Mastering Sales Pt 2- Brook’s Guide to Scaling Successfully and Leading with Impact

0:01 Welcome to The Coaching Equation, brought to you by Empire Partners and hosted by Ryan Lang and Brooke Bishop. Our mission is to help you build a profitable and impactful coaching business by cutting through the noise and all the expert advice to deliver tried and true actionable insights that you can deploy in your business today. Each week, we bring on expert guests, unveil cutting-edge tactics and strategies, and share the secrets and stories that we've gathered from working with the most successful coaching companies on earth. Welcome to episode 19 of the Coaching Equation podcast.

0:42 I'm your host, Ryan Lang, CEO and co-founder of Empire Partners, alongside my co-host and co-founder, Brooke Bishop. And this is part two of Mastering Sales as we dive further into Brooke's journey to sales success and mastery. And in this continuation episode... Brooke really dives into taking all of the muscle that he built in the early part of his sales career and learning how to turn that into massive amounts of sales revenue and eventually scaling that at a team level to the tune of. of $33 million.

1:25 Now, this is going to be an incredibly impactful episode yet again. You're going to get countless lessons from Brooke on turning difficulty into opportunity, learning how to identify systems, processes, patterns, patterns that allow you to excel and succeed faster in your sales and then taking all of that templatizing it and scaling it once you have a team so let's dive in right now this is episode 19 of the coaching equation podcast let's do this welcome back to the coaching equation podcast i'm your host ryan lang ceo and co-founder of empire partners alongside my co-host and co-founder brooke So the continuation part of our episode, really diving into Brooke's journey to sales, success and mastery.

2:24 This is part two, by the way. So if you're showing up to this episode and you're like, oh, part two, there's a part one. Stop listening right now. OK, go back. Listen to part one. This would be the equivalent of like trying to watch The Empire Strikes Back. without watching Star Wars. Okay. You show up and you're like, who's this whiny fucker Luke? And like, why, why is it? Look, what's this Dagobah system? What's this weird ass Yoda guy? There's no context. Go back. Okay. Find out Luke's journey at the beginning. Okay. Go back to Tatooine and, you know, do the thing. So many people are lost right now. If you're not a Star Wars fan. And I'm like, wait, Star Wars started on episode three. So this just totally fell apart. Yeah, it totally did. Totally did.

3:05 Okay. Well, anyhow, picking back up a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away, Brooke was at Buffini and company and things, you know, you did a lot of amazing things at Buffini and company. You know, we talked a little bit about the relationship side of things. So tell us a little bit about how things start to unfold from Buffini and moving on from there. Buffini was just honestly, it was an incredible experience. Number one, they've won like company of the year for Southern California. I don't even know how many years running. Like in terms of as an organization, as a culture, the way that they take care of their employees and the structures and the pieces that they've set up.

3:47 I've never seen anywhere like it to be totally candid. Now, that being the case, it was also very niched into the world of real estate. So before I parted ways from Buffini, I started to see a lot of the writing on the wall of where the real estate market was headed. This was back in the pre-2008 window of time, right before that whole industry went kaput. But what I was able to really pull from that experience, number one was they were teaching relational business practices. So I got to learn inside, behind the scenes, how to build an entire company by referral. What do we have? I don't even know how many coaches we had at that time, but it was the largest coaching organization on earth at that present point in time. They had no ad spend for their company.

4:28 They were not spending any money to generate leads. All of it came from word of mouth, referral systems, the same systems that they were teaching. So I got to learn a lot of those pieces, but I also got to learn internally. And one of the things that I did is I kept journals and I would document the Not just what was happening with me and my sales clients in that piece, which was one piece of the puzzle. I also kept journals on how the company was structured, how the org chart was set up, how the systems were wired. Why did they do the things they did? Because I figured some people go to school and get their MBA. Why not get an actual MBA of a company that was doing millions and millions, hundreds of millions of dollars in business? And actually learn like what the hell were they actually doing and why were they doing it?

5:08 My big benefit came from not only the sales pieces and what I got to learn from that. It was also the actual business structure. And then they had this really cool tool called Heritage Profile, which was a personality assessment. Still is personality. It wasn't, didn't go away. But from my vantage point, that was really like the most killer tool. And I'd never seen anybody else put anything like that together in the coaching realm. This was like Myers-Briggs on steroids. Hmm. And they created it. So I got to actually sit down with Kevin Buffini, Brian's brother. And I, in essence, I got a PhD on this personality assessment that was just unbelievable. So I went all in on not only making money there, but also all the other pieces that that opportunity gave me.

5:52 Was there something that you learned early on? Because again, I want to highlight this. I think one of the things that I feel like you really developed as a superpower was the ability to be inside of a company or a situation and have the wherewithal to recognize that there's more there than just your job, or there's more there than just what everybody else is getting. Yeah. I'm just curious, man. I've never asked you this question. Is there something that you can point to that helped you cultivate that level of curiosity? Was it mentorship? Was it something you kind of developed during younger years? What was it?

