Tag: April Garcia

Ep 478: Small Business Success Secrets with April Garcia

RV (00:02):
It’s always a privilege when I get to introduce you to someone that I’ve known for years and worked with as a friend also as a client. And April Garcia is one of my favorite people that we have ever worked with. She was one of the early BBG members B-B-G-O-G as we like to say. And she comes from a world of big, big business. And she climbed the ladder as a top performer in the financial and telecom industries. She’s got a bachelor’s degree in biology. She built several businesses. She’s advised both US and international corporations all the way from like startup to billion dollar enterprises, right? So she’s an expert in growing revenue, sales, operations, and just kind of like what it takes to scale. But a few years ago, she made a pivot to say, I wanna start working with small businesses to help them succeed. And that’s what we’re gonna talk about today, is basically how can small businesses apply the principles of big business to help ’em scale faster? And where should they not try to be, like big businesses so that they can scale faster? So anyways, welcome to the show. April Garcia, it’s great to have you,
AG (01:12):
Rory. It’s so good to be here. I’m so glad that we made this happen, and it has been such a journey with you, with the company I’ve loved working together, and I so appreciate being here today.
RV (01:22):
Well, thanks buddy. So I just wanna start, like, right, what I was just talking about is going, what, you come from the big business world. You’ve been working, helping small businesses. What do small business owners need to know and ex like, what do they need to do, like big businesses? How do, how should they be thinking more like big businesses? Mm-Hmm. , what should they be implementing that big businesses do that like maybe they’re not even aware of and like they’re not doing, but you go, gosh, this is, these are things you, you need to, you need to be doing.
AG (01:57):
Yeah. There’s so many things. I’m gonna try to boil ’em down to just a couple of things. Part of it is that we, we don’t realize when we’re leveling up, we’re a small business owner. We start with zero sales, zero experience. And it’s not like someone comes to you and says, Hey, you just crossed this threshold. Now you need to start doing these things. Or you need to let go of these old habits. And so there’s no kind of this magic moment where someone comes to you and says, it’s time for, for example, processes. And so, one of the first things I will tell you is, when I made this transition from big business to small business, what I found overwhelming was that, well, small business owners were completely overwhelmed. They had way more things than could possibly get done. And so it’s, it’s funny, I did this exercise one time.
AG (02:40):
I was, I was doing a training and I said, okay, if there’s one word that could describe your state, write it down on a piece of paper and I’m gonna gather everyone’s up, and then I’m gonna look at it. And there’s probably 30 business owners in the room, and they ran anywhere from they’re small business owners, you’d say probably about 500 K to about 5 million. And they all wrote down a word. And then I opened it up, and every single one of the words were some iteration of overwhelmed. Wow. Every single one of them. And then I said, okay, we’re gonna take this a little bit farther. I said, if you could have a superpower, what would it be? And now I put a little space between these two questions. And what was very interesting is I was kind of thinking we’d get a couple of, like flying or I don’t know, see-through walls or something like that.
AG (03:24):
Ultimately, it was some version of could I multiply myself like, or slow down time so I could get more things done. And I remember this hitting me like a, a, a ton of bricks. And I thought, gosh, they’re really struggling with overwhelm. And so part of that is when we’re small businesses, we don’t think about things like processes. Processes aren’t fun, processes aren’t sexy. But if you don’t have time for processes, you never have time, right? And so, one of the things that big businesses have, they have processes, they have SOPs, standard operating procedures. Now, this doesn’t have to be a super involved process. This doesn’t have to be someone that, you know, an onset consultant that you bring in to do this. Just capturing what needs to happen to make your business run so that as you staff up, you can convey that information to them will be huge. Now, let me tell you what I see small business owners where, where we mess up, and I’ve done this too in the businesses that I’ve owned. We say things like, well, I need someone who’s quick on their feet. I need someone who’s a fast learner that doesn’t need me to handhold. And when you hear words like that, they need to be red flags of like, oh, so you’re planning on not training that person, right? ? ’cause that’s what we do. That Uhhuh, that’s the translation code. Have you been there? Code?
