How To Stop Worrying About Sales Growth with Rick Janezic
Posted by John Livesay in podcast | 0 comments
Episode Summary
Rick Janezic is the founder of Ascenceo, which helps entrepreneurs who are waking up in the middle of the night worrying about how they’re going to make payroll and how they’re going to grow the company, not have to do that anymore. He said, “When emotions are high, that is when facts are few.” He gives people the right information on what the problem is whether it’s in sales, marketing, onboarding new clients, or keeping new clients, so that the entrepreneurs can have some peace of mind. He also helps investors figure out what they can do to help the founders that they’ve invested in who are struggling with their sales. He has some really great insights on how to do it and make it easy so that you are taking guessing out of the picture. He said, “When you’re guessing, you start doubting your judgment.” Listen in to Rick’s secrets on how to make your sales soar and how to stop worrying about sales growth.
Listen To The Episode Here
How To Stop Worrying About Sales Growth with Rick Janezic
Today’s guest is Rick Janezic, who is the founder and CEO of Ascenceo Revenue Sciences, which is the secret to keeping your sales growing and booming. Rick went to Wharton. He’s been an investor with Golden Angels. He has the secret and the science behind the ways to keep sales growing and growing and growing. Rick, welcome to the show.
John, it’s a pleasure to be with you.
I always like to ask my guest to take us on a little bit of a story of origin, if you will. Obviously, you’ve had some great education, going to Wharton, etc. but you’ve been doing this for a long time. We’re going to do a lot of car analogies on this episode because of your website and video. Looking under the hood of what does it take to get a company’s sales growing, if the leads start to die down, the revenue goes down, the expenses go up, things that are a big problem. You’re solving a big problem, aren’t you?
We’re trying to work with company owners, company leaders, and investors in those companies to really take a more thoughtful, deep, and scientific look of process that a lot of people think of begins and ends with sales, but it’s really broader than that. We talk about customer development. Rather than just a customer development process, the series of steps or the recipe, if you will, we take a look at how that recipe gets put into action by people, the decisions that they make, and the actions that they take. We try to use a combination of probability sciences, process engineering, as well as optimization to help customers and everybody throughout that process run as fast and as confidently as they can. That process of creating a client, keeping the client, and keeping those clients incredibly happy and pleased.
The sticky factor that everyone’s always looking for. How did you get this experience, Rick? What did you do before you launched your company?
I’ve been a very curious person my entire life back to the point that I was a young child. I’m sure that everybody goes through that process of why, that questioning and wondering about why things are. Why things work? Is that really true? How would we understand that? How could we prove that? That’s been with me for a long period of time. That helped me get through my studies in engineering, through business, through marketing, and through helping run companies, help turn companies around, and helping improve those companies. I’ve been doing these for several decades, unfortunately. It doesn’t feel like it’s been that long but time flies when you’re having fun.
As any good entrepreneur, you saw a problem and you’ve decided you have a unique solution with your experience and intellectual property using the science to solve it. Let’s take a deep dive. One of the things that really stood out to me when I was on your website is, there’s a hundred steps sometimes to get a new customer. Is that the norm? Is that low? Is that high? What have you found?
Sales Growth: All too often, folks think that selling is a one-to-one. It’s gotten much more complex.
It depends on the type of company, the type of process, the type of product, the type of service, the richness of that, the number of people that are involved on the market or the sales side, as well as people on the buy side. All too often, folks think that selling is a one-to-one. It’s gotten much more complex. There are many more people that are involved both on the seller side as well as on the buyer side. Often, I found that folks haven’t really thought through that entire process. How do you prepare for a meeting where it may be you and a colleague meeting with five to ten people on the buy side, and really understanding what’s the decision process that they’re going to go through? What’s really the problem that they’re trying to solve? What’s the evidence that you bring as well as the enthusiasm that you bring that helps them understand you’re the right company, you’re the right solution to a problem that they have?
I’m going to ask you to put your investor hat on for a minute. When you hear a pitch, what are you looking for as it relates specifically, since this is your area of expertise, to how they’re going to monetize and get revenue in the company? What are some of the things that you think make a good pitch?
One of the key things that I’ve seen, and I’d love to get your perspective since you and I have some similar interests, I don’t want to hear about the product. I want to hear about the problem, because people don’t buy products. They buy solutions to problems. How clear, how deep, how thorough is your understanding about the problems that your clients have? How compelling the interest is on their part to solve those? I try to really understand, what’s the problem? How do you know that somebody has a problem? How do they know they have that problem?
I couldn’t agree more. The more empathy you show for the potential customers that you’re targeting, the better the investors feel that you really understand that problem. You’ve said something that’s really interesting to me. I think most people when they’re pitching an investor like you, forget that the whole premise is based on the people that we are targeting have a problem so big that they’re willing to change their behavior to solve it. That’s the big a-ha, that people underestimate how big the problem has to be in order to get someone to change their behavior. What are your thoughts on that?
There’s a gentleman whose book I read recently who is out of New York, I believe. It’s Charles Duhigg and it’s called The Power of Habit. All too often, folks don’t really understand. They think, “I’ve got a product and this product fits the problem.” What’s the probability? What’s the likelihood? What’s the difficulty socially, culturally, practically from a process perspective of an organization changing their habit? When they look at doing something, what they were doing with somebody else’s product, now they’re going to do it with you. That means they have to change their habits. They have to learn new things, do new things to really be able to get that value. Not just have it be a technical fit but have it be a business fit. Thinking through the realities and some of the challenges of getting folks to recognize those habits, understand those habits, and then having a successful process to carry them through into that new habit is critical.
Sometimes an investor will say, “This looks like the right team. They’re solving a problem. They got some unique ability to solve it. There are some barriers to entry with the competition. I think I’m going to invest.” They invest and the leads aren’t converting. The sales cost go up and the revenues are down. They have a big problem. They start doubting if they made the right choice. They start putting pressure on the founder. That’s really where an investor would reach out to you and say, “Rick, help me out here. You’re an investor too. Did I make a mistake? How can we fix this sales problem?”
I’ve heard that term, “We have a sales problem,” many, many times. The challenge is you may have something that’s manifesting itself and making it look like it’s a sales problem but isn’t a sales problem. If it is a sales problem, where is that problem? How deep is that problem? Is that pervasive across everyone, which tells me either you’re remarkably bad at selection or it’s really not a sales problem? Maybe it’s a marketing problem, maybe it’s a product problem, maybe it’s a segmentation problem. Really doing that diagnosis. As they do in healthcare, you want to diagnose before you prescribe. How do we know what the true source of that problem is and the cause of that problem? What’s the biggest risk? What’s going to have the greatest amount of leverage to be able to improve, ameliorate, or address that problem? If we’ve got fifteen problems that we need to solve, which one do we do first? Which one do we do second? Can we do some of this in collaboration with one another or some of them so big and so challenging that we can only tackle one at a time?
Like cars, running a business, you need a great engine to have great performance. What you’re really offering people is the ability to retune, repair, and rebuild the engine of sales in a very step by step methodical scientific way, it sounds like.
