 I've known Chris for many, many years and we often talk about, we hang out together, we travel together, we do lots of things together, but we often talk about business and I do consider Chris a trusted partner of mine, somebody I can call up and just share honestly with what's going on in my business and things that, challenges that I'm facing and it's the kind of things that we talk about regularly and so I did invite him here today to share some of those things as well with you so I'm going to go ahead and let you start with, it can't be possible with a failure. You may have learned about failures. Something you've, just make it up. Maybe I just saw it on TV or something. Alright, so how many of you have ever, how many of you have ever worked on a puzzle? Puzzle? Okay, my wife loves puzzles. When we go on a cruise we find the library or the room where they do puzzles and the first thing she does she gets the box out and she lays out the pieces and she does a puzzle, okay? So I want you to imagine, right, given that I really struggle with failure, what it feels like to work on a puzzle where you take a piece and you try and place it like right next to the edge and then when it doesn't fit, I just lose it. I screw it, I'm like no! It's big and it's, that's how I deal with failure, right? Isn't that how you guys deal with puzzle pieces with anything? No, no, how many of you have key rings with keys on it, right? And you put the wrong key in the door and it doesn't fit and then you're like, no! Right? That's how you, no, that's not how you deal with it. Okay, so it turns out that I don't do that with puzzle pieces, I don't do that with keys and I don't do that when something doesn't work at work or in life. I don't call it a failure because I don't call putting a piece in that doesn't fit a failure. I don't call putting a key in that doesn't fit a failure. It's just that one didn't work, let's go to the next one. If something, if I have a proposal at work and I want to pitch it and it doesn't work, I don't lose it, I don't call it a failure. Someday I may run, I don't know when that's going to happen but if I was in a 5k for example and someone went ahead of me, right? I wouldn't be like, no! I'd just be like, okay, yeah, okay. So I think one of the problems we have with failure is the label failure. If you're a teacher, you know this, right? When we talk about, if you were getting your master's degree in education, if you were a teacher, you would know that when you ask a question to a classroom of students, and the first person answers, you don't say that's right. Today in education we know that when you say, hey, how do you know whether or not this is popular? And five kids raise their hand and you go to the first one and they go, because a lot of people are clapping and you don't say that's right. You say what else? Because if you say that's right, you have four or five other people who put their hands down and just go, I guess my idea was wrong. And it wasn't. We look at things when we put in the label failure, what we're really doing is creating negative self-talk or criticism. There's an entire field of psychology that I love reading about, which is sports psychology. And you watch what high-performing athletes do and they learn mantras like this won't kill you or been here before going to get through it, right? If you're on a serious race, if you're in the Boston Marathon and you're in the middle 13, 14 miles spread and it's hard, you don't say this sucks and I'm not in first and this is a failure and my life is a failure and everything I've done is trained for. You're like, been here, going to get through this, right? Been here before, going to get through this and that's how you push it through. A lot of times what happens when we put the failure label on something is we close down our thinking, right? There's a tiny little bit of stress that happens in our brain when we go, I failed so now I'm bad, right? We talked about this earlier, Chris Ford was talking about it. I'm bad. We limit options like well if that didn't work therefore nothing will work. If I have a proposal work that doesn't work, I just find another way to bring it in and then another way and I try. It's like keys going in the door. That one didn't work, let's go to the next one. That one didn't work, let's go to the next one. So I've learned a lot about failure, but mostly what I've learned a lot about is how to persist past it, right? How not to give it that big label because that big label starts narrowing down options rather than trying to open up options. That make sense? There's a documentary that I think I turned you on to recently on Netflix. That's awesome. That's exactly what you're talking about and if you haven't watched it, it's an eight-part documentary called Losers. I just want to pause right there. When your best friend calls you up and goes, hey, you should watch Losers, maybe rethink your friendships, right? Maybe rethink your friendships because he's like, oh, you should watch Losers. It's awesome. You specifically. You specifically. I'm giving you a record and you're like, wow, okay, thank you very much. If you haven't watched Losers, I highly recommend watching Losers because it's very much about what Chris was just talking about, about sports philosophy, right? Yeah, absolutely. So years and years ago, I was raising money for startups, right? So three times a week, I would put on a suit, I would drive to Silicon Valley and I would do probably three to four meetings a day, 10 meetings a week, asking other people for millions of dollars. And that's probably 50 meetings in the year and we got one yes, right? 