Thomas Green here with Ethical Marketing Service. On the podcast today, we have Brad Tornberg. Brad, Welcome.
Thank you, Thomas. It’s nice to be here.
Nice to have you. Would you like to take a moment and tell the audience a bit about yourself and what you do.
Sure. My name is Brad Tornberg. My background is in technology. I’ve got over 35 years of consulting experience and that has led me into other types of consulting because once the client sees that I understand what I’m doing, they say, Hey, well you seem to understand sales where you seem to understand employees that you seem to understand wellness. Can you maybe help us in some of those areas? So 30 years of technology with Microsoft and consulting on my own. But what happened was as I was doing consulting for a client. I actually was making some observations. I was blogging, and I noticed that the business owner was completely out of shape. He was sweating, and he was eating fried food, sitting on his desk and he was yelling and screaming at all the people in his company and the people were miserable.
You could see it in their faces, you could see it in the way that they would respond to me when I asked certain questions, and I realised the business owners really like if you compare the human body to the business body and this is how the whole thing started. The business owners like the brain and how he communicates or doesn’t communicate to his people is the central nervous system, and if he’s not communicating effectively, there’s a blockage in the central nervous system. Similar to the case where you might have a limp because you have a disease or you have some problem with your spine. So from that point, you know, I wrote the article on it and then to the to the next six or seven weeks I started to compare the human body like the circulatory system to the businesses circulatory system. How quickly cash moves through the business, the infrastructure, which is the muscles and the strength of the system and all of those things that the eyes, how you see the world and how you see the future, the mouth, how you communicate to people, what your message, is it what your messages and is it in alignment with what your product is or your services.
So from that we created a book, I created a book called The Business Fitness Revolution and what it was each chapter compares essentially like I said, each of the parts of the business body to the human body. And then over this past summer had a good year, financially decided to sink a few dollars into creating an online course for this. And this is kind of the direction that I’m going into. It’s kind of this ominous and all-knowing consulting includes technology, but it can also include other things like financial wellness, employee wellness, business development, growth management, things like that. And then you know how to make, how to make an internal organisation, you know as Burnett Brown would say you know more empathetic and getting people to lean in and not be afraid to say the things that they really need to say because that’s what accelerates the growth of the company. So that’s how this kind of all came about and we’re having a lot of success with it right now. Have you gotten any feedback regarding the metaphor?
I think that’s the right word regarding taking the business and then comparing it to the body and guess what I’m going for is how what’s switches of people made as a result of of using that analogy. Well, there’s a couple of things. One of the things that the whole purpose of business fitness is so that business owners are C level executives can achieve peak performance for both themselves and their business. So the biggest change that I see initially is when I work with the business owner of the sea executive is I get him into this mindset of Look I get up at 4:30 AM. I mean I get up at 3:30 AM, I go to the gym at 4:00 and I work out for an hour every day my day starts because I can rip the face off the world when most people are just getting out of bed. So I get more done by 10 o’clock, 11 o’clock in the morning us time obviously, and then then most people get done in a day, so in order to achieve peak performance, your body has to be at 100% efficiency, you have to be healthy, you have to be awake.
Um you have to feel good, the whole mood, everything about that and what I’ve noticed is is the business owners, the feedback that I get from them is like, wow, you know, the first couple of weeks I was dragging my ass around and now I have all of this extra energy and all of this extra focus. So now they take them, they say let’s apply it to the business. Now, now I want you to talk to the people in my organisation and what I find is a lot of people, they themselves aren’t personally optimised. So we try to get that going in order to optimise the whole organisation. So the feedback has actually been very positive because it’s a different approach. You know, everybody has business consulting or business coaching or all of these other things, which is about the business, but what they fail to realise is the business owner isn’t around, there’s no business, so he has to maintain his health and his wellbeing and that’s what we kind of focus on and that’s kind of the underlying, so a lot of times that the wellbeing is comes from the fact that the people are afraid to talk, they’re afraid to say things, so we kind of try to open up the communication and what the business owner comes back to me and saying, gee I didn’t really realise that a lot of the things that people are thinking now they’re saying that I never even realised we’re issues, because as the business owner, I just let it kind of roll over my head, but as an employee, they tend to take things a lot more personal and they tend to internalise things a lot more.
