197: Growth Loops + Why it’s Better to be Respected than Liked with Todd Herman

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Objectively look at your field and say, does this field still serve me? Is this business still the business that I want? Yes. Okay, well then let's optimize and systemize and make it better. But if it's not, let's redraw the lines of this thing.

This is your time. How can we earn twice as much in half the time with joy and ease while serving the highest good? That is our guiding question here at the Freetime Cafe, your home for heart based business. I'm your host, Jenny Blake. Join me for conversations with authors, friends and fellow business owners as we explore ways to free your mind, time and team to do your best work. Now onto today's show.

Welcome back, Free Timers Jenny Blake here with a very special guest, Todd Herman. You're going to love Todd. We were already just rolling before we hit record and we're like, we got to just stop talking and hit record already. I'm so excited to welcome him to the show. Todd is a man of many talents. He has a long history, two decades plus of leadership performance coaching with athletes, with entrepreneurs. He's the creator of the 90 day year. I quote him in free time, about 10k tasks and just the framework, the entrepreneurial scorecard that he helped popularized. He wrote a Wall Street Journal bestselling book, the alter ego, the power of secret identities to transform your life. So many accolades. His latest project is upcoach.com, which is a platform to help coaches simplify, organize and automate their coaching. Todd, welcome to the show.

Jani, the lady with two first names. It's great to be here.

Thank you. You know the Rocketeers girlfriend, her name is Jenny Blake.

So the Rocketeers. Now I'm gonna have to go back and watch that movie. I haven't seen that. It's such a good show. Wow.

It's very old school. Like probably, you know, people always say the reference dates me, but people always used to either reference that movie or Forrest Gump. You know, I was gen nag in like seventh grade the whole year that that came out.

Oh, wow. Yeah, it's on my list now this week. So thanks for that.

You said to me before we hit record that you have a unique approach to even being on a podcast because you said I don't play the influencer game. What do you mean by that?

I think one of the challenges of when people are coming on public broadcasts is they don't actually speak their minds and their real true thoughts. And that bothers me because then there's this pervasive narrative out there that's presented by this person said that and this person said that. Okay, well then it must be a truth because these people are all operating at a certain level and that must be how they all think. And I pull no punches. I am not an influencer. I run businesses. I very much identify with being a coach. It's my favorite activity that I could do in my week. I still work with people one on one. Yeah, I've got big programs and thousands and thousands of people have gone through them and stuff like that. But it's the classic phrase that we see in the New York City subway system. If you see something, say something. I'm a farm and ranch kid from Alberta, Canada. There are certain values that were embedded in me and if it ruffles feathers or if it chaps someone's ass to use a little farmism for people, I really don't care. I'm not out there to make friends with a bunch of influencers that just put out a lot of cotton candy fluff that never satiates the appetite for people's ambitions. I'm going to come. And whether I punch you straight in the mouth or it rattles the six inches between your ears, that's how I play the game.

So we're all about permission slips here. It's almost like you're giving yourself and other people permission not to be liked. But to come on a show like this or even in your one on one coaching to say what needs to be said, what your gut tells you, what your intuition is telling you is needed in that moment. It's not about making friends per se.

Life is challenging and I think there's a lot of ideas that are out there that people try to equip. Other good, well meaning people who are trying to pursue hard things, you're trying to equip them with tools that just break under the weight of practical application. So I am someone who wants to give people real tools that will actually help you as you try to perform your daily, weekly and monthly tasks and goals and projects as opposed to just lovely ideas. And so some of the times I share things that fly in the face of some of the most popular Instagram or Twitter or LinkedIn posts ever. And some people don't like it, but I'm just not here to be liked by everybody.

It kind of reminds me of Jordan Harbinger, who I'm guessing is a friend of yours. I'm just assuming such a good friend.

We were just messaging last night. Okay.

I figured you two must know each other. But he often says about podcasting with his guests, I'm not there to make friends. And I find it so interesting because I have met so many people and have made such rewarding friendships because of my two shows, and yet I always have Jordan's voice ringing. I mean, he kind of has a different style than me, but he is not trying to get his guests to like him. He wants his listeners to like him.

And.

And that he says if he tries to make sure that the goal of the show is that his guest is his friend, he just doesn't get the content that he's looking for, and he kind of softens. He would pull punches, just like you're saying. Yeah, I'm wondering if you agree with that or, like, what your take is on that. And even we've used this phrase influencer. Now, just the difference between what a business owner needs to do versus what you perceive influencers doing.

