Creating Lasting Transformation in Your Coaching Clients

Welcome back to the Magnetic Marketing Podcast. Today we get to listen to Robert Scrobb and Rob Berkley. Now this is a very interesting episode for a couple of reasons. Often the person who builds the business is not the person who really wants to train and take care of everybody and support everybody. That's not their number one strength. Usually the number one strength was doing the thing. So now when it comes time for you to reposition and become a leader, What are the vital skills that you need in order to be able to take care of a team and properly hand off the things that are most important? Today we get to listen as Rob Berkeley, who's a coach, entrepreneur, board director, CEO, CIO, and co-developer of Vision Day, talks about not only the elements that make for a good coach, but also how those elements of a good coach are absolutely requisite in order to become a great leader. And he's going to break his definition of leadership down into 4 different quadrants and talk about how you delegate, how you organize, but really how you create lasting transformation in your coaching clients, whether or not your coaching clients or your clients are your employees who are now going to take your vision farther than you ever could alone. Let's listen in.

I don't think there's anybody that has had a bigger impact in the field of direct response than Dan Kennedy.

The legend of Dan Kennedy. Dan Kennedy should be ignored at your own peril.

They're not really lessons, they're kind of laws that you live by.

Dan opened my eyes to what small business marketing looks like. Dan teaches strategic direct response that is timeless.

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The world as we know it was changed because Dan Kennedy became obsessed with marketing.

Welcome to the Magnetic Marketing Podcast with your host, Dan Kennedy.

Well, coaching clients love the idea of being able to hire a coach, get accountability, get something done. Very often when they receive that accountability, they're not as excited about it. You know, somebody asking them if they got something done all of a sudden can make them feel bad. And balancing that, you know, selling of accountability versus how to hold them accountable and how to help your clients achieve their goals. And how you can achieve your goals as a coach is what we're going to talk about today. Hi, I'm Robert Scrobb, President of the Information Marketing Association and author of the official Get Rich Guide to Information Marketing. My guest today is Rob Berkley. He has clients that are some of the largest, fastest-growing information marketers in the country, as well as corporate executives throughout the Fortune 5000. Previously, he was a successful entrepreneur, board director for public and private companies, both at CEO and CIO. He has held executive positions at Bankers Trust, Simon Schuster, and Pearman— excuse me, Pearson. Rob is the co-developer of Vision Day, the strategic planning day for your life and business. He's conducted hundreds of Vision Days for individuals, couples, families, business partnerships, and clients including Chase, Citibank, Ernst Young, General Motors, IBM, Merrill Lynch, and even Robert Scrope. I know that that is way high on the list. So thank you very much, Rob. I appreciate you joining me today.

As always, Robert, it's really great to be with you. Thank you for having me. And thank you for that wonderful introduction.

And I want to make sure that you appreciate— you know how much I appreciate you. You've been my personal coach. Monthly now for, I think, 3 years, 4 years, probably 4 years, something like that.

The time has really flown by.

And I certainly can't imagine having to go through this journey without you, and I absolutely appreciate your help, guidance, encouragement, insight, and, and kick in the pants every now and then.

Well, thank you very much.

I really, really appreciate that. So you are well known as the coach of coaches, the guy so many people turn to who are themselves coaches and trainers. Why don't you talk a little bit about the types of clients, you know, just give folks a little bit of background, you know, what are you involved in now and who are the types of clients that you're serving?

Really, I always sort of think of two dimensions of my work and really three major avenues. So the first really are fast growth entrepreneurs, and these are people that have an ongoing entrepreneurial concern that want to really ramp up their business. They want to make that transition from being an entrepreneur to a CEO. Where they've taken their real gift, the essential gift or the essential idea that they start the business with and turned it into a profitable venture. And then they want to move forward in their own professional lives so they can be CEO and run and have an asset rather than something that actually owns them as many entrepreneurs do. So that's a lot of the work I do and always engaged in that. Is very fast growth, increasing profitability, building their teams out and helping them really understand the difference between being an entrepreneur and being a CEO. That's the first group. The second group really is classical executive coaching where I work with the owners and leaders of public and private companies. And these are people that can have organizations of, thousands of people. And this work is a little different. It's generally focused on overall organizational communication. If you want to change the culture of a 1,000-person organization, which I am involved in, actually currently one of those projects, it's very different than working with a small, nimble entrepreneurial organization. It takes a different sort of planning, communication, different sort of coaching, different sort of engagement with the executive. Helping them create a durable strategy, helping them think about how they constitute a senior team that they can direct to get the work done for them is very often the work. And then the last thing that I do very often, and I probably do about between 45 and 60 or some of these a year are vision days. And vision day is a one-day strategic planning day for your life, your work, your partnership, or your committed relationship. And so I do that with individuals and teams. So that's kind of a quick summary of the things I'm involved in right now.