6:32 Honest answer was being able to flip the bird to my dad. Growing up, so my dad was a pastor and he actually, he got cut from college. He actually had a full ride scholarship for volleyball. And because he didn't make grades, he lost that scholarship. And so I believe he's never voiced this, but my perspective is probably that he always thought that in order for me to make it in life, I would have to have a college degree. Hmm. And since he didn't satiate that fast forward in time, his belief was if I, if Brooke didn't go to college, then he would never make it. And he failed as a father. So there was always this piece from my vantage point when he told me, he's like, Hey, you're not going to make it if you don't get it.

7:15 If you don't go to college. And so for me, every job I had, it wasn't about the job and getting a paycheck. I wanted to milk as much juice out of those positions as I could, because my intention was never to be stuck in a sales seat. It was, how can I master the heck out of this and parlay that into something bigger? And then how can I master that and parlay it into something bigger? I really wanted to get as much from these roles and these jobs that I could that went beyond just the function, if that makes sense. Oh, it makes 100% sense. And I think there's so much value in that because I think both of us have been in circumstances, whether it be that we were working for other people at various times or surrounded by mentors or situations where maybe we got extra support that we wouldn't later get when we were completely on our own.

8:06 And When you can find those opportunities to really recognize that there is more there and that you can squeeze more out of the orange or the lime, if you're a margarita guy like me. If you like guinea coladas. Oh, I want a frosty drink right now. God, it happened again. But yeah, I think it's such, it's so wise. And I also think that one of the things that I want to highlight about this is that you had a reason why, like there was something behind your hunger, right? There was something for you that said, okay, I'm going to have a reason. Like I'm determined to do this for a specific reason. And similarly, I suck at working for people. I just do.

8:47 And I watched my dad grow up an entrepreneur. And ironically, he really wanted me to go the straight and narrow path and go to college and do the thing. And very quickly, I was like, yeah, no, did that for a little bit. No, thank you. But the point being that I was very driven at that point. I just knew I had this sense, this belief that if I could find the right opportunity, and even early on, I didn't know what I would do working for myself. So I wasn't as entrepreneurial minded at the beginning, but I felt like if I could have an opportunity, I knew I had the aptitude. I knew I would get hungry. I knew I'd eat it up. And it sounds like that's a lot of what you did as well when you're working for Buffini.

9:27 Yeah. Yeah, it was, you know, the school of hard knocks or, you know, I knew that there was, and again, this was to the benefit of having a mentor. Learning influence skills I knew would be far more valuable in the long run compared to having a couple letters after my name. And again, there's no knock to anyone that's gone the path of getting a degree. Nope. But I knew that if I was in the rooms, if I was in the conversations, if I had the connections, if I paid my dues to cultivate those pieces, that it was like the equivalent of being in like a really good fraternity or having that network that would be on the other side. But I was able to be calculated with my network, right? I was able to basically put myself into the orbit of the top coaching businesses because I knew I wanted to be in that space.

10:12 Yeah. I want to ask a question. You talked about heritage profile, and I don't want to go deep on that specifically because there's a lot we could unnerd there. But more importantly, I'm really curious when you started to learn more about personality types and really influencing, you know, just influencing people, but being able to effectively communicate with people based on their personality type, what... So what were some of the big moments for you that kind of happened from a sales perspective? How do things change in sales once you kind of started to unearth all of that? Two things. So I'll say the politically correct one and then I'll say the other one that'll probably get me in trouble.

10:55 The politically correct piece was I saw the ability to know other people's rhythms and their communication styles and how they received information and how they communicated externally. What things would be important to them. That to me was like this decoder ring that I'm like, well, shoot, if I know that skill set, I was watching coaches that were, you know, helping their clients navigate through stuff that I'm like, that's an impossible situation. But because they knew their profile, they were able to help these people navigate through there. And I'm like, how the hell do they just do that? And I'm like, I want that superpower because if I can do that in sales... Like sky's the freaking limit. Right. And so it gave me this rapport tool.

11:36 So that was the politically correct side of it. The other end of the spectrum, when I met the woman who is now my wife, there was a little bit of leverage here because her personality profile. Leverage. Uh-huh. I was going to say other words that would give me trouble, but I won't. But the reality was she had a very different profile than I had. And in the beginning years of our beginning months, weeks, days of our relationship, we communicated a lot. So it was in the early days of cell phones and driving home and being in the commute and talking. And so we literally used that heritage profile as... like this decoder ring of understanding each other and figuring out each other's worlds. And why do we communicate that way?

12:17 And why do we see life that way? And like, it gave me a platform to want to know more. And in doing that, I got a skillset that gave me a big benefit on the sales side too. So my biggest sale, my biggest closing was my wife. So yeah, there's that way to get her done, buddy. Way to get her done. All right. So you gain all of this knowledge and really soak up the environment at Buffini, learn what they're doing successfully as a company. And what was the transition from there? Like, what happened? We're far enough now away from the NDA clauses. Yeah. Yeah. So they were grooming me actually to take over their entire sales division. So I had a really good relationship with my direct manager.

