Sales and business growth

Welcome to Building Better Developers, the Developer Nord podcast, where we work on getting better step by step professionally and personally. Let's get started. Well, hello and welcome back. We're continuing our season of interviews, but we're starting a new interview. This time we're going to be talking with Nikki Blue. He is a high level mentor, coach type of person. High energy, really interesting guy. Got a great story. I think you're going to love this. Even if it's, this is one of those that even if it doesn't give you a whole lot of information, although he will, it would still be entertaining. And I think this is one of those that is very helpful for us to listen to from time to time because it pushes us. He's going to talk to us about things that are, if you take them to heart, these are going to stretch you. These are going to push you. These are going to get you to aim higher than you have. I don't care how high you have aimed. It's going to get you to think I can do better. I can aim higher and it will be serving other people for me to do so. It's a great combination, a great story. And so let's dive right into our conversation with Nikki Ballou. So today we are starting a new discussion. This is with Nikki Ballou. You're going to find that he's somebody that you probably want to discuss with. He's got an incredible background and lest I mess it up in any way, form, or fashion, I'm going to let you tell us a little bit about yourself, Nikki, and we will go from there. Sounds great, Rob. First of all, thanks so much for having me on the show. It's a pleasure and an honor to be here. And I'll begin by telling you a little bit about my backstory. So I'm actually originally an immigrant from the Middle East. I'm a Christian from Iran. When I was a young boy, the Islamic Revolution was happening in Iran, 78, 79. And my late father, God rest his soul, he could see the writing on the wall that this was not going to be a great place for him to raise his Christian family anymore. So he hustled us out of Iran and eventually we settled in Toronto, Ontario, Canada. And I got to tell you, every single day, I thank God for my father and his pre-science in getting us out of Iran because he took us from tyranny to freedom. Now Rob, I don't know if you've been paying attention to the international news lately, but just a few weeks ago, just over a month ago, a young woman by the name of Mahsa Amini, 22 years old, beautiful girl in the flower of life, went outdoors, outside, and her hair was partially uncovered. In Iran, the theocracy there has rules and laws that prohibit women from showing their hair, from showing their body in any way. And they arrested this woman and beat her to death. And when this happened, there were a series of demonstrations and protests, which are still ongoing in Iran, and over 200 other young teenage girls, 13 to 19 plus young women, have been out there in the street fighting for their freedom. You know, the definition of courage to me is when someone does the right thing when they've got something to lose. And these young women have had their very lives to lose. And I got to tell you, it makes me very proud to be an Iranian, but it also has me come and tell you my number one value is freedom. And you look at the world right now, in the West in particular, it's fashionable among a small subset of society to say the West, America, so oppressive, so racist, so sexist. You know what I have to say to that? Bullshit. This is the greatest, freest, most incredible society in the history of the world. Has it been perfect? No. But it is unique in that America actually looks at its past mistakes and does everything in its power to right them. And Iran, they're doubling down on what they're doing to these young women. And that happens all over the world. We are lucky and blessed to get to live in America and in the West. And freedom is my number one value. And I'll tell you this, my father, though, he was an entrepreneur, he believed in freedom and free enterprise. And he's the greatest man I ever knew. This man who if you needed a job, he'd go get you one. If you were trying to start a business, even if you were going to compete with him, he'd help you get set up in business. He didn't care about that. He just wanted to help people. And if you worked for him and you were looking for a house, a car or an apartment, you didn't have enough money, dad would help you make that happen for yourself too. And you might think to yourself, wow, who does that? Well, the late great Napoleon Blue, he did that. And you might want to ask yourself, well, why? And I'll tell you this, there are two reasons. Number one is he was a Christian and he felt that he'd been blessed by God Almighty and he had an obligation to share those blessings with others. Secondly, though, he did it because he could. Brother, he had the financial wherewithal