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Wisdom At Work With Chip Conley

Posted by John Livesay in podcast | 0 comments

21.06.21

TSP Chip Conley | Wisdom At Work

 

When you were young, you had kindergarten. When you were a teenager, you had high school. When you were a young adult, you had college. What happens when you reach midlife? Research says that midlife starts at 35 and ends at 75. Does learning stop at 35? Is that why people call it a midlife crisis? Join your host, John Livesay, and his guest, Chip Conley, in this discussion about why being middle-aged is just bad branding. Chip is the Founder of Modern Elder Academy and is the best-selling author of Wisdom at Work. Learn all about the Modern Elder Academy and why Chip created it to fight off the negative stigma of midlife. Also, learn the difference between retirement and regeneration, diversity, and so much more.

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Listen to the podcast here

 

Wisdom At Work With Chip Conley

Chip Conley, the Bestselling Author of Wisdom at Work and the Founder of the Modern Elder Academy. He said middle age has bad branding. It’s not just a crisis. We talked about the difference between retirement and regeneration. When you are as curious as you are wise, you are a modern elder. Enjoy the episode. On this episode’s guest is Chip Conley who is a Rebel Hospitality Entrepreneur and New York Times Bestselling Author. He disrupted his favorite industry twice. At 26 years old, he founded Joie de Vivre Hospitality, which transformed an inner-city motel into the second largest boutique hotel brand in America. He sold that after running it as CEO for 24 years.

The young founders of Airbnb asked him to help transform their promising startup into the world’s leading hospitality brand. He served as Airbnb’s head of global hospitality and strategy for four years and now acts as the company’s strategic advisor for hospitality and leadership. His five books have made him a leading authority at the intersection of psychology and business. He was awarded the Most Innovative CEO by the San Francisco Business Times and is the recipient of the hospitalities highest honor, the Pioneer Award. He holds an MBA from Stanford and is also, where we are going to get into, the Founder of something that I’m extremely impressed with called MEA, the Modern Elder Academy.

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Chip, welcome to the show.

John, it’s great to be with you. Thank you.

You have so many words of wisdom. My favorite book of yours, Wisdom at Work is just something I have read multiple times. I usually don’t have the time to read a book more than once but it’s become a resource for me. Before we get into how you’ve got to be so dang smart and wise, let’s go back to your own story of origin. Tell us, childhood or your days at Stanford, wherever you want to start.

I grew up in Southern California in Long Beach. I wanted to be a writer and an entrepreneur and my dad said, “Entrepreneur, yes. Writer, no. Writers are poor and psychotic.” Ultimately, I became an entrepreneur and a writer. I was a rebel, of course, but I went to the College of Stanford. I went to business school at Stanford. I’ve got an MBA. About 2.5 years, out of Stanford Business School at age 26. I decided to call my new boutique hotel company Joie de Vivre. It is not easy to say, spell or even know what it means in America. French for Joie de Vivre. That was our mission. Our mission was to create joy. I figured, “Why not have the name of the company and the mission of the company being the same.”

I started with a broken-down motel in the Tenderloin in San Francisco and grew that into 52 boutique hotels around the State of California over the next 24 years as the Founder and CEO. It became the second-largest boutique hotel here in the US. I loved it until I hated it. There was nothing in between for 22 years. What happened was, I was starting to love the writing more. The third book I wrote was called PEAK: How Great Companies Get Their Mojo from Maslow. It became a bestseller. I started giving speeches on it, and then the Great Recession came along in 2008. I didn’t want to do this anymore. I didn’t want to be founder and CEO anymore but I didn’t set up the company to have a succession plan.

The Great Recession started to wipe us out and I had a bunch of other stuff going on. I had a difficult couple of years around 47, 48, 49 years old. Finally, I’ve got to the places that I’ve got to sell this company. I did it during the recession. What’s fascinating is it allowed me to say, “I now am without a resume, without a job and identity.” It was weird. I felt naked. That’s the time that the three founders of Airbnb came along. A couple of years ago, I joined them and it was a small tech company. Nobody in the company had a hospitality or travel background.

[bctt tweet=”DQ, Digital Intelligence, also requires EQ.” username=”John_Livesay”]

That was a fascinating journey, helping them guide the rocket ship in a 70-hour week. I only did it for four years. While I was there that I came to realize, they were calling me the modern elder behind my back. I wasn’t sure if I liked that. It sounds like modern elder lee. I was mentoring Brian, the CEO and Joe is the Cofounder. He said, “Modern elder’s as curious as they are wise.” That’s what led me to where I am now. When I left my full-time role and became a strategic advisor of the company, it gave me the space to write Wisdom at Work: The Making of a Modern Elder. While I was writing that down here in Baja, where I had a home on the beach, I had a Baja a-ha and epiphany. That’s when I decided, “We’ve got to create MEA.” That’s a quick summation.

There are a couple of things that stood out for me. “I loved it until I hated it.” Twenty-two years, it was joyful. I can’t help but think about personal relationships, marriages, partnerships, or any relationship with something. Not everything has to last forever for it to be a success. We could be in those relationships with ourselves and go, “It’s time for something new.” It doesn’t mean that it wasn’t great or that I’m a failure at this just because I don’t want to do it anymore.

We all evolved and there are things in life that we think will be permanent but nothing is permanent, including ourselves. We die at some point. Your reputation could live on. There’s a famous Developmental Psychologist named Erikson. He says, “I am what survives me.” I like that. It speaks to legacy. Your legacy and your reputation can live on. There are things in life that have to have an end. I didn’t think I would have an end with the company I started but I had a flatline experience. I died multiple times after having an allergic reaction to an antibiotic that I was on. I died on stage, even worse, it was right after giving a speech in St Louis. It was that moment at age 47, almost 48, where I just said, “Something is not working here.” There were a lot of things that are not working. It allowed me to step back and say, “This is the wake-up call for this hotelier.”

I have a phrase that I would love your opinion on, which is, “If not now, when?”

What that phrase does is it says stop procrastinating and stop optimizing for some perfect time because often, the perfect time is now.

