angishields, Author at Business RadioX ® Page

BRX Pro Tip: Better Onboarding

May 5, 2023 by angishields

BRX Pro Tips

BRX Pro Tip: Better Onboarding

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BRX Pro Tip: Better Onboarding

Stone Payton: [00:00:00] Welcome back to Business RadioX Pro Tips. Lee Kantor and Stone Payton here with you. Lee, let’s talk about some key tips, some strategies, tactics, tips for better onboarding.

Lee Kantor: [00:00:12] Yeah. I know when in selling, I always feel like the selling is the most important part. But, really, once you’ve sold somebody, you got to have a good system of onboarding that person, whether it’s a client or an employee. You’ve got to get them to have a win early and often in the process. So, I think it’s really important to have a system in place when it comes to onboarding that include regular check-ins, maybe 30, 60, 100 day check-ins to make sure that they’re progressing as you both expect the progress to come.

Lee Kantor: [00:00:50] And like I said earlier, small wins, early and often, should be built into the process so momentum can be felt. So, the person feels like they are making progress. So that the client feels like, “Hey, this is working.” And the employee feels like, “Hey, this is a good place to be.” And then, ultimately, so that the client and the employee can feel some sort of escape velocity of, “Hey, I got this. This is a right fit. This is something that’s going to help me get the outcome that I desire.” If you do this correctly, you will have happier employees and you will have customers for life.

BRX Pro Tip: Say Thank You

May 4, 2023 by angishields

BRX Pro Tips

BRX Pro Tip: Say Thank You

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BRX Pro Tip: Say Thank You

Stone Payton: [00:00:00] And we are back with BRX Pro Tips. Lee Kantor and Stone Payton here with you. Lee, let’s talk a little bit about how important it is the value in saying thank you.

Lee Kantor: [00:00:11] Yeah. This is another one of those things that you can control. You can, every day, express gratitude to your clients, to your team, to the people that are listening to this podcast. Saying thank you is essential every day, especially during these kind of chaotic times. So, everyone likes to be appreciated. Appreciation is free. Do it early do it. Do it often. When people do business with you, they should be treated like gold. And thanking them for trusting you is a great way to demonstrate how much you care about them and their success. So, don’t be shy when it comes to saying thank you. Appreciate people and then they will continue to appreciate you.

Bob Miner with Dynamic Traders

May 3, 2023 by angishields

Digital Marketing Done Right

Bob Miner with Dynamic Traders

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In this episode of “Digital Marketing Done Right”, Lee Kantor and David Brandon interview Bob Miner, founder of Dynamic Traders, a financial newsletter and trading education company. Bob talks about his background in trading and how he adapted his business to the digital age. He shares his marketing strategies and how he evolved with new platforms and technologies.

They also discuss the different products Bob offers, including his financial newsletter, trading software, and streaming course. He emphasizes the importance of educational material in marketing and how it’s been the lead-in to his business.

Robert Miner began his career in the mid-80’s with his first company, Gann-Elliott Educators where he produced analysis reports for the major financial markets and presented live workshops in the U.S. and overseas.

In the mid-90’s he founded Dynamic Traders Group to provide market analysis and trade strategies reports, practical trade education and develop his Dynamic Trader Software and Trading Course.

Robert’s first book, Dynamic Trading, was named the “Trading Book of the Year” by the SuperTraders Almanac and he was named the 1997 “Guru of the Year. His most recent book, High Probability Trading Strategies, has been one of the consistently top selling trading books since its release in 2008. It has become a must read classic trading book of practical trade strategies.

Robert has expanded on and integrated the work of W.D. Gann, R.N. Elliott and his own unique approach to Fib time and price target strategies into his own comprehensive and original approach to multiple time frame time, price, time, pattern and momentum trade strategies.

Follow Dynamic Traders Group on Twitter and YouTube.

This transcript is machine transcribed by Sonix

TRANSCRIPT

Intro: [00:00:07] Welcome to Digital Marketing Done Right, a customer success spotlight from Rainmaker Digital Services and Business RadioX. We cover digital marketing success stories drawn from real Rainmaker platform clients and showcase how they use the Rainmaker platform to build their business. Now here’s your host.

Lee Kantor: [00:00:36] Lee Kantor here with David Brandon, another episode of Digital Marketing done right and this is going to be a good one. Who do we have on the show today, David?

David Brandon: [00:00:43] Hey, Lee Well, we’ve got Bob Miner here from Dynamic Traders. Hey, Bob, good to have you on the show.

Bob Miner: [00:00:52] Hello, I’m here.

Lee Kantor: [00:00:53] Well, Bob, before we get too far into things, tell us about dynamic traders, how you serving folks?

Bob Miner: [00:01:00] Well, I’ve had this URL since 1996, so for a long time, three primary products that I’ve sell and that is a subscription based product, financial newsletter about analysis of stock and forex markets, that sort of thing. And I’ve developed a software program for traders many years ago and then I’ve most recently in the last year have released my third major trading course, which is now a streaming course. So that’s what I’ve been doing for a little over 30 years or about 30 years now.

Lee Kantor: [00:01:37] What’s your backstory? Have you always been involved in trading in some form or fashion and then just kind of evolved into offering all these services for traders?

Bob Miner: [00:01:46] No, I was all self-taught in this, and I began in kind of mid to late 80 seconds with a regular sort of subscription based newsletter that was mailed out. So all the marketing was done, you know, traditional direct mail, magazine articles and ads, as well as at that time, I would almost every month would travel somewhere around the US and sometimes in foreign countries and speak at conferences. So that’s how we attracted business at that time. So the kind of business that I’m in is just made for digital online marketing.

Lee Kantor: [00:02:26] Now, when you were starting out, this is at the beginning of kind of the Internet as we know it. Did you feel like you were able to just kind of transfer some of the knowledge about direct marketing just to the Internet and then use that as kind of the way to deliver those messages?

Bob Miner: [00:02:42] Absolutely. It was particularly earlier on, is that basically we did almost the same marketing on the Internet as we did with digital and not digital with print media, that sort of thing. And that’s mainly because and I really haven’t thought about this to ask the question is we didn’t have such an easy way to attract and capture a lot of email addresses and contact information at that time. I still, even when I had the website in the early years, would go out in person and do speak at conferences and do print ads and that sort of thing, just to get the eyeballs to come to the inner because it was so new. Not that many people were looking on the internet for their information as they have been in recent years or decades. Really?

David Brandon: [00:03:30] Yeah. Bob, do you feel like you got a little bit of a first mover advantage there? I mean, I know you said that this field, it’s a pretty natural fit for your for your industry. Do you feel like there was a first mover advantage for you?

Bob Miner: [00:03:43] There was somewhat, yes. I was kind of early on as far as subscription based. Of course, the Internet and digital marketing just made for subscription based businesses. So I think I had a little bit of a jump start. I can tell you one thing is I didn’t make the best advantage of it over the years because I did so well before I had the website and did digital marketing, and I did so well in those first few years that I kind of coasted and got left behind in a lot of the new marketing through social media and, you know, email campaigns and that sort of thing. So even though I’d been doing this a long time, I’ve still the last few years kind of learning new things and catching up.

Lee Kantor: [00:04:27] Because you’re always have to kind of have that top of the funnel collection of emails to send information to right like that. There’s no shortcut for that.

Bob Miner: [00:04:37] The whole business is based on your email list. You know, that’s the that’s the whole business is email list and how you communicate and treat your customers through that email list.

Lee Kantor: [00:04:49] So like you said, there has been an evolution and you always have to kind of, I guess, make some adjustments based on new information and new platforms that arrive in the on the Internet. How have you handled that? You said you were you feel you were kind of not not very late, but maybe later than you would have liked When looking back, how do you kind of stay in the forefront when there’s new platforms popping up, you know, seemingly every day?

Bob Miner: [00:05:15] Oh, I don’t know if I’m in the forefront. I’m kind of always catching up. I mean, literally, I am like I said, I’m learning new stuff right now. I can tell you something that happened to me a few years ago and actually why I’m now on the Rainmaker platform. As I was for years, my entire website database, everything was custom custom built. I probably spent 20 to $30,000 a year on maintaining that. I know, I know. And and I spent that kind of money long after I needed to, but I had my own server. It was hosted in a company in New York. And the guy that originally built the back end, well back end and front end. Um, we had that server backed up and you know, he’s the tech genius and the server was backed up with a hard drive connected to the server, which means no backup. And I got hacked and ransomed by, you know, the Russian mob basically, and encrypted. And one day I had a very thriving business and the next day I had zero. And because our backup and you know, it sounds foolish now, but because our backup was just connected hard drive connected to the server it was backing up the hard drive. It wasn’t backing up. The data is everything was lost in one day. And so I was out of business for more than six months. And that’s what brought me to Rainmaker as a system that was integrated already that I could hopefully, you know, get jumpstarted a lot quicker than what had taken me in earlier years.

Lee Kantor: [00:07:03] Now, there are several components of your business, right? You have the reports, you have education, there’s software. Do you treat each one of them as their own business with their own kind of funnels and their own kind of communication cadences? Like how do you create the content for each of the different parts of your business?

Bob Miner: [00:07:26] No, they’re all, they’re all integrated. Uh, the, the, the lowest cost entryway to what I have is a subscription to a report. Right. So that’s, that’s the primary marketing is for the subscriptions to the reports. And then through that report someone might subscribe a while and they, they see the software I’m using is my software that I developed. They might get interested in that. And of course that’s a big jump in cost. And then if they really want to take their education further, then I have the streaming course that, by the way, I wrote the first self-study futures trading course that was ever made in 1989. So. Wow. Yeah. So my my background, I briefly worked in the early 80 seconds as a real estate agent and worked with some of these, you know, middle of the night infomercial people that traveled around the country. And when I started trading and doing a newsletter, which was always been an educational newsletter as well as an analysis, as I said, you know, there is no trading course available. So I wrote one and it was very successful. And because I knew how to promote it and sell it and that went on, I sold that for many years and then I did a another course and that was released in 2006.

Bob Miner: [00:08:52] But it was on a a CD or DVD, and it was for its time it was pretty advanced. But of course, we got to the point where nobody even had a CD player to play it. So, you know, sort of had to redo that. And now through the Rainmaker and LearnDash is it’s been just a little over a year ago, I spent one year producing this course that’s currently available and it’s probably. The most comprehensive and reasonably priced and real world trading course that’s out there. That doesn’t mean that everybody believes that it’s that, but it probably is. And it sells fairly well. And I guess I should mention also that the lead in to all of my business has been two books that I’ve written, and the first book was self-published in late 90 seconds, but I sold about a half million dollars of that book in 6 or 7 years, and that jumpstarted the entire business. And the second book was it’s now 10 or 12 years old, but then it kept the business going. So that’s the lead in Everybody should know is educational material, whether it’s a book or something, you know, free report that you give out is the greatest email contact capturing mechanism there is.

David Brandon: [00:10:14] Oh, absolutely. I mean, we’ve talked we talked about promotion a little bit here. I’m curious if you can expand on that. You know, you’ve you’ve got your email list that you use. I’ve seen you put out your weekly YouTube videos, which it looks great. You know, you’ve talked about books being a way to get people in the door. What do you think is the most effective promotional avenue that you’ve had over the years?

Bob Miner: [00:10:40] Well, the book. The book? Yeah, the the book has probably been the most effective because a book, if it’s done right. I mean, one, it’s got to be a really good book and it has to sell. You know, you have to market it. So there’s a lot of good books that don’t sell because it could be the title, it could be the marketing. But if you market it and you get it out there and people read it and they understand it and they learn from it, everything has to be for the customer. You know, you got to it can’t be a promotional product. It has to be an educational, really good educational product. They’re going to come to you then for sure, because there’s so much material out there and there’s so much not just in what I do, what everybody does that is not quality material that’s written to to make sure it gets really great value to the customer, that the customer figures that out pretty quick. I’m reading a promotional book, you know, forget it. Now I’m reading something that I want to keep going through it because I’m learning something. So that’s one of the best ways. And you know, it’s not practical to tell everyone, go write a book, but some solid educational material on your website, whether it’s a free handout that is not just a promotional handout, but is really good, useful education well written. Well, people come back to you now. It’s pretty simple stuff.

Lee Kantor: [00:12:07] Is that a mistake? You see, maybe some entrepreneurs make that they don’t kind of share the good stuff, that they’re holding back too much and they lean on maybe being clever or try to persuade somebody to do.

Speaker5: [00:12:22] You know, to to.

[00:12:23] Sign up for something that really isn’t providing an overwhelming amount of information. That’s absolutely a mistake. It’s absolutely And particularly telling people, well, I can’t tell you about this until you pay me. You know, that’s the kiss of death for any business and absolute kiss of death. Um, so you you want to make everything that they get from you valuable because the lifetime value, at least in my business, the lifetime value of a customer is huge. You know, it’s hundreds of dollars every year. I’ve got customers that have had 20, 30 years sort of thing. And the low periods, those people that stick with you because everything you do is valuable is what keeps you, keeps you going. And since content is so important, how like in a given week, how much of your time do you invest in creating valuable content now? Probably 12 hours.

Bob Miner: [00:13:23] So a big thing. I’ve been doing this a long time. So.

Lee Kantor: [00:13:27] So. But a big part of your week is creating content and delivering content.

Bob Miner: [00:13:32] Well, it is, but it’s delivering my reports. That’s what that’s where my time goes, is I issue this report three times a week, and two of those times includes a 20 to 30 minute video analysis. So that’s got to be recorded and edited and as well as it accompanies a written report. So that’s where the most of my time is. I if I were younger, I would be spending much more time on new marketing material. But, you know, I’m not younger.

Lee Kantor: [00:14:07] But is that is creating and delivering the content. Is that something that you look forward to nowadays or is that something that’s kind of a necessary evil to be part of your business?

Bob Miner: [00:14:18] Well, it’s never a necessary evil if it’s part of your business, part of your business. So, of course, you know, anything I do, I’m trying to do the best at it and and keep the business going so and maximize my time. And I mean, I’ve been doing it a long time, so I have a base. It’s not like, you know, it’s free money from the sky. I still got to earn it, but I’ve been doing it a long time. So I’ve, I have a lot of routines that and a large mailing list and a reasonable number of subscribers. So but when you beginning is, you know, then you have to constantly, you know, everyone tells you that, oh, you’re self-employed, you got your own website, that’s fantastic. Get to work when you want. Yeah, They don’t know in the first ten years you’re working ten, 12 hours a day work extra. Yeah, exactly. It’s like you never stop because you’re. You’re never finished. There’s always something more you can do. And that’s, that’s still the same with me. But, but I’m just I’m kind of coasting now, to tell you the truth. I’ll tell you one thing, too. This one thing I really missed out doing is having a partner in someone particularly, you know, I kind of miss all the early years of the social marketing revolution, so to speak, because I was coasting. And, you know, if I had had a partner who kept on top of that or someone younger or whatever, you know, I could have taken advantage of that much better than I have now.

Lee Kantor: [00:16:00] Is it just as rewarding to you nowadays when you have a trade that goes extremely well, or if one of your clients has a trade that goes extremely well?

Bob Miner: [00:16:11] Well, I don’t know how my clients are trading. I know how I am. Part of what I do is just and this is personal, but it works for marketing is I’ve won a number of international trading contests. And so that’s, you know, that’s that kind of puts me in a category that a lot of people aren’t in and that I’ve actually traded quite successfully and I can prove it. Whereas most people selling courses and information have never actually successfully successfully traded. So the lesson learned, regardless of what information you’re selling, hopefully you have some way to show that you’ve been successful doing what what you’re trying to teach people to do. And that’s very unusual in any business.

David Brandon: [00:17:04] Yeah, I was going to ask, do you feel like that’s really like, do you feel like that’s something that more people should focus on first before they start trying to peddle themselves? And I think because I’m on the younger side, I see a lot of people around my age kind of trying to talk about it before doing it to some degree. Do you think that’s a danger?

Bob Miner: [00:17:24] Well, you know, I mean, that’s the entire universe of YouTube. Yeah. No, basically. And Twitter, if you want a legitimate, long lasting business, is whatever it is you’re teaching, you should have experienced success in it. Otherwise, all you’re doing is regurgitating something someone else has taught. So, I mean, it’s kind of that simple. And that’s kind of the the integrity part, reliability part and the authentic part that usually comes through. People usually figure that out whether you’re authentic or not. And so, yeah, I mean, you can only speak with authority if you’ve had successful experience doing it.

Lee Kantor: [00:18:10] Now for you. You started pre-Internet and had success in a on a book that that you published. Was there any kind of hurdles prior to that? Like in being taken seriously and being respected in the industry when you just starting out, you didn’t have that kind of badge of success, you know, and and winning awards yet, but you made that leap to having the credential and that social proof that you are who you say you are. How did you handle those early days?

Bob Miner: [00:18:45] Well, mostly, I guess I never tried to be something or someone I wasn’t. I didn’t try to allude to anyone that I was a great trader or investor or whatever. I sold information and very straight up about that is that in the early years I was obviously just an analyst, So I had a unique way of looking at the market and I communicated that well and people were interested in that information. So there’s a lot of people in my business that don’t trade, but they don’t try to convince people that they’re a great trader. They’ll say, I got a really good friend of mine who I’ve known for 30 years in the business, and she’s never traded, never traded or on and off, maybe a bit, but she’s real up front with people. I’m an analyst. I’m going to spend my time giving you information that you can use to make decisions. And so you just have to be up front with people on who you are, what you do, and and hopefully what you’re good at doing and how you can help them with that information.

Lee Kantor: [00:19:56] Now, you mentioned you have kind of several tiers of I guess I’ll call them membership in your site, in your community. Were you always looking at some sort of progression from a, you know, kind of a top of the funnel report to a more expensive offering, whatever that would be down the line? Or was that something that just evolved over time?

Bob Miner: [00:20:18] Yeah, it really just evolved over time. I mean, the early days was just a mailed out newsletter once a month and that never really grew very big. But through that and keeping her subscriber base is I learned a lot more. You’re constantly learning no matter what you’re doing. And at some point, you know, I quit the day job, so to speak, and just focused on that and and writing the course. My first course, you know, the first course was 12 audio tapes and two three ring binders and a great big 11 by 17 inch chart bucket. And it was I kid people. I sold it by the pound. It was a 17 pound package that, you know, I shipped out of my garage. But you know, it was $1,000 package. So you do a few of those a week or a day and pretty soon you got, they say, real money.

Lee Kantor: [00:21:17] Now, were you getting mentored at all or were you just seeing what else was out there and then saying, oh, that’s a good idea, Why don’t I start doing that? Like like how did you kind of learn all these more and more sophisticated marketing strategies as you progressed?

