Episode 125: The Leadership Playbook with Nathan Jamail

So the big question is this: how do small business owners like us grow our leadership, develop our teams, and scale our business in a way that allows us to get our products and services out to the world yet still remain profitable? That is the question, and this podcast will give you the answers. I'm Bradley Hamner, and this is the Club Capital Leadership Podcast.

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Welcome to another episode of the Club Capital Leadership Podcast. My name is Bradley Hamner, your host. Today's episode, we have a good one— Nathan Jamail. Nathan has spent the last 2 decades coaching top executives and thousands of leaders around the world on leadership, employee coaching, selling skills, cultural development, and a whole lot more. His clients span the globe in all industries, from financial services, technology, healthcare, and many more. He's written and published 4 bestselling books, including his most recent book, Serve Up and Coach Down, which has been sold all around the world and has become really a guiding principle for a lot of organizations. Prior to becoming an author and working with organizations in a coaching capacity, he spent 20 years as an executive director in corporate America, as well as a small business owner of 4 companies. Himself. Needless to say, he's been in the trenches. Without further ado, here's my conversation with Nathan Jamail.

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Nathan Jamail, welcome to the Club Capital Leadership Podcast.

Thank you, Bradley. It's great to be here.

Excited to have you. We always start with background and origin story. I know a lot of our listeners are very familiar with you, but for those of you don't know your backstory, why don't you kind of take us up to where you are present day and how you got to where you are?

Sure. I'll try and give you the Reader's Digest version. So, very young in my career, you know, heck, I think I was 15 when I started working full-time. School wasn't my thing, but work was. So, I was on that work program at school and started selling retail back early, early in my life. And then, ultimately, when I graduated high school, it was either college or work. And I tried college and after about 6 weeks, the counselor was like, you know, you should probably wait. And come back when you're actually mature enough. And so, I went to work. And then, shortly after that, was in retail for several years, got into insurance. So, life and health insurance. And I'll never forget one time I went to my boss and I said, hey boss, I got it. Here's how I'm going to be successful. I'm going to change my name, my title, my business card from life insurance sales to financial planner. He's like, you're an idiot. He's like, you're 19 years old. Whose financials are you going to plan? You sell life and health insurance. And at the point, I think he was saying, sell life insurance because you're young. What I learned to take it as, be proud of what you do. Yeah. And focus on trying— don't give yourself a fancy title. Your job is to serve people selling insurance. So I did that for several years, and then I got into technology and sold the first alphanumeric paging system, which most people today don't even know what that is. But did telecom, and I did telecom for years. I went from that to wireless phones and And then in 2001, while I still had my corporate America job until 2005, I lived in 7 different states. I owned a couple of small businesses, one of them being 3 dry cleaners and eventually a mortgage company. So I kind of transitioned from corporate America to entrepreneur. And in 2005, I decided I was going to leave corporate America and go do the speaking business and write a book and all that. And so, 2008, wrote my first book. And it was funny because I remember my accountant going, let me get this straight, you're gonna leave this big corporate executive salary job to go do this, which shows no income. I'm like, I know, isn't that great? He's not really, but good luck. And so, yeah, I wrote my first book in '08. And, you know, as my wife and I always say, went broke twice and still made it. And, you know, I think I shared with you one of our conversations. I remember an end of 2000, I believe it was the end of 2007, uh, and, and our book we just finished, uh, maybe it was 2008 because the book was published in '08. And I went to my wife and say, we're, we're out of money, right? We have 30 days. And, uh, and, uh, I said I should probably get a VP job or go back into corporate America. And she says, no, I was born poor, raised poor. I'm not afraid of poor. You always say, you live in the dream. Well, chase your dream. And, you know, that encouragement, that belief, that support, it really just changed the world for us. And next thing you know, one client here, one client there, one speech here, one speech there. Here we are, 5 books later and just a great whirlwind of success with a ton of gratitude. I tell people all the time, I'm worthy of none of it, but I'm grateful for all of it. So that's— and so now what I do is I basically do keynote speeches, workshops, and executive coaching. Um, I always tell people all the time, I haven't had a real job in, in, in over 12 years. Yeah, I don't think I want one.

