Boost Client Value Through Counter-Intuitive Principle of “Off-Boarding” with Alex Mandossian

Most stick strategies have nothing to do with selling. They happen to do with putting people in the position to say yes. So there's not a close happening. A close as in a sale. An onboarding is anticipation of what's to happen in that in the phase of when it's going to end. But most people in, in the onboarding process, which I talked about several months ago, and the recording is there in the members area, they don't talk about what the end is. So becomes kind of like this very unhealthy codependent relationship by I see someone here as a relationship expert. If there's not an off board, whether it's divorce or it's a breakup or it's from engagement to marriage, you're offboarding from one phase to the other. I mean bachelor's degree, master's degree, PhD, there's two offboardings there. And after PhD, if you're going to work in an office, then you have those three certificates up, you off boarded your academics. So if you can think of the beginning in the end, the alpha, the omega, the primacy, recency effect of that segment, it will create so many better boundaries. And your clients, customers, patients will not annoy you as much as mine have because I didn't know this. To set those boundaries in advance, I.

Am going to introduce our guest, our Genius Network member expert for today. Many of you know him and if you don't, you're going to be very glad to if his name is Alex mandosian. And since 1993 he has generated nearly $417 million in sales and profits for his marketing students, clients, joint venture partners over six continents. And best selling author Harvey McKay acknowledges him as the Warren Buffett of digital marketing because his unique ability is to make money for his students, for his clients and his JV partners. And he has shared the stage with Richard Branson, Larry King, Tony Robbins, Marianne Williamson, Robert Kiyosaki, Suze Ormond, Mikhail Gorbachev and the Dalai Lama and two US Presidents. And Joe Polish as a virtual trainer. He has over 22,000 hours of training time and nearly 4,800 interviews that he's done. And he and Joe have actually been friends since 1995. And if you came to Genius Network from 2017 or after, then you've seen him lead our Genius Network morning panel, the sunrise breakfast at our big event each year. So please help me welcome Alex Mandosian.

All right, hey everybody. Good morning or afternoon depending where you are. Thank you. Gina. I saw Joe just walked in, so I want to acknowledge him. If you have been to Genius Network, big events from 2017 and onward, I'm the resident pimp there on Saturday mornings, and I do the onboarding on the Thursday evening. And it's my pleasure. One thing if you know my story, I was one of the first 20 people Joe approached back in 2006, and it took me about 11 years to say yes. So I'm a slow learner with deep pockets. As Dan Sullivan says, those are the kind of clients to go after. And if you put me in speaker view, it will be best for this learning experience, because I talked to Joe last night. He's been traveling around, and he can tell you what he's doing, because I want to turn it over him before we begin. But I will be doing. If you can see me in speaker view, if I can pin myself, I'm going to be doing Gina. Can you. Can you control it? Because I just see you right now. Is it any way that you. You. You can give me pinning ability?

Just you, Alex, you see me.

Okay, cool. All right. Because I just saw Gina. Anyway, I'll be doing this, and I can't see it very well anymore, but I'll be doing these cards, right? So if you want to take notes, you can. This will be recorded. Obviously, it's being recorded now, but let me go to Joe, because this comes from stick strategies. We have about 45 of them. And previously I did onboarding a couple months ago. I didn't think anything of it. I think everyone needs to do onboarding. So I. I did the same type of presentation with the. It's a flip chart for virtual, right? Like on stage, but only virtual. And I was just amazed at the amount of feedback afterwards and getting direct messages and phone calls and stuff like that with something what I thought was so basic and that Joe and I had been doing for years. So I thought, okay, well, if that's the. That's the starting point, onboarding, let's talk about something that's a forgotten stick strategy, which is off boarding that most people don't talk about. In fact, I haven't heard that term coin. So I thought, if that's an interesting topic, people will show up. We have people here, and hopefully this will be worth the hour that we spend. So, Joe, why don't I turn it over to you before we get started? Because Joe is going to be the devil's advocate. He's going to represent you and just kind of pummel with questions if he doesn't understand something. And then we'll Go to Q and A at the end and I'll finish on time. But the stick strategy of onboarding, as you know, with, with Genius and then the three years like coming into Genius, if it's not a three year plan, when one year is off boarded to the next and and to the next, then it's not worth being a Genius Network member, just kind of dipping your toe in the water. So onboarding is important, but the off boarding to get to the next level, which we'll talk about during this training, is just as important. You want to speak to that before we begin?

Yeah. You know, one of the things we've been hearing quite a bit is how valuable the onboarding we have been doing, which we keep honing and we keep doing our best to improve and Gina does a tremendous amount of it. So I want to thank Gina for that. We're getting quite a bit of feedback on the value that people are getting from the onboarding by itself is worth the investment in Genius Network. Now obviously we only hear that from people that go through the onboarding. Don't run away from it, stay, you know, they actually show up for their appointment, that sort of stuff. And I know you're going to speak to all of that, but when we were talking yesterday about offboarding, I was like, huh, this is an interesting thing where this obviously operates as a stick strategy. Every single person here would like to find people that would do business with them, be happy with that, refer them to other people and keep doing business with them. That is the whole goal. It's the Peter Drucker thing. You know, the primary purpose of business is to create and keep customers, marketing and innovation, produce results, all other business functions or costs. And so as it relates to six strategies, I had just finished yesterday, three days in the studio, eight hours a day recording my audiobook. What's in it for them? Has anyone ever, by show of hands, because I can see everyone recorded their own book on audio in a studio, say whatever does that, you know, the. I mean, I have done over a thousand interviews with people. We have countless hundreds of seminars. I have, I never realized how much work I can do stuff spontaneously. I can ramble and you know, kind of like what I'm doing right now. But having to read your own book is. And I've written, you know, this is the fifth book I've written, but I've never recorded a book word by word and be put in a process. And by the time I was talking to Alex, I was absolutely brain dead. I mean it was such I mean, poor me, like violin sort of thing. But it was a tremendous amount of work. But I also had present in my mind the happy client experience, where there's. Because that's part of what I write about and what's in it for them is, you know, there's three experiences that a client can have. They can be, you know, frowning, so they're unhappy, they can have just a straight face, they're satisfied, and they can have a smile, whereas they're happy. So it's the happy client experience. And in order to have stick strategies work, you want people to have a smile on their face. You want to exceed their expectations. Because we can either have less than what we expected, exactly what we expected, or more than what we expected. Now, certainly, if I look at everyone here with your experience in genius network, your $25,000 investment, you either got less than what you expected, exactly what you expected, or more. And we want to strive to have people get more than what they expected. Now, there is a point in time where the relationship comes to a point where the person goes off and they are. You set them up for either where they're going to go, or you just say thank you for being a client and everything in between. But the opportunity of offboarding, which I had said, talked with Alex, and this is Alex's idea, and this is thought. And let me mention that back in 2003, I think it was Alex, we did the stick strategy secrets program, where we spent probably like 8 hours recording all the different things that someone could do after somebody buys from you in order to make sure they're happy, make sure that they refer you to other people, make sure that. Make sure the cell sticks. And we've taught this to countless people. I think to this day it was one of the best trainings and information products where some of the world's top marketers have utilized and made tens of millions of dollars with what we taught in that program. And so today we're just looking at, you know, the same strategies that always worked, new things that we could utilize that could work. But I actually have some sort of concerns about this Alex, too, as you go through it. So I might just, you know, butt in while you're talking about it and give my thoughts based on our conversation last night. But I want everyone just to think about every client that is currently doing business with you, has done business with you. When they stop doing business with you, how do you off board them? What is the way to do that? And this is an experiment in a lot of ways. Because, you know, we're doing a really good job with onboarding, I believe, and we certainly can do better and we're going to keep trying to work on that. But now there's the offboarding process too. So with that said, Alex, I'll turn it over to you, have you give some context about it. And I may interrupt in between.

