The Secrets To Building And Scaling A Business With Doug C. Brown
How do you build a business? If you already have one, how do you scale it up and double the revenue? Many business owners want the idea of growing their business, but they forget to translate those goals into their lifestyle. Missing this vital piece creates friction between career and personal goals that pin down business growth into a headlock. Today’s guest, Doug C. Brown, a global sales coach of at least a thousand people, joins Mitch Russo to reveal his secrets to building a business. Tune in to gain valuable lessons so you, too, can scale up your own!
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The Secrets To Building And Scaling A Business With Doug C. Brown
In this episode, I have something for all of my coaches and the readers. As a coach myself, I realized that I had been spending about 30 minutes per session extra on admin because they had five applications open at the same time. One for note taking, my calendar, my spreadsheet, my browser, Zoom, and all past session history, all there ready to serve my client. The problem was that at the end of every session, combining all of that into a single email to send homework to my clients was driving me nuts. I decided to get myself a professional coaching platform but here’s what I found, they were all too complex or expensive, so I created my own. I worked for eighteen months with a team of developers and it’s ready for you. I want you to try it for free. If you like it after fourteen days, it’s $20 a month. Go to ClientFol.io and test-drive it yourself. There is no credit card required. See how much more productive you can be and give it a whirl.
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Let’s get into our guest and their incredible story. As a struggling music student at Berkeley College, he discovered that he was better at selling music equipment than playing the keyboards. Selling equipment to Aerosmith, Billy Joel and the Eagles, turned out to be more fun than he realized when he started school and then came the army. With all that being in the army brings with it, years later, he found himself out of work. Even though as a veteran and he was awarded Most Distinguished Soldier, but without marketable skills, a little savings, and a feeling like he had no direction, he took the first job that came along in sales and that changed his life.
Behind every corporate goal is a personal mission. Click To TweetFrom a broke veteran to a lucrative sales position, he mastered the art of sales to train thousands of business people all over the world, including enterprise, car rental, Intuit, P&G, CBS, and more. By the way, that’s when our history began. Longtime readers know that I was the CEO of Tony Robbins, Chet Holmes, Business Breakthroughs International and that’s where we met. I immediately realized his skills were unmatched by anybody in the organization, out-closing, outselling all of our best people. He’s here to show you how you too can increase your revenue, close more deals, and enjoy the benefits of being unstoppable. Welcome, Doug Brown, to the show.
Mitch, thank you for having me here. I’m happy to be here. This will be a lot of fun.
After all, we sure have enough history between us. I‘m thinking it’s several years. We both worked together. We followed each other’s careers through marriage, divorce, and everything that comes in between and here we are. Doug, I’m so happy to have you and thrilled to hear more about all of what you’re doing. Let’s go back and start at the beginning. Roll back and tell us a little bit more about your history and how you got it going.
I started working when I was three years old for my dad. I swept floors for $0.25 a week. That’s starting from the bottom up, if you will. However, $0.25 back then was a lot of money for a kid to buy candy. That was a good payoff. I always learned from that experience that I always wanted to be free and not necessarily working. Even though I’ve worked for other people, I’ve always had that drive to want to have my own say consistently. When I was young, I started worked for my dad all the way through. I’d go to school half a day. I’d get out of the school around 11:00 in the morning. I go to work for my dad. They call it work study. All along that path, I started thinking, “I could do this or I could do that.”
I started this little business. I had a newspaper route and the whole thing that I would take from other people because I wasn’t old enough to get a newspaper route. My brothers would get the newspaper route. I do all the work. They’d collect their 25% and I get %75 but that was okay with me. I kept building businesses all the way through. I was thinking, “I should get a degree.“ What are you without a degree? I went to college for a long time and I still continued to build business. I built some businesses while I was in the military. When I got out of the military, it was like, “I have these college degrees. I have this military background but for some reason, I can’t find a field. I’ll finish up a degree.“ I went back and got one in Nuclear Medicine and I couldn’t find a job. It was like, “Eight years of college with no job. What am I going to do?“
It occurred to me, Mitch, one day because I got a job offer in Nuclear Medicine and what I realized is it was for less money than I was making selling music equipment. I decided that I’ll give the sales thing another try. I had a lot of fun while I was doing it. I went to work for a major corporation at that point and I became the number one sales rep out of 315 in the company. I was pulling down some good money but I was getting disillusioned with the industry that it was in. It was in telecommunications even though I built a telecommunications auditing company. I started migrating out of the corporate world into the telecommunications auditing company, which is what led us to meet.
