Search Interviews:

Jeremy Weisz 13:53 

We’ll get into a little bit that is mentors and what you learn from them. But we’re on your website here. If people are listening to the audio, there is a video component here, and you were kind enough to show us the new version, and so I love to hear the decisions you made from this version to the revamped version. I’m sure this one’s not completely finished yet, because it hasn’t even launched yet, by the way. So talk about some of the differences here?

Thaddeus Tondu 14:24 

Sure. So in terms of the original site, one of the things that you note that, like, there’s a lot of the colors and the synergies. When we first started, we were, I asked, I’m like, What’s my favorite color and what’s the other person’s favorite color, the business partner? We’re like, oh, we had blue and green. So it was white, blue and green. That was our colors. And then we rebranded to be like, okay, let’s actually paw off some pop here. And we chose pink because not a lot of marketing agencies have pink. But if you scroll down, one of the things that you notice in here is that it’s all stock photos, right? There’s like, it’s a guy that’s like, I’ve seen these same three people, four people, rather, on like five other websites and so like, it’s all stock, you know, you scroll down into the case studies and what it’s like working with us now.

Granted, three of those four clients are no longer with us anymore, for good reasons, but just taking it and saying, okay, well, if we built this site three years ago, which is roughly when we did that, well, what’s changed in the last three years from design elements? Well, now you flip over to the, and like, so you see the old branding right here, like on this one here. This is on purpose. And so that’s one of our oldest reports. You can actually see, if you look really closely at the logo, like different colors, right? And so, that’s part of it. There’s just old things that are on here. We cared so much about our clients’ marketing that we just neglected our own for such a long period of time. And so we’re like…

Jeremy Weisz 15:46 

I do like to meet our team page, though. So, I don’t know if that’s changing much, but this is…

Thaddeus Tondu 15:52 

No, it’s still staying the same. So you can actually on the staging URL, navigate the entire website. And so we have our team. We have it down there, but if you come and you look at this, and so now we’ve cleaned up someone. This is the new site. Yeah, this is the new site. And so one of the things that you’d note from the old one to this one is the buttons or the call to actions, or, as we like to call it, the CTA is for short. So you’re looking at the top rate the schedule a strategy call, and then the other one says, book now, schedule a strategy call. Like, I don’t even know, like, calling us, right? Like, book your free strategy session. Okay, well, there’s so many different things going on there. Like, I don’t want people to call me as a marketing agency. I want you to book a time on my calendar, because that’s going to be the easiest for you. Right now, sure, will we put our phone number? Yes, on there. But now, if you see this this button is book now, schedule strategy call and then find the next button. Like, if you used to keep scrolling down. So book now, schedule strategy call, The next button is you scroll down.

Guess what it says? Book now. Schedule strategy call, I mean, minus those ones, it’s like giving more information or whatever. But like all the other CTAs are our book now, schedule strategy call, we’ve also modernized it, so that image right there, our work is going to change. But like, that’s a video that plays. And so we have video elements in there. We’ve updated it to match a lot of our designs, of what we do with our current clients as well. And that’s just a video on why On Purpose Media and why us, sort of a thing that we’ve embedded onto the site, and just showcasing a little bit more of our work the other pages, once we get our images are being redone in some of the pages. But when we go into like, an SEO page or PPC page, for example, specifically to our clients, you’re actually going to see screenshots of our work that’s in results that are in there where that wasn’t in there and before and so, so like, right there, right?

So you look at that first picture, no, it’s talking like, okay, this is a legitimate screenshot. Now I don’t like the pink background. That was one of the things that we’ve changed, and I’ve given to my team to fix, because, again, this is a work in progress, right? We’re currently building our own new website, again, just creating a better flow for it and better ease of use. Putting in photos of me, putting in photos of our team, putting in non-stock photos that are legitimate, I think is a big thing. And I think any business, for that matter, should get away from stock photos. If you’re a home service business looking this, I mean, if you’re a marketing agency, if you’re any business listening to this podcast right now, do yourself a favor and go get some real photos, because if you put stock photos on there, you instantly hurt your conversion rates.

