Stevie Dawn Inspires — Episode 10

Brand Junkies - Rethink Creative Group

In this episode, David interviews Stevie Dawn Blakely of Stevie Dawn Inspires. Stevie shares her secret to creating raging fans is simple... she holds her clients accountable. If you're in a business where you work with clients this is NOT an episode you want to miss.

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Show Notes

David: Welcome to another episode of Brand Junkies. Today I sit down with Stevie Dawn Blakely of Stevie Dawn Inspires. Stevie is a leadership coach and a trainer of emotional intelligence. She does some phenomenal work with the Fort Worth Police Department and the fire department to train their leaders, not to mention a few other nonprofits as well.

Stevie is great at what she does and she's also a good friend. She's very very talented, and I'm telling you today she's going to give you some ideas for how to create raging fans in ways that you never thought possible. She's got some really good insights into how accountability actually creates long-term clients.You're in for a real treat today. Enjoy Stevie Dawn Blakely.

Hey welcome to another episode of Brand Junkies. Today I'm joined by Stevie Dawn Blakely of Stevie Dawn Inspires. She's the owner and founder of it. Stevie, thanks for being with me here today. Why don't you tell us a little bit about what you do and Stevie Dawn Inspires.

Stevie: Awesome. Thank you for having me. Stevie Dawn Inspires, I think it's important to know that the name, logo, everything was done by my college students. That's my background. I have been doing college student leadership and development and tutoring for the last 12 years. As I was starting my own business and deciding I wanted to see what a side hustle could do for me, I crowdsourced from my college students my name and my logo. I'm not completely narcissistic in calling it Stevie Dawn Inspires. My college students say inspires and so that's what I went with. I promised them when I left higher education that I would not change it. That's what it is, that's what we're sticking with.

I got started, gosh I think I've been doing training for 18 years, 19 years, forever. My very first job out of college, I worked at a office that did re-entry programs for people who were ex-cons or having trouble finding work. One of the things we did was interview training, resume writing, those kinds of things. I was the receptionist, had nothing to do with any of that, but one day I did.

I got in front of this group and I taught them how to interview better and I taught them how to write their resumes and I started to love training. I think that was really the beginning of my journey. Every job I got after that I was always training in something. I was always the person in the office who did training, regardless of what my actual job title was. I think that led me down that path. In 2015 I got my Doctorate in leadership with a specialization in emotional intelligence, so I know way more about that than anybody would ever want to know about that, but I do.

I started a side hustle just training people on how to communicate better and that side hustle turned into real money and then that turned into a business. We train organizations and companies, nonprofit, for profit, we do a lot of work with government. We're teaching them how to communicate better and how to develop leaders within their own organizations. Having the ability to actually promote somebody within and not have to hire outside the organization, keeping the culture positive and supportive for people, and really helping people to take the drama out of the workplace. That's a lot of what we do.

David: Wow. Okay. You have been around for awhile now working as your side hustle and now your full-time job. You have people as clients that write you a lot bigger checks than what a six pack of beer costs, or a case of beer or 100 cases of beer. You clearly have raging fans as clients, how have you created those raging fans that now stroke you, not just write you, but stroke you big checks on a regular basis.

Stevie: That is true, although I don't know what 100 cases of beer would cost because I've never asked that question. Gosh that's tough. If I had to guess, I would say that it's my client's success is more important than my own. I always put their success, their ability to lead, their ability to have a better conversation, their ability to not be a jerk the next time somebody irritates them, I take that as a win. When they have their success, I have my success.

I really take a lot of value and a lot of pride in them being able to achieve what they want to achieve. I think life is just a series of a bunch of small wins and then they add up to some big, at the end of your life looking back and go wow look at everything I got done, look at everything I accomplished. If I can just be a small piece of somebody's small win, that to me has more value than any check they write. I think that that dedication to people is probably why they keep writing me big checks. At least that's what I think.

David: Okay. What does that look like in practice for you to be for their success? I think a lot of business owners that are in the service industry would say, oh yeah I'm dedicated to my client's success, I want to see them be successful, how does that manifest for you in Stevie Dawn Inspires?