13:00 Her and I got along just amazingly. The position they were going to roll me into, they had an opportunity to take their top competitors, director of sales and pull him away. So they made more of a, an offense move versus a defense move in that, in that time and space. Yeah. So they brought on this new sales director. So right out of the gates, I was already pissed because I'm like, you guys were promising me that was going to be my seat. So I was already had a chip on my shoulder because of that. culturally, he was, in my opinion, totally opposite. So this kind of goes back to you and I just did training this morning on the importance of having the values and living by your values and being in that space. They had them on the wall. And in my opinion, this guy did not fit the bill.

13:42 Now, at the end of the day, I wasn't in a position to voice that or at least be respected for my opinion because I was a submissive in the hierarchy of things, which I didn't understand. Yeah. So publicly, he comes in. First week, he's on the job. He decided to change everybody's comp plans. The people at the bottom were going to start making a lot more money. But me being at the top of that comp plan, it almost cut my income in half in one swoop. I let my opinions be heard. And what I got to find out is there's certain things that should be happening with one-on-one, and there's certain things that shouldn't happen in front of your entire team. And so...

14:23 I got to learn the hard way that, hey, yes, you have an opinion. No, we don't want to hear it. And they actually, in my exit interview, they referred to me as the sacrificial lamb to get control of the team. Great. I know. Apparently, brutal honesty is not appreciated in this establishment. Nope. And I thought because of my production and I thought because of where I was at, I mean, I was entrenched in that company. So my, obviously my, sorry, I met my wife, her sister was there on the executive team. My mom was one of their top coaches. My brother was one of the top salespeople. Like I was in the game, right? You were in it. And so, yeah, so it was really fascinating because internally I was heartbroken because in my mind, you know, I was like, I'm going to progress and I have this path and this ladder and I'm all in on the culture and I infiltrated.

15:10 Right. So I thought certainly my whole life trajectory was going to be moving up the ladder there with them as a company. One thing that I want to point out here, for those of you that have sales teams or want to build and grow a sales team in your coaching business, one of the lessons to pull out of this is you be very careful when you are messing with salesperson's comp plans. And here's the thing. Not only do you need to be careful when you shift a comp plan, but additionally, you need to be careful when you set it up in the first place. We've got somebody that we've consulted for who set up a comp plan that is not sustainable.

15:54 It wasn't really sustainable from the beginning. They weren't really sure what they were doing when they set it up. It's not a good situation to be in because anytime that you tell somebody who basically eats what they kill day in and day out that you're going to change their income, you know, tread lightly. I think I wanted to just point that out and bring it up because, and not to say there are certain circumstances where you got to make a business decision and it just is what it is. But you have to be very careful about it because it's case in point. Salespeople want certainty is imperative for the salesperson. They take more risk in most cases than just about anybody else on your team.

16:35 And as a result, we trade all the risk for the certainty that if we perform, if we figure it out, this is what's on the other side of the rainbow. So I don't want to go too far in the weeds there. I just wanted to point it out because... I'm glad you brought it up. You know, looking backwards is always a straight line. Looking forwards is chaos, right? Yeah. But, you know, I had to go through that experience and I'm not to totally hit the fast forward button, but in the near future, when I got promoted, my first day in my promotion and the new gig... I had to tell the entire sales team that their comp plan got adjusted outside of my hands. But it gave me context, right? Like I was able to have compassion.

17:15 I was able to communicate it differently because I was pissed at what had happened to me before. I lost my job for it. And I thought my life was ending and all the rest of the story that went through. But I got to be the deliverer of that down the road and I got to do it in a very different way. So, yeah, how you communicate, it's just as imperative as the changes you make. That's huge. What a fantastic point. Really, really good distinction, man. So, the Buffini marriage ends unceremoniously. Where do we go from there? Yeah. So at that point in time, so full transparency, I was 23 years old at that point. So I was still a youngin'. I was fortunate enough to have a mentor in my corner. And so that night I called him and I was in tears and my life's over.

17:59 Right. And went through the whole process. emotional debacle of things and kicking myself for opening my mouth and the whole nine. He goes, look, he goes, this is that moment in time. You get to decide who are you going to show up as? Are you going to show up as the victim because you made a shitty move with how you communicated? Or are you going to take it and turn it into fuel? So that next morning, I was up at 5 AM. I had on my three-piece suit. Well, actually, I didn't have my suit on yet, but 5 a.m., got to the gym, we did our workout, showered, put on my three-piece suit. I didn't know what the hell I was going to do, but I knew that I had to do something. And so I figured I might as well dress the part and I might as well step into this state of success. And just put myself into, I was an actor for the day to go, who am I going to be?

18:41 How am I going to play this? What am I going to do? And from that, that day is when I decided, I'm like, I know sales. I've got this skill set. I know the structure of how these businesses are running. I know the industry in terms of not just the coaching industry, but I also really had a good firm grasp on the real estate industry. I'm like, I got a lot of free time now. I knew where to go find the people. I knew San Diego County, Orange County. I knew that I could walk in the door and I could own the fact that I knew how to help them get clients. And so that's where I started. So that week, I made a list of 50 real estate offices in San Diego County. I walked in the door, I shook their hand and I did a mayor campaign, which was, hey, do you guys have an in-house coach that coaches all your real estate agents?

