Episode 244 – Andy Neary
In this episode of The Hero Show, we delve into the world of insurance sales and explore how modern marketing strategies can unlock success in this industry. Our guest today is Andy Neary, the founder of Complete Game Consulting – a company that provides coaching, community, and accountability to help you generate relevant sales opportunities by standing out in today’s competitive landscape. Whether you’re an insurance professional or simply interested in learning about effective marketing techniques, this episode is packed with actionable tips and strategies that can help you take your sales game to the next level.
The Power of Digital Marketing in Insurance Sales:
In the ever-evolving landscape of insurance sales, it’s crucial to stay ahead of the game. Andy Neary shares his insights on how digital marketing has transformed the industry and opened up new opportunities for success. He emphasizes the importance of utilizing social media platforms, email marketing, and content creation to establish a strong online presence and attract potential clients. By embracing these modern marketing strategies, insurance professionals can reach a wider audience and build meaningful connections with their target market.
Building a Personal Brand:
Andy Neary highlights the significance of building a personal brand in the insurance industry. He explains how showcasing your expertise, values, and unique selling proposition can differentiate you from your competitors and establish trust with potential clients. By consistently sharing valuable content, engaging with your audience, and positioning yourself as a thought leader, you can become the go-to insurance professional in your niche.
Connecting with Potential Clients in the Digital Age:
In today’s digital age, connecting with potential clients requires a different approach. Andy Neary shares his tips on how to effectively engage with prospects and build meaningful relationships online. From personalized outreach and networking on social media to leveraging online communities and providing value through educational content, he provides practical strategies to connect with potential clients and position yourself as their trusted advisor.
If you’re looking to unlock success in insurance sales through modern marketing, this episode of The Hero Show is a must-listen. Join me as I chat with Andy Neary, an insurance sales expert, as he shares invaluable insights and actionable strategies to take your sales game to the next level. Whether you’re a seasoned professional or just starting out in the industry, this episode will provide you with the tools and knowledge to thrive in today’s digital landscape. Don’t miss out on this opportunity to learn from one of the best in the business. Tune in now and unlock the secrets of success in insurance sales through modern marketing!
Recommended Media:
Andy mentioned the following book/s on the show.
- Building a StoryBrand by Donald Miller
- $100M Leads by Alex Hormozi
- The Infinite Game by Simon Sinek
The HERO Challenge
Today on The HERO Show, Andy Neary extended an invigorating challenge to Ray Baldwin, urging him to join as a guest. Neary believes Baldwin, a distinguished business coach, embodies the essence of an intriguing interviewee. What captivated me most about Baldwin’s journey is his remarkable resilience. Despite not securing a starting position on his high school basketball team and facing rejection from his college team, he persevered. Remarkably, Baldwin transitioned from intramural basketball to a thriving eight-year career playing professionally in Europe, demonstrating unparalleled determination and ultimately reaping the rewards of his unwavering commitment.
AND MORE TOPICS COVERED IN THE FULL INTERVIEW!!! You can check that out and subscribe to YouTube.
If you want to know more about Andy Neary, you may reach out to him at:
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/andyneary/
- Four Marketing Pillars: https://apn-consulting-llc.mykajabi.com/2023-broker-playbook
Andy Neary: [00:00:00] If you’re watching or listening
to the audio you can’t see behind me
but there are three portraits behind me
and they have three words on ’em.
Consistency, persistency,
and patience
those are my super power, Richard.
Consistency
which is the ability to show up every week
and do the same thing every week
week after week.
Persistency is to keep doing it
after everybody quits.
And then patience is knowing that
this is a very long game
and you have to enjoy
the process if you’re
gonna have success
and I was not given any special skill
I was not given any special talent
and by the way
I did not have this as a kid
this was a learned skill over time
but I really started developing it
late in college when I realized
I had a chance to maybe
play pro baseball
this consistency of putting
in the work off the field
when no one is watching is
what’s gonna help me get to the next level
and I’d tell you
if there’s one thing right now
that we leverage as our superpower
here at Complete Game Consulting
it’s that consistency
Richard Matthews: yeah
Andy Neary: Our ability to show up
every week create content
put out what we need to do
run the [00:01:00] process to grow our business
and that’s the advice
I’d give any entrepreneur
you wanna have success in business
be consistent
Richard Matthews: [00:02:00] Hello and welcome back to The Hero Show. My name is Richard Matthews and I have the pleasure today of having Andy Neary on the line. Are you there, Andy?
Andy Neary: I am Richard. Excited to be here.
Richard Matthews: Awesome. Glad to have you. So, I know you were just talking before we got on here where we’re at and I know my audience always wanted to know ’cause we’re traveling. We are currently in Southern California, in Temescal Valley visiting friends and family out here. where are you coming in from?
Andy Neary: I am here in Dull and Gray South Central Wisconsin. We just moved back from Colorado after nine years. And I won’t lie, Richard, I’m struggling with the winter here. It’s a little too gray for me. I’m used to that Colorado Sun.
Richard Matthews: I’m in Southern California and we’ve got rain for the next four days, which is not very typical of SoCal. And I got a little TikTok video that showed up on my wife’s feed this morning that was like, check in with your Southern California friends. We’re not okay. Like, it’s raining and it’s like, you know, I think the temperature is 54, right?
That’s cold, right? Like,
Andy Neary: Well, I’ll tell you what, I gotta share this. So we lived in, we grew up in Wisconsin, moved out to Colorado and just moved back. But when we grew up in Wisconsin, I always [00:03:00] thought this seasonal depression thing was hokey.
Richard Matthews: Yeah.
Andy Neary: Then we moved out to Colorado and I realized like, no, I get it ’cause in Colorado, if it went more than three days without sun, people lost their minds.
Richard Matthews: Yeah. So like, as a Southern California kid, born and raised like it gets to 64 degrees and I’m like, I’m frozen because like my body freezes at 65.
Andy Neary: You don’t wanna come visit me right now.
Richard Matthews: I don’t wanna come Wisconsin, but we got like family in Illinois and in Iowa and we’re gonna go visit and be cold. I’m like, oh man. You realize the south exists, right? Like, you guys can move and that’s my joke. So before we get too far into this, I want to dive into your bio real quick and then we’ll start getting into your story.
So, Andy Neary is a former professional baseball player, two-time Ironman finisher, business coach and founder of Complete Game Consulting. Combining this building and talents he used to compete in professional baseball and Ironman Andy’s on a mission to help businesses and insurance professionals succeed in their careers and in life. He helps insurance professionals target the right audience at the right time. His programs help people cultivate the off-field habits, [00:04:00] mindset, and rituals that lead to all-star performances.
So, with that brief introduction, what I wanna start off with is what are you known for, right? What’s your business like? Who do you serve? What do you do for them?
Andy Neary: Great question. When people ask me, what do you do better than anybody else, Andy, I’d say our team specializes in helping producers build credibility with their prospects before they ever meet ’em. And that’s done because the way we prospect Richard, has changed. If you’re in sales, back in the day, it was all cold calls, cold email, door to door.
Richard Matthews: Absolutely.
Andy Neary: Well, nowadays there’s so many different channels you can use to get attention talking about online, social media, things like that podcast, right? We teach people how to use the modern forms of marketing to get attention from their prospects and get their prospects to build credibility with their prospects before they ever meet ’em.
Richard Matthews: Yeah. That’s wonderful. I know one of the things that I tell people all the time is that the information age died. YouTube and TikTok killed it. And you’re in the trust age now and what I tell people the trust age is this, the idea that in order for you to get a prospect, you have to build the know, like, and trust before they [00:05:00] become a lead.
Right? Not after they become a lead, which is last generation type marketing stuff. And the businesses that are actually taking advantage of that are seeing a lot of success. And so like in our business, we work with a lot of different industries. So, what’s interesting to me, and you might know where this is at since you work a lot with insurance professionals, is you have like categories of businesses that follow the marketing bell curve of innovation.
And so like your coaches and consultants and online agencies will be like at the front end of the technology. And then you’ll have like your service professionals who get into like lawyers and doctors and insurance agents. And then you’ll have like the back end of the bell curve, which is like construction then and electricians and plumbing and my light and like pest control companies that are like at the back end of the technology bell curve.
And so like the marketing thing now is like if you start getting into this content creation and building an audience and doing that kind of stuff now, and you’re in like the insurance industry space. You’re in the legal space, you’re probably one of the few in your industry. That are playing with these tools and doing that.
So it just gives you a humongous step up over the competition. And you see that?
Andy Neary: Yeah. I mean you talk about the bell [00:06:00] curve, Richard, if they’re, you know, late adopters are on one side of the bell curve when it comes to modern marketing. The insurance is definitely on the late adopter side. And I think part of the reason for that is if you look at our industry, the average age is still pushing 60 years old.
And so these are folks that were brought up selling in the 90s, sometimes even in the 80s. And what’s happened is everything has shifted the way we market, right? And 2020 fast forwarded everything.
Richard Matthews: Oh yeah.
