How One Wildly Successful CEO Gets It All Done

Welcome to the Magnetic Marketing Podcast. Today we get to listen as Dave D interviews an under-40 CEO. Have you ever looked at the mirror and thought to yourself all the things that you wish you could get done and you're like, how did time pass so quickly? This is going to be an episode you will want to listen to. This is how Chris Hearn literally dissolves time. You're going to hear everything that Chris has done, how he's built out his core business, and how he's grown his business so extremely well. Plus, you'll hear how he is juggling 7 to 8 books at a single time and the unique way that he's using interns in his business. Let's listen in to Dave D and Chris Hearn as we talk about how one wildly successful CEO gets it all done.

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Welcome to the Magnetic Marketing Podcast with your host, Dan Kennedy. Hello everybody, this is Dave D., Chief Marketing Officer of GKIC, and welcome to your Gold Members CD. And my very special guest and good friend is Chris Hearn. And Chris is the CEO of Mercantile Capital. And as CEO, he does a lot more than what a traditional CEO does. He just about does about everything that you could possibly do in the business that needs doing. He provides the direction and the support for the underwriting team, and we're going to discuss exactly what his business is. He dreams up really, really cool marketing and advertising. He does incredible videos. If you haven't seen Chris's videos, and we're going to definitely give out your blog, Chris, so people can check it out. He's really a master, master marketer and master salesperson. He's also a really smart guy. He graduated from Loyola University with two magna cum laude bachelor degrees. He earned a master's degree from the University of Pennsylvania's Fels Center, and that was formerly at Wharton School of Business. He also went to Georgetown briefly, but then decided, hey, the world does not need another lawyer. So he's done a lot of things. In addition to all of that, he is also the CEO, chairman, and co-founder of an upscale men's barber shop called Kennedy's. All-American Barber Club, and he's got a baby face, and he attributes it to the straight razor shaves. And by the way, Chris, just so you know, that video— I also want to— if that video that you did about how to shave properly was unbelievable. And you probably don't know this, but I'm actually following that procedure right now. I got a mirror for inside the shower, got the oils, got the whole thing. So awesome. Really cool. So welcome to the call.

Thanks for having me, Dave. Yeah, I'm glad you saw that video. And it's kind of shocking. I have guys literally come up to me— happens about once a week on the street wherever I'm at— saying, hey, I saw that video. Thanks. I'm following that, whatever. I never would have thought to do some of those things. And yeah, so it's pretty cool. And by the way, I think we had Mr. Kennedy until you started mentioning all my academic accomplishments, which I think that's about when he probably just ejected this out of his CD player.

Yeah, exactly. Exactly right. Exactly right. Chris, tell us a little bit about your core business and what that's all about. Then we're going to get really into the discussion about how you accomplish all the things that you accomplish and how you've done it at such a young age as well.

Okay. All right. Well, I'm about to turn 40, Dave, so you're going to date me.

You're not that young. You know what it is? It's the way you take care of your skin, I guess, with all the barber shop stuff.

It's clearly that. For years I've told people, yeah, I'm the best looking 65-year-old they've ever seen. But I'll make it real simple because I know you don't want me, and nor do the listeners want me to get into all the technical detail because it'll make your head spin. But basically, I finance commercial property for business owners and entrepreneurs all around the US. That's all I do. That's what I like to do. I don't want to deal with the indecision committee process crap of large organizations. I like to work with small business owners. I get great personal satisfaction working with them. I consider myself a small business owner, so these are my people. I like to work with my people. Basically what we do is we create wealth for them, usually lasting generations in the way that we do it, the smarter financing that we provide. That's what we do, Dave.

Yeah, and you do it really well. I think one of the keys is that you're really passionate about this. Yeah, yeah. You really love this business. You go to your office and you've got pictures all over the place of all of the different buildings that you've helped entrepreneurs get in.

That's right.

You've worked with people who are in our mastermind group to help them out. You've got a real, real passion for it. How did you get started though in this? Let's go back to, was there ever a time, Chris, that you were struggling?

Was there ever a time that I was struggling? Gosh.

Were you just a superstar right out of the gate? Seriously, I think it's an important question.

