This is Costing Your Business

In this episode, Bernie dives into the nitty gritty of what it means to be fully immersed in your business. 

From a macro perspective down to the granular level - all the details matter and can be the difference between a business that remains stagnant versus one that is constantly evolving and growing.

Hear Bernie's own trials with going through the growing pains of becoming fully immersed, learning to hire the right individuals for specific roles, what we can learn from top entrepreneurs such as Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk, and much more..

Transcript

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Hey everybody, it's Bernie Gallarani bringing you an episode of Success is not convenient. This is a fun one for me, and here's the title: Immersion and How We Learn. How do we grow through immersion? And what does immersion mean? It's kind of like really digging down deep and going so far down that you're immersed in everything that you're doing. So we're going to talk a little bit about that today. You don't really have a business problem. You actually have a distance problem. You have a distance problem that you're not fully emerged. And I'll tell you, I have recently experienced this in my business where I thought I was actually understanding and running my business at a level that I understood it until I actually rolled up the sleeves and realized that I'm not really doing what I'm supposed to be doing and I don't know enough about most things. I know some things, but I'm not immersed enough in my business. That really makes me an expert in so many different areas of my company, right? Most entrepreneurs are too far removed from the real action to understand how the business really works. They're too far from their customers and they're too far from the numbers themselves. They're just too far from people. And here's the truth is you can't dominate something that you're barely involved in. And I gotta tell you, I'll throw myself on the sword a little bit where I did what I wanted to do and didn't do what I didn't want to do. And that's fine and that's fair if you're an entrepreneur. But what I realized is where it cost me time, energy, and money by not rolling up my sleeves and being more involved. And I can give you some examples as we go through this of what I mean. But what immersion actually means to us is immersion is not working more hours. It's not, it's really being mentally locked in and not distracted. We my mentors always said to me, like, you have to work with massive urgency. And I think there's a lot of truth to that. But you also have to understand a lot of different departments so you can know if they're being ran correctly. Knowing your business at a granular level, being emotionally connected to the outcomes, that's really a little bit of an issue if you're just emotionally connected to the outcomes because you don't really know the process. Immersion is when your business is not something you do, it's something you're inside of. You understand the all the intricate processes of how it works. Are you emerged fully in your business? Or are you a little bit lost on what other departments are doing? It's not our job, I think, as owners, to be absolutely focused in and understanding lots of things. And we're gonna talk a little bit about numbers, but we're gonna talk about processes within those numbers also, right? And this is where actually most entrepreneurs break. They confuse activity with immersion, like staying busy, right? Busy does not equal effectiveness, and meetings don't equal momentum. If you're one that likes having a lot of meetings, and I know people like this, by the way, where they're in meetings after meetings after meetings, but yet there's real no no real growth. And you can't really get granular on problems when you're in that kind of state of mind. They outsource too early in their business, and they what they do is they, and and that by the way, this was me, where they give a taste to somebody, but they don't fully understand it. And they hire somebody, right? They hire before they understand the actual role. They delegate things that they've never mastered themselves and they avoid really hard parts, right? They don't really understand lead gen. They need lead gen and they understand part of lead gen, but they don't really understand everything and immerge themselves in that process. I'm in the middle of that right now where I'm really working on things that I don't really didn't really understand. But how ignorant is that for me not to understand it? And I'm learning this the hard way, um, I can tell you. And I give you an example just on lead gen. I have a a source of business that had been declining. And we were scratching our head, well, why is this declining? And what's that all about? And like, what, like, what do we do? Well, there's not really a lot we can do. So we actually played that game of there's not a lot we can do until we started realizing this isn't solving our problem. How do we find an answer to this? Right. So here's the here's what I want you to are you digging deep, really deep, into the reason why? Why is it not working at the level you want? Right. As an owner, entrepreneur, and a person who purchases lead opportunities, it we can we can, it's easy for us to say it's just not working, but we have to ask ourselves, why is it not working? What's what is what is going on with why it's not working? Well, you want to hear something fun. We decided to roll up our sleeves and really dig into it. And we heard a little like, hey, it's just might be people aren't really paying any attention to our sources anymore. It might be this, it might be that. And we were just making assumptions. And you know what happened? It was the lead distribution