Andy Neary: And I think a lot of people just haven’t caught up to what works. And here’s what’s happening in our industry is those folks that are 55, 60 years old, they’re at a place in their business where they don’t have to grow as much as they have to maintain what they already have.
And so you have all these young producers getting in the industry who grew up with social media, grew up with technology, but they’re being trained by people who are still teaching ’em to do it the way they did it in the 90s. And so there’s this huge gap right now to help producers how to learn how to win using the modern forms of marketing, and that’s the gap we’re trying to [00:07:00] serve.
Richard Matthews: Yeah. So what’s really fascinating there, and again, you probably understand this too, is your younger buyers, right? So you’re talking about your young producers, right? The ones who are actually making business happen, but the people that are buying from them you know, your millennial generation, your Gen Z, which is starting to come into their money-buying years, right?
Like right now just the first part of that generation is getting into their early 20s and whatnot. So like those two generations have grown up buying differently than Gen X or the baby boomer generation or the greatest generation. They all their buying habits are different and they do something that I have lovingly starting to refer to as a heartbeat check on businesses.
And so the what the heartbeat check is when they go to like hire someone, whether it’s a real estate agent or an insurance professional, or a pest control, it doesn’t matter what it is. What they’re gonna do is they’re gonna go to their favorite social media channel. And you may not know what that is, right?
It could be TikTok, it could be Facebook, it could be Instagram, it could be any one of these social media channels. And they’re gonna look you up and they’re gonna look for the heartbeat. And the heartbeat is when was the last time that you posted something relevant, right? And so if it like six months ago or two years ago, or you know, [00:08:00] you inconsistently publish stuff, they’re like, that business doesn’t have a heartbeat.
And they will pick the business that has a consistent heartbeat, even if it’s just a monthly heartbeat. Like the heartbeat is there. You exist, right? And so that’s what I’ve started referring to it as a heartbeat check ’cause the younger generations absolutely perform heartbeat checks. Whether or not they’re, that’s what they would call it.
But that’s what they do with businesses is they go and look. Are they?
Andy Neary: I love, sorry, I didn’t mean to cut you out there. I love the way you said that. I haven’t, I’ve never referred to it as a heartbeat check, but what we tell people is, are you searchable? Because nowadays what do people do? They Google you, right? And if somebody Google’s you, are you searchable? Am I gonna see a page one full of your content?
If I don’t, you lose credibility with me. And so I love that concept of the heartbeat ’cause that’s really what it’s almost like, do you have an online heartbeat?
Richard Matthews: Yeah.
Andy Neary: It is so important these days.
Richard Matthews: That’s the reason I like the heartbeat is ’cause it gets that consistency sort of like picture in people’s heads of like, hey, if it should be like, ideally you got something going up every day, right? As a millennial buyer, if [00:09:00] you’re comparing, you know, your pest control guy who’s posted once every in the last six months and then wanna once before that, and the guy who’s posting stuff on TikTok every day about the work that he is doing, who are you hiring, right?
Like you’re hiring the guy who’s posting content regularly, which is, you know, for better or worse, that’s just the way the market is moving. So you have to move that direction with your business if you want to win.
Andy Neary: Yeah, I agree. I was just listening to GaryVee clip a couple weeks ago, and he was talking about how he had coached a gentleman, I think the guy actually owns a business here in Wisconsin. Asphalt Paving. Asphalt Paving. And he told him that he needed to be on TikTok. And so the guy started creating TikTok videos for Asphalt Paving, and he doubled his business in one year.
Richard Matthews: That’s amazing, right? And that’s just one platform. Just one, right? There’s a lot of platforms where there’s a lot.
Andy Neary: A business like Asphalt Paving would say, there no way somebody’s gonna benefit from social media content if they run a business like Concrete or Asphalt. No, it works today [00:10:00] ’cause you have to have that heartbeat online.
Richard Matthews: You have to have that heartbeat. So that’s I think that’s a great place to start, just as you know, understanding what it is that you guys do. So you help insurance professionals understand how to do and how to build that. So what I want to get into next is your origin story, right? So every good comic, quick book hero has an origin story.
It’s the thing that made you into the hero you are today, and we wanna hear that story. Were you born a hero or were you bit by a radioactive spider that made you wanna help insurance agents with their online marketing? Where’d you start a job and eventually become an entrepreneur? Basically, where did you come from?
Andy Neary: I love that question because I’m actually gonna do a Ted talk about this, Richard. I think a lot of entrepreneurs think when they grow up that the people we all follow today, they all have this rag a riches story, or somehow they overcame some unbelievable odds to get to where they are. I had the most average childhood anybody could ever have.
I was raised by two great parents. I was literally the definition of middle income in this family or in this country. I was a little overweight as a kid, but everything about my childhood was average. I did not [00:11:00] have a hard childhood.
Richard Matthews: Yeah.
Andy Neary: But just because you had an average upbringing doesn’t mean you can’t go on to have big time success. And early on, you know where I came from. I struggled to get attention as a kid because I was an overweight kid, and so I was that kid who tried to just fit in anywhere I went because whenever I got attention, it was usually negative. You know, I talk about this in some of my keynotes. My biggest enemy in grade school was not the bully on the playground, it was the annual presidential fitness test because when you’re an overweight kid, you struggle with pull ups, push ups, sit and reach and climb the ropes, right?
And so as a kid, I just wanted to fit in and it was so easy to look fast because I never wanted attention, but there was always one place I was okay getting attention. And that was on the baseball field. I grew up in a baseball family. My dad played college baseball. He was the longtime high school baseball coach where I went to high school.
And so. I grew up having a pretty successful baseball career, which [00:12:00] led to playing college ball at University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee 30 miles east of where I live. And I had a good college career as well. It was up and down, but at the back end of the career I had a successful run, which gave me the opportunity to play sign a free agent contract with the Milwaukee Brewers, which was kind of cool ’cause they were the team. I grew up for a rooting when I a kid.
And so the, if you think about it from a superhero concept, this is where I went back to being the chunky kid again. I feel like it’s when Peter Parker goes back to being Peter Parker from Spider-Man. Because when I got to pro baseball, all those fears I had of not belonging came back.
When you’re a free agent who didn’t sign for much money, you’re playing with kids who sign for millions. It’s easy to have that feeling like you don’t belong. And I let all the fears of judgment comparison and failure get to me because when you’re a free agent, a bad day on the mound could easily be your [00:13:00] last day.
You’re easily cuttable. And so living in that fear, I think is what defined my pro baseball career. And it’s why I lasted only two years in pro baseball is because I did not reach my full potential, because I let those fears dominate who I was.
Richard Matthews: Yeah, that’s really fascinating. So how did you go from a pro baseball career to what you do now?
Andy Neary: Like everybody else. I found my way into this industry. I had a family friend who suggested I should try this thing called insurance, and I went to work for him. But shortly after he hired me, he had a heart attack and he had to retire. And at the same time, my sales manager at the same organization left.
So here I was twenty-two years old without a boss and a sales manager. And I’m like, okay, what am I gonna do here? I don’t wanna, I feel like I’m lost. And so I made a decision to really get into commercial and health insurance. And so I went to work for an organization called Federated [00:14:00] Insurance that had a great training program.
And that was twenty-two years ago, Richard. And here I am. I no longer sell insurance. I coach insurance producers, but it’s been a twenty-two year journey. But I’ll be honest, the first 10 years of my insurance career were just like my pro baseball career I just wanted to fit in. I had the fear of comparison, failure and judgment still kind of ruling my life, and I didn’t perform near to what I was capable of in this industry because of all those fears.
So, you know, when you tell the story of the hero, the journey the superhero, most of my early life and childhood were spent as I was not in my superhero cape, let’s just say that.
Richard Matthews: Yeah. Yeah. I have a similar story growing up. I grew up in, you know, the quintessential perfect American family. I had a mom and a dad, and they both were amazing and I still have great relationships with both of them. And like they were, you know, middle income, upper middle income as they grew into their careers you know, growing up.
And like, I didn’t struggle and, you know, for [00:15:00] anything really growing up. And I didn’t have like the rag to riches story, but, you know, I was the opposite. On the opposite of the spectrum. I wasn’t the overweight kid. I was the scrawny little kid who was like, you know, a full head shorter than everyone else and started puberty later than everyone else, and like would get teased and picked on and like, I had a roller backpack, which didn’t help at all in middle school.
And my only saving grace was I could do the pull-ups. Right, because I weighed nothing. I was, like 60 pounds to everyone else’s 120 pounds. So I could do pull-ups, you know, all day long. And so that was the only thing that kept me from getting teased on campuses, you know, well, I got teased all the way up until we did the test and they were like, oh, you can actually do pull-ups. Maybe we shouldn’t tease you as much. So,
Andy Neary: It elevated your status on the playground.
Richard Matthews: It elevated my status on the playground ’cause I could do some pull-ups, but that was like all I had going for me. So I was a nerdy kid who could do some pull-ups and, you know, I was really into writing and I got really good at creative writing and it’s how I got into storytelling and, you know, it’s kind of like now my business is all about storytelling now, but I was [00:16:00] the kid who, like, my history teacher in sixth grade when I turned into my first essay was like, I need to keep you after class.
