Episode #547 - Trusting Your Instinct: The Key To A Successful Business with Heather Smith

Welcome to this edition of the million Dollar Mastermind podcast. This is where we pick the brains of high achievers from all walks of life and get their hard earned real world insights on winning. I'm your host, Larry Wydell.

As you went through this thing now getting. How did you. Let me just talk about instinct. What role does instinct play? Because people have got to learn. If you're going to, if you're going to do something great and you're going to be in charge and you're going to get people to buy into your leadership, you've got to learn to trust your instinct. And instinct in leadership is everything. Who gets the attention? What gets the attention? How much resources go in that direction, when is good enough? The funny thing is I don't know if you paint, but I paint. And the number one question any painter gets is how do you know when.

You'Re finished, when it's done?

How do you know when it's done? And that's really true about. Isn't that true with your business? You're working on a project, you got a brochure and you got an event. How do you know? You know, and I usually say, well, when I'm excited about it, then you know, then that, you know, like, how do you know you've prepared enough for a meeting or a talk or whatever? It's like, well, when I put enough in that I'm excited about doing it now I'm ready to go, you know, I don't that I've overcome the doubts, you know, but how do you look at instinct and how you have, you develop the instinct and develop confidence and.

In calling shots, I don't actually think that you can develop instinct or I don't know how you would really, I, I rely, I agree with you. It is everything. So I would, I think everybody inherently must have it, but maybe it's just nurtured, not developed, but are not actually also, you know, it is interesting. I get this question from my team all the time. You know, we've got to be data driven. We've got to know these answers, you know, oh, we need to ask people and do market research and what are we focusing on? Because truly what the most challenging thing that we've dealt with over the past three years of having this business was actually deciding what to focus on and what area to focus because there are so many opportunities and there's so, I mean, it's a massive, massive, huge idea that can actually affect you in your daily life in a number of ways.

Yeah.

So It's. It's a massive idea, a massive concept. What do you focus on? And then my team comes to me and says, you know, you gotta. We have to know. We have to know what people are thinking. We have to know this, and let's get some numbers on it. And my constant thing, especially at this stage in our business, is you're not going to be able to do that. You're just not. And you're not going to be able to do it for a while. And at this stage right now, it has to be instinct. It has to be, because I know it will work. And because I've talked to so many people, like, you're right. And you see how people are excited about it. You see their face, you see that aha moment, you know, when they really get it, and they're like, oh, my God. And they themselves come up with, okay, so there isn't probably one idea that I haven't heard, but all of a sudden these people rattle off these ideas, you could do this, you could do this. You could use it for this, you could use it for that. Oh, my God, are you doing this? And, you know, you have to temper them and say, you. Yeah, but. So there hasn't been one person in the. In the 1012 years that I've been doing this that hasn't said, this is a bad idea or this isn't going to work, or what you're doing is. Is it. It sounded crazy at first, but now it's like it's, yes, this is amazing. But how are we going to do it? And how are you going to make it as successful as it really could be? Yeah, that's the question.

Yeah. And of course, the answer to that is you unravel it. It's like peeling an onion.

One layer at a time, one layer.

At a time, you take the next step. And the thing is, with instinct, we learn from all of our education, our experiences, people, stories. We've heard things that we've tried, you know, we've. Yet one of the great teachers of instinct is failure, you know, because, you know, you stick your, you know, it's like, no, my finger doesn't need to go over to that. Yeah, I can feel the air going. That wakes up a bad memory. Yeah, don't go in there. And so that's why, you know, people. People will look at you and say, you're a genius, you know, and the way you get to be a genius is you make millions of a mistake mistakes and millions of failures that they have not had A chance to make yet.

Right.

And so you're way down the road on educating yourself about where, you know where to go and where not to go. But that's an instinct right there where you say.

I was just gonna say that. That's an instinct, too.

Yeah.

As well.

The fact that you would say to them, they're saying, data, data, data, data, which is. There is a time.

There is a time.

There is a time in running a company, and a lot of that has to do. Heather, when you go from, you know, that's one of the things where you go from a founder of a company and a movement to where now we got to bring in the professional managers, we got to get Steve Jobs out of the building, you know, and, you know, we've got to. We've got to get organized here, you know, for a while. There is a time to do that. And of course.

Well, I think a lot of times.

Those people run it in the ground using it.

I think when you have more people using it, when you have more customers, when you have more people that have gone through it from A to B, and they're actually like, for example, when SAP starts using this and they have, you know, over what, 4,000 clients of their own, but they start using it, they're successful at using it internally. And then they go to their. Their clients and say, okay, now you should be using this, too. That's when you can really collect data.

