0348 | Jonathan DeYoe

Hi, this is Jonathan Dio with Mindful Money and you're listening to eainterviews.com EA.

Interviews episode 348, inspiration, transformation, success stories and the imperfect action round. Seven days a week. Join Mario Ficcini for today's Expert Authority Effect interview. Money is important to everyone, but is it important to you the way it should be? Are you taking caring of it? Taking caring of it? What? Are you taking care of it the way you should be? Is it? Do you have the same habits in your personal life as your business life and professional life? I am excited to have Jonathan Deyo on today's episode because we're going to be talking about Mindful Money and how you can stop just doing whatever with it and you can start managing it better. So I'm going to read some of these off because he has been a trusted voice on so many different platforms. I don't want to skip them. But I love it when this happens because I can do 1, 2, 3, 4, maybe even 5 like here. You know, you've seen them here, here and here. But this is a litany. We got Business Insider, Huffington Post, Yahoo Finance, Wall Street Journal, New York Times, San Francisco Business Times, Money Tips, MindBody Green, Nerd Wallet, the Motley Fool, Market Watch, and many more. I'm excited to bring them up. Jonathan Deo, right after we thank our sponsor. Every business needs a book, including yours. And that's why I'm launching my new book to help you, regardless of where you think you your current writing abilities are. Visit eapublishingmethodbook.com today to learn the seven steps to publish and promote your nonfiction lead and profit generating business book in eight weeks. Once again, that's EA publishingmethodbook.com Here he is, ladies and gentlemen, Jonathan Deyo. Jonathan, thanks for causing me a first world problem of having to read off your rap sheet there because it's very impressive and so are you. So how are you feeling today?

I'm feeling good. It's impressive, but it's because I've been doing this for 25 years. That's very few per year if you think about it.

Well.

It'S still impressive and I know you can't get there just making the stuff up. So I'm excited to have you share your wealth and wisdom because so many people I find, whether they're personal or business.

Let me just ask you, I'm going to reframe this. Would you say the way you do one thing, whether it's personal or business, you're doing it the same and the opposite.

Yeah, I think you, you know, we have certain grooves of the way we behave, the way we do things, and those grooves persist whether we're doing things personally or in business or in a family gathering or. Yeah, it's. It's who we are that determines what we do.

Okay. Because I heard this quote a while ago from someone smarter than me. I don't know who said it, but it was something to the effect of, you don't have a business problem, you have a personal problem in your business.

Yeah, I could very well be. And it's applied to me many times in the past as well, I'm sure.

So that brings me to the full circle of the mindful money. Because if you have a business, it doesn't magically mean, okay, everything's perfect. On the contrary, I believe it's just amplified. So what are you doing to help people be more mindful with their money?

So, I mean, the first thing we do, and this is sort of countercultural if you think about what our world does when it focuses on money, is we're focusing on market timing. We're focusing on what's happening in the economy right now. We're focusing on whatever the catastrophe or the headline of the day is. So the first thing we try to do is try to eliminate that in terms of helping people understand how little it matters in the long term. And lots of ways to do that. The first way is obviously to think long term, which means starting things with a financial plan rather than trading or investing. If you based your investing on what your plan calls for, then you're going to invest in things that are not dependent upon today's variable. And it's the dependence upon today's variable that gets people into the most trouble. And so we try to avoid that as much as we can.

So when people are only focusing on today's issues, what does it keep them from doing long term?

Anything like if all you're doing. So there's two really important things in that. The first is we actually can't control what happens next. So there is no way you can use the data you're getting today, the headline of today, the catastrophe of today, to actually make a change that will make a difference tomorrow. You can't predict what happens next. You can't control what happens next. So with a little bit of humility, you can get to the second thing where, okay, what can I do? What are some of the levers I can pull that will actually help me? As you say, long Term. And there are things like basic financial literacy education and start with a financial plan based on your own values. Understand yourself, understand what you want, where you want to go. Once you have that down, the daily headlines don't matter as much.

That's a good point. And I love that you said focus on your own values. If you were to recommend to anyone what's the first thing they should do when being mindful about their money and turning it around, would you say the values are the number one thing or is there something else?