Bob Miner: [00:21:33] Just study, study, study. I read every book I could find on marketing. One of the best things we did at that time, I still do it is at the time is I cut out magazine ads that you see over and over again because they must be working if they’re being published every month somewhere. And that’s you know, that was recommended in some famous person’s marketing book because, you know, you don’t have to recreate the wheel. You got to find what’s working for someone else. Maybe you put your own spin on it and you know, they’ve done the work for you. So, you know, some ad agency with, you know, spending a lot of money has figured out how to write that ad right. And so just kind of copy that. It’s kind of like with websites is look at websites of successful companies, you know, and you learn as much as you can. Hand about website design and marketing, what works. But then always think about a company has been around a long time, could be small, could be big. What’s working for them? It’s probably more likely, by the way, it’s probably small. You know, the more you learn and when you go to big corporations websites, you go, Who’s thinking up this stuff? I’m so confused. I don’t know what they’re selling me or how to find the information.

Lee Kantor: [00:22:49] Now, when you had that crisis with the ransomware, what you could have gone to a variety of resources after that. What kind of drew you to Rainmaker?

Bob Miner: [00:23:04] All in one package, Basically, You know, that’s the that’s the idea is that you don’t have to put together all these components. You don’t have to put together with WordPress and your shopping cart and your membership, you know, plug in and all that. It was it was pretty much all together and it was membership based. And so that’s my primary business. And you know, we learned to work around it and how to sell the software and the add ons and all of that. So yeah, it was, it was a packaged package deal. And that I think has a lot of promise for people that are not programmers or not designers are, you know, all the, all the companies like WordPress say all this is real easy to do. It’s not, you know, it’s or maybe I’m missing something, I don’t know. But but it appealed to me that it was a package deal. And once you got it, got your site up and running. The the overhead is very reasonable, let’s say. Yeah.

Lee Kantor: [00:24:15] So now moving forward, is there anything you’re excited about for some of the future marketing trends? Like I know that you feel like you’re late to the game in a lot of ways and some of these platforms, but whatever you’re doing seems to be working. Is there any that you would like to just play around with or is there any that you’re saying, okay, this one I’m going to pass on or like anything future looking that you’d like to share?

Bob Miner: [00:24:46] Well, I’m doing I’m in the midst of hopefully doing a fairly substantial redesign of the website. I’ve already made a lot of changes and it’s based a lot on, what’s his name, Donald Miller’s Storybrand approach. Yeah. And and I think it’s for about three years I’ve been reading all this stuff and taking all of his courses and finally going, Oh, okay, I think this, this works. This looks good. So yeah, I’m constantly looking to improve it and get a new method of capturing emails and driving more traffic to the site. And, and I’m actually totally reinvigorated. I’m writing a new book, which is probably going to be my swan song, so to speak, and, you know, that sort of thing. I’m constantly improving. You got to constantly improve, change the format of the newsletter and content Every 2 or 3 years or so, I do surveys with my subscribers and say, What’s in this that you like? You know what don’t you? Don’t you use much? And I’ll change it. And, you know, you just you can’t stop. Someone else is going to pass you up.

Lee Kantor: [00:26:01] Now, that’s great advice for our listeners that are building some sort of a community. How can you talk a little bit about it seems so obvious, but communicating with your members to ask them what they’d like more of what they like, less of it seems like common sense, but has that always been part of your kind of dynamic when you were talking with folks, like, were you always asking for feedback and asking advice from your the people in your community, or was that something that happened over time?

Bob Miner: [00:26:35] Uh, well, my situation is a little bit different. I have almost no contact with customers. I have a woman that’s worked for me for 30 years, and. And about every 5 or 6 years I’ll see her because she’s in Tucson, Arizona, and I’m in North Carolina. But so she she deals directly with all customers. I get forwarded an email if they have a question. But what I do do is whenever I get emails, I look at what what are they asking about? What have they what is confusing to them about our product services, our information? And then at least every two years I do a survey of all subscribers. You know, you could subscribe to like Survey Monkey or whatever and do a for that matter, for free. I think you can do a a quickie survey with a few questions. And that’s the best feedback that I’ve gotten over the years, is I ask them specifically and I and I narrow the choices, you know, for them to choose from. You always want to make a survey so they can do it in about two minutes, uh, and ask a limited number of questions. But I find out what it is they’re looking to get educated on, which markets they want to see, what time frames and that and that’s how I might redesign the content or the format of the newsletter that they get on a regular basis as well as what it is I’m going to teach them.

Lee Kantor: [00:28:03] Now. Have you been doing that since the very beginning of the surveys or is that more recent?

Bob Miner: [00:28:09] Oh, for a long time, probably 20 years anyway.

Lee Kantor: [00:28:12] Yeah. So what do you need more of? How can we help you?

Speaker6: [00:28:17] Um.

Bob Miner: [00:28:18] I don’t know. Right now, I’m pretty. I’m pretty happy, you know, unless you can, you know, write for me. But right now, you know, I’m pretty happy with the system. You know, there’s there’s a few things with the reporting and the information about, particularly for memberships that I’ve made suggestions and a lot of them that have been taken and improved on and and rainmaker and there’s a few more that would be helpful. But because data is the name of the game, all marketing is data based marketing. So you have to have the best data you can on who’s buying, what percentage are buying, how many, and really important who’s renewing, not renewing when you have a subscription base. But I’m pretty happy.

David Brandon: [00:29:11] And especially now with with third party data kind of dying out, it seems like first party data is going to be really, really important moving forward.

Bob Miner: [00:29:20] Well, it’s always. You mean first party your own data? Yeah. I mean, that’s always been the most important. Those those are the people that come to you are they’re pre-qualified. If you if they give you their contact information, they’re prequalified as being interested in your product. So that’s the that’s the data you really want to have. You want to understand and you want to understand how often they come back, what they’re coming back to look at. You want to be able to analyze every email that you send out and how many people open it, read it and respond, all those sorts of things. Um, like I said, it’s like any business is if they come to you, they’re pre-qualified to be a probable customer, you know, at some point in time.

Lee Kantor: [00:30:13] Well, Bob, if somebody wants to learn more about dynamic traders, can you share the website dynamic traders.com. Good stuff. Well thank you so much for sharing your story today. You’re doing such important work and we appreciate you. You bet. All right. This. This is Lee Kantor for David Brandon. We’ll see you all next time on digital marketing. Done right.

Ask the Expert: Chris Maier with Contractors Closers & Connections

May 3, 2023 by angishields

Contractors-Closers -Connections-feature

Cherokee Business Radio

Ask the Expert: Chris Maier with Contractors Closers & Connections

00:00 /

In this episode of Excel “Ask the Expert”, Randell and Robert welcome Chris Maier, founder of Contractors Closers & Connections (CCC). Chris talks about his organization’s focus on commercial real estate networking and connections. He also shares about the franchise expansion of CCC into various cities across the US, and the challenges of building trust and establishing CCC as a valuable networking organization in the commercial real estate industry.

Chris Maier hosts & organizes private commercial real estate events in Atlanta, GA through the Contractors Closers & Connections (CCC), a growing national organization bringing together the highest quality professionals in the business via exclusive networking functions.

The primary verticals that the CCC attracts are Developers/Owners, Owner’s Reps, CRE Brokerages, Investment Firms & Capital Partners, Management Firms, and Elected Officials.

Chris sits on the Executive Board of Directors for EV Hotel, Board of Directors for Lambda Alpha International (LAI) Atlanta, and serves as a special consultant for cold storage industrial development firm, Yukon Real Estate Partners.

15+ years sales & management experience, master’s degree holder, entrepreneur, business owner, multiple career promotions, proven track record of top-producing results, highly active in relevant industry-specific and nonprofit organizations, fitness enthusiast, father of (3) dogs, husband of beautiful wife, networking mastermind, lifetime relationship builder.

Connect with Chris on LinkedIn.

This transcript is machine transcribed by Sonix

TRANSCRIPT

Intro: [00:00:07] Broadcasting live from the Business RadioX Studios in Atlanta, Georgia. It’s time for Excel Radio’s Ask the Expert. Brought to you by Beckshot Photography and Video. It’s your story. Make it awesome. For more information, go to beckshot.com. Now here’s your host.

Randall Beck: [00:00:31] I’m here today with co host Robert Mason and our producer Stone Payton. Good morning guys. Beautiful spring day in Woodstock, is it not?

Chris Maier: [00:00:39] It is.

Stone Payton: [00:00:39] It is gorgeous.

Robert Mason: [00:00:41] Wonderful.

Randall Beck: [00:00:42] Special guest today, Chris Maier from CCC. He’ll explain what that is, what that’s all about. Good morning, Chris. Good morning.

Chris Maier: [00:00:49] Thank you, guys for having me. Pleasure to be here.

Randall Beck: [00:00:52] Let’s start with what’s CCC?

Chris Maier: [00:00:56] CCC. So it’s courage, conviction and confidence. No, guys, actually, what it is that fits, those are those are the morals that we stand behind. We have a lot of culture and energy, but what it actually is, is the contractors, closers and connections. Do you want me to go further into that? Yeah.

Randall Beck: [00:01:14] Well, you know what I tell everybody is that your group is preeminent commercial real estate connections and networking you’re doing. You’re just knocking it out of the park compared to all the other networking groups, your franchising all over the place, making all the money. So why don’t you elaborate on like, what you’re all about and what you’ve been doing, what you’ve got going on over there.

Chris Maier: [00:01:32] Yes. So, Randall, I started out in the commercial industry of demolition. A lot of people like to see things getting blown up, see all the environmentals getting done. You don’t see, you know, and that’s people like on on LinkedIn and social media. It’s important to build that brand. And so that’s where it all started, is just being dirty, you know, blowing things up, taking down hospitals, wrecking balls and that sort of stuff. And so in that capacity, you got to work with a lot of end users, developers, municipalities, things of that nature and master planners. So I took that opportunity to not only work with all the large general contractors under their schedule, but with the real estate, commercial real estate components of the business, and also attended every sort of seminar, conference and association. And we created the C.c.c. because there wasn’t any sort of melding between commercial construction and real estate and all those wonderful entities in between that have a say on the final decision making process. So that’s why we did what we did, created this professional forum about five years ago in 2019.

Randall Beck: [00:02:38] The thing I like about it at best, we talk about the whole built environment, right? The design build process from the project inception from permitting and design and site selection all the way through the finished product, whether it’s leasing up or whether it’s a resale or whatever. And so the thing I liked about C.c.c. was all those people are represented, right?

Chris Maier: [00:02:58] Yep, They are represented very consciously. You know, I think that’s a big part about what we do. There’s there’s a lot of wonderful brokerage associations. You know, they may have some that are specific to retail industrial office, but there’s really never been an organization that has put checks and balances in place. Operational on the back end to curate an audience that has the five verticals that we now know as our identity, which is development, investment management, brokerage and construction. So where we settle at a chapter when it becomes more evolved is like in Atlanta, it’s 85 to 15 principals. So the majority, 85% is actually commercial real estate. Like you said, 15% is the built environment. We can have architects, engineers, people like yourself that offer all sorts of services to assist in that overall decision making process and value add to projects and future developments and leasing and landlord and tenant rep and investment sales. And it’s just a it’s a wonderful environment that’s never really been been seen before, whether it’s you need equity, debt, you know, all that sort of stuff you can find at C.c.c..

Randall Beck: [00:04:12] Now you don’t have any exposure to residential. You’re strictly commercial.

Chris Maier: [00:04:17] There’s some there’s some agents and brokerages that might have a dip into into both worlds. But it’s meant to be commercial real estate. That’s our.

Randall Beck: [00:04:26] Brand. Now, tell me about all these franchises you’re opening up. You’ve got groups opening in Dallas and Nashville and we’re all.

Chris Maier: [00:04:32] Yes, sir. Yeah. So most immediate on the docket, we currently have ten chapters. So it started with Atlanta in 2019. Now we’re on our 10th, which is Memphis. So we’ve got Florida, we got Texas, we got South Carolina, North Carolina. And it’s all been organic. That’s what that’s what the beautiful thing has been. We’re just following where these primary markets and the United States is going with commercial real estate development and demand people moving in, single family, industrial, retail, mixed use and all those wonderful things that follow behind one another. So we’re in talks. We just had a national call with New York, with the New York City and people in Manhattan. We got folks we just flew in from Philadelphia. We had folks we flew in from Denver. We’re in talks with Charleston, Jacksonville. So we’ve got at least five more that we’re really hoping to have 15 by the end of the year, 2023 moving into 24. And they’re their licensed chapters. We find great people that are on the ground that can be our boots and they typically we like to have those two sides of the the field. We have construction professionals and real estate so they can pull in their resources, their networks, and we bring them all together and do what we’ve done in Atlanta. And we typically have to ship them out here first, because if we told them what we’re talking about today and they hadn’t seen it, they’re not going to know what to create. They won’t see the magic and feel the energy.

Robert Mason: [00:05:55] So what would be an example of a group of folks that you’d be looking for a franchise?

Chris Maier: [00:06:00] Yeah, you know, some of our organizations are started by a brokerage, which have been wonderful. Some have been started by a general contractor or an owner’s representative. Scott was actually our first licensed location in Tampa, and he found us, introduced himself to me in the middle of a pandemic. And he’s managing a 200 acre automotive enthusiast development. It’s mixed use. It’s got a track. It’s called the Motor Enclave down in Tampa. He’s an ex-Marine, very disciplined, great man. And and he said, I’ve been watching what you’ve been doing in Atlanta. It looks high energy. It looks genuine. There’s no sort of forum like this in Tampa, and I want to run it. So it starts on an individual’s heart and passion. And if I have that, I can work around them and we can bring attorneys, we can bring debt equity brokers, that sort of thing, to create what our environment is and and make it nice and finely balanced, that sort of thing. And I, you know, from the corporate perspective, we’re helping out with branding, marketing, keeping everything in alignment on on the websites and social media, things like that. And in person, when you got.

Robert Mason: [00:07:04] Into commercial real estate side of that, how did you what was the evolution like there? Describe that early on.

Chris Maier: [00:07:10] That was that was the hardest part, right? Because the hardest thing is building trust. I call phase one, establishing the company back in 2019. Who are we? Why are we doing what we’re doing? What is our value? Right? Where is our energy? People had to literally come to the events to see it and then they perpetuated it via social media. Phase two has been really what I see in the last 2 to 3 years. It’s been evolving. The decision makers. It’s not just folks in leasing or analysts crunching numbers or, you know, folks in the office sector. It’s got to be like, Hey man, we need the development directors, we need directors of construction, you know, acquisitions, professionals, principals of the firm, things like that. So if we don’t have the dealmakers in the room, it’s really hard for the brokers and everybody else to synergistically work out, Hey, where’s the capital coming from? Where’s the stack? You know? So that was the hardest part, is just just building trust. And now we’ve retained them. Now we have over 20,000 contacts we can reach out to actively in the Atlanta area and construction real estate architecture and bring them out to our events, which typically bring 300 people plus to a function.

Robert Mason: [00:08:19] When you’re evaluating folks, are you looking for a certain value add, what, 10 million? 20 million? What do you have a precip that you’re looking for?

Chris Maier: [00:08:30] You know, usually there’s a three step process to that. So step one is who is the individual? What firm are they with? Rather So they could be with a multifamily manager ownership group of apartment units. And it’s like, all right, check what is. And that’s point one. Point two. Well, what is their position in the company? Are they an acquisitions director? Are they an associate? Are they managing principal? What do they do? Right. So and then part three, my favorite, you know, because we could look into points like that, but it’s mainly based off the credibility of the firm and what they’ve done in the past and sort of name recognition in the community. Part three is their energy, right? Are they coming and are they bringing this energy of reciprocity and a Go-Giver servant leadership type of mindset like, how can how can we help each other? You know, we want to do more deals. That means you’ve got to give us some of the off market stuff. Mr. Broker You know, and that’s how we can all play synergistically. But if people aren’t coming to the table with that, it’s, you know, it’s not good. Right?

Robert Mason: [00:09:31] Okay.

Randall Beck: [00:09:32] All right. So Robert touched on a question. He said, why? And we all know why is the big question for buckshot. So tell me why you decided to do this kind of thing. You were in a demolition contractor, right? Yeah. And looking at opportunities. Why this?

Chris Maier: [00:09:52] Well, I thought it served a higher purpose. You know, I think I also worked at a mid-sized general contracting company. I figured this was a way to help a multitude of people, and I just started going to a bunch of associations and hearing the same sort of objections. And man, we really wish an association or some type of forum existed that gave back to the community that still cared about, you know, others and all sorts of causes. Is that we can now help and benefit. But it just nothing existed, you know, And there’s people that love us and there’s people that hate us because it’s not everybody’s organization. It’s not meant really for the junior. It’s not meant for for children to come in here. And it’s not an internship opportunity. We want people sort of like you were saying, like at least two years experience in brokerage and things like that. We vet that process and we’re constantly evolving, cutting the fat, evolve, move forward to have, you know, the elite private events of the industry.

Randall Beck: [00:10:48] So you’re seeing all the real players. We want the players, actual players. Yeah. Let’s let’s convene the big brain club for a minute here. Mba, MBA type people. What? Talk to me about trends. What are you seeing in the commercial real estate market in Atlanta that’s hot or that must be noted, whether it’s a good or a bad thing?

Chris Maier: [00:11:07] Yeah. You know, I just got off the phone with some of our people on our board of directors today, and they’re having trouble in the debt markets right now. You know, a lot, especially smaller deals, because it’s just as hard to go out for the larger deals. You know, the $100 Million, $50 Million plus. And these guys are looking for stuff that’s under 10 million, under 5 million. You know, some of these subdivision developments and multifamily, you know, mid-rise. And it’s just tough with the way our economy is. So having relationships is now more important than ever, you know, and the trend of this whole chat, GPT and AI and all that stuff, our motto is making business personal again. So there’s a trend to get out of the office and to move away from culture. You know, that’s that’s not our culture. People always say, Well, this is important to note as well. S.s.c. is not membership based. So what does that allow us to do? It allows us to move past the traditional association that are local here in Georgia. And if I’m being generous, they stop at 1000 to 1500 members and they put people’s information on the back of some website, and they call that a value prospect, right? Why would you put people’s information on the back of some website that’s private and these are the players. Like you said, they don’t want their information broadcasted. So we’re different. We’re blasting past that 1500 mark again into the 10,000, 20,000 people. And I’ve got a team that just prospects information and new opportunities. So it’s always fresh and novel.

Speaker5: [00:12:37] Okay.

Randall Beck: [00:12:38] And, you know, building and development trends, what’s going on with spec office, what’s going on in retail?

