EP: 001 The Foundation of Sales Success: A Conversation with Brian Neal from Blind Zebra
What separates successful salespeople from those who struggle? After 19 years of sales coaching and over 15 million podcast downloads, Brian Neal from Blind Zebra has identified the core issues that hold most sales professionals back. In this inaugural episode of the Sales Spark podcast, host Jason Barnaby sits down with his longtime friend and mentor to explore the foundational principles that drive sustainable sales success.
Brian Neal's 19 years of sales coaching experience reveal powerful principles that separate successful salespeople from those who struggle. His insights address fundamental challenges in sales mindset and approach.
⚡️ Key Takeaways
⚡️ Key Takeaway #1: Your years of experience and accumulated knowledge represent tremendous value to others. Stop underestimating what you know—75% of people haven't learned what seems obvious to you.
⚡️ Key Takeaway #2: The AID framework (Abundance, Intention, Detachment) provides the mental foundation that separates consistently successful salespeople from those who struggle with emotional volatility and inconsistent results.
⚡️ Key Takeaway #3: The difference between successful and unsuccessful people often comes down to two factors: the willingness to start and the courage to put something out in the world to see if it will succeed or fail.
💬 Notable Quotes
💬 "Think of five things that have made you, that you know, that you just know, that you could talk about. Here's the thing: 75% of the world doesn't know that. And the other 25% still need to be reminded, even if they know it."
💬 "The one that splatters is the salesperson that doesn't have an internal set of true north guiding principles, whatever values, whatever you want to call it. The hard-boiled egg does, so it can bounce. It's resilient."
💬 "You'll find what you're looking for. You can go find a deserted strip mall with nothing in it. Times are tough, right? Or you can go find one like, good God, look at all these people. There's a line out the door for that place."
💬 "The match I would strike that makes just life good for everybody is being a student of my calendar and everything gets booked and inked on calendars always. And if you're listening to this, I can guarantee you don't do that."
🔗 Resources
Transcript
So that's the first thing I always say is you've got to find the cues. You'll find what you're looking for. You can go find a deserted strip mall with nothing in it. Times are tough, right? Or you can go find one like, good God, look at all these people. There's a line out the door for that place. Yeah, you'll find what you're looking for.
All right, ladies and gentlemen, I am so excited to kick off the inaugural episode of the Sales Spark Podcast. When I was asked who I wanted as my first guest, I already knew who I wanted it to be—none other than my good friend and buddy, Brian Neal from Blind Zebra. Brian, tell the folks just give a little quick introduction. Who you are, what you do. If we didn't know you, what would you want us to know?
This is great. I'm mostly known as being the first ever guest on the Sales Spark Podcast. That's how most people know me. I've been doing sales training and sales coaching work since June 3rd, 1997, literally when I started, and then a sales podcast in September of 2006, which puts us in the 19-year mark. Do you know how many downloads roughly that you're at? Fifteen million, sixteen million? It's lifetime downloads. So it's not huge, but I tell everyone, man, we just don't quit. We started early and outlasted everybody.
My company's called Blind Zebra, and it's called Blind Zebra on purpose. I'm also an NFL referee. I've been refereeing in the NFL for this'll be my 12th season coming up starting in four days. I was telling somebody about you the other day and I couldn't remember. I was like, I think it's like 10 or 11-ish. Yeah, just finished 11. Jason, I've been friends for a long time. I'm so proud to do this. This is just awesome.
I'm so glad you're just doing what we teach, right? You're just starting. People are like, "Oh, I'm going to do a podcast. I'm thinking about it. I'm putting it together. I'm putting the framework down." Yeah, I just want to make sure, you know, work through some things, kind of get the show voice just kind of set, you know, maybe kind of auto-tune. Here we are, dude.
Well, and that leads me right into the first thing that I wanted to talk about. We share this back and forth because some of you who are listening will know Brian and I got together in college and were founding—Brian was one of the three musketeers that really started the thing. I was on a short list, I think it was short, that's what I want to believe anyway, of people who wanted to be involved with Dance Marathon. So we were the inaugural Dance Marathon group, and then Brian graduated and I stayed on for another year.
I remember, Brian, when I met you after college and I lived overseas and you'd gone and done your things and we had lunch together. I've referenced this lunch so many times, you have no idea. But I didn't know what you did. And I said, "What do you do?" And you said, "Well, I'm a sales coach." And I said, "That's great. What the hell does that mean?" And you told me something that I have repeated the story multiple times. But do you remember what you said?