No. Yeah, once you go this way, you're never going back. You're never going back the other way, you know. But I have to tell you, I mean, truthfully, your books— I was struggling in leadership. Nobody had taught me leadership. I started my business in 2000 14, roughly or so, I read your book Leadership Playbook and then ended up digesting Sales Leader Playbook. So the belief that you had— and we're going to talk about beliefs in a little bit because I've got some questions around that— because you and, and the belief that your wife had in you, but that, that, um, perseverance that you had honestly has impacted my life and it impacted so many lives of thousands of business owners and their teams around the country. And so I just think it's amazing that you know, that ultimately the belief that you had in yourself and the belief that your wife had in you and the message that you wanted to get out has been able to have that much of an impact to people and business owners and, and their teams and leaders around the country and the world, for that matter.

Uh, thanks. I will tell you, it's, um, and we'll talk about it. I think if you look back at even when I wrote the books and while we were successful in our teams in business, is I always believed that belief trumps talent. It's— I have a saying in my speeches: belief creates conviction, conviction creates effort, and effort creates results. If you have conviction for something, nothing gets in your way. If you believe in something, you'll do it for the purpose of the impact versus because someone tells you to. And as leaders, it's real difficult, especially given— I say given today's time, but finding good people has always been tough. Yeah, it's just now more visible for everyone. But that— the willingness to make a difficult decision because someone doesn't believe the way they need to believe to be successful in your team is a tough decision that leaders have to do if they're going to go to the next level.

Do you think it's more that we have beliefs that we need to get rid of? So some people refer to those as limiting beliefs. So I believe things that I don't need to believe versus I don't need— I need to adopt new beliefs that I don't currently have.

Yeah, I think what happens is we allow fear and obstacles to become part of our belief system and limit us, right? You call it limiting beliefs, and it's because we accept them, right? If there's, there's a, um, there's a, there's a saying out there where it says if I told you to walk across a 2x4 or 2x6 and I laid it on the ground, you'd do it, no problem. But put it on top of a 20-story building, you wouldn't do it. If I put it on top of a 20-story building and caught that other building on fire and put your child on the other side of it, you'd run across it like it's nothing.

That's right!

And it's because the reward was worth the sacrifice and I think that ties into our belief. I think when you believe in something and you believe that you can make an impact or you can achieve a goal, I think you'll do whatever it takes to get there. And when that result is no longer worth our sacrifice, I think we start to allow ourselves to say, well, it's not possible. In life insurance, right? No one wants to buy life insurance. It's much easier than saying, I need to get better at selling life insurance. Right? It's, um, I use it with my coaching clients all the time. A lot of people call it the marketplace. You know, well, the marketplace determines this. Marketplace is a fancy word for competitors. And if the marketplace is determining your value, what you're really saying is that you can't find the way to sell enough value that people will pay more for you versus someone else. It's easier to blame marketplace than ourselves. It's easier to blame a belief versus our belief.

Yeah, that's true. I know that there's had to be times, not only whenever you decided to make the leap I mean, that was one time, but I'm sure there's been times along the way that you yourself have faced those beliefs about like, well, who am I to do this? I mean, honestly, I was that way about the podcast when I first launched it 2 and a half years ago. I was like, you know, who am I to be starting a podcast? Why would I do that? And, and so it's one thing to have the belief, but it's another thing to believe it and not push past it. So for those of us that say like, yeah, I do struggle with that, or even we see it in our teams, whenever they're struggling with a belief, what are the things that you've done and that you teach other people to then push past those?

Yeah, listen, we struggle with all— we all struggle with it. You know, I have to tell myself all the time when I do a speech is I had to remind myself I wrote the book. Like, you know, a lot of people say, what, I didn't write the book, right? That's the joke. And I'm like, Nathan, you actually wrote the book, so you have that right to go do it. And at the end of the day, people call me an expert on this, right? And what makes me any more justified to be an expert than someone said I'm an expert. It's funny, we have no trouble believing that when other people tell us we're good enough, we have no trouble like it because they said it, we're good enough. And sometimes we just gotta realize that because we say it, we're good enough. And so I guess my answer to your question is we all have some level of self-doubt. The question is, do you allow yourself doubt or self-questioning to stop you from doing what you know you need to be doing. There's no certificate, there's no license, there's no number of years of experiences or struggles that you have to have a certain limit to say, okay, once you hit this limit of either licensing or certifications or struggles, then you are qualified to do it. You've got to believe in your heart that you are qualified to make an impact in whatever you are doing. And you have to take that self-doubt, pour it out, and fill it up with competence and, and confidence and competency. Because when people perceive us to be confident, they'll assume that we're competent.

