E.69 - Does Your Salary Deserve A Raise? Executive Negotiation Secrets with Jacob Warwick

The problem with the word negotiation is that people think it starts much later than it does. The timing is the most important piece. I helped a client make $500,000 in a 15-minute consult. 2 weeks ago, we're in a counter negotiation. We pushed back for 2 minutes and made $440,000 in the 2-minute pushback. And then they also said, we're still not sure if it's enough. I obsess heavily on behavioral psychology, especially been focused on how leaders control rooms and control people. For folks in sales, you should be masters of psychology and rhetoric. When you're going to close deals, it's not about, you know, what the SaaS stack is going to look like and how this person is, you know, how to get the champion to, you know, make more money for their company. It's how do we make the buyer look good?

Hi, I'm Tolu, also known as the Podfather, and I'm the host of What Makes You Tick.

And I am Richard Washington, founder of Tick Talent. We are delighted to sponsor this podcast. Tolu, I'm in a strange place right now. So apologies to anyone that's watching this on YouTube, but rather than being in my beautiful studio, I'm in the Dolomites. So the other side of this camera is one of the most beautiful sights you've ever seen. And I'm not just talking about my wife who's sitting opposite me right now. But the Dolomite Mountains are behind me.

Yes.

Which is not as impressive as our guest today, because I think this is potentially going to be one of our most valuable and important podcasts that we've done today. So, Tolly, without further ado, who have we got on this week?

So this week we have Jacob Warwick, general badass, like he's a negotiation king. He helped someone to get a G-Wagon as part of their negotiation package, like Yeah, he's just a proper, just a cool dude. And he was like, dude, me and my wife are hillbillies and we made it. And he's just so down to earth, so cool. Like, yeah, loved talking to Jacob Warwick.

Yeah, amazing. I think that this podcast is going to resonate with a lot of people because Jacob touches a lot of people. You know, it's like his work around coaching executives at really crucial moments in their careers and in their businesses is just perfect. And so whilst we know the intrapreneurs who grow startups, he knows the entrepreneurs and the intrapreneurs who grow startups. So I think that anyone who wants to know about a true rags to riches story around from being homeless to being an incredible authority within their niche, proper growth mindset, building democratization around something that's really like complicated, as well as a load of war stories around how he's helped real people to achieve some incredible things. I think there's a load of gold in here for people. From the conversation that you've had, Tolly, what were some of those standout moments that you want to signpost for people?

I think just his approach to understanding and connecting with humans. So he understands some of the psychology around people, and he just uses that to, you know, sometimes we think about, you know, creating a win-win for the company and stuff like that. He's like, no, don't do that. He's like, create a win for you. And I was like, huh, okay. So I was actually quite challenged by a lot of what we talked about, but in a really, really good way, you know. So you Yeah, there's just so much in there. I think it was a much longer episode than we normally have, but there's just so much in there. So much in there.

Definitely our longest ever episode and potentially one of our best. So without further ado, ladies and gentlemen, let's roll the VT.

Jacob, welcome to the podcast. Thank you so much for joining me today.

Hey, happy to be here.

So what makes you tech, Jacob?

Oh yeah, you were, uh, we were talking about this in the green room a little bit, and I sort of feel like I'm an enigma because I don't deal with the status quo very well. Like, I don't like, uh, corporate nonsense and like kind of the typical status quo, and I oftentimes can be a chameleon, and I like to break tension. I'm probably a pretty serious person but knows how to have a good time, I guess you could say. Um, a lot of the times when I'm working with clients, they're in very stressful, high-anxiety moments, and sometimes I'll break that tension with an off-colored fart joke or something that just kind of helps them recognize that not everything is so deeply related to their career and still empathize with the way they're feeling and help them manage those emotions and things. But that also we're here to have a good time and, you know, they're not alone in that journey. And I think that I break the, break the tension with that quite a bit.

Okay. And where do you think your approach to life comes from?

Yeah, we were, we were talking about a little bit of this in the green room too. I, I grew up in an interesting way. I'm the product of a sexual assault from my mother who was in Narcotics Anonymous and had a, let's just say, interesting upbringing and was very fortunate to have a stepfather kind of come in and help raise me through that. And he was an entrepreneur and my mom is a nurse. And although there was some, some substance and violent kind of issues kind of growing up here and there, still like pretty fortunate to have grown up in that environment. And it kind of taught me, you know, from a very young age that some of the stuff that we're dealing with in the corporate world is really not that serious in the scheme of things. Like if you Yeah, if you grow up with, with fear or trauma or substance abuse or homelessness, or you've had friends who have, or you just know what it's like to struggle and really, really make a name for yourself in the world, and you get out of that, um, you have a different perspective on life. You take things differently, you work in different ways, you value your time differently. Some of my best clients, when you drill under the surface have had trauma, like some type of trauma that they're almost proving they're not like that anymore, right? They're proving that they are stronger than that, that they can overcome that, and that they can influence and overcome that for other people as well. They pay it forward really well. And you see that a lot of folks I work with, I would categorize as Type A overbearing, obsessive personalities. Which I would say probably makes me tick as well. I'm almost overly obsessed on details that a lot of people don't often think about. Like, I obsess heavily on behavioral psychology and nuances and, and triggers and outcomes and rhetoric and things that make people change their decision-making processes, and especially been focused on how leaders control rooms and control people. Presidential cycle was actually pretty fascinating. Like, I study that intensely on, on both sides, albeit most of my clients tend to be on one side. So it's interesting to share things you learn from the side that they don't agree with. Yeah. Yeah. It's just— it's fascinating to obsess on those things. And I think a lot of times people are, you know, finding their strength through their work. Some folks tend to, if they, if they have a difficult personal situation or family situation, they work harder. Yeah. And I don't know if that's healthy, but you bottle it up and, and you say, I'm going to focus on my work because that's what I can control. And then they become obsessively good at it.

Right.

So it is where they have control. And I think you tend to see a lot of executives that have gone through that trauma and have fought it and then have become very successful and driven and push out others because of that as well. So I think a lot of that, maybe I personify that a little bit, but it's also the types of people that I choose to engage in, in my line of work. I deal with a lot of highly anxious, highly successful folks, and I think in one way my work with them is also me working on myself.

Well, and you, you've talked a little bit about it, but what is that— what is the problem that you solve? With what you do?

I, I like this joke, uh, just— well, I guess it's not really a joke. It's, uh, about 90% of my work is getting executives to tell the truth and to feel confident doing it. Like, that is the most difficult thing. Now, I could be very salesy and talk about the outcomes of breaking negotiated benchmarks and helping earn people millions of dollars and having these successful outcomes and those things all happen in time. But I've noticed that, again, I obsess over process, that in order for those outcomes to happen, it starts much sooner and it typically starts with confidence and making sure people are confident, making sure they're enthusiastic about the opportunities that they're pursuing, making sure that they have this almost childlike curiosity about the type of future they're creating or the type of work that they want to do. Because my mission has always been to help people find more fulfilling work, not necessarily help them make the most money. It just so happens that those two things kind of go hand in hand to a degree, or at least they think they do. So the hook that gets people in the door to be interested in the things that I do is typically like, hey, I had this contract that was $700,000 and I pushed it to $3 million a year, or I got this $10 million seed round close with an intervention. I helped— I have some clients in Hollywood, and I've worked on Hollywood contracts with stars that I won't mention here because I can't. But let's, let's just say I've saved some movies with some negotiation that sometimes don't even involve money. It involves psychology. Sometimes getting someone to say they're sorry can win a deal over, like, more so than an extra million dollars. Yeah, we had a, we had a deal where I got to dance around this topic a little bit for confidentiality, but there is a, a movie. It is a, it's not the first movie in a series. Oftentimes in Hollywood they have rights to more and more movie deals when the first, if the first one's successful. So the first one was successful, the second one was successful in the, in the production company was exercising their right on the third and the fourth. Well, this main— the main talent, um, who I won't mention but you've seen on TV plenty, very, very famous, uh, had a disagreement with the director on the, the basically the direction of the third and fourth movies. And it really pissed the director off because it was in line with how the other ones were going. It made sense. And so there was a little bit of an ego from the celebrity and they tore it apart. They basically tore, like, tore the director a new one and went with other directors. And then as that celebrity read the new scripts, they're like, can't we just do it the way we were doing it before? Like, this is trash. So the agency was in an interesting position. They're like, well, let's throw more money at the director to get him to come back. And these are folks that sometimes make $10 million a year. A couple hundred thousand doesn't move the needle for them. Right. I said, what would move the needle is if the celebrity— and there's actually— you and I could talk about this in the green screen.

Yeah.

You'll start to understand where the ego comes from too. Yeah. But I said, if so-and-so offers an apology and says, hey, you're actually right with this, I needed to go through this and kind of see the direction more clearly, can you come back? That will move the deal forward. And so they didn't have to pay. I think they were offering $800,000 more to bring the director back, of which the director said, "Kiss my ass," right? Was not having it. Like, "I'm never working with someone like that again. This disrespectful, petulant ego bull—" You know, it was getting real emotional. And I said, "If there's just a heartfelt apology, it's a 1-minute conversation. You can get this deal back on track." And that movie will be out in Amazon Prime here in the next let's say 18 months for sake of discussion. But sometimes what you're looking like— I obsess on the nuances, right? So like, think about it. This person doesn't need money. You like— they need to save face, right? Like, they're both throwing a tantrum. One person, whoever stands to— whoever wants this deal to go forward the most needs to own up to something that the other person thinks they never would. And that would be meaningful for them. And so that took a couple weeks to figure out, and once we got there, like, it moved the deal forward. So sometimes it's those kinds of nuances that you don't often hear about.

And so you mentioned earlier that behavioral psychology and nuance is something that you're really interested in. What was the journey to kind of going from where you started? So, you know, you mentioned that you started in marketing. What was the journey of going from marketing to where you are now?