49 knows one yes. And I think much like if you've ever worked with Steve, you know Steve's really good at sales, Steve probably makes, you know, not that he does outbound calls, but when he interacts with other people, see that little dig, but he may have 49 conversations that don't go well, but he knows all he needs is the one, right? There is a certain dynamic, a certain skill in learning how to let the 49 go because all you need is the one, right? All you need is one to work for it to move forward. And so a lot of times for me, it's just a game of numbers, it's just a game of persistence. If it doesn't work this way, it will work this other way. So I work really hard on plan B, plan C, plan D, plan E, plan F, plan G, and it just keeps going, right? It's annoying to the people that are close to me because by the time something hits, I'm like, oh, no problem, we'll just do this. Or we'll do this, and they're like, how do you think about this? Well, I spent the last two months thinking about this, right? Like, I'm just always prepared for the next failure and how to move around it to get to the next thing. So you haven't given us any specifics? Yes, okay. Okay, come on, man. One of the biggest failures of all time! I was responsible for hiring an SVP, a senior vice president for a software company, and I hired them. They were awesome. They had spent 16 years at Microsoft as a technical evangelist. They were everything we needed, right? I knew that the guy was awesome, right? I knew he was a technical evangelist at Microsoft because even when he mistakenly, like, his bag fell down, his badge from Microsoft fell out, right? He was the legit thing. If you're a technical evangelist at Microsoft, it means you've passed a whole bunch of criteria already. Like, I don't have to vet you. I still... I made a couple phone calls, made sure he was legit. Two days in to the job, I asked him to do something, and he started getting cagey. You know that feeling where you're like, hey, well, show me what you got. Well, I'm not ready to show you yet. Yeah, but just let me see what you got. No, no, I just... You know, let's take a look at it tomorrow, and then tomorrow he doesn't show up to work. But it's because his wife is at the hospital and we're like, well, have some compassion. Don't be a jerk. So great. Let's call the hospital and ask for Mrs. Green and send her flowers, except there's no Mrs. Green. So then we send an email, and he's like, well, she's not at that hospital. She's at this other hospital. But she's already checked out. She's at the house. Great. Send us your address. We'll send flowers all we want. I know what you're trying to do. What? When someone says, I know what you're trying to do, and you were trying to send flowers, right? It's really awkward, because you're like, I don't really know what you're saying I'm doing. So in the back of our head, we started wondering, like, what's going on? What's the issue? And my boss comes in and says, hey, how much vetting did you do of this employee? Oh, no. And I'm like, well, I called a couple of people. Plus he's a Microsoft. I mean, like, he works at Microsoft, right? In those days, Microsoft didn't do employment verification, right? Or they didn't do references, right? And it was a big deal back in those days of technology and what they would say or not say. But they had just opened up a service where you could pay $50 and punch in the person's information, and they would tell you when they worked there. This guy spent 16 years at Microsoft. Or at least that's what I thought. I paid the money, right? I paid the money, and he had worked there for six months, right? He was friends with, we knew, because when he came into the interview, like, I wasn't a moron. We had him physically show up. Several of us interviewed him, right, including my boss, so I didn't feel like this was all my failure, but it was mostly my failure. He had mentioned that people he knew at Bank of America and we were doing deals with Bank of America, and so eventually I called Bank of America and I'm like, hey, you know, like, Stan Green, do you know Stan? And they're like, who's that? And I'm like, well, he's the guy. Remember, we saw each other. Oh, I was saying hi to you guys. I didn't know who was with you, and he was like, oh, yeah, I