Jim Riviello is the founder of Leadership X University and international best-selling author of There Must Be a Better Way.
Those who know him know that he is on a personal mission to have a positive and meaningful impact on a million or more people before his time in earth school is over.
Listen to this informative Publish. Promote. Profit. episode with Jim Riviello about developing energy, focus, and momentum in business and life.
Here are some of the beneficial topics covered on this week’s show:
– How success of any kind comes with its own problems and challenges.
– Why COVID was a blessing from some businesses and business owners.
– How people must give themselves room to experiment and see what works.
– Why using a book is a great way to connect with people and clients.
– How sharing your struggles with people actually makes you and your business more attractive.
Connect with Jim:
Links Mentioned:
lxu.training
Guest Contact Info:
Facebook
facebook.com/LeadershipXUniversity
Rob Kosberg:
Hey, welcome, everybody. It’s Rob Koberg here. I have another episode of the Publish. Promote. Profit. Podcast, really excited to be with you today, and I have a great guest that I think you’re going to absolutely love. Jim Riviello is a leadership development coach, motivational speaker, of course, international bestselling author of a couple of books, There Must Be a Better Way, and Freedom to Experiment. We’re going to talk a lot about those books, and also how Jim is using them. Jim and his team work with visionary entrepreneurs and business leaders who want to make a meaningful difference in the world, and they have the courage to do what is right to champion growth for their team and for their business. Jim is a sought after transformational coach to help businesses and business owners to change, innovate, and develop leadership. So, Jim, thanks so much for being with me.
Jim Riviello:
It’s my pleasure. I’m looking forward to it.
Rob Kosberg:
I love that you got your books there right behind you, so that’s fantastic. I want to talk about both those, and what you do. Why don’t we start there? I love how you describe, and of course, I just described it to those listening what you do, but tell me, who is the average client that you work with, and what would you say, not in a general way, but in a more specific and direct way, that they’re coming to you for help with?
Jim Riviello:
I work with businesses of all sizes. From small businesses to large corporations, and it’s the leadership folks, it’s the executive leadership team that wants to take their business to the next level, that wants to elevate their leaders, because they know that themselves, of their own devices, can’t get there. So they need to depend on our leadership team. So, I always tell them a lot of times it’s been my experience with many leaders throughout every organization that a lot of them have this overwhelming desire to have a business and a team that’s kind of problem free. I always say, “Success of any type, it doesn’t come without a set of challenges and a set of problems.” The growth of any company, the growth of any team, is directly linked to the ability to have leaders throughout the organization who are willing to embrace change, who are willing to manage adversity. We call those people grow champions, and so we try to identify the key grow champions in an organization, and then figure out how they can have a greater impact, how they not only for themselves, but how they can be points of light for other people within an organization.
Rob Kosberg:
Give me a case study, give me something specific that might fit our audience. Many of those that are listening are small business owners. I have a leadership team, of course, as you know, and yet at the same time, there’s all the day to day minutia of marketing, and sales, and delivery, and all those kinds of things. So, give me a case study before and after what the challenges were, and what it looked like on the other side.
Jim Riviello:
I’ll give you two examples that kind of pop into mind. So first you say small and medium size businesses, so a lot of small and medium size business, what did we all have to deal with over the last two years, COVID, right? Working from home and trying to figure it out. Talk about change. Talk about things that we weren’t even expecting, but we were forced to change, forced to change how we work, forced to change how we interact with each other, forced to change how we look at productivity, et cetera. So many small and medium sized businesses would approach me and say, one, “What could I do differently with my team,” because the common ingredient throughout COVID is retention. I got some really good people I don’t want to lose, and what we’re finding happening right now is it’s an employee market. Everybody is poaching each other and are offering them all these kinds of benefits, work from home, et cetera. It’s strange to say, and I’ve had my fair share of heartache with COVID, but from a business perspective, it’s actually been a blessing for me. It’s forced us all, myself, my business, and other business owners like ourselves, to look at our business differently, and one of the key things we all talk about, it always sounds good on a website or a company poster about core values, that we develop and grow our team, and we’re into personal development. I said, “Well, now is your chance to walk the walk.” It’s a retention strategy, and it’s actually a development strategy. We grow our people. So, I work a lot with leadership teams to kind of help grow their leadership and develop what I call leadership grow champions. Many small businesses have seen that as a retention tool, and also seen that as more of a way to elevate and let them help them get things done in a different capacity. At the same time, I work with a lot of larger corporations who are going through mergers and acquisitions right now, a lot of M&A activity happening. Companies are being gobbled up, and whenever you’re going through a change of that magnitude of being acquired by another company, fear is at the bottom of that. So people are wondering, “Do I have the same job? What’s my role going to be?” So, I have a leadership program. It’s a 12-week leadership program I call Self 2.0 that we roll out, and we make it part of when a company acquires another company, they put them through this leadership program, and that almost baptizes them with the new culture, the new personality. Since I’m kind of like the bridge, I’m an insider, an outsider. So many of these companies I know, as I executive coach to many of them, I’m an insider in one perspective, but I’m not there every single day, so I’m an outsider. So during the leadership, we can have frank conversations about what it’s like to manage change through an acquisition. So there was just two examples, one from a small, medium business size, and one from a larger perspective.
