TES 057 - How to Build a Great Reputation

Hey there, real quick, before we jump into the episode, listen, if your earnings treadmill hasn't set you free yet, running faster won't either. Listen, hustle without principles just going to burn you out. So here's what I want for you. I want you to join me for my money machine experience live. It is three free trainings. Deep dive into how to escape the treadmill and build a money machine that actually works for you. All right, grab your spot here by going to moneymachinelive.com and I'll see you in the free training. Hey there. I'm Mel Abraham, the author of the number one best selling book the Entrepreneur Solution and the founder of Thoughtpreneur Academy, where we teach you how to capture, package and monetize what you know, the ideas in your head, the wisdom you have so you can have more impact, more time and more income. And welcome back to this episode of the Entrepreneur Solution show. In this episode, we're going to touch on something that takes years to build and a moment to destroy. It's about your reputation. You know, Socrates had once said that you can gain a good reputation by endeavoring to be what you want to appear to be. And in this episode, I'm going to take you through something that I call the Reputation navigator. And it will help you understand what's important, what you need to manage and, and how to build a reputation and protect your reputation. If you want to get that downloadable tool, just go to melabraham.com session057 or send me a text. Send me a text to mylegacy. One word, no spaces 38470 make sure that we get that to you. So reputation, what is it? Well, here's the deal. We want to make sure that we're able to build a reputation that is not only your reality, but your customer's reality, but your team's reality, your vendors reality, your community's reality. In other words, your reputation is from the outside in, in the context of how it's envisioned. It's from the inside out, in the context of how it is developed. And so that's what I want to really kind of drill down on because here's the deal. If we don't get this right, if we don't get this right, ultimately what's going to happen is that people aren't going to buy from us. They're not going to come to us. They're not going to come, whether it's a restaurant or a clothing store or a service provider, a doctor office, if we don't have a good reputation. They're not knocking on our door. And so that's one of the first problems we have. The second problem is that, and this is more of the reason the first problem is that they don't trust us. So even if you talk, even if you say something, even if you go out there and try to build some, they're going to turn around and go, I don't think so.

They don't see you as a trustworthy person, a trustworthy supplier, a trustworthy vendor, a trustworthy.

Store or service provider or something. And you can't, you can't work that way. Ultimately, what ends up happening then is that they break up with you. I mean, it becomes a commercial, if you will, a financial divorce. Because they're not going to do business with people they don't trust. They're not going to like. They say, you know, you do business with people you know like and trust well, if they know you, they can't trust you. They're certainly not going to like you. And that means they're not going to do business with you. And so they're going to break up with you. But.

If we get this right, if we truly take the time to one engineer and build the reputation that we want out into the world and live into it to make it a reality, things can shift because ultimately what happens is that you're going to get tons of return customers. In fact, what happens is that.

When you have a good reputation with your customers, they tend to buy more, they tend to buy more broadly and they actually will trust you in the process. If you turn around and say, here's a recommendation.

Then they will typically take you up on it because you, you've built that relationship, you've built that reputation, and you've built that trust.

We see this a lot in the Internet space, if you will, in the context of affiliate marketing. When an affiliate someone that you've got a good relationship with tells you, hey, this person's a good person and what they're teaching and what they're doing is good stuff.