So it kind of opens up the communication, which is a big part of this, of what I’m trying to do because once you get people talking to one another, you can pretty much work through anything. So, I mean, I would think a good if it’s the case that you get a lot more done as a result of getting up early, would it go to sort of working hours, would in a business, if you were to have increased working hours, do you think that that would have the same result or not? Well, I don’t believe that working more makes you more productive. I believe that focus is what makes you productive, so, you know, it’s different for different people, Some people work better in the morning, some people work better in the evening, some people work better in short spurts of focus, some people work better where they just take a project or where they’re multitasking a whole bunch of things and they just plop it on their desk and they just work until it’s done. but what you find is that when you’re doing things that way as you get, people can only maintain focus for a certain period of time. So you need to take breaks, you need to do the types of things that contribute to your personal wellness, to improve your business wellness, okay.
And as a result of focusing on that, I guess the question would be around how, how is that, how does that relate to the communication that you that you were referring to earlier? I think that Renee Brown has a term called rumbling, basically, I might disagree with you Tom, let’s go into the conference room and we’re gonna have a rumble. Now, what does that mean? That means that it doesn’t mean a fistfight, it just means that anything and everything is on the table and no matter what I say to you, no matter what you say to me when we walk out of that room, that’s it. You know, we’ve either resolved an issue or come to some kind of impasse or come to some kind of mutual decision in terms of how we’re going to proceed, but it’s not personal, it’s business. And the problem is a lot of times if you’ve seen conference, if you’ve seen in a conference room and you get two different departments in there. It almost becomes like a pissing contest and people are they, they won’t open up and tell the truth, but they need to defend their turf.
And what we’re trying to do is to remove that, that that wall that people put around themselves and open up the communication and rumbling really gets a lot of things accomplished very quickly. Oh, I didn’t know that you felt that way. Well, I do and here’s my reasons why and I know that you might feel differently, but I just need you to understand my point of view and that’s one of the best ways that people can come to, you know, mutual agreement with one another and solve problems and issues and become more productive and move the business forward and move themselves in their career paths forward. Have you after being doing what you do for you got a significant amount of experience, have you noticed any major trends or problems that people come to you with? Yeah, I think with Covid, I mean, and I’m sure a lot of people are talking about it. There’s two things, there’s burnout and there’s this sense of isolation because people are not with other people, you know, the social, this is the problem. Even in the schools with the kids, the kids are missing out on the socialisation aspect.
So a kid who’s in second grade, if he’s in it for two years, he’s going to be socially immature because he’s not interacting with people in a positive way and even in a negative way, right? Remember when you were in school, somebody got you angry, you guys would go out in the schoolyard and you have a fistfight. But the point is is you interacted with one another that is missing now. And I find that a lot of people that the reason that people are starting to leave their jobs in droves is because they want the freedom to have a balanced lifestyle. So the biggest change that I’ve seen is that the workaholics of the world are starting to get it and most business owners and entrepreneurs are workaholics and they realised that not only do they need to have balance for their employees, but they need to have balance for themselves. So the biggest, the transformational shift that I’m seeing going on is Get in at eight, work it for work, work, work and I don’t want to hear any of your problems to the and it’s a little hard for even me to adjust.
Being someone who’s been in business for 45 years, I used to work for bosses. If you didn’t do what you want, they’d kick your gas out of the company now, it’s like let’s explore, let’s see how we can make things better kinder gentler now, this is the way the world is going and this is the way the world is moving and the people that aren’t like that, like me either need to adjust, which I’m doing now and I’m finding, I found the adjustment actually kind of hard, you know, you’re talking about an older generation and a new generation and the coming of age, right? And I’m finding now that as I get into this kinder gentler, it’s making me kinder gentler, not only within business but within the whole world and stuff and it’s made my perspective different. While money is important, money isn’t the thing, what is important is that, you know, the balance between my family and life, my personal life and my money and life because a lot of entrepreneurs that buried down into something and they don’t pick their head up and the next thing they know their five year old kid is going to college and you know, I had three daughters and kind of went through that a little bit and with my oldest and decided with my other two girls that I wasn’t going to do, that, I was going to be present, and that’s what I think the biggest thing is now, people are learning how to be present in the present as opposed to looking forward to what’s going to happen in the future and lamenting on what happened in the past, so you’re seeing this attitude shift going on with people and it’s kind of interesting, it’s like a mad as hell and I’m not gonna take it anymore, you know, like the old movie and I think that that is the biggest change that I’m seeing and it affects their work life and their personal lives any opportunities as a result of that change.