Yeah. So I, I started in marketing directly at 18. I like skipped school, sort of ran away from the home situation I alluded to before and tried to make a name for myself. I guess you could argue that. So didn't go to school but started. I was the AV nerd in high school. Okay. You know, you see my, my podcast set up like this was no big deal for me. Like, I geek out on this stuff. And so it turns out that if you know how to create content, I also took some journalism classes, so I had some copywriting background. Like, you sort of have the foundation for marketing, right? You're creating content, you're, you're writing. So in the earliest days, I graduated high school in 2008, financial collapse, a lot of great people ran out of work. So if you were willing to work for $10 an hour or $8 an hour like I was, right, I would take jobs that were originally $60,000, $70,000, $80,000 a year, like marketing manager jobs. And at the time, social media was starting to get popular. LinkedIn was getting popular. And also at that time, the kid was the one that managed that. Oh, let the kid deal with that stuff. So I was the kid who did all the social media. So I started with social media management, and because it was so difficult to prove an ROI for people, I had to start learning analytics and behavioral psychology and what's actually going to get people to convert and how do I show the dollars and cents of this because I also chose to work for, let's say, questionably bad startups, like a lot of first-time founders with weak visions where I would just work kind of wherever I could out of survival. Also, beggars can't really be choosers if you don't have a college education and it's the shittiest economy in a long time and like you're trying to figure it out, you don't know anything. So like I worked for, let's say, some less favorable companies and I did have the opportunity to work with MyFitnessPal, which was pretty game-changing for my career. And then I learned that I started looking at data and marketing managers tend to make $80,000 to $120,000 a year in Silicon Valley. So as I got recruited out of jobs and they said, you know, hey, Jacob, how much money do you want to make? I couldn't open my mouth and say, I make, you know, $30,000 a year commuting to San Francisco 2 hours one way on Amtrak, right? Instead, I just said, I'd be curious to hear what your range is for this. I'm sure it's competitive. And like that, they said, they said, oh, we're looking at $100,000 to $120,000 for this role. And I said, well, I'd be more interested in the high end of that if we were in alignment. And I got that job. I quadrupled my salary in one conversation, in one move, in one move. And I was 22, 23. I did the same for titles and I got a, I got a director title at Xerox. At 24, and that's when I learned that perception was important because it was in title only. It was a public title because I was responsible for working with Inc. magazine and supporting some advertising deals. And the last thing they needed to see was freelancer copywriter Jacob Warwick Warwick is trying to move this $7 million contract forward. So I negotiated with the VP and said, hey, what do you think about a director title? I think it'll help me be taken more seriously. And the email back was like, sounds good. Sounds good. So director at Fortune 500 publicly at— I know you're laughing, but this is how it went down. And so I put that on my LinkedIn profile. Yeah, right. I put that on my LinkedIn profile, and within a week I had a conversation with Forbes 30 Under 30 as a finalist. It's like, I didn't win, for what it's worth. I think Shaun White and like all these other folks are like dominating that, but I didn't win. But it taught me that just the title and the perception. Yes, perception is 9/10 of the law. If people think you're good, right, that goes a long way. And so it really got me studying that. And that opened up so many opportunities because I started writing for Forbes and Inc. and I was exercising my copywriting acumen. And the stronger you got at speaking to the audience, the more your content would get viewed and you kind of get that as validation metrics. And then I started getting jobs because people would see that I would be writing about marketing. So therefore I must know about marketing, even though every article was me studying marketing to write about it in the moment. And so that pushed me into VP of marketing and CMO roles in my mid-20s. And I'll be honest with you, I hated every minute of it. Like, I hated— I hated marketing software companies like million-dollar software products to other millionaires. I hated like working in the Salesforce AppExchange because I'm basically giving more work to admins who have to slave away on their computers all day for 12 hours dealing with some bullshit software. And I didn't want to be the cause of perpetuating that almost dystopian society. And I, I had to feel like even though I'm making good money, and I shouldn't complain about this, this doesn't feel fruitful for me. And A lot. I think a lot of other people feel that way but don't say it. So I think one of the reasons I've been successful is I say the quiet part out loud. I'm like, you're seeing this shit, right? Like, this, this is not nice. This is not fun. Like, I understand paying the bills and that we need to do this, but can we do better? And the big aha moment for me was having learned a little bit about neuromarketing and a little bit about perception and rhetoric and studying psychology. Reading Influence by Robert Cialdini as an example, like one of the masterclasses there, studying kind of some of the Stoic philosophies and things. I— the game-changing moment was applying a go-to-market strategy that I would use on Silicon Valley company and apply it to, you know, Tolu the person, right? The individual. And it got me thinking like people's careers are— you are the product. And if you want to find a job or you want to do something else, you're going to market with yourself. Like, you have to market yourself to the world. And it's kind of an icky way of thinking about it because it's like you have to sell yourself. I don't want to think about myself as this asset, but that's how companies hire you. They're hiring you to make an impact. They're buying an asset. And then it got me thinking as I started working with people that made more and more and more money, right? And I know there's a lot of sales listeners on your podcast, right? Like how long— maybe you can answer this for me— how long does an enterprise sales deal take?

Oh, can take anywhere from months to years.

Right, right. And so how would you categorize enterprise sale?

Like what number in terms of the size of the deal or the size of the company?

Like the amount? Yeah, the deal size. Like at what point does deal size equal enterprise sales methods?

Varies, maybe $50,000 to $100,000.

Is it? Yeah. Is it $50,000 to $100,000? Okay. Now, if you're a $50,000 a year earning individual, right, how senior are you? Not very. Not very. No. Right. Not, not in tech. Right. So now it's 5x that, right? Let's say you're a director of sales. You're making $250,000 a year, right? How long should it take you to close a $250,000 a year deal? Because you are a professional services asset that the company is buying. Mm-hmm. Right. How long is it going to take to close that deal? So fortunately for executives, the deal cycle is usually less than what an actual enterprise deal cycle is. Right. But the principles are there. So for folks on this podcast that study the Challenger Sale as an example, it takes 6.5 decision makers to close an enterprise deal. When you're closing your own deal, you're interviewing somewhere, you're building champions. You need to challenge the way they're doing things. Yeah. You need to create an opportunity for your product to become part of their solution. You sell the vacation. For those listeners that watch Alex Hormozi, his closer framework is perfect. Yeah. You clarify why you're in the room, you label them with the problem, you overview what they've been doing about it, you sell them the vacation, you explain away any concerns that they have, and then you reinforce the idea to hire you. Right. My favorite part of that is selling the vacation, because if I said, Tolu, fast forward 6 months from now and you look back at your podcast performance and the most successful podcast was the one that you and I are doing right now, how would you feel about that? Amazing, right? Like, you smile. I'm making you feel good. And what I'm doing is I'm planting a seed in the future of you feeling good. And who's right there next to you? I am. Yeah. So part of, part of this fantasy you have is me being right alongside. And so I fired the neurons in your brain to go through and sell that vacation. And now we're going to hop off the call. I don't know if it'll be the most successful podcast you've ever had. I hope so. But if you keep fantasizing about that and I ask you, how do I make sure that becomes a reality? The odds are you're going to do more to promote the podcast that I'm on with you right now than your other guests, right? So your other guests didn't plant that seed of success in your mind. Therefore, I'm encouraging you to go to battle for me. I'm creating an advocate for myself. I'm having you coach me on what it takes to create this vision because you're involved in it. You're visualizing it and you're fantasizing. I'm hitting dopamine in your brain like I'm getting you excited. Now, the likelihood that I'm more successful because of your success is greater. And I masterminded the whole thing. And not only am I teaching your audience that, but I'm actually encouraging you to promote the shit out of me right now.

I know, right?

I'm like, this is going to be the most— Yeah, I know. You're like, oh no. Like, I could see the puppeteering strings come out. And then you can also see— but you could start to see where this gets dangerous because if you really study all these things, you can start to see it in politics and how you can shift you can shift entire countries, you can make countries go to war with your rhetoric, not even your own. Right. Americans are masterminds at controlling the world. Well, that's why so many people hate us, right? Like they do that for a living. They peddle in other people's business and they do that. And people can see it, especially those that are affected the most. But you can see where this can be very powerful. And my kind of caveat on this is I assume the best of my clients. You will use this for good and not evil. Yeah, right. And that's kind of where I'm at right now. But if I'm honest, I wrestle with that sometimes. But you have the power and the ability to control. It's how you choose to use it. And I think there's a lot of integrity that needs to be brought into that conversation as well. I don't know if I answered your question. I just went on a tangent.

Tangents are good. Tangents are good. I do wonder with your, you know, what you're wrestling with, do you ever do anything on the other side of people understanding rhetorics and understanding how they can be impacted by rhetoric so that you're kind of helping both sides, right? You're helping people to understand how to use it, but also to understand how to not get sucked into it.

Yeah, so naturally this is kind of how my relationships with clients go. So I really struggle to articulate what it is I do, which is funny because I teach people how to articulate what they do. The cobbler's children have no shoes, right? Yes, of course. The reason for that is if most people call me a coach right now, I think the perception of coach is snake oil salesperson. And generally they have a lot of responsibility over clients. They have a lot of sway. They can control folks. And I think a lot of coaches prey on their clients when they're most vulnerable, especially in the job search world. When you're out of work and all these factors are starting, like, underneath the surface, like, you're feeling insecure. In America especially, you've lost your identity. We introduce ourselves by our titles, not who we are as people. Like, I don't say I'm a father. I say I'm an executive or I'm a CEO. Like, typically people lead with that. And so our identity is shaken, and I think coaches start to prey on that.. And so I don't want to call myself a coach because the perception of coach is negative. Now I've had clients call me consigliere, which is the advisor to the Godfather. Right. Which also doesn't have great connotations. Right. Especially for my friends in New Jersey. Yeah. Yeah. Like, well, my, my clients in New Jersey and New York are like, yeah, I'll call my consigliere, you know? And then the ones in San Francisco are like, oh my God, you're so toxic. Right? And so I don't like that word either. But the perception of what you're called really matters. And then like with coach, the perception is that you're on an hourly retainer or, you know, there's some type of hourly fee. And I can't show up for my clients, especially in a negotiation, if they feel like they're being nickled and dimed. Right. So if they feel like I can't call Jacob because it's going to be $1,000 for that phone call or whatever the number is, spoiler alert, whatever your hourly is, it's always going to be too much to somebody right now. On average, I do anywhere like on the low end $1,500 an hour, and on the high end I've made $20,000 an hour. Like, I've had all kinds of different pieces like that, and that's how I structure my contracts, based off of performance instead of hourly consults. Uh, I see. But so, so you asked about like, how do we do this? So I don't cap my hours with clients. I want to be— this obviously drives my family nuts because I'm like always on call. Yeah. When I was talking about that, that CRO deal that I closed in the green room that was worth a little over $12 million over the 4-year period, that was on Christmas Day last year, right? Like, that's when it happened. So I show up when my clients need me. I'm almost a sparring partner in their pocket, but I don't charge a nickel and dime model because I don't want them to think I'm an attorney, although I want people to use me like an attorney process where let's say you were interviewing, you get new information, you send that information to me before you send it to anyone else. That way we can control exactly what information we drip. We control the power language you use in the counter. We control how much you share and why, when to go open kimono or when not to, and what the timing looks like, how we create a bidding war situation, how we deal with other information that I need to have access to previously. Yes. So I get to know my clients very intimately. Like, it is a level that most of my clients say, I didn't know this existed. And then— but when people are looking, like, they don't really know they're looking for me. So there's not really a word for what I do. At its core, I'm an entrepreneur. Yeah, right. Like, I'm more entrepreneurial, less coach. And I also am more like, I'm not purely a coach because a coach is like, ooh, let's go. I do have my hype man hat. But then there's also consulting work that says, this is what you've seen and this is what you've done. Then I have a networking hat where it's introducing clients to other clients who have been in similar situations to get new sides of the story. And so as clients are essentially just waxing poetic about something that's happened, a lot of my clients will explain things in different levels of detail, and I'll be able to caution them and say, This is what was happening to you right here. This is where that influence is getting to you. And here's why it doesn't matter. Right. And so part of it, we talked about confidence being important and a big part of negotiation is leverage. And if people understand that they can always walk away and say no, they have unlimited power because they can just say no. Most of my clients can say no, whether they feel like they can or not. There are other pressures. Like, most people don't want to walk away from their job even when they're burnt out because, yeah, well, their spouse could look at them funny. Like, their spouse may not want to spend that much time with them at home. They might be an absolute terrible person to spend too much time with, right? They might have 3 kids, 2 of which are going to high-tuition schools. They may have parents in failing health that they're taking care of financially. There's a lot of demands on the typical breadwinning executive client that I tend to attract, where they also— and I think men feel this quite a bit, and maybe you can relate to this, but I, I get my worth as a man by being respected and by being a provider. Right. I know a lot of women. I know a lot of women breadwinners that feel this way, too. But I know specifically for me, in my experience, I want my family to rely on me. I want to be the source because I want to be the one to make the sacrifice because I feel like I can handle it. And sometimes that hurts my mental health, right? I have a very difficult time finding other people that I can connect with on a personal level, especially when you're in CEO mode or you're in entrepreneur mode and people want to talk to you about problems and you solve them for them. And then they're like, I just wanted you to listen. Don't like, stop solving it. It's my job. I'm a consultant. Like, I solve problems. What I do. Yeah, right. And then, you know, your sister or whatever is like, just listen to me, like, don't solve it. And I'm like, yeah, but it's clearly an easy fix, you know? But with, with my clients, like, my clients actually become my friends. Like, my closest friends are clients, and they're typically the ones that stay the most top of mind, right? And they, they have no problem just reaching out. And I have 3,500 executives in my phone. Like I've gotten 12 text messages since we started this of people just sharing information. Hey, this is happening. Here's how I'm feeling anxious about this interview. I'm reading some right now. I recently found myself on the job hunt again. I'm looking for your help here. Hey, did you mention this psychologist in your latest newsletter? Hey, we should think about this and going outside to do that. Like, I'm just reading all these texts real quick. Like, I like being the source of that information because I live and die off the information I have about the market. And so as people feed me information, I'm the vessel that can share it and kind of eliminate the confidential pieces of it and really help people master the market and make their moves accordingly. And that was another long-winded tangent. So I hope your, uh, hope your listeners are happy.

