EPISODE 234 WITH DR. KEVIN GAZZARA: THE SIX Ps OF ENTREPRENEURIAL SUCCESS

Ready Yet?! Podcast with Dr. Kevin Gazzara: The Six P’s of Entrepreneurial Success

Transcribed with Descript

Erin Marcus: All right. Hello. Hello. And welcome to this episode of the ready yet podcast. I’m looking forward to today’s conversation one, because my guest today, Dr. Kevin Gazara, first of all, one of your topics about leaving corporate is one of my favorite topics. So I’m sure that’ll come up. And then two, you have the six Ps.

Erin Marcus: And I don’t even know what they are. So I saved it. Like we can have a completely organic conversation, but the, tell me more about the six P’s of what an entrepreneur needs to be and what a little more formal introduction of who you are and what you do.

Dr. Kevin Gazzara: Sure. Well, thanks, Erin. Thanks for having me on the podcast.

Dr. Kevin Gazzara: I originally born and raised in Levittown, Pennsylvania, grew up in Philly, went to school there, did my undergrad in engineering and business MBA, and then eventually went off and did my. All my doctoral work in organizational leadership and management and really focused around how do you get people motivated, engaged in the workplace so that you create these environments that not only retain the best people, but also entice them to have their friends come and work for you.

Dr. Kevin Gazzara: So, so I, I was fortunate. I spent almost 30 years, 29 years in in corporate America. I worked for what ultimately became Siemens corporation. I worked for them for the first 10 in heavy equipment, completely unrelated to my second job. And my last 18 years that I spent at Intel, I was a product manager, I was a general manager.

Dr. Kevin Gazzara: But the last 10 years, I spent managing Intel University and they’re managing leadership development programs, their residential programs for first and midline managers. And when I had. I had a personal goal to retire at 50 and then go give back to help organizations, you know, that didn’t have 10 million budgets.

Dr. Kevin Gazzara: And when I said Intel, we had our programs when I had left in 2007 with two of my colleagues to start up Magna Leadership Solutions, my consulting firm we had just finished training because we used to do 2, 500 managers and leaders in 10 different countries. A year so it’s a big job kind of managing that when I had left we had just finished training our 40 000th manager.

Dr. Kevin Gazzara: So I got pretty good at that and when I found it Things

Erin Marcus: out right you figured a few things that that’s enough data to figure a few things out, right?

Dr. Kevin Gazzara: Yeah, exactly. So so we’ve been you know, last 17 years every year has been better than the last it’s been fantastic. I love being an entrepreneur and like I said, I took two of my colleagues with me.

Dr. Kevin Gazzara: We all left in June of 2007. So this year will be what? 17 years. Nice. We’ve been doing it. So it’s been great. It’s been great. And and what I’ve determined, so lots and lots of my friends and colleagues, Co workers have leftover that this period of time, and I was doing these phone calls probably once a month from someone that was getting ready to leave or wanted to know what it was like on the other side.

Dr. Kevin Gazzara: I just

Erin Marcus: had one of those yesterday. Yes, exactly.

Dr. Kevin Gazzara: So, so so I realized was I needed to put a mastermind. Program together. So so about 10 years ago, I started this due to these monthly masterminds. Anyone that was at Intel or people that are listening, if you were doing any facilitation or coaching or learning and development, you can certainly send me a note and join the group.

Dr. Kevin Gazzara: There’s about 25 to 30 in the group at the moment, and we meet once a month. And the whole idea is Is how to to give back how to help each other. You know you know, basically if I have a big project I know I have 25 people that I could go to. And that’s my

Erin Marcus: favorite thing about entrepreneurship versus corporate.

Erin Marcus: And I had a great corporate career. I love, I had great people I worked with. I had huge opportunities. So it’s not, for me, it’s not a, you know, chip on my shoulder complaint. But the collaboration and support that you see in the entrepreneurial world There’s nothing like that in corporate.

Dr. Kevin Gazzara: Yeah, I would agree.

Dr. Kevin Gazzara: And I had a fantastic, wonderful, wonderful time at Intel. I learned so much. Intel truly was a learning organization and I don’t regret it at all. But I really did want to give back, right? Fortunately, I was at Intel during the 90s and, you know, stock was going crazy. So, so I had a really good financial advisor and I was pretty diligent.

