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Randy Lyman with The Purpose Driven Leader

May 9, 2025 by Jacob Lapera

Randy-LymanRandy Lyman, The Purpose-Driven Leader, combines decades of business experience with a deep commitment to fostering emotional intelligence, spiritual grounding, and transformational leadership. His area of expertise is leading from a place of strength through vulnerability, creating cultures where authenticity and emotional connection drive high performance.

His book, The Third Element, which was released on March 19, 2025, makes these complex concepts accessible and actionable. It reveals the missing piece in manifestation that most people overlook—emotions. Randy teaches how unhealed emotional patterns can secretly shape our reality and how to transform them into a powerful tool for attracting abundance and fulfillment.
His own pivotal moment came after achieving material success but recognizing the emotional disconnection and stress that limited both his potential and his team’s. This awakening led him to focus on emotional awareness and belonging, which became the catalyst for dramatic business growth and renewed purpose.

Today, Randy shares his principles with individuals and organizations seeking clarity, connection, and authentic transformation. His teachings equip others to harness emotional intelligence, build meaningful relationships, and turn inner healing into outward success.

Beyond his professional life, Randy is a passionate craftsman who builds custom motorcycle motors and restores classic cars—blending precision with creativity. He is married, devoted to his family, and deeply rooted in his community. Randy’s mission is to inspire others to heal, lead, and unlock their full potential by embracing The Third Element: emotional truth.

Connect wtih Randy on LinkedIn and Facebook.

What You’ll Learn In This Episode

  • Randy’s personal leadership journey
  • How adding spiritual practices to workplace culture can foster a more calming environment
  • Misconceptions leaders might have about introducing spiritual practices into the workplace
  • Advice for leaders who want to begin incorporating spiritual practices and emotional awareness into their leadership style

Transcript-iconThis transcript is machine transcribed by Sonix.

 

TRANSCRIPT

Intro: Broadcasting live from the Business RadioX studios in Atlanta, Georgia. It’s time for High Velocity Radio.

Lee Kantor: Lee Kantor here. Another episode of High Velocity Radio, and this is going to be a good one. Today on the show we have Randy Lyman. He is the purpose driven leader with the Third Element. Welcome.

Randy Lyman: Hello. Good to be here with you.

Lee Kantor: Well, I’m excited to learn what you’re up to. Tell us about your practice. How you serving, folks?

Randy Lyman: Well, the latest way I’m serving folks is my new book, The Third Element The Missing Key to the Law of Attraction. And in that, I give people an opportunity to understand a little bit better the rules of the game of life. I’m also doing a personal coaching and corporate coaching.

Lee Kantor: So what’s your backstory? How did you get involved in this line of work?

Randy Lyman: Well, 35 years ago, at the age of 28, I was a left brain scientist and engineer and entrepreneur with multiple, uh, million dollar businesses. I was very successful, but I wasn’t necessarily happy and fulfilled. I met a woman by the name of Maria who I spent three years with, and she opened my eyes to a different way of looking at the world from a little more of the unseen, the emotional, spiritual side of life. And as I learn more about that, I was so intrigued and drawn in. I started applying what I was learning, and my success in the material world has blossomed.

Lee Kantor: So, um, as you were already working at the time, what about what she was saying? Unlock something inside of you.

Randy Lyman: Well, she helped me see that everything around us is a mirror of what’s inside of us. And the universe is creating our reality for us every moment based on our thoughts, our actions and our emotions. And the emotional part was the part I was not aware of. So I was doing all I could to be educated and to work hard and put in the hours and serve my customers. But I wasn’t aware of the emotional side of being human. So any old emotions I had, negative emotions I was hanging on to. Subconsciously they kind of crept into my world and they kept me from being the best I could be. And once I started to uncover those and address those, I was able to really multiply the effectiveness of my thoughts and my actions.

Lee Kantor: So what was kind of the first emotion that you were dealing with that gave you this kind of aha moment?

Randy Lyman: Well, for me it was a combination of anger and frustration. Underneath that was sadness. But I was doing all I could to find success, and the world wasn’t responding to the way I. To me, the way I thought it should. And to me that was very frustrating. I was I was again intelligent. I was working hard, but I wasn’t getting the rewards I knew were possible in the material world. And once I went through a few emotional healings, I went to a four day communications workshop for business communications, and the third day we went through an exercise that got me to a level of, uh, feeling of something I experienced 12 years earlier that a family member had said that had hurt me, and I subconsciously pushed that down and believed if I was competent in the material world, I would get their approval. Well, that really worked well to motivate me to material success, but I needed to feel that emotion. And so when I did in this workshop, it was very, uh, it was a huge upheaval. It was a very dramatic moment for for me, it was kind of an icebreaker for the group. And I went through the emotions around what my uncle had said to me about wishing I was more like a friend of mine, and I wasn’t who I was. That’s how I heard what they had to say. So I went through this emotional release and four days later, when I went back to work, then my world changed. All the people around me who had previously been incompetent suddenly became competent. Or they left my life. And being a physicist, being a scientist, it’s always caused an effect for me. And I saw the the cause was my emotional release and the effect was my relationships changed and that changed my life. I started looking at everything differently.

Lee Kantor: So when you say there was an emotional release, what how did that show itself? Was it did you throw a chair? Did you break a window? Did you cry like what occurred?

Randy Lyman: I just I broke down and cried like like a little kid would cry. And I was an adult man. I’m a logical, successful guy. But that emotion that that hides within us hides in what a lot of people refer to as the inner child. So there’s our adult ego self ego not in a bad way, but our adult personality. There’s our higher self. I believe our soul that comes through our intuition and other ways we connect with our higher soul. And then the third is that inner child. Now the inner child isn’t just a useless child. The inner child is joy and creativity and excitement and a lot of things we need in life, especially the creativity part. So we don’t want to kill the child. We don’t want the child to run the show. But that inner child in me that was hanging on to that pain was able to finally release it. So I cried the tears in front of a room of 15 people and it was just so pure. There was no embarrassment.

Lee Kantor: So how did your physicist brain, uh, handle kind of this spiritual awakening.

Randy Lyman: Well, I was so intrigued by Maria, my partner at the time, and the thing she was teaching me, and just the way she saw the world from such a place of purity. She saw the she saw God in every way. She saw love in every situation. And I wasn’t able to do that because of my own clouded judgment, based on my own emotional wounds. And so her world worked for her when she wanted something. It worked out. Her life just flowed very smoothly in my life was a constant battle. And I didn’t want the battle anymore. So even though I didn’t understand how she was approaching life, I saw how she was easily able to achieve results. And that’s what I wanted. And that’s what engaged my scientific mind to figure out what the heck is going on here. What am I missing?

Lee Kantor: Now, was she achieving the same level of materialistic results you were achieving?

Randy Lyman: No, she wasn’t the same level of materialistic results, but with regards to friends and business relationships and health improvements and just synchronicity in her life, her life flowed. Now she had lower expectations than me and she didn’t have the same financial rewards, but she had a sense of calm and ease and fulfillment. And that’s what I was missing. Even with all the financial and business achievement and success, I was missing that level of calm and fulfillment.

Lee Kantor: But you weren’t trying. That wasn’t what you were after.

Randy Lyman: No, that wasn’t what I was after. But that’s what I knew I was missing. Because if you’ve if you’ve met and you’ve been a very successful person, I think you realize that material success does not bring happiness. Material success does not bring fulfillment momentarily. It does. And it brings a lot of comfort. And I love material success. Don’t don’t get me wrong, but that the emptiness that I felt inside from not being connected to the people around me and feeling like I needed to achieve more in order to be happy. That’s what I wanted to move past. To move through and move past. And I wanted that sense of fulfillment that I. That she had.

Lee Kantor: So in your mind before her, you I guess you equated, if I got these material things, then I would get this kind of inner peace and then.

Randy Lyman: Absolutely. Because that’s, I believe, right.

Lee Kantor: So it’s that cause and effect. You said, if I do this, then I’ll get that.

Randy Lyman: But that’s not the way the game works. And, you know, a lot of very successful people who are not happy. And so the happiness is that we achieve through material success is fleeting. It’s momentary. It doesn’t stay with us because even when we’re successful, we still have to drive in traffic. We still have to, uh, talk to people we don’t necessarily care to talk to. We still need to, uh.

Lee Kantor: We still. Yeah. Still, bad things happen to everybody, and challenging things happen to everybody. There’s people that have a lot of wealth and are unhappy, and there’s people that don’t have a lot of wealth and are unhappy. I mean, um, I don’t know if there’s a correlation between all of those things, but when you’re adding this type of spirituality into your coaching and in helping other people, I guess, get to new levels, how, um, how do you kind of help them understand that this might be what’s missing, and this is what’s keeping them from maybe achieving the levels, even if those levels are materialistic or as part of your practice, trying to, you know, maybe de-emphasize some of the materialistic.

Randy Lyman: Well, I’m not against material success. I love material success. So what I do with left brain people and most people is I start out by let’s write down the problems and challenges you have in life. What do you want to see different, or what do you want to see added? Or what do you want to see gone? What changes would you like to see? And first we we talk about what we want to change. And then we say, can we do this simply through your current methods and if. And then the third level is aside from the second level being the approach, the third level is what does this feel like? Does it feel frustrating? Does it feel, uh, agonizing? Do you feel jealousy? What do you feel around this situation? So the mind has to work through it one step at a time. So outside problem. Second thing. What can I do? Third thing, what do I feel? And then if there are emotional feelings behind all this and people think emotions are bad. No they’re not, they’re natural. So we talk then about the feelings and we talk about the reason we have emotions and the value of those. And then we talk about Out the emotions that we didn’t feel completely in the past. That energy is still with us and we are able to release that energy through some specific techniques. So we take a left brained approach to emotions. I’m still a scientist and I’m still left brained, and that’s the simplistic approach that I take.

Lee Kantor: So. So you’re saying that there’s some simple A-b-c steps that anybody could take in order to, um, get a deeper understanding of these, the inner emotions that maybe are holding us back?

Randy Lyman: Absolutely. There are steps we can take. And in my new book, The Third Element, I outline, first of all, why? Because we’re not going to go down a tunnel that has no light at the end of the tunnel. So the first thing I do is give some people, give people some understanding of the light at the end of the tunnel. And why should I even open Pandora’s box of my emotions? So understanding is where we start.

Lee Kantor: So when a person comes to you, um, are you doing active coaching right now or are you primarily, you know, talking and selling your book?

Randy Lyman: I’m doing I’m primarily talking selling my book. I’m working with a few people on active coaching, but primarily I’m selling my book. But what’s your question?

Lee Kantor: So I’m just wondering when a person comes to you, are they coming to you because, hey, my business is struggling or are they coming to you with, hey, I’m not feeling joy anymore. Like, what’s the what’s kind of the impetus to begin a relationship with you or learn more about what your book says.

Randy Lyman: Any form of stalled progression or success, if they’re looking for a change and they’re not finding progress, or they’re not finding success and they just don’t know what else to try. That’s when I come in.

Lee Kantor: So it may not be, hey, sales are down like that. That’s not a problem you’re trying to solve. Or if you do this, this might solve that problem too.

Randy Lyman: This solves that problem too. So I’m very well versed in conventional business coaching and conventional management and leadership and all that. And I believe in all that. But at a deeper level, when we’re when we’re doing all the things we know we should be doing and we’re applying the techniques we’ve learned worked in the past or work for others, and we’re hitting a wall and we’re just these techniques I know should be effective or are not effective. Then we go a level deeper of okay, what needs to be felt and how do I need to change my, my, um, thought process and my thought patterns? And where’s my opportunity to feel something from the past? I’m ready to release.

Lee Kantor: And then, um, once you identify it and I’m assuming you have some techniques that will help a person release those emotions, then once the released. Is that it? You’re done. Now it’s. I have closure. I can move on. Or is there something else you have to do to kind of, you know, heal the wound that’s been opened?

Randy Lyman: Well, there’s there’s levels to it. So if a person gets even 50% of the way through it, their life’s going to be better. And some things I’m still working on after 30 years. But when we have a breakthrough of any sort, small or large, in my experience the physical world around us responds and improves. Now, um, we we still need to show up and do the work and think positive thoughts and make active decisions and do the work. But that work becomes more effective as we heal the old emotions. Oh, the other thing I want to say, Lee, is we don’t need to understand the emotions. We just need to feel whatever it is, process it through our feelings and our body and release it now. It can be done through working out, uh, punching a punching bag, singing, screaming at a tree. Just sitting in a place, uh, in nature or in life and being grateful for the wonderful people in our life and for the things that are positive. If we get to a place of feeling at any level of emotion and we’re able to breathe and work through that without blocking the feeling, our life improves.

Lee Kantor: Now what do you tell the person who says, I don’t? You know, I’m not a crier or I’m not, you know, I’m not a feelings person. There’s plenty of people out there that feel, I don’t know if it’s shame or embarrassment or what. The rationale is, why they almost take pride in not showing emotion.

Randy Lyman: Well, I can speak to that from my own perspective. So I was taught by the world around me that if if I showed emotion, I was weak. Now we can show emotion and not be weak. There are two separate things, but I learned that if I’m emotional at all, then I’m going to be seen as weak. And as men, our position is to provide and protect. And as men navigating the world, it’s important that we are respected. So I’m not just going to break down and sob in front of people who don’t understand. And I don’t need to break down and sob every time. But I’m being I’m exaggerating here, and I don’t make decisions based on emotions. And I’m not an emotional person. I’m still a logical reason. Reasonable take action person. The reason I’m sharing the message is because it’s been so useful for me, and I understand it so well, as from a person who was completely left brain, who is now much more balanced. So men have to be respected. Men are worried that we’re going to lose our effectiveness if we feel our emotions. Now we can feel our emotions without being overly emotional.

Randy Lyman: We’re not going to make decisions being based on emotions, but we can show up more compassionate, more caring. We can be more vulnerable in the way that we share. Yeah, I’ve made some mistakes in the past and and working with a team, I don’t want to make these mistakes. How do we work together as a team? Together? Being a key word together as a team to navigate this. And so I don’t have to show up as a leader. I don’t have to show up perfect. I don’t have to show up with all the answers. And yet when I help other people achieve success, they respect me and they see me as a leader and they get behind me as a leader. So leadership is not about barking orders or be this being the smartest guy in the room. Leadership is about helping the group achieve success through individuals in the group achieving success and through the group overall achieving success. And I can do that from a place of calm and confidence without having to exercise the power of my title.

Lee Kantor: Now, early on, um, when you started answering this, you mentioned that, um, that men are taught, I guess, through the world or whatever, just through life, that they shouldn’t show emotion. They shouldn’t, you know, that that’s a, uh, that equates to weakness. Or they could think that the but earlier you you mentioned that if they would just spend time by themselves in nature or, um, or, or with these kind of emotions and show the emotion, like, why is it difficult for them to even show emotion when they’re alone? Like there’s no one judging them except themselves. There’s no nobody, um, embarrassing them. They’re by themselves if they can’t still show emotion alone. Isn’t that that seems to me a bigger problem.

Randy Lyman: Right? Right. And great question. Thank you for clarifying your question. I didn’t hear that correctly. You said it right. I didn’t hear it right the first time. So here’s the here’s the deal. The emotions are so big, we’re afraid they’re going to continue forever and they’re going to take us over. That’s one of the challenges because we need to be as men. We need to be in control. And we’ve seen people who are emotional and they’re out of control, and we don’t necessarily realize that we can let this emotion through and move past it. And again, that’s what I explained in the book. And then the other thing is it’s painful sometimes, even if it’s something small from the past. And I was not abused and I didn’t go through all the emotional challenges many people did. But when those memories come up of being embarrassed or shame or whatever that might be, they hurt. They’re overwhelming. And our ego is designed not not like I have a big ego. I’m a narcissist. Just the personality part of our ego mind says that it’s going to protect us from any pain, whether it’s picking up a hot piece of wood off the campfire, it’s going to hurt, or whether I feel my emotions alone, someplace in a safe place. It’s going to hurt. And that part of our brain protects us from that pain. I want to add one other thing, because I know you’ve got other great questions. I say do it alone, but we can also do it with a friend or a mentor who understands, especially if we can find somebody who we connect with, who is on a similar journey of just becoming more aware of their emotions. Then we can work with somebody else, and we don’t have to do it all by ourselves. But most of the time, for men, we’re kind of on a journey by ourselves when we start down this path.

Lee Kantor: Now, is this book primarily for men?

Randy Lyman: No, this is very generic. This is the game of life. There’s only two rules. There’s a lot of there’s a few other things to understand, but there’s only two rules. One is when we respond from a place of of love and caring instead of fear, we’ll find an answer a lot faster. And the second is it’s really based on God or the universe does not judge us at all. All we have is the law of attraction, and the Law of Attraction says things that are similar to each other vibrate, similar, similar vibration of frequency of each other, are attracted to each other. So our thoughts have a vibration. Three categories or three elements. Our thoughts have a vibration, our actions have a vibration, and our emotions have a vibration. And the challenge with emotions is they’re bigger than time and space. So if I had an emotional experience two years ago or 20 years ago, I didn’t feel completely that energy stored within me and the universe. The Law of Attraction says, oh, I want you to feel better. I’m going to remind you of this old emotional energy you’re holding on to. I’m going to remind you with an irritation, with an annoyance in real time. And nobody has taught us before. Hey, there’s a connection between this annoyance and the opportunity to release this old emotion and make our life better with fewer annoyances. That’s the book.

Lee Kantor: Now, when you came to this kind of spiritual awakening as a scientist, did you immediately say, I am going to test this thesis using scientific, uh, you know, fundamentals? Am I going to double blind test this? I’m going to do some research. I’m going to really hold this hypothesis, uh, to the scientific method.

Randy Lyman: So the the, the best I can explain a scientific method was whenever I had an irritation, and I set my intention on finding the underlying emotional issue that was related to that outside irritation or challenge in my life every single time. 100% of the time I attempted to do this, I succeeded. I didn’t always understand the reason, but as soon as I felt whatever I needed to feel and release that emotional energy. The outside world changed 100% of the time. So I guess part of the double blind test is there was problems I tried to fix in my life, like like relationships with vendors through logic and reason. And I got nowhere for months. And then that part of me kicks in and says, Randy, you know better than this. You know, you got to look at the emotion. And I’d go and look at the emotion, and I’d do one of my exercises tapping, journaling. There’s 14 different exercises in chapter seven of the book. And I would go through one of the exercises and I’d get to a place of feeling, I don’t have the ball, I don’t have to cry. Sometimes I get just a feeling in my body. Sometimes I’ll get a tear in my eye. That’s it. But I had a physical, tangible, physical feeling come through where I changed that old emotional energy into a physical action or feeling of heat. Then the problem went away. So I’d work on a problem for weeks or months. It would not resolve itself. Again, I remember. Hey, go back to the emotion. I feel the emotion and you’re talking within hours or days. The problem would be fixed.

Lee Kantor: But when this happened, I mean, as a scientist, you have to agree that when something happens anecdotally in science, people don’t, you know, take it to market. They test it. Did you did you go to a stranger and or come up to somebody or have somebody, you know, go through the process, um, and test it, you know, kind of with somebody in the wild that wasn’t you?

Randy Lyman: Yes, absolutely. So coworkers I worked with, I’ve had, uh, got over 20 men cry at my desk, come up and see me and start talking, and I just hold that space, listen, ask a few questions, and pretty soon they’re in a place where they’re emotional because I’m comfortable with it. They’re comfortable with it. They feel what they need to feel. I talk to them a him a few days later and the problem’s gone. I’ve worked with family members, I’ve worked with neighbors, I’ve worked with, um, friends and acquaintances and just held that space and asked questions. And when they get to that place of emotional release again, whether it’s small or large, they feel it. And then I ask them later, hey, how’s how are you doing? How’s things going? God, that that problem went away. And pretty much every time I can’t say for certain 100%, but pretty much every time, at least 80% of the time, those people’s particular problems, they were speaking with me about speaking to me about where they had a chance to feel whatever they needed to feel. Their problem went away. Now we still need to address challenges. I still had to fire people. I still had to get rid of vendors. I still had to deal with lawsuits and rules and all those things in the material world that doesn’t go away. But at the same time, in order to keep that problem from recurring in my life. The emotional healing, as I call it, or experience, kept that problem from getting bigger or coming back again.

Lee Kantor: So if somebody out there is struggling and would like to give your, um, hypothesis a go, uh, where can people find the third element and where can people connect with you? Is there a central website for some of this, uh, material?

Randy Lyman: There is a central website. My my name, Randy Lyman. Com I’ll run together. Uh, last name l y m a n so Randy Lyman, they can find access to my book. They can find access to books that I’ve been helpful for me, practitioners I work with for, uh, hypnotherapy and, uh, Reiki and things like that. They have access to, um, some of my tapping exercises. But the book is the best place to start because it’s so logical and reasonable and easy to understand, and I think that’s the best place to start. Not because I want to sell books, because right now the e-book version is dirt cheap. I think it’s just a couple bucks. And this is about helping people understand the rules of life that are pretty simple, and regaining control and getting hope in their life, and having faith in God and realizing I can take charge of my thoughts, my actions work through some emotions and my life’s going to improve. So my website’s the best place to start.

Lee Kantor: Well, Randy, thank you so much for sharing your story today. You’re doing important work and we appreciate you.

Randy Lyman: Well, thank you for having me on. This has been fun. Your questions have been great. I like the work you’re doing.

Lee Kantor: All right. This is Lee Kantor. We’ll see you all next time on High Velocity Radio.

Lauren LeMunyan with Spitfire Coach

May 9, 2025 by Jacob Lapera

Spitfire-Coach

Lauren-LeMunyanLauren LeMunyan is the founder and CEO of Spitfire Coach, an adaptive leadership and innovation firm on a mission to help leaders ditch outdated playbooks and unlock real-world results.

With a no-fluff coaching style, Lauren specializes in building unstoppable leadership pipelines, creating cultures of psychological safety, and driving innovation mindsets across industries.

Lauren is a Master Certified Coach (MCC), dynamic keynote speaker, and fierce advocate for leading through change with grit, grace, and a whole lot of guts.

When she’s not fueling high-growth organizations, she’s lighting up stages and shaking up old-school leadership norms.

Connect with Lauren on LinkedIn.

What You’ll Learn In This Episode

  • Why Most Leadership Books are Wrong and Harmful
  • The Dangers of Performative Leadership
  • Creating and Psychological Safety: The Hidden Engine Behind High-Performing Teams
  • Coaching Skills Every Entrepreneur Needs But Few Actually Use
  • Pivoting to Profitability: Leading Through Uncertainty and Change
  • Why Most Leadership Development Fails — and How to Fix It
  • The Most Powerful Tools in 2025 – Dilemma Flipping, Critical Thinking, Patience

Transcript-iconThis transcript is machine transcribed by Sonix.

 

TRANSCRIPT

Intro: Broadcasting live from the Business RadioX studios in Atlanta, Georgia. It’s time for High Velocity Radio.

Lee Kantor: Lee Kantor here. Another episode of High Velocity Radio, and this is going to be a good one. Today on the show we have Lauren LeMunyan and she is the Spitfire Coach. Welcome.

Lauren LeMunyan: Thanks so much, Lee. It’s great to be here.

Lee Kantor: Well, I am so excited to learn what you’re up to. Uh, what’s it like being the Spitfire coach? How are you serving, folks?

Lauren LeMunyan: It’s a little warm. It’s a little hot, a little spicy. But we get right to business. We get. We get that high velocity going, you know? But basically, it’s about helping people get all the weight of the shoulds, coulds obligations off of them so that they can emerge as their most purpose driven and awesome selves.

Lee Kantor: Can you share a little bit about your backstory? How did you get involved in coaching?

Lauren LeMunyan: Oh, you want the short version or the long version? I know we only got a little bit of time here, but I know, I know that every coach has their own kind of wake up story, but for me, I was in a an 11 year career, I was married, I was living in Las Vegas and Co-running a CrossFit gym, and I was sleeping for hours at a time, drained. And I thought, hmm, my job must be making me miserable. So I thought, I need someone to help me with this. But I didn’t seek the help until I literally hit the floor in my own life. Um, and that was from using alcohol to kind of numb whatever unhappiness I had going on in my life. And after 13 months of me avoiding that help, I finally said, you know what? I’m about to throw my life away if I don’t get myself in order. And that came in the way of a life coach. And that coach just started asking me questions that I’d never thought about, which was what makes you happy? What gets you inspired? And it was all about helping other people.

Lauren LeMunyan: It was all about helping them discover it. And he said, well, what about you? And I couldn’t answer that question. And that aha moment led me into discovering my own passion for coaching. I knew it in the CrossFit space of helping people get past those internal mental blocks of feeling physically stronger. But I thought, you know what? That’s what I’m more interested in versus just lifting heavy weights and putting them down. So I got certified as a coach ten years ago. I got divorced, I sold my house, I moved back to Washington, D.C., I quit my career in association management with no clients and said I’d rather be broke and happy than unhappy and knowing what’s making me miserable and willingly doing that. So that is kind of the short, long version. But really, coaching is what makes Present to Future Vision possible. It worked for me, and I get really excited when I see people light up and find that clarity and really do it for themselves and believe in themselves again.

