Business RadioX ®

Joe Coppola with Premier Business Brokers

by

Joseph-Coppola
Buy a Business Near Me
Joe Coppola with Premier Business Brokers
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Joseph-CoppolaJoseph Coppola, with Premier Business Brokers, is a serial entrepreneur and has owned several business ventures since a young age.

He has spent the last few years as a business broker in the Saint Louis Metro area and has been providing small business consulting services for the last decade.

Joseph also has a deep passion for education and has been teaching both business and marketing courses since 2013. His combination of experience as an educator, business owner, and business consultant provides him with a unique perspective.

Connect with Joseph on LinkedIn and Twitter.

What You’ll Learn in This Episode

  • Buying A Business 101 (Tips for First-Time Buyers)
  • Financing Your Purchase
  • Transitioning into Ownership
  • Exit Strategy (Preparing To Sell Your Business)

This transcript is machine transcribed by Sonix 

TRANSCRIPT

Intro: [00:00:07] Broadcasting live from the Business RadioX studios in Atlanta, Georgia. It’s time for Buy a Business Near Me, brought to you by the Business RadioX Ambassador program, helping business brokers sell more local businesses. Now, here’s your host.

Stone Payton: [00:00:32] Welcome to another exciting and informative edition of Buy a Business near Me. Stone Payton here with you this afternoon. Please join me in welcoming to the broadcast with Premier Business Brokers Mr. Joe Coppola. How are you, man?

Joe Coppola: [00:00:49] I’m wonderful, Stone. How are you today, sir?

Stone Payton: [00:00:51] I am doing well. Really been looking forward to this conversation. Delighted to have you on the program. I’m thinking probably a good place to start. If you could articulate for for me and our listeners mission purpose, what are what are you and your team really out there trying to do for folks? Man?

Joe Coppola: [00:01:10] Well, I’ll keep it very simple. We are here to help people buy and sell businesses and we work with people every day doing just that. We guide them down the path and show them a lot of different opportunities and kind of give them a different way to look at things from a different lens. Sometimes on both sides, both buyers and sellers for that matter.

Stone Payton: [00:01:31] So I’m operating under the impression that you probably find yourself quite often working with first time, only time kind of kind of buyers. Is that the case? And if so, what kind of counsel do you give them and might you give some of us who are thinking about it?

Joe Coppola: [00:01:49] Well, I’ll tell you, I would say probably 90% of people who do come to us at some point, this is their first rodeo. So and, you know, with that being said, they have a little idea about what I do, but a lot of times they have no idea about the benefits. And really the the reason why they would start with working with a business broker and kind of part of that is just to help them put a plan together and then kind of help guide them through those steps.

Stone Payton: [00:02:20] There’s just so much that we don’t know, right? I mean, you need someone that has experience, expertise, can lean on other people on the on the team as well to provide, you know, examples and precedent of what they’ve seen, what they might run into. There’s so much we just don’t know. What we don’t know.

Joe Coppola: [00:02:37] Right? Oh, absolutely. And one of those things, too, when you go to a firm that’s got a team of brokers like my company premier that I work for, you know, I’ve got 15 other people that I can bounce ideas off of and they’ve got 15 different points of views as well as 15 different Rolodexes. So when we list a business, when a seller comes to us to list a business, you know, that’s 15 different people working for you. And likewise, when people come to us buying a business that’s 15 people out there looking for those opportunities for you. So, you know, you get a team and a lot of times it’s like anything, you know, 15 heads are better than one, right?

Stone Payton: [00:03:20] Absolutely. So what’s your back story personally, man? How did you get into this line of work?

Joe Coppola: [00:03:26] Well, what’s kind of funny, a lot of brokers come become brokers from actually being buyers or sellers. And that was kind of my story. I was a buyer looking to buy a business, and that’s kind of how I even found out about brokers. I honestly thought, you know, you would just find a guy selling a business in the paper or online, you know, nowadays and you just buy it from them. But working with the broker actually opened up my eyes to the process and I thought it’d be a great opportunity. And I found a place that was looking for brokers and I’d actually worked with them on buying a business. So it was kind of a perfect match.

Stone Payton: [00:04:01] So I suspect you find probably buyers and sellers alike if they’re first time buyers or sellers, there are probably some misconceptions or myths or they maybe they go in with with some assumptions that just really aren’t the aren’t the case. Is that accurate and or are there a couple of those kind of things that maybe you could set the record straight for us?

Joe Coppola: [00:04:24] Well, and one of the things and it’s just like, again, one of those old sayings, you got to do your homework. You really do. But what you can also see is you might look at five businesses. They could be five of the same businesses on the same busy street, but they all make different amounts of money and they all are ran differently as well. All of them have their warts and bumps and some of them have they’re great pros versus their cons, but you have to really look at each one individually to kind of gauge if the opportunity makes sense for you. One of the biggest things I can tell people is, you know, it doesn’t necessarily you know, not every business needs somebody to have a 20 year track record of success in that industry. But if you like it, if you’ve been doing it, if it’s something that speaks to you sometimes, maybe it’s an opportunity that you’ve never, ever thought about. But based on your background, say, your guy that’s done sales or even a guy that’s done operations and all of a sudden you see an opportunity to where, well, hey, I could do that based on my background, but I’ve never thought about selling this type of product or this type of service. I have a true story where I had a gentleman that had worked in the automotive industry for 20 years running cruise and running a large facility, and he got laid off and he didn’t know what his next opportunity was going to be. And he was sitting in his backyard kind of depressed and bummed out watching the neighbor have a tree cut down. And he was watching the crew leader run the cruise. And he said, you know, I could do that. And he started looking for a business and he found us and found a tree cut business. So it wasn’t something directly in line with what he had done, but it was something that he could wrap his head around and say, hey, no, I could run cruise. I know how to do that. I know how to do this.

Stone Payton: [00:06:13] It sounds like incredibly rewarding work to me. What are you enjoying the most at this point in your career? What’s the most fun about it?

Joe Coppola: [00:06:21] Well, so a lot of what we do is a very linear process with regard to paperwork and documentation, and there’s checklists that you have to go step by, step down. But when it comes to, say, the deal itself, and once you have two parties that want to work together, everything’s kind of open at that point. And it’s a very malleable thing at that point as well, where, you know, if you’ve got two parties, if the seller is in love with the buyer and the. I was in love with the business and the seller. You can get a lot of things done. It’s just that’s the fun part is where you get two people on the same page and they want to work together and you know, things pop up and you know, there are roadblocks and obstacles that come along. It’s trying to figure out how to get through those and showing both sides, you know, the different opportunities again, and maybe how to mitigate this, this obstacle, how to get around it and so forth. So that, to me is probably the most rewarding and fun part of the business.

Stone Payton: [00:07:21] Well, let’s talk a little bit about deal structure, because since I started hosting this series, I’m learning that I guess it was one of the misconceptions I had going into this. My picture was, you know, I hand you a check, you hand me the keys to the business, and there’s just so many different ways you can get really creative in how you structure the deal, can’t you?

Joe Coppola: [00:07:43] Oh, absolutely. And you know, the two biggest differences. I tell clients that my business is different than real estate is. Number one, we always work confidential. Very rarely do we ever list a business with its name. Every once in a while, depending on if it’s a legacy business or a real well known brand or something along those lines, people might say, Hey, let’s use the name because it might attract the right attention or more attention. But 99% of the time we don’t list the business. And for instance, we don’t put a sign out front saying for sale. The second part that is pretty different is usually when you sell a home to somebody, you never see that person again unless it’s a family or friend or something along those lines. But with this, there needs to be some transition period between the buyer and the seller. And again, depending on the buyer’s background, if they’ve been doing the same thing for 20 years and now they’re just going to buy a business to do it for themselves, they may not necessarily need quote unquote training, but they do need a little transition. I sold an automotive shop to a guy that had a background running shops. He was a regional supervisor for a big company. And when the seller looked at his resume, he said, Oh, this guy doesn’t necessarily need me to show him how to use an impact gun. And the joke ended up being, No, we just need to know where the coffee filters are and how to turn on the lights at the end of the day.

Joe Coppola: [00:09:07] And, you know, and that’s what it can come down to. I’ve had we usually do like a mandatory two weeks training. We always ask the seller, can you do at least minimally like, say two weeks? And we’ve had cases where three days in the buyer looks at the seller and goes, you know, I don’t need you anymore. I think I got it figured out. And again, it’s really based on the buyer’s background and then obviously to just kind of depending on what the seller’s goals are, a lot of times we have guys that they want to stay on and maybe do one thing. Maybe they love sales. I’ve had a couple of those instances where the seller wanted to focus just on doing the sales and maybe letting somebody else do the back end of the business and control the day to day and the operations. And we had a buyer take it over and basically say, Hey, if you want to go out and work four days a week, 4 hours doing sales, that’s great. I’d love to keep you on. And that seller was in his mid fifties, so, you know, he felt like, Hey, I’m still young enough to get out here and pound the pavement, but I wouldn’t necessarily want to work six, seven days a week like I’ve been doing. So.

Stone Payton: [00:10:11] Well, and you can get pretty creative, or at least there are a number of options available to a buyer in terms of financing the the purchase as well. Right.

Joe Coppola: [00:10:21] Absolutely. In a majority of first time buyers will use the SBA program, which is a great program. But again, you’ve got people that you know, they can be cash buyers, they can use conventional means, they can refinance. There’s all kinds of different options in that place. But a lot of people do come in using the SBA program.

Stone Payton: [00:10:44] All right. So you’re helping people market their business on the seller side. How does the whole sales and marketing thing work for you and your business? How do you get the new interest, the new clients?

Joe Coppola: [00:10:57] Well, and again, that can be a challenge as well. But for the most part, we sell I’d say 80% of the businesses we sell are the people that we sat down and talk with, buyers that have came to us. Maybe they’ve looked at a business and it wasn’t in the right area for them or just wasn’t the right fit. They’ll see maybe an email blast that we do internally, or maybe they’ll see a listing even on a site like Biz by sell and see our name attached to it and go, Hey, I talked to Joe a couple of weeks back about a business that’s similar to this. Just be a great opportunity. And then myself and my fellow brokers, we always keep a Rolodex, if you will, of what buyers are looking for. And if I’ve got a guy that says, Hey, I’m looking for an automotive shop and X, Y, Z area, and if I run into a guy looking to sell, well, there you go, You go, Hey, you’ve got a guy looking to buy a business in this area. Are you interested in selling? And you kind of start with low hanging fruit, if you will. And then as you kind of branch out, we use social media, we use sites like I mentioned biz by sell, and you get a lot of people from all walks of life and all backgrounds. Those means as well. And you kind of start the process over with them. You introduce yourself, you meet them, you walk them through from the buyer’s side with the buyer process looks like. And one of the biggest things that we always do is make them sign a non-disclosure slash confidentiality agreement that states that any of the confidential financial records, anything that we disclose to a buyer, they obviously don’t disclose to the general public.

Stone Payton: [00:12:33] Well, and it sounds like you’ve had the benefit of one or more mentors probably very early on when you were making this pivot and getting in this into this arena. But yeah, you’ve had the benefit of one or more folks to help you navigate this terrain, haven’t you?

Joe Coppola: [00:12:51] Absolutely. And that’s been key to the success that I’ve had. Also, having a background, I’ve been a business consultant for almost 20 years on some level. So I’ve worked with small business owners, I’ve spoke their language, I know their pain points. And when I go in to sit down with them, you know, I don’t obviously know everything about their business, but I try to do as much research as I can. I try to get an idea of of what their business model looks like, what some of the challenges are in it, what some of the problems that we can obviously talk about and figure out right away, because there’s a lot of challenges with selling specific types of businesses. If, for instance, a guy needs a background in it, you know, it’s like you’ve got to find the right person with that right background then. So you’ve got to advertise it and obviously market it to that type of person or try to find that type of client. And that can be a big challenge.

Stone Payton: [00:13:45] Well, And I believe I saw in my notes that you have a passion for teaching. You actually teach both the business and marketing courses and have been doing this for some time now, haven’t you?

