 Hey, I'm gonna lay out a plan for my relationships and I'm just gonna love the crap out of them, not because they did anything for me, just because. You want more referrals? You want 10X more referrals? You show up at the random, I just thinking about you and people are like, I didn't do anything for them. Internally, what do we want to do? We want to reciprocate, especially when people do that over and over. It starts to feel unequal. Now, there's no strings attached. They want to go out of their way to do things for you versus waiting for a referral or a deal to happen. What's up everybody and welcome to the show today. We drop great content each and every week and we want to make sure that you guys get notified and in order to do that, you're gonna have to smash that subscribe button and hit that notification bell. And if you've gotten a lot of value out of this, make sure you give us a like and share our videos with your friends. John, welcome to the show. We're so excited to talk today about gift giving. Yeah, man, thanks for having me. Now, with the holidays on us, everyone is probably thinking about what gifts they're gonna receive, but today we want to talk about actually the art of giving gifts in ways that we can use it to enrich every relationship in our lives, our personal relationships, as well as our professional relationships. And Johnny and I would love to just start with a little bit of the backstory of what got you so enthusiastic about the art of gift giving. Yeah, well, it's like a lot of things in life. It comes out of desperation, right? Most of our best ideas come when our backs against the wall, our backs in the corner, we're poor, we're hungry. I grew up milking goats on a farm. So I didn't grow up around nice gifts. I was the kid that wanted to air Jordans, but I was ending up with like the Walmart or Aims at the time special. And so I wanted to get out of that. I hated milking goats and bale and hay. And I was gonna go be a doctor, a good deal or a chiropractor because I wanted to make money and I didn't know what an entrepreneur was. But my life changed because of a mentor who was this rain making guy. He was amazing at relationship building. And I looked at him and he was 60 at the time. It was my girlfriend's dad. And I was like, I want to be him someday. I want to have the relationships. I want to have the referrals, the deal flow. Like people just flocked to him because he was radically generous with all of his relationships, not tactical, not like, hey, here's a gift. Now I'm going to ask you for a favor. He just loved on people. And because of that, he just had this amazing law firm, but he also in real estate that magically became the Walmart. Like those sorts of things just happened to him all the time. And I'm like, Paul was just this magnet. And so I pitched him cutco knives. In turn with cutco at a desperation, like I did no sales experience. My mom was like, nobody can afford these stupid knives. Like, how are you going to pay for med school? And I'm like, I'm going to sell these knives, mom. She's like, you're nuts. So I pitched him thinking maybe he'll give all those clients at Christmas, the like a pocket knife. A lot of his clients were men. They're into hunting fishing outdoors. And he's like, John, I don't wear the pocket knives. So I'm like, I understand, Paul. He's like, I want to order 100 of the pairing knives. I'm like, Paul, you want to give a bunch of dudes like a kitchen tool? Why? And he's like, the reason I have more referral, deal flow access is I found out a simple truth in business, whether you're in law or financial services or manufacturing, it doesn't matter. It's all just people. And if you take care of the family and business, everything else seems to take care of itself. So that was the lightning bolt moment that I understood that Paul understood, you know, like Robert Chagini talks about with, you know, influence and reciprocity and pre-sways and all of these things come down to human psychology. And if you want to get anywhere in business, whether you're a sales rep, whether you're a VP, whether you're an owner, it comes down to human beings. Like your investors, your mentors. And so really, we wrote giftology five years ago. We've been doing this for 20 years. We've landed 25 pro sports teams. But at the end of the day, it's a relationship. Like everybody rises and falls on the relationship. So nobody cares about gifts. The gift I realized was just the delivery vehicle for this emotion and this connection and made people feel like, hey, you care about them. They matter. And when people feel a certain way, they run through walls for you. And so that's really the core of, I was like, I didn't want to go to med school really. I just want to make money and I don't want to go to half a million dollars in debt. So I really latched onto that idea and I'm like, I don't want to be poor. So I'm going to start pouring into these relationships. And I started a business when I'm 20. By the time I was a senior in college, Cutco has worked with about 2 million sales reps. We became their number one rep out of 2 million in the 70 year history as this country bumpkin farm kid who had no sales experience