The Most Important Key Factor To Customer Diplomacy

Hey, it's Mark Podolski, the Land geek with your favorite niche real estate website, www.thelandgeek.com. and today's guest is. I'm gonna have to put on my anchorman voice. A big deal. But before we talk to our guest, I'd be remiss if I didn't properly introduce my co host. You know him, you love him. Scott Todd from scotttodd.netlandmoto.com and most importantly, if you're not automating your Craigslist and your Facebook postings, posting domination.com thelangic Scott Todd. How are you, Mark?

I'm great. How are you?

I'm intimidated. I'm just gonna. I mean, this guest is just smart. He's just smart. So let's just get into it. I have to get over my insecurities. Our guest is Jeremy Greenberg. And if you don't know Jeremy, he's the founder of Avenue group, which advises Fortune 500 executives and mid market companies. He's also the co founder and CEO of Flight Fitness, an exercise equipment education company. Jeremy built multimillion dollar businesses for two Fortune 500 companies, Capital One and Avon Products, and is an entrepreneur in residence at the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania, where he holds an mba. Jeremy Greenberg, how are you?

I'm good, guys. I didn't know who you're going to introduce after that. Really nice, really nice intro, but I guess it's me. I'm very humbled. Thanks for having me on, guys.

Yeah, yeah, no worries. So Jeremy, let's just kind of rewind the tape. And before you became, you know, sort of the shaman, if you will, to Fortune 500 executives, what were you doing?

So I started my career at Capital One after college, which at the time was basically a credit card company. Super analytical place and really terrific place to learn about customer psychology. And then I went to business school and began working for management consulting firm Boston Consulting Group, which consults all over the world, big Fortune 5000 and private equity firms. And then I just started getting to more of the entrepreneurship world. So ran a mobile app company for a year, which is not, it's a good learning experience because it wasn't a good fit for either of us. And then formed a fitness equipment company and got into advising folks from startups to mid market companies to private equity firms. Fortune 500s on my own with Avenue Group, the company that I started that focuses on that and a bunch of other areas.

All right, great, great. So from your entrepreneurial journey, what would you say has been One of the biggest lessons that you've learned.

I think. So when I get a lot of folks, either through UPenn, Wharton, or just folks who are inventors or, you know, aspiring entrepreneurs, asking me, you know, what's the big thing? I, you know, what's the number one piece of advice? I think it's all about prioritization. So there's a big focus in the entrepreneurship Silicon Valley world where people talk about how you have to work every second of every hour of every day, and whoever works harder is going to win. I don't believe that. I think that you can find yourself churning and working and doing a lot of work, and then when you take a pause, you realize you're not working on the right thing and you're not really making progress towards what your real goals are. So the first thing to do and to try to keep in mind all the time is prioritization around what are the two or three most important things for my business and when should I be doing them? Should I be creating an app now, or should I be focused on my pricing model first? I've worked with a lot of students and faculty who want to start a business, and in some cases, instead of focusing on developing their product or service, they've jumped ahead and they're focusing a lot on the social media presence and sort of the sexier elements of owning a business as opposed to figuring out, well, what is it exactly that I'm selling? Why am I selling it? What's the best way to sell it? So that's what I would say. It's around prioritization and figuring out how you spend your time as opposed to just spending as much time as you can in your business.

Scott Ty, what are your thoughts?

I mean, I echo that too, because a lot of times what happens is we want to jump into the sexy stuff, the stuff that we find, the fun stuff, and we don't want to really lay the foundation. We live in a society that, like, we get satisfaction from getting something done right now. And, you know, you can go off and you, like you said, you can go out and build your social media presence, not even a following a social media presence, but yet you don't even know what you're selling yet. And, you know, I think that the prioritization is so dang important and it's missed by a lot of people. And just as Jeremy is saying, it's missed by Fortune 500 executives, too. I mean, you can see it. You can see the right all over the wall.

Yeah. I mean, in Our land investing niche. It's so simple, though. Like, you don't need to hire a consultant to tell you, hey, these are the only two things that are going to move the needle in your business, mailing and marketing. Now, I can imagine, though, for Jeremy, you've got people who don't know what they don't know. How do you help them sort it out? Mentally.