Yeah. So in the book we talk about, there's three steps. There's three different sections of the book. The first section of the book is really about the illusions, the stuff that we're told that's just not the case, or the stuff that we. The experiences or the narratives we get that just aren't true. The second section of the book is, well, if that's not true, what should you focus on? And the very first step, the very first thing you should look at is what's important to me. There's all this. I mean, you know, there's enormous amounts of literature on success, getting to success, creating success, being successful, tons and tons. Go to any self help, go to any bookstore, go to Amazon, there's just thousands and thousands and thousands of titles. The fundamental thing when anyone talks about success is what is it? And it's not a universal. It's different for every single human being. So understanding what your values are, what your purpose is, and then layer some goals that are very personal on top of that. I don't know what you're doing. If you're not starting with that, you're just shooting from the hip, or you're just doing what you saw on TV last night, or you're doing what your parents expected of you, or what your friends or peers expect of you. If you don't go deep and figure out stuff for yourself, what you want, what's important to you, then I don't know how you define success. So the very nature of success requires some self reflection to begin.

How would you define success?

Never a light question here. So success for me, I want to be a great father and I want to have free time. And so for me to have free time, a lot of things have to be in place. But I want to not have to do what I'm supposed to do in that moment. I want to have the choice, whatever the thing is. And that free time comes with all kinds, just a slew of huge benefits. But it's hard to get to Free time. And I know many people that are CEOs that run great, successful businesses.

They.

They've got zero free time. I also know people that are monastics who have zero free time because they've got everything prescribed. So there's this thing in the middle that you got to figure out between giving everything up or attaining everything. What's important to you pursue that thing.

Can you elaborate on monastic? I have no idea what that is.

I mean, literally, monks in a monastery.

Oh, okay.

My graduate training is in. Is in Tibetan Buddhism. And so I spent seven years studying philosophy and comparative religion. And I had a bunch of Tibetan monks. I know some Indian monks, I know some Chinese chan monks. And they all, you know, it looks like they have all this free time, but it's all pretty prescribed and how they live their lives. And that's fine. Nothing wrong with that. That's their thing.

Right, I see what you're saying. So normally I look it up, but I'm in the middle of hosting the show, so I always look up stuff if I don't know it. But I'm. Can I pull this off on the other monitor right now? I'm like, I'm just gonna ask. No, I get what you're saying, though, because if you have no time in the world, you could have all the money, and that's not, you know, that better for you than having no time and no money. But at the same point, like, you're saying monastic, you could have all the. It looks like all the time in the world, but if it's so regimented, you're saying the component in there is that freedom to choose. What do you want to be doing with your time?

Yep, Exactly. Exactly.

And that how do you decide how much you're going to work versus how much you. You're not.

Again, you go, you go back to what your goal sets are, what your. What is, what's important to you. And this is. We had a brief conversation earlier about, you know, I lost my brother six weeks ago, and that changes what my belief system says. Like, I used to believe as one of the most important things in my. When I think about what's important to me, one of the things on the list has always been achievement. Now when, when your brother dies at 45, you have to ask yourself the question, is that really on the list of most important things? Because it can happen to anyone, anytime. So if that's the case, then there's got to be something. There's lots of other things that should be above that. And for me It's a, you know, you get a shock, you re reflect, you think about it.

And I'm sorry for your loss. Again, that's unfortunate.

Thank you.

Since then, what has changed and what are you looking at now for the next 5, 10, 15 years instead of the.

I'm sure you still have achievement, but I'm sure you dropped down the priority at least 10 pegs or so.

Yeah, it's top 10. It's probably not top six as much.

Okay.

The, you know, one of the things my brother did really well is my brother engaged his family like so when the pandemic started, they withdrew from most of their activities, the kids activities, and they started doing more things jointly together. So I already do a bunch of stuff with my family. We do stuff together. But the importance of that, given their recent past, is just unbelievable. It's huge. So he, he conscientiously said, hey, we're going to do more stuff as a family. About a year before he passed, that's we should all just wake up and say, you know what? Tomorrow isn't guaranteed. Those things that are important with the people who you love should absolutely be at the top of everyone's list. And this, if you live, if you live past 45, if you live to a ripe old age of, ripe old age of 90, 95, those people who you spend time with, those will be your most important people then too, that will be the source of the vast majority of your happiness, those relationships. So to squander time with humans to achieve more stuff or things or whatever is a mistake. And that's a mistake that I think I can say that I've made in the past. It's a mistake that I'm going to be watching for in the future.

Good for you. Good for you.

You mentioned there's three parts of your book.

Yeah.

What would the second part be? The second and third? I'll just tell you now. I'm going to ask you about both of them.