Okay, well, so getting to the like thing. So even in our conversations so far, we've sort of indexed towards the word of like. People are very familiar with the phrase, in order for someone to buy from you, they got to know you, like you, and trust you and know you. I get that. I mean, in order for someone to buy something, I have to know it even exists. Right. But in that whole KLT thing, I've always had an issue with the middle letter, the like part, the way that my brain works. And I think you're the same way, and that's why you write books. Jenny is like, the moment I find, like, a little grain or a little pebble in my shoe that's bothering me, I sort of, like, want to inspect it. So then I sort of started diving into this world of, like, know, like, and trust and thinking about even myself and who I appreciate, et cetera. Like, you and I were talking right before the show started about Nassim Taleb. Now, I don't know if I like Nassim, but I know him.

So true. He doesn't even care if you like him as well.

I trust his writing, and this brings in the letter that I substituted for like, I really respect him. So mine is K, R, T, no respect, trust. And there's a baby L at the very end which is like, hey, a little cherry on top or a little sprinkle or dabble of dollop of whipped cream is I like the person too. But I don't index my life towards trying to find people who I can just only like. Because I think liking is the great fog of the mind. It can hide a lot of imperfections in the data, imperfections in the words and ideas that are out there. And influencers are specifically out there to get you to like them and their content. And even the words that are underneath all of the posts is, should I like this, like it, love it. And I just don't go out there and try and pursue likes in the way that I show up in the world. Cause I think it's a massive trap that the world has laid for us now, especially with social media. So when I look at. Going back to your question about Harbinger, I know him, I really respect him. I really trust his process for how he tries to unpack information people. And then it just so happens that over time I've come to not like him. But I love Jordan as a human being as well. And that's the cherry on top of the friend cupcake that I have.

I love the cherry on top of the friend cupcake. And that in that sense, when you don't prioritize the little L superficial, like, it can develop into deep respect and love. Like you said. Like, I too, I respect Jordan and what he's built and how he's built it and how he shows up on his shows. And it's like, I love his show and his format because he's putting so much of his heart and soul into it. And yet his goal isn't to be liked. And I remember before I met you, at least before we were part of an author mastermind call that you were putting together. I remember peak turn 2020. I'm pretty sure it was you that you posted data. Like, speaking of data you posted on your Facebook page, it created this whole shitstorm. I wonder what that experience was like for you because here you are just posting research that somebody had done on the efficacy of protests in yielding a certain outcome. And people were like ripping this post to shreds as if they were just projecting all their anger onto you. And it's a good thing that you don't have this philosophy of trying to be liked, because I think anybody would have wanted to just curl up into a ball in that moment. I wonder how it was for you on your side.

It's so funny that you referenced that. I did a post about Omar Wassau. Omar Wasow is the associate professor at Princeton. He happens to be black as well. He also built the largest online social network for the black community as well. This is after George Floyd. While all this discussion was happening and you know, and people were posting black squares and you know, a lot of performative stuff on social media. I like data. It's how I scaled my sports performance company started it in 1997. Coaching wasn't really a thing back then, let alone mental game coaching. Yes, mental game coaching was popular a little bit amongst the professional sports ranks and specifically Olympic sports, but not at the youth sports level, which was where I was starting and where I was qualified to even start, frankly. And so as I was doing my own research, I was obviously diving deeper and deeper into the world of psychology. I didn't like a lot of the things that I found there, a lot of the ideas. Again, psychology and sociology are in the disciplines of science are the least sciency. And it makes sense because trying to unpack the entire human experience through one lens of psychology or sociology, you got to look at the entire spectrum. Biology, physiology, all these different things. So anyways, I really didn't like a lot of the stuff I found in psychology. So I dove into the world of neuroscience and I ended up hiring neuroscience researchers. So I was the first one to bring in neuroscience into the world of sports performance. And that's the thing that kind of helped differentiate and scale us. So when the George Floyd thing happened and there was the uprising that was happening, there was also a discussion that was happening because it was the election year around should people have the justification of burning down their communities and violent protests and stuff? And I came across this amazing paper that was written by Omar Wasow, going back to him on the riots that happened in the 1960s after Martin Luther King Jr. Was assassinated. And it was an election year as well. And it turned out that in the science and the data that he unpacked that the communities that had violent protests, how it impacted the voting was it increased towards, if I remember the numbers correctly, it's around 12 to 13% voted more Republican. And then in areas where there was peaceful protests, it indexed towards skewing towards voting more Democrat by surrounding counties and communities that were affected by either one of those two measures. So anyways, I go on, I do this post about it and saying like, hey, these are difficult times. And I think it's always very helpful to look at data. And here's this amazing man, Omar Wasa, who's created one of the most cite. I mean, the first 13 pages of his report, Jenny, were citations. Like, I've never seen anything like it. It was incredible research. And so I shared the link to the PDF and said, hey, read this, because it actually shows that there actually is an optimal way of if you want to create this exchange. Here's the actual path and Omar does a great job of unpacking it. And so to your point, yeah, a bunch of people piled on. One lady in particular was trying to rile up an entire community of people. But funnily enough, we had over 2,500 private messages from leaders around the world saying, you're the only one who's not backing down on this because other people were getting canceled. Like entire personal brands were getting canceled at the time.

