Driven to Business with Eddie Mayfield

Listen to Building Relationships on Driven to Business with Eddie Mayfield on Saturday, August 15th at 11 AM on 1190 AM or streaming on Biz 1190.com

Assuming that you have the chance to lie on a deathbed ( as Jerry Seinfeld quipped: “who on earth would get in one?“) and evaluate your life, I can assure you that it will be judged  by you, and everyone else, in terms of relationships.

Nothing is really more important.  Those relationships are with God, family, friends, and yes,  even business people.  In fact, in terms of business,  it is my contention that absolutely nothing is more important than developing long term relationships.

I recently had the opportunity to have dinner in Vienna Austria with a long time customer. Our company, EMA Inc. , has for years repaired, supplied, and serviced electronic motor drives.  Many years ago we got in a unit for repair, manufactured by a company we didn’t know in Austria.  Following that repair, we sent a fax (remember, this was years ago) to the company asking if they needed a North American service center.

We’ve done directly and indirectly over a million dollars in business with them since.  The Austrian company was recently purchased by a large multinational corporation, but due to our relationships there, we’re still doing, and in fact, expanding our business with them.

The gentleman I was dining with has been a major part of us getting that business, and we talked about our relationship and how it had grown and deepened over the years.  It’s a relationship that was built, and still stands, on trust.

Every good and profitable relationship is built on that.

We live in a seemingly digital impersonal world, but don’t ever believe that.  Malcomb Gladwell, in his book Tipping Point  makes the comment toward the end of the book that in his opinion, we are in fact re-entering  the age of word of mouth.  I’m not sure we ever left it, but think about yourself for a moment.

If you are looking for a place to eat lunch, which has the most influence on you?  An advertisement you saw, or the recommendation of a coworker you trust?  That “relationship” based referral far outweighs any advertisement.

It can also work against you.  An unhappy customer talking about your business can destroy any chance you have of doing business with anyone inside that person’s sphere of influence.

Here’s another thought..  it’s a lot more enjoyable to do business with people with whom you have a good relationship isn’t it?  And that’s true regardless of whether you are supplying the product or service, or consuming it.  It’s also the trick to long term business success.

It’s the secret to overcoming problems, and every business, including yours, will occasionally have problems.  John Maxwell talks about “Big Mo” or momentum.  If you have a great relationship with a customer, and a problem arises, then it tends to remain a small and contained problem.  On the other hand, if you have little or no relationship with that customer, that little problem will become a much bigger one.

So, how does one go about building long lasting, positive relationships?

Here’s a few ideas.

Jeffery Gitomer wrote a great little book called “The Little Black Book of Relationships” in which he talks about exactly that.  His number one rule..  it’s NOT about you. 

If you approach relationship building with the idea of what you can get out of it, the other person is going to think they’re being used, and no one, responds well to that.

Gitomer talks about giving value to people, John Maxwell talks about adding value to people, but they both mean the same thing-  Try to enrich people’s lives.  How do you do that?

Well, start off by being friendly and recognizing their accomplishments and skills.  I’m not talking about phony brown nosing, I’m talking about actually noticing what people do well, and how they do it.  When someone does a great presentation, instead of just applauding and walking to your car, seek them out and tell them how much you enjoyed it.  And make a habit of doing this whether or not that person is in a position to benefit you.  Gitomer is right, it’s NOT about you.

Become a resource to a customer, far beyond the service or product you provide.  If you see an interesting article about their business,  send it to them.   Offer to help  in ways that do not directly benefit you, but benefits them.

If you find a common interest, then use it to enhance the relationship.  Let’s say you play guitar, or golf, or are a big baseball fan.  Find those common points and build a relationship around it, even (and again) when it does not directly benefit you.

Above all..  be trustworthy.  If you make a promise .. KEEP IT at all costs. Do not fudge on the truth..  if your product isn’t great at some little aspect of the business, then tell them that.  Daniel Pink in “To Sell is Human” suggests that the best and most effective sales pitches are those that include something slightly negative about your product or service.   This is because trustworthy people don’t lie about their products and services.

Gitomer again, has a great line in which he asks you to think about a customer you WISH you had.  Then he says, the primary reason you don’t have that customer is that someone has a better relationship with them than you do.  Maybe a hard dose of medicine to swallow for some of us, but true nonetheless.

