E556 | How To Take A Chance On Yourself With Brett Bartholomew

What's up, everyone? Welcome back to the podcast. This week, I am joined once again by my good friend, Brett Bartholomew. Brett is a performance coach, author, keynote speaker, and founder of Art of Coaching™. Today, we had the chance to catch up with him since we last had him on the podcast. Enjoy!

• Why leave what some would describe as a dream career
• How the coaching Brett does now is the hardest yet
• Brett's advice if you're thinking about working with your spouse

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Podcast Transcript

Danny: [00:00:00] So there's all kinds of hidden fees within your business that are just part of doing business. One of those is credit card. Processing. And for us, we didn't even realize how much we were paying in credit card processing with the first management software we were using for our practice. And when we switched over to PT everywhere, we just realized we were saving literally hundreds of dollars a month with credit card processing, with their partner with Card Point versus who we were using with our prior software.

This has made a massive difference. It's more than paid for itself. It allows us to decrease our overhead. It allows us to have more cash flow to reinvest in our people, in our technology, in our facility, in marketing and everything that's gonna drive the business. So don't get abused by credit card processing companies.

Make sure you're paying what you should pay. And if you're looking for a management software, I highly recommend PT Everywhere directly integrates with a processor makes it very easy and their rates are super, super competitive. So it's saved us a ton of money and it probably will do the same for you if you don't know what you are getting charged.

So head over to PT everywhere. Take a look at what they've [00:01:00] got. I think you really like it. So here's the question. How do physical therapists like us who don't wanna see 30 patients a day, who don't wanna work home health and have real student loans create a career and life for ourselves that we've always dreamed about?

This is the question, and this podcast is the answer. My name's Danny Matte and welcome to the PT Entrepreneur Podcast.

Brett: What's going on guys?

Danny: Doc Danny here with the PT Entrepreneur podcast and today super excited to chat with one of my good friends, Brett Baral, you. These are always easy conversations. We sh we should have recorded the last 10, 15 minutes. It's always pre-conversation, funny stuff that we get into but we'll get into quite a good bit of topics today.

In particular, what I really realized today, I was telling Brett I was on a run and it just hit me. I was like, man, I've never really. Taking a deep dive with Brett into the, all of the [00:02:00] nuances of how he got to where he is today. Cuz I'm familiar with your background with EXOS and when it was Athletes Performance Institute and I went there for a week long rehab mentorship with Sue Fone when she was there.

And we potentially even crossed paths in Phoenix unknowingly. And it's just such a great place and to go from a place like that where it's like one of the top strength conditioning places in the country to then decide to do your own thing is it's an interesting step to take and it's very undulating along the way.

I think for everybody's listening to this, it's helpful sometimes to hear the real story and not just like what on social media about overnight success. Cause that's typically not the case. I'm excited to dive into that today with Brett cause he's doing some really cool stuff.

He's an author, he is an educator, he's an entrepreneur. He wrote a book called Conscious Coaching, which I have quite a few copies. This one is actually signed. Go figure. Yeah, I got a signed copy. Can I

Brett: think that right with Cologne too? That one is, yes. It

Danny: smells amazing. Yeah. And coming up, he's got a second book on the way.

Is there a name to it yet or

Brett: no? I technically, and this isn't me trying to be cool, I can't release it yet because it's like a working title.[00:03:00] It's cool. Yeah. It's part of the publisher, the big publisher game apparently on this one. There were some really concepts, but we wanna make sure that nobody seals those URLs and trademarks and all that.

That makes

Danny: total sense. And that gives it an even more cool allure to the book that you can't disclosure at. But either way it's gonna be awesome working on finishing his doctorate up. When do you finish that up?

Brett: We were, this fits perfectly into the narrative, Danny. It was supposed to be finished this December, but because of the messy realities of life and entrepreneurship, yeah.

It may be March. So we are doing everything that we can. Turns out like trying to be a parent. There's no book on how to successfully run a business, be a parent, do a doctorate, and write a book. But if there was, I also wouldn't write that book because I don't feel like I'm successful at any of those things right now.

Yeah. But hopefully March or at the very latest by the summer,

Danny: Yeah. Yeah, that, so either way you're doing a lot, dude. You're one of the, you're one of the most like hardest working people that I know in terms of just the sheer amount of output and work that you put in.

So what I, I wanted to make sure that we did though, was figure out how [00:04:00] you got here today because not that long ago you were teaching people how to do multi-directional movement and speed and agility and load absorption and all these, all these movement elements of training, conditioning, with within the profession.

T tell me, so from the start you get a job with exos, right? At the time it was Athletes Performance Institute, or Athletes performance Institute at the time, right? Yeah. Yep. So api, beautiful facility in Phoenix, like just such a, Probably one of the nicest gyms I've ever been in. I love the lunch there dude, the lunch there.

Amazing.

Brett: I love that. That's I'll reach out to Deb Martel, who would've been one of the chefs there at the time and make sure that, I'm like, listen, you may have not known this, but I'll do later. This is something I that's gonna make your day. So Yeah, was great. I

Danny: told him, I was like, listen, I come here every day, I check these boxes.

You give me this delicious food. I don't have to think about prepping it. It's like amazing and good for me. If I were trained there, I would be an even better mediocre athlete than I actually am. That's great

Brett: phrasing. Yeah, that's [00:05:00] great. Perfect. That would be

Danny: slightly better. Okay, you're there and you did tactical work, you did work there with a lot of the N F L guys that seems like a dream career.

Why leave?

Brett: I. Yeah. Oh wow. That's, it's loaded. I think it's an even interesting story of how we got there. And this is nice to be able to talk about this, by the way, cuz most time people ask about my story, they inevitably wanna talk about my hospitalization and things like that, which I enjoyed talking about too.

But this is gonna be a refreshing chat. First of all, before we even got to athletes performance, I had worked in collegiate strength and conditioning. And so I had gone to Kansas State University, gotten my undergrad, had had done a ga at Southern Illinois University where I got my master's in motor learning and attentional focus in queuing, which later fed into my communication obsession.

But my wife and I had also worked at the University of Nebraska. Before we had even one big goal of going to a p I was like, all right, now I have team setting experience. I wanna get into the private sector. And it really would be no different than. Somebody that maybe worked for the government in some aspect, maybe a legal [00:06:00] representation, and then decided they wanted to get in the private sector of that industry.

The goal was always to have a more bulletproof resume because I just I value autonomy and I didn't want a life. I spent a year of my life where somebody told me what to do in a hospital, and I wanted to say, all right, what can I do professionally to make sure that I have maximum kind of option value?

And we were trying to get this I tried getting this position down there once. And, did an interview. They ended up not having that position. I had interned there to even intern there because I had already graduated. We basically had to fly down to Arizona, talk this pre talk, the president in of the company into letting us join.

That led to an internship. But yeah, eventually, man, like I went there and worked in Pensacola, Florida. And the thing that made a p i, which is a different company than exos, I don't know that everybody would agree with that, but at the time, this was a place where coaching was very competitive.

And in a good way. Like anybody that worked at a p i, there was like this standard. If you were on the floor from the way you cued the way you like, [00:07:00] just your overall compartment to the way you led groups, there was a standard. And so that was an addictive part of it. Really high level coaches, people that had been in the pros port side, the Olympic side, whatever, but wanted more stability in their life would come and work at a p I.

And you knew that you could, you'd work at a place that you were gonna get a lot of diverse folks to work with. There was gonna be tremendous attention to detail. And there was a standard I think the thing that most people don't know too is, Martin Ver Sagan. And that model was really everybody involved with that.

They were really the first to put the, like the same level of focus people were putting into linear speed, they were putting into multi-directional, like nobody had really broken down multi-directional movement, change of direction with that level of detail. And then they also wanted to make sure that they provided a place where all the walls were broken down between physical therapy, between training, between nutrition.

Like you could get really total integrated care. And I think it's surprising for people to hear that because now it's so commonplace. Yeah, you can go almost everywhere and you can see, okay, [00:08:00] here's a physical therapist and they can see what athletes are doing on the floor. But for a long time this stuff was siloed.

That wasn't the reality. People would go train at a gym and then they'd have a dietician and then they'd go to their pt. Nobody ever really talked and, this was pretty commonplace, and I don't wanna speak for Mark, but I know that some of the goal was later on, even to say, Hey, the pro athletes have a lot of tremendous resources.

