Business Growth Secrets: How to Scale Your Business with Proven Sales Systems with Doug Brown

Business Growth Secrets, how to scale your business with Proven Sale Systems. Welcome to Biz Bites for Thought Leaders, the podcast where we deliver actionable insights to help you grow your business. I’m your host, Anthony Perl, from Podcasts Done for You. In today’s episode, I’m joined by Doug C Brown, who is the host of the CEO Sales Strategies Podcast, and he’s a business growth expert who specializes in helping business owners.

Implement proven sales systems that drive exceptional growth. In this episode, you are going to discover the crucial mistakes that prevent business growth, how to build scalable sales systems that work practical strategies to increase your revenue without. Burning out an important thing there. There’s a lot we’re gonna unpack and some great stories with Doug who has bought and sold, I believe 37 businesses in his time.

He’s clicked over a billion dollars in sales. He’s someone you want to listen to. So let’s get into this episode of Biz Bites for Thought Leaders.

Hello everyone, and welcome to another episode of Biz Bites for Thought Leaders and continuing our tradition of going all over the world. We’re hitting over to New Hampshire and I welcome Doug C Brown to the program. Welcome, Doug.

Hey, Anthony, thanks so much for having me here. I’m very grateful to be here.

Ah, it’s an absolute pleasure to have you here and I’m gonna get you to introduce yourself and we are just having a little bit of a laugh off air, weren’t we, about the fact that Doug Brown is is not an uncommon name. So we’ve got you as Doug c so that way we make sure you stand out. Tell us a little bit about you and your story.

I I started actually working at the age of three from my dad. In his business. Wow. Yeah. All my brothers did the same thing. We all slept not slept. We swept floors and didn’t sleep

on them, just swept them.

I’m sure maybe when I got tired I probably did. I did. I don’t remember. But.

Yeah, I was sweeping floors at age three. By the time we were six, they actually started helping us learn how to sell. They were putting us in front of clients and people were helping us out, with the orders and things like that. I can only imagine, back then I wish I had an in a sample of what my order sheets looked like back then, but.

We were and we worked with my dad for the most part. I worked with him until I was about 19 years old until I went into the military. And then I always had side businesses all the way through his businesses and through the military and through college or university, as some people call it, in the different parts of the world.

Over my life, I’ve actually built we’re on our 37th business at this point. Wow. So not all have succeeded. Some have some have broken even some have made some money and some have made a lot of money and we’ve lost a lot of money at times at, too. Got a fair amount of experience in doing that type of process.

But that’s my, kinda my business life. And, married, I have two kids and and it was interesting, lots of Doug Browns. We talk about Doug Brown, who’s a famous hockey player. I love hockey and music and a few other things. Funny today, ha, I thought I was talking to a, he was a drummer in a band.

And a kind of a. Famous band here in the United States and we were talking about me and he goes, are you Doug Brown that lives in Gloucester? And I’m like, no, that’s the other Doug Brown musician. So that’s why I have the C in there. It differentiates me.

Does the C actually stand for something or you just liked it?

Oh, I always say it’s charming, ’cause people get a little laugh out of it. But actually it’s Charles, it’s my middle industry, Charles. My mother was gonna name me Charlie Brown, not my father wanted to name me Charles Douglas Brown ’cause he thought it was distinguished. But my mother said, I’m not having a son named Charlie Brown.

There’s enough, challenges in the world. And I thank her for the best. Yes.

That would’ve been a hard one to have lived up to. Yeah. It’s interesting isn’t it, because there are of course, plenty of actors who famously put an initial there for similar reasons to you have that there’s already someone with a similar name and they put it in there, and that doesn’t actually stand for something.

I, I, if I’m not mistaken, Michael J. Fox, I don’t believe the J actually stands for anything. Oh, really? Yeah. I didn’t know that. The sound of it. Yeah. So there you go. A little bit of trivia to start us off.

Hey you know what? We might go on jeopardy someday and the show here and make some money.

Let’s hope so. Let’s hope so. Make some money is good. Speaking of making some money and as you said you’ve had a lot of businesses, which in of itself is interesting. We might come back to that, but tell me about the current business, because your focus is really, and the reason we are talking today is largely around giving CEO strategies to succeed and to grow.

