0540 | The Compliance Handbook: A Guide to Operationalizing Your Compliance Program with Author, Founder, and the Voice of Compliance Tom Fox

This is Tom Fox. I'm the founder of the Compliance Podcast Network and you're listening to EA interviews.

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Join Mario Ficcini for today's Expert Authority Effect interview. Welcome Expert Authority World. We have another great episode here with attorney founder of the Compliance Network, Tom Fox. If you've ever had any questions about compliance or ideas about it, what it means to you and your business, I can't wait to jump right in and bring up. Tom Fox.

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Is, ladies and gentlemen, Tom Fox. Tom, how are you feeling today?

I am doing great, thank you Mario.

Glad to hear that. Why is compliance so important for business?

Compliance is critical to allow you to do business ethically and in compliance with laws and regulations. More importantly, compliance is a business process and effective compliance equates to more efficient business processes, equates to greater ROI and greater profitability. So if you run your business in compliance with the appropriate sets of internal controls, it's actually going to be a much more efficient business and you'll make more money.

How many people would you say are running it out of compliance?

You mean in the compliance profession domestically or internationally?

Yeah, I was thinking domestically. But does it depend on industry or are certain industries more buttoned up than others or across the board, everyone can be better.

Across the board, everyone can be better. If you're a U.S. public company, you're required to have a compliance program. If you're a regulated industry, meaning you're in insurance, financial services, banking or similar service, you have to have a compliance program. If you do business internationally, you have to have a compliance program. And the same is true for international companies that may have a U.S. subsidiary. So basically every major corporation needs a compliance program.

How many would you say? What percentage would you say don't?

The percentage that don't are small, typically family owned local businesses that don't do business internationally or across the United States or don't have access to capital markets like stock exchanges or private equity funding.

What, what could they do better.

And.

Where would they even start? Because I'm thinking of networking groups and places I've spoke locally and even across the country to bigger rooms, hundreds of people. I don't think anyone's ever brought it up like, as one of their top concerns. It's usually leads, profit, the team, the workforce, the staff, whatever.

Everything you just said touches compliance. So corporate culture touches compliance. Corporate governance touches compliance. Your staff, your employees, touch compliance. Business sales, touch compliance, business operations, touch compliance. Compliance is basically financial controls. And I've spoken to numerous companies who did not have a compliance program in place. And I said the following. You have 95 to 98% of a compliance program in place if you have an SAP accounting system. And they go, wow, really? I said, you just don't call it that. You call it financial controls. And if you let me write policies and procedures around that, you will see that it is not 100 steps past what you have. It's five to two steps pass. And when people start to understand, oh, you know, I guess we do have to have a written document for an employee expense reimbursement. We have to do that for the irs, we have to do that for our cfo, then they begin to see, yeah, we have the basics of a compliance program in place.

Where would someone find that? Just what you said, the employee expense.

Reimbursement.

Sure. That is as basic and employee financial control as there is. So if you've ever worked for a corporation and you went and took a customer out to lunch and you, you wanted to get reimbursed, you know, you'd have to turn in the receipt, you would have to identify who you took, where you took them, hopefully what you talked about and their job position. You then sign that, attesting that what you've said is true. Then you give it to your supervisor, who then counter signs it, showing that they reviewed it and saw that you filled in all the right boxes. Then you send it to AP or your accounting department and they review it to see is all the information we need in here so that we can get an appropriate business tax deduction from the irs. Those are all mandatory steps, and they're basic financial control steps. That's also the basics of a compliance program. So you're probably already doing it. If not, I'm happy to send you a form.

I would love to see the form. And my follow up to that is, what about if they're a vendor or a contractor? What if they're not technically an employee?