Could we create a place where even the average Joe or Jane could get those kinds of resources? Now I have no idea what their business model is now. I haven't been there six years. I don't know any of that. But I know when I worked, there was this idea that whether you were a military, whether you're a professional athlete, or whether you were just a high performer daily person, you could go in there and get this holistic team working around you to help you perform your best.

I'll stop there just to let it breathe and elaborate where you'd like me to.

Danny: Yeah, I would say it was the most impressive facility that I've seen outside of, really some of the professional teams or like [00:09:00] very high end military special operations groups that we've worked with.

But if I had to guess they may have modeled even some of that off of off of that facility because yeah, it was just shockingly nice. It was shockingly like put together. And I remember the tr the integration of the training floor even made so much sense with at the time they had a lot of baseball players that were in the off season.

So they're over there, they're getting some arm care work done. They're going straight into a warmup with, the trainers and then they're going over to like long toss stuff or, or whatever their like functional, specific sport movement was gonna be that they were working on.

And I remember that was like, this is so smart. And then they had the eagle program. With all the military guys, which is one of the reasons why I was sent there where they're doing high level rehab multiple times a day typically to get back to their, to, to their job post-surgery. And I just thought, I was like, man, this is such a great model.

And I think a lot has actually been adaptive from that, which is great. When you're there, this is like such a cool environment where it sounds like it's a coach. [00:10:00] All the coaches are legit. All the coaches had very high standards. When I was there, it was very apparent. You could tell.

And you probably learned a ton in that environment, but at what point was it where you realized, was it that the culture of the company was changing and you didn't really want to go that direction? Or was it you're just like, dude, I have to do something on my own because I have this, this desire to do so And if I don't, I'll probably have some regret around that.

Brett: Yeah. I think it's important to say some things upfront just because people, when they transition right there, a lot of times people don't know what goes into that and the thought process, somebody just feels oh, I've either been here for a while or this place won't pay me what I want, or whatever, what's important to note there. And the thing that I was most grateful for my time at a p i is I the five or six years that I was there, It was like putting 20 years in a bottle from the standpoint that the minute I was hired there, I was working with a combination of pro athletes, high school youth surgeons from the Andrews Institute, folks that were in their fellowship program military, as you alluded to, whether it is, whether it was just wounded warriors or whether it was like [00:11:00] operators that had essentially been, for lack of a better term, blown up down range.

And you had to train around some really complex surgeries, some really complex. So the amount of code switching, I had just came out of collegiate strength and conditioning, which of course there's nuances between training football and tennis and golf and baseball. But now you're, they're still all college athletes.

Right Now you're getting into a situation where an 8:00 AM group might be three operators, and one of 'em might have a spinal fusion and another one might have shrapnel, and another one might be a partial amputee and this and that. And then all of a sudden, the next hour or hour and a half, I'm training a bunch of pro athletes.

And then not only that one time I had a group with about 10 athletes, but they were all modified, meaning one guy was healthy, another guy was post a c l reconstruction three weeks out. Another one was post ACL reconstruction, three months out, another one. So like anything that you did, let's say the healthy athlete was doing resisted sled sprints, right?

You add to seamlessly run. A session where that person got their work in, [00:12:00] but then you had to think of an appropriate regression for another person that couldn't do that loaded kind of sprint. So they might be just did a heavy sled push. And then another one that wasn't even ready to push and just needed to work on structural integrity and trusting disability of that knee would be a doing a load and lift, wall drill.

And then another one be D. And mind you, this wasn't like college where I think some people don't understand that at the college and pro level, there's staff and then there's a lot of interns. There were times where it's like you 50 people and maybe one intern. Yeah. And you're expected to be able to do I was really grateful for those challenges. And so when I was thinking about leaving, it just, it had come up, I think it was our sixth year. There were a number of things that had gone on in the company. I had ran the pro sports side. I had worked on the youth side.

I had gone and been a part of international education, and for the first probably three or four years, just, Hey, keep your mouth shut. Do the job. You know what I mean? I probably asked for a raise here or there, but eventually, like I had a fail. Like me and my wife got married and we wanted to have kids, [00:13:00] and, what we were making, anybody listening to this that doesn't know, you don't make a lot of money in strength and conditioning.

Coming out of there with a master's degree and having had coaching experience, I was hired on for about $35,000. You know what I mean? And you're fine. That's fine, but then all of a sudden, then it's 40,000. Then all of a sudden it's like, all right, we wanna have kids and we're stuck at this 40 to 55,000 thing.

But you're seeing people in other positions make more and you can't really compare cause you don't know what their stuff is. But I do know this, there came a point in time where I then been over there half a decade. I was trying to be very patient in the financial side of things. And I said, okay, listen, if you can't do that, like what can we do?

Is there a day, maybe on the recovery days where I can work from home or I was starting to get invited to do more speaking engagements, but the answer of that time was essentially if you do it, then everybody's gotta do it. So you can't do more speaking engagements. Then it was. Okay. At one point I wanted to write a book.

No, you can't write a book. And so I was caught in this quagmire of a company that I really loved, really appreciated. But the fact is [00:14:00] now I needed to make more money. It wasn't like, and I wanna make that disclaimer cuz some people are in a job one to two years and they think they're entitled to a raise.

Or all of a sudden, Hey, I've been here three years, give me equity. This was not a situation like that, nor was that the expectation. Yeah. Like we really wanted to play that smart. We were really grateful, but it was just a point that we wanted to have a family and we had to think about these things.

And so it was clear that I had to make a change. The interesting part became then of how to handle that internally. There were some people there that, it was amazing. I remember one time there was a rumor about me that I was trying to go back to the University of Nebraska. Which I love where I'm from, I love the University of Nebraska, but we were not job seeking, there was rumors about this.

The only thing that we ever came up against was there was an N F L opportunity that really would've been a financial life changer. $275,000 a year. Working with one of my best friends. But, there were contingencies around this too. So ultimately what made me decide, hey, it's time for a change, is my wife was stuck at a position in her company.

There was no real [00:15:00] movement. I was now stuck. We'd exhausted a lot of options. We had been there a fairly long amount of time. So our hand was really just forced to examine some other things.

Danny: Okay, you decide I've gotta, I gotta do something else. And you're right. Training conditioning is like athletic training.

It's, is just not, there's not a lot of good compensation for that unless you're at a pro or division one big university level. What was the next step for you? What'd you do after you decided, all right, I've gotta, try to figure something else out?

Brett: Yeah. And this goes into where salary's not even the main thing, right?

Because as you alluded to, yes, pro and some division one, you make a good bid, but most people will tell you that they're golden handcuffs as well. If you don't, if you don't win an n NBA A or N F L championship in two to three years, you're likely fired. If you go to a Nebraska or an Alabama or something like that, you don't win in a certain amount of year, you're fired.

And so when you look at what some coaches do the average salary and strength and conditioning is like that and education, it's just, it is, you're like, you're gonna have highly qualified people that don't make that much money. And then a lot of folks also don't get business sense, so they don't know how to, or education, so they [00:16:00] don't how to manage that.

So they feel like, okay, I can go one of these ways. We looked at that. There came an opportunity where there was three things. One, stay at a p i. At that time it was exos and that window would've closed quickly regardless. And I knew, the book wasn't something I wanted to write because, oh, I wanted to get my name out there.

This was something that was inside of me that had to come out it had to come out right. There was either stay there, take an opportunity in la which would've allowed me a little bit more freedom in terms of speaking. I could write a book, I could also run a facility, coach some athletes, things like that.

Or take the N f L gig. The trick was, at that time, and this isn't something I've ever really talked about much, the, I was offered by one of the individuals at the Dolphins, but they were also switching coaches at the time. While my friend was like, dude, this is good. I, granted I do need to talk to the new head coach.

We have not hired them yet. They could come out with something outta left field. And I'm sitting here I can't do that. I can't. So EXOS was saying, you need to let us know by this [00:17:00] date. The N F NFL position was saying, you need to let me know by this date. But by the way, we don't have anything ironclad.

And then they're saying, in LA I'm thinking, ah, do I wanna, I don't wanna move to la. So I had to just weigh, all right, what would future Brett want? If I went to the N F L, I'd get work with a great friend. If that money came through, you'd get the money. But by and large, I'd probably leave there just, e either still a strength coach or a slightly better strength coach.

