Business Innovators Radio - Interview with Jacques Skuteeki Business Innovation Strategist

Episode Date: July 26, 2023

Jacques Skuteeki is a McGill graduate in Economics and Marketing. Started his career in sales and then got his first dream job in the pharmaceutical industry. Then, his interest was to get into Hospital Supplies so he could learn about group purchasing, his next step was to discover the world of Diagnostics; quickly after he became a Marketing Manager and then got a sales Manager position. At that point, he needed a break from the corporate world and decided to take a 6-month Sabbatical and backpack to Asia and visit six countries and then fell in love with Bali in Indonesia. That is when he convinced himself to never live in a winter country anymore or work for anybody. That day, he decided to become an entrepreneur. So, he started to get involved in Network Marketing with health-related products, but now he needed to learn how to network.Jacques decided to be a member of BNI with their weekly breakfast meetings. Became a director opening new chapters in the French part of Montreal and training the officers to run those chapters and build memberships. Meanwhile, he was working on his Goal to live 12 months per year under the sun. So, he got involved in Landmark education learning how to create possibilities, and had his breakthrough in one of their seminars! As he spread the news of his dream, his best friend was working with a manufacturer of fancy foods.Jacques got introduced and several had the interest to expand into the West Coast market, Next thing you know, he is on a plane headed for California attending the Fancy Food Shows building a great import/export business under the sun far away from winter working hard and having a blast. Then 911 hit us by surprise and his profit margins went down overnight because of the trade exchange. Now he had a new problem creating a new possibility in his life. He had samples or inventory in a warehouse and had no idea what to do with them. So, he got into the gift basket business and got into the world of trade and barter. This is America’s Best Kept Business Secret. Now, he trades his excess inventory into purchasing power. Then, for the next 15 years as a barter member, he moved to marketing and landed up running his own barter exchange in California.Covid hit the market, and he decided to sell his business. With his exposure to hundreds of business owners, their common challenge was to sell more because they had unsold inventory in the warehouse, as most professionals had empty appointment slots in their business, meaning lost business forever.So today, they have created the 12-Step Cash Flow Marketing System that focuses on the sales cycle or the customer journey. They have produced creative ways to shorten it, generating quicker cash flow. They generate leads, build the audience, and create momentum with prospects to build like, trust, and understanding of your product or service.Learn More:https://jacquesskuteeki360.com/Influential Entrepreneurs with Mike Saundershttps://businessinnovatorsradio.com/influential-entrepreneurs-with-mike-saunders/Source: https://businessinnovatorsradio.com/making-money-and-making-an-impact-business-innovator-andrew-alanis-short-term-rental-journey

Welcome to influential entrepreneurs, bringing you interviews with elite business leaders and experts, sharing tips and strategies for elevating your business to the next level. Here's your host, Mike Saunders. Hello and welcome to this episode of influential entrepreneurs. This is Mike Saunders, the authority positioning coach. Today we have with us Jacques Skuteki, who's a business innovation strategist. Jacques, welcome to the program. Well, thank you. Nice to be invited.

Yeah, I'm excited to talk with you because I always love when I hear the word innovation. That's a powerful word because it means you see one system and strategy and you're enhancing and improving. So I'm excited to see what you do with business innovation. But before we dive into that, give us a little bit of your story and your background and what's your entrepreneurial journey been like to this point in your career. Yeah, listen, my my, my, parents were from Europe. I was brought up in Montreal, Quebec, Canada as a Canadian, and now I landed as a U.S. citizen and just living a great life. But my parents were blue-collar. And my parents always wanted me to get an education because they say, hey, we do not want you

to have a job where you're going to dirty your hands. And I guess that was like engraved in who I am. and I just started in my teens working as a bus boy and as a waiter and as a barman. And it was pretty much always in a hotel business, obviously. But I just fell in love with people. I fell in love with the public. And more or less, you know, when you're a waiter or a barman, you are involved in sales because they have to like you or else are not going to come to your bar. Or they're not going to give you a bigger order on your menu. when you're selling items on a menu.