Well, so the first part is a series of illusions. The second part is the. And that's the stuff that we have. We have a sense of what's important, that's not important. The second part is the values. It's the purposeful work. It is relationships, it is health. It is those things that we should use as the foundation of a financial plan. And then the third section is actually once that's the foundation, what are the steps we create to do the math and create our own financial plan?

If I were to dive deeper here, since we're talking to entrepreneurs, I love your framework, and I think it's very accurate. And I agree that you should have the values as first and foremost, because.

Like you said, 40 years from now, 50 years from now, whatever the case is, heck, even next year, I mean, this last year, what, you can't ever get the time back, but you can always make more money. If someone's listening to this right now, and I know they are.

What would you say they should identify in their business? They set up the values. They know they want the time, freedom, they want the family. They, heck, maybe they want to take Fridays off. Whatever the case is, what would you say they should start looking at within the business to, you know, the big levers to say, maybe I need more of this and less of this, or maybe I should add something in. What do you find from all the people you've helped with your processes where they should start looking first?

Well, every business is different. Every person is different. So with that initial caveat, the thing that I think is universal.

Is, and this works for me, this works for many, many, many people. And that's if you want more time. So we have a certain list of things we have to get done. If you don't want to do all of those things, which means you want more time, right? You want something, you need to have people that can do those things. You need to. And this is. I learned this, you know, before my business did, you know, $250,000 of revenue long, long time ago. You need to have somebody that can take some of these things off your desk. And if you have somebody that can take some things off your desk, you create time. Guess what? When you create time, you can actually amplify the things that add value to your business that you do. Make them better, you know, make them more efficient, make them work faster, have better outcomes from that. And then you hire somebody else to take some more of those things off your desk. And the faster you grow, the more time you're going to be able to spend doing the things you really want to do. And that is, I think, the trick in any. And this is this works much more specifically in a service business than it does in, say, you know, like a manufacturing business or something like that. You're not gonna do the manufacturing yourself anyways, but you can. It kind of. You can scale it with, like, another plant, more equipment, those kinds of things. But in a service business like mine, it's gonna be human beings. It's gonna be people that like the things. Like to do the things that you're not Gonna be a big fan of and outsource those to those people.

That's a great point. You know, whether you like McDonald's or not. And I'm not claiming they have the best burgers in the world, but I always loved their model, loved the innovation and the assembly line. You know, same thing with Henry Ford for the automobile industry. I think it's a great differentiation you bring up because service based is different than manufacturing. However, I find a lot of businesses that are service based are nowhere near as efficient as manufacturing as huge companies that have all this going on. And it's like, that's part of like you're saying how to scale it and make it more efficient and profitable because they feel compelled to just have to do everything. Why do you think that is?

You know, I think there's a fear that if you give somebody else the job, they won't do it as well as you did. And there's an attachment to everything being perfect. Perfectionism is rampant. Right. I got a really close friend of mine who owns a retail store. This is just a mom and pop retail store. And he doesn't make anywhere near as much money as a lot of people that I know or myself. But he has way more free time because he has given his people the ability to make mistakes, the ability to recover from them, the ability to figure it out and not ask him. And A, they love that trust. They think that's the greatest thing in the world. B, he doesn't get bothered by small things. They handle it. And if it's a problem later, he says, hey, let's figure this out. Let's do some education. Let's make this better next time it happens. But the idea, if you want time, he's taking months off at a time like, you know, traveled South America with his son, which is an incredible thing on, because he has this business that he's created that he's trusted the people to run without him. That's. I think the hard point is how do you trust the people to run it without you? That's hard. I have a hard time with that.

It's impressive because taking months off at a time, I know people who do it. And it's a different level of having that efficiency in the business and the team behind you. And I'm saying team specifically, not staff, because I just had another great interviewer and we were talking about employees, strictly employees. And there's a difference between I have people, staff, employees, and I have bodies here versus a team of people. And I see the team as they're bought into the bigger vision and they want to support you, and you maybe do give them a little bit more latitude versus just sit here and do what I tell you. Because the issue I see with that is model is you. Now turn. And I've. I've encountered this in my business. When I first started building up my team, it was just like, okay, I'm gonna have them do all the stuff I don't want to. But then it's like, well, my job just shifted from doing the things that were actually creative and fun to now I'm just keeping tabs on them. And I'm like, this is a giant bottleneck for me because it's like.

