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In this Infusioncast episode Joshua Millage interviews Brian Young, owner and president of Home Painters Toronto. In 2012 Brian’s business was almost dying. But in just three years using Infusionsoft he’s grown the company to be dominating his market, and he is the winner of a 2015 Small Business ICON Award. Determination, reputation, and motivation have helped him get massive business growth.
Brian started Home Painters Toronto over 25 years ago when all of his business processes were done manually and pagers were still the best way to contact employees who were working on a job. He made sales by going door to door himself and talking to people about painting their houses. When the internet came into the picture and competitors went online, Brian experienced a long period of declining sales. He was determined to keep going, so he just kept trying harder and harder. But the harder he tried, the less it worked. He felt like his business was dying.
In 2012 Brian started using Infusionsoft, but he struggled with it for the first few months. Then he connected with Kelsey Bratcher, who was the right person to help him learn how to use the software to segment and automate his sales process, and things started to turn around. In just three years he went from begging for leads to having so many prospects that he can choose which ones to work with. His biggest challenge now is keeping up with how rapidly his business is growing!
Since it’s so easy for an unhappy customer to post negative reviews on the internet, maintaining a positive relationship with customers and a good reputation is critical for success. Brian uses Reputation Loop to follow up with his customers once a job is completed to ask for feedback. If there’s ever an unhappy customer, he can address it right away and fix their issue before they post a negative review on the internet. If a customer gives positive feedback, then it automatically encourages them to give a positive review on the top review sites.
It’s important to have great role models to help you stay motivated. Brian likes to watch motivational video clips on YouTube to help him stay in the right frame of mind and be inspired. There are links in the show notes to some of the speeches Brian likes. Working regularly with a business coach is another way he stays focused on what’s important in the business. Having good groups of peers and friends is also key.
Thank you for joining us.
You can connect with Brian and ask him questions by emailing agent@homepainterstoronto.com.
Show Links:
[transcript height=”200px”]
Joshua: Hello, Everyone. Welcome back to another episode of Infusioncast. Today I have the opportunity of interviewing Brian Young. Brian is this Small Business ICON Award winner in 2015. He’s just such just a nice guy, very transparent about how he started with Infusionsoft in his business. I took so many things away from this interview. You actually get some funny take-aways too, and there will be some links on the website at Infusioncast.co/brian-young-determination-reputation-motivation-massive-business-growth. Those takeaways and those value adds I should say are a bunch of links to some YouTube videos that Brian uses to motivate himself. I think you’ll really like him. I’ve actually started watching a few. I have to say, if I’m feeling a little down I don’t know what it is about Rocky but he does fire me back up. I hope you check those at over at Infusioncast.co. Without further ado, let’s get into the interview.
Speaker 2: How the heck do you use Infusionsoft? How do you make it work for you? Welcome to Infusioncast. The only podcast that shows you the tricks of the trade and teaches you how to be an Infusionsoft expert. Join your host Joshua Millage as he sits down with Infusionsoft pros to hear their stories and experiences making Infusionsoft work for them. Ready? Here’s Joshua.
Joshua: Hello, Everyone. Welcome back to another episode of Infusioncast where we interview Infusionsoft experts so that you can become an Infusionsoft expert. My guest today is Brian Young. Brian is the owner and president of Home Painters Toronto and the 2015 Small Business ICON Award winner. Brian, welcome to the show.
Brian: Thanks very much for having me. It’s a pleasure.
Joshua: I’m excited. Today I got to experience your presentation at ICON, and I found it really inspiring and just helpful at so many different levels. I’m honored that you have decided to jump on and do an Infusioncast interview. I’m curious. Let’s go back in time to your days before Infusionsoft. What did your business look like? How was your life before you learned about marketing automation and automation in general?
Brian: Actually, I started back in 1987, which was a long time ago – 25 years roughly. Back then, there’s absolutely no automation. Everything was manual, face to face, no cell phones. Pager was the best way to contact each other if you can imagine, digital pagers. Everything was manual, that’s how we started, and that’s how I got trained. I was used to that, door to door sales, in your face marketing, no internet, no emails. That’s what I was used to. I was trained that way and I was pretty much working out that way for a good 15 years before the internet came to play. That was how I ran my business before Infusionsoft.
Joshua: Wow. How did you find it, Infusionsoft?
Brian: I found that actually there was…I went through a long period of declining sales like others said the internet eventually took over my business. I was stubborn, and I was good at what I did, so I just kept doing what I was doing, but over time over the years this wasn’t working. I would just keep trying harder and harder. The harder I tried, the less it worked. Every year I felt that happening. It led up to the point where it was declining sales, struggling sales, my business was dying. I had to do something. I didn’t know what to do but I had to do something. That was when I basically hired a coach, and he introduced me to Infusionsoft. Finally on my website, a bunch of my processes went online and did a lot of our marketing that way. That’s how we change. Pretty much the last three years that’s what it’s been.
Joshua: That’s amazing. Do you use Infusionsoft to automate everything if you focus primarily on the marketing side of things? Or do you use it for internal processes, too?
Brian: We’re working on the internal part remarketing we try that’s where we started to market to our clients how they opted in to our website. How we would let’s say, segregate each client like which category we’ve put them in. Once we quote them then we’ll put them in a further category. That’s how we could automate how we could market to those types of clients as well. Basically, it’s the marketing was the main part and working on the other parts, as we speak actually, we’re just having a meeting about some things that were having trouble with. Because I’m building my business really rapidly – roughly 20 to 30% a year. When you are expanding that fast, everything’s changing on a daily/weekly basis, like you’re hiring more employees. Every weekend and every month we’ll have new problems, or new challenges we call it.
Joshua: I can imagine.
Brian: That’s the challenges. It’s keeping up with the business, and because we’ve marketed our business in the past three years, like we have so much business keeping up with it is the biggest challenge. That’s been pretty amazing. Whereas before, I was like begging for every lead, literally begging. I was like, “Can I quote your house? Please let me quote your house.” I won’t force you doing anything you don’t want. Now I’m trying not to turn away leads, but I’m finding them at the point where there has to be a breaking point.
Joshua: Let’s dive deep into that actually. What is the journey been from begging for leads to turning away leads? What is some of the…I guess if you could look at that process from a macro view and say do an 80-20 on it and say these are the 20% of things that I did that I had 80% of the results, in terms of figuring out lead gen, because you what, Brian? I’ll be honest. I struggle with that. I think every entrepreneur at some point in their life cycle of growing a company, they get from point A to point B based on say, referrals. That groom to this stage, and then they’re sitting there like, I can’t seem to grow just off of this one source of leads anymore. How do I do lead gen with paid traffic or whatever else? I’d love for you to give some insight and how that worked for your company.
Brian: Like I said, I was the one man show. I did everything myself before Infusionsoft. It was all door to door. I was the only gold collar in my company, and so I was doing all of my own sales. Everything was manual, physical. I’d have to meet the client, write up the quotes physically with handwriting. Sell them, call them back. I had to do all the callbacks myself. I did everything myself. Since Infusionsoft, we’ve got a website. We actually had pay-per-click but we turned it off, because I just have too many leads to even think about dealing with pay-per-click leads now. We’re one of the top rated painting companies on the Internet if you Google Toronto painters, you’ll find us everywhere. If you see our reviews, they’re pretty stellar.