If there are a vendor and a contractor, the rules and obligations are a little bit different. If they're a vendor or a contractor, you need to know who are you doing business with? Why are you doing business with them? How are you doing business with them? Do you have a contract in place? And if they send you an invoice for services, for products, for a sale of a product, if they're a third party sales agent and they get a commission, have they fulfilled their obligations under the contract? So let's start with why. Why do you want to do business with this particular company? And let's just say Tom Fox Inc. And you say to your boss, we want to bring in Tom Fox Inc. To do something for us. And he says, what? What's he going to do? Why do we need him as opposed to someone we already have? Or why do we need him instead of someone else in his field? That's called the business justification. Number two. Get some basic information on me. How long has my corporation been in existence? Who are the owners and beneficial owners? Where do we do business? And we do. We really do the business we say we do. And so I'm going to deliver. I've said I'm going to deliver a widget to you. Can I deliver that widget? Or as it turns out, I don't deliver widgets. I deliver roses in East Texas. I maybe not be the guy for you if I deliver roses in East Texas. You say, fine. Then you do some very basic background checks on me called due diligence. Is this guy a convicted felon? Is he on any prohibited lists? Has he had lawsuits against him for engaging in fraud? Everything clears. And you're satisfied that I'm okay to do business with? I can deliver on the service or product? I've said I could. And you need my services. Now you have a contract. Typical vendor contract. I'm going to deliver X and you're going to pay me Y. Well, you put in some basic compliance terms and conditions, like I have the right to audit you if you violate this contract. From the compliance angle, I can terminate this contract. And every year you attest you haven't violated the compliance rules, then we sign a contract and then you pay me based on that contract. So those are steps you should take in any business relationship. I've just called it compliance. But you should do that with every vendor. You better know who you're doing business with because if it turns out they're fraudsters or criminals or crooks, not only can they steal money from you, but the bigger damage is reputational damage. If you found out that, you know, it turns out Tom Fox was a fraud and he had a list of lawsuits against him in the great state of Texas. And now everybody's found out we do business with fraudsters.

I never thought about that. You never thought that about you. But I appreciate the example. I gotta ask, I love this. I actually almost went to law school, so this is fascinating on many levels for me. But you mentioned the background checks. Do you recommend any business should always run background checks on anyone they hire? Contractor, vendor, employee, whatever the case is?

Absolutely. A lot of contracts require it. So I come out of the energy industry. So typically we would do a contract with a big energy company at a chemical plant and they would have in their contracts with my subcontractors, you have to do criminal background checks. You have to do some basic minimum tests, whether even you call it drug testing, that's a due diligence check.

So you're already doing compliance. You just didn't call it that.

So tell me more about the. Because you keep saying, you know, it's financial, this, it's. You're doing compliance. Is this the only area you've focused on and how would you equip? I mean, ip, I know is different and there's many different types of law. But do you specifically stay around the compliance for businesses?

I typically do. But if you're concerned that I'm limiting this to financial controls, let's talk about culture.

No, no, I actually love that you're talking about financial controls and all of this because so few people. I'm thinking of others I've had on the show or just talk about at different events or meet at different in person speaking events like we did, and I'll be speaking it again. So many, so few don't talk about the money and don't talk about accounting and definitely don't talk about the compliance. It's one of the reasons I wanted to have you on because it seems like everyone's on the leads. Profit marketing, social, all the fun stuff everyone thinks they need. But the reality is I'd bet 9 out of 10 companies could be better with accounting and 100% of companies could be better with compliance.

Absolutely. And the compliance or violations of compliance are really subsets of fraud. So if you think about fraud in a corporation, it's someone who creates a pot of money to steal from the company. And that's a classic fraudster. Well, compliance is somebody creates a pot of money, but they use that to pay a bribe or they use that nefariously to get something for the company that the company wasn't entitled to. And that's what compliance is. So It's a subset of fraud. And when you begin to understand that, you see why compliance is so critical to. Because you don't want to violate any anti competitive laws, you don't want to violate money laundering laws, and you certainly don't want to get caught paying a bribe.

