In this week’s episode of The CEO Warrior Podcast, Mike Agugliaro interviews Dan Antonelli, who has more than 20 years experience in small business branding and marketing strategy. Dan is the CEO and creative director of the New Jersey agency Graphic D-Signs. He has helped almost 1,000 small businesses succeed and has won more than 200 awards since founding the business in 1999. During this episode, Mike and Dan discuss where most businesses fail in branding, brand promises, and how a brand delivers.

Branding: how to leverage a great brand for success with Dan Antonelli

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Summary: Mike Agugliaro takes a break to share some crucial relationship training for business owners. If you want your employees and team members to stick around for the long term and give you their best work, you have to be able to understand what they need, want, and desire from you. Learn how to avoid conflict and creating lasting relationships by having one simple conversation with your employees right now.    Key Lessons Learned: Relationship Problems  When we look at our employees there is always questions and relationship problems. Why are they not happy? Why do they feel let down? In all your relationships, including with your employees, there are needs. Everyone has needs, some are simple, like food, water, and air, but some are more complex and unique to the individual. Needs are the first level of wants. Understanding what someone needs can allow you to create alignment with them so that you can also get what you need. Wants are the second level. We want more money, new clothes, a new car, opportunity, etc. Desires are higher level wants, they are more long term and ambitious. We desire a bigger house, an empire, etc. If you can understand a person’s needs, wants, and desires you can get everyone aligned and on the same page. It’s a tool that you can implement in your company to create alignment between your business and your team. Clarity creates alignment, alignment creates accountability. You don’t have to grant whatever it is the person desires, but you can be a path that allows them to reach it. Once you’ve done this exercise with an employee or prospective employee it’s time to flip it around and establish what you need, want, and desire from the relationship as well. Oftentimes employees will leave a company because one of their needs aren’t being met. Failing to fulfill something that you promised is a common relationship problem. Don’t promise something that you don’t intend or can’t deliver. Sometimes you have to take what you want into your own hands instead of waiting for the other person to satisfy you. Employees are like any other relationship, if their needs and wants are not met the relationship will fall apart. The conversation can be tricky but it’s essential if you want to be able to work together and ultimately avoid relationship problems that cause employees to leave.  Links To Resources Mentioned Thank you for listening! If you enjoyed this podcast, please subscribe and leave a 5-star rating and review in iTunes!

There's A Really Big Problem Out There

Mike Agugliaro talks about success and failure today and why you need to understand two crucial insights. Without them you will never feel successful and failure will always loom over the horizon. Key Lessons Learned: Success vs Failure  A lot of people say that success is a mindset, but that’s not entirely accurate. It’s understanding what success looks like for you. There are many layers of success and sometimes we let happen is we let one thing that we look at as a failure consume our mind. It becomes our ultimate failure. There is confusion between success vs failure, specifically on what to do and what not to do. The fastest way to find success is to find someone to show you what to do, just like the wise masters of the past. How will know you have succeeded and will you be satisfied when you get there? For most people, the trouble is the goal posts keep moving. There is one cardinal rule that has to be steadfast. If you never have clarity on what success looks like for you, how can you ever feel any satisfaction in your life? Get completely clear on what success means. If your success target is too far or too large, it won’t drive you. You need defined criteria that is imminent for you to feel motivated. People tend to focus on their failures and they tend to overshadow all the small and big ways they’ve succeeded in the past. Winning small games helps you stay in the big game and hit the big targets. You can’t create alignment without hyper clarity on what success looks like for you and your business. Ask your employees what success looks like for them this week. People will drive themselves way more than you ever could. When your team starts leading themselves to success, that’s when you’re ultra successful. The leaders job is to lead only until everyone can lead themselves, that’s when they should step back.  Failing Forward  You have to rewire your perceptions. Instead of thinking of something that went wrong in your life being a failure, consider it a lesson that will get you closer to where you want to go. The success vs failure paradigm should be success or lesson learned. A real failure is something that doesn’t have a lesson behind it. Just because something can always be better, that doesn’t mean you didn’t achieve success. Don’t look at something as just a success or failure, always look for the lessons that you can carry forward into the next experience. Contracts keep people aligned, Service Level Agreements are about agreeing on what success and failure look like between companies.  Links To Resources Mentioned Servicebusinessgrowth.com Thank you for listening! If you enjoyed this podcast, please subscribe and leave a  5-star rating and review in iTunes!