A man named Jay Conrad Levinson said to me, “Doug, you ought to go onto this Chet Holmes web training.“ I said, “Sure, Jay.” I was working with his nephew. I did and when I saw what was there, I was like, “I could apply this to my business.“ I literally did double my business that next year. I brought it up to $2,000 under a seven figure level. I approached the Chet Holmes organization and said, “I love what you’re doing. I’d like to try to be a coach for you.“ One thing led to another and as you know, I was successful in the coaching program there. When you came in as CEO, that’s how we met.
As a reminder, I didn’t come in as CEO. I came in at the bottom of the rungs recruiting salespeople. Do you remember that?
Yes, I do because you had the Hiring Sales Superstars Program.
The story is that Chet and I had been friends for many years. He called me up one day, and angry. He was having difficulty with one of his employees, a guy named Ted Miller. I said, “What’s the problem?“ He goes, “Ted is so unruly. He can’t get everything done.“ I said, “What’s the problem?” He goes, “I don’t know. I need someone to get ahold of this guy and figure out what’s the problem.“ I said, “Give me his phone number. I’ll give him a call.“ He goes, “What do you mean? You don’t even know him.” I said, “That’s fine.” I call up Ted. I said, “Ted, what’s your biggest problem? If I could take any one problem off your plate, what would it be?“ He said, “Recruiting.“ I said, “I’ll be your recruiter.“ I literally started at the beginning. I called Chet back and I said, “I got good news and I got bad news.“
The good news is that Ted shouldn’t be bothering you about recruiting anymore. The bad news is I’m your new recruiter. I said, “What do you need?“ He goes, “Double my salesforce and that would be great.“ I said, “Chet, I don’t think I know how to recruit salespeople for you. How do I do it?“ He goes, “It’s easy. Read chapter five in my book and you’ll see the whole thing.“ I have his book and I followed the instructions but I realized they weren’t instructions. It was a philosophy. I decided to codify that philosophy and created a software internally to help me do it and that’s how we doubled his salesforce in six weeks.
After weeks, he knows what’s going on. I call him back. I said, “We’re done. You got your salesforce. I doubled it for you. I even identified a guy who I think could run it for you.“ He goes, “What do you mean?“ I said, “My job is done. I’m all set. I hope I helped you out.“ He says to me, “Where do you think you’re going?“ I said, “I told you, I’m done.“ He goes, “What am I supposed to do with this $18,000 check I have on my desk?” I said, “Why do you have an $18,000 check on your desk?“ He goes, “That’s what you earned from the people that you recruited.“ I said, “You could send it along.“ He goes, “That’s not what I meant. I meant you’re going to continue to do this.“ I said, “Really?“ He goes, “I want you to continue to keep doing this because salespeople quit all the time and I need you.“
I did and I stayed. I built the recruiting division. I added client services and all these other things. As a result, the company was growing fast. He offered me the job of running the whole company, which I accepted. Within 30 days of accepting that position, we were on the phone with Tony Robbins every Thursday night trying to figure out how to combine the three of us into one company and build Business Breakthroughs International. I met you around the time that you were still working for Ted and running the webinars. Is that right?
Originally, I ran the frontend on the sales side to get used to everything and then I went into coaching. I quickly became the number one coach in the company in revenue. I remember Chet calling me. It’s funny you’re saying this because as you’re talking, I can hear Chet’s voice talking to you. He called me. He goes, “What are you doing,” which is Chet‘s way. I thought I was in trouble. I said, “What do you mean?“ He goes, “I don’t know what you’re doing but I need to know.“ I said, “What are you talking about?“ He’s like, “You’re billing $65,000 a month in coaching. You’ve only been here six months. What are you doing?“ I’m like, “I’m selling coaching like I would.“ That’s how that worked in. They asked me to be a presenter for Ted’s group at the time. All of a sudden, my close rate was double what everybody else’s was. Ted was going to be exiting at that time. Chet approached me and then you approached me and said, “Do you want to take this over, become the president of training and sales for these?” I said, “Sure.” It’s been a good ride. I got a laugh because I can hear Chet’s voice in the background when he’s talking.
