Brian J. Pombo Live

Are you a business owner? Do you have a need for control?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zrkEbnVd5ds

Transcription

Drop the control illusion.

Hi I'm Brian Pombo, welcome back to Brian J. Pombo Live.

Tonight I had a good talk with a friend who I met via business. But we've been able to talk about things beyond business and we had a really good talk.

One of the things I found with really some of the most successful business owners that I've known through the years, we tend to have a thing about being in control. And the only time we really lose it is when we feel out of control.

This control-freak nature that we have is dangerous.

Eventually, I got to a point where I had to pull back out of it and realize the truth.

And here's the truth, if you're not aware of it, I'm sorry, if I'm the first one to prove this to you. Or if you already kind of figured that this was the case, but you hadn't had anybody confirm it. There is no control.

Control is a complete illusion.

And if you've worked in a business large enough, with enough people, you realize it's all a complete scam, you are not in control, you never were in control.

What you are is you have a situation where you have the ability to determine how you handle the circumstances that have been dealt with you. Really, you can't control the circumstances, you can't control anybody else or any of their reactions.

The only thing that you have any dominion over is how you react to the situations, people place things. That's, that's what it all comes back to. How are you reacting at the moment, to all of those things?

Life started getting better for me when I pulled back and accepted the fact that I'm not in control. Except for that one area, and just got really good at watching how I react to things,

Stop overreacting to things stop falling into that emotional state, where you're just out you're truly out of control there. You know, whether you get too high or too low, it's the same thing. And you got to be distant enough from it, that you can accept the fact okay, I'm not in control. But now what?

So what's the next step?

If I'm not in control now what I still have a life to live, I still have things to do. So now what do I do now?

Where do I go?

This is a simple idea in words but a really difficult thing as humans for us to wrap our minds around, especially entrepreneurs. Because the entrepreneur promise is the idea that you're going to be in charge of your life. It's not that way at all.

What it comes down to is that you get enough autonomy as an entrepreneur, as a business owner, that allows you the space to be able to realize the true things about life.

One of the biggest things that I realized years ago, and have to be reminded of over and over again, is that I'm not in control. And that's okay.

So now what, that's the next question.

And so a lot of that comes down from having proper perspective after you've kind of accepted that having proper perspective and I came across a whole string of processes that work every time they've tried.

My first try at putting out a book kind of talking about some of these concepts was this one, 9 Ways to Amazon-Proof Your Business.

I've gotten good reviews off of it so far. I'd love to hear what you think even if it's negative.

Brian talks about a recent power point presentation he gave to a group to help them get organized and active.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KXrat8-oJbw

Transcription

Imperfect action.

Hi I'm Brian Pombo, welcome back to Brian J Pombo Live.

I'm a Business Investor and so what that basically means is, I look into a lot of different types of businesses that work with a lot of different types of people and I've found that this is absolutely true.

Something that people have to keep reminding me of, because I like things to come out smooth and nice and look good, and not be rough around the edges. But imperfect action beats perfect inaction.

And that's a quote supposedly, by Harry Truman, I didn't do the research to see if it's a real quote or not but it's a good quote, regardless of who says it. That idea of imperfect action. I'll give you a good example. Because it fits into the activities of today.

So today, I was actually started yesterday, yesterday, I realized that I had told a lot of people that I was looking to do a webinar on Saturday, and all of a sudden, it occurred to me, that was only one day away.

So I had to rush together, come up with an email, make it official pick a time everything else, I finally got it out the door. And it became this thing that I all of a sudden, I had a timer to put the presentation together. And I got a lot of responses back, a lot of positive responses, a lot of people who weren't going to be able to make it so I had to record it for a particular project I'm working on.

So please don't come back and ask me what it was about unless you really know me well, because it's not important right here what it was about, it's for a very particular audience.

But I ended up getting all these people asking me about it and so I start lining people up to go to it and everything.

Then it's just this timer is going okay, now I got to get everything together.

I'm not really sure how long it's going to be. Not sure about all the different points, I'm going to make anything else.

So this 24 hour period of just cram, which tends to be how I do things and right before I set the date, I knew it was going to be like that I knew that if I was going to do it just right.

