Summary:

Mike Agugliaro takes a break to share some crucial relationship training for business owners. If you want your employees and team members to stick around for the long term and give you their best work, you have to be able to understand what they need, want, and desire from you. Learn how to avoid conflict and creating lasting relationships by having one simple conversation with your employees right now.

Key Lessons Learned:

Relationship Problems

• When we look at our employees there is always questions and relationship problems. Why are they not happy? Why do they feel let down?
• In all your relationships, including with your employees, there are needs. Everyone has needs, some are simple, like food, water, and air, but some are more complex and unique to the individual. Needs are the first level of wants.
• Understanding what someone needs can allow you to create alignment with them so that you can also get what you need.
• Wants are the second level. We want more money, new clothes, a new car, opportunity, etc.
• Desires are higher level wants, they are more long term and ambitious. We desire a bigger house, an empire, etc.
• If you can understand a person’s needs, wants, and desires you can get everyone aligned and on the same page. It’s a tool that you can implement in your company to create alignment between your business and your team.
• Clarity creates alignment, alignment creates accountability.
• You don’t have to grant whatever it is the person desires, but you can be a path that allows them to reach it.
• Once you’ve done this exercise with an employee or prospective employee it’s time to flip it around and establish what you need, want, and desire from the relationship as well.
• Oftentimes employees will leave a company because one of their needs aren’t being met. Failing to fulfill something that you promised is a common relationship problem. Don’t promise something that you don’t intend or can’t deliver.
• Sometimes you have to take what you want into your own hands instead of waiting for the other person to satisfy you.
• Employees are like any other relationship, if their needs and wants are not met the relationship will fall apart. The conversation can be tricky but it’s essential if you want to be able to work together and ultimately avoid relationship problems that cause employees to leave.

Links To Resources Mentioned

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Mike Agugliaro talks about success and failure today and why you need to understand two crucial insights. Without them you will never feel successful and failure will always loom over the horizon.

Key Lessons Learned:

Success vs Failure

• A lot of people say that success is a mindset, but that’s not entirely accurate. It’s understanding what success looks like for you.
• There are many layers of success and sometimes we let happen is we let one thing that we look at as a failure consume our mind. It becomes our ultimate failure.
• There is confusion between success vs failure, specifically on what to do and what not to do.
• The fastest way to find success is to find someone to show you what to do, just like the wise masters of the past.
• How will know you have succeeded and will you be satisfied when you get there? For most people, the trouble is the goal posts keep moving.
• There is one cardinal rule that has to be steadfast. If you never have clarity on what success looks like for you, how can you ever feel any satisfaction in your life? Get completely clear on what success means.
• If your success target is too far or too large, it won’t drive you. You need defined criteria that is imminent for you to feel motivated.
• People tend to focus on their failures and they tend to overshadow all the small and big ways they’ve succeeded in the past.
• Winning small games helps you stay in the big game and hit the big targets.
• You can’t create alignment without hyper clarity on what success looks like for you and your business.
• Ask your employees what success looks like for them this week. People will drive themselves way more than you ever could. When your team starts leading themselves to success, that’s when you’re ultra successful. The leaders job is to lead only until everyone can lead themselves, that’s when they should step back.

Failing Forward

• You have to rewire your perceptions. Instead of thinking of something that went wrong in your life being a failure, consider it a lesson that will get you closer to where you want to go. The success vs failure paradigm should be success or lesson learned.
• A real failure is something that doesn’t have a lesson behind it.
• Just because something can always be better, that doesn’t mean you didn’t achieve success.
• Don’t look at something as just a success or failure, always look for the lessons that you can carry forward into the next experience.
• Contracts keep people aligned, Service Level Agreements are about agreeing on what success and failure look like between companies.

Links To Resources Mentioned

Servicebusinessgrowth.com

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What would happen to your family and your business if you couldn’t work anymore? Learn about the consequences of success and why small mindedness will prevent you from making an impact on the world. Find out why your business and your life won’t grow until you work on yourself and create permanent lasting change.