With that in perspective, I set to myself, okay, I really have to learn how to connect with people, right? So I need to have better personality and better skills and how to connect with them. So those are the two things I really had to focus on. So I started off my education in college, in pure and applied sciences. I had a lot of health biology classes. And then it landed up. I said, listen, I need to learn something about business. So I joined as a McGill.

I went to McGill University of Montreal. And I became a McGill graduate in marketing and economics. And I learned a lot. And I said, okay, where do I want to go? I want to have fun in life. So my dream job pretty much was in a pharmaceutical business. So I started with a company that was launching. launching Tylenol in Canada. In those days, you only had aspirin available called ASA.

There was no motrin called ibuprofen. There was no naproxen over the counter for pain. So the only thing out there was ASA. So I had the opportunity to introduce that product in Canada, and I was in Montreal, Quebec. And I did great. I did miracles. I was sales rep of the year, two years in a row. And now they promote me as a hospital specialist. They move me back down to Montreal. And now, believe it or not, I'm promoting Tylenol and hospitals and other products like Enovar sublimates and enaxin. And one of those products is fentanyl. That's a number point killer. Yeah, today. What we didn't know then, now we know. I was selling dosage of fentanyl to, an osteologist, believe it or not, it was crazy. And I just love what I was doing for several years.

And then I said, you know what, I have to learn something else in my career. And I want to learn about hospital supplies. How does bidding works? How do you bid for products in a group purchasing, right? And how do you get products evaluated? How do you get How do you specify the standards of the evaluation and how do you present it the committees and how do you pretty much tell them how to present results on your product when they compare your product to competitors? And I did extremely well also then and we introduced the first number one adult brief diaper in the Canadian market.

So that was interesting. And that was in competition with Pampers. Pampers had the number one market for adults, and then we became number two. I said, okay, this is great. I need to learn something more. Now I wanted to learn about testing and diagnostics. So I got involved with a company that was selling drug of abuse testing to the U.S. Army. And we also did therapeutic drug monitoring, which means that some doctors, they prescribed drugs like theophilin or dejoxin.

or degoxin or dejoxin. And dejoxin is given to a patient when they have a transplant of an organ. If you don't take dejoxin, your body will reject the organ that you got. And it's very important to monitor the blood levels of dejoxon, you know, on a regular basis to make sure that the patient keeps the organ in their body, as simple as that. And again, there, at that point in time, I said, I'm ready to go in the office. So I was promoted as a marketing manager. And then after two years later, I decided that that was enough.

I became a sales manager for Eastern Canada. Now I wake up and I say, too much politics. I want to unplug. I want to unplug into politics. and I decided to do a six-month backpacking sabbatical in Asia. Now, backpacking, people think that after three weeks or a month, you unplug, no. It takes three to four months to an unplug of whatever you're doing. So here I am after three or four months.

I'm noticing, okay, I've unplugged now of my past, of what I learned. what do I want to do right now? And I took three decisions. Number one, no more winters. Number two, I need to learn more about networking. And number three, I want to become an entrepreneur. Right. It's more like number one, no more winters. Number two, I want to become an entrepreneur. And to help me become an entrepreneur, I need to learn about networking. So I get my ass back into in North America and Montreal, then the first thing I do is I do a search. And I notice that B&I Business Network International

is a networking group, membership, weekly meetings. And this was a concept that was so new to me. And I was a member of a chapter in downtown Montreal. And the director there was called Fred. And he was English. And I did extremely well because while I was doing my membership with B&I every week, he gave me an opportunity to say, listen, you speak English, you speak French, I don't speak French. We want to create new chapters in the north part of Montreal called LaValle and then the south part of Montreal called South Shore.

So here I am with Ivan Meisner's concepts of networking, creating chapters. meeting people, providing them to the opportunity to become officers. We needed a president, a vice president, a treasurer. So I had grasped all those concepts, and I built several chapters on North Shore and South Shore. But in the same time, understanding my need to be an entrepreneur, I got involved in network marketing.