I didn’t return, like, he passed all the papers out to everyone else but me. And he was like, I need to see you after class. And I freaked the F out because I was like, oh God I like, I’ve ruined it and I’m going to fail out of middle school. But he called me up after class and he was like, I didn’t give you your paper back because I didn’t want you to cry when I gave it to you. He is like, ’cause I graded you at a post high school level for your writing.
Andy Neary: Oh, what grade was this in?
Richard Matthews: Sixth grade he was like, your writing skills are significantly better where they should be at your age. And he is like, so it would be unfair of me to grade you at a sixth grade level because you would get nothing from it. And he was like, so I’m gonna grade your writing at a higher level and I’m gonna tear it apart for you because you could take it.
And I was like I still had a freak out moment. And then I, he had, he gave me a permission slip to do some coaching with him after class to like coach me on my writing ’cause he is like, I don’t usually see a lot of kids with writing talents. So,
Andy Neary: That’s awesome though. You know, you just made me realize though, Richard, I haven’t really thought about this a whole lot, but what we do with our business is a lot of storytelling. In [00:17:00] fact, I don’t know if you’ve read the book “Building a StoryBrand” but I’m a certified guide with Story Brand because of the whole storytelling concept.
But I, as a kid, I loved writing stories.
Richard Matthews: Yeah, yeah.
Andy Neary: I haven’t really thought about that until you said that. Now, I didn’t go on and do it a whole lot after high school, but I loved writing stories and I guarantee that’s had an impact on what we do today for sure.
Richard Matthews: yeah, Yeah. And I know, like for me, I had two teachers. I had my sixth grade teacher who did that with me and my 10th grade teacher at the same time. It was like when I turned in my first couple of writing pieces in 10th grade. And both of those teachers were skilled writers themselves.
And so when they saw my work come through, they were like, this guy could do some additional coaching for it. And so, and that’s, it has turned into, you know, that’s what my business is now. And I’ve actually I have gone back to my high school class and taught a class with my high school teacher, my 10th grade teacher, and like, Hey, the stuff that he’s teaching you has actually led to, you know, we run a, you know, a million dollar business, right? He is like, so,
Andy Neary: That’s awesome.
Richard Matthews: This stuff is valuable when applied the right way. So anyways, that’s, you know, part of my origin [00:18:00] story was getting into writing early because.
Andy Neary: And what they, as they say in sports game, recognizes games. So your teachers obviously saw something in you, which was cool.
Richard Matthews: Yeah, yeah. And so that’s where, you know, you went into to baseball, into marketing and whatnot. I went into writing a storytelling, but, you know, I was the nerdy kid who didn’t make a lot of friends and could do some pullups, but that was it. So, what I want to dive into next is your superpowers, right?
So every hero has their superpowers, whether that’s their fancy flying suit made by their 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 the course of your career.
And the superpower is what really what sets you apart. It allows you to help you people slay their villains, come on top of their journeys. The way I like to frame it for my guests is if you look at all the skills that you’ve developed over the course of building your business, you probably have a common thread that ties those skills together, and that’s where you would find your superpower.
So what do you think your superpower is in your current business?
Andy Neary: If you’re watching the, or listening to the audio, you can’t see behind me. But there [00:19:00] are three portraits behind me and they have three words on ’em. Consistency, persistency, and patience. Those are my super power, Richard. Consistency, which is the ability to show up every week and do the same thing every week after week. Persistency is to keep doing it after everybody quits. And then patience is knowing that this is a very long game and you have to enjoy the process if you’re gonna have success.
And I was not given any special skill. I was not given any special talent. And by the way, I did not have this as a kid. This was a learned skill over time, but I really started developing it late in college when I realized I had a chance to maybe play pro baseball. This consistency of putting in the work off the field when no one is watching is what’s gonna help me get to the next level. And I’d tell you if that, if there’s one thing right now that we leverage as our superpower here at Complete Game Consulting, it’s that consistency.
Richard Matthews: Yeah.
Andy Neary: Our ability to show up every week, create [00:20:00] content, put out what we need to do, run the process to grow our business. And that’s the advice I’d give any entrepreneur you wanna have success in business, be consistent.
Richard Matthews: Yeah, I don’t know if you see it on the video. I got chills. And the reason is because it’s politely simple, right? Because it sounds like it should be easy, but it’s the hardest thing in the world. And the story that pops into my head for that is my son was in gymnastics growing up ’cause grandma Isaiah was a professional gymnast. She was very good and.
Andy Neary: Oh wow.
Richard Matthews: Yeah. And to the point that like she’s just turned 60 the other day and I’m pretty sure she can still walk on her hands, like, and she’ll probably listen to this episode and call me out for telling people that she’s 60 years old. So I apologize in advance, mom. But congratulations and so she got our kids into gymnastics real early and I remember he was probably seven at the time, and one of his best friends in his gymnastics class had all the talent in the world, right?
Just incredibly skilled on the floor, right? Incredibly. It didn’t matter what it was, he was really good at it and he [00:21:00] could pick stuff up really fast, and it was just easy for him. And then my son was exactly the opposite. He didn’t have this talent. And it upset him that his friend who is the same age as him and had would show up and, you know, play around and not do all the things and then get better results than he did. Right?
And when he put in all the effort and practice at home and tried all this stuff and he just wasn’t as good as his friend that just had all the talent. And I was like, and one of the things I regularly told him and I was like, listen consistency beats talent every day, right? Hard work beats talent every day.
And I was like, because you can build yourself to the point where you can have the same level of skill as he does if he doesn’t put in the work, right? I was like, when you put talent and hard work together, that’s when you get Olympians. But I was like, but you can compete with someone who just has talent and doesn’t have the work ethic and not just compete.
You can destroy them over time. And I was like, that’s where like that first lesson for me was just like, it was a really tangible like lesson for my son and he is picked up on it a lot and, you know, he doesn’t do gymnastics anymore. He does some other things. He’s actually a [00:22:00] very talented fire spinner at this point. He’s one of the most talented fire spinners in his age category on the planet. Because he puts,
Andy Neary: That’s a hobby. That’s like a categorized hobby.
Richard Matthews: Yeah, he’s very good. So,
Andy Neary: Now I gotta ask. Now I’m intrigued. When you say fire spinners, I’m thinking of being at like a Hawaiian luau and they’re spinning the fire. Is that what we’re talking about?
Richard Matthews: Like legitimately, he takes balls of fire, lights them, like balls of like flaming things and lights ’em on fire and spins them around his body and dances to music with them.
Andy Neary: Wow.
Richard Matthews: And he started that at 9 years old. And he did several professional performances this last summer. He performed for two block parties and he performed for a wedding. Like he’s really good. So he took a lot of that consistency and the work he puts in the work every day. And he’s not a talented dancer. He’s not a talented mover. He doesn’t have, like, he doesn’t know how to get into that flow state and you, but you can tell like he has learned the skill of being consistent and putting in the effort.
And anytime he’s around someone who has the skills that are better than him, he is like, teach me what, you know, show me how you can do this ’cause he wants to be good at [00:23:00] it. And I’m starting to see him build talent in places where he didn’t have it, which is I don’t it, same kind of story. Anyways it all comes from those three things, consistency, persistency in patience.
Andy Neary: I’ll tell you what, man. If I’m building a team right now, we’re in full scale mode, and you give me somebody who is not all that talented right now, but has the drive and the discipline to show up every day. I’ll take that person over anybody with the skill. And the talent, but maybe a little complacent because they’re resting on their laurels, they’re resting on their talent, and we see that in the insurance industry all the time.
Everybody wants to go out and hire the best. Give me somebody who’s willing to put in the work off the field, even though they may not be the most talented. And that team will kick everybody’s butt any day of the week. And I have a special place in my heart for that because you can’t see me fully on camera here.
I’m five nine, I weigh 160 pounds. I was not the prototypical size for a pitcher. [00:24:00] My stats stature says I should have never pitched professionally. But because all the work I did off the field and did it consistently, that’s why I got a chance to play. And so I will always take a chance on somebody who may not be that talented, but is gonna show up and put in the work every day of the week.
Richard Matthews: Yeah. Yeah, I’m the same way. I was like, even when we hire for our staff I tell people, like I will take someone who has no skills, but is willing to show up and communicate well over someone who has the skills every day of the week. And so like our hiring process is designed around that, and that’s how we run it internally.
And then like for our clients, one of the you know, I told you before, and you know, my audience knows this. We run a podcast agency. And so all of our clients are they’re running podcasts to help grow their business. And we turn those into all their assets and everything.
And we have a series we have called “The 10 Commandments of Podcasting” and commandment number two is “Thou Shalt Be Consistent”, right? And it says ’cause because consistency over time is it compounds results. It’s if you’ve ever heard in the what I’m gonna money management world like when you’re investing and stuff like that, they say [00:25:00] money loves speed, but wealth loves time.
