Thomas Green here with Ethical Marketing Service. On the podcast today, we have Sunil Godse. Sunil, welcome.
Thank you so much for inviting me onto this great podcast show and happy to drop some knowledge bombs or negative wisdom on intuition.
We are happy to have you. Maybe start a bit about yourself and anything we should know.
Yeah. So my name is Sunil Godse. I’m the CEO of Radical Solutions Group and I’m in the intuitive branding space. And what that does is it takes the power of the subconscious phenomenon we’re all born with called intuition and I help business owners leverage it to create a trust with their employees and their customers And with the research showing that this trust happens in under 14 seconds. that’s how quickly you’re able to win their engagement in your brand. And when that happens, then you actually strip them away from your competition, which gets you to eliminate them again in under 14 seconds.
And I’ve been doing that for years. That’s quite a, quite a promise that one eliminating your competition in under 14 seconds. if someone wants to know more, what would you say? Yeah. So if you go to dot com, there’s an explainer there as to why this happens and I introduced some research there and then I’ve got a webinar that takes people deeper, a deeper dive into all my into the branding services because it’s really about leveraging your intuition in various parts of your business in your hiring in your operations. Even in the data, the stats and in your case and your world marketing and what are those one of those messages that are really resonating with your customers at or potential customers at an intuitive level or an emotional level? And when you start crafting your messaging around that, that’s when they started deep in their engagement with their brand. And as long as there’s consistency from stop the scroll to what you’re delivering your products and services, you deepen that engagement further, which leads to a purchase.
And then if you continue that customer journey in a genuine way you get multiple purchases. You used the term intuitive branding, have you got a definition that you use? Yeah, so into the branding is essentially again using the power of intuition to trigger the emotional response in customers and employees. So if you look at employees for example and with the great resignation that we have today, you know, this is this is now one way of looking at it, which I think is the right way of looking at it, is that you know, no longer employees wanting to be treated like numbers. and they’re now essentially voting with their time with you know, where they’re going to be valued and the old command control style short term focus thinking from the leaders is not working anymore. And if you look at the statistics now, you know, 85% of employees are unhappy in their jobs and of that 85%, which is by Gallup 20% of those are actually stealing from you. and so from an employee perspective, when you start to treat them like people and allow them to be creative and trust them to use their skills and you’re very genuine in your approach.
Then what happens is you’ve got a two-way trust relationship that’s established. And when you look at the science behind trust and intuition, which happens in the middle of the media last year, your fight-or-flight response. So either you’re a threat to them or not, essentially that trust starts and in as little as 33 milliseconds. And so it’s constantly watching to make sure that you actually do value them and that your actions match your words and you actually care about who they are and that solidifies that trust and it from 33 milliseconds, it goes anywhere from 10 to 14 seconds for them to exchange some time and effort or money with you to say, yep, this is where I want to stay. And we’ve all, I’m hoping that we’ve all worked for people who we’ve loved working for them. We’ve loved working for that company. If you look at what we buy, why do we buy certain things, certain brands? If it’s cheaper, that’s great. But if there’s something of value, there’s that emotional trigger to us that has this, wanting to buy that and the job or the role of marketing in this case for customers is to make sure that your messaging resonates with that value, right?
And from an employee’s perspective, you’ve got to make sure that the way you lied resonates with that value to them, and that’s where the science comes in, that’s where intuitive branding comes in, because the brand is really in the eyes of those who see you as a brand, who trust you as a brand. And then your employees, if they trust you as a brand, they’re going to stick with you. If your customers trust you as a brand, then they’re going to want to buy from you. So the brand is really established in how you treat others before you start looking at colours and logos and things like that, because colours and logos are an important element. But what I find is that businesses start because they trust themselves for the logo, but they haven’t established a brand yet. So the logo doesn’t mean anything to anybody. It’s the colour doesn’t mean anything into to anybody yet. And so you have to make sure you get that process right? So focus on the relationships first, and then you can start working on these other sort of subsidiary things that might help increase that awareness of that brand mentioned from the customer perspective, and also the employee perspective.
Do you tend to focus on both or is it a balance or one more than another? So the, the intuitive branding process, there’s, there’s basically three phases that I look at and the first phase is really looking at yourself. So let’s get you to strengthen your intuition. And when I looked at the research in intuition, there’s actually four types of intuition that work together and they send you a bunch of signals. So if we dive into this sort of, the science of what intuition is to start to start. If we look at, you know, if it’s like driving a car, so when you drive a car you turn the key, is you pressing a button and you hear the engine were and as long as it’s worrying, okay, you drive off. and that’s very, very similar to the signals that your intuition sends you. There’s two types of signals, there are positive signals and negative signals. Obviously, the positive signals are the ones saying that the decision that you’re about to make is the right one. And a negative signal is saying the signal, the decision that you’re about to make is the wrong one and what’s more interesting with positive signals, they tend to be more sort of a sense of flow.
