The Home Service Expert Podcast - How To Consistently Get New Customers By Putting Relationships First

Episode Date: October 18, 2019

Kody Bateman is the founder and chief visionary officer of SendOutCards, an international greeting card company that presents busy professionals with an innovative way to maintain deep business and personal connections via the digital medium. He shares his wisdom, gained from years of experience in the professional and entrepreneurial arenas, with audiences worldwide as a speaker and author. In this episode, we talked about relationship marketing, entrepreneurship, personal development and marketing strategies...

Guys, I'm so excited about today's podcast because it's an absolute game changer. I'm literally going to show you how to quadruple your business using the postal service. We've got a service today that we're going to introduce to you that you can send unlimited heartfelt cards for one small fee per month. I got Cody Bateman, a good buddy of mine, coming on, and if you hang out to the end, we're going to show you how to get a free demo of exactly how the program works and exactly how I send out hundreds, if not thousands of cards a month. This is an absolute game changer.

You need to hang out to the end because I'm going to show you how much things you can change in your business by using this program. I mean, I've never been more excited to show you guys a product because I'm absolutely killing it with it. Can't wait for you to listen. Welcome to the Home Service Expert, where each week, Tommy chats with world-class entrepreneurs and experts in various fields, like marketing, sales, hiring, and leadership, to find out what's really behind their success in business. Now, your host, the home service millionaire, Tommy Mello. Welcome back to the Home Service Expert. My name is Tommy Mello. And today I have on a good friend of mine over the last year we've connected. It's Cody Bateman. He lives in Salt Lake City. And I'm going to tell you a little bit about him. He specializes in relationship marketing,

entrepreneurship, personal development, and marketing strategies. He's the founder and the visionary officer, chief visionary officer since 2006 of SendOut Cards. I believe that they account for the largest customer of the post office. Huge following on social media. He's got a podcast, international greeting card company, but more importantly, it's a gifting company. I think those two things tie in so well together. He was featured in the 2009 Inc. 500, not 5,000. See, I'm in the 5,000. He was in the 500 list as one of the fastest growing companies, entrepreneur, network marketing, industry professional for over 20 years. And he's been the featured speaker at over 200 marketing

events he wrote the book prompting your inner guide to making a difference and the human connection which is all about relationship marketing cody i'm so excited to have you on today this is you're one of the largest guests i've ever had and i love what you're doing well we love what you're doing too tommy thank you for having me on the show. I'm excited for this. So I want to start out with just telling the audience who you are and a little bit about SendOutCards and how you started it. Yeah. I mean, SendOutCards today is... Literally, it's the premier relationship marketing system out there today. It's a great way to follow up with your clients, customers, prospects, associates, and most people in business use us for that

purpose. I'd like to tell your listeners that that's why I started the company, but it's not. I actually started the business to help people act on what I call their promptings. And that came from a story. It actually came from a personal story that happened to me back in 1989. I had a tragedy in our family where I lost my older brother, Chris, to an accident, industrial accident. But the segue to that story was,

is that my wife and I, I just graduated from college and I accepted a job in New York City. I was living in Utah and I accepted a job in New York City to go work for them. And so we gathered all of our belongings together, went over to my mom and dad's house to say bye to the family. And we said our goodbyes when we went to leave, I noticed in a lot adjacent to my parents' home, 200 feet away, my older brother, Chris, was moving some vehicles around over there. And I had what I call a prompting that I needed to slow down, stop what I was doing, go over and tell him goodbye. And I ignored it. I got in the car and drove away. I remember honking at him and we waved at each other, but I drove away and moved all the way across the country, a couple thousand miles away and

got moved in. Three months went by, everything was going great until I got a phone call in the middle of the night, three o'clock in the morning. My mother called to let me know that my brother Chris had been killed in an accident. He was 29 years old when he died. And when I got the news that night, the only thing I could think of was I ignored a prompting to say bye to him. I ignored a prompting to go over, give him a hug, tell him I love him, say goodbye. So when I got the news that he passed away, that's the only thing I can think of. It's like, oh my goodness. So I made a promise to him, my brother, that night that when I had a prompting to reach out in kindness to others, I would act.

And I tried to do all I could to help as many people as I could do the same thing. And that's where the dream started to build what you see today in send out cards. I just wanted to create a way to help people act on their prompting so that, you know, if you need to say thank you to somebody or I care about you or appreciate you, job well done, whatever, that there was a way to do it, you know, a quick use technology to do it. And so that was the why. And that's why I started it. And we started teaching seminars on promptings, acting on promptings, being kind to people. And what it turned into was a relationship marketing system. And so that's kind of the Reader's Digest version, I guess, of how that happened. So that was all the way back. 2006 is when it formed. And you guys have kind of been on a wave of different things because the way that it works is the business model.

Describe how it works and what, how everybody gets together and how you can monetize it in several ways, depending on what side you want to go from. Just so the audience understands exactly what send out cards is. I got them right here. And, you know, I got these,

these nice ones that have been coming. This is the monster one. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. This is from your event super cool and they're really nice looking cards it's like it's unbelievable what you could do and how efficient you could make them so i'll let you kind of give the the overview of what send out cards really is and how it all works well again send out cards is a system that you can access online from your computer or your smartphone. And the whole idea is to make it super easy for you to choose a card. We have over 20,000 greeting cards to choose from or build your own. And most people

today actually build their own. So you can take a picture. I can take a picture of you, Tommy, right on my phone and turn it into a greeting card on our system really fast. Type in a message, you know, Hey, it's nice to be on your show today, whatever. And, uh, click send. And that comes over the internet to our digital printers where we print a real physical greeting card. like you just showed. We stuff it, stamp it, put a first class stamp on it. You can add a gift if you want. We send it off in the mail for you. So that's the concept. That's the idea. And again, about 70% of our users today, over the course of our lifetime, we've had over a million people join us.