Yeah, please do. My former wife does and so do my kids. So I feel at home when we do that. So here we go, offboarding. What's the ultimate off boarding? Well, in the context of marketing, it works for any business. And I know most of your businesses just based on reading the directory. But the ultimate offboarding is death. And depending on your spiritual responsibility to what you've studied, or maybe you don't have any spiritual beliefs, offboarding going into death or passing into death is different. The Tibetans have a way to prepare for death and most people don't. Most people don't prepare for death. They expect it, but they don't. And then it's up to you what you believe and what happens afterwards. But that is the ultimate off boarding. And just last November, I had the honor of watching my dad take his last breath. It was in Toluca Lake. He was in his bed. It was very comfortable. All the family was there. And I got with my son and I together, we watched him take his last breath. It was expected. He passed at 86. I am not going to say I lost him. He was ready to go. And it was the most amazing experience I've had. And of course I wept and we went to the funeral and everything else. But I had my son there. We had three generations in one room while he was still living. But, you know, he couldn't talk. And that was the ultimate off board for me. And so this applies in any part of life, both personal, professional. So let's get going at the speed of sound. So genius network offboarding the forgotten stick strategy. Now, most strategies have nothing to do with selling. They happen to do with putting people in the position to say yes. So there's not a close happening. A close as in a sale. An onboarding is anticipation of what's to happen in that in the phase of when it's going to end. But most people in the onboarding process, which I talked about several months ago, and the recording is there in the members area, they don't talk about what the end is. So becomes kind of like this very unhealthy, codependent relationship. I see someone here as a relationship expert, if there's not an off board. Whether it's divorce or it's a breakup or it's from engagement to marriage, you're offboarding from one phase to the other. I mean, bachelor's degree, master's degree, PhD, there's two offboardings there. And after PhD, if you're going to work in an office, then you have those three certificates up, you off boarded your academics. So if you can think of the beginning in the end, the alpha, the omega, the primacy, recency effect of that segment, it will create so many better boundaries. And your clients, customers, patients will not annoy you as much as mine have because I didn't know this to set those boundaries in advance. So the key point is we have over 45 stick strategies and secrets we teach. The first version was 2003, we launched in 2004. If we do it right by the big event in November, we're going to certify people to be stick strategists. People don't need to learn stick strategies, they need someone who knows it. And that mindset is a support person, not a salesperson. The worst person that could be your stick strategist manager is a salesperson because they're like a, they're like a, you know, racehorse, you know, they're twitching if they can't sell something. The support person is the one who is, is just nurturing that person who's on the other end, the client, customer, member, whoever it may be. And then they put themselves in a position as a, let's say a setter so that the spiker or the closer who the salesperson is, can their job can be a lot easier getting them to the boiling point to steam. It's one degree difference, right? 211 to 212 in Fahrenheit.

Hey, I hope you're enjoying this video. And I want to let you know that I have a new book that's come out and if you'd like to get it absolutely free, there's, there's a link below in the description or you can wait till the end of this video or you can Simply go to joe'sfreebook.com and you can get a copy there.