Yeah, that, that would be bad, I'm sure, for 100% of businesses that it happens to. I'm enjoying this. I got to make a lawyer joke here, line of questioning and I'm playing off of it, but I feel like there's other areas. So we're talking about the compliance, the financial. What other areas should people look at? If we're talking the Main street business or maybe someone doing 20 or 50 million a year that, you know, it's a larger company. What, what are they violating? Also that I haven't asked you yet. Like there's a few, few friends of mine, I know they're eight figure businesses. What should they be looking for?

I'm sorry, but you're gonna have to repeat that. I couldn't hear anything. My dog basic.

Oh, no problem. I was saying, we've talked about this, small, smaller Main street businesses, you know, let's say a million or less. But what about the, the companies? I'm thinking of some friends of mine that have eight figure companies. You know, maybe they got 10, 20, 50 employees. Whatever the case is. What, what are their set of issues? Like a seven and eight figure business versus a six figure.

Sure. So it's not really the size of the business, it's the quality of the violation. That violation can be in money laundering, that can be in export control, meaning if you're sending something outside the United States, it can be in import control because there are laws that say you cannot purchase products that were created by slave labor. And right now that loss specifies China, but it keeps a large part of the semiconductor and clothing industry from accessing markets in China. So those are the two. The one I specialize in is called anti corruption and anti bribery, where companies pay money, pay bribes to get contracts or other benefits outside the United States. So there's a variety of laws and they're only going to increase. It's not, it's administration agnostic, meaning it was robust under Biden, it got more robust under Trump. One it continued it was robust under Obama, got more robust under Trump. One continued under Biden and will become more robust because Trump sees economic sanctions as a way to deliver a message and penalty to countries he thinks are hurting the United States.

So this, so the through line is Politically, regardless of who's there, it sounds like it's still going to continue on because the companies are making so much money. Whether, you know, and I'm not going to support slave labor, but it sounds like they're doing it for competitive advantage at whatever the cost. Is that correct?

That's correct. But there's another set of reasons which is perhaps even more important and that is compliance is now seen as a business mandate, meaning it's not compliance with the law that's driving it, it's business to businesses that are driving with it. And I mentioned it a little bit earlier. If you want access to capital markets, you have to have a compliance program. You certainly do if you are a U.S. publicly listed company on the New York or other stock exchange. But it's beyond just public, public companies. If you want to have private equity investment, the second thing they're going to look at is your compliance program after the financials. If you want to get a bank loan, you're going to have to show your compliance program. If you want to get insurance, you're going to have to show them your compliance program. And it's to the point now where if you want to have a contract, and I mentioned a little bit earlier, in the petrochemical or energy space, I represent a lot of eight low eight figure valued companies. So 50 million, 100 million too small to have a chief compliance officer or even a general counsel. And I do contracts for them and I see in their contracts they're required to have a compliance program to do chemical plant work. And you may say, well, Tom, what's, what's the tie? The tie is that the plant owner sees it as a benefit or mandate to them, so they're requiring it down the chain. So it's almost now a business requirement. It certainly is. If you want access to money for your own business.

How hard is it to establish a full compliance program for any business?

The type of compliance program needed for Exxon is not the type of compliance program needed for Tom Fox Energy. They are very different. And the Department of Justice who regulates this area recognize that. And they say you must have a compliance program appropriate to your business.

So, so it's scalable.

It's scalable, but it has to be able to scale up. And the best example I could point you to is I once had a 15 million dollar software client. They had one piece of software that did something in the energy space. And I couldn't even tell you, but I told them, guys, if you don't have, they were so Small. They didn't even have their own sales force. They outsource all of their sales and that's the highest risk in compliance. And I said, if you don't do due diligence and get these guys under contract, you're never going to get a contract in the energy space. And that was true. And after they let me put in an appropriate level of compliance program, recognizing their highest risk, which were these outsourced sales agents, basically just agents on commission, nothing exotic.

Then they started getting contracts with other energy companies. So it's, it's mandatory to do business now.

This is so interesting.

