Be Unreasonable With Paul Lemberg

Posted by John Livesay in podcast0 comments

 

Have you ever tried being unreasonable when running your business? Most people would try to be reasonable and use everyone else’s strategies. By doing this, there’s not much you can do to differentiate yourself from the pack. Learn how to be unreasonable while still finding success in your business. Join John Livesay as he talks to Paul Lemberg about his coaching program that will grant you profitability. Paul is a business coach and author of Be Unreasonable: The Unconventional Way to Extraordinary Business Results. Paul’s goal is to help small business owners and CEOs double or even triple their income. Learn more about his Formula 5 Hyperdrive program. And discover how to trust and work with your intuition. Try being unreasonable today!

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Be Unreasonable With Paul Lemberg

Our guest is Paul Lemberg, the author of Be Unreasonable and he has a Formula 5 Hyperdrive way to give you a system to get your business revenue soaring. He said, “Part of what we have to do is realize we need to generate a 2nd sale after we have made the 1st sale. Our intuition is a muscle we need to use and work out on a regular basis.” He helps entrepreneurs become wealthy.

He has consulted with Fortune 100 companies like Cisco, Adobe, IBM, Goldman Sachs, but his real passion is helping small business owners and CEOs double and even triple their profits sometimes growing companies more than 10X. Over the last few years, Paul’s one-on-one small business clients who range in size from brand new startups to companies with around $20 million in sales have profited by more than $450 million in bankable put-in-your-pocket cash, which is what everyone’s looking for.

He has been an entrepreneur most of his life. After a three-year stint as a software programmer in Corporate America, he launched his first company with $3,000 worth of credit card debt and sold it for $9 million in less than three years. He has published three books, including one published by McGraw Hill called Be Unreasonable. He is a speaker and a trainer.

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Welcome to the show, Paul.

Thank you, John. It is great to be here.

Our mutual friend, who has been a guest on the show, Sam Morris, connected us and those warm introductions bypass so much of our brains that need to filter, question and make a decision, don’t they?

They do, especially as they are coming from you. Not me.

Let’s dive in a little bit to your own story of origin here. You can go back as far as childhood or school. You got into software but nobody probably grows up thinking, “I’m going to be an entrepreneur. I’m going to be an author.” How did that all come about?

I sure did not. My parents were working people, and between the two of them, have no entrepreneurial bone in their bodies. I was an art student. I went to art school mostly because I had ADD, and it was the only way I was going to get a college degree but I forgot. I thought I was supposed to be an artist. I came out of art school and I tried to be an artist, and all that stuff you hear about starving artists is all true. You have to make a decision about whether you are willing to starve for your work and I was not that good as an artist. I had forgotten about why I was at art school. I concluded that it was not going to be worth starving for me.

Somebody told me to become a computer programmer. It seems like I had the mind for it. I was amazingly lucky that I got myself a job at the time because they thought that artists and musicians made good programmers. I ended up with a job. I did that for about three years. I was great at it. I was like, “Programming was a natural gift,” if it could be that way.

[bctt tweet=”Our intuition is a muscle that needs to be exercised.” username=”John_Livesay”]

I did not want to stay in Corporate America. With a guy who is a client of mine, we started a software company that ended up writing software for gigantic worldwide banks. I did that. It was great but we ended up selling that company. It is not as exciting as it sounds. We were basically on the verge of bankruptcy and in the Federal Government about $1 million of somebody else’s money and all your taxes. Don’t ever do that. That’s a tip. Do not ever spend your employee’s taxes on your business.

Rather than going to jail, we ended up selling the company for a whole batch of money, which was a fantastic thing. I had not taken a couple of years off because I had a non-compete. I ended up starting another company doing the exact same thing. We sold that company to a big German bank and through a couple of career changes, I ended up one day, I woke up and the voice in my head said, “You are not doing your life’s work. You would better get busy.” I was like, “Who said that?” All I did was hear that same thing again. It is like, “There is something that I’m supposed to be doing,” and that was helping entrepreneurs.

In 1996, I hung out my shingles to coach. I made the biggest guarantee that anybody could possibly make. Coaches don’t do this, by the way. Coaches don’t guarantee results. I guarantee that you worked with me for a year and you will earn more money faster and with greater satisfaction than you ever thought possible or I will give you your money back. I still offer that guarantee. People said to me, “How can you do that? Nobody does that.” I took this straight out of Tony Robbins. I tapped myself on the chest and said, “I am that good.”