Chris Maier: [00:12:45] So there’s a there’s a bunch going on still strong in industrial. I guess just to pick on one sector we’ve got, usually what we do is we’ve got a board full of boutique hospitality, mixed use, petroleum based industrial cold storage developers. And it’s it’s booming. There are certain markets in Denver and Arizona and really all the places that we have a s.s.c. that are doing tremendously well. And I’m seeing a lot now and I’m hearing a lot regarding reuse, right? Adaptive reuse. There’s a bunch in that trend right now creative office where you’re taking old gas stations and turning them into co-working. Yeah, kind of like this place we’re in, you know, a bunch of things like that. So it’s again, going back to the whole inception of debt markets, equity placements, things like that, where the interest rates are where they are. You have to be creative with the redevelopment plays, you know?

Robert Mason: [00:13:42] So COVID changed the game in the commercial real estate in a big way, in my opinion. I mean, we’ve been talking about this for a long time. Randy Um, I’m seeing shopping center space become. It’s dark. People aren’t going to the malls as much. People are ordering online. Amazon’s doing incredible. I’m seeing a lot of office parks with a lot of empty space. My wife’s company in particular, you know, that’s tied with Nasdaq. You know, they’ve they’ve given up a couple of floors and that seems to be the trend. And there’s a lot of there’s a lot of speculation on what’s going to happen with all of this commercial space that’s sitting empty.

Randall Beck: [00:14:19] Well, my brother works for Ethicon. It’s a J and J company. Right? Big, big subsidiary of of J and J. They literally their goal is to reduce their lease hold and their employees in the office by half.

Robert Mason: [00:14:31] Their brick and mortar.

Randall Beck: [00:14:32] Holdings. They’re cutting in half and they’re basically saying half. You’re going to work from home and we’re going to convert our office to shared space, you know, and you can come in and do the ad hoc meeting.

Chris Maier: [00:14:41] And they’re not building banks anymore. I just noticed that I talked to the guy. All the banks chase banks. Why would.

Robert Mason: [00:14:46] They. You do it all online now.

Chris Maier: [00:14:47] Exactly. Go in there like you came in for an appointment. Get out of here. Why are you here?

Randall Beck: [00:14:52] We don’t want to go home, buddy.

Robert Mason: [00:14:54] Send me a picture of your check.

Randall Beck: [00:14:55] That’s right. Email me your money. Well, the apps. That is right. It’s like a picture of the check. And. And it has a Well, I.

Chris Maier: [00:15:01] Had to go in for like a money transfer, you know, it had to be electronically done through the person there. So and they just look at you like you’re crazy nowadays.

Randall Beck: [00:15:09] So so all these buildings are going empty. You know, clearly the lease holders are going to there’s going to be a shuffle, right? They’re going to want to renegotiate their space. And now some of your B tenants can move. Oh, I can get a deal on a space. So I’m going to move up and the C’s are going to move up to the B’s. So you know what’s going to happen? We’re going to hollow out at the low end the lower tiers of office space and retail space. It’s going to create opportunity.

Robert Mason: [00:15:31] Randy, We’re going to see some things out there. There’s going to be some plays. And investors that I represent are asking me about, hey, what’s the deal with the commercial real estate aspects? And I’m saying wait for your pitch because it’s going to be available. Prices are coming down these landlords and see, these are smart folks who own commercial real estate, right? These are no dummies, whether it’s in, you know, stock portfolios or whatnot. And REITs like we talked about, they’re going to figure it out, right? They’re going to repurpose shopping centers to be entertainment spaces, whether it be concert venues or condos with retail on the bottom. They’re going to figure something out.

Randall Beck: [00:16:07] I was talking to I think it was Michael Bull a few weeks ago. And, you know, Michael and he was saying he was actually saying that retail was at least in his experience or in his exposure, is doing well because all these people that are have left their jobs right. They work from home crowd. Some of them are starting businesses and they’re taking small retail spaces and they’re filling up all these neighborhood centers with their new entrepreneurial ventures. And I imagine that will see a lot of that.

Robert Mason: [00:16:35] You know, when the.com collapse happened in 2000, those were a lot of middle managers that worked for a lot of big companies. Right. These were not dummies. Right. And when they got their pink slips, they didn’t just go home and jump on. You know, the the dole. They went out and they did things. They created businesses. We’re going to see a revival of that kind of mentality, I think.

Chris Maier: [00:16:53] And that is exciting. You’re right. It’s an opportunistic time where a bunch of stuff is going to be left on the table. Sellers aren’t going to get what they want right now. They can command what they can command, but who knows what things might be like in the next 6 to 8 months. You know, it’s people are holding on to a lot of cash right now.

Robert Mason: [00:17:08] Right. Which is a good thing.

Randall Beck: [00:17:10] You know, we did a segment recently with Robert on investment properties on particularly like Airbnb, short term rental type things. And Robert had some ideas on hot areas or hot trends. So now let’s take let’s take somebody out there that might be listening to us as a business type person who wants to invest and put some capital into commercial real estate. What do you think is hot for them? Where should they be looking.

Chris Maier: [00:17:30] In commercial real estate? So there are some great opportunities that one of our board members had put out there. It was a HUD deal with a locked in 4% interest rate for 30 years fixed in Arlington, Texas class. A 358 units that was just built in 2021. Deals like that with the good sponsor team that’s putting in 20% of their own money. It sort of checks all the boxes. It’s on a golf course. You know, again, it goes back to the relationships and these private offerings, whether you’re an accredited investor or not, getting in on some of these deals, if it’s one of your first time and you’re not going to get a GP share, perhaps if you have the capital, you could. But yeah, I think in multifamily is going to keep going strong with the way the interest rates are. You know, they’re going to keep fixing them up even if there’s a little bit of value add and they can raise this. This particular opportunity I looked in last week, 96% occupancy so they can raise the rents easily, you know, and get and they’re based on a on a five year sell refinance. So you know.

Robert Mason: [00:18:34] That’s funny that you just said that you’ve got that high occupancy so they can raise the rents. Yeah with my with with Harley’s hideaway this this cottage that I’ve got at big canoe because we’re so occupied, our occupancy is so high, we’re raising the daily rate that we can get. And it actually works. Yeah, I get pushback from my wife, but she said that.

Randall Beck: [00:18:55] Worked for me to. It worked. Raising my rent. Yeah. Got me. Yeah. So. All right. Very quickly, plug your short term rental. Harley’s hideaway.

Robert Mason: [00:19:02] Harley’s hideaway, Big canoe, Great cottage on Lakes County on the golf course. All right.

Randall Beck: [00:19:06] We’re Daisy’s downtown one mile from Mercedes Benz in downtown Atlanta in the Pittsburgh neighborhood. You up and coming. You should see all the building going on there, Chris. Yours?

Chris Maier: [00:19:15] Yes. Stargazer hideaway in Clayton, Georgia, right off 441, next to the visitor center of Clayton Hookah, right next to Moonrise Distillery, right up the mountain. All right.

Randall Beck: [00:19:25] You said mountain. I was going to ask if that’s mountain. I don’t know. Clayton, Georgia. Yep.

Chris Maier: [00:19:28] Yeah, it’s about an hour, 15 minutes north of Atlanta. And it’s got a wonderful little town with shops and. Yeah, wonderful mountain town. Gorgeous. Yep. It’s a.

Randall Beck: [00:19:37] Secret. I’ve seen your website. The photos of your place is real nice.

Chris Maier: [00:19:40] Yeah. A lot of people ask about the LJ’s and the Blue Ridge and stuff. We’re sort of the path less traveled, you know? And there’s a stipulation on how much forestry authority that there is. So it determines how much residential can be built or not built. So it’s really nice. There’s not too much residential being built. There’s a cap on it.

Robert Mason: [00:19:56] How long have you owned that property?

Chris Maier: [00:19:58] Two years. Built it during COVID.

Robert Mason: [00:20:00] Okay. Yeah. New construction. Yes. All right.

Randall Beck: [00:20:03] All right. Robert, your former commercial broker. So let’s put your commercial broker hat on for a minute. How would you have benefited from having a s.s.c. in your life?

Robert Mason: [00:20:13] Holy smokes. Well, I’ve been doing it for so long. You know, I had less gray hair back then and a lot less experience. I think the coordination value, you know, to be able to focus energies where they were going to be most advantageous. A lot of times in the commercial real estate world, we’re just frantically knocking on doors, trying to to get new product, trying to get new centers to represent, whether it be commercial, retail, industrial, whatever. We’re looking for land. That would be a real big benefit for somebody like me to be able to look for land for development, right? Because like development now is huge. We’re looking for land and it’s we’re like California. We’re moving out. I mean, the epicenter is just getting further and further out. So that I mean, just to be able to focus on finding what we need for the parties that we’re representing.

Chris Maier: [00:21:02] Yeah. And not to sound pompous or anything, but, you know, it’s having us at the the back front because we’re not just, you know, there are people who run their organizations. Again, they reach that 1500 member and it’s just account maintenance mode. It’s some 16 year old that doesn’t know what they’re talking about. But us and our entire leadership, we’re all in the trenches, you know, So when I’ll give you a story the other day, one of our board of directors members, he’s in more or less the ground up hotel hospitality business between here in Greenville. And I said, How can we help you through the SEC? What is your most immediate need? And I thought he was going to say, Hey, find us sites for hospitality. But he said, no, we’d actually like more of an investment sales opportunity. And like a retail strip center, that’s cash flowing. I got some 1031 money we need to insert into that. And we knew exactly who the best investment sales guy is in Atlanta In less than a week later, we had a deal, right? So that’s the value is like saying you have to be very specific with your needs. Like, hey, we have a wonderful cold storage site and we’d like to build something spec. Do you have a developer and the best architect and industrial real estate that can build it and title it and do this, that and the other and design it? Sure we can.

Robert Mason: [00:22:14] So putting all of these people and and parcels into place, yes, it’s able to focus attention where it needs to go, correct?

Chris Maier: [00:22:22] Yes. And you know, I have a pretty exciting breakfast that’s coming up at one of the coolest mixed use developments with Bridge Investment Group and Lincoln Property Company in September. And our thought behind that is to bring in all the sort of elected official people, all the all the kids community improvement districts and economic development, so you can find out what’s going on in South Fulton. Ten. Gwinnett Forsyth And you hop basically from table to table. The landlord reps are gaining, the tenant reps are gaining knowledge. And that person saying, well, here’s what public and private partnerships we have going on. Here’s an industrial park in which we have this much availability for health care users, and we’d like to see like a 40,000 square foot sort of building there, like it could be so collaborative, but nobody’s curating that experience to bring value to the community. Not very often.

Robert Mason: [00:23:13] It was unheard of to be able to put those pieces. It’s like a big puzzle. Yes. How do you put the puzzle together? Yeah. Here’s the puzzle maker right here.

Randall Beck: [00:23:20] That’s right. For any entrepreneur, obscurity is the problem, right? And in commercial, you know, the pieces can be so fragmented that people are obscure, right? You don’t know who to talk to. They don’t know how to reach, you know. And so so this is a good lead in now because at a S.c.c event, you can walk right up and talk to these guys. So let’s talk about the character, the character of your events here. Yeah. When you do something, what’s happening right? Like the last one you did at the beautiful showroom had the the model. Now you’re doing a Kentucky Derby later this week. Yes. Let’s talk about your events.

Chris Maier: [00:23:53] You know, again, I think it all comes down to an energy and a culture, one of reciprocity, because it goes back to me seven, ten years ago when I didn’t have a network, but I still believed in the American dream and the entrepreneur and the fact that, you know, a few people can make a difference. And what I mean by that is even when I didn’t have a network and somebody said, Well, Chris, I’m really looking to meet, you know, industrial users or multifamily developers, and I’m like, Look, I’ll be honest with you, I don’t have the network, but I know that the civil engineer, that’s really all he does is these Home Depots and that’s all they do, their civil engineering and site plans and whatnot for perhaps that would be an advantageous introduction. Now the coin is flipped. Now that I have the contacts, it’s sort of irresponsible for me not to help people, you know, And that’s what we want other people to realize, like you said, is putting the puzzle together. It’s one of which people are like you said, we don’t want the ambiguity to be there. What do you do? How can we help each other? Like we want to try to bridge that gap?

Robert Mason: [00:24:53] You know, it seems to me that this this idea would be useful in all environments. It is. I’ll give you for an example. A doctor goes to med school, gets out when he’s 35 years old. He knows all about medical and biology and all this stuff. He doesn’t know anything about creating a business. He doesn’t know how to staff. He doesn’t know how to set up sources. I mean, your business could be for any different industry, in my opinion. Yeah.

Chris Maier: [00:25:20] We have to your point, I mean, I go to a bunch of these international conferences and just ask the people from North Rhine-Westphalia or Africa or wherever they’re coming from and they’re wanting to do business in the United States. It’s like guys view the C.c.c. as a soup to nuts, you know, enterprise that can help you staff with your manufacturing, with your health care, with your IT, with your electric vehicle charging stations, because we have just enough and the right trusted vetted vendors that can help you know, whether it’s Boone Boone’s Rich Kentucky or, you know, California. You know we can help people all all across the the nation if they want to invest in real estate or ground up, if they want to partner up on some hotel venture. Really the it’s endless. It is now.

Randall Beck: [00:26:06] One of the drawbacks in the networking world. I mean, there’s other groups out there and I’ve I’ve been to a few of them and, you know, you get you see the same crowd of people showing up and some of them are just there for the social event and the party and they take a bunch of selfies and they go home and that’s their marketing. The free drinks. Yes. This is not what you’re doing. Right? Right. You have you have a not only do you have high class events in in the themed themed venues that relate to commercial real estate. Yes. And that’s good. I mean, it’s a great way to meet people. But you have a series, you have a layers different types of events. Right. So kind of run through what your offerings are for us. Yeah.

Chris Maier: [00:26:41] So there’s a variety of different value add propositions we try to do nowadays we have the authority. I just reached out to North American Property Properties today about the Peachtree Corners forum that they’re redeveloping because there’s going to be a bunch of opportunity there for the commercial real estate and construction professionals to come out and lend value. And really, I view this game as one of a magnifying glass. If you’re not under that spotlight, under that magnifying glass and your property is not envisioned and you’re not top of mind, people aren’t going to know about it. So that’s why we host events such as our one in June coming up with Ackerman and Company, one of Atlanta’s oldest, if not the oldest brokerage firm.

Robert Mason: [00:27:23] That’s who I started with in 1991.

Chris Maier: [00:27:25] Good people, I think they’re the oldest. Charlie. She’s still around. I’m not sure. I don’t know. Charlie There he was, the owner.

Robert Mason: [00:27:31] Charlie Ackerman.

Chris Maier: [00:27:32] Yeah. No, I don’t know him personally, though. We we’re hosting an event with them, though, to show off 90,000 square foot of creative office that they have with the Leon White site downtown. So you know we’re. Doing events together with purpose so that they can drive the attention to that development.

Robert Mason: [00:27:51] Yeah, that’s perfect. You know, it goes back to we don’t know what we don’t know, right? And so if these people don’t know that there’s resources out there like you, then, you know, they’re kind of lost in the wind and you hit on it with the micro, you know, you put the scope on it and it’s going to magnify it and then people are going to know.

Chris Maier: [00:28:08] Yeah, I mean, I know a gentleman right now who’s and we’re doing a lot of curation, not only at the event, you know, we’re sort of leading people’s hand into it. Just it kills me when I see somebody right behind Randall and it’s like, that’s the ultimate person he needs to be speaking to right now to further his business, because I know they probably just asked there was an instance the other day we just formed a national partnership with a commercial valuation appraisals company, and they’re doing these they’re out of our Phenix branch and they’re offering appraisals and valuations for half the cost typically of what most of our vendors are that don’t even know me by a first name basis. And they’re doing it quicker. Sometimes it can take weeks for these appraisals and whatnot, and they’re doing it in a matter of days, if not one day. So we form that and we’re just we’re adding these national partnerships to help people not only in Atlanta but across the country.

Robert Mason: [00:29:00] Well, I think you need a cattle prod to hit Randy here up with when somebody behind him you need to speak with, give him a little electrocution. That’s right. I mean, from what you’re describing to me, Chris, I mean, there’s so many entities that that I know of firsthand that I could call today and say, you need to talk to this guy.

Chris Maier: [00:29:18] Chris Yeah, we’re pretty diverse. We certainly didn’t want to come off as like the jack of all trades. That’s why we really are special. Like if we’re getting 50 lenders that want to come to seek different banks on the institutional side, we’ll cut them off and say, No, we’re good. Like, we’ve got enough like 30, 40 architects, that’s too much, you know? So that’s where we’re really watching who is coming into this event because if it’s not curated properly, it’s not s.s.c., it’s just something else. But it’s not us.

Robert Mason: [00:29:50] You get 50 realtors in the same room. That’s just kind of like an overkill in your.

Chris Maier: [00:29:54] Yeah, yeah. We want the money. We want the people taking risk. We want the people to find the deals. And then we want some people to also help if they need a fees. I met with an architect the other day and again, I’m asking him that question real, like down to the point type of stuff. That’s my personality. And I’m like, All right, give me something here. What can I work with? And like, well, we just did a feasibility study where a developer of a hotel could come in on this particular site. I’m like, Now we’re talking. All right. So but a lot of these architects and engineer types don’t know how to play ball like that. They don’t speak the real estate language, but we’re teaching them.

Robert Mason: [00:30:26] Yeah, diversity of thought.

Randall Beck: [00:30:28] Yes, they need the real estate aspect. Yes. That’s just not where they function.

Chris Maier: [00:30:32] Yeah. They’re just they keep, they keep hitting up these end users and whatnot and going after the RFPs and it’s like, what if it was just negotiated? Yeah, right. Like, let’s talk that.

Robert Mason: [00:30:42] Well, you get a room full of 50 attorneys. Golly, that’s going to be a boring event.

Randall Beck: [00:30:45] The other day. You guys will find this. You guys will find this funny. I was in an antique store the other day, and there’s a book laying on this counter for sale. And it was the original. Feasibility study from an architect from Marietta Square. Yeah. Wow. That’d be back when? Back when you had to put photos on the page and glue them down, you know? Yeah. I mean, they’re.

Chris Maier: [00:31:10] Using the old.

Robert Mason: [00:31:10] You’re doing hand traffic counts.

Chris Maier: [00:31:12] Yes. Click, click. Yeah.

Randall Beck: [00:31:14] It was really interesting to see, you know, speaking of that kind of thing, how how different the reality was than the original concept. Right. You know, that’s cool. And of course, I see stone, you know, pretty often you see why I’m always showing up with blood and bandages right after hanging out with these guys? Yeah.

Robert Mason: [00:31:32] The minute you said.

Randall Beck: [00:31:33] Cattle prods, you know, the.

Robert Mason: [00:31:34] Minute he said antique, I was like, Wait, you are an antique.