RV (04:35):
Can you come take care of this mess for me while I pay you, pay you under market value, overload you with work? And can you just like, solve all my problems, , that’s so great.
AG (04:46):
Sometimes I’ll be asking you to work on operations, and other time I’ll ask you to pick up my car. This is, we all do this, right? Like, we all start there. And, you know, I worked with this real estate investor in Ohio for a couple of years, and he always complained about like the job market. And he’d say stuff about the millennials and the job market and what kind of, you know, what kind of talent are they turning out of the universities? And what I continuously had to remind him, as I said, Eric, and we’ll say your name, Eric. Eric, what kind of training program do you have? How are you training these people? Mm-Hmm. He wasn’t. And yet he was continuously disappointed with what they were providing. So when I say training guys, I don’t mean that you have to sit down and you have to write a dissertation on how to do a job.
AG (05:30):
I mean, it could be you turning on Zoom or you know, Google Meet or something like this. And you walking through a process your organization does while you’re doing a screen share. And that does a couple of things. One, it addresses the people that are audio learners who are listening, but it also addresses the people that are visual learners. They actually are watching you walk through the process. So, I mean, this is a very tactical thing I’m jumping into right away. But for example, if you need to know about how to onboard a client or how to send out an invoice, you turn on Zoom, you do a screen share, and someone’s watching your mouse clicks, someone’s watching. As you talk through the process on Zoom, it’s being recorded. And then afterwards, zoom has this nice, and it doesn’t have to be Zoom guys, but it was a nice little transcribed feature.
AG (06:10):
Transcribe it, go back in, take five minutes, just clean up, make sure that the transcription was accurate. Bam. Now you have an SOP. Now you have a process in your organization for onboarding. And this doesn’t, you don’t require tens of thousands of dollars of software or tools or, or consulting fees. There’s value to that. Yes. But if I’m talking to a small business owner right now, they’re already so busy that when you propose more expenses and when you propose more work, it feels overwhelming. You can literally put something together in a Google drive. Now again, big businesses, they’ve got nicer tools for that. But let’s just talk about the scrapper. That’s the up and coming. Mm-Hmm. , you are going to want something like a Google drive. And it could be here’s our sales plan, here’s marketing, here’s how to onboard a client. Things like that are so easy. So I’ll go back to the original question. What’s something they do? Processes? And without processes, A, you’ll never free up your time. But b, you’ll never adequately train teammates. They may stick around, they may stick around ’cause they love you or they love your mission, but you’re gonna burn them out.
RV (07:14):
Mm-Hmm, yeah, I, that, that is what happens, right? I mean, in so many of these small businesses, the hardest thing is they go, well, I can’t, I don’t have the time to hire someone, so I’ll do it myself. And then they get to expert and they go, okay, I’ll hire someone, but I don’t have the time to train ’em. And then the person leaves and they go, see, I don’t have time to hire them. That never works out. And mm-Hmm,
AG (07:34):
, I’ll do it myself.
RV (07:35):
I’ll do it myself. And, and it’s just this sort of vicious cycle. And I think a lot of times a lot of times I think small business owners mislead themselves to thinking, oh, a person is the answer. I’m looking for this magical person. And it’s not. The process is the answer, which is good news. Absolute is because the process is more controllable. The process is mm-hmm, , like, you can sit down and like to find a good person is like, that’s hard and takes time and money. But like, you can sit down and create a process like right now Mm-Hmm, and have it solved forever. Like never have to deal with it again.
AG (08:15):
You can keep doing iterations and it gets better and better. And, and, you know, the other thing is, we, we jumped in the process thing. And, and, and I’ll be honest with you, where no one wants to hear that they need a process, no small business order. They’re like, oh God, not the process thing. Next thing I’m gonna tell ’em to have a morning routine or journal. I get it. I get it. Everybody’s busy and they don’t wanna hear that, even if it’s good for them. But Rory, I’ll tell you another piece that big businesses do fantastic and small businesses overlook. Oftentimes we get into running our own business because we’re very good at our craft, but we are not very good at selling our craft. And what I see small business learners do over and over again is they love a good product development.