And it's interesting, zipping back to what you said the first is working with high-speed entrepreneurs and helping them transition from the business owner overwhelmed into more of a CEO role. And that's something that I've, you know, because we've shared a few clients where I'm working on, working with them on their membership side and you're working with them on their leadership side. And it's fascinating to be able to watch you work. You take these folks who are really overwhelmed, overworked, they're running as fast as they can, and they just don't understand why their best is good enough. They know that they're smart, smarter than even most everybody else they know, but yet they can't seem, they feel like their best isn't good enough. They just can't make it happen. And you show them how, they can do a different sort of work. And how, you know, even though they may have been frustrated or disappointed with their delegation in the past, how they can delegate and succeed. And how they can get a lot more done by really working a lot less and communicating and trusting others and delegating these tasks that they thought that they were the very best in the world to do, and maybe they were, but how they— when they delegate those, it gets done, you know, very well through a team, and it doesn't involve the business owner. And, you know, I've seen this happen over and over through your work, and I'm just amazed at how you're able to help folks make that transformation. Can you talk a little bit about what is— I guess, what is the mindset change? Because I think that's, from what I can see, that's what it is more than anything. The business owner has to change their idea about what they do on a daily basis.

What, what it—

can you describe, you know, what does it take for somebody to go from, you know, overwhelmed business owner, they don't really think they can do anymore, to making that change to where they're that CEO able to really scale their organization?

You know, this is one of my favorite topics. And, you know, I'll start with— and I love the fact that you mentioned our collaboration. One of the things that you do with your clients that really makes this transition easy is when you start working with them on their memberships. And one of the distinctive factors that happens when an entrepreneur shifts to being a CEO is that they have automatic processes that generate recurring predictable revenue. And you are the master of that. So I sort of started in the middle, but that's one of the key aspects that people need to think about and it's really powerful. And so let's think about some others. And you talked about, of course, Delegation, one of the things that I very often, and this is kind of in the small, but one of the things that the people listening to our call right now need to have, whether they have a large organization or a small organization, is they need to have a model for delegating effectively. Everybody's told to delegate. And no one is taught how to delegate. And this is really, really important. And if you don't know how to delegate, you very often end up dumping on people. Or hovering.

Exactly, yes.

Dumping or hovering seems to be the two most popular alternatives to an effective strategy. Right, and thank you, yeah. And hovering means that you don't trust people that work for you and get things done for you. And if you outsource things or you get it done directly by your staff, if you're hovering, you might as well just be doing it yourself. So first and foremost, and this is in the small, what we really want to have is a model and expertise in delegation. So I would just always recommend that people develop that when they want to make that transition. This is about, and I would say the first, like the major topping, the major topic header is that the entrepreneur is fully committed to being a CEO. And it's a mind shift. And what it means is that little by little they have to relinquish all the things they're that they do, focus on their gift, go from a doing position to a wisdom position, going from doing it themselves, which is why they're all exhausted and frazzled, to getting it done through others in a reliable and accurate way, which is one of the important things we just talked about. Fully committed to being a CEO means sometimes letting go of the of the technical thing that got them there. So if they're, for example, if they're an expert legal practitioner, it means teaching others how to do what they do and stepping back from doing it. If they're an expert medical practitioner, cosmetic surgeon, dentist, periodontist, orthodontist, specialty worker. They learn how to teach others, get it done through others, get it done through others, and build a staff so that they're spending less time doing it and a lot more time guiding it. And the same thing for people that have another kind of specialty, whether it's information marketing or running a chain of pizza restaurants.