It is. It’s to the point where you can either guess at doing things, you can only guess so many times before investors lose their patience, before clients lose their patience, before high-quality talent says, “I don’t want to be a part of this. We don’t have professional leadership in place or a professional plan in place to really address some of the challenges that exist.” Guessing is no fun because you can only do that so many times where you start to really doubt your own judgment.
[Tweet “Guessing is no fun as it causes you to doubt your judgement”]
One of the mistakes that I see lot is the wrong message to the right market or the right message to the wrong market. Do you have a story around that that you can give us an example?
I try to keep the client’s dirty laundry in the laundry room so others don’t see it. With that said, I’d give you an example of a company that we had done some work with a while ago that were starting off with something in the healthcare space. It was really a challenge to understand, who within the organization has this problem, recognizes this problem, and is willing to engage in understanding, “How do we make that problem go away?” One of the challenges that we found, because this was so new and so different, that when we’d start to try to engage with who we thought the appropriate people would be, they didn’t really know how to think about that. They didn’t know how to respond to that. They didn’t understand, “Do I have this problem. Do I own this problem?”
One of the key challenges was to really stop, step back and ask much easier questions. When you call into a very large organization, there’s a common theme or a common belief that a brand new product, that somebody’s going to magically see it and recognize it. That’s not always the case. You may be calling on the right person but until you really understand, “How do I ask a question they can confidently answer?” because you don’t want to make somebody look foolish. They’re probably not going to help you in that case. That ability to ask easy questions and sometimes simple questions. I’m a fan of Peter Drucker. Peter Drucker had his Drucker’s five questions: What’s your mission? Who’s your customer? What do they value? What are your results? What’s your plan? Easy to ask, tough to answer.
What is your mission? What do you exist for? What’s the purpose of your organization? Why was it created? What are you really trying to accomplish? Second, who’s your customer? Who is it that has this need for what it is that you do? Product, service, combination of the two. The third piece, I think is one of the critical pieces, what do they value? The way that you present and you think about your product or service may not be the same way that they value that. It’s the dialogue and that deep level of understanding about who your clients are, how they think, how they behave, what their habits are, what the challenge is, how they’d recognize whether or not they have this potential problem that you think that they might have. Then what’s the process that you use collaboratively with them to really validate, test, and confirm for you and for them they have it, it’s a big problem, and they’re ready, willing, and able to solve it.
That really is the empathy we were talking about earlier and that’s the sweet spot that you’re solving. If that isn’t done, then everything doesn’t work.
It becomes a challenge. The fourth question is, what are your results? What have you been able to accomplish to date? Number of customers, number of products, whatever the series of metrics that exist are. Now that you have those four answered, the final question is, “Now, what’s your plan?” Given everything that you now know, what are you going to do?”
That’s everything because if you don’t have a plan to fix the problem or hit certain milestones, investors get really nervous. Let’s just take, “The leads aren’t converting.” We’re running ads on Facebook or whatever it is. We have a sales force that’s going out and trying to get new clients. There’s such a long lead time or they’re just thinking about it, they don’t want to make a change. The reasons are varied, I’m sure. Is it, A) the sales force isn’t good, or B) the price is too high, or C) the competition is beating them?
Sales Growth: Do you have competitors? Who are those competitors?
Part of it is to take a look at the market. Is there really truly a market there? Do you have competitors? Who are those competitors? Michael Porter did work a number of years ago that he talked about Porter’s Five Forces. That takes a look and says, what really determines the size, shape, health and trajectory of a market? There were five factors that he looked at. One of them is called rivalry. How many other people are you competing with? Either internal to the organization or traditional suppliers, if you will, folks who build products and services to try and address that market. If other folks are doing something successful, they’re growing rapidly, they’re picking up customers, and then it’s time to look inside and say, “Either we don’t have the right product, we don’t have the right team. We don’t have the right message. There’s a credibility issue.” It’s really going back and diagnosing what is that gap. Sometimes it is on, “We didn’t build the right product for the right market because we didn’t really understand our customers.” Sometimes, it is the sales team. One of the toughest challenges that every organization has is selection. Not hiring, selection. If the ideal candidate showed up on your doorstep, would your selection team recognize that?
That goes back to really not only having an ideal avatar for your client, but an ideal avatar for your sales force so you’re not just hiring the best of whoever just happened to show up but, “None of this people fit because we have these criteria.” Is that what you’re saying?
It is. Even to the point where one of the questions that we ask as investors if someone says or asks us for a $1 million, we ask, “What is that going to go for?” They’ll say, “We need to hire a couple of key people.” We’ll ask, “Who?” Not what role, who.
That’s so key. “Who are you going to go after?” Not just the job description, but you’ve already thought it through that far. That’s great. I’ve never heard anybody say that. I love it.
Who specifically? How is that person number one? If that person says no, who’s number two? Why is number two number two and why is number one number one?
That’s good stuff. That’s really great. I hope everyone is really hearing that. I always tell people, when you pitch to an investor, you need to be prepared for questions. You need to have answers that show you’ve thought things through. If you get asked this question by a smart investor like Rick, you better have the answers. If you don’t, you better hire Rick to help you get the answers. Not only have you helped investors who’ve gotten some frustration because the sales are stalling, but you also help founders make sure that they have a really strong sales strategy in place and that after they’ve gotten the funding, they continued to use you to keep the sales growing. Is that accurate?
It is. It’s one thing to have the capital. It’s another thing to know what to do with it.
What’s the biggest mistake you’ve seen a founder making besides let’s just say, not thinking out who they’re going to hire? Let’s say, they hire their number one or number two choice and they’re still having trouble hitting their sales goals. Is it because they’re not training them? Is it because the sales force is not understanding how to be compelling? What’s the biggest bump that you see in the road?
If it were so easy that we could say that it was just one thing, that would make life a whole lot easier. One of the reasons we always talk about revenue sciences, the science piece of that, and the customer development engine, it’s really taking a look from product development and innovation to marketing, to sales, to customer onboarding, to customer success, to loyalty and expansion. If you take a look at that entire waterfront, that entire process and understand where the problems are, where the gaps are. Is it a team gap? Is it a process gap? Is it a fit gap? What’s really not working well and how do we know? How do we test that? Is that an assumption or is that a fact? How would we prove that that’s indeed the case?
Until you can really get to that point, it’s a guess. Guessing can be very, very expensive and very, very frustrating. One of the things that we take a look at from an investor perspective is, do they have a board? Do they have some advisors? What’s the quality of the advisors? It’s easy when you’re in the battle to think that you’re doing the right thing. Without some oversight, without some guidance and another set of eyes to help take a look at blind spots that you may have about the market, about the product, about competitors or about yourself, it’s tough to recognize that.
I think some of the problem, especially for first time founders seeking money, is they don’t even have the big picture that you just described. How marketing and sales relate to each other? How is the customer on-boarded? What are we doing to keep them loyal? How do we get referrals? None of that’s thought through or they haven’t thought through each one of those areas in great enough detail that they’ll just start to guess and say, “We’ll wing it when we get there.” That never really works.
It’s an option. It’s generally not a good one though.