Yeah. Yeah. So I mean in that, so I have over a, I think we’re over a billion dollars now in, in sales. We just added our next four, 4 million, I think that kicked us over the billion, which is nice. Yeah. Congratulations. That’s huge. Oh yeah, thanks. Yeah, it’s and I haven’t, I have another company that we started just recently.

It’s actually the insurance business. Life insurance and health insurance, which is. Super crazy here in the United States. And I love it. It’s I feel like I’ve come home ’cause of the, all the accumulation of everything I’ve done over the years. I still have the software business that’s called The Bit No, which is a automated, proactive follow-up system and and I still occasionally am helping mostly.

Consultants and some companies in the revenue growth aspect of it too. But I use a lot of that now going into the new business. Because we’re building agents and agencies and things like that within the company.

It’s, it’s a huge thing these days to, you talk about, automations, you talk about getting in and out of businesses, like that sort of stuff.

It’s almost taken for granted that people are gonna do that, but it’s not so easy to do that. And you’ve clearly had lots of experience in doing that, that in of itself is a huge thing.

Yeah. And it, the, you can get experience from reading and listening to others and, listening to podcasts like we’re doing and those type of things.

And I still do a lot of that and I know, I have people that I hang out with that are. They literally have billions of dollars, in the bank type people, they’re constantly learning. But I think the, nothing really, it, I shouldn’t say it this way, learning a hard lesson and learning it from YouTube versus learning it from your own bank account, being drained out.

It’s a lot, it’s a nicer play, sometimes those hard lessons that we learn are really not. They’re not failures, they’re just hard lessons. And that’s where we as human beings, we go, oh no. Anytime I have a GI get into one of those places. Andrew, I always remember Ted Turner, I had a a network over here called TNT Turner network television.

Yes. And at one time, he was losing $20 million a day. Wow. And I was like, first time I heard that I was like, all right, I don’t have problems. We just lost a, half million or whatever. And I’m like crying over it. He’s losing $20 million a day. And the thing about business is very fair, but it’s also very very clear about its rules.

It’s money out. Money in equals loss, break even profit. Really that’s business when it comes down to it.

It, yeah it’s simple, but it’s complicated of course, isn’t it? That’s the thing is that and I’m fascinated by the fact that you’ve had so many different businesses because the one thing that it does teach you is you have to be attuned to what the audience wants.

Yeah. I think that’s where a lot of businesses fall over because they go in with an idea and they go. I’m going to do this, but they haven’t actually engaged with an audience to find out if that’s what they want and they’re not adapting necessarily as they go along the way to what changes may happen and if that’s gonna be a lesson that you would’ve learn many times over.

Yeah, that was a hard, that is the number one thing really, when it comes down to when we’re starting a new business. Anybody listening, if you have not engaged your audience to find out, not if they like the idea, but actually if they’ll pay you ahead of time. For rolling out your idea. I think about four times more about actually rolling that business out until you can get them to pay for the actual idea.

And ’cause a lot of people will tell people, oh, that’s a great idea. And Andrew, Bob, Mary, Josh, whoever. Diane? That’s an amazing idea. I love that idea. And then we as entrepreneurs think, oh people are saying yes, but you and I both know Anthony, that if they don’t pay for it, it doesn’t mean that the business is gonna survive.

So that’s, it’s, I have made this mistake more times than I care to count, quite frankly, because we as entrepreneurs always go, oh, my idea is amazing. And. And I disagree with Steve Jobs. Just tell him what you’re gonna give him and the market we’ll buy. I think he got lucky, quite frankly, and had good timing.

You all you jobs people out there, please don’t send hate mail to myself or Anthony. But the, my experience in business is exactly what you’re saying. You wanna figure out whether you have an audience first and. ’cause there’s a lot of amazing products and services in the entrepreneurial graveyard because they just can’t sell ’em.

I had a a gentleman I talked to he was, came to me and his business was almost on the verge of going outta business. And Anthony, he invented a suit that if a paraplegic put it on, somebody who couldn’t walk hands, legs, didn’t move. They literally got up and could walk across the room and I was like, whoa, this is an amazing product.

But couldn’t sell it. He just was way ahead of his time. He just could not sell this product. I actually know there’s a company here in the United States. It’s worldwide now. It’s Starbucks. I actually know somebody who tried to do the exact model of Starbucks 11 years prior to Starbucks being founded and complete.