Randall Beck: [00:31:37] Yeah.

Robert Mason: [00:31:37] Speak for yourself. Is it a book about yourself?

Chris Maier: [00:31:40] Speak for yourself. He signed it. I might be older.

Randall Beck: [00:31:42] I’m only 37. This. This comes from dealing with you. Okay, So, Chris, before we run out of time, a couple of things to promote for S.s.c.. What’s your vision? Where does seek going next?

Chris Maier: [00:31:56] So we want the business professional and commercial real estate and construction to be able to go to various cities throughout the US. We want to be in every 50 states, you know, and there are some successful associations that are well known in construction, real estate, and they’re in about 80. So I’m on the right track and with our with our brand growing the way that it is and the systems and operations that we have in place that are just essentially a better mousetrap. You know, we want to grow quickly. We make the turning the ignition and starting a chapter and licensing with us. Very simple. And we’re getting better and better and better at opening them and people seeing the credibility and purpose behind what we’re doing. So that would be the idea is to be in first all the primary markets. We want to get all the way coast to coast to California. We’re already as far as Dallas and Phenix. Again, we got to hit New York, we got to get Philadelphia and Denver so that it’s a pretty good chance if you’re going out to a conference or something or you’re just, you know, out of town for a week and you want to stop by a local or get instantaneously connected to that chapter’s leadership of brokers and developers and whatnot, just reach out to us and we’ll connect you to Cincinnati or Philly or whatever.

Robert Mason: [00:33:08] And again, it’s going to get back to knowing what you do. And people don’t know what they don’t know. So you’ve got to get out there and brand yourself and market.

Chris Maier: [00:33:16] And I’ll be honest with you, the tough thing about the name of our company, the acronym Contractors, Closers and Connections like it connotates more construction. So people are a little bit confused and it’s unfortunate, but it is easy to remember triple C, You know, we didn’t want to be the International Federation of Commercial Construction and sound extremely professional and just. We wanted it to connotate the fact that we’re a little bit more laid back, you know, in our events, like you mentioned, they’re genuine, they’re high energy. We typically don’t go to a stuffy hotel conference room with drop ceilings and carpets. That’s not us, you know. So we’re bringing people out to interesting, genuine sort of environments they’ve never been to before. And that’s what we wanted to Connotate. So we’re putting out a bunch of branding on video and digital to get to those new chapters because Atlanta’s already established, you know, we want to bring that same flag to other people and just shorten that time from A to B of understanding who we are and what the value is.

Robert Mason: [00:34:13] I know a really, really good video guy.

Chris Maier: [00:34:15] Yeah.

Randall Beck: [00:34:17] Now you’re going almost where I want to ask next because let’s face it, there are groups that that you know in the construction and the commercial real estate industry Boma people like that. Yes. That foster education. Yes. Relationships, you know. Best practices, thought leadership in the industry. So how is C-c-c different from, say, a UL?

Chris Maier: [00:34:43] So yeah, we want to leave a bunch of that to the organizations who do that best. You know, we want to leave the continued education, the award ceremonies, you know, people coming up on stage getting a plastic trophy for the most energy efficient building. That’s great. Like we’re boiled down dealmakers, right? We’re here. Black, white. Very simple. We want the best of the best people. And, you know, we want everybody to win. It’s not just about one person’s participation trophy. You know, it’s about let’s let’s win.

Randall Beck: [00:35:13] That’s an awesome way to differentiate yourself. And in terms of the people involved with you, who do you need? Who are you looking for? What’s what’s the big need or the big?

Chris Maier: [00:35:21] The short answer is just really people ask me this all the time, but it’s just if somebody is really in the trenches, they’re wheeling and dealing and touching commercial real estate, right? You could be a zoning attorney. You could be a civil engineer, you could be the developer themselves, the development team, the owner’s rep, the city, all those sorts of wonderful individuals that play into that unique ecosphere that we mentioned. People of that nature is who we want. Brokerages. Yeah.

Randall Beck: [00:35:48] All right. And some of those people are out there and they’ve heard about you or maybe they’ve been to one of your events and they’re not quite sure what to do next. You had one thing you could say to them, What would that thing be?

Chris Maier: [00:35:57] Come on out. Hey, we’ll get you a complimentary ticket to feel the energy and test it out for yourselves and spend some time with you on the phone to get a better idea for what you all do and how we can best serve you at c-c-c. And you can check us out at our website, which is contractors, closers, connections.com.

Robert Mason: [00:36:17] It flows very well off his tongue.

Randall Beck: [00:36:20] Chris Meyer, everybody from C-c-c.

Chris Maier: [00:36:22] Thank you.

Randall Beck: [00:36:23] Thanks for coming out today.

BRX Pro Tip: Keep Delivering, Keep Selling

May 3, 2023 by angishields

BRX Pro Tips

BRX Pro Tip: Keep Delivering, Keep Selling

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BRX Pro Tip: Keep Delivering, Keep Selling

Stone Payton: [00:00:00] Welcome back to Business RadioX Pro Tips. Lee Kantor and Stone Payton here with you. Today’s pro tip, Lee, keep delivering, keep selling.

Lee Kantor: [00:00:08] Yeah. You shouldn’t stop selling once your client has purchased something from you. You should always keep delivering the value, obviously, that you promised your client. That’s critical. But listen to what their frustrations are. Listen to what they need and figure out ways that you can incorporate some of that into your service offering. You might be able to upsell them into an additional service, number one. But number two, if it works for them and you’re able to execute it well, you might be able to then offer that to other clients.

Lee Kantor: [00:00:37] So once you’ve sold your client something, it’s a lot easier to sell them another thing rather than finding a brand new client to sell them anything. So, always look at it in terms of trying to solve the problem that they have listened to their frustrations and figure out ways to keep serving them and keep selling them different services that you’re able to execute at a high level. And, again, if you do that for one, figure out a way that you can do that for all.

BRX Pro Tip: Are You Following Up Enough?

May 2, 2023 by angishields

BRX Pro Tips

BRX Pro Tip: Are You Following Up Enough?

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BRX Pro Tip: Are You Following Up Enough?

Stone Payton: [00:00:00] And we are back with Business RadioX Pro Tips. Lee Kantor and Stone Payton here with you. Lee, the answers are so often in the questions. One of which is, are you following up enough?

Lee Kantor: [00:00:13] Yeah. When it comes to sales and your prospects, you probably aren’t following up enough. Most salespeople give up on prospects after one or two attempts. They kind of go into this pile of folks that, “Yeah. I wish that would have worked out,” and they just kind of leave it alone. But successful salespeople know that they have to try and connect with those prospects about ten times in a variety of ways over a 30 day period before they move that prospect to some sort of a nurture campaign.

Lee Kantor: [00:00:44] And this is where you can really leverage some automation, and especially marketing automation can be your friend in this area. To me, I would much rather keep marketing to a prospect until I have a definitive no. And then, even after I got a definitive no, I would still send them my newsletter every month. You know, I wouldn’t quit after that.

Lee Kantor: [00:01:06] So, I think that most folks kind of give up on a prospect too early. When a lot of times, for prospects, the answer is not now. It’s not no. And then, if you’re just in front of them for a longer period of time, they’re going to remember you and they’re going to, hopefully, think of you the next time they have the problem that you solved.

Casey Gaetano with Integrity Compounding Pharmacy

May 1, 2023 by angishields

In & On Business

Casey Gaetano with Integrity Compounding Pharmacy

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This episode of In and On Business features Casey Gaetano, owner of Integrity Compounding Pharmacy in Sandy Springs. Casey discusses the difference between working in and on your business. He emphasizes the importance of constantly reinventing processes and systems in a growing business.

Casey also talks about the unique manufacturing process of Integrity Compounding Pharmacy, which focuses on creating batches of one, tailored to the specific needs of individual patients. He stresses the importance of maintaining a commitment to customer service and quality, even if it means sacrificing efficiency.

Integrity Compounding Pharmacy customizes prescriptions to fit individual patient needs. This ranges from turning a tablet into a suspension for a toddler to combining multiple drugs at precise strengths for a particular patient.

We believe that a healthy and active relationship between the Patient, the Provider, and the Pharmacist benefits all parties. Please feel free to inquire about additional information or educational materials related to compounded prescriptions. We welcome the opportunity to serve you and your patients.

Casey Gaetano has been the owner and operator of Integrity Compounding Pharmacy since 2015.

A graduate of Emory University, he was born and raised in Atlanta, where he continues to reside with his wife, daughter, and son.”

Connect with Casey on LinkedIn.

This transcript is machine transcribed by Sonix

TRANSCRIPT

Intro: [00:00:07] Broadcasting live from the Business RadioX Studios in Sandy Springs, Georgia. It’s time for In and on Business brought to you by the Sandy Springs perimeter chamber. For more information, go to Sandy Springs Perimeter chamber.com. Now here’s your host.

Adam Forrand: [00:00:33] Hello everyone. This is In and On Business with the Sandy Springs Perimeter Chamber where we explore the tension between executing on and innovating in your business. I’m your host, Adam Forrand, and today I am joined by Casey Gaetano, who is the owner of Integrity Compounding Pharmacy here in Sandy Springs. Welcome, Casey.

Casey Gaetano: [00:00:52] Thanks for having me. Excited to do this.

Adam Forrand: [00:00:54] Glad you’re here. For our listeners and even for you, Casey. Just as a reminder, we talk about working in and on your business. We are talking about when working in your business. We’re referring to the work that enables the delivery of a fabulous service such as integrity compounding pharmacy or a remarkable product. So what you’re really known for what the market and the community knows you as and working on your business refers to the growth oriented activities you undertake to ensure the sustainability and the viability of your business in the future. So we’re going to dig into that. The difference between working in your business and working on your business. So let’s just get to it. Casey Great, Let’s do it. Your signature says owner. Why do you use the word owner in your signature and not something else?

Casey Gaetano: [00:01:44] So it really goes back and this entire conversation, I guess what we’re going to be talking about in verses on business gets back to I am the owner of a compounding pharmacy, but I am not a pharmacist. So there’s never been one day in the history of our business where I could say it’s either my way or the highway. I will be doing everything right. I will be checking this prescription and it will go out the door. And that’s just the way it is because I’m the, you know, the pharmacist in charge and that’s what it is. Yeah. So for me, it’s always been a tension of working in versus on because by law, quite literally, I cannot do all the parts of what working in our business would would mean. And so for, for me and we still I still talk about this in hiring all the time, I say the best part about our business is that I’m not a pharmacist. The worst part about our business is that I am not a pharmacist because it forces me to clearly delineate the things that I do versus what our team of pharmacists do. Right. And that’s been basically the structure around which this conversation we’ll be having today revolves around.

Adam Forrand: [00:02:48] Yeah, so using the word owner in your signature and only owner. Right? Sends the right signal.

Casey Gaetano: [00:02:54] Yeah. For me. Well a lot of you know everybody else most compounding pharmacies the owners are are pharmacists. And so a lot of times there will be pharm.d this right and what board certifications they have and then either they’re most of them are the pharmacist in charge. Some of them end up passing that off at some point. But that’s what it’s to talk about. But for me, it’s more on the business side of things where it does get to be working on the business.

Adam Forrand: [00:03:17] Yeah, and that’s what’s going to make this conversation great, right? Hopefully, yeah. So we’re going to focus on working in your business. So when working in your business, what strategies or tactics have served you well so that you get the best out of yourself and or your team?

Casey Gaetano: [00:03:33] So in terms of working in the business, I got into compounding pharmacy when I was very young, 22, 23, and my job at that time was basically to do all the stuff that nobody else wanted to do at the beginning, right? So it’s like. Some of it, I guess maybe in hindsight it seems obvious, but I’d never thought about things like how do you make sure that the trash people come pick up your trash once a week? Somebody has to call them details, details. These things happen, right? At&t insurance contracts, all these stuff. So I kind of started there in terms of, you know, as we’ve gone forward, I’ve held different done different things in terms of in the business versus on and and part of it is how you define those things. But I’m still very involved in a lot of purchasing, very involved in our financial side of the business and even down to down to bill pay. A lot of times very involved in putting, you know, all of our orders together and sales and product development and all of this kind of stuff is where I tend to be more on for me involved in the business.

Adam Forrand: [00:04:36] Gotcha. Okay. And so what’s many years later? Sure. Right. How old is integrity?

Casey Gaetano: [00:04:42] So in our current form, it’s basically been the way that it is now since 2015. Since about eight years.

Adam Forrand: [00:04:48] Yep. And so you’ve grown to a team of one You.

Casey Gaetano: [00:04:53] Yeah. Well, I was never a team of one because I couldn’t be the pharmacist. But that’s true. So we were when, when I took over at Integrity, we had a team of, I think 5 or 6. Okay. And then so now we have a team of about 36.

Speaker4: [00:05:06] Wow.

Casey Gaetano: [00:05:07] So it’s different.

Adam Forrand: [00:05:08] It is. It’s very different, right? Yeah. What is the difference between as you were contemplating working in the business. Right. And those early experiences and those finer details to where you are today? What has been the through line? What has been the common thread in terms of your experience as it relates to your focus on delivering the service? That integrity is known for sure.

Casey Gaetano: [00:05:34] So when you have six or 5 or 4 or 2 or 1 employees at a business, then basically when you’re the owner, you’re responsible for everything, right? And that never changes when you have 36 employees or you have a thousand employees or a million employees. It doesn’t matter if you’re the owner, you’re still at the end of the day responsible for everything. What changes is the fact that you can’t do everything anymore, right? Um, so there’s a delegation side of that. And to me, one of the biggest parts is intentionality, which is okay if I don’t think about this and I just try to respond to every email and phone call and employee that knocks on my door or whatever in the moment, it’s very overwhelming. So you have to try to think about in advance, what are the things that you feel like you truly provide value add doing versus things that other people could do just as well of a job if given the right training that you’re kind of doing. And to me, that’s like really the ultimate question. And there are certain things as the owner that you probably can never you never give off right to anybody else.

Casey Gaetano: [00:06:37] You never want to delegate. But as time goes on, because it’s just the volume of requests, each individual task tends to just take longer and longer and longer because there’s more, Right? And so you just are slowly working down this funnel to just eventually deciding what is the one most important thing that if this was taking 40 plus hours a week for me to do, I would just only do this one thing. Yeah, I think, you know, for us and for me, I always said that our we would know our business was super successful if I could just sit in a dark room all day and just think about what we should be doing, Right. Um, you know, that’s. I wish that was the case. It happens on the way to work and in the shower, and while I’m brushing my teeth. Yeah, exactly. And all these types of things. But dimly lit. Yeah. Not dark exactly. Um, but yeah, I think, yeah, to answer your question, it’s just kind of working that funnel of trying to figure out what’s important and that only you can do it versus what’s what can be given to other people. Yeah.

Adam Forrand: [00:07:35] And so are there new systems or new protocols, new processes that you’re relying upon now that you didn’t rely upon many years ago or even last year or the last two years? Yeah.

Casey Gaetano: [00:07:49] We’re constantly reinventing processes and all of that kind of stuff. I tell people in whenever I do interviews for hiring, I’m still very involved in the hiring process. I always say, If you don’t like change, then don’t say anything. Just get up and leave. Just walk out the door. Never come back. Never. Don’t, don’t look back. It’s all good. It you’re good. Like let’s not do we’re good. Yeah. So we’re constantly changing everything. But that’s because I think it’s very easy. It’s very easy to understand that what works when you have five employees doesn’t work when you have 50 and and definitely wouldn’t work when you have 1000 employees. People understand that. What I think people don’t understand is that what works at 1000 employees doesn’t work at 50. And what works at 50 also doesn’t work at five. It’s actually bi directional in terms of scale with different things. And so if you are a growing business, you can’t like you can’t somebody that runs Coca Cola or something can’t just be like, Oh, well, here are all of our processes for our 100,000 employees. Like just institute these with your team of 30. It doesn’t work. And so you’re constantly as you go trying to reinvent things up and down. As as as it kind of comes.

Adam Forrand: [00:08:58] And so in the face of new regulations, in the face of other regulatory constraints that you have, is that borne out of just the sector that you’re in and the service you provide? Or is that that change? Does that come from within? Is it internal or is it as much external?

Casey Gaetano: [00:09:21] This is a great question. So so definitely being part of pharmacy and what we do in compounding is one of the most highly regulated parts of probably the the entire the entire economy. And there are certain rules about doing things like quality management meetings and standard operating procedures that we have to have by law. Thank goodness. Right. Exactly. The general public should be very happy that these things are in place. Right. So we have to have some frameworks for those for that, for that type of stuff as a business. But we try to carry that over into other things because again, kind of back to some of the scale stuff when you’re, you know, 2 or 3 employees, a doctor calls in and says, Hey, could you make this for me? And a lot of times if it’s just maybe back in the day, that would be just me and a pharmacist. We sit there and we look at each other, we think about it and decide whether we want to pursue that or not and what that would mean. But now, you know, we have 4 or 5 salespeople out there doing it full time. We’ve got 10 to 15 people answering phones all day long. We’ve got a lot of people working in the lab. And so it’s not just one question that comes in per week that we have to decide whether we want to do it or not.

Casey Gaetano: [00:10:29] But there’s 30 questions that are coming in per week about whether we should do things. And then, you know, we’re trying to build out systems such that if one doctor, let’s say one gastroenterologist, called in and asked about a particular product in April 2023 and I did three hours worth of research and we decided whether to do it or not. Well, if another gastroenterologist calls in in April 2024, we’re trying to build out systems so that we don’t have to like we can remember what we said and what we did and how we did it right and all of that kind of stuff. And so we don’t have to keep answering some of these same questions over and over again because I know that I’ve sometimes I’ll be halfway through researching something. I’m like, I’ve done this already. Kind of like reading a book. You get three chapters in and you’re like, Wait a minute, I’ve read this book, right? So we’re trying to build out those types of systems. And a lot of that to me is taking all the information that’s in all of our pharmacists heads, my head and our sales people’s heads and putting that into some sort of. You know, procedure such that we can learn from each other. Right. And we can save that information over time. Wow.

Adam Forrand: [00:11:39] So to provide more context for the listeners, you would describe your environment as a high mix, sort of low volume environment, or do you work on a low mix, high volume in terms of the the pharmaceuticals that you compound for your clients?

Casey Gaetano: [00:11:56] So in the Okay. So in the grand scheme of things, we’re kind of a little of both. So a regular retail pharmacy like your Corner, CVS, Walgreens, Kroger, whatever, a busy store might process 500 prescriptions in a day or a really busy store might process 7 or 800 prescriptions in a day. Okay? And usually at most of those types of places, they’re going to have one pharmacist on. On duty. On duty. And then just depending on what their hours are, it might be split between two different people or one person working a like 3 or 4 twelves or four tens or whatever the case might be. Just kind of depends on their hours. But a busy store would say do 500 to maybe 800 retail prescriptions in a day. Okay.