by applying these principles that we now teach on stages all over the world. Now, many of us have that exact thought, okay, gifts so transactional. You're giving me something because you naturally want something out of me. And because of that, we avoid even going down that path of gift giving. How can we make it less transactional and just a part of enriching those relationships around us? Yeah, well, first off, we're talking around a holiday, right? And so almost everybody gives holiday gifts, Christmas gifts, whether you're in manufacturing, distribution, oil and gas, finance, like every industry, most people's conference tables are ready to collapse from all this chocolate, nuts, brownies, wine. You're giving gifts out of obligation. Like if you show up for your clients out of obligation, it feels very transactional. So I don't know, we call it no ABC gifting, no anniversaries, no birthdays, no Christmas. We don't allow, we own a gifting agency. A done-free gifting agency. And the reason I can take the time to do the call is because we don't send gifts, it's a holiday. We own a gifting agency. And so like, people are like, you're gonna die. You're like, your business is gonna go out of business. I'm like, no, I'm gonna focus on the other 10 months out of the year for our clients. And so now when you send a gift, it's like if you're married. If you show up on Valentine's Day for your wife, you earn brownie points. Hell no. You show up on a random Tuesday with a spot package of the four seasons and say, honey, I got the four kids, go. The same thing applies with clients. You show up at Christmas, you're competing with 47 other things. It's very obligatory, very expected. Whereas if you start doing things, we call it planned randomness. We'll lay out once a quarter for our top 250 relationships and our clients that we do gifting for do the exact same thing. One might be in the middle of February. The next year, that first quarter, we're gonna do it in January. The next quarter, we're gonna do it in March. We rotate through, so the person who's receiving it doesn't feel like it's just a check the box. We also don't allow people to do deal gifts. Hey, you signed a million dollar deal, here's your box of brownies. Who cares? You got a million dollars, here's your box of brownies. Does that feel good? No, it feels transactional. Whereas if you waited six months and gave a thoughtful gift out of the blue, not because the deal was done, we don't allow referral gifts. Why? Hey, here's a million dollar referral, here's your bottle of champagne. Does that feel good? No, it feels tit for tat. So the timing matters just as much as what you're sending and most people do things very reactive versus saying, hey, I'm gonna lay out a plan for my relationships and I'm just gonna love the crap out of them. Not because they did anything for me, just because. You want more referrals? You want 10X more referrals? You show up at the random leave. I was thinking about you and people were like, I didn't do anything for them. Internally, what do we wanna do? We wanna reciprocate, especially when people do that over and over, it starts to feel unequal. Now, there's no strings attached. They wanna go out of their way to do things for you versus waiting for a referral or a deal to happen. We drop great content each and every week and we wanna make sure that you guys get notified and in order to do that, you're gonna have to smash that subscribe button and hit that notification bell. And if you've gotten a lot of value out of this, make sure you give us a like and share our videos with your friends. There is so much going on in everything that you said there and there's a few points that I wanna bring up. First, in communication, there's passive communication and there's proactive communication and whether you're gonna be reactive, waiting to see what happens and then make your move from there or are you gonna drive the conversation in a certain direction? Of course, you had brought up because gift giving is much in the same manner. Now, for myself as a guy, the minute I heard you say, well, getting your wife a gift randomly is gonna have more, for those guys in the audience who thought, if I got my wife or girlfriend a gift randomly, the first question she's gonna ask me is, what did you do? So, of course, you have to reevaluate where the relationship is and why that's your first thought and being proactive in gift giving and what you're setting up. And I'm sure you've heard this a million times. So what do you have to say to that, John? Well, I would say that maybe has more to do with somebody's character than it has to do with the gift concept. I mean, if that's the only time you're sending gifts is when you do dumb stuff. And then it's not really proactive, it's reactive. But I think that there is that pattern of guys only do things when they have to. Guys only wait, they wait for the anniversary, they wait for the last minute. If guys specifically would be just as proactive with their relationship internally, personal and business-wise, externally, as they are with their fantasy football league, they'd be an amazing, thoughtful gift giver. But most people are like, John, I