Jeremy Weisz 18:17 

Anything else that people should notice on here that obviously people can see the call to actions are different.

Thaddeus Tondu 18:27 

The heading term on there, and so you look at the original site, is those data-driven digital marketing solutions for HVAC, plumbing, electrical companies with like an h2 or a subtitle underneath it, growing your revenue and filling your dispatch boards, blending new school technology with old school relationships, I found that was a mouthful. So if you go over to the new site, so purpose-driven digital marketing, and by the way, we’ve highlighted in pink the words digital marketing, right for HVAC, plumbing, electrical businesses, that gets you results, again, highlighted that in pink, not just clicks. And so you’re looking at the pain point.

Well, what’s the biggest pain point for a lot of home service businesses is marketing companies that promise the world and give nothing, right? So we get your results, we just don’t get clicks. Now, the subtitles increase your leads in revenue with specific marketing strategies designed for home service businesses. It’s punchy and it’s to the point, but it also blends the name On Purpose Media to be off self and on purpose, because we want to be purpose-driven in what we do. Love it. That’s the big change.

Jeremy Weisz 19:28 

No. Thank you for sharing that. And mentors, some of the stuff you learned from mentors, you mentioned one early on that basically was like, listen, you got a niche here. Talk about some of the mentors business-wise and what advice they gave you?

Thaddeus Tondu 19:44 

No great question. So I mean mentors for actual operational aspects of our business were huge, and so we had one September 2020. Think we were with him for nine months. We outgrew him. His MO was getting you to 25k per month in recurring revenue time and place. I mean, we came to him, we were doing five right now. Obviously we all grew that and paced beyond that. And so we had to find another one, and we joined Josh Nelson in the Seven Figure Agency. Phenomenal resource, phenomenal person. Lot of great folks in that organization as well. And his thing is to get marketing agencies two seven figures. And while we outgrew that one, and he has other programs for people that are doing multiple seven figures, but for us, I just felt it was a time to move on. And so we actually have two right now, best practice coaches type things in there.

And so I kind of view different mentors and coaches are almost two different things, right? So coaching groups are what I’ve talked about so far, and we’ve got another one, more of a mastermind scenario for me, more of a coach for my director of operations. And we pay for access to that. They’re a marketing agency that’s multiple seven figures, if not combined, all of their resources eight figures, and everybody in the room has to be doing minimum seven figures in order to be able to join that group. We also have another paid coach inside the business as well. That’s more of a one-on-one for the sales and marketing and the operational side of things. We actually pay for two coaches inside of our business, the mentor part of things. So coaches hold you accountable to be able to get there. The mentor side of things have been there, done that. Here’s what you should do. There’s been a phenomenal amount of individuals in especially the most recent, like three, four months, six months of my business journey, who have been absolutely amazing, saying, hey, here’s what’s happening in my business.

Here’s what I’m thinking I should do. What do you think? Because they’ve been there, they’ve done that. And they give the unbiased. They don’t sugarcoat it either, right? They tell you exactly what they would do, and it’s up to you now to choose whether to take that information or not from a mentorship. And there’s been some phenomenal people as a result of those, the coaching groups that we were in that have really helped that out.

Jeremy Weisz 21:57 

Thaddeus, what was something that stuck out from the Josh Nelson group. It doesn’t have to be himself, but like, I’m sure there’s other people in there that you took and ran with in your business.

Thaddeus Tondu 22:12 

They talked a little bit about culture in there, for sure, but a lot of it is just making sure that your things are systematized. When you can have your SOPs and you’re standing operating procedures, and you never dialed in. So when anybody comes into the organization, they know exactly how to find that information. I think is the biggest one, was a big catalyst to us making sure that it’s there. And he’s got a ton of swipe and deploys as well that he gives you the resources. And think that’s the other one too, is that lead with value. When you can lead with value and help people, well, at the end of the day, you’re going to help yourself in return. It just takes a little bit longer to see your return on investment from that, but the greatest feeling ever. Is to help other people and lead with value and then know they come back to you later because you help them out

Jeremy Weisz 22:57 

Software. I love to hear what kind of software and tools you like. I remember I had the founder of sweet process on because we’re talking about SOPs, and it helps. It’s basically that database where you can document your SOPs, having them a searchable database, so anyone from the company can deploy them and search them. So I’d love to hear some of your favorite software that you use.