And one of the companies that I joined, They had an ionizer. They had a box that cleans your air in your home, in your office, in your restaurant, in your bowling alley. And I built a team that were promoting the MLM side, but I developed the business side of that product. So we went to homes. We gave them a one-week trial. And out of five trials, we got usually four sales. but I also got involved in doing trade shows like a home show and we would do a 10-day home show

and we would sell a couple of hundred of those units that were being sold for $900 in those days. That's a lot of money. Yeah, that was really good money. And I loved it. I loved it. And then one day, you know, there's a lawsuit from the competition saying that the box generated two things, ionization and ozone. And those are things that are happening every day when you have a rainstorm outside.

The ionization takes all the stuff that's floating in the air, brings it to the floor or brings it to the ground. And the ozone kills the odors. And that little box was doing both. We had very low levels of ozone and was using the technology called ionization. In competition, they were freaking out because they knew that this product was very powerful. Politics came involved. They got new laws in Canada that banned the use of ozone, believe it or not. So again, my business did not do very well because of that.

But meanwhile, because I was part of B&I for all those years, 60% of my sales was coming from the other members from my networking. So networking works. It really, really, really works. And then unfortunately, this lawsuit against a company, the company was called Alpine EcoQuest. And they're still in business today. They're doing very well in the U.S. and I still have two machines in my home. I have a home in Vegas and in Chicago. In both homes have got this ionizer, I swear by it. It's just an incredible box. And I said to myself, then, oh my God, what happens? Meanwhile, I started with landmark education.

And landmark education is all about empowering people to become more creative, to build better relationships, to understand how leadership works, and to give you more self-confidence. And there was a program called SELP. self-expression leadership program. In landmark education, it was a concept that was created by Werner Earnhardt, and it's all about anything is possible, and you can create a possibility. That seminar that lasts a couple of months changed completely my life because I said,

okay, well, what is my decision again? My decision is no more winters. I want to become an entrepreneur and I got to learn networking. So here I am an entrepreneur. I learn networking, but I'm still living in Montreal, Quebec, Canada, and I'm freezing my ass off every winter. I said, okay, I knew a friend of mine that was involved in coaching Quebec-based food manufacturers, jams, patte de foie, mouettes, oysters, oil, like olive oils and things like that. One of the manufacturer was called Equibar, EQUI-B-A-R, and they were launching a raw health bar that was a raw hemp seed bar that was competing with Luna. And Luna is still available today.

If you go in any trader Joe, they really have a good market share. But in those days, only Luna had a product like that, and they didn't have a hemp seed product. But we had the raw hemp seed product that I introduced in the U.S. And again, I chose the fancy food shows in Los Angeles and in San Francisco, but not in New York. Why? Because in New York, they have winter, right? Yeah. So I stuck to the West Coast and did very well.

We got introduced in many retailers. We work with Trader Joe's and other. high-end retailers because our products were pretty expensive. Our little jars of jams and mousers were like anywhere between $8 and $10 and $12. But it was really good stuff. And I got a lot of subsidy by the Quebec government to introduce these products into the California market. And then my business was booming like crazy. And then 911 happened.

And then I had to change completely what I was doing. And because of 911, I got involved in the world of trade and barter. I really got involved in the world of trade and barter. And then I had a better understanding of the customer journey because of the world of trade and barter. And next thing you know, we gave birth to a concept called 12-step cash flow. That is what we're running right now, and that is changing and empowering those business owners out there. So, Jacques, through that whole introduction of your entrepreneurial journey, you might not even realize this, but you said the word learn close to 10 times. So what that tells me is you are a lifelong learner.

You never view yourself as having arrived. you are teaching, learning, always being open. And I know that is how now, when you're in your current venture, how you are serving your clients currently by teaching them because that is ingrained in you. So talk a little bit about your current venture, how you're serving your clients, and what sets you apart from the competition so that your clients see you as the obvious choice. Well, you know, like that that's a loaded question. there, but I'm sure that I got the answer here.