to go out there and make it happen. And so me, I wanted to be like my dad. I wanted to be an entrepreneur. And so eventually I became an entrepreneur. And here's the first thing I found out, brother. There's a lot of good men and women, good people, entrepreneurs out there who are struggling and not achieving what they want to be achieving. You know what I'm talking about? These are the folks who go out there and they go, man, I want to I want to do good things. I want to change the world. I want to I want to provide for my family. I want I want to help my clients. And yet they're they're they're not doing it. And the main reason is because they're nervous about coming across as pushy or salesy or reeking of commission breath. And so they don't go after business. They should go after brother. And here's the problem with that. Very straightforward, very simple. They lose out their business struggle, but that potential client loses out because a good person, a good human being didn't help them. And then, you know what the worst is, some charlatan marketer, some dude or do debt with no compunctions, no real caring about that person who all they want is the money. They know how to sell the sizzle better than most. They go and they get that business and that person doesn't get served. They don't get the result they should be getting. And as a result of that, man, the sum total of goodness goes down in the world. And, you know, I saw this and I thought, wow, this is horrible, man. I want to help these people. And I thought about it and I thought, well, you know what? Sales actually, to me, has always been an act of caring and act of love. But, you know, the word has a bad connotation with it. So what if we could reframe selling to serving? And nobody wants to be sold. You don't want to be sold. I don't want to be sold. But everybody wants to be served by a caring advocate. And so, brother, that's what happened. You know, I started to do that and I started to be able to help a lot of good people who had problems selling embrace serving and dramatically increase their business. And that way they stand out against those Charlotte to marketers and they stand out very powerful. That's a that is an incredible flip of looking at sales, because I think I agree, most of the entrepreneurs, most of those that are building solutions, they're doing it because they want to help others. They're not doing it just to get money. I mean, that they may see that as part of, like, you know, sort of the score to say, hey, if I build something very useful, I'll make a lot of money. But it's really an interesting change of perspective to say, hey, if you don't get out there in front of customers that need your product, that are where it's where you know your product is good for them, is a good fit, then you're actually doing them a disservice. In a sense, is that you're not providing them something that's going to be a fit. And instead, which is almost even worse, they're going to end up with something that is not a good fit. And even though in the consulting world, I've lived off of this most of my career where, you know, somebody will come in, they'll say, yeah, that sounds OK, but they get sold on something else. And then they come back around six months, a year or two years later and say, you know, that didn't work out for us. We liked what you told us. Let's see if we can, you know, switch out and get something that's going to be a solution that works for us. But if, you know, if there had been more or a better approach to sales in the at the front, they wouldn't have had to waste all that time, that money and that effort. And it would have saved them some headaches. Yeah, 100000 percent, 100000 percent. And here's another thing I noticed, right. Going out there, business, these same good people, they are not business people. OK, they just don't understand business at the level that, you know, professional business people do. And so they really don't understand the importance of standing out from the sea of sameness. Dr. Nito Kubane, a great man, taught me that beautiful, elegant phrase, the sea of sameness. Most people are stuck in the sea of sameness. And as a result of that, they don't get to stand out and the market doesn't know why they should work with them. So if you ask them what they do, they'll say things like, oh, I'm a realtor, I'm a mortgage agent. I help people deal with overwhelm. You know, I'm like, come on, man, that's not really that that that's in no way differentiates you. You know, and as a result, people don't know why they should work with them and they don't work with them. So they're stuck and they're struggling, you know. And instead of saying, I'm a realtor, you should say, I work with first time home buyers and I help them navigate an extremely difficult process and get a home that they'll love. That would be way, way cooler, right. Or instead of