The concept of a Modern Elder is as curious as they are wise, I have found that people I know who are fully alive in their ’80s, friend of mine turned 90, she has always been someone extremely curious. That doesn’t stop just because we get older. That need to keep learning and stay on top of what’s going on and have an opinion about something makes me want to dive into what you are doing at the Modern Elder Academy, which is creating, first of all, a safe space for people to be vulnerable. Would you say that’s accurate?

TSP Chip Conley | Wisdom At Work

Wisdom At Work: Your legacy and your reputation can live on, but there are things in life that have to have an end.

 

That is very accurate. This is particularly important for men. Let me give you the background on what it is the Modern Elder Academy and then we can dive into what we do there. While I had this big Baja a-ha reading on the beach, what came to me was the following, why do we not have any schools or tools, rites of passage or rituals for people in midlife? Midlife has a bad brand because we slapped on midlife crisis. That’s the term that everybody associates with midlife.

Sociologists say midlife now extends from 35 to 75. It’s starting earlier than in the past. The past was 45 to 65. Why is it 35 to 75? Why is it a marathon? It’s partly because in certain industries if you are a software engineer, an advertising executive, a model, a professional athlete, there are a lot of industries where people feel over the hill at age 35. Similarly, there are a lot of people who are not going to retire at 65. They are going to live longer. They are going to work longer. If midlife is 40 years long, what do we have to help people through that period? That’s why we created the world’s first midlife wisdom school, the Modern Elder Academy down here in Baja.

Our program is dedicated to what we call long-life learning. We like lifelong learning but long-life learning is a different thing than lifelong. Lifelong learning, says, “At age 30 or 60, you are learning something new.” It doesn’t suggest that maybe what you want to learn and how you learn it is different at age 60 than at age 30. Long-life learning is based on the premise that as we are living longer, we want to live a life that’s as deep and meaningful as it is long. It’s not just about filling your head with knowledge. It’s having the curiosity to figure out what is valuable to you and how can you be a value in the world. How do you cultivate and harvest your wisdom and repurpose it in new ways?

We like to call this same seed, different soil. You have a seed inside of you but the question is, “How do you go out?” Let’s use examples rather than being abstract. My seed was my company. I became one of the better-known hospitality executives in the US as a boutique hotelier. I sold that company. I still had that seed. I thought my seed was exclusively knowing the hospitality business and travel. What I didn’t realize is that seed was wisdom around leadership and entrepreneurship. When I was asked to go to Airbnb, they thought they wanted me for my hospitality knowledge but Brian Chesky has said to me many times, “What we’ve got was not just my hospitality knowledge, we’ve got your leadership and entrepreneurship wisdom.” That’s the same seed, different soil. How do we help people at 45, 55, 65, maybe even 75 take that wisdom, that seed and make it relevant to other people out there in the world?

What you are offering and the success stories that I have seen from being on your email list and watching you on social media is using one of the genres of storytelling that I love, which is this rebirth. It’s a Wonderful Life is an example of a movie that rebirth. Even Prudential at one point had a campaign about your retirement is not a continuation of middle age, it’s your third act. It’s time for a rebirth. That concept, as you said, there’s no transition. Otherwise, it feels like, “I’m in middle age, going to feel and do the same things I have been doing since I’m 40 now that I’m 62.”

That is so helpful to give people, as you said, these same seeds, different soil. For myself, I have looked at it from a standpoint of I have a sales career. I was successful at Condé Nast and other companies. You are like, “What else?” I have given a TEDx Talk. Larry King interviewed me. Now, I have different things to help people with, not just help them win new business. A lot of people have a dream of giving a TEDx Talk.

[bctt tweet=”Midlife has a branding problem.” username=”John_Livesay”]

A lot of people would love to be interviewed by the press. A brand is all storytelling. What story do you tell the press? What story do you tell in a TEDx Talk? It’s a very different story than you speak to an audience of salespeople. Uncovering different parts of our skillsets, in your case, you are like, “I know hospitality.” No, you also know leadership and entrepreneurship. These are things that, especially young people, need and value. You have completely given people a reframing instead of feeling awkward or embarrassed that they are older. You should want this.

There are a couple of thoughts here. Do you know that 40% of Americans have a boss that’s younger than them? If you are 55 years old, 70% of 55 years old have a boss younger than them. By the year 2025, the US Department of Labor predicts that the majority of Americans will have a younger boss. What does that mean? We have never had this. This is a new phenomenon. We never had it before. It’s partly because people are living longer. Sometimes when they get older, they say, “I want to work part-time.” They can’t be the boss anymore. It’s also because of digital intelligence, DQ is more important.

Brian Chesky, CEO of Airbnb and I had a trade relationship. I offered him EQ. He offered me DQ. I was able to offer him some emotional intelligence. When I joined Airbnb, I was 52. Brian was 31. He was my boss. I was his mentor. That’s an unusual situation. What’s beautiful about it is that we had something to teach each other. Here’s your mentorship. Here we have these young digital leaders creating companies that are becoming billion-dollar companies almost overnight and yet they need to microwave their emotional intelligence and leadership skills because they have never been in this situation.

How do we create an alliance between younger and older? These are leaders such that we can be there to support them and help them be better leaders. I’m proud of Brian. I have been working with him for many years. He’s now a public company CEO, Airbnb. Airbnb’s value is worth more than Marriott, Hilton, Hyatt Intercontinental and Wyndham combined, whether it should be worth that to be determined, the fact is what it’s worth. This is a company that has grown to that point. Here’s a guy who went to design school at the Rhode Island School of Design, had no business background at all, and is now leading that company as a public company. Good for him. I’m proud. He’s like my son.

What you are describing, in my opinion, is the EQ that you brought to the table gave him a frame of reference that he didn’t have because he was either too young or it wasn’t part of his skillset yet. Without that frame of reference, you are almost, as a mentor, a Sherpa. “I would climb this mountain before. This is the path we want to avoid. You will get frustrated spinning your wheels here. You need to have this philosophy about hiring and firing people because you will hold on to somebody too long.” It’s not producing whatever the skills that you have been through. You could go, “I don’t have to reinvent every wheel myself. You have been up this mountain before. You can save me so much time.” I love that.