Dr. Kevin Gazzara: And so when I hit 50, I could really retire without having To worry about things and that’s one of the six P’s that we’ll, that we’ll talk about.

Erin Marcus: Well, let’s dive right in. Which P is that?

Dr. Kevin Gazzara: Well, that, that one is what I call provisions. It’s, it’s having, you know, one of the things I learned from one of my mentors, a guy by the name of Bill Daniels, wrote a great book by the way, called Breakthrough Performance, if anybody’s listening.

Dr. Kevin Gazzara: Bill was, I would say, was one of my mentors and he did lots and lots of consulting at, at Intel. And and what Bill told me, as well as many other consultants, I, so I did my homework. So as a, you know, kind of a, an engineer and I like the numbers, I went and talked about a dozen people that had built over a million dollar businesses.

Dr. Kevin Gazzara: And I wanted to know what are the things that I need to focus on in order to be, be successful and built. One of Bill’s things. That he had said to me was, is you need to have provisions for cash. You have to have 18 to 24 months in the bank that you were willing to invest in yourself, right? Because you’re not making any money at that point in time when you pull the plug, whether it’s voluntary or involuntary.

Dr. Kevin Gazzara: And if you’re thinking about being an engineer, being sorry, entrepreneur is don’t wait till somebody else does that to you till the corporation does it to you pick a time to work towards it. And do it under your terms, which I was fortunate to do.

Erin Marcus: Well, and I, I, one thing I learned, it’s kind of a different way.

Erin Marcus: I, even when you want to leave, if it’s not under your own terms, the energy around it can completely derail you. And so when I had my franchise in it, I had a franchise, I was a trainer for the franchise system. And then even now as a business consultant, the one thing I have learned, I don’t know which P this might fit into for you, but one thing I have seen over and over again People who leave because they want to create something.

Erin Marcus: Are successful and people who leave because they’re mad and they just want to get away from the people they’re mad at They’re not successful because they don’t Really understand the underlying problem Kind of goes with you.

Dr. Kevin Gazzara: Yeah, so that that’s probably ties into the first p The first p that we I have of my six p’s to be a successful entrepreneur and the first p is is product Right as you’re as you’re talking about you have to have this unique schtick of something that differentiates you from everybody else.

Dr. Kevin Gazzara: And a lot of times it may not be a single element, it might be a multiple element. But when my, when my friends would call me, I remember having this conversation with a guy I used to work with who, who got downsized several years after we had started the firm and he said, Hey, I just want to come to work for you.

Dr. Kevin Gazzara: And I said, okay, Joe, tell me. you know, let’s do this as a kind of mock interview. Tell me why I should hire you. And he says, well, you know, I got great experience and I have an education, you know, and I’ve worked in this and I know this and, and I just let, I just let them go on until they’re finished. And I say anything else and usually say, no, that’s pretty much it.

Dr. Kevin Gazzara: And then I asked them this one question that just completely shocks the system. So what will the next person tell me? That’s coming in for the interview. That’s any different than what you just told me. And usually you get this massive pause. It’s like well, I’d probably tell you it’s the same, right?

Dr. Kevin Gazzara: So I said, yeah, so you need to figure out what your shtick is. What is different about you? You know, for an example, for me, you know, why would you hire me as, as a, as a coach or to do a leadership development program the thing is, is, you know, I have a technical background. I’ve lived in the world, you know, I’ve managed teams.

Dr. Kevin Gazzara: Microsoft, Apple were clients that I had to manage software development between, so I have this, I have this techie nerd side of me. And then on top of that, in addition to the experience and knowledge, you know, I’ve been a professor at six different universities. But, you know, I have, I have this passion, you know, and that’s the reason I went back to school to do my doctoral work.

Dr. Kevin Gazzara: You know, I have this passion of you know, helping people through developing. Great leader so I’ve got that technical side so I can talk bits and bytes, you know, I can talk nerd and then on the on the other side I can I can Bring all of the knowledge together of why things work and and talk in a quantitative way to people that I can get them to listen to, to, well,

Erin Marcus: and I think that had so when I teach sales and I didn’t this is not my original concept when I teach sales when I’ve learned sales.

