Episode #635 - Business Success Comes From Constant Learning with Joel Yi, CEO at Joel Yi LLC

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. So Henry's instincts were correct in that if he could get you to partner up with him, great things would happen. And it paid off.

It paid off for him and for me.

Yeah, yeah.

Money than I ever made. Yeah, absolutely. Yes.

Yeah. So probably you should invest with Henry because his instincts seem to be pretty good.

I like that one. That's a great one.

This guy needs to be sponsoring my podcast.

Yeah, he does. He should be.

I never even heard of Henry before today. But anyway, the thing is that now you came in and, you know, it's a nice progression and you didn't get sidetracked off. So many of the things that get caused people to take forever, you know, it's 39 for their 45 before they, they get their own business or have this kind of success because not that they weren't working hard or doing wrong things, they just did not make the exact choice that would allow them to slingshot and keep climbing fast. And so let's back up to where you learn in any. You need the experience of managing people in anything you're doing, because in your world now you're advising people that are doing that. But you know, when you get, as you get bigger, you have your own organization that's. You got to manage your own organization and manage others. So the thing is, you started. How did you move into management and what kind of big surprises, if any, did you get managing other people?

Wow. I mean, this brings back a lot of memories. Yeah. Okay, so you don't have to be.

45 to get these lessons. I mean, if you, you move up through the thing, you get promoted early, you know, because I always that that happened to me in my life. You know, I was always at a position earlier than everybody else. I remember when I started in financial services and we were recruiting and training, I always looked around the room and I was the youngest person in the room. And I'm saying, why are these guys listening to me? Then I'd go, well, I don't know, but let's go.

Right, right. It's interesting you bring that up and because the whole concept of leadership and management, I've been very fascinated by it, especially in the recent year, because I look back at my life and I always thought to myself, was I a natural born leader? Yes and no. I had some traits of leadership even at a young age. But I never had a platform to actually develop it. So the best part for me was when I did rotc. ROTC in university.

Right.

That was when I was training to become a commission officer. Every day we were just learning about leadership. Now.

Okay, what do they teach you about leaders? I'm curious about that. What does the army teach you about leadership?

Absolutely. I'll tell you a few quotes that I'll never forget from my lieutenant colonel. Colonel died. So one of my favorite quotes from him that I learned from him is whenever your team or your platoon experiences failure, right. When you fail, your team fails. As the leader, you must take 100% ownership of the failure, even though it wasn't your fault. Now, the flip side is true. If your team experiences success, you will then give all credit to your team and take none for yourself. So you would teach us things like that in class?

Yeah, that's great.

Which was amazing for me at a young age. Yeah.

Once you know it, you know, and you don't have to figure it out on your own, you can just, you can, you can operate in a productive way. You can make sure the words that come out of your mouth are not creating static or, you know, obstacles or conflicts with the people you're around. You can, if it enables you to be intelligent with edit, self editing, what way you respond to situation. Because a lot of the time in leadership, there's a leader there because you need a leader, sheep need to be led, and the sheep wander off in all the directions and you're in charge. The thing is the blame's going to come down on you. And so if it's not done, so you might as well, you might as well accept it, you know, and so the thing is that when you know how to talk to people and you know what's a productive thing to say and a not productive thing to say, you could just save yourself so much grief, you know, and so you picked up a lot of. A lot of lessons right there about leadership and in your ROTC training. Now, when you got. You moved into. How was that? When the rubber meet met the road, you got into the real world.

Yes.

How did that go?

Now that's where things went. Fun. So, you know, I have all these theory, right. And to be fair, I was also doing rotc. I got promoted to becoming the battalion command sergeant major for my final year. So I was.

Congratulations.

I was in charge of. I was in charge of my entire university. And until today, I don't know why I got Selected for it. Honestly, I just think that my cadre, the staff member, just saw potential in me. But I got some, you know, a bit of hands on experience of actual management. But when I got to Dan's company, this is where, let's just say, you know, stuff hit the fan. And I'll tell you why. Because when I came into the real world and actually had to manage a sales team, right? And he only promoted me because he saw my leadership potential as well as my experience with the military, that's why Dan promoted me to sales manager. Right. And, and like you said, it was the first time where the rubber met the road. And so I literally tried to treat everybody like the military. That was literally how I operated for the first year. And it was not good. It was not good. I was extremely aggressive. I would belittle people. I would fire people at the slightest drop of the hat, I would just fire them off the team. I was, I was so aggressive to the point where Dan would get emails about me from people that I fired. That was how bad I was in.

The beginning because like little, Little Napoleon.

Exactly. Yeah, absolutely right. I was brute, I was brutal.

I was.

But. But you know, there was also good things from that because I realized what it actually took to. So I went on the far extreme, right? Like, I went extremely aggressive. And I think when it comes to managing a sales team, you do need some aggression. Just dial it down a little bit. You can't be too passive. You will not hit any sales targets.

