It's time for Conventions of a Serial Salesman, author, expert sales trainer, and serial entrepreneur Steve Noodleburg wants to help you change your life and your business using his 27 roles for influencers and leaders. This is the Conventions of a Serial Salesman Podcast. With Steve Noodleburg, here's Josh Cohen. And welcome to not just yet another edition of the Conventions of a Salesman, the podcast based on the book and hardcover and paper back, but also on audiobook.
It's not just any episode, it's not just another edition. It is number five zero. It's a half a century mark. Congratulations, Steve.
Who thought we both still be alive by the time number 50 rolled around? We just spoke to somebody, a real good friend of mine, contact, and he said he's listened to every single one of them. Every single one of them, right? I mean, we just started to be incredible.
What's wrong with that guy? He was like hospitalized? Is he immobilized? Why would you want to listen all 50?
He was putting good shit out there. Not terrible. A lot of people have been informed, educated, motivated, inspired, and then some. Oh, and for 50?
Yep. We are blowing the top off. Really? This guy's incredible.
You know, I had a bottle of wine for you, but I was bringing it. I totally forgot it. I was halfway here. You're a lot of that.
You're really nice. And I was going to bring champagne, but it's dry January. So for you it is. For you it's the worst idea ever.
Best idea. I have so much clarity. It works for you to each the room. All right.
So why don't you introduce us to our guest for number 50? You said you blew the top off and you want all that. Yeah, you know what? They're the power of LinkedIn, the power of social media got me introduced to a guy who was pumping out unbelievable content.
I reached out to him. I said, I really, really love what you're doing. Let's grab coffee as I do with most of the people I try to meet. He accepted and I consider a friend.
I made a friend and he is here to share who he is, what he does, how he does it. And I'm just, you know what? When you meet somebody who is really, really good at what they do, you should pay attention and the sky is really. And who's this guy going to do some stuff?
Joe Mullings. There he is. The president and CEO of the whole name. You seem to do that a lot.
I don't know if you realize that. You set him up and you set him up and you never actually say that. Well, you usually do that. Well, I think it's your show.
It's your shine. We got to get our first one was so good. No pressure Joe Mullings, but 49 was maybe the best. It was the Citizen Kane of the Confessions podcast.
So no pressure on you. I'm feeling like a minute forward left, no time outs. The balls at your own seven yard line, you need six points. So good luck on this drive.
Am I Brady? You can be whoever you want to be. You got 93 yards ago, but a minute two and no time outs today. So thank you for joining us.
You guys met you connected on LinkedIn, which seems to be the new cocktail party for the universe. Correct. Right. Is the digital cocktail party of the universe?
Correct. And the key is bringing you to your private party. And there you go to your own separate, when you kind of link, I guess, if that were the case. So Steve took an interest in what he does, you were putting out there.
And then what did you see in return? You know, to the same, I see a lot of personalities on LinkedIn. I see a lot of people doing amazing things. And then when it was local down here, I've watched Steve.
So it was really cool that he reached out to me as well. I'm not a big reach out guy in general on the social side outside of my circles. But when he did, I took that meeting immediately because one is he's a fellow New Yorker. So you can.
We can. We can pick. Well, I'm from upstate. So I'm literally the hit count.
Well, I mean, I'm between Rochester and Syracuse. So I'm either an upstate New Yorker or like Toronto. It's close to Pennsylvania and Maine. It's the three one five between Rochester and Syracuse.
We're on the New York State through way. It takes it 42. So yeah, so Steve and I are from a similar era, Long Island boys, New York boys. So it's really easy to align with somebody who's a high performer.
And I really respected them even before we reached out. So it was sort of serendipitous. So you recognize that. You notice that without even doing homework, you could just tell a personality characteristic trait.
No, I saw him in mine. I mean, he was very present on a number of platforms. And there's an ecosystem down here in the Palm Beach area. And there's there's posers and there's doers and he actually is in the small pool of doers, which I appreciate.
Yeah, I like to separate those posers. How about that? And there's two kinds of posers. Those that are faking it until they can make it and those that couldn't make it.