And I love how you say 15 million like a small company. They only had this, they did. There was too small for that. Like I think most people would love to have a $15 million company, you know, so that's why it's like.

It sounds like everyone needs it. How long does it take to put into place?

Well, if I go back to my $15 million company, it was I think six employees and I did it in a couple of weeks. I mean I was working full time. But you have to go through certain steps. You have to document those steps. So if a regulator or who another company comes knocking and wants to audit you, you can show them. This is what I did, this is how I did this, why I did it. And this is a compliance program. The steps are basically the following. You have to do a risk assessment of your risks. So with my little 15 million dollar company, it was their outsourced salesforce. So how do you manage that risk? There's a program for managing third parties. We put that in place. We got everybody under contract. I trained everybody, we created written policies and procedures and that was an appropriate compliance program for that organization.

That's great.

What would you say to the ones that are half a mil to 5 mil?

The quicker and sooner you can put a compliance program in place, the better off you're going to be. The more other companies will, customers will take you seriously and it will open access to both capital markets and other companies that want you to have a compliance program if you're going to do business with them.

Wow. I was literally just giving an interview and said people do business that, you know, everyone's heard. They like know and trust. And I, I said I have to add on respect and know they can get you past the finish line because there's people, I'm sure I'm not going to have you name them. But if I said name five people you know like and trust, but you've never Referred business.

I'm sure there's people that you like, know and trust. You just don't refer them for whatever reason. And it's probably something they're dropping the ball on with emails or just getting back to you this and that. And after, you know, I'm still hearing you say all this, I'm like, you literally can open up new areas of business and expansion and markets because someone that these larger companies that have compliance programs that are playing on this level, they might not even take you on as a contractor or vendor if you're not following the same rules they are, let alone if they're trying to go from 15 million to 100 million. Is that correct?

That's correct. Unless you use your phrase like know and trust. Great, Mario, show me your documentation.

I like that.

It's just I tell people, and I've said this for 15 years, what are the three most important things in every compliance program? Document, document, document. Whatever you do, document it. Because if you don't document it, document it, you can't prove it.

I love that the attorney side of that. It's not what you say, it's what you can prove. And as the founder of a publishing company, I'm all about written words.

There you go.

Okay, so I'm going to kick it back to the people who. Because we all need more help. You originally started by saying just a vendor reimbursement agreement. What other types of Ingram I'm talking, let's go a mil or less. They're not even playing on the same field as these tens of twenties of millions and 100 million. Like you need an employee agreement. Vendor reimbursement. Is there three or four or five other ones that like, here's what you should have as a basic compliance start.

You should have policies and you should have procedures to implement those policies. Those policies can be as basic as you can spend up to X amount of dollars on client entertainment, client meals or gifts. Whether that's fifty dollars, a hundred dollars, two hundred and fifty, or five hundred. Get close to one thousand, you're getting close to a range you probably shouldn't be. And it's not that you can't spend more than any of those amounts. It's that you can't do it without authorization.

Approval from someone above you. So you're basically putting a second set of eyes on it. You say, tom, when you're in Detroit, I'm going to take you to dinner. If it's below 250, you don't have to get pre approval above 250 just have to get someone above you to sign off on it. So that's, that's a pretty key policy because it's something that almost every business engages in in some form. So that, that's one. If you're going to pay for travel, have a policy around that. You obviously want to have no harassment and no anti competitive. And you also need some sort of hotline, meaning is there a internal reporting mechanism for you or your other stakeholders, including vendors, to report illegal acts? You can hire companies that do that. So it's outside your company. You don't have to sit around waiting for a phone call yourself. But those are some of the basic things you need in place. You need to do background due diligence on the people you do business with. And then as you grow and get larger, you would need other policies, such things as around.

Mergers and acquisitions. And then you need to train your employees on it. It's not simply enough to have policies and procedures, you have to communicate those policies and procedures. And once you train people on them, you can't sit around. Then you have to make sure they follow them. So it is have a risk assessment, manage those risks through policies and procedures, train your employees on policies and procedures and then monitor their compliance with those policies and procedures and upgrade or update as appropriate.

