're going to ask me for my numbers. And I said, you are exactly right. Because until we know what you have today, until we know how it's been performing historically, there's absolutely nothing I can say to you and no way I can help you unless we know what's going on and your numbers tell the story.

I said, are you telling me you don't have PNLs on your business? And he said, no. I said, how are you operating? I said, are you making money? And he said, I don't know. I said, okay, I don't understand what that means. You don't know if you're making money. I said, did you pay your taxes last year? He said, I filed a tax return.

I said, did you pay any taxes? He said, no. I said, okay, so you're probably losing money. I said, how much money did you take out of the business personally last month? And he said, nothing. I said, well, how are you paying your bills? Your business has been around for two, two years and you're not taking any money out.

How are you paying your bills? He said, well, my wife has a good job. I said, okay, let me get this straight. You called me and said that you have the best burrito shop in the state of Georgia And you want to build it into the next chipotle and then you sit down with me and you tell me that you don't even have A pnl since the day you started but you want to go and ask me to help you raise money Now we are five minutes into this conversation and I said I got to tell you This and not trying to be mean but this is a waste of time I said you go do your pnls for the past two years and when you have them done you call me And then we'll sit down and we can have a discussion on how to help you.

And he said, okay. And he left. That was a year ago. I've never heard from him since. And that business has since gone. All right. You can't be in business for two years and not know what your numbers are. You can't be in business for a year, six months. You shouldn't be in business for 30 days if you don't know what your numbers are, because if you don't, you are just guessing at everything you do.

You have no idea what's going on and you are probably going to fail. Rule number four, track your numbers like a maniac. And if you're not good with numbers, you better learn how to be good with numbers or hire somebody who is get a mentor, get a coach, find somebody that can help you before it's too late.

Okay. Number five, and I'm going to use another story here. Number five goes back to, you need to hire a coach or a mentor to help you. You need to bring somebody into your business and in your world who are. Who have been there and done that, who can help you make decisions because of their experience, not because of your guesswork, okay?

The problem we have as entrepreneurs sometimes is our ego gets so big that we think that either A, we have to know everything, or B, we already know everything. And everything that we think, eh, it's gotta be right, because I thought it. And that just unfortunately isn't the case. And I'll give you, uh, a quick example.

I wrote my last book. It's called No. Psychology of Sales and Negotiation. And I remember I took it to the publisher after it was done, and I sketched out a, a, uh, cover for the book and sent it to her. And she sent it back, she said, this cover isn't going to work. And I said, yeah it is. I mean, I've already got two best selling books.

This is the cover I want to go with. And she said, Brian, this cover is not good. It's not any good. It sucks. And we proceeded to argue for about two minutes. About why I wanted to use my cover and her telling me that it wasn't going to work. And suddenly it dawned on me as a guy who sits here and preaches to people day after day that you need to bring in somebody that knows more about this than you do.

It suddenly dawned on me that this woman had probably published a hundred books, I don't know, five hundred books, and I'd published two. And I said, you know what? You're right. I apologize. You know more about this than I do. And we went with her cover. And by the way, It was awesome and the book hit number three on Wall Street Journal, okay?

I don't care how good you are how smart you think you are if somebody else is in the room that is better at Whatever it is you're trying to do you need to listen to them. So rule number five hire a coach It can be a relational coach a technical coach or a tactical coach and those are three different things by the way But bring in someone to help you see the bigger picture.

So that's it for today. Everything I talk about is in my books, the dropout multimillionaire and know the psychology of sales and negotiation. You can find all my information on my website, which is brianwillmedia. com the books, social media, podcasts, guest appearances. There is also an intro masterclass to sales and negotiation based on my last book.

Uh, this is a course that I've taught for 20 years. In fact, Uh, I've taught probably over a thousand people this course. It has done billions of dollars in sales and products and services, and you can get the intro to that class for free. If you go to my website, brianwellmedia. com, go to the coaching tab, go down to the, uh, the training class tabs, click on training class, go to sales and negotiation tab, click on that, there is a coupon code.

If you will enter the word sales, S A L E S, that will get you the class for free. You can have it. Take the class. Come back. Drop me a message. Let me know what you think. Hopefully it'll help. Alright? So, have a great day, and as I always end my podcasts, here's what you need to remember. People say all the time, well, I, I wanna do that, or I wanna, I can't believe you've had this much success, or I'd like to be able to do that.