And about 70% of those people are small business owners or people in sales capacities that use it as a way to follow up with their clients. So imagine you go and do home repair. And when you finish with the transaction, you send out a simple card of gratitude, thanking them for the business. That's the concept. That's what you do. And since then, the referrals that are generated off of that is just phenomenal. And again, I didn't plan it that way. I didn't build it to give you the best referral tool in the world because it is today. I didn't build it for that, but it became that. So we started being nice to their customers. And guess what? Their customers started being nice back by referring them business.

So that's what it became. I mean, just so many people came in. So we leveraged that by focusing on relationship marketing. And since then, we've gotten all kinds of statistics. We generate a lot of referral business for our clients. So that's the primary product offering that we have out there. It's also coupled with a business model. So it's a direct sale. So you can simply use the product as a customer, or you can become what we call an affiliate. And as an affiliate, you can share it with other people. And your job as an affiliate is to put on customers and build teams of people to put on customers. And then you create... By doing that, you create a residual stream. Imagine putting on 20 or 30 businesses that send a couple hundred dollars worth of cards a month and you make a commission off of that. And better yet, imagine helping several people become affiliates themselves who do the same thing. And through

duplication, you might end up getting a small percentage off of a few thousand customers because other affiliates are putting people on too. So our biggest income earners do very, very, very well at send-out cards as their primary way of making income. So there's really two ways to make income with send-out cards. One is to use the product and generate referral business with whatever business you're in. And the second one is to become an affiliate and add another stream of income for you. So that's how it works. So when I first talked to you, I asked you, I said, what can I get? I came from a thought of what's this going to do for me? How many referrals?

And you said, well, Tommy, take a step back. It was, what if you just send a card and genuinely said, thank you. You don't ask them for a review. You don't ask them to use you next week. You can send reminders. You could do holiday cards. You could do that stuff. But what if you truly just said, Hey, I really appreciate your business. It means a lot to me. I know I have Scott out there. I know we did this, this, this on your, your property. I really, really appreciate you being my customer. I'm not asking you for a referral. I'm not asking you for a review. And you said, Tommy, I really think the best way to go about it is a genuine thank you. So that way when they open it, which they do open it because it comes in a card that looks handwritten with

actually it looks like a stamp on it. And it's one of those things where you're going to open a card that looks like these. I mean, you just do. I've opened every single one I've got and stuff doesn't get through my gatekeeper, but these ended up on my desk unopened. So tell me a little bit about the thought process behind that and how the psychology behind that works. Well, again, you've tapped into what our philosophy is. You mentioned I have a book, The Power of Human Connection, which is how relationship marketing is transforming the way people succeed. That book has story after story after story from multiple industries.

There's over 25 different industries featured in that book of stories of people in business that do exactly what you just said. They send a card out just thanking people. Don't ask for anything in return. That is our philosophy. We teach you to just appreciate people. What you appreciate, we'll appreciate. It gets bigger. And the best way to appreciate is to just say thank you. Just say happy birthday. Just say happy holidays. Don't ask for a referral. I mean,

I used to get in debates. I do these big seminars and I'd have real estate people come to seminars and they'd want to debate me about it. Cause I would say, don't ask for the referral, deserve it. Don't ask for it, deserve it. How do you deserve it? Just treat people nice. Just be nice to people. Just say a genuine thank you. And listen, the best referral you're going to get, no matter what business you're in, best referral you're going to get is an unsolicited one. So if somebody's asking for a referral, there's a little bit of a weirdness to that. Yeah, okay, well, I'll find somebody to send to you. But if I provide you a great service and I provide you great appreciation on top of that

and just say thank you to you for your business, I might even drip a couple of cards on top of that and just say thank you to you for your business. I might even drip a couple of cards on you over time and just say, hey, you know, I hope you're enjoying the product or whatever and not ask for anything. And that's what we have found is the best. By the way, we've tried the wrong ways of doing it. We've tried the ways of saying,

they put a little referral card inside the card, you know, send this offer and I'll give you 10% off next time, you know, because you sent me a referral kind of stuff. That works, but it doesn't work near as well as just saying thank you. So that is part of our philosophy is just give for the sake of giving. Don't give for the sake of expecting anything in return at all. You just love on your people, period. That's all you do. Just love on your people.

Use the service to love on your people. They will love on you back. It's just the way it works. And by the way, Tommy, that's a universal law. It works whether you believe it works or not. It's just like the law of gravity. If I drop these business cards, they're gonna fall. That's the universal law. It works whether you believe it works or not. It's just like the law of gravity. If I drop these business cards, they're going to fall. That's the universal law.

Law of attraction is the same. If you're nice to people, they're going to be nice back. It's simple as that. Yeah. I just found this out recently, but there's a guy that owns a huge HVAC company, Ken Goodrich, who uses your service very seldomly actually for what he could use it for. But he sends a brownies and a card to all of his employees and he's got hundreds of employees. So it's great for customers. It's great for family. I was just at a recent bid for the Christmas light business and it was a big one. It's a quarter million dollar job. And I just simply took a picture of, I had about five guys there with us, took a picture of us talking to the guy, and I threw a picture of Johnny and his wife and kids,

and just can't tell you how much we appreciate just the opportunity to be able to bid on such a project. And it means a lot to us, and it would be a great addition to our portfolio, and blah, blah, blah. I put some time into it, sent him a card, And I don't know how much it swayed the decision because I don't think a customer is going to tell you necessarily because of that card, you got my business. But I think that's the extra touch, the extra icing on the cake that said,

wait a minute, I'm learning about these guys. They were nice. They showed up on time. They had a smile. They are outgoing. And I think the card is kind of the icing on the cake, but it's also the things that help you remember those people, that situation say, you know, I got a good book up there. It's called raving fans. And it's all about how do you deliver that extra service? And I think this does it to customers, but I also think, you know, and I didn't send my aunt one the other day, but I found this really nice journal. It had roses on it and it had my grandma's name, which is my aunt's mom and my mom's mom. Her name was Grandma Rose. So I posted a big picture of my grandma there and I wrote my aunt a really nice letter about how much I love her and I miss her. And then I have this shirt. It's like a wine t-shirt and I sent it to her the other day because actually send out cards has got me thinking more about these gifts and just doing nice things. So actually, I got a lighter up there that made me think of you. I haven't sent it out and you're not a smoker, but it's just got a big eagle on it. But the point is, I sent this to my aunt an hour ago.