Key Lessons Learned:

Success

• Success is many things. You’re successful just to be alive today.
• The consequences of lack of success come out in many ways including stress, pressure, anxiety, frustration, and anger. They all come from a lack of the success that you wanted.
• Your perception of what growth is and what it takes determines how you feel about it.
• Don’t let small mindedness keep you small.
• Many people believe they are small, but is that really true or is that just a choice. Some people have already accepted defeat. You can only accomplish things at the level of your thinking.
• When you’re digging a ditch it comes down to either you’re going to beat this task or it’s going to beat you. It becomes a question of your definition of success.
• It’s not difficult to grow a company or achieve success, it’s just different.
• The common idea is that it takes weeks to create a change in behavior but that’s not true. One moment can change your whole life.
• It’s not grow or die in terms of the business, it’s death of success and freedom and the belief you will be able to achieve what you wanted.
• The brain is nothing more than a computer. Whatever you tell it, it will create. If you tell yourself you’re small, you will be small.
• Even believing your company to be big can be a form of small mindedness if it stops you from trying to grow.
• What you would tell your five year old child, you should tell yourself.
• When you visualize the outcome and tell yourself a different story, your story is going to change. People sabotage themselves because they tell themselves a story that keeps them small.
• You can’t hone a new skill set with the same mindset.
• Temporary motivation doesn’t work, you need permanent change. For Mike permanent change happens in a total immersion environment, you have to figure out what method works for you. You can’t move on to the next thing until permanent change has occurred.
• If you want greater results you need to work on yourself first before you work on your company.
• Success is mandatory because there will be pain down the road for your family. Ask yourself “what’s the consequence of not moving quicker?”
• The bigger you grow the more you can impact the world.

Risk

• What happens to your business if you get hurt and can’t work or if you died?
• Mike tells the story of his former boss who passed away due to cancer. After passing away the business quickly fell apart because there was no plan or people in place to keep it going.
• Are you setting the stage for your family? Will they be protected if something goes wrong?

Links To Resources Mentioned

https://www.servicebusinessedge.com

Thank you for listening! If you enjoyed this podcast, please subscribe and leave a 5-star rating and review in iTunes!

Discover the blueprint to billions used by master marketer Jay Abraham to grow your service business and gain the all-important position of preeminence in your market. Find out how helping your customers understand the value you provide can transform your business and how the Socratic method of interviewing can lead you to hidden business insights you never thought were possible.

Key Lessons Learned:

Why?

• Optimization is the highest and best use of your time and resources.
• If you don’t fall in love with the people you’re serving, and that includes your team, you’re not going to be able to create something great. You may be passionate about what you do but are you passionate about the people you do it for.
• Most people just want to grow a business and make money, but you need to know what your endgame is.
• Why are you building a business in the first place?
• If you don’t understand marketing, you are not playing the game, business is playing you.
• You are rewarded in your business life for the value you create for others. If you’re not focused on that and instead focused on making money, you probably never will.
• It takes the same level of effort to build a business that is a systemless mess with no value as it does to build something worth a small fortune.
• You’re the one who chose your business and you should use it facilitate what you want to achieve in your life.

Traditional vs Non-Traditional

• It’s not necessary to go through the arduous traditional ways of growing a business. There are many different and creative ways to accomplish the same goals faster or cheaper.
• Most businesses spend money on advertising and ignore their referral business, but that’s going about trust completely backwards.
• You must test your marketing assumptions. One small variable can be responsible for 2x-4x the results.
• There are 50 impact points in your business that you don’t even know about and they all have variability. A 10% increase in 20 to 30 small points in your business can lead to many hundreds of percent increase in profit.
• Never launch something in your company and give it to everybody, that’s a good way to blow it up.
• Everyone could double their business right now by doing it better.
• Different articulations and ways of expressing yourself can make a major difference. Your headlines should convey the most self serving benefit that the other side can expect to receive when they take the next step.
• You don’t have to recreate the wheel, you can learn, adopt, and borrow from other methods that have worked before.

Education Marketing

• Give your customer the understanding to appreciate the value of what you are creating for them.
• Most people don’t understand that human beings need to understand why you’re better. “The reason why…” can be your force multiplier.
• The things you do may be the same as everyone else, but if you tell the story and no one else does you will have a preemptive story in your market.
• Masterful marketing is more science than talent.
• You have to measure the lifetime value of different types of clients and leads.
• The way to get better answers is to learn how to ask better questions.