It just feels easy to make that decision, whereas a negative one, it actually is a little uncomfortable. So it starts sometimes in the gut feeling or you hear that voice that’s trying to talk to you or something or something doesn’t feel right, those are your negative signals that are, that are coming at you to say, hey listen, you gotta watch what decision you’re about to make. And so those are the easiest ways to figure out, you know, whether you’re making the right decision or not. Now, in that same car analogy, we’re not all mechanics. So for me to drive a car, I don’t need to pop open the hood to know that there’s a gear ratio and oil and etcetera. I just need to drive the car. But when I popped open the hood, so to speak, when it came to intuition, there’s actually four types of intuition that I looked at when I looked at the research. Uh, and I interviewed over 1000 people to collect all this data. Um, and the best way I can explain these four, the four types of this of intuition is by going through a case study of one of my very first interviewees who is a non-believer in intuition.
So he’s a friend of mine and I asked him his name is John Ross to say John would you do an interview on intuition? This is a guy who’s been an investment banker for 25 years. And so data, you know, the numbers, you know, certainty, all that stuff ruled the world. And at that time when he, if you googled intuition at that time, it was more about, you know, voices from God and coming from the cosmos and you know, sort of the woo type of descriptions, which is fine if people think that’s what that’s what intuition is but is in his mind it just didn’t exist. And said, well, you know what, come down, I’ll give you the interview. I have no clue what we’re going to talk about because this stuff just does not exist. You know? So we’ll talk about intuition for five minutes and then let’s just catch up. So I’m driving down to see him with my camera equipment. I’m going, boy, this is gonna be a really short interview. I don’t know how to stretch this over to an hour. And so I actually turn on the camera and he’s just like, yeah, intuition and I’m not sure. And then there were a couple of signals that I had from other entrepreneurs I’ve interviewed.
And one of them had his left ear lobe getting hot when he made, that was one of his negative signals. And another CEO had an omen that popped up on his right shoulder and he’s run to multimillion dollar business is based on this intuitive signal. And so, you know, I could see John sort of rolling his eyes and yeah, you know, I’d like to shake their hands. But I just, I don’t get it right. And then he says, listen to everybody, every decision you have and businesses based on your learning or experience. And so now this is how I’m going to start diving deep into the four types of intuition. One of the four types is called experiential intuition. And so you’re actually born with intuition. There was a science study done that showed that infants as young as two months old had shown to have intuitive tendencies. And so when you’re born, you have 5-6,000 experiences per day, when you’re older, 28-35,000 experiences per day. Every single piece of that experience is a data point that goes into the subconscious area of your brain.
So if you look at your brain like an iceberg 90% below water, 10% above water, You’ve got billions and billions and billions of data points that have gone into the subconscious nature of your brain, like a library for your intuition to pull from. And so when you’re about to make a decision today, in business or in your personal life, you have a huge library of experiences that have worked and they have not worked. And that’s what your intuition uses to start with some of the signals to say, okay, listen, Thomas, you know, you made that decision in the past, that was great. Here’s a positive signal to tell you, yep, you can definitely go ahead with that position or Sunil, you’re trying to make a decision that really kind of didn’t work in the past, here’s a negative signal that I’m going to send you and if you don’t pay attention to me, this first negative signal, I’m going to send you a louder one And a louder one until you finally start listening to me. And one of the CEOs I Interviewed, he was running a nine-figure company and he continued to ignore. His company is our stories intuition and he was in the back of an Uber and the words just popped out, you’re gonna quit. It was a negative signal that was brewing and end up getting louder. He goes into the boardroom. Again, nine figure mortgage can’t be at the top of its game says, I’m quitting, sorry. you know, and he just said that’s just what I feel. And so luckily he got out, you know, 68 months later the market crashed and the company came down. So that’s kind of how these, these positive and negative signals work and it’s the experience that’s there. And that’s, this is one of the misconceptions of intuition because I think people think that just comes from somewhere but it actually is deep in data and experience. And so what I was telling john is that sometimes your intuition will tell you to go against the data and he goes, well that’s funny that you mentioned that I have an exact case study for that and I said, well please tell me what happened. So John was in the business of putting franchise locations in and so there was one location that his team looked at that was in a really crappy area of Toronto.
And so they used the scale out of 10 and nine out of 10 meant that they would put a franchise in like McDonald’s or Wendy’s or Burger King, whatever it is, anything less than that. It just wasn’t a good location. When they looked at things like demographics, traffic sources, you know, and things like that, that would make, you know, development in the area, John went to that area and, and now we’re going to talk about the second of the four called situational intuition. He was looking in this situation was just looking around and he goes, ha, something’s telling me that the data is wrong, something is telling me that team is wrong and we’ve all been in that situation, we walked into a room or we just kind of get the spidey sense that something’s off, that’s your situational intuition working. And so he decides to say no, I’m going to go against the team’s data and he puts the location there that ended up being something called the beer market, which was the most profitable of the brand names that he had under his portfolio because he once went against the data and now John is also saying that perhaps this was intuition, I’m not sure.