We’ve really worked on our business itself to make the client experience as great as possible. It’s always a work in process of course, but because of the internet, you’re exposed in every way. You go basically out of hand, take care of every type of client and the ones you can’t handle you have to put them aside and realize, “Okay. This is a client I can’t handle, so It’s probably best that we didn’t do business.” Then the clients that you could take on, you have to treat every client as if they’re all gold and try to of course get 10 out of 10 ratings. Home Starter is our biggest lead source. Online reviews, improving your business to the point where it’s almost flawless. There’s no such thing as flawless, but you know what I’m saying. The customer experience is almost flawless, taking care of every type of client that you can take on. What else?
Basically our website like I said, organically where I think we’re 1, 2, or 3 on any pretty much any Google search to do with Toronto painters and when I would expanding our regions. We’re at the point where like okay we’ve pretty much saturated this region so let’s go to this region. I don’t know what’s next, basically franchising, but we’ve mastered that part of our marketing. We’re trying to expand that to different regions. We’re actually in the process of getting two other websites going as well that are related to painting, but painting services and commercial services we haven’t even topped those markets. There’s so many different…it’s like I got a template of how to market for painting in Toronto. Now, I figure I can duplicate that and find different parts of painting around Toronto and even a different region in Toronto, so that’s why I think the sky is the limit. We’re growing 20 to 30% a year, and just trying to keep up with sales is a challenge.
Joshua: Yeah. Absolutely. Though that’s a good problem to have for sure.
Brian: Yeah, thanks.
Joshua: When you say you’ve really focused in on a customer experience, help me understand that a little bit too, because I think painting is you come, you bid, you quote, you come with the paint, you paint it and you leave. How do you make it a real solid connection where someone would be willing to go online and review something for you?
Brian: Again, that’s a big … That’s something we’re working on regularly. What we do in business 25 years before infusionsoft that was I had in my head what I thought the customer needed. Since Infusionsoft now we’re online works both everything customer service, I don’t want to be negative but they go online let say, “Okay. I found” it’ll pick you apart in every different way. I found thousand of ways of handling every one of those issues, and we would make list of things clients would complain about or they’d potentially complain about. We’ve tried to find every way to handle a problem whether be setting their expectations promptly saying, “Okay. This is what we can do, this is what we can’t do. Are you okay with that?” To be an example.
Then the other way would be, just making sure all of your employees and all your managers…like since joining Infusionsoft, I’ve hired eight staff, and we’ve grown our subcontractors from about 4-6 to about over 25. Making sure everyone is all on the same page and making sure that everyone is accountable. That’s it. That’s a bit of a challenged but it’s something that you can do if you just really put your mind to it. Using for example, Infusionsoft, have your systems like really ironclad so every step of the process is documented. Because I’m trying to manage 25 people through paper is near impossible. Then your clients, that’s the other thing is updating them properly. Automating that part of the process while you are doing the job.
At the end of the job, we use Reputation Loop to follow up. A lot of times I would personally want to meet every client, but now there are so many clients I can’t meet almost any of them. We use Reputation Loop now to follow up. Once the job is done, we ask their feedback and lot of time the production manager can’t be there. The form just doesn’t have the sign off sheets so we’ll use Reputation Loop is the way we’ve screened them up if they’re happy or not. If they are not happy in any way, we address it right away. We have people, I dispatch them right away within hours. Someone will be out there to take care of the client and taken care all of their needs.
Joshua: That’s great. What’s Reputation Loop? I’m not really familiar with that service.
Brian: Oh sorry. It’s basically a middle person between us and our client going online and writing something good or bad. What it does, it sends out a questionnaire basically ask them how their experience was, and then if their experience was good then it automatically encourages them to go to our top review sites which in our case is Home Stars, Google Places and write a review. If they are not happy, we’ve only have it for about 5, 6 months now. If they are not happy, then we can catch it right away then call them and say, “We didn’t know that was happening, can we come by and fix it up for you? Or can we offer some kind of a discount? We didn’t realize that was the case.”
Joshua: That’s really a cool service. Since you just plug that into your fulfillment, processes that at the end there, and then they’ll take care of that for you.
Brian: Yeah, exactly because before I was guessing, it was random. Like one customer would complain, I’d no idea they complained. They will go online, and they will complain. I have no idea. Can I fix it for you? Access of a bit of a middle man, so I can catch it before something happens and take care of it right away as opposed to just hoping that everything went well.
Joshua: Right. Absolutely. Well Bryan, let’s get tactical for the beginners and the audience. If you could recommend them like what area to start with their … Maybe it’s where you started. What would that be? Because Infusionsoft can do so many incredible things. It really can automate a business end to end. Depending on the business model of course, but I’ve seen it happen. I think people get it and they’re like, “Wow, I’ve got this amazing power tool. I don’t know where to begin with.” Where would you tell people to start?
Brian: The first thing is that I just want to start off by saying I was not an internet marker. I didn’t have a smartphone since 2012. I’m not a technology guy. One of my things at Infusioncon was if a guy like me can figure this thing out at all to certain degree, everyone in this crowd should be able to. I believe that if you have the heart and that you are willing to learn and be a student, you can pretty much do anything you want in your business. As long as you are willing to pay the price. Be a student of Infusionsoft or automation in general. Start with that. In terms of what specifically we did. Kelsey Bratcher is my ICP, and he basically when he first got Infusionsoft, that was … I was a mess, I didn’t know what was going on. I got set up. Unfortunately the set up wasn’t very user friendly for me. Like I said, I’m not a technology guy. I was struggling for about 3 or 4 months.
I was almost ready to quit. Like I said, “This is just impossible. This isn’t going to work.” Fortunately, I met Kelsey, it was an amazing thing. It was a random thing. I just met him at some men’s group seminar. I wasn’t on a marketplace or anything. I told them I was having a problems with it. He actually works there so he said, “Well, listen. Let me help you out. I wouldn’t charge you for it.” Yeah, sure. Long story short, first thing we did was we broke my sales process from the start to the end. We segmented every different way and part of the way. I didn’t know what sales process was at first. I was like, “Well, I will just go out knock on the door.” Time comes to a website and then I ask them, “Okay, what do you want then?” We broke it down from sales to sales stage and that took roughly not even a week. We had I think 6 stages or something like that. Now, since then, we’ve broken it down further. That’s another story I’ll explain later.
Joshua: Real quick question, Brian. When you say break it down, do you mean the door knocking thing phase and then the qualification phase. That sort of thing?
Brian: Yes, exactly. I don’t knock on doors anymore. The client came to our website, they will qualify in, and then I would decide whether I want to take the lead or not, and if I don’t then I would qualify that lead. That would be an example of one stage, we call it new leads. Then if they do want the lead, then we open up an opportunity it’s called, “Who wants quote?” So we put them in that stage. That would be the second stage. Then the third stage would be appointment set. We would break this process down like that and in these little chunks. In that way, I could make sense of it and make a duplicate to the point where I can actually create content, meaningful content to nurture each client through each stage.