Joe Coppola: [00:13:56] Absolutely. That’s kind of one of those things where sometimes it doesn’t feel like a job. You know, you’re sitting around with a group of like minded individuals talking about business. I mean, what what more fun can you do? And you’re getting paid for it. You know, I’ve taught people from every age range, every demographic, every background. And when you get a group of people with ideas that want to share them openly in that format, I mean, I’ve been able to teach students at like the 101, the general, how to write a business plan. But I’ve also had those students later on in the 201 or the 301. Type of courses where now you’ve got to know their business model, you know, what they’re looking to do. And in that group setting, you can have more of a conversation and you can say, Hey Steve, this is a great opportunity for what you’re looking to do with your restaurant or Hey, Stone, this would be a great thing to market for your opportunity. And again, it becomes a much more open conversation versus your structured traditional. All right, guys, let’s go over chapter one, page one out of the book, etc., etc..

Stone Payton: [00:15:04] You obviously have a lot of irons in the fire, a lot going on at any given time. The teaching, the working with the buyers and the sellers. And you clearly have a real passion for the work. And I know you’re a human man. Sometimes the tank has got to run a little bit low. The batteries need charging. What do you do? Where do you go? How do you get how do you recharge, man?

Joe Coppola: [00:15:27] Well, you know, again, even when you when you’re talking to business owners and you’re talking to people that are passionate and like minded individuals, again, you get recharged on the daily sometimes. Now, again, you know, you get beat down from the battle of the day to day, there’s no doubt. But when you sit down even something like this and have a conversation, it recharges. You get you back out there, get you back in the fight, and then, you know, you’ve got a disconnect sometimes, too. I see that a lot with people that have been doing this for a while to where they go, Hey, you know what? For the next couple of weeks, I’m going to unplug and try to get back to some of the fundamentals and then re approach their attack. You know, you can you know, you can spend hours cold calling, knocking on doors and trying to get things going and just not get any progress. And that can be frustrating. Sometimes you need to just recharge, take a week to kind of figure out what the next steps are and then go back to the to the program.

Stone Payton: [00:16:23] All right, before we wrap, I’d love to talk a little bit about exit strategy. Maybe a couple of pro tips on helping someone get prepared to sell their business because there are some you got to get your ducks in a row to do this the right way. Yeah.

Joe Coppola: [00:16:39] Well, I’ll tell you, the number one thing I can say is have one, right? Number one thing I can recommend is have one and you’ll be again. As you can appreciate, there’s a huge percentage of people that come to me that they didn’t have one. You know, a lot of business owners, especially if maybe an older demographic, don’t necessarily start a business to exit it. Now, you know, you’re meet more people nowadays, especially maybe in the younger demographic that actually think that way and they run their business in order to sell it one day. But there’s definitely a difference between a person that starts a business to run one and a person who starts one to sell one. And that’s going to be key because when you exit, we tell people it can take up to a year to sell a business and the average is nine months. Now, personally, I’ve seen them sell within a month or two, but I’ve also seen them take nine months, ten months, a year, a year and a half. So the further out somebody calls me is better. I always tell people the guy that’s 2 to 3 years out or even 3 to 5 years out is in a better position to have a conversation with me to build that exit strategy and to build that long term plan versus the individual that says, hey, I need to move in six months or I want to sell a business in less than a year.

Joe Coppola: [00:17:56] A lot of times we tell people up front that we can help you as much as we can, but we can’t guarantee success in a short timeframe. It’s just something that we can’t control. Now that being said, the more together person has an exit strategy, yeah, the sooner that business will sell and the more together the business is, yes, the more likely it’s going to sell faster. But we always say again, give us a little more time because you just never know how long it’s going to take to find that right person. And we also always say to a client, it only takes one. So if we can find that right person, it may take some time. But if we find that right person, that’s all we need.

Stone Payton: [00:18:36] All right, man, where can our listeners get in touch with you? What’s the best way for them to connect with you? Tap into your work, whatever you feel like is appropriate. Website, email, LinkedIn. I just want to make sure that that they can if they if they so choose, that they can have a conversation with you about some of these topics. Man.

Joe Coppola: [00:18:53] Well, you can find me and my fellow brokers on premier business brokers, and I can also give you guys my direct email. It is Jay Coppola, Ink jc02 P’s, Ola I and C at gmail.com. Feel free to reach out to me any time and I can answer any questions you have.

Stone Payton: [00:19:17] Well, Joe, it’s been a real pleasure having you on the show today, man. Thank you for sharing your insight, your perspective. You’re doing important work. To me, this is so critical to just the foundation of our of this good country of ours, this great country of ours. So thank you for what you’re doing and thanks for investing the time with us this afternoon, man.

Joe Coppola: [00:19:38] Now, I appreciate you two stone Thank you for your time as well today, sir.

Stone Payton: [00:19:42] All right. Until next time, this is Stone Payton for our guest today, Joe Coppola with Premier business Brokers and everyone here at the Business Radio X family saying, we’ll see you next time on Buy a Business near Me.

 

Michael Kohan with The Elevate Life Project

by

Michael-Koham-headshot
High Velocity Radio
Michael Kohan with The Elevate Life Project
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Michael-Koham-headshotMichael Kohan is an I.C.F Certified Life Coach who wakes up each morning with a simple purpose: to help others rediscover their powerful inner strengths and give clients and students the tools they need to make more meaningful decisions, to Aim Higher and Elevate Their Life.

In 2015 he founded The Elevate Life Project, an online community for people to re-discover their true selves and gain the skills they need to move forward and find lasting success. He is the host of the Elevate Life Project Podcast, a show dedicated to helping listeners develop a positive mindset, a rejuvenated outlook for themselves and their future, rediscovering that they are spiritual beings – and any dream a person wants in life is possible. Elevate-Life-Project-logo

Michael is dedicated to helping his clients and students find balance in all aspects of their lives—emotional, spiritual, mental, and physical well-being. He feels his purpose is to serve others through his teaching by encouraging students and clients to become steadfast in their practices while integrating spiritual and mindful living into their day-to-day lives, to achieve their goals, live their dreams, and achieve the impossible.

Connect with Michael on LinkedIn, Facebook and Instagram.

What You’ll Learn in This Episode

  • What can Eastern Philosophy teach us about living successfully in the modern world?
  • What is success?
  • How can mindfulness help one live a better life?
  • Why do we suffer, and how can we heal suffering through non-attachment?
  • How does a person live life with integrity?
  • What is a holistic wellness and how can practicing it deconstruct negative patterns?
  • Why are change and personal growth difficult, and why do most people fail in achieving their dreams and goals?
  • How do you go from a corporate job to building a health and wellness business from scratch with no initial investment?

This transcript is machine transcribed by Sonix

TRANSCRIPT

Intro: [00:00:04] Broadcasting live from the Business RadioX studios in Atlanta, Georgia. It’s time for High Velocity radio.

Stone Payton: [00:00:15] Welcome to the High Velocity Radio show, where we celebrate top performers producing better results in less time. Stone Payton here with you this morning. Please join me in welcoming to the broadcast. Icf certified life coach with Elevate Life Project. Mr. Michael Kohan. Good morning, sir.

Michael Kohan: [00:00:35] Good morning. By the way, I love that sound intro and it pumped me up.

Stone Payton: [00:00:41] Well, good, because we got a lot of questions. I’m sure we won’t get to them all, but I think maybe a good place to start would be mission purpose. What are you and your team really out there trying to do for folks, man?

Michael Kohan: [00:00:55] Well, it’s in my tagline. I basically just work with people to try to help them aim higher and elevate their life. I work with people that are typically 35 to 55 years old, spiritual, nonreligious, who are at a crossroad in their life, and they’re looking to make some changes, but they just don’t know how, whether they just don’t have enough time for their family or they are struggling financially, or they’re just trying to set some goals to take their life to the next level. I just sit with them. I kind of help them work through what’s holding them back, what is getting in their way mentally, emotionally and what changes they need to make to their lives so they can then form their own conscious choices to make their life the best version for themselves.

Stone Payton: [00:01:45] And I think I read in my notes where you do lean on some aspects of Eastern philosophy to help you serve these folks. Is that accurate?

Michael Kohan: [00:01:55] That’s 100% accurate. First of all, all psychology is comes from Eastern philosophy, Freud, Carl Jung, which are the founders of psychology. They took a lot of their cues and references from the Bhagavad Gita, which is a Hindu text on how to live a spiritual life in the material world and for a better part of a decade. At one point in my life, I was contemplating becoming a monk, and I was studying all these texts on Buddhism, Hinduism, yoga, mysticism, and even dabbled in a lot of Judeo-Christian mysticism. And I take those teachings and I try to use them to help people remove those sort of negative predisposition ideas and thoughts that are just not serving them. Basically what I do is I take certain philosophies of like, you’re not the mind, you’re not the body, you’re something more. Well, what’s that mean? Well, that means that you’re not who you are in this material body. Then if we’re not, we are in this material body. Then we could do anything. We can change any aspect of our lives, because that’s not who we are.

Stone Payton: [00:03:02] As timeless as these ideas are, I’m operating under the impression that you believe with all of your heart that you can lean on this to to teach us all about how to successfully live in the modern world. Can you speak to that a little bit more?

Michael Kohan: [00:03:19] Well, like, let’s put it this way. Okay. All right. So from the human condition, we have two minds. We have the fight or flight mind or animal mind, because we are by nature, humans have animal bodies. So it’s either I’m going to kill this or I’m going to run from this. Either I can destroy this or it’s going to destroy me. I’m going to avoid pleasure or avoid pain and seek pleasure, right? That’s our lower selves. Then we have as humans are higher selves are our ability to think beyond our material gains of acquiring possessions just to feed our hunger. So if we understand those two concepts, which comes from spiritual practices, then we can begin to look at our lives and be like, okay, whatever is going on in my life is a choice. What I mean by that is we have that lower mind. In that higher mind. Our lower mind is to avoid pain and seek pleasure, which causes what? Suffering. That suffering is a choice we all go are going to go through struggles in life. We’re all going to go through periods where we have hardship, we have challenges that overcome and today more than we have ten years ago. Right. Look at the American economy. Look at, you know, the conversations we’re having in the public arena.

Michael Kohan: [00:04:46] There’s a lot of fear, a lot of a lot of strife. And that is all about suffering When we look at it from a spiritual standpoint, which is different, where in spirituality, we look at both our the good things we have in our lives and the pain that we’re having in our lives. It’s temporary. Then we can say, okay, whatever I’m going through right now, it’s temporary. If I’m struggling right now and I’m going through a hardship, that pain is inevitable. The suffering is by choice. So then I can look at this pain and say, okay, I know it’s temporary, so then I can then choose to make changes to it. And if I choose to take changes to it, that means I empower myself. And if I empower myself, that means I can do whatever I want in life. Now, some of us will have better luck and have big stages where we become massively successful and we come multi mega millionaires and billionaires, but most of us will not. But when we realize that if we choose to empower ourselves and we choose to recognize that what we’re experiencing is temporary, then we’re going to be successful no matter what. And that’s how spirituality helps us live better lives.

Stone Payton: [00:06:01] Okay. I got to know more about the back story, man. How in the world did you get into this line of work?

Michael Kohan: [00:06:08] All right. So I guess you could say I grew up in that classic American Northeast lifestyle. You know, both my parents were college educated, so it wasn’t a matter of me. If I was going to go to college, it was I’m going to college and I’m 45. So I went to college 25 years ago where college was not very expensive and my parents were also very affluent, so they were able to pay for my college. My entire four years of college cost less than a year at the same school now. And I was going to I was going to Rutgers and I was studying to become a therapist and I was getting my master’s in psychology. And 911 happened. And if you lived where I lived, we all went through, you know, the Northeast. If you lived in the Tri-State area, you had friends and family, you knew somebody. And I just kind of like had that like I give up moment in my life and I just sort of dropped out of grad school. I had an associate’s degree in business from community college also, and I didn’t really know what I was supposed to do with my life. And my parents were like, Get a job. And I was like, Well, I wanted to do I guess. So I ended up getting a job working in corporate America, and through the course of about a ten year period, I found myself at 30 years old working for a real estate investment trust.

Michael Kohan: [00:07:34] I was making 175,000 a year +22 biannual bonuses, so I was making well over $250,000 a year. I had a great apartment in New York City across from the park. I had enough money to enjoy whatever I wanted to do, but I felt very empty inside and I was basically functioning. In a way where I would basically wake up in the morning do do, you know, do cocaine work all day? Come home exhausted at the end of the day, at like 9:00 at night, take a bunch of Valium pass out. And I did this for years until a friend of mine was like, You need to change your life. You’re going to die of a heart attack. You’re killing yourself. And I started seeing a therapist and the therapist started introduced me to yoga and the yoga studio that I went to, I just fell in love with because there and I just started just changing my life and studying spirituality and yoga and mysticism. And this this became everything for me. So on Tuesdays, I studied the Bhagavad Gita. On Thursdays. I went to a Buddhist class. On Fridays, I went to this very progressive Orthodox synagogue on Fridays for Shabbat dinner, and on Saturday they studied the Torah and Saturday afternoons I did more yoga and that’s all I did for about five years, or to the point where I decided to quit my job.