was going down, and the cost per lead was going up. Let me explain this to you guys. When your lead distribution goes down, when you're paying X amount of money, it's changing the cost of that lead. And so our lead was going from a certain dollar and then it was going up 20%, then 30%, then 40%, then 50%. We were scratching our heads. And when we figured out really, we started digging into, and what we found was our one of our landing pages had something on it that was actually disregarding our marketing plan in the system, and it was kicking us out of spam. Now, I don't even know how that happened. And actually, the platform and the company didn't know how it was happening either, but this is it. We became fully emerged into what was going on. Instead of just saying that's just the way it is, we said, no, it can't be that. We can't accept this anymore. And we learned a lot. Like you, when you talk about full immersion, you go in and go, I gotta dissect this whole thing and figure out why it happened. The good news, we solved it. We solved it. But we had to be fully invested and merged into the process in order to even figure it out. Are you fully emerged in the process of accountability with your sales team or with your staff? I'm having issues in those particular areas where if there's a department that is suffering, we are it's easy for us to blame the uh the employee, but we're not fully emerged. So what do we have to do? We have to go into that department, we have to break it all down, and we have to really get to understand the process. You don't have to hate the business, you just have to hate the parts that you refuse to immerse yourself in. You know, there's a great uh I heard something really great at a retreat that I was at last week, and I love this. And it says, you know, um, it's kind of like that whack-a-mole game, you know, when you and you hit it down and you think you're solving the problem or or or maybe you're making the problem go away, but really you're not. It's gonna pop up somewhere else. And here's what I love this business leader said last week is they said, you don't hate the business. The business is not something that you would hate. You only hate the problems that continue to keep showing up. And the reason the problems keep showing up is because you're not solving the problem. You're not immersed in the problem. So you're saying, oh, I solved that problem, or it comes in and there's an issue, and we put water under the bridge a little bit and say, okay, well, we solved this situation. But here's the question: did you solve the problem? What does full immersion look like for you? Right? Are you fully immersed in the numbers to figure out where the problem come from, right? Are you really immersed in the conversion rates like I just went through? Do you really like we'll talk about leads because this is interesting. Like every business has a lead cost. Are you really immersed in the process of why that lead cost is what that lead cost is, where that lead cost goes, what is your waste rate, right? What is your conversion rate? How do you get that conversion rate over? How are your scripts, your dialogues, how are the people communicating it? Are you just accepting your conversion percentage because that's just the way it is? Or are you really rolling up your sleeves and getting immersed in the process of what it takes to increase that, right? I have a friend of mine who has a very successful business and he had a conversion percentage and it was like 1%. And it was a billion dollar business, and he had a conversion percentage of 1%. And I remember asking him, what happens if you make that 1.5%? And he looked at me and he goes, Oh my gosh, that's all profit. So think about it, 1%. And he has, by the way, it's about a six billion dollar company that is all based on lead distribution. And he had a 1% conversion. And I understand a little bit about conversion, so I challenged him because our conversion is much higher than that conversion that he had. And so I said, God, what happens if you raise that half a percent? You know, and he looked at me and he goes, Well, that would bring about $10 million of revenue to the business. I said, Why don't you solve that? I don't know. I mean, I just want to try to get some of you guys to look at this today and ask yourself this question: Is there something small that I could make a difference in? It's not like you're looking at your numbers monthly, looking at your numbers daily, having daily awareness. If your numbers that you're looking at right now are surprising you, like you're you're you're going, well, where did that come from? Then you're just not that immersed in getting it done. You're just kind of guessing at it. Guys, I've lived this life for so long. The hardest thing I think for a lot of people is that when you make money, you don't realize how much you're wasting. If you're making X amount of money, really look at how much money you think you're you're wasting. Immersion in leads and lead generation, you have to understand how much money it costs you. And if you can't figure out how to raise that, so here's a challenge. Can you raise it a quarter percent? Can you raise those those conversion rates a quarter percent? Can you raise it a half a percent? And what would that do to your business? Write down that. If you're if you're netting seven figures and you're converting at 1% and you convert at 1.25%, you just added $250,000 to your revenue, to your pocket, because you're still paying expenses. A lot of those costs are actually pure net profit costs. You understand exactly where business comes from when you're in it every single day. You're either doing it or you're deeply inspecting it constantly. The second you lose touch with a lead flow, your business starts bleeding. You just don't