Stevie: I think it's being their accountability partner. Being that person who's going to say to them, glad that you came and did this workshop, glad you learned how to have a better conversation, now how did that go for you last week? It's remembering those small details, remembering that they supervised five people and that one of those guys' names is Bill and Bill is a jerk and nobody likes Bill, and so giving them the information to say okay I want you to go have this conversation with Bill and then following up the next week and saying did you do it? Did you have that conversation with Bill and how did that work for you?

I think holding people accountable is something that a lot of people forget to do. I think that is how you show them that you care about their success by remembering all those little details and following up with them on all of those skills so that it's not just wasted money. How many times I have heard we don't invest in training because it's a waste, we don't get any return on our investment. The return on investment is when you have a trainer who holds you accountable to say you actually have to do this. You can't just say yeah that was good information last Friday during that luncheon, but I'm not going to ever use it. That's not the point.

The point is to remind them of it, the point is to be there. My husband would tell you I'm there for people a little too much probably than I should be. I answer emails and I take phone calls. I was on vacation this weekend and I took a phone call from a client who was struggling with a conversation and I talked her through it. I do that all the time because I love it. It doesn't really feel like work to me, it's actually just something I enjoy.

I think if we hold people accountable and if we always are there for them when they need us, not saying you have to answer your phone at 2am, because I don't answer my phone at 2am, but you have to respond. I take it as a personal goal to always respond to email within eight hours. I'm always there for them, I'm always responding so they know they can reach me. Even if that email says hey by the way I'm out of town and you won't see me for a week, I respond within eight hours. I think that's important, people want that instant notification that you're there.

David: Wow. Okay. You do a lot of emotional intelligence stuff. You and I have talked about that at least briefly. Tell me about the psychology or the sociology or what's going on whenever you hold someone accountable? That seems like that was a really big deal. Not only are you always trying to get back to your clients as quickly as possible, being honestly responsive as opposed to, yeah I'm going to get back to them by the end of the week, which is what so many people do and they wonder why they're struggling with client based service businesses.

Anyways, tell me about what that accountability does because I think that you're right, that's such a huge thing. What does that do in someone's brain and the sociology of the groups?

Stevie: Right. Without diving into psychology and brain matter and all that gray matter, the thing about holding somebody accountable is that you are in their corner. You're reminding them of what they agreed to do and it's that constant push to change something into habit. If we think about something once, we're not going to remember it. If we think about it twice, we're not going to remember it. It stays in our short term memory bank and that does us no good. We have to be reminded of something three times, psychologically speaking, three times for our long term memory to kick in and say oh I'm supposed to remember this.

I find with people that if you tell them hey you need to go have this conversation, they're like oh yeah yeah yeah I'll get to it, but then life happens and five other things come up that are so much more important than that one thing. If they don't have somebody reminding them, their own brain is not going to remind them. They have not been told to do it three times. For me it's always I tell them about it in training, when I see them in person, I follow up with an email and I remind them that they need to do it, and then the next time I see them I say hey did you do it. That kicks it into that long term memory and then they're more likely to do it.

I think some of that is brain power and psychology, I think some of it is just the emotion of having somebody who cares. I think we live in a society right now where there's a lot of negativity, there's a lot of drama, and there's a lot of I can say whatever I want and it doesn't impact me. Words impact our feelings. If you're going to say that that's the world we live in, then we need somebody on our side, we need somebody who's giving us a positivity boost, somebody who's saying you can do this. It's within your grasp, you have everything you need. Somebody who's saying I'm your cheerleader, I'm going to be your coach.

I think something that differs between mentoring or having that almost a parent figure versus a coach is that accountability person. Your coach, if you think of a sports team, you are accountable to your coach. You showed up for practice, you had to do what they told you to do, they were your coach. That's what I try and be to my clients so that they know I'm still in their corner, I'm supporting them, and even when they lose I'm going to give them the pep talk in the locker room and we're going to go back out there and do it again. They also know they're accountable to me and I'm going to expect things from them.