Lee Kantor: Now, what was the transition like going from coaching, you know, fitness and wellness and health and then coaching, you know, leadership and business?

Lauren LeMunyan: Well, you know, it was very similar because those same feelings of self-doubt, of who am I to show people how to be healthy, healthy and happy when I don’t feel that way myself. Like I probably was the most unhealthy I’ve ever been being a CrossFit coach, which people don’t believe because I was super strong. I was supposed to be eating well. Um, and it was that same type of thing where when I became a certified coach, I knew I had to clean up my own stuff if I could feel confident helping other people. Um, so there’s a lot of similarities, but I think for people who are really effective in the coaching space, they first have to address their own resentments, their own mental blocks. They’ve got to clean up their baggage or it gets leaked into all of their sessions and client engagements.

Lee Kantor: So now who is the ideal client for you nowadays?

Lauren LeMunyan: Oh, it’s anybody who wants to have fun, who wants to kind of who isn’t afraid to shake things up and try new things. Um, I think the people who come in and say, Lauren, I’m so coachable, you can’t tell you how many leaders I get. I’m so easy to work with Lauren. Um, but the people who are like, you know what? I’m scared. I don’t know what this is, but I trust you. And I think when there’s that mutual trust, um, you get some amazing co-creation and, um, and openings and awareness. And so people who can take really clear, direct feedback of like, here’s what I’m noticing, here’s some patterns that I see emerging. And they’re like, Holy crap, I see it too now and let me do something about it. So it’s the people who aren’t just engaged but are ready to take action.

Lee Kantor: So when people come to you and tell you how coachable they are, is that a yellow flag? Like, how do you feel about that orange flag?

Lauren LeMunyan: It might be even red.

Lee Kantor: Those people who are so self-aware that maybe they’re missing. They have some blind spots.

Lauren LeMunyan: They usually have, um, some, uh, subscriptions to Harvard Business Review and Forbes. They love to read articles and tell you all about what they know, but they never put it into practice.

Lee Kantor: So what’s, um, for a listener out there? What is kind of is that one of the symptoms that you’re reading so much, but you’re doing so little? Is that kind of, uh, maybe that’s a sign that, hey, maybe I need a coach.

Lauren LeMunyan: Yeah, I think it’s bypassing. It’s. You’re hearing everyone else’s advice, but you’re not listening to yourself. And I think when you have that kind of overwhelm of information and shoulds, that’s where you really should lean into. Like coaching is an amazing space to just kind of process and be still. And I think especially in the US, in our society, we’re a go, go, go go go like look busy, be busy that we miss the really critical art of being still and being silent to allow that inner voice and that intuition to emerge. So yes, coaches can absolutely help to open that space up for you.

Lee Kantor: But at some point, you have to get out of the book and into the work, right? Like the work has to be done. You have to. A friend of mine says, do the do you have to do the work?

Lauren LeMunyan: Well, I would say you have to be the work first. So I see a lot of my clients get so wrapped up in the doing that they’ll have an I actually just talked to a prospective client this morning about this where he he’s like, I love a good plan. I’m really good at planning. And I said, and how’s your implementation? He said, well, I always, you know, go off course. And I said, because you haven’t embodied the transformation. You don’t know who you want to become. So until you can actually become that person and believe through that lens, the doing doesn’t matter. It’s always going to fall off.

Lee Kantor: So when you were making the shift into coaching full time and you were being coached yourself and they asked you those questions about, you know, what fires you up and what your true north and things like that. And you articulated, I think you said you want to help people. That was kind of at the crux of a lot of your work, right? Was that is that correct? I want to make sure I’m on the right track. Um, and then when that happened and you had that aha moment, what changed in terms of like taking an action, like did the next day, all of a sudden you were taking productive action in the right direction or like what was the shift after the aha moment?

Lauren LeMunyan: Well, so it actually was the opposite, because I was so used to.

Lauren LeMunyan: Building and doing for others, I wasn’t doing it for myself. And so the big prompt was to just be still and to journal and to reflect. Because if we go into that kind of I’m inspired, here’s my light bulb, I’m going, we’re not actually like getting the full picture yet. Like, there’s still so much to marinate on and process. And if we’re jumping to go, go, go and do, we don’t actually know if that’s a reactive mode or if that’s actually someone that something that’s future vision towards what we want to create. And so I think that critical thinking lens of is this coming from me because it’s my old default operating system, or is this something that’s now newly programed into this future vision? So I knew that if I was repeating behaviors from my past mode, I would get exhausted. I’d lose my voice. I’d get sick. Um, and we call it actually like the baby giraffe syndrome, where you first learn a new skill and you’re, like, super awkward, but you’re like, I’m so excited. And I got to share it with everybody. And then you keep falling down. Um, so I realized I need to keep practicing. I need to I need to observe other people in this space. I need to work under other coaches. Um, or else I’m going to come off like every other, like creepy life’s life coach who’s like, let me show you how to be everything to everybody. Um, so I was really patient with it, and I was patient with myself, which I knew was a new way of being. And that’s how I knew that I had a new transformation happening.

Lee Kantor: So you believe that this pause in between maybe chapters is an important component that can’t be shortcutted. You have to sit still, and you have to listen to your inner self in order to really get to that next level.

Lauren LeMunyan: Ding ding ding. Yeah, we call it bypassing. So if you don’t sit with it, if you don’t process it, if you don’t reflect on it, you’re missing the nuggets. You’re missing all those amazing lessons and insights that you can apply to those next chapters. And if you aren’t, if you’re bypassing and speed cutting through it, you’re actually probably going to have to relearn those lessons in some other fashion. Um, and they get a little more painful because it’s like, hey, you didn’t really pay attention the last time. So the more that you can slow down, it actually will save you time later on, and it will kind of lessen the blow later on, because you’ll have even more skills and resilience to face those hardships or to face those challenges. You’ll be like, oh, that looks familiar, because I reflected on that before and I know what to do now.

Lee Kantor: Do you find that in today’s world, you know, between the short attention spans and and just people wanting results, um, before maybe earning them, um, that we are susceptible to, let’s call it like catchphrase leadership, like, you know, lean in or let them or, you know, like, whatever. The hottest new.

Lauren LeMunyan: Were you checking out my past episodes? I’m my podcast.

Lee Kantor: It’s just there seems to be every couple weeks or months, there’s some new catchphrase that everybody is like, this is the secret to life, if only I regurgitation. So is that. Do you find that just people are there, they’re hungry for something. And this is catchy. And and a lot of people are buying it and they’re like, hey, that seems like the, you know, that’s going to work for me.

Lauren LeMunyan: Yes.

Lauren LeMunyan: I actually did a whole video on this of like the potency of self-help books will last for about two weeks. And then you realize very quickly that the tools that were shared don’t actually work. They worked for that person. But you try to, like, convince yourself that I just need to do these things. But again, because we’re not pausing and we’re not figuring out what we actually need and how to get that need met, we’re living through the lens of someone else. And so it’s really easy to get excited because you see all these gurus going around like, I’m so successful. And by the way, most of who you’ve mentioned all hang out together. So it’s the same content repurposed in a different way. There’s a whole thing about it. It’s really scary and gross. Um, but the reality is we don’t have short attention spans. We just haven’t been told that we matter enough to go slowly. We’ve gotten wrapped into the capitalism model where it’s like, you’re not enough, do more go. And if you actually, like, sit back and and question who wins by me being busy. Who wins by by me not thinking I’m enough, you start to uncover that it’s not actually about you, and therefore you don’t need all these experts telling you how to live your life. You can just chill out. There’s a great woman I wish I remembered her name that runs the Nap ministry, and it’s all about just take care of yourself, slow the pace and notice. Like it’s not even about Buddhism. Or like you don’t have to have a religion to do it, but like, just start noticing who wins by you chasing down the next fad, the next phrase, the next thing.

Lauren LeMunyan: It’s all the same marketing blitz of you don’t know enough. You aren’t enough. None of this stuff is new. None of what I’m doing is new. I’m just bringing it out in my own voice and lens. It’s the same thing as these books, and they’re half baked like they’re they’re fluff. If you’ve actually, like, read them beyond just like the the back cover, it’s one thought that could be an email Matched with about 4 or 5 fluffy stories that don’t even have any legitimacy. And it’s usually written in the lens of someone who has a high level of privilege and has never really experienced hardship in their life. As much as they want to say, woe is me, I didn’t have anything. Um, Mel Robbins was already at a Ted talk where she just happened to slip in her five second rule. Oh, it just came to me. It’s all these very manufactured stories that people grab onto because it sounds good. It’s like our own little Disney myth that we’re like, oh my God, if it worked for them, it can work for me too. And I think we’re all kind of looking for that silver bullet or that that permission slip to kind of bypass the hardship that we have to live through to get better. But like, we all have trauma. Everyone has trauma in their life. And so we have to heal from it to get to another place. There is no shortcutting it.

Lee Kantor: So now when you’re working with your clients, is this just part of the process you have to bypass? You have to, uh, you know, kind of come to terms with your trauma. Like, what are the kind of what’s your methodology? Ideology.

Lauren LeMunyan: So I don’t. What I do is I acknowledge it. Like if I notice that someone is focusing on a past storyline, that’s where I’ll say, you know what? This sounds like something to work through with a therapist. Um, as a coach, we focus on present function to future vision. Um, some coaches get in trouble with that. It’s actually in the ICF guidelines to not play pay, play phony therapist. But what I do is bring attention to I’m noticing a pattern in your language. I’m noticing that we’re getting stuck here. And so if I notice that there’s a wiggle, that there isn’t like a really stuck storyline here, because that’s when I know that it’s really deep trauma that another professional needs to deal with, then I can help them rewrite their scripts. I can help them upgrade the storylines that they’re telling themselves, because most times people don’t realize how much they’re re-embedding the storylines that aren’t working for them. Um, there’s actually a great book called Mind Your Body. Um, Doctor Nicole Sachs, like love it. Just finished it and she talks about this process called Journal Speak, which is about addressing through writing things that have gotten us stuck in the past, but it helps us reframe it in a positive way because most times we’re not able to communicate these really deep seated emotions like we’re just repressing all the time. And so it’s popping out and then we’re self-sabotaging.

Lee Kantor: Now, you mentioned journaling. And, um, a lot of coaches are big fans of journaling. Is there some, um, maybe techniques you can share when it comes to journaling? Because journaling can mean a lot of different things, and it can be done a lot of different ways. Is there some best practices you can share when it comes to, um, efficiently and effectively journaling?

Lauren LeMunyan: I would say just do what works for you. So my style is probably different from most people. Um, but I love the tangible of having a pen with a with a spiral bound notebook, and my minimum is three pages every day. It can be fluff. It could be. Here’s what my to do list is. It’s I use it as brain dumps.

Lee Kantor: What’s an example of fluff?

Lauren LeMunyan: Oh, like, uh, the sun is outside. My baby’s asleep. Like, it’s just kind of. It’s not fluff. It’s just more of like a here’s what’s happening in my in my present space. And actually, I shouldn’t I shouldn’t denounce my stuff. Um, it’s more of like taking an inventory of what’s happening in the present, um, so that I’m more in a, in an observation space. Um, but where I’ll take that is how am I feeling right now? What sensation and am I feeling in my body? What happened from this? So usually, like I do it as a daily practice, but I also will pull it out if I’m feeling overwhelm, if I’m feeling confused, if I’m feeling like I need some more clarity. And I just am like putting everything on paper and helping to sort things out. Um, so I use it as kind of like a sounding board. Um, and so whenever I have clients who are like, I hate journaling, I said, cool. So I want you to get a piece of paper out right now, and I’m going to set a timer for a minute, and I want you to just write, well, what do I write? Whatever you want, whatever comes up. I don’t care if you write the same word over and over again, but you got to get yourself in the practice of it. That’s why meditation is a practice. Yoga is a practice. Journaling is also a practice. And so it works when you do it. Um, there is no perfect way. In fact, I don’t think that you should ever go back and look at your journals. It is for you, and it’s really there to create more mental space and to help you sort through things that are going on and clogging up some brainwaves too.

Lee Kantor: Now, when you’re talking about all this kind of inner work for an individual, are you also doing work that’s translating to their business challenges?

Lauren LeMunyan: Oh, it’s all interrelated. So I call it holistic coaching because there’s always if you start pulling one thread, there’s other things that are going to lift up. Um, so we’ll typically start with business challenges. Um, and then the client will usually emerge other things. So I don’t ever go looking for it. It just kind of appears um, or they’re like, oh, this this skill really worked well with an employee. I think I’m going to use it with my wife, and then we’ll start to play with, okay, what would that look like? Where what shifts or tweaks would you make. And so it’s never use this thing and then, you know, step and repeat copy and paste and everything. There are nuances to relationships. There are nuances, um, in environments and different situations. And so again, it’s that critical thinking lens of how might this work and how might it not? And where do I need to tweak? Um, but yes, we we focus on every aspect of people’s lives. But specifically, people want to see results in their business because that’s how they pay their bills. That’s how they keep their employees, uh, with their lights on and keeping them happy. Um, so when people have money in the bank, they are more empowered to do other things. And so we like to focus specifically with people in an employment setting or with their business.

Lee Kantor: What’s a typical challenge that an entrepreneur that works with you is struggling with? Like what’s usually the first challenge that comes, you know, or is there a typical one? Or like some people come with sales, some people come with talent, some, you know, they all have different ones.

Lauren LeMunyan: Yeah. Well, so they come to me and they’ll say one thing and it’ll actually be something else. So they’re like, I need, uh, I need to work on bringing my team together, or I need to work on team management. And so we’re it usually comes down to is it’s boundaries. It’s clarity around expectations and roles. Um, and it’s them being able to delegate and not get their hands in things. So a lot of it’s around control and trust.

Lee Kantor: And then, so, um, if they’re in need of maybe some delegation skills, what are some baby steps they can take to let go?

Lauren LeMunyan: Yeah. Well, so I think it’s first, what are they willing to let go of? What are the things that they absolutely need to manage and oversee. And then what are some ways that they can start to hand off. And then also have checkpoints. So one of the biggest, uh, search keywords on our website is leaders leading leaders. Because people don’t know how to manage high performers. So like I should just let them do what they need to do, but then I don’t know what they’re doing and then they’re off off to the races. But I think it’s a matter of having CEOs specifically and and leaders who are leading other people to be clear on what needs to happen. Who’s going to do it, when are they going to do it by? And then when are we going to check in to make sure that we’re aligned? So when those things can happen in a process, then you can create more consistency. And I think that’s the core element of it, because I think a lot of leaders think if I do this one thing, then there’s an assumption that it’s all going to come together. But businesses organizations are microorganism like it’s an ecosystem. So you’ve got to make sure that it’s maintained and that you have the right people in the right seats doing the right work. And then they also have a space and a place and an expectation of when to come back to things, to make sure that they’re on the right, on the right page, on the right track, and they have the resources they need to get the job done.

Lee Kantor: Now, is there a story you can share that maybe illustrates, um, how your coaching can elevate somebody? Uh, don’t name the name of the person, but maybe share the challenge they were having when they came to you and how you were able to help them get to a new level.

Lauren LeMunyan: Yeah. Well, I mean, you know, unfortunately, I wish this weren’t the case, but I hear from so many CEOs when they’re just like, they’re like, I don’t know if I have to close up shop. I don’t know, you know, if I can make payroll, like, they’re coming to a place out of a place of desperation. And I wish that this was a more proactive maintenance so that we didn’t get to that place of like, I don’t know if I can make this work. Um, but I will tell you a really positive story. So there was a business owner, and I do, um, an exercise of what’s the quality that you admire most in other people. And this person said, Joy. And I said, that’s really interesting. You know what? What is it about Joy? And he said, you know, I just don’t feel any joy in my business. I don’t feel any joy in my life. And I really miss it. And through our time working together, um, I kept linking things back to Joy. I kept saying, okay, tell me, what brings you joy about this? What about this? Like getting people back to that passion of what got them started in running their business. And after six months, they had this reflection of, like, I found the joy back in my company. I, I love what I do, I love this, and I’m sharing it with my team members. And so like I get goosebumps, like just thinking about this. And I know this probably feels kind of vague, but it’s literally helping people fall back in love with their with their companies and being able to spread that energy to other people and creating those safe spaces for people to also be excited to come to work. Like, imagine that right now of like people being excited for Mondays and not and not dreading coming to the office or logging in. And I think that that’s the gift of like insight and awareness of helping people get back what they had.

Lee Kantor: Now, is there a niche that you serve primarily, or are you industry agnostic? Um, is there a sweet spot?

Lauren LeMunyan: I mean, I love me some tech clients. I love professional services, services and design. I love creative fields. But, um, if you’ve got a passion for psychological safety, positive disruption, and you care about your people like I’m here for it, so I am not a I am not going to say no because you’re working in, you know, um, sanitation. Um, because I did have a client with that. I don’t I don’t judge it because it brings in money.

Lee Kantor: So if somebody wanted to learn more, have a more substantive conversation with you or somebody on the team, what’s the website? What’s the best way to connect?

Lauren LeMunyan: You can check out our website at Spitfire. Com. We also have our YouTube channel and podcast at Spitfire Coach or Spitfire Podcast. And we do tons of of free stuff. But also we can come in and help your team feel more confident, upskill them in psychological safety and leading with certainty through these volatile times. Um, and help to equip your leaders with amazing coaching skills so they can be better communicators and problem solvers.

Lee Kantor: Well, Lauren, thank you so much for sharing your story, doing such amazing work, and we appreciate you.

Lauren LeMunyan: Thank you so much. I appreciate it.

Lee Kantor: All right. This is Lee Kantor. We’ll see you all next time on High Velocity Radio.

John Dwyer with The Institute Of Wow

May 7, 2025 by Jacob Lapera

John-DwyerJohn Dwyer is a marketing enigma, a “direct response customer attraction expert” who thinks way outside the box.

His marketing consultancy business is called The Institute Of Wow – & John’s mantra is that one’s marketing needs to “wow” prospects.

He’s also the guy who shocked the marketing world some years back when he convinced Jerry Seinfeld to come out of retirement to be the spokesman for an Australian banking institution, The Greater Building Society.

Jerry headed up a “free vacation campaign” which broke home loan lending records and remains folklore in the global banking industry…..people received a “free vacation” when they got a home loan.

This was probably one of the most successful “incentive-promotions” in the world, resulting in many BILLIONS of dollars in extra home loans.

John helps business owners understand how to exploit platforms like Facebook, Instagram, YouTube and LinkedIn by implementing “incentive-based marketing offers” that can be targeted specifically to certain audiences.

His client list reads like a Who’s Who of business and includes the likes of Rupert Murdoch’s News Ltd, 7 Eleven, Westfield Shopping Centres, Walt Disney, KFC and BP to name a few.

His skills have been used by such companies because they acknowledge he is “the master of creating incentives that work.” The-Institute-of-Wow-logo

He has created done-for-you “customer incentive packages” that businesses can plug & play – including “extraordinary customer rewards” like Fuel Savings & Free Vacations.

When it comes to “unique marketing concepts” that attract an avalanche of new clients for businesses, John certainly delivers.

Connect with John on LinkedIn.

What You’ll Learn In This Episode

  • What service John provides to businesses
  • What direct response marketing is and what makes if different from general marketing strategies
  • What sort of business should consider direct response marketing
  • About incentive-based marketing

Transcript-iconThis transcript is machine transcribed by Sonix.

 

TRANSCRIPT

Intro: Broadcasting live from the Business RadioX studios in Atlanta, Georgia. It’s time for High Velocity Radio.

Lee Kantor: Lee Kantor here. Another episode of High Velocity Radio, and this is going to be a good one. Today on the show we have John Dwyer, who is with the Institute of Wow. Welcome, John.

John Dwyer: Thank you for having me, Lee.

Lee Kantor: Well, I’m excited to learn what you’re up to. Uh, tell us a little bit about the Institute of. Wow. How you serving, folks?

John Dwyer: Yeah, I like the way that you say that. The institute of. Wow. Um, look, uh, as that name infers, uh, it’s all about, uh, providing businesses with what we call direct response. Wow. Factor concepts. So things that will, you know, I guess, attract customers much easier than price discounting because a lot of businesses fall into that trap where they they need to put some money in their pocket and some food on the table, and the first thing they do is drop their prices. So what we do is that we provide them with wow factor ideas. That takes people’s eyes off the price.

Lee Kantor: So what’s your backstory? How’d you get involved in this line of work?

John Dwyer: Uh, yeah. Look, I’ve been doing it since the 1800s, so therefore I’ve been doing this for quite some time. And, uh, my backstory is that when I was getting towards the age of leaving school, I was pretty good at art. Artwork was my subject. And then, uh, back in the day, a thousand years ago, when I was leaving school, I could see that computers were coming around the corner and that a little bit like what kids would have seen a few years ago with AI, I guess. But I saw computers were coming around the corner. I thought, hmm, there’s not going to be much money in doing artwork as in freelance artwork. Maybe what I should do is take that creativity and put it into something that might be scalable. Not that I knew what I was doing at the time. By the way, I’m trying to make myself sound smart. At 18 or 19, I wasn’t. Yeah. So anyway, that’s what I did. I went to university and college and picked up the advertising degrees after a few years. And then, yeah, went and worked for a major supermarket chain in Australia. As you can tell from my accent, I’m down under. And that was a great experience because in my 20s I was lucky enough to work for a big supermarket chain in Australia called called Woolworths, and they had a lot of this wow factor stuff happening. So if you shopped at Woolworths for every $10 you spent, you may have got a stamp back in the day. This is pre-digital, you might get a stamp and you put that on a saver sheet. And when you saved up so many stamps, you got special prices on cookware and glassware and all that sort of stuff. And throughout the time I was there, we ran big scratch games to give away million dollar prizes. And yeah, basically it taught me direct response. And it was very, very good for me because obviously I ultimately left Woolworths and set up a business that did the same thing.

Lee Kantor: So does the same formulas and techniques of back in the day leveraging direct response. Does it still work in today’s kind of short attention span world that we live in?

John Dwyer: It does. I mean, look, it’s tougher It’s tougher because everybody’s got that four second attention span as they’re scrolling. So it is tougher. And I guess that’s why we’re continuing to do okay. Because, uh, business owners do realize that you’ve got to stop the scroll. Uh, and uh, while some business owners are still using television and radio and newspapers and so forth, it’s not what it used to be. So really, Zuckerberg and, uh, TikTok and LinkedIn, they’re getting all the money these days. So you’ve got to learn as a business owner, you’ve got to learn. And if you don’t want to learn, then get someone like us to do it. But you’ve got to learn how to make sure that you can stop the scroll because you’ve got four seconds.

Lee Kantor: So, um, let’s try to help some of these listeners. How do you stop the scroll? What are some of the do’s and don’ts?

John Dwyer: Mm. Okie dokie. Um, well, again, you wouldn’t expect me to say anything differently. I mean, it is the Institute of. Wow. So what we say to people is you’ve got to have a wow factor. And as corny as that might sound, uh, when it rolls off the tongue like that, um, a wow factor is something very much akin to what McDonald’s do with the Happy Meal toy. I’ve got six children. They’re all grown up now and left home. But, you know, over the years we probably would have given McDonald’s, you know, a small fortune. And it had nothing to do with the hamburger in the Happy Meal box. It was all about the free toy. So metaphorically, they stopped the scroll. They got everybody’s attention by putting a toy in the Happy Meal box. Uh, Kellogg’s have been doing the same thing for 50 years with a toy in the bottom of the box. Uh, Amazon. Do it with their Prime membership. If you’re a member of their Prime membership club, then you get free shipping and free movies and all sorts of other privileges. Um, and the cafe down the road from you and from me, uh, probably, you know, has given you a reward card. And if you get ten coffees or nine coffees, you get the 10th one for free. So it’s all out there. Um, the irony is that 97% of businesses have never used an incentive. Um, so a big part of direct response marketing is what we call incentive based marketing. And that’s the Happy Meal toy in the box. And 97% of businesses continue to go down the price discounting path. And they don’t, uh, they don’t value add with an incentive. So my advice to anyone, if they were advertising on social media, have a wow factor incentive. And that is a very good way of stopping the scroll.

Lee Kantor: Now what about the, um, kind of B2B, uh, coaches and consultants of the world that don’t have maybe tangible things that they sell? How can they add some of that wow factor into their offering?

John Dwyer: Mm. Yeah. Good question. Um, yeah. Look, I fall into that category because when I moved from corporate, which was the big supermarket chains and stuff like that, into helping smaller to medium sized businesses, the, the Anthony Robbins business model is pretty much it. So you jump on stage and do your song and dance, uh, and you attract, you know, business owners in the room. And then at the end of that, of course, you, uh, you offer them the opportunity to use your services and, you know, courtesy of Covid. A lot of that now is done online. Like we’re, you know, like we’re doing right now. I mean, webinars and podcasts have become the new seminars. Um, on a B2B basis, you could do exactly what I do. If I wanted to beef up a month’s worth of income. I will run an ad on Facebook or LinkedIn because my audience are business owners. That’s the only people who want to talk to me. I don’t deal with consumers. And I will say, look, how about you enter the contest to win? You know, three months worth of coaching free of charge from me.