Michael Kohan: [00:09:07] I shaved my head and I was aspiring to be a monk. At one point I took what’s called first initiation, where you take the initial vows where you kind of step into monastic life. And then I met my wife and then I decided to change directions and with my wife and I started teaching yoga full time. And I loved it. But I was broke. I was poor, I was living off of me and my wife were living off of like $3,000 at one point. And the Northeast, that’s not a lot of money in north. In the Northeast, that’s like very poor. That’s like, I would say in Georgia, $1,500 a month. And I asked myself, like, what did I like about teaching yoga? What do I like? And it was about helping people. And then we realized I had this master’s in psychology sitting there. So we decided to go back and become a life coach. And that’s how I got into this. And I took those ten years of studying yoga and Jewish mysticism and Eastern philosophy and combined it with psychology and incorporated coaching techniques to start this business. And it just took off.

Stone Payton: [00:10:15] Well, I mean, you’re clearly finding the work incredibly rewarding. What are you enjoying the most? Do you and your wife both at this point in your practice?

Michael Kohan: [00:10:24] Well, I you know, I just love I just love I just love helping people. You know, there’s always one or two clients that just don’t work out for whatever reason either, and they just get really upset. But by and large, most of the clients I feel that I work with, I really do help them. I mean, I just help them just take their lives and make them easier. I don’t do these, like, programs or like sign up for my 12 week goal setting course and I’ll take your life to the next level. I do that, but mostly it’s just it’s mostly it’s just about my clients having somebody to talk to. Where they don’t need therapy, but they just need somebody to help them get better clarity and better perspective on how to handle their situations. And that just makes my life better because I get to earn a living. I make a good salary now, but I also get to make the world better. I’m leaving the world better than I got it. And I try to do that with everything now. Every time that we go somewhere, my wife and I are always like, How can we be better? People treat people better, How can we be better to the people that are working in the restaurants or the person that’s like picking up our garbage? That’s this. And that’s why I love what I do. And I think when I’m coaching people, I get to instill those values into people because that’s what’s missing. I think today that just that, that decency.

Stone Payton: [00:11:49] Yeah. So help me and our listeners help me get my arms around this term that I’m hearing more and more often now mindfulness speak to that a little bit, if you would.

Michael Kohan: [00:12:01] Mindfulness is, by and large just an easy way for individuals like myself to incorporate spirituality into your life without it being offensive. What we found was a lot of people became very triggered when you would bring in Buddhist or Hindu teachings into their lives because they thought it was going against their upbringing. So that’s where mindfulness comes from. It’s an adaptation of this idea that your thoughts and emotions affect your environment and your environment affects your thoughts and emotions. And through techniques like breathing properly, like learning how to breathe better. Because if you breathe shallow, your mind is very shallow. If you breathe deep, your mind is very deep like this. Think about that one. When you get into an argument with somebody, you watch your breath. It gets very short so that you react very threateningly. But if you’re in an argument and you learn to breathe deeply, you learn to become so those are the basic teachings of mindfulness. And then through meditation, we’re able to go into our subconscious mind to understand what’s going on beneath the surface so we can kind of clean out the garbage. And through other techniques like diet and exercise and what your environment, your home looks like all affects the quality of your of your life.

Stone Payton: [00:13:32] Another term that I’m running into is attachment. You know, I guess more accurately, it’s non-attachment to talk about where that applies.

Michael Kohan: [00:13:42] All right. It’s obviously viaggio pomodoro. It’s a Sanskrit saying through the practice of non-attachment, one attains enlightenment. What enlightenment basically is from a material standpoint is Uri. So we all have two lists. You and I have two lists. You want to like for those who are driving, don’t do this, but for those who you are not driving. Take a moment and flip your palms or turn upward like they’re facing the ceiling or the sky. And then look on your right hand and imagine you’re holding a piece of paper. And on that piece of paper is everything that you like about your life, who you are as a person, what you do for living your narrative. Everything about who you are that you love. Now look at your left hand and imagine a list of things that you don’t like about your life. All the struggles you’re going through, all your hardship, where you’re from, your narrative, your life, everything you don’t like about yourself and everything you do like about yourself are on two lists. Now we all have these two lists. When we are attached to something, we cling to the list of the things either we love about our lives and we ignore our problems, or we think there’s something to overcome or something that’s wrong with us. Or we cling to the negative list of all the things that we don’t like about our lives. And we feel that our lives are in despair when we don’t when we’re not attached to either or list.

Michael Kohan: [00:15:14] And we look at our list of the things that we like about ourselves with gratitude, like, Wow, I’m lucky I get to live in America. Wow, I’m lucky I’m I’m healthy or I get to I wow, I’m lucky. I woke up this morning and I look at my list of the things I don’t like about my life. Now there’s things that are wrong with me, but as opportunities for growth. Then we’re no longer attached. Because when we are attached, that means we try to cling to the things that we like or dislike and we try to run away from everything else, and that leads to suffering. There’s nothing wrong with driving a nice car. There’s nothing wrong with having a nice house. There’s nothing wrong with with having a nice life. But we have to understand that that’s all given to us temporarily. They’re not technically ours. Because when you leave this body, because the one absolute truth in this world is we’re all going to die. Right. You and I are going to die. So the house that we live in that we might be paying a mortgage to isn’t really ours. It’s a gift given to us. Because when we leave the body and we go on to our next state of consciousness, the house is still going to be there and someone else is going to have it.

Michael Kohan: [00:16:29] So it’s not really ours. And that goes with everything so that when you have your your high, your peaks, like we’re like, Yay, life is great. I just got a paycheck and life is good and I’m going to go to the mall and I’ll buy a bunch of crap that I don’t need, and you’re attached to that. Then you’re going to then be the next on Monday, be like, Wow, life sucks. I got no money. Now I’m attached to misery. When we understand that neither, we’re going to have both the highs and the lows and we’re not going to be attached to either or. And when things come will be grateful. When things leave, will we understand that that’s temporary also, and we just go through life with the ebbs and flows? I saw this during COVID, right? I saw this with a lot of my colleagues during COVID who who were motivational speakers and life coaches who when COVID happened and things shut down, they crumbled because their entire identity was revolved around. I’m a motivational speaker and I get to go on stage and travel across the country. And that all got shut down and they crumbled because they were attached to that identity versus other people I saw like myself were like, Well, I can’t do that anymore. That’s not who I am. I’m someone who helps people. So how else can I help people? That’s basically how non-attachment works.

Stone Payton: [00:17:46] So I’m sitting here palms up, trying to breathe more deeply because I want to make a little bit of a movement towards some of what you’re describing. And, you know, change is hard. It’s hard for me. I’ve seen other people struggle with change and fall very short of, you know, what are noble intentions. Is that your experience? And if so, why do you think change is so hard? Hard for people.

Michael Kohan: [00:18:12] Change for change is probably one of the hardest things to do, right? Because that goes back to your identity, back to attachment, right? How do we identify ourselves as people? We identify ourselves in what where we’re from, write our narrative. I’m for me, it’s I’m a white male from North America, grew up in New Jersey. I was born Jewish. I was raised Judeo-Christian, parents, got divorced, had it both apartments and a bat mitzvah or a bar mitzvah and a confirmation. And then that’s my that’s that’s that’s where I’m from. I went to I went to Rutgers. I live now. Who where do I live? I live in New Jersey. I’m married. That’s who I am now. And then what I do for a living. I’m a life coach. That’s how I identify myself. And everybody identifies themselves in those three ways. Where are they from? What do they do now for a living and where do they live? Like their narrative. When we want to change, right? We want to make changes to our lives, then what do we have to do? We have to change our identity. And that’s really hard for people because the other part of that equation is we don’t live in a vacuum. We live by collective.

Michael Kohan: [00:19:32] We as humans are group oriented by nature. We form groups. Right. This is the this is an easy explanation of why bad good people do bad things because it’s about joining a group. We are a part of a group, and in that group our identity is in alignment with other people in that group because that’s how we survive. We thrive and survive by being part of a group. So if I want to change, I have to both change the group I’m part of and my identity, and both of those lead to hardship. And so that’s why change is so hard. And the best way to put it is you’re not happy right now in your life of one aspect, right? And if you have to change, you’re going to have to change how you look at yourself, who you are as a person. And by and large, a lot of times you’re going to have to change who you spend your time with. And that’s going to maybe take a period of very painful period of your life. Giving up friends, giving up maybe some family members that are toxic. Changing your habits, changing your identity. And so we don’t want to do that because we look at where we’re at as painful, but we look at the change as worse.

Michael Kohan: [00:20:51] So we don’t want to go through it. But here’s the truth, though. If you aren’t happy now in one area of your life and you’ve got to go through the necessary changes, that is also going to be painful and you’re not going to be happy, what’s the difference? And that’s what you have to look at it to make those changes. Because if you do enough work eventually with hard with luck also though, because you’ll get to a place where you’re actually happy with your life. But most people don’t want to go through those steps of changing who they are, how they describe themselves, and changing like the people around them. And on the other side of the flip coin, the people around you don’t want you to change too, because that’s part of their identity. So as you grow, they start to they start to they start to push back on that because they don’t want to see you change because then it changes their identity. And so we have these two struggles going on, our internal identity, the necessary to change our habits, our lifestyle, the people around us, and other people pushing back against us.

Stone Payton: [00:21:59] So how does the whole sales and marketing thing work for a guy like you, a business like yours? How do you get the new clients?

Michael Kohan: [00:22:09] So I, I do it, which I don’t know why other people don’t do this. So I use a listing service called called BBC.com, where I spend. Between 275 to $500 a month, and I basically pay for leads. Bbc.com is one of the four sort of like high searchable, like life coaching Google searches that people that when you type in life coach will show up and you click on Bach and you’ll type in what you’re looking for and it will go out to people that signed up for this service. And I can click on that lead and give you a call. I get your name, phone number and email address. What makes me so successful versus other life coaches is the fact that I have consistent follow up. What happens is most people, when they click on that lead, they don’t call the client or b only call the client once and they don’t get them on the phone. They never call them again. And to when they click on the client, they tell the client who they are, not how they can help the client. So a lot of times I’ll be like, I’m a PhD in psychology and a life coach. Great. What are you going to do for the client? So that’s how I build my business. I use e-com, I click on the lead and then I call them four times. And after the fourth time, if they don’t call me back, I put them into my email funnel and then they start getting free information from me. I send out a week, a weekly blog, I send out free coaching videos, I sent out free audio, video coaching videos, and then eventually, when they’re ready, they end up coming back to me and signing up for coaching.

Stone Payton: [00:23:57] I am so glad that I asked that. That is really good information. So when a when a relationship with you and a client begins. Talk a little bit about some of some of what happens early. I’m operating under the impression there’s some conversation maybe largely centered around what they’re trying to accomplish. Talk a little bit about the early stages of the work, if you could.

Michael Kohan: [00:24:22] So what I always do with my clients is step one. I do what’s called a discovery call. It’s an industry standard. Basically, you sit on the call with a client for about a half hour to 45 minutes and you just you have a conversation like you and I are having where I ask the coach why they’re looking for a life coach. Get a little bit of their back story, try to figure out, try to pull out what their narrative is and really try to get to see what they’re looking for. I ask them questions like what would be a successful ending of a coaching relationship with me at the end of that discovery call, if if I feel like I can help them and if I’m the right fit for them, I’ll give them a free trial coaching session if I’m not a right fit for them and I don’t think I can help them, I’ll try to point them in the right direction. Sometimes I’d be like, You know, I think you need to see a therapist. So here are two like online therapy directories that you can use, or I think you need this type of coach. I’m not really qualified for what you’re looking for, so I recommend this type of coach you’re looking for and I’ll point them in that direction. But if I can help them, I do a free one three hour trial coaching session, which we typically do a rocking chair exercise, which is a visionary exercise where I’ll have them vision their future self and what they would like their future self to look like.