They'Ll turn around and people will buy based on the recommendation and they'll do things differently because of the fact that they trust the person recommending. Same thing with your customers. If you have a good reputation, they're going to return, they're going to come back over and over and over again and they're going to tell a friend, going to tell a friend, going to tell a friend. And we've seen that along. The second thing that happens is this, it builds good will. Now, what's goodwill? When you talk about goodwill, you talk about intangible value. You talk about all kinds of things that can come into play. But the bottom line is if you look at businesses, truly successful businesses, and remember, I value businesses for a living, I have bought and sold businesses as we go through it. And those truly successful businesses, 60 to 80% of their value comes from what's called intangible value. In other words, if I have a, I don't know, a product like this pen here that I just grabbed off my desk, okay, there's, that's a physical product. Okay, it's tangible, I can touch it. But there's things in businesses that are intangible you can't touch. And that's the relationships. That's the intellectual property. That's not the hard stuff. And many of the businesses that are out there, their value is derived through intangibles. The goodwill, the relationships they created with their customers, the reason that Apple is where it's at. Now, Apple has their challenges just like any other company, but they've got a tremendously loyal following and such a loyal following that you literally overpay for their products in the sense that if we were just buying the utility of a computer, I can buy a far cheaper computer to get the same type of stuff done. But we choose to buy Apple because they built the goodwill, if you will. They built the intangible value and they built the loyalty on a variety of different fronts that brings people back. So having a good reputation builds goodwill, it builds value, it builds intangible values as we call it in the business world. It also creates loyalty for a premium. Just like I said with Apple, you know, loyalty for a premium. In other words, that these people that are working for you, that are customers or team members or vendors or community, community stalwarts that are really there, they have loyalty to a premium. In other words, they're willing to pay more and to work with you. And I have a number of providers, a number of people that I've done work, work with. And I know that the reputation I have and the relationship I have with them, they know that I'm not the low cost provider. And I don't make any bones about it. I'm really clear that I'm not the low cost provider and that I'm actually higher than most in the context of what I do. But at the same time, I build such a good relationship with them, they've gotten such good results with me, that they're willing to pay the premium, and they stay loyal to me. I've got people that have referred me business since the early 90s, and they will not refer business anywhere else because of it. And they tell their clients, look, Mel's not the cheapest. He's actually on the high end. But what you get with him is worthwhile, and he's one of the best out there. So when you build that kind of reputation, it becomes really, really, really valuable to you. Because here's what's. What's happened with me, for instance, I don't do any advertising. I really do very little marketing on my consulting side or my strategic consulting side of my business because of all the work that I did previously of building the goodwill, building the reputation, building the results. Now there's this momentum that I get get recommended in, in the process. So if that's the why it's important, what do you need to know? What do you need to know to really, really drive this home? How do you build a reputation? What are the key principles? And there's a number of things I want to just take you through a few that I think are some of the most important. And one of the first is to realize that perception is the reality. It doesn't matter what you think. It matters what those around you think. And we're going to talk about the categories of people that.

Will determine your reputation, if you will. We need to manage the perception and then manage their reality through building our reality. Let me say that again. We need to manage the perception then by managing their reality through our reality. In other words, there's this perception and reality, and the wider that gap is, the bigger the problem you have. We need to make sure that we manage that. Which is the next principle. Shrink the gaps. The fact of the matter is that you may believe you're one thing, your customers may believe you're another thing, your team may believe you're another thing. The challenge is your reputation is built on what outsiders say, what outsiders see, what outsiders do. So they get a chance to determine your reality. If your reality in their eyes is different than it is in your eyes, that gap is a problem that we need to close. So we want to shrink all the gaps between perception and reality. And the third is to control the active voice. Now, what I mean by controlling the active voice is control the conversation that is happening around your business, around your person, around the things that you do, Especially in this.

Social media type of world that we're in. And bad news travels even faster. I mean, they're sitting There, let me just grab that. I mean, they're sitting there on their phones just typing, typing, typing. I mean, they capture things.

Just by hitting the video camera and they can stream it straight on Facebook and Periscope and Meerkat and 32 other videos, video feeds, if you will. So the reality is that we need to control the active voice. What are people hearing out there? So need to get ahead of it in that context. Now, the gaps, if you really start. We talked about gaps in this last piece, but when we think about it, there's that reality gap which I talked about, the difference between perception and reality. There's also a gap that we need to manage, which is called the expectation gap, is that there are things that may have happened that previously were previously acceptable but currently are not. They're shifting and changing preferences, if you will. You can call it a preferential gap or preference gap. Also, for instance, I sit on a board of directors. We do a lot of work in the ports around the country and logistics. At one point, some of the technology and the ways that we were running the ports was acceptable. But now, in today's clean air, sensitive environment, those technologies, those principles, those processes are not acceptable anymore. And what happens is that that creates the gap again that we need to shrink and control that active voice, control what is being portrayed out in the marketplace, control how we're being talked about in the marketplace as we move forward. Here's the thing. There's going to be positive messages in the marketplace. There's going to be negative messages, messages in the marketplace, and there's going to be neutral messages in the marketplace. My belief is, is that.