You know, there was this, I call it BB, before Berkeley, time in my life when, and I can remember it very well, when I was just totally overwhelmed, swamped, and it really finally occurred to me that, you know, I'm never going to be not swamped unless I learn how to work through others and be able to get things done. And, you know, you have a kind of a communication protocol that, you know, I kind of, you know, in membership and, you know, when we're— when I'm working with new members and, you know, trying to work with a client that has members who are coming in but aren't really doing anything, you know, we talk about how, You know, in order for somebody to actually be able to do it, they've got to have a trigger, they got to have motivation, and they've got to have an ability to be able to actually do it. So if you want somebody to trade options, you've got to, you know, have a trigger. You got to kind of motivate them to get to think about what options, how they're going to impact their life and how much money they can make. And they got to have the ability. They got to have the, the right account. They got to know how to put in information in it in order to make that. So it doesn't matter if you tell somebody, you know, great tip on, you know, an option they should buy. They've got to have those 3 things to be able to actually do it. And I think, right, with you, you've got a protocol that really helps simplify, uh, of, you know, one, it's not only, you know, for me when I'm delegating something, I've got to trust the person that I'm I'm delegating to. But really what you helped me understand is the person that I'm delegating to has to trust me, or they're go— or they're like looking— their, their mind isn't right about it, and I'm never— we're never going to have a successful relationship. Can you talk a little bit about how to create that trust in a relationship, you know, as you're bringing on a new person? Or maybe if you've had a person and things are stressed out and it's not really, doesn't feel like it's going well, how can you build trust with the folks that are on your team so that you can delegate without this fear that it's going to be screwed up or never done or take too long or what have you?

That's a really great question. And you've drilled into one of the core things that makes a huge difference. For the business owner, the leader. You know, there's, and as you mentioned, it's a two-way street. So the person who's doing the delegation needs to be able to trust the people that they're delegating to. And the person who's receiving the delegation needs to have a relationship of trust with the person that's delegating to them. And so I think one of the core things that people miss is that they very often ask people to do tasks that the person doesn't know how to do. And they don't know why it's important for them to do it and/or important for them to do it in a certain way. And this is always the first kind of assessment when you're doing a delegation. And so if you throw tasks over the wall to people that don't know how to do things and then you hover, as you said, and you start poking in and start criticizing and start micromanaging them while they're struggling to figure it out, they will— trust between you will erode. So one of the key steps at the beginning of a delegation is to assess whether the person knows how to do the task or not. A, and B, whether they know why the task is important and why it's important to do it a certain way. And if they don't, if neither of those is true, the protocol really is to sit down with them and you teach them step by step how to do it. Teach them step by step how to execute the task and tell them why it's really, really important. And, you know, for example, when I was in high school, I worked in a gas station. And I loved working in the gas station. And it was fun. It was dirty, greasy, really physically hard work. And I was the snow tire changing guy because no one else wanted to do it. And I was the youngest guy in the place, so they made me the snow tire changing person. But before they let me use the tire machine, my boss, whose name was also Robert, and I really loved this guy, taught me step by step how to get the wheel off the car, how to lift it without hurting my back, because I was young, dumb, and strong back then, and I could have really hurt myself. How to lift it without hurting my back, how to get it onto the machine, how to position it, how to tighten it down so the thing wouldn't fly off and kill somebody, how to use the bar, etc., etc., etc. And he taught me step by step and showed me along the way why it was important to stand a certain way, put my hands a certain way, to keep my face away from certain pieces. And the reason I'm going into such detail here is when someone doesn't know how to do something, you've got to transmit the information to them with that level of detail. And then after you're done with that, the thing to do is actually have them teach it back to you. 'Cause you can close the loop that way. So once you've gotten them to teach it back to you, you've got a closed loop process. Then you set them off on the task and you tell them when they need to check in. So for a longer task, they can check in every couple of days. For a short task, have them check in every couple of hours or every day. And that way you don't have to hover 'cause you know that they're going to come back to you. Does that all hold together for you, Rob?

