Episode 193 – Fred Joyal

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Automated Transcription

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Richard Matthews  0:00  

Yeah, so you had to learn how to lead from the back.

 

Fred Joyal  0:10  

It’s influence rather than control. I was not so much a dictator but the equivalent of it because I would say, let’s do this, let’s go. I would make very quick decisions on a lot of stuff, I wouldn’t let a lot of stuff tumble around forever. My decisiveness was a strength and a weakness. So I eventually had to give up control and learn how to influence and learn to let them influence me to let the influence flow in two directions. And that only happens when you are not a controlling leader.

 

Richard Matthews  0:50  

Heroes are an inspiring group of people, every one of them from the larger than life comic book heroes you see on the big silver screen, the everyday heroes that let us live the privileged lives we do. Every hero has a story to tell, the doctor saving lives at your local hospital, the war veteran down the street, who risked his life for our freedom to the police officers, and the firefighters who risked their safety to ensure ours every hero is special and every story worth telling. But there was one class of heroes that I think is often ignored the entrepreneur, the creator, the producer, the ones who look at the problems in this world and think to themselves, you know what, I can fix that, I can help people, I can make a difference. And they go out and do exactly that by creating a new product or introducing a new service. Some go on to change the world, others make a world of difference to their customers. Welcome to the Hero Show. Join us as we pull back the masks on the world’s finest hero preneurs and learn the secrets to their powers, their success, and their influence. So you can use those secrets to attract more sales, make more money, and experience more freedom in your business. I’m your host, Richard Matthews, and we are on in 3…2…1…

 

 

Richard Matthews  1:45  

Hello and welcome back to the Hero Show. My name is Richard Matthews. And today I have the pleasure of having on the line. Fred Joyal

. Fred, are you there?

 

Fred Joyal  1:52  

I am here and ready to go.

 

Richard Matthews  1:54  

Awesome. So glad to have you here. We were talking before you get on here, you’re coming in from LA which is finally getting a little bit of sunshine today, I think,

 

Fred Joyal  2:02  

Yeah, we have an abundance of rain. And we felt like Florida here for a while.

 

Richard Matthews  2:07  

I know. I’ve been in Florida for the last year or so during the whole pandemic and I came over here for the holidays. And then it just rained for the entire holiday. And I was like, what is this? I came over here to get sunshine and there isn’t any?

 

Fred Joyal  2:20  

Yeah, no, it’s a beautiful day like 70 degrees outside today. It’s wonderful.

 

Richard Matthews  2:26  

Yeah, absolutely. So what I want to do before we get too far into the interview is do a quick introduction so my audience knows who you are. So Fred is a number one Amazon bestselling author of boldness as a superpower, you’re a speaker, entrepreneur, business advisor and you co-founded the most successful dental referral service in the country, which is 1-800 Dentist, I’m pretty sure all of us have heard those commercials on the television, which over the last 30 years has generated more than a billion dollars in revenue. And along with that achievement, you’ve also been awarded the Conrad Hilton Distinguished Entrepreneur Award by Loyola Marymount University and had a successful career as one of the top advertising firms in Los Angeles. As the company CEO you’ve written over 200 television radio commercials, written two books on marketing, Devlin stand up an improv comedy, acted in bad movies, and in excellent TV commercials. So with that, a brief introduction. Fred, why don’t you tell me a little bit about what it is that you are known for? What is your business do? Who do you serve? What do you do for them?

 

Fred Joyal  3:29  

Well, 1-800 Dentist is still there but I sold it about five years ago. But it was a referral service for people to find a dentist and the dentist paid me to be part of the service. I ran a call center and we ran television advertising. And that generated calls and said we will match you with a dentist it was before Yelp and those companies existed. We were the best way to get the most information about a dentist so we created this service that was about something that people had a lot of apprehensions, a lot of anxiety, and a lot of mystery and like how to pick a dentist. And that all evolved out of my advertising career, which was my first real career. I had a bunch of pointless careers, not career jobs in between till I finally found my calling, so to speak.

 

Richard Matthews  4:31  

Awesome. And so you sold that business about five years ago. What is it that you do now?

 

Fred Joyal  4:35  

So now I coach CEOs and a few high-end dentists who have multiple practices. Having made many mistakes, totaling millions of dollars. I have a lot to teach CEOs to help them avoid the potholes that I hit. And I became more motivated to write a book on boldness on how to cultivate the superpower of boldness because it was something I had to develop myself because I grew up as a very shy person. And so I created a system where anyone can learn to build their confidence and boldness to surprising levels very quickly. So that becomes my new mission in life. And if that’s all I do, from now on, that’s going to be very satisfying, because I want people to live full and satisfying lives. And this can help them.

 

Richard Matthews  5:33  

Absolutely. So you transition from building 1-800 Dentists into teaching entrepreneurs and others how to build boldness. What I want to find out is how did you get started in the advertising career and starting your 1-800 Dentist thing, we call it your origin story here on this show. Every good comic book hero has their origin story. And it’s basically, what made you become an entrepreneur? Were you bit by a radioactive spider that made you want to start only 1-800 Dentists, or did you start a new job and eventually move into the entrepreneur field that way.

 

Fred Joyal  6:06  

So when I got out of college, and actually, it took me eight years to finish college. But I did all sorts of uninteresting jobs, just so that I could travel a lot. I worked in a kitchen in Europe for six months. I had a painting business, I worked in a machine shop, I laid carpeting, I did all sorts of stuff just for money, with no sense of what I wanted to do. And then I was out visiting a friend in Los Angeles, and he was a storyboard artist. So he took me into the ad agency that he was working at, which was a fairly large Los Angeles Agency. And everything about it just said, oh, my gosh, these are my people, this is what I want to do. So he introduced me to the general manager of the station. And I said, how do I get a job here? And he says, well, I’m not going to hire you because you don’t know how to write advertising. So there’s a night school that you can go to. This was sort of my Batman training, it’s like where I’ve learned the martial arts of advertising. And it was taught by Creative Directors at night. So I went to this school for six months and refined my writing skills, and got the first job that I interviewed for, and then I worked in an ad agency, and I just loved it. And because of all those crazy businesses that I worked in, I really identified with the business owners and their need and desire to actually sell their product. There are a lot of people who make advertising that’s fun and interesting but doesn’t sell anything. But it looks good on your resume and your portfolio. So I became very good at doing advertising that worked. But I didn’t really want the career arc of being in advertising because basically, it swoops up in income, and then falls off a cliff right at 50 years old. And you can’t make a 10th of the money you used to make. So it just happened that a friend of mine said, I’ve got this 800 number, I think you could turn it into a business. So it was that random. And he said you have all these advertising skills. And so he licensed me the phone number. And another friend of mine who was a stockbroker said I can’t stand to be a stockbroker anymore. All I do is make commissions off people losing money. And he says, I’m losing my soul here. So we got together and started it and beat the streets and found 1-800 Dentists to go along with it. In Los Angeles, set up a phone room in this 200 square foot room and ran radio ads. And we got 50 phone calls the first day. And after six months of just trying to get the doctors to go along with it. And we went wow, this is actually going to work maybe. So we just kept adding dentists and spending more money on advertising. We had no idea. If it was going to succeed, it wouldn’t be profitable for about two and a half years, we just kept building up more and more advertising debt. But all of a sudden it tipped and a tip when we went on television, and I wrote a television spot. Found some people that make it really cheap and it really clicked and then after a while, we just kept making more and more TV spots. Eventually, I was in the TV spots for about 20 years. And so that evolved into writing marketing books and public speaking and just a very satisfying set of twists and turns along the way, along with massive numbers of mistakes, of course.