Yeah, that's right.

And we have to do the same thing for us.

Yeah.

Um, I, I— last part of that is I was at dinner with a client one night and I loved it. And he says, uh, I said, whenever I'm having dinner with client And depending on where they are in their life, right? Let's say they've been married for 40 years. I was just with another client. He's been married for 55 years. I said, what's the secret to marriage? So I get my— give me my nugget. I meet someone who's got 3 daughters like I do, or kids like I do, and I say, okay, give me the— give me the— give me the father nugget. Uh, I met the CEO and I said, give me the— give me the leadership nugget, the life nugget, right? He says, I want to be fearless. I said, okay. He was not brave. Brave means we act despite our fear. He said fearless means we don't fear any judgment. Some of the people that we think are nuts or crazy in the political world or the business world who just act despite everyone thinks they're nuts, you know, look at them. Elon Musk and the Jeff Bezos. You know, when Jeff Bezos told his buddies, hey, I'm gonna start a bookstore on the internet, they're like, you're an idiot. Right. Oh, but one of my sayings I'd love to say is the difference between being a genius and idiot is success.

Oh, I love that. I love that. That's so true as well, you know, because if you've had the success, you had the success, you're not an idiot. I heard this before. If you were like in a foreign country and you went out to get a coffee, like my, uh, in-laws are in Italy right now, yeah, and they get a coffee at a coffee shop and they sit down and start talking to somebody and the person starts talking to him about business, it's easy for him to blow it off. But if somebody taps him on the shoulder and says, hey, do you know that that's a billionaire? He's the richest person in Italy. The framing of that is just like totally different. It's like, whoa, wait a minute, let me go back and talk to this guy. You know what I mean?

Right? I can get something from this. This is some knowledge here I can gain. Yeah, that's funny.

So I know there's so many people that started this way. You did. And so I know you can really speak to this. I— there were so many questions I was going to ask you One of them that I think is really valid is the transition from being in sales yourself to being in sales leadership. And so, so many people, like, they were really good in another office, and because of their sales success themselves, they get plucked to start their own agency, to start their own business. Well, now the game has changed because it's— instead of you doing it, now you have to lead other people doing it. It's a totally different skill set. And I think people really struggle with that, you know. Um, and so can you just speak to the transition from going from being in sales yourself to sales leadership and how our beliefs and our skills have to change?

This is a very common issue, and it's common in, in agency. It's also common in all the business. We tend to promote the best salesperson to be the sales manager, corporate America. And in agency, you know, you get, you get a young agent or a team member and they're going to be superstar. And here's the thing, it's the same reason why some great superstar football players become announcers and not coaches. Totally right. It's— you've— coaching and playing are completely different skill sets and activities. They both require the knowledge of the sport, they both require the discipline, but coaching is not about being the best at that position. It's about making people who are great better. And it's a development. And so one of the biggest mistakes we see when someone goes from agency to agent or leader, an individual contributor to a coach, or a— I don't want to say coach, that's giving way too much credit to all leaders because you can be a leader and not be a coach. In fact, most, more common than not, most people are leaders and not coaches. And so when you do that The question becomes, do you know how you got to where you are, right? Did you— did— in other words, I tell people all the time, I talk about practice. If you read my books, you know I'm real big on practice. And when I do speeches, this is where people start to— at first they sit back, they go, well, I don't need to practice. I mean, have you seen me? Look how good I am. And my challenge to them is, I said, listen, I'm not here to give you religion, whatever you believe in. I— we all have— I believe we have a maker, and I believe that God gave you these gifts. And, and I think your people that raised you and influenced you and your chemical gave you your attributes. And so my challenge to people is, if you're— if you've been successful purely on your gifts and your attributes and you never perfected your skill, you never practiced, it's hard to teach other people how to be great at something if you don't know the disciplines of practice. And most people who are in sales are successful purely off their gifts. And my challenge to people is, listen, if you're successful with the gifts you've been given, A, you can't take credit for it because you didn't do anything, they were gifts. And B, How much more successful could you be if you actually practice? This is the difference between someone who has got a naturally gifted athletic presence and then becomes a superstar athlete at a certain sport. And so here's the thing, because you're a top agent doesn't mean you're gonna be a, a great coach or leader. Um, you have to decide, is making other people better part of your focus? Are you willing to spend more time developing them than handling the problems in which you face? Most agents spend more time with customers than they do their team members. Yeah, most agents spend more time in the office doing administrative work than they do making their teammates better. And there's a difference between meeting with your team like, hey, what's going on? Who you gonna call today? And, and what went on yesterday? There's a difference between updates and communication and teaching and developing. I, I tell— listen, as leaders, when we get from correcting people— like, you listen to one of your team members make a call and it wasn't right, you correct them. Coaches don't correct only. They prepare first. They say, listen, you're going to make this call, Bradley. Let's, let's scrimmage it. Life is practice. Let me teach you before you make the call.