And what they’re talking about there is compound interest, right? So like, money likes to move cashflow is very, it likes to move quickly, but if you wanna build wealth, it’s consistency over time. And that happens, like it doesn’t just work in the financial world, it works anywhere. It works in skill development, it works in social media and content development.
All of that consistency over time gets you from like, it’s slow and it’s slow and slow until it’s fast, until it hockey sticks. And you know, we’ve seen that in our business, right? Where we were consistently put in the effort on our, podcast and our stuff for the first three or four years of our business.
And then last year, 2023, we eight and a half extra business in 12 months, right? Like.
Andy Neary: Wow good for you.
Richard Matthews: Right. It’s slow until it’s fast, but you have to put in the effort and those kind of things, and that’s, you know, it, that consistency and persistency in patience, man. If you could embody that into everyone that’s,
Andy Neary: And content you bring up such a good point about content and we see it all the time with our insurance producers. Takes something like video content. It makes me laugh how many [00:26:00] producers create a video or two, and then they tell me they’re not good at it.
Richard Matthews: Yeah.
Andy Neary: I’m like, okay, so lemme get this straight. You tried recording a video twice and you have made the determination that you’re not good. When you were a kid, there was a time you couldn’t learn, you couldn’t ride a bike, and then you could, there was a time when you didn’t know how to drive a car and then you did. And now today you could probably drive your car, look on your, even though you should look at your cell phone or eat your lunch.
You could probably do both at the same time. That’s video content. You gotta it’s about putting in the reps and you gotta do that consistently because if you put in the reps consistently, you’re gonna get good.
Richard Matthews: You are gonna get good. I tell one of the things that my kids and I, teach all the time is we talk about the, I call it the great suckitude, right? Whatever skill you have, to go through the great suckitude. And so we watch a lot of movies and TV shows and everything, and I always, you know, ’cause I’m a storyteller, I’m always picking apart the hero’s journey in the show.
And I, you know, I point all the things out to my kids and whatnot. So we use them for lessons and everything. And the other day we were watching a, it was an anime [00:27:00] series, and like, there’s a mage character who’s like learning magic. And he was struggling with the magic there. And I was like, kids, what is he doing right now?
And they all were, replied back because I got four of ’em. They’re all like, he’s going through the great suckitude. And I’m like, that’s right. The great suckitude. And so we celebrate that in our family. We celebrate the suckitude because that’s how you get good at anything, right? Is you have to go through putting in the reps and being bad at it because nobody just starts off being good at anything. Right?
Like you didn’t start off knowing how to talk, knowing how to walk, knowing how to put food in your mouth. But yet you do all those things now without even thinking about it. And so you have to go through that phase of the suckitude. Anyways. I appreciate that.
Andy Neary: And it, but that’s the moment of truth though, what you call a suckitude, that’s when, that’s what separates. The men from the boys, the women from the girls. When it sucks, are you willing to keep showing up?
Richard Matthews: Yeah.
Andy Neary: Are you willing to play the long game that, you know, if you just keep showing up and trust the process, it’s gonna get better. And I think that’s where a lot of people fall off. The Great [00:28:00] Examples podcast, right? We’re doing an episode right now. What did I hear? If you’ve done more than 10 podcasts, you’re in the top 1% or 5% or something of a podcast?
Richard Matthews: I can give you the stats on that.
Andy Neary: Ten?
Richard Matthews: Cause I run a podcasting company. I know those stats at the top of my head. So, if you have done more than 10 episodes you’re in the top 3% of podcasters. If you’ve done more than, so 3%, if you’ve done more than 50 episodes, you’re in the top 1%. And if you’ve passed a hundred episodes, you’re in the top one 10th of 1% of podcasters.
And those are numbered in the millions, by the way. So, getting past the 10th episode is a huge milestone that puts you in the top 3%. Like you’re a three percent, right? And ’cause most people aren’t willing to do the suck, dude. They’re not willing to be bad at it until you can get good at it.
Andy Neary: Well, and I’m gonna say something, and this might ruffle feathers, but I think because of who we are as a culture right now, Richard, if you can show up consistent, it is easier to win today than it’s ever been because so many people are willing to [00:29:00] give up so quickly.
Richard Matthews: Absolutely.
Andy Neary: If you can just show up consistently, you will separate yourself from everybody else. I see it. I have friends, I’ve been part of Masterminds for entrepreneurs. I watch these people over the years, and some of these people are onto their fifth different idea in three years because they’re chasing a quick dollar versus saying, no, even if this business doesn’t grow right now, I know what I’m here to do and I’m gonna stay the course.
And it’s because nobody wants to apply that patience to keep showing up every day and knowing the winds not coming tomorrow. It might not come from next year but you just have to keep showing up every day. So many people can’t do that.
Richard Matthews: Yeah, that’s like I wish I could give someone an easy button and be like, listen, just put in the time. But that whole chasing the dollar thing is it’s really interesting. And I wish I could have, I had a word to describe this, but you know, I love your three words there, this consistency, persistency, [00:30:00] patience ’cause like, that’s what I’ve seen in my business is I spent the first 10, 12 years of my business doing the chasing things, chasing offers, chasing different things that I could do, retrying to build my business so I could get there faster.
And when I realized, I was like, Nope, I just need to put in the reps and get really good at one thing. Right? And that’s where we started building the Push Button Podcast agency and really getting into the storytelling stuff several years ago. And it was like, we’re gonna do this every day and we’re gonna refine this process and we’re just gonna get better and better at this one thing.
To the point now that like when I get on sales calls with people, like it takes me two seconds to tell someone what our offer is, and they’re like, I want to give you my money. And I want to refer business to you, right? Like, ’cause we’ve just, we’ve put in the reps, we’ve gotten good at but we didn’t start there, right?
Like we didn’t start being good at it. And you don’t get good at something until you have the thing that you’re going to put in the reps in over and over and over and over again. And that willingness to put in the consistency and the persistency over the long term, that’s the patience. And then, you know, that’s how you get to the point where you can eight and a half x your business in a year. Right? That doesn’t happen to on accident.
Andy Neary: [00:31:00] Yeah I’ve been listening to a lot of Alex Hormozi lately, which is a lot of entrepreneurs probably know that name, and he’s become a very popular individual. Yep. I’ve got my a hundred million leads on the shelf too. And he said, you know, he talks about playing the Infinite Game, and Simon Sinek wrote a book about that.
Right. And when I heard Alex say it, it just really hit home for me, which is, there’s a big difference between an a finite game and an infinite game. Finite game has rules. It has players, it has a beginning and an end, and a score, and the score tells you who won or lost. An infinite game doesn’t have that. The only rule of the infinite game is to keep the game going. And I think that’s where a lot of entrepreneurs screw up is they get into the business with a finish line already in mind. Instead, if they would imply a infinite mindset of, my only job is to keep the game going, enjoy the process while I keep the game going, so many more entrepreneurs would successful.
Richard Matthews: Oh man. That’s one of my favorite things, and I tell this to my kids, I tell this to everyone I meet. It’s like my one message that if I could get across people, like I wish people would just understand it, and I don’t [00:32:00] know how to get people understand it yet. So maybe just more repeating of this. This stuff is like the only business is the only game that you can play where you can never lose if you just don’t give up. Right?
If you just keep going, you will win at some point. Like, that’s not the way other games are played, but that is the way business is played. And Alex actually, if you are listening to this and you haven’t picked up this book, it’s worth every cent of the $9 he charges you for this book. It’s only the last chapter in the book where he talks about that dice metaphor about playing that dice game ’cause that’s the metaphor he uses where he talks about, it’s like, Hey, you know, you don’t know how many sides your dice is. Right?
And, you know, someone else might have another one. And they get there faster by rolling, you know, they’ve only got 20 sided dice and it turns green on every one of ’em. And yours might be a hundred sided dice, but if you keep rolling it, eventually you will turn all the sides green. Right? And that’s like, that’s just the way this game works. And yeah I’m a huge fan.
Andy Neary: Well, and I, you know, I hope my mezzos resonates with people because I think on the whole word entrepreneur too, right? It’s become [00:33:00] a lot cooler these days than it used to be. And so you got a lot of kids coming outta college that wanna be entrepreneurs. We didn’t have a lot of kids back in I graduated from college in 2000.
Entrepreneurism wasn’t as big back then, but I’m a story of somebody, Richard. I didn’t grow up with the entrepreneur mindset. Both of my parents were teachers. I was raised in a family that preached safety, you know, get a job, put food on the table, have a retirement plan. And it took me 41 years to finally go out on my own and try this thing called entrepreneurship.
So anybody who’s listening that maybe is asking themselves if they have what it takes took me forty-one years to figure it out. It’s never too late.
Richard Matthews: Yeah, it’s never too late. I was a little bit the opposite. My parents were also employees. And so we didn’t have a lot of the business stuff going on, but for reasons unknown to me, my dad brought me home a copy of “Rich Dad Poor Dad” book when I was like 11 years old.
Andy Neary: I wish I would’ve had that then. Yes.