Rob Kosberg:
I love that. You said something that rang really true to me, and that was because of COVID, we were forced to change. For a number of years, I had wanted to take my company more virtual. I wanted to get talent outside of the local talent pool, but I come from this maybe older school mindset of all of at least our administrative team having to be in one place. We had a big office in Los Angeles, and then we were told by the Governor of California that we were a non-essential business, and we needed to shut down. I was scared, just to be 100% honest. I was like, “What is this going to look like?” I was forced to do it, and, oh my gosh, on the other side of it, the team is happier. We’re more productive. I’m way happier. What a wonderful blessing that looked like a curse, but at least in this one area became a blessing. Have you heard a lot of stories like that in this space?
Jim Riviello:
One of the things I think I’ve said 1,000 times over the last 18 months was I always talk about, say, “Look, before COVID, we’ve always talk about Harvard Business Review.” I said, “You look at those reviews they do, talk about transformational change.” I said, “You are now, you’re going to have a case study yourself once we come out of COVID of living, breathing, and managing through transformational change. So, you are a walking Harvard Business Review case study.” It’s funny what you said. When you first went into it, you were scared. We all were. I was. I mean, the month of March 2020, I lost a third of my business, and then I grew it back 3X by August of that year. So, yes, there was a lot of fear, uncertainty, and doubt, but coming through the other side, now you have a case study that’s a look back. Okay, now going forward, any change they throw at us, it’s going to be trivial at the end of the day. You think about it. What we just lived through has got to be leveraged from a leadership perspective of embracing change, focusing people’s efforts, and accelerating results through the biggest curve ball we’ve all been thrown in our entire lives.
Rob Kosberg:
Fear, uncertainty and doubt, that’s a little crypto reference right there as well. We could go in a completely different direction, but I won’t. I will refrain from doing that, because I love crypto so much. I love the premise of freedom to experiment. I love the premise for a couple of reasons. Obviously, you’re writing from a business perspective, and I’m not going to do justice sharing what my thoughts are. So I want to share, and then ask you some questions around it, but the reason I love the premise is I’ve always told my children, “Look, don’t be afraid to go out there and fail at whatever it is that you want to try. Don’t be afraid of that. You’re young. I’m on my fourth or fifth business iteration over my lifetime. It’s okay if you don’t exactly find the success you’re looking for in this first thing. It’s not the end of the world.” I’ve always said that. It seems to me that that’s a lot of what the premise is from a business perspective in Freedom to Experiment. Can you talk a little bit about that?
Jim Riviello:
I was hell-bent on that title, and a lot of people would try to talk me out of that title in my circle and stuff like that. I said, “No,” because all my coaching, all my advice to my kids the same way, was I found myself saying that expression, “Just give yourself the freedom to experiment.” I think the word experiment is a magical word. We all carry around this major pressure valve on our shoulders of trying to be perfect, and trying to have all the answers, and every leader in every genre, myself, you, we all put this pressure on ourselves to be really good. We’re type A people, and the moment you give yourself the freedom to experiment, you release that pressure valve of not having to be perfect, not having to be right. It’s just a simple fact of taking that next step, getting it into the mindset of, “Hey, as long as I take the next step, and I become a conscious observer of what worked and what didn’t work, and give myself the ability to adjust, then I’m gaining momentum.” Show me anything in this world of value, of serious value, that was done right the first time. There’s nothing you could point to. I mean, it’s a constant iteration, and I think if more leaders got into that mindset of not trying to force their team to be perfect, and just take that pressure valve off, you see the progress that will accelerate fast. At the same time, I always tell people that I coach and through my training programs, “If you take half the stuff I teach you, or even just 1/10, or all of it, it can be applicable in your personal life.” I always take a lot of personal pride when people come back to me and say, “I’m using the stuff you taught me with my husband, with my wife, with my kids.” My kids are all grown. I have three kids. I have two girls and a boy, and they’re all grown. I was coaching my son’s AAU basketball team for years, and it was funny. I had him captive for hours in a car on a weekend, and I would pontificate. He would never answer or say a word. One day I’m driving him home from college, and he’s matching me word for word, throwing all my isms at me. I’m looking at him, and I go, “Were you listening all those years?” He goes, “Yeah, I was listening. I just didn’t want to give you the satisfaction.” It’s funny, but the thing is, I always tell my kids, “If you just get in a habit of just taking that step.” A lot of people have come back to me and say they used the same material. The book is written for business leaders, without question, but if you’re paying half attention in the book, it’s laced with so many things you could apply in your personal life. To me, I always plant that, and I always find a lot of joy when people come back and comment on that, and how they connected it in their personal life. I said, “Now, that’s leaving a legacy, because the legacy is, you’re not two different individuals, you’re one individual.”