If they didn’t qualify or if they ended up dropping out, they would go of course to long term nurture, and then we would find the reason why they decided not to opt that we would ask questionnaire. We do that now. Then we would develop different follow up sequences based on their reason, because I’ve found out there was roughly, I think 6 reasons why they want to go with us. Too much, cost too much, not good time a year, or something like that. Once we’ve got the information, we could follow up with them through nurturing them and saying, “Well, if it’s not this time of year, when would be a good time, or do you realize it summer’s the time to paint, we only have 4 months to paint.” That’s where we would nurture the client back into a lead that would want to buy from us potentially.
Joshua: That’s huge. That is so cool. It’s just taking what we’re doing and breaking it down and getting microscopic about each and every phase. Then I feel like you ask really good questions. I just picked up on them, too. What is their reasoning? Oh, this is their reasoning. Okay, this is how I’m going to speak to that reason. If it’s cost or whatever. That’s brilliant, Brian. Thank you for sharing that.
Brian: No problem. By the way, like I said, we didn’t start of that detailed. It was very general and then over the past three years we’ve tweaked it out to I think 12 to 13 stages. If you are feeling overwhelmed, “How am I going to break this down?” I didn’t realize that I had a process. That what I was going through at that time. We just broke it down in the main stages. Okay, I’m not the client. Decided if they wanted a quote, give them a quote, follow it up, and then do we both the jobs. That was like 5 or 6 stages. Like I said, since then, we’ve broken it down into 12 or 13 stages. Start off small, you’ll find through working in your business. Okay, I need a couple of more stages here. I need to. This is to make clients in this one stage they’re all being jumbled in this one category. There’s actually 3 different types of clients here. You know what I’m saying
Joshua: You segment them out?
Brian: Exactly.
Joshua: That’s really good. I did that recently with a completely different scenario. I’m selling my learning management system plugin online. I just segmented people based on whether or not they’re registered for a webinar. If they attended the webinar, if they didn’t attend and spoke to them accordingly. It was like before I did that, I had one or two conversions. Afterwards, I had 20 to 30 conversions. It was just as little details. The furious successes is a real thing and sometimes that furious successes like well it wouldn’t really matter if you talk to people in that detailed manner or specifically about their needs. You can be general. It’ll be fine. It really does change things dramatically. When you speak to people’s needs.
Brian: It does, because when you’re selling as a sales person and someone comes to you and says, “We don’t want to do it until next year.” Okay, then you’ll say, “Okay. Is there any reason why next year as opposed to this year?” Then they’ll say something like, “Well my wife, whatever. She’s not into it.” If you can actually talk to the customer through the automation way, that’s the ultimate goal I would think. Then you can sell to that client in that round rather than selling them on something like well, it’s too expensive. Why it’s too expensive? Did you get other quotes? Do they have worker’s comp? Do they have general liability insurance? Were their painters background checked? Do they have a 95% satisfaction rating on Home Stars? Do they check their online reviews? You sell them in a those different ways or market to them then you’re obviously going to be a lot more successful than if you just do a general email. It makes more sense to the client, too. They actually do respond as a postage. They can tell when it’s just a generic email.
Joshua: They can. It has more soul to it. That’s really good Brian. That’s really good. You started using Infusionsoft. How long were you an Infusionsoft user before this last ICON win?
Brian: I think in February of 2012 was when I bought it in terms of actually … I think there was 2 months or 3 months of struggle. Like I said, I’m not doing anything. Then April is when I met Kelsey. That’s when we really like geared it up and started making things happen. It started with little wins. It wasn’t like we just threw out an email blast to every one of my clients and made millions of dollars. Like I said, breaking the process down. Just organizing my business. Systemizing everything and as much as possible least of the time. That really allowed me to even hire certain people. Saying, “Okay, well. There’s like a hundred and fifty leads in this one stage, are you going to get someone to call these people back?” Because I didn’t have the time with all the expanding and marketing that we’re doing, I just don’t have time. I could actually hire certain people for different processes for different part of the way.
I could actually turn this more into … more about franchise-type thing where I could make it more duplicatable. That was the other thing it helped me do was help me organize my business not just get more business. Organize the clients partly so I could hire the right people to take care of certain stages. There are certain people that are just that’s their job to call these people back in the stage. There’s other jobs in progress to make sure the jobs is doing okay. There’s different ways of organize your business. Did that answer your question a little bit?
Joshua: Yeah. That totally did. That really helps.
Brian: Like I said, it was started small. Little wins turn into bigger wins. Nurturing the client to each stage. Then our biggest win I think was in our first year, we finally threw out an email blast, and we got seventy thousand dollar response rate in less than 24 hours. It blew my mind . This is the slowest time of the year. I think it’s in December. They want us to paint for Christmas. I was like, “Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.” I think I offered a free TV for any job over $2,500. That’s the other thing, Infusionsoft allowed me to track my lead sources so I could see where I’m spending my money. Which ones are costing me money and more producing and which ones weren’t. I could figure out, “Okay. This cost me $250/lead.” The colored TV cost me $220, it’s actually saving me money by giving away a free TV for this month’s business.
Joshua: That’s pretty cool.
Brian: Yeah, exactly. It allowed me to organize my business lead source-wise so I could figure out which ones were making me money or not, so I could know which ones to concentrate on them, which ones to get rid of.
Joshua: That is a beautiful thing. I love that. That is really cool. What would you tell a listener or share with a listener on what it takes to become an ICON, Small Business ICON Award winner? Because I know there’s a lot of people going, “Well, how do you do that?”
Brian: I applied actually that first year, was it in 2013. They did not accept my applications. If I had to say one thing just keep applying until they accept you.
Joshua: Persistence beats all resistance is what I’ve been told.
Brian: I would say the main thing for me, I’m definitely not the smartest online guy by any means. I have incredible amount of passion towards my business and towards making my business better. It doesn’t matter who you are, what business you’re in, how much money are you making, whatever or how much money you’re not making. If you have passion you just keep, I call it pig-headed determination. If you’re just relentless and finding ways to fix issues in your business, don’t let things knock you down. Develop some fix towards that.
Then you can pretty much handle everything. I must have made so many hundreds and thousands of mistakes, and I just didn’t care. I’ll just say, “Okay, how do we fix it?” You just keep trying until something works. Even Infusioncon, I just kept applying and say, “Well, I’m just going to keep applying until they accept me.”
Joshua: I love that.
Brian: I would just say keep trying, pig-headed determination, don’t give up and there is a way. Just look at my profile itself. If this guy can do it, and if he didn’t even have a smart phone before 2012, then there’s no excuse I think of – anyone can pretty much do it.
Joshua: That’s amazing. Let’s get into some of the soft skills here, because that’s very inspiring to me, that pig-headed determination. How do you cultivate that? Do you have any habits or rituals or things to build that confidence, because I think that’s one thing as I talk to entrepreneurs. The ones that I find that are really growing fast or have done a really good job. They just have this confidence. This like you said, this determination just to continue to go, and nothing is really, when a problem arises they almost get excited about how to solve it. They are not concerned. They don’t waste a lot of energy with the mistakes that they’ve made. They’re just under the understanding that mistakes will happen. It’s part of life, so what do we do when the mistakes happen? How do we get around the obstacle in the road? What are some other things you do so you can keep that mindset strong?