You need to have twice as many positive, negative, positive messages in the marketplace then negative. And if you can have more, that's great. But at a minimum, I need to have two times the number positive messages in the marketplace than I do negative. And in times of crisis, I think it needs to go much higher. And there's a study out there by media tenors and media tenors said unless you can control at least 35% of what they call voice share.

Then you're not going to control the message out in the marketplace. So this concept of being able to get yourself out there to present a voice, now you say, well, how do you. What do you mean present a voice, Mel? Well, I mean your Internet presence, your website, your press releases, your speaking.

Maybe your videos like this. How are you putting yourself out there and what are people seeing about you creating a community? One of my clients and friends, Gary Erickson at Clif Bar, they've got a face, a very, very active Facebook and they're really interacting with their community in there, in that, in that process and dealing with things at a high level. Another example of this would be.

Elon Musk and Tesla. If you recall back just a little while back, there was a lot of bad press going around about the Tesla's catching on fire and that if something hits underneath them that they'll blow up, they'll catch on fire. They're very, very dangerous cars and you shouldn't buy them. And Elon Musk, to his credit, you talk about the epitome of a great leader. Elon's one of them I believe. He's a visionary. He's the new Steve Jobs of our time. He is looking at shifting and changing the world, shifting and changing communities, shifting, changing society and ways that we only dreamt about years ago. An amazing, amazing man. But he had this challenge where there was a lot of bad press about the Tesla coming in and some of it was, it was evolved because they were catching on fire. But you know, I don't know whether the motivation was from the auto industry, the petroleum industry, the gas industry, I have no idea. But it doesn't matter. It's how we handle it that's important. He wrote a letter personally.

And published it to get ahead of the messaging, to explain what's happened, why those things caught on fire, what are the safety precautions, what are the statistics, where the myths are, where the fallacies are in the sense of the reporting and the things that they're hearing. And not from a defensive standpoint where he was digging his heels and doing that. It was actually from an explanation, fact based standpoint and a very personal based and inviting letter in the sense of if you've got questions, if you have concerns, please reach out to me. We're more than happy to help you out and get you to understand this. So it was very open, very inviting and I think that this is a huge, huge thing. So control the active voice. Those are the kind of the three main principles I want you to to consider. Remember, perception is reality. Shrink the gaps and control the active voice. So if that's the case, what do we need to deal with in the context of reputation? Now I'll introduce you to this reputation Navigator. This is something that I use in my consulting with myself, with my one on one clients, my high level clients to allow us to engineer and figure out reputation because I think it's much broader an impact then we give it credit for. Yeah, reputation Reputation. But it, it is huge. Huge. Did I say huge? It's huge when it comes down to this. So here's what I think reputation is built on. Reputation is built on the things, on three things. The things that you say, the things that you do, and the things that are seen. Alright, now that seems really simple. And it is. Bottom line is that you're saying things, they're saying things, you're doing things, they're doing things. And we'll explain who they are doing that. You see things and they see things. The question is, do they join together? Are they consistent? If they're not consistent, therein lies your reputation. Reputation is built on three things. Now here's the interesting thing. When we look at the things that we say and the things we do, where they overlap, that's where you build trust. That's where you build trust. When you do what you say you're going to do, or you say what you. And then do what you say what you're going to do, and they go do it, you build trust. So trust is a result of doing what you say and saying what you do. And then interesting enough is that when you start to look at do and seen. So what you do out in the world and what everyone sees out in the world, where that intersects is where you become the role model. You're the example. And by leading by example is one of the most powerful things you can do, is that I don't need to explain, I don't need to.