Listen, you gotta be in the game to win the game. So go get in the game.

Transcription

We are back with the Dropout Multi-Millionaire podcast. Because anybody can be a millionaire, but it takes something more to be a multimillionaire. And by the way, at the end of the show today, I'm going to give you a discount code for my Intro to Masterclass in Sales. It's on my website.

Stay tuned. I'll give you the code at the end of the show. And today I want to talk about business growth. Love this topic. And I'm going to start the podcast with three questions. Alright? Number one, is your business growing the way you want it to? Number two, are you as profitable as you want to be? And number three, or more importantly, Are you as profitable as you should be?

And three, have you ever worked with a tactical coach? Not a relational coach, not a technical coach, but a tactical coach. We'll get into that a little later. All right, let's jump right into these. Is your business growing the way you want it to? I have found that stagnation in business growth is generally a three phase problem that people move through.

And as I go through these three phases, I want you to look at yourself in your business and ask yourself if your business is stagnant. Which one of these phases are you in? Okay. Phase one. We have an entrepreneur who is trying to do everything in the company. They're wearing all the hats. And when you run out of bandwidth, the growth stops.

In other words, you start your business, you're working 40 hours a week. You're successful. Everything's good. The business starts to grow. You're at 50 hours a week. It grows some more, 60 hours, 70 hours, and you're making good money. But the problem is you eventually run out of time and bandwidth. And the business stalls out and doesn't grow.

This is a problem with delegation, not a problem with the business. And then as an entrepreneur, you tend to get frustrated. Okay. You get burned out, burned out as a cliche. It's an entrepreneur cliche. There are books, websites, podcasts, trainings, coaches, all about this burnout that entrepreneurs go through.

And the problem is this burnout is primarily. Because they never learned to delegate. What's worse is if something happens to you and you can no longer put in the 50, 60, 78 hours a week. Now it's not just growth that stops. You're actually going to start going backwards because nobody else in your organization.

Can pick up the slack. This lack of delegation is generally caused by a lack of understanding on how scaling a business works. Big sentence. Okay. It's a lack of understanding on how scaling a business works. The entrepreneur doesn't understand that. Scaling a business is not about perfection. It is about delegation and there's a difference here.

All right. And here is the dirty little secret. If you are in this phase of the business where you're doing everything and you have not learned to delegate yet, or you don't understand delegation, it is because you did not build your business correctly from the start. And unfortunately, if you're going to move past this stagnation phase, your business will probably have to take a profit hit short term.

In order for you to grow longterm, you need to stop thinking about today and start focusing on where you want to go and how you're going to get there. We call this the reverse engineering phase. It's one of the three tracks in my training program. Okay. Once you understand that you need to delegate, however.

We come to phase two of the problem. Phase two is fear. The entrepreneur says, okay, well, I understand I need to get delegate. However, I am afraid to either hire two new team members or to train new team members and turn over the tasks that I am already doing. And I'm afraid. Probably about two different things.

Okay. I'm afraid that my new team members will not do things exactly the way I would have done them, or they will not do them as fast as I would have done them, or even as good as I would have done them. All right. It can also be a fear of loss of income. The entrepreneur can be afraid that they can't afford to pay these people to do the job.

And that is because this entrepreneur is personally consuming all of the profit. Out of the business. If you are consuming a hundred percent of your profit, then there's nothing left over for you to have the ability to expand with. You can't hire somebody else. There's no money. There's no money because you're consuming all of it.

All right. You have to understand that if you implement delegation again, your business is going to take a profit hit for a period of time because you have to hire that person and you got to pay them and you got to train them before you can let them take over and allow you to go. Grow the business. All right.

Now, how long that takes could be a short time or it could be a long time. And that depends on how well you implement the delegation strategy. Okay. Again, this is what we do in the coaching track. You need to get this delegation piece, right? Or it will not work for you and you will just get frustrated and you will probably quit.

All right. Lack of delegation and fear will stop growth in its tracks. Which is fine if you're making money and you're happy, but if something happens to you and nobody can pick that slack up, you're going to get hurt. Okay. Now that fear I talk about, the fear of the delegation is usually a product of what I call phase three and phase three of stagnation is a lack of clarity.

It's a lack of clarity in both the longterm vision of the company and where you want to go. And it's a lack of clarity in the specific steps needed to accomplish the goals that you set out to accomplish. It is the lack of clarity that causes the fear because it is an unknown. It's a lack of understanding why you're doing something and how you need to do it.