I think what you just said is key, that most of us, probably all of us, don't know what we don't know. And what we focus on, Avenue Group is what we call customer diplomacy. And what customer diplomacy is, it's an acknowledgement that customers are human beings. Right. So inherently, we have a transactional relationship with our customers. And that's important to have a careful, balanced partnership with your customers and to create that and foster that and nurture that, to develop information that helps both the business and its customers. So unless you have an extraordinarily small local business, your customers are not your friends, they're not your enemies, hopefully. But at the heart of the customer company relationship is a transactional component. You know, your customers are providing you money in exchange for a product or service. So we want to move the relationship to a place that's emotionally positive and robust. However, at its core, it's always going to be a transactional relationship. So what this means is, you know, one miscue might piss off a customer, and one positive move could lock in a customer for life. So diplomacy is creating, you know, is critical to converting a transactional relationship into a deeper one and maintaining that relationship further. And it's really all about listening to customers, being humble, being open to their feedback, and creating channels where you can learn from them. It doesn't. Just to be clear, this notion that the customer is always right, we don't necessarily believe that. In fact, we don't necessarily believe that the customer even knows what he or she wants. It's not the job. Think about yourselves as customers and everyone listening. When you buy something, you don't need to know exactly why you buy it. It's not your job to understand why you bought toothpaste Crest versus Colgate or why you buy Pepsi versus Coke. You just do. It's the company's jobs to figure out why you're making those decisions. And by listening to them and speaking with them and analyzing data, that's a way to help develop a better understanding and figure out where those gaps in your understanding are. Especially as the market is moving and it seems like it's evolving more and more today in Whatever area you're in. So keeping on top of that is really, really important. And developing relationships with customers such that you can extract that information is very, very key.

So why couldn't I just send out a survey right, right after they make the purchase, hey, why did you buy this?

You could, you could, and that could be one of the ways that you are interacting with your customers. We are big fans of qualitative before quantitative. When we do primary research, meaning instead of asking questions in a survey immediately, we like to, you know, get 10 to 15 customers on the phone, on the phone and talk with them in an open way. So understand the journey of how they found out about you, what they think about you, how their experience has been. And then certain things are going to pop. And then after that you can ask a survey and figure out what they're telling you. But very often a customer will say, oh yeah, I bought your product because it's cheap, for example. But that's not really why they bought the product. It just happens to be a lower priced product. Maybe they buy to fulfill some, some need that is a little bit under the covers and it's a little bit less clear. But when you get into a discussion with them, you start to really understand that and then that helps you in your marketing. You say, oh, okay, well here are kind of these, these seemingly small little items that are really motivating people to make decisions and we need to emphasize them more in our marketing or we tell stories around them to really help pull that prospects part strings. And it's not just about price. So surveys are great. They're like, we always say, they're better than nothing. And you can learn a lot from a survey sufficient to getting a good understanding of, you know, what, what customers are really thinking. And there have been, you know, a lot of historical screw ups by big companies where they rely a lot on market research, but they just didn't really listen to their customers. Things like, you know, one of the most famous ones is, you know, when, when Pepsi started to do its taste challenge, I think in the, in the mid-80s and Coke responded with New Coke where they changed their entire formula and they replaced their previous formula which wasn't called Original Coke. They ended up bringing back Original Coke later and branding it that. But that was a big screw up and they did a ton of market research. But what they didn't do is really get into the heads of their customers and ask, how do you feel if we replace the currant Coke with this product? They just asked, which taste do you like better. And that wasn't the right question to ask. So when you have qualitative discussions with people, you understand how to ask the questions that you should be asking and what questions to ask. And that's why we really believe in having conversations with folks. It's kind of like if you have a friend and you want to understand what's making them tick. Yeah, you could send them a survey, but it's probably better to have a conversation with them. You'll get a lot more out of it.

Yeah, absolutely. This is why I have to talk to Scott Todd on a daily basis, just to figure it out. So, Scott.