The other thing that I find so fascinating about you is, we both have been interviewed by Ageist Magazine, which you have to be over a certain age and be comfortable with what your age. We are also both openly gay men. I find that everyone has a journey. I think to myself on that journey, two years apart in age, me being 62, the premise of coming out, whenever you do that is one thing. You go, “I’m so much freer than I have this ‘secret.’” Back in the early ’80s, that was not as comfortable to be in the Corporate America world as it is now.

TSP Chip Conley | Wisdom At Work

Wisdom At Work: Whenever anyone has to water down or dilute who they are to accommodate the majority, especially the dominant power, they risk losing some diversity and even creativity.

 

Now, a lot of people feel like they have to keep their age a secret. I thought to myself, “No, you need to come out about your age as well and own that.” Otherwise, you are walking around with another secret. There are few people that I can have this conversation with. Even if you don’t happen to have the coming out of sexuality issue. Many people will be reading this and they are going to be talking about it in terms of whatever age. I feel old over the 35 already. I wanted to bring that up as a topic for you. Even myself, I had to go, “If someone doesn’t want to hire me as a speaker because I’m this age and I’m openly gay, then that’s fine but I’m not going to pretend to be somebody I’m not to get a job.”

I want you to write a wisdom or blog post from a guest post for me on that subject. It’s a great idea. Let’s start by saying, “Whenever anyone has to water down or dilute who they are to accommodate the majority, especially the dominant power or forces, we have a risk of losing some diversity and even some creativity.” This is what I said to the world. We need to have an annual Be the Other Day, BTO because everybody needs to learn what is it like to be in a non-dominant power. It helps people to understand, “I can walk a mile in your shoes.”

I understand if you are a woman in a male-dominant place, an LGBTQ person in a place that’s predominantly heterosexual, a person of color in a place that’s predominantly white, as you said, a person who’s older in a predominantly younger workplace or vice versa. The younger person who feels like they have to almost act like they are five years older than they are, the thing that we need to help people with is the idea that having those diverse voices, there’s so much evidence that diversity on teams on average is better as opposed to worse.

If you are a diverse person on the team but you feel like you have to act like a man, it’s because you are a woman, a white person because you are a black person, a straight person because you are gay, a young person talking as if you rap, that’s 62 years old. That process, if it’s not genuine, if it’s coming from a place of muting who you are, it’s not good for the organization and certainly not good for yourself. I love the idea of coming out with one’s age. It is a very much topic we converse about here at the Modern Elder Academy and especially in our MEA Online class, which is on the website. We definitely go into that topic a lot.

There are six different kinds of ways to engage with the community. One, you mentioned, you don’t even have to go down to Baja. You can connect with the community online. You have these wonderful two weeks or longer sabbaticals. Let’s hear what that’s like.

Sabbatical Sessions was a pandemic project because we had to close down on March 15, 2020, pandemic came along. Six and a half months later, we reopened with what we called Sabbatical Sessions. It’s people coming for extended stays. We have had people come for as long as three months. At a minimum of two weeks, the intent is to give people the space to reflect. The programming we have is much less intense. It’s a little bit each day and it’s all optional. It’s three spectaculars, healthy and delicious meals a day. We are on the beach. We used our campus for a different use, instead of our very intensive, emotionally, physically, intimate workshops, which didn’t feel quite right during COVID. It’s been really popular. There are a lot of people who come for two weeks and say, “I’m staying for 4, 6, 8, then 10.” They keep extending. I hope they don’t have a pet dog at home.

[bctt tweet=”Regeneration, not retirement.” username=”John_Livesay”]

You mentioned that the workshops can be somewhat intense. Who are the workshops for and how would somebody know if that’s something they need?

What we often say is that our purpose as an organization is to help people to navigate midlife transitions. Let’s face it. There are all kinds of transitions that happen in their life. They were not careered once. You have a career or a job transition. You can lose your parents. If you have kids, you can become an empty nester. You could be in the sandwich generation, taking care of your parents and your kids at the same time. You could go through menopause or men go through something called andropause. You could have a divorce or the end of a long-term relationship. There are a lot of things that happen in this period.

A person who is well suited to come to MEA or do the MEA Online course is probably somebody who’s in the midst of transition. A lot of people, with the pandemic, are in the midst of transition. Our workshops here in Baja are based upon the premise that, “You come for a week. There’s a core curriculum that’s 75% of the program of the week. You are in a group of 18 to 20 people. The other 25% is whatever the theme of the week is with the guest faculty member.” The theme could be money, dating and relationships, purpose and legacy, and mindfulness. There are a lot of different kinds of workshops we have, average ages 54. A large percentage of our people here in our Baja campus are on some form of scholarship we give them, which is great. We have a diverse collection of people. Over 60% are women. We want more men. Men have a hard time being vulnerable. A lot of men, not everybody, that’s the program. Now we have bought a ranch, 2,600 acres just outside of Santa Fe. We are working on that campus. Hopefully, we will have a campus in Santa Fe as well.

I know for myself when my dad died years ago and I was still in the throes of working in Corporate America, how intense that was. You had your own health challenges. A lot of us haven’t had that health challenge but when a parent dies, that is a huge wake-up call. I would think a lot of people could use some transition of a wake-up call for your mortality when a parent dies.

Death is one of the things we don’t talk a lot about in our culture and yet it is so inevitable, just like taxes. Helping people to make sense of it, we even have a workshop with Michael Hebb. We started an organization called Death Over Dinner, which is how to have dinner conversations around the subject of aging and death. This guy is in his mid-40s. We are in our late 40s. It’s about around 45 or 50 where people start to think about a little bit more for themselves because of their parents, partly because their own body starts to run down in certain ways. It’s a very important subject. It’s also something you don’t want to be paralleled in Harold and Maude who gets a little obsessed about it. Death is a beautiful organizing principle for life. It helps you to understand how you want to live your own life but it is not the purpose of life. The purpose in life is not dying like the purpose of running a marathon. It isn’t necessarily hitting the finish line. It is having the sense of accomplishment of running 26.2 miles, the enjoyment, and hopefully, the endorphin high along the way.