It does. Now, are any— what about automating some of that training through creating videos or a screen share or something like that where maybe if you feel like you're going to have to train this to a couple of different people, you create a video and walk them through that, and then that— there's a video that somebody can watch in order— can you automate this to some extent?

I love that, and that's really important. And so we go from doing a one-on-one to sort of— I want to just talk about a little bit of a higher-level concept. And the higher-level concept is that an entrepreneur who's making the transition from entrepreneur to CEO, his or her job is to build an asset rather than a job, or rather than quote-unquote a business. And an asset is first and foremost assets are boring. They behave predictably. They throw off a certain amount of profit and income. And within an asset like that, as much as possible is checklisted and automated. So if you're going to train multiple people on how to do a task, like you mentioned, we would have them make videos. We would put the actual step-by-step checklist and processes into some kind of a process management system so they always had at their fingertips the steps they needed to take. In the process though, even if they're watching videos, the thing that I would never give up is making sure that they've absorbed the video and they can demonstrate the expertise before you turn them loose, if that makes sense. But I think that videos, audios, checklisted processes in program management systems, document management systems. All these things are essential to building an asset that can scale, that can be replicated, where you, and this is for our listeners, where you as an entrepreneur or a CEO can actually be a little more free from the business. And I think, Robert, I'm glad you raised this. And this is one of the things that you do so well when you go into organizations As you take a look at what's going on and you help people clean things up so quickly that they can be extremely productive. And also knowing you as well as I do, I know you do this in your own work and you get a prodigious amount of work done for a small organization.

Well, and we started swimming and went swimming today as a matter of fact. And it didn't take me very long to figure out that I got to create a checklist for swimming every morning, or every morning I'm going swimming, I got to look at my checklist because I got packing checklist, I've got a monthly checklist of the things I need to do on a day for the month, and then there's checklist, checklist. But if I don't have a checklist of kickboard, fins, goggles, swim cap, then I forgot something, and then I got to run back home in order to go get it, or I don't have it and I'm not able to do part of my workout. I may as well not have gone swimming then. So it's interesting how the job changes. So I hear from folks all the time that are like, well, I don't have time to be training people all the time. I got crap to do. I got clients that are— I got money to make. I got calls to fulfill. I got newsletters to write. I got stuff that's got to get done. I don't have time to train people. And it's interesting because the less of all that stuff you're doing and the more that you're training people, the more money— there's a lot more money as a CEO, or I guess probably at that level you're more of a manager where you're actually training the people. And then as a CEO, you're kind of training the trainers, so to speak. But transitioning yourself out of the role of doing and into the role of training others how to do it, there's a huge productivity gain for making that transformation in yourself.

That is so important. And what I want to mention here is that I think of the job of a leader really in 4 quadrants. And one quadrant is the quadrant of leadership, which, you know, at a summary level we think of managing the culture of the organization. And it's managing the rate of change, managing the strategy, keeping people inspired. So that's kind of a handful, small handful of things that the leadership role does. The next quadrant is management. And management is the control organization. Measurement of resources, schedules, tasks, all the things that need to be measured and tracked in an organization. The third quadrant is developing others. And this is one that people leave out. And we, you know, here in my work, I know you do this, but we focus intensely on developing other people so that they can take over as many aspects of our roles and of the roles above them as possible. So people are always growing and moving up in the organization and feeling challenged and being really engaged. People find it so valuable to be growing. That's what makes a happy employee. And then the fourth quadrant, just to be complete, is what we can call self-leadership. And this is being aware of where You, I, the people who are listening need to grow as a leader. How we come across to others is our communication effective? Are we hard on people? What are our personal values? How do they fit with the business? Are they in alignment? What's our learning plan for the next 12 months, meaning what do we want to be able to do differently or better in 12 months than we can do today, etc. So I think of it in 4 quadrants. I really wanted to call out that aligns with our conversation is this one of developing others. So that's really a key job of an owner, of a leader, is to be able to grow the people around them, to teach them, to pass on their wisdom, and to provide and create a culture where people can grow.

