We have so much information, but how do we know who to trust? Which advice about how to live should we believe? This episode is about holistic approaches to business. We talk lead generation, core values, team building, and balance. Dave shares what he’s learned through ten years of entrepreneurship and writing his book, Core Values– the art of building a business for a healthy, well-rounded life. Our goal is your success. Welcome to the In Work Guild Podcast.
Dave Valentine 0:08
Hey, I'm so excited that you're here to talk about in work, things that we do in work and in our lives for the inner work. That's what this podcast is all about. Today, I want to talk about a very important topic, which is, we are information rich as a society, and we are wisdom poor. Here's what I mean by that, we have more information accessible than we've ever had in the entirety of human history. And with this information, we've made lots of decisions. We've got so much data that we don't even have enough time to analyze it at this point. One of my favorite things was I worked at this guy who was a old school marketer, and he was always kind of bagging on clients who wanted to have data related to digital advertising and how this particular ad led to a conversion. And he used to make this joke, he said, you know, back in the 80s, no one would come in with a TV and say, Hey, I saw your ad on the TV. And he always did a southern accent, which made it more enjoyable, of course. And that's why I'm here to buy a car, you know, and it's this idea that we have so much information. Who do we trust. And we see this in our media consumption, we see this in our friendly conversations with people that we know, we see this with our government now, right? Like, the government's coming out with food pyramids, and this is what you should eat. And this is what's healthy. And this is what isn't healthy, and allowing things to slip through that other countries, or entire groups of countries said carcinogenic, and the United States government's like, this is fine. In all of this, we have information. But we don't have the wisdom anymore, to know what actually works. And that's one of the things that we have to change. As entrepreneurs as business owners, and as a society at large. It's time for wisdom to rule the day. I've been on this business owner entrepreneurship journey for 10 years now, for some of you, that's a long time for others to listen to this. That is just another chapter of your life. I in that 10 years, I've gained a lot of wisdom. I've seen some things, I've done some things that were not helpful and others that were really helpful. One of the things that I did in my information gathering in the early days was I just came to the belief that I had to work as hard as humanly possible to generate business growth. And I did, I would go to networking events in the morning, I would go to networking events in the evening, I would send out emails, not through an automation but manually as prospecting endeavors, I would do all sorts of different things in order to generate the kinds of results that I was aiming for. So I used to make all of these attempts to grow the business and I was going to do it, no matter what it took, I bought into this information of hustle culture, you have to wash your body, you have to make it your own, you have to colonize yourself. And what it led to was adrenal fatigue. And my doctor at the age of 29, saying, Dave, do you know when you're going to have a heart attack? Which I said, No, I don't even understand what you're asking doc. He's like, do you know when you're going to have a heart attack? I'm like, if you ask it again, he's still don't know what you're asking. And he was like, you don't know. You just have one. You're 29 We've tested 4500 people, you're the most stressed out person we've ever tested. If you keep going this way, you won't see 40 What I had been given was information from other people work hard, hustle, do whatever it takes break your body, break your like, whatever you have to do to get success, get it attain it, and success is dollars and cents. So I went there, but there's all these wisdom traditions like it's not just one. It's every wisdom tradition you can imagine, throughout the course of human history, Judaism and Christianity and Buddhism and Taoism and Sufi ism, and every single one of them has a common cadence, and it sounds like this. Eat, drink and enjoy your work. Because the money is now going to satisfy the fame is not going to satisfy having lots of sex with lots of really attractive people is not going to satisfy driving the Mercedes Benz may feel good when you drive it off a lot may feel good for that first week, that first month, it will not satisfy. And we bought into this idea of more, when actually, the wisdom in our space says everything that you have everything that you have is already enough, already enough. And so what I had to do was I had to learn what it was, was actually bring about my breakdown of body, mind and soul. And through that process, one of the first things that identified my business was, I did not have to have a sustainable lead generation practice, I was very good at networking. And it took so much energy and effort, I was enjoying it, I got to meet other people. And it took me away from my family, or my friends, from my own alone time where I could recharge my batteries. So in that the first piece of wisdom is this, figure out your lead generation for your company. Because if you have lead generation figured out dialed in unlocked, you now have the ability to grow and scale your company in a way that doesn't require you as the owner, as the founder, as the person in charge, to have to drive that business. That's number one. If you don't have that figured out, that is the thing that you have to spend your time doing. I have ideas for you keep listening to the podcast, I own lead generation companies because I know how important it is to change the success of entrepreneurs and business owners. If you get that figured out, your whole life will start to change. But it doesn't change automatically. It's just the first step. The second step is figuring out your sales. Okay? Now here's what I hear