People even got fired. There were journalists who got fired for citing that.

Exactly.

If not Omar himself was let go from a position. Right. There was all kinds of stuff surrounding that that you probably might not have even known when you first posted.

Well, it was after I posted it that I learned that, yeah, this one person was getting canceled. And I reached out to the person to help them as well, the person who got fired to help set them up in another job anyway. And I just kept on pushing back and saying, hey, did you. So people were just coming in and performatively just being angry. And I knew they couldn't have read what I had shared because it takes 45 minutes to read the damn paper. But people just wanted to be mad for the sake of being mad. They wanted to be performative. And so I know myself. I worked for Nelson Mandel in the South African government. I built the leadership program for the South African government to help them with equalization of the workforce. I lived in Cape Town, only working with the black community throughout South Africa to build their leadership program to help build more confidence in their people. I know my history. And so it's pretty amazing, though, as an experience within yourself, when you feel like, okay, I am uncancelable.

Was there a shift in that after this, or were you already so secure in yourself going in, knowing your history of.

I was already secure in myself only because just the term being canceled is a new thing. During that process, I was like, oh, yeah, there's nothing for me to fear here. I'm uncancelable because I'm not going to play your game. Because you want to play the cancel game. But if I'm not going to get on the field with you, then you can't cancel me. That. That's your game. You guys are also concerned about that. I'm not.

That's such an interesting way to put it, because I was listening to you on Beyond a Million. You were fantastic. I'll put it in the show notes. And you were saying that the mistake a lot of entrepreneurs make compared to athletes is they don't define the right playing field. And there's just an interesting parallel here, whether it's the game you're playing online, the game you're playing to be liked, or gain respect, but also there's that broader. What playing field are you on? And I thought it was really compelling how you were saying in your work with elite athletes, the difference that the advantage they have is that the game is clear. It's clear what the rules are, it's clear what the playing field is. And for entrepreneurs, there's often a lot more chaos and uncertainty surrounding them because they don't even know if they've defined the right playing field. Are you playing your game or someone else's? That's a fascinating concept.

Well, it gets to, hopefully, the purpose of why some people are here, too. They don't want to hear some dude talk about his experience of not being canceled or not playing the game or whatever. But to the point of what you're trying to help people with, which is give people better systems and processes to lead their lives through or lead their professional lives through, that is a system. It's a system of thinking like, I'm not going to play that game. I built up this big sports performance company, sold it to Real Madrid. Through that process, I also built up this leadership and performance company, which I ended up selling to an oil company in 2007. So I had a few different kind of umbrella markets that I was operating in corporate, and then one in the sports world. And then in about 2010, I started working with entrepreneurs more and in a bunch of these different podcast interviews, because people know that I still work with pro athletes. I just feel like, for me, in order to help people with the current challenges of the day and build good programming for people or write good books, you gotta be on the field. You can't be standing on the sidelines. That's why I kind of go hard at researchers. It's like, okay, that's nice to put a hermetically sealed research experiment inside of a lab, but does it have practical application and So I am every single day coaching people on the field in the gutter, dirt underneath the fingernails, and I love it. And when I came to entrepreneurs, I was like, oh, wait, these people are way more challenging to work with than an athlete. Because to your point, athletes have a field or a court or an ice rink that's defined. The borders are defined. How many players get to play? What are the rules? Where do I get three points on a shot and where do I get two points on a shot? Oh, I get one point from the free throw line. All these things are defined for them. So now the only thing you need to do is develop your tool, which is the athlete itself, for your role that you're playing. Well, in entrepreneurship, we're handed a pencil or a pen and they're like, okay, go build your business. Most people will look at Jenny's business or my business or someone else's business, and I'm going to build it like that. And in my world, like in the coaching and mentoring programs that we do, I'm like, that's a trap. Because I custom built my business for me to win on, not for everyone else to win on. There's a Thursday every month where I coach for 14 hours straight. And my wife, she's seen me do this for about a decade now. Almost every single Thursday this happens. She'll see me walk in and then she'll see me walk out and she'll go, how do you not come out drained? And I'm like, because that's my treadmill. I love that treadmill. I built that treadmill for Todd and he likes getting on it. And so these conversations, I have energy that gets fueled by other human beings. And I get it. Other people don't have that as much. So the key here is pick up a pen or a pencil and let's draw out your field that you're custom built to win on right now. And then we need to review that field and we have to get into that rhythm of, okay, sitting back objectively look at your field and say, does this field still serve me? Is this business still the business that I want? Yes. Okay, well then let's optimize and systemize and make it better. But if it's not, let's redraw the lines of this thing.