Yeah.

And so coaches are pre-act, they get in front of the opportunity and not correct after the opportunity. So I think that is the difference.

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There's a reason why great salespeople don't always make great coaches. And the main reason why is because they don't know what makes them great.

Man, that is so good. That was worth every bit of you coming on here. That is such a good answer. You know, you, along those lines, you do draw a distinction when I was preparing around scrimmaging and role play. And nobody really likes to role-play. And I think that maybe it was Socrates, somebody back then said, you know, wisdom first starts with a definition of terms. And what ends up happening is we use these terms like interchangeably. But I think one of the things you do a really good job of is saying like, no, this is what training is. This is what scrimmaging is. This is what role-playing is. We need to define these terms so that whenever we use them the right way, we understand what it is we're talking about.

Bradley, it's funny. So, I have a couple of financial planner coaching clients, and it's not a lot in that world because the coaching is pretty expensive if you're in a small agency. But I have a couple of guys who have 3 or 4 agencies, and so, the cost investment versus reward is worth it to them. And it's funny, I was literally just doing a coaching session with one of them 2 days ago, and he's talking about his team member who who sells life insurance and they do annual reviews of the policies, right? And he says, "Nathan, here's the deal. I don't know if she doesn't, I don't know, she's great at client services, she's great at communicating, clients love her, but she's not getting any business out of them. Like she's not doing the right sales activity because she's not leaving anything." I said, "Well, that's fair." And he goes, "And I've coached her." I said, "You sure you've coached her?" He says, "Yeah, I've coached her." I said, "Let's see if you've coached her." When you sat in the meeting with her, how'd she do? Well, I haven't sat in the meeting with her. Okay, so you don't know what she's doing to me. So how do you, how do you expect her to help her get better if you don't even know what she's doing? Yeah, the problem is you're gauging what she needs to do based off a result and not her actions. And I said, uh, I said, so what do you mean you coached her? He said, well, I told her the word track and we went over What? And he goes, I know she's doing it right because she has the right answers. I said, no, no, you know she's asking the right questions, but she's not pivoting from those questions into the value and the impact which she needs to make. And so again, you can't adequately say that she's doing right or wrong because you don't know what she's doing. So you're not coaching. I say, here's my challenge to you before you make an assessment. Is she in the right position or not? You need to make sure you invest in her and prepare her, right? Scrimmage with her and then sit in that meeting with her and see if, if she's saying the wrong thing. Because really, in our world, especially in financial world, I always tell people selling is hard because selling, you have to get someone excited about something. In most cases, they're not ready to buy yet. When people are ready to buy something, they don't need to be sold. They just buy it. Hence Amazon. But insurance is even harder. This is why insurance is so hard, and even investments, right? Because if I— if you were to sell me a whole life policy or a universal life policy or a life policy in general, hey, I gotta pay for something that I never get to use, and if I do get to use it, something really bad has to happen to me, right? So before I get value, something bad— that's a tough sell. But because it's so tough, it's It's more imperative than anything we do. I mean, you guys in financial planning truly— and I'll say this tongue-in-cheek or lightly— uh, what you do changes people's lives. It determines the trajectory of people's lives.