19:23 If they said yes, I go, great. What kind of results are they getting you? And I went down the road of, can I get you better results? And then I navigated. If they said no, I said, great. I'd love to be that person. And I'd love to offer free training to you and your team. And in 30 days, I added 30 clients to my payment roster of paying coaching clients. I didn't know how to coach, by the way. So that was... Like, shit, how? Never mind that. I'll figure that out later. I got to pay my bills. I know I can sell. So let's go get some clients. So, yeah. I love this because, you know, here once again is opportunity that is born out of necessity, right? We're in a spot back against the wall.

20:04 You got to do something. You're not going to just keel over and die. And by that time, you've been through enough to have anchored that into your identity and And I want to really call this out for the people that are listening right now that are at the beginning of their coaching journey. Maybe you're staring at a big fat goose egg right now. You're at client zero at the moment. Look, there are always ways to figure it out. And Brooke used the oldest one in the book, which is go figure out who you can help and pound the pavement a little bit. And today, my goodness... compared to back then, there are so many more options that are available when you don't yet have any clients. It still involves the hustle, right?

20:46 But it seems to me that that would be yet another... I kind of look at identity a little bit like we're building a house, right? We put one brick down and then we go, we find another brick, we put another brick down. When you got to With that level of determination, that had to be another brick in the house that you were building that said, I don't lay down. I will find a way. I am resourceful and I will exercise that muscle. Yeah, I mean, it was sheer necessity, right? Like I had a mortgage, I had girlfriend who I'm like, I'm not going to show up in a way that is like, Oh, I throw cashing in my chips, you take care of me.

21:29 Like we were at that point in our relationship where it was in that zone of okay, I'm going to need to be proposing here pretty soon. And I need to be able to pay for a wedding. And I mean, I need to be able to buy an engagement ring. So I had a lot of leverage that was there on that side, but I also had built a muscle of responsibility. And so the way that I saw it, it wasn't just, oh, I got to pay my bills. It was more along the lines of, I have a responsibility to show up in a certain way because it was going to reflect my character. And I wasn't going to let all those people and the naysayers of the past, I wasn't going to let them be proven right. It was, no, I need to show up this way and I need to crack the code and I'm going to find a way. Yeah. Because I know that I'm capable of more. And that was really that fire that kept me going when I was like, trust me, there's a lot of office.

22:11 I was 23 years old walking into an office with 40, 50, 60-year-old realtors that are looking at me like, who the hell are you to coach me on my business? I had a lot of internal dialogue I had to navigate and really, really move through. So I had hair back then. That's how far back it was. And a suit. And a suit. That was the last time that Brooke wore a treat. No, I'm kidding. One of the things too that I want to mention, if you're listening to this right now, what you just heard Brooke talk about with regard to the intensity that you could even feel with him talking about it now around the why, why it was a must, it was a standard that he had to live up to. Guess what? We talk a lot about the discovery process of a sales call.

22:55 And this is exactly what you've got to get to in the discovery process of a sales call. You've got to figure out why change or getting to that milestone that you want to get to or that your prospect wants to get to is an absolute must. Because when it is, people get resourceful. They figure it out. They find a way. They move forward. That's what we do as humans. In the absence of that, why not just keep doing what you're doing and kick the can around, right? So what a beautiful explanation. What's the word I'm looking at? Illustration of a really strong why and what it does for you. So you build this coaching practice and how long – we've talked about this a little bit over the years, but not really a whole lot.

23:40 How long did that go? I was running my own coaching business for about two and a half years. Within that, I got to... Actually, it was pretty wild. So I got to work with a number of different clients. I started to branch out separate from real estate. I'm like, okay, I got some lender clients. I got a couple of home developers. I branched out into just some different... you know, industries because the referrals started to come from that core group of realtors. And I got introduced to a gentleman who was actually, ironically, in the chiropractic industry. So he did practice management for chiros. And he happened to live like four doors down from where I lived, or his office was four doors down, like from where I lived. And At that point in time, I'm like, you know what, let me do a little contract work with him. And again, I could take what I had learned with Buffini and I'd take what I would learn with Penley.

24:24 And I'm like, okay, here he's got a small biz, like maybe 10 employees. Can I apply those same principles into his business and like what will happen? So he contracted me to come in and help support him in that way. Sure enough, we just started growing like gangbusters. But it opened me up to a whole nother sector of business, which was practice management. And so now I got to look at what's going on between front office and back office. And what about insurance? And what about how you market yourself? And what about people who are in physical pain versus people who are in emotional pain? And I got this whole new scope on this industry, which I knew nothing about prior. But I got to apply the same principles. And it worked there, which to me was like, Ta-da. Okay. This is gangster. Yeah. Proof of concept, right?

25:05 In working with him, I actually went out to do some speaking for him out in Vegas for, if you're not familiar with the chiropractic world, it was basically one of the largest seminars each year that happens in Vegas for all the chiropractic schools. They do this huge thing. So we're there. We have our own booth. We're speaking. We're doing our thing. And lo and behold, next to our booth, Tony Robbins. So Tony was the headliner for the whole event. And here they're now right next to me for five days at this event and got to chatting or engaging, talking about what they're doing, what's going on and what their business is all about. And I didn't know if anything, we weren't talking about me coming on board with them, but they went back and they talked to their HR department.

