TSP049 | Linda Galindo – Transcription

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John:

Hi and welcome to The Successful Pitch. Today’s guest is Linda Galindo. She is an accountability expert, and she talks about the 3 different kinds of flowers as an analogy for the kinds of people you have on your team. There’s the weed, which is very low maintenance, and all you have to do with them is mentor and lead them. There’s the daisy that all they need is some maintenance but not a lot, but you just have to coach those people. Then there’s the orchid that’s very high maintenance, and you basically become a babysitter for somebody like that. You want to avoid having all orchids on your team regardless of their skill set because it’ll drive you crazy. Linda says accountability is investability, which is also creativity, that when you are accountable and have a team that’s accountable, you have a competitive advantage because you don’t have meetings after the meeting. You talk to people, not about them. You don’t rescue, fix, or save anybody who’s an underperformer. Enjoy the episode.

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Hi and welcome to The Successful Pitch podcast. Today’s guest is Linda Galindo. She is an accountability expert and author and a keynote speaker. Linda helps executive leaders realize their definition of success by being accountable. She’s a former radio news personality, so she’s got to have a great voice we know. She’s the author of great books like Way to Grow, as opposed to way to go, The 85% Solution, so we’re going to dive in to what that’s all about. I love the concept of taking responsibility for yourself and your work. She also wrote Where Winners Live about selling more. If you’re listening to this podcast, you know the importance of being perceived as a winner by investors. Linda, welcome to the show.

Linda:

Thank you so much for having me. I love talking about accountability.

John:

That’s one of my favorite topics too. You have something that’s sort of your tag line. I’m always interested in where a tag line comes from with the clients I work with on how important branding is and what you stand for, so the people instantly get it. Yours is the straight truth. Can you tell us how you came up with that tag line?

Linda:

When I had my branding expert that I hired interview all of the CEO clients I had, he came back to me and he said, “I have an archetype that describes you from what they told me.” He said, “That archetype was the little boy that stands in the crowd and says, ‘Excuse me, he’s naked. He doesn’t have any clothes on.'” He said, “Not only do these CEOs say that you just call it out and tell the straight truth, you don’t care if they like it or not. You want them to be successful, so you don’t pull back on your message to say that isn’t clear or you’re the problem or I’m not even going to take you as a client, because the straight truth is you have no interest in being personally accountable yourself. You want everyone else to be accountable.” It’s this fearlessness around just saying, “Hey, this is the deal. Here’s what I see, and I like you just how you are. Take it or leave it. I don’t care if you change, but I’m not going to tell you something you want to hear so I keep the gig. Not going to happen.”

John:

I love it. I really want to dive into this concept of fearlessness, because it’s so crucial for startup funders to be fearless when they start their company and when they run their company, and even when they’re talking to investors. They cannot be coming from a place of fear. Can you take us back to how did you become an accountability expert and how did you learn to be so fearless?

Linda:

It came from being a newscaster, a broadcast journalist. That’s what I wanted to do from the time I was 7 years old. I did have this great voice and a wonderful name to be a newscaster. I followed that passion, and I was on air for 11 years at various stations, and rose very quickly to being an anchor on radio, loved the medium. One day, the sales manager came in to the studio and said that he wanted to see my story lineup. I said, “Who are you?” He said, “I’m the sales manager.” I said, “Okay, here’s my story lineup.” He said, “Well, you have to take this second story out of your lineup.” Why? “Because they are a sponsor.” So? “It’s negative. They’ll pull their advertising.”

I’m getting my first lesson on how the whole picture works. That is that now sales can dictate whether or not you do a story. That didn’t sit well with me, and I had to rethink what am I going to do. In that period of time, I started to notice something, that leaders on news stories who did something great and made money for their organizations or could claim an award had no trouble being personally accountable. I did this, my company, I’m the CEO, it was me. They changed their definition when something didn’t work. I didn’t know about it. I wasn’t told this. How can you expect me to know everything about everything?

They would still get the reward. They’d still leave with the stock, or they’d leave with their bonus, or they’d leave with their golden parachute. I’m thinking, “Huh, that’s interesting.” I think what’s happening in our society is we’re starting to reward not being accountable more than being accountable and quite visibly. That can’t be good. I think that’s what I’ll do. I think I’ll focus on this concept and see if it can be pushed out in the world in a way that’s way more serving than doing a newscast that is dictated by sponsors.

