Brian J. Pombo Live

Part 5 in a series of videos on what what Brian looks for in companies.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yZy8rvIh9ds

Transcription

Qualities business owners look for number five.

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

I'm gonna point out a few things if you've been watching this series on qualities that business investors look for.

One, yes, I have had a haircut. Okay, so that's one thing you'll notice.

Another thing, for those of you who are watching versus listening, those of you who are listening, none of this matters. Another thing that the people watching will notice is I've got a bloodshot eye, which is really disgusting. You can't feel it though. This is another injury, for those of you keeping track at home, that Lucas the destroyer hit me in the head this morning. Probably with his head, I don't even remember exactly what happened cuz he's such a rambunctious two year old.

I always come on here with new scratches and bumps and scars and everything from my two year old. So this is a new one, so just in case if that's throwing interview off.

Let's talk about the things that business investors look for when they're looking for somebody to partner up with, or somebody to a business to purchase.

This is number five, if you want to watch the other ones, go back and watch the other ones we've is a series that will continue. I pretty sure we're just going to hit the top seven, we'll see how it goes.

But this is number five, and it is called, CLUBHOUSE CLIMATE.

Now, when I'm talking clubhouse, I'm not discussing the hot new app. So there's a social app that's really popular right now here in 2021. That has to do with audio chat rooms that you can get involved with. That's not what I'm talking about.

But I'm talking about the type of thing that that app creates, which is a clubhouse type environment, you have a club situation fit into your business, this is fabulous, there's very little that can go wrong. If you have this setup and your business, if you can make it to where it has both and possibly elite flair to it or or a section of it that does but at least a feeling of belonging.

I talk about this a lot in my book, 9 Ways to Amazon-Proof Your Business, specifically chapter five, which is number five here. But chapter five and chapter six, discuss this belonging concept and having the subscription membership concept plugged into your business.

This is a major deal, I have two whole chapters referring to it, you can get a free copy of my book, by the way, if you go to AmazonProofBook.com, or you could purchase a hard bound version over at Amazon, Barnes and Noble or wherever books are sold. So you check that out.

But think about how powerful this is think about all of the businesses that you're aware of that have a club feeling to them. And some of them they just have kind of a subscription model tied to them your costcos your amazon.com.

Yes, they have somewhat of a club, you know, Amazon Prime, and so forth. But it's not really any way you don't go there to meet people you don't hang out, you don't feel that you're part of anything special. So I wouldn't specifically include them just because they have a membership option, even though it's very valuable to have something like that tied in with your business because you're creating consistent flow.

But really, if you can create a club like attitude, Apple had this in the very early days when it was still a very out of the ordinary company.

Part 4 in a series of videos on what what Brian looks for in companies.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ejOm_8EVZ80

Transcription

Qualities business investors look for, number 4.

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

Today we're going to be talking about the number four on the list of however many qualities that a business investor looks for. So if you're I'm talking about business investors that are either looking to purchase a business or are looking to invest expertise and capital into a business. That's what we're discussing here.

So let's delve a little deeper into another one of these topics, we covered three up until now, the fourth one is, is also extremely simple, at first glance and the problem with it is that so few businesses actually have it as a major piece of their business.

It can be a stumbling block to growth, one thing I found is that businesses will usually hit the million-dollar mark and have a tough time getting past that ceiling if they can't figure out how to get past number four, number four is being PROFIT PLEDGED.

I know this is going to this is gonna really irritate a whole lot of people out there, because it's really not cool to talk about profit, and to focus on the numbers and all that type of thing that's just greedy, and selfish and this and that.

And I agree, if that was all your about your business isn't going to last long, you're going to have a tough time gaining attention, because you're just you're too concerned over numbers and all that.

The problem is, is when it does not exist in your business because it is the main thing. You shouldn't be thinking all day about how you consume food, and then the food gets distributed, the nutrients get distributed through your blood.

Most of you don't need to be thinking about whether you have enough blood in your system, just the right amount so that you don't have low blood pressure, and you don't have high blood pressure. That blood is taking everything where it needs to go, most of us don't need to worry about that. But without it, you're dead.

There's this little thing in business, that if there was no one focused on it, you're dead in the water and that concept is profit. Profit is the simplest thing in the world. But it's if you get too over-focused and outside of the realm of where the profit lies, then you will you'll lose momentum in your business in trying to fix it later on.

So that here's the deal. This is what I mean by profit, it's actually really simple. You have something left over, after you spend everything that you made, okay if you've got a business that's growing, you've got money coming in. Right?

