Epiosde 436: Stay Aware of What’s Going on Around You with Glenn Hopper

Welcome to this episode of the Million Dollar Mastermind. I'm Larry Weddell.

And before we get started, if you.

Want to know exactly how to win again and again, go to Wydell on winning.com webinar now to watch something I've put together for you. Now let's get going into this episode of Million Dollar Mastermind.

I'm here with Glenn Hopper and we're talking about winning. And Glenn, let's talk more about. It's a great lead in to a big area of affects, a big area of winning. But that whole idea we were finishing up with on the previous episode of staying aware of what's going on around you because that applies to everything. And it does because, you know, we're all connected. Everything's connected, you know, personal life, business life, your kids, your ac, your wife, your kids, your neighbors, your, you know, your staff, your employees, your competitors, your community. Everything is related. And if you get the easiest thing to do is to become consumed by the tyranny of the urgent and become a firefighter putting out the tragedy, the fire that started today and you lose focus. It's not that people are bad people who lose focus on these things. They're good people, hardworking. But what happened is they let themselves lose control of their life. And you can stay in control of your life when you're just a new employee on a job somewhere, not let yourself be hounded or get loaded down with too many commitments and this, that and the other. But it doesn't mean you're a bad person. But staying aware of what's going on around you is really a skill. I mean, that's a decision you have to make. It's not just, hey, that's a good tip. That's a decision that you have to make if you're going to be able to move up in life and have bigger responsibilities, run your own company, have a bigger division inside your company. And does that make sense to you?

It does.

And I've been thinking a lot about this lately in this world where everyone is working from home and we're all just two dimensional faces on a zoom screen. And here's what I'm, we were talking in the previous episode about people that are doing things for you up and down the line with, you know, you're, you're just one part of the, of the wheel. You're one cog that provides something and knowing where you fit in the, in the whole process is great. But if you don't, if you don't have the empathy and you can't step outside and understand what's going on with these other people, then it's going to be harder to work with them. And what I see in Work from Home is, and I've even been guilty of this, and I'll give a perfect example that I caught myself doing recently and, and tried to correct it. So I've, I've got this project, it's a several months project that's been going and really about seven months now. And we had to replace someone on the project and everyone who's been on this project for the prior six months. We all know each other, we've talked a lot and we're all familiar with what's going on. When I brought the new person in, I found myself so focused on the project that instead of treating them like a person and asking them about how they're doing and all that, I immediately started just overloading them with the fire hose of information to get them caught up on the project. And then I had to stop and realize what would that feel like to me if I walked into a new situation and nobody's even asked my name? I didn't even introduce them to the, and I realized it quick, within the first 10 minutes. But how would that feel to walk into a system and just be dumped in like you're a robot or a piece of software that's going to solve this? And so I think that it's easier to do that. When you think about that the computer is the medium in which we're communicating. You're used to, like I said, typing a search into a browser and the computer just spits it back. So when you're looking at people on the, on the computer, on Zoom, or sometimes if they have their camera off, they're just a voice. It's easy to find yourself treating them like they're just a program in a computer and who cares? Let me just dump this information in and I'll get the work product from them.

Yeah.

And when you moved up the ladder, what, how did, how quick did you start moving up the ladder and getting in higher positions and moving towards that CEO position at all?

So it was slow but steady going back to my military. So I, when I came in, I moved up through the ranks pretty quickly because I was aggressively taking the exams and doing, you know, there was, there's a time requirement, but I was doing the exams, doing all the extracurriculars, making sure that my uh, scores on performance evals and, and physical fitness and all were high. Just doing everything I could to move up. And then when I got out, I started as a product manager and I. There were a couple of times where I might have practiced a little too much brinkmanship, but it ended up paying off. Where I would basically tell. I remember a conversation I had with my boss. They had promised me some razor promotion and then said, oh, when it came time, they said, oh, sorry, we can't do that. There were budget cuts. And in that meeting, I said, well, I've got another job, I'll see you, and just said I was going to leave and I didn't have another job and I had a young family at home, so maybe not the smartest thing, but it was a poker, you know, it was a poker hand. And I bluffed and they, they didn't call me on it. They went back, my boss went to her boss and they came back and they got me the raise and promotion that I wanted. That was maybe the most dangerous one. But beyond that, it was, you have to advocate for yourself. And some people don't like to do that. But if you're working really hard and you're doing all this stuff and nobody knows, sometimes, maybe only your boss knows and your boss may not have the power to help you. So I would always make sure that I had audience and not. Not that I was trying to go around my boss. This is especially something you don't do in the military. But make sure that there's visibility into what you're doing and that people know who did something and appreciate the work. And I think that a lot of my moving up came from, you have to be. You have to be good at your job first. But being good at your job is not enough. You have to advocate for yourself. And it's. I always say the three things I hate to talk about the most are politics, religion, and myself. But the third of those serves a purpose. And I don't mind talking about myself when it's to reach some end. But yeah, I think you've got to work hard and be sure that the right people see what you're doing is the recipe for moving up.

Hey, listen, there's a lot of information online, but there aren't a lot of people who have actually done something. In my case, I've actually built a successful business, has accrued over $5 billion.

In assets under management, and has done.