She sent me a text that I'm bawling my eyes out right now. You don't know how much this means to me. This has made my week. This has made my week. This has made my month. And I love you so much. So it's those little things that you don't even realize. And it's so powerful. And you've automated the system, right?

I mean, that's what you do is you just go on the phone and tick, tick, tick, tick, tick. So I just wanted to share that story. Over the last two decades, you know, there's been waves of innovation in the business world. And one can say that the technology has changed a lot, but in the home service space, it hasn't changed much. But I know what you guys have come because I was at your event is Sendogo. And that's a big piece of where you're going with the technology piece. Can you introduce us to that a little bit and how that's going to work? Well, yeah, a big shift in the marketplace is SaaS, S-A-A-S,

you know, system as a service. And a lot of CRMs are out there today and customized CRMs are out there today. And I know, you know, your industry has several customized CRMs. So Service Titans is an example, and many of your listeners probably know what that is. So our new product called Sendogo is an integration service. So it's API-driven, it's an integration service.

So rather than use send-out cards at all, through Sendogo, you can use whatever you're on. So if you're on Service Titans, you just use Service Titans and through Sendogo, it will integrate to our system and you can send cards and gifts right from your CRM of choice.

And so that's what Sendogo is about. That is a big movement for us because when we started sending out cards, good heck, Salesforce.com was brand new. Nobody even heard of Salesforce.com back in 2003. It was in business. Nobody even heard of Salesforce.com back in 2003. It was in business. Nobody even heard of it back then. And so when we first started SendOutCards,

people would use... We have a contact management system right in SendOutCards. It comes with your monthly subscription. And it works great. But many people today have their own customized CRM. And that's what Sendogo is all about. It's a great product. So it's pretty cool because if you could automate the process of when we finish a job,

there's certain pieces we could pull out of that job ticket. And there's more integrations. I mean, you guys are still in the early stages of what it's going to become. But to automate a heartfelt card, what does it mean to send a heartfelt card? Well, I think that's key too. Most people in CRMs are interested in automation. Let the system do it for you. And most everything you do is digital.

So it's like everything's set up to where when you finish a transaction, there's touch points in your CRM that sends an email here and it sends a chat line or a text message or whatever it does. It just automatically sends stuff out. And through Sendogo, you can automate a card as well. We call that a system send. And a system send is great. I mean, a system send, it's just pre-built, pre-automated, not a lot of customization to it, but at least it's a physical card. Greeting card shows up in the mail. We call that a system send. But the most effective touch is a heartfelt card, which is what you asked about. Yeah. Actually, so if you're a service rep that's on the job and you finish the job and you built a rapport with your customer, you built some dialogue,

you built some rapport with that customer. When you finish, literally, you go right out to your truck, get on your phone. You can even do it through your CRM, get right on the phone. And you can actually even voice it in if you want, but send what we call a heartfelt card is you're sending the card. Like you're sending the thank you and you're typing out the message word for word.

In our system, it takes less than a minute to do that. And you click the send button. The heartfelt card has about three times the effect that a system card has. And the system card has great effect. But a heartfelt card, three times the effect that a system card has. And the system card has great effect, but a heartfelt card, three times the effect of the system card. So people in CRMs, they don't want to hear about the heartfelt

because you have to do stuff. They want the automation and we'll give you the automation. But if you want to put your relationship marketing efforts on steroids, you got to implement the heartfelt side and you're learning that. You're certainly learning that. You're certainly

learning that. I know you've told me stories about, you know, cause you, you came in, let's face it. You came in kicking and scratching and fighting. You just wanted it all automated. Right. But since then you're now telling stories like you just shared and that's the difference. Well, you know, I think one of the biggest mistakes that I've made is I feel like sometimes you like to please everybody and get all these cars out and do all this stuff. But really, if we think about it from a home service aspect or a real estate or whatever it might be, there's really probably 10 to 20 to 30 people, whether it's a custom builder, whether it's a certain manufacturing company, whether it's a certain big customer that's going to use you again. And it's knocking on that door as much as possible and leaving emails, in my opinion. I personally hate emails because I got to read a lot. I like voice text messages. I prefer text. They always get looked at. Usually a text message isn't a novel, except for a couple of people I know. And it's just a quick way.

But when you get a card, it's like, wait a minute here. And you see a picture of you and the person and then you look in it and it's got a special note. And then on the back, it says even more. And it says just, you know, it's top of mind. And I think most of us throw a lot of our mail out. I mean, the mail still works, but these don't get thrown out. It's the one thing that gets open that you want to open. So the way that I got in this is I had a guy come in here, George Redheffer, and he kept sending me these cars and I kept getting brownies and gifts and I got your book and all these things.

And I was like, man, I got to start paying attention to this. And I think the biggest way that you've grown the business is that people tend to use your product to start to get people interested in the product itself. And it's amazing how it's just kind of, it's a domino effect of how it all works, but it works for me. And I'm just super impressed by the way you've grown it. So the early days, a lot of the people listening to the podcast are obviously trying to get better. They're trying to improve their lives and their families' lives and everybody around them.