 

Fred Joyal  8:19  

So how long did you run 1-800 Dentists from inception to when you sold it?

 

Fred Joyal  10:15  

So it started all the way back in 86. And right around 2017 is when I sold it, I had stepped down as CEO three years earlier but stayed there. And then once we completely sold the business that I was done and I moved on. But I still do a lot of work in the dental industry, because that’s where I’m really well known. But I really wanted to get beyond, I wanted to get out and have a greater impact on the world.

 

Richard Matthews  10:50  

So you ran that company for almost 30 years, how big was the company from an employee standpoint, when you sold it?

 

Fred Joyal  10:57  

About 250 employees. And we had just a great culture, just to give you a sense of it. That’s what we were really good at. And my partner is creating a place where people want to come to work every day. And so my last month at work, where we celebrate birthdays and anniversaries, we would always have cake day where we would do that. I celebrated 325-year employees and 110-year employees all in the same month. It was one of the most gratifying days to see that we had these people, their lives and careers were at our place. And they were, of course, integral to the success of the business. And that’s really it, but my business was successful because of the people we had working there. I can’t take a lot of credit for it.

 

Richard Matthews  11:51  

That’s really impressive especially to have people that have worked for you for 25 years and continue to do so that’s really cool. And I think that’s actually probably a really good transition into talking about how you develop your superpower over the course of building that company. So we talk on this show, every hero has their superpower, whether that’s a fancy flying suit made by genius intellect or the ability to call down thunder from the sky or super strength. In the real world, heroes have what I call a zone of genius, which is either a skill or a set of skills that you were born with or you developed over time so that you could actually go out and help your people slay their villains and come out on top on their journeys. The way I like to frame this for people is if you look at all the skills that you’ve developed, there’s probably a common thread that ties all those skills together. And that common thread is where you’re going to find your superpower. So what do you think your superpower is?

 

Fred Joyal  12:44  

I think it’s my creative persuasiveness, I think would be the easiest way to frame it with a larger element of creativity, because I was always challenged on the business side, I didn’t have a good financial head and those organizational things weren’t my strength, but I could really get the team ready to go and try something new and get behind it. And then get really creative about what we did, either in the advertising world or in marketing our business or eventually promoting me using books that I had written. So my writing blossomed into an ability to really effectively, persuasively communicate. And it became this reflex. And it all started at the ad agency and then the school before that, where I learned how to craft messages. And they would, sometimes they bring me into a room and they say, okay, we need a title for the webinar, or we need this, we need that. And I would brainstorm with them for three minutes and have something and they would just laugh. They say like, you’re like a vending machine, we put in a quarter and we get out what we need every time titles. 

 

Richard Matthews  14:15  

You get our good titles.

 

Fred Joyal  14:16  

Yeah. And they realized that it was very good on my feet. Now I trained myself to be very good on my feet by doing stand up comedy and improv classes and acting classes and having a speaking coach and develop that ability because I really wanted to be good on stage, even though for many years, I was too shy to try anything like that. But I developed the skill mostly by getting up on stage and not being that good until I got better and better. But it allowed me to really promote the business effectively because I could go out into the industry and go to these conventions and things like that and attract dentists to us, they saw us coming from a place of generosity. My books taught them how to market their dental practices well, whether they were clients of mine ever or not. So they were just out in the world, helping everybody,

 

Richard Matthews  15:17  

Leading with value before leading with value is popular.

 

Fred Joyal  15:21  

Yeah. And that it was very gratifying for me because I would meet dentists that I didn’t know. And they’d say, Look, I’ve never been a client of yours. But five years ago, I got your book. And it changed everything because I was hanging by my fingernails, and I didn’t know what to do, and somebody gave me your book. And I just got my team to do it and get behind all these ideas. And now I’m thriving, and it would be so incredibly gratifying because the guy came out of nowhere, I didn’t even give him the book. And he wasn’t a client, but I had an impact, a profound impact on his business. So that’s kind of the real reward of business. If you’re not driven by money, as your only purpose, which is not a purpose, money should be a byproduct of your success, and you’re serving and you’re giving something that a customer wants, that somebody is benefiting. To me the gratification is these guys didn’t know what to do and we were helping them, they didn’t know how to attract patients, and we were helping them, they didn’t know how to translate that potential patient into a productive patient, which is a lot of what we taught them, what do you do internally to market your practice. So all of that stuff just became part of my reputation as someone who just has this wealth of knowledge on how to make your business thrive, and in the industry.

 

Richard Matthews  17:04  

I like the thought of calling your superpower the creative persuasion. Because I have this thought, I guess that I always talk about marketing in terms of alchemy, because it always strikes me as a type of alchemy, where if you learn to string your words together properly, you can turn your words into gold. Which is very similar, it’s all persuasion of some sort, where you’re like, hey, if I put these words together in the right way, in front of the right people, they’re actually gonna change their life in some way.

 

Fred Joyal  17:42  

Yeah, putting it something exactly that right way that penetrates because there’s this whole idea of, people think they’re communicating, it’s like, you’re not communicating until they’ve understood what you said, and actually can play it back to you. And so a lot of people think they’re really clever communicators. But what they may be is clever. But the communication may or may not be happening, we were always very focused, and I just became very focused on how effective the communication was. The other thing people would say is, your business books are really readable. They say, there are a lot of great business books out there. But you really earn every bit of knowledge because they’re just not that well written or the guy is too professorial, or whatever. I tried to make my books like you were having a conversation with me. And that’s what people told me, that was their experience of it. So that’s definitely part of the superpower is making it so it actually works to communicate.

 

Richard Matthews  18:53  

Yeah, it’s that persuasive part of the communication, of the creativity that actually gets someone to understand it, and then understand it well enough to change how they’re acting based on that new knowledge. So to change their marketing practices in their business or to set up and work with 1-800 Dentists, whatever it is, they’re actually taking an action based on that communication. 

 

Fred Joyal  19:15  

Yeah.

 

Richard Matthews  19:17  

It’s awesome. So if the superpower is the creative persuasion, the flip side of that, of course, is your fatal flaw. And just like every Superman has his kryptonite or wonder woman can’t remove her bracelets of victory without going mad you probably had a flaw that held you back as you tried to grow your business, something you struggled with. For me I struggled with a lot of things I still struggle with some of these things but perfectionism for one kept me from shipping products Another one was not having good boundaries, I had poor boundaries with time and poor boundaries with my clients, and those basically it’s a self-care problem, not learning how to put yourself at the top of your pay yourself first, and all those respects and learning how to overcome those you can still grow. So what do you think your fatal flaw has been? I think more importantly, how have you worked to overcome it so you could continue to grow your business?