But, but I think these, these are some of the things, right, that people don't necessarily have access to because I think that as you're coming up through the ranks, there are some things that it's not hidden, but it's hidden, right? It's not hidden on purpose, but unless you have a conversation like this, why would you know that these are the important things?

So I'm glad you brought that up. I promise this wasn't staged, but I'm glad you brought that up.

I don't know what you're about to say.

So, well, so I was telling you in the green room about when you become a parent, especially if you're a parent and you kind of had trauma as a child, I saw this quote that said, you become the parent that would have protected you as a child, right? You become the one that would have been there for you. And I'd like to think I'm a phenomenal father. I have a second on the way right now. It's— it brings me the most joy that I've ever had. And I don't say that because I'm supposed to. Like, I, I now cry several times a day. Like, I promise you, that little— like, when I see a kid throwing a tantrum in the store, I don't get upset. I'm like, oh, he had too much sugar. Right? Like, get sad. And I— it's weird. Like, I am very empathetic with that, I guess. Right? Or maybe an empath when it comes to that. But you're asking, like, you know, people don't have access to this information. Like, as a kid, you don't have access to— you can't choose your parents. You can't choose your mentors. You can't choose those things. Right? And part of my mission is to democratize what I've learned from some of the most successful executives to to be there and show up for the next in line, right? To show up like I've had conversations with 500 women at Chief at a time, right? And sharing things that I've learned from the C-suite on how women rise and how to negotiate as a woman and just sharing things that I've learned. And they don't have access to that information, whether it comes from a man or a woman, that's kind of irrelevant. And sometimes I'll get pushback and they'll say, Jacob Warwick, you know, with all due respect, your tips on being assertive really only apply to men because it's very difficult for women to do that. And I don't disagree with that point that it's difficult, but I like to share that, look, I learned these tips from women that are doing it. And so it's not that it's not that it can't happen. We have to ask, how can it happen? How and how do we support the next in line? And I actually turn that one woman, she's an African-American woman. And she said, Jacob, should I just negotiate for 80%? Because that's— we all know that's what Black women get anyway, right? And now I'm on a call with 500 women, the only man talking, white man. Yeah, very scary territory, right? And I said, look, like, I just asked her, are you a mother? And she said she was. And I asked her, she said she had two little girls. And I said, "Could you honestly look your daughters in the face and tell them to do that? Could you look at your fellow colleagues in this room and say, 'Hey, ladies, let's just give up?'" I'm not saying it's not true. I'm not saying that the gap's not there. I'm saying that you can't let it affect you, right? And so, one of my missions is to democratize what I've learned from top executives and bring it down. And one of the things that's tricky for me right now is that I'm creating a lot of content. You mentioned you saw some of my LinkedIn content. I'm creating like AI content flywheels that are trained only on me where I obsess and I have human intervention on every single piece. So it's not like I'm just AI generating content, right? I'm expanding out to YouTube and Instagram and starting to extend my reach. Like I'd like to speak to who Jacob Warwick Warwick was at 18. Yes, right. Or who, you know, Tolu Warwick was at 14. Right. And there's a lot of podcasters and influencers that are doing this pretty well. Now, the trick for me is when I work with a one-on-one client, I'm typically getting $50,000 to $100,000, right? Sometimes more depending on the success that we have. Now, I'm running a course right now. I have 50 students in it or so, and I sold that course at $1,000 a head. Right. And I'm trying to bring the cost down. And then I also offered promo codes if you're in you know, this community or this community, some people got in for, you know, like about $500. I'm trying to democratize as much information as possible and do one-to-many. That's why I'd like to do a podcast where I could get someone to open up about the real things that they're afraid to talk about, do a 3-hour podcast and let other people absorb and adapt if they want to spend the time and learn the information there. And the beautiful time, like what we're living in right now, has never been greater. Now, it's still difficult to find the signal through the noise, right? I'm sure you've had some guests that probably felt a little more like noise than signal, right? And you don't necessarily want to perpetuate that, but you also need to learn and grow through that. So as people are growing, you're watching their influence expand. I think regardless of your thoughts on them, like, I think Alex Hormozi does a phenomenal job of this. I'm a massive fan of his content. Yeah. Yeah, like his— when he's talking about like, this is what it takes to get a business off the ground, it's like 20-minute masterclass. All like, one, I've lived all these things, so I know he's right. Right. I'm a little frustrated because I didn't do it first. Right. But also, I know I'm not going to work as hard as that guy. Right. He's not going to have kids like he is. That is his mission. I commend him for that. Right. I also understand the points when they're saying you have to eliminate some people from your life that don't help serve that vision if you are exceptionally driven. Like he has masterclass content almost every day. It's insane what he's investing in this. And then you go to— there are folks out there that are bringing the cost of education down, or, you know, your fellow, fellow countryman like Stephen Bartlett in Diary of a CEO, absolutely just providing so many unique insights and deep dives and asking these intelligent questions that the democratization of information that we can have right now is so powerful. And there's so many resources to help somebody. One of the things I'm really interested in is helping people have the opportunity to grow out of their, their economic class. Yeah. And just having the possibility, having gone from— my wife was the youngest of 5 that grew up in a single-family trailer. Mom was on meth, right? From my childhood, which I'd argue is under the veil of middle class. Right? Like there was a lot happening behind the scenes, but on the outside it looked healthy, right? Knowing that as I graduated high school, I was fully satisfied working graveyards at Home Depot. And I've got friends from my graveyard at Home Depot days. Like I thought that if I made $60,000 a year, like that's all I ever needed. Like that's, that's icing. Like, and it just happened that I caught some good breaks. I made some good judgment calls. Things have started to work out for me. And I just want to show that path to more people. So I'm glad you brought up that. How do we get this information? Because it is hidden, but we have so many ways to access it now. AI is pretty interesting with that. Actually, my newsletter tomorrow is on as AI or as IQ becomes a commodity, EQ becomes your necessity, right? Because everybody's going to start to look the same, the same. Yeah, right. We're already seeing that on LinkedIn. I know you're on LinkedIn. I know there's a lot of sales leaders here and, you know, when they're like, hey, that new sales leader started to publish more content all of a sudden and they have the emojis in the same place that ChatGPT puts emojis. And actually, what he did, you said you went over to Scott Lise's post and you said, just rewrite this under my name. And then you publish that and then you went to Devin's post, right? Or whoever. You said, rewrite that under my name. And so it starts to create this noise. Yeah, right. And then one of the reasons I love— like, I invested— this is a $25,000 studio right now. I have another like $100,000 to spend in the other room. Is that— how does Jacob stand out in a wall of text if I can't get in front of people like this? Right. So you investing in your podcast, sales leaders going physically to clients, walking into a room and controlling the room. Right? When, when somebody walks into the room and the temperature changes, those are the people that are going to win. Yeah, right. So they have the executive presence, they're augmented learning through AI, and it's like helping them extend their reach. And then they understand all the tenets of psychology. For me, that's the great convergence. When those three things come together, you have AI, psychology, and leadership. Those are going to be your next generation leaders. When they can do all three of those things. That's what my newsletter's on. So it's, it's a loose thought, I'm still working on it, but it's coming together. You'll probably see it echoed all over social media as soon as this launches now that I said that.

But, but I think, to be fair, what else is actually missing? Because I don't think we've managed to meld those three things together yet. We have people who are either really strong with AI, but they're kind of AI themselves, right? They're not really good at psychology, not that good at leadership. You have people who are really good at leadership but a little bit afraid of AI. So I think when you get those three things together, like, what else could be missing, do you think, that would need to make someone successful?

So it's important that we categorize what I mean by leadership, right? Because for me, you ask 10 different people what leadership is, you'll get 100 different answers, right? So when I say leadership, I I do mean executive presence. I mean, I mean, likability. Yeah. I mean charisma. I mean courage. I mean integrity. I mean the soft skills, trustworthiness, honesty, not leadership for the sake of I have a leadership role, but like a true— like I would stand behind that, that man or that woman and go to battle with them because I believe in that. Right. So I'm— when I say leadership, I think Integrity is a big part of that. And actually, the, the case that I'm making in the article is that I'm not saying AI is not important. It absolutely is. It— we have a tendency to be very shiny object oriented. And so it's like, AI is the thing. Let's all focus on AI. Well, don't leave psychology behind. Like, you will get wrecked, right? Don't leave leadership behind. You will get wrecked, right? You have to focus on multiple areas of discipline. And I noticed this, I work in communities that are, let's say, all sales-focused or all marketing-focused. And you surround yourself with people that are all salespeople and all marketing people. You don't have diversity of thought. You have an echo chamber of function. So in a CMO group, as an example, everyone around you is a CMO. So that's great. You can be the most functionally sufficient badass marketer in the world, but if you don't know a lick about sales because you have no friends in sales, you don't know a lick about product, and you don't know how to be a CEO and have that visibility, you don't know what investors care about, and you lose sight of your customers, and you don't understand psychology to make it all come together, you're going to lose that job. You're going to lose that job in 6 months. You're an imposter. Like, or you're so good at marketing. If you're so Damn good at marketing. Almost dropped the F-bomb.

I don't know if that's cool here. You can.