Thaddeus Tondu 23:18 

Sure we are heavily into the Google workspace for a lot of our stuff. So everything’s organized in Google Drive. Every client has their own folder. Everything gets uploaded into that folder, so everything is there, which is a big thing for us, because we’re already paying for access into the Google workspace via emails. We use Google Chat and Google Spaces. We don’t use Slack in our organization. To be honest, I dislike that Slack on desktop doesn’t have the Giphy keyboard, so you can’t actually search for GIFs. You have to be like, I’m feeling lucky and type in a word, and you got to, like, keep going through where, like, I want to scroll. You can do it on your phone, just not on a desktop. Gifs are a big part of our business, if you can’t tell. So a plus, we’re already paying for access to Google Spaces, anyways.

So that’s kind of the one for, like, the organizational back end of things. We use ClickUp for our project management software massive to be able to have a centralized place to manage tasks. Because if you’re like, wow, I’m going to do and then you never write it down, well, it doesn’t get done. Like, I mean, get a bunch of quick starts in a room and come up with a thousand ideas. But if nobody wrote it down, you’re not gonna you’re not going up with one, right? And so making sure that these ideas get documented in there, we use EOS, and we use a software called BloomGrowth for our EOS platform. Be able to manage to do that. But perhaps my most favorite software that we use in our agency, is actually something called Kumospace. So Kumospace, I don’t know if you’ve heard of it before, but Kumospaces is wild, so you actually have a virtual office inside.

Jeremy Weisz 24:51 

I’ve never heard of it, no, yeah.

Thaddeus Tondu 24:52 

I mean, am I able to share my screen? Yeah. All right, so let’s actually do this. So I. Is the right one. So down here on the bottom, this is our, literally, our virtual office. So you can actually see like me down here in the bottom is my office. I can actually move around as an avatar in my office with my keyboards and double clicks while you put a turkey.

Jeremy Weisz 25:13 

If you have to go to the bathroom, you put yourself in the bathroom.

Thaddeus Tondu 25:16 

Well, we just do, we put the away, and then we, then we put the emoji, the poop emoji there. So, but you can actually move into anybody’s office at any point in time, like you can see, so like these folks up here having a meeting, and so like, if I wasn’t in focusing mode, you could actually, actually don’t want to turn the cameras on, but so if I wasn’t in this focusing mode, I can actually see their cameras on right now, because they’re in a meeting in our board room, right? And so if you want to pop in to have a conversation with somebody, she’s like my Director of Operations, if we’re typing something like this, is stupid, her door is open. I’m just going to go into her office and have a conversation.

So it actually saves a lot of time from it. But then that helps build culture, because what’s the most aggravating thing in a remote world, isolationism? And so how do you remove that? Well, we have a virtual office. I’ve been exclusive remote since 2014 and this is the closest thing that I’ve ever found in my life to being in an office without being in an office.

Jeremy Weisz 26:13 

How’d you discover Kumospace? It’s pretty cool.

Thaddeus Tondu 26:17 

We’re having a conversation with somebody that we were looking to hire as a coach into our business, and he just mentioned it very quickly in passing, yeah, there’s pricing — so very neat. I think if you use Kumo on purpose at checkout, you get 10% off. I think is the name, or is it they don’t have, like, the tracking URL, but yeah, it’s, it’s actually super fun. He just mentioned it in passing. He’s like, yeah, we don’t, like, we don’t use Zoom or whatever in our business. He’s like, we use something called Kumospace. It’s where everybody comes in and works, and it was time. Doctor, that’s what he was referencing. He’s like, we don’t use time doctor, we use Kumospace. And I didn’t really think anything of it. I wrote it down and went and looked at it, did a demo, when I rolled it out to the team over a year ago, like, hey, we’re going to do this as a two-week test, because there’s a two-week trial. Period, week trial period.

Jeremy Weisz 27:03 

What were using before Kumospace?

Thaddeus Tondu 27:05 

Time Doctor.