So the fact is it's the first and last onboarding and offboarding which we're talking about today is 80% of the impact to create lifetime value. Many people forget what's in between, right? They don't look at, you know, the meat in the sandwich or if you're vegetarian, whatever vegetables are, you know, fake meat are in the middle, right? They look at the two slices of bread, you know, all the books are there, but then it's the two bookends that keep those books on the shelf going to bed. What you do before you go to bed and what you wake up. If you have a good ritual like I do, it will, it will give you a very predictable day, in my opinion. At least that's what I've learned. So onboarding is, is the, it's the primacy effect of bringing someone on and off boarding is the recency of the last thing before they either move on or they no longer with you. And by the way, you want to increase lifetime value with other people who do want to move on, make sure that you close and you have good closure with people who are no longer going to be clients or customers, because that happens. And if it's messy, there's resentment, there's contempt. And I'm just telling you all the experiences I've had until I actually learn this. So the first stick strategy is always onboarding. The last is offboarding. And all the 45 plus are in between there, which you'll probably learn if you stick around or are interested in it. So the purpose of both onboarding and offboarding is the same, Is the same. And ultimately it is to expand client LTV without advertising cost. That's the beauty. The ebitda, you know, the profit. That's what the accountants call it. The EBITDA is pure because there's no cost of acquisition that's been amortized over the first sale. So if you off board them and they ascend, then that lifetime value and the profit of that appreciating asset is growing, growing and growing. Member, student, client, customer, patient, whatever you want to call them. Now, if you off board them and they, you say we're done, right? And they're clear that we're done. It's going to give you more focus where you just cut the umbilical cord and you get to focus on the people who you know are in. But if you're uncertain or you have doubt or you're stressed over are they continuing or not? Happens all the time with masterminds. You know, there's a lot of avoidance, right? Like I don't know if I'm going to renew or I don't know if I'll continue. Have I got my roi? And all those things that pop up in people's heads, I think they're the wrong questions, but I know why I continue. And so whether it's a mastermind or it's one of your own coaching clients or if it's an investment property, any type of business. If you're in the medical field or financial services. It's really important to have a clear onboarding strategy, offboarding strategy, and it's revealed during the onboarding strategy, which I'll talk about in a little bit. So the purpose of onboarding is get more engagement and set the expectations. I don't know if you've had unmet expectations, but I hate those. I like certainty. I have a therapist. I go as a prophylactic just for my future every Wednesday. And she told me yesterday we were looking at, okay, when do I feel stressed and uncertain and, you know, when do I act out and I can't read the label from inside the jar. She concluded that it's when I feel trapped, when I don't have freedom. I remember when I went up to Canada, right? And I know some people live in Canada and can't come down to the U.S. i was put in quarantine for two weeks. I felt trapped, completely trapped, and I acted out as a result, right? So I got to be really careful. Like, I'm very mindful because the off boarding process wasn't clear to me. What do I. What can I do in another country, which I used to go in and out of all the time, you know, after this 14 days is over? Because we have a whole different government up there and. And the Canadians, God bless them, are very compliant, you know, I mean, a lot of Americans wouldn't put up with that shit, but it's just a whole different community, which is why I moved to Arizona. So the purpose is not to be political about it. The purpose is if you know what the onboarding is, whether it's a relationship, it's always a relationship. But whether it's personal or professional, it alleviates the stress, the doubt, the uncertainty. And if you're like me, you won't feel trapped in this relationship because some of them just go on and on and on. And it's my doing. That's my doing. Now the purpose of offboarding is more ascension and guiding the intentions. It's a very simple sale when they know something is over. You know, with Genius Network, when it's time to be off, boarded into the next year. And if you're in year two and then if you're in year three, which I'll get to in a moment, I'm using Genius because I got my swag on and this is what we're here for. But if you look at the Stats because I work with Joe and his team as a, let's say a fractional pro bono cmo, Chief marketing officer of sorts, right. And one of the things is just studying how many people leave after the first year, how many people leave after the second, how many people leave after the third. So offboarding, they actually leave. And it's astounding. The highest percentage is after year one, the percentage drops dramatically. This is for all masterminds, not just Genius for year two. And Joe does an amazing job to make things stick. Gina does, Eunice does, the whole team. Of course, you know that. I mean Genius Morning is just one example of a stint, right? We're all here and our time is valuable. I'm trying to make it even more valuable with the hour I've been given. And then after the third year, it's negligible. Very few people drop. And there have been many instances who are good friends of mine and Joe knows them, they may have left and then they come back, right? So it's a pattern. And if you off board properly and they know I'm going to stay, that's offboarding year one to year two. And they're called different things in Genius Network. It's on the website or if they leave, we need to bring closure to that closure because you never know if they come back. And, and it's just clear. So when I was growing up, just past high school, I learned through one of my mentors three reasons why a client gets upset. Then here they are. You may have learned this through. When I was growing up, it was called est. Then it was later called Landmark. You can call it, you know, kick ass personal development and experiential work that people do where you get yelled at, they cut you open, they clean you out, they sew you back up again, Right. Well, the number one reason for an upset is miscommunication, right? So I say, hey, Genius Network morning starts at 9am Well, I didn't mention Pacific, now Gina did. But if I didn't mention Pacific, 9am means something to the East coast that's different. 9am means something different to Europe and parts of Canada and on and on, right? So that's a miscommunication of just not using the AM or the pm, right? So that happens all the time. So the way I overcome that is when I'm onboarding someone, I make sure that the communication was clear and they know what the off boarding strategy is. When I'm hiring someone, here's what I tell them. The two most important days this this may. You may want to write down because a billionaire taught me this. Now that's a little stick strategy, right? You're going to write it down. A billionaire taught me this. Add a zero. All right, the two most important days of work, I look them straight in the eye. I don't care if they're executive assistant or they're a CEO. I tell them your two step, two important days are your first and your last period. Mic drop. There's going to be a last day. So we want to be super clear that those are the two most important days. And why is the last so important? Because if you leave and you make it a train wreck, it's only going to hurt your future. And there's not going to be a recommendation here. So we want an elegant off boarding there. Or it may be a promotion where they're off boarding from what they're working to a new level and they ascend. So I make it crystal clear. And then the next thing I do when I'm vetting them, I say, now let's talk about all the things that could go wrong and have gone wrong. So I don't talk about how great they're going to be or what their deliverables are, which most people do. This isn't the hiring process. But the way I want them to stick is I want to scare them. And I say, hey, this is what could go wrong. There's going to be three upsets, and the first is miscommunication. Am I communicating clearly with you? They go, huh? So the second one is unmet expectation. This hurts, especially in relationship. Let's just say one person wants to break up, doesn't let the other person know they're not part of the process, and boom, now you're done. Could be divorce, could be engagement, it could be work. Someone gets fired. Shame on the business owner if the person they're firing doesn't know why. Right. Hire slow fire, fast. Don't know who said it, but it's been re quoted again and again. So unmet expectations in the onboarding process, if they know what the off boarding is, if they're reminded of the off boarding, what direction they can go, you're setting their expectations and then misguided intention. What does that mean? Well, someone comes to me, says, alex, you know, through your fact fractional CMO work, which is what I do, I want to make an extra million dollars in the next 12 months. I go, I'm not your guy. I'm sorry, I got to look under the hood. I don't know what we got. I don't know why you think I'm the magician. I can't join on that basis. So those are misguided intentions. Well, you know, take a look at it and then we assess it. So if the intentions are misguided. See, one of the things are, let's say Every Genius Network 10 minute talk is worth 250k, right? It could be. It could be. But only if someone activates what they learned. Right. So setting those parameters the way that 10 minute talk. I see Joel Weldon is here who's resident coach. Off. He off boards them, the 10 minute talk people. He off boards them at the end and tells them what they did well and how they can improve. So that's really an off boarding. Say, okay, you're done, then we go to Q and A. That's really an off boarding structure. Most people don't think about that. The reason I'm talking fast is because we got an hour. So I don't mean to be like Tony Robbins, but you know, you can take notes quickly. So what is offboarding by definition, what is it? But that's important. I want to communicate clearly. To me, it's inviting closure to a relationship phase. It could be engagement, it could be marriage, it could be dating, or it could be year one. It could be three months of coaching. It could be the letter of engagement for a particular client phase of work you're doing, like for a webmaster or an executive assistant. So it's inviting the closure. Like when does this thing close? If you're a coach or psychotherapist, when does each session close? Every session has offboarding. For me it's an hour. Right. So when I see 58 minutes, I go, okay, I better not go into anything too deep because I'm going to leave here raw if I do. Right. So I kind of wind it down at 45 minutes, you know, so that there's plenty of time. So here's some examples because I think examples are very important. Relationship offboarding opportunities. Engagement. What's offboarding? You either end it or you get married. Wedding. What's off boarding? You get divorced or you stay married and have kids. Right. By the way, if you have kids, that changes the relationship. Right. So there is an off boarding there. Divorce. Okay, what's the offboarding there? Well, I didn't get along with my former wife the first couple years because it just didn't work the way the divorce settlement was. Right. It was like a war, which I didn't anticipate. So the off boarding was from contempt to becoming friends again. Took about five years for me. I'm a slow learner. Death ultimate offboarding in my opinion. As I told you, my dad, I got to witness that with my son. Moving off boarding your current residence to somewhere new childbirth. Okay. Off boarding to me was cutting the umbilical cord to both my kids, Gabe and Brianna. Gabe is now 6 inches taller than me and Brianna is 1 inch taller than me. And they both go to University of Santa Barbara, California.