Michael Kohan: [00:25:42] And it helps me get a good narrative for them at the end of that, that discovery call and that trial coaching session, I’ll typically, unless they’re really not ready, I’ll start with goal setting and I’ll have them start to work with me on goals in four areas of their life Financial goals. Career professional goals, health and wellness goals, and then miscellaneous goals. Miscellaneous goals are things like travel, books, vacations, any sort of major purchases they want to do. And I find that helps me understand a little bit more about what’s going on in their life and where their struggles are. So when I can see what needs to be worked on, once that’s done, then it’s just opens up and it comes up by individual approach where it’s either I’m working on their communication skills, their time management skills, their are their emotional skills, or they have negative beliefs. And I sort of start to tailor it after that goal setting program to really figure out what their own individual needs, because everybody is different. And that’s why I don’t do I don’t put people into like nine session programs because it doesn’t work for them. Some people are like, Yeah, I want to set goals and as I’m working with them, I realize why they’re not setting their goals is because they lack boundaries. And so I have to do a whole coaching on how to develop boundaries or they don’t have good habits. So I’ll have to do a whole coaching series on habits, and that’s basically what I do.

Stone Payton: [00:27:17] All right, man, what is the best way for our listeners to connect with You begin to tap into your work, whatever you feel like is appropriate. Website email that LinkedIn.

Michael Kohan: [00:27:27] This, go to my website. Everything I do is at my website Elevate Life Project. They go to my website, they can sign up for our newsletter. So they go to my website, they can see, they can see my coaching rates, they go to my website, they can take a quiz on understanding their life purpose. They can watch my coaching videos, they can read my blog. It’s all there.

Stone Payton: [00:27:47] Well, Michael, it has been a real pleasure having you on the program today. Thank you so much for investing the time to visit with us and share your experience, expertise, insight and perspective. This has been a lot of fun, man. Thank you so much.

Michael Kohan: [00:28:03] Yeah, man, this is great. I love doing this. Like I said in the beginning, I’m good at talking. I’m terrible at being an interviewer. You were fantastic. So thank you.

Stone Payton: [00:28:12] My pleasure. Man. All right, until next time, this is Stone Payton for our guest today with Elevate Life Project, Mr. Michael Cohen and everyone here at the Business Radio X family saying we’ll see you in the fast lane.

 

Jena Apgar with 2X My Biz

by

Jen-Apgar-headshot
High Velocity Radio
Jena Apgar with 2X My Biz
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Jen-Apgar-headshotJena Apgar is an international speaker, digital agency CEO at 2xMyBiz.com Marketing, Founder and Agency Coach at LeadFlow365.io with the popular 90-Day Double My Agency Challenge. 2X-My-Biz-logo

She’s also the host of the popular videocast, Marketing Strategies that Grow Your Business, which takes you through what it takes to build a 6–8 figure business, to double your business, leveraging marketing strategies, funnels, traffic tactics and more.

Connect with Jena on LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter and Instagram.

What You’ll Learn in This Episode

  • How Jena went from being in the military to running a marketing agency
  • Why 2x and not a Grant Cardone style 10x
  • The number one tip that you would give to every business owner

This transcript is machine transcribed by Sonix 

TRANSCRIPT

Intro: [00:00:04] Broadcasting live from the Business RadioX studios in Atlanta, Georgia. It’s time for High velocity radio.

Stone Payton: [00:00:15] Welcome to the high velocity radio show where we celebrate top performers producing better results in less time. Stone Payton here with you this afternoon. Please join me in welcoming to the broadcast with 2X My Biz, Jena Apgar. How are you?

Jena Apgar: [00:00:33] Hi, I am doing wonderful. It’s always a good day when you closed three clients in one morning.

Stone Payton: [00:00:39] That does sound like a marvelous day. I am so delighted to have you on the program. I know we got a chance to visit by phone a few weeks ago and I knew then this was going to be a marvelous conversation. I got a million questions. We won’t get to them all, but I think a great place to start here is maybe to get a little context, if you would, share with me and our listeners a little bit about niche and purpose, what you and your team are really out there trying to do for folks.

Jena Apgar: [00:01:08] Ooh, mission and purpose. So I probably should do one of those fancy schmancy mission statements, vision statements, but my heart is always going to lie in specifically a smaller business owner and helping them grow a business that’s an asset to them, to their family that pays it affords them a healthy, safe lifestyle. I don’t mean anything extravagant. I’ve had clients that they took the what we helped them build and bought a new polo pony for 100 K, or they go buy a $2 million yacht. And I’m like, That’s no fun. I want to hear about the kid who went to college or you moved into the house in the safe neighborhood. And then where I really get passionate is specifically doing that for moms, because when you do it for a mom, it’s so exponential. So many moms get stuck in some very violent, dangerous spots when they are not making income and they can’t leave the house because they have no money. And then you double down on that. When you teach a mom how to build a business, she grows that. So she’ll teach it to her kids. She teaches it to other moms, to her community, and really spreads that information around. So that is definitely my my heart spot, if you will. And my mission is to help families grow, leveraging businesses.

Stone Payton: [00:02:34] So what is your back story? How in the world did you get into this line of work?

Jena Apgar: [00:02:40] Man, I have one of the back stories. I wanted to be an attorney from fourth to 10th grade. I did mock trials, teen courts, until I learned how much school they have to go through. And I was like, I went to a highly segregated school and city. I went to what was considered the black high school, and we had a great principal who is really a grant writer, and he got tons of technology at our school and we had majors. So I majored in communication, so marketing and I didn’t go to school for it because I couldn’t handle how big the classrooms were. I’m a small class type of person, and all I knew back then was Mad Men style, like cutthroat. And I was just way too nice of a human back then. Did the military because I didn’t know what else to do. My dad did that, My uncle did that, My grandfather’s very military family did. Military intel analysts of all things blood, guts, fun 180 out of that into interior design left after the recession and considered being an investment banker because that wasn’t keeping my brain up to where I wanted to be made babies. That’s not a very baby friendly profession and decided to. I just had all these little side businesses and at some point I realized I built better websites than the website builders. And I did it faster and I did it more conveniently. And I had a process to it and slowly started picking up some clients in the social media space and the website building space learned about funnels, started building those, went to seek out a master’s degree, Realize school doesn’t teach you anything about marketing. It tells you to create a story, knows the metrics, all right, but it doesn’t actually tell you how to do the nitty gritty. Got certified in everything with a company called Digital Marketer, which I love those guys and love it, man. I can do it upside down on a napkin drunk with one hand and a pen. So fun journey that found my little passion, my little niche.

Stone Payton: [00:04:52] Incredibly divergent arenas, military entrepreneurship. And I got to believe. But I’ll ask, are there some some parallels? Are there some things that you feel like you you learned in your military experience that help you serve your clients even to this day?

Jena Apgar: [00:05:09] Yeah. So Intel is all about a consuming massive amounts of information and turning it around and making it usable, right? So marketing, that’s everything, right? But also from a strategic standpoint, the ability to look at the greater picture and decide who are the players, who are the customers and what is the best way to go about reaching them. And for all the little tips and tricks and tools and stuff online and everyone’s telling you what to do, that doesn’t always mean it’s the best thing for you. You really have to look at it from a strategic mindset and take a look at you as a human, you as the business owner, you and the tools and the the assets you have right. And what you’re willing to do for the business and build a system around that. I don’t there’s literally nothing more military about that. Part of Intel, too, was learning how to interrogate essentially. So waterboarding more like we called it debriefing. Just to be clear, that was CIA. I would debrief people. And so part of that you learn how to really get into the other person’s head calmly, Right? This is not like police interrogation. This is like you’re interrogating your own pilots type thing, but you learn to get the information that’s good. And so when I go to do kind of like mini market research for my clients and I call their customers, I’m amazed at the information I pull out that my customers never tell me. Like if you’re if the people listening could walk away with knowing one thing right more than any other thing that anyone else says is go ask your customers what they would tell their best friend why they should hire you.

Jena Apgar: [00:06:52] Because you’re going to come up with all the tech stuff. You’re going to be like, Hey, we should do a podcast. It’s awesome and it increases your leads and blah, blah, blah. It’s so amazing where you ask your customers and you get some very interesting things. Like the one that I noticed the most was one of my first large clients with a daycare center in town that was very different. It’s more focused on music and the arts and developing children in a non test type fashion, right? And they were so focused on curriculum and they’re like, all the parents care about curriculum. And yeah, the parents ask about curriculum. But when I talk to the parent, she’s like, Oh my gosh, and my daughter owns the stage. And I was like, What stage? She’s like, Yeah, they have a stage in the next building. I’m like, What are you talking about? My client didn’t even mention they owned a stage, much less another building. And then I find out they do like three productions each year. On stage and she’s like, Yeah, the first one, my daughter was terrified and she hid. In the second one she was okay, and the third one she like, owned the stage. And I’m looking at like this from a female perspective going, How many women can hold their own on a stage?

Stone Payton: [00:07:58] Yeah.

Jena Apgar: [00:07:59] But when a daughter can own a stage, she’s going to raise her hand in class and ask the questions. She’s going to get her questions answered. For girls, that’s a huge thing because they’re afraid to answer or ask questions because everyone will stay with them. So when you switch the marketing over that direction, suddenly the Google ad spend goes from $3,500 with zero return to 2400 on our best month. And we’re getting clients in the door at $120 apiece.

Stone Payton: [00:08:29] Wow. When you’re working with clients, especially in the early stages, I’ve got to believe you’ve been at this long enough now. Do you see some consistent patterns? And maybe you don’t say it out loud, but do you think to yourself, Yeah, I’ve seen this before.

Jena Apgar: [00:08:43] Oh, yeah. I actually. I just had this this morning. Every person and the number can be different, but every person over 30 is broken. Every single one of them. And how you fix that and how you move forward depends on your success level. So I see so many people who are brilliant. Oh, my gosh, they’re brilliant. They want to serve. They they’re good to their clients. They have great services. They have great products. But because of their emotions, because they’re there’s something broken that has not been fixed or because something that is completely emotional has nothing to do with business. That is what’s holding them back in business. I can build them a funnel. I can build it end to end. We we have a framework of eight stages, end to end. And the very first one is awareness. If they don’t know you exist, they think nothing else can work, right? I can build you the funnel. It handles the other seven stages, right? We can turn on a Facebook ad, we can do all these different things, but you will see the emotional blocks come in when it actually comes to driving that original traffic because things happen because maybe somebody calls you out, maybe they call you a name. Maybe they say that your emails were too aggressive or stop spamming me or you look like a poser. You’re not really that good. And why are you acting like a guru? And just because you’re doing things that business owners do, other people attack them and they can’t handle that. Their emotions, they they don’t want to be in the they don’t even want to test the concept of being called out. So by far, it has nothing to do with what I’m doing. It really comes back down to their individual emotions and how they handle those things.

Stone Payton: [00:10:29] So now that you have been at this for a while, what are you finding the most rewarding? What are you personally enjoying the most about the work?

Jena Apgar: [00:10:40] I So I’m a numbers girl. So I on that Myers-Briggs scale, I’m the INTJ. I am the not only is that the least across all of the different personalities, but for women it’s only 0.5 of a percent of all women. I like my numbers. I like my math. And in business, that’s where you see people win is and this is why men I feel like are better at business in so many regards as they know their numbers. And I utilize a client dashboard for the big picture and I build on a platform that has a beautiful dashboard with all their numbers. I mean, you send an email out, it’s an all in one system, and when you send that broadcast email, it tells you all the basics like MailChimp and Constant contact. It tells you you send it to 2000 people, 1000 people open 500 clicks, but mine tells you you made $300.

Stone Payton: [00:11:32] Nice.

Jena Apgar: [00:11:33] And when you can see these two dashboards, you can start to see the metrics move up those pretty little line graphs and you can see especially that email one man and you can tell exactly, I made money today and you can see their face light up and they didn’t believe they could do it. So going back to that emotional state and maybe the only made $5 in the beginning, maybe they only made $100 the first launch and then all of a sudden it’s 5000 and it’s 10,000. And they can see that in a dashboard. Right. It’s not just this intangible money going through a stripe account into their bank account, paying their mortgage. No, it’s this thing you can see when you get up in the morning and it’s that little dopamine hit and they get all excited and this amazing thing happens. It’s like a gold star for Grown-Ups. No one gives us, like, gold stars anymore, right? There’s no gold star for making your bed. There’s no gold star for getting up in the morning and not biting someone’s head off. There’s no reward for doing the right thing as it any time There’s no reward for being a business owner, ever. You can make $1,000,000. There’s no reward. The reward is in that dashboard. It’s in that money. When you see their face light up and they get excited and they start doing it on their own without you, that’s exciting.

