The Power of Mentorship: 3 Key Takeaways from Paul Martinelli's Rise to Success

Welcome to beyond you'd why Podcast, where we go beyond just talking about your why and actually help you discover and then live your why. You see, we believe that knowing your why, that driving force behind every decision you make and every action you take, is the essential first step to really knowing yourself. It allows you to move forward faster and have a bigger impact. If you're already a fan of the show, then you know that every week we talk about one of the nine whys and then we introduce you to somebody with that why so you can see how their why has played out in their life. This show will be more powerful for you if you've already discovered your why. If you still need to do that, head over to whyinstitute.com and discover your why today. It'll only take you about five minutes. Now let's meet today's guest.

This week we're going to be talking about the why of mastery, a very rare why. So if you have this why, then you have an insatiable thirst for knowledge, but not at a superficial level. This thirst is all about exploring the depths and intricacies of a particular subject. You'll pursue this goal until you are viewed as an expert in your subject area. You find enjoyment in the sheer act of immersing yourself in something new. You are fearless when it comes to learning about new subjects and ideas, but often cautious when it comes to expressing your thoughts or feelings. You love to peel back the layers of the onion, always going deeper and looking for subtle differences on any given topic. Short answers to questions are a challenge for you because you know they won't get to the depth needed for someone to truly understand the subject being discussed. So today I have a great guest for you. You're going to love meeting Paul. This is Paul Martinelli. He is an internationally acclaimed speaker, trainer, mentor and coach who truly believes that if you can dream it, you can do it. While many people know Paul as the founding president of the John Maxwell Team and co founder of the Cialdini Institute, what they may not know is that he is a high school dropout who overcame a stuttering disability to share the stage with some of the biggest names in leadership and personal development. Names like John Maxwell, Seth Godin, Robert Cialdini, Jack Canfield, Wayne Dyer, Brian Tracy, Zig Ziglar, Les Brown and Mark Victor Hansen. Paul was raised by a single mother in Pittsburgh, lower class family. In the late 1980s. With just $200, a used vacuum and a dream, he founded a small commercial cleaning company in South Florida. He combined smart sales tactics with personal development teachings and propelled his business to unbelievable heights. Just 15 years later, he sold his commercial cleaning company to pursue his passion and purpose of teaching people how to achieve success in their own lives. His awareness and ability to apply the success strategies and principles that he learned and taught to others led Paul's success in life and business, including building six multimillion dollar companies. He now leads the Empowered Living Community, a global platform of more than 2.3 million followers, providing personal and professional development, training, and education to help individuals and businesses build and grow beyond their current results. Paul Martinelli may not have a wall of diplomas, but you can't argue with his PhD in results. Having worked his way up from mop bucket to millionaire, Paul has practiced and proven what he preaches. Paul, welcome to the podcast.

Thank you so much. Great to be here. Great to be with your audience and just a big fan of all that you've created with this tool and helping people discover their why.

No, thank you. This is going to be fun. I've been looking forward to our conversation. I saw your bio and I said, man, I got to read the whole thing because there's so much to unpack there. But let's start, Paul, by kind of going back in your life. You know, part of that. You mentioned that you had a stuttering problem when you were a kid. Where did you grow up and what were you like in high school?

Yeah, so I was born and raised in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Raised in a single family home by a mom. I, my, my father left the family when my mom was three months pregnant with me. And, you know, I grew up in a traditional Italian family. Socioeconomically, we were poor, grew up in a Catholic community.

And, you know, it was in that environment that I was programmed to believe things about me, to believe things about what I was capable of, how much potential I had, what I would create in my life. But my, my home was not a safe place, Gary. It wasn't a safe place physically, it wasn't a safe place emotionally. My mother was physically abusive. I would frequently go to schools with a black guy or fat lips. I mean, back then.

Things weren't, things weren't like they are today. Today, my mother probably would have been arrested and we would have probably been removed from the home. And it's that. That caused me to have a stuttering problem. You know, most people who have a stuttering problem don't have a neurological deficiency. It's usually, you know, a stressful situation that causes them to have a language pattern interruption and, and so excuse me, you know, on the playground of life we, we all know kids could be cruel. And when we're on the playground, anything that's different about us, the other kids kind of lock on it. Some kids were tall and skinny like bean tolls and got teased for that. Others were short and round, maybe they had kinky hair freckles. For me it's that every time I spoke, I.

Spoke, spoke like this and the kids had a field day with me. But I did realize though, and this is really at the crux of the story here is that my belief about who I was was being formed at a very early age. We, we develop a self concept held held in place by our self image. That's the image we hold of us and the image that we believe other people see us as and our self esteem, that's our personal self regard, how I value me and how I train the world to value me. And so I was programmed to believe that I was dumb and stupid and that I would never amount to anything. And the power of that is this. My brother who was, you know, I've got two older brothers and an older sister. We're all born in the same house, we're all raised with the same mom, we're raised in the same environment, same DNA. My sister graduates number one and her, her class goes on to nursing school. My brother David gets a full ride scholarship at Carnegie Mellon university, gets a PhD in engineering. My brother Tom goes to University of Pittsburgh, becomes an Apache attack helicopter pilot. The army, they don't pick the dumb ones to fly those. And I failed out of school, same same everything. But in 10th grade, you know, my grades were so poor, I had done so bad academically that there was no way that you know, I was ever going to be able to graduate. And they invited me to leave. And again, you are programmed to believe that, you know, education and DNA is everything but it's truly our self programming, right, that that really can make or break us. And so I did what most high school dropouts do, you know, I smoked a lot of pot and I, and I did a bunch of dead end jobs. I was a roofer making $4.10 an hour. That was though that was the least they could legally pay me and I did the least legally required, you know what I mean? And, and one day on that roof, you know, I, you know, I'm, I'm a person of faith. I just, I, you know, God intervened in my life and just kind of spoke to me that there was more for me. Now I didn't know what that meant, but it was kind of my Road to Damascus experience. And through a series of events I landed myself up in South Florida and I had a couple hundred bucks and I started this cleaning company and my life changed. I, I walked into an office on any given Tuesday to give a bid, you know, cold calling to grow my business. And I walk into a guy by the name of Patrick Hayes, whose father was the chief legal tax accountant for Exxon Corporation for years. Patrick was a municipal bond trader on Wall Street, 45 years old, retired, was worth a couple of hundred million dollars. And he put a book in my hand called Think and Grow Rich. And not only did he give me the book, Gary, he gave me the book and said, I'm going to take you through the book line by line, sentence by sentence, paragraph by paragraph, chapter by chap, and I'm going to, I'm going to mentor you in how to think. And that was really, you know, it was puzzling. And I never thought about how to think. Most of us are programmed what to think, not how to think. And so Patrick, over the next three years poured into my life. My income went from $20,000 a year to well over a million in that, in that period of time. I made a commitment then that I was going to be, you know, an advocate for other people. I was going to, I was going to be an awakener. I was going to help people who were in conditions like I was in, with very low self esteem, low self belief, find, find their potential and live it.

So how well do you know the book Think and Grow Rich?

I've read it thousands of times, my book, I don't know if I got my copy. Here it is, it is beat up. I've read it, I've taught it to over a hundred thousand people all over the world. I teach it for free. Every year people upwards of 20,000 people will enroll in the class and I teach it for free. And I go chapter by chapter the same way Patrick unpacked it for me. You know, the, the principles of the book are timeless and they're really, if you, if, you know, if you trace it back, you know, all roads go back to a guy by the name of Thomas Troward, probably the most prolific writer on human development. In the late 1800s he was an English judge living in India and he would write the Dory lectures, the, the, the, the Essay on Opulence and just prolific writer. But all of that, all of that study of natural law, right, the laws that govern the Way that we think, behave, and create is what's taught in Think and Grow Rich. But it's cookies on the bottom shelf. It's available to anybody. And the history of the book is, you know, Napoleon Hill spent 20 years interviewing Edison Ford Rockefeller, the Wright brothers, Alexander Graham Bell, four U.S. presidents. I mean, heavy hitters. And the culmination of all of those interviews ends up with 13 principles of the book that can grow rich. There's not a chapter on luck, but there's a chapter on faith, right? There's not a chapter on being born into a good family, but there's a chapter on decision making. And in each one of those. Each one of those principles, there's a. There's a code for thinking, for how we think. And most people just never really consider how we think. Most people think of thinking as just, you know, a mental regurgitation of what they heard. Other people say it's a mental activity. But thinking as our highest function is actually a creative process. We are always creating in the way we create is through our thoughts, either knowingly or unknowingly, right? This is the work of Carl Jung, where he said, you know, until you make the unconscious, what's running below the surface that you don't even know? Until you make the unconscious conscious, it directs your life, and you call it faith.