 

Fred Joyal  20:09  

My fatal flaw was, and to a degree still is, but of course, I’m still working at it. I want to spend the money now, I want to push all my chips into the middle of the table all the time. And there are times when things need to be more thought out, especially if you have a foundational organization that the mothership needs to be protected. And I would go off on it on enough wild schemes that we were constantly draining the war chest, and so we never really had one. We paid ourselves, Well, we took care of people really well. But never had any buffer money because I go, look, we’ve got $2 million, we could do this, we can do that, like, oh, let’s borrow this, and roll along in this direction,  let’s try this. And there were some big mistakes that you got to figure out how to recover from because I would be making big, not well-calculated bets, and only learn afterward that it was poorly calculated. So I had to learn to trust my team, and particularly have a really strong CFO that would say, not this month, Fred, or not this year, or not that much money, or my brother was my COO, and he was actually a great counterpoint. Because he would say, this is going to take a lot longer than you think because the other side of the fatal flaw is I think everything can take two weeks. And nothing takes two weeks and nothing that I imagined, I always totally under projected how long anything would take to get done. And because of it, we would be six months into something that I thought would be done in two. And I would be incredibly frustrated, and they would feel the pressure of my frustration. But it was just me being unrealistic. That’s probably because I’m a visionary, which makes me unrealistic.

 

Richard Matthews  22:25  

So over the years how did you work to overcome that flaw and start making better, more calculated decisions as you went along?

 

Fred Joyal  22:35  

It came from the mistakes being painful enough that at one point or another, I would have to absorb the shock because we’d put ourselves in a position where I’d have to take a cut and pay until we recovered from it. And so what I did is I began to completely abdicate control of the operation of the business and just become the listening CEO. I’d say, here’s where I think we can go, how do you think we can get there? And what are the resources we’re going to need to do it? And does it make sense and what’s wrong with it? I was so persuasive. For the first part of my career, people wouldn’t speak up and go, I think this is a half-baked idea. This needs a little more time and a little more thinking. And maybe it’s not a good idea at all, but maybe it’s not a good idea right now. Or maybe there’s somewhere else where we should focus our time and money and attention on. I was so good at getting them excited about it. But then they’d have to figure out how and then eventually, I realized what I was doing, because I thought it was just a big room of discussions about it and my brother finally also explained to me said, when you talk, it’s not like just another person in the room talking. It’s the CEO talking. So they’re not going to be as comfortable offering their contradictory ideas or their counterpoint. Or just saying that’s not going to work. He said you got to back off and that’s really what I needed to do is I needed to learn to shut up and speak last and it’s hard.

 

Richard Matthews  24:30  

Yeah, so you had to learn how to lead from the back.

 

Fred Joyal  24:40  

Yeah, it’s influence rather than control. I was not so much a dictator but the equivalent of it because I would say let’s do this, let’s go. I would make very quick decisions on a lot of stuff. I wouldn’t let a lot of stuff tumble around forever. So, my decisiveness was a strength and a weakness. So I eventually had to give up control and learn how to influence and learn to let them influence me to let the influence flow in two directions. And that only happens when you are not a controlling leader.

 

Richard Matthews  25:21  

So what would be your biggest piece of advice for other up and coming visionary leaders who have small teams that are looking to grow, if they’re struggling with something similar?

 

Fred Joyal  25:34  

Get really clear on your weaknesses and don’t hire people like yourself. Hire people that cover your weaknesses, respect them and empower them. Because a lot of people, when they start a business, their core team is five of them. And they all have the same weaknesses, and they’re missing huge things. So they have, let’s say, five people who are all visionaries, and creators, and smart engineers and stuff like that. And they bring in a financial person, and she’s stuck trying to keep the thing afloat because she’s got five people trying to spend money in five directions. And so she’s not empowered enough, because it’s imbalance. So I learned early on that my partner was much better at selling than I was because I could never do the same pitch twice. Once the pitch was honed, he could do it 100 times in a row exactly the same. So I learned to say, I’m going to let him handle the sales team and train the sales team, because if I train them, they’ll talk to everybody for 30 minutes when they should be talking for seven men, and then they’ll be freestyling it like I do every time. And so that was the first moment of it. And then I realized, as we were running the money around, I said, I need somebody much stronger with financial statements and also with banking relationships, so that there is always enough money because we keep running out, we keep running super lean, and then have to borrow it. And then we have a great influx of cash and we get ahead again, and then I have an idea. And there goes money. So you got to bring people in that are different from you and then really strong at what they do. And then you’ve got to open your mind to contradictory opinions.

 

Richard Matthews  27:46  

So one of the things you said earlier that I wanted to just touch on a little bit because I think it might be interesting for people who are maybe in a different place in their businesses, you mentioned your war chest was always empty. And I want to touch on a couple of things one, for people who are younger in their business. What do you mean by a war chest? And why would it be beneficial to have a full war chest?

 

Fred Joyal  28:12  

So conceptually, the war chest is that you have a reserve of cash that you don’t need for anything. And you never do that thing, like I said, of pushing all your chips in the middle of the table. We can do this, all we have to do is buy this company, it’s going to take all our cash, but it’ll be great. It’s gonna add tremendous money to the bottom line. And it’s a series of assumptions all revolving around that they’re gonna all go right. And of course, they’re not, five of them may and two of them aren’t. And what happens is the money disappears. And you never have any room to absorb shock, we went through the 2008 financial crisis, we went through the 2000.com bust. These were major impact things that we were terribly at risk because we didn’t have any money to absorb the shock. We would buy media and not have to pay for 90 days. So we always had multi-million dollar media debt that we were rolling forward. But if anything happened to that, where we couldn’t pay it, we would lose all our media credit, and we’d have to stop paying in advance so it would move our payables 120 days in the wrong direction, and we’d be out of business. So, whatever you’re doing, make sure that there are some reserves. This is true in your personal life as well.  At some point, something’s gonna go wrong with your car or your house or your health, and you’re gonna need some cash. It’s the same thing with your business and the bigger you get, the bigger the war chest should be. And a lot of people go, I don’t want to pay taxes. So we’re going to distribute all the money, it’s like, pay the damn taxes, and have the war chest, don’t distribute all your money because at some point you may have to go back to your partners and say we need to all inject a half a million back into the business right now. And nobody wants to do that, then not everybody has it.

 

Richard Matthews  30:29  

Yeah, absolutely. So do you have any rules of thumb for people like, should you have like six months of payroll or anything? If you were just thinking, hey, wherever you’re at, in your business, your war chest should look like this.

 

Fred Joyal  30:43  

Yeah, I think it should be, ideally, at least three months of gross revenue that you have in reserve. And it all depends on what kind of payables you’re running, but your balance sheet should always be positive by at least the equivalent of three months of what you generate in revenue. So if you’re generating $2 million a month in revenue, you need 6 million bucks sitting somewhere, pretty much liquid that you can get whenever you need it. And the only time you spend money is when you have 8 million bucks, you spend two of it, and you keep the six, or you say, does it make more sense to borrow it? Because now money’s cheap, so you’re constantly making that decision. Should I tap the reserves, or should I just get some debt? Because money is so cheap, if I can earn 20% of the money and borrow it for 3%, or 4%, let’s borrow. But meanwhile, I could pay the whole debt off tomorrow. And what happens is, they’ll lend you tons of money, if you’ve got a war chest, they’ll lend you massive amounts of money, we were always good at getting better debt than we should have gotten, because our bank really understood our business model, and our cash flow situation. But that was a weakness also, because the bank understood us, that was another reason why we didn’t build a war chest, we can always tap them for a million bucks. And with a floating line of credit, and so we went, oh, well, we can always do this, and they trusted us that we were always gonna pay them because we were 15 years into the relationship and they had all our money in their bank, and we were always paying them. So they would just go into the loan committee and say, who’s a better risk than these guys, all they do is pay us for 15 years. Let’s lend them some money.