25:45 And then they started headhunting me to try and bring me into their world. We had a great conversation earlier with an incredible lady, and it was such a great story of how if we really try to look forward and connect the dots to where we end up, it's impossible when we're really letting go and letting things just happen. And I love this because the opportunities cannot present themselves if you don't take inspired action. It comes from the place of inspired action and being willing to take chances and risk and jumping and all of those things. And by way of doing that, we open ourselves up to the opportunities that, you know, eventually come.

26:25 And here's another great example where in a moment, in theory, where you could have said, no, you know what, I can just stick in real estate. I don't need to go over there. I don't need to look for other types of clients. Instead, you were curious. You had an open mind. And yet again, yet another one of your qualities that I really admire, bro, because especially in the context of this conversation about sales, it's that level of curiosity that leads us to opportunities inside of our sales calls. And when I talk about opportunities, I'm talking less about opportunity to enroll someone. And I'm talking more about opportunities to actually pull out of them the things that that are going to get them to move towards what they want or away from where they are right now.

27:13 It's that level of curiosity. Yeah. It really did apply to working with Tony, right? Cause that Tony's been the biggest name in the game since whenever his infomercials were happening in the eighties or whenever that was right. Yeah. And so for me, I'm like, okay, if I can put myself in the room there, if I could even have the slightest chance of an opportunity to be in the room and be associated to the guy, let alone, like, what can I actually do in the organization? It just peeled back the curtain where I'm like, okay, this can open doors like nobody's business, not just because of the name drop, which everybody that's ever worked with them, even if they got fired in the first week, I was Tony Robbins top, whatever. Yeah. But it was really more of a place where like, if I took the same approach of looking at what happened with Buffini and dissecting their world and then applying it to the next, I'm like, shoot, I can do that with Tony.

28:03 Like, what is that going to look like? So now we kind of get to the TR days and I want to hear about your experience in sales inside of RRI and everything, you know, because there was so much growth for you there and so much opportunity. And I think, again, yet another enormous building block in your sales career. So talk a little bit about what was the initial opportunity and how did that dovetail into the next thing? I have to close one little interesting loop. So on my drive down to my very first day working with Tony, the team that fired me from Buffini, I got the message that my phone started to lighten up.

28:44 On my way into day one with Tony, the whole team that let me go back at Buffini, they all had gotten fired. And they all got fired because guess what? They weren't a cultural fit. They came in and they torpedoed their entire culture of the sales department. And so there was this element of like closure before I walked in the door and I'm like, Hmm. I don't want to say vindicated, but there was a part of me that was like, okay, I said what the right thing. It didn't feel right. And I got my ass handed to me for it. But there was kind of this like ending the chapter and starting anew, if that makes sense. Yeah. And so, yeah, going into Robbins. Now, here's the funny part. I know you know the story. But my very first day at Robbins, like in my head, I'm like, Tony Robbins. He was on Shallow Hal. And like, he's the biggest name. He's got the castle in San Diego.

29:25 He makes more money than God. And like... So in my head, and again, I came out of the culture of Buffini, which was they were dialed like nicest cubicle spaces. I had a panoramic ocean view above the flower fields in Carlsbad. I had a brand new computer. I had like they were running a tight ship. I get to Robbins. The key fob doesn't work on the door. The elevator is out of order. I had to go find the back stairwell to get up to the second floor. HR walks me down the aisle to my desk and I'm like looking at the carpet and I'm sure somebody died on it. I mean, it was like stained beyond. The cubicle walls were literally falling into my desk. Somebody rather large had sat in the middle of the desk. So everything was buckled and all the drawers were falling out.

30:06 They didn't even have a chair for me. And, oh, I'm like, is this a joke? Right? And then the girl who sat next to me, she walks by. She goes, I just want to let you know the last three people who sat there, they all got fired in the first month. And she goes, she walks away. She goes, she yells out in front of everyone. That desk is cursed. And I'm like, oh, my God. what the hell am I getting myself into? So I go to the meeting on that first. So first off, I turned around and walked back out and I went to Home Depot to buy parts to repair all the chaos. Went to Big Five to get a Pilates ball to sit on. And I'm sitting in my first meeting and the sales manager comes in and he goes, Hey, I just got to let you guys know, we don't have any ad spend to pay for leads.

30:53 So whatever you guys hunt and kill, you guys keep. I don't know what else to tell you. So everyone else is in like panic mode. I just came from two years of cutting my own teeth with my name as 23 year old brand of nothing. Yeah. And I'm like, I get to use Tony Robbins' name and I get his whole freaking database of humans. Like, oh, game on, right? And I also had a different paradigm, which was really interesting. The precedent that was set by the sales management and also reinforced by the sales team. Sales management said, if you book five meetings a day... you'll have three people that show up.