Wow. For me, what I was. I was subconsciously running a program that I was a high school dropout. High school dropouts amount to nothing. You'll never get anywhere without a good education. You know, it takes money to make money, right? You got to be in the right place at the right time, you know, and all of those kinds of idioms were the soundtrack of my life that created this belief that I would never amount to anything. What Patrick taught me to do more than anything was really challenge the conviction of those beliefs. Like, why did I believe what I believe? I remember one time I. When I first started working for him, you know, he had sent me home with the book, asked me to read the chapter on persistence every day for 14 days and come back with a goal. And I came back with the goal. I was making $20,000 a year. Time I came back with a goal of $50,000. And he said, why so low? Why so low? And I. Hell, I thought that was a lot. My goodness, if I could get $50,000, I thought that was all the money there was in the world. He said, but what was your first number? And I had to admit my first number was a hundred thousand dollars. But as soon as that Hundred thousand dollars came into my mind. I immediately rejected because it didn't match my program. Just that quick. I immediately. And so he said, so why don't you think you can make $100,000? And I said, I'm killing myself to make 20. How could I ever. He said, well, you know, you're thinking you have to do it the same. You're thinking that you're going to make 100 the same way you make 20. You're going to do something completely different. Well, I don't know how to do that. I don't know what to do. And, and I, and I didn't think that there was, you know, anybody making money in the cleaning business. And he said, pulled out the Wall Street Journal. He had me look up a stock symbol. I'd never done that before. Now I'm a big fan of stock market. I love it. It's my hobby. And he had me look at this company called American Building Maintenance ABM, that's a company that's doing $10 billion a year, that the top 100 people in the company make well over $100,000. And these are companies that are cleaning the World Trade center. They're cleaning major airports. And I had never thought, you know, I'm thinking doctor's offices for a thousand square feet, $20 a visit. And, you know, it's kind of like, you know, you go into a car dealership and you see a car for $100,000 and you think, that's a lot of money. There's somebody who bought the whole dealership. You know, there's somebody, there's somebody who owns them all right? And, and I realized I had been walked into a pattern of just thinking small, marginalizing myself and diminishing my dreams for my old programming. And that had to change.

And so reading the book, what allowed you to expand your thinking?

Yeah, it did. What it does is it gets you first, it gets you to dream again first, it gets you to drink. I mean, most people. Most people, God willing, you know, 365 days from now, you and I will each celebrate a birthday. And if we're lucky enough, you know, we'll have some family and friends light a candle and they'll sing Happy Birthday. We'll close our eyes and make a wish. And that's the, that's probably the only time people do that that whole year. And then the first thing they do is, is they blow it out. They extinguish their dream. Most people don't anymore. Most people have just settled for you know, this is the way it is. This is as good as it gets. And you know, we settle for the small incremental changes in our life and that's it. And you know what you fight for, you get life is a fight for territory. And if you settle for less, that's what you'll get. And so the book gets you first to dream, then it starts to, it gets you to start challenging what you think. Like, why do you believe this is true? Why do you believe you can't double your income? Why do you believe? You know, nobody can make a million dollars in the cleaning business.

I remember I was building the John Maxwell team. We were doing $10 million a year. And in my spirit, I had this goal for, for 20 million. I wanted to double the company. I remember I rented a, the, the World Marriott Resorts, the largest Marriott in the world in Orlando. And I had them give us their, their, their biggest convention space. It's about 155,000 square feet. I had them drop the walls, empty the room and just put 20 chairs in the middle of the room. And I brought my, I brought my team in and they're walking into this room. I mean it's, it's three football fields, you know, And I said to them, we're going to fill this room. We're going to fill this room. You know, they built it. Who did they build this room for? I think they built it for us. Now what I knew at that time and they didn't is that a lot of them wouldn't be there when the room was filled. Some of them just couldn't, some of them just wouldn't make that journey. Some of them just couldn't get there. I mean, some of them, like two or three of them were gone before the end of the weekend. They just thought I had lost my mind and this would never happen. We would go on to put 40,000 people in the program. We would fill that room twice a year with 3,4000 people every single time. And so again, most people would think, you know, to double a 10 million dollar business in one year, no way. Yeah, can happen.

Wow. So you built your cleaning business from 20,000 to. How long did it take for you to get kind of take us on that journey from 20,000 a year to like what happened and then what did you do with it? And you know, take us through your thinking.

My first, my first, I went from 20,000 to $250,000. Okay. And then something really weird happened. I sat down with my accountant, my accountant, you know, congratulated me for making 250, $250,000 a year and then told me how much I had to pay in taxes.

And I did what most people do, I moved right to resentment. And I ran a program that we all run. We run it every single day. It's the number one cause of bankruptcy. It's the number one cause of divorce. It's the number one cause of business failure. It's the number one cause of disease. It's called the three R's. Resentment, resentment, resistance, revenge. So resentment is any negative emotion, any negative emotion that, that's pretty big. Any negative emotion towards any person, place, thing, condition, circumstance, thought or idea, dead or alive, including yourself. So hard as a human being not to have that happen to you every day. You're going to have a resentment, you're going to have a negative energy. The question is, is are you going to have it or is it going to have you? And for most people, you know, you're driving down the road on your way to work, somebody cuts you off. You know, for most people we can shrug that off. There's other people that becomes the story for the day, you know, and the next day they're looking for the guy to cut him off, right? And so what happened was, you know, we've got where if, if, if we don't clear that energy of resentment, it then moves to resistance. Resistance is the withdrawal or withholding of any of our God given skills, talents, abilities or resources. And we see it, we see it in corporate America, we see it in small businesses every single day. Mary and Jane don't get along. Mary needs the file, Jane has it, Mary requests it. And what does Jane do? She with withdraws her discretionary goodwill to get Mary the file on time and will sabotage the entire meeting of the entire project just, just because she can wear it is right. The husband says, you know, I'll be home at 7 o'. Clock. He comes home late, didn't call, walks in the door, how's everything going honey? You know, wife says fine. Well hey, I've been married, I've been divorced twice. I know what fine means. It doesn't mean good, right? I mean the dog gets up and leaves the room, right? The dog can feel it. And so later, you know, the husband tries to give her a kiss on the cheek. And what does she do? She withdraws. She was, she withdraws her skill, talent, ability or God given resource to give or receive love. If we don't clear that energy then, then what happens is we go to what is Known as revenge. Revenge is the act of the desire, of causing the source of our resentment, the awareness of the pain we felt.

You know, it's, it's trying to get even, right? An eye for an eye leaves everybody blind. And so I run immediately the 3R program. I think I'll teach the government. I won't make 250 out. And I purposely, I mean, this is how, proving, proving my belief that I was dumb and stupid. I purposely made less than $250,000 a year because I was going to show them that I was. And so, you know, I obviously, you know, I had lots of growth to do. And when Patrick heard me do that, he sent me to a psychiatrist, literally, who was a, who was a, who was a Lutheran minister. And after I told him all the problems I was having in the business and you know, you know, you know, we were stuck. I, we were stuck. I couldn't, you know, I was at 250, but I, I, I was stuck. I couldn't get new jobs. If I would hire somebody, somebody would leave if I got a new account and you know, the gerbil on the wheel, the entrepreneur story. And at the end of the, you know, 55 minute appointment, he looked at me and he asked me one question. He said, who do you need to forgive? And I instantly knew what he was talking about. I had held so much resentment from being abused as a child. And he said to me, he asked me one of those questions. Gary, when somebody asks you, you know, when somebody's smarter than you and they ask you a question and they think that you should absolutely know the answer, and you, you pretend like you do, but you don't.

He said, paul, you don't, you don't think that you, you don't think that when you're stuck in one area of your life that you're just stuck in that area, do you?

Like, like you, you don't think that, like, you know, like, you don't believe that it's not possible that, that maybe you're holding resentment or, or anger or hatred towards somebody else, maybe even yourself or your results or your dream or your business or somebody in your family, somebody's hurt you. You don't think that, that that resentment isn't restricting you in every area of your life.

And that's really when, you know, my first real work. I wrote a book called the Three Missing Chapters to Think and Grow Rich. And the three missing chapters I wrote are on forgiveness, unconditional love and tithing, giving money. And because I think those are three fundamental principles that if you're going to have a fulfilled life, you have to, you have to get, right. You have to get those three right. You have to get forgiving, right? You, you have to be able to release resentments. You, you have to get unconditional love, right? And you have to give. Giving, right. The first, the first, the first law of receiving is to give. You can't. If, if you can't graciously give, you'll never be able to graciously receive. I firmly believe that. It's the only part of the book, you know, where God says, challenge me on this. Right? And so.

As I go through that process of forgiveness, my income jumps then to probably 750,000 and then over a million three years later. And the business grew. And what's interesting is, is we never changed really anything structurally about the company. It wasn't like we had found some new and improved way to clean a toilet or empty trash can.

What I, what I stopped doing was I stopped focusing on getting the external customer list to grow and I started pouring into the internal customer, my four walls. And I realized that everybody was showing up for, working for me. They had a dream.