John Dwyer: And I’ll tell them on that advertisement, which might be on LinkedIn, uh, you know, all the sort of stuff that I do, what direct response can do to help their business and so forth. Now, any business that enters a contest to win three month’s worth of my consultancy obviously is interested in getting marketing consultancy. So I don’t attract an audience. I attract a red hot audience who have already glowed in the dark and put their hand up and said, I want more of this stuff. So we give one away. But then I might have another 100 or 200 businesses that are pretty warm prospects to go back to and say, look, you didn’t win the three months consultancy with John, but we do have an opportunity for you to work with them. Would you be interested in this special deal or whatever it might be? And that’s what I would suggest to any business coach or consultant or advisor that, you know, come up with a price that might be your services.

Lee Kantor: And, um, walk me through what it’s like to start an engagement with you. So say I come to you, say I’m one of those business coaches, and I come to you and say, you know what? I’m frustrated. Uh, the growth of my business is not going in the right direction. That’s. I’m. I’m assuming that’s how most of your clients feel, right? When they’re working with you. Something’s gone wrong, and they need help either rebooting or refreshing. Uh, what they they do. So talk me through what that first kind of conversation looks like. So you so you get enough information so you can educate and educate and help them.

John Dwyer: Yeah. Look, it’s not a very long conversation, Lee, because it’s the same conversation just about for, you know, 95% of people, um, uh, nobody has ever knocked on my door and said, oh, John, my name is John Dwyer, but I get JD, nobody’s ever knocked on my door and said, JD, I’d like you to help me build my business over the next, you know, five years I’m in no hurry and no one’s ever done that. Uh, they’re always looking for David Copperfield to provide them with a marketing plan that’s going to get them a hell of a lot more clients quickly. Uh, and so, generally speaking, yeah, if they’re in the same sort of game that I am and that is providing advice, um, a lot of the time they just are not aware of how best to, um, play the numbers game, because look, at the end of the day, uh, it is a numbers game. It’s all about selling once to many. Uh, if you’re not selling once to many, then of course, you know you’re not scaling. And I fell into that trap. By the way, I can’t criticize anyone else. When I first got into this, I didn’t realize that, you know, the scaling was very, very, very important. Uh, not so much when you’re dealing with bigger businesses. So I’ve only been in the small to medium business sector for about a dozen years. Uh, up until then, uh, I, you know, had McDonald’s and 7-Eleven as clients. I had Kellogg’s as clients. Um, I had, you know, big businesses. Rupert Murdoch’s News Limited, uh, I used I used to provide them with all the scratch bingos for their newspapers, you know, not these days, but back in the early 2000.

John Dwyer: And what happened about a dozen years ago, I said to my wife, look, we’re not getting any younger. Why don’t I use this intellectual property that I’m charging a few dollars to for the corporates and cut it up into bite sized pieces and make it available for smaller businesses? And she told me that I was an idiot and, uh, stick to my knitting. And as our husbands do, I didn’t listen to her. So Teresa. Yeah. Yeah. I had a baptism of fire. I jumped on, uh, you know, the small to medium business owner sector very quickly. And, uh, I’ll tell you what. It was a dry six months to start with because I didn’t know how to speak the language. Um, I was used to being involved in corporate and corporate are not necessarily wanting to win the race. They’re happy for you to provide them with consultancy. And eventually, after six or 7 or 8 months, you know, they start to see results in the small business sector. That’s not the case. They want results tomorrow because they’ve got to put food on the table, no matter how many likes they’ve got. The kids are still wanting to eat, you know. So what we do is we just simply have a very quick conversation that would probably go for the best part of, you know, maybe 20, 25 minutes. And then I put a plan together for them, um, that will hopefully, you know, give them a roadmap that they can follow quite easily.

Lee Kantor: And then, uh, then they do that on their own. This is your kind of, uh, giving them help. And sometimes, though, people need a helper. Do you ever do the work or that you got out of that side of the business?

John Dwyer: Oh, yeah. I was an idiot, Lee. I thought that just like the corporate world where they had an advertising staff that maybe, you know, five or 10 or 20 people where I’d go in and, you know, I mean, one of my most successful campaigns. And I’m going to show off here because I’m going to name drop, uh, was a bank down under, uh, whereby instead of advertising on price, uh, in other words, an interest rate for a home loan might be 6.2%. Uh, we got rid of that and gave that, uh, what was what used to be their their lure, which is a honeymoon rate. We’d give that to a travel company. And that travel company gave them a, you know, a discounted vacation. So we came on television for this bank. It was the only bank in the world that did something like this. It was very bold. It was get a home loan from this particular bank and get a free vacation. It went nuts. And then a few years after launching it, I got Jerry Seinfeld to do the ads. And so I’d fly backwards and forwards to New York, and Jerry would do all the TV ads for us, so we would be Down Under with Jerry Seinfeld on TV saying, get a home loan, get a vacation, get a free vacation.

John Dwyer: Now, when Seinfeld got involved with something that was already successful, it went through the stratosphere. Um, now that bank had a marketing team of 12 people so I could get into their office. I can, you know, basically show off and provide the advice to them and say, you should do this and you put this on TV. You did this on the newspapers. You did this on Facebook. You did this on LinkedIn. And they had a team to execute. Um, in the small business sector, that’s not the case. Uh, they’re all too busy. They’re running their business. Whether it happens to be a butcher, baker, candlestick maker. So we woke up to ourselves after getting very frustrated. I would give them the Seinfeld style level advice. Uh, but I found that that was something that was just silly because they just they appreciated it, but nothing ever got done. They never executed it. So what we do now is that we implement it for them.

Lee Kantor: So now take me back to that time at that bank. So every other bank in the market was, um, working off a price or advertising on price or that was their point of differentiation. So you’ve you’ve found one needle in the haystack that you were able to convince to do something totally different. And, uh, and that’s not easy to do to convince someone to go against the tide. Can you walk us through kind of how you were able to persuade, usually a very risk averse group of people, to take a chance this bold at a time when none of their competitors were putting their neck on the line. How how did you persuade them to take the risk?

John Dwyer: Yeah. Look, very good question. Um, they were boring bankers. Okay, uh, lovely people. But you wouldn’t want to get caught in an elevator with them. The conversation wouldn’t be gripping. Um, and so therefore, they employ a marketing consultant like me who’s sarcastic and cheeky, and I thought we were probably going to butt heads. Um, as it turned out, they didn’t realize until I told them that they were a challenger brand. And if you’re not the Coca-Cola of your industry, um, you’re a challenger brand. Okay. And, uh, so, you know, I mean, Richard Branson used to be a challenger brand with Virgin Airlines, but of course, it’s up there now with, you know, American Airlines and everyone else. A challenger brand is one that doesn’t take the number one or number two spot. So when I got together with them in their boardroom and, you know, there might have been 7 or 8 managers around the table, I threw a Happy Meal box in the middle of the boardroom table. Uh, Anthony Robbins tells you, you know, you’ve got to get attention. So therefore, that was the way I got attention. And I pulled out the, uh, the toy. And I’d been there for a couple of months doing a time and motion study on the business from a marketing perspective. And they had been doing everything that all the other banks do. So it’s a me too industry, the banking industry or the home loan industry.

John Dwyer: They all look the same. So it’s all me too. Me too. Me too. And so what happens is I said to them, okay, um, this is what I think could make a big difference in your business. Now, I was being silly just to get their attention, and they said, okay, idiot. I mean, what are you talking about? With a toy out of the box in the middle of the boardroom table? I said, look, I will give anyone here $100. I put out $100 note because that gets the attention of a banker. And I said, I’ll give everyone $100. Note if you can tell me what a Happy Meal costs because they’ve all got children or grandchildren. No one got within a dollar. And I said, well, that proves to you that McDonald’s have taken your eyes off the price. Okay. It’s all about the toy. And so I suggest what you guys might like to do. You don’t want to be advertising on price. You are the 250th biggest business in Australia. So they’re not small. They weren’t a butcher, a baker. They’re a pretty big business. But the big banks, the Wells Fargo style banks were, you know, 50 times bigger. And that’s why they were a challenger brand. I said, so if you’re a challenger brand, you’ve got to do things differently. What is your acquisition tool at the moment? And they said, oh, we give 1% honeymoon rate to, you know, the husband and wife for the first year.

John Dwyer: I said, every bank does that. You know, if the interest rate was 6%, they’d make it 5% for the first 12 months to get your in, and then it goes back up to 6% after 12 months. Why don’t you pick that up and give it to this discount travel company that I’ve been doing some TV commercials for, and they will give you a $10,000 vacation for $5,000, right? So if you were borrowing $500,000 and a 1% honeymoon rate for the first year was five grand. You give that to them and they’ll give you ten grand holiday. And that’s what we did. So I introduced them basically to the travel company. And then the rest is history. We came on television and social media and we said, get a home loan from this bank or not even get a home. Swap your home loan from the nasty Wells Fargo bank who’s treating you like a number and charging you? Uh, well, what we would say is that not once in ten years we ran the promotion for ten years. Not once did they ever advertise a price. You you can imagine. That’s that’s, um. Nobody in the world would run their business for ten years without advertising a price.

Lee Kantor: Now, I know when you’re saying that, you tell them this idea, and instead of giving the 1% as 1%, you take the same amount of money or less and then make it into a vacation. Um, and, um, I just find it difficult to understand how a bunch of bankers throw their credit card across the table to you and say, oh yeah, let’s run that. Like, there’s committees. There’s boards of directors. How possibly were they able to be persuaded this simply on such a contrarian idea? I just think there has to be more to it.

John Dwyer: Uh, look, uh, I make it sound easy that they said yes on that day in the boardroom. No, no, you’re quite right. I mean, it took a couple of months for them to get their head around it and have all their usual committee meetings. Um, but, you know, it was I had been there, uh, as a marketing consultant for probably 2 to 3 months when I was just looking at all the stuff that they were doing and it was all rubbish. It was all the billboard freeway, right?

Lee Kantor: It was all the MeToo stuff that everybody else was doing. You were telling them to do something totally contrarian, something totally outside of what I would imagine would be their comfort zone. So I’m just want to understand, because this is what the listeners need, because this is there in that same position. A lot of listeners have a great idea. They just have a difficult time convincing people to take a risk. You were able to do that. I want to really understand how you were able to convince it had to be layers of bureaucracy to go along with this idea. Did they pilot it in a small way, or did they just kind of go all in? Like, how did this get across all of that bureaucracy to get a yes?

John Dwyer: Yeah. Look, um, I guess it starts with the big idea. If you’ve got a big idea, um, there’s a pretty good chance even a left brain person, which, of course they are, uh, would react to it. Um, I think really, if I didn’t have the pedigree that I had up until that time, uh, maybe it would have been difficult to get across the line, but I had pulled off a few of these things over time. Um, you know, over the years because of, I guess, thinking outside the box, I’ve done stuff with meatloaf and Michael Jordan and Paul Hogan, Crocodile Dundee and all of these sorts of people. So, uh, not that Seinfeld was part of the equation in the first instance. He didn’t come until 3 or 4 years into the campaign, but I had a reasonable track record. So therefore I would show all the things that I’ve done for the big supermarket chain here in Australia and for car dealerships and for butchers and bakers and candlestick makers. So I showed them what I had done. If this was my first rodeo, then yeah, probably they’d go, look, you have no clue. You don’t know what you’re talking about. And the fact that the travel company was already a client of mine and I was doing infomercials on television for them, um, I think that played a role too. So therefore I already had the relationship with the travel company and, you know, sometimes perfect storm. You know, the jigsaw pieces just fall into place. Um, I have to say this to you. It was easier to get the building society. It’s called the Greater Building society. It was easier to get them to say yes, to get a home loan, get a free holiday. That’s what we call it. Down under. You guys call it vacation, but we call it holiday. It was easier to get a yes from them for the concept than it was to get Seinfeld. So if you said to me which one was the easier, I’ll say the bank. Yeah.

Lee Kantor: So now do those same techniques work nowadays? Infomercials. Uh, those kind of, uh, classic direct response communications?

John Dwyer: Absolutely. Yeah, absolutely. It doesn’t matter what the medium is these days. Um, and, you know, I don’t do a lot of copywriting. Now, there’s a guy called ChatGPT that does it for me, but, uh, but nonetheless. Yeah, the when, you know, I’m a baby boomer. And so therefore, you’re going to get the question from younger people who own their business. Look, uh, how do we know that? You know, you’ve kept up with the times? Well, I have, because if you’re in the marketing game, you’re an idiot if you don’t. And I’ve got all the young guys around me that, you know, press the buttons when it comes to LinkedIn and Instagram and Facebook and so forth. Um, but the thing is, the actual principles of direct response marketing have not changed. It’s still basically problem solution marketing. You know, you overweight and you know you don’t feel good about yourself. Well guess what? I’ve got the solution for you. And coincidentally, spring and summer is just around the corner. You’re going to look good in your swimsuit. So problem solution. So nothing’s changed with regards to what direct response marketing is. It’s all about the problem, the solution. The only thing that’s changed is the platforms. You know, the communication platforms. And uh, yeah, I mean, it doesn’t it doesn’t take away that the idea that worked 20 or 30 years ago will still work. It’s just a different communication platform.

Lee Kantor: Now, in order to leverage the, um, social channels nowadays, do you have to use paid as well as, uh, kind of organic or can you get away with just doing organic?

John Dwyer: No, no, no, there’s no way in the world you could get away with just doing organic. And, you know, the platforms have designed their platform to make sure that you can’t. Yeah. Someone said to me the other day, we’ve got a couple of clients in Texas and, uh, they’re selling motorbikes. Uh, and, and, you know, although I’m down under, we have clients all around the world these days because what we do, of course, is package it together for them. And they just basically sit back and watch it work. And this happens to be, um, a vacation promotion. Um, with Seinfeld’s campaign going out. Get a home loan, get a free vacation. Uh, we got contacted by an international, uh, travel company who said, listen, we’ve got an access to empty rooms right? Throughout America and Australia and Europe. These hotels outside of school vacation periods are running at 30 or 40% vacancy. Um, can you help us? You know, basically fill those rooms by giving this as a promotion to businesses to attract customers. And I said, yeah, Hallelujah. They said, look, you’ve obviously got half a clue when it comes to marketing vacations Where a vacation company, we’re just helping hotels fill otherwise empty rooms. And it’s a win win win. It’s a win for the business that says, look, come and, you know, buy my refrigerator and you get a free vacation in Vegas.

John Dwyer: It’s a win for their customers, obviously, and it’s a win for the hotels because, you know, ordinarily they would have been running outside of school vacation period with 30 or 40% empty rooms. They fill those rooms and then hope whoever stays there might spend money on food and beverage. So that’s how it worked. And as it turns out, we have a motorbike dealership in Texas that launched the promotion, uh, for getting test rides. So it’s a test drive, but it’s a motorbike, so it’s a test ride. And I designed the promotion for them. We give them the vouchers for 3 to 7 nights vacation in New York and Orlando and Las Vegas and San Diego, Grand Canyon, all around America. So this voucher will give you up to seven nights vacation at any one of these four star hotels. In all those beautiful locations, all you got to do is take a test ride. Now, the mathematics on that is, is that for every ten test rides Odds. In the US, the average is 3.5. Conversion rate in sales. Now these are Harley-Davidson motorbikes. They are about 25 to $40,000.

John Dwyer: So you can imagine if I give them the vacation vouchers for $50, uh, and they give me ten times that because, you know, they do ten test rides. That’s a lousy $500 they spent. But if they sell three and a half times a motorbike, that’s worth 30 grand a time, it’s a pretty good oari. And, uh, it had been running for a couple of weeks, and I got on the zoom call with them and said, how’s it going? And the marketing girl said, look, not flash. You know, we’ve had about 10 or 15 people come in for a test ride, but we would expect it more. I said, what marketing have you done? And she said, ah, we’re boosting posts. That was it. I said, well, there’s your problem. Because the point is, is that you may as well just give a donation to Zuckerberg. That’s not going to do anything. You’ve got to do paid advertising anyway. Cut a long story short. We put the ads together and they’re doing paid advertising and kaboom, It just took off. So no, you can’t you can’t use organic and think that that’s the only thing that you’re unless you’re an influencer with a million followers, uh, you’ve got to pay Zuckerberg some money.

Lee Kantor: And then what is a budget that you would recommend? Maybe a solopreneur or business coach to start with?

John Dwyer: Yeah. Uh, you know, um, it comes down to the CPM, the cost per lead. Uh, and so therefore we advise people to do a test and fix mentality. So they should run at $50 a day for it depends on how wide your audience is. But let’s just say your audience happens to be your city or your state. Then you might run a 50 to $100 a day for ten days and see what your CPM is, your cost per lead. Um, and of course, the quality of those leads. Um, in our instance, you know, we’re a marketing agency and we have all these package promotions. So the, the vacation voucher one, which is extraordinary because you can actually give someone $1,000 value Vacation is only going to cost you 50 bucks. Um, we package that together and provide it to businesses, so all they do is press the button. We would market that down under, uh, here in Australia, but we do it in America as well. But we market that down under in Australia at around about $100 a day. Um, and that means over a week that’s $700. Uh, we will get leads. In other words, you know, business owners are scrolling through their phone and all of a sudden they see, wow, this is a a Happy Meal toy from heaven.

John Dwyer: You know, I can use this to sell my products because I can give someone a free vacation. They will stop. They will click the ad and go through to our landing page, and on our landing page, it gives them enough information for them to the landing page. By the way, if you want to have a look at is vacations incentive comm. So if you go to vacations plural vacations incentive comm, you’ll see it. Don’t worry that the price is $97 there. We give it for $50 for anyone that’s, you know, that looks like they’re going to do it properly. Um, but anyway, what happens is that they click, that they go through to the page, they get excited and fill the details in and then we follow up. Now we get leads for that at about $23. Um, sometimes it jumps into the 30s and 40s, but mostly for $23. So out of $100 spend today, I should get around about five leads. And if you’re closing, you know, two out of those five leads because it’s a spectacular offer. Uh, and we’re selling, you know, packages that are a couple of thousand up, then. Yeah, you get a pretty good return on investment, but it all comes back down to that cost per lead.

Lee Kantor: Now, in your business, are you still, um, so it sounds like you’re still doing, uh, kind of classic agency relationships with, uh, businesses, but do you have kind of the, um, few to many strategy as well where you do online classes, online kind of offerings?

John Dwyer: Yeah we do. Yeah, yeah. So, um, you know, the, uh, model that we’ve got because I realized that small business owners didn’t have the wherewithal to implement a lot of this stuff. The major part of our business is packaged promotions. So for example vacations incentive. Com has one. Um, we have another one called the Facebook contest formula. Uh, I think it is, uh, and what that is, we actually provide to them a service whereby they tell us what their product or service is, and we just get the leads for them. Um, so say, for example, a dentist, uh, came on recently and he’s after, you know, obviously fixing people’s teeth. And so therefore we said, okay, what’s the most expensive product that you’ve got that you want to push? And he said, oh, the Invisalign, um, braces. It’s the invisible braces. Instead of the kids having metal on their teeth these days, and they’re about $5,000 a pop. So we just ran a contest with the formula that we’ve got. I’ve come from a contest background, so we’ve done all the big scratch bingos for Murdoch’s newspapers and the monopoly style promotions for McDonald’s and all that sort of stuff. Right. So, you know, it’s in my DNA. So we ran a contest, as we do for everyone else. And it basically on Facebook said to parents, uh, would you like to win for your child? Invisible braces? Now, the only parents that enter that contest are parents with children who have got crooked teeth. If your teeth. If your children have got perfect teeth, you’re not going to want to win invisible braces.

John Dwyer: Um, he only spent $25 a day by seven days. And in the first seven days, he got just under a thousand contest entries. Okay, so let’s just say it was 990 or something. Uh, he gives one away and worth $5,000, but only costs him half of that. So he gives one away. But he’s got 1000 people then have glowed in the dark. Who said my child’s got crooked teeth? You don’t get a better database, you know, than that. And so therefore he then follows them up and offers them a special deal that if they actually do book his braces by the end of the month, they’ll get guess what a free vacation. So what we do there is we join both of those promotions together to give him dynamite. And because he couldn’t get to the, uh, he couldn’t get to the thousand people because we had to stop it. So successful for any one of our clients. We, you know, we had to stop the campaign pretty quickly, which is not exactly a smart move on my part. Uh, but anyway, because he couldn’t get to them, we just put our robot onto it. So we have a business within our business called a Genie Now.com. And what that is, is that a AI receptionist basically takes over so we can ring those thousand people within a few hours and offer them exactly the same deal. But a robot does it.

Lee Kantor: So it’s kind of a turnkey offering to any business out there that wants to run some sort of a contest online. They just are basically they pay your service, plus whatever the, uh, the fee to Facebook or LinkedIn or whatever platform they’re using.

John Dwyer: And that’s right. And look, and we keep, you know, look, most of the big advertising agencies, of course, as we know, because they’ve got to pay for the water fountain in the lobby and they’ve got beautiful offices and they’re driving Maseratis. They tend to have a, an ongoing consultancy fee, which is frightening. Uh, we don’t I mean, we’re a relatively small company. There’s half a dozen of us involved in the company, so we don’t have those ridiculous overheads. I think we are really on the ball when it comes to ROI, and it comes to the creativity of these concepts. Um, what we do is that we, you know, the, as I told you, the vacation formula, uh, that is like a no brainer for any B2C business. Um, you know, we’re giving these vouchers away for $50 a time now. They can’t buy in onesies and twosies. They’ve got to buy in multiples of, you know, 30, 40, 50, uh, but nonetheless, that’s that can fix a business in five minutes if they do it properly. That one I just told you there was all about leads and what we found when we got into it, because it generates so many leads so quickly and so cheaply, they can’t get to the leads. And so therefore, that’s why we got the AI receptionists involved. Uh, we do the million dollar draws, so we get $1 million, uh, insured for around about 20 grand. I can get $100,000 prize for a business for probably 3 or $4000. So all these are, you know, buy my product during the draw to win $1 million. Okay. So we do a lot of that package stuff. But then there is other things, uh, which if you don’t mind me plugging it, it’s JD Marketing makeover. Com so my name is John Dwyer. So JD marketing makeover. Com and in that instance it’s for businesses who just want to use my consultancy services and suck up whatever is in my brain and then go off and do it themselves. So there’s there’s the opportunity for consultancy if people want it.

Lee Kantor: Now as part of the service that when you’re, uh, building all those leads in the database for any of the people who are, um, you know, uh, signing up for, for whatever the prize or the contest is, is there any follow up email marketing offering as well, or is it on their own of the company has to kind of figure that part out?

John Dwyer: Oh, you know, that I would do all that as well. So therefore we create a full funnel. Um, uh, we have a software program called Go High Level. I mean, we’ve been through all the other ones. Um, Infusionsoft and Ontraport and a whole lot of them. Uh, but we have a database ourselves of, uh, just under 10,000 business owners. Um, most of them, 7000 are probably in Australia. The other 3000 are in America. Uh, so, yeah, we’re pretty used to doing the email funnels. Uh, so anything that we provide to a business, we make sure that we give them, uh, either advice or packaged promotions that play on very little input from them because we know they’re too busy running their business.

Lee Kantor: Now, a lot of our listeners are business coaches and entrepreneurs, uh, in America, um, is there uh, let’s see. How can I phrase this? You mentioned a success story for a fairly large bank. Do you have a story you can share for a solopreneur or an entrepreneur? Were you able to help somebody that maybe had was a coach or a consultant was struggling and you were able to help them get to a new level.

John Dwyer: Um, yeah. Look, plenty of them. And it’ll be the same story for all of them. Um, most of them are not scaling. That’s the issue. Most of them are not scaling. Um, yeah. I’ll give you an example, and I’ll come back to answer that question in two seconds. But I’ve got a buddy of mine, uh, flying down from the US, uh, to Australia in a couple of weeks time. And he’s, uh, he’s speaking at a conference Down Under, and this particular guy used to work for Disney, uh, in Orlando. So he was one of the senior managers in Disney. And, uh, as you would expect, anyone who’s worked for Disney is normally in high demand, uh, for, if you like, revealing how Disney runs their business. And so therefore he’s coming down under to have nothing at all to do with me. I’ve done some stuff with him over the years. He’s about my vintage. We’re both baby boomers, so we both tell dad jokes and, uh, but what’s inside his head is incredibly valuable because he worked for Walt Disney in Orlando. And so therefore when he contacted me and said, oh, JD, I’m coming down at the end of this month, um, do you want to catch up? I said, yeah, absolutely.

John Dwyer: Now, instead of just catching up and having a beer, I contacted him last week and said, look, why don’t we do this when you’re down under? Why don’t we do a webinar, uh, live webinar. It’ll be a two hour session and, uh, we will call it if Disney ran your business, what would it look like? And, uh, all it will be is that we will just hire a little room. Uh, we’ll have it set up, uh, like we’re doing now, but it will obviously be zoom visual and we will banter for a couple of hours. We will sell a product at the end of that, which will probably be a, you know, 2 or $3000 product, which they get his stuff and they get my stuff as well. Um, and there’s every chance in the world that we would have between 50 and 100 people on there. Realistically, we might get more, but let’s just say 50 to 100. Let’s just say you go high ground and we get 100 on there and we have just a 10% close. We will do better than that. I know because we’ve done it before, but let’s just say we have a 10% close on a 30 on a $3,000 product.