Was it the thing that had to do with the numbers? I don't remember the exact numbers I used, but is it something to do with 70% of the people don't know what you're teaching them and the 30% that do need to be reminded, something like that?
Yeah, it was actually 75-25. And I said, because you told me, you said, "Think of five things that have made you, that you know, that you just know, that you could talk about." And I said, "Okay, cool." And you said, "Here's the thing: 75% of the world doesn't know that." And I was like, "That's total bullshit. I completely don't believe it." And you're like, "Okay." And I was like, "What's the other 25%?" And you're like, "Well, the other 25% still need to be reminded, even if they know it."
And I told you, I said, "I'm going to prove you wrong." Right? And I went out for a year and tried to prove you wrong for a year and I came back to you after a year and I go, "Here's the thing, dude, you are wrong." And you're like, "Really?" And I go, "Yeah, it's 90-10."
I am telling you, I have shared that with so many people who have said to me, "I don't have anything to teach. I don't have anything to say. Nobody cares what I have to say. My 20 years of experience in X industry doesn't matter." Holy crap, does it matter. And how did you figure that out? Where did you come to the 75-25?
I feel like I figured everything out from going bankrupt the first time. Seriously, you were kind of wired this way naturally. And if you're listening to this show, maybe you're not wired this way, but you want to be, and maybe you are because that's why you're listening to the show either way. You're wired to chase continual personal improvement, to be better at your job, and to wonder what other people are doing.
So you and I are kind of wired that way. I feel like a lot of salespeople are not—not all of them. And so that's where it started. It was like, "Okay, well, what do I not know? And I know these things, but what does someone else know?" And I used to sometimes in a bad way, you know, what do they say? Comparison is the thief of joy. Right? So I used to do that. I was like, "What are these other people doing that I'm not doing because they got this thing or this house?"
And what I realized is nobody knows what they're doing. Nobody knows what they're doing. When I started in the sales coaching training business, it was really interesting to me when I'd meet someone that I looked up to beyond anything. Like this person has life figured out—their business or their family or whatever. And then I'd sit and talk to them, and they don't have anything figured out. I'm like, "What the hell's going on here?"
There's no book like, "Oh, here's how you run a company." And then I'd hear people make excuses for things like, "Well, it's easy for him. Well, he owns the company." I'm like, "Didn't he start the company from scratch, like on credit cards?" They're like, "Yeah, but he owns it." I'm like, "Right, he owns it."
And again, you know, age is a nice teacher. You just don't know shit. And if you stay in that mentality, if you don't know shit, then it's pretty good because you keep trying to learn stuff. But that's to me where it all started—this realization of meeting people that I thought had life figured out and learning and understanding that they didn't.
And it may be some things that I had learned. I'm just the communicator, the vessel to teach an idea to somebody else, but they still need that. That's all part of it, and the community link is still good. You don't have to have the original ideas.
And I think that's where a lot of people get caught up and they're like, "Well, I don't even know how to be a vessel." And it's like, "Yeah, you do. Just open your mouth." And I think as you and I have lived life and grown up, we've seen a lot of people who have tried stuff and failed. And we've seen probably more people who, like what we were talking about, "I've got, I'm going to do a podcast. I'm getting ready to do the thing," and they just never do the thing.
And I love that you said that you learned it from going bankrupt because for anybody that's listening, it reminds me of that line from Dumb and Dumber: "So you're saying there's a chance."
I love that 75-25, and then that leads me to this other thing. I don't know if you've always said it, if we co-created it, if I stole it from you—I don't know, probably the latter. But I even said it to a lady today. I was at a client, she was making origami cranes. And I said, "You know, a friend of mine and I say this saying to each other that it wasn't a thing until it was, and now it is." And I said, "Look at, you know, you didn't—there was nothing. It was just paper before, and now you've made this thing." And she's like, "I love that." I'm like, "Yeah."
So I think you and I may have been a co-creation thing. I feel like you said it first, but then you said I said it. I didn't remember saying it. So either way, we'll take credit. It's so true, isn't it?