Maybe you don't know. I would argue that it would be hard to say that I was gonna be better because you had more diverse coaching experience working with a wide range. It was, if I moved to LA I'm taking a massive risk. I don't know this individual as well, there, there's some other things here where I'm gonna get some freedom and how much basically do I wanna bet on myself?

And if I stay at a p i, this is ticking time clock because the company's rapidly changing. So that was the tough thing when people are like, Hey, I'm scared of risk. I get it. This was December and I have to make this decision now. Yeah. And we decided to go with LA because I thought, you know what?

At the end of it I'll have a better knowledge of business. No matter how good that goes or [00:18:00] how poorly that goes, I'm gonna have more coaching experience. I'm gonna be a more well-rounded person. It's gonna mean more diversification on my resume. But I'll say this too, the hard thing then was, man, the minute people hear you don't like when people hear you have an N F L opportunity, everybody's your friend.

Everybody's your friend. There was a certain portion of that population that the minute they heard, I didn't take that. Now you're not the cool kid on the block anymore. You know what the hell you decided. And that's the reality is anybody that's facing these decisions in their life, they need to know that.

Hey, you're gonna learn who your circle of true friends is real quick. And like looking at your level of risk aversion, one thing that should never come into consideration is other people's approval. If I can give value just right out the gate, that's that that was not one thing that we worried about.

Like I didn't give a shit what anybody thought of me for doing these things. I cared about what was best for us and what provide most diversification. Cuz at the end of the day, if you're good at your job, you're good at your job. And why do I care? But I think that's a problem. So many people chase the label, [00:19:00] they sell out to certainty as opposed to selling out to an opportunity that's gonna diversify your skillset.

So does that make sense? Or is this kind of triple threat of decision making? What am I gonna do? And you've gotta bet on, hey, diversify your skillset and jump into the unknown sometimes. Cuz chaos is clarity.

Danny: I, yeah, I think that's, I think what most people do though is they the, it's uncomfortable.

So they just stay like that. That's the reality of what I see a lot is there's discomfort in, I'm not super happy here, but it's not that bad, and it's comfortable, it's safe. And they just they stay there. For you as you made, as you make this adjustment, as you make this decision to leave and to not take a job like with the, with the dolphins, which you're right, they could have hired a new coach.

You'd be like, that's not my guy. And then you're gone. I've seen that happen to friends of mine that are in the, in the professional sports world at different different teams that are physical therapists. They do nothing wrong. They just get a new coach that comes in and they clean house and they send, everybody's [00:20:00] gone.

So for you, the transition to go to la that involved learning how to, be a part of running a prac, or not a practice, but a

Brett: facility, right? It's, yeah. My, my business partners were essentially Lindsay Berg, who is a world-class volleyball, has a world-class volleyball background, Brian Acker, right?

You're just in a market. This was West Hollywood. If anybody ever sees like movies where there's this Chateau Marmont, and they see like literally just anything that, like we were in Hollywood. So here my wife and I are, and we're pretty, we're both Nebraskans, we're pretty bare bones people.

We're not really into the glitz, the glamor, whatever, but it was crazy. And now all of a sudden we're living in like Century City, Beverly Hills. I, she had to stay behind and help sell the house and pack that up. She must have driven back and forth to LA like six times with the dogs.

Damn. We had to find an apartment. We ended up paying $3,600 a month for a 900 square foot apartment that didn't even come with a microwave. And then not only that, talking about certainty, I basically was given two options, and I [00:21:00] can't remember the exact numbers, but one was like a higher salary with, very lower level of what's the word now?

Commission and equity or a significantly lower salary with a higher percentage of commission and equity. And that was a no-brainer. If I'm gonna make this risk, like I'm going there for ownership. And I just remember I had lived with somebody else while we were looking for a place for six weeks living out of a suitcase.

You're going in there, you have a staff that hears like you're the new guy and a co-owner. They're all eyeballing you, like you're back in this situation. I'm like, for six years you had built a reputation, within your previous organization. Now you're an outsider.

But, just one more thing that I think helps people that I learned after the fact, and we share this in one of our courses, is people really need to reevaluate what commitment means. Whether it's people saying with organizations or in relationships, right? Like commitment is a choice led by both rational and emotional aspects of our decision making.

But here's three different levels of commitment. This can help people right out of the bat, right? There's [00:22:00] three types of commitment and you will know if you need to leave or make a change or whatever based on where you are here. So one type of commitment, like why somebody stays in a relationship or organization is what's called effective commitment.

They want to, I want to be in this relationship. Okay? And I'll repeat these. Another form of commitment is normative commitment. Normative commitment is, I feel like I ought to, so it could be this was the first company to hire me. They gave me a chance, so I feel like I owe it to 'em, right? Or, hey I met, I understand my partner's abusive, they helped pull me out of a dark place in my life once, and whatever.

Then there's continuance. I feel like I have to. I talked to a buddy the other day and he was like, I can't leave my job right now. My significant other just lost theirs. And it doesn't have to be that dire, somebody could just feel I feel like I have to, cuz there's no other options.

Yeah. It could be a manifestation of imposter phenomenon. So you have to analyze, are you staying [00:23:00] in a situation because you want to, you feel like you ought to or you feel like you have to, the answer's obvious. You need to leave if you feel like you have to or ought to. Unless there really is a circumstance where no, if you leave, you couldn't support your dying mother.

Or but you still need to know where you're at. If you can't leave a certain situation because you have to support your dying mother, even though you're not happy, at least knowing that you're in this continuance aspect of commitment helps you realize that hey, whenever that situation resolves itself, either you know she gets better or unfortunately she passes.

Now you need to take the next step. And this was a situation where I did not leave because I just wanted to, or I felt like I ought to, it got to a point where like I had to, it was clear, you are not going to grow. We're not going to give you the opportunity to grow. This is what the job is.

Take it or leave it. Yeah. So does that make sense or is there anything there that I made too confusing? No, I think that's

Danny: super helpful. In fact, and for us, most of the people that listen to this [00:24:00] podcast are, they're clinicians. They're their own a business or they're thinking about starting a business.

And I think that framework right there of a lot of people feel very loyal to companies. And if a company treats you really well and has done the right thing for you as an employee, then there's a lot of reasons to feel loyal to that company. Because entrepreneurship is, there's no guarantee.

It's very No, it's very sketchy, especially early on. It's a massive amount of work. They always laugh when people, when they'll reach out to me and they're like, Hey, I thought I was gonna make a lot more money, and it seems like I'm working twice as hard to make half as much right now.

And I'm like, yeah, that's how it goes whenever you start a business like it, it's hard. It's hard to get that going and really it would be so much better for people if they could go in the lens of, I want to do this. But most people, it's not, it's that they have to, they feel like they, their hand is, it's, is forced to be able to do that, i, I think as [00:25:00] people realize that, and they think to themselves, all right, I feel like I have to make a change now after, hearing you put that together in such a simple and easy to understand way, what would you say for you when you realize that when you had to. What did you, what kind of mode did you go into?

Was it like, Hey, here's what's important to me or is Hey, here's literally the best opportunity to succeed and I'll figure the rest out. What did you decide to make your decisions

Brett: based off of? Yeah. I think what one was, and there's another decision coming, right? The story's not done yet.

But just at that point it was all based on growth and option value. Like I, I very much tried to stay Yeah. With my old organization because I valued it, and that's where I said, okay, if salary's off the table and titles are like, what's the zone of possible agreements, but there's just no wiggle room, my staff knows that, while money's finite and we're still, a young organization, we may not be able to pay them all exactly what they want, but they do have commission opportunities.

They can work remotely. There's so many other options. They just need to be creative. Yeah. And then it was just like, I investing in you [00:26:00] guys, invest in me. Like I don't agree with this whole idea of and they had a reason for it. So I'm not criticizing, API's decisions at that time.

It's just not one based on my circumstance now that I agree with, but I can understand in different context why this makes sense. At the time I was there, everything was like, I. You couldn't do those speaking opportunities or whatever because there's this idea that then everybody would want it.

And there's this, it's fairness to everybody's situation, or you couldn't have a brand, you couldn't have a website, you couldn't have this, they didn't really wanna, talk about coaches or have them because, there's transients, right? Some people get there and they leave.

Yeah. And it, so I get that part, on the way we run our business now is, right now, the people on our staff, it's me, my wife, Liz, Becca, Allie and Nate. And that might change, in four months or three years or whatever. But right now, that's our staff. I want people to know Becca.