Erin Marcus: The truth is that buying decisions are made based on emotion and then justify the logic, right? Every, I talk about my mini Cooper. There is no reason in the Chicagoland area. I need a mini Cooper with a turbo engine where am I going to get to go? But good gas mileage got a good deal can pack it anywhere.

Erin Marcus: So, but it’s an emotional decision. It feels like more like a jet plane than a car. And I think what you’re saying about like for, and I, you know, if we just even stick to the coaching and consult the consulting business, this differentiator of that allows people to connect to you emotionally, right? And they’ll justify their decision based on your credentials, right?

Erin Marcus: That helps them justify their decision. But most of the time when people Like, when I hear, and I don’t know if this is good news or bad news, it is what it is, it’s too old to change it at this point. A lot of times when people say to, you know, say, yes, you’re the person I want to go with. Yeah, they, they reiterate all my credentials and all the things I know how to do and all the big fancy experience, great.

Erin Marcus: But so many times they’ll say to me, I know you won’t lie to me, you’ll just tell me what I need to know and what I need. Like, they like the directness. They’re ready for it. Right. That’s an emotional thing.

Dr. Kevin Gazzara: Yeah. Well, you know, one of the things I teach a program in positive intelligence if anybody’s unfamiliar with that, and if you, if you, The listeners haven’t read or heard of this go grab the book.

Dr. Kevin Gazzara: You know, I’ve been teaching it for the last three years. I got certified to do that book by the name from Shirzad Shamim on positive intelligence or what he calls PQ. And it’s fantastic program. He basically has taken a lot of the work that was done on emotional intelligence and Aaron, as you point out that people really make the decisions on.

Dr. Kevin Gazzara: On you and the trust level and so forth. And what, what Shirzad talks about in the positive intelligence is that you need to get the, you need to get the emotional barrier kind of lowered so you can get to the rational brain, right. You know, and all of the quantitative credentials that I had mentioned.

Dr. Kevin Gazzara: You know, you have to, I have to work on the emotional piece, build that trust and so forth. But I think the thing that has worked really well, because we work a lot with technical companies delivering what we call our six month leadership Academy leading forward Academy. One of the things is that the people, the senior managers, the execs that hire us is they know that I, they can put me in a room with, you know, a hundred people.

Dr. Kevin Gazzara: Project managers or project engineers or software developers and I will, I will be able to connect with them because I have that empathy and I have that connection. I have the experience. And most of the time, particularly since we focus. On technical people, it really allows. It gives them some confidence of like, Oh, he’s not a trainer, you know, cause most of the time you’re getting trainers in there and they’re really good at training, but when you ask them, so what’s it like when you’re seven days behind and Microsoft is beating you up about a software release and you’ve got, you know, 18 level one bugs.

Dr. Kevin Gazzara: And it’s like, I can talk, I can talk to that. And the minute that I say, here’s what we did. Then all, all the emotional concern goes away. And now the trust

Erin Marcus: factor, especially if you’re, if you are selling to corporate, if you serve corporate clients in any way, shape, or form, you have to remember that the person making the decision and bringing you in is still a human.

Erin Marcus: And they’re fearful of making a mistake. They’re fearful of making the mistake that makes them look bad or costs them their job or hits their P& L the wrong way. So the emotion there is the trust factor.

Dr. Kevin Gazzara: Yeah. And the more, the more you can. Can kind of get that emotional wall down right where you can develop the really it is, as you point out, developing that trust or some degree of confidence that if I, if I bring you in, if I spend this money, if I bring this program in, it’s going to be successful and it’s going to make a difference, right?

Dr. Kevin Gazzara: Cause I think one of the things that we learned is we don’t do training. We do a development, you know, so all of our programs, people have to bring in their challenges and they, and they. Learn by doing and after each session they leave with an action plan that they’ve practiced and kind of gone through during the time so they can go back out on the shop floor the next day and apply it.

Dr. Kevin Gazzara: Too often I think trainers, what they do is they give you great information, You’re all, you’re entertained. You know, you get the smiley faces. I call it edutainment.

Erin Marcus: Yeah. You’re motivated, but do you do anything

Dr. Kevin Gazzara: and you don’t do anything with it? Right. So it’s

Erin Marcus: one of the, it’s one of the things that people going back to your, the product conversation and what’s your stick and what’s your differentiator.