see it. And because you're because sometimes we're just accepting the situation. I've been there so long where you're just going, well, that's just the way that is. No, that's just the way you have it, and that's just the way that you've accepted it to be. So immersion in your people. Who's performing at a high level? Who's slipping? And who's faking it? If you're daily having a daily level of accountability, you're gonna know all those daily. So here's the question I have if you're coaching and training your people. Are you looking at their numbers monthly, weekly, daily? I just met a meet. I know I have a friend of mine who I was taking to yesterday, and they were talking about that they do accountability with every lead that any one of their salespeople get every day. Some of you guys might go, well, gosh, Bernie, that would be taxing. Do you realize how much more profit you would have if you held somebody accountable every day for the leads that you gave them? You're in conversations, not just reports. So you have to be able to have good conversations, look at people and help them get through this so that conversion rate can go up. Leaders who rely only on their dashboards get blindsided. I get to see numbers every single day, but I don't really understand the numbers until I get granular on the situation. You have to have immersion with your agents, with your people, with your salespeople, but you also have to have immersion with your customers. You know what it feels like, right? To work with your company. Go through the process and ask yourself this question. If you were, if you were going through the process that a customer goes through, would you say you're doing a great job with your people if you see how your company behaves? If you were going through that, one of the things I love uh most is when an agent on my team goes to buy a house. And I've had this happen, I can't even tell you how many times, where they go through a house. There are agents that go through their job, they go through their process that they do every single day to service their clients, but then they actually go and buy the house a house themselves, and then they realize how difficult it is, how much emotion is attached to it. You don't assume anything, you have to test it. What can you do in your company right now to test to see how your company's doing? If you haven't experienced your own service recently in your company, you're totally disconnected. You're disconnected from your business of seeing what the customer service relationship that you have with all your people, how it's actually unfolding. Because immersion in skill development is key. You're still sharpening all of your tools every single day. Don't ever feel like your axe doesn't need to be sharpened because you've had some level of success within your business. You need to continually sharpen all the sales skills, all the communication process, all the decision making that's needed. The moment you stop improving is the moment that your business starts declining. Guys, just pay attention to it. If you really watch it, sometimes like you think things are going really great until they're not. They've been slipping away for some time. You just didn't see it yet. Every elite entrepreneur has a period of obsession in their business. Not balance and not moderation, but immersion. Being immersed, immersion, and immersion has to come when you get to a point. I'm in immersion right now, which is why I thought this would be a very interesting, fitting uh conversation. If you think about this, and I know this is a little bit extreme, but I'm gonna go a little extreme. Let's look at Elon Musk. Do you realize if you ever watch anything that he does, he sleeps on this factory floor a lot? I was watching an interview with him somewhat recently, and he was talking about going to lunch, or someone was asking about going to lunch. And he's like, I don't go to lunch. I work through lunch. I have my lunch brought in. I don't leave. He's fully immersed. If you look at the fact that he's the richest person on the planet, he's fully immersed in his businesses. He understands them pretty well, right? Steve Jobs was obsessed over his product detail. Like he was so in line with how everything worked. The glass they used, the way the corners looked, and I've seen shows on him, it's pretty crazy. He was obsessed. But he was fully immersed in that product quality, right? Jeff Bezos, he's totally fixated on customer experience. If you were fixated on customer experience, doesn't your customer really tell you the truth? In some of the relationships that I deal with in business professions that I work with, you get certain people who sit there and just continually deny and or make excuses for the level of service they provide. And as a person who really works on customer service, it's really sad that people can't even see it. I mean, I'm working with a company right now that's a billion dollars of company, like multi, multi, multi, multi, multi-billions. And I'm working with one of their representatives, and their service is wretched. Wretched. Somewhere that's going to catch up. Obsession is just nothing more than immersion that other people are uncomfortable with dealing with. Being obsessed is just immersed, being an immersion in that product and that idea that most people are just uncomfortable doing. And the question you have for you that I would have for you is is it worth making the best company you possibly can for the effort that you're putting to make sure that the clients are taken care of at the highest level possible, to make sure that you are providing the greatest service you possibly can and you're getting the best return from your investment. See, entrepreneurs start by making money, but they step away too soon from the