So when we talk about learning, I think what I really like to do right now is empower. My mission is to empower business owners. I don't help anybody because no one likes to be help. Help is saying you're broken. I'm going to help you. Business owners are not broken. Business owners need to be empowered. There are some things that, you know, that they don't.

don't know that they don't know. And when we start working with our leads and prospects, we look at their goals, we look at their challenges, what are their pain points, and what are the opportunities. And to do that, we have to start by what are their marketing tools, right? What are their marketing tools? And how does their marketing tools fit in the customer journey. And I'll explain a little bit more of what the customer journey is. And then we create what they call us an SAP, a strategic action plan. And the big picture is really to create something that's missing to be able to fuel the customer journey. And that's where we have to design a strategy that we call strategic action plan. And what's really funny is because when I was in a

Barter World forgot probably 15 years. I worked for somebody. I had my own trade exchange. I was exposed to, God, five, six hundred clients on a regular basis. Because members of the barter organization, they stick on for five, ten, twenty years. You don't really use many, you don't really lose members when they are active traders if they get the concept. And what I notice is that people join barter organizations, which bartering is the best kept business secret. It's the best kept secret because people barter because they have excess capacity. What does that mean? It means that they have stuff in the warehouse they can't sell. They have empty tables in a restaurant. They have empty chairs in the massage or the hairdressers, you know, business.

And they have empty time slots for lawyers and dentists and accountants in their agenda. And when you have an empty time slot and you have no business in that empty time slot, you lose that potential money forever. So using trade and barter with other business owners allows you to fill those slots that costs you not much money, right? Because if your service is $1,000, that time slot is just about probably cost you maybe $3 or $400 if it's not applied. So the world of barter, I always thought that the problem was excess capacity. And once I noticed that that wasn't the problem. The problem is really not being able to sell. They don't understand the customer journey.

They always think the problem is that they don't have enough people, but they don't have enough people. Why? And that woke me up to say, wait a minute here. That's why I was able, when I got out of the barter world after COVID, I said to myself, that's what I want to do. And the customer journey is all about creating leads, right? You find them.

You generate them. You drive them to some capture page. And how do you do that? You use a landing page, pipeline, sales funnels. And now you create engagement. But what we do, we don't sell. We educate. So when you become a prospect or a lead with us, now we start teaching you,

why you can use this product or service. You know, what are the reasons why and how you can use it? We're not selling people. And if you have a pain point that you know, you're trying to find a solution. But if we sell you, you will not buy the solution. But if you're pushed. Yeah, we're pushing then people. So when we educate you, we get you interested in looking at different options.

And we tell you exactly what to do. And we know that you can't do it on your own. So now you have to buy the product or service, right? And that engagement builds trust like in understanding. That's what it does. Now, a lot of businesses, once they have a new client, they're saying, okay, we've got a new client, but they stop there. But no, the third section after leads and customer journey and getting that client

on board is now to get more business out of that client. And there's different ways you can do that. You can do that by referrals, teach them how to give referrals and compensate them. You can do that through loyalty programs. So those are the best ways to generate new business or more business from your current clients. And how we do that is we automate that. We have our own digital marketing platform that we white label, and it does a bunch of stuff. It does emails and texting and videos and voice drops.

Voice drops is something that people don't. Not many people use or not people know what it is. They don't know what it is. So can you imagine if you're my customer and on your birthday you get a voice drop on your cell phone? Hey there, Mike, happy birthday. Hey, Mike, Merry Christmas or Happy Thanksgiving. Can you imagine the power of creating and building a strong relationship through using VoiceDrop? And we do that on our automated platform.

And because we do that, you know, we're also noticing that when people are on the customer journey, our open rates are really good, really, really good. They can range anywhere from, you know, 20 to 50 percent, depending on the product and service. So what we do is very different. My competition is not selling the customer journey. They're selling sales funnels. But sales funnels don't work if you don't know what to put in them. And if you don't know to have the right strategies.