I want people to know Allie. I want Becca to go get speaking events. I want people to, to wanna get on a mentoring call with my wife. Like I don't wanna be the main person, and also like we're creating a [00:27:00] community. Here. I think that if Allie all of a sudden got a $10,000 speaking gig, Becca wouldn't sit there and be like, Aw man, I, that should have been me.

Be like, if anything alright, that should inspire you. Yeah. Like I always say, Hey, I want us all to eat from the same pantry. I don't want, this isn't called Brett of coaching, so I never understood this idea that we don't wanna build your brand under our umbrella. And by the way, that wasn't even my thought then.

My thought then was, I just wanna make some extra money and I wanna do something by the way that I feel really passionate about. It's burning me to get this book out. And I'm not gonna let my job drop off like this is every now and then. So I think you had to look at option value. You think you had to look at like future u what would be the most bulletproof kind of aspect of that.

And then you also have to consider your age. I knew if I was gonna make a move like that, this was this, what would I have been? I would've been in my late twenties like Extre, very early thirties. I'm 36 now, that's the time of your life. You need to do those things. Not that you shouldn't take risk later on, but it's just like investing, early on, if you're [00:28:00] investing, if you're in like your twenties and thirties and most of your money's in bonds, that's a little weird. You know what I mean? Like you, you've gotta have a higher risk portfolio. So ev even if a situation had gone horrendously wrong, better that it goes wrong later in my twenties or early thirties where I have time to pivot.

So those were some things that I looked at. I didn't really worry about where are we living otherwise I never would've chosen la cuz it was always gonna be something that like, hey, it's not like we're necessarily gonna retire there. But those were a few of the things. And then I would say, once the situation in la like we, we had always looked at, all right, how long are we gonna be here?

That business model changed after we were there a year that one of the owners was like, Hey, we're gonna do this. We're gonna do that. That was not what we signed on for. So it was clear that, there's some changes there that we needed to move on. We felt like we had done our job. We had kept our word, okay, now what do we do?

This was a true burn the boats thing, because now this is a, okay we've both moved enough. We've done GA's, we've done internships, we've taken a job, we've moved [00:29:00] for promotions, we've done this. Now this is a big move. This is a big move. And there were many decisions to be made because my wife loved her job in la.

So I had to say, all right, if we're leaving again, and the situation dictates this is a move where we're really putting a stake in the ground. And man, she thankfully could work from anywhere. I just burned the boats and started writing this book. I was training some people on the side, so like I was training from five in the morning to 11 at night, and then I would come home, eat, whatever, conscious coaching from like 1130 to 2:00 AM you know, and it was like, all right now we're rolling. So that was the real scary one because now there's no, we weren't going to a situation where there was a salary waiting for me. This was, we are going out on our own. And mind you, we still fought stuff.

I remember at that time we got a call from another organization that was like, would you wanna work here? Sure. I'm writing a book, I'm doing this. Oh, you'd have to kill the book if you want this job. So this was stuff that only strengthened my resolve and made that decision easier, [00:30:00] Danny, because everywhere I was going, when we were trying to bet on ourself, there was somebody reminding me of why we were doing that.

Yeah. At the time, and I'll be very frank, this was with the U F C. This was before they had created their U F C P I and all this stuff, and there was a headhunter that kind of reached out and they just said, we want a coach, not a brand. We're not interested in you if you're writing a book.

And I just, I remember calling a friend of mine that's a lawyer and he goes, how ridiculous if I wrote a book and it did well, I'd be made partner. You know what I mean? And that's part of, sometimes, streaming conditioning based industry is oh, if you have a brand, you're in it for the wrong reasons.

And that was what we were trying to get out of. Yeah. Is we believe that's a very zero sum toxic limiting thing. And that's another tip, like it's a no-brainer guys, if you're in an industry where you are being controlled at every turn, people have very limited ideas of growth and they wanna define you.

You need to understand where to roll the dice. Yeah. Yeah,

Danny: and I think, for you. They're, you're just, for some people that's exactly what they're looking for. They want a job, they want to [00:31:00] a job with a company that they don't care about, writing a book.

They don't care about any of the things that are important to you, but it's the wrong setting for you. It's the parents, right? As you look back and I. And you think about the book because it's self-published, it's not like you thought it, maybe you thought it was gonna do well, but you didn't know, and it's a ton of your time.

It's never know. Yeah. It's an expensive thing to do. Both opportunity costs, but actual cost to go through that. And so for you, what year was it? The book came out

Brett: the book came out in April, 2017. Okay. Because

Danny: when we met you were still training athletes, like in, in Atlanta. I remember, meeting you for the first time at St.

Pius at the high school. Went through a little training session with you, record a podcast on the field for Doc and Jock. It was just like one of the actual last episodes that their podcast that we had before we shut that project down. And, I just, I remember thinking like, oh, cool, this got high level strength coach.

That's awesome. Somebody I can refer people to that they come to me if they're looking [00:32:00] for like strength and condition stuff and. Your trajectory is so different now from then. And I know even looking at the Atlanta area, thinking about starting a gym there, like a brick and mortar gym, like what took you from, the coach path, even owning your own facility and going that route.

Training athletes and training high level athletes, which a lot of people will look at and be like, this is awesome. This is a dream. I don't train all these n f NFL guys. And from there you decide to make a complete, shift in a lot of ways to what you're doing today. Like why make that

Brett: change?

Yeah. And by the way, for anybody that doesn't know, when Danny went through that training session, like this dude who moved so fast that it looks like he's going 300 miles an hour when he is just sitting there. Like just never seen the raw athleticism. I just think, whether it's basketball, LeBron's on notice.

Yeah. You's just uncanny. Listen, I wanna speak to your athleticism one, that, that was when I knew I actually had to get out of coaching Yeah. Athletes is because I was like, nobody I could ever coach could do this. Yeah. So what am I doing? And I just, I remember going, I went [00:33:00] home and I cried.

Yeah.

Danny: Look, the problem is I weigh 50 to a hundred pounds less than need be for most professional sports. So my my dainty movements that you got to see in my slight agility is about all I had. But I will say if Coach Joe is listening to this if we're in a combine.

I'll taking him out. He's going, he's getting picked. Number

Brett: two, listen, not a flex. I don't mean this as a flex, but I trained more than a thousand professional athletes over the course of my career thus far. Yeah. And I still don't know anybody that could have kept up with you, Frank.

Yeah, going back to that, like the first step was like us thinking like, where are we gonna go? And there was some ego here cuz it was scary. I'm just like, now the reputation thing fed into it because, you built a reputation for yourself. I'm very much a head down, respect the craft kind of person, so you value that reputation, but when you move once people are like, oh that makes sense.

Even if it's not what we thought you'd go do. We can respect that. And the [00:34:00] ones that get it, are a little bit more mature. Get it. Don't take the flashy job. Take a job that's gonna give you more just diversification of a skillset. But you move again. People are now like, yo, you good?

You like, it just that scares some people, they're just, they don't, especially when it's not the norm for that field. And we were looking at that. I'm like, all right, we're gonna open up Jim, do this our way. Let's look at places. And I remember we had looked at Texas. We had looked, we loved Arizona, but out of out of respect, basically to a p i who I valued, although their leadership was changing dramatically.

Yeah. I got along with a lot of their leadership, but there's a person here or there that is new and didn't even know you. And next thing you're getting told like, Hey, if you move here, there's you can there's a non-compete and you're like, I wouldn't even like, like I would ever open my thing next to you.

Like you're just, I'm like, all right, there seems to be drama there, so we're not gonna do Arizona, didn't wanna live in Florida, had already lived in Florida, Texas. So we're like, you know what? Atlanta. I had just spoken there not that long ago. It was only two hours from where our parents were. It was the busiest [00:35:00] airport in the world.

And by this time, my speaking, cuz a book had come out by the grace God, it had, and at one point, and again, you know how this, but anybody listening, this is me stating this out of surprise and to orient you to this story, not me saying like I'm Prust or some Pulitzer winner, but I, and I have the screenshots to prove it.

We were out selling Tony Robbins and Dan Rather and Phil Knight's Shoe dog. Yeah. So for a book that somebody at one point in time, a publisher who only reached out to me because a friend asked him to, was like, dude, nobody's gonna be interested in a book about communication, let alone from what industry are you in?

Strength and conditioning with a greater world. Has no idea what that is. Don't waste my time. So like to your point, no, we had no idea it would do this. The Atlanta at the world's busiest airport, meaning you could literally get anywhere with a direct flight. Just about, I'm like, there's strategic things here for sure.