We'll be right back just after this.

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Tell me more about this 14 hour day. Is that all your coaching clients within a given month on one day? What's the purpose behind it? What's the system behind it?

That is a couple of things. That's a bunch of one on one clients that all happen on that one day. Now they also happen on other days as well. They're just not like if you work with me one on one, there's only one day a month that we talk. I don't operate that way necessarily. It's a combination of one on one clients and then our group and mentoring clients as well that are on there. And then one of those calls is a one hour block where I'm doing a what's called a we call it build it with up coach. So for our upcoach community, you had mentioned the platform that I'm co founder of. I get on for one hour and just talk about the different features that are inside it to help people who are running coaching, training, consulting businesses. You know, maybe use our platform better, optimize it better, give them some advice and so forth. But that's the gist of that.

14 hours is the reason that it's such a long day so that you can have free time or just open time on many other days. Like I guess I'm wondering about the design of how you design your time for a given month or week.

Yeah, Thursday is a day that in my 90 day world and in helping entrepreneurs put together a performance system that helps them build the business that they end up loving, we talk about theming out your days. And so for me Thursday has always been my coaching day. And structurally the reason that it's there is Friday is what I call my domino day or my catch day. So I don't have anything typically ever scheduled onto my Friday like when I give you my schedule link to go and book something with me. Friday is never a day that someone could get access to it because I look at my Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday there's dominoes that fall and then I leave Friday there as a catch pile of work can happen. But after that Thursday day is my thinking day. After that particular Thursday where I take a look at all of the outputs that happen from that coaching and I just think about content and I think about what are people challenged with, what can I put out to the masses that I know after being on the field with an individual would go and help more people? Because if one person says it, that means 10 people are thinking it. Then they just didn't say it yet. If two people say it, it's just a compounding effect, right? And so that's where I come up with my best ideas, my best content, my best training, my best books, my best articles, my best videos are always after that Thursday because I get so inspired. And now you can start to see to your point. And it's a great question. That's my flywheel. And so I would encourage anyone who does any delivery work, whether it's later that day or it's the next day, block off time for you to think about your previous day. Because your best stuff is going to be coming out of your interaction with your idea, deal, clients, customers, market, whatever.

I love how you create the space for that and intentionally put in these thinking days. There's a book called the Road Less Stupid by Keith Cunningham.

He is one of my favorite humans. He's one of my favorite humans.

Yet the thinking time prompts at the end of every chapter are so good. I didn't know if I would like the book or not. My brother told me to read it and I'm so glad I did. And any one of those prompts could serve you for a year. He talks about the importance of thinking time. I want to talk about the business model behind 90 day year for a moment because a lot of people ask me about licensing and that you and I have this shared love of systems and you've built a whole lot more scale and success with it than me. But in general I'm always thinking how to scale beyond myself, how to scale beyond a service based business. And so I have figured out some amount of licensing to companies. You were also really intentional. I just found it powerful hearing your story that after you created and road tested 90 day year and it was working with your clients, you set your mind to licensing it. And I'm wondering if you can just take us behind that decision a little bit. And how did licensing play out for you? How did you design that 90 day year?

We have certified partners, so I license to those certified partners. But the real story, Jenny, is actually in the Peak Athlete company. So I scaled the Peak Athlete. So my sports performance company on licensing far more than I have 90 day.