Erin Marcus: One of the things that I, it’s the reason I hesitated to be a coach or consultant for so long. I wouldn’t throw my name in the ring. You know, I didn’t want to throw my hat in the ring because I saw this huge gap in the market. It. Which you just turn into a opportunity for

Dr. Kevin Gazzara: yourself, right?

Erin Marcus: Is there’s so many people out there that can tell you a list of what to do.

Erin Marcus: Like, this is not hard. There’s books, there’s YouTube, like there’s, I can give you a list, but can you, have you done it enough so that you can take it apart and apply it to the person you’re now showing how to do it so that now they can do it is a completely different game there.

Dr. Kevin Gazzara: It is. And you know, that’s one of the things, one of the reasons I started the, this.

Dr. Kevin Gazzara: This site called CoachSultans. com is that what we find is a lot of people will hire me or any, any of us in the firm, they’ll hire us as a coach. Right. And, you know, I’ve done all my coach training and certifications and so forth. And ultimately what I found is almost 100 percent of the execs that I work with in particular really need.

Dr. Kevin Gazzara: About some type of mixture of coaching and consulting, and a lot of times you hire the coach and they’re great at answering questions and going deep and, you know, really bring out the why you’re, you’re doing things, but ultimately, what I have found that many of the execs really don’t have the tools or the processes or the practice for For different approaches to things and no matter how much I coach them it’s

Erin Marcus: sometimes you just gotta tell them what to do.

Dr. Kevin Gazzara: Yeah. And that’s like, we’re, we’re the two hats, you know, so this is a coaching session. I say that all

Erin Marcus: the time. I work at the intersection where what you need to do meets who you need to be to do it. Because the plan doesn’t matter if you can’t do the plan. I can give you a business plan. I can give you a marketing plan.

Erin Marcus: I can give you a scaling plan. This is what I like. I can do it by accident. I can’t stop it. That’s the way it’s the brain. Can’t do a lot of things, but that’s what I nodded. But if you can’t do it,

Dr. Kevin Gazzara: then

Erin Marcus: it doesn’t matter.

Dr. Kevin Gazzara: Right. Yeah. So. So that’s, that’s the reason that I found that you have to have some kind of combination of both.

Dr. Kevin Gazzara: So, hey, so you want me to finish the six Ps? Yeah, let’s go. I’m just going to,

Erin Marcus: great. So we’ve got provisions, we need money in the bank, we’ve got product, what’s your differentiator, and what else do we got?

Dr. Kevin Gazzara: Right. So next, next one you need is you need and these are no particular order, right? You need what I call presence, right?

Dr. Kevin Gazzara: And that’s your social media and people to find you, you know, we use a tool we do. I don’t know, 50 posts 50 to a hundred posts a week. You know, at to Twitter and to, yeah, to, to LinkedIn, to to YouTube. Trying to Facebook, I don’t, I don’t

Erin Marcus: think businesses understand the amount of activity it re, it takes to grow an audience.

Dr. Kevin Gazzara: Yeah, and I had this call, we did our mastermind session last Wednesday, and one of the women who just joined us, you know, she finally left the corporate world a couple months ago and then joined the group, and she said, I just don’t get it, why do you even bother doing social media? And I said, well, let me tell you, I’ll tell you two quick stories.

Dr. Kevin Gazzara: One is, is I had, we, we, we use something called Meet Edgar, and Meet Edgar is. Gives you the ability to post everything. So, so my social media time that I spend is maybe 10, 10 minutes a day. I wake up in the morning, I get an RSS feed of articles. I say, I like, don’t like, like, don’t like. And I just say post and it goes out to, to the world.

Dr. Kevin Gazzara: So people don’t like, how do you do all this? It must take you hours and hours. No, it’s about 10 minutes a day. But one of the things that is, I think is, is really important and when I was telling Ellen was, you know, I had someone that was following me for about 10 years and they really liked the work that I was doing.

Dr. Kevin Gazzara: So it’s not just posting other people’s work. It’s also, you know, creating blogs and articles and books. And so we do all that. And. You know, out of the blue, he calls and says, we’ve been following you. I have this this particular need. I, I like the stuff you’re doing. Can you come in and, and talk to us?