saying, I'm a personal trainer. I work with new fathers who've added 20, 30 pounds. I want to get rid of the dead body. You know what I'm saying? Something along those lines. And in that regard, let me tell you a story. So several years back, a young man was introduced to us and he was a personal fitness trainer. He was 25 years old. And Rob, he was a good dude. His name was Dan. And, you know, Rob, if you met Dan, you'd like him. You just go, I like this dude, man. I want to be buddies with him. You know, let's go out, grab, grab something, grab a, grab a drink or something. And I root for this guy to win. That's the kind of guy that he was. You know what I mean? Like he walks in the room. You want to help him. Problem was, man, he had seven clients. He lives in Toronto and Toronto is like the New York City of Canada. If you know anything about the cost of living in New York City, you know a lot about the cost of living in Toronto. You know what I'm saying? So Danny, Danny had seven clients and he was making $1,200, $1,300 a month. Now in Toronto, $1,200, $1,300 a month is not a living wage. You know what I'm saying? He had to borrow money from mom and dad to pay the rent and things like that. So I met Danny. Okay, Danny, buddy, come on, talk to me. Danny, what's going on? What do you do? Who do you help? I'm a personal fitness trainer and I can help anybody. Really, I can help a loose man. I can help him get strong. Ba ba ba ba. Yo, Dan, slow down, man. Slow down. Now, come on. You can't like, no, seriously, you can't help everybody. Would you help? No, no, seriously, I can help everybody. And I just like, kind of like, I started to laugh. I go, anybody with a wallet, the pulse buddy, he laughed too. He goes, Nikki, good one. Yeah, I guess so. And I'm like, that's not going to work, buddy. It's not going to work. I said, you need to narrow your focus. And he goes, okay, okay. I'll work with doctors. My dad's a doctor. I love my dad and doctors have a lot of money and maybe I'll help them like, you know, lose weight. And okay, that wasn't a great message. My dad's a doctor. You make a lot of money. Come work with me. Didn't really land so well. So Dan, we got to, we got to change this. This isn't the Z. He goes, okay, okay. You said go narrow, right? I'll go even narrow. I'll work with cardiologists, cardiologists. They make even more money than doctors. I'm like, dad, you're not getting it, buddy. Not getting it. So it didn't work out so good. You make more money than doctors. Cardiologists can't work with me. No, no, no. Now just by happenstance, by serendipity, the good Lord put a man in front of Dan, who was a Paralympic athlete. He had a missing leg from when he was a child. You know, he had an accident and he was an Afro Cuban fella. And he had a really cool name, Papito Wilson. And you better pronounce it properly. You couldn't call him Papito Wilson. You know what I mean? So Papito and Dan, they worked out together. It was great. Dan got him stronger, got him ready for the next Paralympic games. He won some medals, but more importantly, it opened up Dan's heart, you know, and Dan came to me and said, man, I love working with this fellow. And I think I want to work with people with missing limbs. You know, I think I can really make a difference. I mean, I now have an expertise like a, and a hunger to be of service. And he go, I went to him. I go, okay, man, that sounds great. Go do it. So brother, here's what happened. In six weeks, Danny signed up 400 clients. Now you think about that. He, he made four figures a month, 12, 1300. He added not one zero, but two zeros to his monthly income over a hundred grand a month. He couldn't do one-on-one training anymore. It just wouldn't, wasn't going to work with that many clients. Now, why did that work? Well, first of all, nobody else thought going after people with missing limbs was a good idea. Their thought was, Oh, well, you know, these guys have missing limbs. They can't work out. So forget it. But then was no, no, no, you can work out. I'm going to make you strong. Let's go. And think about this, put yourself in the shoes of, uh, uh, you know, a person without all their lips, they probably would rather have all their limbs, right? They probably, you know, at some level feel that they're not able to do everything everybody else can do. They maybe even feel bad about that. Maybe you can feel bad about themselves. And Dan's message to them was, no, don't feel bad about yourself. Feel good about yourself. We're going to make you stronger. We're going to make you badass. That message landed, landed, landed, hit them in the heart. And they just went, boom, let's go. And that's how this young man, 25 at the time, 26, 27, by the time all this rolled out, got to a hundred thousand a month from 1200 a month. Added not one, but two zeros to his income. And actually he worked less. He worked even less. That's