 

Richard Matthews  32:54  

It’s an interesting discussion, especially with what’s going on right now with all of our financial systems that if you want your business to weather, whatever storms are coming up, which it definitely looks like there’s more coming with everything from shipping constraints to problems with our dollar to everything else that’s happening a war chest is probably a fantastic idea for whatever your business is.

 

Fred Joyal  33:15  

Well, and even just a war chest also may not just be money, but it could be supplies, it could be, what everybody’s looking at, there’s chip problems and stuff right now, I was just talking to a guy that had a Volvo dealership and he said, we killed it in this year. He said because Valvo had parts. We had all the parts we needed, we had cars, he said because people would come in to us and say, do you have cars? Or can you fix my car? And we’d say yes, all the people, their cars would break and couldn’t be fixed by other brands. So that’s the power of anticipating that everything is not going to go right. And just having enough reserve of your technology and your capability to weather things, but also to take advantage of downtimes. Downtimes are always coming, everybody should be looking at right now, that downtimes are coming. We’ve been in a booming stretch for a while, and the wealthiest people in the world are peeling off their stock. So how much more do you need to know about the marketplace? If that’s happening, if Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos are selling stock, does that mean they think everything’s gonna keep going like this forever or not? And you can be in a great position if things go wrong. And you’ve anticipated where are we when things aren’t going steadily up? How do we pivot and do better instead of just surviving?

 

Richard Matthews  35:05  

And then the other thing that’s really useful to note too, is because things don’t always go bad. And if you have a big war chest, you can flex your muscles in good times. You can show up and take advantage of opportunities that you would have to pass by if you didn’t have that ready to go.

 

Fred Joyal  35:24  

Yeah, I mean, cash is always going to be king, if you find a business that you really like. Let’s say, we had this, we had a business that we really liked, we wanted it and it was going to cost us $3 million. And everybody else that wanted their technology was offering them terms. It’s like, alright, we’ll buy you for $4 million, but we’re gonna pay you over five years. And they would say, we don’t want to do that. We could just keep the business and make that money. So we walked in and said, no, we’ll just buy it. And they like that. Because it was done. We weren’t playing some sort of game. It’s like, what do you want for it? Okay, this is what we’re willing to pay for it. But we’ll wire the money, all of it. And they go, okay, yeah, that’s appealing.

 

Richard Matthews  36:26  

And money loves speed.

 

Fred Joyal  36:28  

Yeah. Speed to close is really powerful. It’s a lot easier to get to yes. When you start playing games, you lose the deal a lot of times.

 

Richard Matthews  36:40  

I want to shift gears a little bit and talk about a common enemy in your business. This would generally put this in the context of your clients. Every superhero has an arch-nemesis, it’s the thing that they constantly have to fight against in their world. In the world of business, we like to put it in the context of your clients. So it’s a mindset or a flaw that you constantly had to fight to overcome so that you could actually get them the results that they were coming to you for. And so either way, in the world of 1-800 Dentists or now, the speaking and teaching that you do with entrepreneurs, what’s the mindset or a flaw that you constantly run into that you have to fight against all the time?

 

Fred Joyal  37:21  

This applies to a lot of businesses, but we had a lot of trouble getting our client—the dentist to understand the value that he or she was getting, for what they were paying us. So let’s say they’re paying us $20,000 a year to be part of our program, they wouldn’t have any systems in place to say, what’s my ROI on this marketing. So they would take snapshots of it, they would basically go by what the last patient spent. And they would say, we got a really good patient from 1-800 Dentists, it’s working really well. Or they would go by what the front desk person said, oh, there’s a lot of people who don’t show up. And because she’s got to deal with the annoyance of it. And we couldn’t get into their systems, and show them the ROI. Because anybody who did it would find out that we were doing 5x that our ROI goes four, or five to one, even if they were doing a lot of stuff wrong if they were wasting the referrals that we sent them. But we couldn’t get into their database and prove this out. So because of it, we turned down a lot of clients who would come back two years later and go, I need to get back on again, I realized that I needed you. And I was like it’s too late now, we’ve already replaced you with somebody in your immediate area, we can’t support you anymore. So this was our arch-enemy the whole time we couldn’t get the client. And this is what’s important in any business, you need to be able to show the client in a measurable way that they understand what the value is that they’re getting. And that’s the glue that keeps them on. Otherwise, you’re going to turn over clients that are perfectly good clients that are technically happy and just don’t know it.

 

Richard Matthews  39:23  

Yeah, and it’s an interesting thing, because when I was doing marketing and advertising. We worked in the dental space for a while. And one of the things that we had to build was we actually built like a spreadsheet that they can put in the leads that they got and the sales that they did from them and then we taught them how to like track upsells and other things just so we could solve that particular problem because people they don’t see what happens after the first sale, or the first impression and it’s very hard to teach a business owner how to see Lifetime Customer Value and the other things that go into the value creation process, you guys are creating leads essentially. But a lead is a lot more valuable than just the initial phone call. Because I believe when we were looking at it, the dental clients have a lifetime value of like eight years something like that?

 

Fred Joyal  40:20  

Yeah, and it’s in the 10s of 1000s very often, but minimum, it’s a $10,000 LTV. And so against the cost of acquisition of maybe four or 500 bucks in a very expensive market like LA, and so cheaper all the way down. So if you took a business person who understood those metrics, and you said, look, I’m going to give you leads, warm leads for $500, your average return is going to be $10,000, they would say, I will take 1 million of those. But we were in a constant process of debating this stuff with dentists because we couldn’t show it to him, because of this exact thing. They didn’t have a tracking system, or if they had one, they didn’t know how to use it, or they wouldn’t look at it.

 

Richard Matthews  41:13  

Yeah and it’s interesting because it’s the same in every business that I’ve ever been in, trying to show the business how to see the long term value. It’s very difficult. And from a marketing standpoint, when you’re putting your advertising and putting your marketing together, you have to be able to communicate that value, because in the marketing space, we’re talking ROI, we’ll give you $500 leads, you make $10,000 Lifetime Customer Value, it’s money to discount, but if you’re selling stuff in the relationship space, or in the health space, a lot of that doesn’t have a monetary ROI. So you have to learn how to communicate the value differently. And you have to start talking about ROI in terms of time saved or in the value of life and that kind of stuff. And it’s a very difficult conversation to have with people so they can actually understand the value transaction.