Excuse me, I knew if I was going to do it just right, you could tell him a little bit exhausted already today, a little more than usual.

Because I knew if it was going to be right. I had to spend a couple of months on it. It wasn't going to be right, it wasn't going to be perfect. I just need to get it out there. It's an idea. It's a concept. It requires conversation. It requires people to challenge it.

So I did it. I put together a PowerPoint presentation, which takes me a long time to do in general, and just kind of slapped the whole thing together.

Got it out the door got had an extremely low turnout for the number of people that I talked to, but it was also within like less than 24 hour period. But the point which they were being told officially, when where, and how was not good timing. Not the ideal day or time of day to get people onto a webinar.

So for the number of people that showed up, I was actually grateful. But at the same time, it's like you just kind of move sometimes and also the holiday. We're coming up on Thanksgiving, all this stuff was happening.

So just goes to show. imperfect action is necessary. Most of the time, you have to move the movement is more important than perfect m...

Thoughts on getting business done during the holidays.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r3JUxKQKY9Q

Transcription

Sneaking business during the holidays.

Hi I'm Brian Pombo, welcome back to Brian J. Pombo Live.

I'm actually holding here the calendar for next year. But I want to point out November, we're in November right now.

If it we're not in November, when you're watching or listening to this, just realize that you got holidays coming up at some point, it's a good time to get in touch with people.

This is how you sneak business, if you're even if you're not supposed to be doing business, this is a great way to be able to get things done when it's tough to get things done.

What I like to do are what I set out to do, I don't always do as much of it as I'd like, is to reach out to people who I haven't been in touch with, for a very long time, especially people I have business connections with, so that you never know, maybe we could do something again, maybes, you never know.

It's very important relationships is what business is all about.

So you go through your LinkedIn, you go through your Facebook, you go through all the different social media, you go through your phone, you go through it, any place where you have, where you keep your contacts and your connections, go through that pile of business cards that you haven't been through in a long time, that shoebox full of them or whatever, go through and start calling people to start emailing people start sending people private messages on the social media, and say, hey, it's been forever.

Here it is the holiday season I just wanted to wish you happy holidays.

Hopefully, everything's going well for you. And that you don't reach out to me sometimes, let me know how life is.

That's all he just kind of say something like that and it can be so valuable doing something like that, you can always do something bigger and grander and find things, find reasons to get in touch with these people, maybe you're planning a trip somewhere.

You'll look up all the people from that area and see if you can get together with a few of them.

You know, it's the little things, it's the little thin threads that make the business work.

The reason why I'm bringing this up is I I heard a conversation today on the clubhouse, where they were talking about strategic partnerships and joint ventures, that type of idea, the idea of, of really finding people that you can gel and build a business with.

That's always been it's the real reason why I ended up in the business investment field is that it really, you can't ignore the fact that as to the relationships, it's all in who you know, and who knows you. And so you got to get out there, you got to mix it up.

You got to go back, get back in touch with people you haven't been in touch with. And you never know what will happen. You never know what they have going you never know what you have going on that they may be interested in.

So take advantage of the holidays if you have any time off whatsoever. Do some very light touches back to the people of your past I think you'll be satisfied with what you get. It's one of the main three pillars of BrianJPombo.com is being relationship reliant.

Maybe I'll be talking about some of the other pillars in future episodes. We will talk to you later.

Hey, follow, subscribe, like whatever wherever you're at, or go to BrianJPombo.

Another season of fun on deck.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4bXdTtNgxA4

Transcription

Here come the holidays.

Hi I'm Brian Pombo, welcome back to Brian J. Pombo Live.

Holidays are coming, that may be a good thing or a bad thing in your business. We talk about business here in case you didn't know. So if that bores you, you may as well click off.

I want to talk about this from a business owner executive position. And that's that was the holidays are coming up, there are certain things that you just can't control.

Some of them are good and some of them are bad, good thing that you can control that that you can't control of the holidays is the buying frenzy that occurs.

The buying frenzy isn't just in the gift sector, the buying frenzy is across the board. When people are in the motion to buy, they are in the motion to buy and they will buy anything.

