Dave Lorenzo (00:01):
Hey, now welcome to this Saturday Side Hustle. It's Dave Lorenzo. I'm the godfather of growth, and today I'm solo because it's Saturday, Nikki G will be back with me tomorrow for the Sunday special. Today's show, we have a talk I did just this past week in Skokie, Illinois for a group called the Executive Guild. It's a 70 year old membership club for people who own businesses in the suburbs of Chicago. There were about 46 people in attendance. It was at a capital grille and they just finished their entrees and dessert was being served when I started to talk. So you will hear the gentleman who leads the group introduce me, and then you'll hear some clanking of plates and silverware throughout the talk. You'll hear the audience participation in the beginning. Right in the beginning of the talk. You may hear a little background music, but that slowly fades away and by five or six minutes into the talk, the music is completely gone. These things shouldn't distract you. You'll be able to really concentrate on the talk. We cover the topic of leadership influence and how you can use your leadership influence to attract the right people into your business to achieve your business goals. So welcome to the Executive Guild in Skokie, Illinois. Enjoy your dessert as I give this presentation and I'll be back at the end for the happy recap.

Steve Glick (01:38):
We are extremely fortunate to have him come. I'm very honored to consider him a friend and he is the godfather of growth. Dave Lorenzo.

Dave Lorenzo (01:48):
Thank you, pal, I appreciate it. Alright, thanks everybody. Thanks. Now, now that everybody has had their stake and you need a nap, this is the perfect time for the after dinner speaker. It's an absolute honor and a pleasure to be here. Steve is a really good friend and when he asked me to do this, I jumped at the chance because I spend all of my time talking to, working with and speaking in front of groups of business owners just like all of you. You are my people. It is a pleasure to be here, but I want to tell you that I wrote that intro for Steve and I got to punch it up a little bit. There was one time when I think the introduction as a speaker was worse. And I guess since we're all so close now, I mean I've been here what, like an hour and a half already.

(02:34):
Let me tell you that story. I used to be a partner with the Gallup organization. How many of you have heard of the Gallup Poll? Okay. Gallup has a consulting company as well, and I was a managing partner of their consulting organization based in New York, and we got booked by a company named Sutherland Lumber. And this is like, it's got to be like 2004, maybe 2003, and it's Overland Park, Kansas, and it's their all employee meeting. So they're bringing in people from all over the place. They're like the Home Depot of the Midwest, and they book it at this ornate theater and it was an all day event. They had a bunch of activities and speakers planned, and I'm the opening keynote speaker. So they tell me to pull around the back and come in the back door, which is the performer's entrance of this old ornate theater.

(03:21):
So I open the door and I walk in and I go back there and it's like a high school. Remember your high school stage? You're back there and there's cobwebs and there's a cord you pull to open the curtain. So I go there and I'm standing there and it's just me and a couple of technical people and the guy who booked me, the HR director not there yet. So I look at my watch, it's like 10 minutes before I got to go on and not there. It's a surprise. So I peek outside through the little corner of the curtain, people are in there, everybody's in their seats and they're talking and milling around and two or three people come in and it's five minutes before I got to go on. The guy's still not there. Then it's the time I have to go on and now people are really milling around and he's still not there.

(04:02):
So five minutes after I'm supposed to go on the door opens, he walks in, walks right past me, doesn't say a word, goes out on the stage, spotlights on him, grabs the mic, and he says, ladies and gentlemen, first he taps the mic. I hate when people do that. He taps the mic to make sure it's on right. The only thing worse than that is blowing in the mic, right post covid all kinds of disease. So he taps the mic, ladies and gentlemen, ladies and gentlemen, can I have your attention please? Place goes silent. He's like, I know many of you may have heard the news that Donald, I think his name was Donald, Donald Sutherland, the patriarch of our family was found dead in his living room last night. All of a sudden, everybody in the room goes, oh, woman screams. People start crying. He's like, I just want to let you know that we're going to cancel the rest of the program today. But since he's come all the way from New York, ladies and gentlemen, Dave Loren Enzo.