Jeremy Weisz 27:06 

Oh, Time Doctor, does the meeting.

Thaddeus Tondu 27:08 

They don’t. It was just like, so it was all Google Chat, and then we would meet, and then we time track with Time Doctor, so it’s just a mess. But then you had no visibility, right? You couldn’t see if anybody was in and working, or there or whatever, like shot in the dark. And so within was it 48 hours of us rolling this out, the team goes, well, yeah, you’re not getting rid of this. Like, we want it, like, don’t know, because they were decorating their offices or having fun. They’re bouncing and all the it’s just phenomenal from a visibility standpoint. For anybody that is virtual, there’s other ones that are out there too. We had already committed to this like so work is another one, but it’s more like 3d avatar world type things. And so there’s a bunch out there, and this is just the one that works for us.

Jeremy Weisz 27:56 

So this replaced that is for people. If they’re using Microsoft Teams or Zoom, they would use this with their team instead of those things. So you basically go in the room and you basically click, and you kind of you meet with them that way. But it also does time tracking as well.

Thaddeus Tondu 28:10 

Yeah, very rudimentary time. So there’s, there’s three statuses. It tracks your available, your away, and you’re focusing, and then that’s it, and then shows you how much you’ve been in the office, and so there’s very rudimentary time tracking at best, but the end of the day, I mean, if a business is having to rely on minute time tracking to see if their employees are doing their work or not, it’s not the right way to go about. It doesn’t create a culture.

Jeremy Weisz 28:36 

I want to talk about culture in a second, because I love your kind of thoughts and ideas around that, from what I’ve researched. But so it’s interesting, you had different coaches and mentors and groups for different stages, right? What was the next group? So Josh Nelson and then you joined another group after that?

Thaddeus Tondu 28:53 

Oh yes, Fully Committed is the name of it. It’s from JC and Karen Hite are the ones that they’re the pioneers behind that, but it’s called Fully Committed. They actually cap it. So there’s only a set amount of people that are allowed in. And it’s a very intricate mastermind, where we meet in person three times a year, and then they have coo level coaching to be able to get director of operations into the COO suite. They also got some like, I think there’s other programs that don’t involve the mastermind that they might have, but I wouldn’t know I’m in their mastermind.

Jeremy Weisz 29:22 

So what was something you took away from Fully Committed?

Thaddeus Tondu 29:27 

Oh, man, what haven’t I taken away from Fully Committed? I think the biggest one is how to have they had John Maxwell come in for a little while too and do some stuff. And it’s just how to have tough conversations with employees, business partner, spouses, anybody, really, for that matter, how do you appropriately fire somebody in the words that you use matter, right? Like the biggest thing for that change how we go about having people fire themselves is the better reframe on that is, when you step into the office, people tend to build them up and have a conversation, and then, like, 10 minutes in, they’re like, oh, by the way, you’re fired.

And they’re like, what? But we’re just having a good conversation. So rather than that, it’s like, within, like, literally, the first 30 seconds that, hey, by the way, at the end of this conversation, you’re no longer going to have a job here. But let’s talk a little bit about how we got here. And so now they know the rug’s been pulled out right at the very beginning. And then you just, you have an honest conversation from that.

Jeremy Weisz 30:21 

Well, I’ve heard you say you like to hire slow and fire slow and you can correct me if I’m wrong Thaddeus on this. But I heard you say you give people six chances. I don’t know if that’s the case, but I was like, whoa, that’s a lot of chances to train someone that That’s commitment. Talk about that. When you’re talking about, you know, for people context, right? When you’re talking about people to fire themselves, you’re giving them multiple rounds of chances to improve in coaching and things like that. But talk about the six chances that should be your next book, or something.

Thaddeus Tondu 31:00 

The six chances, sure. I think it depends on the level of what their mess up was, right? Like, people mess up all the time, and I actually have no issues. I had this conversation with our team today, like, I don’t care that you guys messed up the first time. I really don’t — what I care about is I’m asking you now three times to fix it, like it shouldn’t have to ask more than once to be able to fix something. So the six chances is actually from our performance improvement plan. So it kind of depends on what happened in their level of things. And so we always want to make sure that we help people get better. Because if the instant thing is to go, well, I’m just going to terminate that person, you’ve actually failed them as a leader, in my opinion, because you actually haven’t given them the tools necessary to succeed, again, depending on what the area is. So the six chances comes from within inside our performance improvement plan.