For our readers, that’s a quick catch-up. There’s much more depth to our friendship and our relationship. What I want to get is you have perfected this system of helping people raise revenue and close more sales. What I’d like to do is turn this into a masterclass where you teach our readers how to do that for their own business. Let’s get started. Where do you want to start?
I think if we’re going to teach them how to raise revenues, the first part would be getting truthful in where they want to go. One of the things that I found working with thousands of companies, either in group or one-on-one, is most people don’t have a clear and truthful goal. They have an idea. People used to come to us all the time at Chet and say, “I want to double my company. I want to double my thing.” We start digging into it and it’s like, “You’re a $5 million company. Do you want to be $10 million?” “Yes.” “What if we got you to $6 million?“ “That’d be okay too.“ You’re not committed to going into $10 million and doing that. The first step that I always go through with everybody is let’s get truthful on the outcome and we’ll assess where you are and what’s there. We’ll look at the company and say, “What blind spots are there? What are things working great? What are things working amazingly well? Let’s look at the people, the processes, the skillsets in the company and then let’s build a growth plan from there.”
Let’s go back one step. You said to get real with what your true goals are. You didn’t quite elaborate on that much. How would I become real on what my true goals are? In other words, if I’m a business owner, everything is cranking and I’m doing okay but I want to “double my company?” How do I do this deep dive inside and get real on what I truly want to grow to? How do I know that?
Firstly, you start with your life. We start with the life because behind every corporate goal or agenda is a personal mission or agenda. A lot of people, what they want to do is they want to grow their company but they want to have more discretionary time, free time for themselves. They’re at a scary place because they go, “I’m already working 60 hours a week. If I double my company, I’d be working 80 hours a week or 90 hours a week.“ The first thing I do is if it’s a sole owner company, a couple of people or family–owned, I get everybody to get together. We talk about lifestyle first. What is the lifestyle that we all want to lead? Without that, what ends up happening is we make decisions based on a corporate agenda and they could compete with our life’s goals.
Many people want to grow, but most aren't willing to do what is necessary to succeed. Click To TweetOnce we get the life’s goals clear, then we go back to the business and we start with the corporate goals. “We’re here. We want to go to where. Are we committed to doing that versus is it an idea that we would like to have?” While we worked together, there were a lot of companies that came to us and said, “I want to grow,“ but they weren’t willing to do what was needed or necessary to grow. I find getting clear on the life’s goals first then going to the corporate goal and making sure that all the people who are involved do the exercise, not just the owner or the CEO. It has to translate through the whole organization.
To summarize, we’re going to get really clear first on what we want in our lives. We have to take into account our age. We have to take into account the amount of time we want to spend on business. When I started TimeSlips Corporation, I was okay working 16 to 18 hours a day, 7 days a week for months on end. Why? It was all I cared about during that period of my life. I knew that to be successful, sometimes you had to step on the accelerator as hard as you could but then later as I got older, I didn’t want to work like that anymore. In fact, in the next phase of the company, it was much better if I didn’t because I needed my energy and focus to take the company beyond the Mitch show and have a team of people and employees. I think that’s a great start. What else should somebody think about when they think about their own personal goals other than retirement age? Wouldn’t one of those things being is my objective to sell the company or is my objective to pass it down to my kids? What do you think?
Yes, without question, whether there’s an exit plan, a hold, a lifestyle company or something. I remember the day that Chet was able to exit because you, I, and everybody else was running things like clockwork. He was sitting on his boat having a good time. It depends on what the end goal is. That’s why we start with lifestyle first. What do we want as an end goal? They definitely also want to look at how are their choices affecting the other people in their life? If they’re married working 16 or 18 hours a day, the marriage is going to suffer a bit, if not a lot. You and I have both done that. We’ve worked hard and got to where we needed to go.
How’s it going to affect the other people within the organization? There may not be that drive from everybody. When the CEO has got that drive and others don’t, then we’re going to have to look at other people potentially down the line. There are all these factors, exit strategy or no exit strategy, buy and hold, or do you want this for retirement and you’re into your grand years. All of that is important. As well as, do you want a physical company or a virtual company? A lot of companies can be turned into virtual companies and people like that because they could work from anywhere.