So we’re now going from intuition doesn’t exist at least I got him to acknowledge that perhaps it exists. So I’m kind of winning the game in this video interview, I’m thinking and then at some point his purpose changes. He says, I no longer want to be an investment banker anymore, I want to actually run a business and now we’re going to get into the third of the four called relational intuition. And what relational intuition does is it takes a look at the people around you and filters them to only allow those on the inside who you’re going to actually trust and listen to who really care about your success. And we’ve all you and I have met probably tens of thousands if not hundreds of thousands of people in our lifetime and I probably have two, I have two or three that I can absolutely trust in my inner circle to have my back and most people can have it on the one hand. And so in John’s case when he made that decision, all the people Who he was surrounded with were more concerned about Ego, money, fame, private jets restaurants, all the fixings of a $3-$4 million dollar a year salary.
And they all told him he was nuts. The only one person actually asked him why and that was his wife and he looked at his wife and he said this just feels right. That was his intuitive signal. And so he trusted his wife. His wife said, yeah, if it feels right to you then go ahead. and right after telling that story now, I’m paraphrasing John because the last of the four is called creative intuition. This is the one that actually makes you take the decision and creative intuition looks at the risk level. So if you’re eating a sandwich and turning left at the traffic lights, you know, creating a creative intuition is not really high. But in John’s case, his intuition was saying, you would think his intuition saying, okay, here’s a beautiful robust business with great cash flows and high revenues and fantastic balance sheet. That’s the business you should take over. Not his intuition. His intuition says John you’re going to run this tiny bankrupt little restaurant.
And now I’m paraphrasing John after a year story an hour into our interview, he said Sunil sometimes you can have all the data in the world, but you have to trust your intuition. And he made the decision to enter that a tiny bankrupt little restaurant after quitting His $3 – $4 million dollars a year job. And that tiny bankrupt little restaurant ended up being franchise called East side Mario’s which is location # one and over the next 20 years He grew that one location to over 1000 under different brand names, $2 billion dollars in revenues by the time he retired just before our interview all because it felt right. And so that’s the power of intuition when you use it in business, this is how and I completely turned him around in an hour. And so all I did was I made him understand how intuition works for him, how he defined it, what his signals were, how he saw the four types. And so when you look at my twitter branding services are coming full circle to my original point was that I get you to understand how intuition works for you.
So what are your signals? How are the and we’re normally based on our experience, We’re normally really, we’re really strong in one of the four types of intuition. And so we’re really good at picking up that particular types intuitions, signals, but that also means we’re weaker in the other three types of intuition, which means that even when they are warning you with a signal either, let’s say I’m experience, I’m really good in experiential intuition. But if my relational intuition is warning me about somebody I’m about to do business with, who is not straightforward or the situation is bad. Um, or the decision I’m making is not the right decision, it’s, it’s, it’s too risky. Those three types of intuition, one of them may be sending me a negative signal, but because I’m weaker in them, I don’t know what that signal is. So I’m now going to make a decision that’s gonna put me in trouble. And so what I do with the first thing I do with intuitive branding is I get you to understand. Okay, let’s strengthen the other three types of intuition.
Let’s recognise your inventory of intuitive signals. Now you’re ready to go. And once you understand how intuition works for you, the next step is to understand how it works for others. Because now you know that they also have four types of intuition. You also know that they also have intuitive signals. And you’re also able to pick up now on when they’re not telling the truth or when they’re being deceptive or when you’re making a decision that’s not the right one. Their feedback from their behaviour, their body language, their tone, how they make decisions. It’s gonna trigger your intuition to know whether you’re on the right track or if they’re being decided. And so the first thing I, once I get you to understand how your intuition works. Then I start working inside the company with the people. You lied and making sure that you have the right people in place. You get rid of the people who are cancers in the organisation. And then you actually start to lead them by being empathetic by being open and honest and letting them trust you and getting that trust.
And once you have that inside the organisation, you work on your hiring and those the new people coming in and then you shift your marketing because the hiring, when you have the right employees in your organisation they’re the ones that going to help you make your operations smooth. And they’re the ones that are going to help you in that when you’re ready to scale, they’re the ones who are gonna be involved in helping you with that. And they’re also the ones that are going to create the marketing. They’re also going to be the ones that are going to keep the customers happy. So that’s the next shift after you work with the hiring the operations. Then we switched to marketing. And then from your marketing, we were talking earlier about deepening that engagement through trust based messaging. where we actually talk about the problems that you’re solving your product service solved rather than just saying, hey listen, these are my features. This is what we do. So changing your marketing. Looking at where your customers are, are spending their time. So looking using tools such as like spark Toral or things like that. Where or you look at Reddit or things like that or Cora.
And you want to take a look at where your customers spending their time and what problems are they addressing that are directly linked to your products and services. That’s how you start moulding your marketing around that. And that triggers them at an intuitive level because they’re saying, okay, this company actually gets me and they get the problem, I’m trying to solve and now you’ve triggered their trust at an intuitive level to say let me pay attention to that company. And then that’s going to deepen their engagement. And then finally we work on sales and the customer journey. So after that first purchase, how do we continue that conversation And now that we understand how intuition works for us and others, well no how to guide that customer whether one sale is good enough and we’re not being pushy or does that customer actually needs something else in our repertoire of products and services that’s going to enhance their life in some way. Let’s show that to them because it’s genuine because it’s a natural it’s a natural evolution in their thought process that yeah I bought this from this company. Absolutely.
