328 - The Unexpected Benefits of Humility and Listening in Business with Paid 2 Persuade's Luke Lunkenheimer

Welcome to Listening with Leaders. I'm Doug Noll, lawyer turned peacemaker. I teach executive leaders how to listen to emotions rather than words so that they can become the leaders everyone wants to follow. And I teach those same leaders how to be authentically present, available, and connected to their families despite being insanely busy. I have learned that we are 98% emotional and only 2% rational. Learning how to listen to emotions is, in my experience, the foundational skill of life. Stick around to the end of the show and I'll reveal how you can be on our next guest in 15 to 20 minutes. So let's get started. Luke Lunkenheimer, welcome to Listening with Leaders. You are— you actually have a really interesting background, which we're going to get into, but I understand, number one, you have a company called Paid to Persuade, which is a sales training company that you're just working on building, and you also have some used car dealerships and, and you've made pretty good money doing that. But before that, you had a pretty rough life. You had addictive disorders and spent some time in prison and somehow got it all figured out. So we're really interested in hearing the story. Welcome to the show.

I'm excited to be here, Doug, and it's nice to know. I thought you were referring to the seesaw injury, but you meant the prison time. I'm glad we clarified that.

So let's just start off. Tell us a little bit about your backstory. What happened?

Yeah, man, a lot happened and we can go down a lot of rabbit holes of what caused it and why. And but what's important is I went down a very dark road. I had a scholarship to play football, got injured, lost the scholarship, tried to get the shoulder fixed, and in the midst of doing so got very addicted to opiate pain medication. Addiction was rampant in my family. Wasn't properly educated about it, didn't know the warning signs. A lot of naivete and lack of education in what I was dealing with. I just thought I was a guy who took a few extra pills here and there. And then a decade later, you realize you've lost your 20s into your 30s and and you need to pivot. So I subconsciously, I think the reason that I robbed the bank and went to prison was because I did not have control of myself. I was not able to get off the drugs. The willpower was there, but it's a very physical addiction with opiates. So it's a very difficult— it's like a double threat. When you're dealing with something very difficult, you can oftentimes overcome it with a significant amount of willpower, but when you've got two things working against you, it's difficult to tackle both at the same time. And I think that's why opiate addiction has such a poor recovery rate, is because once you feel like you're getting past the mental portion of it, then becomes very physical. And then once you try to finally get past the physical portion of it, when all the emotional pain comes back and you remember why you used in the first place. For me, it was more of just, I think, subconsciously wanting control to be taken from me. So I says, hey, we'll rob a bank. I always thought it was a flashy thing from the movies of my childhood, and I'll either be a successful bank robber and get off drugs, or maybe stay on drugs, I don't know, we'll have a whole bunch of money to do it with, or I would inevitably be caught and go away to prison. And prison was actually a life-saving intervention for me. I think it is for a lot of guys, but I'm one of the few that the correction system actually corrected. I participated actively in it and tried to get better, and I did. So I needed the physical quarantine. That's what needed to be taken from me, was the physicality of it, and to get sober physically. And then the mind reacted. The mind wanted to be better. So that's, that's the rough phase.

So you got out, then what happened? Now you're, uh, now you're, uh, Ellen Yep. You got 15 strikes against you coming outta prison. How do you turn that around and overcome all the, the bias and the, all the barriers that states put up against people who have been rehabilitated?

