Hi everyone, Carl Gould here with your #70secondCEO. Just a little over a one-minute investment every day for a lifetime of results.

Are you in the committed mode? Are you in the convenient mode? And here's what we find out almost 100% of the time. You're not getting the results you want; you probably fell into the convenient mode. And I understand. I live in a shore state, New Jersey. We have a beach that backs right up to the Atlantic Ocean. And guess where everybody is from now until Labor Day? There. Guess where they're not? At networking events, schlepping out to a trade show, and taking the extra phone call. They blocked out their calendar. All of a sudden their Calendly link has nothing on it. That's where they're at, right? So last week I got the op, hey Carl, you wanna go to that concert? Or hey Carl, are you coming to the networking event that you have to drive to New York for? That's an hour and a half away, one way. Which one do you think I wanted to go to? Now, turns out I went to the networking event. Made two nice contacts. Missed the concert. Okay, that's what happens.

Like and follow this podcast so you can learn more. My name is Carl Gould, and this has been your #70secondCEO.

Hi everyone, Carl Gould here with your #70secondCEO. Just a little over a one-minute investment every day for a lifetime of results.

Now I'm trying to make it sound fun, like, yay, referral party, but we also call it a one-to-one house call. It's a meeting with somebody where you sit down and you say to them, Here's what's going on in my world. And here's what a good introduction looks like for me. Tell me what's going on in your world and what a good introduction looks like for you. And we don't get off the phone until we make at least one introduction for each other. You do that with five people every month. Who can I introduce you to that's meaningful? Now you might not always get a perfectly qualified lead. That's why you want to do five. You might say, Oh, well, my son or daughter is about to take their SATs to get into college. Oh, I know a great, you know, SAT tutor. I'll make that introduction. All right. Well, I was hoping for someone that was going to buy 10 units, but I'll take the SAT tutor. Sometimes it's that; sometimes it's just relationship building.

Like and follow this podcast so you can learn more. My name is Carl Gould, and this has been your #70secondCEO.

Hi everyone, Carl Gould here with your #70secondCEO. Just a little over a one minute investment every day for a lifetime of results. I don't know where the universe or the volcanic activity that regulates this is, but when I have 12, I get no leads. When I have 36 or 48, leads, the quality of them goes down. Somewhere in that bubble of 24, and here's what I think, I think it's because I stay in touch with them, their frequent dinner or networking people, I see them on a regular basis, we tend to talk a lot, we tend to have deep conversations, something pops. So if you don't have 24 referrers, set that as a goal. If you could look and say, all right, so how many accountants, how many attorneys, how many realtors, how many business brokers, how many private equity funds? Like and follow this podcast so you can learn more. My name is Carl Gould, and this has been your #70secondCEO.

Hi everyone, Carl Gould here with your #70secondCEO. Just a little over one-minute investment every day for a lifetime of results. What can we bring in? What are other activities? So if you look at the second one right there, one of the things that I like to have is I like to have I found over the years, I don't know what the magic science is behind it. I don't know how the planets rotate to make this work. After 35 years as an advisor and 40 years as an entrepreneur total, what I found is if I maintain a good stable of 24 people that will refer me once per year, that helps my deal flow stay pretty active. That means once a year, these 24 people are going to say, Hey Carl, you should meet so-and-so. Hey Carl, here's an investor. Hey Carl, here's a landlord. Hey Carl, here's a realtor. Hey Carl. You see what I mean? That gets me to a month, and I found that that's pretty consistent. Like and follow this podcast so you can learn more. My name is Carl Gould, and this has been your #70secondCEO.

Hi everyone, Carl Gould here with your #70secondCEO. Just a little over a one-minute investment every day for a lifetime of results. Things that I've noticed is that bottom-of-the-funnel results tend to match the top-of-the-funnel activities. In other words, if you're 10% ahead of your goal and you look to your top of the funnel activities, you might say, Oh yeah, you know what, I do. I've got, I've been to 10% more networking events than I normally do. I've had 10% more one-on-ones. I've had 10% more, I went to that extra trade show I don't normally go to, or I stayed for that extra day. If you're behind, that tends to be the case too. We've seen a correlation between bottom of the funnel and top of the funnel. In other words, if you're looking at your year and saying, I'm 20% behind, and you say, all right, let me, how many leads did I generate? Boom, not as many as I thought. How many phone calls did I make? A little bit less than normal. How many days of networking did I do? Ooh, that's right, I skipped that whole week on vacation. I didn't go to those three events. And we tend to find that you're, oh, I didn't make that many outbound calls, or I didn't do that many emails, or I didn't send as many check-in text messages with my existing client base as I normally do. They tend to correlate. I'm down 10% on the bottom of the funnel. I tend to be down 10% top of the funnel. Like and follow this podcast so you can learn more. My name is Carl Gould and this has been your #70secondCEO.