You can. It's a sales podcast. Okay. Yeah. So if you're so fucking good at marketing, right, you're so functionally good, like you're a director, you're a tactician, right? So you have to get different perspectives because you won't know how to survive in the C-suite if you don't know what Carol in HR needs or what, you know, the CEO Kim needs or you know, whoever, if you don't know how to influence the product person, if you don't know how marketing— I'm just using marketing as a use case here— if you don't know how to create force multiplication in every department, right? And that's not bitching about, oh, all they want, all sales wants for me is to be demand gen. Like, no, that's not it. Like, if they're pushing you on that, push back and say, this is how we become a full force multiplier across the board. Marketing hits every single touchpoint. We improve the messaging here, we improve the experience here, we improve this here. And as the sales leader, come back to me with the feedback that you're hearing on the other end. As a customer success team, come back to me. As a product team, tell me where things are breaking. Like, you have to be a leader of leaders at every single C-suite role. This isn't like— if you're a chief revenue officer, you have to have that insight. Like, if you're leading go-to-market, you have to know not to close deals that your product team can't cash because it shifts them off roadmap. Right? You, you, you have to know, from a psychological perspective, our CEO's under a lot of pressure from the board. They're going to need me to present this in a different way. How can I best show up for them to protect them from that pain? So I've also learned like the driver, what we think is the driver is typically not the driver. Like when, when somebody says, I want to make more money. And you ask why, right? You think the answer is, you know, cut and pay, like it's real clear, but it's not. People don't want more money for the sake of more money in most cases, right? Money doesn't do anything. It doesn't buy you time. We talked a little bit about that in the green room, but it's like, why do you want money? Well, I, I think I deserve it. Bullshit. Why do you want more money? Oh, then you get to it and it's like, oh, well, my, my husband is pressuring me to get a new house. Right. Or my kids need to go to school or I want to show my favorite, especially like I have. I've worked with a lot of women and helped them get into the C-suite for the first time. And in an overwhelming majority of C-suite cases, it is a cutthroat environment that if somebody says, I want to be a C-suite leader, I know they're not qualified to be a C-suite leader. When they say, I want to be a CEO, they're not qualified because if you were a CEO, you wouldn't want to fucking want it. I promise you, like, that job is so hard. Like, everything is on you. And having been a CEO going through that and going through COVID and also going through an election and having my team split Republican and Democrat right under my nose, that was fucking hard, right? That was hard. Nobody wants that on you and everything is your fault no matter what, right? And your bank account's on the line every day. But when somebody says, like, when I'm getting to the bottom, like a woman who's a VP wants to be a C-suite, It's not about the money. It's not about the ego. It's not about all these things we think it's about sometimes. And I was talking to this gal, first-time CMO, immigrant from the Philippines. So first time to the United States. And she had two little girls and we got down to it and she said, I just wanted my girls to know that anything is possible for them. Well, it's not that she wants them to follow in her footsteps. She just wants her girls to feel strong. And big. This came from a woman who was under 5 feet tall who said, I want to feel big, right? So it wasn't money, it wasn't title. I want to show my girls that anything is possible for them. So it was deep-rooted in her parenting, not her bank account. So it's interesting to think about what are the true drivers of somebody's ambition. Like, there are CROs out there that don't particularly like just being CROs for the hell of it, right? They oftentimes the AEs make more money than the CROs depending on the comp structure and the kind of companies, right? There's a deep— there's something else there. Sometimes it's they enjoy the travel and feeling important and being brought around all over the world, right? Even though they complain about it to their wives, right? To their husbands. Yeah, right. Some of them enjoy 300,000-mile years or 600,000-mile years where they enjoy the feeling of being on stage. Maybe not the work so much. There's, there's a deeper cause kind of behind it that I think as sales folks that listen to this podcast, when you're going to close deals, it's not about, you know, what the SaaS stack is going to look like and how this person is, you know, how to get the champion to, you know, make more money for their company. It's how do we make that part, the buyer How do we make them look good? Like you're making that person look good. You're not just making the company money. It's, you know, I'm selling to this guy, Colin, and he cares that his boss has been on his ass and he's about to miss quota. And, and I'm, I'm trying to sell him this solution that may not solve any of those things. If you get to the root of what Colin actually— what his actual drivers are and you— and it makes his life easier, you're going to close that deal. Like, it's going deeper than you think you need to. And I think that's why, especially for folks in sales, you should be masters of psychology and rhetoric. Like, deep, deep dive. Stop studying sales-specific tactics, like what channels to be on and things, and start studying Robert Cialdini, right? Start studying How to Win Friends and Influence People, as obnoxious as that sounds, right? Don't always use the trick of saying someone's first name because it's their most favorite word in the dictionary, right? Learn from other psychologists. Psychologist too. Yeah. Yeah. And behavioral psychology and Adam Grant and even some of the stuff that Simon Sinek says, right? You don't need to read his book. The whole book is in the title. Start with why, right? Yeah. Yeah. That's all you need to read. You're like, oh, that's actually pretty good advice. Yeah. I've learned that the drivers are deeper than people usually anticipate.

What practical advice would you give people? So whether it's the questions that they need to ask themselves to understand their deeper motivations, or the questions that they need to ask others to understand theirs, what practical advice could you give someone for getting to that core understanding of other people's drivers?

So in general, it's asking better questions and I like to— the quick hack for this is you have two ears and one mouth for a reason. You should be listening twice as often as you're speaking, which means you need to ask more questions to make sure that ratio is fit. Like on a 20-minute conversation, or if you have a 30-minute call booked, at least 22 minutes should be focused on the other person. What this also does from a psychological perspective is it triggers an imbalance with reciprocity. Right. The other person is getting all of this value and then they almost feel guilty that they're not helping you because they've— we're trained at a human level to reciprocate with others. Otherwise we would die as a species. So you would learn that if you read Robert Cialdini and learned about reciprocity, or if you learned about shared identity and asking questions that insinuate that we're more alike than, than not. If you recall in the green room today, I was looking at— I noticed you had a studio. You obviously take that very seriously. And I said, are you and I the same person? Interesting, right? I said that. Yeah. And you said, yeah, I think we are. Yeah. Right. From a psychological perspective, we like people that are like us. So very quickly I built rapport with you, like, I'm going to like this guy, right? And so when you're exploring somebody's kind of drivers, you might say, have you felt this way? Have you felt that way? I've felt like that before. I've seen other people feel like that. They're like, I have felt like that. You're building shared identity while also providing value by actually listening to somebody and triggering a reciprocity imbalance. And then as I'm thinking about, especially as people start to look all the same with AI and that information kind of all blending together, I've talked to top recruiters, top executives. I've been testing this theory for a couple of years. And I think the easiest way to tell somebody's the real deal is by the quality of question that they ask, not by what they say. Hmm. So the quality of questions that they inquire about to show that they're listening, and it'll also show that they've had either shared experiences or they have an opinion on the matter. Right. The quality of question is what has them stand out immediately as the right type of person. And I do this and I do a lot of interview prep, as you can imagine, right? Yeah. And people are always worried, what are they going to ask me? What am I going to say? How do I talk about my history? And the whole game is to stop talking about your history, only talk about their future, right? And you sell that future. And so you can only do that if you're asking questions. But the way that you ask the question is something like, You clarify why you're in the room. You might say, "My name is Jacob Warwick Warwick. I'm a negotiation and psychologist kind of junkie. I suspect I'm here because you care about those insights that I've picked up from having thousands of conversations with executives. Is that right?" "Yeah, I would love to learn more about that." And then I might be able to add, "I've worked with— I see that you're a mostly interview salespeople, right? So I'm happy to dive into a lot of sales leadership perspectives or go-to-market perspectives. I've also got some interesting insights that are either gender-based or race-based insights that I've picked up, um, ways that people navigate because of that. I've talked to a lot of product leaders, but I've also talked to investors and CEOs. What types of people are you interested in learning more about? So I've given you a preamble like, I am a well of information. Where would you like us to guide the conversation? What's going to be most impactful for you? And the general, like the catch-all question is, you know, Tolu, thanks for having me on the, on the podcast today. How can I best show up for you? Like, how can I make you most excited? And so that's, that's a pattern breaker too. I think that was the what makes you tech breaking patterns. So in an interview, the pattern is you're getting drilled. You break the pattern by asking more questions and bringing that closer to a 50-50 balance or even more where you're asking more questions. You're naturally showing being assertive, the characteristics of a leader, being curious, being enthusiastic because you're showing interest in the company and you're naturally showing the characteristics of an executive leader versus just waiting to be asked a question and trying to have the perfect answer. You'll still get jobs like that, but you're always on the back foot and you're never in control. And that stresses a lot of people out when their anxiety and their cortisol rises. They perform less optimally in the interview and they're more likely to lose it. So that's where I have to put my hype man hat on. When I'm prepping somebody for an interview, I get them confident and enthusiastic and excited and let them know that they, they're here for a reason and then also give them the little nuanced tricks and questions to ask to guide that entire process. And I guess— why— oh, sorry, go. Okay, yeah, there's just one other part to that. So there's— sales folks will appreciate this because they work with multiple people in a company, right, as they're building advocates and champions. Well, you do this in an interview process too. I call it running the gauntlet. You have one interview with so-and-so, and then the next one, and then the next one, the next one. My favorite thing to do is to name-drop the next people and get advice on how I should handle them. So, you know, Tolu, you know, this is— I'm going to talk to Mike next. I know you've known him for 4 or 5 years. What should I say or what should I avoid? How could I win him over? Right. Then I'm going to talk to Kathy next. What do you think about Kathy? Is there anything you want me to share with her? After I learn and have that conversation, I'm going to loop back around to you and share what I've learned. Right. So this is a great way to— you're becoming part of the tribe because you're using the names that they already trust. And you do that at a company. What's— what's your boss going to care about kind of thing? But what psychologically happens is I'm turning you into a coach for me. So you're coaching me on how to deal with other people on the team. And coaches want their players to succeed. So you're also putting yourself Yeah, you're psychologically putting yourself on the same side of the table with you and saying, hey, you and I are going to collaborate on this. How do we deal with them? Right? Like, you and I are a team, and I'm assuming you and I are a team because we're already going to— like, we're, we're won over. Like, I know I've won you over, right? So how do we deal with everyone else? Like, what's your advice? Well, I was thinking about this. What do you think about that? And I noticed you said this thing earlier, right? Do you think Kathy's going to care about that as much as we do? Why? That's a good question, right? I don't think Kathy will give a shit about that, right? I think Kathy's going to care more about your culture fit, right? So let's, let's have this. Then you go to Kathy and say, you know, Tolu was saying it sounds like you care a lot about culture fit. How do I make sure I tick the boxes that you're looking for there? And she's forced to tell you exactly how to close her, but she's more likely to say it because Tolu said to focus on that. Not— I'm not just bringing that up. Someone she respects is. So we're using names to kind of drive that entire process forward. Does that ever backfire? That's a great question. And typically, no. Okay. Right. I'll have— I'll have clients that you can't control the type of person that's on the other side of the table. Like, that's where sometimes you'll get a dud. It's like, I don't want to talk about it, and they push. So that can backfire. Typically for my clients, that's an indication that they don't want to work there because they want a more collaborative executive team to work with. So usually I get my clients confident and having talk tracks that they're very comfortable with, low-risk ways of saying things that don't put them in any— like, they won't be perceived as arrogant or too aggressive. Like, if they're worried about that, we come up with counters and and we work on their language to make them feel most confident. And then as soon as they're most confident in their approach and they do what they came out to do and they're comfortable with that, if it doesn't go well, they know they didn't find alignment and then they save time in the process. So if you're desperate for work, you might take a different approach. And that, I'd argue, is— I won't— I will never judge somebody for being somebody else for the sake of getting a paycheck. Right, to manipulate a paycheck to take care of their family. I will not do that because I have been there. I have worked for companies I am not proud of. Right. And it's not— it's not like they were bad companies. It's not like I was working in an industry— it's not aligned— shady or anything. It's just, yeah, I could care less about the product. I really couldn't care. But what I could care is about paying my rent, which was really freaking high in San Francisco. Right. So This goes back to Maslow's hierarchy of needs. If you're operating from a position of survival, right, you're going to manipulate, you're going to do what you need to do to survive. My clients are typically working towards self-actualization and legacy planning. Like, they want to leave a good mark, and it's really important that they choose where they go next. And that's some power language. They're choosing. They're not in market. They are choosing where they go next. They're not being chosen. And that psychological shift is really important for executives because it builds an in-demand mindset. It can help build bidding wars. It helps build alternatives for negotiation. It builds their power along the way and their confidence. And then we also do things to increase scarcity along that, like, I will make a decision by December 15th. Now, all of a sudden, I put a deadline on you and not the other way around. Wow. I'm in high demand. Other people want me. If you don't get this shit done by the 15th, bye. You can always renege on that a little bit later. But at the same time, like, I'm choosing to make a decision like this because I already have 3 people in the hopper. What are you going to do about it? And again, we're not that assertive, but I'm just, you know, shortening the principle of it, right? Yeah. You create scarcity. It's just like in an interview and you'll know this, if you were managing an AE, and the AE said to you, "Tolu, it's a done deal. Pipeline's gonna close," right? And you say, "When's the follow-up call? Like, when's the next call? When's the deal done?" Right? And they go, "Oh, they'll get back to me." Is that deal closed? Nope. Right? So in an interview process, why do we do that? Right? We let an interview hang on, "Oh, you know, Tolu, I think this was really good." I'm going to— I'm going to run back and I'm going to talk to my team. And, you know, you're my favorite person. You're my favorite candidate. We'll get back to you. Right. Then they ghost you because there's no repercussions of doing that. And that's what's expected. Right. And then you sit around going, oh, when are they going to get back to me? Oh, I can't wait. Oh, do you think it's too early for me to message? Oh, man. Like, oh, it's Friday now. Like, I wonder if they forgot. And then all of a sudden you like— then you start to internalize it as your problem. Right? Like, oh, they didn't like me. And then you— and then psychologically the wheels come off a little bit. You lose your confidence. You're more likely to fail after that. Oh my gosh. So instead you say, you know, I had a great conversation with you, Tolu. Like, I imagine that I need to talk to Kathy next. I'm available on Friday at 3 or Tuesday at 6:30. What works best? Now they're forced to answer you. Yes, right there. Right? Actually, Kathy doesn't want to meet with you because you're not moving forward. Nobody says that, right? But what you're also saying is, I'm only available these 2 times. Yes, I am not at your beck and call. I am only available these 2 times. It's why I love when people say they're really successful and then you click on their Calendly link and every fucking slot is open. Are you kidding me? Are you kidding me? Right? Like, at least put some fake blocks in there to make it look like somebody is talking to you. Yeah, right. Yeah. It's like you're saying, I only have this availability because I have other shit to do, right? So I think there's alignment here. It sounds like you think there's alignment. I'm reconfirming as we go to the closer framework and reinforcing that this is a good call, right? And maybe we do a podcast just on that. But we go into these details and we're saying, it sounds like this is a good fit. The next steps for me are clear. We need to talk to Kathy Hale, probably need to talk to so-and-so and so-and-so as well. I'll circle back to you on what I learn. I'm available these two times. Which one works best? Right? Then they have to answer, oh, those two times aren't going to work. Let's do this time instead. Or at least you know where you're standing. If they said, hey, we're not ready to commit to that conversation, at least you know, okay, I didn't, didn't do enough. But if you're waiting for feedback, you've met, you've messed up. Like, you should have driven your own feedback through the process. Things like You know, we're 40 minutes into this call. It sounds like it's going well. Correct me if I'm wrong. Is there anything that I should have talked about that I didn't? Is there anything— this is the quality of questions thing— is there anything that you liked more about other candidates that I didn't show up for? Tell me about your alternatives, because I want to know right now so I could say, look, I think that's a great point. Let's circle back on Wednesday and we'll go do a deep dive on that. And I have an opportunity to address it and take the ball in my court rather than wondering, oh, what went wrong? You are not being led through the process, especially for salespeople. If salespeople are being led through the process, they are bad salespeople, right? You need to lead the conversation and you may not have the clout to do it. Yeah, you need to get creative. You need to find ways. You might need to soften your language and say, pardon me for assuming, but this has gone pretty well, right? You agree, right? Would it be too forward for me to assume that there's another conversation? So you can soften the language a little bit if you're scared. For these executive leaders, they should drive it themselves.