John Dwyer: So therefore that would be ten times 3000. That would be $30,000. We’d split with each other for just basically sitting down and talking for a couple of hours. So that’s what I would suggest to any consultant or business owner. Just think like that in terms of scaling and stop doing the Onesy Twosies. And this is coming from someone who made massive mistakes, by the way, because that’s exactly what I would do. People would ring me up and say, would you like a coffee? And this idiot who you’re talking to, Lee would go and have a coffee. By the time I got to the coffee shop and got back again, I lost half a day. And if they didn’t come across the line, then, you know, I wanted to just jump off the edge, you know? So what I do now is that there’s no such thing as coffee, and it’s not because I’m. I think I’m better than them. I’m not. It’s just that it doesn’t make sense to work on ones and twos so that what you need to do as a consultant Sultan is, you know, have, um, you know, webinars and and what you’re doing right now, podcasts where you’re, you’re selling once to many.

Lee Kantor: Great advice. I mean, it has been such a joy to be talking with you. Somebody old school with new ideas for today’s time. I mean, it’s just amazing conversation. Thank you so much, JD, for sharing. What, you know, um, is there kind of a central location for people to go to kind of get Ahold of all the things you mentioned?

John Dwyer: Uh, by all means. Yeah. So, uh, I’m not wealthy enough to have my own private island, uh, quite yet. So therefore I’m quite happy to hand out any contact details when people say to me, why are you still, you know, treading the boards? I go because I had six kids. I mean, we had the Von Trapp family and, you know, private schools and vacations. Yeah. Uh, that’s why I’m still doing what I’m doing. Um, yeah. Uh, Lee, uh, the best place for them to go would be the website. And that is the Institute of Welcome to the Institute of Wow.com. The one that might intrigue even business owners because they can use it themselves. Uh, is the vacations incentive. That’s an interesting one. But if they wanted to talk to me and just have a chat on zoom because their audience, I’m more than happy to do that. So therefore, my email address is John at the Institute of Wow.com. So if you contact John at the Institute of Wow.com, I’m more than happy to book in a zoom call with you.

Lee Kantor: Well, JD, an absolute pleasure. I learned so much. Thank you for sharing what you know. Um, it was a great conversation and you’re doing important work and we appreciate you.

John Dwyer: My pleasure. Thank you. All the best.

Lee Kantor: All right. This is Lee Kantor. We’ll see you all next time on High Velocity Radio.

LaWanda Scales with Wisper Couture

May 7, 2025 by Jacob Lapera

LaWanda-ScalesLaWanda Scales, Owner of Wisper Couture, didn’t let anything get in her way of achieving her goals, dreams, and aspirations. Diagnosed with a rare medical condition and having several close calls to losing her life, she strived through it all with determination to live life to the fullest while enhancing the lives of others by doing what she loved.

After evaluating her new normal and deciding to make the best out of what life had given her, she decided to go full-on with building her empire. In 2017 LaWanda decided to take what started out as just a creative outlet and turn it into a successful brand. Wisper-Couture

A brand that stands for confidence, strength, class, and empowerment. A brand of value and quality. Inspiring others and creating unique pieces for the unique person.

Follow Wisper Couture on X and Facebook.

What You’ll Learn In This Episode

  • The story behind Wisper Couture and what inspired LaWanda to create the brand
  • What makes Wisper Couture unique
  • Who the Wisper Couture woman is — and how LaWanda’s brand empowers her

Transcript-iconThis transcript is machine transcribed by Sonix.

 

TRANSCRIPT

Intro: Broadcasting live from the Business RadioX studio in Atlanta, Georgia. It’s time for Atlanta Business Radio, brought to you by Kennesaw State University’s Executive MBA program, the accelerated degree program for working professionals looking to advance their career and enhance their leadership skills. And now, here’s your host.

Lee Kantor: Lee Kantor here, another episode of Atlanta Business Radio. And this is going to be a good one. But before we get started, it’s important to recognize our sponsor, CSU’s executive MBA program. Without them, we couldn’t be sharing these important stories today on the Atlanta Business Radio. We have LaWanda Scales and she is with Whisper Couture. Welcome.

Speaker3: Thank you, thank you, thank you for having me.

Lee Kantor: Well, I am so excited to learn what you’re up to. Tell us about Whisper Couture. How you serving, folks?

Speaker3: Well, Whisper Couture is a luxury clothing brand, and I serve women at the moment. Men to come soon. And what we are is a couture clothing all around fashion brand. And we pretty much empower women to live their own stories and walk their own journey and be bold about it.

Lee Kantor: So what’s your backstory? How did you get involved in the world of fashion?

Speaker3: Well, I started doing fashion because myself, I was born differently, able to had a little bit of a medical situation, and I noticed how clothing pretty much empowered myself. And then as I got older and started learning how to design myself, I also noticed how it empowered other women as well. So I just wanted to tap in more into it, and I just became very passionate about it and loved it ever since.

Lee Kantor: So do you remember the first thing in fashion that you made?

Speaker3: I made my sister’s prom dress. Yes. It was. It was interesting because I hadn’t had any sewing classes just yet. So. But it came out really well. Didn’t last long, but it did come out really well.

Lee Kantor: And then was that kind of the response you got? Was that enough to say, hey, I’m pretty good at this. This is something I want to do more of.

Speaker3: Oh yeah, she loved it. And she told me, you know, just from the design alone, that I should do more about more into it, dig more into it. And then from that moment, I just started to do little research and started to learn the trade a little better. And it just grew from there.

Lee Kantor: Now, did you get formal training or are you self-taught?

Speaker3: I got formal training after I went into college. The first time I went for fashion design. And then I went back for fashion product development.

Lee Kantor: And did that help you kind of, uh, create your brand, or was the brand bubbling in the background while you were learning all these kind of fundamentals.

Speaker3: Oh, yes, it was it. I kind of had an idea of what I wanted to do. I just knew I needed the education. So with going to school, it helped bring all my ideas together a little bit more, I guess you could say professionally. So it did help my journey. And then also my grandmother actually helped me pursue the college journey as well, because we tapped in a little bit into the design market for teddy bears.

Lee Kantor: Oh, so you do that also?

Speaker3: Well, I started off doing dresses for them, but then I tapped more into like doing it for women.

Lee Kantor: And then when did kind of the brand, the Whisper Couture brand, begin to, you know, be a thing where there was actually Whisper Couture, where someone could buy something from Whisper Couture.

Speaker3: That started in 2017. Actually, I waited until I got out of school and started to market it a little more. I did more fashion events and I did more custom clothing, and from there, I just made it more of a perfection.

Lee Kantor: Now, when you were building the brand, um, how did if you were giving advice to someone who’s thinking about building their own fashion brand, like, what are some of the things, the do’s and don’ts when you’re creating those first pieces?

Speaker3: I would say try not to live so much in a box, because it gets a little hard and a little tricky when you’re trying to compete against other brands, when what you really need to do is stand out. I would say probably learn the trade a little bit better as far as the design aspect and just construction wise, business wise, getting the circles you need to get into, adjoin, vent, join uh, groups, go to events and things like that and just overwhelm yourself with the culture.

Lee Kantor: Now, um, can you share maybe that first time you got into a big event or were you able to show a collection and really spotlight your work to maybe a new audience?

Speaker3: Yes. Actually, my first event was with Easter Seals. And, um, what we had to do is create two adult garments as well as a child’s garment and, um, matching teddy bear garment to go with the child’s garment. And it was just, I don’t know, it was almost like a rush, like I felt even when I was designing the pieces, I was excited about just showing my craft a little bit more to a bigger audience, because it was the first time I did a show. So, you know, it’s a little nerve wracking but exciting at the same time. But I learned so much and I got to meet so many amazing people in the meantime.

Lee Kantor: So how how realistic are shows on TV like Project Runway when it comes to fashion and kind of releasing products?

Speaker3: Realistically, they don’t show all the chaos. There’s a lot of chaos behind the scenes. Um, it’s such a, um, I would say a flash. Like, it goes by so fast. Like you don’t even like the going out on the stage afterwards. You don’t even realize how fast the show goes by, but it gets pretty hectic behind the scenes. Um, the time management is very different than what you see on TV. The pressure is different. Um, they show a lot of glam, but they don’t show the how tough it really can be. Whether it’s physical, emotional, they don’t show all the all the little details.

Lee Kantor: Now, when you’re building your own unique brand, are there things that is the objective to be anytime somebody sees. Something in your collection that they go, oh, that’s Whisper couture. Like there’s some something that signifies just at a glance almost that oh, I can tell that that’s a whisper couture garment.

Speaker3: Yes. For sure. Like, uh, I’m at the point now where I actually have people say that just because they know what is good for using unconventional fabrics, um, making certain designs. So that’s something you do want to be aware of and make sure you’re doing, is that you stand out from everybody else. You want to be able to have someone come up to you and be like, oh, I know your piece. I, I, you know, I seen your piece and I knew that was your brand right away. You know, that’s that’s an amazing thing to have like that stand out, you know, detail about your brand.

Lee Kantor: That’s a compliment, right? That’s like.

Speaker3: That’s very much a compliment. Yes.

Lee Kantor: And do you, do you remember the first time somebody said that to you?

Speaker3: Um, I don’t know if it was the first time, do I? I do remember someone coming up to me. I attended a fashion event. I wasn’t in it, but I did attend it. And someone had came up to me and showed me a picture of a piece I had actually did on another show, and they were like, I knew that was your piece, just by the fabric that was used and the detail to attention and that, I mean, that meant the world to me, because that’s what I want to show people. And for them to know that it was me. It really meant a lot. Like, I’m doing my job. I’m standing out. I’m empowering women. And, you know, it’s it’s a it’s making things memorable.

Lee Kantor: Now, how did someone, um, kind of buy something from your collections? Is it online or is it available in stores?

Speaker3: Yes. I actually have a website. Um, Whisper Couture that’s with no H. Com and everything is available on the site as well as I also tend to sell things at fashion events. So I’m all over I’m on social media. I’m on website. So. Yeah.

Lee Kantor: So so how does the marketing work? Uh, for somebody in the fashion industry, is it all pretty much done online nowadays?

Speaker3: For the most part it is. I try to attend a lot of fashion events. I have, um, models that I usually use for my brand, and I usually dress them for events, so that’s marketing as well. A lot of it’s social media. A lot of it’s ads, um, social events, fashion shows. But marketing is pretty much wherever you can get it nowadays. But social media is a really big one.

Lee Kantor: So like you’re showing up on, uh, Instagram or TikTok, uh, in places like that.

Speaker3: Yep. Instagram, TikTok, uh, YouTube, uh, threads, uh, Facebook and then as well as the website.

Lee Kantor: So now is there anything coming up that you’d like to share? Or do you have a collection that’s about to launch or an event you’re going to go to? Is there something that you’re looking forward to ahead?

Speaker3: Yeah, I’m actually in the process of rebranding, um, Whisper Couture and we are actually expanding our size. Uh, so we used to do from small to large, and now we’re going to be doing extra small to two XL. So we’re expanding not only our sizes, but we are also providing women with style guides that they can use to enhance their wardrobe with items they already have. So it’s not just a purchasing, but it’s also guidance towards in empowering women and letting them, you know, be bold in their own ways, whether it’s with things they have or things they purchase from Whisper Couture. So we’re expanding on not only our collections, but training as well. They need so.

Lee Kantor: So what is some advice you can share with that person right now that maybe isn’t ready to afford Whisper Couture, but maybe wants to make the best of what they have? Is there some do’s and don’ts that’s just waiting for them in their own closet right now?

Speaker3: Oh yeah, for sure. They can take something that like, I like to mix and match a lot of pieces. You don’t always have to wear what comes together. Like you can buy a set and you can match it up with a pair of jeans. Jeans are always good to have. Blazers are always good to have. So those are key pieces that you know no matter when you bought them. Always keep them around because fashion is like a wheel. It’s just it’s going to always come back. Those are staple pieces. So you know you’re going to always need them. So you don’t always have to buy something new. Just mix and match what you already have. Style it up with a different accessories such as shoes or belts. Even your jewelry. Like you don’t have to buy something all the time now.

Lee Kantor: Is there any, um, kind of accessory that’s hot right now? Is there a jewelry that is more popular than others, or pins or bracelets or necklaces? Or is there something that is kind of on trend right now?

Speaker3: Yeah, I’m seeing a lot of metallics on trend right now. Whether it’s a belt, it’s, um, big bold earrings, um, even metallics in the shoes, shoe designs, you see, like the brooches on shoes. Nowadays, brooches on shoes are really big, um, big bold jewelry as far as necklaces and earrings are really big.

Lee Kantor: So one more time, if somebody wants to check you out online, the website and the best socials to find you and the keywords to find you within the socials.

Speaker3: Yeah, sure, the website is WWE couture and it’s whisper with no H. And then our handles are also Whisper Couture with no H and we are mostly on Instagram. Facebook. Um, we’re doing some YouTube and some TikToks as well.

Lee Kantor: What an amazing story, LaWanda. Congratulations on all the momentum. You are just, uh, doing so well in a very difficult field.

Speaker3: Yes. Yeah. You got to push through, you know.

Lee Kantor: Well, thank you so much for sharing your story. You’re doing important work, and we appreciate you.

Speaker3: All right. Thank you so much for having me.

Lee Kantor: All right. This is Lee Kantor. We’ll see you all next time on Atlanta Business Radio.

Jim Osterling with Bridge Realty Advisors

May 5, 2025 by Jacob Lapera

Jim Osterling has spent his 46-year career in the real estate industry as a senior executive and board member for several prominent real estate developers. In 2002, he founded Bridge Realty Advisors, a real estate development and advisory company. Bridge develops real estate projects as a principal and also provides development advisory services to property owners.

He has been involved in real estate development projects with a value of over 5 billion dollars in a wide variety of property types including residential, affordable housing, retirement, retail, office, industrial, self-storage, resort, golf course, aviation, and master-planned communities.

He was CFO for California Pacific Homes, a development company affiliated with The Irvine Company. Mr. Osterling was CFO for Shea Homes, the nation’s largest private homebuilder and master planned community developer.

He earned his MBA from Northwestern University. Mr. Osterling earned a BS in Business from Iowa State University.  He served as an Adjunct Professor at the USC School of Planning teaching courses in Real Estate Development and Finance.

He was elected to serve as a trustee for Pasadena City College for 2 terms, 8 years, representing Seat #2 – Sierra Madre, NE Pasadena, and Altadena. Jim served as the Vice-Chair of the Altadena Community Standards District (CSD) Committee which updated the land use policies in Altadena. Jim serves on the Board of Directors of Villa Riviera Estates, Inc. building affordable housing for Santa Barbara Cottage Hospital employees.

He is a CPA, member of the Urban Land Institute (ULI) and served on the government affairs committee of the California Building Industry Association.

Jim’s hobbies include historic renovation, creating music playlists, basketball, tennis, and swimming. Jim and Scarlett have two adult children and celebrated their 45rd wedding anniversary in 2024.

Connect with Jim on LinkedIn.

What You’ll Learn In This Episode

  • What a real estate developer does
  • The current challenges and opportunities in the real estate development industry
  • Some of the key personality traits to be a successful real estate developer
  • The education and career experience that can lead to a career in real estate development
  • The most interesting and rewarding aspects of being a real estate developer
  • What role real estate developers can play to help rebuild Altadena and Pacific Palisades after the devastating wildfires

Transcript-iconThis transcript is machine transcribed by Sonix.

 

TRANSCRIPT

Intro: Broadcasting live from the Business RadioX studios in Pasadena, California. This is Pasadena Business Radio. And now here’s your host.

Lee Kantor: Lee Kantor. Here. This episode of Pasadena Business Radio is brought to you by Xavier Inguanzo, realtor. Berkshire Hathaway HomeServices California Properties. Today on Pasadena Business Radio, we are honored to be talking to Jim Osterling, CEO of Bridge Realty Advisors. Welcome, Jim.

Jim Osterling: Thank you. And welcome. And it’s a it’s an honor to be to be on your show. Looking forward to it.

Lee Kantor: Well, I’m so excited to learn what you’re up to. Uh, please tell us a little bit about Bridge Realty Advisors. How are you serving folks?

Jim Osterling: Bridge Realty Advisors was established in 2002, and prior to that, I had been in a top executive in several major, well-known Southern California real estate development companies. Left the security blanket, if you will, of of large corporations and started out on my own. And the initial game plan was to provide services that I did previously as an employee at these major companies and instead provide those services, advisory services for consulting services to my clients. So we started out doing financial advisory services, which is just a fancy way of saying money raising, money finding real estate is a very capital intensive business. So in order for projects, even by major developers. To get completed. They require OPM, other people’s money, debt, money, equity, money, etc. and that’s how the business initially got started. We had some success. We raised capital for clients and earned our success fees or brokerage fees. And then we started. Investing in developing projects as principals.

Lee Kantor: Now, for folks who aren’t familiar with kind of the day to day of a real estate developer, can you share a little bit about what that’s like? Is it is it you have to have people come to you and say, I have this plot of land and I want to build a building, or do you like, stumble upon a plot of land and say, hey, this could be a whole neighborhood? Or like what is kind of the ins and outs of what you’re doing on, you know, kind of a daily basis.

Jim Osterling: So that’s truly a great question. There is no such thing as a typical day. Every day I start off, I have an idea in mind of what I’m going to accomplish that day, and along the way, something happens and and I get diverted to this, that or the other. So if you like structure and very planned out schedule for the day and regular routine hours, this is not the business that you want to be in because it’s long hours. It’s hard work, it’s very fulfilling work, and it’s unpredictable. To try to answer your question, do the deals come to me or do we go out seeking deals? The answer is a little bit of both. We have, um, I’ve been doing this for about 46 plus years now, and over time you start to see patterns and opportunities, um, based on the economic cycles and the interest rates and the in the capital market cycles. And so we have ideas of things that we can successfully develop at this particular time or whatever. Um, so we do have some strategic thought about what we’re trying to do and how to go about doing it. But the actual process of finding a project is very reactive. Even though our our we try to be proactive and strategic. And what I mean by that is, is the opportunity to develop something comes along when a property becomes available in the marketplace, a vacant parcel of land or land that has some old, unimproved buildings on it.

Jim Osterling: Um, that need to be scraped and developed, which is the same thing as vacant land. It just looks different. So even though we have strategic ideas of what we’re looking for right now, um, You have to find opportunities, properties that are available with which you can then pursue. And that particular development that you’re that you’re looking for. And to try to be a little more concrete about it. For example, right now in most markets, including Southern California, we don’t need to develop new office buildings, um, for fairly obvious reasons. Um, and that is, um, due to Covid and how the working world changed and we, we overnight flipped from mostly being in the office to being, uh, entirely working from home. And now we’ve, uh, kind of switched back to what’s called the hybrid model. But, um, in general, um, we have way too much office space because it’s being utilized less Than it was pre-COVID. And I just give that as an example. So strategically, right now we’re not looking for land to develop into office buildings. On the flip side, um, housing, we’ve been short changed, um, housing production nationwide, statewide, region wide for many, many years. So there’s still lots of opportunity for new residential development of all types luxury housing, uh, working, uh, working housing, affordable housing. And so we tend to be more active currently looking for those types of opportunities.

Lee Kantor: Now, um, it’s funny because you mentioned two things that I’m curious about and maybe you can educate us about this. So if on one hand, you have all these office buildings that are maybe underutilized and you have all these people that are looking for homes, can you explain why it’s not that simple to just make the office building into like, condos, like, structurally, they were built for offices. So there’s some challenges in retrofitting an existing office building into, you know, a bunch of condos.

Jim Osterling: Yeah. Lee. Uh, excellent question. And we are seeing some conversion of some office buildings into residential, and we are seeking those opportunities as well. Um, but it’s not as simple as just saying, oh, gosh, we have a bunch of empty office buildings, and we’re going to convert them into much needed residential. And in simple terms, um, most modern office buildings that are designed and optimized for today’s, uh, working for working world, uh, offices that people work in, um, tend to be fat rectangles. This is very simple, but it’s important. And, um, residential. One of the fundamental things that you need to do is to bring, um, air and light into most all of a residential area, um, your bedroom areas, ideally your living room areas, less, less important for the kitchen and bathroom areas. And when you have a big fat rectangle, you can put some form of residential around the perimeter of that former office building. But the core, the center of that office building, is very deep within, and it’s hard to get to design floor plans that go all the way into a big fat rectangle.

Jim Osterling: So what we find is the office buildings that lend themselves best to residential conversion tend to be skinnier buildings, and therefore they tend to be older. So, for example, in downtown Los Angeles. Many years ago, they passed the Arrow Adaptive Reuse Ordinance, and that ordinance allowed developers to relatively, uh, in a streamlined way, convert old office buildings into much needed residential. And that work because those old, beautiful Beaux Arts building, the downtown um, finance district, uh, and so on, had u-shapes and E shapes because there was no air conditioning back in the 1920s. So they needed to to have the ability to open windows. And so these were skinny buildings and they’ve been, um, fairly readily converted. And there’s more of that inventory available in downtown LA and elsewhere. So we will see some, um, office conversions to residential. We we have seen and will continue to see that. Um, but it is a very complicated and costly process. Um, and so it’s not a slam dunk as, as we would think and hope that it might be.

Lee Kantor: And I thought another limiting factor was the plumbing that most offices have, like bathrooms only, you know, in one portion.

Jim Osterling: Thank you. Yeah. So when you look at the design of a of a modern high rise office building or mid-rise office building, all of the utilities come up through what is called the core or the center of the building. And so in your core, you’ve been in an office building. You’re going to have the elevators in the core. You get off the elevators and the plumbing. The bathroom tends to be somewhere right around the elevator in the center of the building, in the core. And those are called chases. So you have plumbing chases and drainage chases coming up that core. You have electrical conduit coming up that core. But yeah, that’s that’s it. So the plumbing ends at the core area because that’s where your office kitchens and bathrooms are located. And like we’ve already discussed, the residential units are going to be at the, at the exterior, um, at the, the outer edge of the, the building, not there in the core. So yes, bringing plumbing and drainage, um, to every different unit is is a significant cost.

Lee Kantor: Now, um, in today’s business climate where we’re dealing with higher interest rates, there’s now tariffs. How does that change. Maybe the opportunities like um, in every economic situation we have there’s there there’s always opportunities. What is there opportunity in um in real estate development. When you’re when you have these kind of challenges of high interest rates, uh, tariffs and even some of the immigration policy that that might be affecting labor.

Jim Osterling: Yeah. You’ve hit on some really important and impactful issues that are affecting real estate right now. In my 46 year career, um, real estate development has never been easy. There’s always challenges. But I will say right now, at this particular time, second quarter of 2025, the amount of headwinds and challenges that a property faces to be successfully developed or redeveloped, um, is extremely challenging for the reasons that you’ve already mentioned the mortgage rates, whether it’s for your home loan or mine, or for a commercial property, an office, a shopping center, an apartment building. The mortgage rates have gone from about 3% back in, say, 2021 to about 7% today, and that more than doubling of interest rates has a tremendous, tremendous impact on getting a building to cash flow and being able to make its debt service. So that’s the interest rate, significant, um, impact. Um, we are hoping that rates will come down soon. I thought they would, um, start to come down already, but they haven’t. They’ve remained stubbornly high and inflation has remained somewhat stubbornly high. Uh, the next element you mentioned is cost increases. Um, um, the cost to produce real estate, the labor and materials was creeping up and getting high before Covid. Covid disrupted the Did the supply chains and made the material costs higher and very much affected the labor base. Uh, so labor became more scarce and more expensive.

Jim Osterling: So coming out of Covid, um, the costs increased a lot. Um, I thought once the supply chains got back to normal again, coming out of Covid and the and the labor return to the market, those costs would decrease. And I was wrong. They did not. Um, and then so we were already in this environment of, of higher costs and higher interest rates, and then the two current um, shocks to the system that we haven’t felt yet, really, but we are definitely going to feel them. Is immigration reform certain types of construction, uh, is very much affected by immigration reform. Other types are not. Uh, if you’re doing a Large scale downtown anywhere USA high rise with with union labor. Not so much impacted by immigration reform. If you’re doing, um, your own home remodel or if you’re doing track development somewhere, let’s say in Southern California, that labor base is much more impacted by immigration reform. Uh, the full impact of that hasn’t been felt yet, but it will be. Um, and then, uh, you mentioned the tariff reform. Um, a surprisingly large amount of our building materials do come from China. So a 145% tariff on goods from China is just a cost increase, uh, that, that a project can’t bear on top of everything else, all the other shocks that we’ve said.