Brian: There’s a lot of things. Everyone has their own way of motivating their selves and keep getting up when they’re kicked down. Keep going through. Keep dropping through. I was talking to one of my other interviews. Basically, I broke down it into 5 different steps. First thing is to have great role models. For example, I watch Rocky all the time. If you just YouTube certain parts of Rocky, the sequel, like there are so many motivational things there. I love watching motivational speeches on YouTube because there are so many things that go wrong in a given day in your business and if it’s not, then you should be doing more. There are so many things that go wrong in a day that can get you down and say, “Oh, I feel like taking the rest of the day off.” You got to keep tracking or else eventually you’re not going to get anywhere. Listening to great motivational speeches on YouTube …
Joshua: Do you have any you’d recommend? I’m curious, because I like doing that too.
Brian: Independence Day, Bill Pullman that speech. Scent of a Woman, the Al Pacino one when everybody is trying to get them to get the board to accept, I can’t remember exactly what happened, but I just want that speech all the time.
Joshua: What is it?
Brian: Scent of a Woman with Al Pacino. Speech at the end.
Joshua: I apologize for my typing. I’m going to write these down so people can go and check them out.
Brian: No problem. There’s the Wall Street Gordon Gekko. Greed speech.
Joshua: That’s a good one.
Brian: Boiler Room Ben Affleck. You must have, I think there’s three scenes he just comes in and just drills everyone. We have Glengarry Glenn Ross, Alec Baldwin the closing speech ABC, Always Be Closing. Top Gun best of the best speech. And then there’s a bunch more.
Joshua: Got it. That’s awesome, Man. I’m still going to put this in the share notes for people, because I do the same. I don’t remember the one I listened to the other day, but it was like a wake up. Like I told you, in the pre-interview I’m trying to wake up earlier, and it was like a motivational “get your butt out of bed” video. It was really good though. Fired me up, Man. I just dropped down and did my fifty pushups. I was like, “I’m ready to go.”
Brian: I believe that all this Infusionsoft stuff is great, but if you don’t have the mental stamina to get yourself over these humps, you’re dead. Might as well not even get started, because you are not even going to want to start studying what should I do. You have to be motivated. There’s going to be tons of things that knock you down. Either way, your soul. If you can just struck through. By the way, I forgot Rocky. Any of Rocky’s stuff is great. The training scenes.
Joshua: Training? Yeah. Training scenes. I was just going to say. I was listening to Eben Pagan training, and he said something that really blew my mind. I guess it’s so simple. I just hadn’t thought about it. He said, “Thoughts are high leverage items. Like a space shuttle wasn’t created until someone thought about it first, and they’re talking about how …” He was basically saying, “What you allow to happen inside your mind has a dramatic output on your life and your business and so forth.” I think some people might be listening and will go like, “Really? You two are weird, listening to Rocky’s speeches and Glengarry and Boiler Room.” But if that’s what causes me to think stronger thoughts, that’s so important. I have funny little rituals like this, too. A lot of them have to do with just intaking information in a time of the day where I am open to it, which is usually when I first to wake up, and then allowing that motivation to carry me through the day. When I do get that angry customer email or that conversation that you need to have with the employee. Like I can think back to the Boiler Room scene or whatever else and utilize that to motivate me. I think he’s really cool.
Brian: Because the toughest thing, like I said to me is 95% getting over this mental hump. I just got a couple more to go over. This peer group, making sure you have good peer group. Friends. Groups of…you said you were in a mastermind group, so those are great. The other thing that I use is I have a coach that I talk to regularly, sometimes weekly. Whenever I’m stuck. They are not necessarily tell me what to do. They just give me a sec…a different light of looking at it and to know that you’re not in this game alone. They can also focus you. Sometimes you get so focused on what you are doing, you lose the big picture.
They can globally look at your situations saying, “Okay hold on. Where were you a week ago, where you now?” I’m doing pretty good actually. They can keep some perspective. It’s expensive, but it’s worth it because these little distinctions will keep you from let’s say crawling into a little hall works that you want to do sometimes and just give up. You know what I mean? Those are the things that I do to keep myself crawling. To me that’s 95%. Infusionsoft stuff I will get eventually, it’s a question of when. Sometimes I’ll make 15 mistakes. Sometimes it will take 2 mistakes. Sometimes you get it on the first time, but if you can get through those mental humps, then you’re good.
Joshua: That’s good, Man. I really like that. I think we might have already covered it, but I close up these interviews with the success habit. Are there things that you do habitually? Or do you have a morning routine or anything that you do to get you in the prime state.
Brian: I don’t actually have a specific thing. It’s just that I feel when I’m getting part where I want to give up. I just go to these resources and coach. I just believe. The Rocky thing is the number one thing when I’m really upset and really ready to give up. I just watch the Rocky thing. I just think the pig-headed determination. If he can do it, I can do it. He’s a human being, I’m a human being, we both have two arms and two legs, I can do it.
Joshua: That’s great. Actually, I do want to ask you one final question, because you and I had a great talk yesterday. About coaching, you said you’re part of the strategic coach group. I think a lot of people hear this a lot. I’ve been in to the Infusionsoft community for a while and I hear, “Oh, I had this coach, and it’s that coach.” The other thing that you mentioned that they can take this high level perspective and help focus you on what matters. Do you feel like a coach makes you stronger? What is the coach doing for you internally?
Brian: The coach should be able to globally be keeping perspective, because sometimes you get so zoned in on your situation. You do this perspective. They can give you key distinctions. They should be able to know you personally, and sometimes even force you to go against what you thought. Sometimes you get so centered, no this won’t work this can’t work. They say, “No. It can work. This can work. There no such thing as “can’t.” A good coach, they can be stern enough with you and know you well enough to know your weaknesses because everyone has strengths and weaknesses. Knowing those strengths and weaknesses is one of the key to growing your business.
Then exploiting those strengths and weakness to the point where you can actually say, “Okay. These are my strengths, I want to be focused 90% of my day doing this. The other 10% that I’m … The other things that I am bad at, I’m going hire. I’m going to get other people to help me with those things, because they’re not things that I am strong with.” Coaches can focus you that way, keep you focused on things you’re good at, help you get help on the things that you are not good at and then of course, motivation keeping you focused. You don’t get too depressed to the point where you want to quit.
Joshua: No. That’s really good. Brian this has been just such an incredible interview. There were so many great nuggets of wisdom that people can implement into their applications as well as their lives. I really appreciate you coming on the show. If someone wanted to contact you what’s the best way for them to do that? If they have any questions or anything?
Brian: They can email me directly at agent@homepainterstoronto.com. You can email me directly. The other, I have a website, it’s Passionate Brian. Passionatebrian.com.
Joshua: Right on. Brian thank you so much for coming on the show. We’re excited to see what happens as you ride this wave of being a Small Business ICON Award winner. Any time you want to come back on just let us know.
Brian: Absolutely. Thanks so much. I’m glad to be here.
Speaker 2: Thanks for joining us in this episode of Infusioncast. Struggling to embed Infusionsoft web forms in your WordPress website? Head over to Infusioncast.co and download our free WordPress plugin FusionForms. FusionForms allows you to easily embed beautiful Infusionsoft forms in any WordPress website with a simple shortcode. Thanks again for listening, and we’ll talk to you in the next episode.