I want to be doing the fun stuff, like hosting this. You know, I don't want to be going, like, before this. I wasn't worried about what anyone is doing. Oh, did they do this? Did they do this? If I can't trust them, why are they here? You know what I mean?

Yeah. There's a point where, well, first, right person, right seat. You know, there's all kinds of ways to talk to people and figure out the kinds of people they are, the kinds of jobs they would excel at and enjoy, and make sure that there's the right person in the right seat. You don't want to have somebody. Somebody that is very introverted in sales, for example, doesn't work as well. This is true. Right. So that's the first thing is right person, right seat. But then.

It'S really trusting. It's really saying, you know, go ahead, make mistakes. That's okay. And then if you get to a certain size and this is. I'm kind of on the cusp of this, and I'm kind of excited for this. If you get to a certain size, then you can actually have a coo, Someone else that manages those folks and those other projects to make sure all the pieces fall into place. And you can just do the podcast, you can just do the writing. You can just do the things that are really fun, working with clients directly. You can just do those things that you really. I'm talking about myself here. Just do the things you really want to do and not do the things you feel like, you know, not be a perfectionist about all the other details.

Yeah, absolutely. I know some people, they're, you know, and sometimes stuff doesn't work out because I fired plenty of people. And, you know, you just don't know until it's a couple months later. You know, maybe it was an advanced screening, but there's other people. I know that consistently for over a decade now, they're constantly burning through people because it's like, oh, they mess up, they mess up. And I'm just like, you've went through about 80 people in the last eight years. How is this. It's always on them. What's the lowest common denominator in this little equation here? And it's like. And I think it's a little bit too much of that. Maybe not even perfectionist. It's just. They can't let go. So maybe they do trust them, but it's not enough to say, hey, here's the keys to the castle. I'm trusting you to actually run this part or division so you can free it off my mind. What would you say for someone in that scenario.

Someone that's having a hard time trusting or someone that's got a.

Just letting go to that part of their business to free them up from other aspects?

I mean, you have a choice. You either hold onto it and you do it yourself forever, or you let it go. I mean, there's really. You have to take that step if you're going to get bigger, because you cannot. We have a limited, you know, we have a limited amount of time. There's a list of stuff we have to do. You could always pair the stuff you do that's going to affect the final product in a different way. So if you want to grow again, go back to those values. If that's important to you, then you have to release it. It's not a choice issue. It's something you have to do and you just got to be okay with it. And so you will waver until you stop wavering. You know, you'll waver until you do it and discover, okay, this will work.

There's this. Another good quote. It's something to the effect of. And I didn't come up with it, but it's something to the effect of, life will keep giving you the lessons. If you don't learn them, Life will keep repeating the problem until you learn the lesson.

I have heard that. Or the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and over and over again and expecting a different result.

Absolutely. So it's great to move forward and everything, but it's like, man, I've been dealing with this for so long. Ooh, that's not a good thing. What haven't you learned yet? And I'm glad again, I'm glad you talked about values in your book. What inspired you to write your book?

Wow. So I was actually told I had to write the book. So in 2007, 2008, you may remember, the world is falling apart.

I had a meeting with a client and I just did what I did. I just talked to the client about, hey, I don't know what's coming next. No one can predict this. I still am investing every single month in my 401k. I'm still doing it this way. I still believe that it's going to be okay. I don't know when it's going to be okay. I don't know how it's going to be okay. I don't know what's going to cause it to be okay. But I know that it will be okay. And we'll look back at this and we'll say, oh, remember that thing that happened and it took three years and we were looking back at 2008 and saying, oh, there's this great recession and most things had recovered in that period of time. And that's kind of how it always works. So I was just telling her this story and she's a, you know, she's a Pulitzer Prize winning author and she said, well, Jonathan, you have to take this and you have to turn this into a book and if you do, I'll write your forward. And so she, she wrote the forward and I wrote the book. And that was a, it was a requirement that the, one of the huge benefits that came out of it was, you know, as I mentioned, I studied Tibetan Buddhism in grad school. So that's, you know, that's different than finance. A little bit very different than finance. So what writing the book enabled me to do is bring these two parts of my life into alignment. Like, it helped me really understand how these two things work together and how to actually apply that understanding so that it can help not just me, but other people. Which means it's not always about, you know, better returns. In fact, it can't be about better returns, but it is about better living, it is about happiness, it is about well being. And that whether we like it or not, our finances is all wrapped up in our well being. Those things are so interconnected, it's very difficult to separate the two unless you go monastic, unless you become a monk. But if you're not going to become a monk, then finances are going to be part of your life and that's period, you know, end of story. So if that's the case, let's understand how to use that in a way that actually makes for a better life. You know, makes for it.