AG (08:51):
They love getting better and better and better at their craft. Mm-Hmm, . But they forget that you can have the cure for cancer in your garage, but if nobody knows that you have the cure for cancer, it does you no good. And you have to acknowledge that every organization is a sales organization. I had two calls this morning, two consulting calls with two different nonprofits. And I always ask them about their sales. I always come back to, okay, you know, because the money allows us to staff up the right people, make sure that we can do the TED Talk, make sure we can do all these other things. Every organization is a sales organization. If you are the founder and you think your time is best spent improving upon your craft, you are mistaken. The truth is, there are people half as good as you getting paid, double what you are paying just ’cause they’re better at sales.
AG (09:38):
So get it’s facts and you know, it’s, it’s, it’s facts. And, and that’s, and that’s the thing I see a lot too, is people will go, well, why that person? Why, why is that person, you know, getting the book deal? Why is that person on stage? Why did that person get the big clients? It’s not skillset guys. It’s mindset. It’s confidence. It’s things that you have totally under your control if you just use the tools that help you improve those things. So I have a lot of people that sit in front of me and say, I’m not good at sales. Well, you’re not gonna be good at your craft. You’re not gonna be able to do it for the right people, because there’s someone out there tonight, I want you to imagine that 11 o’clock at night, someone has opened up their laptop and they’re trying to find a solution. They’re googling for answers that are inside your head. And unless you get good at sales, unless you, unless you get a sales plan together or hire someone who’s good at sales, they’re never gonna get that solution. So stop burning the midnight oil, getting better at your craft and get better at sales.
RV (10:34):
Yeah, I think, I think, you know, there’s, there’s something to be said to be for being great at your craft, for sure. Sure. But it, it’s like there’s, there’s so many great artists that are the starving artists and you and Mm-Hmm. , I think marketing is art. Like marketing is part of your art. Half of the art is creating it. The other half is telling people about it. It’s only the, it’s, it’s, it’s the naive artist that thinks, oh, my art is so good. People should find it themselves. And and I think that’s really, it’s really painful. And I think what you’re, I see this a lot with personal brands, right? Mm-Hmm. , obviously the people listening to this is, they go, they spend, they spend years creating the perfect course and, you know, meticulously pouring over everything. They get the course done and mm-Hmm. . And instead of selling it, which they should have done like six months earlier, they go totally and start over. They go, oh, I have a new, I have a new course. I want to create a whole new thing thing all the time.
AG (11:31):
And it’s because product development is fun. It’s fun.
RV (11:33):
Product development is fun. Yep. You don’t have the rejection, you don’t have the, the the, the fear. Totally. And like, it is this, it’s creative avoidance to use a term from take the stairs. Yes. It’s, it’s going, it looks like we’re being productive, but we’re really doing it subconsciously as a defense mechanism to avoid the pain that comes from, like, what, what needs to happen. So I wanna stick on this for a second, and then I want to talk about what small businesses should do different from the big businesses, but to stick on this Mm-Hmm. , a lot of small businesses are good at their craft, right? They started Mm-Hmm. because it’s like, I don’t wanna run a business. I wanna be the baker. I don’t wanna run a business. I want to like, help clients. I want, I don’t wanna run a business like I want be the person painting or recording the music or like, you know, writing the book. They’re not starting a business to go, I wanna like, sell and market the crap out of anything. Totally. So how do you get over that? Like you said, it’s not skillset, it’s mindset. What’s the switch that needs to flip in their head if they’re, if, if, if you’re, if they’re listening right now and they go, oh my gosh, that is me. I, I, I constantly iterate on my product so that I never have to market and sell. What do they need to change to like, stop doing that and get busy selling?