Well even during trying times. Now, if you want to know exactly how I've done this, go to white ellenwinning.com webinar Now, I've compressed a decade of learning into five short weeks. Just for those of you who want to give yourself an incredible advantage and are tired of waiting and watching others move up.

Otherwise, you get lost. And that's like. It's the same thing with your company or your products, and you have to do things to make sure people notice you. The biggest myth in business, I learned this a long time ago, was build a better mousetrap, and the world will beat a path to your door. You can build a better mousetrap, and if you don't market it, it's just going to gather dust in your garage. In fact, I have a cousin. I won't get into his background, but he's a big inventor. But he. In 1978, he built a portable EKG unit. And this was after. Well, I won't get into it. But anyway, he had all kind of inventions, but this was actually did. He was a doctor, you know, but he despised marketing, and it just gathered dust in his garage. And then, you know, a decade later, somebody else figured out how to do it, and there you go. But, you know, you have to. I like that phrase. You have to advocate for yourself. It's not that you're. What I found is that people, you know, when you're in a leadership position, it gets ingrained that if we have any success, it goes to the team. It goes to the people. You know, the people that if there's any. We screw up, it's my fault. You know, I'm the leader. I'm. I'm not supposed to let that happen. And you get in that mindset where you don't want to take credit, you don't want to. You know, it's not that you're Simon Peubert. It's just part of the role. It's how you do well in that role is you're. You're thinking about your people, how to get them in the best positions and this and the other. And so you're not advocating for yourself that much. One of the hardest things to do, Glenn, is to get people. When I start these interviews and I meet people that I haven't got before, it's like, you know, what would you say is your biggest achievement or something? It's like pulling. You can have somebody. They won the Nobel Prize or something, and, well, you. Oh, we had this and that the other. But they get so much credit, they don't really have to brag about themselves, and so they never do it. But when you're on the way up, the CEO is not going to be ignored. The CEO if the company does well, CEO is going to get all the credit and attention they need. But not everybody inside the company that made that win happen, that helped them win the super bowl, is necessarily going to be recognized. And you do have to advocate for yourself in the right kind of way to make sure you're not trampled and your contributions are not minimized. And how long before you founded did you find this? You didn't find you were the founder of this company, you just became the CEO, Right.

So, yeah, so I'm the CFO at Sandline Global.

Yeah, I read that.

GR Ventures, I was a co founder in and I was an early partner in both New Box Communications and an HCT investment. So I've been in those. You know, from full blue sky, the only thing with your product or company is what you've drawn on the whiteboard to, you know, those first articles of organization and setting up the LLC and all that. So I've been in those early stages of companies as well. But these last two companies I've come in, I've been brought in to help them adopt these processes that I talk about in the book. And to go from this startup mentality where it's sort of this cowboy, no processes in place, just an approach of just everybody's going to work hard and we're going to figure this out, to systemizing and putting processes in place so that companies can then grow to that next level. And that's where I've spent the past four or five years of my career as helping those companies.

And does your, is that part of what Sandline does or is that just a book you wrote from your experiences?

So that's a book I wrote from my experience. So Sandline is a, an E discovery company that, that we basically just provide legal services for corporate and law firm clients. And the company that I was at before Cicada did the same thing. So there's a lot of consolidation in the industry. And with Cicada I was brought in to help them sell the company. And with Sandline, I was brought in with the idea of helping them to eventually raise money and to be able to be the kind of the lead person and future M and A activity.

Well, E discovery. What's an E discovery? I understand what a document management service, or at least I think I do, is, but an ediscovery service. What is that?

So in, in a lawsuit, the plaintiff and the defendant in a lawsuit, there's before it goes to trial, there's the discovery period. So in the discovery period, there's interrogatories. There's questions that go back and forth and there's also both the plaintiff and the defendant have to turn over relevant information. And it used to be years ago when you needed to turn over relevant information, if you were suing Ford Motor Company about the Ford Fairlane seatbelt situation or whatever, there'd be an army of paralegals that would go into Ford and they would get bankers boxes and fill them up with files and they'd take them back to the attorney's office and they would go through the files and look for things that are they relevant to the case or not? They're kind of looking for the smoking gun. And it was very manpower intensive. Intensive. But imagine all that work in a digital world. So when there's more and more data every day of the year and it just, it's only growing. So there's emails, there's Word documents, there's Excel files, CAD drawings. So it's the amount of data that's out there, it's impossible. It would be impossible for to have enough man hours to do it. So we have software that goes, you basically collect all the data, process it, run it through our software, and it helps flag what's relevant, what's not, and you train it. It's machine learning based. And then it gets those documents down to a manageable document set that humans can review.

Yeah, it is a robot.

Yeah, exactly.

Yeah, it's like the Google robots. This, this is a robot. You don't have to ask them how they're feeling. And so, but from that and your experiences came the book. And what I want to do is take a break now and go into the book because I just think you have tapped into a really fascinating subject there. And it's called deep finance. So we're going to dig into deep finance in a minute. Thanks so much, Glenn.

Great. Thanks, Larry.

If you enjoyed what you've heard and are dead serious about finding out for yourself exactly how this works and in the real world, I've taken the most valuable business lessons I've learned over 40 years and put them into something for you to watch, go to whiteellumwinning.com webinar now in order to move up as fast as possible, I'm Larry Wydell and I run the Million Dollar Mastermind. Go, go, go.