Lessons - Move Faster With A Mentor | Ryan Stewman - CEO of Hardcore Closer

The issue with people starting something is that when they actually do deliver value, they're still in their head. They think that they don't know what they're talking about. That imposter syndrome always creeps in, especially with entrepreneurs. So what would be the advice you'd give to somebody who's looking at everything you've built? They're like, fuck, that would be so cool, but like, I'm not ready yet. Or I don't know my industry or my category enough yet, but realistically, they may. So how do you know when it's the right time for you to start coaching, start building a community saying, I can be a leader of people. I can teach somebody how to do this better. When is that point when you want to actually take this stuff you learn in your career? And then you start turning it into a business? Well, first, like I said, I think, you know, if you're going to be a coach, you need to have some level of success. Obviously, I wasn't teaching, now I'm qualified to teach people how to do a billion in sales or a hundred million, build a hundred million dollar company. We've done that, right? Like, I have the ability to teach that, but in the, in the past, like I said, I started out somewhere, right? I wasn't having the conversation today, I had a conversation when the guys got $13 billion in assets under management, right? I wasn't able to have those conversations what I first got. So I'm going to have to fucking say, right? It's like, wow, you're rich, that have been all I've done pretty much known to say, you know? And, but the thing is, like, when I got, like I said, I got forced into all of this. But if you, let me just tell you two things, because I have this conversation a lot, because being a coach is kind of like being called to be a pastor or preacher or police officer or a teacher or a nurse. It's more of a, it needs to be more of a noble calling, like you would do the shit for free before you charge money for it. And here's why I say that because when you're coaching people, you got to realize you're dealing with problems, they, they hired you to be a problem solver for them. So you're going to hear people bitch, you're going to hear people complain, you're going to hear people that are struggling, you're going to have people that you tell a clear solution that's struggling that would stop their struggle, that are still going to choose the struggle despite the fact that you can help them and have helped them and are trying to fucking help them, right? Like this is, this is just, you have to be able to understand it. It's not just show up and get on a call and be like the cool guy and roll out like you see in the social media, highlight Reels, it's going to be people crying about divorce, people crying about not being paid fair and all it's like, it is not an easy job. You become their component, right? You become that police officer, that priest, that person that they can trust, right? And so if you're called to do it as like a nobility, here's what I would tell you, first you need to let somebody coach you, right? It doesn't mean you've got to go pay to join a mastermind or you've got to pay or any of that shit, but you need to find somebody who's a level up of you. Everybody in life needs to have someone poured into them, someone on their level and someone they're poured into. So before you can pour into somebody, you need to go get somebody poured into you, right? Just yet I have two mentors that I pay, one of them I pay $10,000 a month for 90 minutes of his time. The other one I pay $3,000 a month for 90 minutes of his time, maybe two hours a month of his time. Regardless, I have two people that I invest, you know, $13,000 a month in just to be able to have conversations with and because how am I going to pour into, and one of those guys has richer than me. The other one's not. One of them's a pastor and I pay for the pastor's time because I think that's important. One of them's a pastor, so he's leading me with wisdom, core value, spirituality, that kind of stuff. The other one's a multivillionaire who's teaching me how to exit my software company correctly for probably about the same. So, you know, but these are people that are pouring into me. Yesterday, my pastor and I were on the phone and we're on a Zoom and he gives me this template for core value stuff and I'm like, dude, I'm stealing this and he's like, take it. I'm like, dude, you just saved me a ton of time like coming up with this. You already have it. Yeah, I'm using your stuff and I'll put your name at the bottom of it and they can put a donation to the church if they want, you know, but so if you're called the coach, you'll know. But if you say, I think I can go and make a few bucks coaching, man, I wouldn't even waste your time because you're going to find the A, you're miserable and the clients are going to find that you're miserable because of it, you're going to deal with chargebacks and unhappy and it's going to be short live. The other thing, that's the first thing I told you I had to, the other thing is suppose you are called the coach, but you are a roofer and you're fucking busy, right? The wind keeps blowing these damn roofs apart and you're busy as hell and you're like, man, I want to coach people but like, how do I do it? First of all, have a, have a goal to coach people and what I mean by that is like, maybe you say, I'm going to coach people who want to be on my team. I'm going to go higher some people, get them to be roofer's with me and I'm going to mentor them. So you don't have to go out and charge and start a roofing coaching program. You can just say, hey, come work with me and I want to mentor and coach you as a part of being on my team. Then it's a winning situation because now you're coaching people that are making you money and it's a success cycle that you create there. So I would challenge you to have a back end like if you're an investment banker, it's like, okay, so maybe you could do some coaching and consulting with the end goal to get people to invest in whatever your projects are that you're raised and money for. So don't just think, you don't just have to think coaching on the front end is like, you know, where I'm going to make my money. You can coach people for free and do deals on the back end and get connections and build your own business and everything else. So you can think of it that way too. You don't have to go start a side. I love that. And that's a smart way to look at the top because I feel like what you mentioned where people jump into it and they don't understand the scope of what coaching is. And it leads to really shitty experiences. And it leads to negative stigmas from coaches who have like screwed over people or not delivered value. Like that's not what we're trying to do here. We're trying to get people that can actually and it does take a certain kind of person to pour into someone else. That's a great way of