Unlocking the Power of Relationships: A Journey with Ed Wallace

Thank you. Nice to see you, as always. Broadcasting from the world headquarters there in Hawaii. How great is that? I want to be you when I grow up, Ron.

Well, there's a lot of things we can talk about. And I recently did a little minute to win at one of our little broadcasts where I talked about how do we avoid letting macroeconomic factors impact us? And I talked about, Ron, macro, we can't do anything about macro. We can do what we can is we can focus on micro. And in the last recession. I want to make sure I cite the data right. 14% of companies actually grew at least 9%. So how do we become a 14%, right? And we were talking a little bit beforehand. I said, you know, the end of the year is also the time to reflect. The year is done, right? Like you're going to close what you've got if you're in sales. You're going to deliver what you need to deliver if you're in service or something. You're going to make what you need to make if you're in manufacturing. it's really starting time to reflect and think about the next year.

And I always like to reflect on us as humans and not necessarily as business people. And, you know, I mentioned to you about our dash and you and I both know what our dash is, but I'm going to ask the audience to just consider a number for a moment and then we'll explain what that number means. And that number. is if you create a zero on a piece of paper, put a decimal point to the right of it, put seven more zeros and the number two. So 0.70 is number two. That number, Ron, represents an 85-year lifespan over the age of the Earth. Not a lot of time, right? Wow.

And I call that our dash. And that takes the four years we were born. And we're on this dash right now. If you're listening to this podcast, you're on your dash. And our dash is not necessarily comfortable. You know, when we see, you know, a person's lifespan, it's a straight line. It's really not a straight line in life. Our dash is uncomfortable. It could be like jagged lines. It could be spaces in between that line. And so I wanted to talk about meaning and connecting what we do to some kind of performance today. You know, we're talking about topics. I'm like, hey, it's the end of the year. Let's reflect on ourselves, our lives, how we're making a difference, what's important to us, those kind of things. So if you're OK, that's where we're going to go.

And again, you know, there's all kinds of things written about choosing happiness, all that kind of stuff, right? And I'm a sales guy. You know, we do sales training. So we're not going to get any psychology here. But I started, I heard about dashes and I put that number to it. And I started thinking, wow, when I'm 85. What am I going to look back on and value the most? And it's probably not how much money I leave behind. I've never seen roof racks on a hearse. Have you, Ron? It may be that I've left my family in a better position with me not around anymore. But like, how do I, what did I really leave that created some kind of difference with people? And it takes me back to relationships. Because that's the one thing, despite the economy, despite what's in our pocketbooks, that we can control, that we have influence over. So, you know, I think a dash well-lived is full of relationships.

I have one. I want to this day. We met in we live in such a small town, Ron, that they combine the two grades. So first and second grade were taught in the same room. I mean, I'm not that old, but, you know, and you really think about one room schoolhouses. Right. But in the town I lived in, the teacher taught the first graders and gave the second graders work to do. Can you imagine the chaos in that room? And we all made it through. And I met this second grader. His name is Mike. And to this day, we're still best friends. We've got a golf trip to Ireland planned where I'm working part-time in two weeks. My best man. I was his best man. We're each other's godparent. All this stuff, right? Lots of friends and lots of people I've known. And I've got a great partner in life, my spouse, Laura, and great kids. But from a friendship standpoint, outside of those kind of things, one guy. And like I said, I've trained 30,000 people.

So it's difficult to build relationships that last. And, you know, one of the things I got asked this just the other day. With all the people we have to interact with virtually now, how do you build a great relationship? My thought is you go to this concept that I know I've shared with you in the past called relational GPS. So if I'm on, what that stands for is goals, passions, and struggles. And it's something we've innovated. And it's such a simple idea. Ron, you've got business and personal goals. You've got causes or passions, things you care deeply about. And you've got struggles just like everybody, business and personally. We wouldn't be human beings circling the universe. at some crazy speed, thank goodness for gravity, if we didn't have strokes. So how do we locate that even in a drive-by 30-minute Zoom? Well, ask some questions. It's that simple. The power of inquiry versus the power of presenting.

So I've been presenting here for a few minutes, so why don't you ask a question?

Well, and it goes back to what I was originally saying. Wherever we go, we're interacting with other humans. And those humans, believe it or not, have a lot of this. They're a lot like us. And when we've introduced this relational GPS concept. And I'm going to Ireland, like I said, Ireland, in Switzerland, in the Middle East. Everybody seems, it doesn't matter what generation, it doesn't matter what demographic, it doesn't matter what culture, what beliefs, even spiritual beliefs. Everybody has those kind of things. So if we could, if we go back to our dash, our dash is a series of interactions with humans for all those years. Is there an opportunity in a drive-by zoo? to make that person's day better. It may not be something kind you say. It might be some question you ask them. You talked about my friend, the cab driver. So this fellow, Max, he changed my whole life around. You can see it there.