 

Fred Joyal  42:11  

Well, and you even need investors that understand that let’s say you raise money, if you have a SaaS product software as a service product, 100% of the revenue that you would spend, you would get from that client is going to be your cost of acquisition of that client. And that’s a basic metric. And if you’re doing that, if the first year you break even on that client with your marketing costs, now, your marketing cost is the sales commission, it’s everything. If that’s what happens, you’re fine with a SaaS product, because after year one you’re at a 70, or 80% margin, the profit margin on that client. So you can do that for other clients manufacturing, it’s a whole different model. So you have to understand your model. And so does your backers.

 

Richard Matthews  43:10  

One of the most interesting spaces I ever worked in, we did work in the solar space and worked with big commercial companies. And one of our software products was a software and hardware combination that we can go into a manufacturing plant. And we could work with Safeway, for instance. And we can tell them how much energy a single loaf of bread costs to produce. So they were used to having cogs like here’s how much flour it costs to make a loaf of bread, but the energy cost was just like a big line item for the whole facility. And so it was like a major mindset shift for the facility to be able to have Ecogs, the energy cost of goods sold,  right down to that model, knowing what kind of things you can change and how that impacts your ROI. So definitely, you have to understand your model and understand where your costs come in and how you can get your ROI.

 

Fred Joyal  44:07  

Yeah, you got to know your metrics, and you’ve got to find a way to show the customer some measurement of value. When I coach CEOs, they can’t necessarily put $1 value on my coaching, except sometimes I’m going to give them one thing in my hour conversation with them, where they say, oh, yeah, I shouldn’t be doing that. And it could just be that you’ve got to let this person go. Or they’ll run a whole pitch by me and they’ll say, what do you think? And I’ll say, I think the price is completely wrong. Really why? And then I can tell them and they won’t spend $300,000 launching it that way. So what they paid me, let’s say they’re paying me $5,000 a month to coach them. One response I’ve given them covers their cost for me for the year. So once they’re with me long enough, they know that that happens. But it’s not linear. But I always say to them, look, if you can’t 10x what you’re paying me by having me as your coach, then your business isn’t big enough, basically, because I know what I can do for you. You know, if you’re running a million dollar a year business, I’m no good to you, because you’re not going to be able to pay me 60 $70,000 a year to coach you. You don’t have the room in your business. I can’t move the needle enough for you. So that’s part of the fun of it is,  when they say something, and I’ve already made that mistake. And I just say, yeah, I  know that feels that sounds great. But no, don’t do that. Don’t ever do.

 

Richard Matthews  45:53  

Don’t do that. That’ll be very expensive. Here, let me show you why.

 

Fred Joyal  45:58  

Yeah. Let me show you the receipts.

 

Richard Matthews  46:01  

So the flip side of your common enemy, of course, is your driving force. So just like Spider Man fights to save New York Batman fights to save Gotham or Google fights to index and categorize all the world’s information. I want to know what it is that you fight for, with your businesses now, your mission, so to speak.

 

Fred Joyal  46:22  

Well, my mission certainly has evolved now that I’ve published SUPERBOLD, that I want everyone to be able to harness this superpower so that they can chase their dreams, and not have a life of regrets not get to the end of their life saying, I should have done this, I should have done that. And to overcome their hesitation and their reticence so that they can pursue life knowing that the clock is always ticking. So my goal is to teach as many people to be as bold as possible because we face big problems. And we need people willing to take bold moves to solve them. And that all comes from inside them. But my mission always was, we had simple rules, we wanted a great place to go to work, we wanted everybody to win, the customer had to win, we had to win, the marketplace had to win. In other words, we weren’t strip mining or doing something to the environment or the world that created a negative so that we could win. And in the end, the employees won, it had to be this place where if they worked there, they liked working there, they liked what they’ve accomplished. And so my mission has always been, let’s try to bring as much value as possible to the people working there to the people we serve as customers. And we had two customers, we had people who weren’t paying us anything, which were the patients or potential patients, we had the dentist who were paying us, we had to serve two masters knowing only one was paying us. But we couldn’t behave like the one paying us was the only master we had to take care of that patient too. Because there had to be two winners in the transaction. The patient had to find a great dentist, the dentist had to find a great patient. And as much as we could we had to work that formula. So I’m addicted to everybody winning.

 

Richard Matthews  48:38  

Your mission with a SUPERBOLD reminds me of one of my favorite quotes that I’ve had on my wall since I was a little boy was from Mark Twain who said, 20 years from now you’ll regret more of the things you didn’t do than the ones you did. So throw off the bowlines! Sail away from safe harbor, explore, dream and discover. And that really sat well with me. And I’ve always really liked that idea. I’m 36 now, and we’ve done all sorts of things from traveling all over the world with our kids and running a couple of businesses from the back bedroom and RV and all sorts of crazy cool things because I’ve sort of lived that in my own life where. And I can tell, the only things that I’ve ever regretted, are things that I chose not to do. I haven’t yet run into something that I did do that I regretted later, even things that turned out poorly. I’ve never regretted those things. And it’s only the ones where I have that question, what if I hadn’t done that? What if I had chosen to do that instead? Those are always where the regrets come in. And I tell people now because I do the whole podcast thing too where I go and get on other people’s podcasts. And one of the questions always has been, what’s one piece of advice you’d give someone? I always tell people to take the risk, whatever it is, take the risk because the chances of you regretting it are bigger if you say no than if you say yes.

 

Fred Joyal  49:59  

It guarantees failure if you don’t try. But yeah, that’s it, take the risk, it sums it up really well because in that you will discover something. And it may be a very powerful lesson, in our business, we would make bets and we’d lose a million dollars. And if we didn’t learn anything from it, then we lost a million dollars. But if we went like, why did we lose a million dollars? What can we glean from this? This was a very expensive classroom. We paid the tuition, let’s learn the lessons from it. 

 

Richard Matthews  50:41  

You’re getting a lesson or you’re getting a story. You’re always getting something out of it. When you say yes when you take the risk.

 

Fred Joyal  50:47  

Or sometimes it’s just the cheap thrill of you trying it and falling flat on your face. But you went, I tried.

 

Richard Matthews  50:55  

Then you got the scar on your forehead to tell around the fire pit. 

 

Fred Joyal  51:02  

Yeah, absolutely. 

 

Richard Matthews  51:04  

Yeah. One of the things that we talked about a lot is how human beings are story born people. And we build our relationships, we build our businesses, we build our whole life on the stories we have with each other. And stories come when you say yes when you take the risk when you do the things. And so that takes that boldness that you’re talking about being able to stand up and actually just do something. So anyway, I appreciate your mission and what it is that you’re trying to do because I know it’s had a huge impact on my life even though it’s just my own decisions, my wife and I together, but I definitely would love to see more people take those bold steps because the ones who do that are the one who’s going to change the world to make this a better place.

 

Fred Joyal  51:55  

Yeah, and it’ll be a fulfilling life. They may not die wealthy, I may die broke. But my life story is gonna have some fabulous twists and turns to it. And some great adventures to talk about. The other thing I say to people is you really don’t want your epitaph to be. I played it as safe as possible my entire life. I mean, because we only get one life, and as you said, the great stories come from saying yes. So the great stories come from getting out of your comfort zone. So take the risk.