No, I mean, like, okay, so look, I always say that there's four reasons why people buy land. Right? Like, beyond that, there's always people are only buying things because they're trying to solve some problem, real or perceived. Right. And I think that if you go in and you survey somebody and you send them out the survey, well, those survey questions are kind of skewed to the way that you're thinking that they're thinking. And a lot of those things, I see these surveys all the time. Did you buy it for 1, 2, or 3? And so, like, these are my choices.

Neither.

And reply back. And so then what happens is you begin to get these survey results back and they feed into your bias because of the way that you're thinking. And then you miss the whole opportunity. And as Jeremy's just saying, like, if you get on the phone or you start surveying your people, not surveying, but talking to them, interviewing them, having conversations with them, then you start to uncover something else. And you did that before. Like you talk about this at boot camp, about how like someone bought some land from you. You're like, hey, they got their buddy to go buy land. And you're like, hey, why are you guys buying this land? And they said, because we like to hunt rattlesnakes and this area has a lot of rattlesnakes. But if you would have sent us out and said, hey, why are you trying to buy land? Is it because you want to live on it? Is it because you know, you're a long term investor? You would have missed the boat. They would have fed into your bias of what you were thinking. But then you uncovered their words. And then all of a sudden, once you uncover your customers words, man, you're half the battle down the marketing stream.

No, absolutely. So, Jeremy, what's some of the worst advice you see or hear given in customer diplomacy?

The worst advice is what most people actually do and When I say most people, I mean everyone from the, I live in Manhattan. So people on the corner, on the bodega, selling groceries all the way up to Fortune 100 companies. Many companies, they go through the motions and they'll do, you know, some surveys or what's called an NPS or a Net promoter score to understand their customer satisfaction. And they'll have data and they'll have some analysis around it and they'll have just treasure troves of data on their customers, but they're not actually going any useful with that information. So oftentimes, you know, at a, you know, a solo entrepreneur, one person or two person or small organizations, you don't have departments for research and departments for strategy. You just have a person making decisions. So it's, it's easier to forgive, you know, the smaller companies. But at a large company you have entire departments that are focused on understanding customers and doing research. And then you have entire departments focused on, you know, making decisions for the, for the business and how to run it. The big challenge for a lot of these organizations is you have these camps that are really siloed. You have the research camp and they know how to do statistical significance, how to sequence the questions, how to write the demographic questions correctly, how to randomize things so that you're going to get, you know, you're going to reduce your bias and all and so forth and so on. And they end up producing like a 200 page report on whatever their findings is. It's just like, it's just too much. And on the other hand, you have the business part. When I say business, the people are making business decisions, you know, changing price or going to a new channel, like really running the organization. And they tend to not really focus so much on the research in part because if you give a CEO a 200 page document, it's like giving them nothing. I mean, no one's going to look at it, no one's going to read it. So another thing we do at Avenue Group is we help bridge the gap between these two organizations and making sure that with customer diplomacy, listening to your customers is something that's embedded in your organization. That's something that the CEO and the general managers of the organization care about and are part of. And also on the researcher side, they understand the business needs. So they're not producing 200 page reports, they're producing 10 page reports that are focusing on, you know, what are the three or five big things that I, that I should take away from this particular survey or research program or Focus group or anthropological study, what have you. So I think by bridging that, I think it's. It's really important. And I think the mistake that most companies make is they really, the big companies really put these customer research group in a corner, or they outsource to groups that are only thinking about research and they're not thinking about impact. And at the end of the day, and we talk about big data a lot in the media these days, but at the end of the day, you could have as much data in the world as possible. But if you're not doing anything useful with it, it doesn't matter. And what drives business decisions in an organization, it's not data, it's stories, it's logic. No one's going to stand up in a board room meeting saying three is bigger than two. And therefore, this is why we're changing our strategy. No, they're going to talk about so we have a better understanding for our customers. This is what they're looking for. Here's why they're looking for it, and here's the research to back it up. And it's the story and the logic that really transcends the data and gets embedded in the organization. And that is what drives change. But to get to the story and the logic, you can't just have a siloed research group and a siloed. Siloed business group. You've got to find some gap. You got to find a way to bridge those gaps.

Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I'll give you an example of a company that. The big company that I thought did an amazing job was Logitech. So my mouse broke, and it was after the warranty period. And, you know, I didn't know. I thought, well, maybe I can troubleshoot this. Or, you know, I didn't know it was broken. And they just sent me a new, like, $200 mouse to replace my mouse. And I was like, wow. And I remember thinking, wow, man, I would never buy a mouse from anyone, any other company again. And I think Apple used to be that way. They sort of had this. You'd walk in there and you talk to their genius bar, and you kind of walk out like, wow, they just gave me a new phone call because I wasn't happy or whatever it is. They don't do that anymore. Can you give an example of a company that's really dialed into this and one that's really just off track?

Sure. Well, I think there's a difference between customer service and customer experience. Right. So customer service is Something like I go to the Apple store, you know, my phone is broken and they, they help me quickly. They, you know, they replace it for free and I have a really good experience. But then, but that's only one part of customer experience, right? Part of customer experiences is the fact that my phone broke to begin with. Right. And it's the actual product and how I'm interacting with the product and you know, how I even see, you know, Apple branding and you know, how I interact with the product and so forth. So I actually would say Apple generally does a pretty good job job with this. It depends. You know, I think now you have a lot of these digital players that are developing a very robust brick and mortar experience. Warby Parker is one that does a great job. But these guys started out selling glasses instead, glasses, frames and prescription lenses for 95 bucks instead of 3 or 500 bucks like most of the competitors, because they're basically owned by Luxottica, which is effectively a monopoly before they came in. So they undercut them with price. And now they have a lot of brick and mortar locations where you can go in and every time you have a touch point with them, you have a good experience, in my opinion. Again, it's my personal opinion and also what I've read on feedback on them, because people go in and if you want to swap your glasses, you didn't like the frames, within a certain number of days, they'll give you a new one, no extra charge. They'll adjust your glasses, your frames, they don't fit any number of times. And just generally you get the sense that they're really listening when you walk in. It's a good overall experience from a buying perspective, but also after you purchase. So I think they're doing a good job because they're realizing that the relationship with the customer continues well beyond that first transaction. So as a result, you have people buying multiple pairs of glasses with them and know going to these stores and they're really changing glasses or one of the companies changing glasses. Instead of being a, an item I need, it's also an item that can make a fashion statement. And I can have multiple pairs of glasses because it's become affordable. So I think, you know, I think they've done a good job. I think Amazon obviously has done a really good job because they focus so much on convenience and personalization and just making things as easy as possible. And there's a consistency element. So when you think about customer experience and customer diplomacy, it's really important to have a consistent experience every time you're interacting with that brand. And I think for the most part, both Apple, Warby Parker and Amazon do a really good job on having that consistent experience. I think a company that's, that's struggling but trying is well, financially they're doing well, but in terms of their future, they're definitely, they have a lot to worry about is Facebook. So Facebook does a ton of market research. They do one on one interviews. I've been in those where they sit you down, you know, they watch you as you go through an app or you know, you're on Facebook to really understand how you're using it. But I think the challenge that Facebook has is an authenticity challenge. So whenever you. One of the components of customer diplomacy that we talk about on we just posted an article on customer diplomacy on avegroup.com Avenue Group's website is transparency. And when you're communicating with customers, you're being open and honest with them. And I think Facebook's having a lot of trouble with being transparent coming off as authentic. Because what they tend to do, frankly is if they see a competitor, they copy the competitor or they try to acquire the competitor if they're unable to copy. And you see this when they acquired WhatsApp, you see that when they acquired Instagram, you see that when they introduce Instagram stories that can compete directly with Snapchat, you see that in their attempt to buy Snapchat and then Snapchat said no. And you see that a lot with the way that they're communicating around privacy, it just comes off as very inauthentic. So you see these. It's a really interesting dynamic where, you know, they've done polling recently that shows something like, you know, 70 to 80% of people think going on Facebook is bad for them. But you know, 70 to 90% of people are doing it on a regular basis anyway. So eventually the rubber is going to hit the road on that one and they're going to need to figure out a way to have a better, more authentic experience with their customers.