John:

Wow. I love it. It’s such a great example of, what is the problem, and what is the solution I am uniquely qualified to bring? When investors look for what startups they want to fund, and when they’re listening to pitches, that’s exactly the kind of clear, concise way to describe, “Here’s who I help and here’s the problem I solve.” I love it. Thank you so much. There’s so many things I want to talk about. Let’s dive into this personal accountability because it transitions from what you were talking about where you’re only taking responsibility if something’s great and not if it’s bad. The 85% Solution, the kind of person that is in the 85% and the kind that isn’t, can you tell us a little bit about that from your great blog?

Linda:

Yes, because one of the things that investors want to see is measures. Those are concrete. I became very interested in this whole idea that you could measure someone’s mindset about personal accountability. That’s really super-investable. If I said to you, “John, I’m going to bring you to this operating room where you need to get this operation that will save your life. In this operating room you get to ask every single person who’s about to touch you, on a scale of 0 to 100%, how much personal accountability are each of you taking for this being a good outcome? In this other operating room, you don’t get to ask that. You just have to go lie down and take your chances,” now in the one where you get to ask people on a scale of 0 to 100% how much personal accountability are you taking for this being a good outcome, what answer do you want from everyone who’s going to touch you in that surgery?

John:

Ideally 100%, but that’s probably impossible, so I’ll settle for 85.

Linda:

You might say that, yes, but the truth is that by measure, people have an ability to say 100%. The key especially when you’re a startup company and you’re forming your team is that the investor wants per individual. Would you say that would be correct? They want that.

John:

Yes, of course.

Linda:

What is that going to mean? It’s going to mean when something goes wrong, if something isn’t done, or people come unprepared, you don’t hear finger-pointing and blaming. You don’t hear the surgeon say, “Well, for my heart, I’m 100. These other people I can’t control.” You don’t want the circulating nurse saying, “Well, they changed the reward, and I got the surgery started on time but I didn’t get all the instruments cleaned.” This idea that there’s 100% available in total needs to be shifted to there’s 100% per individual available individually and collectively at the same time, which is the true meaning of a team. In this other operating room where you don’t get to ask, you’re taking your chances, and that’s what we do every single day.

John:

Yes.

Linda:

We do it when we make investments. We do it when we go to a provider, get on an airline, eat food. It’s this thing that we’re thinking is going on, and I can actually measure it. If you have a million dollars and there’s 2 companies, and I say, “Well, this one might have the more sexy technology cool thing, but this one has a higher level of accountability,” I can tell you which one you’re going to get your money back from.

John:

That’s right. All the investors I interview talk to me constantly about the importance of the team and their ability to get along and their ability to persevere and pivot when they need to. Accountability is such a huge part of that that there’s no finger-pointing. Once that happens, then the morale plummets, the productivity plummets, and nothing gets done.

Linda:

They’ll all claim that they’re not going to do that, so that’s where The 85% Solution came from. It was going to someone and saying, could we create a measure of mindset before we go in? Why isn’t it the 100% solution? Because what we found over 20 years of doing this, and 15 really focused on the validated assessment, is that, yeah, that stuff happens. There’s turns in the weather. There’s economic stuff. There’s all kinds of things outside of our control. Those things happen.

If your mindset measures on our 4 categories cumulatively at 85% or higher, we can predict with very good certainty that when things do go wrong, you will not even think about uttering an excuse, blame, or finger-point. You will start to talk to, not about the problem. You won’t start having meetings after the meeting. You won’t rescue, fix, and save underperformance. You’ll get very solution-oriented. We’re acknowledging 15% could land on your head, but we can also predict when it does, you will keep working toward the best value for the investor. They won’t start to get skittish because you’re making an excuse or blaming.

At the 85% mark, that’s where we know we’ve got something to work with. The next book, Where Winners Live, is the groups that are between 85 and 100%, a whole new ballgame. You got to dig pretty darn deep. It’s very rigorous. In either case, we don’t take every client that approaches us, because the assessment tells us, at a certain point, where it’s probably not where they need to be. They need to be in basic good management practice, not reaching for the stars and spending an investor’s few million dollars.

John:

You said something that I want to go back to, because I think there’s some gold in there, that when you find people who have this 85% mindset of accountability, and something goes wrong, I didn’t quite catch it all so I want to ask you about it. You said they talk to the problem, not about the problem. Do you remember what you said there?