Richard Matthews: And so he put that book in my hands and I read it like six [00:34:00] times in a row, like over the course of a couple of days. And I was like, this is different. And I want to know, like everything there is to know here. And I convinced my parents in when I was like 13, I don’t remember what grade that is, but somewhere like between middle school and high school that I didn’t need to go to after school care anymore.
And what I would like to do instead was get dropped off at Barnes and Noble so I could read all the books I couldn’t afford to buy. And they let me do it. And so I used, back in the day when Barnes and Noble used to have like chairs, I would go over and sitting in the business marketing and leadership section and just grab a stack of books and just read them for cover to cover every single day.
And I remember at least a couple of times a couple of like, people that are my age now, it’d be like, what are you doing? And I’m like, I’m reading books that I can’t afford. And they’re like, that’s crazy. And I’m like, might be, but you know, it was just, it was what I did. So I got the,
Andy Neary: Yeah, but I gotta tell you, man, I love those stories, right? Like, you go and you at that age to have the what’s the word I’m looking for? The presence or the perspective that I’m gonna go to Barnes and Noble and essentially use it as my library. You know, like I, [00:35:00] again, I follow, I’m a big follower of Gary Vaynerchuk. Gary Vee he, how you used to talk about it being a kid, he loved spending time figuring out where he was gonna put his lemonade stand signs because he wanted to figure out where he could get the most attention.
And that’s where his marketing mindset started. Like kids like that, who had that kind of perspective at that young age. I love those stories hearing you at age 13, to have the cojones be like, I don’t wanna go to after school. I wanna go to Barnes and Noble and read, like no kid at that age had that mindset. And it’s not a surprise you’re having, it’s not a surprise. You’re successful.
Richard Matthews: Yeah, it didn’t help with the teasing on campus, but it did help with growing. It did help with growing my business later in life. And actually if I have my high school yearbook somewhere in, you know, collecting dust somewhere, and it did say on, you know, they put the, you know, most likely to, you know, likely live in your parents’ basement or whatever it was. Mine was most likely to be in Millionaire. And I’m like, I haven’t reached that yet, but.
Andy Neary: Oh, there you go. That’s awesome.
Richard Matthews: My [00:36:00] friends.
Andy Neary: I didn’t know, I know better back then, but that is something I would’ve loved to win in high school.
Richard Matthews: Yeah. My so all that’s just to say my friends recognized that I was nuts early on. So, that was you know, I was one of those kids that like I convinced my dad to give me a loan for first stuff. I was like, can you gimme 50 bucks? I’ll pay you back 10% interest, which is like, I don’t know, was like 55 bucks back.
And take me to the big box store, which was smart and final. If those are, I dunno if those are everywhere, but it’s like a miniature Costco. And so, we got to buy, I got buy all the big chocolate bars, like the big fat ones that you can’t get on campus. And I stuffed my backpack full of them, didn’t have room for my schoolwork, wasn’t gonna bring my schoolwork with me.
And I sold them on campus for uh, you know, I was making like bucks a pop on ’em. And I made about, made about 1500 bucks before I got I tell people I had my first government shut down because they told me I couldn’t sell on campus without a business license. And I was too young to get a business license, so I was no longer allowed to sell on campus.
But I made some money first. And I also got my first real lesson in business, which was the difference between. Profit and like your [00:37:00] revenue because I remember like I had $50 and I owed my dad 55 for the loan that he gave me. And I sold my candy and I had a hundred dollars then. So I had to pay my dad back 55 and then I had $45 left that I had to go back to the store and buy more candy with, in order to continue the business. And I was like, I am actually like $5 short. Like I’m minus $5. I was like, I don’t know how this worked. And I had to go back to Barnes Noble and start looking up the profit and margin and all that stuff so I could actually understand what was happening here.
And then,
Andy Neary: Time to raise your prices.
Richard Matthews: Yeah, so anyways, that was my first couple of lessons there.
Andy Neary: That’s such a cool story. I thank for sharing that, that I love those stories ’cause again, growing up as a kid who didn’t have, wasn’t surrounded by people who had an entrepreneurial mindset like that. Now yours sounds like it just came naturally, which is phenomenal. But I have a lot of kids I grew up with that had that, and I kind of in some ways I’m jealous of that because those are the people who have gone on and probably have had a lot longer success than [00:38:00] I’ve had because they’ve had that mindset surrounding them their whole life.
Richard Matthews: Yeah. So the reason I tell the story actually is for our audience, just to give like a juxtaposition ’cause I also didn’t have the entrepreneur people around me, so I had to go and find them. And for me, I found them in books, right? Like, that’s where I was finding them. And that’s like, it’s just an encouragement that like, hey, if you don’t have those voices around you, they exist.
Right? Whether it’s Barnes, Noble, or the library, or nowadays podcasts and YouTube and stuff like this, subscribe to a show like this one, or, I imagine your show is very similar, right? To pick up these mindsets and learn from people who are who can teach you the uh, what the journey looks like.
Andy Neary: Absolutely no, my first mentor, you know, I’ll tell you, I wasn’t really into professional development, personal development, Richard, until we moved to Colorado. So Amy and I both grew up here in Wisconsin 2014 we moved to Colorado and for whatever reason I started searching for mentors. And I think what people don’t understand is a lot of the mentors you have in life are people you’ve never met, right?
The people you read about in [00:39:00] books. And I bought a course from Darren Hardy, I dunno if you know who Darren Hardy is but he is a leadership thought leadership expert. And I just remember I bought a course for of his, for like $900 and it was how it was called Insane Productivity. So it was how to get more done every single week, you know, with time blocking and owning your calendar and things like that.
And that’s where that journey started, where I was like, wow, if I just take the time to spend. Every week getting better at something. Where am I gonna be 5 or 10 years from now? But it didn’t happen until I found myself in a place where I was kind of starting over in Colorado and I was seeking those mentors to help me. And that’s really where my personal development journey began.
Richard Matthews: Yeah.
Andy Neary: And it hasn’t slowed down since. And I think if there’s one thing I can owe to me sitting here at age 46, with my own business successfully growing, it’s because of that journey that started 10 years ago.
Richard Matthews: Yeah. For me, know, if you get into the [00:40:00] personal development leadership world in the books and everything, you sort of learn that early on. And the obsession that it started for me and then I’ve, had this for years is the collection of skills, right? The way, like collecting skills, the way other people collect stamps or coins, right?
And the reason it stuck, and I was, I couldn’t always have told you it in this language, this is more recent language in my life, but the idea that if you’re not growing, you are dying. Like a shark, if a shark’s not swimming, they die. Like they have to be in constant motion, right? You know, or a fruit on a tree. Like it’s either ripening or it’s rotting, right? And so you either are growing or you’re dying, and that’s really your only options. And so for me, it sort of started this lifelong obsession with picking up new skills. And so I’m constantly, like, I’ve got the stuff that I’m learning in my business, but I always have something else that I’m working on learning.
Like at the current moment in time, I’m learning piano and I’m learning to juggle. And those two things go together. By the way, I started learning piano and realized I couldn’t get my left hand to work. So I started learning to juggle, which has really helped with the left hand part. And so it’s like
Andy Neary: That’s awesome.
Richard Matthews: Learning piano, learning to juggle. But [00:41:00] like over the last couple of years it’s been like I learned to draw, I learned to do calligraphy. I learned how to do carpentry, and I learned to do plumbing and I learned to do electrical and I learned to do cabinetry work. And my son and I are learning to windsurf, we’re doing martial arts, and it’s like, it’s what?
It’s not even the idea that I want to be, become a master at any of these areas. It’s just constantly working that brain pathway of learning how to learn, right? Learning how to learn things. And then you get to a point now and I’ve been passing the skill onto my son is like, you can pick up skills really fast.
And like to the point that it blows other people away. They’re like, how do you pick up skills like that? I’m like, because the skill that I work on the most is the skill of learning how to learn. And like if I could pass anything on to someone and be like, Hey, if you want a superpower in life that you can develop like that, you can just create for yourself, learn how to learn.
Andy Neary: Yeah, I, what you just said resonated with me on such a high level because right now one of the skills, so I use a planner every week. I absolutely love called Clever Fox. So if you’re watching the video, it looks like [00:42:00] this. So this is my calendar’s in here. And one thing I love about this is every month it asks you to try a new skill.
It says what skill are you gonna learn or improve upon? And right now, Richard, I’m in the season of practicing to become a better golfer. I have a lot of friends who are really good golfers and I’m sick of playing with them and getting my buck kicked and donating money ’cause we always had to play for money and I never win.
So I said, I’m gonna put the time in to get better and get the instruction. But what you just said, the part I love about the most is we have a indoor simulator, two minutes from our house. I love going over there and practicing one shot a hundred times in a row.
Richard Matthews: Yeah.
Andy Neary: Same shot. One over and over and over. And that process of getting better, the process of learning is where the success is. And we actually have a rule in our company, you’ll love this. I make our employees pick one mental and or physical challenge every single quarter they have to partake in.
Richard Matthews: Nice.