One of the hardest things for me has been delegating or trying to get things done when I don't know exactly how to do them. Because, you know, I've been a person that always wanted to do it myself, and so there's a whole wide range of things that I know how to do. But there are, you know, increasingly things that I don't know how to do, and I either have to have somebody on my team figure that out or We got to find a person and bring them on our team, a professional or expert, or try to develop that stuff in-house. What about, you know, somebody is, you know, trying to grow and they need a copywriter in order to write copy, or they need a particular programmer, or they need, you know, a particular type of skill. How do you bring that into an organization when you don't have the expertise yourself?

You know, that's a really important question. So the first place to start is to be really clear on the outcome that you want. So if you're looking to write copy, well, what really do you want this person to do? If you're looking for a programmer, at the end of the programming project, what really are they going to do? And what's the program going to look like? What's the software or the system going to look like? So I always think that you can eliminate a lot of disasters by being clear on the goal and the outcome, so clear that you can actually visualize what you're wanting. And for example, if it's copywriting, perhaps you want a multi-step email sequence that promotes a particular product. You would want to be so clear about what the product is, who the audience is, what the hook is, what the call to action is, what the offer is, what your guarantee is, and all the components that go into it. And then once you have all that, there are a couple of ways to go about it. One is to interview people, and it's hard to assess, it's hard to assess talent if you don't know how to do something directly. But one way to start off is by interviewing people and checking their references. The other way is— and this is the way I really like, and I firmly believe that almost anybody— actually, forget almost— anybody that's in their own business, anybody that's wanting to grow a business, any executive has to have a network. And one really good way of creating a network is to be in a mastermind group. And when you're in a mastermind group, then when you have things you don't know how to do, you're going to have trusted people that you have a strong relationship with that you can ask for support and help to get something done. The other thing is, of course, to have really good, really close professional relationships outside of the group. That can help you with this. And this is one of the things that I know about you. You've got a really good network. So if you need to get something done that you don't know how to do, you can call on close friends, but you can call on associates that you have a good working sharing relationship with over time. So I think those three ways are a really good way to go about it just from a start. But to go off into the wilderness by yourself to try to hire an expensive thing done, That's difficult. One more thing I would add is that it's worth it at a high level to do enough research so you understand the terminology and the general flow of what you want to get done. So for example, if I— and I do know how to write copy and I do know how to hire copywriters, but for example, if my task was to get an email sequence written, I would I would go find an information product and I would study it. I'd study it enough to know about what should be done, knowing full well that to develop real skill takes a lot of practice and a lot of expertise. And I would study it until I know the moving parts well enough so I can have an intelligent discussion with the person who's going to execute it. And then the last thing is to build in in the engagement if you're hiring an expert, you know, performance milestones so that you can work incrementally with them and check the work.

And I really like— and I think that's brilliant. And in particular, the clarity over what you want to happen, because, you know, that's one of the things that I deal with so much is like, oh, well, I need to get, I want to delegate this. Who should I delegate it to? And like, oh, well, wait a minute. What exactly are we delegating here? And let's get really clear about that because that's in fact where I see most of the delegation errors happening is really what the entrepreneur wants is a promotion that generates more customers.. But yet, they've got a kind of an idea of how that promotion's going to work, and maybe they've even gotten other people to work on several pieces of it. They expect, because they've been thinking about it a lot, they expect their copywriter to be able to instantly know all the different pieces they need and to be able to drop it in. Even if you're talking about something like Product Launch Formula where there's a template, there's really more like 15 templates. And even at that, everybody does kind of their own little version of it anyhow. And so your idea of how you're going to implement it, even though you studied something like Product Launch Formula and then you said, okay, this is exactly what I'm doing and it's exactly Product Launch Formula. Your idea of what that is is going to be very different than the person in the building next door looking at the same system. And so you've got to be very specific. I want 4 emails that are promoting, pre-promoting this, and I want 2 that are after the fact. You're really kind of charting out doing that strategy or working with a copywriter and paying them to do the strategy and then getting them to write the copy.. But you've got to have a very set list of this is what I want. When I created membership sites, I would in a Word file— it was very tedious because Word isn't really set up to do this— but use little boxes and text boxes to map out where I wanted certain things and what I kind of wanted it to look like. They call that a wireframe now, but this is before that even existed. We are dating ourselves here, Robert. And I still use Word because I'm like, even though that's such a nightmare, it's still— I don't know how to use the wireframe. But yeah, coming up with, yes, I want a box here, and this is the kind of information I want in it. And I want these tabs, and these are what the tabs are, and this is what I want. So when somebody goes to create that site, they have a much better chance of giving me what I want. I've got a much better chance of getting what I want if I've drawn them a picture of what I think the end product is, let them ask me a bunch of questions, and then let them repeat it back to me of what they— often that's an iteration where they go in there and do the wireframe and then kick it back, and I go, yeah, yeah, that looks like what I want it to look like. So being very, very clear about what you want is critical. So one of the things I did want to And I think a lot of this exists— how different is working with your own team versus working with your coaching clients? Do you— when you're working with a coaching client and helping them become better and build their team, how different is that when you're working with individuals within your own business?

