The Wow Factor: How Mind Mapping Can Catapult Your Business | Gary Klaben

You've heard the expression, one picture is worth a thousand words. What if I told you one picture that you create could be worth millions of dollars to you? It's true. If that picture was a mind map. The term mind map was first coined by Tony back in the 1970s to define a diagram used to visually organize information. Gary Clabban has been using mind maps for years with his clients in his wealth advisory practice. It's generated well over $6 million in business. Aside from using it with his own clients, Gary has developed over 321 mind maps for entrepreneurs and individuals. Gary recently did one for me at Genius Network and it was extremely powerful. Basically, I could look at a single page and, and see all of the things related to Genius Network. What people want, what it provides. It's just awesome. On a personal note, I think it's important for you to know that Gary has served our country as an infantry officer in the 82nd Airborne Division. He is also a graduate of West Point and both of his children have graduated from West Point as well. So, Gary, thank you for your service. Gary's tit.

That's cool.

Gary's title is the wow Factor. How Mind Mapping Can Catapult yout Business. Please welcome Gary Clabbin.

Awesome. Thank you. So how many in here have actually seen mind maps or know what they are? Raise your hand. Now keep them up. If you've actually built a mind map, you put one together and keep it up. If you've built one specifically targeted right to your customer or client, couple of you, okay. That is the powerful part of it, the most powerful part. It's the distinguishing difference between a regular mind map and a focused mind map. So what are mind maps all about? First, they're very visual. So about 50% of our brain is taken up with visual and visual contact. Looking at something and. And bring that in gives you lots of information very quickly. And this is something that's very hard for most understand when you're dealing with linear or regular information on page, especially words, how that works. So we want something that can see the words very easily and it can interconnect. And that's something the mind map will do. When it does that, basically you get this real aha, clarity moment. And this is what happens to most people as they get this huge wow if that map is really focused on them. So as a company, we had a problem. We have a thing called in the wealth advisory business called shadow work. You may not have heard of it, but it's work done behind the scenes. That our clients don't see. And as we were working through the decades, we were getting more and more and more of this and weren't able to get paid for it because of the way the structure in the industry worked. So we were looking for something to make it very clear to our customers and clients what they were getting so they could understand the very complex nature of this very intangible world we live in with them. And so this was something we struggled with for a long time. And basically it was looking at this issue. We have what they can see on the front stage. When they see us once in a while, we communicate with them, but they really couldn't see the backstage part of it. And we had to figure out a way for them to see that, but not only see it, but understand and be very clear about it. So they could see two things, be very clear about it and see the work that was being done so that we could actually charge them the appropriate amount for that value that they were getting. So our challenge in our world was to get paid for this. And basically the bottom line was we had to go to something like a quarterly retainer. Nothing else worked. This is many years. I spent 15 years trying to find a one pager. Something that would make it really, really simple for our clients to completely understand everything about this intangible world they're dealing with their taxes and their investments and their benefits and their cash flow and all these other items. If you're going to write anything down today, I would just write this down and nothing else. If you make the map all about them, it's the difference between a 1 times and a 10 times when it comes to clarity and understanding. And also cost, revenue or value that you will be giving to them, you can receive back. That's it. It's all about them. If you always make it all about them, they'll get a huge wow factor and they will really understand. Be very clear about what you are doing for them with the value they're receiving. So let me talk about, you know, what is my map now? This is Noah Katz's store. I don't know. I jumped in there the other day and took a picture of your store. But really I want to talk about a grocery list now. I'm going to be a little bit non PC here. So my wife was really ill a couple years back and I have two children now. I've never been to a grocery store making that up, but let's assume I haven't been. I know what everything looks like and she Wrote this list up and says, honey, you got to go to the store. The kids have to eat, so go there and do it. So, sure enough, I go to the store. I walk in, I get one of his carts. I look at the top, I see milk, and I look down the aisle there, and I say, well, there's dairy. So I drove my cart down there, I see the milk, I put it in there. The next one it says is Cheerios. Oh, I think that was aisle six. I rolled back there, put that in. Next one is eggs. I know what that's. I was just there. I go right back over here. No, guys