Rob Kosberg:
Like I said in the beginning, I love that premise. I love it from a personal standpoint, as I shared about with my children. I love it from a business standpoint. I think without directly recognizing it, in a lot of ways, that’s how everything that I’m doing, I’ve created with Best Seller Publishing, with all the marketing, I mean, that is absolutely my mantra when it comes to marketing. It’s like, “What do we have to lose?” I mean, I remember the first time I did a webinar where I offered a high ticket. You’re always told, “You can’t sell anything on a webinar more than $1,000 or $2000 bucks.” I was doing all these webinars, and I was selling various of our courses, not our Done For You Programs, but really we’re a Done For Your business, and the course is nothing more than a way to come into our world to eventually let us serve you, and I was getting tired of it. I was like, “I’m just going to go ahead and offer the full $25,000 thing.” I thought to myself, “Why not?” I mean, it’s not going to be the last webinar that I do, and I did that, and I did $300,000 in 90 minutes. I mean, you don’t know unless you try, and I love the terminology, “Freedom to experiment.” I think that maybe there is something freeing, and forgive me for taking the time to tell that story, but I want to lead into a question. So many authors, and you, of course, are an author, and you know what it is to be author, it’s tough, right? There’s all this perfectionism within you. I see this in my clients, which drives me bananas. So many of them after they get their book done, and I give them 37 different ways to experiment based on what they feel comfortable, to begin making a return on investment. A challenge, a webinar, a virtual event, a four hour masterclass, a fill in the blank, and I see oftentimes them just painfully not moving, because they want to do it right. Is there any magic ingredient that you can say to someone like that to get them going?
Jim Riviello:
It’s funny you say that. Obviously, we talked about part of the Russell Brunson, and Click Funnels community, and stuff like that. I was at a Funnel Hacking Live one time, and I was talking to a guy, and we had this conversation just like this. He says, “You need to start a challenge.” I sat there in the audience, and I was just like, “Hmm, what can my challenge be?” I’m always pontificating. One of the other things I always pontificated about is moving the needle. I started a 14-day challenge just to move the needle, and for that reason of what you just said. Most people in my experience will either procrastinate over and over again, or they’ll overanalyze everything to death, to the pure weight of that, like you said, just prevents any movement forward. If you just get into a mindset of, “Okay, what are the three things I can do in the next seven days?” I make the analogy to football. I don’t care whether you’re a sports fan or not, but most people know, understand the game of football, and you got four plays to go 10 yards, and typically, if you don’t make in the first three, you punt the ball back. I have a friend of mine who’s a head coach. He always talks about this. “When the game starts, no one cares about winning. No one cares about you winning the Super Bowl. No one cares about going to the playoffs. No one cares about scoring a touchdown.” It’s mind blowing. All they care about are the three plays they could run to get a first down, with the simple logic that if I do this enough, I’ll eventually score. What I always tell people, that where to start, I always try to say, “Just what are the three things you could do next week?” Somewhere on my desk I have this thing called an idea jar, because my brain thinks like a popcorn machine. I, like yourself, I travel, and all of a sudden, I get these ideas. I can do this. I can do that. Next you know, you get so overwhelmed with the ideas that you do nothing. I always say to myself, “Okay, put it in an idea jar, park it, but what can I do in the next seven days to at least move the needle?” When I joined your challenge a year ago, I had one book written, and I had another book in my head. I took your challenge from vacation. It was great, and when I went to the beach, all I thought about on the beach was I got out a notebook on the beach, and I just basically started writing down some title chapters. I said, “All I want to do next week is come up with 12 title chapters.” Trust me, if you saw that piece of paper today, it’s not the same 12 chapters that are in this book but that created momentum, and it gave myself the freedom the next day to say, “What could the book title be?” I wrote down a bunch of different ideas. I just kept taking this whole idea of my goal this week is to have an initial draft of titles, and the goal next week was then signing a contract with Rob. I kept moving these small little milestones. Even before I got on this podcast, I actually just did one to do an audio book. I’m not getting on this podcast without signing a contract for the audiobook. It’s just the whole idea of just doing the next step and giving yourself the freedom to take the next step, breaking that log jam of indecision that you talk about.