For some of my clients, I run some peer groups for reps in sales. And I started talking about podcasting and a couple of them go, "Yeah, I've always thought about it too. I should be doing it." I'm like, "Okay." I said, "Tell you what, outside of the engagement, like no extra money or anything, anybody that wants to come do podcast one-on-one, come on over." Four people came for that. I know these guys really well. They're in my group, and one of them brought their team with them.
And I'm sitting there and I told them, and two of them said, "First domino, first thing you do if you want to start a podcast, you get the equipment. If you don't have the equipment, get the equipment." Two of them walked in with their podcast starter kits. They bought them on Amazon. I'm like, "Good. Now you're going. Now you got to open the thing up and learn how to use it and then record a show." And I gave them some more framework stuff, but it's a thing. Now this is a thing.
We're well into the first episode. It's a thing. I have a cover, a website, the domain for the Sales Spark Podcast dot com. It's a thing. And I just cannot underscore that enough—the difference between so many people that are successful. I think there's two things. One, the willingness to start and do. So you can have the willingness, but you've got to buy the podcast equipment, make business cards, buy a website, whatever it is. But secondly, there has to be something that you put out there in the world and see like, "Am I going to fail or am I not going to fail?"
And I was telling my wife yesterday, we were on a walk, we were looking at the electrical wires that run around our neighborhood. And I said, "I just got done with this book in my book club about Thomas Edison. And he had a factory with over a hundred people. He called it the invention laboratory or something where they failed hundreds of times a week to try to figure out something that we take for granted when we flick a switch and the light bulb comes on." And I think over and over and over, what would have happened if he just said, "We're just not figuring it out. We're done. Everybody go home."
I mean, you've been podcasting for 19 years. Somebody argued with me that they didn't have podcasts back then. Go look up the episode. I'll show it to you, chief. I feel like I was at that Thomas Edison museum in Fort Myers, Florida one time. But there's some—it was that same story. He just had guys and gals just making shit up and you're right, failing over and over and over.
How many times, if you had to guess, don't put a whole lot of thought into it, but from the time you started your sales training business until where you are now, how many times have you pivoted? How many times have you scrapped things that you started? How many times have you gone, "How many times have you built the thing where you go, 'This is it,' and you take it to the market and they're like, 'Yeah, we don't want that'?"
It's so funny you bring this up because I've been doing my own work, trying to chase a little self-improvement. So I'm running on this system and part of this system is I'm supposed to go take what they're called clarity breaks. The system is called EOS. A lot of people have heard of EOS. We run on EOS at Blind Zebra. Take clarity breaks, and a clarity break is just literally a blank page. Go take your notebook and go sit somewhere and let your subconscious work. And you just start writing. Don't take phones, literally written.
Because I hadn't done this for so long, I didn't have my old notebooks. I couldn't find them. So I found them. They were buried in a drawer in our office. I popped them open. I was like, "Oh my God, there are things in there that I wrote down, like ideas, sketchy things," and some of them actually came true later. Some of them like, "What the hell was I thinking?"
Even I was originally going to be, before it was even cool, a fractional VP of sales. There was a whole little business model for that. It's not scalable, whatever. I wrote down a business plan called "On Your Mark, Get Set, Get Hired." There was like the help college kids who didn't have a business placement office like we had at Indiana University. And so yes, all the time.
I mean, the current state we're in, the Blind Zebra Sales Operating System came accidentally because we started to run on EOS. And I'm like, "Why don't I have this for sales? I just don't have it organized." Right? So it just keeps going and going and going.
I think that's a good lesson for salespeople—just the concept of adaptability, of being able to move or pivot or whatever word you want to use there. And just be adaptable to your environment. Like, "Oh, they're changing our pricing." And I'm like, "Yeah, so you can stay in business, dude. That's why they're changing your pricing. So you have a freaking job." Pricing is going up. I'm like, "Have you not been paying attention? Everybody's is going up. Have you looked at your grocery bill? Anything?"
It's just so funny how people are. So in light of all these things that you've done and pivoted and tried and all the experience that you've had, and I don't know if you can just have one, but I know you've worked with so many people. Where do you think most salespeople miss it? And I'll let you interpret that however you want.
The thinking side. I want to say so many things. The number one place I think at the core is they don't have a set of foundational—we call them guiding principles. Some might call them core values, but they operate from that are their own.