So every customer we have, every sales funnel is custom made. because the customer journey for a furniture store, which is a short-term sale, is very different from an accountant or from a restaurant. You know, a restaurant, you want people to come every week or every month. An accountant, once you get them on board, you know, they have annual sales. So our sales funnels are really customized. And we notice two things that in that, in that,

opportunity is Google My Business. A lot of business owners, retail stores, they do not know that it's free. They don't know the power of Google My Business or Google Business profile. And what we do is we clean up those profiles making sure that you pop up number one instead of your competition. And we also have affiliate programs. We work a lot with coaches and speakers. and they don't know that having their own affiliate link,

they can be cross-promoted by people that know them very well. And the only time when you're being cross-promoted, it means that you get an affiliate link, you put it on their website, you put it on their social media, and you then automatically become endorsed. You become a trusted resource of your friend, and when you get sales, you only pay a commission when you get the sale.

that's not much known out there. People know about affiliate marketing, but they don't think that they could use it to grow their business significantly. And that's what we do. And finally, we have a lot, you know, our programs are a couple of thousand dollars. So we got involved in zero. I have a partner that now we offer zero percent financing

from anywhere from 12 months to 20 months. and we can get financing anywhere from $5,000 to $250,000 without any collateral. Very, very powerful. I don't want to get in financing, but I met one of my partners, and they've been doing this for over 10 years, and I said, you know what, I need to offer that to my potential customers, so they have less headaches when they want to work with us, and also they have extra cash flow to grow their business, buying other stuff out there. That's amazing.

You know, through your entrepreneurial journey and even your current business and how you serve your clients, I'm sure it's not been a direct line of success each and every day. You've had some breakdowns or business or personal failures. Talk a little bit about some of those and how you overcame them and how faith and confidence in yourself and your abilities played a role in overcoming those. you know, thank you. The first, I think there was two main hurdles in my life was what the 911, the Twin Tower and COVID. So with the Twin Tower, I was doing the import, export business.

And our profit margins, 20%. I was automatically getting a 20% profit on the exchange between U.S. currency in Canadian currency. There was a 20% margin there that added to my profits of whatever I was importing into the U.S. And when the Twin Tower event, the attack happened,

it became a whole new era in America. You know that. And I said to myself, oh my God, what do I do right now? I got all these samples. I don't know what to do with them. And I don't want to give them away. I don't want to discount them.

And because I was a B&I director, there was this dude in living in Los Angeles who was a director in Los Angeles and his name was Harvey. So I called Harvey. I said, listen, I'm a B&I director and so are you. Let's have lunch. I want to, you know, I just want to talk to you. I want to meet you. What are the opportunities in L.A.? And then we had a conversation.

I gave him some maple syrup and some fancy jam and handpick blueberry jam was incredible. and he says, do you have a lot of that? I said, yeah. I said, I have inventory and I don't know what to do with it. He says, have you ever thought about trade and barter? Thought about what's trade and barter? And he says, you know, instead of discounting what you have, if something is worth $10, you're going to discount it at $5, right?

So if it's worth $10 in the market retail value, what was your cost? Well, it was probably, you know, 30 or maybe $3 or $4 out of $10. Well, it says if you do trade and barter, you can get $10 of purchasing power a rate away. How does that work? Well, because you have lawyers and dentists and plumbers and car people that paint your car and it offer oil changes at retail pricing. So that means that if your jam that costs you $3, that's worth $10, you're going to get $10. And now you can use that $10 to be able to buy services from other members in that trade exchange. Wow.

That means that whenever I spend $1,000, my real cost is only 30% or 40% of that. He says, yeah, that is best kept small business secret trade and barter. But I said, okay, so I found a trade exchange. I met three of them. I started working, I started becoming a member with one of those trade exchanges. And then I was able to trade all of my samples. We made gift baskets, all kinds of stuff. And then an opportunity, I just fell in love with the concept.