At some point, you're going to have money coming in. Now maybe if you're at the very beginning, you're putting a whole lot more out than you have coming in, I get that. But you should have enough predictable amount coming in, that you'll know next month, we're going to pull in at least about this much.

In general, we're going to have at least this much coming in and you know that you have at least this much going out. Now you may know that you already have more coming out than in, but then you also know that the next month you're going to have some more coming back in.

So even if you're running at a deficit, you should know that number. And the focus should be to stop running at a deficit eventually, to eventually have money left over.

After it's all been spent, that you have more coming in, then you have coming out going out. That's profit.

Part 3 in a series of videos on what what Brian looks for in companies.

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

Transcription

Qualities business investors look for number three.

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

I am a business investor, I look at a lot of different businesses for a lot of different reasons. Sometimes I've had businesses that I've looked at purchasing, I've had more often than not, I go in, and I look for ways that I can partner with the business because I could see missing elements or elements that can be tweaked just ever so slightly, to have a huge gain.

And if I can partner up with the owner, for any number of ways of doing that, and be able to help them to tweak something where we can all profit off of it, it helps everybody.

These are some of the things that I look for in a business in the most ideal scenario, the things I would look for in a business if I were just straight in going in and purchasing the business or looking to partner up with them, these are the things that I look for.

So we went through number one and number two, and today I'm going to go through number three. And number three is one of those things that is it's not quantifiable.

In a numbers situation, it's more of a very much a very clear track record. That is being set by the owner or owners.

Number three is what I call universal communication.

Does the owners do the leadership of the company?

Do they communicate across the board?

So are they communicating with staff?

Are they communicating with vendors?

Are they communicating with investors and other owners or people that have ownership in the company?

And most importantly, are they communicating with their current customers?

If those communications like if any one of those communication lines is broken, it's usually broken across the board. How you communicate with one is oftentimes how you communicate with all.

And one of the most common things that honestly this will completely negate deal so often, is if I go in, and I see all the good things happening, but I see that they're not communicating properly, either misleading people or just not communicating, shutting off communication lines between themselves and the people that matter in their company.

That that that's a big red flag and it's a tough thing to dig out of. Because it's almost like PR, even if it's PR between you and your staff, it's really something difficult to change, because you've created a system of distrust.

There's distrust between you and your staff. And there's going to be distrust between you and everybody that your company touches, guaranteed. I've seen it too often, for it not to be true.

That's why it makes it extremely difficult for anyone to come in, and partner up and attempt to fix or improve any element of that company. Because it's rotten at a foundational level.

I don't like using the term rotten, because it's oftentimes really good people neglect communication. If they're not good at it, they usually have not hired someone else that's good at it and it absolutely needs to happen.

One of my clients went through a similar situation for years and years, where it was just nearly impossible to keep the communication game up and be able to do all the things that he was great at.

I told him,

Part 2 in a series of videos on what what Brian looks for in companies.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fb-diBalbPg

Transcription

Qualities business investors look for part two.

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

I am going through this process of developing a list and this list is what the top things that business investors look for when they're looking for businesses to invest in, invest their time in, invest their experience in, and possibly even investing capital and so forth.

I came up with this list and this is the second thing on this list.

Now, these aren't in any particular order and you can go back and watch number one. Listen to number one from yesterday.

But this second thing is definitely one of the top ones.

The second thing is what I call systemized attention.

I'm going to go through what systemized attention is in just a moment.

First, I want to remind you about my book, 9 Ways to Amazon-Proof Your Business. If you haven't gotten your copy yet, get it now, it is currently if you're watching this within a recent time at a good price going on amazon.com you go check that out, see if it's still there.

You can also get it absolutely free on my website, AmazonProofBook.com. AmazonProofBook.com and get your own free digital copy of it. You can also get an audiobook version that's going to be coming out in the next few weeks.

Let's talk about systemized attention and why your business, if you don't have it, you should have it and if you do have it, you will make yourself much more attractive to business investors like myself.

So what how I refer to systemized attention is, are you getting attention on a regular basis, on a consistent basis that has a system developed around it?

Let me give you an example. Real simple example.

What you're watching listening to right now, Brian J. Pombo Live is a daily podcast that gets sent out via video and audio. So you may be watching it, you may be listening to it. But it gets sent out over the world wide web, both via audio podcast, and video, we upload it to YouTube and LinkedIn.

All the different social media is out there, you may be watching on Instagram, and it gets put out there on Rumble, we're out there on a whole bunch of different platforms.