It’s like not practicing your pitch. I can’t stand it when someone says, “I’m just going to wing it.” I’m like, “Oh my god.”
That’s disrespectful to the audience.
This premise here I think is really interesting because having worked at Condé Nast, there’s always some rivalry between marketing and sales. I’m sure you see that. I worked at big control data and all big computer companies. There’s always a rivalry between engineering and sales. Speak to that problem, because it happens, I would assume, in small companies. The sales person is like, “I did my job. You guys are on-boarding these people in such a clunky way that they’re frustrated and leaving. There’s a problem, there’s no customer service. That’s not my job.” It just goes on and on, doesn’t it?
[Tweet “Emotions are high when facts are few”]
It really does. We were interviewing a CEO not too long ago who just had a remarkable background, engineering and theology, which is a rare combination to include in one individual. He studied Greek philosophy. One of the philosophers, I apologize that I can’t recall who the name was, had an expression, “Emotions are high when the facts are few.” It’s easy to do finger pointing when you really don’t know what the answer is. What we try to do is to really shine a light on the facts that we know and go through a rigorous process to get through the facts that we don’t know, because many of things these days can be discovered internally or externally. Sometimes, it’s writing a check. Sometimes, it’s just spending the time to really dig down and get to the point of knowing that you know that you know. That helps to reduce that finger pointing, improve that collaboration, and help to take out some of the arguments or the differences of opinion because it gets from a point of being who’s right to what’s right.
It takes away all the emotion. You’re no longer pointing fingers, “You’re wrong. I’m wrong,” taking blame but going through the facts so it can remove some of the emotions. That’s what I took away from what you said.
My mom and dad used to say, “Don’t point the finger at somebody else because you’ve always got four pointing back at you.”
Of course that creates morale problems and all kinds of things. We talked about getting people to change their behavior. My favorite example is, if the economy hadn’t been bad in 2008 or so, people wouldn’t have been open to Airbnb. They’re changing their behavior, “I’m letting a stranger rent my room or rent my place.” There is some catalyst to make people change their behavior. If we all didn’t have smartphones or the majority of us anyway, Uber wouldn’t work. The problem that you’re solving right now has been going on for a long time. That’s why so many businesses are going out of business or not getting funded, because they haven’t thought through all these things. You’re really not asking people to change their behavior so much as just instead of trying to wing it and guess it, “Hire us so we can give you some science to have a strategic plan in place with the money you get and what to do if there are some other problems that your plan hasn’t worked, that you can figure out what to fix first,” is really what I’m hearing is the big value you bring.
I’m going to say it’s unnecessary to try and fall asleep at night and to be worried about the things that you worry about, because that says that you don’t really have good strong answers. When we know what to do, generally speaking, people will run toward that. If I know what to do, I know how to do it, I know what great performance looks like, I know what success looks like, generally speaking, I’m going to have a beeline to that. When I don’t have that, that causes threat, it causes indecision. The common term is analysis paralysis. That’s because there’s a level of uncertainty that folks haven’t had a process that they can think through, analyze, and get to the point of knowing that they know so they can move forward with confidence. That cascades all the way throughout the organization. Not just at the executive level but from the bird’s-eye view to the worm’s-eye view and everywhere in between.
One of my favorite things to do is to try and come up with a quick pitch for people in any area to get new clients, to get new customers, to get funded, whatever your elevator pitch is. To me, if I was saying, “What would be the elevator pitch for Ascenceo?” It would be, “Want to stop having sleepless nights as an entrepreneur?”
That’s a good one. I do like that. John, I may have to borrow that or buy the trademark from you there.
“Having trouble sleeping as an entrepreneur? We help you figure out what those things are that keep you up at night and fix them.” If you just said it that way, everybody will be going, “Oh my god, tell me more. How do you that?” That’s the whole thing of a good pitch. Just to intrigue people enough to want to get them to know more. They’re like, “I’ll help you with your sales. I’ll help you grow your sales.” Okay, but you go, “Let’s help you get rid of those sleepless nights as an entrepreneur. Are you worried about your sales? Are you worried about making payroll? Are you worried about marketing? Are you worried about getting funded? I can help you with all those things that keep most entrepreneurs up at night.” Then we’ve got people going, “That’s what I need.”
John, I appreciate that moment of clarity for you and for me. Thank you.
My pleasure. Is there any last thought you want to leave us with? I think that one is a great one but I’m going to give you the opportunity to give us one last thought that you want to give us, Rick.
Sales Growth: Most things that you need to know, that you’re not sure about, are knowable.
I think the big thing is most things that you need to know, that you’re not sure about, are knowable. We try to use the process of helping you get to the point of knowing that you know so you can move forward with confidence, with certainty. That creates energy and vitality both internally with the organization and then when someone shows up from the sales perspective or from a service perspective, they’ve got that confidence. They’ve got that swagger to know, “I know how to help you when.”
It’s like a doctor going, “Don’t worry. I’ve figured out what your problem is. We just need to take your tonsils out. I’ve done a thousand of these operations. You’re going to be just fine.” They’re like, “Fantastic. You’ve figured out my problem. You have the solution.” That’s it. You’re really the doctor of sales in my opinion.
Rick, I can’t thank you enough for being here. Tell us what your Twitter handle is, the best way for people to engage to your company.
The best way is to go to Ascenceo.com.
What’s your Twitter handle?
I have two, one is @rjanezic and @ascenceorevsci.
Rick, thanks again. I think everybody has really learned something. Emotions are high when facts are few, so let’s get those emotions down and those facts up and go to Rick. He’ll get rid of your sleepless nights as an entrepreneur and as an investor. Thanks, Rick.
John, thank you. I really appreciate the time.
Links Mentioned
- Ascenceo Revenue Sciences
- Golden Angels
- The Power of Habit
- Porter’s Five Forces
- @rjanezic
- @ascenceorevsci
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Up The Mood Elevator with Larry Senn
Posted by John Livesay in podcast | 0 comments
Episode Summary
Today’s guest on the successful pitch is Larry Senn, the author of Up the Mood Elevator. He has some great insights on how you can shift from being angry and irritated to being grateful. He said that really is the key. He’s been called the Father of Corporate Culture so he knows how to get people and teams to work really well together, and of course that’s the secret to being successful. His whole premise is if you maintain a gratitude perspective, everything shifts, and that companies have value systems just like people do. He’s got so many great nuggets that I can’t wait for you to hear how he tells people to ask this question, “Do you have winners or whiners on your team?” Enjoy the episode.
Listen To The Episode Here
Up The Mood Elevator with Larry Senn
I am honored to have Dr. Larry Senn on my show today. Larry is someone that you probably don’t realize what an impact he’s had on your life and your business. He is a pioneer in the field of corporate culture and has literally been called the Father of Corporate Culture, so we’re going to ask him about that. He really has a vision to create a process to allow leaders to create a healthy and high performance culture. Of course, if you’re trying to get your startup funded, that’s one of the key factors as to whether it’s successful or not. Investors are always asking you, “What kind of culture do you have here?” From his Doctoral dissertation, Organizational Character as a Tool, he’s played a key role in really helping people for the last 30 years. He’s got a book out called Up the Mood Elevator. I can’t take you on a ride literally but since I’m all about helping people with the elevator pitch, we’re going to have a lot of fun talking about that. Larry, welcome to the show.