Fascinating. Yeah. Tell us more like what you mean when you say licensing because it could mean so many different things.

It can, yeah. The story actually goes to. Here's sometimes the value of sitting in a first class seat. It was early 2000s. I'm a very big believer, Jenny, in apprenticeship and mentorship. Like my parents, when I was leaving the farm and ranch, they knew that I wasn't going to become a farmer or a rancher. And so they had a very intentional conversation with me and they said, listen, whatever career you go and pursue, we're probably not going to be able to help you with that. But hopefully we've given you the character traits and integrity and all that kind of fundamental stuff that needs to sit below the surface for you to be successful. But their advice was just whatever you go and do, go and be humble enough to tuck yourself under the wing of your the best. Just promise us that you're going to find the best though. And so I did and I almost choke up with it because it was the single greatest piece of advice my parents gave me. And I love and honor my parents so much that if I can give their advice and pass it on to someone else, I think it sets a very important tone to your self esteem when you think to yourself, no, I'm not going to settle for the middle of the road or I want to go and learn from the best. It helps you to appreciate yourself more. And so I did. And so Jim Rohn, who was a giant of the speaking industry, was an early mentor to me for a little while. And then when I was building up this mental game business, Harvey Dorfman, who is known as the Yoda of baseball, wrote the best selling books on mental game. I explicitly reached out to him because his stuff was the only stuff that made sense. And this is important for the context of the conversation around licensing because being around these giants in their respective industries, I saw what I liked and didn't like. I loved the accolades that they got, but I didn't like the roadshow that they had. Like Jim Rohn was on the road all the time speaking. I loved speaking. Hey, you would too. Like we love being on stage and getting that kind of energy from it, but I don't want it three times a week. And so they had practices that were very much geared just around their personal brand. And I had A little more entrepreneurial endeavors with myself. And so early on, I was trying to codify a training system within the peak athlete. It was still Todd Herman that people were essentially buying early on because it was just me, but I really wanted to build a system. So now I'm getting on a flight, and I'm flying from Chicago to Dublin, Ireland. And I happen to sit next to this man. He lives in Chicago area. He happened to be the inventor of the Flip top cap to the Powerade bottle.

So fascinating.

He had a very unique design to it. It kind of had this, like, silicone seal within the thing so that when you squeeze the Powerade bottle, the stuff comes out, and if you tilted it upside down, it wouldn't pour out even if the cap was open. So anyways, he was fascinating to talk to, and he sacrificed his sleep on the airplane to basically teach me the licensing game because he was like, listen, I get paid. I think it was a half a cent or a cent, a penny for every single bottle that's sold. And I can tell you, it adds up to millions upon millions of dollars every year for him. And then he was like, okay, so you're in the training world. And so he was kind of breaking down my business model for me and said, well, here's how you could license your stuff. And so it completely opened up my mind to, wait, wait a second. When I'm going out there, Jenny, I'm looking for a client that I can continuously serve through my time. And I flipped it. When I landed and I was working in Dublin with a rugby team, I was like, wait a second. What if I say to them, what if I give you my entire system and I train someone on your team.

To be the one that runs it? This is the value of being around smart people. He was like, todd, one of the objections is going to be people want you. And what you need to do is flip the sales conversation and say, find a different way of positioning it so they think that it's more valuable that they have it. And so what I said to them, I'm like, and by the way, the benefit of someone on your team doing it is now it's on every single bus, every single practice. And that person has way more trust with your team than I do. Because while you guys know me, I need to come in and do this workshop and build authority and trust and stuff with me before they're gonna accept my ideas. But your people are embedded inside. So that's what started my licensing game. And so it started with train the Trainer. So I'm gonna train one of your trainers, and then you're gonna license this from me for the year. And my first big one. So that was okay with the Irish rugby team, but it was the German soccer federation. They've paid me for 18, 19 years to license the peak performance models and trainings that I've had.

That's incredible. And are they paying you per participant who goes through end participant as well as train the trainer? Or you want a different pricing model now with them where it's like unlimited use, annual subscription?

