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How did I do this past year from standing out from the competition and it sometimes it might start from the name of your entity or the branding of your business. But I think that every business ought to have at least one major differentiator from your competition. Yes. Okay. And so you can’t know what that is unless you do a competitive set analysis. Well, gosh, Larry, what’s a competitive set analysis. Well, if you were in the victory coaching program or the higher, my VA, and you might know that.  But yeah. So do a competitive set analysis to find out or to help you identify what is your one significant or a major differentiator?

You know, Dave as we were talking about this, we said that really, there’s three separate categories that make for a, kind of an easy framework to, or recovery and they are the Micro Rest , Macro Rest and the Long Term Rest. Well, there’s some ideas there, but it was like, we were talking about it and those are our terms, so we can kind of like you said, put some framework around it and make people understand is what category this is in. It’s always easier for me. I think of, I always try to think in terms of threes, right. It just makes, it makes it easier for me. And hopefully it makes it easier for other people.

Can I share one of the things with my own personal executive assistant, one of the things she wanted out, like, so what’s the job description here? You know what, the first thing I told her is more than anything else, your job is to protect my time and reputation. 

Well, let me start with one of our tips that we’ve got. So I guess it may seem obvious, but as we go through these it’s important. So number one, if you’re going to hire somebody to do this, you’ve got to define what type of leads that they’re going to be getting for you. I mean, what are they going to be cold, warm? You know, where are they going to do it? That kind of thing you need to identify what type of leads, what industry type of leads and start and start really defining like what we talked about, your ideal client in a lot of ways.

Can we talk about this all the time, right? Like you gotta be grateful and, but what do you actually do to get out of it? It’s interesting because you know, a lot of folks and this might actually be a really good topic, Dave. You and I have had conversations about anxiety and depression lately, because there are people in our, both of our lives who, you know, struggle with that. And it’s hard when you’re in those moments to actually be grateful.

And when these types of changes happen so fast socially, it takes a while for our brains to really catch up and how to deal with it. So given all of that, one other thing before we get into this is we’ve got to really remember that overwhelm- It’s, you know, it’s not really a thing, it’s, it’s just a feeling that we have, because you can feel overwhelmed right now. You might feel overwhelmed, just hearing what we said, but then, you know, you go having a good night’s sleep and you’re not overwhelmed in the morning. So it’s, it’s really a feeling and there’s multiple definitions of it.

Have you ever worked with a leader who is always stressed out, always anxious? How has that worked out for you and the team? Not very well. Right. So if you could be more attractive to your team members, David, you’re saying the team members become more attractive, but also you become more attractive to your clients. Clients want to interact with them, right. And I just promise you it’s, it’s going to be a better work environment. Life is going to be a whole lot more fun.

You know, we talked a little bit about what we were going to invest in, you know, a year ago or we’re going to what opportunities and stuff we’re going to do for 2021 as we’re approaching the end of 2021 now, as we’re looking at 2022 and another month, or so we need to talk about what opportunities are we investing in both us together and individually and what are we investing in and potentially pursuing as we approach 2022.

The point is that you get people attracted to you, pretend you are the honey pot. Right. You know, there’s a, there’s an adage out there that says they it’s not what you know, it’s who you know. Right? And I kind of put another spin on that. I don’t think that’s necessarily the case. I don’t think it’s not who you know. I know a lot of people who knows you, who knows that you’re alive, who knows about your talents, who knows about your successes, who knows about the services that you’re offering. Right? So once you get people to know who you are and become very attractive, right? Then you become the honeypot. People are coming to you and that’s what this webinar teaches. It talks about, you know, how do you expand your influence? How do you attract attention to you and your business? How do you reach more clients? How do you find more investors? How do you build your personal brand? All those things are included in this.

Well, I think first of all, we need to ask tons of questions, right? Leaders have to do and ask more questions than delivering edicts. If all we’re doing is delivering edicts over and over again. We’re not learning, we’re not learning about our team members and Dave, you know that I’ve got this to-do list, right? That I carry with me everywhere. And at the bottom of it, for anyone, everyone who’s been through any of my programs or Dave programs, my programs, I’ve got a bunch of questions down here at the bottom that I ask my team members on a regular basis.

This is episode 103, it’s part two. The first part was we talked about the why behind doing it, you know, the purpose. Right? And we talk about whenever you do anything, make sure you understand the why behind it. So you’re not wasting your time and it also makes sure that if you understand the why you’ve got better results that’ll happen after you’re doing the how. Right? So we talked about the why behind doing an employee satisfaction survey or confidential work climate survey, as you mentioned with your team members.