(04:58):
So I walk out on the stage and I do my hour and a half, but that was probably, I got to say that was probably the toughest intro. This I think is going to be something that, well, let's put it this way. You had a great meal tonight. Consider this talk like a buffet. What I want you to do is take what you like and leave the rest. And here's what I want you to think about. First, I got four really impactful or maybe five slides. First thing I want you to think about is are your current goals aligned with these objectives? This year, I will speak probably 35 times to people just like you, people who are business owners through an organization called Vistage. I know you all know what Vistage is, and I'm honored to be a seminar leader for Vistage. I go all over the country and do half day seminars.

(05:44):
And what we found is that when you align your goals, the goals that you have with these four objectives, everything in your life becomes completely clear. You have what's clarity of purpose? So think about these for a minute. Are your goals aligned with a way to attract more customers, a way to increase customer lifetime value, a way to increase the value of your company or a way to plan for your exit or succession? Now, when I first talked to business owners about their exit or potential succession planning, they think to themselves, either I'm not ready or my business probably doesn't have an exit or I'm going to die at my desk. But what we found is that if you think about what you're going to do with your business, whether it's 15 years down the road, five years down the road, you build a better business because you're building something that focuses on all the drivers of the value of the business.

(06:55):
We're going to spend just a few minutes today talking about leadership influence, and I want you to think about the who, not the how. Okay? This is a phrase that I'm borrowing from a gentleman named Dan Sullivan, who's the founder of Strategic Coach. It's a fantastic entrepreneurial coaching organization. Most of us as entrepreneurs, as business owners, we get all hung up in the How am I going to do this? How am I going to make this happen? What we should be thinking about is who do I need to help me do this? Who do I need to make this happen? And our time today talking about leadership influence is going to be about how to attract the right who's into your world to make the how happen. Now, there are 10 key drivers of value for your business. I'm going to put 'em up on the board here, and I want you to think about someone that you need to attract into your world that can help you with one of these key drivers.

(08:05):
I'll give you an example of what I'm talking about. Okay, so the 10 key drivers of enterprise value, the 10 key drivers of business value are diversity of revenue stream and the quality of your revenue stream, your leadership development and management team, your operations, standard operating procedures, your HR standard operating procedures, legal exposure, brand reputation, sales and marketing systems, market industry and supplier conditions, financial conditions and reporting, cybersecurity risk and information technology. If a private equity fund was going to buy your business today, I don't care what size your business is, think about it this way, but private equity fund was going to buy your business today. This would be their due diligence checklist. They'd go through all of these things and look at your business with each of these. And what you'd have to do is you'd have to make sure you maxed out all of these that you minimized the legal risk, for example, that your HR standard operating procedures were on point.

(09:02):
Let's talk about revenue streams real quick, and I'll give you the who versus how example. So there's four types of revenue in any business. There's only four types of revenue. Ad hoc revenue and ad hoc revenue is I find a client, I take care of the client, I move on, find a new client, forget about the first client. Completely ignore the first client. That's what we all do. We're all thinking about ad hoc revenue. Second type of revenue is repeat revenue, revenue, revenue, repeat revenue. It goes over big everywhere. Alright? Repeat revenue. Repeat revenue is same client, different type of work. So you're a widget manufacturer. You find out that your customers, 80% of them need crankshafts. So you start manufacturing crankshafts, widgets and crankshafts. That's repeat revenue. Third type is recurring revenue. Recurring revenue is same product, same customer widget, widget, widget, widget, widget.