You cannot be passive. You gotta be. But there's ways you learn how to dress their want to. Because really they want to do big things, you know, and they just need to be reminded that they want to, you know, it's like. And the great way, great way to do that is questions. You find you don't get in trouble with questions like, okay, you know, they had a big month the month before you say, okay, congratulations. Unbelievable. I'm so proud of you. I can't, you know, it just blew me away. I didn't expect you to be there for two or three more months. Now ask me, you know, I got, you're on a commission, you know, everything. Do you want to take a month or two to kind recover from this, this massive effort that you made or do you want to keep growing? Because, you know, I'll understand if you want to back off, but oh no, I'm going to keep growing. Is it? Oh really? You want to keep growing? Really? Okay. And so, but they're telling you, you know, that they Want to. Rather than. You say you got to keep growing.

Yes, absolutely. So that's.

Tap into that one. Want to, you know.

Yeah, that's the lesson I had to learn in my first year was that I was, you know, I took. I took basically the theory from the military and I had to then figure it out in the real world as I went along. And then thankfully, I improved. Thankfully, I learned from my mistakes. Yeah, yeah.

The thing is with commission people, it's a volunteer army. It's an art, but it's still going to be an army. It's still going to be an army. And you gotta, you know, you, You've. They volunteer to join and you volunteer to let them.

Right.

Be on the team, you know, and so if you've agreed, both sides have agreed that you want to be here. Okay, let's be here then. You know, I come in and suck air up and ask stupid questions and never do anything, you know, so you do have to be. And that's a hard thing to find the right way of dealing with people to where you can be yourself, but you can be your aggressive self and not offend people and run them off, you know, because. And especially if you've made mistakes yourself and you're willing to laugh at yourself, those are the managers that people can relate to, you know, because you don't, you don't imply you never made a mistake. So talk about some of the things that. Where things started to turn around for you with your. What was your biggest disaster in sales management?

Oh, man, I think my. My biggest disaster aside from people writing into the company.

Yeah, that's pretty bad.

I was the worst person they ever met in my, in their life. The worst disaster was when I have. And thank God they're still with me today. In my company, I had two sales managers that I've trained and coach and manage since four years ago. They moved with me to my company today. But the work. The worst moment, right. At least as a. As a guy and a girl, the worst moment, I can almost imagine was when I was so aggressive that I, I basically almost destroyed our relationship. Yeah, right. Had I not change, because I would be yelling at them, I'd be slamming the table. I'd be saying, you guys are not good enough. Why are we not doing this? Why are we not following orders? Why are we not right? And so I almost lost them. I literally just almost lost my best. My best people because of me, because of my failure in leadership. Right. And we had to have an intervention. They literally had to tell Me like, hey, Joel, if you keep this up, like, we cannot work. Like, I just can't work with you. I don't even know, like, I want to be here, but you're making it extremely hard for me. Right. Like. And so, like, I had a come to Jesus moment.

Yeah.

Where I was, like, I had to reflect back in the past two years and realize, wow, I was a pretty terrible leader.

Yeah.

I got a change, right. That was my come to Jesus moment when my managers had to come talk to me. And by the way, keep in mind, they were extremely terrified, Right. To even give me that feedback. That was how desperate the situation was that they had to tell me. Right?

Yeah.

And so that was it. That was the moment.

Well, that's the thing that. The best thing, really, that happens to you on the way up the ladder and building things is your rough edges get knocked off, you know, unless, you know, I was hoping that would happen to Donald Trump when he ran for president, but it just. It just seemed like it sharpened his edges, you know, it didn't knock them off, it just sharpened them. But. Which I hate it for him, you know, because. But the thing is. And for everybody else around him. But the thing is that you have to find your own style, but we got to get things done with people, and people are going to be imperfect. And the thing is, I always could get myself to give them the benefit of the doubt, even when I wanted to strangle them. And because it was just like, well, I'm going to make mistakes, too. And so, you know, let's. If it's easier if you don't keep them in a straitjacket for you not to be in a straitjacket for them to give you the benefit of the doubt when you screw up, you know, but you always take responsibility for it, you know, and you don't have to be right all the time as a leader. And so how did that impact the way you change going out of that situation? Because the impulse to respond like the Napoleon was. Was already in there. And so those, you know, so that's geared. Those habits, those responses are geared in your core, and you had to stifle those and turn it into something else. Talk about that process.

Yeah, I'm glad you brought this up. I actually forgot. I mean, not forgot. I just. This has been buried back in my brain. I don't remember. But, you know, now it's bringing. Now it's coming back. It's like I realized. So this is what happened before I got promoted to sales manager right there was the previous manager in the company that Dan had kept around for a few years before me. Now, this manager was actually my boss in the beginning. Okay. I learned a lot of the traits from him as well. I'm not just blaming him. Blame myself too. But then what I realized was that there's a reason why he got demoted. There's a reason why no one liked him.

Yeah.

And Joel, if you continue on the same path, you're going to end up exactly just like him.

Right.

So that was the moment that also helped me. Course. Correct.

I see.

I have.

Yeah. And did. Did you have talks with Dan about this?

Yeah. Yeah, we did. We did. Because I told him. Because he. He saw that I changed and he asked me, how did I change? Why did I change? Right. And so I. I shared. I shared these things with him.

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