So we’ll sit down and we’ll identify if there’s an issue in terms of the performance, and we have a two way conversation to say, hey, here’s what we see, here’s what happened on our end. What’s your side of the story? What’s happening on your end? What’s going on? Why aren’t we having these conversations. Why is this like this? And now we have a conversation and initiate dialog. After that conversation, we say, great, let’s work on our performance improvement plan to help you get better. It’ll help you get better at this specific instance, we can meet up to six times for this particular instance to see if you can get better. Most people are done after three. We’ve never actually, I don’t think I’ve ever went past like three or four times of meeting with somebody, but it’s to monitor their plan right, to see if they’re getting better and they’re progressing.

And so that’s where that six times come in. I mean, if we have to have three different performance improvement plans, usually it’s three strikes, okay, now it’s having a different conversation at that point in time. So it’s three strikes still, but it’s inside each strike is a meeting up to six times to monitor their improvement on their performance.

Jeremy Weisz 32:51 

Talk about tough, I know culture kind of bleeds into sometimes tough conversations, and I’d love to hear an example of a tough conversation you were talking somewhere about you have an arch I don’t know if I’m quoting this right, but we’ll say arch nemesis within your company that you always clash with. And so talk about how you handle that.

Thaddeus Tondu 33:18 

Not very well. Yeah. Like, look as leaders, as owners, as managers, or whatever your title is, like, you’re gonna be spouses, significant others, right? Parents, like siblings. There’s always gonna be some form of a tough conversation, my opinion, is to be direct but kind. If you can be direct, but kind. And not everybody can do that, by the way, some people process things emotionally, and some people process things logically, and some people are kind of in between, like I’m 90% logical processing 10% emotion. My arch nemesis was 90% emotional, and I probably would say 95% emotional and 5% logic. It’s funny that that person actually is no longer in our organization anymore.

Jeremy Weisz 34:00 

I was gonna ask, right was to survive in the constant clashing with the CEO, founder. It’s tough.

Thaddeus Tondu 34:11 

Well, and I think it’s different on how they clash, right? I’m open to having you disagree with me. I am open to you challenging our thoughts. I’m open to you challenging our ideas on how we do things as a business, because at the end of the day, I believe that boots-on-the-ground individuals are going to be the key to survival of a lot of businesses. If I the CEO, am the only one ever coming up with an idea that I believe that the organization will remain stagnant and die out. You need to have those ideas from the ground floor. So that’s why we open that dialog. The difference, though, is how you do the dialog, if you come out and attack other people on the team, and say that that like and don’t want to help somebody else on the team, because do you think like this, that or the other thing, you don’t like them, or whatever, or I’m not going to give them the resources they haven’t even sat down in a month of that new person.

There to be able to, like, introduce themselves and help them figure out our way of doing things. That’s the part where, where it doesn’t really work inside of, like, the clashing of the organization. So this particular individual, so I, at one point in my life, was very — I mowed people over. I didn’t really give a heck. I was going to ask you if I could swear on here. But in the little I’ve been doing my bad, doing my best of not swearing, so you’re allowed to. It’s fine, right? Perfect. So, like, I never gave a shit about their emotions or their feelings. I just mowed them over because I that’s how I was. And it took somebody telling me, like, hey, dude, you can’t just mow people over all the time. Like you have to have emotional intelligence. Emotional Intelligence, 2.0 Travis Badberg, great book.

But when you, when you look at having that component of things, how do you actually change who you are as a leader? It’s just like the coaches and mentors, right? You have a different season in your business and a different season as leader. Well, you have to have a different way of showing up to different types of people, and so I worked really hard at not coming off the handle, except for this one person the last one was me coming off the handle. And it was some yelling back and forth, not my most proudest moment as a leader in most recent memory. So, not perfect, right? And we yelled, and it resulted in him leaving our organization. Probably what’s the word I’m looking for, mutual agreement at that point in time, that it was time.