You have to own it, especially for charging something that has a premium price associated with it. We talked before the show about a way you have of bypassing the need to develop a rapport with somebody over weather where they live or whatever. Can you share with us what that is?

I absolutely can. Rapport is not about talking about the things that you have in common with somebody. There is about establishing a bond, which is based on commonality but those are not the same things. I’m a bit of a magician and I don’t mean stage magic. It is like manipulating energy and the world.

What I do is before I’m going to meet with somebody, whether I have met them before or not, I go into a little meditative state and I imagine our connection and our meeting, whether it is on the phone or in person, the warmth and the communication between us and everything are going well. As a sales trainer, when I train people, I say that the most important thing you do is to provide somebody with enough information to make a clear decision.

That does not mean it is going to be yes. It means that clear decision that’s with their best interests at heart. I imagine all of that in my mind happening and I found that when I meet people, I automatically have a rapport with them. This is not a strange thing. This is magic that we build rapport energetically, which is all you ever need to be able to communicate with somebody at that level of depth.

 

I talk about that all the time that literally money is energy and action. People are buying your energy. I remember when I got hired as a keynote sales speaker, the bureau said, “Congratulations. They picked you over the other speakers they were interviewing. They liked your energy.” I thought, “There it is in writing. Rarely is that clear.” You think they liked your sizzle reel, your book and what you said, but they said later to me, “You made us feel good on the call. We figured you would do the same for the audience.”

Even if you are not selling yourself as a speaker, whether you are selling a very expensive tech product or anything, it is still selling yourself first, which is that energy of, “I care about you. I have got your back,” and things like that. You have something here that I’m fascinated about, Formula 5 Hyperdrive. I happen to live in Austin near Circuit of The Americas. That concept is very visual for me. How did you come up with that name and what system is this?

Formula 5 is a system that is guaranteed to allow you to double your business and then potentially double it again if you keep going. People say, “You can grow your business ten times.” I don’t know anybody who has a clue as to how to grow a business ten times, but I do know how to double it and double again, which is about as close to 10X as I want. It is actually 8X but it works like this.

I was trying to create a program that would give people the benefit of coaching without having a life coach and what that meant was that it would have strategies and tactics which produced results every single time that were simple to execute and that it would keep you motivated to keep executing. Those, to me, are the things that a coach should give.

I built a system that was based on five different principles and the strategy is that you make small changes in each one of them and that small changes pile up. If you can make a 5% change and another 5% change, it does not take too many of those to make a lot of money. I found that my biggest failures were my biggest ideas and the things where I was swinging for the fences. I lost $1 million here and I lost something else there.

When I do things, which are incremental, fair and easy to do, you get results if you keep doing them. The five things are simple and they are also obvious. The first one is lead generation. How do you get more leads? I give people simple strategies that are not based in whatever the current technology is, then how do you convert more? Which is not about becoming a great salesperson. It is about testing and figuring out what works and what does not work so we teach that and again, these are easy changes to make.

I like that because it takes away people’s fear of rejection if you are testing and you are not so attached to whether you get a yes.

[bctt tweet=”Ask for the second sale.” username=”John_Livesay”]

You are always testing and you are not committed to getting some BC. You are committed to their clarity and they are making decisions based on their best interests, then we teach them about margins and pricing. It’s shocking how many entrepreneurs go broke because they don’t understand what their margins are.

I teach them enough about margins and then show them how to double their business by making incremental price changes, which is astounding for people. You can teach them how to make the 2nd sale, 3rd sale, 4th sale and 5th sale. You spend all your energy getting a new customer. It is shocking how many people sell 1 person, 1 thing in 1 time. The ones who don’t have rehab programs, resell programs or don’t have second things to sell on. Don’t have upsells and all those things.

The last one is how do you use your assets and your resources more efficiently through things like systemization and prioritization. Every single thing in this program, I did not invent anything. What I invented is the way to put it together and execute it so that you can keep doing this and grow your business by shocking amounts by making small changes. That is Formula 5. It’s Formula 5 because it was a formula consisting of five things. I’m not a race car guy. I did not even consider that until it was pointed out to me. I use that metaphor a lot.

We talked about energetically connecting before we even talk to somebody or meet them. Is there some specific thing that you can help people tap more deeply into their intuition?