kind of Nikki's tagline is I help you add one to two zeros to your, to your monthly income while working 10 to 20 hours less per week. So Danny was part of what helped me do that. That's a pretty good tagline. But I think, and I think that gets to the heart of it is that I think too meant too often we start out, everybody, I think starts broad. Everybody wants to do everything for everybody and make a billion dollars and all that kind of stuff. And as you get further in, you realize that there's things you don't want to do. You realize that there's things that you would take a pay cut to, to avoid doing them. And there's other things that you would take a pay cut to do them. You know, or you say, Hey, I'll, I will, I don't need to get paid as much because I'm going to have so much fun doing this, which is exactly his story is that you, yeah, he found something that he wanted to do anyways. And so I think he would have, you know, he would have, if he still had seven customers and kept on going, he would have struggled, but he would have been happier working doing that. Cause now it's something he wants to do. And that's, you know, that's that why is that, you know, why is it that you want to do whatever it is you want to do? And when you can find that it makes a world of difference, not only for yourself, but a lot of times that's your key to success because now you're chasing something instead of just sitting there hoping that everything's going to fall into your lap. Exactly. Exactly. Exactly. Exactly. Now here's another thing I noticed about a lot of good people who are entrepreneurs, they undervalue themselves. They just undervalue themselves. They undercharge. And, you know, there's really only two reasons people undervalue themselves and undercharge. Well, number one is they don't think what they have is good enough. Right. And, you know, that could either actually be true or just the person's, you know, mindset needs an improvement. Number two is they do think it's good enough. They just don't think anybody will pay for it. And again, that's big time a mindset issue. And it's because they're focusing on themselves and not the other person. Right. Oh, what are they going to think about me? I'm not going to charge. Listen, I'm going to say this, and this is a good thing for you to write down as a listener. Business is not a numbers game. Business is a people game. Business is not a numbers game. Business is a people game. The person sitting in front of you, that's someone's father. That's someone's mother. That's someone's brother. That's someone's sister. That's someone's son. That's someone's daughter. That person is a hero to somebody. You know what I'm saying, brother? That person has probably been disappointed by life. And maybe they've even been disappointed by someone like you who promised them everything and delivered nothing. Right. And so you've got to be all in for them. All in to make a difference for them. And if you don't value yourself and you undercharge, you are doing them a massive disservice. They will not get the result they're looking for. What is business? Business is about what I call the 3P seven-figure solution, which is solving problems for people for profit, solving acute problems for wonderful people for awesome profit. That's all it is. And if you are thinking business is about you selling your program, you're mistaken. It is not. Who cares about your program, your product, whatever. This is about the other person solving problems for people for profit. Acute problems for wonderful people for awesome profit. That's all you're there to do. And if you undercharge and undervalue, they will undervalue what you have to offer. There's certainty in your solution drops. It's called the expectancy bias. Okay. The expectancy bias kicks in when you buy anything. Now, I'm going to show you a little something. Okay, pal. Nikki Bill who is a knife collector. This is a knife that sits on my desk. It's a Kershaw Amerson knife. It's a lovely knife. It does the job. It's quite sharp. It cuts. I paid $40 for this knife. Don't take any special care for it. Drop it on my desk any old time. Use it when I need to. It's a $40 knife. Now, let me show you another knife. This is a custom-made Greg Lightfoot knife. Take a look at this baby. Is this not something beautiful? Now, this knife is a little more expensive than the other knife. This knife comes with its own case. I use special oil to basically take care of this puppy. I don't just throw this on my desk. When I'm done with it, I carefully put it away. You understand what I'm trying to say here, brother? There's a difference. Why? They both cut. They both do the job. I value one way more than I value the other. That's true with everybody. If you are, for example, Rob, let's say you're a relationship coach. I know you're not, but let's say you were. Let's say you worked with business owners only