This is something else that I need. And so that gets you to really kind of use your intuition to guide the customer to make sure that he or she buys as much as they need to enhance their value. And this is where your sales tactics are gonna be really, really important. And once you’ve got that all that done now you’re ready to scale and scaling becomes really easy. And so I take people through a 12 month coaching program. So I have of course that I’ve developed where it gives you the basic nuggets of intuition and working on yourself with some worksheets and case studies and then I’ve got a customised coaching program that works that integrates with that course to actually take that course work and actually implement it and customise it for your business. and with the ones that I’ve helped I’ve got and of course there are people that don’t want me to tell their names because they’ve got their customers, not wanting to know that they’ve got my services, but of the ones that have been able to give me a testimonial on my website, They collectively have added more than $1 million Twitter branding in action.
There’s a number of people willing to talk about, you know, how these have actually helped them increase $200,000, or triple their customer base or what have you. There was definitely some knowledge bonds in that answer. So thank you very much explanation. I’m not sure, I’m sure you’ve been asked this before on the topic of intuition, do you think there are people who have good or bad intuition because I’ve heard it said that, you know, my main tuition is great or you know, and you often see people who perhaps do things that they shouldn’t and maybe their intuition told them or guided them to do it. Yes. And I think this is where intuition is not really understood, I think when you actually really understand what intuition is and you have those signals. you know that they’re making the right decision and a really great example of this is I interviewed Mark Petrie and Mark Petrie has, I think it’s got a really popular podcast. And so in Mark’s case, he ended up almost taking his own life in high school, even though this guy was making five figures as an entrepreneur, even in high school.
And on the external surface, everybody would say this guy looks successful. But internally, internally this guy was just a mess and he was trying to fit in and you know, so, you know, in my podcast interview with him, when we were, when we were talking about this, he was saying that yeah, my intuition led me down the wrong path and it got me to lie to myself so much in high school that I didn’t know who I was and I wanted to take my own life. and then I just stopped him. And I said, well, Mark, actually, if we were to, and I was listening very carefully to his interview, and I said, well actually Mark, if we were to go back to the podcast and I was able to reverse what you what, you know right from the start, when you started telling me the story, what you actually said was that I knew I shouldn’t have lied, but and then you continue down. And so your intuition was actually probably active in the podcast interview saying, no, no, no, no, no, I knew I shouldn’t have lied. But I went against my intuition and I started to do this. Now, of course, I’m blowing this up. You know, this is not going through his head and he’s not saying, oh, my intuition is saying something.
But what happens is we there’s a couple of things. One is our intuition actually sends us the signal to say, don’t do it, but we’re so emotionally laden or emotionally heavy that we go ahead and make that decision And we override the signals. Or it could be one of the cases where you’re just weaker in one of those types of intuition, right? And a relational intuition is a real big one. So those going to in business or those, you know, every single time they’ve had a bad partner of those people I’ve interviewed, 100% of the time they knew that something was up before they got into the trouble that they did. Those people who shouldn’t have gotten into a relation relationship, 100% of the time of those I’ve interviewed knew at the very start, when something happened, they should have gotten out of. So when we reflect back on, first of all, understanding what intuition is, an understanding that there are signals that we pay attention to. And when we go back, we now know, we always say, you know what, there was a signal and this is the way the signal happened.
I’m just formally formalising it. So what my role is to do is to say, okay, you have these signals. Let’s first take a look at again strengthening the four types of intuition so that you know what each of these signals are. And because intuition is one of those things that are just great to put on social media, you know, trust your gut. Everybody says trust your God. But I mean God is one of the signal may be your first signal is, you know, the hairs on the back of your neck standing up. And so I think we’ve gone away from what understanding what intuition truly is and taking a deep dive, which is what I did to rather than just having something like, you know, trust your gut. And yeah, my intuition led me down the wrong path if I was to go back to each and every single person and interview them about that statement and go back to the first time that they made that I can guarantee you with 100% accuracy. That there was an intuitive signal saying don’t do it interesting. I think I wanted to talk to you about an example you gave, which was the difference between intuition and perhaps conscience.
So, would you say that they cross over or the same thing? Yeah, I would say that they’re the same thing. So intuition is the same thing as, you know, self-awareness that people talk about self-awareness consciousness. in some cases, manifestation gets put into it. So it all depends. And I’m generalising of course, but what intuition really does allows you to do is again, take a look at what’s happened in the past, look at pattern matching. And if you take when you take the time to really kind of reflect on, okay, what’s the right decision for me and you take the time to listen to that, those signals? it’s those signals are going to tell you what the decision is or not the right decision and the wrong decision. So some people may call it consciousness, some people might talk about that. Their voices from God. some people say I had a former NHL coach who said that these are signals that came from the cosmos. So, my role is to say, I really don’t care how you define what intuition is. That’s for you to do it.