Adam Forrand: [00:12:43] Non compounded.

Casey Gaetano: [00:12:44] Pharmaceuticals. Non compounded. That’s just where they’re off the shelf. They’re off the shelf. You know, there’s antibiotics and blood pressure medications and all of these things. So and 1 to 2 pharmacists might be able to cover that for a day, just depending on exactly how that’s set up. We have 13 pharmacists that work just in Atlanta, and we only do about 250 to 300 compounds. Gotcha. Okay. So each one of our basically every single compound is just a lot more work than a particular commercial product. And that’s on a couple of different for a couple of different reasons. One, we have to make it so there’s that whole making it component to it. And then two, based on the types of work that we do at your regular retail pharmacy, at CVS or whatever. Every patient that walks in the door, most of the time it’s a refill and they’re on the same blood pressure medications and the same things month over month, over month. Obviously, that’s going to be a little bit different. You get sick, you get an antibiotic steroid, whatever. But a lot of times, you know, you have your CVS and you’ve been going there for the last eight years because it’s the one that’s most convenient to the house and they give you good service and whatever. For us, it’s a lot of new patients. And not only is it new patients, it’s new patients that don’t know what a compounding pharmacy is. And depending on how that conversation went with their doctor or their nurse, they might not even know why they got prescribed a compound.

Casey Gaetano: [00:14:02] Gotcha. And so it’s a lot more work on the front end. We’re getting payment. Insurance doesn’t cover most of what we do. So a lot of times it’s cash pay. So it’s explaining that whole process to them and then it’s got to be made and then it’s got to be, in most cases, shipped to the patient. Sometimes they do pick up. But we we probably ship about 90% of what we make. Wow. So so then you’ve got that and then you’ve got what pharma does. So or hospitals a little bit different, but you’ve got what pharma does. Pharma runs these massive batches that are going to go towards thousands and thousands and if not tens of thousands of people in a single batch, right? That’s very traditional manufacturing, whereas when we’re doing it, a lot of times we’re making batches of one. So we do a lot of one on ones. Okay. So it’s very time and labor intensive to just make that single compound that’s going to make a specific difference for a for an individual identified patient. Right. So it’s a very like it’s a it’s kind of we’re in the middle of all these all these different things that are kind of going on. Some things we do batch for up to maybe a few hundred patients, but a lot of things, about almost half, probably over half of what we do is one of ones. Gotcha.

Adam Forrand: [00:15:09] And so your primary relationship is both with the physician and the customer, the ultimate patient, right? Who is ultimately the customer who receive this specialty.

Casey Gaetano: [00:15:20] Correct combination. So so we the slogan that I made up was Our patients are our patients and our doctors are our customers. So patients are very important to us. Absolutely. Ultimately, who’s paying the bills? Right. And that’s who’s getting the medication and that’s who we want to get better. If that’s the case, or maintain whatever they’re trying to maintain, depending on what it is. So they’re very important to us. We, you know, think very highly of that relationship between us and our patients. But our sales and marketing are geared toward the doctors of those patients, such that, you know, if you are a particular patient, you go into your doctor, you know, it might be that 98 out of 100 people need one thing. But when that doctor realizes that you are in the two out of 100, they think a compound and be integrity compounding pharmacy. So that’s what we work with a lot of times on our salespeople, is that it’s that two part sale. It’s like when to use a compound. And if you are going to write a doctor or write a compound doctor, please send it to integrity versus some, you know, what other choices that you would have. Yeah.

Adam Forrand: [00:16:18] So does that culturally speaking at integrity, does that phrase your patients are your patients and your doctors are your customer? Is that imbued in every part of of the work that you do?

Casey Gaetano: [00:16:30] I think it is. And I always and I always catch myself saying I never want to diminish the work that our customer service and patient services team do with our patients. But from a strategy standpoint, my job, yep, that’s who I’m thinking about is, is why doctors would write compounds or we don’t always work with doctors, sometimes with hospitals, sometimes it’s with other pharmacies that are outsourcing different things, whatever. Right. Okay. But that’s who I’m thinking about, is those people as being the people that are trying to prescribe something or to handle something that they don’t want to do themselves and therefore they want to use us for that service.

Adam Forrand: [00:17:07] Yeah, brilliant, Brilliant. You know, the question of differentiation across compounding pharmacies, right, is the question I was headed towards. But you answered the question in terms of that ethos. That is integrity compounding, Right? It is acknowledging the difference between. Those whom you serve and how you serve them differently and why you serve them differently.

Casey Gaetano: [00:17:27] I think that’s that’s right. Most compounding pharmacies grew out of independent retail pharmacies and then they started doing compounding. And so for those places, the customers are their patients. It’s one and the same, right? Because they what they’ve realized in a lot of those cases was that they had a captive audience of two, three, 5000 patients that are coming there to pick up their regular medications. And it’s like, okay, if we just start doing compounding for this sliver of patients and doctors that already know us. It’s just, you know, a value add service that we can make some money off of. And sometimes that grows and grows and grows and the next thing they know they can. It can be a standalone compounding pharmacy, but it never typically loses the roots of the patients and customers being the same people. And that’s what their marketing is geared toward, doing Facebook things. And, you know, social media is more important to to them than it would be to us and all that kind of stuff. But for us, you know, I really do think that a lot of our job is to make our doctors look good. Yeah, I want my whole goal is that the patients not necessarily go tell me that we did a good job with our compound, but that they go to their doctor and they go back to their doctor and say, Wow, that recommendation you made was great. The company took great care of me and it worked. And thank you, doc. That is more where we are geared toward than just that individual relationship between us and the patient.

Adam Forrand: [00:18:46] Awesome. So beyond that mantra, how do you get the best out of your people on a on a day to day basis?

Casey Gaetano: [00:18:53] Do we have like seven hours? We do not know. I think that’s that’s very difficult. Seven minutes.

Adam Forrand: [00:18:59] How about that? Right.

Casey Gaetano: [00:19:00] No, that’s that’s that’s it’s such a challenging question. I think it’s the question. Yeah. In terms of of building an organization is how do you get the best out of your people Because ultimately all of the the words and the things I mean, it’s still human beings that are that have to do all of those things. And so I think it really is the ultimate question to me, the answer to that to that question, because it is so hard, is to try and simplify it. And what that means to me is if the our company aligns on like one on one axis, right? The patient’s professional life is a second axis and their personal goals and ambitions in life is a third axis. Okay. If those three things intersect, what I’ve typically found is that most problems just kind of take care of themselves because everybody’s incentives are aligned like, right? If it makes sense for them professionally and personally to have this job and what they do and what they bring to the table is a good fit for what we are looking for in that particular role. Then typically any sort of personal issue or lack of motivation or it kind of just all falls away. Whereas when those three things aren’t lined up, all of a sudden they don’t like this one policy on that and they didn’t like, like it’s like things come out of the woodwork, right? And it’s all because there’s an inherent tension in that. It’s just not the right fit at the right time for that, for the for that particular person. Yeah. So I think about that a lot in terms of just trying to align those three things up and therefore basically solving the problem before it can become a problem. Right? Because everything just makes sense. Yeah.

Adam Forrand: [00:20:35] Yeah. That’s incredibly hard to assess though, in an interview process, Right, Very. Um, and maybe you can speak to it or your managers, your hiring managers speak to that in terms of that alignment and certainly that ethos by which you guys operate. But assessing that through a hiring process is incredibly difficult. So you’re probably putting the onus on the candidate themselves.

Casey Gaetano: [00:20:58] Yeah, look, you’re never going to get it right 100% the time. No, I think the number that I read most recently was like, if you can be successful in hiring 70% of the time, you’re absolutely knocking it out of the park. Yeah. And even 50%, you can be happy there. Yeah. So I think and I think we’ve gone through ups and downs with hiring. We’ve had times when it felt like every single hire we were making was just the right person, just the right time. And then there have been other times where it’s like, okay, we hired six people in the last three months and none of them are still here. It’s been only three months. So we’ve kind of gone through both of of of those of those things. And I think the biggest the times when we make the most mistakes or when we are desperate and that’s either because we have a job that we just have to fill or because something happens or whatever the case might be. And we I almost always look back at it and I’m like, Yeah, we made that decision because we were desperate. And so we try to stay ahead of it. That keeps us out of being desperate. But that brings us to this other thing that’s kind of important called the budget.

Casey Gaetano: [00:21:59] You know, small thing. It’d be great to have an extra person at every position, but that’s not how it works. And so you try and balance those things the best that you can. But yeah, it’s hard in the in the interview process. So we try to see we try to select for people that like change, that are motivated, that are curious, that are. That. Honestly, the question that to me matters the most in an interview process is why do you want this job? Like when people have trouble articulating that, that to me is probably the biggest red flag because we’re a niche company, right? We’re a compounding pharmacy, right? There’s not that many. And when people can’t articulate why they would want to work at a compounding pharmacy, to me that’s kind of a red flag for like, have you done any thought or are you putting like any thought into your personal goals and life and write any research at all into any of this stuff? So when people are able to well articulate in a way that to me makes sense of why they want this particular job, that’s such a green light to keep talking to that person.

Adam Forrand: [00:23:01] It goes to motivation right across those three axes. Sure. Yeah. And while they can never meet the same motivation you have as the owner and the leader and the founder, if they’re getting close right, then you’ve got you’ve got an indication that there’s something there for sure.

Casey Gaetano: [00:23:20] And we are in health care. So obviously I am the the the owner of the company. So, you know, there is a financial component to that on on all axes. But a lot of people got into health care because they want to help people. And that’s really important, too. Yes, it is. So we try to make our company a place where people can help people if that’s what they wanted to do. And the most common reason that pharmacists will move from like from big box retail to integrity, at least on the patient services and customer service side, is because based on the nature of the business where it’s CVS, they might have 30 seconds to spend with a patient. A lot of times we try to give them the space to spend 15 minutes with that patient and actually trying to get in there and help them and do do all that stuff. And I think they they do find that rewarding. I think also when a lot of the retail pharmacists feel like doctors don’t always respect them professionally as much as they would. Okay. But and I almost have to like untrain that out of them because when they come over to our side, on the compounding side, those same doctors are calling because they have real questions. They don’t they know that they want something, but they don’t know exactly how to write it. Yeah. And so they’re those pharmacists are like, wait, a doctor hasn’t really asked for my opinion about something in five years and all of a sudden they’re starting to ask me for my opinion all the time. I actually, I really got to double down and know this stuff because my opinion is valued here, because the doctors need help getting what they need. And that’s that’s kind of what we’re trying to to be able to, to be set up to do. Yeah, that’s.

Adam Forrand: [00:24:50] Fabulous. So I’m going to transition to the working on your business. Sure.

Casey Gaetano: [00:24:53] The whole thing we were supposed to talk about.

Adam Forrand: [00:24:54] Yeah. No, we got the in part we got a great dose of the in part. And there was some absolutely fabulous stuff in there on the on part. You and I were talking earlier before this broadcast, this recording that you know where you are with 35 or so employees. Right. And you think about the viability and the sustainability and perhaps the scalability of integrity compounding where are you in that working on the business part? So you mentioned some of the things that you’re trying to delegate that you do, delegate some of the things that you’re in the mix on in terms of the operations at Integrity. But when you think about hiring new people and the prospect of hiring new people or you think about systems development within your organization that may take certain tasks away from others and perhaps automate them, like what does the future look like? When you think about when I’m going to you’re going to switch that gear, change that gear into I’m working on my business now. What does that look like right now for you?

Casey Gaetano: [00:25:59] So a couple of different things. You know, at its roots, pharmacy is a scale business meaning and in health care, a lot of things are not great scale businesses because people are getting paid for their time. Right. When we’re on the pharmacy side of things, we’re not getting paid for our time. We’re getting paid for prescriptions going out the door, which it naturally lends itself towards being a scale business right in addition to that, with compounding very high fixed costs compared to most pharmacy operations, just because it is, you know, at the end of the day, it’s a very small batch manufacturing facility. And the the actual costs of the drugs that we’re using to compound are typically quite low as a percentage of what that product looks like. So from that reason, I always think about compounding as a very scalable business. On most axes. The hard part to scale is actually the institutional knowledge of how to do everything correctly and how to sell it and all that kind of stuff. Yeah. So when I think about working on the business from a sales and actual production standpoint, a lot of that is working on processes that will build institutional knowledge. Institutional knowledge across employees such that, you know, as you grow, you’ve got ten, 12, 15 pharmacists, you’re going to have different people there every day.

Casey Gaetano: [00:27:18] Can you still do everything you need to do when 2 or 3 employees are out? And then in terms of sales, you know, do all of those sales people know what they need to be saying in front of doctors and then that coordinating with the patient services folks so you never want it, where a salesperson goes into a doctor’s office and says, Hey, this is how to prescribe this. The doctor does it exactly that way. They get a call back from the pharmacist saying, You didn’t do this right at all. And then they turn around, look at the salesperson, like, what did you tell me? So everybody’s got to be on the same page with all that stuff. And so I do think about that from a process standpoint. You know, we do that. We tend to hire younger pharmacists, generally speaking. So there’s a lot of learning and training to be done there, right? But that’s where we do a lot of meetings and a lot of internal teaching and internal learning about how to do all this stuff and then try to put it together in a way that it’s actually written down and saved such that anybody can go back and find our notes on a lot of these things and kind of and kind of build on that with, with other types of processes.

Casey Gaetano: [00:28:21] I mean, it’s kind of the same thing on the other side of things, all the different parts of running a business, there’s invoicing, there’s payables, receivables, purchasing inventory, all of these types of things. And again, that’s just to me, I spend a lot of time trying to think about processes such that that somebody else could do what I have been doing or what somebody else, you know, somebody else has been doing. And then if that person were to left or to leave, okay. And we had to rehire for the next person, how long would it take them to figure out how to do the job? Because if it takes two years to figure out how to do purchasing, that’s not going to work because that’s not necessarily a job that you’re going to keep somebody for the rest of their life doing. And we need to have it done in a way such that somebody new would be able to come in and figure it out. Right? And so that’s what I spend a lot of my time doing is trying to build those processes.

Adam Forrand: [00:29:11] Yeah. And so does that documentation that that memorializing of institutional knowledge does that is that a really just a hard transcript of documentation of conversations? Are you recording audio conversations? Are you recording them in video? How are you capturing this huge amount of knowledge that you have?

Casey Gaetano: [00:29:32] So a lot of it is mostly written So, so as a pharmacy, we have to have written SOPs on a lot of things and that’s where a lot of things will start. But then a lot of times we will make basically reference documents with instructions, supplemental supplemental documents that kind of just walk you through doing it the right way almost. Yeah. And so for instance, with purchasing, I know that they just added a yesterday, they added a box that could be checked so that somebody with an iPad can just have the iPad and know where they are in the in the doing it. And but it sounds really simple that we just added a checkmark. Checkmark to the document. Right. But it’s allowing people to basically figure out across hundreds of different SKUs what we need to purchase on a weekly basis without constantly getting lost in the middle of what they’re doing. It was so simple. It’s like, why did we not do this five years ago? But it’s little things like that. And then, you know that document now it’s made whoever’s doing purchasing now might move on. Somebody else comes in. Well, that little, that little check mark is not going away. And so it’s going to help the next person too. Even though it’s weird. Like institutions, I think institutional knowledge is something that’s kind of fascinating to think about, but like nobody’s going to talk to that person about the times before the check. Mark The checkbox, right. Like they’re just always going to know that the check mark, what the check marks for and why it exists and how it keeps you from getting mixed up when you’re in the middle of things. And so those are the types of things that you you build on these processes. You just iterate over and over times thousands of different things. And that’s to me is how you, you know, ultimately build an organization.

Adam Forrand: [00:31:07] Yeah. So you’ve got regulatory requirements in terms of SOPs and documentation, and then you add on really what makes integrity unique and special from an operational standpoint. Do they live in the same place? Do they live on the same platform or do you have separate platforms? I’m curious like, what does this look like? Yeah, we keep.

Casey Gaetano: [00:31:23] We keep everything on Dropbox. Yes. Shout out for Dropbox, I guess. Sure. Shout shout out for Dropbox. So we really keep everything on Dropbox in different folders and different things and almost everything. I mean, there’s a. Couple things that I keep in private drop boxes and H.R. files and stuff like that. But for the most part, any document that has to do with anything for our company, somebody could look up on their first day of work and just be like, Huh, I guess that’s the invoice that we sent to this doctor six years ago. Yeah, And it’s that.

Adam Forrand: [00:31:53] Knowledge that is absolutely critical for your future success, particularly when you think about working on your business and scaling your business. Sure. That that stays with the organization and it’s not lost with the individual as they make a transition out.

Casey Gaetano: [00:32:07] So yeah, I think that’s right. So I guess in terms of the on the business stuff, I think. I could divide it almost into like, internal strategy and external strategy. Like what? Like internal strategy is all about processes and how we move the pieces around the chessboard and who should be doing what and how we should be doing certain things and all that stuff. And then the external strategy is all about how do we present ourselves? What’s our brand? Do we do we know our brand? The doctors know our brand, Do our own employees know what our brand is, right? You know, then and obviously sales is the next step down that and just trying to understand, okay, do we want to get involved in allergy compounding? Do we not want to get involved in allergy compounding? Do we want to do fertility? Do we not want to do fertility? And if we do those things, what does it mean for the rest of the way the business works? Yeah.

Adam Forrand: [00:32:58] Moving forward.

Casey Gaetano: [00:32:59] Allergy doctors typically like typical turnaround time on a lot of this stuff in the industry is 4 to 6. 4 to 6 weeks. Sometimes in our fertility and genetics program, they want, if they call it five, they want us to ship it at 525. So you know, how do you have an organization that can handle these big batch runs for allergy on this hand? Right. But then the second a reproductive endocrinologist calls in and wants a fertility med, everybody drops what they’re doing and makes sure it gets out the door that day. Those are two conflicting things. So how do you run like processes side by side so that you can do both things or can you do both things? Should you pass on one right? Or can you do both? What what similarities do they have? What differences do they have? That’s to me that that is the essence of working on the business.

Adam Forrand: [00:33:45] Which in many cases and you know this well too, across different sectors, different verticals, that ability to be nimble and agile and serve a customer’s need and prioritizing those customers appropriately is really where the greatest challenges, right? And shifting gears and doing a fire drill, if someone calls at 5:00 and no, it’s going to hit the hit the dock by 525. Right.