So they hope you believe that you did that they did. Bingo. There's two times in the way that I don't trust people. I'm skeptical of people.
I'm always particularly not be too nice too fast. They want something from me. You know what I mean? And you know that I believe that one's character is revealed by how they treat those that can do nothing for that.
Totally agree. Right? You know, in this case, it was really cool because I reached out. I really liked what I saw him doing.
Here's a CEO of a big company that has embraced social media in such a relevant way what he's invested in his organization providing great content. It's like, listen, it's a master's degree every day. So why don't you share your story, who you are, how you got here, and then we can talk about winning. Top of the day today says, what's Joe's story?
So you know what? I'm going to ask Joe himself. What's your story? So New York boys, I mentioned born on Long Island Hicksville.
Actually love it town, but move over to Hicksville. The 516. The 516. To the 561.
I was a boy. I was a boy. I was a boy. I was a boy.
I was a boy. I was a man. I was going to have a 305 area code for those that call me. I'm an early Miami guy and 92.
Early adaptor. Yep. I made it out of high school. Lower middle class.
You excelled? No, I did. No, no, no, no. Straight A's.
But I rested a couple of times and a lot of tensions and a lot of suspensions. Okay. I made it out. So we have a lot in common.
I know it. I like to kill myself creative. So I'm super creative. I've been played with in the guidelines.
With the school engineering. You're smart for your own good? Never too smart for anything. Okay, because you had straight A's.
You kept getting in trouble. Normally that is a mind that is not challenged. Correct. That is a mind that is not being necessarily tested.
So it tested itself with the boundaries of behavior. Right. So I think of the Kennedy family, right? But I'm sure it's all about that.
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I tried to watch an episode last week a little bit.
It's just with the music and the framing and suspense. I'm just a Joe Friday Dragnet. Just the facts. Just give me the facts and I'll determine Ronald from there.
But continue, please. State. Alia. Dave.
Dave. I'm not here to one-up join the fort. And within two years, I decided I was going to start buying up businesses. So I bought up businesses on Long Island and we started to get into the health businesses.
And in the 80s, those were the go-go years in the health business. There was a lot of extra money and extra curriculum activity out there. I know. I just think Jamie Lee Curtis in Spandex in the movie Perfect.
You remember Perfect with John Travolta where he was the reporter from Rolling Stone? And she was just flawless. She was perfect. That was just after her.
She was close to her. I like the training place. Training places. Keep the spandex all you want.
Quick little flash of Jamie Lee Curtis there. Perfect. Yeah. Every week.
I thought she was great in the role of Barbara Bush two Sundays ago at the Golden Globes. You know, it's that she looked exactly like I rest her so far. Anyway, we're way off. We're talking to you about photos of Patterson, ancient aliens, and Jamie Lee Curtis topless.
But here we go, Joe. There we go. So I then started building up the health club business and did really well. So I would wake up in the morning at five, go open up the health club.
We built the personal training business around it went to school as an engineer. Left at five thirty, worked till ten o'clock at night. You know, again, side hustle back on the day. We were talking about that.
Did that for two years. Rolled out. Where does that drive come from? Where does that come from?
Oh, God. I think some people are a bit of my money. Nature and nurture. It's creativity for me.
It's never money. OK. I never chase money. I always chase the ability actually that requirement for me to express myself in a business model.
My expression, my art, my masterpiece is done in business. And who are you proving that to? For yourself? My parents proud?
No. Not sure the world how smart you are? No, not my parents. Do something that's never been done before.
Good for you. Yeah. It's not about the zeros and it's not about the trophies. Because a lot of people listen to this podcast or read the book.
They think that, well, I need the book and I'm going to listen to the audio book and listen to the podcast. I want to make more money. I want to make more money. That's not what drives everyone.
He means more than that financial award to many of the purpose exactly. So I'm curious always as I needed to pick your interesting mind as to what it was when you recognize it made you work that hard. Some folks come from a humble upbringing. Some folks never pleased or made their parents proud enough to hear your dad say I'm proud of your son.