Falling in love with the concept meant that, you know, there was an opportunity with that trade exchange. They hired me as a marketing dude, as a marketing manager. And down the road, I decided that, you know, again, It got involved in corporate and company politics. I said, you know, screw this. I want to do my own trade exchange. And I started my trade exchange. And then what happened, the second hurdle I got was COVID.

So here I am. My revenues and my trade exchange are based on monthly fees and transaction fees, which means that if a member sells for $1,000 a service, I would get about 15% as a cash commission, $150. But now there's COVID. Businesses are going belly up. My restaurants are not trading anymore. My massage therapists are closed.

My hairdressers are closed, you know. And a lot of businesses, even if they're lawyers and dentists, they can't do business because of COVID. I said, listen, this is a sign from the universe that it's time to do something else. And that's when I noticed that the problem of business owners is not excess capacity is getting more leads, working on the customer journey, and then working with their clients to get more business. And that was the birth of 12-step cash flow. And then I just had to find the software to make it happen. It was all in my head for years that marketing stuff. was in my head, in my mind and how to create leads.

And it was all there, but I couldn't automate it. It was impossible because the technology was not there. So I bumped into the technology. And COVID was also the birth of Zoom, right? That's when Zoom really took on. So that's pretty much, those are the two things. I say thank you to the Twin Towers. Unfortunately, it was a bad situation, but it helped me.

and the COVID helped me too. And your question about faith, you know, I always trusted myself. I have faith in myself. I believe, you know, what I'm doing. I believe my vision. But I believe really in energy and whether it is from the source or from the universe, whether you call it vibration, whether you call it God, it doesn't really matter. It's all energy and vibration.

And what I learned is that fear is a dream stopper. Because fear is ridiculous. Fear is being frightened that you're not going to succeed in the future. Fear stops you because you don't even know what the outcome is going to be and you're already concerned and fear just stops those dreams. It blocks your dreams. And I was always driven by success, always very motivated, very, very ambitious, and a lot of ambition. And I have a thirst to learn. It's really incredible.

You know, well, some of my colleagues are retired and bored with their retirement because they're not using their brains anymore. And yes, I'm making a judgment call. But I'm saying to myself, listen, I want to learn. And I believe in the goals that I want right now. And I am finding all the resources possible to give birth to my vision, my new vision. And my new vision is my new why is to empower business owners to be more successful with the knowledge and the tools that we have. You know, I think what you just said was so insightful because through those setbacks, you noticed keyword there and you became aware. another keyword of opportunities and you pivoted and you built upon the lessons you had learned

in decades past. And so those qualities led you to even more success. So I think that is just so spectacular that you have just made these progressive improvements in yourself personally and professionally to move forward. Kind of looking back on those, would you do anything different if you were given the chance to go back and change anything? I think probably, you know, when you're younger and you have a vision, you know, and you want that vision to be turned into reality. And, you know, you have your knowledge, the knowledge you have is really limiting your vision. Your vision is limited by what you know because there's so much stuff that you don't know that you don't know. And then you realize when you have that vision

that you've got a bunch of challenges and you have opportunities that you don't see or you didn't see. And I think the most, the thing that I would change is really get more mentor, get more mentorship and tap into the wisdom of other business owners. And to get better results, but the most important is to do it right and to do it faster. Yeah, and I've learned that right over the last 10 years. I'm using a lot more. I work with mentors and, you know, I'm part of some type of inner circle, which is like a master class. So that helps me a lot. And the other thing is branding.