Wow. I love this. Absolutely do. How long would it take for the sub million dollar companies to put something basic in place?

I would say in five days.

Oh.

What type of investment are we looking at?

Well, if they go hire a white shoe law firm, they're probably looking at $25,000. They hire someone like me, it's going to be considerably less.

Okay. But it will open up new markets to them, it will open up new capital to them. And I would think also a sense of confidence just knowing you're doing your business is one of the ones doing it the right way.

That in the following. You don't have brakes on a car to slow down. You have brakes on a car so you can go fast. Compliance is that. Yes, it is the guardrail that keeps you between the lines to make sure you don't go outside the lines. Now you might bounce off those guardrails, but that's why they're in place. And hopefully you'll drive long enough and fast enough and hard enough that you won't get near those guardrails. But that's how I like to think of compliance.

I like that you don't have brakes to slow down. You have brakes so you can go fast.

I like that A lot.

All right.

What.

What should I be asking you that I haven't yet? Because I want to help the audience as much as possible, but this is obviously not my forte. Is there something else that sub million can be doing quicker than larger or is there something that 5 to 10 million. It only applies to them if we are at a certain size or above.

It's really where you're doing business, who you're doing business with.

Okay.

And how you're doing business. If you are all outsourced third party sales agents, that is the highest risk. Why they're not your employees? Because they're not your employees and you don't have control over them. You can't make sure they're doing the right thing all the time. Now, I recognize you can't do that with employees, but at least you can terminate employees or you can see their expense reports and you have a little closer monitoring. I really think we've hit the high points because we've talked about get a compliance program as soon as you can, build it to scale for your business and then have it expandable or scalable as you grow.

I like that. You can scale it. So you're saying we could get started now, put something in place and then as you grow, say, hey, we should probably tack this on. Maybe you start off with contractors and vendors and then you go, hey, I am going to hire five people as actual full time employees. That's probably a different scenario than 10 part time vendors, right?

Correct. Very different.

And you keep saying the expense cards and doing this. That really also sounds like if there's sales and marketing and they're traveling to entertain and it's like the front end, but someone working behind a computer, they might not really need an expense account and they might not be traveling, huh?

No, but they might be overseeing those who are doing so. It doesn't mean they're overseeing in terms of approving, but it may be that they're in. They're the AP clerk who's making sure all the documentation is there. And if they see one employee, if you have a $75 limit on your meals and they have 10 invoices at 74.99, that is a suspicious pattern for invoicing. Yeah. Coming out right below. And that's something that they would want to raise to their supervisor or the.

CFO made real nice with the waiter or waitress saying, hey, can you break this up over five different cards? And I got to ask you about the two. What's that?

You nailed it on the head yeah.

And maybe it's not for food, but they just ran it that way. You. You said 250 for dinner. I want to take you out to dinner.

Okay.

Is the 250 a legal law by the US Constitution or something, or was that just a hypothetical.

Amount?

It's not a law.

Okay.

It's not a hypothetical. It's somewhere in between. It is in the world I play in, which is international anti corruption, there have been enforcement actions for dollar amounts as low as 1000. Meaning if you did 1000 without prior approval, the. That's viewed as bad. Okay. So if you told me I wanted to have a limit of a thousand, I'd say, Mario, you're, you're getting close to a limit that you may get into trouble, but that means anything below that is fair game. And then it becomes, how much discretion do I want to give my sales force? I have a new client. And we were having this exact discussion and the CCO said, I want to have it at 500. Our, our CEO likes to go to nice places for dinner. And then we were presenting all this to CEO and he said, $200. That's it.

Oh, interesting.

Now, once again, it's not that you can't spend more than that. It's just you have to get pre approval.

