Episode 160: How the "40 Wide" Idea Totally Changed the Way He Worked with His People with Busine...

Welcome to this episode of the Million Dollar Mastermind. I'm Larry Weidel, and let's get started. I am back with my good buddy Michael Piette out of. Exactly. Is it la. Is it where we're actually in California?

Well, I spent.

Where do you claim?

I spend half my time in Burbank and the other half in Malibu. How's that?

Okay. Burbank and Malibu. You sound like Johnny Carson. That. That's where he lived. Dennis Court, that's. That was his lifestyle. Jay Leno, all of those guys.

That's right.

Yeah. And so talk to us now. Can't be emphasized enough is the importance of relationships and meeting people and being somebody people want to meet and enjoying people getting to know them, asking questions, you know, like, you know, being somebody that has a lot of friends by doing that, that turns you into someone who can, over time, create a lot of opportunities for yourself through your network of friends without even pushing. You know, I like. I, you know, I would never really thought about cold calling. I always hated cold calling and being pushy in sales. That's why I was glad when we went independent. You could build teams and. But I used to go. I've told this story before. They started a brand new gym at Sandy Springs where our office was before we went independent. And I'd always played basketball growing up and played it in, you know, from elementary school all the way up. So, you know, I go in there and it's a new gym. Nobody's going. No one's playing ball in there. Nobody even knows it exists. I went in there at noon, Monday, Wednesday, Friday, and just shot around for an hour. And then eventually another guy came and we'd play a little one on one. This. Pretty soon there's 30, 40 people there and, you know, and the place is full now. I never consciously remember. Now, this went over for about two and a half years. I never consciously remembered Mike talking to anybody about our business. But when I left, it dawned on me I had wound up selling. Either recruiting and selling or at least selling everybody there that was a regular just by, just by being around. You know, I don't even remember how it happened. And by getting in a network of friends, basically, it's easier if you actually like to do things and you can make friends, you know, fishing, boating, swimming, tennis, golf, whatever, or tailgating. You know, a lot of people, they have the big friend network. They wonder why do they go to the games?

Everything.

Well, they, they love the tailgating. They love the camaraderie. They have friends that they've sat next to at games the last 15, 20 years. And they know their kids and everything, you know. So however you build your network of friends, it opens up opportunities because they're comfortable letting you into other things going on in their life. And you said that's how you got into Universal Studios with. Was that a relative or someone in the neighborhood or someone. What was your friend contact that got you into Universal Studios?

Well, actually, I was working on a skill. I was developing my skills as a body and fender repair guy. And I had all the tools and I had some pretty good talents. And a friend of mine that I had gone to high school with, we had ski boats. And he said, why don't you come over and work at the studio for the summer? He says, I think I can get you in and I can get you in on the swing shift. And I think that started at 4 till 2 in the morning or something like that. And we can go skiing during the week, during the day. And I thought, well, that's a good idea. That sounds fun. So I went in there on his call and his contacts, just for the summer. Before I knew it, I'd been there years. I'd been there for years. And the sad part about the studios is since I didn't have the same value structure that the studios operates on, I had not developed very many friendships. I developed a number of acquaintances and had a lot of interesting experiences, but not a lot of friends. And developing friends for me back in the day was not that easy to do for you, Larry. It was probably pretty easy for me. I was pretty much by myself. Guy. I like to surf because I could go by myself. And if I'm sitting out there and you paddle up and start talking and I don't want to talk to you, I just paddle away. There wasn't a big problem with it, but it wasn't real conducive for building a big network of people that, you know. So this business of people that we're in came very, very hard for me for a long time because I had to learn how to do those things.

And how important. How important is that is, you know, you've seen it over and over now with the recruiting and development side that you've excelled in. You know, you've made that a tremendous strength. And you teach it to other people. Talk about how that plays out with some of the people that have come in and people who can get the hit the ground running and who stall out for a while, you know.