What’s step two?
After we get clear on that, step two is taking the first initial assessment in this whole process. It’s about getting truthful about where we are as a company. What do we have that our liabilities, constraining factors and our assets? Getting clear on that because if the goal is to double the company and we, for example, don’t have the budget to put into marketing. I remember we used to work on radio ads all the time. We’d spend over $1 million a year on radio ads. I had a guy who came to me and said, “I want to grow from $3 million to $53 million.“ I said, “What budget do you have?” “I have no budget. I have zero. My profitability is 70% of the company.“ “We need to get money because it’s hard to grow from $3 million to $53 million in a year, sometimes 3 to 5 years.” We look at all the constraining factors. What is working and not working?
A lot of the companies are focused on things like getting new clients. That’s their focus but what they’re not looking at is once we got the client through the client journey, how do we optimize more sales revenue through that? How do we increase the buying frequency? How do we get a higher transactional value? You added division after division when we were together. That was increasing all of that. It was getting them to buy more frequently. It was increasing their transactional value. It was increasing the retention. We were also looking on the sales side on how to shorten the sales cycle down so that we could have more clientele coming through in a shorter period of time. There are a lot of factors that companies should look at but the first step is getting brutally honest about where are you, what do we have for assets and constraining factors?
For the guy who wanted to move from $3 million to $53 million in a year, clearly the first thing going through my mind is, “I don’t care what you got. That’s not even possible unless you have a huge bankroll to blow on Facebook Ads or other stupid marketing.” It will not pay off. Here’s the other thing that I have found in my work with businesses is that in most cases, it’s like the rock and roll industry. Most people have a hit. Sometimes it’s a one hit wonder that they milk for two decades and other times they release something and it’s a hit. They’re smart and they followed up with a second hit like a side B on the album and then another single and then another album. Before you know it, they’re building a catalog of powerful tools or education material.
Instead of selling these things one at a time, they can combine them into a program, a university platform or just about anything like that. What I love about business is that you’re not limited to talent or to the number of people because everything can be automated and can be virtual. Companies used to need 100 people, now might need 14 at the most. I’m sure you go through all this as you go through with clients. Finally, after you’ve done your plan, what do people need to know? What do they need to commit to before you say, “Let’s go?“
They need to commit to the fact of once the plan is laid out, we have to lay out those priorities. We have short, medium, and long-term priorities that are going to be within that plan. The question is, now that they know, are they fully committed? Once you start the plan, it’s like building a blueprint for a house. Once you start putting the framing up and everything up, changes afterwards are expensive and time-consuming. Is that level of commitment there? What I like to see from an owner or the CEO of a company is, are they going to hold people accountable? It‘s their business and their job to hold their people accountable. I’m looking for the commitment on that plan before we say, “Go. Make sure all the budgets are laid out as much as we can in the process.“ Before we pull the plug to let the water stock to run, we want to make sure that we line things up.
I assume at some point you’re doing a rollout budget. You’re making sure that people have enough cash on hand. One of the things that I was lucky to have is I had bankrolled my salary before I started my software company and I sold real estate that I had in my portfolio to fund my lifestyle, which wasn’t elaborate back then. It was literally a car payment, a mortgage, and some money for food. Other than that, I cut everything else out of my life because I wanted to focus on that. I wanted that runway to last as long as it had to.
It took me 2.5 years before we were able to draw a salary. It’s important to make sure that you have your plan in place. Once you’re working with a client and once you have this whole idea of where they’re at, what they truly want to go, maybe what their current assets are, and what their future assets can be, what would you say the next thing is? Is it a marketing program? I realized that somewhat personal based on the client. What do you see happening more and more as you start working with more clients?
One of the biggest mistakes they make is when they’re going out to new clients or going after any business, they’re not calculating in burn rate. If they’re doing medium long-term type of client acquisition strategies, they’ve got to carry a lot of money. Everybody wants to, for example, go after these large, big, complex accounts. What they don’t realize is it takes months and sometimes years to get them and they’re paying people all the way along. I like to calculate burn rate on anything that’s long-term. The first thing that I focus them on is how do we get some short-term wins? I call it short, short, long. You got to do three shorts before we can go into a medium or long. There are a lot of things sitting there. Something as simple, Mitch, is referrals. They’re not doing referrals. A lot of companies are bad at doing referrals because they don’t have an active program around referrals.