If that makes you happy in what you want to do, right, and how you want to coach it. My job is to say, okay, you’re going to get these signals, you can tell me whatever that that I don’t care if you what origin you want that those signals to come from. I’m giving you a scientific way of explaining it, but I can also give you a religious way of, of saying as well if you want to use voices from God. Okay, great. You know, then voices from God are telling you that, you know, take this path and don’t, and those are the signals you hear. If it’s if it’s a level of consciousness and self-consciousness or self-awareness is taking the time to really kind of listen to yourself. Go deep. Do the inner work against more common terms that I’ve heard out there? Yeah, doing deep, going to Inner work is taking the time to cut out the noise and think about what decisions you’re about to make. And is that does that make you feel right to move ahead? Does that give you the flow to pull? Or is there a resistance? and so once again, those are still tied or analogous to the positive and negative signals?
And so and because from the science, I mean, it hits the amygdala, there’s no capacity for language. So you actually really define it in however you want. And so I’m not here to shove a definition down anybody’s throat. it’s you define it however you want. I’m just saying, pay attention to these positives and negatives because they’re there for a reason. You come back to your relational example when someone said that they gone into business with someone and it ended up being bad, let’s say you have that particular example, do you teach like a decision making process in terms of how about you tackle that? Absolutely. So, so if you look at the four types of intuition that for those, those four types of intuition end up being a template for every single decision you make. So and that starts right at the start of you strengthening the four types of intuition and then now you have this template. So when you take this template, what happens is you remove the emotional aspect of the this going in.
I mean there’s a lot of people go into it because they’re emotionally really excited. Somebody says I’m gonna two extra business, we can partner up, I’m your friend, I get it, you get giddy. There’s a lot of emotions that run really wild when it goes to partnering up with someone. And then when you take the four types of intuition, let’s just take a look at, I’ll use one example, someone who she was running a store and somebody else wanted to wholesale her items, she wanted to hold retail her items and she said the wholesaler and it was exciting. She said, oh yeah, my business is gonna grow. And so if you look at the four types of intuition. So if you look at the experience, so let’s say international intuition, does this person have the right experience? And so you might emotionally say, oh yeah, yeah, okay, yes, because I’m you know, so convinced that this person is the right one. Okay, let’s take a look at experiential intuition experiential intuition have you ever wholesale before and you haven’t, and it was a risk level. And do you really need to grow that fast? And when, when I was interviewing her, she was saying not really.
Let’s look at the situation, Are you okay with your business now? Is it profitable? Yes, it is. And if you look at the creative intuition, creative intuition. Is this a risky decision? Is this, um, is risky decision? Yeah, it is. And then in the relational intuition, what it does is that okay? Can you trust this person? Have you done enough background checks on this person rather than just listening to what she’s saying and getting excited by taking the emotions out. And it turns out that this person didn’t have a history of running good businesses. She actually had a history of doing the same thing to people where she actually, what ended up happening is she partnered. And then she got in the inventory and then one weekend this person walks in, the inventory is gone and this person has stolen all the inventory and sold it and turns out when, when this person did her homework finally on this person, she had done this to a number of other people. So how do you use the four types of intuition to really kind of take the temples of the emotions out of that decision, You would have had a lot more balanced approach to partnering with that person.
And so every single time I’ve had, uh, somebody on, I’ve interviewed or I’ve coached where they’ve had an issue with somebody else. There was always a negative signal from one of those four types of intuition. They’ve just chosen to ignore that signal because they were so excited at the opportunity of running an excel spreadsheet in the head with a lot of revenues going high. and it didn’t work out right because they failed to look at the warning signs that were there already. And even in when you talk to other people, you got to take a look at their body language, their tone, their experience, right? You can use the four types of intuition on them to say, do you have a balanced approach to them? Do they have the right experience? Have they been in similar situations? How are the people that they’re mentored by or their associated with? Are they business people? Are they savvy enough? You know, and who were they associating with? And so you can use the four types of intuition as a blueprint. Um, and had that blueprint been put on that this other business partner, the person interviewed would have quickly seen that her history, her experiential intuition would have triggered something saying she’s done this before, there are some lawsuits, I think I’d better back away.
And so the four types of intuition gives you a really good template and once you understand it, how it works for you and the signals and the types of decisions that you had to develop this, this for these four types of intuition on a template that they give you, which is through a worksheet that you fill in. You can use that each and every single time for any decision you make. And it gives you a whole well balanced decision. And even for my kids, you know, I asked I tell them to do the same. And so formal terms, I’m still young, 10 and 14, 10 to 15, But I used that same template for my younger daughter who started a non-profit business at 12. and so if you see the paintings behind me, those are hers. So she sells art to raise money for disabilities and illnesses. And in the last 2.5 years she’s raised over $30,000 to do that. But it’s really kind of talking her through the four types of intuition to make the decisions that get her success. And so she’s 15 years old, $3,000 in. And she has a podcast as well where she’s got people that she’s interviewing like former FBI people for FBI agents just had a billionaire early this week where she interviewed on the podcast with other artists just to find how art and creativity are in their lives.