I gotcha. Yeah. When you said 250, I was like, yeah, I'm thinking of the bills from the steakhouses a couple places. I'm like, they were more than that. So I was, yes, you had me concerned. I was like, I almost said, can it be 300? Or that actually wouldn't have covered it either. So it's not a law. It's just more the company decides, here's our threshold. So we're not like raising any flags. Obviously you don't want to make it 850. And then you're just constantly skirting that line. But.

Right.

I was also thinking the reasonability. I'm like, if the stakes are 120 a piece, no drinks, no food, no sides, 250.

Well, and you're absolutely right.

It's got to be reasonable. It sounds like I haven't eaten in.

Detroit in a long time, but there are cities not only in the United States, but across the globe where it's much more expensive. And this happened to me. I had a hundred dollar a day per diem in Oslo, and I was there for several weeks and I was feeling sorry for myself on a Friday night. So I said, I'm going to get a large pizza and a gallon of Coke.

Nice.

And it was more than a hundred dollars.

For what? So, yeah, seriously, how big was this pizza?

It was just a Pizza Hut, large.

So was that with the, with the conversion to US dollars or was it literally 80, 90, 100 bucks?

It was with a conversion, but that's how high that was the exchange rate plus the cost of living there and you know, with my gallon coke. So.

Wow, you win. I, I spent 40 and that was including tip.

For a large pizza at like a sit down place that I took back to the hotel on one of the last trips. And I was like, this is obnoxious because they're like 8, 9, 10, 12 bucks normally. Yep. But a hundred. Wow.

Oh, okay. There are, there are cities where it's very expensive in there. You just need to plan.

Sure.

Well, let me ask you, how did you get into this? Now that you've given us all this great detail, how did it start? What's the origin story?

The origin story is I was in recovering trial lawyer. I did that for 25 years. And I went to the corporate world and in the energy space. I ended up the general counsel of a company who had violated the U. S. Law about migrant corruption outside the United States.

And now one of my tasks was to build out a compliance program. That's how I learned to do this. The company got sold, my job went away. I was 50. I decided what I really wanted to do in my life was race bicycles. I went off on this great adventure, race bicycles. And until a year later I was on a training ride and I got taken out by a hummer that ended my cycling career. Sorry to hear that. And so I realized I was gonna have to go back to work. And when I finally got enough energy to get on my walker and toddle into my office, I thought about long and hard about what did I want to do. You know, when you have one of those life changing events, you tend to think about those things. And I decided what I really enjoyed was building compliance programs inside of corporations. So I decided to be the nuts and bolts guy. And that's what I did. I started blogging, then I started podcasting. And. But there's lots of things you can do in compliance. You can do investigations, you can travel all over the world, you can negotiate with regulators. And I choose to build compliance programs. And so if you want to know how to build a compliance program, I'm the guy.

Absolutely. And I think I know the answer, but I want to be 100% sure. And what inspired you to start the podcast network?

So I Had this brilliant idea in 2017 that I went around to all of the trade groups in my space, two nonprofit, one for profit. And I said, guys, let's start. Let's do a consortium or joint venture where we pool together and we create this podcast network. And we will be the only source for compliance information in podcasting. This will not take away from anything you're doing, any training, any conferences, any written publications, and not that I would ever suggest anything. And a competitive will corner all the market on advertising. And I got get zero interest. No one even nibbled. So I just said, bleep it, I'll do it myself. So I did.

Good for you. And now you have 60 plus people on it shows.

Yes, good for you.

I love that. I think that's all the great stories.

Someone had an idea and.

Said, I'll do it on my own the polite way, like you said.

So what happened was in 2019, I decided I either had to fully commit to the podcast network or move it to hobby status and go back to practicing law. And so I quit practicing law, built this huge infrastructure.