That’s a good question. Yeah, I think people are a lot more open now too, collaboration, not criticism collaboration. Where instead of saying, Tom, you did this wrong, it’s more like, Tom, let’s put our heads together and figure out how we can do. I find that it’s not just cut and dry as it used to be with things that it’s more like people willing to help people to solve a problem or to get to a solution. And I think that’s really, really good because what that’s going to do in the long term and that’s the change that I’m seeing now, the people that are happy in that kind of company or they move to that kind of company, you’re going to have much, much less turnover because people leave, not because they don’t like the companies because they don’t like the people who they’re working for and they’re working with. And if you can change that dynamic, you’re going to reduce turnover greatly and let’s face it, it takes 66 months to two ramps someone up. So you take whatever someone’s yearly salary is cut in half, that’s your investment, is the business owner.
I mean, I want to optimise that as a business owner, don’t you have you got any favourite stories in terms of how your consulting has impacted a business. You know, I have over 350 consulting clients, but I like the clients when I walk into point the gun at my head and say we’ve had three systems and they failed. We’ve had two consultants and they’re just no good and prove it to me. You know, and there was one client I had who the president of the company was. We’re not going to do this. I don’t really like what I’m hearing. Meanwhile, they did everything I asked them to do and this gentleman and I have become friends. So, you know, I look for every engagement that I’m involved in to develop a new friend. It’s not about business, it’s about developing a long-term relationship with someone and then seating that relationship and becoming their trusted advisor. So when I can successfully point to someone and say, mm hmm, I’m their trusted advisor.
I have one client that I’ve had for 35 years that had nothing when I started it has everything now and doesn’t even make a move in any part of their business unless they reach out to me first and say, does this sound right? If I could have five of those, I could retire. You know, that, that to me is something that’s important to me. And one of them actually nominated me for entrepreneur of the year award with the Delaware Valley in 2015, and I won the award. So to me, not that I’m looking for awards or kudos, but that’s the highest compliment that someone could, could pay to me, but kudos, congratulations. Um, in terms of that, the one thing that I picked up on was about the trusted advisor, the first time I heard that phrase was actually from jay Abraham, Have you got any inspiration there from jay? Yeah, I listen, I listen, I read and I listened to a lot of the guys who are, you know, the grand card owns and the J Abrahams and the Michael ports of the world.
And you know, at one point I, I owned the duct tape marketing business. So, I got into that circle with John Janice and all those people speakers are great. I take titbits away from everything. I read HBR Harvard business review, I’m very newsworthy in the sense that I’m always trying to pick up things that I can share with my clients trusted advisor concept is something that I’ve always lived by. I mean, I’m an old-fashioned guy. I believe in belly to belly selling. Okay. And one of the best stories I can tell is a client of mine, one of the largest fabric manufacturers in, in the United States, uh, had asked us to come in and this was at the point when I was with Microsoft and we came in and I walked into his office and all I saw in his office was memorabilia about the New York Yankees and we started having a conversation about the Yankees and we kept talking about sports and everything else and he was like, he shook his president company and the owner and he said, you know, I really like you, I want to do business with you $14 million dollars later, we put in an oracle based system and I never had to sell him anything.
So you know, to me, the relationship is really what it’s about and that’s, that’s how you begin the trusted advisor relationship, you established the person, you prove to them, you can do something, you establish that personal relationship and then you do what you say, you’re gonna do, deliver what you promised delivery expectation gap. If you’ve got a gap in there, it’s no good. If you can delivery can meet expectation, then you then then you’re fine, then you’re good to go. So I find that at that point now, once I get a project under my belt and I begin to have that relationship with the owner, guess what, that ends up being the trusted advisor relationship because they feel, because when we’re talking and we’re personal to one another, we talked about a lot of other things and the reason they brought me in, you brought me in to look at the system, hey, you know, have you looked at your people, You know, I mean you’ve got to have, you know, I called the technology is a triangle people processes and technology.