To a certain extent, psychologically, we hate to let people down. We absolutely hate to think we let people down or we disappoint somebody. When you put that accountability piece out there, you hold people to say I don't want to disappoint Stevie, I better do what she asks me to do. Exactly. That's exactly what I want every client to think. I want them to have a voice in their head that says what would Stevie do, and then maybe do the opposite or maybe do what I said. Either way, I want them to have that voice and to know that they are accountable to me, they need to get down what I told them to get down because it will make their life better, not my life better. It will make their life better.

David: Have you seen, I'm assuming you have, but have you seen this high level of accountability, as you said earlier people have said to you I don't invest in coaching or I don't invest in training because it doesn't lead to results, we don't see any benefit from it. You said yeah if you have accountability, then it will. Are you seeing then results for your clients based off that accountability?

Stevie: Absolutely. One of my favorite stories is I worked with the sergeants in a police department. One of the sergeants just had this way of communicating with people, a little bit aggressive, a little bit blunt, harsh could be used as a word to describe him. He wasn't moving up, he wasn't getting promoted, he wasn't getting good projects because people kept saying gosh we're just not sure how you're going to talk to people and you're not going to promote a good image for us.

He came to my training, we did this training. In one of the training sections I talk about killer whales, not the oceanography part of it, but killer whales are things you say in conversation that kill the conversation and nobody wants to respond. They're called killer whales versus friendly dolphins which are cute and cuddly and encourage conversation.

During this killer whales discussion he came up to me after and he goes, "Oh my gosh, I use those, I use killer whales all the time." I said, "What do you think that does to people?" "It probably makes them not like me very much." "There you go. You got it. That's it. Try to use more friendly dolphins."

He went out, he had a project he had to do where he had to cut people. He was doing some sort of physical exam for them, he was facilitating the exam and he had to cut people at every stage. They were only taking one person at the end. He had to be the bad guy, that was his role, but he came back to me and he said the first two times I was just like pack your stuff and get out of here. I don't even care. He said, then I had this moment where I thought that wouldn't be what Stevie would tell me to say. I started changing my verbiage a little bit and I started saying it's not going to work out today, it just wasn't good enough today, but we'd love to have you come try out again.

See how much nicer that sounds? It's just prettier, it's friendly. We started having this conversation. He goes by the last guy that he had to say no thank you, they were thanking him for the opportunity and thanking him for being so kind about it. That was something that nobody had ever told him before.

To me, having him have that realization and have that turnaround, that's it, that's where that accountability knowing that he was going to have to see me the next week and I was going to say how's that going for you, he knew he had to think about it. He made those changes and the result was he had a great experience and so did everybody else that he interacted with, maybe except for those first two guys that he wasn't so nice to. Everybody else thought he was great. I think that helped him and he did get promoted, so that's awesome.

David: Wow. Okay. What I find interesting about that is you seeing, because you do trainings for these big organizations, you're seeing the change happen not at the C-suites or top level of management, you're seeing the change happen middle management to people that are on lower levels and then that has to somehow make it's way up to the top people that there's this change happening. That has to be such a significant voice of people saying whoa we're seeing a big difference here, to make it to the top people.

I'll just speak as a business owner, I know that you are too, I have employees, we don't have a very large organization yet so we were still pretty shallow, but even for a small thing like that there would have to be a big change noticeable. I think I heard something awhile back, for every 100 percent change you make the people around you only notice 10 percent. If that's the case, how's this getting up to the people that are ultimately writing your checks?

Stevie: I think it actually works in reverse. I think the people at the top have to believe that change is possible and that's why they write the checks. They write the checks because they know it's needed and they believe it's possible. Then they evaluate afterwards.

Every program I do I always evaluate, at the end of the program I produce a report to administration that says here's the change we saw, here's the growth we've seen. I use assessments, I use tools, I have numbers, I have data, because they have to see that. For me it starts at the top and a belief that change can happen. If that belief isn't at the top, I'm not going to get any change down below anyway because they're not going to invest in their people and their people are going to know it.