Thank you. I’m delighted to be here. It’s great to be with the famous Pitch Whisperer. There’s actually some mysticism in being a whisperer. I’m anxious to learn more about how you really create that deeper connection, which is such a key. I also think we’re aligned in the notion that nothing happens until you can sell something, whether it’s funding, an idea, a product, a vision. That’s what makes life move. Nothing happens until that happens, so it’s a wonderful art to develop.
We all have to “pitch” ourselves all the time. Even if we’re starting our own company, we have to pitch our vision to get the right team, we have to pitch to get clients, and if you want to pitch to get funding, it’s a skill that everybody needs to learn. Part of it has to do with being comfortable with who you are. That comes from defining your own culture even if you’re a one man band or one woman band at the time. If you wouldn’t mind, Larry, can you take us back to your own story of origin. There’s a story behind how I became The Pitch Whisperer, as you alluded to. I’m really fascinated to hear the story of how you became known as the Father of Corporate Culture.
I followed what my father told me to do initially, went off to engineering school. I didn’t come from a wealthy family so I started my first commissioned work selling flowers on street corners at eleven. As I started college, I started a business with kids selling flowers on street corners. Then I found that they didn’t sell flowers that time in supermarkets, so I started a second business selling flowers in supermarkets. By the time I was eighteen, I was driving a Jaguar XK120 and doing pretty well for my businesses. I said, “Maybe I’m more a businessman than engineer.”
When I finished engineering school I went on to get my MBA at UCLA. What I found is that I loved case studies. I love to try to understand businesses and what made them tick. Early on, I decided I want to be consultant. With the help of a professor and a kid named Jim Delaney, that’s why it’s named Senn Delaney, after the two of us, we started an early day retail, more of a process improvement firm. What I quickly found was that it was easier to decide on change than to get people to change. Most organizations were a bit like dysfunctional families. They had politics and turf issues and trust issues. I got my epiphany. We actually were hired, Delaney and I, to help Sam at Walmart, create the original supply chain for Walmart. It was a dream job. He was like an evangelist. Talk about a Pitch Whisperer, this guy just could charm you in. He had this vision of bringing low-cost goods all over America. He really lined up all the financing to build that organization and to grow it. Working with him was a dream. At the same time, we were trying to do something similar at Woolworth in New York. I would fly from Bentonville, Arkansas into New York and it would be like going to the morgue, just a bunch of old guys and there were old guys sitting around the table. Their only purpose seems to be to maintain the status quo. I said to myself, “That little company in Arkansas is going to take over the world and this one is going to die.”
There something about them, it’s almost like they have a different personality. I need to understand that. I realized that companies are like people, they have value systems, they have habits, they have character and that’s what corporate culture is. The name didn’t exist back then. This is in the 60s. I found a professor at USC who’d written a book called Readings in Organizational Character, just people commenting on the phenomenon. I went to him and I said, “Dr. Wolf, I’ve got to understand this thing because it has more to do with success in any company, even my own company as a startup, than anything else.” He said, “People have talked about it. No one’s ever studied it. What if we paid your way through the doctoral program and you study this phenomenon?”
You hit on a big problem there and you got a big solution for yourself out of it, what a great story.
That was really what led to ultimately writing my Doctoral dissertation as the world’s first research on the concept of corporate culture, then starting the world’s first firm devoted to shaping corporate culture. It’s those two things that got CEO Magazine to name me the Father of Corporate Culture.
The big takeaway for me is when you said companies have value systems like people. I love that so much, Larry. I think people sometimes aren’t even introspective enough to figure out what they value. Then if they’re starting a company they certainly don’t think of it like a person, so they don’t really even think that they need to define what the values are. You’re saying you really better have it, otherwise you won’t succeed.
In fact, for anyone who’s creating one, there’s a series of essential values that exist in any healthy individual leader, team or company. One of those, for example, is called the performance value rooted in accountability because I think in life we have winners or whiners. If you really want to make it, then you really want to be highly accountable. Then you also have to have a collaborative value because you can’t do it all alone. Unless you can partner with others and bring people on board and have healthy relationships, you can’t be successful, so that’s a second of the essential values. There’s a set of values that we all have if we’re successful, even if we haven’t thought about, but we have them. We are accountable. We are collaborative. We are open to change. We do have integrity.
[Tweet “You either work with winner or whiners.”]
You speak in such great sound bites and nuggets, I can’t get enough of you. That’s great stuff. It’s memorable, it’s got a good hook, and it really is an a-ha wake-up moment for people who are running their own company, and then also if you’re at all willing to look at your own growth as a person and as a leader. You can take a minute and go, “What do I have to do the majority of the time?” If I find myself whining or complaining about something that’s not really important, stop it.
I think that life is partly about energy management. What’s your energy like? If you think about it, one of the great drains of energy is moaning, complaining, blaming, being in wait and hope as opposed to the energy created by having a bias for action and results orientation. Energy is drained if you have politics in your company, no matter how small or large, people not getting along, that’s another energy drain. If you have people who are aligned around your purpose and going for the same goal with healthy relationships, then you have this clean positive energy that really does move you forward. That’s just a part of any person or organization.
That’s a really interesting way to distinguish it because from a metaphysical standpoint, quantum physics, you look at everything as energy. Certainly, when I’m working with people on crafting a great pitch and telling them the importance of using stories to pull people in and literally become magnetic, being magnetic, being charming, that is an energy that is created between people. You either repel or you’re attracted to want to work with people or not and have them as clients. All that stuff comes into play. If we can take the perspective you just gave us and say, “The better I manage my energy, then the better I’m going to be as a person and the better I’m going to be at being magnetic to my ideal clients.” I just love that. That leads us right into managing our energy on upping the mood elevator. How did you come up with Up the Mood Elevator: Living Life at Your Best? How did you come up with that title?
[Tweet “Companies have values like people.”]
We got to thinking about these essential values. In fact, one of the values is positive spirit. What became clear to us is that when people are at their best, when people are their best selves, at the top of their game, they tend to be more accountable, collaborative, creative, innovative. They have better energy. If you think about even yourself, when you’re at your very best, what are the kinds of feelings you have? For example, when I’m at my best, I’m more optimistic, I’m more hopeful. I feel more resourceful. I feel more confident. Those are some of the ways that I feel. I feel more loving as a father or a spouse. I feel more creative, more energetic. Those are feelings I have. On the other hand, think about those times when you’re really off your game, when you’re at your worst. For me for example, I tend to get more bothered and impatient easily, more irritated and bothered. I can become more judgmental. I can worry. I can become more self-righteous.