They, they had a why.

A why. And if I could help them find their why and show them that by working for me, that I, that I would create for them an opportunity. Now, I did change how I paid people. I stopped paying people by the hour and started paying them by performance. And I started sharing in the profits of every account. So when somebody, when you would win three or four guys, and usually these were, you know, first generation Americans, these were immigrants who had come to the country and, you know, I would give them, let's say, the know, bank of America building, they would get a percentage of everything that would happen in that building. Toilet paper sales. We sold toilet paper. We sold, we sold hand soap, we sold all the paper towels. We sold the garbage bags, the urinal cakes, the coffee cups, the sugar. We sold everything inside the company. We did all the carpet cleaning, floor waxing, marble polishing, window cleaning, pressure cleaning. They got a piece of everything in that building. When I sold the company, here's something really powerful. And I sold the company. I had 150 people working for me. The average length of time was 11 years.

Wow.

Yeah. The only industry that has more turnover than the janitorial business is the food. Is the fast food has about 125%. Janitorial has about 108% turnover. 11 years. People, they, they, they fell in love with the job because they realized that this was a way for them to get ahead, that they weren't, they weren't going to clean so they could pay rent. They were going to the way one day they could own a home, one day they could buy a car. One day they could get their kids out of poverty. And the power of what you do, the power of your tool is that when people are connected to their why, they're connected to their why providence sets in. There's a third mind that is created. And they instantly become intuitively guided to their how ideas that they never thought before. You've had to have seen this in your work.

Who finally accepted their why? Many people know it and run from it. Run from it. I think of, I think of the great Les Brown. You know, Les Brown slept on his brother's couch for eight years.

Because he thought nobody would listen to him.

Less the John Maxwell. John Maxwell waited six years to write his first book because he thought, because he thought he had nothing to say and nobody would read a book from him. So they knew. Most people know their why, they reject it. But once they accept it, as you guide people through using your tool to not only become aware of what that why is, but become alive in it. Right. Providence sets in. And now, now all of a sudden they're thinking thoughts they never thought before. There's opportunities that they had never seen before. Success isn't about being in the right place at the right time. It's about being aware that you're in the right place at the right time. No, it's about awareness. And, and so that's really, you know, over Those, those next 10 years, as I built the business into a multi million dollar company, when I sold it was the largest.

Sale of a, of a privately held commercial cleaning company in the southeast United States. Wow. I mean it was a big. We were cleaning 100 buildings a day.

Yeah, that's a lot of, that's a lot of toilets.

That's a whole lot different. And that's proof of what you. Of the power of thinking. Think and grow rich, right?

You bet.

Proof of it.

Yeah.

Well, if, if you could narrow it down to one thing that was the, that you got out of that book. The one thing that could have the biggest impact for people that are listening now because a lot of people have heard of that book and probably a lot of people haven't read it. A lot of people have, but a lot of people have it. What would be the one thing?

It's the application of. There's seven laws that govern the way we think and behave. One of the most powerful that most people don't relate to success and achievement is the law of polarity. So simply put is, you know, everything has a polar opposite, right? For up, there's down in, there's out, left there's right, right, hot, there's cold. You can't have one thing without the existence of, of, of, of, of its polar opposite being somewhere in the universe. It would be a universal impossibility. And so how does that relate to success and achievement? Well, the minute, the minute I am 100% sure that I can't reach my goal.

The only way I can be a hundred percent sure that I can't reach my goal is that in equal measure.

There has to be a part of me that has the awareness of how I can.

And so you couldn't possibly come up with all the reasons why you can't if there wasn't a part of you that could come up with all the reasons of how you could. And, and so once I accepted that and truly, like, like right now you're inside your studio and the way that you know you're in, you're 100% sure you're inside your studio. But the reason why you are 100% sure you know you're in your studio, Gary, is it because of walls and a floor and ceiling? It's because you came from the outside and you're 100% sure that there's an outside.

And so in equal measure you're 100 sure that you're inside. No how you got inside, you may only be 50 sure if you were really inside, then you would only be 50 sure if there was an outside. You can't have one without the other in equal measure. And so for me, this was the first tool of, of, of cracking that those limiting beliefs. And then I think if there, I know you asked for one. So I think the first was this awareness is truly he says whatever the mind can conceive and believe you can achieve. You know, if you can hold it in your hand, if you can hold in your mind, you can hold in your hand. The second thing though is in the chapter on decision.

And he said that successful people have a habit around decision making and they make decisions very quickly and seldom have ever changed those those decisions. And when they make those decisions, they consider those decisions through their purpose, through their why.

Unsuccessful people have a habit around making decisions. They make decisions very slowly. They make decisions by opinion poll. They often change those decisions when the circumstances or conditions get rough. And. And. And. And they. They make decisions like, you know, put, you know, wet the finger and see which way the wind is blowing. Not based on purpose. Purpose is why you do what you do in the filter through which you make all your decisions. To me, that's what. That's what purpose is. It's why we do what we do. And it should be the filter through which we make every decision in our life. You know, we knew it took us a while to get this interview scheduled, but it didn't take me a long time to say yes. I said yes in one second. Why? Because being on this show is in harmony with my purpose. I'm an awakener. You have a huge audience. If I can wake people up, if my presence can wake people up, that's in harmony with my purpose. The answer is yes. The rest is details. Right?

Wow.

It's funny. You know, I have that book. It's on my shelf. I have not read it. Yeah, I'm gonna go read it.

Yeah. It's an amazing.

And all I can think of as we're sitting here talking is who I want to read it with.

Yeah.

You know, I have some people that. Yeah, that's awesome. So, okay, so you sold your cleaning business, and then what happened? You had a big exit.

Yeah. Now what? It's funny. I sold the business in. In 2006, and along my journey, I had met Bob Proctor. And.

You know, I partnered with Bob, so I. So I sell the company. This is. I'll just show you in my. My home. This is a picture of me and Bob, and I've got a gold card there. And on that gold card, it says that I will one day be business partners with Bob Proctor. And that's me holding the card 90 days. At 90 days after I listed the business, I sold the company in 90 days. That's me and Bob Proctor as business partners doing our first seminar together on the book science of getting rich in. In London, England. So I sold the business partner with Bob proctor, and about 90 days after I partnered with Bob Proctor, talked about timing the movie, the Secret comes out number one, selling personal growth. Right thing. And Bob was like, the guy of the Secret. And so. So I partner with Bob. Bob and I were partners for the better part of three and a half years. And that's really what made the big difference.

But I partnered with Bob. I paid him $300,000 for him to mentor me and buy into his company. And we started a certification company called Life Success Consultants, where we were licensing people to teach Bob's content. And that was my introduction into this world. Right. I had never, I had never attended a public seminar. I never, you know, you know, outside of, you know, really think and grow rich. You know, Patrick was a purist, so I studied the dead masters. You got to remember this is 1991. When I meet Patrick Hayes, you know, I'm 57 years old, so we're probably around the same age.

You'll remember in 1990, the big thing was, you know, go to go to Hawaii and Walk on Fire with Anthony Robbins. Right? Yep. Yeah, I, I never did any of that. Patrick had me re reading, you know, as a Man Thinketh by James Allen. Psycho cybernetics by Dr. Maxwell Maltz. Right. Spirit of Opulence, Duro Lectures, Edinburgh Lectures by, by, by Troward Carvel Martin. He had me reading all the dead masters. Right, right. And yeah, one of those dead masters was a guy by the name of Throughman Fleet, a founder of the concept therapy movement out of Scottsdale, Arizona back in the 1930s. He would write Concept therapy and that's what Bob was teaching. You know, Bob teaches this diagram of a stick person and shows, you know, kind of how we think. That was created by Throughman Fleet. I had saw that through my work with Patrick. And so when I partnered with Bob, I already knew everything Bob taught me. And, and then he would open the door for me to meet everybody. That's how I got to meet and work with Wayne Dyer, Zig Ziglar. I got to share the stage three. You know, at 57, there's not many, there's not many 57 year old speakers who shared the stage with Zig Ziglar anymore. Right. And two of those times was when Zig was Zig before his fall. Right. So. And, but he opened. That's how I met Les Brown. That's how I met John Maxwell for the first time. So I was partners with Bob and we were, we were selling an $18,000 certification five days long in Florida. We were doing that three times a year. And then we, Bob and I parted ways. I spent about a year and a half partnering with other people. I did a. There was the Birth of Empowerment, Mentoring the empowered living Community. I partnered with Les Brown and Les and I worked together for a while. We, we did a speaking tour for subway, did about 10 cities with them. And then I was introduced to John Maxwell. And during the lunch with John, I pitched this idea for the John Maxwell team. John had written about 80 books at that time on leadership. He had this great, you know, library but he had retired, he had sold his company, sold his name, his likeness all you know, he was on the white horse and going out, right? He was done. And he had done what most speakers do. He traded dollars for hours. You know, these guys like you look at somebody at John, John Maxwell's level, or we'll take Les Brown. Les Brown's probably making $100,000 a talk. But when he microphone down, he's unemployed.