So we've got a really good group of people that is listening. But you weren't always successful. I know you've been through a lot of trials and a lot of errors and a lot of mistakes. You've said that even on this podcast. Tell us a little about the early days of being a business owner and just some of the struggles and maybe things you would have done differently. Well, again, yeah. I mean, the early days... By the way, just to preface this, there's a book called The $100 Startup. I encourage anybody to buy it. It's called The $100 Startup. You read The $100 Startup, it teaches you how I'm wired. I'm wired for The $100 Startup. Basically, what it's about is, when you start a business, don't be sophisticated. Don't invest hundreds of thousands of other people's dollars into it. viable product or service, having a target of people to take that product or service that want

to buy it from you and a way to collect money. That's all you need. You just need those three things. And so when we started ScentOutCars, that was the mindset. I got a product. I think there's a bunch of people out there that would want it. I've got a way to collect on it. We chose direct sales as the way to do that. So we'd have meetings where you would, by word of mouth, you would bring people to it. We'd give you a presentation. People would sign up for the service. And we just, we grassroots build it. Like we just grassroots build it

one day at a time kind of thing. And that's how we do it. And yeah, there was a lot of trial and error that took place and nobody had done what we'd done before. Like we were the first. We had to pioneer our way through this whole thing. In fact, nobody had sold this kind of product in direct sales before. So not only were we pioneering a new kind of product,

we were also pioneering a new type of product in direct sales. And so we were pioneering both of those. My goodness, Tommy, we probably made every mistake in the book. We had to learn by our mistakes. And some of those mistakes cost us a lot of money. We'd have to regroup, restart, redo. By trial and error, we just kept on moving until it began to grow. And so yeah, there were a lot of challenges. And you have these cycles. So you go through, no matter what business you're in, you're going to go through the cycles. You're going to go through the cycle of hard knocks. You're going to have challenges and you're going to have troubles and you're going to have setbacks. You're going to have unexpected stuff nail you upside the head.

If you're an entrepreneur, that's what you're going to deal with. If you can't deal with that, don't be an entrepreneur. That's just the way it is. You know, it's flat just the way it is. It's flat out the way it is. And then if you weather that well, then you go through your season of prosperity. Now, a key word to that is season. Prosperity doesn't just happen for the rest of your life automatically. You go through seasons of prosperity, and then you're going to go through seasons of challenge again. It's a cyclic effect. Cyclical, yeah.

Cyclical effect. And that's what we went through. In fact, we went through a recent stage of that literally over the last... We're a 15-year-old company now. We've been around a long time and had a lot of success, done a lot of great things. Again, made Fortune 500 fastest growing companies back in the day. We did a lot of really cool stuff, but we also had to catch up with technology shifts. Technology shifts so rapidly. And the average shelf life today of the technology that your company uses is about 18 months. So we're literally right now, we've introduced the technology that we have currently We're literally working on technology that will be introduced 15 months from now

And we have to stay ahead of that now five six seven years ago. We didn't know that We didn't know that there was an 18 month shelf life I don't know what rated this podcast is, but we'd get caught with our pants down, you know It's like the technology would shift and we didn't shift with it. So we'd have to reshift and we were late to the game and that kind of stuff. And so we went through more seasons of challenge again and kind of had to restart, reinvent, those kinds of things. But we've learned from that. We've learned from that. We're not going to be caught with our pants down anymore. But there'll be other sets of challenges that we'll face as we go.

There's a book I read, it's a business book and I can't think of the name of it, but it talks about, it's straight up like, it's a college book and there's peaks and valleys. And there's always, I don't care if you're 200 million, for some reason, when people think about a huge company and we're right between 35, 40 million and some people are 200 million.

I don't care how big or how small you are, you still have challenges. I think General Motors just had the strike happen again. I mean, look, you've become a big company, you're dealing with unions, crazy stuff. One of the hardest parts I think about scaling that I always hear from other home service companies is I need more people, but I can't trust them. They're not as good as me. I don't delegate well. They're not going to take care of my customers. And I'm sure there's been a spot in your life where you said, if I don't do it, it won't get done to my liking. And a lot of it has to do with hiring and the right people. So what do you say to those people? And look, we're all that person at some point. So how would you combat that question and answer that?

Well, again, and I've learned this the hard way. I've learned it the hard way because when it is your company and it's your baby and there's certain skill sets that you've learned and things that you know about your product and service that perhaps others don't, you certainly care at a higher level. You do get into the mindset of

nobody's going to take the owner mentality like I have. And so I got to kind of do it myself. It's kind of the kiss of death, to be honest with you. It's kiss of death to have that mindset. You have to shift the mindset. You have to build great teams of people, provide great onboarding for your people, and allow them to make mistakes. You have to do it.

If you want to scale your business long term, you have to go through that process and allow things to be done mediocre on occasion as your people learn what you have learned. Now, even a bigger challenge to that is once they do go through the learning curve and learn it, some of them will leave and go somewhere else. So then you got to take another group through and learn it again. But it's much better to duplicate your efforts as much as possible. You know, if I can take 100% of my efforts versus 10 people that can do what I do at 30% capacity. Let's say I've got 10 people that are 30% as good as I am, but there's 10 of them. I'm going to take that all day long because they're going to get more done than I can at 100%. So yeah, it's got to learn it. Got to do it.