(10:02):
You find a customer that buys widgets all the time every month. That's recurring revenue. Fourth type is passive, right? You get a referral from somebody in here, passive revenue, big bag of cash, drop down your desk, you go speak somewhere. Somebody runs up to you after the speaking gig, they decide they want to work with you that I would consider passive revenue. You didn't do anything. They came up to you. Two weeks later they decided they want to work with you, right? The first revenue stream, ad hoc revenue, that's what we all focus on. But when somebody's going to buy your business, that's the least valuable revenue stream because it's not predictable. He loves it. Makes sense? He loves it. Alright, the other three revenue streams, I call those relationship revenue. Say it with me. What type of revenue relationship? Very good. You guys are fantastic. Even after dinner, you got it. This is great. Relationship revenue. Okay? So if you're going to think about who you want to influence from our time together today using the techniques we talk about, if you want to think about who you can connect with, think about somebody that can help you deliver repeat, recurring or passive revenue because that's relationship revenue. Now, if you want to influence somebody to help you to be your client, to be a strategic alliance partner for you or to potentially refer you business, there's a model that you can follow.

(11:29):
This is how you become a person of influence. There's three elements to influencing anyone. The first element is what people think they want from you. It's the outcome. It's the outcome. So you're a widget manufacturer, they need a widget. That's the outcome.

Audience Member (11:46):
Can you go back and talk about repeat versus

Dave Lorenzo (11:48):
Recurring? Yes, great question. Okay, because I think,

(11:53):
Okay, repeat revenue. So repeat revenue is same client, right? Different type of product or service. And the reason that it's differentiated from recurring, recurring is the same product over and over and over again. The big difference in those two from the client's perspective is the investment of trust. Okay? So with repeat revenue, repeat revenue requires more trust than recurring revenue because you're a widget manufacturer. Now you want to sell 'em crankshafts. They've never seen you make crankshafts before, but they're crankshaft supplier. He's on vacation in Europe with his wife. His wife never been to Europe, so he can't give him crankshafts this month, right? So he's going to try you for the crankshafts, but he's got to invest more trust in you because he's never seen you do crankshafts before. That's repeat recurring revenue. He needs widgets. He's seen you do widgets over and over and over again a million times.

(12:49):
He knows that you can do widgets, which customer is stickier, recurring revenue is stickier, recurring revenue is stickier because it does not require that investment of trust over and over again because they've seen you do it. What we find most often is when people start thinking about client lifetime value, right? When they first get it and they go, man, if I want to sell my business, or man, if I want to 10 x my business, I can increase the client lifetime value. They immediately think, what else can I sell this guy? And then they go off and start doing things that are outside their core competency. When in reality you should just look for the customer that needs the recurring revenue, that needs your thing over and over and over and over again. Okay? Is that good or good? Thank you. Alright, great. Thanks. Okay, so if you want to influence people, this is what the model looks like.

(13:39):
The first thing that everybody thinks about if they're your customer or if they're a person you want to influence is what do I want? What do I want to get out of this? We think providing the outcome, that's the whole ballgame. I work with lawyers on occasion and lawyers think, Hey, listen, I'm just going to be a good lawyer and the clients are going to beat a path to my door. Laura, I'm sorry. That's just the way they think. It's not going to happen. It's not going to happen, right? It's not going to happen. I'm just going to be a good lawyer and they're going to beat a path to my door. Well, the second thing, we love consultants, love this. If you're a consultant, I feel your pain because we love to talk about our methodology. I got the greatest methodology in the world.

(14:18):
My magic is better than everybody else's magic. So now we got outcome and we got the magic. And then the third thing is the experience. People answering the phone, people returning calls, how I make the customer or client feel. That's the third element in our minds. The outcome and the magic are the two things we always focus on. This is what it looks like to your client or to your customer. Here's the outcome. You got to deliver the outcome. If you can't deliver the outcome, you're out of business. It's the price of entry. Delivering the outcome is the price of entry, how you do it, your 30 years of experience, your magic juju that you provide. You know what that's worth to the customer. This not much. What's the whole ball game makes the difference? The relationship experience? Do you make them feel like they are the most important customer in the world to you?

