Episode 77 – George DiGianni

George: Before I was hired to get on the radio, I went through 13 weeks of speech therapy. Most people don’t know that. I learned to open my mouth and speak clearly. When you want to impress a specific message on someone, the length of your discussion matters. For a 40-minute talk, you’ll want to revisit that one thing about 20 times. People only remember 10 percent of what you share with them.

Brandon: Welcome back to The Blueprint. Today I have George DiGianni with me. He’s an entrepreneur, author, and honestly, he knows everything. If you can do me a favor, hit the subscribe button so I can get more people on here to tell their stories and hopefully inspire you for future endeavors.

George: I came here from New Jersey 35 years ago. I’m that guy in the bubble. I drive frequently, but not far. When you’re from New Jersey, anywhere you go for 20 minutes, you’re out of the state. You could be in Manhattan within 7 or 8 minutes.

Brandon: Native Texans say it’s a long way away and mean 3 or 4 hours.

George: Right. I’m thinking you’re going to San Antonio. That shows I’m not from here.

Moving here from New Jersey, I used to talk like an idiot. I hated that with a passion. I was hypersensitive to how my friends spoke. I never said “dude” in my life, and it really bothered me. When I moved here, of course I started saying it. Before I got on the radio, I went through 13 weeks of speech therapy to learn how to open my mouth and speak this way.

In New Jersey and New York, we process so fast when we speak that if you’re not speaking fast enough, we interrupt you. It’s rude. It took me a while to recognize how I was turning people away by how I speak and by not listening actively.

Brandon: I think accents are an integral part of who you are as a human. I remember going through a similar journey. I’m from 40 or 45 minutes outside of Dallas, in Greenville, Texas. Five generations there, my grandfather and parents gave me this accent. When I went to work at top agencies in Dallas, people kept saying I was a country bumpkin and expected me to be dumb just because of my accent. I tried to tailor that for about six months to a year, and then I became embarrassed of myself. I realized you got this from your family. You own this. It’s your heritage.

George: People expect you to be dumb. When you’re from New Jersey and speaking fast, using certain words because you speak over yourself, people tend to think you’re trying to get over on them or don’t have integrity. While some people think Southerners are unintelligent, that’s stupid. It’s just an accent. It doesn’t mean somebody’s trying to screw you over.

The person and situation matter. When you interact with people and get to know them, you learn about their integrity and values. There’s a study that says people who write really fast with terrible handwriting are actually more intelligent than people who don’t. I can’t read my own writing. I’m left-handed, which makes it worse. I grew up writing in cursive, so that makes it even more challenging.

George: People who speak really fast are usually insecure. Here’s a great lesson for anyone in sales, even if you own your own company. You’re in sales. You introduce yourself and what you do, talk about your company, and brag about your team. When someone has confidence about who they are, when they own their accent and their family’s generations, they speak slower and with more confidence. They pause. The power of the pause. If you get on the phone and say “Hey, how are you today? My name is Andrew,” you’re out. I’m hanging up on you. You don’t know yourself. You’re not confident in yourself or your product or service.

If you’re in sales, never apologize for someone or thank them for taking time to talk with you. Don’t say you’re sorry to bother them. You’re not sorry. You’re intending to connect with them because you have value to provide. But you must have already qualified that prospect as someone who can benefit from what you have. If you’re just dialing for dollars, you’re a pain in the ass.

Brandon: Sometimes I have to reel myself back because I’m so excited to tell somebody about what we can do. We do things a little differently than other people. When they start to see it, I can become ramped up. I’ve had to coach myself on this for a long time. Hey man, stay calm, stay peaceful. Let people understand and stay at a certain pace. If you start to ramp it up, they no longer listen to your words. They listen to your cadence.

George: Your passion is infectious. I would not pull it down. You do want to make sure you’re doing a give and take, though. And third, when you want to impress upon someone a specific message, you want to mention that one thing 3 to 10 or even 20 times depending on the length of your discussion. For a 40-minute talk, you’ll want to revisit that thing about 20 times. That’s roughly once every two minutes. People only remember 10 percent of what you share with them. And that’s 10 percent total. You have to make sure it’s the right message.

Brandon: Once every two minutes.

George: It’s a real skill. I didn’t even do this when I was on the radio for 20 years. I had great speaking skills, but I’ve done tons of keynotes now for corporations. I speak about leadership development, talent management, and sales evolution. I also have my goal compression program where I help compress your 10-year goals into 4 years. First, we identify those 10-year goals. Then I sit with you and your team with my training manuals and we compress those goals down to 4 years. It takes time because it gets really uncomfortable. Do you have a team that’s talented that you like? Can your team take you to those 10-year goals or will they hold you back?

Brandon: That’s interesting because you’ve built this team, you’ve built emotional bonds with these people, and next thing you know, you’re like, can this person level up to this position I need or do they need to stay where they’re at? Can I put someone over the top of them, or do I need to move you somewhere else?

George: You may not know at this point that they will be holding you back. And second, you’re just as dynamic as a founder as the lowest level employee. You did the work. You were in the game. The more conversations you can have with your team to let them know you’re real and evolving, the better. Let me give you a case study. I graduated from Harvard Business School in 2015. There was a business with a top sales performer killing it at about 4 million a year ahead of the person in second place. For three years in a row. He didn’t fit the culture. He was an AI guy, not a team player. He said let me do it my way and I’ll kill it for you. And he did.

His superior, the Chief Sales Officer, was leaving. There’s an opening. The person in second place was about 4 million behind. She was killing it. A female team player. Everybody loved her. Great fit for the culture. So here’s the question. Do you promote the number one guy who’s been killing it for three years in a row and maybe adversely affect your culture? Or do you bypass him by putting number two as his boss and risk losing him?

Brandon: If you don’t put number two in the first spot, you risk losing your entire company. That’s worse than losing the number one guy. Look at the stats. You have to coach him. Hey man, you’re killing it. You’re doing great. But I don’t know if my number one can switch over if he’s not a team guy. Succeeding companies are all about culture and the environment people live in. I tell everybody all the time. You see people more than they see their own family. If we can’t get along, it ain’t gonna work. If you’re not going to be able to get along with people and learn to work together, I don’t have time for you. I don’t care how talented you are. That’s a short run. All you’re going to do is cause a cancer in the office and spread it. For me, I’m taking number two and putting them at the top. I’m going to have a conversation with number one and say hey man, you’re killing it. I’m still paying you. I’ll deal with that on some other scale. But I don’t want that for you either.

George: The company did exactly that and risked losing the number one guy. And he left. But here’s what you said. The number one guy doesn’t make the company. He doesn’t make the entire team. If you have one person you’re relying on, you have the wrong company, the wrong attitude, the wrong culture. There’s no right or wrong answer when you’re looking at case studies. Whatever the outcome is, is what will be meaning. If they chose to go with the number one guy and it worked out, or if he went to therapy and became a team player, that could have worked. But that’s not the path they chose.

The biggest challenge companies have is talent management, development, and attrition. What often happens is a company doesn’t know it yet, but they’re about to talk about a company. I don’t want to mention it on air because I know the guy who started it. He’s either a billionaire or close to it now. He moved here from New York years ago. He’s a restaurateur. Everybody listening to this would know his restaurants if you live in America. He started a deli that mimics the New York New Jersey vibe. I would go every single day for years. Nothing changed in there. It was the same exact food but massive. So many things to choose from every day.

When you walk into a New York or New Jersey restaurant, a real one off type place, what happens?

Brandon: You get a greeting and there’s generally a little line to the side. You walk through and it’s very personable. You find your own seat.

George: Tell me, expand upon personable.

Brandon: It feels like I’m getting something authentic. Like I’m getting something original from just that location. Like a special recipe or whatever. Mom and dad are back there making it as opposed to some big reader place.

George: How did you feel when you walked in and spoke to those people? Was the owner talking to you?