That's hard for you, Tommy. That's hard for you because you're that way. You're a perfectionist. You're at such a high energy. I'm sure you've had challenges in duplication just because of your energy level alone. But you have figured out how to do it. Your book, by the way, is awesome. The book you have and you talk about a lot of this and how to scale your business and how to duplicate

and how to hire and onboard properly. Your book's incredible. I actually, I have recommended your book as standard management book reading for all of our employees. And I know it's about the home service business. Home service millionaire, yeah. Yeah, the home service millionaire. I mean, that's standard reading around here to learn how to manage business, not necessarily home service, but just like home again. So now we started up our book club and we started out with Simon Sinek, start with why. And I let them rotate, all of us that are in the book club rotate who picks the book. So Andrew picked it and I'm rereading it

again. And it said, Simon says, when the economy is amazing, sometimes you don't realize that you need relationships because everybody's doing well. But when the economy, and it's cyclical, when the economy starts to go down and get worse, which it's only a matter of time when we hit a recession, it's not a matter of if it's when, is when those relationships start to pay off and the connections you've made and the human connections that you've connected with. Because when people call me up, they don't go, Tommy, I need to know how much it's going to be, or I'm going to call another garage or a company.

They say, Tommy, I'm going to call you out for a buddy of mine. Just make sure to take care of him like I know you will. And the difference is I get 10 of those calls. I literally, if it's not through social media, it's to my cell phone, or it's a phone call, or it's a friend of a friend. And there's two things I've wanted, Cody, and I want to hear your perspective because to me, I don't even know. Maybe I heard this at your seminar or maybe I built it in my head. Now I can't figure anything out because I read so much and I'm listening.

But wealthy to me is great relationships, amazing people that will take my call that I could grow with, that I appreciate, that appreciate me for who I am. That's first and foremost, because you could have all the money in the world. But then the second thing for me is I could be sitting at a really, really nice dinner at the Ritz Carlton, the nicest hotel or restaurant in the world and not have to count and try to add up the menu, who's there and see if I could afford it. And it's not about having a ton of money. It's about just being able to do the nice things with the people you care about. And that's really what I'm working towards as a goal for me is money is important, but building the relationships and the journey and marriage with the money is a good thing. I mean, what's your take? Because this is the stuff you do all day long. Well, I'd actually like to try to answer that question

specifically to the home service industry. I'm going to use that as an example. So I'm going to speak to you as a consultant of relationship marketing, but also as a consumer of home service products. So kind of the way I'd answer that is that relationships are by far the most important investment you will ever make. It's more important than any financial investment that you make, you know, and you should invest properly your money and all that good kind of stuff. But relationships are the most important and the most important time to invest in relationships is when your business is doing well so when the economy's doing really

really well that's the most important time to invest in relationships when the economy is doing poorly that's the most important time to invest money follow so right now economy's doing poorly, that's the most important time to invest money. Follow? So right now the economy is doing great. And a lot of home service businesses are killing it right now because there's so much business. And I know as a consumer, because I call home service people all the time and get crammed. I can't get someone to my house in a month, I guess three or four weeks before I can get anybody there. And everybody tells you how much business they have and they can't get here and they can't get back and they got to order parts three or four weeks before I can get anybody there. And everybody tells you how much business they have and they can't get here and they can't get back and they got to order parts and parts are back ordered and blah, blah, blah. And it's during those times. And I'm just going to use

home service as an example that people in home service, I'm just going to be candid. You get spoiled. You get spoiled in those fat times and you don't think relationships mean that much because after all, you got so much business coming in. Why do I need to worry about relationships? I got so much business coming in. Well, guess what? That's so much business coming in is not always going to be coming in. So the key is, is to build relationships. When the business is really good, that's the most important time to build relationships. You got to hire another couple of people to be on your staff,

to do proper follow-up during this time, to do things to help you with your relationship bargaining efforts. By all means, do it, because now is the time to invest in people, invest in relationships, so that when the economy takes a turn downward, you're getting the phone calls

like Tommy just mentioned a few minutes ago. That's when you're gonna get the phone calls. Hey, I've got so-and-so, please take care of them. You're going to get a lot of referral business during the downtimes because you spent the time to build a relationship and it's super, super important. So there's something that I struggle with. And I think as a home service person, we tend to work 12 hours a day. I mean, a lot of the guys that are successful is because the blood, sweat and tears. And that's typically the first few years of business, unless you got a big trust fund or something. That's the way you get there. And the relationships sometimes take the backseat. And I'm talking about wife, kids. I'm not that person at this point in my life, but I want to be. I want a wife and kids in the future. So, and my dad had a job and our relationship sometimes suffered from it.

My mom worked a lot. So I hate to say balance, but it's hard enough to see your own family and now you're supposed to see your customers. And I don't know, I'm asking you a question and I don't have any insight onto this, but I'm asking you because it seems like you've built thousands of great relationships

and you have an amazing relationship with your family and your coworkers, is what I like to call it. So how do you do it? How do you manage it? How do you balance that? I don't manage time, I manage people. To me, relationships are everything. So if you center your life around relationships, everything else kind of takes care of itself.

And when I say relationships, I'm talking genuine relationship. It's genuine, true connection with other human beings. Be in a place of service to other human beings. Be there for other people all the time. And that means, obviously, your spouse is the most important. Your family members come next. And then it goes on down from there. Your customers are very important to you. But as long as you stay focused on that aspect of things, if you've got great relationships everywhere,

people rally to help you. So a lot of times people have that the other way around. Well, I need to be the best at what I do. I got to have the best system. I got to work 14 hours a day. I got to be in charge and take care of everything. I'm going to get the whip out and make sure all my employees are doing stuff. That's not focused on relationships. That's focusing on business and systems. If you switch that to where relationships are what the focus is, now you still got to be very focused on what your business needs to do and what it needs to be. But if relationships come first, those people line up to help you. In fact, I heard Kevin Hart, this is interesting. Kevin Hart said,

you know, I learned something. He says, I learned that if your car breaks down on the side of the road and you stand out on the road and put your thumb out or you try to wave people, most times you drive by. But if your car breaks down and you get out, you get behind your car and you start to push your car, what happens? People will pull over and they'll help you push the car. So why do I share that? If you're focused on who you are and what you're about,

people will flock around you. So make relationships the most important thing. People flock around you and they help you get stuff done. I guess, I don't know if that answers your question, but that's kind of how I tried around my life. I'm not the best at it, by the way. I'm the first to tell you, you know, I make a ton of mistakes in every area of my life

and I try to learn from them. But over my 55 years now, I've learned that by far the most important thing you can do in business, in family, in friendship, in everything is to genuinely focus on relationship. Everything else kind of takes care of itself. And that's coming from a point of gratitude.