Yeah, absolutely. It reminds me of airline travel. Right? It's like nobody likes it necessarily, but we have to keep doing it. Scott Todd, what are your thoughts?

Sorry, I would just say, you know, it is interesting to see that really some of what this comes down to on some of these examples is really it comes down to the marketing component behind who they are. Because, you know, Warby Parker I don't really have any firsthand experience with them. I mean, I know who they are. But the thing is, is that all Opticals kind of will provide the same kind of service, if you will, but they just don't do a good job of marketing it. They don't do a good job of telling the story to the customer. And so in that case, it's like Warby Parker is owning the storytelling of that piece. And then when you're talking about Facebook and just kind of copying everybody, that is, in fact, a big deal, I think, in our business society today is that, hey, instead of me going out and creating something new, let me just literally copy everybody else straight on. And then, I like what you said. You're not being authentic. You're not being who you are. And ultimately, I think that companies can win the battle for the customer's wallet by being unique and being who they are. And then all of a sudden, now there's something different. There's something that builds loyalty there. And one of the places that I think about when we're talking about this example is Publix, the grocery store in the Southeast. Publix. And the thing about Publix is I grew up in Florida. I have a strong. I mean, I have family members that have worked at Publix. I worked at Publix at some point in my. My life for a very short period of time. But essentially, you begin to build this loyalty to the brand, and the brand continues to evolve and do the right thing for the customers. The customer experience. You walk into the stores, it's clean. You walk into the stores, you know what to expect. The shopping carts, they don't have wobbly wheels, and they're not shaking all the heck and back. They take care of the little things that you just ignore. And then you go to a competitor, and you walk in, you're like, whoa. You know, whoa. And so, you know, like, I go in, and I walk into, like, a Whole Foods, for example. I'm not interested. There's a new place that opened up near my house called. I think it's called Earth Fair or something. My wife walked through there. She's like, I love this place. And I'm like, I don't like it. It's not Publix, you know? And so you begin to build these loyalties through the experience. And Publix is who they are, right? First and foremost. And then they build services that you could say, well, they're just emulating somebody else. Well, no, they're not, because they may be the similar services, but yet they've put their own customer experience on the whole wrapper. And I think that's A big difference. That's a big differentiator. And I think a lot of times, like Facebook, that's a, I think you nailed it with that piece because they just want to copy everybody. And it's like their best is their best genius behind them. You know, like here, let's just go buy everybody else's ideas now or just copy them. And that's not gonna win them that long term innovation that I think that they think that they're gonna win.

And that's a really good point. And Publix, you know, it's a regional grocery store, but I think that's an example where, and you may disagree with me on this, but Publix objectively may or may not be the best grocery store, but it's the best to you, it's the best for you. And you have been accustomed to all the little minor traditional cultural components of whatever that experience is that works for you. And Apple's another example where one of the things we always say at Avenue Group is it's not about being better, it's about being different and standing a lot standing, you know, standing out among your competition. So if you objectively, and you know, this is again where surveys don't really work. You objectively ask an Apple customer, you know, why did you choose the app, this phone over, you know, Samsung or you know, another Android? And they'll say, oh, it's the camera, oh, you know, it's the display. Oh, it's the, this, this is this. The reality is if you do side by side, for the most part, Android phones are superior. And I say this as an Apple iPhone user, but what Apple does is they focus on design, they focus on branding, they focus on that human experience that they convince many of us who buy their products that technology and their experiences better because we're bought into their brand. And that goes well beyond something as easy as just copying, trying to copy another feature or what another company does. And going back to Coke, that's where they made a big mistake because they were thinking, oh, well, if people think that this new Coke tastes better than the current Coke, well, why don't we just go ahead and change everything in the new Coke? The problem is people have had an emotional association with the brand of Coke. And even if it had a little more sugar and tasted a little better in a small cup, that didn't mean that the people who were buying the current Coke wanted to switch to a different taste. And they found out the hard way that that didn't work. It wasn't Just about taste. You think about it logically. Oh, well, you're drinking a beverage, all you should really care about is taste and maybe consistency or something. But the reality is, just like you and Publix, if you showed up one day and Publix started selling. IPhones or just something weird that just didn't stick out or whatever, lawn mowing service, something would just feel off to you and it would feel inauthentic. Whereas in a different scenario, that would feel completely organic and it would work just fine. Right?