Right.

They're 19 and 21 respectively. And then betrayal. Now in any kind of personal relationship, betrayal is an off boarding trigger, right? Like fuck right. I doubt there isn't a person here who hasn't been betrayed. It sucks because it's unmet expectations. Now for professional ascension is an off boarding opportunity. We'll have a matrix with stick strategy secrets. What are all the off boarding opportunities? This is the best I can do with these cards this morning. Unsubscribing. That's offboarding. I no longer want to get your your email or your text. A company sale, that's offboarding. Okay. And by the way, if you've ever sold a company, if the buyer is smart, they'll hire you as a consultant for a year to two years. And that's your offboarding strategy. If you don't have one. And let's say it's a, it's a contingency sale where you know you're going to get some profits after the sale and there's like a balloon payment after sale is done, right? Well, there needs to be an off boarding process from me owning the company to me being a consultant for the company. And I've coached a few people in that arena and a few of them are a genius network. When you resign from a company and you move to another company when you're fired, that's offboarding. And when you're promoted, you're ascending. That's an off boarding strategy. So I don't want to just make it about tactics and strategies. It is all encompassing. It's all about life. And the best example academically, bachelor's degree, I've got one turns to masters. I don't have one of those. I do it at the university of hard knocks. Right. But I don't have a master's and then doctorate. Okay. And you know, I'm gonna, I'm gonna offend a few people, but I'm trying to be funny, so just humor me. BS means bullshit. Mississippi means more. And PhD means piled high and deep. That's how I feel about the know the academics these days. But like when my kids come back and tell me what the teachers are teaching, like I'm in shock. I think parents were in shock during COVID because they got to see on zoom some of the curricula that's happening. It wasn't when I was growing up. Right. So trying to be funny but this is an off boarding strategy, you know, for academics. And then what is the signal for off boarding? Well, a certificate of completion. That is so key because either they're done or you seduce them to keep ascending. So if someone comes in as high ticket closer, which is a $4,000 course for a fractional CMO assignment I have and they're in Vancouver, Canada, then the next step and I was hired to create this is high ticket sales coaching. Now they know how to close. Now they do high ticket coaching for sales. That's 7,500. And then the next level is the mastermind which is called the Dragon Mastermind. It's a, it's an Asian based company. So Dragon is the theme they go with. And so that's the Ascension model. So we make that clear during the onboarding for their lowest level. So they can anticipate, they can have expectations that are met, they can move towards that. There's no miscommunication, there's no misguided intention and they're coached through that process. I'm going to show one more card, Joe and then, and then hop in. Examples of professional are when someone renews like a genius network, when they upgrade 25k to 100k, when they go from free to fee. Many times I'll do, I'll do laser sessions for people who want to hire me and they say, you know, what do you got? I said if I show you a letter of engagement, you're not going to say yes. Let's do three 20 minute sessions together. Well, can we do one hour? No. Why not? Because each session off boards to the next. I'm not big on dating. I can't remember last time I dated. But it's better to have two dates in one day than have one long date. Because you have a beginning and an end and then you have another session together, whether it's lunch to dinner or whatever it may be. You can use your imagination. So from fee to free, I mean from free to feed, what I do is I do two or three 20 minute laser coachings and then if they don't say yes by that time, it's usually a 30 to $60,000 opportunity. So I want them to feel really good about it and then to know you're not for me or you are for me. Reviews is an off boarding strategy. If you have a store online. We happen to have in one of my clients, we have one of the largest Shopify stores for personal development and business coaching. Multiple, multiple products in that shop. And so when people buy what's called the Dragon Ready collection to make them Dragons mastermind, same client every time they complete a session, which we have Kajabi as the membership area. Every time they complete a session they're not done and they don't get the certificate of completion until they give a review. So the review is the off boarding trigger. And that's why we have so many reviews which are all legitimate because it's part and it's baked in to the client journey. Now I happen to think that's genius because we're getting so much without begging or asking, you know. But they looked at it. Okay, that's kind of cool. I go, fuck, what do you mean? I've been doing this a long time. The review is baked in to the training before they move on. And what happens when they're given a review and I say give me. Give us four stars, give us three, give us five. If you give us five all the time, it's not believable. I'd rather have four and a half stars versus five. It's much more believable. So the off boarding for each product, there's 40 in this package. It's five grand. Right? Is the review. It's like heaven without dying. And then employee to contractor. Sometimes you have to off board an employee. But they're trustworthy, you like them, you have good chemistry. But you don't want to keep them on as an employee for tax purposes. You know, if you live in certain states in the US it's not even feasible to have lots of employees just because the state is not tax friendly like the state I come from. So I turn them into a contractor. I have all the legal paperwork for that. They're netting more because now they have a small business and they're still doing the same thing. So that's a really good off boarding strategy. I'm just trying to give as many ideas as possible. So you don't think this is just about marketing, which I have a tendency to have a bias towards. So Joe, what do you think and challenge some of these things? Because I want you to go ahead and mute unmute.