If you think about those things, you can put those on a scale that you call a mood elevator. At the top of the mood elevator is grateful. That’s an overriding emotion we have. When we’re seeing a sunset for seeing the birth of a child, there’s no thinking, it’s just positive, just embracing emotion. That’s at the top. Then you come down to feelings like being forgiving or being creative. Those are all higher states of the mood elevator, then you go all the way down to depressed at the bottom. Every moment of every day, we live somewhere on this thing called the mood elevator. Wouldn’t it be great if you know how to press a button that could move you up? What if you learned how to not do damage when you’re down? For example, have you ever said something to a loved one you wish you could take back? Where were you in the mood elevator? You were down there because when you’re down there, your thinking is unreliable, you say things you don’t mean, you sent emails you shouldn’t have sent. It’s just learning to know that you’re thinking’s unreliable in the lower mood states in the mood elevator and not acting on them, it really can change relationships, it can change companies, it can change many things. I remember one of the CEOs said to me, “Larry, I can’t always be up the mood elevator but I can learn to do no harm.” His mantra is, “Do no harm when you’re in a bad mood.”
[Tweet “Don’t do damage when you’re down the mood elevator.”]
If you’re at the bottom of this mood elevator that you so brilliantly created where are your depressed and angry, because typically behind depression is anger that’s unexpressed from my experience, is it possible to just jump right from that to being grateful or do we have to slowly move ourselves up? Like let’s just get a little where we be just maybe realizing we’re not depressed but a little irritated and then maybe we can start to find some humor in the situation so that we can start? Can we jump from depressed to grateful?
Let me give you an example. Let’s say that you’re sitting there at home one evening and you really are down that mood. One of the goals you had in your life is you wanted desperately to see Hamilton. It’s impossible to get tickets and you’re sitting there depressed. Your friend calls up and says, ” John, I just scored four tickets to Hamilton and I want you and your spouse to come with me. In fact, I know a member of the cast, we’re going to get to go backstage. We’re going to have dinner beforehand across the street. Would you like to come with me?” Now where would you be in that?
You instantly jump up.
The Mood Elevator: Take Charge of Your Feelings, Become a Better You
Let me tell you what happens. Our thinking creates our experience of life. Our thinking creates our reality. We’re talking about how someone can immediately shift as in the case of learning about going to Hamilton. The fundamental principle in understanding the mood elevator is that we create through our thinking. Worried thoughts create worried feelings. Grateful thoughts create grateful feelings. Every moment it’s like we’re creating a movie and we’re the producer and we have all the Hollywood sound effects to go with it. There are times where we will be stuck for a period of time in the lower levels. Just to know it’s our thinking though helps a bit, but there are things you can do. There are pointers to being up the mood elevator.
One of those is if you can do a pattern interrupt, and what I just described is a pattern interrupt, you were thinking very depressed and all of a sudden you are thinking Hamilton. A pattern interrupt can be as simple as taking a walk, walking with the dog. I pick up the phone I call Bernadette, my soul mate of four years, because just talking to her raises my spirits. I call one of my kids and just listen or maybe pick up the phone and call the grandkids. There are things you can do. I can read a book and get lost in the book, go to a movie. If I can change my thinking, I will change my mood.
We found that there are two things that scientifically shift what you call your set point on the mood elevator. One of those is pretty obvious but people don’t do it, and that is take better care of yourself. We don’t get enough sleep. We don’t take enough breaks. We don’t eat right. We don’t exercise. It’s scientifically proven that if you really get run down, you can catch a cold more easily. The fact is if you get run down, you catch a mood more easily. If you’re physically fit, taking care of yourself, you are much less likely to slide down the mood elevator. That’s one basis. That’s in my book, The Mood Elevator, that’s actually chapter nine, Shifting Your Set Point: The Wellness Equation.
Let’s take a moment and acknowledge that you walk your talk, because a lot of people can say, “Exercise, eat right, take breaks.” You literally do it. Can you just tell us a little bit about what you do to stay in shape?
Yes. I am nationally ranked and undefeated in the 80 and over sprint triathlon category. I just won the Long Beach triathlon two weeks ago in my category.
When he says 80 he means 80 plus years old, not 80% of something. I wanted you to really own that because you are walking your talk and it’s such an inspiration of how not only live better at any age but how to live better in our third act. I just think it’s so inspiring there are people out there like you. We know people like Carl Reiner maybe and other people or Norman Lear that are even older than you are that are still out there creating and making a difference. When you say something, it has a whole different level of credibility than somebody who’s just saying it, I don’t know, 30 or 40 years old. Thank you for that.
I want to also ask you, because this is one of my passions, is to help people get off the self-esteem roller coaster, especially if they’re in the sales position of only feeling good about themselves if their numbers are up, and feel lousy about themselves if their numbers are down. Let me tell you, it goes up and down multiple times in a day sometimes. I love your example of you can go from depressed to grateful if suddenly something wonderful happens, like getting tickets to a show you want to go to. Do you have any insights either from your own personal life or within the mood elevator of how can we shift our mood without having to have something outside of us come in and shift it?
[Tweet “Maintain a gratitude perspective.”]
That’s a deep question. What’s interesting is that we are so attached. We just learn in life that we think we are our results. The most significant factor that can help someone with the mood elevator is this notion of maintaining a gratitude perspective. I might have lost this sale today but my wife loves me. I have five wonderful kids. I can still run a triathlon. I’m so blessed in many ways. What can I learn from that sale? What did I do there that I didn’t do as well as I could? How do I turn that into a learning experience? The ability to maintain perspective in life. Whenever we get depressed and down, we’ve made the thing too big a deal. We’ve lost our perspective. All of us here and anybody who’s listening to this is in the small fraction of a percentage of people in the world based upon how fortunate we are, where we live, the fact we have a job, the fact that we’re learning and growing by turning into something like this. All of those things are wonderful things and yet we sweat the small stuff too much.
It’s Maslow’s hierarchy, isn’t it? You’ve got the basics handled and you know where your next meal is coming from and you’ve got a place to sleep, anything above that and the self-actualization stuff of constantly trying to make things perfect will drive you crazy and you won’t have any peace of mind. I’ve been fortunate enough to interview thought leaders, business experts like yourself. I interviewed Isaac Lidsky who happens to be blind, and wrote a book called Eyes Wide Open and runs his own company and looks at his blindness as a gift. I’ve interviewed Sam Morris who is known as the Zen Warrior. He was hit by a drunk driver 16 years ago and he’s paralyzed from the waist down. He tells me, “My brain’s not paralyzed. I’m helping other people transcend their physical.” Whenever I start to get a little mopey or frustrated or overwhelmed like, “Why isn’t this happening as fast as I want it to?” the impatience button, I go, ” I can see and I can walk. Let’s start there.” This maintaining the gratitude perspective is brilliant. I just love it so much.
I want to do a little bit of a shift if we can because you’re such an expert and you have so much information. One of the things that you are the master at, Larry, is helping companies that have merged two different types of cultures figure out how that team is going to get along. Can you tell us when example of what you’ve done so people can know to go to you for that in the future?
In any relationship, look at your differences as complementary.