Success vs Failure

What would happen to your family and your business if you couldn’t work anymore? Learn about the consequences of success and why small mindedness will prevent you from making an impact on the world. Find out why your business and your life won’t grow until you work on yourself and create permanent lasting change.   Key Lessons Learned: Success  Success is many things. You’re successful just to be alive today. The consequences of lack of success come out in many ways including stress, pressure, anxiety, frustration, and anger. They all come from a lack of the success that you wanted. Your perception of what growth is and what it takes determines how you feel about it. Don’t let small mindedness keep you small. Many people believe they are small, but is that really true or is that just a choice. Some people have already accepted defeat. You can only accomplish things at the level of your thinking. When you’re digging a ditch it comes down to either you’re going to beat this task or it’s going to beat you. It becomes a question of your definition of success. It’s not difficult to grow a company or achieve success, it’s just different. The common idea is that it takes weeks to create a change in behavior but that’s not true. One moment can change your whole life. It’s not grow or die in terms of the business, it’s death of success and freedom and the belief you will be able to achieve what you wanted. The brain is nothing more than a computer. Whatever you tell it, it will create. If you tell yourself you’re small, you will be small. Even believing your company to be big can be a form of small mindedness if it stops you from trying to grow. What you would tell your five year old child, you should tell yourself. When you visualize the outcome and tell yourself a different story, your story is going to change. People sabotage themselves because they tell themselves a story that keeps them small. You can’t hone a new skill set with the same mindset. Temporary motivation doesn’t work, you need permanent change. For Mike permanent change happens in a total immersion environment, you have to figure out what method works for you. You can’t move on to the next thing until permanent change has occurred. If you want greater results you need to work on yourself first before you work on your company. Success is mandatory because there will be pain down the road for your family. Ask yourself “what’s the consequence of not moving quicker?” The bigger you grow the more you can impact the world.  Risk  What happens to your business if you get hurt and can’t work or if you died? Mike tells the story of his former boss who passed away due to cancer. After passing away the business quickly fell apart because there was no plan or people in place to keep it going. Are you setting the stage for your family? Will they be protected if something goes wrong?  Links To Resources Mentioned https://www.servicebusinessedge.com Thank you for listening! If you enjoyed this podcast, please subscribe and leave a  5-star rating and review in iTunes!

The Consequences of Success

In this episode of the CEO Warrior podcast the roles are reversed and Jay Abraham is interviewing Mike Agugliaro. Jay and Mike discuss the origins of Gold Medal Service and CEO Warrior and talk about the biggest mindset change that Mike made over the course of his business that allowed him to go from two guys and a truck to generating $30+ million a year in revenue before selling his company.   Key Lessons Learned: CEO Warrior  CEO Warrior was given birth by Mike Agugliaro and Mike Disney in an effort to completely transform the way the service industry operates. They turn service contractors into strategic and thoughtful entrepreneurs. Mike takes in high growth oriented contractors and uses his teaching and training to level up their business and doubling their results and success. CEO Warrior is an organization that gets people taking positive, powerful, and decisive action. When Mike started out the only training he really had was what he learned at a vocational school. He had been on his own since the age of 15 and there’s one thing everyone who has had a similar experience knows, you learn how to survive. Mike convinced his partner to venture out and start their own service business despite the fact that they had good jobs at the time. Little did they realize they that the first ten years would be extremely difficult. They were young, knew they could work hard, and were willing to trade dollars for hours but that started to change when they got a bit older and started having kids. Everything changed when Mike’s partner declared that he was finished, that he wanted to quit and couldn’t take it anymore. This put Mike on the path to looking for people who had already figured it out. Imagine what you can do if you knew what to do. That was the lesson that Mike and his partner learned and that thought transformed everything. You can try to wing it or you can find out what you need to know in order to succeed and really increase your chances. Mike realized that marketing was one of the keys. Most small business owners didn’t understand what marketing means and what it can do. Change is uncomfortable but if you don’t try to do something different you’re just going to stay the same. The most important asset to people is their time. Times have changed and people now want convenience and simplicity. Becoming a source of one and adding additional trades allows you to serve your customers faster and more efficiently. It also lead to scalable and sustainable growth for the company.  Mindset Change  The biggest shift in thinking that Mike had was going from working in the business to working on the business. Going from the work itself to figuring out how to find new customers, creating assets in the brand, and creating a sustaining and multiplying business. It’s hard to grow a million dollar business with a hundred thousand dollar mind. Mindset change begins with your personal identity and then radiates out to your brand and your people. After changing the brand, Mike realized that they needed to get around people that not only knew the business but would be around to make sure they don’t make critical mistakes. When you find the best in the world you realize that one conversation with them can move you forward faster than a year with someone who hasn’t gone that far. You have to want hurtful truths instead of comforting lies. You always have a choice, but if you trust someone who has the expertise and you get out of your own way, things will change very quickly. Connecting the right people with the right leverage can lead to a decade’s worth of progress in six months. When you remove the weak links in your business the whole chain becomes much stronger. In order to appreciate expertise you have to appreciate as an asset that can pay greater dividends than any piece of machinery or technique you can use. Why would you want your business to be just a paycheck if it could be a wealth creation engine? Struggling people are usually surrounded by other struggling people. There are a lot of people that settle and begin to resent their life. Being around and mentored by people that think different is very important. Once Mike started to believe in himself, he started to reevaluate his language and thought patterns. Once Mike articulated and believed the vision he had for the business, it became a question of not whether they will succeed, it was how big do they want to get? There are no problems, only opportunities. One of the greatest enlightenments that anyone can have is the moment they know that the reason they are on the planet. That’s a mindset change that transforms the way you think about the world and your place in it. If you can get mind growth and then turn that new growth into your mindset change, the effects on your life can be profound. There are very few reasons why someone can’t win this game unless they choose not to. Nobody retires from what they love. You grow or die, and that’s true in business and life. It’s impossible to stay neutral and not making a decision isn’t possible. Inaction is a decision in itself. You have control of 98% of what happens to you, are you going to be a victim or a victor? If you knew you were going to live to 100, what would you do differently? Be brave enough to step and move into your greater self.  Tactics  One of the smaller changes with disproportionate impact on Mike’s business was changing the way they answered the phone. Instead of just a quick transaction they began to focus on building a rapport with them and understanding what they really want. If you don’t have a framework of delivery everything about your business will appear to be episodic and inconsistent. Mike found out that the more they trained and coached, the more empowered and confident the team began to feel. If you verbalize your commitment to train your team and follow up, your team will reciprocate and commit back. Every process and element of your business should reinforce the same message.  Links To Resources Mentioned https://www.ceowarrior.com Thank you for listening! If you enjoyed this podcast, please subscribe and leave a  5-star rating and review in iTunes!