So it's consistent, it's out on a daily basis, we have a systematic way of doing it. It goes out constantly and in all these different areas.

If I want to promote something, I promote it here. Lately, I've been promoting my book on a daily basis, but I can promote anything, I can promote other people, other projects I have. And it's built into my business, it's built into BrianJPombo.com which is it's really handy to have this is just one piece of my attention system that I have built up but it's a useful piece.

Most businesses don't have any attention system whatsoever. They have no way of standing out on a consistent basis, let alone a way that systemized that they know this is what we're doing today, this week, this month, through into the next year.

We know what we're doing as far as that goes. A lot of businesses the largest businesses have some form, but do you have a full attention system?

Do you have systemized attention built into your business plan?

If you don't, I recommend you get it. Find a way of doing it one way of doing it, go check out my book,

The first in a series of videos as Brian breaks down the various things he looks for in a company before he invests working with them.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c2RsEuWj9fo

Transcription

Qualities business investors look for number one.

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

We're going to talk about the qualities that business investors look for when they're looking to invest in a business and in this situation I'm speaking for myself, I'm a business investor.

There are certain things that I look for in businesses when I look to track them down, and to either purchase or to partner up with, find something that I can do with the business and be able to get value on my end, but also be able to produce value for whoever's the current owner.

This is the first thing I look for is number one, this is going to be a list of videos that you be able to watch once I'm done doing them all. But this is the first one.

That one thing is a singular vision. I'm looking for a singular vision from whoever's in charge. So in most cases, that's going to be the business owner. In some cases, it may be an executive, whoever cares the most about the business and is making it function from day to day, the person in charge, the person calling the shots, they have to have a singular vision regarding that business.

And what that means is, where do they see it going in the next five years, in the next 10 years?

Are they consistent in where they want it to be?

Extra points are absolutely awarded if you can find other people in that business, that know what those goals are, and can tell you what they are and they're on board with them. Okay, this is unusual.

This is unusual for small businesses or big businesses.

When you have a singular vision, though, you have something really magical that cannot be replaced. Where it needs to be added.

I found that in every business, you have to have some form of singular vision. And it's ideal that the entire team is on board with that vision.

So that's the one thing, the first thing I look for in a business.

As I said, they don't all have them, but if you're looking to have somebody come in and help you out on your business, or looking to sell your business eventually or looking to partner up, then that is the type of thing that you should honestly be thinking of having even if you don't plan on bringing anybody in, you really should focus on.

What is our long-term goal?

What are we trying to accomplish here?

Can we get everyone on the team on board with that?

Hopefully, that makes sense to you. Tomorrow, I'm going to be going through the second thing that I look for in businesses, and in the meantime, go check out my book, 9 Ways to Amazon-Proof Your Business. You can get a free copy at AmazonProofBook.com.

We'll be back here tomorrow. In the meantime, get out there and let the magic happen.

Thoughts on qualifications and experience from a question Brian received on one of his older daily videos.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yfycjKt9GDY

Transcription

Qualifications or Experience?

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

Over the last handful of episodes that we put out, five, I think to be exact, we had an interview with Ari Galper and if you didn't get a chance to watch that, go back and watch those episodes is really good stuff.

Ari is a guy with a whole lot of experience, and qualifications. So really interesting in terms of a different perspective on sales, and sales is a huge part of business so really good to check out.

What we deal with here a lot, is ideas, concepts, principles, strategies, tactics that you can use in your business, if you're the business owner, or the executive, where you're in charge of making decisions and getting things done.

These are the types of things that we talk about here and we talked a lot about the principles that apply to businesses across the board, or at least when it comes to strategies. We deal with the questions that you should be asking yourself.

I got a great question here, off of one of our YouTube videos out there, that this was off of the Five Excruciating Steps to Becoming a Business Strategist. This is from Danny, he just posted this a couple of days ago. He said, If you were to redo your career, from scratch as a strategist in the year 2021, with the knowledge you have, would you focus more on qualifications or gaining experience?

This is a very interesting question and it might require some back and forth, but I'm going to try to answer it as best as from what I understand he's asking here.

So thank you very much for the question, Danny, and anyone else that has questions, please leave a comment wherever you're watching or listening to this, you can always go to BrianJPombo.com. Go into the media section, and find this video or any of the other videos and leave me a comment and a question doesn't even have to do anything with the video.

So this is a great question because there's an ongoing argument over qualifications versus experience and it's asking me specifically what I would do. And for me hands down experience over qualifications any day.