I look at anything that we can immediately monetize. That could be something like, “What are we doing with our past or dormant clients?“ Even at Chet Holmes when I took over the sales division, that’s exactly what I did. I went back through the past and dormant clients and we made sales. There are short-term gains that can be immediately seized and capitalized on within the first 30 to 90 days. Anything above and beyond 90 days is a medium strategy. Starting a podcast is either a medium or a long-term strategy, even if it’s guesting on shows because it takes time for these things to build up. We want to look at the burn rate, the run rate on what’s going on. Putting short-term strategies in first and short-term tactical plays in first to get some money so that they can start monetizing that. You take a portion of that money and you reinvest it back in to the other growth strategies that are going on.
Can you give me an example of a client you’ve worked with? What that process looked like in real life? Take us through those steps.
I worked with a company. I can’t say their name because I did sign something. I work with a company and they do wireless optimization. What they do is they take cellular phone bills. They put them into their software program, find all the billing errors, mistakes and then they manage the account going forward. When we looked at their company, part of the growth plan was their operations were not set up to scale their customer service and operations. We had to take a look at that in the beginning but what we discovered was that there were things sitting right there that they could monetize.
What do you want as an end goal? Click To TweetOne of those things was their customer service department. They had a farming strategy going on where they were taking care of it and playing customer service. What we started doing is we started introducing cross sells into the customer service department so they would identify something similar to what you did in client services division. We had identified immediate opportunities. All of a sudden, they’re starting to spark some revenue coming out of their customer service department. What I found is helpful if we could take most of the divisions or most of the departments in a company and get them client focused on selling. It can be done with any division.
You used the term client–focused. I think I know what that means but I’d like for you to explain that.
Chet used to call this moral obligation. Are we leaving the client better off than when we started with them? How are we conveying that value? How do we get the client’s value conveyed to their client base? How is their client base left better from what we’re doing? Being client–focused means that you’re playing win-win through the whole situation and from my perspective. That’s how I view it. What’s win-win? The client wins, you win. Too many people are selling stuff that they shouldn’t even be selling.
You mentioned something that I thought was incredibly powerful. I believe Chet introduced this on his weekly meetings with the salesforce. He would make a simple statement, “If you don’t believe in the product, you shouldn’t be here.“ He would ask a question, “Who here believes in the product?” Everybody will go, “I do.“ He’d say, “Who here doesn’t?” No one would say a word. At that point, what he did is he laid a trap. I love the way he used to do stuff like this. He said, “If you truly believe in the product, then you have a moral obligation to close every single person you get on the phone. Why? If you don’t, you’re depriving their entire family of the increase in revenue that your products can bring to their lives.“ It was a powerful where I call a third party motivator. I thought it was so ingenious in the way that he used that entire moral obligation concept, if you will, not just to motivate people but to prove to people that they truly did believe in the product.
I was a client of the products who did double my company so I fully knew what could happen. I think in some capacity, that is part of the reason I did so well right out of the gate. I had the business experience. I had the sales experience. I would go twenty respectful verbal rounds with people to get them to see the light, if you would. A lot of times people are in fear. That’s another thing that stopped companies from growing. It’s fear of exposure, a fear of failure, or whatever it might be. Being client–focused is about being focused on the client. Many companies talk about it but they don’t live it across the board or they have certain departments or divisions that are living it and others aren’t.
What ends up happening is they have a great marketing and sales experience. They go into the operations department and the operations department is like, “I don’t care.” That type of thing. We’re getting paid salary an hourly. That’s got to change. The deliverable has to be the same thing, congruent all the way through in their customer, client experience, facing experience. All of that has to be one, Sun Tzu said, “The spirit of the same rank.” It has to walk on that same light. When that happens, magical things happen. We had that happening at Chet Holmes and BBI.
How did we do that? I know how but I want you to tell the readers.