a lot. I don't want to do sales. I hate doing sales. It's not fun. It's not enjoyable, I don't like it. Well, there are a number of ways to do sales, like an infinite number of ways. And most of them suck. Most of them are not enjoyable, most of them are not great. I remember being in states in this time period, where I would just be like, you know, everyone is a wallet. I remember walking through a sea of crowd of people in a networking event, and I'm just like, who is going to give me their money. That is stressful, because when you reduce another human to only what you can get out of them. It's the antithesis of abundance. It's lust, not of the flesh, but of the wallet. And so we have, we have to engage with this idea of once we have enough leads coming in that we're full, you have plenty, all of a sudden, we can start to look at people with open generous eyes. Number two, the sales thing, right? When we're doing sales. Don't sell people just consult 50% of the people that you talk with at least are not a good fit, at least or not a good fit for your services. Last month, one of my companies disqualified 58% of the people that they talked to, they had 100 meetings, they disqualified 58 of them. So 42 Were good fits out of the 42. They the close 18 deals more than enough, plenty 100,000 Plus and monthly recurring revenue. When you consult with people, you can tell them you're not qualified. But good luck. And if you need a recommendation, I'll give you one. When you consult with people, you can tell them if that makes sense for their company to work with you or not. Or you can tell them the secret sauce to getting the best results they can. This is what's in store when you start to do sales from a consulting perspective. Again, I'll have more details on that as we continue on. Number three, team building. You have to have core values to build your team around what are the things that are in you? What are the things that you naturally lean towards in your life that have made you get to where you are? What are the things that you think that the ideas that are gonna help you push forward to get to where you want to go? I'll give you the six that we use. I just finished my first book about this. I'm so excited I did. It's called the core values.
The six are very simple. And they're the core values that have helped me grow. And they're what we run all of our companies with. And the reason why we run them with these core values is because we've seen them over and over and over again, be successful in finding the right individuals to be on our team. I don't care if you have a high school diploma or a college degree, I don't care if you've worked in our field, I don't care what your background is, if you have the core values, you're probably a great fit for our team. There in order number one is tenacity. Will you do whatever it takes to find the answer? Obviously, within reason we want to commit a crime or burn ourselves out? And are you going to have that nagging sense of I gotta figure this out? I gotta figure this out. Number two is curiosity. Curiosity is a response to tenacity. There's a problem here. What can we do to fix it? That's a curiosity move. It's a question, what can we do to fix it? What's worked in the past? What have other people done? What is new and unique? What can we do to expand the reach? Number three, initiative, if you see something, that's not right, just go fix it. If you see something that could be done better, just go do it. Don't wait on someone in leadership. Don't wait on me as the owner, don't just go do it. Take initiative, take action. Number four, accountability. This one's easy. Own, whatever it is that you did, if you had a win on it, if you had a loss on that. Number five, transparency. Just be yourself. Tell the customers, clients, students, everything given the secret sauce, tell them why it's working, tell them why it isn't working, give them everything. Be honest with your co workers. Hey, you seem kind of down today. Dave? Yeah, I had a really rough night talking with my wife, I feel unwell I'm trying to push through. But I'm just not. Whatever that is, right? Just be honest. And number six as humanity, you got to be kind to other people, you have to show them the sort of grace that you wish people would show to you. When you're building a team around core values, what ends up happening is you build people that have similar mindsets, towards how they're going to how how they're going to execute their job, not how they think. It's how they interact and execute their work. And when you get that sort of traction with lead generation, and sales, and now you've got a team that's ready to execute, you may just find that your stress level starts to go down. I have a client who has been, I haven't been working with that long, and they don't have lead generation setup, but they have a nice business they've had for a long time. And they're doing just under a million dollars. They keep wanting to push back turning on lead generation, because they're afraid. They're terrified of what happens if I get these new customers and I can't fulfill. And instead what I've started to teach them is perhaps it's actually more terrifying to be worried about a handful of customers, that if you lose one, your whole company's in trouble. It's time to change the way we think. There's plenty of customers, clients, and students out there for all of us. And they just are waiting for a easy way to understand how you're going to solve their problem. Sales doesn't have to be smarmy, it can be a conversation and consultation, let me help you. I will tell you if you are not a good fit for what we do, I don't want to work with you unless I know we can help you. What a difference that makes. And when you build a team around core values instead of I just need somebody with lots of experience in the space or someone that I'd like to talk to. Instead, you find people that fit the core values and fit the ethos of what you're trying to build. It's amazing what will happen. I look forward to hearing your stories of your company soaring and have your own personal health increasing along this podcast journey. Until next time, I'm Dave Valentine. Have a kick ass day.