And they absolutely do. And you're certainly an authority to speak on that. And it's almost, it's tough when you're, when you're outside of that ecosystem looking in, it's very easy to pass judgment and have opinions. Uh, but once you're immersed in it and you're forced to try to survive amongst it, it becomes a very different thing. And you do realize how much is stacked against you. And that's not, that's even And after the societal barriers and the negative connotations and the preconceived notions and all that stuff. Luckily for me, I had some history in sales before I went to prison, and I knew that I saw people in sales literally high off drugs, drunk, previous felons. It didn't matter what their past was if in that moment they were selling, closing deals and making money for the company. This, of course, was in the car business, which is a very— can be a nefarious terrain to operate on. It's not exactly a great launchpad for success for young boy. But what I knew when I got out, I tried to do the 9-to-5 thing. I would get on the bus at 4:30 in the morning to get to the bus stop by 5:30 to catch the connecting bus at 6 to ride to work at 7:30 to wait an hour till the place opened, another half hour to start my shift. And I was spending 5 hours in the morning just to get to the job. That's how committed I was. And then another 2 hours to get home. So I would sleep 4 to 5 hours a night and return to a 9-to-5 job that I hated just to try to do things the right way. That employer discovered that I was a felon even though I had disclosed it on my job application. I think it was more some local people came in, recognized me, gave him a hard time, and He didn't have the mental capacity to deal with that, so he let me go. And here I was, a guy trying to do everything the right way and just continuing to get kicked in the shins. And there was a lot of things, and we only have so much time, but understand there were a lot of things that continued to push back on me, as I'm sure you can imagine. And it just, it felt very hopeless. So I, I had an opportunity to get back into sales, and I said, okay, this is— I need to regain some sort of control and have some sort of power in my life, meaning to assert change. And I knew that if I got— because I was such a strong salesperson, if I could show my worth and closing deals and selling and bringing money and revenue through the door to a business owner, that I would be able to secure employment and then from there build and make money and try to rebuild my life. It's funny, sales actually was one of the hooks that I latched onto to try to help rebuild.

It just sounds like— I know because of my work in prisons over, over a long period of time that it's not good enough just to serve time, that our legislatures have decided that because being tough on crime gets them elected, kicking people between their legs when they're coming out and then kicking them in the head and then kicking them in the face.

Yeah, just for— to your point, Doug, I, I was a 1 to 3 indeterminate sentence in New York, which means you do a year in prison, which is I believe 10 or 9 months with good time, and when you get out you can do 6 months on parole. And if you do what you're supposed to do, they release you, you go back to your life. I was a one-time felon, first time ever doing state time with a drug-related charge, which is generally something they're a little lenient with because if you got rehabilitated and you have clean urinalysis and stuff, they'll let you So they maxed me out. They made me do 3 years on parole or 2 years on parole. I ended up— I was a guy— everybody else that I did time with, they're all getting— these are guys that violent crimes, domestic abusers, vehicular manslaughter. These guys are getting merit boards at parole. And because it was related to drugs and opiates, it was crucifixion. I did too. I had to do 2 years of absolute perfection. Now, I will say that I did them perfectly. There were no technical violations. I never so much as missed a curfew. And I peed Poland Spring water for 2 years of my life and have every day since. But it's certainly having that loom over your shoulder. It's like being incarcerated. You can go in on an aggravated unlicensed operation charge in the state of New York, and then you can do the rest of your life in prison because something transpires while you're immersed in the system, and they just throw— you get forgotten about. It happens all the time. It's very sad. So I was petrified, and I was willing to do whatever it took to get away from that. But yes, to your point, I ended committing 3 years of my life to supervision in the corrections department. And it really, it halted my ability to make progress. It certainly, it did correct me from a drug addiction standpoint, but it didn't make it easy to try to regain footing in society, that's for damn sure.

You managed to do that and you're successful today. So what is it that gets you up in the morning and gets you excited to go to work?

That answer today is different than it was years ago when I first got out. Today it's my kids. And you'll get me emotional saying that. When you learn that there's something that you're responsible for now, something innocent and pure that, that doesn't care about your mistakes, it doesn't— it loves you for who you are, but you have a responsibility to it to not have to go through what you went through that led you down the path that you went. It's an incredibly overwhelming sense of responsibility and commitment, but it's also an overwhelming sense of pride and purpose. So that, that answer today is my children. Now I can tell you, had I never had children, I do believe I still would have gotten quite, quite a bit of success and still gone down a similar path because my son Maximus was born well into our success with the car dealerships. I can tell you, for me, it is— the beauty is in the process. For me, achievement is what gets me high. Progress, learning, gaining new information. Because every time I learn and I gain new information, I'm able to get more money, more position, more freedom. And having been incarcerated, and having lived in a very naive small town, it was just blinders on my whole life, my young adult life into adulthood, and then drugs and addiction. It just— I lived in this little itty-bitty petri dish of the world where if you were a $100,000 a year earner, you were a deity. And if you were able to get out of the confines of Cato, New York, you were special. And I made six figures by the time I hit 20 years old and was promoted to sales manager. And I was like, Where the hell do I go from here? I made it. Meanwhile, there's Sir Richard Bransons and the Elon Musks of the world flying private and changing the world and flying rocket ships. Expanding my think was a major part of that. But to me, what gets me up every morning, man, is knowing that I can continue to live and grow and gain knowledge. And the freedom— the world that we live in and the opportunities that exist in it via relationships, meaning every time you meet somebody new, like for instance our, our having met will blossom into some sort of growth and learning moment for myself, maybe you as well.