And a lot of times when clients from me and they say we have a technology problem and I told the owner, no, you don’t. You have a people problem. And sometimes the owner says, I need you to look at my business and find out what my problem is. And I’m the ugly guy who comes to the business owner and say, hey, I found out what your problem is. It’s you, it’s the way you talk to your people, it’s the way you deal with your people. It’s the way they ask you. They give you something they want to do, you give them no feedback. So a lot of times my trusted advisor relationship is like me being your friend, being able to tell you, hey, Tom, you’re an idiot and you would look at me and laugh and smile at me because we’re friends and you would know that. So to me, that’s the core of the trusted advisor relationship. It’s establishing that personal connection because if I walk into a client and I can’t establish a personal connection with them, I am not going to be successful And in those situations sometimes in fact, as I’m getting older, a lot of times I walk away because I can’t establish one of the best leading questions to find out. And this is what I always say, this is how I start all my conversations with business owners and C level executives, Tom, it’s five years from today.
You brought me in to fix your business. You brought me in because you have some problems and things like that. I want you to tell me five years from today, we’re having coffee and you’re really happy with me, what did I do? I make him work from the future state back to the present state to see if we’re in alignment with one another, right? That’s an important thing, you know, and if the business owner says to me, well in five years, I want to be on the golf course playing golf, that tells me this guy is wants to retire. So now I need to, everything I need to do is with the mind of maximising what he wants to do so that he can retire. Sometimes it’s like, well, you know, I want to be acquired, Okay, how do we do the things that get you acquisition? People don’t ask that. They ask what you’re paying now. Right? And so I said, what’s your pain now, okay, now when I fix that pain, you know, it’s like when you have a pain in your hand, you can’t worry about how long your hair is right, because your hand hurts so bad. So I need I need you to get past the pain point because guess what MR business owner, we can fix that.
We can bring the right people and we can bring the right solutions and I can lay out a strategy, I can lay out a road map and I’ll stick around and project manager for you. That’s another big thing. Trusted advisor relationship is I’m not a sales guy who’s flipping it over my head and walking out the door and I’m not a guy who’s gonna be there through that first part of the sale, sign the contract, I’m gonna be with you the whole journey. So when you’re happy, I’m happy when you’re angry, I’ll be angry too. And you can take it out on me and you could yell at me and I’m your consultant that’s that, you know, pick up the phone and let me know and if you’re not happy let me know. So I find that if you develop a good personal relationship, it’s really easy to develop the trusted advisor relationship. But the key to the trusted advisors expectation delivery there can’t be a gap, great information. Have you got any thoughts on how to apply the trusted advisor? If you’re not customer facing as a business owner and you have to let’s say roll that out to a team.
Well, if there’s a team that I’m rolling out to, I have one rule and I can equate it to this statement and you’ll understand it. If the generals make a battle plan in a conference room and fail to communicate it to their privates at the end of the day. You’re gonna have a lot of dead soldiers and that’s really what the situation is. So if I’m rolling it out to a team, we’re gonna have a kick-off. We’re going to have everybody at the same level of understanding and knowledge through the process. Because the only way a team can decide on things as if they’re a empowered to and be given the facts of what it is. A lot of business owners compartmentalised as well. He doesn’t really need to know that. Well, yeah, he does need to know that because there’s an impact to his role. And he may be able to point out something because this is a, this this is information that flows to him. He may be able to point out to you a better way for him to see it, for them to lay it out to him.