(15:17):
Do you make them feel like their business is important? I'll tell you a quick story. In sales it's called a damaging admission. It's just flat out vulnerability. I had a client come into town to see me one time consulting client, and the next day we had a group meeting and this guy's in my car and he wasn't, let's put it this way, he wasn't my highest paying client at the time and I'm taking him to dinner. He was the only person who came into town early. I'm kind of regretting that I'm taking him to dinner because he wasn't my highest paying client. And we're driving to dinner and he says something to me about this other client who's coming in the next day, who's going to be at the event. She's going to be speaking, she's going to be teaching a part of the event with me. And he says to me, I don't understand. I've been with you for five years. Why does she get the teaching spot? She's only been with you for two years. And I turned to him and I said, she pays a lot of money.

(16:16):
What did that do to the relationship experience? Here's the thing, folks. That was the lesson that taught me that the relationship experience is everything I needed to make that guy feel like he was the most important guy in the world because what he's paying, that wasn't his fault. Whose fault was it that he wasn't paying as much as the other person is my fault? So when you're thinking about what clients are worth, they're worth what you asked them for. So you have to provide that same kick ass client experience to everyone regardless of who they are and what they're paying. So how do we develop this type of experience? I got a formula for you. It's called my relationship operating system. I'm going to share it with you here tonight. These are six core values, six core values that are guaranteed to provide a fantastic experience if you demonstrate them to your clients.

(17:16):
You're going to see some terms up here that are very common that most of you probably possess right now. The challenge for you is to present these core values to your clients or to the people that you want to persuade when you want to persuade them. And I'll give you some examples. The first is integrity. And there's a reason I've shaped this like a pyramid. The values at the bottom are foundational. If you don't build on these, you can't to the top. Now, you all are people of integrity. Steve has told me, I don't know how much you paid him, but he told me that you're all people of integrity. But if you want to persuade someone, no matter how well you know them, you have to demonstrate again the integrity that you two share. And you have to demonstrate that your request is coming from a place of integrity.

(18:17):
So let me give you an example. If I wanted to persuade Steve to do something, I would connect with him and I would say to him, Hey Steve, listen. You told me that you wanted to get more listings in Naperville. And Steve would say, sure, I'd love more listings in Naperville. I'd love to spend half my day in the car. And I would say, wonderful, Steve, here's what I'll do. I know five people who are centers of influence in Naperville. I'd like to connect them with you. I'd like to do it over a couple of lunches. Would that be okay? And he would say yes. So what am I demonstrating there? I'm demonstrating there that I care about Steve. I'm showing him that I have an external orientation that I care about his success. I make those introductions to Steve. Maybe Steve picks up a listing.

(19:05):
Maybe he picks up two listings. If I want to ask Steve for something, he's going to be more receptive because he sees that I'm a person of integrity. I have an external orientation and I'm interested in his success. And he knows that if he helps me, I'm going to continue to be interested in his success. I'm demonstrating to him that I'm a person of integrity by going to him first and helping him first before asking for something. Does that make sense? So you need to demonstrate that you're not only a person of integrity, but the second core value that's foundational is competence. Let's say you have an employee. How many of you have employees in your business? So you got an employee and you want them to do something that's outside of their normal routine. So you go to them, you demonstrate you're a person of integrity.

(20:00):
Hey, I heard you want to grow. You want to be a manager someday? Yes, I do want to be a manager someday. Well, here's what I'm going to do. I'm going to take one day where I'm going to train you behind the scenes one day every month, and you're going to rotate through the business one one day you're going to spend one day with a bookkeeper. You're going to send one day in the warehouse. You're going to spend one day out in the field with sales. How does that sound? Oh, that sounds great. You're going to get paid the same amount of pay you get paid, but you're going to learn all these different roles because you want to be a manager someday. So you're demonstrating integrity. And then you say to them, and now what we're going to do is we're going to record all of these things, record the things that you learned, and then we're going to talk about where you are the best fit.