Yes. Actually two companies merging is almost like two people getting married and all they have is their bios. They just met each other. It’s this phenomenon called cultural clash when two organizations come together. A famous example is a very costly one. Sprint when they tried to buy Nextel, it cost them $20 billion of market cap because of cultural clash. Most of the problems that United had. Continental was a pretty good culture and United was a terrible culture. The culture there was a clash. These things can happen. Some of the very successful mergers, CVS and Caremark, Boeing and McDonnell Douglas, all those we’ve been a part of. It’s really about really understanding the culture of the two firms and getting really to respect and value the differences as opposed to judging it. I think in any relationship, a marriage or anything, if you can look at your differences as complementary, if you look at them as helping one another as opposed to being opposing or critical.
The key thing we do, in fact, right now we’re working with a company called CenturyLink and Level 3, a gigantic $34 billion merger. We just did a two-day off-site seminar with the new eighteen-person team about half of each company. We just spent a lot of time really getting to know each other and tell our crucible stories about where we came from, what our values are, what our aspirations are, what we want to have as a joint vision for the future culture of this organization. At the end of that two days is like they’ve been together ten years in terms of trust, openness. A term we put out there is it’s very useful in life to assume positive intentions in others, not assume motives. We so often assume motives. What happens in mergers is we assume motives. It’s believing that each person’s doing what makes sense to them even if you don’t agree with it. It’s not malicious. It’s just how they see things.
We bring these wonderful concepts like the mood elevator and assuming positive intention and accountability and collaboration. We play a fascinating game that they can only win if they cooperate. Initially, they compete and don’t win, but then they finally figure it out and they say, “We’re so much better together than we are apart.” There’s an interesting thing we call an insight or a-ha based learning methodology we use that many people describe our two-day off-site event as a life altering event. That’s part of our magic.
One of my favorite expressions is when you’re healed, you’re not healed alone. When you fix something inside yourself, you’re in an ecosystem or your family or friends or in corporate situations, where if one person can get that a-ha moment of, ” I don’t have to go it alone. I don’t have to assume that everyone’s out to get me or get me fired,” and come from this place of trust. I work with people all the time that there are three unspoken questions people have when they hear you pitch. The first one is, “Do I trust you?” If I don’t trust you, I’m not ever going to hire you, buy from you, fund you, any of that stuff.
You really have delved down into a great way for people to start trusting each other so that then the client could say, “This team gets along. They’re trustworthy.” Just to double-click for a minute on the United Airlines example, which didn’t have a good culture, as you said, those things leak out. That’s the controversy that happened with the passenger being dragged off. Then the way they responded to it wasn’t the ideal scenario according to the majority of people who looked at that. You’ve got to own your stuff when you make a mistake. Putting principles above people never works. That’s what I saw happening there. I’d love your take on if you agree with that or what your perspective is.
I do. One thing that can drive all that is to have a purpose or noble cause. For me, both working today at my age and writing the book all has to do with a purpose. Taking care of myself is my purpose of being around for my family. I have a seventeen-year old son in high school still, kids ranging in age from 17 to 52. The book really, my personal purpose is to help more and more people live life at their best mentally, emotionally, physically, and spiritually. When I formulated that, I said, “I need to write a book about living life at your best.” The original book I wrote in 2012 was Up the Mood Elevator: Living Life at Your Best. The new book that just came out is called The Mood Elevator: Become a Better You. It really is my way of communicating things I’ve learned about living life as your best self more of the time. That’s what I hope to get to the world through the seminars that tens and thousands of people attend every year and through the book and ways like that. To any of your listeners, if there’s any way it’s helped any of them with their startup or their idea or anything, then I feel as if I’ve made a difference.
People can follow you on Twitter @TheMoodElevator. Larry, do you have any last words of wisdom? Obviously, you’ve led an incredibly productive, looking from the outside-in, very fulfilling life. Do you have any insights for people on how to do that? Almost like if you could talk to your younger self, what would you say?
Find your passion in life, the thing that really inspires and motivates you and creates energy for you, and then go about doing it being your best self. Be really accountable for the shadow you cast. Know that your mood affects others and that you are accountable for how you show up every day. You’re accountable to the world for that.
You cast a shadow wherever you go. That’s about being conscious, isn’t it?
Yes.
How else can people follow you?
There are some great videos I’ve done on The Mood Elevator and some great articles on TheMoodElevator.com. They can reach me at [email protected] also.
Thank you so much for inspiring us to find our passion. Stay healthy, stay active, and most of all figure out ways to get up when you’re down by using your mood elevator. Wonderful stuff. Thanks, Larry.
You’re welcome.
Links Mentioned
- Larry Senn
- Up the Mood Elevator
- Dr. Wolf
- Isaac Lidsky
- Eyes Wide Open
- Sam Morris
- Up the Mood Elevator: Living Life at Your Best
- The Mood Elevator: Become a Better You
- TheMoodElevator.com
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Show Me The Money with Leigh Steinberg
Posted by John Livesay in podcast | 0 comments
Episode Summary
Today’s guest on The Successful Pitch is Leigh Steinberg who was the inspiration for the character Jerry Maguire. He has a fascinating story of where that famous line, “Show me the money” came from, so you’re going to really want to listen to hear how that came about. Leigh is also very interested in making a difference in the world, not only with his own business but for the athletes and coaches and newscasters that he represents. He’s all about making sure that people know about anti-bullying as well as the issues of concussion with football players. He has all kinds of tips on how to take what you’ve learned as an athlete and apply it to the business world, whether it be courage under pressure or the self-discipline that you learn from sports and applying that to being a business leader. He said when you ask the right questions, you draw people out, and that’s really the secret to negotiating a great deal. Enjoy the episode.
Listen To The Episode Here
Show Me The Money with Leigh Steinberg
Today’s guest is Leigh Steinberg who is the CEO and Chairman of the Board at Steinberg Sports and Entertainment. He has two core values that I am really resonating with and excited to bring you, about treasuring relationships and making a positive impact in the world. Leigh represents professional athletes that are willing to serve as role models. He can retrace the roots to high school and collegiate programs and scholarships. He has represented eight players in the Pro Football Hall of Fame. He represents boxers like Oscar De La Hoya. He represents literally 40 television news anchors, sportscasters and coaches. As if that’s not enough, he was a creative consultant on Jerry Maguire, to name a few. Leigh, welcome to the show.
Thank you, John.
I’m always interested to ask my guest to tell me and our listeners the story of origin. In other words, I know you went to Berkeley and got your law degree there and actually taught legal things. How did you get from being so involved in the law into becoming this guru for sports and entertainment?
Show Me The Money: Leigh Steinberg was the inspiration for the character Jerry Maguire.
I went to Berkeley in the tumultuous time of the late 60s and early 70s, ended up Student Body President when the Governor of California was Ronald Reagan. I learned all I needed to know about negotiating from interacting with Governor Reagan as we were on the streets protesting the war in Vietnam and he was crushing those protests. I became a dorm counselor in an undergraduate dormitory. Working my way through law school, they moved the freshman football team into the dorm, and one of the students was Steve Bartkowski. In 1975, he became the very first player picked in the first round of the NFL draft. There really wasn’t sports agencies then. Players mostly represented themselves or have their parents represent them. He asked me to represent him and we got the largest rookie contract in NFL history. Berkeley was laid back when it came to sports, and so was Southern California where I’ve grown up.