Brandon: Sometimes. They made me feel like family.

George: That deli made me feel that way too. Because the people he put in place were from back east. Pennsylvania, New York, Connecticut, New Jersey, whatever. I was in there so much, twice a week, sometimes three times a week, that I would walk out with bags of food for free. Naturally. And this is real important for any company that wants to grow beyond their current space.

Naturally, he would take his top people and they would go open other locations. Right now those top people aren’t there anymore. I don’t feel like family anymore because the people that replace them weren’t of the same mentality. Years go by and I stopped going as frequently because I didn’t feel like family anymore. I really miss that. I said something to my friend and he got pissed. I know he’s a low self-monitor. He wants to do it his way. That’s the end of it. He’s been very successful. Who am I? Shut up. But I’m somebody important that recognizes the family vibe is gone.

Brandon: 100 percent. It’s the person at the top every single time. You’re responsible for the way people talk to people. We have conversations in our office all the time about how to talk to different clients. This is a white glove client. This client doesn’t really need a lot from us. Here’s how we go through the meetings. After we get through with the meeting, what did you guys think? We recap it. It’s up to us to germinate that same thing onto the people that work with us so they can understand the feel. At the end of the day, it’s always your fault.

George: You’re 100 percent correct. As companies grow, they tend to lose their messaging. People within the company don’t know what the mission is or the vision. If a company hasn’t first identified their core values, then you’re in trouble. Core values are non-negotiables, must-haves. When I taught at SMU Cox Business School, I would say it’s imperative that you identify your core values and make them your Constitution. You hire by them and you fire by them.

George: Would you say culture is an input or an output?

Brandon: I think it’s an input that causes an output. The number one thing I look for when interviewing people is whether they sit with us. If that culture is divided, the vibe doesn’t work. The movement from one job to the next gets stuck and causes logjams.

George: You’re validating what I’m saying. Based on your non-negotiables, how you hire, that’s the input. The output is your culture. But you could never tell a culture to act this way or that way. It starts with how you hire. If you haven’t identified your core values and hired based on those core values, making sure the potential employee aligns with your company’s mission, you’re setting yourself up for failure. The 90-day lag comes in. Complacency sets in. Even in personal relationships, at 90 days people settle into whatever they’re going to be. They default. They’re not trying to impress anymore. They’re part of that culture now. You’re reactive.

I have a fantastic story about leadership not listening to subordinates. My friend Elden and his brother moved here from Croatia with 5 dollars each in their pocket. That’s all their father could give them. They did one of the lowest level jobs, drying off cars at a car wash. After a year, they went to work for a convenience store. From there they went to a truck brokerage company. They were brokers arranging transport from one place to another. They did really well. Saved up some money.

Getting out over your skis as a manager is difficult when you have a low IQ and you’re using your position to talk over people, be dominant, be forceful. You demand respect instead of commanding it. Elden and his brother told one of their direct reports you’re missing a big opportunity in truck brokering for something specific. The direct report wasn’t listened to because they were low on the totem pole. Just pound the phones. A short time later, they told management again. You’re missing this great opportunity. Of course, that direct report never escalated the conversation to the next level. It was already a very good sized company.

So my friend and his brother max out their credit cards for 18 thousand dollars each and buy one truck. By the time we were in Harvard Business School in 2013, his company was worth 400 million dollars. Come forward to Covid and his company skyrockets to 1.4 billion. Why? Because the niche was simply focused on brokering trucks only for medical supplies to hospitals and other medical places.

Brandon: So he had that locked up before it even got there, right? I mean, do you think that was luck?

George: I don’t know if it’s luck. They recognized what was missing in the market. They had trouble getting their trucks there and getting over the competition. I don’t know about the luck as much as going back to being a low self-monitor. The person at the top didn’t tell the boss. So the more diluted a company becomes as you grow, the harder it is to govern your employees and make sure you’re getting the right talent.

If you don’t have your messaging in place and telling your people what your messaging is constantly, this is who we are, this is our message, this is what we stand for, here are our values, it should be plastered all over the place. As you grow, if it gets diluted, it’s your fault. Your C-level folks need to be aware of it. Your mid-level managers need to be aware of it. Lower level managers need to be aware of it. In all meetings. If your hiring manager or HR manager isn’t hiring based on your core values, mission, and vision of the company, that person needs to be let go. But why wasn’t that communicated in the first place? Sometimes that hiring manager has a political agenda and wants to hire someone who aligns with their political views. Now you’re really screwed, especially in this day and age.

The bigger you become, the more problems there are in a business. Sometimes it’s worth being a small business making a couple million dollars a year.

Brandon: You know, it’s funny because I have a lot of buddies. I waited a long time to start my own thing. I built up other companies along the way and waited a long time to start my own. I’ve talked to a lot of guys who are 10 years ahead of me. We’ve grown pretty rapidly since we took off. I ask, I have some big opportunities coming up. When is the time for the leap? Should I take that, should I not? How do you know? Is there a mathematical equation to it? Without question, most of the guys who have done really well for themselves say run and stay small as long as you can. Because here’s what’s going to happen. You don’t want to get out over your skis.

George: I don’t agree with that.

Brandon: Tell me.

George: You can get out over your skis. I have confidence in you that you can get out over your skis. But what does getting out over your skis look like? If that’s not qualified, then that’s a different story. Getting out over your skis is that you can’t govern your people and hire properly. But I think listening to you now that you can.

Brandon: I believe in this thing. It’s going to go. It’s absolutely going the right way. I’m super excited about it. No qualms. Not a dream. I think about it every night. It’s part of it. I’m excited. But you want to make sure this isn’t a bubble. You want to make sure you’re not making a long-term decision based on a six-month bubble. And then the second part they came back with was the most you’re going to enjoy this job is the stage you’re at right now. You really are in everything. You’re touching this. You’re making this go this direction. You have so much in it. It was so much fun when we were all at that level. Then you crossed the threshold where the fun isn’t as much there anymore. You’ve put all these things in place and it kind of runs. You start dealing with insurances, taxes. You take a different role and you’re not in the throes of it anymore. Stay as small as you can for as long as you can for a couple of reasons. I struggle with that because I’m passionate about what I do and believe in what we’re doing. Am I holding it back or am I giving it the opportunity to breathe?

George: I would say you being a high self-monitor, which means you have a high IQ and are on point with the things we talked about today, asking case studies, you can grow. Second, if you eat, sleep and drink this like you said you do, think about it every night, whatever you think about, you bring about. It’s going to happen. Your awareness of what your team needs to look like. I met your team. Great guys. They’re all focused. They have this pride that I want to mention.

There’s a clip about Optimus on Twitter X. Elon’s posted it, several other people have posted it. It’s two minutes long. All it is is interviewing the people at Optimus. If you’re a business owner and you don’t go right now and find this video of how these people speak about their role and the company and its future, then you don’t want to grow. You’re afraid to grow. You’re afraid to make changes.

When an employee leaves your company, I don’t care if you’re HVAC or in tech, when they leave your company, they go out drinking with their friends. They meet somebody new and the person asks what they do for a living. I work for a marketing firm. So what do you do? You’re done. You’ve lost it. They have no pride in your company. None. But when you watch this video of the employees at Optimus speaking about their job, the vision of the company and its potential, there’s this pride you want all your employees to have. Why? Number one, they’re marketing you. Number two, they have confidence. Number three, they believe in the mission and vision of your company. They like the leadership. Your attrition will drop dramatically. They want to stay there.

The stats came out about five years ago. The longest an employee stays at one job is an average of three years. Both Google and Apple held the record for those three years. When you’re at Google and Apple, you have all these fun things in pods, you can sleep, and the culture is great. Tony Hsieh from Zappos said culture comes first. Not the customer. He even had a condition when Amazon was acquiring them. He said I’ll only do this under one condition. You don’t change my culture. He believed in his employees. Our culture is first. That’s an argument you can go back and forth with depending on the company. But when you take care of your employees and they have that pride, they’re going to take care of your company. You could take a day or a week off and it’s going to run fine instead of having employee issues. Your employees make you or break you. But it’s all your fault, manager and owner.