It's really about the C-level people understanding that change is possible and being willing to invest in it. Once they see it, that's why I work with people- that I work with them year after year after year. Once they see it the first time, then they're like oh my gosh we need this with more people, how do we get more people into this. It starts at the top. It starts at that belief that change is possible. I think when you have that, then anything can happen.

David: Wow. Wow. That just blew my mind actually a little bit because that was brilliant. That was absolutely fantastic. Stevie, if someone wanted to connect with you about some of the things you do, which by the way, what are some of the things that you offer now? You give this story about what you did before, what are some of the high-level things that you offer now at a 30,000-foot view?

Stevie: Okay. 30,000-foot view. Let's see. We have what we call customized training solutions. Those are where we evaluate what a company needs, we go in, describe, define, design all these things, a program specifically for that company with their culture, their values, their mission, all of that at its heart. We design a program for them. Those training programs can be six weeks long, they can be three months, we've even done a year-long training program. Those are our customized training solutions.

We also have a lot of stuff just available for individuals or anybody who wants to get better at communication and training. We have our High Octane Leadership Program. That's designed for middle managers who are looking to get a leg up on their competition, looking for that edge as far as how to communicate, how to manage people, not just things but actual human beings and have good conversations. It's about branding, it's about how to stand out from others, how to be dynamic and engaging, how to influence and motivate. We have that program, it's an eight-week program and anybody can join in in that one.

Then we also do one-off workshops. We actually have an exciting one coming up. We're doing a workshop where we've partnered with a nonprofit. It's for a nonprofit staff, but we're opening it up to the community and any community member who attends, the proceeds from their tickets are going to the nonprofit who hosted it. The nonprofit is getting training for their staff and making a little fundraiser money on the side. We also do some cool stuff like that where we come in, do a workshop on emotional intelligence or communication.

One of my favorites is when Mars and Venus Go Networking. Networking difference between males and females is huge. We do a lot of that kind of stuff, those workshops and training sessions like that.

David: Okay. Awesome. If we wanted to find out more information where would go to find all that stuff?

Stevie: As I've already said I will email you within eight hours. If you want to email me, I've already put that out there so I have to hold myself accountable to that. If you want to email me my email is [e-mail]. You can go to our website www.steviedawninspires.com or you can follow me on Twitter, Instagram sdinspires.

David: Awesome. I want to thank you for taking the time to chat with us today. I know that I got a ton out of this and I'm sure our listeners will as well. Thank you so much.

Stevie: Thank you so much.

David: Most people would say that they want their clients or customers to be successful. You're selling a cup of coffee or a pint of beer, being successful as a customer might not be a thing. However, you want them to enjoy the product and be able to further their life with it and be able to get where they're going if you will. If you're a client based business, then you know that you actually do have to invest in your client's success, it's actually vital.

If you're a realtor, you want your clients to be successful selling their homes. If you're a coach, clearly you want them to be successful what you're coaching them in. The same is true for a lot of other services. I love what Stevie said here is because, for a lot of service based businesses, you actually are working with that company or that nonprofit to see them achieve new levels of success. There's only so much you can do as a service company, the other company, the client that you're working with, actually, has to hold up their end of the bargain as well.

I love what Stevie said. She gets to know people in such a way that she can then hold them accountable based on the things that they either A, committed to, or B, Stevie game them to do as homework. I think this is vital for so many service companies in particular because oftentimes we will take on the moniker, and I'm speaking as we because I'm in the service industry as well, we'll take on the responsibility to do everything when ultimately there has to be a certain level of responsibility from the client's side as well. If you're able to define those very clearly and say this is what you're responsible for and here is what my team and I are responsible for. If you don't hold up your end and if I don't hold you accountable to it, then we're not going to have a successful project, coaching session, whatever that is. This is incredibly valuable information.

Hey, I hope that you enjoyed today. Stop by on Thursday we'll be interviewing the owner and co-founder of Sebago Brewing in Portland Maine. We've got some really excellent content to give you. I'm telling you this guy has got some good nuggets, Kai Adams, man he's going to drop some good branding knowledge on you.

Until next time junkies, peace.