Military hub, baseball, N f L, we're locked in. So we get there and we like, we moved everything by ourselves. Like we, we're in like Decatur in the middle of the night. We get [00:36:00] this house that didn't even have running water, that people forgot to turn on our water. We had to go to Walmart in the middle of DeKalb County at 1:00 AM to get an air mattress to sleep on.

Just the move went very in as most people's moves do, right? If a move goes well, that was by accident. Moves don't go well. But bottom line is we started looking at buildings several months into it. I had athletes. I was training out here just cuz there were plenty that left in the off season.

We, we were about to buy just this massive building in a really amazing part of town. And we had figured out the numbers and all this. It worked. And then it basically, we got outbid by a subsidiary of Coca-Cola that wanted to use it. Man, we had blueprints. We were literally going there to sign and the guy was like, somebody outbid you five times your price.

So we're like that's not gonna work. So then another coach that was gonna come be my head coach, he had left the N F L, he got cold feet and was like, oh, I don't know if this is gonna work. I'm out. So I'm like we're not, we're gonna look at another building and another.

And, we either couldn't find this pot that we [00:37:00] wanted. And so around the time I met you, a friend had said, Hey, I work at a large Catholic high school. A lot of our equipment doesn't get used a certain percentage of the day. I used to work in college football. I'd give anything to be around high level athletes.

Again, why don't you train your guys here? So I was like, great, I'll donate to the school. I'll train my guys there. It was a lifesaver. I'm like, why would I pay for a brick and mortar when I have to do this? Yeah. And then a friend of mine just said, this might be the best thing that ever happened to you.

And I said, why? And he goes, that book continues to take off. So does your speaking. You might want to think twice about opening a gym. So then Danny, it was just a matter of seeing where things went. Like I loved coaching athletes. Still would do it on a concierge basis. It's gotta be very, it's gotta be.

But it was very clear that what I loved more than anything was coaching. Is coaching is not a term that is resolved for problem or for sports or fitness. Coaching is to guide, to teach, to mentor, to lead. And there were just more and more opportunities coming up with companies like Wells Fargo and Microsoft and Facebook [00:38:00] and other things.

And it was clear where this was going and people were bringing me in to talk about the messiness of dealing with people, the messiness of dealing with personalities. So then it became, all right. Do I shed this old skin, this reputation I built, like for 15 years I worked to get this reputation of myself and to hone this craft, but now I have to be comfortable evolving.

And it really was that conversation of what do you love? Yes, I do think training is a tool to teach people what they're capable of. But the thing I loved most was coaching. And the thing I found most fascinating was people. After that it was a no-brainer burn. The boats Art of Coaching was built and we decided that we are gonna be a company that helps individuals from every profession navigate the messy realities of leadership in life.

And we never really have looked back and we've continued to just try to scale from there.

Danny: It's interesting when you really look at like the skill development that you've had in your career, and how. [00:39:00] Helpful. That is with even what you're doing now, right? Because you're coaching people still.

You're just doing it in a slightly different fashion and with,

Brett: at a very higher level, by the way, coaching people Yeah. I have found, has been way harder, not, and not to oversimplify, strength and conditioning, athletic training, physical, the, these are all very nuanced things and understanding of physiology, biomechanics, just stress, adaptation, whatever.

But I, I have found that training people, whether that's executives, whether that's other coaches, training people on how to navigate negotiations and hard conversations and power dynamics is the hardest coaching I've ever done and also the most fulfilling. Yeah.

Danny: There's so many more factors associated with that.

But even looking at anybody even listening to this, right? I, Think that you probably undervalue the skills that you've developed and in, in our profession in particular, and straining conditioning, there is a, there's a lot of overlap there with talking to people about things they need to do to achieve a goal that they're trying to achieve.

And the development of [00:40:00] a plan, the development of reasoning as to why, like logically creating frameworks around what needs to happen in order for those things to come together. But ultimately it also comes down to them believing that you're right and frankly that's sales. And when I talk to people, that we work with, one of the bigger problems they have is I've never learned how to sell.

I'm not, selling, selling makes me feel dirty. Like I don't wanna talk about money. And I tell 'em all the time you're literally selling people on your plan of care constantly about them. Why they need to do dead bucks. You're literally like selling them on that. You can do that in so many other ways.

So I think the transfer of skill from these disciplines, these professions to other ones is very valuable. Even talking to people that have software companies that are like employing physical therapists because they're natural problem solvers. They're very organized or multitaskers, they think in like logical frameworks and they're great communicators.

Great communicators, right? Those are all things that are great, whether it's in our profession or another profession. I think the 15 years that you spent, think about that. If you hadn't done that, there's no way you could have done what you're doing with art of [00:41:00] coaching. You wouldn't have had the capacity, the

Brett: skill to do it.

Yeah. I think people just, again, have to remember to your point, that these skills transfer, periodization of programs and all that goes hand in hand with periodizing people, periodizing business plans. If a certain thing in your business isn't going well, you gotta look at regressions.

If it goes really well, you gotta look at progressions. And we call that scaling in business. And to your point, yeah, it's the sales thing is an interesting thing that comes up quite a bit. We just gave a presentation on this. I just gave a presentation down in Austin, Texas about this.

I think some people just need to remember, like they have to get off their high horse about the sigma of selling. Like that, that moral high ground is very expensive because they don't realize that you sell somebody, like you said, every day on the value of something. Whether it's an idea the value of a resource behavior change.

Hey mom, you should get more sleep. Hey dad, you should be more active. Like selling is information like you're sharing information and you're guiding. And so one thing we told people was like, you need to quit confusing an action with an identity. Cause maybe you had a bad sales experience and maybe you have an unhealthy attitude towards money, but [00:42:00] if you have a resource or you have information, which is a resource that could impact somebody's life in a positive way and help them, you have a responsibility to tell them about that.

But on one hand somebody will be like, ah, I don't know. But then on the other hand, they'll be like, oh, you should try this restaurant I went to the other night. You know what I mean? I'm just like, yeah, I'm out. You sell me on this restaurant or this movie I need to see. But you're saying that you don't wanna tell people about your service, it's one of our groups said this morning, it's like saying I wanna be the best coach or practitioner that nobody knows about.

Oh, and by the way, you're dumb if you don't find me on your own. That's just ridiculous. But to your point, that it's also not easy because a lesson I learned in that is I was in this interesting quagmire now of there's not, how many strength coaches do you know, have crossed over.

It's not as easy, it's not many, right? It's not as easy to think about as like military that have crossed over into leadership or doctors or academics. People like Adam Grant. And so I was in this really weird place where I was forced to get good at selling and marketing because I had to help people understand, especially in a name like Art of [00:43:00] Coaching.

There were some times I wasn't getting corporate gigs cuz somebody thought I was a fitness guy. Yeah. Which even if I was, that's even if they were halfway right, like strength and conditioning is not fitness, but then on the other hand, there were some people on strength and conditioning that were like, are you still one of us?

And so we were trying to find this way of saying, Hey, we're art of coaching. No, we're not selling training or anything. Like we, I happen to have a background in strength and conditioning, but really my background is in coaching people and we're doing this. So then it was navigating all right. Now my doctorate, as you mentioned too, is on kind of power dynamics and communication.

We had to make it clear what we did, what we don't do, who we aren't. And this was a multi-year marketing process. This was just understanding that if you are crossing over and doing those things, there's nuances there that you have to manage about perception, but you're gonna be forced to sell because otherwise you can't complain.

When people don't choose you, they don't understand the difference that you provide. And, if we wanna go down that, note, we can more, cuz we give people a lot of those tips. But [00:44:00] it's something you're extraordinary yet I don't think there's anybody that is a better natural salesperson than you are.

And you do it through relationship building. You do it through making them feel comfortable, making them feel informed, and you also don't force it. Yeah. And I think if people just understand that it's relaxed guidance, it's guided discovery, it is relationship building, it's being, you're just trying to help them think through some things.

And I think you've been invaluable in terms of the guidance that you've given me. And it's just it's very interesting. It's as effortless watching you sell as it is, like watching Lady Gaga sing. It's very weak.

Danny: It's, that's, thank you for the compliment. What's interesting about that is I I once had a mentor, I was going through sales training program, and I can't remember really much of what they said except for one thing that really stuck with me.