Wherever that stuff comes from, it responds well to usage. If you do ask your intuition for some help and your intuition serves up an idea to you. A lot of people ignore their intuition. They ignore it because they are not sure what it is or if they get an idea, they can’t approve it. They don’t act on it. There are two different things going on here.

One, they ignore it but even if they don’t ignore it, they tend not to act on it. I’m not sure where these things come from. I have my own beliefs that they come from way outside of yourself but even if it is your own other than conscious, that serves up an idea to you and you don’t do anything with it. What does that say?

It’s like, “I’m not respected. I don’t need to get this guy any more stuff because he’s not doing anything with it.” On the other hand, if you start paying attention to your intuition, that little tickle in your stomach that tells you not to do business with somebody and then you do and you kick yourself. I should have listened to my intuition. You start listening and you start implementing whether it’s do something, don’t do something or your idea stinks.

 

I’m working on a new product. I was thinking that product idea was wrong and it took somebody else to tell me, “Your product idea was wrong,” and I’m like, “I knew my intuition was saying this.” It’s like you get the acknowledgment. The more you use your intuition, the more intuitive ideas that you use you come up with.

That is a great tweet, “Our intuition is a muscle that needs to be used.”

It is a person whose advice you are asking for that you are not respecting by not doing anything with it. You can look at that on a very logical level or on a very outer rule level but it is true either way.

You talk about we all have some superpowers. If somebody does not know what their superpower is, is there something you can help them find out what it is that they could count on all the time?

I think it is easier than it sounds. It is like your intuition. There are things that people do and they do well and they keep doing them, but they don’t realize that it is a thing that they are doing. It is the easiest thing to do and the simplest thing to do is talk to your friends who get you and ask them, “What do you think my superpower is?” If you ask ten people that, they might give you five different answers but amongst those ten answers, five of them will start to coalesce and that is the thing that you start to investigate. If somebody says to me, “Your superpower is creating systems for other people.” That is one of my superpowers.

I knew I was good at this. I have been doing it for a long time but it took somebody to say it to me. What they said to me, all the tumblers dropped into place. Somebody said to me one day in full statement, “You get to be brilliant by creating systems and for other people to use profitably.” I was like, “I do that.”

Once you get an idea of what that superpower is, then you go back and look in your history and you will see how many times that is the thing that you have relied upon. For me, all the way back to my software days where I would talk to Wall Street traders to figure out what they did and then I would create these structures for them and I do it now as a coach. It’s a superpower.

[bctt tweet=”Do not ever spend your employee’s taxes on your business.” username=”John_Livesay”]

A lot of people think that being a CEO or running your own company is lonely. There are all kinds of quotes about entrepreneurship. It can be lonely. Even a big company is “lonely” at the top. Is there some role that you think a CEO should be doing that they find difficult to do?

In my experience with my clients, the hardest thing that CEO and owners have to do is continually re-enrolling their team whether it is their core management team or their entire company, into the vision of the company. In my opinion, what a CEO is more than anything else. The CEO as visionaries. They are the ones with the ideas. They are the ones who provide that visionary energy to the company itself. If I ask your typical small company owner, “When was the last time you rallied the troops and shared your vision with them?” It is like, “I don’t have to do that anymore. I did that years ago, we had a big meeting.”

Several years ago is probably not enough. You would probably want to do that at least once a quarter, if not once a month. They can’t understand it and the reason they can’t understand it is they are already enrolled. It’s their vision. They believe and they buy into it. They don’t do anything to make sure everyone else is already engaged. We talk about engagement all the time. Engagement is the thing.

I have an advertising background. If Coca-Cola did not have to keep running ads, they would not. Big brands constantly re-enroll people on their vision and their branding. You have not heard it before but if you don’t keep reinforcing, it goes away. I completely relate to that. Also, another big thing is a lot of people don’t do it as much as they used to, but when I was in Corporate America selling, it was always like interviews, “What is your 3-year goal and your 5-year goal?” All those things and you had to have some answer or they thought you were not serious or a deep thinker. Why do you think long-range planning is a bad idea?

I want to make two statements about this. Number one is I’m not crazy and it is a good idea to have a long-range point of view, which consists of where are you going and what do you want to achieve? Those are the objectives and the goals. The problem is not the long-range goals but the long-range plan itself.

There is a famous quote from a German General from 1800 named Von Moltke. He said, “No battle plan survives first contact with the enemy.” What he meant by that, which is pretty simple, was if you are about to go to war and you put your men, material, cannons, all that stuff and you placed them, that is the best you can do.”