Well, that's— No one has ever asked me that. I love that question. I love that question. I really love the question. I think it's great. There's a differentiating factor. And this is for me since I really think of myself as a coach. And when I was an executive and I had a large organization with lots of people running around doing stuff. 7 or 8, I don't know exactly how many anymore, but like let's just say 8 high-level direct reports that were responsible for directing the rest of the organization, my work was twofold. And one, it was organizing, planning the work, being clear on our goals, which you just spoke about, and our outcomes, making sure we had an effective strategy. And I do this now in in our business today, making sure the strategy is effective, making sure the administration work is done, making sure all the processes are in place. But at the same time, I still play the role of coach. So when I had a large team, I set aside time every week to develop each one of my key direct reports. And even today, there's a continual process of developing the people that work here in this organization, although it's much smaller, but there's a continuous process of developing people. So there's both the work of the work and there's coaching. When working with clients, the focus is a little different. Getting, you know, stoking the fires of their motivation so that they feel the importance, the positive aspects and the negative outcome. Well, the positive aspects of getting the work done and the negative aspects of not doing it, the consequences of not doing that. So it's first and foremost, in fact, where you started this interview is talking about, you know, holding people accountable. And I think of it less as holding people accountable because as you mentioned, if you hold people accountable, very often they get mad. So the work of a really high-level coach is to have people understand the benefits and the consequences of not doing what they need to do on their life and their work, being clear on that, which creates this internal fire for them to get the thing done. So they stay on track and they are more, excited to check in with you and track with you how they're doing on a certain project. And so the work with coaching clients is about helping them be super, super crystal clear on what they want. I find that where most people go sideways, at least in the beginning, is they don't— they're not clear on what they want. So being crystal clear on what they want and being self-motivated to kick down doors and make stuff happen without having somebody externally to nag them and bug them and prod them. It's important for them to feel the strong support of their coach, which is one of the things that I make sure to do. And I know you do this as well with your clients. It's good for them to have a strong hand at their back and to feel their feel your presence by their side, but not to feel like you're a parent chasing them around, which is the work could have a tendency to be.

In particular, folks who take up coaching see themselves almost like as a sports coach with a whistle around their neck and going, all right, it's time to do these. Time to do these splits and this workout and this, you know, this activity, and they feel like they really want to push their clients. And you really have a different approach of leading and leading them with their— by stoking the internal fire. How can you give some insight on, you know, what is it that you're thinking about and doing when you are working with a client and they're stuck and you're trying to help them find that motivation within them to get unstuck?