[/transcript]
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In this Infusioncast episode Joshua Millage interviews Brian Young, owner and president of Home Painters Toronto. In 2012 Brian’s business was almost dying. But in just three years using Infusionsoft he’s grown the company to be dominating his market, and he is the winner of a 2015 Small Business ICON Award. Determination, reputation, and motivation have helped him get massive business growth.
Brian started Home Painters Toronto over 25 years ago when all of his business processes were done manually and pagers were still the best way to contact employees who were working on a job. He made sales by going door to door himself and talking to people about painting their houses. When the internet came into the picture and competitors went online, Brian experienced a long period of declining sales. He was determined to keep going, so he just kept trying harder and harder. But the harder he tried, the less it worked. He felt like his business was dying.
In 2012 Brian started using Infusionsoft, but he struggled with it for the first few months. Then he connected with Kelsey Bratcher, who was the right person to help him learn how to use the software to segment and automate his sales process, and things started to turn around. In just three years he went from begging for leads to having so many prospects that he can choose which ones to work with. His biggest challenge now is keeping up with how rapidly his business is growing!
Since it’s so easy for an unhappy customer to post negative reviews on the internet, maintaining a positive relationship with customers and a good reputation is critical for success. Brian uses Reputation Loop to follow up with his customers once a job is completed to ask for feedback. If there’s ever an unhappy customer, he can address it right away and fix their issue before they post a negative review on the internet. If a customer gives positive feedback, then it automatically encourages them to give a positive review on the top review sites.
It’s important to have great role models to help you stay motivated. Brian likes to watch motivational video clips on YouTube to help him stay in the right frame of mind and be inspired. There are links in the show notes to some of the speeches Brian likes. Working regularly with a business coach is another way he stays focused on what’s important in the business. Having good groups of peers and friends is also key.
Thank you for joining us.
You can connect with Brian and ask him questions by emailing agent@homepainterstoronto.com.
Show Links:
[transcript height=”200px”]
Joshua: Hello, Everyone. Welcome back to another episode of Infusioncast. Today I have the opportunity of interviewing Brian Young. Brian is this Small Business ICON Award winner in 2015. He’s just such just a nice guy, very transparent about how he started with Infusionsoft in his business. I took so many things away from this interview. You actually get some funny take-aways too, and there will be some links on the website at Infusioncast.co/brian-young-determination-reputation-motivation-massive-business-growth. Those takeaways and those value adds I should say are a bunch of links to some YouTube videos that Brian uses to motivate himself. I think you’ll really like him. I’ve actually started watching a few. I have to say, if I’m feeling a little down I don’t know what it is about Rocky but he does fire me back up. I hope you check those at over at Infusioncast.co. Without further ado, let’s get into the interview.
Speaker 2: How the heck do you use Infusionsoft? How do you make it work for you? Welcome to Infusioncast. The only podcast that shows you the tricks of the trade and teaches you how to be an Infusionsoft expert. Join your host Joshua Millage as he sits down with Infusionsoft pros to hear their stories and experiences making Infusionsoft work for them. Ready? Here’s Joshua.
Joshua: Hello, Everyone. Welcome back to another episode of Infusioncast where we interview Infusionsoft experts so that you can become an Infusionsoft expert. My guest today is Brian Young. Brian is the owner and president of Home Painters Toronto and the 2015 Small Business ICON Award winner. Brian, welcome to the show.
Brian: Thanks very much for having me. It’s a pleasure.
Joshua: I’m excited. Today I got to experience your presentation at ICON, and I found it really inspiring and just helpful at so many different levels. I’m honored that you have decided to jump on and do an Infusioncast interview. I’m curious. Let’s go back in time to your days before Infusionsoft. What did your business look like? How was your life before you learned about marketing automation and automation in general?
Brian: Actually, I started back in 1987, which was a long time ago – 25 years roughly. Back then, there’s absolutely no automation. Everything was manual, face to face, no cell phones. Pager was the best way to contact each other if you can imagine, digital pagers. Everything was manual, that’s how we started, and that’s how I got trained. I was used to that, door to door sales, in your face marketing, no internet, no emails. That’s what I was used to. I was trained that way and I was pretty much working out that way for a good 15 years before the internet came to play. That was how I ran my business before Infusionsoft.
Joshua: Wow. How did you find it, Infusionsoft?
Brian: I found that actually there was…I went through a long period of declining sales like others said the internet eventually took over my business. I was stubborn, and I was good at what I did, so I just kept doing what I was doing, but over time over the years this wasn’t working. I would just keep trying harder and harder. The harder I tried, the less it worked. Every year I felt that happening. It led up to the point where it was declining sales, struggling sales, my business was dying. I had to do something. I didn’t know what to do but I had to do something. That was when I basically hired a coach, and he introduced me to Infusionsoft. Finally on my website, a bunch of my processes went online and did a lot of our marketing that way. That’s how we change. Pretty much the last three years that’s what it’s been.
Joshua: That’s amazing. Do you use Infusionsoft to automate everything if you focus primarily on the marketing side of things? Or do you use it for internal processes, too?
Brian: We’re working on the internal part remarketing we try that’s where we started to market to our clients how they opted in to our website. How we would let’s say, segregate each client like which category we’ve put them in. Once we quote them then we’ll put them in a further category. That’s how we could automate how we could market to those types of clients as well. Basically, it’s the marketing was the main part and working on the other parts, as we speak actually, we’re just having a meeting about some things that were having trouble with. Because I’m building my business really rapidly – roughly 20 to 30% a year. When you are expanding that fast, everything’s changing on a daily/weekly basis, like you’re hiring more employees. Every weekend and every month we’ll have new problems, or new challenges we call it.
Joshua: I can imagine.
Brian: That’s the challenges. It’s keeping up with the business, and because we’ve marketed our business in the past three years, like we have so much business keeping up with it is the biggest challenge. That’s been pretty amazing. Whereas before, I was like begging for every lead, literally begging. I was like, “Can I quote your house? Please let me quote your house.” I won’t force you doing anything you don’t want. Now I’m trying not to turn away leads, but I’m finding them at the point where there has to be a breaking point.
Joshua: Let’s dive deep into that actually. What is the journey been from begging for leads to turning away leads? What is some of the…I guess if you could look at that process from a macro view and say do an 80-20 on it and say these are the 20% of things that I did that I had 80% of the results, in terms of figuring out lead gen, because you what, Brian? I’ll be honest. I struggle with that. I think every entrepreneur at some point in their life cycle of growing a company, they get from point A to point B based on say, referrals. That groom to this stage, and then they’re sitting there like, I can’t seem to grow just off of this one source of leads anymore. How do I do lead gen with paid traffic or whatever else? I’d love for you to give some insight and how that worked for your company.
Brian: Like I said, I was the one man show. I did everything myself before Infusionsoft. It was all door to door. I was the only gold collar in my company, and so I was doing all of my own sales. Everything was manual, physical. I’d have to meet the client, write up the quotes physically with handwriting. Sell them, call them back. I had to do all the callbacks myself. I did everything myself. Since Infusionsoft, we’ve got a website. We actually had pay-per-click but we turned it off, because I just have too many leads to even think about dealing with pay-per-click leads now. We’re one of the top rated painting companies on the Internet if you Google Toronto painters, you’ll find us everywhere. If you see our reviews, they’re pretty stellar.