We were a mission-driven company and people felt the mission through the company. We knew why we were doing it. When you asked that question, I had to step back and think, “How did we pull it off?“ I can tell you in the divisions that I managed, it was totally mission-driven. I know client services was the same thing. I think this comes down from the leadership down. It came down from Chet and you. We put people in place or got rid of people who didn’t respond well to the mission.
We also had one other practical factor that motivated people in some ways more than even the mission.
High compensation.
Incentive compensation. We had this democratic policy that said simply, “If you do well, you’ll make more money. If you suck, we’ll give you a chance but you can’t stay.” Some people will say, “That’s a cutthroat environment.“ Doug, did you feel that way too or did you feel as if it rewarded those people who were simply good at what they did and worked hard?
A big mistake that companies make is they feed the weak versus feeding the strong. There are a lot of people out there who are strong and A players. One of the things we did is we tracked it a lot of A players because we were an A player company. One of the first things that people say is, “I want to hire top producing salespeople.” I was like, “Can you keep them? Are you an A player company?“ They have to step back. We were definitely an A player company on the client focus side and certainly on the sales compensation side.
There was no cap on anyone’s income. If you wanted to make $ 1 million, $2 million a year, you could definitely do it. It was a unique thing at that organization because you ran it. We were total mavericks. When I looked at that I was like, “How are they managing? How has Mitch managing all these people?” I had a ton of mavericks on my side because that’s what we would hire. We would hire people who had those free-thinking entrepreneurial roots of growth and they were compensating well. I think the magic of having the mission-driven thing, the compensation to back it, and the accountability that if you didn’t play on those rules, you weren’t going to stay there.
I’m drawing more on my teachings from Chet. The bottom line is when you hire sales superstars, you know two things about them. Number one, they’re going to be a pain in the ass to manage and number two, they’re going to chew through walls to get the job done. Some people used to call me the zookeeper because it felt like I was keeping everybody in line but the fact of the matter is it was the opposite. I was getting everything out of the way so they could do their jobs. My philosophy as a CEO was to enable as many people to soar the best that I could. To me, we did the opposite of what most companies do. We didn’t decrease commission as they made more money. We increased commission as they made more money. Why? Psychologically, salespeople are easy to figure out. We know what drives them, money. We use the simplistic viewpoint that the more we reward people for the great work they’ll do, the more great work they will do. I assume that you felt that you were rewarded that way too when you worked for the company.
I was making a ton of money. I’m not sure if I was the highest paid guy there. It was all commission-driven. I think the other factor in addition to money that motivates people is the lifestyle. The one thing we had at that company, which I’ve always tried to put into any company that I have employees in, is you can make a lot of money but you also have to have the feeling of, “I’m doing a great thing. I have family time.” The whole rounded benefit. This is one of the reasons that I go back to lifestyle for us. What is the lifestyle that you want to lead? Once we understand that, then we can build compensation around that, we can build growth around that. What that does is it fires us up even more.
I have two daughters that I adore. They were little when they started there. I wanted the ability to send them to private school if they wanted to go to Montessori or any other type of school like that. I wanted to be able to take them to travel with me. It was so cool to bring them into like the Eiffel Tower, knock on the Eiffel Tower and then go back to work in the hotel room. There were all kinds of things that lifestyle supported with what was brought forth through your efforts and other people’s efforts, including Chet‘s, and even my efforts on the company.
We were a little bit early in the game when it came to the working from home movement. In fact, we even had a division where we were helping people transition to work from home from corporate or from physical structure to work from home, which was successful. The reason was because of what you’re talking about and that’s lifestyle. Unfortunately, everybody works from home because of our friends in China decided to share a little gift with us. The bottom line again here is that gift has enabled many people to change their lives. Some unfortunately not in the way they’d like and many others in a great way. When sudden shifts happen in the world and in your life, you have to make a decision, “Am I going to get motivated and do something good about this or am I going to collapse and crawl under the rug and hide?“
The under the rug and hide strategy might’ve worked for a month or two as the shell shock of being locked in your house wore off. Here’s the statistic I found out. There were more small businesses created in the last months than in any month period in all of American history. That’s because we had to find a way to survive and thrive. Think about all the people that we worked with back then who are running their own business. They had jobs before, now they have their own business. That’s what I think some of the freedoms of being good at selling, knowing how to sell, how to close, and ultimately how to manage the sales process brings you.
