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James Klingensmith
In an interview with James Klingensmith I asked, Do you think that luck and timing have anything to do with success in networking and attraction marketing or are there one or two other factors that play a big part for you?
James’ response was; That’s the best question I have heard yet! Luck and timing… people always blame it on luck and timing.
Sure, why not, let’s say yes and break this down…
Here’s what really happens: every single second your eyes and your body get over a billion messages that go to your brain. It’s just amazing. Now, not all of them can compute; not all of them can fit, so your brain has to decide what it is going to throw away and what it is actually going to keep up there.
So what you do is you can actually re-program your brain – which is amazing – and find that thing that they call ‘luck’ and take in all the opportunities that you missed before.
Let’s get a good example… Sometimes in a leads group somebody will be saying, “Oh man, I need to lose weight,” or “The wife needs to lose weight,” or, “My cholesterol is over the top,” or something like that over, and over, and over again, and you might not even hear that because you haven’t programmed your mind to listen and catch that. Believe it or not, you can miss it all the time.
So, it’s all about what your mind chooses to accept and you create your own luck from that. You create your own timing. It’s amazing – there is money out there every single day. There is so much money for people to have, and it just comes to you if your train your mind to look for it.
I asked, So luck is really a heightened perception of opportunities that are already there? and he replied Man, he says it better than I, doesn’t he? I love it!
Something to think about when we are tempted to wish for a lucky break or better timing. There may already be opportunities all around us if we would just open our eyes to see and choose to take action to maximize them.
In my interview with Rob McNealy I asked the question, How important is it to be clear on your personal and business core values in relating to people in a networking context?
His response was; “I would say that that is pretty straight forward. Don’t be a jerk, don’t be a thief; don’t be a fraud, don’t be a liar. There are people who get through life doing that. If that’s your short term view it’s about churn and burn. I don’t respect that and I don’t think it is sustainable.
If you can’t make a living, yet you claim to have a million dollars in the bank and that you’re driving your beater car and then you tell people it’s your son’s car because your car is in the shop – I know people that have made up whoppers like this – and I am like, “Don’t lie to me.” I ultimately think that those people are missing out on great long-term friendships and opportunities and I just don’t think it is very sustainable. It is bordering on illegal.
Relationships are built on trust, common interest, mutual admiration and respect. If you are taking away the parts of that, you are never going to build a real relationship and then you are not going to get the long-term benefit of it. I would just say that you’ve got to be a nice person. Stick to your values; why lie?”
We have all been tempted at one time or another to take “short cuts” whether with the truth, or with circumstances that might unfairly disadvantage someone else to our benefit. One of the first words we seem to learn as children is “mine”. Some children learn to play nice, and make friends. Others struggle with the social graces.
Hopefully we do learn over time that we don’t like it when other people are mean to us, lie or take advantage of us. We realize that it is more than likely that other people feel the same way.
By the time we reach adulthood, we have been burned enough times that we are usually somewhat cautious where we place our trust, and learn to give it slowly. Trust is more easily broken than built. The bigger the issue and the greater the risk, the more careful we are about who we choose to trust.
Stephen M.R. Covey, in his book “The Speed Of Trust” talks about trust as something that either pays dividends or costs us in efficiency and profitability in our business and personal lives.
Where there is high trust, things are done faster and more efficiently with less cost than in a low trust environment where every statement or request is regarded with suspicion.
This was what came to mind for me as Rob McNealy talked with me about core values in a networking context. People do business with those they know, like and trust. To violate trust as a way of doing business is to be chronically myopic and condemns an untrustworthy business person to always be searching for new people who will trust them because they don’t know any better. In the long term, it is usually more profitable to honor the trust of customers and build a long term relationship than to have to rely on acquiring new ones, especially in an age where the speed of information may be greater than the speed of trust.
Rob McNealy is an Entrepreneur and networking professional. At the time of his interview with me on December 19th 2009, Rob has three businesses including a social media marketing company. One business is full-time that he is in the process of selling, another is full-time that he is starting up, and the third is a part-time business. Rob is also a husband and father. If this wasn’t enough, Rob announced two weeks before the interview that he is also running for office as a candidate for the U.S. House of Representatives in Colorado’s 6th Congressional District, which according to him is “the most enormous, gargantuan marketing project I have ever undertaken”.