You could take advantage of that if you have something that you're selling service, or what have you anything, especially if you could turn it into a gift if you create a gift certificate for what it is that you offer, product or service. That's something that's pretty useful right now

You can take advantage. I know we all can't stand, Black Friday, Cyber Monday, and all this stuff. But there's a reason why it keeps going and it keeps getting bigger.

That's because it works.

Because when most people are doing the same thing, they continue to do the same thing. If you follow along with it, you will prosper with it because it's just it's a weird thing about human personalities and human psychology.

When we're in motion, we tend to stay in motion and so when people are buying, they're going to continue buying and so you can take advantage of that. Now.

Those are some of the good things that come with the holidays and we could spend more time on that another time. I want to talk about some of the bad things that come with holidays, especially from a business person's perspective.

If you enjoy doing business, you're going to be held back in that area. If you have employees or other people that you work with, they may be running at a slower pace.

During this time period, if you have family and so forth, you are going to be pulled away, quite possibly, for days on end, away from a lot of the things that you love doing business. And that's good or bad, depending on your perspective.

But you got to be ready for it because this stuff happens every year, the good and the bad, you have to know where the good and the bad, reside, Don't get worked up about it, plan for it.

Plan for it, you got it, you see it come in here, it's coming, it's coming, it's coming. You see it coming, I know what you're going to do know how to handle it, watch yourself and how you handle things, watch the overeating, watch the oversleeping watch the whole the little overs and unders that ended up taking over our lives during this period of time.

And for those of you who don't have any of the attachments, meaning family and friends and, and a lot of things that could be very good. If you don't have those things and you're in work mode, keep working work through it, I don't care.

For those of us who have less of a choice in the matter because of the way that we've designed our lifestyle, then you got to be ready for what's coming. And got to do what you got to do and I do it myself.

I only say this because I go through it every year.

Thoughts on what to do when you run out of things to say doing content marketing on a regular basis.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tmlVGqMfMsU

Transcription

What do you say when there's nothing to say?

Hi I'm Brian Pombo, welcome back to Brian J. Pombo Live.

I'm specifically talking about the content marketing headache that we all get into if you're doing any form of ongoing content marketing, you may realize that there's there are there is a point at which you just don't have anything to say where you're not, you may not be inspired, you may have fallen behind in, you may not have your lists that we've discussed, of things to talk about.

You don't feel like doing quick research to be able to find something to talk about real fast. And you just don't have anything to talk about. That's just, it happens.

This is where I am today.

So it's not unusual, it can happen from time to time. And what I do is I tend to just try to jump into it, which is a little difficult with my format because I've formatted it…if you've ever watched any of these episodes of Brian J Pombo Live, I start with a headline and then I play off of that the whole time. And so this headline just had to be the fact that I had nothing to talk about.

Now, if you don't do that, it's you can get really good at just riffing, and just talking and just moving until something meaningful comes out.

So one of the things I do every single time that I talk is if I have some type of offer, I have some type of endorsement, I have something that I encourage people to do. And the one thing I've been doing for well over a year now is encouraging people to go get a copy of my book, 9 Ways to Amazon-Proof Your Business.

It's not going to be my only book, but it's my only book right now. And it's actually it's my lead offer right now for meeting new people to be able to work with or partner up with or what have you. And so it's kind of one of the things that I like to offer to people. Now you go get a hard-bound copy at Amazon.com.

But I wanted to show it to you. For those of you who haven't seen it up close yet. It's a thin book, I mentioned this a lot. Let me see how many pages are we at in here? This is I mean, this is less than 60 pages 59 pages cover to cover.

It's got big writing and it's got a few pictures here and there.

This isn't tough. It but it is meaningful, and it will set you off in the process of trying to make your competition break. Really the sublime, it even makes more sense than the title the title confuses a lot of people, but how to stand out in your industry and make every competitor irrelevant.

That's the point of Amazon proofing your business. Now you can go buy a copy, or you can go pick up a free copy at AmazonProofBook.com.

As long as I'm able to get out some type of an offer as long as I can, I can give a where they call it a call to action for the people that are viewing or listening. That's all that matters.

That's the main thing I want to do anyways, so consider this, the main point of today's talk, and that's all I'm going to do tonight. Take it easy.

If you don't have anything to talk about, get out there and talk about anything or always go back to your offer.