31:34 If you do that for a week, you'll have two people that enroll. So our outcome for you each month is eight enrollments. And they built the comp plan around that structure. I came in when I was at Buffini, I had done 14 enrollments off the phone in one day. So my paradigm, I'm like, oh, I'm going to so fuck up this comp plan. I'm going to break this sucker. And everyone else is talking, oh my gosh, we have no leads. And they're all freaking out. And I'm like, I just went, tune out the noise. What is my outcome? I'm going to have the same muscle. I'm going to apply the same principles and I'm going to just freaking go for it. And the record at that point, I think the record was something like $38,000 in a month cash collected for a salesperson was the record.

32:18 And I'm like doing the math on this thing. I'm like, oh, I'm going to smoke this. So I learned from Buffini. I'm like, I'm going to keep my numbers up and I'm going to keep my ass down because I make that same mistake. And so I just became almost silent in terms of I had no opinion externally and very strong opinions internally. But that first month I did $98,670 in cash collected. And so now I had everyone's attention of like, what are you doing? And I was just like, hey, you can listen. I'm happy to share if you want it. I'm not going to preach or teach anybody anything. You come to me. Cool. I'll help. But game on. And that was really my intention was how can I have such insane results that it commands Tony's attention?

33:03 I didn't want to get his attention through my squawking. I wanted it to be like, who, what, what is this person doing? Let the results speak for themselves. One of the things that I want to point out about this is that we all have to remember that no matter what business we're in, no matter in the coaching world, what our offer is, who the clients are that we're working with, it's a game. All of it is a game. And whether you're working for somebody else or you're working for yourself, the point that I want to make here with regard to the really awesome story that Brooke just shared is that he looked at the way that the game was set up and he...

33:43 figured out how to play the game so that he hedged his bets and all results were in his favor right and we all have the opportunity to do that it's just that we don't think about it enough they're too often we come out of perfect example so many people come out of coaching certification programs and they're taught hey you know what you ought to be charging you know Don't go too crazy. Charge like 30 bucks an hour. And just try to talk to your friends and your family, and you'll get some clients. And if that's the game and you decide to play it according to the rules that someone else has given you, well, you're now locked up in that box.

34:27 And guess what? That's the box that you chose to make. What Brooke did in this situation that's so brilliant is he chose to go outside of the box. We're playing the same game. He just decided to stack the deck in his favor at that point. He made it work for him. We always have the opportunity to do that both in life and in business. Once we realize that there's a loose construct here and I can bend things. The thing that's crazy about the coaching world, probably exists. And it is the most complex business to actually be successful in because it's so simple, it can be Pandora's box of what direction you go and what do you do and how do you approach it.

35:14 And here's the biggest thing, and this is something that I just want to... plant the seed just in case we get hit by lightning again. Not that that's happened twice in the last month, but there's this dynamic of wanting to have certainty that if you put your energy into it, that it's going to bear fruit. And what I will tell you is get into the habit of putting in massive amounts of energy and adjusting until you get the fruit. Yes. There's too many people that want to have certainty of if I do a, it's going to give me B. Who the hell knows? Like, even if somebody goes, hey, I'm doing this webinar model, or hey, I'm doing this online launch model, or hey, I'm doing this podcast model, or hey, I'm doing whatever it is, just because it's working for other people doesn't mean that it's going to work for you.

35:55 So you've got to have that resilience and that wherewithal to go, I'm going to go all in. And if it doesn't work, I'm going to shift. And if it doesn't mean I'm a failure, and it doesn't mean that I suck. Yes. And it doesn't mean that, well, why is it working for them? And it's not working for me. No, you've got to be in the game and committed to the outcome. You've got to play the end game instead of playing the front game. Yep. I love that. It goes down to one of my favorite sayings, which is that I either win or I learn. And the beauty of it is that you had the experiences that led you to that point where you had built the muscle and the mindset to be able to go in and take advantage of that opportunity.

36:36 So you had played the game, you saw places that you had to adjust before. Now you're walking into a game where you're like, whoa, I mean, like all I've got to do is go in here and do what I already know how to do. And I can go way outside the construct of what's been given to me and built for me here and win at a really big level. And I think that that's the big lesson that you just highlighted, which is especially when you're at the beginning, you're thinking like, oh, I just want to guarantee that if I, you know, if I put in my input, I'm just this is my input. I'm going to put it in and I'm going to get this output out. It's not that simple. you're probably going to get your ass handed to you several times before you figure that out.

37:18 But the point is you play, you don't, it's not about failure. You play the game, you figure out where you went sideways, where it didn't go right. The first time you would just, and you keep on playing. And that's what Brick did. I love this. So, so, So 98K in the first month and you're rocking, you're getting people's attention. How did things then, because you then built what, I mean, I would call it a pretty prolific career in sales before you even got into leadership. Yeah, so I took the same approach because I'm like, it worked and I learned my lesson in terms of... flipping the bird to management. But I took the same pieces that I went back and I went to the drawing board and I went, okay, what worked there? What can I apply?