putting it. That's not it. It's not an easy thing to do, man. It takes away. It can give you energy, but can also drain your energy. So you got to like be prepared for that. But the other thing I wanted to I want to go into it just because like it's all over your brand. It's okay. But that's like the one sales lesson because I know that you know, you could talk about you could talk about negotiation. You could talk about doing discovery. You could talk about finding leads closing. What's the what's the strategy that you would teach over to somebody that's having trouble? Because I think that everybody can figure out the majority of the deal. But closing is always the hardest part. Actually, I would I would even say there's like two hard parts of closing either get get it. There's only two things you should ever be able to do if you're a salesperson. You get leads or you close, but if you can't do either, you're not going to be a very good salesperson. But the closing part is very, very fucking hard. So what are the strategies tips that you do to bring a deal all the way through? You know, it's it's it's funny because when I got started in this, that was all I knew with sales. I was a salesman for a mortgage company, you know, so I taught hard core closer. Closers are what mortgage guys are. They close mortgages, right? So that's where that came from. I'm this prison guy. It was a, you know, a closer or mortgages. So I'm like hard core closer, right? And that was what they called me at the office. It was like my nickname. So I read shirt in our line, you know, this is 2012, I think, what all that came, but that's what they had called me at the car dealership I worked at for a short period of time. They, you know, I'd always been that in the mortgage. It's like, oh, that's the hard core closure. It's just kind of a nickname that stuck and what I know about nickname is if you get a cool one, you know, because you can get a shitting one right after that and it sticks, you know? Now, our core closer, that's me from now on and going to earn them, right? So, um, but that was all I knew. But now that I've been doing this for so long, I couldn't even tell you the last time I actually closed the sale sale, like, like, to Ape, somebody asked me how much level one of APEX was the other day and I didn't know if it was $2,500 or $3,000, which is really weird because it's A, it's my company. But Drew B and Zach that are my sales guys, these guys do, you know, a couple of million dollars a month in sales and so I don't have to, you know, at one point, I was a social media manager for everything too and I've got Brittany, so I don't, I don't have to do that. So I say that because I still know a lot about sales, but I'm about to give you all the sales training you will ever need to pay for in about five minutes. But, but I'm not his hands on with that because is we make a progression from being employed to self-employed to the CEO of a company to ultimately selling or, or exiting or owning that company in a cash-loan forest, right? That's, there's never such thing as retirement, that's, that's what it is, it's an exit, not a retirement. Retirements when you don't have shit to do and your board of money stops coming in and you go crazy and you go start another job, exits where you're onto the next thing, right? So for, for me, I'm at the CEO level right now, but as a CEO, I've had to have a different sales conversation that I did as a salesperson and I can tell you, sales just breaks down to two things only, man, don't give a fuck what Grant or, or Jordan or any of those. I'm not shitting on them. I'm just saying, I don't have sales training to, to sell you and to stop selling sales training because when I figured these two things out and I'm fuck, I'm like, well, I can't literally sell that to anybody that's cheating, right? So it comes down to two things. Number one is empathy and listen, don't go all Gary Vee saying that shit on me. I've been saying it longer than him, but here's the things like empathy is, I like it. I like messing with him because that's his thing, empathy, why it should say every time I say that, I feel like I got to make sure that it's different, right? So, but empathy just means that you listen. So if you're in sales, we are taught that we need to be talkers, you got to have the gift of gab, you got to have the blah, blah, blah, it's not true. He who speaks the least earns the most. If you're in the sales conversation and you use the least amount of words, chances are they're going to buy from you because that person's talking to you because they're looking for a solution and they want you to know that the problem, they want you to clearly understand the problem, so they are articulating it to you. So how do you get empathy, to empathy means for you, for them to know that you understand their problem. So you get empathy by listening, you get to listen by what asking questions. So that's the key, talk less and ask questions because like you could call me as a loan officer and I know the second that you get on the phone, the premise you need leads for realtors, that's what the fuck you called me for, right? But I can't just go, well you need to buy my product because I already know your problem, I got to let you tell me that it all started in the fifth grade when Jenny kissed you and then ran off and kissed another boy right after and it ruined the way that you thought of life. And like I got to hear your whole life story so that you know I understand, everybody thinks we're unique, we're not, we're all the same. We just have a different story to arrive at the same place, right? And so but you got to hear that story so they think, right? That's how you create empathy. Once they understand, you understand all your missing confidence and confidence works like this product knowledge. If you know your product inside and out and you are confident that it can solve their problem because they know that you listen to them. When you pair empathy and confidence together, we can't help but buy from you because you know their problem and you are 100% confident that you can solve it for them only a fool wouldn't want to move forward at that point. But so many people never get to that because they're too busy talking instead of listening to where the customer feels, see we live in the field's economy, my fuckers need to feel like they're listening to. They need to feel like somebody cares about them because everybody's swiping on social media, everybody's talking over everybody, everybody's interrupting people and trolling each other on the internet and shit like that. So when you actually have the benefit of having a physical human conversation with somebody whether on the phone or FaceTime or in person, the whole empathy confidence thing just changes it. You know what I mean? It's like, hey, this person's listening to you. I love it, dude. That should be funny. Nobody listens to you. That's damn good advice. It's so simple.