You can always say something different about it that you haven't said before like I have just now. That's all I got for today. You have a great night. We'll see you tomorrow. In the meantime, get out there and let the magic happen.

Thoughts on the good and bad of wants and desires.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G_RcQU4Qwe0

Transcription

Want the double-edged sword?

Hi I'm Brian Pombo, welcome back to Brian J. Pombo Live.

I'm going to give the sword back to the Black Knight over here. And let's talk a little bit about what wants his desire right in business. It is the place where you can come right out and talk about desire directly.

Even though it fuels most people most of the day, most of the time, it really is, it's the thing that makes us do, what we end up doing is our desire to do it our want to do it. That's why so many people don't do what they need to do they do what they want to do, they follow their initial desire.

Now, this has bad connotations, obviously but it also has good connotations in a marketplace economy as we have in the United States or the partial marketplace economy.

You it has a whole lot of benefits to it, it brings about innovation and everything else, I'm not going to get too deep into that on whether one does a good thing or not a good thing.

The plain fact of the matter is, if you're looking to sell anything to anyone, you got a product, you got to service anything, you have to understand or constantly get to understand more and more about what and I'm going to talk about the double-edged sword of it.

I'm going to talk about the fact that we and I talk about this a lot here is we talk about the customer and the client and the end, the end person whoever you're working with, if you're bringing on a patient, it doesn't matter what circumstance if you're attempting to get somebody to do something, you have to play to what it is that they already want.

You have to either know what that is or find out what that is and then you have to play to it and show how your widget your service, your church can get them what they already want.

Not an easy task and at the same time, here's the other edge of the sword that I don't talk about as often you have to keep an eye on what it is that you want in the back of your mind, but not in the front. Okay.

So you really have to get good at setting your wants aside while attempting to help other people achieve their once.

It's a natural thing because if you are too consumed with your own once it changes your behavior.

This is really apparent in one on one sales environment and I'm not just talking about a used car salesman, I'm talking about any situation where you're in a conversation with somebody attempting to take them from where they are to purchasing something that you have or doing a certain action that you want them to do.

It could be that you're looking to get them to donate to a charity, it doesn't matter. It's the same process no matter what different wants, perhaps, but it's the same process.

So in that process, if you are focused too much on getting them to do what you want them to do, because you want the end result that's going to come from that, meaning you're going to get a paycheck from you're going to get something if you pay too much attention to what you want.

It messes up the whole feel of it and people can sense when somebody is pushing them to do what they want them to do versus what they themselves want to do if that makes sense.

This is very, very, very prevalent, like I said, in one on one interactions. It gets a little bit more dissonant as you start talking about marketing and start having a distance between the person doing the sale and t...

Brian talks about an article from Kristen M. Vaughn from Search Engine Journal on questions to ask a content marketing agency.

Checkout Kristen's Article - https://www.searchenginejournal.com/hiring-content-marketing-agency/426244/

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NNYpRI2sgIk

Transcription

11 questions for a content marketing agency.

Hi I'm Brian Pombo, welcome back to Brian J. Pombo Live.

What I have here is an article, and this is an article by Kristen Vaughn.

Kristen M. Vaughn with a Search Engine Journal SearchEngineJournal.com.

The title of the article is, Hiring a Content Marketing Agency? Ask These 11 Questions First.

So I'm going to go through Kristen's 11 questions and kind of give you my just initial take, I have not read the article cover to cover a top to bottom, I should say. But what I do is I have a certain instinct on some of these ideas.

I'm not a content marketing agency, I do have a little bit of a background in content marketing, both doing it myself, doing it for other partners and clients, and so forth.

So I want to talk a little bit about some of these ideas that are being presented here. So we're just going to go through one by one, I'll just give you a quick take on all of them.

Number one, Do You Perform SEO?

And that's an interesting question to ask a content marketing age agency. But it does have something to do with it now was Search Engine Optimization. That's what SEO is.

So the main idea is when you're putting content out there, do you know not that you're an absolute expert but do you know the basics of SEO, so that you can get around in all of the areas that you're going to be posting content?

So if you're posting content on YouTube, does the person know what is going to get attention on YouTube?