business. They stop inspecting the process, they trust the systems that aren't that solid. And then what happens? Culture starts to slip, lead flow drops, standards actually fall to the wayside. You don't build something that runs without you. You walk away from something that is still needed in you. You still have to keep going until it runs on its own. And that is the hardest part. I did that so early on where I had this little teeny business, and I'm like, yeah, you know, it's fine. Yeah, I can kind of step away. But guess what happened? The business stopped growing. Yeah, everything business was great and money was coming in, but it was not inspiring. And so here's some things that for you to look at that maybe can help you, right? Get back into the front lines weekly, daily, by the minute. Listen to the real customers, the agents, the conversations, listen to all of them. Don't just sweep it under the carpet. How can you have it? I had an agent leave leave me recently for something that I thought was kind of crazy, like to be honest with you. So they left to go somewhere else. And when it was brought to my attention, why? What do you think the first thing I said to myself was? Well, fine. But then after I thought about it, I'm like, you know, where did I go wrong in that relationship? Where could I have made a better choice? Where could I get granular and get more immersed in the real issues? Did I was I surfacing the issues? Yes. The answer to that was yes. Was I taking for granted the situation? The answer to that is yes. You need to shadow your team. You need to get involved. You need to roll your sleeves up. You need to find out what's really going on. Don't always look at your numbers and your profit margins. Look at things that could be a problem that ultimately are going to be an issue that could shut your company down. Redo the parts of your own process yourself. Go into every department and dig into it. Block time for deep, uninterrupted thinking time. Close your door and think about how do I make this whole system better. If it drives revenue, you should feel it. You should feel positive about it. But if it's not, my gosh, don't make excuses for it. Don't allow yourself to be okay with just being okay. Your business will only grow to the level that you're willing to immerse yourself in. And that's it. Not the level you talk about and not the level you plan for. It's the level you actually live in. It's what you make a decision every day to be a part of. Is it part of your DNA to build a really great business? Because if it's not part of your DNA, you're just going to have an average business. Ask yourself this question: where am I disconnected in my business right now? Right now, where am I not 100% focused? All the areas, right? All the areas. My relationship with my staff, my relationship with my salespeople, my relationship with my vendors. How is all of that? How is every single lead source? How are they performing? These are really good questions for you. Here's another one. What part of my business do I avoid the most? Where do I feel the most uncomfortable? By the way, the part of the business you avoid the most, they need you the most right now. The one that you avoid is probably the one that you're lacking the most in. Here's another one. Do I know my numbers or do I hope that they're good? Are you looking at your numbers every single day? Are you coming into your office every day and looking at all of your numbers, your revenue numbers, what's coming in, what's not working, what lead source are working, how much does it bring in? What are my conversion percentages? Are you counting everything? Ask yourself this question. If I stepped in today, would I actually know what to do? That's a scary one because I just took on a responsibility that I have never done. I've always had somebody do it. And I made a decision, partly out of necessity, but I made a decision to step into something that I know absolutely nothing about. But guess what? I'm a salesperson and it was a sales role. So I took it over. And guess what? It's kind of fun. I'm not saying I'm going to be doing it forever, but I'm learning a lot. And guess what I learned? I learned that the presentation that had been being presented on the recruiting aspect of the sales side was just okay at best. It wasn't going to sell anybody to get excited about anything. So guess what I learned by doing it? Man, this whole thing needs to be revamped. Thank God I stepped in. Here's another one. Am I building something great or just managing something average? Nothing wrong with being average. I mean, I don't want to be average. I'm sure you don't either, but if you have an average business, that's okay. But why not have an amazing, successful, unstoppable business? And the only difference is you're not fully emerged in all of the process that it takes. You might say today, well, I don't want to be fully emerged because I lucked my life. Then that's perfectly fine. But if you're looking at your business and saying, Bernie, I actually need help. I need to figure this thing out. Go in step by step to your entire business, roll your sleeves up, dive in, be part of the DNA of it, and solve the problem so you can lead the other people in those departments to a really great company. Guys, I hope you found some value in this today. I'd love to hear any of your thoughts, concerns, opinions. Please, you know, send me a message below. I'd like to hear from you. All right. And so again, remember success is never easy. It's always difficult. That's why we say it's not convenient. Success is never convenient. But if we can just take one little bit and just change 1% of our growth every day, 1%, that's ultimately going to add up to a really great company that you're going to be proud of. Hope everybody has a great day.