To me, one of the greatest things I can accomplish in another human being's life is get them to the place that in their eyes, you can see. They get up in the morning, go, I got this. I can do this. I can do this. And for every person, it's a different obstacle course. Some people get that very easily. Some people pick it up in three months, six months, some take a number of years. But when they can get to the place that they're looking at you going, okay, I'm listening to you. But I got this. I can figure this out for myself now. I figured this thing out. When I can get somebody to that place, that's the biggest paycheck I can receive right there. Because what I want them to be is I want them to be independent. I decided years ago, long time ago, that I didn't want a business that was dependent on me. I wanted one that was independent of me. So every dime I make is an override. Has been for quite a while. And I did that on purpose. I worked on that purposefully, because then I thought, well, you get to a million on that, you get yourself a real business as opposed to a high paid good job because you're in the field eight nights a week. That wasn't what I wanted to do. And to do that, you have to help people get to a place to not need you. And your ego can take a beating because they'll look at you and go, you know, I never needed you to begin with. And maybe they're right. Yeah, maybe they're. But you did take a role in their life. And you probably housed them for a while and you diapered them and fed them for a few years, you know.

They forget all that.

Yeah. But once they're up and moving, you know, and they're doing their own thing, I got no problems if they say, you know, I don't need you. Well, good. That's. That's what we're all about, you not needing me.

Yeah.

I want you to do that place.

Yeah, I read last week I've, you know, so that was a decision on your part. I always thought that was just because you naturally alienated everybody.

I might have done that by accident.

Oh, that was a decision to make him independent. Oh, okay. This is. I'm learning things anyway. Yeah, I, someone told I, I read this last week. They said leadership is like being a bridge where you help people get from where they are to what they're capable of and what they want to. But he said the problem about being the bridge is once they get to the other Side, they forget they went over the bridge. No way. Nobody sends a car, nobody sends a card back to the, to the Golden State Bridge and say, thank you so much for being there when I, you know. No, no, I drove over the bridge. It's all me. You know, the bridge was just something that was there that I used, you know, to get ahead.

Yeah, that's, that's right. But I would have done it anyway.

I would have done it anyway. And so you've got to be, as a leader, you can't worry about things like that. But the kind getting them independent on their own means they've got a network, they have a team in place themselves. Not just. They have a skill set and their head full of knowledge on things. They've got places to go, people to go do those things with and talk about. You know, that's. The relationships that you have don't mean that you have to be there minute to minute, day by day. I mean, it starts. But the more solid your relationships are, the more you can turn them loose. And then maybe if you, you know, you check in and a, you know, once a year or a phone call here, there, or a card or something like that, but they know you're there if they need you. And how important is it for people to get out of themselves and understand you're going to need to be, you're going to need to be a kind of person that people want to be around. You've got to be, have some magnetism, some kind of fun. You know, Art used to say, have an opinion, you know, have. Show some, you know, expression on your face, you know, get, you know, let yourself have some fun, you know, kid around. It's easy for me because I grew up with a, a bunch of relatives who are always, you know, telling stories and making fun of each other. You know, the locker room, you know, the half that. That's the great advantage of being a jock, you know, is like, there's no sympathy in the locker room. You know, it's, it's merciless. The, you know, you talk, you hear kids talk about, I've got, you know, the kids growing up and the little girls, you know, they had the bullying going on and this area. Well, play football and get in a football locker room and you're going to get bullied like you can't believe, you know, but you got to learn how to stand up for yourself. And that's one of the things that standing up and being somebody that people want to be around, being able to take the punches and enjoy. Enjoy not being a fragile flower. You know, that's. That. That really doesn't pay well. Take everything personally. You know, go into a depression, and when things go wrong or you imp. You think that other people are talking about you and stuff like that. I mean, that you got to get out of yourself that way. And did what. What things did you do to kind of learn how to get going and get a team together once you got the fundamentals in your head about how this business went? Because I know just the kind of person you are. You didn't. You weren't going to be satisfied being insignificant. Nobody does what you've done who just wants to go along for the ride. I mean, that's why you left the. The union, you know, that's why you left that situation. You were saying no to a just, stable, guaranteed, boring way of life. You wanted some energy, some excitement. You again. That's why you teared up when you heard Art say, I want to be somebody. So when you realize I'm going to need. If I'm going to be somebody here, I got to get a team, you know, and I got to be a leader. I got to be able to say things to them to get their butts fired up and thinking about doing, being the best they can be and being special themselves. So how did you go through that change and how would you talk to people like that?