can't do this. I'm not good at it. I'm like, I grew up on a farm, goat milking. My love language is not gift giving. I'm actually naturally an introvert and I'm naturally. So the fact that I'm on stages and whatever else, I go back and have a bourbon and a cigar by myself because it takes a lot of energy to go out and give it. But I'm also not naturally skilled that way. I just have worked what I call the gratitude muscle consistently for 20 years. So now I'm pretty dang good at it. But there's other people that are better. It's just that we put a system and a strategy to it. So I'd say, like, if the only times you're doing it is when you're in the dog house, like that's not proactive. That's reactive. And if you start showing up for your wife or your girlfriend or significant other at random times and they realize, oh, this is because they just were thinking of me, not because they did something stupid, then you'll create a new pattern where they're like, wow, my husband or my boyfriend or my whatever, it's just crazy thoughtful and good things will start to happen. Now, if you give a guess randomly to your spouse and expect something that night, it wasn't a gift. That's a manipulation. Just like if you give a gift and then ask for a referral, it wasn't a gift. You're trying to manipulate the situation. Very different than you give something open handed versus, hey, honey, I just, I took care of you. Now you need to take care of me. That's a gift to get. You're gonna get like, mapped down. That's not gonna work well for you. So the little intricacies of everything with gifting or anything else matters just as much as the thing itself. Yeah, that intent is so key because many of us go in with a transactional mindset around the gift. Exactly. I'm gonna give you something and that means now that I'm expecting something back from you in kind. And whether that's in real estate, trying to get a referral, whether that's in business, trying to land that contract by sweetening the deal with champagne and anything else, of course, that puts the other person thinking, well, you just want something out of me and it hurts the relationship and doesn't help. The other key point that you brought up that I want to focus on is, think about your birthday on Facebook, right? We get inundated with happy birthday messages. Does any one of those messages stand out to you? Do you remember every single person that wished you happy birthday? No, if you're a business owner, what happens around the holidays? Tons of fruit basket, tons of bottles of wine, tons of chocolates. Does any one of those gifts stand out to you? No, it's just doing business. Piles up, you give it to your staff and you move on. You don't even really think about it. But the randomness, the planned randomness stands out because there's nothing else to compare it to. There's no one else sending a gift in the middle of March for no reason. There's no one else in late August who is thinking about the client or the potential client like you are. So planning your gift giving around major holidays, major events, following the tradition that everyone else follows doesn't really really allow you to stand out from the crowd. No, no, I mean, we tell people all the time, even a sucky gift that shows up in the middle of August stands out better than an amazing gift that's given out. And so if you can gift at a level 10, so like you take somebody out to dinner, you're not taking them to McDonald's, you're taking them to a court season or some world class restaurant. Most people give sucky gifts and they give them a sucky, expected obligatory time and they spam their logo on it. When I give those people the recipe, they're like, oh my gosh, I've been doing everything wrong for the last 20 years. No wonder nobody cares. No wonder nobody cares because it sucks because it's vanilla, it's bland, but the timing, man, the timing is so clutch. It's like, when I tell people we own the agency no Christmas gifts, like they get ghost white. They're like, what are you talking about? Like they want to help me. But we do this every year for 30 years. I'm like, well, how are you getting the amount of referrals you want? Are you getting the amount of loyalty from your employees that you expect? Are your suppliers running through walls for you? No. Then start showing up for those buckets of relationships at unexpected times and uncommon ways and come back three years from now and tell me that it didn't pay off 100X. Nobody comes back other than to tell me you're so right, not only is my marriage better, but my relationship with my employees is better because we're just humans. I don't care. Like I spoke at Google, I'm just working in technology and they're like challenging me. And I said, are there humans at Google? And they're like, well, yeah, there's like 80,000 of them. I'm like, then it works. There works in Idaho, Africa, like we're all just humans that we forget. We think, oh, it has to be industry specific or we have this tradition of doing this in December. I'm like, everything that everybody's doing go completely against the grain. Just do the opposite of what everybody else says and you'll probably be in the top 1% of gift givers.