It's a lack of understanding on what's going to happen if you do do it, alright? So, in other words, let me give you an example. Let's say that I want to go from Atlanta to LA. I'm sitting in Atlanta right now and I want to drive to LA. Now, I know that L. A. is west of here, so I could literally get in my car right now and start going west, all right?

I'm gonna be going on all kinds of crazy back roads, I'm gonna hit dead end after dead end, I gotta back up, I gotta go a different direction, I gotta go forward, hit a dead end, but in other words, it would probably take me a month to get to L. A. If I just tried to drive West, all right, now, a lot of times when we talk about change in business, we think, well, I need to grow my business.

And if I'm going to do this delegation, then these are the results I need to get, but I don't really have a specific clarity and how that's going to work. And so if I try it, it generally fails. If I try it without clarity, if I try it without a plan, it will generally fail. The reverse of just going West is I can actually go from Alpharetta, Georgia.

I can go South. I can go south on 400, then I can get on 285 east, and I can go east for a while. By the way, those are both exactly the opposite of what I'm supposed to be doing. I need to go west to get to California, but to do that, I got to go south and then I got to go east. And then if I go far enough down in about 45 minutes, I can hit 20 west and I can zip all the way across the country.

I get on that highway and now I'm flying. All right. This is what we call reverse engineering. Your business and your goals to create the specific steps needed to get you where you want to go. Just like when you're driving, you have a GPS. If you have the GPS, you say, I want to go to California. And it says, great, you got to go South and East and then go West.

You go, Oh, perfect. I understand the goal. I understand why I'm going the wrong direction. I understand why I'm going the wrong direction for an hour. It's because I have to go the wrong direction in order to go the right direction. Same thing with delegation. If we build you a plan, if we reverse engineer where you need to be and we bring it back to where you are today, I'm telling you, your business is going to take a hit.

You're going to make less money. You'll probably have to put in a little more work, because you have to get yourself in a position where you can hit 20 West and start zipping across the country. and get your business to really grow. All right. Clarity in the plan will overcome the fear of delegation that you absolutely need to do to get from where you are to where you want to be.

And that is, that is the bullet point you need to memorize. Clearly, clarity will overcome the fear of delegation that you need to do to stop the burnout, to stop the stagnation, to get from where you are today. to where you want to go, alright? So we've talked about these three phases of stagnation. The first is...

I either don't know how to delegate or I am afraid of delegation. That's fear and I'm afraid of delegation because I don't understand how to do it, how it's going to work. And that is clarity. And all this brings me back to my last question. Have you ever worked with a tactical coach or really any coach for that matter?

We talk about three types of coaching, right? There's relational, technical and tactical relational coats are going to relational coaches are going to talk to you about how are you doing? How's your staff? How are you getting along with everybody? What's going on in your business? How do you feel? That's relational coaching.

Technical coaching is you have a software company and you bring in a software coach or you own a daycare and you bring in somebody who owns daycares to show you how to run your daycare specific to your daycare. That's a technical coach. And then there's tactical tactical coaching is operations, sales structure.

It's. actionable steps to move your business forward based on your operations, which are generally general, I guess we'll call it to every business. Okay. Have you ever worked with a coach? Was it a relational coach? And you said, Hey, it's relational coach. That's great. But they didn't help me out to grow my business.

It's because it's not their job. If it's a technical coach, it might be specific to your industry, but do they really understand P& L analysis and reverse engineering and historical P& L analysis using pattern recognition to predict the future? Do they understand operations in your company? What I do is tactical coaching.

I focus on the operational side, P& Ls, organization, tactical sales training through what we call the psychology of sales. You work with me, we will dissect your business. Build you a plan to make those necessary changes to accomplish whatever goal you have. If you have never worked with a tactical coach and your business is not growing like you want, maybe it's time you bring somebody in with company building experience and coaching experience to help you move your business to the next level.

And as an example, we're going to talk about Tim Cook. Tim Cook currently runs Apple Computer. One of the biggest companies on the planet, the guy's clearly a genius and yet Tim Cook has a board of directors that comes in every quarter. Basically, it's eight or 10 or 12 people. I forget how many and they all sit down and they say, Hey, Tim, what's going on in your business?

And Tim tells them and they say, okay, based on all of our experience, here's our advice. Here's what we think you need to do. And Tim takes all that knowledge and all that advice. And he uses that to help him move Apple forward. Tim also has a personal coach. He has a personal coach that comes in outside of the board of directors.