You know what, you just saying that right there, people need to be reminded often more than we need to be taught. And you just reminding people about that that are listening to this is, is, is absolutely gold because that is a belief. Almost going back to what we talked about earlier, going back to belief. Okay, so I never— just as you were talking about watching somebody in action, I never have thought about this analogy, but it's like the coach who goes in practice and they have practice on the football— on the practice field, and then they tell the team, okay, now you guys go play the game. I'm not going to even watch the game or watch film. You guys just come back and tell me if you won or lost, and then I'm going to tell you 'You know what? You didn't do— you're not doing a good job.' It's like, 'Well, you didn't even watch the game.' I've never actually come up with that analogy.

Yeah, it's a great analogy.

Yeah.

How do you correct someone if you never saw him play the game?

It's very true.

But here's the thing. I mean, the biggest struggle is allocation of time. Most people who are listening is going to say, 'Nathan, that's great, brother. I love your idea and your theory, but in real world, we don't have the time.' Yeah, I'm gonna tell you the same thing my wife tells me all the time. If it's important to you, you'll make the time. Yeah, if you're not making the time, it's not important to you. And so here's what I will share with you is when I start off a keynote speech, I ask a question to the audience of leaders, and I say, who wish your employees were as committed to the team in the organization as you are? And every one of them raised their hand. And I say, I think what you're going to find, if you don't hate me when I'm done and you do love me, I think what you're going to find is most of our employees are not as committed to the team and us in our organization as we are, is because what you're going to find out is we maybe are not as committed to them as we think we are.

Hmm.

And we ask people to You know, go the extra mile, close the deal, work extra hours, do what it takes to hit the goal. Yet how often do we spend time teaching them and making them better? And then we ask them, you know, be a good part of the team. Yet, you know, we want you to be a positive contributor to the team. Yet how often do we have people on our team who are negatively impacting our team members and yet we still accept them? And even though we know they're not the right fit, we keep them there because either they do enough to make our payroll, or they have been with us for a long time, whatever. But we sacrifice the very thing we think is important for the short-term result.

Yeah.

Um, and so there's a lot about— I tell people being a great coach is like being a parent. Hey, we just got to quit messing up. We're never going to be great at it, right? I mean, I have 4 kids from 26 to 10. My number 1 goal is to make the less person I just want to mess the next kid up a little bit less than I messed the last kid up. Right. In coaching, I just want to coach a little bit better today than I did yesterday.

I want to ask you two questions. I want to ask you around a topic that most people probably would not know that you actually know a lot about, care a lot about, and that is as being a leader, self-care. Now, as I was doing my research, You actually own a ranch retreat, uh, your family does.

I do.

And, um, so you have spoken about this, about the, the value and the importance of not giving it lip service, of actually rest and rejuvenation, and why that's so important to our energy that we then ultimately give to our team, etc. Can you speak to that?

Yeah, so, you know, people ask me about life-work balance all the time. I don't believe in life-work balance. I believe in life-work separation. I've written articles on this. I've spoken about it. I think the biggest problem we have is that we don't— we're never fully engaged in something. And I'll give you an example. You see people at the park with their kids and on their phones the whole time. You see people at work and they're on the phone with the family members all the time. So, my ask of everyone is, listen, be present no matter where you are. Now, it's easy for me to be present with my children when they're there because I'm a kid. So, I like to play in the playground. Yeah, right. Uh, you know, my wife makes fun of me. She goes, she has 5 kids, I have 4. Um, right, because I'm a child. And, and by the way, let's be clear, I'm not perfect at it either. But I think by being present in whatever you're doing— and I've had some good years, I'm more focused on my personal health. You know, I, for 6 years, I worked out 6 days a week no matter what city I was in. I was in the best shape of my life. I felt great. And, and it was— it become— because I made I made my fitness a routine.

Yeah.

Well, now with the ranch, um, the fitness— we call it Ranch Fit now instead of CrossFit. And, and now it's about getting our minds right, you know?

Yeah.

Um, this, this— the idea of Retreat Ranch that came up with is my wife does women's retreats all over the world. When we got married 16 years ago, we always said we're open a bed and breakfast when we retire in Costa Rica and never tell our kids where we live. And and we're going to, you know, have couples come in. We're just going to entertain. And I was going to take the men fishing and she was going to do yoga with the ladies and we were going to create this bonding experience. Well, then all of a sudden 2020 comes up and she says, hey, I think we've merged both ideas. I want to— I want my own retreat ranch.