The London taxi, he drove around in a London taxi. He's been the foundation of everything we teach because he created an experience for people in a taxi cab. And people were lined up. We had to schedule weeks in advance to be with this guy in this commodity because of the experience he was creating. So whenever I talk about dashes, I'll refer people to Max's dash. And even though Max is gone, his dash, the legacy of his dash is still touching people. And I think when we get to 85, I think that's what we're thinking about.

And that private integrity, right, takes us to our public integrity. You know, how does this translate into the business world? Because this is a business that you run. So we should take this, what seems like soft stuff, which is not. It really, how do we translate that meaning? We've spent so much of our time at work. There was a recent study done around meetings. And the average business person spends 12 working days per month in some sort of meeting. This is a meeting right now. We don't practice meetings, right? We just go from meeting to meeting. We don't have a process for it. We don't have thoughts around it. How about if you went into a meeting with some idea of your purpose for that meeting? And then doesn't that make it create a better experience for the other person? Isn't that a way of extending or smoothing out your dash and building that relationship rather than, you know what? Like my father, bless his soul, right?

He passed away when I was only about 30 years old. And I always like to tell this story because I think it's really impactful. He was a dentist in a very small coal mining town in the front of his mother's row home. So he wasn't a dentist to the stars. He was a dentist to the coal miners, right? And, you know, he always said, I'm going to retire and go fishing. I said, Dad, you got a day off once a week. Why don't you go fishing? I'm a kid saying this to him. Nope. I got to work hard, save, retire, go fishing. So when he when he when he I remember it was the spring of 1989. He went out and got himself a fishing license at Kmart, which doesn't exist anymore. Big department store. Right. And hey, I got my fishing license. I'm going to start fishing in November when I retire. He passed away on September 18th, right before he retired. So. There has to be that. So he didn't miss one of our school events or anything that he was always able.

But then he would go back that night and work. And I saw that and was like, you know, there's got to be a way to find some sort of. And we get out of balance wrong. I mean, I'm sure you've gotten out of balance. I've gotten out of balance. And fortunately, we have good partners in life. They've helped us with that. If we don't have a great partner in life, we've got to figure it out ourselves. And I think it gets back to. Do I have that infrastructure of people? So if you're a business person and let's say you're in sales and let's say you're not making many sales right now with a certain target group of customers, but you've built enough relationships in an industry that's now growing. It's like we do a lot with heavy equipment. Great place to be. Lots of business there. But let's say heavy equipment stopped growing. The other area we do really well is in chemicals. Chemicals never seem to stop growing. I'm not saying they're good.

So we have to be a little strategic about who we build these relationships with and who we learn GPS about. Because, again, we only have so many hours in a day. We're spending a lot of that time in meetings. So how do we balance all that stuff?

Right. I'll tell you, I ask in front of CEOs of large companies, how many of you enjoy going to meetings around the company and nobody raises their hands and that person rolls their own eyes when all you really need is, I call it a purpose statement. What am I trying to accomplish and why will the people coming to my meeting benefit? By coming to my meeting. If you can't articulate that to yourself before you send an invitation out, you're not ready to have the meeting. It's that simple. It's that simple. It's respect for yourself and everybody else's time. Here's a trick. One quick trick on that, too. Call the meeting for 10 after the hour because everybody's finishing a meeting on the hour. So 2-10,3-10,9-10, whatever 10. And it's going to get people's attention. End the meeting five minutes early. They'll love you.

So can I give you a four-step process for a great meeting after you figure out the purpose? Perfect. It's real simple. First step is get the group talking first.

So you're starting the meeting off and some new people are joining. Introduce them or ask them a question. Or have somebody update you on what happens. But stop talking as the meeting leader. Okay. Second, now the next three steps just repeat. They're so simple. First one is introduce meeting topic. So Ron is going to talk about, you know, parts and service today. He gets 20 minutes, right? Then the group talks about it for 10 minutes. That's the next step. Topic, dialogue, what did we agree to and commit to? That's how you process a meeting topic. And then you do it again for the next topic. And if Ron is running late, he's got to borrow time from Ed, the next topic leader, or Ron's done. And it's such an easy cadence, but no one does it. Unless we work with them.

And with the person we voted against, we want to try to find a way to get them to consent to it. Right. To say, OK, I can support it. I wasn't what I wanted to do, but I'm for the betterment of the greater good. I could consent to that. I always thought consensus is we don't necessarily agree, but when we leave, we support it.

Right. When they leave the room, it's like, well, you know what? I agree to it in there. But guess what? I'm going to do everything I can to slow things down. Kind of like governments do. But that's another topic. We won't do that.