Yeah, it's an important question. I'm going to try not to have my ego get in the way. Roy Firestone moment and cry or anything on this call. I think I grew up in a pretty working-class neighborhood outside of Peoria, Illinois, so downstate Illinois. People know Peoria from Caterpillar. That's the world headquarters, as long as they can keep it. And I grew up in a broken home, and I started working when I was 8, and I've pretty much been working ever since. I call that hustling. Back then it was your typical thing that most I think teenage kids do in the Midwest, which is, you know, what's called lawn maintenance, which means in the spring and summer you're mowing grass. In the fall you're raking leaves. And in the wintertime you're shoveling snow. And so I did that. It's actually kind of funny. I learned early on to fire my first customer, or one of my first customers, when— it's going to sound horribly crass here— but when a little old lady had me shovel both of her driveways. She barely used one, but she wanted to have the other one cleaned. And a driveway would take a while. When you're 8 years old. I mean, it's not just like a sidewalk, right? And she wanted to pay me like $5, and I probably spent like an hour and a half. And I'm like, you know what, sorry, I did it this one time. Thanks for the $5. I will be avoiding your house in the future snowstorms.

So, but, um, you know, you know what's cool about that? Because, you know, Dan is always talking about marketing and selling. Yeah, fluent. And so even at, even at your young age, that's what you decided to do. Yeah, yeah.

Really? Well, I mean, new kind of happenstance, I think you just get pissed off and you're like, "Well, geez, I could have done 4 sidewalks, you know, homes and made $10 each for what you just paid me." So, yeah, sometimes you learn by trial by fire, I guess. So I don't know, I just, you know, I've been always working and, you know, I think I did grow up kind of young, you know. I was kind of, I didn't like, you know, get kicked out of the house or any time, but I basically, I've been pretty much working since then and had a job or multiple jobs, actually had multiple jobs many times, and was active in school and sports and all the other stuff. So I pretty much left home at 17 and only go back to visit every once in a while, that sort of a thing. It's one of those things in downstate Illinois, you don't have a ton of choices, and in most cases you got to get out of town. It's a great place to grow up, but you got to get out to go to the big cities and do your thing. But yeah, I mean, Dave, I've had, you know, I've had, I've had what you're calling failures along the way every once in a while. I mean, I don't like to even use that word because I think every time you fail there's hopefully a lesson there if you look hard enough. And so I just feel like they're bumps along the road, little things here and there. Learn from it. Try not to do— if it was a stupid thing, try not to do it again. Move on and be smarter the next time.

Now you're involved in a lot of different projects from like the barber shop to your core business. I just saw a video of you speaking before the Senate. You're creating unbelievable marketing materials all the time. You're in the process of writing a book which is coming out. I guess the first question I really have for you is what are some of the strategies you use to keep all of this straight? Just so the folks on the call understand this. Chris is running, quote, "a real business." I mean, he's got a, you know, well, no, it's important. I mean, you're not a guy working out of your bedroom.

No, no, I've got 25 employees, 7 part-time employees in one business, and the other business technically, since they all effectively report to me, I mean, we're probably pushing, I don't know, 70, 80 employees in that business, in Kennedy's business. That's a franchise, but still. So how do I keep it all straight? Is that what you're asking?

How do you keep it all straight, get it all done? Because I think another important point that we need to make here is the balance that you have in your life.

My running joke is— and then I'll give you behind it— is I'm a Gemini, so it depends on what hat I put on. So I can at least do 2 things at any given time. But the reality is— and this kind of harkens back to what I said earlier, and I should have elaborated— is I'm one of these guys, and I don't know what it is. I'm not sure where I get it. You know, if you were to have my had my mother on the call right now, Dave, she'd say, I don't know how he does it, where he gets it from. It doesn't get from me. You know, I've been telling him he's been burning the candle at both ends since he was 10. So far I haven't burned out yet. But I, I think that— I think success is an obligation. In other words, I, I think we have a duty to give it all we got in whatever it is that we do. Now, a lot of listeners, and I know you probably share this view with me, and a lot of your listeners will too, but we are not— we're very different. We're not like the mediocre majority that's out there who are never going to listen to these CDs. I mean, the reality is I just think that— I don't know, and we can get into spiritual and religious things if you want, but really I just feel like you're given this life and you got to bust your ass and you ought to try your best and give it everything you got. And so I view that as kind of my that's my walking around life philosophy. And so how do I keep it straight? I mean, I hire good people. I mean, I've been very fortunate and very blessed to have a lot of the staff with me for a long time. Now, as you probably remember, I've involved them in a lot of things over the years. You know, for years I used to take a number of my staff to the GKIC events, partly because I wanted to accelerate their learning curve so they knew how to handle me more and work with me and deal with me more. And that's worked very, very well. I was one of the first IBAs a long, long time ago. And part of the reason I did it was because I wanted my staff to help participate, at least my marketing staff, in a lot of those meetings, the marketing of the meetings, the running of the meetings, listening to what happens at the meetings. And we've benefited considerably by that. It wasn't just as to make money. It was also to sort of leverage what I already have. So those are some of the things that I've done. Does that answer your question?