In fact, the board pays for it. That helps him on the other stuff, not just the business, but personal and how are you doing and how you feeling and what's going on. So if Tim cook running one of the biggest companies out there and needs both a board of directors, as well as a personal coach to help him run his business, what in the world.

As a entrepreneur with a much, much smaller business, what in the world do you think you're doing not having at least one coach or mentor helping you? All right. So that's it for today. And as a final thought, here's the deal guys. If you want to win the game, You got to be in the game. See you next time.

Transcription

We are back with the Dropout Multi-Millionaire podcast. I'm your host, Brian Will. And as always, this podcast is based on my wall street journal and USA today, bestselling books, the dropout multimillionaire, and no, the psychology of sales and negotiation. And by the way, stay tuned at the end of the episode, I'm going to give you a coupon code for a free copy of my intro masterclass.

In the psychology of sales based on my second book, it's a one hour summary course. It's four modules. I'm giving it away to you for free today, just for listening. So stay tuned. So today we're going to talk about sales management, how we effectively manage a team of salespeople. We're kind of switching it up from sales to sales management.

How do we get our teams to crank up their sales? How do we increase their close ratios? So everybody makes more money, them and the company. And I want to start this discussion today with what we call a few guiding principles of sales management, things that you need to base your decision making around.

And so one of my favorite questions I ask people is what motivates salespeople? And most people will tell you, Oh, it's money. Yeah, money is a motivator, but that's not the only thing that people say. Well, it's rewards and incentives. Well, yes, again, that's one thing, but it's not the only thing. And in fact, both of those may not be the primary driver of what motivates salespeople.

I like to call it and people, I actually got banned on Facebook for this for a day. I don't know why, but I said, salespeople are lazy and Facebook banned me craziest thing, but there is a laziness factor. in sales. And that factor really isn't as much lazy as it is based on an individual salesperson's self worth, their self image, and what we call the basic needs factor.

Okay? Yes, salespeople are motivated by money. But they are also limited by their own personal self belief. And this is where most sales managers miss out on coaching. They think it's all about the money. And then they get frustrated, they're like, I don't understand why this person slacked off the last week of the month.

Well, let me ask you something. In your organization, have you ever actually seen that? You ever seen a salesperson, they're crushing it for two to three weeks and then they hit their goal And then all of a sudden, they back off. They take some vacation time, they slack off, they come in late, they're not really pushing it anymore.

Why do they do that? So, we like to say there are a couple of reasons. One could be their own self image is limiting them from actually going out and over producing what their basic needs is. I call this a laziness factor. They've already met their goals. Why should they push? In other words, think about it like this.

If I'm a salesperson and I'm making 200, 000 a year, and I have built a lifestyle around my 200, 000 income, and I'm happy with that, right? I got a boat. I hang out at the lake in the summers. I got a good life. I know I need to make 16, 600 a month in order to keep that lifestyle up. That is a nice lifestyle.

So if I'm in sales and I start cranking it out on January 1 and by January 20, I have hit my 16, 600 goal. Not only have I met my goal, but I now have the opportunity or the option of taking off the next 10 days of the month and really just, just kicking back and taking it easy because I've already made the money I need to make.

Now my lifestyle is even better. I'm only working 20 hours or 20 days a month to make my 200 grand, right? This is what we call the laziness factor. And by the way, if you have a salesman that has a current book of business, it amplifies this particular problem because they know they don't have to actually go out and produce to get whatever that baseline book revenue profit commission.

is going to generate. So that laziness factor can be amplified by that book of business. In fact, I asked myself, if I'm a salesperson, I'm already hitting my goals by the 20th of the month. Why would I go out and work 10 more days? I don't really care. I got a good life, right? I can do very little to have what I already have.

So the challenge becomes as a sales manager, how do we motivate salespeople to max out their potential? Not just hit their personal basic needs goal. Okay. How do we help them move up the ladder? To the next step. And I'm willing to bet in every sort, uh, every sales organization out there, including yours.

If you're listening to this, you have people that perform at different levels. I've never seen a sales organization where everybody performs at the same level. They all perform at different levels. And I break these levels into three, right? And let's call it the one to 10 scale. We have a few salespeople who are operating in the nine to 10 range.