When I interviewed Alison Levine, the first woman to ever climb Mount Everest, she said, “It’s just ice and rocks gang at the top. That’s not what it’s about.” You think you are going to get there to have some amazing epiphany. The other thing that I’m so impressed with is when someone goes to the Modern Elder Academy, they have the opportunity to be part of this alumni membership. Even if they were not there when some other people who had been there before them might have some wisdom to share, you suddenly are tapping into not just the people you are interacting with when you are there but the entire legacy of all that collective wisdom. It must be an amazing value for people.

TSP Chip Conley | Wisdom At Work

Wisdom at Work: The Making of a Modern Elder

When we were doing the beta program three years ago in the first half of 2018 here in Baja, we are trying out MEA to see if people like the idea of the one-week workshops. We used that two-week workshop then. We found that one week was better. The number one thing we heard from our beta participants was, “Where’s your alumni program?” That was a good sign. If the number one question is the alumni program that says, “Whatever we were doing, was working.”

We now have 1,250 alumni from 25 countries who are part of the alumni program. We have twenty regional chapters around the world. The most active one is in Australia and New Zealand. It’s a great collection of people. There are three ways you become an alumnus. You come down to do a workshop here in Baja. We are reopening for workshops until Thanksgiving, do Sabbatical Sessions in the meantime or you do MEA Online, which is the easiest way to become an alum because you do it from home. It’s the most affordable. It’s an eight-week course. That is easy to accomplish and very connected. Most online learning courses are boring and nobody finishes it. We call it digital intimacy. How do we help? You are in a cohort of six people and you feel a sense of digital intimacy by feeling the sense of connection with your small group and your cohort.

You just dropped a really another great value bomb there. I want to underline it for readers, which is when your customers, clients, whatever you want to call them, tell you what they are looking for, that’s your social proof that you should create something. Listen to what people are saying they want or need and would be willing to see value in or pay for. I wanted to underline that. The last thing I want to ask you about is this wonderful pillar of regeneration. You hinted at it in terms of form, soil, seed and putting the same seed in different soil. For their soil, there’s a soul, community and locale. Would you mind touching briefly on that? How can people get a sense of how that would be another compelling reason to integrate that? If one of those is missing, it’s like a stool without enough legs, I’m guessing.

Here’s the idea. In some ways, we are disrupting two industries. Having been a disrupter twice before, I can promise, you become an entrepreneur to be a disruptor. You create something that starts to disrupt. There are two things we are disrupting with MEA. One is higher education. Why are we disrupting or what? How are we disrupting higher education? Clay Christensen, the famous thinker who was unfortunately passed away, said years ago, “Half of the American colleges and universities will go out of business in the next years.”

That was even pre-COVID. COVID has made it even harder more than go out of business. We are disrupting higher education by bringing college professors and academics to the area of long-life learning and midlife learning. What if some of these college campuses that are going to go out of business became a midlife wisdom school? What if alumni can no longer give enough money for a particular campus? It’s gorgeous. It has been around for 120 years. What if that university says, “We are changing our model.”

Instead of dealing with people 25 and younger, we are now in midlife wisdom school. You can get a one-year certificate and you do a gap year. That’s one thing. Secondly, the other thing we have noticed and listened to, is people said, “I love coming to MEA. I want to live this lifestyle year-round, not just one week a year when I come to visit you.” That’s when we started to think, “Let’s create a residential community.” Instead of it being a residential community, we decided for it to be a Regenerative Community, not a retirement community.

[bctt tweet=”Stop procrastinating and stop optimizing for some perfect time because often, the perfect time is now.” username=”John_Livesay”]

What is the Regenerative Community? It has a regenerative farm. It’s better than a sustainable organic farm because it enriches the soil. It does what’s called carbon sequestration, which is good for the climate and has better crops. It’s not monocropping. Instead of a fairway in the center, like in a retirement community, there’s a farm in the center. We have an academy. People come here to learn. If you are in this community and you are buying a home around the farm, you also have a school there. While you may not go to workshops every week, of course, you are not going to do that, there are some collateral benefits to being where the school is.

There’s a famous speaker, Brené Brown is coming to town. She’s going to be giving a workshop for a week, David Brooks, or Paul Hauck. You can sit in on a public lecture that this person is going to do. Plus, other programs as well. Soil is the farm, the soul is the sense of regeneration people have. Community is our broader MEA community, living in an intentional community with a bunch of homes and people who all have similar interests. Locale is wherever we go to do this, we want to be a net positive benefit to the community.

A lot of times, if you think about retirement communities now, they have walled off their gated communities. Everybody there is 65 plus, and often 80 plus. There’s no sense of connection. This is not true of all of them but it’s true for most of them. They are not very connected to the community other than occasionally getting people on a bus and taking them to the shopping mall so they can go shop. Why aren’t there mentorship programs? Why isn’t there a co-working space intergenerationally in the retirement community so that old entrepreneurs and young entrepreneurs can be side by side and learn from each other? Aren’t other volunteers providing service from that retirement community in the broader community? In essence, we are creating a regenerative community. We will be disrupting the retirement community and senior living space. We are disrupting two things at once. Both of them, which is quite frankly ready to be disrupted.

As you are building this regenerative garden, that is a metaphor for people doing the same thing for their body and their mind. Also, the awareness of nature has cycles and seasons, not to resist one coming in the next. There are a lot there I’m sure quite wonderful. Any last thought or a quote from your book that you want to leave us with?

Here are a couple of thoughts. Let me define the word elder. In Modern Elder, they are curious as they are wise. An elder is different from than elderly. Elderly is the last 5 or 10 years of your life. Elder is a relative term. It speaks to who you are surrounded by. If you are an advertising agency and you are 42, you might be an elder. Similarly, if you are a software engineer and you are 40, you might be an elder around a bunch of people who have just joined MIT and know a whole new tech language.

The elder of the past, they were respected because they were perceived as being reverent. There was a revering the elders. You revered your elders. Now is not about reverence, it’s about relevance. The modern elder is not about being reverent to the modern elder, it’s about the modern elder being relevant. That’s why the curiosity piece is so essential. If you are not long-life learning, if you are not constantly learning something new, it’s hard to know how to take that wisdom you have and put it in the context of a bunch of people who don’t understand what you are saying because you don’t understand the tech business as I did. I joined a tech company at age 52, had never been in a tech company. That’s why my curiosity around tech was essential. Otherwise, I would be just passing out wisdom. I was talking about how many rooms a maid cleans in eight hours? That’s relevant to the hospitality industry of hotels but not Airbnb.