37:58 What can I learn? To your point, I either learn or I win. Okay. What I started to really look at, I started to ask some different questions. And I pulled this from my immersion in Tony's world. I had to shift my primary question. So when I got in there, I'm like, how do I make a name for myself? That was kind of like my primary question to start with. I'll be candid. It was driven by significance. I'm like, I want to be noticed, right? Because in my mind, that would put me at the table. It didn't. It definitely brought awareness to I was kicking ass, but it didn't put me at the table. So I then shifted my question. I went, okay. Okay. If it's not putting me at the table, I'm going to let go of that. I shifted my question because I knew we were, my wife and I, we were, so in the space of that time, I got engaged. I paid for the wedding and a wedding ring and I got to pay for it cash and I didn't like have to go upside down and I got to accomplish that goal and super excited.

38:43 And then we had a baby come in. And so my primary question shifted and I went, you know what? So at first it was, how do I increase my, my earnings? And I'm like, is that what I really want? I'm like, yes, but there was caveats that started to come in. So there's a couple of things that came up. The first thing was, I'm like, I shifted my question. What can be the ultimate primary question based on where I was at at that time? I'm like, how do I triple my income and cut my hours in half? And asking that question and making that my life mission, it changed everything. So I made a commitment. So there's a piece that's here. And I know we've recommended 10x is easier than 2x to our listeners and... Yeah, great book. I didn't realize that's in essence, to some extent, what I was doing at the time. Here's like the golden nugget within that. The question was powerful.

39:24 But what I did with the question was what made the difference. I made a commitment to waking up every day two hours earlier than what I would normally wake up at. The only thing I was allowed to do during those two hours was find answers to how do I triple my income and cut my hours in half. It took me 45 days to crack that code. And so in doing that, no one was documenting the processes. So I started there. I started to find different things, find nuances. I started to find leads that no one was touching. I started to figure out that some of the highest quality leads no one was talking to. I started to figure out there's all these people in the company that no one had relationships with that could open doors. I started to figure out that there was technologies that weren't being leveraged. It was this whole like ecosystem that I got to create. And here's the cool piece.

40:05 Tony gave me the latitude to basically do what Buffini wouldn't. He goes, you keep getting the results from me. You keep helping transform people's lives. You do whatever you need to do. I'm like, cool. And I'd never had a sales manager or a leader give me that latitude. It was always, you have to do it my way. You have to do it this way. You have to say it was. So I got this pressure cooker of an environment where I had a brand. I had freedom and I had room to run. So I felt like Seabiscuit because I was not your stereotypical salesperson. I was not the high D on the team. I was the high SI. So I wasn't the razzle dazzle. I'm going to be your stereotypical salesperson. I had a very different personality type. So in doing that, here was the killer piece.

40:46 In figuring out how to triple my income and cut my hours in half, I figured out how to make a system out of what I was doing. And then I got to train the other people that were on the team how to do the same system. And they got the same results. So now, tripling my income and counting my hours in half, the entire sales division tripled. And that's what put me at the seat. Incredible. That's what put me at the table. Incredible. One of the things I think is so important about what you just said is that you figured out the system that would allow you to get the type of results that you wanted to get. You double downed on it. You refined it even more. And now you're able to help the team do that. And... You know, one of the things that we do inside of our sales program, Close Everyone, is we help people with the sales script.

41:29 Well, one of the things that we don't do is provide you literally a word for word. This is exactly what you should say. One of the reasons that we don't do that is that it is about figuring out. We talk so much about recipe around here. And Brooke, this is great because I know... that during that time, you played around a lot with recipes. This is where you got super obsessive about patterns and things that you noticed and heard inside of calls, and you documented that. And through that process, you developed the beginnings of what's now become our Close Everyone framework. And the thing that I want to highlight about that is that if you're listening to this right now, right?

42:14 So many people come to us so hung up on exactly what should I say? Exactly what are the right words in this situation? Word for word, I want to be able to know exactly what should come out of my mouth. And it's less about that and more about the system and the syntax and the patterns that are going to lead you to success within your specific offer. I want to hit on this because I think this is forgetting kind of the whole picture of things. The big benefit I got from Buffini, and this might sound so simple, but they had a saying within Buffini as it related to their profiling system. And it was, you said, but I heard.

42:54 And as it related to the sales scripting of things, it wasn't about what I was saying. Yeah. It was about what does this one individual client need to hear? And this is where so many salespeople make a mistake because they want to say the same words the same way to the next person thinking that, well, it made that monkey move and get the banana. Therefore, it's going to make this monkey move and get the banana. Each person receives information differently. So this is my person to hang up on scripting. Yeah. is you're going to take the same thing and rinse, repeat, thinking it's going to give you like greater results. If you can move into the space of really knowing who you're talking to and deliver the information the way they need to receive it, guess what? You're never going to say the same thing twice ever because you're never talking to the same person twice.

43:36 You're talking to a different human every single time. So you've got to become a master of how do I communicate what that person needs? Not how do I convey what I want to say? Yeah, that's so good. That's so good. Well, you know, Judas, we start to kind of come to the end of this episode before we come to the end of it. I really want you to share this because I love hearing it and I'm proud of you for it. But you developed these systems, these processes, you paid attention to patterns. You know, you worked really hard to be able to refine and hone your craft. You accomplished that goal of tripling your income in half the time.