We’ve really worked on our business itself to make the client experience as great as possible. It’s always a work in process of course, but because of the internet, you’re exposed in every way. You go basically out of hand, take care of every type of client and the ones you can’t handle you have to put them aside and realize, “Okay. This is a client I can’t handle, so It’s probably best that we didn’t do business.” Then the clients that you could take on, you have to treat every client as if they’re all gold and try to of course get 10 out of 10 ratings. Home Starter is our biggest lead source. Online reviews, improving your business to the point where it’s almost flawless. There’s no such thing as flawless, but you know what I’m saying. The customer experience is almost flawless, taking care of every type of client that you can take on. What else?
Basically our website like I said, organically where I think we’re 1, 2, or 3 on any pretty much any Google search to do with Toronto painters and when I would expanding our regions. We’re at the point where like okay we’ve pretty much saturated this region so let’s go to this region. I don’t know what’s next, basically franchising, but we’ve mastered that part of our marketing. We’re trying to expand that to different regions. We’re actually in the process of getting two other websites going as well that are related to painting, but painting services and commercial services we haven’t even topped those markets. There’s so many different…it’s like I got a template of how to market for painting in Toronto. Now, I figure I can duplicate that and find different parts of painting around Toronto and even a different region in Toronto, so that’s why I think the sky is the limit. We’re growing 20 to 30% a year, and just trying to keep up with sales is a challenge.
Joshua: Yeah. Absolutely. Though that’s a good problem to have for sure.
Brian: Yeah, thanks.
Joshua: When you say you’ve really focused in on a customer experience, help me understand that a little bit too, because I think painting is you come, you bid, you quote, you come with the paint, you paint it and you leave. How do you make it a real solid connection where someone would be willing to go online and review something for you?
Brian: Again, that’s a big … That’s something we’re working on regularly. What we do in business 25 years before infusionsoft that was I had in my head what I thought the customer needed. Since Infusionsoft now we’re online works both everything customer service, I don’t want to be negative but they go online let say, “Okay. I found” it’ll pick you apart in every different way. I found thousand of ways of handling every one of those issues, and we would make list of things clients would complain about or they’d potentially complain about. We’ve tried to find every way to handle a problem whether be setting their expectations promptly saying, “Okay. This is what we can do, this is what we can’t do. Are you okay with that?” To be an example.
Then the other way would be, just making sure all of your employees and all your managers…like since joining Infusionsoft, I’ve hired eight staff, and we’ve grown our subcontractors from about 4-6 to about over 25. Making sure everyone is all on the same page and making sure that everyone is accountable. That’s it. That’s a bit of a challenged but it’s something that you can do if you just really put your mind to it. Using for example, Infusionsoft, have your systems like really ironclad so every step of the process is documented. Because I’m trying to manage 25 people through paper is near impossible. Then your clients, that’s the other thing is updating them properly. Automating that part of the process while you are doing the job.
At the end of the job, we use Reputation Loop to follow up. A lot of times I would personally want to meet every client, but now there are so many clients I can’t meet almost any of them. We use Reputation Loop now to follow up. Once the job is done, we ask their feedback and lot of time the production manager can’t be there. The form just doesn’t have the sign off sheets so we’ll use Reputation Loop is the way we’ve screened them up if they’re happy or not. If they are not happy in any way, we address it right away. We have people, I dispatch them right away within hours. Someone will be out there to take care of the client and taken care all of their needs.
Joshua: That’s great. What’s Reputation Loop? I’m not really familiar with that service.
Brian: Oh sorry. It’s basically a middle person between us and our client going online and writing something good or bad. What it does, it sends out a questionnaire basically ask them how their experience was, and then if their experience was good then it automatically encourages them to go to our top review sites which in our case is Home Stars, Google Places and write a review. If they are not happy, we’ve only have it for about 5, 6 months now. If they are not happy, then we can catch it right away then call them and say, “We didn’t know that was happening, can we come by and fix it up for you? Or can we offer some kind of a discount? We didn’t realize that was the case.”
Joshua: That’s really a cool service. Since you just plug that into your fulfillment, processes that at the end there, and then they’ll take care of that for you.
Brian: Yeah, exactly because before I was guessing, it was random. Like one customer would complain, I’d no idea they complained. They will go online, and they will complain. I have no idea. Can I fix it for you? Access of a bit of a middle man, so I can catch it before something happens and take care of it right away as opposed to just hoping that everything went well.
Joshua: Right. Absolutely. Well Bryan, let’s get tactical for the beginners and the audience. If you could recommend them like what area to start with their … Maybe it’s where you started. What would that be? Because Infusionsoft can do so many incredible things. It really can automate a business end to end. Depending on the business model of course, but I’ve seen it happen. I think people get it and they’re like, “Wow, I’ve got this amazing power tool. I don’t know where to begin with.” Where would you tell people to start?
Brian: The first thing is that I just want to start off by saying I was not an internet marker. I didn’t have a smartphone since 2012. I’m not a technology guy. One of my things at Infusioncon was if a guy like me can figure this thing out at all to certain degree, everyone in this crowd should be able to. I believe that if you have the heart and that you are willing to learn and be a student, you can pretty much do anything you want in your business. As long as you are willing to pay the price. Be a student of Infusionsoft or automation in general. Start with that. In terms of what specifically we did. Kelsey Bratcher is my ICP, and he basically when he first got Infusionsoft, that was … I was a mess, I didn’t know what was going on. I got set up. Unfortunately the set up wasn’t very user friendly for me. Like I said, I’m not a technology guy. I was struggling for about 3 or 4 months.
I was almost ready to quit. Like I said, “This is just impossible. This isn’t going to work.” Fortunately, I met Kelsey, it was an amazing thing. It was a random thing. I just met him at some men’s group seminar. I wasn’t on a marketplace or anything. I told them I was having a problems with it. He actually works there so he said, “Well, listen. Let me help you out. I wouldn’t charge you for it.” Yeah, sure. Long story short, first thing we did was we broke my sales process from the start to the end. We segmented every different way and part of the way. I didn’t know what sales process was at first. I was like, “Well, I will just go out knock on the door.” Time comes to a website and then I ask them, “Okay, what do you want then?” We broke it down from sales to sales stage and that took roughly not even a week. We had I think 6 stages or something like that. Now, since then, we’ve broken it down further. That’s another story I’ll explain later.
Joshua: Real quick question, Brian. When you say break it down, do you mean the door knocking thing phase and then the qualification phase. That sort of thing?
Brian: Yes, exactly. I don’t knock on doors anymore. The client came to our website, they will qualify in, and then I would decide whether I want to take the lead or not, and if I don’t then I would qualify that lead. That would be an example of one stage, we call it new leads. Then if they do want the lead, then we open up an opportunity it’s called, “Who wants quote?” So we put them in that stage. That would be the second stage. Then the third stage would be appointment set. We would break this process down like that and in these little chunks. In that way, I could make sense of it and make a duplicate to the point where I can actually create content, meaningful content to nurture each client through each stage.