Dr. Kevin Gazzara: And this was a guy in Austin. So we went in and we did a kind of a short, really short program for him. And then the CEO said, yeah, just hire Kevin and let’s do all of our plants. Around the world, and that was a 3 year contract, you know, that’s, you know,

Erin Marcus: and that’s what it is about social media in particular, and we won’t have to go down this rabbit hole because there’s more piece to go through.

Erin Marcus: But. Your high end clients will not engage with you, but they are watching.

Dr. Kevin Gazzara: Right. Yeah.

Erin Marcus: The vanity metrics mean nothing because the people who will really, your, your best, best, best clients aren’t really engaging with you, but they are watching.

Dr. Kevin Gazzara: Yeah, that’s a great way to put it. So and we’ve had several, several clients like that.

Dr. Kevin Gazzara: The other thing is, is that you know, we have a Google business page and I will tell people if you haven’t done a Google business page, do that. We have made so much money from cold calls that are incoming rather than us outgoing that It really increases, you know, where you show up on the, you know, on the, on the Google search.

Erin Marcus: Yeah, absolutely. So, so yeah, a hundred percent agree with that. The audience and, and I watch people not really understand that they need to grow an audience.

Dr. Kevin Gazzara: Yeah. Yeah. So that’s the second piece, which is, is the, is the presence. The third piece is is the people which you need to build your network right now.

Dr. Kevin Gazzara: I think we’re running about 22, 000 people. On followers on LinkedIn. Mm-Hmm. Because that’s where our primary market is. Yeah. In fact one of the things that we, that we wrote a couple year, about a year and a half ago, is we wrote a book on how do you mind LinkedIn in a way that you can get clients.

Dr. Kevin Gazzara: And the book’s called Ready, set, get hired and whether you’re looking for a job or you’re looking for clients. Essentially, what I’ve done is I put 100 percent of all my scripts in there in the book. It’s written by Rita Creasy Reed, who was one of my graduate students at Arizona State University.

Dr. Kevin Gazzara: And Rita got downsized and she said, Hey, I know you know how to do this stuff. And I said, Hey, I do have a process. I’ll coach you through this with the understanding is like, once you’re, you’ve landed your Nirvana job at the end, cause she was an executive and it took some wilding to get that that you write the book and I’ll, I’ll, I’ll co write it with you.

Dr. Kevin Gazzara: So she, so that was the deal. She got her, she got her Nirvana job, actually mentioned Salt Lake. She’s up in Salt Lake and yeah, we published the book a year and a half ago. Nice.

Erin Marcus: Cool. Cool.

Dr. Kevin Gazzara: So that was that’s 100

Erin Marcus: percent the people are nothing matters without nothing happens without the people.

Dr. Kevin Gazzara: Yeah.

Dr. Kevin Gazzara: So yeah, so so bill builds your network.

Erin Marcus: Yeah,

Dr. Kevin Gazzara: keep your network and your presence. It’s going to keep them keep them happy. Take every opportunity to make not only online connections with them but but personal connection. So product presence people. And we talked about provisions. That’s the, I think that’s probably the biggest thing, the biggest challenge is that people that I usually end up having that conversation with is they say, well, you know, I’ve got like three months of money that I can invest.

Dr. Kevin Gazzara: And then I said, well, that’s, that’s not enough time that you need to go look for a job, right? That if you’re constantly worrying, in fact, I’m coaching one guy right now. If you’re constantly, Worrying because you can’t pay the bills. This is not the time to become an entrepreneur, right?

Erin Marcus: Yeah,

Dr. Kevin Gazzara: it’s it’s you have to go get something else and then kind of do it on on the side

Erin Marcus: I think people miss that a lot and I think those numbers have been flow and there’s good months and bad months and It’s interesting to me As a consulting example, it’s interesting to me how many people will join a program, whether it’s coaching, consulting, a mix, whatever it is, or, you know, some kind of program to teach them how to grow their business and get mad that they didn’t have, you know, three times ROI in the six months of the program.

Erin Marcus: And I never understood that because like I went, I got an MBA. I didn’t expect. I didn’t expect to get my whatever it was 40, 000 return, you know, I didn’t expect to make 120, 000 on that 40, 000 investment while I was still in school,

Dr. Kevin Gazzara: right? Yeah, it’s

Erin Marcus: so weird.