If people want to explore being part of that wonderful community, follow you, you have your own website, which is your name, ChipConley.com. Wisdom at Work is the book. Any other ways that you want people to follow you on social media or join your email list?

WisdomWell is one of the better ways. It’s a daily subscriber opportunity that is free. My LinkedIn profile is where we post almost all of those articles so you can stay at it. Keep an eye on it there too.

Chip, thanks for sharing your wisdom, not just at work but in your own life. It has been a joy to interview you.

Thank you, John. I appreciate it. I appreciate what you are doing in the world. You’ve got a great message.

Thanks.

 

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Business Mastery With Bill Prater

Posted by John Livesay in podcast | 0 comments

16.06.21

TSP Bill Prater | Business Mastery

 

If you want to excel in business, don’t think like the players in your niche. Instead, figure out what the elite players do and emulate them. Joining John Livesay in today’s episode is Bill Prater, a business owner, entrepreneur, publisher, author, speaker, consultant, and coach. Bill is best known for his long-term success in enabling business owners and leaders to quickly eliminate personal barriers, rapidly reach their current dreams, and embark on a journey of business mastery. Today, Bill shares some insights on how you can think like an elite performer and dominate your market. Enjoy the episode.

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Listen to the podcast here

 

Business Mastery With Bill Prater

Our guest on the show is Bill Prater, who’s an expert at Business Mastery. He tells people not to use the same approach for all problems. He’s got some insights on how to dominate your market and how to think like an elite performer. Finally, he says, “Always be ignorant. Don’t be afraid to ask questions and stay curious.” Enjoy the episode.

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Welcome to the show. Our guest is Bill Prater, who’s a business owner, an entrepreneur, a publisher, author, speaker, consultant, and coach. He’s best known for his long-term success in enabling business owners and leaders to quickly eliminate personal barriers so they can rapidly reach their dreams and embark on this journey of Business Mastery. His own story was that he was excelling in sales, sales training, and sales management at IBM in the computer division as a national sales manager and a partner in the country’s largest oil and gas securities firm. He raised more than $750 million of equity capital in eight years. He recruited, trained, and led more than 100 sales professionals and achieving average revenue growth of 100% annually. I know how hard that is. Bill, welcome to the show.

It’s great to be here, John. Let’s make this happen.

One of the things I want to ask about having sold multimillion-dollar mainframe computers myself earlier in my career is your own story about that. We can start the story before IBM. If you’d like, you can start with school, college, or wherever you got this passion for connecting and sales.

The connecting and sales lineage started back with me being a full-ride football guy at a university. I got a scholarship. I got hurt before the season started. After the first year was over, I had to figure out how to go to school on my own. I ended up working in the land surveying civil engineering field and made pretty good money that I thought, “Why bother going to school?” That’s my first relationship with the value of money. I ended up flunking out of school. I went back and saw the Dean of Men at the University of Washington. I said, “I like to come back into school because I’m a good guy,” and I went through my whole spiel. He said, “No. Why would I let a flunk out in the school when I have these eager young freshmen that want to come into school?”

TSP Bill Prater | Business Mastery

Business Mastery: If you think you know the answer to something, go ahead and ask anyway. You never really know what you don’t know until you ask.

 

That was an excellent point. He vented. What he said is, “I’ll let you into night school if you get straight A’s, then I’ll let you go into the day school.” I said, “How do I get straight A’s?” He says, “I don’t know. Ask the professors.” He needs to know I’m dead serious. “Think this through. What kind of students asked the professor how to get an A?” I said, “Probably A-students.” He said, “You got it.” That was my first major learning about effectively, the art of asking questions or, better yet, asking for help. You and I have a sales background, sales management background. You’re stuck with it. I’m still in it, even though I don’t claim I’m a sales guy.

A big major lesson that I got early on is always to be ignorant. By that, I mean, even if you think you might know the answer to something, then go ahead and ask anyway. You’ll never know what you don’t know until you ask. Fast forward, I did ask the professors how to get A’s. I ended up getting straight A’s for the rest of my college career and graduating on the Dean’s List. It’s all because of that simple question, which I asked over and over again. It was amazing the kinds of things these people would do to help me get an A.

They know you’re that committed. What I love about what you said, “Always be ignorant. Ask anyway,” as opposed to assuming you know what the answers are going to be. I’ve helped some people when they’re interviewing for a job ask a question. At the end of every interview, people say, “Do you have any questions for us?” Unfortunately, a lot of the younger people might say, “When’s my vacation start?” I tell them to ask this question, “What would it look like if I were to exceed your expectations in this job?” It is another way of saying, “What do I need to do to get straight A’s?” Most people never ask a future employer that question, nor do they ask a professor that question.

When people are reading this, they can start to think, “What question am I not asking that I could ask that my competition is probably not asking? What set me apart?” Once you have that momentum going in any conversation, whether it’s a sales conversation or trying to get your team motivated to grow and scale, which is your expertise, it completely shifts in the box traditional way of solving things. Also, what I love about that story is your resilience. A lot of people would have given up. “You got a good point. Why should you give it to me when you got all these hungry freshmen? That’s too high a bar. Straight A’s? Forget it.”

[bctt tweet=”Allow yourself to be ignorant and ask questions anyway.” via=”no”]

There are lots of things that come out of that story that starts to give me a little more color and texture, almost like a painting coming to life. I know how hard it was to get a job at IBM. They would test everybody. If you think getting into college was tough, getting a job at IBM was tough. It was the best of the best. You just didn’t get a job. You thrive there. I’m sure there’s a little more context. I specifically want to know when you were at IBM, this premise of scaling 100% out of 100%, there are two things that come up all the time when I’m talking to people who are entrepreneurs, salespeople, or both. One is fear of rejection. The other one is, “I had my best year ever. How am I going to top myself?” That’s where the superstars like you shine, is the consistent growth, not just, “I have a great year. Don’t ask me about next year.” How do you start to help people with that mindset and strategy?