So there people don’t realise that it’s, it’s not, we’re not all in isolation. So in a team, when you’re building a team environment and the good thing is, is, you know, you gotta have collaboration tools in place, right? You have to have a place where everybody can go and read the same messages and see the same documents and things like that. And and the collaboration has to be very tight. I have status meetings with my clients every couple of weeks or every week, depending on how intense the project is. But the whole idea of that is, is everybody should be knowing where they’re going and they should all be at that place at the same time. And once you have that kind of alignment with them, then it makes it very easy because you’re communicating the same message. It’s a consistent message across that whole team, um, and team, you know, the other thing that you need to figure out very quickly, if you’re working with the team is the team dynamics, there’s always the one guy who’s gonna analyse every single thing that’s out there and there’s going to be the other guys, the salesman who says, that’s great, let’s just do it.
You know, and then there’s gonna be someone who’s going to look at it from the money point of view. So it’s really important within a team dynamic for you to identify who’s the coach, who’s the economic buyer, who’s the sales guy, right? The dreamer, you know, uh, and you know, those, those are things like the Kathy Kolbe profile and, you know, those things, what type of person are you, you know, you’re an ABC day. So I always try to, in a team dynamic, learn the team players. And then one of the things that I’ve always been good at. And it’s, you know, it’s my gift of Gab, I guess is being able to adjust my style to each team member, because if you’re really aggressive with someone who’s quiet and shy, they’re gonna pull away from you and you’re not going to get valuable and important feedback from them, you know, and so you get, you get the guy who’s really excited because you’re the guy who you want to give him the message so you can tell everybody else in the organisation, hey, we got to do this.
So once you identify each of the players and what their roles are in the team, then you can be successful. So, you know, I always find that you get past the owner and he says this is great and I want to introduce you to my team and then I always, the first step is who’s the team and he goes, what do you mean? I said, I want to know who are the people that are going to be involved in it, what their roles are and what their responsibilities are. So I know how what things that are key and important to them and what other things could potentially impact them that they should be involved in. And this way everybody sharing that same knowledge and things tend to move forward that way when things don’t move forward is you get by in over here from two people. But then you get resistance over here from another three people and what we really need to do is have the two groups in the room and figure out what the compromises or figure out what the best solution is because a lot of times it’s a negotiation when you’re in a team environment. Hey tom does that sound good to you? It does. Okay. Great. How about this? Does that. No that doesn’t.
Hey Joe, he doesn’t like that. How can we get around that? What else can we do? What joe suggests something? Hey tom would that work for you? It’s not exactly what you want. But it gets you closer to your goal brad. I can live with that. So what you’re trying to do is check off boxes with people because what I do is I have the marital, I call it the marital statement speak now or forever hold your peace. And so here it is. We’re in a team you can say what you want and sometimes in a team that one of the team players isn’t comfortable talking in front of others and if you’ve built a nice relationship with them they’ll pull you aside Brett, can I talk to you a second? I really don’t want to bring this up in a team environment but I thought just maybe know about it again. It’s not only the trusted advisor with the business owner. It’s being trusted by the people below that business owner to know that you’re going to listen to them and you’re going to bring that back to the team or back to the owner and you’re not going to judge them and you’re not gonna under you know, you’re not gonna take them down, that you’re going to be positive and what your approaches so that they’re even more open to you.
I don’t have really any issues with teams except when I’m working individually with different departments and there’s never a point where they come back together because it’s the point that they come back together that they usually start screaming at each other. You know, this is the problem. We have no, we have this. Well, yeah, you do. And it’s impacting me. I’m downstream. You know, it all floats downstream to me. So I try to build consensus and in a team I try to build, I don’t move forward unless I have agreement on things and or we say, look, you know, we’re beating this horse to death. Let’s put this to aside this is an issue. And I call it out in my status report is a risk. We have a risk here. We have two teams that are not agreed to two groups of people that do not agree. You need, you’re the business owner, you need to, it’s an escalation. You need to make this decision. So when I give a status report, I always tell people, even from a team point of view, this is what we did. This is what we’re gonna do. These are risks that we might have that we’re hearing and these are things that are escalations for you or the people that are writing the check because we may need to spend more money to fix this problem.