Why is that important? I think it's like if you held up two eggs and one was hard-boiled and one wasn't and you dropped them from a six-foot ladder, eight-foot ladder, whatever, the non-boiled egg's going to splatter. And the other one's going to bounce. The one that splatters is the salesperson that doesn't have an internal set of true north guiding principles, whatever values, whatever you want to call it. The hard-boiled egg does, so it can bounce. It's resilient. It'll still crack the shell, but it's still there, still intact. You can still do something with it.
And I think then the root cause—that's the root cause. The kind of outcome, the way it shows itself for sales teams and salespeople, then they behave how they think they're supposed to behave, not how they want to behave based on their own set of values. So then they think, "Oh, my job is to sell everybody I come in contact with. Everything I do is operating around trying to get every deal that I want."
And I don't think that's the best way to do it. I think that makes it inefficient and I think it drives people away. So things like that. That's the biggest thing I can think of.
And I think taking your analogy a little bit further, when the market, when your clients, the logistics, the supply chain fail—because they will—I see those two eggs. It's like it's a testing of those core values. Will you run at the first sign of trouble and when things get hard, or do you know that this is what you were supposed to do?
And that is making me think about during COVID. I had just started my business in mid-2018. So I was just getting going and I had a lot of momentum. And then COVID hit and it was just a kick in the nuts just over and over again, to the point that I was like, "Should I be doing what I'm doing?"
And I honestly went back through the 30-day program that I wrote that helps people hone in on what that thing is. And I got to the end and I was like, "Well, shit, this says I'm supposed to keep doing it."
And here's the other thing. Just that thought didn't bring money in the door. I worked at the Target warehouse, 12-hour shifts, Friday, Saturday, Sunday in Indiana with no air conditioning. Sucked. Like, talk about dirty jobs and jobs I don't want for a thousand, please, Alex. I would never want to do that again.
And I think about that Elton John song, "I'm Still Standing," because you just keep doing what it is that you need to do. And for me, I feel like if I was a hard-boiled egg, by the end of those things, I maybe have just a few pieces of shell left. But I was still there.
One of the things that I love about your content and what you do and what you've developed is—correct me if I'm wrong, but I think I am still your only non-client who got certified in your content. Is that true?
That's true. Now that's the old—yes, the old. It's a little deeper now, but yes, the old way you certified, you were the only non-client that got certified.
Which to me, I take that as a badge of honor. But the thing that I have continued to take with me from that is—well, let me back up. When I was in my roles in the corporate world, I developed training, I bought training, I facilitated training, I helped lead and guide it and mess with it. I did a lot of things. And so I've seen the scripts and I've seen the playbooks and I've seen the things.
And what I loved about yours was that it didn't start with what you say or how you act, which so many people are like, "I got to have the script when I get on the phone, I got to have the playbook and how do I make the first call and then the second call and how do I start doing outreach and what do I do?" You started and I would assume largely still do with mindset, with what's going on above the shoulders. Talk a little bit about why that's the starting focus.
It's the egg example and you give a great example for you personally about what that looks like for you. When we jump to do and to say too quickly without examining how am I feeling on the inside, if you build that outside do and say stuff on a non-foundation or a weak foundation, those tools and those things become weaker, just like the inside of a non-hard-boiled egg—there's nothing there. It's just goo.
And so that's the first thing is that I want everything that I do and say to be based on something. I want them to be grounded in a philosophy. So we have ten—we call them guiding principles now in our operating system—but there's ten of them. I'm sure you remember, Jay, the first three: abundance, detachment, and intention. And those three things together, if I carry that energy with me everywhere I go, then anything that I do or say, if it's grounded on that, it's going to be clean, it's going to be good and easy.
Can you unpack those three for us? Because I know that there are some people who are listening who are going to think about those things in a particular way. I remember the acronym AID to help me remember the Holy Trinity. It's an aid to what we do.
None of those words I invented. I just put them into a framework. Obviously the abundance—and I love this, I just did this last night driving home from my stepson's lacrosse game. The world around us is abundant. I'm not talking about big space geek stuff too. So I love that stuff. I'm just talking like in your little town, our little town of Indianapolis, Indiana. You say, "Well, it's the 12th biggest city in the country." It doesn't matter. There's a bunch of corn fields and soybeans 10 miles to the east, right, north and south, they're just here.