That’s exactly what it is. It’s the mindset. What it is that all of us were programmed as young people to act in a certain way. A lot of that becomes part of our subconscious. Since it’s in our subconscious, we’re able to deal with a bunch of stuff. We don’t have to think, “What color is that light? What color is red?” You know red means stop the car. You don’t process that through. A couple of points about mindset is that it had happened at IBM that I realized what my programming was.

When I was young, I remember vividly that when something would happen in the house where my grandmother lived with us, she’d say, “Billy, do something about that.” I didn’t have any idea what it was all about. I jumped up and took action. I didn’t think. I just responded. That’s lesson number one. I realized that in a company like IBM, there’s a lot of telling you what to do going on all the time. I decided, “No. I’m going to think this through, not be reactive and figure out how can I reduce the amount of time it takes to get something done?” If you remember IBM, they used to be greedy good at giving you performance appraisals.

I was a systems engineer to start with. I get in performance appraisal. My boss, his name is Dave, said to me, “Your score is outstanding.” I said, “That’s great. I’m outstanding. Now what?” He said, “What do you mean now what?” I said, “If I’m already at the top, what’s next to your point?” He flounders around a little bit, frankly. I got him in a box because I was outstanding. I said to him, “If I’m your number one systems engineer, am I the highest-paid systems engineer?” They don’t like to answer that question, but he did, unfortunately, and said, “No.” I said, “I don’t understand how I could be rated number one and not being the number one paid?”

TSP Bill Prater | Business Mastery

Business Mastery: Most of us were programmed as young people to act in a certain way. A lot of that becomes part of our subconscious.

 

He went through. He got the old chart out. You’ve seen the charts of how many years and what your score is. The maximum raise you can get. It’s all a Mathematical model. He said, “The only way to get paid what you’re worth in IBM is to be a sales guy.” I said, “Okay, sold.” He said, “No, not so fast. You’re my number one systems engineer. I don’t want to let you go.” I said, “Dave, that is not a good answer. You’ve got it.” He says, “I’ll let you go to sales school if you finish in the top three.” I go, “Okay.”

I got the challenge of finishing the top three. I ended up finishing at the top one. I was number one in sales school. I came back, and I walked into his office. The school ends on a Friday, and I’m back at work on Monday. He doesn’t know anything about what happened. He said, “How did it go?” I said, “It went pretty well. When’s my sales job?” He said, “What do you mean?” I pull out my gold cross pen that has IBM on it and I hand it to Dave, and he uttered a nasty word. I said, “It’s time for sales.” He said, “You don’t want to go now. This is September. You’d have to have a whole half year’s quota.” I said, “Fine.” He says, “You don’t know what you’re saying. You got three months to do a full half-year.” I said, “I want to go now. You’re barking was if I did this, I get there.”

I ended up doing pretty well. I bought myself a Porsche in the whole deal because I completely shut it out. I shut the lights out. You and I talked before we got into our interview about cold calling. I figured I might as well go cold calling people. I don’t know anything else about what to do. I go. One of the very first people I banged on the door of, I walked in, and the receptionist said, “You’re with who?” I said, “IBM.” She said, “I’m sure that David wants to see you. We’re looking for a computer.” That was it.

Once you got into sales management, how did you keep the momentum going when your team would have a good year and the quotas would go up accordingly? This is why I was excited to have you on the show is we can go into this subconscious mindset. I feel from my observations that a lot of salespeople think when they’ve had a great year, it’s a fluke. Therefore, when you were asked to repeat it or exceed it, it’s the same thing for the business leaders you deal with, a new council. They don’t have a plan or a roadmap in place.

[bctt tweet=”Be curious to get insights.” via=”no”]

They say, “Everything started lined up as a perfect storm.” They had a big knee. They had a budget that they’ll never have again. “I can’t possibly find another client like that. With these numbers, I’ll never make it.” You take the mindset and the strategy. It’s not just one or alone. I wanted to get a sense from you when you work with companies. Companies hire you to pick this expertise and give them the scalability issue that you’re great at. Not just growth but dynamic growth. What is it that you do that helps people overcome their initial negative self-talk that they can’t possibly exceed the best year they’ve ever had in terms of mindset? What are they missing strategy-wise?

I’m going to finish up with mindset and then we’ll jump into strategy or positioning. A lot of what you asked me and a lot of the answers I deal with is the notion that we’re originally programmed or taught that we need to deal with the environment we’re put in or the hand that you’re dealt. You’re given a certain quota, a crappy sales territory, a sales team, but half of them are rookies. We can continue to list all of that. All of that, in general for all of us, you and I and the people that are reading, if you think about a bell curve, most salespeople, sales managers, business owners think of themselves as in the middle. In the middle is what’s called the standards or the averages. That’s the way you measure the middle of any industry.

The people that end up looking at the environment through the prism of being in the middle of the bell curve are going to stay in the middle of the bell curve. What you need to do mindset-wise, I found is you’ve got to figure out what the elite players in your niche. If you’re 1 of 140 salespeople, they’re not all performing equally. You don’t think the revenue of the company, divide by 140, and everybody does that Math thing. Instead, there are some super laggards. There’s the mass unwashed middle, and then there are the superstars. What are the superstars doing? One, they’re not waiting until they get their quota in the middle of January. They’re starting day one, minute one. Second, you remember this with IBM, every year, they had a different sales plan. The sales plan was designed to benefit the company called IBM.

They wanted you to sell certain things. They wanted you to add certain kinds of software and a variety of it. They put all that stuff in the sales plan. Step one, minute one, don’t deal with all that stuff, go figure out what the fastest path to the cash is, and go do that. It’s usually a machine they want you to sell etc. Number one is don’t think like the rest of the players in your niche, instead figure out what the elite players do and emulate them. Their mindset is one of mastery, dominance, excellence or extraordinary. Emulate that. Strategy is an entirely different thing than tactics, but a lot of people get that stuff mixed up. For example, a tactical thing to do is to make cold calls on the phone or send out cold emails.

TSP Bill Prater | Business Mastery

Business Mastery: Once you’ve got the goal and assembled your resources, the next step is to execute.