If they didn’t qualify or if they ended up dropping out, they would go of course to long term nurture, and then we would find the reason why they decided not to opt that we would ask questionnaire. We do that now. Then we would develop different follow up sequences based on their reason, because I’ve found out there was roughly, I think 6 reasons why they want to go with us. Too much, cost too much, not good time a year, or something like that. Once we’ve got the information, we could follow up with them through nurturing them and saying, “Well, if it’s not this time of year, when would be a good time, or do you realize it summer’s the time to paint, we only have 4 months to paint.” That’s where we would nurture the client back into a lead that would want to buy from us potentially.
Joshua: That’s huge. That is so cool. It’s just taking what we’re doing and breaking it down and getting microscopic about each and every phase. Then I feel like you ask really good questions. I just picked up on them, too. What is their reasoning? Oh, this is their reasoning. Okay, this is how I’m going to speak to that reason. If it’s cost or whatever. That’s brilliant, Brian. Thank you for sharing that.
Brian: No problem. By the way, like I said, we didn’t start of that detailed. It was very general and then over the past three years we’ve tweaked it out to I think 12 to 13 stages. If you are feeling overwhelmed, “How am I going to break this down?” I didn’t realize that I had a process. That what I was going through at that time. We just broke it down in the main stages. Okay, I’m not the client. Decided if they wanted a quote, give them a quote, follow it up, and then do we both the jobs. That was like 5 or 6 stages. Like I said, since then, we’ve broken it down into 12 or 13 stages. Start off small, you’ll find through working in your business. Okay, I need a couple of more stages here. I need to. This is to make clients in this one stage they’re all being jumbled in this one category. There’s actually 3 different types of clients here. You know what I’m saying
Joshua: You segment them out?
Brian: Exactly.
Joshua: That’s really good. I did that recently with a completely different scenario. I’m selling my learning management system plugin online. I just segmented people based on whether or not they’re registered for a webinar. If they attended the webinar, if they didn’t attend and spoke to them accordingly. It was like before I did that, I had one or two conversions. Afterwards, I had 20 to 30 conversions. It was just as little details. The furious successes is a real thing and sometimes that furious successes like well it wouldn’t really matter if you talk to people in that detailed manner or specifically about their needs. You can be general. It’ll be fine. It really does change things dramatically. When you speak to people’s needs.
Brian: It does, because when you’re selling as a sales person and someone comes to you and says, “We don’t want to do it until next year.” Okay, then you’ll say, “Okay. Is there any reason why next year as opposed to this year?” Then they’ll say something like, “Well my wife, whatever. She’s not into it.” If you can actually talk to the customer through the automation way, that’s the ultimate goal I would think. Then you can sell to that client in that round rather than selling them on something like well, it’s too expensive. Why it’s too expensive? Did you get other quotes? Do they have worker’s comp? Do they have general liability insurance? Were their painters background checked? Do they have a 95% satisfaction rating on Home Stars? Do they check their online reviews? You sell them in a those different ways or market to them then you’re obviously going to be a lot more successful than if you just do a general email. It makes more sense to the client, too. They actually do respond as a postage. They can tell when it’s just a generic email.
Joshua: They can. It has more soul to it. That’s really good Brian. That’s really good. You started using Infusionsoft. How long were you an Infusionsoft user before this last ICON win?
Brian: I think in February of 2012 was when I bought it in terms of actually … I think there was 2 months or 3 months of struggle. Like I said, I’m not doing anything. Then April is when I met Kelsey. That’s when we really like geared it up and started making things happen. It started with little wins. It wasn’t like we just threw out an email blast to every one of my clients and made millions of dollars. Like I said, breaking the process down. Just organizing my business. Systemizing everything and as much as possible least of the time. That really allowed me to even hire certain people. Saying, “Okay, well. There’s like a hundred and fifty leads in this one stage, are you going to get someone to call these people back?” Because I didn’t have the time with all the expanding and marketing that we’re doing, I just don’t have time. I could actually hire certain people for different processes for different part of the way.
I could actually turn this more into … more about franchise-type thing where I could make it more duplicatable. That was the other thing it helped me do was help me organize my business not just get more business. Organize the clients partly so I could hire the right people to take care of certain stages. There are certain people that are just that’s their job to call these people back in the stage. There’s other jobs in progress to make sure the jobs is doing okay. There’s different ways of organize your business. Did that answer your question a little bit?
Joshua: Yeah. That totally did. That really helps.
Brian: Like I said, it was started small. Little wins turn into bigger wins. Nurturing the client to each stage. Then our biggest win I think was in our first year, we finally threw out an email blast, and we got seventy thousand dollar response rate in less than 24 hours. It blew my mind . This is the slowest time of the year. I think it’s in December. They want us to paint for Christmas. I was like, “Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.” I think I offered a free TV for any job over $2,500. That’s the other thing, Infusionsoft allowed me to track my lead sources so I could see where I’m spending my money. Which ones are costing me money and more producing and which ones weren’t. I could figure out, “Okay. This cost me $250/lead.” The colored TV cost me $220, it’s actually saving me money by giving away a free TV for this month’s business.
Joshua: That’s pretty cool.
Brian: Yeah, exactly. It allowed me to organize my business lead source-wise so I could figure out which ones were making me money or not, so I could know which ones to concentrate on them, which ones to get rid of.
Joshua: That is a beautiful thing. I love that. That is really cool. What would you tell a listener or share with a listener on what it takes to become an ICON, Small Business ICON Award winner? Because I know there’s a lot of people going, “Well, how do you do that?”
Brian: I applied actually that first year, was it in 2013. They did not accept my applications. If I had to say one thing just keep applying until they accept you.
Joshua: Persistence beats all resistance is what I’ve been told.
Brian: I would say the main thing for me, I’m definitely not the smartest online guy by any means. I have incredible amount of passion towards my business and towards making my business better. It doesn’t matter who you are, what business you’re in, how much money are you making, whatever or how much money you’re not making. If you have passion you just keep, I call it pig-headed determination. If you’re just relentless and finding ways to fix issues in your business, don’t let things knock you down. Develop some fix towards that.
Then you can pretty much handle everything. I must have made so many hundreds and thousands of mistakes, and I just didn’t care. I’ll just say, “Okay, how do we fix it?” You just keep trying until something works. Even Infusioncon, I just kept applying and say, “Well, I’m just going to keep applying until they accept me.”
Joshua: I love that.
Brian: I would just say keep trying, pig-headed determination, don’t give up and there is a way. Just look at my profile itself. If this guy can do it, and if he didn’t even have a smart phone before 2012, then there’s no excuse I think of – anyone can pretty much do it.
Joshua: That’s amazing. Let’s get into some of the soft skills here, because that’s very inspiring to me, that pig-headed determination. How do you cultivate that? Do you have any habits or rituals or things to build that confidence, because I think that’s one thing as I talk to entrepreneurs. The ones that I find that are really growing fast or have done a really good job. They just have this confidence. This like you said, this determination just to continue to go, and nothing is really, when a problem arises they almost get excited about how to solve it. They are not concerned. They don’t waste a lot of energy with the mistakes that they’ve made. They’re just under the understanding that mistakes will happen. It’s part of life, so what do we do when the mistakes happen? How do we get around the obstacle in the road? What are some other things you do so you can keep that mindset strong?