We got back to Atlanta, their Klieg lights flashing in the sky like for a movie premier. A huge crowd was pressed up against the police line and the first thing we heard was, “We interrupt the Johnny Carson Show to bring you a special news bulletin, Steve Bartkowski and Leigh Steinberg have just arrived at the Atlanta Airport. We switch you live for the interview.” It was really then I saw the tremendous idol worship and veneration that athletes were held in communities across the country, how they were movie stars and celebrities. I thought if I could take those core values and have athletes go back to the high school community and retrace their roots by setting up a scholarship fund or working with the boys and girls club or church and then go to the collegiate community and endow some form of a scholarship, and then set up a charitable foundation at the professional level where the leading business figures, community leaders, and the political leaders with chairs and advisory board and set up a foundation that enhance the quality of life. They really could serve as role models, show the qualities of their character, and make a profound difference in the world.
It’s not enough to just be famous, I don’t think. You still want to make an impact in the world. In fact, one of the people I think that does that really well is Judith Light. I am fortunate enough to know her on a personal level. She’s won two Tony’s and an Emmy and all kinds of great stuff. She uses that fame to support causes that she believes in. It sounds like that’s what you’re doing for the athletes that you represent.
Running back to Tampa and Atlanta, just flipped 161st single mother and her family into the first home they’ll ever own by making the down payment and having the output. We have athletes who are working on causes from dyslexia to endangered species, from at-risk kids. Warren Moon has sent hundreds of kids with scholarships to college through his Crescent Moon Foundation. Troy Aikman has enriched children’s hospitals. The athletes pick something near and dear to them and then go ahead and make a difference. While they’re doing it, they’re learning skills other than athletic ones and they’re networking. It also can be messaging. I had the boxer, Lennox Lewis, cut the public service announcement that said, “Real men don’t hit women.” He was able to permeate the perceptual screen that especially rebellious adolescents put up against authority figures in messages and make more of a difference on an issue like domestic violence than a thousand authority figures ever could. Steve Young and Oscar de la Hoya, “Prejudice is foul play.”
[Tweet “Build Trust Through Listening”]
There’s so much to unpack there. First of all, the irony of having someone who’s a boxer talk about not bullying people and then realizing that a lot of people somehow don’t see color when they see a star athlete. Then that athlete as a person has still experienced some form of racism and can be the person to speak out and say, “This is not okay.”
We use the cultural symbols to try and deliver messaging in a way that triggers imitative behavior. It could be Bruce Smith, all-time sack leader in the NFL being part of The Impression Virtual Environmental Law March on Washington. It can be Warren Moon and I posing for an ad for one of the environmental organizations. You’re able to take an athlete like Rolf Benirschke, who did a program with the San Diego Zoo called Kicks for Critters, which raised millions of dollars and exposure for the concept that many species are endangered and they can be saved.
I think having athletes who have a shelf life much like a dancer, for example, ballet dancers or somebody like that, you know you’re only going to be able to do that for a certain amount of time. It sounds like you really help them have other focus besides just how much money you’re making and what team are you playing on, to start broadening their horizons while they’re in their peak so that that they can transition into possibly being a co-host of a talk show or whatever else they might want to do from being known for more than just being the athlete. Is that a fair statement?
We’re trying to stimulate both the most positive values and priorities with them, but also prepare them for a second career that will be just as fulfilling as what has come before. We have three players who are now minority owners of actual NFL teams, players who own parts of luxury hotels or head of construction companies, or run hedge funds or very involved in broadcast. No longer the greeters in front of Las Vegas hotels; these athletes have brand. Everything they learn in the athletic experience, whether it’s pushing off present gratification for future success, self-discipline, mastering complex information and applying it in real time, courage under pressure, team work. All these skill sets are completely applicable to business, media, coaching or anything else that they like to be involved in.
Self-discipline from sports can be transferred to business career and this concept of courage under pressure, which you will face whether you work for yourself or someone else, that there will be pressures and you have to dig deep. If you have that frame of reference, I think that brings a lot of credibility to what you’re doing. You wrote a book called The Agent: My 40-Year Career Making Deals and Changing the Game. Tell us about some of the stories from that.
The Agent: My 40-Year Career Making Deals and Changing the Game
What I try to emphasize there is that the real skill in life is listening. People think that it’s suasion, but allowing a space and trust to be built up so that you can peel away layers of the onion in another human being and be able to understand their deepest anxieties and fears and their greatest hopes and dreams, and bond with them at a deep level and see the world through their eyes. If you have that skill, you can gracefully navigate life. It’s not as important what your feelings are in the situation, whether it’s recruiting someone, negotiating with someone, trying to get to a solution. Being able to understand the other person’s priorities and goals so you can craft a win-win scenario is critically important. It’s listening and being able to draw out another human being and understand not what they’re telling you on the surface but what their real deeper agenda is, and seeing if you can figure out a way to accomplish your own goals while doing the same thing.
I negotiate contracts and the time frame of it is critical because there’s nothing that the athlete can do better with his life than to play for that team. Time works against us; time to be late to training camp or time to miss. The point is that what you fear is deadlock. When two people feel like somehow good faith has been offended, they can lock their positions in and self-destruct and just takes over. They’ll lock in and lock in. When you think things can’t get worse, in a deadlock they always can. The question is, how can you work out a paradigm of cooperation and not have that break down, and to be able to somehow identify points of commonality where resolution could be reached?
You’re the renowned expert at negotiation. I think people would be surprised to hear that your real tip on negotiating is not being typically aggressive but the listening and the empathy skills that you just iterated there. I think that’s a nice a-ha moment for everybody to say, “If I really want to be a good negotiator, I should become a good listener.” Am I on the right page there, Leigh?
Yes, and you also need to understand how to ask the right questions that could draw people out. The same skill is true in recruiting, in trying to make a sale, in every area of business. Making the assumption that you’re pre-set pitch is going to be effective assumes that every human being has the same priorities and the same personalities. What’s really important is to focus in critical situations that someone have the power to exclude all extraneous stimuli, to ignore the fact that the consequence of not making a sale or not negotiating this deal may be apocalyptic. To be able to tune that out, tune out extraneous noise, focus on the moment and elevate your level of performance to come through in those situations. So often in life, there will have been mistakes made or the situation may have grown dire. You may be facing pressures or temptation to quit or to see the situation as dire and unsolvable will be there at all times. It’s having the ability to tune all that out and focus on solution and be creative and perform in that moment that’s critical.
[Tweet “Ask The Right Questions When You Negotiate”]
You are the “real life Jerry Maguire,” super-agent, that’s what your book is really about. The director, Cameron Crow, of Jerry Maguire said you were the primary inspiration for that. Did you ever have a client ask you to do what they did in the movie about “Show me the money” and all that stuff?