Jeremy Weisz 36:30 

Talk about, so tough conversations, obviously. And then culture. And you mentioned culture is big, even from the different groups and mentors. How do you maintain culture? I mean, we saw one of the things, which is Kumospace. But I know there’s other things you do to maintain culture in an all remote workforce.

Thaddeus Tondu 36:52 

I’ll continuing to talk about our core values, our big ones. It’s part of our as we go on our new website and our like, our careers page, and part of our hiring process is we’re talking about them right, like, from the beginning in our recruiting process to be able to bring people in, like, I have a video that’s like two minutes of me playing that talks very briefly of our core values in our recruiting process, and then I ask questions in our interview that are based on our core values first interview, right? Obviously, some technical things, yeah, if you went on our new website, so there’s our career. So we actually have our core values listed right there. But then if you scroll down, and let’s just click on the web development application, for example, okay, so when somebody goes on here, if you keep scrolling all the way down to the bottom, there’s a video, okay, and so you have to watch the video first, and it’s two minutes and 48 seconds.

So three minutes of their time to watch the video where I talk about culture, core values, what it matters to us, what it looks like. How does it operate in here, I give them a secret passphrase that they need to remember at the very end of our questionnaire, because now I’m actually matching and mirroring what’s on our website to what we talk about in our leading up to it, why we have such a lengthy application process. Then when we come on to the interview, guess what I do? Well, I ask questions that are related to our core values. One of them is, be resourceful. Well, one of the questions so I asked is, hey, when was the last time you were on YouTube, and what was the problem that you solved, or what was the last problem you saw via YouTube, right?

So one of those things in being resourceful, right? I also asked my third question is, what motivates you, right? Because I want to see if they have a bigger purpose. And then I ask another question, following up to see if it matches. To say, if money were unlimited, what would you do? Because now I want to see if those match, and if they don’t match, there’s incongruency in what actually motivates you, because most people aren’t motivated by money, right? They’re motivated by something else, being part of something that’s bigger than themselves. And so those are sort of the things that we ask inside of there. And some of them aren’t quite as direct as those two with there’s a lot of them that are kind of thinly veiled into that, because now I want to make sure that they match our culture and our core values. Your skills can be one thing, and there’s sometimes we will hire for skill, and sometimes I don’t really care what skill you have, if you’ve got good aptitude, I’m going to hire you because you fit our core values. Every Monday we talk about our core values.

Every Monday we highlight a team member that’s doing our core values and living those out. We just constantly reinforce what they are. Because if somebody talks about their core values and also our mission and our vision, right? Like I can ask our team, what’s our mission, right, what’s our vision, right? They’re going to go conventional people first digital marketing, because that’s our mission and our cost. We just happen to do it with home service marketing. And so understanding those things when you can take your vision, your mission, your core values, and you can talk about the ad nauseum inside of the organization, you repeat your vision, you repeat your mission, repeat your core values. I mean, was it Peter Drucker that said culture erodes 1% a day. So if you don’t talk about culture for 100 working days, your culture is completely different.

So the top has to really formulate the culture. The other part now is finding a culture steward inside the business, especially remote finding a culture steward inside the business, who lives, sleeps, eats, breathes, our core values, terms of EOS, when you have Gino Wickman on, he probably talked about the GWC or the people analyzer. Once a quarter, we actually go through our five core values, plus we have the 3H model, the hungry, hustle, humble that we also talk about too, when we actually rate our people once a quarter on all eight of those metrics. Do they visit most of the time they exhibit some of the time or rarely? Because at the end of the day, if they’re doing rarely, now, we have to have a conversation say, hey, by the way, we’re seeing this in the core values. How are you showing up inside the organization? So everything that we do is veiled through our core values.

Jeremy Weisz 40:43 

Thaddeus, thanks for sharing that I do. Yeah, I remember, I think it was Peter Drucker also said, culture eats strategy for breakfast, or something like that as well. Do you remember an interesting answer to the if money were unlimited, what would you do? What do people say to that?