And others just say, uh-uh, there's more I can do just because I can. Ryan Seacrest doesn't have six jobs. He doesn't have a gambling problem. Well, maybe he does, but not to that degree.
He does it because he needs to fulfill his own creative outlet in just going to master that stuff, right? Yeah, creative outlet. And I love the process since I was a kid. So I was a pretty high end athlete.
I went to school D1 as a soccer player, then moved into competitive cyclist and also as a mixed martial arts. Well, state and fly are soccer teams in those early mid 80s were really good. D1, 82, 83, 84. Wait, were they there?
84. See what I'm saying? I don't really say that. I don't know that.
I heard him saying he got out of 84. I don't. I was just, I'm blowing wind. I'm blowing some chunky, baby.
Yeah, that's it. But it's the process. So I've always been a game player, but I've always loved practice more. Really?
Yeah. As a golfer. So to me, I don't like winning as much as I hate losing. And so that's what drives me into the process.
I get enamored with the process and the outcome is the dollars. So if you pick something that you're good at and you really get wrapped up into the process, not wrapped around the axle, difference between focus and fixation. I have the ability to focus, but I never fix it. But I balance that out with an amazing amount of OCD.
And then I figure out where there's a problem in the market and then I hopefully overlay those and they're then the bench. So you love the practice more than the play. And there's a very small percentage of people who feel that way and of that small percentage of people that feel that way, they are overwhelmingly statistically successful because they're not looking for a shortcut because they're not looking to just get through this to get to this. Instead, it's understanding and working it so they're better prepared than anyone else's is.
I've learned from meeting great people, people who do great things. They all develop a process that works for them. They all invest in the process. I use the saying, teams that watch the scoreboard lose.
And it happens all the time. So when you hear somebody really successful, Nick Saban talks about the process. He goes, man, everybody wants to be the beast, but not everybody's willing to do what the beasts do. He does what beasts do.
Everybody wants to have an opportunity. He posts shit at six o'clock in the morning in his parking lot going, well, it's three other employees who beat me here this morning. And that bothers you, that bothers you, that three other species to the earth. You know what?
It's like a proud parent. Makes you proud of that, but also damn it, it's like the day my kid beat me in basketball in the driveway. I was pissed as shit. I was very proud of that.
And you can balance both. And I love the fact that you say you hate to lose more than you love to win. I'm more mad about not getting in a wager, in a legal wager. You know what, I bet illegally with organized crime.
Several factions have for years. Which family? Several. I hate not getting a bet in that wins more than actually enjoy the bet that did win.
Does that make sense? Totally. I don't gamble because I can't handle losing. I don't want to put myself in position where I don't want to lose.
No, so. Nobody should like it. You should never like losing. Well, you should, but for some of us, you should hate it more than actually winning.
You know, as it relates to business, which is kind of cool, I've learned the most from the things I've lost. So learning to embrace failure is really a key to success. And that goes against the grain of, you know, like any salesperson that worked with me, that was okay with losing a deal didn't stick with me well. But the key about the L when you get the L, it's immediately what you do after the L that dictates outcomes moving forward.
So when you get the L, the immediate question that you should ask yourself is what could I have done in order to have a better outcome versus ISOC? Right. And then too many people self talk is shit, ISOC or I lost. Or I should have done this rather than immediately indexing to what could I have done and what can I work on in order to become better.
And I think that's really important. And when you do that in aggregate day, week, month, year, that's when you start again to fall in love with the process, because the process is about the else. It's not about the W's. The process is about the, don't we learn more from the things we do wrong?
Always. Now we learn from things we do like, I mean, some of the, you know, I write about it in the book, some of the biggest failures I've had taught me a lot about me, my ability to deal with it. But you know, my son who, both of my sons are college football coaches, but Mark specifically talks about the 24 hour rule. He gives himself 24 hours to either enjoy the shit out of it or beat the hell out of himself.
But when it rings done, 24 hours, flush it and move on. My next book is called the L stands for learn, not loss. I just made that up right now. Not any books at all.
