How are your fears holding you back?

Over the last several years, every time someone approached me about offering business consulting, I rolled my eyes. My dad, my business partner and multiple clients and prospects have told me I should start consulting entrepreneurs.

While it’s a huge part of what we do with our clients at Interview Connections (we spend their first month entirely on strategizing and consulting), I was afraid to offer business consulting as a stand alone service. I felt like if people said no, they would be rejecting me personally.

I’ve had a breakthrough in realizing how my fear of rejection has been holding me back from doing the things I want to do, and more importantly from providing value to my fellow entrepreneurs.

My first employee and now business partner, Margy and I have been working together over the past two years and have accomplished incredible success in the restructuring of Interview Connections by streamlining operations, increasing revenue and building an amazing team.

I started Interview Connections in 2013 and made six figures in the first year. Our revenue doubled in 2015, and again in 2016. We closed 2017 at just under a half million in revenue and standing here at the beginning of 2018, we are on track for our biggest year ever.

Since launching Interview Connections in 2013, we’ve booked over 10,000 interviews and are the most well known booking agency in the podcasting industry to date.

After growing Interview Connections virtually with a staff of 1099 contractors booking interviews, Margy and I realized that an independant remote team was not a strong enough foundation to take the business to 7 figures while delivering an elite level of service. We took a risk and made a huge change by replacing our remote team of contractors with an inhouse team of W2 employees in a 2300 sq ft building. Interview Connections now has 7 full time employees (with health and dental insurance!) and is operating more profitably than ever before.

We made the shift from a virtual business to a company locally run and operated because we knew what this would make possible for our future: empowerment, joy and the magic of having it all (we’re typing this email from a train on a Monday afternoon while our staff is in the office serving our clients!).

Margy and I are officially launching our consulting business today with 20 VIP days available! We want to help our fellow entrepreneurs achieve their biggest goals this year and experience the kind of fun and joy we have together growing Interview Connections.

Will you be our first client?

Sincerely,

Jessica Rhodes and Margy Feldhuhn

Co-Owners of Interview Connections

Jess and Alex talk with Dave Claffey, who is the communications and PR manager at Realty Shares. Dave discusses the importance of having multiple people from different departments of the same company be guests on podcasts, as well as his softball prowess, and experiences with company sports teams.

Resources Mentioned:

Dave Claffey

Realty Shares

Womensplaining

Fan of the Band

On today’s episode, Jess and Cassi interview an Interview Connections client, Willard Barth, and he teaches them a lot about themselves and how to better understand their co-workers and employees.

1. What topic resonates the most on the podcast interviews you’ve been doing lately?

a. Willard recently released a book called “The Anatomy of Transformation.”

b. People seem to mostly be focusing on his interesting personal journey: Willard lost one of his legs to bone cancer when he was a child, had to overcome a drug and alcohol addiction, and has even been in prison.

2. What was your time like on Broadway?

a. He released a CD almost twenty years ago and had a 17-year friendship with Les Paul.

b. Willard shared the stage with Les Paul over one hundred times.

3. What’s the connection between your life as a creative/performer and your life as a business consultant?

a. When you’re a business consultant, you need to come up with creative solutions to solve problems.

b. When he was writing and performing, people would get an escape for either a few minutes or a few hours, but now he’s giving people a life-long result with what he’s doing for them.

4. How can I create a more streamlined, but still personalized, sales process?

a. Have you identified your sales process map? Capture what’s in your head (each individual step) and get it down on paper.

b. Write down what you can automate or delegate out to someone else and what steps you personally need to be involved in.

c. Think of what you can improve upon the most to make your sales process even more effective.

5. How do you motivate and incentivize a small team when each person is motivated by different things?

a. Willard doesn’t believe in motivation because it’s short-term, but he believes in influence. If you really want to consistently inspire someone to take action, find out what inspires them.

b. Six human needs: significance, certainty, uncertainty, love, connection, growth, and contribution.

c. Understand what human needs most inspire someone through their personality profile and direct them in such a way where their needs will be fulfilled.

6. How do you identify what specific needs motivate someone?

a. Ask them quality questions that will teach you something about how they succeed, how they feel in certain situations, and what makes them feel fulfilled.

b. When you understand what motivates someone and feed it back to them, they feel like they want to take action and be involved.

7. Why are personal transformations so critical to business success?

a. After Willard meets with his team to lay out a 90-day plan, he tells them that the person they currently are will never achieve those goals because if they were capable of achieving those goals, they already would have.

b. A small/mid-size business is a complete and total reflection of the person who owns it.

c. In order to become a better leader, you need to become a better communicator and a better delegator.

d. Many people don’t recognize the areas that they aren’t strong in and therefore don’t delegate those aspects of their business to someone else on their team who is the best equipped to handle it.

e. Fears and limiting belief systems keep us from becoming successful. If you want to grow your business, you need to grow, face, and transform areas that have been limiting you all of your life.

8. Are the six human needs mentioned in your book?

a. Willard does talk about the six human needs in his book.

b. The original idea, the Six Human Needs Psychology, was developed by Tony Robbins.

9. DISC Personality Profile:

a. Each quadrant of DISC will house members of your team and areas of your business.

b. D- dominance. I- influence. S- steadiness, C- compliance.

c. A lot of companies have the right people, but they have them working in the wrong quadrant. Once you understand someone’s personality profile, you can move them to the right part of the company and better understand what influences them.

Resources Mentioned:

Connect with Willard

Willard’s Book

Womensplaining

We Know What You Did on Fear Street

Fan of the Band