Thaddeus Tondu 41:00 

Most times, a lot of them are taking care of my family, because that’s a lot of their motivations. I actually really like the one most recently, someone’s like, you know what, probably the exact same thing that I’m doing right now. Like, all right, why? Well, I just love what I do. The only thing with money would do is just give me a nicer house to be able to do it from right? They love what they do, right? And that’s, I think, the best case is that they love what they do, and they just want to help their family or help change, like in the interview today, and he’s like, there’s a lot of poverty in his area, and he would be able to help people with education, able to reduce the crime rate, buy a farm for his grandpa so his grandpa can have cows and chickens, because he loves cows and chickens, but he doesn’t farm to be able to do it. Farm to be able to do it on like, just those things that matter to family, I think is the biggest one, because that’s really at the end of the day. I mean, not everybody’s motivated by family, but a lot of people are.

Jeremy Weisz 41:54 

When we talk about tough conversations, sometimes that happens with clients, right? And so I know we were talking before we hit record about not always getting it right. Can you talk about one of those times with clients and how you handle it?

Thaddeus Tondu 42:09 

Yeah, like a champion right off the chin, really, like the end of the day, humans mess up right? Like you probably messed up too. You probably don’t want admit it, Jeremy, but you probably did right, maybe even today. Right, maybe even today, maybe yesterday, every hour, right? Every hour, right? So, like, you make mistakes. Well, I make mistakes. Well, guess what? Business owners make mistakes as well. And I think when they get treated with a bunch of superfluous stuff that doesn’t really matter and is relevant, you try to hide behind it, versus taking it on the chin saying, yeah, you know what, I messed up, or my team messed up. We did that wrong. We are so sorry. We are working on making that right. That goes a long ways with a lot of people. It’s communication at the end of the day.

Jeremy Weisz 42:53 

Two things, again, we’re kind of talking about lessons and mentors. Something you learned from Cutco sales.

Thaddeus Tondu 43:03 

Dropping down and never giving up. Like, I think that’s the biggest one is there was really no follow-up sales from Cutco. It was that you sold on the spot, or you didn’t sell them, sort of a thing. But you like the amount of times that you start at the very top and you drop down, you drop down, you drop down. Ask for the order. Drop down. Ask for the order. Drop down. Ask for your drop down. Ask for the order is, I think, a key thing. Now, obviously, there was a lot of products to be able to do that with, but at the other point.

Jeremy Weisz 43:27 

When you say drop down, it’s like giving them a big package, then a smaller than a small I got you.

Thaddeus Tondu 43:32 

Yeah, and so, like, there was, there was, I mean, a bunch of different co-sets, like, we called it the homemaker. That’s a great lesson, though. Keep going, huge lesson. So you have, like, the homemaker, and then you have another set. You have a smaller set with a smaller price tag. And so what are the things that in the sales as well? You start with the biggest one. Why not? What are you gonna say? No, okay, well, hey, by the way, I also had this other program. What are they gonna say? No, okay, great. Well, I got another program. You just keep going down and you show them the different options, right? I mean, now some people say, well, in marketing, like, if you’ve got three programs, and I’ll just show them all and let them choose.

But I think the other part that a lot of people miss is that the thing that Cutco taught me, and I think partial to today, is that people are lazy. They don’t want to just pick up the phone and call somebody, regardless if it’s a sales call or not. They want to hide behind an email or text message. Well, pick up the phone and call somebody, because you can get a lot more accomplished by just picking up the phone and dialing. The other part is, if you’re asking for a meeting, give somebody a choice of two times. Don’t just say what time works best for you, because if they tell you time, then you’re not free. Now you’ve lost control of that conversation. Give them a choice of two times that work for you, and if they say none of those, give them another two choices that work for you? And keep going until you find a time.

Jeremy Weisz 44:44 

EOS and we were talking about KPIs, and how do you implement EOS and KPIs into your business?