worked with her for years when I was over there at Wells Fargo. And so, I mean, it started falling through. He said he went to San Diego, or UC San Diego. So we called UC San Diego and I said, okay, like, I'm guessing his age. He'd be around here. And they're like, no, we don't have anybody by that name. I'm like, oh, sorry, not in the computer science department. And she goes, no, no, no, not, like, we don't have anyone in the computer science department, you know, with that name. I'm like, okay, what about the university? No. What about any time in all of history? Have you ever had this person? No, right? So then I wrote the email that said, I'm gonna need you to bring in your transcript and this and that, and he just launched this massive email of bad words. And I was like, well, I guess that's your resignation, right? So he worked for me for three days. But the amount of energy we had put into hiring him and the amount of plans we had set up for him, that was a $30,000 or $40,000 failure. When I was 27 or 28, and I was terrified to hire for the next couple of years, right? Because you do something bad and you think I'm bad, right? And it turned out, no, it was just, it was a mistake, it was a failure, but you have to eventually get back up and start again, right? So these days, of course, if you've ever worked for me, if I don't know you, just plan for a six or eight week process to hire, like I won't hire fast, I'll fire fast, but I'm not hiring fast because I want to make sure we do everything right. So hire slow. Hire slow. Fire fast. Okay, good. Any questions? So far? So you want another one? I had a follow-up question, but absolutely no, no, no, no. We only have nine minutes, ten minutes. I absolutely want another one. So how many of you send out quotes for people to sign up for your services? Right? Yeah, okay, a good amount of you. So I sent out a quote to a client once, right? We had this whole conversation, sent out the quote, and they signed it and sent it back right away. And nothing about that sounded bad. Like, there was not a... Awesome. There was no failure there, right? You send out a quote that says it will be like $9,000, and they signed back saying great and done. And then you're in the middle of the work, and he goes, I'm super impressed by the work you're doing for just $9,000. And you hear the word just, and you're like... What were you expecting to pay? Right? And he goes, well, we talked to a couple other folks that wouldn't do nearly what you have on your list, right? Like, you have gone over and above. We talked to a couple other folks. I think the cheapest quote we had was like $75,000. So we said, let's just throw it to this guy for $9,000. If he's a bozo, it's not even like it doesn't matter if it's $9,000. And if it works out, we got a deal, right? Now, he's saying this with full on, like we're trusted partners and friends, but I'm like, you're a jerk. You could have given me a heads up, right? So from then on, I have never sent out a single price, right? I always send out three. So here's 80% of what you want, right? For the price I'm willing to do the project for. Here's 110% of what you want for, you know, a bigger price, right? And then here's what you might need two years down the line if you really want to pay and get going now and go for success and push that price up. And I have been far more committed to asking a lot more questions. Like, have you talked to anyone else? Do you have a set budget? Have you heard a lot of questions? What's your range? How do you characterize how much you want to spend? Learn a lot from, again, doing that one really, really wrong. Have you done this kind of thing before? What did you pay in the past? You know what, don't use logic with me. That's not right. Awesome. So on the pricing, what you just explained, I just lost my question. It'll come back to me for a second. Questions for Chris on that story? Yes? Mike, come and hang on a second. So what happens if you ask the questions such as what's your budget or what's your range if you don't get back an answer that gives you an idea? And then how would you then present a quote that allows you to... Yeah, so what happens if they don't give you a range back or they don't give you enough information? So I learned this trick when I went to go build a pool in my backyard. So I invited a vendor to come to the house and put fake grass in the front of the house. Fake grass in the front, little square. My son's allergic to grass, so just fake grass in the front. Called the vendor over, but I'm in the meeting in my office so my wife takes the meeting. And I tell her, just fake grass in the front, get me a number. And so two hours later, I'm done with the call. I come out of the office and the dude is sitting in my living room. And so I look at my wife and I'm like, what happened? And she said, well, he said that project was too small, but he said he'd be more than happy given that I told him all about what we wanted in