George: If you’re not taking the foundational moves I mentioned earlier, it’s not that George DiGianni came up with these. I know it’s worked in my businesses. I’ve looked at all the case studies I possibly could. I teach this stuff. I work with my consulting and coaching, and I do keynote speaking. I go in and help teams and it gets really uncomfortable in there. I have an alpha personality. I have to try to tone it down. But we go through exercises and do role playing. I want you to fail so badly while you’re with me as many times as possible so that when you go out into the real world, failure isn’t failure. I’ve already gone through all these objections and scenarios with me.

Every single time I’ve invested in an idea of a company, greatest thing since sliced bread, I’ve lost money. Every single time I’ve invested in a team that’s either exited together or worked together before with great culture, I’ve made money.

Brandon: I agree with that. And here’s one thing I want to make sure I’m asking you correctly. You said I work with these people and we go through hard times. Do you think someone can be taught to be culture based? Or do you think people need to be selected based upon how they fit that hole?

George: That’s two questions with two answers. One, culture is the output. If your hiring managers didn’t do a good job, then that’s the culture you’re faced with. Are you going to fire those people because now your company is really in trouble until you can hire new people? People that have a presence about them to maybe affect the culture where they want to follow the leader. Then we could talk about traits of a leader.

As far as teaching people, there’s three answers. If someone is a low self-monitor where I say it gets uncomfortable, when I ask uncomfortable questions or role play and somebody becomes defensive, that’s not my fault. It’s theirs because they know there’s truth in it. They’re afraid to change. That’s a low self-monitor. What I present isn’t a novel idea. It’s what works.

A great book called Good to Great is amazing. Companies that were worth a billion or billions of dollars were considered good. The great companies that scaled way above them. You and I would think you have a great company. But how do you become really great? And my third one is I talked about this on my radio show years ago. Doctor Carol Dweck is a Stanford professor. She wrote a book called Mindset. If you’re a high level manager, owner, or startup listening to this, get the book Mindset.

She took kids, I think they were nine years old, and identified the ones that had a fixed mindset versus a growth mindset. The ones in a fixed mindset don’t like change. That’s the change? No. They became defensive. It was hard for them to get out of their way of thinking. They didn’t think they could learn more. They didn’t want to learn more. They were low self-monitors.

The good news is regardless of your age, you can have a growth mindset. The challenge is being aware of it. Someone has to make you aware of it. In today’s society, the larger the corporation, the harder it is for people to have an uncomfortable talk. They’re afraid to get sued. That’s why it’s good to stay small also, depending on how you hired.

You have to become aware of it. Someone has to communicate that to you. Once you’re aware of it, what do you do with it? Now you can grow. If someone says yeah, I didn’t do as great of a job as I could, I’d like to do better. Get me the tools, show me how to do that. I want to be a better leader so I can get to my next level. Then you’ve got somebody you can really work with. They’re an asset to the company.

Do you know the top two reasons people leave companies?

Brandon: I guess relationship probably and then growth.

George: Growth is one, which means they stop learning. There’s no more stimulation. That’s one. The second one is something you already do but you’re not aware of it. So I want to try to pull it out of you. I know you value your guys. What do you do with your guys when you have a project?

Brandon: We have a sit down conversation with everything. We walk through where it is and I want to get their input too. I’m one.

George: It’s asking for their input. People who don’t continue to learn and don’t feel valued, there’s no collaboration. Go back to my friend Elden with the company that’s now 1.4 billion from coming here with 5 dollars in his pocket. All because a low-level manager with an attitude didn’t want to take them seriously and apply change. I’ll bet to this day that company doesn’t even know about Elden and his brother’s success. They surely don’t know there was a complaint or suggestion to work with that other niche.

Brandon: I mean, if you think about it, and first off, I really love the collaboration part of it because I mean, that’s what we’re all doing this for every day. Look, I can make a pretty ad or whatever, but there’s no heart behind it. Who wants to do it? And if you’re doing something, you’re signing up to do it with people every day. You have to have heart behind it. So you got to think, not only do I love it, does my guy that sits next to me. I expect him to be there with me not one year, and not 3 years. If someone’s going to be there 3 years, that’s crazy to me. I’m looking for people that are there 10, 15 years. That’s what I’m building. Foundational people.

My last place I was at, I was there 13 years. The lowest tenured person I had was 5 years. Everyone stayed. It’s because of the way we built the culture. I want people that ask what are your goals? What can I be better at as a manager? How can I take us to the next level? And what do you see that we’re missing? Especially the younger guys coming up directly from technology. They’re coming in it. They’re breathing it. You want to have that coal that’s in the fire. It’s the hottest.

George: You’re asking the right questions. That shows once again you’re a highly self-monitor. People who are narcissists have high ego issues. They don’t want to admit they’re wrong, show vulnerability, or have trouble asking others for their input, especially people who aren’t at their level. If somebody is new, they feel threatened that person will take their job in the future. As far as I’m concerned, you want that person to touch your job so you can go higher because you did a good job helping them grow. You’re grooming them.

Brandon: But don’t you? I mean, even better than that, I take such pride in seeing my guys go get their first car, my guys go get their home, my guys go get the dream thing they wanted. And as a seed of this company was able to help supply that. I love that. It is my job to make sure I’m saying a couple of things. One, are you happy with your family? Is things going well? Am I doing everything I can to support that? Two, are you getting everything that you’ve ever dreamed of? And then what do you want to do to fulfill the passion that you have for your job?

Look, man, I can’t give you your passion. Every job isn’t always going to be what you want. But if we’re talking about 10 things on the list, two had better be focused towards your passion. Because I understand that 80 percent of stuff that comes through is just not always going to be what you want. But I need to give you time to focus on those other two. Let’s hurry up and get through these. Let’s systematically make sure we can get these buttoned up, done right out the door. So now we can spread this out a little bit longer and let you live in your passion as long as possible.

George: Let me give you the four things that have made me successful. Adversity, fear, introspection, and passion. If one of those were missing, I would not have enjoyed the success I’ve had. Adversity and being introspective about that adversity. Did I cause something? Where did it come from? How can I make it better? There’s the growth mindset. Fear. At one point I had 500 dollars left to my name. I was 23 years old. Didn’t know where my next meal was coming from. And passion for my industry. I wound up being the best I could in my industry because of that fear. I’ve dealt with more adversity along the way.

My friend, a billionaire in the big oil business, said George, people think when you get to my level that you don’t have challenges. You have more. I have more challenges than most people can shake a stick at. Since I know that and that they’re going to come, I have to just recognize that I’m going to have these challenges and find out how I’m going to work through them. If I think that I’m not going to have challenges at this level, no matter how many assistants I have working for me, then life will be much harder. It’s easier to accept life knowing that regardless of what you see, the glitz and glamor in social media, TV, and your friends’ lives, life is going to kick you in the ass if you’re not aware that’s going to happen to you.

Brandon: I love that input from your perspective. When people start to grow significantly, I think they get further away from their employees. There’s a bigger gap between the top and the bottom. A lot of the time, people are comfortable being the guy in the sky. But I’ve seen a lot of successful companies where the guy in the sky is down talking to the people on the bottom floor.

George: We all know who that is. The entire world knows him. Who is he? The richest man in the world.

Brandon: Elon Musk?

George: Elon Musk. I don’t know if he knows every single one of his employees and gets down and dirty with them like you do with your employees. Every one of them. Because he wants to ask questions. Is this the best way to do this? Can we do a better way? What haven’t we considered yet? All the ones at Optimus. When you watch that video that he talks to them, he interacts with all of them. So the bigger you are, the more you want to talk with those employees.