Andy Neary: And what that [00:43:00] has done is that has, I have an employee who did the 75 hard to get in shape and she Frickin loves it. Now she’s in shape working out twice a day. The same employee picked up painting by learning how to do it on YouTube. She’s posting her paintings on LinkedIn right now. They’re phenomenal. I have another employee who decided to just go get her pilot’s license it. It’s like, it is been so cool to see the growth that comes out of this by just saying, Hey, every quarter I want you to challenge yourself physically or mentally.
Richard Matthews: Just pick something and do it.
Andy Neary: You’re gonna constantly get better if you do.
Richard Matthews: Yeah. Yeah. That is absolutely true, and it’s one of the things that, like I said, it’s. I’ve been doing it for a long time, but I’ve only recently started to realize that it’s a differentiator, in between people who stagnate and people who continue to thrive. Right? And you can see it consistently in every category of life, the people who like you don’t have to go off the, you know, like as you age, you don’t have to get worse.
You don’t have to get older, you don’t [00:44:00] have to get, you know, soft. Right? You don’t have to, you know, there’s all sorts of things that, like, we become complacent. And a lot of times it seems to happen in that, you know, early 30s, early 40s timeframe where people start getting into that midlife stuff and like midlife crisis is happened to people who stopped.
Andy Neary: Yep.
Richard Matthews: Right. If you talk to people who are constantly learning and picking up skills and challenging themselves, they don’t have midlife crisis is because they’re living life. Right? And so the thing that has like the most recent sort of like light bulb moment for me. Has been how that ties back into storytelling.
And so, you know, because our business is all about storytelling, I’m always looking for ways that, that story, you know that ties into storytelling. And so your business doesn’t really matter what it is. You are in the attention business, right? And the attention business is like, it doesn’t matter what you do. You could do insurance, you could be doing pest control, you could be, you know, asphalt doing stuff. You’re in the attention business and the business that, what that means is you have to be able to get people’s attention. And storytelling is the baseline of like [00:45:00] human communication. And that’s how we collect attention and distribute attention is with storytelling.
And so for me, one of the things I’ve realized is that the collection of skills means that you are constantly putting yourself into new places, right? And doing new things. And trying new things. Whether it’s, you know, if you want to have a good story to tell. You have to live a good story, right? You have to have good food, you have to have good experiences, you have to have good friends, you have to have good sex, you have to do all of these things.
You have to actually live life. And when you do that, those things form the foundation of your ability to tell a story, right? And the more you live, the better your story you can tell. And that will absolutely impact the bottom line of your business. If you learn to tell stories about your business and your life and how your life and business fit together.
Andy Neary: Yeah, I agree. I mean, I think a lot of people overthink marketing. They get so wrapped up in the metrics of marketing, which are very important. But what we forget too often is the message. You know, in our industry when we work with insurance teams, one of [00:46:00] our, you know, most important lessons we teach ’em is guys, just as much as you wanna tell your story, you have to tell your prospect story, right?
If you wanna get their attention, you have to be able to tell a story they can put themselves into, and I really believe a good marketing message, which is storytelling, comes down to answering three questions. Who are you talking to? What are you saying, and where are you saying it?
Richard Matthews: Yeah.
Andy Neary: If you get clear on those three things, who are you talking to? What are you saying and where are you saying it? You’re gonna have effective marketing as long as you take the time to sit down and really understand who your prospect is.
Richard Matthews: Yeah.
Andy Neary: You build, to your point, the storytelling, you build a good story that draws them in. You’re gonna be effective with your marketing. And I see too many agencies in the insurance industry want to go right to the metrics or go to the looks of marketing and they skip the message, and that’s why they’re wasting money on marketing. I start with the message the storytelling marketing will take care itself.
Richard Matthews: Marketing will take care of herself. I think it’s a great type, sort of like transition point to flip into the next question [00:47:00] here, right? So we talked about, we talked for a while actually, about superpowers, consistency, persistency, patience. The flip side of every superpower is of course the fatal flaw, right?
So just like every Superman has his kryptonite or wonder woman can’t remove her bracelets of victory without going mad, you’ve probably had a flaw that’s held you back in your business, something you struggled with. For me, it was a couple of things. I struggled with perfectionism for a long time where I was like, if it wasn’t perfect, I wouldn’t ship it, which means I was shipping nothing ’cause nothing’s perfect.
And the other one I struggled with for a long time was lack of self-care, which really brought it self out and not having a good relationship with time, not having good boundaries with my clients and stuff like that. And you know, there was probably another one too is being a visionary but lacking the discipline to implement, right?
Like I had a lot of those things I had to work on fixing them. So, but I think more important than what is the flaw is how have you worked to overcome it? So our audience might learn a little bit from your experience there.
Andy Neary: Yeah, I, there’s two that stand out. Number one, I am a natural born people pleaser.
Richard Matthews: Yeah.
Andy Neary: And that can lead you to saying yes to things you shouldn’t. It can make it easy for people to put themselves and their priorities on your [00:48:00] calendar, and it can have you chasing opportunities you shouldn’t be. And by the way, avoiding tough conversations with people. And so that’s one that I’ve had to really overcome is learning how to say no more and learning how to have candid conversations with people and know that it’s not personal, it’s just business.And I think though that’s one that I’ve definitely worked on hard, that I’m getting better. I’m still a work in progress, but I’m getting better.
And then the second one would be, I kind of tie this to being an athlete. It’s tying my self-worth into the results I create. I think that’s a trap a lot of athletes get themselves into as they tie their worth into the result they create. And so they’re in this up and down. Like when I was a pitcher, if I was four in one with a 2.0 ERAI was awesome. If I was one in four with a 4.5 ERA, I sucked.
And I think it’s easy to get caught in that tying your results to your self-worth when you have to learn that you are not your results. If you just follow the process, no matter [00:49:00] what happens with the results, it does not mean you are a failure. It just means the plan failed, tweak it, change it, try something else. And I think that’s another area I’ve had to work on really hard because you fail all the time as an entrepreneur.
Richard Matthews: Yeah.
Andy Neary: Just knowing that failure has nothing to do with who you are. It’s just your plan fail. Figure out a new plan and try something else.
Richard Matthews: That’s a hard lesson. And I’m still working on that myself. I have a thing, or in Woodward, Chris Brady, they wrote a book called “The Launching, a Leadership Revolution”. They talk about this concept called plan, do, check and adjust. And which I, which has been sort of like how I’ve worked through that whole, like not tying my self-worth to my results ’cause you know, as an entrepreneur, you’ve lots of failing, right? It’s, you know, a failures for one win and the one win makes for all the losses kind of thing. That’s the game playing. And so you have to know that and realize that, like, that’s where you know, we work on celebrating our failures, right? And celebrating our, you know, the solitude.
And so like, we do that, like even at the dinner table with our kids, we, you know, at the end of the week we do like, Hey, what was your biggest failure this week? And we celebrate it, right? Things like that. And realize that, like, that’s a mindset that you have to [00:50:00] cultivate. And for a lot of us, we didn’t grow up with that. So like, it’s a mindset you have to cultivate for yourself. The other side of that though, I actually find more interesting real quick repeat. The your first flaw that you talked about.
Andy Neary: People-pleasing.
Richard Matthews: Yeah. So people-pleasing aspect is I think it’s really interesting to me because we get into that people-pleasing mind a lot for our business. And one of the things that like a huge lifeful moment for me was is that you have to learn say no before you learn how to say yes. Right? And we get into the trap as entrepreneurs learning how to say yes first without first knowing how to say no. And I don’t have a well thought out like answer for this yet, but like, I’ve got my work in progress sort of like idea here is it for me, it was learning in my business what to say no to that allowed me to have massive growth.
And so [00:51:00] the, for me it was learning how to say no to like everything else from an offer standpoint is like, Hey, we offer this thing and if it doesn’t fit into this world, it’s a no. Right? So it’s like learning to say no to the offers was the first one ’cause as entrepreneurs a lot of times we’re like, Hey, we can offer this and we can offer this, we can offer the other thing.
And you realize that, like, that comes down to that dollar chasing things. Like, Hey, if I offer, if I say yes to this, I can add more dollars to the bottom line. And then, you know, you go back to that patience, consistency, persistency, that kind of stuff. If you’ll just say no, learn to say no to all the things that are outside of your offer, right?
Then eventually it will grow. Like that’s the kind of thing there. And then the other there. So there’s saying yes or no to the right offers, and then saying no to the right people. And so it’s like offers people and then probably your message and like learning how to say no to all those things. What that does is it unlocks your ability to say yes. Right? And that’s what, or I think people miss the mark on that, is they say yes to things without first learning to say no. And so for me, when we sort of realized, when I realized what we should be saying no to, it opened the doors to all the [00:52:00] things we could say yes to.
And so like in early in 2023, I was like, we know exactly what we’re doing in all these categories. And so I could one of my business associates, his friend of mine, he’s the marketing director for the Pokemon companies responsible for like $8 billion of revenue on their bottom line over the last few years. And so like when he says, do things, I listen. And one of the things he said to me is like, once you learn to say no, he’s like, the next goal is say yes until it hurts, and then fix the pain.