 

Richard Matthews  52:35  

One of the things that I have really come to love since we started traveling with our business was realizing that the good and the bad are all part of the story. And I started referring to it as the texture and contrast of life. When you look at a good picture or a good movie, it’s gonna have its highs and lows. It’s gonna have both. And I think mistakes that people make is they try to keep their life as close to the median as possible. And that’s just a recipe for being boring. And I think when you open yourself up to big risks, you open yourself up for both big wins and big losses. And both of those are ultimately good things in your life.

 

Fred Joyal  53:25  

Yeah, it’s really true. Because the other thing that happens is, if you survive a big loss, that tells you something about yourself. If you dig yourself out of a huge hole, you become even more fearless. Because you say to yourself, wow, I was nearly destroyed. And I figured out a way out of it. So now you become even more invincible in your mind. It’s like, I can take more because even if it all goes badly, I’ll figure out something and I’ll figure out my way back. So it’s great to know about yourself.

 

Richard Matthews  54:05  

It’s true in business, it’s true in life. And I mentioned we’ve been traveling, we’re in an RV. One of the things that people are asking us all the time, we’ve been traveling for five years full time, and they’re, what’s one of the things that you should know? And I’m like if it’s attached to the RV in some way, it’s gonna break, it doesn’t matter what it is, all of it will break. And the reason I say that is because, at this point, I’ve learned how to fix everything. Like slides, plumbing, carpentry, electrical stuff, all of it. And five years ago, I knew that those things existed. But at this point, when things break, I’m like, I know exactly what to do to fix them and to continue on our way. And it’s like having a whole new set of superpowers like I can fix all the things that break on something like an RV or a yacht. And it’s the same kind of thing in business, the more that you try, the more that you put offers out there and the more things break and you have to fix them, the more you have a tool chest of I know how to solve these problems. And so things don’t scare you as well. And you’re more willing to say yes when opportunities come, and you have more tools to make those opportunities turn into wins instead of losses.

 

Fred Joyal  55:18  

Yeah, that’s so true. And that’s really what comes from taking chances, taking risks, putting yourself out there, because your RV breaks down, you’re gonna figure out how to fix it. There’s no option, you’re out in the Palm Desert or something like that. And you’ve never changed a flat before? Well, you better figure out how to change a flat.

 

Richard Matthews  55:39  

You got to figure out how to do it. Yeah, I just had $3,700 worth of tire repairs we had to do a few months ago. So I know exactly what that’s like. So I want to switch gears and talk about something more practical. We call this the hero’s tool belt. Just like every superhero has their gadgets like batarangs and web slingers and laser eyes, or the big magical hammer. I want to talk about the top one or two tools you couldn’t live without in your business. This could be anything from your notepad, your calendar, your marketing tools, something you use for your product delivery, something you think is essential to getting your job done on a daily basis.

 

Fred Joyal  56:17  

So I can do a bunch of them because there’s such a variety to them. One of them is Evernote, which is a software that you put notes in and into various notebooks. And they synchronize with every device you use. So everything’s basically in your note, it instantly appears in real-time everywhere. So if I’m riding my bike and something comes to me, I can just stop my bike, grab my phone, dictate the note, and now it’s there on all my devices. And I’ve got notebooks for everything I’m working on everything I want to be working on. So that’s an essential thing in my life without that. The other thing that’s a tool, but it’s being able to speak comfortably to a camera, you have to develop this skill. Because if you’re not good at video, you’re dead meat, basically, you’re living in a world where everything needs a video at this point. And so you have to say, how do I talk to a camera like it’s my best friend? How do I get good at this? How do I refine my ideas down to what somebody is going to understand? How do I not babble? How do I not say uhm 6000 times? All of those things are gonna happen because the other part of the tool is, you got to watch the videos, you gotta watch what you do in your videos. And so you go, what the heck am I doing? What am I saying? Why did I keep saying that? That’s not what I want to say, why do I keep grabbing my nose, whatever the heck it is, you’re going to, you’re going to learn from watching yourself, it takes boldness to put yourself in that position, and take that painful learning. Because it’s so uncomfortable. You just say I don’t want to know how bad I am. Well guess what you need to find out how bad you are, so you can get good. So that is a business skill. And you have to learn how to sell. As a general rule, you have to learn how to not just communicate, but how to ask for money. Whether you’re asking for money from investors, or you’re asking for a deal, or you’re asking for a partnership, or you’re asking for a job, or you’re asking somebody to come work for you, you find this fantastic engineer, you have to sell her the career with you, you have to be good at that. Your persuasion, to move somebody to a decision is the thing you will be doing the most. So you got to get good at it and you got to work on it. Nobody taught you this in high school or college. So this is the biggest thing on your tool belt is your ability to persuade.

 

Richard Matthews  59:26  

Yeah, I hired a sales coach once, spent like $12,000 just have them put me through sales torture essentially, but to get good at it. And it’s one of those things that you realize, you have to do it all the time. Everything in your business is always sales, you’re selling to your staff on doing good work and you’re selling to your customers on why they should have your service and you’re selling your service providers, everything, it’s all sales in one form or another and really when you get down to it understanding what sales is, is learning how to say hey, here’s the problem you have and here’s the solution that we have and let’s put those two things together. When you really understand that’s what sales is because people have it in their heads. And sales is the dirty car salesman or whatever. And I think that does a disservice to people who do not understand where sales actually fit. And sales is always in some form or fashion problem solution, let’s put them together.

 

Fred Joyal  1:00:21  

And if you’re selling something good, especially something that they don’t know they need, or that would be to their benefit, then you have to help them understand that that’s a good thing. If you’re talking someone into going to college to learn a specific skill, because they want to have a career, but they’re, but I really like construction too, maybe I should just get a construction job right away. That’s doing something for their benefit when you’re selling something bad. Of course, that’s what gives all of the sales a bad reputation is somebody getting over on you to sell their crap, basically, or to overprice what they’re selling you. But most of the time, if you want a satisfying life, screwing people is not going to be the way to go. Because it’s going to catch up to you. And it’s in the end, you’re not going to have a lot of friends, and you’re not going to have a lot of business friends. And you may have a lot of money, good for you. But when somebody doesn’t understand the value of something. Life insurance is a perfect example, people need life insurance, you got kids, you got a wife, you got an RV. You need life insurance, but somebody probably had to talk you into it. And if they haven’t, they should, because you need it and nobody wants to talk about it, they want to pretend they’re gonna live forever. So a salesperson has to say, I know you think you’re going to live forever, I have to help you with that delusion. And to talk about this unpleasant thing that you need to talk about, for your benefit.

 

Richard Matthews  1:02:12  

For your benefit to help them. So I want to talk a little bit about your suggestion to get good on video too. Because I know it’s one of those things that a lot of us, particularly those of us to give back to your book title who are shy have a problem with and I know, I am not particularly great on camera when the camera is by itself. So I do much better when I have someone else on the other side of the camera that I can actually talk to and interact with. So what are some of your suggestions for people who want to get good at talking to what is essentially an inanimate object? Because really, you’re just disconnecting the communication, because there is going to be someone else on the other side. But you have to get over that mental switch of like, hey, I’m not talking to the live right now I’m talking to the camera, who’s the video that is going to go talk to that person.