I always thought the best training or learning for someone going into sales, customer service, account management, parts and service counter, branch manager would be a job serving tables or bartender job. I always thought those positions prepare you for the unknown. Oh, the guy's steak got burned or they got the drinks wrong. I can't get the coffee out fast enough. Those are all the things that, you know, in interacting with someone who's actually paying money and expecting a nice experience. So I always thought, hey, if you want to go into those positions, I worked. I did all that stuff. But I think the whole idea when we see good service, we were like shocked by. Yeah. And I'll ask. I'll ask a question, and maybe I'm teaching a leadership class and a customer program. And I'll say, write down the name of a company that puts people before their processes. I get two companies. When I'm in the States, I get two companies, Chick-fil-A and Amazon.

Yep. Because the returns are so easy. And people cannot, and you get outlawed. But think about that. Diverse groups of people in a room, that's as far as they can go. So that tells you. So when the plumber calls me back of the three that I called, I'm hiring him no matter what, because he actually called me back. Yeah. You're right about customer service. It's tough.

Anecdotally, one of my best customers is from the Netherlands. And her name is Emma. And Emma is in charge of global training. She's a global leader for learning and development for a medical products company. And Emma got hired when she was a bartender in a pub in England by three of the executives who had just happened to go in there to get a pub. a pint or whatever you call it after their meeting. And they watched her and they said, do you have a degree? She had no degree. And she's now pretty much running global training for a $5 billion company. Who cares about the degree? If you're great with people and an amazing facilitator, great at relationships. And the other thing I'll hear, because we're still talking about our Dash relationships. Well, I'm an engineer or I'm a CPA in recovery, but most CPAs don't necessarily come off like I do. What do I do? And I'll say, well, you can still think about relationships from a process standpoint.

You've got to find something in common with Rob. Ask him some questions. Oh, I can do that. And then when you do things together, make sure you're on time. Make sure you deliver what you said. Oh, I can do that. And when you're meeting with him, be prepared for the meeting. Well, I can do that and try to help him. See, I can do all those things. Well, why does being an engineer get in the way of you building a good relationship?

we're working with anybody.

Because you started kindergarten early.

It creates your culture.

You don't have to dictate the culture. It creates itself. And I think that's, everybody goes, well, we have to have a cultural shift here. I'm like, well, look at the people that work here and they're your culture. You can't dictate. You can't design. You can have a collaborative culture, but people have to collaborate. You can have a cross-functional culture. People have to be able to work on teams. You can put all those things in place, but if you haven't provided the skills, which I know you do an awful lot of that stuff with Learning Without Scars and all the great programs you have, and now you're in universities and everything. If you can't provide the skills, then are they... Do you have the right processes? We talked about processes fail, not people, in my mind. And, you know, to this day, two companies always come up when I hear about processes.

I'll get an occasional boutique or something that we don't even know who they are, but that's very personal to the personal answer. And I'm like, okay, we'll go there sometime, right?

I think longer. Yeah.

Well, this one university class I teach, I tell them right off the bat, it's a master's own class. I say, number one, you all get A's if you do these four things. And they're like this on the screen, like, you all get A's. I said, I've never not given an A in 12 years now, except if you don't do these things. Number one, you make the classes. You engage during the classes. You take something and use it every week and come back and tell me what you use. And when you get to your final paper, I don't care about grammar. I don't care about citations because, number one, I don't know how to correct citations. I care about, and what they're doing is they're working on relationships through the class. Business relationship. I care about what you did to launch, advance, or sustain that relationship. That's what I care about. And I think that the three questions I ask, I call it ask, ask, ask. You know, let's say you said something.

I go, well, I should ask you why or how come, right? And then you're going to talk some more. My second question in active listening, I call this active listening. My definition of active listening is. Can you tell me more? You're going to probably tell me more about your business if you're a business owner like you are, or if I'm trying to engage you to buy our products and services. And you're going to talk more and more. Then I'm going to say, is there anything else? And those three little questions will create a pause in your pitch, a pause in your request for budget, whatever it is you're looking for with your significant other. Be engaged and ask them some questions.

Don't do that to me. I get that all the time. That doesn't work with me. Yeah,

Sure. And no, thank you for having me. And it's the honor of being with you. Whenever we talk and we talk less offline than we did previously. I remember in my car driving home, I'm trying to learn this industry and you picked right up and you. told me everything I needed to know. So I cannot thank you enough. I'll do anything to help you grow learning without scars. As a parting thought, let's go back to what we started with. Maybe, you know, write down the four numbers of the year you were born, the year, and then put a dash, and then maybe ask yourself a couple of questions. What am I here for? What's most important to me? And what's my contribution going to be? Ask yourself those three questions. You're going to intermix business and life and everything. And I guarantee you, you're going to get a little deeper insight into, you know, this continuum that we're all on right now. And I think that the key is, am I working with the right people?

Am I being the right people to really create a great dash? So I hope that helps.

The holiday special coming up, Ron Mahalo.