Jim Osterling: So the great equalizer or the plug number in our know, development pro forma is the land price. And we if you owned a valuable parcel of land, you don’t want to hear what I’m going to tell you. And that is is because of all of these interest rate increase and costs of production increases, the LRB, the land residual, the amount that I can pay to buy your land and make a successful, profitable development out of it. The price that I’m willing and able to pay has gone down. And so there’s stiff resistance by land sellers to not wanting to reduce their land prices. So, um, things are kind of, um, stuck right now on the land acquisition side. And something has to give either our interest rates or our production costs have to come down, or sellers are going to have to adjust their expectations. And these are all normal frictions in the marketplace between buyers and sellers of land. But the exacerbated right now by all of these, these confluence of cost increase factors that are that are hitting us all at once. So in summary, it’s a really, really challenging time. We look at about 100 potential deals for every 1 or 2 that we might do. And, um, the filter has become even more extreme as we look at today’s market.

Lee Kantor: Yeah, you can’t squeeze just part of the balloon. It’s going to have an effect on other parts. So something has to give. Something has to give at some point. Right. You know, I guess the if you have land now, you’re just kind of in a holding pattern and hoping something else changes. But if it doesn’t change, at some point you’re going to have to make some adjustments.

Jim Osterling: You know, from right from my vantage point. I’m not seeing a lot of land currently moving, but there’s others in the system that are, you know, the the commercial, um, uh, real estate brokers that, that, um, list and buy land. They might be able to tell you that there’s more transactions perhaps, than I see. Again, we look at a lot of deals and we just, uh, we’ve always been very disciplined and very conservative. Um, but, um, we’re looking at a lot of deals, and they just, um, don’t make sense in today’s high cost environment.

Lee Kantor: Right? The math has to math. Right?

Jim Osterling: Yeah. Yeah.

Jim Osterling: Correct.

Lee Kantor: Now, um, beyond the financial, uh, returns, is there, uh, kind of a bigger why to to why you do what you do is, um, you know, um, you know, there’s a financial aspect obviously, to it, but there has to be something rewarding seeing a building go up or seeing a neighborhood, you know, come to life and seeing families going in there. And the impact that you’re making in a community with your work. It has to be so rewarding. Is there a story you can share about, you know, that side of the business?

Jim Osterling: Well, um, it is very rewarding. And it it’s it’s long hours. Um, I work 50 to 70 hours a week, and you’re constantly juggling from one project to the next. And, um, working on a land acquisition, um, today, tomorrow, you might be working on a, uh, with your, um, creative team, the architect and design team, you know, working on design challenges. Um, uh, the next day, you might be doing CM Construction management, um, um, or doing all of the above, um, you know, every day on a daily basis. So the rewards are the variety of work that you do. The, the, um, the reward of seeing a vacant piece of land turn into, uh, real estate, where you’re providing homes for families, where you’re providing places for people to work, to shop, uh, to entertain, to to, uh, recreate. Um, and I’ll give you a local story that has been particularly rewarding and fulfilling to me. Uh, right here in Pasadena. Uh, a few years back, we embarked on a new development, um, that successfully was completed back in, um, uh, 1921. Um, pardon me. We started it in 21, and we finished it in 1923.

Jim Osterling: This is called Pasadena Studios at 280. North Oakland and its 180 unit apartment building. What makes that project particularly rewarding and fulfilling to me personally, is that every single one of those units is affordable for those in the greatest need in our community. And these are technical terms called very low and extremely low income residents. So everybody living in that property has to make below certain levels of income to qualify. And then their rent is a relatively manageable 30% of their income. And um, it enables somebody to live in Pasadena, um, that otherwise wouldn’t. And possibly because they work in Pasadena or otherwise. And that was a very rewarding project. And today, that project is fully leased. We have about one vacancy that’s going to be filled in in a couple of weeks after we turn over that unit and move somebody new in. So, um, and the thanks that we’ve received from the staff in the city of Pasadena and the elected officials bringing much needed affordable housing to our city, it’s just been a a very rewarding experience.

Lee Kantor: Now what in your ideal world, if if communities were trying to, um, create more affordable housing, do you need that kind of private public partnership in order to pull something like this off in a, in a fairly efficient manner?

Jim Osterling: Um, yes. Uh, excellent question. And, uh, I believe the answer is yes. Um, I grew up in Chicago and I watched the C.H. in Chicago Housing Authority, where they would develop and own and manage the affordable housing for low income folks. And these were high rises, and they were notoriously poorly developed, poorly managed, and all kinds of problems associated with many of those buildings have been demolished and rebuilt. And coming out of that, I learned a lesson. You need the public incentive to make affordable housing attractive and able to be developed by the private sector developers, such as our company. Um, and but the the business of designing and constructing and owning and operating a business is a very, very, um, entrepreneurial business that requires, you know, constant attention and hard work. And so I think the best mix to provide as much affordable housing as possible, um, is private sector execution with public sector, um, uh, incentives. And in the case of Pasadena Studios, in a in a quick nutshell, it was tax exempt bonds and tax credits that enabled us to drive the affordability of every one of those units down to those lowest levels, very low and extremely low income residents. We couldn’t have done it without those those government incentives.

Lee Kantor: Now, um, as we’re getting ready to wrap up, I think we’d be remiss without mentioning, um, the rebuilding of Altadena, Pacific Palisades after the wildfires. Can you talk about what, uh, real estate developers role is in dealing with something, you know, a tragic event like that. And and where there is, um, a place for real estate developers to really use their expertise to reboot an area like that.

Jim Osterling: Yeah. The, the, um, uh, the Palisades Fire and the Eden fire were just horrific. Nobody anticipated the scope and extent we know that we live in in areas where wildfires are prevalent. They start in the mountains, and then they can and do move down into the residential areas. Uh, I’m a resident of Altadena. Uh, Scarlett and I, my wife, we were very fortunate. We fled our home on Tuesday, January 7th at 6:30 p.m.. That that, uh, Eden fireball was coming right at us from the Edison transmission tower, which we live very close to. We knew that our neighborhood and our homes were going to be destroyed, and the winds changed after we fled during the night, and we returned the next day in a home was still standing, albeit smoke damaged. We have so many friends, neighbors, uh, people that I know from, uh, the community from from our club, from being in elected office, easily 200 folks that we know personally that lost their home and that many and more like us that were smoke damage and evacuated. We, um, just returned to our home a couple three weeks ago and just glad to be back in and so fortunate that our home was, was, um, uh, saved, albeit smoke damaged. Um, to try to answer your question, um, there’s going to be there has been already a variety of reactions. By those that were, um, so unfortunate to lose their homes, ranging from immediately going out and hiring an architect and getting started on the redesign and the rebuilding process to, um, many folks just saying this is not how I want to spend my next two or 3 or 4 years.

Jim Osterling: It’s really hard work. It’s not something I know that much about. I’m not good at it. I don’t want to do it. It’s going to be very costly. And there’s already been, um, a number of homes placed on the market. Um, I don’t really see a big role for large scale real estate developers in the rebuilding of the Palisades and the Eaton Fire. I think you will see small scale, um, developers. Maybe it’s a general contractor that that is willing to go out and buy land and use his contractor base and his own resources to build something, maybe to live in themselves, maybe on a spec basis to rebuild. So there’s certainly a role there. And professional developers such as myself, um, we do this on a day to day basis and have much more experience. As I mentioned, I’ve been doing this for 46 years, and every day I do this, I learn more and learn what I don’t know. And so for folks that have never done this before, um, it can be daunting. It can be a daunting task. Uh, both the city of LA for the Palisades and LA County for Eden. They have pledged to streamline the rebuilding process, and I believe they will, but it’s still a complex undertaking, higher in architect overseeing their work.

Jim Osterling: And then the the biggest challenge is on January 6th. Many of us were properly insured. I think, you know, if our building, if our home had burned down in isolation, um, our insurance coverage would have been enough to rebuild our home. But none of us, none of us anticipated 5000 homes over there in the Palisades and 6000 homes here, um, in Altadena. And not to mention all the commercial and apartment structures that went up at one time. And that’s going to be a tremendous stress on our architect and engineering, uh, base, the design professionals. It’s going to have a huge impact on the The construction industry capacity to rebuild all of these homes at the very time that we’re dealing with immigration reform and, and, and tariffs and all of that. And simply put, on January 8th, all of us, um, ourselves included, we were underinsured. Um, uh, we thought we had proper levels of insurance, but the costs of rebuilding all of our homes overnight increased by 50% by 100%. We don’t really know. And nobody had insurance up to that level. So those that do rebuild, um, many of them, most of them. All of them perhaps, uh, in addition to whatever they can get from their insurance proceeds, um, will need to come out of pocket with additional capital or build something smaller than what they had before.

Jim Osterling: There’s various choices. So in addition to that work being difficult, detail oriented, and time consuming and challenging, it’s also very costly. And and some of the folks have just said this is not for me, and they’ve put their lots for sale. Um, um, large public home builders. And I’ve worked for large private home builders, typically will buy a large acreage of land and develop 100 homes or 200 homes or 5000 homes on those large acreages. This is not going to be like that. They’re going to have a lot here and a lot there that comes up for sale. Um, so it’s not going to be a large tract development, like, you know, you would see in Orange County in the Inland Empire. That’s not necessarily a bad thing. One of the unique things about architecture, about Altadena. That that we all love is the variety of architecture and the variety of people that live here. And, um, it has a different look and feel than Irvine, California, where I’ve built many, many tract homes. Um, and people love Altadena for the diversity of people, for the diversity of, of housing that that we live in. So it’ll be a small scale opportunity here and there for, for smaller developers. And, and I’m not saying that in a negative way. That’s, that’s not a bad thing at all.

Lee Kantor: Right? Because you lose that economy of scale when you’re building the tract homes.

Jim Osterling: Yeah. There is economy of scale of building. You know, when we would do a typical 100 lot tract, we had developed 4 or 5 floor plans, and then we dress them up with different elevations to make the homes look more varied than that. But we were building the same 4 or 5 homes repetitively. And yes, there were some economies of scale and you go up a learning curve of building the same thing over and over. But to be honest with you, it is a more repetitive and, um, less diverse and you could say more boring product. I’ve built wonderful production homes that I’m very proud of, the homes and the communities and providing housing for families. But but it is a more competitive product.

Lee Kantor: Is there a place for any of the new technology, like with 3D printing and things like that, to, you know, make things more affordable or efficient?

Jim Osterling: Oh excellent question. Um, you know, in the same way that Covid accelerated various things, um, you know, including like, uh, more, um, Amazon.com, you know, buying, um, you know, through the internet. This rebuilding will definitely do that. I follow the, the 3D printing. I haven’t really seen how that’s going to work, um, yet. Um, I think, though, what you are going to see is you’re going to see, um, well designed modular housing. So just for example, in Altadena and in the Palisades, one of the things that they’re allowing homeowners to do if they want is to build first an Adu, an accessory dwelling unit on their lot so that they can move in and, and, um, get out of whatever temporary housing they’re in, um, while they then do the larger build on the lot, the main residence, the main house, that’s something that some will do. Um, not everybody, but that’s an opportunity. He? And, um, if you can bring in, um, that adu in a in a modular format. Already pre-built at a at a nearby factory and transported to the site. You can do that. Uh, more quickly. Um, maybe more cost effectively, maybe not. So I think I, I think we’ll see. Modular. Um, um, housing, we’re going to see, um, pre, uh, approved plans. And that’s important because it can take a long time for the city of LA or the County of LA to approve your building plans. And if you have some pre-approved plans that are already planned, checked and approved by the city, by the county, uh, that streamlines your design process.

Jim Osterling: And then you will get some, uh, learning curve and economy of scale when you build those pre-built plans, but it’s not going to look like a track development. Um, you know, in the, in the Inland Empire and Orange County, let’s say, because, um, it’s these, these, um, pre-approved plan homes are going to be sprinkled here and there throughout. So it’s not going to be a a bland, boring, uniform environment. You’re going to have a lot of people doing their own thing, rebuilding their home much the way it was before. You’ll have a few lots here and there that do get sold that, that, um, um, you could put a pre-approved plan on or you could custom build a plan for that home. So, um, we had a lot of lovely old homes from the 20s. I used to live in a beautiful Monterey colonial built in 1932, and I hope the current residents, that home was burned down. I hope they do something beautiful, but it probably won’t look the same as it was before. Um, and, um, there are some of us architectural preservations, myself included, that love those old classic homes, but we have to, um, move on and we have to look forward and we have to see what new modern designs, um, those homeowners are going to, to choose to do.

Lee Kantor: Well, Jim, thank you so much for sharing your story today. Um, if somebody wants to learn more, have more substantive conversation with you or somebody on your team, is there a website for bridge?

Jim Osterling: Yeah. The the website for bridge is, uh, w ww dot bridge Advisors. Dot com. And uh, at that website, uh, you are. Our contact information is available and we’re happy to, um, talk to anybody that’s interested. And particularly for the Altadena rebuild, I’ve tried to be a knowledgeable resource in our community to help friends and acquaintances with with questions that they have, and I’m going to continue to try to help our community rebuild in that way.

Lee Kantor: Well, thank you again for sharing your story, doing such important work, and we appreciate you.

Jim Osterling: Yeah, thank you for for doing what you do and getting the word out about what’s going on in our local business community. That’s important work.

Lee Kantor: All right. Well, thank you very much. This is Lee Kantor. We’ll see you all next time on Pasadena Business Radio.

Carly Pepin With West Coast Growth Advisors

May 5, 2025 by Jacob Lapera

Carly Pepin, International Business Coach and Human at West Coast Growth Advisors.

She is an International Speaker and Consultant with a specialized focus on leadership and scaling business utilizing human behavior principles and strategic growth strategies. She shares the message that regardless of one’s background, occupation, or origin, every individual encounters personal and professional challenges stemming from their own perceived flaws.

She highlights the transformative power of reinterpreting these narratives to lead a fulfilling life. Having devoted her life to mastering the intricacies of human behavior, she integrates this knowledge with strategic business processes and systems to empower clients both professionally and personally.

Through her guidance, individuals and businesses alike learn to purposefully design their trajectories, moving beyond obligation to genuine fulfillment and achievement.

Connect with Carly on LinkedIn.

What You’ll Learn In This Episode

  • Burned Out & Overwhelmed: How to Fall Back in Love with Your Business
  • Scaling With Purpose: How to 3–5X Your Business Valuation Without Losing Your Vision
  • From Operator to Visionary: The Leadership Shift Every CEO Must Make to Scale
  • The Human Side of Scaling: How Behavior Shapes Business Growth
  • Balancing Pride & Shame: The Untold Leadership Skill That Changes Everything

Transcript-iconThis transcript is machine transcribed by Sonix.

 

TRANSCRIPT

Intro: Broadcasting live from the Business RadioX studios in Atlanta, Georgia. It’s time for High Velocity Radio.

Lee Kantor: Lee Kantor here. Another episode of High Velocity Radio, and this is going to be a good one. Today on the show we have Carly Pepin. She is an international business coach and human behavior specialist with West Coast Growth Advisors. Welcome.

Carly Pepin: Thank you so much for having me, Lee.

Lee Kantor: Well, I’m excited to learn what you’re up to. Tell us about West Coast Growth Advisors. How you serving folks?

Carly Pepin: Yeah. So we really help bring life to business owners, entrepreneurs to their vision. So we work with them on an external level to help them scale their companies. We focus on the people, strategy, execution and cash side. And then we’re also doing the internal dynamic where we’re doing a lot of leadership development and personal development as well to help them along the way.

Lee Kantor: So what’s your backstory? How did you get involved in this line of work?

Carly Pepin: Yeah, absolutely. And definitely when I first began, I kind of began just doing the personal development dynamic. It was trying to solve my own problem. Couldn’t figure it out. Uh, once I did find a really inspiring solution, a few of them. I just really wanted to share it with other individuals. So I turned it into a business, and it kind of spiraled into the business scaling and strategy after realizing we continued to attract entrepreneurs, business owners, and that all this stuff that was going on on the inside was affecting what was going on on the outside. Um, so we started to incorporate a lot of the scaling strategies to ensure that they could basically focus on both simultaneously.

Lee Kantor: Is this a methodology you developed, or you partnered with an organization that kind of gave you a structure?

Carly Pepin: Yeah. So I partnered with an organization. So we use the scaling up system and that is by Verne Harnish. So we love that one. It’s definitely stood the test of time. And for me, when I pick something, I pick something that usually most people are pulling from. So it’s the most comprehensive and definitely the origin point of a lot of the offshoots. So I really love it. It’s been amazing.

Lee Kantor: So now are you working with typical people that have had coaching in the past and are switching to you, or are you sometimes the first coach they’ve ever had?

Carly Pepin: I’ve done both. Yeah, sometimes you’re the first person and sometimes they’ve had previous coaching. So definitely it just depends on the person and yeah, sometimes both.

Lee Kantor: Now if you were coaching a person about getting a coach, what are some of the do’s and don’ts when you’re choosing, you know, to make sure it’s the right fit for both of you?

Carly Pepin: Yeah. Remember, when you’re on a sales call, I think sometimes people get nervous on being on a sales call. I don’t even think like, to me, they’re not sales calls. They’re Conversations. And when you’re on one of those conversations with people, you’re also interviewing them. So you’re checking in. You can ask them for some extra insights, some extra details to make sure that the individual that can get you what you want, but also that you like them. You know, when I’m working with clients, we’re working for a year minimum generally. And so part of those conversational components is making sure we actually get along like you want to hang out with me for the next year minimum. So that’s part of the dynamic too, is you don’t just want to pick someone who has like what you need, but also someone you like because it’s generally a pretty intimate dynamic.

Lee Kantor: So, um, some of your clients come to you because they have a desire to grow their business. Maybe they plateaued, or maybe they aren’t growing as fast as they would like it to grow. Can you share a little bit about what those early conversations are at the beginning? Uh, to make sure they’re the right fit and then managing their expectations of what’s possible.

Carly Pepin: Absolutely. I’ll just be asking a lot of questions, basically in the sense of first, I have them go through a few really in-depth questionnaires because I want to find out what’s going on in their business. Right. And so by the time I get on the phone, I have a good idea whether you’re kind of lacking in people, strategy, execution, cash, what’s going on with your mindset. Right. So I’ll have a general pretty general idea. Then I’ll ask questions to dive a bit deeper into those dynamics. There’s going to be the things that you can see and that you know are a challenge. But we’re also looking for like, what are what are the things beyond what. You know, in a sense, what are the levers that are actually controlling the more obvious challenges that you’re focused on? So it’s a lot of question asking, you know, basically that first initial conversation is me gathering data to ensure that I know exactly what you’re looking for and know exactly what you need. You know, and it’s cool because, you know, you ask the right questions. You can pull up that information pretty quickly. And there have been times when I’ve just been very transparent and said, I’m said. Definitely not a fit for you. I don’t do this, but let me check my network and see if there’s someone I can refer to you to instead of, you know, trying to do everything. There’s a lot of things that I don’t do, but there are things that I very specifically do.

Carly Pepin: So that’s part of it as well. And then also just engaging in the dynamic to see if they’re able to invest that kind of time of energy into their company. There’s going to be a degree that, yes, it may be challenging. It’s going to be challenging on a regular basis to make these kind of shifts, but more so I’m looking to see if you really want to. Right. So it’s kind of checking in on the desire level, like does this person really want to do this because it is hard to implement these systems and processes. But at the end of it, you’re really grateful because in the beginning it’s challenging. It’s hard because shifts like that are constantly challenging and hard, especially in a company. But at the end of it, you’re grateful, and it makes life easier if you’re willing to go through that effort, you’re great to be on the team with. But if I can tell that, yeah, you just you’re not going to and you’re not going to do the stuff in between. It’s a waste of time and money for you as well. So I really check in to see all those different dynamics to make sure that this person, if they’re making that investment, will not only get the best out of me, but also get the best out of themselves.

Lee Kantor: What are some kind of clues that you pick up on that the person isn’t kind of all in? Maybe they feel like that they should do this, but they’re not actually doing. A friend of mine calls it doing the do. They’re not, you know, kind of doing the the work of the grind.

Carly Pepin: Yeah, absolutely. And it’ll be interesting because it’s, um, it’s funny, it’s not even so much that they’re not doing the grind. It’s that they just don’t want to switch it up. Right. And so there’ll be a dynamic when I’m talking to someone where I’m kind of giving them the information of how and what it looks like to work with an individual like myself or one of my other team members. And it’s like, okay, so if we’re going to do this and we’re going to go through this process, this, this, this and that, if I keep coming up with obstacles And, you know, barriers. And we can’t do this. We can’t do that. If it gets to a point where, you know, and I keep saying, well, this is how we would do it, this and this. And you kind of give them examples and you’re showing them the possibility and they keep coming back with no, like I’ll ask the question like, do you really think this is a good fit? Because these are the things that I’m going to ask you to do, and you just keep giving me no. Right. Sometimes at that point, I’ll get a response where they’re like, no, no, no. I just I’m really stressed out. And it’s like, okay, well let’s focus on the internal part as well and see if working through that would help you with getting this stuff done on the outside.

Carly Pepin: And sometimes they just look at me and they’re like, yeah, I think you’re right. And I’m like, okay, cool. If you’re ever interested, they can always reach back out, right? Like it’s not a big deal, but it’s really just checking in and asking those questions and seeing the resistance that comes forward immediately. You know, like, um, I even talked to someone about like a couple things recently, and, yeah, they wanted me to do something and I just I told them no. And I was like, I’m not your ideal client. It’s not how I run and structure my business. And I don’t actually want to do that because it’s not something that works for me. Like, genuinely, it wouldn’t work for me, you know? And I had to tell them, like, I’m not your ideal client, right. And so it’s an interesting dynamic because when you’re talking to someone, you’ll know, like, you know, pretty fast if they’re an ideal client because they’ll be engaged and interesting and they’re like, even though this is hard, I want to try it versus I don’t want to do any of this. This sounds awful. Like I’m a no, no, no all the way, you know? So then you’re just not a fit to work together, which is fine. You know, tons of people, 8 billion people on this planet, lots of coaches, consultants, individuals who can help. I don’t have to be the one.

Lee Kantor: Right? Everyone doesn’t have to be the right one. No, no. Choose. Choose wisely.

Carly Pepin: Choose wisely. Yes.

Lee Kantor: Um. So are there some kind of like, um, fundamentals when it comes to scaling your business? Are there certain kind of must haves in your playbook that a business leader should be doing in order to scale?

Carly Pepin: Yeah. So we. The must haves are your people. So you want to get your culture and your people. You have teams of eight players. You want all of them on board and you have your execution, right. So no strategy is going to work if you don’t have a great execution plan day to day where people are held accountable. You know what’s going on. You have measurable KPIs. The strategy which is part of your vision. It’s part of like the mission of the company, the core values of the company and making sure everyone’s engaged in that. That’s also really helpful with the culture. And it’s the thing that’s going to drive the execution, right. And again, the execution is going to make sure the strategy comes into place. And then we focus heavily on cash flow as well. Just because it’s very hard to scale a business without cash flow. So it does require money to scale a business. So if a company is low on cash flow, then we’ll focus on that immediately, which often still stems into your people and strategy and execution. We figure out which one’s pulling that lever, and we make sure that the cash flow gets healthy so you can actually continue to scale the business. And even if the company has healthy cash flow, we still dive in to figure out ways to actually make it healthier.

Carly Pepin: Like, how do we make it more profitable? You know, how do we bring in more revenue? And how do we make sure that you guys have that liquidity to help you to continue to scale? And leadership mindset, you know, leadership mindset because the people at the top, it goes from the top all the way down to the bottom. So we work a lot with the CEOs, you know, and the founders to make sure that we’re understanding what challenges they’re going through. What are they struggling with, both personally or professionally, that’s causing them to have a hard time leading the team, leading the business into this vision, because generally these businesses, they’re not picking small things to achieve, you know. So it’s a pretty big deal. And sometimes we work with the leadership team as well, depending on which one it is, just to get them aligned, get them together to a greater degree, and also if they need some one on one assistance as well, because you never know what’s going on with someone just to make sure they can show up every day without getting burnt out during this process.

Lee Kantor: And do you mind if we dig in and a little on some of those, uh, elements that you shared?

Carly Pepin: Sure.

Lee Kantor: So you mentioned, uh, people and and try to have a, a players on your team. How do you know you don’t have an A player? And what do you how do you find a players? Because it sounds like. Yeah that yeah. We only want a players that that sounds simple. But obviously it’s not easy to identify and to recruit people to your team.

Carly Pepin: I think the fun thing about business is everything when we talk about it is quite simple, but implementing it is difficult. So if you are accurate there. Yeah. So when we think about a players, if I asked you if you would enthusiastically rehire everyone on your team, you’re probably going to say no, right? And so the ones that you wouldn’t enthusiastically rehire are not your A players. They could be B or C players, or sometimes a mix of like BC players. Right? So what we do when we’re we go through scorecards, right. So we’re actually checking in to see and rate these individuals. And when we’re rating someone, we’re rating them not only on their job duties. Right. So the job duties, this is why when we’re going into a company, we really focus on understanding the individuals in each role that they play in the company and also assigning them KPIs to make sure we have something to measure their job against. Right? And every job, every position can have a specific KPI. It’s just figuring out which one works the best for the position. So we kind of dive into those in our longer workshops and stuff. It’s it’s cool. It’s fun. So if they’re not meeting those KPIs, that shows us that we’re already seeing they’re not an A player, right? If they are, they’re already on the way to being the A player. But the other key component is if they’re aligning with the core values of the company, right. So if we look at the core values of a company, these are the things that the company stands for.