AG (12:47):
So we constantly iterate so we don’t have to sell, maybe because we really like it to be perfect, maybe because we’re convincing ourselves that we wanna make the most impact in the end user if we make it really, really good. But I have found time and time again that it’s fear. Because if we get to stay in our workshop and tinker on our craft, and it doesn’t matter if it’s a speak if, if it’s a speech, if it’s a book, it doesn’t matter what the, the particular craft is or the product. And when I say product development product, I mean your service, your product, whatever widget you sell or whatever service you sell, when we get to just stay in our workshop and tinker, we get to stay safe. Mm. And we don’t have to get out in the middle of the arena where people are gonna throw things at us, right?
AG (13:30):
I mean, it’s scary to get your product out there. There’s there’s a famous quote. I’m gonna, I’m gonna paraphrase. But essentially if you know that your product is ready to release it, then you’ve waited too long. I’m paraphrasing. But you have to get your product out messy. You have to get it out and iterate. Product development needs to be an iterative process because you have to get feedback from the marketplace, not feedback from your mom or your brother or your wife. You have to get feedback from the end user. Don’t show it to someone that isn’t the end user. I wanna say end user. I mean, if I am writing a book about how to help real estate agents sell, don’t sell, show it to your sister that runs a bakery. Like that’s not your market. And it won’t resonate with her. And besides she loves you and she’s probably gonna tell you good things.
AG (14:16):
So you have to get it out. Like you have to birth that out in the universe and then let someone throw tomatoes at it. And I see that over and over again. I, I work with a client Ben, who’s a remarkable composer. And he, he said it great. He said, I find that I just over complicate it like it’s a Christmas tree and I keep hanging ornaments on over and over and again until it gets so heavy, it just falls over and I start again. And I thought, what a great way to do that. So small businesses continuously focus on making their craft better, making their product better so that they don’t have to be exposed. I mean, this is why I, I go on a tangent here for a second, Roy, but I hate when social media loves people love to put this out on social media about like hustle and silence and then surprise them with their results.
AG (15:00):
And I think that is absolute garbage. I hate that when I see that on Instagram and Facebook, because people should see you iterate. People should see you get out there and like, well, this didn’t work. Well, that’s okay, I’m gonna try again and I’m gonna try again. Like, don’t only come out when everything is polished and perfect. The only person you are protecting in that instance is you, is your ego. But when someone sees you iterate, they see, hey, that’s available. Or someone like me for someone who’s messy or someone that maybe has a learning disability with someone with, with a DHD, someone with young kids. All those reasons that we tell ourselves. ’cause We, we’ve got that negative narrative well rehearsed as to why that success isn’t available to someone like me. When you actually get it out to the marketplace, when you stop living in product development, that’s when you can also inspire people with your journey.
RV (15:50):
Mm-Hmm. , amen. Now you, you. Amen. No, that, that, that, I mean, it is fear. I mean, that, that mm-Hmm. and it’s totally, it’s weird. And it’s masking itself as productivity, which is the definition of creative avoidance. Like it’s it. And, and so it just perpetuates. It just goes, it goes on and on and on. So I wanna come back to now what sh what should small businesses not be doing? Mm-Hmm. , how should they not be emulating what bus big businesses do? Because I think sometimes they do that also right as they go. Mm-Hmm. like, oh, like, you know, I’m gonna model my two person company after Apple . Mm-Hmm. , yes. You know what? Whatever. So like Sure. Tell me some of that again, just coming back to that you straddled both of these worlds. I have. And I, I, I, I’m curious your perspective.
AG (16:39):
Yeah. So I will start by telling you how I did this wrong, Rory. So I’m glad that you asked this question. So, when I came out of the big business world, I had just finished this we’ll say a very, very popular telecom launch. And it was a hundreds of millions of dollars of a launch. And I was very much a part of the strategy and spearheading this and negotiating all the contracts and the deals and flying over all over the world to make this happen. And then I went and built a personal brand five years ago, which is where we met, right? Mm-Hmm. . And in my mind, I was like, I am building an at and t I’m building a Wells Fargo, a chase Manhattan. So I went about some things wrong in that I was used to a very large budget. I was used to a very large expense account.