Dr. Kevin Gazzara: So the key is, is that you have to, you know, the other thing to think about is you’re really, you have to, you’re investing in yourself, right?

Dr. Kevin Gazzara: That, you know, say, let’s use round numbers. If you’re making, let’s say 10, 000 a month, so 120, 000 for the year, or whatever the, whatever the number is, is that number is going to go to zero. Right. So, and if you do, right, like that. And, and if you do, if you do get, you know, some hits here and there for, for small activities, just look, kind of look at those as windfalls, but don’t, don’t expect them.

Dr. Kevin Gazzara: And then you really have to ask yourself because you don’t have that funding coming in and plus you’re, you’re spending money to do other development or set up your website or, or, or whatever it is. Right. That you have to say am am I worth it? And do I have that level of confidence That people that people ultimately will hire me to be able to get me back to the the ten thousand dollars And and if the answer is well, i’m really not sure and if you think about it that way Maybe not.

Dr. Kevin Gazzara: So so maybe entrepreneurism

Erin Marcus: And there’s nothing wrong with that by the way.

Dr. Kevin Gazzara: Oh, no,

Erin Marcus: this is not for If it was easy, everyone would be doing it. I mean this it’s not for everybody

Dr. Kevin Gazzara: Yeah, but it looks really exciting and sexy from the outside, doesn’t it? It looks exciting on

Erin Marcus: Instagram.

Dr. Kevin Gazzara: Yeah.

Erin Marcus: It doesn’t look, right, it looks, let’s be real, it looks exciting on Instagram as we’re sharing our highlight reel and sharing our success stories because it’s not good marketing as an entrepreneur to go out on the internet and say, you know, oh my God, like, nobody really is going to hire you.

Dr. Kevin Gazzara: Yeah, when I was talking to Joe, when he got downsized and I was giving him some, some, some coaching he said, I just, I just want you to hire, just hire me, you know, I can charge the five to 10, 000 for the day and then the rest of the month I can have off and that way I can make my 10, 000 for the, for the month, for the month.

Dr. Kevin Gazzara: That’s how that works. It’s like, yeah, it doesn’t, it doesn’t quite work that way. You don’t see all the stuff, you know, the man behind the curtain. Right. Exactly. All right. So let’s, so that’s the, those are the first four. And then the fifth one I got, I got also a recommendation from many, many of successful consultants or coaches that you needed a publication.

Dr. Kevin Gazzara: You need to have a book. It’s not an oracle. You have to have a book. And they also said you have to have a hard cover book right now, particularly in my market where you’re marketing to executives, right? That for some reason, Having being able to, to feel that book in your hand.

Erin Marcus: There’s so much truth to that.

Dr. Kevin Gazzara: That, that, that is probably one of the best things we had done. So when we left in 2007, we, we published the our first book in 2008. It’s called the leader of Oz. You know, we took the story of the wizard of Oz. I published it with my, my partner, Dr. Ali Lakhani. Both of us had done our, our, all of our doctoral work in leadership.

Dr. Kevin Gazzara: And we started writing an academic book, and man, it was just so boring that we didn’t want to read it. So, so we were speaking at a conference in San Francisco and driving back and forth between Sacramento where, where he lived. And we were talking about things that, you know, movies and books that we loved and we found we both loved.

Dr. Kevin Gazzara: The Wizard of Oz, both the movie and the book. And I said, that’s it. Let’s do a book. We’ll call it the leader of Oz. And he said, ah, there must be a thousand people have done that. So we went, went home that night, you know, logged on to the library of Congress to see no one had ever done it. We grabbed the name.

Dr. Kevin Gazzara: And we published it. We basically took all our academic stuff and wrote it in a business parable. So instead of having Dorothy and Dora, and so the nice thing is you don’t have to do any character development because the characters stay, stay in place. So, so we basically took everything that we did and You know, from what we learned as as leaders and managers in a big corporation, and we put it in a book in a fun way.

Dr. Kevin Gazzara: So if people are interested in building their teams, they can get that.