Stone Payton: [00:12:47] So have you had the benefit of one or more mentors as you were kind of making that pivot from the military environment to the business environment? And as you continue to progress some folks to kind of help you navigate that terrain.

Jena Apgar: [00:13:04] Yeah. So normally when people say, do you have mentors, I remember a long time I was like, No, I don’t have anybody I look up to. I feel like every individual along my pathway has given me these little tidbits, right? When I went to digital marketer and I kind of got into their system and we became partners. Definitely. Ryan Dice He doesn’t necessarily teach directly, but I remember I really, really dug down into my business. My ex husband was we were arguing, I just found some inappropriate text messages. I’m pregnant with my third baby and I remember him looking at me and he’s like, I’m going to basically bankrupt you if you leave me. And I’m just devastated. But I’m like, spiteful. I’m still a military person. And I looked at him. I was like, I don’t care if I’m poor. Like, I don’t need the big house. I don’t need all the fancy anything. And he looked at me and smiled and he was like, I know, but you do mind if your kids are. Cool. The man just stabbed in the gut, just just emotionally gutted me. And I remember diving down into all of digital marketers material. And so I’ve got this little guy, Ryan Dice on my screen constantly, and I’m like, upstairs sleeping in my daughter’s bedroom and folding like a mountain of clothes, listening to all this training to get good at what I’m doing.

Jena Apgar: [00:14:24] And here’s this little guy, Ryan, just bouncing around like, Yeah, you just do this and you just send emails and you just. Here’s a customer value journey. And I’m like, Oh, damn. So And Ryan’s sweetheart, now I know him and like, other people will get all giddy around him like he’s like a celebrity. And I’m like, It’s just little Ryan but amazing to work with. I don’t know Richard Lindner as well, but he’s so intelligent. Level is trading’s Roland Frazier. Holy man. If you ever watch any training, I can watch most training on two x speed because it’s just the information. I already know so much of it and it’s just slow to me. Roland, I’ve got to stop every 5 seconds. I’ve got to look up a word in the dictionary. But that man buys and sells businesses. I think he called himself a reformed attorney. Those three guys are amazing. Billie Jean Shaw has been very inspiring to me. Told me to stop my little literally got down on his hands or on his knees in front of me and he’s like six foot a million inches tall on his knees, almost as tall as I am, and begging me not to be a perfectionist. So yeah, I’ve had a lot and even more than that, like I can think of something from everybody that I’ve interacted with.

Stone Payton: [00:15:40] Now you’re in the marketing business, you’re helping people sell and market what they do. How does the whole sales and marketing thing work for a person like you, a practice like yours? How do you get the new clients?

Jena Apgar: [00:15:55] So the cobbler’s kids has no shoes quite often. I actually coach agency owners too. Now I’ve gotten to that point in the career and we’re about to actually launch a 90 day campaign just for agency owners with some very large global partners. It’s going to be amazing. But the hard part about marketing a marketer is we’re marketers and so we already know all the tricks. We have the lead magnets, we have the entry point offers and the loss leaders and the beautiful glossy PDF. So in the big scheme of things, how do you stand out? Is the real trick. Like the ad cost to market myself is significantly higher than the ad cost for me to market an attorney or a dentist or anything else. So what I’ve really learned is the art of cold outreach, which I’m so not a salesperson, but I’ve had to learn to be. I we do cold outreach on LinkedIn. We do I have an actual SaaS product that I own to that does cold outreach, leveraging Facebook business pages for my clients. And we offer tons of information. So I try not I cannot do spam as a cold outreach.

Jena Apgar: [00:17:15] I cannot as a human, I just I hate being spammed, but we offer value in advance. That was one thing I definitely learned from Ryan and the team that digital marketers value in advance. So we partnered. We have a beautiful dashboard for our clients and we can scan their business. And so in in doing that, we just provide education. Be like, if you’re ready to see where your business is at and what your numbers are in the marketing world, go scan your business. And so we can provide education. I can teach them about a customer value journey and teach them about building an avatar and be like, Look, go scanned your business. That’s my loss leader. That’s my my lead magnet to get your information and see how it’s doing. And then that every time you add a layer to your business, whether it’s with me or with someone else, you can see if it made any lifts or improvements. So you know your numbers without having to try too hard. It’s hard.

Stone Payton: [00:18:11] As our listeners no doubt discovered early on in this conversation. You are no stranger to the microphone. You host a popular video cast as well. Can you speak to that a little bit?

Jena Apgar: [00:18:25] Yeah, I haven’t I haven’t been like really on board recently, but we have a to my biz over on YouTube and provide a ton of value there. And sometimes I got to dig for my own videos because I don’t SEO optimize them the way that I should, but we were building live funnels for a while. I think I’m going to go back to that this week as we just bought a bunch of new clients in the funnel space, but showing people that building funnels is not hard. And it doesn’t have to be complicated that I can build a funnel in one hour. And I had a great co host, Scott Schilling, who my goodness, that man has been on stage with every large name in the business that you can think of from Sir Richard Branson to less brown. Every every major speaker is Zig Ziglar. I was just trying to create some. I was he was my client for a bit as well. We were doing custom quotes and I was showing them how to do these, quote, social media things for like Monday mornings and do them really fast. And I’m like, he’s like, Yeah, I’ve spoke on stage with Zig Ziglar. And so we made a bunch of quotes with Zig Ziglar quotes on them.

Jena Apgar: [00:19:33] But it’s a picture of Scott and Zig together and there’s like 20 different pictures of different instances. I’m like, sometimes you forget who you’re working with, and he’s so smart. Like, I’m the the nerd in the background of these videos. Building funnels. While Scott is just dropping sales knowledge bombs and keeping the conversation going. And I mean, it was amazing. I really didn’t just start them again. And, you know, I mean, YouTube’s great and be wrong, but YouTube is a little old school now. It’s a little old school like it’s still relevant. I’d be wrong. It is the second largest search engine on the planet for Americans and but reels are the new thing. So I’m at this point taking my old YouTube content, chopping it up and putting it over on Instagram and Facebook and TikTok and even YouTube has gone to shorts, which are technically real. So it’s amazing the places that you can put content now. But yeah, I drop all sorts of information all over the place and the only thing that amazes me is that people don’t want the gems, they want the easy stuff.

Stone Payton: [00:20:45] Yeah. So in just a moment, I’m going to ask you, if you will, to maybe leave us with a couple of Pro Tips or maybe your favorite pro tip on any of these topics. And of course, make sure that we get your contact information. But I had another question. I was curious because I assume that this was I’m operating under the impression that this was a very conscious decision. Why did you choose to go with the framing of of to X as opposed to, I don’t know, you know, like a Grant Cardone style X or something like that?

Jena Apgar: [00:21:14] Oh, yeah. So I mean, I’ve met Grant Owen and he’s a special person. And don’t get me wrong, I like the concept really. His concept of ten X is a mindset shift, right? So stop thinking about building little and think big, right? But the problem with marketing is even doubling a company is really hard. We had one company that was $135 Million in Revenue Company, which seems like a whole lot, but they’re in construction, right? And they’re building barracks and hospitals like tilt up walls really fast. They literally cannot double their revenue. It’s impossible. They do not have the capabilities of handling enough projects to double. Right. So but here’s the thing. There’s four different places that we focus on doubling. You can double in traffic. So how many eyeballs and targets are coming to your stuff? You can double in that of leads you’re getting. You can double in the amount of sales you’re actually making, and then you can double in monthly recurring revenue and returning customers, which is where the real money is. When you if you were able if you were able to double across the board, that becomes exponential. It’s not two times two, it’s two times two times two times two. So now you’re up to 16. So but the reality is you’re never going to be able to double all four categories. You’ll get maybe you can double your traffic. Heck, maybe you can triple your traffic, maybe you can double your leads. But then you find out maybe your offer is not converting as well and you only get a 1.1 lift. Right? So I’m a bigger fan of doubling in the individual metrics so we can measure each one. And as we lift one, we can lift the next one, because when you double the traffic, if you’re already converting at 50% to your leads, well now you’ve just doubled the number of leads you have. So it all works out.

Stone Payton: [00:23:06] Yeah. That’s a that’s a good and and relevant math lesson right there. I’m glad I asked.

Jena Apgar: [00:23:13] It’s whenever you do the math, you can make people smile or cry. So when you show them that one, it’s much better on a visual on on a board so they can see the math on it. Right. And then the other one that makes them cry is they tell me what their goal is and I break it down to how much, how many leads and how many meetings and how much traffic do we need to get to accomplish their end goal. And then that’s when you see tears show up. You’re like, Oh, you.

Stone Payton: [00:23:40] Can’t drive that.

Jena Apgar: [00:23:41] Much traffic. Then like you better start converting higher than.

Stone Payton: [00:23:45] And do you have a go to number one favorite kind of pro tip that you almost would share with virtually any business owner? Do this think about this, read this. You know, don’t do this.

Jena Apgar: [00:23:58] Don’t do this. I would say the absolute biggest one is done these perfect. Just start even if your video quality is poor or it’s shaky or your audio is bad, even if your makeup’s not good. I had one of them. I’ve lost a client this week that I thought I had because she said she wasn’t ready to take on all the responsibility because it required being in the video. And she was £40 overweight.

Stone Payton: [00:24:27] Yeah.

Jena Apgar: [00:24:27] So just get started. I’ve got a sticker on my computer right now. I hand them out to all my clients. I hand out a book and I don’t know what kind of program you are, but it says, Just get done. Nike says, Just do it. I would drop an F-bomb in between us.

Stone Payton: [00:24:49] I love it. All right. Let’s make sure that our listeners can reach out and have a conversation with you or someone on your team. I want to make sure it’s easy for them to tap into your work.

Jena Apgar: [00:24:59] Really simple. Just go to two x, my biz to x and Y by z and right up at the top. Ignore the phone, Don’t call me, Don’t hit my social media. On the top side you’ll see it says, Know your numbers. Put your business in there. If it doesn’t pop up, it’ll give you the resource to says can’t find your business. Click here and put all your information in, get your info in there and you’re like, Oh, she just wants my info. No, I promise I will give you a full dashboard. I usually I used to before I had the platform to work with, we charged our clients $50 a month for this platform and you plug in, you connect your Facebook account, connect your Google Analytics account, get your Twitter in there, your Instagram, and just start connecting your account. And this dashboard is a wealth of information and you never have to pay me for it.

Stone Payton: [00:25:52] Fantastic. And that website again.

Jena Apgar: [00:25:55] To x my biz the is dot com.

Stone Payton: [00:25:59] Well Gina, it has been an absolute delight having you on the program this afternoon. Thank you so much for investing the time and the and the energy to share your insight and perspective. You have a great deal of enthusiasm and, you know, just neck deep in knowledge. I have thoroughly enjoyed the conversation and I know that our listeners have as well.

Jena Apgar: [00:26:21] Well, thank you so much for having me. Happening me. And if your your listeners have any questions, feel free to find me. Dm me on Facebook, LinkedIn and always happy to help.

Stone Payton: [00:26:34] Well, it’s my pleasure. All right. Until next time, this is Stone Payton for our guest today, jenna apgar with two x my babies and everyone here at the business radio x family saying we’ll see you in the fast lane.

 

Jennifer Drago with Peak to Profit

by

Jennifer-Drago-Peak-to-Profit
High Velocity Radio
Jennifer Drago with Peak to Profit
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Jennifer-Drago-Peak-to-ProfitJennifer Drago is an award-winning strategist and business coach. She helps service-based business owners and coaches develop and implement a laser-focused vision and strategy so they can earn more and amplify their impact.

Through her business, Peak to Profit, she offers consulting and done-in-a-day strategy to help entrepreneurs get further faster. Jennifer worked as a strategy and operations executive in the corporate world for 30 years, facilitating strategic plans and developing new programs and service lines.

She holds a bachelor’s degree in Finance, a master’s degree in Business Administration and a master’s degree in Health Services Administration from Arizona State University. She is a Fellow of the American College of Healthcare Executives.

Connect with Jennifer on LinkedIn, Facebook and Instagram.