And it was, you have to imagine that you are. The assistant buyer. Imagine that you're taking your mom somewhere and you're helping her make a, an informed decision. I [00:45:00] think of if I was taking my mom to a physical therapist and I'm sitting there with her and I'm like, okay, here's what he's saying.

Here's here. I don't know if I agree with that, or Yeah, he's spot on. I know this sounds maybe like something that you've never heard before, but this is accurate and this is, I agree with that and I wanna make sure that I help her make the right decision. And every, ever since then when, whether it's in the clinic or it's it's a potential client that we're working with on our business side.

I think that you have to disassociate yourself from the outcome and treat it a as. You are the assistant buyer. Because one of the mistakes that I think I see, and you probably have seen this yourself, if you're talking to somebody and you're like, man, this mentorship program I have is gonna kill it for you.

You gotta do this. And they don't do it. It's very easy for us to take that personally. Yeah. And it's I do something wrong or to get angry. Maybe it's like, what don't they understand? They get frustrated and that doesn't help anything at all because that their decision could have so many other factors that have nothing to do with you.

So I always think [00:46:00] if man, if I am being a good assistant buyer, I give them the best information, the most accurate, high integrity, option that I can. And it's up to them to decide whether they agree with what I, think they should do or they shouldn't. And I'll tell you what, I think that's something that actually for a lot of people, if they struggle with sales and they feel weird about it, It takes a lot of that away when you're really just trying to help another person and they actually, I think, feel much better in that interaction.

Cuz when somebody's selling you hard, right? And if you catch yourself doing that, you might as well just stop because you're ruining the, our relationship capital more than anything. You know what I mean? I don't know. I'd be interested. What have you found with selling now? Because you have, sizable coaching programs, different courses and all kinds of things.

You've done a lot of selling, over the last few years. What have you found that has helped you? If there's anything like, that's like a golden nugget somebody could take away as far as that's

Brett: concerned? Yeah. The biggest thing is what's helped me and granted. It's helped me because I'm interested in human behavior.

This is my life [00:47:00] now. Yeah. Is understanding consumer psychology better. Understanding that even if you make what you do extraordinarily simple to understand. And by the way, most people don't do that. We have an activity we do at our brand builder course called Who is Your Daddy and what does he do?

I

Danny: love that reference by the way. I re I made that reference the other day in Arnold Accent, and the person didn't know what I was talking about and I

Brett: got the weirdest look. Yeah. And so anybody that doesn't know, this is like the kid brings his dad to school and like they're, or he's talking about what his parents do and it's toddlers, trying to speak to what their parents do.

That's analogous because when you're trying to sell yourself the value of your service or whatever, you want to make sure that there's a cognitive ease to it. That people don't have to think too hard. So many people, they say, what are you doing? They say, blah, blah, blah. No. You need to think of it like that.

Simple. And so we have an improv exercise where people that think they know what they do and are good at describing it, have to stand up and basically talk to somebody like, who has no concept of this, and explain what they do. Simpler and simpler and [00:48:00] simpler. Like one of the kids in kindergarten, cops, like my dad, helps people understand their emotions and makes the bad ones go away.

Yeah. Like that's simple now. Understanding consumer psychology and the standpoint that even if you do make it simple, people sometimes like it, it comes down to timing. It comes down to environment. It comes down to the fact that perception of anything is subjective, right?

There's gonna be some people like it. It becomes easier not to take these things personally when you realize there is a segment of the population that really does think Little Caesar's Pizza is amazing. Yeah. And then you could take them to a chef driven Italian brick oven flown over from, Sicily, like whatever like wherever.

And they would hate it. So you could have the best of the best of the best, but we live in a world where the norm is that perception of anything in value is subjective. Some people like restaurants or places just cuz they met their significant other there or their dad took them there.

There's nothing you could do. I think you [00:49:00] also have to remember the teacher appears when the student is ready. I. So that's where you have to play the long game. That's the best business advice, right? And another guy was like, yeah, but I feel like I do that and I give so much away for free.

And my mom always says why buy the milk when you're getting the cow for free? I go that's the assumption that the cow only produces milk. You know what I mean? I always tell people, if our free shit's this good, imagine what our paid stuff is like. Yeah. So it, there, there are millions of co like I would say if anybody is interested in the deeper dive answer, the consumer psychology will share some resources on that.

But that's a two day course. But man, there are some people that their stuff doesn't sell well just because the entire process of somebody navigating their site and getting to check out sucks. And people either people buy things for one of two reasons. The same thing that you can imagine and we've talked about.

They either go towards pleasure or they're running away from pain. Yeah. The fancy term is dy, which is more self-actualization. Longer term, I'm investing in a [00:50:00] long-term outcome. Buy once, pry once or hedonic. This is something that, because we're all little pleasure sax is gonna make me feel better right now.

And by the way, you can have both. You should have a process. You should have a service that is fills, that eudonic need, but feels hedonic in terms of them purchasing that, getting that. That with Apple, the clean branding and whatever. That's a hedonic. Oh, this is clean. This is sharp.

This is simple. The AirPods para seamlessly, an idiot could do it. But it's you demonic in the sense generally you treat those things well. It's gonna last a long time. Yeah. So we can get into that. I'll nerd out for an hour on human psychology and consumer psychology. But that's, those are some pieces that I just urge people think of before they take those things too seriously or crumble.

It's a complex process. It cannot be resolved down to an algorithm. So you gotta be willing to play chess, not checkers when it comes to sales and business.

Danny: Yeah. Yeah. Pleasure sack is all I took away from

Brett: that. Yeah, we're all [00:51:00] funny. Little pleasure sax. You gotta make sure that you like, give us our little but think about that, right?

If I have the choice between two apps and the same service, I'm using the one that's easier to navigate, more visually appealing and simpler. When in doubt, make what you do simpler. When in doubt, make it a more enjoyable process. This is why I don't like the whole idea of funnels. Funnels are like, oh, as if it ends when the customer is bought from you.

No. You know what I mean? So we send people handwritten notes with wax seals, that there's a hedonic element to that. And there's this, so you've gotta evaluate every aspect of your business and say, how am I addressing the pleasure sack part of it and the long-term value part of it.

Yeah. Yeah.

Danny: I think the other big thing that, that is challenging for people, I know this is the case in the strength and conditioning profession, and it's definitely the case in the physical therapy profession is oftentimes we have a really challenging relationship with money because it is a business of, it is a profession of service to somebody else.

And we are in the business of helping people like achieve goals, [00:52:00] achieve physical goals, get outta pain to get back to things that they like to do. And the reality for most people in our profession that are truly really enjoyed the work is that they would do it for free if they didn't have a mortgage, they didn't have bills and all the things they had to do.

So I find that it's challenging for them to disassociate from that and then to put a dollar assignment on what they're worth. And what's interesting is that the consumer puts a much higher value on what we actually do and our unique understanding and unique skillset than the actual clinician does.

The specialist does. They downplay what they're actually worth. It's such a hard thing to balance. And I think once they realize that they're worth more than that, they start to make that adjustment. But that also plays into what their upbringing was, whether they came from, a lot of money and they never talked about it because it wasn't the thing that you did or they came from very little money.

They never had enough. So they always feel scarce with it. And they're, they have a very negative relationship. Like they're, there's never enough and it's and they're losing it. [00:53:00] And then you throw that into starting a business and it becomes a really challenging thing for a person to be able to accept the fact that this is just an exchange of value.

This is exchange of trust. This is how we quantify it, for the things that they're getting in exchange for what we're doing. And, I think that's a really hard thing to do. Have you found anything, I'm sure that with, especially with strength coaches, they've gone through similar things and maybe even yourself, like your relationship with money.

Like how have you. Help people reframe that and really get

Brett: over that. Yeah, I think you talked about the exchange of values. Interesting. That's a huge piece. I think too the best arguments are the simplest ones. I wish that I could go to the bank or any organization that sends me a bill or, whether it's a loan or my electricity bill and say, Hey I understand that I have to pay you, but I'm in my profession for the right reasons.

Doesn't that count for something? Yeah. Just I'm sorry. That's not how the world works, right? Economics are a basic principle. And money is a tool and the fact is, it's funny I pay $88 a month for [00:54:00] garbage disposal, like I have to pay a fuel sur so I have to pay a fuel surcharge.

On top of what it costs to do recycling and trash collection. Everything in life has a cost in exchange. Like in all these things. The re here's the reality, Danny, I'll make it real simple. What we have found, and there's research to support this, is generally people I wanna be delicate in how I say this, but also straightforward.