Project, I don't need to broadcast, I don't need to do. Let me just live, live quietly, live it in a way that I become a role model, that those that see what I do.

Will see the power in it. It goes back to that whole, the old adage that.

Actions speak louder than words. And I think that fits here. And then the last piece of this, this is that what you say and what is seen, where those two coincide is where your notoriety comes from. It's what you're known for, okay? It's what people see and what you say in that process. So really that's how I see reputation. We got to manage the things we say, the things we do, what is seen, because through that process we create ourselves as a role model, a trusted party in whatever endeavor we're doing. And we create notoriety in the process. But there's more to a reputation than this. And here's what we need to look at in the context of a reputation. We need to focus on who we're building the reputation with. Because it's easy for us to say reputation. Many of us will look at reputation and assume that it's in our customers, in our markets. But reputation is far broader than this. In this model, I'm focused on business and entrepreneurship and success. We can develop this model, and I've got another version of this model for personal relationships. Same thing. But who are the stakeholders in your reputation? Remember, your reputation is defined from the outside in. And so here's the people that I think that we need to think about. Here's the key. You might have a different reputation with each and every one of these, and that is a problem.

So what we want to do is evaluate and how we use this reputation navigator is to evaluate and rate. Where are we as far as our reputation with each of these five different stakeholders? Community.

What do we like in the community? Do they. How do they talk about us? What do they do for us? Do they. How do they see us, our suppliers? I mean, these are our vendors. These are the people that support our ability to put our business out there, to put our products and services out there, to get ourselves out there, to make a difference. How are we. How. What's our reputation with them? Do we, pardon the expression, jack them around with bill payments?

Do we turn around and are we argumentative? Do we treat them like crap or do we treat them really well? Do we pay our bills on time? Do we speak highly of them? Do we refer to them? How is our relationship from a reputation standpoint with them? What about the owners? And when I say owners, it might be investors.

More so than anything else. But what's our reputation with our investors?

And of course, our customers, the people that buy from us, the people that use our services or products, and then our team, our employees. It does you no good. And I've seen it. I've seen it happen over and over again where I see someone in a meeting with a team member and they're an absolute, pardon the expression, ass, okay, just to schmuck. And they treat them awful, okay? And then customer calls, and they're cheery as cheery can be. And it's like this divided personality of one is Jekyll and one is Hyde. And we can't. That's not a reputation. It's. To me, reputation is holistic. If I have.

Bad reputation with any one of these five stakeholders, then I have a bad reputation with all of them because it's not real. It's not real and you can't manage it long. So the key is building a good reputation in these Five areas, community, suppliers, owners or investors, customers and team. The other part of the thing that we need to manage, which we spend a lot of time really digging into as businesses, many times, but I think we need to is what is our reputation built on? And I think that there's again, five categories, broad categories, where we can build our reputation. And, you know, one is financial relations, quality, governance and social. Most of us would think about quality reputation. Do I have a good quality product? Do I have a good quality service? Yes, that's one, but that's the foundation. What about being financially responsible? Think about Enron, think about Bernie Madoff, think about WorldCom. You know, what happened is that there was a gap between what the perception was in the marketplace and the reality in the business was. And so what did they do? They lied, they cheated, they stole to try and keep the perception up rather than being real. So their ability to build a reputation in the financial arena was destroyed, Absolutely destroyed. What about relations? What are my relationships like, okay, with those stakeholders? Employer relationships, Vendor relationships, So I can build my reputation on, on a financial level, on a relationship level, on a product or service quality level, on a governance. How do I run my organization? How do I run my business? How do I interact with the government entities, with the taxing authorities? Am I cheating? What am I doing? What kind of reputation do I have with how I treat. Treat that? And then last, and I think this is huge in today's world is socially. Are we socially responsible? Do we dump stuff into our water system that could be harmful? Do we use processes that can impact people? You know, we had a horrendous, horrendous example.