It's—

I just pop out of bed excited, man. What is the day going to bring? What can I learn today? Because when you're a guy whose parents made $70 grand a year and your excitement was limited to Skee-Ball at Chuck E. Cheese's, and now you're flying first class, speaking at seminars, training billion-dollar companies, and with multiple locations in multiple states, it's, wait a minute, if I can do this, maybe I can get to that rung on the ladder. And then you grab a hold of it and you realize you've got it secured. You pull yourself up and you're like, Good Lord, the view's way better from up here. What's the next rung on the ladder like? So for me, it's progress. It's progress. It's learning. And I'm just excited to get up each day and see what, what the future holds.

So you gotta, you've got some used car dealerships that you built up and you also have a company called Paid to Persuade. Yep.

Paid to Persuade.

What got you into the training business?

Those two are very cohesive. So I got, I had an employer that was, so He owns a company called Ziebart. It's a franchise of the Ziebart International Organization, just automotive rustproofing, aftermarket products, car protection, so on and so forth. I had gotten out of prison, partnered with a guy doing a used car thing. He robbed me. He was a nefarious actor. It was an example of getting involved in the same people, places, and things. Luckily, I didn't fall back into addiction, but I certainly was dealing with a nefarious individual. I was— ended up getting $40,000 stolen from me, lost my nest egg, was right back to nothing. And this individual who had fired me me previously before I went to prison for not being a good employee— we'll leave it at that— had reached out to me and given me a second chance. And I was a very profitable salesperson for him. He invited me back, and within 2 months, he just— he saw something had changed in me. He saw that I wasn't the same Luke Lunkenheimer, the cocky, egomaniacal, drug-addicted guy that puts huge numbers on the board. I was the calculated, responsible, caring, respectful, integrity-bearing individual that still did very strong numbers but was poised and was safe.

But mature.

Mature is a good word. And he, he offered me an opportunity, offered to front me $150,000 to start my own used car dealership. I would pay him back over 4 years what was borrowed and what was used to start the business. And if after 4 years everything went as it was supposed to, he would allow me to buy it out, buy his interest out for a predetermined figure, which was a dollar store bargain compared to what we built that company up to. But he kept his word. And that right there was the beginning of what led to later becoming Paid to Persuade, because over the course for several years. We scaled that dealership to 3 locations. We just had a record month last month, and that's not even with me at the helm anymore. That's with a CEO and a general manager installed. And I realized, Doug, that I wasn't a super talented car dealer. The reason that my companies were successful is because I was a ruthless closer. Everybody with a pulse that walked through the door, as long as we had something that was— as long as we had the means and a car that was good for them, they bought an automobile. I was able to teach that. And what I learned about myself was that there's very few— there's a guy by the name of Dave Shearoff. He's a multi, multi-millionaire CEO of several companies, most notably the CEO of the Metro Mattress Group out of the Northeast region of the United States, one of the most noted furniture, multi-franchise furniture companies that ever existed, if you do the research. And he's a mentor of mine. And he used to say back during my dark period, he said, Luke, you're like Michael Jordan. And I said, oh yeah, why is that? He said this the day he fired me, by the way. He says, you're like Michael Jordan. I said, why? He goes, because I got to put you in the game because you're my top producer and you win me games. He says, but none of your teammates can stand you. I say that to say this. Michael Jordan, guys that are incredibly— LeBron James, people who are incredibly talented athletes and very effective at what they do generally do not go on to teach the craft, right? They're executors. They can do it. But to teach it requires a whole different mentality and a whole different persona. I've been blessed. As it would appear, with the ability to do and teach and almost teach better than I do. So once I learned that I was able to replicate what I did to about 90% efficacy in a green salesperson off the street, never sold a thing before, and then place them in my company and have them spin product productivity at 90% of what I was doing, that was remarkable. And I didn't know that until outside entities who were mentors said, You're getting him to do 90% of what you were doing. Yeah, dude, you need to scale, open another one, train somebody else. So I started doing that. Once I replicated it the third time, the mentors in my life were like, Luke, you're on to something here. Like, you, you either need to scale this company to 1,000 locations and become worth a couple hundred million bucks and then sell, or you need to take this skill into an ecosystem that has better margins. And what I stood back and saw at that point was there was a tremendous amount of sales trainers in the space that had a very, a very neat combination of kind of some fame and notoriety, well-known names, household names, but also very wealthy. The one thing I thought they were missing was integrity. I read some of the stories and I saw the backstories of a lot of these guys, and I would go to their funnels and their landing pages in there, and it was— you would expect them to be ridden with testimonials if these guys were so effective at what they were doing. I'm thinking they're— they just got to be plastered with testimonials and You're hard-pressed to find one. So I said, if I'm so good at doing this and I'm this effective, then hell, after my first person trained, I'll have a great testimonial and then I'll just build off that and build off that. So it's the age-old tale of working really hard to secure the first few clients and then living off the fruits of those testimonials and that word of mouth. And what that's turned into— that same gentleman who fronted me the $150 grand, opened my car dealership, hired me back to train his salespeople, and we increased their average ticket by 40%.