As can be imagined, Rob is a very busy man, but he knows the value of networking as the lifeblood of his businesses and public life. Rob is very active on Twitter, at last count having over 164,000 followers as of February 2nd 2010. Rob has taught classes on “Using Twitter for Influence and Profit” and with the launch of his congressional campaign, has the first campaign launch ever to be done via Twitter.
Rob was born in 1972, grew up lower/middle class in Metro-Detroit Michigan. His father was a high school teacher in Detroit’s inner city. His mother was a shipping clerk in a factory. Rob has kind of been working his entire life, starting at age twelve running paper routes. Instead of doing the typical sport kind of thing in high school, he worked because his parents never gave him any money since they didn’t have any money.
To Rob’s way of thinking, at that age, sports were sort of a waste of time. He would rather just work and kind of pull his own way. Rob would say in many ways that he was emancipated at a young age. Very self-sufficient from the time of about fifteen or sixteen, he didn’t rely on family very much.
Rob worked his way through his undergraduate degree – First starting at a community college and then going to Central Michigan University for his undergraduate degree. He studied geography, specifically ledgers, planning, environmental analysis and graphic information systems and then he minored in marketing. The marketing teachers and the science teachers couldn’t figure out what the heck he wanted to do and then when Rob started taking maps and applying mapping technologies to solving business problems, they kind of went, “Oh, I get this.”
Rob finished his last semester of undergrad in Ireland at St. Patrick College in Maynooth in 1997. He enjoyed it immensely and then kind of wandered around the corporate world in a few industries – automotive, aviation, and environmental. Everything kind of spanned around project management and technology. That was kind of the threads that went through his early career in the corporate world and then he moved into sales.
During that whole time, Rob was always an entrepreneur on the side. He was always doing consulting or trying to come up with a great “Get Rich Quick” scheme that never materialized, but he learned a lot.
Rob got married in 2000 when his wife Kristie graduated from her undergraduate degree. They moved out to Utah for a year while she was applying to medical school. After meeting disappointment with acceptance into the University of Utah, Kristie got accepted into the University of Colorado, so they moved again to Colorado. Kristie started medical school at University of Colorado and Rob started business school at night at Colorado State University doing his MBA.
Things seldom go exactly according to plan. Rob had been working for a technology company in Utah during the dot-com boom. The company was based in Denver and Rob was hoping to transfer to the Denver office. It seemed to be a great fit, but things changed with 9/11 and the dot-com bust and Rob was laid off a month or two before moving to Colorado. Rob struggled to find a job after that whole tumultuous period.
Eventually Rob got an internship making about a third of what he was making in Utah. He did that for a couple of years, graduated with his MBA, but wasn’t really happy with what he was doing in the corporate world. They were going through some financial troubles at the time and his wife was getting stressed out, they just had a baby, didn’t want to put the baby in day care, and so Rob became an entrepreneur at that point and a stay-at-home dad while Kristie finished medical school. Next came baby number two, right around Kristie’s last year in medical school. The baby was a 9-week preemie.
She ended up having to be in the ICU for several months and on oxygen for almost a year, so Kristie graduated from medical school but then did not do a residency because she became a stay-at-home mom caring for their chronically ill child at the time.
The original plan was that after Kristie graduated, Rob was going to go back to the corporate world, but his company had actually been doing really well. He got over the ego part of being a floor company owner with an MBA, and just said he was a business owner with an MBA, who is making a good living where he can support his family without having to put their kids in daycare.
About a year this whole period of time of graduate school and medical school and children and all this Rob and Kristie had a long chat about their plans, their life, and ultimately just decided that they were happy with her not being a doctor and Rob being “just a floor guy” because they actually get to see each other a lot and get to hang out with their kids.
It has been four and a half years since that conversation – and along the way Rob started networking.