(20:40):
And I came up with this technique because that's the way my dad taught me the business. What are you demonstrating there? Competence. So now you've demonstrated that you're a person of integrity, you're interested in them. You have an external orientation. You've demonstrated your leadership competence by having that plan for them. So if you wanted to ask them to do something, you've already demonstrated that you're coming from a place of integrity and you're coming from a place of competence as a leader. The third element is empathy. Who wants to give me a definition for empathy? Throw it out. Shout it out. Go ahead, Howard, please. Well,

Audience Member (21:20):
It's under the umbrella of paths, right? There's sympathy, there's apathy, there's empathy. Empathy as I understand it is truly relating to their experience and their feelings as if you were them.

Dave Lorenzo (21:33):
That's the key word. Feelings. You can understand their feelings, our empathy. Thank you, Howard. Put your hands together for Howard. Good job. Who wants to answer this question? Does empathy mean agreement?

(21:50):
It's different. Can you be empathetic with someone without agreeing with them? Yes. Think about your crazy uncle who your spouse says, we're not inviting 'em over next year for Thanksgiving. All he does is get in fights with people. Well, here's what you can do with the crazy uncle. You can say to the crazy uncle, your beliefs are fascinating. How did you come up with them and let him spend 45 minutes, by the way, bring a bottle with you. Spend 45 minutes, spend 45 minutes telling you how he came up with the beliefs. Watch how it softens him up because part of his issue is that nobody tries to understand him. Lemme tell you a quick story about flat earth Eddie. My daughter is in a Girl Scout troop and she joined a Girl Scout troop that was from a different school than the school that she goes to.

(22:36):
So it was a little tough for her at first. She didn't know anybody in the Girl Scout troop, but she gets acclimated. She meets these kids and they're really into it. Now I'm from New York, okay? I don't camp. I had never been before. We were involved with the Girl Scouts. I had never been camping. I get a text from my wife one night after a Girl Scout meeting. My daughter's name is Dalia. Dalia is going to tell you something, be sure and be excited. So I'm like, okay, fine. So she walks in, dad, dad, guess what? We're going camping.

(23:09):
Okay, we're going camping. So I had to go to Dick's and buy a tent. And you know what I did? I put the box with the tent in my trunk and I forgot about it until the camp out came up. So we get to the campsite and my son and I literally, it's in a big circle. All these people are putting up all kinds of fancy tents and stuff. My son is looking at the directions and reading the directions to me for this cheap Dick's tent I got. And we're putting poles together. A goes into B, and everybody else has unbelievable tents. I look over next to me. So our slab is here, our friend's slab is here, and the guy who's over here, he's got his three girls lashing wood together, forming a lean to, okay? And he's got a tent that has a porch, his tent has, it's a full blown tent with a porch, and he's using power tools.

(23:59):
So we put our dick's tent together and thank God the tent could only fit two people. So two people had to go to a hotel, which was amazing. I said to myself, I got to figure out what this guy's doing. So I go over to the guy's tent, I said, you got this whole thing down? And he's like, well, I was in the military and I really like this. This is kind of what we do. By the way, all camo and his three girls all in camo too. I didn't think about it at the time, but it was a little creepy that he had the girls in camel. But anyway, he's got this amazing tent. He's like, come, let's have a drink and talk about what you got going on over at your campsite. I said, all right. So we sit on his tent porch and we're having a drink and I'm getting to know the guy and he seems like a kind of cool guy.

(24:39):
He's telling me some stories. So that night we have, they call it family dinner, and we all sit down at the table and my buddy who got us into the Girl Scouts, his daughter's got us into the Girl Scouts in the first place, sits next to me and he elbows me. I see we're talking to flat Earth Eddie. I'm like, what? He's like, yeah, flat earth Eddie. He thinks the earth is flat. I'm like, really? And he says, yeah. I said, I didn't get that impression from him. We were talking about building a tent, hunting and being in the woods. And he says, no, no, no. He's like, you got to ask him. You got to ask him. So they do the campfire afterwards, and Eddie's sitting over by himself and I'm like, oh, I got to find out about this. So I go over to Eddie and he says, I guess you heard about me. He's like, I saw you talking to Leo, heard about you. What do you mean? He's like, everybody makes fun of me because of my beliefs, and I'm playing along. I'm like religious beliefs. He's like, no, I have an alternate version of science.