Linda:

Yeah. There’s a set of very predictable behaviors that come with that 85% by measure. The top 3 of the 12 that we know we’re going to get or we can coach that individual or team to, the top 3, are that as an individual or group, I talk to, not about other people. We don’t engage in the who’s frustrating us, and that investor is really making me crazy, he’s micromanaging me. We talk to each other. There’s this huge trust that’s built on a very solid level in relationship up to and including, if you and I, John, got into a deal, and you started talking about someone who’s also involved and it was negative, I’d say, “John, I need to stop you and go get him, so he can hear this too.” We just don’t have that stuff going along. It’s just nasty and …

John:

Nip it in the bud.

Linda:

… it’s a bad investment all the way around.

John:

Got it.

Linda:

The second thing is no meeting after the meeting.

John:

That’s so great. We’re going to tweet that out. No meeting after the meeting.

Linda:

Now if the one where you’re going to implement, good for you. That’s awesome. Go do that. It’s the one where you start to say stuff you should have said in the meeting, and you’re starting to draw people off of whatever consensus was probably reached. It’s actually extraordinarily immature and ridiculous. Boards of directors do it. High level directorships do it. I’m often admonishing them to the point they start looking at their shoes, because they know they’re doing it. They’re asking me to come into their organization and build accountability when the workforce is doing what they’re doing. Unless you’re willing to give that up and have integrity and raise your own hand and clarify in the meeting, silence is agreement. If you go outside that room and you start up, then it’s again a very bad investment on a group of people that does something like that. You could say to your investor there’s 3 things you can totally count on us for. One is we talk to, not about each other. We don’t have meetings after the meeting. The third is we don’t rescue, fix, and save underperformance. We hold people accountable.

John:

We don’t rescue, fix, or save underperformance.

Linda:

Underperformance.

John:

That’s so great. I love that.

Linda:

People say they love that, but when it comes down to, “It’s just easier to do it myself,” and that’s the startup mentality, we’re all just stretched so thin, no, it isn’t. It’s because you don’t want to sit down with someone and say, “Look, you can be voted off this island. We’re not going to rescue, fix, and save.” It’s like doing a paper with a college group and you want the A. I’m dealing with this all the time right now. The professor puts the groups together or somehow they’re formed, and there’s 2 people in your group that you didn’t pick and they’re losers. You want the A to get into graduate school, so you guys go ahead and pick up the slack for the 2 losers to get the A. Is it ethical to put their name on the paper?

That’s a question that gets asked all the time. It’s like, no, of course it’s not ethical to put their name on something they didn’t do or earn. In order to put this in front of … You switch that to a startup and a company. I see it all the time. The excuse is we just have to be flexible and do it and make sure it happens, because we want to get our seed money or we want to get the next round of funding. You’re building incapacity, a lack of capacity, into what you’re selling your investor. That’s unacceptable. It’s guised under working hard and digging deep, instead of sitting down with people and saying, “Let’s get really clear on what the roles are and what happens if you do not take care of your role. We have to talk about that upfront.” Reassure the investor you’ve done that, that we all own our role. We have to interdepend. We hold each other accountable. We don’t rescue, fix, and save underperformance, so that you’re always being told the truth about what the capacity of our organization actually is.

John:

That’s great. Who doesn’t want that? That’s so great. I really love these 3 things so much, because it separates you from 90% of the pitches that you’re going to hear, because then you’ve got the investor sitting up, listening in, leaning in, going, “Wow, this is the team I want to invest in, because they’re not going to get bogged down in finger-pointing and blaming and rescuing,” and all these other things you’ve just talked about. Can you speak to the importance of creating a culture where it’s safe to raise your hand in a meeting for clarification?

Linda:

That’s done one-on-one. For some of us, we can totally deal with people who are direct and have really bad interpersonal skills. I might be in a meeting. I deal with very high level people, surgeons and elected officials and board members who are in the hundreds of millions of dollars in their companies. If I make a statement and I hear them say something back that is disrespectful or not funny, but instead of calling it out right then, I notice, “Well, that doesn’t make me want to be here and participate. What was that about?”

I just go to them later and say, “Yesterday when I made that statement in answer to the question, this was what I heard back. I’m not sure why I got a vibe that there’s something not great in the relationship between us, so I wanted to check it out. Is there something that I’m doing that I’m not aware of that brings that on? I’d love some feedback.” Now 9 times out of 10, they’ll say something like, “Well, you just got to grow a thicker skin and you’ve got to be a little tougher about these things.” I’ll say, “Okay, I was just checking it out. Thanks so much.” You better believe that when you bring it to them directly, the gig’s up.

John:

Yup. Love it. That goes right into what you term the PMA, the present moment accountability, right?

Linda:

Right.