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I'm like, and you need to know this, I do whatever my wife says. So I'm like, I think that's a great idea. And what it's really created us is a sanctuary of mindset. I mean, we get to spend time together. If I'm not on stage, I'm on the ranch. And it's funny, I found, you know, I know how to plumb now, right?

Hey!

I get my— I have tractors and I will tell you, there's a— I put my audiobooks on, I get my skid steer, which is a close— and I just go knock down trees, right? I sleep around, and, and so it's really important. It's amazing how much reach— how well we recharge when we take away. My wife and I leave once a quarter, and we go for 48 hours to, you know, 2 to 3 days, and we unplug. And what we do is we sit down and we, we spend half the day kind of doing our thing, whether it's getting massages or, or just kind of restoring ourselves. And then the other half of the day, we, we work on our business plan for the year. And, and it's a— and then, and then we go and at night we'll have a nice dinner. And we do this every year, or, you know, we try to do it every quarter, um, but we definitely do it a couple of times a year.

I love it. All right, my last question is, uh, so I reached out to a good friend of mine and I said, he's a big fan of yours and has read all of your books, and I said, hey, I'm get to interview Nathan on the podcast, what would you ask him? He said, you know, I'd love to know about focus, is like, how do you determine what to be able to focus on? And And I think as a, as a leader, there's just so many things, you know, we were talking about our team and, but I need to, I need to meet with clients and I've got to hit these numbers and I've got this conference call to be on and all these things. Like there's just so many demands, there's so many inputs. It's hard to sometimes kind of like get up, get above the clouds and be able to look at it and say, you know what, I need to go focus on this. I think Naval Ravikant says what you work on is more important than how hard you work. And he's not diminishing hard work. He's just saying, what are you working on? Can you speak to like just focus and attention?

Yeah, so I'll give you two thoughts. Uh, one is I just— in fact, I'm listening to the book again. Um, it's called The One Thing by Keller.

Yeah.

And the one— and, and that's what he talks about, the one thing, right? What's the one thing that you need to do today to get you where you need to be tomorrow? What's the one thing you need to focus on in your business? And so as I'm listening to that book, I start to internalize it. Um, And so, what's my one thing? Now, at the same time, I'm gonna tell you that we need to understand that there's one thing, but under that one thing, there's 3 more one things.

Yeah, yeah.

And so, let's take agency just because I know a lot of your listeners are in the financial sector. And here we got your, just like being any small business owner, when you're an agency, when you have own agency, you're the vice president, you're the salesperson, you're the janitor, you're the bouncer, payable, you know, and, and all that stuff. So what's your one thing? And here's what I believe: the one thing that we need at agencies is to create revenue, okay? Because without revenue, nothing else, nothing else happens.

Yep.

Now the question becomes, what's the one thing that helps create the most revenue? I believe if you're a leader of agency, your number one thing should be every day you do is teaching your people to be better.

Yeah.

Because you meet with a client and you do a good job, you get one new business, you get a new policy or a new home, household, wherever it may be. You work with your 3 team members and they go out and do one thing, they get 3 new policies, right? And so it's about expanding and developing. I believe if, if you go out and work 5 days a week, 5 days a week, and meet with clients every day for 5 days, you're going to get that amount of return on investment. And that week might be a better week than me, who, if I have 3 employees, I work my 3 team members, and at the end of the week they didn't sell that much because I spent all my time with them and not the customers. Yep, you probably beat me that week. Yeah, but the next week I might have gained 2 on you, and the week after that, and the week after that. And if I'm constantly making my people better, here's what you're going to find: I can only make me so good. I'm— amazingly enough, we might make our people much better than we are. And so I think what the idea— to answer your focus— is, like anything else, we're going to get out of focus. The idea is to get out, get back in focus as fast as possible, right? Uh, the one thing Keller says is know when you're— know when you're— are your productive times, right? No, no, that if you're busy, if you're productive, like if morning is your clear-minded, that is your— that's where you are the most efficient, then that's where we need to do our priority of our one thing.

Yeah, yeah.