That's right, yeah.

I mean, Jeremy, wouldn't it be weird if you worked with somebody for years and they were an Apple and then they switched to Microsoft? Wouldn't that throw you off a bit?

No, wait. Sorry, sorry, sorry. Say again. Is this an inside baseball thing?

This is inside baseball. Because Scott Todd has been an Apple guy with me from the very beginning, and he just switched to the Surface and we were having this. This sort of battle of branding, right?

Yeah.

Very emotionally attached to my. And now. And he was. And now he is defected. And my only sort of argument is that, well, you're gonna get a virus, right?

But see what Jerry said, he like, look, he just said it too, because, you know, like, I was an Apple fan for many years. I still have an iPhone. I still love it. I own two iPads. I still use them when I fly. I fly with an iPad. So their purpose is. Right. But then for the computing environment that what I wanted, I could not get Apple to give me. I wanted a screen that I could touch. I wanted a screen that I could write on in a big way. I wanted to be able to Write on my MacBook Pro screen and they wouldn't give it to me. And I was hoping, like, okay, well, eventually the iPad will make the conversion over. And the iPad is super strong and powerful. But what it doesn't do is it doesn't have the full compute power. I can't get all of Excel in there. It's not usable in a laptop replacement. So here in comes in Microsoft Surface. So Surface allows me to write on the screen. I can use it in a powerful way. I can use it the way I want to. So then it killed me to go buy it. But you know what the reality is that is, I think a perfect example of being unique and bringing your own resources to it, because there's gonna be Apple customers that they're gonna live and die for Apple. And, you know, I was one of those people, but then all of a sudden, there's a tool out there that provides me with a better experience that Apple won't replicate. And so Microsoft created it and now I'm using Microsoft. I have two Microsoft products. It's my compute component of it and it's like, great. And I don't understand why everybody else won't defect with me, but I get it.

Yeah. And I'm actually similar. I'm sitting here in my apartment trying to keep my dog from barking. He's on my lap and I'm looking around my living room and I see my Apple tv, I see my iPhone. But then I also see that I have a Dell and I got a Pixel Book recently that was kind of free. But the reason I do PCs is because similar to what you said, they work much better with Microsoft Office. It's as simple as that. So. And I don't think, I mean, you think about Macs, they're more design oriented, more for the creative folks. I mean, definitely people use them in offices, but the PC is really primarily for, it's focused on that usage. And yeah, I think you can have, you know, it would be inauthentic for Apple to basically, you know, copy that experience. And I think that's probably why they're shying away from doing that. Right.

And they should be okay. You know, you can't be everything to everybody. And you know, like if I think that if Margot, you know, I'll just kind of wrap this up. But like one of the things is like we, you know, we try to onboard people through our email series when they get on our buyers list or email list. But essentially what we try to do is we try to a lot of times not necessarily offend them. We're afraid to offend somebody on our email list. But the reality is if we don't kind of like push them and identify who we want as customers, well, the next thing you know, you end up with people that you don't want as customers and they're a terrible fit. So why not just cut and go and just realize like, hey, they may not be a good fit for me. I may not. The, the Mac computers may not be a perfect fit for me, but it doesn't mean that I can't respect what they've done and vice versa.

Absolutely. Yeah.

Well, Jeremy, I think this was a really interesting conversation and you know, I could talk all day with you about customer diplomacy. Is there anything that we should have asked you that we didn't ask you before we get to our tip of the week?

Well, I tried to throw some leading questions in there Leading comments about my dog. You didn't really ask me about my dog. His name is Buddy. Turns three in July. He's a Beagle Chihuahua mix. Very cute boy. Besides that, I think. I think that you guys asked all the right questions. You guys are good at this. You guys are pros.

What do you think that the Beagle Chihuahua brand, like, how did they.