And we were driving home—this is abundance versus scarcity. And I looked over at the strip mall, and there was a quilting shop in there. And I don't quilt, never have, don't notice it. I imagine that you do. I said, "Who do you think somebody owns the quilting shop?" And someone started the quilting shop, just like you started the Sales Spark Podcast today. And people work there and people go there and spend money.
We were right by Keystone. It's a big, for those not from Indianapolis, one of the big major thoroughfares next to a big interstate, 465. And there's some buildings right there. So I asked that. I'm like, "Who do you think owns the quilting shop? Isn't that crazy?" And if you sell quilting stuff, that person's one of your customers. You call on them. And then I go, "Do you see all those buildings over there? Every one of those buildings has a business in it, multiple businesses. And every one of those businesses has salespeople in it." Right in that little bitty—it's less than a half a mile in radius. I'm like, "The abundance of our world is just mind-blowing."
And that's just a tiny little patch of grass in Indianapolis, Indiana. Then spread out to outside of Indianapolis in Indiana, then go over to Ohio and Columbus and Cincinnati and Louisville. It's the same fricking thing. It's mind-blowing. So for us to get caught up in "the world, it's really hard out there. There's not enough customers," you got to be just blind.
So that's the first thing I always say is you've got to find the cues. You'll find what you're looking for. You can go find a deserted strip mall with nothing in it. "Look, times are tough." Right? Or you can go find one like, "Good God, look at all these people. There's a line out the door for that place." You'll find what you're looking for. So look for abundance. Look for opportunity in places. That's the first one.
And then that leads us to detachment going off of your acronym, AID. And that is the ability to emotionally not react to all my outcomes. My new favorite guy currently to follow is Sadhguru. And I watch him on TikTok all the time and he's like really evolved human, I think. But he talks about just like all of our suffering is in the past and the future. All of it, like the mental kind of emotional stuff, past and future. He's like, "The past is the past. There's nothing you can do. And it doesn't even exist except in your mind." So all of these, when you really step back.
A little deep on you. And then the future worry concern is in the future that hasn't happened yet either. So you have this hard-to-understand present moment thing. How do I translate that detachment? I can let go of those things. If I lost a big deal last week, that's over. It's done. And I can only act and do what's right in front of me today.
And I think the thing for me, when I think about detachment that really helped me when I was getting certified in that content, is so many salespeople get so hung up in, "If I win this, then I'm going to fill in the blank. Then I'm going to win"—where I used to work, the Eagle was the top sales award—"then I'm going to be the top, then I'm going to win the trip. Then I'm going to buy the boat. Then I'm going to get the summer house. Then I'm going to—then everybody in my company is going to know who I am."
The problem with that is on the flip side, if you lose it, you go, "Oh, well, I suck. I'm no good." And so much of salespeople's identity is based on what have they won and what have they lost. Now, the sales cycle helps bolster that because it's like you were the number one person in Q1. Great. Well, it's middle of Q2 and what have you done for me lately? So that's never going to go away.
But what I loved about hearing that was that a win—the biggest win in my life doesn't define who I am. It doesn't. Because those cores of my egg are still the same. If I lose the biggest deal of my life, it doesn't define who I am. And to me, when I heard that from you the first time, I was like, it just meant so much for me because I had worked and managed salespeople and I had seen so many get a crushing defeat and it affected their entire next quarter because they couldn't let it go.
And I had I known what I know now and could say to them, "How you got a time machine? You're going to go back and change that? I don't think you can go back and change that as far as I know." So I think that that one for me was a game changer and a mindset changer.
That's great. And I think very few salespeople have a grasp of what that means for them. I love when people take an idea, concept and say, "Here's what it means for me." That's brilliant. Like my dorky little thing comes from refereeing. And I'll use this in my own work though, when people are yelling at me on the NFL field, which they do. If it doesn't bother me anymore, but when it did or if a coach is mad, I really made a mistake, I've got to stay out of my own head. I'll say, "They're mad at my shirt. They're not mad at me. They're mad at my shirt."
So it kind of separates me. So I'm not internalizing that "I suck. I'm no good at this" creep in it. Before you go on to the third one, I just have to say, I am comfortably or and/or naively sometimes both unaware of things that I should be aware of. And I remember, I don't know if you remember this, but I asked you once—and I knew, I was sitting with you when you got the call for the first Super Bowl to be the alternate.