Climate is more important in your culture, is more important than everything, than any — almost anything else right now. Given what’s going on. Right? With the great resignation and people. Just man, just recently the company that I’m very intimately with, the couple, like key members on their team just left and they spent time, so much time and energy recruiting them. Why did they leave? They don’t exactly know yet, which is an important thing. We can talk about in another episode. But you know, if you make your culture as great as possible and understand what people are really thinking through these surveys, you’ll have a lot better chance on keeping folks.

One of the big mistakes that folks make is that they just look at a resume and they pick all their candidates from a resume. Right? Resumes are very important for sure. Finding out what people’s experiences, what’s their training, all about, that’s the cognitive part of the brain and that’s very important but oftentimes, a resume does not measure some of those things that are really much more important than experience. And there’s three things that we look at and that we teach all of our coaching clients and mentees, is this, we really need to be hiring on motivation, integrity, and capacity first.

One of the first things though is you know, we have to congratulate ourselves in doing the discipline and getting this going and doing it for a hundred episodes. That’s pretty awesome, pat ourselves on the back. But of course, we couldn’t do it without our team, especially Daphne and Brian, but especially Daphne how much she’s edited and created some great graphics. And Daph, it would have just taken us so much out of our extra time to do this. So we really appreciate you. And we thank you for helping us out.

Strengths finder 2.0. This is one of my favorites. And we talk about this in our course in community and all the training we do. How critical, how important it is to understand yourself as well as your team. One of the things that I love about it is it really helps you and shows you how important it is to work towards spending as much time working on your strengths and having your team work on their strengths. Maximum success and productivity and happiness. And one of the great things that talk about the different characteristics, but one of the things I love is for each strength, it gives you if you’re a manager, some tips if you’re working with others who have futuristic as a strength.

Well, like anything new, I’m sure there are phenomenon’s that happen. And there are days, not just zoom, I think it’s any kind of video conferencing service. Because I believe that we are built for community and something happens when we have real physical interaction and you actually can feel people’s energy in one room. If you’re an extrovert, that charges you up. But if all day long, you’re looking at this two-dimensional monitor, I can see how it zaps you. I mean, there’s already been plenty of studies that have talked about the blue screen, blue light time. How it can really zap your energy? That’s why Dave got these fancy glasses on. But you know, there are a couple of things that I know from talking to some of our clients, Dave, is seeing themselves on the monitor all the time and that’s one of the things we need to consider.

There are a bunch of ways that we can handle this thing, but my sense is that’s really what they’re trying to figure out. How do they take more initiative? How do they take more responsibility, just to do stuff? Let me throw a few things out that just kind of roll off the tip of my tongue first and then we kind of dive in. I know you probably got some ideas here too. I think Dave, we need to set up an environment where we hold people accountable for results, not task necessarily. So if ownership is really more about initiative. Accountability is really more about follow through and getting things done. We need to build, if we want people to take more ownership, that really means that we need to set up an environment of trust. We trust that they’re gonna get things done and take initiative and they trust us that they’re not gonna get ground down by making a mistake.

I got my own stuff to do. You should do your own stuff. Well, the truth of the matter is, as a leader, we’re also mentors. We’re also teachers, right? And so we have to have enough margin in our calendars, Dave, to walk the four corners of the business, as they say in the food and beverage industry that say, to touch tables. Which means, if you’ve been to a good restaurant, the manager comes around and they literally touch the table, which means they’re close enough, this was prior to COVID, close enough to actually have a conversation with you. As a leader, we should do that. Even if it is metaphorically, you do it through video calls and you check and say, how are you doing? What can I help you on? Are you, are you stuck on things? That way, you get moments to mentor. You get moments to teach. This question is particularly problematic when we have zero margins.

When you’ve hired your first VA, some people, when they hire somebody, they can just get lucky. That’s like, oh, a friend referred to this other person and they just get lucky. They didn’t ask them many questions or go through a really good rigorous process and they just come on board and they get lucky. You don’t wanna do that with your second one. Because you’re attempting fate. You wanna make sure that when you hire your first one, that you’ve got at least some type of a process down to where you feel like you’re gonna have some confidence that the second person you get, you’re not just throwing darts at the wall or spaghetti at the wall or whatever.

In love and nature, we tend to believe that opposites attract. When it comes to core values and goal setting, however, like attracts like. It’s one of the principles by which many of us choose to live. If we want to be surrounded by people who are in big business, we must have that goal for ourselves and our business. So think big. To be surrounded by people who are socially responsible in business, we must look at our own business and see what changes must be made to be more socially responsible. And likewise, to attract friends and teammates who are loyal and honest, we must display those traits first. Okay, so here’s the question and we end every flashpoint with a question for your reflection. Here it is. What and whom are you attracting through your character traits? So, people that are listening to this podcast, they’re interested in building a team or they have a team and they wanna build their team up more and more. So given that, that’s the question. What are the top three characteristics I should have to lead my team well?