Yeah, absolutely. And just on that, one of the things that no one has ever talked about on these calls, and I think it's really important, and I'd like to get into a little bit of detail about it, is how you use interns. Oh yeah, sure. Because you have a very unique way of using interns. First of all, why did you decide to use interns? Second, how do you find the interns? And then third, what do you have the interns do? That could be applicable to anyone who's looking to bring people on board?

Okay, so interns. When I started my main company, Mercantile, about 10 years ago, I wanted to— and again, you know, we're going to go back and forth with my personality and my background and stuff, but I'm not a real— how do I put this? I'm not one of these guys that just does whatever somebody says. I'm not a good follower. I know when to follow, and everybody has to follow at some point, they can't lead all the time. But I'm not the most respectful individual of authority figures. You know, I had, it's funny, when I was in grade school, they didn't know what the hell to do with me. I went to public grade school. I used to get A's in every subject and was bored out of my mind and was basically sort of the, you know, the guy in the corner that would tell the bad kids, hey, I got an idea, why don't you go do this? I was sort of like the mastermind of all the bad shit that they did. And so that's kind of what I did. And so I usually would get Cs, Ds, and Fs in conduct. And in fact, I oftentimes talked my way out of Fs in conduct up to Ds. And my mother didn't know what the hell to do with me. And she's— I mean, literally, she was just at a loss. And so I remember distinctly when I was in 8th grade, I found out that I would not get graded on conduct when I went to high school. And I was so excited by that. I just thought that was a great, great thing. And so I guess the reason I bring all this up, Dave, is I've I've sort of been defying convention, and I don't really fit into sort of the norms all the time. And it's stayed with me for a long term, still to this day. And that actually, believe it or not, is the genesis of why do I have interns. Well, when I started this company 10 years ago, I didn't want to be like every other commercial bank. Okay? I wanted to do things a little bit different. The problem within the banking community is, you know, if you've seen it, bankers, they jump around. They go from one bank to the next bank to the next bank. I mean, I have somebody in town here I've known for probably 20 years. Been with them for 12 years and she's literally on her 8th bank in 12 years. It's like, wow. I mean, and they try their best to move their clients with them when they move, but at some point you get a little irritated by it and it's just silly. My point is they all take their baggage with them as well. Okay? And so when I started this company, I wanted to hire people that would sort of join me in the revolution. Okay? And what I mean by that is they would be young, enthusiastic, energetic, hopefully smart, smart folks that I could train my way. And my way is a little bit different because I've been in the industry long enough. I know what works and what doesn't work. And we're going to try and focus on not tradition, but we're going to focus on what works, what gets us our results, period. And if getting us our results means we're going to do things that hardly anybody else does in the industry, then that's okay. And we're going to be fine with that. Okay? Well, if you try to sell that that viewpoint on a 50-year-old, you're probably going to fail. But you can sell it on new college grads. You can sell it on college kids, especially now that they can't find jobs in a lot of places. And so that's where we started. I was literally in like a 250-square-foot office that actually now is a copy room. That shows you how small it was. And it was myself and my first hire. Here, and she had just graduated. And then I immediately wanted to hire an intern because I knew that for me our internship program has never been what people think of as interns, you know, going to make coffee and getting dry cleaning and walking the dog and making copies and all that kind of crap. For me, our internship program is really an apprenticeship program. So if they prove themselves to me, and I'm going to give them real responsibilities, I'm going to give them real tasks to do that are meaningful to our business. And oh, by the way, I pay them. Them, okay, which again was kind of a novelty. I mean, they're so much more grateful when you actually pay them, and most of them are getting college credit anyway. But if you'll do all this, you find your future employees. I mean, it's basically an audition, and that's how I always viewed it. And that's why I've now had, Dave, I just looked at it the other day, we are now on our 63rd and 64th interns that we've hired. Those are 2 new ones for this summer. We've actually got, I think we've got 4 this summer. And so actually we'll have another one joining us later this summer who is a friend of yours and mine. It's his son who is going to come spend about 6 weeks with me in Orlando. And of those I've actually hired as full-time employees, I think we're up to like 13 of them that were former interns that have become full-time employees. Now that's not a huge percentage. Percentage, but it's decent enough. I mean, what is that, like 15%, 20%, something like that? It's pretty decent. And they know how I operate. And we sort of have an— I'll call it an onboarding program where we give them what we call our Intern Survival Guide. And it's— I've shared this before. I know you've seen it before. But it basically talks about who we are as a company, our philosophy, what we expect. I mean, something simple like— and I'm looking right now, be on time, be busy. And when we say be busy, find useful things to do. Be curious. Be excited. Because I try to hire for attitudes much more so than I do for skills. I can teach them the skills, but the attitude is crucial. Take notes. So one of the things that's in this little book it talks about, and there's actually pages, blank pages, lined pages for notes, is you shouldn't— somebody said years ago, you should never go into a meeting with Chris without a pen and a paper. Because he's probably going to give you something to do, or he's going to say something you're going to want to remember. If you can't write it down, you're going to forget it. It's just human nature. And so all these different things. Another one is be in touch. You know, basically it's what, you know, if we have to ask what are you working on, that's not very good. You know, so it's just little simple things like that. There's a few little quotes in here as well. But that's something that we developed years ago. And I think it's what produces terrific future employees. And frankly, we're populating a lot of other companies here in Orlando, but also around around the country with our high-quality former interns who learned a lot. And it wasn't just a, you know, how do you take your coffee, Mr. Hearn? I mean, it was a substantial experience. And I think that's important. And again, I feel it's my obligation. If I'm going to look to bring on a new team member, then I need to do all I can for them, giving them a good experience. And hopefully they're going to return it.