 

Fred Joyal  1:03:05  

It comes down to getting good at most things, embracing sucking and putting yourself in a situation. So if you know you’re not going to be good at it, you need to set up a camera. And you need to just nobody’s going to see it but you, nobody’s in the room but you and you got to just start, you’re going to say I’m going to explain this and give yourself 60 seconds to explain it. And do it over and over and over again and then watch the video, it comes down to that. And if you have somebody there who can tell you certain things, obviously there are people that can coach you. So you want to look at the camera, you want to smile, you want to have energy, this is a projection of your best, most enthusiastic self, you want to be clear, you want to articulate all of those things. Take practice. Now you may need to memorize something, in order to do it. I don’t recommend that everything sounds like it’s memorized. Working with a teleprompter takes a year of practice to get really good at. So you want to be able to get up and say in 20 or 30 seconds, something clear. And so, I said it earlier, talk to that camera like you’re talking to your best friend. And take a few breaths before you do it to relax yourself. I talk about a bunch of this stuff in my book about meeting people, but it’s the same thing talking to the camera. It’s like how do you engage? You’re going to calmly, clearly express yourself and that just takes doing it cuz there’s no way you know how to do it. And then you’re gonna watch the video and go like, why am I looking away? Why am I looking down? What am I doing? Why don’t I look at the camera, and you’ll fix that. It doesn’t matter, the content doesn’t matter at that point. It’s the physical habits that you want to change so that you’re comfortable connecting to that camera. And you’re and you’re watching what your hands do and what you’re fed, you got ticks, all of this stuff that you can’t resist scratching your head, or you’re going to find yourself doing all sorts of dumb stuff. And you’re going to go like, what, stop it. But you have to catch yourself because it’s all automatic. It’s just happening. And then all of a sudden, you’ll say, wow, that’s how to do it. That was pretty good. And then show it to somebody else. And say, what am I doing wrong? Was that persuasive? Was that convincing? And they said, well, it’s really good that you trailed off at the end. Or she didn’t smile at all. And you went, I was trying to smile. But it looked like this. You know, So work on it.

 

Richard Matthews  1:06:13  

Yeah, so the secret is hard work. Is that what I’m hearing?

 

Fred Joyal  1:06:17  

Yeah, and I know, that’s the bad news. I don’t have a magic wand that you will suddenly be good on video. Anything anybody’s great at, it’s because they worked at it. Yeah. And there’s a whole bunch of stuff in the garbage. When we make TV commercials, we’d shoot 10 takes before we nail it or 15, or 20 I’d go 50 sometimes in certain situations. So you get it exactly right. It’s failing till you succeed.

 

Richard Matthews  1:06:58  

Yeah, it’s just got to do the hard work. I know it’s always a struggle because you want it to just be, I’ve just decided to do this thing and now I’m going to be good at it. It never happens that way, unfortunately. But we do wish it did.

 

Fred Joyal  1:07:11  

Yeah. I mean, we don’t do it with language, we wouldn’t assume because we wanted to speak Spanish, that we would suddenly be good at it the next day. But all sorts of other stuff we feel like we should be because we’re going to be embarrassed, like, nobody’s embarrassed because they can’t speak Spanish because they never learned Spanish. But we feel like we should have all of these other social skills and sales skills and business skills and stuff like that, that come with time and practice and learning and failing till you get better.

 

Richard Matthews  1:07:44  

Yeah.

 

Richard Matthews  1:07:45  

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Richard Matthews  1:09:16  

So I’ve got a couple more questions for you here before we wrap up the interview. I want to talk briefly about your own personal heroes. Every hero has their mentors, just like Frodo had Gandalf or Luke and Obi Wan Robert Kiyosaki and his Rich Dad or even Spider Man had his Uncle Ben. Or the newest one, if you’ve been watching it, it was Aunt May. I want to know who were some of your heroes? Were they real life mentors, speakers, authors, maybe peers who were a couple of years ahead of you, and how important were they to what you accomplished over the life of your career?

 

Fred Joyal  1:09:46  

The first thing that happened to me in advertising, remember I said I was in that ad agency and the general manager said, I’m not going to give you a job because you don’t know how to write this stuff. But he also gave me A book by this author, his name was George Lois. And the title of the book was very funny is George, Be Careful, which is what his parents always said to him. But he was part of the 60s advertising revolution, the creativity that poured into the marketplace for the first time. And I read about his life and his career, and I said I want to do that, that is a life I want. And I had no vision of anything like that before. So George Lois always stuck in my mind as to how I wanted to approach the kind of work life I wanted. And then over the years, I met various people, really successful people, but probably the person I admire most is Sir Richard Branson. Just goes how he had these got virgin airways, he’s got Virgin Galactic, he recently just went into space as an astronaut. But he’s an incredibly generous person, very down to earth, very playful. And believes that because he has been lucky and been successful, it is important that he finds ways to give back to make a difference in the world. And so he works at it, and his son and daughter run a huge foundation that has charitable events all around the world going on all the time. And they’re helping young people and business owners and people like that. But it was meeting him and seeing how normal he was and how he treated everybody the same way. He didn’t come at them, like, I’m really important, I’m really successful, I’m a billionaire, why are you talking to me, he never gave that vibe off. And it really stuck with me. Having met him and, and I played chess with him, I actually managed to play chess with him a few times, which was really fun. Especially when I beat him, I beat him once. And he called me a really bad name.

 

Richard Matthews  1:12:25  

Not a lot of people can say they beat Richard Branson at chess.

 

Fred Joyal  1:12:28  

Yeah, but there are many people, tons of authors that I’ve read that have given me so much value. And many business people who guided me along the way and took me under their wing and said, look at this a different way or gave me an opportunity. All through my life I have been blessed with mentors of all different types and learn to really value them and learn to really listen to them, and invite their candor, which is so important. It’s really hard to get feedback, just like watching a video of yourself. It’s really hard to get feedback to invite feedback and say, look, I need to know the truth, I need to play it straight, don’t sugarcoat it with me. It’s hard to listen to that stuff. But you need it, it’s a life skill when you learn how to do that because that’s how you get better. There are people who know a lot more than you. And there are people that know you a lot of times better than you know you.

 

Richard Matthews  1:13:40  

Yeah, absolutely. And having the people in your life that are willing to actually tell you those things and actually give it to you straight is such an important aspect of growing your business. I know it wasn’t until I started getting into a regular mastermind group where I had that, that my business started growing really rapidly.

 

Fred Joyal  1:13:59  

Yeah, it makes such a difference. I mean, a good friend is somebody you have a great time with. A great friend is somebody who says, you know you’re messing up here. And you go, well, what do you mean? It’s like, you can’t keep behaving this way. You drink too much or something like that or you drink and drive or any number of things, a great friend calls you out and gets right in your face. And I’ve got great friends.

 

Richard Matthews  1:14:28  

Absolutely.

 

Fred Joyal  1:14:29  

I’m tired of them calling me out. But they do it anyway.

 

Richard Matthews  1:14:33  

That’s why you keep them around. So last question for you. One of the things that makes heroes heroic is that they live by a code, for instance, Batman never kills his enemies he only ever puts them in Arkham Asylum. So as we wrap up the interview, I want to talk about the top one, maybe two principles that you use regularly in your life, something maybe you wish you’d known when you started out all those years ago, on your own hero’s journey.