Erin Marcus: It’s a credential. And I talk about social media the same way. If until you are prepared to hire the people who know how to create online sales funnels, social media is a necessity, but it’s really a credential. It’s really a credential, same way as the book.

Erin Marcus: It opens doors. It’s such an absolute, there’s something still, no matter how digital our world gets, there is still, I got books all, I still buy it. If I’m interested, I might read a book online, but if I’m interested, I will buy it. So I can put all my sticky notes in it.

Dr. Kevin Gazzara: Right. And I’ll tell you, you know, if you meet someone, you meet an exec that really can use your services, you know, being able to stick a book in the mail that shows up on their desk or at their home probably, probably 80 percent of them don’t read it.

Dr. Kevin Gazzara: But they can skim through it and realize, oh, okay, this guy must be legit because he’s written a book and even if you read just, you know, we, we designed it. We have an audio audible book as well on it and it’s only about three hours. We designed it for a plane read, right? So you could fly from city to city and finish the book.

Dr. Kevin Gazzara: So, so that’s, that’s the other thing is, is do that. And it’s, and people don’t realize. You know, when they say, oh, you’re an author and you have a published book, and they have no idea, most people have no idea how easy it is. The easy it is to do and there’s

Erin Marcus: so many people who can help you do that and do it and do it

Dr. Kevin Gazzara: So well last p right?

Dr. Kevin Gazzara: Yes last last p is is I used to have five in this one. I I had to add So I went to six a couple years ago and it’s the it’s persistence, right? It’s not Determination to get through the difficulty. And you know what we recommend is Get a mentor get a coach get a consultant to You To work with you because ultimately, you know, when people say, come to me and they say, Hey, Kevin, I want to do what you’re do, you know, can you help me?

Dr. Kevin Gazzara: It’s like, I absolutely can help you. I would love to help you. And I say, here’s, here’s my fees, right? In order for me to, to do some, some business coaching with you. And then they, they go, Oh, you know, like, I really don’t have enough. I don’t have any money. It’s like, well, how much money have you saved for the investment?

Dr. Kevin Gazzara: Like, oh, I can last like two or three months. Okay. This, this is not the conversation we’re going to have. If they say no, no, no, I really, I’ve got plenty and I want to invest. And I realized this is, I’m going to play the long term game. The long term game. I. So I tell, I tell them, here’s, here’s the fees, and they usually kind of wince, like, oh, you know, so my, my real, my question then is, so what would it be worth to you if you can get your client one month faster, just one month, that’s all you have to do, right?

Dr. Kevin Gazzara: And And he said, well, I’ll probably be worth, you know, whatever, whatever, whether figuring a client is five, 10, 20, 000, 20, 000, you know, if you can, if I can get you that client one month faster to get you that, that money, you know, how much would you invest? And if you think, well, I can get 10, 000. So how about we do a short coaching session sessions and it’s 2, 000 and I’ll I’ll guarantee, you know, you’ll get a five, a five times return on your investment, right?

Dr. Kevin Gazzara: Or if it’s a 20, 000 that you get a, you know, the 10 times return on your investment and, and, and my, I always tell people, you know, I will stay with you until we, you reach that, reach that threshold. As long as you’re going to do the types of things that you’re committed to do that. And I think the biggest thing I would say are kind of as, as kind of a closing note here, Is that, that we as developers as people that do training and development and leadership to kind of stuff is we love to, we love to create and to, to develop as an entrepreneur, you have to have an 80, 20 split, 80 percent of your time.

Dr. Kevin Gazzara: You have to be selling, right? You have to be out making connections, building a network, developing, developing your your, your presence, having the phone calls. You should be having a phone call. Once, once a day with, with even just, and I’m not saying selling them anything is just let them know, here’s what I’m doing.

Dr. Kevin Gazzara: You know, I have some references. Tell me your challenges. Let me help you no selling. And then ultimately they’ll, they’ll come back. And I think the, the last one of my, actually my doctoral students who lost his job. But I had this, this conversation with him and hopefully this will stick with your audience is that his name was Carlos in New Jersey and, and his job went away suddenly he’s, he was a teacher and I, and he was working for months and months, months, trying to get another job, you know, and doing the normal thing of, you know, you know, putting in a hundred resumes a week online, none of that ever works.