Carly Pepin: These are the things that the company is the culture of a company. And you could have someone who’s the best at meeting KPIs, but nobody wants to work with because they’re not aligned with the core values of the company. And that’s not an A player. Right. If you have someone who’s very aligned with core values and meeting KPIs. That’s awesome. They’re an A player. You could have someone that’s really aligned. With core values but can’t meet their KPIs. They’re not doing their job. Not an A player. So we want both, right? We want someone who has the core values of the company and simultaneously meets their KPIs. And those are our A players right? So again, obviously there’s a lot of things to put into place to make sure we gather that data and have that information. But at the end of the day, if you have a team full of people who basically do their jobs, meet their KPIs, and are team players with the core values of the company, it’s like, wow, I love those people. It’s worth putting the work in as opposed to hiring and firing and training, which costs a fortune in time and energy as well. And yeah, just having the wrong people in the wrong seats can really ruin your company and your culture often. So that’s why we really emphasize, of course it takes work, but business is going to take work anyways. Why not focus your time and energy on the work that’s actually going to get you the results that you’re really looking for.

Lee Kantor: So what do you do if the leader that hired you isn’t an A player?

Carly Pepin: So usually the leader that’s hiring me is going to be the founder, right? So that’s who I’m going to be working directly with. If the founder is not an A player in their own company, that’s where the mindset component comes in. And I find out, are they actually going to be engaged in this company if they’re just struggling with something? I’ll actually do a lot of personal development work to get them realigned and re-inspired reinvigorated by their business. But sometimes, genuinely, there are people who want to transition out of the business. And so at that point it’s like, okay, well, let’s get an either an exit strategy put together if you want to sell the company. Sometimes they still don’t want to sell the company. It’s like, well, let’s get an exit strategy for you. Which means all of a sudden we’re going to try to figure out how to have other individuals take his role. Right? So him or her. Right. So this individual at the top is like, how can we get these individuals out of this role, so they can be more of an observer in the company instead of an active participant. If it’s someone in the leadership team we actually like, share this with our customers. When we start where this is going to stir up some stuff. This is going to make people feel uncomfortable because once I put this scorecard out and I’ve given you KPIs and even on the leadership team, right.

Carly Pepin: Even on the leadership team, someone’s going to get uncomfortable being held accountable and someone’s going to quit. You know, it could be one person, it could be a couple people. It depends on the size of the teams. Realistically, though, what’s really quite fascinating is when that occurs, I’ll usually hear from the founder later and they’re like, they quit. But you know what? We were questioning them the most. We weren’t sure if they were the right fit. And lo and behold, we put some pressure on them to actually get to work. And they left, you know. So it’s kind of like you give them the opportunity to leave the position that they’re not meant for anyways. If you put pressure on someone and they leave, they don’t want to do that job. If you put that pressure on someone and hold them accountable and they stay and they actually try. That’s your a-players. Those are people who really, really, really want to do a great job, who love working for you, love working for the company, and even if they struggle, they’re really grateful to see that there’s some improvement and they want to be held accountable. They want to grow, you know? So it’s kind of a cool exercise. It really weeds out a lot of people sometimes, again, depending on the size of the company.

Lee Kantor: Now another foundational element was cash, which I find interesting. Uh, not a lot of coaches kind of get into that side of the business, you know, this, uh, overtly. Can you talk about why cash is important? I know as a business leader, you know, cash flow is critical that that’s at the heart of if you don’t have good cash flow, you could be out of business no matter how good your product is. So can you talk about how you, um, kind of weave cash in as part of the coaching?

Carly Pepin: Yeah. I mean, you said it right there. Like, if you don’t have cash, where’s the business? Right. How are you going to maintain the business? How the business is going to survive? Covid is a great example when we went through that, and there’s a lot of businesses that weren’t able to actually sustain themselves because they didn’t have enough cash. So we’re having cash for those reasons. But also one day when you’re like, hey, I think it’s time to grow. That requires cash. You take on another person, that’s cash. You know, you got to do more research and development innovation. That’s cash. Right? Everything that’s going on with AI right now and people really working to incorporate AI into their companies, that’s cash. That takes cash. So having cash is a really healthy opportunity to make sure your company is going to thrive. And it’s not just profit, right? A lot of people focus on profit and revenue alone. But you really want cash. Cash is king in this case. And we really like to focus on it in the sense that yes, it can be challenging, but it doesn’t have to be that hard. So we look at where we can make small changes. It’s the power of one 1% changes here and there, just tiny little changes here and there that really make a difference on a company’s cash flow.

Carly Pepin: And you make sure to do this. It’s a lot of stuff that’s going on. And it’s just to remember too. It’s like when you’re trying to focus on this, um, there’s we we have a beautiful software that we use within our team. And within this, we actually take all of your actual data and your financials from the past few years, and we input it all so that we can pull all the levers of the different areas of cash from, you know, per se, like a balance sheet and profit and loss, the most common ones. And we pull the levers to see what would work best. Right? Because in some instances people will be like, well, let’s just sell more not realizing that. And this is fun. We show this in our software. It’s fun. If you increase your sales, basically what occurs, it could possibly require you to have to increase and get a new sales representative, right. You might have to get more employees, you might have to create more product. And all of a sudden, even though you’re making more money, you made less because your overhead went so high, right? And so that may not be the lever to pull, right? We were just doing this the other day with a larger company, and it was really fun to see their lever, and the best lever for them to pull was actually just reducing cost of goods sold by 1%.

Carly Pepin: You know, 1% would save them almost $500,000 every year, which is amazing. And it’s like, okay, cool. Like, can you do that? Is that something you can implement? And they just came up with a strategy and a system to actually just pay vendors in advance, like really far ahead of time. They’re already great at payments just to entice them to take a bit of a discount. And even though it’s only 1%, they’re going to try for five, right? Because they’re they’re good at paying. They have great cash flow. And so this is pretty cool because it’s like, what are those opportunities. How can you take advantage of in your company. And we use that like dynamic and the software as well to make sure that we’re looking at it, to pull levers correctly, to increase your cash flow in the specific way that works best for you. It’s really inspiring because sometimes it’s not even about like getting more sales. Sometimes you’re are is just taking way too long and just shortening it by like, you know, five days or something. Really gets that cash flowing in your account more effectively, more efficiently, more quickly. Right. So it’s a really fun process. It’s. Obviously I love it. I could talk about that in a while.

Lee Kantor: So who is who is the ideal client for you and your team?

Carly Pepin: Yeah. So we love to focus on hospitality and construction companies. So people in hospitality industry and construction industry and it’s individuals who really value they really want to scale their company. They may have a vision and they’re not quite sure how to execute it yet. They may feel disconnected from a vision, maybe a little bit burnt out, just trying to get there and are not just invested in doing the work in their company, but also in themselves, right. Because that’s a big goal of ours, is we want you to have a thriving company, but we also want you to thrive, right? So if your company’s having an off day, I don’t want you to have an off day. Like, I still want you to be inspired and feel live and not be as burnt out when the shit hits the fan in a sense. So we really want to work from the inside out, and we look for people who are willing to work from the inside out.

Lee Kantor: Now, is there a story you can share? Don’t name the name of the company or the person, but maybe what the problem they had when they started working with you, and how you were able to help them get to a new level?

Carly Pepin: Yeah. So they first came to me just because they were frustrated. They did feel a bit burnt out, right? So they were starting to get burnt out. They were feeling disconnected from their vision, and they were feeling like they just didn’t know what the next steps are. They knew they wanted to scale the company, but they didn’t know what the next steps were. And so when we actually went on the diagnosis, they did have a healthy cash flow, but again, still did a little bit of work on that. We really focused on their strategy and their people. They were actually pretty great at execution as a company. So whenever we expanded on the strategy and we worked on the culture of the company and leadership training and all this dynamics. They were really great at execution, so we didn’t have to do a ton of stuff there, but we still dive into it a bit, and that was really cool to witness because we worked on all that on the outside, while I focused with the CEO and founder on working on what was going on within. Right, only to find out that they were having some challenges in their personal relationship and that was really impacting them at work. So once we kind of did all of that work and got the business on from the inside out, we did the personal development work with the founder. We got the opportunity to really invigorate them and they really fell in love with their business again. So they’re very excited. They kind of went from, I think I might sell this to I don’t want to sell it like I’m going to go for it. I want to leave a legacy behind. It’s like, all right, let’s do this. Um, and their companies also scaled, so I’ve worked with them for quite some time now. It’s been about five years, and they started out at about 8 million when we started. And now they’re up to almost 65. So that’s really inspiring.

Lee Kantor: So is that the size of the companies you typically work with multi-million dollar companies.

Carly Pepin: I’ll start with companies as low as 2 million and up. That’s usually the time when we can implement something like this to that degree. And then we just go up. Yeah, yeah, you can work with it at any scale. So it really depends on the business. But yeah.

Lee Kantor: Good stuff. Well congratulations on all the momentum. If somebody wants to learn more, have a more substantive conversation with you or somebody on the team. What’s the website?

Carly Pepin: Definitely head over to West Coast Growth advisors.com. And they can reach out to me directly there.

Lee Kantor: All right. Well thank you again for sharing your story. Do an important work and we appreciate you.

Carly Pepin: Thank you.

Lee Kantor: All right. This is Lee Kantor. We’ll see you all next time on High Velocity Radio.

Teresa Caro With Liminist

May 5, 2025 by Jacob Lapera

Teresa Caro is the founder and CEO of Liminist, where she helps CEOs, CMOs, CPOs, and leadership teams navigate pivotal moments of growth and transformation. Drawing on over two decades of experience in digital strategy, acquisitions, and team leadership across industries like CPG, Retail, Fintech, and B2B SaaS, Teresa blends strategic insight with grounded, empathetic coaching.

An ICF credentialed executive coach and co-author of “The Purpose Playbook,” she empowers leaders to evolve from functional experts to visionary collaborators. Her clients value her practical tools, human-centered approach, and ability to unlock lasting clarity and connection—both professionally and personally.

Connect with Teresa on LinkedIn.

What You’ll Learn In This Episode

  • The business of coaching
  • Coaching vs. therapy vs. mentoring/sponsorship
  • Tips for finding a coach
  • How to determine how much to spend on a coach (1:1 coaching and team coaching)
  • Results you should expect from a coach

Transcript-iconThis transcript is machine transcribed by Sonix.

 

TRANSCRIPT

Intro: Broadcasting live from the Business RadioX studios in Atlanta, Georgia. It’s time for High Velocity Radio.

Lee Kantor: Lee Kantor here. Another episode of High Velocity Radio, and this is going to be a good one. Today on the show we have Teresa Caro. She is the CEO and founder of the Liminist. Welcome.

Teresa Caro: Thank you so much. I’m so happy to be here.

Lee Kantor: Well, I am excited to learn what you’re up to. Uh, tell us a little bit about the Limonest. How you serving, folks?

Teresa Caro: So let’s start with what that word even means. It’s a combination, really, of two words liminal and specialist. Liminal is that state of being between and betwixt. So if you think about someone in a liminal state, they’re going from this, this journey of discovery to Realization to action, to something new. And a lot of people and companies tend to get stuck in that middle, in that liminal state. So I am a specialist or myself and limonest. We are specialists and moving people and teams through that liminal state to get them unstuck and move them forward.

Lee Kantor: So when a person’s in flux or maybe transition, what percentage of the time are they in that state, rather than being either in that beginning state or, you know, the state of where they’re doing action or some sort of thing like that?

Teresa Caro: I’m really depends on the situation. If you think of someone that they really want to do something new, yet their day to day is getting in the way and they’re really just looking for an accountability partner. That person is not necessarily stuck, stuck. They just need someone to hold them accountable. So we meet once a month. We have homework assignments knowing that we’re going to meet again, pushes them forward on that extra thing that they want to do. That true state of being stuck is you have a team that has probably been together for a decade, and they’ve been trying to move the company forward or transition to a new way of thinking or a new purpose, and they just can’t figure out how to get there. They keep trying and failing, or they try and they believe that they have come to a decision, but then they fail and holding each other accountable and they’re not seeing the results. That level of stuck now you’re into a bigger level of stuck that that might take you a good six months, maybe even a year, maybe even longer to figure out the the source of what’s causing them to be stuck and then retraining or rewiring our brains or creating new habits to move them forward.

Lee Kantor: So if you just took an average person or an average business leader. Are they in that moment in time? Are they typically stuck or are they? They got a plan?

Teresa Caro: Well, that’s it really depends on the situation. Some leaders have plans and they know how to implement that plan. They have the right team. They have the right people in the right seats doing the right, right things. They’re happy. They have clarity. They have buy in. They have all the things. Those teams are not stuck. They are really pushing things forward. If you have someone completely on the other side and they can’t figure it out, they might not even know that they’re stuck. So a good way for a leader or a team to figure out, even if they are stuck, is if they’re having the same conversations over and over again with no progress, if they’re coming up with big ideas, but then they come up with lackluster results. It’s really being honest with ourselves around what is trying to be accomplished, and what kind of success or lack of success that they are running into.

Lee Kantor: Now is being stuck. Is that something everybody’s going to go through at some point in time, or just some people are just more apt to be stuck periodically, and other people are just are able to avoid that.

Teresa Caro: It just depends on the personality. This concept of stuck. So let’s take it back for a moment. If you think about our brains and how they’re wired, we you know, we think of our brains as just this thing that we use every day. In all actuality, it’s a muscle with nerves and just different ways of firing things. And over time, those pathways become just like highways. It’s the same pathway over and over again, which is great in some ways. It enables us to move quickly, efficiently, effectively, because we’ve been there before and we just know what to do and we can do. It requires very little thought. The challenge is, is if that pathway is one that keeps on ending up in a, in the result that we don’t like, in us not showing up the best way that we can be, or us not taking an action in the way that we would want to take it, then that’s a pathway that needs to be reframed. And much like, you know, muscle memory. I don’t know if you play golf, but I love the analogy of golf is, yeah, your swing could be great. And it gets, you know, you know, your drive gets you a certain amount of yardage. Um, but it maybe isn’t the right way. Um, or it isn’t as best as it could be. And so you have someone come in and break down your swing and give you a new swing, which you tend to use. But then if you don’t practice it over and over again, if you don’t have that person reinforcing that new swing, you get tired. You go back to old behaviors. You end up in a stressful situation. You go back to old behaviors. So the concept of stuck just depends on where we. Where are we in our career? Where are we from a team perspective? What situation is causing pressure on us or triggering us to behave in certain ways? There’s so many things that we need to take into consideration around this definition of stuck, and how to get unstuck.

Lee Kantor: Now, the idea of, I think you referred to it as grooves or these kind of repetitive behaviors that are happening time and time. It sounds like that transcends beyond business. That sounds like it could apply to your personal life, whether it’s your parenting or your relationships. Uh, is all of this a similar thing? But it’s just you would work on it differently if it’s business as opposed to something more personal.

Teresa Caro: Uh. You are. That is just such a great question. Gone are the days, and I’m a Gen Xer. Generation X was taught to leave home at home and work at work, and they will not combine. Um, it’s almost like the Apple TV show severance. Like it must be split. And what we’re coming to realize is that we bring personal to work and we bring work back. And a lot of times, the behaviors, how we lead a team or how we parent a child or how we relate with our spouse or our peers or bosses, uh, a lot of times you can find some common behaviors in those different situations. So, so yes, you know, something you work on at work or something you work on at home, you actually can figure out that it applies in the other, um, but not always. The other thing to think about, too, is we might go home and feel fully supported and understood and appreciated. So we show up as our best selves when we are at home. Yet when we go to work, we may not feel heard or appreciated or have clarity of what is expected of us or all the things. So we may go to work and feel triggered and get stuck and not show up as our best selves, but be fine at home. It again, it just depends on what’s going on around us that’s causing us to be the way that we are, or even from a team perspective. That’s because now you’re looking at a bunch of humans trying to work together to a common goal. What are the things that are tripping them up in the business world? That’s not getting them to move forward?

Lee Kantor: So if an individual is stuck, how do they know the right kind of solution to this? Is it a business coach that’s going to address my business issues? Is it going to be a therapist that’s going to address my personal issues? Like, it seems like there’s a blurring of the lines everywhere. And it’s as an individual, how do you know which is the right path to go on in order to alleviate some of the stuckness?

Teresa Caro: So there’s a few things to approach what you just said. First is, is let’s help people understand the difference between therapy coaching and advising. Slash consulting. Advising slash consulting versus coaching therapy is is very clear. Do you want someone to tell you what to do? Will you hire a consultant? You hire advisor if you pretty much know what you need to do, and you’re just struggling to lay it out, or you’re looking for a thought partner or someone to help you break through all the weeds and help you realize the right answer. Now you’re looking at more of a coach or a therapist. The difference between a coach and a therapist has to do of what’s the source of the issue. Therapists are receive a lot of schooling. A lot of training, a lot of degrees, certifications, all sorts of things. Because if there is an issue that you cannot get behind. Beyond that, issue needs to be resolved with the tools and techniques and the therapies that a therapist brings to bear. Where a therapist and a coach tend to overlap is the creation of the new behaviors. So a therapist can actually work with you and help you figure out. Now that we’ve resolved or the therapist has resolved that core issue, they can partner with you to help you create new behaviors so you don’t go back to that.

Teresa Caro: You’re now moving forward. You’re getting unstuck and moving forward. Coaches do the same thing. We help you create new behaviors so you can get unstuck and move forward. Coaches and therapists a lot of times actually work together because a therapist will help you move forward in everyday life. Whereas a coach might have an area of expertise that helps you do that in a particular area. So for me, it’s business. For me, it’s I tend to work with marketing people and product marketers and product managers. So they know I come to the table with a certain area of expertise. I already understand the language that they speak, the situation that they’re in, and so I have that cognitive shortcut. They don’t have to explain anything to me. And so then I can partner with them in that particular area and help them help their teams, help these people work together more effectively. So that’s I’m a looking forward from a coach perspective. I help them look forward and get unstuck and move forward. A therapist comes in if there’s unresolved issues that they need their certain expertise to resolve.

Lee Kantor: So what’s your backstory? How did you get involved in this line of work?

Teresa Caro: Oh, well, so I had that pivot moment, and my background is I did most of my career in the advertising agency space, leading amazing teams across really amazing advertising agencies. I did some time as a chief marketing officer for a credit card company. And so I have grown up in the marketing product management, product marketing space. I realized when I had that moment to pause and to reflect upon what did I want to do for the rest of my career. I realized, although I will completely nerd out with the best of them, talking about product development and marketing and all the great marketing things, I am very happy to nerd out about those things. I don’t want to do the work anymore. What I do enjoy and what I started doing very well when I was on the corporate side of the world, is mentoring and coaching leaders to make them great leaders, mentoring coaching teams to make them great teams. And so when I had that opportunity to reflect and sort of get myself unstuck and heading into a new direction, get me out of my comfort zone, my liminal state, I chose coaching as the way to go.

Lee Kantor: Can you share maybe that first inkling that you had, uh, when you realized, hey, I’m going to be good at coaching? This is something that I do have the ability to help people get to new levels. Is there was there an aha moment that you were working with somebody and that occurred?

Teresa Caro: Well, it’s pretty easy on the agency space to start realizing that you’re good at something when you. So in the advertising agency world, it’s a service based model. So each person at a different level goes at a as a particular rate. And so everyone’s very mindful of how expensive it is to have me in the room versus someone else. Well, that moment where other leaders on my team, other members of their teams are starting are being requested to show up at meetings. And I’m not. I realized I did my job, that I really set them up for success that people preferred to have them have a seat at the table because they were impactful. They did bring value and oh, by the way, they were less expensive than me. So I sort of accidentally kept putting myself out of a job. Uh, and I kept being recruited to the next company to fix the next thing. So as you think about that, it wasn’t necessarily my marketing expertise at the end of my marketing career that people valued. It was my ability to transform organizations into higher performing organizations. So it was really the reason why people were recruiting me away to join the next company. And so why not do that for multiple companies at once?

Lee Kantor: When that was happening, was there a a point in time when you were thinking, hey, what’s the deal here? Why am I being excluded? Or are you able to, um, you know, have a level of humility and humbleness to say, hey, this is good on me, that I’m able to, um, help these other people reach a new level. And it’s nothing personal about me and my abilities.

Teresa Caro: Oh, yeah. No, my my goal was always to get them the seat at the table. And the moment they were requested, I knew I did my job.

Lee Kantor: And then when you took the leap to go out on your own, was that being in that transition? How did you handle that? Did you have a coach at the time for yourself, or was this something that you felt that you had all the skills that you needed in order to make the leap from going from corporate to being an entrepreneur?

Teresa Caro: I am a big believer that the smartest people know what they don’t know, or know that they don’t know, and you hire the right people. You surround yourself with the right people to ensure your success. So the very first thing I did was hire center for Executive Coaching. Andrew and his team are an exceptional organization, and they helped me, you know. Yeah, I was coaching before, but I didn’t truly understand what it meant to be an International Coaching Federation credential coach and ICF credentialed coach. I didn’t know what that meant. And he and the team helped me get that credential. And now two and now a second level PCC coach because of him and his team. And then I’ve surrounded myself with coaches who have gone before me who really are paying it forward because coaches have helped them in the past. I’ve had mentors. I even within your own organization, I learned from really talented people like John Ray and the generosity mindset. So my recommendation for anybody, it doesn’t matter if you’re a leader or in corporate or if you’re choosing to run your own organization, is make sure you you are aware that you have blind spots and make sure you have people around you, organizations around you that can help you identify those blind spots and then help you learn how to fill those blind spots.

Lee Kantor: Now, when you were looking for that coach for yourself, did you have to kiss any frogs? Or was this something that you just found the right coach right away? Because finding the right fit, I would imagine, is the first major decision that you hope to get right.

Teresa Caro: Well, I would say so. There’s two things for me to that. One is for me. No, I you know, I talked to a lot of coaches. I had a good sense of what kind of coaching program I wanted. And then thankfully, coaching programs do a good job explaining who they are, what they represent. So I’m very much a spreadsheet kind of person. I just put them all in a spreadsheet, put in all the key things I found on the website, and then Ceec was a clear choice for me. When others are looking for a coach, it’s not necessarily kissing a lot of frogs. It’s more just you need to do your due diligence. This person is someone you’re going to bare your soul to. Um, we all follow a code of confidentiality, so you can trust that we’re not going to share anything that happens in that one on one session, but it still is. You almost pretty quickly have to develop a sense of trust. So that’s the first thing is it’s not necessarily kicking kissing frogs. It’s it’s getting a sense for what do you need. What’s your objective. Do you need someone to tell you what to do, or to partner with you to come up with the best decision? What kind of value do you want? Do you want to see out of it? There’s a whole.

Teresa Caro: We could probably have a whole podcast on all the different things you need to think about to select a coach. And the most important thing, though, is trust. And then the second thing is just understanding what kind of results do you want from this relationship. Either a one on one coaching relationship, a team coaching relationship, or even a cohort or group coaching relationship. What value do you want to see and can you in your mind? And you know this isn’t a a soft skills kind of thing, you should be able to sit down and say, this is how much they’re charging. This is the value that I expect to see. And this is the expected return on investment that I expect to get out of that. If you can combine trust with an ROI conversation, a value conversation, and you feel good about your choice, you should be able to to come up with a coach that makes sense for you and your team.

Lee Kantor: And how much time should you give a new relationship with a coach to know if you’re on the right track? Like, are there certain things that happen where you’re like, okay, this seems to be working, but I’m not getting any tangible results, but I feel like I’m on the right path. Like, are there some kind of, you know, yellow lights, red lights, green lights. As the relationship is evolving at the beginning.

Teresa Caro: Well, a good coach is going to make sure that we are all on the same page. So what typically happens is we get hired on for an executive, a team, or even within group coaching to solve a particular issue. And that’s part of the kickoff. So I, I always talk about my program is two months, two months, two months for, you know, just to use one on one coaching as an example, two months of discovery, two months of pushing you out of your comfort zone, two months of results. And we start with, I want to solve this problem. I want to get promoted. I want to show up as a better executive and get better scores. I want to find a new job. There’s different things that they want to do. What typically happens, though, is in the discovery phase, we actually discover something else, and it is at that point that we pause and say, okay, we discovered this. So we can either continue down the path that we have set or we can pause and resolve this first. So we set another near-term goal, and then we head towards that so that persistent check in to make sure that you and your coach or your team and your coach are all heading down the same path and have clarity and buy in around what success looks like over the next period of time.