Casey Gaetano: [00:34:11] I get pushback all the time from our employees like Casey. You cannot promise people that we’re going to ship things at 6:00 if they do not send it to us until 550. And my response to that is always when we made the decision to be a compounding pharmacy for genetics patients and for IVF patients, we made the decision that we will try our absolute best to do it. If we’re not, there is no doing it. There’s no for me, there is no doing fertility and genetics without the the end of the day problems and the immediate things, either you’re in or you’re out. Right? We made the decision to be in. And that means if it means we’re in, it is if it is physically possible, we are going to try to do it. And we made that decision years ago. And so that’s what we have to stick. Why? And I think it’s one of those things that employees like. It’s one of the reasons I like new employees, things like that. They’re just like, Oh, okay. And then they keep going, Yeah, Your people that come over work another jobs for ten, 20 years, that takes a little bit longer until they get the buy in and understanding of, okay, that is the way we’re going to have to do this one particular thing. Even though I understand that it makes it less efficient and I understand that it’s a pressure at the end of the day. And if we don’t double, triple, quadruple, check it real quick, it theoretically could lead to mistakes. And we understand all that stuff, but we try to put the guide rails on to respond to it because we made the decision to do it five years ago. Right. And we’re all in on it.

Adam Forrand: [00:35:33] Yep. And you’re maintaining that commitment through and through.

Casey Gaetano: [00:35:36] Correct. Awesome.

Adam Forrand: [00:35:37] So, Casey, you lead a group for us here at the Sandy Springs perimeter chamber that I it’s got many names, but I’m going to just call it a mastermind group. Sure. Because I think that’s the most accessible.

Casey Gaetano: [00:35:49] I never use the same name twice. So.

Adam Forrand: [00:35:51] Good. We’ll go with Mastermind. So you’ve got a front row seat to a lot of other business leaders who are challenged with particular aspects of their running their business, scaling their business. And so you’ve received advice and counsel from those folks. You’ve also provided that as well. As it relates to working in and on your business, what advice would you give our listeners and how to best balance that?

Casey Gaetano: [00:36:20] I guess the advice that I would give is that it is a balance. It’s never going to be all one way or all the other way. Yeah, One of the things that I think is most important for understanding your business is at least the beginning. Sometimes it’s doing your own books. Like when I talk to business owners that outsource that function from day one and didn’t didn’t happen to come out of like accounting or some other job where they had to understand how to do that and they outsource it from day one. I’m like, how could you? I don’t understand personally how you can understand your own business without doing your own books, at least for a little while. That’s fair. And so again, what my counsel be, do your own books for the rest of your life, even when it’s taking 80 hours a week just to do the books by yourself. No, but I think there’s there’s parts of it that you have to just do yourself at the beginning, even though it’s inefficient. Right? It’s the whole point is that it’s inefficient. Because you’ve got to learn it. And so again, that’s why I talk about it as like a concept of a funnel, because at the beginning you have to do everything yourself, basically. Yeah. And then you can start either outsourcing it or you start hiring for it, right? But everything at the beginning is this giant funnel.

Casey Gaetano: [00:37:30] And so you’ve got to start slowly working that funnel down in terms of what you’re going to concentrate on and what you’re going to try and either delegate or outsource. But my I guess my one piece of advice was you can’t go too hard in either directions because you do have to truly understand being in your business. Right. And I, I and I like, you know, our pharmacists that, that have that no longer work necessarily in workflow all the time. I always tell them that they’ve got to be in workflow at least once in a blue moon so that they understand they can still remember what the pharmacists are in workflow are looking at. So when they’re building the processes to help the work people, to help the people that are in workflow, they remember what workflow feels like, right? And I feel the same way for myself. Granted, not on the pharmacist side. For me, no. But still, like occasionally answering a phone call or dealing with an angry patient and understanding why they’re upset is not the worst thing to have to get your hands dirty in. Um. In order to truly understand the strategy of what you should be doing, right? So again, it’s kind of that balance. If you if you go too far out, you start to lose touch a little bit with exactly what your company is.

Adam Forrand: [00:38:37] Well and what you should be doing changes.

Casey Gaetano: [00:38:40] Yeah, right. And it doesn’t have to be the most efficient thing all the time.

Adam Forrand: [00:38:43] It does not. Not if you’ve made that commitment. Right. You’ve made that commitment to your customers, to your patients, to a community, to an organization. And then on behalf of all your employees as well, right? I think that’s right. Yeah. That’s awesome. Casey, share a little bit about where potential customers and patients might be able to find you.

Casey Gaetano: [00:39:04] Sure. So we’re we’re over at off of Dunwoody Place. So we’re North Sandy Springs. Feel free to call the pharmacy drop by the pharmacy. We do try to get to doctors in terms of of getting but if you’re a patient that that is either on compounded medication or has questions about compounded medication, please feel free to call the pharmacy. Find us on Google. Our website is mixed with integrity.com. That’s probably the best way to start. Yeah, I think that’s. That’s that’s honestly, it’s old school. It’s calling people don’t people don’t call anymore. But in our in our businesses there’s like so many exceptions and nuances and this and that and the other thing that it’s very difficult to automate down to like different things. So we just prefer people to call us and just say what their problem is and we’ll try and respond the best we can. Yeah. What’s the number? (404) 815-1610.

Adam Forrand: [00:39:54] And I can say I’ve been to your pharmacy before. The place is buzzing with phone calls. So I know they call. They do. It is old school, right? It is mixed it with integrity. Dot com is great. But when you have the question and you want to talk through it.

Casey Gaetano: [00:40:09] That’s that’s that’s definitely the way to go.

Adam Forrand: [00:40:11] That’s the best way. Casey Gaetano, owner of Integrity Compounding Pharmacy. Appreciate you being here today. Appreciate your leadership in our community as well. And thanks for these wonderful insights on how you can and should be working in and on your business.

Casey Gaetano: [00:40:29] Thanks, Adam. This was fun.

Adam Forrand: [00:40:30] I enjoyed it. Thanks, Casey. Yep.

Speaker1: [00:40:39] Broadcasting live from the Business RadioX Studios in Sandy Springs, Georgia. It’s time for in and On Business. Brought to you by the Sandy Springs perimeter chamber. For more information, go to Sandy Springs Perimeter chamber.com. Now here’s your host.

Shawn Stewart, Ron Sweatland and Anna Teal with Cherokee Cyber Commission

May 1, 2023 by angishields

Cherokee Business Radio

Shawn Stewart, Ron Sweatland and Anna Teal with Cherokee Cyber Commission

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Joe Cianciolo with Front Porch Advisors and Brendon Canale with Diesel David

May 1, 2023 by angishields

Cherokee Business Radio

Joe Cianciolo with Front Porch Advisors and Brendon Canale with Diesel David

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Joe Cianciolo, Human Capital Strategist with Front Porch Advisers, is a thinker, questioner, planner, goal setter, problem solver, family man, and all-around believer in people.

As a teenager in small town Ohio, he learned early that reaching higher levels of success requires becoming, building and leading from a healthy place of self-awareness.

Joe has helped create missions, achievable strategy, social media content for brands, as well as developing nationwide outreach and local community building platforms. Through it all, he’s discovered that no matter the job, he finds success by leaning on who he is at his natural best.

Each of the amazing opportunities Joe has allows him to understand and build his own human capital. Now Joe gets to share his skills and tools to help others do the same.

Follow Front Porch Advisers on LinkedIn, Facebook and Instagram.

A small drop can result in a ripple that grows into a tsunami. For Brendon Canale that was a toy truck as a young child and a bmx bike. These two seemingly small things gave him the fundamentals that would ultimately shape his life.

Bmx bikes taught Brendon to love adrenalin and turn wrenches. The toy truck began an obsession with vehicles that has only grown stronger throughout the years. When the opportunity to come on board with Diesel David presented itself, Brendon took the job.

Brendon started off as the shop handy man, then he took charge of projects and took care of what needed to be done. That pattern of taking the initiative set him up perfectly to take over service writing, and eventually shop management.

Brendon didn’t realize this was what he would be doing, but if he hadn’t taken that initial opportunity, he wouldn’t be where he is at today.

Follow Diesel David on Facebook.

This transcript is machine transcribed by Sonix

TRANSCRIPT

Sharon Cline: [00:00:07] Coming to you live from the Business RadioX studio in Woodstock, Georgia. This is Fearless Formula with Sharon Cline.

Sharon Cline: [00:00:18] Welcome to Fearless Formula on Business RadioX, where we talk about the ups and downs of the business world and we offer words of wisdom for business success. I am Sharon Cline, your host, and today in the studio I’ve got two really interesting people. I’ve got my favorite Front Porch Advisor. This is Joe Cianciolo. He is the human capital strategist with Front Porch Advisors. And we also have Brendon Canale, who is the general manager with Diesel David, which is an auto repair shop. Is that the best way to say it? Auto repair shop in Diesel.

Brendon Canale: [00:00:50] Diesel Specialty Specialty shop in downtown Woodstock.

Sharon Cline: [00:00:53] Oh, I’m so glad I asked you how to say that correctly. I would have butchered it. Thank you for coming on the show.

Brendon Canale: [00:00:57] Of course.

Joe Cianciolo: [00:00:58] Happy to be here, as always.

Sharon Cline: [00:01:00] I’m so happy to chit chat with you because we’ve got a really interesting show today. And I know we talk a lot about business owners and how they manage their natural inclination to have fear and how they can manage and work with themselves to even learn and help other people who want to have their own businesses. But what’s cool about you guys is that you all kind of have a almost like a relationship where you can help, where Joe helps Brendan to understand the positives and negatives of his personality type and how he can work with those positives and quote unquote negatives, I guess, to, to further your self in business. So it’s fascinating to me because I think every one of us has obviously we all have our own personalities, but it’s very easy for me to look at myself and say, Well, here are my weaknesses and I can’t do that. And here’s an excuse for why this doesn’t work. And oh my gosh, I’m so horrible when I have days like this, but I like that you’re spinning. It’s not even a spin. It’s a reframing of allowing myself to accept that I have maybe the light side as well as the dark side that I can work with both. Right? So I don’t have to have something that’s like such a I can look at myself in a positive way, I guess is what I’m trying to say. Man, it took me forever to get that out. So what do you think about what I just said?

Joe Cianciolo: [00:02:18] Well, I’m excited because when you say fearless formula, of course, that’s we talked about this earlier, but everybody needs to know what their fearless formula is. And in our business at Front Porch Advisors, we believe that awareness and acceptance of who you are or what you bring at your best and what you need to be at your best is the formula to overcome the fear. And when we say who you are and what you bring, that means good, bad and ugly. And so yesterday we had the fortune of sitting in a room full of business owners and local business professionals talking about vulnerability. And the question was to provoke what is your strength that sometimes gets you in trouble? So I’m excited to be here today to talk more about the double edged sword, because here at Front Porch Advisors, our philosophy is that the same thing that makes you strong under pressure or stress or extreme challenge becomes your nemesis. Hence the double edged sword. And Brendan has graciously come to sit here because sometimes it’s hard for people to understand what that means to get there. And Brendan has fully gone into the realm of awareness and acceptance and now we practice all the time.

Sharon Cline: [00:03:37] So I think it’s really interesting that you have you’ve kind of gone through the process. It’s not like in the beginning steps. You’ve gone through the process with Joe and have seen positive changes in your relationships with work, and I’m sure it’s exponential with other relationships. What was it that made you realize that you really needed some coaching in a way to reframe how you view your positives and negatives of your personality?

Brendon Canale: [00:04:03] Yeah, so I was stuck back in the day, you know, I’m pretty old, so I was stuck and, you know, I came to Joe and fresh out of a relationship in a dark place, you know, And Joe was like, you know, who’s this kid, you know, down to coach me? But, you know, kind of, kind of unsure. Don’t don’t blame him.

Sharon Cline: [00:04:21] And he’s open. He’s open to people and.

Brendon Canale: [00:04:25] Exactly, exactly. And so we we worked through it. And, you know, my greatest superpower is I care. And my biggest downfall is I care. So I you know, I come in and, you know, first of all, I’m going to want to say yes. So you’ll hear me say yes and then you’ll hear me backtrack and be like, okay, wait a second. And then second of all, you know, whenever I have the ability to give you care, you know, I thrive whenever it’s expected. I struggle. And, you know, working through that understanding that and then using that not only professionally, but with my friends. Relationships. It’s helped, you know, now, now we’re in a successful place.

Joe Cianciolo: [00:05:08] I’m going to turn into Sharon and ask the question because do it, do it. But like she said, you’ve been through the process, but we’re still in it. Why are we still in it?

Brendon Canale: [00:05:17] There’s always room for development. You know, I’m working through some big things with my job and understanding, you know, how to go from where I’m at now to the next level. You know, it requires some advice, some coaching, some guidance so that I can be calculated in my approach and not just like come in guns a blazing reactionary. Exactly. Be calculated. So that’s.

Joe Cianciolo: [00:05:41] It’s interesting. I like it because somebody like Brendon and his tendency to care, it’s interesting how that works externally and internally because it’s more natural for him to provide that care externally. So internally he doesn’t know, always know how to provide that care for himself. That is very common for a lot of people who have that same double edged sword. Yeah, so.

Brendon Canale: [00:06:04] Today I had to force myself to do things for myself, care for myself. So I went to Joe that wasn’t forced. That was something that I know I need to do. But going to.

Sharon Cline: [00:06:13] Joe, going to Joe is a form of care for.

Brendon Canale: [00:06:15] Yourself. Yes, it is a form of care for myself. After that, I went and started taking care of things for myself because what I’ll do is somebody tells me they need my help. I’m out doing that. Like my needs don’t matter. I want to help somebody else. And so today I had to focus on taking care of myself, doing things for myself, which is something that Joe has helped me with because I did not do that well.

Sharon Cline: [00:06:36] I think when you’re a giver and I tend to give as well is and when you had said the expectation, when you set that expectation, then it’s there’s not even a discussion about whether or not you’re going to come and do what because you did it once. So now you’re going to do it again. I get resentful very fast, but I but I did it to myself. I set the precedent like I set the pattern, the expectation. So it’s something I’m working on as well. And I can imagine in your business as well, when you’ve got people coming asking you to help and can you fit me in? Can you do this or that? Well, you want to help. Naturally. This is your job, right? But then you have to be careful if you over promise or something.

Brendon Canale: [00:07:14] Boundaries.

Sharon Cline: [00:07:15] Well, that’s a nicer way to say it.

Brendon Canale: [00:07:17] Setting boundaries. Because the answer is yes. I want to help you, but here’s how you can help me Help you and knowing to communicate.

Sharon Cline: [00:07:25] Are you so proud of them?

Joe Cianciolo: [00:07:26] I’m so proud.

Brendon Canale: [00:07:29] I’m proud to take the mic, you know. But it’s hard. Yeah. You know, and when to when to ask for help. Help me care which I can see it in you. You care. And so let me ask you a question. Okay. Here we.

Sharon Cline: [00:07:44] Go. Let me ask you. Wait a minute. This I asked the questions on this show.

Brendon Canale: [00:07:47] This is Brendan’s ready. Okay, I’m ready. So I’m ready. So whenever somebody expects you to care and you feel like it’s been pushed on you, how hard do you pull back that care?

Sharon Cline: [00:08:00] I don’t. Don’t. I don’t. I push. I go into it more. I’m like, oh, okay. Will you expect this of me? I can’t let you down, but there’s.

Joe Cianciolo: [00:08:07] Always a trade off. You pull the care from yourself even further in thinking that you’re providing more care for them and digging harder. But actually you’re not providing the greatest level of care that you possess. Naturally.

Sharon Cline: [00:08:21] Yes. True. Because I’m not. Because it’s not about me so much in my mind, it’s more about, okay, well, this is what you need. Here I come. You need, you need me. You even came to me and asked me. So of course. So I don’t think about what it’s costing me so much as as much as I’m thinking about what I’m giving you, which maybe it isn’t 100%, but.

Joe Cianciolo: [00:08:42] It also is what Brendan said and what got me so excited was him understanding and acknowledging like, Yes, I want to help, but help me make sure that I’m helping you. And that’s one of the things that it’s a tool that we’ve gone through, setting those parameters in a dialog that you have to practice because it’s not natural for you to think it that way. Your natural inclination is to say, Sure, I’ll help. Instead of saying no, I would rather provide you with the best help and the best care for you, so I need you to help me with that. I need you to set that.

Sharon Cline: [00:09:16] So the question so if someone were to come to me and say, Can you please help me, my question back to them is what is the best help that I can give you that what you mean.

Joe Cianciolo: [00:09:25] Sure that can help? Or if you feel the need to want to say yes, out of obligation is to say, what is it that would be an opportunity for you to help as opposed to an obligation. So you say, okay, I am most likely to want to help when I know X, Y, and Z. So that’s where those parameters, that’s where those barriers or boundaries come in, because then at that point, you’ve flipped it from an expectation to an opportunity.

Sharon Cline: [00:09:50] Opportunity, right? Completely different energy behind that. Wow.

Joe Cianciolo: [00:09:54] That’s why I’m so proud.

Sharon Cline: [00:09:55] Are you so proud? Well, that’s so.

Joe Cianciolo: [00:09:58] Awesome when we talk about Fearless formula. That’s why I really got excited about today of trying to to pair these two is you can hear in Brendan Brendan and I are going through a little bit of an exercise here because he’s learned so much and we’ve been practicing and we’re going through the entire program together. And now I hear him sharing that out and not being afraid. So overcoming that fear of thinking, I just have to do it. No, he wants to help others around him, which is part of his care mechanism. Yes. But it’s the opportunity care mechanism, knowing that when you use his formula, when he uses his formula, then it is exponentially more effective.

Sharon Cline: [00:10:38] Because he’s protecting himself as well. He’s not coming at an expense of yourself.

Joe Cianciolo: [00:10:44] Well, that’s the trade off that we want to keep healthy at the expense of you is not healthy. Brendan What happens to you when you don’t consider your own health? When providing care for someone else?

Brendon Canale: [00:10:55] We go downhill, you know, dark places. But, you know, then I have to take a step back, you know, find my peace. I usually, you know, I’m a person that likes to be around people. I’m a nurturer. I care. I want to be with my people. Um, but I have to step away. I have to ground myself. I choose to go to the top of a mountain at midnight and stay there all night. Um, that’s me. And, you know, find my peace, find my ground ness, and then come back whenever, you know, I’ve healed. And then I can handle. Right. You know, helping with everybody.

Joe Cianciolo: [00:11:27] And when you scale out, which. Depending on your wiring. Some people are wired for very day to day and some people are future. Just what he explained about getting away going on top of the mountain. Even that little bit of time will energize him enough that when he comes back down, that ability to care is fueled by inner energy. If you take that away, like we talked about earlier, if the trade off is is is pulling your energy, then you’re not going to have the fuel in your tank to actually get the job done. Like you might be limping along. And that’s not a that’s not you at your best. You at your best is, oh, my gosh, watch me, watch me. Come care. I am so good at providing care.