He said yes, this is just destiny. Elden and his brother were meant to do this. But had the person at the top of that company talked to all the employees, especially the lowest level ones that are just pounding phones, to find out what their objections are, what they could do better, do some role play, whatever it takes, then maybe Elden and his brother would have stayed there. Maybe they would have been a high level manager by now, making good money, but not great money.

Brandon: You get to the point where you start to watch these guys as they start to spread out. They start to put things in play like hey, let’s just get them some training or let’s get something that’s a PowerPoint document that can walk them through how to do X, Y, Z. But I think what I’m getting at is people lose that personal touch between each other. That personal touch is really the difference between a successful growing company and a stagnant, sterile company that is dollar generated. If you have something that’s rinse and repeat, cool. Let’s go ahead and have whatever you want and make it as easy as you want to make it. But if you want to have something that’s thriving and cutting edge, and you want to have people bringing ideas to the table, you have to cultivate that. You have to make sure you stay connected all the way through. Am I thinking about this the wrong way?

George: No. And regardless of the level you are in the company, the higher you are, the more you should be talking to every single person. The lowest person who pushes the broom. Talk to them. What are they seeing at that level that you’re not aware of? Maybe they overheard something and now they like the boss because the boss came down and talked to them. They respect the boss. Hey, boss, I heard this from someone you probably wouldn’t know any other way. I think you should know this. Cool. That’s the level of introspection, awareness, and growth mindset.

Brandon: Connectivity.

George: Yeah. I know of a guy who all he does is drive an SUV. I don’t want to say where, but he brings people to a certain retail space in Dallas. High end. He’ll pick them up at their home within two miles of the surrounding places. Drop them off if they’re drunk at night from restaurants, whatever. Most people dismiss someone like that, talking about accents earlier, at his level as being unintelligent. Yeah. The guy’s an engineer. He didn’t do anything with it. Yeah. But if you’re an engineer, you’re pretty freaking intelligent.

Any time I’ve taken an Uber or Lyft, I always ask what did you do before this? Are you doing this with something else? Do you enjoy your job? What were they like? As if I’m their boss, but I’m just inquisitive. I love to learn about people. What makes them tick? Why did you choose this?

Brandon: It’s crazy because early on in my career, I worked for a minister named Tony Evans in Dallas. He would have a conference every year and have us help pick up some VIPs from the airport. I was working in his graphics marketing department. They didn’t know me from nothing. But some people that would come in and sit in the car with me, we would have great conversations. It was so locked in. When I’d get to the destination, we’d park and we talked for another 15 or 20 minutes. It was really cool. Some of them would send me signed books. Great meeting you. And it was really cool that you first off always give respect to the person that is in that role. You could have been somebody’s son or somebody. And you weren’t putting out whatever. You could have been a nobody like at the end of the day. But you always treat people with equal respect because it’s about the value of what they bring at the moment. And what can you learn from that?

I listen to these guys as much as possible on what their journey was and what they brought to the table. How they got to where they were at. They were just as excited about me being at the beginning of the birth of what I was doing and what dreams I have. Where do I go with this? It was really cool because that made me always able to connect with CEOs and owners of companies. I’ve never had a problem sitting down and talking to somebody at any level. The ones that helped me along that journey and my upbringing from my family. You know better than anybody else, nobody’s better than you. They put your pants on one leg just like you do. Treat yourself with as much respect as you’re going to treat somebody else. Always ask honest questions. Always try to grow out of those situations.

George: Just stay on my phone and not say anything to you other than hi and bye. Go back two decades. When I was young, I had a little bullying in high school. Not a lot, but it made me get heavily into martial arts, working out, weights. I always had to be the biggest, baddest guy in the gym or dojo. The karate school. I’ve lost about 40 pounds so you never saw me when I was a big meat head. But that was all ego driven. So I modeled, I did martial arts, bodybuilding type stuff. It was all about the outer protective shell. It was not introspective. George was this protective shell, right. The fear, the lack of vulnerability.

I’m sharing that with you because it’s important to get to know someone before judging them. However, our amygdala kicks in. When we see certain mannerisms of a person, it makes us either feel defensive or invited. The way I acted then, people became defensive toward me because I was this big meat head and like a wild, wild West guy. But they didn’t know my heart.

Epictetus said something important. When you view a statue, you can then go tell people you saw it. When you know my mind and allow me to know yours, is when you can then go tell people you met me. It’s quite deep. When you get in an Uber, you see somebody with dreadlocks or whatever and you’ve already surmised your opinion of them without getting to know them and why they’re doing that. Maybe they were homeless and now they’ve got a freaking job. They’re killing it.

When I went to therapy, one of the worst things you can do is go to therapy. One of the best things you can do is go to therapy. I went to therapy at age 28. I didn’t have any friends. I had a lot of acquaintances. It was my fault. The culture I grew up in, where we come from in New Jersey and New York, is always bonding at your expense. Brandon, would you comb your hair with a firecracker today? And then we laugh at your expense. I loathe that, but I became that and didn’t realize that crap doesn’t work outside of Pennsylvania, New York, and New Jersey.

So I go to therapy for three years, age 28 to 31, once a week every single week. Didn’t miss a week. Then I became aware. If you don’t know you’re a jerk, now you know you’re a jerk. Even if you don’t intend to be. Because I have this munificent heart I’ve always had since sixth grade. I only remember this because of reading my yearbook. It said from a Spanish girl. George. Sandra. George, thank you for helping me learn English. I don’t remember that. But I remember what she wrote. Ever since then, I’ve always been the guy to jump forward ahead to help people whenever I could.

But if I don’t give off those vibes with how I stand, how I work out, what I’m wearing, then you already want to stay away from me. When I was a big meat head years ago working out in the gym, I would be covered up in big shirts. Didn’t like showing myself unless I was working out. But when I was training I would cover up. That really helped launch my career when I shifted my mindset and got into the growth mindset. I realized what people saw wasn’t what I wanted to represent. That’s not my brand. But it wound up being my brand. I gotta shift this.

So I wrote my first book in 1999, which was number 11 on Amazon’s health. I started radio in 1998 and took that to 2018. All of that shifted because I took responsibility and shifted. I recognized that I don’t want to be that person, that culture I grew up in.

The big disconnect with all of that is going back home and listening to how people speak and having a conversation with them. It’s completely different. They don’t get it. They think I’ve gone off the rails. But only people who are low self-monitors, with a fixed mindset and victimhood mindset, think that people like us are way out there, wrong, whatever their words are to describe us.

I’ve come a long way and I have all of this knowledge, experience, and success. These tools I have can really help somebody grow. When I do keynote speaking in front of large audiences, I get a lot of interaction from people and they can relate. Then I hope that turns into consulting clients.

Whether somebody is a founder, a startup, or mid-level of a 100-million-dollar company or higher, they’re all often missing what started the company because of its dilution and fear of not hiring the appropriate person. If you have 10-year goals you want to compress to within 4 years, I can help you do it. But I can’t do it for you. Because if something becomes uncomfortable for the decision makers, then that might be an impediment to bringing those goals from 10 years to 4 years.

Brandon: Do you think 10-year goals are where people need to shoot for? And what is the benefit of compressing? Is it rapid growth and is rapid growth the best? I’m trying to put my mind around that. Coming back to some conversations of stay small longer or whatever versus growth. I think there’s some really good anecdotes you’re throwing in there. Like hey, I can ramp this up or speed this. Or am I giving you a concentrate of things that you need to be focused on?

George: Your first question is the thing we need to look at. There is no need for that vocabulary. It’s whatever. I just give that as a reference because that’s what I teach when I teach C-level leaders. Whether it’s teaching leadership development or helping them bring their 10-year goals within 4 years, people often have 10-year goals. That’s a lie. The people who are setting big goals have 10-year goals. You want to work with people where they are.