I'm just thinking about— so I also like Alex Hormozi, and he talks about BAMFAM, right? Like book a meeting, from a meeting. And as salespeople, that's what you should always be doing. When's the next follow-up? But I think there's something about interviews that we don't treat them like we would a regular sales meeting. We don't treat them like a sales process. And I think it comes back to that thing of we don't often realize that in a way we are our own business, we are an asset, and we're trying to sell ourselves. So I think there's a bit of a disconnect between how we treat interviews and how we would treat a regular sales process.

So that's why I frame it like that, because I frame it differently depending on who I'm talking to. Knowing that you have a sales audience, I frame it that way. When I talk to a product office, like a product audience, it's different. It is a product strategy. Like you, because they know this is what they do for a living. So I'm reframing something that they clearly and intimately know. If I'm talking to somebody about go-to-market and they understand go-to-market, I go right to the grassroots. I say, what's the first thing that you do when you're going to market? Oh, I do a little market research, right? So you're researching your market to find the types of companies you'd want to work for. Got it. Okay, then what do you do? Well, I talk to a bunch of people and I try to learn about the opportunities there. And yeah, got it. That's our next step. So our KPI on whether or not you're successful in your job search is about the number of conversations you have, not the number of applications you send, right? Wow. Because now you're learning, you're like working through the process. And then you're learning how to adapt your product, which there's only a couple channels to adapt. Got to tweak my LinkedIn a little bit. Usually the more senior you are, the less information you share on LinkedIn because you want to lean into your strengths of being on a phone call and only sharing what you want to share and why. And the more senior you are, the more it becomes an outbound networking process and less an inbound wait for a recruiter process. So there are nuances to it, but it's— you're essentially going to market with yourself. And the beautiful part of it is, if you can do it at a complex level for the companies you work for, it's so much easier for yourself because you only have 2 or 3 channels to dick around with unless you're a total tryhard like us and we're doing podcasts and we're, you know, but we're entrepreneurs, right? There's an entrepreneurial angle there too. So You— I reframe to meet my clients where they are in the process. Now, sometimes I'm not as intimately familiar with their background. Like, if I'm working with finance people or I'm working with healthcare leaders or celebrities— like, I don't know that much about Hollywood. I'm starting to, having these conversations. You have to meet them where they are and say, look, in my line of work, this is what it looks like, and dumb it down to a level that can help them follow the breadcrumbs and then ask them, how does it work in your line of work? Like, make it like them. Like when you're working with a Hollywood agent, Hollywood agent's a salesperson. Yeah, they do sales. They sell people. That's their job, right? They do biz dev, they do partnerships, they do sales. They're all those people in one, right? They just happen to do them for super millionaires, right? And the way I see it, there's really only 3 functions in a business that's operations, sales, and product, and everyone fits under one of those umbrellas, right? So it's relatively easy to simplify it and then apply that to an individual to go to market for them. And I'm trying to get more communities to let me do talks on— like, I went to the Pavilion Go-To-Market Summit and I did CMO huddles, and we have all these great how to be a great functional leader or how to go to market for the SaaS company. I'm like, let me do a talk on how to go to market for you. You're the person, right? How do you do your pricing strategy? If somebody said, you know, Tolu, I want you to swim upmarket and stop being a, you know, a midsize sales guy, I want you to swim upmarket. Then you look at your career and you say, okay, how do I articulate those skills? How do I meet the maturity necessary at the enterprise level? How do I uplevel this? How do I upload? Like, now all of a sudden your execution plan is there if you apply it to yourself because you know how to do it for a company. Now how do you do it for you? And that starts to unlock a lot. Most of my clients are smart enough to do most of the work on their own just with a handful of reframes. And that's why when I figured out value-based pricing, that's how I unlocked $5,000, $10,000, $20,000 sessions because I can very quickly find the problem, reframe it, and they're going to be successful. And when the outcome happens, that's when I get paid. So like, once I figured that out and got that confidence in that track record, that's when I made enough profitability to invest in marketing, to start to build out my business, to start to hire other people.

There is so much to— so much to think about. You mentioned something before. About the, the pattern disrupting or the pattern breaking. And what I would be curious about is what happens when patterns are broken. Why should people be trying to break patterns? Because as humans, we kind of want to fit in, right? We kind of want to go with the thing that keeps us safe. Breaking patterns isn't always safe. So why should people be doing that?

What's the impact? I kind of argue that it's the other way around. When you, when you break the pattern, you're the one in control. Hmm. So unless you don't know what to do with the power, you are safe. Interesting. Which I, for a lot of my career, I didn't know what to do with the pattern or the power. I just broke the pattern and then, you know, folded like a cheap chair. I didn't know what to do with it. Right. But when you, if you know what to do with it and you know where to direct it and you know the agenda you're trying to come and you're like, you're very strategic about it, you're the one in control when you break the pattern. If you break someone off of their traditional pattern, wouldn't that also by definition mean you're being differentiated? Yeah, right. So much of what we do in— how do we differentiate our product? How do we break the fucking pattern of what they're used to? Right? Be contrarian. Hmm. Contrary. Like, those are the posts that get the most virality. Like, They're contrarian. They're not afraid to get blasted in the comments, right? They're breaking the pattern of what you're seeing. Like everything on LinkedIn is like milquetoast, half-ass takes on stuff. Unpopular opinion, but remote work is kind of okay, right? Like, oh great, you did it. But then you see the person that goes viral, like remote work is the only way, everyone else is a slave. And then they're like, you know, and that goes crazy. And then someone else says you have to be in office and that one does the adverse. Right? It's like all in, all in committed. And then what most people do is this milquetoast nothingness take, which is, by the way, all the content that's fed AI. Like, you have to train AI to be provocative in the right way. Like, sure, I've done it, it's pretty cool. Um, otherwise it's going to give you milquetoast, more of the same, which people are like, yeah, that sounds kind of good and that's pretty safe. And the safe play doesn't differentiate you. You have to break some eggs. And so that's why we break the pattern. I stumped you.