Not a.

Not additional complexity, not more pain, not more difficulty, not, you know, lesser outcomes. Let's figure out a way to make it work. So that's where you go, okay. Education, planning, mindfulness. Those three things actually make a difference.

Who's been your biggest success story that you've been able to help?

So it, when I think about the biggest success story, I don't really have a single, you know, this is the thing that was awesome. I mean, I have, you know, I've got young clients who retired, you know, late 40s. I'd say that's an enormous success story. And they did that because they did the plan and saw how much they had to save so they could do what they wanted to do and retire early. That's great. That's a great success story. But I also have clients that had too much in the way of assets, owned a lot of, you know, when they bought their first house, they bought a massive house that was way outside their range. And we got them to see that in a long term financial planning process. They sold that house, went to a smaller house because they didn't really want the big house, but they thought they were supposed to have the big house. So that's what they did. And they were able to save more and they were able to get there. So that's also a huge success. I've had clients that expanded a business and they could expand the business because they saw they had the resources to do it. That's a, that's a huge success. It's just.

The thing that makes me feel good about what we do is there's like an aha moment. There's a moment in the financial planning process where people go, oh, like, I can do these things that I wanted to do, but didn't know how they fit in because I've never thought it through before. And that aha moment, you know, allows people to focus on the stuff that's really meaningful to them. That is, that's why I love this is that aha moment comes and sometimes it's not right away, it's not right when they get the financial plan. I had a guy who we did the financial plan and every single time we saw him for like a five year period after we did the financial plan, he was just angry, bitter about some little thing in his financial life. It was, you know, some project, remodeling project was over budget, or the car he bought was too expensive, or, you know, they took this big vacation. None of the family was appreciative enough of the expense or there's always just some little too much in taxes, too little in performance, whatever it is. Always some little thing. Then one day we did this presentation, he sat in the audience and he came up to me after the presentation, he goes, I think I get it. You don't manage investments, you manage people. And I said, yes, that's right, we manage people. And he goes, oh, and very next meeting he's like, okay, let's look at the plan, let's look at the big picture. Let's not get, let's not get stuck in all these little details because they kind of, they kind of even themselves out over time and with each other. So let's look at the big picture. Let's ask some questions about the big picture and let's go from there. Let's make decisions with long term in mind, not get mired in all these little details. Yes, shit happens all the time. There's no way to avoid that. But if you expect it and just behave according to how you're plan says you should behave, well, you're going to be fine. And you just have to know that and embrace that. Lots of, lots of success stories. I can't, I can't point to one and say this is the most successful. There's a lot of good ones.

Again, I appreciate the problems you're causing me because I really love it when people go, wow, I get, oh my gosh, I got so many. It's like, I know. And that's why you're here. Because if you only have one or two, good for you, keep going. But when you go, oh my gosh, I'm in the hundreds or thousands, which one do I pick? And I love that you varied them because yeah, if someone is able, does the stuff younger, does the stuff younger on does the stuff when they're younger early on. See that when it's your show, you can just skip out like five words and it still makes sense. Good for them for being able to do that by 40, late 40s. But at the same token, I almost give more credit to the person who's 50, 60 and goes, I never learned any of this stuff. Now I am, and now I'm fixing it because that takes, I think, more to go, I'm changing everything versus I had a better upbringing than learned early on. But by all means I'm still giving credit to them because I wish there was more people who learned early on. And it doesn't matter either way because I was going to make a joke about the Home because yeah. If you're approved for half or a million dollars or more, isn't it against the law if you don't use every last little bit of that up to get the first one or the second one?

Right, right. We can't under buy. We can't do that. No, no, no, no.

Oh yeah, same thing with the car. Oh, cool. You have creditworthiness to get fifty hundred thousand dollars vehicle. Fantastic. Well, make sure you don't only use half of it. Who would want to be ahead of the ball five years from now?

Right, right, exactly. And it's always that trade off and that without. That's the fundamental when it comes to financial planning. Not every business, but when it comes to financial planning, you want to find the trade offs that you will embrace. You want to, okay, these are all the things that are important to me. These are all my values. This is what I want to have in my life. Prioritize. Pick the top three, four, focus on those. If you let other things go, the top three, four happen faster. That's the. What are the trade offs you can make and embrace? You make them happily knowing that those top three, four of the things are going to come true and they're going to come through in a way that wouldn't have happened had you not focused. That's the whole thing. That's the entire package. That's why you do a financial plan for sure.