 

The question is, why are you doing that? What’s the strategy? What’s the higher-order bid? What’s the reason that you have to go down the road you’re going down? Once you’ve figured out your reason or your strategy, then you can start doing tactics. Maybe cold calling is a perfect fit, but maybe it isn’t. Maybe, instead, what you want to do is go and interview your last year’s customers and have them tell you, for example, here’s the question, “Sir, I enjoyed working with you last year. How could I have served you better?” That’s the question I taught my people to ask. We went and interviewed all of our customers the previous year, ask them how we could do better, how we could serve them better. We got this huge list. We got our whole tactical plan from asking people, “How do I get an A?”

Were there many surprises? Were those things you knew you could do better and didn’t have the resources to do, or was it, “I had no idea that was something people wanted, so we weren’t doing it?”

Mostly surprises. Companies like IBM or Transamerica are large organizations. The senior executives don’t have a clue what’s happening on the street. The people that know what’s happening on the streets are the people that are on the street. Just because the sales plan or the missive from on high says, “X, Y, Z,” that doesn’t mean that something like, “P, R, Q,” is what you should be doing. The only way you can find that out is to ask people that are your customers. Prospects are going to give you the answers too, but they don’t have much context because they haven’t seen what you’ve done in the past.

This Business Mastery system that you’ve been doing for many years, helping companies, small and large, figure out a killer strategy, makes a lot of sense in that context. One of the things you have on here is this wonderful blog about What’s Stopping You From Getting Better Results Every Single Time?, as opposed to, “I’m going to try, be like a baseball player, and hit a certain percentage.” You’ve got four beautiful colored circles, things. Would you walk us through what those are? We’ve touched on them. I want to intrigue them to read this blog. If you described what the four things are and how they all keep going round and round to keep growing, it might be a light bulb moment for some people saying, “No wonder I’m missing this key part while I’m doing 3 of the 4.”

[bctt tweet=”Don’t think like the rest of the players in your niche. Instead, figure out what the elite players do and emulate them.” via=”no”]

Even using baseball or softball, either one analogy is a good place to start. Nobody told you that you had to have a good batting average. Your coach didn’t say that. Nobody said that. That’s not baseball. That’s not what it is. If you’re up for batting, what is the first thing you’re supposed to do? It’s not hit the ball. The first thing to do is get on base. How can you get on base? The ball can hit you then you go on base. You can hit the ball and have nobody catch it or throw you out at first. You’re then good on base, or you can walk. There are at least three different ways.

The point of it is to figure out how to get on base. That’s back to that comment about a tactic versus the strategy. The individual player, the job of the batter, is to get on first. They do have a term in baseball and softball called on-base percentage. That’s much more important than a batting average. It’s the same thing as though in business. What I discovered of a variety of things and I won’t go in order because frankly, John’s describing, it is a cycle, number one, and it fits for any size company in any niche privately held and republic he held but even more magically if it’s in every department in every company. Even more magically, it fits in every team in every department, in every company. It makes my life easier.

Those of us that are in sales is a practical matter. We’re a business owner. We have a geographical territory, some product niche, or specialty. All of that is an entrepreneur’s or business owner’s jive. We already talked about this concept of the environment. The environment is where all your resources are. That’s where you have your tools and potentially some team members. Most people operate their business, territory, job from the standpoint of whatever they have from a resource standpoint. For example, if you’re physically in San Francisco and an opportunity comes for you to service somebody in, let’s say, Baltimore, and you say in your mind, “I’m in San Francisco.” That would be resource restrictive that you’ve allowed yourself to be contained by your environment.

Instead, what you wanted to say in your mind is, “How can I service somebody in Baltimore at a high-quality level?” That’s one of these four phases, which is effective alignment, but most people put that a front of planning. It should be behind plan. Your plan should be the pick of the year. “I’m going to be 300% of quota this year. I’m going to grow my business by 300%. I get 300% more new customers.” That would be effectively an annual goal. Once you’ve got that, it’s time to look at what resources you do need. Not the other way around, make your decision about what you want to do first, then find the resources. For example, we could cold call. We could figure out a way to get a bunch of referrals. We could survey all of our existing customers and all of those.

TSP Bill Prater | Business Mastery

Business Mastery: Dominate Your Market: How to Quadruple Revenue in Four Steps (Business Mastery Series Book 1)

The temptation a lot of people might have is they’ll hear an idea like that, and they’ll put it in action. It may or may not be a good idea. The way to do it is to do it after you’ve figured out what your goal, objective, or strategy is for the year. Once you’ve got the goal, and you’ve assembled your resources, next is to execute or go get into action and do stuff. Instead of being like, “I did with my grandma jumping up immediately when she told me to.” Think, gather your resources, then execute. The fourth phase is to figure out what in the world happened.

The answers are either red and you fell on your face. Green, you exceeded whatever heck you’re after doing. The third is some Amber or a yellow, meaning you’re just about okay. The cycle is to analyze your situation, figure out a new plan, gather the resources you need, execute. After you execute, analyze the result, adjust your plan, find new resources if you need to, then execute. It’s a cycle. All businesses, departments, projects, individuals with a sales territory, all people with some project that they’re managing, you should run them through that four-phase cycle I gave you.

When we clarify something, we’re not limiting ourselves to one answer, and you zero in on what do we want to focus on first. The thing that I love about this Business Mastery system you’ve created is the alignment. Not just executing without other people’s agreement, understanding. That’s crucial to what you’re doing that makes this fly so much. I did also want to touch on this wonderful quote of yours, which is, “Don’t use the same approach for all problems.” If you go to sales training like, “You get this objection, here’s the answer regardless of who’s saying it or what the situation is.” I don’t think that’s the case anymore. I tell people, “You’ve got to think of your brain like a jukebox with multiple stories ready to go depending on what the problem or the challenge is.” The fact that you talked about this is another wonderful blog about how you bring results to people. Give us a little taste of what this means in terms of some things that require more finesse etc.

Objections are problems. However, most of them are disguised. What I mean by that is most people that you’re having a sales conversation with are not very skilled at giving you quality objections. They may say something, but they’re hoping you’re going to go away. They’ll make a comment to see what you’re going to do. If you say, “I’d give up,” then mission accomplished. What teed up in my mind is whatever you hear from anybody is likely not a well-thought-out response. Sometimes it could be, but you simply need to practice this art of ignorance and say, “Could you elaborate more on what you mean by that? Would you flash that out more?”