who are worth $10 million plus, whose wife said, sayonara. And your schtick was, I'm going to help you survive and win your divorce, thrive through your divorce. You're not going to lose everything. Right? Great message, right? Dude who's about to lose his family, his fortune. And you sit in front of a dude. Right? And you go, okay, listen, we're going to do this. We're going to help you. If we can't stop the divorce, we're at least going to make sure that you get through this without losing everything you got. And you'll come out of it stronger. And the guy goes, great, great, great. Let's do it. What do you charge, Rob? And you go, 50 bucks. He's going to go, what? He won't take you seriously. If he paid you the 50 bucks, he would probably miss half of his appointments with you. Because there wasn't enough leverage on him to have him have skin in the game and show up. You understand what I'm trying to say here, brother? That's really at the end of the day, what ends up happening. You should charge him 50,000. He's got a $10 million fortune. 50,000 will make sure that he takes you seriously. Now he might think that's a lot of money and it's a good chunk of money. But he'll also respect and understand that, hey, you know what you're talking about because you're charging appropriately. You're charging based on the value of the outcome you provide, not on some fear about, is he going to like my program? Should I charge less? No, that's BS. Charge based on the value of the solution you provide to people. And you do that, you're going to do great. So I'll tell you another story around this. There was a fella I knew. He was an acupuncturist. Had his own clinic in Manhattan. He was successful. He made $150,000 a year. But $150,000 a year in Manhattan, not so much money. You know what I'm saying? He wanted to make more money. So when he came to me, he said, hey, Nicky, I want to make more money. I go, how much? He goes, million dollars. Sounds like a nice round figure. I go, all right. Let's take a look at your business. So we took a look at how he was operating his business and he had a good group of loyal clients, not as many as he wanted to. He had a decent message we tightened it up for him to really focus on optimizing health for people who were older, over 45, that were suffering some issues. And everything was great except one thing. He charged way too little. So I look at him and I go, Chris, his name is Chris. Chris, buddy, this isn't going to work. We need you to charge more money for what you're doing. You had clients that were a-listers. Robert De Niro was a client of his. And he's like, OK, OK, I can charge a little more. I'm like, I want you to charge 20 times more. And he went, oh my God, no, I can't, I can't. Hyperventilating, buddy, calm down, relax. I mean, this is not going to be at the end of the world. These people need you to charge more. And he just couldn't do it. He thought I was going to say 10%. So eventually I made him charge, not that I made him, but he chose to charge seven times what he was charged. Seven times. So guess what happened? He got 20 times as many clients because all those big a-listers started thinking more seriously. Hey, look, come and see my acupuncture. He's the best in Manhattan. Look at how much he charges. And he went from 150,000 to 1.2 million in four months. And that is a perfect point for us to pause. And we will come back with part two next time around. Just a great end of the story. We're going to pick right back up from there going forward. What is it that we can do to help ourselves be better as ourselves, to go do what we enjoy doing, to get paid more, to work better, to serve others and to still have a life around it and to not wear ourselves into an early grave. I think you have seen already, Nikki's got a great message. She's got a great energy, fun guy to talk to, got all kinds of neat stories and we're not done. We're going to keep talking to him. We're going to come back next time and we're going to get more of the same, who knows, even more of that more. Maybe even more enjoyable than the first half. But I'll leave you thinking about that as you go on to your day until we come back around to that. So go out there and have yourself a great day, a great week, and we will talk to you next time. Thank you for listening to Building Better Developers, the Develop-a-Nor Podcast. You can subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Stitcher, Amazon, anywhere that you can find podcasts. We are there. And remember, just a little bit of effort every day ends up adding into great momentum and great success. Please check out school.develop-a-nor.com. That is where we are starting to pour a lot of our content. We've taken the lessons, the things that we've learned, all of the things that make you a better developer, and we're putting it there. 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