But again, so age doesn’t matter, right? You know, I’ve taught my 10 year old, she wants to run a business because her older sister is, and You know, I said, you have to be serious, you have to raise $500 to, and she wants to write bookmarks to encourage reading because way too many kids have their, their noses stuck in in phones and devices. And so I said, Okay, raise 500 bucks if you’re serious. And she did it in five days. and she had a couple of Zoom sessions she assumed with one of my buddies and another podcast in beauty. I had, they both gave her 100 bucks, right? So I mean this stuff kind of, it kind of works. It doesn’t matter what age, but you really tap into that, that I mean intuition just really propels you forward and opens up the doors of opportunity by avoiding some of the things they’re gonna take you down And that’s how important the four types of the signals are. Well, yeah, your kids have got a good consultant that they can talk to. So, and I never get paid though. Yeah. I just don’t get silent partner movie. There’s other ways I get some muffins and cookies and lots of love and stuff.
So upset. That’s invaluable. Of course the template that you’re referring to is that almost like a period. It’s like a sorry review. Yeah, it could be seen as a peer review. Yeah, absolutely. So in one way, yeah and it just gives you a really good well balanced approach to take a look at the four different areas that I found really, really important. and that I’ve also used when it comes to consulting with other companies, right? So I took one company from $400,000 almost in the hole. They were on the way down to 3.5 million in two years just by using this template. Right? So they were in massively in trouble. There was no trust between the CEO the two CEOs and the rest and they were struggling with cash flow and there were about six months to live, they hired me to come on and said you’ve got to fix this. And so the first thing I do in a struggling cash company, it is I raised the salaries of the people there and so now the CEOs are going, oh my God, like who did we just hire? But luckily the contract was there for at least a year.
And I was tied to a performance and I said if I don’t do well, I don’t get paid very well at all. And so what I ended up doing is because they were under, they were not paying their employees well at all. They were lowered the market rates. All I did was I get got them market rates and slightly higher to say you are valuable. And then once I did that I started to talk to the employees to say, okay, how do we fix this company? And when I brought them in, I listened to what they had said and then the next step is I implemented what they said and all along the way. Their intuition is looking to see if I’m a charlatan or am I the real deal here. and all along the way over the next year they said, yeah, we can trust this guy like he got his respectful amount of money, he’s taking our suggestions, he’s involving us in decisions and what to do and what not to do, you know, he really cares. And then what happened is over a year, we fixed the company and then that in the second year I was allowed to actually work on expansion and what happened is now the employees took care of the operation side and then there actually, if I want to expand it to other locations, they took care of the operational side of that.
And so we were able to quickly grow to $3.5 million. And when it came to knocking out the competition, which is what my tag line is what ended up happening is that we started running this is these are healthcare companies locations where there was a massage and physiotherapy and orthotics and things of that in, in one location, The average location at that time was making in Ontario Canada was making about 250,000, maybe 400,000 on the top end. If you were lucky per location our locations were coming in once we fix things at a million plus and we started to get phone calls from the local health care companies saying you guys have taken my employees and my customers are now coming to you because they’re spending their insurance money at your place or they’re paying out of pocket and they’re coming in in clumps because they enjoy, That’s the Camaraderie. We had, we had such a fun environment and so a number of people start telling other people and we had at one time we had one police officer in that one in one town who ended up telling the other police officers within six months.
We had all the whole, uh, probably about 80% of the police officers in that town coming to us, just us. And that we had, there were probably six or seven other locations doing the same thing that we did. So that’s the power of really kind of when you treat people and you have that trust with your employees and your customers, they support you. And then, you know, now these competitors are calling and saying, can you buy my assets at least because I got to have something while I’m going down right. Um, and, and we were able to peel away the, the competitors, they became dominant in the markets they were then they were in. And when I left after a couple of years, um, basically they had a $10 million plan to expand in. Some of the market’s already indicated was the game plan already. And so that’s how you accelerate your success, that’s how you knock out your competition. And all started with me just starting to have people trust me. And then once they trusted me, they helped other customers because they were having such a ball and we are an amazing team.
And in my mind, that’s how you grow a business. Great answer. You mentioned earlier, I have to ask you about it, about their first impressions. Um, and 30 three seconds, 33 milliseconds correct. Now I’ve said previously, I don’t make a great first impression. I grow on people over time. So now that you, with all your knowledge or intuition, how do you make a better first impression? So, so in your case, um, there’s one thing that intuition does really, really well. It’s establishes a baseline and so, you know, so you and I have different personalities, you know, you’re a little bit a little bit more reserved ah and I’m a little bit more upbeat. It could be because of the caffeine as well, but in that the 1st 33 milliseconds, your intuition is hard at work establishing a baseline and where the trust versus the non-trust comes in is the detraction to that baseline. So, if you come in as a very introverted person, a very conservative people, your people’s intuition will understand that that’s the baseline.