What makes me say I want to bring them to 4 years or for the ones that want to scale, we’re having a massive concern with AI right now. How is it going to take jobs? How do you pivot before you need to pivot? Because if you’re reactionary and you pivot, then you might be in a lot of trouble. All the more reason for hiring properly now.

Brandon: Like how soon do you see this thing coming? This AI switch?

George: It’s already come. People are aware. I think by 2033 or 2034, Amazon will have no employees. Everything will be robotic and AI driven in their warehouses. So then where do those people find jobs?

Brandon: Yeah.

George: Elon put out this really bold statement. In the next 5 to 7 years, there will be so many robots and AI that people won’t need to work. That doesn’t register for me because if you go to a fast food place and something currently costs 3 dollars and now due to AI it only costs a quarter, you don’t have a job anymore, right? That quarter is no different than 3 dollars or 300 dollars. So I’m a little lost. I don’t know how to follow him on that. I’m not saying he’s wrong. I’m lost. I just don’t get it because he can see into the future with that.

I think it’s real important for some of these companies, depending on how much they will be affected by AI, to hire the very, very best consultant with AI. Maybe somebody connected to a chip company. Have them come in and do an assessment of your business. Identify some potentials over the next one, three, and five years of how your business can or will be affected.

Brandon: So if everything is going the way that you’re saying with AI, the value of certain things go down. The investment at that level is no longer in technology. The investment is no longer in service. The investment then becomes in data crunching and resources, power, like electricity. Things that fuel those other things that are about to explode in multiplicity, right?

George: Yeah.

Brandon: So the investment model at that point becomes different.

George: But how does the person who maybe doesn’t have a high enough IQ or is older and is not very healthy, therefore their mind isn’t processing as fast. You can have an IQ of 115 in your 20s, but if you’re not stimulating yourself anymore, it can decrease. You can’t increase your IQ above whatever your IQ is, but it can decrease. How do those people get another job within the areas you’re saying?

This is why having plumbing, electricity, HVAC, waitstaff, all will thrive and are thriving now. I can’t tell you how many private equity firms are gobbling up HVAC, plumbing, electric. Calling people who are not ready to sell their business. You love your business. You want to do this for a while. Somebody calls you and says hey, Brandon, I’ll give you 7 million for your business. Well, 7 million or even 10 million is nothing after taxes. Then what? What do I want to be when I grow up?

Here’s one of my things. I always ask the leader or decision makers. If you were to exit your company today, what would you do if you started another company that would compete with your current company? It’s not an easy question. But it’s an easy question. A lot of people don’t want to face whatever that is. I often get pushback. Well, George, if I did that, I wouldn’t be able to do these things today. I would be in a lawsuit if I let people go. You hear all the excuses right away. But what I want to hear is what would you do. Then how do we make a plan around what you would do to compete with your own company? But really, for the current company that exists.

Brandon: I really love that. I see that as there’s a couple of things when I start talking about where the company goes. Part of it is knocking yourself off a little bit. Like what would I do if I was somebody doing the same thing? Do I have a non-compete in that situation? If I have a non-compete and I’m taking it a completely different direction, am I doing things to make my company better? I would have to ask myself that question. But I’m really excited because some of those things that I talk quite often to my team about, because this is the thing we’re doing next, we are really good at what’s happening right now. See this thing? It’s out there. It’s going to happen. It’s coming. We are on it and it is coming next. So let’s get really polished at these things. Let’s set everything up so we can run and do the things we need to do. But this thing that’s coming, I am going to conquer this. We are going to set some models up. I believe in this thing wholeheartedly. So those are the goals that I start to put into. I wonder now if as you say that, like how fast do we put those things in action before we wait for the other things to solidify?

George: I wonder if any of those goals would be adversely affected by AI.

Brandon: I know they are.

George: They are. Yeah, okay. Well, the reason I’m saying that, if someone else were to say this and they had nothing to do with AI, and someone would say we have 7 goals and 3 would be affected by AI, I’d say implement the ones right now that would be affected by AI. Make money on them. Grow them. Be first to market. So you know this. You’re going to get the answer because you’re a marketing guy. But you have to blow your nose with your reach for tissues, right? Most people would say Kleenex because Kleenex was first to market with the name. That’s why. So marketing people already know that. So why not do that? Be first to market with whatever those goals are.

My latest book just came out on my website. I’m sure you guys will put this in the description. GeorgeDiGianni.com. My book is called Potentially You. Subtitle is Making Goal Achieving Decisions through Strategic Discomfort. Does that align with me or what. Strategic Discomfort. Making goal achieving decisions through strategic discomfort. Potentially You. You have this potential. Are you willing to get out of your own way? Are you willing to have the hard conversations with a significant other?

For every person in the world, especially managers and decision makers, if you’re stuck in your story, whatever your story is, you’ll never grow. That’s a fixed mindset. We have this thing in our brain called the anterior cingulate cortex. In high achievers and high performers, whether you’re an athlete or successful businessman or woman, you have a thickened ACC because you’re constantly challenging yourself. Here’s how it works. Doing the things you don’t want to do that you know you need to do. Make your bed. Don’t eat bad food. Go to the gym. The things that are uncomfortable that you don’t want to do, fill out your CRM, make 100 calls a day, have an uncomfortable conversation with an employee or significant other. Every single time you do what you don’t want to do that you know you need to do, you thicken the ACC. The benefits of that, because the ACC is responsible for mood regulation, decision making, whether we persevere or give up, that’s what it’s responsible for.

So every time you work on doing the things you don’t want to do that you know you need to do and thicken it, the things that you don’t want to do become easier. Having to fire an employee is never easy. But it’s easier to have the conversation instead of kicking the can down the road or moving that employee somewhere else within the company so you don’t have to fire them.

People just don’t realize that I have all of these tools to help somebody grow. Especially when it comes to my goal compression of bringing your 10-year goals to within 4 years. How do we do that? It’s going to get uncomfortable. How important is your goal? How badly do you want that 10-year goal to be within 4 years? How badly do you want to beat the competition?

One of the worst things a sales director can do or a company can do, if they’re not getting the sales numbers they want, is hire more salespeople. If your system is broken and you’ve not identified that through hiring, back to core values, back to your messaging, back to vision, back to mission. If you’ve not done that, why is that going to change over there? If the person pounding the phone, if they’re in sales, if they don’t have the pride of the company that the founder does, then you’re hiring wrong. You don’t just hire more salespeople.

Brandon: You just kind of take away. You water everything down. You’re not going to get it. You would just throw in more add and more resources at it. You got to skin back at that point.

George: But you know what your problem is. You’re speaking logically. Stop it. It’s easier for us who can pivot quickly to speak logically and have some common sense when you’re in a larger company, mid-sized company or larger. People aren’t making those statements because it’s much more challenging. But how badly do you want to bring your 10-year goals to within 4 years? I have my system that I train people on to take them through that.

Brandon: You’ve said some stuff to me today that I’m really excited about implementing. It’s cool to give validation to the things you’re thinking and the way you’re going about your business. But also strategy and scale, day to day, those are the things we spend a lot of time internally talking about. But strategizing for a length of time, I think my strategies also currently are, how do I solve where we’re at to make it the best front door to back door?

George: That’s a question. But the strategy is the steps to get there. So I want to give you something. This was during Covid. I’ve trained over 350 realtors and brokerage firms. I want to share something with you that doesn’t apply today. It was only during Covid when people were buying houses sight unseen. It was craziness. I did a keynote talk for one group. You know when an idea comes to you and you’re like whoa I’m on. This was one of those times and I’ve used it ever since. I’m going to share it now. I was talking about the UVP. Your Unique Value Proposition.