It was like, if you looked at the business, they were identical, but one of them tried to start it in the east coast of the United States, which failed and one of ’em started it in the west coast of the United States, which is today’s Starbucks. That’s a great point you bring up.

The second great point is. You gotta roll with the changes because if you don’t, your audience sometimes changes, the needs change, technology changes, inflation, recession, great economies, real estate up, down, all kinds of things happen. And if we don’t roll with that and understand and AI is a good example of that today.

And if you, if we’re not rolling with AI today. We are gonna have some challenges in, in almost every industry. I don’t know about ’em all, but certainly the many businesses are gonna be affected by ai. If you’re a, a solo entrepreneur and you’re a freelancer today, and you and AI can do what you’re doing, if you’re a graphics designer, you might survive it, but your clientele’s gonna change.

Yeah. And the way you operate is definitely going to change. You just, you were just talking about the innovation there and it made me recall a, an old gag from a comedian, Victor Borger, who you might have remembered from. Yeah. Long time back. And he has this little sketch where he talks about, my uncle invented the soft drink.

He tried something and he called it one up, didn’t work, tried two up, didn’t work. 3, 4, 5, 6, tried six up. Didn’t work, gave up. Little did he know how close he came

and someone else invented seven up and here we are. So it’s ex

Exactly. And I think, but that’s the truth is that you have to keep innovating in business.

And just because there are so many stories out there of businesses who had an idea and who. Failed or didn’t get the support. Famously that’s the Walt Disney story is that I think it was something like 34 banks or something of that nature that rejected rejected him before one said Yes.

And so there’s a, there is that’s the hard thing we, we talked about before, is that you have to be in touch with your audience and be, and, be as assured that’s, that what you’re gonna provide is something that they will want and need. Yeah. And then you have to be stubborn enough to keep pushing and going forward if you truly believe in it, because sometimes you’re going to get knocked back and it might happen several times.

You mentioned Walt Disney the ATM that we all, we don’t even think about. We put our card in the machine to get our money if we want to today, that took about, I think, 13 or 14 years for it to actually take hold because people thought it was gonna steal their money and eat it.

And there’s a lot. I remember I was born in 1962, feeling a little old when I say that, but I was born in 1962 and I remember when I was a kid, a child they were talking about electric cars, but people were. Vehemently opposed to even talking about it. So they used to say things like, I’m not driving a golf cart around.

I’m not doing that. Here we are in, 2025 and, government subsidies are being handed out for people who are buying, and driving. You got, Tesla is a pretty good sized company. You got others out there. The electric car is, becoming more of the mainstay at this point.

So certainly hybrid cars are so everything changes and you don’t wanna be caught, saying I learned how to repair that steam engine and I’ve got a job for life, because that doesn’t always happen and neither does your business. There are all kinds of just the nature of the a, the, the atom, is constantly changing.

And so we must, as you were saying, we’ve gotta be able to change with it. If we don’t, there, there are plenty of things. Some of you are probably old enough to remember the fax machine. I can tell you I have two daughters and they were like the heck is a fax machine, right? When there are kids who don’t remember a time without a cell phone tethered to their body.

And or learning. And if you look at today, you gotta use apps. You can, you can’t even do business some with some companies unless you have an app on your phone. And when I was growing up, the phone had a cord and.

Yeah. And it’s amazing how much it’s changed, just as you were speaking there, I was just thinking about, the fax machine. I remember when it came and I remember when it left, yeah. CDs were the same. There. There’s technology like that, and you’re right, the phone has changed so much. I, I used to not leave the house without a wallet.

I can’t remember the last time I had a wallet in my pocket.

Yes.

Why do I need it? I’ve got a phone. Yes. It’s things change and the, there is a generations that don’t remember what it was like before.

That’s one of the reasons that we started the insurance business, because insurance is not gonna go away.

It’s, it’s it might change form, but, we’ll roll with that and, it’s a great long-term business and. We all, we’ve all fall pre. There was a, when the automobile came in, they didn’t think it was gonna make it. People didn’t think, they didn’t think the horse was ever gonna get replaced.

When television came in, they didn’t think it was ever going to outdo. Radio television, I think got caught. They didn’t think that streaming was actually going to take over. The movie theaters or the, the TV itself to pay for television, my goodness. Like people now are paying for television.