Rob Kosberg:
That’s beautiful. I can see so much progress in my business simply because I’ve experimented with different things, and I found what worked and what didn’t. I don’t know how you can do it any other way. I mean, you have to experiment.
Jim Riviello:
It’s funny when you say that. The other thing with people experimenting is you’ve got to become a conscious observer. You just said it. Once you take the move, if you take the pressure valve off, if you’re taking the move, then you got to step back, and you say, “Okay. What worked? What didn’t? What would I stop doing? What would I start doing? What would I do differently?” They got to go through that check down, and you’re doing that, then that gives you more confidence to take that next step. If you don’t do that little check in with yourself, then pretty soon you’re going to find yourself back in that abyss.
Rob Kosberg:
Let’s switch gears for a minute. As I mentioned to you earlier, we always like to talk about, of course, your expertise, and how you help people, and what you’ve put in your books, but you’ve written your books to also do something for you, help you grow your business, help you get speaking engagements, help to attract new clients, whatever that is it. For everybody, it’s a little bit different. How are you using your books? I know you use your books differently, and I’d like to hear some stories, or maybe you could share a little bit about how you’re using your book, and then specifically what kind of successes that you’ve had from them.
Jim Riviello:
Let’s first talk about the first book. When I first started my business years ago, one of the things, I was just doing a lot of executive coaching, and I wasn’t really so much into the leadership training at that point yet. I found a lot of times when you’re coaching somebody it’s very difficult for them to open up to you and tell the truth. No matter how much you say, “Be vulnerable,” and all that kind of stuff, I felt like it took so long to earn that trust. Many times, I would make comments like, “I’m just like you. I went through the same thing.” I would tell stories. I’m a storyteller, so I would tell stories about where I struggled, or where I made a mistake, or where I had doubt, and all those kind of things. Finally, I decided to write my story in the first book, and the reason I called that book There Must Be a Better Way is because years ago, when I was in corporate America, before I left to become an entrepreneur, I had everything the outside world would consider a success. I had a nice house. I had a nice job, making good money. I had a vacation home that was mine. I had a beautiful family, but inside I was a mess. I remember many nights; I’d be staring at the fan. My wife would be sleeping next to me, and I’d be staring at the fan going, “There’s got to be a better way. There must be a better way.” I went through all this, and then I left to start my company, and my business partner and I struggled, and different things like that. I was always fighting this ghost in my head saying, “There must be a better way.” I decided to document that journey, and ironically, it took me five years to write that book. We went through so many iterations, because my coach kept telling me, she said, “You got a great story here, but something is missing.” I said, “What’s missing?” She goes, “You’re not telling the reader how you feel. You’re telling the story, but you’re not opening up to really the mental and physical anguish you were going through.” I lost my dad during that time period. I went through a bunch of different emotional struggles. It took me five years to write that book. When I launched it, what I found was that people that I was trying to attract, my avatar, who were just like me, and I was trying to attract the entrepreneur who wanted more, who’s searching for that better way, and I would give them my book, and, Rob, every single time still to this day, I give somebody that book, or they buy it off of Amazon, they come back, and we engage in a conversation, and the conversation goes, if it’s an hour conversation, without question, we talk about my book or a story for five minutes. The next 55 minutes is about them sharing their story. It opens them up like, “Yes, you told that story about your dad. You told that story about your business partner. You told a story about this. Let me tell you, I got one too.” I activated their openness, and we vibe. I was able to track my ideal avatar, because that book is about reinventing yourself. I use that book to really break the barrier down and connect with people, because if someone reads that book and comes back to me, what I have is I have a very qualified person that I can work with. That’s how I use that book. For Freedom to Experiment, I was solving a different need. Then, I started getting into leadership training, working with businesses at all levels with an organization, and I saw the one thing that was stressing a lot of leaders out was that over anxious anxiety you talked about earlier, about the pressure they carry with them about trying to be perfect. The other thing I saw was lack of confidence. They may have a good idea, but they keep hesitating. I decided to write Freedom to Experiment to activate that confidence. A lot of people now who read that book say, “Oh my god, I can’t wait.” In the book, what I do is at the end of each chapter, I actually give them a little thing to experiment with, saying, “Don’t believe me. What I just wrote is an idea, is a tool, is a formula for something, but don’t believe me. Put it in practice, and here’s how you put it in practice, and get the results yourself, and experiment it with, and see for yourself what worked, and what didn’t work.” People have come back to me already, and they’re saying, “Oh my god. You’ve given me the confidence, the courage to take the step.” Now they’re asking, “How can I get into your leadership program? I want to go deeper.” So to me, both for two different reasons, but they’re loosely coupled, but they’re highly aligned.