Qualifications is an extremely subjective term and it all depends, it's very much dependent on the person that's judging you, you know, you're judging whether you they think you're going to be good judging whether, whether they'd like to do business with you, and so on, so forth.

So that's where qualifications really come into play for what I do. There are no qualifications. There's no degree on business investment or strategy, not in the way that I do it.

And so many of the things that I've done, actually, most of my life, one of the main reasons why I never finished college, as a little tip there, I never finished college is not that I couldn't, or that I didn't have the ability to, it was more of one of these things where I kind of listed out all the different things that I wanted to do it like in life at that time.

None of them required a degree and a degree wouldn't really help me in any of those areas.

And the areas I was already doing well in, able to get positions to work in, and so forth, they didn't require degrees either and it wouldn't really help.

Now, in some cases, people are looking, especially if you're in a job market where it's tight, and the employer is kind of in charge,

Ari tells us what the difference is between being a trusted advisor (post-sale) and a trusted authority (pre-sale).

Checkout Unlock The Sales Game - https://unlockthegame.com/

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M2wQN92kX1I

Transcription

Brian: There's a difference between being a trusted adviser and trusted authority.

Can you touch on that a little bit?

Ari: Sure.

So the whole notion of trust advisor been along around for a long time and most people will classify themselves as a trusted adviser, not as salesperson.

They are the trusted advisor.

Oh yeah, I'm just like, you're a trusted advisor to those clients who already know you.

Sure, post sale.

But you're not a trusted advisor, someone who doesn't know you, pre-sale.

That's a different way of thinking.

We have to become what I call a trusted authority, which we teach to professionals how to do consultants and advisors. That's a different way of thinking.

You have to be positioned yourself as an authority, you have to use a trust based process to engage them and enroll them because they don't really get to know you until after the sale.

And what I teach my clients to do is…this may sound crazy right now and it's a bit of a bomb, but we teach our clients to stop building relationships pre-sale.

That's the worst thing you can do.

Because relationships and trust building can now become mutually exclusive.

You can build trust with someone in a deep way. Without doing the whole fake rapport thing.

Oh, hi, how's it going?

How's the weather?

It's, oh, that's great, where are you from really.

All that is 1980s fake rapport that we're taught to do. And you know, what the other person knows is not real anyways, they don't want to become your friend.

But here we are trying to like get to know them better have a cup of coffee, go golfing, go network, and then hopefully one day, if they like us enough, well, then they'll buy from us.

Well, if you want to wait a long time for that, then feel free. But I'll tell you right now, that's just a game everyone knows.

And we have a process and a system here we're talking about the removes all that BS relationship building, which is fake anyways, save the real stuff when they're a client of yours.

But instead, focus strictly only on trust building.

For full conversations, go to BJPchats.com.

Ari explains why it's important to take the pressure out of the sales call by using Feedback rather than traditional lines like Follow Up, Checking In and Touch Base.

Checkout Unlock The Sales Game - https://unlockthegame.com/

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XZenegqIIP8

Transcription

Ari: Never again use the phrase "follow up" ever again.

Now, what's the only industry in the world that uses the word follow up?

Brian: Sales.

Ari: Exactly sales!

You're being instantly associated with that negative salesperson stereotype.

Hi, I'm giving you a call as a follow-up to move things were towards the sale.

Brian: Yep.

Ari: You're killing it. Right there. It's over.

Here you are a heart-center professional, you're not salesy.

You're just a nice person, but your languaging screams, Hi, I'm just checking it out.

There's another one "checking in."

There's one more classic, remember the old school one, I'm giving you a call to "touch base."

It's so 1980s, you know, the minute you use that languaging it's over.

Now, there's still nice to you, they still talk to you, but they don't tell you the truth because you're just been tagged with that horrible stereotype.

No matter who you are, I don't care if you're a CEO, or a lawyer or an accountant, it's over.

So I'm going to ask you all right now to replace that phrase with this instead. This because right from our program, I'm giving you a call to see if you have any feedback from our previous conversation.

Any feedback from our last meeting, any feedback from the proposal.

Feedback is going which direction?

It's going backward away from the sale.

Follow-ups going where?

Towards the sale.

Remember when I said in the beginning, you have to take the pressure out of the process, do not create momentum. This is the complete opposite of the entire sales industry, which is all about moving things where forward.

I'm saying move things were reversed, that's what creates authenticity, that creates trust because you're not doing the behavior and process everybody in the world knows at, Hello.

For full conversations, go to BJPchats.com.

Sales expert Ari Galper talks about the power of finding the truth of where your prospect stands first, rather than spending time "chasing the sale" as most sales people have been trained to do.