AG (17:24):
I was used to being the big dog on campus. Well, when you’re a small business, you aren’t, and you have to be aware of your expenses. And so, one thing I would encourage someone is you are not building a hundred million dollar company. You’ve first gotta build a million dollar company before you can build a hundred million dollar company. So when you’re out there looking at the big guys again, let’s say you’re, you are speaker, if you’re out there looking at someone who’s been speaking for 20 years and they’re, you know, wildly successful at what they’re doing, you cannot fully emulate them. Yes. I say, who are you chasing? You, you should be chasing someone. You should be, you know, have an idea of, okay, I wanna be similar to the speaker we were talking about John Maxwell earlier, or Les Brown. You can have an idea of someone that you’re like, okay, this is someone that I’m, I’m, I’m sort of chasing, but understand you’re chasing the version of them that are finely tuned 40 years down the road.
AG (18:13):
If I am trying to scale a large consulting business, I can’t look at a, a consulting business that’s a billion dollar business and say, I wanna be like them because they were first a million dollar business. So I will say, scale appropriately, watch your expenses. You can’t indulge in expenses like the big guys can. But I’ll, I’ll make it even more tactical than that. Rory. I’m going to say that you’ve got to be very particular who you take on as a client. Oh, large businesses, yeah. This is key. This is key. So large businesses can take on a multitude of clients, and they have lots of customer service people and lots of salespeople and lots of account managers and, and engineers and different people to sort of scale according to the customer demographic. Small businesses, we don’t get that. The problem is, when we are a small business, we kind of have this rule, whether we say it or not, they’re like, well, if it ships, it fits.
AG (19:07):
If they pay, they play. Right? And we take on all these clients that aren’t a good fit for our model, which is one of the reasons why I loved your guys’ program about like the avatar work and primary and secondary audience that is so key. Because what I saw with small businesses is that anybody who could write a check, they would say yes to. Mm-Hmm. . So if I’m a consulting firm and I just started and my revenue’s only 700 k and someone comes along and says, Hey, I’ve got this 250 K contract, you’re gonna go, oh my gosh, my revenue’s only this much. And that would be so much. And wouldn’t it be nice to have that and imagine all the things we could do? And then they say yes to the wrong client. And you see this with small businesses over and over again, it will suck the joy right out of you.
AG (19:47):
We’ve all had those clients. Like we’ve had the client that just made us not love our craft anymore. Big businesses can afford that. Big businesses have the, the latitude to take on different client demographics. If I’m talking to a small business owner right now, like whoever’s listening right now, if you’re running, and, and I’ll say I usually define small businesses under 50 million, but probably for, for who we’re talking to, I’m saying between, you know, 1,000,020 5 million, who you choose to have as clients is everything. Because that will make you and your team love your work or hate your work. And I’ll give you a little, I’ll give you a little insider tip. This is an exercise I do as a business advisor. Your highest maintenance clients will almost always be your lowest profit clients. But they won’t appear like that at f at first. So that same 750, you know, K revenue c client might get a 250 K contract and they go, this is the mo the biggest contract we’ve ever had as a business.
AG (20:46):
This is amazing. This is amazing. But if it’s not the right fit, it will end up costing you in the long run. They might be high maintenance, they might not be a good fit. You might have to add on extra bells and whistles just to meet their demands or meet their needs because they weren’t quite a fit. But you really needed the money. And I, I’ll tell you, I’ve seen so many small business owners grow to dislike what they do. And it wasn’t because they, they don’t like doing it anymore. It’s who they, who they’re doing it with. A lot of times when I talk to small business owners, when they say that they’ve lost that love and feeling like, oh, I just don’t enjoy it as much. I always say, talk to me about your client demographics. Who are you working with? How has that changed through the years?