 

Fred Joyal  1:15:02  

It’s evolved over time to always be asking, what can I give? How can I lead with my giving hand in every situation without expecting the direct return from that person, a lot of times my generosity or service goes in one direction and the reward will come from a completely different direction this service may not pay off, may not monetize at all, it may monetize in feeling like I help somebody. But that creed is like, always start with how can I serve? How can I help you out? And it came to me when I met Tony Shea, who was the CEO of Zappos, who passed away a couple of years ago, I met him and we went to lunch. And the first thing out of his mouth after we sat down was, so how can I help you? And I’m thinking, this is a billionaire, who’s asking me how he can help me, instead of worrying about what I can do for him. He doesn’t care about that. Soso my crit is to care about what I have to offer, what impact I can have. And it’s got to be a win-win, or I’m not gonna play. And profits will never trump integrity. There will never be a good enough deal or a rich enough deal, or I will sacrifice my integrity for.

 

Richard Matthews  1:16:51  

Yeah, that’s such an important thing, too. And it’s one of the things that I think is really interesting about entrepreneurship in general is, we’re eclipsing 200 episodes here on this show. And I’ve interviewed everything from brand new mom and pop startups to people who are venture capitalizing in Silicon Valley, with multi-billion dollar companies and everything in between. And what’s interesting to me is how common that mentality is that integrity is such an important aspect of running a business. And what’s interesting is culturally, entrepreneurs are looked at as villains. The entrepreneurs are always the villain in everything, willing to sacrifice whatever for the dollar. And one of the movies that came out over the holidays was Ryan Reynolds was Free Guy. It’s a great movie, but the premise of the movie is the video game entrepreneurs willing to sacrifice life for $1. He’s willing to kill the AI that they created in order to make money. And that’s always the mentality that is shoved down our throats is that entrepreneurs are willing to sacrifice integrity for money. And when you actually get into the entrepreneurship community, you find it’s exactly the opposite. And that’s why we run this show. That’s why the hero show exists is to help hopefully change that conversation a bit. But yeah, I completely agree. And I appreciate the mentality.

 

Fred Joyal  1:18:23  

Yeah, it’s important to me that people do understand that. I grew up thinking that rich people are jerks. They’re greedy jerks. And I had to let go of that limiting belief. Because I know really, really, obviously, Sir Richard and Tony Shea are examples of these really good, generous people who are richer than I will ever be. And so I can’t dismiss them as greedy jerks. And most of the successful people I know are not greedy jerks. The reality is if somebody is a greedy jerk, and they’re rich, they were a greedy jerk when they were broke. And so don’t paint all enterprises, people make all sorts of great things that make your life better all the time, and by taking risks, by being entrepreneurs, and so learn to appreciate them because they’re willing to take the risks that you want in order to succeed. And so what if they get rewarded for it? What’s wrong with that? That’s nothing disproportional about that, they took a big chance and a chance to lose. If you’re working a job every day for a salary. You’re not taking a lot of chances. You could get laid off for something like that. But most of the time you get a paycheck coming to an entrepreneur who always got to earn her paycheck forever.

 

Richard Matthews  1:19:54  

You have to show up every time or you don’t get paid. As you mentioned earlier, one thing that stuck out, you said, hey, we made a mistake. And who’s taking the pay cut? It’s me. It’s not your staff, they’re still getting their paycheck.

 

Fred Joyal  1:20:10  

Yeah, I’m the shock absorber. And so that’s what happens. And it could go under completely, I could have invested all my money into a business enterprise. And it goes three or four years and then fails completely, I lose everything. And nobody steps up and goes, that’s too bad, here, let’s give you all the money you need for groceries for the next two years. I gotta figure out what to do. Because I took a chance. So they’re not there to step up when I fall, and help me so why be there to criticize me when I succeed?

 

Richard Matthews  1:20:45  

Absolutely, I think that’s a great place to wrap our interview with that mentality, that entrepreneurs really are the ones that make the world go round. So I do finish every interview with a simple challenge I call the hero’s challenge. And basically, I do this to help get access to stories I might not find otherwise on my own because not everyone’s out doing the podcast rounds like you and I are. So the question is simple. Do you have someone in your life or in your network that you think has a cool entrepreneurial story? Who are they? First names are fine, and why do you think they should come to share their story in our show? First person that comes to mind for you.

 

Fred Joyal  1:21:17  

Spencer, he started a business that he brought me in as a partner on and he is the most coachable person I know, it’s amazing to watch him grow from a young business person with no business skills to just really run a business well, run a team well and just take the feedback and get better at what he does all the time. And he’s also terrific at delegating a lot of people to entrepreneurs or micro managers at the beginning, they can’t let go of anything. His instinct to delegate is really strong, and it’s really impressive.

 

Richard Matthews  1:22:05  

Awesome. So what we’ll do is we’ll reach out later and see if we can get an introduction, maybe get him to come on the show. Not everyone says yes, but those that do sometimes we get really cool stories. So at the end of all the comic books, there’s always the crowd of people who are cheering and clapping for the acts of heroism, so our analogous to that, as we close here, is where can people find you if they want your help in the future? Where can they light up the bat signal so to speak, and say, hey, Fred, how can you teach me to be SUPERBOLD?

 

Fred Joyal  1:22:33  

Obviously, the book is out there on Amazon. It’s on audio and Kindle, and hardcover. And you can go to FredJoyal.com, download the first chapter. But if you want half an hour of counseling, book a free consultation, you can do it right there on FredJoyal. com. And I’ll talk you through something just for the fun of it.

 

Richard Matthews  1:22:57  

Who are the right types of people to reach out and pick up that book or take a consultation session?

 

Fred Joyal  1:23:04  

If you are at a point where you say my confidence is holding me back, my hesitation is I’ve missed too many opportunities and you’re tired of it, which is a lot of people or you could be anywhere in your life or your career could be about meeting people or trying to get a promotion or trying to start your own business, or just starting a new chapter in your life. It’s anybody who’s trying to build that confidence, that’s who the book is for.

 

Richard Matthews  1:23:33  

So it’s SUPERBOLD. And again, you can find that anywhere, Amazon and where books are sold. And you said the audiobook is out already because that’s probably where I’ll pick it up make my car with me.

 

Fred Joyal  1:23:45  

Yep, sounds great.

 

Richard Matthews  1:23:47  

Thank you so much for coming to the show today, Fred. Really appreciate getting to hear your story and hear the story behind 1-800 Dentists and everything, very fascinating. Do you have any final words of wisdom for my audience before I hit this stop record button?

 

Fred Joyal  1:23:59  

I would say the mantra you can always say to yourself as a rule of confidence is wherever you are, say I belong everywhere. You could change that mindset. It will change a lot in your life.

 

Richard Matthews  1:24:13  

Absolutely. I belong everywhere. You belong wherever you are. 

 

Fred Joyal  1:24:17  

Yeah.

 

Richard Matthews  1:24:18  

Absolutely, cool. Well, thank you for coming on again Fred, appreciate it.