Bought all the cool toys you see here and all the stuff, and at the end of the year, I'd made about $10,000. And I thought that was an interesting experiment. I guess I have to go back to practicing law. So I did for a quarter when on March 15th in 2020, Trump shut the country down for Covid. And what happened was two months later, I literally got the same phone call from every product provider in the compliance space, which was how long to get access to your network? Because up until that time, almost all marketing was in person, whether it was conferences, trade shows, breakfast, roundt tables, dinner, meetings, etc. And because of the work I'd done in 2019 and the money I'd spent to create this network, my answer was 24 hours. Because it was just a drop and drag or plug and play. And even by that time, I had the largest social media presence in compliance. And so my little podcast network literally blew up. And I've been riding that wave since then and trying to consolidate it and see if I can make a long term asset out of it.

Good for you. Do you have any long term goals to go? I want to double it, triple it, whatever. Or do you want to say I'm capping it and I'm going to go deeper with the existing people and add boom, boom, boom, boom, boom.

I want to make it attractive enough that somebody buys it.

Okay.

Like you were talking about. The M and A exits are fun I hope so. Good for you.

I'll let you know.

All right, well, I appreciate you sharing all of that. I have a few more questions. We're gonna have you pick a color first though, before we wrap up. Yellow or black?

I'm gonna take black.

What movie was that? Always bet on Black. Passenger 57. Wesley Snipes.

He was playing very good.

Playing roulette there.

Reference.

Okay.

Black. What type of movies you into?

I like superhero movies. I love the mcu, but also fantasy, sci fi. A big Harry Potter fan and my favorite series is James Bond.

I was just watching Iron man and James Bond the other night.

Which one do you prefer? MCU or James Bond?

Oh, James Bond. I grew up Sean Connery. Okay.

Have you ever been to the island where he was created?

No, I've never been to Jamaica.

Would you go?

My wife is really not an island kind of gal. She likes the mountains and she likes the continental America. She's. She's English and so she just loves traveling around here because she never lived here and everything here is new to her.

We got plenty of great stuff in Texas.

Plenty. Yeah.

Well, excellent. Well, we're going to thank our sponsor and come back for the imperfect action round.

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I can't make a higher recommendation for 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 and as our next video success story once again, that's EA publishingmethodbook.com and we.

Are back with the imperfect action round. Tom, are you ready to take imperfect action?

You betcha.

Three questions for you. Rapid fire answers. What is the fastest path to the cash?

Get off your duff and start. Or to quote a famous company, just do it.

I like it.

Whatever your passion is, do it.

Number two, what is the biggest problem you see your prospects making and the fastest way for them to fix it?

Well, if my prospects are in the podcast world.

There are no mistakes. And by that I get often asked, what mistakes did you make you wish you hadn't made? And I said none. Because with one exception, I've learned from every situation that's come up in podcasts and it's made me a better podcaster. Now, that mistake is the same mistake every podcaster makes. But you only make it once. Forget to hit the record button. And I've done that. In the compliance world, it is being compliance in many ways. You're only limited by your imagination. If you can think of it, you can do it. You say you don't have any money, you don't have the budget, you don't have the headcount. I give a tip every day on something you can do at little or no cost. You just have to have the imagination to implement it.

I love that. Agree wholeheartedly. The last one, what is the best way to maximize customer lifetime value?

Engage, engage, engage, engage. Be a thought leader. Be a content provider. Be a trusted partner. Be someone they'll call up and say, tom, can I ask you this? When it's not involving a product or a service, but you know you've got them then because they've called you. If you're a trusted advisor, you'll be a trusted business partner in whatever your business is.

All great stuff. Where would you like people to learn more?

They can reach out to me through the Compliance Podcast network, which of course is www.compliancepodcastnetwork.net I. You can leave a voicemail or you can send me an email. On that side, I'm on LinkedIn @thomasrfox.

I love it. Thank you Tom, for sharing everything you have. I enjoyed it thoroughly. Wish we had more time, but appreciate you sharing.

It's really been my pleasure. Yeah, some really good questions.

Well, thank you. I appreciate that. I strive to all right, Expert Authority World, we have another exciting episode here today. I'll see you on the next one. 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 eapublishingmethod book.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.