And so that's a legitimate question. But once again, I don't think it is really needed that they really need to be an expert, they just need to know the basics to be able to get forward if they if you've got good content, and no clue about SEO, you may have a little bit of a tough time, especially if you're doing a full organic search.

But if you understand basic as an SEO, if you know basic SEO, you should be able to get through pretty well.

Number two, How Will You Help Our Business?

That's a pretty good question.

Especially if you're looking for a specific end outcome.

Most agencies, whether content marketing or any other type of marketing agency, try to dissuade looking at a specific outcome. Because if you get caught up in a specific outcome, it means they literally have to perform for a result.

It's a little tougher to do with content marketing, but anybody that's fighting you on results based in the game is someone you should be careful of working with because you should have an idea of what you are going to achieve and whether it's actually measurable or not with via a content marketing campaign.

Number three, What Results Can We Expect?

That plays toward the same idea if you're looking for results?

If you're looking for how you're actually gonna get help from these people?

That really stuff you got to know before you, you hunker down with an agency?

Number four,

Thoughts on JnJ splitting up their company.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9_dAnCrbNXw

Transcription

Should you split-up your company?

Hi I'm Brian Pombo, welcome back to Brian J. Pombo Live.

This news came out just recently, just Friday, that Johnson and Johnson are splitting up its company into two publicly traded companies.

One's gonna deal with the high-end health care and things like the vaccine and medical devices and those types of things that they deal with kind of on a higher-end, you know, kind of business to business business to government type solutions.

The other one's going to take care of all of the home consumables, your band aids and everything like that.

So taking two completely separate functions of the company, and creating two separate companies out of it.

Now, why would a company go about doing this?

Well, there's a whole bunch of reasons why politically, a company would do this, well, General Electric just did the same thing, that they just announced that they're going to be split into three different companies dealing with completely different things that they're one company was already doing and it's pretty smart.

If you think about all the ramifications of especially dealing with international and national governments and a whole lot of the controversy surrounding all of that, whether you're talking vaccines, or all healthcare, all this other stuff that's going on.

It makes sense to be able to separate some of your other things out from that, that have zero to do with it.

All they have is a name attached, that happens to be the same name. But when you're talking General Electric, you're talking of a very massive company, that as is really when you get that large, it's made up of many different companies and so should you look into splitting up your company?

Well, it's another option in it when you're looking at what to do with your company in the long run. And most people look at the option, okay, do I shut my company down after I die or when I retire?

Do I just shut the thing down or do I sell it?

You know, those are the two main options that most people look for. Sometimes people look for passing it on, especially ownership that you may have management worked out, but succession in terms of ownership, you may pass on to children, so forth. But in general, people look at either shutting it down or selling it.

But this blending in is actually pretty unique and it tends to happen only when you have a company large enough that you do enough multiple things. That makes sense.

Because sometimes if you do multiple things, and you really do have something that's like a separate company, or it could be a separate company could run on its own, because of a product line, maybe that you started that took off or what have you.

In a situation like that, it only makes sense that you should look into splitting it off because then you get a chance to maybe part of your company you do want to sell or you may want to sell earlier than the other parts of your company.

Or if one of the people are looking at purchasing your company, they don't want that other piece maybe baggage to you. But you can see the use of it in the marketplace.

There's a lot that goes into this and so it's really worth asking yourself whether that could possibly ever be a function?

Do you have a company that has enough different functions ...

Thoughts on birthdays and offers.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kiR5HYvDYSo

Transcription

Super Simple marketing hack.

Hi I'm Brian Pombo, welcome back to Brian J Pombo Live.

I've got this little meme for those of you listening and not watching. I've got this meme of this monkey that you may have seen before where he's got kind of a funny smile on his face and says when people sing happy birthday to you, and you just sit there like there's something awkward about birthdays, it's awkward.

I think it's awkward because it's forced, you know, we don't really have a choice in the fact that we have birthdays. And when they are they just they happen, they're automatic, they just happen on the calendar and that's just the end of it. You know, and we don't really have a choice in the fact and the fact that it kind of means you're one day closer to dying type of thing.

It's a very strange thing and everybody has them. It's nothing unique.