44:16 And then just do me a favor and share the ridiculous amount of accolades that you ended up with in terms of top salesperson. And then how that dovetailed into the results that you got for Tony inside of the sales mastery program. I just literally I just want you to brag about yourself for the next couple of minutes. What else can I tell you about me? It's fun talking about the stories of it, but then when I have to like put myself into the frame, it's like, oh, that feels weird. So it's interesting. I sold frontline for Tony for six years and I kept refining it, kept refining. It was actually the reason why we, we went from a brick and mortar to a virtual company long before the world of COVID hit. I wanted to work from home and they said no.

44:57 So I went and again, I went in with my reasons. I went back to the drawing board and figured out what the CFO, what his reasons were. And I went back the next day and he said, yes, go figure. So I was able to help actually transform and move everyone out of the physical office and save about two and a half million dollars a year just in overhead. Fast forward in time, I actually hit a precipice where I was burning out and I was just bored of doing what I was doing on the sales side. And I had actually written up my resignation letter and I was a week away from turning it in. And I got the call that Tony wanted me to replicate what I had done for the coaching division for another division that he had that wasn't doing so well in his business mastery division. And so I was like, what the hell? Let's surrender.

45:37 We'll roll with it. Again, didn't realize it, but if it hadn't worked out that it was going to get kiboshed like six months later, fortunately it did work out. So we took that division from the year prior, they did somewhere around 180,000 total in revenue in that division. And that first year we did close to 4 million with zero profit. Zero marketing budget. The next year we did 10 million. The next year we did 15. The next year we did 18. The next year we did 23. The year that I left that year prior, we had done 27 million in that division. And we had created a completely separate product line called business results training. And we did 5 million in our first year with... zero supports, zero ad spend.

46:18 So all in, we did a little bit over 33 million that final year for that side of the house. The thing that was cool, man, aside from the numbers, the number of people we got to impact and the number of lives we got to change, the number of businesses we got to help save. And here's the craziest piece. The ones that actually stand out the most, some of them were not actually the ones who enrolled. They're the people we got to help that actually never did enroll, but we helped them because that was still who we were. And that was the culture we created. And that's what our team, that's how we showed up was for the people who needed it, not just the people who could afford it. And so there's endless stories of people that were suicidal or people that were, you know, living on the streets to, you know, then a year later being on Oprah to, you know, I mean, just crazy, crazy stories.

46:58 Right. So that was kind of the pressure or the compressor. That's my non word for the end of the day. My compressor combined with pressure. You have a compressor. It's a compression. It's a compressor chamber. It's okay. Everyone's got it. Yeah, whatever. Yeah, compressor chamber. Compressure chamber. First of all, I really want to thank you for doing this because I think this is so insanely useful for people. And I would love for us to cap this episode off by you thinking about from Brooke walking into timeshare sales and going over for two months. Fast forward to captaining the ship of a $33 million sales apartment with Business Mastery.

47:45 If someone right now is listening to this and either A, they've been trying sales, they're struggling with it in their business right now, or they haven't even started selling something, or they're just not seeing, you know, maybe they've been selling okay, but they're not seeing the results... what's the message that you want to kind of leave with people relative to the opportunity that sales provides? And I mean, I would cap it off this way. There's two whys that are mission critical. The first why is be selfish. Why for you? Why must you do this? Why are you doing it in the first place? Why do you want to generate the money? Why do you want to have the impact? Why do you want to, you know, grow and build a business?

48:28 That's the first why. And be really, really clear and honest about it, right? Like for me, it was why I wanted to get married. I wanted to have a family. I wanted to have kids. I wanted to prove everybody wrong. That was for a long time. Then it was, I wanted to show my son that it could be done a different way. And I wanted to be there for him. And that was a catalyst for how I played. So that was the first why. The second why is why does your client need what you have? And what I mean by that is not why do they need to buy your bells and whistles and benefits and features. Right. It's the why on the other end for them. Who do they get to become? And why do they want it? And why do they want to transform their life? And why do they want to move from where they are to where they want to be? If you can help enough of those people answer their why and get them there, your why becomes an automatic.

49:13 And you don't have to fixate and focus on what you do or don't have. Automatically happens if you help enough of those people get their why met. That's a mic drop. That's a mic drop, folks. It's time to end this, baby. Well, bro, once again, thank you for sharing this. This was such a delight for me. I'm so blessed and grateful to be alongside you day in and day out. And I love everything that you shared. There's so much gold in it and lots more, really. I mean, this was like the CliffsNotes version of the story, which is hilarious because in total, it's going to be about an hour and a half. But man, thank you again, honor you and appreciate you. And really, especially the example that you provide to these people, you know, day in and day out.

49:54 So with all that said, guys, thank you for listening to this episode of the coaching equation podcast. We've got a whole lot of good stuff on the other side of this. In fact, another brand new episode that is going to knock your socks off coming in hot and heavy pretty quickly here. So stay tuned. We'll see on the flip side. Thank you for listening to this episode of The Coaching Equation. Please hit subscribe wherever you listen to your podcasts. And if you got value out of this episode, we would be so grateful if you would share it out with a friend and leave us a review on iTunes or your favorite platform. To learn more about Empire Partners or to inquire about working with Ryan and Brooke, please visit www.empirepartners.io forward slash go.