And John was unemployed. You know, John a speaker. And if, if he wasn't writing a book or speaking, he was unemployed. He didn't have a, he didn't have a multiple stream of income. And I told him, I said, look, John, people are already teaching your stuff. You're just not getting paid. And those people aren't stealing from you that you haven't given them a model to be able to work with. They would gladly pay to have your certification, to have your blessing, to have you speak into their life, to have your mentorship. And I've got a team of pros that is know I did this for Bob, for Bob Proctor. I know, you know, we, we did. Oh gosh, we did probably.

100 million with Bob somewhere around. Wow.

Wow.

We would end up doing over a half a billion with John and in 10 years. So John. It's funny because John said yes and everybody on his team said no. But John instantly saw it. He had to buy his company back. He had sold it to. What was the name of that group he sold it to? Oh, I forgot, it'll come to me. But he sold it to, to, to another company. So he had him buy it back in order to do, to do the deal. And then we launched the John Maxwell team. And, and then that, that opened up doors for me because, you know, I wanted to bring in other, you know, speakers into that training. And so I brought in Seth Godin, who was amazing. Dr. Cialdini, who you and I both know. Dr. Robert Cialdini. Dr. Bruce Lipton. Have you read the book Biology of Belief?

No.

Oh.

It'S a must read. Yeah. Biology of Belief by Dr. Bruce Lipton. And so I brought in all these other, other thought leaders and thinkers. Dr. Paul Shealy. Amazing. Um, and you know, we really built a, a huge, a huge business. And then John had announced that he was going to begin to retire. He was going to have a, had a 10 year retirement plan and he was going to pass it off to his number two. And so I knew that we, I had probably taken it as far as I could go and it was time to give it to somebody who wanted to be more creative in a different way. And so I sold the company back to John and his partner, Mark Cole, and ever since then have helped other speakers. I work with Dr. Daniel Amen with the Amen clinics. Joseph McClendon, who's been with, you know, he's been Tony Robbins teaching partner for what, nearly 20 years. If you've gone to be on to anything with Tony Robbins and you probably met Joseph McLendon on stage. Yeah, just a ball of energy. And so we. I helped them build what was called the Brain Revolution. I partnered those two up. I did, as you mentioned, the launch for the Cialdini Institute. I worked with Barry Morrissey, Life Mastery Consultants, Bob Berg, Endless Referrals and the Go Giver. And so I created this niche where helping intellectual property owners be able to really monetize what they had in a unique, different way and build community and tribes around their work while helping the, you know, while still doing private consulting and mentoring for, you know, entrepreneurs and large. Large and small businesses.

Okay, let's go back, man. That's an amazing path, an amazing story. We've met all the best of the best, and you're one of them.

Well, thank you.

And you've been on stage with all of them. So let's go back and talk about how you. So people that are listening, this will be thinking, you know, it's amazing what he's done. How the heck did he do that? How did he enroll people in a. In an $18,000 certification? How did he get 40,000 people to join John Maxwell's tribe?

Sure.

How did you do those things? Like, let's go back and see what, what actually happened.

Yeah. So as you know, nothing happens until somebody sells something.

Yes.

And so what I realize is that most people who are masters in one area are usually horrible at selling what they have.

And most people lack the ability to create a value proposition. And so.

Let'S. What do you mean by that?

So what you. What you deliver to the market has a. Has a price.

That is the cost of currency, but that price is established by the perceived value of the good or service. What I have to be able to do is I have to be able to communicate to you.

The value that I bring, and that value has to exceed.

Your expectation and willingness.

To pay the price for.

And so there's a lot going on in, in, in being able to communicate my value to you. First off, you're a unique individual. We all know people process, you know, visually, auditorially, kinetically. Right. I mean, so a. How they process. If you've taken Myers, Brigg or Desco, my goodness, all the different personality styles. There is so much that goes on when you're trying to communicate to another person. And so it's not like, okay, I'm going to communicate my value proposition to you the same way I will everybody else. No, not at all. You're going to have very unique and distinct needs in order for you to make what I call micro agreements to be willing to listen to me for the next sentence. And, and so I define sales as this. Sales is the transference of emotion.

That's what sales is. The primary emotion being transferred is certainty. If you think of the. The last time you spent $500 or more, it required a level of certainty in order for you to get it. And when somebody lacks certainty, they throw up what's known as an objection. But if you really understand what's happening, and this is why it's important to understand, if you don't understand, you will think that the objection is really what's holding the person back. They don't have the time, they don't have the money. They have to get approval from the boss, the, the wife, the butcher, the baker, the candlestick maker. None of that is true. All objections are the same.

There's smoke screens for uncertainty. What they're really. You can take any objection and replace it with I'm not certain enough. Like you haven't convinced me enough. And so what. What I've learned to be able to do is I've created a model where I teach people how to communicate their unique value. And then I teach them how to ask a series of questions, what I call intelligence gathering. To be able to build massive rapport with that person and uncover either what their problem is or what their want is. See, everybody has the same. Why, at some level.

Every single. There's 7 billion people on the planet, and every single person today woke up doing the exact same thing. And that is getting their wants and their needs met. That's why you and I are both doing this. You and I both have wants and needs. And you believe, and I believe that doing this show, exchanging our time, our talent, our treasure, to be able to do this is a fair exchange in order for us to get our wants and our needs met.

Now, how do we get our wants and our needs met? How do we get our problem solved? Well, we manipulate, control and influence. We manipulate, control and influence the people, conditions, circumstances and environment around us. That's what we do.

If we don't know how to do that in an ethical way or in an elegant way. We come across as pushy. We turn people off. We, you know, we, you know, we come across maybe as a zealot or we come across as crazy. We come across as, you know, we go from, we go from guest to pest really quick. And so how do we, how do we maintain this level of rapport where we, where we stay guest instead of past.

To get somebody to talk about the pain associated with the problem or the frustration associated, associated with the unmet want.

And once, once we can do that. Once I can ask a series of questions to the degree that I know, you know, what your problem is, because some people don't. They think they know what their problem is.

Right? Some people think they know what they want. But how many times have you, have you sat down as a, you know, as an executive coach at your level, where people think, they start out thinking they want this and then as they go through your process that you guide them through, they, their awareness expands and they realize, whoa, that's not what I want at all. The reason I want that is because I want. There's a bigger why. It's the why behind the why, isn't it? Yeah, that's what, that's what you do is, is you, you get layers deep in the why. You get to the truth of the why. Right? And so I'm going to ask questions to the degree that I know that you know what you want or your need, they, that you know that I know what it is.

And that you're convinced with 100% certainty that I'm the person to solve the problem.

My tool or my resource is absolutely the solution you need and that my company is trustworthy and will stand there. You have 100% certainty in these three areas. Only then, then, and only then does the sales process really begin. Then, then I begin to make an offer. And what happens is, is most people in sales have been trained to, you know, ABC always be closing and they ambush the sale. And so what I did with John Maxwell and with my cleaning business.

When I worked with Bob Proctor with all the thought leaders, this, first we got really clear about what problem they solve what problem is.

Then we got very clear about what's the value proposition? What's the value in having that problem solved or this want met. What's the value in that? And then finding the right price, Right? Because, I mean, you, I know you guys have every, every small business faces. What's the, what's the price because, look, I mean, you may have this wonderful value, but, you know, there's only so much money people are going to exchange for it. So then you have to change your model of, you know, duplication. You know, I mean, how, like when I was in the cleaning business, you know, the way to get rich in the cleaning business is clean more toilets. I mean, because, I mean, I can't, you know, people. People, yes, I could clean a toilet perfectly. But what's that really worth to someone? You know, so there's a. There, There is a lead imposed on this value proposition. We got to be realist, you know.

And then. And then it's a matter of not ambushing the sale and doing what I call. I mentioned the word micro agreement. There's two things that, you know in the sales process that really matters. One is these micro agreements, and it's getting the other person to make small.

Seemingly insignificant commitments.

And it's done using.

Small idioms like does that ring a bell? Sound fair enough? Just out of curiosity, right. It's done in a reasonable man. Tonality. Tonality has a lot to do. This we teach 9 tonalities in our sales program. But reason. We don't sound fair enough. Hey, can I get. Can I get a go? Would it make sense for us to have a cup of coffee? Would it make sense for us to just, you know, would it make sense for me to send you over a proposal? Would it make sense for me. I'm not asking you to make a big commitment. I'm asking you, would it make sense? That's all seemingly an insignificant. But when you say yes to that, when you're saying yes, it would make sense for me to look at that proposal. You're saying a lot. And so I'm looking to get micro agreements to what I call a commitment objective. And this is where most people kill the sale. Most people think the commitment objective is for me to get you to buy something.