Are you okay with that? That four quadrant status is something I’ve had for 40 years and then on the, and then on the bottom of it I have a red, yellow green to say where our status of our project is. I mean I do a lot of project management and that, that could be technology projects. They could be build out projects, that could be expansion projects. And it’s the one thing that I do really, really well I think is managed projects because I stay focused on the present. Let’s not look at what six weeks from now, what we’re at. I developed project plans. What were we supposed to do this week? Did we do it? No. Okay, well, I’m going to change the dates but that’s going to impact the live date of something. Right. Wouldn’t you rather know that we’re gonna be late on a project four months from now. Today would you rather wait for the day before when I said, hey Tom, we’re not gonna make it because that’s what happens most of the time with people they’re afraid to say. And what I try to do is by opening up that communication is hey brad. There’s no way we’re gonna get this done in a week. Okay, good. I put it down as a week.
I was wrong. Tell me what it should be. See, I’m not building your project plan, you’re building your project plan and we’re making changes to it as we go away. When you involve people in your process, you have a much greater chance of success. So I want everyone to feel empowered and to feel like they’re an owner and that that at the end of the day when this thing is good, they’re going to get the kudos, they have to have the passion about right. The problem is a lot of people say we’re gonna have a project out here guys, I’d like you to all be involved. Come sit in the room and you sit in those rooms and no one says a word and I talk and I talk and people sit there and they’re looking at me and there’s a and I’m not getting any feedback and tell the business owner, I don’t think this is gonna work this way. We’re gonna need to break down these barriers and communication is, is a prerequisite for working with me. If you don’t have it, we’re gonna have a problem. So, you know, I guess my short answer is over 40 years, 35, 40 years I’ve made a lot of mistakes, just like everyone’s made a lot of mistakes, but I learned from my mistakes and I improved my process and I improved my demeanour.
Look, when I first started in business, nobody wanted to work for me because I assumed everyone worked like me and I’m an entrepreneur, not everyone is like me and I was failing in the people that I was hiring because guess what? I was trying to hire people just like me. I don’t want someone like me. I want someone who does the things that I don’t do or see things from the point of view that I don’t do. You know? So I have learned that there are different people, personas, different types, different styles. When you look at my course, I talk about communication styles, communication types. You know the way people communicate. I mean, I have a whole chapter, a couple of chapters and a couple of lessons dedicated to that because that seems to be where a lot of people have difficulty is moving the team forward and moving the group forward. I think I have, I have solved that and the best way to solve it is you got to be honest and you’ve got to be open, you can’t candy coat things, you can’t, you know what the business says. I don’t want you telling people that you know unless it’s financial, there’s no reason not to tell people everything. You know, if you don’t want them to know how much you’re making, you don’t want to tell you how much they’re costing you that.
I agree with that. There are certain things they shouldn’t say. But in terms of your business operations, why can’t an accounting person be part of a manufacturing demonstration so that they understand the way data is collected even though there are two different areas. This is just an example, right? And then when the business owner says, all right, well I have them in there – the accounting guy is the guy who’s telling the manufacturing people that if you do something this way it’s going to impact us much easier down here downstream. And then as a group you begin to solve that problem. That’s what I’m looking for. A group dynamic where there’s more than one person who’s solving that problem. Sounds like you’re very passionate. So I mean that’s a major a major to say advantage to what you do. You did reference earlier about if you had five clients like this one, meaning the really good client, then you’d be able to retire. And I wanted to ask you would you want to retire if you could? No, are you kidding me? I’ll die if every time I – my dad had dementia, and he retired early and I believe that your brain needs to stay active.
But I am passionate and because the course was written this year, I’m not retired. I mean I’m preparing myself for a pure role as okay. Not a consultant, not a coach, but as a trusted advisor and offering a whole series of services around that trusted advisor, whether they look, we’re thinking about buying a company or we’re thinking about putting the systems in or I’m not I have a high turnover helped me solve that problem, how I could reduce that, you know, just specific tasks that, that once I do one of them kind of open up the kimono for other things, I like the business owners that call me up and say let me bounce something off of you, that means that they believe in the things that I have to say to them and you know, as I tell the c executive or the entrepreneur and me being one, it’s lonely here, I don’t have another entrepreneur, you know, they always tell you should have a mentor, you know, and you should, if you’re starting out in business, you should have someone who knows more than you who’s been there who’s done that, who’s actually failed, you know, I failed a few times before I succeeded.