Dr. Kevin Gazzara: Yeah. And I, and I said to Carlos, I said. I said, all the work that you did this week, tell, tell me if you had to pay someone to do that, the stuff that you did, how much would you pay them for, for doing work that you did? And he thought about it and he said probably about, you know, 250 kind of thing.

Dr. Kevin Gazzara: I said, okay, so you realize you’re, you’re asking, you’re looking for, cause he was looking for about 120, 000 salary. I said, you’re asking for a 10, 000 a month. Right, which turns out to be about 2, 500 a week. You’re asking someone to hire you at 2, 500 a week and you’re doing 250 work, right? So you realize that doesn’t make any sense, so you have to change what you’re doing.

Dr. Kevin Gazzara: So, so I finally got him, you know, off the dime. I talked to him a week later. He said, I called every superintendent and principal I knew. He said, I am doing doctoral research in this area. I’d love to be able to come in and share. That what I’m doing and he had had the 5th person he talked to on that Friday.

Dr. Kevin Gazzara: Called him or if it called him or happened during session said hey, I don’t have a position for you But we’ve been wanting to do some research that was That kind of moves along the same lines that you do. We only have about 30, 000 for the research Would you be willing to doing the research for us? So within a week, you know, there’s a 30, 000 contract, right?

Dr. Kevin Gazzara: and and if you can And, and you have to be able to think about that. And a lot of times, I mean, that may not show up of like, Hey, I talked to you a couple months ago. You know, you’re still doing this. You need to continue to plant the trees. It’s the old, it’s the old, the best time to plant a tree is 20 years ago.

Dr. Kevin Gazzara: The next best time is today. And if you can do that, generally, I think you can be successful.

Erin Marcus: I agree. And I think that for me, the persistence. Is not just inactivity, but in the introspection, right? The persistence is an inner game. Because you have to change how you’re thinking, you have to change what you’re doing.

Erin Marcus: I love the phrase, if you’re going to be an entrepreneur, your business cannot outgrow you.

Dr. Kevin Gazzara: Yeah.

Erin Marcus: And, and the persistence is the, for me, the persistence is the personal development journey. Be persistent in my personal development. Above all else that allows me to do all the things that I need to do from an action standpoint.

Dr. Kevin Gazzara: Yeah, and most, most people, even myself, I mean, I have a coach, right? Is most people can’t do it on their own, right? Because they, you know, it’s kind of like being in the fishbowl. It’s kind of hard to describe what water’s like, right?

Erin Marcus: And people get, you know, I’ve, I’ve taught, I have a lot of other consultants as clients.

Erin Marcus: And it’s always interesting to me when I talk to a consultant who will tell me straight out, they don’t want to do it because they’re also a consultant. And I’m like, have you never watched professional sports? The top performers have multiple coaches, they’re the top performers, who’s the best at what they do in the world, and they have a whole group of people making sure they’re able to do it.

Dr. Kevin Gazzara: You don’t

Erin Marcus: have to feel bad. I love it. I absolutely love it. If people want to continue. I mean, I could talk to you about this stuff because. But if people want to continue this conversation with you, learn more about your books, how you help them, all of the things, what is the best way for them to find you?

Dr. Kevin Gazzara: There’s a couple of ways, you know, they can go to the website, you know, they can go to coach sultans. com or they can go to my business page, which is magna leadership. com. And in either of those, if you just put Kevin at Magna leadership or Kevin at coach Sultans calm that will send an email to me And the thing that I’ll promise the audience is that if you want to have a discussion in any of the six P’s or whatever My purpose in life is to give back that I will be glad to share or go down a really in depth discussion on any of those and give you my best tips and my promises Will not there’s it’s not going to be a sales call.

Dr. Kevin Gazzara: There’s no sales pitch or whatever And if and things work great and you want to continue having a discussion with me, you know in the future I’m a resource for you. So please please do reach out. It’s probably the most rewarding thing I can Can ever receive is is getting someone to call and say, you know, can can you help me and that’s kind of where I thrive

Erin Marcus: Love it.

Erin Marcus: Love it. Thank you so much for your time and your energy and all your insights. Absolutely dead on. I’m hoping people were paying attention. So a lot of good information. So thank you.

Dr. Kevin Gazzara: It’s been my pleasure. Thanks, Erin.