No stranger to overcoming challenges, Rob had a night vision company start-up that he had developed originally before the floor company, this was his first start-up. He started the floor company to pay for that night vision company start-up and although he would never recommend starting a start-up to pay for a start-up, in their case it worked.
The original star-tup didn’t work, but the flooring company did, so Rob stuck with the flooring company. A couple of years later, Kristie started blogging, Rob started blogging too, he started networking in person and then started learning about networking online at the same time. Rob tapped into some people that knew a lot and then started experimenting and got the hang of it.
Rob started speaking about social media across the country at different locations and teaching seminars. He and Kristie do consulting with their company “Contrived Media”, but it was almost like a part-time thing. It’s not enough to live off of, but it makes a decent side income, which they still do today.
With the decline of the economy over the last couple of years, the floor company that was doing really well began to decline along with the economy because it is so closely tied to real estate construction. Rob doesn’t think the economy is going to get better any time soon. In fact, he thinks the economy is going to get a lot worse going forward, not better.
One of Rob’s friends is a medical device representative back east in Michigan and he turned Rob on to a company that’s looking to build up their nationwide distribution. His wife is more interested in doing something in the sphere of medicine because she doesn’t want to waste her medical degree, so to speak. They made some choices and are now in transition again, ramping up a new company called Atlas Medical Devices and getting ready to exit out of natural wood floors over the next six months.
Rob announced on December 3rd 2009 that he is running for US Congress. Maybe a year ago, Rob started getting involved with politics on the social media side. People were asking him, “Rob, you kind of know this social media stuff about online marketing, can it be applied to politics?”
“Of course it can!” Most politicians don’t understand even how to turn their email on. So, Rob started working on a campaign for a gentleman running for office here in the state of Colorado. After about a month, they created a strategy. The gentleman didn’t want to do anything with the strategy, and then Rob found out about a lot of this gentleman’s political ties. Rob couldn’t endorse or support these ties. Getting frustrated with politics in the United States, thinking “our country is going over a cliff”, Rob and a buddy decided that one of them should run for office and the other would lend his support. Rob stepped up and said, “I will run this time; you run next time.” So they have been preparing over three or four months to really develop a strategy and how they can win the election. Then on the last two weeks, they committed, pulled the trigger on December 3rd and became the first congressional candidate to ever announce via Twitter on the internet his race for office. Now they are in fund raising mode and for almost the next year, that’s all Rob is going to be doing on top of running his business, family and everything else.
“To me, the race has a lot of obstacles and hurdles with someone of my background who has never been a politician before and never run for office, but the great things are the people that I am meeting are amazing, and the things that I am learning about marketing in politics are also amazing, and they are things I will use the rest of my life. So, regardless of the outcome of this race, the things that I am gaining just for doing this, running a campaign and running for office are amazing. And that’s how I am here.”
I will be featuring more tips and wisdom from Rob McNealy and others on my blog over the coming weeks and featuring the interview with him in my book “50 Attraction Marketing and Networking Professionals”.
James Klingensmith is the official 105.9 Alice Morning Show Hypnotist and networker extraordinaire. He’s a real live wire and I thought it would be fun to interview him for my 50 Interviews with Attraction Marketing and Networking Professionals project. I interviewed James on December 16th 2009.
James grew up in Casper, Wyoming (about 50,000 people) and lived there until he was about 23 years old. He had a full ride voice scholarship to a state college and then went to the motivational institute for hypnotherapy in Tarzana, California.
James has been in sales and networking for most of his life. From the age of seven up, James has been an award-winning salesman. He was the kid who would always sell the most candy bars for fundraisers. Through the years James sold newspapers, choir and drama tickets.
At 14 he started selling lumber, cabinets and repair for Builder’s Mark for 10 years.
He drove a Schwan’s truck on a commission only basis and became the number one salesperson, doubling his route.
From there, James went to be a broker at a car business becoming employee of the month – The only salesperson to be awarded that distinction for this organization.
James went to work for Service Magic and was in the top 4 of 400 sales people, outselling pretty much everybody.