Okay, so that is just—

that is just Brilliant.

I mean, that's a short course on really how to work with interns and how to get them on board and hire them and get them up to speed. Let me just dig a little bit deeper here because it's just such a fascinating subject that I don't think enough business owners tap into this, right?

I agree, I agree.

So, so somebody comes on, and so for example, at GKIC, we just are bringing on an intern. She just graduated from, from University of Texas. We're bringing her on. How should we work with her? Who should she report to? What kind of things should we have her be doing and how much supervision does she need?

Okay, well, just off the top of my head, she probably should at least partially report to a senior person like you. It doesn't mean you have to spend a lot of time with her, you know, half hour to an hour a week tops. Give her some real tasks. I don't know exactly what you're going to have her do. Is she a marketing intern?

That's correct.

Okay. How to write some copy. One thing I've found is the university system in this country does not teach people how to write well at all. It doesn't matter if you majored in English Lit, if you majored in accounting, you're just terrible writers. So they've got to learn that skill, and you're going to have to spend a little bit of time, you or somebody else is going to have to spend a little bit of time with her. Important that they understand that they're not in academia anymore. There's a certain way that you write in academia that's vastly different than the way you and I write when we write copy. And usually, because you actually do a lot of the same things I do, which is you and I tend to communicate and write copy that's very conversational. Well, they don't learn that anywhere else. So you're giving her a skill set right there, whether she becomes a future employee for you or she goes somewhere else. It's very, very valuable. When you give her responsibilities, give her time frames. This is what the previous person did and this is how long they took. This is roughly what I expect. Little things like that.

One of the things that you said, Chris, which was— and again, it really struck me— is I wrote down earlier that you said give them real tasks. But you're talking like real, real tasks, like writing copy. I mean, that's a real task. So something that someone would actually do. If they were part of the marketing team?

Yeah, I mean, it's going to be crap.

Of course.

The first time around. But you're probably at the same point I am, which is it's a heck of a lot easier for you to edit what somebody else started, unless it's absolute garbage, than it is to start from scratch. And frankly, it's a teaching moment. I mean, you're trying to explain, here's why this sentence doesn't make any sense, or you need to add more personalization here, or how about you think about starting this, or oh, by the way, here's my cheat sheet of some openers or some headlines, or see what you can do with this. Let's do some bolding and some underlining. I mean, you know, the same thing. But yeah, you want to give them real, real stuff. Now don't have them talk to your banker on the phone or try and balance your books or anything like that. But I mean, there is real contribution that can come from these young people. And frankly, that's how they learn. If you don't give it to them, how are they going to learn? It doesn't happen by osmosis.