You know, I can't tell you who gave the speech, but earlier in my career, I heard from somebody that you needed to be 40 wide. We're in direct marketing, and you needed to be 40 wide. And there's some charismatic guys that could hire three or four or five people and make things bloom like a garden. And I wasn't one of those guys. And somewhere, I don't know where it came from, but I had. I got a sense in my mind that I needed to have 40 directs. And that became a focus for me in the first season of my career as a new RVP. Up to SVP. And I never made it to 40, but I did make it to 38. And I get 38 directs. And almost all of them were multiple licensed. Many of them were full time. Some of them came from, you know, RVP's promoting out and some from me hiring and everything. But the point was, everything I have in business today came out of that decision and came out of those people. Everything. I could draw a line all the way back to somebody out of that 38. You know, it was almost like the, you know, the Mayflower landing At Plymouth Rock. I don't know how many made it the first few years. Probably not very many of them, but a whole bunch of people in the country could trace it back to there. And that decision, once again, I can't tell you where I got that from, but that served me really, really, really well because there's a lot of folks in marketing that are incredible people. And I've been listening to their speeches and interacting with them for years. And they're wonderful. They're charismatic. People hang on everything they say. They're just so glib and fired up and everything. And that just wasn't me. I was more contemplative. I needed to think about it. I need to analyze what the downside is, what's the upside? Potential. Very thoughtful on it. I figured then I have to get the numbers working for me since I'm not like that. And 40 was the number I picked. And like I said, I drove to 38, I got it to 38, and I just kind of petered out for some reason at 38. And it's been a great business and an incredible run since then. And I. One of my kids just went to work for me in my office here a few weeks ago. First one, I enjoy it. If you don't have those special things, then you can hire people that do.

Well, I would imagine you got to 38, you could just get. What happens, Mike, is you get overwhelmed, you run out. You know, you run out hours in the day. You know, 38 was the number that 40 represented. You know, you just got as wide as you could possibly get, you know, and maybe some other superhuman could get up to 40. 42, 40. You found your max at 38. It was just so many hours in the day. But, yeah. How long did that take and how did that change the way you went about your business? Because to get a big goal like that and to reorganize yourself mentally and schedule wise and presentation wise and all that is a different approach than most people have about how. And a different approach than what you had up to that point. So how many, how wide were you when you heard that?

Well, we went through a period of time and this is a bit of a history lesson of the company that, you know, there were some decisions and choices made at the management level that didn't fare too well for those of us with selling organizations. And I believe about 70% of my business evaporated over a 12, 14 month period of time. And as I looked forward, going forward, I realized I had to do something Little bit different because I didn't want to do that again. And it kind of came out of that period. It was probably 1990 and had a handful of people then and just built it from there. But it was. A lot of it came out in necessity. If that had not have happened, if those business reversals have not have taken place, I'd have probably been happy to just roll along with the ship that we had at the time. But, you know, things happen in your life and you have to make adjustments or lay down and die. Those are your two options. And I wasn't ready to lay down. I wanted to keep on moving.

A lot of the success that big leaders have is when they go through those things they've got. For one reason or another. You could call it either just they blindly assumed it. They have a maturity, they have somebody who tells them. But for some reason, if you'll accept that and say maybe there's a reason for that and maybe something good or better can come, I'm going to. I'm going to attack again. And then, amazingly, things do. Even with the biggest hedge funds in the world, you know, BlackRock, you know, they talk about how when they got started and they went around, they had their strategy, they got, you know, at a few hundred million or something or this, that, and the other than their strategy went down the toilet and their name was mud, and that forced him to go out. I mean, this is like the biggest hedge fund that's got built, you know what, hundreds of billions of dollars under assets. Now with you, the same thing. And they were veteran pros at it, with a great reputation. In fact, that was like step 17 on their growing. But step one was when they went independent. They went. And they'd had a track record at different financial institutions, had a lot of clients, a lot of people with a lot of money knew them. They said, this will be easy. We'll just send a letter out to all of our contacts and old clients and say, hip, hip, hooray. Guess what? I know you're going to be excited about this. We've decided to go independent, start our own new hedge fund. Unbelievable. And they got zero response. And, you know, says, like, even the great giants, you feel like, wow, these guys have got hundreds of billions of dollars in assets and everything. Well, a lot of those launches are the same kind of. You go through the same kind of things that you and I have been through, and just about everybody does along the way. It's. But that's where you learn. That's where you learn now, how long did it take you to get. Once you got that going? How long. Do you have any idea of when you got up, how long that took? Were you in a. Trying to sprint to make it happen and get that phase done?

It took about four years. After I made the decision to do that. Took about four years.

Yeah.

And it was a long four years. But. And if you remember what was going on in the company at that point and what was going on in the culture and everything, it was a hard four years.

Yeah.