I feel— because what I'm thinking, right, is that this stuff makes so much sense, but I think in some ways it takes bravery to go out and do it. And I think that's where what you're talking about, about the confidence that you give people, because I hear it, I'm like, yeah, that sounds dope, like that makes absolute sense. But then imagining myself in that situation when you're in an interview and you're now breaking the pattern. That's where I think some people will get a bit like, oh, it's a bit of a brave step for people to take.

Yeah, so one, I obviously have a very strong appetite for risk. I'm a multi-tech founder. I will, I will go $100,000 in debt and a quarter million in the clear in a 3-month period and not break a sweat. Does not worry me at all. Um, It's why I also think those that have suffered trauma or have overcome trauma, those who have been through difficult times are better suited to do stuff like this because no boardroom is scary if you're hiding in the corner as a kid, hiding from your parents, right? If you're needing to be a chameleon to survive or you're in poverty and, you know, like, I don't know where my next meal is coming from, or you go to the gas tank and you can put $4.82 in your Corolla because that's all you have left on your credit card that's maxed out and you're in student loan debt. Like that struggle, that is difficult. Like having a smug, arrogant, see-whatever officer like look down on you, you're safe. Like there's no danger there. Yeah, you have nothing to lose. And a lot of the folks I work with, I've had folks make $20 million in exits, right? Like, they're so— there's their urgency is self-imposed, right? So there's something else to get to the bottom of. It's like, look, like, you're kind of hot shit. Don't, you know, wear all these opinions of others as ankle weights around you, right? So I agree that it can be very scary to go do that. And I think that when you look at it and you look realistically, you know, if I lose my job and I have to go from a 4,000-square-foot house to a 2,000-square-foot house, or I have to go from my brand new BMW to a Corolla, did your life really get worse? And how many steps would you have to fall to do that? Right? Like, how many things would you have to have fucked up on for you to fall that far? So oftentimes That's why the people that take the most risk rise the most, because they're failing more and they're growing more and they're learning more. But all my risks are calculated. Like, you eventually build up enough stability that— like, there was a period in my 20s where I was homeless. I slept on a park bench at Maidu Park in Roseville, California, if anyone knows the area in Sacramento. Kind of a luxury place to be homeless. The weather's really nice. Yeah. And I'll be clear, like, I was homeless out of pride, not out of necessity, meaning I had friends that would likely take me in if I had asked, but I was too proud to go ask them and I was too scared to go home, right, to my parents. I had lost a job in Silicon Valley. I was totally broke, like, couldn't pay for rent. I was actually hustling Magic cards at a local comic book store to feed myself. What does that mean? Meaning like I went to, they're called Friday Night Magic events and it's like a $10, it was like a $10 buy-in and I got really, really good at Magic: The Gathering. And if you finished in the top 3, you'd make money, right? So it's kind of like poker for nerds. Yeah. And sometimes you'd win like a box of cards, which are like $100-something and some cards in those boxes would be worth $100-something. So like if you were a hustler, like you would be trading, trading kids for their best cards, knowing, speculating the market on the cards. And like, that's how I fed myself. Gotcha. I learned that in third grade when I traded a Digimon card to a kid named Talon Parker for his Charizard, his foil Charizard, if you remember the days. Yeah. And I got, I got Pokémon cards banned at my school because he was very upset that I gave him a Digimon card for what at the time was a several hundred dollar card. Yeah, I was like, but Digimon are so cool. And Charizard, you know, Pokémon's been done. Yeah, apparently I've always been a manipulative bastard, but I— so again, homeless out of pride, not out of necessity. And I was at this, like, bench at the skate park. I used to like skateboarding and I was looking up at the stars and breathing fresh air and it was kind of cold but not too bad. And I kind of thought, I'm really, really lucky. Right. And again, this isn't to dismiss the homeless experience for those that are truly in that position. I wasn't like into drugs or in any other vices. I just felt like, look, I'm in my 20s, like I'm healthy. Like, this is a beautiful night. I honestly, since that period, I can count probably on 2 or 3 hands the amount of times I've stared up at the stars because of how busy I've been. Right. And so in that moment, I'm like, look, I— if I end up here, I'm okay. Right. And, and the odds are, for the education I have, for the opportunities I have in front of me, for my, my level of intellect at the time, the odds are I won't fall this far., but this far is passable, at least at the age I was at. Right. And so I ended up— I was very close to joining the Army. I was actually in the MEPS. I was like a week away from signing all the paperwork and getting going. And I got a job offer from a biotech company in Grass Valley, California, for $12 an hour. And that's how I got back on my feet. And they they paid most of their staff like under $15 an hour. It's like a trade show company, but they paid HubSpot like $80,000 a year for software. And most of the people at the company were older and didn't want to deal with HubSpot at all, like the sales team and whatever. So I was the kid who was like, well, shit, I'll take any opportunity. I actually got hired as a graphic artist but then became HubSpot guru, and I built sales funnels and I did RevOps and I tracked our marketing and I ran our social media. And I actually owe a lot of my career to HubSpot's customer success team because I had to call them 3 or 4 hours every day and just walk like, tell me how to do my job so I can not go back to being homeless. And I just put that effort in and then I put HubSpot on my LinkedIn profile and got exceptionally lucky that people were looking for people that knew HubSpot. That's got me from, you know, I think it was $10 or $12 an hour to $35,000 a year. And then that marketing manager position got me to $120,000. The next one, then the jump after that, director at Xerox was $250,000. And then that's like catapulted my whole career. And that was in 18 months. All of that happened. It all happened very, very quickly. So I got very lucky and it started it kind of started with this laissez-faire, like, I don't really give a fuck what happens to me because this is all kind of bullshit. And LinkedIn was also taking off that you could add anybody that you wanted. You should be able to add like 1,000 people a day. So what I did when I started realizing marketing was my thing is I added everybody that was a VP of marketing or CMO in San Francisco, New York, and every major area where people made money so that I could just learn from them. So I did A/B tests on my headline and I added 1,000 people a day across LinkedIn in all these different areas. And what happened was when you apply or when you add somebody on LinkedIn, they look back at your profile, right? Yeah. And LinkedIn used to do this thing where they tracked how well your profile ranked amongst other people at your company, right? So I was doing this, but I had a title at Xerox, which had 55,000 employees. I was the number one viewed profile at Xerox above the CEO Ursula and above the CMO John Kennedy and the VP of advertising. Like, I was number one and nobody knew who I was because I was a contracted director of marketing and like Forbes was paying attention. And so like the C-suite at Xerox contacted me for like, how the hell are you understanding social media so well? And it was literally my ambitious, not giving a shit, just reaching out to 1,000 people a day, almost like I didn't even say anything. I just reached out like old school BDR. Yeah. And people— some people wanted to talk to you, some people didn't. What I did was I tested being a freelance writer versus a consultant, and I measured how many people wanted to work with me based off of how many outreaches I did, even without saying anything. And what I found was when I was listed as a freelancer, more people reached out, but the amount of money that they wanted to pay was less. Low. Yeah, because this is where I learned about perception. Freelancer is synonymous with cheap and disposable. But when I was a consultant, less people reached out, but they expected to pay me $100 to $150 an hour, whereas freelancers, they wanted to pay me like 10 cents a word, right? So, right, way more engagement with freelancer, way less money. Way less engagement with consultant, way more money. Way more money. And that like That got me into the psychological thing. I'm like, I changed nothing else. I changed one word. My whole career changed. So words matter. That's the lesson there. Long-winded lesson.

No, this thing of the rhetoric, I think, is something I would love to explore more and how people can start to understand that and start to shift the rhetoric around them.

So Did you pay close attention to the election?

Not as close as I would have in America, but close enough.