The Power Team

• The first thing you have to understand is that no one is great at everything and you need to figure out what someone’s strengths and motivations are.
• Your team looks to you for their security, fulfillment, and acknowledgement. If you don’t feed and nourish that you are doing a disservice to them and constraining your own growth.
• Your team has to see that you are committed to their best interest.
• Train your team in more than just your systems, train them on trust building, communication, and collaboration.
• You have to be able to acknowledge and appreciate other people’s different points of view.
• 95% of small and medium businesses never reach their goals because they don’t have goals, they have vague hopes and dreams.
• A business not examined constantly is a business not worth owning.
• Your team can produce more multiplied profit for your business but not if they don’t understand what performance metrics look like what to strive for.
• Interview your best employees on how they do what they do, it can be quite profound for the employee at the same time because they often don’t know exactly how they do it.

Attract Convert Deliver Scale with Jay Abraham. Listen to the legendary Jay Abraham reveal the reasons you’re always in the business of selling and why learning is meaningless without taking action. Finally, discover what Jay Abraham would do if he were starting over today and had to grow a business ASAP and what the three most important skills you have in your arsenal are.

Key Lessons Learned:

Business Growth

• Everything you do in marketing should be a profit center.
• Everyone on your team is in sales because you are always selling your company’s unique position in the market, you’re in the job of selling the vision of the business to each other, and you’re selling the quality of the opportunity you are offering if you’re trying to hire them.
• Don’t be the smartest person in the room. Don’t delude yourself into believing you have mastered anything more than the outer periphery of all that’s possible.
• The greatest tragedy of expertise is that the people that need it the most discount it the most.
• You can’t grow at the pace that is possible on your own. You need to have collaborative thinking partners to help you reach your potential.
• Learning without doing is like being in the stands watching the game instead of playing it. You have to take what you learn and execute. It’s yours to lose.
• Showing up is not the commitment, it’s merely the preparation.
• You need to be masterful at quantified, direct response marketing.
• Most business owners are two dimensional, part of being preeminent is knowing that you will have and planning for a higher quality of client and you will be their trusted advisor for life.
• You have to be strategic, not tactical.

Links To Resources Mentioned

Thank you for listening! If you enjoyed this podcast, please subscribe and leave a 5-star rating and review in iTunes!

Learn about the three primary components of growing a business and how you can use them to explode your service business. Discover the real reason you are in business and why you are thinking about sales all wrong. Find out what it means to really lead from the front, and how get your team on board with your vision for the future.

Key Lessons Learned:

Managing Risk

• Ask yourself what could go wrong. It’s possible for your creative idea to cost you a million dollars if you don’t think about the risks involved.
• You have to do your due diligence with everything you try in your business. The bigger you get, the more you have to lose.
• If you’re going to be a coach in this world, make sure you have the success and the scars to share, then take on the ethical responsibility and know that you are playing with someone’s life.
• Business and life is not easy, it takes honest work and plenty of effort to achieve anything worthwhile.

Growing a Business

• There are three components to growing a business: marketing, sales, and leadership.
• Every business is in the business of marketing. You should understand the difference between the psychology of marketing and persuasion.
• Marketing is different for each business, just because it worked for one does not mean it will work for your business. Diversify your marketing and don’t rely on one platform for everything.
• Make a list of all the marketing vehicles you could consider. If you don’t have a list, you are just going to be sold by what other people have. Evaluate your list, pick what might work for you but choose based off of ROI and test out the results. Avoid long term contracts.
• When measuring ROI you have to measure results at the beginning of the process, not at the end.
• You have to come at sales from a serving perspective first. If you’re amazing, people buy amazing. The greatest sales people in the world don’t have to convince anyone of anything.
• Be relentless in trying to achieve better results for your business and your customers.
• You have to lead your people. Are you leading by example or are you leading by force?
• You must always look for the skill sets you don’t have now that will grow your business to the next level. Every $5 million there is another level of understanding and evolution.
• Your team should be growing your business with you. How can you implement new levels of achievement with a team that isn’t evolving? Your business will always lower to the lowest level of mindset in your business.

Mindset

• Master something at a level that you can understand.
• Find someone that is willing to teach and who you are willing to learn from.
• If you don’t reflect on your life, you will end up living through the same cycles of success and failure over and over again.
• The only difference between confrontation and conversation is the emotion you attach to it.
• The results you have are the results you deserve.
• If you don’t evolve as a person, how can you expect to become successful as a person?
• Your belief system is either holding you back or pushing you forward. Ask questions when you’re learning new things and try to get to the why and the how of what you’re hearing.

Links To Resources Mentioned

servicebusinessedge.com

Thank you for listening! If you enjoyed this podcast, please subscribe and leave a 5-star rating and review in iTunes!