John:

Yeah.

Linda:

It’s just like I’m accountable for the quality of the relationships I experience. If I’m getting some vibe that someone thinks I’m stupid or don’t know what I’m talking about or I’m too slow to understand their brilliant, marvelous idea, and I get that vibe, I’m going to say, “Help me understand why I’m being talked to this way. I don’t understand what the point is of creating a situation where I don’t really necessarily want to be here.” When you put that way, of course you’re noticing I don’t use the word you are talking to me like I am stupid, I’m curious. Really where it’s coming from at the end of the day is that I really want to be here and I really want a good relationship and I really want to understand if there’s something I’m doing that can create a better situation. I love Shark Tank, because when you watch some of those pitches, you see people get defensive when somebody says, “If you did your homework and the math …” It’s like why am I reacting to that defensively if it’s not true?

John:

Exactly. That’s so key because when you’re in the room with an investor, there’s so much on the line. Your nerves are up probably. You have to really be conscious to be present and accountable at the same time, and not be thinking about what you’re going to say when someone’s asking you a question, but really listening to the question so you answer the question properly, because that’s one of the biggest mistakes I see all the time is people don’t really even hear the question. They answer something, and then the investor feels like you’re avoiding the question. Sometimes they just didn’t listen because they’re not in the moment.

Linda:

I would say that when you replay some of the pitches that went sideways, you didn’t feel really good about them, and I tell this to executives all the time when they’re in that hot seat, getting defensive is a gift. If someone can put you on the defense, they’re a gift to you, because they’re pointing out a blind spot. If it’s not true, you just ask for more information. It’s like, “Oh, that’s interesting you’d say that I didn’t do the math. Tell me what makes you think that.” You go exploring without any energy around it. If it’s, “You know, well, I was winging it,” and you’re caught, boom, that’s where … I’m investing in someone who wings it and hopes they don’t get caught. No thanks.

John:

No, pass, right. That goes to this whole concept of if you don’t know the answer to something, whatever you do, don’t lie, because in due diligence, it will come out. This whole measure of accountability, you’re much better off saying, “I don’t know the answer to that. I know I should, but I don’t,” as opposed to trying to fake it.

Linda:

Yes, and the truth is just lying and hoping no one finds out is the standard of the day. It’s better to hope that you can somehow cover your track later. Okay, those deals are done every single day. They don’t last. You can predict the day and time it’s going to blow up or sink. Why are you doing that? Because I see it get rewarded over and over and over again. All right. How about if we don’t use someone else as your excuse not to be personally accountable for yourself? Don’t be someone who others can use as their excuse not to be personally accountable for themselves. Where winners live, that 85 to 100%, is they understand there’s zero wiggle room. They don’t get to use other people as their excuse. Everyone else is doing this, or it’s my turn at the trough and I’m going to do these things. It’s not illegal. It’s a little unethical, but it’s not illegal, whatever. That’s where we get into trouble. We reward not being accountable more than being accountable, and then it gets all mixed up. We don’t want to do that.

John:

Wow. You mentioned something about teaching companies, big and small, how to get out of the babysitter university. Can you expand on that?

Linda:

Yes, and this is actually … My face just breaks out in this gigantic smile. This is the book Way to Grow. The subtitle of it is Cultivating the Weeds, Daisies, and Orchids in Your Organization, or on your startup team or on your board. What I do is I say … It’s a kind of situational leadership. I kept telling this story over and over again. Somebody said, “You better write that down,” so I turned it into a book. It is okay, John, from now on, you’re going to be a gardener, and you’re going to garden these entrepreneurial opportunities and deals. You’re going to garden the management teams in your businesses. You’re going to only have 3 flowers to work with. The first flower is a weed. You want to grow weed. Weeds, you want to grow weeds. Weeds are … Sure.

John:

As opposed to the other kind of weed, yes.

Linda:

Listen, here’s why, because they’re low maintenance. Weeds, you don’t go out and water your weeds. They get in the cement. They jump the cement. Weed killer, they figure out how to be resistant to it. They’re very low maintenance. They’re the ones that come in and say, “Got dirt, I grow.” They won’t finger-point and blame. They’ll score 85 or higher on the assessment of mindset for personal responsibility and personal accountability. They’ll take ownership. They just want to grow and do these great things.

The second flower is a daisy. Daisies come in varieties. Some need some sun, and some need some shade, and some different things, but there’s degrees of that. I’m going to coach a daisy, whereas with a weed, I’m going to mentor and lead a weed, where they’re in a good position to be a mentor or a leader. The daisies though, they just need a little support and help. We sit down with them. Maybe they don’t shine at the spreadsheets or understanding the business as a whole. We’re going to give them coaching.