(25:28):
And I'm like, tell me more about that. And he goes on and on about how the earth is flat and 25, 30 minutes. And I asked him a question. I'm like, if I fly to California, how far can I go before I got to turn around? And all kinds of really good, really good. And he's got a theory for everything. By the way, we were drinking beer on the 10th porch. He had switched to scotch. So he's like, you want another drink? I said, no. I said, I got to get back to my family. I said, but I really, really enjoyed this conversation. And as I turned to walk away, he goes, Hey Dave, I want to thank you. I'm like, thank me for what? And he says, I've been hanging around these families for five years. Everybody tells me I'm crazy. I know you don't think the earth is flat.

(26:07):
And I looked at him and he goes, but you're the only person who took the time to ask me how I developed these beliefs. Now, listen, Eddie may be bat crazy, but what I will tell you is he's an HVAC mechanic, owns his own company, and when your air conditioning goes down, you want to be the guy who's friends with flat earth Eddie. The second thing I'll tell you is that the next day, Eddie had a case of beer in him and we went skeet shooting. By the way, I'd never been skeet shooting before. We had a case of beer in him, and he went, skeet shooting a hundred and clay pigeons missed three times. So when the zombie apocalypse goes down flat earth, Eddie, he is your best friend. So that's what empathy is. The next element is vision. This is the whole ballgame here.

(26:57):
Now there's more stuff on the pyramid, but if you can get to the place where you have a vision for somebody and you share that vision with them and they buy into the vision, you are set. I'll show you what I'm talking about. Go back to that key employee. They can do more. They can be a manager someday. You can see it. If you run up to them without doing these other steps and you say you're going to be a manager, I'm so excited you're going to do all these things and you're going to make so much money, they're going to go, they never thought of themselves in that role. And here's what's going to happen. They're going to think, well, this guy works 90 hours a week. He's the manager. Do I want to work 90 hours a week? No, no, no, I don't want to do that.

(27:39):
I'm never going to do that. I don't know what he sees, but I sure as hell don't see it. So if you go back and you demonstrate your integrity, demonstrate your competence, use your empathy as a gateway, then you have the ability to share your vision with them and they will buy into it. So what does that look like? You're asking them questions about what they want for their future. You're understanding why they want what they want, and then you use your vision as a path to help them get what they want because you understand where they're coming from. Now, there's one more element to vision that's critically important, and that is that you have to get them to see it and to articulate it as clearly as if it was real. How many of you know who Michael Phelps is? Okay, great. So Michael Phelps trained in a very particular way.

(28:38):
Michael Phelps's coach was a genius at this, and he's one of the people who pioneered this technique from the time Michael was eight years old. What he would do is he would have Michael swim a stroke in the pool, and when he did it perfectly, he would get him out of the water and he would sit him down and he would say, close your eyes and swim that stroke in your mind. And he would repeat in his mind what he had just done in the pool visualization, and he would say, describe for me exactly what you're doing and exactly how you're doing it over and over and over again. So whenever Michael would swim the stroke perfectly, his coach would pull him out of the pool, make him swim it in his mind, and then before a race, the coach would say, now we're going to play the tape.