Sorry about that. I said that this is really Good. And what comes to mind, I want to hear Annie Lala's thoughts on this especially when it comes to off boarding relationships, dating, relationships, love relationships, marriages, etc. The other thing I want to touch on is what about what are your thoughts on when you have to fire a client? Or, or it just, it's just there is no. You want to do it as amicably as possible. But when you're dealing with someone who's a real, either either abusive or has crossed the line in some way, what are your thoughts on that? And I not only leave that open for you but even for everyone that's, that's here participating what their thoughts are on this too because I want to leave some time for Q and A and some comments to get feedback because this, this is I think really valuable.

Well, okay, thank you for both questions. I was directing some of my presentation to Annie thinking about relationships because she sees a lot of. And a relationship is marketing. You know, you got to be a good marketer to attract someone and to elegantly, you know, end it. If that's going to be the case, then that also, you know, does matter because otherwise there's a lot of trauma involved and many times childhood trauma leads to the way someone's off boarded which is no way. There is no off boarding whatsoever that they avoid it or, or they're aloof about it. And then it's just like ah, you know, just depending on what drives you. So there's, there's many more psychological quadrants on that. But just going to the part where you got to fire someone, here's the way we do it. If you onboard that person and in a forthcoming Genius Network morning, if I'm invited, I will talk about our vetting process of how, how to hire a new employee. And we don't even talk to a potential employee without them knowing our core values online. And then they listen to a 24 hour recorded message and they get a code to go to the next page because we want them to go through a sequence of hoops without any human interaction. So we're repeating ourselves again and again and again, right? That's insane, right? Albert Einstein doing the same thing again and again expecting different results. The second page shows them their deliverables. You know, what we're expecting them to do, which there's a checkbox that they agree and they can do it. This is all before the interview. And then they give, they take a couple assessments, two of them, one of them I've made and the other one is more a little bit Like a Myers Briggs. We don't do Colby. And then we make them do a 500 word essay to see if they can write why they feel they deserve to be the ideal employee in this. Like, why should they be in the bus in this seat? If they have the core values, they belong on the bus. But if they can't do the deliverables, they're in the wrong seat. Right? That happens a lot. You can have them change seats and then the final thing is we make them do a two minute YouTube video on why they feel they deserve to be an employee. Now, I'm, let's say before the end of the year again, if I'm invited back or next year, I'll do that. That's an hour presentation. But we are so clear, when we bring someone on, we hire slow, that firing just becomes an expression of what they didn't do. So on that second page, where all the deliver deliverables were and they signed on it and I had the talk with them, the speech is first and last day are the two most important days. Right? And the last day can be either a promotion or you're let go, or for other reasons, you leave. And here are the worst things that can happen, or here's some of the things that will go wrong. And just so we don't have any miscommunication, unmet expectation, or misguided intention, the three upsets, I just want to present that to you. So are you still on board? And they say yes, Then we ask them for three references. And we don't ask the references anything other than what was their greatest strength when they worked with you? What was their greatest weakness when they worked with you? And Brad Smart taught me this over 20 years ago. He was a client. And you introduced me to him. Joe. I was at his house in Chicago. I remember. He's a. He's a diver, by the way. I don't know if you knew that he has.

I was scuba diving with him in Galapagos. And by the way, everyone, that's the guy that wrote the book, top grading, where all this eight players stuff came from.