And it may have even been around then, but I clearly knew what you do in the NFL, and I said, and I just remember your face. I was like, "Why did you name your company Blind Zebra?" And that was your reaction. You start laughing and then you look at me and you're like, "Oh, you're serious." And I was like, "Yeah." And if you remember this, but here's what you did. You go, "Dude, really?" And I was like, "Yeah." And you go, "Okay. So what do I do when I'm not doing stuff with Blind Zebra?" And I said—
And I was like, pissed. I was like, "Right. You're an NFL official." And you're like, "Anything?" I'm like, "Nothing." And you're like, "Okay, and what do I wear every Sunday or Saturday or Monday or whatever time it is on the field?" I'm like, "Pants and a black and white shirt." And you're like—and I felt like it was like a Chandler and Joey thing from Friends, because you're like looking at me and you're like—
And you saw my eyes. I'm like, "There it is." I was like, "Ah, because you're an NFL referee." And you're like, "Yeah, there you go."
Well played. Love the vulnerability there. And it still happens with people. It's great because it invites a story. It's a nice story. It's really great. You're one of the best branders that I know. It invites a story.
So intention or intent. That one—and I've actually evolved this one for me personally, again, spirit of people using it. So you talk about what my intent is. And if you pulled 450 salespeople apart, like what's the salesperson's job? Like to sell. And they get that's for them, right? Selfish job. Like, "Look what I closed, I closed, I see it all the time on LinkedIn, like, "Oh, I was number one, I did this and I got this and I—" No one ever says, "Hey, my clients achieved this from the thing that I sold them." No one ever says that.
So to really dial in and like, what is my intention with other humans just in general? I want other humans to be better off than they were when I talked to them that day in any way, shape or form, just for that little touch. And then I want them to get what they want. And I want to be helpful to them and resourceful. And sometimes that means working with them as a client. Sometimes it means being on a podcast with them. Sometimes it means listening to them. It could mean all sorts of things. And I'm never—I don't achieve that all the time. That's always the goal. So that's my energy going in.
So I'm not wanting anything for me. I want to get something out of this. I'm not sitting here going, "I hope Jason asks me about this thing so I can promote it." I don't even have anything to promote. I don't care. I'm just here to be with you to talk to people that might be listening that could help someone. That's it. Then you're clean. That's good intention.
Where it actually helps mechanically though, I think, is in sales efficiency. Because when you show up with that kind of energy, you're not looking at every opportunity as a thing to get. And when you look at every opportunity as a thing to get, you waste a shit ton of time chasing things you shouldn't chase.
And people that listen to this, I guarantee you, if they go to their sales funnel, they're going to go, "Oh man, I've been chasing that one a long time." And I check—why have you been chasing it? What a waste of time. And there's—just cut it loose, man. Cut it loose. The world's abundant. Another one will show up. It just will. So that's one that I think some people, they—which someone just said this the other day. I was like, "Oh, it's like cringy a little bit." Like, "I'm not here to sell you anything." You couldn't say anything worse to somebody these days. I'm not listening. I don't care what you say after that. You've already lost. And so I haven't heard that in a long time, but I heard it just last week and I was like, "Oh, yeah."
That reminds me of—I'm sure you remember this guy. He was quasi-famous and I was always convinced he was a mobster, but the guy that owned Don's Guns. Remember his slogan? "I don't like to make money, folks. I just love to sell guns." I'm pretty sure you like to make money. I've seen your house, Big Don, down there in Greenwood where he lived. That's a local thing. Don's Guns.
All right, so I got two more questions to take us home. The first one, and you said something about it. And in fact, again, I have you to thank for this. A couple of years ago you go, "Hey, Barnaby, why aren't you hiring yourself out as a fractional sales leader?" And my response was, "Well, because first of all, I don't know what that means. And secondly, maybe if I did, I would go do that thing."
And what's been super cool and really has led to the birth of this podcast is I did that and I put together an offering that wasn't a thing until it was, and now it is. And I found clients and I helped them and found out that I absolutely—I mean, talk about a big pivot for me or continued pivot—was just realizing how much I love sales and I love people development. And this fractional thing for me gets both of those.
And I know you've done some fractional sales work too. How have you seen fractional sales help organizations versus bringing in a full-time salesperson to do that?