Got it. Well, you know, this is really— I think about 3 things. And one is relief, two is change, and three is transformation. Okay. It's very easy to give people relief. If you relieve them from their struggle, they feel better right away, but nothing gets done. They do not move forward. We think about change is when you add in some sort of resources or some sort of expertise, and they change the way they do things. And then we think about transformation, which is what we really, really want to go for in our work. And transformation is when they become different. They react differently. They behave differently. They think differently about their work. And the way to get into that, A, is to be super clear. As we've talked about. And the other is, and this is where a lot of coaches go wrong, is to focus on the absolute fewest things possible at a time. So pick the one thing that's causing the greatest trouble or the greatest opportunity and focus all of our energy in our working partnership together to change that. And, you know, you experienced that yourself. We identified the largest, we'll call it a personal bottleneck, and we work to change the way people actually respond when they encounter that thing, to develop motivation from within, to develop such crystal clarity on the effects of their behavior and their thinking patterns, their either their skill level or lack of skill, in order so that they can have a transformative experience in their life. Once they go through a transformation like that, then the cycle wants to repeat itself. They come back, and even though the work is hard, takes focus, takes energy, takes clarity, people, once they've experienced that, where they notice themselves that they're responding differently in situations, where they recognize all of a sudden that they are starting to trust the people around them to get tasks done, where they're starting to think strategically rather than how to get QuickBooks to work right, then the relationship, the coaching relationship, the partnership goes to a new level and their rate of change accelerates. And I've seen this for years. I've been doing this since 1991. And the tendency is just to go too broad, and the thing that makes the biggest difference is to really have a laser focus on just one or two things at a time. In fact, you know, I have a series of coaching calls coming up today. I was reviewing my notes early this morning and beside everybody's note is the one thing that we absolutely must work on and focus on and move to the next level.

That's awesome. If somebody feels overwhelmed or stuck, how do you help them find— how do you give them relief? In your model, relief, change, and transformation, how do you help them feel better about not getting that done or better about that situation or the fact that they've got so much to do or that something—

some negative change that happened within their business? Yeah, that's a really important question, and this may sound a little strong. Sometimes you don't want to give people relief because it removes their desire to change it. And this is done with deep caring for the people that we work with, but the idea is if somebody's really struggling You've got to support them through the change. And, you know, very often, and with senior executives, some of them have behaviors that are just not conducive to building great relationships. And if you give them relief around the consequences, well, they're not going to work to change. If you help them see their role, they're not going to feel great about it. But if you support them, meaning you bear witness, you stand by their side, you look at their struggle, you look at their suffering, and you let them know there's somebody there that cares and understands what's happening while they work to change it through the motivation of the discomfort, that's much more valuable. There are times, of course—

go ahead, I'm sorry. Well, working with a client that launches products and he's got a 50% refund rate, on the product. And one of the reasons why it's such a high refund rate is that the product sucks. And, you know, they've hurried through the implementation and they're shipping something that isn't delivering on the promises within the product. And, you know, it's— you know, they still, you know, during the process, you know, they still are selling the product and still have the 50% refund rate. But, you know, it's like, yeah, you— this is exactly why we're doing this project. And as we get this implemented, we're going to start to see that refund rate go down. But until then, you know, I mean, it's a half a million dollar a month problem for this business, right?

And so, I mean, this is a perfect example. If they have this product that's shoddy where they get 50% refund rate and you relieve them of the responsibility and discomfort, they're never going to change it. So if we go, oh, you know, that's okay, 50% is okay, no problem, don't sweat it, we'll just sell more. Well—

Right, we get the other 50%, that's still half a million dollars, that's still good money, right?

Exactly, but really here is to, and you know, sometimes this is a difficult conversation and this is a conversation I know you're capable of having really nicely, clearly, and directly, but this is a conversation that at the end of the day uplifts people, the hard conversation. And let's call this person Fred. I don't know what their name is, but, you know, Fred, hey, 50% return rate is really hurting your business. You need to look long and hard at this, and we need to change it, not make it okay for them.

And so you give them relief by making them, by helping them control, putting them in control of the solution. Versus having them feel like they're victimized by this circumstance.

Exactly, yeah, put them at, that's really great. So the idea is, are they an active participant in their life or are things happening to them? Right, so there could be, they could, let's take that example, they could feel like a 50% refund rate is happening to them, or they can feel like they're responsible for that and that they're responsible for making it better and move heaven and earth to change it.

Rob, thank you so much. It's been a pleasure having you on today, and I really love what you shared about building your team, building organization, and how to coach when you have somebody that's frustrated and overwhelmed and how to help them see that pain as something that they can control, give them the tools to help transform their life.

Thank you so much. I appreciate you. I appreciate you. Thank you for having me, and what a wonderful interview, Robert, as always.

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