Rob Kosberg:
You bring up a very, very common question, and I’d like to get your take on it. Just speaking to a new client yesterday, and same kind of conversation I’ve had 100 times. He was concerned about how much he could reveal or he wanted to reveal in the book, because he felt like if he revealed too much of his methodology, and how he did things, then they wouldn’t need him. Can you speak to that at all?
Jim Riviello:
There are two things about revealing. One is that feeling we always have about giving away the good stuff, and they won’t want to buy the other stuff. The other feeling, they have is, “Well, if I tell them where I wasn’t perfect, will they still see me as an expert?” I found that the part about the more you share about your struggles, the more attractive you become. The more vulnerable you are, the more attractive, because if I was going to come down to visit you, and I was going to go to the airport, and you were giving directions to the airport and saying, “But don’t go on this highway, because it’s going through construction. Go this back road,” because you tell me, “I got stuck there last week for an hour.” Well, that knowledge, that wisdom, is really valuable to me. Not the fact that you got stuck there, the fact that you showed me a different way. So to me, when you share stories about where you made a mistake and the lesson you learn, you become more attractive. That’s the first one. The second one is I believe you got to give away your best stuff. Some of my best stuff is in this book, but the difference is when people take my leadership program, we go over a lot of same stuff, but it’s illuminated completely different, and now they’re ready to implement it. We talk about now implementation challenges. There’s a difference. I read your book. I read your book twice. Still, differently going through the process with you and your team of publishing a book. Now I’m a better educated client for you, just like so when I give away my good stuff to my clients, what I’m really doing is I’m making them more educated, which then they become a better client.
Rob Kosberg:
Yeah. I couldn’t agree more. I wanted your take without me giving mine, but I feel the exact same way. I feel like, and I have experienced myself personally, that when I tell people how to do something, that this is exactly how we’re doing it, I don’t get less clients. I get more, because the clients that we want to work with are the clients that understand that time is far more valuable than money anyway. That is a hard one for some people to get, especially if they don’t have a lot of money, because they’re always exchanging their time for money. My best clients understand that, “Okay, this guy really knows what he’s doing. This is some revolutionary stuff. Why don’t we just write him a check and have his team do it all for us?” If you don’t give away your best stuff, you don’t prove to people that you really are better. I have a lot of passion around that. I mean, some processes are so detailed that it would be boring to go through all the details of that, but we’re very aligned in that. It’s hard to reveal negative things about yourself, because you’re afraid of how people are going to react. It’s hard to reveal all of your magic, because you’re afraid that people are going to take something. Yet both of those things are necessary for real success. That’s awesome.
Jim Riviello:
One of the things that’s really helped me in my business is I’m a framework kind of guy. I think in frameworks. I think in simplifying things for people. I’m the master of one sheeters. I love one sheeters. I always call them their frameworks or tools, but I always say, “The trick is adapting them in your world. So, just because something works for me in my world, you can take the principle of it and adapt it in your world.” In there is where the coaching and consulting comes in. A lot of times you give away all the frameworks, you give away the process, but people struggle to adapt that process to their world, which then activates your expertise in helping them make the adjustments that fit their world.
Rob Kosberg:
Let’s give some links. Where can people learn more? Where can they get a copy of your book? I know you’re using your book in conjunction with a free plus shipping funnel, which I love. So give us some links where people can connect with you and learn a little bit more.
Jim Riviello:
The place where I would send people first and foremost is my website, which is lxu.training. So LXU for Leadership X University .training, and there you can get a copy of either book from there, as well as there’s a whole content hub. Depending upon how you want to consume information, if you’re a podcast kind of person, there’s links to my podcast called The Getting Results Podcast. If you’re a blogger and like written material, there’s links to my blog. If you like leadership videos and YouTube, there’s links to my YouTube video. There’s a whole bunch of other resources I try to make available to people. They get a chance to experience me, and if you vibe, if you vibe with each other, then it’s usually there’s a way to set up an exploratory call. There’s a ton of information there, again, lxu.training. If nothing else, I encourage your listeners to tackle me socially. I mean, all my social links are there as well.