Checkout Unlock The Sales Game - https://unlockthegame.com/

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

Transcription

Ari: Let's say you're having the first call with somebody over the phone, a potential client or prospect. They could believe that they're qualified could be a good fit.

All this good, you're looking forward to it call kind of comes to an end.

What do we typically say to somebody at the end of a call like that?

Not a trick question, but what are we trained to say to somebody, if we have someone on the hook, and they're pretty qualified, what do we normally say to somebody and then a call like that?

Brian: Are you ready to buy?

Ari: Yeah, we say something like, let's take us next step right you have a copy, a demo. We're conditioned to move things in which direction?

Brian: Our way.

Ari: Right, that's our normal trigger from our past conditioning.

Brian: Sure.

Ari: But what happens if you try and move somebody forward and they aren't ready yet? What do you break right there at the beginning of the process with them?

Brian: You're kind of breaking trust, right?

Ari: That's right. That's what happens.

So let's reverse it. same scenario.

Calls going well, a call comes in. And rather than saying, Hey, how about, we go to our next step?

What we say instead, is this based upon our approach and our mindset, what we say is this, we say, Where do you think we should go from here? (says words slowly here)

Now, how does that change the dynamic of the moment?

So it makes them willing participants in the process, right?

So you're shifting the power over them now and usually, when you say to somebody, where do you think we should go from here?

They're usually in a state of shock. They can't believe somebody in business would actually ask them what they want to do. This is revolutionary. And you know, what's funny is when you say to somebody, usually, they say things like, I've got one more question. You know, what comes out all of a sudden, the truth, and hat is your goal.

Your goal is no longer to focus on making a sale anymore. Your goal is to focus on the truth of where they stand because you don't get that from the beginning. you chase ghosts your entire day.

Your whole pipeline is full of people who express interest, but you know, they never convert. And that's the game we're stuck in. Stuck in the dysfunctional, brainwashed process that we think is our reality, but we're the ones quitting because we don't have an exposure to realize we're the ones causing that to happen.

For full conversations, go to BJPchats.com.

Brian gives us his closing thoughts on our interview with sales expert Ari Galper

Full Convo https://brianjpombo.com/bjpchats/

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RSBPM8521IM

Transcription

Ari Galper interview review.

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

This is kind of a capper to follow up on the interview that we did with Ari Galper of Unlocking the Sales Game. We had a great interview, you can go back and watch it or listen to it.

Regardless of where you're watching this right now just check the description for the link to that.

I wanted to talk about kind of what I got out of the interview initially. So this happened just a little over an hour ago and I want to kind of point out some things that I saw with it that I thought was interesting and might be helpful to you.

Number one, the thing that happened behind the scene that you didn't get to see is that Ari has a very well-organized process for taking on an interview.

So he has a media kit that he sends out beforehand, which is really helpful if you're a podcast host, and you interview people. You have conversations with people on there, that type of thing is really helpful in scrape because our is kind of high profile.

He's one of these people that I already knew who he was long before I ever interviewed him. But having that extra piece really helped out a lot. He also had a thing in there called an interview kit that goes through the type of things that he'd like to cover.

And some of the points and he even talk to me before the thing happened before our interview, started filming. We discussed the type of things that he'd liked to have covered again, just to make sure that I caught it off of the interview kid.

This is really important if you're the type of person that's getting out there, and you want to stand out more, which I talked about a lot.

If you're looking to stand out, and then you're going to want to be interviewed, and if you're going to be interviewed, you got to make clear what it is that you'd like to cover.

If you can, if you can go through that with the interviewer ahead of time. That's really helpful. So that was really cool to see and that's the thing you don't you wouldn't notice on your end of things.

Another thing is that already does is he creates a new language.

If you saw what he did with that interview, or got to hear what he did he because he actually points it out. He says, don't say this anymore, don't say "follow up" anymore, don't say these terms anymore.

Replace it with this, try this language.

I mean, I love some of his phrasings, chasing ghosts, right?

His new questions like, would you be open to that, these are really subtle, but very important when you're attempting to get attention when you're looking to stand out when you're looking to grow your crowd, and the hand that people that are interested in what you're bringing out, and you're looking to get your message to them, then you have to switch things up quite a bit.

Having your own language, having your own phrases that aren't typical, that aren't usual, that make a person stop and think.

I mean, that's really his entire philosophy. If you think about it, his entire philosophy is to slow things down and reverse the way that people look at you. So you can learn both from what he says but also from what he does...