Well, so there's, there's this one thing that, uh, Donald Trump does that probably drives a lot of people crazy, but marketers will appreciate this especially because in marketing, when you're gonna do paid advertising, right, you're trying to justify the paid advertising spend. And you're thinking about impressions, it takes approximately 17 impressions to get someone to click and recognize your brand, right? That's a lot of repetition, right? That costs a lot of money. And what Trump does when he's telling a story is he'll repeat the same thing 4 or 5 times the same way, in a way that forces you to remember it. And he'll do things like he's very good at giving people shitty nicknames that he doesn't like. Right? So he'll repeat, you know, fake news, fake news, fake news, fake news, fake news. And that repetition of rhetoric makes it true. And when you say scamala, scamala, scamala, scamala, scamala, it makes it true. Right? Just like on the other side, they were saying Hitler, Hitler, Hitler, Hitler. Right? Which I think devalues the word because that was atrocious. But the rhetoric of repetition is what happened. So when, like, when Trump tells a story, he'd say, I was— I saw a guy and I'm not going to do an impression. I'm going to try. There's too many people that are good at that. But he'll say, like, you know, Tolu was a great guy, great podcaster, specimen of a man, one of the greatest that ever lived. Right. It's like 4 ways to say you're awesome. Right. Repetition, repetition, repetition. Tolu synonymous with awesome. Tolu synonymous with awesome. So it's you plant the seeds and you follow up on those seeds regularly. It's why with your network, what's important is to stay top of mind. The onus is always on you to follow up and stay top of mind. It's why actually when I was homeless, I lost my domain name of JacobWarwick.com. To another Jacob Warwick who promised to give it back to me. But the verdict's out on that. He started ghosting me after he promised that. So go find him, friends. But so I lost the domain and I was in this like, words matter, psychology is important. So I wanted my name to be a call to action. So at the time I had a very small freelance marketing, as I was talking about, kind of a marketing agency, one of my first businesses that I was trying out, like kind of side hustle.. And I came up with Think Warwick because what I wanted to repeat constantly is when you think marketing, think Warwick, think marketing, think marketing, think like. So I kind of wanted this like almost jingle. Yeah. And then I've evolved like Think Warwick became my personal brand for a while, then it became now my coaching brand. So now I'm not sure what the rhetoric is there, but the idea is like when you think this, think me. Think about me. Yeah, think that. Think me. Think that. Think me. And if I can repeat that, like I planted seeds in the conversation. Let's do this again. I want this to be the most successful podcast you ever had. Right now, we talked about that, what, 40 minutes ago or so? And now I'm repeating it. What's it going to take? Now, when we're done with the call, we're in the green room. I'm going to say, right, how do we make this the best? Like, I'll go put you in my newsletter next week. Right. Yeah. So when it's live, I'll put it in my newsletter. That's going to go to 10,000 executives. I'll put it on my LinkedIn profile. It's going to go to 33,000 followers. I'm going to put it on X. I'll do whatever. Like, I'll start— what I'm doing now too is creating that reciprocity imbalance. Yeah, right. I'm going to do all these things for you and you're like, shit, what am I going to do? Yeah, right. Yeah. This is amazing how these things come together. But so the rhetoric, the repetition is so important. And it's why the word choices you use matter so much. And so the words that you use, especially on social media, are really important. Like, somebody noticed, like, Ian, you say executive so much. I'm like, yeah, because when you think about executives, you need to think about me. That is the word I own. Well, right. I was hesitant to call myself a negotiation coach, one, because I don't think a lot of people know what that means. But the problem with the word negotiation is that people think it starts much later than it does. So if I say I'm a negotiation coach, they say, Jacob, I have an offer, help me negotiate it. I'm like, oh no, no, no. Yeah, this is— yeah, the first thing a recruiter is going to ask you is how much money do you want to make? And if you screw that question up, you've lost hundreds, if not millions of dollars in your career. Hmm. Right. If you make that one mistake. Right. I guess for sake of people listening, they're probably going to want to know what to say when somebody asks how much money you want. Yeah. Typically, depending on your clout, like my really badass executives, sometimes I'll have them laugh and just say, you know better than to ask me that. I'm not going to use that shit against myself right now. Right. I love that. So I love the ones that have a lot of clout do that. Those that are a little bit more scared say, You know, I think it's a little too early to answer that question. What's most important to me is to find alignment across this. And it sounds like we're there, right? And I'm going to have some more intel as I talk to more people. Right. I feel more comfortable talking about compensation when there's a written offer in front of me. Thank you for respecting that. There's also giving someone a reputation of being respectful. Thank you for respecting me, because if they fight back, they're not respecting you. They don't respect— that's one way. You can also shift it and say, I have no hesitation right now that your company is going to create a competitive offer if we're all aligned. Now, granted, I know that you're likely asking to make sure that we're within a possible range of agreement or whatever. Is there a range that you hope to stay within for this role? So I can help you if you're trying to save time. Now you have to be prepared to not give a positive or negative reaction depending on what they say. Yep. Right. So you'll have to kind of decide what to do with that in that moment. I help people with that, but that'll send us down a rabbit hole. But there's essentially no reason you should ever say your number first because you anchor yourself to that number no matter what, even if it's the perfect number. If you include a range, they think the bottom of the range, you think the higher part of the range. Yeah, everything's all jacked up. It's better to not talk about it at all until they— the leverage is in your favor. You have no leverage when they're at the beginning, when they know that they want to work with you and you drag that process out. So everyone else has fallen out of the process. They're all in on you and, you know, they have to make a decision before the end of the year because the holidays are coming up. You think all that timing and leverage and power is built up, then you have the most power to negotiate what you need. So I help with all that too. But you can't— you can't give up the number first. There's not a single situation where that helps you. And there's a lot of bad advice online about that of people that just don't get it. It's the same with the green circle, open to work. Don't fucking put that on your profile like that. Eviscerates your leverage. Whether it's not to say you're desperate. Yeah, that is the wrong language. It's not that you're desperate, right? This, this advice is particularly for senior leaders, not mid-level managers, right? Senior leaders. You lose so much leverage when you do that because you shouldn't have to. The best leaders don't have to. And if you want to associate yourself with the best, then don't do it. Right? So, most people would argue that they want to associate with the best, follow those best practices. Yeah, that money one, that's why I don't use— I don't want to use negotiation because the common perception is that it's too late. Now, one of the reasons that I have been more successful lately is because of negotiation, primarily because of Chris Voss, who is paving the way in a provocative way. Yes. Because his story is, so there was a gun to her head and I had 30 seconds to come, right? And immediately people are like, oh my God, this is interesting. I gotta know. Right. And I'm over here like, well, you're in the corporate room and you got like, you know, like it's, it's way nerdy by comparison. But so Chris Voss, first of all, brilliant insights across the board, like behavioral psychology insights, like. Getting people to, "That's right," is very powerful. And again, like you're using language to get them to agree with you, using no-oriented questions. Now, a lot of his disciples use it recklessly and it's pretty easy to see through, which is not his fault, right? But so he's paving the way with this provocative message. And then what I do is I make it applicable and more tactical for your situation. For me. Yeah, right. So it's hard to say like, all right, well, if there was a gun pointed to my boss's head and I needed to negotiate, like, it's not as— oh, never going to happen. Yeah, because that's the most memorable piece. And my more memorable pieces are directly with what sales leaders are going through or directly with what the CEO is going through. And so I'm fortunate, like, I wouldn't consider Chris competition at all. First of all, we're not even in the same league, right? He's— I don't even know where he's at. He's in some stratosphere. But I admire that, like, he's paving the path. And I know you had Devin Henning on the show recently. He's paving the path for folks like Devin and I to exist. Hmm. Right. Because if we try to do it on our own, we don't necessarily have that sexy, like, gun-to-your-head type provocative message yet. Right. We're building our clout, but he's paving the way and people are getting interested in it. And we are essentially becoming validated with his work. With him. Yeah. So yeah, and I— that just goes to, I don't think anybody is competition, right? We're all learning from each other and growing, and, um, there's a lot of value in that.

I, I think there's also just so much opportunity for everybody. Like, the abundant mindset thing is a thing, right? Like, if you treat things like they're really scarce, they will be really scarce for you. But if you're open and you work with people and you collaborate, that's how everybody gets better and the whole thing grows anyway. Yeah.

And like Alex Hormozi, I think, is a shining example of that. Yeah, right. Like he taught me about content licensing, just that it was possible, what it looks like, how it was successful for his gym business. I licensed my first course this year, really started licensing and getting hundreds of people to go through it. I recorded my first course. I got 5 courses next year. Like I have this business-to-business licensing because when I think about it, remember I mentioned I'm trying to democratize the data. What better way than to leverage another company's resources to get it in front of the right people? Like, I want to scale impact. I'm a little less concerned with the financial aspects of it. Like, that stuff comes. I'm more focused on the quality of the content, and I'm hiring instructional designers to clean up the work because they know how to teach people. I'm a fire hose. Like, as you've known from this podcast, I'm all over the place. Like, I am put gas on the fire, hope other people contain it. Right. So I'm hiring smarter people than me. Yeah. To work on the design. And I still have that MVP, like, break it first mentality, just go after it and do it. But every iteration that we do gets better and better, and we all have that kind of growth mindset. And so Alex paved the way for some of that. Chris Doe paved the way for value-based pricing. That, that one on like, like listening to Chris Doe and I think it was Blair Enns YouTube on value-based pricing, combined with reading Robert Cialdini's Influence and reading— just reinvigorating my Aristotle rhetoric in some of those pieces— that took me from $300,000 a year to over a million a year in like 3 months' time. Like, nothing changed. All my client contracts like 10x'd. I was averaging like $5,000 a client before that, 5 to $10,000 to like I was doing a year client engagement, unlimited coaching for $12,000. And I thought I was the shit, like $12,000 for a client all year. Like I was indebted to them. Yeah. Now I can do— I could do $12,000 in sometimes 2 hours of coaching. Oh, like depending on the output, I helped a client make $500,000 in a 15-minute consult. I helped another client 2 weeks ago, we're in a counter-negotiation. We pushed back for 2 minutes and made $440,000 in the 2-minute pushback. And then they also said, we're still not sure if it's enough. Like some of these outcomes, like if you know when, like the timing is the most important piece. Like if you know how to study that and you know the timing and you know what to say in the moment, you can make huge gains. I did a bidding war between YouTube and Snapchat years and years ago where we took a client from $800,000 to $2.4 million in like a 3-hour session, like 3 different sessions that we had. And I was hourly at the time. I was $1,000 an hour and I was stoked. I was like, yeah, $3,000. This is great. That sounds great. My client made a shitload of money. Yeah. And this is what changed. He he sent me a $5 bottle of wine as a thank you. And I don't know if— I don't know if you get alcohol sent to you or like gifts, right? But for whatever reason, I'm the kind of asshole that when someone sends me a gift, I look up how much it was and I don't know why. I guess it's definitely toxic. Like, the gesture was important. I get that. But for a guy making nearly $2.5 million a year, I tell you what, like, that changed my mind. Like, something's wrong here. Yeah, first of all, but shame on me. I put it on me. Like, I didn't put it on him for being cheap because that wasn't really the point. I put it on me for not being smarter. Right. So when that happened, one, I made a bitchin' spaghetti sauce with that wine. With the wine. Yeah, that's like— that spaghetti sauce, that's what it was good for. Amazing. It was great. I also don't drink, so like, people sending me alcohol is like a bad thing. Like, they really don't pay attention. But Yeah, it got me thinking like, if I can get these outcomes, I need to get paid for those outcomes in some, some way that makes sense. So I started experimenting with 5% lift and 10% and 25% and low retainers and high retainers. And then what I found out was that my best clients would pay a high retainer and a high percentage. And it took me like 6, 7 months to figure that out with experimentation. I tried maybe In 2022, when I was hiding in the woods in Montana, I shared that story with you earlier. Yeah, I tried, I think, 10 different lines of revenue to get paid. I experimented with affiliates and sponsorships, direct coaching, media spends, workshops, SaaS model, like a subscription model. I tried a community model. I built all those out, just kind of messing around. And the value-based pricing model was the one that just— the best. The returns are so good for your time. But then it also gets you thinking in that mindset of if you can make $1,000 an hour or $2,000 an hour or $10,000 an hour, you cannot accept deals that are less than that. And then it started getting me to think about why people— here's the one way people can buy their time back, like pay for someone to do your laundry, pay for a trainer who's don't have any ego in the gym game. Like, I used to train a lot. I trained with like an athlete a long time ago. Like, don't pretend you still know how to do it. Just pay someone to figure it out for you because your time becomes so valuable. Now I know why people fly first class, because a half an hour waiting in the line, it's not about, you know, sitting in the back. It's about that half an hour of you waiting in line is $5,000. Right, or $10,000, or the more leverage you have, it could be $1 million for some of these executives. So I used to be so resistant about money and like almost despised people with money that my psychology had to change around it as like, I am uniquely qualified to get an abundant amount of money more than I need, right? And when my cup overfloweth, I can give to others more generously than I could before. And you get to choose that. And that's an incredibly interesting place to be versus the alternative mindset, which is all rich people are the devil, right? And like, you have to break that mold in the process too. So I think that's an interesting psychological take that people need to think about.

What got you to that change?