Believe me, your business life will get a lot easier once you’ve built meaningful and deep relationships with your customers and vendors.  So do it.

Eddie Mayfield

Driven to Business with Eddie Mayfield airs at 11 AM every Saturday on Atlanta’s business radio, Biz 1190 AM.  The show is streamed live on biz1190.com and is podcast on eddiemayfield.com and

Simply the best business radio in Atlanta..  Driven to Business.

Sean Clark is a management consultant specializing the hospitality industry.  He had years of experience as a chef prior to starting True Hospitality.   (www.truehospitality.org)

The restaurant business, especially in Atlanta, is a tough one, and the failure rate is high.  Sean’s perspective on why this is so is not only interesting to those of us that frequent restaurants, but contains valuable business insights for anyone in a business leadership position.

You’ll enjoy this program.  Tune in Saturday July 18th at 11 AM on 1190 AM.

Driven to Business, hosted by Eddie Mayfield, is heard every Saturday morning at 11 on Atlanta’s business radio, Biz1190 AM.

The show is streamed live on biz1190.com and podcast on eddiemayfield.com and itunes.

Simply the best business radio in Atlanta..  Driven to Business.

First of all, let’s clarify the terms. A “team” is people, individual people with their own frustrations, gifts, passions, and problems.  When you lead a team,  you are dealing with individual people, not some amorphous entity.

This is why you don’t lead with memos, emails, and blog posts.  You must deal in the messy reality of individual people.  Anyone aspiring to leadership must come to grips with that truth.

To begin with, you have to care.  In their well researched book on military leadership,  Five Star Leadership, Patrick Townsend and Joan Gephardt  interview a hardened marine corp gunnery sergeant about what he felt was the most necessary ingredient for being a good leader.  His answer was surprising- you have to love the people under you.  Hardly the answer you’d expect, but nonetheless, exactly correct. You have to care.

Jim Collins is famous for comparing a business to a bus. At first, one might think that the role of the leader is to drive the bus, but Collins says no; the role of the leader is to put the right people in the right seats on the bus.  Who is in what seat will determine where the bus goes.

The late Zig Ziglar said that you don’t build a business, you build people. Then the people build the business.

But how do you do that?

The first thing, as mentioned, is to care about the people you lead.  Don’t skip this step. For many aspiring leaders, it’s the hardest one.  Tim Cummins, a Christian leader here in Atlanta, said one of the mistakes young pastors make, is trying to build and grow a church from a computer.  It doesn’t work for them, and it won’t for you in your business.  You have to care about people, and that starts by engaging them.   Anyone that thinks this is easy has never done it.

Learn to trust.  Jim Belasko and Ralph Stayer wrote a great book some years ago- Flight of the Buffalo. They discuss a hunting technique used by buffalo hunters to simply shoot the dominant bull first.  The rest of the herd would then mill aimlessly around, and they could pick them off one by one.

The question this generates is: what is your team doing when you aren’t there?  Milling aimlessly around?  In many cases the answer is yes, and here’s why.  You’ve taught them to do it.

When we make it clear that we don’t trust the people we lead,   when we make it clear that mistakes are not tolerated, when we, in effect, punish creativity and energy, we will get lethargic, unmotivated team members.

Townsend and Gephardt talk about a class at a British military academy where after a leadership lecture, the instructor was asked: “Sir, what do you do if you are assigned to a crummy company?”  To which he replied, “if you have a crummy company, then you are a crummy leader.”

If you have a terrible team, then you are a terrible leader, period.  While that may sound harsh, in fact, it’s empowering.  IF I am the problem, then I am the solution. That mindset allows much clearer thinking and corrective actions, then blaming everyone else.

Get the right people in the right seats.  Encourage, encourage, encourage.  Don’t concentrate on failures, concentrate on solutions and successes.  People will make mistakes, and by the way, so do you!

Another great Zig Ziglar quote is that we judge others by their actions, but ourselves by our intentions.  Stop finding errors, and instead find opportunities.

No One ever arrives at being a great leader; it’s a journey. So get started.

To say that Glen Meakem has been a successful entrepreneur would be an understatement.  Glen was an early achiever in the technology boom, founding several high tech firms.  Among them were Kiva Systems- sold to Amazon, Hotpads-sold to Zillow, Shipwire-sold to Ingram Micro, and CloudMeter-sold to Splunk.