It's funny. I have a Cheegle shirt, so Chihuahua Beagle. So they call it a Cheegle. So there is a. There is a brand out there?

Yeah, I mean, yeah, absolutely. I mean, I think if you really start kind of dialing in, you see it everywhere. My wife, like, I think it's an inferior product. She's a Starbucks person. Like, she loves Starbucks. And I like.

You scared me when you started the sentence. My wife. I think she. I think it's inferior product. And. And pause. You don't want to. Don't get yourself in trouble with your wife. I know you think Starbucks. Yeah. So she likes. I think so. I don't drink coffee, but for people who really like coffee, I don't think they like Starbucks.

No, they don't. Yeah, but their brand is really, really strong. They're like the apple of coffee in Scott.

Right.

So.

All right, Gary.

Well, let's get to our tip of the week. A website, a resource, a book, something actionable. With art of passive income, listeners can go improve their businesses, improve their lives. What do you got?

So I'm actually going to give them a tip, something to do. Because I think it's always, you know, you listen to these interviews, it's like, okay, what can I actually get out of this? And at the beginning, we talked about prioritization. So my tip or my suggestion is try this for four weeks and it'll be interesting. If you hear feedback from folks, I want. I'm challenging folks to try this for four weeks. I do this every week at the beginning of a week, whatever that means for you, whether it's. Whether it's Monday or Sunday or Tuesday, whatever. Write down, really think, and write down, you know, what are the main things I want to get accomplished this week. It could be personal, it could be professional. It could be a combination of both. But if I fast forward to the end of the week, what are the things that if I get done, I will consider a successful week by doing so. I think it really helps you prioritize and think as opposed to getting caught up in all the mundane. I got to do this chore and this and that, and things are going to come up. But it's really helpful. So write down a list. Maybe it's five things, maybe it's 10 things, maybe it's one thing. If you get that one thing done, it'll be a successful week. And then check back at the end of the week and hold yourself accountable by just noting what did you get done and what did you not get done and think about why and do that for four weeks and see how it works for you. I find it really helpful.

I love it. I love it. Scott Todd, what's your tip of the week?

Mark I actually have a book recommendation. The book literally came out today and I have downloaded it and I cannot wait to really dig into it. I got it on Audible, but you can get on Kindle, whatever. And it's called Late Bloomers, the Power of Patience in a world obsessed with Earth early achievement. So it's by Rich Karlgard and I heard a preview of this book, I heard kind of the premise behind this book and I was looking forward to it and literally it came out today. And basically it's talking about how we see all of these people achieving success at 30 years old or very young ages, Facebook or whatever, these unicorn businesses. And in fact, you cannot let that kind of stop you from achieving life no matter where you are. And he kind of goes through human psychology behind that component of it. So the book was just released today and check it out, it is in fact already number one in popular psychology.

Alright, I love that. Check that out. I'm getting it right now. Buy now with one credit done.

All right, well, that's pretty good.

Yeah. My tip of the week is get smarter and learn more@avegroup.com avegroup.com There's a lot of interesting information here and then you'll just see why I was, you know, seeing why Jeremy's the smartest guy in the room. So very cool. Jeremy Greenberg, Are we good?

We're good. And again, let me just edit that a little bit. Right now I'm equally the smartest guy in the room because in my room I have my dog buddy. And for all we know, dogs are a lot smarter than we think. So the jury's out on that.

That's true. We, we have a Havanese poodle that, that poodle is really smart for sure. Okay, I'll, I'll edit it for sure. Scott Todd, are we good?

We're good, Mark.

All right, well, I want to thank all the listeners. I'll just remind you today's podcast is sponsored by Flight School. Learn more go to the landgeek.com training. And the only way, the only way we're going to get the quality of guests like Jeremy Greenberg from aevegroup.com is if you do us three little favors. You got to subscribe, you got a rate, you got to review the podcasts. Send us a screenshot of that review to supportlandgeek.com we're going to send you for free the passive income launch kit, which is normally $97. All right, well, I want to thank everybody and let freedom ring. Thanks.

Guys.

Thank you.