Hi everyone, Carl Gould here with your #70secondCEO. Just a little over a one-minute investment every day for a lifetime of results. In sales, yes, there are times when you get the lucky one, right? We have a franchisee who thought they were calling our competitor. And they said, Oh, I remember the three calls we had; they were so good. Meanwhile, I'm going through my records, and I'm like, does anyone have a record of this person? What did we miss? We didn't find out till later that they actually were talking to the competition. They mistakenly sent us an email for the fourth meeting, which they thought was the fourth meeting with the other people. I just played along with it. I'm like, oh, well, how are we doing so far? We're like, really close. And they said, I can't wait to come to the discovery day. I'm emailing the team, when's the next discovery day? I get the note back, I'm like, put this person on the invite right away. And by the time they woke up and realized that we had them, all right, fine. Now and again, you step in a little dung, and you get a little bit lucky. And maybe you make your luck by being out there and putting yourself out there and doing the work. For the most part, though, we still gotta go out and get it. And the marketplace doesn't care what you did yesterday. They like your resume, they like your business card, they like that you have the expertise that you had, but tomorrow someone's gonna beat you to it. Like and follow this podcast so you can learn more. My name is Carl Gould and this has been your #70secondCEO.

Hi everyone, Carl Gould here with your #70secondCEO. Just a little over one-minute investment every day for a lifetime of results.

So we come to the middle of the year.

You're either out of inspiration, struggling with motivation, or the activities have been up and down and not as consistent. I saw this great infographic recently, and it says, here's what people think consistency is. And it shows a bunch of glasses and cups, filled right to the top with fluid.

And they said, but here's what consistency actually is. And they show the same dozen cups. One's full, one's half, one's got a drop in it.

One's three-quarters, next one's full, next one's half. And basically the message is, if you're taking some action at each day, that's consistency. It doesn't have to be perfect; it just needs to be progress.

Like and follow this podcast to learn more. My name is Carl Gould, and this has been your #70secondCEO.

Hi everyone, Carl Gould here with your #70secondCEO. Just a little over a one-minute investment every day for a lifetime of results. We need to put that same level of discipline into our daily activities so that when we do get an inspiration or we do get a motivation, that only fuels the fire. You all probably follow some sport on some level, and the top players in the world do drills before every match or every game. You know, why does a hockey player before a match have to go and shoot the puck 100 times beforehand? They're the best in the world. Why do basketball players have to do 100 free throws before a game, and they won't stop until they hit at least 50 in a row? Why are they practicing layups? Why is a baseball player doing batting practice? What do you need that for? If you're a golfer, why are you taking all those extra swings at the driving range? What do you need them for? You're already great. They're instilling that level of discipline, and along the way of coming into a tournament, coming into a game or a match, they're looking for anything that'll give them that emotional edge. Discipline instills that mechanical repetition, predictable, consistent activity, and then you add on inspiration and motivation for the mental part. Like and follow this podcast so you can learn more. My name is Carl Gould, and this has been your #70secondCEO.

Hi everyone, Carl Gould here with your #70secondCEO. Just a little over a one-minute investment every day for a lifetime of results. I'm sure you've heard the statistic by now. 95% of New Year's resolutions are gone by the middle of January, and the rest are gone by the end of January. We have these great ideas; we're inspired. Inspiration's a spark. Inspiration is a daily dose. It's not what carries you through. My son quotes, and I'll paraphrase, my son quotes a line that he hears in the military a lot. He's in the Army; he's in his seventh year, and he'll be retiring this year. And whenever the topic of motivation or inspiration comes up, he'll say, when motivation or inspiration is of no avail, discipline will prevail. I always thought that's a really good line. He said, Dad, I don't care how motivated you are, how inspired you are, I don't know anybody that's looking forward to getting up at 5.30 in the morning so they can go on a 12-mile ruck with 100 pounds on my back in either 100-degree weather or pouring rain, and he was in Alaska, or 40 below. I don't know too many guys in the bunks that get up and are really excited about that. So when we don't have the inspiration, we don't have the motivation, you know what works day in, day out, every day, discipline. Like and follow this podcast so you can learn more. My name is Carl Gould, and this has been your #70secondCEO.

Hi everyone, Carl Gould here with your #70secondCEO. Just a little over one minute investment every day for a lifetime of results.

Your greatest strength on this planet is your ability to take limited information and make a decision on it.

And that's what you're amazing at, okay? All right, now here's the challenge. You only wanna hear about step one and step 10. You don't wanna hear about the middle eight.

But you are giving away your top asset, which is your creative problem-solving and decision-making, if you are blind to the processes in your own business. You follow me? Imagine you got to make eight decisions along the way. You could expedite your business plan, you could amplify your results, but you're giving away your top thing because you don't like the process.

I'm with you, I don't care for it either. But here's the deal, here's the problem we have, is that you can't build the part of your business that you hate, you can't. The part of the business that you disdain, so you guys don't like to come on video, you're never gonna have a sales conversation, that's for them, I'm not doing that, all right? You guys don't wanna hear about the back of the house, just get me the result.

You can't build the part of the business that you don't like.

Like and follow this podcast so you can learn more. My name is Carl Gould and this has been your #70secondCEO.