Well, in. In a sales process, Gary, I may be trying to sell you a hundred things first. I'm. I might be selling you to. Answer the phone. I might. I might be selling you to. Give me three minutes. That's a sale. That just help. And, And I, I, I can't talk about my product until I get that first sale.

And, and once I. Once I. Once. Once I get you to agree, I have to get you to agree to allow me. Can I ask you a few questions? That's a sale. And, you know, if I start telling you about the program and I haven't asked you Any questions? I ambush the sale from going to the close. So in. In. In every dynamic, relate. Every. Every relationship we're in is a dynamic relationship, okay? In. In a matter of seconds. At the unconscious level, you and I, each and every human being does whenever we are interacting with another human being. There's an unspoken cultural phenomenon where you or I step into either the subject or the originator role. This is your show. You're clearly the originator, right? And what you do, in a very elegant way, is you pass the originator role on to me as your guest.

So I. Yeah, like when you. When you go to. You know, you go to the dentist, that. Who's in charge? The dentist is in charge. The subject is the patient. Everybody in the office, right? You sit down with a lawyer. You know who's in charge? The lawyer. You go into the courtroom, the judges, they're thinking, teacher, student, karate student, you know, sensei to student. In every relationship, parent, child, there's a dynamic that gets established.

And. And once that's established, really hard to change. And so what I found is most people who have a great idea, who are masters at what they do is they. Is they marginalize themselves. They get on and say, thank you so much for giving me five minutes of maybe your time's valuable. You don't. Oh, you don't be overly gracious. Like, when you go in to see your lawyer, does your lawyer say, oh, my goodness, thank you so much for giving me the time? No, you're lucky. You sit in the chair. Like, you're lucky to be there, right? Yes, you're lucky to be there. That's. That's the posture they have.

And it immediately establishes them as the original there. And. And. And so it's not about control. This is the word. And when you hear the difference, it's authority. The. The. The. The. The person in charge is the person who has authority, the person who can make things happen.

This is why positional leaders fail all the time. You can have somebody who's a positional leader. You know, I say, okay, you're in charge of the sales team. Well, if everybody on the sales team can't be influenced by that person, they're not leading the team. Whoever has the most influence in the room is. Is the authority in the room, period.

In the sales. Let me see if I can re. Let me see if I can say what you said. So what you're wanting to do. One of the processes that you teach is the micro agreements, which is just a small yes to kind of keep the and that sounds like it establishes the authority, kind of establishes who's in charge.

It, it immediately establishes that and establishes rapport. Right?

Yeah. And it's not like you're asking for big things, but just little things to just create that.

Boundary, if you will. And then you go from there.

Exactly right, exactly right. And from, from there, I'm going to, I'm going to know what the commitment objective is. So once I know, okay, my commitment objective is to be able to get Gary to give me five minutes. So I'm going to, I'm going to begin to build micro agreements around getting five minutes at a time. Right.

The other thing is, is, you know, we've got to, you know, again, think of the five love languages, right? What a phenomenal book that is. And everybody has a love language, right. What most masters do is somebody, you know, meets them at the BNI or the genius Net network, like how you and I met and they ask you, hey, tell me what you do. And what most people do is they, they tell them what they do.

And the truth is, is they, they were being polite by asking you what you do. Said another way, they don't care about what you do. Okay. And so what I do is I teach people not to tell you what I do. I'll give you an example. Let's say, let's say you and I are at a cocktail party. I'm there, you come up and you say, how you know. I'm Gary, what's your name? Paul. What kind of work in Paul? The first thing I would do is I would say, so I could better explain it to you. Let me ask you this, what kind of work do you do? You say, well, I'm real estate agent. What I'm going to do is instantly and automatically I'm going to access my database of every single problem you have right now. And I'm going to be, I'm going to tell you your problem and how I solve it. I tell, you know, Gary, you know how you probably have buyers who are in the market right now who are, who are on the sideline because interest rates have gone up and now they think that they can't afford the house. Or you probably even have sellers that now think that because rates are so high and we see prices falling 17, 35, 50% now they think they're out of the market. And your real estate agents don't know how to be able to kind of persuade and influence people. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, what I do is I train your agents on how to Use proven linguistic patterns to be able to maneuver people and influence people in an ethical way to making a decision that they should be making, but they're hesitant about making. Makes sense.

Yeah. Really good.

And then I would follow up. Hey, if you'd like, you know, I know, I know. You know, this is the time or place. Would it make sense for us to have a cup of coffee? Would it make sense for us to have a cup of coffee? You know, whenever I've done that, my closing ratio on a cup of coffee is about 100%. Yeah, 100%.

I, I don't even own a real estate company. And I want to say yes.

Yeah, sure. You're like, well, yeah, wow. He. He knows my problem. He understands. How does he. He. He gets where I'm at. He's speaking my language. He may have. So I don't know. But certainly a cup of coffee is worth finding out whether he's a nut job or not. You know, I didn't ask for an hour of your time. Would it make sense for us to have a quick call? I'd ask an hour of your time and ask you for 30 minutes.

Yeah.

Would it make. Would it make sense for us to have a quick call, quick cup of coffee? Yeah, sure. Great.

Yeah, that's very similar into, like dentistry. When I was a dentist, people would call the dental practice and they only know to ask one thing. You know, how much is a cleaning? Well, that's not really what they're asking.

No, it's not.

That's just all they know to ask. So you want to find out, like you said, what's the why behind the real reason you're calling?

Yeah, a hundred percent. A hundred percent. And, you know, dentists, you know, I, I built my business on dentists, literally built my book. Because what happened for me was, you know, you, you know, I, you probably. Were you practicing in 1990s?

Yes.

Okay, well, you remember when the age. It all happened here. Kimberly Bergalis was a young girl, I remember her name, in Fort Pierce. She got, she got AIDS from her dentist, and that changed all the protocols. And so I latched on to that and I targeted dental offices. And I went in with a whole thing with dental offices with microfiber cleaning cloths and HEPA filters. And I told dentists, look, people no longer care about how good of a dentist you are when they're looking at the ceiling. And most of them are all day, all day long. If they see that air vent drip in mold and dust, they're never coming back. Now Right. And so, you know, we're the kind, we're the company that's going to be looking to make your, your patient feel safe.

Make you.

Wow.

We're going to be able to say that you've got a cleaning protocol that's used in OR and surgical theaters because that's, we're using the same HEPA filter, we're using the same microfiber clean cleft we're using. We don't clean with pine salt. We don't, we don't clean with cleaning fluids. Everything we clean with is an antibacterial disinfectant. Everything on every surface. So now all of a sudden I'm talking to a dentist office. I'm completely different than the next cleaning guy coming in who wants to, who wants to talk about the splash and dash, right? So I'm talking about a problem, you understand, that's at the heart of your practice.

How did you, how did you learn all this? This is really fascinating because it's basically the art of the sale, right? I mean, that's, it's so different than just, hey, here's what I got. You want it?

I take people who've never, who couldn't lead a group in silent prayer and turn them into killers. I mean, turn them into like, you know, people's closing ratio. I mean, people are happy to closing ratio of 20%. I'm thinking, are, are you nuts? Like, where else in your life are you happy at 20%? Never? Like never, right? I mean, if, if, if, if you're not at 75, 85% closing ratio, right? And so I, again, poverty teaches.

What prosperity never can. And so at a young age, I had to go out. You know, I was the kid that shoveled snow. I raked your leaves, I collected your bottles, I sold light bulbs door to door. At 13, I had a store in.

The strip district of Pittsburgh selling peanuts at an indoor flea market. And then I built out an entire fruit nut stand that I sold called the Goodie Bag. I was always an entrepreneur and so I was an unconscious competent. For years. I was very good at. I wasn't afraid to knock on doors, that, that if I wanted shoes, if I wanted a winter coat, if I wanted lunch money, I had a, I had to make it. And so I learned, I learned unconsciously how to be able to read people, how, just how to be able to do that. Then through my studies, through thinking, grow rich. That introduced me to some other areas of study. So I mastered neuro linguistic programming. I went, I got certified in hypnotherapy.

And, and just years of years of studying about what makes people. Just human behavior, right? Just behavioral problems, what makes people tick. And, you know, how can we influence, again, every single person, every single day spends their day manipulating, controlling and influencing the people, the conditions and circumstance and environment they're in to get their wants and needs. Method. And if you can systemize that, if you can break it down and if you can get really good at understanding what you do, like what problem do you solve? What problem do you solve? That's where your value is.

And so for all of your listeners, stop thinking about what you do and think about why they're calling you. Why are they calling. What do they want when they call you? What do they really want?

And I've got like, I don't know, 12 pages so far of notes, and this is awesome stuff. So you said, why are they calling you and what do they want from you? Is that what you said?