What You’ll Learn in This Episode

  • About business strategy
  • How having a business strategy impacts business owners
  • How entrepreneurs can conquer shiny object syndrome
  • The most common reasons that businesses fail

This transcript is machine transcribed by Sonix 

TRANSCRIPT

Intro: [00:00:04] Broadcasting live from the Business RadioX studios in Atlanta, Georgia. It’s time for High Velocity radio.

Stone Payton: [00:00:15] Welcome to the High Velocity Radio show, where we celebrate top performers producing better results in less time. Stone Payton here with you this afternoon. Please join me in welcoming to the broadcast award winning strategist and business coach with Peak to Profit, Jennifer Drago. How are you?

Jennifer Drago: [00:00:35] I’m doing great, thank you. Thanks so much for having me today.

Stone Payton: [00:00:37] Well, it is an absolute delight having you on the show. I know that you’re a strategist and maybe that’s a good place to start. Maybe help us get our arms around that term. What really is business strategy?

Jennifer Drago: [00:00:54] Oh, thank you. That is such a a key a key thing to ask and to know, because I feel like the word strategy just has some mystery around it. So let’s demystify it. Having a business strategy just means being very clear about where you’re headed, where you’re taking your business, what that vision is of that business at some point in the future, and then crafting a roadmap to start moving in that direction. It’s really that simple. So as a business strategist, one of the things I do is I work with corporations and small business owners and even entrepreneurs that are launching their businesses to help them get very clear on where they’re headed and the the priority ways to get there. So how to prioritize their daily efforts so they can get there, they can get further, faster and not spin their wheels or waste time.

Stone Payton: [00:01:47] I can remember what I thought was a very clever book title. Hope is not a Strategy, and I’m operating under the impression that you probably reside in that in that same camp.

Jennifer Drago: [00:02:02] Yes, that’s one of my favorite sayings. And honestly, I’ve seen it too often in companies where I’ve worked and also just with entrepreneurs that they don’t really have a strategy articulated. And so when you don’t, you truly are operating on hope and faith, which are also good things to have. I’m not discounting the need to be hopeful and positive that’s so important, especially in the mind of an entrepreneur. But you need to have all of your efforts and directions focused on a very clear path and vision.

Stone Payton: [00:02:36] And I suppose it’s one thing for me or me and my partner as entrepreneurs, as the founders, to even have strategy to some degree buttoned up. But if we don’t effectively communicate it and maybe a whole host of other things you’re going to tell us about, do so that so that the people we’re trying to work with and through embrace that and help us live into it. I mean, a lot can get lost in the translation, I suspect 100%.

Jennifer Drago: [00:03:02] Yes. And especially if you have a partner. So let’s start there. There are multiple owners or partners in a business. It’s really important to be on the same page first and foremost. And so that’s some of the sessions that I facilitate and have the most fun with are just really getting clearer on what are the values that our company is going to espouse and amplify to our customers and how are we going to serve customers and and getting really clear on that vision. And I like to use a term or a product, I guess a framework called a vision narrative. So instead of just having a business mission and which is generally a statement, one or two sentences that describe what the business is or why it exists, and then many businesses or we learned this in business school, that we also create, in addition to the mission statement, a vision statement and a vision statement also generally 1 to 2 sentences, but it tends to be more aspirational and it’s supposed to be motivating and inspirational to you and your team on where we’re headed or the impact that we’re trying to have in the world with our business. Instead, I like the vision narrative because it’s actually a little more descriptive. It’s 6 to 10 statements that paint a mental portrait of your business three years from now. And you might say, Well, why three years from now? Well, we used to do strategic planning and planning for business growth in a 5 to 10 year horizon.

Jennifer Drago: [00:04:34] But the reality is business changes too quickly, Our environment is changing too quickly. And so we really need to have that vision narrative, I would say three years in the future and then we can steer the business in that way. But even articulating those 6 to 10 statements, those the things that we’re going to ask ourselves and I actually have a download that asks you all these questions so that you can craft your own vision narrative. But it would start out something like by December. Any 25 picked a prophet, which is the name of my company, Will. And then I’m going to have some action oriented bullets serve an average of blank customers per year, enjoy revenues of X per year, consistently earn a net profit margin of blank per year is known for. And there’s where you might put in the values or the things that you want to be known for providing to your clients or the transformation that you’re providing. So it really speaks to very clearly some of the metrics that you want to have in the future. What is the number of clients revenues, profit margin? Maybe even if an audience is important to you, as it would be with a podcast or with an online business, you want to have a certain number of audience members and you want to continuously be growing that I was in.

Jennifer Drago: [00:06:01] I led a workshop yesterday and somebody said, Sometimes growth isn’t always what we need. So if you’re tracking quality metrics, you may want some indicators to be lower than they are today, and that’s fine too. But whatever is important to your business, how it operates and how it’s going to grow and impact more people in the future basically gets put into a bullet. That’s part of this vision narrative. And then what do you do with it? Well, you already kind of mentioned this. If you have a team in place, one of the best things that well, one of the most important responsibilities you have as CEO of your business is to have that vision for your business and to articulate that and communicate it to your team members so that they can help grow the boat in the same direction. So having that vision narrative and bringing it out and talking about it at every single staff meeting and reminding the team where you’re headed, it’s so important and so impactful and your team members are going to surprise you in ways that you hadn’t even expected because they’re going to bring ideas to you about how to reach that vision perhaps faster. They’re going to bring ideas maybe you hadn’t thought of because they understand what the end result is, where you’re headed. They can help be part of the solution to get you there.

Stone Payton: [00:07:16] What is your back story? How did you find yourself in this in this line of work?

Jennifer Drago: [00:07:23] I actually I’ve worked in in the corporate space, in nonprofit health care and senior living for the better part of 30 years. And I actually started in planning roles, doing strategic planning for a hospital system as well as new program planning and new facilities planning. And we were in we’re in Phenix, so we were growing by leaps and bounds and we couldn’t seem to keep enough beds in our system. We had to keep building expansions and we added new services all the time. And so just that foundation of constantly planning for the community’s needs. And then we had a nonprofit board that we used to facilitate board discussions because they would help us set the direction for where we were heading with the hospital system. In this case, that was just kind of the foundation that built all of this. And so it was really traditional strategic planning. And one of the things that I enjoy is still doing strategic planning with corporations because it’s so important. But I love sharing these messages and these tactics with entrepreneurs and small business owners because I don’t think a small business owners, unless we grew up in a corporate environment, we don’t think in these terms and we may not employ these tactics to help us grow our business. And really, again, I’ll say it again, get further, faster, right? We do a lot of testing and throwing spaghetti at the wall and spray and pray with social media content and we could really just be much more focused in our efforts. I think if we start with that foundation of the vision narrative and then the goals and action plan to get there.

Stone Payton: [00:09:08] Well, I can certainly see how that skill set, that experience based would serve you and your clients now in tremendous ways. And I got to believe that. Wasn’t that a little bit scary, like going out on your own?

Jennifer Drago: [00:09:23] It was. It was I, I really one of the things about growing up in the nonprofit world and doing some of those things that I got to see have a community impact, is it really just filled my heart? I have a I like to be a servant leader. I like to share and increase my impact. And so one of the things that I realized about 18 months ago was I can do a lot greater good. I can have a bigger impact in the world by being out on my own and sharing this message with many corporations and many small business owners. And so that’s why I love opportunities like this stone to actually share that message.

Stone Payton: [00:10:04] Yeah. So the sales and marketing for you is, is it getting easier? Was it or was it even difficult in the beginning? How do you go get the new clients?

Jennifer Drago: [00:10:15] That’s a great question. So to be completely honest, the business that followed me when I left corporate was mostly corporate work. So continuation of planning and feasibility analyzes and how do we get from A to B? And it came from people, word of mouth, people that have known me in the industry for years. And so I’m grateful for that work. I love that work. The part that’s been harder is sharing my gifts with small business owners and entrepreneurs. And I think I’m still trying to get the message out there about how I can help them and hopefully gaining their interest in in doing some of that. But yeah, that’s that’s kind of where I’m at right now. So I mostly serve the small business and the entrepreneurs right now through a lot of free content, through downloads on my website. Podcasts like this, I just hosted a series of visioning workshops and goal setting for 2023. I did those locally in person, and I’m about to host three of those online so that anybody anywhere can take advantage of those. And those are free workshops. And again, that’s, I think, experiencing the work that I do and seeing the value it can have in their business will hopefully help me continue to attract those clients on a longer term basis.

Stone Payton: [00:11:42] So earlier in the conversation, you touched on business partners being aligned and being on the same page. My business partner, his name is Lee Kantor, his Achilles heel, his weak spot is his business partner, which is me. And one of the ways that manifests itself is, Man, I am so bad about chasing the shiny object. You know, I, I find any counsel, any insight perspective on, you know, what someone like me who has that tendency, at least if I’m aware of it, maybe I can do a little something about it.

Jennifer Drago: [00:12:20] Yeah. Thank you for asking this question. It’s so important. And again, anybody that’s on an entrepreneurial journey, and especially if they’re in a new environment, like even me coming out of corporate and figuring out how to promote the things that I do on social media, that’s a whole new experience for me. So it’s really easy to get distracted by shiny objects or over consuming content. You know, the next magic bullet because somebody said, Oh, I have this great workshop that’s going to help you, and sitting down and and spending time learning strategies that I’ve already heard 100 times before, the foundation for maybe lessening the shiny object syndrome, because I don’t think we ever completely get away from it. But if you have that really clear vision and that action plan in the process of putting that together, what you’re doing is you’re saying, here’s my priorities and your priorities are going to be fewer in number than probably you even think. But less is more. And and you’ll know that when you place your efforts toward those priorities and only those priorities, you’re going to reach your goals faster. And so that that whole process becomes foundational and helping you maintain that focus over time and realize that when you’re about to overconsume, something that you really don’t need to know.

Jennifer Drago: [00:13:41] At that point, you can say, no, this isn’t a good use of my time because I’m going to work on this growth strategy that I’ve articulated as part of my my roadmap and my action plan. So that’s number one. And then the other thing I would say, Stone, and this is something that I’m trying to do better to, is I’m a big proponent. Once you have an action plan, breaking it into quarterly action plans and then kind of breaking it down by week, there’s 13 weeks in a quarter. So it’s actually simpler than it sounds. But within each quarter, I allow myself one professional development goal, right? So as business owners, we always have to learn about something new. I still am struggling with search engine optimization, SEO, and I know there’s more that I need to know, but I’m going to take that on as one topic in in each in the next quarter that I’m going to focus on. And I’m only going to allow myself to consume additional content and to spend time learning around that one topic for the quarter. And I think that’s another way we can be strategic and kind of still allow ourselves to grow, still allow ourselves to get educated, but manage our shiny object syndrome.

Stone Payton: [00:14:55] One of the things that really just leapt off the page when I was preparing to have this conversation with you and reading through your bio, you offer something called Done in a day strategy. Can you speak to that?

Jennifer Drago: [00:15:12] Yeah. Well, one of the things that sometimes are called VIP days or intensives, and I really find that in today’s environment, you know, I’m not sure everybody wants to consume a course that’s going to take six weeks or be led through a group coaching experience that still may get them where they need to go. But again, it’s going to take 8 to 12 weeks. You know, we want immediate action. And so one of the things that I love to do is develop that business strategy, the vision, the goals, and even the scorecard templates so that we can track our metrics and do that all for a business in the course of a day. And it’s we can do it in person that’s actually a little more effective, or we can do it on Zoom. And it’s a little bit of there’s a lot of interviewing that goes on, some drafting, some reviewing, right? So we’re going back and forth throughout the day. But at the end of the day, the business owner or the executive that hires me has their plan done and they can implement it the very next day. So that’s something that I love to do, and I think it’s really effective when folks really are time challenged, number one, and they’re very motivated to move quickly.

Stone Payton: [00:16:29] Before we wrap, we’re going to make sure that we get your contact information for our listeners so they can reach out and have a conversation with you and, you know, begin to tap into your work further. But between now and that step, are there some things that I don’t know? I’ll call them Pro Tips. So there are a couple of things that we could be doing, not doing, reading about, thinking about that would kind of get us in the right frame of mind and help us make a little bit of progress on these topics.