actually do this. Guys actually do this. And the worst part is, I get to the checkout line, I'm looking through my list. I forgot the toilet paper. I'm not going home without the toilet paper. I got to go back again. Now, that's a very linear approach. Here's what a mind map looks like. So on this mind map, I'm going to blow it up for you. Let's look at aisle one and aisle two. Is that a little simpler, you think? For me? For you. And all the way around that store. Now, if my wife was on her game, she would have done this for me, because it's all about me this time. It's about me grocery shopping. Right? It's about them. So it gives you an idea what a mind maps focused on the person you're trying to help out. Now, the interesting thing, I asked Joe last time I was here to go ahead and take his business, to get him clear about what he does for us. This is not for us. This is only for Joe's eyes. It's for Dan, it's for Eunice, it's for Rachel. It's for everybody and his firm so they can understand what it is about us. So we walked through a little exercise here last time. There's wonderful. Joe got the heart, the initial transformer. Guys, that's us. All right, and so this is Joe's mind map. Now, I can leave it up for a minute. And if you were Joe, you'd get this real wow factor very quickly. But I'm going to walk you through this a little bit so you can see what I'm talking about. Well, by the way, we have all this for you. You're going to have a handout. You don't need to take pictures. All right, first thing, what are we doing? We're trying to seek clarity, aren't we? All of us, we're very innovation driven. We want to simplify Everything. And we know we want. Joe tells us. And I totally agree with an ALF business. Right? Easy, lucrative and fun. This is what we want. How about this next one here? So does this say what you want in growth? Look at that for a minute. Are these the kind of things that you are like a 10 times thinker? How about pain points? Those things that we suffer with that Joe's trying to get very clear about. He wants to really get clear about this so he can put materials together and speakers and everybody else to do all this. Connections. We all love to connect, don't we? Culture. Tons of you guys in here, generous givers. It's just wonderful the way you do things. And finally, strengths, continual perseverance. You guys go at it hard all the time. Now this is for Joe. This is to make Joe clear. So if I was a consultant and I was his coach, I'm making him clear about this. I'm giving him this map back so he can have this anytime. He I told Joe, anytime you're not clear what you're doing, pull the map out and look at it. Within 30 to 60 seconds you'll be clear. That fast? That fast. So I didn't do the next step for Joe which would be to go out and do it. What does he do for us? So he would do a map for. So we could read about what we want from him. But instead he introduced me to Ari Meisel a couple months ago. Now I'd read his book Less doing and I'd known about his firm. I talked to people that knew about him. They told me what to do with him. This all took place over several years. I listened to that. I love marketing about Ari and what he did. And the interesting part about it was until I saw this, I didn't really understand everything he did and particularly for me. I'm going to go to the section that kind of. I just shot out of my desk after 30 seconds of looking at this because I needed all of that. And I was on the. My team was on the phone right away and they bought the service immediately. That's a wow. He was speaking to me. Ari was through this mind map very clearly. All the other stuff I did all the reading and everything didn't matter. That's what happened very clearly for me. So what's the practical applications to this high end coaching? I just mentioned what I did with Joe. If you're in high end coaching, let me tell you what's the whole thing is in the absence of value, price matters or price right. It doesn't matter. If you're going to show this absolute amount of value, especially the very intangible area of ideas and thoughts and everything, that's what high end coaching is. The second area, transformative discussions. It is amazing when I'm in my office and I've got a couple there and we're going through their large estates and they're talking about their children, their grandchildren, and we're walking them through and they see it up on the mind map and their tears are coming down and they're absolutely getting totally transformed that moment. The maps really help significantly in doing that and then bringing clarity to really complex issues. You guys are in a lot of fields out here where it's very complex what you do, and you're trying to get that down very easy and simply and visually so you can see it. So what do you do? What's practical for you? So I'll go to Joel. What's Joel's Aisle one? We're going to go back to this. You can do a map yourself. Joel, yours is about coaching, right? Wouldn't it be nice if that first one was called coaching? You can write down those really key things for you. How about aisle two? I'm going to go back over to Noah out there. There's something you do for your customers coming in that store about maybe navigating around the market. I can't find anything in the darn grocery store, but if you could get me clear about that, I'd love that. How about the rest of you? How would that be? Same thing. Aisle three, four, five, six. Think about that. I've got the handout. I'll be here later for questions.