So you know, failures are stepping stones to success, right? I mean I’m successful now because people say to me, you know, you know, you look at people who make money and then you realise that a lot of those people, man, as I say to a lot of my clients or to a lot of people say to me, you know, being an entrepreneur is easy, I say, you know, until you’ve eaten dinner four nights in a row out of a can of Spaghettio’s and made that risk and that sacrifice, you really don’t know what my shoes are like, you can’t walk in my shoes, but when I talked to an entrepreneur who bootstrapped his own thing and he understands that are a business owner, you know that’s one view, then I have the family dynamic, right, family owned businesses. Where do you watch the Godfather? It’s been a while, but yeah, what I find in a lot of family businesses is the entrepreneurs. The dad and the son is like Fredo Corleone, you know, so it tends to skip a generation grandpa started the business, the grandfather kind of ran and managed that the grandson is the entrepreneur.
So I have that situation where I work with the grandson who’s like he wants to do everything because he knows how to grow a business or thinks he knows how to grow a business and needs me to kind of guide him and then I have the father who is just, he’s not an entrepreneur, you know, a lot of entrepreneurs are not good managers, a lot of managers are not good entrepreneurs, so he’s the manager where the grandson is the entrepreneur to different people, but yet they’re going to both be present, you know, the father is the president now the Sun is going to be a president, so now how do you shift the business model that you know, how do, how do you work on the grandson on the things, he’s going to be weak at that. The manager, father is really good at manager, Father is a touchy feely guy and he thoughts about why that’s the case about it skipping a generation. Well, it’s even the same in my family. My grandfather was started my father’s business, manufacturing business. My father, I love him to death based on dope. You know, I mean as a businessman, he just did make the right decisions with a lot of things. He just wasn’t very, you know, entrepreneurial in that sense to be able to see.
For example, it was a sipper manufacturer, and he merged his business with guys who are manufacturing handbags, which actually took them away from manufacturing zippers for everything else. And he was like, well I’m getting killed by, you know, Japanese imports because I make zippers and brass and they make zippers, you know, in plastic and stuff. He goes, so I want to go to another company, sell the company at some point because I think it’s a dying industry. Little did he realise if you ever look at like eight state and everything zippers are fashion statements now they’re in colours and things like that. And you know, he didn’t have the foresight to see that there’s going to be a shift in an industry that he was looking at the now just the now and, and you know, you’ve got people who are like that, they have no horizon. The horizon is tomorrow. You know, they’re, they’re busy body, there are people who they just have to be task oriented and take care of the tasks they’re all done okay and go home now tomorrow. Whereas entrepreneurs tend to look at things different. I think it’s ADNA thing and I also think part of it is how you were raised, I mean if you’re a kid who’s going out and says, I want to make some money in your parents or the type of parents who say to you, I’m not giving you anything. The kid goes out and starts to lemonade sand or shovels, driveways, like I did rakes leaves in the fall and learns how to earn money and learns the importance of money and the importance of holding onto money versus somebody who’s handed everything. You know, I’ve seen that even with children that get everything handed to them. I have no impetus to go out and have to hustle and bust their ass. And that that motivation comes from, hey man, if I don’t work, I don’t need, you know, and I think that the generation before my dad was that way, they all came over from Europe, they didn’t have a part in the expression of pasta piscine, but what did they do? They picked themselves up, they went out and they found a way to make a living. Some of them found a living that they could turn into a business or they had an idea that can turn into the business and they knew someone and that’s how things expand and that’s how things grow.
The problem is this generation today, their heads stuck in, it is stuck in it’s everything is instant gratification. It used to be if you called someone three days later and you return their call, you had a pretty good customer service, you know, and then when you got to the point where you could call them back, you know, the next day, you’re exceptional customer service. My kids, if I don’t call them back within 10 minutes, where were you, what were you doing? It was like, it’s that instant gratification, which is the reason why people say if you’re going to do any kind of marketing, your message shouldn’t be more than seven seconds because that’s the attention span of a gnat or a child, you know, so everything’s getting shrunk down, everything’s quicker. It’s accelerating. Things are happening at a much quicker pace right now. And I think what you’re finding is the younger generation now has kind of caught on to that. My daughter told me something very interesting. I said, you know, probably, you know, people talk about the problem with the millennials is that they’re lazy and they all go back to their house and things like that. You know, it’s easier to live at home.