Jennifer Drago: [00:16:58] Yes, I think the very first step in the framework that I teach is creating that vision narrative. And I mentioned that I have a workbook that can help you create your very own vision narrative. And I think if you did that, if any of your listeners did that alone, that would set them up for success, because then they would, even if they only did that step, which I don’t, I’m not a proponent of, I want you to also have the goals and the roadmap that go with it. But even if they only did that step, they could be such a better leader for their organization, for their own business, because they would know where they’re headed and be able to start moving in that direction. So with that, I do have that free workbook that you can download from my website, and I know you’ll probably put this in the show notes, but it’s peek to profit dot com forward slash F as in frank forward slash vision and you will be led to a place where you enter your email. So you get to go and get on my email list and get all my tips and tricks from that point forward. But you also will get instant access to that download. And I do think that that’s really helpful. The other thing I would say is that we as we record this, we’re in early November and we’re going to be going into a new year fairly soon. And so I would say if you haven’t set goals for your business in the past, I would urge you to go ahead and try the process of setting annual goals for the coming year.

Jennifer Drago: [00:18:28] And even if you listen to this sometime in the future, go ahead and set goals in the middle of the year. There’s no perfect time to set goals. In fact, I’m always adjusting my goals each quarter, which is just like kind of resetting them anyway. So don’t wait to the beginning of a year or beginning of a quarter to set goals. You can set goals any day and then just be really mindful of of accomplishing them. And one of my last tips, I guess my third tip that I would offer is it’s hard to, especially as an entrepreneur or small business owner, it’s hard to work on the business when you’re working in the business every day. And so a strategy that I like to offer to every business owner is, you know, after you set those goals, set aside time every single week to work toward those goals. And so I call it strategic time, and I like to recommend between 4 hours and 8 hours per week that you time block in a way that your team isn’t going to bother you. You’re not doing client work, you’re not doing sales calls, you’re not doing anything during that time except for the work that’s needed to grow your business and move it forward. Because as a business owners, we’re the only ones that can do that. And if we don’t plan the time, we know it’ll get sucked up and the general operations of the business.

Stone Payton: [00:19:46] I am so glad that I asked more lucid counsel. Okay, let’s do let’s make sure that we leave our listeners with contact information. Whatever you feel like is appropriate website, email, LinkedIn. I just want them to be able to tap into your work and and connect with you.

Jennifer Drago: [00:20:02] Yes. Thank you. So my website is peak to profit. When you go on the website, you’ll see a button right at the top where you can have a free strategy session with me for 30 minutes. That’s getting your my eyes on your business or anything that you want to talk about. That’s strategy or goals or growth oriented or even personal development. That’s the best way to connect with me. You can also email me, which is pretty easy. It’s Jennifer with two ends at peak to profit. I’m on LinkedIn, Jennifer Drago, so you’ll be able to find me there. And I also have a peak to profit page. Linkedin is my primary social media, so that’s the best way to connect with me and stay up to date on the content that I offer.

Stone Payton: [00:20:50] Well, Jennifer, it has been such a pleasure having you on the show this afternoon. Thank you for hanging out with us and sharing your perspective and insight. This is this has been a fun conversation, informative, inspiring. And you’re just you’re out there doing terrific work and we sure appreciate you.

Jennifer Drago: [00:21:08] And thank you so much. Stone. I really appreciate the opportunity to offer any value that I can offer to your community, so I appreciate the opportunity very much.

Stone Payton: [00:21:18] My pleasure. All right. Until next time, this is Stone Payton for our guest today, Jennifer Drago with PETA Profit and everyone here at the Business RadioX family saying we’ll see you in the fast lane.

 

Michael Davis with Speaking CPR

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High Velocity Radio
Michael Davis with Speaking CPR
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Michael-Davis-Speaking-CPRMichael Davis helps professionals attract more clients, create efficient teams, and increase their influence with improved speaking skills. His passion for his work was born when he was threatened with a job loss because of his poor speaking skills.

With the help of thought leaders and industry experts, he discovered how to become an impactful speaker, trainer, and coach.

Michael has helped speakers on five continents and written 7 storytelling books. He’s a speaker, trainer, and the founder of Speaking CPR.

He lives in Ohio with his partner Linda, and the overlords of their house, Sky and Riley the Super Chihuahuas.

Connect with Michael on LinkedIn and follow Speaking CPR on Facebook. You can also download free resources, send Michael an email, or schedule a discovery call on his virtual business card.

This transcript is machine transcribed by Sonix 

TRANSCRIPT

Intro: [00:00:04] Broadcasting live from the Business RadioX studios in Atlanta, Georgia. It’s time for High Velocity radio.

Stone Payton: [00:00:15] Welcome to the High Velocity Radio show where we celebrate top performers producing better results in less time. Stone Payton here with you this afternoon. Please join me in welcoming to the broadcast speaker, trainer and founder of Speaking CPR. Mr. Michael Davis How are you, man?

Michael Davis: [00:00:35] I’m doing well. Stone Any time I can be on a program entitled High Velocity, I’m in. Fantastic.

Stone Payton: [00:00:43] Well, I’ve got a ton of questions. I know we won’t get to them all, but. But if we’re going to talk about speaking, we’ve got to talk about storytelling, man. How do you know which which story to even bring out and tell this day and age?

Michael Davis: [00:00:58] Excellent. First question. It’s first of all, the story has to resonate deeply with you. If it doesn’t, your audience will pick up on it. Whether you’re a speaker speaking to an audience, your sales professional speaking to one or a leader speaking to your team, it has to resonate with you. Secondly, it has to relate to the point you’re trying to make. Storytelling is very popular today, and one of the challenges I’m seeing is a lot of people are telling stories because they heard somebody say, Tell your stories, but we’re not always seeing the point to the story. So it’s really important that we have that.

Stone Payton: [00:01:32] So when you’re speaking with your clients, do do they ever share that they they sometimes feel like, man, I don’t know that my story is that interesting. I don’t know that I have a great story. Do you ever get that?

Michael Davis: [00:01:45] Frequently. And it took me years to determine what people are really saying when they say to me, Michael, I don’t have any stories. And I say to them, If you have lived to this point in your life, if you’ve ever been in a relationship, if you have children, if you’ve ever had a job, you have stories. What people are really saying when they say, I don’t have stories, stone is they’re saying I don’t have any newsworthy stories. Somewhere along the line we got confused and we’re we’re taught that unless you’re on CNN or NBC or any of the big stations, that people don’t want to hear your story. Well, I’ve discovered it’s just the opposite. It’s the newsworthy stories that are rare. We can’t relate to most of those. I mean, don’t you love a story about someone who has climbed Mount Everest despite a physical disability? Or the Olympian who overcame all the odds?

Stone Payton: [00:02:42] Yes, absolutely.

Michael Davis: [00:02:45] Yes. Now, how much can you relate to that story?

Stone Payton: [00:02:47] Yeah.

Michael Davis: [00:02:49] Versus. How about the business owner who’s struggling with inflation as a current topic and is really not sure how to meet payroll and pay for the increasing cost of goods and services and still run a profit that’s more relatable?

Stone Payton: [00:03:08] Oh, absolutely. You better believe it is. It is for me. I’m trying to run a business here. I own 40% of this network. I’m I’m dealing with that kind of thing every day. Know that that person really has my attention. I suppose a gifted or properly trained speaker on those other topics. I might find them entertaining to some degree, but no, you’re absolutely right. That’s far more relatable.

Michael Davis: [00:03:30] Not to the listener. I will ask you think about what you just heard from Stone. When I talked about the mountain climber or the Olympian, Stone’s reaction was somewhat muted. Yeah, that’s interesting versus Are you kidding me? I can relate to that. When I talked about the relatable topic, that’s exactly what our audiences are feeling, too, when we talk about relatable topics.

Stone Payton: [00:03:52] So speaking of stories, got to know your back story, man. How in the world did you get into this line of work?

Michael Davis: [00:04:00] I’ll give you the shortened version. When I was in first grade, I was humiliated in front of my first grade class by my teacher so badly that I told myself I’ll never stand in front of people again. That was awful. And for the next 25 years, I avoided any opportunity to stand in front of a group, even if it meant not participating in events. I wanted to like being in the school band. I knew if I made a mistake, people would laugh at me. If I joined the drama club and made a mistake, the audience would laugh at me and I couldn’t take that after that very difficult experience in first grade. And then when I was 31 years old, I was in the ultimate irony. I was a financial planner, and a key part of my job was to give retirement planning workshops to attract new clients. And one day my boss and I sat down in his office for quarterly review, and toward the end, he pulled out a stack of papers and said, These are the evaluations from your last workshop. Michael, I’m going to cut to the chase. You’re a lousy presenter and your stories suck. Ouch. Yes. He said, you’ve got to fix this.

Michael Davis: [00:05:18] You told us you could do this. This is part of your job. If you don’t get better at this, you don’t start getting people through the door. We’re going to let you go. That threat of losing my job sent me to, first of all, Toastmasters and eventually the National Speakers Association and other groups like that. And I met world class mentors who took me under their wing. They helped me work on my mindset first to deal with that incident from my childhood. To put it in its proper context, I realized I wasn’t the only one who’s ever been humiliated in front of people. Second, they taught me that speaking is a learnable skill. We are wired to be afraid of speaking because at some subconscious level it seems like a threat to us to be in front of people. But over time it took me far too long. But eventually I developed a positive mindset and with the help of my mentors, learned the processes and the tools and gain the confidence in one day decided this is my calling. Helping other people get past the hurdles I’ve experienced to get their messages out to the world.

Stone Payton: [00:06:19] Now, are you finding yourself gravitating to a certain type of client type of business type of talk even, or finding a particular group or type of client that you really particularly enjoy working with?

Michael Davis: [00:06:34] I do. My parents were entrepreneurs. I’m an entrepreneur, and I find that I do a lot of work with entrepreneurs and the presidents of companies to help them get their vision out to their teams, to their boards, to your prospective clients. And I understand a lot of times they feel very alone because they don’t always get the proper feedback they need. And when they hire me, sometimes it goes beyond speech coaching. It becomes life coaching because they just need somebody to talk to. But I love working with people in that position because they have so much on them and they have so many good ideas and they often struggle to get them out in a way that moves people.

Stone Payton: [00:07:16] And you clearly enjoy the work. I mean, I see it in your eyes. It’s coming through over the airwaves, I’m sure, for for our listeners. What are you enjoying the most about it at this point in your career? Because you’ve been at this a minute now. What are you finding the most fun?

Michael Davis: [00:07:32] It’s when that person comes to me and says, I’m not a very good speaker or I don’t have any stories. And when I pull the curtain back and shine a light on their experiences and they see that they do have significance and power and they can help others. If you see a shift in them, their energy changes. They get a lot more confident. They want to speak instead of being afraid to speak because they realize, yeah, this can help others. They don’t focus so much on themselves, which is where a lot of people build the fear. They’re concerned about how their hair looks in their clothes. We don’t care about that. If you’re there with authenticity, with a message to help us. And when they when I see that shift, that’s why I do this, because I know that I’m not just helping that person. I’m helping all the people affected by this new powerful message.

Stone Payton: [00:08:27] So I had two gentlemen as recently as this morning, and I knew you and I were going to get a chance to visit it on air. So it really stuck with me this morning. And he used a phrase I’ve heard a lot of people use. He said, long story short. And I thought to myself, I did not say out loud too late. So it’s kind of a tactical question, but are there some things that we can do or not do to, I don’t know, keep our stories lively, keep them from being boring?

Michael Davis: [00:08:55] Yes, there are two in particular, and I didn’t do it today just because I know we’ve got a shorter interview. But one is to provide dialog. And that is character dialog, but also internal dialog. I did it in my short story where I said. After I got in trouble. I will never stand in front of people again. That was awful. That was six year old me dialog. And then I did the dialog with my boss in me and unfortunately, that’s exactly what he said to me. Never forget those words. So that’s one way I did use that. The other I didn’t have we didn’t get into was to provide details, what we call it, vaccinating your speech VAX. I’m not talking about that other controversial vaccination. We’ll leave that alone. But VAX, visual, auditory, kinesthetic and smell and yes, are my medical people in the out there. I know that olfactory is the correct word, but Varco does not create a nice metaphor like vaccination. So I went with smell. I also know taste is involved, but in a more detailed story I would get involved with creating those sensory details so people feel like they’re right there in the story with you.

Stone Payton: [00:10:09] So you not only became a world class speaker, but you turned it into a a business, did you? I know the answer to this is yes, so I guess I’ll rephrase it. Tell us a little bit about maybe one or two of the mentors that you had the benefit of along the way. Surely you had some help and guidance as you were trying to navigate both?