Yeah. And so what we do to off board the interview is I say, okay, what would referral one say is going to be your greatest strength? What will referral one say is your greatest weakness? So I'm not asking the candidate what their strength and weakness is, because normally I hear my weaknesses. I work too hard, I'm too committed. Right? All that. Right. I'm playing my violin, which I used to. What I do instead Is I see how well are they with communication? So Joe, going back to the question, they know they're going to get fired because I just bring up page number two, which I'll teach in the future, and I'll say, look, this and this and this and this hasn't been happening. And it's way before they're fired. So it's, you know, three strikes they're out. So they're told they're, they're brought in for a review, second review, and then you know what happens after the second one. They usually take themselves out. So it's never uncomfortable if firing is uncomfortable. And it is. And I used to be not very good at it. And then I was an asshole about it. See, when I don't know how to do something, I overcompensate. You know, just like the government, you know, they find a bomb in a water bottle like 25 years ago. Now we can't take liquids onto a plane, right? So it's over compensation, man. So that's what I did. And then the just right, you know, Goldilocks principle is, well, strike one, strike two. And then they typically will come to me say I gotta go, this is not right for me. And what Brad Smart and Jeff, his son, who I think, you know, no offense to Brad, but I think Jeff is even more a better teacher. He's younger. Obviously the, the key with the, the mis hire is putting everything into effect. It's usually 15 times that person's pay for the year. You know, if you add up all the, all the opportunity costs. So if you have trouble firing, it's probably because you don't have a good offboarding strategy and they're not aware of it. I know it sounds self serving because the topic here is offboarding. But to make them stick as an employee or to make it stick as a former employee, both are stick strategies, right. And both can be clean. You can still be friends after they're gone. I would, I prefer for them to notice it because if I haven't set those parameters and they don't know what the off boarding boundaries are, then, you know, shame on me. So, so that's my answer, Joe, and I hope that's for now, it's good enough. Key point, offboarding is most effective if it's anticipated. So I just got set up for this. So if they don't anticipate the off boarding of ascending or leaving, then it's going to be traumatic depending on the type. I'm traumatized with shit like that because relationships are Important to me. I believe it's not how well we get along and maybe Annie can debate this, but I believe it's how elegantly we reconcile when we don't get along. I'm flawed. I'm going to fuck up if we can't reconcile differences and I'm the wrong guy. You know, in both in business and in personal life, I don't do it deliberately. But when it happens, there's a reconciliation process, right? Offboarding from the trauma, upboarding from a great night's sleep is an example. Like when you have a great night's sleep and I go to work out early in the morning, like 5:15am If I had a shitty night's sleep, the off boarding from sleep sucks. If I had a great night's sleep, then I feel great. I do certain things in my bedroom so that sleep is enhanced through white noise, binaural music and then air purifier, which makes a big difference. Trust is activated with anticipation. So if I anticipate a dog is going to bite me, I trust the dog. I'm never going to touch the dog. If I anticipate the dog is going to love me, well, I trust the dog, I'll pet the dog. So trust is not good or bad inherently to me. It's what I can predict and anticipate or what's unpredictable or what's expectations that are not met. I don't mean to get psychological, but you know, with off boarding, if it's anticipated, if it's predicted, it just makes the relationship so much cleaner in my opinion, with the client, with the employee, with the family member and with the lover or partner. So I'll give you a case study. High ticket closer is three months, right? And I, I gave that before, it's four grand. It's a great example, I mentioned it before. So they go from High Ticket closer and we tell them if everything goes well. I love three, right? Easiest one, two, three. Three blind mice, three wise men. You go to Google, type in power of three, you'll see why three so powerful, right? Two is not enough. One is slavery. Four is sometimes too much. I love three, so it just works for me. So they go from this thing High Ticket Closer. In the orientation or onboarding of High Ticket Closer, they. They're talked about, it's talked about High Ticket Coach. When you get your certification, you'll be invited to High Ticket coach, which is 7,500, 7.5 thousand, right? And then if you have the revenue, because it's revenue specific, then you'll be invited to the Dragon Mastermind which is 25 or 35k if they make 7 figures is 35k. If they make 6 figures is 25k. So each ascension is made so much cleaner because there's a lot line drawn in the sand of getting offboarded from one. They're done. There's no much. There's nothing else to do. There's no scope creep. I don't know if you've ever worked with webmasters, IT professionals or copywriters. They don't off board the work. It just, just keeps going on and on and on because it's never perfect. It's never just right. So I just go for iteration. All right, it's not going to be perfect. Let's test it. And we off board after this time frame and after we get these projects done. So it's just cleaner and more anticipated. Living life is unanticipated anyway so just, just it brings more certainty to you. Unanticipated offboarding causes trauma. I'm a good example of it at any given day. So I was taught this by Lisa Sasevich and she just wrote this. It was in 2006 at at the National Speakers Association. We were both keynoting and Lisa used to be a genius network member and so she wrote down PS1, PS2, PS3. What does that mean? Was it's not postscript. It's problem solution one leads to problem solution two leads to problem solution three. That I learned that almost 20 years ago. That is so elegant. So for example, for me, Conversion Secrets is what people started with. Well, I don't have any traffic. I need more traffic. No you don't. You need to plug the holes in the barrel so the water is not leaking out or the wine, whatever your persuasion. So take Conversion Secrets first. Now that's the first problem. And then the training with coaching teaches you to solve the problem. That's PS1. That leads to PS2. What's the next problem you have? I don't have enough traffic. Well, John Reese came up who lived right down the street, smart guy, had a million dollar day in 2006. Dear friend of mine, dear friend of Joe's Traffic Secrets. So he had traffic secrets and I coached him on his three day presentation. He had, I think it was in Florida, long time ago. Legends were at that. And it was later bought by Russell Brunson, former irritating student who's now my teacher with funnel creation. That's so irritating. But I'm grateful for it. Traffic Secrets ends up solving problem number two. So that's like A1 goes to B1, point B1 becomes point A2 goes to B2. And then what's the third? Well, shit, I have the traffic, I know how to convert, but I'm working too hard. P3, problem three is scaling secrets. Because you're scaling right now, you bring on teams and you solve that third problem. You can go on and on if you wanted, but doing that in threes. Now, when we make an offer for P1, we tell them about P2 and P3. You'll get your certificate of completion offboarding. Then you go through the second one, certificate of completion offboarding. You get the third one. The whole thing takes 18 months if you really want to give it your all. If you don't, it's in the first three months and you can stop if you want. So we set those expectations in the beginning for Genius Network. If you go to the website, foundation is year one, growth is year two, and acceleration is year three. Gina, nod your head yes if this is accurate. Okay, I want to. I want to remind everyone, because we don't talk about this shit enough and because I'm not, everything I do is pro bono for Genius Network, then I have the right to say this. So foundation, growth and acceleration. Now you could have three of anything. You can have three of anything. But those are the three that we've marked. And then I got to talk about why people failed with Ascension. Number one reason I get why. Why can't I ascend? Well, because you have a lack of engagement, which means bad off boarding. See, people don't know what the light at the end of the tunnel is like. If they don't know what the end is, then there's no time constraint for them to finish the thing. We'll do it after 12 sessions. No, we'll do it after 12 sessions or three months, whichever comes sooner. That's offboarding, you know, time or the actual volume of what you're teaching. So a lack of engagement is bad offboarding because they don't even know what the off boarding looks like. Therefore they're not engaged. But if they know they only have three months, they're going to stay engaged. Otherwise they lose. If they're only at session eight because of things that happened, it's amazing all the things that happen in between the excuses. I've heard them all right in November. And I don't mean to be, you know, I'm not trying to be slick with this, with comedy, but I've heard this year after year after Year. And anytime a training I've done, and that is there's someone, there's someone's aunt or uncle who dies in late November. So they can't continue. Okay. I never believe it because they can't even name who the aunt and the uncle was. But they come up with that shit, right? And so they come up with an excuse. And I can't tell you the number of times I don't hear it anymore because I don't do the training. But there's always an excuse because there wasn't a clear off boarding. And so if they know you got three months or 12 sessions, whatever comes first, they are engaged. So I would highly recommend you do that and you can reach out to me privately on that. So profitable offboarding is with effective onboarding. I know I keep saying this again and again, but I figure if I say the same thing and give the same sermon, some people will take action because you hear it a different way. So in the onboarding, you tell them what the off boarding looks like and, and people ask me, what do I say, you know, to off board them? How do I close them, you know, to off board? So Here are the two questions. Tony Robbins, been using it since 1989 to attend his UPW events. What would happen if you didn't continue? I say something terrible. Nothing, nothing would happen. If you're happy with that, then you don't need to continue. But what could happen if you did continue? Right? Would and could. Elegant, simple. You don't need to be a salesperson. I have coaches who hate to sell and they close people on that. So cultural offboarding, like a rite to passage, a bat mitzvah, a bar mitzvah. Right. A teenager, Jewish kid, girl or boy going to adulthood. Financial support. I told my kids after, at age 23, I'm off boarding you. No more funds. So they're preparing. They're preparing. And I'm getting a lot more text back and forth now. Right. Spiritual and religious. How is death offboarding? Right. So those are just, you know, examples. Again, I'm repeating myself just so it sticks. Offboarding invites a closure to a phase. Relationship, job, a year and a mastermind. Think about life and death. Joe just recently was supporting Chris Foss. He's 100k member. With hostage negotiation, the off boarding is the outcome. Are we killing this terrorist? Are we going to get him out alive? We don't want any victims for the hostages. There's an off boarding process he naturally goes through. So here are the three steps in closing. So there's time for questions. Here are the three steps for effective offboarding. Number one, set expectations of how this phase will end during the onboarding process. Do it from the very beginning. I'm telling you, it will feel so good to you. It'll be like you've had, you gave your, your own therapy session, right? And your clients, customers, patients will thank you for it. Number two, clearly communicate the next ascension phase. I communicate the next two ascension phases. Now, we have an NLP expert here. He's a dear friend of mine, Michael Stevenson. I don't do that nlp. I had a much more effective teacher for my purposes. That was Carol Mondosian, my mother, right? I used to tell her, mom, I didn't lie. The truth changed. You know, that's the way I tried to negotiate with her, you know, growing up in high school and all that. But the ascension phase, if you clearly communicate that you are future pacing them, you're putting them into the future of expectations and then express the intention during the relationship. What, what do you expect from them? Well, it's 12 sessions or three months, whatever comes first. If you set those expectations in the onboarding, the off boarding becomes automatic. And that means letting go of someone because they should know way before you're going to have that conversation with them. And then clarify and confirm your offboarding plan with your team, with your executive team, if you have one. What is it? You probably haven't thought about it or talked about it. You may call it something else. I'm doing this presentation so I look smart to all of you. It helps my self esteem and self image. But I'm done and I'm open to questions. So that's about it. My job is done. Yours is about to begin.