According to James, Working in sales is all the same no matter what the product or service is. You sell yourself, that is the most important part. If somebody will buy you, they will buy your product.
This is where James’ style fits in with networking and attraction marketing. He is marketing himself first, rather than his service, and people buy the service because they buy him as a person.
I met James in a leads group where he opened a short presentation by standing on a chair and singing an aria. A novel approach for me, and definitely a memorable one. If I tried that for an introduction, it would be memorable for a different reason.
James launched full-time into his hypnotherapy counseling practice in February 2009 after gradually building his client base through word-of-mouth, referrals and relationships, without paid advertising.
You can find out more about James Klingensmith at AskYourHypnotist.com. I will be featuring more tips and wisdom from James and others on my blog over the coming weeks and featuring the interview with him in my book “50 Attraction Marketing and Networking Professionals”.
Gene Hamilton is the CEO and founder of “I Take The Lead”, a 10 year old leads group organization with about 100 leads groups in Oregon, Seattle and Denver. Gene started the organization in 1999 in the Portland area where they now have about 60 leads groups. Through the leads groups Gene and his team provide an introduction service introducing people who want to do business with people who want to get business done.
This is quite a way from his beginnings as a farm boy from southern Iowa who joined the Air Force where he worked on air-to-air and ground-to-ground missiles. Gene often jokes that those were great transferable skills if he wanted to be a terrorist or an arms merchant, but it was electronics training, which lead him to doing college training on computers. Gene worked with computers for six years before moving into the insurance industry.
Switching from a technical profession to a sales orientated one, Gene also got involved with Toastmasters and leads groups. He put college on the back burner and spent his education time doing informal self-help education and Neuro-Linguistic Programming (NLP) training. He found any type of self-help education more fascinating and useful to him than formal college.
Gene was and is active in the community and in community events. During his time with Toastmasters Gene has achieved the award of Distinguished Toastmaster (the organization’s highest award) three times. In 1991 Gene was the number one recruiter for Toastmasters, recruiting 107 new members. Gene has served in a leadership capacity as District Governor for Toastmasters and was a long standing member of Tigard Rotary as well as being a past member of the board for the Mt Hood Repertory Theater Company.
After twelve years of selling insurance, Gene started his current venture building leads groups and helping to facilitate professional networking between business people. He feels that his 22 years in Toastmasters was a networking activity, building new Toastmasters groups, and although it is an all volunteer organization he developed transferable skills that helped with “I Take The Lead”.
In our interview on December 2nd 2009, Gene said that The time it takes networking before you actually start to see tangible results can vary greatly. For some people it is really quick, sometimes it can take several months. For large ticket items it can take six months to a year. Other times it can take six to nine months for someone to make their first sale then things really begin to take off for them.
One big thing that really makes the difference is how much you are interacting with other people so that they trust you. If you sit back on your hands waiting for the business to come, sometimes it doesn’t come, and sometimes it does if you are a lot more proactive and getting to know people.
The big thing with leads groups is that you have to give to get. It is a reciprocal relationship and it isn’t a one to one transaction for every lead you give and get. You really should give about 3-4 leads for each lead that you get.
You can find out more about Gene Hamilton and “I Take The Lead” at http://www.iTakeTheLead.com. I will be featuring more tips and wisdom from Gene and others on my blog over the coming weeks and featuring the interview with him in my book “50 Attraction Marketing and Networking Professionals”.
Dale Carnegie’s “How to win friends and influence people”, first published in 1936, has been hailed as the most influential business book of the entire twentieth century.
Now there is someone I would have liked to sit down with for an hour and asked a bunch of questions. There are so many people who have contributed [...]
“Word of mouth is always the best kind of business. The people you get referred to typically stick and become customers; long-term customers for life.” – A quote from my interview with Gene Hamilton on December 2nd 2009.
You hear that “word of mouth is the best form of advertising” or a similar statement all the [...]
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Welcome to my blog. This project is for me a form of extreme education as I interview 50 Attraction Marketing and Networking Professionals, and the blog is a record of my journey. Who knows where it will take me, who I may meet, and what I may discover along the way.
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