Teresa Caro: That’s really critical and a sign of a good coach, because you can’t just blindly say, oh, you want to solve this in six months later. It’s like, okay, you really need to continue to to check in and confirm we’re still on the same page. And really, as a leader of teams, you should be doing the same thing with your teams. You may say, okay, the beginning of 2025, these are our goals and objectives. But having making sure everybody’s clear on their roles and responsibilities. What they’re heading towards and how to get there. Starting off with that, getting buy in and commitment, but then doing those regular check ins to make sure that everybody’s still in alignment, to make sure that nothing else has popped up. That’s going to keep them from moving forward. That’s just that’s just typical great leadership kinds of conversations and how we should progress forward.

Lee Kantor: Now, you mentioned several different ways to approach coaching in terms of one on one. I think you mentioned group and maybe cohort coaching. Mhm. Can you explain maybe the trade offs of those.

Teresa Caro: Sure. Um so group or cohort. So group and cohort are the same thing. Group and cohort coaching is typically people with some kind of similar thing, similar goal. So I run um a group or cohort coaching program called living a Prioritized Life. It’s very focused on how do we show up as our best selves, as leaders of teams? Um, both, um, well, professionally and then of course, personal also comes into the mix. It’s a certain level of person, uh, with a certain focus using similar tools. So the benefit of that is you get to value me the, the, uh, operating system or the tools that I teach you. And you can tap into your peers as a form of a, as a form of peer advisory. And you can do that weekly. And it’s very cost effective to do it that way. The shortcoming of that is if you have a particular challenge that you really need to work through, you probably need some one on one time in order to do that. So a lot, a lot of my clients tend to do one on one coaching with me because there’s something that they’re trying to accomplish, and they need that intense one on one time with me in order to work through the latest challenge and come up with the next steps that the new way that they’re going to break down that muscle memory and build new muscle memory. So that’s the benefit of having that one on one with the actual group coaching team is a whole nother thing. So team is all working for the same company, all trying to achieve the same goal at that company. And so a coach is going to come in and make sure that that team is working together the best that they can, working on presence and communication skills and conflict resolution and psychological safety. Enter any business buzzword here. That’s what a team coach is going to help that team do.

Lee Kantor: Now, is there a story you can share that, um, maybe illustrates the power of having a good coach in terms of don’t name, obviously the name of the person or the company, but name the share the the problem they were having and how you were able to help them get to a new level.

Teresa Caro: Yeah. So a common thing that I run into is when a company or a team is shifting their direction. So and this isn’t one company, this is several companies that I work with that all have a common challenge, which is you’re going from a particular organization that I’d like to call a lifestyle organization or a best place to work organization where they prioritize. And I’m a big believer that there’s no such thing as balance, but let’s just use the a balanced life as a as a term for this discussion. So they they prioritize that. They prioritize, um, field trips and volunteering. And it’s just really a great, fun place to work. And yes, the company still does. Well. Um, it may not be growing exponentially, but it’s a good, solid company. Then that leader, for any number of reasons. It might be a family owned business. It might be, um, a particular organization that. Yeah, that was great for 20 years, but now it needs to be sold. There’s a there’s certain things that may happen that shift from that best place to work to more of a growth mentality. Well, when you shift from best place to work to growth mentality, for a lot of people, that means the culture changes. That means that everybody needs to get on board around the fact that they’re going to go from maybe 5 to 10% growth per year to now, 20 to 30% growth per year.

Teresa Caro: They’re going to have to put in longer hours. The intensity of the work, the type of work, the pressure around the work. There’s a whole bunch of things that go into that sort of more of a growth mindset versus a steady state kind of mindset. So with that said, having working with that leader because a lot of them get stuck. Because if you think about it, the people who have been with their companies for 20 or 30 years have they’ve been probably working with the same people for at least ten years. There’s a certain amount of loyalty to them. There’s a there’s an IP. These people know the business. They know how to do the business. And losing these people would, you know, would cause pain. And so helping that leader and these teams shift to this new way of thinking, helping these teams, these leaders figure out, do they want to shift? Are they excited by the fact of, you know what, we have worked really hard to grow this company, and now there’s this potential exit, and we are all going to benefit from that exit. Some people can really step up and be very excited about that and others do not.

Teresa Caro: So I’ve had that in several different times. And so what we tend to do, and this is not a quick change, this is not I’m going to come in at three months, change it. This is a couple year kind of evolution where we come in and do discovery. Who’s on the team. What kind of there’s different data driven assessments you can use to make sure the right people are in the right seats, doing the right things, making. So that was the first step, making sure that all the owners and everybody that’s that’s involved, they are all in alignment with where the next direction is for the organization. So then getting that settled and then it’s going the next layer down and making sure do they have you’re going to be putting these people in a pressure cooker. So do they have the right communication skills. And you know I’m very much a huge fan of Lencioni. Do they truly trust one another? Not just functional trust, but truly do they trust that these people all understand where the organization is heading, and do they trust that these people are all in it together? Do they know how to have a constructive conflict conversation? Because we’re going to be taking them from the nice, happy conversations that they’ve been having that can take a long time to the need of having very efficient, effective, intense conversations.

Teresa Caro: Do they have the tools to do that? Do they know how to commit to a decision? Do they know how to hold each other accountable? Don’t just wait for the owner or the leader to hold them accountable, but to truly hold each other accountable so they can all work together to generate results. And then putting that plan together. So I wrote a book called The Purpose Playbook, which is around purpose and vision tenants, which is another way of saying strategic statements and values. So then the final step is, is running them through what we like to call pdtv and making sure that they have a uniform plan, making sure that people are clear on who is accountable, necessarily responsible for everything, but who’s accountable that it gets done. And then sending them off to do it. And so I’ve had several companies go through this process with me. And yeah, it’s fun because they actually graduate. And yeah, I’m still doing one on one coaching with the leaders. But at the end of the day, the rest of the organization has has graduated and they are off to the races with this this new purpose, this new vision. And they they have clarity on what’s going to do. And that is truly exciting and satisfying.

Lee Kantor: So who is the ideal client for Limonest? Is it a team like you just described? Is an individual? Is it both? And what type of pain are they in right now where it would be a good idea to contact you and your team?

Teresa Caro: So there’s a few ways to look at it. One is I tend to operate more in the advertising marketing, product management, product marketing space. So if you’re looking for a coach who can speak your language in those areas, that would be me. From an advertising perspective, it’s generally a 50 people or more. Once you hit that 50 person mark in the advertising agency space, you’re now running into a new set of challenges, a new price point. You’re looking at different goals and paying more attention to succession planning. And I generally work with independently owned agencies in that space because I want to work with the owners, the decision makers. On the brand side, I tend to work in around the C-suite area. So again, marketing, product management, product marketing, VP and above, ideally people who lead teams. So as you look on the. Com on my website and you see one on one coaching and team coaching that helps you understand who I generally work with. From a cohort group coaching perspective, it’s typically leaders. I have some entrepreneurs in that group. Um, so to me, the cohort and group coaching are really people with a certain certain level of expertise, certain years of experience that ends up deciding to do all group or cohort coaching. And that’s called my Living a Prioritized Life program.

Lee Kantor: And, uh, you mentioned the website, the. Com. Is that the best place to go? If somebody wants to learn more, have a more substantive conversation with you or the team and get a hold of your book.

Teresa Caro: Uh, yes. So if you can start there, that gives you an idea of the kinds of products and services that I offer. Uh, also, I highly recommend people follow me on LinkedIn. I am a prolific writer, so if you want to get a sense for who I am and how, I think going to LinkedIn and finding Teresa Caro there and reading some of my content, that’ll give you a good sense of who Limonest is and how we approach different challenges that are out there. The Purpose Playbook I highly recommend you go to Amazon. It has been written by myself, Theresa Caro, as well as Jeff Hillenmeyer and Megan Barney, and it’s called The Playbook. It’s blue and yellow. That’s how you know you have the right one.

Lee Kantor: And Theresa Caro is spelled t e r e a r.

Teresa Caro: Correct. And you’ll see me on LinkedIn as Theresa Caro, MBA, PCC. That’s how you know you found the right one.

Lee Kantor: Well, Theresa, thank you so much for sharing your story today. You’re doing such important work and we appreciate you.

Teresa Caro: Thank you so much for having me. What great.

Teresa Caro: Questions. So much fun.

Lee Kantor: All right. This is Lee Kantor. We’ll see you all next time on High Velocity Radio.

Rohit Panedka With Microsoft

May 5, 2025 by Jacob Lapera

Rohit Panedka is Microsoft General Manager, E+D Product and Atlanta Site Lead. He is responsible for M365 and Experiences and Devices Support, Care, Innovation and value generation for our customers through Care and Support.

His organization looks to understand customer needs with empathy and consistently experimenting on improving outcomes and experiences for our customers and aspire to scale those experiences to all our customers so we can live us purpose of impacting every individual and organization on the planet.

His professional career spans ~20 years in technology focused on delivering managed services, supply chain, and customer service/support/care, go to market, delivery and transformation. He enjoys giving back and paying it forward and always open to engaging and learning from others.

He serves as the Executive Sponsor for Asians at Microsoft Atlanta to advise and provide resources for the organization and leadership team. He enjoys being of service to others as a mentor, support to HBCUs, donating time to charities such as Ronald McDonald House, Emerging 100 of Atlanta, Boys and Girls Club, The Urban League and MANNRS here in Georgia.

Connect with Rohit on LinkedIn.

What You’ll Learn In This Episode

  • Microsoft’s work here in Atlanta
  • What is the Microsoft Work Trend Index and what’s new about this year’s report
  • How does AI fill productivity gap

Transcript-iconThis transcript is machine transcribed by Sonix.

 

TRANSCRIPT

Intro: Broadcasting live from the Business RadioX studio in Atlanta, Georgia. It’s time for Atlanta Business Radio, brought to you by Kennesaw State University’s Executive MBA program, the accelerated degree program for working professionals looking to advance their career and enhance their leadership skills. And now, here’s your host.

Lee Kantor: Lee Kantor here, another episode of Atlanta Business Radio. And this is going to be a good one. But before we get started, it’s important to recognize our sponsor, CSU’s executive MBA program. Without them, we couldn’t be sharing these important stories. Today on the land of business radio, we have Rohit Panedka and he is the end product and Atlanta site lead for Microsoft. Welcome.

Rohit Panedka: Thank you. Lee. So great to be here. I remember we talked about some of these things last year. Thanks for having me again.

Lee Kantor: Oh, well, I’m excited to get caught up. And for folks who don’t remember last year, can you share a little bit about your work at Microsoft here in Atlanta?

Rohit Panedka: Yes, I’m a partner and general manager here at Microsoft Atlanta. I lead our presence here in Microsoft Atlanta. We have engineers that build our core products, which is M365 now, you know, largely focusing on Copilot, our AI work, our intelligent cloud. We have our Azure products dynamics products security. We also have our sales folks and customer solution architects. So the whole breadth and gamut of what Microsoft does, we have a presence here in Atlanta. We are here to serve our customers that are here locally. We are here for our diverse talent pool here locally, but also to serve the community, our diverse and vibrant community here in Atlanta. So very glad to be here and the community has been great and good to us as well.

Lee Kantor: Now, every year I think it was last year we talked about this same work trend index that you all put out. Is there anything in this year’s report that you’d like to share?

Rohit Panedka: Yeah, certainly. Uh, just to give a little bit of context. Uh, Work Trend Index is a global survey that we do, uh, largely focused more recently on, uh, how, you know, AI at work is being used and how the, you know, workplaces are adopting AI as a tool. And last year, you know, I was relatively new tool in the workplace. So we wanted to see how many people use such tools and how they’ve applied it across their work. And this year, we took a more critical look at how business leaders have planned to apply AI to more of their operations and what they could be. Um, you know what that could mean to their work, but also to the, you know, experiences of their employees as a part of a global survey. We also asked 500 specific business leaders and knowledge workers here in Atlanta for their thoughts. And, you know, we have a pretty good snapshot of where Atlanta stands in this moment. And the biggest takeaway we found here in Atlanta is 84% of the business leaders say that 2025 will be the year that they will use AI strategies to address their operations, specifically to improve productivity. And that is the biggest takeaway that we’re seeing, Lee, from our initial findings.

Lee Kantor: Now in your career? Um, a lot of times when there’s a disruption like AI historically, uh, it’s been I, I remember kind of a slower uptake, you know, kind of gradually than suddenly, but with AI, it seems like it’s suddenly then suddenly, um, how do you feel about the embrace of AI amongst whether it’s the worker themselves, maybe they were first to get in and start playing around with it. But now leadership is, like you said, looking at ways for AI to fill that productivity gap.

Rohit Panedka: Yeah, I think you’re spot on. When we looked at the report last year, you might recall, uh, we were seeing that, uh, workers were bringing AI on their own into the workplace. And the theme remains the same, which is the fact that, uh, workers are feeling, uh, compressed. Uh, you know, that’s the reality today, right? Um, you know, leaders are demanding more productivity. Uh, but workers are feeling more compressed to do the work that’s already on their plate. In fact, uh, within the Atlanta workforce itself, uh, more than three fourths, uh, almost three fourths of the work workers feel like, uh, they don’t have enough time to do the work that’s already on their plate. So that’s the dichotomy that we’re dealing with, right? You know, our leaders want more productivity for all the right reasons. I mean, obviously we in Atlanta want to lead the, you know, economic landscape. We want the greatest productivity here. Uh, our workers want to do a great job, but they feel compressed. Um, so that theme still exists. But the good news now is that, uh, leaders do want to use the tools that are now available in the form of AI to solve that problem. I think that’s the real sort of, uh, I would say opportunity. Right. Uh, there’s, there’s intent to solve that problem, so. And do it the right way. I think that’s the opportunity. We are in the crossroads of opportunity that we are here now.

Lee Kantor: What is if there is a right way, what is the wrong way? What is the right way and a wrong way look like to you?

Rohit Panedka: Yeah. I think the, you know, the wrong way is not, uh, you know, employees bringing some of these tools on their own, uh, without the knowledge of their, uh, you know, employers and their IT departments, uh, trying to do their work with the use of unauthorized tools and AI capabilities, trying to, uh, plug them into their, you know, data, uh, expose their data outside of their, you know, uh, secure environment, uh, that could expose their, you know, trade secrets and, you know, uh, do do harm to their business. The right way to do that is, you know, ensure that the organization itself has an AI strategy and, uh, make sure that, uh, the employees are brought along the journey of, uh, implementing, uh, the AI strategy, the the first step, I would say, is making sure that, uh, every employee gets comfortable with the use of AI for their own workflows. What that means is, uh, you know, one other really important step that, uh, you know, stood out for me was, uh, and this probably we all relate to every employee today, on an average, gets interrupted, uh, every two minutes by meetings, emails, other things. That’s about 275 times a day that they get interrupted. So how do we make their, you know, individual workflows? Uh, easy. So this is with everybody having a personal assistant like, you know, the Microsoft copilot. So being able to summarize your meetings, being able able to summarize your word documents, being able to draft your emails. So everybody having their own personal assistant to do their work uh, much easier, you know, remove the drudgery of work. The second layer of this is, you know, introducing, uh, teams to work with AI agents.

Rohit Panedka: So this is where, uh, collective workflows could be automated. So, for example, let’s say a team is used to working with, uh, insights and reports that the whole team uses to come up with the next project or idea, or build project plans together to work on the next product. These are things that, uh, AI agents can do for the teams such that removing some of the, uh, you know, um, I would say the burden on the team to kind of come together, you know, lengthy meetings and workshops and things like that, which the agent can do in the background. And it can be doing this 24 over seven. Uh, you know, when the teams are, you know, you know, sleeping and, you know, taking care of their life and spending time with their families. The agent could be working in the background doing all of these workflow stuff. Uh, while the teams can come back and do the creative work. Right. That is where the integration of AI into those kinds of workflows will make the team’s productivity enhance. But also the happiness index of the teams goes up. I think that is where that is the right way to do things right, which is bring AI agents into these business workflows and automate them, where the teams can spend most of their time on the creative and the core value addition part of the the business. That’s the next, uh, you know, uh, you know, I would say the area where we can deploy AI, uh, the right way.

Lee Kantor: Now, what do you tell that employee who might be fearful? And when you start listing all of these tasks that an AI agent can do, and they start thinking in their head, that’s what I do. Um, how do you kind of either help them prepare for this inevitability or, um, or just get retrained into some other area that will make them less easily to be displaced?

Rohit Panedka: Yeah. You know, this is this is a fair, uh, you know, fear with any, uh, new technology that, uh, does come into play, right? I mean, with anything new, there is a little bit of skepticism. Uh, you know, this goes back to when computers were introduced, uh, people, you know, did fear what happens to their data entry jobs or, uh, you know, when the internet was introduced as well, there were quite a few roles that were fearful of elimination. But what’s really happened is, uh, there’s been a proliferation of other jobs that have come in place of that. You know, there’s been proliferation of, uh, sysadmin jobs. There’s been a proliferation of cloud architects. There’s been a proliferation of, uh, you know, network administration, security jobs, right? Because of the proliferation of, you know, compute, uh, heavy jobs and technology jobs. So it’s the same thing with AI. Uh, there will be a proliferation of jobs that require specializing in training the AI models specializing in, you know, uh, creating, uh, infrastructure that, uh, you know, and models that, uh, need, uh, you know, uh, the technology expertise to build these AI, uh, tooling.

Rohit Panedka: There’s also a need for people that know how to manage, uh, AI heavy organizations as well. The organization structures will also get upended when we introduce these AI agents to work with humans as well. So how do you manage such organizations? Uh, you know, how do we manage organizations where we have both humans and agents working together to create outcomes for an organization? All of these are net new concepts that we’ll have to learn, uh, to, to deploy and make sure that, uh, they, they, uh, perform as expected. These will all create new opportunities and new jobs. Uh, so, yes, there’s an element of learning. There’s an element of skilling, reskilling and upskilling that has to happen with anything new. But it’s not that it’s going to necessarily eliminate jobs or it’s a zero sum game. It’s more of a, you know, we’ve got to move towards those new opportunities and new jobs. That’s definitely a need. The way work is done, the kind of jobs that are needed to do those kinds of jobs will definitely change.

Lee Kantor: It’s just historically, though, it’s been like a blue collar or maybe the the lower paid people in the organizations were the ones being displaced. And now with AI, it seems like it’s moving up the ladder in terms of white collar. And, you know, now coders can be replaced, even lawyers. Or they’re talking about replacing a lot of medical professionals can be replaced by AI. This is a different group of people who aren’t usually the ones that get displaced by a disruption like this. And it seems to me that a lot of organizations are now looking a lot more like tech companies, where it just takes fewer people to execute what it used to take lots of people to execute.

Rohit Panedka: Yeah, I think I mean, that’s a that’s a good observation. But we also have to recognize that, uh, there’s a lot of problem sets that are unsolved as well. Right? I mean, one of the other important stat that, uh, we did, you know, glean even last year and even this year is that, uh, you know, there is a, um, you know, consistent lack of talent or there is a consistent need for intelligence on demand, uh, especially human intelligence on demand that needs to be augmented, that needs to be complemented. Uh, I does solve that. Um, you know, in the, in the form of, uh, ability to compute large problem sets, uh, ability to compute very large problems and things like that. So think and put that in context of still unsolved problems, like in healthcare in the field of, uh, diagnostics, in the field of cancer research, in the field of, uh, you know, climate change, uh, you know, in the field of, uh, you know, agricultural problems, growing needs of, uh, you know, humanity at large. I think those are still problems unsolved and new fields of engineering, biomedicine, uh, you know, even creative fields and arts are continuing to grow. So, you know, I believe that, uh, that’s where, uh, you know, human potential is going to continue to shift. Uh, so to your point, uh, I think there is tremendous opportunity for talent to shift into those spaces as well as, uh, we get this, uh, you know, intelligence opportunity filled.

Lee Kantor: So where in your mind is the low hanging fruit for an organization to really, um, kind of lean into this opportunity with AI.

Rohit Panedka: You know? So there is really no barrier to entry, you know, uh, if you if you start working with Microsoft today, you could just go to, uh, copilot Microsoft.com. And if you are a Microsoft customer with any sort of license, you could get access to Copilot chat. And copilot chat gives you access to, uh, you know, copilot uh, to, to start working with copilot, you also get access to what is called as agent builder, where a user can start building agents, start experimenting with, you know, small workflows. Now, if you want to do more complex, uh, agent building or, uh, you want to start working with very contextual data. Then you have to obviously get into paid licenses. Uh, and then you have, uh, you know, capabilities like Microsoft Copilot studio, where you can, uh, build more complex, uh, agents that, you know, uh, you can automate more complex, uh, you know, business processes and things like that. But you can start with simple, uh, workflows at user level, uh, you know, workflows and start, uh, improving their individual workflows. So start with getting your, uh, employee experiences better, their drudgery out of their work, getting them comfortable with the use of AI. One stat to remember is leaders are more familiar with AI today than the employees.

Rohit Panedka: So, uh, I think, you know, from from the stats, it looks like seven out of ten, uh, leaders are more familiar with, uh, in Atlanta or more familiar with AI against four out of every Very ten employees. So let’s get our employees also more familiar with AI. And the barrier to entry is very low. Let’s get them, you know familiar with copilot chat. Get them to use it on a daily basis. This is a very secure environment. Uh, you know, it’s it’s within the boundaries of your own data. And then, um, get them to start building, you know, agents, then start integrating your workflows, uh, into, uh, you know, with, with copilot studio like capabilities. That’s when you start getting, uh, your teams, you know, uh, larger teams integrated with agents. That’s when you start transforming your organizations to be more AI ready. But start with your employees getting more familiar and comfortable with AI. And this goes back to your question, Lee. How do we get employees more comfortable, right, with the AI and not, uh, view it as a fearful thing? You know, we have to, uh, get everybody comfortable with the idea that this is a tool for good and, uh, higher productivity and greater experience.

Lee Kantor: So if they have, uh, Microsoft licenses, is this something that I can offer to my employees and say, hey, there’s learnings like, or is that something that there’s additional fees for learnings or is there kind of free opportunity to learn or at least get my feet wet from an employee standpoint of learning about AI through Microsoft and from a strategic standpoint of my leaders want to, um, you know, get some help and get some expertise from somebody in Microsoft to get their thoughts on the best way to roll something like this out. Are there people to talk to there?

Rohit Panedka: Yes. So if you’re a you know, if you’re a large commercial business, obviously you’re going to have your account team that can connect with you. But if you’re a small business, you know, we have help and learning sites that have a lot of, uh, you know, resources for you. We have a small business customer advisory boards that we recently launched. This was a very recent launch that you can reach out to if you’re working through a partner of ours. We have partner programs that get that are also enabled with the same materials. We have AI adoption kits that are available on the same, uh, you know, Microsoft websites. We also have, uh, you know, uh, programs where, uh, these are paid programs, but, uh, they are called Pro Direct and Business Assist. Uh, we also have on our support.microsoft.com, which are also free landing pages where you can go and you can look by based on your use cases. Uh, we can, uh, support you. So the use cases could be you’re trying to create a hub for your team, or you’re trying to create, share and create and share documents with your customers. We also have very free, uh, resources like getting more done with your with with AI as your companion as an example. That is a ten minute course. Uh, if you if you’re pressed for time just to get started. Uh, so there’s a lot of resources, uh, for, for small businesses. So, you know, try those out. And some of these programs that I mentioned, uh, you know, like, we have a business advisor program that actually you can speak to somebody, uh, human, uh, basically that can walk you through these things. We also have programs where, uh, we do reach out to customers. Uh, if they’ve made an attempt to reach us out, we proactively reach out, especially if they bought a Co pilot license and they’re struggling to start. We reach out ourselves and give them a hand. Uh, it’s called welcome to copilot. We help get them started if they don’t know how to where to start.

Lee Kantor: Now, is there a story you can share? Maybe a small business success story of somebody who, um, hadn’t been using AI and then started using Microsoft’s AI in order to, you know, get to a new level or to improve their productivity.

Rohit Panedka: Yeah, there’s a few, actually, uh, you know, there’s a story of a solo founder that actually, uh, started a staffing firm, um, and, uh, they used, uh, you know, you know, our copilot, uh, capabilities to actually, uh, streamline a lot of the, you know, resume sorting, uh, helping their, uh, clients build resumes, uh, you know, keyword, uh, targeting those kinds of things. Uh, so that thus eliminating a lot of the, uh, you know, uh, the human powered, uh, pieces of the work, and then that actually helped them, uh, in their own words, about $2 million in, um, profitability increase. There was another construction group, another 5%, 5% start up company. Again, a small business that said that they boosted revenue, sorry, operating margin by about 20% by using AI across their operations. So basically, uh, using it for, uh, market research. Uh, a lot of their, um, research was done by, you know, uh, human effort that they were able to redeploy for other activities. They did a lot of the research through, uh, copilot, research assistant. Uh, another one was another entrepreneur who basically skipped hiring an expensive CFO but made do with their, you know, financial staff by using, uh, expertise through, uh, you know, uh, copilot for, for financial, uh, you know, um, capabilities. So these are all, uh, you know, stories within the small business solopreneur kind of, uh, uh, examples.

Lee Kantor: Yeah. The impact is real. It’s not going anywhere.