We never paid for television. It was free. So it, it’s unless you’re

in the uk the UK by the way have been paying for television forever. There’s always been a tax to, or a levy that they have to pay every year for for licensing, for television, for free to Airtel free to air television.

Really? I, that’s super. So they’re the ones who started this paid television. Absolutely. They’re responsible

for it all.

Yeah. You, if people don’t, no matter what businesses they’re in right now, if you’re in the roofing business, I can tell you right now that environmentally friendly shingles are coming forth.

I have clients that, that, talk to me about this all the time. And they’re using it as a differentiation factor to come in because the old shingles, the asphalt shingles they can’t dispose of them like they used to. So there’s environmental factors. They don’t, they just don’t decay.

So there’s different types of room. Who heard of a metal roof years ago? Unless it was on an industrial building, yeah. Solar panels, they were a thought. But now they’re mainstay, right? There’s all of these things that, not just innovations of new products and services, but within our business.

My, my original college focus was on the medical field. My goodness, is that changed? It’s now like crazy changed, with not just the technology, but in the United States, it’s become way more of a business versus even healthcare. And if you were banking that it was always gonna be what it was 30 years ago, 40 years ago, and you had planned on being in that business, your business is very different or you’re no longer in business.

And to your point, Anthony, if they don’t roll with it, and that includes selling, if people, you know are still trying to sell like they were back in the. The eighties and the nineties, or the older sales methodology, the internet completely changed how we sell. Not because you could just buy things online, but because you could find information.

The sales channel used to be the expertise for people making decisions. And no longer is that the case because now. Pretty easily the potential buyer can have as much or more information than the sales channel even has themselves.

Yeah, it’s it is, it’s the truth, isn’t it? You walk into, particularly if you’re buying something of reasonable value, although it still happens, actually, I had this experience with my kids recently and they wanted to buy a book and they’re standing in the.

In the shopping center looking online at how much it is and they’re going into one shop and then another going we can get it cheaper over here so we can save $5 by going to this shop. And you don’t, I mean we, we went to a shop the other day and we were not buying, I think we bought a kettle.

That’s right. And it was advertised at a price that already said discounted. We actually didn’t even look it up. We went to the counter and said, is there anything better you can do? And they knocked $20 off it. Wow. They didn’t have to, but that’s the but they also know, the reality is that.

Majority of people would have looked it up and said this same kettle is $20 cheaper or $15 cheaper over here. So they not going to get the sale unless they do that. So that whole idea that people are very much armed before they walk into a store. You can’t have a sale no longer. Is there the opportunity for a salespeople to twist your arm with a few words because you know they know more than what you know because.

That is not likely.

No. And it’s it happens as you said, in the retail aspect or in the stores. It also happens in the manufacturing world. It happens in the software. I actually happened today. I a friend of mine introduced me to a new software company and they’re out of they’re in Pakistan.

And I’m like, okay, I’ll talk with ’em. And it turns out that they’re 20% more than my current development team, which is in a much higher cost area. And I asked them, I said, you’re in Pakistan. Correct. ’cause I know what the wages are in Pakistan. And they said, yes, absolutely. I’m like you’re five times what you’re supposed to be price wise from Pakistan.

Because, I’ve worked I’ve, I had a company in India, I know the region. So it’s, but it’s very easy to look things up online and know what a senior developer, for example, makes in Pakistan and Pakistani money. Which isn’t even close to what they were telling me.

They wanted to charge us for the price. So it’s that won’t happen business wise. I can also find out cultural differences. I can find out, if anybody, I had a company in India, so I can say this. They take a ton of vacation days. It’s in, compared to the United States, it’s very culturally different on the time off.

We can factor all these type of things in. If we’re looking to buy a laser guided whatever, machine for our inspecting the bottles and cans for our manufacturing plant, we can look up this stuff and there are people who are proud to put that stuff, that information out.

And we can find out all kinds of things before that sales person comes through the door, or before we even invite a sales channel. In. A lot of times there are meetings now that happen within companies. So that whole dynamic shift, will continue. Ever changing shift will always continue.

With AI today, it’s taking another shift. You can have conversations with it to elicit responses that you might have had with meetings with sales teams. And so you can have all the, those conversations ahead of time, so you can just zero in on these things.