I love it. I love it. So we have about eight minutes for some rapid fire Q and A. So raise your digital hand or just come off of mute. And first of all, Alex, thank you so much. This is amazing. And I cannot wait to watch the replay and just get it all going on. So raise your digital hand or just come off mute and say hello or type your question in the chat. Whatever you want to do.

Annie, why don't you go ahead and comment on this?

I was just curious what are the.

Similarities and differences to make a powerful onboard and off boarding? And in particular, what's common to both, since every offboarding is an onboarding to something else, even death possibly. But so what is common if you're going to construct an onboarding and an off boarding? What do we have as similar in Both.

Annie, it's a great question. I was hoping you would chime in because it's very important, especially in the work that you do. So what's common is expectations setting. So setting expectations in onboarding is setting expectations for that off boarding. Right. And then that off boarding, setting expectations for the new onboarding. Right? So point A to point B, point B1 becomes point A2. Right. So expectations management is number one. Next is clearly communicating what not only is expected to them, but how this dialogue is going to happen. So I'll give you an example. Some people love to text me. Some people like to email me. Some people like to call me. I prefer text if they're close to me because I'll check text a lot more than I'll check email. So I want to communicate with them. What is my preferred way of communicating? I have people. I just closed my Facebook account. I didn't shut off anyone. I closed it just for. For reasons not. Not more political than anything else, right? So I just shut it down. And people have been using my reach, you know, to get more reach for themselves. So I shut it down. And the miscommunication was, I'm getting, you know, calls. Why did you block me on Facebook? I said, I didn't block you on Facebook. I didn't think I had to call everyone and tell. I just. I turned it. I didn't. I didn't delete it. I turned it off. But it's probably going to be indefinitely, you know, so that's. Communication is the second thing, right? And then the final thing is intention. So in relationship, one person may have different intentions than the other. One person may deal with conflict different than the other. So setting intentions is very important because if I know what the deliberate intention is of someone else, and I can predict and anticipate, you know, their next move, right? If I know they're going to steal my stuff and they actually state it, which I've heard before in an onboarding conversation. It's like I said, well, we're not going to invite you in. I go, are you serious? She goes, yeah. And it was like a. Like a language barrier. But I was so grateful, you know, because God bless him, I said, well, I can't bring you on board. I'm sorry. I mean, maybe it's okay in your culture, but it's not an artist, right? Because this is my intellectual property. So setting expectations, communication, and then the intentions, which are really the inverse of the three upsets I talk about. All right. You look great as usual, Annie. Thank you all right?

We're going to Daniel and then Katie. We have about four minutes left, so rapid fire. Daniel.

Sorry. Of course, the whole, the whole 40, 56 minutes. My dog doesn't bark and as soon as I'm about to go off mute, the dog, dog starts digging. Babe, take the dog that's offboarding right there.

You learned, you already learned from the presentation. You just offboarded your dog.

Awesome stuff. Alex. I love, love, love this topic, especially the handoff between ascension levels. Like I think that's brilliant. And then the pre framing around that. It's fantastic. Especially since sometimes coaching or masterminds are outcome based at the different level. So why not have those very clear kind of lines in the sand. You also mentioned something about kind of this offloading and you know, Joe and Dean have spoken about it. I love marketing the sort of before, during and after, like focus on an after unit specialist. I like wrote that down at some point. It's like, how would you go about kind of building that role and putting some energy behind it? Because I think it could be, I mean, between the LTV of your customer and you know, there's a long list of why that's such a massive position and I think very few companies are even focusing there. And so could you shed any perspective on that?