Why are they calling you? And what is it that they. What's their problem or what's their need? What, what, what, what really is it? So somebody, somebody who's, somebody who's calling out for carpet cleaning. Okay, what do they really, what do they really want? What do they really want? They don't just want their carpets clean, Right. They want the convenience.

Right.

They want the certainty that, that, you know, that you're removing whatever the smell or the dirt is. They want to know that you're going to protect the carpet afterwards. They may have kids that are crawling around on the floor with special needs, and they want to know that, you know, you don't, you're not using harsh chemicals. There's all kinds of things. You know, I had a client who had a, A, a pool business. And one, one of the things they sold, and it was, it was dying, his business was dying. He sold these floating alarm systems, right? So you put this alarm in the pole and if something breaks the barrier of the water, I mean, a shriek, right?

But he was up against pole fences.

And so I, I started that. I, like, we, we, we doubled his business by him asking one question. Why do you need a fence?

Why do you need a fence around your pole? Well, you need, yeah, because you want to keep the kids out of the pool. Okay. All right.

But why would the kids be in the pool? How could, how could the kids possibly have fallen in the pool? Well, the way the kids get there, though, you want a fence because somebody's going to forget to lock the door.

So the problem isn't at the Pool edge is it the problems at the house and this guy's alarm system also tied to all the doors and windows on the first floor. So when somebody would open up a door without pushing a passcode, the pole alarm would automatically go off like a true alert system. Well, before anybody even got to the pole. He was able to solve a problem long before I said, look, do you realize that most people who have pole fences still have people drown in their polls because the pole guy, who has access to the pole fence, who can keep the fence, who can forget. Well, all the drunk adults at the party can forget the law. The pole guy can forget the landscape guy, who, who, who, who unlocks the pool. That fence is only good if somebody remembers. And the reason why it's there is because people don't remember.

He created a problem for a pole fence guy that the guy didn't even know he had. The homeowner didn't even know that he had that problem. Now all of a sudden the pool fence wasn't this in, you know, wasn't this indestructible boundary anymore that was really vulnerable to stupidity. And that's why he needed it in the first place, because he didn't have certain certainty that the people around him weren't going to be stupid. He'll lock the door.

And so what? And now it's not that people didn't buy fences.

They did, but they also bought his.

Wow.

So I told him, you're not selling, you're selling an insurance policy that when somebody forgets to walk the fence, you're the first line of the fence. You're going to spend $10,000, have people drill holes all in, all around your pole. You're going to put in this pole fence for another 12, 1200 or $1800 dollars. You're not going to put this flotation alarm device in to just make sure that on any given Tuesday the pool guy doesn't leave it open and your three year old falls for 12.

Wow. So how did you then go from no coaches at, with John Maxwell to 40,000 coaches? Because I see there's so many coach organizations today.

Yeah.

That struggle to get a few coaches, much less 40,000.

Well, what we did is, you know, then what's the problem that a coach has? Well, coach has a problem first off they, most coaches have, you know, a real low self esteem that, that, you know, nobody's, nobody's really gonna, you know, hire me. You look at NSA National Speakers association. The average person at nsa, I think makes a thousand dollars a Year speak.

Right. Why? It's, it's not, it's not that they're not any good. It's that they can't sell themselves. And so most coaches suffer from imposter syndrome. They feel like a fake, like they don't have, like there's nothing unique about them.

And so what I sold them was association. I couldn't, you know, it's a lot harder for me to get you to buy into you being special than me saying, you know what, you're right, you're not that special. You need John Maxwell's name next to you. And now you become special. It's very interesting for most people, what's necessary for me to sell you is that I'm not you. It's like, I can sell you, but most people can't sell themselves. They could sell John, but they couldn't sell themselves because they didn't know their own value. They didn't understand their value proposition. They didn't know what was unique, the unique solution that they brought to people. Kind of. I can't tell you the number of women I had who had, you know, left their professional careers when they had kids, spent the next, you know, seven or eight years, you know, dealing with terrorists, you know, three year olds right now. And now all of a sudden they're going to go back, you know, now, now, now they're going to be a coach because getting back into the work field, you know, they've been passed over so they, you know, they're going to become a coach and they think, well, I've got no skills. No skills. You, you just did the hardest job in the world. You brought a human being into the world. You made a safely from, you know, from the cradle out the door. There's all kinds of skills and negotiating skills and time management skills and creative thinking skills and, you know, all kinds of skills that you've developed and all kinds of ways that if, if positioned right, you could use that. And when we look at people who've been really successful, particularly females in the, in the, in the coaching or speaking or thought leader leadership, most of them have done so using that leverage, you know, the Barefoot mommy, right, the, the mommy executive kind of programs and they, you know, they, they've, you know, Kerry Wilkerson, you look at the empire she's built on, you know, being a mom, right? And taking, you know, the, the, the, the skills and talents and abilities and creativeness of being a mom into becoming the executive mom, right? And how to, how to be able to do that and so teaching what we did with John and I've done with lots of other brands is finding what their buyer wants or needs or again, what their problem is. All of them. Most coaches have an inferiority complex. Why should somebody buy from me? There's nothing unique or special about me. So selling them the power of association. Hey, look, you, when you go in, you're bringing the name of John Maxwell with you right? Now, all of a sudden, what happens? Their certainty goes up.

Sales is the transference of certainty. So now where does the prospect get certainty? From the salesperson. So now I have all this certainty as I'm now somehow certain now, because I've got. I've been blessed, right? I've got, you know, I got the certificate, I've got the patch, I'm in the club, I've got the name, I've got the video with John endorsing me now. I'm now on bonafide. Right.

I like that.

So that.

That's.

That's one of the pieces that we saw.

Yeah, okay.

That's one of the pieces.

And that was that the biggest piece, do you think, or.

Oh, I think so, 100%. You know, I did this whole campaign that, you know, we wrote our entire sales script that the currency of. Of the time that we're in right now is association. When, when. Whenever a company hires you, the first thing they do is they go to your social media and see who you are associated with.

And if you're not associated with the right person, or God forbid, you're associated with the wrong person, you're in a reality even. Even before they interview you. So who you, you know, who you are associated with is the new currency you want to be associated with the biggest and the best.

The companies you're trying to get into already know the name John Maxwell. The people you're trying to go in and train know of John's work, know of his pedigree. They know they can't get John at $125,000. But if you could come in bringing John's expertise with John Seal, they'd gladly write you a check for 20.

I like that. And so, yeah, you, you said. Or you feel the need for them to have the stamp of approval and credibility, Right? Credibility?

Yeah, we were selling credibility. We were selling. You weren't selling a coach certification program. People could care less. Most people. Most people never completed all the work, all the resources. Most people never even went through the resources. Well, look, most people never read the book. Right?

Wow. Kind of like me and think and grow rich.

Yeah, look, it's. It's behavior compliance, Right?

Yeah.

So somebody will pay $5,000 for a certification program and. And not show up to the calls.

Yeah. Yeah. So would that lead you back to.

Number one cause of second heart attack and stroke? Number one cause of second heart attack and stroke is they don't take the medicine after the first one. Right. There you go. Behavior compliance. Right.

So.

So they're not really looking for another certification. That's not what they want. Hey, I think I better find another certification today.

Well, at some level, they are, because they don't feel they're enough. So something new needs to be added to me in order for me to be complete.

And so this is. You got people who've got 19 certifications. Yeah. They're in every course. Right. You know, it's. You know, it. They. They. I call it, you know, sos you know, shiny object syndrome. You know, they buy the next program or the next course, because that's what I need. I need. I need to know how to do landing pages. Then I can start my business. Oh, I need to take the communications course. Then I can. Oh, I need to be disk certified. I need to be that certified. And so. Right. And so for many programs, yours included, you know, that's a great leverage is. Look, if you don't have this tool in your toolkit, I mean, you're. You're a carpenter without a hammer. Every single person. I don't care why they're coming in for coaching. It all starts with the why. Whether they want to be a leadership coach, communication coach, relationship coach, business coach. I don't care what it is. How can you be a coach if you don't have in your toolkit the tool of all tools? It'd be a carpet. It'd be a plumber without a wrench. You're a coach without the Y box. What do you think? And you're not.

Yeah.

You'Re.

I mean, you're thinking that they're going to somehow get to their why through osmosis or through some other process. No.

The word why and intentionality go hand in hand. You have to be intentional about guiding your clients to a why. You need this in your. You are incomplete without this in your toolkit. And I believe that.

Yeah, I do, too, by the way. Yep. It's the first place. It's the place to start. It's just step one.

Tell me a coach who doesn't start with the why question. So they got a why question, but they don't have the tool. And so what is they get some surface answer and then they spend 10 weeks coaching the person, the CO, and the person doesn't renew because nothing's changed. I guess not.

Wasn't their why.

It wasn't their why.

Yeah, exactly.