And my daughter is telling me that her generation, she is now 26 and she’s going to medical school has been looking at that generation saying, look at these people, they’re living at home and they have no money, I don’t want to be like that. So what you have is you have generations that keeps cycling based upon what they saw in the last generation that they didn’t like and I think that’s what breeds entrepreneurs a lot of times, you know, hey, it’s, it’s, it’s a new, it’s a new horizon out there. Look at Bitcoin all of a sudden Bitcoin came out, right, and you’ve got all of these young entrepreneurs out there that are building Bitcoin business or trading businesses and stuff like that. And there are there writing courses in social media by my course to learn how to do Bitcoin. That’s what you’re seeing. You’re seeing a lot, a lot of, I think what you’re seeing is you’re seeing a migration of the working population to the freelance population. Freelancing, I mean, you go to Fiver or you go to those sites, people want to have that balanced lifestyle. So that means I want to work when I want to work, I don’t want to work when I don’t want to work and I only want to work for the people who I like and that’s kind of the state to me is what it is.
It’s, it’s the way I’ve always operated. If I didn’t like a boss, I left, you know early on and then I finally said, you know, something, I’m tired of working for people who know less than me that are making more money than I am. I think I’m gonna try this and I did and you know, it’s not easy and you know, people say, how did you do that? You know, someone fun. You know, it’s not easy like you have a job and you start working a little bit on your own, You do some freelancing and then when that builds up, you know, you transition into it. So it’s as adults, Huxley says it’s a new world. Mm hmm. Yeah. Is there anything that I should have asked you about today, Brad? Ah no, I think we really covered questions. Is there anything I didn’t answer for you, Thomas, now? You’re very thorough and I reiterate the passion. I think it’s great and I’d like to know what your goals are if that’s okay. Well, my goals are actually simple. At this point. I have three daughters, one is going to be graduating medical school. I want to be the most important thing to me in my life at this point in my life is my health and wellbeing.
Because without that I have nothing. So my goal is to stay healthy and keep a good wellbeing and continue to save for my retirement that will never take. But to know that I’ve got enough comfort in my finances that it’s one less thing I have to worry about. And more importantly, to see my grandchildren. I have two of them now, graduate, high school and college, they’re 10 and two. So that means my wellbeing and health have to be good. So my goals now are much smaller than they were. If you would’ve asked me this question 15 years ago, I would have pulled out a sheet of paper and showing you 500 things that I’m going to do before I’m 50. As you get older, you know, you tend to slow down a little and I don’t mean slow down in the sense of how you perform and what you do, but you tend to slow down in your thinking process and say, what is it that I really want and what are my goals for the future? You know, my goals for the future. They’re not monetary, they’re not those types of things. They’re more like I want to know that when I want to call it quits and go play golf or something or, or travel the world that I can do that because that’s, I have the ability to do that and that means I have to be healthy and I have to have enough money put away and I have to be happy with my family because those are my family is what it’s all about, right?
Family is what it’s all about at the end of the day. You know, when you leave it, when you leave your career and stuff, your people are going to miss you for a couple of weeks. But that’s it. They’re on there. They’re moving on. So that’s what my goal is. My goal is, is to live to 100 healthy and wealthy and wise. Very good. If someone wants to hire you as a business consultant, where do they go? My website is E3businessconsultants.com. My cell phone which I give out to everybody – and I’ve had my cell phone for 35 years. So when clients say to me, are you going to pick up your phone and how am I going to find you? And I tell them, ask my first client. He still has the same phone number I’ve had. I’ve never had to change my phone number to run from anybody. My phone number is 732 area code us 7356429.
And my email is btornberg@E3businessconsultants.com. And I’d be happy to talk to anyone who’s on your podcast. I’d be willing to give them a free consultation. We can talk about what their issues are because they listen to Thomas Green, who’s a great podcaster, and I’ll be happy to help any of your clients out, Thomas.
Brad, thank you very much for being a great guest.
Thanks, Tom, I appreciate it.