But I don't remember all the things that I touched in life successfully without any issue. But I remember like, hell, the time I put my hand on that hot stove and burn the hell out of my hand and you touch a lot of stuff and I touch a lot of stuff and a lot of people. But people need to recognize it. Let's not blow past and ignore when we lose, but rather examine that loss to take from it because we're all going to make mistakes in life.
It's just not making the same mistake over and over again, right? Yeah, we talk about there's no wins or losses. There's always outcomes and that's a really I don't mean a word Smith because I do words Smith. No, that's exactly the point.
It's outcomes. Just look at outcomes. Don't call it a winner loss. Take it as a learning moment outcome move forward.
How often do people tell you like a young Eric Clapton? And by young, I mean like Grammys 93, you know, tears and hurt. I've had a good one. That's a good one.
Yeah. Now that you say it, I see that. Yeah. For sure.
So I want to stay on the company you've built now, the culture you've created when we visited, I was enamored with the culture. It's not just you. You've replicated a mindset, a mood, you know, all of the feeling that we got there was insane. It was great.
So share more about what's happening today. Yeah, I think, you know, to all the entrepreneurs out there, there came a turn when we decided to just go out and hire best athlete, right? And best athlete means that, so let's look, let's use an analogy, best athlete, best coaching, right? So if you play high school ball, usually the team that has the best athletes wins the game most of the time, right?
But then when you step up into college and you know, the upper echelon's a college, sometimes it's give or take one or two athletes to make a difference in a game but a little more. Yeah. Then when you get to the NFL, all the athletes are the same. They're all freaks.
Right. Right. But then the coaching matters, right? And then when you get to the Super Bowl, coaching wins, Super Bowls, you do have the black swan event here in their shore.
But on par when you can take best athlete with best coaching year over year, then you have legacy. And that's what we've done. We've made sure we have a nine step interview process based upon what's required in our organization. It's very difficult to get hired.
We overpay. I mean, we grossly overpay in market because I don't want to spend time hiring, training, firing, hiring, training, firing, most people do. And to me, that's championship teams are built around cohesion, right? The second that you lose one good player on a squad, things go off balance.
Right. We've seen that all the time. Again, I like to use sports analogies and it's appropriate. It's a good example.
Right. And so that's what I look at is as I look at, I make sure I get the best athlete for our program and we make it a very prohibitive interviewing process. And then I put best coaching in on them, meaning creating a leadership mentality and not a man in a culture because before, you know, Steve mentioned culture, I really, I thought to ask you culture versus talent. All right.
So which means more because you can take really, really good people and coach them and teach them how to be good at their roles and their tasks. But it's hard to take people who aren't good people, but just excel in areas like say sales and teach them how to be good teammates, good in a culture. It's very difficult to retro engineer them. Is it not?
100%. So early mistakes in my career as a leader was I allowed people to stay in my organization who were amazing performers, but cancer to the team. Right. And so the biggest lesson and every entrepreneur is listening to this or every person who's in a company knows that there's an asshole who's a big performer who's allowed to screw up psychosis.
Right. Right. So it doesn't have to be either or. But what you need to stand guard at is at the top of every list should be integrity, empathy, work ethic, and somebody who's already been punched in the face in life.
So you don't want somebody's first bat with adversity to be on your dime. No, I love that. Well said. I love that.
In another football analogy, the Pittsburgh Steelers and the Antonio Brown situation, some say well, addition would be by subtraction. You know, chemistry is a funny thing, but beyond that culture, good people that look out for each other and they're happy to succeed. There's positive vibran energy in a room. And that goes a long way as opposed to somebody being jealous because well, that was supposed to be my account.
Well, how come this commission is not my commission? You know, you're not your head. You know exactly what I'm talking about. I do.
And we design our pay plan and our organization that way by design, we do not allow superstars to emerge because when you focus on something, you tend to remove focus from other things. And so I, you know, and when you tell a narrative, you're deciding not to tell another narrative. And so it's really important that you balance out that organization, like in our organization, there's no private offices. I don't have a private office because I never want that.