Was there because big differ between somebody's why and because.

Yeah, between somebody why and somebody's because.

And it's fascinating how many PE coaches that I talk with that talk about why and then I'll say, so that's great that you believe that it's their first step. And so how do you do it? You know, how do you get them there? And they say, oh, well, you know, we have some conversations and we talk about a couple of things and they say, oh, that's great. Well, that the coach, the client you're working with right there. Well, what's their why? Well, you know, we're still working on that. We're kind of trying to still kind of work through that and figure it out. I'll say, well. Well, what's your why? Say, well, we're. I'm still kind of working on that. Trying to, you know, like figuring that out right now too.

Yeah. Yeah. And did you. We discovered through process, Ross Mose. No, you don't. You get intentional about it and there's a tool and there's a process for it and you've created it and it works every time it's tried.

Just before we, we got on here, I was doing a workshop with, with a group that had gone through our. One of our personal yos online course. And so I offered them a golden ticket to spend an hour with me and I and kind of go through what they, they learn. And so not, not individually, but as a group.

Yeah. Wow.

And so that was a. One of the big comments was, hey, I've already, I've been trying this for so long and I got to this statement but it, you know, sounded interesting but it didn't really do anything for me. But now I know, now I have clarity, now I have certainty. Now I can move forward.

You move forward.

That's the point. And so you take people, you know, it's all. I am sure for our listeners it's starting to kind of to become clear, er, the process that you take people through to get them to take action. Because if they don't take action, nothing you have to offer is, is really valuable.

Right.

If they don't buy.

Yep. They don't buy. You can't solve their problems. You can't solve their problem and help somebody. I Mean, that's the problem with, you know, most, most nonprofit organizations is, you know, is if they're not good at raising funds, it's not sustainable. There's lots of people that would do really good work, but it's not sustainable unless there's money.

And so you've got to be able to get donations or sales or something.

Which is how we started the whole conversation here, which is if nobody buys, no, nothing happens. Nobody gets better, nobody improves. Your business doesn't move forward. So it changes the view of selling, right? Of sales.

Look, I talk to speakers all the time and I ask them, you know, what do you sell? Oh, well, I don't, you know, I don't like to sell from the stage. Well, do you? I mean.

What are you, Buddha? Are you like, who are you? Like, you're going to change somebody's life in an hour on your stage? That could change anybody's life in an hour. You can get somebody who you could, you can maybe move them to being somewhat interested in changing their life. You could, if you're really good, you can get somebody who may, who may actually think, maybe I will change my life. But if you then don't offer them a book or a resource or a program to take the next step. Why are you speaking? The only reason why you should speak is so that you can influence people to taking the next steps in your body of work. And if you're going to speak for an hour, 20 minutes of your talk, 30 minutes of your talk needs to be your sales presentation.

30 minutes, I mean, 20 minutes of it.

I thought it was like the last two minutes when I throw up a slide that says, hey, buy here.

Is that it? And they don't know why people aren't going up and rushing to the back of the room and buying and they, they close 3% or 10% of the room. If you, if you were up in front of an audience, influencing the audience to make a decision to buy your program for an hour and you got less than 50%, you need help. You need help. You need help in being able to communicate your value. That's a vote. When, when, you know, when, when 80% of the audience walks away without buying your product. They just voted about what they think of the value you brought to them.

So I'm sitting here listening to this now. I'm. Or one of you know, in our audience is listening to said man, I see where one of my weak parts points is, and that is for sure the sales process. I don't understand it. Don't know how to do it scares me to death. Yeah, I'd want to hire someone else to do it because I don't know how to do it, but I probably should learn it. What advice is this something that you offer? Is this something that they can connect with you with or what would you recommend that they do?

Yeah, we, we have a sales academy, a sales course that we take people through. It's an 11 step process. It takes about 12 hours for us to take people through the, the, the, the, the 11. We spend about an hour on each piece of the process and then we spend the next 9020 days on live calls, three or four calls a week live with groups, role playing. And we get you scripted and we get your script and we get your value proposition and we teach you what we call the four corners. You know, because again, when people are trying to sell somebody that you know, they're trying to get sell somebody the truckload people, people don't need information to make a decision. They need emotion to make a decision.

Not information. As a matter of fact, the more information you give them, the more confused they are. And confused people do nothing. Confused people lack certainty.

This is, you know, people buy on emotion. Every purchase you make is an emotional purchase.

And so what we do is we teach people how to communicate the tangibles of their product in an emotional way.

You know, either through future pacing and, and guiding that person. You know, just imagine you walked into your office Monday morning and now every single one of your salespeople are ready. You walk into your office and every single one of your agents is prepared to say to those sellers exactly why they need to be selling in this market right now. That wait market is the worst thing they can do. Imagine all of your agents now are bulletproofing that. What happens to their confidence level? What happens to the results? I mean, what happens if every single one of your agents increases their sales by 5% this month? Just what happens? Right? So I'm future pacing you, right? I'm getting you to, I'm getting you emotionally involved in what could happen. I'm painting a picture of a desired future outcome. I'm painting a picture of. Because people, people are very clear about what their problem is. They're very attached to what their problem is. And they've imagined the worst case scenario and they've gone to the devil's advocate. I don't want to be the devil's advocate. But you know, they, they've gone, they, they've gone that route. What they haven't, what they don't have and nobody's giving them is a future alternative to the pain that they've created a solution. What does that look like? What would that feel like for you? And if you could feel that, if you could feel that way on Monday morning, what would that be worth it? What would that be worth to you? Surely it's gotta, that's gotta exceed the cost of this program.

Yeah.

You know, and so we, we, you know, we do it live. And then, you know, first is live teaching the 12. I mean the, the 12 hours is all live. And then it's about three months of live calls where you role play with other people and you're, you're in a hot seat. You're going to sell me and I'm going to, you know, you're going to sell me and we're going to stop and we're going to script out. We're going to give you language patterns. No, I'm not. This isn't coaching because coaching is, is you come up with the questions. This is mentoring. I'm going to tell you what to do. You know, you know, let's cut to the chase. I'm going to tell you what to do and then you're going to try it and then you're going to get a result and then we're going to improve on that result. And then when we're done with those 90 days, then you're going to come in for a two day boot camp. At our last boot camp, $100,000 was sold in the room. This was just people role playing and people ended up buying what they were role playing with. It's funny, I mean we, we, we never even real, we never thought of that. When we first did the program, when we first created it, we never thought that people would actually be buying the room. People were buying the room. One guy, one guy was a girl who has a book writing program. Program she sold a doctor who'd been wanting to write a book. Ten thousand dollar book deal in the room.

Wow. Okay. How do you come up with, how do you figure out price? Yeah, because that's a really interesting topic. You know, what should I price my service? How much should my coaching be? How much should my ex be?

Yeah. And again, price is a direct reflection of value.

And perceived value. Right. Perceived value.

And that's, that's important because you, you know, someone's perception is their reality and so the only way we shift perception is we shift perspective.

Right. I can't shift, shift your perception. You've bought you're sold on your perception. Me, you know, me trying to convince, I'm convinced that I can't convince you of anything. That's the only thing I'm convinced. So me trying to convince you to change your perception. No, but if I can change your perspective, you're forced to change your perception.

Shift perspective in order to change perception.

To change persp. Perception.

Yeah, yeah. You, you perceive the value of what I have. So I go to you. You're the dentist. I'm coming. I'm the janitor. You know, you've never paid more than 30 bucks to get your office clean. And I'm going to sit down with you and I'm going to tell you, yeah, it's going to cost you, you know, $117 a visit. What? Now if I try to change your perception.

No way. But if I change your perspective and I say, well, hold on, you're looking at this as I'm going to come in and clean your toilet.

I'm going to come in and let me show you what we're going to do. That's completely. Let me show you a different picture. Let me show you a different perspective because you're looking at it from there. I want you to look at it from this way. Now do you see the difference?

Really hard to have the same perception from here. When you're looking that way. Your perception has to change. If I change perspective, and so what most people do, the seller has a perception in their mind of what they're worth.

So we've got to change that first. Because when somebody says to me, I don't know my price, what they've just told me is they don't know their value.

Now, this isn't a trick question, Gary. I'm not one of those guys that asks you a question and there's. But just let, let just, just play along and I promise you, not a trick question.

No. Okay.

If you went into McDonald's today and were to get a Big Mac, my favorite sandwich at McDonald's, what would you expect? What's your perception of a cost of Big Mac today?

Four bucks.

Four bucks. Now, if you and I, I was going to go down, we're going to go to Capital Grill. Familiar with Capital Grill or Ruth Chris?

Yep, yep.

We're going to go lunch, we're going to sit at the bar.

What are you gonna pay for their, you know, half pound cheeseburger?

16 bucks.