When I started my trade exchange, I really learned about branding because branding allows you to be different from your competition, gives you credibility, influence. And it's very powerful within your networking because you look like you're competent because you have good branding. And that's very, very, very powerful. And that's one thing that I really implemented over the last, I would say probably, yeah, last eight to 10 years. Branding is powerful and mentorship. Branding and mentorship. You know, you've mentioned things like you noticed things around you. You were more aware.

you learned, you became educated. In your opinion, what are some more of the key attributes that people need to be aware of and manage and implement so that they can notice, be aware, and overcome obstacles in their personal and professional life? You know, I think you got to have resilience. You have to be able to bounce back. Regardless of what happens, you got to keep motivated. you need to have some adaptability because things happen you know life turns life throws you curveballs

and you have to be able to pivot quickly and that's the difference between success and failure you decide what happens to you when when when you get a curve ball whether it's 9-1-1 or COVID you decide to be a victim or you decide to use this as an as an opportunity opportunity. And, you know, problem solving skills, of course, you know, you've got to be able to look at a situation objectively. You need to have some emotional intelligence. Empathy is really, really, really important. You've got to be persistent. You need to have a positive mindset. Because if you don't, if you don't have the right attitude and open mind, you're not going to open your mind to new opportunities. And all of that, you have to operate in a space of integrity. You have to have integrity with yourself. And when you have integrity with yourself, it means you got to respect what you say. And when you do that, you attract people that are like you.

Because the phonies, they don't want to deal with you if you have a high level of integrity. And I guess maybe that's why my customers, for the last, God, 15, 20 years, I never had past dues. The people, the business owners, I do business with me, whether the, whatever the umbrella was, they always paid me. I never had issues of past dues, believe it or not. Only when COVID, I was getting past dues. So I said, that's it. That's a sign of the universe. I have to move on. Okay. That's, and I'm glad I did because a whole new realm of opportunity and possibility got born because of COVID. Thanks, thank the universe for, you know, being a victim of covert and converting that into an

opportunity. Yeah. You know, it's just amazing that you have that positive outlook. You know, Napoleon Hill called it the PMA positive mental attitude. And that's what we need to have that positive energy to respond to things, not react to things. So you've just painted such a great picture that way. What do you think about if you look now currently of all the things you've learned from in your past? What's your purpose and what is your why? Now, my why got born right during COVID. That's, you know, because with the trade and

barter world, thinking it was excess inventory. It was more about the customer journey. But, you know, my background in a pharmaceutical and diagnostic and hospital supplies, we really learned how to sell, you know, the DMS techniques, there's so many techniques that we learn on how to sell. But the way I look at it right now is that the big picture is you meet strangers, they become friends, and they become family, right, whether it's your personal life or whether it's your business life. And what's really important for me right now is to keep the balance. But I have the balance between, you know, friends and business and family and time off and exercise and food, all that stuff. Keep the balance.

But I really have identified the reason why I do what I do because that gives me a meaning of fulfillment. And my core values, purpose, and beliefs is really what fuels me right now. It keeps me excited and energized. And my passion, and my why is really to empower other business owners to grow their business. We got the tools. We got the automation. We got that by using digital automatic marketing tools. And we call it 12-step cash flow.

It works. And we see results. And that's my why right now. And that's what motivates me every day to wake up before the alarm goes off. Every day. I just am so excited and so energized with what I'm able to bring to the world. And that's my why. That's what excites me.

And of course, it really comes through, really comes through that you are passionate, enthusiastic, and your why shines through. So I just love our conversation. If someone is interested in learning more about all of these things you've taught us, what's the best way they can learn more and connect with you? There's my personal website. It's Jacques, J-A-C-Q-U-E-S-360.com. So it's J-A-C-Q-U-E-S-360.com.

They can connect with me. They can see our speaker program. They can see all of the stuff that we do. and they can get some free stuff there too. There's some videos about what we do, how we do it, and that's how they can reach me. Excellent. Well, thank you so much for coming on today.

It's been a real pleasure talking with you. Well, thank you for the invitation, Mike. I so appreciate your time and your interest to find out more about me. Thank you so much. You've been listening to Influential Entrepreneurs with Mike Saunders. To learn more about the resources mentioned on today's show or listen to past episodes, visit www.

www. influential entrepreneurs radio.