the backyard. And I'm like, wait, what? And she said, remember the other day you were telling me about what we were going to do in the backyard? You want the pool, you want the waterfall, you want the cave behind the waterfall, then you want the big jacuzzi on this end plus the fire pit over here and the shade and then the trees in the back? I'm like, that's why the vendor's sitting in my house. He's been waiting for two hours. We'll just pay straight cash. Oh, thank you, sweetheart. You're amazing. Have I mentioned how awesome you are today? And so the guy says, let's review what you want. Of course. And so we go in the backyard. He looks at everything. He's talking about the pool and everything else. And then he says, what's your budget? Now, I've written a book on pricing, right? So I am not going to negotiate with myself. You think I'm going to give you the first number? And I said, out loud, I said, no, dude, I'm not the pool expert. I haven't built pools before. You do this. You've done this for what? 20 years? He goes, yeah, 22 years. So you've done this for 22 years. You know what it's going to cost. You tell me what this is all going to cost. And instead of answering me, he says, well, in 22 years, what I've discovered is that most people do have a number in their head, but it's about 50% of what it will actually cost. And I blurt out, I'm not spending 150 grand on this thing. And he goes, so your budget is 75? I learned that from my pool guy. And by the way, what did he do? He gave us a quote for just the pool to this, the basics, the waterfall, but no cave beneath it. If you want the cave, add on. If you want solar to heat up the pool, add on. And by the time we were done, we were back up to $150,000. And you're like, this is insanity. But he played it perfectly. So when someone tells me they don't have a budget, then you start navigating around it to say, well, here's an experience. You might tell them about other projects. And as you're telling them, you might drop the anchor of the price. So this is a project we did. This has the automated marketing. That was $35,000. And you're watching them in the eye where they're like, no. You don't have to do everything that we did for there, but it is just to give you an example. Here's this other one. Oh, that's painful. All right, I think we're OK. OK. So I might use two or three examples to anchor them on price and say, we don't need to do all of this, or we don't need to do all this, but we could do some of these things and just help them understand where the guidelines are. Does that make sense? Awesome. Just to reflect what Chris said, when I'm doing that, I do the exact same thing. I say, here's a project. It's not exactly like what you're thinking. I always start with that. This is not exactly, this is not an apples-to-apples match. But here's that cut, because that leaves me the door open to say those kinds of things. So I start with that. I remember my question. My question was, I know that this wasn't your intent when you quoted the $9,000 project, but a lot of people play the pricing game by quoting low, giving an exact scope for what they're doing, like your pool guy. And so I wanted you to expand on that a little bit if you wanted to play the pricing game. You can absolutely be the low price leader, as long as you're willing to narrow down the dynamics. You probably don't know this unless you're super astute, but the size of your peanut butter jars have been changing over time. And you're like, wait, what? Your peanut butter jar pricing hasn't. And so you're like, oh, look, it's still the same jar that I bought five years ago. No. Grab the jar, flip it over, and look at the dimple on the bottom. They've been slowly... This is an entire conspiracy I'm just letting you in on. They've been slowly taking away peanut butter from the peanut butter jar for years, right? By changing the size of that dimple. Why? Because fundamentally they can keep the price of the peanut butter jar the same and give you less peanut butter. What does that have to do with this? You can do the exact same thing in your pricing. You can keep your price at $9,000, give them less. Oh, you need to migrate the site over, that's separate. The performance of the... Oh, that's separate. Oh, you need responsive design or that's separate. But the base of the design of your website or the base of your installation of WooCommerce or whatever it is, that's this price. So you can start with a lower price, right? As long as you're letting them know here are some of the extras, and then they'll walk themselves up to wherever they're comfortable. And if you've ever competed in the RFP game, especially government RFPs, that's how they work typically. They're looking for price. But you can play that game with a narrow scope and adding on. Other questions for Chris? You're nailing it, you're killing it. All by myself. Any other stories you want to share? No, I'm good. Thank you guys so much. Have a great lunch.