It’s the third flower that’s going to get you. The third flower is the orchid, because they’ll come in very high maintenance. I need steam. It’s too hot. It’s too cold. Where’s my special food? I need to be turned to the sun. They just suck you dry. Sometimes they’re the most technically competent. I have all of the knowledge and everything you need, but they just make you nuts, because they’re so high maintenance. They’ve equated their knowledge and skill with being able to be a good team player or accountable, and that couldn’t be further from the truth. A lot of times, people try to pass them around and get rid of them. They figure out that if you will rescue, fix, and save all the part that they don’t like to do, that they need to work for an orchid farmer, someone who is going to rescue, fix, and save in order to make it right, and they’re just very, very high maintenance.

You manage an orchid, you coach a daisy, and you lead a weed. In this opportunity, if you don’t handle those orchids, you’re going to be a babysitter. 9 times out of 10, when the manager or the lead in an entrepreneurial startup says, “I feel like a babysitter. I’m running after deadlines and getting people to do what they’re supposed to do,” I say, “That’s because you have all orchids. You’ve got to press the reset button here and stop feeding that and get clear with people on their role, and stop using the excuse that we’re all busy,” because some of these things have to get done. You need to have that conversation now. Otherwise, you’re just going to get sucked dry by the orchid.

John:

So good. Even something as simple as coming to work on time, and the orchids are always a little bit late with lots of excuses. They’ve got 101 things going on because they’re such a orchid that they can’t just walk out of the room and get to work on time because 6 other things take priority, right? It’s that …

Linda:

High maintenance.

John:

High …

Linda:

Very expensive.

John:

Yes. So many people feel like, “Ooh, if I have this tech skill, then I can be a diva,” or, “If I have this great sales track record, people will put up with this behavior.” It’s not necessarily the case. It reminds me of what you said at the beginning of the episode which is the difference between investing in a startup that may not have the sexy tech thing, but they have the accountability, versus the people who have a sexier tech thing, may not have the accountability. In this case, the orchid is prettier than a weed, but not worth the high maintenance, right?

Linda:

Very much so. I got interested in the whole investability equals accountability to me when I went to a merger and acquisition class with a nationally known seminar provider. I was very curious about the M&A world. I’m listening and I’m thinking, “This is ridiculous. There’s times when the people that are investing just fall in love with the deal, but they’re not paying any attention to whether the team they’re buying, the energy and folks that are going to make this happen, are they accountable or not?” I brought that up.

The guy closed the door and he said, “Let me tell you something. They could care less. They’ll just replace them with the team they want if they like the idea,” versus how about if you take a picture of whether you’ve got that accountability you want or not? He said, “It’ll never happen. They fall in love with the deal. They want that thing, and they’re not paying attention over here.” Then I saw this light go on. I said, “What an opportunity.” I fix lack of accountability in organizations. Why do you want to choose me to do that? You want to choose me because I turn down people. I don’t take everybody.

It’s like, do you really want to get there, because the level of rigor to do this is unusual. It’s absolutely, no question about it, a competitive advantage. You’re spending your time and money on the thing that will make it work, not this dumb stuff like, “Joe doesn’t come in on time,” or, “Finance isn’t getting the reports so that we can report to our invest,” all that kind of stuff, the babysitting stuff. You could predict it right up front, but it’s not for everybody. That is for sure. It absolutely is not for everybody.

John:

In my opinion, listening to you, if people want to live where the winners live, they will hire you to make them accountable so that they can have that competitive edge.

Linda:

You make such a good point. I love it, to make them accountable. See, I don’t do that. If I could do that, I’d charge more. I don’t do that. What I do is I educate people to what accountability really is so they can decide. My mantra is you cannot mandate accountability. You can only demonstrate it. With investors in particular, you only get 1 bite at that apple. 1 excuse, 1 finger-point, 1 blame, you’re done. Really, come on. What do you do … When Apollo 13 happened and they had a sock, a bag, and duct tape to fix it, or something like that, you didn’t hear them going, “Well, if you had put an extra bag on the thing, we would have had blah blah.” You didn’t hear any of that. You heard, “Failure’s not an option. Let’s go in this room. Let’s commit to making this work with very limited resource, high performance team.” Of course, you can’t operate like that every single day. You’ll burn out. When you’re very clear and you take ownership and you go forward that way, oh my gosh, sky’s the limit. Very, very investable.