(29:17):
And he would sit Michael down and tell him to swim the entire race. In his mind, that was the cue. We're going to play the tape. Okay, now a tape comes from a V C R, which some of you may not even remember. It was a thing you had to use. You put a thing in and watch movies. We don't have those anymore, but he would say, play the tape, and Michael would swim the race in his mind. That's what you have to do with your key employee, with your customer. If you want them to buy in, you've got to get them to buy into the vision. Here's the way it works. First, they believe in you, then they believe in the vision, and then they believe in themselves. That's the final element. We stop when we think they believe in us. I'm going to say those three things again because it's so important. First, and this goes for customers or employees first, they believe in you, then they believe in the vision, and then they believe in themselves.

(30:16):
Making people a part of a community is critically important, and the community can help you with your persuasive process. This is a community. What you all have here is a community, and if somebody comes up to you and they're a person of integrity and they've demonstrated their competence in the area that they're talking to you about and they've shown you that they care about you and they have a vision for your future, and they say to you, Hey, why don't you try this? Five or six other people in the group have done it and it's really, really successful. The community will help you influence and persuade them. Think about fad diets. Years ago, a million years ago, there was a diet called the Atkins Diet, right? Everybody remember that? Eat all the meat you want, no cholesterol, it's great. This place would love that diet.

(31:06):
Eat all the meat you want no carbs. You know what's going to happen? You're going to lose a lot of weight, man. People love that diet. That was a great diet. Well, where I worked at the time, it ran through that place like a virus maybe too soon. I don't know. It ran through that place like a virus. Everybody in the office was on the Atkins diet. Everybody was losing weight. And then six months later, everybody got fat. But the community, the community helped persuade everyone to go on that diet because what happened, Jane did the Atkins diet. She was a house. Now she's just a condo now. Mean it worked like magic, okay? The community can help you persuade. The final element is professional intimacy. And in business, we're really uncomfortable with this word because this means that they don't make a move without calling us.

(32:11):
They don't make a move without asking for our opinion. If you have professional intimacy with your client, with your customer, they check with you on a Saturday afternoon while you're watching football, and it's the most important thing that they get your opinion before they make the big decision. But you got to have all of these other elements in place before you get to professional intimacy. Now, if you just get to the vision step, can you persuade people? Absolutely you can. Here's what happens with professional intimacy. This is the client that never leaves when you screw up the client apologizes. This is the employee that misses family events to take care of something that you need taken care of. This is the strategic alliance partner that gives up their vacation because it's your busiest time of the year. That's how you know you've got professional intimacy. Now, I told you this was a buffet, so I told you that I just wanted you to get one thing. Take what you like and leave the rest. Here's the reason why. I think it might make sense for you to give this some thought.

(33:28):
This is my bio. Steve did a good job of describing it. I started two different businesses in the last 30 years. I took a startup from Marriott from zero to 50 million in three years. I took the Gallup organization's consulting business in New York from startup to 250 million in six years. But that's not the reason why I think you should give this some serious thought. I've written three books. The last book was really successful, which means I made $15 in royalties and five people actually read the book, and those five people became clients. So that's good. I got two master's degrees. None of these reasons, this process I've used in 55 different industries. None of these reasons are the reasons why I think it makes sense for you to consider this and take it back with you. The reason why I think it makes sense, and the reason why I think you might want to think about implementing this in your business is because of something that happened to me on the corner of sixth Avenue and 43rd Street in New York City.

(34:27):
My biggest client at that time was Pfizer Pharmaceuticals, and we had done a study on a drug called Lipitor. It was going to come off of patent protection six years after the study was completed, our job was to interview physicians and Lipitor patients and come up with a way to get doctors to write 10% more prescriptions than the generic drug. And that 10% was worth over $650 million. So if we could get these docs to increase prescriptions for the brand name drug by 10%, six 50 to the bottom line for Pfizer, okay? We were in the field for a year, 19 different countries, 300 people, 300 people involved in this study. It was a $5 million project for Gallup. Pfizer's my biggest client. I'm in my office in December. I'm engaged to be married. My second wife, we had plans to go to lunch that day to discuss our wedding phone rings.