Thaddeus Tondu 44:53 

Hire an implementer, that’s going to be the best case for anyone. Lynn Askin is our implementer. He’s. To have an agency specific to agencies. But the other part that the person has to understand is, when you put in KPIs and scorecards, that not everybody’s going to want it, not everybody’s going to want to be held accountable. A players will. B players won’t. They don’t want to have the accountability, right? And then A players get tied to B players who don’t ever pick up the slack and do the work. And so now you’re gonna have to, like, do this balancing act all the time. Well, now here’s our scorecards. You either hit them or you don’t. If you don’t hit them, guess what? Go find somewhere else. Like, it’s black and white. It’s just putting those in, and it’s a little bit of a transition period and letting people work through it a little bit. And now we’re here. We have our score cards. We have our KPIs, like, as you got to perform. Like, the end of the day, we’re in a business, and it’s, yeah, I like feel good, but I also like facts, not feelings.

Jeremy Weisz 45:50 

Thaddeus, this has been fantastic. I have one last question before I ask it. I want to point people to they can learn more in onpurposemedia.ca. You can also check out more episodes of the podcast. My last question is about favorite resources or books. You mentioned the Emotional Intelligence 2.0 you mentioned EOS, which people check out Traction by Gino Wickman, I actually had him on the podcast, and Mark winters I had on. Also who co-wrote Rocketfuel. Gino Wickman, any other favorite books or resources that you like?

Thaddeus Tondu 46:26 

Oh, man, there’s just so many. Somebody asked me this, so what’s your favorite book of all time? Like, I don’t have just one. It matters on the season of my life. And the lessons that I’m going to pull from it, I think one that actually it’s one of the first ones that I’ve ever re-listened to was The Hard Thing About Hard Things by it was a Ben Horowitz. Ben Horowitz, yeah, I was good because it’s Andreessen Horowitz is his VC firm, so, but The Hard Thing About Hard Things, and I think there’s some really good lessons from inside of his book, because a lot of the times, I mean, he even says it too, maybe somebody else.

But like a lot of times, the books, the self-help books, or the business books or whatever, are written when things are going well. How do you make things go well? Well, not very many are written on the fact of well, what happens when things don’t go well? How do you do? How do you react? In his book, The Hard Thing About Hard Things is all of his life lessons of doing those sorts of things. I think Jack Welch’s book was also one of his books. Anyways, I remember which one it was that I listened to. Was also a lot like that too. About, hey, some lessons from things. I think there’s a lot of good lessons that somebody can take out of biographies.

Jeremy Weisz 47:33 

Yeah, I think I listen to, I don’t know if it was Winning by Jack Welch, that was one of them, but he is now.

Thaddeus Tondu 47:39 

Now you’re going to want me to. I’m gonna look at my —

Jeremy Weisz 47:42 

Look at Audible, yeah, if you want to rapid-fire off a few in your Audible that you like.

Thaddeus Tondu 47:49 

Mindset by Carol Dweck, Hard Thing About Hard Things, I mean, jock, a will and Nick, anything him is really good. Patrick Lencioni, anything came is good. I mean, Clockwork by Mike mccallow, it was also a good one, actually, that allowed me to take a 10-day sabbatical. I just, I turned everything off, locked my phone, couldn’t even access Facebook for 10 days when we went to Mexico with the family. So now I’m sure The Real Life MBA is the Jack Welch, one that I met, that I read also really good. I mean, Dan Martel’s Buy Back Your Time. I mean, Buy Back Your Time and Clockwork, very similar books, in my opinion.

But Dan Martel is just a beast there. I have even got some ones that are Vince Flynn books. So those are, like the, no, it’s not a business book. So it’s Jack Ryan Jr books. So it’s from, like, the Jack Ryan series and Jack Ryan Jr. So there’s just so many. I think the thing to point just one, and like, I’m scrolling, and I’m still scrolling to point just one, I think is a disservice. I think the person just needs to consume. And I’ve also looked at books differently a little bit recently, I used to just consume, consume and consume, consume, consume and consume and saying, okay, well, what’s one or two things that I can really learn from this and then work on it, versus just consuming and forgetting it all.

Jeremy Weisz 49:13 

Thaddeus, I wanna be the first one to thank you. This has been fantastic. Check out onpurposemedia.ca. More parts of the podcast. We’ll see you for next time. Thaddeus, thanks so much. Thanks everyone.

Thaddeus Tondu 49:23 

Thank you.