It seems like really knowing how to prioritize your time. I was sitting with a guy who's a billionaire last Friday in San Diego. And he goes, Tommy, there's so many decisions we have to make as entrepreneurs. We get flooded with opportunities. And he said, I've narrowed it down to three things. You're going to love these three things, he said.

He goes, the first thing is people. Do I love the opportunity of the people I'm going to work with? He said, the number two thing is people. Do I love the opportunity of the people I'm going to work with? He said, the number two thing is time. How much focused energy and time is this going to take? And number three is the reward. It could be monetary. It could be something else. It could be getting on stage, getting that, the presence of who you're trying to become. But have you noticed, I mean, I'm sure there's opportunities that just knock on your doorstep. I mean, I probably have 10 people waiting out there for stuff to do.

When I started focusing my energy, focused energy, and really understanding how to delegate properly, I really, and say no. What is your take on that? I'm curious. Well, I think the main thing, you got to get down to the core of who you are. You know, who are you? In fact, I just the main thing, you got to get down to the core of who you are. You know, who are you? In fact, I just did this morning. I just did what I call the I Am Blueprint Workshop.

It's an online course that we have people go through and we have you write down your I Am statements. I Am statements are affirmations. You know, I am financially independent and free. You know, I am toned strong and in great shape. These are affirmations starting with the words I Am. And I'm big on that stuff. I am toned strong and in great shape. These are affirmations starting with the words I am. And I'm big on that stuff. I think it's really important. But we have people write their list of I am statements and then we have them drill down to a core statement,

one core sentence that kind of defines who you are. And this is different than your why, by the way. This is a core purpose statement. So as an example, I've drilled down to my core purpose statement in life is I'm bringing the human race together. That's what I do. I am bringing the human race together. So whatever I'm involved with has to support that. So if people bring other things to me that I don't feel like it's in alignment with that, I don't do it. Now, I know there's two ways that I can bring the human race together. One is I can create a relationship system like we have and help people be kind to each other.

That knows no race, no color, no religion, no nothing. Kindness has no barriers. Kindness is kindness. Love is love, that's it. If I've got a system that can help you with that, then I'm bringing the human race together. The other way to bring the human race together is financial security and abundance.

If I can provide a way to help people take control of their financial world or provide a financial opportunity where people can make an additional stream of income to where they can realize their dreams, take care of their family, do those kinds of things. If I can focus on those two areas alone, I can bring the human race together.

So that's how I channel all of the things that come into me. Like you said, you get people lined up with what I ought to be doing. Trust me, there's a thousand people that are gonna tell you what you ought to be doing. And that's why I think it's important to get to your core purpose statement, find out, you know, what am I about? Who am I? What makes me happy? And take that out to the world and don't let anybody get in the way of it. So you start out with I am, you write down maybe 10 affirmations. I'm a good dad. I'm a good son. I'm a good

provider. I'm a good boss, whatever it might be. So you go through these affirmations and then what's the next step to get to that core statement? So what I do is I, and I actually just, it's kind of funny. I just went through this today is, is I encourage people to write those statements. Like you just said down on three by five index cards. In fact, I've got some right here. I wrote these a long time ago and I keep these with me everywhere I go. In order for me to get to my core statement, I literally took these and just set them out so I could see all of them at once. So I've got five cards here that's got about 20 I am statements on them.

And I can just read down through them. And what I do, and this is what I encourage in the workshop, is take keywords. Just look through. And what you're looking for in your I am statements is a theme. What is the theme? And keywords, like my keywords are inspire, train, teach, motivate, potential, ethnicity, human race, enthusiastic. Those are key words that really pop out at me that really just make me excited. Write those words down and then rewrite some statements off of those until you can drill down to that one core statement.

And that's exactly what I did. In fact, I'll share with you. I have this worksheet. I did that same thing off my statements. I wrote all those single words and then I wrote some statements out of it and I was able to drill down to, I am bringing the human race together. Every single I am statement I've ever written is represented right there. And I had people on today. I had eight people,

eight people on the workshop today, online workshop, and it's on a Zoom. So when they can raise their hand and we call on them and we bring them up live. So they're on the screen just like you and I are right now.

To see the emotional impact We bring them up live. So they're on the screen just like you and I are right now. To see the emotional impact that these statements have on these people that finally found theirs, it blows your mind. And it makes you realize just how powerful this is. And it's critical, especially today, because there's so much competing for your time. You just got to find out who you are. Do you, man. You got to do you. That's it.

I read the book, The Five Love Languages, and I've read the book, Five Love Languages, in the office. And I'm still figuring it out. More than anything, I like admiration. There's somebody that actually respects me. They look up to me. And I'm still figuring it out. And I don't think there's a perfect answer.

But it's not easy. I'll tell you that a lot of people are lost out there. And I feel like I might not be where you're at today, but I'm in the right direction. And I don't think anybody ever knows 100%. And don't get me wrong. But there's different things. And people change.