I’ve had the privilege of training, a lot of coaches, and a lot of consultants. I’m still doing that. What I have found, Mitch, is a shift like you said. These unfortunate times are upon us. I’m getting a lot of people that are top producers for large companies. They’re like, “I need to change my life. I want to be a consultant. I want to be a coach.“ I have doctors coming out of the woodwork and say, “I’m done with the medical profession because I can’t stand it anymore.” It’s an interesting thing.
This is one of the things not to make this the Chet Holmes show. Chet used to throw some things our way and it’d be like, “Are you kidding me?” It’s like, “You want me to do this in a weekend?” That type of thing. We found out how to do it. We made it happen. Those types of things like this pandemic will knock you down or it will create a thought process in one’s head that it’s like, “This is where I’m at and this is where I’m going to go.“ Those people are the people who tend to start those businesses is what I found.
Also don’t forget that many people have decided to use the time, particularly the time that they had some support from the government to better themselves, to learn more skills and to acquire a new skill. Some people back in March and April of 2020 were paralyzed, while others were getting busy working on programs that they purchased to learn a new skill, start a webinar or run a summit. All these things are skills that people had to learn through others, whether they acquired it by buying a course or simply by studying the market and trial and error. This is why in some ways, while we certainly will never remember COVID as a wonderful thing that happened to the United States or the world, we will remember it as a time of great change in a positive way for many people. Doug, this is a fantastic moment, if you will, to summarize a little bit about what we’ve talked about. What would you say are the core takeaways from our discussion so far for anyone reading this?
There are so many. Moral obligation, make sure you’re clear on where you’re going, be truthful about it all the way through the process. That means, what’s the downside, what’s the upside. Be clear on where we want to go, where we are, have a plan and have that plan reviewed. Don’t create a plan in your head because we all think we got the greatest idea. It’s got to be the next, $100 million idea. What I have found is from having outside eyes, which I do for companies, having outside eyes look at my company, I get objective feedback and that objective feedback sometimes has saved me from going down directions that I didn’t want to, thinking I was running enthusiastically down the path. I know this is a buzzword out there but it’s about being client focused, having that moral obligation, rewarding your people well, recruiting top people, giving people the opportunity to be entrepreneurs within the entrepreneurial framework of a company and starting it all first with, what do you want as a lifestyle?
Doug, at this point in the show, we’re going to transition to a different segment. This is the part where we get to know you a little bit better. We do this with a couple of questions that I have asked over 250 guests. I’m going to ask you too. Here’s the first one. Who in all of space and time would you like to have one hour to enjoy a walk in the park, a quick lunch or an intense conversation with?
I’m going to say what came to my mind. I’d love to have a conversation with Adolf Hitler.
I think years ago, someone said that too. Tell me why.
My first question to him would be, “What the hell?” I would like to know what was behind the thought process of what he was trying to do. A lot of people have speculated that, what it could be. Did it get out of hand? Did the power get there and then all of a sudden this got out of hand? I see a lot of parallels in his thought process of what I’ve been able to study anyways, versus other people have done similar things. I’ve also seen those same traits, Mitch, applied in a positive way which grow massively large, wonderful companies. I don’t know if I could stop from maybe choking him. The reality is that I would love to have a conversation.
Now that you bring it up and I think about it besides the guttural, visceral reaction I have to that name, one of the things that he did do was he understood the psychology of moving large groups of people, in fact, entire populations. I believe was whether he realized it or not, it was a powerful skill. I don’t know if he realized he had it until he started doing it. From there, it took off. The reason is because he hit a nerve. The other thing I wanted to remind you of is that while he did so many bad things, it was like the pandemic in a way. He unified many parts of the world against him. It was the common enemy theory. How do you unify disparate groups you find a common enemy? He was the common enemy. At least for a little while, he created unity in defeating him. Clearly, that would be an incredibly interesting conversation to have.
We see people doing that in business all the time and they end up on TV a lot.
You’d be allowed to kill him because he’s already dead. Feel free to strangle him if I can set that up for you.
For some of my family members, I’d like to do that.
Here’s the grand finale that changed the world question. Are you ready?
Yes, sir.
What is it that you are doing or would like to do that truly has the potential to change the world literally?