So there, there’s, innovation is always a thing that’s going to happen. Adaptation is the thing that sort of lags. I think Anthony, that’s been my experience,

So talk to me, let’s get into this whole sales thing a little bit more because I know one of the things that you like to talk about is the the problems that people have with unpredictable revenue.

Pretty common problem in majority of businesses, and you’ve been through plenty of businesses back as a child, and the businesses that you’ve owned as, as well over the years with innovation, constantly changing. How do you actually teach? Sales techniques that are going to continue to work and adapt, be because of exactly that problem, unpredictable revenue and change that is happening in the areas that, that we’ve just been talking about.

It’s a great, that’s a great question, a great point. So firstly, math never changes. The outcomes might change based on the formula change, but the reality is that selling is really foundationally grounded in metrics in math. Revenue growth is f is grounded in metrics in math. So the first thing that we wanna do is always figure out what our true will goal is.

That’s step number one. And that’s the part that people miss. They like, I’ll talk to companies and I just talked to one, he wants to. He’s 7 million today and he wants to be 12 million within a year, which is not doubling the business, but it’s good growth for that type of business. And we got talking and I, it’s long story short, after we got talking, I’m like, what’s the real number?

He’s nine, right? So it’s if we design a plan and mathematically build a plan till 12 and you don’t. Wanna do that type of work or put the budget in to get that and all that other stuff, it falls apart. Frankly, it never gets off the ground. Most of that. I had a gentleman one time tell me he wanted to go from 3 million to 51 million in his first year, and he had no marketing budget whatsoever.

No sales budget whatsoever. It’s not gonna happen, right? Yeah he would’ve needed, at least in his industry, 5 million. Just for the marketing budget alone. So once we understand what the truth truthful goal is, then we can really start objectively looking at, ’cause we can put math to that process and then, so no matter what the economy’s doing or what the markets are doing, that never changes.

It’s a standard concept of and condition. So now, yes, if the, if the industry is, wreaking havoc. On on the business owner, conditions might change, but the math will never change. It’s always gonna be the same thing. We have this to sell at x with this is our cost of selling it.

These are, soft cost, hard cost, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. We wanna net this type of profit. We just figure out the mathematics at that point. We’ve gotta sell this many things at this and that at this. Going back to your original point, one of the, one of the foundational things that we do is who’s the ideal right fit buyer for those?

Because, most companies, frankly, are selling a lot of things that if they just focused on other things that are already selling, they would sell more and grow more than, the old Pareto principle, right? The 80 20 rule of 2080, 80% of your revenue comes from 20% of the clients, and 20% of the revenue comes from 80% of the clients.

I’ve never found that to be exact, to be honest, but it, the proportions aren’t really the key. What is proportion. What is important is that there is a percentage of clients who buy quicker, pay more, are a lot more fun to work with. And if we could identify those and double down on those with, and here’s the key, don’t give up the others because you don’t wanna knock off 20% of your revenue just to gain back if the other thing doesn’t work as well as you want it to.

But when you find out who that ideal right fit buyer is, your messaging gets clearer, your targeting is clearer, everything just falls into a lot more, of an aligned process. And from there, once you understand that, it’s okay, now how do we massively prospect to get these people? And then once we massively start to prospect to get these people, I always like to induce at least six new ways into a company that are working.

Within a year to grow a company. And then how do we automate those six ways, right? So we can free up our time and our monies. And it’s just constant influx of business coming in at that point. And so then how do we up our sales conversations and how do we anchor all the math to each one of these stages?

And I think one of the more important ones that people miss are there, there are two, and this is one of the reasons I developed the. Personalized follow-up system because I literally lost $125,000 sale by going on vacation. Yeah. The vacation cost me $4,000, so now you can figure out what my vacation really cost me.

And I was like,

I hope you got a couple of decent margaritas out of it.

Yeah. I actually thought I needed at least a dozen more margaritas after I lost that video.

Wow, that is a huge, yeah,

so follow up is super important. So we follow ups, the glue that holds everything together.

It’s the glue that holds the relationships together. And so we built that system. But I think one of the things that most people miss out of the whole thing, an Anthony and growing revenue is we can’t if we just grow the company revenue, but we as individuals don’t grow our mind. Like shape our mind to accept the new growth, accept the new challenges, accept the new responsibilities, accept the new fact that we are now doing way better than we were.