They're killing it. We have a few that are what we call sub five level and they're dying and then everybody else is in the middle. They're in that five to six to seven to eight range and that's their production. It's, it's the same month in month out. Why is it that we have people in these different ranges?

Why are some people killing it? Why are a lot of people, most of them average, and why are some of them not doing very well? We like to say that the sub five people, and by the way, this is where you have your biggest opportunity to fix your organization, but those sub five. Level people, they either need to be coached up or they need to be coached out.

And by the way, in our example, those people may be performing at a level that makes them happy, right? If you have an organization that pays really well, and they can be on a scale of 1 to 10 of 5 or less in production, and they're still making 100, 000, they may have a personal needs of 100, 000 a year or a 100, 000 self image.

And because of that, they're never going to produce above it. The problem here with you and your company, however, is that their personal goal is not in alignment with your corporate goal. They are the only ones winning in this scenario. They can make their hundred grand, they're happy, they got a good life, but if they're not maxing out their potential, if they're wasting your leads, if they're wasting your time, then they are not accomplishing what the company needs to accomplish.

Okay? And by the way, this is the area, as I said before, the sub five.

If, and this is a big one, if they are coachable and if we can get them to want more, okay, if they are, if they're coachable, we can make amazing transformations and their production, their personal income and overall productivity for the company. In fact, I would tell you we can change their life. Okay. If they're not, they're not coachable, they don't want it.

They're not willing to listen. Okay. Thank you. Then they need to go. Sorry. Most organizations I've gone on to, in fact, I would say every organization I've gone on to and done sales training, we have eliminated the bottom 10 to 20 percent because they just weren't interested in doing any more. Okay. Then there are the ones you have in the organization that are the nines, the tens.

These are your killers. These are your hunter killers. These are the folks that are making a lot of money. And these are the ones who are unfortunately setting the bar. For the rest of the organization on what is possible. If I have 10 salespeople and I've got two nine to tens and I've got two sub fives and I've got six in the middle, everybody below the two at the top need to be looking up and going, holy crap, we really can do a lot better.

It's just a matter of whether we want to and we're willing to learn. Okay, they're setting the bar. Unfortunately, they put the target on everybody else's back on that team. Okay, they are proving what is possible. The balance of the team is your bread and butter, right? These are the middle folks, and this is probably 70 percent of the organization.

They are doing well enough. To satisfy their personal needs and enough for the company goals to get by. But as a sales manager, have you ever looked at these people and thought, Holy crap, they could do so much better. They could. The opportunity is there. They're just not doing it. Okay. They need to want it.

Is the problem. So what do you do with the team that is doing? Okay, they're not the superstars. Leave those folks alone. They're not the bottom. They're not, you know, losing money for the company or just not doing what they need to do. They're just average. They're not bad. But you know what? They're probably happy with the income they make and they're happy with what it satisfies their personal needs goal.

So how do we motivate them? This is what we're going to get into, right? Now remember when I talk about motivation, motivation, uh, is money. Yes. It's incentives. Yes. It's personal needs and it's self image. Okay? If I don't believe that I am a top producer without any outside help, I never will be. That's just human psychology.

If I don't believe I can be the best, then I never will be. If I don't believe I can produce more, I won't. Okay? That's just the way people work. So let's assume that you as an organization have a proper compensation package in place.

The next two areas we want to focus on from a motivation standpoint are going to be the incentives. And the self image and needs issue. Those are the two we need to focus on if we're going to raise the bar in the organization. So, let's start with the incentives piece. And I love incentives by the way.

They're an awesome way to push people to do more than they would normally do. Okay, but, so many organizations screw up the incentive piece. There are rules for incentives and if you do not follow them, you will actually waste time and money from an organizational standpoint. Okay, it will not give you the results you're looking for.

If you do your incentive packages wrong, incentives have to push people past their comfort zone and not reward people for normal production. That's a big one. Incentives have to be for extraordinary production, not just doing your job. In fact, I see too many people say top sales people are going to get the rewards and incentives.

That is a complete waste of time because the same people are going to win those awards. Every single time the mass of the organization, most everybody else is not going to push for a reward that they know they are not going to achieve. They will not even try. You as an organization have just wasted an opportunity to raise the bar.

And I'll give you an example. I worked for an insurance carrier years ago and the top ten Managing general agents across the country would go on these amazing trips. I mean, every two years, they were amazing. I've done some stuff that would blow your mind. Okay? But the problem is, we were always the top ten managing general agents.