The best you can do is figure out how to deploy your assets because as soon as they say go, the cannon starts firing, smoke is everywhere and they can’t see a damn thing. They have no control over what happens after that. It’s easy if you are an architect, the building does not fight back. You can plan out how to build the building because the building does not fight back.

On the other hand, if you are a marketer, the customers fight back. In other words, they do their own thing. Your competitors do their own thing. Maybe the regulators do their own thing. There are all these human beings who have free will and they do their own thing so your plans don’t survive first contact with the enemy because no matter what, whatever you think they are going to do, they will do something different.

I can relate to that as a storytelling keynote speaker. When the pandemic hit, that is not in my battle plan. I was like, “I never even had that as a contingency of, ‘What if there were no more live events?’ because it never had happened in anyone’s lifetime.” You think, “I have to reinvent myself and become a virtual keynote speaker, not one that can do live events if I’m to survive, and that is going to require a whole other set of skills.”

I ironically created a whole new set of needs, which was clients asking me, “Can you train our sales teams how to look and sound good on Zoom because they are very intimidated being on camera selling?” That never happened to be needed before. Zigging and zagging is key. A lot of people think that there are some obvious truths out in the world, like nice guys finish last. That’s when I don’t believe in obviously. The other one I think is that people buy biologically and then back it up with the emotion. I said, “It’s the other way around. People buy emotionally and then back it up with logic.” Do you have some truths that you think people believe are not true?

My last book is called Be Unreasonable. The core idea behind that book is being reasonable will get you dead fast. Being reasonable will keep your business in the back of it. All the things that you do to become comfortable are killing you. Another way of saying that is that the comfort zone is extremely uncomfortable because it can’t produce any good results from it. The idea of being unreasonable, every time I hear myself saying, “That is not reasonable.” I’m like, “The second tone is good. Let’s explore that.” Reasonable things are what everybody has done before. That is how they got to be reasonable.

It is fascinating because you will sometimes hear that as a negotiating tactic. Be reasonable, which you are asking for.

There is a thing that goes with that, which is the idea of best practices and people say, “The best practices.” I say, “Best practices are not and they got to be best practices because everybody is doing them. If everybody is doing them, you have no sources of leverage. Leverage comes from doing something which is different.”

If people want to reach out to you to explore getting coached for themselves and their business, what is the best place for them to go?

[bctt tweet=”Your biggest failures are usually your biggest ideas. So do small incremental things until you get results.” username=”John_Livesay”]

They can go to my website, which is PaulLemberg.com or they can reach me at my email address [email protected]. P was the shortest thing I could think of so it’s an easy one to remember. Those are the two best ways to reach me.

Any last thoughts or famous quotes you would like to share?

Not a famous quote but people ask me what my favorite business books are and I talked to them about philosophy, history, popular science, all sorts of woo and spiritual things. They are like, “I meant business books.” “I meant business books because reading business books is useful for gaining tactics, but business books are never going to give you the insight about life that you need to be truly successful.”

I would like to leave people with that which is that the greatest things that you can do in your business have very little to do with business. You learn those things way back in the beginning. The greatest things about business are how you deal with your people and how you provide opportunities for your people, and what you even think your people are doing, working for you. If you understand that, that’s the bones of a high-performance team.

Paul, thanks so much. You have inspired us to think of a Formula 5, as well as ways that we can all be a little more unreasonable in our limitations.

I am on the verge of releasing a new program, which is called Entrepreneur Alchemy, and it’s a program that merges some very hardcore, proven and easy to use business scaling strategies, and merges that with what I call magic. It is corralling and using the energy of the world to drive your efforts inside of all those activities and to give you extra leverage. If people are interested, they should go to my site and sign up for the waiting list. We are going to be launching this thing on the summer solstice. I figured it was a very magical plan. We are going to take the Earth’s energy and pour it into everybody’s business.

Thanks, Paul.

Thank you, John, for having me. It is a pleasure.

 

Important Links

• Paul Lemberg
• Be Unreasonable
• Formula 5 Hyperdrive
• Sam Morris – Past Episode
• [email protected]
• Better Selling Through Storytelling Method Online Course

 

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Tags: Be Unreasonable, Company Vision, Energetic Rapport, Formula 5 Hyperdrive, Making Small Changes, Using Intuition