People that generally have issues with money it's a bigger confidence issue in themselves. It's a bigger confidence issue in themselves when they say, what should I charge? People want an algorithm for certainty on that because they don't realize that these things are made up, right?

Yes, you could say let's look at comps, let's look at this. You could get very surgical about those things. That's fine. But the reality is if you don't know at all, you just need to ask yourself, what do you value your time at? What is the opportunity cost of your time? What do you value yourself at?

There's somebody that I know that's brilliant, that charges like $35 an hour and they have a doctorate. And I'm like, what did it cost you to get this information right? Like I tell [00:55:00] somebody one time, I'm like it's real simple. I got $4,000 of bad advice one time and I was on a call for two hours of the trademark attorney.

I'm like, it's very easy for me to warrant, $600 and a phone call if I know that I can save you that money right off the bat. Yeah. So I think a couple things take, just taking the pressure off of people always come up with different pricing options, at least two to three cuz this goes hand in hand with just good business practice.

It doesn't matter if you have the best service, if your messaging is off and your hard to understand. Nobody's gonna care if you are two absolutist. About what you're charging and you don't have options, whether that's a low barrier offering, a middle offering a higher tier, or you at least have to have two or three options, or you have to have different services.

Now, I understand that there's this YouTube market out there that quote unquote king makers, that is telling people just do one thing, charge the hell out of it, and run. Run a bunch of ads and you'll be a gazillionaire. I, great. That's work that works for some people. I don't think that there's long-term economics out of that, that necessarily work for everybody.[00:56:00]

People just have to like, look around and say, what's my relationship with money like? Is that tied to my confidence? Am I being smart about what the second and third year order consequences are and a story to solidify? That is one time when I did not know what my time was worth, somebody asked me to go teach a weekend clinic and I was like, cool.

And he's how much would that cost? I'm like $800. And he goes, buddy, you married? And I go, yeah, why? And he goes, you want to stay married? I said, yeah, why? And he goes, you might want to consider charging a bit more than that. Yeah. And he's cuz I have a feeling you're gonna end up doing a lot more of this.

And if you're leaving your family for $800 when I'm gonna have you teaching from eight to five both days, you're not gonna be married long. So I had to go back and think about that, and then I had to get, I had to get clear about that when people wanted me to, there's a time a year, Danny, where it's three times as much for me to come speak.

And if somebody said how do you warrant that? You spoke, for this guy at this time, we have a very clean and clear document that says, hey, there's a couple things that impact the quote. You're gonna get [00:57:00] time of year, distance traveled, obviously the deliverables, all these things. And one guy was like, why don't understand why Tommy year matters.

I go try booking a hotel in the off season in Phoenix versus the end season. Yeah, it's different. You know what I mean? Try booking a last minute flight, try doing these things. I go, it's no different. But I was able to do that math and say, okay, if I leave and I'm gone a week and I've normally trained 20 athletes and I can make 1800 to 2000 a month per that, I break that down.

It's real easy to know what I have to charge, so people can be as literal as they want or they can literally throw it dart at a starting point. The most important thing is that you back it up and here's the final point. Most people are not scared to charge what they're worth. They're scared they can't deliver it.

Oh, yeah. And I know that because somebody said that in our, several people have said that in our audience are like, listen, I know what I should charge, but I'm scared shitless that I can't live up to those expectations and that I'll let somebody down. That's a confidence issue.

Danny: [00:58:00] What a good reason to do it though.

I always thought about that with any of our businesses, with, with what we charge. It's if I'm charging what I feel like I should I feel a sense of pressure to Yeah. Get outcomes that I want the, our clients to, to achieve. Like that. But I want that, like I, I prefer that because it makes our team work so much harder to make sure we're doing the right things for them to where the only variable that we can't necessarily take complete owner ownership over is if they're willing to do the work that we know they need to do.

But the challenge the benefit to that, I guess should say is if somebody's paying something that is considered a lot to them, they're going to do the work because they have skin in the game. They're literally, they're paying attention far more because it's not like a waste of money to them.

It's an easy thing for them to pay for. It's this, in many people's experience. It's the most expensive thing they've ever invested in besides their education.

Brett: Yeah. One if you, by the way if any, it's funny if anybody thinks that hiring a professional is expensive, try hiring an amateur.

But yeah, to your [00:59:00] point, when somebody on my staff they're no longer on our staff, but early days was like somebody paid us $36,000 for a year long retainer on something and he said, don't you feel bad? I go Feel bad. I used to pray every night that I'd be one of the best coaches on the planet. That's a silly prayer by default, because you do, everything's subjective and even but the point was is I wanted to be one of the best at this craft.

I go, what better way to test my metal? Than to accept a challenge like that and then make that person fe My goal is to make that person feel like they should have paid me 150 grand right now. Just if you're not willing to rise to that challenge, that's like a musician saying that you're not cool from, you don't wanna go from playing in the Ranch Bowl to Wimbley Stadium.

Yeah. You know what I mean? You want that pressure. A one more example that might be helpful. Somebody was like I feel like basically what I'm charging for, one of the things they were charging the most for was a convenience oriented thing in their business. And I said, listen, people are willing to pay a premium for convenience. I don't know if people realize this, but like during the late 1990s, like one of the examples of like technologies from [01:00:00] music distribution was like Napster and, all these other th bear share limewire, right? You could get music online at no cost.

And a lot of people like really availed themselves to that option. And if you remember, like Microsoft Zune was making they, they made something and I iPods were a thing. Yeah. But the Zoom was like a way better looking, more durable product. It was a way better. But here's the difference with the Zoom.

It didn't have a complimentary place that they could download music. That was not only free, but high quality. Because that was the downfall of Napster and Limewire and Bear Share. You didn't know the quality you were gonna get. You didn't really know if it was gonna be that song or a DJ was talked over it.

Apple was like, I bet people will pay for convenience. Created the iTunes store said, I bet people will pay for the assurance that they're actually getting the song they want and the quality they want. And they had an inferior hardware, physical product, but became way better and put the zoom out because of something lateral to that people were willing to pay for.

Yeah, [01:01:00] people will pay for something as silly as convenience people will pay for. That's not always silly. People will pay just for the ability to lay their head down at night and not think, not wake up and be like, oh my God, did I forget to do this? So like everything, everything is worth what the other person is willing to pay for it.

Totally.

Danny: That's it. That's actually the only answer to what should you charge. It's what somebody willing to pay for that. And. What value are they getting from it? I think that, I wanna finish with one last thing and, we'll wrap it up. But Ashley, when I, she was like, oh yeah, you're talking to Brett today.

Make sure you're asking him about working with Liz because I feel like you guys have really have done a good job of hitting your stride with working together. And it, and just from the outside looking in, it actually seems since Liz has started full-time, working on the business with you, it seems to be going much better.

So if it wasn't for her, who knows where where you would be, yeah. Yeah. You'd be, yeah, you'd be dead. And but and I a hundred percent same thing with me, with Ashley. And it's something that [01:02:00] we always love to, see how other people, do with working with their spouse.

Cuz you hear so many stories where, People say yo, you should never work with your spouse. It's a great way to ruin your relationship. But, I look at you guys, I look at us, I look at somebody like Kelly and Julie's, Juliet, Tourette and their relationship. And I feel like if you if you are respectful of each other and have complimentary skills, it's actually one of the greatest sort of assets that's, that is available.

How would you like reference and what advice, I guess is a better way to put it, would you give people that are thinking about working with their spouse or they do work with their spouse from the lessons you've learned with with working with Liz? Yeah, it's,

Brett: it's funny, by the way we did episode a hundred of our podcast was talking about this when we first started, we need to do another one.

She was like, we need to do this. And as a joke, but somewhat literal it's kinda like the Kubler Ross grief cycle, right? Where the stages of grief people go through, like denial, anger, bargaining, depression, acceptance. I would say, and I wrote this down, I was like, when Liz and I started working together, it probably went from, and this is asynchronous excitement to like frustration to, okay, now [01:03:00] we're making progress to overwhelm, to, okay, I wanna choke you.

Oh my God, you're the best thing ever to, this is the best thing for our marriage to, there's so many like things that you feel I, I think that, man the best piece of advice is don't listen to, don't listen to everybody. People love to project their stuff on you. I am certainly not gonna say everybody should do it, but I'm certainly not gonna talk somebody out of it.