That's a great question. It's one of the greatest things a growing business can do, in my opinion, for two different sides of the coin here for the reasons. So the first is as a business owner or someone who's a founder of something and they've been playing—doing founder selling and things. Then they hire a couple of salespeople and they're playing sales manager. It is a great leverage point that gets them out of it. But not too far. They're still nearby because they still are in the day-to-day. So I think it's the—there's no—and I love the idea of Occam's razor, like the best answer to any problem is the simplest one. It's the simplest thing to do for leverage first to me. It's a great move to do something fractionally versus going all in.
So I think it's just brilliant to bring—I love the gift of outside perspective. I think that's a great way to put that as a fractional because in the—and the other thing you have as a fractional, if you've got multiple clients, you also have this little Petri dish in each client, you can see what's working and bring it back to the next one. If you work with me full time and you're the CEO and you're my VP of sales, you're just in my shop the whole time. You're not in anybody else's shop. But as a fractional, I get that great broad gift of perspective. It's just fantastic.
On the other side of the coin is the kind of the financial commitment side. And I know this has never happened, Barnaby, but you know, I was real easy to fire, man. The way you fired me as a consultant coach was like, "Brian, we're going to stop the program." I'm like, "Okay." You didn't have to walk me out to my car, call HR, give me my key fob, all that jazz. And so from an ownership standpoint, the risk is less. It's worth the investment. The upside's really high. The downside is really low. You're going to spend some money. You're going to spend money either way. So that to me becomes a wash. Then you look at commitment levels.
And I think for you personally—and I did that for a little bit, not really. I've done it a couple times, but that's not really our model anymore. But there's something very rewarding to say, "I built that or I helped build that." Even if you hand it off to, "Hey, we're going to bring someone full-time in-house," I'm like, "That's really cool and good." And you started it.
There's a guy that was more of a fractional guy than I was. We shared a client. I was more of the trainer coach. He was the fractional guy and his model—he was so great. He was very definitive. He said, "I come into a company, I stay typically for 18 months. I get everything stabilized, the structure built. I then hire my replacement in the last six months. I train them and I leave." His model is beautiful, man. He was awesome at it. Really good.
I totally agree with that. And I have learned in my life and I've also had a conversation with my dad who owned a construction company when I was a kid growing up and basically realized I was the same as he was. He would say he'd love to sell the job, to draw for the job and to frame the job. And he said, "As soon as the last nail was in the frame," he said, "I lost interest." And I'm like, "I wish you would have told me that when I was 18, because you just described my life." And I'm basically a framer, not a maintainer. That's the phrase that I use.
And it's so true because I get bored and if you hand me a book of business that's established and want me to babysit it, I will run it into the ground most likely because I just don't love to do it. I mean, it certainly won't grow, but if you give me a mess to clean up and things to go find and big clients to go find, yeah, man, I'm all about that challenge. But because I'm a framer and not a maintainer.
So I love that perspective. All right. Here's the last question. This will always be the last question of the Sales Spark Podcast. So consider that you have a matchbox of different tools that you can use, but somebody says you can only take one match out of here and strike that to make a difference today. What is the one match that you would strike?
I'm going to give you a very tactical answer. And the tactical answer is actually one of a—it's a Blind Zebra tool, but it's a mutual timeline agreement. I would—the match I would strike that makes just life good for everybody is being a student of my calendar and everything gets booked and inked on calendars always. And if you're listening to this, I can guarantee you don't do that. I guarantee you don't do that. If you're listening to this, you think you do, but you don't.
And that is it. That is a match that many strike that one. It gets good for everybody. Good for me, my customers, my prospects, my company, my internal people that I work with. If everyone just runs a real clean, efficient calendar with clarity and efficiency, life's pretty good.
One might say that you strike that match and start a bonfire that everybody can gather around. Who would say that? Let's see what I did there.
All right, that was for you, Neal. This has been—dude, I have to keep talking because I'll get emotional, but I do want you to know, look what I had in my hand the whole time. A Blind Zebra pen. With a magic marker. I had it right here. So, hey man, I couldn't think—I mean, when I was asked who should be the first guest, there was no doubt. I owe so much to you. Thanks, dude. I'm super grateful. I'm super grateful to watch your journey, dude. Yeah, it's a little part of it. So really appreciate it.
Explain anything about football you ever need to know. I appreciate that. Thanks, brother. And thanks for joining us on the first inaugural episode of the Sales Spark Podcast.