Sharon Cline: [00:12:10] So I’ve heard the notion of boundaries are loving. They seem mean, but they’re loving. And I think for me, that’s always been a big challenge for myself to be able to say, I see that you need me, but I can’t give that to you right now because I need I need to take care of myself for a little while. It feels like I’m in the face of someone needing me saying no. And that is so counterintuitive to my wiring, I believe. And but I do get the notion of being able to be quiet in myself and give like, my spirit what it needs so that I’m not resentful, because that’s that’s a big theme, I think, for me. Have you found the same in your relationships or with work? Yeah.

Brendon Canale: [00:12:50] You know, I am so inclined to want to help and care, so I. I’ll lead with, Hey, if you can’t find anyone else, I’ll help you. But I have other things I need to do. And this isn’t professional. It’s more personal. But I have other things I need to do. So if you can find someone else, like I need to go do these things. If I have to, you know, make some space, I can come help you. And, you know, setting that boundary of, hey, like, yes, I’m here as a resource. If you absolutely need me, please explore another option.

Joe Cianciolo: [00:13:21] Do you hear how, though? It’s it’s kind of one of those things where he’s keeping himself grounded in the fact that he will care but not overcorrecting. He’s staying really grounded in the fact that, hey, you know, I have to care for myself, that in order for it to be a fearless formula, it has to be practiced. It has to be You have to constantly be aware in this moment, am I obligated or am I opportunity?

Sharon Cline: [00:13:46] What would overcorrecting look like in that scenario?

Brendon Canale: [00:13:50] Brendon overcorrecting, either agreeing and then ghosting or just saying no.

Sharon Cline: [00:13:58] Flat out no risking the feeling that this person is going to walk away knowing that you don’t care which is the opposite of who you are.

Joe Cianciolo: [00:14:06] Well, and I think the overcorrect can also look like martyring yourself by taking everything on and just kind of saying, No, everybody else out, I’ll do it until you run completely into the ground, which we’ve had to face a couple of times, where the physical, the physical health part of it goes away. And even though you anyone who has that care double edged sword can sustain that longer than most, at some point you lose your influence because of it.

Sharon Cline: [00:14:38] So something will give emotional, spiritual, physical. Oh yeah, Somewhere along the way.

Joe Cianciolo: [00:14:44] Mental, mental. And the thing that I find and Brendon I would love for you to share is especially in the business when you have customers, they can feel this natural tendency to care. So when he brings sort of the credibility and competence of awareness and acceptance of help me make sure that we do this properly, it actually grows his influence and his trust within the customer base, which makes them more likely to want to do business with him because he is being fearlessly but grounded.

Sharon Cline: [00:15:19] How often are we not grounded as a general statement? Percentage it out. You know.

Brendon Canale: [00:15:26] I’m doing better every year. Every year there’s been there’s been improvement. But I’d say probably probably once or twice a year. Right now I catch myself where I’m like, okay, I really need to take essentially a mental health break and go, you know, handle myself.

Sharon Cline: [00:15:41] That doesn’t sound so terrible once or twice a year. Is that bad?

Brendon Canale: [00:15:44] Oh, it used to be all the time.

Joe Cianciolo: [00:15:46] And that’s the thing. There is no such thing as perfection. But being grounded is being. That’s why I say awareness and acceptance, because those together, you can stay grounded and there’s going to be variables thrown every which way, and you’re going to have different personalities coming at you. Some are coming in hot, some are coming in, you know, very confused or misguided. And sometimes they’re just redirecting frustration from something else. So that’s why for us, it’s a practice. It’s something that we have to do every day and we have to give ourselves grace when we fall back into the only one side of the sword on ourselves.

Brendon Canale: [00:16:21] What I’ve learned is, you know, customers are going to, like Joe said, have their emotions. And our tendency is to take that on. And, you know, it can be overwhelming if you can’t process what’s going on. So, you know, a customer is upset because their truck’s broken. They’re not upset at me. I’m just the messenger. And, you know, a terminology I’ve used is I’m an advisor. I’m not here to sell you work. So if you come to me, you’re like, Hey, what do you think I should do with this truck? What’s going on with it? And that gives like, I love, I love vehicles and then I love caring.

Joe Cianciolo: [00:16:55] Opportunity to care, opportunity, not obligation.

Sharon Cline: [00:16:59] Opportunity to care. But you’re not obligated to care. Interesting.

Brendon Canale: [00:17:02] And so I can guide them through the process of, hey, let’s let’s figure out the your circumstances. Do you make money with this truck? Is it just a hobby? And, you know, guiding them through that and hey, it makes sense to fix it if you’re losing $1,000 a day because you’re not driving this truck doesn’t make sense to fix it if it’s just your daily driver, probably not. And, you know, guide them through that, hey, it’s sellable right now. Here’s some other vehicles you can get. And, you know, I’ll talk myself out of a large sale just to make sure that customer is cared for.

Sharon Cline: [00:17:33] And you keep yourself grounded in the meantime. That’s the goal, right? The energy is feeling like you’re not overcompensating or trying to sell them or trying to placate them in their feelings. Just a.

Brendon Canale: [00:17:46] Conversation.

Joe Cianciolo: [00:17:47] Ask him how his numbers have done since I was going down.

Sharon Cline: [00:17:51] That was my next thing is like, how has this impacted your daily life personally and professionally?

Brendon Canale: [00:18:00] Daily life. Oh man, you know, you know that anxious feeling. You know, you just get that, like, overwhelmed. I have I.

Sharon Cline: [00:18:07] Have anxiety rings on as we speak. They’re like fidget spinner rings because I live in that space.

Brendon Canale: [00:18:12] So there is a space outside of that space and there’s a.

Sharon Cline: [00:18:17] Space outside of that space.

Brendon Canale: [00:18:19] Yes. And you can access that more and more as you understand what’s going on internally. Like I can be overwhelmed and I can take a second to be like, okay, I’m overwhelmed. And just that second of realizing like, hey, this is like building up inside of me, take a breath, realize it’s happening, and then you can control your response and kind of guide yourself out of it, figure out what you need, move forward from there. And you know that that piece, like, I’m an anxious person, but I operate very calmly now.

Sharon Cline: [00:18:52] That’s nice and that’s amazing. How are your numbers at work?

Brendon Canale: [00:18:58] Um, we have, uh, if I remember correctly, 7 or 8% growth a month.

Sharon Cline: [00:19:04] So how do you feel about that? What do you think?

Brendon Canale: [00:19:08] A little accomplished. But I have an excellent team that I work alongside with.

Sharon Cline: [00:19:11] They’re very humble.

Joe Cianciolo: [00:19:13] As always. But that’s the thing. Sometimes we try too hard as business owners. If we think being fearless means being loud, bold, you know.

Sharon Cline: [00:19:22] Caution to the wind.

Joe Cianciolo: [00:19:23] Hustle, you know, push, push, push. But if that’s not the formula that fits into who you are at your best, then it’s not going to work. So instead, when you ground yourself, it naturally, like I said earlier, grows that influence to the point where people are gravitated towards you. And because, like you said earlier, you don’t know what’s causing their stress. They come in emotional because of whatever it may not just be their vehicle. And when they when you’re around somebody who is practiced and grounded, it’s calming and it makes you realize, oh, wait, maybe, maybe I can knock it down. And they don’t even know it, but they definitely are attracted to it. And that is a good thing. And it builds trust. But it’s not trust because you’re trying to prove that you’re trustworthy. It’s no, this is who I am. This is what I do. I mean, the way he says it, I love it because it sounds so professionally created. No, it’s Brendan doing the study, understanding what? That awareness piece. The acceptance of it. And this is it. I have nothing to prove. Nothing to hide, nothing to lose. Totally grounded in myself. And I would love to help. Here’s the best way to do it.

Sharon Cline: [00:20:29] What was the process like when you were just starting where you you were the first time you were in a scenario where someone came in and gave you sort of a lot of all their energy and stress and you had the tools in your head of how to ground yourself. Was it scary in itself to do that? How was that?

Brendon Canale: [00:20:47] It can be it can be overwhelming working with somebody who’s operating from a place of emotion. And, you know, a lot of times they want to be heard. So hear them, you know, help them walk through the process of, hey, here’s here’s what we’ve done. Here’s, you know, the conversations we had. And putting the the rationale back in the conversation is helpful for me. That’s where I operate best. So working through that and, you know, whenever they get a misconception or something, helping guide them, like, hey, like, no, this is what’s going on. And, you know, I just want to make sure like we’re on the same page. I understand your frustration. Like, I want this vehicle fixed just as much as you do. I don’t want to have I don’t want I will have these conversations. But these aren’t the conversations I like to have. I like to have like, Hey, you’re good to go. The vehicle is awesome. But you know, the how you handle the hard conversations is almost more important than how you handle the easy conversations.

Sharon Cline: [00:21:43] Was it a challenge to change your interactions, to be more grounded, or how challenging was it.

Brendon Canale: [00:21:52] The the process getting there is the challenge because it’s a lot of internal, it’s not as much external. Um, so I would say it’s challenging internally, but in those cases, once you become healthier and healthier in your practice, they become easier.

Sharon Cline: [00:22:10] Do you find that things didn’t. Oh, sorry. Go ahead. Go ahead, Joe.

Joe Cianciolo: [00:22:12] Go ahead. I am excited to to hear him say that. And because I watch it, I get to work with it all the time and the confidence just grows the more practice he gets. And so it’s hard for him to remember as as dramatic of a difference because now it is an ongoing thing. And. And we all fall back into some past patterns. We, you know, sometimes under that extreme stress, we do use the other side of we’re.

Sharon Cline: [00:22:40] Hungry or we’re tired or we’re, you know, there are various reasons, right?

Joe Cianciolo: [00:22:44] And so to hear him say it like that makes me very proud. And I know we still have work to do, but it is building sort of that repetition and being rhythmic about understanding that being grounded is not something you can just read in a book and just have. It takes specific situations. Situational awareness where we will study it. He’ll come to me and be like, Oh, this happened. Whether it be internal with the office or whether it’s with a customer or even personal. And we then go, okay, go ahead. You look like you want to say something.

Brendon Canale: [00:23:15] Yeah. The awesome part is, is as you’re working through it, is it? And I had this defensive driving teacher whenever I was like 18, 17, and he said he called events that you pull from movies. So you build your movies and you know, as you have those conversations you’re building experience and like afterwards, like, Oh, I messed up here, I messed up here, and like, not mad at myself, just data and like, Hey, I could have done this better. And you know, the awesome part is, is, you know, working with Joe David, the owner of the company, he, you know, they both give different input and it allows me to grow from a situation, ask for, ask for advice, you know, hey, how could I have handled this better? And, you know, then next time I’m in that scenario, I’m like, I got this. I have a movie about this and I can move forward from there.

Sharon Cline: [00:24:04] It’s tools you’re talking about, like exercising a muscle, right? Absolutely.

Joe Cianciolo: [00:24:09] So be careful. We’re going to flip this around on you. Oh, wait a minute.

Sharon Cline: [00:24:15] Yeah. The thank you for coming to Fearless Formula and Business RadioX. So I think it’s fascinating, too, because what you’re doing is giving yourself a lot of self compassion. You’re not judging yourself for having failed something or it didn’t work the way I thought because I live in this space very easily of being like, Well, yeah, at two in the morning I have a playlist and I just add stuff to my two in the morning playlist of how I did something wrong, or I could have done it better or I should have known. I have a lot of judgment that way, but it’s so refreshing to see someone not take that as being the focus God, where did I do wrong? I could have done it better. You actually are just giving yourself, like you said, data or data and using it for your movie, which which makes it so third person. It’s not so personal.

Joe Cianciolo: [00:25:04] Well, just listening to the way that you said that about your 2 a.m. list in my head, I hear obligation, obligation, obligation, obligation, not opportunity. And that’s where I think and maybe, Brendan, maybe we haven’t used these terms, but I think that’s when things flipped for you was when you were looking for the opportunity in all of that feedback, because feedback is just that. The emotions that we bring to it are separate and we do that. So the thing is, is like we have had to deal with a lot of emotion through all of our time to get everybody does. And but the way that we react to that is not influential. And that’s the part that when he can say you probably, well, it’s not a video, but you I smiled because I always say it is just information. It’s not good or bad. It’s information. What we do with it is a response if we don’t think it through, if we’re not aware of it, if we don’t accept it as data, then we will react. And our reactions tend to be the other side of our double edged sword.

Sharon Cline: [00:26:08] Interesting. But why Let me ask you this. Why How much is the way that we are naturally predisposed with our personalities and how much is our parental influence regarding our responses to things and the the the judgment, the meaning that we put behind the failures, so to speak, or our experience. Because obviously in listening to you, I’m not looking at my experiences that I don’t love the outcome of as data. I look at it as a failure of spirit in some way or myself or I should have known, right? So I don’t know how much of that is inherent to who I am or if that was just like scripts that I’m hearing from parents or other experiences. So how much does that influence us?

Joe Cianciolo: [00:26:58] She just opened chapter one, and chapter one is it’s one of the courses that we have, and it is a hard course because it does look at the one thing that we all own for ourselves, which is our experience. And in that experience comes influences. And we have a formula for that where we can study that and understand if we can look at the past and understand collect data. That’s how I do it, is we look at what were those influences like, what was their role in our world? And then we have to understand that people are naturally wired even within. That influence. And it could either be nature, nurture or choice. So it’s either how they are or who they were raised to be or the choices that they make now. Because once we start to realize that all those people are in one of those areas, then we start to look for the people who have learned how to be more than that. And we look for the people who liberate us to be free. And that’s why I love what I do, because my job is to be a liberator for Brendan. But that means I have to study him right alongside him. So because what he needs is very different than what I need and I need to be that influence so that we can help unlock way more people like that, that will keep him going forward. Forward. That’s the fearless formula.

Sharon Cline: [00:28:15] Well, I wanted to ask you, do you also have do you also have relationships that you’ve had to let go in this process because they are not the types of people that will help you along your journey?

Brendon Canale: [00:28:26] Every relationship has its own unique attributes. You know, I have a lot of challenge in my life with what I do, so I look for support and I look for positive influences on my life. Um, you know, fortunately I’ve had a good friend group and, you know, relationships throughout my life where, you know, even from a young age, if somebody wasn’t making me feel good about who I am or wasn’t offering challenge in an appropriate way, then I was already going to distance myself. Because the cool thing about being a person that really cares is our weapon is you just pull back hair.

Sharon Cline: [00:29:09] Listen, I have what’s called the INFJ door slam. Are you familiar with this thing? The Myers-Briggs? So, yeah, the door slam is significant. I cannot work around it either when I have decided that I have just this is not a healthy relationship. I’ve given everything I can and it still is somehow becoming toxic to me. I walk away and I cannot even reason with myself to come back, even if I think, Oh, well, they’ve learned or they’re sorry, or they or maybe it could be better at some point. Like, I don’t know how to override my natural protective instinct at this point.

Joe Cianciolo: [00:29:43] Her is number two.

Sharon Cline: [00:29:45] My caretaker is number two.

Joe Cianciolo: [00:29:46] Yeah. Because for us, we study all of those patterns and tendencies in an order that’s most natural and we are a combination of all of them. And so his is number one and yours is number two, which is why yours is a little bit more extreme. That’s why you have the shut the door what you refer to. And so when it’s number one, you pull it back. But they’re the only ones that can bring it right back to care without a whole lot of effort. Really. There’s a formula for that, too. We we have tools for that that help understand why you do that and whether it serves you or not, and how to make sure that you’re staying grounded within that. And so for you, you you have more of that charismatic forward, you know, people and values need to put together. Yes, they must be aligned that that comes first, which is why you may not see eye to eye right now on how he can do what you just asked him to do. It’s just different. You still have access to the care. It’s just not first, it’s not the top one. For me, it’s number three. It’s not even.

Sharon Cline: [00:30:53] Oh, yeah. But I think that’s fascinating to me because I did not realize that I always thought of myself as a caretaker, number one. But it’s but but it’s interesting to think that at some point I realize that it’s too much for me and I’m able to get out. But if it were number one, would it be harder for me to get out? Oh, don’t you think I’m cold? Brendon?

Brendon Canale: [00:31:21] Yeah. Um. So somebody, somebody wrongs me and whatever that instance is, you know, a pretty chill person. Not many people. Wrong me, but I’ll pull it back and be like, okay, I’m going to go do my own thing. I don’t have to have an argument, conversation, anything. All right, I’m going to go do this and, you know, say that person, you know, shows a positive light, whatever that is. Like, I’m willing I’m able to comfortably forgive and, you know, welcome them into my life. Like, there is a there is there is a boundary, there’s a wall. Um, but, you know, as long as everything is kosher and, you know, I continue to do me.

Sharon Cline: [00:32:00] Wow, that sounds so healthy.

Joe Cianciolo: [00:32:02] That’s why I say grounded, but it looks different for everybody else. I’m I’m a strategist. I, I calculate and I remember everything. So it’s not the same. And if, if my double edged sword when I’m healthy and grounded, then I am providing clarity. I am looking for a strategic solution to a problem. But when I’m unhealthy and not grounded.

Brendon Canale: [00:32:28] Lots of questions.

Joe Cianciolo: [00:32:31] Then I do have. Incessant questions, which is also a sign of of unhealthy or not healthy or whatever you want to say. And the questions become judgmental and personal in nature, but you’re.

Sharon Cline: [00:32:44] Able to see yourself do this. Yeah.

Joe Cianciolo: [00:32:45] Oh, and I can stop it now because I have the formula. Like, I have studied it enough that I can I can hear it instantly. I can even feel it in the muscles of my face. So because I pay attention to it with all of my clients, I have to be able to see what’s natural. It’s not a judgment, it’s a piece of data. And so as soon as I see my eyes or feel my eyes pass that personal line, I’m like, Nope, that question was not correct. And then I will stop or I will say, You’ll hear me. I’ll say, This is not that. That sounded judgmental, and then I’ll reframe the question because it’s not my intent. But all of us, when we’re stressed and we’re reactionary, we aren’t intentional. And so that’s why it’s called a reaction. You know, when we’re responsive, then we can be intentional. We can even call out what he said, like, I’m pulling it back. I can give it back. I’m oh, let me stop my questions. If they’re really that important, I’ll bring them later.

Brendon Canale: [00:33:39] And that’s where I have to be careful with customers, is whenever I start pulling back that care and they’re already frustrated is I have to catch myself doing that because I become transactional. And so then it’s yes, no, okay, all of that. Instead of like, let let me let me guide you through this. And so spearheading that before you’re in it is, you know, from a customer service aspect is how I can work through customers utilizing the tools.