Yes, we. That's a great question and thank you for that, Daniel, and thanks for off boarding your dog. Although I don't mind hearing the barking with because they love unconditionally, you know, they're different than cats in my opinion. But that's a different.

So.

So the, what we do that makes life very simple is we have an on and off boarding concierge. It's like a concierge in a hotel if you have a platinum card or a black card, Amex, they have concierges that, you know, they're assigned to you. And we assign one concierge to 50 people. That, that is the sweet spot. You know, we're blessed enough to have, you know, lots of high end people over 7,000 who paid four grand, right, over the course of three years. So that concierge, or I don't know what the plural is, concierges, right. That person ends up becoming fully responsible for that transition, including if the off boarding means they're leaving and not coming back or they're ascending. Now if anyone here has a mastermind, you know, how you know if you don't have an off boarding strategy that's crystal clear is if you're wondering if someone's going to renew if you're wondering if someone's going to renew and that person is important to you, you don't have offboarding. And offboarding is more. It's not meant to be scolding. Upboarding is more of a mindset of a heart set than anything else. If your team starts thinking offboarding, it changes the way you define boundaries. And most companies don't have boundaries. Most many relationships do if you've done the work, but organizations don't. The more familiar you are with a close friend, they leave and you go, what the fuck? Why don't you renew? Oh, come on, I got enough of it. You know, I can't tell you. A number of times it's probably broken Joe's heart, you know, and all the shit he does for people and people will like, leave. They don't mean anything from it, but they don't realize that, you know, there are consequences of that and they had a very valuable level of contribution. So if there is a clear offboarding strategy, not a threat, but a line in the sand during the onboarding, then there's no unmet expectation. As they're moving through the relationship, they're always thinking of renew, renew, renew. I firmly believe, again, this is not a scolding or any kind of criticism. I believe we should talk about foundation growth and acceleration a lot more often than we do in genius. I really do believe every fucking event just, you know, 30 seconds until it's steeped like a teabag in hot water in the minds and hearts of everybody here. Right. So I'm guiding Joe from the side here right now. Not a sage from the stage, but guide from the side type of shit.

Right.

All right, thanks for your question. And Katie, hi.

Hi, Alex.

I.

This is a great presentation. I have a really quick question because I know we're wrapping up is when you're looking at the hiring process and then the off boarding. So onboarding and offboarding, how often? And I'd just love to get your take on this with SOPs and having that expectation. How often do you. Do you have that? Obviously that expectation up front, but then within the off boarding. But how? Within the. Even the term of someone working for you or working as a team member, how often are you checking in on that or what's your take on it?

What? During the first hire, they do a lot of shadowing with me, like at a restaurant. Right. So the first check in is two weeks.

Okay.

The second check in is four weeks after that. So within six weeks we have two check ins. Right. And then after that time, you know, they're on board or they're not, right? And then the next check in is three months after that. So initially I've, I noticed all the books in the background. If a book has lots of table of contents like how to Win Friends, Influence People, Think and Grow Rich, it's a lot easier book to read, right? Because the chapters are short and you're onboarding offboarding each chapter, you feel like you've, you know, you've done something. But if a chapter is 50 pages, you go, man, I'm only, I, I'm very OCD. So if I'm like 10 pages into a 50 page chapter, I get pissed. You know, I didn't complete the damn thing. You know, cognitive dissonance for me. So I like to check in, you know, twice within six weeks and definitely first two weeks, right? And then one final word. And I learned this from Evan Pagan, but he doesn't realize he taught it to me. He told me that I mentioned it at an event that I went to his, but he's the one who taught me so I want to off board the acknowledgment to him. In the first two weeks, we do what's called an rcq. And R stands for result, C stands for challenge, Q stands for question. And so for, for two weeks before 5pm Every day, they email me or slack me and the whole team. Here's one result I got today, here's one challenge I'm facing, here's one question I have. And if you do that every single day, if they miss two, you're fired. I haven't had to fire anyone, but they do it within two weeks. Sometimes I have it go another four weeks. And so everyone is seeing, hey, that is a result. Some people say result is, you know, I went to the toilet, right? So they go, no. Well, it's not the kind of result I'm looking for, right? So we don't. Just because the pipes are working, it's not going to help our bottom line. So what's the result? What's the challenge? And hopefully if they're smart, whatever challenge they faced, what's the question according to that challenge? Now, in a perfect world, the challenge and the question becomes the result the next day. See what I'm saying? And so you have that ongoing growth. So initially, if they check in every single day before 5pm, why before 5? Because I like to give an answer that day and it takes about 10 minutes and you can do it by email. And now what you have is Documentation. So if you need to fire them in the first two weeks, you go, what are you talking about? Look. Look at the results. You got no results here, so hopefully that's useful. And you can follow up with me privately if you want more.

Thank you.

All right, cool.

Yeah. Alex, if anybody does have any other questions, can they email you? You want to put your email.

No, no, don't email me. Don't email me. Text me.

Hit them up on Facebook.

No, they use Facebook messenger. And I go, fuck, I haven't even been there ever. So 4, 1 5. I'm auditory. Okay, 4154-8874-0641-5488-7406. Now, if you have a burning desire, you have a question. Every day you don't text me, you'll go down 10% of ever texting me. Within 10 days, you won't text me. So you can look at that as a challenge. I call that offboarding. So good luck. Thank you for allowing me to share, and we'll talk about vetting maybe next year or later this year. But I get so much joy out of Genius Network, especially because I live in Scottsdale, because I get to drive to HQ in Tempe. So I love Joe. He's one of the few men I go I love you without saying man afterwards. Just, I love you. So, thanks, everybody. Okay.

I hope you found that video awesome and useful. So if you want to get a free copy of my book, I want you to click here. And if you want to watch some more videos that will be useful and awesome, click here. Go ahead. You're over here. Do it now.

Come on.

Thank you.

Watch them.