You know, okay, you've hit. You've hit the nail. You know, your. Your instincts now have proven dead on point because you've worked your way to the issue. And the issue is that data is useless unless you have large enough numbers. It's like man in the mass is totally unpredictable, you know, man in the masses is totally predictable. Man as an individual is totally unpredictable. And the law of averages does work only if you combine it with the law of high numbers. And so you're right. Buried down in your head, you had, you know, Exactly. We get SAP involved. We got. We. We got hundreds of thousands of experiences to work off of. Then we can go from data and it's going to mean something. But now we got to go off of instincts, what we see and what we're hearing, you know, and follow the. Basically follow the light, you know.

Absolutely.

And that's why the founder. That's why I brought. That's why I brought that up, by the way, Heather, you know. No, that's why I brought up instinct. You know, I want to encourage you to follow your instinct, you know, because a Lot of people. You know, you get to the point where everything you do is wrong. You know, every, every decision you make is going to be wrong to somebody. And so you've got to get to the point that you don't. Well, first of all, you don't mind being wrong because then you'll learn something you wouldn't have learned otherwise. But you'd rather be the one who calls the shot and be wrong than trust somebody else. Because you like your instinct and you're, you know where you're coming from. Better as better informed to call that shot than anybody else. You know, and so a leader has to be able to, to have, you know, you're never going to mount anything if you can't stand in your own two feet and get things done. Let me ask you something. You know, recall those shots and, and not worry about being threatened because people don't agree and all, you know, but.

I've been lucky that most of my team agrees. So we're all good. Yeah.

Yeah. And you know when that, you know when that happens? When you're growing. Okay.

Oh, yeah.

And this is, this is the message for, for all of us running businesses. Never have a slump if you can avoid it. Okay. The first, you know, keep an eye on your numbers. You, you know, you don't need to be data driven, but you have to know your data. And as soon as the data starts to slack, you know, the stars, the car starts to slow down, hit it with everything you've got, Your, your accelerator, because that's when the grumbling starts, the second guessing start. But when you're growing, you know, like people just love that, you know, wind in the face and a lot of new fun things are happening. So that's, you want a happy organization, keep it growing leaders. And what do you think about schedule? How do you organize your time for maximum efficiency? That's something we all struggle with. And have you changed that over the.

Years, aside from getting up much, much, much earlier in the morning?

Yeah. Now, how earlier did you get up?

6Ish.

Yep.

Yeah, it's, I think you have, you can, you can have a schedule, but I don't think that you have to be, you need to be flexible as well. And you need to, you need time to think and you need time to actually do the work, which I think that, I think it's, that's been particularly challenging, especially going through Covid with all the zoom, you know, the meetings like that and not having everybody around you and physically.

Are you back to that now? Have You. Have you made the total shift yet?

We've been trying. It's been. It has been a difficult move. Some, some of the key employees did move out of Los Angeles during COVID so it has been a slightly more challenging. It's been nice to be able to have the whole world as your oyster.

Right.

You know, as far as employees and talent. But it's also been challenging from a perspective of having your whole team, you know, in, in the office and being able to brainstorm, for example, doesn't work as well on a, on a zoom as it does in. In how, you know, in person.

So what number. What numbers are you. The thing about a schedule is like, when do you gather up your numbers and look at the numbers and what are the most important numbers for you right now in your development that you want your team to be aware of? You know, like, it's working. We're doing this where our outreach is expanding. You know, this, that the other.

I think customer feedback has been our biggest communicate. Like when we share our, our wins, we call them right. Story file wins. And it's mostly now, what's a story file win?

It's a story. Or what is. What is a story?

It's when a client maybe has produced a certain kind of story file that is maybe a little a bit out of the norm and is actually, you know, being successful with it. Like, for example, Walmart did what they're calling a financial mentor for their store managers. And so their store managers can literally pull out their phone, their smartphone, and Walmart has a whole learning system on it, and they can just ask their financial mentor a question about running the store. You don't have to do an email. You don't have to wait for someone to respond to the email. You don't have to slack someone and wait for someone to text you back. You don't have to get on a phone call and ask somebody and wait for them to call you back. You get the answer right then and there. It's right in your pocket. So the feedback and the win would be when the store managers are actually using it and they, they like it and it's providing value for them. So actually it's actually not. It's our clients, but we're not building our products for them. They're our, our platform. And our technology is not really for them. It's actually for whoever they are trying to connect with, whether it's their customers or whether it's, you know, their employees or future talent or they're training somebody or it's a, it's a professor that wants to get out and record their lecture and then answer questions from their students. Yeah, it's anywhere. It's the, you know, the grandmother that you didn't really know and she's passed away now and you want to ask questions, you want to know about her life and what, what, you know, what were her values? What was, what, what was she like as a kid? What does she remember from being a child? You know, it's, it's all of that. It's being able to just, instead of going on Google, for example, and typing in a question, why can't you just ask somebody? You just pick up the phone, you go, you know, you go to a story file and you just ask them.

Yeah.

You know, it's so much easier to just talk to people than it is doing all of this.

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