And so like we did that all last year and it was like we started saying yes to things like cold marketing and started saying yes to affiliate outreach stuff. And we started saying yes to stages and we started saying yes to like all sorts of things that we could say yes to that fit in our lane. And it caused pain, obviously. Like you can’t, you know, it was say yes till it hurts, was the goal that I was going for. And so we did that. And then you start working on how to fix the pain that’s saying yes creates, but now you’re saying yes in the right categories, you’re saying yes to the things that are actually gonna grow your business.
And it’s such an ethereal skill because you can’t just say, Hey, these are the things you need to say yes and no to. You have to like learn for yourself how to set up learning to say no, because that’s what’s gonna allow you to say yes [00:53:00] and grow. So I know that’s convoluted, but that’s.
Andy Neary: No, it’s you got me thinking because we just had that moment in the fourth quarter. You know, I think back when Steve Jobs came back to Apple. At the time he came back, I wanna say they offered something like 300 products he came back and he said Scrap it. We’re narrowing it down to four. And that’s when they came out with the iPad, iPod, the iMac and then the iPhone and the rest is history.
We just had that moment in our business in Q4 where we were probably offering a lot of different things, but then we got really clear that, you know what, we only offer four things. We don’t do anything else. Everything else is a no.
Richard Matthews: Yeah.
Andy Neary: And if what we are engaging in doesn’t help us grow our business in one of those four buckets or buy back our time, it’s a no.
Richard Matthews: Yeah. You learn to say no.
Andy Neary: And once we got there, Richard, man, it’s been a fast ride of growth since then because it hurt ’cause I’m a guy who [00:54:00] likes to say yes. But yeah, once you’re, once it gets a lot more comfortable to say no your growth of your business will pick quickly, pick up.
Richard Matthews: So the, since you know, I’m only a few quarters ahead of you on that whole journey of learning to say, you know, no to all the right things is once you say no, and you know what you’re saying no, to just open yourself to saying yes to everything that fits, right? Like if it fits, say yes to it. And then figure out how to make it happen afterwards.
Right. And that was, it was one of the things like, you know, I guess my business associate a who told me that he was like, he is like, if you want massive growth, say yes till it hurts, right? But you can’t say yes you learn to say no. So like now that you’ve mastered what you’re saying no to that opens that door to say yes to a whole bunch of things and.
Andy Neary: Case in point, man. I’ll just say it. Live on this show. You and I talked offline before this episode started and I told you exactly what we’re doing today. Your service that you guys offer is exactly what we’re looking for, and that’s the being open to yes. [00:55:00] That conversation would’ve never happened had I not said yes to getting on this podcast. Right? And so to your point, if it fits the lane or lanes of where you’re trying to go, say yes as often as you can, but everything else should be a no.
Richard Matthews: Everything else would be a no. And it’s, you know, in the world of talking about superpowers, that’s one of those things, it’s another superpower you can develop, right? You can develop the ability to say no. And then once you’ve developed the ability to say no, it gives you the ability to say yes and saying yes to the right things is really what skyrockets growth.
Andy Neary: A hundred percent. That’s a great way of saying it. Say yes to the right things. Sounds pretty simple a lot harder to implement.
Richard Matthews: It’s hard to implement. Like I spent a good, I don’t know, 20 years in my business saying yes to all the wrong things because I started with saying yes and not with saying no. So you know, I learned that, you know, that one of my favorite things is you know, lesson repeated until lesson learned, I spent a lot of time. Repeating that lesson until it sunk in.
Andy Neary: Well, it’s just like a lot of people spend [00:56:00] 10 years repeating year one of their career, right? A lot of people who believe they should be promoted and get bonuses and pay raises. ’cause I’ve, they’ve been doing things for a certain amount of time. But if you’ve just repeated the same thing over and over, you’ve repeated year one over and over again.
You really haven’t gotten any better. And I think you’re, the point you’re making is, especially in the world of entrepreneurism, you’re gonna fail. And the more you are okay with failing and let it to, and let and learn from it, the faster you’re gonna grow.
Richard Matthews: Yeah, absolutely. That is exactly what I’m saying. So.
Andy Neary: It’s that valley of sucktitude, you call it.
Richard Matthews: Yeah the great suckitude. So I got a couple more questions for here. I’ll talk about, about your common enemy, right? So every superhero has an arch nemesis, right? And it’s the thing that they constantly have to fight against in their world.
In the world of business, we put takes on a lot of forms, but generally speaking for this show, we put in the context of your clients. And it’s a mindset or a flaw that they come to you with, that you constantly have to fight to overcome so that you can actually get them the result that they came to you for in the first place.
So, in the world of helping your producers actually [00:57:00] produce, what is the common enemy that you regularly have to fight against?
Andy Neary: It’s one thing that leads to the other. It’s a lack of clarity. And without clarity, they’re not confident and without confidence they’re not consistent. And the real culprit, the real enemy in our industry is outdated training. A lot of people come in our industry wide-eyed, bright-eyed, ready to go, but they’re kind of left out on their own to figure it out how to win or they’re given training that’s 30, 40 years old. And what happens is they quickly become burnt out, dejected. They’re driven, but they’re dejected. And the second they lose clarity, they lose confidence. The second they lose confidence, they lose consistency. And right now, the reason they’re not winning is they’re just not consistent.
They don’t have a weekly plan. They can execute to have success. And so what we’re bringing them, Richard, is modern marketing. A modern marketing plan to go out and build credibility with prospects so they can walk in the doors of prospects with credibility and trust build. And when they have that clarity, they will be confident. And when they have the confidence, they’ll be consistent. One breeds off the other.
Richard Matthews: Yeah. [00:58:00] So I wanna say something that is, that you said below the surface, but didn’t come out in your words, and I wanna see if this is true. But one of the things that I hear in what you’re saying is that the, one of the keys to being consistent is having a set of actions that you can take and not a set of results that you’re looking for.
Right? And so, like, I know in the insurance world this is probably one of those outdated rules, but it’s like, are you making your 20 calls a day? Right. Like, and you can control the 20, making 20 calls. You can’t control what’s gonna happen on those calls. That’s the result. You don’t get to control the result. You get to control the input.
So you have to be able to consistently put in the things that you can do. Right? You have to, you know, for us it’s show up on our podcast every week, right? Like that consistently of doing that work is what leads to the results. And so to your point they get the dejection happens because they’re not getting the result because they’re trying to focus on controlling the results. And you can’t control the result. You can only control the input.
Andy Neary: totally agree. You know, in our industry, a producer will be given a goal of, Hey, you need to go out and sell $150,000 this year. There really won’t be [00:59:00] a plan of action to help ’em get there. So they’ll set a plan, like you just said, I’m gonna make 20 calls a day every three times a week.
Richard Matthews: Yeah.
Andy Neary: Cool. Now, you could call that a more traditional form of prospecting, but hey, cold calling is still part of the game plan. But here’s what separates the winners and the losers. A loser, and I used the word to describe somebody who’s not winning. It’s not about their self-worth a loser is somebody who’ll just pick up the phone 20 times a day and not figure out why it’s not working. They won’t try to get better. They’re literally just trying to check, make 20 check marks a day.
A winner’s gonna go. Okay. I went, oh, for 20 today. What can I do tomorrow to improve my message? Where can I go study about cold calling to get better? And how can I come back tomorrow a better cold caller than I was today? And even if I don’t have more success tomorrow than I had today, I’m willing to show up the next day and the day after that because I know if I put the reps in, I’m gonna get better. That’s what separates people.
Richard Matthews: Yeah, So as, a real world example I do, I still do all the sales [01:00:00] calls for our company and I record every single one of them. And I have currently, one of the things that I have my personal assistant doing is they’re going through all of our call recordings and they’re pulling out the all the pitches and as little individual like clips.
And we’re gonna have like a whole training library of like, Hey, here’s the picture, the work, here’s didn’t, right? And we’re doing the same thing with like the questions our clients ask us or potential clients ask us, we’re gonna turn ’em into a whole FAQ library. So we’re like, we’re reviewing the work that we’re doing and looking at how do we make this message better? How do we make it connect better? How do we shorten it and be more brief with what we’re saying?
And you use those reps to practice, right? And on your, you know, every time you get on your pitch you can adjust something, you can change a little bit, see how it works, right? Because every time you get on the phone, you get an opportunity to try again and to be a little better this time than you were last time. And that’s how you get better, is you put in the reps and, you know, apply the persistency, I guess to trying to get better.
Andy Neary: 100%
Richard Matthews: So, I only got a couple more questions for you. Next one is your driving force, right? The flip side of your [01:01:00] common enemy, right? Common enemy is what you fight against. Your driving force is what you fight for.
So just like you know, Batman fights to save Gotham or Spider-Man fights to save New York or Google fights to index and categorize all the world’s information. What is it that you’re fighting for with your business? What’s your mission, so to speak.
Andy Neary: Yeah. We have two north stars we apply, that drives us every week. Number one, we create our content. Our goal with our content, Richard, is to help 25,000 insurance producers sell their first $250,000. So if you go look at our content on social media, it’s really geared for those early stage insurance producers who are just trying to sell their first 250,000.