So we were the same group of people that went on these trips every single year. So how did that incentivize anybody else in the organization? You've got 15, 000 people in this organization. Probably five or six thousand agencies, but the top 10 were the same top 10. So I know I was going because I'm a top 10.

How did that help anybody else in the organization? How did that raise the bar? It didn't. Incentive programs need to be achievable for everyone, not just the top producer. Otherwise the majority of the organization won't care. And won't try, right? For instance, I could do a most improved. That means everybody can try to achieve that one.

That's not just for the people that are killing it. Average sales is a waste. Do not waste your incentive programs on what people should be doing anyway. Okay. You can't do giveaways from people doing their jobs. It just hurts your margins. Incentives need to come from increased production generated from additive sales Over and above what your fixed ops, op X is already figured into, okay?

Incentives need to come from increased margins generated from additive sales that are over and above your fixed ops. That's how you make money, okay? They also need to be done in a short enough time frame that people will get behind it, okay? If you set your incentive, if it's January 1 and you say, hey, we got a big end of year incentive, nobody cares.

Nobody's going to care about that incentive until maybe June or July. Which means your first half of the year, you're getting zero productivity change out of this incentive that you put out there. You might get it at the end of the year. But you're not going to get it for the majority of the year. Okay.

We like to say that incentives have three rules. They have to be achievable for everyone. Otherwise it will not raise the bar on the organization. It has to be substantial enough that it makes a difference. So people go, wow, that's, that's a, that's a cool incentive. I really want that. And it has to be in a short enough timeframe that it will overcome that laziness factor.

It will overcome what people normally do on a day to day basis. It will overcome the average. And push people into the extraordinary. If you're not doing those three things, if it's not achievable by everyone, the organization won't care. If it's not substantial, again, nobody cares. Like, I don't care if you're going to give me 20, but if you give me 20, 000, now I'm fired up.

And it has to be a short enough time frame. Right? It has to, if it's January, I'm going to get this incentive in March. Not December. December I don't care about until probably October. So those are the three big rules for incentives. That's how you raise the bar. Number two, the second motivation. We can use is what we'll call expectations, management, and goal setting.

And this is a one where we overcome the self image problem and the basic needs problem. If you remember what I said earlier about if someone's making 200, 000 in your organization and they're happy with that income and that's all they need to live a knife's lifestyle, you're going to have to push them out of their comfort zone to 200 grand they already need.

If you can't push them out. Then they're never going to do it. Okay. So as a sales manager, I ask people all the time, are you sitting down with each one of your team members individually? Okay. Are you sitting down with them individually? Do you, as a manager know what their goals are? And I mean, specifically, if you're sitting down with Bob or Susan, do you say, Hey, Bob, what are your goals for this year?

And if Bob says, Oh, I made 200 last year, I'm going to make 200 this year. Your answer is, Nope. That does not work for me. We are an organization that moves forward. We do not stay stagnant. Okay. So we need a bigger goal. If Bob or Susan says, Hey, my goal, I made 200 this year. I want to make 300 next year.

Now we got a goal. Okay. Do you know what their personal goals are? How much money do they want to make? And I want to get real specific on this one. And then. Once you've done that, are those goals written down, memorialized, and readily available so that we can use them every week, every month, for the entire year?

Have you gone the extra step, then, to reverse engineer that goal for them for the year? It's one thing to say, hey, last year you made 200, this year you want to make 300, awesome, go get it. That's, that's a waste of time, okay? It's, Hey, you made 200 last year. Your goal is 300. Let's figure out exactly how you need to, what you need to do in order to make that money.

I want to know what you have to do monthly and each month of the year. I want to know what you need to do weekly and whatever your metrics are, how many calls do you need to make? How many appointments do you need to set? How many quotes do you need to do? What does your close ratio need to be? Whatever those metrics are within your organization, you need to reverse engineer.

That increase in their goal from the end of the year all the way back to today so that we can build a plan on exactly how they're going to achieve that, right? If they need to do an extra two calls a day, if they need to do an extra two appointments a week, if they need to do an extra five quotes a week, whatever it is in order for them to achieve that goal, you need to reverse engineer it.

Write it down, memorialize it, and use it as a guide week over week, okay, to keep them on track and hold them accountable. This is the biggest area where sales managers fail. They fail to specifically plan how to meet the specific objection or the specific, uh, goal, not objection, the goal of each individual salesperson.