No. It’s funny. Cameron called me up back in 1993 and asked if he could shadow me to pick up the atmosphere for a film that will involve a sports agent. He followed me to the 1993 NFL draft where I had the first pick. He came up to a press conference in New England with Bill Parcells, went to USC Pro Scouting Day, came for a week to league meetings, came into my office, Super Bowl parties, games, and I told him lots and lots of stories. The line, “Show me the money,” comes from a player named Tim McDonald who was out in Palm Springs. It was at the league meeting as I was showing him off to different teams to try to get them to sign him as a free agent. One night, Cameron went up to Tim’s hotel room and said, “What are you looking for in this experience?” Lou Dobbs in Moneyline was on in the background and Tim gestured towards the screen and said, “I’m looking for someone to show me some respect. I’m looking for a team to show me some winning. I’m looking for a team that shows me some money,” and Cameron wrote, “Show me the money.”
I love the story behind that. It’s such an iconic moment. Thank you for sharing that. You also have a story about how you decided to pass on representing Peyton Manning. Can you tell us about that?
That was one of my genius moves of the 20th century. There had been a situation where there were two quarterbacks coming out in ’93, Drew Bledsoe and Rick Mirer. Everyone thought Rick Mirer was more prolific in college, Drew was a better natural talent. I took Drew, we went on to Pro Bowls and to play in the Super Bowl, and Rick was not quite as successful. The same paradigm looked like it was going to happen in 1998, and that was Peyton Manning and Ryan Leaf. Ryan Leaf was really gifted athletically. Peyton Manning was really prolific in college. Ryan had to decide earlier, I took him. Peyton goes on to be one of the all-time great players and Ryan had a very fore-shortened career.
Do people pitch to you all the time to represent them? What do you look for when you hear a pitch like that?
I’ve represented in football 61 first round draft picks and the very first pick in the first round eight different years and in baseball practice, basketball practice. You’re looking for a talent level that’s going to enable our practice to stay on the cutting edge and give us role models who will really make an impact. In football, we have a quarterback-centered practice. This year, we have a quarterback Patrick Mahomes II who’s shooting up the first round with Texas Tech and last year. Paxton Lynch who hopefully will start this year for the Denver Broncos. You look for good values, first of all, and you’re looking for someone with a sense of self-respect, who understands the importance of nurturing family, who wants to be part of the community where people care for each other. Then you look for a work ethic and then that capacity, the ability to transcend the moment to perform in critical situations. All those things. Hopefully you have a strong family there but that’s sometimes not possible to have a nuclear, two-parent family. You look first for the character and personality qualities. There are many talented athletes. Every time you represent someone, it involves cutting up a little bit of your own life, which you have a finite amount of. You want to make sure you’re spending it on young men or women that truly you’ll be proud of.
What’s interesting to me is you not only represent the athletes but news anchors and sportscasters and sports coaches. I assume that same filter applies to them as well, yes?
It does. If you’re meeting people who have a heart, compassion, social conscience, a sense of a larger world, they’re going to use their craft and they’ll do more. They’ll find a way to use their profile to make a real difference. You get the same impact from people who are on television really in any capacity. Some of the coaches are as well-known as the players. They have longer careers, so do the news anchors, than athletes do. Again, every form of celebrity affords the opportunity to influence other people. A news person can do it through a well-crafted story or a story that’s got some passion or illumination to it. I think it’s all equally compelling.
The other thing that you’re doing that I’m really interested in is this creation of a virtual studio where you’re producing sports themed movies and TV and video games. Certainly, in the startup world, these internet apps and fan interactivity, the second-screen involvement, is really the hot button right now. Can you tell us about how that came about and what you’re doing with that?
We learned very early that the representation of athletes took us into the creation of content, and being involved with technologies. Back in the 90s, I have developed a company called Athletes Direct which was football, baseball, basketball players’ writing weekly diaries talking about their charitable foundation, e-commerce application. This was when you still have to go to AOL to get on the internet. We germinated it and sold it a couple of years later for a massive multiple. These projects where we can develop a sports themed reality show, a competition show, are dramatically scripted where we can consult on a sports themed motion picture. Then in technology, can we find the next new app, the new startup that brings fan experience closer, the next new website, the next new way to deliver content and be an adviser to that?
We have a group called Steinberg Ventures that looks at all forms of new technology development and looks for good startups.
I’m an adviser to a company called Desk Site where if you live in Los Angeles but you grew up in New York, you want to follow the New York Giants football team, you can get 30 hours of high-def over your computer, all the highlights, all the analysis and everything. It’s just like you were there. It’s got a demographic feature where you can tailor the advertising on a subscription basis to women or men or younger people or older people, as opposed to the scatter shot that happens when they’re advertising trucks on NFL games to an audience that’s 41% women. It’s a new concussion helmet that uses coil and compression to attenuate and dissipate the energy that comes into the head by as much as 50%. We have a group called Steinberg Ventures that looks at all forms of new technology development and looks for good startups.
Let’s talk about one of your other passion projects besides preventing bullying is working on concussion awareness and prevention and potential cures. You touched on that a little bit with Steinberg Ventures. Using technology to prevent some of these head injuries, obviously it’s a big topic right now. If the damage has occurred sometimes it doesn’t show up for a while. Anything else you want to tell us about what we can do as people who care? Is there a charity or something?
First, awareness. The reality of the situation is that, for example the sport of football, every time an offensive lineman hits a defense lineman with the inception of a play, it produces a low-level sub-concussive event. It turns out that an offensive lineman can walk out of the game with 10,000 sub-concussion events, none of which has been diagnosed, none of which has worked. It could happen as many as 10,000 times. The aggregate will almost certainly produce ALS, premature senility, Parkinson’s, chronic traumatic encephalopathy and depression. This danger exists not simply in pro-football or college and high school, in field hockey, in AYSO, in hockey; anything that involves collision. People need to be aware of that and understand that the collisions and concussions have especially devastating effects on younger people.
Looking at the age someone should start a collision sport, it takes longer for that adolescent brain to heal. Keeping track of the amount of concussions, finding ways to play collision sports more safely, protective helmetry and other devices. These are all things we need to focus on. We know that athletes who play collision sports may turn 40 and have problems bending over to pick up their child. It’s another thing not to be able to identify that child. We’re talking about the brain, which makes the concussion issue different than any other type of injury.
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Any final thoughts, it’s just been a pleasure having you on, that you want to leave the audience with?
My dad used to tell me, when you’re looking for someone to fix a problem or deal with a situation in the world, and you keep waiting for the amorphous ‘they’ or them to fix it: the government, older people, someone else. He would say to me, you can wait forever. He would look at me and say, “The ‘they’ is you, son. You are the ‘they’.” It’s about individual responsibility and people believing that they have the power to affect the world around them and make a difference.
Don’t wait for somebody else to make a difference. You do it. I love it so much, Leigh. Thanks for sharing your insights and even the secrets of where, “Show me the money” came from. It’s been a fascinating interview. Thanks again.
Links Mentioned
- Leigh Steinberg
- Steinberg Sports and Entertainment
- Pro Football Hall of Fame
- Crescent Moon Foundation
- Kicks for Critters
- The Agent: My 40-Year Career Making Deals and Changing the Game
- Desk Site
- Steinberg Ventures
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