Right. I mean, that's brilliant. Absolutely brilliant. So let's— God, we could talk about this all day. Maybe we'll have another call, another training about this because it's huge. And I mean, you use them and you hire them, and like you said, you're creating great employees.

And it's something like 30% of the young people today, and I'm saying that's like 18 to I think it's like 30, are underemployed. I just saw that statistic the other day. 40% of them are underemployed, meaning they either work part-time, they work at a job that they don't like, that they just took for the money and it's not something that they wanted to do, or they are unemployed entirely. And that's terrible. So my point is, there is a whole population of people that you could get that won't cost you as much. Even though you pay the intern, you are not paying them like you would a full-time staff person. And you are trying to figure out, it's an audition. Is this somebody who should be here with the team going forward or not? I just hired a guy, as you know, who's the son of one of our mastermind members who interned first, did an outstanding job, worked his way into a position. I actually didn't have a position for him when he started, but we created it because I didn't want to let him go. He's a good guy.

Wow. So, okay, let's continue on here because there's so much I want to talk to you about. We're running up against the clock here.

Here.

Let's— the one thing I want to talk about is you are a voracious reader. I mean, a voracious reader. Every time we go into the mastermind meeting, you have like read, I don't know, a gazillion books. So, and I kind of touched upon this, I asked you this at the, at the actual event, at the mastermind meeting, but I want to get into deeper, a little bit deeper. Number one, how do you choose the books that you read? Okay, so let's talk. Let's start with that.

Like a lot of people, you know, I— if you like recommendations, I'm very, very observant. I'm curious. I have a natural curiosity. I pay attention to things. If I'm reading the Wall Street Journal on a weekend on my lanai and somebody talks about a book and it seems interesting, I might, you know, hit up my Amazon Prime and 30 seconds later the book's on its way. I do that. I rely on smart people like yourself yourself and other folks who recommend books from time to time. I mean, I have inputs coming from all over the place. How do I prioritize them and how do I finish them? I mean, that's actually the rub. Because I still have this method I guess that I developed in college which is I may have 7 or 8 books going at any given time in various stages of completion. And if at some point if I haven't picked it up and it's been 3, 4, 5 weeks, I pretty much just throw it back in my library and forget about it because there probably wasn't enough there to captivate me to keep me finishing it. And I don't always read. I read a lot of business books obviously, a lot of nonfiction, but I also read some fiction. I've gotten better over the years. Some of that has been Dan prodding people to read a little more fiction. And so I've started doing that a little bit more. And then I also Also, as you know, I have a little bit longer commute than I used to in that we moved our offices to downtown Orlando, and I moved my kids out of one school into a further school for other reasons we can talk about in a minute. So now I have an elongated commute, and so while I'm doing— I'm basically doing what we call the windshield university. I've got audiobooks that I haven't— I've got piles, stashes, and stashes of audiobooks that I get to. And my wife's convinced that this is my— other than caffeine, this is My one big addiction is that I'm an audiophile or whatever you call it. You know, the people that collect books and buy books all the time. I really use my Amazon Prime account, let me tell you.

Why do you like still the traditional print book as opposed to the eBook or the Kindle book? Because I know that you really like the physical book. I do. Why is that? Is there an advantage to it in your mind?

The advantage is, well, for starters, I have a home library. I have in my office, which you've been in, you probably saw I've got hundreds of books in there as well. I like seeing books. I feel like they're all little accomplishments if I got through them and finished them. I like to highlight. I like to dog-ear the pages. I like the tactile feel of a book. I'm old school, I guess. I don't know. I haven't gotten into the Kindle stuff. It's the same thing like when I edit copy. Copy. I mean, I could do it on the computer, backspace, backspace, whatever, and type it in or whatever. But you talk to any of my marketing staff and they'll tell you they have to print stuff out, hand it to me, and I whip out the pen and that's how I edit.

I don't know.

It's just a tactile thing, I guess.

Cool. Well, Chris, thank you so much. It was a real pleasure as always talking to you. It was fantastic. So thank you so much.

Thanks for having me, Dave. I appreciate it. And I hope everybody enjoyed the call.

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