16 bucks. I know perceived value, right? Yeah. You know, arguably McDonald's hamburger is better by my stake. I'm A big guy. Give me four Big Macs over one of those all day long or I'll take the four, right? That's right. But it's, it's value, right? McDonald's doesn't try to sell it for 16. They don't try to change your mind about 16. They make no effort to make the restaurant any better. They don't, they make no effort to make the burger better. It's two whole beef patty, special sauce, less cheese, pickles on the sesame seed bun, period. And that's it. They're not, they're not even trying to make it better because they're not going to. They're not. They know their value. They know who their client is. They are dialed in and they're one of the best run companies in the world. In the world.

And by your description, they sell subpar pan burgers. They just sell a billion of them. Right? And so what we do first off is we've got to help the, our client who's learning how to sell, really learn their value. And so it starts with the process of then of us discovering what it is that they really do and what problem do they really solve and what value. And we force them to go back and read all those emails that people wrote thanking them and we ask them to rewind the tapes of, you know, the conversations of people who said, wow, thank you so much, you really helped me. And we have them call their past clients back and ask him, can you like, could you blow my horn for a minute? Can you tell me what was good about me? Like, what did I do? What, why, why me? Why was I What? When you went through my thinking, grow rich, study, what was different about what did I bring to the book? What was my value?

Because most people don't know their value. It's like potential. You can see other people, but they can't see to themselves.

And then, and then once, once, once they know their value, all of a sudden they, you know, they, they sit up a little straighter. You know, they feel a little bit better about themselves. They have a little bit more certainty about what they do. They have a little bit more confidence, they have a little bit more authority in how they speak. And then we look at, you know, what is it that they do? And words mean things. No, you know, is it, is it a hotel or a resort? You know, is it a program or is it, or is it exclusive access? Right?

So all these things can shift perspective, which changes perception.

You know, me, when I was in the cleaning business, I was trapped there's only so much people can, are going to pay to get the cleaning, the toilet clean. However, there are people in certain industries that will pay significantly more for a HEPA filter in their office and a microfiber cleaning cloth in their office and other, you know, and so we, we offer those things too. And so what often happens for us when somebody comes through our sales program is they end up having three or four different levels of service now because they realize, oh, you know, my base price, I can't do much about that, but what I can do is I could add alternative processes and programs and procedures and, and things to it that have additional value. Right. You know, coaching during the day versus coaching after hours. There's a different price. Wow.

Yeah.

Big different price. Right. I'm not, I'm not interrupting your team's day.

Yeah.

So I'm working with your team. When they're away from the team and they're focused on this, they're not thinking about that next project. So you get the full value of the coaching experience.

Gosh, there's so much more to this than people and me included put to it or think about it or, you know, it's so much more strategic than just, hey, look what I made. Do you want it?

Yeah, yeah. I mean.

Know, it's what separates you from everybody else and that, you know, there are, you know, there's very few coaches and you know, I look arguably, arguably I've trained more people to be speakers and coaches than anybody else in the history of the world. Right. 40,000 with John Maxwell, thousands with Bob Proctor and then through Mary Morrissey, Bob Berg, Daniel Amen, Joseph McClendon, Cialdini. They've all used my process for training these guys.

There's very few coaches that make, you know, 100,000, 200, 300, $500,000 a year. And there's no reason why they all don't, there's no, there's no reason why, you know, I tell, you know, take the tip of a compass, put it up, put it right on your house, make a 20 mile circle and you can retire.

You don't need to go all over the, you can retire right there. Just be a, just be a master of your own neighborhood. Just master that area. There's, you know, work with the millionaire, you know, now, you know, I never, you know, I never, I never trained Google, I never trained Microsoft. What I did is when I got into, when I got into coaching, I went for the millionaire next door. I went for that for, you know, plumber Bob. You Know the woman who owned a gymnastics studio, the woman who owned a dance studio, the karate instructor, somebody. These were people who were successful entrepreneurs. They'd been in business for five years or longer. They owned their own dirt. Right. They were still active in the business. Right. And, and, and the business has gotten too big for them to kind of manage and they needed somebody else to come in and help them develop their people. But they couldn't hire, you know, a big company. Yeah, I, I, I became their solution. They could get a top corporate trainer for, you know.

Three or four hours a week.

I know I'm keeping you way longer than.

I, I could keep going all day. You just have so many great things that you've experienced and lived and done and shown people how to do and taught and on and on. So this is so valuable.

The, maybe the last question. What's the best piece of advice that you've ever given or been given?

I think the best piece of advice I've been given and it's probably the best advice I've given. Right. Which makes sense. Right. It's that in principle, it's, you get what you fight for, you get what you make agreement with.

And you can so casually make an agreement with limitation.

And it sounds so right and so natural.

It seems so logical. Well, of course you're not going to become a millionaire in the cleaning business, but you know what? You can carve out a nice little company, you can make, you know, nice 60, 70,000, you can get comfortable.

Right. Like, where else in your life would you settle for that? And so I think it's this idea of being.

Hyper aware.

Of what I'm making agreements with, what territory I'm taking and what territory I'm giving. Because, you know, we, we mentioned these seven laws. They're fascinating when you understand them, but the one is the law of vibration, and most of us know it as the law of attraction. Attraction is the secondary law. In other words, attraction occurs because of vibration. There's no attraction. What causes attraction is the, is the vibrational frequency of one thing attracting the other. Right. So it's divided. So it's the law of vibration, which is the primary law. And the law of vibration says that everything in the universe, from the smallest electron to the grossest form of matter, is in a constant state of change, that there's no such thing as inertia. My house is falling apart. Now it's happening. It's such a slow rate of vibration with our physical senses, we don't see it, but intellectually we know If I don't maintain this house, it's going to be the Acropolis one day it will fall apart. So the law is create or disintegrate, move forward or backwards. You are either taking or giving territory today.

You're either taking or giving territory today.

And if you understood the long term compounding effects of giving up territory of your territory of your belief, territory of your compassion, territory of empathy, territory of intimacy.

Transparency.

We give territory away. And if you're not, the compounding effect of that could be really dangerous in the long term. You know, you can wake up and not have, not have many close friends one day.

Because you gave up that territory because you know other things are too important.

And so you know we, we have a, we have a seven year old, an eight year old boy and we homeschool them and I have breakfast and lunch with them almost every day and every day in the morning, you know, we, because I'm blessed and we, they buy a share of stock at the stock market before the market opens. They buy a pre market so they get into the auction and at 9:30 we stand and we clap. Free enterprise and capitalism when the bell rings on Wall Street.

Because I don't want to give that territory up to somebody else. I want that territory. I want the territory of their memories, I want the territory of their heart. I want the territory of their thinking and their belief. I don't want to give that to anybody. That's, that's precious territory.

Wow, I had not thought of it that way. That's, that's powerful Paul. If there are people that are listening that want to connect with you, want to get in touch with you, want to learn from you, what's the best way for them to do that?

Well, thank you. They could go to my website PaulMartnelli.net or email me. It's Paul@PaulMartinelli.net.com goes to a real estate agent in, in Canada.net comes to me. So you can send me an email just paul@paulmartinelli.net I, I, I'm one of those old school guys. I still read my own email or you can go to my website paulmartinelli.net there's free resources you can sign up for.

Oh that's awesome. Thank you so much for being here and thanks for all the wisdom you shared and all the, the experiences that you shared because I'm telling you I have at least 10 pages of notes here and I'm sure everybody else listening does too. So we got to have you on again. Sometime, because I'm sure we could just keep going. There's so many things I know we didn't even touch yet. Well, but thank you so much.

Let me just say this also now, if you're, if you're listening to this podcast, you're not, you're not here by accident. This didn't just happen for you, I believe there's no such thing as luck of chance. Everything in the universe operates by law. So you're not here by accident. If you've been on the sideline thinking about having a tool that could help people find their purpose, you've got it right here, right now. And having worked with Gary and his team from a distance, admittedly from a distance, I can tell you this. I've never found somebody more committed to their work and a team more committed to helping you get their work right, to help help you really get it and make it effective. I've worked with coaches and coaching programs all over the world. And I mean that. So if, if you, if you are lacking a tool to intentionally help your client uncover their why, you are doing a great disservice to your client. This is a tool that will help you intentionally guide and take away all the guesswork. All the guesswork. And I'm going to tell you what clients who know their why complain less, pay better, and renew. You can take that to the back.

Awesome, Paul, thank you so much. And I'm sure I'm going to have you on again as soon as I can do. I probably need to arrange it now so it's going to be so far in the future. But thank you so much for, for all that you've shared and I look forward to staying in touch for sure.

Thanks for having me. Be well. Bye. Bye.

I really hope you enjoyed today's episode and that through today's guest, you heard how important it is to know your why and how impactful it can be in your life and the lives of those around you. Be sure to head over to why Instagram and discover your why today. Remember, the more you know about yourself, the more you'll know about others. I'm Dr. Gary Sanchez and I'll see you on the next episode.