If we see ourselves at a, say a seven, but we grow to a nine, I see this time and time again, the entrepreneur will actually start coming back to who they believe their identity is and they’ll start sabotaging the growth. And so a big component is also conditioning that part of us because we all have desires, fears, wants, doubts, confidence levels at certain levels.

But we’ve gotta, we’ve gotta constantly keep growing that otherwise we and I’ve done this to my own businesses, I’ve done this, where I’m like, why am I doing this? I don’t know why I was doing it right. And then I figured it out and you gotta keep going in that process and keep growing.

If you want to continue to grow, going back to your innovation and things that are happening, the world will do this for us. It’ll kick us over and over until we understand that we’re not the center of the universe. We’re just part of it.

Yes. It’s a and that’s. And that’s an important lesson. It’s simple, but it’s the, but it is the truth that we often forget that there are other people around that matter. And it goes back to what we were saying in the beginning, really, that businesses need to understand fundamentally there audience.

And in order to be able to respond and to grow, and innovation is a part of it, because that’s part of the process as well, is that now there are expectations. We talked about it before, that the expectations of what people have are very different to what they were 20 years ago. And they’re going to be different again in 20 years time from now.

They’re probably gonna be different in a year’s time, the way change is happening. And, AI’s a good example. AI has come into sales. I know of a. Company that replaced 80% of their sales team with AI and they’ve had a 60% growth. And as a result of doing it, now, it depends what you’re selling.

That’s a low ticket, a hundred dollars a month kind of subscription idea where it’s fairly straightforward for people to understand and AI can sell that. Yeah,

And so to that point, Anthony, I think you’re bringing up a very smart cautionary phrase, which is, it isn’t for everyone.

Folks, you’re not gonna, probably in high probability, redu, take out a. Complex sales situation with AI today. It’s li unlikely to ha not happen, I should say. It’s unlikely to happen. Very likely not to happen. So before you run out and start deploying AI and kicking your sales team off, let’s do a thorough study on that one.

Yeah, it’s it is one of those things, isn’t it? And it’s cautionary with all of this sort of stuff, AI is a good example where some of these things are worth trying. There are some things that will take you to a certain point, but it does depend on the nature of the industry.

It does depend on the nature of what you’re selling. And in, in that particular case, it’s a product that. Doesn’t need isn’t going to, it’s not gonna be service driven, put it that way, that it’s, you’re not going to actually need to engage with a human. It’s a, it’s basically a software product that they’re selling a subscription to.

So it can make some sense in that market. But, I’m in a, in the business of podcasting, that’s not something that is going to be able to be replaced by ai. I know there are ais that can do certain amounts of things, but. We traded, we’ve traded a number of stories here today, and you can’t do that with an ai.

They’re not going be able to do that in the same way. And that human element and how we respond, particularly in a sales process is also important because often it is that rapport that you develop with someone, which has a big emotional stake in your ability to be able to connect and sell.

Yeah, I don’t know what the future.

Brings in that regard. Maybe in time podcasting does change, maybe in time, hugs change, maybe AI can create a hug feeling. I don’t really know, a rapport building. I don’t, we have a need as a human being to have other human beings in our lives. And if we, and I, this is the whole I would say pet peeve of mine, right? Where I think people are so far moved on the technology side that they’re actually getting away from the human to human side. And I see it in restaurants. I watch people in restaurants and they’re on their, they’re looking at their cell phones, like through, three quarters of the meal and barely talking to one another.

And I, I think, AI can do that. But I don’t think it will ever get to that. I shouldn’t say ever. I don’t see it getting to that place where it replaces what we’re talking about, what you’re talking about right now, Anthony? I think it’ll give it a shot for sure, because, the video cloning is so good now.

I can’t only imagine where it’s gonna be in another year where, you just feed it a script and. To ai, video clones or having a conversation back and forth, and it’ll be a little more hard difficult to discern, is it accurately. AI or not I don’t think like you, I, we just heard a dog in the background, right?

I’m assuming it’s your place because we don’t have a dog. Yes. I think

that I think someone’s decided that there’s something at the front door or a package is arriving, something like that. So there’s a. There’s a dog that’s going a little bit nuts in the background, so apologies for that.