We’ve built a membership site, which has become one of our main revenue streams, and the whole mission with the membership site is to help a thousand producers get to a million bucks. So we apply this approach where content, it’s free, right? Free content to help you sell your first 250, our membership sites, to get you to a million bucks and then at a million bucks.
That’s where we often work with people. One-on-one, and so we apply that rule to how we do business. That’s our mission. I see a [01:02:00] big gap right now in this industry because a lot of producers are sold the dream to make a lot of money and have a lot of schedule flexibility, but no one is helping ’em actually learn how to do it.
And so when I saw that gap and I knew I had a gift with coaching, I said, we’re gonna fill that gap and we’re gonna give ’em the training and modern training, especially to teach them how to win today. If the industry doesn’t wanna do it, we’ll do it for ’em. And we have seen that gap. We feel proud, we feel we’re filling that gap.
And I know it’s creating a lot of excitement in the insurance industry ’cause when we work with people, we get a lot of feedback that this is very different than what they’re used to and that’s what I love to hear.
Richard Matthews: That’s awesome. Yeah. I we feel the same way, right? A lot of the, you know, people who come and work with us, we obviously we’re in very different spaces, but like that message at the end of the day, like, this solves a problem that I had. Like, that’s what we’re going for. And so I love that.
The hero show will be right back.
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And now back to the Hero show.
Richard Matthews: So for my audience who’s watches us regularly, I’m gonna skip a couple of our regular questions ’cause we’re getting long in our conversation here. But I have one more question I wanna ask you. And it’s your guiding principles, right? One of the things that makes heroes heroic is that they live by a code where since Batman never kills his enemies, he only ever brings ’em to Arkham Asylum.
So as we wrap up the interview, I wanna talk about the top one, maybe two principles that you live your life by, run your business by. Maybe something you wish you’d known as you when you started your career, your life, you know, all those years ago.
Andy Neary: I would say the number one principle I live by is just practice what you preach. It really ruffles my feathers when I see a somebody out pontificating and they’re, selling a certain concept or belief to grow business, but you know, they [01:05:00] don’t practice what they’re selling. And as a coach, I think you can get exposed really quickly if you’re doing it that way. And so one of the pillars I live by is I will never talk about something I haven’t done. And so everything we coach, I tell you one of the proudest things I’m proud of with running our business is everything we coach, we still do.
And so that is probably the biggest guiding principle for me is whatever I’m gonna teach you to do, I want you to have the trust. I’m actually still doing it and getting better at it myself.
Richard Matthews: Yeah. That’s wonderful. Right? We don’t offer a coaching business, but we run the same kind of thing. I, for whatever reason we’re in the service space. Our businesses, our clients always ask us for like, you know, their our,
our,
uh.
expertise in different areas. So we end up doing coaching regardless, even though that’s not what people pay us for.
And so like I, same way, right? You know, the Alex Hermosy book, “A $100M Dollar Leads”, he talks about the four categories you’d be running leads in. And so like we talk about the same thing, right? We have our four categories that we’re running leads in. We don’t use the same ones that Alex does I call ’em buy, borrow, build, and blitz, right? And so, you know, buy is buying ads and borrow [01:06:00] is like, you know, what you’re doing, getting on someone else’s podcast and borrowing our audience or getting on someone’s stage, speaking. And we do all of those things. And then build is like building your own audience, right?
And then the blitz is like cold outreach and stuff like that. And so when people talk to me about our business I’m like, listen, these are the four categories you’d be running leads in. Build is like what we teach at Push Button Podcast, what we actually implement for people. But in our own business, we do all four of them, right? We fit, we have stuff going in all four of these categories, and here’s what it looks like in our business, right? And so when I’m telling, you know, I say, Hey, you should use our service. I was like, we use our service internally.
Our business is listed as one of our clients. We have a whole slot on one of our clients slots, and we do all of our own stuff. And then we do same thing in all those other categories. And I was like, so when I recommend you to do it, I’m not saying you should do it, and I don’t. Right? We do these things for our own business. We actually run three podcasts internally. So we have three clients slots for our business, right?
And so that’s a, it’s just part of what we do. And so it’s that integrity and the consistency to say like, Hey, I’m not asking you to do something that we’re not gonna do internally. And then [01:07:00] like even when it looks at outside of things that we don’t actually run business in, we don’t have offers for you. And these are the same ways that we’re using these things. We do all of these things and you should be doing them too questions. Here’s the resources we recommend. So,
Andy Neary: That’s awesome. Nope it’s what you guys have built. I’m only getting a quick, you know, an early look at this. It looks pretty impressive, man. And you know, nothing says credibility when you your own client.
Richard Matthews: Yeah. You run your own stuff, right? That’s it was actually, it was one of those game-changing moments where you realize, you’re like, oh, I should probably doing this myself. Right?
Andy Neary: Well, I’ll give you a great example. So we have a program called the Social Media Sales Academy. It’s a six week course I teach where we teach insurance professionals how to use LinkedIn and content on LinkedIn to grow their business. And the best thing I love talking about that is I ask people, do you like the way I create content on LinkedIn? Do you like our content? Yes. I’m going to teach you how we do it.
Richard Matthews: Yeah. Like it’s,
Andy Neary: I don’t know if there’s a better sales pitch out there than if you like [01:08:00] how we do it. I am going to teach you how we do it so you can do it yourself.
Richard Matthews: Yeah, absolutely. Well, I think that is a great place to wrap our interview, right? Run your business with integrity, do the things you say you’re gonna do that kind of stuff, and actually show up and do the work that you’re doing, you recommend your clients do. And so I do wrap every interview with something I call the Heroes Challenge.
And I do this to help get access to stories that we might not otherwise find on our own. So the question is simple. Do you have someone in your life or in your network who you think has a cool entrepreneurial story? Who are they first names or find? And why do you think they should come share their story with us on The Hero Show? First person that comes to mind for you.
Andy Neary: I don’t know why I thought of it, but the guy I just interviewed on our podcast, Ray Baldwin, and he is a successful business coach. I loved his story because he played professional basketball in Europe for eight years, yet he didn’t even start on his high school basketball team. He got cut from his college team and as a junior and ended up playing intramural basketball. Yet he found a way to play professional basketball in Europe for eight years and [01:09:00] get paid handsomely to do it.
Richard Matthews: That’s cool.
Andy Neary: It’s his mindset. His mindset is so, and he’s now an unbelievable entrepreneur as a business consultant to others. And he is got a program called “Work On Your Game Academy”. And so yeah, he is the first guy that comes to my mind.
Richard Matthews: Awesome. Well, we’ll see if we can reach out later and get an introduction to him. But on this show, and you know, we have the send off in comic books. There’s always the crowd of people at the end who are cheering and clapping for their acts of heroism. So as we close where can people find you? Where can they light up the bat signal, so to speak and say, Hey Andy, we’d love for help. And then more importantly than where is who are the right types of people to actually reach out.
Andy Neary: Yeah. Number one, two places you can connect with me. Go to LinkedIn. We have a huge following there. Andy Neary, N-E-A-R-Y. I also have a video recording if people wanna watch it on our brand. Our four marketing pillars. If they wanna go to CompleteGamePlayBook.com they can go grab that if they like. And then the last question.
What was the last question again?
Richard Matthews: Right types of people to reach out?
Andy Neary: Right types of people. We work with insurance [01:10:00] professionals, whether they sell commercial insurance, health insurance, life insurance, disability insurance, financial planning, you name it we’re here, we’re helping them build credibility with their audience using the channels we didn’t have available to us 5 to 10 years ago.
So we, if they are an insurance professional, we can serve ’em.
Richard Matthews: Absolutely. And I know personally at least one of our listeners is an insurance specialist ’cause they told me a couple weeks ago that they were starting their insurance training for sale. So if you’re listening, reach out to Andy and and get the training. And you know, thank you so much today for coming on and sharing your story.
Andy, I really appreciate just getting to hear your perspective and hear what it is that you guys do. It’s been fascinating. Before we hit this stop record button, you have any final words of wisdom for my audience?
Andy Neary: I go back to what my, wall behind me says, build builds. success comes by way of being consistent, persistent, and patient, and most of all, enjoy the journey. This is a long road and you gotta play the infinite game, remember, your job is just to keep the game going.
Richard Matthews: Awesome. Thank you very much Andy. Appreciate your time today.
Andy Neary: You bet. Thank you, Richard.
[01:11:00]
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Richard Matthews
Would You Like To Have A Content Marketing Machine Like “The HERO Show” For Your Business?
The HERO Show is produced and managed by PushButtonPodcasts a done-for-you service that will help get your show out every single week without you lifting a finger after you’ve pushed that “stop record” button.
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Empowered by our their proprietary technology their team will let you get back to doing what you love while we they handle the rest.
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A peak behind the masks of modern day super heroes. What makes them tick? What are their super powers? Their worst enemies? What's their kryptonite? And who are their personal heroes? Find out by listening now
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