Um, I think again goes back to, you know, everything ties into this. I think if we're focused, if we believe in something, it's easier to focus on it. Mm-hmm!

So true!

When we're trying to do stuff that we don't believe in, it's really difficult to focus.

Yeah!

And so, I do believe that. I think we have to identify what that one thing is and what that one thing below that one thing is and I struggle with it just like everyone else. I mean, look at my world! If you ask me, my one thing is it's being on stage. At the same time, I've written 5 books, so I've got to focus on selling books so I can get on stage.

Yeah, yeah, right.

Yeah. And then, and then I do executive coaching. And so even though my one thing is, uh, getting on stage, my true value is having the impact. Because if I have an impact with you, just like on your podcast If people listen to this and they go, man, I got 3 nuts, that was it, that was, that was worth my 30 minutes or 40 minutes of my time. Everything else comes together for me.

So true. So this has been awesome. It's been a great pleasure of mine to have you on the podcast. I know some people are going to want to reach out to you. Where can they connect with you? And even if they want to know a little bit more about the ranch, where would you point them to?

Uh, yeah, so, uh, nathanjamail.com is my website. I encourage everyone to follow us on social media. We are getting more active and more active in social media. So, but nathanjamal.com, we have an Instagram page. And then the retreat is theretreatranch.com. And if you want some good entertainment, my wife and I have, she's always, she has an Instagram story or page, whatever you call it. And it's called The Retreat Ranch Marble Falls, Texas. Watch that. You'll see, you won't see this Nathan. You're gonna see Nathan with the cowboy hat, the torn up jeans, and the mud on his face. And then on top of that, we have a podcast my wife and I do, um, it's called Happy Hour at Retreat Ranch. In fact, we're getting ready to record a couple today. Um, but yeah, get in touch with nathanjamail.com, look us up. Uh, you want to do an executive retreat at the ranch, we do that now. So bring your team members and, uh, we'll have a little fun, ride some horses, and do some leadership.

That's awesome. That's awesome. Nathan, it's been a pleasure having you on. I hope to have you back on in the future.

Love to. Thank you, Bradley, so much.