Rohit Panedka: No it’s not. It’s not. Look, you know, uh, on the other hand, you know, I will say this, right? There’s a there’s a real reason why we, uh, kept the name as copilot. Right? It’s, uh, you are still the pilot, right? You are still in control. Uh, you set the tone, you set the direction. You still have to validate the work, right? And, uh, there is an element of continuing to validate the work and training, uh, through your validation. So, uh, that’s also something to be confident about. Like you, you’re still in control, right? So there’s no to. Goes back to the point of fear, right? You you still control the narrative and you still control the outcomes.

Lee Kantor: Well, if somebody wants to get a hold of that work trend index report or connect with that, uh, Microsoft’s AI community, is there a website or what’s the best way to connect?

Rohit Panedka: Yeah. So it’s aka Dot Ms.. Slash. Uh, 2025 is the work trend index and for the customer advisory board. Uh.

Lee Kantor: Let me just ask your I.

Rohit Panedka: That’s right. That’s what I’m doing right now. Um, let me follow up with you on that one.

Lee Kantor: But is there if they went to is there kind of a central Microsoft Atlanta website they can go to, to Support.microsoft.com?

Rohit Panedka: Yeah.

Lee Kantor: And then they can get uh, that’ll go to if they can search for the Atlanta folks. And then from there they can probably get that community.

Rohit Panedka: Yeah. Customer advisory board.

Lee Kantor: Yeah. Good stuff. Well, Rohit, thank you so much for sharing your story today. You’re doing such important work and we appreciate you.

Rohit Panedka: Thank you so much, Lee. And you are too.

Lee Kantor: All right. This is Lee Kantor. We’ll see you all next time on Atlanta Business Radio.d

Jeanne Omlor With Jeanne Omlor International

May 2, 2025 by Jacob Lapera

Jeanne Omlor is a Business Strategist, multi 7-Figure Online Business Coach, and Certified Servant Leadership Executive Coach at Jeanne Omlor International. At 54 years old she was a solo parent in deep debt and got herself online and to $1M in 17 months, without ads, and has since scaled to multi-millions in 5 years.

Her company has helped almost 500 businesses to thrive online. She is emotionally connected to helping others prosper, as she lived in lack for years and overcame that mindset.

She is now helping as many people as she can to maximize profits and reach their full potential while being the visionary they’re destined to be.

Connect with Jeanne on LinkedIn and follow her on Facebook.

What You’ll Learn In This Episode

  • How to leverage what you already know to help others.
  • Launching and scaling your business online without ads or complicated tech.
  • How to make a good living while creating impact.
  • Navigating overall marketing challenges.

Transcript-iconThis transcript is machine transcribed by Sonix.

 

TRANSCRIPT

Intro: Broadcasting live from the Business RadioX studios in Atlanta, Georgia. It’s time for High Velocity Radio.

Lee Kantor: Lee Kantor here. Another episode of High Velocity Radio and this is going to be a good one. So excited to be talking to my guest today, Jeanne Omlor with Jeanne Omlor International. Welcome.

Jeanne Omlor: Thank you. Nice to meet you, Lee.

Lee Kantor: Well, nice to meet you. For those who aren’t familiar, can you share a little bit about your practice? How are you serving folks?

Jeanne Omlor: Sure. So I’m a coach for coaches and consultants with my company, and we help coaches and consultants and certain online businesses as well to get more sales, get more clients without ads. So it’s organic social media marketing.

Lee Kantor: What’s your backstory? How’d you get involved in this line of work?

Jeanne Omlor: Well, I’ve been a coach for 13 years and I’ve been coaching people offline. I was coaching people offline, all sorts of businesses with business coaching and consulting, and I did that for eight years and also executive leadership. And then I realized, you know, there’s an easier way to it must be an easier way to get clients. So I got online and I figured out how to get clients not having to run the funnels and the ads, although I have tried those and they don’t work. You know, I got to $1 million in 17 months at very high profits, and I started showing other people how to do that. And it’s been a very big solution for people that don’t want to go down the high tech funnels ads sort of fiasco route.

Lee Kantor: Now, at the beginning of your career, were you working in corporate as a coach or were you always kind of self-employed coaching other coaches, and were those your typical?

Jeanne Omlor: Yeah, I always had my own business because to me, if you’re going to be a coach, I mean, you really I mean, I know people do that, but you really want to make it that it’s your own business because otherwise you still just have a job.

Lee Kantor: So, um, so you started coaching individuals. What’s kind of the ideal profile for at the beginning of your career? Who was the ideal client for you?

Jeanne Omlor: It was always business owners. So small business owners and entrepreneurs, all sorts of businesses, lawyers, people that were in beauty and all sorts of any designers, you name it. Uh, some coaches and consultants as well. So any small business, I’m just really good at helping people make money. That’s kind of my jam is how do we help people make money? So. And marketing. So it really didn’t matter. Like anybody that had a business that needed help, I would coach them.

Lee Kantor: And then initially, how were you going about getting your leads before you figured things out, or did this just come to you naturally?

Jeanne Omlor: No, nothing comes naturally in business. We’ve got to completely alleviate ourself of that la la land that things are just going to come to us. Very few people that happens. So when you have a business you have to market. So I always marketed and I knew that from the very beginning because I got to coach from day one. So I used to do networking, speaking at events, public speaking, and that was it. That was how I got my clients just meeting people offline. This is great, but there is hard to get critical mass when everything you do is depending upon you getting in a car, driving somewhere, and meeting a handful of people because the numbers just aren’t there. Online, there’s millions of people you can meet, and you don’t have to get in a car and drive around. And that’s the beauty of online marketing.

Lee Kantor: So when you start working with somebody, walk me through, like, what are those initial conversations? What do you need to get clarity around in order to help them?

Jeanne Omlor: Okay, so we get a lot of people that are just starting coaching. Some people have been coaching a while and haven’t been able to get, you know, a sustainable monthly income. So just depends where they are. So let’s just say it’s a new coach, somebody that says, Hey John, I’ve been wanting to coach for years, I don’t know what to do. We will actually help craft their offer, their coaching offer from scratch. So okay. You don’t know. What do you want? Well, I think I want to coach these people. Okay, great. You want to coach men on, you know, leadership and the relationships. Great. Okay. So let’s build an offer around that. And I help them build an offer. We get price and then we have an offer. And from there we show them how to position the offer online, create content lead generation and how to do a sales call and sell a high ticket offer.

Lee Kantor: Now, how is that, um, like what? What part of this is different than a funnel? How are how are you differentiating this from the typical funnel sales strategy?

Jeanne Omlor: Okay, so with marketing, everything technically that you do is a funnel. But when we say funnel because you’re funneling and it’s a step by step funnel. But when we’re talking about funnels, we’re normally talking about tech funnels that are landing pages, and then you get the landing page and then you run an ad to it, and then they click on it, and then it goes to something else and then something else. Then they get on a call or they buy a product. That’s when we say funnels. We are talking about those sequences. Make sense?

Lee Kantor: Yeah.

Jeanne Omlor: Yeah. Okay. So the difference is we’re not creating a funnel of landing pages and this and click on that and upsell a downsell then they get a $20 product and then they get this. Then they get a sales call and then you get a client. We don’t have that kind of a tech funnel the funnel. For instance, my funnel used to be I would drive my car to a networking event. I would meet people, I would get their card, and I would go. And if they said they were interested and sure, I want to get on a call with you. Then I would go home. I would email them and say, hey, so nice to meet you. Book a call. And then they would get on a call with me and they would either hire me or not. That’s a funnel. That’s a marketing a very simple marketing funnel. So they’re all funnels actually. But when people talk about funnels and ads, they’re talking about the landing pages. Okay. So I just wanted to explain what a funnel is and the different types of funnels. So this funnel is not a landing page funnel. It is a kind of like the offline funnel. But it’s organic social organic. So it’s not hey click on this and book a call. It’s reaching out online. Kind of like how you I was reaching out offline, but now it’s online and we do it differently. Make sense.

Lee Kantor: So I’m still unclear on how you do it differently. So if it’s similar in the sense of it’s an offline conversation but it’s online, how is it done online?

Jeanne Omlor: Okay. So offline I would be getting in a car and I’d be driving to an event. Correct.

Lee Kantor: Right.

Jeanne Omlor: Okay. Online there is no car. There’s no well, there are some events, but, you know, I’m not in a car. I’m sitting in front of my computer like I am right now. But instead of going to an event, I’m going to go to LinkedIn or Facebook or Instagram, a platform, and that we’re getting the clients on the social media platforms because there’s millions, billions of people. Actually, I think at this point on these platforms. So we’re reaching out through the platform. We’re creating content. People see our content. We’re saying, hey, you want to get on a call? So it’s, uh, it’s using the social media platform. So if I were going out and I go to a networking event, the networking event is the platform. That’s where the people are. Right.

Lee Kantor: Right.

Jeanne Omlor: Online, it’s let’s just say as an example, for instance, LinkedIn. So that’s the platform. That’s the difference is I’m not driving to the local networking chamber networking event with a few people there. I’m staying at home and I’m logging into LinkedIn and there’s my platform. Does that make sense?

Lee Kantor: Right. So now you’re on LinkedIn. So anybody can get on LinkedIn at any point and then post anything you’d like. So your recommendation is to do more posting on social platforms.

Jeanne Omlor: No no no it’s much more involved than that. Yes, people should post, but just I’ve heard that so much and it’s just such bad advice. Just post more really. Just just post more. That’s no strategy. That’s just posting more. It’s not a strategy. And what we teach is actual strategy posting with reach out with sales. But before that, the very first thing we help people do, I’ll repeat that, is we help them craft a really good offer so they have something. First. First thing, who are you selling it to? What’s the offer? How much does it cost? Now we have an offer. Now we have a product. Then you work on your messaging, which I can’t just tell people how to do that in three seconds. You need coaching on that messaging. Then there’s content and different types of content. It’s not just posting more. Absolutely not. Please don’t. Don’t go post more. Folks of random stuff won’t work. So it’s really about what you’re posting and what kinds of posts and which ones work. And then from there, lead generation, which is reaching out to people and what you say when you’re reaching out to them. This is very involved. Even though it’s simple, it’s not easy. Does that make sense?

Lee Kantor: So how are you defining lead generation?

Jeanne Omlor: Lead generation is the content is lead generation. So the content you’re doing that for lead generation because some of that content pulls people in. Okay. And then there’s the same way at a networking event, I walk up to Lee, who’s standing on a corner with his hand cards, his business card in his hand. I say, hey, Lee, how are you? And you go, I’m great. Same exact thing, but on social media.

Lee Kantor: So how do you do that interaction in an elegant kind of non-salesy way. Or do you? You don’t mind if it’s salesy?

Jeanne Omlor: Yeah, I do mind if it’s salesy. And we coach people to not be salesy.

Lee Kantor: So how do you do it? In an elegant manner.

Jeanne Omlor: Uh, we coach you on how to do it in an elegant manner by creating those, uh, messages for you.

Lee Kantor: And that’s all part of the coaching program that you offer?

Jeanne Omlor: Absolutely. In fact, I will work with people on their particular messaging so that it’s not salesy and spammy and weird, because that’s not what people want. People don’t want that anymore. And they’ve seen through it. And there’s just a whole new way of selling. And we teach that. We call we call it heart based sales. People don’t want to be tricked and treated like you’re tricking them. And it’s just very not not good. And I believe that the way that people have been sold to how we’ve been sold to for hundreds of years is just unethical. It’s like about tricking people. So you don’t want to trick somebody, you want to just reach out to somebody in a very normal way without any kind of tricking or weirdness or spammy or or just strange. I mean, people, they’re not good at this. Generally. I get such weird messages on LinkedIn and all over the place. So teaching people how to to sell in a heart based way and the messaging, well, there’s a lot of coaching on that. I can’t like tell you now here on the podcast exactly what you would say, because it depends. It’s different for every person because it can’t be the same for everybody else. So that’s just weird because if I’m a business coach, it’s going to be a certain way. And if there’s a relationship coach, they can’t do my messaging. Does that make sense that it can’t be exactly the same for everybody?

Lee Kantor: Absolutely. I think that’s the problem with the thing. My pet peeve on LinkedIn is someone says, hey, do you want to connect? And then you say, yes. And then the very next message is buy my stuff. And like.

Jeanne Omlor: That’s not good. That’s like, that’s a bait and switch, right?

Lee Kantor: Like I’m not I mean, you got to at least have a conversation first. Um, exactly.

Jeanne Omlor: Yeah. And there’s different ways of doing that. Um, but 100%. If, you know, I had people say, hey, well, the other thing is nobody really wants to read your latest post or your article. We don’t. We have so much to read. You know how backed up I am on my audible right now. So it’s not like the old days where it was so amazing that you sent somebody an article. Nobody thinks, gee, thank you. They’re like, oh great. Another thing you want me to read? It’s almost an insult because if we’re really aware of what’s going on in the world, there’s so much media, books, articles for us to have to act like we’re grateful because somebody sends us. Their article is insanity.

Lee Kantor: So did you, um, how did you kind of discover that there is a more elegant, more heart centered way of communicating? Was that something that was just natural for you, or was this something you learned through trial and error?

Jeanne Omlor: This was something I learned offline when I’d go to a networking event and people would throw five of their cards at me and like, I’m going to go out and sell for them. And I was always amazed that I would go to a networking event and they’d go, hi. And they would just start talking at me. And I thought, wow, these people really have no idea about human nature. So I started developing this offline and I would coach my clients on this. And I used to actually do whole talks about this at NYU, NYU, MBA, alumni, and all sorts of business places on how to act in a networking event, how to actually get your little, you know, intro. I didn’t call it a pitch either. I called it an intro. How to do this? Well, and guess what? We’re human beings, so doing this well offline translates to doing it well online. Basically, when somebody walks up to you, do you know that? What do you know that I never tell anybody what I do unless they ask me. Never. I never tell somebody what I do unless they ask me why. Permission based selling. So people meet me and they start telling me everything, and I listen and I listen. I listen and then I go, that’s that’s interesting. And then I ask them questions and, and sometimes they don’t even say, what do you do? And I’m okay with that because that was what they wanted that interaction to be, was me being like having to listen about them selling to me. And it’s so disingenuous. And they think it’s so great that they just told me, I’m just thinking, well, wait a minute, you didn’t even ask me what I did, you know? And at that point, I don’t even care because I’m thinking, this is not somebody that’s interested in what I do, so I’m not going to force it on them.

Lee Kantor: So how do you, um, with that philosophy, how how do you incorporate, uh, any level of proactivity into that if you’re just kind of absorbing the person initially before and you’re waiting for permission to, um, you know, share what you do.

Jeanne Omlor: Most human beings will turn around and say, tell me what you do. Some do not.

Lee Kantor: So that’s your first level of vetting. If they don’t do that, that’s probably not the right fit for me.

Jeanne Omlor: Probably not. Because the thing is this if they don’t have the social aptitude to ask another human being, after basically talking at me for a long time, what do you do? This is not the kind of client I’m looking for, so I’m good because I only coach people that are high achievers and high achievers. They have enough social grace to say, well, look, tell me about what you do. I’m like, yeah, sure. Here’s what I do. Now, this rarely happens that somebody just talks at me and doesn’t every now and then. And I’m not criticizing. I’m just saying human beings are all wonderful and beautiful and they’re different, different styles. Now that’s great, but they’re just showing me that they have zero interest in what I do. If they have zero interest in what I’m doing, I’m not going to force it on them. Why would I do that? I just I’m zen about it. Great. Nice to meet you. Thank you so much for sharing that. And I move on. Most people say, hey, what do you. By the way, John, I really wanted to hear what you do.

Jeanne Omlor: Actually, I’m like, yeah, sure. And they go, yeah, I wanted to hear about that. Most people don’t get on a call with me unless they’re actually interested in what I’m doing, because they’ve seen all over social media the help that I provide. And they’re just like, okay, I want to talk with this woman. So usually there’s no problem there. I’m talking about, you know, it’s not really. All of this is so easy for me at this point. People see me, they say, sure, I want to get on a call. We do a 15 minute just, you know, connection, uh, on Facebook, on on LinkedIn, on other places. They go straight into the booking, the one hour, um, with me like a sales call. So, yeah, it’s really about, um, you know, everybody knows you have something to sell, right? We all know that. It’s. How are you doing that? Are you getting on a call? And just like, oh, okay, here’s my chance just to tell somebody exactly what I do, that desperation doesn’t work.

Lee Kantor: So should a coach have, um, kind of tiers of things? They sell a lower price thing, a mid-price thing, a high price thing.

Jeanne Omlor: That depends. There’s no actual rule. Like exactly what every single person needs to do. It depends on their offer. Lee, are you a coach?

Lee Kantor: I am not a coach.

Jeanne Omlor: Okay, I was just wondering. So. So that depends. It just depends on the offer. It’s just really. There’s no. I think people are too attached to everything being set in stone. And my answer is it depends.

Lee Kantor: So when you’re working with a new coach, um, how do you help them decide what is the appropriate offer for them?

Jeanne Omlor: Well, we work with them. And the very first, um, first session, and I work that out with them. I just work back and forth, and I figure that out.

Lee Kantor: And then what are some of the criteria you use to decide the type of offer?

Jeanne Omlor: Uh, it depends what they’re doing. So let’s say it’s a relationship coach then that might be different. Might be different than somebody that’s a business coach, for instance. And whether they’re coaching a corporation will be very different from an individual.

Lee Kantor: And then is the offer different or the pricing different or both?

Jeanne Omlor: Everything will be different because if you’re coaching a corporation to do go in and do a team coaching, it’s going to be very different deliverable than some individual that needs a relationship coaching because their boyfriend left them.

Lee Kantor: And then but the offer would be different and the pricing obviously would be different.

Jeanne Omlor: Everything’s different. The pricing and the offer completely different because it’s a different context. Yes.

Lee Kantor: And then when you’re working with the coaches, is there something you’ve learned over time, like the typical objection that they might face when.

Jeanne Omlor: Well, you know, with sales there’s always the same objections with all sales. Do you know what they are? Help me out here. What are the sales objections?

Lee Kantor: Um, time and money effort.

Jeanne Omlor: Yep, yep.

Jeanne Omlor: It’s always the same for anything you’re selling. You’re going to get the same objections.

Lee Kantor: So, um, what are some of your advice to them? In order to get past some of those objections?

Jeanne Omlor: You need to be so good that those objections don’t matter when you show that you have had great results with somebody, or even not have had that. But when you give them an offer that is a grand slam offer that they’re like, can’t lose, then those objections are easier. And I don’t say to deal with because some people don’t want to get past their objections, and I don’t if they don’t want to get past the objections, I don’t try. So it’s all it’s not about forcing people. It’s about just peeling back, the peeling back the obstacles to them wanting to do it. That’s that’s more how I look at it. So somebody goes, oh, John, I really, really, really want to do this, but I don’t have any money. I’m like, well, you know, do you really, really want it? Yeah I do okay. Well what would that look like if you don’t get coaching? Well I’m never going to make this business work. Okay. What would you rather have the risk of investing or never make your business work and then it’s their choice.

Lee Kantor: And, um, early on, when you were developing this and you were selling it to other people, can you share the first story of maybe one of the early wins you had where you’re like, okay, I’m on to something. This is definitely transferable. I’m able to help people get to new levels.

Jeanne Omlor: Exactly. My very first client with this particular offer signed up, and we had a couple calls and he and his wife, he said, do you have any testimonials? I said, not for this. I said, I’m not going to lie to you. You would be my first client for this online offer. He went, aha, okay, cool, because everybody needs to start somewhere. I said, yep. So I’m not going to give you testimonials from another offer, which was the one on one coaching. I said because it wouldn’t be true. So I’m not going to give you that. You would be my first client. He said, wow, my wife and I are so amazed that you did not lie to us and make up some fake stuff. We’re hiring you. I said great. Then before he got on the first call, he said, guess what? He gets on the call. And he said, I just got a 30 K client. Just by being in your world, just the mindset. I never would have gotten that. Just just those two sales calls and what you were telling me, I went and got a 30 K client even without actual coaching. Now that’s pretty good.

Lee Kantor: And then is your offer one on one coaching or is it group coaching or. You have both.

Jeanne Omlor: Is it a group? It’s neither. It’s actually a group one on one hybrid model. So there I have other coaches that work with me. I have a mindset coach who’s also a theta healer. I have a heart based sales coach because that’s what we teach. And we have a content and copy coach that used to run Universal Studios video content department. I have another head coach, client success director, and me. So you have a very, very dialed in professional high level team of coaches. And there’s also unlimited one on one. It’s a very unusual model in the marketplace.

Lee Kantor: And then so, uh, a person signs up, they have a call with you at some point, or you just get information.

Jeanne Omlor: Because they have unlimited one on ones.

Lee Kantor: Right? But before they make the buying decision.

Jeanne Omlor: The very first call is we are going to craft that offer and get them their pathway.

Lee Kantor: So there’s this is an introductory paid for call is the first call.

Jeanne Omlor: No, the first call is actually a sales call, which is free.

Lee Kantor: Okay. So there’s a free sales call, I guess, for each of you to vet to see if this is a good fit.

Jeanne Omlor: Absolutely.

Lee Kantor: And then from there, there’s a paid offer call where you craft the offer.

Jeanne Omlor: Nope. There’s not a paid offer call. There’s there’s two offers that we sell. They get one or the other. And that first. No we don’t we don’t. We’re very professional. We’re not like bits and pieces. And that’s what I teach is to run an actual coaching business. That’s not like we’re, you know, like actually professional. So people get a free call, of course, to see if they want to do it. They sign up or not. Sometimes they want a second call. Sure. That’s also free, of course. Then they’re in a program and it’s all included. It’s not. Then one call and then we pay. No, it’s the hire. They hire us for a program and it’s all included. So that first coaching call we do is all included in a program. Does that make sense? We’re not then doing one column. We pay for that. That’s not very professional.

Lee Kantor: And then is a program a month, 90 days a year. Like what’s the how’s the program defined?

Jeanne Omlor: We have a 12 week program and a year program.

Lee Kantor: So those are the two programs.

Jeanne Omlor: Yep.

Lee Kantor: And then um, and then is it something that people just keep signing up for? Or if you go through the 12 week or the year, you’re kind of self-sufficient at that point.

Jeanne Omlor: Some people do the 12 weeks and then they want to continue because they want to keep building it. But we do the 12 weeks because the 12 weeks is geared to giving people the fishing rod how to go get clients online. Some people just want to learn that, hey, show me how to go fish. And we say here, sure, 12 weeks, you’re good. They’re starting to get clients, so now they know how to do that over and over again. Some people want to build the business. They want mentorship as well. They want to learn other things other than just getting clients. They want to get on podcasts. They want to monetize that. They want to start a podcast, maybe get speaking gigs. We coach on all of that in our longer program, team building, all that.

Lee Kantor: But either one you get access to the team.

Jeanne Omlor: Yes.

Jeanne Omlor: Both of them just. And some people do the 12 weeks and then sign up for the year. One of my clients signed up for three years. He just kept signing up because he enjoyed the mentorship. It was working. He just wanted to keep building.

Lee Kantor: What rewarding work. I mean, you must sleep well at night knowing the impact you’ve had on so many people.

Jeanne Omlor: It’s amazing actually, and I’m actually very proud of me and my team. Um, because, you know, during Covid when people were dropping like flies, not just dying, but I mean, like, they were just like, what am I doing? I have no job. We helped a lot of people position and offer online and start selling it, and they were putting food on the table. So what we provide, what we help with is a very simple solution.

Lee Kantor: Well, I mean, it’s meaningful work and you’re really impacting a lot of individuals, their families and their communities. So it’s important.

Jeanne Omlor: Exactly.

Jeanne Omlor: And you know what what people need is they need to thrive. They need. It’s the worst feeling because I’ve been there, you know, I have been very poor. Deep debt. It’s the worst feeling in the world to wake up and think, gee, how am I? Going to how am I going to provide for my children? Worst feeling in the world. And my thing is, once you get to a point where you’re not worried about paying the rent or the mortgage and all your daily expenses, that’s a level of freedom where it’s like, you know, it’s just taken care of. That’s the first level of freedom, and I want everybody to feel that level of freedom where they have no worry about their day to day livelihood. And then from there, then you go to the next level.

Lee Kantor: So if somebody wants to learn more, have a more substantive conversation with you or somebody on the team, what’s the website? What’s the best way to connect?

Jeanne Omlor: Best way is we’re going to give you that link. But it’s just com. And if you look you’ll see, you know, reviews and you can click on that page. And then there’s a place where you can see hundreds of client testimonials. And there’s also a place where they can book a call.

Lee Kantor: And that’s j e e m l o r.com.

Jeanne Omlor: Yep. That’s it.

Lee Kantor: Com and then do you are you on all the socials or do you have a main social that you’re active on?

Jeanne Omlor: Linkedin Instagram, Facebook are the three main socials. I also am on YouTube TV. I have a podcast that’s uh, we put on YouTube as well, and other videos.

Lee Kantor: Well, congratulations on all the success. You’re doing important work and we appreciate you.

Jeanne Omlor: Well thank you. Thank you for the opportunity to speak with you about this today.

Lee Kantor: All right. This is Lee Kantor. We’ll see you all next time on High Velocity Radio.

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