And I felt like that's all we got at first was people being like, oh, don't do it. Don't do it. Definitely we found. That so far has worked for us, despite the ups and downs and this and that, because what the things that forced us to get better at were things that we also needed to get better at in our relationship.

A hundred percent. Like my family is very direct. We will meet the conflict head on, not because we like conflict, but just because, we'd rather her, she comes from a family, that's wonderful, right. But there tends to be a little bit more passive aggressive behavior, things like that. They don't, they didn't always express things where my family expresses things sometimes [01:04:00] too much.

And Liz and I could have not worked together, but then, like we still would've had certain issues in our relationship that Wouldn't have come out cuz you pass each other in the hallway or like you just wouldn't be in those situations. It's no different than an athlete or an individual that needs overload and stress to become a better version of themselves.

The job has forced us to communicate at a higher level. The job has forced us to look inward. The job and frustrations forced me. To figure out my, like anything that I did that, that made the job harder for her. And it also forced her to look inward and say, what are my struggles as a human? And how is that manifesting in the job?

I think it's great for people that wanna be faced with an uncomfortable truth and be exposed to all the areas. You're probably not communicating well with your spouse, but if you just want this delusion that everything's good, don't don't do that. Yeah. So that's why it worked for, but I also wanna be very clear, the first year Liz started, about like the first year, she like loved it.

The second year she was like, I think I need to quit. I can't do this. This is overwhelming.[01:05:00] She was learning that she wasn't as good at delegating that as she wanted to be. That she was letting her perfectionistic and like just workhorse tendencies take over. And there was nothing I was gonna say, I tried fixing it, which only made her matter at me.

Sure. And I realized that like most people, we've gotta learn through our own experience. So she just had to learn, she had to realize she could delegate. Sometimes that's not always the case. And then you just had to realize that this is what it is, this is what life and leadership and family is its ups and downs and it's a wild ride.

But we can look each other in the eye and say, we know each other way better than most couples ever will because we have to constantly meet like whatever we're feeling. There's times where we gotta put that aside. We've gotta talk that out. So I just think people need to dive in and not be so scared of conflict.

I do and I think that we, that's when it really clicked for us is when we realized we can disagree and have it out on a business sense. But still be husband and wife now. We still struggle with that. There's still [01:06:00] residue sometimes if you disagree, but you gotta work through that. And what better training for real life than having to manage that kind of ki And by the way, that's also what gives us a license to feel like we can give advice on it.

Yeah. But like all the people that say in your lane saying piss off my wife and I work together every day. We've lived it and we're gonna continue to work through it. So it's a struggle, but it's a worthwhile struggle.

Danny: Yeah. It's like forced therapy is the way I look at it. Yeah. Just because yeah, you have to you have to learn how to communicate better with each other.

You, you also have to learn how to understand, is this a business conversation? Is this a personal conversation? I think the biggest challenge for people that work together is carrying those conversations over into every aspect of life. Everything turns into a business conversation, which is so hard not to do, if.

You're so wrapped up in that together, it's such a core focus of your business and it is a challenge, but I do think it's a pretty special thing to be able to work with your spouse and to to be able to like work towards a business vision that you have [01:07:00] together and experience that together.

And also when it sucks for both of you. And you can share in that cuz long, I feel like entrepreneurship can be very lonely, especially when things are not going the way that you want, it can feel like, everything is just like not working and you're trying so hard and it's like you're stuck, and to be able to have somebody to share that with I think is very helpful as

Brett: well. And that was the last two things I was gonna bring up is, the thing that I think that we do that most people might not agree with is, We're both the type that will keep working if we're not careful, like we have to actually be cognizant of Nope, we're gonna spend some time together and we're really big.

We're gonna do a podcast on it at some point, where we create an an intimacy menu checklist. Hey, intimacy's got broad ranging terms. Everything from holding hands on a walk to reading a book together to whatever date night, to anything like that. And we try to accrue a certain amount of points every week because we need to be mindful of that.

We wanna keep dating each other as spouses. We want to keep, doing those things. And I think that's important too, cuz we don't wanna have a detached relationship. We don't like, just not healthy. And I think that you and Ashley are a [01:08:00] great example of this, right? You guys are great parents.

You have a kick-ass business. You value experiences, like you've been really successful, but you could hang out with you for any amount of time and you're not the type that ever rubbed that in anybody's face and you're not preachy. And so we wanna be that. It's just like you're not an expert until somebody invites you into their life as one.

And, just balancing all aspects of yourself as a total human and not losing your yourself in any one piece of that is a critical part of maintaining that relationship.

Danny: That's it, man. I think that's what a good way to, what a good way to end it. I think everybody is just trying to figure out how to make to make it work, like how to hopefully, how to be a great just human being in as many variables and aspects as you possibly can. And I think with what you guys are doing, especially with art of coaching and the frustrating lack of being able to communicate with people in a meaningful way and be able to, I wouldn't say just get what you want in life, but to be able to effectively, Move towards the things that you want and other people know what those are and not have that [01:09:00] that breakdown on a communication that can be so frustrating and cause so many problems.

Just think about how many, relationships that ruins, or opportunities that ruins or, family dynamics that can strain. Like it's such a valuable skill. If people are interested in learning more about what you guys are doing and getting ready for the new book you have coming out, where do they go?

What's the

Brett: best spot? Yeah, real simple Art of coaching.com. And depending on when this goes out, like we have our Black Friday sale right now. We have tons of folks from a variety. All of our events, all of our stuff is for every profession. So as long as you're somebody that wants to get better at how you deal with people, decision making, problem solving our stuff is for you.

Art of coaching.com, like we have a podcast. Danny's been on it twice. He'll be on it. Plenty more. But yeah, that's, and then my book, conscious Coaching is on Amazon. If you do wanna learn about the next book, you could just go to art of coaching.com/book. We're gonna be doing a lot. Th this book is about navigating power dynamics.

Think of it as a playbook for anytime you got screwed over in life. Anytime there was a misunderstanding. Anytime you [01:10:00] feel like, my God, like, why didn't I have that information when I needed it? Because leadership is not just sing-songy, positivity, energy bus type stuff. That's the kind of book this is.

What do you do when life gets very gray? Things get hard and people get shady. How do you counter that? So art of coaching.com/book is gonna be there,

Danny: dude that sound like, who's not gonna buy that book? You know what I'm saying? It's it's, it reminds me of how to Win Friends and Influence People just like how, who shouldn't read that book?

It's like everybody should read. And understand this because we have to deal with it. And there's not you. I think the only way you learn some of these things is via negative and positive reinforcement in life. You learn it in school, you learn it in life and, but there's what, it would be much better if you could shorten that that learning curve or make it a little less steep for people to, to have to figure that out.

Cuz some people are naturally very good at it and some people are terrible at it. And I think it's, a very frustrating element of people's lives. If they [01:11:00] can't understand why, what they're trying to get across to people or what their goals are, they just can't seem to achieve those. And they don't know because they're missing something that no one's ever taught them.

So I think this is, I think it's gonna be way bigger than your other book just because of the focus of what you're talking. I'm honestly, I think the topic is so generalizable to so many people. I'm excited for it, man. I'm excited to. I'm a terrible reader, by the way. I will listen to the audio book but are you gonna read the audio book so

Brett: I can hear your voice?

Yeah, the publisher allows me to, the last one, we couldn't do that, but this one, and especially because I'm alright, like I'm, I think my voice sucks, but we've had a lot of weird compliments on it lately, so I'm all about it. If you guys wanna hear my voice, we'll read it. I'll make sure to choose some more glass and drink some more coffee.

So it sounds actually like more gravelly. Yeah. We'll go charm is not a language that I speak. I think you

Danny: have that old school strength coach voice where they've just yelled so much that they basically permanently caused damage. I think that's what's going on.

Brett: Okay. As long as it permeates the souls of my readers in a good, it does in, in,

Danny: in the most, in the best way.

Like that's a thing it reminds me of That's [01:12:00] like an old school. Like you've got some miles on that,

Brett: on those vocal chords. Gimme, get out there, you loser Bobby. Come on out. That's it, man. That's it. Guys,

Danny: we'll wrap it up there. Thanks so much for listening. Brett, dude, thanks so much for your time.

I know you're a busy guy and it's always fun to chat with you. Until next time guys, thanks so much for listening and we'll catch you next time

Brett: later.

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