How to come up with that, that is unique to you. I would say to these brokers and the realtors, I don’t care if you sold 1 billion of real estate in one day, you don’t impress me. I don’t care about your Louboutin shoes and what you drive and how you dress. That doesn’t impress me because it’s about you. What are you doing for me? Where’s the customer-centric focus? I came up with the idea off the cuff. Let’s say you and I are in an elevator. I’m a realtor. I recognize you as a prospect. We get on the elevator. We only have two floors to go so that’s not even 30 seconds. It’s about 10 or 15 maybe.

My elevator pitch is this. I’ll find your dream home within 10 homes or less. Otherwise, I’ll turn you over to another realtor. Here’s my card. I’ll find your dream home in 10 homes or less. Otherwise, I’ll turn you over to another realtor. Now let’s talk about the mechanics of that. We’ll talk about the words behind what all of that says and then the mechanics. This is real important. This is a valuable lesson. People pay me 10,000 dollars a month for just one of them out of the many of them. But this is a valuable lesson.

So what does that message suggest? I’ll lead you with one of them so you can go off with the others. So now we’re starting with I will find your dream home in 10 homes or less. Otherwise I’ll turn you over to another realtor. What does this suggest? The first one is confidence.

Brandon: Yeah.

George: What else? There are more.

Brandon: I have the ability to do what I’m going to do. Like a confidence going towards it. But there’s to solve your problem.

George: Okay. So it’s about them. I’m going to say it again. Think about it. I’ll find your dream home in 10 homes or less. Otherwise, I will turn you over to another realtor. That means if I’m not good enough, I’ll put it on. But also what does that say about my character? Tell me, what’s the word?

Brandon: That I’m a solid person. I believe in myself.

George: Integrity. If I can’t do it, I’ll turn you over to someone else. 10 homes or less boundary. You’re not going to be a liar and do this 150 times. I ain’t happening. And then it’s customer-centric.

Brandon: Right. I want to bring you along.

George: So now here are the mechanics. You take me through everything you want in your dream home. Everything. Baseboard, size, thickness, paint. I don’t care. Everything. I’ll go and I’ll find it in the MLS or even off market whatever. Of course I’m not going to find their exact home they’d have to build it for. So I go back to them and I say, here are 5 homes that I feel match what you’re looking for. Each home I take them through they’re telling me no or whatever and they’re giving me feedback and we get to the 5th one.

I say okay you didn’t like any of these 5. What would you like to change from your criteria. That makes me go back to the table and make adjustments for the next 5. So again setting a boundary. For your 10. They can either say change a thousand things or change nothing. It doesn’t matter. I come back to them with 5 more. We see those other 5. They don’t want any of those 10 now. And now I come back to okay I’ve shown you 10 homes. You don’t want any of them. So here’s what we can do. You can either build a home I’ll find you land. I can turn you over to another realtor. Who isn’t likely to find your dream home because it doesn’t exist. Because all realtors have the same access that I do unless it’s off market. Or we can revisit one of the 10 homes, a couple of them you that you liked. So they have 3 options. So what have I done at the end?

Brandon: You just got to open up the possibilities. Like you brought it back and said hey I hit my deadline. This is the threshold I said I was going to do. I’m reevaluating the way I told you I was going to do it. Here’s some options to go forward. Which way do you want to take it? That’s back in their court.

George: Right. And from a sales approach it’s the takeaway. And it’s a boundary. It’s saying you know here’s my integrity I’m going to do this if you want me to do it. But nobody’s likely to be able to do it because they have the same access as I did. If you’ve developed a rapport with them right, you have a good rapport. Then they’re not likely to go elsewhere. If they are, then you didn’t waste any time except for 10 houses.

I know one guy who took somebody, this girl who was desperate for selling a home, 108 houses. Wow. No thanks. You know what? The average salary of a realtor in Texas and the United States just happens to be within 1,000 dollars or so annual salary. 48,000 dollars. Of the realtors I trained, how many of them adopted anything I said in my entire training?

Brandon: Well, I don’t know how many you’ve trained, but last.

George: One was 350 realtors and others were individual brokers.

Brandon: One.

George: One. And he’s killing it because he wasn’t afraid to go outside of his fixed mindset. He enacted his anterior cingulate cortex. He had goals. He recognized he didn’t know anything and didn’t know everything. And he already been a realtor for 3 to 5 years. Five years. But what often happens, this is a real big one for all you successful companies, the more someone gains success, especially a founder, a CEO, the less likely they are to hire someone like me because they think I don’t understand their business. I understand business and how to scale business. I’ve done it and helped other people do it. I can do it and repeat it again and again. When the ego gets in the way and you’re a low self-monitor and you think you know it all, or maybe you don’t think you know it all, but someone like the Uber driver or Elden doesn’t know enough or George doesn’t know enough, when you stop asking for and allowing feedback is when you stop growing.

Brandon: 100 percent. I mean, even the way you hire people needs to be not your same mindset. They need to think differently. I try to get people that are outside of the way that I think because I know how I think I can duplicate that. I can rinse and repeat that a billion times over. I want people to have a different perspective on life, a different perspective on certain things. But I also want us all to kind of row in the same direction.

George: Let me summarize that for a moment in something. When I was teaching at SMU, I would say hire the people that have the strength to fill the gaps in your weaknesses. If you don’t do that, then you just have sycophants. Yes. You have brown nosers. That’s all you’ve got.

Brandon: That’s exactly right. The echo chamber right.

George: You have brown nosers of psycho fox. That’s all you’ve got.

Brandon: Yep. No I totally agree with that. So as you start to build this up, to me that’s what it’s about. Spread it out. Like I said fill in the holes. Fill in the gaps.

George: Yeah.

Brandon: The people in there. I mean, I think that you know as we’re going through them, we’re starting to talk about how we build stuff, how we approach it, I think the approach is really strong. But I’ll say my grandfather just told me this. There’s two ways to have the biggest building in town. You can work really hard and build your building up bigger than everybody else’s, or you can spend all your time focused on knocking everybody else’s building down.

George: Yeah.

Brandon: I like that, you know what I mean? And so in any, you always finish off by saying, what kind of man are you? It always kind of gave me this drive to be man. I just need to work hard. I just need to I need to get out there and push.

George: How old are you?

Brandon: I’m 49.

George: You know, with the challenges with someone of our cohort today, with a younger cohort, they don’t. Hard work? Hard work. I’ll do something with AI and I’ll do it for 6 months and I’m changing or whatever it is. They don’t understand the adversity that I’ve been through. Maybe you’ve been through and so many other people that drives us to the success we seek. If you’re going off of social media and being driven by that, I got news for you. Whatever results we gain fast in life, we will likely lose them just as fast, if not faster. But if you have been built up through years of experience, massive wisdom, adversity, overcome it. Know how to pivot, know how to talk with people and grow. That way you’re more likely to wait it out. Pivot properly, grow.

Brandon: Yeah. No I think that you know again a lot of those things come from the people you surround yourself with. The people. And so luckily some of us have been surrounded by wise people. People. And again I called you say just beginning. Hey it’s been really cool to kind of see you speak the way that you have and intrigued me to go out and search for some other gaps that I’m missing. First off, I can really appreciate that. But but also, like, if you were to ask somebody, you know, hey, the number one thing, let’s, let’s get three things that every company, young company needs to focus on. But just give me the top three things in order from the most important thing to the least important thing.

George: Core values, mission statement, and vision. It’s the foundation of everything we do. Are there some that are equally important as you grow? Absolutely. But if you don’t have that, like my mission is to make a positive, profound difference in the lives of everybody I meet, and I do every single day of my life. There’s not a day that goes by that I don’t add value to somebody’s life. And that spills over into my business.

If you’re hiring people who love your mission, align with your mission, then you’re more apt to be successful. There’s something called the new aspiration economy. The new aspiration economy is the younger cohort. They don’t give a crap what you sell. They care about what you stand for. What’s your mission. Who are you helping. Why are you on this planet. That’s what they care about. If you have a big head about yourself and you have like a Jack Welch mindset. One of the things I taught at SMU was I would ask the question if Jack Welch or Steve Jobs were alive today, they didn’t have a job. They didn’t run their companies. But they had the same low level self-monitor IQ about them. And they were going to get a job today. Would you hire them? Of course you would. Of course they would completely adversely affect your culture.