Wow.

Which is in monumental shift for them, a fundamental change. And then we just deployed it at scale, and now we train lots of salespeople, and we're really good at it with lots of testimonials.

What kind of industries are you working in?

So all, any and all. But in order to try to be as— to communicate as effectively with your audience, if you say we train everybody equally as good, that's obviously not true. There's no such thing as that, right? I would say the vertical that we are strongest in is the one that I'm most at home in, which is auto industry or tangible asset. Selling a couch, selling a chair, selling a car, selling a house. To take a thing, build value in it, and sell it to somebody. That's what we are best at. However, we have branched off into merchant services, home services, roofing, and we're crushing it there too. So my ego wants to tell you I can train anybody. I truly believe I can, and that will prove to be— and I have testimonials to back that. But if I'm trying to speak candidly and with humility, car sales and tangible assets, we're very strong at, and that's where we're at home.

There you go. So let's talk about listening. You know, this show is called Listening with Leaders because as I told you before we started recording, that in my view, listening is the foundational skill of life. How does listening play into who you are and what you teach?

It's been the reason for my success wholly and entirely. And I agree with your statement with tenacity. You're talking to a guy that is very arrogant and narcissistic by nature, right? I, and it's humbling to admit that most guys don't lead with that. You audit your life and you look back and say, man, I missed so much. The reason being is because at a very young age I was told I was the virtuoso, right? That I was some god of sales because I was an 18-year-old kid who'd lived and grown up around the car business. So I was very confident and it came very naturally to me. And within your first month or two on the sales floor, when you're taking the top spot by significant margins, that breeds that inside you and you gain that at a young age. And it's very detrimental. It's very detrimental because it puts you in a position where you don't believe there's anything else out there for you to learn, that if anything, you're the youngest guy that's supposed to be teaching it to everybody else. But what of course you eventually learn is It's just not logistics and semantics and words and phrases, and it's experience and it's repetitions and it's frequency. It's laps around the track. And I can tell you that from a young age, I was a very arrogant guy. And as time has progressed, I've listened in small partitions, small portions. My— I tried to gain humility and really it happened. Probably the most notable moment is in prison when a drug addiction counselor said to me, because it was— I was having a conflict with the group. And he goes, hey, Luke. I said, yeah. He goes, if there's 99 people in a room wearing raincoats and you're the only one with a white t-shirt, do you think that I'm going to see your nipples? And I said, Greg, what are you talking about? He goes, wet t-shirt, rain. You get the point? I'm trying to be funny. And I'm like, not really. And he says, Luke, you're standing in a room, 99 people around you are wearing raincoats saying it's going to rain, and you're standing there in a t-shirt. We're gonna see your nipples. And I'm like— and it just didn't click. Later that night in bed, I'm sitting there, and it was after something else had happened in the mess hall, and everybody was telling me I was stupid for doing what I was doing. I'm like, no, you guys are dumb. This is the way you do it. And I realized how arrogant it was, because in my head, oh, these are just inmates, these are just prisoners, they're not going to tell the great Luke Lunkenheimer. And I'm like, I'm a prisoner, I'm an inmate. Just because I don't feel as though my brain lives in here with these guys, my body certainly doesn't. That's because of my actions. If my brain leads to my actions, my actions led me here, then damn it, maybe I am one of these guys. And then you start— then all it takes is it's one thread on the sweater to get tugged, and then all of a sudden it's away. And now I am fundamentally a paradigm shift in human being today. And I fight those urges to show arrogance and narcissism. And I can tell you this: listening is the reason that I have the success that I do, because I look back over all the significant benchmarks in this latter part of my life, in this kind of 30 to 41. Mind you, I lost the age of 20 to 30 to addiction and prison. So I went from 0 to 19 and a half and then drugs and prison and then woke up at 31. That's really, truly when you're in that cloud of fog of drugs and addiction. That's how that happens. So I'm a 41-year-old guy with 31 years of real-world experience. If you look at it that way. And I look back over the progression of the past decade, Doug, and I cannot attribute my successes to anything other than I listened to this guy. And it