And then they fail to manage it, okay? This, this is going to apply to every single person on your team. You got 10 people on your team. You got 20 people on your team. This requires 10 to 20 meetings. Okay. Every single person needs to go through this exercise. Are you as a sales manager then actively managing those goals?

And I call this my, my, uh, core metrics chart, right? So once I have my 10 or 20 people on my team, I have each one of their goals. We've reverse engineered each one of those. We know what everybody has to do weekly and monthly. I typically, in my org, in my organizations, I will have a project manager come in, build these numbers out, build these metrics out so I can see each person in a glance on a spreadsheet.

And then every week I have that person go in, feed, bring in all the data from that, that salesperson, from each one of these salespeople, fill in those marks so that I can get actuals against projected, and then highlight the folks. That are not meeting the specific goals for that week and or for that month.

Okay, so some project manager will build this for you. Literally, you can have a spreadsheet pop in front of you every week that shows you, Hey, I got 10 people. These five hit their goals. These two were close and these three are way off. Now, if I'm a sales manager, where am I going to focus my time? I'm going to focus my time on the people that aren't hitting their goals.

This is problem solving from the bottom up. Okay, so I'm gonna, I don't worry about the people that hit their goals. They're good. The people that barely missed them. Okay, if I have time, I'll get to them. The people that are missing them big time. That's where I focus my time. Okay, if I go, if you will focus your time on that and you will bring the level up from the bottom up, you will see amazing differences in your organization.

Okay, now let me say this, and this is the trick, right? As a sales manager. If you commit to doing this, by the way, first of all, if you commit to doing it, it's going to make a hell of a difference in the organization. But secondarily, if you commit to doing it, you have to actually do it. You have to actually do it every single week.

And here's the challenge. If you miss a week, you are two weeks behind. Okay? That's just a fact. If you miss two weeks, you're a month behind. So you've lost one out of your 12 potential months, you need to be accountable to yourself. You need to be accountable to this management practice and you need to be accountable to your sales team to keep them on track.

If you do again, amazing results. If you slack, you will see this whole thing go to hell in a handbasket pretty quickly. I promise you that. Okay. So focus on the metrics. Focus on the people that don't hit the goals. This is the type of management accountability management and goal setting that will help your team Overcome that needs based limitation laziness factor because they know Somebody's watching they know somebody's managing they know they have to hit specific goals and targets each week They know that if they hit it, you're gonna leave them alone.

They know if you don't if they don't Then you're going to be in their office or at their desk asking them what's going on. Okay. So here it is. You are a sales manager. You have one goal, just one. If you have a team, you have one goal. Your goal is to make your team better. If you are not making your team better.

Then you're a paper pusher and we don't need paper pushers. I can get a paper pusher in here for 40, 000 a year. Your goal is to make your team better. This is how you do it. Individual goal setting, reverse engineering, individual accountability and consistency. Every single week, every single month. Okay.

This is a huge topic. There are a lot of specifics I can't get into because we just don't have time. Sales management systems take time to build, they take time to implement, and they take discipline to manage. Okay. This is the stuff we do in my coaching and consulting practice. Personally, I would love to work with your team.

And by the way, I told you at the beginning, uh, I have this coupon code for my free master class in sales. If you go to my website, brianwillmedia. com, click on the coaching tab. From the coaching tab, click on the training courses on the training courses, click on the sales course and you'll get in there.

You'll see a box for a coupon code. You can enter the word sales, just sales. If you do that, you'll get the course for free. I suggest you watch it, give it to your team to watch. It will make them better. So that's it for today. I appreciate you being with me on the Dropout Multimillionaire podcast. If you want more information, like I said, go to brianwillmedia.com or thedropoutmm.com. That's my coaching page. Check it out. If you have any questions, if you want to get with me, if you're interested in learning more, drop me a message and we'll get back with you. See if we can help. And remember, You have to be in the game to win the game.

Transcription

And we are back with the Dropout Multimillionaire Podcast. I am your host, Brian Will. And as always, this podcast is based on my wall street journal and USA today, bestselling books, The Dropout Multimillionaire and No, The Psychology of Sales and Negotiation. And by the way, stay tuned at the end of this episode today.

I'm going to give you a coupon code to get a free copy of my masterclass in psychology of sales. It's on my website. It's a one hour, four module course, and I'm giving it away to you today for free, just for listening. And so today we're actually going to talk about sales, or more specifically, the psychology of sales, one of my favorite subjects.