And that was great having Nathan on. He was definitely somebody that I was really excited to be able to have on the podcast. And what a, what a treat to have him on. I really do hope that he comes back in the future. There's so many different really takeaways from that podcast. I think one of the things that really stood out to me whenever I asked him the question about going from sales or production to sales leadership, one of the things that was really unique about that is he gave a very specific answer that I had not really heard people give before. And that was, is that if you have the gifts, it's easy to just say, well, you know, this is God-given ability, I don't really know how to do it. Because you're not taking the time to work on and develop your own skills so that you can go from really good to great, or even great to even better, which is something I know Nathan says quite often. You've not invested, so you can't actually coach it because you've not done the work on yourself to understand how you've gotten to go from good to great or great to even better. And I thought that that was a really distinct message that he gave there around that question. You know, a couple other things that stood out to me would be, you know, whenever he said— when he asked the question about like our teams not being as fully committed to the business as we are, but then he also flipped that around and said, you know, well, are you really committed to your team? I think that one landed pretty hard with me. And then also whenever I had the conversation around self-care and then the idea of work-life separation— I've never heard that before— and then just never being fully engaged. I mean, I know I, I have kids. My kids are 11 and 7, and, and I have to really check myself at times. You know, I'll spend all day with them, and then, you know, if we go to dinner and my wife and I are wanting to, you know, have a glass of wine and just be able to talk, it's easy to just grab your phone or be distracted and not be fully present with your wife or with your kids or your significant other, whatever that is. And I think, I think it's a good reminder. It really is to just wherever you are, be there. So make sure you check him out. Go to NathanJamail.com. Yeah, definitely check out the ranch retreat too. That'd be a cool place to take your leadership team, take your team out, maybe even get together with your study group or mastermind that you're a part of and go down there. I've definitely going to, uh, take— maybe check him, uh, out and take him up on that offer to go down there. I think that would be really cool to just completely get away. That's, uh, that's definitely more my pace. We truly couldn't do this podcast and have amazing guests on like Nathan if it wasn't for our podcast sponsors. So let me give them a shout out: DirectClicks, Coach P, Rock Solid, and of course Club Capital. You know, I've talked about the importance of developing in your team, but Nathan was just talking about this, right? Like, are you really developing your— in your team and having the scrimmage and the roleplay. Well, that's exactly the type of development that you're going to get whenever you work with David Peterson and Coach P. Go to coachpconsulting.com. Make sure you mention that you heard about him on the Club Capital Leadership Podcast. He'll give you your very first month for free. Why would you not take him up on that? That's 8 training sessions for you and your team. Just like if you're going to go buy a new vehicle, you want to take it for a test drive. I want you to do the exact same thing. Go to coachpconsulting.com. Now, you've heard me say— I'm certainly not the first to say it— but having A players on your team. And whenever you have A players on your team, you're wanting them to start at a high level so that through your training and development and then to get to kind of get indoctrinated into your culture, that way you can take them from, you know, whatever, 7 or an 8 to a 9 or 10. And so you really want to start with really quality people. To begin with, whoever's coming on your team. Well, there's definitely the same thing is true whenever you have an executive assistant or creative marketing assistant. I mean, that's what Rock Solid does. They vet and find the very best people, the very best assistants, and they want to plug them with the very best people. Look, they are in demand. They have a waiting list to get started, and there's a reason why, but it is well worth the wait. The thing that an executive assistant is going to give you is the single most important thing, and it is, it will It will help give your time back. What is more important than your time? There's nothing more important than time. Well, you know, your time and your attention is, right? What are you giving your attention to? Which is why I asked the question around focus to see what Nathan would say around there. So go to rocksolidassistants.com, go to rocksolidassistants.com, and just have a conversation with them about, you know, what would it look like for me to have an executive assistant at 10 hours a week? I promise you If you, if you do this, you will be surprised about how much they can get done. I know it doesn't seem like a lot, especially if you've never hired somebody who is a fractional team member instead of full-time, but just trust me on that. It would be one of the best investments in your business and in you that you could ever make. Uh, just yesterday at the time of this recording, I was talking to, um, Matt, the founder of DirectClicks, And we were just talking about some of the results that they get for clients. And the bottom line is, you know, at the end of the day, you want somebody who's going to give you personalized service, you want somebody who's going to care about you and your business, you want the exclusivity, you want all of those things. But you know what you want more than anything? You want results. You want to know that you're actually going to be able to grow your business with leads that are quality, and at the lowest price possible. You want to be able to have really great inbound leads coming to your sales team so that they can have— they can hit their numbers and they can have a really great conversion percentage. And that is exactly what DirectClicks does. They've got some really amazing products they're going to be rolling out in the future that I know about. Obviously won't mention one here, but they're continuing. And one thing I love about their team is that they absolutely are focused on quality. They're never going to put something out that they— that they're not proud of. And it's just really easy to put something out in the short term that is kind of a crappy product, but it takes more work, um, on the front side to put out and put together a really great product. And that's exactly what the team at DirectClicks has done. Go to directclicksinc.com. And last but not least, but if you're looking to possibly bring on in the system but you don't know if you can afford it, well, if you were working with Club Capital, you could go in there plug it into, you know, the scenario planner, the forecast tool that they have now, and you'd be able to say, okay, how is this going to affect cash flow? How's this going to affect profitability? When do I think that I would get a return on my investment? You ever wondered that? You ever wonder what it's going to do to your cash and what your monthly run rate is on average and what your expenses are at? And if I make this decision, when am I going to start getting a return from it? You ever thought about that? I'm sure many of you have, but you just don't know exactly where to start. That's exactly the kind of decisions and insights that you'll be able to get whenever you work with Club Capital. Go to club.capital today. All right, everyone, that's a great episode. It was awesome having Nathan on. We appreciate all of you so much, and hopefully we are providing you some great value on your time and on your attention. Until next episode, lead well. So the big question is this: how do small business owners like us grow our leadership, develop our teams, and scale our business in a way that allows us to get our products and services out to the world yet still remain profitable? That is the question, and this podcast will give you the answers. I'm Bradley Hamner, and this is the Club Capital Leadership Podcast.

Hey, before we get into today's episode, did you know that Club Capital is the largest accounting advisory firm for insurance agency owners in the country, providing monthly accounting, CFO services, and tax preparation? Check them out at club.capital.