It's a great example of what not to do with the gas company out here in Los Angeles. And you may have heard it up in Porter Ranch, where they had a gas leak and they didn't tell people about it.

And people were getting sick, they were getting nosebleeds. They ended up having to move out. And it took. It took literally what seemed like forever. I think it started October, November, December, January. I think it was three or four months of this process of having to go through this. And I think, quite frankly, those people, as far as I'm concerned, and this is. This is just personal opinion. The people that were responsible for suppressing that information and being that irresponsible, I think we're criminally negligent. That's just my opinion. But let's not go there here. But are we socially responsible? What does that do to their reputation? What happened to BP Petroleum? With the problems that they had and how they handled it or mishandled it in the process and in dealing with the perception and the reality and being socially responsible in that context. So here's the deal. When it comes down to your reputation, it's about the things you say, it's about the things you do, it's about what's seen.

And we got to manage that reputation with five different stakeholders. The WHO community suppliers are owners, investors, customers and your team.

And we manage that reputation based on five categories of what's we want a good reputation from a financial standpoint. We want a good reputation from a relationship standpoint. We want a good reputation from a quality of product or service standpoint, a governance standpoint and a socially responsible standpoint. And when you do that, and when you manage your reputation on those levels, you are assured.

At least a higher probability to building your reputation in a good way. So you build that intangible value, you build that goodwill, you build those repeat customers and they will refer you. So get out there, build that reputation in a great way. I hope that you found this of value. I hope that you take this to heart and start to think about and evaluate Do I have a good reputation? Do I have that kind of reputation? With each and every one of these stakeholders, do I have that reputation? Each and every one of these categories use download the Reputation Navigator help. Let it help you try and analyze this and figure it out so you know where you need to spend your time to shrink the gap, build your reputation. If you need that, just go to melabraham.com 057 or text me mylegacy1word to 38470. I'll send you the download link.

If you found this of value. And I certainly hope you have. I mean the comments that I'm getting from so many people about some of the broadcasts have been amazing. Just subscribe so you can stay on my list and I can get a chance to keep giving you tools, tactics, strategies and things that will help you in life, success, wealth, business. And if you want to ask me a question, have a specific question, just go to askmelnow.com leave me a question, I'll be sure to try to bring it up and maybe we get it on one of my upcoming episodes of the Entrepreneur Solution Show. And if you would do me a favor, do me a favor and share this with a friend. Share this with as many people as you can because I think it's important. I think our society needs to see the shift in paradigm and to look for other directions to build their life their way. And that's my way of being their entrepreneurial mentor, their success mentor, and give them access to some of the tools and strategies that I've used for myself to build the businesses and build the life that I have, but also for my clients. So again, I hope that you had this, found this of value. I look forward to hearing from you, seeing your comments, seeing your notes and helping you out. And until we get a chance to see each other again, may your vision be grand, your journey epic, and your legacy significant. See you soon. Cheers. Bye.

We hope you enjoyed this episode. Make sure you subscribe so you get access to all of Mel's business and success tips. And if you like this episode, share it with a friend. If you have a specific business or success question, you can ask it at www.askmelnow.com. remember, it's all about being bold, dreaming big, and living life your way because the world needs you. Until the next episode, may your vision be grand, your journey epic, and your legacy significant.

Foreign.

And that's it for this episode of Building your Money Machine where we help you learn how to master your money, eliminate financial stress, and live a life of choice. If you found this valuable or helpful to you, here's what I'd love for you to do. If you do me a favor, go to Apple, Apple Podcast, or wherever you're listening to this podcast and rate and review the show. It helps us tremendously to keep us at the top of the list so we can continue to get this information and this message out to people. Because I truly believe that financial freedom is your birthright and I want to help each and every one of you claim it. Thanks so much.