[bctt tweet=”What’s stopping us from getting better results is almost always not asking questions or for help. ” via=”no”]

I don’t believe in a Rolodex type of thing where you get a certain question. You need to find that answer and deliver it. That’s what you get when you have a chatbot or something like that running on a robot. All you have to do is be genuinely curious. “I’m surprised you said that. Where did that come from? What’s the backstory of that?” That’s the key. The key is to be ignorant, don’t act like you’ve heard that before because maybe it isn’t quite the same and ask, “Tell me more. May I ask for more? Can you help me out here? I don’t quite get it,” things like that.

Are there any last thoughts? You have this wonderful book that people can get. It’s called Dynamic Growth.

In GetBillsNewBook.com, and you’ll get a chance to get the pre-publication version. It will give you a book form. It will encapsulate a lot of what we’ve been talking about here.

It’s called Dynamic Growth: How to position your business as a 24/7 cash-producing ATM. Who doesn’t want that? Bill, thank you so much for sharing your gifts, including this wonderful book, and more importantly, this awareness that when we’re curious and when we’re not pretending we know something, no matter how much experience we have, get our mindset and our strategy in place, there’s nothing that we can’t do together. Thanks again for being on the show. I’m looking forward to having all kinds of feedback on how many people are going to be giving me insight going, “That was a great episode. Thanks so much for having Bill on.” Nothing makes me happier than to have guests like you that have so much wisdom and a heartfelt passion for what you do.

Thanks, John. I appreciate it very much.

 

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Resilience in the Rain

Posted by John Livesay in blog | 0 comments

In October 2020, I decided to put money down on a lot where new homes were being built just south of the Austin airport.

Little did I know, this decision would start a journey of testing my resilience, patience, and organizational skills.

After I picked my lot, I then had to decide what I wanted the house to look like. Normally this entails going to a design studio, but during a pandemic, most of it had to be done on Zoom.

There’s a book called The Paradox of Choice. It says that when we have too many choices, it is overwhelming and can even be depressing.

Luckily for me, my friend Phillip Sherman is a professional interior designer, and he was able to help me.

Decisions can get overwhelming.

There are big decisions like what kind of stone and brick you want on the outside of your house to small ones such as what color should the gutters be painted, what color do you want the grout in your shower to be, and what type of toilet paper holder do you want.

The goal was to have the house done by the end of February. What was unforeseen was a shortage of lumber on top of a freeze in Austin that was unprecedented, which caused the house not to be finished until the end of May.

Not knowing when you’re going to move is very stressful. Some of the concerns I had was whether or not I could extend the lease on the condo I was renting and when I should order the movers.

While it was a lot of fun to visit the house on a regular basis and see the progress, there were also mini twists and turns along the way, including light fixtures being on backorder, the driveway needing to be repaired, and the washer/dryer not being available due to the pandemic of shortages.

If you ever applied for a loan, you know that can be incredibly stressful. Trying to convince a bank that being a speaker during a pandemic with no live events should still qualify me for a loan was challenging, to say the least.

While juggling the many back-and-forth requests with the loan office, I was also scheduling an inspector to come to the house while getting my real estate agent to go with me on something called a blue tape walk-through. This is when you get to walk-through and put blue tape everywhere they have missed a spot that needs to be touched up or on a mirror that has a dent in it. Once the city inspectors sign off on everything, then I got to go to the title company.

In this case, they were so busy I had to wait over an hour before someone could see me.

Not much has changed in this industry, and I still had to manually sign many pages. On top of that, the keys they gave me were not cut properly and didn’t work. I had to wait until the next day to get the right keys from the builder. The combination of having to wait that long and then getting the wrong keys also added to the list of things I could choose to be stressed out about.

I recently read the book The Energy Bus, and there’s a line in it that says, “I’m too blessed to be stressed.”

I chose to use it as my mantra.

Are you starting to see and feel how all these things could start to chip away at the joy of getting a new home?

Instead of resisting what is happening or complaining about it or losing my temper or getting frustrated, I decided I was going to tell myself a different story.

Let’s look at all the wonderful things that they got right and let’s be grateful that the interest rates are so low right now. That’s the story I chose to focus on.

The night before the movers were scheduled to come, I picked up my friend Phillip at the airport, and we went right to the new home with keys that let us in. It happened to be in the middle of a huge lightning storm, with a lot of wind. After only being in the house for 10 minutes, we started to see water coming through the electrical light fixture in the kitchen ceiling, and quickly place a bucket underneath to save the brand new floors.

I chose to see this as a little bit of drama. I decided that “big drama” would be if the ceiling collapsed.

I texted the builders and they sent roofers first thing the next morning to fix the problem. This was happening concurrently while the movers were coming to pack my things into the truck.

One of the things that I had bought during the pandemic was a motorized standup desk that allowed me to stand up and have my computer go up and down depending on whether I wanted to stand or sit. When the movers came to me and said they were sorry but they had broken the desk, I was numb to bad news. I  just simply said, “Send me the pictures and I’ll file a report to get reimbursed later.”

After the movers unpacked the last box and left, my friend Philip and I were exhausted, but we decided to go out and treat ourselves to a nice meal at a nearby restaurant.

This whole thing is a metaphor, I thought to myself. We are all always going to have some rain in our life.

How do we stay resilient in the rain? Whether it’s a leaking roof or waiting on other people, we always have the choice of deciding whether something is going to knock us down and keep us down or just be a temporary bump in the road.

I’m now happy to say that my first weekend has been filled with gratitude and creativity as I decided with my friend Philip where to hang art.

(Have you ever noticed how things that have been hanging in your house for a long time are suddenly seen in a new way when they’re in a different space?)

I think the same is true of our life. We can take relationships for granted. We can take many things for granted until we don’t have them.

Remember that you are the movie director of your own life, and if you don’t like what you’re saying or thinking, you can say cut at any time and tell yourself a different story.

Email me at [email protected] and let me know your own story of resilience!