No that’s the greatest part of AI can’t do that, right?

We can’t respond. The AI on this side would not go, oh, it’s a dog. At this point maybe down the line it could. But that’s how people, you and I are both human beings having a conversation and that’s, I don’t think selling ever will get that far away. That won’t happen.

But I do agree that if you’re selling a moderately low end or commoditized type process in most cases, AI will do an amazing job on something like that. If you’re buying a I don’t know, just pick anything a a. A piano for your kids, and you’re like, what? Piano sounds great.

And the AI can work out these things and tell you differences in these type of things. And you could probably make a decision to buy a piano, right? But if you are a concert pianist who is, playing at a high level, high end, you’re probably not ever gonna get AI to be able to get you to buy a piano.

You’re gonna want to go into a piano. Store or shop that’s been established for a long time was, has Steinway or Yamaha or a whatever brand you’re looking for, and you’re gonna wanna talk to people. So I think that, I don’t think that’s ever gonna go away. Personally.

Yeah, and it’s fascinating you say that because when my daughter was 12 and she had an opportunity, she got given some money and collected some over a period of time and wanted to buy a piano.

She only had a certain budget to it, but she was very strict. She had to play those pianos and wasn’t what anyone was selling her. It was sitting down and actually. Enjoying it and appreciating the sound and going through her own process. And it wasn’t something that you could have done online.

No. And it does make it, it does make a difference. And sometimes that, touching and feeling the product or service is an important aspect of of how we go about all of this.

Yeah. And I think there’s a place for AI to do that. And I think there’s a place for AI not to be able to do that.

And, I use AI every day of my life and it’s great for the things that I use it for. I just, again, those complex or those it’s really hard to f. I don’t even know if it’s impossible, but it’s certainly hard, I think, to emulate or replace what you’re talking about with your daughter.

And if you’re sitting into a piano and you’re feeling the weight of the keys and the touch and the feel and all of that, when she’s pressing down the notes, she’s gonna feel a little better playing a certain type of keyboard than another one. And they’re all different. And so I, I know this ’cause I’m a musician and I play piano and those type of things.

It’s the same thing for, a vocalist in a microphone. I don’t think, I think AI can make recommendations, but I don’t believe it’s gonna be able to pick the microphone for you until

you hear it. Exactly. There’s so many more things that we could have touched on and talked about and we do have to wrap things up, but I do want to ask you two final things.

One thing I wanted to ask about and we are only just going to touch on it, you talked at the beginning about an incredible background. I wouldn’t say slave labor at three years old, but starting work at three years old with your dad and I understand that, and that would’ve been an amazing experience.

And watching those businesses that he was involved with, going through the military, having many of your own businesses, what are the big lessons that you’ve learned from all of that, that you impart then in as part of the strategies that you give the people you work with?

So I had A mentor’s name was Richard Menino.

Richard has passed on. I have no idea why he even mentored me. He was very wealthy guy. I think I reminded him of a young hymn, when he was going through and he said something to me one day. And I think this encompasses what I learned in the military and throughout life. And as I get a little more seasoned in my years, I still.

I learned, I come back to this lesson, he said to me, son, ’cause I asked him, I said why do people not get what they want in life? Why do people like just not get it? Anything is pretty much achievable. I can’t imagine a male would have a, a baby unless it was a seahorse or something.

But, for most normal things, you can get what you want in life and if you’re willing to, and he said to me, he said, son, here’s the thing.

When you’re going for a goal, the only thing you can do is point your nose in that direction and take one step a day. He said, you just keep pointing your nose in the direction you know you want to go. And I promise you two things, one. It will take you two to three times longer than you figured. And two, it’ll cost you two to three times more than you figured.

But if you keep going, you will get your goal. And he said, oh, I didn’t answer your question. The number one reason people don’t get what they want is they quit. Yep. And I learned in the military you can sustain, all kinds of things for a period of time. I’m freezing cold and, combat, all kinds of things like that.

I learned from my dad’s business, you’re always gonna have ups and downs. When he was I was 16 and he had a heart attack, and my dad was the center of the business, and all of a sudden, I’m 16, I gotta run the business. So created a lot of confusion in my life at that moment.