Every single person has a birthday, and so we all have them. The amazing thing about birthdays is the idea that some people can get away with people not realizing that it's their birthday, oh, they, they take it off of Facebook.

They take it out of the public domain so that people can't see it. But most of us have to deal with that we've got family, we've got friends, people that won't forget people that have it on their calendars and so forth.

So you're going to have a birthday whether you like it or not.

Here's where marketing comes in.

And here's where your business can get something out of it. Everyone's got them. Most of them are pretty easy to find out if you don't ask them directly.

Here's the funny thing.

Every birthday that you have, how many free or amazing offers are you getting from different businesses on your birthday?

You go and count them, doesn't happen that often. Even if you go and sign up for a whole bunch, you probably do not get that many amazing things, you may get one or two.

And you've got a lot of these businesses, maybe the coffee shop or whatever says hey, come by for your own free coffee on your birthday, you know, but it that takes effort on your part, how many of them go out of their way to send you something or to email you something?

Or to really put the full effort in giving you something good?

Okay, now pull it back the opposite direction?

How many people do you think to get that?

Across the board, of course, everyone's the same. Most of us do not really get that type, the type of thing we appreciate on our birthday, which is something we really want or something that at least someone put some thought into the type of thing, even if it's complete across the board the same thing for everybody. I can't I can't think of a good example.

But imagine if you have a product that that applies to everybody that you have a list for that you have, you know who your audiences so to speak, you know who they are, okay. And if you don't, you better find out. You know who your potential client is or who your current client or customer is.

Send them something on their birthday even if it's just a note saying hi.

But send them something. They're having a birthday anyways, everyone's acknowledging it anyways, it's already super awkward, make their day a little brighter.

It's the simplest thing in the world to be able to get at...

Thoughts on transitions in business and how you handle change.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E6seyaYEMLg

Transcription

The funny thing about transitions.

Hi I'm Brian Pombo, welcome back to Brian J Pombo Live.

I want to talk a little bit about transitions because we're going through quite a few transitions here at Brian J Pombo. Live.

We're kind of restructuring how we're doing things.

I mean, everything's always in transition if you're looking at the right way, but we're restructuring things, we're shutting down some projects some long term projects that we've been working on, and opening up new ones that I've been hinting at for a while, but putting a lot more energy and focus into that.

And the funny thing about transitions is everyone handles it a little bit differently. Some people get really freaked out about new things and trying out something new and ending something that you've done for a long time.

I'm lucky that I don't have a huge staff or anything of that sort. It's all designed to be able to run and turn quickly. And as I've been discussing it with the people that I do work with, we realize that certain things have to change.

At first, that can cause a little bit of trepidation but if you back away from it, it can get really exciting.

Now I have a funny thing about my personality, being that I'm entrepreneurial, and very, very much an innovator, if you will, I love transitions, I love the beginning of anything, the ending of things I'm not that great with but the beginning of new things, make the ending of other things even better.

So I'm always for the beginning, I'm always hot to try it when we're first running out the door. So we're working on a new project and I've got these books all laid out.

I'm highlighting them and I'm organizing and I'm putting things together and kind of drawing out a map of where to go.

Now when it starts getting into the real nitty-gritty and really getting into the into, into getting things done. I'm not as good at that. That's the time I want to start something new, you know, but everybody's a little bit different.

And you got to be aware of that, especially if you're working with a team of people. Everybody handled these things differently, it really is built into how your brain functions.

A whole lot has been put into this in terms of research and I always recommend people look into Kathy Kolbe's work.

Really good stuff, Kathy spells her name with a K and her last name, also with a K.

So it's Kathy Kolbe, go check out Kolbe.com, and look up the stuff regarding the Kolbe index, because they've been able to find that there's a certain part of the brain, right that they call the conative center of the brain, where you pretty much it's set to run a certain way pretty much your entire life.

And that from the time you're a baby all the way till when they put you in the ground.

I mean that that's how you function. And it's even more pervasive than what people would normally consider personality, and it's how you work.

It's how you function in work.

And some people enjoy during certain types of things.

They could do that in a whole bunch of different careers but there's one thing they really have an aptitude for, and everything else they may not have.

And some people they're spread out in their aptitude and other people are,