I think what I’m doing has the way to change the world, maybe not the whole world, but make it a better place for people. When you and I were at Chet Holmes, I remember this being in the presenter’s division. I remember having this guy on the call. He was in high fear and he wasn’t buying. Normally when they get to a certain place, you can only beat them up so much. It would be nice but this guy, for some reason was like, “Doug, stay with him.” After everybody left the room, I asked him to stay and I said, “Can we have a conversation?” We spent over an hour on the phone, him giving me every objection known to mankind. Finally at the end, he said to me, “I’ll do it.“ I did a takeaway on him. I said, “No, wait a minute.” I pulled back on him to make him chase it a little bit more hoping he would do that. He made the decision. He went on his way.
This pandemic can knock you down, or it can make you think, 'This is where I'm at, and this is where I'm going to go.' Click To TweetWhen I was running at the division, I used to get and read the testimonials that were coming in. I got this thing and this was the title, “Thank God someone had the balls enough to stand up to me.” That title caught my attention. I was like, “Which one of my guys did this or gals did this?” I’m reading. He’s going through and he said, “Thank goodness that someone had the fortitude to stay with me through this. I was not at all kind on the call. I was a real pain. What I didn’t tell the trainer on the call was that I was 60 days from going out of business, losing my family, being estranged from my children and having my whole world collapsed.” He went on to tell more bad things that were going to happen to him. He said, “What happened was this guy stood up to me and made me see that there was potential. I’ve been doing this for months and my company turned around, my marriage is stronger than ever, my children and I are talking all the time, my brother and I are back together.” He went on and on.
I’m reading this and I’m getting moved. I’m like, “I can’t wait to reward that person.“ He goes on and on. At the bottom he goes, “Whenever you talk to Doug Brown, thank him please for me because thank God he had the balls to stand up to me.“ Honestly, Mitch, I put the paper down and tears were coming out of my eyes. I was like, “What I do changes lives.“ That’s where I got it. It was like, “I’m going to continue to do this because I know even if somebody gets a 20% lift in their company, it could be the difference between them having to let people go or driving into another area where they can expand their business. They could fund their kid’s education.” There are all kinds of things that can happen. I think what I’m doing is changing the world. That’s what I feel every day when I get up and I talk to people.
Doug C. Brown, you are changing the world with the work that you do. I will say this, one of the things that I remember about your style was that you were gentle in your closing system and process. No one would ever get offended. You knew how to maintain a relationship with another human being while you were closing them. That part of how you did it, in some ways, other than your raw skill was the key to your success. You never ever pushed anybody. You consistently stayed on and made sure that they understood exactly what it was, how they would benefit and all the elements of the process, which I think that’s part of what made you the best that we had. That was one more reason why you are where you are, I believe.
I appreciate that, Mitch. I agree with you. I never felt it was a necessity in sales to crush people’s feelings or to try to overcome things. It’s always win-win. I like playing that way.
That’s what Chet used to call, keeping rapport in place. Doug, we made people sit through the two of us chatting away with the promise of an incredible giveaway. I know it’s incredible because you told me about it and I wasn’t sure you should give it away. You call it The Million Dollar Sales and Marketing Cheat Sheet. You want to tell us a little bit about what that is?
It’s a candid assessment that people can take to find out where are some of the holes in their current play. A lot of people think of marketing and sales as two distinct operations, if you will, in two facets. The reality is when they’re combined into one focus, it’s powerful. I created this cheat sheet to anybody. It doesn’t matter what size company you are. You can take this cheat sheet, go through, you answer the questions. They’re easy. It’s yes, no, 0 to 5, 0 to 10 type of questions. It will give you a good feedback on where you are objectively. Do you need to look at your marketing, your prospecting, or your sales a little more? Do you need to look at customer service, whatever it might be? You will get some information out of this. It’s normally something I use with my clients but because of our relationship, I’d like to give it to your readers.
Readers, you can go to BusinessSuccessFactors.com/cheatsheet. It will be there waiting for you. Doug, thanks so much. I enjoyed our call. I appreciate you being so open and sharing so much. I know it will benefit many.
Thank you, Mitch. As always, it’s great to be with you regardless of this or having a personal conversation. I appreciate and grateful for you too.
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