But, I made it through, I just kept going. And then my dad, when he got better, he came back and the business grew again. And we did that as you’re always gonna run up against things that are always gonna challenge us. And the question is, how clear, and this is the reason I start people with a truthful goal and why they want it.

Because how clear are we? On that truthful goal and what we want, and if we are committed to it, we will get there. In most cases, I’m sure there are people who have not, but I know even in my life that’s been a very helpful thing. It’s not fun when you know there’s an old song, frank Sinatra made it famous. It was called, that’s life, you’re riding high in April and shot down in May. That was one of the lines I found that to be the way it is in business. It’s the way it is in selling. You have a great day and you’re like, oh my gosh, I just sold five outta six, and then all of a sudden, like four days in a row, no one’s buying.

And it can beat up on your mental and emotional. Desire to say, you know what, I’m going to the beach, or I’m gonna go, I’m gonna go to the pub, or I’m gonna, whatever. I’m gonna watch te tell you, but the reality is you just gotta keep focused. And this is the second thing I learned, Chet Holmes, when I was the president sales for Tony Robbins and Chet Holmes.

Chet used to talk about pigheaded discipline and determination, which means you just keep going like Dick. Menino said, and Tony always talked about can I constant and ever, never ending improvement. If we take those two concepts with what Dick Mino said, that’s how you get your goal. And that goes back to what we were talking about, where you gotta innovate and you gotta be fluid and you gotta be able to move through the process because it is not always a linear line.

So much great advice in that there. And it’d be remiss of me not to point out to everyone listening in and we’ll include some details in the show notes. There is a regular newsletter that you produce that people can sign up for and get lots of information on a regular basis about that. So we’ll include the details of.

In the show notes for everyone. Just a final question for this time, because I think there, there has to be more in the future. As I’ve enjoyed this conversation, I hope everyone listening in has as well. What is the big aha moment that people have when they come to work with you that you wish more people knew they would have in advance?

Wow, that’s an awesome question. I’ve never been asked that question. I’ve done hundreds of these and never been asked that question. The big aha moment that I see is, there’s two things. Number one, there’s rapid growth that can happen, and rapid growth, everybody has it on their own level. Anthony, right?

So I. I love working with solo consultants. I, it was one of those things that it was originally it was like they don’t pay enough. But, I’m at a place now where it’s I take clients when I wanna work with them. ’cause I got the other businesses, supporting everything else.

I’ll give you a couple of examples and then, a larger company, I had a gentleman, his that I worked with, his name’s Jonathan. And Jonathan was an interesting man. He’s super smart. He’s a consultant. He was doing 700,000 a year and he went from 700,000 to $945,000 in six weeks in revenue.

But we attacked. Not just the business side of it. And I don’t, when I say attack, I don’t mean blitz Creek. We attacked the things that needed to happen. But what he did was a great job was also attacking the mental side of the business because that’s what was holding him up. So when we can free that up, the metrics and the math and the application of that.

It can work very rapidly. I just was working, this just happened literally last week. Sam, he’s a, also a consultant and Sam we got a 20 x increase in product in production of outbound activity happening for two weeks in his business, and he’s already set. From the previous numbers, $450,000 in new business that’s expected to come through the door from this activity based on our close rate, right?

So you can have massive growth quickly. I have done this with large companies. Intuit, for example, which many people know the QuickBooks company, they do Rocket mortgage and a bunch of other stuff. They went from a $10 million loss to a $7 million gain in under a year, so in, in one division.

So these things can happen quickly. So I think that’s probably, maybe the shock and awe of it, Anthony. But what I really see happen with people is when these things happened. Is there, not only does their business life get better, but their personal life gets really better too because they, the skill sets they’re learning to grow that business and get that rapid growth directly impacts their personal life where they have better family relationships, better friendships more life satisfaction, all kinds of things.

So that’s what I would say.

Fantastic. So much great wisdom and I really appreciate everything that you’ve given us, and I think we’ve just touched the tip of the iceberg as it were in, in what we could discuss and go into. Doug c Brown, thank you so much for being an incredible guest on the Biz Bites for Thought Leaders Program.

Oh, Anthony, thanks for having me. Again, I’m very grateful to be here.

And to everyone listening in, of course, don’t forget that all the details how to get in touch with Doug are going to be included in the show notes. We look forward to your company next time. On the next episode of Biz Bys, four Ford leaders.

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