I never want to high performing to come to me and say, I need a private office. I'll look at him or her and say, dude, you're leading by example. Yeah. But it's a cultural statement versus an exam.
I don't like to lead by example, like because that's a conscious thing. And what we do is we hire by example and therefore the person's natural behavior and frequency is already in vibe with ours that we're just adding them to the chorus. And then adding them to the chorus, another voice in harmony. Yes.
To the melody. You're moving over here. Yeah. You know, when you say, how many people?
Yeah. Yeah. That's really well said. Great.
But he's at a really high performing or in harmony. They are moving at a pace that is better than any individual. You know, so that's true. I saw it happen when you see it.
It's magic because it's brutal to do. It is really hard for people, especially in a competitive environment to put the team first and start and we run across it. So we have a full media agency on our organization, right? A seven moving to eight person media agency hiring creatives and keeping them empowered and what they want to do alongside of a sales organization alongside of a tough to marry those.
You don't marry them. You just hire the right people so they all have the same vision and you also have to set the North store. So when somebody's interviewing and they're going through the process, if that North store does not resonate with what it is that they need to complete them, they self select out often and we force and they get it. They totally get it.
And we've turned out probably we had to turn down somebody you introduced us to earlier in the process. Okay. Yesterday was a final interview. Wonderful person, unbelievable person, really qualified.
However, our lines were just slightly askew on alignment on what would work. And if you take that line down range, like if you were in a gun range, that's a problem. If you're in the green off, but I take that two, three, four years down range, bear 400 meters away from where my star is. And you've got to see that and declare that to the people in the process.
That's a hard discipline to stick to. It's hard to see the right person today. It's hard not to plug and play. I wanted to hire her.
Yeah. I wanted to hire her. She was great. However, I knew when I took that down range, two degrees, four years down the road, she's four miles down.
It's just discipline. I mean, I'm not doing her a service. Correct. Wow.
Incredible. It's not a benefit to anyone. I'm not a leader, a CEO of this tremendous company. You're commitment to social media.
And what's your perspective of what's happening with social media, power of LinkedIn, validate some of the things I think, break up some of the things I think, go for it. So look, social media is, you know, it does it's amplified good and bad, right? So if you got a shit message, it's going to amplify shit, right? Like the people who sit in their car and take the iPhone picture up their nose and make a statement to it.
God bless you, you're doing social media, but you might not be doing it well, right? And there's the art and the science side. So we have a seven person agency in house that world class people, I'm incredibly proud, incredibly proud to stand alongside them. And we went over the top, you know, and I share this in public.
Our annual spend will be north of $700,000 this year, just on social, meaning salaries and expenses. Right. That's an investment. That's not a spend.
That's an investment. That's an investment. That's an investment. That's an old brainer.
Yeah. Right. I mean, you want to talk about conversions. So, but the key is it sounds interesting, but just getting to that point where you have the 18 is really challenging.
So we did that about three, three and a half years ago, and we're all in on it. Here's, it's that simple. Sales today is you choose to work in an environment either analog or digital. And the analog meaning, one phone call, one conversation, one engagement, you know, 18 hours in the work day, how many of those can you pull off?
No, it's 18 hours. Right. So how many of those can you pull off? Now, I put a digital team together and I put out really good messaging, both art and science, and I deploy it on the right platform to the right people.
I now have thousands of sales calls occurring on a daily basis. Right. So, and it doesn't replace the conversation. What it does is it makes my conversation an A plus conversation when I do eventually engage.
So that's the thing is you were right, cold calling is dead, cold calling in the sense of the old school analog way is dead. Cold calling still exists in digital. However, it's storytelling along the lines of inspirational, educational, informational, about a product market. So we always talk about market.
We never talk about our product. Love it. Talk about market, not product. Correct.
Okay. Oh, we have four pillars because that people feel is not being educated, not sold. No, the second you sell directly on social is when you move to the bottom of the pile. Correct.