An Encounter With Jay Abraham

Discover the blueprint to billions used by master marketer Jay Abraham to grow your service business and gain the all-important position of preeminence in your market. Find out how helping your customers understand the value you provide can transform your business and how the Socratic method of interviewing can lead you to hidden business insights you never thought were possible. Key Lessons Learned: Why?  Optimization is the highest and best use of your time and resources. If you don’t fall in love with the people you’re serving, and that includes your team, you’re not going to be able to create something great. You may be passionate about what you do but are you passionate about the people you do it for. Most people just want to grow a business and make money, but you need to know what your endgame is. Why are you building a business in the first place? If you don’t understand marketing, you are not playing the game, business is playing you. You are rewarded in your business life for the value you create for others. If you’re not focused on that and instead focused on making money, you probably never will. It takes the same level of effort to build a business that is a systemless mess with no value as it does to build something worth a small fortune. You’re the one who chose your business and you should use it facilitate what you want to achieve in your life.    Traditional vs Non-Traditional  It’s not necessary to go through the arduous traditional ways of growing a business. There are many different and creative ways to accomplish the same goals faster or cheaper. Most businesses spend money on advertising and ignore their referral business, but that’s going about trust completely backwards. You must test your marketing assumptions. One small variable can be responsible for 2x-4x the results. There are 50 impact points in your business that you don’t even know about and they all have variability. A 10% increase in 20 to 30 small points in your business can lead to many hundreds of percent increase in profit. Never launch something in your company and give it to everybody, that’s a good way to blow it up. Everyone could double their business right now by doing it better. Different articulations and ways of expressing yourself can make a major difference. Your headlines should convey the most self serving benefit that the other side can expect to receive when they take the next step. You don’t have to recreate the wheel, you can learn, adopt, and borrow from other methods that have worked before.    Education Marketing  Give your customer the understanding to appreciate the value of what you are creating for them. Most people don’t understand that human beings need to understand why you’re better. “The reason why…” can be your force multiplier. The things you do may be the same as everyone else, but if you tell the story and no one else does you will have a preemptive story in your market. Masterful marketing is more science than talent. You have to measure the lifetime value of different types of clients and leads. The way to get better answers is to learn how to ask better questions.    The Power Team  The first thing you have to understand is that no one is great at everything and you need to figure out what someone’s strengths and motivations are. Your team looks to you for their security, fulfillment, and acknowledgement. If you don’t feed and nourish that you are doing a disservice to them and constraining your own growth. Your team has to see that you are committed to their best interest. Train your team in more than just your systems, train them on trust building, communication, and collaboration. You have to be able to acknowledge and appreciate other people’s different points of view. 95% of small and medium businesses never reach their goals because they don’t have goals, they have vague hopes and dreams. A business not examined constantly is a business not worth owning. Your team can produce more multiplied profit for your business but not if they don’t understand what performance metrics look like what to strive for. Interview your best employees on how they do what they do, it can be quite profound for the employee at the same time because they often don’t know exactly how they do it. 

Branding: how to leverage a great brand for success with Dan Antonelli

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