Yes. So there's a certain point in the threshold of payment where it becomes too painful on their side to pay per user. And so I built that out in the pricing model that basically when you hit this unit number, we just flip to full access use to all the people going through your training protocols. And it's this number every single year. So in some companies, maybe that would max out at a quarter million dollars a year. And then also, Jenny, you can bundle into this, like, especially in corporate. Okay. Or bigger deals. By the way, this also grants you one keynote speaking gig a year with me as well. And so, Jenny, now what happens is because people accumulate these training protocols inside of corporations and companies, and they sit inside of some sort of learning management system that people do or do not access. Right. But what happens, Jenny, is when I go in and do the keynote speech, what happens? Boom. The access rate inside the LMS to my stuff goes way up. And then when they're judging in HR whether or not they should renew certain programs and they see that Todd Herman's always gets accessed or used. Boom. Now my recurring fee and my retention rate stays really, really high inside of companies. But it's because of that one keynote gig, I stand up on stage at their company event, I speak my speak, and then I say, by the way, everyone, you don't need to hire me one on one. This amazing company that you all work for has already grabbed the best of my stuff and put it inside of their learning management system. So you can access me 24 7.

That is awesome. I love it. That just gave me an idea. Because I've gotten to the flat fee annual subscription with companies. I agree. I prefer that. And I feel that it incentivizes reach rather than trying to penny pinch per participant to come under a certain budget. It's like flat fee, use it or lose it. The goal then becomes to spread it as far as they can throughout the company. But I've never thought to pair it with a keynote to kind of make sure that interest is still there year after year.

It's how you get booked again. And the flywheel of that is now you're guaranteeing at least one good keynote every year at a big company. And don't Forget like the VPs of hrs or the executive VPs of hrs or decision makers, the VP of sales. No one stays inside of one company now. They move on. And now you're pollinating the corporate landscape with people who know you and they like you, they like dealing with you. And then when that person goes off to salesforce.com and they're looking at, they're like, you know what? Jenny has this great thing. Let's engage with her. And that deal now takes a week to do, not four months.

We'll be right back just after this.

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That flywheel, that word of mouth flywheel to create what you call a transformational business or even business model. You're also applying it to coaches and this is something again where you know you've probably had a pebble in your shoe around creating a coaching based business model. So tell us a little bit about what you're building here with upcoach. But also, where do you think coaches get this wrong? Because I do think, you know, you talk about that first stage of business being so full of chaos and overwhelm, yet there's this light at the tunnel of a flywheel that is possible that I feel like you have figured out for coaches in particular if someone had.

You know, a classic circle with like four arrows that lead together to come back on each other inside of the coaching business model, consulting business model and the training model, like that kind of expertise maybe type business that's out there the thing that people get wrong, especially nowadays with the pervasiveness of social media and marketing and people making you feel like you need to have the perfect funnel, et cetera, is they index too hard towards marketing. And yet really what we're paid to do is transformation. So just like you said, there's a pebble in my shoe. And I'm like, well, why is it that my referral rate is just exceptionally high? And I hear other people saying things like, well, referral isn't something that you can build a business on. Well, but behind closed doors, if you ask them, okay, well, where'd you get that client? They're like, oh, so and so sent them over. So all your best clients come from your referrals. So very early on in my business, I engineered a referral engine in my business. And the great thing is you were talking about the author mastermind that myself and Mike Michalowicz put on a brilliant referral engine. The guy who wrote the book on it, John Janch, is in it as well. You can build a referral engine, but why is this important? Well, Jenny, when you think about when clients are coming to you or me or the listener that's listening and they want some sort of one on one help or team help, whatever it is, depending on the type of client, a lot of times it's because they discover that there's a problem or an issue or a challenge that they're up against, then they go on a journey to solve that problem. They might read a book, they might watch some YouTube videos, they might read some articles, might do some research themselves, they even might go and buy a course. But at none of those points in time has that person raised their hand and said, I am committed to making the change. They're interested in the change. Now, do some people make a change from the book or from the course or from the YouTube video or from the article? 100%. But it's a very small portion of the population. But the moment someone comes to you or I sends the email or books the call with us on calendly or acuity or whatever system they use, they're raising their hand to a level of commitment. Hey, I really want to make this change. So they want a transformation. So what I call this loop that I'm going to unpack is called the transformation led growth loop. And it comes down to four main categories that really drive our business models that are in the space of truly trying to help someone transform or some team transform their work, their skills, their results. And so the first category is results. And so in that, what you should be thinking about is the thing that impacts your results is how you onboard people. So that first experience that they have when you're onboarding them, how good are you at milestoning along the path? Like, how good are you at creating wins for them throughout the journey towards the final transformation or the final result? Because people don't want to wait months to experience something positive until they finally get the end result. This is in really good engineering of the way that you design your program or your coaching model. And then finally is creating wins, which is the final result, or it's the wins along the pathway. So results isn't just the final thing. There's results that happen throughout. The second category is the relationship. This is how you engage with people, how you serve them, how you lead them. So I've said to people, and I've said it on interviews for a long time, that there's really only three core qualities of being a phenomenal coach, phenomenal coach, coaching leader. One is encouragement. I think it's very natural for most coaches because most coaches very naturally are encouragers of other people. So encouragement, because again, the process of change is a difficult one and it's a challenging one. So you gotta be able to encourage people because it gets hard when they're trying to make that change. The second one is the one that most coaches are not very good at, and that is accountability.