(35:26):
My assistant comes in, she says, Jeff Kinsler's office. Jeff's the c e o of Pfizer. They want to talk to you. I answer the phone. Jeff's going to be in China when you're due to deliver results. He wants top line from your study. Can you come over and give it to him? I said, sure. Lemme pull the team together. We'll put a short presentation together. I'll be over next week. How does Tuesday look? She said, no, no, you don't understand. Jeff wants you to come over right now. So I called my wife and I said, listen, I'm not going to be able to make it. I'm sorry. She said, don't worry about it. I already made other plans because this is not the first time I had canceled something personal to deal with something in my business. I pull some papers together, I got nothing. I got nothing to give this guy, but he's my best client. So I pull some papers together, go down in the elevator, walk outside, five five-block walk from where I was to Pfizer, get to the corner of sixth Avenue and 43rd Street. There were 30 people in the crosswalk. 29 of them were successfully able to avoid the taxi That struck me. Now, I don't remember very much from immediately after that. I know I flew 23 feet, seven inches because that's what the police report said.

(36:41):
The next thing I remember is waking up in the hospital, St. Vincent's Hospital strapped to a backboard with my head in a brace on a gurney being wheeled down the hall of the hospital, looking up at ceiling tiles. It kind of looked a little like this and no feeling from my armpits down. And I did in that moment what basically everybody does, whether you're religious or not, I made a deal with God and I said, listen, if you let me out of this, if somehow I get out of this, I'm going to make some changes. So you see me standing here in front of you today. So thank God everything worked out fine. But what I took away from that was three things. Number one, if I had had the courage to say to my client, listen, I don't have what you need right now.

(37:30):
It's not in your best interest or my best interests to come over, give me a couple of days to make this work. Would've been better for both of us, especially me. If I was influential enough, if I knew how to do what I showed you tonight, I probably could have persuaded him, put Jeff on the phone, let me talk to him. Probably could have persuaded him that this is what would've been in his best interests. And the third thing that I learned from this, probably the most important thing is that if you do the things that we outlined here today with the people in your life that you care about the most, those relationships will get you through just about anything. Because that's what ended up helping me get through the situation that happened to me. So now I did. I fulfilled, God, fulfilled his end of the bargain. I fulfilled mine. I ended up leaving the job that paid me a lot of money, yet was making me relatively miserable. I ended up starting my own business, and now I go around sharing this with people like you so that you can potentially use it in your business, in your life to connect and develop deep relationships with the people who are the most important to you. So it's truly an honor to be here with you. It's my pleasure. So thank you so much for having me, and I hope you enjoyed your dessert.

(39:02):
Well, thanks for joining us for that talk on leadership influence up in Skokie, Illinois. We cover this topic whenever I talk to a group of CEOs because I want them to focus on who they need to attract into their business to help them achieve their goals. And you heard at the beginning of this presentation, I briefly go through the 10 key drivers of business value, the key drivers of enterprise value for all businesses. And it's critically important that you have the right people in place to help you get the most out of those key drivers. Some of them, you're going to try to minimize the exposure, for example, legal exposure, others, you need people to put best practices into place, like with your standard operating procedures and with your HR rules and regulations, and then others. You need someone to do an assessment and give you some guidance like assessing the brand value or evaluating your sales and marketing team and making sure that you are doing everything you can to attract your best possible leads, close them as quickly as possible, and deepen the client lifetime value.

(40:26):
Deepen those client relationships, the who the people you want in your world are critical. And this leadership influence model, which I call my relationship operating system, is an essential part of that. So whenever you think you have a difficult problem to solve, don't think about how you're going to solve it. Think about who you can attract into your world that can help you solve the problem. And then go back and listen to this show again and use that leadership influence model to help you develop the relationship and persuade the person to come on board and give you a hand and solve your most difficult problems. This is the Saturday side hustle. I'm Dave Lorenzo, the godfather of growth. We'll back here tomorrow with the Sunday special. Until then, have a great rest of your day.