And so and so anything detracting from, even if you have a little bit of excitement, okay, But let’s say you go from being super introverted and then you’re really extroverted on stage or you’re very animated in a business meeting or you’re saying things that you normally wouldn’t say or your body language is, you know, you know, away from them. And just, you know, because intuition is picking up on body language twitches on your face like there’s seven micro expressions you can’t get around. And so your intuition again, in 32 seconds of assessing a lot of this to say, what’s the detraction from? What I know is true north for this person. And when that detraction becomes a moderation because your intuition says this is not Thomas, that’s not normally the language he uses. When he comes into a meeting, he usually looks at us and then greets us today. He’s looking away and he’s slowly getting to meet us. There’s something bothering him. So these are the attractions away from the base that is telling someone’s intuition that something’s up.
Now, if it’s a piece of bad news or you’re just having a bad day, your intuition will look for other clues, right? And so if it’s if it’s something, it’s bad news, we’re anticipating what’s he gonna say? That’s bad. Maybe we’ll be lost a big contract or you didn’t like my performance or whatever it is. Or if you’re having just a bad day, you know, perhaps when you’re walking away, you just sigh or you hold your temples or what have you. But your intuition is looking at the behaviour is to say, okay, perhaps subconsciously saying perhaps he’s having a bad day, maybe had a bad phone call, whatever it is, but it’s not directed at us. Now, I’m slowing things down a lot, right? But I’m taking you through some of the slices of things that your intuition looks at. And so yeah, you may not make a good impression at the start, but you know, if I’m looking to your marketing services, um, I don’t really care about your here. I mean, it’s great to have a bad impression. What can you do for my business? How are you helping me further my message? And when that happens, I really don’t care if you’re extroverted or introverted. I love you because I trust you.
I trusted you trusted you understood my message, You’re taking me in my business, you really care about what I want. It’s not about the numbers, you have a good engaging. Like I’m taking all this information in and then all of a sudden your first impression, who cares? Because you get me, I’ve got friends who are super introverts. I’ve got friends who are super extroverts. but it’s our relationship that matters. It’s not, you know what that first impression is. So and in some in some cases I think when we talk about first impression, sometimes that becomes a talking point, right? And then we hammer away on that talking point when it’s really not that important. And I think research is like that, right? You know, I think research kind of pins you into, you know, certain things. That’s one of the things. When I look at academic research, I look at okay, where did the data come from? Who did they interview? How valid is this? Right. Because you can say I was telling my daughters this as well. I don’t know why I talked to my daughter’s about data when they’re so young. But you know there’s one where you see the on the toothpaste, three out of four dentists say that your that this is the toothpaste you should have, let’s just put that’s marketing messaging for one of the big ways big companies.
Okay. So did they did they actually interview three dentists out of four in a room and they fed them with? You know, a nice dessert before. And so yeah, you know and they had a group think yeah, I think this is good. So those are the three of the four or did they interview 3000 people or sorry, 4000 people have the 7000 of them have said yes. So that’s what I look for. And you know, it’s like a research saying, okay, let’s look at the viability of the colour black that you know, which shades of black do you like on a scale of 1-5? But there’s no question that says, well do you like black at all? So you almost pigeonholed to say, yeah, okay. You’re assuming I like black. So I’m gonna answer your questions. So when it comes now, it’s kind of a long way of saying when we come, when we talk about first impressions, okay, you’ve now talk to me. Okay, I’m now talking about a point called first impressions. Now let me give me your opinion on your first impression. Yet when I meet you for the first time, your first impression doesn’t really matter to me. It’s what can you help me with from a business perspective given that, you know, if you’re meeting customers or how are you as a person when I meet you for coffee, are you the type of person that I want to continue going for coffee with or have a beer?
Because we just enjoyed such a great conversation and that’s that trust that is such a comforting feeling that when you call, I see you calling that your intuition is going, it’s Thomas and then because I had a great time with him last time, let’s have a good chat, hey, you wanna go for coffee again. That’s how it works, right? And I’m just distilling it down to a science. And in your example, you did use being on stage and I watched the Ted X talk. It’s very good. Did you want to share anything about that experience and how it’s received by people? Yeah, it really, a lot of people didn’t, first of all, they didn’t understand how how complex intuition was, but they really, the comments that I typically get from those who watched the Ted X talk is that they were really, really engaged in and really taking an understanding about intuition really opened up, you know, them either reaching out to me or asking about it or, you know, at least getting them to my website to say, hey, listen, I loved your Ted X talk. It’s really interesting what you do. So this is the feed kind of feedback that I’ve, that I’ve done.