John:

Without having your skill set in the team and the training, they don’t have that in their toolbox. As has said, if the only tool you have in your toolbox is a hammer, you go around with hitting nails. You’re giving people all the tools of accountability so that they can decide when to bring it out and how to use it. I love this. We’re going to tweet this. You can’t only mandate, you can only demonstrate, accountability.

Linda:

Yes. It’s personal. If you don’t make it personal, you’re wasting your time. What is the phone call I get all the time? Come in and make them more accountable. Now what the leader doesn’t understand, and that’s the only person I’ll talk to who hires me is, that what’s going to happen is I’m going to put up a mirror. When you look at yourself in the mirror and you see your hair is all because you were out in the wind, you don’t reach into the mirror to fix it. You take care of it on your side. 9 times out of 10, the leader will say, “Oh, I’m very accountable. That’s where I got where I am.” Then they take the assessment, and somebody’s crying by the end of that. It’s not me.

John:

Yeah, interesting. I love it. What a fascinating … I love all the weeds, daisies, and orchids, and just identifying what kind of people you have on your team, which kind of people to avoid, being in the present moment to stay accountable. It’s just fantastic, great, great stuff. Of course, no meeting after the meeting has got to be one of my all-time favorite lines ever. Linda, how can people … You have 3 great books. You have Where Winners Live, The 85% Solution, and Way to Grow. Are there any other books that you would recommend founders to read or are they covered with those 3?

Linda:

Wow. Of course, Judy Robinett’s book which is all about connecting. It’s fantastic. I have been in the business for over 20 years, and we’ve heard the networking, connecting thing, because once you understand where you are with your personal accountability, you want to connect with like mind. That is an aspect of power connecting. Be sure to pick that up, because once you take ownership fully of the power of connection, you have to have good tools, so hers.

John:

We’ll be sure to tag that in the show notes along with yours, How to Be a Power Connector. Yes.

Linda:

Yeah. Personally I get a lot out of Warren Bennis’s book, Why Leaders Can’t Lead: The Unconscious Conspiracy. It’s just so true, and it’s true today. He wrote it back in 1985, believe it or not. I just love it, because it says we get drawn into the minutia so easily it’s ridiculous. We need to be very aware that that’s the choice we make and to cut it out, because the minutia, just dumb stuff, that is like a little blinky instead of the Apollo 13. We have this and this is what we have to work with. The more accountability you have, the more creativity you’re going to demonstrate. Accountability equals investability, and accountability equals creativity, both of those things.

John:

Nice. Great. It’s so fascinating. That book was written so long ago, and it’s even more true today than it was, because the whole distractions of email and getting caught in the minutia of email versus the creativity stuff. It’s great. How can people follow you on social media, and how can people get your books? Obviously we’re going to put the link on Amazon to buy them, but as far as hiring you to be a speaker and all that good stuff.

Linda:

My name is my website, lindagalindo, G-A-L-I-N-D-O.com, and there is, right there when you go to lindagalindo.com, my blog. I write this fantastic blog. On Facebook, it’s linda.galindo.accountability. There we have yet more fabulous connections to all things accountability. My Twitter handle is @ru, the letters R-U, accountable. We tweet out as often as I find really great stuff to remind us that accountability is a competitive advantage for you, individually and collectively. Website’s probably your best bet for all things, lindagalindo.com.

John:

Nice. It’s been a pleasure having you on the show. Thank you so much. It goes so fast with somebody like you with so many great ideas. Thanks for your energy and your insights.

Linda:

My pleasure. Go out there and pitch.

John:

Will do. Thanks Linda. Thanks for listening for listening to The Successful Pitch podcast. If you like the show, please go to iTunes and write a review, and encourage your friends to write reviews too. It really helps get the word out. People say that the longest distance is between someone’s mouth and their wallet. People can tell you they’re going to invest, but when it comes time to write the check, they don’t do it. How do you get people to say yes and then follow through? Visualize yourself on the left side of a river bank, and you have to cross the river. On the other side of the river is where the funding happens.

First, you make up your idea. Then you make it real. Then you make it reoccur. Once you start dipping your toe into the water to get to funding, that’s where I can help. I get you across that river faster than you would on your own with a lot less frustration than you will get when you hear a bunch of nos and you don’t know why. If you want some help getting funded faster with less frustration, go to my free funding webinar, sellingsecretsforfunding.com/webinar. Sign up and get in-depth information on how you can get funded fast. Thanks.