I had a real good question and it just temporarily slipped my mind about money and it had to do with. Oh, that's it. Savings. Thank you.

What is the savings rate now and what do you think it really should be the average savings rate for Americans now and what do you think it should be?

So I'm not. It's a very interesting question because there's two things. The first thing is it's completely up in the air right now. It has totally changed the last year with all the federal money that got pumped into things, we saved a lot more. Now we're just starting to spend again. So I don't think we actually have a good idea about the current savings rate is, well, let's say over the.

Last 10, 20, 50 years. In which direction has people's money trended for savings?

So we've saved less and less and less over time. I think it was down around 6 or 7% before the pandemic. So it's, you know. And what should it be? Well, frankly, you know, my dad's, my dad set a minimum for me at about, at 10%. But I wish he would have said it at 20%, and that would have been. That would have been a much better, you know, thing. However, not as worried about averages. You know, I think that every individual's got to figure it out for themselves. Because there's. Frankly, there are people. I have clients that are artists or clients that are authors. And so they can actually. Or real estate agents, like, they can do what they do into their 70s. They don't have to plan for a post, you know, quote, unquote, retirement period. They can work for as long as they want to work. And those people that are authors, they can. We have an author who's getting. Sorry, a musician who's getting royalties from a song that he wrote that was produced by one of the best artists in the 60s, Janis Joplin. So he continues to this day to get royalties on a song that he wrote that someone famous sang. That's huge. He doesn't have to, quote, unquote, retire. He still has an income from this. If you have 20 of those songs, he's got a few of them, then you're in great shape. At the same time, if you write a book, you continue getting royalties. As long as that book is important, as long as people want to read that book. If you're an artist, you can continue doing your art for a long period of time. There's a lot of therapists, there's a lot of people out there that they don't make a huge living, but they can continue doing that work for a long period of time now. So what. What does that mean? Well, if I can work into my. Into my 70s and 80s, I don't have to save as much. So this is how much you save depends just as much upon what kind of work you do as it does upon what your values and goals are. This stuff all comes together in a planning process. And this isn't. I've had people come to my office and hey, have you done a financial plan? Oh, yeah, here it is. And they show me a pie chart of their investments, right? I'm like, that's, you know, where's your cash inflow, cash outflow? Where's your spending on your parents? Where's your spending on the kids? Where's your retirement income? Oh, that's not here. This is our plan. This is, you know, our advisor at whatever bank of somewhere said, this is our plan. And so we have a plan. No, you don't have a plan. You haven't actually any values. Say again.

I said you don't have a plan. You have A pie chart.

You have a pie chart? Yeah. That's all you got. That's all you got. And that happens all the time. And if you haven't done the internal work, if you haven't embraced the things you're going to let go of, you're like, I'm not. Okay. I don't have the resources to have that annual trip to Jamaica. So I'm not going to do. If you don't ever make that decision and think about it, you're just going to spend money. So what? The average savings rate, I'm not as worried about that as a culture. It says something. When we save less and less and less and less, it just means we spend more and more and more and more. That's probably not a good indicator long term. But I'm worried about the individuals that are sitting in front of me far more than I'm worried about resolving the culture. I don't have the power to fix that one.

Okay. And that's fair. And I appreciate the honesty. It's all I'm ever looking for. Great answers, this whole thing. I got one, actually, two more questions for you. One of them, it's real easy. Yellow or black?

Yellow.

All right, I'll spin the wheel or whatever.

Do you think it's going to land on your question right there?

I have no idea.

All right, yellow, Here we go. Here's the question.

If you could change one thing in the financial industry, what would it be?

I would limit the ability of people to predict and then get all kinds of airwaves with their predictions. No one has any idea. Just stop listening to predictions.

Oh, okay.

Very true, very true. Well, thank you for that. We're going to thank our sponsor and come back for the imperfect action round. You've heard me say every business needs a book, including yours, and it's true. And that's why I'm launching my new book@eapublishingmethodbook.com so you can learn the seven steps to publish and promote your nonfiction lead and profit generating business book in eight weeks. But you know what, don't take my word for it. Take it from a few of my authors, like Lori. I went from having an idea and.