I, What got me to that change is actually that happened this year. Like, I wrote an article about it this year. Yeah, I'm not— I'm constantly learning. Like, it's not like I try to talk about things that I'm learning live because as I talk through, as I was talking through the convergence of AI, psychology, and leadership, I came up with that concept like 8 hours ago and I started writing about it, right? Well, I'm talking about it because I want to see if it resonates with people. Yeah. Yeah, right. Like, you know, Alex Hormozi said, like, there's another thing he said, like, you could tell how successful someone is by how quickly their ideas become execution. Yes. Right. And how quickly they can deliver. So, yes, I, I'm a Marriott Bonvoy member and I spend a lot of money on my American Express for the business. Yeah. And my son, my son, was just turning 1 and he was our first time traveling. He, he has cystic fibrosis. So I'm like really careful with like his medical condition and where we can travel. And I just was a little hesitant about it, especially earlier in his life. So this was February and he's— I, I booked with points a room at the Ritz-Carlton in Maui. And my son was eating a $65 omelet in the Ritz-Carlton in Maui. And I'm sitting there having just bought a $200 breakfast, right? And I'm looking at my life and I'm going, are you fucking serious? Like, this is real life. Like, this is happening. My wife's like, I could get used to this, right? She's super happy. You know, and I'm like, when I was your age, I was in a trailer. Parents were getting clean. When Mary was this age, my wife was the youngest of 5 girls in a trailer in Oak Run, California, like in a little, like kind of a little crack den, right? Like the sisters have different dads. Like she, until she was 12, um, she slept on, and people that have like Outdoor motorhomes understand this, like the little table where 4 people can sit, the table folds down and it turns into a bed. That's where she slept with the cats and on a pile of laundry until she was 12. Wow. Right. So, and I'm looking at her and I'm like, this is amazing. You and I, we're two white trash. Like, we are so white trash. Everyone at the Ritz is like, they're wearing fancy clothes and I have like Shein and Costco on, like I imported some shit from China and I'm wearing Costco sweatpants and I wear flip-flops every day and baggy clothes and gym clothes. Like, I look like a dirtbag almost all the time. Right now I'm wearing Patagonia because I'm trying to upscale, but I'm like, I see it. How did these two white trash dirtbags end up with a son in at the Ritz-Carlton in Maui eating a $200 breakfast. And it kind of got me feeling like I felt guilty to a degree because especially growing up, my friends did not come from money. Like nobody around came from money. Like we, we grew up and everything was a luxury. Like, everything felt like a luxury. And none of my friends made it out in that. To me, for somebody who— like, I've made a career on being available when people call upon me, right? Like, I live by this principle that you should provide, you know, 10 times the value or 5 times the value of what you sell. You should give more than you expect to receive. A friend of mine, his name's Brandon, shared this philosophy of you always surrender the outcome, like do the right thing that makes you do the thing you need to do. And if somebody doesn't reciprocate, fuck it, right? Surrender the outcome. And it almost like the part that frustrates me the most is that I would be there for any of my friends if they'd ever asked. But nobody asks. Not a single person, right? They'll say like, hey, it looks like you're doing well, or whatever, like, great, you know. Oh yeah, nice to meet your kids. Oh, looks like your family's beautiful. Great, great. Nobody ever asked for help. Even if every piece of content I've put out is to talk about why it's important to me to be generous and to give back and to democratize what I've learned. People don't ask for help. And like, it's like they stay kind of trapped in that. And I don't know, maybe you feel this way too. Entrepreneurs probably feel this way, or sales folks, because I think in a lot of ways sales folks are kind of a kick ass and take names later kind of thing. Like they just rush into things, right? And kind of bullheaded. Like, that's kind of how I've been. And then I also just think most of society is hesitant or they don't believe in themselves or it can't happen to them. Or it's like this, whether or not you are a victim, right? Or whatever's happened to you, whether or not you are a victim, it doesn't matter. You can't let it hold you back because the, the more I do this, almost the softer my language becomes. Meaning that I start to turn more into like, it's your limiting beliefs, you know? And it sounds like you're a hippie, right? And but the more you get to it and you start to study the most successful people in the world, they're the ones holding themselves back. Yeah. And it's like simple changes like this can't happen to me of shifting to how can this happen to me? Or if you say, I can't do that, the simple add-on is to put comma yet. Yeah. Oh yeah. Right. Just comma yet. Like, I can't do that yet. If you just add the yet, now you can at least be in the mindset of how can I make that happen? How can I do that? And again, this sounds very fluffy and high level, but it applies more universally across every individual I've met. Like they limit themselves. Like, that's not a path for me. I can't do that. You just don't know how yet. It's— we have access to— so as we were talking about earlier, access to so much information. There's so many great educators out there for free. Like, podcasts changed the election. Podcasts did. Not media, not university. Podcasts did. We have access to unlimited information. Now, I would be careful. You should create more content than you consume. Consume, right? That's the leading principle that I have. You should consume 20%, create 80%. Yeah, yeah. I would imagine you believe in that or you wouldn't have a podcast.

So do you know what, that it just, that came to me one day, like I consume so much, what am I creating? And that balance of I need to create more than I consume is so, so important to me. Because if you think about from calories, right? If you put in more than you give out, you get fat, right? It's the same thing with content. If you're just consuming, consuming, consuming and not giving anything out, you just get fat and you get lazy. And that's not who I want to be as a human.

I wholeheartedly believe in that. And that's, that's why that quote from Alex Hormozi stuck with me so much on the time to ideate, to execute. And that's why I shared with you that I really felt like I stayed up at night last night thinking about that convergence for the newsletter that was due tomorrow, right? Yeah, that's what I had to do. So, um, yeah, I think that was a, that was a big takeaway for me, is that you don't have to be an expert to train just what you've learned on recently. So exactly, exactly. And sometimes it's just Hey, y'all, this is something I'm thinking about. Are you thinking about it too? You could be a thought leader just by saying, this is what's on my mind. This is where I currently am. You don't have to worry about how junior you come across or how infantile in, you know, the path of learning you are. Right? Like when it comes to the world of psychology, I have barely scratched the surface. I'm not at all trying to present as an expert. I'm sharing this is what I've learned from other leaders.. And I want to bolster those leaders and what I've learned from them as much as I can because they've been helpful. Right. But I'm not trying to say I'm an expert there. No, no. Other people will call me that. Right. And I'm very happy that they do. Right. I'm glad that when they think, think expert, think Warwick. Right. Here's planting the seed of repetition again. Right. But yeah, you just don't have to be as far advanced as you think you do, you know?

Yeah, because I, I feel like we think we need to take people from A to Z, but really, if you can take someone from A to C or A to D, you've still left them better off than when you met them. And that's really all you need to do is move people along. You don't have to take them all the way, right?

And then those people start to follow you because you're just a little bit ahead of them, right? Sometimes like if you're a novice negotiator and you start watching Chris Voss, like he's so far beyond you that you need somebody who's a disciple to give you the breadcrumbs to guide you to that path. Right. Some folks are too far ahead of what you can grok at any given time. So it's why with my messaging, it's hard for me to go back and pick up mid-level managers. Yeah, because I have to now reinvent the way I think about it to explain it in a different way to help bring them on the path. And it's also why every time I get a new one-on-one client, I want that client to be my floor, not my ceiling. Hmm. So like every client that I bring on, I want to be the next worst client I've had. And that's because I'll get bored if I keep having the same clients. I'll get bored. It becomes too easy. I need clients that just kick my ass.

So, so Jacob, thank you so much. This has been amazing. As we just wrap up, I would love for you to tell the people that are listening about your new podcast.

Sure. Yeah. Well, you're getting the insider scoop as I'm in this office that I leased quite literally 13 days ago, which seems to be a recurring theme on the podcast, right? Hey, we're just going live with it, right? Did it. So I've got this half of the— I got this half of the studio relatively set up. I got some furniture coming in, some paint, and then this other side behind me here that you can't see on camera, uh, I'm gonna be bringing in another camera, some video crew. I already have the mixers and stuff, and probably looking at a Q1 or Q2 launch. I'm going to give myself a little, uh, a little bandwidth there simply because The quality of a podcast is really important to me. It's clear that you take that seriously too. You have, you have the lights, you have the camera, you have the great microphone, you have the interesting background. It's clear that you've paid attention to that and you understand that, especially with the audience we serve, they should expect the best. And so the idea is I want to have 3-hour conversations with executives that have done it. Even though all the advice we hear is, oh, that's too long, nobody's going to listen to that. You know, I want to have deep dives with some of my clients, sometimes others. I would love to have great thought leaders on as well, talk about their— get a little personal, but also talk about their career and then provide some feedback on some of the psychological triggers and the negotiation triggers that I found in their rise. Why something worked, why it didn't work, and so on. So that's the gist of the podcast. I also have this fantasy. I'm going to fly him into San Francisco. I'm going to go down to San Francisco, pick him up, do some B-roll footage with like the cool buildings. And then my studio is in Lake Tahoe, which is a beautiful kind of outdoorsy location. Get some more B-roll of the outdoors, maybe go on a hike with them the first day, talk about what the podcast will be. And then the day of, like, we get the full production crew in and take care of that and then start to launch kind of the next steps there. So, uh, now I'm overselling it. I guess I'm not like— on one hand, I'm just put something out there and break it. On the other hand, I have this like highly sophisticated, uh, you know, this, this mastermind plan of this complex process that's going to cost hundreds of thousands of dollars, and I'm not going to tell my wife about it. Um, but I got that like I want to say it was Stephen Bartlett in Diary of a CEO where he gave someone on his team a list and he said, look, I want to make a really sexy podcast. I want to make one of the best in the world. And how much is it going to cost? Right. And the guy came back like, well, I could do it for like $12,000. He's like, no, seriously, how much is it going to cost? And then I think the list got to $50,000 or $100,000 in just studio equipment and sliders and bitching cameras and automation and And then he went through— he's got like 8 people on that team that put that together. When I create that— yeah, yeah, right— are— we will be one step closer to democratizing the information that other people need to see. So I want to be clear, the mission is to get the information out to people. It's not, can I create a sexy podcast to get sponsorship deals? And raise money, right? That stuff will come. Like, that stuff is necessary to pay the way and pay the people to make it happen. But when that happens together, like, collectively, one, I think we're going to attract some really cool sponsors that just love that mentality. And that, that I probably wouldn't have more than 4 or 5. I think that's something that Stephen Bartlett does too. He's like very critical about who he lets in and why. I think that we attract some, probably some big tech companies that want us to accomplish that. Like a dream would be Anthropic. Like if Anthropic said, Jacob, make that thing happen, we would love to learn and scrape data from these executives for AI, whatever. Right? Like that would be a dream to have a really cool company that— and I think Anthropic has a little more integrity than OpenAI, at least from the sounds of it. Sounds important. But yeah, when that's a reality, we'll fly you out, have you on the podcast, like kind of come full circle and talk about your rise. Because I think people need to see the story of entrepreneurs and, and other creators as well and just have this kind of open dialogue that's not just, you know, the same podcast tour you always see, right? You see somebody on 4 different podcasts all the time. Uh, I, I'm really looking forward to that because again, my goal is to spread impact and influence, not just license content to B2B companies for— it's about scaling impact. Yeah, yeah.

And there's something about hearing the stories of people that aren't like super famous all the time. Like some of the execs that you will talk to, they— people might not even know who they are, and that helps to identify with people a little bit more. Right? You can hit, oh, this person is kind of just like me.

And it's, it's really helpful when you see people that are just like you, that sound like you, but are also making $2.5 million a year. It kind of gives you hope, right? Right. If, if that's what you want, right? Like, yeah, it's— we talk about, you know, representation. It's important for representation to happen, to see successful people of all different, you know, shapes, sizes, and colors and things. And that representation is important. And if people took the time to be behind closed doors with folks that appear to be your everyday Janes and Joes, right, you would see that we're not all that different. And you would see that there's actually just a little bit of nuance in the skill set. And it's just that you don't know the nuance yet. Right. And so I want to find those nuances and continue to share those because people are a lot closer than they think they are. And they just build this own uphill Sisyphus battle that is— it's crushing to them, but it's mostly perceived because perception is 9/10 of the law.

It's everything. Yeah. Yeah.

Hmm. Well, did you have fun, Jacob Warwick Warwick?

This was honestly amazing. Thank you so, so much for being on the podcast. I've loved our conversation., and I know it's going to be very helpful for a lot of people. So thank you so much. Thanks so much for joining us for the What Makes You Tick podcast. I hope you enjoyed listening as much as I enjoyed having the conversation.

Yeah, there's so much value in hearing other people's career stories. And if you're someone focused on growing in your own career, check out our Growth Magnet newsletter on LinkedIn. We'll put a link in the show notes, and we will see you on the next episode.