And it really got to a lot of people, like if you looked at, there were 12 of us that were, that did the Ted X thing and of the 12, I was swamped with people afterwards. And so if you want to use that as an engaged in some kind of indication of the interest level of my talk. I would take that as people really asking questions about these signals from the examples, I was actually talking even in Stockholm do a bunch of accountants and a bunch of saying, people are saying, oh my God you’re talking to accountants and they all lived intuition as well. And after the talk and Stockholm I had, you know, I was doing some book signings and stuff like that. And there was one person, she was from Poland and she came up to me and said, I loved your talk and she says, let me tell you a story. and she was she had a beautiful marriage, two kids. And something was telling her something was off with her husband. She didn’t know, she said everything was good. We kissed each other in the morning, everything was lovely dinners, you know, and but something was telling me something was off.
And when she did her digging, what she will found out was that her husband was cutting her out of the bank accounts. And there was some processes going on. And she said, had I not stepped in, I would have lost access to all my bank accounts. And I would have been on the road with my two daughters. And I eventually confronted him and there was nothing she didn’t think that there was anything to trigger it. But it was clear that her intuitive signals were saying something’s off in his behaviour or maybe perhaps what he’s why he’s going to the bank twice a week when he’s gone once a month before whatever it is, she was not able to pin it. And so what I find is when people look at my Ted X talk or they come to hear me speak or we engage in a Zoom meeting. Every single person has a topic of when they ignored intuition and it got them to a really bad place. And what happens too often, unfortunately is that when you’re on the way down, even though your intuition sending you these signals all the time, your focus is on the slippery slope down.
You forget to look up to take a look at the signals. And when you hit rock bottom, there’s only one place to look is up and finally said, oh my God, my intuition was there all the time. And that’s what helps you out of that situation, right? Answer for your girls. My goals is to help as many businesses be as successful as they can by living through a really purposeful mission. One business at a time. And just to leave this, leave this education of intuition because I don’t think anybody’s done this much. Taking this much of a deep dive into intuition. And if I can just make people aware of these signals, I can help better their lives. And you know, I’m putting my mouth from my, my money where my mouth is with my two kids and you know, the success they want through the missions that they have with their non-profits that they want to you want they want to run. But it’s really about impacting other people and teaching them lessons of you know, don’t let other people tell you what to do.
You have these signals, you know, listen to it and live life to the fullest right based on what’s right for you and all that has to be wrapped up in these in the intuition, the signals and their experiences and they’re allowed to fail. You know, failure is amazing because it’s another data point for your intuition. and so you know I’m just and that makes me happy. That makes me incredibly happy. And there’s no better way to live life than if you can live every single day happy that you’ve left some marks somewhere and the work that you do leaves marks somewhere and it’s going to affect someone. I think it’s a great place. Great way to list. Is there anything I should have asked you about today? The one thing is if you make the decision to ignore your intuition, there’s something called opportunity, cost and opportunity costs. And the best way to explain this is through Again, another interview with someone I did, his name is Binging. was someone who is, he’s international keynote speaker and in 2016 this guy was earning over seven figures 100,000 people 80 stages a year.
His life looked amazing. He had his intuition was saying externally, you’re happy internally, you’re a wreck. And in 2016 he finally said, I’m done, I Gotta Fix This. And so it goes away to place in new Zealand take some pens and notepads and stuff. And he started putting up these things, which he thought were his values in the wall and he looks at them and says, that’s my wife wants, that’s what my manager wants. That’s what this person wants. That’s what the audience wants, where the heck is binging. And he takes these values off and he puts on his own values as hard as it was. What does he want in life? And what he thought was going to be a cathartic experience. He’s gonna live through his life, his values and he was very haunting because he says for the first time in his life, he’s actually living his life for him. She goes back home ready, just listen to his intuition. He falls back in the same old, same old lifestyle and six months goes by and his parents come up from Australia and he’s Vietnamese and background.
His mother pulls him aside and says, there’s this saying in Vietnamese, when you hang around squid, you’re going to get some ink on you, you have a lot of ink on you, this is not my boy. And so six months goes by and he finally makes the decision to cut out everybody who’s caustic in his life. Forget the downtown l a apartment, get rid of the brands, get them in again, live out in the boonies and really be fulfilled as to who he was. And so when it comes to opportunity cost, when I was interviewing him for the podcast, one of the things I told him has been, this is how opportunity cost works. It wasn’t just the six months that you lost ignoring your intuition. Again, it’s also the six months that you lost that you could have gained by trusting your intuition. So you actually lost a full year of your life. And if you’re in the business of helping 100,000 people a year improve their lives. How many people did you leave behind? How many people did you let down? And he said, I’ve never, ever thought about life like that way. So when you ignore your intuition and when you make a decision, the cost to you is going to be sometimes twice or more.
So never ignore those signals, ever. You’re a very good storyteller. Did you know that? Uh, no, but I get very passionate about these examples because I think they had home well for people who want to know more. Where can they find you? Yeah, they can just go to dot com. Everything’s there. I’m also on the socials LinkedIn, Twitter. I’m on TikTok. I don’t do any dances because I’m sure that it’s going to trigger some intuition of others not to look. And Facebook, Instagram. Send me a DM. Contact me, watch my weapon and watch me take it however you want to engage with the content. Please do.
You’re a great guest and very easy to listen to, Sunil.
Thank you. Thank you very much. I appreciate that.