A possibility to actually get my book published.

Or Catherine, thank you for making my.

Mom number one best selling author.

Or Mary Alice, what he got done.

For me in three days regarding my book launch.

Unmanageable.

John Cody.

I've worked with Mario over the phone and online and he's been very helpful in getting me where I needed to go with promoting my books. Rocio, there's no way in the world I would have been able to do this with somebody else again. I've attempted it in the past. It didn't serve me. As a matter of fact, I ended up more frustrated than anything. So this has been a very seamless process.

Adele, if you're looking for an amazing.

Business coach, I highly recommend Mario Ficini or Bill Benner. I can't make a higher recommendation than to work with Mario Ficini. He has been great for me, and right now I won't work with anybody else except for Mario.

Hey, their words, not mine. Visit eapublishingmethodbook.com to get your copy and I look forward to hearing your transformation as our next video success story. Once again, that's eapublishingmethodbook.com and we are back with the imperfect action round. Jonathan, are you ready to take imperfect action?

I am. Let's do this, Mario.

All right, three questions for you. Rapid fire answers. What is the fastest path to the cash.

Client experience? Client transformation. The best thing you can do is make it worthwhile for the people you are serving. If you make it worthwhile for the people you are serving, they will talk about you. If they talk about you, more people will come your way.

Audience will allow it. I'm teasing. Okay, the second one is.

I've never done that in the life of this show. What is the second question? It's something about your prospects. What's the biggest problem your prospects have and the fastest way for them to fix it?

The biggest problem the prospects have and the fastest way for them to fix it. The biggest problem is the prediction thing. And it's if you have a financial plan, if you understand your values and understand that it's far more important to understand the history than is today's headlines, you can get a lot closer to fixing it.

Excellent. Number three, what is the best way to maximize customer lifetime value?

I love this question because you know, it's in the answer is in the question. Lifetime, right? How do you extend the lifetime of the customer or client? If you can extend the lifetime of the customer client, how long do they work with you? Then you're going to extend the lifetime value. And so that goes right back to that transformational experience. If you, if you create something that has them leaving your office and they're like, oh, my God, that was incredible. They will tell people, same token, if you create something that everyone's going to hate, they will talk about that as well. And so if you do it the right way, you get more clients. You get more clients, faster, they stay longer, you increase the lifetime value of the customer.

Another great point. And I believe it's something like 18 to 20 times more from a negative experience. They'll tell people.

Yep, yep. Wow.

What books would you recommend to Expert Authority World?

If you haven't read Steven Pressfield's the Art of War.

Great book.

I think you're missing out. That is, that's been critical for me and all the, all the creative work that I do. I love Derek Sivers, Anything youg Want. He's the founder of CD Baby, A Great book. There's so, there's so many, I mean, there's so many great books.

Where would you like people to learn more?

Best place to learn more about mindful money is to go to Mindful Money. And you can see the courses there, you can see the education stuff there. You can look at our, our services there. A lot of the education stuff you can do on your own. You don't have to use us. There's a lot of, you know, in our culture there's a lot of shame about money. And so we created, we created this digital course platform so that people could do it in their house and their vacation, you know, whenever they wanted to do it from wherever they are so they can be safe and feel good about it.

Excellent. Well, thank you for making that available. That sounds good.

I have appreciated everything you've shared. I wish we had more time, but thank you for sharing with Expert Authority World.

Thanks for having me on, Mario.

And you know what?

We can always do it again. We can create more time.

Absolutely. All right, Expert Authority World. We have another great episode here today. I'll see you tomorrow. Have a great day and God bless.

You're already the expert, but have you transformed your expertise into a tangible asset that will generate qualified leads while increasing profit for you 24 7? And if so, how well are you promoting it? With my new book, the Expert Authority Effect Publishing Method, I take you through my process step by step. Visit eapublishingmethodbook.com today to learn the seven steps to publish and promote your nonfiction, lead and profit generating business book in eight weeks. Visit eapublishingmethodbook.com to get started now. Once again, that's eapublishingmethodbook.Com thanks for listening to today's episode. I would love to know what you enjoyed most from it if you haven't done so already. I invite you to connect with me on my new LinkedIn. You can go to it directly at eainterviews.com LinkedIn Once again, that's eainterviews.com LinkedIn lastly, check out the full eainterviews.com site for complete show notes, the full interview video experience, links to the resources we mentioned, and more. Have a blessed day and I'll see you on the next one.