And maybe one day I have grandchildren. And my purpose changes, right? It's a different time. It's a different me. I want to read something to you. I want to tell you what you think about this. So finish what you start creates happiness. Quitting is the secret art of winning. So they're kind of opposite statements. So finish what you start creates happiness. So getting something done, that accomplishment, getting to the finish line. But quitting is the secret art of winning. Wow. Well, that's deep. Did over it because it's something that I realized is I love to finish, but I became a quitter in the same time. And I'm not a quitter, but I became a really good quitter. I don't do commercial anymore. I got out of all the distractions and I've been able to focus. So it's written down here on this. No, I think that's powerful. I mean, you know,

you threw me for a loop of kind of how you worded that a little bit, but I totally see what the meaning is. You find out who you are and say no to the rest. You know, quit the rest of the crap. Quit that and just do what you do. And that is the secret to success. There is no doubt about it. That is the secret. The number one blocker of anybody succeeding

is they get distracted. They get distracted by things that just don't matter to them. It might matter to their mother-in-law. It might matter to your cousin. It might matter to your brother that you haven't talked to in 12 months. But if it doesn't matter to you,

why are you worried about it? So yeah, I think it's important. So you've kind of switched from a CEO to a CVO, and that's Chief Visionary Officer. And I read the book Rocket Fuel, which changed my perception of everything, which is I'm a visionary and there's people that are integrators. It's the VI relationship. And some people could do them both. And as a business owner, we always do them both. Because no matter what, Walt Disney was a visionary.

Yeah, he could integrate things, but Roy was better. And Roy was really good at it. And I'd love to say that I'm 50-50, but nobody is. And to say that is a cocky. And I've seen people say, I'm both. Everybody I've had read the book, there's certain personality types that you're just like, oh, I'm both. I could do both. I'm like, yeah, I guess I could. Like, I'd rather not. I know what I am. So, explain to me how you picked Greg as that role, because I know this is going to take a few minutes

and then I just want to close it out. I know you're busy. So that's kind of my finale question is visionary. You stepped away from a CEO, you picked Greg, what visionary means to you and what an integrator is supposed to be able to do? Well, again, first of all, that's a great question, by the way, and that ties to what we've been talking about this whole podcast. How do you focus your energies, focus on the right things, have enough time to create proper relationship in your life? And I went through that experience. I've been the CEO of this company for 15 years. And as a CEO, I've also been the CVO. Now, I didn't officially have that title, but I was acting as the CVO. I was and am the visionary. I'm the spokesperson for the cause of sent out cards and its philosophy.

I'm on the stage. I'm teaching the principals. I'm on the conference calls. I'm running people in the field. I'm doing all of those things. But as CEO, I'd have to come back during the week and run day-to-day operations of a multi-million dollar business. That included 100 employees. It includes HR. It includes six, seven different departments. It includes cash flow. It includes accounting. It includes lawyers and attorneys and this and that,

on and on and on. And so my weeks would get consumed with all of the integration stuff, which limited my ability to do my visionary stuff, which I was and am much better at. So the plan has been in place for quite a while to replace my CEO spot with the right person. And we finally got to where we were able to do that about nine, 10 months ago. And I found the right person. I knew I had the right person for about 2 years before I hired him.

His name is Greg Breyers. He came on as our CEO about 9 months ago here at Send Out Cards. The number one thing for me to pick out the perfect CEO for our business didn't have a whole lot to do with resume. I mean, the resume was important. I needed somebody that had been there, done that, been at C-level of different companies before, had a good network of people, learned those kinds of things for sure. But that wasn't the most important thing. The most important part to me was someone that resonated with the vision, someone that was a product of our product, someone that implemented relationship marketing, somebody that did reach

out and does reach out and care for other people and gets the vision of what we're doing. And Greg was that. And I knew that. Greg and I became friends for a couple of years before I hired him. So I knew he was a product of the product. I knew his heart was in the right place. Plus he had the resume on the other side to do the work. So it's been a godsend. It's been an absolute godsend because like Roy and Walt, in fact, he and I use Roy and Walt as an example all the time.

You know, Walt Disney had no business running the business. But without Walt Disney, obviously we wouldn't, we wouldn't have an American society like we have today without Walt Disney. Go to Disney world, go to Disneyland or watch a Disney movie. Think about 50 years ago, who in the world would have an imagination to come up with that?

Like it blows my mind, the vision that Walt had. But he really wasn't a business guy and Roy was. And so Roy Walt's a perfect example of that whole thing. And I recommend it to anybody that's in business. Because typically, I see you more as a visionary for sure. And you are good on the other side. You are a great integrator, but you're a better visionary. And you got to take which one you're better at. And that's the one that becomes the focus over time. Unfortunately, integrators sometimes take a backseat to the visionaries. And sometimes they don't get the, you're not in the spotlight.

And mine's integrator sitting right over there. And he's like, dude, i'll be the bad cop and i'll i'll do this and i'll handle this and i mean i i feel like when we gotta fire somebody i'm like dude good luck but but it is what it is you know it's fun and i think he accepted it and he's enjoying it and uh it's cool so i want to add one thing real quick is what Send Out Cards has done for me, it's brought me happier customers, and it's allowed me to really get ahold of the people that it would be hard to get ahold of.

It allows me to get in front of family and friends. I've sent my niece and nephews, so many with the brownies and the things, and I wish I could do more for them. I mean, not monetary, but just more time, energy, me. But I think they're going to be happy when they turn 16 because there's going to be good things happening. And, you know, happier friends

and just kind of reaching out and saying, hey, I know we don't get to talk like we used to, but you're always on my mind. Here's a picture of me and whatever it might be. It's an effective tool that's not used as much as you would think, but it gets through all those. It gets to Pinterest, Snapchat, Twitter, Facebook, Insta, email, text.