caused me to deploy this, and that got me to this next step. Then during a coaching session with my mentor Dave, he told me this thing, and that caused me to execute upon this plan, and that got us to here. And then as of recently, I was hiring a CEO to replace me in the car dealership so I could pursue Paid to Persuade full-time. And it was— he was bringing ideas and things to the table, and my pride said, no, that's not how we do it here. But then I said, I'm pursuing you and I'm recruiting you because the company you work for is bigger than mine, so maybe I should shut up and listen. And then I just installed him into the company, paid him well, let him do his thing and make decisions. And the ones that I know are the wrong decision, I call out and I explain why. But aside from that, and they're few and far between, I just let him run. And we've just had our best month ever last month with an amount of cars that you would ask me in the early stages of this company if we would ever see. I probably would have disagreed with you. So listening, Doug, has been the fulcrum of my success. In every way, shape, and form.

How you talked about the fact that you have a narcissistic and arrogant personality, you grew up with a self-protective mechanisms for the emotions.

Defense mechanism. Yes, sir.

How, what advice would you give to people, people listening to this show?

Yes.

Who, they were successful and, but how do you develop the humility to listen? That you have obviously developed?

There's a video out there, and instead of just trying to give some sort of prophetic philosophical answer, I'll just make it very simple and tangible. There's a YouTube video where Elon Musk is standing next to one of the Falcon Heavy rocket ships that's about to take off into space, and he's talking to a YouTuber, and he's like asking him— he asks him about one particular propellant and how it's used at one stage of the rocket's acceleration. And Elon goes, yeah, we use that for— and that's it. And he goes, why don't you just use it for the whole thing? And Elon goes, That, that, that's a good idea. We're going to look into that. He turns, he just walks away. Very weird. Then several videos later, and if you watch the YouTuber's channel, he blends the both videos together, say maybe a year and a half later, 2 years later, they're back. And this is when they're launching the big one that they sent out and they caught, I think, somewhere in the progression. And he walks over to the YouTuber, says, hey, how you doing? He goes, I remember you. He's like, hey, that thing that you said about the such-and-such repel— yeah, we do that now. It's far more efficient. It's changed the game completely. It's part of the reason that we're even still here. And getting funding. So thank you for that. That's a YouTuber, man. That's a guy that probably ChatGPT'd his thoughts and got an answer from. And here he is with one of the world's most success— arguably one of the most successful and wealthy individuals known to existence. And he got life-changing advice from a YouTuber in a 30-second short-form video clip. So if that doesn't tell us that if we're not aware and listening out in the ether for what could come our way. Things are sent to us, and I don't mean that in a spiritual way. Information and energy is all around us, and you can either choose to listen to it or you can choose not to. And I can tell you that if you were to go to the top of the food chain and ask the Rockefellers, the Carnegies, the Sir Richard Bransons, the Elon Musks, the Jeff Bezos— the list goes on— what do you think is probably your one most— not maybe singular most, but one of your most skills that allows you to progress. It would be, I'm a good listener, I listen to my team, I listen to my kids, I listen to my wife. Brother, once you experience that, you cannot go back. That's right, you cannot go back. The level of humility that you gain at that point, and then the excitement, then you go on this quest for learning, right? It's like, I used to be the guy that listened to heavy metal while I lift weights. I'm 6'4", about 275 pounds. I'm not a small guy. It's tough to depict on a Zoom call, but I'm a looming individual. And I can tell you that I used to lift, listen to heavy music and rap music and throw the weights like I was back in prison. Now I'm listening to audiobooks on Audible while I'm lifting weights. It's the goofiest thing to see this sweaty gorilla listening to The 48 Laws of Power, but it's very real. And I think I probably replaced that necessity for addiction and dopamine response with getting new information. And that replacement, obviously much healthier, but the success that it brings, man, it's undeniable. You cannot constantly be getting better and have a lack and not have an improved quality of life. It's a logical fallacy. So that's why I love your show so much and the idea of it. When I was asked on here, it was— I just really latched on to it because you're saying what needs to be said, which is just shut up and listen, man, because it gets better. It gets better.