Brandon: I know, I know they would. But I would take them and I would hire them for something else. I wouldn’t take them and hire them as a leader. I would take them and I would put them in the corner.

George: Yeah, yeah. So that division is 100 percent. That’s a good perspective I got it.

Brandon: I want to I want to put unique people around me that I feel like have the ability to take something and blow it up right now. I know those guys. I’ve seen a lot of the stories behind them, and they just are just egotistical guys at some point, and they’re very hard and they blow cultures up. But for me, like, I see those guys and I know what they can do in their drive. And I say, cool, let me see this. Got to go do something right. Let me get out of the way.

George: So with that said, just interject for a moment. Going back to that is if you haven’t had enough adversity in your life and you don’t have enough insecurities that drive you. Eckhart Tolle wrote a book about the ego. And it didn’t resonate with me, all of it. The reason is because if we all dropped our ego, then we wouldn’t have this. We wouldn’t have cars, we wouldn’t have these shoes. We wouldn’t have plastic bottles. We wouldn’t have the furniture because everybody would be sitting on a mountain just doing this. No ego. You need ego, but it needs to be healthy and you need to be aware of it.

Egos are driver. So the more insecurities someone has, the more they’re likely driven by whatever that is. Walter Isaacson wrote a great biography. He wrote the biography for Steve Jobs. All of his alter egos, Walter Isaacson’s books are 600 pages. I couldn’t put it down. Did you know Steve? We probably know Steve Jobs was adopted. His father was putting fence posts in the backyard. Steve was helping him. He did something to fashion the post at the bottom and it was going to be covered with dirt, but it looked great. Steve asked him, he said nobody’s going to see that. Why are you doing that. He said because I’m taking pride in my own work and it doesn’t matter what someone else sees. It’s what I know and how it works.

That was one of Steve’s biggest lessons from his dad. Which is why when you open an Apple, you get a look you don’t get with other computers. That was his focus and his drive. Everybody has something.

When we judge people who are jerks, by the way, Steve would yell at people, which you’re aware of. And then you go in another room and cry. I didn’t know if you know that. That was in his book as well. He was alive when the book was written. Walter interviewed him. Walter was afraid that Steve was going to blow up on him. He didn’t because he wanted everybody to know about his life, where he came from. When someone’s really, really insecure, just take a breath. It doesn’t mean you have to interact with them. But recognize that you don’t know what they went through. Just like they don’t know what you went through. You might have had the most charmed life but they didn’t. They’re driven by that insecurity. Caveat, it doesn’t mean that insecurity works for your business and it’s going to succeed, especially with the culture.

Brandon: And it doesn’t mean that insecurity is a positive either.

George: Sometimes it isn’t like it was for Steve because the company he built. But not the people who surrounded them yet. You have an Elon Musk. He was brutally bullied. Do you know that?

Brandon: No I didn’t.

George: Brutally bullied. He talks about his story. And he’s come out of that just from being curious and talking about going to Mars and all that other stuff when he was a kid. But he’s down in the trenches with every single one of his team. His teammates. What do we want to call them. Talent. Within his company. Every one of them.

Brandon: When you talk about mission statement I want to really kind of focus on that for just a second. Is mission statement ideology or is it what we’re doing as a result and who were affecting.

George: So it’s both. It’s your idea of what is so important to you, so important to you, that you have to get it out to the masses. It’s infectious to the end result.

Brandon: For example, my mantra, mission statement that I throw around at this company. I got it on my bottle right here. Sketch bold lines. Chase big ideas. Be the disrupter.

George: So that’s not a mission though right.

Brandon: But that’s what I’m getting at. Is this a am I supposed to. Because what I feel like as part of our mission is to set ourselves apart from everyone else.

George: Be the disruptor right. But read those again for a moment. Sketch bold lines. Is that important to you?

Brandon: Very important.

George: Sounds like a core value to me. What’s the next one?

Brandon: Chase big ideas.

George: Is that important to you?

Brandon: Very important.

George: Sounds like a core value to me.

Brandon: And then be the disruptor.

George: Is that important to you?

Brandon: 100 percent.

George: Those are core values. Your mission statement. Go back to mine. Make a profound positive difference in the lives of everybody I meet. That’s my mission. So what’s the mission of the company? What’s the company want to represent? What are you doing? How are you giving back to society? You can go to ChatGPT or Grok or whatever and ask for mission statements of the top most successful marketing companies. Look at theirs not to copy them because I know you wouldn’t anyway. It wouldn’t be your mission anyway because it wouldn’t be authentic. But to identify certain key words that align with you or vibrate with you. You can then adopt your own from those or at least get an idea of the structure of a mission statement and come up with your own.

Brandon: Yeah. I mean, I think there’s something like for me, a lot of that, some of it is for internal and some of this for external. When someone sees me and they want to know a synopsis about me or someone sees me and they want to know what we do and what we produce and what we kind of live and breathe as we’re in this company. And why would someone want to sign up with us? Those are the things that I believe. You could say that’s my core values, but but also to the point for me, like, I want someone from the outside to read those things and know that the top of this group is someone who I want to sign up with because this is what they believe in.

George: So you put it out. You put the messaging on your site. Here’s our mission. Here are our values. People, when they’re looking for people to hire organically, instead of word of mouth, which is where you’re killing it, you get somebody organically and they say well, what made you call us? You interview them and say your mission aligns exactly with my beliefs. Your values are exactly what I’m looking for. Those are the clients we really want. Those are the employees we really want. The ones that call you out of the blue. Hey, Brandon, I looked at your site. Yeah, you’re talented and I love all the stuff that you’ve done. But there are a lot of talented companies that are larger than yours. However, the one that I interviewed with, they were willing to give me 150,000 dollars a year. And I know I saw the job post, you only willing to give 95. But your mission and your values tell me you’re going to go far. I want to go on that ride with you. Tell me you haven’t found the right person.

Brandon: That’s exactly right. And honestly, that’s a great point. Building blocks for not only clients but potential people that are getting on board with us, too. I get that.

George: I think it’s important for people, everybody who watches this and listens to be proactive and put all of this in play now, not to be reactive when you have to. So when there’s a down economy or AI starts disrupting your business and then someone’s going to choose between 5 or 10 companies. They’re going to these websites. Now you’re having to identify your messaging and what your distinct competencies are and why they should hire you. Even get on the phone with you. That’s a low level self-monitor someone who is going to be reactive. They’re not willing to bring in someone like me because I am a disruptor. Not intentionally. I just bring this authentic communication. We bring this out in the open and ask what are we missing? Let’s look at the blind spots. If you’re okay with that, then let’s go ahead and move forward. Let’s put a plan together. I’m not going to do it. It’s your company. But I’ll help you navigate through that with my training manuals.

Brandon: I tell you honestly, there’s been a lot to cover in this. There’s so much stuff that I wanted to touch and haven’t had a chance to touch as well. I don’t know if you’d be open to do this again. I know it’s a long drive.

George: I got a nosebleed coming out here so far. Good night. But I would do it again. Give me a 2 or 3 years.

Brandon: But I just think it was really cool, man. I honestly, we talked on the phone. We got introduced by somebody. We talked on the phone for a little bit. Man, it was really great just kind of talking to you. I’ve seen you on the radio before. Whatever, but I didn’t really know you like that.