I can keep going, but you get to open a card. I mean, it's just something good and wholesome about that. So I recommend send out cards. And there's a lot more we could go into send out cards. But what I wanted to do is if somebody wants to get ahold of you, obviously you've got a lot of cool things, what you're doing helping people understand their core mission in life and just with the relationship building and bringing the human race together,

what's the best way to reach out and get touch base or email or what's the best thing for you? Yeah, probably the main way to, to make connection. You know, I've got my, all my information on LinkedIn under Cody Bateman. And I've got my website, CodyBateman.com. That's probably the best starting point because it links you to everything else.

K-O-D-Y-B-A-T-E-M-A-N, CodyBateman.com. Shares a lot of the stuff that we're involved with. Of course, we have SendOutCards.com. That's the primary website for the primary business. We have sendogo, S-E-N-D-O-G-O.com. My podcast, Relationship Marketing. Just go to your favorite podcast channel and click in Relationship Marketing with Cody B

and it'll pop up any of those channels and get access to that as well. So yeah, Power of Human Connection, available on Amazon or available on any of those sites. So those are ways that you can stay in touch with me. And by the way, for all of the listeners here, Tommy was featured at our Relationship Marketing Grand Summit. He was actually one of our speakers. You did a phenomenal job, brother. You did a great, great job. In fact, you you know if you're nice to me i might have

to invite you back to speak again next year so hey i had a blast you know you when i sat down with you as these promptings and i mean there was seven eight hundred there's just a lot of people there and i've done my fair share of speaking in front of a lot of people, but this was a little bit different. It's not the home service audience per se. It was a bunch of realtors and all these different people. And I was like, I don't even know. And I mean,

it just kind of came together. I don't know what it was. It was almost divine. I just went up there and told a bunch of stories and I was sweating like a pig. Yeah. You were sweating. I'm going to wear a jacket next time.

So you, uh, you did some cool things up there, though. You started rapping, and it was absolutely amazing. And actually, you got that really cool video. I went and I bought a couple. Oh, yeah. Yeah, nice. Nice. The Office, because I love this movie.

But when you did that with the DeLorean, I was like, man, I'm going to buy a couple model cars. And I kept telling everybody, when I just want to buy a fun car, and I'm just, right now I'm going to buy a couple of model cars. And I kept telling everybody, when I just want to buy a fun car, and I'm just, right now I'm reinvesting everything. I think I'm going to get a DeLorean. But what is the three books? Because there's so many books that you've read. I mean, you're a big, big, big reader. Obviously, there's the two books, Prompting and The Human Connection. But if you had to give three books and there's so many, what are they? I'm going to cheat a little bit on that. One of my books is actually an author and I encourage you to read all of his books. And that's Og Mandino, O.G. Mandino, best known for the greatest salesman in the world. So if you're only going to read one of his books, read that one, the greatest salesman in the world. He's got like 12 or 13 books and every one of them are just life-changing,

incredible stuff. So Ogbandino, anything by Ogbandino is one. Obviously, you got to have Power Positive Thinking on there, Norman Vincent Peale, How to Win Friends and Influence People by Dale Carnegie. I think those are essential. Excuse Me, Your Life is Waiting by Lynn Grabhorn. Great book on law of attraction, different things like that. And there's great business books too to read and whatnot. But I think those are the essential ones that you want to get your hands on.

All right. And the last thing we always do is I'm going to give you the stage and just really one final thought. It doesn't need to be about Senate card. It doesn't need to be about relationship. It doesn't need to be about home service, whatever you want to let the listeners kind of resonate on.

Yeah, thank you. And I appreciate the opportunity to be on here. And I'll be brief in this. I think the fundamental, most important thing that people should focus on is to be themselves no matter what it is you do just just be you that is by far the most important thing you do and that's why the i am statements and those kinds of exercises are so important because it helps you get down to the core of who you are as a person what you have to offer the world and remember that there's uniqueness in you that nobody else has. I'm a firm believer of that.

There's uniqueness in you as a human soul that nobody else possesses. There's things that only you can do. And that's why it's so important to find out who you are and just do you because that's the only way that uniqueness can come out. And when that uniqueness comes out, that's when you leave legacies. That's when you change the world. That's when people remember you and have their lives changed for good because of you when you're here and after you're gone.

So I guess that's how I would close up is just focus on those things. Stay positive. Live in a negative world. Stay positive. I'd encourage people, and I'm learning this myself. You get into habits with this stuff, habits with your phone and all your social media is available here. You get notifications when somebody commented, whatever. There's so many distractions today and you gotta learn how to get away from the distractions. Start every day by reading or listening to something good and end every day by reading or listening to something good.

And that does not include scrolling social media. You need to get off of the screen in the morning and you need to be off of the screen at night right before you go to bed. And those are the times when you feed positivity in here without any distractions. And I think if you can do those simple things, sky's the limit. You can do anything you want. I love it. This is amazing. I look up to you. I think that what you do is you've touched more people just at the last seminar I saw you at, and I've seen you speak twice. So very fortunate and really thankful to have you on. I think the audience is going to get a ton out of this, and I think we

need to do it again. So I look forward to seeing you. I'm sure I'll be out there before the next show, but thank you very much, Cody. I appreciate it. Thanks for having me, Tommy. I really appreciate it. Keep doing what you're doing, my friend. All right. You take it easy, buddy. All right, we'll see you.

Something that we decided to do is go ahead and do something very special for the listeners today to kind of let you know how Send Out Cards works. If you go to topofmindcards.com and book free demo, you got to scroll down. There's a blue thing there that you just put book demo. I got a buddy of mine that's going to show you everything you need to know on how the whole program works, how it'll work for you.

And you can watch some of my personal demos on that page. So go to topofmindcards.com. Thank you.