Like everybody else. Talk about it every week. What do I tell you? Yeah.
I can throw them all right. I want everyone to visualize the kiosk. You see that dude sitting there and you know, so as you get nearby, excuse me, excuse me, you're going to help you with your cell phone case, or your nails or your hand cream or whatnot. Nobody wants to be sold.
Nobody likes to be so what they want to be educated. They want to be told that in on something that is useful to them. So they feel empowered now and now they're in that message. That's right.
And you want to start to have that thread put out there. And again, it's they want to be educated and infotained, not goofy. Like, I believe the only platform moving forward, if you had to go all in on any platform, I don't care if you had a landscaping service, a roofing service, a headhunting firm or consulting service, all in on LinkedIn. We've been at it for about three plus years.
Look, here's the thing is you're on LinkedIn, you're on Instagram, you're on Facebook. Those last two are not, you're not in the business mindset. When you're on LinkedIn, you have your business chinstrap on tight and you're expected to be spoken to and educated. You're on Instagram, you're being entertained and you're escaping.
The second somebody tries to sell me on those other two platforms, I shut down, I'm like, no, but on, on LinkedIn, I am prepared psychologically by us to being approached, not sold to, but being approached. I agree. And so that's the difference understanding what I remember. We use every platform differently.
I mean, I remember summer 2012, somebody said, you know what we're talking about. You know, Facebook is where we go to lie to the people we know and Twitter is where we go to tell the truth of strangers. And I say, yeah, and now we got Instagram at their fault. Instagram now is where we let the world believe that this is really our lives and who and what we are.
You know, all these girls are public figures. It's a fashion model, except for the other day, she was selling chicken wings and asked me, what do I want? Medium, mild or hot? And I thought, well, the fashion model, Instagram says public figure, right?
Rancho blue cheese. So the platform's matter, the message matter. I mean, I think the coolest thing was that before we actually physically met, we knew, I knew him and he knew me. He could see it.
You know what he can know what other people are saying. There's a body of work on LinkedIn. LinkedIn is the only platform that allows you to put validation of really who you are. To your point, the fine young lady who was an influencer also sold chicken wings.
Nothing wrong with that at all. She still does, but she collects herself as a public figure fashion model. And she's all right. All right.
Well, we're all right. When you were in LinkedIn, so when I saw Steve, when he reached out to me, I was already following it, I dug in a little deeper and I'm like, wow, wow, your work, your work. Who's he who's he role with, right? Who do you role it?
What are his comments? What is he trying to pretend there, right? You can't pretend. It's hard to pretend.
You can't. That's the line of the day. You cannot pretend that sale. That's the biggest paradigm shift in sales is that before you, if you were the biggest bullshitter, you were probably the top guy in the organization, because you could cheat your way through it.
Correct. You can't do that anymore. I'll send it for LinkedIn. I'll give it.
I'll give it. The story you tell will be seen in a business mind. You're about growing your brand. I'm taking it at this point.
I'm on the clock out. Listen, death has no timeouts. All right. And we're inside two minutes.
I'm just taking a knee. We're on the clock out. I know this. I know that.
I know that. It's okay. Joe Mullings, president, CEO of the Mullings Group, faster 31 minutes of your life. Is it over already?
That's what she said. Wow. 31 minutes. My wife at one minute and then I sleep at 30.
No. And then you go back to work properly. It was a pleasure. Thank you, Joe, for being with us.
Steve, every week we ask him to tell them something good. So when we wrap up number 50, half a century mark, we just tell them something good. So I believe that you are only as good as the five people you hang out with. And I'm thrilled that this guy is hanging out with me.
Wow. Look at that. Happy 50, bro. I'm trying to think of five people that are willing to hang out with me.
Ken, what have you got? I got two. I'm going to lost, Josh. You need to help.
I need three more people to hang out with me. For Steve Noodleberg, Josh, thank you for listening. On this 50th edition. We'll do it again.
We got 51 coming up. We're coming back. Thanks for listening. On the Confessions of the Seal Salesman podcast.
So long, everybody.