George: Nobody does. That’s my point for the Epictetus statement mentioned earlier. Because you don’t know people you watch on TV and you might hate somebody. I’m going to give you a great example. I didn’t like Deion Sanders right. I didn’t like him. He was so cocky when he was playing for the Cowboys. But at one point in my life when I was a trainer, which was 27, 28 years ago, I was training Dennis Rodman for the Mavericks. So of course I have front row seats and I trained Dennis after the game. But when the game was over, I was wearing this lime green fluorescent tight shirt. And this is when I was meat head massive George. Deion Sanders, I see him talking to someone. I’m just doing whatever. He comes over to me and says man, you look great. Whatever you’re doing, you just keep it up. He’s my best friend and that’s amazing. He completely took my defenses down because I got to know a guy who wasn’t afraid to give a compliment to someone else outside of his sphere.

Brandon: Yeah, right. Openly give him one out.

George: He kicked me in my mental ass from that point on I never forgot that. Number one. And number two, it helped me again. Introspection. It helped me to help others. When someone said something negative, I don’t care if it’s about a politician or somebody within your company, if you haven’t broken bread with them and had an authentic conversation, then you don’t know them. You’re judging them at a surface level. Me on the radio for 20 years, people didn’t know me. If you didn’t have this interaction with me, you didn’t know me for 20 years. You didn’t know any of this about me.

Brandon: I have a very similar type of experience. I was painting a mural. You know that as well. But yeah, I was painting a mural and this kid shows up on the outside. He’s backed up behind it. I’m up on a lift and I’m painting. I recognize he’s back there. He’s probably 17, 18, 19 years old. He comes up on his bike. He’s watching from the background. So I just kind of slowly when I waved him over. I said hey, man, what are you doing? He’s like, oh man. He goes, I’ve been watching you for so long painting and everything. I just wanted to. And I heard that you were down here. I wanted to come and experience how you do it and all you’re paying and everything. And I said, well, today’s your day. I said, you’re playing with me. There you go. And I put a can in his hand. He’s like, no, no, no, I don’t want to do it.

And I said, well, he had this yellow can. And I said, that’s your letter right there. You’re going to fill this in and do whatever. And he’s like, I don’t know how to do it. So I gave him two minutes of like instruction. Then he just started going and I mess with him. We just kind of sat there and painted side by side for you know, 30 minutes. He’s not necessarily doing it correct. There’s paint going everywhere. It’s all over his hands. Down the can on the side.

And I remember he looks over. He’s looking like he’s looking for a rag to wipe this on. And he goes, he has a shoe. And he wipes the nozzle and paint across the shoe like.

George: Know that’s going.

Brandon: And I was like.

George: Whoa, I.

Brandon: Know. And I said, brother. I said, I have a rag over there. I have a whatever. I say, you can clean that up. You not have to worry about getting in your shoes. I mean, the kid rode up on his bike and he had a pair of black shoes that look pretty new. And he rubbed it off. And I said, you don’t have to do that. And he goes, no, you don’t understand. This is a memory for me.

George: Yep.

Brandon: And then he goes, and I am marking the day and how it happened. This is a memory for me. And it changed the way that I thought about what I was expecting or what I was doing or how it was really affecting other people. And I really, at that moment, tried to start thinking how can I do more of this?

George: Not I thought you were going to say that he continued and did more on his shoe. Because when you said the memory, yeah, that’s where I went. He wanted to remember that that day he did that. But I thought he was doing even more. Made it kind of art if you will.

Brandon: And when I told him, I said here’s. And he goes, I’m an artist. But I just haven’t been able to put my stuff out. And I said, well, look, here’s the main thing that you have to do as an artist that you don’t want to do.

George: And it hurts to.

Brandon: Put it out there because you want to hide it. You want it to be your baby. But you also want everybody to understand. But when you put it out there, people are going to kick it. They’re going to call you crap. They’re going to say your stuff’s not great, blah, blah, blah, whatever. Who cares. You’re on a journey and you’re growing. It’s your first step. Whether it be your first, your second, your third, 20th, 10,000th, whatever. Keep doing it and let them kick. That’s the biggest growth you’re going to have when you start to put art out. And I said, what I want you to do is I said, do you have Instagram now? And he goes, no. I said, sign up right here. And he signed up to Instagram. I said, take a photo. And I said, I’m following you. I said, give me a follow. It’s a follow the back. And I said, I want to start to see you on here and where you grow and what you end up doing. And he did it for a while like he did it for 6 months to a year or whatever. And I could see like he kept doing or whatever and it kind of faded over time.

George: Wasn’t his passion.

Brandon: Wasn’t his passion.

George: But you taught him something about a person who’s successful. That he’ll take into the future.

For 11 years, I volunteered at an all black church in Oak Cliff. Yeah. Mission Baptist. I was the only white guy there. I would push the broom. I helped with handing food out. I helped with operations. All of it. Every week, every Thursday for 11 years. Unless I went out of town for a holiday. It taught them that the white guy is willing to do what they didn’t think. They thought I was going to come in and start pushing people around when I did jobs that they weren’t doing because they were at this station or that station and they didn’t go outside of that when I went outside of that and did everything.

It takes a long time with that community to build trust because they’re used to being inconsistent. Having other people who are inconsistent in their life. No trust. They always have to do everything to rely on themselves to survive. So it took me years to build trust with the majority of them. That was learned through experience. Not something I expected. I didn’t think oh I’m going to come in here and make these changes I just did. That’s my character. Your character is what you do behind closed doors. It was very rewarding.

And it aligns with what you’re saying that you gave back these people. Don’t forget me. I go back. There’s something called Christmas in the Park in Fair Park once a year. 40,000 people come. Kids, you know, parents and there’s bikes and all these other toys and beds and food for all these people. It’s real. If you don’t know Cliff, it’s very, very poor part of Dallas. But they all remember me when I go in there. Hey, George, good to see you. I haven’t seen you in a while. So I stopped going when Covid happened because of the whole masks and gloves and whatever. But yeah, I look forward to that.

Brandon: That’s cool, man. When you when you start to connect with people that aren’t necessarily in your circle or whatever and you just get to see people for who they are, you know, I think that we need more of that in this world. We need more of listening a little bit more. You know, a lot of times we’re trying to project everything on everybody and stand up for people that we don’t necessarily know if they need standing up for or not. It’s like hey man, do more listening. From all across the board, everyone needs to do a little bit more listening and then you know from what your perspective is, you still may believe it but that’s okay because you might see this other person to know that they’re not vindictive because they believe a certain way either.

George: So to that point and then I know we have to wrap it up. I don’t recall who said this. If it was Plato or Socrates. Socrates said we were born with two ears and one mouth so that we can listen twice as much as we speak. And I still have trouble with that.

Brandon: 100 percent. So. Well, George, thank you for coming on. Tell people where they can find you.

George: GeorgeDiGianni.com. Hopefully you guys are going to put it in the description. GeorgeDiGianni.com. And I also have my TikTok page, which is George digitally, and my Instagram page George DeLanny. So I’ve been putting some short videos up there of stuff that we’re talking about here.

Brandon: Yeah, we’ll have some clips and we’ll make sure that we connect and collab with you on that.

George: Ideally I’d like to do much more keynote speaking and consulting and coaching. I’m doing that and I’m loving it right now. I have a business broker brokerage firm that thought they knew everything kind of. But they had a high IQ, not low IQ. And we did some role playing and I won them over in my first session. We’ve been going along and really kicking some butt. They’re going to excel at a very high level fast because that’s another very competitive business. They find businesses for sale and then they find the money and put them together. So it’s been interesting. Anyway, I’ll let you go, but it’s fun.

Brandon: I’ll say this, George, I didn’t know what to expect coming in here. Pleasantly surprised. Thank you. Honestly, sometimes people can have a bigger personality. But honestly, the guy that’s inside, there’s a really cool cat, man. And I appreciate the kind words you said and the knowledge that you’ve dropped on me. And now you’ve kind of piqued my interest on some things that I need to get taken care of too.

George: So then I’ve fulfilled my mission with you today.

Brandon: Yeah. Thanks, brother. It was great.

George: Man, it was great. Thank you.

Brandon: Well, everybody, until next time. That’s The Blueprint.