AG (21:26):
And sometimes it’s, well, I got part of this organization and they were sending me leads and so I just took them. And they aren’t realizing that they’re not loving it anymore ’cause they’re working with the right, wrong kind of clients. So small business owners be very clear, not who you can serve because you are a creative person, you’re a resourceful person, you can help lots of people, but I want you to be very specific on who you should serve, not who you can, you can serve lots of people, but who should I serve? Who am I passionate about serving? But also will light me up too. Because again, you’re resourceful. You can help lots of people, but you help the wrong person and you won’t love your business anymore.
RV (22:03):
Mm-Hmm. , I think that a a lot of this, the mindset here, you know, you said earlier it’s not skillset, it’s mindset. Mm-Hmm. , I think the mindset of a small business owner is, is often like revenue at all costs and going like, I, I gotta take on the revenue. But time is more valuable than money. Especially if you’re small. And whenever you take those, you know, a lot of times you, if you take it on, it’s like now you have to create a whole bunch of new stuff that you didn’t have. Totally. And it pulls you away from the core and what you’re good at. And that the cost of that time is, is more expensive than the gain of that revenue if it’s not like perfectly aligned. Yeah.
AG (22:43):
Yeah.
RV (22:43):
So, you know, that kind of fits with alignment and goals and something in general you talk about. So mm-hmm. , you know, smart Goals is like a thing that everybody has heard. You, you’ve got, you’ve got a special take on smart goals an addendum to it if you will. So I’d love to, I do walk walk us through that. ’cause That’s a framework people are familiar with and I want to, I want everyone to hear your take on it.
AG (23:04):
Absolutely. So smart goals is sort of, well, the gold standard, right? Like they it, and, and there is, there is validity to that. I, I operated off of smart goals for years, but there is a piece that’s missing in the smart growth format that I found has really handicapped a lot of people’s success. Part of what I do, much of what I do, I, I said that people come for skillset, but they stay for mindset. Part of the mindset piece is just getting people out of their own way and making sure they’re truly leveraging all the tools that they have around them, even the ones that they’re overlooking. So I use a framework called the anatomy of goals. And in the anatomy of goals, it’s around identifying the what. That’s, that’s key. But usually when people are setting goals, they move right into the how.
AG (23:45):
The second they say the what, it doesn’t matter what the goal is. It could be, I wanna hit seven figures this year. It can be I wanna run a marathon or write a book. The goal doesn’t matter. And, and that’s a piece that’s important too. Goals are just project management with a bunch of emotions baked in. People try to make goals into this big thing. It’s just project management. It’s, it’s figuring out the what and then chipping away at it a little bit at the time and figuring out a way to keep yourself focused on it until you hit that. But the piece that’s missing with smart goals is the who, like who can help you get ahead. And so what I created in the anatomy of goals is, is it’s a three part. You establish the what, which is very important. Okay? I want a seven figure revenue, for example.
AG (24:25):
Great. We’ve got the what now, resist the temptation to move right into the how, which is where our brain immediately goes. If I say, okay, I’m gonna hit seven figures immediately, it’s like, well, the market’s downturn with the political climate, dah, I’ve got all the reasons why I’ve, I’ve practiced this narrative many times of all the reasons why that’s not feasible, or if it’s I’m gonna run a marathon. Yeah, but you know, my kids are still kind of young and would drop off and now we’re sending so and so to soccer practice. There’s all these reasons why that’s not possible. ’cause We moved into the how, forget the how go from what. And then you immediately go into the who. I break the who into three parts. So regardless of the goal, I want you to be looking for three different parts. The first one is the mentor, which makes sense.
AG (25:06):
Like, who’s done this thing that I’m about to do? I wanna hit seven figures. Who do I know who’s hit seven figures? I want to write a bestselling book. Who do I know who’s written a bestselling book? That’s the mentor, the person who has gone ahead of you. The next is the networker who has the network to support this goal that I want. Sometimes the mentor and the network are the same person. You know, if I want to climb Everest and I have this friend Allison who’s climbed Everest, okay, great. She could be the mentor. Does she have the network? Now here’s how that’s different. Does she know the Sherpas I should use? Does she know the pilot that can fly me in? So who’s got the network, the connections that can help me get to my goal quicker? Here’s the third piece, the buddy.