And that is, you gotta remember they came to transform. They don't have the skills or the beliefs or the attitudes or the attributes or the qualities yet. So you got to hold them accountable because your process is the process to help them get that result. And it's not going to be comfortable, it's not going to be easy necessarily. So you got to be good at holding people accountable. That means challenging people. If you're just always, quote, holding space, I mean, that's a term that therapists could use. I'm a coach. I'm here to help you perform. And then the third one is progress. We've got to show people progress. Progress isn't always just in the physical world. Jenny. If you and I were coaching and we're three weeks in and you asked me a question, I would stop first and I'd say, hey, Jenny, I just want to recognize something. That question that you just asked, that's a very different question than you've asked on week one. That is showing that there's a real mental shift that you're making. Your paradigm is changing on the inside. Because you wouldn't have asked that question three weeks ago. And so I just wanted to kind of acknowledge that and kind of give you a virtual high five here because that's some real progress that you're making there. So I think about progress happening at three planes. The mental, the emotional, the. And then the behavioral or physical level. Always look for those things because people could get discouraged if they're not getting results in the physical world. But you can be showing them they're getting results on the inside as well. Cause there's shifts that are being made. So going back to that second category then. So we talked about results first, then relationship and then so it's how you engage, serve and lead and then the final two really quickly. I know we got time retention, which is how you upgrade, retain and develop new products. Again when you're on the field with people, have a process where you're processing your actual coaching or your delivery because there's great nuances in how you can develop new products, books, articles, whatever. And then referral, how you activate word of mouth testimonials and create champions. So if you build systems in the results, the relationship, the retention and the referral world, you'll be hired for life.

I love it. Oh, I just love all your systems and frameworks. I know that alone could be its own episode.

So I'm trying to give people the platform that activates all those four categories naturally. Because I wish this is sort of one of my. And I'm not an operator inside the company, I've got two co founders. But this is sort of. I love the coaching world. I'm going to be coaching until the day that I die. And so I wish this was the platform I could have had. And so I'm trying to empower, you know, people who are out there trying to transform people's lives with something that's better.

Yes. And the system is like you've cracked the case on the system to support these different transformation led growth stages. And so now the system is the software.

That's right.

Thank you. I can't wait to dive into it even more. And I know you even have bonuses around that. Last question before we wrap up and tell people where to find you. If you could give fellow business owners permission to do something differently or drop something altogether, what would it be?

The need to make your business look like someone else's. Be honest with yourself about what it is that you want. Drop the idea that you need to scale, scale, scale. The beautiful thing about the world that we live in right now is it is your choice for the type of business you want. You don't need to qualify it. You don't need to say that yours is more or less successful. Like you had made the statement earlier, Jenny, that you know, I've been even more successful with licensing. I don't know about that. You know, it all depends on the quality of business and life that you're trying to lead. If you've implemented licensing and it's worked for you, that sounds like success to me. So run your race, run your game. Always look at how you could be improving good self reflection and you're gonna feel so much better in your days and your weeks when it's coming from you as opposed to the influence of so many other people.

Beautifully said. And I love how you also say that peak performance is really a subtracting process, that as you get to those elite levels, it's doing less, not more. Todd, this has been so fun. I know we could talk for hours on any one of these topics. Where would you like to send people to learn more and keep in touch?

ToddHerman Me is my home on the interwebs and if you're on socials, toddher Herman on Instagram and Twitter. But I love it when I, you know, do these podcasts with people like you. And if people come and you know, whether they DM or they share it like one of their favorite takeaways, I appreciate it and it's how I can engage with people.

Awesome. Thank you so much Todd. This has been great and I'll link to all the great resources, books, articles, up coach, everything in the show notes.

Thanks jb.

Thanks so much for listening.

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