Brian: There’s a lot of things. Everyone has their own way of motivating their selves and keep getting up when they’re kicked down. Keep going through. Keep dropping through. I was talking to one of my other interviews. Basically, I broke down it into 5 different steps. First thing is to have great role models. For example, I watch Rocky all the time. If you just YouTube certain parts of Rocky, the sequel, like there are so many motivational things there. I love watching motivational speeches on YouTube because there are so many things that go wrong in a given day in your business and if it’s not, then you should be doing more. There are so many things that go wrong in a day that can get you down and say, “Oh, I feel like taking the rest of the day off.” You got to keep tracking or else eventually you’re not going to get anywhere. Listening to great motivational speeches on YouTube …
Joshua: Do you have any you’d recommend? I’m curious, because I like doing that too.
Brian: Independence Day, Bill Pullman that speech. Scent of a Woman, the Al Pacino one when everybody is trying to get them to get the board to accept, I can’t remember exactly what happened, but I just want that speech all the time.
Joshua: What is it?
Brian: Scent of a Woman with Al Pacino. Speech at the end.
Joshua: I apologize for my typing. I’m going to write these down so people can go and check them out.
Brian: No problem. There’s the Wall Street Gordon Gekko. Greed speech.
Joshua: That’s a good one.
Brian: Boiler Room Ben Affleck. You must have, I think there’s three scenes he just comes in and just drills everyone. We have Glengarry Glenn Ross, Alec Baldwin the closing speech ABC, Always Be Closing. Top Gun best of the best speech. And then there’s a bunch more.
Joshua: Got it. That’s awesome, Man. I’m still going to put this in the share notes for people, because I do the same. I don’t remember the one I listened to the other day, but it was like a wake up. Like I told you, in the pre-interview I’m trying to wake up earlier, and it was like a motivational “get your butt out of bed” video. It was really good though. Fired me up, Man. I just dropped down and did my fifty pushups. I was like, “I’m ready to go.”
Brian: I believe that all this Infusionsoft stuff is great, but if you don’t have the mental stamina to get yourself over these humps, you’re dead. Might as well not even get started, because you are not even going to want to start studying what should I do. You have to be motivated. There’s going to be tons of things that knock you down. Either way, your soul. If you can just struck through. By the way, I forgot Rocky. Any of Rocky’s stuff is great. The training scenes.
Joshua: Training? Yeah. Training scenes. I was just going to say. I was listening to Eben Pagan training, and he said something that really blew my mind. I guess it’s so simple. I just hadn’t thought about it. He said, “Thoughts are high leverage items. Like a space shuttle wasn’t created until someone thought about it first, and they’re talking about how …” He was basically saying, “What you allow to happen inside your mind has a dramatic output on your life and your business and so forth.” I think some people might be listening and will go like, “Really? You two are weird, listening to Rocky’s speeches and Glengarry and Boiler Room.” But if that’s what causes me to think stronger thoughts, that’s so important. I have funny little rituals like this, too. A lot of them have to do with just intaking information in a time of the day where I am open to it, which is usually when I first to wake up, and then allowing that motivation to carry me through the day. When I do get that angry customer email or that conversation that you need to have with the employee. Like I can think back to the Boiler Room scene or whatever else and utilize that to motivate me. I think he’s really cool.
Brian: Because the toughest thing, like I said to me is 95% getting over this mental hump. I just got a couple more to go over. This peer group, making sure you have good peer group. Friends. Groups of…you said you were in a mastermind group, so those are great. The other thing that I use is I have a coach that I talk to regularly, sometimes weekly. Whenever I’m stuck. They are not necessarily tell me what to do. They just give me a sec…a different light of looking at it and to know that you’re not in this game alone. They can also focus you. Sometimes you get so focused on what you are doing, you lose the big picture.
They can globally look at your situations saying, “Okay hold on. Where were you a week ago, where you now?” I’m doing pretty good actually. They can keep some perspective. It’s expensive, but it’s worth it because these little distinctions will keep you from let’s say crawling into a little hall works that you want to do sometimes and just give up. You know what I mean? Those are the things that I do to keep myself crawling. To me that’s 95%. Infusionsoft stuff I will get eventually, it’s a question of when. Sometimes I’ll make 15 mistakes. Sometimes it will take 2 mistakes. Sometimes you get it on the first time, but if you can get through those mental humps, then you’re good.
Joshua: That’s good, Man. I really like that. I think we might have already covered it, but I close up these interviews with the success habit. Are there things that you do habitually? Or do you have a morning routine or anything that you do to get you in the prime state.
Brian: I don’t actually have a specific thing. It’s just that I feel when I’m getting part where I want to give up. I just go to these resources and coach. I just believe. The Rocky thing is the number one thing when I’m really upset and really ready to give up. I just watch the Rocky thing. I just think the pig-headed determination. If he can do it, I can do it. He’s a human being, I’m a human being, we both have two arms and two legs, I can do it.
Joshua: That’s great. Actually, I do want to ask you one final question, because you and I had a great talk yesterday. About coaching, you said you’re part of the strategic coach group. I think a lot of people hear this a lot. I’ve been in to the Infusionsoft community for a while and I hear, “Oh, I had this coach, and it’s that coach.” The other thing that you mentioned that they can take this high level perspective and help focus you on what matters. Do you feel like a coach makes you stronger? What is the coach doing for you internally?
Brian: The coach should be able to globally be keeping perspective, because sometimes you get so zoned in on your situation. You do this perspective. They can give you key distinctions. They should be able to know you personally, and sometimes even force you to go against what you thought. Sometimes you get so centered, no this won’t work this can’t work. They say, “No. It can work. This can work. There no such thing as “can’t.” A good coach, they can be stern enough with you and know you well enough to know your weaknesses because everyone has strengths and weaknesses. Knowing those strengths and weaknesses is one of the key to growing your business.
Then exploiting those strengths and weakness to the point where you can actually say, “Okay. These are my strengths, I want to be focused 90% of my day doing this. The other 10% that I’m … The other things that I am bad at, I’m going hire. I’m going to get other people to help me with those things, because they’re not things that I am strong with.” Coaches can focus you that way, keep you focused on things you’re good at, help you get help on the things that you are not good at and then of course, motivation keeping you focused. You don’t get too depressed to the point where you want to quit.
Joshua: No. That’s really good. Brian this has been just such an incredible interview. There were so many great nuggets of wisdom that people can implement into their applications as well as their lives. I really appreciate you coming on the show. If someone wanted to contact you what’s the best way for them to do that? If they have any questions or anything?
Brian: They can email me directly at agent@homepainterstoronto.com. You can email me directly. The other, I have a website, it’s Passionate Brian. Passionatebrian.com.
Joshua: Right on. Brian thank you so much for coming on the show. We’re excited to see what happens as you ride this wave of being a Small Business ICON Award winner. Any time you want to come back on just let us know.
Brian: Absolutely. Thanks so much. I’m glad to be here.
Speaker 2: Thanks for joining us in this episode of Infusioncast. Struggling to embed Infusionsoft web forms in your WordPress website? Head over to Infusioncast.co and download our free WordPress plugin FusionForms. FusionForms allows you to easily embed beautiful Infusionsoft forms in any WordPress website with a simple shortcode. Thanks again for listening, and we’ll talk to you in the next episode.
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The post Brian Young: Determination, Reputation, & Motivation for Massive Business Growth appeared first on Infusioncast.
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