Michael Davis: [00:10:29] Yeah, I did it through Toastmasters. They have an annual competition called the World Championship of Public Speaking. I made it a point to befriend some of them just to pick up some of their wisdom. Well, the best speakers tend to be the greatest mentors, at least in my field, because they’re generous and they they know how hard it is and they want to help others. They see that if you do the work, they will help you. So Darren Lacroix, who was the 2001 world champion, Craig Valentine, Marc Brown, all world champions who have gone on to successful professional careers. And the best part of having mentors and coaches is they can see the the brilliance in you that you can’t. We all have brilliance in us. But we can’t see it. It’s just it’s impossible. It’s like we all wear blinders when someone else shines a light on those skills you have that you don’t even see. That makes a huge difference. That’s where you build confidence. I just went through that this week with a marketing piece. I went to my business mentor and in all candor, he ripped it to shreds. But I wanted him to because I couldn’t see all the blind spots in it, because that’s my material. We all fall in love with our material. It’s very hard to us to say, Oh, that’s not very good until someone else gives an expert opinion or some feedback on it.

Stone Payton: [00:11:52] So speaking of confidence, I think one of the things that I would find intimidating if I were to get in front of a group and speak is like, how do you how do you memorize what you’re going to say? Because I don’t really want to go up there with a bunch of notes. I see the folks who do a really good job with it don’t seem to rely on notes or even slides as there must be. And I know it’s again, a very tactical question, but, you know, hey, it’s my show, so I’m going to know.

Michael Davis: [00:12:19] It’s an excellent question. Here’s the thing. If you get nothing else out of this interview today, if you’re listening to this, never, ever memorize, ever. And here’s why. Number one, you sound like you’re memorized. You sound like a robotic speaker. Secondly, if you forget one word, you’re done. And by you’re done, you’re going to lose track and that triggers the fight or flight in you. And all those neurotransmitters start triggering, getting triggered, and you start to panic. Ask me how I know Stone happened to me once in front of 450 people in a high stakes presentation, I said, I will never memorize a speech again. So what you want to do is internalize the flow. Look, you know your story. Don’t get hung up on the words we’re often asking. And this is a parallel idea, but we’re often asked, Do I have my stories? Have to be 100% true. Your story has to be true. It does not have to be 100% factual. The reason being, if you are 100% factual, you bore people way too much back story. What we’re looking for is the emotional truth in stories. So if I’m recreating dialog, one of my favorites is from a client that hired me back in 2009 when I first started this business, when she came up to me in an event and said, I understand you’re a speech coach and I need your help. Really, Patti, tell me why. Because I’ve done something stupid. I agreed to give the keynote for the Women of Excellence dinner. And Michael, I am so stressed out. I’m sick to my stomach.

Michael Davis: [00:13:57] I’m not sleeping at night. That’s how I deliver that when I share that story. Well, Patti and I are still friends. And I asked her a couple of years ago, Do you remember exactly what you said to me that day? She said, Michael, I don’t remember what I told my husband yesterday. How do you expect me to remember what I said back in 2009? So the point of that is, I don’t know that those are the exact words she used, but I deliver them in the emotion that I remember she presented to me and she was stressed out, panicked and scared to death to give the speech. As long as I convey that people don’t remember the words, they remember the emotions behind them. And I tell all my clients do not stress out about a word or two. No one knows your script. As long as you keep the story flowing or the entire speech, it’s okay periodically to look at your notes. By the way, I don’t think you should read off them because then you lose total connection with your audience. But I’ve never sat in an audience with a really good speaker who occasionally went over and looked at the lectern and said, Oh yeah, what was I going to say? Oh, there it is. That, to me tells me that person’s ego is not involved because they’re not worried about somebody thinking, Oh, well, gosh, he looked at his nose. I can’t. That’s not what it’s about. Occasionally, looking at your notes tells your audience that you’re there to serve them.

Stone Payton: [00:15:24] What a marvelous point. Both of those points that they don’t know the script, they don’t know what you are supposed to say or we’re hoping to say. And when you talk about this, this topic of memorizing and kind of and put that to bed, it strikes me there are probably more than a handful of myths or misconceptions that we’ve all come to accept and believe around speaking. There’s probably others. Yeah.

Michael Davis: [00:15:52] Yeah. Memorization is a big one. And what I tell the people I work with is that a speech or a story is actually an evolutionary process, unlike actors and musicians who have to follow that script. They pick your favorite band or favorite singer. If you go to a concert of that person and that person starts to sing your favorite song of theirs and they sing it completely differently, you’re not going to be happy. However, if as speakers and storytellers, we tell a slightly different version each time and it evolves, people aren’t going to get upset as long as the emotional core is the same. If you say a different phrase or you have a little bit of a different dialog, it evolves. You have that right. Plus you see your story and your topic in a very different light as the years go by. So it should evolve. So that’s number one. Number two, and this is this is what I see a lot of people struggle with and they miss opportunities, is I can go up there and wing it. You can. And you’re also going to go up there and be forgettable for the most part. Again, there’s a balance between you don’t want to memorize, you want to internalize the flow. But you’ve got to know have a pretty good idea of what you want to say.

Stone Payton: [00:17:08] Your stories, even in this exchange, are quite memorable. The lady who came up to you. That’s fantastic. And I’m sure you were able to help her a great deal. How does the whole sales and marketing thing work for a guy like like how do you get the new business?

Michael Davis: [00:17:27] One is repeat business. I’d say I did the numbers recently. It was like 30%. I get repeat business as I tell everyone, Look, I’m teaching you processes and tools so that you never have to come back to me if you want to. I’d love to work with you again, but I don’t want them to feel like, well, got another speech. Got to hire him again. That’s not a positive business relationship. So repeat businesses one second is referrals. And third, LinkedIn has been very good to me. Now I post a lot. I’m very consistent about posting on LinkedIn and I also do YouTube videos. I was talking with a branding person the other day, really sharp young woman, and I told her I have two channels, I believe that’s all, and I think they all work. I’m not going to denigrate any channel that I don’t use because I don’t know it, but I keep it very focused and that’s where I’ve built a following.

Stone Payton: [00:18:20] In the stage is not your only platform. You’ve written several books and shared these ideas and more in that medium as well. Yes.

Michael Davis: [00:18:30] Books. Online courses. I’ve got my first book was called The Book on Storytelling, and then I wrote a Kindle series called Some More With Stories. And my new book is coming out early next year, tentatively titled Your Stories Suck. A Step by Step Roadmap to Fix Them and Speak With Influence. I always get a good laugh when I share the title, and it is not meant just to be a one of those eye grabbers and to be. I can’t think of the word right now, but I didn’t do it just for the shock value. Yeah, the title is Born from the Words of My boss many years ago who helped me get down this path when he said Your story sucked. But there’s a deeper meaning is your stories could be sucking the life out of your audience and your chances. To influence them. What I want people to do, there are a lot of books out there talking about. How the brain reacts to story and storytelling is important, but I don’t find too many of them that are showing you how to do it in a step by step fashion. There are some and they’re really good, but I just wanted to put my spin on this topic and give my version of what I’ve seen work for me, for my TED clients and my professional clients.

Stone Payton: [00:19:49] And what about this medium you had? I teach you up to essentially deliver a small keynote on this platform. Would you have approached it and maybe executed on it any differently than you would have if we were physically with with the audience?

Michael Davis: [00:20:07] Actually 75% would be the same. The material still has to be the same. The stories, the the opening, the sub points, all of that is very similar. The delivery method would change in the sense that on camera we have to change it up more. It can’t just be a talking head, nor can it be the speaker hiding behind slides. It’s what we call the change of pace elements. It’s important to for people to see you because we have to connect through the face. One of the important ideas that we were teaching our clients stone at the beginning of the pandemic was that when you stand in front of an audience, all five of your senses are engaged. When you stand in front of a camera, only two are engaged and even those are limited your sight and your hearing. So because of that, we have to change up the look on camera to keep people more engaged. Videos, pictures, graphs, our faces, chat boxes, breakout rooms. We have to change it up every few minutes because if we don’t, we’ll lose them. I’m a big football fan.

Michael Davis: [00:21:17] Our local team, the Bengals, went to the Super Bowl last year and the reason I mention that is because I was watching a clip from one of the AFC Championship game. And in one minute there were 11 scene changes. I mean, it was bam, bam, bam, bam. I started wondering what was it like 30 years ago? Right around the time before the Internet took off. And I watched a scene from one of the championship games from 1989. There was a famous play where a player fumbled away his team’s opportunity to go to the Super Bowl. And when that play happened, the camera focused on him and it followed him all the way back to the bench. And in 60 seconds there was one scene change and it was just to show him from behind. So if you think about that one scene change 30 years ago, this is 11. Our audience is conditioned to constant movement and shifting. And if we think we’re going to stand in front of a camera or an audience and just deliver and have them engaged, we’re not going to succeed.

Stone Payton: [00:22:24] Well, kind of following on that point, what do you think the the future of speaking might look like? There’s there’s new technology, new platforms. And I got to believe there’s going to be some you know, we haven’t even thought of yet. But do you have a feel for what the what the future of speaking might look like?

Michael Davis: [00:22:42] Well, what we’re seeing in the medium planning industry is in 2023, most meetings are back to in-person, which is good because as human beings, we need to have that connection as much as possible. However, we also have to be prepared at a moment’s notice to get on camera. Because meeting companies have discovered that if something happens last minute, we can shift now to a virtual world. And the speaker better be good there too. The third piece of that, though, Stone, is we have to, as presenters, be able to speak to an in-person audience while also knowing where the camera is. Because in this hybrid world, companies are saying, oh my gosh, we can have global reach any time with any presenter. So when you’re presenting, make sure you practice delivering your key points to the camera in the room. The people in the room are still going to see you. You’ll be there interacting with them, but the people online will feel like you’re talking directly to them. We saw this before the pandemic, by the way. I was part of a group that was helping some speakers at the World Championship of Public speaking a few years ago.

Michael Davis: [00:23:55] And we taught our clients to talk to the camera even when she was standing in front of 2000 people. Because the next time you go to an event where there are screens on the stage where the speaker is, notice where the audience looks, even in the live in-person audience. They’re looking at the screens most of the time. Hmm. We’re conditioned as human beings, at least in the United States. We’re born now with phones in our hands. We come out and doctor says, Congratulations, boy, girl. Here is a phone for your child. It feels like that. So they are raised on screens. You and I were raised on TV. My son was raised on a computer. So we are conditioned to look at screens. Don’t make the mistake of ignoring the fact that your audience, even if it’s right in front of you, may be looking at screens. If they’re on the stage with you and you’re not connecting with them if you don’t know where that camera is.

Stone Payton: [00:24:53] I am so glad I asked, because that never occurred to me. It makes all the sense in the world. You’re going to have to master both domains and simultaneously. And this has been fantastic. I could do this, do this every Wednesday. No, it’s been it’s been informative. It’s been inspiring. I have thoroughly enjoyed the conversation. I want to make sure that our listeners can can reach out, have a conversation with you or someone on your team. I want to make sure that they can get their hands on one or more of these books. And I just want to make it as easy as we can for them to tap into your work. So whatever you feel like is appropriate website, email, LinkedIn. Let’s just let’s make it easy for them to get connected with you.

Michael Davis: [00:25:33] Mail if they want. Contact me Mike, at speaking CPR or visit my website speaking CPR and we can have a conversation. I can send you a list of complimentary resources. Happy to do that. More than happy to sit down and have a chat with you for a few minutes on a on an old fashioned device called a phone. Or we can do a zoom call, whichever you prefer.

Stone Payton: [00:25:58] Well, Mike, it has been an absolute delight having you on the show this afternoon. Thank you so much for investing the time and the energy. This has been just marvelous.

Michael Davis: [00:26:10] I’m glad you like it, I hope. Listener, I hope you appreciate it.

Stone Payton: [00:26:14] All right. Until next time, this is Stone Payton for our guest today, Michael Davis with speaking CPR and everyone here at the Business RadioX family saying we’ll see you in the fast lane.

 

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We help local business leaders get the word out about the important work they’re doing to serve their market, their community, and their profession.

We support and celebrate business by sharing positive business stories that traditional media ignores. Some media leans left. Some media leans right. We lean business.

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Business RadioX® Headquarters
1000 Abernathy Rd. NE
Building 400, Suite L-10
Sandy Springs, GA 30328