But everything I'd read before, of all the successful autobiographies and biographies I'd read before, talked about that, and I was looking at my life going, well, okay, then I'm on track. I did pretty well. Then I fell on my face. So now dust yourself off and get up. And what's interesting that what I've learned since then is this. Everybody wants. Everybody wants the goodies. They want the things. They want the nice car, they want the nice house, they want the nice bank account, they want the stock portfolio. What they don't understand is it's not the nice things. It's the experience that you gain to acquire the nice things and the confidence that comes through the experience that you now have. So if something happens and you go through a major reversal in your life, a divorce, a sickness, something, A bankruptcy, a bankruptcy, then the next time you do it, you look around and you go, you know, I didn't want to do it again, but I know what it takes to do it, so I'll just put my head down and do it. And what happens is you'll do it quicker than you did it the last time, and you have a little bit more fun doing it because you're not surprised by things anymore. I remember Bob Safford, years and years ago, when I was a young pup, was talking about the first year that you make $100,000 a year, you'll probably work, which at the time was a big amount of money. So you'll probably work 100 hours a week. And he says, and by the third year, you can have that down to 10 or 15 hours a week. Because he says, you know what to do and what not to waste your time with. 100% correct? 100% correct, absolutely.

And so we. Can you think of anything you changed about your schedule and about how you attacked your business when you made that change to go after the directs, how did you organize your time? Because you only still have the same amount of time, right?

Well, I didn't. I didn't I didn't feel as vulnerable as I did under the, you know, recruit, recruit, recruit system.

You know, the blow hot air into.

It and see what happens. This was something I could diagram out on a piece of paper. I could figure this thing out. I could get down with somebody and who's part time getting ready to go full time and sell them into full time. Then I could sit down with them and sell them into why you need to get a securities license with the back end opportunity looks like. And I could get into the pieces of carrying them across because I didn't want just a direct breathing. I want them to be multiple, licensed and hopefully full time too, because that's where the goodies were. You're not going to win big being part time, we all know that. And full time is more a state of mind than it is a state of your hours per week. So that's kind of how I made the move to that. And once I made that move, then the amount of hours you work on that per week was incidental. It was just fun, you know, even in the midst of all kinds of different leadership going on in our company at the time. And a lot of angst and what's going to happen didn't matter. I was still having a good time with my goals and with my objectives. And once I hit that 38, I just. You're right, I just kind of ran out of time. And now you're, you know, putting out fires and dealing with people and running here and running there. But what a fun run.

Yeah. And the thing is, but what I'm hearing and see if I'm taking this right, it seemed like you made a shift in the thing of expecting them or waiting for them to decide they needed to get more people in their team licensed in this come full time or thing. But you said, like, I need these guys to be there. Okay. So I'm not waiting for them to figure it out anymore. I'm gonna sit there, butt down, and I'm gonna say, hey, here's what you need. And I'm gonna get their butt in gear because I'm gonna sell them on why it's important for them to do that. Because I need them there and I can't sell. I can't let them wait around any longer. Is that accurate, Mike?

Exactly. I switch my business to becoming more intentional as opposed to playing for the T shirt at the end of the month or whatever that was all about. Get 10 cells and you get a T shirt. I got lots of T shirts. I don't need a T shirt. What I need is I need all 10 of those cells to stick. So maybe I only get 8 instead of 10 and I don't get a T shirt. I don't care. I need the money. I need the business. I need it to be, I mean I moved from, from checkers to chess. I need it to be real. And that's where, that's where the solidification because we our business. If I don't come in for the next month, I'm not sure if anybody would miss me.

Yeah, well.

There'S, maybe they would but.

Well, you know, it's a good feeling and that getting the business up to that point doesn't happen by itself. And that's it's kind of a lead in to what I would like to talk to you about. And that is teaching them about the fundamentals that, that you feel like they have to know and they have to have implemented in their life and hopefully we'll get a chance and we can talk about that somewhere down the road. So thanks for sharing Mike, and look forward to seeing you and your team continue to shoot up the charts.

My pleasure.

Thanks for listening to this episode of Million Dollar Mastermind with me, Larry Wydell. If I've helped you in any way, leave us a five star rating and review on Apple Podcasts. For more information like this, listen to our other Million Dollar Mastermind episodes and check out my Wydell Academy YouTube channel and visit us on widel on winning.com I'm the million Dollar Mastermind. And until next time, go, go go.