Joe Cianciolo: [00:34:07] When you want. Wouldn’t everybody want Brendon to be in charge of customer service because he naturally provides care. But the fact that he is that aware to be able to notice mid mid conversation and that’s why we why we think this can be a fearless formula because once you do understand that about you, you start to pay attention to it in them and you start to see their patterns and tendencies, you see their reactions as just that. And if we can become that aware and accept that it’s maybe them on a bad day, you know, who are they on a good day and how will you connect with them? What kind of communication can you use that will remind them of what they’re amazing at? Then all of a sudden you’re like, Take them on a whole journey where they’re kind of with you forever. And that creates customers for a lifetime for a business if done properly.

Sharon Cline: [00:34:56] And that’s so exciting. I mean, when I think about it, it’s like what I’m learning in therapy about observing and not absorbing. You’re able to observe yourself without absorbing the negative connotation with your reactions. You’re able to observe yourself as just, This is just how I’m feeling today, whatever. But you also can if you do it for yourself, you can do it for other people when they’re interacting with you. So you don’t take it personally and they can feel that because you can have a space of them being upset and it’s not going to rattle you and create like a bad energy that could create a huge argument or something. And then they feel grounded as well because they’re kind of feeding off of you, right?

Joe Cianciolo: [00:35:32] Well, yeah, What I would say and Brendan, I would love for you to chime in, but for any caretaker, it will affect you. But the question is, is how much? So as I always say, like for caretakers that go into self deprecation because they’re overstressed, they start going down the steps into the pit. And I always say, if you’re going to go into the pit of despair, you are naturally going to do that because you care so much. The question is, is can we stop you five steps down instead of taking yourself 1000 steps down? And in doing that, you weren’t denying who you are. You’re just reminding yourself, Oh, wait, stop. I’ve been down there before and I don’t want to be there now.

Brendon Canale: [00:36:12] Yeah. Taking the taking a breath, giving yourself a reset. There’s been a few times after, like the heavier conversations where, you know, I’m a car guy, I work at a shop, I work there for a reason. So, you know, I’ll have one of those heavy conversations like, All right, I just need to go on a quick, like 15 minute drive, you know, go on a drive, go do a lap, and then, you know, come back and, you know, that that little reset of, you know, hey, like I realized I need this or, you know, most of the time the customer doesn’t get me get to me anymore. Like, okay, on to the next one. Um, but you know, whenever you do have those heavy ones, you need to take that second, find your ground and then, you know, move forward. Because if you carry that to the next customer, then it’s just going to keep going. You’re like, Man, I’ve had like six bad customers today. The customers? Yeah, yeah.

Joe Cianciolo: [00:36:58] What did you do today?

Brendon Canale: [00:37:00] It’s not the customers.

Sharon Cline: [00:37:01] If you have six bad customers, it’s not the customers. Right. Interesting. Such self-awareness.

Joe Cianciolo: [00:37:05] Though. Wow. And I’m so proud to sit next to him and watch every one of my clients who takes this to heart and really decides that they want to make this into a fearless formula. It is so fun to hear them talk about it good, bad and ugly because we’re not going to be 100% great at it. But if we are 70, 80% great at it all the time, that’s awesome.

Sharon Cline: [00:37:28] There’s space to not be 100% great at it because nothing is perfect.

Joe Cianciolo: [00:37:32] But instead of judging that, we accept that, Oh, I screwed that one up. Tomorrow I’ll do better.

Brendon Canale: [00:37:38] The win feels so much better when there was loss.

Joe Cianciolo: [00:37:42] Dang, he’s very, very good. Are you.

Sharon Cline: [00:37:44] Are you so ready? I am. It’s exciting to see that some of the tools that you 100% believe in and know work in in real time. You’ve seen the positive effect it’s had not only in your interpersonal relationships, but what it’s meant in terms of dollars, which is what’s important here. We’re talking about in in business. So what are the other I don’t know if you call them archetypes, but what are the other main ways that people interact? Like he’s he’s a caretaker. I’m not quite sure what I am, but.

Joe Cianciolo: [00:38:15] Well, and I started it thinking about yesterday’s question is what is the double edged sword? And for mine as a strategist, it is overthinking or analysis paralysis. When grounded and used for good, I ask strategic questions to gain enough pieces of the puzzle to be competitive and solve it When I’m stressed out. It’s too many questions internally first and then externally is awful, and I will lose credibility instantaneously when I do that, which is why I had to practice learning how to stop. Then you have the extreme emotion dreamer, maybe archetype as you want, and when healthy they can solve problems that no one else can solve. They see the future in a way that nobody else can. But when stressed out the extreme perfection of It’s in my head, why don’t you understand? And an inability, if they’re not aware, their communication does not come out at all like what they say does not match what they dream. And that’s very, very frustrating for them and for the people that that work for them. That’s one of the hardest things when we’re looking at different business owners is we attract that in our business. When the owner is in that dream state and dream does not operate day to day, dream is meant to operate bigger. So then you also have a more dominant which most business owners want to be. We will call them initiators for today’s purposes when amazing and healthy and. Rounded, they actually execute and make the biggest things happen because their confidence is through the roof.

Joe Cianciolo: [00:40:02] But when stressed out, their arrogance and ability to blow up the situation on purpose because they want you to remember how bad whatever just happened, incompetence is is a trigger for that. And so what they need to remember is very few people are actually number one initiator. It’s what, something like 9%, maybe 7%. It’s really, really low. And the majority of the people that work for them are going to be caretakers or strategists, and they do not communicate the same and they don’t receive it the same. So what we’ll find with our clients that are inclined that way is that they often feel like islands and they don’t understand why people won’t get it done. They are working their people so hard that the turnover is ridiculous. And so we say, okay, let’s figure out what it is that your team needs in order to be their best and then let them do it, you know? And then who did I miss? Oh, the the believer. Oh, the believers are the type of people I think that Sharon, I think you and I have talked about this before, but you have this natural ability to believe in people and ideas and you feed off of a big crowd of it to the point where you just want to bring them together. That’s why you hosting the show. It’s like I get to bring all these people in and I get to try to find ways that they can relate with each other and I can relate with them.

Joe Cianciolo: [00:41:24] And when healthy and grounded, that’s amazing. But when unhealthy, I think the flipped sword on that one is trying really hard to force a belief and then it becomes forced on all the people around them. And man, it is like walking through glue and they’re so typically on a grounded strength, very charismatic in a great way. But that same charisma when when not grounded and not healthy is kind of emotionally explosive on people around them. So, I mean, like I said, we are bits of all of them. The question is which ones are the most natural, which are the ones that give you the most energy. And so that we don’t have to pretend to be all of them. As a business owner, I that’s one of the hardest things at the very beginning is helping them understand the best way to lead your business is through your own natural patterns and tendencies. Even though you think or have read books that tells you you need to be such and such a way in order to work. That’s not true if you lead from that grounded place, just like what Brendon experienced with the gravitational trust, the customers and the staff that always rely that Brendon is there and he’s grounded. The same thing happens for a business owner. You attract employees that want to stay there. And so I.

Sharon Cline: [00:42:47] Mean, and if you recognize what your pattern and tendency naturally is, then you can strategically choose the people that you have in your business and you just put your arms up. I did.

Joe Cianciolo: [00:42:57] I did because strategic hiring is one of the biggest programs that we’ve been using lately is to say, Hey, you need to be given the majority of the time to be in your natural best and the people who are going to balance that is probably your natural least. So why don’t you hire those people and empower them to be their best? And Brendon was one of those strategic hires and it’s beautiful. It’s glorious, It is sometimes unexpected, but it has the biggest outcome. I guess it’s the best outcome.

Brendon Canale: [00:43:31] Yeah. You asked you asked the question, what was the percentage in dollars of the benefit of the growth? And the other side of that is the cultural benefit within the company, the people, the people with you.

Sharon Cline: [00:43:48] The non quantifiable.

Brendon Canale: [00:43:50] Effect. Yes. Having a healthy place to work. That’s not like, you know, they’re stressed. It’s a job but like having a healthy place that you can work and you you want to be there and you have these people around you, you know, that continues to improve and grow, which is again, unquantifiable.

Joe Cianciolo: [00:44:09] But it also is a level of care for a team and sometimes it’s business. We always think numbers, but numbers aren’t always the only driver. We have a formula for that too, where you as a business owner or a team leader have to understand yours, and then a company itself has to understand what it wants to be and we will take people through that. So we can say if I mean obviously money has to happen in business, we get that. But if it’s not a natural top driver and it’s getting the most of your time, energy and effort, it’s going to feel off, it’s going to feel against the grain. And so if you do it in a more natural order, then it will come along with That’s why Brendon I’m happy for him to sit today because it has come along. With the culture and money just because of him learning how to be grounded and and and do his job at his best and him being able to communicate that to the team and the customers verbally and non-verbally.

Brendon Canale: [00:45:10] Yeah. So what got me to bringing that point back up is the strategic hires is figuring out who whenever you’re looking at people, not only looking at their voice orders, interacting with them, seeing, you know, maybe they maybe they, you know, fibbed a little while. They’re taking their their analysis or where you’re kind of understanding them and seeing who’s going to be a good fit for company culture. So you can continue that environment of just like a healthy place to work, as I’m sure everybody’s had that job where it’s just like the manager. Is this like super toxic or like one bad apple just like focuses on the wrong thing and you’re like, Hey, like, this is what we do, this is what we provide, this is who we are. And, you know, figuring out who fits within that mold.

Sharon Cline: [00:45:54] Um, it’s interesting because you’re talking about sort of an ultimate acceptance of who you are without the whatever nature versus nurture versus choice, meaning that we all put on the feelings that we have right?

Joe Cianciolo: [00:46:10] That’s why when people ask me, Oh, do you do personality? Yes, I do as a basis, but I don’t put stock in the terminology. Like if you’re a caretaker, what does that mean? How does it play out? How does it serve you? How does it not serve you? What’s an opportunity for you and what’s the opportunity for the company? And that’s strategic hiring. That’s kind of the big thing, is you can get warm and fuzzy vibes from somebody who’s extremely charismatic in an interview and they may have the best credentials, but if the job that is needed does not serve their natural best tendencies, it won’t last. And it’s really a formula there too. So what we always say is we we because we’ve done interviews on the front porch with clients of ours, we say, Oh my gosh, you’re awesome. That’s not the job that we have right now. But when we do, we would want you and we’ll call you because we don’t want to give you the false sense that we just want you on our team because we like the team environment, You fit the team environment. We want to make sure that you have the right opportunity to continue to be healthy and actually, you know, develop yourself and say, hey, I want to be here and I’m going to be more committed to being in a place that values me for what I bring, not just what’s on my resume.

Sharon Cline: [00:47:23] I love that, too, because the way you’re talking about it is a I am not a victim of my personality and the jobs that are out there and someone’s not putting me in the right place. I’m not so much a victim. I’m more I can take action to change the outcome, which feels so much better. Yes.

Joe Cianciolo: [00:47:43] But it requires at the very beginning we talked about awareness and acceptance, and that’s the acceptance piece. Like, you can be aware of your tendencies, but you have to accept what that means for good and for bad and for ugly so that you can say, Oh crap, you know, if I know that this is going to bring me down, what do I need? Brendan said, This is what I know is care for me. He knows that now. It’s part of his cheat sheet booklet, whatever. So he can he doesn’t even need to look at it anymore. It’s part of his daily practice. He knows how to get it.

Brendon Canale: [00:48:14] Yeah, I have my. I have my people, you know, So I have it. I have a reminder on my phone. 830 goes off every night. I call a person I care about. And, you know, it’s either a person that I need care from or a person that I want to give care to, and that’s very much so simplifying it. But that is a part of like my daily routine, making those phone calls. Like, hey, like it’s been a heavy day. Who do I need to call? Or I need to call this person? And they always just bring that light back, right? And, you know, I’m feeling fired up. You know, I want this person to be fired up to let me call them and, you know, kind of helping them through that, whatever it is.

Sharon Cline: [00:48:49] I love this because it really does give in real time what your company, Front Porch Advisors offers companies, because I’m sure in a way it’s almost like esoteric. It’s almost like you can’t really say it in a quick snippet. It’s it’s complex but not unmanageable. And so I guess I really like that. You’ve had a moment here to explain in a not just from the beginning like we did with Anna Kawa, which was so interesting because it was like the initial this is what it would be like if someone just came to you brand new and assessed. What are your things that you like about yourself and don’t or how it works in your business? But now you can see the other side of you’re not a completely different human being. Like the notion of, Oh, I have to change can be so daunting and scary. And what is this going to mean for why am I still going to like going skateboarding? What, like, what’s it going to mean for my life? But I love that you have your, your your the best version of yourself. Yes. Yes. Oh, still yourself. Just the best version of yourself. Which which to me, if someone told me that you’re going to be the best version of yourself, then I’m not going to be so scared to go through a process of kind of unpacking all of the different things that I don’t like about myself, or I have to look at myself and maybe change and but I don’t want to change too much because that seems like too much.

Brendon Canale: [00:50:10] Learning to use your natural wiring to benefit your job. So, like, I’m a service, like service advisor, service writer. I sell work for a shop. So it was it was exhausting for me when I first started out to sell work for a shop. But whenever that role changed to I’m caring for the customer. That was an internal change. It’s not something that stated that is that is an internal quiet. It was quiet. Exactly. So learning to use my wiring for what I am doing and, you know, growing from there, then make it so that I’m not exhausted doing my job. But it’s actually rewarding is one of the bigger takeaways for me. I don’t know if you guys want to. Oh, but.

Joe Cianciolo: [00:50:53] It also if you notice because he’s humble. Yes. Which is part of his wiring, he’s never arrogant and caretakers are never arrogant. But as a result of this kind of work, his influence makes him a natural team leader. Which is why throwing the term GM, it is a really good fit for him. But traditionally, when you look at that title, a company thinks I need a GM that’s going to be this. No, no, no, no, no. It doesn’t have to be one. It has to be grounded. It has to be. What does the company need to balance out between owner, between other team leads, between other staff members and their company? Needed a Brendan, but he needed to be the best version of himself. And that’s what’s the formula that’s working really well for them. Yeah, it’s it’s glorious to watch.

Sharon Cline: [00:51:42] I love I hope that business owners who are listening right now. Can contact you and say, Here, here are the things that I see aren’t working for me. What’s the best way they could contact you?

Joe Cianciolo: [00:51:52] Well, we are front porch advisors.com esses advisors with an E. I am Joe at Front Porch Advisors. You can email us. You can go to our website. There’s plenty of ways to to connect. But what what I really also hope and why I love today is all of the clients that I get to work with on a leadership level, fearless leadership. I’m going to start saying that fearless leadership because Brendan has been on that leadership journey. He’s in it right now is you can see them intentionally spreading it out because that’s part of what it means to be a fearless leader is that when you know this about yourself and you become grounded, you want other people to be their best selves. And that’s why listening to Brendan talk to you and then all of a sudden flip things.

Sharon Cline: [00:52:36] Back, he was asking me questions.

Joe Cianciolo: [00:52:37] It’s because if we do that as a community, we all want the best around us. We want the best. And that is, like you said, you don’t have to change and you don’t have to pretend to be extremely dominant or extremely demanding. You just have to be grounded because everybody brings something different to the table and it’s necessary in all arenas.

Brendon Canale: [00:52:58] So when everybody sees the fake but they respect the real, so be yourself. Don’t pretend.

Sharon Cline: [00:53:07] I.

Joe Cianciolo: [00:53:07] Won’t pay you later is. But it’s coming out of him. And I get to usually when we’re in session, we’re doing the work like right now. But when we are at this point, I’m watching and he’s coming up with these gems that we it just makes me feel like I want to do more. I want to continue and I see Brendan continuing his journey upwards and the fear has didn’t even play a part today, I don’t think.

Sharon Cline: [00:53:33] Not at.

Joe Cianciolo: [00:53:33] All. Fearless formula.

Sharon Cline: [00:53:35] Fearless formula.

Brendon Canale: [00:53:37] I was ready.

Sharon Cline: [00:53:39] I like that. You say when you’re when you’re elevating yourself and you want to elevate people around you, well, then it just elevates everything. Do you know what I mean? Like, exponentially.

Joe Cianciolo: [00:53:47] Well, and like you said, you can people can feel the fake, and the try is fine. I don’t have a problem with people trying as long as they’re willing to accept that they’re trying. Instead, once you take that away, it can be a little bit simpler and you can be more accepting of what’s real and not sort of trapped or enslaved by your own tendencies. The double edged sword is there for everyone. The question is, is do you know which way to hold it? Do you know which way to use it? And can you stop yourself when you start to see that it’s it’s not the best version of yourself takes practice. Even after all these years, we’ll find plenty of opportunities to say where it’s not. But I bring people like Brendan right into that, where I will call it right out so that I know and he knows.

Brendon Canale: [00:54:33] Yeah, we’ve, we’ve had many sessions where Joe is like did this old tendency.

Sharon Cline: [00:54:39] But you know, I love that you call it even your own fearless formula because you are you have tools, you refer to it. We have a plan for that. This is how we can work around it. You’re not a victim of your circumstance.

Joe Cianciolo: [00:54:51] Well, and it’s really easy to measure numbers, but like you said, the intangible, the the culture that these words have, I think, been a bit co-opted lately. That’s what you you felt from Brandon. Yeah. When we do that, we do have tools and we do have formulas, but it’s sometimes harder for a business owner to think, Man, I really need that because they want to know how is it going to improve sales? Well, this is it. And that’s why I appreciate you coming on to help, because Sharon is one of those people who connects people she’s really good at. But it will be so much easier for everybody when they realize, oh, wait, that’s not natural for me, but maybe one of the people on my team is for them and how do I empower them? What do I need to give them that provides them what they need to be fearless and amazing like?

Sharon Cline: [00:55:39] Brendan So if you if people want to come see you and see this interaction in action, where could they.

Brendon Canale: [00:55:46] Go? Diesel David Inc Type in diesel. David.com. Check us out (770) 874-5094. I’ll be on the phone and.

Sharon Cline: [00:55:55] No one’s going to test you at this point We got.

Brendon Canale: [00:55:57] It. Main Street, Woodstock, Georgia.

Sharon Cline: [00:56:02] Well Brendan Connell and Jose and hello from Front Porch Advisors. I’m so excited that we got to have this conversation today. This is some of my most like I said, I get in my own head and just seeing it in real time, someone right in front of me. You’re different from the first time you came on the show, which was probably last September or maybe maybe August. It’s cool to see. It’s it’s really true. I guess so. All right. Well, listen, everybody out there listening to Fearless Formula, thank you for tuning in today. And this is Sharon Cline again, reminding you that with knowledge and understanding, we can all have our own fearless formula. Have a great day.