Glen is a venture capitalist, and co-founder of Freemarkets, which at its height, had a market cap of $13 billion.  In addition to all of this, Glen hosts a nationally syndicated radio program, “Glen Meakem on the weekend.”  Glen was a combat officer in the Gulf War, and is a Harvard MBA.

His latest venture is perhaps his most interesting.  Glen founded Forever Inc in 2012.  Forever is the world’s first and only permanent media storage and sharing company.  Visit Forever’s site HERE.   Forever is actually hosting a 3 day photo and scrapbooking extravaganza right here in the Buckhead area September 24-27.  You can read about that HERE.

Most of us use digital media to take pictures, videos, and generate documents.  We attempt to store them for safekeeping, perhaps on a DVD, hard drive, or even using the online storage sites.

A common and reasonable concern has been that the media we’re using to back things up might not be readable in a few years.  As a for instance, at one time our company backed up files on 7 1/4 inch floppy disks. We now have nothing that will read those disks.  There is almost no media any of us are using, that will not be replaced or fail at some point.

That has opened up a huge market for online backup, but there are issues.  Google, for instance, is a great company, and does a good job at storing your data online, but it has a downside.  Google’s free storage is limited, and they mine your data.  Under Google’s present plan, you can only store up to 16 MP resolution.  Larger files are compressed, and original documents are discarded. The question of exactly who owns those files once uploaded is an open question.  Facebook, for instance, to their credit, is very open that THEY own your photos once you upload them.

Glen founded Forever with a different mindset.  Their mission  is to back up your media and memories, guaranteed for your life plus 100 years.  To accomplish this, he founded the Forever Guarantee Fund, designed to grow over time like an endowment.  The majority of fees paid by Forever subscribers goes to this fund, to ensure that the media is preserved for generations.  It’s a unique and smart approach, much like most of Glen’s other business ideas.

Don’t miss this conversation with one of the most interesting businessmen you’ll ever hear.  Glen’s interview with Eddie airs at 11 AM, Saturday June 20th.

Driven to Business, hosted by Eddie Mayfield is heard every Saturday morning on Atlanta’s business radio, WAFS, 1190 AM.  The show is streamed live on biz1190.com and podcast on eddiemayfield.com and itunes.

Simply the best business radio in Atlanta..   Driven to Business.

Nicole Fallon wrote an article for Business News Daily listing 15 business ideas for 2015.  Not all of her ideas appeal to me, but it’s an interesting article, and  the topic of our discussion this week on Driven to Business.

In the first place, this is an exciting time to be an entrepreneur.  Opportunities that never before existed are out there to be seized.  At the same time, we’re in one of the most unstable times my generation has seen. Obamacare, the devaluation of currency, a huge increase in the dependent class, and the subsequent rise of class envy  has eroded much of the American dream.

Here’s how I look at that; no one can predict the future with certainty.  Even the New Testament warns against this in the book of James, saying: “Now listen, you who say, “Today or tomorrow we will go to this or that city, spend a year there, carry on business and make money.”  Why, you do not even know what will happen tomorrow”

So, we live until we die, and the worst thing anyone can do is hunker down in a hole and await the apocalypse. But all that being said.  I remain an optimist.

Here is a sampling  of Ms Fallon’s ideas..

• Kid Friendly Apps..  Reminds me of when Apple began supplying computers to elementary schools so kids would grow up liking Apple computers.  ANYTHING you can do that appeals to kids AND their parents is probably a good business idea.
• Freelancing..  figure out what a business manager hates to do, and learn to do it for them.  Outsourcing is huge, driven in part by businesses leery of adding employees due to regulation, insurance, and instability.
• Translator..  don’t laugh..  IF you are fluent in languages other than English (and are fluent in English) many businesses need you.  Heck, even if you don’t speak another language, you can still start this business and simply hire those that do.
• Traveling beauty and nail salon..  admittedly, not for me, but with an aging population still wanting to look good.  Mobil services like this can fly.

There are more, and we’ll talk about this and other topics Saturday at 11 on Driven to Business.

Driven to Business hosted by Eddie Mayfield is heard every Saturday morning on Atlanta’s Business Radio..  BIZ1190.  The show is streamed live on biz1190.com and podcast on eddiemayfield.com and itunes.

Simply the best business radio in Atlanta..  Driven to Business.