And the questions are, how do you make more money? How do you make more sales? How do you increase your close ratios? When I wrote my last book, The Psychology of Sales and Negotiation, I wanted to really focus on the mental part of sales, and not the cheesy sales lines or the sales tricks. Honestly, it's because I hate cheesy sales lines and I hate salesmen who use them.

I don't like high pressure sales tactics. I don't think they work. They are generally designed to get people to do something that they don't actually want to do. And if I have to pressure you into buying something that you don't really want to buy, Then you will probably end up regretting the purchase.

You will have negative reactions towards me, and that just sucks. I would much rather find out what you're looking for and if what I have to offer fits that need. And if it does, everybody wins. If it doesn't, then let's both move on. So how do you do that? How do you find out if what you're looking for and what I have are a good fit?

It's really simple. And when I say this, half the people listening are going to say, Well, of course everybody knows that that's too simple. What's the real secret Brian? And i'm gonna tell you this is the real secret And the secret is, it's about asking questions. It's about asking a lot of questions, and more specifically, it's about asking the right kinds of questions.

And here's what I mean. Our objective in the sales process is to overcome objections. Right? Everybody's heard that. We've got to overcome objections. And we've all been through classes about overcoming objections. And there's guys online, and they're big and huge, and they teach how to overcome objections.

And we know that the single biggest thing that's standing between you and closing that sale are probably the objections. So we take classes and we try to learn. But here's what everyone misses. The secret to overcoming those objections is to overcome them before the client has them. Not just overcome the objections, but overcome the objections before the client has them.

If you can over, if you can do that, if you can overcome that objection before the client has it, then guess what? They won't have the objection and your single biggest obstacle is gone. And so you're asking me now, so, well, how do we overcome an objection if they haven't had it yet? And that brings us back to my original secret.

We ask questions, but not just any questions. We ask the right questions and the right questions are based around what we call the common objections. I would venture to say that no matter what you're selling, you get the same objections to buying all the time. If you talk to 10 clients. Eight of them will probably give you the same objections, right?

You get them over and over. And I'm willing to bet that if you've been selling your product or service for very long, you have had those objections over and over, and you know what they are. So if you know what the objections are, can you write them down? I'm guessing there's probably four or five that you hear over and over.

So what are they? If you can tell me what those objections are, and if you can write them down, then I can build you a script around them. Using a very specific set of questions, the script and the questions if properly executed can bring those objections out upfront and allow you to get them out of the way before you get to the end of the sales process and before the client can raise them.

This is how we disarm a client and we do it upfront. Okay. As an example, a lot of those questions or objections you're getting are probably about what we call the why and the when. Why are they looking? Why are they shopping? Why are they shopping with you? Why didn't they buy from somebody else? Or, have you ever gotten through the presentation and the client says, Well, I'm not looking right now.

That's a win objection. Okay. How about I need to think about it? That is usually a win objection or a money issue that you didn't already handle. And then there, by the way, there's what I call the first objection. And this is a one nobody talks about, but it's so obvious when I tell you, you'll be like, Oh yeah, I knew that.

And the first objection is that you're a salesperson and people don't like salespeople. And it's not that they don't like them as much as they don't trust them, right? They don't trust that you're going to give them the best deal. They don't trust that you're going to give them the best price. They don't trust that everything you're telling them is true.

So if we know that's the very first objection and we know that client has that wall of mistrust up, what are you going to do to overcome that one? And you better overcome that one before you even get started trying to sell them. Otherwise you're fighting an uphill battle. This is the huge first objection.

And almost everybody misses it. All these issues and all the rest are handled by building proper scripting and questions. And if done right, we can disarm 80 percent of the client's objections before they have them. And you can get to your close and your sale much faster. If that makes sense. If you want to learn more, you already get it.

You're going to get a coupon here shortly for that one hour masterclass on my website. It's normally 199, but with a coupon code. And by the way, that coupon code is sales. If you put sales in where it says coupon code, you can get that class for free today. I want you to take the class. It goes over the four boxes in the sales process.

It gets into a lot more of what I've talked about today. It's a good class. You need to take it. So that's it for today. I appreciate you being with me on the dropout multi millionaire podcast. If you want more information or to get that class, go to my website. It's www.brianwillmedia.com or thedropoutmm.com.

And remember, you have to be in the game if you wanna win the game.

Transcription (Coming Soon)

Transcription (Coming Soon)