AG (25:46):
And that is simply the accountability buddy. So again, I want to hit seven figures, so I’ve gotta sell a bunch or I want to climb ever. It doesn’t matter what the goal is. You should have an accountability buddy in there for your goals. The buddy doesn’t need to know anything about your goal. They could never have written a book in their life. But just by virtue of the fact that they text you every morning and ask what your word count was, I mean, I’ve done this before. I have a cousin that knew nothing about the goal that I was doing. She’d understand the intricacies, but I said, here’s the exact words you need to say to me. This was years ago. I said, this is the exact words you need to say to me. You can even set this up that it automatically gets text to me.
AG (26:22):
But by me just knowing I was gonna get that text from my cousin, I tended to perform. So when you’re looking at your goals, a lot of people will go, okay, I’m gonna research this. I’m, I’m gonna run my first marathon. So they’ll research a ton out of how to run a marathon. But if you simply hang out with a bunch of people that have run marathons before, it’s gonna shorten your path to success. If you talk to someone, how did they do it? Who do they know? Do they know? Any races come up? And so when you’re looking at your goals, guys,
RV (26:49):
It’s funny that you talk about this. ’cause I’m literally in Bible study with a bunch of marathon runners, Uhhuh. And I’m actively gonna end up running, trying to repel the idea. It’s not gonna work that I get, that I get recruited into running this. ’cause It’s like, it’s not gonna work. It’s so organically there’s such an organic draw to like, come do this. And I’m like, no. The answer is no. Resistance
AG (27:08):
Is futile. I Rory
RV (27:09):
Given , given I’m not gonna do this.
AG (27:12):
We’re gonna talk to Rory again in six months and he’s gonna tell us how many miles a week he’s doing It just, just, you can’t, you can’t, you gotta give in if, I mean, if you what was it Steve Harvey says, if nine of your friends are broke, you’ll be the 10th. I love that saying, but the truth is, the opposite is true as well. If nine of your friends are rich, you’re likely to be the 10th. Totally. I I, I worked with a guy who was part of a, a I’ll say a men’s group that was amazing. This was a few years back. And he ended up dropping out and I said, man, I thought you really liked that group. And he said, yeah, but he’s like, they were all really, really wealthy and it kind of made me uncomfortable, like their conversation, I didn’t feel like I belonged at that table.
AG (27:46):
And I said, and by you dropping out, you will never belong at that table. Hmm. If you can just withstand the discomfort that you, yourself feel, nobody else needs to feel it. But if you can just withstand the discomfort that you feel because you, you feel that they’re operating at a higher level, you’ll reach their level. This is the power of a network. This is the power of a social circle. Our mamas we’re right. Like we are who the, you know, the people we surround ourselves with, which is why Rory Vaden will become a runner.
RV (28:13):
No, you heard it here first. Not become a, I’ll change Bible studies before that happens. , you’ll get somewhere April, this is so powerful and so tactical. I really appreciate. Where do you want people to go if they want to connect up with you and follow you and stay connected?
AG (28:28):
Absolutely. So the best place is the april garcia.com. I’m the April Garcia on all the platforms as well. And I got a lot of free tools and free resources as well as the the Pivot Me podcast, the April Garcia Pivot Me podcast. I love what I do, I love who I do it with. And I’m happy to answer any questions about what we talked about here or any other topics on the podcast.
RV (28:48):
So cool, friend, well, we’re cheering you on. We’re, we’re so grateful for you and just believe in you more and more friend. I, I know the be the best is ahead for you. So thanks for making time for us and, and keep crushing it.
AG (29:00):
Absolutely. This was amazing. Well done. Thank you so much for having me on Rory. .