Absolutely. Well, look, I got one more question for you as we come to our conversation. What's— you've told us a lot about yourself, but what's one thing about yourself that we would never know about unless you revealed it to us?

One thing about myself that nobody would know unless I revealed it to you— I can't swim. Really? I sink like a rock. I used to, and it's probably one of the more devastating things that's happened in the latter part of my life. My muscle mass to body mass ratio is so dense. And I'll tell you how I discovered this. It was when I purchased a 45-foot Sonic triple screw, about 1,000— let's see, about 1,800 horsepower boat. And I banging across the Onida Lake at 90 miles an hour. When I was young, the big hot cigarette boats were something my dad was into. It was just like a— it was a marker of success for me. So I got this big boat that I can hardly trailer around, and I put it in the water. Takes 4 people to launch it, and we're out zooming across the lake. We got in the middle of the lake, and I'm sitting there with my wife, and I crack an iced tea, and I'm like, you know what, man, this is great. And I just ran off the sun deck, and I jumped into the water, and I kept sinking.

And I kept—

oh my God, I kept sinking. And it was about— I got lucky because at that part of the lake, it was probably I don't know, and the deep divers can tell me that I'm wrong with the depth and the pressure and stuff like that, but it probably was like 6— 15 or 16 feet. I could still see light, but I was definitely down there, and I pushed off, and it was very mucky, so I got very little propulsion back up, and I literally had to swim back to the surface. They had already thrown a life vest over for me because one of my buddies knew exactly what happened, and I latched onto that thing for dear life. And if it weren't for the fact that we were only maybe 15 or 16 feet deep I don't know if we'd be having this podcast today. So my pool at my house is probably more perilous to me than it is to my 7-year-old at this point. But the Lukester can't swim, Doug.

Luke, it's been really great talking to you. And I know that everybody listening to this show has probably learned a lot. I know I have. I'm honored to know you, and I hope our paths will cross soon.

Feeling's mutual, brother. Thanks so much for having me.

You bet. Doug Noll here. Thank you so much for listening to Listening with Leaders. If you are a successful executive leader who would like to be on this program, please visit podcast.dougnull.com/podcast. If you got something out of this interview, would you please share this episode on social media? Just do a quick screenshot with your phone and text it to a friend or post it on the socials. If you know someone that would be a great guest, tag them on the social media to let them know about the show and include the hashtag #ListeningWithLeaders. I love seeing your posts and guest suggestions. We are regularly putting out new episodes and content. To make sure you don't miss any episodes, go ahead and subscribe. Your thumbs up ratings and reviews go a long way to help promote the show and mean a lot to me and my team. Want to know more? Go to my website, DougNoll.com, or follow me on LinkedIn, Facebook, and Instagram. That's @DouglasEnoll. Thanks for listening, and we'll see you on the next show.